Black deaf adults have been said to have “poor communication skills” at least partly because of difficulties interviewers have had in obtaining information from them. Apparently, however, at least in some regions, blacks' sign language has been different from whites' sign language. This paper will present some differences between the sign language of black deaf. persons educated before and since racial integration of the schools and relate these differences to educational policies. Evidence is also provided as to the awareness of these differences and of educational policies on the part of teachers before and after integration. (Sociolinguistic variation, sign languages, minority group language, language death, racial integration)

In a 2018 referendum, the Irish public voted to lift the Irish state's near-total constitutional ban on abortion, bucking a recent global trend towards restrictions on reproductive rights. While abortion rights have long been a major concern of Irish feminists, appeals to national identity have often been viewed with suspicion by the women's rights movement in Ireland due to the historic role of national identity construction in perpetuating gender-based inequalities. This article explores the way(s) in which discourses of Irish identity and gender were mediated by the use of Irish in the linguistic landscape (LL) at the time of the vote. Proposing a modified version of Du Bois’ (2007) stance triangle, I argue that signs use Irish as both a means of stancetaking and as an object of stance in itself, thus effectively taking a stance on both the referendum and on Irish national identity, indexed by the language. (Stancetaking, Irish (language), national identity, gender, abortion, Eighth Amendment)

Work of the Language Survey of Ethiopia is drawn on to illustrate that social surveys can contribute to scientific theories and methods as well as to policy making. Findings with regard to four general problems are indicated: a metric of linguistic distance (considered here in terms of selection of diagnostic traits for linguistic areas, subgrouping of related languages, and dialect variation within a language; measurement of basic cognate frequencies; and testing of mutual intelligibility, a typology of the processes of language spread (lingua franca, mother tongue, superposed variety); verbal deference behavior (in use of Amharic second person pronouns); and pidginization (Simplified Italian of Ethiopia). Some comparisons to findings in sociolinguistics research elsewhere are made. (Language surveys; measurement of linguistic distance; language spread; social meaning and mode of address; pidginization.)

A recent issue of this journal carried an analysis of the theoretical status of variable rules by the present authors (Kay & McDaniel 1979) together with a response by D. Sankoff and W. Labov (1979). The central issue with which Kay and McDaniel dealt was the following: which (if any) of the mathematical assumptions embodied in variable rules may reasonably be attributed to the linguistic abilities of speakers? The Sankoff and Labov response has gone some distance toward clarifying their position in this matter, though problematical issues remain. The basic question divides naturally into two related, though distinct, parts: (1) which (if any) of the mathematical assumptions comprised in the variable rule method are to be taken as substantive claims (versus conveniences for the data analyst)? (2) of the mathematical assumptions which are held to make substantive claims, what is the empirical locus of these claims – that is, what are the claims about (e.g., speakers' linguistic abilities)?

The title of this review article is inspired by Jean Aitchison's (1981) textbook, Language change: Progress or decay?, although I do not intend to discuss her book here. By including historical linguistics, I want to focus attention on the question of whether there has been any progress in the discipline of historical linguistics rather than whether, as Aitchison queries, language change can be thought of in terms of progress or decay (although that question, too, had its heyday [see, for example, Jespersen 18941]). I will start with a simplistic view of “progress” and assume that the notion can be coherently applied to a discipline or research paradigm: assuming that a central goal of historical linguistics is to “explain” language change, if historical linguistics can provide an answer to this question, then the discipline has “progressed.” The two books which I will discuss here, David Lightfoot's Principles of diachronic syntax (1979) and Roger Lass's On explaining language change (1980), bear on this issue although in rather different ways.

The first goal of this article is to present a description of the linguistic features that distinguish the genderlects of Russian. Although there exist some data on interruptions and other kinds of gender-specific discourse behavior in Russian, they are not discussed here, because the variables that govern gender differences in linguistic behavior are too numerous and inconclusive, and Russian data that bear on such behavior remain at this point too meager. Rather, what is discussed here are the structural features of Russian genderlects. This focus leads to a second goal, a theoretical one: to explore how genderlect phenomena can be explained in the Transactional Discourse Model (TDM), a broadly generative, pragmatically based discourse model that is sensitive to the factors that control the occurrence of gender-specific features in speech.

An American-influenced singing accent, referred to here as Pop Song English (PSE), is common in popular music throughout (and beyond) the Anglophone world. This article presents an analysis of the sung pronunciation of two variables (bath and nonprevocalic /r/) that distinguish New Zealand English (NZE) from American Englishes (AmE). The Phonetics of Popular Song (PoPS) corpus includes 154 performers, structured according to country of origin (NZ and the US) and musical genre (pop and hip hop). An auditory analysis was conducted for each variable, distinguishing between the NZE and PSE/AmE variants. Almost all New Zealand performers adopt the PSE variants at least some of the time, with greater adherence to the American model in pop than in hip hop. In the US, region determines hip hop, but not pop, artists’ degree of rhoticity. PSE represents a supralocal norm for pop music, while hip hop artists tend to use their ‘own accent’. (Pop Song English, singing accent, rap accent, supralocal norm, nonprevocalic /r/, trap–bath split, intentionality, language performance, pop music, hip hop, responsive style, initiative style)*

In Luang Prabang, Laos, pétanque players distinguish two types of gambling: ‘gambling for beer’ and ‘gambling for money’. They readily and vividly contrast these types in abstraction but are more circumspect about identifying actual games as instances of one kind or another. In this article, I trace how players use these types in two modes of typification—as generics and specifics—and articulate a new way to approach similar salient and ideologically weighty ‘ethno-metapragmatic terms’, which can appear messy and unwieldy. I argue that pulling apart these modes of typification clarifies how and why people use such terms for social action, and where anyone studying them—or the types that are thought to underly them—should begin. (Generic reference, specific reference, typification, social types, explicit/implicit, metapragmatics, linguistic anthropology, Laos)*

How is ethnicity indexed linguistically in a speech community in which immigrant L2s have typically not been spoken for three or more generations? Drawing on recordings and ethnographic observations of eighteen white high school girls in south Philadelphia, speakers of Irish descent are shown to differentiate themselves from speakers of Italian descent through their use of (ay0), that is, Canadian Raising. (ay0) is an ongoing sound change in Philadelphia and is remarkable for being a rare example of a male-led change. Irish girls exploit more male-like, backed, and raised variants as a resource for indexing their ethnic identity, which is associated locally with stereotypically masculine characteristics such as toughness. The symbolic reflection of ethnic affiliation through this subtle linguistic device makes use of both local and supralocal social meanings. (Ethnicity, adolescence, Philadelphia, Irish, Canadian Raising, gender, sound change, language, and identity)*

The multi/translingual turn in sociolinguistics has highlighted a number of ideological entanglements of foundational concepts, most significantly the way that the notion of ‘named languages’ as bordered entities is intertwined with ideologies of nation and race. In this article, I consider what the conceptual place for linguistic borders is within a ‘trans’ framework of language and propose a focus on bordering, social actions in which indexical meanings at different scales are mobilized to exert control over discursive space by erecting boundaries within or around it. I draw on data from a Facebook group for non-local teachers of English in Thailand, examining how bordering served interests of hegemonic power when linguistic borders were policed with reference to ideologies of nation, as well as how it enabled counter-hegemonic resistance when borders were erected to separate teachers of colour from the intense discursive struggle in the group. (Translanguaging, linguistic borders, bordering, code-switching, scale, resistance, discursive agency)*

While speakers have been shown to deploy linguistic styles to project socially meaningful personae, less well-understood are the ways that variability or consistency of stylistic practice across and within speech events can itself accumulate to construct a public image. This study examines the use of (ING) and word-final /t/-release across multiple campaign rallies of three US presidential candidates, speakers in heightened contexts of persona construction. Differences emerged in the degree and nature of variability candidates exhibited in the use of these features across rally locales and utterance-level topic differences. We argue that the degree of linguistic variability a candidate exhibits across events itself serves as a socially meaningful linguistic resource, contributing to a constructed public image of flexibility or consistency in relation to a speaker's audience and public platform. We conclude that the amount of linguistic variability a speaker exhibits across contexts is itself a dimension of stylistic practice. (Style, sociophonetics, politicians, variability)*

Using data from four sets of alternating forms in a moribund Dutch-lexicon creole, this article addresses the characteristics of variation in moribund languages, and “the usefulness of variationist approaches in the description and analysis” of them (Drechsel 1990:552–53). The analysis shows how variable phonological rules continue to exist in a dying language, even after large numbers of words have been bled from the rules' inputs, thereby providing support for Dressler's hypothesis of lexical fading (1972). A three-stage scenario of rule loss is proposed to account for the fact that, in the Negerhollands case, there is substantially greater phonological variation at the level of the community than at the level of the individual. (Obsolescence, phonological variation, phonological change, creole languages, Virgin Islands, Negerhollands)

The creation of a large artificial lake in 1968 that flooded a large part of the Sekani homeland has led to change in the political outlook of the reorganized Sekani villages. In particular, there has been a reemergence of a universalist social–political philosophy, pan-Indianism, that had as its precursor the cultural–political category of phratry. The association between disruption and the emergence of this system of categorization is historically grounded. The particular problem addressed is why the Sekani speak English when there is little direct contact with Euro-Canadians and no particular advantages, in terms of adaptation to the new economic regime, in doing so. Changes in Sekani English in the political sphere and in relationship terms are examined within the context of maintaining a commitment to pan-Indianism/universalism. (Language loss, bilingualism, political culture, ways of speaking, British Columbia, Athapaskan languages)

In applied sociolinguistics in West Germany the notion has been influential that the indigenous working class is separated from the middle class by a linguistic barrier and thus is at a linguistic disadvantage, as well as suffering other forms of disadvantage. The paper places this view in its context within German work on language and society, examines it critically, and outlines why, in the author's view, it is of questionable validity. (Sociolinguistics, dialectology, education, German)

This article analyzes the specific pragmatics of an extremely asymmetrical example of market interaction between Spanish-speaking middlemen Mestizos and Hñahñu (Otomi) occasional sellers in the market of Ixmiquilpan, in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, where Hñahñu is still spoken. The fine indications of interpersonal cross-cultural conflict found in the transcript (e.g., duration of turns, varied use of indexical terms by buyers to address sellers, and the timing of verbal performance) allow us to understand how interethnic, gender, and power differences operate in this specific setting, relating the global and local levels. Detailed analysis of one case demonstrates the validity of certain universal theories regarding the use of language and enables us to understand the unavoidable conditions of conversation in terms of their universal status vis-à-vis the use of language as the material expression of power, or symbolic violence

This article analyzes the multimodal integration of gesture, talk, and sociocultural context. More specifically, I investigate how forms of Gemeinschaft/Gesellshaft community are embodied in the concrete details of multimodal form—in the iconic interplay of multimodal practice and symbolic forms of social organization. Using a focus group interview of community policing training, I show how criss-crossing laminations of participation emerge through novel gestural configurations like multimodal quotation and pragmatic beats to not only pace the rhythm of speech but simultaneously plot the spatial coordinates of social organization. In the course of events, we see how speakers integrate gesture, gaze, and postural orientation into the stream of their utterances to project rhythmically infused meanings of communal identity, social solidarity, and cultural opposition. (Multimodality, community, legal discourse)*

While the sociolinguistic variable is often deemed the carrier of social meaning, recent work reveals that the strength of social meaning can interact with linguistic environments. This study provides additional evidence that the same sets of variants can index drastically different social meanings across linguistic environments. Specifically, we present two cases of linguistic stylization in Taiwanese singer Jay Chou's performance in different genres: the ‘Chinese Flavor’ ballad and hip hop. Focusing on two socially salient variables in Mandarin—rhotacization and retroflex sibilants—we argue that while in both cases, Chou adopts variants associated with standard and mainland Mandarin, they index different social meanings. The conforming linguistic use in the ‘Chinese Flavor’ ballad indexes a sense of tradition, whereas the hypercorrected forms in the hip-hop song construct an unconventional stance. The study also addresses the connections between linguistic and non-linguistic stylizations and calls for more research on the multimodal construction of style. (Social meaning, linguistic constraint, multimodal, high performance, Mandarin)*