This article focuses on the branding of Patriotic Alternative (PA), a British fascist organization and business, in three analytic steps: (i) branding as circulating ideologies as commodities; (ii) branding as creating—and selling—community, and (iii) branding as regimenting meaning. Building on work on the communicability of evil and language, nationalism, and political economy, we explore how PA uses the affordances of platform capitalism in a project that goes beyond ideological normalization: not just rebranding a message as acceptable but selling a product which builds a community aligned with this ideology. Looking at both brand and political websites, YouTube, as well as Telegram channels, we show how PA's branding functions to invest a wide range of mundane practices with racist meaning; they are imagined to forestall the great replacement. Rebranding racism as white community, every cup of tea sold brings back the world of your grandma, each bar of soap protects white skin. (Far-right semiosis, branding, platform capitalism)*

This article uses a dialogue between memory studies (MS) and ethnographic and interactional sociolinguistics (EIS) to explore the dynamics of interdisciplinarity. MS focuses on the social remembering of high-profile and often traumatic events, and this is relevant to EIS's growing interest in (in)securitization. MS is increasingly keen to explore everyday practices of remembering in interscalar analyses, and EIS’ expertise in the study of mundane communication can provide essential support. But there are major differences in their focal concerns and analytical cultures, as well as in their approaches to interdisciplinarity. This generates asymmetries in their exchange, which we illustrate with studies from Oświęcim/Auschwitz (MS) and Cyprus (EIS). By mapping these differences and highlighting collaborative data sessions as a practical arena for building relationships, the article seeks to deepen our understanding of interdisciplinarity and facilitate its practice. (Everyday practice, cultural memory, (in)securitisation, Mode 1 and Mode 2 interdisciplinarity)

Recently, the Danish island of Bornholm has earned international fame for its food. In this article, we analyze how the meaning and value of the phenomenon of ‘Bornholmian food’ is transmitted and transformed through discursive processes, moving from the island to other locations. Through analysis of photos and audio-recordings from Bornholmian restaurants on Bornholm, in Copenhagen, and in Brooklyn, New York, we focus on recurring elements and noteworthy differences in the presentation of Bornholm, and we discuss how these depend on place and context. Thereby the circulation of ‘Bornholmian food’ is more than transmission of meaning and value; ‘Bornholmian food’ becomes different things in different locations. We suggest that although authenticity is made relevant, authentication is merely a starting point for processes of meaning production, notably when considering the reception of guests. In particular, nostalgia and exoticization make the relation to Bornholm meaningful to both producers and consumers. (Food, authentication, nostalgia, exotization, semiotic landscape analysis)

Deaf signers are typically multilingual, often exposed to a signed language and a spoken and/or written language. One outcome of this type of contact is ‘mouthing’—the silent articulation of spoken/written words with the simultaneous production of a sign. This article focuses on mouthing patterns in the Kufr Qassem deaf community, in which there is contact between Kufr Qassem Sign Language (KQSL), Israeli Sign Language (ISL), as well as Hebrew, and Arabic, which exists as a diglossia. The findings show that mouthing is constrained by the interlocutor and sign language used, with more mouthing with an ISL interlocutor than KQSL interlocutor, and when using ISL signs than KQSL signs. Contact with a diglossic spoken language shows that signers mouth in Palestinian Arabic rather than in Modern Standard Arabic. Furthermore, evidence of diachronic changes in mouthing was found, reflecting changes in education and mobility. (Mouthing, sign language, language contact, Kufr Qassem Sign Language, Israeli Sign Language, Arabic, diglossia)*

While scholars have long been interested in the formation, meaning, and uses of diminutive morphology across languages, the present study illustrates a novel approach to their examination. Drawing upon a corpus of recordings of Brazilian obstetric and gynecological consultations conducted in Portuguese, our analytic points of departure are action and the sequential progression of interaction. We address these by investigating moments where diminutive forms and base forms of a lexical item are used in close proximity. This approach allows us to unpack and particularize the generic, overarching function of ‘mitigation’ in terms of the specific actions being constituted by the participants—here, offering reassurance, attenuating intrusiveness, pursuing acquiescence, and launching activity transitions. We conclude by discussing some of the implications of this analysis and suggesting some potential avenues for future comparative research. (Portuguese, Brazil, gynecology, obstetrics, healthcare, morphology, pragmatics, granularity, methodology, conversation analysis)*

This article discusses communicative strategies enacted by participants of Faveladoc, a documentary-making workshop that the first author attended in 2021. It examines how the participants, who are residents from Rio de Janeiro's Complexo do Alemão favelas, grappled with a shootout that broke out during a meeting. Based on textual analysis and our ongoing dialogue with participants, we unpack their semiotic and rhetorical work of avoiding despair by reorienting knowledge, building socialites, and pursuing resources. They mobilized generic resources (i.e. discursive and listening genres), pragmatic strategies (e.g. collective singling out of the area of risk), and metapragmatic moves (e.g. contextual recourse to humor) to assess security. Through further enacting a distributed embodiment—collective commitments beyond a bounded body—participants facilitated hope as a modality of action. Finally, their recourse to humor in spite of potential danger reflected an enactment of communal care that we call a poetics of hope. (Sociolinguistics of hope, favelas, distributed embodiment, generic resources, humor).

While multiple threats to the language, culture, and existence of the 700 members of the Village of Tewa loom (Kroskrity 1993, 2021), this diasporic Pueblo society deploys sociolinguistic resources to generate hope ‘as a moral call’ (Mattingly 2010). Their heritage language is rhematized (Gal & Irvine 2019) to their community identity but now that emblem, and their very existence, has been challenged by the encroachment of English and other crises (including climate change and the pandemic). For Tewa, repairing the situation requires a hopeful ‘reorientation of knowledge and action’ (Miyazaki 2004; Borba 2019) that recontextualizes traditional linguistic practices and language ideologies (Kroskrity 1998). Tewa linguistic and discursive expressions of ‘hope’ are more agentive and directed than their English language counterparts. These practices are examined as forms of what Tuck (2009:417) called generative hope ‘about a present that is enriched by the past and the future’. (Pragmatics, language ideologies, hope)*

Sociolinguistics has recently turned its attention to the production of hope in language. Although hope is dismissed in several everyday and academic discourses as escapism or cruel optimism, if investigated ethnographically, the affect and practice of hope emerge contextually as both practical reason and semiotic ideology with important political implications. The articles in this special issue variously engage with hope as situated action whereby individuals and communities struggle for material resources, reorient temporality, recalibrate registers, create alliances, and reflexively engage with social practice to build forms of life that in many ways resist despair and paralysis. While the collection of articles gathered here does not share a single view of hope, a common thread is that hope in different ways coheres with the Brazilian Portuguese esperançar—that is, hope not as sheer or passive waiting but as pragmatic and reflexive action. (Sociolinguistics of hope, affect, practical reason, language ideology, ethnography)

This article explores the dialectics of hope and anger as responses to what Lear (2006) called ‘devastation’, the colonial-capitalist destruction of the ontological groundings of life. Lear argues that ‘radical hope’ allows for ‘survival’ in such contexts, and his work has been influential. Yet, I want to be careful with relying on hope as a political affect. Hope is also a sociality-sanctioned emotion. Anger, by contrast, remains frowned upon and discouraged. However, anger can have liberatory potential: it constitutes a communicative act, articulating the urgent need for political change. I explore the semiotics of anger by considering the complex affective contours of a musical performance, ‘Protest’, created by Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach (1960). The expression of anger is reflexive and performative. It is a recognizable register as well as a politically passionate communicative act that resists its own foreclosure and that intersects with hope in complex ways. (Hope, anger, affect, music, negative dialectics, philosophical sociolinguistics)*

The article examines hope as employed in short political speeches given by a Palestinian resident and activist, Mr. Saleh Diab, to a small audience of Jewish-Israelis, during the weekly Sheikh Jarrah protest in East Jerusalem. Informed by linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, hope is viewed contextually as a resource or affordance that enables indexical connection-projection from the narrative time of the present to a future that is yet unforeseeable (yet-to-become, Derrida 1990/1992). The analysis of future-facing utterances highlights the indexical semiotics that underlie hope, connecting collaborative political action performed here-and-now in the occupied Palestinian neighborhood to its future ramifications. Examining Saleh's employment of hope points at its essential moral and affective entanglement. The article seeks to contribute to a sociolinguistic understanding of hope, as collaboratively and consistently sustained (specifically within the Israeli-Palestinian context), and more broadly to supply a clearer view of the sociolinguistics of grassroot political activism resisting oppressive regimes. (Narrative, time, indexicality, Israel-Palestine, Sheikh Jarrah, protest, demonstration, political discourse)1

Ridicule is often understood as an instrument used by an agent to accomplish a goal. This article, however, investigates ridicule as an indexical phenomenon, a social meaning activated for certain participants in particular situations. Through a detailed analysis of interviews with a scientist, this study shows how storytelling, stance-taking, and entitlement practices help shape the experience of ridicule and the situations where it occurs. The scientist experiences a joke about her research as ridicule when it is reported in the news but experiences the same joke as rapport when it is told by colleagues in the lab. The article demonstrates that the meanings and purposes of humor do not inhere in jokes, and joking rights do not inhere in people; they are negotiated and accomplished in interaction. Drawing on an indexical understanding of context, it further shows how the experience of situations shapes and is shaped by discourse. (Narrative, stance, entitlement, indexicality, humor, literacy, scientific popularization)*

This article explores relations between transcultural processes and historical boundaries. Drawing on the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of assemblage, it examines the selection and organisation of cultural elements in a Japanese-styled Chinese New Year installation at a Hong Kong shopping mall. The article presents three affective regimes produced in this transcultural assemblage: New Year festivity, simulated tourism, and partial historicity. We argue that these regimes are regulated in the processes of erasure (the selective blockage of competing lineages of rituals, traditions, and spaces) and forgetting (the process evoking creative re-organisation of semiotic boundaries between cultural elements selected into the transcultural assemblage). This article suggests two implications. First, transculturality is not only the dialogic transgression and creation of boundaries but also the selection and regulation of cultural elements in an assemblage. Second, historical boundaries are not sidestepped but are regulated by the partial blockage through erasure and re-organisation through forgetting in affective regimes. (Transculturality, assemblage, affective regime, erasure, forgetting, Hong Kong)

Translingual knowledge allows sociolinguists to appreciate more ‘playful’ negotiation and the assemblages of linguistic, cultural, and semiotic resources for meaning-making. Yet, this very idea of ‘translingual playfulness’ should never lose sight of the subversive purpose of this apparent playfulness: to destabilise norms and boundaries. The reason behind all of this translingual playfulness is precisely the ‘precarious’ positions of the creators of the playful. In this article, I urge sociolinguists to think more carefully about how translingual playfulness may connect to precarity and argue that it is important not to construe playfulness and precarity as dichotomous or even as opposite ends of a spectrum but rather to view them as symbiotically (re)constituting each other. The idea of ‘precarity’, thereby, deserves much more attention than the representation of ‘playfulness’; that is, explicit/implicit translingual precarity needs to be revealed in translingual scholarship. (Translingualism, playfulness, precarity)*

This article moves from the familiar—the human—to the very different in sociolinguistics—the dairy cow. Based on multispecies ethnography, the aim of this article is to advocate the animal turn in sociolinguistics (Cornips 2019). The guiding question is how do non-human animals, that is, dairy cows—mutually and with humans—imbue their intraspecies and interspecies interaction with meaning that makes sense for the two species. The concept of semiotic repertoire is invoked in order to investigate how dairy cows draw on resources to make meaning, and the concept of material-semiotic assemblage is applied in order to account for the different effects generated by the resources that come together at particular moments. The assemblage perspective does not take a ‘cow’ or ‘human’ as discrete and fixed but focuses on the distributed and emergent agency as a relational effect of all elements involved: humans, non-humans, and other. (Intraspecies and interspecies interactions, the semiotic repertoire, assemblage, dairy cows, practices)*

The article describes the practices through which patients’ self-presentations are challenged in psychotherapy. Based on the analysis of thirty-eight instances from psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, analyzed with methods of conversation analysis, narrative analysis, and coding, this article reports on how therapists challenge patients’ self-conceptualizations in response to patients’ self-presentations. Challenges mostly follow patients’ descriptive, narrative, or evaluative accounts that include a strong claim about their self. Challenges to the self pertain to core issues of the therapeutic projects. They are mostly built in ways that show its sensitivity to probable rejection by the patient. Overwhelmingly, the challenge is accounted for by reference to shared knowledge built in the participants’ shared interactional history. Arguably, psychotherapy is a particular setting where the organization of face-work is modified, as occasional challenging of the co-interactant's self-presentation is part of the institutional task of the professional participant. Data are in Finnish and German. (Self, psychotherapy, Goffman, conversation analysis)*

Showcasing how understandings of social mobility encoded raciolinguistic ideologies of the ideal upwardly mobile speaker, I investigate blue- and white-collar orientation to language, race, and social mobility in the Canadian labor market. I analyze these two subject positionalities and the way bundles of skills are ‘bundled otherwise’ when ideologies of race and language are invoked as relevant to a class experience. While the acquisition of standard languages remains understood as a gateway to upward mobility, the increased commodification of language made the acquisition of standard registers of French and English a skill amongst others, on par with any other. If this shift challenges an implicit ‘linguistic’ bias embedded in emic and scientific understandings of class, raciolinguistic ideologies continue to organize worker's orientations to language and work, be it to imagine themselves as cosmopolitan workers or to defend the positions of ethnic, national, and racialized groups in the economy. (Social class, raciolinguistics, work, language ideologies, francophone Canada, bilingualism)*

This article advocates for a ‘sociolinguistics of deglobalization’ that focuses on the sociolinguistic impacts of major shifts in the world system that have taken place since 2008 and have become particularly salient amidst the covid pandemic. Drawing on case studies of China, Indonesia, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, we describe the period after 2008 as an emerging post-neoliberal epoch characterized by the intensifying of state power, constrained resistance, differential inclusion, and organized abandonment. Our article explores the theoretical, methodological, and ethical challenges of researching the sociolinguistic impacts of these developments. We also argue that our discipline's dominant approach to global-scale analysis—the sociolinguistics of globalization—has impeded our ability to perceive the emerging dynamics of deglobalization. Our call for a sociolinguistics of deglobalization is offered as both a provocation and invitation to our discipline to engage with the rapidly changing nature of world politics. (Deglobalization, sovereignty, neoliberalism, coloniality, securitization)*

This article investigates visual communication practices among members of a disabled people's organisation (DPO) in a market in Uganda. Deaf members and many of the hearing members are proficient in Ugandan Sign Language (UgSL) and use it daily. I examine three communicative settings within the market, identifying varied modes of visual communication in use, ranging from loosely conventionalised multimodal improvisation to standard UgSL. Deaf stallholders value the varied forms of linguistic community accessed through these different modes, which are complementary rather than opposing, except at key moments of tension. By combining ‘deaf space’ theory with Silverstein's distinction between speech and language communities, I link the visual communication practices of deaf and hearing marketgoers to the varying forms of solidarity that underly linguistic communities. Deaf marketgoers creatively articulate different visual communication potentialities and the communities they arise from and index, including negotiating linguistic access through strategically opposing deaf and hearing communities. (Deaf space, sign language, language communities)*

This article explores one underestimated aspect of language in migration settings, namely the experience of not being in full control of circumstances and doing. Recent research has indeed highlighted aspects such as transcendence of boundaries, hinting at a version of multilingualism among migrants that does not feature enough of their experience of constraints. In contrast, other scholars have emphasised structural inequalities often focusing on macro-social pressures that migrants have to navigate. Approaching lived experiences as they emerge while researcher and informant build rapport-in-talk, the study concentrates on a young Gambian in Italy. He speaks of a lack of institutional support and being in a position where certain languages cannot be used, despite concrete help from a local NGO and personal efforts. The data also show suffering beyond language-related constraints and the progressive mutual surfacing of linguistic repertoires in interaction, evidencing more broadly the merits of this type of qualitative study. (Migration, constraints, Gambia, Italy)*

In this article, we address the following question: how do comprehenders reason about the persona embodied by the speaker to determine the referential meaning of numerical expressions such as ‘The price is $200’? Using a picture selection task, we show that descriptions uttered by speakers embodying a Nerdy persona, indexically associated with highly precise speech, are interpreted more precisely than those uttered by speakers embodying a Chill persona, indexically associated with imprecise speech. These findings contribute to building a more integrative perspective between the socio-indexical and the referential domain of signification, highlighting comprehenders’ social perception of the speaker as a crucial element informing pragmatic reasoning, and meaning interpretation more broadly. (Social meaning, personae, pragmatic reasoning, precision, numerals)*