Recent research has been concerned with whether speech accommodation is an automatic process or determined by social factors (e.g. Trudgill 2008). This paper investigates phonetic accommodation in New Zealand English when speakers of NZE are responding to an Australian talker in a speech production task. NZ participants were randomly assigned to either a Positive or Negative group, where they were either flattered or insulted by the Australian. Overall, the NZE speakers accommodated to the speech of the AuE speaker. The flattery/insult manipulation did not influence degree of accommodation, but accommodation was predicted by participants' scores on an Implicit Association Task that measured Australia and New Zealand biases. Participants who scored with a pro-Australia bias were more likely to accommodate to the speech of the AuE speaker. Social biases about how a participant feels about a speaker predicted the extent of accommodation. These biases are, crucially, simultaneously automatic and social. (Speech accommodation, phonetic convergence, New Zealand English, dialect contact)*

In this paper we examine the formation over time of a lexical honorific speech register, Tongan lea faka'eiki, or ‘chiefly language’. Use of the comparative historical method enables us to consider honorific register formation within a framework of greater temporal and spatial scope that has been typical for studies of register formation, and to identify some properties of such formation that have not been documented before. Our evidence shows that the higher and lower levels of honorification in this speech register have been formed at different times and through predominantly different etymological processes, even as they draw on the same broader set of word formation processes. In recorded speech, the differences between the sources of the two sub-registers are even more pronounced, preserving and reproducing the historical differences in their formation.*

A number of Conversation Analytic studies have documented that question recipients have a variety of ways to push against the constraints that questions impose on them. This article explores the concept of transformative answers – answers through which question recipients retroactively adjust the question posed to them. Two main sorts of adjustments are discussed: question term transformations and question agenda transformations. It is shown that the operations through which interactants implement term transformations are different from the operations through which they implement agenda transformations. Moreover, term-transforming answers resist only the question’s design, while agenda-transforming answers effectively resist both design and agenda, thus implying that agenda-transforming answers resist more strongly than design-transforming answers. The implications of these different sorts of transformations for alignment and affiliation are then explored.*

This article examines the influence of language ecology on bilingual speech. It is based on first-hand data from two previously undocumented varieties of Romani and Pomak in contact with Turkish in Greek Thrace; in both cases Turkish is an important language for the community's identity. This analysis shows how the Romani-Turkish “fused lect” was produced by intensive and extensive bilingualism through colloquial contact with the trade language, Turkish. In addition, it shows how semi-sedentary Pomak speakers had limited, institutional contact with Turkish, resulting in more traditional codeswitching and emblematic lexical borrowings. (Language contact, bilingual speech, fused lect, language ecology, Pomak, Romani, Turkish, Greece)*

This article investigates the enregisterment of an internet-specific language variety and its features. The enregisterment of internet language is explored through several sites of metadiscourse: academic scholarship about computer-mediated communication, uses of the metalinguistic terms netspeak and chatspeak in print media, and online comment threads about language and the internet. This metadiscourse provides evidence of a shared concept of internet language as comprising distinctive written features, primarily acronyms, abbreviations, and respellings. Internet language's enregisterment emerges from standard language ideology and deterministic views of technology, where the construal of these features as both nonstandard and internet-specific articulates the perceived distinctiveness of internet interactions. Yet empirical evidence shows that these features are relatively rare in instant messaging conversations, one form of interaction to which internet language is attributed; this discrepancy has implications for the application of indexical order to enregisterment. (Enregisterment, language ideology, computer-mediated communication, internet, metadiscourse, indexical order, Standard English, technological determinism, mass media)*

The intertwined role of language ideologies and affect in language shift and revitalization can be understood by taking a language socialization perspective on local micro-level interaction between adult Gaelic learners and fluent Gaelic-English bilinguals. Seven adults living in the Western Isles were interviewed about their efforts to learn and speak Scottish Gaelic, a minority language spoken by 1–2% of Scotland’s population. Their negative affective stances in describing their interactions with local Gaelic-English bilinguals indicate that they were being socialized into an ideology of local Gaelic-English sociolinguistic boundaries: an “etiquette of accommodation” to English speakers and wariness about public Gaelic speaking. This socialized combination of ideology and negative affect reduces opportunities for Gaelic speaking, hindering both Gaelic learners’ efforts to become fluent speakers and their potential contribution to language revitalization. In contrast, however, the interviewees described “sociolinguistic mentors” who socialized them into a more inclusive vision of Gaelic speaking laden with positive affect.1

The multilingualism and patterns of language use in Misión La Paz, Salta Province, Argentina are described and analyzed. Three indigenous languages, Chorote, Nivaclé, and Wichí, are spoken here, but interlocutors in conversations usually do not speak the same language to one another. There is extensive linguistic exogamy, and husbands and wives typically speak different languages to one another. Individuals identify with one language, speak it to all others, and claim only to understand but not to speak the other languages spoken to them. Children in the same family very often identify with and thus speak different languages from one another. This situation is examined and explanations are offered, with comparisons to similar situations elsewhere. The pattern of language choice and multilingual use in this case is arguably unique, with implications for several general claims about language contact and multilingualism.

The topic of this article is how conversationalists deal with emergent problems of reference in the construction of a turn at talk. It analyzes practices for modifying and expanding a turn-constructional unit in progress to accommodate information that will introduce a referent to the interlocutor or check his or her familiarity with it. One set of practices expands the turn after the referring expression has been produced: apokoinou constructions and appositions. A second, and previously undescribed, practice is identified by which speakers insert referent identification before the referring expression has been produced. In this practice, speakers initiate two separate sentence structures and complete them both by merging them in a common complement. This practice has the advantage of embedding the subordinate activity of establishing reference within the main sentence frame, and furthermore minimizes the disruption of sequential progressivity of the talk. (Turn construction, reference, expansions, apokoinou, apposition, progressivity)*

In the Tanzanian Bongo Flava youth music scene, Abel Motika is a popular artist who uses both verbal and visual markers of Kisongo Maasai ethnicity to style himself as “the Maasai rapper” with the stage name “Mr. Ebbo.” Through analysis of his 2002 song “Mi Mmasai” ‘I am Maasai’, this study investigates his ethnic stylizing in playful use of Maa pronunciation and an understudied Swahili language game known as kinyume ‘backwards style’. The study finds that while Ebbo strategically disrupts the sociolinguistic order that privileges Standard Swahili, the Maasai persona he projects is humorously stylized as unable both to speak Standard Swahili and to engage with the urban lifestyle associated with Tanzania's de-ethnicized Swahili modernity, thereby leaving dominant ideologies of language and ethnicity intact. Moreover, in arguing that Motika's stylization of ethnicity has a contradictory effect, both affirming a local ethnic identity and preserving the logic of ethnolinguistic stereotyping, the study critiques approaches to hip hop that privilige authorial intent and assume linguistic subversiveness. (Swahili, Maa, Bongo Flava, parody, ethnicity, rap, kinyume)*

Salsa, a global urban music and dance phenomenon, is an interesting example for the emergence of transnational cultural spheres. Salsa has its roots in the Americas and in many Salsa communities outside of Latin America, the Spanish language is seen as the authentic means of expression. However, attitudes to multilingualism can differ strongly from Salsa community to Salsa community.

In this paper, the Salsa-scene of Sydney is introduced with its various stances towards multilingualism. These are connected to different styles of the dance, where one style is practiced in English only, while dancers of another style are often bilingual speakers of Spanish and English. Monolingualism and multilingualism here mediate the affiliation to different local scenes. Simultaneously, both language ideologies relate to different global discourses of competitive and cosmopolitan culture. It will be asked whether the introduced language ideologies challenge traditional frameworks of society and reified discursive concepts of language. (Multilingualism – Transnationalism – Cosmopolitanism)*

Kawaii, an adjective meaning ‘cute’, ‘adorable’, and ‘lovable’, is an important aspect of Japanese material culture and a key affect word used to describe things that are small, delicate, and immature. While “cuteness” has been widely discussed in relation to Japanese society and psychology and the globalization of Japanese culture, there has been little analysis of the word kawaii in interaction. This article explores the use of kawaii in interaction in a Japanese preschool. In particular, it analyzes ways teachers use multimodal resources, including talk, embodied actions, material objects, and participation frameworks, in making assessments of things in the social world and in “glossing” children’s actions as thoughts and feelings, and it examines children’s emerging use of kawaii with teachers and peers. The findings shed light on ways everyday communicative practices shape children’s understandings and use of language in relation to affect, gender, and relationships in preschool.*

This article focuses on the question of how systems of expectations for social conduct develop in a context characterized by diversity and transience. The empirical focus is a series of women's neighborhood meetings in a transient urban milieu in Indonesia. Drawing on work on semiotic register formation, I argue that expectations for social conduct within this neighborhood are constructed through the positioning of self and others in talk across speech situations. In doing so, I explore interdiscursive relationships between this conversational activity and more perduring signs of personhood and social relations. (Enregisterment, identity, Indonesia, migration, trust)*

In his landmark contribution to the field of language shift/maintenance, Fishman maintains that, for language shift to be reversed, “face-to-face, small-scale social life must be pursued in their own right and focused upon directly.” This article responds to this call to examine language shift at the level of face-to-face interaction. It describes a specific interactional practice, referred to as “medium request,” observed in the Rwandan community in Belgium, where language shift is taking place from Kinyarwanda-French bilingualism to French monolingualism. The practice consists in the fact that younger members of the community, when in interaction with adult members, constantly (albeit indirectly) request the latter to “medium-switch” from Kinyarwanda to French. The article therefore describes the practice as a specific type of language/medium negotiation, examines its various strategies, and shows how, through this interactional practice, members of the community actually talk language shift into being. (Medium request, language shift, language maintenance, language/medium negotiation, other-initiated medium repair, embedded medium repair, generalized content repair, targeted content repair, understanding check)

Although an increasing number of sociolinguistic researchers consider functions of voice qualities as stylistic features, few studies consider cases where voice qualities serve as the primary signs of speech registers. This article addresses this gap through the presentation of a case study of Lachixío Zapotec speech registers indexed though falsetto, breathy, creaky, modal, and whispered voice qualities. I describe the system of contrastive speech registers in Lachixío Zapotec and then track a speaker on a single evening where she switches between three of these registers. Analyzing line-by-line conversational structure I show both obligatory and creative shifts between registers that co-occur with shifts in the participant structures of the situated social interactions. I then examine similar uses of voice qualities in other Zapotec languages and in the two unrelated language families Nahuatl and Mayan to suggest the possibility that such voice registers are a feature of the Mesoamerican culture area. (Voice quality, register, performance, metapragmatics, Mesoamerica, Zapotecan, Mayan, Nahuatl)*

As a linguistic curiosity, Chinglish has long fascinated native speakers of English, prompting numerous studies that analyze its form with a view towards either eliminating it or accepting it as a viable Standard English variant. In this article, I examine how various social groups involved in foreign language education in China, including Chinese students, foreign teachers and linguists, enregister Chinglish as a linguistic variety. I argue that Chinglish is not distinguished by the presence or absence of any particular linguistic feature, but a label produced in the intersubjective engagements between language learners and native speakers. Chinglish is structured by and reinforces the relations of expertise within the Chinese English language speech community, thus representing larger anxieties about nationalism and modernization in a global context.*

The development of digital communication technologies not only has an influence on human communicative practices, but also creates new spaces for human collaborative activity. In this article we discuss a technologically mediated context for interaction, computer games. Closely looking at interactions among a group of gamers, we examine how players are managing complex, shifting frameworks of participation, the virtual game world and the embodied world of talk and plans for action. Introducing the notion of participation cues, we explain how interactants are able to orient to, plan, and execute collaborative actions that span quite different environments with quite different types of agency, possible acts, and consequences. Novel abilities to interact across diverse spaces have consequences for understanding how humans build coordinated action through efficient, multimodal communication mechanisms. (Computer-mediated communication, language and technology, gaming, gesture, participation, multimodality)*

This article discusses the use of well as a discourse marker in some New Zealand courtrooms. While well has been discussed by many in the past, the data have been selected mainly from small, friendly encounters of various kinds, including sociolinguistic interviews. The study reported on here looks at a very different situation that necessarily involves a range of relationships and includes both cooperative and adversarial activities. It confirms that explanations of well’s use focusing on single strands such as social indicators (e.g. gender) or discourse coherence are simplistic, a more fruitful account being afforded through a multi-pronged functional approach. Finally, the article considers the application of politeness and relevance theory.*