This article contributes to research on commemorative naming strategies by presenting a comparative longitudinal study on changes in the urban toponymy of Leipzig (Germany) and Poznań (Poland) over a period of 102 years. Our analysis combines memory studies, linguistic landscape (LL) research and critical toponymy with GIS visualization techniques to explore (turnovers in) naming practices across time and space. The key difference between the two localities lies in the commemorative pantheon of referents—events, people, and places inscribed as traces of a hegemonic national past—that are replaced when commemorative priorities change. Other patterns are common to both study sites. Notably, in both Poznań and Leipzig, peaks of renaming occur at the threshold of regime change, after which commemorative renaming activity subsides. We report on our findings and propose methodological guidelines for analyzing street renaming from a longitudinal, transnational, and interdisciplinary perspective. (Collective memory, critical toponymy, memoryscape, linguistic landscapes, encoding of ideology, comparative analysis of Eastern Europe, longitudinal analysis, commemoration, GIS visualization)*

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)*

This article investigates the situated orientation to and production of social and political norms related to the pronunciation of person names in the context of announcing next speakers during a political meeting. Through a detailed multimodal analysis of naturally occurring interaction, the article discusses how participants to a political party's congress in Sweden treat the chairpersons’ pronunciation of person names as rendering them (non)normative and as relating them to ethnic categories. In associating specific prosodic realizations of person names with ‘(non)Swedish-ness’ and orienting to this as inacceptable, the participants reflexively establish these membership categories as (non)normative and, moreover, as unequal. In this way, the article contributes to our understanding of normative aspects regarding public announcements of next speakers as a turn-taking procedure in political interaction and how names are invoked and established as related to (non)normative ethnic categories by virtue of the formal properties of their production. (Conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, person names, political interaction, turn-taking, ethnicity, prosody)*

This article investigates the use of touch as a tool for engaging prospective next speakers within Indonesian multiparty conversation. We examine the lamination of touch onto questions directed towards specifically targeted recipients. First, we find that questions with touch are deployed when the physical environment complicates the attainment of mutual orientation. Second, when previously targeted recipients have failed to respond to a question, touch is added to follow-up questions that are deployed for pursuing a response. Third, touch is added to questions that are personal or that inquire about potentially delicate matters. This multimodal investigation of conversational turn-taking provides data from Colloquial Indonesian as basis for cross-linguistic comparison. In considering the volume of touches in these data we ask whether cultural and environmental factors might contribute to a haptic modification of ordinary turn-taking procedures. (Turn-taking, touch, multimodality, sociotopography)

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

Research on Jewish English in the United States has drawn on a set of ideologies linking the Jewish ethnolinguistic repertoire to New York City English, but less is known about how these ideologies interface with the social meanings of regional features in the communities outside New York in which these speakers live. Through meta-linguistic commentary and acoustic analyses drawn from sociolinguistic interviews with white Jewish and Catholic Chicagoans, we find that meta-linguistic ideologies associate Jewish speakers with New York City English and white Catholic speakers with ‘local’ Chicago features. However, in actual production, these linguistic differences appear to be driven by neighborhood rather than ethnoreligious identity alone. We argue that while meta-linguistic commentary may re-circulate broader linguistic ideologies, the uptake of elements of the ethnolinguistic repertoire may depend on the social meanings of those features in the local community more broadly, including class- and place-linked variation. (Ethnolinguistic repertoire, place, Northern Cities Shift, Jewish English)*

This article demonstrates how mediatization facilitates the (re)production of mock language. Through an examination of Chinese netizens’ reactions to a series of viral internet commercials that feature three Hong Kong actors speaking nonstandard Mandarin, it uncovers the processes whereby Gangpu (Hong Kong Mandarin) has become increasingly perceived in China as funny. The vast scale of uptake formulations enabled by mediatization has made it possible for Chinese netizens to engage in a collaborative effort not only in highlighting certain features of Gangpu and certain elements of the commercials but also in presenting them in ways that evoke specific meanings and interpretations. Ultimately, it is through the parodic revoicing of Hong Kong celebrities speaking nonstandard Mandarin that this non-native variety has come to be keyed as humorous. This study shows that we gain a better understanding of how mock practices reinforce and build on each other by tracing their uptake and circulation. (Mediatization, mock language, parody, listening subject, Mandarin Chinese, Hong Kong, China)*

The present article reflects on the concept of ‘spatial repertoire’ through a ‘trans’-perspective in order to explain the trans-formation of migrants’ homescapes during the pandemic—a time of restricted mobility. In the context of translocal im~mobility, this ethnographically informed multiple case study explores how three Greek ‘brain drain’ immigrants performed homescapes in the online-offline nexus from October to February 2020. Employing a critical discourse analytic approach, the findings showcase the pandemic biopolitics that have resulted in the de/reterritorialisation of everyday sociospatial activities, thus creating heterotopic places within the home. Specifically, the integration of work and political activity into the homescape has led to the resemiotisation of the linguistic landscape of homes and the dissolution of boundaries between ‘named’ spaces in homes. The concept of ‘transpatial repertoire’ captures the hybridisation of the pandemic-affected homescape, taking into consideration the vulnerabilities and emergent resistances to biopolitical control. In other words, it sheds light on the emergent heterotopias of im~mobility. (Pandemic, heterotopia, transpatial repertoire, linguistic landscape, homescape)*

This article analyzes how English medium of instruction (EMI) policy is implemented by disciplining teachers’ and students’ language behaviors in school spaces. I adopt Foucault's (1977) ‘discipline’ to examine how schools exercise disciplinary power to create an English-only environment in multilingual classroom contexts. The data is drawn from an ethnographic study of EMI policies in two Nepali schools. The findings of the study show that schools exercise their disciplinary power through both panoptic and post-panoptic surveillance strategies to police their students’ and teachers’ language practices and punish them for speaking the languages other than English. Such disciplinary power is reinforced by neoliberal development ideology that legitimizes linguistic and symbolic capitals of English. While enforcing EMI policies, schools craft students’ identity as disciplined English-speaking subjects who are perceived to contribute to development ideology. The article discusses some major impacts that sociolinguists can make on transforming unequal EMI language policies and practices. (Discipline, English medium of instruction (EMI), language policing)*

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)*

Across the contemporary world, neoliberalism operates as an anticipatory regime through which mediatised conceptions of the future are aligned to an aggressive (absolute) marketisation of social life. Alongside a critical, queer-theoretical attention to homonormativity, this article uses multimodal critical discourse studies techniques to analyse how such a neoliberal future for LGBTQ people is envisioned in #HoldTight, a pride campaign by an Australian and New Zealand bank. #HoldTight focused on how the act of holding hands can be turned from a source of shame to a joyful, powerful tool for social action: ‘if you feel like letting go, hold tight’. My cultural-phenomenological analysis of #HoldTight demonstrates how this imbrication of LGBTQ rights discourse and mediatised capitalism engaged embodied, hopeful affects as semiotic resources. In this way, I argue that the bank enshrined a speculative, anticipatory chronotope of a future better world, while validating neoliberal governmentality as a benevolent form of LGBTQ agency. (Neoliberalism, multimodal critical discourse studies, queer linguistics, affect, embodiment, cultural phenomenology)*

This article aims to illuminate absences in the semiotic landscape of Crimea, resulting from the erasure of Ukraine after Russia's occupation of Crimea in 2014. By foregrounding what is not there, the study expands semiotic landscapes studies and critical sociolinguistic research more generally by interrogating absence and its haunting effects. More than 3,500 photographs of semiotic landscapes collected over two months of fieldwork between 2017 and 2019 together with fieldnotes serve as ethnographic data. The production of absence is interrogated through an analysis of its material effects, that is, voids, holes, and blank walls. It concludes that erasure does not simply negate Ukraine. Instead, pasts remain present, visible, and audible in semiotic landscapes. Absences, as part of a relational ontology of materiality, discourse, and affect, shout about complex invisibilized histories of violence. In this way, they suggest the need to probe traditional approaches in semiotic landscape research that rely on an ontology of presence. (Absence, trace, materiality, ghost, spectre, haunting, Crimea, Ukraine, semiotic landscape, linguistic landscape, interdiscursivity)*