William Bright, friend and colleague, died on October 15, 2006, near Boulder, Colorado. Bill received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Berkeley in 1955. He taught linguistics and anthropology at UCLA for 29 years until his retirement in 1988. Up to the time of his death he was adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado. He wrote more than 200 books, articles, and reviews, of relevance to many disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, literature, psychology, and sociology. He was the editor of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America, from 1965 to 1987. He was a leading figure in the field of sociolinguistics, and he edited Language in Society from 1993 to 1999.

It is proposed that the response token Right, in one important use, is a marker of epistemic dependency between two units of talk by a prior speaker, and that this talk has progressed the understanding by the Right producer of a complex activity involving much information transfer. Two other Rights as response tokens are considered: as an epistemic confirmation token similar to That's right, and as a change-of-activity token similar to Alright/Okay. In addition, Right is shown to be different from other response tokens, including the news receipt Oh, newsmarkers such as Really?, and continuers and acknowledgment tokens such as Mm hm and Yeah. The primary data consist of a fully transcribed dietetic consultation in an Australian hospital between a dietician and a client.This article has been evolving for nearly ten years, and I wish to thank numerous members of a range of audiences for their stimulating questions. I also wish to thank four anonymous reviewers whose penetrating questions led to two fairly radical rethinks of the arguments and organization. I would particularly like to thank Keith Abbott, who was in the audience for what I hope was the last oral presentation of this paper. He provided extensive written feedback and really put me on the track of epistemic progression marking as being the best characterization of this response token.

This article examines a genre of literary texts in early modern Spain written to be readable in both Latin and Spanish. These texts provide explicit evidence of a phenomenon called “strategic bivalency.” They exemplify both the ideological erasure of language boundaries by experts and the purposeful mobilization of bivalent elements that belong simultaneously to two languages in contact. It is argued that by using such bivalency strategically, speakers and writers in contact zones create the effect of using two languages at once, and that this can be a political act. The texts examined here were composed to demonstrate the superiority of the Spanish language and thus to support Spanish political preeminence. The article addresses the import of the Latin-Spanish bivalent genre for language ideology and considers its implications for understanding of modern bivalent practices and of languages as discrete systems.An earlier version of this article was presented in March 2005 at the International Symposium on Bilingualism 5, in Barcelona. Woolard is grateful to the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia of Spain and to Joan Argenter, principal investigator, for partial support (grant #BFF2003-02954) of that presentation, as part of a project on “Codeswitching and culture in historical communities: Studies in historical linguistic ethnography.” Some of this material was also presented at the Joint XX Conference on Spanish in the U.S. and V Conference on Spanish in Contact with Other Languages, in Chicago, March 2005. Woolard thanks the organizers of these events for the opportunity to discuss these ideas. Archival and library research was supported in part by the New Del Amo Foundation through the University of California and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, which we gratefully acknowledge. Vincent Barletta and Monica Seefeldt assisted with bibliographic work. We are especially indebted to Roger Wright for helpful comments and sources. Thanks also to José del Valle, Narcís Figueras, Ricardo Otheguy, Barbara Johnstone, two anonymous reviewers, and a number of other scholars who kindly responded to queries. We are responsible for any errors and misconceptions that persist despite all this generous assistance.

This article examines how a group of Tanzanian journalists employ various tactics of intersubjectivity to achieve mutual understanding during a conversation at work. The analysis focuses on one particularly challenging episode of talk wherein political figures and clothing styles from the early days of African independence are referenced, and an ensuing joke about body image is made using the phrase kumaintain figure ‘to maintain figure’ in reference to a male journalist. The joke arguably (re)appropriates the original meaning of the phrase and challenges the relevance of Western body aesthetics for Africans. All participants laugh at the joke, but the basis for their laughter is ambiguous. The participants' interpretations of the joke are examined through ethnographic methods within the framework of (re)entextualization (Silverstein & Urban 1996). The analysis shows that the participants have produced somewhat different indexical orders (Silverstein 2003) for the phrase and, therefore, have different reasons for finding it humorous.

This article presents a case study of second dialect acquisition by three children over six years as they shift from Canadian to British English. Informed by Chambers's principles of second dialect acquisition, the analysis focuses on a frequent and socially embedded linguistic feature, T-voicing (e.g., pudding versus putting). An extensive corpus and quantitative methods permit tracking the shift to British English as it is happening. Although all of the children eventually sound local, the acquisition process is complex. Frequency of British variants rises incrementally, lagging behind the acquisition of variable constraints, which are in turn ordered by type. Internal patterns are acquired early, while social correlates lag behind. Acceleration of second dialect variants occurs at well-defined sociocultural milestones, particularly entering the school system. Successful second dialect acquisition is a direct consequence of sustained access to and integration with the local speech community.We would like to thank Tara, Shaman, and Freya for their patience and humor in letting us analyze these materials, and especially for the hilarity of their antics, which added greatly to the amount of fun we had in figuring out their second dialect acquisition. This study was inspired by and has also profited from many discussions with our mentor and friend Jack Chambers. We have also benefited from the insightful guidance of Peter Trudgill, both in print and in personal commentary. An anonymous reviewer added an additional perspective. Of course, none of them is responsible for any remaining shortcomings of our analysis or interpretation.

This article examines how portrayals of Javanese and Indonesian in language policy, the media, and educational settings might lead to enregisterment. This process of association of context to language over time and across space represents knowledge that Indonesians can appropriate in talk. A multidisciplinary approach is used to examine audio and video recordings of Javanese-Indonesian bilingual talk conducted in meetings held in a government office in Central Java, Indonesia. Although the findings are contrary in some ways to earlier descriptions of Javanese and Indonesian usage – for example, in talk containing code alternation there is no one-to-one relationship between hierarchical social relations and code – nevertheless such contradictions can be accounted for by viewing the enregisterment process as merely providing “constituting possibilities” to speakers in situated interaction.I would like to thank the Faculty of Letters, Diponegoro University and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences for help in gaining permission to conduct research in Indonesia. I would also like to thank the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University (LTU), and the Wodonga campus of LTU for the sabbatical leave to conduct this research and for three grants that supported fieldwork in Indonesia. Most important, I would also like to thank the participants in this research, who cannot be named here. Finally, I would like to thank Cecep Wihandi and Junaeni Goebel for their help with initial transcriptions, and Paul Black, Pauline Savy, Peter Burns, two anonymous reviewers, and Barbara Johnstone for their valuable feedback on this work, although all errors remain mine.

This article analyzes the reasons for and the effects of the language shift in Zimbabwe represented by the increasing use of pan-ethnic lingua francas, or urban vernaculars, of local origin. It is suggested that essentialist/primordialist assumptions about “indigenous” languages that feature prominently in current accounts of language endangerment should be made more complex by understanding their historical and social origins. In Zimbabwe, this means understanding the origins of Shona and Ndebele during the colonial period as the product of a two-stage process: codification of dialects by missionaries, and creation of a unified standard by the colonial regime. In the postcolonial context, these languages and the ethnic identities they created/reified are giving way to language use that indexes not ethnic affiliation but urbanization. The article adduces data showing that as Zimbabweans move with relative ease across language boundaries, urban vernaculars express their shared social experience of living in postcolonial urban environments.The authors would like to thank Xingren Xu for his technical support during the writing and revision of this article.

This essay interprets the relation between inalienable possessions and personhood among speakers of Q'eqchi'-Maya living in the cloud forests of Guatemala. In the broadest sense, inalienable possessions are things that are inherently possessed by human beings, such as arms and legs, mothers and fathers, hearts and names. The relation between inalienable possessions and human possessors is analyzed across a variety of domains, ranging from grammatical categories and discursive practices to illness cures and life-cycle rituals. While this relation is figured differently in each domain, a strong resonance between such relations is shown to exist across such domains. For example, the gain and loss of inalienable possessions is related to the expansion and contraction of personhood. This resonance is used as a means to interpret Q'eqchi' understandings of personhood in relation to classic ideas from William James and Marcel Mauss: on the one hand, a role-enabled and role-enabling nexus of value-directed reflexive capabilities; and on the other hand, the material, social, and semiotic site in which this nexus is revealed.This essay was presented to the anthropology departments of Case Western University and Barnard College, the Mesoamerica Workshop at SUNY Albany, and workshops on linguistic anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago. It has greatly benefited from discussions with participants in these forums, especially Asif Agha, Anya Bernstein, Thomas Chordas, Courtney Handman, Walter Little, Elizabeth Povinelli, Lesley Sharp, Michael Silverstein, and Greg Urban. Above all, a course I took from John Lucy, entitled “The Self,” was fundamental to the topic choice and theoretical framing.

When offered unfamiliar words, do children attend to them? Examination of 701 offers of new words drawn from the longitudinal records of five children provides extensive evidence of attention to the new words: Children repeated the new word in the next turn 54% of the time; they acknowledged it in the next turn with markers like yeah or uh-huh 9% of the time, or made a relevant move-on by alluding to some aspect of its referent, again in the next turn, 38% of the time. By comparison, the repeat-rate in new-to-given shifts in conversation is significantly lower. The present data provide strong evidence for some immediate uptake. When children register that new words are new, they can assign them some preliminary meaning and begin to use them right away from as young as age two.This research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR97-31781), the Spencer Foundation (199900133), and the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. I am indebted to Andrew D-W. Wong for help with the data analysis, to Karin Kastens for locating elusive articles, and to Bruno Estigarribia, Barbara F. Kelly, David A. McKercher, and Edy Veneziano for discussion and comment.

This article reports on a study of standardization and language change in the Basque town of Oiartzun. It presents apparent time evidence suggesting that, while certain local features are giving way to competing standard forms, other emblematic features of the local dialect are not undergoing change. It is argued that the absence of change in the case of emblematic local forms is related to community members' ambivalence toward recent economic and social changes in the town. In particular, in the spirit of Labov's Martha's Vineyard study, it is argued that younger Oiartzuners' retention of emblematic local forms is a way of staking a claim to a local identity undercut by recent housing development and suburbanization. In so doing, this article contributes to a growing body of work on the often unique behavior of emblematic local features in language change, particularly in speech communities undergoing rapid social and economic change.I am grateful to the people of Oiartzun for their support and hospitality during the fieldwork portion of this study. I am also grateful to John Singler, Renée Blake, Ricardo Etxepare, Gregory Guy, Richard Kayne, Bambi Schieffelin, Jaqueline Urla, Koldo Zuazo, an anonymous reviewer, and audiences at the University of York, the University of Ottawa, and NWAV 34 for comments pertaining to some of the data presented here. Special thanks also to Iñaki Arbelaitz, Maider Lekuona, Jabi Elizasu, Ana Arruti, and José Luis Erkizia. All errors are my own. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0317842 and by a Fulbright grant. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

In the past twenty years the existence of a sense of ethnic belonging among immigrant groups of European ancestry in the United States has become the focus of frequent debates and polemics. This article argues that ethnicity cannot be understood if it is abstracted from concrete social practices, and that analyses of this construct need to be based on ethnographic observation and on the study of actual talk in interaction. This interactionally oriented perspective is taken to present an analysis of how Italian ethnicity is constructed as a central element in the collective identity of an all-male card playing club. Linguistic strategies, particularly code-switching, are central in this construction, but their role becomes apparent only when language use is analyzed within significant practices in the life of the club. Code-switching into Italian is used as an important index of ethnic affiliation in socialization practices related to the game and in official discourse addressed by the president to club members through the association of the language with central domains of activity.I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal, Barbara Johnstone, for their insightful suggestions, which have substantially contributed to the shaping of this article.

The sequence that begins a story may be a rather small segment, but how one performs the segment may affect whether one achieves the goal of telling the story. The participants in this study are native speakers of Australian English and Japanese, and the stories were collected in both languages. In recipient-initiated stories, Australian speakers begin a story in concert with the recipient's topic presentation, but Japanese speakers build momentum through the building of rapport and trust. In speaker-initiated stories, Australian speakers use a conventional story preface to claim the conversational floor, but Japanese speakers insinuate a story in subtle ways. Such differences may be related to differences between Australian and Japanese social and cultural structures. The final section discusses implications for conversation analysis in addition to cross-cultural issues.I am pleased to acknowledge the assistance of Felicita Carr and Pascale Jacq for their help with transcripts, and Gavin Fryer, Malcolm Mearns, Johanna Rendle-Short, and the editor and anonymous referees of Language in Society for their comments, input, and encouragement.

This article describes the construction of a corpus of spoken French with a time depth of a century and a half, the Récits du français québécois d'autrefois (RFQ). The folktales, local legends, and interviews constituting the RFQ were produced by speakers born between 1846 and 1895. They spoke the French of 19th-century rural Québec, a variety shown to be replete with the vernacular structures and inherent variability of contemporary dialects. The authors review the advantages and drawbacks associated with this type of diachronic material, and argue that, exploited judiciously, it effectively represents an earlier stage of spoken French. They show how systematic comparison of the RFQ with contemporary vernaculars can help pinpoint the existence, date, and direction of language change.The research on which this article is based was generously funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Killam Research Fellowship to Poplack. We are very grateful to friends and colleagues Diane Vincent and Claude Poirier of Université Laval, and especially to archivist M. Jean Coulombe and the staff at the Archives of Folklore there. Without their precious collaboration, this project could not have come to fruition. Carmen LeBlanc and Lauren Willis collected much of the data for the RFQ, and, along with Lyne Klapka and Dawn Harvie, also participated in corpus transcription and correction. Our thanks to them and the other members of the research team at the Sociolinguistics Laboratory, University of Ottawa, for their painstaking work.

Using a large, computerized corpus, this study aims to provide lexico-grammatical evidence of stereotypical constructions of age and aging. It focuses on elderly, a word that is pivotal to the domain in question and whose associative meaning is contested. The collocational profile drawn up on the basis of corpus evidence shows that elderly is primarily associated with discourses of care, disability, and vulnerability, emerging less as a marker of chronological age than of perceived social consequences. In addition to making a contribution to discourse-oriented aging research, the article also demonstrates the use of corpus linguistic methods within a sociolinguistic framework.I am grateful to several colleagues for their comments on a draft version, including most notably Susan Hunston, Virpi Ylänne-McEwen, Kieran O'Halloran, Angie Williams, and two anonymous reviewers. Veronika Koller contributed to the initial corpus searches and also provided useful feedback on the first draft. Eva Kerbler's support during the revision phase was invaluable and much appreciated. I am indebted to Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien and the Austrian National Bank (OeNB) for financial support while spending a sabbatical at the Centre for Language and Communication Research of Cardiff University. Material from the Bank of English® reproduced with the kind permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

This article illustrates the use of an empirical method for examining the perceptual identification of gayness in male speakers. It demonstrates how, by digitally manipulating the speech of isolated individuals, it is possible to obtain reliable evidence that pitch range and sibilant duration may act as indexical of a gay male identity. Further scrutiny of this result, however, illustrates that linguistic indexicality is not as straightforward as it originally appears. Subsequent analyses of the data highlight the ways in which the perceptual evaluation of sexuality is a highly contingent process, dependent upon a variety of sociolinguistic factors. An envelope of variation in listeners' affective judgments of a speaker is shown to exist, and it is argued that research on the perception of identity must go beyond identification of salient features, and also consider when and why these features are not salient.I greatly benefited from the insight and assistance of the following people, whom I would like to thank: Renée Blake, Lisa Davidson, Penny Eckert, Rudi Gaudio, Ron Butters, Keith Walters, Barbara Johnstone, and three anonymous reviewers. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting in Oakland, California, in January 2005, and the 72nd Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 2005. I thank the participants at those events for their questions and comments. All errors are, of course, my own.

This study examines two public hearings on a zoning proposal that would allow the construction of a Super Wal-Mart Center on a field over the town's aquifer. Many citizens speak out against the zoning change because of the risk to drinking water, as well as other issues. Citizens face the speaker's problem of how to make their presentations convincing, given the technical matters involved and the fact that Town Board members have likely already heard about these issues. Some speakers draw on the words of others in their presentations. Using another's words allows the speaker to cite an authoritative source or to respond to what another has said, to evaluate it, and often to challenge it. Speakers use other devices in addition to quotes, such as formulations, repetition, and membership categorizations to develop their evaluative stances in the reporting context. The study's focus is the discursive construction and rhetoric of using others' words for the speaker's own purposes.We gratefully acknowledge the early discussions and help in transcribing from Katherine Hobbs, Diana Martinez, and Jackie Smith. Thanks for the useful comments from Jamie Dangler, Kendall Phillips, Karen Tracy, Donal Carbaugh, Benjamin Bailey, Robin Shoaps, and Vern Cronen. Portions of this study were presented to the Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, 2006, at the National Communication Association Convention, San Antonio, 2006, and at the International Communication Association Convention, San Francisco The final version of this paper benefited tremendously from detailed comments and criticisms from Barbara Johnstone and the two anonymous reviewers.

This article argues for an account of language shift that focuses on ideological conflicts and competing discourses of language, identity, and progress in Tlaxcala, Mexico. The study is based on ethnographic research on patterns of language use, ideology, and boundary differentiation in several Mexicano (Nahuatl)-speaking communities in the Malintzi region of Central Mexico. Metadiscursive practices consisting of three discourses that have local, regional, and national expressions are analyzed: the pro-development metadiscourse of salir adelante, ‘forging ahead’ and improving one's socioeconomic position; the discourse of menosprecio, denigration of indigenous identity; and the pro-indígena or pro-indigenous discourse that promotes a positive attitude toward indigenous identity. Analysis of these discourses offers an understanding of the semiotic resources speakers employ as they orient toward and against particular identities that are both “traditional” and “modern,” as they respond to changing social and economic circumstances. It is concluded that a focus on individuals and communities, through ethnography and discourse analysis, is of critical importance to understanding how and why speakers shift their ideologies and their languages.

This article demonstrates how the field of Jewish interlinguistics and a case study of Jewish Russian (JR) can contribute to the general understanding of ethnolects. JR is a cluster of post-Yiddish varieties of Russian used as a special in-group register by Ashkenazic Jews in Russia. Differences between varieties of JR may be explained in terms of differing degrees of copying from Yiddish. The case of JR allows the general conclusions that (i) the diffusion of ethnolectal features into mainstream use is facilitated not only by a dense social network but also by a relatively sufficient number of speakers with a variety of occupations; and (ii) in addition to matrix language turnover and lexical and prosodic features, an ethnolect may be characterized by new combinability rules under which stems and derivational suffixes belong to the target language (here Russian) but their combination patterns do not.

Modern social theory highlights the role of language in social change/reproduction, yet rarely draws on actual linguistic resources or theory. Equally, sociolinguistics situates linguistic practice within the social domain, but only weakly makes links to social theory. Using a linguistic analysis of policing discourses in Northern Ireland, this article considers how such analyses can both inform and be informed by broader social theories. Policing is a contentious issue for nationalists, and despite recent reforms, many continue to regard the (new) police force with suspicion. Data from nationalist women in Belfast are used to explore the thematic frameworks and interactional/pragmatic strategies (pragmatic blocking) through which the speakers jointly produce a “discourse of resistance,” effectively blocking acceptance of the new service. The analysis is discussed in relation to theories of social change (with particular reference to Bourdieu's habitus). Considered are implications for sociolinguistics, social theory, and policing policy in Northern Ireland.This article derives from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded study (Award No. RES 00-22-0257).

This article characterizes a spoken genre, bargaining, found in retail encounters in traditional markets in southern China. Analysis of substantive acts in 38 tape-recorded interactions shows that verbal and nonverbal actions within the event carry a small set of illocutionary forces germane to negotiating price and quantity. Analysis of ritual acts that mark boundaries of the event shows that participants behave primarily as outgroup persons seeking to transact business. Bargaining hence constitutes a primary genre (Bakhtin 1986), a textual form that shows domination of a transaction frame over a consultation and a valet frame, and a communicative purpose that is tightly circumscribed around the exchange of commodities and not relationship. A socially oriented form of genre analysis is apt for elucidating the speakers' strategic use of generic resources, as well as investigating development in retail marketing in the PRC, marked by growing popularity of new retail outlets and changing consumer attitudes.