This article considers a form of marketing strategy among upmarket food and beverage establishments in Hong Kong and Singapore involving the use of Chinese text in their decor. Although the two cities have a majority Chinese population, English is widely considered the language of social mobility and an unmarked language in the discursive construction of eliteness. In asking, “Why Chinese?” we consider how the indexical value of a vernacular language can be rescaled in upmarket commercial spaces for an emergent group of consumers known as “cultural omnivores.” Through the process of indexical selectivity, the invocation of Chinese in these establishments taps into the unique disposition of cultural omnivores by feeding their multilingual desires, and more specifically their desire to consume relatively more or less prestigious languages omnivorously in indexing social distinction. Such alternative readings of the prestige value of the vernacular by a privileged group of consumers point to the ambivalent indexicality of language.

This article presents a case for approaching works of nineteenth-century realist fiction as proto-ethnographic documents that contain unique evidence for reconstructing extinct discourse practices. We focus on two previously undescribed phenomena: improvised rhyming in sparring dialogue, and the use of ideophones in oral storytelling.

This article examines the role of referential directness and community emblematization in the documentation of Libyan sign processes construed by Italian colonial ethnographers as secretive. I examine the key texts on these practices to show that colonial ethnographers metasemiotically framed the so-called argots of Libya in terms of what was understood to be their occulting function of hiding one’s intentions and their anti-language function of opposing established society. I show that Italian colonial-ethnological preoccupations with clarity and moral unity were articulated against the discursive background of French colonial ethnology of Algeria as well as Italian racist criminology anchored in the metaphor of relative opacity.

Capturing the zeitgeist of youthful challenges to the status quo in Ghana, a video of an anonymous young person challenging an older politician with a derisive call of “Tweaa!” went viral in 2014. Reentextualizations of the encounter were soon circulating online in the form of memes, songs, and hashtags and offline in joking exchanges everywhere from vegetable markets to parliament. This article traces the many ironic reembeddings of the tweaa clip across these contexts, as young people used tweaa to subvert and interrogate Ghana’s rigid social hierarchies—ultimately producing an enduring shift in the vocabulary of protest in Ghana. Tweaa, once a casual interjection of disapproval, is now explicitly seen as iconic of the disenfranchised challenging those in power: a verb meaning “to protest inept authority.” This case study of memetic circulation suggests that memes not only discursively produce publics but can effect seismic semiotic shifts in everyday language.

This essay studies papo reto (straight talk) activist register as an enregistered social formation that indexes practices, relations, and personae belonging in Brazil’s favelas (low-income neighborhoods). Drawing from fieldwork in the Complexo do Alemão favelas in Rio de Janeiro, I discuss three case studies that showcase prototypical pragmatic features of papo reto (suspension of face concerns; directness; and indexically valued tropism). In juxtaposing findings from the sociology of violence in Brazil with my informants’ ethnopragmatics, I conclude that papo reto activist register is a crucial language game for surviving the “crossfire,” that is, the violent dispute between the normative regimes of the state and the “world of crime” in favelas. Further, in its rewording of the “convoluted” language of bureaucracy and other upscale registers to a “direct” and more participatory speech level, papo reto activist register is a fundamental weapon for the political participation of Blacks and other minorities in one of the world’s most unequal countries.

This article analyzes the significance of the place in Kyiv where the statue of Lenin stood before it was toppled during the Euromaidan protests. Following the monument’s demolition, many works of art have been successively exhibited on this site. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival sense of the world, the article suggests that these sculptures, installations, and performances have demonstrated the permanent carnivalesque potential of the place. Moreover, as different representations of Ukrainian memory and identity, these works of art have created a polyphony of voices about the Ukrainian past, present, and future. The research explains the significance of this phenomenon for the Ukrainian society.