This article explores how modes of listening and ideologies of democratic action are intertwined, through the example of a multicultural neighborhood in Oslo, Norway. While much work on language and democracy focuses on speakers, this article instead interrogates how a government listens to citizens, and how different conceptualizations of what listening is index different understandings of democratic action. While the Oslo municipality sees listening as a form of legitimation for governmental policymaking, local residents try to create a more open form of listening, which they see to be a better way of addressing the needs of a more diverse citizenry. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with municipal employees, neighborhood organizations, and residents, the analysis focuses on the participation frameworks and interactional genres that my interlocutors take to be instances of democratic listening, and how listening practices are intertwined with imaginations of a more inclusive future. (Listening, democracy, participatory politics, Norway)*

This article performs a multimodal digital discourse analysis to examine how the 2020 social media political campaign called ‘Settle for Biden’ successfully encouraged young Progressives to vote for Joe Biden. In contrast to previous US presidential campaigns that highlight the extraordinary capabilities of their candidates, this campaign utilized the scalar and chronotopic production of normativity to highlight Biden's ‘mediocre’ capabilities. The campaign's focus on ‘settling’ for a mediocre candidate was feasible only in the sociopolitical context of 2020, at a time when Donald Trump's leadership had come to be perceived as chaotic and dangerous. While using humor to make salient the normal nature of Biden, the campaign used semiotic strategies appealing to interconnected unmarked normativities associated with class, age, race, and gender. To draw on Hall (2021), the campaign produces ‘language in the middle’, constructing Biden as neither extraordinary nor reprehensible yet preferable to the abnormality of his competitor. (Normativity, scales, chronotopes, multimodality, intertextuality, politics, social media)*

This article examines the language ideologies undergirding university English language admission requirements. Universities are today caught between the order of the nation state and that of corporate globalization as they seek to attract both national and international students. This tension produces conflicting processes of (converse) racialization and linguistic (un)marking within which universities construct language proficiencies and ethnonational identities. Our study finds two categorically different constructs of English language proficiency (ELP): inherent ELP based on citizenship, linguistic heritage, and prior education, and tested ELP. These two constructs of ELP map onto two dichotomous student groups. One side of this binary—the white native-speaker citizen construct—is subject to converse racialization and unmarking. While it becomes blurred, it casts its Other into clear relief: the Asian non-native speaker non-citizen. The research has implications for critical language testing and language policies in higher education. (Citizenship, English as a global academic language, internationalization of higher education, international students, language ideologies, language testing, native speakerism, racialization, World Englishes)

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)

The multi/translingual turn in sociolinguistics has highlighted a number of ideological entanglements of foundational concepts, most significantly the way that the notion of ‘named languages’ as bordered entities is intertwined with ideologies of nation and race. In this article, I consider what the conceptual place for linguistic borders is within a ‘trans’ framework of language and propose a focus on bordering, social actions in which indexical meanings at different scales are mobilized to exert control over discursive space by erecting boundaries within or around it. I draw on data from a Facebook group for non-local teachers of English in Thailand, examining how bordering served interests of hegemonic power when linguistic borders were policed with reference to ideologies of nation, as well as how it enabled counter-hegemonic resistance when borders were erected to separate teachers of colour from the intense discursive struggle in the group. (Translanguaging, linguistic borders, bordering, code-switching, scale, resistance, discursive agency)*

This article analyzes the sociolinguistic construction of two gendered figures in multilingual performances, namely a category of young Mongol wives in rural societies who challenge patriarchal social order, and a group of young urban Mongol men whose dream is to be rich and indulge themselves in luxury. By drawing on the analytical framework of stance and stylization, the study analyzes how the performers’ multivalent stance-taking towards constructed personas and specific social-moral orders are communicated through their skillful stylization of multilingual resources in Inner Mongolia. It also points out that language stylization and stance-taking, taking place in reference to local cultural values and linguistic ideologies, are anchored in continually evolving ethnic, gender, and class relationships in a changing, minoritized Mongolian society in the context of Chinese modernization and capitalist marketization. (Stance-taking, language stylization, gendered discourses, Mongols, multilingualism)*

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).

Though research on the multiethnolect spoken in London—Multicultural London English (MLE)—has described the social distribution of the variety, the stylistic potentials of MLE remain poorly understood. This article explores the enregisterment and subsequent ‘recontextualisation’ (Bauman & Briggs 1990) of MLE by analysing the linguistic and aesthetic components of a stylistic identity—the ‘roadman’. Specifically, I explore a corpus of TikTok videos to analyse the ways in which linguistic features characteristic of MLE (e.g. pronominal man, discourse-pragmatic styll, fronted /uː/) are co-opted and stylised in parodic performances of the roadman. I demonstrate that these linguistic features co-occur with tropes of personhood (e.g. participation in grime music, overt heterosexuality, a streetwear aesthetic) that are ideologically associated with a particular type of gendered, classed, and racialized identity. Concluding, I reflect on the status of the roadman persona with reference to contemporary patterns of language variation in the UK. (Multicultural London English, personae, digital culture, TikTok, stylisation, performance)*

This study examines preference organization in adult second language classrooms in relation to possible -isms—utterances which are hearably racist, classist, (hetero)sexist, or otherwise exclusionary, although their exclusionary nature may be (re)negotiated in situ. A collection of sixty-one possible -isms from a corpus of fifty-five hours of video-recorded English second language classes was examined using conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis. The analysis shows that participants orient to solidarity by supporting -isms, progressivity by deleting -isms, and moral accountability by challenging -isms; however, participants prioritize solidarity, enacting it early, even in cases of deletion and challenges. I argue that this preference organization is rooted in the institutional roles and objectives of adult second language classrooms, where presumably competent members of diverse cultures aim to foster an environment for active participation. Findings underscore the importance of conducting microanalyses of talk-in-interaction to uncover structural constraints which facilitate the reproduction of systemic exclusion. (-isms, preference, conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis, classroom interaction, exclusion in interaction)*

My theoretical aim in this article is to focus on an examination of processual enactments of scale in light of the technological affordances that are currently at the disposal of a significant majority of humans. I offer the terms algorithmic scales and algorithmic scalar affordances to describe one activist's engagement of practical theories of scale—her ‘algorithmic imagination’ (Bucher 2017)—which led her to design her audience in ways intended to algorithmically scale up, or amplify, her activities on Facebook—to enhance their spread numerically, rapidly, and translocally, making use of the algorithmically constructed communicative possibilities or affordances available to her on the site. (Social media, scale, algorithms, audience design, Facebook, activism, nation, politics)

In this article, I ask how the body is discursively constructed within the wellness industry. I analyze a corpus of articles from the Goop franchise, examining how bodies are constructed, and how subjects are impelled to act within contemporary neoliberal risk culture. Corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis reveals that the body is ultimately constructed as unwell and at risk, by virtue of its presence in the environment. Faced with this inescapable risk, the neoliberal citizen is responsible for managing the self in ever-increasing domains. I link the particularities of this discursive embodiment to larger cultural imperatives of self-surveillance, discipline, and control, and argue that it is particularly a white female subject who is interpellated within this discourse. Throughout, the wellness industry is revealed as propelling the interminable cycle of the project of the self, and as a contemporary mechanism for the reproduction of docile white female bodies. (Discursive embodiment, neoliberal ideology, risk society, corpus analysis, critical discourse analysis, feminist critique)*

The discursive construction of institutional identity concerns how speakers, through their verbal conduct, perform actions as incumbents of particular institutional roles. This can be accomplished through the first-person plural pronoun, a salient marker of the ongoing displays, expressions, and constructions of institutional identity. Drawing on the Chinese premier's press conferences, this study investigates how politicians, journalists, and interpreters constitute their institutional identities through their use of the first-person plural pronoun (English we; Mandarin 我们 wǒmen). Relying on qualitative analysis and bivariate analysis, this study shows that Chinese journalists and interpreters tend to constitute their identities as aligned with the Chinese authority. This stands in contrast to patterns identified in independent press systems, in which journalists confront politicians, and interpreters serve as impartial facilitators. The findings illustrate the bounded fluidity of identities in political discourse and provide insight into the workings of the political communication system in an authoritarian context. (Political discourse, identity, personal pronoun, press conference, journalistic norm, mass communication, interpreter-mediated interaction, China, authoritarianism)*

This article considers a particular set of cultural and ideological discourses—police discourse about domestic violence (DV) victim/survivors—in a study about indexicality. Via the processes of indexicality, victim/survivors are consistently described and constructed as frustrations for police officers and police work. We pinpoint two sociosemantic structures that index frustration—the use of the word frustration and statements that initially show understanding for the victim/survivors’ situation—and then mitigate that understanding with stories about being frustrated. In the process, we argue, DV victim/survivors become indexical forms that index the social meaning that victim/survivors are frustrating rather than compliant. Further, we show how such constructions are available for reiteration by different speakers in police discourse and different contexts. The linguistic features that signal ‘frustration’ thus function in police discourse as indexical features that can be accessed and animated by police officers when they describe encounters with victim/survivors and the victim/survivors themselves. (Indexicality, narrative, police discourse, domestic violence)*

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)*

One key aspect of threat in terrorists’ language is incitement to violence. Contributing to a fuller understanding of how terrorists use language to encourage people to join their cause, this article examines the role of evaluative language in incitement strategies used by a far-rightist to align with and alienate particular social groups. The Affiliation framework (Knight 2010a; Zappavigna 2011; Etaywe & Zappavigna 2021; Etaywe 2022a), as grounded in systemic functional linguistics, is used to understand how values and social bonds are leveraged in the process of incitement, as explored in a manifesto published online by Brenton Tarrant, preceding his 2019 terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand. The findings reveal two main affiliation strategies used for incitement: communion (forging solidarity and alignments) and alienation. These strategies function to construct opposing social groups in discourse, with the condemned groups positioned as a threat, hostility legitimated as morally reasonable, and violence as warranted. (Far-right extremism, incitement, hate crimes, affiliation, morality of terrorism, forensic linguistics, conspiracy theory discourse)

This article investigates how marginal individuals construct a productive self in an interview. It reports on a case study of three women—a squatter, a rough sleeper, and an Irish Traveller—who inhabit uncertain and threatened homes. In response to dominant discourses of productivity, in the interviews the speakers’ talk reflects the desire to be perceived as able and knowledgeable individuals. Thus, rejecting their marginal subjectivities, the three women propose profitable solutions to society's issues along the very same principles of productivity heralded by dominant society. Framed within a performative notion of identity, the study elaborates on the notion of a non-sexual desire as the trigger of most human actions. The results suggest that marginality is not a fixed and segregated state of being and the stereotype of individuals like those discussed in the study as passive and out of touch must be challenged. (Marginality, space, squatter, Irish Traveller, rough sleeper, desire/aspiration, epistemic and agentive self, neo-liberalism)*

This article investigates the discursive dimensions of the Zika epidemic in Brazil. It focuses on the ways the sanitary crisis is talked about by mothers of babies born with microcephaly—a Zika-related syndrome. We examine the situated ways these mothers refuse the biomedical and bureaucratic scripts that are handed down to them by engaging with their new realities and fostering hope against the grain of bleak prognosis. To do so, we scrutinize a corpus that comprises media reports covering the health emergency and ethnographic interviews. Resorting to strategies such as inverse stories, timespace anchorage, and scalar reversals, mothers of Zika inventively plot against painful scripts while reimagining their kids’ future (as well as theirs) in the present. They hope pragmatist hope without teleology. This chronotopic movement sheds light on how somber plots can be twisted through (re)scaling projects, thus forging hopeful actions. (Hope, narratives, scale, plot, epidemics, agency)

In police interviews with child witnesses, ground rules like ‘correct me when I say something wrong’ are established. Establishing these ground rules is required by guidelines, with the aim of enhancing the reliability of children's testimonies. In this article, we use conversation analysis to examine how ground rules are practiced in thirty-eight Dutch police interviews with child witnesses. We focus on the police officers’ use of test questions to practice such ground rules. We found that, often, these questions (at first) only consist of an if-clause. Questions with this format leave open whose turn it is and what the appropriate response should be. If-clause questions allow flexibility in the difficulty of the test question, and a subtle pursuit of a response from the child. Yet, they are also treated as problematic by children, shown by silences and hesitations. Surprisingly, the practicing of ground rules sometimes occasions affiliation. (Police interviews, children, testing, practicing, affiliation, conversation analysis, hypothetical questions)*

Standardisation is often touted as the default means to improve attitudes towards minoritised languages and prevent/reverse their obsolescence. However, standardisation can ‘tamper’ with the indexicalities of minoritised languages, potentially alienating their speakers. Two aspects of standardisation stand out as particularly problematic: the shift from ‘ideologies of authenticity’ to ‘ideologies of anonymity’ (Woolard 2016), and the resulting introduction/intensification of prescriptivism (Eckert 1983). Although much literature focuses on the irreconcilable nature of these ideologies, I show that their discursive manifestations are neither clear-cut nor always incompatible. First, I analyse a TV debate on the standardisation of Martinican Creole (MC), in which the fault-line between authenticity and anonymity is blurred and partially overcome. Next, I draw on a Martinican activist's Instagram profile to show how various discursive strategies and a positive take on language variation can help promote MC as an ‘anonymous’ language without forgoing its ‘authenticity’ or openly stigmatising spontaneous practices. (Minoritised languages, Creoles, Martinique, maintenance, standardisation, ideologies of authenticity, anonymity, prescriptivism, purism, Abstand)*

Previous research has proposed that phonetic variation may index affect prior to indexing other social meanings. This study explores whether the affective indexicality of vowels identified in previous studies can also be observed among deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers, in this case, speakers of Taiwan Mandarin. The results suggest that /i/ backing is invoked to signal negative affect. This study also demonstrates how assistive devices like hearing aids and cochlear implants can be considered semiotic resources. For deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers, assistive hearing devices enter into a process of bricolage with linguistic and other symbolic resources, generating new potentials for the embodiment of affect. (Affect, iconicity, Taiwan Mandarin, embodied sociolinguistics, deafness)*