Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

Throughout their education, students learn to use “academic English,” and to navigate associated language ideologies. In focus groups, college students discuss formal features of “academic English,” especially “removing ‘I’,” and “avoiding bias,” that they link to a sense of alienation and loss. They show themselves not to be passive receptacles for the ideologies they are exposed to as part of their education, but rather, as agents who take up various stances relative to *Academic Standardized American English and to their use of “slang” varieties, and who reintegrate both themselves and their communities into their discourse, through the use of embodiment and multivocality.

Benchmarking large language models (LLMs) is a key practice for evaluating their capabilities and risks. This paper considers the development of “BIG Bench,” a crowdsourced benchmark designed to test LLMs “Beyond the Imitation Game.” Drawing on linguistic anthropological and ethnographic analysis of the project's GitHub repository, we examine how contributors developed tasks based on their lay understandings of language, cognition, and intelligence. By tracing how contributors make implicit judgments about what constitutes a meaningful test of intelligence, we show how widespread language ideologies shape the evaluation of LLMs and the imaginaries that guide their development.

Building on Smalls's (2024) raciosemiotics, I use “raciosemiotic disruptions” to refer to ways some African-born individuals in the United States have connotatively and denotatively reworked the indexicality of the Euro-American bio-logic racialized signs in different spatiotemporal contexts and at different semiotic scales. I examine, via their metapragmatic commentaries and meta-discursive evaluations, how the processes through which meanings that are made about Blackness are inevitably disrupted and subverted. That is, how do some African-born individuals in the United States, though they share in the signs (i.e., phenotypes) that reproduce racial ideologies/ontologies, refuse racialization? How are race, racialization, and racial meanings transformed, refused, or resisted through the recalibration of these racialized signs? I argue that even as some African-born individuals in the United States seek to distance themselves from Blackness and refuse colonial and hegemonic constructs by interdiscursively refusing the naturalness of white epistemes, they sometimes inadvertently revert to the very hegemony they disassociate from by aligning themselves with white hegemony. I conclude that an awareness of one's Blackness has much less to do with phenotype than a decolonial reclamation and self-affirmation project.

This article examines how commodification practices of Ruhrdeutsch, a formerly stigmatized variety, contribute to local language awareness and enregisterment. Following the decline of the Ruhr Area's heavy industry and the shift from the secondary to the tertiary economic sector, companies have discovered the value of local marketing strategies to create “authentic” products. Focusing on the gastronomic sector, I discuss how the region's working-class image is co-constructed by producers of commodified items and how these serve to reinforce a “newly emerging” regional identity. Based on linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork in a catering company and a bakery, I argue that authenticity is achieved through a combination of imagery and regiolect features, and that selected features have acquired emblematic status.

This ethnographic account—the first stage of a variationist sociolinguistic study with First Nations youth in Australia—explores the stylistic practices of First Nations women at a boarding school in Western Australia. It shows how drawing on semiotic signs of racialized bodies, anti-mainstream practices, and orientations to language use, borders create a joint identity as an act of resistance. In displaying subtle distinctions at different levels of symbolic practice, students signal differentiation and give shape to fluid peer groups, or Constellations of Practice. Yet, ultimately, their stylistic practices point to a shared project: the articulation of Aboriginal identity in a settler-colonial context and, more specifically, within a white-led boarding school environment where enduring regimes of whiteness persist.

This article explores one dimension of gestures' mediation through ethnographic research with Berlin-based auteur animation filmmakers. In positioning gestures as extricable from embodied and environmental contexts, my interlocutors flex the aesthetic and critical potential of what I call gestural alienability. To understand how these artists de- and recontextualize bodily movements, I engage linguistic anthropological writings on gesture and contextualization. Drawing on 2 years of participant observation and conversation, I propose that such processes of gestural alienation underpin the critical (yet unpredictable) potential of mediated gestures to creatively index contexts beyond the immediate or self-evident. Although I focus on auteur animation filmmaking in Berlin as a sharp, reflexive articulation of gestural alienability, the concept has broader salience with respect to the reenactment and (re)mediation of gestures across sites, moments, and materialities.

In the Dominican Republic, Haitian migrants are conspicuously absent in Dominican media, yet one Haitian performer has been extraordinarily successful on mainstream talk shows, “El Moreno Venezolano” (the Black Venezuelan). His comedic performances hinge on an emphatic denial of his Haitian heritage, claiming instead to be Venezuelan. In this study, we identify the raciosemiotic features, including enregistered linguistic forms, exploited to construct an identifiable Haitian character, as well as the language features of a Mock Haitian register used to create a Haitian accent. Our analysis shows that while El Moreno Venezolano frequently invokes hegemonic racializing scripts for humorous effect, his comedic engagement with the local semiotic system permits him to covertly challenge the Dominican ethnoracial hierarchy. This leads to a key finding: the performer's manipulation of sign values functions as a tactic of subversion. Furthermore, the study stakes a claim for the importance of the body as a readable text in processes of enregisterment, especially those involving mock registers and character performance.