Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

This commentary argues that sociophonetic perception studies and linguistic anthropological analyses of the listening subject examine the same underlying process—ideologically structured listening—though at different observational scales. Drawing on Inoue's foundational work and subsequent research on enregisterment, mediatization, and indexical inversion, I show how experimental and ethnographic approaches each illuminate complementary dimensions of listening as both cognitive and sociohistorical. I advocate for a multiscalar model of listening that brings these traditions into closer dialogue, emphasizing how collaboration across methods can reveal the ideological conditions under which voices become audible, meaningful, and contested.

Rihan Yeh. 2025. Ghost deixis and the public secret in Tijuana, Mexico. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 35(2):e70010.

In the above-referenced article, Constantine Nakassis' essay in press at Current Anthropology is incorrectly titled “Looking, Seeing, Perspective.” In fact it is titled “Voicing, Looking, Perspective.”

We apologize for this error.

This article examines how political conflict arises through discourses constructing contrastive social meanings for the same sign, conceptualizing controversy over the 2019 DC Dyke March ban of the Jewish LGBTQ+ pride flag as a case of indexical misrecognition. Through multimodal digital discourse analysis of Facebook posts and comments, I analyze how interactants construct a contested sign—the Star of David—as a component of two separate bricolage constructions: the Jewish pride flag and Israeli flag. The article demonstrates that semiotic investigations of conflict over sign use reveal complex beliefs about moral ways of navigating the world and interacting within (anti)nationalist political systems.

This paper uses Star Trek's “Universal Translator” (UT) as a point of departure for considering the imagined future of mediated linguistic interactions and of contact across difference. Although such a technology does not exist, taking its potentialities seriously as folkloric devices allows for an exploration of ideologies relating to translation and mediated communication. The UT represents the hypothetical ultimate achievement of a Euro-Western ideal of easy and clear interaction, in which direct brain-to-brain contact is possible and speaker intent can be manifested clearly and reliably to a listener, regardless of language differences. A mind–body duality is inherent to this possibility, and by rendering the translator/interpreter in a disembodied, mostly invisible form, the UT imagines the irrelevance of the body to the communicative process. Within both the narrative itself and fan responses to the UT, however, attempts to think about how it would have to work bring about contradictions, and in particular, the consistent resurgence of embodiment as a central semiotic component of communication. Using the mythical UT, I examine the ideological implications that an imagined techno-utopian future has for contemporary understandings of language and the body, including in themes of gender, race, modality, and labor.

This article analyzes how humor around contrasts between standard and non-standard Northern, i.e., Kurmanji, Kurdish spoken in Turkey contributes to the enregisterment of standard Kurdish, arguing that Kurdish language jokes promote the recognition and, to different degrees, uptake of standardized linguistic repertoires among differently situated Kurdish audiences, while also promoting alternative ideological perspectives through which the contrasts between standard and non-standard language can be evaluated. In developing this analysis, the article also considers how Kurdish language humor functions to both reproduce widely circulating language ideologies and subvert them, inviting Kurdish audiences in contemporary Turkey and North Kurdistan to be reflexive about language and the ideological processes through which value is ascribed to it. It argues that for many Kurds in Turkey, Kurdish linguistic revival and national unity are premised less on the accomplishment of Kurdish linguistic uniformity and more on the ongoing recognition and valorization of linguistic and social differences; Kurdish standard language can function in ways that not only minimize but also draw attention to linguistic variation in socially consequential ways.

Drawing on data collected in a global, collaborative ethnography called The Living Justice Project (LJP), this paper investigates how formulations of social justice situate speakers' bodies in relation to one another as well as in relation to dominant interpretations of the past, felt experiences in the present, and visions for the (possible) future. It specifically investigates the ways in which body-centered or somatopic formulations of social justice afford a creative and often provocative reconfiguration of spatiotemporal scales of difference at the heart of contemporary social justice discourse. Analyses demonstrate how, within a conversation centering the meaning of social justice in relation to embodiment, LJP collaborators (1) rescaled equality as an emergent relational practice enacted within and across bodies in space and time; (2) reconfigured recognition as a continuous and emergent as well as relationally, spatially, and temporally engaged process that disturbs normative distinctions between Self and Other as well as between the past, present, and future; and (3) remapped movement by situating liberation in the possible present as well as the possible future. The analysis responds to calls from interdisciplinary scholars advocating for more diverse and expansive definitions of social justice. It also contributes to the deepening and expansion of chronotope theory in linguistic anthropology and embodiment theory in anthropology generally.

This article explores young children's language socialization to kinship vocatives and some of their indexicalities in “Dovubaravi,” a rural Indo-Fijian community in Fiji. The investigation engaged 11 young Dovubaravi children and their extended families in qualitative ethnographic data generation across 2 years. Findings (i) demonstrate participation in culturally approved discourse in Dovubaravi requires apposite deployment of kinship vocatives indexing elder respect, lines of kinship, familial roles, asymmetrically reciprocal obligations between family members, consanguinity taboos, and ethno-cultural identities, and (ii) suggest how multiparty talk supports Dovubaravi children's language socialization to kinship vocatives and their indexicalities, and to a culturally authorized curiosity.