Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

Through analysis of one interview, this paper explores ghost deixis—the act of pointing to and, I argue, iconically embodying imaginary or absent objects—in the articulation of a public secret: governmental responsibility for the deaths caused by a 1980 flood in the Mexican border city of Tijuana. My interlocutor struggles against the dominant evidentiary regime of the public sphere, which shapes our interaction both via the interview genre itself and via a map I ask her to engage. When she finally circumvents her indexical difficulties with the map and its authoritative form of knowledge, her narrative of the flood—and full ghost deixis—break forth.

This article examines linguistic shaming behaviors, focusing on the case of an Indian news media platform where newsreaders commented on and criticized a Muslim college lecturer for ‘errors’ in her handwritten resignation letter in English. We develop and bring together several concepts including (online) chronotopes, deindividuated voice, colonized/ing mind, and religiolinguistic ideologies as our theoretical lens to gain insights into the newsreaders' discourses and ideologies underlying their comments. Our analysis suggests that, in shaming the lecturer's linguistic idiosyncrasies in the resignation letter, the newsreaders held a colonized/ing mind which informed their belief in the existence of ‘correct’ English and their view that the lecturer's English was substandard. Some commenters expressed their religiolinguistic ideologies in relating the lecturer's English use to her religion, whereby they religionized her as a Muslim English-writing subject. Their discourse of (sub)standard English and religiolinguistic ideologies can be considered manifestations of the ‘religious Us-Them’ divide in Indian society. The article also illustrates how the Kachruvian project of Indianizing English fails to work for disenfranchised communities such as Muslims who have been discriminated in the context of the resurgence of Hindu nationalism in India.

This article examines how seven transgender South Carolinians drew on racialized conceptions of linguistic ownership during metalinguistic discussion about queer and trans language during ethnographic interviews collected between 2020 and 2022. I explore how participants refer to distinct lexical sets when referring to “Black queer/trans language” and “white queer/trans language.” When talking about Black trans language, participants primarily referred to elements of “slang” (e.g., sis, queen), tying Blackness to informality and “coolness”, yet when describing white trans language, they referred to gender-referent terminology (e.g., demigender, nonbinary, and other “micro labels”), locating this language in relation to processes of gatekeeping and to ideologies of correctness and standardness. I argue that this distinction reflects broader ideologies of race and language, according to which Black communities are recognized for their linguistic cultural influence, while whiteness remains a prevalent, structuring power in debates about trans language.

This article argues that social actors' media ideologies about digital interfaces are key to the enregisterment of online activities. Focusing on an online register emergent from user activities around Year, Hare, Affair (YHA)—a state-aligned Chinese animation—I explore how different metadiscourses evaluate this register by entextualizing digital activities around this animation on two platforms, Bilibili and Weibo. First, mainstream discourses praise the YHA-derived, user-generated register as a case of youth patriotism based on an expressionist, affective understanding of Bilibili's danmu interface. This shows observers' media ideology of an interface can inform their enregisterment of user activities. Second, I analyze YHA's audience design to show that, the interface's organization of user activities conditions the design of the media artifact; the alignment between the audience design and actual user participation in turn informs subsequent enregisterment. Finally, I trace how some users, by drawing on the design of individuated user accounts on Weibo's timeline interface, put forward a different social meaning for the YHA-derived online register. Meanwhile, mainstream media erase such interface features to assert the official uptake of the register. This shows that observers' perceptions of how interfaces organize the interdiscursive distance between user activities and the source media inform their evaluations of an emerging register.

This article examines competing discourses about Jordanian Sign Language (LIU) among deaf and hearing people in Amman, based on ethnographic fieldwork at an educational start-up for deaf children and at a deaf cultural center. In these spaces, how my interlocutors discussed the use and value of LIU took on conflicting ideological tones: on the one hand, they would emphasize the importance of access to sign language for deaf children, described as the “mother tongue” (al-lugha al-ʾumm) of deaf people. On the other hand, they would make comments that disparaged LIU as a form of “broken Arabic” (ʿarabi mukassar). I argue that these contradictory discourses can be productively read as forms of rhetoric: for instance, calling LIU the “mother tongue” of deaf Jordanians, rooted in its materiality, is a way for the start-up staff to convince audiences to support their cause, while describing LIU as “broken Arabic,” while incorrect, is useful insofar as it asks students of sign language not to sign in conformity to Arabic grammar. Building on recent work on sign language ideologies, I argue for understanding these contradictory discourses in the contexts in which they are deployed and for the centrality of language to deaf personhood in Jordan.