Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

While in postcolonial contexts the language of the former imperial power is often associated with modernity and prestige, in Lithuania, which has a history of Russian domination, the Russian language indexes backwardness and vulgarity. In this article, I argue that this semiotic inversion is due to the coexistence of competing chronotopes linked to divergent political orders, the functioning of languages as indexes of chronotopes, and linguistic alignments precipitated by the Russia–Ukraine War. Based on ethnography and interviews, this article shows how linguistic practices can become charged sites of chronotopic contestations and exclusions in contexts situated along the intersection of geopolitical orders.

Ahmed has suggested that refusing to laugh may be used as a political strategy for oppressed groups. But what happens when it becomes a tool of discipline and exclusion? Drawing on a video ethnographic study of incarcerated boys and their staff in detention home treatment, this paper focuses on one of the boy's struggle for inclusion. Despite formal equal treatment, his exclusion was maintained by the others' refusal to laugh at his attempts to be funny. We thus aim to study, in interactional detail, how unlaughter may work as a subtle yet powerful affective practice.

This paper is about “social slurs,” or dysphemisms for collectivities and their members. Social slurs thrived in Russian politicized milieus of the 2010s, during the “two Russias culture war.” Examples of social slurs include mrakobesy, vatninki, bydlo (used for Putin supporters), and liberasty, demshiza, kreakly (used for regime opponents). For the benefit of US readers, these can be idiomatically translated as ignoramuses, rubes, sheeple, and liberasses, democrazies, bobos. In Russia, social slurs have been employed to attribute characteristics of enregistered social personae to both political supporters and opponents of the regime. These attributions, in turn, have been used to evaluate the conduct of participants in public life against the norms of interaction rituals central to modern political imaginaries.

This study analyzes Indigenizing semiotic tactics in television narratives from the United States, combining corpus linguistic methodology with a theoretical framing inspired by linguistic anthropology. Given recent changes in the US television landscape, we analyze two landmark series with First Nations showrunners: Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls. Specifically, our dataset consists of all dialogue transcribed from both series' first two seasons. We use generic (e.g., Native, Indian, and tribe) and specific (e.g., Navajo, Lakota, and Oglala) identity labels as a starting point, combining corpus linguistic analysis of these labels with a semiotic analysis of selected scenes. The study identifies not only what identity work is being done by such labels but also how they are leveraged in the creation of an Indigenizing semiotics that disrupts “White” settler colonial frameworks that have traditionally been promoted in the media, enacting semiotic processes that we call overlay, icon-marking, and erasure-marking. A comparison with supplementary data from Australia allows us to show that these Indigenizing tactics are not limited to one country. Finally, the study demonstrates how a semiotic analysis of identity labels is a useful way “into” a larger corpus.

In this paper, I explore the monolingual and polylingual stylistic behaviors on Instagram among Basque native young people within the project Gaztesare. By means of an in-depth qualitative study, I try to explain in which sense such monolingual and polylingual behaviors or styles are socially significant signs of difference (Gal & Irvine, 2019). The study reveals that those styles are organized in an axis of differentiation (Gal, 2016; Gal & Irvine, 2019) that takes the contrasting monolingual and polylingual styles as iconic representations linked to different personhoods or person-types. The participants of the study consider them tools to shape and create contrasting voices that interilluminate each other in different contexts on Instagram. The study also informs about new ideological dynamics among these young people. In fact, the most innovative results in this study are about the enregisterment of the polylingual style I study. It is becoming an exclusive in-group talk, and it is acquiring stereotypic indexical values related to informality. It is, moreover, being naturalized as a “social network speech” with which young people recreate multiple multicultural and playful voices.

This research advances racioreligious linguistic ideologies as a concept to examine discursive processes whereby language, race, and spirituality become entangled within cultural lenses. It begins by exploring the racialization of Yoruba-inspired (Nagô in Bahia) spiritualities and linguistic/semiotic practices under colonialism and racial slavery. It continues into the modern context with an extended example situated in a northeastern Brazilian school, where Nagô/Yoruba typifies Blackness. The data highlight how interlocutors in this school, working within affirmative racioreligious linguistic ideologies and the values they assign, engage in education as racioreligious identity work to resist racial, religious, and linguistic prejudices, sustain traditional knowledge, and affirm Afro-Brazilianness.

My paper asks which linguistic features become enregistered to a politician's image, and how this process occurs. I examine glide insertion in the speech of former Romanian Prime Minister Viorica Dăncilă and parodies of her. As parody requires exaggeration of salient features in order to be legible, I use it to investigate what is heard as salient in Dăncilă's speech. Although glide insertion is uncharacteristic of Dăncilă's speech, parodies overrepresent Dăncilă's use of the feature. To explain this, I investigate social meanings of glide insertion through metalinguistic commentary and historical memory, finding that glide insertion links Dăncilă to Romania's Communist era. Though Dăncilă rarely uses glide insertion, the feature emblematizes her political persona. Treating parodic performance as reflecting a wider listening subject, I show the listening subject's ideologies influence the enregisterment of a feature to an individual; the process by which a politician's linguistic image arises is dialogic and heavily involves listeners.

Through a linguistic anthropological lens of interdiscursivity, this article analyzes the semiotic and historical development of the testimonio genre of #Cuéntalo (“tell it [your story]”), a 2018 Twitter movement that began in Spain to protest sexual violence and evolved when the hashtag traveled to Argentina. The recognition of #Cuéntalo tweets as a genre helped to put the narratives on the public record by offering a paradigmatic frame that invited participation and poetic variation, producing a sense of performance of witnessing and memory-making. I argue that this endeavor was ultimately a successful intervention due to the following factors: the infrastructure and participation frameworks of social media, the historical precedent of women's and feminist movements in the region, the genre's allowance for first-person storytelling by other narrators, and the subsequent archival efforts and media recontextualizations. The large quantity of tweets—iterations of a similar story—demonstrated the truth and severity of the issue, as each tweet was simultaneously narrated by the victim, the tweet's author, and society as a whole. In the case of #Cuéntalo testimonios, the individual and the aggregate came together via hashtag activism in a collective witnessing of social injustice that was archived as subaltern social memory.