Journal of Sociolinguistics最新文献

This article contributes to sociolinguistic scholarship on register formations, digital technology, and labor by analyzing technofuturist registers—historically inherited, typified, and socially shared modes of speaking about technology. These registers create distinct modes of feeling, relating, idealizing, and desiring technology and its effects on society and our future. The focus is on recruiters’ and tech entrepreneurs’ talk about artificial intelligence (AI) as a site for the enregisterment of AI. These registers link recruitment and AI-powered job matching technologies to a broader anarcho-capitalist vision of an AI-driven future, one that both recruiters and society are encouraged to embrace. Centering technofuturist registers contributes to our understanding of contemporary language about tech, helping to understand how AI is made desirable and, in so doing, how digital technology shapes the social imagination of the future and with it, reconfigures visions of labor, personhood, and modernity.

This paper responds to a recent call to develop a sociolinguistics of potentiality by examining how semiotic and multilingual practices may participate in processes of ethical world-building. It looks at contexts where minoritized language speakers who are subjected to colonial government use colonial languages (e.g., English) along with other semiotic resources to create spaces of potentiality where alternative social projects embody complex interplays of hope and despair. Employing the Southern notion of sumud pedagogy as a localized application of Stroud's notion of Linguistic Citizenship, I examine how Palestinian Arabic-speaking youth in Israel employ multilingual and semiotic resources to deconstruct social constructs and reject imposed subjectivities. Combining my voice as a Palestinian sociolinguist in Israel with the voices of Palestinian youth from Haifa, I illustrate how a horizontal movement from one language to another enables multilingual-minoritized speakers to disrupt English hegemony through constructing new modes of being, belonging, and knowing.

Bill Labov passed away peacefully at home on December 17, 2024, with his wife and fellow Penn linguist Gillian Sankoff by his side. He leaves behind a legacy so large that it is hard to put into words. All three authors were fortunate enough to have had Bill as our PhD supervisor (Laurel: 2012, Meredith: 2014, Betsy: 2018). We feel that the many hours we spent in his presence and with his work have given us a good insight into who and how he was. We also feel deep love and gratitude for him and for his imprint on the field and on us. As such, this piece is our reflection on Bill as a person, an advisor, and a scholar, from our perspective as three of his students from his later years.

This study examines emotional and material traces lingering in the aftermath of forced linguistic landscape transformations in Inner Mongolia following the implementation of a new assimilationist national language policy in 2022. Drawing on ethnographic and linguistic landscape data, the study specifically examines how the multilingual signs that have undergone invisibilization or changes in their layouts are accompanied by marginalized senses and excluded voices—linguistic hauntings—in the multilingual Mongolian borderlands. In this study, linguistic hauntings are animated by Mongolian linguistic anxiety and conditioned by the Chinese state's intensified language oppression in transitioning from a multinational and multilingual state to a unified Chinese nation with one singular language. The article suggests that linguistic haunting is a powerful lens for analysing the interlinked political, affective and temporal dimensions in drastically reconfiguring landscapes. The study contributes to the sociolinguistics of the specters, borderlands multilingualism, nationalism and its linguistic entailments.

This paper contributes to research on the awareness of grammatical variability through a study of variation in reflexivity marking in Mano under the influence of Kpelle, both indigenous languages of Guinea. The speakers of these languages are found to be sensitive to contact-induced grammatical variation in reflexivity, which manifests via variation in comprehension patterns and, more specifically, in form-to-meaning correspondence, across different communities. We explain the patterns by hypothesizing that variation in comprehension is at least partially based on language experience in a particular environment and does not necessarily reflect a difference in grammatical representation. Such explanation underscores the importance of sociolinguistic considerations for employing acceptability judgments in syntactic analysis.

This article explores the ways that young French speakers from British Columbia, an English-dominant province of Canada, navigate different processes of linguistic delegitimation and how these processes are linked to linguistic insecurity. The findings are derived from interviews conducted with nine young French speakers from British Columbia who shared their most significant experiences of linguistic insecurity. The results, which are based on a thematic analysis, show how participants are being delegitimized by family members from dominant French-speaking contexts due to some of their linguistic practices that diverge from standard forms. They also indicate that participants have found ways to gain linguistic security by acquiring knowledge, participating in their communities, and accepting different linguistic practices that characterize their variety of French. However, this linguistic security work is limited by the existing ideologies in the French-speaking world that delegitimize the non-standard varieties.

Theories of speech accommodation and audience design have tended to focus on social identity functions of convergence and divergence in interaction. In this article, I focus on additional interactional phenomena that are under-studied but systematic. I present real-time data to illustrate variable control of speech features in style-shifting. These cues give listeners a sense of the default style of a speaker and their range of divergence from it, forming an ‘anchor’ from which to interpret the intended meanings of a specific person's style shifts. Rather than seeing convergence as a simple rapport-building move, I propose a system of non-linear inferential schemas, whereby the payoff of a style shift diminishes when it exceeds a certain threshold, due more to considerations of sincerity and credibility than social group indexicalities. These Bayesian inferences can be modelled within recent game-theoretic frameworks, allowing us to account for social but also cognitive payoffs and costs as part of how speakers and listeners interpret each other's speech styles in real time.

Sociophonetic perception is often studied using versions of the matched guise technique (MGT). Linguists using this technique appear united in the methodological assumptions that participants believe the manipulation and that this belief influences perception below the level of introspective awareness. We report an audiovisual matched guise experiment with a novel “unhidden” instruction condition. The basic task is a replication of the Strand effect (Strand 1999; Strand and Johnson 1996). Participants in the “unhidden” condition were instructed that the man or woman in the photo did not represent the voice they were listening to. Participants in both guises exhibited the Strand effect to nearly numerically identical extents. This result suggests that participants need not believe a link exists between a voice and a purported social category for visually cued social information to influence segmental perception. We explore the implications of this result for the MGT and for theories of social awareness and speech perception more broadly.