Journal of Sociolinguistics最新文献

This article examines the construction of language ideologies on social media in the context of the use of Kazakh and Russian languages in Kazakhstan following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Through the analysis of Instagram and YouTube posts and comments from popular Kazakhstani bloggers and opinion-makers, which were selected for the heated online debates they generated, this study explores how the choice of speaking Russian or ‘shala-Kazakh’ (a mixed form of Russian and Kazakh) is perceived in relation to the national identity of individuals in Kazakhstan. The analysis of social media content reveals the dominance of ideologies centred around notions of linguistic purity, national authenticity and decolonizing anti-Russianness. Utilizing Agha's theory of enregisterment and drawing on Irvine and Gal's concept of language ideologies, this research investigates the impact of social changes on language ideologies. It also explores how language regulation and mocking practices on social media serve as significant mechanisms for the circulation and maintenance of these ideologies and broader linguistic and social hierarchies.

This article uses mixed methods to establish how social meanings are situated in lived experiences. I test whether Greek listeners recognize features of Istanbul Greek (IG) and whether they associate the same social meanings with the variety as IG speakers. Results from a verbal guise experiment and metapragmatic stancetaking discourse suggest the confluence of IG features co-present in multiple Greek varieties (a) hinders non-IG-listeners from placing speakers and (b) allows for other varieties’ social meanings to influence judgments. Although listeners attend to multiple structures, features involved with allophonic processes are most salient. Consequently, the salience of competing processes led listeners to (re)interpret features based on their awareness of them in other enregistered speech. These findings add nuance to how enregisterment occurs within (sub)communities, and how social meanings are unevenly distributed among individuals based on the exemplars that emerge via enregisterment. Results further complicate how personae circulate and contribute to social differentiation.

Relatively little work has examined how metalinguistic awareness about sociolinguistic features can impact processes of sociolinguistic memory, which are crucial to the formation of cognitive sociolinguistic representations. This article explores how metalinguistic commentary can bias listeners’ memory of a linguistic feature, uptalk, that is ideologically linked with women in popular meta-discourses. A novel contour-recognition paradigm tests how listeners mis-remember uptalk depending on the perceived gender of the speaker. We provided participants with top-down metalinguistic information about which gendered speakers were most likely to use uptalk to induce metalinguistic bias toward associations between rising contours and speakers of particular genders. Results show a speaker's perceived gender, as well as metalinguistic information provided to a listener, can bias recognition of prosodic contours, but only when this information reinforces listeners’ pre-existing beliefs. Overall, we suggest that linguistic ideologies can shape how listeners interpret and even remember both metalinguistic statements and sociolinguistic variants.

This paper explores how language intersects with race in shaping the experience of Chinese international students in UK higher education (HE). Through the lenses of racial microaggression, critical race theory, and raciolinguistic ideologies, the study analyzes interviews and written diaries from Chinese students at a public research university. It reveals three language ideologies rooted in white supremacy: the ideology of English-only, the ideology of incompetence, and the ideology of exclusion. These ideologies manifest in everyday interactions and institutional practices, positioning Chinese students as the inferior Other and reproducing the university as a white space. However, these ideologies are sometimes internalized by students who reproduce their own raciolinguistic inferiority. The article argues that students’ racial experiences are embedded in the racial logics of the internationalization of HE and the racial hierarchies of knowledge construction, which sustain and rely on white English supremacy as a multi-scalar and transnational endeavor.

Discussions of sociolinguistic awareness are often about how patterns observed in one practice (often linguistic production) appear in others (often person perception or metalinguistic commentary). Models like Labov's indicator/marker/stereotype trichotomy force this complexity into a single dimension, due to presupposing a conscious/unconscious distinction unsupported in current cognitive psychology. A more effective approach takes a theoretical step back, asking basic questions about how analogous sociolinguistic meanings relate across activities. In this article, I do so by asking whether explicit verbal reports and speaker evaluations of accentedness in Ohio correlate in strength across individual language users. Such a correlation would suggest a shared representation and/or a shared learning process. A total of 1106 participants listened to Ohio talkers reading word lists of trap, dress, lot, or goose tokens. Participants rated each talker's accentedness, then the accentedness of seven Ohio places. The expected main effects emerged: southern and rural Ohio were most accented, then northern Ohio, and lastly cities and central Ohio. Likewise, the acoustic features influenced talker ratings. Crucially, however, these two effects largely did not interact: those most likely to describe northern (southern) Ohio as accented were no more or less sensitive to northern (southern) vowel features. These results support the small but growing evidence that indexical relationships are learned and used independently across linguistic practices. They also move us further from a unidimensional model of awareness toward an approach where different systems are treated independently.