Journal of Sociolinguistics最新文献

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.

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.