Journal of Sociolinguistics最新文献

Palfreyman, N., &  Schembri, A. (2022).  Lumping and splitting: Sign language delineation and ideologies of linguistic differentiation. Journal of Sociolinguistics,  26, 105–112. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12524

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Language users discursively circulate ideologies of identity, especially in stances taken while assigning social characteristics to enregistered personae. Previous research has demonstrated that with the Istanbul Greek (IG) diaspora, speakers use the emic terms of Ellines and Romioi to orient to or away from Mainland Greeks, respectively. In this paper, I discuss how IGs in Turkey relate such ethnonyms to linguistic features and how they rely on enregistered dialectal features to construct their ethnicity as Romioi in opposition to Ellines. These ethnonyms result in personae that are used stylistically, but in turn fractally (re)create differentiation into separate ethnic categories. Such sociolinguistic processes demonstrate how linguistic variation is socially embedded in a minoritized indigenous speech community. Studying variation in concert with ethnonym use shows how speakers add nuanced meaning to established identity categories and create new ones based on their lived experiences.

Grandparents’ World War Two (WWII) stories are emotionally powerful, intimate accounts of firsthand experience that can shape grandchildren's ideas of state history, nation, and identity. This effect, I argue, manifests most intensively in critical times when national history and identity are threatened. Such was the case when former Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev relayed a controversial version of Macedonian national history and identity in a TV interview. In reaction, many Macedonian citizens shared fragments of their grandparents’ WWII stories. This study analyzes several more detailed versions of these grandparents’ narratives in order to ascertain the formative power of family WWII stories over one's personal sense of national identity. To do so, it will examine the positioning practices of the present-day narrators, the grandchildren of WWII participants, focusing on the manners in which they interactively reproduce their own sense of national identity vis-a-vis-these stories.

This article shows that a perspective rooted in Bakhtin's dialogism between the fixed centripetal and fluid centrifugal forces of language and culture is useful in achieving a nuanced understanding of globalization in general and semiotic landscapes in Indonesia in particular. Drawing on data from Indonesia, this article shows dialogic interconnections between fixed and fluid notions of languages and cultures through a multimodal and indexical analysis of governmental and commercial signage in the urban center of Semarang, the provincial capital of Central Java. The analysis highlights the nuanced localizing and globalizing strategies in signage and how dialogicity helps shape the semiotic landscape.

This study argues that spice talk, a register that indexes spices as exotic, is one linguistic instantiation of the discourse of Orientalism. I identify the presence of this register from the advent of the Spice Trade to the present, then provide a case study of its use in cooking show programs by British celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, whose Orientalist description of the spices and foods she prepares is a means of indexing physical commodities from the East as ‘‘Oriental’’ and naturalizing the link between spices and the exotic, as well as upholding power imbalances. I maintain that spice talk comprises five thematic features: poetics, sensuality, tourism, otherness, and coloniality. I argue throughout for a situated understanding of spice talk, asserting that contemporary practices of consumption and patterns of taste cannot be divorced from the broader social order or the weight of history.