Journal of Sociolinguistics最新文献

While browsing my Facebook feed on an early summer day in May 2017, a post with the trigger warning “inconsistent use of pronouns” grabbed my attention. The post, shared within a private Facebook group for (foreign) LGBTQIA+ individuals and allies living in Japan, featured an article recently published in The New York Times. Titled “Japanese Transgender Politician is Showing ‘I Exist Here’,” the article focuses on Hosoda Tomoya, a Japanese trans man who recently won a seat in the local city council in a suburb just outside of Tokyo (Rich, 2017). Hosoda made history as the first trans man in the world to be voted to public office, and the near-full-page article delved into Hosoda's life history, his journey into politics, and the challenges that he faced as a trans person living in Japan. What the author and the subsequent commenters of the Facebook post found “baffling” about the article was the use of the pronoun “she” when referring to Hosoda's childhood years as a girl named Mika, whereas throughout the remainder of the article, “he” was used to refer to Hosoda. This inconsistency was deemed by some as “poor etiquette,” particularly from a reputable outlet like The New York Times. What the readers were not aware of, however, was that Hosoda himself had approved the use of the pronoun “she” in that specific section of the report. The reason he provided was that it is an undeniable fact that he had “publicly lived as a woman before chiryo” (transition, literally medical treatment) and therefore did not see anything wrong with using the feminine third-person pronoun (private communication). If Hosoda himself did not find the pronouns “inconsistent” or offensive, should the general readers take issue with them?

In the middle of 2020, I received an email from a graduate student based in the United States who had recently read one of my articles. The student took issue with my use of the term “FTM,” pointing out that by using it to refer to my research informants, I am perpetuating the “linguistic violence” associated with the term. In that article, I drew on my fieldwork in what I term the Japanese FTM community in Tokyo to show how seemingly mundane social events, such as drinking parties that are organized by and for trans men, can function as a site for my informants to negotiate inclusion and belonging as trans without undermining their male public selves. Within this community, “FTM” (the English acronym for female-to-male transgender) is the preferred term of self-reference, both in written form and in speech (transliterated as efu-tii-emu in Japanese). Although I was aware of the debates surrounding this term in English-speaking contexts, where it is considered outdated and criticized for emphasizing a notion of change that contradicts the experiences of many trans individuals who have always identified as such, I chose to use it to refer to my informants because they have consistently used i

In “Trans Language Activism and Intersectional Coalitions,” Lal Zimman offered a compelling account of the complexities and challenges of trans language activism in the current political moment. Zimman urged that “trans people's linguistic issues are best addressed as part of coalitions built on intersectional models of sociolinguistic justice” because “transphobia's impacts are felt most intensely when coarticulated with other axes of oppression.” However, Zimman importantly demonstrated that “the most visible and well-resourced types of trans (language) activism tend to represent the perspectives of relatively privileged trans people, in which racism, colonialism, ableism, classism, and other kinds of subjugation can easily manifest.” Indeed, we find ourselves in the middle of many binds, and the stakes are high. How do we carefully critique dominant trans language activism when all trans people are under attack? How do we contest invisibilization without falling into the many traps of visibility? How do we advance activist efforts without prioritizing the most privileged activists? How can we center the most marginalized without objectifying and exploiting them?

Although I alone cannot answer all of these questions (here or elsewhere), I offer something that I believe Zimman sets the foundation for and gestures to in this piece: the possibility that in the pitfalls and failures of dominant trans language activism lie queer, radical, and liberatory possibilities. In a conversation between Green and Bey about the relationship between Black feminist thought and trans* feminism, Green (2017, p. 447) stated, “The fear of losing categories isn't the trap. The trap is believing that these categories have the capacity to deliver us to ourselves fully and wholly.” Green continued: “Identities like language help to bring us closer to a thing or a being, but we never fully arrive at the materiality, the flesh of the matter, and I don't know if we should try to remedy that.”

The youngest interlocutor in my ethnographic research with sex working transgender Latinas in Chicago exemplifies Green's wise words. Mercury is 18 years old and disabled. To describe her gender identity, she uses the words “transgender,” “transgender woman,” “trans femme,” “demi-girl,” “non-binary,” and “woman” interchangeably. To describe her racial identity, she uses the words “Black,” “Black Latina,” “Afro-Latina,” “Afro-Puerto Rican,” and “Puerto Rican” interchangeably. How she articulates her race and gender changes depending on how she feels and who she is speaking to. Yet, she explains that “no one word fits me perfectly.”

Mercury lives in a homeless shelter that is lauded as a model of queer progressiveness, inclusivity, and “intersectionality” in Chicago. The staff, however, construct Mercury as “difficult” and “complicated.” She expresses rage, slips between race and gender categories, and pushes the boundaries around taken-for-granted unde

In this article, we explore how raciolinguistic parody functions in a society that hegemonically denies racial divisions. Through an analysis of Puerto Rican comedian Natalia Lugo's YouTube portrayals of her character, Francheska the Yal ‘welfare queen,’ we argue that covert racialization operates through a semiotics of respectability, whereby disreputable forms of femininity, class expression, and nonstandard language are co-indexical with the yal’s failure to normatively “whiten” herself. We contend that US colonial narratives that scapegoat poor women of color for the island's poverty are reconstructed in Lugo's parodies by depicting the yal as provincial and excessive. Lugo's performative choices underscore the interplay of linguistic, material, and discursive elements that marginalize the yal, enabling parody without challenging structural inequalities. Our analysis sheds light on the ways in which semiotic practices reify such social hierarchies where they are systemically denied.

This article reports on a study of multilingualism, language choice, and identity construction for six Ukrainians in Shanghai, China. Thematic analysis of data collected from netnographic observation, semi-structured interviews, and narrative frame writing revealed that diasporic Ukrainians’ language choice is both instrumentally strategic and sociopolitically charged; in the public domain, they construct light “citizen of the world” and “nice foreigner” identities; in the private domain, they construct “Ukrainian who speaks Ukrainian language” identity. To understand the seemingly binary or even conflicted situation, we turn to the concept of “social anchoring” and propose a conceptualization of “diasporic people's language choice and identity selection.” This study shows that the construction of diasporic identity is, first of all, an individualistic process, articulating the affective aspect in their seeking psychological stability; it is also a social practice indicating diasporic people's strategies in seeking social stability.

Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that ‘urban contact dialects’ tend to diffuse beyond the speech communities in which they first emerge. However, no research has attempted to explore the distribution of these varieties across an entire nation nor isolate the social mechanisms that propel their spread. In this paper, we use a corpus of 1.8 billion geo-tagged tweets to explore the spread of Multicultural London English (MLE) lexis across the United Kingdom. We find evidence for the diffusion of MLE lexis from East and North London into other ethnically and culturally diverse urban centres across England, particularly those in the South (e.g. Luton), but find lower frequencies of MLE lexis in the North of England (e.g. Manchester), and in Scotland and Wales. Concluding, we emphasise the role of demographic similarity in the diffusion of linguistic innovations by demonstrating that this variety originated in London and diffused into other urban areas in England through the social networks of Black and Asian users.