Journal of Sociolinguistics最新文献

In this article, I build upon calls for an intersectional approach in sociocultural linguistic research – particularly in the context of language, gender and sexuality – which attends robustly to the question of race. Through the analysis of four moments of discourse between young LGBTQ+ people, I show how their queer positionality is informed and shaped by their experience as white or racialised youths. In doing so, I demonstrate the intra-categorical nature of identity and the benefits of a ‘thick’ analytical approach which pays close attention to individual speakers’ positionalities. Furthermore, I argue for sociocultural linguistic research which honours the origins of intersectionality theory by accounting explicitly for the role of systemic racism and white privilege on speakers’ identity constructions.

Language is a key resource for speakers and signers to index different aspects of their social identities, such as their ethnicities and sexualities. Yet, for users of sign language – who exploit movements of the hands, face, head and torso for linguistic purposes – it is often assumed that any communicative movement of the body is part of a sign language rather than a general feature of the body's potential to communicate social meaning, shared by hearing and deaf individuals. In this study, we test this claim by comparing the movement features produced by gay and straight Israeli Sign Language signers to the gestural movements produced by gay and straight Hebrew speakers. The findings reveal that deaf gay signers and hearing gay gesturers exploit similar movements of the body. By incorporating the notion of embodiment into sign language sociolinguistics, we can better conceptualize the relationship between sign language and social identities.

This article focuses on alternative ways of understanding language in the context of minority language advocacy through an examination of the Galician tradition of singing-in-verse, known as regueifa. It proposes the notion of “linguistic collective action” to refer to the battery of resistance and solidarity strategies that lead to social transformation, implemented in grassroots movements linked to language struggles that not only go beyond the binary tropes of “pride” and “profit”, but also transcend traditional ideas of how language revitalization should be carried out. To tap into the dynamics of this social movement, we draw on a multi-sited ethnography of the interconnected spaces in which urban-based Galician speakers engage in collective action through the practice of regueifa. We examine how progressive values (e.g.: LGBTQ+ advocacy, feminism, and anti-neoliberalism) are intertwined with the use of minoritized language reclamation, acting as a trigger for social transformation.

Accent often carries social implications and can serve as an identity marker, reflecting how speakers perceive themselves and how they wish to be perceived by others. This study employs a variationist approach to examine the agency of Chinese English language teachers in negotiating their professional identities through accent. Instead of a loose association between identity and accent, detailed sociophonetic analyses reveal that these teachers construct desired self-representations through the strategic use of linguistic resources. Findings indicated that participants’ perceptions of the relationship between teacher qualifications and native-like/first-language-influenced English accent can predict their pronunciation patterns. Relating to how they perceive nativeness and professional identity, participants’ use of robust DRESS–TRAP nuclei and larger tongue movements in MOUTH and PRICE can be interpreted as strategies to distance themselves from a “non-native” identity, which is often stigmatized within the language teaching community. The utilization of stylistic resources allows participants to construct a professional teacher persona and signify expertise in language teaching.

A shift from understanding languages as discrete towards understanding them as undifferentiated features in the repertoire has caused disagreements over the reality of linguistic boundaries. In this paper, I show how a middle-ground approach is achievable by applying the complex workings of a scalar-chronotopic lens to the discourse of bilingual/multidialectal Bahrainis. I argue that both perspectives on (in)discreteness become relevant in accounting for bi/multilingual subjectivities: at times, Arabic is idealized as a large-scale code against English, whereas at other times, the intrusiveness of English is backgrounded to show affiliation for one Arabic variety over another. I show accommodation in communication as a spatiotemporally layered process, where the internalized contextual factors within the repertoire may overlap with or take precedence over the immediate context. As such, this paper adds to the question of linguistic discreteness, with implications for our understanding of the repertoire and its utility in bi/multilingual practices and accommodation theory.

We analyze Asian American comedian Ali Wong's linguistic and embodied performance in her 2016 stand-up special, Baby Cobra, through a genre-specific lens to investigate how stand-up comedy's performance conventions shape her comedic persona. We argue that Wong uses communicative forms indexically associated with Blackness to perform racialized and gendered figures of personhood, including the white “Karen,” “sassy Black woman,” and “Asian grandmother.” This performance allows Wong to challenge hegemonic whiteness and dominant racializations of Asian women but relies on signs potentially interpreted as reproducing anti-Black ideologies. We situate Wong as an individual performer, “Asian American” as an ethnoracial category vis-à-vis Blackness, and the linguistic practices of Asian and Black American communities within racial capitalist histories that have shaped contemporary raciolinguistic ideologies. Rather than approach language varieties and racialized groups as necessarily distinct, we treat them as relational—as necessarily intimately and historically connected.

Researchers in variationist sociolinguistics have long sought to develop social measures that are more sophisticated than demographic categories such as age, gender, and social class, while still being useful for quantitative analysis. This paper presents one such new measure: discursive worlds. For each speaker in a corpus, their discursive world is operationalized through compiling a list of specific referents cited in their interview. These lists are then used to construct similarity spaces locating the speakers along dimensions that are discursively relevant in the corpus. Using common clustering algorithms, the corpus speakers are then partitioned into categories, and this partition can be used in statistical analysis. We show how this method can be used to analyze a series of lexical variables in the Cartographie linguistique des féminismes corpus, a corpus of francophone interviews with feminist and queer activists, for which, we argue, quantitative analysis using classic demographic categories is inappropriate.

The current paper argues that speakers of Tongan English, an emergent variety spoken in the Kingdom of Tonga, may use rhoticity to construct a cosmopolitan and globally oriented local social identity. A variationist analysis of non-prevocalic /r/ in a corpus of 56 speakers reveals a change in progress towards rhoticity led by young females, whereas an affiliation with Liahona High School, a Mormon secondary school, predicts advanced adoption of the feature. I argue that rhoticity carries a positive ideological load for younger speakers as an index of globalness, modernity and Western cultural values, whereas for Liahona-affiliated speakers, an additional indexicality of rhoticity is Mormonism. Linguistic constraints on variation mirror patterns found in previous studies on L1/L2 varieties and are thus more universal, whereas social constraints on variation are best examined through a local lens.