Journal of Sociolinguistics最新文献

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.

The topic of gendered language policy has engaged the public for decades, while at the same time becoming increasingly theoretically marginal in the gender and language field. The recent public debates in many parts of Europe, however, highlight the new frames of the topic in the era of rising authoritarian and right-wing discourses, which make notions of ‘gender ideology’ a central symbolic point in neo-nationalist rhetoric. As a hub of this ‘gender trouble’, Eastern European societies have lately attracted particular public attention, but they remain among the least explored in the field. This paper stresses that the complexity of discourses in the post-socialist, post-‘transition’ societies, along with their specific structural-linguistic features, promises rich grounds to assess the newly shifting discourses around gender and language policy in Europe. The study contributes to this research direction by employing a corpus-based, discourse-analytic approach to analyse the media representations, and particularly the citizen responses, in Serbia, which has recently witnessed intense debates on gender, language and politics. The analysis reveals clear trajectories with the discourses described in earlier research, but also some shifting foci pertaining to questions of ‘true science’, distrust of authority and wider social crisis, pointing to emerging global challenges in gender and language research.

Pitanje politika rodno osetljivog jezika decenijama je predmet debata u javnosti, mada je u oblasti izučavanja jezika i roda teorijski sve više marginalizovano. Prisustvo ove teme u javnom diskursu u skorije vreme, međutim, međutim, skreće pažnju na njene nove obrise u kontekstu osnaživanja autoritarnih i desničarskih diskursa, pri čemu pojam 'ideologije roda' postaje centralna simbolička tačka neonacionalističke retorike. Kao središte ovih 'nevolja s rodom', društva Istočne Evrope od skora su u središtu pažnje u međunarodnom medijskom i javnom kontekstu, ali su i dalje među najmanje izučavanim u ovoj oblasti. U ovom radu ističe se da složenost diskursa u post-socijalističkim, post-'tranzicionim' društvima, zajedno sa njihovim specifičnim strukturno-jezičkim odlikama, nudi vrlo bogato tle za razumevanje novonastalih diskursa vezanih za rodno-osetljive jezičke politike u Evropi. Rad kombinuje korpusno-lingvistički i diskursni pristup kako bi analizirao medijske predstave, a pre svega odgovore građanki i građana na njih, u kontekstu Srbije u kojoj traju intenzivne debate o rodu, jeziku i politici. Analiza otkriva jasne veze sa diskursima opisanim u ranijim istraživanjima iz drugih delova sveta, ali i neke specifične lokalne obrasce, kao i fokus vezan za pitanja 'prave nauke', pitanja autoriteta, i šire društvene krize, što sveukupno upućuje na nove izazove za istaživanja jezika i roda.

This article presents an analysis of the role of social networks in shaping patterns of /æ/ realization among Latinxs in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Social network metrics are shown to be statistically significant predictors of pre-nasal /æ/ tensing. I argue that social network metrics operationalize important aspects of the sociolinguistic context and contribute to our understanding of factors influencing how Latinx speakers recruit locally significant sociolinguistic variables in linguistic performance. The data and analysis strongly argue against distinctiveness approaches to studies of language and ethnicity, where “racial categories are equated with empirically distinctive sets of linguistic features” (Rosa & Flores, 2017), by demonstrating that Latinx speakers participate in a local change-in-progress in ways that are shaped by the same types of sociolinguistic factors that shape linguistic variation generally. The analysis is based on excerpts from a series of interviews conducted with Latinxs in the city (n = 33) in 2017–2018. The interviews were transcribed and coded for tokens of /æ/. Participants were categorized into one of three systems of /æ/ realizations, and tokens of /æ/ were further analyzed using inferential statistics to determine which independent variables were significant predictors of pre-nasal /æ/ tensing. This research contributes to a growing body of work rejecting distinctiveness approaches to the linguistic performance of minoritized speakers, focusing instead on the ways in which individual speakers recruit linguistic features in the negotiation of identity (Eckert, 2008, 2018; Rosa & Flores, 2017; King 2016, 2018) and helps advance our understanding of how linguistic ideologies and articulations of ethnicity shape linguistic performance.