Journal of Sociolinguistics最新文献

Why this text? Why now? These are two questions that Flores and Rosa's article prompted on my mind. The paper sounds like a ‘tune up’, if not a recalibration, of the raciolinguistic perspective (RP) that the two authors see drifting away from its original ambitions, which can be summarized as (1) to account for the co-naturalization of language and race and how the process is achieved semiotically; and (2) ultimately to expose and disrupt the inherited colonial foundations of the field of linguistics.

The fact that intellectual ideas or theoretical paradigms take a life of their own — with misinterpretation being part of the equation — is not new in science. Related to the questions articulated at the outset of this commentary are those of why the RP has been embraced increasingly by several language scholars in some parts of the world and why it has evolved in the way it has. The sophisticated analysis of academia of Bourdieu (1975) as a field — whose social dynamics are analogized to those of a game — helps us understand this evolution. The RP's higher ‘market value’ over the previous scholarship that had also addressed the entanglement of language and race and did not receive as much attention from the wider academic community (see for instance Makoni et al., 2003) appears to be the answer. It adds to the geopolitics of the production of knowledge and the circulation of the latter from the United States modern academic ‘centre’ (which is highly stratified) to the world's ‘peripheries’ (in the terminology of Wallerstein (2004)’s world-system analysis). Although I assume that doing raciolinguistics is part of doing being in the current game of socially-oriented linguistics, I do not intend to undermine in any way Flores and Rosa's (as well as other scholars’) important contributions to our understanding of the intersections of language and race. Unveiling the logics of the heterogeneous academic field in which we position ourselves and are positioned by others not only challenges the positivist idea of ‘true knowledge’ but also helps each of us reflect on what we research, why we do it, and why now. It would be naive to think that language scholars’ increased interest in language and race has been driven only by the current political situations across the world. Contemporary race-based dominance and exclusion have precedents, often distant ones, from which they are not radically different.

Flores and Rosa add their voices to some prominent linguists before them (e.g. Mufwene, 2001, 2008; DeGraff, 2005 in the case of creolistics) who have repeatedly called out some racist underpinning of Western linguistics inherited from its birth in a period when colonization was associated with ‘la mission civilisatrice’, and non-Europeans were considered less evolved than, and their languages as inferior to, Europeans. We should ask

In 2023, I was invited to give a talk on the resurgence of deficit thinking in England's schools, and how contemporary education policies reproduce raciolinguistic ideologies which frame the language practices of working-class and racialised children as suffering from debilitating absences. After my talk, a White male professor commented that this was more about class than race, and that sociolinguistic scholarship focusing on race risked downplaying the struggles of the White working class. I have witnessed the same anxieties unfold in the peer review system, where UK sociolinguists seem uneasy about scholarship which centres race and colonialism, despite the colonial logics which lie at the core of the discipline (Heller & McElhinny, 2022). This is especially concerning given that sociolinguistics emerged simultaneously with the anti-colonial organising of the Black Power Movement in the 1960s, representing community activism which included exposing systemic anti-Black language policing in schools.

In their leading piece, Flores and Rosa articulate how a raciolinguistic perspective invites us to interrogate the colonial roots of sociolinguistics and how issues of race, colonialism and White supremacy have been pushed to its disciplinary margins. A raciolinguistic perspective seeks to undo taken-for-granted assumptions about language, race and class to interrogate how British colonial logics continue to shape modern society. This intersectional approach has been fundamental to the emergence of a raciolinguistic perspective from the United Kingdom which has examined the mutually constitutive nature of race, class and language in different contexts including schools (Cushing, 2022; Cushing & Snell, 2023; Li Wei & García, 2022), the UK citizenship process (Khan, 2021), speech and language pathology (Farah, f.c.), and urban areas with high South Asian populations (Sharma, 2016; see also Harris, 2006). This builds on a long history of work produced by racially marginalised scholars who exposed how colonial and White supremacist logics delegitimised the language practices of racialised communities in mid-20th-century England (e.g. Coard, 1971; Singh, 1988). Yet, these names are typically erased out of historical accounts of UK sociolinguistics (see Gilmour, 2020 for one exception) in much the same ways that colonialism and anti-Blackness are often overlooked in projects on so-called Multicultural London English. The need for UK sociolinguists to pay attention to coloniality is ever more urgent given energised attempts by the state to deny the existence of institutional racism, censor anti-colonial efforts in schools and universities and project images of White, working-class children as victims of ethnic diversity (Shafi & Nagdee, 2022). As Flores and Rosa argue, sociolingu

This article explores the spatiotemporal and affective qualities of linguistic landscapes at three linguistically diverse neighborhoods in Helsinki, Finland. The three sites were selected for qualitative fieldwork using a method that combines social media and population registry data with quantitative measures of diversity and spatial analytics. The article demonstrates how each site is characterized by its own distinct affective atmosphere, which is discursively construed and made sense of through references to other places and times. The timespace analysis of affects provides conceptual and methodological tools that allow analyzing the change and circulation of social meanings in the landscape, as well as differences in these aspects across settings.

Although recent sociolinguistic research on high performance has shown that persona construction is multidimensional and context-specific, little work has explored how interactions between personae affect their shared semiotic landscape. This study focuses on stylistic practices in 2017′s The Rap of China, China's first hip hop-themed competition show. A quantitative analysis was conducted to describe the rhyming styles of contemporary Chinese rappers. Based on language uses, visual representations, and lyrical themes, we then identify three rapper personae and discuss the semantic dimensions of hip hop authenticity invoked by each persona. Finally, through an analysis of a combative rap performance and reactions to it, we argue that contestation among different personae shapes the ideological landscape of “authentic Chinese hip hop.” This work demonstrates the potential of the semiotic landscape as a theoretical tool for the analysis of digital communities and cultural forms.

The study traces the trajectories of Uyghur college students’ subjectivity construction and transformation from Foucault's governmentality perspective. Drawing on ethnographic data of two telling cases, it explores how minoritized students’ subjectivities were linked to neoliberal discourses of English and constituted by power techniques, self-technologies, and affective dispositions embedded in wider institutional transformations. Participants were found experiencing a shift to the individualistic subjectivity associated with academic achievement and performance in English away from the collective identity of “authentic Uyghur” symbolized by the Uyghur language. Two salient discourses of English, i.e., English as constraints, and English as academic excellence, emerging from the neoliberal-oriented institutional English language education policies and practices, shaped the participants either as incompetent English learners or elite subjects. Participants learned to responsibilitize themselves through such self-technologies as confession and preaching, and affective practices. Yet, technologies of hope and optimism became for a few the enjoyment of experiences and performance of elitism while projecting a majority disadvantaged as affectively problematic others. The self-technologies and affective responses without recognition of larger structures of inequality could further reinforce the neoliberal logic. The affective labor of sense of solidarity, commitment to community, empathy for the deprived ones with critical reflection and collective action, nevertheless, may counter neoliberal logic and point to an alternative path to meaning-making and social relations.

Unpacking the possible ramification of how ownership of language and the responsibility of language revitalisation is perceived and how this may impact language revitalisation, this study uses a critical discourse studies approach to examine how the speakers negotiate their language ownership, which eventually leads to the question ‘who is responsible for language revitalisation’. The data of this study comes from semi-structured interviews with 11 Indigenous participants in Taiwan. The findings suggest that, when deciding who can ‘do’ language revitalisation, only those who are deemed legitimate by the speakers have the power to act. However, the speakers view the non-Indigenous speakers as potential speakers and, thus, were also assigned language revitalisation responsibility. Thus, by encouraging non-Indigenous speakers to become speakers of an Indigenous language via language acquisition, language ownership is shared. This study shows the complexity of how the speakers negotiate language ownership and how this has an impact on language revitalisation efforts.