Journal of Sociolinguistics最新文献

The observation that gender differences in Japanese language use are becoming less prevalent as women increasingly use ‘men's language’ appears in popular media from time to time. Some empirical studies support this view. However, such observations are usually based on the consideration of only one or two linguistic features, especially sentence-final forms and personal pronouns. In contrast, this study analyzes the use of multiple linguistic and paralinguistic features related to gender, regarding them as resources for styling identity. According to our analysis of eight same-gender and mixed-gender dyadic conversations of college students, these speakers’ use of features other than sentence-final forms, which we found to vary little by gender, is normatively gendered to a large extent. The study thus demonstrates that the analysis of multiple and multilevel variables enables us to better understand the complex process of styling through the speaker's negotiation of linguistic gender norms in actual practice.

Pink Dot, a homegrown LGBTQ activist group based in Singapore, has been treated as a social movement since its inauguration in 2009, and they organise an annual event to advocate for LGBTQ individuals. In 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the twelfth edition of the event (PD12) took place online as a livestream on YouTube. The highlight of PD12 was the unveiling of a ‘digital pink dot’ via a virtual map of Singapore, where the permeability of its discourse in virtual and physical spaces became much more apparent in comparison with previous physical iterations of the event. Approaching the data with counterpublic and citizenship theory, I outline the circulability of discourse as the key feature of a counterpublic, and argue that PD12 achieves this in two ways: (i) the semiotic fragmentation of its physical signs and online discourse; and (ii) the deployment of intertextual elements in a drag performance.

A central concern in sociolinguistic ethnographies has been how people use language to make social distinctions. This article discusses the relevance of paying closer attention to the role of machines as actants in communication and social distinction-making processes. It analyses audio and video-recorded workplace interactions between humans and machines in a metal foundry in the Dutch-German borderland. Specifically, it focuses on several cases of a breakdown of a production process, a frequently observed phenomenon in the foundry. The cases show that: (1) the production work entails many improvised human–human and human–machine interactions as opposed to Taylorised working practices; (2) the machine-actants initiate and afford (re)negotiations of situated, hierarchical workplace relations through these interactions; and (3) the question whether these interactions should be considered ‘language-centred’ or ‘language-marginal’ partly depends on an ideological, conceptual distinction between what counts as ‘language’ and what not.

Through its colonial, class- and caste-based history, English in India has come to be seen as a powerful resource that opens doors for those who ‘have’ it and holds back those who do not. For women, English ostensibly offers various promises in addition to employment: progressiveness and ‘empowerment’; and the potential for upward mobility through marriage. Yet, the conversion of English capital for English-speaking Indian women proves to be intensely complex in practice, as many find themselves forced to navigate between shifting moral regimes attached to ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in an NGO in Delhi that offers free English training to ‘disadvantaged youth’, this paper explores how English capital is managed by young women striving to attain middle classness through English, and how their class, caste and gender positionings are negotiated across particular time-space configurations as they seek to become English speakers.

This article analyses vernacularisation as a sociolinguistic change that brings with it an ideological fracturing of previous standard/vernacular indexical relations. It considers this ideological shift in the polycentric environment of social networks as mediated spaces where the values and functions of languages and varieties are re-evaluated and brought together. We argue that Instagram is a fertile space to study the hierarchies among Basque varieties which could reveal a sociolinguistic change among the Basque youth. In our stylistic and ethnographic research, we draw the data from the corpus of the Gaztesare project that contains the production in Instagram of 30 Basque university students. The discussion highlights the difficulty to give a simple answer to the question of what ‘best’ language is, and it underlines the importance of a multi-scalar perspective to explore the complex and multidimensional ideological schemes of the Basque youth and to detect new values and hierarchies among Basque varieties.