The "multilingual turn" brings questions of language ownership to the forefront of debates about linguistic minority governance. Acadian minority cultural producers construct language ownership using multiple languages and targeting multilingual publics, but use ideologies of monolingualism to situate Acadian authenticity in place and…

By comparing two recent French films, "L'Esquive" (Kechiche 2004) and "Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis" (Boon 2008), a realistic drama and a comedy, this article proposes an analysis of two different cases of stylisation that entertain complex relations of authenticity with stigmatised vernaculars, and in which actors stylise their own linguistic…

In this short commentary piece, the authors stand back from many of the specific details in the seven papers which constitute the special issue, and offer some observations which attempt to identify and assess points of similarity and difference amongst them, under a number of different general headings. To the extent that the "sociolinguistics of…

In this article the notion of "community" is examined through a lens which focuses on the way people interact and communicate in and around a Panjabi complementary school. Analysis of linguistic ethnographic data contributes to understandings of how identities are produced and reproduced, and how belonging becomes naturalised. The…

This study analyzes the narrative-based interview data of three Indian women to examine the manner in which they utilize stylization to construct identity-rich, ideological stances related to discriminatory discourses of Hindi and English medium education in the linguistically rich, albeit complex, present-day context of India. Stylization is…

From a critical sociolinguistic perspective, this article investigates the written linguistic practices of 20 labor migrants from heterogeneous backgrounds who organized their life trajectories in an "ethnic" call shop in a marginal neighborhood near Barcelona. This was a late capitalist institution informally providing the undocumented…

This study investigates attitudes towards varieties of English among Norwegian adolescent learners and assesses the role of social evaluation for second language (L2) pronunciation choices by combining a verbal guise test with speaker commentary and reports of language choices. The results suggest that while American English is the most accessible…

The complex notion of the public/private distinction of social spheres has not been systematically investigated in sociolinguistics; particularly in the case of bidialectal kindergarten age children and how they construct their social lives around this distinction in a public environment such as that of school. No simple continuum can clearly…

Existing studies on doctor-client interactions have largely focused on monolingual encounters and the interactional effects and functions of the languages used in the communication between doctors and their clients. They have neither, to a large extent, examined the several codes employed in single encounters and their pragmatic roles nor given…

The transgressive use of language by out-group speakers, or crossing is used in a variety of ways to achieve both affiliative and disaffiliative ends among youths. However, crossing can also be used as an affiliative resource in asymmetrical power relations between teachers and students. Reporting on the findings of a 1.5 year ethnography of an…

This paper examines the use of Japanese addressee honorific in several social contexts (e.g., family dinner table and faculty meetings) and considers the relationship between social norms and variations. It attempts to reconsider the notion of discernment (Ide, 1989, 2006) in line with Bourdieu's (1977) conception of "habitus,"…

This paper addresses the issue of the emergence of new standards of English in the postcolonial world by means of a language attitude study conducted in the Caribbean island of Trinidad that involved rating the accents of newscasters. Accents represented in the clips played to respondents comprised various local as well as non-local ones. The…

We investigate the current position of English in the language ecology of Swedish academia, with a special focus on the humanities. Semi-structured interviews with 15 informants from the fields of Anthropology, General Linguistics and History were carried out to explore how non-native speakers of English experience using academic English in their…

This paper examines language stylization in "Aigia Fuxia" ("The Fuchsia Goat"), a highly popular Greek Cypriot sitcom, where the (imagined) linguistic and socio-cultural "self" of a dialect-speaking community is subjected to extreme and aberrant stylization. The overarching filmic and generic trademark of "Aigia…

This article analyzes four Hollywood films set in Hawai'i to shed light on how particular languages and language varieties "style" (Auer 2007; Coupland 2007) Local/Hawaiian and mainland U.S. characters as certain kinds of people. Through an analysis of films featuring "haole" ("white, outsider") male protagonists who…