Girls and guys,ghetto and bougie: Metapragmatics,ideology and the management of social identities1

This case study explores the metapragmatic awareness of a young, academically successful, African American, female speaker. It describes some of the identities and orientations that the speaker performs through language and the perceived role of linguistic style in such performances. This study suggests that these linguistic performances are a complex negotiation of ethnicity, gender and class that both draw from and resist the macrosocial indexing of social categories. Further, the understood role of language in the social negotiations of the speaker serves as an illustration of the relationship among metapragmatics, ideology and identity and also highlights the dynamism of identity management as individuals position themselves in allegiance with, or opposition to, various groups that populate their social landscape.     

What's in a name? Language ideology and social differentiation in a Swedish print‐mediated debate1

This paper investigates a recent print‐mediated discussion about linguistic phenomena that are perceived by many commentators to be ‘deviant’ from ‘standard Swedish.’ The aim of the paper is to illustrate how this language debate is built on two closely entwined discursive processes: a struggle to define the name, meaning, and value of a specific linguistic phenomenon; and the indexical processes through which such a phenomenon is bound up with a multifaceted image of its purported speakers, in which gender is imbricated in age and ethnicity. Essentially, the argument is that the metalinguistic pronouncements in this debate are ultimately the outer manifestation of deeper social concerns about what it means to be a ‘non‐Swedish’ young man.     

Style and Language Use among Youth of the New Immigration: Formations of Race,Ethnicity, Gender,and Class in Everyday Practice

In this article I consider “style” as a linguistic and cultural concept that can demonstrate how identities performed through language use are linked to topics of central concern in studies of immigrant youth, including racial and ethnic formation, generational cohorts, acculturation, assimilation, and gender. I draw on anthropological and sociolinguistic approaches to style not generally considered in migration studies and present ethnographic data of two cliques of Desi (South Asian American) teens in a Northern California high school. I argue that analyses of youth style can substantially complicate assimilation frameworks by highlighting the ways in which young peoples' linguistic practices may not fit neatly into commonly used analytical categories of “immigrant” and “American.” Focusing on how political economy and local histories inform power and difference that shape migration experiences for youth, the article moves beyond routinely examined areas of heritage language retention and loss to analyze the significance of youth performances of heritage languages as well as English.     

Unexpected but authentic use of an ethnically–marked dialect

Recent work on language crossing in the U.S. has examined the temporary appropriation of African American Vernacular English by white youth in an effort to participate in the current popularity and prestige of hip–hop culture, or in order to highlight racial boundaries. While such verbal behavior probably encompasses most white use of AAVE, it is not the only way in which whites (or other non–blacks) can use the variety. This paper presents a case study of the language of a 23 year old white female who makes consistent use of many distinctive linguistic features associated with AAVE. I argue that the interaction of ideologies of race, class, localness and language allow her to be considered an ingroup member despite her biographical race. This suggests that there is a tension between academic linguistic theory and actual speaker practice in assigning authenticity to individuals, and I conclude that language ideologies and other forms of qualitative evidence should be taken into account by sociolinguists looking at the link between language and race.     

Slave Ships and Coffin Ships: Transatlantic Exchanges in Irish-American Blackface Minstrelsy

Abstract

Irish participation in blackface minstrelsy underwent complex transatlantic exchanges as it jumped from the US to Ireland and back again from the era of the Great Famine through the end of the nineteenth century. Most research on Irish-American blackface minstrelsy treats the Irish in America as a homogenous group that used ‘blacking up’ to establish its ethnic whiteness. However, there were at least two distinct groups of Irish Americans who participated in blackface minstrelsy: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants. The latter’s incorporation into the history of minstrelsy means that we must reconsider assumptions about how and why the Irish performed blackface in both Ireland and America. Because Irish Protestants’ whiteness was never in question, theories of ethnic assimilation and working class anxieties do not adequately account for Irish gravitation to minstrel shows. Something else about Irish identity captivated performers and audiences. Moving beyond the racial assimilation mode, I argue that blacking up carried tensions of land dispossession, national identity, and ethnic conflict in Ireland into American culture.     

Syllable-final /s/ as an index of language,gender, and ethnicity in a contact variety of Mexican Spanish

This study of syllable-final /s/ reduction in a 55-speaker corpus of Spanish in Juchitán, México, a contact variety, uses both language contact and social processes to explain its results. Contact with the indigenous Isthmus Zapotec language leads to decreased rates of syllable-final /s/ retention, creating a locally salient n+1-order index between “Zapotecness” and /s/ reduction that influences the indexical field for syllable-final /s/ reduction. Zapotec identity is associated with tradition and femininity. Therefore, in this new indexical field, syllable-final /s/ reduction comes to directly index Zapotec language dominance and indirectly index both femininity and tradition. This leads feminine and elderly speakers to reduce /s/ more frequently than “less feminine” and young speakers, even though the opposite pattern is usually found in other varieties. The results show, therefore, that language contact can influence the indexical field typically linked to socially meaningful variation and thereby cause unexpected patterns of variation to emerge.     

The Acculturative Experience of French Students in a Southwestern University Apartment Complex in the United States

This article is an ethnographic study that explores the lives of eight French students in a Southwestern university apartment complex in the United States. The researcher employs narrative methodology to understand their acculturative experiences in American higher education. Thematic analysis of in-depth, conversational interview data is used. Emergent themes from these narrative interviews are also found in regard to the participants’ acculturative experiences of studying in a foreign country. Those themes are discussed in the order of the participants’ experience: (1) the theme of culture shock, (2) the theme of acculturative stress, (3) the theme of linguistic limitations, and (4) the theme of culture adjustment. As they experience the American lifestyle both in and outside the classroom setting, it was found that, overall, those French participants report difficulties in crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries while studying in an American university.     

From sociolinguistic variation to socially strategic stylisation1

This article investigates the indexical relation between language, interactional stance and social class. Quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of a linguistic variable (the first person possessive singular) is combined with interactional analysis of the way one particular variant (possessive ‘me’, as in Me pencil's up me jumper) is used by speakers in ‘stylised’ interactional performances. The aim of this analysis is to explore: (1) how possessive ‘me’ is implicated in the construction and management of local identities and relationships; and (2) how macro‐social categories, such as social class, relate to linguistic choice. The data for this analysis comes from an ethnographic study of the language practices of nine‐ to ten‐year‐old children in two socially‐differentiated primary schools in north‐east England. A secondary aim of the article is to spotlight the sociolinguistic sophistication of these young children, in particular, the working‐class participants, who challenge the notion that the speech of working‐class children is in any way ‘impoverished’.     

‘Pure’ Farsi and political sensitivities: Language and ideologies in Farsi complementary language classrooms in Denmark

This paper presents an insight into two Farsi complementary language classrooms in Copenhagen, Denmark, characterised by political sensitivities. We illustrate a number of characteristic features of the classrooms concerning language use, pedagogical methods and cultural phenomena, which were related to key adults’ preferences, and we consider possible interpretations of them as indexical signs. In particular, we emphasise ideological interpretations (e.g. the monolingualism norm and language purism) and we relate the classroom characteristics to the contemporary state of Iran as well as to the time and place in which the classes occurred. We analyse both explicit metapragmatic messages and implicit ways of indicating ideologies, and see both types as characterised by avoidance of particular referents, that is, by unmentionables.     

Signifyin' Cinema: Rudy Ray Moore and the Quality of Badness

This article engages the limits of both film and race studies in their approach to heterogeneous and “low” forms of African American cultural production through an analysis of the films of Rudy Ray Moore. While Moore’s films have been almost entirely overlooked in both film studies and black studies, they were extremely popular among black youth of the 1970s and have exerted a powerful influence on today’s hardcore hip hop artists (and their understanding of how to turn black market entrepreneurship into global enterprise). The theory of “signifying”, advanced most rigorously by black literary theorist Henry Louis Gates Jr, helps explain how and why Moore has slipped through various critical nets — and grounds a claim for why we should take “bad” black film seriously. Close film and context analysis illustrates how Moore’s low‐budget films “signify” on Hollywood and the system of expectancies that go with putatively “good” filmmaking and reveals the extent to which they constitute a hybrid cultural and multimedia practice. As vehicles designed to elaborate on the badman of black folklore, Moore’s films contribute to the long history and rich language of “toasting” in African American oral culture and music. As such, far from being emblematic of black filmmaking’s impoverished relationship to mainstream cinema (as a cinema manqué), these films constitute vital precursors to the hip hop music video.     

LANGUAGE, experience and history: 'What happened' in World War II

Sociolinguistics can contribute to our understanding of history by showing how language helps to develop and maintain a sense of a communal past. This paper focuses on the referring terms for the World War II experiences of European Jews and of Japanese Americans, as evinced through various sources of public discourse (newspapers, library cataloguing systems, book titles). The analysis of linguistic form and function combines with discussion of the social and cultural history of Holocaust awareness in the U.S. to show how the word Holocaust (as a referring term for the experience of European Jews) became part of an American lexicon. A comparison of this stable term with the variety of nouns and verbal expressions used to index the Japanese American experience allows us to more fully consider how language helps to create and preserve collective memory.     

Community identity and language change in North American Anabaptist communities

Patterns of language maintenance and shift among historical German-speaking North American Amish and Mennonite communities reveal ways in which these groups have utilized language to encode and mediate group identity. The Old Order Amish and the Old Order Mennonites have maintained German to resist secular authority, to remain separate from the dominant society, to preserve the traditions of their forefathers and, above all, to mark themselves as Old Order. More liberal groups have shifted to English to demonstrate a commitment to evangelism and a rejection of Old Order practice. This paper supports the view that individual communities may actively direct language change. Guided by an ideology that invests particular patterns of language use with religious significance, each Amish and Mennonite community determines its own linguistic fate.     

Defining Māori language revitalisation: A project in folk linguistics

The postmodern and critical movements in language policy, with their redefinition of governmentality and attention to power structures, call for localised perspectives on language arrangements. In this way, a polity, in its social and cultural context, can be understood as much as the policies it operates. In the case of Indigenous languages undergoing revitalisation, this allows us to define language revitalisation, and the vitality it should deliver, not through western scholarship but for local purposes with local ideas by examining local knowledge and preferences. To do this, a folk linguistic approach was applied to language policy research. A quantitative and qualitative survey investigated how around 1,300 Indigenous and non‐Indigenous youth in New Zealand define Māori language revitalisation from their own perspective and how they perceive the revitalisation processes and outcomes proposed in scholarship and local discourses. The paper shows that claimed linguistic knowledge not only exists parallel to language attitudes, but informs local policy ideas. The findings indicate that these youth define language revitalisation and vitality in terms contextualised by local ontology, knowledge, ideologies and values, therefore challenging the local applicability of universal theories.     

‘Ch'us mon propre Bescherelle’: Challenges from the Hip‐Hop nation to the Quebec nation1

We examine the uses of and attitudes towards language of members of the Montreal Hip‐Hop community in relation to Quebec language‐in‐education policies. These policies, implemented in the 1970s, have ensured that French has become the common public language of an ethnically diverse young adult population in Montreal. We argue, using Blommaert's (2005) model of orders of indexicality, that the dominant language hierarchy orders established by government policy have been both flattened and reordered by members of the Montreal Hip‐Hop community, whose multilingual lyrics insist: (1) that while French is the lingua franca, it is a much more inclusive category which includes ‘Bad French,’ regional and class dialects, and European French; and (2) that all languages spoken by community members are valuable as linguistic resources for creativity and communication with multiple audiences. We draw from a database which includes interviews with and lyrics from rappers of Haitian, Latin‐American, African‐American and Québécois origin.     

‘Don't speak like that to her!’: Linguistic minority children's socialization into an ideology of monolingualism

It is of general interest to the study of language in society how ideologies motivating linguistic hegemony get formulated in the context of increasing diversity. This includes if and how linguistic diversity surfaces under conditions that are clearly disfavouring it, and why or why not it happens. Also, we need to know how ideologies of language surface at the micro‐level, and how they are continuously passed on, shared, negotiated or contested. These are central issues in this study of socialization into a condition and an ideology of linguistic hegemony in Copenhagen, Denmark. It is illustrated how school‐authorities, parents and children co‐create Danish dominance and a linguistic ideology of monolingualism during the first school year. The primary focus is on two school‐beginners with minority language background in a linguistically diverse classroom, and the linguistic registers of particular interest are Danish, the majority language, and Turkish, an immigrant language. The article builds on field‐notes, ethnographic interviews, video‐ and audio‐recordings. Linguistic Ethnography and Language Socialization constitute the methodological frameworks, and Silverstein's ‘total linguistic fact’ forms an analytic principle.     

Fighting words? Joning as conflict talk and identity performance among African American preadolescents

This study examines how preadolescent African American students in Washington, D.C., used a linguistic practice called ‘joning,’ a style of verbal play similar to ritual insults, in peer interactions. Sociolinguists have focused on how children socialize each other into vernacular styles appropriate for peer group use but often assume that they disalign with social and linguistic norms for classroom behavior. Drawing from a nine‐month ethnographic study that the author conducted in an after‐school program, this article analyzes the structure and function of joning as a vernacular style of African American Vernacular English and its uses in constructing classroom identities. Joning often facilitated student learning, but it was perceived as a socially and physically risky linguistic practice because of its uses as conflict talk in the local community. Focusing on preadolescence as a key stage of language socialization, this article shows how minority students modify peer‐learned linguistic practices to pursue academic success on their own terms.     

Martha Stewart behaving Badly: Parody and the symbolic meaning of style1

This study addresses the issue of how to correlate social meaning with linguistic style through an investigation of the parodic speech genre. The analysis examines two parodies of lifestyle entrepreneur Martha Stewart and compares linguistic strategies used in parodies of Stewart to her own linguistic performance on her talk show. Features considered include phonological characteristics, lexical items, politeness strategies, and voice quality. A comparative quantitative analysis of aspirated and released /t/ as employed by Stewart and her parodist reveals that a variable feature of Stewart's style is rendered categorical in the parody. It is demonstrated that both parodies exploit elements associated with Stewart's ‘Good Woman’ image in order to expose Stewart as a ‘Bad Woman’, a reputation she earned for her 2003 insider trading conviction. This study suggests that parodic performance may serve to strengthen and even iconize indexical connections between stylistic variants and their social meaning in particular contexts.     

Nationalism and the Linguistic Rights of Deaf Communities: Linguistic Imperialism and the Recognition and Development of Sign Languages

This paper examines the impact of nationalism on the linguistic rights of Deaf communities. In exploring the subtle hegemony of nationalism in relation to linguistic minorities, the paper discusses the impact of nationalisms on sign languages from two perspectives and in two contrasting situations. First, the paper examines the impact of nationalism on the recognition and promotion of natural sign languages. Second, it examines a particularly potent form of linguistic imperialism as the dominant linguistic forces seek not only to destroy minority languages but to transform existing minority linguistic processes to conform with the form and content of the national language, through the development and promotion of manually coded versions of national spoken and written languages in formal education. These issues are examined in relation to the nationalisms and indigenous sign languages of Australia and Indonesia.     

Pronoun morphology,modality and semantics of political communication in presidential debate of two Italian political leaders

The present article wants to be an example of how spin can be profitably analysed not just as far as the content of the utterances is concerned but through their linguistic form as well, and of how mystification can be made transparent through the analysis of the language use of political texts at all levels, including morphology, grammar and syntax. The alleged ‘end of ideologies’ has brought about new forms of spin based on subtle ideological mystification that can be analysed through forms of language. One such example is the use of figures and expressions borrowed from the language of economics and business, considered the realms of ‘objectivity’.