Learning language regimes: Children's representations of minority language education

Minority language education initiatives often aim to resist dominant language regimes and to raise the social status of migrant or autochthonous minorities. We consider how participating children experience these alternative language regimes by analysing drawings made by children in two minority education settings—a Slovene‐German bilingual school in Austria and an Isthmus Zapotec (Indigenous) language and art workshop in Mexico. We examine how children's drawings represent language regimes in the social spaces they inhabit. Considering these drawings in relation to ethnographic observations and interviews with educators, we illustrate differences between how the social spaces are planned by educators and how they are represented and experienced by learners. Generally speaking, the children in our studies depict flexible, multilingual experiences and spaces, in contrast to the educators’ agendas of separating or emphasizing languages for pedagogical purposes. Mexican children's perception of themselves as participants in fluid language regimes, and Austrian children's increasing appropriation of multilingual space over time through both (school‐like) routines and (fun) exceptions can inform the efforts of minority language educators.     

'Du hast jar keene Ahnung': African American English dubbed into German

This paper explores the translation of sociolinguistic variation by examining the ways that African American English (AAE) is dubbed into German. In discussing this ubiquitous yet poorly studied area of language use, I show that ideas about language as an index to social groupings are transferable to the degree that the ideas overlap in the cultures in question. In the case of German, if the character being dubbed is young, male and tied to the street cultures of the urban inner city, then AAE is dubbed using a form of German that has links to the urban youth cultures of north‐central Germany. The transferability of sociolinguistic variation is important to issues related to cross‐cultural communication and the ideologies that may play a role in the outcomes of that communication as well as to linguistic creativity and language style more generally.     

Post‐socialist language ideologies in action: Linking interview context and language ideology through stance

Changes associated with the post‐socialist period in Albania have complicated the legacy of language ideologies grounded in Ottoman‐era and socialist‐era politics. In this article, I analyze two metalinguistic interviews with young adults in the Albanian capital of Tirana in order to investigate the status of standardizing and anti‐standardizing language ideologies while also raising a methodological question regarding interview context and researcher role as persistent issues in sociolinguistic research. As acts of evaluation, language ideologies can be linked to interactional positionings and alignments via stance, which is significant for understanding aspects of identity and context in the interview. I argue that this framework provides a better understanding of interview dynamics than previous style shifting approaches, as any explanation of differences in interview interactions must simultaneously consider macro‐level influences of ideology and micro‐level interactional developments.     

Grandparents,kinship ties,and belonging after migration: the perspective of second‐generation grandchildren

In this article, I investigate the roles of grandparents for second‐generation immigrants who live with their parents in a different country from their grandparents. I draw on in‐depth interviews with second‐generation Vietnamese immigrants living in the Czech Republic, where they are very often raised by Czech caregivers. The carers and the children are joined through the process of caregiving and become grandmothers and grandchildren to each other. The analysis focuses on how the interviewees make sense of, interpret, and understand their roles as grandchildren vis‐à‐vis their Czech and Vietnamese grandmothers. It shows how, after migration, the kinship ties are performed, negotiated, and reproduced on a micro level of everyday life, with tasks of caring, homeland visits, and a transnational/face‐to‐face maintenance of intimacy. The article concludes that grandparents play an important role in the grandchildren's sense of belonging both to their family kin and to the homeland.     

The Role of Premigration Status in the Acculturation of Chinese–Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans

Drawing from fifty in‐depth interviews, this research examines the role of existing parental language knowledge on the ethnic identity negotiation of two ethnically distinct children of immigrant groups—Vietnamese and Chinese–Vietnamese—whose families have emigrated from Vietnam to the Southern California region of the United States. While previous research focused primarily on the influence of premigration status on first‐generation immigrants, this article considers how a central aspect of premigration status (intranational ethnicity) applies specifically to the children of first generation immigrants. By taking the premigration approach of comparing the experiences of different ancestral‐origin groups from a single nation (the intranational ethnicity perspective), this analysis suggests that a family's premigration ethnic status shapes the 1.5 and second‐generation's ethnic self‐identification choices through the mediation of parental language knowledge. Specifically, for the children of immigrants with twice‐minority status (Chinese–Vietnamese Americans), parental language knowledge serves as an easy ethnic identity default during these children's early self‐identification process.     

The sociolinguistics of exogamy: Dialect acquisition in a Zhuang village

Adult dialect acquisition is typically studied in relatively idiosyncratic situations where adults happen to move to another community. But how does dialect acquisition play out in indigenous minority societies that have systemic adult migration due to exogamy? Do the in‐married spouses acquire the local variety? Why or why not? How much do they acquire? We investigated an indigenous Zhuang community in southern China. Sociophonetic analyses of in‐married women and local villagers show that the in‐married women acquired the local variety in most respects but not in aspirated consonants. To the limits of their phonological ability as adult learners, the wives followed the local sociolinguistic norm: they acquired the husbands’ variety. By contrast, in societies experiencing greater external cross‐cultural contact, exogamous women sometimes use their liminal status to challenge such gendered sociolinguistic expectations. Comparing the present study with outcomes in different societies, we lay the foundation for a typology of the sociolinguistics of exogamy. In this way, we help expand the study of language and gender toward new horizons and under‐represented social settings.     

The role of marriage in linguistic contact and variation: Two Hmong dialects in Texas1

The role of marriage in linguistic contact and variation has been under‐represented in sociolinguistic research. In any practice‐based analysis, individual interactions and relationships are crucial. Therefore, marriage relationships – small but intense communities of practice – deserve variationist attention for their role in dialect construction and identity. This investigation of cross‐dialectal marriages explores how dialect practices and choices are negotiated between partners. The results show the importance of viewing this linguistic behavior in terms of community ideology, culture, and individual choice, rather than primarily as a matter of the amount and intensity of contact. Likewise, the study shows how less commonly studied minority communities can bring new insights to the study of dialect acquisition and linguistic contact. Specifically, this investigation focuses on marriages between speakers of two different dialects of Hmong, a Hmong‐Mien language of Southeast Asia. On the basis of home visits to ten Hmong immigrant households in Texas, the study analyzes lexical and phonetic contrasts and ethnographic interviews. Results suggest that macro‐level shifts in Hmong social organization and gender roles are being reflected and constructed by gendered, marriage‐level dialect practices. The linguistic behavior in these marriages is best viewed as a matter of community ideology in tension with individual choice: individual wives are choosing to challenge the traditional Hmong ideology regarding language behavior in cross‐dialect marriages.     

Self‐presentation in sociolinguistic interviews: Identities and language variation in Panambi, Brazil

This paper contributes to recent work examining the role of identity, and in particular the uses of language for self‐presentation and the expression of individual identity, through the analysis of two sociolinguistic interviews from a community of German origin in southern Brazil. Drawing from a quantitative study of variation in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, we conducted a detailed analysis of the interviews of two women of different ages and social backgrounds. We first describe the social, cultural and historical context of the interviews, and then discuss how our two speakers use their linguistic resources to express varied, and at times conflicting, aspects of their identities. More specifically, we show how our participants seem to maintain certain in‐group, German‐linked features, yet also use out‐group or Brazilian features in order to index both the (local) German and (regional) Brazilian aspects of their identities. Our data and analysis highlight how participants' identity and language use patterns can be better understood through close analysis of the content of their discourse.     

Viewing Texas Germans through the lens of transnationalism: A new form of transmigrant?

This paper discusses whether Texas Germans can be viewed through the lens of transnationalism. As a group, Texas Germans exhibit a rich linguistic and cultural heritage, both of which have significantly contributed to the formation of a strong sense of “Texas-Germanness.” My goal is to investigate this particular instance of “Germanness beyond Germany” (Maxwell and Davis, German Studies Review, 39, 1–15, 2016) and to determine if Texas Germans represent a previously unidentified form of linguistic transmigrant. The study utilizes a mixed-methods approach, consulting both quantitative (surveys) and qualitative data (open-ended interviews; semi-structured phone interviews). The results indicate the presence of various transnational elements and confirm that both linguistic and cultural heritage are defining elements in the construction and maintenance of Texas German identity. Language, moreover, appears as an important connector and mediator between these concepts.     

What teachers say about addressing culture in their EFL teaching practices: the Vietnamese context

This paper examines Vietnamese EFL teachers’ beliefs about the role of culture in language teaching. It also considers how they address culture in their teaching practices in a Vietnamese university. Ethnographic data collected from semi-structured interviews indicated that opportunities for culture to find its way into EFL classroom activities were still limited. Priority was given to teaching language knowledge and skills, while culture played a minor role only.     

Situating language rights: English and Swahili in Tanzania revisited1

This paper argues for an ethnographic‐sociolinguistic approach to the issue of linguistic rights. In much of the literature on linguistic rights, a fundamentally flawed set of assumptions about language and society is being used, leading to assessments of language situations that are empirically not sustainable. An alternative set of assumptions is offered, grounded in ethnography and focused on language use as oriented towards centering institutions that attribute indexicalities – function and value – to linguistic resources. Such centers are invariably multiple but stratified, and the state occupies a crucial place in these systems, between the world system and local forces. This model is applied to the Tanzanian sociolinguistic situation, where a strong state appeared to be caught between pressures that were both transnational and local. This gave rise to a pattern of distribution of linguistic resources, including English and Swahili, that offered semiotic opportunities to speakers to construct deeply ‘local’ meanings. The languages were not in themselves agents of inequality, but the way in which they were distributed nationally and in relation to transnational hierarchies is the key to understanding inequality. Discussions of linguistic rights should start from assessments of the real potential and constraints of linguistic resources, not from idealized and static conceptions of language and society and predefined scenarios of their interaction.     

‘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.     

A sociolinguistic application of Bakhtin's authoritative and internally persuasive discourse

Through the use of two central Bakhtinian concepts, authoritative and internally persuasive discourse (word), this paper examines the tension between the ideology of linguistic hegemony as a source of power in the Greek public sphere and the condition of language shift faced by the Albanian‐speaking communities of modern Greece. I argue here that a cautious application of these two notions, which are relevant to linguistic ideology, can reveal crucial aspects of two processes: that of subordination to and that of questioning of the dominant linguistic ideology by local Albanian‐speaking communities. Thus, in language shift contexts, it is possible that no simple relations obtain that place social agents in unquestionable and easily predictable positions. Such an approach proves useful for the sociolinguistic study of threatened language communities.     

Performing blackness,forming whiteness: Linguistic minstrelsy in Hollywood film1

The ideological and indexical aspects of linguistic representation have been extensively examined in contemporary sociolinguistics both through investigations of language crossing in everyday interaction and through analyses of mediatized linguistic performances. Less well understood are the indexical meanings achieved when language crossing itself becomes the focus of linguistic representation. One prominent instance of this phenomenon is the use of African American English by European American actors in Hollywood films as part of what is argued to be a complex language‐based form of blackface minstrelsy. As mock language, linguistic minstrelsy in such films involves sociolinguistic processes of deauthentication, maximizing of intertextual gaps, and indexical regimentation of the performed language, but unlike earlier forms of minstrelsy these performances are typically problematized within the films as transgressions of the ideology of racial essentialism. In the two films analyzed in detail in the article, linguistic minstrelsy is shown both to reproduce and to undermine the symbolic dominance of hegemonic white masculinity.     

Minority language revitalization and educational assessment: Do language‐related factors impact performance?

In contexts of minority language revitalization, educational assessment should consider the effect of language‐related factors on performance. Student score comparisons might be unfair if assessment does not take into account the student's language background, language of instruction or the level of minority language standardization. Including language‐related variables in assessment may improve validity, reduce sociolinguistic bias, and make it possible to monitor the progress of the revitalization plans. In this study, we present research conducted in the Basque Autonomous Community, where Spanish and Basque co‐exist. Based on population data (N = 16,270) from a study of fourth‐grade students, results show a positive relationship between the percentage of minority language speakers in the school catchment area and mathematical competence. Results also highlight differences in performance as a function of sociolinguistic groups based on the combination of family language and instruction language, showing better average performance for the Basque‐Basque group.     

Public Child‐Care Expansion and Changing Gender Ideologies of Parents in Germany

This study investigates whether the expansion of public child care for children aged younger than 3 years in Germany has been associated with individual‐level change in gender ideologies. The authors develop and test a theoretical framework of the short‐term impact of family policy institutions on ideology change. The analysis links the German Family Panel pairfam (2008 to 2015) with administrative records on county‐level child‐care provision for those aged younger than 3 years and applies fixed effects panel models. The findings show that the child‐care expansion has been associated with moderate changes toward less‐traditional gender ideologies only among mothers in West Germany and mostly among mothers without a college degree. In East Germany, the authors found evidence of more traditional gender ideologies among mothers without a college degree as the child‐care reform unfolded. The results provide evidence that policy reforms may alter gender ideologies also in the short‐term.     

Explaining Gender Inequalities That Follow Couple Migration

By exploiting the unique social and economic differences between East and West Germany, the authors investigated how macro‐level opportunities interact with couple‐level decision making to explain gender differences in the determinants and economic outcomes of household migration. By incorporating regional socioeconomic conditions into household bargaining theory, 4 hypotheses for each region were derived. The hypotheses were tested using cross‐classified multilevel regressions and the German Socio‐Economic Panel (1992–2012) combined with regional economic indicators. First, gender‐specific determinants of couples' West–West (i.e., within West Germany) and East‐to‐West migration were analyzed; second, subsequent economic consequences were investigated by comparing couples with singles. The results confirm that gender differences in macro‐conditions can impose decision logics that seemingly contradict the initial power relation within couples. Despite more traditional gender arrangements in West Germany, well‐educated partnered women earn significant absolute and relative income gains from migration; their egalitarian East German counterparts suffer significant losses compared with single women and East German men.     

Creaky voice as a phonational device marking parenthetical segments in talk

This study examines the function of creaky voice through investigating salient occurrences in sociolinguistic interviews. By identifying different types of embedded frames within the interviews, as well as paying attention to linguistic features that co‐occur with creaky voice, the study provides evidence that creaky voice marks detachment of an utterance from the surrounding discourse, or from the speaker. Detailed discourse analysis, undertaken mostly from the perspective of conversation analysis, illustrates that creaky voice is a phonational device marking parenthetical segments. The study further demonstrates that the parenthetical function of creak can be extended, and that creaky voice can come to be employed in structuring a narrative by organizing information of different levels of importance, and in conveying stance – particularly a stance of distance or detachment. I suggest that the association between creak and parentheticals is attributed to the ‘less voiced’ nature of creak, which may be an articulatory manifestation of parentheticality.     

Symbols of Organization: Informal Ways of Negotiating the Global and the Local in MNCs

Abstract In this article I build on the growing number of anthropological studies of businesses and explore the role that symbols play in the development of globalizing business networks. Transnational business people employ symbols not only to define boundaries between groups and develop collective solidarity but also to construct continuously changing networks between different social spaces and even, in the final analysis, between the concepts of global and local. The case study presented here focuses on the use of the symbols defining ‘German business style’ by the employees of a branch of a German bank in London as they interact with colleagues in the office, staff at their Frankfurt head office, and their clients and competitors. I conclude that, first, the use of symbols in social interaction is key to the negotiation of global and local spaces, and second, that, as the concepts of ‘global’ and ‘local’ spaces are themselves symbolic constructs, the drawing of distinctions between the two may be misleading.