{"title":"A winning dialect: Reinventing linguistic tradition in rural Norway By Thea R. Strand, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press. 2024. 150 pages","authors":"Laura Siragusa","doi":"10.1111/jola.70073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70073","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148754200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Figurative vanua as archive under erasure: Semiotics of the delayed arrival of stranger-kingship in contemporary Fiji","authors":"Yuichi Asai","doi":"10.1111/jola.70067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70067","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines a prolonged “delay” of a chief installation ritual in Dawasamu, Fiji, conducted in 2010 by a lineage group not recognized in the colonial archives as the rightful kingmaker. It argues that this incident signals a broader socio-semiotic transformation in the understanding of how land as a spatiotemporal place relates to the people as its components in Fiji. In particular, drawing on semiotic notions of interpretants, the article argues that this transformation is a “downshift” from a “dicent” to a “rhematic” interpretant in the entextualization of Fijian <i>vanua</i> (i.e., land and people). That is, whereas the colonial archives signified Fijian <i>vanua</i> as a contiguous, developmental, or hypotactic entity of land and people, the diagrammatic frame of entextualization in the archives came to be self-grounded, thereby figurating <i>vanua</i> as a formal, figurative, or paratactic entity of land and people. The article further characterizes the self-reflexive nature of this socio-semiotic transformation as a shift from “archive state” to “<span>archive</span> state,” in which efforts to disavow colonial archives and to long for the delayed arrival of “unwritten” truth nevertheless reanimate and ultimately adhere to the diagrammatic frame of <i>vanua</i> that was itself a product of the colonial-era archival work.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148752733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Computing consensus: Language ideological work in LLM-assisted deliberative democracy","authors":"Janet E. Connor","doi":"10.1111/jola.70071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70071","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines how the digital platform <i>Polis</i> and its experiments with large language models (LLMs) reconfigure democratic participation through a particular vision of consensus. Through analysis of media coverage of Polis and developers' public discussions of the platform, I argue that developers reframe consensus from a discursive achievement to a computationally surfaced pattern, turning deliberative democracy into a computing problem which LLMs are perfectly fit to solve. Under the guise of “saving” or “improving” democracy, Polis produces “illusions of consensus” that depoliticize purported public opinion and further abstract it away from the individuals assumed to have produced it.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70071","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148752420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Palatal violence: Sonic gatekeeping and enemy-making in wartime Ukraine","authors":"Anatoli Ulyanov","doi":"10.1111/jola.70069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70069","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Within 2 days of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a single word—<i>palianytsia</i>, a Ukrainian round loaf—became a phonetic test separating Ukrainians from Russians. The article traces how a culinary term was enregistered as a wartime shibboleth that structurally marks the very citizens it was meant to protect as enemies. Combining acoustic–phonetic and digital discourse analysis, it shows the war rhematizing Ukrainian–Russian phonological divergence into innate bodily deficiency. <i>Palianytsia</i> makes racialized wartime nationalism audible as a form of sonic gatekeeping that cannot distinguish Russophone Ukrainians from Russian saboteurs.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70069","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148617059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Firme ass chola like me”: Raciolinguistic ideologies on YouTube","authors":"Brandon J. Martínez","doi":"10.1111/jola.70072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70072","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Drawing on raciolinguistics and critical discourse analysis, the current study analyzes lexical choice and other semiotic resources utilized in four YouTube parodies of the <i>chola</i> “Chicana gangster” persona. Through the performances, certain negative social values are enregistered, including social backwardness, perceptions of poverty, and performative unintelligence. As an intertextual speech chain, these videos provide evidence for the development of this figure as an entextualizable stereotype with excerptable parts and, in the process, it is argued that these parodies are indexical of raciolinguistic ideologies relating to standard language and white supremacy, treating the <i>chola</i> as a racialized Other.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148616378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the record: Papers, immigration, and legal advocacy By Susan Bibler Coutin, Oakland: The University of California Press. 2025. 170 pages.","authors":"María Luz García","doi":"10.1111/jola.70070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70070","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148616053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Domesticating robots, domesticating language: The hylomorphic paradox of “openness” in large language models","authors":"Raffaele Andrea Buono","doi":"10.1111/jola.70068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70068","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines how openness is interpreted in human–LLM interaction through an ethnographic study of a robotics experiment. Focusing on an episode in which a robot produced an unexpected utterance, I analyze how engineers classify the output as inconsequential noise. I argue that such dismissal reflects a hylomorphic understanding of language, where form is externally imposed on linguistic matter, by latching onto ideas of alignment and usefulness. I configure such hylomorphic movement as undergirding the semiotic ideology at play in robotics engineering, one which constrains the dynamism and potential of situated interaction, transforming openness into a domesticated variability, and limiting the emergence of forms of coordination and meaning.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70068","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148615623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From community care to corporate category: Platforms' discourse on digital trans-affirming practices","authors":"Cedar Brown","doi":"10.1111/jola.70062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70062","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Trans-affirming community movements have interfaced with tech platforms in recent decades, leading to innovations in pronoun-sharing online. As (mostly US-based) platforms created online “pronouns fields,” they released supportive statements and help pages about the feature. However, with the recent roll-back of LGBTQ+ support, such support is revealed as contingent. Thus, analyzing these platforms' statements provides insight into the capitalist impulse for corporations to appropriate movements when strategic. This article analyses the positioning of trans-affirming language practices for corporations' benefit by examining discursive strategies in three platforms' pronoun feature statements, posted 2014–2025. Platforms utilize stance, reference, and figurative language to position themselves as human-like subjects, knowledgeable about trans-inclusion and able to perform affective labor to support marginalized people. Through this, corporations entangle trans-affirming language with corporate harm and entextualize a sanitized version of it that is most aligned with their neoliberal positioning of identity. Further, corporations spatiotemporally construct pronoun sharing through indicating their uneven linguistic and geographic roll-out of the feature. I thus utilize linguistic analysis in challenging a view of digital trans-affirming language practices as socially progressive abstractions, exploring how trans-affirming practices can be incorporated into neoliberal institutions—and the implications of this for how transness is discursively constructed.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70062","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148462893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘You were Cape Verdean before you were American’: An autoethnography of language, race, and diasporic border crossings","authors":"Eva Michelle Wheeler","doi":"10.1111/jola.70066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70066","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Existing research on Cape Verdean identities centers known heritage as the primary determinant of sociocultural positioning. Less frequently studied is the practice of discursively bringing non-Cape Verdeans into a Cape Verdean imaginary through readings of language and race. Framed by the tactics of intersubjectivity and employing an autoethnographic lens, the present analysis attends to the ways that language and race converge in (un)official checkpoint interactions to shape perceptions of sufficient, authentic, and authorized Cape Verdeanness. The discussion highlights the raciolinguistic logics that sustain and contest colonial legacies, the negotiation of social identification, and the implications for diasporic connectedness and belonging.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148281943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The passion of butterflies: Notes on “translating” a Navajo poem by Rex Lee Jim","authors":"Anthony K. Webster","doi":"10.1111/jola.70059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70059","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay honors three kinds of tradition. The first tradition is the poetry of Rex Lee Jim. The second tradition is the translation work of Blackhorse Mitchell. The third tradition is the discourse-centered and ethnopoetic tradition of linguistic anthropology. I do this by focusing on a brief poem in Navajo by Rex Lee Jim. I then discuss a translation of the poem by Blackhorse Mitchell and his influence on a translation that I did. I follow this by placing the poem within a particular Navajo view concerning ‘butterflies.’ In the final section, I offer reflections on linguistic anthropology and on the life of poetry.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70059","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}