{"title":"“You keep the y'alls”: Multivocality and embodiment in college students' negotiations of academic English","authors":"Jocelyn Ahlers, Nicoleta Bateman, Mary Stewart","doi":"10.1111/jola.70034","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jola.70034","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Throughout their education, students learn to use “academic English,” and to navigate associated language ideologies. In focus groups, college students discuss formal features of “academic English,” especially “removing ‘I’,” and “avoiding bias,” that they link to a sense of alienation and loss. They show themselves not to be passive receptacles for the ideologies they are exposed to as part of their education, but rather, as agents who take up various stances relative to *Academic Standardized American English and to their use of “slang” varieties, and who reintegrate both themselves and their communities into their discourse, through the use of embodiment and multivocality.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145909353","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":"Human tests for machine models: What lies “Beyond the Imitation Game”?","authors":"Noya Kohavi, Anna Weichselbraun","doi":"10.1111/jola.70035","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jola.70035","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Benchmarking large language models (LLMs) is a key practice for evaluating their capabilities and risks. This paper considers the development of “BIG Bench,” a crowdsourced benchmark designed to test LLMs “Beyond the Imitation Game.” Drawing on linguistic anthropological and ethnographic analysis of the project's GitHub repository, we examine how contributors developed tasks based on their lay understandings of language, cognition, and intelligence. By tracing how contributors make implicit judgments about what constitutes a meaningful test of intelligence, we show how widespread language ideologies shape the evaluation of LLMs and the imaginaries that guide their development.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70035","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145909354","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":"","authors":"","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148066189","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":"Recruiting Mubai: Race turning into qualification in China's private English language education\u0000 招聘“母白”外教: 中国私立英语教育行业中的种族与资质","authors":"Shuling Wang, Raviv Litman","doi":"10.1111/jola.70043","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jola.70043","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Native speakerism in English language teaching (ELT) has become associated with Whiteness. However, how this association is sustained in everyday practices within China's unique socio-cultural-political context remains underexplored. This study examines the raciolinguistic construct of Mubai, a central recruitment criterion in China's ELT industry, and analyses how <i>Mubai</i> codifies the explicit conflation of Whiteness and English nativeness, persistently privileging Whiteness over qualifications through a highly prescriptive recruitment process, which undermines teaching quality, produces unsustainable labor practices, and perpetuates structural racism often unacknowledged in Chinese public discourse. It highlights how <i>Mubai</i> both sustains and destabilizes racialized ideologies of English in China.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70043","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145904679","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}