Journal of Sociolinguistics最新文献

{"title":"Big Impact or No Advantage? Raciolinguistic Framings in Australian Media Coverage of Young People's Multilingualism","authors":"Naomi Fillmore,&nbsp;Hanna Torsh,&nbsp;Yanisa Jakklom","doi":"10.1111/josl.70005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.70005","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article examines Australian media coverage of childhood multilingualism and language education through 85 news articles published between 2013 and 2024 across major news outlets. Using a critical post-structural framework and raciolinguistic perspective, we demonstrate how identical linguistic practices (multilingualism and language learning) are framed through different ideological lenses depending on children's racial positioning. While White, monolingual children's language learning is consistently celebrated through neoliberal ideologies of competitive advantage and cognitive benefit, racialised children's existing multilingualism is constructed as a deficit, barrier or threat requiring intervention. These differential framings reveal systematic raciolinguistic hierarchies that privilege Whiteness while marginalising Indigenous and migrant communities’ linguistic practices. Our findings reveal how media discourses actively construct and maintain linguistic inequalities through racialised framings, demonstrating the importance of examining how language and race intersect in public discourse, with significant implications for how sociolinguistics advocates for children and young people's multilingualism in the Australian and other settler-colonial contexts.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"30 2","pages":"135-149"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147708163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Articulating Our Vision and Claiming Our Place: Personal Reflections on Language, Linguistics, and the Academy","authors":"Erica Britt","doi":"10.1111/josl.70021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.70021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"30 2","pages":"210-213"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147708012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ungrammatical Selves","authors":"Vincent Pak","doi":"10.1111/josl.70014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.70014","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;If asked about my first impression of linguistics as a discipline, I would extol its generosity. I enrolled in an introductory class—a decade ago—with no knowledge of what it meant to study language, wielding only a relatively good grasp of English. One of the foremost principles taught to us undergraduates was that linguists are not prescriptive; rather, they take a descriptivist approach to language data. Later in the class, we would learn that formal linguists depend on speaker judgements of grammaticality to theorise how humans cognise the rules of language, a Chomskyan view of linguistic competence. Such a revelation was at odds with the ways in which I learned English and Mandarin Chinese before university, where I was explicitly taught and evaluated based on my ability to follow grammatical rules. Ungrammaticality in linguistics, I learned, is necessary and productive to advance the field. What a generous, welcoming discipline that welcomes deviations, I remember thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ten years and two degrees in linguistics later, it became clear to me that while ungrammaticality in language is embraced by linguists, ungrammaticality in linguists is not. By this, I mean that the welcoming of ‘broken’ rules in language is not extended to linguists themselves, many of whom are deemed infelicitous because of who they are and how they produce language. &lt;i&gt;Inclusion in Linguistics&lt;/i&gt; hinges on the observation that the discipline does not always confront the borders that it draws, even if a significant portion of its research scope attends to the human condition and the social world. The edited volume is assembled with contributions from an impressive range of language scholars and practitioners who have been part of, or have witnessed, the limits of linguistics and linguists. These contributors do not merely demonstrate the invisible ways in which individuals and communities can be left and kept out of the discipline, but also itemise in concrete steps suggestions for allies to recognise and rectify this exclusion. Their suggestions for action are easily adaptable for both teaching and research contexts, and it is more than heartening to witness the commitment of the contributors to ensuring that others will not have to undergo the same exclusionary experiences that they have. While there have been other academic projects that are similarly reflexive in their discussion of the field of linguistics, &lt;i&gt;Inclusion in Linguistics&lt;/i&gt; carves out a distinct space for contributors to share what they think can be done better, and how to implement truly inclusive practices for all users, teachers and learners of language. I suspect that for some readers, this volume would be their first confrontation of the tangible barriers that linguists have put up for their own peers and (potential) students. There is little meaning to assuming that those who have been exclusionary do so intentionally; many of them are also subjects of an insularity that plagues acad","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"30 2","pages":"214-217"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.70014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147708013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Deborah Cameron (1958–2026)","authors":"Don Kulick","doi":"10.1111/josl.70023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.70023","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Deborah Cameron (whom everybody who knew her even slightly called “Debbie”) is the smartest, most well-attuned, most level-headed, and sensible person I have ever met. I know I should write “&lt;i&gt;was&lt;/i&gt; the smartest, most well-attuned, most level-headed, and sensible person I have ever met” because she tragically, incomprehensibly, enragingly, is no longer with us. Right now, though, only a few weeks after her passing, those past-tense words seem too raw, too stark, too close to the bone. They also sound too final and also wrong because Debbie is still with us. She will always be with us through her extraordinarily perceptive writing and in the memories of her that anyone who ever spent time with her will hold and cherish forever.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I met Debbie sometime in the mid-1990s, when she was visiting New York University. I was working there at the time in the anthropology department as a visiting assistant professor. Like most sociolinguists, I had read &lt;i&gt;Feminism and Linguistic Theory&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;Verbal Hygiene&lt;/i&gt;, and knowing that she was in the same city as me, I did something I never before had done nor have done since: I wrote a fan letter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I cannot remember what I wrote, but amidst the gush, I must have timidly proposed meeting up for a coffee. She consented, and we met. I had no idea what she looked like (remember this was before one could just type in a name on Google), but of course I knew that she was British. Being acquainted from her books with her laser-beam perception and her biting wit, I think I expected her to look like Maggie Smith in &lt;i&gt;The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie&lt;/i&gt;: sharp-boned, tight-bodied, prim. I also assumed, based too on the authoritative, no-nonsense style of her writing, that she must be at least 20 years older than me. I was wrong on both counts. She turned out to be a robust lesbian, only a few years older than me, dressed not particularly fashionably and with a short haircut, in my memory almost a buzz cut. She smoked a lot. She liked to drink. She enjoyed swearing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We hit it off immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;What I loved about Debbie from the first moments of our first conversation was her laugh. It was a raucous, infectious combination of a cackle and a guffaw. And contrary to my expectation that she might be decorous and stiff, she laughed readily and with gusto. Our conversations, from that first coffee in the mid-90s to my final conversation with her by phone, 30 years later from Hong Kong, right before Christmas 2025, were always animated by laughter. I could always make her laugh, and she always made me laugh. After she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, soon following that conversation in December, I never had an opportunity to speak to her again—her partner, Meryl, who remained by her side constantly, told me daily that she never felt well enough to converse by phone or online. My biggest regret is that I was not able to make Debbie laugh at the end. I know I could have done it. God I miss her laugh","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"30 2","pages":"232-233"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.70023","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147707870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"More Seats at the Table: Bringing Linguistics Behind Bars","authors":"Dominique Branson","doi":"10.1111/josl.70018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.70018","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"30 2","pages":"207-209"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147708015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Between Recursive Monolingualism and a Thousand Multilingual Plateaus: Thinking With Tibetan Sociolinguistics","authors":"Xiao Schutte Ke","doi":"10.1111/josl.70003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.70003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"30 2","pages":"223-231"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147708391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"African Perspectives on Decolonising Linguistics","authors":"Felix Banda","doi":"10.1111/josl.70017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.70017","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Growing up in the late 1960s in a small town in Eastern Zambia bordering Mozambique and Malawi, where at least four languages were spoken at home and in the town, multilingualism is my mother tongue. I grew up interacting with people from different ethnolinguistic backgrounds who lived, and still live, side-by-side speaking each other's languages and living multilingually. Scholarship on the sociolinguistic situation in Africa shows that a typical African speaks at least three languages (Banda &lt;span&gt;2009&lt;/span&gt;; McLaughlin &lt;span&gt;2009&lt;/span&gt;). The literature also intimates that not only do they not hierarchise them additively as first, second, third, fourth languages and so forth, but the languages are typically acquired outside the formal school system, unlike in the Global North (Banda &lt;span&gt;2009&lt;/span&gt;; Brock-Utne &lt;span&gt;2009&lt;/span&gt;). Starting my primary school in the late 1960s, other Zambian children and I experienced a renaissance of some sort: the unusual and negative impact of forced monolingualism, not in an African language, but in a foreign language, English. The emergent African government after Zambia's independence from British colonial rule in October 1964, instituted a new language education policy that the medium of instruction was going to be English right from the first grade, replacing the missionary and colonial education policy, where the first four or five years were done using an African language medium of instruction. The English medium of instruction was based on what I came to know later as an undergraduate student, as the New Peak Curriculum, which the British Council had prepared for Kenya, and was now transported to Zambia, another former British colony.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whereas I could speak five languages, excluding mixed repertoires outside the classroom, I quickly learnt about the linguistic restrictions inside the classroom, as everything revolved around speaking and writing English ‘properly’. Out of the more than 72 languages spoken, only seven were chosen, with each of the nine (now 10) regions allowed to use one Zambian language for local administration, and as an optional subject in schools. This created a language matrix of power, and a hierarchy with English occupying the top, followed by the official Zambian language, and the rest of the non-official Zambian languages occupied the lower levels. In practice, the exuberant multilingualism and creativity of linguistic variation in the communities (Smith 2024) were and are still in sharp contrast with the push towards English monolingualism in the classroom. Nevertheless, other learners and I quickly learned how to resist and circumvent the colonial imposition of English monolingualism, as even as the teacher engaged in her/his English monologue, where something was not clear, we would consciously or unconsciously reconceptualise it in an African language and knowledge, and if prompted, translate it back into English in response to the teacher. In terms of group work ","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"30 2","pages":"193-197"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.70017","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147708011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Localizing the Sacred: A Sociolinguistic Study of the Linguistic Landscape in Beijing's Catholic Churches","authors":"Jiang Renfeng,&nbsp;Fang Xue,&nbsp;Tian Xiaolong","doi":"10.1111/josl.70008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.70008","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This study examines the linguistic landscapes of four Catholic churches in Beijing to explore how religious institutions negotiate visibility, authority, and cultural belonging in a rapidly urbanizing and commercializing society. Drawing on multimodal analysis and geosemiotic theory, the paper analyzes over 600 signs to reveal how churches construct layered semiotic strategies. Chinese signage reflects state-aligned legitimacy; Latin indexes religious tradition; English evokes cosmopolitan accessibility; and festive or commercial texts mediate local cultural and economic engagement. Churchscapes emerge as hybrid spaces where sacred and secular discourses coexist, sometimes in tension, often in strategic alignment. From liturgical inscriptions to wedding advertisements and themed cafés, signs perform localization not as translation, but as ideological choreography. The findings expand the scope of linguistic landscape research by foregrounding religious sites as dynamic semiotic environments shaped by policy, heritage, and everyday urban life.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"30 2","pages":"150-164"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147708331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Racially Hegemonic Articulations: Class as Race in Constructions of Dominance in an Undergraduate Architecture Studio","authors":"Steve Dixon-Smith","doi":"10.1111/josl.70007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.70007","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article responds to recent debates in this journal surrounding <i>raciolinguistics</i> and potential pitfalls of siloing of race and reproducing essentialism in the scholarship of language and race. Using Stuart Hall's theory of <i>articulation</i>, it provides an anti-essentialist linguistic ethnographic analysis of identity construction in a UK educational setting that centres the racialised social formation by locating these constructions in specific histories and material conditions. Through a focus on colonial logics and treatment of race and class as co-constitutive axes of social differentiation, the analysis takes a raciolinguistic perspective and illustrates the utility of Hall's <i>articulation</i> for managing the tensions between anti-essentialism and accounting for structural injustice and oppression.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"30 2","pages":"123-134"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.70007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147708387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Descolonizando Decolonizing Linguistics, or the Perils of Refusing Pero no Mucho","authors":"Rodrigo Borba","doi":"10.1111/josl.70019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.70019","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This critical review of <i>Decolonizing Linguistics</i> situates the volume within South American debates on descolonização/descolonización to examine the limits of contemporary decolonial discourse in Anglophone linguistics. Drawing on Cusicanqui's critique of decoloniality and Bispo's notion of contracolonialismo, I argue that the volume (and, more broadly, linguistics as a field) often performs what I call quasi-refusals: speech acts that promise radical transformation while remaining institutionally domesticated by colonial infrastructures of academic visibility, authorship and citation. To this end, the review traces the tensions between situated, community-centred practices of descolonização/descolonización and the institutional logics that tame radical refusal. Grounded on this critique, I contend that transforming linguistics requires opposing these contradictions upfront and thickening forms of collaborative, plurilingual, community-grounded knowledge-making that can move beyond nonperformative decolonial rhetoric.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"30 2","pages":"198-206"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.70019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147708014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}