Journal of Sociolinguistics最新文献

{"title":"Discourses of solidarity and resistance in alternative linguistic spaces: Galician improvised poetry as linguistic collective action","authors":"Bernadette O'Rourke,&nbsp;Alejandro Dayán-Fernández","doi":"10.1111/josl.12675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12675","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article focuses on alternative ways of understanding language in the context of minority language advocacy through an examination of the Galician tradition of singing-in-verse, known as <i>regueifa</i>. It proposes the notion of “linguistic collective action” to refer to the battery of resistance and solidarity strategies that lead to social transformation, implemented in grassroots movements linked to language struggles that not only go beyond the binary tropes of “pride” and “profit”, but also transcend traditional ideas of how language revitalization should be carried out. To tap into the dynamics of this social movement, we draw on a multi-sited ethnography of the interconnected spaces in which urban-based Galician speakers engage in collective action through the practice of <i>regueifa</i>. We examine how progressive values (e.g.: LGBTQ+ advocacy, feminism, and anti-neoliberalism) are intertwined with the use of minoritized language reclamation, acting as a trigger for social transformation.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 5","pages":"79-98"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12675","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142692119","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":"Voicing expertise: Exploring strategic use of vowel variants in the English pronunciation of Chinese language instructors","authors":"Yunbo Mei","doi":"10.1111/josl.12674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12674","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Accent often carries social implications and can serve as an identity marker, reflecting how speakers perceive themselves and how they wish to be perceived by others. This study employs a variationist approach to examine the agency of Chinese English language teachers in negotiating their professional identities through accent. Instead of a loose association between identity and accent, detailed sociophonetic analyses reveal that these teachers construct desired self-representations through the strategic use of linguistic resources. Findings indicated that participants’ perceptions of the relationship between teacher qualifications and native-like/first-language-influenced English accent can predict their pronunciation patterns. Relating to how they perceive nativeness and professional identity, participants’ use of robust DRESS–TRAP nuclei and larger tongue movements in MOUTH and PRICE can be interpreted as strategies to distance themselves from a “non-native” identity, which is often stigmatized within the language teaching community. The utilization of stylistic resources allows participants to construct a professional teacher persona and signify expertise in language teaching.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 5","pages":"52-78"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142692145","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":"Accommodation, translanguaging, and (in)discreteness in the repertoire: A scalar-chronotopic approach","authors":"Wafa Al-Alawi","doi":"10.1111/josl.12670","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12670","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A shift from understanding languages as discrete towards understanding them as undifferentiated features in the repertoire has caused disagreements over the reality of linguistic boundaries. In this paper, I show how a middle-ground approach is achievable by applying the complex workings of a scalar-chronotopic lens to the discourse of bilingual/multidialectal Bahrainis. I argue that both perspectives on (in)discreteness become relevant in accounting for bi/multilingual subjectivities: at times, Arabic is idealized as a large-scale code against English, whereas at other times, the intrusiveness of English is backgrounded to show affiliation for one Arabic variety over another. I show accommodation in communication as a spatiotemporally layered process, where the internalized contextual factors within the repertoire may overlap with or take precedence over the immediate context. As such, this paper adds to the question of linguistic discreteness, with implications for our understanding of the repertoire and its utility in bi/multilingual practices and accommodation theory.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 4","pages":"24-39"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12670","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142219613","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":"African American English, racialized femininities, and Asian American identity in Ali Wong's Baby Cobra","authors":"Kendra Calhoun,&nbsp;Joyhanna Yoo","doi":"10.1111/josl.12673","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12673","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We analyze Asian American comedian Ali Wong's linguistic and embodied performance in her 2016 stand-up special, <i>Baby Cobra</i>, through a genre-specific lens to investigate how stand-up comedy's performance conventions shape her comedic persona. We argue that Wong uses communicative forms indexically associated with Blackness to perform racialized and gendered figures of personhood, including the white “Karen,” “sassy Black woman,” and “Asian grandmother.” This performance allows Wong to challenge hegemonic whiteness and dominant racializations of Asian women but relies on signs potentially interpreted as reproducing anti-Black ideologies. We situate Wong as an individual performer, “Asian American” as an ethnoracial category vis-à-vis Blackness, and the linguistic practices of Asian and Black American communities within racial capitalist histories that have shaped contemporary raciolinguistic ideologies. Rather than approach language varieties and racialized groups as necessarily distinct, we treat them as relational—as necessarily intimately and historically connected.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 4","pages":"64-84"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12673","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142219614","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":"Analyzing linguistic variation using discursive worlds","authors":"Heather Burnett,&nbsp;Julie Abbou,&nbsp;Gabriel Thiberge","doi":"10.1111/josl.12672","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12672","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Researchers in variationist sociolinguistics have long sought to develop social measures that are more sophisticated than demographic categories such as age, gender, and social class, while still being useful for quantitative analysis. This paper presents one such new measure: discursive worlds. For each speaker in a corpus, their discursive world is operationalized through compiling a list of specific referents cited in their interview. These lists are then used to construct similarity spaces locating the speakers along dimensions that are discursively relevant in the corpus. Using common clustering algorithms, the corpus speakers are then partitioned into categories, and this partition can be used in statistical analysis. We show how this method can be used to analyze a series of lexical variables in the <i>Cartographie linguistique des féminismes</i> corpus, a corpus of francophone interviews with feminist and queer activists, for which, we argue, quantitative analysis using classic demographic categories is inappropriate.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 4","pages":"40-63"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12672","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141549472","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":"We /r/ Tongan, not American: Variation and the social meaning of rhoticity in Tongan English","authors":"Danielle Tod","doi":"10.1111/josl.12664","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12664","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The current paper argues that speakers of Tongan English, an emergent variety spoken in the Kingdom of Tonga, may use rhoticity to construct a cosmopolitan and globally oriented local social identity. A variationist analysis of non-prevocalic /r/ in a corpus of 56 speakers reveals a change in progress towards rhoticity led by young females, whereas an affiliation with Liahona High School, a Mormon secondary school, predicts advanced adoption of the feature. I argue that rhoticity carries a positive ideological load for younger speakers as an index of globalness, modernity and Western cultural values, whereas for Liahona-affiliated speakers, an additional indexicality of rhoticity is Mormonism. Linguistic constraints on variation mirror patterns found in previous studies on L1/L2 varieties and are thus more universal, whereas social constraints on variation are best examined through a local lens.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 4","pages":"3-23"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12664","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141189102","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":"Decolonising trans-affirming language in Aotearoa","authors":"Julia de Bres","doi":"10.1111/josl.12657","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12657","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;I thank Lal Zimman for his thought-provoking piece on trans language activism (TLA) and sociolinguistic justice. Heeding his call for intersectional coalitions, I focus my comments on colonisation and decolonisation in trans-affirming language in Aotearoa (New Zealand).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Aotearoa is a settler colonial society, where Māori, the Indigenous people, have continuously resisted non-Māori dominance. Pākehā (non-Māori of European origin) are the largest population group at 70%, compared to Māori at 17% (2018 Census). Pākehā have imposed their social and cultural norms, resulting in the devastating loss of Māori language and culture. Although language revitalisation is occurring, most Māori mainly speak English. Issues relating to gender and language mirror those in other colonised countries, with Western gender discourses supplanting Indigenous ones (Clark, &lt;span&gt;2016&lt;/span&gt;). Each cultural context remains specific, and I will focus on what I see as the most pressing issues in Aotearoa. I am Pākehā, cisgender and queer. I offer my perspective as a sociolinguist and activist working in trans-affirming spaces, but my views do not hold the same weight as those of Indigenous trans people.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I will address three issues: problems associated with the use of Western-origin terms to refer to groups with experiences of colonisation, the challenge of de-centring whiteness in trans-affirming spaces and the rise of Indigenous efforts to decolonise language and gender.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The use of Māori gender terms in English contrasts with the low linguistic prominence of gender in the Māori language, which has no grammatical gender and uses the non-gendered pronoun ia for he/she/they. When Māori gender terms are used in English, binary or non-binary pronouns appear around them and speakers operate in a colonised linguistic context. This reflects the colonisation of Māori gender norms more generally. Christian ideas were imposed on Māori, including restrictive Victorian norms of gender and sexuality. These were internalised, so that, despite a tradition of openness to gender and sexual fluidity (Kerekere, &lt;span&gt;2017&lt;/span&gt;), homophobia and transphobia exist among Māori today. As Zimman observes, ‘it is important to remember that transphobia is a cultural force, not something that (only) belongs to or lives within individuals’. When non-Māori criticise Māori for being transphobic, they are really criticising the effects of colonisation on Māori. Addressing transphobia requires addressing its structural causes, including the gendered history of colonisation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Similar issues arise among Pacific people, who constitute 8% of the population and have experienced colonisation in the Islands and racism in Aotearoa. Pacific societies also have histories of gender and sexual fluidity that were suppressed through colonisation and a range of traditional terms referring to gender and sexuality. Pacific advocate Phylesha Brown-Acton developed a Pacific version of the LGBTQ+ a","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 3","pages":"30-34"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12657","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141146865","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":"Theorizing trans language activism for euphoric transmutation and our collective liberation*","authors":"Tulio Bermudez Mejía,&nbsp;Anyel Marquinez Montaño","doi":"10.1111/josl.12662","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12662","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;In his piece, Lal Zimman tells us that while discourse is changing about trans communities, they are still killing us, so trans language activism (TLA) needs to focus on sociolinguistic justice. Sociolinguistic justice is defined as self-determination about our language and redistribution of resources (Bucholtz et al., &lt;span&gt;2014&lt;/span&gt;). Zimman argues that sociolinguistic justice for trans people should be more aligned with coalitional social justice for all marginalized people who suffer from interlocking systems of oppression. How does TLA play a role in the liberation for all people? Historically, TLA challenges oppressive power dynamics that are misogynistic (Cameron, &lt;span&gt;1998&lt;/span&gt;; Lakoff, &lt;span&gt;1973&lt;/span&gt;), heteronormative (Livia, &lt;span&gt;2000&lt;/span&gt;; Queen, &lt;span&gt;1997&lt;/span&gt;), and transphobic (Zimman, &lt;span&gt;2017&lt;/span&gt;). As Zimman suggests in this issue, we want TLA to not only challenge misogyny, heteronormativity, and transphobia. We are looking for liberation from all systems of oppression, including ableism, capitalism, colonialism, fatphobia, HIV status, (English language) imperialism, incarceration, Islamophobia, poverty, racism, sexism, Survivorship, transphobia, and xenophobia. In this paper, we argue that euphoric transmutation is a strategy for liberating us through language. Euphoric transmutation refers to practices of language play where the play/juxtaposition/inversion/innovation/resignification of lexicon functions to call attention to hegemonic power and destroy it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;TLA is dependent on a community supportive of change and willing to hold people accountable for their use of politically correct forms (Ehrlich &amp; King, &lt;span&gt;1992&lt;/span&gt;). Because of this, it is necessary to work collectively within and across safe(r) communities of practice (Eckert &amp; McConnell-Ginet &lt;span&gt;1992&lt;/span&gt;) in dialogic intersubjectivity (Bucholtz &amp; Hall, &lt;span&gt;2005&lt;/span&gt;) to identify how language relates to our political conditions and to set up shared language that challenges this. We do this through political education. Political education involves connecting forms of oppression across geographies, identities, and identifications. For example, we connect how oppressors use stereotypes and controlling images (Collins, &lt;span&gt;1986&lt;/span&gt;) like “swarms of animals,” both to xenophobically dehumanize people crossing the border between Mexico and United States and also to Islamophobically dehumanize Palestinians who are waiting for food aid from trucks and planes in the midst of Israel's genocide. TLA requires communities of practice to engage in discussion of these topics to collectively process systems of oppression and our reactions to them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Collective discussion requires shared community spaces in which people can produce language play. But in order to produce more language play in our everyday lives, we need safe(r) spaces.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Spaces to hold conversations to understand each other and how we (people in powerless posi","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 3","pages":"25-29"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12662","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141146896","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":"Beyond “correctness”","authors":"Shu Min Yuen","doi":"10.1111/josl.12656","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12656","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;While browsing my Facebook feed on an early summer day in May 2017, a post with the trigger warning “inconsistent use of pronouns” grabbed my attention. The post, shared within a private Facebook group for (foreign) LGBTQIA+ individuals and allies living in Japan, featured an article recently published in &lt;i&gt;The New York Times&lt;/i&gt;. Titled “Japanese Transgender Politician is Showing ‘I Exist Here’,” the article focuses on Hosoda Tomoya, a Japanese trans man who recently won a seat in the local city council in a suburb just outside of Tokyo (Rich, &lt;span&gt;2017&lt;/span&gt;). Hosoda made history as the first trans man in the world to be voted to public office, and the near-full-page article delved into Hosoda's life history, his journey into politics, and the challenges that he faced as a trans person living in Japan. What the author and the subsequent commenters of the Facebook post found “baffling” about the article was the use of the pronoun “she” when referring to Hosoda's childhood years as a girl named Mika, whereas throughout the remainder of the article, “he” was used to refer to Hosoda. This inconsistency was deemed by some as “poor etiquette,” particularly from a reputable outlet like &lt;i&gt;The New York Times&lt;/i&gt;. What the readers were not aware of, however, was that Hosoda himself had approved the use of the pronoun “she” in that specific section of the report. The reason he provided was that it is an undeniable fact that he had “publicly lived as a woman before &lt;i&gt;chiryo&lt;/i&gt;” (transition, literally medical treatment) and therefore did not see anything wrong with using the feminine third-person pronoun (private communication). If Hosoda himself did not find the pronouns “inconsistent” or offensive, should the general readers take issue with them?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the middle of 2020, I received an email from a graduate student based in the United States who had recently read one of my articles. The student took issue with my use of the term “FTM,” pointing out that by using it to refer to my research informants, I am perpetuating the “linguistic violence” associated with the term. In that article, I drew on my fieldwork in what I term the Japanese FTM community in Tokyo to show how seemingly mundane social events, such as drinking parties that are organized by and for trans men, can function as a site for my informants to negotiate inclusion and belonging as trans without undermining their male public selves. Within this community, “FTM” (the English acronym for female-to-male transgender) is the preferred term of self-reference, both in written form and in speech (transliterated as &lt;i&gt;efu-tii-emu&lt;/i&gt; in Japanese). Although I was aware of the debates surrounding this term in English-speaking contexts, where it is considered outdated and criticized for emphasizing a notion of change that contradicts the experiences of many trans individuals who have always identified as such, I chose to use it to refer to my informants because they have consistently used i","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 3","pages":"35-39"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12656","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141166246","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":"Tongues of abstraction – Intentionality in trans language activism","authors":"Katlego K Kolanyane-Kesupile","doi":"10.1111/josl.12663","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12663","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 3","pages":"15-19"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141146922","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}