{"title":"The discursive construction of language ownership and responsibility for Indigenous language revitalisation","authors":"Chien Ju Ting","doi":"10.1111/josl.12630","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12630","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Unpacking the possible ramification of how ownership of language and the responsibility of language revitalisation is perceived and how this may impact language revitalisation, this study uses a critical discourse studies approach to examine how the speakers negotiate their language ownership, which eventually leads to the question ‘who is responsible for language revitalisation’. The data of this study comes from semi-structured interviews with 11 Indigenous participants in Taiwan. The findings suggest that, when deciding who can ‘do’ language revitalisation, only those who are deemed legitimate by the speakers have the power to act. However, the speakers view the non-Indigenous speakers as potential speakers and, thus, were also assigned language revitalisation responsibility. Thus, by encouraging non-Indigenous speakers to become speakers of an Indigenous language via language acquisition, language ownership is shared. This study shows the complexity of how the speakers negotiate language ownership and how this has an impact on language revitalisation efforts.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 1","pages":"46-64"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12630","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45638271","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":"Syllable-final /s/ as an index of language, gender, and ethnicity in a contact variety of Mexican Spanish","authors":"Craig Welker","doi":"10.1111/josl.12629","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12629","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study of syllable-final /s/ reduction in a 55-speaker corpus of Spanish in Juchitán, México, a contact variety, uses both language contact and social processes to explain its results. Contact with the indigenous Isthmus Zapotec language leads to decreased rates of syllable-final /s/ retention, creating a locally salient <i>n</i>+1-order index between “Zapotecness” and /s/ reduction that influences the indexical field for syllable-final /s/ reduction. Zapotec identity is associated with tradition and femininity. Therefore, in this new indexical field, syllable-final /s/ reduction comes to directly index Zapotec language dominance and indirectly index both femininity and tradition. This leads feminine and elderly speakers to reduce /s/ more frequently than “less feminine” and young speakers, even though the opposite pattern is usually found in other varieties. The results show, therefore, that language contact can influence the indexical field typically linked to socially meaningful variation and thereby cause unexpected patterns of variation to emerge.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 1","pages":"26-45"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12629","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41369604","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":"Lengua y utopía: El movimiento esperantista en España, 1890–1936. Roberto Garvía. Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada. 2022. 301 pp. 24 B/W illustrations. Paperback (9788433869364) 24 EUR, Ebook (9788433869371) 9.60 EUR","authors":"Mariana di Stefano","doi":"10.1111/josl.12627","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12627","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 1","pages":"93-96"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45509480","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":"“They always want to argue with you”: Navigating raciolinguistic ideologies at airport security","authors":"Pippa Sterk","doi":"10.1111/josl.12621","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12621","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Dutch public discourse promotes a self-image of the Netherlands as ‘innocently’ post-racial, a place where distinctions are drawn based on cultural differences rather than bodily characteristics. However, this innocence is called into question when groups or individuals, who culturally, legally and linguistically ‘fit’ within the Netherlands, are still racialised to the point of not being recognised as properly Dutch.</p><p>This paper uses a feminist approach to autoethnography and critical discourse analysis to explore the author's racialised/racialising experiences of Dutch airport security, and how these experiences are both informed by and themselves re-inform wider enactments of normative raciolinguistic ideologies. Drawing on theorisations of the links among language, embodiment and (self-)surveillance by Sara Ahmed and Samy Alim, this paper argues that although markers of citizenship and linguistic ability can be fluidly employed and engaged with, raciolinguistic categorisation is still heavily influenced by bodily appearance.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"27 4","pages":"364-383"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12621","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47250797","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":"The vowel space as sociolinguistic sign","authors":"Teresa Pratt","doi":"10.1111/josl.12617","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12617","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines variation in vowel space area and its use in social meaning making. Among adolescents at a California high school, patterns of difference in vowel space correlate to social practices of exclusion in the partying scene, albeit alongside explicit discourses of high school social life as inclusive and fluid. I treat vowel space as a sociolinguistic sign, that is, a holistic semiotic resource at play in addition to (or in tandem with) individual segments. Though the semiotic potential of a given linguistic sign is no doubt shaped by large-scale patterns of variation, the particular manifestations of meaning making are best viewed at the community level alongside other day-to-day practices. Further, I suggest that linguistic practices of difference and discourses of sameness are not contradictory, but instead a feature of the semiotic landscape. I thus interpret this vowel space variation as stylistically meaningful within the context of social actors’ ideological orientation to social life.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"27 5","pages":"526-545"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42246868","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":"“OK guys, thank you for coming today”: Indexicality, utterance events, and verbal rituals in political speeches in Sheikh Jarrah","authors":"Chaim Noy","doi":"10.1111/josl.12619","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12619","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This ethnography looks at the indexical function of several brief utterances, routinely employed by a Palestinian speechmaker, in the Sheikh Jarrah protest in East Jerusalem. Following Silverstein's contributions to the indexically based theory of (meta)pragmatics, “creative” and nonreferential utterances are examined at the utterance event level, in relation to the speech event level, and more generally to verbal rituals. The political speeches I study have been delivered weekly, in Hebrew, by a Sheikh Jarrah resident and activist, for over a decade. The ethnographic analysis depicts how the utterances create a physical and symbolic (rhetorical) space for the performance of the speeches, routinize and ritualize their recurrence, and secure their endurance in a hostile environment. This is accomplished by spatially disassembling and reassembling the protesters, modifying the participation structure, and establishing a host–guest relationship. The speaker is repositioned as a resident, activist, and political rhetor-in-the-becoming, and the protestors are repositioned as his audience.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"27 4","pages":"345-363"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12619","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47009804","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":"A materialist take on minoritization, emancipation, and language revitalization: Occitan sociolinguistics since the 1970s","authors":"James Costa","doi":"10.1111/josl.12618","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12618","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper introduces and discusses Occitan sociolinguistics as it evolved from the 1970s onward as a theory of language contact as conflict. It was developed in conjunction with its Catalan counterpart and as a reaction to Joshua Fishman's allocational model of diglossia, and came as a response to conditions of swift social and linguistic change in Southern France after the Second World War. This model, proposed mainly at first by Robèrt Lafont in Montpelhièr, is strongly materialist in that it focuses on the material conditions of language production and replaces the language movement among other social struggles. This paper first explores the roots of the contemporary Occitan movement and its links with the birth of Occitan sociolinguistics. It then analyzes key concepts in Occitan sociolinguistics such as diglossic ideology as essential to understand processes of minoritization, linguistic alienation, and social domination. Finally, it looks at how this approach conceptualizes language revitalization not as a linguistic issue but as a social one and suggests that Occitan sociolinguistics provides an alternative to models of language loss and revival rooted in cultural and identity politics.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"27 4","pages":"327-344"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12618","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42771724","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}
Romeo De Timmerman, Ludovic De Cuypere, Stef Slembrouck
{"title":"The globalization of local indexicalities through music: African-American English and the blues","authors":"Romeo De Timmerman, Ludovic De Cuypere, Stef Slembrouck","doi":"10.1111/josl.12616","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12616","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article reports on a sociolinguistic study into the prevalence of African-American English (AAE) features in the lyrical language use of blues artists, relying on data from different social and national backgrounds and time periods. It adopts a variationist linguistic methodological approach to examine the prevalence of five AAE forms in live-performed blues music: /aɪ/ monophthongization, post-consonantal word-final /t/ deletion, post-consonantal word-final /d/ deletion, alveolar nasal /n/ in < ing > ultimas, and post-vocalic word-final /r/ deletion. Mixed effects logistic regression analysis applied to a corpus of 80 performances finds no statistically significant association between national/ethnic background and variant use, and indicates that blues artists, from different eras and nationalities, are highly probable to realize the AAE variant of the analyzed variables, regardless of their sociocultural background. By building on early scholarly work on language and music, existing studies considering the use of AAE by non-members of the African-American community, and current theorizing on authenticity, style, and indexicality, this study hence provides tentative support for the existence of a standard blues singing style, which involves performers using AAE forms as a stylistic-linguistic strategy to index artistic authenticity.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 1","pages":"3-25"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45538154","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}