Enregisterment

The current era of emerging forms of populisms in the world is bringing novel vocabularies, sentiments, and modes of political action into political systems. In the United States, the populism of Donald Trump is unprecedented in many senses. It would be unimaginable that the preceding leaders in the U.S. executive backed a wall to separate the country from Mexico, that they called people fleeing violence in Central America "invaders", or that they openly supported physical violence against enemies as Trump does in his speeches.

The aim of this paper is to explore how markers of an enregistered sociolect perceived as feminine may be recruited to portray stereotypical female teenage characters on television. The analysis focuses on ‘Valley Girl talk,’ also known as Valspeak, popularized in the 1980s in California by Frank Zappa’s eponymous hit song, which parodied the sociolect. The corpus is composed of a sketch entitled ‘Ew!’, featured in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, in which the host dresses up as a teenage girl, Sara, chatting with her friend Addison (John Cena). Two main points are made. First, it is suggested that Fallon uses Valspeak markers, as well as linguistic features which may be perceived as feminine, in order to portray ‘girl talk’ on screen. Such features include lexical items, higher fundamental frequency, a prosodic contour (High Rising Terminal), a voice quality (creaky voice), and a shift in vowel quality. Second, the main goal of the sketch is to make the audience laugh, and its parodic power partly relies on the fact that semantic bleaching is used to orchestrate a loss of meaning in the discourse of the two characters. It is suggested that this stereotypical depiction of female characters’ use of language may be a case of ‘linguistic misogyny,’ i.e. stigmatizing an individual’s linguistic practices because they are (possibly wrongly) perceived as feminine.

The article focuses on methodological and methodic considerations concerning the research on every day literacies of adolescents from a sociolinguistic perspective. Relating to the linguistic-anthropological concept of enregisterment the article advocates for the integration of ethnographic methods to the research designs of sociolinguistic writing studies. In the light of the enormous differentiation of writing events due to the mediatiziation of communication, the term of sociolinguistic registers of writing becomes important. The article suggests a three-level-model of analysis and gives a concluding case example of its application by discussing the pragmatic functions of the period within informal, interpersonal registers of digital writing.

This article engages with Archer's call to further research on reflexivity and social change under conditions of late modernity (2007, 2010, 2012) from the perspective of existing work on reflexive discourse in the language disciplines (Silverstein 1976, Lucy 1993). Drawing from a linguistic ethnography of the networked trajectories of a group of working-class South Asian youth in Hong Kong (Pérez-Milans & Soto 2014), we analyze the trajectory of Sita, a Hong Kong-born young female with Nepali background. In her trajectory, performative acts of ethnic minority-based activism emerge as key in the enactment of a given set of values, stances, types of persona and situated forms of alignment/disalignment. That is to say, Sita's enactment of activism is seen in this article as tied to a discourse register (Agha 2007: 147). As such, 'talking/doing activism' is inter-textually linked to a speech chain network of a group of secondary school students, teachers, researchers and community-based minority activists engaged with Sita in various interrelated projects for social empowerment. Analysis of interview transcripts, online chats and multimodal artifacts shows the extent to which the coordinated formation of this discourse register proved useful in providing Sita with relevant cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986) with which she shaped her own academic trajectory, from a low-prestige government-subsidized secondary school to an elite international college.

This article deals with the symbolic and material formation of an authenticated register of Övdalsk – a Scandinavian local language – unfolding in a situated engagement with grammatical artefacts. Seeking to refine the often underspecified category of the indexically ‘pre-shift,’ ‘traditional,’ ‘old’ or, in some other way, temporally authenticated register, it intercalates an analysis of linguistic exchanges with histories of production of authoritative discourse. Through a stepwise analysis of the production of metapragmatic discourse, it explores the indexically presupposing and entailing relationship between artefactual objectivation and novel registers of language. Thus examining the enregistering interpretation of genred regimentations of language-as-form, it argues that such focus is apt for creating a reflexive and less essentializing understanding of linguistic authenticity.

Keywords: authenticity; indexicality; enregisterment; metapragmatics; descriptivism; engagement

“Vulgarity” is a term that may refer to what is offensive, coarse or unrefined, and therefore necessarily appeals to subjective criteria; vulgarity is in this sense intrinsically ideological. This article explores how vulgarity may be expressed linguistically. Analysis centers on the use of syntactic and lexical markers, as well as two prosodic markers: creaky voice and the High Rising Terminal contour (HRT). The corpus is composed of scenes from an episode of NBC’s television series Parks and Recreation (season 6, episode 4). The linguistic markers are used humorously in order to create a frivolous, oblivious female character thanks to a strategy of feigned accommodation. It is suggested that this occurs because several markers are both likely to be stigmatized, and because they may be perceived as intrinsically female.

Guided by sociolinguistic theories—including indexical order (Silverstein, 2003), folk linguistics (Niedzielski & Preston, 2000, 2009), and
enregisterment (Agha, 2003, 2007), this article reviews research on Taiwan Mandarin and explores the indigenization and enregisterment of Taiwan Mandarin since the KMT government introduced Mandarin Chinese, or Guoyu, into Taiwan in the 1940s. Two main research questions that guide the literature review are: Is Taiwan Mandarin linguistically unique from other Mandarin varieties? If so,
how aware are speakers of Taiwan Mandarin (and speakers of other Mandarin varieties) of Taiwan Mandarin’s linguistic uniqueness? In other words, is Taiwan Mandarin perceived as a socially recognizable variety? A review of the past thirty years of research on Taiwan Mandarin indicates that Taiwan Mandarin is indeed indigenized in a variety of linguistic dimensions and has enregistered into a socially identifiable variety that marks a Taiwanese identity.

本文以社會語言學理論中的指標層次（indexical order；Silverstein, 2003）、大眾語言學（folk linguistics；Niedzielski & Preston, 2000, 2009），及語言標記化（enregisterment；Agha, 2003, 2007）等理論概念為論證基礎，以台灣華語的相關文獻為佐，探討自1945 年國民黨接收台灣以來，通稱為「國語」的台灣華語是否已經在地化，在語言層面上形
成獨樹一幟的華語語言變體。除此之外，本文更進一步論證語言上的獨特性，是否代表在語言態度的層面上，台灣（及其他華語區）民眾亦認為台灣華語有其獨特性？而在這個語言標記化的過程裡，民眾對於各種語言特徵的意識程度究竟到了哪個階段？結果顯示，台灣華語不只在語言各面向已在地化，在社會感知及語言態度的層面也已被標記為獨立的語言變體，並已達到Johnstone 等人（2006）所言的第三層指標性（3rd order
indexicality）的階段。

This research investigates the explanatory power of Arabic dialects in describing why the `Arab Spring' is a transnational regional phenomenon rather than an isolated local event specific to Tunisia or Egypt? Is the Arabic language (standard), or its colloquial variants (dialects), part of the explanation, and to what extent? In a December 31, 2011 YouTube posting, Al-Arabiya spotlights language as a critical component of the Arab Spring uprisings. In countries where certain kinds of speech and particularly anti-regime expression are monitored, regulated, and punishable by both legal and extra-legal means, an imperative like /irHal/ (MSA: `depart') is interpreted by regime security apparatuses as action. Elliot Colla explains that the "slogans the protestors are chanting are couplets--and they are as loud as they are sharp." This poetry is "not an ornament to the uprising," but rather it is a veritable "soundtrack and also composes a significant part of the action itself." In the Arab Spring uprisings, then, poets are warriors. Code choices about Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Colloquial Arabic (CA) in the context of the Arab Spring reflect Reem Bassiouney's concept of "involvement," a psycho-social objective related to the speaker's intended level of audience engagement. Its corollary, "ideation," is the "translation of this aim into different types of discourse." In the Arab Spring, involvement is a choice the chanter makes after determining a communicative aim and then decides upon a method of ideation, and finally arrives at a code choice based on her/his perception of the intended audience. This analysis argues that there is an illocutionary element at play in the "travel" of the revolutionary chants, and therewith its requisite sentiments and objectives, across Arab state borders. The chants are designed to increase public engagement and sustain the tenor of the uprisings in order to provoke the revolutionary movement, or action. The language of the Arab Spring is a critical form of action. The shouted slogans of the demonstrators take the form of couplets with predictable and simple rhyming patterns that set the tone and meter of the protests. These `couplet-slogans' carry the sentiments and objectives of the revolutionaries across national borders, down streets and alleys, but also transmit the entitlement, the right, the messages, and the impetus to revolt into the mouths and feet of the public at large, but also into lexicons, syntaxes and synapses of spectators who, in turn, are driven to activism. In participating in a protest one understands her/his words to be a form of revolutionary activism, or involvement. In most cases, the language of the Arab Spring slogans has been colloquial Arabic, which, this research argues, contributes to the transnationalism of the uprisings because dialects are perceived to be the authentic speech of ash-sha'b (the people) and therefore travel more easily across borders. With the words of the people echoing across borders, revolutionary action is inspired. This analysis suggests that the chanters in the uprisings believe the revolution to be popular (sha'bi) and, while they perceive their audiences to be Arabs of all nationalities, they choose to speak and be moved by colloquial rather than standard Arabic. While the regime speaks MSA, the protestors speak colloquial Arabic to engage locals and use MSA to interact with and spread the revolution regionally.

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ABSTRACT
Trudgill (1983) observed phonological adaptations of British singers to a generalized American dialect, which he argued responded to the industry's power dynamics. Since then, several studies have explored this issue (Beal 2009; Campos-Astorkiza 2016; Eberhardt & Freeman 2015; Duncan 2017). Very few investigations have looked at this phenomenon within the Spanish-speaking world (Coloma & Colantoni, 2012; Papadopoulos & Martínez Cane, 2021). The present study expands on this by examining a linguistic variable of flamenco singer Rosalía taking on enregisterment theory (Agha 2005), as well as authenticity in music genres (Duncan 2017). In Spanish, the phonemic realization of ⟨c⟩ before ⟨i⟩ and ⟨e⟩ and ⟨z⟩ and ⟨s⟩ before vowel can be of seseo, ceceo or differentiation. In Rosalía’s native variety, she would differentiate, “casa” (house) as /cása/ and “caza” (hunting) as /cáθa/. In other dialects, speakers merge to the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in both cases, known as seseo. Flamenco originated in some parts of Andalusia amongst working-class and Romani people, who did seseo (Fernández de Molina Cortés 2020). This paper argues that linguistic features of these groups became enregistered (Agha 2007) as part of the style of flamenco, which resulted in an expectation of certain linguistic resources, one of which is seseo (Ropero Núñez 2004). This preliminary investigation analyzes Rosalía’s realization of said graphemes by selecting pairs of words in her spoken and sung voice(s). A total of 4 interviews and 4 live performances were selected, which took place in different countries, to account for audience accommodation (Giles & Smith 1979). Acoustic analyses of a total of 39 words (27 spoken, 12 sung) were done using PRAAT to verify these realizations. The results show that Rosalía adapts almost categorically to seseo when singing (92%), while she always differentiates in spoken speech. This contextual variation relates to a generalized stylistic adaptation in music, which shows how linguistic features may be enregistered as part of genre performativity.

This chapter presents a sociolinguistic analysis of a current political project that aims to saffronise India. I study two recent discursive events, the staging of national unity and Hindu superpower by means of erecting colossal statues and the renaming of cities that bear a recognisable Muslim toponym, to show how saffronisation is part of a larger branding of India as a non-secular Hindu Nation. This branding circulates alternative narratives in public discourse that erase the historical achievements of postcolonial India’s secular architects, as well as the role that Muslims played in India’s history, and instead enregister recognisable Hindu elements as political symbols for a vision of a new Hindu India. This sociolinguistic saffronisation is dangerous insofar as it might incite and further normalise communal violence.

Keywords: Saffronisation, Hindutva, Erasure, Enregisterment, Statues, Toponomy

This study is a quantitative and qualitative investigation of the use of thou and you in four tragedies and four comedies written in eighteenth‑century Britain. the quantitative study deals with three factors: genre, characters' class and gender. Thou tends to appear very frequently in tragedies, which were often written in verse. While class has a notable influence, gender does not play an important role in the pronoun choice. the qualitative study of thou in comedies reveals that thou is used to mark heightened emotion. In tragedies, thou can be used as an unmarked pronoun to represent social distance. As in comedies, emotive use of thou is also seen in tragedies. One unexpected finding is that the percentage of thou in the eighteenth‑century tragedies in this study is higher than that in Shakespearean plays. these eighteenth‑century tragedians sometimes used thou where Shakespeare did not. My hypothesis is that eighteenth‑century dramatists tried to imitate an older style of second person pronoun usage when writing tragedies, but since thou was no longer a part of their everyday language, they failed to imitate it perfectly and enregistered thou as a part of theatrical language.

Audiences often ascribe monolithic linguistic authority to news media institutions, viewing journalists as the bearers of language standards. Yet media are in fact heteroglossic, with journalists across different media platforms negotiating competing practical demands and different understandings of the social purposes and possibilities of their work. This article examines a case of hyperideologized minority-language media to show how the interplay of deep-seated language ideologies, the local sociohistorical context of media, and the material, technological affordances of different platforms produces a cline of enregisterment. It focuses on media produced in Buryat, a Mongolic language of southeastern Siberia whose speakers are shifting to Russian. Comparing journalists’ linguistic practices and audiences’ interpretations across the coexisting media platforms of newspapers, radio, and television shows how media enregisterment and, in turn, the enregisterment of a standard literary ...

With the emergence of communities that are primarily based in computer-mediated communication (CMC) environments, we see the prevalence of internet-derived neologisms, i.e., netologisms. Often these netologisms are acronyms (e.g., ‘LOL’), blends (e.g., ‘weblog’), or other forms of abbreviation. These new forms may present challenges for English phonotactics, which must be spontaneously resolved by first-time speakers of the netologisms. If the forms contain orthographic characters or sequences that do not directly or consistently correlate to specific English phonemes or phoneme sequences, it is likely that these new forms display phonetic variation.

Netologisms can also be used as linguistic resources in taking stances or asserting aspects of identity, especially where phonetic variation is possible. These stances may represent the identity of the group, or they may become associated with particular identities within the group. The process by which sounds, features and word forms become associated with particular identities is known as enregisterment (Agha, 2003, 2005; Squires, 2010). Enregisterment has traditionally been studied in sociolinguistics as a function of individuals interacting in face-to-face (FtF) environments (Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson, 2006; Beal, 2009). However, as more of our daily interactions are mediated by computers and technology, attention must be paid to how enregisterment may take place in primarily text-based social environments.

This research presents the first large-scale mixed-methods study of enregisterment occurring in CMC. The varying pronunciations of two netologisms — the community’s nickname (‘MeFi’, from MetaFilter.com) and the collective nickname for its participants (‘MeFites’) — are naturally-occurring sociolinguistic variables that showcase the ongoing negotiation of community conventions and the development of group identity. An exploration of this kind adds an important piece to our broader understanding of linguistic interaction in CMC, while also exhibiting one of the many new directions of sociolinguistic research today.

A tentative paper presented at the SociolinguistEssex 2016 conference at the University of Essex. It collects my thoughts on a couple of points which didn't fit into my thesis, but arose during data collection and analysis. The main one being the question 'Are you Australian' which several of my participants (and also other people I have met in Suffolk) reported having been asked when meeting those from outside of East Anglia.

Audiences often ascribe monolithic linguistic authority to news media institutions, viewing journalists as the bearers of language standards. Yet media are in fact heteroglossic, with journalists across different media platforms negotiating competing practical demands and different understandings of the social purposes and possibilities of their work. This article examines a case of hyperideologized minority-language media to show how the interplay of deep-seated language ideologies, the local sociohistorical context of media, and the material, technological affordances of different platforms produces a cline of enregisterment. It focuses on media produced in Buryat, a Mongolic language of southeastern Siberia whose speakers are shifting to Russian. Comparing journalists’ linguistic practices and audiences’ interpretations across the coexisting media platforms of newspapers, radio, and television shows how media enregisterment and, in turn, the enregisterment of a standard literary language occur along a cline that is shaped by the intersections of ideology with technology.

The emergence, in the eighteenth century, of increasingly rigid prescriptions for spoken English, resulted in part from the process of “enregisterment” of a variety of the language (Agha 2003). The usage-based prescriptivism conveyed in pronouncing dictionaries, which were explicitly intended to represent the language of the upper classes, was both a vector for this process, and a consequence of it. Yet the authors of these works were overwhelmingly outsiders: the first section of this paper shows that throughout the century, the majority of orthoepists were religiously, culturally, politically and/or socially at the margins of the world whose speech they sought to describe and emulate; their “marginality” seems in fact to have been an asset (Elliott 2003).
However, orthoepist-lexicographers did not follow only the principle of “authoritarianism” (Pullum 2004:7). In many ways, orthoepists did reinforce a socially established norm, but they also evaluated possible pronunciations according to more arbitrary and subjective criteria, subscribing to an abstract ideal of language. In the second section of the paper, I inventory and classify the specific motivations and justifications (referring back to the categories proposed by Pullum, i.e., “nostalgia”, “aestheticism”, “functionalism”, etc.) presented in the metadiscourse of four dictionaries: James Buchanan’s Linguae Britannicae Vera Pronunciatio (1757), William Kenrick’s New Dictionary of the English Language, Thomas Sheridan's General Dictionary of the English Language (1780) and John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791). By contributing to the myth of an absolute, feeding into “ideologies of correctness” (Mugglestone 2010:329), the orthoepists ultimately helped create an artificial norm for English, determined by subjective criteria distinct from class and geographical origin.

The focus of this article is how linguistic reflexivity, the organization of linguistic features and the normative behavior following from these processes takes place across online and offline activities among a group of adolescents who daily interact with one another though several modes of communication. In the paper I argue that written discourse have taken up a much more important role in people’s everyday discursive practices because of the widespread availability and impact of social media. As a consequence of this I make the claim that spoken and written discourse in combination should be considered when studying everyday language use and processes of enregisterment.

In this article I illustrate how young people from a linguistically and culturally diverse area of Copenhagen use linguistic features indexical of speech styles in their linguistic practices on Facebook. I study how the use of such linguistic resources points towards different stereotypes and what sense of rights and sanctions are involved in the reactions to the use of these different types of marked language use. I study this to discuss how spoken language practices and practices associated with writing co-contribute to similar processes of enregisterment.

Keywords: Reflexivity, enregisterment, normativity, social media, youth, multi-sited ethnography

In casual conversations, interlocutors often merely hint at intertextual references. The elusive design of such references ranges from extremely truncated or modified quotes, or mentions of names, to the rendition of generic patterns and enregistered (Agha, 2007) varieties associated with social or ethnic stereotypes. The paper refers to such non-explicitly marked references as allusions and discusses the methodological challenges posed by their detection and analysis. Qualitative analyses of four conversational episodes illustrate how Russian speakers and interlocutors draw on such allusions and playfully exploit the meaning potential of the (con-)text referenced. The talk that thereby emerges points, in various ways, to the recognition and possible understanding of an allusion. Allusive talk is thus both based on, and points to, a common ground shared by the interlocutors and providing a rich inferential substrate of interaction (Haugh, 2017) that usually remains unexposed.

This paper explores the perceptual power of accent and dialect through an interdisciplinary prism, which renders the utterance of accent performative and the ideological load of accent memetic. The theoretical framework established synergises Neuropsychology, Semiotics, Memetics, Performativity, and Sociolinguistics and is extrapolated to the field of Translation Studies. In light of the performativity of accent and the existence of dialectal memes (often shared ideas around linguistic identities) in lingua-cultural communities, it is posited that speaking in any given accent triggers a chain reaction culminating in perception, whereby preconceived ideas or 'memory' associated with the speech variety is activated in the listener, from which point an image of identity is formed in his or her psyche. The use of accentual variation, therefore, to create audiovisual identities in original versions is illustrated and, in turn, the flattening out of cultural dimensions in dubbed versions is attributed to the levelling of accentual variation into a standard. Spatiotemporal and other practical constraints, as well as ideological questions, imposed on dubbing practices are considered with a view to translating linguistic variation. Audiovisual translation practices are considered in the context of English-language productions dubbed into Castilian Spanish.

This essay studies papo reto (straight talk) activist register as an enregistered social formation that indexes practices, relations, and personae belonging in Brazil's favelas (low-income neighborhoods). Drawing from fieldwork in the Complexo do Alemão favelas in Rio de Janeiro, I discuss three case studies that showcase prototypical pragmatic features of papo reto (suspension of face concerns; directness; and indexically valued tropism). In juxtaposing findings from the sociology of violence in Brazil with my informants' ethnopragmatics, I conclude that papo reto activist register is a crucial language game for surviving the "crossfire," that is, the violent dispute between the normative regimes of the state and the "world of crime" in favelas. Further, in its rewording of the "convoluted" language of bureaucracy and other upscale registers to a "direct" and more participatory speech level, papo reto activist register is a fundamental weapon for the political participation of Blacks and other minorities in one of the world's most unequal countries.

Building on Silverstein’s (2003, 2016) oinoglossia (wine talk), this paper argues for a closely related genre: brutoglossia, (craft) beer talk. Drawing on a corpus of craft beer and brewery descriptions from Toronto, Canada, I argue that the appropriation of wine terminology and tasting practices (re)configures beer brewers and drinkers as ‘elite’ and ‘classy.’ The ‘specialist’ lexical and morphosyntactic components of wine discourse provide the higher order of indexicality through which the emergent technical beer terminology is to be interpreted. Together, the descriptions can be read as fields of indexicalities, mapping linguistic and semiotic variables associated with a particular social object: beer.

Sociolinguistic study of social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) has firmly established these interactive spaces as a rich source of data for both study of form (the emergence of new ‘digital’ vernaculars, cf. Crystal, 2011) and function (users as showcasing various methods of identity construction and stance taking (Dovchin, 2015). This presentation aims to further develop our current understanding of the forms and functions of social media discourse by investigating the enregisterment of specific semiotic repertoires with two online icons of personhood prevalent on social media: the ‘Basic Bitch’ and the ‘Instagram Hipster’.
While interaction on these platforms must be approached in consideration of the particularized forms in use and the particularized functions they serve, the social media context is comparable to observed patterns in ‘offline’ social relations: I argue that in social media, the multimodal resources employed by users (text, linked text such as hashtags, photos, memes, gifs, videos, etc.) can be seen to make up particularized semiotic registers that through enregisterment acquire pragmatic value in their ability to transform into “social facts” regarding resources employed and in turn index (both congruous and contesting) characteristics, roles or icons of personhood (Agha, 2007: 80; Agha, 2011).
To illustrate this I explore the enregisterment of particular semiotic registers with two icons of personhood: the ‘Basic Bitch’ and the ‘Instagram Hipster’ (figures of ‘selves’ composed of essentialized stereotypic features such as moral character, taste propensities, appearance, etc., cf. Wortham et al., 2011: 6; Agha, 2007). To do so I investigate the sociohistories of the particular semiotics of these registers (chiefly use of specific hashtags such as #basic, #liveauthentic and related variants; images; memes; videos; posts) as well as the extensive metapragmatic commentary (found within Buzzfeed ‘listicles’; wikihow pages, etc.) that surrounds these icons and the semiotic registers that link them. Thus, this presentation aims to further our understanding of how processes of enregisterment operate within the social media context and the significance of those processes to cultural models at large.
Such investigation of the sociohistories and metapragmatic commentary of ‘Basic Bitch’ and ‘Instagram Hipster’ semiotics reveals how these icons of personhood have come about as well as the ways in which they continue to develop: e.g. the ‘Basic Bitch’, initially a characterization of specific type of woman within black communities who enjoys material items and social practices viewed as trite, conventional or pretentious has “fractionated”, in Agha’s terms (81) to additionally index a white female counterpart with its own distinct associated semiotic register. Tracking processes of enregisterment on social media also reveals the unique dynamics of the hashtag as a semiotic resource: not only can a hashtag be seen to link or index traits in the abstract sociolinguistic theoretical sense (Peirce, 1940; Silverstein, 1976) but they also serve as literal indexes, on a click directing the user to a collection of photos and posts that share the same tag, allowing both analyst and user to view embodiments of chains of semiotic transmission.

This article explores what deaf signing diversity means for the creation of effective online signed language translations in Australia and for language theory more generally. We draw on the translanguaging and enregisterment literature to describe the communication practices and individual repertoires of deaf Auslan signers, and to problematise the creation of translations from English into Auslan. We also revisit findings from focus group research with deaf audiences and translation practitioners to identify key elements of existing translations that were problematic for many deaf viewers, and to illuminate what makes an act of translation from English into Auslan effective for signers who need these translations the most. One main challenge is the inherent hybridity of signed communication practices, resulting from variable language learning circumstances and other factors. Instead, signed communication practices are often shaped by what we refer to as the nascency principle: the perpetual redevelopment of new forms of expression for understanding the specific discourse and spatiotemporal context, by and for the signers who are physically present. This affects possibilities for enregisterment and therefore translations. We conclude with suggestions for improving translations and some broader implications for understanding and researching signed languages.

This article focuses on the emergence of “speculative architecture” as a distinctive strand within the professional field of urban studies, one that is future-oriented and claims to “create narratives about how new technologies and networks influence space, culture, and community [with the aim of] imagining where new forms of agency exist within the cities changed by these new processes” (Liam Young 2017). In so doing, speculative architecture is conceived of as a discursive space (Heller 2007) for social performance (Briggs and Bauman 1992; Hanks 1987) and capital accumulation (Bourdieu 1986) under conditions of late capitalism. I examine how a set of semiotic and discursive features that become emblematic of “doing speculative architecture” get “enregistered” (Agha 2007) or “stylised” (Cameron 2000) in ways that regulate access to socio-institutional networks and associated material/symbolic resources. This approach is intended to shed light on the semiotic production of new professional selves while at the same time identifying the embedded forms of inequality that these may enable.

'Uhh I'm not try to be racist or anything': Exploring an indexical field of Thai English This paper explores the notions of indexical order and indexical field of Thai English based on thirty interviews conducted with students at a public university in Thailand. The data in this paper is based on a series of interview questions that asked students about their opinions of Thai English including: whether they believe the variety exists, if they can offer an example, who speaks Thai English and does the respondent speak it? The results of these interview questions examine the indexical field of Thai English where in many cases students perceived Thai English to be spoken by certain types of people, specifically people who are not educated. Thai people who work as: tour guides, restaurant workers, street vendors and the prime minister. Despite the fact that many students who participated in this study had features of Thai English in their own repertoire many students presented Thai English as characterological. The findings shed light on how we classify global varieties of English as the present study illustrates how the features of Thai English are not uniform, nor is the community of speakers who make up this variety. Despite this, it is argued that a variety of Global English in the expanding circle may be enregistered despite lacking a status directly attributable to a community of speakers. 2 Keywords: Thai English, indexical field, indexical order, varieties of English, expanding circle varieties, post varieties of English, enregisterment

ABSTRACT: Against a Racial Real backdrop, I argue for consciously adopting a sociocultural approach to style in linguistically and racially diverse Basic Writing classrooms. To make this argument, I focus on a multilingual writer named Tejada, who reveals how she had internalized a racialized stereotypical discourse about herself as a minority—a discourse which operated in an unconscious manner despite it informing her written voice on the page.
Tejada’s revelation led to her decision to amplify, rather than hushing, her own voice. Her epiphany is presented through a case study approach, including a close analysis of Tejada’s process writing and recorded transcripts of peer to peer and student to teacher interaction. I end the article with some practical advice for how to promote sociocultural style feedback that develops a practice of micro-affirmation with students.

From countryside dialects to Vaasa Swedish. Indications of dialect levelling and enregisterment of a town variety in four steps.

The aim of the study is to discuss changing indexicality and enregisterment of a Swedish dialect in western Finland. Indexicality is studied for the variety as a whole, rather than for individual dia-lectal traits. Fifteen women and 15 men born 1936-1997 from the town Vaasa and the neighboring municipality Korsholm were interviewed. The theoretical and methodological framework for the study was taken from sociolinguistics and perceptual dialectology. The informants show a collision of different indexical orders: while older informants tend to link Vaasa Swedish (VS) to the working class, younger ones tend to associate the variety with the whole town. In the first case, VS seems to index modesty and certain poverty, while in the second case, it indexes toughness, courage , aggression and self-confidence. The question of whether a moderate use of VS simply may index authentic Vaasa Swede is discussed. This would explain why women and younger people use the dialect less, perhaps being unwilling to be associated with toughness and aggression, while still wanting to be associated with the town and to call their own variety VS. The variety seems to be enregistered for younger informants, whereas older informants pick out certain working-class neighborhoods as bearers of a distinct dialect. The enregisterment of VS can be described as a four-step gradual movement from countryside dialects to working-class speech, and then from working-class speech in a certain neighborhood to a town dialect.

Keywords: enregisterment, indexicality, dialect levelling, perceptual dialectology, interviews, Swedish, Vaasa.
Språk & stil NF 26, 2016

In this paper I focus on the sociolinguistic aspects of membership in a Food Not Bombs group in Athens, Georgia. I analyze the members' metapragmatic discourse in the instances of " language policing " to describe the language ideology I refer to as situated personalism, a register that was crucial in the performance of membership, and how the members were trying to create an inclusive frame of interaction free of discrimination. I discuss the paradoxical consequences of the members' reflexive language use, due to which a certain way of speaking effectively became a crucial prerequisite for group membership, contrary to the commitment to inclusion the members espoused.

In this article, I investigate the interactional use of the linguistic labels “araber” and “perker” among a group of
Copenhagen schoolchildren and discuss its indexical outcomes in relation to public discursive tendencies to equate
having an ethnic minority background with academic and social failure. Both labels are well-known to the Danish public
and predominantly they are associated with ethno-cultural heritage. Even though the interactional examples are few,
they indicate an interesting common understanding of the two labels and their indexicalities (Ochs 1992, Silverstein
2003) among the group of children in focus. Within this understanding, the indexical element pointing to ethno-cultural
relations does not seem to play a prominent role. Instead, the use invokes mainly associations to age, school
orientation and transgressive and ill-advised (social and linguistic) behavior. The data thus reveal an interesting link
between the children´s use and the diacritics of failure that are routinely foregrounded as emblematic of non-Danish
schoolchildren in public debates about schooling. In my discussion, I therefore suggest that the indexical outcomes
might be reflecting a wider societal tendency similar to what Madsen (2013) has argued in relation to ways of
speaking. What I suggest is that the tendency in Danish public discourse to treat non-Danish ethnicities as uniquely
tied to being socially and educationally inept means that labels that designate these identities are becoming emblems
of a (new) societal low. My study thereby illustrates how situated language use among urban schoolchildren invoke
aspects of social stratification and institutional inequality and supports the growing awareness that systematic
inequalities remain even though we may talk about them in different ways than we used to (Rampton 2006, 2010,
2011, Jaspers 2011, Madsen 2013, Collins 2015).

This thesis studies the use of THOU and YOU in eighteenth-century English plays by
conducting both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Although THOU had died out in
Standard English by the eighteenth century, it was still used in dramas, especially in
tragedies. This usage has been largely neglected by linguists, who prefer to studying more
‘authentic’ text. I propose the language of century drama is worth studying as a genre
which was understood by the audience, not as a substitute of ‘real/authentic’ language.
I use a corpus of twenty plays and conduct macro-analysis on genre, class and gender
of characters. Genre and class are shown to affect the use of THOU while gender was not.
My micro-analysis focuses on the emotion of characters and individual contexts. I also
studied related linguistic factors: second person singular pronoun ye and address terms.
I attempt to explain the lingering use of THOU in the dramas using enregisterment
and indexicality (Johnstone et al. 2006). I argue that there are two usage of THOU in the
eighteenth-century drama. One is to show relationships and emotions, as Shakespeare did.
The other is to represent the grave style of theatrical language, especially tragedy. This
happened because THOU, having fallen almost out of use in everyday language, came to
be associated with the language of drama. My thesis presents the possibility of using
indexicality to explain how the stylistic meaning of THOU changed from ‘casual/intimate’
to ‘formal/elevated’.

Building on Silverstein’s (2003, 2016) oinoglossia (wine talk), this paper argues for a closely related genre: brutoglossia, (craft) beer talk. Drawing on a corpus of craft beer and brewery descriptions from Toronto, Canada, I argue that the appropriation of wine terminology and tasting practices (re)configures beer brewers and drinkers as ‘elite’ and ‘classy.’ The ‘specialist’ lexical and morphosyntactic components of wine discourse provide the higher order of indexicality through which the emergent technical beer terminology is to be interpreted. Together, the descriptions can be read as fields of indexicalities, mapping linguistic and semiotic variables associated with a particular social object: beer.