Enregisterment

The article aims at unfolding the key linguistic aspects of nowadays’ stereotypical Szekler-representations through a case study on a satirical representation of regional communicative practices in the locally well-known sketch Úgy-e, Magdi? (‘Right, Magdi?’) by Open Stage. The research is mainly centered around the concept of enregisterment, thus the work is meant to be a contribution to the scarce literature on the enregisterment of Szekler (and Hungarian dialects in general) and on regional communicative practices. After providing a brief overview of the key areas and aspects along which the Szekler dialect has been enregistered so far in public discourse and in linguistics, the article tries to capture the main attributes which create the authentic Szekler voice for Hungarian speakers through analyzing the plot, the characterological figures and the linguistic repertoire conveyed by the sketch, as well as the online reactions to it given by viewers. Besides examining the most prominent phonological/phonetic, lexical and grammatical phenomena construed as characteristic to Szekler, the article also touches upon some regional conversational features depicted through stylization by the sketch.

Although scant, the previous research on Guatemalan Spanish has suggested that both /f/ lenition, /f/ → [h], and /f/ fortition, /f/ → [p], are more common among Mayan-Spanish bilinguals with lower levels of education as /f/ is not present in any Mayan language. The present study analyzes 1,430 tokens of /f/ from sociolinguistic interviews in Spanish from 40 bilinguals of Spanish and the Mayan language K’iche’ according to both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Overall, both lenition and fortition were relatively infrequent. The results indicate that /f/ lenition is favored by the following [u̯i] and [u̯e] context and speakers with less formal education, especially for those who were more K’iche’-dominant. /f/ fortition is favored by previous nasals and pauses and by speakers who were more K’iche’-dominant. That is, while /f/ fortition is predicted by language dominance, /f/ lenition, similar to other varieties of Spanish, is most predicted by educational attainment, although with an interaction between education and language dominance. Thus, it is argued that in this community, /f/ lenition is due to sociolinguistic variation of a diachronic sound change while /f/ fortition is a result of language contact and processes of enregisterment (Agha 2005; Babel 2011). Sociolinguistic studies in bilingual communities must examine the role of education, language dominance, and the interaction between the two as language dominance does not inherently explain all variation in situations of language contact.

It is uncontroversial that there exist different ways of speaking, that language is characterized by orderly patterns of variability. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which these patterns take on social meaning. I begin from the assertion that the assignment of social meaning is always an ideological process. While patterns of linguistic difference may already exist in a given language or context, those patterns only start to become meaningful when they help to establish contrasts between relevant social groups and situations. I provide an overview of the different semiotic steps involved in making particular variables socially meaningful, including how particular variants become linked to given social categories or characteristics (indexicality), how, once established, such indexical links are naturalized and come to be seen as signals of a group's underlying character (rhematization), and, finally, how all of this works to consolidate a field of contrasts between different social types, each associated with their own characteristic way of speaking (enregisterment). I illustrate each of these steps with brief examples from variationist research from the 1960s to the present-day. I also describe how the social meanings of variation evolve over time, and briefly discuss this point in relation to ongoing work examining the social values of different articulatory settings in the UK.

Keywords: variation, social meaning, indexicality, enregisterment, ideology, differentiation

Ever since the Beatles, British pop music has been oriented towards an American accent model, even the "patriotic" Britpop. This changed in the 2000s in the Indie music scene, where we find local accents and dialect features. The theoretical approach of enregisterment can provide new explanations for this development.

This paper delves into the concept of 'enregisterment,' which defines processes and practices linking linguistic repertoires with social meanings, by examining meta-linguistic commentary in newspapers. Focussing on 'Multicultural London English (MLE),' the study analyses 200 articles from major British newspapers (2006-2022) qualitatively and quantitatively. The research uncovers recurring linguistic shibboleths, indexically linked social meanings, and prevalent language ideologies concerning MLE and other London dialects. Results reveal a consistent emphasis on specific linguistic shibboleths repeated in articles. Indexical links for 'MLE' are constructed through evaluative comments, alarmist metaphors employing xenophobic immigration tropes, and loaded keywords. 'Cockney' and 'Estuary English' are portrayed more favourably and, together with 'Received Pronunciation (RP)', serve to stigmatise MLE. This study underscores the role of media discourse in shaping the enregisterment of dialects, contributing to social stratification and the 'othering' of certain linguistic varieties.

In 2011, the Arab world had become the centre of attention once again after the emergence of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ in December 2010. This historical event in the modern history of the Arab region has brought significant social and political reform to the Arab world. The wave of Arab uprising begins in Tunisia at the end of 2010, rapidly separated into other neighbouring countries such as Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Bahrain, and Sudan. Since the early stage of protest, which mainly participated by locals, mass media has comprehensively reported this historical event, which brought down many Arab leaders in power for decades. Thus, Arab Spring has become the headline of many international media outlets, and the media are still discussing the significant impact of the event until now. Hence, the main objective of the study is to examine the event's Arabic online news discourse by focusing on the keywords and prominent social actors in the news reports surrounding the Arab S...

This article concerns online data capture using survey methods when the target population(s) comprise not just of several different language-using groups, but additionally populations who may be multilingual and whose total language repertoires are commonly employed in meaning-making practices—commonly referred to as translanguaging. It addresses whether current online data capture survey methods adequately respond to such population characteristics and demonstrates a worked example of how we adapted one electronic data capture software platform (REDCap) to present participants with not just multilingual but translanguaging engagement routes that also encompassed multimodal linguistic access in auditory, orthographic, and visual media. The study population comprised deaf young people. We share the technical (coding) adaptations made and discuss the relevance of our work for other linguistic populations.

This article intends to put forward the hypothesis that "ʃit5識" grammaticalized from a verb with the meaning of "knowing" to the experiential aspect marker through an analysis of the polysemous structure of the Taiwanese Hailu Hakka language "ʃit5 識".

The growing variability in Europe’s standard languages has spawned widely shared accounts of destandardization, as well as premonitions of the death of the very idea of a standard language. In this paper, we propose an alternative to these views by demonstrating that the ‘classical’ standardness criteria (uniformity, prestige, codification) have become too narrow to define standard varieties in our Late Modern era of democratization and digitalization. Rather than rejecting these criteria as invalid, however, we revise them in function of contemporary standard language dynamics. Building on corpus data and (especially) experimental perception data, we will show (1) that the overt prestige which is typical of standard languages has extended to include other types of superiority (such as media cool or dynamism), (2) that the uniformity believed to manifest itself in the absence of variation can also surface as ‘perceptual harmony’ (an intuitive agreement on howmuch socially meaningful...

This project investigates English–Spanish codeswitching in internet memes posted to the Facebook page, We are mitú (mitú), and analyzes how lexical insertions and quotatives contribute to the enregisterment of linguistic patterns and the construction of collective identity among U.S. Latinx millennials in virtual social spaces. Data include instances of lexical insertion (n = 280) and quotative mixed codes (n = 114) drawn from a collected corpus of 765 image–text memes. The most frequent lexical insertions included food items (e.g., elote and pozole), kinship terms (e.g., abuelita and tía), and culturally specific artifacts or practices (e.g., quinceañera and lotería), which reflect biculturalism and rely on a shared set of references for the construction of a group identity. Additionally, the quotatives in the data construct Spanish-speaking characterological figures that enregister a particular brand of U.S. Latinx millennial identity that includes being bilingual, having Spanish-speaking parents, and having strong ties to Latinx culture. Overall, this work highlights not only internet memes as a vehicle for enregisterment, but also, and more importantly, how the language resources employed within them work to enregister linguistic and cultural norms of U.S. Latinx millennials, and thereby, play a role in identity construction in virtual social spaces.

In contrast to Early Modern English, little is known about address pronouns in Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This paper investigates early Scottish pronoun usage in more detail by presenting a case study on singular pronominal address in Late Middle Scottish and Early Modern Northern English witness depositions from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The source texts drawn from theCriminal Trials in Scotland 1488–1624, theHelsinki Corpus of Older Scots 1450–1700andA Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760are examined with a quantitative and qualitative approach based on historical pragmatics and historical sociolinguistics.Thouis found to be relatively frequent in the Scottish and Northern English data in comparison with the rapid decline inthourecently found in South-Eastern English depositions. However, there are significant differences in the distributions of pronouns, which are explained by an overrepresentation of upper social ranks in ...

This paper investigates the role of local dialect forms and other semiotic signs in languagecultural practices on social media in the southern Dutch province North Brabant. Although dialect use is severely decreasing in this area, we find abundant dialect features in present-day media productions, but these are not simply some last remains. By conducting a qualitative discourse analysis of a carnivalesque music video (2020), we argue that non-linguistic resources and co-occurring dialect features are enregistered as recognizably 'Brabantish' for the purpose of indexing place-based identities. Moreover, we show that reproduction on TikTok (2021) takes place through recontextualization and indexical stance-taking.

Räisänen, Tiina Professional communicative repertoires and trajectories of socialization into global working life Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2013, 202 p. (Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities ISSN 1459-4323 (nid.), 1459-4331 (PDF); 216) ISBN 978-951-39-5469-7 (nid.) ISBN 978-951-39-5470-3 (PDF) This longitudinal study explores the construction of professional communicative repertoires of Finnish engineers across their trajectories of socialization from the educational through stay abroad to global working life contexts. Taking a biographical perspective on lives with English, this study investigates repertoire construction in relation to community memberships, identity work within discourses, participation in interaction and enregisterment processes of ways of speaking. Utilizing ethnographic, sociolinguistic and discourse analytic theories, this study conceptualizes repertoires as biographical and indexical of macro-level phenomena of globalization, global working life and Engl...

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.

Language users discursively circulate ideologies of identity, especially in stances taken while assigning social characteristics to enregistered personae. Previous research has demonstrated that with the Istanbul Greek (IG) diaspora, speakers use the emic terms of Ellines and Romioi to orient to or away from Mainland Greeks, respectively. In this paper, I discuss how IGs in Turkey relate such ethnonyms to linguistic features and how they rely on enregistered dialectal features to construct their ethnicity as Romioi in opposition to Ellines. These ethnonyms result in personae that are used stylistically, but in turn fractally (re)create differentiation into separate ethnic categories. Such sociolinguistic processes demonstrate how linguistic variation is socially embedded in a minoritized indigenous speech community. Studying variation in concert with ethnonym use shows how speakers add nuanced meaning to established identity categories and create new ones based on their lived experiences.

This article draws from our ethnography in the Complexo do Alemão favelas (neighborhoods built by residents) in Rio de Janeiro to discuss how Black activists bring affordances of digitalization and enregistered practices into broader arenas of political participation. We unpack our own positionality and experience with the armed surveillance and securitization of normative regimes that challenge (and often cooperate with) the state in governing peripheral and, to a lesser extent, central areas in Brazilian cities. Favela residents are disproportionately affected by these violent forms of securitization. We look to their ordinary digital and enregistered languaging and 'artivism' as a means of surviving necropolitics that are proper to the African diaspora. In dialogue with the sociolinguistics of globalization and the sociology of violence, the study provides ethnographic evidence of situated cooperation and creative use of language and technologies. We believe this may offer promising paths for further objectives, including antiracist education and comparative studies of grassroots activism.

It is well documented that the same sociolinguistic feature can be used as a sociolinguistic resource with different indexical potentials in different linguistic as well as social contexts. Often, however, indexical meanings of a specific feature are related to or derived from one another. In this article we present the results of a perceptual study of indexical meanings of alveolar versus fronted (s)—[s] versus [s+]—in different registers. The data consist of responses to male speakers' use of [s] and [s+] respectively, in two different registers that may be labelled “modern Copenhagen speech” and “street language.” Results show that the [s+] indexes femininity and gayness when it occurs in “modern Copenhagen,” whereas the (s)-variation has a different and less significant effect when occurring in “street language.” We discuss the implications for theories of indexical fields and the relation between features and clusters of features in speakers' perceptions. (Indexical mea...

T he success of the Amish in maintaining their ancestral language until now has been well-documented in the related literature, and the arguments about this maintenance sound not to dry up any time soon. At the heart of the existing discussions stand the questions of how and to what extent they have managed to protect their language. The present theoretical commentary serves as an explanatory account of this distinctive issue. To that end, without going into much detail , the author first sets the initial stage by providing a description of the Amish society, a short historical background, and general information on their life, including social structure, religion, education, and language. The author finds this input necessary to foster the understanding of the Amish success of language maintenance in its entirety. Then, she provides the readers with the possible reasons which oil the wheels of this distinguishing success when compared to other minority languages that died in the U....

Abstract 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.

This article draws on ethnographic research carried out with Marxist reading groups run by a Lebanese revolutionary socialist organization. I examine the labor that Marxist theoretical practice was doing in a political conjuncture widely viewed as post-Marxist , discussing the relationship between theory and affect, and the role that affective infrastructures play in maintaining and reproducing social movements and political organisations. Drawing on Moten and Harney, I frame this intellectual labor as a form of dissonant , disorganized study - a mode of preparing for revolution by being together in brokenness and routinely generating a commitment to a particular political horizon. This form of political praxis as study unfolded within a Lebanese activist scene dominated by a pragmatic conception of politics, within which the critical labor of the radical and revolutionary left was largely considered sterile , mired in something akin to what Berlant calls cruel optimism. Drawing on ...

Written chatspeak is said to be marked by two basic principles: (1) write like you speak and (2) write as fast as possible. As for Flemish chat language, the first principle seems to result in a multilayered mixed code, in which dialectical, substandard Flemish and standard Dutch features interact in an eclectic way. In addition, most of the chatters insert English words in their chat discourse as well. This intensive code mixing is assumed to be – at least to a considerable extent – a reflection of the daily speech of these Flemish chatters. But what about the validity of this assumption? Can chatspeak function as an alternative dataset for the study of (spoken) language variation and change and thus as a research tool for e.g. the study of Flemish teenage talk and the representation of non-standard speech in spoken interaction? The dependent variables for the present test case are two substandard Flemish (or ‘tussentaal’) features that urge the chatters to violate the second princ...

We present a new method for automatic classification of Chinese unknown verbs. The method employs the instance-based categorization using the k-nearest neighbor method for the classification. The accuracy of the classifier is about 70.92%. Keyword: unknown word, lexical similarity 1. 緒論 自然語言處理中重要的步驟是將中文文件斷詞並附加詞類標記;在斷詞標記 的過程中會遇到的一個問題為未知詞的存在。現行的斷詞標記系統以辭典為基礎 輔以構詞的規則訊息進行斷詞標記,但因為語言的特性之一「無窮盡的創造力」, 無法窮舉出所有的詞彙;一本好的辭典也不應該無止盡的擴大所收錄的詞彙,因 此如何辨識處理辭典中不存在的詞彙就成了一個重要的課題。 1-1 研究動機與目標 前人對於未知詞的探討重點集中在名詞細目的辨認上,如組織名、人名、地 名辨識等(李振昌(1993),李振昌、李御璽與陳信希(1994)人名辨識等等)。僅有 Chen、Bai 與 Chen(1997)利用前綴(prefix)、後綴(suffix)的訊息處理全部的未知詞, 正確率約為 76%,而白明宏、陳超然與陳克健(1998)使用 Chen、Bai 與 Chen (1997) 所提出的方法,再利用前後文的訊息來補強 Chen、Bai 與 Chen (1997)方法不足 之處,將正確率提高至 83.83%。在動詞辨識正確結果不高的情況下,本論文將 處理重心放在未知動詞的辨識處理上,並且希望將這種處理未知動詞的方法在未 來可以轉移處理名詞與形容詞。 動詞不管在任何文法理論中,在剖析句子時都是位於最中心的部分,若動詞 為未知詞,勢必將影響句子剖析的正確性。現代漢語的動詞結構繁複,內部規則 複雜,若無足夠的語言訊息完全無法判斷其分類,我們認為動詞自動分類研究至 1 本論文中程式設計感謝馬偉雲、楊昌樺學長提供意見;兩位評審老師惠賜意見,特此致謝。 今無法提高正確率的主因為動詞繁複的內部結構。 我們的目標為將動詞自動分類到中研院詞庫小組(1993)的詞...

This report suggests potential types of actions and messages most likely to influence and deter Bashar al-Assad from using force in the ongoing Syrian civil war. This preliminary study is based on multidisciplinary analyses of Bashar al-Assad’s speeches, and how he reacts to real events and verbal messages from external sources. The results are summarized in a two-part report. Part I (this document) provides a preliminary summary, comparison of results, and recommendations. Part II gives a detailed description of each analytical approach. Data: The speeches used in the study were delivered by al-Assad from Jan 2000 to Sept 2013; the past six years was sampled most densely. Additional Twitter feeds were analyzed to gauge his influence in the region. Analytical Approaches: Five separate methods analyzed the speeches: (a) automated text analytics that profile al-Assad’s decision making style and ability to appreciate alternative viewpoints; (b) integrative complexity (IC) analysis that...

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.

The present study investigates the vitality of colloquial Belgian Dutch by investigating to what extent it is used in written subtitles by the (self-declared) norm-setting public broadcaster VRT within the Flemish area of the Dutch language community. Next to the official standard language (General Belgian Dutch), various non-standard, colloquial varieties (e.g. colloquial Belgian Dutch, regiolect, dialect) are widely used in Flanders, both in informal and formal situations. Previous research has demonstrated that several of these varieties frequently occur in spoken language on Flemish television (e.g. Van Hoof, 2013). In this context, it is particularly interesting to investigate to what extent this colloquial Belgian Dutch variety penetrates in intralingual subtitles. If this would occur in a significant number of cases, this shift from an exclusively spoken variety to a written medium would be indicative for the further spreading and acceptation of non-standard Dutch in Flanders.

This article is meant to initiate a dialogue with Judith Bridges about the performativity of language. By analyzing how social media users talk about what language is doing, especially when these users accuse someone of whitesplaining, mansplaining, or other forms of [X]-splaining, I show that they implicitly acknowledge what has been called elsewhere the ventriloquial dimension of communication. By ventriloquation, I mean that whenever we speak, write or, more generally, communicate, an act of delegation always takes place, which means that what is said, written or communicated can be presented by others as making us say things that we had not necessarily anticipated. This form of delegation, which is typical of the episodes analyzed by Bridges and that I identify as a form of downstream ventriloquation, is contrasted with upstream forms of ventriloquation, that is ventriloquations by which other actors are deemed as expressing themselves through what is being said or, more generally, communicated. I believe that the identification of these two forms of ventriloquation can help us analyze the performativity of language that interests Bridges.

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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.