Sociocultural Linguistics Research Articles

‘Stupidest of all the primates’

This article examines the effect of linguistic anxiety on identity by analyzing the use of English in Japanese television from the perspective of Sociocultural Linguistics. Close analysis of segments from Japanese television entertainment programs shows how both verbal and visual intertextual resources are used to create linguistic anxiety at the micro level of personal interaction, on the macro level of government policy and television genre, and also at meso levels that exist between both the macro and micro. Semiotic resources such as costumes, set design, subtitles, and other elements in the mediascape allow for circulation of ideologies from government policies into assessments of individuals. The role of meso level discourse in the bidirectional transmission of linguistic anxiety between the macro levels of society and the micro levels of personal interaction is discussed.

A CONCEPTUAL REVIEW ON LINGUISTIC APPROACHES OF IDENTITY INVESTIGATION

Identity has been a blossoming issue in different fields. The intensity of investigating identity has stimulated the diverse methods and approaches to study identity from different angles. This paper discusses the how identity can be investigated from three different linguistic approaches, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and sociocultural linguistics approach. The practicality of these three approaches is explored to detect the nature of identity which is fluid, multiple, fragmented, socially, culturally, historically, religiously, and politically constructed and emerges within interactions. More space, however, is invested for elaborating the five principles of sociocultural linguistic approach due to its flexibility and multidimension of the approach. Empirical data is provided for proving its practicality for identity investigation. Further areas of investigation is given at the last part of the paper.

Stories of assessment: Spanish–English bilingual children's agency and interactional competence in oral language assessments

Prompted by a concern that the cognitivist orientation and monolingual biases of current language assessment practices may unwittingly perpetuate deficit perspectives on language minority children, this paper examines the linguistic, interactional, and identity resources that Spanish–English bilingual children used to co-construct interactional competence in narrative-based speaking assessments with bilingual researcher-assessors. Insights from sociocultural linguistics guided our close interactional analyses of three assessment excerpts, which we discuss in their ethnographic context by drawing on interview and observational data from our 18-month study. Our analysis demonstrates that children were able to create space for agency, bilingualism, and interaction even in assessments that assumed passive, monolingual, and monologic participation. We discuss implications of these findings for research and education, arguing that language assessment needs to be reconceptualized in ways that account for children's interactional competence and agency.

Cognition around the world

Cognition around the world

Code-Switching and Competition: An Examination of a Situational Response

Code switching is primarily a linguistic term that refers to the use of two or more languages within the same conversation, or same sentence, to convey a single message. One field of linguistics, sociocultural linguistics, is broad and interdisciplinary, a mixture of language, culture, and society. In sociocultural linguistics, the code, or language that is selected, can be triggered by a social situation or setting in which the speaker is placed. Code-switching can also apply to behavior. In physical education, teachers may communicate in the language of sport. When teaching a competitive activity in physical education class, the environment changes, becomes competitive, and the teachers often code switch and switch instructional choices unconsciously. This article examines the occurrence of code-switching during competitive activities.

Iranian bilinguals’ reverse code-switching: an implicit quest for power?

AbstractPositioned within the discipline of sociocultural linguistics, this study redefines the concept of code-switching (CS) by focusing on switches to L2 within one’s mainstream speech in L1-a phenomenon called reverse code-switching (RCS). It further studies the role that age, educational background, second language proficiency (SLP), and familiarity with second language culture (FSLC) factors play on these perceptions. Applying a mixed-method approach, a researcher-made instrument was validated through Rasch modeling and exploratory factorial analyses, and the results were computed through a multivariate regression. The older and less educated the audiences, the more they labeled RCS as a symbolic resource. The younger generation and the more educated considered it more as a metaphorical switch. Socially negative attitudes were negatively correlated with SLP, but statistically unaffected by FSLC. The study concludes with a discussion of the results and a body of implications for future research.

“Dolls or teddies?”

The concept of ‘community’ often presents a problem for queer linguists. ‘The gay community’ is often viewed as an impossible site for research due to its imagined status, whilst local communities of gay people have been considered too heterogeneous and idiosyncratic to draw conclusions from. In this article, however, it is argued that both of these aspects of community can, and should, be a central focus of an investigation into language and sexual identity. Through the analysis of a conversation emerging from a lesbian group, using a sociocultural linguistics framework, it is argued here that the community of practice approach can play a crucial role in understanding how ideologies from ‘the gay community’ are used to construct a coherent sexual identity on a local level. The analysis reveals how the group engages in practices that enable them to construct micro-level personas in direct response to broader, ideological structures of heteronormativity.

Digital language practices in superdiversity: Introduction

This Special Issue brings together research at the intersection of two emerging areas of scholarship in sociocultural linguistics, digital communication and superdiversity. The nine papers explore their relationship from two angles: they examine the role of digital language practices in contexts of societal superdiversity, and the relevance of superdiversity as a theoretical perspective for the study of digital language practices. In our Introduction we first outline the concept of superdiversity and the way digital media and communications technologies are conceptualised in literature on superdiversity and some relevant earlier scholarship. We then turn to the reception of superdiversity in sociolinguistics and the role of digital language and literacy in this discussion. Drawing on the papers in this issue, we then outline a number of research perspectives on digital language practices in superdiversity. Finally the papers in the special issue are introduced.

Sociolinguistic Justice in the Schools: Student Researchers as Linguistic Experts

AbstractThe commitment of sociocultural linguistics to the cause of social justice has been central to the discipline since its foundation. This commitment is nowhere more evident than in the educational domain and particularly in the development of sociolinguistically informed curricula and teacher preparation programs. Such programs help ensure that students who speak politically subordinated linguistic varieties have the same opportunities in classrooms, college, and careers as their standard English‐speaking peers. Informed by previous and current efforts to forge linguistic partnerships with communities, a set of potential goals for those who work toward sociolinguistic justice is proposed. The goals of sociolinguistic justice are then exemplified using a California‐based research and academic outreach program that guides youth of diverse linguistic, ethnoracial, and economic backgrounds to carry out original sociocultural linguistic research in their peer groups, families, and local communities.

Commentary I: ‘It’s a hijra!’ Queer linguistics revisited

In a review of contributions to a special issue of Discourse & Society on queer linguistics, this article argues that the concept of indexicality, as theorized across diverse fields in sociocultural linguistics, has the potential to offer a much richer account of subjectivity than found in dominant strands of queer theory. While queer theory valorizes practice over identity, viewing the latter as fixed and necessarily allied with normativity, research on language and social interaction suggests that an analytic distinction between practice and identity is untenable. The indexical processes that work to produce social meaning are multi-layered and always shifting across time and space, even within systems of heteronormativity. It is this semiotic evolution that should become the cornerstone of a (new) queer linguistics.

“But I’m attracted to women”

This paper examines the understudied and stigmatized sexual category of “bisexuality” as it emerges in the discourse of bisexuals at a California university. Building on the concepts of performance and “doing” identity presented by Butler (2006 [1990]), Goffman (1990 [1959]), and West and Zimmerman (1987), an outline is offered for how bisexuals, who are made invisible by the hetero/homo binary, may build an intelligible social performance of their identity and sexuality. Utilizing methods from within sociocultural linguistics (i.e., “the broad interdisciplinary field concerned with the intersection of language, culture, and society” [Bucholtz & Hall 2005: 586]), this paper uses ethnographic observations and video-recorded social interaction in order to analyze how bisexuality is performed in social contexts, with a focus on its performance in discourse. The paper closes with a critique of the ways that normativity operates alongside efforts at social resistance and an exploration of the relationship between different layers of sexuality.

Listening to WhitenessWhite Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity. By Mary Bucholtz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Since the late 1990s, Mary Bucholtz has been a leading analyst of linguistic styling, gender, and race and their place in American youth identity construction. She has a terrific ear for the telling details of young people’s talk. Bucholtz has now brought together the many threads of her influential work in a much-anticipated monograph based on her ethnographic research in a multiracial Northern California high school, pseudonymously dubbed Bay City High School (BCHS), in the mid-1990s. White Kids examines how European American youth used the tools of language to construct a range of identities in a school that was experiencing racial turmoil. Bucholtz argues that these multiple styles of whiteness are all founded on calibrations of alignment with black and white youth cultures. She examines three emblematic local white styles: preppy mainstream, white hip-hop fans, and nerds. The analysis relies centrally on recorded interviews of 26 white students, along with maps of the schoolyard that she asked them to draw, a rewarding technique. Contextualizing the interviews in ethnographic observation, Bucholtz analyzes extracts from the transcripts in fine-grained interactional detail to unpack the identities and social worlds that these students negotiate. Limited quantitative analysis of a set of sociolinguistic variables rounds out the study. A central goal of the book is to demonstrate that the conceptual and methodological tools of sociocultural linguistics can enrich the study of identity across all the disciplines, showing in detail how language serves ongoing identity projects and is implicated in larger sociopolitical structures (p. 3). The book is intended to reach readers well beyond linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, and the presentation is well geared for such a broad audience. Bucholtz focuses on different features of linguistic display for each of the three white styles. The preppy, or “popular,” group appears to arbitrate white students’ exclusive social

Taking a stance on emotion: affect, sequence, and intersubjectivity in dialogic interaction

AbstractThis paper explores the domain of affect and emotion as they arise in interaction, from the perspective of stance, sequence, and dialogicality. We seek to frame the issue of affective display as part of a larger concern with how co-participants in interaction construct the socioaffective and sociocognitive relations that organize their intersubjectivity, via collaborative practices of stance taking. We draw mainly on two research traditions, conversation analysis and the dialogic turn in sociocultural linguistics, focusing on their treatments of affect, emotion, and intersubjectivity. Key ideas from the respective approaches are the role of sequence in shaping the realization and interpretation of stance, and dialogic resonance as a process of alignment between subsequent stances. We present a view of stance as a triplex act, achieved through overt communicative means, in which participants evaluate something, and thereby position themselves, and thereby align with co-participants in interaction. Alignment is argued to operate as a continuous variable rather than a dichotomy, as participants subtly monitor and modulate the “stance differential” between them, while often maintaining a strategic ambiguity. Finally, we comment on the rich contributions to the study of stance, affect, and intersubjectivity in interaction made by the collaborators in this special issue.

‘It’s different for guys’: Gendered narratives of racial conflict among white California youth

As race talk has gained attention throughout the social sciences, sociocultural linguistics has become crucial in revealing how racial ideologies and identities are discursively produced. This article examines how race talk may reproduce racial binaries while perpetuating gender ideologies. Drawing on ethnographically collected narratives of conflict at an ethnoracially divided California high school, the analysis examines three discursive practices of racial reversal whereby white youth portray themselves as disadvantaged vis-a-vis their black peers: claims of ‘reverse discrimination’, narratives of racialized fear, and fight stories. Whereas white girls’ narratives relied on racial vagueness, white boys’ narratives highlighted racial difference, contrastive strategies that indicate the different racial stakes for white girls versus white boys at the school. The article demonstrates the necessity of examining race talk not only for its content but also for its discursive structure, its ethnographic and interactional context, its co-construction by the researcher, and its ideological effects.

“The Only Dykey One”: Constructions of (In)Authenticity in a Lesbian Community of Practice

This article demonstrates how members of a lesbian community of practice make interactional moves that allow them to position themselves as “authentically lesbian.” Through the use of discourse analysis and a sociocultural linguistics focus on indexicality, the speakers are shown to invoke broadly accessible stereotypes and ideologies and to rework them in order to create locally specific, meaningful identities. This is achieved via mutually negotiated stance taking toward group-constructed, oppositional personae. Specifically, the women in this group position styles deemed as “girly” as inauthentic and antithetical to their concept of a lesbian—the authentic “dyke.”

All of the above: New coalitions in sociocultural linguistics1

As the history of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology shows, a sharp distinction between these fields and others concerned with the sociocultural investigation of language is untenable given their significant common ground. The article describes the current state of relations between sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and similar approaches to language, culture, and society. It then locates theoretical, methodological, thematic, and political points of commonality and explores emerging areas of productive dialogue among these closely overlapping research traditions. Two analytic examples, one focused on race talk in sociolinguistic interviews with European American youth and the other on ideologies of English among sexual and gender minorities in India, illustrate the benefits of bringing together different branches of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.

Accomplishing marginalization in bilingual interaction: Relational work as a resource for the intersubjective construction of identity

Abstract This paper examines the use of impoliteness by Spanish–English bilingual pre-adolescents as a resource for accomplishing identities in spontaneous conversational interactions in an elementary school setting. The theoretical approach employed integrates the concept of relational work (Locher 2004; Locher and Watts 2005), which is based on Goffman's (1967) notion of face and which privileges participants' evaluation of language behavior within the norms of the community of practice, with recent work in sociocultural linguistics (Bucholtz and Hall 2004a, 2004b, 2005). This approach views identity as an interactional achievement reached through the use of what they call tactics of intersubjectivity. In this analysis, negatively marked, non-politic behavior is viewed as an interactional resource, which, along with other resources such as codeswitching, bilingual speakers may employ for the purposes of alignment and stance-taking. Specifically, the paper examines how speakers use strategies referred to as impolite (cf. Culpeper 1996) in the performance of a variety of tactics of intersubjectivity to manage local identities (e.g., leader/follower, insider/outsider) as well as membership in broad social categories (e.g., gender, ethnic identities) in interaction, how they engage in conflict talk and what they gain from it, and how codeswitching is (and is not) used in interactions. This analysis is situated within the wider social context of language politics and immigration politics in the individual school, the region, and the US.

Never Quite a ‘Native Speaker’: Accent and Identity in the L2 - and the L1

The examination of identity issues in learning a second language has recently become a focus issue in SLA research and especially in the field of sociocultural linguistics, which seeks to examine not only how languages are learned, but also the context in which learning takes place and the individual involved. This study addresses the question of L2 (second language) and C2 (second culture) acquisition by focusing on identity, and specifically on one particular aspect, the appropriation of accent. A first-person account of identity phenomena in learning a second language, it seeks to explain changes in the L2 accent - and later also in the L1 accent - applying the metaphor of self-translation as a general framework for explaining processes of L2 learning and L1 loss, and the construction and reconstruction of learner identity.