Examining regional variation across African American communities has advanced research on African American English beyond its treatment as a singular, uniform variety. While the earlier focus on inner-city, and often male, youth prioritized studying these speakers’ production of ethnolectal patterns, less attention was paid to other language practices of these speakers and their broader semiotic construction of identity. Drawing on ethnographic data and sociolinguistic interviews from African American speakers from Rochester, New York who identify as Hood Kids, I examine how the bought vowel can become a marker of a particular place-identity in Rochester. I argue that the Hood Kid is an adequation of an enregistered racialized NYC persona that reanalyzes bought while also drawing on other emblems of Black, street culture. Such variation suggests that speakers’ conceptualization of race and place ideologically scales beyond immediately local geographic boundaries. (African American Language, style, race and ethnicity, regional variation)*

This study adopts a raciolinguistic perspective to examine the portrayal and reception of Ruan Yuejiao, a Vietnamese female spouse character created by a Taiwanese male content creator. As a representative of the Taiwanese majority, this content creator utilizes linguistic features to perform a racialized Vietnamese accent and embody a Vietnamese spouse persona, which they believe counters racial stereotypes. This article introduces the concept of indexical hijack to describe how the racial majority imposes new indexical meanings on these mediatized linguistic features, disregarding the perspectives of the Vietnamese community. By highlighting a raciolinguistic listening mode embedded within Taiwan's multicultural discourse, this study reveals how anti-racist actions initiated by the Vietnamese community are reinterpreted by the Taiwanese majority as racist, reflecting the complexities of post-racial multiculturalism in East Asia. (Raciolinguistics, Taiwan, Vietnamese migrants, digital enregisterment, indexicality)*

The concept of grafting—described by Gal (2018) as the use of authoritative discourses in distinct, inapposite arenas—is a significant contribution to understanding how individual speech events contribute to processes of enregisterment. While scholars thus far have concentrated on graftings in written and non-interactive texts, this focus occludes the emergent particulars of graftings as they are produced extemporaneously, within local contexts. In this analysis, I examine graftings in public comments during American public school board meetings held from March 2021 through January 2022, a period marked by contentious debates. A sequential analysis of graftings preceded by constructed dialogue contributes a novel view of graftings as interactional achievements. Their citation of prior talk within local contexts not only constructs sequences but also emphasizes that their authority is constructed locally. This analysis therefore expands our understanding of graftings as emergent interactional devices, used within the immediacy of ongoing discourse. (Interdiscursivity, intertextuality, constructed dialogue, reported speech, discourse analysis, sequential analysis, school board meetings)*

The current study provides a holistic analysis of voice quality and how it is employed via affective stancetaking through high performance of non-player characters on Critical Role, a popular Dungeons and Dragons digital media ‘actual-play’ series. Specifically, we ask how a character's moral stance is indexed through improvised performed speech. We show that current acoustic methods for voice quality have the potential for underrepresentation of sociolinguistically meaningful variation when relying solely on acoustic data. By incorporating both acoustic and auditory data, we find that constricted laryngeal settings (and whisperiness in particular) are used to signal evilness and negative moral stance, while unconstricted laryngeal settings (breathiness in particular) are employed to signal friendliness and positive moral stance. The two general vocal settings show nuanced variation linked to affective stancetaking, including one-off changes in characters’ stances as well as their habitual styles. (Voice quality, stance, methods, affect, morality)*

In the present study, we combine southern multilingualisms and linguistic governmentality frameworks to analyze the dominant framings of multilingualism in Pakistan and the subject positions they entail. Using critical policy studies and narrative analysis, we draw upon official policy documents (n = 6) and university students’ narratives (n = 2). Our analysis suggests that the dominant framings of multilingualism in Pakistan are informed by (post)colonial and neoliberal ideologies centered on bounded notions of language and commodification of linguistic competencies. They are characterized by hierarchization of named languages and their functions in relation to their political and economic value, otherization of indigenous languages, and compartmentalization of students’ linguistic competencies into economically privileged languages. These framings entailed subject positions that gradually erased their (students’) multilingual identities and instead morphed them into plurimonolingual subjects of/for the state and the market. We also discuss implications for scholars, teachers, and policy makers in this study. (Multilingualism, southern theory, governmentality, neoliberalism, language education, language policy)

Through analyzing Telemundo's Betty en NY (‘Betty in New York’, 2019), this study illustrates how insights from codeswitching contribute to sociolinguistic theories of stancetaking and style. Betty en NY features multiple characters that use Spanish-English codeswitching to invoke their epistemic rights, take stances, and craft distinct personae, thereby exploiting the agentive potential of linguistic boundaries. Thus, codeswitching serves as a key resource for signaling recursive recalibration—the process by which the alignment of individual stances connects to the repositioning of participant roles and personae. Drawing on data from multiple scenes, a discourse analysis of recursive recalibration at work demonstrates how stance alignment and personae are dialogically negotiated and constructed in interaction. (Stance, codeswitching, social meaning, epistemic rights, style, media)*

Among language users, it is a commonplace that multilingual speakers switch between languages to make themselves intelligible. Yet, sociolinguistics has had surprisingly little to say about this. This neglect traces back to early efforts to carve out a niche for the field by focusing on contexts where social rather than semantic factors like intelligibility shape multilingual practice. As fruitful as this approach has been, here I argue that it has ironically obscured much that is of social significance in multilingual practice. Focusing on prominent practices of code-mixing in Papua New Guinea, I show how their social meanings—the roles and identities they index—are tied to the way they make speech in global languages intelligible to people unfamiliar with them. In the wake of European colonialism, postcolonial nationalism, and neoliberal globalization, contexts of unevenly distributed multilingualism like this are ubiquitous. And there, intelligibility is often a prime social factor shaping multilingual practices. (Multilingualism, codeswitching, intelligibility, social meaning, global languages)*