With the rise of digital and online technologies, subtitling practices once reserved for traditional media to regiment language are now available to ordinary netizens. This article explores the nature of these practices and the publics they project in digital media, focusing on a viral remix video that uses on-screen text to ridicule a Hong Kong government official for his Cantonese-accented Mandarin. Through parodic revoicing, the subtitles in the video mock the official’s linguistic blunders and create a series of incongruities to provoke humor intended for Cantonese-speaking Hongkongers. These subtitles, despite reproducing standard language ideology, bring into being a vernacular counterpublic organized around Cantonese and undermine the legitimacy of the public figures in the video. This article not only prompts us to reconsider the commonly assumed link between standard languages and national publics but also reveals subtitling practices in participatory media as potential sites where ideological reproduction and political resistance intersect. (Subtitling, counterpublic, Mandarin Chinese, Hong Kong, China)

Narratives possess a particular ability both to encapsulate and engender political/ideological aims. The extreme-right is aware of the pedagogic potential of fiction; however, their fiction is only rarely examined from a discourse-analytic perspective. This article analyses a short story written and distributed by a US neo-Nazi organisation. First, my analysis examines: narrative action processes, that is, the (transitive and intransitive) actions of characters, which drive narrative change; and modal tokens relevant to the evaluative function of the narrative. Second, I argue that narrative action processes and modal tokens represent the ‘warp and woof’ of narrative, since they (i) demonstrate how stories connect events, over time, and (ii) appraise the social/political meaning of these events. My analysis has significance for the discourse-analytic understanding of narrative more generally, as well as the specific ways that fantasies of agency and violence function in this story, to incite political action. (Narrative, narrative action processes, modal tokens, extreme-right, neo-Nazi fantasy)

This article examines how the socio-indexical meanings of dialects/style are reconfigured through two-way parallel migration in Ningbo-Fenghua, China, focusing on the socio-indexical (re)valuation of Putonghua, Ningbonese, and Fenghuanese. Using two-phase matched-guise experiments and interviews, the study traces how mobility patterns and generational positioning mediate these meanings. Results show that, while Putonghua retains institutional prestige, it is often regarded affectively empty. In contrast, Fenghuanese and Ningbonese carry ambivalent, shifting values. Fenghua-born migrants reframe Fenghuanese as a resource for expressing intimacy, trust, and regionalism, while non-migrants view it as outdated. Ningbonese occupies a middle-ground, indexing familiarity, respectability, or obsolescence depending on context. Notably, younger speakers collapse dialectal distinctions, reframing both as ‘old speech’ tied to generation rather than place. These findings challenge Global North models that link indexical revaluation to elite cosmopolitanism, showing instead how meaning-making in the Global South can also emerge through administrative restructuring, regional absorption, and long-standing mobility patterns. (Indexicality, social meaning, Ningbo-Fenghua, migration and language, language attitudes).