Given historical and contemporary hegemonic discourse that portrays the United States as a monolingual nation, a critical perspective is needed to counter this societal erasure of bi/multilingualism. The present study reports on an introductory linguistics course about bilingualism in the US that adopted critical language awareness as its pedagogical framework. Results from an end-of-semester survey show that students from diverse linguistic backgrounds (monolingual English, heritage language, L2 world language, and L2 English speakers) demonstrated critical awareness about language, albeit with some differences that were mediated by their linguistic backgrounds. Implications for linguistics and world language programs, as well as adaptations for future iterations of the course, are also discussed.

The publication of ‘A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation’ by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson in Language in 1974 marked the beginning of what was to be a major shift in the way social interaction was to be conceived of and how it was to be studied across the social sciences and linguistics. Widely regarded as the foundational paper of CONVERSATION ANALYSIS (CA), it remains the most cited article in Language. While the authors had published CA studies previously (for example, Sacks 1967, 1972, 1973, Schegloff 1968, Jefferson 1972, 1973, 1974, Schegloff & Sacks 1973), ‘A simplest systematics’ was to bring this new approach to a different and, as it turned out, a more receptive audience in linguistics. At its heart the paper demonstrated both THAT routine interaction or ‘conversation’ was highly organized and locally managed and HOW this could be studied systematically and in detail across forms of interaction and interactional contexts. Initiating a new research direction within an established field is difficult enough, but this achievement is made even more impressive coming from a group of sociologists working in connection with Harold Garfinkel's ETHNOMETHODOLOGY (EM; see Garfinkel 1967), who were at the time finding it difficult to publish in their own discipline (Watson 1994).

The 1980 publication of ‘Transitivity in grammar and discourse’ by Paul Hopper and Sandra Thompson offered an alternative to the focus of much of the field at that time in both methodology and goals. Shared objectives were, of course, an understanding of what language is like and why. But views of just what this might mean and how to achieve it differed in several ways.

Linguists need to collect, organize, analyze, and share data. Despite the variability of linguistic research in terms of inputs and outcomes, there are some common stages, including morphological parsing, lexicon creation, and textual editing. A common software tool for this work is FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx). In this article, we examine some of the ways that FLEx’s data structures conflict with contemporary practices in language work. These assumptions exclude key groups of users and erect barriers to theoretically and practically relevant research. Where workarounds are feasible, they are both fragile and costly. We use this example to start a broader conversation about software infrastructure for digital linguistic data analysis, and how problems with this infrastructure reflect larger issues in language documentation and linguistics.

A recurring narrative in studies of syntactic change is that hypotaxis gains ground at the expense of parataxis. This report shows that this claim—if construed as a quantitative claim about the frequency of different types of clause combining—finds little support in parsed diachronic corpora of seven languages. Genre appears to be a factor that substantially influences the proportion of hypotaxis found in a text in consistent ways, but time does not.

This article introduces a framework for systematically evaluating and comparing language rights across national contexts. We develop an index to assess the range of language freedoms, focusing on areas such as government services, education, healthcare, and media. The index compiles multiple variables into a single indicator, offering a concise measure of linguistic freedom. Our analysis shows that larger language communities typically enjoy more language rights, though this relationship is influenced by civil liberties. We argue that this index is both descriptive and normative, providing a tool for comparing language policy and advocating for linguistic justice.

This article introduces the Corpus of Language Discrimination in Interaction (CLDI)—an open-access corpus of transcribed video data, capturing moments where individuals are policed in some way for the language they are speaking or otherwise endorsing while sharing public space (e.g. in stores, restaurants, parking lots, and parks). Despite having thus far largely evaded systematic inquiry, such interactions are illustrative of a particular genre of language policymaking and enforcement that takes place in everyday social life, which the CLDI aims to document and make available for ongoing empirical examination. After presenting the corpus itself, as an initial exploration into some of the practices and actions observable in these data, we describe the recurrent use of Speak English directives, accompanied by nation-state declarative accounts like This is America. Detailed analysis of such turns, and the responses they receive, throws into relief ways that language policies and ideologies can be instantiated, ratified, challenged, defended, and otherwise negotiated in and through the particulars of interactants' joint conduct. We conclude by describing some future avenues for research, teaching, and public engagement on the basis of the CLDI.

We describe #FPGlobal, a digital platform for revitalizing Francoprovençal, a threatened and underdocumented language. This platform connects speakers and learners of Francoprovençal varieties in three European and two North American countries. Its community-developed, sociolinguistically informed, and electronically mediated approach fosters communication that is less likely to trigger essentialist language ideologies common to language endangerment contexts. Early uptake of the platform illustrates how it encourages language users to share multimodal responses to prompts, archives these responses, and develops corpora of speech and text with potential utility for both pedagogy and research. Our participatory framework increases cross-variety and intergenerational language use, introduces Francoprovençal into new domains, fosters a new generation of linguists, and offers data for investigating developing writing systems and variation patterns.

We contend that attention to signed languages is crucial for a fuller understanding of the processes and mechanisms behind regular sound change in spoken languages. While the label ‘regular sound change’ would seem to limit the object of study to language change in the auditory-vocal channel, a typical assumption is that a visual-gestural modality correlate to regular sound change exists. At the same time, there exists a conflicting position that languages in nonauditory modalities, as they do not deal with sounds, are irrelevant to the study of sound change. These contradictory stances converge in their consequences, leading to the general practice in historical linguistics of not taking evidence from signed languages into account when developing theories of sound change. However, we argue that consideration of the affordances of the visual-gestural modality, and the distinctive aspects of language transmission and demographics in signing communities, is of particular value for refining the field’s understanding of the processes and constraints on regular sound change. Insights from signed languages push us to reframe the processes and mechanisms that lead to regular sound change and to broaden our understanding of why it happens. This has implications for a programmatic exploration of theories of regular sound change.

In this article, we present the Pangloss Collection, a collection of digital corpora of (mostly) endangered or underdocumented languages, developed in France since the 1990s in the context of a global realization of the considerable potential of digital technologies. The Pangloss Collection currently hosts 1,180 hours of audio and video recordings of about 200 languages. These materials are archived for the long-term using a suite of French public services for digital humanities. The Pangloss Collection can be freely accessed through a bilingual English-French website that was reshaped in 2021 to offer a general-audience interface mode and a professional interface mode (see https://pangloss.cnrs.fr/).

This paper provides a response to Law, Power, and Quinto-Pozos’s target article, focusing on two issues. First, I point out that the initial framing of their proposal undercuts the larger point that sign languages should be included in linguistic analysis in order to better understand all human languages, rather than specifically in order to better understand spoken languages. Second, I discuss a number of practical considerations for undertaking the analysis of sound change they advocate for, with a focus on transcription. I describe several tools that have been developed for addressing this issue and discuss how they can be employed in the study of sound change in sign languages.

Podcasts are an immensely popular medium for news, documentaries, interviews, and many other genres. They are also an effective pedagogical tool, both as texts for learners to consume and as assignments for students to create. In this article we present findings from our students' experiences of creating podcasts in upper-level Language and Gender courses and reflect on the affordances and possible risks of this kind of project. We argue that podcasting projects, which center student learning and produce accessible, public-facing scholarship, can also provide a means of resisting injustice in linguistics, in the academy, and in the wider community.

In their target article, Law, Power, and Quinto-Pozos discuss the scarcity of regular sound change in signed languages, and they provide a long list of fascinating linguistic and social reasons why this could be the case. Exploring the effects of modality on sound change has the potential to advance our understanding of signed and spoken languages and language in general. In this response, I focus on the implications of the idea that the relative abundance of regular sound change and phonological rules in spoken languages is a consequence of a specific peculiarity of the auditory-vocal modality, namely, that it is highly serial and temporally compressed.