We examine moments in social interaction in which a person formulates what another thinks or believes. Such formulations of belief constitute a practice with specifiable contexts and consequences. Belief formulations treat aspects of the other person's prior conduct as accountable on the basis that it provided a new angle on a topic, or otherwise made a surprising contribution within an ongoing course of actions. The practice of belief formulations subjectivizes the content that the other articulated and thereby topicalizes it, mobilizing commitment to that position, an account, or further elaboration. We describe how the practice can be put to work in different activity contexts: sometimes it is designed to undermine the other's position as a subjective ‘mere belief’, at other times it serves to mobilize further topic talk. Throughout, belief formulations show themselves to be a method by which we get to know ourselves and each other as mental agents. (Accountability, beliefs, courses of action, formulations, inference, subjectivity, topicalization)*

In linguistic/semiotic landscape (LSL) studies, overall, time and temporalities have occupied a curious space between visibility and invisibility, resulting in time and temporalities being treated as an optional, additive, subordinate, or separate dimension in the linguistic and semiotic study of place-making. The term semiotic timescape serves as a heuristic concept which endeavours to centre time and its imbrication with space/place, with an explicit focus on the semiosis of ‘temporalized place-making’. The five articles in this special issue highlight the ‘complex and multiplex’ dimensions of time (Adam 2008) interconnected with spaces/places, as important aspects in understanding social realities and practices, via entanglements with multimodal meaning-making, materialities, embodiment, and politics of social actors and communities. (Semiotic timescapes, interconnectedness of time and space, complexities and multiplexities, multimodality, materialities)*

This study examines interactional management practices and narrative co-construction in lawyer-asylum seeker consultations in Flanders, Belgium. Drawing upon linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork, it presents a case study of a consultation between an Afghan applicant for international protection, his adviser, and his lawyer. The purpose of the consultation is to prepare the applicant for testifying at the upcoming asylum hearing. Data analysis focuses on (i) the reorientation of the asylum narrative from an authentic-experiential towards a more objectified formal-institutional account; (ii) the participants’ positioning work that indexes this reorientation process; and (iii) their fluctuating alignment of local-interactional and translocal-gatekeeping perspectives. In the discussion, we analyse the consultation in terms of competing legal and experiential voices and views on participant roles/responsibilities. We reflect on how this ambiguity of roles and ideologies relates to the constructed character of credibility, which reveals the importance of adequate legal assistance in this linguistically challenging context. (Legal consultations, asylum procedure, linguistic ethnography, narrative performance, credibility assessment)*

Audiences often ascribe monolithic linguistic authority to news media institutions, viewing journalists as the bearers of language standards. Yet media are in fact heteroglossic, with journalists across different media platforms negotiating competing practical demands and different understandings of the social purposes and possibilities of their work. This article examines a case of hyperideologized minority-language media to show how the interplay of deep-seated language ideologies, the local sociohistorical context of media, and the material, technological affordances of different platforms produces a cline of enregisterment. It focuses on media produced in Buryat, a Mongolic language of southeastern Siberia whose speakers are shifting to Russian. Comparing journalists’ linguistic practices and audiences’ interpretations across the coexisting media platforms of newspapers, radio, and television shows how media enregisterment and, in turn, the enregisterment of a standard literary language occur along a cline that is shaped by the intersections of ideology with technology. (Media, language ideology, enregisterment, standardization, purism, materiality, Russia, Russian, Buryat)*

While speakers have been shown to deploy linguistic styles to project socially meaningful personae, less well-understood are the ways that variability or consistency of stylistic practice across and within speech events can itself accumulate to construct a public image. This study examines the use of (ING) and word-final /t/-release across multiple campaign rallies of three US presidential candidates, speakers in heightened contexts of persona construction. Differences emerged in the degree and nature of variability candidates exhibited in the use of these features across rally locales and utterance-level topic differences. We argue that the degree of linguistic variability a candidate exhibits across events itself serves as a socially meaningful linguistic resource, contributing to a constructed public image of flexibility or consistency in relation to a speaker's audience and public platform. We conclude that the amount of linguistic variability a speaker exhibits across contexts is itself a dimension of stylistic practice. (Style, sociophonetics, politicians, variability)*

Membership categories such as ‘doctor’, ‘customer’, and ‘girl’ can form a set of alternative ways of referring to the same person. Moreover, speakers can select from this array of correct alternatives that term best fitted to what is getting done in their talk. In contrast, self-references alone ordinarily do not convey category membership, unless the speaker specifically employs some sort of category-conveying formulation. This report investigates how speakers manage the categorical relevance of these simplest self-references (e.g. ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’) as a practical means of self-presentation. We first describe how speakers forestall recipient attribution of membership categories. We then consider cases where simple self-references are subjected to subsequent elaboration—via self-categorization—in the face of possible recipient misreading of the speaker's category membership. Thereafter, we introduce the practice of contrastive entanglement, and describe how speakers employ it to fashion tacitly categorized self-references that serve the formation of action. (Person reference, conversation analysis, membership categorization devices, race, gender)*

This study explores the emergence and developments through time of a semiotic artefact, the shield, used by demonstrators in violent anti-government protests in contemporary Venezuela. Drawing on the concept of discourse itineraries (Scollon 2008), the material and semiotic transformations this artefact underwent are mapped through various protest cycles, whilst considering the semiotic enrichment of century-long traditions of shields that inform the various functions they play within current day itineraries. The study concludes by discussing the advantages of using the concept of discourse itineraries for understanding moments in the life cycle of semiotic artefacts in the linguistic landscape and outlines future opportunities to expand the analysis of shields beyond the Venezuelan case. (Linguistic landscape of protest, discourse itineraries, semiotic artefact, shields, Venezuela)*

Language change across the lifespan is relatively underexplored in sociolinguistics. While studies of individuals’ language across life stages are often considered to complement large scale studies of community-level language change, this study aims to explore how changes to family environment and social mobility interact with individual speakers’ stylistic practice across life stages. It examines ethnographic interviews of five women, originally from the same area in western Japan, the same high school, and similar socio-economic background, conducted by a single researcher eleven years apart. The chronological and inter-participant comparisons reveal a complex pattern of stylistic practice and stance taking as the women share stories about career, family and relationships with the researcher. The study also discusses audience design in language variation and explores how the participants utilise their discursive repertoires in their interaction with the researcher, whose background is significantly divergent from theirs. (Language across the lifespan, stylistic practice, Japanese)*

This article discusses semiotic connections among linguistic prosody, the body, and forms of physical activity. A quantitative study of the instructional styles of bodybuilding and yoga instructors on YouTube shows that bodybuilding instructors employ faster articulation rates and higher pitch (F0) than yoga instructors. We argue that articulation rate and pitch become semiotically linked to notions of energy, and the differences in the instructors’ styles are rooted in differences in levels of embodied energy that bodybuilding and yoga are assumed to require. Instructors employ linguistic features that reflect these ideologies of their activities, and in doing so, present themselves as embodied instantiations of their respective practices. This study shows that ideologies of the body as a physically active doer of things provide an important source for the generation of iconic, energy-related meanings. Crucially, we show that ideological notions of energy and embodied iconicity can drive group-level patterns of linguistic variation. (Prosody, iconicity, style, embodiment, social meaning, ideology)*

It is received wisdom in variationist sociolinguistics that linguistic and social factors go hand in hand in structuring variability in language and any consequent instances of language change. We address the complexity of such factors by exploring data from several Arabic dialects in the eastern Arab world. We demonstrate that language change does not always follow expected phonological trajectories, even in cases where older changes are reconstructed to have operated along so-called universal patterns. In our explanation of recent changes in these dialects, we emphasise the role of social motivations for language change and the interactions between these social constraints and purely linguistic ones. Our analysis of change is supported by historical accounts of variation and change in Arabic. We illustrate how general principles of sociolinguistic theory apply to the Arabic data and provide additional layers of sociolinguistic information that highlight the importance of diverse data for evaluating cross-linguistic generalisations. (Arabic, language change, historical sociolinguistics)

In this article, we provide the first quantitative account of the frequent use of embedding in Shawi, a Kawapanan language spoken in Peruvian Northwestern Amazonia. We collected a corpus of ninety-two Frog Stories (Mayer 1969) from three different field sites in 2015 and 2016. Using the glossed corpus as our data, we conducted a generalised mixed model analysis, where we predicted the use of embedding with several macrosocial variables, such as gender, age, and education level. We show that bilingualism (Amazonian Spanish-Shawi) and education, mostly restricted by complex gender differences in Shawi communities, play a significant role in the establishment of linguistic preferences in narration. Moreover, we argue that the use of embedding reflects the impact of the mestizo1 society from the nineteenth century until today in Santa Maria de Cahuapanas, reshaping not only Shawi demographics but also linguistic practices. (Post-colonial societies, Amazonian linguistics, Kawapanan, Shawi, embedding, language variation and change, contact linguistics)*

This article addresses relationships between micro and macro aspects of language use through analyzing online interactions among neighbors discussing racism in their neighborhood. Membership categorization analysis supplemented with critical theory highlights how the ways neighbors name, characterize, and position categories orients to their rhetorical and identity goals (to construct reasonable stances, to seem not racist), which in turn motivates alignment with critical, folk, or colorblind ideologies of racism. Thus, ideologies do not determine interactional choices participants make, but rather are constituted by those choices. Findings also illustrate how discursive strategies such as reported speech, absurdity, three-part lists, and metadiscourse support ways that neighbors organize categories and achieve their aims. Additional contributions to this study include demonstrating the utility of membership categorization analysis for analyzing discourses of racism and providing practical insight into how racially diverse groups can have productive conversations about racism. (Racism, ideology, membership categorization analysis)*

This article examines struggles related to the recasting of the collective memory connected to Danish colonialism, through analyses of exhibitions in, and communication from, the Danish National Museum. By use of multimodal and semiotic landscape analysis, we show how the Danish National Museum works to reformulate the historical relationship between Greenland and Denmark in ways that avoid the colonizer's language and at the same time describe and construct complex relations of past and present. The analysis demonstrates how a temporal ambiguity is present in the museum exhibitions, not offering a conclusive understanding of the colonial period. At the same time, we show how the presence and absence of colonial language in public space is inscribed into temporal frames legitimizing or problematizing their status. (Semiotic landscape, colonialism, language and nation, temporality)*

In normative, academic, and informative works on Basque there are constant debates on the boundaries of what is meant by ‘authentic Basque’ and, alongside that, by ‘authentic Basque speaker’. In the current Basque media, these tensions are often addressed by means of creative practices, as in other minority contexts, by means of satire and other forms of humour, especially parody. In this work my subject is the character Jon Gotzon, who engages in parody on the radio programme Gaztea. Jon Gotzon is a hyperbolic and parodic stylisation of a new Basque speaker. He challenges ‘authentic’ and ‘native’ Basque-speaking styles in his syncretic bilingual stylisation and parodic discourse. In this research, I study the way this parody takes advantages of carnivalesque strategies in order to question fixed ideological hierarchies on Basqueness, and I explore the ideological positions Jon Gotzon's parody reveals, especially with respect to hybrid identities in the Basque community. (Parody, stylisation, authenticity, minority media, Basque, humour)*

While the sociolinguistic variable is often deemed the carrier of social meaning, recent work reveals that the strength of social meaning can interact with linguistic environments. This study provides additional evidence that the same sets of variants can index drastically different social meanings across linguistic environments. Specifically, we present two cases of linguistic stylization in Taiwanese singer Jay Chou's performance in different genres: the ‘Chinese Flavor’ ballad and hip hop. Focusing on two socially salient variables in Mandarin—rhotacization and retroflex sibilants—we argue that while in both cases, Chou adopts variants associated with standard and mainland Mandarin, they index different social meanings. The conforming linguistic use in the ‘Chinese Flavor’ ballad indexes a sense of tradition, whereas the hypercorrected forms in the hip-hop song construct an unconventional stance. The study also addresses the connections between linguistic and non-linguistic stylizations and calls for more research on the multimodal construction of style. (Social meaning, linguistic constraint, multimodal, high performance, Mandarin)*

In this article we consider the discursive production of status as it relates to democratic ideals of environmental equity and community responsibility, orienting specifically to food discourse and ‘elite authenticity’ (Mapes 2018), as well as to recent work concerning normativity and class inequality (e.g. Thurlow 2016; Hall, Levon, & Milani 2019). Utilizing a dataset comprised of 150 Instagram posts, drawn from three different acclaimed chefs’ personal accounts, we examine the ways in which these celebrities emphasize local/sustainable food practices while simultaneously asserting their claims to privileged eating. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we document three general discursive tactics: (i) plant-based emphasis, (ii) local/community terroir, and (iii) realities of meat consumption. Ultimately, we establish how the chefs’ claims to egalitarian/environmental ideals paradoxically diminish their eliteness, while simultaneously elevating their social prestige, pointing to the often complicated and covert ways in which class inequality permeates the social landscape of contemporary eating. (Food discourse, elite authenticity, normativity, social class, locality/sustainability)*

The sociodemographic typology of sign languages classifies them based on the characteristics and configurations of their users. When considering homesign and sign languages in rural areas, this typology needs further refinement. Here, I present new concepts to enable this. The study is based on fieldwork with twelve deaf people in Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea, and review of studies worldwide. Sign language communities can be mapped as sign networks. Using this mapping, I propose a new typological category for languages with one central deaf user and many fluent hearing signers: nucleated network sign language. I use sign base analysis to determine lexical consistency between unconnected deaf signers in Western Highlands. The high level of consistency among largely unconnected deaf people is explained by a regional sign network connecting deaf and hearing signers. This research emphasises the role of both deaf and hearing signers in sign language emergence and maintenance. (Sign languages, social networks, sign networks, typology, homesign, rural sign languages, Papua New Guinea)*

This article examines Iranian social media users’ understandings of normative behavior by focusing on a new online ‘nonstandard’ orthographic norm: the ‘hekasreh’. Adopting a chronotopic approach to the study of discourse, I analyze Iranian Twitter users’ social positionings towards the ‘hekasreh’ phenomenon. I show how tweeters invoke different spatiotemporal configurations, and the normative behaviors associated with them, to argue for and/or against this new orthographic norm. Focusing on the argumentative dynamics of the invoked chronotopes, I investigate the agentive and creative ways in which power is claimed and maintained in online spaces. This study, on the one hand, provides more empirical data to highlight the significance of attending to the online-offline nexus, and on the other hand argues for a more dynamic conceptualization of the interaction between normativity, power, and agency in online communication. (Social media, Farsi/Persian orthography, sociolinguistic normativity, chronotope, power, agency)*

This article questions the time of white modernity based on historical periodization and sequential progression, arguing for a more multifaceted approach to time and space in linguistic landscapes (LL). It rethinks the concept of chronotope by examining effects of the African diaspora in Brazil. The experience of radical uprooting it promoted fuses spatiotemporal dimensions that operate in complementary directions. On the one hand, a necrotope sets forth submission and destruction. On the other, visceral resistance to obliteration emerges when the timespace of encruzilhadas ‘crossroads’ is produced in the cracks of colonial power. The LL at Pedra do Sal in Rio de Janeiro suggests that approaching timespace from this perspective captures the juxtaposition of stasis and mobility, oppression and resistance, loss and life, past and present. We argue that thinking of time outside and against the Euro-chronometer requires decolonial epistemologies that have the potential to disrupt racist chronologies. (Chronotope, linguistic landscapes, African diaspora, temporality, race, Rio de Janeiro)*

This study argues for the analytical validity of the chronotope in research on context by examining a conversational narrative between Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans. It offers an endogenous view of context in the sense that chronotopes are anchored by how participants invoke specific time-space representations relevant to the active shaping of context. Furthermore, it adds a historical dimension to the understanding of context as multi-layered in meaning. In the data, participants’ discussion of Taiwanese loanwords creates three connected chronotopes that draw on Taiwan's transnational history for the narrative co-construction. Finally, the chronotopic analysis demonstrates how identities emerge as time-space coordinates—seventeenth-century Dutch in Taiwan and twenty-first-century Taiwanese in the US—and are used as resources to map a shared background with a Taiwanese origin. The study applies the notion of the chronotope outside of the interview setting and contributes to a more laminated theorization of context in naturally occurring conversation. (Chronotope, context, narrative, historicity, Taiwanese American, identity)*