Current Table of Contents

• Between Convergence and Divergence: Reformatting Language Purism in the Montreal Tamil Diasporas
  This article examines how ideologies of language purism are reformatted by creating interdiscursive links across spatial and temporal scales. I trace convergences and divergences between South Asian and Québécois sociohistorical regimes of language purism as they pertain to the contemporary experiences of Montreal's Tamil diasporas. Indian Tamils and Sri Lankan Tamils in Montreal emphasize their status differences by claiming that the former speak a modern "vernacular" Tamil and the latter speak an ancient "literary" Tamil. The segregation and purification of these social groups and languages depend upon the intergenerational reproduction of scalar boundaries between linguistic forms, interlocutors, and decentered contexts. [Tamils, Quebec, diaspora, linguistic purism, spatiotemporal scales]
• Licked by the Mother Tongue: Imagining Everyday Sanskrit at Home and in the World
  This paper examines the ways in which Sanskrit revivalists in contemporary India imagine social contexts for the production and reproduction of Sanskrit speech. In contrast to the received view of Sanskrit as being a ritual language par excellence, opposed at every step to the domestic sphere and everyday life, Sanskrit revivalists treat Sanskrit as a "mother tongue," figuring the home as the primary site for the creation of an "everyday Sanskrit" world and the mother as the primary agent of this process of Sanskritizing the domestic sphere. "Domesticating Sanskrit," the process of bringing the elevated ritual language down into everyday life, at the very same time "Sanskritizes the domestic," that is, ritually transforms or elevates the home into a "Sanskrit home." Moving outward from the Sanskritized domestic sphere, activists also imagine other contexts in which one could use Sanskrit, which nonetheless conforms to a notion of a Sanskrit interiority or domesticity. [India, Sanskrit, language revival, mother tongue, middle class, ritual]
• Enregistering, Authorizing and Denaturalizing Identity in Indonesia
  This article focuses on one aspect of processes of enregisterment in Indonesia, namely the ways in which institutional representations of language use formulate semiotic registers linking language use to performable social categories of personhood and relationship. I examine three types of institutional and thus authorized speech events: schooling, census practices, and television. Of particular interest are three patterns of representation which I exemplify with excerpts from three television series. The first is the language-ethnicity link long established in colonial practices and found in all three institutional representations of language use. The second pattern relates primarily to some of the new inflections created as part of the first pattern, namely the representation of Indonesian as an index of the ethnic other. The third pattern of representation resembles a type of competing ideology where language-ethnicity links are denaturalized through practices of adequation.[adequation, denaturalization, enregisterment, identity, Indonesia, media]
• Writing Ideology: Hybrid Symbols in a Commemorative Visitor Book in Israel
  This article joins recent ethnographies of written documents which shed light on embedded practices and codes in and through which writing is produced and consumed. The article explores the linguistic ideology of writing through examining inscriptions made in a visitor book in a war commemoration museum in Jerusalem, Israel. These settings supply a dual ideological framework, fusing the modern ideologies of authenticity and national commemoration. Under attention are the physical affordances and circumstances of the visitor book and how they contribute to an "authentic" mode of commemoration-cum-participation via inscribing, where language ideology and national ideology reinforce each other. The analysis suggests that the category "writing" is reductionist, and that under embodied sensibilities it should better be viewed as an array of textual, para-textual, and non-textual visual signs that are fused into the production of materialized hybrid inscriptions. Further, the situatedness and corporeality of inscribing practices carries far reaching semiotic implications, including the transformation of the ontic state of "texts" into that of symbols, calling for the rematerialization of inscribing. [handwriting, language ideologies, museum, commemoration, visitor book]
• Socializing Puros Pericos (Little Parrots): The Negotiation of Respect and Responsibility in Antonero Mayan Sibling and Peer Networks
  This article examines family and peer practices of socialization that illuminate a culture specific social ontology of intentions (Duranti 2006). An interpretive approach to the study of children's language socialization and peer talk is adopted to analyze how local beliefs concerning children's socialization and development are afforded within multiparty participation frameworks that involve teasing and shaming routines. These routines are powerful discursive strategies in the everyday negotiation and co-construction of peer politics and kin group social relationships. Data include ethnographic observational and naturally occurring video-recorded quotidian interactions collected March 1998[ndash]March 1999 in San Antonio Aguas Calientes, a highland Guatemala Kaqchikel Maya town. [responsibility, intentionality, language socialization, peer talk-in-interaction]
• Justifying Race Talk: Indexicality and the Social Construction of Race and Linguistic Value
  When individuals link linguistic behavior to speaker identity, they justify the differentiation of social types based on speech style, and also attach social value to ways of speaking. This study examines ten interviewees' racial characterizations of pre-recorded voices and highlights how they justify their identification of speaker types and speech styles as socially recognizable. Findings illustrate how interviewees formulate links between linguistic habits and social types with a range of accompanying interdiscursive justifications across orders of indexicality. Implications for theory and practice include connections between normative evaluative race talk and its role in the dialectic reproduction of language ideologies. [race talk, language ideologies, interdiscursivity, orders of indexicality, discourse analysis]
• Urban Princesses: Performance and "Women's Language" in Japan's Gothic/Lolita Subculture
  This paper investigates the linguistic strategies used in the counterpublic discourse of Gothic/Lolita, a young Japanese women's subculture of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and explores how the subculture and its practices are characterized by the Japanese media. Particular attention is paid to how subcultural magazines, websites, and Gothic/Lolitas themselves create and sustain a "virtual linguistic community" through a specialized lexicon of neologisms and re-appropriated "women's language," as well as negative identity practices that seek to define Gothic/Lolita against other subcultures and fashions such as kosupure ["Cosplay" i.e., Costume Play]. Additionally, an analysis of representations of Gothic/Lolita speech in two television programs reveals how the media constructs ambivalent images via iconization and erasure through narration and editing.[youth subculture, gender and language, speech community, counterpublic, Japan]
• An Introduction to Contact Linguistics – By Donald Winford
  
• Rancheros in Chicagoacán: Language and Identity in a Transnational Community – By Marcia Farr Mexican Americans and Language: Del Dicho al Hecho – By Glenn A. Martínez
  
• Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter – By Webb Keane
  
• Learning to Write "Indian": The Boarding-School Experience and American Indian Literature – By Amelia V. Katanski
  
• Journey of Song: Public Life and Morality in Cameroon – By Clare A. Ignatowski
  
• ¿Qué Onda?: Urban Youth Cultures and Border Identity – By Cynthia L. Bejarano
  
• Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería: Speaking a Sacred World – By Kristina Wirtz
  
• Chinese Englishes: A Sociolinguistic History – By Kingsley Bolton
  
• Language Endangerment and Language Revitalization – By Tasaku Tsunoda
  
• Publications Received