Current Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
  
• Cover
  
• Front Matter
  
• The Kalapalo Affinal Civility Register
  Data from narratives, conversations, and didactic speech are employed to describe a multimodal, combinatorial civility register used by speakers of Kalapalo, a central Brazilian Southern Carib language. Practiced among family members, these intimate ritual communications involve complementary grammatical, lexical, discursive, and interactive features, including self-abnegation and avoidance practices. Examples of conventional usage, and the consequences of register misuse and the collapse of civility are included. Affinal civility enables both specific domestic unions, and more extensive social networks or chains of partnerships within the multilingual Alto Xingu macropolity. The question of the relationship of affinal civility to multilingual macro-polities more generally is addressed with respect to evidence from Australia.
• Youth Language, Gaul Sociability, and the New Indonesian Middle Class
  This article examines the linguistic form and social functions of bahasa gaul, the informal Indonesian "language of sociability," as it is used among Indonesian university students and in various publications aimed at middle-class Indonesian youth. Bahasa gaul registers youth modernity in both its positive and more contested aspects. It expresses not only young people's aspirations for social and economic mobility, but also an increasingly cosmopolitan, national youth culture. Perhaps most significantly, bahasa gaul articulates the desire of Indonesian youth for new types of social belonging through the formulation of relationships that are more egalitarian and interactionally fluid as well as more personally expressive and psychologically individualized.
• Kinterm Usage and Hierarchy in Thai Children's Peer Groups
  This article examines Northern Thai children's language socialization into the elder sibling/younger sibling relationship, including the communicative practices for inhabiting it, through routinized person-referring practices in their peer groups. Notwithstanding a strong cultural emphasis on hierarchy in this community, children's unmarked practices for self and other reference reflect and create an egalitarian and intimate social space. When children invoke the hierarchical elder/junior relationship through their use of person reference[mdash]especially kinterms[mdash]it is done as a means of seeking compliance within these play groups. It is argued children's practices of kinterm usage socialize them into the affective and social dimensions of their relationships with siblings and friends.
• "Go [expletive] a girl for me": Bivalent Meaning, Cultural Miscues and Verbal Play in Ukrainian Migrant Labor Stories
  Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, migrant labor has become an increasingly important source of income for workers in the southwest Zakarpattia region of Ukraine. This article explores how locally constructed meanings of migrant labor emerge through bilingual verbal play in narratives focused on cultural differences between Zakarpattia villagers' life at home and the situations and people they encounter abroad. In my analysis of jokes and humorous narratives about migrant labor gathered in the field I focus on narrators' use of bivalent and near-bivalent words and phrases as a resource for the expression and representation of the complex relationship of villagers toward their position in the post-socialist cultural, linguistic, and economic landscape.
• Racing and Erasing the Playboy: Slang, Transnational Youth Subculture, and Racial Discourse in Brazil
  This article explores the complex negotiation of race, class, and space that surrounds the Brazilian Portuguese slang term 'playboy.' It is argued that youth use this slang term to grapple with transnational debates around race and to make sense of their nation's situation of stark inequality. Poor black male youth, in particular, use this social label to challenge their marginalization from the Brazilian nation-state, constructing themselves as more empowered racial and political subjects. Yet their more controversial semantic shifts are reinterpreted by dominant society, erasing the race of the playboy and diffusing their critique of Brazil's alleged racial democracy.
• Indigenous Linguistics and Land Claims: The Semiotic Projection of Athabaskan Directionals in Elijah Smith's Radio Work
  In recent decades, land claims and language revitalization have emerged as prominent forms of indigenous activism in many parts of the world. Activists' indigenous language performances merit special attention since they commonly foreground the semiotic resources of their languages and reference the social structures in which they are embedded. This article examines a co-performance by Yukon native leader Elijah Smith and Southern Tutchone elder Solomon Charlie that epitomizes the use of indigenous linguistic resources to assert native rights and identity in innovative contexts. In particular, Charlie's account exemplifies the essential roles of deictic terms as bridges between micro-level narrative processes and the macro-level social fields of contemporary society in which indigenous identity is projected.
• Book Reviews
  The Tailenders, Adele Horne, writer, director, and producer. 2005. New Day Films. 72 minutes.
• Book Reviews
  Medical Interpreting and Cross-Cultural Communication. Claudia Angelelli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 167 pp.
• Book Reviews
  Learning Identity: The Joint Emergence of Social Identification and Academic Learning. Stanton Wortham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 305 pp.
• Book Reviews
  Real Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture. Aaron A. Fox. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. xv. 364 pp. Putting. Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. David W. Samuels. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004. x. 325 pp.
• Book Reviews
  Language and Social Relations. Asif Agha. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xv. 427 pp.
• Book Reviews
  Speech Play and Verbal Art. Joel Sherzer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. ix. 186 pp.
• Book Reviews
  The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process. Stephen Houston, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xvii. 417 pp.
• Book Reviews
  . World of Others' Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality. Richard Bauman. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. ix. 184pp.
• Book Reviews
  Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language. William L. Leap and Tom Boellstroff, eds. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. 288 pp.
• Book Reviews
  Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt. Niloofar Haeri. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. xvi. 184 pp.
• Book Reviews
  Intercultural Discourse and Communication: The Essential Readings. Scott Kiesling and Christina Bratt Paulston, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. xvi. 330 pp.
• Book Reviews
  Language, Identity, and Stereotype among Southeast Asian American Youth: The Other Asian. Angela Reyes. Mahwah. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2007. xii. 183 pp.
• Book Reviews
  Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan. Miyako Inoue. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xvii. 323 pp.
• Book Reviews
  Masking Terror: How Women Contain Violence in Southern Sri Lanka. Alex Argenti-Pillen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 272 pp.
• Book Reviews
  Dialect Change: Convergence and Divergence in European Languages. Peter Auer, Frans Hinskens, and Paul Kerswill, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 2005. xiv. 415 pp. How New Languages Emerge. David Lightfoot, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 2006. ix. 199 pp.
• Publications Received