Public and scholarly discourse has established the ‘coming-out story’ as a culturally significant narrative genre for gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-identifying (LGBTQ) individuals. Yet what happens when this genre is disciplined and managed for institutional ends? This study examines the process of how several LGBTQ individuals learn to narrate their coming-out experiences through trainings for a university's LGBTQ-themed speaker panels. Data include ethnographic observations and audio recordings related to training activities such as practice tellings and peer feedback sessions. Analysis focuses on the discursive practices through which training participants manage a pair of narrative dilemmas that stem from an institutional variation of the coming-out genre. This article contributes to literature on narrative and genre by demonstrating how a regulated form of personal narrative is learned and enforced to achieve the larger ideological aims of an institution. It also contributes to knowledge about identity as a fluid concept. (Coming-out story, genre, narrative, identity, ideology, performance, LGBTQ)*

This article explores the degree and kind of lability that occurs throughout the life span of the individual during ongoing rapid change in the quotative system. Two comparative analyses trace speakers' use of be like across a shorter and a longer time span. Trend data reveal that the robust change is arrested in the middle age brackets; speakers in their thirties seem to display ‘retrograde movement’ (Sankoff & Wagner 2006) away from the community-wide change. This finding could be interpreted as incipient age-grading. A small-scale panel sample collected forty-two years after the initial interview suggests that some older speakers participate in the trend, albeit at very low frequencies. This finding, while exploratory at the moment, might be interpreted as indicative of ‘life-span change’ (Sankoff 2005). A conception of the change in progress in the quotative system as monotonous would thus both under and overestimate the rate of change. (Change across the life span, age-grading, retrograde change, life-span change, quotation, style, language ideologies)*

Romani is a fascinating test case for the role that language plays in the process of identity consolidation in a transnational context. Standardisation is no longer inherently connected to the ‘territorialisation’ of language. Instead, we witness a bottom-up process in which individuals take ownership of language and negotiate language practices. Status regulation and language planning can be instigated and even implemented by institutions other than national states. All of this leads to pluralism of form rather than unification. Yet language remains a key locus for political mobilisation. It allows players to claim authenticity, it offers opportunities for intervention by external facilitators, and it provides a discussion platform through which traditional images can be challenged and recognition can be awarded. (Romani, language planning, standardization, language policy, transnationalism)*

‘Sweet voice’, a distinctive Japanese vocal style, illustrates the role played by voice quality as a marker of authenticity in the construction of linguistic styles. The acoustic properties and sociopragmatic functions of sweet voice, as performed by professional voice actresses, are analyzed using data from anime programs, paraphernalia, and fan discourse. Sweet voice is shown to be connected to a traditional notion of Japanese femininity, and licenses the positive use of grammatical features of Japanese Women's Language. The mature, traditional image conveyed by sweet voice contrasts with the youthful cuteness of burikko and related vocal styles, illustrating that multiple notions of femininity operate within Japanese popular culture. The interplay of voice quality and grammatical features suggests that perceptions of conscious control at different levels of language play a crucial role in social meaning. (Voice quality, Japanese, language and gender, style, authenticity)*

In this special issue, we build on Bauman's seminal observation about performance, that ‘the act of expression is put on display, objectified, marked out to a degree from its discursive surrounding and opened up to interpretive scrutiny and evaluation by an audience’ (2000:1). More recently, scholars have moved to examining the performative role of heteroglossia, that is, the use of multiply sourced, semiotic (verbal and nonverbal) forms. In particular, this line of research has shown how attention to heteroglossic performances and their local interpretations can illuminate the subtle politics of dominant and nondominant identities in different ethnographic contexts. This is particularly true of what Coupland (2007) calls ‘high performances’, which, as Bell & Gibson (2011:558) write, are privileged sites for allowing participants to indexically associate expressive forms with social personae. Thus, while all performances are inherently reflexive, heteroglossic performances particularly amplify that reflexivity with respect to their multiple frames, voices, and stances that they presuppose and establish.

Nonnative English speakers (NNESs) who teach at English-medium institutions in the United States (US) have frequently been the subject of student complaints. Research into language ideologies concerning NNESs in the US suggests that such complaints can be understood as manifestations of a broader project of social exclusion operating, in part, through the ideological construction of the NNES as incomprehensible Other. The present study explores the extent to which such ideological presuppositions and exaggerative performances are observable in students' evaluations of ‘Asian’ mathematics instructors on the website RateMyProfessors.com (RMP). A mixed methodological approach combining statistical analysis of numeric RMP ratings, quantitative corpus linguistic techniques, and critical discourse analysis was employed. Findings confirm the presence of disadvantages related to ‘Asian’ instructors' race and language. However, RMP users' discourse is shown to be less overtly discriminatory and instead to reproduce dominant language ideology in subtle, previously undescribed ways.(Student evaluations, higher education, university teaching, nonnative speakers, second language users, ethnicity, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, formulaic language)*

This article examines how the social meanings of phonetic variation in a British adolescent community are influenced by a complex relationship between ethnicity, social class, and social practice. I focus on the realisation of the happy vowel in Sheffield English, which is reported to be a lax variant [ε̈] amongst working-class speakers but is undergoing change towards a tense variant [i] amongst middle-class speakers. I analyse the acoustic realisation of this vowel across four female communities of practice in a multiethnic secondary school and find that the variable's community-wide associations of social class are projected onto the ethnographic category of school orientation, which I suggest is a more local interpretation of class relations. Ethnographic evidence and discourse analysis reveal that local meanings of the happy vowel vary further within distinctive community of practice styles, which is the result of how ethnicity and social class intersect in structuring local social practices. (Intersectionality, indexicality, social meaning, identity, ethnicity, social class)*

The It Gets Better project has been held up as a model of successful social media activism. This article explores how narrators of It Gets Better videos make use of generic intertextuality, strategically combining the canonical narrative genres of the exemplum, the testimony, and the confession in a way that allows them to claim ‘textual authority’ and to make available multiple moral positions for themselves and their listeners. This strategy is further facilitated by the ambiguous participation frameworks associated with digital media, which make it possible for storytellers to tell different kinds of stories to different kinds of listeners at the same time, to simultaneously comfort the victims of anti-gay violence, confront its perpetrators, and elicit sympathy from ‘onlookers’. This analysis highlights the potential of new practices of online storytelling for social activism, and challenges notions that new media are contributing to the demise of common narrative traditions. (Activism, digital media, genre, LGBT discourse, narrative, positioning)*

In Italy, barzellette are short funny stories that speakers perform in various social events with large groups of friends, relatives, or colleagues. In Northern Italy, where a strong anti-immigration platform has been implemented by two influential political parties of the Veneto region, barzellette are performed to represent certain immigrant groups, especially the so-called extracomunitari. In this article, I examine the performative power of multidialectal language play in race-based humor through an analysis of two such joking events. I show how Veneto speakers perform barzellette in their local language, Veneto dialect, to mock immigrant voices, using approaches that purport, not necessarily in a deliberate fashion, to ‘contain’ or ‘conceal’ their racist remarks in their local code. In this way, they sharpen an exclusionary divide between an ‘us’, as insiders, as the local speakers of this language, and a ‘them’, as outsiders, or the immigrant ‘others’, who do not share this code. I thus examine issues of covert racist discourse within an ‘unmarked’ framework in which race and racializing discourses are embedded in social and cultural patterns. (Code-shifting, jokes, Lega Nord, migration, race, racialized discourse, Veneto dialect)*

This article considers a practice in French talk-in-interaction, formally characterized as other-repeats prefaced by the change-of-state particle ah. The target practice accomplishes a claim of receipt, while at the same time indexing as somehow inadequate a previous turn by the receipt speaker. Evidence drawn upon includes: (i) the sequential locations of the examined phenomenon; (ii) ensuing developments of the sequence, wherein the indexed inadequacy is more explicitly acknowledged; and (iii) the discriminability of the focal practice with respect to alternative practices. Two phonetically distinguished variants of the practice, and their respective sequential projections (‘problematizing’ topicalization or ‘accepting’ closure), are discussed. This article contributes to the study of how intersubjectivity is managed and administered by participants, and to research on the management of accountability for producing ‘adequate’ turns and actions. Finally, it addresses ongoing discussions concerning the analysis of multiple actions (first- and second-order) conveyed simultaneously in single turns. (French, talk-in-interaction, repetition, receipts, particles, indexicality, intersubjectivity, prosody, phonetics)*

J. L. Austin's influential dissection of speech acts into locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts has given rise to much scholarly attention to illocutionary acts and forces. While the perlocutionary facet of speech acts has gone largely undiscussed by philosophers and linguists, folk theories of language often attend closely to the relation between speech and its consequences. In this article, I discuss one conception of perlocutions prominent in Yopno speaking communities in Papua New Guinea that emphasizes the agentive role of listeners in mediating between speech and its outcome. This cultural conception of perlocutions, I argue, is tied to a political sensibility that stresses the self-determination and equality of adult men. The article shows how cultural conceptions of perlocutions provide insight into political values and practices, and how political concerns inform folk models of perlocutions. (Perlocutions, politics, fashions of speaking, language ideology, Melanesia, Papua New Guinea)*

Based on conversation analysis (CA) of video-recorded therapy sessions, the article explicates a particular interactional project of positively evaluating client-reported behavior in psychotherapy. The analysis focuses on the therapist's actions that convey a positive evaluation of client-reported behavior that represents therapeutic progress. First, the data analysis revealed three components that constitute the evaluation project: discourse marker, compliment, and account. Second, the article shows that participants orient towards the observed evaluation project, both as a unified whole and as a combination of discrete and separate interactional turns. The article suggests that this evaluation project functions as a tool for achieving the institutional goal of reinforcing therapeutically desired behaviors. The empirical findings are discussed in relation to the Stocks of Interactional Knowledge, described in handbooks on dialectical behavior therapy (the specific setting in which the data were collected). (Professional-client interaction, adolescent, psychotherapy, evaluation, complimenting, conversation analysis)*

This article uses the concept of stance to examine a series of activities and plurilingual heteroglossic performances and improvisations in a Corsican language-planning event. It focuses on how stances taken by performers attribute stances to the audience, as well as how stance objects (language, community, heritage) are construed in performance. This analysis is used to examine how these language-planning events mediate ideological tensions in Corsican language planning, specifically between traditional monolingual/purist ideologies and plurilingual, polynomic ones. (Stance, Corsica, performance, ideology, heteroglossia)*

Mathematical prescriptivism is a language ideology found in school mathematics that uses a discourse of rationality to proscribe language forms perceived as illogical or inefficient. The present study is based on a three-year ethnographic investigation of Math Corps, a community of practice in Detroit, Michigan, in which prescriptive language in the classroom is used both to highlight beneficial algorithms and to build social solidarity. Although motivated by the analogy with English orthographic reform, prescriptivism at Math Corps avoids potentially harmful criticism of community members of the sort often experienced by African American students. A playful linguistic frame, the prescriptive melodrama, highlights valued prescriptions, thereby enculturating students into the locally preferred register, the ‘Math Corps way’, which encompasses social, moral, linguistic, and mathematical practices and norms. A sociolinguistic and anthropological perspective on prescriptivism within communities of practice highlights positive alternatives to the universalizing prescriptions found in other English contexts. (Prescriptivism, language ideology, mathematics education, community of practice, Math Corps, linguistic anthropology, language socialization)*

This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whether Kiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking in multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language ‘High German’, a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of ‘German’ speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane. (Standard language ideology, Kiezdeutsch, dialect, public discourse, Othering, racism by proxy)*

This article examines how essentializing ideologies of language and identity in Toronto's Portuguese ethnic market, constructed as monolingual and monocultural within the larger mainstream market of English-speaking Canada, provide the background for humorous sociolinguistic performances that playfully acknowledge, reproduce, and challenge ethnolinguistic stratification. After more than sixty years, the dominant spaces of the local Portuguese market continue to exclude most Portuguese-Canadian youth by rarely legitimizing the use of English, bilingual code-switching, or ‘broken’ or ‘Azorean’ Portuguese. By choosing YouTube as a space in which to engage audiences in ideologies of language and identity through performances of sociolinguistic caricatures, three young Portuguese-Canadian amateur comedians negotiate sociolinguistic boundaries with an ambivalent agency. The mocking performances are legitimized by the performers' in-group status and reveal, among other things, how a stigmatized variety of Azorean Portuguese and certain ethnolinguistic stereotypes can be reappropriated and reinforced relative to sociolinguistic hierarchies. (Language ideologies, ethnic humor, performativity, heteroglossia)*

Until recently, the members of a community on the Andean-Amazonian agricultural frontier of Southern Peru have tended to limit their social ties to members of their own families. But the residents have begun to forge a ‘community’ through a semiotic distinction between private and public spaces, social practices, and domains of morality. Particular discursive phenomena in the asamblea ‘community meeting’ are deployed to create and maintain the community as a domain of action distinct from kin commitments, and participation in the asamblea offers a context in which to assume a novel political and moral subjectivity. Thus, the social organizational construct of the community is emergent in public interactions. The article concludes with a comparative analysis of public discourse in another comunidad nativa ‘indigenous community’ that has not embraced the notion of ‘community’, and demonstrates how code-switching allows leaders there to invoke both the private and public modes of social authority. (Amazonia, Andes, Matsigenka, Spanish, Quechua)*

This article analyses phonetic variation among young people who have learned a minority language in immersion schooling as part of revitalisation measures. Such speakers are increasingly referred to as ‘new speakers’ in an expanding body of literature. The variable phonetic features analysed are vowels, laterals, and intonation in the speech of new Gaelic speakers from Glasgow and the Isle of Lewis. Results support previous work suggesting that new speakers will sound different from ‘traditional speakers’. These results are discussed in terms of language contact, modes of acquisition in revitalisation situations, and the differing perceptions and ideologies surrounding how new speakers use Gaelic. The data also necessitate an examination of some of the assumptions in sociolinguistic models of change and their applicability to contexts of rapid social evolution. (New speakers, language revitalisation, minority languages, Scottish Gaelic, laterals, vowels, intonation)*

Researchers have called for studies that link the macro and the micro in language policy research. In turn, the notion of ‘micro’ has been theorised as referring either to the micro implementation of macro policies or to micro policies. In this article, a third way of thinking about the relationship between the macro and the micro in language policy—referred to as the interpretive perspective—is proposed. In this perspective, macro language policies and micro language choice practices are seen as interdependent, as shaping each other. The article substantiates this view drawing on a practice I call translinguistic apposition and that I have observed in a variety of ‘most highly regulated’ texts in Rwanda. However, for an in- depth understanding, the practice is described drawing on data from a single source, namely the Rwandan multilingual media blog www.igihe.com. The article demonstrates how this practice can be seen as shaped by the Rwandan macro language policy and, conversely, how the same macro policy can be seen as written into being through the same micro level practice. (Language policy, micro language policy, micro implementation of macro policy, translanguaging, translinguistic apposition, interpretive perspective)

This study investigates the construction of political identity in the 2011–2012 US Republican presidential primary debates. Focusing on candidates’ self-introductions, I analyze how candidates use references to family members and roles to frame their political identities or ‘presidential selves’. Family references are shown to (i) frame candidates’ personal identities as family men/women; (ii) interweave the spheres of home and politics and consequently, their private and public selves; (iii) serve as a tool of discursive one-upmanship in self-introduction sequences; and (iv) demonstrate intimate familiarity and expertise on the topic of national security. This study extends research on family discourse and identity by examining the rhetorical function of mentioning family-related identities in explicitly persuasive public discourse, and contributes to sociolinguistic research on political discourse by examining how family identities serve as a resource for framing political identities. (Discourse analysis, framing, family, identity, political discourse, presidential debates, sequentiality)