The Ways Of Expressing Condolences Implicitly And Their Effect On Sociolinguistics.

The article considers condolence as a form of English speech etiquette, analyzed as an expressive speech act. The relevance of teaching speech etiquette in a situation of condolence lies in the fact that the effectiveness of learning English increases in the conditions of modeling a real communicative situation. Linguistic means of speech act expression are considered. It introduces sociolinguistics by means of five areas of research: quantitative sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, register variation, discourse analysis, and the sociology of language.

Academic knowledge production and prefigurative politics

Inequality is the pervasive structural characteristic of academic knowledge production. To dismantle this inequality, the challenge raised by prefigurative politics which is based on an ethos of congruence between means and ends must be taken up by the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. The IJSL’s peer review process, its academic conventions and its access model can potentially be spaces for concrete practices that prefigure parity in academic knowledge production.

Southernizing and decolonizing the Sociology of Language: African scholarship matters

In this short article we call for decolonization strategies in the Sociology of Language through a focus shift towards the global South, in particular Africa and a heightened attention to “race” as a significant category. We highlight three primary points that require critical attention in a decolonized Sociology of Language: (i) the identification of northern sociolinguistic theories which have been masked as universal and a critical shift towards theoretical frameworks emerging from the South; (ii) the acknowledgement of “white” privilege and “white fragility” in language studies and its related problem of ignoring “race” as a significant category, in scholarship as well as among authors/editors; and (iii) the under-representation of (especially female) scholars of colour in sociolinguistic research.

Raciolinguistic genealogy as method in the sociology of language

This commentary proposes raciolinguistic genealogy as a methodological approach to the sociology of language. It briefly defines three components of this approach: 1) a genealogical stance; 2) a materialist framing of racism; and 3) a raciolinguistic perspective. It offers the case of bilingual education in the United States as an illustration of the affordances of raciolinguistic genealogy in moving the field forward.

THE WAYS OF EXPRESSING CONDOLENCES IMPLICITLY AND THEIR EFFECT ON SOCIOLINGUISTICS

The article considers condolence as a form of English speech etiquette, analyzed as an expressive speech act. The relevance of teaching speech etiquette in a situation of condolence lies in the fact that the effectiveness of learning English increases in the conditions of modeling a real communicative situation. Linguistic means of speech act expression are considered. It introduces sociolinguistics by means of five areas of research: quantitative sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, register variation, discourse analysis, and the sociology of language.

Editorial: using smartphones to collect linguistic data

In the last decade, we have seen a number of studies come to life in which the collection of data for linguistic research has not followed a traditional path of holding in-person interviews or experiments, or using surveys for eliciting judgements, but instead have made use of smartphone technology and applications for collecting data. The current collection is the first to include papers with reflections from the linguistics community about the use of smartphone technology for linguistic research. The scope of the projects presented in this collection is a broad one. They have the mode of data collection, i.e. through a phone, in common, but all present different opportunities and challenges. The studies discussed in this introduction use smartphones to investigate language variation and change, clinical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and the sociology of language. Our hope is that this issue will provide ideas and inspiration, as well as access to readily usable tools, to keep researchers working, in a remote fashion, towards increasing our understanding the human competence of language.