Indexical borders: the sociolinguistic scales of the shibboleth

This paper engages with the notion of the shibboleth, an indexically loaded, usually referentially indifferent set of (ideologically constructed) minimal pairs that is used in order to mark and perform social differentiation. We argue that the shibboleth is to be considered an interpretive (metapragmatic) phenomenon that operates on different sociolinguistic scales, notably the discursive scale (ideologies of communication), the performative scale (performance and metapragmatic stance-taking), and the subjective scale (lived experience). We propose a scalar metapragmatic theory of the shibboleth as an “indexical border” that takes into account how shibboleths emerge (are enregistered) and how they depend on contextualisation (or the indexical field). As a case in point, we present analyses of biographical construals of sociolinguistic displacement in the context of remigration from German-speaking countries to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Specifically, we focus on construals of displacement that are connected with (mis-)performances of phonologically rather subtle but indexically highly salient Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian affricate shibboleths (<č/dž> and <ć/đ>).

Insurgent words: challenging the coloniality of language

This article explores language ideologies and sociolinguistic scales from the perspective of decolonization. Coloniality is a multi-scalar world system that affects micro-level interactions in multiple locales, both in the metropole and in the former colonies. Not only does coloniality exist on a world scale, resistance to it is scaled up too and engulfs the world. The linguistic tradition that I seek to trace in this article is imaginative, creative and oriented towards alternative decolonial futures. It speaks to the experience of the coloniality of language, of language as alienating and oppressive, and to the corresponding desire, and need, for a different language. It articulates a decolonial philosophy and brings art and politics together to change the world. I show that the global south was, and is, an intellectual-artistic-political vanguard, articulating and shaping discourses about language and revolutionary action. In philosophical, artistic and political practice – stretching from Martinique to Paris, from Cape Town to Kingston – language and revolutionary practice merge into one: language no longer just reflects reality, it can change it.

Language ideologies and social positioning: the restoration of a “much needed bridge”

In recent years, the intersections between, or entanglements of, local action and translocal patterns gained renewed interest in sociolinguistics. Received distinctions such as micro/macro or practice/structure have been challenged and confronted with more granular concepts such as sociolinguistic scales. Consequently, established disciplinary orientations such as micro/macro or qualitative/quantitative sociolinguistics have also been questioned: rather than one of two options, sociolinguistics is now supposed to embrace “complexity”. This fundamental discussion also centrally concerns research into language ideologies. While it has always been acknowledged that language ideologies frame and shape, or manifest in, local action, they have long been construed as a translocal social order, a “macro phenomenon”. In the wake of the general discussion outlined above, however, this has been challenged. Language ideologies are now increasingly located at the intersection of structure and practice, construed as structurating practices and as dynamic, scalar phenomena that emerge from, and are subjected to, ongoing local processes of social positioning and indexical enregisterment (which they reversely frame). This special issue takes up the discussion and asks where we can get to with such a complex notion of language ideologies and/as social positioning, how far we have come already, and which obstacles lie ahead. The authors address these questions from different perspectives. This introduction sets the scene, recapitulates the discussion and state of the art, and provides an outline of the issue.

Figures of personhood: time, space, and affect as heuristics for metapragmatic analysis

Figure of personhood, or set of indexicals that are linked with a performable person type, occupies a key role in contemporary metapragmatic analysis. But how can the concept be operationalized so that it can be used to link metapragmatic analysis to critical investigation of the political processes underlying society? In this paper, I suggest that focusing on how figures of personhood in metapragmatic discourse are organized along dimensions of time, space, and affect can serve as valuable heuristics for a critically oriented metapragmatic analysis, as it is those dimensions that highlight the material and political groundedness of figures of personhood. This point is then demonstrated through three sample cases: representations of Koreans as incompetent speakers of English in a commercial advertisement, middle-class Filipino youths’ self-positioning through construction of an undesirable elite figure, and valorization of neoliberal future-readiness in a promotional video for a Singaporean university’s student career center.

(Meta-)communicative work in a counselling centre for refugees: reiteration, erasure and agency

We have no apartments is a phrase repeated over and over again at the counselling centre for refugees on housing matters based in Vienna, Austria, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork. Based on an analysis of processes of entextualisation, de- and recontextualisation in the reiterative, discursive chain, this paper traces the emergence of an institutional regime of communication and the ways institutional actors – counsellors and volunteers – produce, navigate and reproduce this regime by engaging in (meta-)communicative work. The analysis shows how individual agency is both contingent and co-productive of institutional order and social order more generally. With this contribution, I propose Judith Butler’s concept of the postsovereign subject as a way to understand the relations between “local” practices and wider processes of trans-situational meaning-making.

The dialectics of indexical semiosis: scaling up and out from the “actual” to the “virtual”

Conventional indexicality is semiotically effective when regimented by its meta-indexical (or “metapragmatic”) interpretant, a conceptual scheme presumed upon by participants in communication that determines the categories of possibility for a relevant “here-and-now” of indexically signaled co-presence, just as, conversely, such an interpretant is an emergent consequence of the sign’s pointing to its object. In the more general case of non-denotational indexicality – forms indicating everything from perduring demographic characteristics of participants in interaction to their role incumbencies, voicings of identity, and momentary relational attitudes and affects (loosely termed “stances”) – the culture – and thus group-specific metapragmatics (or “ethno-metapragmatics”) is central to how indexicals entail the mutual (il)legibility of interlocutors and the (in)coherence of interactional projects in which they are engaged, the “interactional text” of what is happening. This inherent metapragmatic functionality of models of indexical signs and their contexts is, in general, itself influenced by genres of metapragmatic discourse about social life that “circulate” among networks of people who participate in certain sites of sociality. Such “circulation” is a virtual reality that comes into being via chains of interdiscursivity, allowing us to imagine an “ideological” plane with its own order of virtual semiotic dialectic that, notwithstanding, we experience in actual interactional context by its effects on the ever-changing what and how of indexicality.

Ideologies of English in Asia: an editorial

That English has spread in Asia is well-known, but this critical reflection, and the five contributions and book review that we hereby introduce, contribute to rectifying the relative absence in the sociology of language literature of studies approaching language ideologies and practices in specific Asian contexts from local perspectives. We are not alone; our inspections of journal archives show that scholars are increasingly responding to this relative absence in recent years. What this special issue offers is further diversity of both authors and cases, and moreover this special issue draws attention to the immutable, binary structure underlying the various globally-circulating discourses of the East and the West as part of investigating how socially constructed East-West binaries interact with language ideologies about English and other languages. It shifts the attention from fixity – East versus West – to diversity, extending East to Easts and West to Wests as our contributors identify and examine multiple, endogenous “imaginative geograph[ies]” (from Arif Dirlik’s [1996] “Chinese history and the question of Orientalism”, History and Theory 35(4): 97) constructed through various Orientalist ideologies. It founds this approach on a combination of the theory of recursive language ideologies and critical Orientalism scholarship. This is generative of new and useful sociolinguistic analyses. Having laid out this theoretical extension, this editorial then provides an overview of the issue’s contributions, which examine how socially constructed East-West binaries are interacting with language ideologies about English and other languages on sub-national scales in various Asian contexts including in Korea, China, Japan, Tajikistan and Pakistan.