In this brief forum article, I draw from the disciplinary orientation of linguistic anthropology to discuss how a collection of linguistic and semiotic resources gets "enregistered" as the "language" for specific communicative activities. Enregisterment is an ongoing social and ideological process whereby a semiotic corpus gets…

We present a description and an analysis of three related language games in Africa's Gulf of Guinea: Fa d'Ambô's Fa do Vesu, Lung'Ie's Faa di Vesu, and São Tomé and Príncipe Portuguese's P-language. We show how these language games can be used to investigate the linguistic features of their main languages and as learning resources for second…

Informed by Goffman's influential essay on "The neglected situation" this paper examines the contextual and interactive dimensions of performance in large-scale educational assessments. The paper applies Goffman's participation framework and associated theory in linguistic anthropology to examine how testing situations are framed and…

In this article, we invite a rethinking of traditional perspectives of language in autism. We advocate a theoretical reappraisal that offers a corrective to the dominant and largely tacitly held view that language, in its essence, is a referential system and a reflection of the individual's cognition. Drawing on scholarship in Conversation…

This article discusses the narrative architecture and interactional uptake of a school child's story about independence in Barbados during sharing time. It is found that an institutional focus on standard resources impacts both teachers' and children's sociolinguistic behavior. Ethnopoetic analysis brings out the child's patterned use of narrative…

This paper explores the interactions surrounding Bible teaching as a means of understanding how Jewish youth are discursively implicated within ideologies of community. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from linguistic anthropology and interactional sociolinguistics, I present a micro-analysis of a classroom lesson on the book of Leviticus to…

This paper advocates a new perspective on languages. It begins by demonstrating that, the occasional disavowals of sociolinguists notwithstanding, the lens through which we in the 21st century, both specialists and laypeople, view languages is predominantly biological. It then suggests that this biological metaphor is conceptually unhelpful and…

The aim of the present paper is to provide an overview of the so-called "Spanglish" phenomenon and its linguistic repertoires (code-switching utterances). We propose that it is necessary to link all different forms of analysis in order to verify hypotheses regarding the relationship among social, linguistic, and cognitive processes behind…

In this paper, we analyse the cultural models (or folk theory of language) that the Mapuche intellectual elite have about Mapudungun, the native language of the Mapuche people still spoken today in Chile as the major minority language. Our theoretical frame is folk linguistics and studies of language ideology, but we have also taken an applied…

The media's response to the release of "Math Instruction that Makes Sense" (2011), a research report by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (FCPP), helped spark a public controversy and spur the Saskatchewan government to reexamine the Ministry of Education's math curriculum. The purpose of this article is to examine the CBC's…

Multicultural discourse has reached Latin American higher education in the form of a set of policies targeting indigenous peoples. These policies are strongly influenced by the transfer of European notions of "interculturality", which, in the Mexican context, are understood as positive interactions between members of minority and…

This paper surveys the research methods and approaches used in the multidisciplinary field of applied language studies or language education over the last fourty years. Drawing on insights gained in psycho- and sociolinguistics, educational linguistics and linguistic anthropology with regard to language and culture, it is organized around five…

This article focuses on the emergence of what the author refers to as "global ill-literacies," that is, the hybrid, transcultural linguistic and literacy practices of Hip Hop youth in local and global contexts, as well as the pedagogical possibilities that scholars open up as they engage these forms. By reviewing a broad but focused range of…

This paper discusses the relationship between entrenched beliefs about language ("language ideologies") and the linguistic system, and considers how conflicts between propositional and procedural knowledge about language have an effect upon the way in which language is regulated within society. It examines the epistemological foundations for…

This article is about interaction, culture, and creativity. The ethnographic setting is a set of jazz performance classes at a California university. Although I write about jazz music, the reader need not have a background in studying or performing jazz (or music in general) to understand this article. In the title of the article, the term…