Through the analysis of materials such as online articles, blogs, and radio broadcasts, this paper investigates linguistic purism toward Russian and English loanwords in the understudied context of post-Soviet Armenia. Our analysis finds that public commentators categorize potential loanwords as "borrowings" ([foreign characters…

Language naming systems are local ways of organising diversity, yet the language names used by linguists are sometimes incommensurable with the lived social reality of speakers. The process of assigning language names is not neutral, trivial or objective: it is a highly political process driven and shaped by understandings of group identity,…

Historically, fictional productions which use sign language have often begun with scripts that use the written version of a spoken language. This can be a challenge for deaf actors as they must translate the written word to a performed sign language text. Here, we explore script development in "Small World," a television comedy which…

In this article I adopt a family language policy approach and a diachronic perspective to explore how the dialect-Italian dynamics unfolds differently within different cohorts of Italian migrants due to the hierarchical position of the two heritage languages. I highlight three main issues that emerge across time in the language policies in the…

A key factor that has been found to be critical in shaping family language policy is parents' linguistic identities, or "parents' personal experiences with bilingualism, biculturalism or second language learning" (King, Kendall A. & Lyn Fogle. 2006. Bilingual parenting as good parenting: Parents' perspectives on family language…

This article is concerned with the history of "yours sincerely," a popular closing formula in English epistolary discourse. The formula was already used sporadically in the seventeenth century, gradually increased in frequency in the Late Modern period, and was the preferred subscription in English business correspondence by the end of…

Insults are prototypical means to express impoliteness in social interactions. In film they are prime ways of staging conflict or jocular abuse, reflecting everyday communicative practices while contributing to the emotionality of dialogue, characterisation and plot advancement. Both original and dubbed films offer a privileged perspective to…

This article looks at what origin stories teach about the world and what kind of material presence they have in Southwestern Amazonia. We examine the ways the Apurinã relate to certain nonhuman entities through their origin story, and our theoretical approach is language materiality, as we are interested in material means of mediating traditional…

Multilingual crisis communication has emerged as a global challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Global public health communication is characterized by the large-scale exclusion of linguistic minorities from timely high-quality information. The severe limitations of multilingual crisis communication that the COVID-19 crisis has laid bare result…

In this paper, I explore multilingual preventative public health messages against the spread of COVID-19 in Taiwan between January and April 2020. Based on empirical data, the symbolic and substantive content of multilingual top-down and bottom-up public health strategies was analyzed and discussed. Findings suggest that the voices of indigenous…

This paper takes up conviviality as an analytical tool to investigate everyday language choices made by foreign residents living in Ras Al Khaimah, a small city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It draws on recent work in human geography and cultural studies to understand conviviality in terms of practices rather than outcomes. Specifically, it…

This paper is based on the data collected during fieldwork in the northern part of Mexico's state of Puebla in 2018-2019. During that period, there was a need to gather information that would serve as a starting point for the participatory-action research project in San Miguel Tenango, a village where the majority of people speak Nahuatl as their…

Although Singapore schools are English-medium, Mandarin is a compulsory subject for students of Chinese heritage. As young Singaporeans increasingly speak English at home, the required study of Mandarin has become a source of anxiety for families. Mandarin 'enrichment centers', which provide supplementary language classes, leverage this anxiety in…

This paper discusses symbolic violence in sociolinguistic research on multilingualism. It revisits an archived recording of a group discussion between four boys about their chances of having sex with a female researcher. The data is rife with symbolic violence. Most obviously, the conversation enacted a heterosexist form of symbolic violence. This…

The concept of sincerity has links to honesty, openness, and authenticity, including of feelings. As expressions of sincerity become formalized in epistolary practice, however, a tension arises between sincerity and the articulation of it. An examination of a corpus of private family letters in French and Spanish from the eighteenth and nineteenth…