The codification of propriety -- talking with a 'proper' accent -- is recorded in audiovisual texts so that cross-cultural interaction between social groups is not left to verbal dialogue alone but to more or less accurate visual cues and to paralinguistic as well as prosodic information. This chapter will examine scenes from various audiovisual…

In rural Valdres, Norway, the traditional regional dialect, called Valdresmål, has become an important resource for popular style and local development projects. Stigmatized through much of the twentieth century for its association with poor, rural, "backward" farmers and culture, Valdresmål has been thoroughly revalorized, with…

This article analyzes four Hollywood films set in Hawai'i to shed light on how particular languages and language varieties "style" (Auer 2007; Coupland 2007) Local/Hawaiian and mainland U.S. characters as certain kinds of people. Through an analysis of films featuring "haole" ("white, outsider") male protagonists who…

The present article argues that the social category of "standardisation" has been instrumental in creating a Foucaultian discourse archive governing what may and what may not be stated on the subject of the history of English. It analyses the question of how language attitudes have been instrumental in creating the myths that have driven…

This article constitutes a re-reading of and an attempt to rehabilitate Basil Bernstein, both of which are important in light of the interpretation of Bernstein as a proponent of the verbal deficit view, and the general discrediting of his work on social class differences in the British educational system, as related to what he later called…