This paper investigates the role of English in voice assistant (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant) use from the perspective of language ideology. Major commercial companies in the voice assistant market use English as a training language for their speech technologies and offer the most optimised support for standardised varieties of English. This…

This article explores playfulness and creativity in translingual family interactions. In particular, it focuses on how and to what ends adolescents mobilize multilingual resources in family interactions. It investigates the cases of two multilingual families with adolescent children (13-18 years old). The families have different linguistic…

This article is based on texts recorded during field studies carried out in Daugavpils in the summer of 2019. It compares the language of two representatives of older-generation intelligentsia and juxtaposes the findings with materials from an unpublished doctoral thesis by Malgorzata Ostrówka "Wspólczesna polszczyzna mówiona na Lotwie"…

This paper explores linguistic and cultural complexity within immigration legal advice communication. Drawing from a linguistic ethnographic study, ethnographic and interactional data from two linked advice meetings about UK refugee family reunion processes are subject to deductive analysis using Risager's model of the language-culture nexus,…

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…

This article reports on the outcome of utilising a multilingual strategy that promotes translanguaging to support primary grade learners and the enablers and constraints of the implementation of such strategies. Purposive sampling was used to select two schools. Grade 5 and 6 learners (N = 162) and their teachers (N = 3) participated in the study.…

In this article we provide a discussion of present-day Khoisan activism in Cape Town, South Africa. The main actors in this movement are people whose heritage is complex: their history can be traced back to the early days of the colonial settlement, reflecting the interactions and cohabitation of the indigenous Khoisan, slaves and the European…

This paper draws on the KINSA project (The Communicative Situation of Immigrants at Swedish Workplaces), which aimed to identify communicative factors that have a positive impact on the integration of second language speakers in the workplace and in their immediate work team. The focus here is on humour and swearing as strategies for doing…

The transgressive use of language by out-group speakers, or crossing is used in a variety of ways to achieve both affiliative and disaffiliative ends among youths. However, crossing can also be used as an affiliative resource in asymmetrical power relations between teachers and students. Reporting on the findings of a 1.5 year ethnography of an…