‘Ey, wait, wait, gully!’ Style, stance and the social meaning of attention signals in East London adolescent speech

Recent accounts of discourse-pragmatic (DP) variation have demonstrated that these features can acquire social indexical meaning. However, in comparison to other linguistic variables, DP features remain underexplored and third-wave perspectives on the topic are limited. In this article, I analyse the distribution, function and social meaning of the ‘attention signals’ – those features which fulfil the explicit function of eliciting the attention of an individual – in just over 35 hours of self-recordings of 25 adolescents collected during a year-long sociolinguistic ethnography of an East London youth group. This leads me to identify an innovative attention signal – ey. Distributional analyses of this feature show that ey is associated with a particular Community of Practice, the self-defined and exclusively male ‘gully’. By examining the discourse junctures at which ey occurs, I argue that this attention signal is most frequently used by speakers to deploy a ‘dominant’ stance. For gully members, this feature is particularly useful as an interpersonal device, where it is used to manage ingroup/outgroup boundaries. Concluding, I link the use of ey and the gully identity to language, ethnicity and masculinity in East London.

Desire and confusion: A sociolinguistic ethnography on affect in the ethnic economy of Thai massage

In my contribution, I will look at the interconnections between language, work, ethnicity and gender in the exemplary site of the Thai massage studio as part of a larger sociolinguistic ethnography in Vienna, Austria. I argue that Thai massage therapists are trying to establish an independent and professional self, while being continuously repositioned along gendered and racial stereotypes based on post-colonial ideas of the “exotic woman”. In other words, their work empowers them on the local labour market, but simultaneously threatens to reinstall clear social and ethnical hierarchies. In order to unpack this complex, I propose to discuss two theoretical concepts from a critical sociolinguistic perspective: the ethnic economy and the affect of desire, as they both inform an understanding of Thai massage as a particular localised global practice. I will first discuss ambivalent opportunities related to language competences in the ethnic economy, and then turn to examine how male clients come to ascribe “confused affect” to their experience with desire in the Thai massage. Finally, I will discuss the issue of researcher positionality in dealing with the potential reproduction of exoticisation through research.

Transnational migrant students between inclusive discourses and exclusionary practices

Transnational migrant students have been found to experience marginalization in educational contexts around the world. This critical sociolinguistic ethnography explores the incorporation and learning outcomes of an as yet under-researched group: transnational migrant students from Myanmar in a border high school in China. This context is unique in that migrant students are celebrated as part of China’s soft power project to extend its international reach. Despite these welcoming discourses of diversity, transnational migrant students experience significant exclusion as a result of practices such as military-style school regulations, a Gaokao-centered curriculum, and streamed segregation. Overall, the paper highlights the necessity to pay attention to the ways in which schools reproduce social stratification of migrant students through implicit and explicit institutional practices despite celebratory diversity discourses.

Gatekeeping the interactional order: field access and linguistic ideologies in Content and Language Integrated Learning–type bilingual education programs in Spanish secondary schools

This article reflexively discusses field access as a continuous process in linguistic ethnographic fieldwork and illustrates how interactions generated during negotiations to establish a research collaboration, initial contacts with participants or data gathered to complement audio-visual recordings of naturally occurring interaction can, in fact, become rich sources to answer research questions. The discussion is based on a critical sociolinguistic ethnography on the implementation of English-Spanish ‘bilingual programs’ in a mid-sized city in central Spain. To build this discussion we propose a framework in which particular research stances held by participants become closely intertwined with particular research processes, spaces and techniques.

An Ethnographic Study of Linguistic Landscapes at China-and-Vietnam Border

Along with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, China is engaging itself with its neighboring countries and many border cities have been strategically positioned as trading nodes linking China to the outside world. This is particularly true with Hekou, a minority-centered border town between China and Vietnam where local minority languages, Chinese, Vietnamese and English are displayed at various spaces. Adopting a critical sociolinguistic ethnography (Heller, 2006; Li, 2017), this study focuses on the intersection of language practices and ideologies by examining the language use and language choices displayed both in public and private signs. Data were collected through linguistic signs displayed at Hekou and individual interviews with local people. Findings indicate that Chinese as China’s official language enjoys the most visibility, and English, though considered as a lingua franca, only acquires symbolic value rather than being used for daily communication at the border town. In contrast, Vietnamese, as a newly emerged foreign language, is acquiring cultural and economic capitals for the local people’ educational and employment opportunities. As a minority-centered border town, the visibility of minority languages on cultural events stands both for tourism boom and for border integrity. The study provides a new context for understanding multilingual practices and China’s border language planning and management in the context of China’s cooperation with Southeast Asian countries.

Ethnographic Perspectives to Teaching and Learning in Multilingual Contexts

This special issue addresses the organization of teaching and learning in a variety of multilingual schooling contexts from different critical ethnographic perspectives (i.e.: critical sociolinguistic ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and language socialization). By analyzing a range of educational settings in Spain, the U.S., the U.K., Argentina, and Guatemala, the articles establish a dialogue with different ethnographically-oriented studies to understand the relationship between situated communicative practices, language policies, language ideologies, dominant discourses about bi-multilingualism, and wider social, cultural and economic processes.

Understanding bilingualism in La Mancha schools

This article discusses narratives of bilingualism told in parental group interviews conducted as part of the critical sociolinguistic ethnography carried out in public and semi-private bilingual schools of the autonomous region of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). School stakeholders in this region are still adapting to the rapid implementation of bilingual programs in this region, which are transforming classroom linguistic practices and circulating discourses about bilingualism, bilingual education, and the bilingual subject. Among them, families are trying to reconcile their language desires and aspirations for English and bilingualism with the understanding of the type of bilingual education their children are receiving. By taking a social interactional approach to narrative combined with anthropological approaches to the study of conversational narrative, this article analyzes parents’ emotional and moral stancetaking in narratives of bilingualism. The narrative analysis will shed light on how families in Castilla-La Mancha are appropriating bilingualism as ideology and practice in the highly commodified global market of English.