Volume 2025, Issue 293

Individuals can make judgments on a person’s personality and socioeconomic status in as little as 30 s after hearing their voice. This study investigates the perceptions of Cuban and Peninsular Spanish varieties by native Cuban and Peninsular Spanish speakers, second language (L2) Spanish learners, and monolingual English speakers. Specifically, it analyzes whether (i) these speakers differ in their ability to recognize these varieties, and (ii) the perceptions of these groups differ to determine unconscious biases. Fifty adult listeners rated 5 Cuban (Havana) and 5 Peninsular (Madrid) disguised female voices. They completed a Bilingual Language Profile (BLP) questionnaire and a survey to examine unconscious accent categorization and perceptions. The results revealed that individuals do in fact make unconscious assumptions on an individual’s voice, as the Peninsular variety was often attributed to higher education and income levels and was closely associated with a higher rank (CEO) position compared to the Cuban variety on behalf of all groups. Furthermore, native Cuban listeners were found to outperform all groups in correct categorization of the accents heard. This study illustrates how perceptions toward stigmatized language varieties transcend native speakers of a language.

Research has shown that Japanese language learners in Hong Kong are affectively rather than instrumentally motivated. Put simply, they tend to learn Japanese because they like people or things associated with Japan(ese). To better understand their affection for Japan(ese), I explore how Japanese language learners’ imagined target language communities shape their symbolic investments in Japanese and Japanese-speaking cultural identities in contemporary Hong Kong. To this end, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 18 ethnic Chinese Hong Kong learners of Japanese. After data analysis, three main themes emerged: “symbolic investment”, “perceived marginalisation”, and “voluntary peripheralisation”. My findings suggest that these Japanese language learners make diverse and personalised symbolic investments in exchange for valuable intangibles, particularly security and well-being. While they perceive themselves as marginalised from imagined Japanese-speaking communities, they also tend to remain voluntarily on the periphery of such imagined Japanese-speaking communities to construct positive Japanese-speaking (but non-Japanese) cultural identities and to secure their imagined “Japan” as a safe haven from the difficult realities of Hong Kong. These learners of Japanese thus see their “Japan” as imagined “foreign” communities to which they do not want or need to fully belong. I conclude this paper with useful implications for researchers and educators.

This study examines the functions of four languages – Darija (Moroccan Arabic), Standard Arabic, French, and English – in a Facebook group for Moroccan immigrants in the US during the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 500 posts related to the pandemic were collected between March 2020 and July 2023 and analyzed. The results reveal that Moroccan immigrants used languages in a Facebook group for different communicative purposes related to social, economic, and political aspects of the pandemic. The study also showed that the Facebook group is an important information hub and source of practical and emotional support for Moroccan immigrants in the US and that Darija, Standard Arabic, French, and English served different purposes in different pandemic contexts, such as getting and giving medical information, announcing deaths and funerals, and discussing politics and job losses.

This paper discusses critical pedagogies in relation to critical language studies. We explore how a posthumanist approach – framed through language ontologies and based on onto-epistemic analysis – may shape critical pedagogies for language education. We specifically ask, how are critical pedagogies transformed by ontology? The paper provides an overview of the core characteristics and goals of critical pedagogies in relation to epistemology-based claims and the ideological critique of language in the humanist tradition. This is followed by an introduction to language ontologies, with a focus on the worlding of language and on ontology as heuristic. This discussion expands how language – or rather, language(s)/languaging – is understood, and considers implications of language ontologies for critical pedagogies in languages education. Finally, the paper turns to praxis  – the coming together of theory and practice to transform the world (Kubota, Ryuko & Elizabeth R. Miller. 2017. Re-examining and re-envisioning criticality in language studies: Theories and praxis. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 14(2–3). 129–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/15427587.2017.1290500.) – to outline how a posthumanist critical pedagogy recalibrates critical language studies as onto-epistemic claims.

The current study covers changes in the corpus of the Ukrainian language as a result of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine which began on 24th February 2022. This research addresses the issue of rapidly changing worldviews and attitudes of the Ukrainian people, which have had a direct impact on the development of anti-aggressor narratives and an explosion of various linguistic means in the language when describing the war, the occupiers, and their atrocities committed on the territory of Ukraine. The period since the invasion is characterised by both a boom of neologisms and an expanding use of some lexical items in the mass media of Ukraine. The paper examines articles and news stories in two major Ukrainian information agencies Ukrinform and Unian since 24th February 2022 and their use of specific linguistic means to describe the enemy. The analysis and discussion of the new lexical items and the development of other linguistic means in the Ukrainian language are based on our findings as well as research publications which have appeared since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This research specifically explores how these linguistic means support war narratives in the Ukrainian media when describing the enemy and its actions. The portrayal of the enemy is increasingly pivotal in these narratives, which bolster the Ukrainian people’s fight for survival and territorial integrity.

In this article, we propose to rethink some of the ethnographic images widely used in critical sociolinguistic studies to refer to and make sense of the fieldwork pace. We do so by bringing into dialogue our two ethnographic research experiences within grassroots initiatives, arguing that the nature of these research sites and the political interweaving that ethnographers might experience there call for a re-consideration of the epistemology that underlies the more usual understanding of fieldwork within critical sociolinguistics. In this vein, we revisit key moments of our research processes (field entrance and exit, data gathering and the dissemination of results), and suggest alternative re-readings of them. In doing so, we wish to engage and contribute to a discussion on the possibilities of re-situating the ethnographic sociolinguistic gaze towards less investigated sites, and ultimately to suggest a broader critical horizon.

This study touches upon a widely ignored topic in family language policy (FLP) research, gendered language ideologies. It also contributes to expanding the narrow literature of FLP in both formally, though mistakenly, viewed monolingual settings, and in the even rarer literature of dialectology in FLP. The aim of this study is to explore the family language policy of one Arabic speaking family in Jordan, with a special focus on the interplay between language (language varieties to be precise) and gender among family members. Ethnographic data collected from observations and recorded naturally-occurring interactions are described and analysed through the lens of Interactional Sociolinguistics. This study argues that family language policy can capture how gender roles and stereotypes are internalised through interaction in the home. The analyses reveal that the existence of contradicting language ideologies within the family is ascribed indexically to gender rather than language. This study suggests that, in the case of gendered languages like Arabic, gender stereotypes have their genesis at the linguistic level and in the home.