Volume 27, Issue 1-2

In this brief introduction, the authors aim to describe the conversation analytic approach to bilingual conversation and the sociocultural linguistic approach to the study of identity in interaction that unite the contributions to this special issue.

This study examines how bilingual family members use language choice and language alternation as a local scheme of interpretation to distinguish different and often contesting social identities in interaction. It is argued that the playful creation of oppositional identities in interaction relieves the speakers from responsibility and creates a safe environment for challenging otherwise strict social hierarchies. The data are drawn from ethnographic research and informal conversations audio recorded in bilingual and multigenerational Azerbaijani families in Tehran, Iran. The methods of analysis integrate a sequential analysis with membership categorization analysis and ethnography. This paper also highlights the need for a multilayered analysis in order to approach the issue of social order as a product of participants' situated conduct.

This paper examines how the interconnected aspects of the stance triangle (Du Bois 2007) allow speakers to tap into multiple ideological layers as they take a stance and reveal intra-ethnic group tensions. Using a detailed interaction analysis of a Chinese American family's multilingual interaction, the paper explores how such ideological dynamics are associated with stance, and considers their relationship to emergent (Bucholtz and Hall 2004a; 2004b; 2005) and brought-along identities. Specifically, the paper analyzes how seemingly conflicting bivalent stances towards an increasingly dominant language (Mandarin) and its speakers discursively frame that group and their language as both similar to and different from the interaction's speakers and their own language (Cantonese). Through this downplaying and highlighting of similarities and differences, the participants' interaction captures not only the dynamics of an individual's identity but also the larger ideological dynamics of an ethnic community as its structure, and what it means to be a member, change over time.

Li Wei (1995) notes that relatively little sociolinguistic work on bilingualism has attempted to analyze and compare the complex relationships between aspects of language choice and code-switching among subgroups of the same community. This study aims to investigate the co-existence of two structurally different Cantonese–English code-switching patterns used by two distinctive groups (a returnee and a local group) in a single community: Hong Kong. It focuses on how overseas returning bilinguals negotiate, reposition, and reconstruct their identities through the use of distinctive code-switching styles (Irvine 2001). This paper demonstrates, through a discussion of the tactics of intersubjectivity proposed by Bucholtz and Hall (2005), how the interplay of language, identity and ideology inform the linguistic practices, social networks, and self (re)positioning of these social participants. Specifically, the paper examines how the returnees position and reposition themselves when they are discriminated against as outsiders, and their ethnic and cultural identity as Hong Kong Chinese are deauthenticated and delegitimated. Data include ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and recorded natural conversation.

This paper explores interpreting in three-generational Italian–English bilingual families as a complex language brokering activity. Recent studies approach non-professional interpreting as language brokering in which bilinguals (often children) interpret for non-bilinguals (adults) in institutional settings (Hall 2004; Valdés 2003). These studies focus on brokering between minority group ‘insiders’ and majority group ‘outsiders’. My research extends these approaches, focusing on brokering in Italian–English bilingual family meal-time conversations. Second-generation family members have served as interpreters for their parents in institutional contexts since migrating as children over fifty years ago. They extend this practice to the family context, brokering between first- and third-generation family members in two ways. Triggered interpreting occurs when speakers verbally request clarification or when second-generation family members perceive conversational sequence problems. Non-triggered interpreting is neither requested nor sequentially triggered. Second-generation family members report playing an intermediary role unifying flanking generations. They act to bridge perceived linguistic and cultural gaps between their Italian-dominant immigrant parents and their English-dominant Canadian/US-born children. Interpretation in multi-generational conversations is one way through which these bridging roles and identities are accomplished locally in mundane interaction. The analysis includes an examination of spontaneous conversational data and participants' metacommentary and retrospective accounts of language brokering.

Speakers often perform impromptu translations during bilingual interaction. Such translations can hold a wide variety of socio-pragmatic functions including reiteration, emphasis, recasting, and repair. When translations occur in multi-party talk where the interactants are of mixed linguistic proficiencies, they may also serve to include interlocutors who have been excluded from prior talk that was delivered in their weaker language. In this respect, translations re-partition interactants in an inclusive way. Making use of both conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA), this paper examines a collection of such post-exclusionary translations video-recorded among Japanese–English bilingual teenagers at an international school. A detailed sequential analysis of this bilingual practice reveals that the act of translation makes relevant various elements of the speakers' and recipients' identities. When a bilingual speaker offers a translation to someone, he or she casts the recipient in the category of novice (or ‘non-native’), often even despite real-time claims to comprehension from that person. Indeed, the study found that when non-natives offered a receipt token after a turn delivered in a medium that was not assumed to belong to them, it often prompted the speaker to repeat the prior turn in the recipient's preferred medium.

This paper examines the use of impoliteness by Spanish–English bilingual pre-adolescents as a resource for accomplishing identities in spontaneous conversational interactions in an elementary school setting. The theoretical approach employed integrates the concept of relational work (Locher 2004; Locher and Watts 2005), which is based on Goffman's (1967) notion of face and which privileges participants' evaluation of language behavior within the norms of the community of practice, with recent work in sociocultural linguistics (Bucholtz and Hall 2004a, 2004b, 2005). This approach views identity as an interactional achievement reached through the use of what they call tactics of intersubjectivity. In this analysis, negatively marked, non-politic behavior is viewed as an interactional resource, which, along with other resources such as codeswitching, bilingual speakers may employ for the purposes of alignment and stance-taking. Specifically, the paper examines how speakers use strategies referred to as impolite (cf. Culpeper 1996) in the performance of a variety of tactics of intersubjectivity to manage local identities (e.g., leader/follower, insider/outsider) as well as membership in broad social categories (e.g., gender, ethnic identities) in interaction, how they engage in conflict talk and what they gain from it, and how codeswitching is (and is not) used in interactions. This analysis is situated within the wider social context of language politics and immigration politics in the individual school, the region, and the US.

This commentary responds to the papers in the special issue ‘Accomplishing identity in bilingual interaction’ and particularly to the use of Bucholtz and Hall's (2004a, 2004b, 2005) framework for the linguistic analysis of identities in interaction. The commentary focuses on the relationship between theory and empirical work, with attention to the role of ethnographic context in the analysis of both microlevel interaction and macrolevel sociopolitical and sociohistorical processes, the place of language ideologies in the interactional construction of bilingual identities, and the necessity to ground theoretical claims in rigorous empirical analysis.