Volume 40, Issue 3

This paper is based on the data collected during fieldwork in the northern part of Mexico’s state of Puebla in 2018–2019. During that period, there was a need to gather information that would serve as a starting point for the participatory-action research project in San Miguel Tenango, a village where the majority of people speak Nahuatl as their mother tongue. In contrast, the employees of the health center located in the village have been exclusively Spanish-speaking doctors and nurses assigned there by the state department of health. The paper analyzes problems of communication between the medical staff and Indigenous patients, many of whom are not proficient in Spanish. It presents two different perspectives on communication in local health care settings, the one of medics and the other of patients. On comparing between them, we can recognize that the existing strategy of overcoming language barriers in Tenango, based mainly on family interpreters, has certain shortcomings, unnoticeable for the staff of the health center. The communication problems are discussed in the context of changing language attitudes among Nahuatl speakers. In addition, the paper includes a critical overview of recent initiatives to promote the use of Nahuatl in health services in the state of Puebla.

This study examines the communication strategies employed by Qatar’s government in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. The study contributes to a growing body of work on the sociolinguistics of crisis communication. We focus on the use of South and Southeast Asian languages, spoken largely by blue-collar migrant workers, which are often seen as peripheral even though they are spoken by a large segment of the population. The deployment of these languages during Qatar’s COVID-19 awareness campaign assumes further significance against the backdrop of a series of measures taken by the government in the last few years to strengthen the status and use of Arabic. We analyze multilingual printed pamphlets, multilingual audio-visual communication through radio and social media, as well as interviews conducted with key figures who were part of the awareness campaign. Our examination of the availability, accessibility, acceptability, and adaptability of the multilingual awareness materials reveals that while the different languages and modes of communication were important in spreading awareness, equally critical, if not more, was who carried the information and in what forms. We show the significant roles community and religious leaders and social media influencers played in disseminating the awareness information to the diverse migrant language communities.

This paper analyzes metalinguistic comments of two young Hmong Americans in the Minneapolis-St Paul area regarding their identity negotiation using tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz & Hall 2004a, 2004b, 2005), the notion of brought-along identity (Williams 2008) and Zhang's (2017) sociohistorical perspectives in analyzing linguistic variation. Two Hmong American individuals were selected from over 60 Hmong American interviewees because their vowel production is nearly identical to each other and that of the local white youth. Although their almost identical vowel production is viewed as their acculturation to the local white majority norm in the first- and second-wave variationist sociolinguistic perspective (Eckert 2012), their speech's characterization reveals a range of potential meanings (Eckert 2008) to index nuanced and unique positions in their local community. The young woman is ambivalent about her speech being characterized as “not having an accent” and claims that she is “not a white girl”. The teenage boy discusses his speech as “Hmonglish” and “English with slang” but carefully distances himself from quintessential African American English. While their characterization of their speech is distinct from each other, their tactics are strikingly similar. Through highlighting and downplaying differences and similarities to a locally salient way of speaking that indexes whiteness or blackness, the two Hmong Americans carve out their own complex identities of race, ethnicity, gender, and class in a local setting.

International students studying at Australian universities are largely represented in the media as problematic speakers of English, in part due to the dominance of the monolingual mindset as an approach to language. This paper focuses instead on international students’ multilingualism and examines the multimodal media representation of them as multilingual speakers. This study presents a thematic language ideological analysis of an episode of an Australian current affairs television program, Four Corners , and social media discussion of the episode and explores the way language ideologies work in the context. It shows that multilingual practices and speakers are stigmatized through the textual and multimodal representation of languages other than English (LOTE). Findings show that the multilingualism of international students and competencies available through LOTE are largely rendered invisible and students are constructed through a ‘double deficit’ view. They are thus not seen as multilingual speakers but deficient English speakers and this deficiency indexes other deficits. Where LOTE becomes visible, it is represented as a problem. The results also show that the social media discussions further amplify the language ideologies of the episode. The implications are considered for media representation and for universities to shift the focus to English language as a medium of instruction only and end ‘language blindness’ for improved social inclusion.

Dualist Hungary (1867–1918) was the linguistically most diverse would-be nation-state in the long nineteenth century, with less than half of its citizens speaking Hungarian as their home language and more than two-fifths being ignorant of it. The Nationalities Act of 1868 accommodated the language of court proceedings to that of the parties, but these provisions remained in effect for no more than a couple of years before a complete overhaul of the court system. Minority nationalist activists were vocal in their attacks against the sidelining of their languages, and the issue came to a head in much the same terms when policy-makers debated the introduction of the jury. In the 1890s, with jury trials introduced and oral proceedings expanded in civil litigation, the government could not postpone the appointment of court interpreters any longer. Interpreting fees were set too high for the average non-Magyar citizen, which, together with a few other predicaments, was likely to bring home to them their second-class status. At the same time, top officials were anxious about the concessions that lower courts, which were for the most part left to muddle through without translators, had to make to non-dominant languages.