Volume 38, Issue 1

This paper investigates the opposition between the realities and ideologies surrounding multilingualism in Latvia. Building mostly on Bourdieu’s theory of language in society, and multilingual awareness as a concept, we study the socio-economic value of multilingual repertoires in a multilingual setting (Latvia), and language users’ awareness of the link between their language competences (Latvian, Russian, English) and socio-economic status. By analysing sociolinguistic survey data, we demonstrate, firstly, that different multilingual repertoires are linked with differences in family income, level of education, and labour market position. Secondly, our data indicate that people generally do not acknowledge the link between their language skills and socio-economic status. To explore this further, we zoom in on language ideologies in formal education. We examine data on the multilingual awareness of Latvian language teachers from focus-group interviews and show that they tend to construe languages in competition, emphasise the symbolic value of Latvian, and ignore the multilingualism of their pupils and broader society. The study illuminates the dissonance between the multilingual realities of a post-Soviet EU country in which multilingual repertoires carry different values for individuals, and the Latvian-centred ideologies (disseminated by the teachers) that leave the presence of multilingualism and accompanying issues unacknowledged.

This paper investigates how and whether speakers of endangered languages employ variation as a stylistic resource to make social meaning and index their identities. The study is set in historically Creole-speaking communities in rural Louisiana, which have now shifted almost completely to English. The Americanization of Louisiana induced language shift, but also a shift to the Anglo-American racial binary which supplanted local constructs of ethnicity and race. The study crafts a historical-sociolinguistic account of this process of Americanization, examining how linguistic differentiation was enacted through the enregisterment of iconic ‘Creole’/‘French’ variants as indexical links to the ‘Black’/‘White’ racial binary. Today, to a very limited extent, some speakers of Louisiana Creole still consider some variants socially meaningful and employ them to stylistic ends. This depends especially on racial identity and the variant in question. Subject pronouns retain some indexical value, occasionally employed stylistically by speakers racialized as White. However, front vowel rounding has fossilized : highly meaningful in the early-20 th century, its social meaning has been lost resulting in synchronic personal-pattern variation. The paper ends by trying to reconcile classic studies of Language Death with contemporary variationist critique, answering recent calls for more nuanced approaches to sociolinguistic variation in threatened languages.

The discourse on linguistic diversity, relativity and pluralism is currently dominant in sociolinguistics. By extension, arguments for universalism are currently unfashionable in the field, particularly within its interpretivist strand. This paper claims that interpretivist sociolinguistics promotes conflicting, often lukewarm, and at times antagonistic views on universalism as a core emancipatory value. In response, the argument is made that appreciating universalism requires a layered social ontology afforded by critical realism. To build this critique, the paper first surveys how universalism has been neglected by prominent interpretivist sociolinguists to date. It then provides a conceptual account of critical realism’s layered social ontology and its relation to sociolinguistics. A discussion on the nature and importance of values in social science and sociolinguistics follows. Finally, the paper discusses universalism as a core emancipatory value, its critique, and its relation to sociolinguistics.

Speakers from the Helvécian community in Bahia, Brazil, have been accommodating their language variety towards standard Brazilian Portuguese for the past 60 years. This article demonstrates that a complex web of socioeconomic events is tied to this phenomenon. It provides an overview of the most recent socioeconomic and political changes in the community, combined with a discourse analysis of the metalinguistic commentaries identified in narratives collected during my 2019 fieldwork in the community. The research demonstrates that speakers’ metalinguistic patterns are mediated by iconization, which sees younger speakers linguistically differentiate themselves from the traditional dialect. The findings support the theory that socioeconomic events cause direct linguistic change, especially among speakers of minority languages.