This article discusses how stylization sheds light on the role of authenticity as an increasingly relevant concept in sociolinguistics. Building on research on style, crossing, and mock language use, the article demonstrates how multilingual stylization provides speakers with a wider range of resources for navigating and negotiating borders and…

Taking an interactional sociolinguistic approach, this study explores how multicultural and multilingual siblings interact with their Spanish grandfather and how, through the use of styling and stylization in these interactions, they negotiate and construct multicultural family identities. Using Tannen's power and solidarity framework, I…

This article analyzes stylized pronunciations of English by Japanese speakers on televised variety shows in Japan. Research on style and mocking has done much to reveal how linguistic forms are utilized in interaction as resources of identity construction that can oftentimes subvert hegemonic discourse (Chun 2004). Within this research area,…

This study presents an analysis of a Nepali comedian's dialect stylization in a stand-up comedy show performed for the diasporic Nepali community in Bochum, Germany. The analysis shows that through creative deployment of diverse linguistic practices of Nepali speakers, the comedian, Manoj Gajurel, engages in important identity work both in…

This study analyzes the narrative-based interview data of three Indian women to examine the manner in which they utilize stylization to construct identity-rich, ideological stances related to discriminatory discourses of Hindi and English medium education in the linguistically rich, albeit complex, present-day context of India. Stylization is…

Through a reexamination of the relationship between politeness and femininity in Japanese, this study considers some of the major theoretical issues concerning linguistic politeness in general. While politeness has been regarded as a central feature of Japanese women's speech, recent research has shown that politeness is a speech norm for…

The situation once described by Hoffmann (1985), in which children grow up exposed to three languages from an early age, is a reality for an increasing number of families. In Europe--as elsewhere--greater mobility is leading to greater numbers of mixed-language couples (Piller 2002), and, by extension, multilingual families. For such families,…

The present study focuses on the language attitudes underlying patterns of stylistic variation in the speech of a female former President of the Spanish local Government of Murcia. We build on previous quantitative work demonstrating that this speaker shows unexpectedly high usage levels for nonstandard Murcian Spanish features in public speech,…

Existing studies on doctor-client interactions have largely focused on monolingual encounters and the interactional effects and functions of the languages used in the communication between doctors and their clients. They have neither, to a large extent, examined the several codes employed in single encounters and their pragmatic roles nor given…

When films rich in cinematic discourse are translated, "character equivalence", the extent to which translated dialogue distorts identities in the original film, may pose a special challenge for the screen translator. This article discusses this issue in the context of "Talk to me" (Lemmons 2007), a film which showcases stylised African American…

By comparing two recent French films, "L'Esquive" (Kechiche 2004) and "Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis" (Boon 2008), a realistic drama and a comedy, this article proposes an analysis of two different cases of stylisation that entertain complex relations of authenticity with stigmatised vernaculars, and in which actors stylise their own linguistic…

This paper examines language stylization in "Aigia Fuxia" ("The Fuchsia Goat"), a highly popular Greek Cypriot sitcom, where the (imagined) linguistic and socio-cultural "self" of a dialect-speaking community is subjected to extreme and aberrant stylization. The overarching filmic and generic trademark of "Aigia Fuxia" is its consistent…

Whereas the speech act of refusal is universal across language, the politeness value and the types of linguistic forms used to perform it vary across language and culture. The majority of the comparative pragmatic research findings were derived from one single source of data (i.e., either production data or perception data). Few attempts have been…

This paper begins by looking at responses to Bernstein in Germany in the 1970s that criticized his notions of class difference in sociolinguistic codes. As part of a re-examination of Bernstein's ideas, the paper goes on to look at the current communicative situation in German education where urban schools have many second-generation immigrant…

Examining the linguistic repertoire of the Anglophone community living in Montreal, this article provides an analysis of the representations of the variety of French spoken by the first generation of young Anglophones who had experienced different types of contact with French. The relation between functional competence and usage of French is…