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- Volume 19, Issue, 2009
Pragmatics - Volume 19, Issue 1, 2009
Volume 19, Issue 1, 2009
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Introduction youth language at the intersection
Author(s): Mary Bucholtz and Elena Skapoullipp.: 1–16 (16)More LessThis special issue examines the linguistic production of youth identities under conditions of cultural mobility. Building on theories of migration, transnationalism, and globalization that have emerged in anthropology, cultural studies, and other fields, the contributions to the special issue investigate not simply the large-scale cultural and political processes that shape the lives of youth but equally how youth identities emerge through the fine-grained details of interactional work and local linguistic practice. The introduction lays out the major themes that run through the special issue: the importance of scholarly attentiveness to the diversity of youth identities; the recognition of youth as social agents moving across national boundaries both physically and symbolically; the role of local ethnographic practice in investigations of global and transnational phenomena and especially the centrality of interaction as the primary site of social life; and the significance of language as a key resource for the articulation and negotiation of social identities, relations, and processes.
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Speaking like Asian immigrants
Author(s): Elaine W. Chunpp.: 17–38 (22)More LessThis article explores the relationship between immigrant and non-immigrant Asian American youth identities and the use of language to manage this relationship. Focusing on everyday interactions at a high school in Texas, the analysis examines how fluent English-speaking Korean and Filipino American students draw on linguistic resources associated with Asian immigrants, thus attending to generational identity, an important, though often oversimplified, social dimension in transnational contexts. According to the present analysis, salient generational differences may exist between Asian American youth, yet their linguistic practices complicate simple binaries of opposition. Specifically, this article focuses on how fluent English-speaking students both accommodate toward and mock Asian immigrant speech and notes that these ostensibly divergent practices exhibit linguistic overlap. It is argued that the convergences and divergences of these practices can be productively examined by distinguishing between the levels of frame and ideology, thus explaining how speakers interpret Asian immigrant revoicings as accommodation, mocking, or, in some cases, an ambiguous linguistic act that hovers in between.
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“She’s hungarious so she’s Mexican but she’s most likely Indian”
Author(s): Jung-Eun Janie Leepp.: 39–63 (25)More LessSchools in California have become increasingly diverse and the demographic composition of school populations has become heterogeneous in the language, nationality, and ethnicity of students. Using ethnographic and interactional analysis, the present article examines how California youth employ a variety of concepts associated with ethnicity to classify themselves and others. For youth who have peers from multiple national, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds, the criteria of citizenship, national origin, language, and phenotype are negotiated interactionally for ethnic labeling. The article further suggests that ethnicity is not a simple category, but rather a concept that youth in a multiethnic context actively construct and co-construct with the help of associated notions. Finally, it is demonstrated that ethnic labeling in interviews may be a dispreferred practice for some interviewees due to its potential connection with racism and discrimination.
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Reflecting respect
Author(s): Chantal Tetreaultpp.: 65–83 (19)More LessThis article explores how ideologies derived from North African culture are transformed in local expressions of identity among Muslim French adolescents. Naturally-occurring interactional data were collected among adolescents of primarily Algerian descent living in a cité (a low-income housing project) outside Paris. The study shows that the local identity practices of Muslim French teens articulate with transcultural ideologies of identity, but in contradictory rather than wholly consistent ways. Specifically, teens in the study circulate seemingly static cultural ideologies pertaining to generation, gender, and sexuality, but also routinely challenge these ideologies in interactions with their peers. Through the innovative interactional genre of “parental name calling,” adolescents articulate their ambivalent relationship to the North African-derived cultural value they call le respect (‘respect’). In the process, they negotiate their own beliefs and practices regarding generation, gender, and sexuality in accommodation and opposition to their parents’ values.
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Transforming the label of ‘whore’
Author(s): Elena Skapoullipp.: 85–101 (17)More LessThis article examines how gender ideologies linked to global processes such as migration and the spread of youth popular culture pose certain challenges for teenage girls who live in patriarchal social contexts. Drawing on a corpus of ethnographic data at a multiethnic middle school in Cyprus, the article focuses on the ways in which language practices mediate this experience and the possibilities that language envelops in the process of gender identity formation in globalizing times. At the intersection of contradictory ideologies ranging from the school’s religious gender discourse, which promotes modesty and chastity, to the predominant media discourse of femininity, which highlights female sexuality, girls’ gender identity claims become fraught with moral implications. In the local peer culture, girls are placed on a fabricated and culturally widespread “virgin-whore” continuum along which different cultural groups – which are often equated with ethnic groups – are evaluated. Paradoxically, girls who embrace sexual freedom (either in practice or rhetorically) may in fact exercise agency and become empowered precisely because of early adolescents’ fascination with sexuality. These girls draw largely on the dominant discourse of femininity abundantly marketed by global media and the pop culture. They thus manage to explore alternative ideas about agency and gender in a locally rebellious manner that defies the traditionalist female roles that school and church promote.
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Translocal style communities
Author(s): H. Samy Alimpp.: 103–127 (25)More LessThis article addresses issues that lie at the intersection of debates about language, Hip Hop Culture, and globalization. Critically synthesizing a wide range of recent work on Hip Hop and foregrounding issues of youth agency as evidenced by Hip Hop youth’s metalinguistic theorizing, the article presents an empirical account of youth as cultural theorists. Hip Hop youth are both participants and theorists of their participation in the many translocal style communities that constitute the Global Hip Hop Nation. Highlighting youth agency, the article demonstrates that youth are engaging in the agentive act of theorizing the changes in the contemporary world as they attempt to locate themselves at the intersection of the local and the global. The article concludes by calling for a linguistic anthropology of globalization characterized by ethnographic explorations of and a theoretical focus on popular culture, music, and mass-mediated language as central to an anthropological understanding of linguistic processes in a global era.
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Youthful concerns
Author(s): Jennifer Roth-Gordon and T.E. Woronovpp.: 129–143 (15)More LessThis commentary explores the links between language, modernity, and young people’s movement – within nations and across borders. Given the scope and pace of globalization and transnational migration, this movement has created a good deal of local and national anxiety over how youth are negotiating their rights to belong – in schools, in cities, and in nation-states. The commentary addresses how youth must be understood as specifically modern subjects, in Foucault’s sense of the term, including how they both utilize and trouble the binary categories associated with modernity, the ways that modern young subjects are constructed through discourses of sexuality, and the ways that young people are disciplined in specific social spaces. In addition to the possibility of hybridity and invention suggested by the juxtaposition of family and peer cultural traditions, the commentary asks how new youth styles also involve the disciplining of youthful bodies by institutions, family members, and peers.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 35 (2025)
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Volume 34 (2024)
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Volume 33 (2023)
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Volume 32 (2022)
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Volume 31 (2021)
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Volume 30 (2020)
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Volume 29 (2019)
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Volume 28 (2018)
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Volume 27 (2017)
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Volume 26 (2016)
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Volume 25 (2015)
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Volume 24 (2014)
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Volume 23 (2013)
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Volume 22 (2012)
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Volume 21 (2011)
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Volume 20 (2010)
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Volume 19 (2009)
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Volume 18 (2008)
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Volume 17 (2007)
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Volume 16 (2006)
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Volume 15 (2005)
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Volume 14 (2004)
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Volume 13 (2003)
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Volume 12 (2002)
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Volume 11 (2001)
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Volume 10 (2000)
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Volume 9 (1999)
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Volume 8 (1998)
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Volume 7 (1997)
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Volume 6 (1996)
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Volume 5 (1995)
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Volume 4 (1994)
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Volume 3 (1993)
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Volume 2 (1992)
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Volume 1 (1991)
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