Language, Culture and Society - Current Issue

Adopting a longitudinal dynamic perspective on the field of Family Language Policy (FLP), combined with insights from language socialization, the current study explores five Iranian immigrant family members’ language ideologies, practices and policies and aims to unfold the processes through which the language ideologies and policies are instantiated and negotiated. Particular foci are the evolving nature of family language ideologies and practices, emphasizing the influence of children’s language ideologies and societal interactions. Through detailed analyses of multiparty family interactions, the study argues the significance of considering children’s language ideologies as integral to understanding of their language practices, moving beyond a simplistic attribution of actions to mere ‘agency’.

This article examines how ‘Sara’, a migrant woman living with a disability, narrates her experiences with Norway’s welfare and healthcare. Sara invokes a trope — tydelighet [clarity] — to describe successful communication styles in Norwegian institutional spaces. Through ethnographic investigation, I demonstrate how this trope indexes broader linguistic ideologies cycling through different levels of the Norwegian nation-state. To be able to communicate with clarity is linked to being a specific type of citizen-subject. On the one hand, Sara describes the sociopragmatic style of clarity as enabling access to healthcare and welfare services, stable employment, and speaker legitimacy. On the other hand, lack of clarity rationalizes inequalities in institutional spaces. I propose that this ideology has a racializing, gendering, and disabling function. The article offers insights into how language ideologies regulate Sara’s lived experience with health literacy to secure a healthy and employed life as a migrant with disability living in the welfare state.

Studies on how observers’ perceptions affect youth Ethnic-Racial Identity (ERI) formation focus on adolescents, and typically fail to consider non-English language use as a salient ERI marker. The current research examines two novel dimensions by examining employing Spanish-language mixed methods to study Midwestern heritage Spanish-speaking Latinx children, ages 7–13. Study outcomes correlate skin tone to ERI such that children identified by observers as ‘phenotypically’ Latinx reported higher levels of ethnic exploration compared to peers identified as ‘phenotypically’ non-Latinx. Children’s phenotypic self-identification and ERI exploration correlated highly with level of understanding of their ethnic group, and in turn with reported higher linguistic discrimination. Qualitative results further highlight that “white-presenting” Latinx children more strongly affirm their Latinx identity through high Spanish language competence. Findings suggest that healthy ERI development in Latinx children may be uniquely aided by bilingualism and biliteracy.

This article investigates linguistic and visual representations of the Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan, in Satoru Noda’s popular televised Japanese anime Golden Kamuy (GK). The study employs multimodal analysis, focusing on content, context, characters, and perspectives related to the deployment of the Ainu language using the perspectives of raciolinguistics, coloniality, and intersectionality, to examine GK’s representations of Ainu regarding two Japanese national discourses on race: the current discourse of “ethnic harmony” (or multiculturalism) and Ainu as a dying race, popularized in the early 20th century. It argues that GK unintentionally constructs a sanitized Ainu-Japanese relationship that epitomizes the discourse of ethnic harmony by erasing Japan’s colonial past. Simultaneously, GK reproduces Ainu as a dying race discourse by contrasting a young bilingual Ainu co-protagonist and her monolingual grandmother. The article discusses how advanced/backward distinctions that the Japanese elites appropriated from the 19th-century colonial discourse are reinscribed in this anime with a modern twist. It also advocates our need to raise critical questions about language, race, and power for a just society in various contexts, including popular media.

Sensescapes refer to the complex multimodal and semiotic assemblages that confer meaning to space as experienced by individuals and groups. The study of sensescapes seeks to understand the nature of these assemblages, how they shape meaning, and with them, individual and collective experiences. This article unpacks sensescapes as an expansive lens to meaning in space, underscoring its potential to investigate the nexus between language and culture. To that end, it integrates existing proposals in linguistic landscapes and translanguaging, and connects them to a working definition of sensescapes drawn from various social sciences and humanities fields. To illustrate the study of sensescapes and their relevance to applied linguistics, the article reports on a case study conducted in the Al-Kissaria district of Nador, Morocco through participatory ethnography. The study provides a phenomenological account of the experiences of two multilingual sisters from neighboring Melilla, Spain, as they navigate a market area. The data illustrate how the sisters’ sensory interactions with the environment interplay with their linguistic and broader semiotic repertoires, activating their previous experiences and shaping their conceptualizations and negotiation of language and culture in this space.