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This paper seeks to contribute to the sociology of nations, a literature that is only starting to carve out its place in the social sciences. The paper offers a reconceptualization of 'nations' as 'national cultures', employing an evolutionary perspective and a systemic framework in which 'nations' are understood as cultural systems of a special kind. National cultures are intimately tied to natural languages, and the acquisition of a national culture occurs as part and parcel of the acquisition of a natural language. Acquiring a natural language is a prerequisite for learning other cultural systems (artefactual languages as well as other natural languages). National cultures function as metacultures. They are also the reference cultures for modern states and their citizens, a political dimension of nations that is of paramount importance, though it will only be touched on in this paper. National cultures should be considered as the most fundamental type of cultural system today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author introduces articles about sociolinguistics and globalisation published in the volume 7 of the "Journal of Socioliguistics". The author discussed the general relationship between sociolinguistics and social theory; The papers were presented in events held in Wales; Research paper exploring the global dimension or context of specific language data; Addresses linguistic/textual/discursive features in different domains of use that need to be understood in relation to interlinked global processes; The foundational insight in globalisation theory.

The author introduces articles about the globalization of socioliguistics in the volume 7 of the "Journal of Sociolinguistics". Research papers in the issue addressing matters of scale; Various papers about the relationship between a world language and local speech repertoires or speech communities; Research paper by Thurlow and Jaworski showing how airlines produce self-imaginings of globality while remaining based in one country or place; The author define the term globalization; Machin and van Leeuwen's emphasizing of the domain-related spread of global registers rather than languages; Articles providing insights into the specific role of particular mediating institutions in economies; The author suggest the need to address the language-ideological level; The author asserts that the key to understanding the processes of globalized insertion of varieties into stratified orders of indexicality is to discover what such reorderings of repertoires actually mean; Suggestion of Meyerhoff and Niedzielski that vernacularization is ametapragmatic complex conveying all kinds of indexical meanings; Discussion of the Rip Slyme case by Alastair Pennycool.

This paper selects as its focus the study of relationality in sociolinguistics. Through an emphasis on social relations as these emerge in discursive and communicative praxis I propose a critical revising of some more traditional, positivistic understandings of sociolinguistic research that enshrine a firm divide between a researching subject and an object of this research. This is followed by a relational analysis of empirical data from the Greek Albanian communities of modern Greece. Many threads of my discussion of relationality in sociolinguistics dovetail with the newly emerging field of Linguistic Ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that linguistic ethnography needs to include psychology as well as language and culture in the list of objects it studies, and build a dialogue with discursive psychology, which similarly focuses on discourse in contexts of use. Discursive psychology, and its variants, are introduced and, using a fragment of interaction from the U.K. reality television programme ‘Big Brother’ as an illustration, ways of investigating ‘personal order’ through discursive research are explored. It is argued that the investigation of identity and people's investments in particular identity positions should not be impeded by, for instance, conversation analytic methodological prescriptions or the concerns of psycho-social researchers that the study of psychology through the study of language is a step too far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines one of the major metalinguistic debates in post-war Germany: the debate about the influence of English on German, an issue which was raised in the 1990s in the German media and has dominated media discussions on language ever since. The analysis demonstrates that the debate is deeply embedded in current socio-political discourses as well as in long-term discursive traditions concerning, on the one hand, the socio-political changes following German reunification in 1989/90, which involved a revision of the concepts of nation and nationalism, and, on the other, the genesis of the concept of nation, which is closely bound up with the history of the educated bourgeoisie and the process of standardisation as well as linguistic purism. It is argued that the debate on Anglicisms, as is the case in many other metalinguistic debates, cannot be regarded in isolation from the socio-political environment and the context of historical usage within which it is embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a confluence of unique values and activities, the collective practice of community psychology is difficult to characterize in a simple way. Increasingly, however, professional contexts are laden with pressure to define any practice-from library work to medical interventions-in the orderly, compact language of traditional science. This trend has historically been resisted in the field by those sensing a fundamental lack of fit between the fluid, emergent aspects of community psychological practice and the fixed, precise language of classic science. In response to this “language-practice gap,” some have attempted to adapt the traditional language of science to better fit the field’s practice, while others have explored alternative languages of practice seemingly more indigenous to the messy “swamp” of actual communities. While the former effort leaves some theoretical contradictions intact, the latter tends to discount scientific identity entirely. This paper proposes a potential step forward by resituating questions of disciplinary language and identity within a current philosophical discourse where the nature of social science itself remains sharply contested. This suggests shifting attention away from “should webe a science?” to “what kindof science might we be after all?”; in turn, alternative languages may be re-cast as legitimate contributors to a kind of science more authentic to human communities-even a viable “science in the swamp.” One such language-philosophical hermeneutics-is presented as a particularly valuable supplement to traditional science. Illustrations highlight ways that hermeneutics may advance the formal language of the field towards a closer fit of what actually happens in practice, while preserving and even bolstering the empirical rigor and scientific identity of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I draw on Davidson's work to generate counter examples to his claim that since there are no untranslatable languages there are also no alternative conceptual schemes. I argue that Davidson's argument to that effect is based upon an equivocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This literature review on gender differences in child–parent interaction links two types of research bodies gathered over the last decades, on the one hand early between-child and within-child differences, and, on the other hand, parental discourse differences with children. Relevant individual studies, as well as two meta-analyses investigating gender in child–parent dyadic interaction, are evaluated, addressing differences in parental gender and child gender, early evidence of child gender differences in discourse, and child adaptations to interlocutors in general. Methodological problems of data gathering of both child and parental language are discussed, as well as the logical caveats of linking input to acquisition patterns. The findings allow no final conclusion regarding the issue of early gender socialization through language but indicate two contrasting hypotheses concerning the importance of early gendered linguistic interaction. The paper concludes with a discussion of research designs which might allow further differentiation between existing theoretical accounts of early gender socialization through language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of an interdisciplinary project which draws together sociolinguistic analyses of workplace discourse and recent work in the field of organisational studies. The starting point for this collaboration was a set of questions which arose from attempts to apply the findings of a large-scale sociolinguistic study into workplace language: (i) How can sociolinguistic tools and models generate useful feedback for practitioners and contribute to organisational learning? (ii) How can the understanding researchers have developed of workplace discourse help individuals and teams critically reflect on their own communication practices? (iii) What can the action research process add to our theoretical knowledge about workplace discourse? The authors explore these questions in the context of a number of current issues in the field of organisational studies, including an increasing interest in language and communication; emerging critical perspectives on the notion of competence in workplaces; and debates over the relationships between expert and practitioner knowledges. The concept of ‘reflective practice’ is presented as a framework to address these issues in the evaluation and development of workplace communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a critical analysis of the book "The Handbook of Sociolinguistics," edited by Florian Coumas. An issue which concerned some potential investigators of social dimensions of language use was that of the scientific and disciplinary statuses of the two principal contributing enterprises, namely, linguistics and sociology. The author finds the treatment of the topic on macro-issues weak and missing critical references. The paper on language and identity missed an opportunity to identify some critical sociolinguistic questions and relevant literatures.

Three studies were conducted in order to investigate antecedents of individuals' preoccupation with person descriptors, such as personality traits, physical-ethnic characteristics, or external characteristics, in Studies 1 and 2 subjects had to rate, for a given list of traits, how important each of the traits was as a prerequisite for performance within an academic context. Subjects who Here relatively inexperienced in writing term papers (Study 1) or in taking major exams (Study 2) showed a higher mean in rated importance of the traits than did those who were relatively experienced However, no differences between experienced and inexperienced subjects occurred if they had to rate the same trait list with respect to each trait's general desirability, i.e. where the traits were simply rated as such, without any reference to a performance realm. This finding clarifies an important aspect of the theory underlying this work, in the third study subjects were encouraged to make use of overt, visible aspects in describing how to recognize a foreign language speaker. The number of physical ethnic and material characteristics mentioned in subjects' descriptions was positively correlated with the number of mistakes subjects made in a foreign-language translation task, particularly when subjectively felt press with respect to translating was high and subjects' performance in translating was salient. Implications of these findings are discussed within a concept framework dwelling on the societal origins of the use of person-descriptor terms (Wicklund, 1986a,b). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]