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In Papua New Guinea (PNG), citizenship rests on one's capacity to translate oneself. Political participation takes place in cultural contact zones, and public discourse circulates only when people create interfaces between disparate languages, systems of knowledge, and values. Yet these translations are not treated equally in mass print media. The uniquely ethnographic citizenship of PNG demands that people decide how their social identities relate to their political agency yet without a guarantee that their solutions will be validated. Just as the national creole language Tok Pisin is subject to competing ideological evaluations of multilingualism, Tok Pisin public discourse is characterized by competing tendencies toward epistemic inclusion and exclusion, particularly when sorcery and other occult topics are discussed. In each case, discussion of the occult involves both an openness to differences in knowledge and a tendency to treat particular knowledge claims as beliefs (bilip) to be overcome. While bilip has become the dominant way to constrain public discourse on the occult, I also show that the bilip can be reinterpreted to index a moral stance of mutual recognition of differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audiences often ascribe monolithic linguistic authority to news media institutions, viewing journalists as the bearers of language standards. Yet media are in fact heteroglossic, with journalists across different media platforms negotiating competing practical demands and different understandings of the social purposes and possibilities of their work. This article examines a case of hyperideologized minority-language media to show how the interplay of deep-seated language ideologies, the local sociohistorical context of media, and the material, technological affordances of different platforms produces a cline of enregisterment. It focuses on media produced in Buryat, a Mongolic language of southeastern Siberia whose speakers are shifting to Russian. Comparing journalists' linguistic practices and audiences' interpretations across the coexisting media platforms of newspapers, radio, and television shows how media enregisterment and, in turn, the enregisterment of a standard literary language occur along a cline that is shaped by the intersections of ideology with technology. (Media, language ideology, enregisterment, standardization, purism, materiality, Russia, Russian, Buryat) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]