Brutoglossia: Democracy, authenticity, and the enregisterment of connoisseurship in 'craft beer talk'.

Building on Silverstein's (2003, 2016) oinoglossia (wine talk), this paper argues for a closely related genre: brutoglossia , (craft) beer talk. Drawing on a corpus of craft beer and brewery descriptions from Toronto, Canada, I argue that the appropriation of wine terminology and tasting practices (re)configures beer brewers and drinkers as 'elite' and 'classy.' The 'specialist' lexical and morphosyntactic components of wine discourse provide the higher order of indexicality through which the emergent technical beer terminology is to be interpreted. Together, the descriptions can be read as fields of indexicalities, mapping linguistic and semiotic variables associated with a particular social object: beer. • Through the appropriation of wine terminology and tasting practice, beer is (re)configured into something 'classy.' • Beer's status as a craft commodity is in large part constructed through the specialized terminology required to describe it. • Though breweries produce elements of democratic inclusivity, they simultaneously reinforce and reproduce class distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]