ABSTRACT Sociolinguistic research has long documented the appropriation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) across media including film, music and advertising. In this article, we add to this body of work by exploring the digital recontextualisation of a subset of AAVE features as ‘TikTok/internet language’. To do this, we analyse metalinguistic discourses of linguistic appropriation in a corpus of 178 TikTok videos. We identify two main competing discourses: On the one hand, a concern regarding the indexical erasure of AAVE as a variety of English spoken by Black Americans; and on the other, claims of a new register of ‘internet language’. Concluding, we argue that, in the participatory context of social media, the circulation of the label ‘TikTok language’ poses an issue for the raciolinguistic enregisterment as a ‘Black variety’ of English.

ABSTRACT This article examines Australian media coverage of childhood multilingualism and language education through 85 news articles published between 2013 and 2024 across major news outlets. Using a critical post‐structural framework and raciolinguistic perspective, we demonstrate how identical linguistic practices (multilingualism and language learning) are framed through different ideological lenses depending on children's racial positioning. While White, monolingual children's language learning is consistently celebrated through neoliberal ideologies of competitive advantage and cognitive benefit, racialised children's existing multilingualism is constructed as a deficit, barrier or threat requiring intervention. These differential framings reveal systematic raciolinguistic hierarchies that privilege Whiteness while marginalising Indigenous and migrant communities’ linguistic practices. Our findings reveal how media discourses actively construct and maintain linguistic inequalities through racialised framings, demonstrating the importance of examining how language and race intersect in public discourse, with significant implications for how sociolinguistics advocates for children and young people's multilingualism in the Australian and other settler‐colonial contexts. 本文通过分析2013年至2024年间主要新闻媒体发表的85篇新闻报道, 探究澳大利亚媒体如何报道儿童期多语现象和语言教育。本文从批判性后结构主义框架和种族语言学视角出发, 展示了相同的语言实践(多语言化及语言习得), 如何因儿童的种族身份, 通过不同意识形态视角被建构呈现。在新自由主义意识形态下, 白人单语儿童的语言学习常被誉为竞争优势和认知收益, 而在社会语境中被归类为特定种族的儿童的多语能力则被建构为需要干预的缺陷、障碍或威胁。这些差异化的呈现方式揭示了系统性的种族语言等级制度：一方面赋予白人身份以特权，另一方面边缘化原住民及移民社群的语言实践。研究揭示了媒体话语如何通过种族化的框架, 积极构建并维持着语言不平等, 凸显审视语言与种族在公共话语中交互的重要性。这一研究对在澳大利亚及其他殖民移民语境下儿童与青少年的多语现象具有深远意义。

ABSTRACT Research throughout the United States has found that the type of high school a speaker attended can impact linguistic variation. However, this work has largely focused on adult alumni of schools. This paper examines high school students’ reversal of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, an ongoing sound change in Chicago, through a qualitative analysis of interview content and quantitative analysis of vowel production. Results show that students from varied socioeconomic backgrounds who attend “elite” high schools produce more reversed variants of the highly salient TRAP and LOT vowels than those at other schools. This suggests that variants originally associated with class have taken on higher‐order indexical meanings as students use them to reflect their positions in a status‐based hierarchy.

ABSTRACT This original sociolinguistic ethnographic study examines social practices and (ING) variation in Aboriginal English, an indigenized variety of English spoken by First Nations people in Australia. Based on 42 hours of audio recordings and ethnographic data with 31 girls at a predominantly First Nations boarding school in the outskirts of Perth, Western Australia, we find higher rates but similar linguistic conditioning of [ɪn] compared to other Englishes in Australia. Additionally, a third variant [ɪŋk] emerges as an iconic affective resource. We also explore the indexicalities of (ING) variants. Our analysis reveals that (ING) use reflects group orientation towards or against school norms and is mediated by access to other languages as identity markers. [ɪŋk] serves an independent function as an iconic resource for emphasis or to signal high emotion.

ABSTRACTSociolinguists emphasize the context‐dependence of social meanings activated by linguistic variation. I examine this dynamic using the Goffmanian concept of frames, focusing on the intersection of gender and sexuality. More specifically, I explore pitch variation as an index of femininity in the domestic abuse victimization frame. People expect the “ideal victim” to be weak, blameless, and, importantly, female. Using an experiment, I show that female victims who diverge from this expectation by having a lower Voice Pitch are perceived as less scared and less rational than their higher pitched counterparts. This effect only emerges for victims in heteronormative relationships, however, with Voice Pitch becoming “indexically inoperative” in cases where a victim already diverges from stereotypical expectations of a victim by having a Female Abuser. I discuss this finding in relation to established dynamics in sociolinguistic perception and to domestic abuse policing.

ABSTRACTThis paper responds to a recent call to develop a sociolinguistics of potentiality by examining how semiotic and multilingual practices may participate in processes of ethical world‐building. It looks at contexts where minoritized language speakers who are subjected to colonial government use colonial languages (e.g., English) along with other semiotic resources to create spaces of potentiality where alternative social projects embody complex interplays of hope and despair. Employing the Southern notion of sumud pedagogy as a localized application of Stroud's notion of Linguistic Citizenship, I examine how Palestinian Arabic‐speaking youth in Israel employ multilingual and semiotic resources to deconstruct social constructs and reject imposed subjectivities. Combining my voice as a Palestinian sociolinguist in Israel with the voices of Palestinian youth from Haifa, I illustrate how a horizontal movement from one language to another enables multilingual‐minoritized speakers to disrupt English hegemony through constructing new modes of being, belonging, and knowing.

ABSTRACTThis paper contributes to research on the awareness of grammatical variability through a study of variation in reflexivity marking in Mano under the influence of Kpelle, both indigenous languages of Guinea. The speakers of these languages are found to be sensitive to contact‐induced grammatical variation in reflexivity, which manifests via variation in comprehension patterns and, more specifically, in form‐to‐meaning correspondence, across different communities. We explain the patterns by hypothesizing that variation in comprehension is at least partially based on language experience in a particular environment and does not necessarily reflect a difference in grammatical representation. Such explanation underscores the importance of sociolinguistic considerations for employing acceptability judgments in syntactic analysis.