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The discourse on linguistic diversity, relativity and pluralism is currently dominant in sociolinguistics. By extension, arguments for universalism are currently unfashionable in the field, particularly within its interpretivist strand. This paper claims that interpretivist sociolinguistics promotes conflicting, often lukewarm, and at times antagonistic views on universalism as a core emancipatory value. In response, the argument is made that appreciating universalism requires a layered social ontology afforded by critical realism. To build this critique, the paper first surveys how universalism has been neglected by prominent interpretivist sociolinguists to date. It then provides a conceptual account of critical realism's layered social ontology and its relation to sociolinguistics. A discussion on the nature and importance of values in social science and sociolinguistics follows. Finally, the paper discusses universalism as a core emancipatory value, its critique, and its relation to sociolinguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how and whether speakers of endangered languages employ variation as a stylistic resource to make social meaning and index their identities. The study is set in historically Creole-speaking communities in rural Louisiana, which have now shifted almost completely to English. The Americanization of Louisiana induced language shift, but also a shift to the Anglo-American racial binary which supplanted local constructs of ethnicity and race. The study crafts a historical-sociolinguistic account of this process of Americanization, examining how linguistic differentiation was enacted through the enregisterment of iconic 'Creole'/'French' variants as indexical links to the 'Black'/'White' racial binary. Today, to a very limited extent, some speakers of Louisiana Creole still consider some variants socially meaningful and employ them to stylistic ends. This depends especially on racial identity and the variant in question. Subject pronouns retain some indexical value, occasionally employed stylistically by speakers racialized as White. However, front vowel rounding has fossilized: highly meaningful in the early-20th century, its social meaning has been lost resulting in synchronic personal-pattern variation. The paper ends by trying to reconcile classic studies of Language Death with contemporary variationist critique, answering recent calls for more nuanced approaches to sociolinguistic variation in threatened languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1994, in a thought-provoking paper focusing on the developments emerging in the renewed standard variety of Italian, Monica Berretta formulated a few previsions concerning the future admittance into the norm of a number of traits, in her own words, "features, or better, clusters of features that, in today's Italian, appear more likely to succeed in establishing themselves in the ongoing process of language change, since they are both co-occurrent and typologically coherent [my translation]". Those features included the incipient emergence of three negative constructions: i) a construction involving the negative operator mica (< Latin 'crumb'), either in post-verbal position without a pre-verbal negative marker (e.g. Sono mica scemo 'I am not a fool') or ii) in pre-verbal position (e.g. Mica sono scemo 'I am not a fool') and iii) a sentential negation entailing the cleft construction non è che ('it is not that') + S (e.g. Questo intervento non è che c'entri molto con il programma del congresso... 'It is not that this proposal is particularly relevant to the conference's theme...'), which Berretta considered to be favoured in prognostic terms. In this paper, the occurrences of negative constructions within the KIParla corpus will be compared with the corresponding occurrences in a thirty-hour corpus extracted from the Teche Rai data base [www.teche.rai.it], dating back to the 60s, 70s and 80s of the twentieth century. It will be argued that the cleft construction non è che + S has hitherto prevailed at the expense of the others (involving the use of the negative operator mica), that have specialised to express a few distinctive pragmatic and discursive functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the theoretical question of linguistic coherence by investigating lexical variation in contemporary Italian. In order to tackle issues regarding the coherence of lexical choice, variation is investigated with methods from lexical lectometry, which approaches the structure of language varieties (i.e. lects) by studying aggregate-level lexical distances between them. Based on uniformity measures, as introduced by Geeraerts et al. (1999), we have calculated the internal and external uniformity of spoken and written traditional standard Italian (represented by the academic section of the CORIS corpus for written Italian and the formal parts of the KIP corpus for spoken Italian) and neo-standard Italian (represented by the ParlaTO corpus for spoken Italian and the newspaper section of the CORIS corpus). The results confirm the hypothesis that two standard norms coexist in contemporary Italian and that traditional standard Italian appears to be more coherent at the lexical level than neo-standard Italian. Yet the study also indicates that other forms of coherence exist in contemporary Italian, depending on the adopted theoretical and methodological framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims at identifying common features in various fields of sociolinguistic research which would help rationalize methodological procedures and increase their efficiency. To this end, the paper discusses Language Management Theory, which focuses on the metalinguistic activities or behavior toward language of various social actors. Such metalinguistic activities represent a common denominator interconnecting seemingly heterogeneous fields of sociolinguistic research. The paper considers the possibilities of connecting such fields in various research areas. These include processes of language standardization and destandardization, the establishment of pluricentric standards, language attitudes research, the conceptualization of descriptive versus prescriptive linguistics, gender-related issues, language law, the management of multilingualism, and efforts aimed at strengthening the status of a language in a state or international organization. The discussion focuses on phenomena of agency, processes of the behavior toward language, the interconnection of the micro and macro levels of these processes, and the need to take socio-cultural, communicative as well as linguistic dimensions into consideration. Such a synthetic perspective would help generate and answer new fruitful research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on launch of the new Sociolinguistica: European Journal of Sociolinguistics, as announced in the preface to volume 35 of Sociolinguistica: International Yearbook of European Sociolinguistics. Topics include examines in this opening contribution individuals would first like to reflect briefly on the history of Sociolinguistica as a yearbook and explain the rationale for its transition to a journal; and considered the aim of positively influencing the circulation of sociolinguistic information as they decided to complement the more classic book reviews in each volume.

This paper addresses some of the challenges to mainstream research in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) thrown up by "critical perspectives", which encompass contributions from postmodern theory as well as recent developments in the range of specialties known as "critical studies". Since these challenges influence substantial tracts of scholarly discourse about linguistic diversity as well as about social and political responses to this diversity, it is useful to take stock of the corresponding claims and assess their import for language policy and planning (LPP) as a field of inquiry. Based on this examination, I argue that unless one is willing to buy uncritically into the problematic epistemological tenets of critical perspectives, their usefulness remains limited and is confined to heuristic side effects. The latter concern, in the main, a deeper treatment of the tension between language politics and language policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This opinion piece discusses how research on language ideologies (or, for that matter, ideologies of communication in general) relates to micro/macro distinctions of both the research field and the discipline of sociolinguistics. Starting off from the thesis that both object and strand of research at stake here do not neatly fit this dichotomous distinction, the paper discusses the Fishmanian origins as well as the diverse and diverging definitions of micro- andmacro-sociolinguistics that ensued from Fishman's proposal, considering the different assumptions that underlie the respective variants of the distinction. The piece discusses why language ideology research locates its object, and itself as a discipline, beyond the micro/macro binarism, and how/why it embraces a more scalar, relative and reflexive approach to social and linguistic juxtaposition, ordering and ranking. To this end, the concept of 'social scales' and its uptake by language ideology research are introduced and discussed. Finally, the paper provides an opinion on what the future of sociolinguistics should be like – independently from the particular strand at stake here – and about the role of this newly launched journal (with its long history as a yearbook) as the author wishes to see it being taken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the opposition between the realities and ideologies surrounding multilingualism in Latvia. Building mostly on Bourdieu's theory of language in society, and multilingual awareness as a concept, we study the socio-economic value of multilingual repertoires in a multilingual setting (Latvia), and language users' awareness of the link between their language competences (Latvian, Russian, English) and socio-economic status. By analysing sociolinguistic survey data, we demonstrate, firstly, that different multilingual repertoires are linked with differences in family income, level of education, and labour market position. Secondly, our data indicate that people generally do not acknowledge the link between their language skills and socio-economic status. To explore this further, we zoom in on language ideologies in formal education. We examine data on the multilingual awareness of Latvian language teachers from focus-group interviews and show that they tend to construe languages in competition, emphasise the symbolic value of Latvian, and ignore the multilingualism of their pupils and broader society. The study illuminates the dissonance between the multilingual realities of a post-Soviet EU country in which multilingual repertoires carry different values for individuals, and the Latvian-centred ideologies (disseminated by the teachers) that leave the presence of multilingualism and accompanying issues unacknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper centres on a dialogue with Liviu Matei, Professor of Higher Education and Public Policy at Kings College London, which aims to transcend sociolinguistic disciplinary boundaries by exploring the increasing use of English for higher education academic programmes at European universities within the context of university autonomy. Once Provost of the Central European University, forced to move from Hungary to Austria when its institutional autonomy was increasingly infringed by the state, Liviu Matei's academic work combines intellectual acuteness with experience, further deepened in the practice of consultation and applied policy research for influential international bodies and organisations, including the Council of Europe and the European Commission. With him, we consider in novel ways the role that legal reform granting a regulated autonomy to universities accompanied by a more corporate style of higher education governance may have played in the rampant growth in recent decades of English language academic programmes in the now European Higher Education Area (EHEA). We reflect on the historical and public policy contexts out of which English as a medium of instruction (EMI) arose, the regulated autonomy of universities by ministerial practices of steering at a distance, and widely obtaining political epistemologies and policy narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates conditions for language use among Norwegian adolescents using the minoritized Norwegian written language Nynorsk. By combining survey data and focus group interviews, and deploying the framework of 'capacity', 'opportunity', and 'desire' as an analytical lens, the study explores some of the factors and forces that influence the adolescents' choice to maintain the use of this non-hegemonic Norwegian written language. The paper thus seeks to add to the body of research investigating language maintenance of minoritized languages. The findings illuminate the discrepancy between regulations and practices in the Norwegian language community. Still, even if the collective structures are not optimal, many of the adolescents display a willingness to keep using Nynorsk – a willingness which is partly rendered possible by the existence of these same collective structures. The study thus demonstrates the dialectic relationship between these structures and individual language choices. Moreover, the data show that under given circumstances, some of the same factors and forces that usually further language shift, may also promote language maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with various aspects of the use of the subjunctive in spoken Italian. Firstly, a brief overview is provided of the interplay of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors underlying the selection of the subjunctive in various syntactic structures. Special attention is paid to the differences in subjunctive use in factual and non-factual contexts, pointing out that the former are less studied and less affected by normative injunctions than the latter. The focus then falls on factual contexts, in particular subordinate clauses which depend on factive and semi-factive governors. The investigation is based on KIParla, a corpus of spoken Italian consisting of different types of interactions with speakers of various origins and social backgrounds. It is argued that in the factual context at hand the subjunctive fulfills a specific set of functions, mostly related to the speaker's stance towards the content of the subordinate clause. Finally, a statistical analysis is performed using conditional inference trees and random forests in order to uncover the linguistic and extra-linguistic conditioning of subjunctive use. The analysis shows that in the context under observation it is only linguistic factors that significantly condition mood selection; the use of the subjunctive is substantially insensitive to socio-stylistic and geographic variation, and therefore a socially shared pattern of variation has emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with an ongoing change in the clitic paradigm of contemporary Italian, namely the incipient overextension of functions of the clitic ne. In the standard variety ne can only stand for prepositional phrases consisting of di + [noun phrase] and da + [noun phrase], such as those found in genitival, partitive, and locative constructions or in passive 'by'-phrases. In contemporary Italian, on the other hand, ne is increasingly appearing as a substitute of a + [noun phrase] when used as the second argument of intransitive bivalent verbs, such as accennare (a) 'to mention', appassionarsi(a) 'to get passionate (about)', and sopravvivere (a) 'to survive'. The latter use has not received much attention in the literature. This overextension is observed in a number of verbs, drawing on data from four corpora of written and spoken Italian, and is discussed as an incipient change from above, originating in formal registers of Italian and moving downwards into the neo-standard and (albeit rarely) colloquial varieties. The change seems to have been triggered and favored by the fact that the standard variants for that slot of the paradigm, namely locative vi and ci, are avoided because they are considered too obsolete or low-prestige respectively, and also by the fact that these clitics, when combined with others, especially in pronominal verbs, might be judged agrammatical by some speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A closer interdisciplinary engagement by geographers, ethnographers and sociolinguists has resulted in new thematic issues being investigated and more sophisticated methodological approaches being adopted. The development of advanced IT and AI capabilities, particularly the wider adoption of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), has opened up new means of exploring and representing aspects of human behaviour. Of particular note is the appreciation by sociolinguistics of the various spatial perspectives currently being utilised in sub-disciplines such as studies of the interactions within metropolitan multilingual contexts, linguistic landscapes, new speaker research and applied language policy. This paper calls for a greater mutual reciprocity and syncretic interpretation of several key issues and promising methodologies. It also indicates how sociolinguists can contribute to significant societal debates on language policy and planning as part of social planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the long history of mutual language contact, Slavic languages have had a considerable influence on German and attitudes towards multilingualism in Austria. With regard to the multilingual setting in the Habsburg state and its repercussions to this day, this article outlines the basic assumptions, the methodological toolkit as well as the main general findings of the special research programme "German in Austria. Variation – Contact – Perception", especially its task cluster on language contact. The opinion paper concludes with an overview of the methodological lessons learnt and the possible implications for further sociolinguistic research in historical contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews some of the changes engendered by the digital turn in language attitudes and language behaviour. It compares the current nexus of technology and language with that of print capitalism and examines the dimensions of digital society that have been affected particularly strongly, paying special attention to social practices, Bourdieu's notion of "legitimate language", legal issues, and our general understanding of how language works. It concludes by proposing a new research agenda in the form of a list of topics that sociolinguistics should address in the future, in particular the role of language institutions in cyberspace, the future of multilingualism, and a reinterpretation of Bourdieu's notion of "legitimate language". The paper is intended as a contribution to the ongoing and increasingly urgent discussion about the nexus of cyberspace, deliberative democracy, and multilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Identity" as an operating variable and/or explanatory concept continues to pervade sociolinguistic scholarship. This article reflects on and discusses the continuing dominance of post-structural and social constructionist accounts of identity and debates whether recent work has led to an "unrestrained embracing of speaker agency" (Bell 2017: 592) with a comparative neglect of social structure, or whether this work is contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between local meaning-making practices and macro-socio(linguistic) processes, and thereby challenging extant binaries in sociolinguistics, in particular: the treatment of stability versus fluidity, agency versus structure and the traditional dichotomy between micro- and macro-sociolinguistics. Reflecting on historical developments and recent trends, it outlines the significant contribution of theoretical models and empirical studies to sociolinguistics, whilst noting obvious gaps, e.g. insufficient studies of the Global South. It is argued that recent work is contributing to a sociolinguistics which foregrounds and problematises the concept of "context" and the contingency of difference and belonging. The paper also argues that recent identity scholarship opens up opportunities for cross-disciplinary projects, drawing on the combined expertise of sociolinguistics, cognitive sociologists and psycholinguists to explain inter alia such phenomena as fluidity and variation in speaker/community attitudes and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our interest should always be aroused when scholars reject the testable approaches that have underwritten scientific development since the seventeenth century. Academic excursions in the arts and humanities need not adhere to scientific benchmarks, of course, and discussions relevant to science that are presented there need not always be subject to rigorous examination. When investigations move into social-science territory, however, more focused attention is called for. Since the scholars discussed in this paper clearly think of themselves as social scientists, it is quite legitimate to subject their investigations to scientific scrutiny and logical analysis. This article briefly describes contemporary investigations and research paradigms characterized by unnecessary neologisms, flatulent jargon, fuzzy thinking, and unconvincing arguments about the discovery of new territory in well-ploughed ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on sociolinguistic variation in spoken Italian, discussing the evolution of language varieties from a situation of "spoken diglossia" to the emergence of a new standard variety known as neo-standard Italian. It explains how socio-economic changes led to the convergence of linguistic features, both from below and from above, resulting in the coexistence of multiple standard varieties and the obsolescence of socially and regionally marked features.

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An interview is presented with Peter Trudgill, a renowned figure in sociolinguistics. Trudgill critiques the concept of sociolinguistic "waves" over the last decade, expressing skepticism towards the three-wave approach emphasizing social meaning and stylistic practice. Topics include Trudgill's disapproval of the three "waves" model in sociolinguistic historiography, emphasizing linguistic goals over ethnographic shifts.

Luxembourgish is a Germanic language in Western Europe situated on the Germanic-Romance language border. The centuries-long multilingualism, that has included German and French as main contact languages, has led to much variation on all linguistic levels, yielding lexical doublets – contact-induced synonym pairs. The study presents the results from the online Lëtzebuerger Futtballsprooch 'Luxembourgish football language' survey (n = 1189 participants), set up to analyze the distribution of the variants of lexical doublets in the special language of football in order to exemplify the mechanisms of contact-induced lexical variation in Luxembourgish as a whole. The variation is correlated with sociodemographic and language biographical factors (quantitative analysis, beta regression). The study also introduces linguistic orientation as an overarching factor for the individual language biography that is useful to model the positioning of individuals in relation to the contact languages involved in a complex multilingual society. The results reveal a societal trend towards Germanic variants linked to the linguistic orientation of the participants towards German, mirroring sociolinguistic dynamics and changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study deals with the presence and role of the Sardinian language in the linguistic landscape of sixteen villages in the province of Oristano, Sardinia. Specifically, their entry signs and street name signs were photographed and analysed using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. In the entry signs, Sardinian was found to have a very strong presence, generating a high degree of bilingualism with Italian, as recommended by national and regional language policies. Systematic bilingualism could not, however, be observed in the street name signs, where Italian clearly prevails. Notwithstanding, the local language is visible in around a quarter of all street name signs. Complying with the provisions of national and regional legislations, Sardinian is used in the majority of street signs to recall the historical memory of the communities. Nonetheless, signs could be found where Sardinian is used in parallel bilingual texts to express exactly the same content as Italian, fostering a modern vision of the minority language. The present work shows how top-down language policies can be locally implemented or re-interpreted in the linguistic landscape; moreover, the article sheds light on how street naming can be exploited to influence society's perception of minority languages and convey messages of local or regional/national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The variety of Italian spoken in Bolzano (South Tyrol) represents a singular case in Italy, because it is not the result of a long-term contact between standard and Italo-Romance dialects but rather the outcome of a process of levelling and koineization. In such sociolinguistic scenario, it is interesting to study phonological variability in Bolzano Italian with the aim of understanding which language varieties have possibly played a role as models from a sociolinguistic point of view. The purpose of our exploratory study is to characterize this variety within the spectrum of variation between the standard and the regional norm. In our analysis, we will focus on the set of mid vowels as a window to understand which variety of Italian BI most closely resembles. Through a corpus-based analysis, we will investigate the phonological distribution of mid vowels (for both Italian and Tyrolean speakers), in order to explore whether it can be explained on the basis of a contextual or a lexical distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the presence of several cross-variety studies on spoken varieties of regional Italian, research on the intonational transition across geographically close varieties is still scarce. This article tackles this issue by providing a first cross-variety comparison of question intonation in three neighboring varieties of Italian spoken in Campania, namely Neapolitan, Salerno and Cilento Italian. The three varieties are chosen based on their position with respect to the isoglosses identifying the Eboli-Lucera line. Such comparison is made possible using the methodological protocol outlined by Gili Fivela et al. (2015) and specifically concerns yes-no, wh- and disjunctive questions. This explorative study aims at identifying intonational features differenced by frequency of occurrence across space, thereby providing a basis for further quantitative studies on spatial distribution. Based on a corpus elicited with a combination of Discourse Completion Task and reading task, we analyze the phonological features of question tunes in Cilento Italian, while also comparing them to their counterparts in Neapolitan and Salerno Italian. Results show that the three varieties present systemic, realizational and phonotactic differences as well as differences in the frequency of occurrence of tonal events. The intraregional variation across Campania Italian varieties hints at an intonational transition featuring a smooth geographic cline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on language standardization witnessed remarkable progress over the past two decades. Building on the strong foundations laid by Einar Haugen, the scholarly canon on the topic was renewed, while also addressing a number of shortcomings of earlier theory building. As historical sociolinguistics gained momentum, standardization history faced the challenge of including 'voices from below' as they appeared in new and socially inclusive corpora of egodocuments from the past centuries. This implied an increased focus on the formerly overlooked role and presence of non-standard varieties, but also on the ideological driving factors behind many standardization efforts. The article makes a case for specific and ongoing attention to the implementation phase of standardization measures, as well as for the study of language conflicts from times past to help prevent imminent geopolitical struggles (or, for worse, to inform our understanding of these conflicts in the near future). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The various collections of language biographies starting in the 1990s have given rise to a new field of investigation in sociolinguistics. The interest in the very individual, autobiographical viewpoint on languages in speakers' own repertoires offers new insights for macrosociolinguistic research. These detailed corpora also provide data for microanalytical investigations into the specificity of autobiographical narrations, i.e. how speakers construe their language repertoires in the narrative interview setting. This contribution seeks to depict how the interest in LB emerged and subsequently describes the most important developments in LB research, which to date is still limited to the European arena. Since the field is still growing and is in need of formalization, this overview must remain incomplete. Finally, the contribution warns of pitfalls and highlights some fields where LB has provided important input, from language didactics to neurolinguistic studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After more than half a century, sociolinguistic research on language maintenance and shift has developed in different directions depending on the type of speech community it focuses on. The similarities between "indigenous" as autochthonous and "migrant" as allochthonous languages undergoing shift have often been overlooked and the two have been treated differently. Such a division not only reflects a much-debated dichotomy between "old" and "new" minorities in political and legal scholarship, but is also linked to different legal and institutional treatments of such minorities and their languages. However, at a time when the mobilities paradigm has become an integral aspect of sociolinguistic scholarship, there is a need to rethink the way in which sociolinguists have come to terms with migration so far, including a highly problematic and artificial separation of different types of linguistic community based on perceived migrational status. Such a rethink is needed in order to be able to provide more contextualized analyses of locally specific sociolinguistic realities, which can rarely be determined on the basis of widely assumed categorizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the publication of William Stokoe's Sign Language Structure in 1960, there was a proliferation of linguistic research addressing different aspects of sign languages. The emergence of this research had implications not only for linguistics as an academic discipline, but also for the deaf community itself. One area in which the study of sign languages and the growing activism of deaf communities overlapped in powerful ways was in calls for the official recognition of sign languages – that is, with respect to status planning. In addition to status planning, there have also been clear examples of corpus planning, acquisition planning, and prestige planning with respect to sign languages. Although efforts to engage in language planning for sign languages, and to develop and implement language policies for such languages, share many characteristics with language planning targeting spoken languages, in other ways they are quite distinctive. In this article, an overview of language planning and policy for sign languages is provided, followed by discussions of the linguistic human rights of sign language users and the role of language policies for sign languages in efforts to ensure civil rights for deaf individuals and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I reflect on the future of macro-sociolinguistic research from a global-south perspective. I discuss the role that activism has played in scholarly work, and how such activism was hampered by persistent ideologies of 'thingification'; that is, ideologies that created languages and nations as 'objects' (to be managed and controlled by states and local/national/global elites). I ground the history of such discourses in colonialism-capitalism. I further explore the global and local regimes of language that were created through the dehumanizing violence of colonialism-capitalism, as well as the alternative futures that have been imagined by all those who resisted – and continue to resist – this violence. I conclude with some thoughts on temporalities, on the different relationships with, and to, time and the urgency of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital media have become a mainstream source of data for sociolinguistics, reflecting the ubiquity of such media and the centrality of their role in people's everyday speech as well as changed attitudes towards what constitutes a valid object of study in sociolinguistics. As our personal and professional reality becomes more technologized, there is, however, an urgent need to engage with a deeper understanding of the current and evolving digital economy underpinning this reality in order to assess critically the data that we now encounter. Trends such as personalization, securitization, and hierarchization, for example, mean that the sociolinguistic data we encounter are increasingly shaped by users' digital identities. In the current digital economy, language is a key tool for steering, recording, and tracking these identities, for example, in the form of algorithms; however, the sociolinguistic dimension to these processes has not yet been explored fully. As well as more integrated approaches to studying digital sociolinguistic data, our increasingly technologized reality demands that we build algorithmic reflexivity into our teaching and our research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]