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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]

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 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]

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]

"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]

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]

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]

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]