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This epilogue highlights and bundles some major points and perspectives that have been identified in the papers of this special issue and locates them in the wide field of language ideology research. By doing that, the epilogue sets out to sketch major trends in the past, present and (anticipated) future of the research field, thereby showing (sometimes hidden) traditions, achievements and challenges of language ideology research (and related fields). Particularly, the (re-)emerging interest in affectual dimensions, social positioning, institutional ideology brokerage, social inequality, and power, which are at the center of a number of papers each, are being highlighted and discussed. In a historical contextualization, the epilogue furthermore shows how these topics and interests can be traced back in the fields history and even further to long-standing engagements with language ideologies avant la lettre.

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.

This paper discusses the interpretive complexity of ‘culture’, which is at the same time the central theoretical concept of ‘cultural linguistics’ (kulturwissenschaftliche Linguistik) as well as the object of its investigation, i.e., a conceptual term and a discursive phenomenon. This results in ambiguous conceptualizations: In culture-theoretical work, ‘culture’ is usually described as being ‘dynamic’, ‘fluid’, ‘procedural’ and ‘context-dependent’, but in discourse, culture is often, if not predominantly, perceived as something ‘static’, ‘fixed’, ‘essential’ and ‘general’. From this ambiguity, many methodological questions emerge: Is it advisable to rely on a concept that has such an enormous ideological load (and that, moreover, is increasingly used in recent neo-nationalist and even neo-racist propaganda)? Does culture analysis willy-nilly perpetuate problematic essentialist framings while relying on ‘culture’ as a descriptive concept? Is it methodologically sensible to use concepts for description and explanation of discourses that are actually products of the discourses that are supposed to be explained (cf. Foucault 2001 [1968])? In other words: is ‘cultural linguistics’ a circular venture if it explains cultural discourses on the background of the concept of culture? Is the discrepancy between dynamic and static, ‘descriptive’ and ‘prescriptive’ concepts of culture to be solved, and how? Should we try to de-ideologize ‘culture’, as some culturally oriented scholars have proposed? Or should we rather drop the concept, as other scholars (particularly from a post-colonial point of view) have suggested? The paper discusses these questions, argues for more sensitivity vis-à-vis the ideological contextualization of ‘culture’ and suggests differentiating ideological fixations of ‘culture’ from the discursive processes and negotiations that constitute ‘the cultural’.

This paper proposes to adapt the sociolinguistic concept of language crossing (Rampton 1995) to the analysis of graphic phenomena (on the level of graphematics, typography and the writing system), where multiple graphic systems are put in juxtaposition. It argues that, like in language crossing, distinctive indexical orders can be merged with the aim of constructing specific contexts that derive from the attitudes that are linked with the phenomena in question. The paper discusses the transferability of the concept of crossing and demonstrates its potential, using examples from all of the three aforementioned basic scriptural levels

Seit 13 Jahren treffen sich die VertreterInnen der germanistischen und zunehmend auch der internationalen Jugendsprachforschung in regelmäßigen Abständen zu einem Austausch über den gegenwärtigen Stand der Forschung. Nach den Fachkonferenzen in Leipzig (1992), Heidelberg (1997), Osnabrück (1998) und Wuppertal (2001) fand im Februar 2005 die fünfte Tagung in Boldern bei Zürich und damit erstmals außerhalb Deutschlands statt. Etwa 90 TeilnehmerInnen aus 15 Ländern waren der Einladung von Christa Dürscheid (Zürich) gefolgt, „neue Blicke durch alte Löcher“ und „neue Blicke durch neue Löcher“ zu werfen, wie es in ihrem Eröffnungsvortrag in Anlehnung an Georg Christoph Lichtenberg hieß. Neben aktuellen Ergebnissen standen also auch alte, ungelöste Grundsatzfragen der Forschung (Welchen ontologischen Status räumt man „Jugendsprache“ ein? Ist sie eine Varietät, ein Stil, ein Register? Ist „Jugend“ eher eine soziale oder eher eine biologische Kategorie? u. a.) auf dem Programm.

The initial stages of homoepitaxial island formation on Si(100)2×1 by SiH4decomposition under ultra high vacuum chemical vapor deposition conditions are studied by scanning tunneling microscopy and kinetic model calculations. The concentrations of the intermediate species formed on the surface during SiH4decomposition are calculated from the kinetic parameters of the dissociation cascade leading to Si film growth in the temperature regime of 500 to 800 K and for SiH4pressures in the range of 2×10-7to 2×10-5mbar. Experimental results showing the surface topography after interaction with SiH4at various surface temperatures and deposition rates are presented, and the observed surface structures are related to the different surface conditions, i.e., deposition flux and sample temperature, under which islands are formed.