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This edited Volume entitled Language policies and the politics of language practices consists of contributions stemming from the field of ethnography of education, minority language teaching and language politics more in general. Starting from past contributions hunched in a more Fishmanian ‘sociolinguistics of spread’ where the driving question has been who speaks which language to whom, where and why, the Volume shows how the study of language in society has moved toward a post-Fishmanian ‘sociolinguistics of mobility’ (Blommaert, 2010; Spotti, 2011; De Fina, 2020). At its core, there is an attempt to show and further grasp how globalization driven sociolinguistics phenomena across the globe have had an effect not only on language policy processes but also on how these policy processes and their politics are often confronted by the practices of language users in their micro-fabrics of daily interactions within the socio-cultural spaces they inhabit.

In the domains of education and labor, we may expect to be assessed on competences and capacities. Alas, stereotyping and prejudice hinder this for people from peripheral areas and marginalized groups. One of the important factors in this is their language. Why does speaking with an accent diminish one’s opportunities in the job market or the achievements in one’s school career? Why are some accents better than other accents?In a pilot study at a teacher training college we addressed the question if future teachers of Dutch may or may not speak with an accent in the class room. Apparently, speaking with an accent will be tolerated by future teachers of Dutch, but it depends on which accent one uses. Indigenous accents are evaluated more positively than foreign accents, especially those we associate with labor migration.Although diversity in the pronunciation of Dutch may have increased, the social acceptance of accents is quite selective. Adolescents have to deal with stigmatized representations when people hear and assess their accents. Tolerance towards speaking with an accent is limited, and this may damage the position of young people from the countryside and specific ethnic groups.

Sociolinguistic stratification – the fact that language diversity is turned into inequality through processes of normative judgment – has been central in the development of modern sociolinguistics and has kept researchers’ attention for many decades. The online-offline nexus in which we have learned to live and organize our social lives in online as well as offline spaces, each carrying different normative standards, has become a lab for manifest sociolinguistic restratification. An analysis of Donald Trump’s orthographic errors on Twitter, and how such errors went viral, shows how multiple audiences apply very different indexical vectors to the errors, each of them iconicizing a more general set of perceived social and political divisions. The outcome is a complex, polycentric sociolinguistic system, far less stable than that imagined in earlier sociolinguistics. This system requires renewed attention.

In dit artikel tonen we aan de hand van kwalitatieve data aan hoe talige praktijken met sprekers en artiesten uit drie steden in de periferie van Nederland en België, namelijk Tilburg, Heerlen en Genk een lokale identiteit construeren en reproduceren en hoe op die manier het besef van lokale eigenheid tot stand komt. We laten zien dat in deze drie steden artiesten en sprekers aan de hand van geënsceneerde en gemediatiseerde taalprakijken bewust nieuwe lokale identiteiten construeren. In de drie gevallen gaat het om hybride of heterogene taalprakijken, waarbij het Nederlands of lokale dialectale elementen gecombineerd worden met elementen uit andere aanwezige (contact)talen (zoals het Surinaams of het Italiaans). Bovendien worden deze taalpraktijken in Tilburg en Heerlen, maar ook ‐ hoewel in mindere mate ‐ voor Genk, via parodie verspreid, versterkt en vernieuwd. ispartof: Taal en Tongval vol:70 issue:2 pages:149-177 status: published

Drawing on examples from Tanzania, I question the sociolinguistic notion of "local". In an age of online-offline communicative economies, the "local" is shot through with nonlocal features.