In this tribute, I pay homage to the late Deborah Cameron (1958-2026), a leading feminist linguist whose scholarship shaped sociolinguistics’ understanding of the relationship among language, society, gender, sexuality, and power. The paper traces Cameron’s sustained intervention against biological determinism, romanticised accounts of gender difference, and the assumption that linguistic reform alone can produce social change. Throughout, the tribute highlights Cameron’s distinctive analytic stance: her insistence on complexity, her resistance to consensus, and her commitment to critique as an indispensable scholarly practice. I argue that Cameron’s legacy lies not only in specific theoretical contributions but also in her enduring challenge to treat language as a social phenomenon without mistaking it as a sufficient agent of social transformation. (Sociolinguistics, language and gender, feminism, power, ideology)

This article theorizes the concept ‘ethnolinguistic infusion’ as a language socialization and language management practice. Infusion involves community members incorporating fragments of their group language, in which most members have little or no competence, in the context of a different dominant language, with the potential effect of fostering ideological links among the individual, group, and language. I explain the metaphor, enumerate several characteristics, and offer a categorization of different types of infusion. I contextualize ethnolinguistic infusion among related constructs in language contact, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology, including translanguaging, postvernacularity, and metalinguistic communities, I explain its relationship to ethnolinguistic repertoire, and I distinguish it from out-group-initiated phenomena like crossing and mock language. I demonstrate how ethnolinguistic infusion plays out in my research on American Jewish summer camps. I offer empirical questions for future research, and I conclude by arguing for the utility of ethnolinguistic infusion, both for academic analysis and for language activism. (Language and ethnicity, heritage language, symbolic language, emblematic language, language and group identity, Hebrew, infusion, loanwords, language contact, translanguaging, metalinguistic community, postvernacularity, endangered languages, language reclamation, language revitalization)

How do Māori deaf people use and perceive variable features of New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) to invoke ethnolinguistic identity? Previous research has documented motivation among Māori deaf people to signal ethnic identity linguistically within and outside the NZSL community (McKee, McKee, Smiler, & Pointon 2007), but how this plays out in situated language practices has not been explored. This study proceeds from Eckert's (2012:98) contention that local ideologies which imbue linguistic variants with social meaning ‘are part of the active—stylistic—production of social differentiation’. With a focus on social meaning, this study combines micro-analysis of two features (pronominal pointing variants, and mouthing with signs) with consideration of metapragmatic data to explore how these features are believed to index ‘Māori deaf’ identity. Usage data and signers’ metalinguistic accounts suggest that these features are deployed to construct Māori identity in particular interactional contexts and roles, rather than indicating ethnicity as a macro-social category in NZSL. (New Zealand Sign Language, Māori deaf, ethnicity, identity, variation)*

Though the US Supreme Court is famous for ideological disagreements among its Justices, agreement may in fact be the norm: most appeals are not politically salient, unanimous rulings are common, and even divided rulings require at least five Justices to agree. Because nearly all speaking turns of Justices in oral arguments are in the form of questions to an attorney, any linguistic evidence of agreement would have to be in the ways that these questions are asked. In this study, I review an oral argument for evidence of agreement, with a focus on supportive alignment, that is, when one party ratifies or approves of another’s conversation turn. I analyze two questions from Justices that were later repeated and endorsed by other Justices, and I argue that these reuses are a form of supportive alignment driven by the unique interactional constraints of the setting. (Institutional discourse, legal discourse, US Supreme Court, multiparty interaction, alignment)

This article analyses the use of adversarial questions in oral hearings conducted by the Parole Board of England and Wales. This is important because the Board is supposed to use an inquisitorial approach to oral hearings, so adversarial questions are examples of where Parole Board members deviate from this norm. The article outlines the work of the Parole Board, the process for carrying out oral hearings and the recent move to increased remote hearings following the Covid-19 pandemic. Using conversation analysis, the research casts light on the relationship between mode of hearing (remote vs. in-person) and adversarial questions and how discourses of blame and responsibility operate in the production of these challenging question types. A chi-square test reveals that adversarial questions are statistically significantly more common in remote hearings, although they remain low in frequency. The article concludes with thoughts on why remote hearings are more conducive to adversarial questions. (Accounts, adversarial questioning, conversation analysis, parole, responsibility)*

In this article, I explore videogames, language ideologies, and vernacular theory. Specifically, I examine the politics of language in Sid Meier’s Civilization, with an emphasis on the representation of toponymy and the renaming of places after conquest. Civilization players lead quasi-imperial states, capture ‘cities’ from opponents, and rename them. Despite limitations in the game code, players use online forums to develop their understanding of the politics of toponymy. I argue that they participate in ‘vernacular theorising’ to critically engage with language-ideological premises coded into Civilization. In doing so, they sometimes make politically sophisticated and progressive observations, while also accepting problematic premises that structure their in-game engagement with language. I offer a deep engagement with theories of interpretation and ideology, which is vital for exploring how players negotiate ludic language ideologies, itself an important problem for the future of the field given the stature of videogames in popular culture. (Language ideologies, videogames, postcolonialism)*

Large language models based on machine-learning technologies are reshaping linguistic contexts and understandings of language. We explore these reconfigurations by investigating discursive positionings of traditional institutional guardians of power in language in response to these changes. Focusing on the discourse of the Real Academia Española (RAE), we show how RAE’s social functions, ways of asserting authority, and the nature, function, and rightful ownership of RAE’s standard language have been reimagined. Crucially, RAE presents itself as a professional soft power that protects the rights of Spanish speakers. Drawing on tropes of authenticity and endangerment, it conceptualises language generated by machine-learning technologies as inauthentic and as destroying the authentic Spanish of human Spanish speakers. We argue that these discourses are indexical of a power struggle where the role of traditional language norming institutions is reshaped in the face of sociotechnical innovations that are in the hands of global commercial companies. (Standard language, AI technology, language academies, authority in language, big tech, Real Academia Española)*

This article discusses the role of affect in diasporic belonging, especially when a community is affected by conflict, tracing the ways it circulates in and through discourses and interactions across different generations. Drawing on a linguistic ethnographic project on Greek-Cypriot diaspora, and following recent calls for paying more attention to affect in sociolinguistic analyses, it analyses the communicative dynamics of diasporic affect. Understanding diasporic affect as the circulation and communication of affects/emotions between individuals within a diasporic space, which is—to an extent—regulated by community norms, we analyze the discursive and communicative mechanisms participants used to navigate emotional norms about collective memory, conflict, and diasporic identifications. At the same time, we show how these mechanisms are productive of subjectivities that could either reinforce, disrupt, or redefine these norms. In doing so, we discuss the political implications of diasporic affect and the rules governing its expression and enactment in discourses and communicative practices. (Affect, conflict, diaspora, emotions, interaction, belonging)*