In the last few decades, knowledge of language acquisition and teaching has come from many diverse and often heterogeneous approaches to the field. Sociolinguistics has contributed to considerations of language, variety, code, and register on the edges as well as to representations of identities as these articulate with citizenship (see Canagarajah, Reference Canagarajah, May and Hornberger2008; Rassool, Reference Rassool and Rassool2007; Stroud, Reference Stroud and Petrovich2009), and it has approached questions of language ideologies (Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998; Donahue, Reference Donahue and Tollefson2002; Woolard, Reference Woolard, Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998), language policy, and planning (Pennycook, Reference Pennycook, May and Hornberger2008; Phillipson, Reference Phillipson2009; Ricento & Wright, Reference Ricento, Wright, May and Hornberger2008; Spolsky, Reference Spolsky2004; Tollefson & Tsui, Reference Tollefson and Tsui2004) as contextual spaces of social, political, and economic intervention. Of central importance for language learning have been postcolonial discourses on the relationship between language and power, language policy, and critical pedagogy. There is an equally significant body of work from the perspective of sociocultural approaches to second language (L2) acquisition (recently, for example, Kramsch, Reference Kramsch2009) and a substantial body of research on L2 learners now coming out of interactional and, more recently, variationist sociolinguistics (see Rampton, Reference Rampton2011; Stroud & Wee, Reference Stroud and Wee2007). Psycholinguistics, on the contrary, has contributed to a more nuanced understanding of how and when languages are learned (Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson, Reference Hyltenstam, Abrahamsson, Doughty and Long2003; Pienemann, Reference Pienemann1998) and engages with questions of developmental sequences and maturational constraints, whereas neurolinguistics and cognitive linguistics currently offer new explorations of how the brain organizes languages and thought. Interventions inside school doors, in both formal and informal educational contexts, have been the purview mainly of applied linguists, who have planned language instruction at the level of course design, pedagogy, teacher training, textbook production, and translation.

There is clearly scope for interdisciplinary studies across sociolinguistics and more cognitive approaches to SLA. Some excellent earlier moves in this direction include the set of dialogues on the relationship between cognitive and interactionist or sociocultural approaches to SLA (see Firth & Wagner, Reference Firth and Wagner1997). More recently, links are being forged between interactionist and variationist approaches to the sociolinguistics of the learner, on the one hand, and between these subdisciplines and SLA, on the other (e.g., Rampton, Reference Rampton2011; Stroud & Wee, Reference Stroud and Wee2007).

Despite this, the perspectives offered by the traditional disaggregation of research on language learning across sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and psycho- and neurolinguistics are not easily reconciled. Rampton (Reference Rampton2011), in an important and deeply reflective position paper on the relationship of sociolinguistic research on style, stylization, and SLA, notes that “historically, ‘style’ and ‘second language’ don’t go together in language research, and they have often been associated with antagonistic views of non-standard mixed speech data” (p. 2). In other recent work, Claire Kramsch (Reference Kramsch2009) complains that even though “imagined identities, projected selves, idealizations or stereotypes of the other . . . seem to be central to the language learning experience . . . they are difficult to grasp within the current paradigms of SLA research” (p. 5).

Part of the problem of interdisciplinarity, however, is the narrow focus on select populations and data types in SLA research. For example, DeKeyser, Alfi-Shabtay, and Ravid (Reference DeKeyser, Alfi-Shabtay and Ravid2010), from the perspective of research on near-nativelikeness and critical periods, recently noted that one of the challenges for SLA research is the need to consider more diverse populations of speakers. DeKeyser and colleagues refer to the fact that in the research on the critical period hypothesis, “almost every sample has been one of convenience, which typically means a much higher percentage of highly educated participants than in the population at large,” and that because “the evidence is only as good as the sample” (p. 416), more differentiated populations need to be investigated. Other authors also argue that there may be multiple critical periods for different aspects of language (see Seliger, Reference Seliger and Ritchie1978). Long (Reference Long1998) remarked that, when carrying out experimental work, researchers work under constraints that lead to a focus on “easy linguistic targets in short term laboratory studies” (p. 123), which, of course, limits the generalizability of the results. These points find clear resonance in sociolinguistic research on multilingualism in late modernity, in which there is a recognition that what it means to be a speaker—and learner—is highly variable and contended in societies and communities characterized by accelerated mobility, new technologies of communication that penetrate ever-deeper into everyday lives, and shifting senses of the local. Language learners in late modern societies are heterogeneous and diverse (as are speakers generally), and the languages and varieties they encounter are more and more polycentric and multinormed (Bijvoet & Fraurud, Reference Bijvoet and Fraurud2012, this volume; Blommaert, Reference Blommaert2010; Stroud & Heugh, Reference Stroud, Heugh, Mesthrie and Wolfram2011). Learners find themselves in contexts of increasing contact with a variety of languages and repertoires that they may partially acquire and master only for specific functions and purposes, in which “different ways in which people come across linguistic and sociolinguistic resources lead to an equally vast range of modes of learning” (Blommaert & Backus, Reference Blommaert and Backus2011, p. 11; see also Kramsch, Reference Kramsch2009; Stroud & Wee, Reference Stroud and Wee2007).

In contrast, sociolinguistic research has often failed to seriously engage with the questions posed and categories employed in SLA research. The notion of native speaker (NS) or near-native speaker, for example, has received very little attention by writers of varying sociolinguistic persuasion and has often been seen as a modernist construct with no real explanatory value. Any notion of proficiency has very different meanings in the two disciplines—that is, proficiency has no developmental aspect in sociolinguistics, and a very narrow instrumental and circumscribed meaning in language learning. A phenomenon such as developmental sequence has received little, if any, currency from sociolinguistics, and features and processes—such as focus on form—that have occupied the attention of SLA researchers and applied linguists across the board have not been researched as such in sociolinguistics, even though noticing and paying attention to form is a necessary precursor to development (Dörnyei & Skehan, Reference Dörnyei, Skehan, Doughty and Long2003).

In this study, a fresh look at the idea of nativelikeness is taken from the perspective of interactional sociolinguistics.Footnote ¹ Cognitive SLA has produced volumes of research on this difficult topic. Recently, Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, Reference Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam2009; Hyltenstam & Abrahamson, Reference Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson2000, Reference Hyltenstam, Abrahamsson, Doughty and Long2003), in a series of carefully designed studies, have identified what they see as key distinguishing traits of NSs in contradiction to near-native or nativelike speakers, although the differences are slight and are only really apparent for highly proficient nonnatives on very demanding tasks. One of the interesting (yet overlooked) aspects of this research is the authors’ emphasis on linguistic features as criteria of nativelikeness, and the recognition that it is difficult outside of the laboratory—and beyond procedures of subject operationalization—to unambiguously determine nativelikeness as a category of speaker or learner per se. This study attempts to move in the direction of interdisciplinarity by addressing the ambiguity in the notion of nativelikeness and by suggesting that a useful way of looking at this cluster of concepts is in terms of interactionally accomplished instances of metalinguistic reflexivity, in which formal features are discursively constructed as carrying particular indexical values in different linguistic markets. In other words, rather than using the notion to refer to a particular category of speaker or learner, a sociolinguistic interpretation of the concepts of nativelikeness, near-nativelikeness, and nonnativelikeness is offered in terms of indexically mediated relationships between linguistic forms and markets. This analysis is offered to give credence to the SLA stance on features of nativelikeness implicit in the work of Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson. The argument is based on analyses of how judgments of speakers’ authenticity and proficiency—nativelikeness—are related to instances of focus on form (Long, Reference Long, de Bot, Ginsberg and Kramsch1991; Long & Robinson, Reference Long, Robinson, Doughty and Williams1998) in everyday interactions. This is explored by looking at how multilingual youth who are highly proficient in Swedish are sometimes positioned as nativelike or near-nativelike, and other times as NSs. The tools of interactional sociolinguistics and, more specifically, the notion of metalinguistic reflexivity are applied to explore how the indexicalities or social meanings that are linked to different features of language, together with ideologically informed identity, work to determine what features of language are focused on, when, in what way, and how this relates more specifically to judgments of nativelikeness. The following questions are thus posed at the outset:

1. 1. In what linguistic and interactional loci can instances of focus on form, or on metalinguistic reflexivity, that are of relevance to judgments of nativelikeness be found?

2. 2. What forms do form-focused language practices take, and when does focus on form matter to judgments of nativelikeness?

3. 3. Given the interactional work done around designations of nativelikeness, how can this be understood in terms of the subjective positioning of the speaker?

In what follows, first, some reflections on methodology—especially the choice of participants—are briefly detailed. These are followed by the empirical part of the study, which comprises an analysis of segments of informant narrative accounts of key interactions in which a focus on linguistic form is central. The study is concluded with a discussion of some provisional implications that interactional sociolinguistics may carry for an understanding of particular facets of language learning.

PARTICIPANTS, DATA, AND ANALYSIS

The participants in this study were 20 young multilingual speakers between the ages of 21 and 26 who identified themselves as Assyrian-SyriansFootnote ² and who reside in two different sociogeographical contexts in Sweden: Södertälje,Footnote ³ a large industrial car manufacturing urban area about 30 km south of Stockholm, and a smaller town in the west of Sweden. All participants have a nine-year compulsory school background, and whereas some of them have continued to higher education, others have left school for work. The Södertälje participants were part of an ongoing longitudinal study initiated in 2003 by the first author. For purposes of this study, only three of the participants are dealt with in detail: Jacob, Christian, and Simon.

The participants in the study are especially interesting with respect to the issue of high-level proficiency because the majority were born and raised in Sweden and are therefore not the typical L2 speaker or language learner. What sets them off from many of their majority Swedish peers—which may motivate the designation of learner or near-native speaker—is that all are from highly multilingual families with parents who are not originally Swedish speaking. The resources they bring to the study are impressive and best captured in the notion of repertoire. Originally coined in (modernist) sociolinguistics (Hymes, Reference Hymes, Gumperz and Hymes1972) to refer to the totality of distinct language varieties, dialects, and styles used in a community, this notion has recently seen a renaissance (Blommaert, Reference Blommaert2010; Blommaert & Backus, Reference Blommaert and Backus2011) in the context of studies of language in superdiversity. In response to the polycentrism and heterogeneity of the language environment in the modern era, repertoire captures the “biographically organized complexes of resources . . . that follow the rhythms of human lives” (Blommaert & Backus, Reference Blommaert and Backus2011, p. 9). Repertoire refers to the “knowledge of repertoires, genres and styles, mastery of their formal aspects and the appropriate subjectivities and social and interactional proficiencies that go with them,” which simultaneously serve as “records of mobility: of movements of people, language resource, social arenas, technologies of learning and learning environments” (p. 22). Thus, different types of exposure to and modes of learning a language may result in very different types of language repertoires and language proficiencies (Blommaert & Backus, Reference Blommaert and Backus2011; Stroud & Wee, Reference Stroud and Wee2007) such that “all these resources in a repertoire are functionally distributed in a patchwork of competence and skills” (Blommaert & Backus, Reference Blommaert and Backus2011, p. 2).

The Assyrian-Syrian group, historically, is highly multilingual, with repertoires comprising different oral languages for home use and immediate socialization (Suryoyo,Footnote ⁴ Turkish, Arabic, or Swedish, depending on the individual), a written language for religious purposes (Old Suryoyo), another written language for educational purposes (predominantly Swedish), and also often a further language for intergroup communication (Swedish or Arabic-Suryoyo). The complexities of this group’s multilingualism come out clearly in the hybridity of their multilingual practices. When one of the participants, Christian, in (1), refers to the multilingual practices used by him and his friends, he is giving testimony to the complexity of Assyrian-Syrians’ common social trajectories and histories as well as to what may distinguish the individual repertoires of the different group members.Footnote ⁵

Adept style shifting is also a feature of their repertoires as reflected in (2).

And example (3) is a response to a direct question by the interviewer to Christian as to why he does not speak with his “immigrant friends” in the way he does with his Swedish friends.Footnote ⁶

The way he speaks with his “immigrant friends” is seen here as an informal and relaxed mode of speaking, rather than as evidence of an incorrect or nonproficient speech.

The data were collected as part of a doctoral dissertation by the first author through semistructured interviews and participant observations—which were audio recorded—as well as through spontaneous conversations, open interviews, and field notes, to explore how these young, multilingual speakers use narrative and conversationally mediated strategies to cope with their everyday lives. This study only attends to their narrative retellings from their time in school and their transition out of school to a work environment. All participant interactions were conducted in Swedish.Footnote ⁷

An important feature of the study is that the Assyrian-Syrian population is generally perceived by the majority population of Swedes in stereotyped and stigmatized terms, which is especially the case for the young members of the community. The stories they offer of their life trajectories are painful accounts of their struggles with ethnic and linguistic discrimination and censorship, factors that will be shown to impact how they focus on form across their linguistic life span. Another important feature of the data is that most of these speakers work in language-related businesses that place great demands on their Swedish language skills. Two of the key participants work as customer service operatives, and one participant is employed in a company that puts a premium on his multilingual skills. Both of these contexts provide excellent opportunities to attend to when, how, and under what conditions focus on form becomes salient in their interactions. The data clearly show how stigmatized and ascribed identities—linked to specific forms of speech—frame features of language, and how subject positions of nativelikeness or nonnativelikeness are negotiated through stylization and performance. This provides particularly rich insights into how social alignment, interaction, and ideology contribute to focus on form in the context of judgments of nativelikeness.

Because these participants are typical of a large body of fluent, multilingual speakers for whom acquiring linguistic skills is “a long-term and life changing project” (Rampton, Reference Rampton2011, p. 3), and for whom “learners’ investments must always be lived out in concrete historical circumstances” (p. 3), the use of narrative as a research tool was deemed particularly appropriate in that narrative is naturally organized around temporal flows of key events. It therefore elicits discussion about movement historically through time and thematically across events. This gives speakers the opportunity to highlight particular moments and organize experiences across particular registers. Baynham (Reference Baynham2000) notes that “narratives provide a way into . . . understanding how participants construct what they do according to which ideologies and values, which historical trajectories, as well as what kind of self-presentation or identity work they are currently engaged in” (Baynham, Reference Baynham2000, p. 100). Narratives provide a premium data source given this study’s specific interest in speakers’ longer-term engagements and interactions with a target language. The essential involvement of identity and speakers’ ideologically evoked social alignments over time determine what aspects of language are focused on, along with how and in which interactional moments.

FOCUS ON FORM: THE INTERACTIONAL ACCOMPLISHMENT OF INDEXICALITY

Judging nativelikeness is essentially a process of attaching an indexical (social) value to a linguistic form and of assigning the speaker a subject position of nativelike, near-native, or nonnative. An essential notion with which to approach how linguistic form becomes indexed or gains social value in ways that can inform conceptualizations of nativelikeness is thus that of enregisterment (Agha, Reference Agha2003, Reference Agha2007), a core notion in the theory of context, identity, and style in relation to language practices proposed by Agha (Reference Agha2007). It is a process whereby speech practices become differentiated, disseminated, and consolidated by (institutionalized) practices of speech typification, in which the circulation of discourse artifacts comes to index specific social personas (Agha, Reference Agha2007) as a socially recognized register of forms. In this case, it provides a theoretical backdrop for indexical meanings associated with language and styles linked to immigrant status.

Example (4) shows enregisterment at work in the form of a narrative retelling of an interactional encounter demonstrating an instance of (focus on form) metalinguistic reflexivity.

In (4), Jacob highlights a problematic first-pair part in the context of telling about how he deals with the problem-encounters he customarily comes across as a customer service consultant. Here, Jacob admits to failing to understand the problem of an elderly man who had phoned in to the call center—“because he spoke very unclearly.” Jacob’s subsequent account tells how this led the caller to not want any further engagement with him and suggests that this was because the caller had perceived him to be non-Swedish at this critical opening juncture of the interaction (e.g., “[I] want to talk to somebody Swedish”). The example is typical of cases in which a focus on form, or metalinguistic reflexivity, takes place in the opening gambits of an interaction and constitutes a break in the normal order of the interaction. Ervin Goffman has discussed such moments of disengagement from the routine flow of unexceptional business in terms of the notion of keying. Examples of keys are features that cue for interactional frames “by which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of some primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on this activity but seen by the participants as something quite else” (Goffman, Reference Goffman1974, pp. 43–44). Keying is one way of attempting to shift the meaning and significance of any given frame through a variety of interactional maneuvers, such as disputing it or making it ambiguous (as in the opening gambit in example [4]), and it “provides one basic way in which a strip of activity can be transformed, that is, serve as an item by item model for something else” (Goffman, Reference Goffman1974, p. 83), as in example (7). Keys delimit play (e.g., narrative or other forms of make-believe), ceremonials (e.g., interpersonal verbal rituals or artful performance), and contests (e.g., games—crossing and stylization), among others.Footnote ⁹ Thus, in (4), Jacob’s interactional problem was keyed and interactionally managed in a site of talk in which instances of heightened metalinguistic reflexivity are typically found—namely, ceremonial introductions or interpersonal verbal rituals.

In the ensuing narrative, Jacob’s problem became subject to a much-engaged metalinguistic commentary and reflection over numerous turns at talk. The explanation offered by Jacob himself in answer to the interviewer’s question “how did he know that you were a blatte?” is a reluctant admission of “probably a little accent.” However, neither Jacob nor Christian is really comfortable with an admission that the impasse was due to a nonnative or marked suburban accent, and they show this with frequent insertions of a structural giggle when either accent or blatte are mentioned. Additionally, the common response by both informants to these problematic exchanges and interactional impasses around assumed accent and ethnic stigma is to reframe them as humorous events not to be taken seriously (see Bijvoet & Fraurud, Reference Bijvoet and Fraurud2012, this volume), which is itself an interesting strategic take on the problem.

The link constructed here between ethnicity and nonstandardness—and subsequently to nonnativelikeness—is a crucial one in the Swedish context, and speakers of nonstandard varieties are inevitably positioned as non-Swedish. It is important to note that these links are created in particular types of talk, as shown by Milani (Reference Milani2010), who discusses how different social actors create an iconic link between nonstandard varieties of Swedish and nonnativelikeness in media texts. The concept of register helps make sense of what is happening here. According to Agha (Reference Agha and Duranti2004), an important feature of register is that there is a reflexive, metapragmatic awareness among producers and receivers of linguistic form and its indexical and social meanings, which is clearly the case here. Register (style or genre) organizes multilingual (and multimodal) resources into complexes of functions and forms that encode communicative events recognizable by community members as conventional performances of a particular type of communicative act (Bauman & Briggs, Reference Bauman and Briggs1990; Blommaert, Reference Blommaert2008). It sets up a particular set of expectations in the interlocutors as to topic and form, attitudinal stance, and interactional roles appropriate to a given speech event and thus serves to orientate interlocutors to the production, reception, and evaluation of discourses.

In the particular case here, Jacob and Christian have a clear understanding of the formal and interactional expectations in the formal register of customer care interactions, which they regularly honor in the breach and evaluate transgressively (e.g., “it’s cool”) when speaking with immigrant others:

The way that registers are executed may be subject to evaluation by others in respect to ideologies of competence or expertise, allegiance, or authenticity (Park & Wee, Reference Park and Wee2009). Here, competence refers to “linguistic fluency or proficiency according to specific sets of linguistic criteria” (p. 196); authenticity indicates “the perception that a speaker bears particular racial, ethnic, or other background attributes” (p. 196), and allegiance relates to how choice of language may be seen as implying an “attitude of loyalty towards the social group associated with the language” (p. 196). The register of customer care used here clearly carries strict criteria not just on formal correctness but also on authenticity and allegiance. On this particular occasion, Jacob’s possible lack of competence or expertise in delivering an appropriate form for this market alerts the caller to question Jacob’s authenticity (i.e., professional or not, Swedish or not) and allegiance. The yardstick of evaluation for this instance and for this register are those of a Bourdieuan unified market, in which there is an expectation that competence, allegiance, and authenticity are performed and executed synergistically. This becomes transparent in the retellings, in which even the informants view this particular register as an arena for a proficient stylization of native voice. By regularly passing as native Swedes, the customer service operatives—in the best of cases—demonstrate their virtuosity with standard Swedish, and at the same time they reproduce an ideology of correctness and acceptance of the standard. In so doing, they play out and assert their professional identities. The degree of success in accomplishing this reflects on the informants’ professional identities and marketable expertise along with their perceived or constructed ethnicity.

A further indication that this register is built around the nexus of competence, allegiance, and authenticity in the performance of a Swedish persona is apparent in (6), in which the two informants attempt to rationalize why they use common Swedish surnames when they have other—non-Swedish—names in reality.

One justification given for the choice of Swedish names is that they are required by the register and market, in which customer care operatives are profiled as mainstream Swedes, possibly in an attempt to brand them as authentic, trustworthy, and helpful people who will inspire confidence among those who seek the services of the consultant. On the contrary, Jacob and Christian are also under the impression that their Swedish names serve to protect their identities and persons from threat of racist backlash (i.e., finding a particular Carlsson or Svensson in the phone book is like searching for a needle in a haystack). In any case, the presumption—or indexical significance of name choice—revolves around native or standard persona. In their reasoning about this, the informants clearly navigate the ambiguity of the market, and at the same time, they consolidate the social values of nativelikeness.

This particular social space of the customer care center and its associated register thus provide a powerful context for a focus on form. Failure to align competence, authenticity, and allegiance in the production of linguistic form is witnessed to threaten the smooth execution of the register and cast doubt over the identity of Jacob as a professional customer care operative. This is the case because the very definition of (non)standard is built around a discursively mediated fit between identities associated with a particular set of features and the requirements of a specific linguistic market. The indexical linkage between linguistic form (standard) and persona (professional identity) in the unified market of the customer care center is reinforced by the association that is simultaneously forged between nonstandard language and being relaxed, as in (7):

The excerpt shows Simon playfully recounting stylization of a native and nonnative Swede in two important ceremonial keyings—namely, the opening and closing sequences of the customer service interaction. Here, he emphasizes the ludic nature of the event and alludes to how the presence of an audience contributes even more value to the performance itself. In the account, he stylizes a stern and authoritative Swedish voice in his guise as a customer service operator who gives factual information on the state of the caller’s account. Toward the closing of the interaction, he promises to personally sort out all the problems, and he does so through stylizing a nonnative voice on the positive note of informality—or, as he himself refers to it, “being relaxed.” In fact, it can be noted that the indexical linkage forged between nativelikeness and professional identity is strong precisely because of the alternative linkage between nonnativelikeness or nonstandard variety and “being relaxed,” which is also available for performance (8):

In general, however, the complex decisions that link features to field-specific identities also create a link between nonstandard, relaxed, and informal forms and non-Swedish ethnicity and thus give rise to judgments of nonnativelikeness or near-nativelikeness, as well as the conception that unprofessionalism is a characteristic feature of nonnativelike speakers. This, however, can be avoided. In (9), in contradiction to many of the other examples of accent detection and the constructed association of nonstandardness with nonethnic Swedish identity—and therefore being a nonnative speaker—a pleasurable self-confidence, together with a playful willingness to explore and manipulate form, is noted, as evidenced by Simon’s story of stepping simultaneously in and out of contrasting and competing identities, skillfully highlighting the parameters of the register:

It is of interest to note that what is happening here is not only a forging of professionalism and relaxedness with formal characteristics of language but the creation of a context that allows Jacob to use an immigrant voice without necessarily being classified as an immigrant, or nonnative, himself. Rampton uses the notion of stylization to refer to a “reflexive communicative action in which speakers produce specially marked and often exaggerated representations of languages, dialects, accents, registers or styles that lie outside [emphasis added] their habitual repertoire (with the caveat at least as this is expected within the situation at hand)” (Agha, Reference Agha2007, p. 187; Rampton, Reference Rampton2006, p. 225). At first glance, what Simon offers here is not a stylization per se because it could be seen as part of his habitual repertoire as a multilingual and multidialectal speaker of Swedish. However, “[w]hen someone switches into a stylized voice or exaggerated accent, there is a partial and momentary disengagement from the routine flow of unexceptional business” (Rampton, Reference Rampton2006, p. 225). The ludic context, which Simon creates, reclassifies the market—or situation at hand—not necessarily as a reflection of his repertoire as such but more as an artful performance of another, stylized, voice. Bauman and Briggs (Reference Bauman and Briggs1990) referred to artful performance as “the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production in a unit—a text—that can be lifted out of its interactional setting . . . rendered decontextualizable . . . which incorporate[s] aspects of context, such that the resultant text carries elements of its history of use within it” (p. 73).

In other words, particular features—or clusters of features—in particular markets are constructed as indexical of non-Swedishness and therefore of nonnativelikeness. One essential aspect of nonnativelikeness is the linkage of personas with particular formal items, and it has been shown that nativelikeness is mediated in forms of intersectionality in which professional identities are clustered with ethnic identities. Judgments are subject to negotiation in circumscribed sites that allow for metalinguistic reflexivity. These sites can then also be used for the conscious production of nonnative features, which may be understood as consciously and playfully setting aside market constraints for the duration. This also defuses the potential nonnative evaluation of the linguistic forms produced. The next section explores the identities and personas or subject positions indexically linked to particular linguistic forms as well as how they are subject to higher-order ideological significance.

IDENTITY, INTERACTION, AND IDEOLOGY

In the section “Focus on Form: The Interactional Accomplishment of Indexicality,” it was argued that judgments of nativelikeness are at base relative to the appropriate performance of features in specific markets. It was also indicated that in the Swedish context, abundant ideological narratives facilitate the linking of nonstandard forms with non-Swedish ethnicity. Because the work of linking formal features with subjectivities, personas, or identities is done in conjunction with processes of enregisterment, the notion of register is a natural locus for judgments of nativelikeness. But attention to—and appropriation and circulation of—forms and their indexical meanings is subject to numerous framing constraints. Rampton (Reference Rampton2011) noted that “metalinguistic reflexivity never takes place in an interactional vacuum” and that “heightened metalinguistic awareness takes many sociointeractional forms, and whether and to what extent a person will develop new features [of style] will depend on the keying of the occasion in which they are made aware of them: the key will steer or constrain their responses” (p. 36). He gives the example of Midlands youth in the 1980s, when attitudes toward migrants and the general societal stance on diversity allowed adolescents to slip into Jamaican Creole in ceremonial exchanges when stylizing another person speaker, but not in contexts of artful performance. In other words, interactional and ideological relations at the scale of societal norms account for the specific manifestations of metalinguistic reflexivity, and these are determined in turn by how a particular politics of location organizes its semiotic (and interactional) resources. For this study’s population, the question then becomes how market-appropriate features are idiomatically acquired and enregistered. In this section, the argument will be further developed that perceived nativelikeness or formal correctness is not so much a characteristic of the individual as it is an ideologically constrained discursive construct that in turn reflects people’s historical and contemporary socioeconomic trajectories as well as their access to a variety of linguistic markets. This is done through a brief exploration of how speakers’ access to specific markets and registers is interactionally mediated through ideologically constrained constructions of subject positions.

In (10), it is shown how Simon’s repertoires of linguistic forms and array of registers have evolved out of his historical location and contemporary trajectory as someone who has been constructed as a non-Swede on many occasions as well as his social and economic aspirations for the future. Here, Simon remarks on how a conscious awareness of the norms of correct or “right Swedish” (rätt svenska), and the social meanings linked to his own speech, was often highlighted in encounters with the average Swede in spaces outside of the local neighborhood geography, encounters that simultaneously reproduced hegemonic monolingual ideology:

Simon gives little detail here on what he or his detractors consider to be the correct or the “right” Swedish, only that his speech differs from those who do speak it, something of which he is made rudely aware in interactional encounters of the ceremonial type (Goffman, Reference Goffman1974) with these others.Footnote ¹⁰

The excerpt in (10) also illustrates another important feature of register—namely, its links to social, ideological, historical, political, and economic aspects of context beyond any single instance of reception and production (Bakhtin, Reference Bakhtin1981; French, Reference French2000). Simon contrasts the school context with his new workplace and notes how he perceived the school as a negative context for learning or improving his Swedish, whereas the workplace is full of language developmental potential. Different registers provide for the performance of different subject positions as well as for how (re)organizations of forms of semiotic potential provide for new positions of subjectivity, depending on how they articulate the wider features of context. Simon appears to refer to how he has more access to a valued subject position, or voice, in his social capacity as a valued employee as compared to when he was part of the academic register, from which he was only offered a subjective position and voice of exclusion.

In either case, when Simon recounts his increasing awareness of the indexical values of his speech as he moves throughout Swedish society, he simultaneously makes reference to the processes of how social meanings become linked to specific forms of speech. This process of linguistic forms and meanings that circulate across different modalities and publics, accompanied by reflection and metacommentary, is a principle dynamic in the spread and consolidation of registers within a speech community (Agha, Reference Agha2003, Reference Agha2007).

In all the examples, we see how issues of identity factors come up in the informants’ discussions of linguistic form and its management (Blackledge & Creese, 2010; Stroud & Wee, Reference Stroud and Wee2006). Registers are carefully calibrated with speakers’ social trajectories and histories of engagement with language(s), and thus, not surprisingly, identity work is a significant aspect of what registers accomplish. In (11), this comes out in Simon’s complaint about the tendency to take interactional troubles in one register as a failure of expertise and proficiency in the informants’ linguistic repertoire as a whole:

Simon laments the occurrence of other-initiated error correction, with its obvious connotations of power and authority, and the presumption of incompetence on the part of the speaker. The desire to avoid other-initiated sequences of repair or incompetence leads Simon to periods of monitoring and Foucauldian self-disciplining of output—especially with respect to the indexical values accorded to particular forms—and to claims that there is “too much blatte” in his language. It is noted that different individuals’ responses to interactional failures differ radically depending on how they perceive the legitimacy of the problem. In fact, the participants’ retellings and complaints reveal the suggestion of a more complex relationship between speakers’ (a) proficiency, (b) judgments of nativelikeness, and (c) enregistered dialectal variation. Many allegedly nonstandard forms are seen as instances of the local dialect of Södertälje (rather than as nonnative varieties) and as indexical of the persona of suburban brat (see Bijvoet & Fraurud, Reference Bijvoet and Fraurud2012, this volume) because the youthful residents of these suburbs are perceived to be resistant and subversive. There are frequent cases in which the informants do not perceive their language to differ markedly in nonnative ways from native Swedes, either as individuals or as interlocutors. It is interesting in this context that the informants often refer to age as a factor in their trouble-tellings in what they consider to be illegitimate designations of nonnativelikeness. This could be expected in a situation in which enregisterment of originally nonnative features has indexed these features over time with a native social meaning that is subsequently lived and experienced by a younger generation as a dialectal variant but is still perceived by an older generation as indexical of migrant status.

Finally, it is also noted how Simon expresses an idea of proficiency in relation to his overall everyday situation (of which the other-initiators of trouble-tellings do not have knowledge). To presume that he is nonproficient in the language on the basis of single, isolated, temporally delimited utterances irks him (“they do not know me in my everyday space”). Again, this captures the emic perception on the part of the participants themselves that proficiency or nativelikeness is register and market specific. The notion of register accurately captures Simon’s attempts to relocate his proficiencies to other identities and life forms that he voluntarily assumes and negotiates rather than identities enforced by others (Pavlenko & Blackledge, Reference Pavlenko, Blackledge, Pavlenko and Blackledge2004). Simon also sees his work of improving or learning a new register as simultaneously involving a general improvement in overall language and the exercise of new forms. This is apparent in an earlier example (9), when Jacob, in a conversation about his working life, turns to the interviewer and asks, “don’t know if you notice any difference.”

It is then clearly shown that the interactional mediations of larger-scale ideological framings open access to some markets and registers—with their associated subject positions, identities, and formal and featural realizations—and constrain access to other types of markets. Given the importance of mastering language features relative to market demands, judgments of nativelikeness or near-nativelikeness are essentially the outcome of negotiated and ideologically informed constraints on access to markets and their features, rather than any direct individual competence per se. Furthermore, given the ubiquity of interactional moments that allow interlocutors to disengage from normal business and to focus on metalinguistic reflexivity, there are many opportunities for redefining markets and identities and the value of features in everyday interactions.