This case study examines how an episode of the popular Spanish-language reality courtroom TV show Caso Cerrado contributed to ongoing language panic about English-dominant children of Spanish-speaking families in the US. Known derogatorily as 'no sabo kids', this intra-ethnic label appears to have emerged in 2020-2021, often through stylization on social media that promotes language shaming. A discourse analysis of the episode demonstrates how participants stylize personae through enregistered features and expressions of hegemonic language ideologies. Altogether, these mediated performances were crafted to transmit the star judge's view of how Spanish language maintenance is important for Hispanic identity in the US. Furthermore, this study critically interrogates the paradox of utilizing language shaming to promote language maintenance, when in fact it may be more likely to promote shift via linguistic insecurity. (Language ideologies, language shaming, language panic, stylization, personae, enregisterment, Spanish in the US)
Abstract This article examines the 2025 controversy over Gallaudet University’s invention of a new American Sign Language (ASL) sign for Coca-Cola as a case study of resistance to the commodification of sign language in late capitalism. Drawing on discourse analysis of deaf social media reactions and satirical videos, this study explores how institutional authority and corporate branding collide with perceived deaf community norms of linguistic innovation. Situating the case within debates on language commodification (Heller 2010), symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1977), and sign language ideologies (Kusters, Green, Moriarty, & Snoddon 2020), this article argues that ASL is both a cultural emblem and an economic resource, and as such, a flashpoint for conflict. The backlash to the ‘new Coke sign’ reveals deaf resistance to top-down language planning and the creative reassertion of ownership through humor, critique, and digital activism. (Authenticity, commodification, minoritized languages, neologisms)
Abstract This study examines how Iranians engage in identity work on live-streaming apps across geographical, political, and cultural borders. Drawing upon nexus analysis and ‘chronotope’ as an analytical tool and employing discourse analysis of a twenty-minute conversation between a young girl in Iran and two boys in Europe, the study demonstrates how specific chronotopes, imbued with certain values, identities, and moral behaviors, traverse borders, while revealing the impact of online platforms in mediating these interactions. The findings highlight the dynamic negotiation of identity and sociocultural norms in transnational digital spaces, shedding light on how Iranians in Iran and the diaspora adapt their expressions of self within these interconnected worlds. (Online communication, chronotopic identities, Iranian diaspora, transnationalism, nexus analysis)
Although Nigerian English is characterized as non-rhotic, this article combines variationist and linguistic anthropological approaches to show how rhoticity (non-prevocalic /r/) is employed across different gender identities in Nigeria. Of these gender identities, attention is paid to feminine-presenting male speakers locally referred to as crossdressers. As these crossdressers are vehemently vilified in the country, this article shows how they recontextualize rhoticity as a register shibboleth (Silverstein 2017) to index American-ness that is constitutive of glamorous cosmopolitanism for purposes of indexical inoculation. The article further argues that rhoticity has colonial entailments and that it is its colonial entailments that contribute to its symbolic capital in Nigeria's linguistic marketplace. Given that Nigerian crossdressers' gender practices get labeled as un-African, this article also argues that transgressing normative gender practices in Nigeria may evoke coloniality, when colonial intertexts are used to resist Western colonial (bio)logics of gender ideology and African languages. (African languages, colonialism, coloniality, gender in Africa, Nigeria, Nigerian crossdressers, Nigerian English, rhoticity, social meaning, stance, variation)
