Sociolinguistics + Art

One of the most widespread developments in sociolinguistics over the past 20 years has been the claim that meaning is contingent. Pushing back against a belief in language as a stable reflection of social structure, research across the field has focused on the diverse ways that meanings emerge in context, the processes through which such meanings are regimented and evaluated by competing ideological systems, and the strategic creativity of individuals when using language to achieve various social, political and interactional goals. While debates remain about how best to capture the underlying indeterminacy of language, and while uptake of these ideas has itself varied across different areas of our field, we believe that the discipline of sociolinguistics today shares a common belief in the situated nature of linguistic phenomena and in the importance of taking individuals' lived experiences of language into account. A second important thread lies in debates about the nature of language itself. Much sociolinguistic work has insisted on the nature of language as a broad set of communicative practices, attending to a wide range of communicative resources. From multimodality to embodiment, sociolinguists have sought to understand language not as an autonomous object, but as embedded, multifacted practice and process. Art, like language, is also an attempt to represent, evaluate and, ultimately, engage with the world around us, and to do so in ways that highlight both subjective and collective experience and resist epistemological closure. Perhaps for this reason, a growing number of sociolinguists have begun turning their attention to art, either by collaborating directly with artists or by involving art in their research. We believe that it is worth bringing this engagement between sociolinguistics and art to the attention of the readership of the Journal of Sociolinguistics. We are therefore launching a new Theme Series on Sociolinguistics + Art. Contributions to the series will appear occasionally and will feature brief discussions of the work being done, including (where possible) depictions of relevant artistic outputs. We do so without any specific predefined objectives other than to showcase forms of scholarly and/or artistic expression that lie on the fringes, or completely outside, of current conventions of traditional scholarship. Topics to be covered in the series will include an exploration of the materiality of sociolinguistic practice in art exhibitions, the use of text by artists as an aesthetic object, art as a field of expression to be taken as seriously as verbal expression in sociolinguistic research, and the embodied and multimodal experience of art by viewers, among others. In this issue, Tim McNamara launches the series with a piece on the visual encoding of affect in the work of Mark Rothko, focusing on his own discovery of the emotive potential of Rothko's visual grammar

Comprehension approach · Epistemology · Indeterminacy (philosophy · Language education · Linguistics · Situated · Sociolinguistics · Sociology · Sociology of language · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Multilingual Education and Policy · Second Language Learning and Teaching