This article describes how comedians and radio professionals in Corsica draw on a bilingual linguistic and metalinguistic cultural repertoire. In the context of Corsica’s history of language domination, language shift, and linguistic revitalization efforts, many of the products of language contact - mixed codes and compentences - are socially stigmatized. In the logic of dominant language ideologies, these mixed codes do not ‘count as’ language and depreciate individual speakers and collective identitities. Comic performances, it is argued, derive part of their tension and effect from the dominant view of languages as fixed and bounded codes which index single identities. Yet at the same time, performers make use of bilingual repertoires in ways that validate mixed language practices and identities. They do so by making maximal use of fluidity and indeterminacy in speaker stances towards mixed codes and identities. Bilingual comic performance also validates mixed codes and identities by evoking an ‘expert’ bilingual audience.

This Introduction provides a framework of the key issues surrounding the non‐standard orthographic representation of non‐standard language varieties. Orthographic choices and their interpretation are framed as metalinguistic, socially conditioned phenomena which shed light on people's attitudes towards both specific language varieties and social identities and on the relationship between linguistic form and the social world in general. From this perspective, the introduction addresses the following specific topics: 1) the selective nature of orthographic choice; 2) the relational and contrastive meaning of orthographic conventions; 3) the interplay of sameness and difference in the use of orthography to make claims on linguistic and cultural identity; 4) orthography and representational control: writing the self vs. representing others and 5) orthographic esthetics: the role of the visual in the interpretation of the oral.

This article addresses the concept of the new speaker from both a theoretical/definitional perspective and from the standpoint of a situated, ethnographic analysis. The more general and theoretical focus addresses some of the presuppositions and entailments of the new speaker concept, both as an “on-the-ground” concept that gets operationalized by social actors and as an analytical category used by researchers. In particular, it considers how the new speaker concept elucidates criteria in relation to which minority language-speaking communities of practice are conceptualized and enacted. The ethnographic focus, on Corsican adult language classrooms, explores how new-speakerness is invoked implicitly in Corsica, where the term “new speaker” itself is not in circulation, but is a target of language planning strategies. This ethnographic research reveals complex identity and language ideological issues that are raised about the legitimacy, authority and authenticity of Corsican language learners in a sociolinguistic context in which both formal/institutional and informal/social use of the minority language is quite restricted.

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Combining features of matched guise tests with sociolinguistic interviewing and oral performance, this study investigates the social meanings carried by nonstandard orthographies. Participant evaluations of the personas represented by non-standard orthographies showed that people connected orthography to social identities. Speci®cally, we found that people uncritically and spontaneously read non-standard orthographies as indices of low socioeconomic status. When we asked participants to read texts out loud, we found marked shifts in their reading performances of texts in standard versus non-standard orthographies. Through a case study analysis of participants' readings and attitudes, we identify two kinds of stances taken by participants towards stigmatized identities indexed by non-standard orthographies. Finally, we use these case studies to argue for the necessity of contextually rich qualitative research methods for the study of language attitudes.

This leading team of scholars presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users. The authors refer to this network of interlinked changes as the new conditions surrounding small languages (Sámi, Corsican, Irish and Welsh) in peripheral sites. Starting from the conviction that peripheral sites can and should inform the sociolinguistics of globalisation, the book explores how new modes of reflexivity, more transactional frames for authenticity, commodification of peripheral resources, and boundary-transgression with humour, all carry forward change. These types of change articulate a blurring of binary oppositions between centre and periphery, old and new, and standard and non-standard. Such research is particularly urgent in multilingual small language contexts, where different conceptualisations of language(s), boundaries, and speakers impact on individuals' social, cultural, and economic capital, and opportunities.

In this article, I interpret a broadcast Corsican spelling contest as evidence of both resistance and accommodation to dominant models of language as an autonomous, authoritative code. First, the broadcast illustrates that efforts to promote the minority language by focusing on written standards conflict with everyday linguistic practices and cultural values and can create new forms of cultural alienation. Second, broadcast participants powerfully assert the countervalues of intimacy and egalitarianism associated with Corsican. This resistance, however, is only partial in that it does not escape the diglossic compartmentalization of domains of linguistic use and value; it therefore fails to take into account the mixed nature of both Corsican identity and everyday language practices. [orthography, Corsica, language ideology, minoritized languages, language planning]