Some football fans go to matches, but what do others do? This thesis examines online football fan forums in order to explore the construction of fan identities and positions. By implementing a cyberethnographical approach supplemented by online interviews with fans, it explores how football fan communities operate, discussing aspects of forum management, control and hierarchies, all the while illustrating how these factors contribute to the development of individual and collective identities. In considering this, it presents football fans as inhabiting a multitude of complex positions, taking into account arguments of 'active' and 'passive' fandom and the importance of fan status (Hills, 2002.) I argue that that there has been a significant lack of research into 'everyday' football fandom, with both the mainstream media and academic perspectives preferring to focus on the extraordinary instances of performance and behaviour, which, I further argue, are simplistic in their treatment of fans. Mainstream media representations are addressed; with the latter sections of the thesis illustrating that discourses produced by fans themselves often contrast significantly with dominant narratives at play in the news media. The football fan is found to demonstrate articulate consideration for his/her own position, with this being frequently determined by the overriding importance of the team's success and the part that the fan plays in this. This is particularly apparent when considering national and regional allegiances, and how these can be seen to present regular areas of conflict in regards to dominant affiliation, yet all the while contributing to the fan's position as an extension of the football club.

This thesis investigates the marketization of universities’ recruitment discourse, using critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistic methodology. University and financial job advertisements were compared synchronically and diachronically. Synchronic corpus linguistic analyses were executed on 3,000 online university and 3,000 financial job advertisements from the present day. In addition, 60 university and financial job advertisements from newspaper in the 1970s were analysed manually for the diachronic comparison. The results indicate that while 1970s university and financial job advertisements are strikingly different, 2010s university job advertisements are fundamentally aligned with those from businesses. 2010s university job advertisements and financial job advertisements seek to establish the credentials of the employer but this move is rare in 1970s university job advertisements. Universities in 2010s are construed as performing activities that are inherently promotional. Applicants in 2010s university job advertisements are construed as more equal and as benefiting from the job. The evaluative adjectives in university and financial job advertisements are largely similar. Business oriented discourse and ideologies have become conventionalized in the phraseology of university discourse. However, universities do not always adopt business discursive practices and should indeed be more selective about the in-take of business discourse.

British-Asians have often been stereotyped in the media through their cultural and linguistic practices, and these have been exacerbated by ongoing anti-Islamic international media coverage. Such associations may necessarily impact on the identity of young Pakistani-Muslims living in the West, and by implication, their sociolinguistic choices. However, no systematic study to my knowledge has attempted to uncover the role fine-grained phonetic variation might play in indexing such associations. In addition, Scottish-Pakistanis who are the largest ethnic minority group in Scotland, have been neglected in prior research on ethnic accents of English. With the increasing acknowledgement that ethnic varieties may influence mainstream Englishes as well as contribute to regional and personal identity, Scotland is a prime site for such analysis with its strong sense of national as well as local identity. Moreover, young female identity in the Muslim context is heightened, and can advance the understanding of the role of age, gender and religion in language variation. This study is a sociophonetic analysis of the Glasgow-Asian accent, specifically examining the speech of British-born adolescent Pakistani girls, aged 16-18. It uses both linguistic ethnographic and variationist methods with auditory and acoustic phonetics to ascertain how social identity and ethnicity are reflected in specific accent features of their spoken English. From long-term fieldwork in a Glasgow high school, results show that distinct Communities of Practice (CofPs) emerge in the girls according to their social practices. The consonantal variable /t/, and six unchecked monophthongal vowels /i, e, a, O, o, 0/ were examined revealing fine-grained differences in realisation according to CofP membership. CofP effects were found: for /t/ for Tongue Shape gesture and Centre of Gravity (CoG), and for vowels in interaction effects with adjacent phonetic environment for FLEECE height (F1) and BOOT front-backness (F2). Findings reveal within-ethnic and cross-ethnic differences across the variables. The girls use a system of accent variation in subtle ways to simultaneously denote ethnicity, and personal, regional and social identity. This reflects hybridity at a fine phonetic level, similar to that of ‘Brasian’ (Harris 2006), but here embodied in the concept of ‘Glaswasian’.