Despite its exceptional importance as a cultural performance event in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, General Conference has received little attention in Mormon studies, to say nothing of sociolinguistics. Situated within the larger question of how the public language of Mormon authorities has changed over time, this thesis seeks to discover style features of what impressionistically appears to be a unitary General Conference style since 1960 (the era of church "Correlation"). Statistical analysis is then used to determine which of five sociolinguistic factors and three pairwise interactions between four of the five sociolinguistic factors most saliently conditions the use of these style features in General Conference. Findings indicate that older male speakers are more likely to perform the majority of these style features, which opens the possibility that a new style may be emerging. Finally, this study attempts to give a theoretical account of style in General Conference by appealing to Alan Bell's (1984; 2001) "audience design" framework, and Nikolas Coupland's (2007) refinement of Bauman's cultural performance theory. The unique conditions of General Conference are best described as a "high performance event" in which speakers converge stylistically on an uncharacteristically present "in-group referee," namely the General Authorities of the church present in the LDS Conference Center during the live broadcast of General Conference.

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This thesis is a study of sibling play and language sociaIization. The concept of language socialization is defined as socialization through language as well as socialization to use language (Schieffelin and Ochs 1986). Fieldwork was carried out for 15 months in a small, Quichua-Spanish bilingual, agricultural community in the central highlands of Ecuador. The lack of land and the desire for change have motivated many men to migrate to the coast and to the major cities of the sierra, striving for upward mobility and economic success in the Ecuadorian society. Lately, however, after the recent takeover of two haciendas, it has been possible for the comuneros to remain in the community. The main focus was on 4 children (2-3 years of age) and their interactions with their siblings and parents. The study is a presentation of their everyday lives, and is based on microanalyses of children's play, parent - child interaction, sibling caretaking and children's work. A San Nicohis developmental story is presented. It was clear that the siblings - hence not only the mothers - were in charge of the young children during much of the day. Siblings are, moreover, often raised in pairs, so that an elder child is in charge of a younger one. Threats, rhetorical questions and other types of teasing were conunon means used by adults as well as older siblings to socialize young children. Also very small children were able to take the perspective of their younger siblings. They functioned as interpreters in "language teaching", in so-called diga routines, and in ente,1ainments. In this highly gendered society, the children's play transcended gender boundaries. For instance, young boys were observed"breastfeeding" their young siblings. A language shift ft'om Quichua to Spanish is apparently under way in the community. The comuneros themselves are at a loss to understand or explain why this is happening and, above all, why this is happening now. They do not see the Quichua language as endangered, since they see it as innately Indian. Contrary to what the comuneros initially claimed, it was found that no children under the age of 10 were fluent in the vernacular. Sibling caretaking is possibly one of the most important factors explaining this language shift in their children's lives.

Rooted in one year of ethnographic research in the central highlands of Angola, this dissertation examines the distinct cultural and linguistic worlds of girls ages eight to eighteen who are growing up in a centro de acolhimento, one of more than 100 residential centers—or group homes—built in the aftermath of Angola’s 27-year-long civil war (1975–2002) to provide shelter and care for children in need. Currently housing over nine thousand young residents throughout the country, centros de acolhimento have emerged as institutional replacements, or supplements, for traditional family structures. As a result, they have become an integral part of growing up for a generation of Angolan youth, shaping their lived experiences, social networks, and access to resources. The dissertation draws on Victor Turner’s formulation of liminality to provide an anthropological analysis of the residential centers as liminal spaces and to understand the ways in which liminality shapes institutionalized childhood, including children’s sense of identity, relatedness, forms of sociality, and caregiving practices. Using audiovisual recordings of everyday interactions in an all-female center, the dissertation analyzes how girls are socialized to behave, think, feel, and talk in institutionally preferred ways as part of the center’s goal to rear idealized versions of Angolan women. It also investigates what it means to “care” and the paradoxes of caregiving in a setting where resources are very limited, affective ties are fragile, and a sense of security is unstable for both children and adult staff. The dissertation illuminates the complexities of institutionalized childhood in Angola and, more broadly, the global phenomenon of children growing up outside of normative family networks. Since the 1990s, anthropological studies of youth have investigated how the instabilities of economic conditions of the late 20th century impact the lives of young people (Scheper-Hughes & Sargent 1998; Stephens 1995), powerfully unsettling the “convenient fictions” of childhood as a time characterized by belonging to the domestic sphere and dependency upon adults (Lee 2001). Yet, despite this long-standing interest in examining childhood outside of the normative contexts of family, there is a surprisingly small body of long-term ethnographic research on children’s lives in institutional care (Carpenter 2021; Goldfarb 2017; Heying 2022; Khlinovskaya Rockhill 2010; Van Vleet 2019). Recent ethnographic work on migration (Coe et al. 2011; Heidbrink 2014; Statz 2016; Terrio 2015), orphanhood (Cheney 2017), and homelessness (Cox 2015) reveals how contemporary socio-economic structures have reshaped traditional notions of family and home, making extra-familial and transitory settings across different borders important sites of socialization for unaccompanied child migrants, orphaned youth, and homeless youth. This dissertation is a contribution toward understanding children’s lives in, and negotiations of, these challenging liminal contexts. / Anthropology

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The availability of Web 2.0 tools and multiple modalities through digital media is promoting a growing renaissance in linguistic diversity and cultural affiliations, providing a cosmopolitan and plurilingual and multicultural landscape for multilingual users. Full participation in these digitally-mediated activities involves not only print-based literacy but also new literacies that are emerging within Internet-mediated social and communicative contexts. In an effort to better understand how these communication technologies can be used to enhance second language acquisition (SLA), this study explores the relationship between social networking and second language (L2) learning. Grounded within theoretical frameworks of an ecological approach to language (van Lier, 2004), second language socialization (Duff, 2008), and new literacies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006), this dissertation examines use of social networking sites (SNS) by L2 learners/users of English as a group and as individuals over time in social networking communities through a mixed method approach, including quantitative (e.g., survey) and qualitative (e.g., case study) methods. The ultimate goal is not simply to describe the SNS use by L2 users, but to apply the findings to L2 writing pedagogy that can bridge students' in-school and out-of-school literacy practices and to examine the efficacy of that pedagogy. The three interrelated studies are comprised of 1) a survey-based study of SNS literacy practices and L2 learning, 2) a longitudinal case study of two L2 users' SNS-mediated community investment and identity formation, and 3) a study of the efficacy of an SNS-enhanced genre-awareness instructional unit in an ESL writing classroom. Findings show that L2 users, across culturally diverse groups, performed quantitatively and qualitatively differently in social media usage and displayed different culturally-informed patterns of technological affordances. The longitudinal case study on two users shows that the availability of Web 2.0-mediated semiotic resources allows users to perform complex identity work and explore multimodal selves over time. Implications are that L2 users can gain access to, develop new identities in, and acquire social capital in new communities. Results from the pedagogical intervention show that writing instructions using an SNS-enhanced genre-awareness approach can develop critical awareness of genres across both traditional and digital media.

This dissertation considers the language socialization of law students. One message that the law students encounter is that legal Swedish is an entirely new language. The main aim is to investigate what linguistic norms are conveyed to the students through the teachers’ comments on the students’ texts and through various forms of writing instructions. The material consists of student texts with teacher comments and documentation on various phases of instruction with a focus on writing. Teacher comments on texts written during the first year of the law programme are analyzed and categorized. The analysis stems from two models. The first model is based on different text levels, like formal conventions of writing, sentence construction, text structure, word choice and style, and content. The second model distinguishes different linguistic norms based on three layers: The first layer consists of written language norms in general language practice, the second of academic language norms and the third of norms that are specific to the use of legal language. The results show that word choice and style is the most common category for the teachers’ comments in the first term of the law programme and content is the most common in the second term (with word choice and style the second most common). Formal conventions of writing, sentence structure and different types of grammatical constructions are some of the things the teachers criticize. Surprisingly few of the teachers’ comments concern more overarching aspects such as text structure or the aim and genre of the text. Comments are made on local features in the text, but rarely on more global features. The teaching practice that the writing of law students belongs to entails, among other things, that the students’ texts are assessed anonymously for the sake of fairness. This means that there is not much opportunity for a student to discuss the text with the teacher who commented on and assessed it. The construction of the teachers’ text comments is particularly important when dialogue between student and teacher on the text draft and final version is not an integral part of instruction. The teachers’ written comments are usually brief and do not allow much space for a consideration of linguistic norms and text patterns, which reduces the opportunities for the teachers and the law programme to contribute to a deeper linguistic awareness in the law students.

This dissertation focuses on social interaction patterns between young people in an online chat room, analyzing how social order is displayed and constituted. An overall issue concerns when and how the participants manage to co-create social communities within this setting. The data draw on an ethnographic study, where chat room observations and online recordings were carried out during three years. Methodological guidelines from discursive psychology and conversation analysis have been used in making detailed sequential analyses of chat room interactions. The thesis builds on social practice theories, including sociocultural theorizing and studies of language socialization, and work on positionings. The findings show that familiarity with chat language, including the use of emoticons and leet speak, as well as familiarity with netiquette and conversational routines such as greeting- and parting routines, are vital for the participants in order to become parts of local groups and alignments. Playful improvisation is an important feature in the chat room intercourse. Moreover, full participation requires involvement in the lives of co-participants and extended dialogues over time. In the process of moving from peripheral to more central participation, the participants formed alignments with other participants and positioned themselves and their co-participants in the chat room. Such alignments were often founded on a shared taste in, for example musical genres and everyday consumption patterns. Shared views on school, sex and relationships, as well as age or gender alignments also played a role in the creation of local communities. Conversely, issues of exclusion were recurrent features of chat room interplay. All considered this created participation patterns that formed local hierarchies which were not fixed or static, but rather fleeting and dynamic. And yet, the participants generally did not transcend or challenge contemporary age and gender boundaries.