Who has a regional accent in Japan? Now over a century into the project of language standardization, this question remains pressing but difficult to answer conclusively. This chapter addresses distinctive characteristics of the metalinguistics of accent in the Touhoku (northern Honshu) region through local categories, and drawing on participant observation, it also offers a close reading of moments of indeterminacy in which language users negotiate the encounter with accent in themselves and in others. Three cases illuminate how the presence or absence of regional accent is subject to the interactional work of language users, and the identification of accent can be thwarted by a strategy of non-participation. The chapter concludes by reviewing the impact of accent in language users’ lives.

No abstract

No abstract

Tests of English proficiency for international graduate students at US universities are neoliberal institutions which make (mis)communication the responsibility of individual workers. While cloaking themselves in a discourse of linguistic expertise, they require test‐takers to assimilate to white, upper class, American mannerisms. In this ethnographic study of two testing centers, we address their material and ideological consequences: increases in precarity and xenophobia, losses in pay and students' communicative competence. We trace tests' distribution of interpretive labor (Graeber 2015) and propose a new interactionally informed approach to intelligibility which accounts for the co‐operation (Goodwin 2018) of multiple subjects.