In this study we address ethnolinguistic identity using Bakhtin's (1981) notion of chronotope. Taking an ethnographic approach to linguistic data from Azerbaijani and Uzbek communities, we trace the impact of various chronotopes on our participants’ acts of ethnolinguistic identification. Building on Blommaert & De Fina (2017), we illustrate how ethnolinguistic identification is an outcome of the interaction between multiple levels of large- and small-scale chronotopes. Furthermore, we argue that chronotopes differ in terms of their power, depending on the ideological force behind them. We demonstrate how power differentials between chronotopes can account for certain interactional and linguistic patterns in conversation. The power inherent in chronotopes that link nationhood with specific languages makes the notions of discrete languages and static identities ‘real’ for our participants. Therefore, discussions of language and identity as flexible and socially constructed, we argue, must not obscure the power of these notions in shaping the perceptions of sociolinguistic subjects. (Chronotope, ethnolinguistic identity, power, Uzbek, Azeri/Azerbaijani, nationalism, language mixing, language ideology)*

In this article I apply the notion of scaling as agentive discursive practice to analyze the construction of moral positionings by migrant women. I draw from semi-structured interviews with Uzbek women in the United States and use discourse analytic methods to focus on the relationship between linguistic choices and existing power structures. I show that although these women are caught between multiple moral orders, by linking behaviors associated with these orders to different time-space configurations and different scopes of generalizability, they are able to justify their choices and highlight the stability of their own morality. I further demonstrate that while these acts of scaling are agentive, they may also be used to reinforce rather than dismantle existing hierarchies, pointing to the need for further investigation of the relationship between agency, discourse and power in contemporary globalization.

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This paper contributes to disentangling hybridity from assumptions about marginality, resistance and the dissolution of boundaries in sociolinguistic scholarship. To do so, it examines how speakers make certain types of hybrid identities (im)possible through their discursive practices of scaling. Focusing on post‐soviet, Central Asian migrants in the United States, I demonstrate how their discourses on ethnolinguistic identity rely on multiple scalar perspectives, which (re)make boundaries in different ways that (dis)allow for hybrid identities to emerge. I show that speakers engage in such discourses in order to navigate their marginal transnational positionings, and that their emergent hybrid identities do not ensure resistance to national norms or transcend categorical boundaries. These empirical observations, I argue, have implications for conceptualizing the relationship between power, marginality and hybrid forms more broadly.

This paper focuses on how information accessed through new media is discursively represented by migrants. Taking an ethnographic approach to the analysis of Uzbek and Iranian migration discourse, we show how the underspecified and decontextualized information received via technology is combined with the “imagined homeland” in order to reconstruct images of life there‐and‐now. Since images of the homeland are chronotopic in nature, we argue that the reconstruction of these images can be understood as rechronotopization. The rechronotopized image, then, operates as a lens through which migrants socially position themselves relative to the homeland. More specifically, we show how the conflict between prior images and rechronotopized images are invoked to construct difference and discuss disconnection. Thus, while technology facilitates connection, we argue that because it reminds migrants of how things have changed since they left, it may also lead to feelings of disconnection.