A perception that LGBTQ+ terminology is undergoing constant and rapid shift is often mobilized ideologically to justify resistance to transgender and/or non-binary people's language activism; however, there is little empirical work that explores this purported language change. How much is language use in queer and trans communities really changing, and how do changes occur? Additionally, there is criticism from within queer and trans communities that mainstream trans and queer spaces uphold and reinforce other hegemonic norms relating to whiteness, ableism, and classism. When language use in online queer and trans communities shifts, how might those with most power in the community influence the way that change unfolds? In this thesis, I explore these dynamics by examining shifting language patterns in an online trans LiveJournal community (TransLiveCorpus – Zimman & Hayworth 2020). Using bigram snapshot language models, I analyze community homogeneity over time, as well as identifying how top users pattern with respect to the overall community. This computational analysis is paired with qualitative analysis of how interactions of creating and enforcing language norms play out. Based on this, I argue that when approaching language change, we must consider how community language use exists within broader socio-political landscapes.

I love you is one of the most meaningful utterances in English speakers’ organization of intimate relationships. This thesis focuses on hegemonic understandings of I love you that are so powerful that they are rarely denaturalized or challenged, often remaining invisible or taken for granted. In order to understand the utterance and its relation to social norms, this study draws on metalinguistic commentary about the utterance on the social media platform Reddit, a popular online discussion forum. Focusing on two large communities, or subreddits, that are organized around normative gender categories, the commentary reveals a system of meaning behind I love you that is embedded in contemporary Western systems of power and norms surrounding love and romance. As shown by the data, saying I love you for the first time in a romantic relationship normatively functions as an invitation to commit to a particular kind of relationship, one which is particularly prized by society: a relationship that is moving towards a long-term, monogamous commitment culminating in marriage. This thesis examines the construction of I love you, beginning with its discursive properties as a speech act. The analysis shows that the first I love you has a performative impact, and it is also the first pair part of an adjacency pair, creating an expectation that the interlocutor will complete the pair by immediately replying, I love you too. The recipient must decide if they will reciprocate with the second pair part, and accept the invitation, or decline, and risk ending the relationship. In this sense, I love you can function as an ultimatum for a blossoming romantic relationship. The thesis goes on to illustrate the challenges involved in saying I love you, including the tensions between sincerity and timing, and how people manage vulnerability and agency. Finally, it considers strategies for dealing with those challenges, such as ways of assessing sincerity and alternatives to saying I love you too. In sum, the analysis shows that metalinguistic discussion of I love you quickly goes beyond the scope of a single utterance: it is structured by ideologies about emotion, intersubjectivity, interaction, and power. This study contributes to the line of research that examines how people produce and maintain normativity, expanding beyond normative genders and sexualities to include the powerful norms surrounding love, romance, and relationships.

Recent research in sociocultural linguistics has increasingly focused on the interplay of prosodic style, interactional stance, and personahood (Bucholtz 2009; Kiesling 2009; Mendoza-Denton 2011; Podesva 2013; Starr 2015; Zimman 2017). Within this vein of research, indigenous languages remain understudied. Furthermore, those sociophonetic studies that do address indigenous languages tend to focus on segmental rather than suprasegmental variation. This analysis investigates the prosodic stylization of constructed dialogue in Kodiak Alutiiq, an endangered Aleut-Yupik-Inuit language spoken on Kodiak Island. Following Coupland's (1980) understanding of style as being comprised of multiple variables, I analyze each speaker's average F0, F0 range, voice quality, speech rate, and intonation contour across excerpts of constructed dialogue and non-constructed dialogue speech. The results emphasize the importance of considering interactional stance in conjunction with persona and of examining the interactions of prosodic variables rather than analyzing them in isolation. Finally, the results demonstrate the important role narrative has to play in language revitalization efforts both as a method for improving fluency and as a conduit for the transmission of polyphony.

Although Indigenous communities and outside institutions have increasingly recognized the need to document and revitalize endangered languages (Hale et al. 1992; Krauss 1992; McCarty et al. 2006; Watahomigie 1998), revitalized languages themselves remain underdocumented and understudied. Purist discourses delegitimize revitalized languages as less valid than their predecessors, implying that authentic Indigeneity is consigned to the past rather than relevant in the present (Davis 2017; Hill 2002). To counter these misconceptions, I consider Kodiak Alutiiq language revitalization in the broader context of cultural reclamation in the face of colonialism. Drawing on participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and interactional analysis conducted between 2014 and 2020, I examine linguistic practices that are sometimes disparaged as inauthentic or impure, with a primary focus on translanguaging practices such as code-switching, calquing, and literal translation. I argue that these practices are not passive, involuntary responses to colonial influences, but agentive strategies for reasserting Alutiiq epistemologies in the contemporary world while continuing cultural traditions of humor and language play. I then draw on interview and survey data to examine Alutiiq language activists’ social and emotional experiences of speaking Alutiiq in specific contexts, showing how these situated experiences benefit community well-being, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, I illustrate how the Alutiiq language movement transmits environmental values and knowledges that are of key importance in light of the ongoing climate crisis. These results challenge purist discourses that devalue revitalized languages, offer insights into the use of translanguaging as a means of sustaining Indigenous language vitality, and demonstrate the relevance of Indigenous language revitalization to environmental and climate justice.

This paper explores the relationship between language, gender, and globalization and, specifically, how gendered identities and sexualities are constructed through the language in popular music lyrics. In particular, I analyze the ways one popular Korean artist named CL, performs, constructs, and negotiates different identities through linguistic and embodied performance. I argue that the rapper-singer uses hybrid linguistic practices and specific embodied choices (e.g. the Bad Bitch, b-girl style, chola aesthetics) to project a distinctively cosmopolitan femininity. In the process, CL challenges longstanding social values vis-à-vis women’s place in Korean society and promotes instead a globalized version of femininity. This study highlights what K-pop as a globalized genre can reveal about circulations of language and discourses surrounding femininity. It also exposes the kinds of gendered and sexual identities that are being articulated through global flows of music and language and contributes to recent discussions in language, gender, and sexuality that take a globalization framework to mediatized contexts.

Trans people often undergo a process of voice training for many reasons, including alleviating gender dysphoria and improving their mental health. While professional options are available, many trans people utilize online resources either as a supplement to or replacement for professional training. One such place where trans people gather to discuss voice training is r/TransVoice, a community on the social media website Reddit. r/TransVoice is dedicated to gathering and disseminating resources for voice training as well as sharing voice recordings for feedback from the community. This thesis examines popular posts, comments, and media from r/TransVoice to analyze an aspect of voice training that is often overlooked in voice training research: emotions.

Using the 25 most popular posts of all time and of the past month, as well as the comments on those posts, this project analyzes the emotions that are expressed and negotiated in the process of voice training and how they are talked about by members of the community in interactions, videos, and memes. Many of the top 25 posts of all time are memes that encapsulate some aspect of the voice training experience, whether it is a common exercise that people use or making a reference to a popular voice coach in the community. These memes are analyzed in a sense of communicating and perpetuating norms, as their popularity relies on their relatability and further reinforces that these experiences are common. In addition to the analysis of memes and videos, comments and comment threads are analyzed to show how community members respond to the discussions of emotion in interactional contexts.

Expressions of affect are present throughout posts and comments on r/TransVoice. Users attend to more formal voice coaches, even as these coaches gloss over or dismiss “bad feelings” as individual problems that can be resolved with individual actions. The bad feelings come not only from dysphoria, but from feelings of discomfort that stem from comparing one’s progress against popular success stories. Through processes of authorization, these success stories in turn get to define what successful voice training is. Members of r/TransVoice address these emotions by building an “affective trans commons” (Malatino 2022) in comment sections as users connect with each other and recognize each other's emotions. However, when that recognition is not present, connection fails and the bad feelings persist in ways that can undermine voice training practices. Through this analysis, I make a case for the importance of emotions and community-based collaboration in the research and execution of voice training.

Prescriptive modern English does not have distinct singular and plural second-person pronouns, using ‘you’ for both. In practice, however, English users have a variety of means to mark the second-person plural, including constructions such as ‘you guys’, ‘you two’, and ‘you all’, and lexical items such as ‘y’all’, ‘youse’, and ‘yinz’. These forms are typically treated as vernacular, and many are associated with specific varieties of English. ‘You guys’ and ‘y’all’, in particular, have become the subject of extensive metalinguistic commentary. Broadly, ‘you guys’ is problematized for its contested gendered quality, and ‘y’all’ is problematized for its association with stigmatized varieties Southern American English (SAE) and African American English (AAE) (Green, 2002; Maynor, 2000). The two forms have more recently been discussed together, as it has become popular for non-Southern, non-Black English users to use ‘y’all’ to avoid ‘you guys’ ’s perceived gendered quality (McCurdy, 2023). I examine this debate through a qualitative corpus analysis of 113 items—including newspaper articles, videos, blogs, and academic works—which discuss how ‘you guys’ and ‘y’all’ are (or should be) used. I focus on metalinguistic stances (Du Bois, 2007; Silverstein, 1993) commentators take to identify ‘you guys’ and ‘y’all’ ’s indexical potentials. I find that both pronouns are attached to meanings that are contested and/or contradictory, and argue that this indexical messiness is a result of linguistic commentators invoking competing sociopolitical stances around race, place, and/or gender. The apparent messy indexical potentials of ‘you guys’ and ‘y’all’ thus arise from competing ideological goals held by metalinguistic commentators, where these goals are informed by commentators’ own various relationships to sociopolitical power. Popular indexical models such as indexical order (Silverstein, 2003) and the indexical field (Eckert, 2008) do not make claims about contested indexicality or indexical contradiction, thus, I introduce the indexical tangle: a contradiction in the indexical potentials of a sign. In doing so, I contribute to a growing body of literature on indexical contradiction (Barrett & Hall, 2024; Calder & King, 2020; Gafter, 2021; Mendoza, 2025), and consider the role of indexical contradiction in sociopolitical valuations of language.

Language communicates not just what we say, but also who we are. Research demonstrates that speakers use linguistic variation to construct sexual identities and communities. Driven by the question of whether stereotypes about lesbian and gay speech have “real” bases in speech production or perception, the literature in this area is historically preoccupied with differences between lesbian, gay, and straight people. White and cisgender positionalities are overrepresented in this work. As a result, the understanding of sexuality that emerges in this area is white, monosexual, and often mapped onto gender expression. Bisexuality and its intersections with other aspects of identity are not widely considered, leaving the theorization of sexuality incomplete. This dissertation extends the theorization of sexuality by positioning bisexual practices and subjectivities as central to understanding sexuality. The first and second content chapters present quantitative analyses of acoustic data. Both chapters explore how bisexual people produce /s/–the sound associated with the "gay lisp'" stereotype–relative to lesbian, gay, and straight people. The first content chapter focuses on the theorization of the gender-sexuality interface, whereas the second content chapter focuses on the intersection between sexuality, gender, and race. The third content chapter examines how people talk about bisexuality online using a statistical approach called keyness analysis. The chapter provides insights into the concepts and ideologies that characterize discourses of bisexuality online, and identifies numerous avenues for further research on bisexual identity construction. All three content chapters illustrate the value of centering peripheral identities in linguistic research. This dissertation represents the largest body of research on bisexuality within linguistics to date.