Imagining language: Linguistic stylization among radio disc jockeys

Linguistic stylizing has been understood as a resource for youth to resist social hierarchies and push boundaries. However, what counts as a stylization has remained empirically ambiguous. Furthermore, research on how speakers display their understanding of the meaning and risk of stylizations is lacking. Therefore, this dissertation investigates ethnically salient linguistic stylizations, and surrounding talk, during on-air talk among radio disc jockeys. I rely on the analytical perspective of Interactional Sociolinguistics to build an empirical description of their linguistic and interactional design, and uncover the ways in which social risk is negotiated.;The data include 270 hours of recordings from the morning radio program, Bob and Brian (Milwaukee, WI, USA). Despite the inherent social risk associated with this type of language use, stylizations are ubiquitous in the data set, appearing, on average, three times per program hour. Approximately 30% of these are linked to ethnicity by the disc jockeys themselves. They are not limited to languages associated with the disc jockeys' own ethnic identities (such as Irish and German) nor are they primarily representations of out-group languages (such as Korean and Japanese).;I argue that the disc jockeys use these stylizations in order to create characters that speak for them, thus escaping accountability for their talk, which affords them opportunity to make commentary otherwise too socially risky to make. Analysis of surrounding talk demonstrates that speakers carefully frame stylizations and negotiate their meaning so that there is little room for open interpretation of linguistic features and that the disc jockeys are aware of the social risk of using ethnically salient talk. They negotiate this risk through several actions including mock challenges, and assessments of their linguistic accuracy. Finally, I argue that the stylizations are carnivaleseque actions that temporarily expose otherwise unspoken, hegemonic understandings of social organization and call into question the tendency of past work to create a distinction between stylizations put on by speakers who belong to dominant social groups and those who belong to marginalized groups.