DOI: 10.1111/josl.

12374

THEME ISSUE ARTICLE

Making registers in politics: Circulation and

ideologies of linguistic authority1 

Susan Gal

University of Chicago, Illinois

Abstract
Correspondence This paper examines the role of register‐making in con-
Susan Gal, University of Chicago— structing and evoking authority for political discourses.
Anthropology, 1126 East 59th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637 Three aspects of such enregisterment are defined and exem-
Email: susangal@uchicago.edu plified: clasping, relaying, and grafting. Though they occur
together in any case of enregisterment, these processes are
analytically separable. As registers circulate, they link are-
nas of social action, creating relations of authority between
the social arena of those who construct the register and the
arena of those whom the register names and characterizes
(clasping). Registers also display connections between or-
ganizations in different social arenas (relaying). Finally,
registers may draw on—tap into—institutional discourses
that are highly authorized, implanting onto them ways of
speaking that convey meanings opposed to the institution's
values. Paradoxically, such graftings draw authority from
the very discourses they oppose. Examples come from
Hungarian and other east European politics, as well as his-
torical cases from the US.
Az alábbi cikk azt vizsgálja, hogy a politikai beszédmód-
ban a regiszterek formálása miként járul hozzá a hatalmi és
tekintély viszonyok kialakításához és működéséhez. A regisz-
terképzés három mozzanatát emeli ki: összekapcsolás, közvetí-
tés, átültetés. Jóllehet ezen mozzanatok együtt szerepelnek a
beszédregiszterek kialakításának minden esetében, elemzési
szempontból elkülöníthetőek. Az efféle elkülönítés megmutatja
ahogy a beszédregiszterek működése során, a regisztereket ki-

Journal of Sociolinguistics. 2019;00:1–17. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/josl |

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd     1
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alakítók és az ezen regiszterek által megnevezettek társadalmi

színtereit tekintélyen alapuló relációba szervezi (összekapcso-
lás). Továbbá regiszterek kapcsolatot létesítenek a különböző
társadalmi terekben működő szervezetek között (közvetítés).
Ezentúl előfordul, hogy bizonyos regiszterek tekintélyes in-
tézményi beszédmódokra települnek, ahova olyan beszédmó-
dokat ültetnek át, amelyek jelentése ellentétes az intézmény
képviselte értékekkel (átültetés). Paradox módon, tekintélyüket
a velük ellentétes intézmény hatalmi poziciója biztositja. Az
elemzés magyar és más kelet‐európai példákra valamint az
Egyesült Államok történetéből kiragadott esetekre épül.

KEYWORDS
authority, enregisterment, language ideologies, political discourses,
eastern Europe, USA

1  |   IN T RO D U C T ION
There are many possible sources for the authority of linguistic forms. Standardized languages, for
instance, gain their authority—their power to persuade, convey legitimacy, and to dominate other
forms—through the ideological link to an axis of differentiation that claims standard forms are “cor-
rect, better” in themselves. They are supposedly everyone's in a nation‐state polity, exactly by being no
one's in particular. As many scholars have argued, this is a valuation of anonymity‐as‐unity, the invo-
cation of an objective and disembodied “voice from nowhere.” Or, put another way, it seems to add the
voices of an imagined “everyone” to that of the speaker. But not everyone can speak in the voice from
nowhere. Access to a standard is controlled and limited, thereby creating hierarchy, domination, and
anxiety. The contrasting linguistic forms in such an ideological arrangement, those usually called so-
cial or regional dialects, are heard as emplaced, embodied, “authentic”: They are understood to belong
to (they index) those at particular social or geographical locations. The mass mediation of standard
national languages in accord with this language ideology, whether in newspapers or electronically,
provides the communicative armature for making mass political subjects—“publics” and “imagined
communities”—that, it is said, “forge their own legitimacy through the medium of [a] common dis-
course,” (Cody, 2011: 39). Thus, publics and imagined (national) communities are language‐based
forms of political authority (Gal & Woolard, [2001] 2014: 4–5; Woolard, 2016).
However, this axis of differentiation is by no means the only way that ideologically framed index-
icality lends authority to forms of speaking and in that way organizes political projects. In this paper,
I consider other communicative contrasts (axes) that evoke a field of political positions. That is, other
axes of differentiation than anonymity/authenticity underwrite the forms of authority described here.
In particular, ideological differences of political value (for instance, “right/left”) undergird the social
organizations discussed and the linguistic forms that index them.2  The social organizations are of
diverse kinds—political parties, supra‐state alliances, activist and legal NGOs, academic schools of
thought, artistic circles, and communities of style. Speakers align with these, authorizing their own
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positions by taking up the various kinds of talk (discourses) that characteristically index such social
organizations in particular historical contexts. In contrast to standardized linguistic forms, the kinds
of talk analysed here are not disciplined through grammars, dictionaries, and the gamut of state‐con-
trolled educational and linguistic expertise. They are shaped and spread more informally. Sometimes,
the results have been called “counterpublics,” in the large literature critical of Habermas's ([1962]
1989) concept of a reason‐driven, universalist, and deliberative public (Fraser, 1992; Warner, 2002).
Scholars critical of Habermas have called for better understanding of counterpublics, and of political
speaking not based on rationality or deliberation, but ones that engage “affective aspects of speech…
figurative aspects…metaphor…irony… and duplicity.” They suggest that attention to these features
would mean embracing “wild publics” (Young, 1987: 71, 64), whose study is inspired by a Bakhtinian
rather than a Habermasian view (Gardiner, 2004).
“Wild publics” evokes an imagined world of multiple and unregimented voices, an open and di-
verse participation often thought to be enhanced by electronic mass mediation. Yet, Bakhtin (1981)
also alerted us to the clash of centripetal and centrifugal forces. It is therefore important to investigate
how, in the age of electronic media and quite separately from processes of language standardization,
political speaking continues to be a field of contestation, domination, and attempts at limitation. We
should ask: How do some forms of talk become dominant? This occurs, I argue, through semiotic pro-
cesses best investigated via the concepts of register and enregisterment. Accordingly, the contribution
of this paper is not so much the exploration of a single ethnographic or sociolinguistic case, although
I examine east European and especially Hungarian politics. Nor do I propose entirely new conceptual
tools. Rather, I show how the tools we already have can be usefully elaborated and extended to reveal
how the same semiotic processes undergird a wider range of social effects than heretofore recognized
and in more diverse areas of sociolinguistic life.
To see these processes, we turn from publics to publicity as a communicative effect. What counts as
public speaking is not determined by the fact of a large audience or the technology of mass‐mediation.
As many have pointed out, publicity in this sense depends on the perceived circulation of utterances
or texts to indefinite addressees, but ones that—by taking up and repeating the utterance—self‐iden-
tify as its recipients. When texts, messages, utterances, ideas, and practices are said to “travel” or
“circulate,” they are not physically displaced. Instead, the effect of movement arises from a perceived
repetition of the forms and hence a seeming linkage across encounters, events, even across media.
The forms are framed as being “the same thing, again,” or as yet another instantiation of a recognized
type of talk (Agha & Wortham, 2005). Such a series of repetitions across events/locations/times has
been discussed variously as a de‐contextualization of a chunk of discourse and its recontextualization
(Briggs & Bauman, 1992), or as citation, for instance in reported speech (Lucy, 1992; Nakassis, 2013),
or as interdiscursivity (Silverstein, 2005). In all these versions of this theoretical vocabulary, framing
(aka metacommunication) is a necessary aspect of creating the effect of sameness, repetition, and rep-
lication—or that of difference. That is, although formal features of repetitions may signal similarity,
similarity never inheres in the forms themselves. What counts as similar across events depends on
interpretations by participants. Recognition and interpretation of a form, signalled by a repetition or
reaction is “uptake.” It relies on language ideologies that orient participants to criteria of “sameness.”
Even though repetition is rarely exact, what counts as similarity and difference is established through
axes of differentiation within some ideological framework. Language ideologies of differentiation
regiment the perceived relationships between types of talk, and between types of talk and their tokens
in everyday speaking. Speech registers are established, recognized, and circulate in just this way.
There is a long history in sociolinguistics of conceptualizing “registers.” At first, they were under-
stood as speech varieties that researchers identified as appropriate for different social purposes or sit-
uations.3  By contrast, current studies focus on participants’ perspective, not that of the researcher. The
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same variants that index (point to) situations of use turn out to distinguish speaker types, so that social
and regional dialects also fit under the rubric of register. And it is clear that registers do not simply
exist, they are ideologically constructed, via the process of enregisterment. The sets of co‐occurring
expressive forms that make up a register—linguistic but also multi‐modal—index people‐types and
their activities: Contrasting and typified features of communicative display are linked to contrasting ste-
reotypes of speakers, their characteristics, activities, practices, and values. Thus, enregisterment is the
assembling and conventionalization of register contrasts via a language ideological process that orients
the expectations and perceptions of participants. One aspect of this process is rhematization, in which
narratives construct and purport to explain similarities among speech features, clothing styles, objects,
and posited human characteristics so that they appear to share qualities and to “belong together,” in con-
trast to some other register, on an axis of differentiation that can be reiterated fractally. In another aspect
of the semiotic process of differentiation, features of speech and of speaker activities and identities that
do not fit the ideologized schema are elided or erased (Gal, 2013; Gal & Irvine, 2019).
Register differentiation—enregisterment—as described here is a very general process. In ethno-
graphic situations across space/times, numerous enregistered stereotypes of personhood—e.g. the
nerd, the jock, the teddy—have been shown to operate in this way. The process can be detected in the
vast array of studies since Hebdige's (1979) pioneering work on musical and sartorial style in British
musical bands, and is equally evident in much work since on sociolinguistic and expressive differen-
tiation. Important for the argument of this paper is that opposed political positions are also indexed
and thus evoked by registers contrasting on an axis of differentiation. Such contrasting forms of talk
are as often called discourses as registers, since they often include contrastive propositional content.
In interaction, they signal speakers’ political positions in participant frameworks, while also indexing
the organizations (e.g. political parties) that support the forms of politically charged linguistic varia-
tion I consider here.
To further analyse the ideological work of enregisterment, I suggest it is useful to divide the process
of assembling and conventionalizing registers into three aspects or “moments:” clasping, relaying,
and grafting. The goal is to clarify the ways in which enregisterment and authority are intertwined.4 
The three aspects operate together in any empirical case, but they are not always equally noticed by
participants or analysts. Taking them apart shows the ways registers are created (clasping), how they
organize positions in fields of alternative possibilities (relaying), and how they enable often paradox-
ical claims to authority (grafting). The three moments highlight the fact that registers create linkages
between arenas of action that have been socially separated and institutionalized as different in specific
historical contexts.5  Definitions of the three moments below, with brief examples for clarification,
are followed by two sections providing more detailed discussion of how they have operated in recent
Hungarian and east European politics. In a final section, I compare graftings in different historical and
national contexts, highlighting some of the political consequences.

2  |  T H R E E A SP E C TS OF E N R EGISTERM ENT

Expressive registers construct and display cultural stereotypes that categorize people and their activi-
ties, so a first “moment” of enregisterment links the action arena in which a discourse is assembled to
the arena of the objects or person‐types that a discourse names and characterizes. We can say that the
register acts as a “clasp” or hinge between arenas, in an active practice of clasping. Some examples
of this phenomenon are familiar. For instance, scholars often define what linguistic forms count as a
standard register along with the speaker categories and qualities these signal. This connects the academic
arena of linguists and educators with the world of speakers who come to value the forms designated as
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standard. Sociolinguistics has documented the effects on the objects of classification—for instance, on
speakers who struggle to learn standard forms or are stigmatized because they do not use them. But we
know less about the effect on the subject positions and authority of those who make the categories and
construct what will count as the standard register. It is not often enough remarked that successful enreg-
isterment is the outcome of conflicts among the value projects of those who attempt to make the register.
For instance, the definition and shibboleths of today's “American English” and the qualities indexed by
its axis—e.g. wholesome rural midwesternness signalled by rhotic speech, as opposed to stigmatized,
urban/eastern, immigrant, r‐dropping—emerged out of historical conflicts among elites in educational
and political institutions a century ago (Bonfiglio, 2002).6 
In a second moment of enregisterment, one best called “relaying,” fragments of a register that are
used at one site or arena of social organization are taken up by other, institutionally different and often
distant or dependent sites. Registers used as relays spark parallel usages in linguistic and other prac-
tices across arenas. One example is women's organizations in Hungary that proliferated after the Cold
War (Gal, 2018). The various women's groups differ in their activist focus and in their discourses—
whether prioritizing domestic violence, legal rights, and/or family welfare and related policies. They
all network to garner support from institutionally distant funders by displaying practices that can be
recognized and approved by the potential donor. Thus, groups in touch with American liberal NGOs
emphasized that violence is caused by a lack of women's autonomy. Those with links to the EU for-
mulated their goals as opposing violations of international norms for human rights. Those allied with
conservative parties in Germany used gender‐blind terminology focused on children's welfare and
abuse of elders, not women (Fábián, 2009). These are distinctions sparked by relays. Even in small
details like styles of dress, amount of English used, and office routines, the practices of Hungarian
women's NGOs mirror that of their patrons within the palette of existing political stances in the arena
of women's NGOs internationally.
Third, registers are sometimes graftings, in an active process of grafting. The analogy with grafting
in plant biology is meant to be suggestive: Shoots are inserted into the trunk of a living plant, from
which the shoot sucks life‐giving sap that it uses for its own growth, not that of the trunk. Both the
trunk and the grafting are changed as a result. A quick, clarifying example is the way the president
of Russia justified the controversial military incursions by Russian forces into Ukraine in 2014. He
invoked the “responsibility to protect” (known in international organizations as r2p) and other shib-
boleths of humanitarian discourse (Dunn & Bobick, 2014). That is, linguistic, social, and material
practices that are indexical of existing discourses and organizations (in this case, humanitarian ones)
in one arena (international diplomacy) provide the sap (authority) for the graftings (practices) added
to them from a second arena (in this case, military action). The effect is like troping; an analogy is
formed. It seems at first like parody. In parody, however, the ironic or humorous effect comes from the
recognition of a difference between two practices framed as “the same.” Theatrical impersonations of
public figures are amusing because we know the actor is not the figure being portrayed. In graftings,
the difference between practices is palpable for some ideological uptakes, while also solemnly denied
as non‐existent by other audiences and their equally ideological interpretations. Cues sometimes tele-
graph how one is to “take” the analogy (seriously or not), but they are not always available.
Graftings build on the recognition and acknowledgement of a discourse's authority, yet may
simultaneously oppose or undermine it. Sometimes, graftings insert into a type‐category of action
an instance that normatively is classified otherwise and would receive a valuation starkly antithet-
ical to the category. For instance, claiming that a military incursion is an instance of humanitarian
action proposes for the claimant the discursive position of upholding international ethical standards as
against those who violate them, even while the claimant (arguably) violates them. But graftings may
also change the type‐level category itself. In the course of the discussion that follows, it will be useful
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to distinguish grafting from related troping like parody and irony, as well as from another analogical
process, appropriation.

3  |  C LA S P ING A N D R E LAY ING IN HUNGARIAN POLITICS

Discourses about register difference set the stage for clasping. Such discourses originate in narratives
about types of people, events, and places. They make judgements about differences among social
types by naming and characterizing them within a system of qualitative contrasts. These semiotic
contrasts in judgment organize sociopolitical competition and value conflict along ideological fis-
sures among those constructing the register. Thus, the narratives are not purely descriptive, nor ever
innocent. At the same time, the narratives constrain those who are described or defined. The register
(as clasp) links the social arena of those who do the defining with the social arena of those defined,
and the latter typically have less power and authority.
Clasping was evident and frankly political in Hungary in 2015. The centre‐right political party in
power—called Fidesz—was losing popular support due to a series of corruption scandals and a weak
economy. Early in the year, the party's leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, spoke out against the
European Union's immigration policies. This criticism was Orbán's response to the Charlie Hebdo “ter-
rorist” attacks in Paris that winter, although those responsible were not migrants but French Muslims.
Hungary had been a member of the European Union (EU) since 2004; Fidesz's turn against the EU's
migration policy soon became Fidesz's central topic in wide‐ranging publicity campaigns that followed a
dramatic rise in the number of migrants wishing to enter Europe via Hungary. At this same time, Fidesz
was challenged from the political right by a new and xenophobic, anti‐Roma and anti‐Semitic party called
Jobbik, which unexpectedly won a hefty 20% of the vote in the previous year's parliamentary elections.7 
Jobbik's electoral fortunes had risen in synchrony with its campaign demonizing Hungary's Roma
population, changing the widespread stereotype of this large, heavily disadvantaged and stigmatized
minority from laziness and mendacity to claims that they were also physically threatening and crim-
inal. Jobbik claimed that liberal parties did not dare to speak this “truth” about Roma; that they were
lying or in denial about it. Using the ethnonym for Roma that is rejected as a slur by Hungarian ad-
vocacy groups and international organizations (cigány, Gypsy), Jobbik claimed as its own the terms
cigánybűnöző (gypsy‐criminal) and cigánybűnözés (gypsy‐crime), shibboleths that were part of a
more elaborate register negatively depicting Roma. This was a clasping operation: The social arena
in which Roma citizens tensely cohabited with ethnic Hungarians (Magyars) was linked by Jobbik to
the political arena in which Jobbik competed with other political parties. In the political arena, Jobbik
created a second order indexicality: By claiming that only Jobbik told the truth about Roma, it was
possible for some to hear the slurs against Roma as a sign of Jobbik's honesty. In this way, Jobbik
evoked a long‐standing axis of differentiation between a valued Magyar self‐stereotype as szókimo-
ndó (outspoken, plainspoken, blunt) that stood in a very old ideological contrast with the stereotype
of Roma as deceitful. The contrast was projected as a fractal recursion: If all of Hungary is divided
between Magyars and Roma, then among Magyars political parties could be subdivided in the same
way. Jobbik was heard as truly Magyar in contrast to other parties that were cast as dishonest, duplic-
itious resembling the stereotype of Roma.
Thus, Jobbik's “gypsy‐crime” register was as much about distinguishing Jobbik's position from its
liberal and other political opponents as it was about Roma. Not using this register suggested a party's or
speaker's opposition to Jobbik. Yet, increasing use of the term “gypsy‐crime” in Hungarian politics was
not due to Jobbik alone. When Jobbik's competitors in the political arena were accused of being deceitful
or in denial, they could have responded in numerous ways. In the event, most (but not all) took up the
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term, trying to avoid such characterizations of duplicity. The term circulated even further when taken up
in other arenas such as personal blogs, newspapers, websites, and research centres. Finally, it was used
even by the government ombudsman for minority affairs, who was officially charged with protecting the
interests of Roma. The term and its register became a relay. The term's use reproduced and mirrored in
other arenas the spreading pattern evident in party‐political talk, leaving only a few dissenters. As one
astute researcher noted, the result was that Jobbik's shibboleth and way of speaking spread so widely that
other and long‐established political contrasts that had nothing to do with Roma faded in salience: “deeply
rooted older modes of speech and [public] positions are being reshaped through new discourses about the
relation between Gypsies and non‐Gypsies” (Juhász, 2010: 18).
It was in this historical situation that Fidesz, the government party, embarked on a clasping oper-
ation of its own that proved effective in displacing Jobbik. When Orbán first spoke publicly against
immigrants, decades of increasing migration into the EU did not affect Hungary. Migrants crossing
the Mediterranean from Africa and the Middle East were heading for Germany, France, Britain and
the northern countries. Polls taken at the end of 2014 showed that only 2–3% of Hungarians consid-
ered immigration a serious issue for Hungary. By the end of 2015, however, more than 35% considered
it a grave problem, and this has risen to as much as 65% in the following years. Crucial to this rising
concern was the very large number of migrants—well over 200,000—who arrived in the course of
the summer of 2015. Hungary had never before experienced such large‐scale entry into the country.
Yet, Hungary was never a final goal for migrants; virtually all were headed for points further west.
As a result, Hungary did not become a country of immigration. Moreover, the building of a fence and
brutality towards migrants further reduced the flow to a handful by the end of 2015 (Juhász & Molnár,
2016). Yet, the Fidesz anti‐migrant campaign has continued unabated, arguably securing Fidesz's
re‐election in 2018. My focus is one piece of the semiotic process by which what has been called a
“moral panic” about migration was created, maintained, and turned into a matter of party‐politics.8 
In 2015, incoming people were designated in a variety of ways. That year, Fidesz organized a
series of events highlighting migrations: a “day of discussion” (February), a referendum mailed to
virtually the entire voting‐age population (April), and a poster campaign (June), all before the height
of the migrant flow in late summer. Several terms were bureaucratically applicable to segments of the
incoming population, depending on their source‐country and legal status, in accord with EU agree-
ments that Hungary had signed. These categories of people were to be differentially treated: menedék-
kérő (asylum seeker), menekült (refugee), migráns (migrant), and bevándorló (immigrant). I ask not
whether incoming people were properly categorized or well‐treated—the question most studies have
explored—but rather the Bakhtinian dialogue among the terms.
In a January speech, Orbán had used the term bevándorló (immigrant), one implying that migrating
people would stay and settle in Hungary. He raised a cultural issue and also an economic question.
He noted:

Extract 1:
A bevándorlásról és az azzal összefüggő kulturá-
lis kérdésekről az eddigieknél sokkal nyíltabban,
őszintébben, teljes egyenességgel kell beszélni… A gaz-
dasági bevándorlás rossz dolog Európában, nem szabad
úgy tekinteni rá, mintha annak bármi haszna is lenne,
mert csak bajt és veszedelmet hoz az európai emberre,
ezért a bevándorlást meg kell állitani, ez a magyar ál-
láspont… (quoted in Bernáth & Messing, 2015, emphasis
added)
Immigration and the related cultural questions [will]
have to be discussed in a much more open, more
honest way than till now and with total straight-
forwardness… Economic immigration is bad for
Europe, one must not see it as having any kind of
benefit, because it brings only trouble and danger
for the European person, therefore immigra-
tion must be stopped, that is the Magyar point of
view…
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The government later claimed that it welcomed “real” refugees, but not the “economic” (gaz-
dasági) migrants mentioned here. Note that the adjective gazdasági (economic) here used by Orbán
modifies “immigrant.” Yet, in all further public discussion, including all the events organized by
Fidesz and listed above, another modifier was used: megélhetési bevándorló. This too might be ren-
dered as “economic immigrant.” More literally: immigrant‐for‐the‐sake‐of‐livelihood, or immigrant‐
for‐survival. Many observers noted that this construction became the Fidesz government's umbrella
term; other distinctions were abandoned. This change of modifier was significant.
Megélhetés means livelihood, and its adjectival form megélhetési was used in the communist
period among sociologists and lawyers as a modifier for verbs and suggested theft: thus, the sort
of petty crime in which perpetrators steal only in order to have something to eat that day. “Poverty
criminality” would be one good rendering. It was identifiable as a leftist way of speaking that
blamed society, not the perpetrator, for minor criminality. After the fall of communism, conserva-
tive politicians complained about this euphemism. By the 2000s, Jobbik's website, using their key
shibboleth of cigánybűnözés (gypsy‐crime), accused liberal parties of having created unemploy-
ment “so that increasingly fewer of the upcoming generation of Gypsies can see work as their first
source of livelihood/survival (megélhetés). Then with the lying category of megélhetési bűnözés
(criminality as livelihood) they gave an ethical absolution for most forms of crime,” Jobbik charged.
Later that year, a liberal blog explicated the effect of the decades’ long changes in the term's usage
for an English‐speaking readership:

Extract 2:
megélhetési [now] means “parasitic, opportunistic, profiteering, sharking… a swindler”
[…] Examples: megélhetési gyermekvállaló—parents who “produce” children solely for
the sake of child welfare benefits—it means a Roma parent and nothing else. Or: megél-
hetési bűnöző, a criminal out of poverty—invariably just a Gypsy. Or: megélhetési poli-
tikus—means a corrupt politician. [… In short] agitating against those who have kind
words for criminals and thereby encourage them… they [right‐wing politicians] started
to use it for “Gypsy” as a… racist slur…
(Haraszti, quoted in Hungarian Spectrum online, 26 April 2015)

As in Jobbik's clasping, Fidesz here created a second order indexicality. The axis of differentiation
that divided ethnic Hungarians (Magyar) on the one hand from migrants/Roma on the other was pro-
jected (fractally) to divide the political arena into the “straightforward” Magyars (see Orbán's terms
emphasized above) and the dishonest: Roma and liberals who were projected as Roma allies. By the
end of 2015, the public discourse about migration hardly used any other phrase but megélhetési bev-
ándorló regardless of the publication's political position. This was another notable case of relaying.9 
Even those who disagreed with Fidesz policies used this terminology when they protested. There were
two noteworthy results: The term equated migrants and Roma, clasping that combination to the polit-
ical arena as index of Fidesz support, while providing deniability of prejudice by eliding the old and
offensive lexical slur. The stigma and fear projected on Roma—who are citizens, not migrants—were
transferred to migrants and fear of migrants was projected onto Roma. Indeed, as late as 2018, in the
context of a re‐election campaign again focused on opposing EU immigration policy, Prime Minister
Orbán, speaking in a small northeastern city, pointedly alluded to the Roma families that had moved
into the city from surrounding villages as an example of the dangers of immigration (bevándorlás).10 
Equally important, by normalizing this nomenclature in government questionnaires, campaigns, and
advertising, Fidesz disarmed Jobbik, robbing it of one of its strongest shibboleths, making the position
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of those following Fidesz indistinguishable in this domain of talk from those following Jobbik. Public
discourse was thus narrowed and moved decisively to the right through clasping and relaying.

4  |  G R A F TING IN T H E E A ST OF EUROPE

The third moment of enregisterment was illustrated earlier by the Russian announcement that incur-
sion into Ukraine was merely a “responsibility to protect.” That raises the question of whether Russian
speakers in Ukraine needed or requested protection, and to what extent the annexation was the same
as, say, emergency medical care. But questioning the terms of the analogy fails to analyse how it
works. Analogies are ubiquitous in social life, so it is useful to distinguish different types. Graftings
are “implanted” in an arena to name or characterize actions that are conventionally considered to
belong in another arena that is widely considered different, even opposed. As noted above, in con-
trast to irony, sarcasm, or parody, the citational practice of grafting denies that there is a difference
between the two parts of the analogy. Although metacommunicative cues may enable disambiguation
of parodic from non‐parodic framings, metamessages are not always available or decisive. While all
analogies enable us to understand the juxtaposed phenomena in a new way, graftings also change or
attempt to change authority relations. The grafting is added—often as yet another instance—to prac-
tices already endowed with hefty cultural legitimacy, thereby capturing authority for a grafted activity
that would otherwise be rejected or opposed in powerful arenas. Russian military incursion grafted
to humanitarianism works for some uptakes, specifically for audiences with the requisite ideological
presuppositions, but not for others. Linguistic as well as non‐linguistic practices can be grafted and
both the “tree” and the new “shoot” are changed in some way.
Some eastern European political talk of recent years illustrates this pattern. I note examples involv-
ing three powerful discourses—human rights, anti‐colonialism, and national sovereignty. All three
articulate the working principles adopted and valued by international organizations such as the United
Nations and the European Union and are embedded in their treaties and resolutions. Their authority is
accepted, honoured, and tapped into—one might say, piggy‐backed upon—with graftings that some
take to be opposed to those principles.
A representative of Jobbik in the European Parliament in 2010 engaged in grafting a new case
onto the principle of human rights.11  That representative, Krisztina Morvai, was formerly a human
rights lawyer, educated in Hungary and at the University of Wisconsin, and had worked for the UN
before joining Jobbik, the extreme rightist party described earlier. Jobbik had established a uniformed
militia, a paramilitary organization called the Hungarian Guard. At one point in the mid 2000s, the
then‐liberal Hungarian government had limited the militia's activities by legal and police action. In the
European Parliament, Morvai demanded the censuring of the Hungarian government for violations of
Jobbik's human rights. The militia had been marching in force in Budapest streets and in villages, out-
fitted in black uniforms, threatening and beating up Roma and other residents. Jobbik's militia had also
attacked Roma in villages (allegedly killing numerous people) and harassed gay people and women
on Budapest's streets. We must see Morvai's invocation of human rights in this historical context.
Police, she charged, victimized gay people, women, and Roma. She then added the Guard onto that list
of police victims, thereby equating the Guard with its own victims. Notably, this move accepted the
authority of human rights discourse while tapping into it to justify her demand for support of Jobbik's
activities, which many found to have quite contrary claims and purposes.
Anti‐colonialism is yet another discourse that has been the basis for graftings in Hungary. This
was a founding register of the United Nations, the international forum that recognized and included
the newly independent states emerging from colonial empires after the Second World War. A few
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examples, through brief quotations of the Hungarian prime minister's major speeches will provide the
flavour of eastern European versions. In 2012, Orbán declared, “we will not be a colony,” naming the
“modern financial world system” as the colonial master. Fidesz organized street marches of thousands
of people carrying banners with that slogan. In 2018, the charge was: “International powers with the
assistance of their domestic henchmen want to force Hungary to become an immigrant country…
we should not deceive ourselves… our struggle is… with an international empire.” That year, he ad-
dressed Hungarians as “we indigenous people… with our own cultures.”12  When the French foreign
minister in 2018 declared that the French do not want to use EU money to support voting member
states such as Hungary and Poland that do not abide by the EU's basic principles such as rule of law,
the response from the Fidesz government was to take exception to “people explaining to us in a colo-
nial tone who is or is not entitled to EU funding.” Thus, the long‐standing authority of anti‐colonialist
discourse, especially within the EU, is accessed and presumed upon. Grafted onto it, and capturing
authority from it, are narratives about new dangers and insults coming from co‐member states that are
named as supposed colonizers.
Another aspect of this grafting is the accusation, increasingly heard all over eastern Europe, that gen-
der equality and the practice of gender mainstreaming are colonial impositions, spread by international
bodies in an elaborate authoritarian plot coordinated by liberal elites that is aimed at disempowering
the poor, destroying cultures, civilizations, and the “traditional family,” denigrating women and eventu-
ally depopulating the planet through homosexuality and contraception. Anti‐colonialism was a self‐de-
clared “liberatory” discourse, one on which the various forms of feminism relied in women's liberation
movements in the late 20th century. Yet, as the studies collected in Kuhar and Paternotte (2017) show,
European activism against practices of gender equality in employment, reproductive rights, and educa-
tion legitimate themselves in large part by grafting their claims onto anti‐colonial discourse, framing their
protests as resistance to colonialism. Some also frame the movement against equal rights as anti‐author-
itarian, claiming that any call for gender equal rights is “worse than Fascism and Communism.” Among
the promulgators of this register are the Vatican (Pope Francis has called “genderism” an “ideological
colonialism”), the Russian state and its allied websites, the US‐based transnational World Congress of
Families, and other conservative and nativist organizations.13  It is ironic that this supposedly anti‐colo-
nialist, anti‐internationalist discourse is rooted in organizing that is itself thoroughly international.
As a final example, Polish political talk of 2006–2007 provides a particularly clear illustration of
grafting on the powerful discourse of national sovereignty. Although the particular context in which
the example was embedded has since changed, it is nevertheless instructive. Graff (2010) describes
the complex political consequences when, following Polish accession to the European Union, street
demonstrations by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people drew anti‐gay violence from police
and members of neo‐Nazi groups, followed by openly homophobic statements by Polish politicians.
Subsequently, the European Parliament passed resolutions against homophobia that alluded to these
Polish events, although Poland was by no means alone in such actions. The reaction in Poland, despite
widespread enthusiasm for EU membership, included a great deal of media talk about EU arrogance
and presumptuousness in interfering with Polish values. Across the whole spectrum of political opin-
ion, including that of the Church, the Polish press objected to homosexuality not on the usual, familiar
grounds of religious outrage, moral aversion, or as violations of “natural law” but on the grounds of
national sovereignty.
Within this complicated situation, it is possible to detect a consequential grafting:

Not only were gays and lesbians being stigmatized in the name of patriotism, but na-
tional sentiment was now regularly expressed through the exclusion of the sexual (rather
than the ethnic or cultural) other… [H]omophobia was becoming the new discourse of
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patriotism… [T]he right to be a “homophobe” became a question of Poland's sover-

eignty, the term always in quotation marks… an identity of proud “patriots.”
(Graff, 2010: 590–591)

That is, when the construction “homophobia” was taken up (ironically) as a positive term—hence the
ubiquitous scare quotes—it was grafted onto the powerful discourse of national sovereignty and its arena.
By eschewing the familiar moral and religious objections and drawing authority instead from the dis-
course of sovereignty in an unprecedented way, the grafting persuaded even some liberal, secular journal-
ists who were usually defenders of homosexual rights.
All graftings rely on differential uptake and thus Bakhtinian double voicing. For example, in the
Polish case, the equating of homophobia with patriotism can be taken as a rebuke to the EU for pol-
icies deemed intrusive. Or it can be taken as a new version of familiar Polish homophobia, or simply
as patriotism. Uptake—interpretation and willingness (or not) to repeat—depends on the participants’
ideological commitments but may also precipitate changes in these.

5  |  CO M PA R AT IV E GR A F T INGS

Grafting is certainly not limited to nor especially typical of Hungary or eastern Europe. On the con-
trary, examples from other times and places suggest its ubiquity. Further examples show this and also
allow me to distinguish grafting from appropriation and parody by emphasizing that it matters what
social positions create a particular grafting, how it is framed, and the state of play among political
positions in the historical moment of its production and uptake.
Questions of historical embedding and relative power distinguish grafting from cultural or linguis-
tic appropriation. As Hill (2008: 160–161) has noted, “appropriation” can be defined, in somewhat
simplified terms, by reference to Marx's discussion of the way capitalists, as owners of the means of
production, collect the value of the work of workers, who do not control these means. Indeed, theft by
a powerful other is a common image for appropriation in critical race studies, where the term has been
generalized from material to symbolic appropriation (Mercer, 1994). Linguistic appropriations add
value to white American identity, argued Hill. When white speakers use forms from Spanish (as Mock
Spanish), Native American languages, and African American English, this allows white speakers to sig-
nal the desirable qualities they index, like laid‐back cool, humour, hipness, and tough masculinity. Yet,
as Hill showed, the effect is interpretable only if one knows the extant negative stereotypes about those
minoritized groups. Thus, appropriation of those linguistic resources by whites denigrates the less pow-
erful minoritized groups by reproducing racist stereotypes of them, while disallowing or stigmatizing
their own use of those same linguistic resources. Hill is persuasive in her discussion of this important
dynamic. Graftings, by contrast, draw on the authority of powerful arenas (international organizations,
respected social movements, or intellectual institutions) by inserting into the discursive frames that
index those authoritative arenas practices that they reject, oppose, or simply do not recognize.
A recent American case shows how this plays out when turns of phrase become shibboleths of
opposed political arenas and positions. Bax (2018) identifies a euphemizing strategy, the form the
X‐word, that she calls the slur‐once‐removed. The construction's origins are obscure, but it appeared
already in 1959 as the N‐word, used to avoid even the mention of a term hurled at African Americans,
one widely considered the most offensive racist epithet in the English language. The use of this spe-
cific avoidance‐construction has increased since, indexing a now‐dominant liberal positionality that
recognizes the reality and harm of racism and so avoids racial slurs. However, the basic construc-
tion (the X‐word) can be taken up analogically as parodic humour, inviting the inference that the
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12       GAL

insertion—whatever it is—is taboo for someone, for some reason. For instance, in the 1984 film All
of Me, the romantic hero, reluctant to marry, jokes about “the M‐word.” This is not just any avoidance
but the use of a specific construction to invite the inference that the word “marriage,” which is other-
wise not taboo, is (ridiculously) taboo for this speaker.
Important here is that the construction is also a resource for non‐parodic use as what is here termed
grafting. Bax astutely shows, through close analysis of a particular incident, that inserting a label for
white people into the formula invites the implication that the inserted term is taboo because it is an
anti‐white slur. Then, the term's use outside this formula can be claimed as lack of avoidance of a slur
and therefore, analogically, as evidence of supposed anti‐white racism (“reverse racism”). The author-
ity of the liberal ideology that avoids racism is drawn upon. But for uptakes that accept this usage,
it alters that ideology, supporting instead a position that equates current, historical, and institutional
discrimination against African Americans in the United States with supposed discrimination against
white people who are thereby claimed to be equally the victims of racial bias. Thus, Bax's example is
a case of what I have described as a grafting that “rides” on a more authoritative discourse, not appro-
priation of a less powerful one.
Yet, what counts as authoritative and for whom is a constantly moving target, itself influenced by
past graftings. Some historical examples that involve different arenas and axes illustrate this point. In
his classic essay The Passions and the Interests, Albert Hirschman asks how thinkers centuries ago
managed to reconceptualize the biblical vices of avarice, gluttony, and lust for power, making them
into the laudable virtues that drive what are now considered honourable pursuits such as commerce,
banking, and statesmanship. In the 16th and 17th centuries, thinkers became convinced, Hirschman
argues, that Christian repression of sinful passions through coercion was inadequate. Some new way
of controlling socially destructive passions was sought. Francis Bacon (1561–1676) proposed an anal-
ogy for control that would have one sin counteract another: “set affection [passion] against affection
and to master one by another… For as in the government of states it is sometimes necessary to bri-
dle one faction with another, so it is with the government within” (quoted in Hirschman, 1977: 22).
Famous as a scientist, Bacon was a statesman as well and had vast experience with the control of po-
litical discord. He drew on that knowledge, grafting on to it this novel—and for some, sacrilegious—
way of controlling inner passions. By the 18th century, the notion of countervailing inner passions
had become self‐evident and authoritative. The Federalists’ arguments for the American constitution
grafted the practice of governmental checks and balances onto it, explicitly drawing support for the
separation of governmental powers from the by‐then universally accepted authority of the doctrine of
countervailing internal passions (Hirschman, 1977: 30–31).
Like Bacon's example, a contemporary instance also involves biblical knowledge. But this time
it is up against empirical science, which is currently the stronger, and more authoritative, discourse.
The case is part of the long controversy in the US that has opposed scientific teachings of evolution
to the biblical narrative. Even the name of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR)—established by
fundamentalist Christians in 1972—is a grafting. Recall that, in the US, the 1970s saw opposition by
fundamentalists to mainstream churches that had accepted scientific narratives of creation and a meta-
phorical reading of Genesis. The ICR is part of that opposition. It has sponsored research, training, and
publications, employing PhDs from the biological sciences; it hosts debates with evolutionary scientists
at secular universities. The ICR's website features mathematical formulas, photos of dinosaur skeletons
like those in natural history museums, and pictures of people in white coats carefully handling test tubes
and equipment for DNA analysis. Behind these images, one sees the first page of Genesis in an English
bible. The voice‐over of the website's video announces that “we have spent more than four decades
researching the science behind Genesis and ICR's conclusions verify that God did create all things…
our science staff research the gamut of origins evidence.” Their project is “declaring scientific truth
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in creation.” Thus, the case against evolution is authorized through the intellectual paraphernalia of
science; hence the difference between registers is denied. The result is a grafting that shows the Bible
and not science to be true.
These examples were chosen with a purpose. Juxtaposing Bacon and the Federalists with Putin
and the ICR clarifies what is meant by the claim that graftings can be interpreted in diverse ways. The
Russian grafting and that of the ICR may seem to readers of this article merely parodic of authoritative
registers. It is harder to read Bacon or the Federalists that way. Considering them together demands a
more complex analysis, as do the east European examples I discussed earlier. Some of Bacon's con-
temporaries doubtless found his suggestion scandalous—demoting sin to factionalism—and certainly
many anti‐Federalists were unpersuaded by the Federalists’ arguments. Similarly, for some liberal ob-
servers, Putin's declaration “satirize[d] the moral and legal arguments used by Western states”—for
instance, in justifying the earlier US bombing of Belgrade (Dunn & Bobick, 2014: 405). In the same
way, educated secularists probably find the ICR laughable. All these objections recognize an important
difference between two practices implicitly and interdiscursively proposed as “the same” by their pro-
moters. But just as surely, some of Bacon's readers and some readers of the Federalists were persuaded.
Putin's assertion is defended by many in Russia, Ukraine, and the United States as an extension of a
powerful humanitarian discourse to a new case. And fundamentalist Christians are confirmed in their
belief by visits to the ICR website. The ideological position of the uptake is crucial in interpreting
graftings. For those sympathetic to the grafting, it is legitimated by the very terms of the established,
authoritative norm that others see it as violating. This enrages (or amuses) those aligned with the au-
thoritative practices, for whom the graftings are illogical or impermissible analogies, self‐serving and/
or duplicitous. Nevertheless, as we have seen, graftings can also prompt ideological changes.

6  |   CO NC LUSION S
This paper has explored the ways that tools we already have in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthro-
pology can be extended and elaborated to understand more clearly a wider range of ideologically
shaped discourse processes in politics. Enregisterment and interdiscursivity (circulation) construct
each other, enabling the effect of connections among the arenas of social life, and their organizations,
that discourses index. Those arenas are often institutionalized as different and separate; connecting
them is itself a source of authority when the connection is interpreted through the ideological work of
uptake—i.e. interpretation along with response/replication—and this relies on values and presupposi-
tions that social actors bring to the job of interpretation, and may well alter those values.
The processes of clasping, relaying, and grafting always happen together in enregisterment, but
can be separated for analysis. Although the examples discussed here come from a small number of
world regions, these processes can occur anywhere. The examples were chosen as illustration and the
particular historical contexts were merely sketched here, to make the process evident. More extended
analysis would also explore the historical, socioeconomic, and political factors that make some ideo-
logical positions attractive or taken‐for‐granted by some social categories of speakers and not others.
But given any set of opposed positions, when the motivations of politicians (or other elites) is to garner
authority for their claims, then the constructions of clasps, relays, and graftings are mechanisms with
which this is done. They are part of politics. In each of the examples discussed above, these moments
of enregisterment had palpable effects on the circulation, authority, and thus dominance of discourses.
By exploring the semiotic logic, this essay showed how clasping creates or re‐creates categories, an
exertion of authority that is keenly felt by those competing to categorize persuasively, as well as by
those who are thereby classified and characterized. Relaying invites and displays alliances among
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14       GAL

groups and organizations. And grafting draws on or attempts to ride (and sometimes transform) the
sociocultural authority established by already existing and highly legitimated institutions and their
discourses.
Language standardization, with its registers (standard/dialects) and ideology, is only one of the
ways in which linguistic features authorize, and are authorized by, social forms such as publics. The
notion of “wild publics” provocatively urges us to imagine more open participation in publics than
standardization implies and more diverse voices in publicity. But that image should not allow us to
forget that, alongside and separate from language standardization, political speaking is a field in which
contestation and domination are ubiquitous. Political positions in competition enact different values
than standardization's axis of anonymous vs. authentic voices. And in contrast to the reproduction of
standardization mainly through the institutions of the state, other axes and their registers are based on
different ideological commitments, different shibboleths, and on struggles of value indexing a range
of organizations from political parties and factions to international organizations, NGOs, and organs
of mass media.
Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists are most obviously implicated in the making of stan-
dards through the writing of grammars and dictionaries. We as experts also participate in making
other claspings and in publicizing and circulating them, for instance, in the work of documenting and
representing minority languages. The relation of scholars to graftings is more puzzling, pointing up
researchers’ positionalities. Scholarly observers, it seems, tend to notice graftings that they themselves
see as illegitimate, that is, those that build on and often undermine the currently taken‐for‐granted
(often liberal and progressive) ideological commitments of many of us researchers. Accordingly, it
was at first difficult for me, in writing this paper, to identify graftings that did not seem objectionable
in some way. Yet I have described a few, showing that graftings and thus the switches in political va-
lence they create or invite can work in multiple directions. I suggest that this form of piggy‐backing
on the authority of established positions that are not one's own is a key feature of ideological, political,
and sociolinguistic change.

ORCID
Susan Gal  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1160-6502

END NOTES
1
Many thanks to Britta Schneider and Theresa Heyd for their expert organization of this special issue and the conference
from which it sprang. Thanks are also due to two anonymous reviewers for comments and questions that clarified this
paper, and to Judit Bodnár and István Adorján for generous help at the moment when it was needed most.
2
The contrasting values in a political field are often named. In addition to the centuries’ old “right/left,” “liberal/conser-
vative” is also a currently widespread contrast. However, the terms are shifters wherever they occur, with no fixed refer-
ential value, and the labelling itself varies cross‐nationally. Contrasting speech forms may also be recognized as signs of
allegiance to one or another political party (Democrats/Republicans in the US, Fidesz/Jobbik in Hungary), to an activist
NGO, or other type of organization, in which case they may be named so that listeners recognize someone as speaking, for
instance, for “corporate” values vs. “environmental” ones. These examples hint at the wide range of possibilities.
3
For a brief history of register and enregisterment in linguistic, sociolinguistic, and linguistic anthropological work, see Gal
(2016); the literature is vast. Key contributions, following Reid and Halliday's early work, include Irvine's (1990) extension
of the concept, Silverstein's ([1996] 2003) introduction of the term and concept of enregisterment, and Agha's (2007) de-
tailed discussion connecting voicing and register. A parallel phenomenon appears in the literature under the rubric of style.
For an overview and several distinctive approaches to style, see the thematized collections edited by Eckert and Rickford
(2001) and Coupland (2001, 2016).
GAL   
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|
4
Put another way, circulation and social organizations often constitute each other, as people are interpellated by discourses
that index organizations, and people signal their alignment to organizations and hence their positionalities in the participa-
tion frameworks of interaction through those same expressive forms; see Gal (2018). This paper builds on that insight to
highlight the relationship between enregisterment and authority.
5
Arenas are sites of ideological work. Anything that is a focus of joint attention for participants can be a site of ideological
work, and sites may be of many different scales, as argued in Gal and Irvine (2019). The processes discussed here are ways
that sites are connected in consequential ways.
6
A clarifying example of what is defined here as clasping comes from a different world region. Inoue (2003) showed that in-
tellectual men in Meiji‐era Japan, arguing about national modernity, invented the image of the “modern Japanese woman”
well before such people actually existed. They posited speech characteristics for a person‐type in a social arena different
from their own. Arguably, the competing intellectuals defined themselves through their different images of “the modern
woman.” In later decades, women took the intellectuals’ prescriptions as ideals. Male intellectuals’ own positions and the
characteristic features they proposed for women constructed each other, but with strikingly different power and authority.
Clasping resembles Hacking's (2006) notion of “making up people” in medical and psychological categorization, where
experts invent classification systems and the features that classify social types.
7
Fidesz is short for “Young democrats”; the full name of Jobbik can be translated as “Movement for a better Hungary,” but is
also a multiple pun. Jobbik means “the better one” but could be heard as “the one further to the right.”
8
As has been widely reported (Bohlen, 2018), Fidesz has increasingly centralized the ownership of mass media into the
hands of party‐friendly oligarchs. This did not stop Jobbik's success. But centralization has intensified since 2016 and has
doubtless contributed to the migration panic. Most print media, radio, and television are now allied with the ruling party
and, since the end of 2018, have been unified into a single Fidesz‐organized conglomerate. Websites remain somewhat
more diverse but are not as widely accessible.
9
For details on the discourse around migration in Hungary across the political spectrum and an English translation of the
referendum, see Kiss (2016). These political moves of Fidesz and Jobbik have been cause for great concern by liberal
commentators in Hungary and around the world (see Kornai, 2015).
10
Other assertions of this supposed equivalence between Roma and migrants that were remarked by the liberal press in
Hungary and by outside analysts include the deeply offensive statement by Orbán in September 2015 that, while Europe is
demanding that Hungary accept a quota of migrants/refugees, Hungary does not ask to distribute Hungary's Roma popu-
lation across the rest of Europe.
11
For an overview of Jobbik's relations at that time in the European Parliament and its funding, see Murer (2015) and cita-
tions therein.
12
There was vociferous protest from Jewish organizations in the UK and the US when the Jewish Hungarian‐American
financier George Soros was named by Orbán in posters and speeches as responsible for the immigration crisis in terms that
evoked both an anti‐colonial discourse and anti‐Semitic tropes. It is ironic that Hungarian national historians have long and
routinely traced the source of the Hungarian nation‐state not to “indigenous” people but to Magyar invaders who, in the
10th century, conquered and occupied the country's current territory in the Carpathian Basin.
13
There is a growing literature documenting this international “anti‐gender” movement and its various tropes; see Korolczuk
and Graff (2018) for the quotations and, more generally, Graff, Kapur, and Walters (2019) and Correndor (2019) in the
special issue of Signs on “Gender and the rise of the global right,” among other recent works.

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How to cite this article: Gal S. Making registers in politics: Circulation and ideologies of
linguistic authority. J Sociolinguistics. 2019;00:1–17. https​://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12374​