Bivalent class indexing in the sociolinguistics of specialty coffee talk

Abstract

In this article, we analyze the register of specialty coffee talk through an analysis of cupping events and broader specialty coffee company discourse. This register includes both a rarefied lexicon as well as broader rhetorical strategies utilized in specialty coffee marketing and branding, with indexical potentials pointing simultaneously to both higher and lower class positions. We refer to this semiotic pliability as bivalent class indexicality. This approach to indexicality offers a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between language and social meaning by analyzing practices that move across multiple sociolinguistic scales (Blommaert 2016) to show how this register indexes social characteristics with seemingly opposing social valances.