| Summary: | This article reports an emerging polycentricity of ideological orientations among young adult middle-class UK-educated Polish-speaking migrants living and working in South-East England in 2013-14. The analysis of phonetic-semiotic details in stance-taking acts in chronotopic representations of experience reveals a continuum of sociolinguistic
authority in which despite a shared sociocultural background, sociolinguistic possibilities are differently conceptualised and enacted. A close examination of the ways in which the participants exploit differences in clusters of morphonological detail demonstrates that English-like realisations in Polish, while motivated by particular linguistic context and discursive function, co-occur mainly in the speech of female Cosmopolitans to signal orientation towards relevant social images and create locally valid and recognisable value effects. The relational, collective and embodied soundings of sameness and difference depend on scalarity and complex interconnections between ethnicity, class and gender in transnational timespace. The findings have implications for studies of variation and migrant discourse.
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