Abstract
Citizen sociolinguistics (Rymes & Leone 2014, Rymes 2020) puts everyday talk about talk at the center of research design, data collection, and analysis. It draws from ethnography in that it relies on organic emergence of “data” rather than on a pointed research protocol to collect it. It is therefore subject to the ebbs and flows of what people happen to want to talk about in a given timespace. While some metalinguistic discourses last for centuries, others last for a single day. But what makes them stop? Does it mean that are they resolved? No longer relevant? No longer interesting? This presentation draws on the concept of the “saturation point” (the point at which no more of a given object can be accommodated, absorbed, or dissolved) to think about how metalinguistic discourses end and, importantly, what happens when people don’t talk about talk. We will consider cases regarding policy and legislation, education and didactics, as well as various types of social media discourse.