ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on professional identity construction using the example of cabin crew, a historically underrepresented group in linguistic anthropology research. Using data from incident reports submitted to a US government agency and posts to Internet discussion forums, and drawing on analytic methods from interactional sociolinguistics and ethnography of communication, the chapter seeks to understand how notions of realness, authenticity, and artifice emerge from and contribute to the construction of a professional cabin crew identity. Cabin crew draw on communicative competence, situationally appropriate knowledge, and social semiotics to signal to their audiences that they are professional cabin crew.
