Beyond social networking: Performing global Englishes in Facebook by college youth in Nepal1

Until recently, scholarship on online social networking has mostly focused on issues of social relationship, privacy, identity and literacy. Research on the interface between multilingualism, multimodality and online social networking from a discursive perspective is relatively limited. This ethno‐graphic study draws data from Facebook pages composed and hosted over two years by three economically and educationally privileged undergraduate students in Nepal and uses conceptual constructs of mediascape, convergence culture and global Englishes. The study investigates how the advent of social networking online in Facebook by college youth has influenced their use of the English language and other semiotic resources to index both their local and cosmopolitan identities. Findings suggest that these youth are using social networking to redefine the role of English in relation to their existing social relationships, innovatively mixing English and Nepali in order to construct their bilingual identities, and embedding English with other texts to recontextualize both local and global media content. The paper concludes with a summary of major findings which suggest that online social networking practices have significantly helped to bring about a cultural change among this particular social group in Nepal.      

Sociolinguistic interaction and identity construction: The view from game‐theoretic pragmatics

Understanding the dynamics that characterize interaction between conversational participants is a fundamental goal of most theories of socially conditioned language use and identity construction through language. In this paper, I outline a class of formal tools that, I suggest, can be helpful in making progress towards this goal. More precisely, this paper explores how Bayesian signalling game models can be used to formalize key aspects of current sociolinguistic theories, and, in doing so, contribute to our knowledge of how speakers use their linguistic resources to communicate information and carve out their place in the social world. The Bayesian framework has become increasingly popular for the analysis of pragmatic phenomena of many different types, and, more generally, these models have become a dominant paradigm for the explanation of non‐linguistic cognitive processes. As such, I argue that this approach has the potential to yield a formalized theory of personal and social identity construction and to situate the study of sociolinguistic interaction within a broader theory of rationalistic cognition.     

Unequal Englishes in the Philippines

In this paper, we show how the notion of unequal Englishes can be deployed as an alternative way of accounting for the global spread of English. Through our data, we show how call‐center agents in the Philippines espouse conflicting ideologies in the workplace that invoke unequal Englishes. On the one hand, they espouse ideologies of privilege by seeing themselves as being able to exploit the resources of English in the call‐center workplace, thus celebrating themselves as proficient users of the language. On the other hand, they also espouse ideologies of delegitimization borne out of pressures to subscribe to American Standard English and the belief in the inherent superiority of ‘native speaker’ Englishes and their varieties. By mobilizing the paper towards unpacking inequalities of Englishes as invoked in the statements of call‐center agents, we hope to contribute to critically engaged discussions of the role of English in the world today.     

Reviews

The article discusses language as a form of social differentiation and the importance of its recognition as such within social work. Structural and ideological barriers to the recognition of linguistic identity within the UK context are explored, before focusing on additional language tuition and the benefits of its use as an awareness raising tool, drawing from socio‐linguistics literature and applying it to social work education.

Research points to the necessity of the development of a ‘third place’ between a native and target linguistic culture to permit a greater depth of understanding of multicultural and multilingual contexts. It is argued that culturally competent language tuition, when used beyond an exercise in communicative competence or bilingual resource development, has great potential in terms of developing anti‐discriminatory practice past a monolingual framework, and allowing monolingual practitioners to discover their own linguistic identities, and reach their own ‘third place’.     

The evolutionary dynamics of postcolonial Englishes: A Hong Kong case study

Schneider's ( 2007 ) ground‐breaking Dynamic Model is widely regarded as the most comprehensive and coherent theory to account for the evolution of postcolonial Englishes, but has yet to be validated by evidence from detailed historical research. This article seeks to bridge this gap by presenting an empirically‐grounded case study of the evolution of Hong Kong English based on the four parameters in Schneider's ( 2007 ) framework, viz. sociopolitical background, identity constructions, sociolinguistic conditions, and linguistic effects. Whereas previous applications of the framework have relied on synchronic data, this study draws on sets of primary data spanning 170 years. These diachronic datasets make it possible to demarcate distinct phases in the use of English in society and the evolution of its community of users. The study casts doubt on the accuracy of Schneider's account of the evolution of Hong Kong English and, more generally, the applicability of the Dynamic Model to Outer Circle contexts.     

Multifunctional teasing as a resource for identity construction in the talk of British Bangladeshi girls1

This paper explores how multifunctional teasing is used as a resource for the construction of linguistic identities, establishing a link between previous research on teasing and the field of language/discourse and identity. I draw on a corpus of 38 episodes of teasing contained in 80 minutes of spontaneous talk between five adolescent Bangladeshi girls who formed a friendship group at their comprehensive school in East London. The qualitative analysis of the data reveals that the teasing in this group can serve four main functions: an accomplishment of fun‐based solidarity; a release of underlying tensions; a display of toughness; but also a display of respect for other speakers’ dispreference for taboo subjects. Building on Ochs’(1992) notion of indirect indexicality my discussion of the data will focus on the social meanings of these different functions of teasing which range from maintaining and managing friendship to (re)negotiating class and culture‐related identities. I shall argue that the identity work achieved by and in the teasing needs to be seen in relation to stereotypical notions and ideologies about class, gender and culture‐specific (language) practices which shape the girls’ construction of themselves as British Bangladeshi working‐class adolescents.     

Popular Culture,Social Identities,and Internal/External Cultural Politics: The Case of Rangers Supporters in Scottish Football

The article examines the construction of critical, resistant identities among supporters of the powerful Scottish football club, Rangers. The analysis is underpinned by two general arguments relating to identity construction: (1) the need to examine carefully the cultural politics of relatively advantaged groups within the field of popular culture and (2) the need to explore how forms of cultural resistance and contestation are focused particularly on relations within the popular culture, rather than on forms of determination by the wider societal order. The article draws heavily on substantial fieldwork with Rangers supporters in the UK and overseas. The findings highlight the complex and contingent relationships between popular culture and broader societal forces, as illustrated by the diverging arguments of Rangers fans on the legitimacy of ethno-religious and market-focused identities within football.     

Work that –s!: Drag queens,gender, identity,and traditional Newfoundland English

Making use of three data sets of Newfoundland English, this paper uncovers the linguistic and social motivations and strategies used by young speakers to reclaim and re‐shape a traditional, local, relic language feature (verbal –s attachment, as in I goes). While each group that we discuss (young females, drag queens, and a sample of the Newfoundland population) is differently situated with respect to the broader local culture (i.e. they each have their own social identities), similarities and parallels in the reclamation and use of verbal –s indicate important processes that occur in the enregisterment and reappropriation of a salient, traditional linguistic form. Results indicate that the local social and linguistic reconstruction of a speech feature can change a path of decline and prove fertile ground for creating a unique identity that moves toward the global while still motioning to the past of a community.     

Entanglements of colonialism,social class,and Unequal Englishes

Recent work in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language education has called for the “return” of class in the critical examination of the role of language in society and education under the organizing logic of capitalist globalization. Nevertheless, while the restoration of class as a core aspect of sociolinguistic analysis is much welcome, it has also come with its own ideological erasures: the disappearance of colonialism and coloniality. Thus, this paper aims to, first, tackle the general erasure of class in intellectual movements in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades, then second, demonstrate how such erasure in fact involves the decoupling of class and colonialism through the example of the politics of Englishes in the Philippines, before introducing the concept of colonially induced Unequal Englishes (Tupas, 2015; Tupas & Salonga, 2016) as a way to address directly such politics.     

Unexpected but authentic use of an ethnically–marked dialect

Recent work on language crossing in the U.S. has examined the temporary appropriation of African American Vernacular English by white youth in an effort to participate in the current popularity and prestige of hip–hop culture, or in order to highlight racial boundaries. While such verbal behavior probably encompasses most white use of AAVE, it is not the only way in which whites (or other non–blacks) can use the variety. This paper presents a case study of the language of a 23 year old white female who makes consistent use of many distinctive linguistic features associated with AAVE. I argue that the interaction of ideologies of race, class, localness and language allow her to be considered an ingroup member despite her biographical race. This suggests that there is a tension between academic linguistic theory and actual speaker practice in assigning authenticity to individuals, and I conclude that language ideologies and other forms of qualitative evidence should be taken into account by sociolinguists looking at the link between language and race.     

The Linguistic Continuity of Ontario's Minority Francophone Population: Examining the Relationship between Culture and Linguistic Practices

Despite decades of policy aimed at the maintenance of Francophone communities in Ontario, the proportion of individuals with French as a mother tongue or who speak French most often at home has steadily declined. Research on language retention has highlighted the importance of sociodemographic and structural factors in understanding minority language practices. However, given the relationship between culture and action, this paper examines how cultural factors contribute to Franco‐Ontarians’ linguistic practices. Results indicate that beyond couple composition and the concentration of minority‐language speakers, cultural factors including identity, cultural consumption, and values play an instrumental role in Franco‐Ontarians’ linguistic continuity. The importance of considering linguistic continuity as part of a “package” of cultural practices is discussed.     

Gender norms and styling in Japanese conversation: A multilevel analysis

The observation that gender differences in Japanese language use are becoming less prevalent as women increasingly use ‘men's language’ appears in popular media from time to time. Some empirical studies support this view. However, such observations are usually based on the consideration of only one or two linguistic features, especially sentence-final forms and personal pronouns. In contrast, this study analyzes the use of multiple linguistic and paralinguistic features related to gender, regarding them as resources for styling identity. According to our analysis of eight same-gender and mixed-gender dyadic conversations of college students, these speakers’ use of features other than sentence-final forms, which we found to vary little by gender, is normatively gendered to a large extent. The study thus demonstrates that the analysis of multiple and multilevel variables enables us to better understand the complex process of styling through the speaker's negotiation of linguistic gender norms in actual practice.     

Sexist talk: Gender categories,participants’ orientations and irony

This paper uses a discursive social psychological approach to develop and extend what we know about the constitution of sexist talk. Using data from a variety of sources where the topic under discussion is gender and leisure, I examine actual instances of sexism in action. Specifically, I examine the ways in which participants use arguments about possible injury to justify women’s non–participation in certain sport and leisure activities. I identify three resources that participants use to sustain sexist accounts, and bolster their arguments against attack. A fourth resource problematises just what counts as sexist talk, and provides evidence for the ways in which participants themselves can exploit sexist arguments in an ironic fashion to expose and challenge sexist assumptions. I end by considering the implications of this approach for future work on sexist talk, and discursive work on the relationship between gender and language more generally.     

Commentary: Foundations in performance

In this article, I outline the principal conceptions of performance that have guided language‐oriented work on performance, where they come from, and how they relate to or diverge from one another. I consider first the undeveloped potential for performance‐oriented work in variationist sociolinguistics, and then turn to performance as virtuosic display, as developed principally in linguistic anthropology, performance as theatricality, with special attention to the analysis of the interaction order, and cultural performance as a marked, heightened event that affords a richly reflexive vantage point on culture. I conclude with a discussion of mediated performance and the productiveness of the concept of remediation in bridging the gap between co‐present performance and mediated performance.     

The green leaves of love: Japanese romantic heroines,authentic femininity,and dialect1

How is ‘authentic’ linguistic femininity in Japan manifested in popular texts? We analyze the dialogue of female characters in Wakaba, a 2005 Japanese drama set in two very different parts of ‘regional’ Japan – Miyazaki and Kobe. Through this analysis, we examine two contradictory discourses circulated through popular media. The first is that linguistic femininity is based in Standard Japanese – a surprisingly persistent ideology despite a current trend to examine cases in which language ideology and practice do not match. Other studies reflect another dominant discourse, that of the ‘authentic’ dialect speaker, who expresses local alignment by using dialect forms outside the bounds of ideologically modern linguistic forms. The tension between acting linguistically feminine and ‘authentically’ local raises some interesting questions for Japanese language and gender studies, including studies of gendered representations: are women who are speakers of regional dialects authentically ‘feminine’? Can they be? Do some dialects express femininity better than others?     

Urban Myths: Popular Culture, the City and Identity

This article uses Manchester (England) as a case study to examine some relationships between the city and the popular culture that emerges from, or seeks to represent, this city. We focus on post-war popular culture that has been widely disseminated such as film, television and popular music. The article considers whether these examples of popular culture reflect wider urban, social and cultural change and discuss what impact this popular culture has had on changing the landscape and fortunes of the city. In particular, we discuss the case study of Manchester's popular culture in terms of ideas about place-based identities and social class. We consider popular culture in terms of de-industrialising Manchester through to regenerated Manchester. The paper concludes by discussing the possibility that the city centre of Manchester has become gentrified and considers the impact that this is having on popular culture.     

THE STUDY OF IDENTITY AS CULTURAL, INSTITUTIONAL, ORGANIZATIONAL, AND PERSONAL NARRATIVES: Theoretical and Empirical Integrations

I argue that the study of narrative identity would benefit from more sustained and explicit attention to relationships among cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narratives of identity. I review what is known about these different types of narrative identity and argue that these narratives are created for different purposes, do different types of work, and are evaluated by different criteria. After exploring the inherently reflexive relationships between and among these various narratives of identity, I conclude with demonstrating how examining these relationships would allow a more complete understanding of the mutual relevance of social problem construction and culture, of the work of social service organizations attempting to change clients' personal narratives, and the possibilities of social change. Exploring relationships between and among different types of narrative identity would yield a better understanding of how narratives work and the work narratives do.     

Social Exclusion,Social Identity and Social Work: Analysing Social Exclusion from a Material Discursive Perspective

Within this article I explore the concept of social exclusion, considering how it has been defined and the implications of this for social exclusion policy. It is suggested that the current use of the concept focuses on material definitions of exclusion, obscures the discursive origins of exclusion and tends to individualise the problem. I argue that we need to adopt a broader approach to defining and analysing social exclusion which understands social exclusion as a process which is influenced by both material and discursive factors. The connections between discourse, identity and marginalisation are discussed and these arguments are illustrated using examples related to different aspects of social identity. Finally the article presents a framework for analysing social exclusion from a material discursive perspective and suggests that adopting this perspective clarifies the role of social work in working with people who experience exclusionary processes.     

Managing multi-mobility and multi-layered identity in China: how ethnic Chinese-Venezuelan returnees cope with Chinese language,culture and identity

An increasing number of ethnic Chinese students born in Venezuela return to mainland China each year to study the language of their ancestors, Mandarin. This article examines how they expose themselves to multiple discourses of ‘identity’, develop a reflexive strategy to cope with a multi-layered identity and act out their identity in China. In order to do so three core topics – culture, language, and identity will be analyzed and elucidated. In today's world, different forms of mobility affect the negotiation of identity and belonging. Besides migration or the physical/corporeal mobility of people there are other forms of mobilities such as the mobility of commodities, the flows of information, ideas and beliefs, financial mobility as in the case of remittances, virtual travel through Internet. These mobilities intersect and affect different discourses of language, identity and culture. The identity and sense of belonging of this group will be elucidated in four interconnected realms of social life: (1) family, (2) school, (3) fashion and popular culture, (4) food practices.