Styling the periphery: Linguistic and cultural takeup in Bangladesh and Mongolia

Focusing on online interactions among young adults in Bangladesh and Mongolia – two countries located politically, culturally and economically on the Asian periphery – this paper looks at how young adults use linguistic and cultural resources in their online interactions as part of a complex and emergent stylization of place. On the one hand, they appropriate the cultural and linguistic flows according to their locations and engage in a playful stylization and reconfiguration of what the local means. On the other hand, they engage in stylization and reflexive language use, often involving exaggerated linguistic variation, mixing, and other semiotic resources in order to produce and perform a range of social and cultural identities. The paper hence shows how the circulation and takeup of popular cultural flows around Asia can involve diverse processes of linguistic and cultural stylization.