April 29, 2022: Stuart S. Dunmore

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Sedrati, Yzza

Indexing heritage, iconizing language: Linguistic ideology in discourses of Gaelic acquisition in Nova Scotia and New England.

Stuart S. Dunmore – University of Sussex / Harvard University sdunmore@fas.harvard.edu

Friday, April 29th, 2022 2 – 3:30 PM

Zoom registration: https://bit.ly/SLXAPRIL29

GC room 4422 in-person tickets (CUNY community only): https://bit.ly/SLXEBAPR29

Abstract:

This seminar will examine Scottish Gaelic revitalisation initiatives and linguistic ideologies among disparate diaspora communities in Nova Scotia, Canada and New England, USA. Notwithstanding the advanced state of intergenerational disruption in contemporary Gaelic communities in Scotland and Canada, second language teaching has been prioritized in recent decades as part of official language policy to create new cohorts of speakers. Based on five years of ethnographic research in Scotland and Canada, this paper examines such ‘new’ speakers’ narratives concerning their language learning motivations, identities, and prospects for language revitalisation in each country. I will also discuss preliminary data from a 3-month Fulbright scholarship in Massachusetts, a major destination for secondary emigration from Nova Scotia since the 1870s. This research will assess how Gaelic learners in New England construct and convey their linguistic ideologies and identities, and how these may relate to the better-known Boston Irish diaspora. I show that challenging sociodemographic circumstances in the remaining Gaelic-dominant communities in Scotland and Nova Scotia contrast with current policy discourses concerning the language’s future prospects. In particular, I consider the relative strength of Nova Scotian new speakers’ sense of heritage identity in relation to Gaelic, compared to Scottish speakers’ language ideologies concerning the ethnolinguistic Gaelic community.

April 1, 2022: Juan Luis Rodríguez

Posted on March 19, 2022 by Sedrati, Yzza

Linguistic Intimacy and Semiotic Conjectures: Venezuelan Sociolinguistic Imaginaries Online

Juan Luis Rodríguez

Abstract:

Gal and Irvine (2019:16) point out how for C.S. Pierce “the unified subject is not the center of his philosophy, which is built on acts of conjecture, not on persons”. In this presentation, I explore how focusing on acts of sociolinguistic conjecture, instead of models of real personhood, can help us understand the development of Venezuelan diasporic intimacy online. Venezuela is a country that imagined itself as a host of European and South American diasporas for most of the 20th century, especially after it became an oil exporting country. Oil gave the country economic resources that made possible for the upper and middle class to live what Fernando Coronil called a magical state, one in which modernity and cosmopolitan consumption was assured. Venezuelans could be tourists abroad but the only real diasporic community that became prominent in its social imaginary was Florida’s. In Florida Venezuelans became “Mayameros.” There was never a large Venezuelan diaspora anywhere in Latin America or Europe that could compare with Mayameros. This all changed after Hugo Chavez’s death in 2013 when coincidentally oil prices plummeted. This brought the most severe economic crisis in the country’s history. The economic collapse very quickly became worse than the economic collapse during the Venezuelan Federal War. Hunger, unemployment, and lack of opportunities pushed almost 20 % of the country’s population to emigrate to countries in South America. Today more than 6 million Venezuelans, a displaced population that rivals the Syrian refugee crisis, live abroad. This has drastically changed the way Venezuelans imagine themselves. Central to this sociolinguistic imaginary there are ideological conjectures that do not correspond with a model of a real diasporic person. In this presentation, I argue that conjectures about Venezuelanness, not necessarily descriptions about actual people, pervade the ideological imagination of this profound and sudden historical transformation. I will show, through examples of online performances and communication, how Venezuelans construct a new diasporic conjectural sociolinguistic imagination.

March 18: Dr. Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson

Posted on March 18, 2022 by Sedrati, Yzza

Weirdos and snobs: Strategies and social meanings of code choice across social media platforms in Argentine fan communities

Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson

Abstract:

The global circulation of English has led to a concomitant circulation of discourses that posit English as the global language. In Argentina, these discourses operate alongside historical narratives of English that link the language to attempts at British colonization as well as to the country’s elite. Thus, display of English in Argentina is multivalent. It can index both cosmopolitan participation in positively valued global cultural flows, as well as a socially striving orientation to local elites. Young people in Argentina who participate in global media fandoms, particularly for Anglophone franchises like Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Star Wars, reckon with this conflict in unique ways. In this talk, I explore how Argentine fans of English-language media orient to these contrasting discourses through code choice on different social media platforms. Platforms such as Facebook highlight local networks of Argentine fans—thus, in these contexts, use of English is highly marked. While in moderation it can signal claims to an authentic, hard-core fan identity, more frequent use of English can index an elitist, snobbish persona. Other platforms popular with fans, such as Tumblr, do not offer the same affordances for interest- and region-based groupings. Thus, display of English on this platform does not carry the same risk of inadvertently indexing a snobbish persona. On the other hand, engagement with communities on Tumblr also carries with it a risk of being labeled a “weirdo” due to a perceived overinvestment in Anglophone media products. By exploring metapragmatic commentary about how these fans navigate considerations of code choice in digital contexts, I show how local linguistic choices are implicated in broader flows of global linguistic and mediascapes.

November 5: Britta Ingebretson

Posted on November 30, 2021 by Sedrati, Yzza

“She has two sons:” Reproducing State Discourses in Rural China

Britta Ingebretson, Fordham University

Flyer: 2021-11-05-ingebretson

Abstract

This talk examines the influence of state family planning discourse and the legacy of Maoism on the moral economy of reproduction in rural China. Caught between competing moral frameworks of traditional son preference versus state policies that both limit total number of offspring and that rhetorically promote having daughters, I look at women’s linguistic uptake and repurposing of family planning rhetoric to contest traditional concepts of family and to define themselves as certain sort of citizens. Through a logic that translates the quantity of offspring into moral and social “quality,” this talk shows how the developmentalist calculus of the current government as well as the legacies of Maoist morality has created a moral framework where a woman with two sons is greedy, a woman with one daughter is modern, and a woman with multiple daughters and a son is traditional. Ultimately, I demonstrate how state discourses and their circulation in everyday life in rural China affords women with avenues of discourse and culturally recognizable moral categories with which to reimagine gender and family roles in rural China, yet this comes at a cost to the relationships between mothers and daughters.

Closed captioning is enabled for this talk. For questions about accessibility please contact the Sociolinguistics Lunch Committee at sociolinguisticslunch@gmail.com as soon as possible. *GC students may contact the SDS office.

November 12: Kahdeidra Monét Martin

Posted on November 30, 2021 by Sedrati, Yzza

Translanguaging Consciousness and Intersectionality in the Languaging of Black Students in Elite NYC Independent Schools

Kahdeidra Monét Martin, Stanford University

Flyer: 2021-11-12-martin

Abstract

In order to support the imminent need to provide effective pedagogical supports that address anti-Blackness and broad issues of school climate, I sought to better understand the specific, hyperlocal experiences of Black students in independent schools. In this relational narrative case study, I conducted in-depth interviews with Black students and graduates and analyzed fiction and non-fiction public narratives. Translanguaging, critical race theory, and intersectionality guided all aspects of the study design, which found that participants experienced dehumanizing ideologies of language, race, class, and gender that were buffered by positive relationships with faculty and multicultural curricula. This study contributes to emerging research on the socialization of youth in elite prep schools and the experiences of racialized students in these spaces. By examining the specific, hyperlocal experiences of Black students in NYC, it can assist independent schools to provide effective diversity, inclusion, and equity programming that address broad issues of school climate, relationships, and pedagogy.

This presentation will explore the methods and findings of the case study in addition to insights that led to new ways of theorizing languaging and privilege across dynamic, relational social identities. I will illustrate the utility of translanguaging theory as method and as a lens to interrogate transnational consciousness, the importance of the hyperlocal context to youth meaning making, and key features of a relational narrative case study. I conclude with novel ways that I have re-analyzed participant narratives for belonging and developed a Relational Student Identity Model to illustrate the social identities involved in the discursive identity construction of youth.

December 10: Felipe Leandro de Jesus

Posted on November 30, 2021 by Sedrati, Yzza

Felipe Leandro de Jesus, Georgetown University

Flyer: 2021-12-10-jesus (1)

Abstract

On November 4th, 2018, the Brazilian National High School Exam (ENEM) included a question about dialects that referenced Pajubá, a dialect spoken by segments of the queer community in Brazil. The inclusion of this question on ENEM generated great controversy and led to the publication of numerous news reports in the Brazilian media about the case. The nationwide debate that ensued led me to be interested not only in how news media represented the presence of Pajubá on ENEM, but it also raised questions about how Pajubá is generally perceived by Brazilians. To approach these distinct but interrelated topics, in this talk I discuss two separate studies:

i) In the first study, I investigate the heteroglossia present in news reports about the presence of Pajubá on ENEM through a critical approach to texts (Fairclough, 1989; 1992) and Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of dialogism. More specifically, I make use of the Engagement network proposed in Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory in conjunction with van Leeuwen’s (2008) work on the representation of social actors as a means to analyze how authorial voices implicitly present their stances towards the issue at hand by mobilizing other voices. The findings demonstrate how publications of all political inclinations make use of similar strategies within the Engagement network (e.g. attributions of voice, counterings, endorsements, among others) to counter or distance themselves from positions that disalign with the authorial voice’s stance on the evaluated object, while endorsing the ones that better align with it. The analysis also points to a trend in centrist and left-leaning publications—in comparison with right-leaning ones—to expand the dialogic space by including more social actors whose stance is at odds with that of the authorial voice.

(ii) In order to investigate the social meanings assigned to speech containing Pajubá lexical items and sociolinguistic attitudes towards its users, the second study employs a matched-guise experimental design. Participants (n=56) listened to randomly ordered stimuli and rated them across a number of cognitive/behavioral, affective and identity scales. The quantitative analysis was guided by three overarching questions: (a) how does the presence/absence of Pajubá alter participants’ perceptions of the speaker’s identity? (b) which aspects of listeners’ identities and traits present significant correlations with positive/negative judgements of Pajubá? (c) Are there significant correlations between the different attitudinal scales? If so, how are perceptions of sexuality and non-normative gender identities connected to other perceptions of identity and personhood? The findings indicate positive correlations between the presence of Pajubá and participants’ judgments of the speaker as presenting a non-normative sexual identity. They also shed light on the ideological processes that permeate attitudinal judgments of queer language in Brazil in addition to demonstrating the effects of lexical choice in listeners’ interpretive schemas that relate language use to identity display.

Closed captioning is enabled for this talk. For questions about accessibility please contact the Sociolinguistics Lunch Committee at sociolinguisticslunch@gmail.com, preferably at least 2 weeks before the event. GC students may contact the SDS office.