scholarly journals Constructing multilingua franca scales

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-242
Author(s):  
Busi Makoni
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
African Immigrants ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Black African ◽  
Negotiation Strategies ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
Host Nation

Using notions of scale and space, this study explores how Black African immigrants (BAIs) experience communication and negotiate, shape and reshape their social identities through language use in Johannesburg (South Africa) – a city characterised not only by complex multilingualism but also by quotidian violence. Drawing from qualitative interviews and group discussions, an analysis of BAIs’ metalinguistic discourses on their communicative practices as they move across spaces suggests that they view Johannesburg as a layered space characterised by dissimilar scales of interaction. Utilising negotiation strategies predicated on variegated scales, BAIs make space for home and host nation language varieties using forms that function as ‘multilingua francas,’ thereby resisting and unsettling the dominant local scales based on regimented ethnolinguistic boundaries.

Metalinguistic discourses on translanguaging and multimodality

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-91
Author(s):  
Busi Makoni
Keyword(s):  
Management Strategy ◽  
Identity Management ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Black African ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Skin Bleaching ◽  
Social Meanings

Abstract This article explores metalinguistic discourses of black African immigrants (BAIs) in Johannesburg on how they mobilize multilingual and multimodal resources in their communicative practices to pass as South Africans (SAs), concealing their identities as non-SAs to avert violent xenophobic attacks. Drawing data from semi-structured interviews and group discussions with BAIs, the article investigates how BAIs report on creatively, strategically using translanguaging and multimodality in performance of ingroup membership as local black SAs, blurring the boundaries between “outsiders” and “insiders.” BAIs use passing as a social identity management strategy, to negotiate their putative identity and resist ascription of the foreigner-outsider categorization and attendant social meanings. Besides language(s), BAIs use modes of corporeal practice (embodiment, clothing semiosis, skin-bleaching) as legitimating markers of belonging. The article argues that using passing unsettles the distinction between local/insider/citizen and migrant/outsider/non-citizen – concepts framed around a nation-state – revealing tensions, contradictions, and complexities in the politics of identity in Johannesburg.

Gay (White) Male Speech and the E(race)sure of Identity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brianna R. Cornelius
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Language Use ◽  
White Male ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
Gay Male ◽  
Men Of Color ◽  
African American Language

Although a notable body of work has emerged describing gay male speech (GMS), its overlap with African American language (AAL) remains comparatively understudied. This chapter explores the assumption of whiteness that has informed research on gay identity and precluded intersectional considerations in sociolinguistic research. Examining the importance of racial identity, particularly Blackness, to the construction of gay identity in the United States, the chapter investigates the treatment of GMS as white by default, with the voices of gay men of color considered additive. The desire vs. identity debate in language and sexuality studies contributed to an understanding of gay identity as community-based practice, thereby laying a necessary framework for the study of GMS. However, this framework led to a virtually exclusive focus on white men’s language use. Although efforts to bring a community-based understanding to gay identity have been groundbreaking, the lack of consideration of intersectionality has erased contributions to GMS from racially based language varieties, such as AAL.

Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: Inherent Translanguaging in the Linguistic Landscape of Sarajevo

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Tankosić ◽  
Jason Litzenberg
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Common Core ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Primary Language ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Southeastern Europe ◽  
Linguistic Identity ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
Balkan Region ◽  
Town Center

Abstract Language in the Balkan region of Southeastern Europe has a complex and turbulent history, acutely embodied in the tripartite and trilingual state of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in which Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs all make claim to their own mutually-intelligible varieties of local “languages”. This study utilizes a linguistic landscape methodology to consider language use in Sarajevo, the capital of BiH, approximately 20 years after a brutal war that led to the establishment of the country. Data originate from three municipalities within the Sarajevo Canton – namely, Old Town, Center, and Ilidža – because of their representation of the region’s diversity and history. Signs were classified according to the three primary language varieties, i.e., Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian; BCS, representing a common core among the three varieties, as well as English, other languages, and mixed languages. The application of BCS uniquely positions the present research in comparison to other studies of language use in the region and allows for a more nuanced, less politically and ethnolinguistically fraught analysis of the communicative tendencies of users. More specifically, data indicate that actors in the linguistic landscape transcend the boundaries of their national, ethnic, and religious identities by tending towards the more neutral BCS, suggesting an orientation towards more translingual dispositions than previous variety-bound approaches have indicated. Thus, instead of the divisiveness of linguistic identity politics, the linguistic landscape of Sarajevo indicates a tendency toward inclusion and linguistic egalitarianism.

scholarly journals Placement Advisors as Innovators. How Professionals Use Enhanced Discretion in Germany’s Public Employment Services

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
CAROLIN FREIER ◽  
MONIKA SENGHAAS
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Public Employment ◽  
Labour Market Situation ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
Employment Services ◽  
Employment Agency ◽  
Logic Of Action ◽  
Market Situation ◽  
Innovation Project ◽  
Activation Policy

Abstract Employees of the public employment services (PES) are street-level bureaucrats who shape activation policy on the ground. This paper examines how PES staff use enhanced discretion in an innovation project carried out by the German Federal Employment Agency. Applying a bottom-up perspective, we reconstruct PES employees’ logic of action and the dilemmas they face in improving counselling and placement services. According to our findings, placement staff use enhanced discretion to promote more individualised support and an adequate matching of jobseekers and employers. The use of discretion is framed by organisational norms and reward mechanisms and by the current labour market situation. Our analyses are based on qualitative interviews and group discussions with placement staff.

scholarly journals Language ideologies in Barbados

Pragmatics ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janina Fenigsen
Keyword(s):  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
Ideological Tensions

Barbadian ways of speaking draw their stylistic richness from intertwined and differentially valued resources of Creole (Bajan) and Barbadian English. Barbadians (and linguists) interpret this formal diversity through two ideological paradigms. One (labeled in Bajan, “adjusting to suit”) corresponds to linguist’s “register”. By attending to laminations of individual repertoires and to skills of their selective contextual deployment, the paradigm indexes the richness of speakers’ resources. The other paradigm interprets the stylistic diversity of speakers’ repertoires in essentializing, “sociolectal” terms that iconically link social categories and polarized language varieties. By exaggerating the distinctiveness of language varieties and by turning them into unambiguous indices of fixed social personae, the paradigm colludes with the hierarchies of linguistic and social prestige. These paradigms and hierarchies can be approached in terms of historical processes that defined their social and linguistic targets. Such a framework, however, neglects institutional sites pivotal in the continued production of cultural orders of language - the literature, media, and theater. Within these sites, characterized by hightened metadiscursive awareness, ideological tensions surrounding language and its couplings with social, racial, and national identities are scripted and launched into public domain. Macrohistorical explanations also neglect the processes that turn specific linguistic forms into emblems of Barbadian language varieties while erasing others. By considering strategies and practices of (re)allocation of linguistic styles to characters in literature, journalism, and theater, I explore sociocultural and semiotic underpinnings of drawing Creole and Barbadian English forms into production of linguistically marked social identities and socially marked language varieties.

scholarly journals Engaging the Canadian Diaspora: Youth social identities in a Canadian border city1

2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Nombuso Dlamini ◽  
Barat Wolfe ◽  
Uzo Anucha ◽  
Miu Chung Yan
Keyword(s):  
African Descent ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Immigrant Youth ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Barriers And Facilitators ◽  
Important Resource ◽  
Final Settlement

Abstract This paper is based on qualitative interviews undertaken with immigrant youth of African descent in Windsor, Ontario; it describes their sojourner lives across geographic borders and their final settlement in Windsor. The paper also offers narrations of the activities that enabled them to formulate friendships and the barriers and facilitators to the development of friendships across races. Critical findings reported in this paper reveal the ways that youth use resources in their travels to construct and negotiate their identities and to formulate new friendships. An important resource used by the majority of the youth was that of an imagined homeland, which consequently impacted on how they viewed and acted on the racial boundary critical in the formation of friendships in the Diaspora.

scholarly journals LANGUAGE VARIATIONS IN DEPOK: A STUDY OF LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE AND DIALECTOLOGY

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sri Munawarah ◽  
Frans Asisi Datang
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Regional Variation ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
Language Variety ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Public Landscapes

Written languages are present in various media in public landscapes, such as notice boards, banners, or bumper stickers. Studying these simple signs is the starting point in observing how a language variety exists and interacts with other languages. It is interesting to study how the instances of written texts found in public landscapes can be an indicator of what language variety is actually used by the inhabitants of Depok. Based on its history and its geography, a hypothesis states that many speakers of Betawi language and Sundanese reside in Depok. The study is aimed at demonstrating the written language varieties found in Depok public landscapes based on written evidence which are compared with language varieties based on the regional variation (dialectology). This qualitative study used the sociogeolinguistic approach combining sociolinguistics, linguistic landscape, and dialectology (geolinguistics). The results show there are two language use distributions in Depok, the Sundanese and the Betawi language. From the landscapes, Betawi language is used in billboards, restaurant signboards, and local government banners. The study is useful for the local government in their efforts to confirm the identity of Depok people.

scholarly journals When and Why of Mother Tongue Use in English Classrooms

1970 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 42-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashok Raj Khati
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Secondary Level ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Classroom Observations ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
English Classrooms ◽  
Teachers And Students

It is often felt that teachers and students overuse their mother tongue, in this case, most probably the Nepali in English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom particularly in government-aided (Nepali medium) schools of Nepal. This, in result, minimizes the students' exposure to English. This article starts with defining mother tongue. Then, it presents the use of mother tongue in EFL classroom in the global and Nepalese contexts followed by summary of three classroom observations and two focused group discussions among teachers and students studying at the secondary level. The final part of the paper presents some simple and applicable strategies and ways of enhancing English language use in the classroom on the part of students provided by three teachers' trainers based on their experience. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/nelta.v16i1-2.6128 NELTA 2011; 16(1-2): 42-51

scholarly journals Perspectives and Practices on Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene from a Fishing Community along Lake Malombe, Southern Malawi

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (18) ◽  
pp. 6703
Author(s):  
Limbani R. Kalumbi ◽  
Chisomo Thaulo ◽  
Eleanor E. MacPherson ◽  
Tracy Morse
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Fishing Communities ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Mixed Methods Design ◽  
Group Discussions ◽  
Fishing Villages ◽  
Sanitation And Hygiene ◽  
Infrastructure Design ◽  
Transient Population

People living in fishing communities have a high burden of preventable water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) related diseases but have often been neglected in research and policy. We explored practices and perspectives on WASH among fishing villages around Lake Malombe, Malawi. We employed a mixed methods design, and data were initially collected through participant observations (five weeks), followed by a second phase of qualitative interviews (n = 16), focus group discussions (n = 7), and quantitative surveys (n = 242). We observed that safe water sources were scarce; latrines were basic; and handwashing facilities were limited. Seventy-one percent (n = 174) of households collected water from unsafe sources (open wells and the lake). Eighty-six percent (n = 207) of households had basic short-term latrines. Twenty-four percent (n = 59) of households had handwashing facilities with soap. Qualitative data supported these observations and identified additional factors which compounded poor WASH practices including, a high transient population associated with the fishing trade, poor infrastructure design and construction which lacked consideration of the environmental factors, context and social and cultural norms. As such, fishing communities are underserved and marginalised with constrained access to WASH services, which must be addressed through behaviour-centered and context appropriate solutions.

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