(Non)fuzziness of Identity in the Spanish-Portuguese Borderland: The Case of the Linguistic Community of A Fala de Xálima (Spain)

(Non)fuzziness of Identity in the Spanish-Portuguese Borderland: The Case of the Linguistic Community of A Fala de Xálima (Spain)This article analyses the social dynamics observable in a conversation with a minoritized language activist about the neighbouring speech communities. The study demonstrates that the local variety, along with its socially meaningful context, can be an important factor for the interactionally constructed local identity. The interviewee is a member of the community of practice of A Fala de Xálima, a Galician-Portuguese Romance minoritized language with about 5,000 speakers; they live in the Spanish province of Cáceres (on the border with Portugal). The analysis applies the ontological and epistemological principles of sociocultural linguistics in order to identify some indexical interactional orientations, such as stance and ideology. (Nie)ostrość tożsamości na pograniczu hiszpańsko-portugalskim – przypadek społeczności językowej A Fala de Xálima (Hiszpania)Celem artykułu jest analiza dynamik społecznych, które można zaobserwować w konwersacji z aktywistą na rzecz języka mniejszościowego, prowadzonej na temat sąsiednich społeczności językowych. W dalszej kolejności, celem jest ukazanie, że lokalna odmiana językowa, brana pod uwagę wraz ze swoim społecznie znaczącym kontekstem, może znacząco wpływać na lokalną tożsamość językową, budowaną w sposób interakcjonalny. Rozmowa została przeprowadzona z członkiem wspólnoty praktyki A Fala de Xálima – języka mniejszościowego należącego do galicyjsko-portugalskiej grupy języków romańskich – która liczy ok. 5000 użytkowników mieszkających w hiszpańskiej prowincji Cáceres (na granicy z Portugalią). W analizie autor posługuje się zasadami ontologiczno-epistemologicznymi tzw. językoznawstwa społeczno-kulturowego i przy ich użyciu opisuje wybrane orientacje indeksykalne o charakterze interakcjonalnym, takie jak pozycjonowania społeczne (ang. stance) i ideologie.

Polymedia in interaction

This Special Issue on “Polymedia in interaction” theorizes and empirically investigates practices and ideologies of digitally mediated interaction under conditions of polymedia. We argue that the proliferation of mobile interpersonal communication in the 2010s calls for, and is reflected in, conceptual and methodological shifts in empirical research on digital language and communication in pragmatics and sociocultural linguistics. In this introduction, these shifts are crystallized in five interrelated themes: (1) a turn from ‘computer-mediated communication’ to ‘digitally mediated interaction’ as a bracket category; (2) a move beyond the on/offline divide and focus on the integration of mediated interaction in everyday communication on micro-units of social structure (e.g. transnational families, business or academic communication); (3) an empirical downscaling towards private and small-scale public data; publicness; (4) a shift from the study of single modes of digital communication to polymedia; and (5) a focus on semiotic repertoires and registers of digital mediation. Research that orients to (some or all of) these focal points is compared with other trends in digital language research, including computational methods. The papers in this issue flesh out these five dimensions with findings from qualitative research, based on multi-sited linguistic and digital ethnographies in various sociolinguistic settings.

"Code switching" in sociocultural linguistics

This paper reviews a brief portion of the literature on code switching in sociology, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics, and suggests a definition of the term for sociocultural analysis. Code switching is defined as the practice of selecting or altering linguistic elements so as to contextualize talk in interaction. This contextualization may relate to local discourse practices, such as turn selection or various forms of bracketing, or it may make relevant information beyond the current exchange, including knowledge of society and diverse identities.

Language, Gender, and Sexuality

Research on language, gender, and sexuality has been advanced by scholars working in a variety of areas in sociocultural linguistics, among them conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, discursive psychology, linguistic anthropology, sociophonetics, and variationist sociolinguistics. The relevance of gender to linguistic analysis was first noted in the early 20th century when descriptive linguists observed differences in female and male vocabularies and patterns of speaking in non-European languages. But it was not until the 1975 publication of Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place (Lakoff 1975), originally published as a lead article in a 1973 issue of Language in Society, that disparate work on language and gender began to coalesce as a field of study. Research during this era of second-wave feminism focused on the everyday micro-discourse practices of women and men as instantiating hierarchical power relations, analyzing such phenomena as turn-taking, interruptions, and topic uptake. Fifteen years later, Deborah Tannen popularized a “two-cultures” approach to language and gender in You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation (Tannen 1990), which shifted the source of gender differentiation away from patriarchy and onto language socialization in same-sex peer groups. Lakoff’s and Tannen’s models—which came to be called the “dominance” and “difference” models, respectively—set the foundation for contemporary work on language and gender. In the mid-1990s, the field was revitalized by what is often referenced as the “discursive turn” in social theory. New theoretical work in post-structuralist and multicultural feminism, including the view of gender as produced in discourse instead of predetermined by biological sex, inspired new involvement by language scholars across the fields of anthropology, communication, education, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and women’s studies. The close analysis of gender in interaction demonstrated its intersectionality with other social categories, such as social class, race, ethnicity, age, and sexuality. Although work on language and sexuality preceded this development, this relationship too received renewed attention as scholars of language and gender came to recognize the heteronormativity that had implicitly shaped previous work in the field and began drawing on perspectives within the emergent field of queer theory. Gender and sexuality came to be seen as intimately connected in the language and gender literature, hence the field’s eventual designation in many publication domains as language, gender, and sexuality. This annotated bibliography aims to bring together socially oriented linguistic scholarship on both gender and sexuality while also recognizing the independent trajectories of these traditions of research. Although the bibliography at times treats gender and sexuality as separate topics for purposes of clarity or emphasis, research in these traditions remains closely intertwined.

‘Stupidest of all the primates’

This article examines the effect of linguistic anxiety on identity by analyzing the use of English in Japanese television from the perspective of Sociocultural Linguistics. Close analysis of segments from Japanese television entertainment programs shows how both verbal and visual intertextual resources are used to create linguistic anxiety at the micro level of personal interaction, on the macro level of government policy and television genre, and also at meso levels that exist between both the macro and micro. Semiotic resources such as costumes, set design, subtitles, and other elements in the mediascape allow for circulation of ideologies from government policies into assessments of individuals. The role of meso level discourse in the bidirectional transmission of linguistic anxiety between the macro levels of society and the micro levels of personal interaction is discussed.

A CONCEPTUAL REVIEW ON LINGUISTIC APPROACHES OF IDENTITY INVESTIGATION

Identity has been a blossoming issue in different fields. The intensity of investigating identity has stimulated the diverse methods and approaches to study identity from different angles. This paper discusses the how identity can be investigated from three different linguistic approaches, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and sociocultural linguistics approach. The practicality of these three approaches is explored to detect the nature of identity which is fluid, multiple, fragmented, socially, culturally, historically, religiously, and politically constructed and emerges within interactions. More space, however, is invested for elaborating the five principles of sociocultural linguistic approach due to its flexibility and multidimension of the approach. Empirical data is provided for proving its practicality for identity investigation. Further areas of investigation is given at the last part of the paper.

“Dolls or teddies?”

The concept of ‘community’ often presents a problem for queer linguists. ‘The gay community’ is often viewed as an impossible site for research due to its imagined status, whilst local communities of gay people have been considered too heterogeneous and idiosyncratic to draw conclusions from. In this article, however, it is argued that both of these aspects of community can, and should, be a central focus of an investigation into language and sexual identity. Through the analysis of a conversation emerging from a lesbian group, using a sociocultural linguistics framework, it is argued here that the community of practice approach can play a crucial role in understanding how ideologies from ‘the gay community’ are used to construct a coherent sexual identity on a local level. The analysis reveals how the group engages in practices that enable them to construct micro-level personas in direct response to broader, ideological structures of heteronormativity.