Spiaking Singlish: The politics of ludic English in Singapore

This article is a case study on how Singaporean intellectuals articulate resistant language ideologies by enregistering the local vernacular, Singlish. The case in point is Gwee Li Sui's 2018 companion Spiaking Singlish, lauded as the first book to be written in Singlish about Singlish. It is argued that in tactically leveraging Singlish in a folk-lexicographical project, Gwee takes the vernacular to the third indexical order; and in so doing, he performs a ludic and extreme form of Singlish through which an everyday tongue turns into a fetish object. Contextualising Gwee's polemics within his tension with the language establishment in Singapore, the article highlights the ethical dilemma implicit in the celebration of languages speaking to an egalitarian ethos, suggesting that in enunciating a vernacular on the order of reflexive performance, intellectuals may inadvertently fashion it into a more elitist language than that which is spoken on the streets. (Singlish, Singapore, enregisterment, performativity, indexicality)

Performing microcelebrity: Analyzing Papi Jiang's online persona through stance and style

ABSTRACT Contemporary digital media is characterized by a cultural logic of participation that encourages sharing, confession, phatic communication, and an emphasis on the visual. In this techno-cultural milieu, self-presentation has become a key mode of communication, and has enabled ordinary individuals to attain a measure of celebrity status. A key component of being a microcelebrity entails developing a consistent persona that is recognizable and unique. How such persona can be studied from the sociolinguistic perspective of stance and style is the focus of this article. We combined corpus linguistic and qualitative discourse analytic methods to examine a small corpus of videos produced by Chinese online celebrity, Papi Jiang. The article presents key lexico-grammatical, discourse-level, and non-linguistic resources that are analyzed as stance markers that together contribute to Papi's intense, critical-satirical performative style. The significance of the findings is discussed in relation to performance, performativity, and critique in digital media. (Persona, microcelebrity, style, performance, stance)*

The language of suppression: Muslims, migrant workers, and India's response to COVID-19

When a society faces a moment of crisis, its language can mirror, expose, and reinforce societal chaos and fault lines. As India came to terms with COVID-19, the coronavirus’ impacts on different populations exposed and widened India's deep social, economic, and religious divides. This article studies the language of India's response to COVID-19 surrounding three major events that occurred in the early months of the pandemic: the janta curfew, the Tablighi Jamaat incident, and the migrant worker crisis. Through an analysis of media reports, speeches made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and representations on social media, we see how forms of linguistic trickery—silence, presuppositions, accommodations, othering, dog whistling, and povertyism—were used to suppress, harm, and marginalize two minority groups: Muslims and migrant workers. This article demonstrates how those in power use language to reflect, shape, and reinforce meaning, social hierarchies, and marginalization in a time of crisis. (Linguistic trickery, othering, silence, presupposition, accommodation, dog whistling, povertyism)