Engaging Superdiversity: Recombining Spaces, Times and Language Practices 9781783096794, 9781783096787, 9781783096824

Citation preview

Engaging Superdiversity

ENCOUNTERS Series Editors: Jan Blommaert, Tilburg University, The Netherlands, Ben Rampton, Kings College London, UK, Anna De Fina, Georgetown University, USA, Sirpa Leppänen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland and James Collins, University at Albany/SUNY, USA. The Encounters series sets out to explore diversity in language from a theoretical and an applied perspective. So the focus is both on the linguistic encounters, inequalities and struggles that characterise post-modern societies and on the development, within sociocultural linguistics, of theoretical instruments to explain them. The series welcomes work dealing with such topics as heterogeneity, mixing, creolization, bricolage, cross-over phenomena, polylingual and polycultural practices. Another high-priority area of study is the investigation of processes through which linguistic resources are negotiated, appropriated and controlled, and the mechanisms leading to the creation and maintenance of sociocultural differences. The series welcomes ethnographically oriented work in which contexts of communication are investigated rather than assumed, as well as research that shows a clear commitment to close analysis of local meaning making processes and the semiotic organisation of texts. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

ENCOUNTERS: 7

Engaging Superdiversity Recombining Spaces, Times and Language Practices Edited by Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebæk, Massimiliano Spotti and Jan Blommaert

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Arnaut, Karel, editor. | Karrebæk, Martha Sif | Spotti, Massimiliano, 1974- editor. Blommaert, Jan, editor. | Title: Engaging Superdiversity: Recombining Spaces, Times and Language Practices/Edited by Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebæk, Massimiliano Spotti and Jan Blommaert. Description: Bristol: Multilingual Matters, [2016] |Series: Encounters: 7 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016031376| ISBN 9781783096794 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781783096787 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781783096824 (kindle) Subjects: LCSH: Multilingualism—Social aspects. | Languages in contact. | Language and language—Variation. | Space and time in language. | Sociolinguistics. Classification: LCC P115.45 .E64 2016 | DDC 306.44/6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031376 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-679-4 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-678-7 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2017 Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebæk, Massimiliano Spotti, Jan Blommaert and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Nova Techset Private Limited, Bengaluru & Chennai, India. Printed and bound in the UK by Short Run Press Ltd Printed and bound in the US by Edwards Brothers Malloy, Inc.

Contents

Acknowledgements Contributors

vii ix

Introduction 1

Engaging Superdiversity: The Poiesis-Infrastructures Nexus and Language Practices in Combinatorial Spaces Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebæk and Massimiliano Spotti

3

2

Superdiverse Times and Places: Media, Mobility, Conjunctures and Structures of Feeling Piia Varis

25

3

Chronotopes, Scales and Complexity in the Study of Language in Society Jan Blommaert

47

Classrooms and Schools 4

‘Taking up Speech’ in an Endangered Language: Bilingual Discourse in a Heritage Language Classroom Robert Moore

65

5

Rye Bread for Lunch, Lasagne for Breakfast: Enregisterment, Classrooms and National Food Norms in Superdiversity Martha Sif Karrebæk

90

Youth Contact Zones 6

‘You Black Black’: Polycentric Norms for the Use of Terms Associated with Ethnicity Janus Spindler Møller v

123

vi

Engaging Superdiversit y

7

Social Status Relations and Enregisterment: Integrated Speech in Copenhagen Lian Malai Madsen

8

Languaging and Normativity on Facebook Andreas Stæhr

147 170

Mercantile Spaces 9

Magic Marketing: Performing Grassroots Literacy Cécile Vigouroux

199

10 Superdiversity and a London Multilingual Call Centre Johanna Woydack

220

Nation-states 11 Superdiversity From Within: The Case of Ethnicity in Indonesia Zane Goebel 12 ‘Designer Immigrant’ Students in Singapore: Challenges for Linguistic Human Rights in a Globalising World Lu Jiqun Luke 13 Citizenship, Securitization and Suspicion in UK ESOL Policy Kamran Khan Index

251

277 303 321

Acknowledgements

This volume is the result of a long-term effort by a great many people, including the entire InCoLaS group, talented PhD students, top-scholars and affiliated colleagues from around the world. All these people provided content for enriching discussions and convivial socialization at the meetings. In addition, we thank the reviewers who spent precious time on the contributions included in this volume. A couple of names do stand out. The editors have a special duty to thank Asif Agha and Nik Coupland for their close reading of the introduction. We will continue to think about their insightful comments and use them as guidelines in our future work with the thoughts presented here. Also, we need to mention that this volume has come about in particular due to Jens Normann Jørgensen. Normann Jørgensen was one of the original core InCoLaS members, but passed away in 2013 as a victim of cancer. Normann Jørgensen made an imprint on people due to his irreverent attitude to social norms and obvious attention. He had an important understanding of the diversity of human beings and he invested his humanistic, social and political interest in his research on language use among some of the more vulnerable members of society. He continues to have an important presence in our minds and hearts. Normann Jørgensen was originally part of the group of editors of this volume, while it was being planned, and when he realized that he had to step down, Martha Sif Karrebæk took over. This book would not have come about without him. Furthermore we wish to thank Karin Berkhout of Tilburg University who has played a key role in the extensive editorial work underlying this publication.

vii

Contributors

Karel Arnaut is associate professor at the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre (IMMRC), University of Leuven, Belgium. Previously, Arnaut was teaching at the Department of African Languages and Cultures (Ghent University) and Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen. The main focus of his previous research was on student and youth movements, social participation, and transformations of the public sphere in Côte d’Ivoire (West-Africa) as well as on postcolonial dynamics in connection with the public image, the societal position and the diasporic identities of Africa(ns) in Belgium and Europe. He is also editor of the journal African Diaspora. Arnaut’s present research focusses on representations and articulations of cultural and sociolinguistic ‘superdiversity’ in city-based, migration-driven contexts in European-African transnational spaces. He is co-editor of Language and Superdiversity (Routledge, 2016) and author of Writing along the Margins: Literacy and Agency in West African City (Multilingual Matters). Jan Blommaert is professor of Language, Culture and Globalization and Director of the Babylon, Centre for the Study of Superdiversity at Tilburg University (The Netherlands), and is also affiliated to Ghent University (Belgium) and University of the Western Cape (South Africa). He coordinates the InCoLaS consortium and is one of the group leaders of the Max Planck Sociolinguistic Diversity Working Group. He is co-editor of Language and Superdiversity (Routledge, 2016). Zane Goebel is an associate professor in Indonesian Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne, where he teaches Indonesian, Asian Studies, and Linguistics. Goebel works on language and social relations in Indonesia, and one of his major research themes relates to how everyday talk figures in the construction and maintenance of identity and social relations. His early fieldwork focused upon how instances of neighbourhood talk contributed to the ix

x

Engaging Superdiversit y

formation of new identities over a period of a couple of years in two diverse Indonesian neighbourhoods; published in Language, Migration, and Identity: Neighbourhood Talk in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press). This work sparked his interest in how ideas of ethnicity emerged and were reproduced in Indonesia and how Indonesians living in Japan appropriate and reuse these ideas and other linguistic practices to do togetherness in everyday talk. These ideas are presented in Language and Superdiversity: Indonesians Knowledging at Home and Abroad (Oxford University Press). Martha Sif Karrebæk is an associate professor, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics. PhD (2009) on language socialization and (second) language acquisition in a pre-school; Postdoc research (2009−2012) on language socialization among school starters. Leading a project on mother tongue education for minority language children in Denmark. Publications in International Journal of Bilingualism, Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Food, Culture and Society, Language & Communication, etc. She has been awarded The Ton Vallen Award (2013), Einar Hansen Forskningsfond research grant (2012), Sapere Aude Research Leader (2013), and Young Elite Researcher prize (2010), both from the Danish Independent Research Council. Karrebæk’s research interests count: language and all of the following: social relations, enregisterment, socialization, diversity and hegemony, ideology, food, popular culture, and security. Kamran Khan is a research associate at the University of Leicester and the IRiS (Institute of Research into Superdiversity) at the University of Birmingham. He completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom and the University of Melbourne in Australia. His research interests include citizenship, language testing and ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages). The chapter for this book was generously supported by the IRiS seed corn fund. Lu Jiqun Luke is currently (since 2012) a PhD candidate at King’s College London, Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication, after having worked as a high school teacher in Singapore for five years. Luke Lu’s interests include Linguistic Ethnography, ethnicity, immigration and language rights. His PhD research seeks to understand how academically elite immigrant students experience life in Singapore. Lian Malai Madsen is an associate professor at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen. She received her PhD

Contr ibutors

xi

(2008) on a linguistic and ethnographic study among youth in a martial arts club, and afterwards she carried out research (2009−2012) on linguistic and social practices in school and leisure contexts among youth in a culturally diverse setting. Madsen is currently involved in a project on language, globalization, and social stratification. Her main research interests involve: linguistic diversity, social positioning, and categorization; stylization; peer-cultural activities in relation to language use; socialization and education. She has published her work in journals such as International Journal of Multilingualism, Linguistics and Education and Language in Society. She is the author of Fighters, Girls and Other Identities (Multilingual Matters) and also has several book chapters in edited Volumes on heteroglossia, sports, and integration, and on European urban youth language. She is a member of the steering committee of Linguistic Ethnography Forum. Janus Spindler Møller is an associate professor in sociolinguistics at the Department of Nordic Research at the University of Copenhagen. In 2009, he earned his PhD with a thesis on the longitudinal development of polylingual practices among a group of Danes with Turkish background. His main fields of interest are languaging, polylingualism, linguistic ethnography, language ideology, and interactional practices of adolescents in super-diversity. Currently he is involved in a longitudinal study of the relations between language use and language ideology. He has published in, e.g. International Journal of Multilingualism, Acta Linguistica, Linguistics and Education, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, and Language in Society. Robert Moore is a Senior Lecturer in Educational Linguistics at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, USA. He has engaged in a long-term ethnographic study of language shift and Indigenous language retention in the Warm Springs Indian Reservation community (central Oregon), and has also studied minority language retention efforts in Finland and Ireland. He has contributed to the literature on ethnopoetics, on the semiotic anthropology of brands and branding, and on language policy in contemporary Europe. Massimiliano Spotti is assistant professor at the Department of Culture Studies of the Faculty of Humanities at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He is also deputy director of Babylon, Centre for the Study of Superdiversity, at the same university. Among his publications: Developing Identities (Aksant, 2007); Language Testing, Migration and Citizenship: Cross-National Perspectives (Continuum, 2009). Further he has been co-editor of Language and Superdiversity (Routledge, 2016), and of two Volumes of the Diversities Journal

xii

Engaging Superdiversit y

(UNESCO/Max Planck) on Language and Superdiversity. He is currently involved in a research project on superdiversity and asylum seeking 2.0 examining asylum seeking related identity practices through social media. Andreas Stæhr is currently carrying out postdoc research at University of Copenhagen, at the Department of Nordic Research. His PhD research (2011−2014) focused on language and social media, and he continues to pursue an interest in the role of social media in young peoples’ everyday lives, with particular attention to the topics of sociolinguistic normativity, popular culture, and social positioning among youth in multicultural urban settings. He has published his work in journals such as Language & Communication, Discourse, Context & Media and Language Variation & Change. Piia Varis is assistant professor at the Department of Culture Studies and deputy director of Babylon, Centre for the Study of Superdiversity at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. She received her PhD (2009, English) at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests include digital culture (in particular social media, questions related to digitalisation, privacy and public/private dynamics), popular culture and globalisation. Cécile Vigouroux is an associate professor at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. She studied at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and University Paris X-Nanterre. Her fields of interest include sociolinguistics, interaction, language ideology, migration and transnationalism, globalization, language and literacy, and La Francophonie. For the past 18 years, she’s been exploring different ethnographic aspects of Francophone African migrations to Cape Town, South Africa. Among these are issues of transnational identity formation, reshaping of linguistic ideologies, sociocultural transformations triggered by new forms of mobility. Her work aims at bridging sociolinguistics with other disciplines such as geography and, more recently, economics. Johanna Woydack is an assistant professor at the Department of Foreign Language Business Communication at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. She completed her PhD, an ethnography of a multilingual London call centre, at King’s College London, Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication. Subsequently, she conducted research on call centres in Asia as part of a post-doctoral fellowship at City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include language standardisation, call centres, workplace communication, workplace literacy, migration, and language commodification.

Introduction

1

Engaging Superdiversity: The Poiesis-Infrastructures Nexus and Language Practices in Combinatorial Spaces Karel Arnaut, Martha Sif Karrebæk and Massimiliano Spotti

This book bears the fruit of a group of sociolinguists who, over the last five years, have been exploring the notion of superdiversity. This introduction aims to report and reflect on these engagements, as well as to explore how the latter can trigger future engagements also from other social and human sciences. We argue that sociolinguistic superdiversity could be a source of inspiration to a wide range of post-structuralist, post-colonial and neoMarxist interdisciplinary research into the potential and the limits of human cultural creativity and societal renewal under conditions of increasing and complexifying global connectivity. In order for this to happen, sociolinguistic superdiversity needs to be properly conceptualized. We argue that engaging the notions of ‘poiesis’ and ‘infrastructure’, recombined in the ‘poiesis-infrastructures nexus’ could constitute a first step in this process of exposing the sociolinguistically-enriched notion of superdiversity. The poiesis-infrastructures nexus is an attempt to rebuild the agency-structure equation by embedding it in a materialist ontology of creative production and the environments in which they take place. The poiesis side of the equation covers social and cultural praxis, iterations and transformations. Infrastructures comprise the normativities, ecologies and affordances that enable and constraint this social and cultural production. The vantage point is a short, informal note on superdiversity by the late Gerd Baumann (personal communication, spring 2012). Writing when ‘superdiversity’ – hyphenated at that time – was beginning to boom, Baumann 3

4

Introduc t ion

hailed its heuristic prospects and ethnographic challenges while rejecting its usefulness as a summary term.1 This introduction will largely take the same stance, happily building further on the hasty notes that bear witness to Baumann’s tempestuous acumen. His nascent ideas undergird our introduction of the different chapters in this volume whose authors took on the task of engaging the notion of superdiversity during the same booming period (2011 to 2014) when Baumann was jotting down his views. Looking back on the time when Vertovec (2005) coined the term superdiversity, it is evident that the latter hinged on a flourishing post-1989 anthropology of transnationalism that was trying to break free from its sedentarism and methodological nationalism (Malkki, 1992; Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2003) and searching out the contours of an anthropology that explored simultaneity and heterogeneity among and within migrating groups (Grillo, 2001; Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004; Portes et al., 1999; Werbner, 2002) in an increasingly interconnected world (Das & Poole, 2004; Ferguson & Gupta, 2002). Despite its potential pertinence and timeliness, it was not until 2010 that superdiversity began to show up regularly in the academic literature – including in the writings of those who were about to form the working group now known as the International Consortium on Language and Superdiversity (InCoLaS) (Arnaut, 2011; Blommaert, 2010: 6; Creese & Blackledge, 2010; Jørgensen et al., 2016; Rampton, 2010). The initial intellectual dynamic of InCoLaS largely revolved around the ‘Language and Superdiversity’ manifesto co-authored by Blommaert and Rampton (2011, also 2016). This position paper was a major achievement. Apart from explaining superdiversity to sociolinguists and indicating how to ‘apply’ it to the benefit of sociolinguistic analysis, it demonstrated how a range of both established and more innovative notions and tools from contemporary sociolinguistics, (linguistic) anthropology and sociology were generating data and insights amounting to an emergent ‘superdiversity of language’ research programme2 capable of ‘seeing’, describing and analysing how people are shaping their lives within ever more pervasive interconnectivity and newly emerging forms of commonality. In hindsight, Blommaert and Rampton’s position paper heralded the ‘voyage in’ of superdiversity into large sections of sociolinguistics. In these introductory notes, we re-visit the notion by tracing its past journey while trying to prepare its future itinerary by making suggestions for its partial reconceptualising. The main concern here is to organise superdiversity’s ‘voyage out’ from sociolinguistics to the human and social sciences. So far, the sociolinguistics of superdiversity are leaving only minimal traces in the anthropological or sociological superdiversity literature; see, e.g. the special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4); Stringer (2014), Phillips and Webber (2014) and Aspinall (2012) are other

The Poiesis-Inf rastruc tures Nexus and L anguage Prac t ices in Combinator ial Spaces

5

examples. The issue may well be one of translating insights and findings. ‘Poiesis’ in combination with ‘infrastructure’, we argue, may act as intermediary or bridging concepts because they grasp the current academic imagination in matters of diversity and mobility. Whether they were presented as work-in-progress papers during InCoLaS meetings several years ago or added more recently, each in their own way, the chapters in this volume can be seen as constituting moments in superdiversity’s ‘voyage in’. Over a period of five years (and counting), small-scale InCoLaS meetings were hosted by the consortium’s main institutional members: the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen (2011, 2012), the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen (2011, 2013), the Babylon Centre (since 2013: Babylon, Centre for the Study of Superdiversity) in Tilburg (2012, 2014, 2015), and the Centre for Language Discourse & Communication at King’s College in London (2012, 2015). The papers presented and sometimes specifically written for these meetings, do what Blommaert and Rampton did in 2011: bring their sociolinguistic case studies to bear on superdiversity. This may seem an odd reversal of the standard way in which concepts are said to fuel, frame or inspire analysis, but that is not what happened in these presentations. Instead, researchers presented their work and explored ways in which their findings and insights could enrich, substantiate or otherwise challenge superdiversity. This process of alignment is referred to in the title as ‘engaging superdiversity’. The question now is: how can we understand the outcome of these engagements? We believe that the chapters in this volume demonstrate that superdiversity, as a notion, fared well, and has been empirically enriched and conceptually strengthened. This introduction tries to extend the initial success beyond the disciplinary borders of sociolinguistics by subsuming the chapters’ findings and insights in terms that increasingly appeal to scholars of diversity and inequality in globalization. In brief, this introduction is a proleptic gesture towards the other social and human sciences in order to engage with the sociolinguistics of superdiversity. The starting point of this desired dialogue is an anthropologist’s unprompted statement skilfully eliciting the entangled processes of multiscalar creation and emergent normativity which has inspired much of the sociolinguists of globalization (see, e.g. Blommaert, 2010; Jacquemet, 2005; Jørgensen, 2010; Pennycook, 2010).

Another ‘Superdiversity’ is Possible In the informal note on superdiversity mentioned above, Gerd Baumann rejects its use as a summary term. Instead, he suggests that it can serve as a

6

Introduc t ion

lens which allows us to discern and conceptualise social cultural processes. Both stances are worth exploring further. Baumann’s argument against unequivocally associating superdiversity with the alleged diversity boom of the 1990s is mainly historical, conjecturing that ‘the vast array of migrations in the 1950s were, for the standards of the time, super-diverse: multi-regional, multi-class, multi-caste, multigenerational, multi-legal to -illicit to -illegal, multi-everything’ (Baumann s.d.; italics ours). More recently, De Bock (2014) made a similar historical observation concerning the Belgian city of Ghent. Arguing that superdiversity deserves to be dissociated from the post-1989 era and to be looked for in other times and places, she is led to explore the erstwhile neglected heterogeneity of the labour migrations of the 1960s and 1970s into Ghent. De Bock, like Baumann, stresses the fact that ‘diversity’ both in ‘quantity’ and in its different facets needs to be considered within its local and historical context. That, we now realise, was a point Vertovec (2006) largely missed out on. For instance, when pointing out that migrants’ diverse legal status had to be taken into account, it is absolutely crucial to realise that such ‘differentiation of diversity’ was not due to the changing ‘nature’ of the migrant cohorts as such. The multiplication of legal statuses is better understood as a Foucauldian ‘instrument-effect’ of the biopolitical regulation of post-Cold War immigration flows across and into Europe – through diversification if not, through ‘abjectification’ (Lazaridis, 2015; see also: De Genova, 2013). This brings us to another but related point about superdiversity as a summary term, namely that categorisations of diversity in whichever form can never constitute a neutral/objective grid for counting differences or for measuring the magnitudes of divergences. Rather, diversity categories are ‘local’ and historical, and thus ideological and political ways for marking and controlling distinction, inequality and deviation. In line with these observations, contemporary sociolinguists have been arguing convincingly that the same goes for ‘languages’ which cannot, and never should have been, seen as bounded ‘objects’ which can be counted (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). Precisely because the established categories of language diversity need to be seen as ‘second-order cultural and ideological constructs’, Deumert (2014: 117) claims that using superdiversity in adjectival form in order to qualify or, worse even, quantify the degree of (language) diversity of neighbourhoods or cities, migrant cohorts or communicative situations, is a ‘theoretical cul-de sac’ (2014: 118). Rather than legitimizing such diversity positivism, superdiversity can serve as a heuristic tool (‘a lens’) or a working hypothesis (‘a perspective’) impelling and guiding us to better understand the global condition of interconnectivity which recently Jacquemet (2015: 73) evoked so eloquently:

The Poiesis-Inf rastruc tures Nexus and L anguage Prac t ices in Combinator ial Spaces

7

The world is now full of settings where deterritorialized speakers use a mixture of languages in interacting with family, friends, and co-workers; read English and other ‘global’ languages on their computer screens; watch local, regional, or global broadcasts; and access popular culture in a variety of languages. Such settings will become ever more widespread in the future and superdiversity will become the standard modality. Baumann’s second point in his short note deals with two dimensions of superdiversity that contemporary sociolinguistics and anthropology have deep affinities with: practices and normativities on the one hand, and identification and group formation on the other hand. Concerning the latter, Baumann suggests we pay attention to the formation of two types of communities: super- and meta-communities. (a) Super-communities, for Baumann, are relatively large-scale recombinations (‘coagulations’) of smaller-scale communities with which people identify in ways they did not or did less before. Well-established supercommunities are Asian-Americans or ‘Latino’ in the United States and the emergent category of ‘Balkanites’ among people from the region between the Black and the Adrian sea living in Western Europe (Buchanan, 2007). Such super-communities resemble rather traditional forms of albeit newly globalised speech communities which accommodate otherwise very diverse national, religious, etc. constituencies (see e.g. Silverstein, 2013). (b) More challenging are Baumann’s ‘meta-communities’ which are being shaped through new cultural, religious or linguistic forms. Referring to Guadeloupe (2008), Baumann characterises the superdiversity of Saint Martin/Sint Maarten as ‘coagulating’, this time, ‘around a new, but integrated combination of DJs as the pivots of civil society, pop music as integrating but culturally multi-inscribed putty, and religious re-landscaping’. From the looks of it, such meta-constellations resemble Alim’s ‘transnational style communities’ (2009) or Blommaert’s ‘supergroups’ (2011). Finally, potentially more important but (sadly forever) under-theorized is Baumann’s ultimate turn to practices that are co-constituted by the reinforced interconnectivity and producing the new-fangled ‘super-’ and ‘meta-’ socialities. These practices he calls, without any further explanation, ‘polymorphic action sets’ which further along the road of routinization morph into action networks and action structures. Arguably, sociolinguists have been reaching out to such ‘polymorphic action sets’ when putting forward

8

Introduc t ion

‘(poly)languaging’ (Jørgensen et al., 2016), heteroglossia (Blackledge & Creese, 2014; Leppänen et al., 2009) and concomitant sedimentation processes such as enregisterment (Agha, 2005), and the ever-changing almost evanescent ‘products’ of these in the form of ‘repertoires’ (Blommaert & Backus, 2013) or ‘contemporary urban vernaculars’ (Rampton, 2011), just to name these. Following Baumann’s preliminary thoughts on superdiversity as a perspective helps us to realise that, if superdiversity is meant to become ‘a theoretical perspective on language and social life’ (and see: Arnaut & Spotti, 2015; Deumert, 2014: 118; Karrebæk et al., 2016), it may require handling at least three things: (a) the further conceptualisation of superdiversity as ‘super-connectivity’, doubling our ethnographic interest in (b) the production of new or emerging cultural (religious, communicative, semiotic, social, …) forms and practices and (c) the formation of new socialities which add to people’s potential for subjectification. Let us look into each of these three and consider how the chapters in this volume engage with them.

Envisaging Convergences In retrospect, superdiversity (Vertovec, 2006) could be taken as one of a range of new, post-1990 terms dealing with entanglements or convergences of people, the amassing of material and ‘immaterial’ resources, the heterogeneity of interactions and the multiplicity of representations about the processes and objects of convergence, if not about the convergence itself. Among the latter, multiculturalism and multilingualism were perhaps the most popular at some stage, besides a set of terms envisaging homogenisation or fuzzy processes of creolisation and hybridization, following ‘earlier’ notions such as syncretism. A relatively new set of concepts could be said to have tried to ‘overcome some of the limitations of current social science discourse on globalization and arrive at a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of social and cultural change under conditions of worldwide interconnectedness’ (Wimmer, 2001: 410). One of the terms capturing this better than others is Latour’s compositionism, allowing for the processes in which ‘… things have to be put together […] while retaining their heterogeneity’ (Latour, 2010: 473–474). While compositionism and actor-network theory in general have remained largely outside the conceptual ambit of superdiversity, three other ‘metaphors of convergence’ have entered it profusely, namely conviviality (Gilroy, 2006; Heil, 2012; Padilla et al., 2014; Williams & Stroud, 2013), intersectionality (Berg & Sigona, 2013; Boccagni, 2014; Yuval-Davis, 2006), and to some extent also cosmopolitanism(s) – Wessendorf (2010: 17) coins the term

The Poiesis-Inf rastruc tures Nexus and L anguage Prac t ices in Combinator ial Spaces

9

‘corner-shop cosmopolitanism’ to indicate ‘the localised and everyday nature of intercultural skills’ and ‘the existence of a certain openness towards people perceived as “different”’. One of the roots of such a postcolonial conception of the growing convergence on the macro-level of world history goes back to the work of neo-Marxist ‘critical’ anthropologists of the 1960s and 1970s such as Dell Hymes, Eric Wolf and Bob Scholte. Diversity, Hymes argued in Reinventing Anthropology (1972), ‘should no longer be located in an ongoing trend of diversification – through dispersion and fragmentation in an ever expanding world – but in processes of “reintegration within complex units”’ (see also Arnaut, 2016: 50). Several decades later, about the same terms are used to characterize the urbanizing process, which according to Simone (2004: 242) ‘generates its own combinatorial spaces and special intercallary (sic) entities by allowing these multiplicities to mesh with each other in an intersection of simultaneities, gatherings, convergence, and encounters’. While such insights have been applied to the glocal repartitioning of public spaces in urban neighbourhoods, religious movements, heterotopia and new forms of activism (‘occupy’, flash mobs, etc.), they are also of central importance for the study of heterogeneityin-commonality in sociolinguistic portrayals of internet activity: It shows how young people’s increasingly savvy, and linguistically and textually sophisticated new media uses are both geared by and express translocal affective, social and cultural alignments and affinities, such as shared activities, interests, lifestyles, and values. (Leppänen et al., 2009: 1081) All these may well be only the beginning of a range of new conceptualisations of commonality, with ‘commons’ and ‘assemblages’ being among the most promising, if not the most popular at this point in time.3 To start with the former, recently Eriksen (2015: 6) made an attempt to describe culture as commons, stating that: There is always cultural osmosis taking place at the crossroads, with the people meeting absorbing, consciously or unconsciously, impulses from the commons which is the pool of cultural signs being propagated. Culture is invisible, mobile and continuous. Although flows are sometimes regulated and the direction of the flows sometimes reflect social hierarchies, they can also be surprising and counterintuitive, producing new concoctions and blends as they go along. In a similar vein, Chau (2013a) contests established anthropological understandings of (public) rituals and festivals by suggesting approaching

10

Introduc t ion

them as rites/sites of convergence, of amassing ‘actants’ of the most diverse nature (humans, animals, objects, colours, foodstuffs, etc.). More importantly perhaps, and against Durkheim, Chau does not conceive of such moments of collective effervescence as the short-lived bonding moments of an otherwise divisive and fragmented ‘normal’ society, but as a cluster of interactive practices which, through the workings of what he calls ‘apparatuses of capture’ and ‘compositional assemblages’, generate semiotic thickness and societal gravity which is constitutive of the process of society’s making and remaking (Chau, 2013a, 2013b). Sites of convergence, can also be perceived in everyday spaces, such as the Gare du Nord train station in Paris, where, according to Kleinman (2014: 290): the West Africans […] redefine complex economic, cultural, and social processes that converge upon the station. Accumulated over the last decades, these practices carve out a space in a marginalizing urban environment, creating not a corner of Africa but a hub that is full of potential precisely because of the multiple trajectories it brings together. What these largely comparable if not related instances of interest in ‘convergences’ share with that of superdiversity is that methodologically they open social and cultural spaces as well as discern groups, socialities and identities for empirical, i.e. ethnographic interpretive engagement. To this, we turn our attention now.

Into Combinatorial Spaces The sites which each of the contributions is studying can be said to share the intersectional complexity of the ‘combinatorial spaces’ Simone (2004) talks about. Highlighting the combinatorial qualities of these spaces or sites helps us to tease out the fact that all of them are spaces which continue to organise or imagine themselves as presumed or aspiring spaces of purity and transparency: classrooms and schools (Moore, Karrebæk, Møller, Madsen, and Stæhr), mercantile spaces of marketing the ethnic (Vigouroux) or the native (Woydack), nation-states such as Indonesia (Goebel), Singapore (Lu) and the United Kingdom (Khan) imagining and imposing their ‘purity’ and ground this, respectively, in panoptical ideologies of ‘unity in diversity’ (Goebel), in an English-driven, high-skilled cosmopolis (Lu) or in a linguistic banopticon (Khan). Moore and Karrebæk set the stage for the exploration through two studies of classrooms – a ‘heritage language’ classroom on an American Indian

The Poiesis-Inf rastruc tures Nexus and Language Prac t ices in Combinator ial Spaces

11

Reservation and a kindergarten classroom in a public school in Copenhagen. Classrooms, and schools in general, are charged with the task of presenting to novices (of different degrees) what is accepted as legitimate knowledge. Often this presupposes the understanding of a consensus about what counts as legitimate knowledge, and that consensus builds upon homogeneity, similarity, even purity. Classrooms are generally imagined as relatively secluded spaces in order to uphold particular accepted and societally normative understandings, and to create or postulate transparency between signs and their social meaning. Yet, Moore and Karrebæk animate the simultaneities and destroy the picture of self-evident or inherent meaningful cultural value. What is, and what isn’t, meaningful is created on the spot, through the assumption of similarity and of difference, of authority and of peripherality, of rights and of obligations, and through the downgrading and erasure of alternatives and of difference as valuable. Møller and Madsen also engage with educationally relevant dilemmas but they take the classrooms in a slightly different direction as the young students’ voices and practices are foregrounded vis-à-vis the institutional voices. The incongruences and paradoxes which are often only implicit appear tangible and all too present when represented through the young participants’ formulations of the societally pervasive issue of integration and ‘integrated language’ as opposed to poietic everyday language use and creative usage of categories and categorisations. Likewise, Stæhr engages with Copenhagen youngsters’ negotiations of orthographic standards where school-based normativities confront peer-generated norms. With Vigouroux and Woydack, we enter the commercial world of marketing ethnic, linguistically native or other forms of authenticity. Vigouroux demonstrates how stereotypes may represent a potential to be exploited when African marabouts redefine stigmatized linguistic features’ value through ‘complex economic, cultural, and social processes’. Woydack’s ethnography of a London call-centre discusses the commodification of language in combination with the affordances of different channels and infrastructures through which language is made valuable. Both chapters show how purity in the form of authenticity or native ‘speakerism’ is marketed but also how it conceals interactive, interpretive and creative processes, and thereby they take up a thread (on the native speaker as a multi-layered concept) laid out by Moore. Three chapters focus on national spaces of inclusion/exclusion, in many ways similar to what may be seen, in small-scale, in the imagined secluded space of the ‘pure’ classroom. Indonesia (Goebel), Singapore (Lu) and the United Kingdom (Khan) imagine and impose their ‘purity’ and ground this, respectively, in panoptical ideologies of ‘unity in diversity’ (Goebel), in an

12 Introduc t ion

English-driven, high-skilled cosmopolis (Lu) and in a linguistic banopticon (Khan). Yet, there is no purity. Goebel tries to grasp the emergent linguistic ‘superdiversity’ and the co-occurrence of competing indexical orders in Indonesia by pointing to processes of recursivity at different scale levels which sit in constant tension with standardizing processes that are outcomes of schooling, television programming and other one-to-many participation frameworks. Likewise in the case of Singapore, Lu describes how English-only education for ‘designer immigrant’ students sits ill with the latter’s unstable positionality as interstitial actors involved in complex migration trajectories and identity-making processes. Finally, Khan exposes the vengeful nation-state making ‘non-native’ language choices part of a surveillant assemblage in which migrants’ mobility is controlled and regulated through stratification and differentiation. With the exception of Varis, most of the chapters present studies of spaces which have seen their imagined or aspired-to purity and transparency thwarted or disturbed. Moreover, the different linguistic ethnographies show how these fallen panoptica resist intersectional processes turning them into ‘combinatorial spaces’ of emergent superdiversity. The remainder of this introduction works further along the line laid out by Varis who tries to make sense of the dynamics of convergence and recombination seeking conceptual assistance from ‘conjunctures’ – attending to the multiple levels, forces and speeds of movement, – and to Raymond Williams’ felicitous notion of ‘structures of feeling’ which Varis claims, could help us exploring how people experience the messy complexity of post-panoptic life. Our affinity with these two terms is double. ‘Conjunctures’ and ‘structures of feeling’ are attempts to grasp the processes of the convergent, the refracting or the recombinant, on the one hand, and the emergent, the innovative and the structuring, on the other hand. The two terms, which we are putting forward here, poiesis and infrastructures, largely serve the same purpose. Moreover, these concepts are not only meant to inspire the sociolinguistics of superdiversity but also to bring the latter’s findings and insights into the human and social sciences.

The Poiesis-Infrastructures Nexus Following up on what the language and superdiversity manifesto (Blommaert & Rampton, 2016) had to say about ethnography, Arnaut et al. (2016b: 7) confirms what also Baumann saw as superdiversity’s original ‘liberational’ moment: ‘if superdiversity announces the collapse of traditional classificatory frameworks, then ethnography is a vital resource’. Although

The Poiesis-Inf rastruc tures Nexus and Language Prac t ices in Combinator ial Spaces

13

this can make sense at many different levels, it appears that superdiversity eagerly challenges the types of classification that have been used extensively and with great consequences over the past decades. This liberational moment resembles an earlier paradigm shift in anthropology. Looking back at a time when ‘culturalism’ was abandoned, Fabian observes: … what we lost in theoretical certainty (or security) we gained in renewed ethnographic fervour that made us study the unruly, boisterous, seemingly anarchic yet inexhaustibly creative forms of contemporary survival. Because it is impossible to study such phenomena ‘from a distance’ (something on which culturalism in its prime prided itself), to conceive of research as an interactive, communicative, and, if you wish, a collaborative undertaking is not an option among others. Epistemologically [….] the development has been one from rigour to vigour… (Fabian, 2012: 443; italics ours) Arguably, the ethnographic engagement which the different chapters in this volume attest to, is mainly meant to capture the ‘unruly, boisterous, seemingly anarchic yet inexhaustibly creative forms of contemporary survival’ referred to above. In that respect, ethnographic analysis is not just an option among others. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, ethnography is called upon to grasp the creativity and the sheer richness of the semiotic processes at hand: identify complex and unexpected indexicalities, alignments and positionalities while reconstructing the relevant indexical orders, as well as the linguistic ecologies/economies at work. A stated interest in creativity does not in any way mean disregarding the interplay of existing and emerging normativities, dynamics of enregisterment and even broader configurations of regulation and governmentality. In the remainder of this section, this constellation is conceptualised as the ‘poiesis-infrastructures nexus’. Until in 2013 Calhoun, Sennett and Shapira put forward the notion of poiesis, it had been used only occasionally in the anthropological literature. Only two authors had given this concept a more or less central position in some of their work: Lambek (1998) and Arnaut (2004). Arnaut’s was a case study of emergent ‘predatory identities’ – Appadurai’s term (2006) – in mass-media discourse in the aftermath of the 1999 coup d’état in Côte d’Ivoire. Examining the citational use of the phrase in Dyula ‘bori bana’ (‘the running is finished’) in three newspaper articles published in different episodes of an escalating crisis, Arnaut (2004: 117) identified the subsequent ‘resignifications’ as instances of ‘poiesis’. These poietic

14

Introduc t ion

interruptions were shown to take place in different contexts, which were theorised as subjunctive spaces of ‘creative ritual and inventive writing’. These spaces which Arnaut (2004: 137) conceptualised at the confluence of François Bayart’s (1985) terms – after Gramsci and Foucault – ‘discursive genres’ and ‘espaces-temps’, formed the concrete/discursive spatiotemporal settings of what he identified as genocidal ‘poiesis’. Although not inspired by Lambek, Arnaut’s use of ‘poiesis’ in ‘discursive time-spaces’ resembles that of Lambek (1998: 114) who called in the help of Bakhtin’s chronotope in order to grasp the ‘particular configurations of time and space’ that organize and emerge from ‘particular cultural productions’. Precisely in order to foreground the (social, political, subjective and ideological) productive side of meaning making, Lambek (1998: 111) had recourse to ‘poiesis’ because ‘it comprises what in much of social thought have been separated and opposed as the material and the ideal, production and creation, ritual and narrative, the making and the made’. More effective than both Lambek and Arnaut, Blommaert (Chapter 3, this volume) in a recent publication outlines the productivity of chronotopes, in his case, very explicitly for the study of superdiverse complexity in meaning-making processes. Starting from the idea that, for Bakhtin, ‘chronotopes’ are ‘an important aspect of the novel’s heteroglossia, part of the different “verbal-ideological belief systems” that were in dialogue in a novel’, Blommaert (Chapter 3, this volume; stress in original) stresses the chronotope’s ‘connection to historical and momentary agency [invoking and enabling] a plot structure, characters or identities, and social and political worlds in which actions become dialogically meaningful’. These are reflexive sites ‘in which other historicities convene in the here-and-now historicity of understanding’. In our view of things, the historical and momentary agency which Blommaert accentuates above is poiesis. When observing constructs like Arnaut’s poiesis-time/space, Lambek’s poiesis-chronotope and Blommaert’s agency-chronotope, one can hardly be surprised that Calhoun et al. (2013) conceptualise poiesis not only in itself as ‘a concrete human activity’ of ‘how things are actually created, including the conditions of creation as well as the products that come out of it’ (2013: 195), but also by embedding it in ‘infrastructure’. This, according to the authors, enables them to better grasp ‘how creative activity is both enabled and constrained by the conditions in which it takes place’ (2013: 197). The choice of infrastructures is an exceptionally felicitous one, also for the ethnographybased studies of sociolinguistic superdiversity presented in this edited volume. Calhoun et al. stress their interest in knowledge of ‘actual infrastructures’ in ‘specific cities’ with ‘particularities’ which connect to ‘larger social structures’ (2013: 197). Key in this potentially multiscalar approach is that

The Poiesis-Inf rastruc tures Nexus and Language Prac t ices in Combinator ial Spaces

15

infrastructures both enable and constrain. They ‘have normative dimensions’ in spite of the fact that these may be ‘hidden or not clearly communicated’ (2013: 198). Finally, returning to Bayart’s ‘espaces-temps’ Arnaut found so inspiring, they may add to infrastructures a degree of complexity-inconvergence – quite literally, a polycentricity: Rather than unidimensional societies we are dealing here with complex space-time configurations produced as different centres by different actors and adjusting to each other only very partially and transitionally while appearing as historical systems both uncompleted and open. (Bayart, 1985: 351–352; our translation)4 Summing up the argument so far, the poiesis-infrastructure nexus envisages the double process of emergent normativities and sedimentations, on the one hand, and the creative and material production processes unsettling these, on the other hand. The latter are crucial, also for Rampton (2013) who suggests to look for what lies ‘beyond standard and imaginable vocabularies of cultural analysis’, by invoking Raymond Williams’ somewhat forgotten notion of ‘structures of feeling’. As Rampton (2013: 9, emphasis original) puts it: (…) if you’re looking towards ‘structures of feeling’, you’re pointing to a zone where cultural coherence, patterns and regularity are continually unsettled by – often at war with – the idiosyncracies and unspoken needs and desires of situated individuals. For sure, the individuality we’re interested in is situated rather than transcendent, but in any exploration of the cultural constitution of subjectivity, the oxymoron in a phrase like ‘structures of feeling’ insists on the importance of the stuff that lies beyond standard and imaginable vocabularies of cultural analysis. In a most productive gesture, similar to the poiesis-infrastructures nexus put forward in this introduction, Varis (Chapter 2, this volume) recombines the Ramptonian reworking of Williams’ ‘structures of feeling’ with Grossberg’s notion of ‘conjunctures’ whereby ‘conjunctural analysis goes into the spatial and temporal composition of moments, or periods, within longer historical processes and their uneven and intersectional materialisations’. As the resumé sufficiently demonstrate, the different chapters in this volume in various ways engage with superdiversity through what can be construed as the poiesis-infrastructures nexus. Regarding the poiesis side of the equation, many authors seem to tie in with what Hand and Sandywell (2002: 216) found was constituting poiesis:

16

Introduc t ion

‘cultural self-making and imaginative (re)figuration’. Moreover, the processes of categorisation and subjectification – in the double sense of ascription (subjection) and recognition (Fassin, 2011: 124) – which many chapters talk about, are often ‘highly self-conscious, reflexive, obsessed with simulations and theatricalizations in every aspect of its social awareness’ (Carlson, 1996: 6). Ultimately, poiesis, far more than mimesis or representation, highlights the embodied nature of identifications and (self-) categorizations. In that respect, examining the essays in the companion volume to this one (Arnaut et al., 2016a), Parkin (2016: 77) observes how ‘contemporary polylanguaging is an ontological act on the part of speakers to empower themselves or to project a desired or appropriate personal image’, alternatively ‘this creation of identity is through semiotic stylisation, which by non-standard means projects new identities or reinforces existing ones’. Indeed, the production of the ‘native speaker’ in the heritage language classes described by Moore (Chapter 4, this volume), or in the London call centre analysed by Woydack (Chapter 10), the hegemonic designer-migrant identity reworked by international students in Singapore (Lu, Chapter 12), the post-colonial refiguration of the West-African ‘marabout’ marketing his skills by ‘doing being African’ in the Parisian metropole (Vigouroux, Chapter 9): all of these fall within the first strand of Parkin’s ontological yet creative identifications. So do the ones that upscale to national identities: the new linguistic-cultural categories in Indonesia mapped out by Goebel (Chapter 11), the production of Danish versus ‘Undanish’ positions congruent with the healthy versus unhealthy and orderly versus unruly positions (Karrebæk, Chapter 5), the distinction between ‘Danes’ and ‘non-Danes’, ethnic majority and ethnic minorities, black and white, Møller (Chapter 6) found among Copenhagen youngsters, and finally, the vague but incisive circumscription of English speakers by evoking how alien language use is seen as threatening national integrity and cohesion (Khan, Chapter 13). The second type of ‘ontological acts’ of alignment and identification as part of multiplex subjectification, according to Parkin, consist mainly of semiotic stylisation and crossing. In this volume, these are documented in two different settings by Stæhr and Madsen. To start with the latter, Madsen (Chapter 7) shows how in class conversations double-voiced stylisations of two enregistered speech styles allow students to navigate delicate situations of power inequality while Stæhr (Chapter 8) demonstrates how youths’ identifications as Perker – Danish equivalent to ‘Paki’ or ‘Nigger’ – can be both successful and contested. When encountering resistance, limitations, emergent or conflictual normativities, (albeit always unstable) routinizations and other forms of sedimentation, we enter into the ‘infrastructures’ part of the equation. It is

The Poiesis-Inf rastruc tures Nexus and Language Prac t ices in Combinator ial Spaces

17

perhaps analytically troublesome that apart from the enumerated forms of cultural, linguistic or social infrastructures (as temporary outcomes of ongoing ‘infrastructuration’) infrastructures can be as concrete as legal arrangements, cultural conventions, financial systems and myriad forms of organisation and institutionalisation (see Calhoun et al., 2013: 198) and as tangible as streets, classrooms, housing blocks, internet platforms and public parks. Infrastructures – as much as ‘poiesis’ – can be anything, it is only in combination with the other, co-constituting term, that the nexus ‘comes alive’. The different chapters in this volume harbour inspiring cases of this. Compare for instance how differently ‘the classroom’ emerges from the educational ethnographies of Moore (Chapter 4) and Madsen (Chapter 7). In the former, Moore demonstrates how the Wasco language class ‘laminated a participation framework derived from a long tradition of Chinookan ritual speech onto the pedagogical framework of Community Language Learning’. Moreover, Moore observes how performable language proficiency is less important than what the lessons’ and performances’ affordances in terms of socialization and affirmation. In that respect, the Wasco classes-as-infrastructure underscore their channelling or bridging function in the process of ‘phatic communion’. In the Malinowskian (1923: 315) sense phatic communion is ‘a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words’ or, in the words of Elyachar (2010: 452), constitutive of ‘a social infrastructure functioning as a semiotic commons’. In the case of Madsen, the class chronotope is shaped into a much more topical and glocalised one through student-teacher interaction in which the former actively map linguistic styles that are associated with migration and minorities into invocations of social stratification and differential status. In that respect, this discursive ‘space/time’ shares structural similarities with Stæhr’s Facebook setting (Chapter 8) in which youngsters’ identifications with recognizable categories (perker and Arab) also serve ‘internal’ purposes of small-scale social positioning. Again, a similar multiscalar chronotope is created by the adolescents researched by Møller (Chapter 6). Here students are insinuating the meanings of such terms as neger (‘negro’) in deconstructions of race-related categorizations as well as in negotiations of local relations with peers as well as teachers. In all these cases, focusing on the infrastructural side of the nexus highlights what Amin (2014) found was the main heuristic potential of infrastructures in that it combines aspects of ‘redistribution, social selectiveness, and differential social dispositions’. As said, infrastructures are as much about ‘how things are actually created’ as ‘about the products that come out of it’ (Calhoun et al., 2013: 195).

18

Introduc t ion

Instances of both the processual and the product are interestingly juxtaposed and sometimes combined in several chapters of this volume. Among the sociolinguistic processes of sedimentation/routinization, Agha’s enregisterment (2005) is perhaps one of the most powerful. In the hands of Goebel (Chapter 11), enregisterment is productively applied to the recirculation of ‘associations between linguistic forms, regions and people’ in the nationwide production of ‘ethnolinguistic personhood’. With this enregisterment came the emergence of ‘multiple centers of normativity’ relating to what was good language, ably embellished, etc., together constituting an order of indexicality – the term is Blommaert’s and refers to Silverstein and Foucault – with ‘Indonesian’ at the top of the hierarchy followed by (a) certain (important) ethnic languages, (b) other (endangered) ethnic languages and finally (c) mixed languages. Similar hierarchies/orders can be found in the (interactional) enregisterments that are so central to Karrebæk’s contribution (Chapter 5). Here in a Copenhagen school, ‘the food registers organize food items hierarchically’ and are ‘subject to hierarchical ordering. Jelly beans certainly rank low on the “Health” register, but for many children high on what could be a “Child Food” register’. In spite of them being contested, hegemonic understandings of (food) registers, Karrebæk argues, ‘exist and are practiced as bounded and natural categories’. Likewise, hegemonic (metropolitan/colonial) frames of reference, this time around, concerning literacy and ‘Africans’ subvert the otherwise creative astroturf literacy – i.e. ‘literacy that imitates or fakes popular grassroots ways of writing performance’, a zero-sum game which Vigouroux (Chapter 9) skilfully unpacks. Although the ‘chronotope’ Vigouroux’ charts is a longitudinal and complex one, it takes as its point of vantage the circulating ‘textual artefact’ of the marabout’s card. The poiesis dimension of this card is quite straightforwardly the resourceful production and commodification of ‘non-literacy skills’. The potential economic benefits which this could bring, is thwarted by the card’s neocolonial affordances in ‘recycling socio-cultural stereotypes’ and the ‘reproduction of the social and moral orders’ that sustain French white supremacism. In Woydack (Chapter 10) and Khan (Chapter 13) two other ‘textual artefacts’ act as products of ‘infrastructuring’ not merely in that they facilitate ‘passage and allow displacement’ (Kockelman, 2010: 406), or the ‘possibility of exchange’ but also as ‘networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people and finance are trafficked’ (Larkin, 2013: 327). Woydack looks into the translated scripts used in multilingual call centres in London and observes how much more than deskilling the call centre

The Poiesis-Inf rastruc tures Nexus and Language Prac t ices in Combinator ial Spaces

19

operators, these scripts are empowering them, as they play a central role in a learning process ‘for the callers with little proficiency in English to communicate adequately regardless of this’. This, in turn, opens a space of possibilities for the caller’s local careers and social mobility – a process which has been overtaken/regimented by the call centres’ managers through the differentiations of statuses in ‘semi-fluent’ or ‘semi-multilingual’. In Khan (Chapter 13) the textual artefact at the confluence of language, migration and security are ‘tests’, such as the ‘UK language tests’ and the LUK (Life in the UK) test. The former, according to Khan, has become a shibboleth, ‘serving both as a “password” and “transition” to inclusion’ into the national community. More broadly, Khan sees these tests operating in what Didier Bigo called a ‘ban-opticon’: a Foucauldian dispositif of ‘channelling mobilities and modulating the speed and mode of movement through a surveillant assemblage’ (Huysmans in Khan, this volume: 315). Because of their multiscalar nature and heterogeneous components, most infrastructures mentioned so far appear as Deleuzian sociomaterial assemblages – as emergent unities ‘joining together heterogeneous bodies in a “consistency”’ (Amin, 2014: 138; Smith & Protevi, 2008). However the ‘migration infrastructure’ (Xiang & Lindquist, 2014) addressed by Lu (Chapter 12) in Singapore is a particularly intricate as much as contested assemblage comprising secondary school transnational head-hunting practices, educational language policies, national regimes of (racial and linguistic) diversity, sets of student selecting and monitoring techniques, students changing aspirations and social networks, etc. After all, what ‘assemblages’ bring out more than anything else is the transitional character of infrastructures and of the poiesis-infrastructure nexus as a whole. Above we saw how Gerd Baumann dedicated most of his quick notes on superdiversity on the combined processes of differentiation and ‘coagulation’. This processual concern is also that of Varis in the other chapter (Chapter 2) that forms the introductory section of this edited volume. What Varis sees as the main merit of her structures of feeling cum conjunctures approach, applies unequivocally to the poiesis-infrastructure nexus: that ‘in trying to understand superdiversity’ it is precisely ‘the focus on change and process – on things being “in solution”’ that is crucial. Compounding what we, following Baumann, had to say about superdiversity as summary term, Varis concludes that superdiversity is perhaps not best applied as a modifier or a label to spaces and places. Superdiversity does not refer to an end point, but aims to capture inchoate phenomena, and can help understand points in time and space where agency is situated in temporal articulations.

20

Introduc t ion

Notes (1) Hereafter, we will use ‘superdiversity’ regardless of the fact that some authors prefer the hyphened ‘super-diversity’. (2) We use ‘research programme’ loosely as a set of research questions and research tools, not in the specific way Lakatos defined it. In our understanding, a research programme is more elaborated than a ‘perspective’ and less comprehensive than a ‘paradigm’. (3) Like for superdiversity, one could argue that the popularity of these notions goes hand in hand with the fact that they are often used very loosely; for ‘commons’ see Narotzky (2013). (4) Original: «Plutôt que des sociétés unidimensionnelles nous avons pour objet des configurations complexes espaces-temps produits comme autant de pôles par différents acteurs et qui ne parviennent des ajustements relatifs incomplets temporaires se donnant comme des systèmes historiques inachevés et ouverts.»

References Agha, A. (2005) Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1), 38–59. Alim, H.S. (2009) Translocal style communities: Hip hop youth as cultural theorists of style, language, and globalization. Pragmatics 19 (1), 103–127. Amin, A. (2014) Lively infrastructure. Theory, Culture & Society 31 (7–8), 137–161. Appadurai, A. (2006) Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay into the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke University Press. Arnaut, K. (2004) “Out of the Race”: The poiesis of genocide in mass media discourses in Côte d’Ivoire. In G. Baumann and A. Gingrich (eds) Grammars of Identity/Alterity: A Structural Approach (pp. 112–141). London: Berghahn. Arnaut, K. (2011) The human zoo after Abu Ghraib: Performance and subalternity in the ‘cam era’. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 11. Tilburg: Tilburg University. Arnaut, K. (2016) Super-diversity: Elements of an emerging perspective. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 49–70). New York: Routledge. Arnaut, K. and Spotti, M. (2015) Super-diversity discourse. In C. Ilie, K. Tracy and T. Sandel (eds) International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction (pp. 1–7). Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Arnaut, K., Blommaert, J., Rampton, B. and Spotti, M. (eds) (2016a) Language and Superdiversity. New York/London: Routledge. Arnaut, K., Blommaert, J., Rampton, B. and Spotti, M. (2016b) Introduction: Language and superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 1–17). New York/London: Routledge. Aspinall, P.J. (2012) Answer formats in British census and survey ethnicity questions: Does open response better capture ‘superdiversity’? Sociology 46 (2), 354–364. Baumann, G. (s.d.) Some improvisations on super-diversity. Bayart, J.-F. (1985) L’énonciation du politique. Revue française de science politique 35 (3), 343–363. Berg, M.L. and Sigona, N. (2013) Ethnography, diversity and urban space. Identities 20 (4), 347–360.

The Poiesis-Inf rastruc tures Nexus and Language Prac t ices in Combinator ial Spaces

21

Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2014) Heteroglossia as practice and pedagogy. In A. Blackledge and A. Creese (eds) Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy (pp. 1–20). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2011) Supervernaculars and their dialects. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 9. Tilburg: Tilburg University. Blommaert, J. and Backus, A.M. (2013) Superdiverse repertoires and the individual. In I. de Saint-Georges and J.J. Weber (eds) Multilingualism and Multimodality (pp. 11–32). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2011) Language and superdiversity: A position paper. Diversities 13 (2), 1–21. Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2016) Language and superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 21–48) New York/London: Routledge. Boccagni, P. (2014) (Super)diversity and the migration-social work nexus: A new lens on the field of access and inclusion? Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4), 608–620. Buchanan, D.A. (ed.) (2007) Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press. Calhoun, C., Sennett, R. and Shapira, H. (2013) Poiesis means making. Public Culture 25 (2), 195–200. Carlson, M. (1996) Performance: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Chau, A.Y. (2013a) Actants amassing (AA). In N. Long and H. Moore (eds) Sociality: New Directions (pp. 133–155). New York: Berghahn. Chau, A.Y. (2013b) Actants amassing (AA): Beyond collective effervescence and the social. In S.L. Hausner (ed.) Durkheim in Dialogue: A Centenary Celebration of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (pp. 206–230). Oxford: Berghahn Books. Creese, A. and Blackledge, A. (2010) Towards a sociolinguistics of superdiversity. Zeitschrift Fur Erziehungswissenschaft 13 (4), 549–572. Das, V. and Poole, D. (2004) Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. De Bock, J. (2014) Not all the same after all? Superdiversity as a lens for the study of past migrations. Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4), 583–595. De Genova, N. (2013) Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: The scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion. Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (7), 1180–1198. Deumert, A. (2014) Digital superdiversity: A commentary. Discourse, Context & Media 4–5, 116–120. Elyachar, J. (2010) Phatic labor, infrastructure, and the question of empowerment in Cairo. American Ethnologist 37 (3), 452–464. Eriksen, T.H. (2015) Culture seen as a commons: Osmosis, crossroads and the paradoxes of identity. International Migration Institute Working Paper 122. University of Oxford. Fabian, J. (2012) Cultural anthropology and the question of knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (2), 439–453. Fassin, D. (2011) The social construction of Otherness. In S. Bonjour, A. Rea and D. Jacobs (eds) The Others in Europe (pp. 117–25). Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles. Ferguson, J. and Gupta, A. (2002) Spatializing states: Toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality. American Ethnologist 29 (4), 981–1002. Gilroy, P. (2006) After Empire. Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Abingdon: Routledge.

22

Introduc t ion

Grillo, R. (2001) Transnational Migration and Multiculturalism in Europe (=Transnational Communities Working Paper, WPTC-01-08). Oxford: ESRC. Guadeloupe, F. (2008) Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and Capitalism in the Caribbean. Oakland: University of California Press. Hand, M. and Sandywell, B. (2002) E-topia as cosmopolis or citadel: On the democratizing and de-democratizing logics of the internet, or, toward a critique of the new technological fetishism. Theory, Culture & Society 19 (1–2), 197–225. Heil, T. (2012) Fragile convivialities: Everyday living together in two stateless but diverse regions, Catalonia and Casamance. MMG Working Paper. Göttingen: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Hymes, D. (ed.) (1972) Reinventing Anthropology. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Jacquemet, M. (2005) Transidiomatic practices: Language and power in the age of globalization. Language & Communication 25 (3), 257–277. Jacquemet, M. (2015) Asylum and superdiversity: The search for denotational accuracy during asylum hearings. Language & Communication 44, 72–81. Jørgensen, J.N. (2010) The sociolinguistic study of youth language and youth identities. In J.N. Jørgensen (ed.) Love Ya Hate Ya: The Sociolinguistic Study of Youth Language and Youth Identities (pp. 1–14). Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Jørgensen, J.N., Karrebæk, M.S., Madsen, L.M. and Møller, J.S. (2016) Polylanguaging in superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 137–154). New York/London: Routledge. Karrebæk, M.S., Madsen, L.M. and Møller, J.S. (2016) Everyday languaging: Collaborative research on the lanhuage use of children and youth. In L.M. Madsen, M.S. Karrebæk and J.S. Møller (eds) Everyday Languaging: Collaborative Research on the Language Use of Children and Youth (pp. 1–18). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Kleinman, J. (2014) Adventures in infrastructure: Making an African hub in Paris. City & Society 26 (3), 286–307. Kockelman, P. (2010) Enemies, parasites, and noise: How to take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20 (2), 406–421. Lambek, M. (1998) The Sakalava poiesis of history: Realizing the past through spirit possession in Madagascar. American Ethnologist 25 (2), 106–127. Larkin, B. (2013) The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (1), 327–343. Latour, B. (2010) An attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’. New Literary History 41, 471–490. Lazaridis, G. (2015) International Migration into Europe: From Subjects to Abjects. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Leppänen, S., Pitkänen-Huhta, A., Piirainen-Marsh, A., Nikula, T. and Peuronen, S. (2009) Young people’s translocal new media uses: A multiperspective analysis of language choice and heteroglossia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14 (4), 1080–1107. Levitt, P. and Glick Schiller, N. (2004) Transnational perspectives on migration: Conceptualizing simultaneity. International Migration Review 38 (3), 1002–1039. Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A. (2007) Disinventing and reconstituting languages. In S. Makoni and A. Pennycook (eds) Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (pp. 1–41). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

The Poiesis-Inf rastruc tures Nexus and Language Prac t ices in Combinator ial Spaces

23

Malinowski, B. (1923) The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards (eds) The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (pp. 451–510). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Malkki, L. (1992) National geographic: The rooting of peoples and the territorialization of national identity among scholars and refugees. Cultural Anthropology 7 (1), 24–44. Narotzky, S. (2013) What kind of commons are the urban commons? Focaal 2013 (66), 122–124. Padilla, B., Azevedo, J. and Olmos-Alcaraz, A. (2014) Superdiversity and conviviality: Exploring frameworks for doing ethnography in Southern European intercultural cities. Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4), 621–635. Parkin, D. (2016) From multilingual classification to translingual ontology: Concluding commentary. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 71–88). New York/London: Routledge. Pennycook, A. (2010) Language as a Local Practice. London: Routledge. Phillips, T. and Webber, R. (2014) Superdiversity and the browning of labour. The Political Quarterly 85 (3), 304–311. Portes, A., Guarnizo, L.E. and Landolt, P. (1999) The study of transnationalism: Pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field. Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (2), 217–237. Rampton, B. (2010) An everyday poetics of class and ethnicity in stylization and crossing. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies 59. London: King’s College London. Rampton, B. (2011) From ‘multi-ethnic adolescent heteroglossia’ to ‘contemporary urban vernaculars’. Language & Communication 31 (4), 276–294. Rampton, B. (2013) Micro-analysis and ‘structures of feeling’: Convention and creativity in linguistic ethnography. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies 115. London: King’s College London. Silverstein, M. (2013) How language communities intersect: Is ‘superdiversity’ an incremental or transformative condition? Language and Super-diversity: Explorations and Interrogations. Jyväskylä: 5–7 June, 2013. Simone, A. (2004) Transversals of trauma through urban Africa. Urban Traumas. The City and Disasters. Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, 7–11 July 2004. Smith, D. and Protevi, J. (2008) Gilles Deleuze. In E.N. Zalta (ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Online]. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/ (accessed 08 March 2016). Stringer, M.D. (2014) Evidencing superdiversity in the census and beyond. Religion 44 (3), 453–465. Vertovec, S. (2005) Opinion: Super-diversity revealed. BBC World News. Vertovec, S. (2006) The emergence of super-diversity in Britain. Research on immigration and integration in the metropolis: Working Paper Series: Vancouver Centre of Excellence. Werbner, P. (2002) The place which is diaspora: Citizenship, religion and gender in the making of chaordic transnationalism. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 28 (1), 119–133. Wessendorf, S. (2010) Commonplace diversity: Social interactions in a super-diverse context. MMG Working Papers 10–11. Göttingen: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Williams, Q. and Stroud, C. (2013) Multilingualism in transformative spaces: Contact and conviviality. Language Policy 12 (4), 289–311.

24

Introduc t ion

Wimmer, A. (2001) Globalizations avant la lettre: A comparative view of isomorphization and heteromorphization in an inter-connecting world. Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (3), 435–466. Wimmer, A. and Glick Schiller, N. (2003) Methodological nationalism, the social sciences and the study of migration: An essay in historical epistemology. International Migration Review 37 (3), 576–610. Xiang, B. and Lindquist, J. (2014) Migration infrastructure. International Migration Review 48, S122–S148. Yuval-Davis, N. (2006) Intersectionality and feminist politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (3), 193–209.

2

Superdiverse Times and Places: Media, Mobility, Conjunctures and Structures of Feeling Piia Varis

Introduction: What do you Expect? Superdiversity (e.g. Vertovec, 2007) as a perspective has already proven its usefulness in characterising present-day complex phenomena, and explorations of language and superdiversity (Blommaert & Rampton, 2016), or a critical sociolinguistics of diversity (Arnaut, 2016) have made important contributions to the study of superdiversity, also successfully in terms of media and digitalisation (e.g. Leppänen & Elo, 2016; Häkkinen & Leppänen, 2013; Leppänen et al., 2013; Stæhr, 2014). This chapter aims to contribute to discussions on superdiversity and media, specifically the internet and new media. This will be done through a review of some of the recent work on the broader implications of digitalisation, and by attending to the consequences of new media for our understanding of superdiversity, in particular in relation to space and place and experience thereof – the digital infrastructures of superdiversity, if you will. To this end, the chapter will conclude by invoking notions from cultural studies, in particular ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) and ‘conjuncture’ (e.g. Grossberg, 2006), as a frame for understanding superdiversity. While superdiversity has provided a useful perspective for making sense of today’s world (e.g. Blommaert, 2013), its conceptualisation has not been without its problems. One straightforward application of its ‘diversification of diversity’ message is the quantitative one, where superdiversity refers to the presence of ‘more diversity’ – whether this be in the form of more diverse 25

26 Introduc t ion

language use(rs) or more people with ‘different’ backgrounds (more ethnicities, more religions, etc.). If superdiversity is used in the ‘more difference, more diverse’ sense, it seems to create an imaginary default condition of ‘less difference’, to which people who are ‘different’ or have ‘different’ practices add a superdiverse – and measurable – flavour. Superdiversity, in this understanding, refers to a totality of differences, and comes with a danger of ‘statistical essentialisation’, where people’s backgrounds and countries and cultures of origin are turned into percentages in a population in a specific location, and hence neatly defined groups which then interact with each other to produce ‘more diversity’. Such a quantitative approach can work to fetishize difference, and has the danger of falling back into essentialism, if the presence of ‘more x’ is automatically taken to mean ‘more difference’. In practice, the quantifying approach can also mean focusing attention on the ‘Other’, or the ‘unexpected’ (Pennycook, 2012), and accounting for its presence in different contexts and locations (see also Maly & Varis, 2015) which can then be labelled, provided a certain amount of diversity, as ‘superdiverse’ spaces or places. The ‘adjectivisation’ of superdiversity definitely has its uses: characterising spaces and places (countries, cities, neighbourhoods, classrooms, online spaces, etc.) as ‘superdiverse’ can also serve to highlight the fact that the default mode of the world is perhaps ‘more diverse’ than expected. This can also have its political uses: ‘superdiverse’ as a modifier in labelling spaces and places can help put diversity as a complex phenomenon on for instance policy agendas. However, the fact that the characterisation of superdiversity is problematic in this sense is apparent in questions such as ‘Is this classroom/ neighbourhood, etc. diverse enough to be labelled superdiverse?’ The logic is, then, that there is a continuum from ‘no diversity’ to ‘more diversity’ to ‘even more diversity’, and superdiversity would be the appropriate denominator for the condition of ‘even more diversity’. There is also the embedded danger of racism and/or ethnocentrism there: which backgrounds, origins or resources are ‘different enough’ to add to existing diversity – is it so that in Europe, for instance, intra-European (Union) migrations produce ‘as much’ diversity as migrations from ‘the outside’? Thus, while superdiversity in the quantifying sense does have its political uses, it also comes with risks. Ideas of ‘more diversity’ inevitably rely on – often implicit – assumptions and expectations regarding what the preceding condition of ‘less diversity’ meant before something ‘more’ was added to it. The quantifying approach also allows for in a way putting the cart before the horse in analyses, if spaces and places are characterised as ‘superdiverse’ from the outset by relying on (statistical) information on how many ‘different’ people inhabit those spaces or places and then proceeding to explain what it means to have ‘so much’

Superdiverse Times and Pl aces

27

diversity there. As Pennycook (2012: 17) points out, ‘reflection on why languages, events, moments may be unexpected sheds light on the normative vision of the expected’. The ‘more paradigm’ does come with a normative vision of a baseline level of diversity, and a vision on difference that can be exoticising and essentialising. In essence, what superdiversity is trying to capture is change and complexity in today’s world characterised by, in Hedge’s (2005: 61) words, ‘(…) the emergence of new forms of sociality and cultural practices constructed by the coming together of media, migration, mobility and the flow of capital.’ Along with this ‘coming together’, new unevennesses, inequalities and discrepancies have emerged: For the inhabitants in the first world – the increasingly cosmopolitan, extraterritorial world of global businessmen [sic], global cultural managers or global academics, state borders are levelled down, as they are dismantled for the world’s commodities, capital and finances. For the inhabitant of the second world, the walls built of immigration controls, of residence laws, and of ‘clean streets’ and ‘zero tolerance’ policies, grow taller; the moats separating them from the sites of their desire and of dreamed-of redemption grow deeper, while the bridges, at the first attempt to cross them, prove to be drawbridges. (Bauman, 1998: 89) While it is difficult not to agree with Bauman’s message, it could be added that today even talking only of two worlds simplifies issues: the interconnectedness and uneven developments in today’s world lead rather to the existence of a number of different worlds, moving at different speeds – not least because of digitalisation and the ensuing emergence of increased translocal communications and connections as well as new forms of control and surveillance to ‘manage’ the increased interconnectedness and mobility, which this chapter focuses on. What scholars of superdiversity are trying to describe, then, is ambivalent ground, where it seems that common points of reference, connections, mobilities and ideas of sharedness have become more unpredictable. This would mean that superdiversity is not only about the scale and scope of things, but also about the nature of things, i.e. about qualitative change in people’s lives, identities and meaning- and place-making practices. In such a world, criticisms of methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002) and methodological modernism (Ezzat, 2004), both of which come with specific understandings of spaces and places, are warranted. The former points to the risks of taking the nation-state as the ‘natural’ object of thought and analysis, while the latter urges not only going beyond the nation-state in understanding today’s world, but also reflecting

28

Introduc t ion

on the theoretical implications of this, and going beyond modernist notions of e.g. the individual. Hence Pennycook (2012: 172): Modernist modes of thought have constructed expectations about what it means to be in place, about where things belong, about languages, mother tongues, territory and place. The unexpected only exists in relation to the expected, and the expected is laid down along very distinctive lines according to what should be where. If we can accept that diversity is very ordinary, then the idea of expecting the unexpected is a question of undoing the lines of expectation, of unexpecting the expected. It is this idea of ‘what should be where’ that mars the quantifying, ‘catalogue of differences’ approach to superdiversity, and shapes notions of spaces, places and mobility: starting from assumptions of (un)expected belongings and presences is one way of charting change, but it may obscure the fact that what is essentially changing is the available horizons of meaning, both in places and spaces that can be labelled as ‘very diverse’ as well as in those that are seem not to be so from this perspective. Labelling spaces and places as one or the other can be extremely problematic in conditions of rapid social change and complexity, as it is in the nature of processes to be unfinished and in motion (e.g. Blommaert, 2013). One way of ‘undoing the lines of expectation’ regarding spaces and places and what belongs where – perhaps particularly necessary in the context of digitalisation and mediatisation where, as we will see below, clear divisions regarding what is ‘here’ and what is ‘there’ and what is ‘online’ and what ‘offline’ in people’s lived experience can be problematic – is to use the frame of the ‘post-panopticon’.

Post-panoptic Mobility Arnaut (2016) has identified transnationality, multidirectionality, heteronormativity/polycentricity and the intertwining of visibility and mobility as characteristic of the ‘post-panopticon’. In its indeterminacy the ‘postpanopticon’ bears resemblance to the ‘post-colonial’, and its ‘breaking down the clearly demarcated inside/outside of the colonial system’ outlined by Stuart Hall (1996: 247): (…) the term ‘post-colonial’ is not merely descriptive of ‘this’ society rather than ‘that’, or of ‘then’ and ‘now’. It re-reads ‘colonisation’ as part of an essentially transnational and transcultural ‘global’ process – and it produces a decentred, diasporic or ‘global’ rewriting of earlier,

Superdiverse Times and Pl aces

29

nation-centred imperial grand narratives. Its theoretical value therefore lies precisely in its refusal of this ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘then’ and ‘now’, ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ perspective. ‘Global’ does not mean universal, but it is not nation- or society-specific either. It is about how the lateral and transverse cross-relations of what Gilroy calls the ‘diasporic’ (Gilroy, 1994) supplement and simultaneously dis-place the centre-periphery, and the global/local reciprocally re-organise and re-shape one another. The powerful forces of today (globalisation, digitalisation, consumerism, neoliberalism) have not spread equally across the globe, but this does not mean that these forces do not play a part everywhere. These ‘forces’ are naturally not blanket phenomena that move around in coherent constellations without human agency, local appropriation or resistance (see, e.g. Gilbert, 2008); quite the contrary. What Hall’s characterisation of the ‘postcolonial’ alerts us to is that when examining our superdiverse conjuncture, we should perhaps not assume that there are ‘superdiverse spots’ – nationstates; within nation-states; in institutions; in cities; in schools etc. – to be found, which can be clearly cut off from the rest of the (‘non-superdiverse’) world with a neat distinction between the two. It is not only the lives of those people who live in ‘diverse’ neighbourhoods, or are heavily ‘wired’ and have thousands of social media connections or are immensely mobile, that are shaped by the recent developments – it is also the lives of people whose lives are influenced by the absence or a lesser degree of these very same phenomena that are influenced, by the very fact of the lack or difference in degree. Understandings of space and place have also been complicated by the fact that mobility is increasingly not confined to physical movement. Rather what we often see is akin to what Raymond Williams (1974) described as ‘mobile privatisation’: a development where subjects are increasingly mobile, yet ‘private’ – (socially) mobile in a cocoon, in a way. The example of the car, for instance, has been used to describe this seeming paradox: while the car can take its driver anywhere, the driver is self-sealed, isolated in a private space. The same goes for internet use, and also the smartphone: these are vehicles of mobility, yet their users do not necessarily have to physically go anywhere in order to be mobile, to be ‘elsewhere’. Recent socio-technological developments have thus complicated people’s experiences of place and locality. With such new technologies come new opportunities, as people leave traces of their digital communications, creative actions and interactions. These are opportunities for researchers, as we now have easy online access to all kinds of data (see, e.g. Rymes, 2012), but also for other kinds of

30

Introduc t ion

watching, tracing and tracking – namely surveillance. In the post-panoptic vein, Vaidhyanathan speaks of ‘cryptopticon’ to highlight that we do not always know of all the ways in which we are being watched and profiled (2011), or a ‘nonopticon’ (2008) to emphasise the idea that we are not aware at all that we are being watched and profiled. There is also the ‘superpanopticon’ (e.g. Poster, 2004) to refer to the configuration of the construction of the subject through media as technologies of power, while Mathiesen (1997), pointing to the fact that many can now watch the few, used the term ‘synopticism’ to characterise our lived reality. Haggerty and Ericsson (2000: 607–608), on the other hand, ‘(…) rather than try and sketch Foucault and Orwell’s concepts beyond recognition so that they might better fit current developments’, talk of a ‘surveillant assemblage’. To this end, they draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze, 1992; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) to underscore that present-day surveillance is not static, but emergent, a ‘potentiality’; lacking boundaries and formed out of links that can be either ad hoc or firmly institutionalised. This makes surveillance a politically difficult target, too: how to constructively resist something that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time? The difficulty (or perhaps the perceived unnecessity) of resistance is also built in Lyon’s (2006) notion of ‘panopticommodity’ – this perhaps most accurately describing present-day online social media users. Lyon (2006: 8) specifically uses the notion of ‘panopticommodity’ to label the phenomenon (…) in which people market themselves. Self-disclosure apparently equates with freedom and authenticity. But you individuate only by submitting to mass surveillance (…) in so far as we believe that our customized products express our individuality and our creativity, we are diagnosed by the panopticommodity. Bigo (2008), then, describes present-day ‘management of unease’ as ‘banoptic’ to emphasise that as opposed to ‘pan’ – i.e. surveillance of an entire population – current surveillance focuses on ‘the unwelcome’, targeted minorities, based on the potential behaviour (cf. Patel, 2012 for an example of surveillance over-focus on those deemed ‘deviant’ in the context of terror panics and a focus on ‘brown bodies’). Bigo (2008) points to the web of discourses, practices, institutions, laws, administrative measures etc. that focus – on a number of levels (‘global’, ‘Western’, ‘European’, etc.), superseding nation-states – on perceived threats, immigration, organised crime, asylum seekers and other sources of ‘unease’. At the moment, it could be argued that Bigo’s definition of surveillance and management of risks – as fragmented, heterogeneous, without a centre – seems to have been undermined at least to

Superdiverse Times and Pl aces

31

an extent by the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden regarding the blanket, mass-scale surveillance by the United States National Security Agency (NSA). In any case, it does not seem far-fetched to suggest that ‘The prime function of surveillance in the contemporary era is border control’ (Boyne, 2000: 287). In the context of digital surveillance, this of course presents an interesting but disturbing paradox: while digital environments can be perceived as ‘borderless’, those inhabiting them do not necessarily find themselves in a borderless world. Whether surveillance and information-gathering is conducted in a more targeted manner (as in Bigo’s margins) or on a mass-scale (as by the NSA), it seems clear that predictions and probabilities are very much part of it, as is ‘governing at a distance’ (Cheney-Lippold, 2011; Rose, 1996) and the ‘manipulation of distances’: governments can ‘nip the menace in the bud’ by (…) retargeting surveilling gear on the starting points of migration instead of its presumed and feared destinations; spotting, arresting and immobilizing suspects well away from their own borders, and blackmailing or bribing labour-exporting countries into accepting the role of police precincts engaged in (read, responsible for) the jobs of ‘crime prevention’ or the ‘incarceration and disabling of suspects’. (Bauman, in Bauman & Lyon, 2013: 81–82, emphasis original) It is clear, then, that ‘The so-called digital divide is not merely a matter of access to information. Information itself can be the means of creating divisions’ (Lyon, 2003a: 2): people can be divided into first- and second-class (potential) citizens and consumers with existing ‘information’ about them, as (…) the ‘mobile publics’ inhabiting the extending neoliberal geographies of flow and access that are the focus of so much recent work in geography, anthropology and sociology (…) are publics that are often prioritized, enacted and kept apart by hidden worlds of soft-ware sorting. (Graham, 2005: 564) What all of this means is that the subject in superdiversity both is and is not defined by physical space, geography and location: the situation is rather more complex, and due to digitalisation, new kinds of borders can be drawn which may and may not correspond with those of nation-states. How individual subjects experience the post-panoptic conditions, then, demands scrutiny: while digitalisation allows for new kinds of mobility, in the post-panoptic certain subjects will be held firmly in place, often based on precisely the kinds of modernist understandings of ‘what should be where’ referred to above.

32 Introduc t ion

(Super)diversity and Social Sorting In popular understandings (advertising discourse; lay discourse; media discourse; popular literature such as guides to social media use) ‘the internet’ has often stood for translocality and disembodiment, with time and space compressed so as to basically lose their significance. While it is true that the ‘wired’ (Western) individual is in many cases ‘dislocated’, going with the flows, appropriating, freely mixing and mashing whatever cultural stuff happens to be lying around, there is the less ludic, phantasmagorical or creative side to all of this, with implications for the ways in which ‘diversity’ is imagined, lived and encountered in today’s societies. Ess (2002: 17–18) observed that the (…) earlier optimism regarding the inevitable march of a computermediated democracy (…) rested in part on a view of the self in cyberspace as somehow radically disconnected from the body at the terminal – where this body was subject to and carrier of specific histories, traditions, and cultural shapings. As the current surveillance practice alone makes clear, however, the bodies at the terminal are not ‘disconnected’ at all; on the contrary, they are connected – or made connectable – in many ways in current surveillance systems. The problem of ‘location’ is also apparent in different location-based applications available for mobile devices (e.g. Foursquare), the ‘check-in’ practices on social media such as Facebook where adding one’s location to one’s posts is a built-in option, and GPS (Global Positioning System)-based applications developed for all kinds of different purposes and practices ranging from keeping one’s family up-to-date regarding one’s location at all times to location-based dating designed to connect people based on their physical location. Mobile devices and applications and online media can thus both uproot people from physical spaces and places while simultaneously firmly place them in their physical surroundings. This connectability of ‘mobile’ users to physical bodies has also been indispensable in the story of the commercialisation of the web in the recent decades. Sherry Turkle’s 1995 study of identity in the age of the internet, Life on the Screen, has become iconic of the internet identity play of the 1990s, and 20 years ago, the freedom and identity play described by Turkle was in turn more or less emblematic of internet use: one’s physical body did not matter, as one could be whoever or whatever one wanted to be. In the nineties, Nakamura (2008: 1675) observes regarding ‘race’ online, ‘The ability to manipulate the “look and feel” of race by online role-playing, digital gaming,

Superdiverse Times and Pl aces

33

and other forms of digital-media use encouraged and fed the desire for control over self-construction and self-representation’. This ‘identity tourism’, in which race was seen as ‘(…) modular, ideally mobile, recreational, and interactive in ways that were good for you’, resembled off-line tourism because it gave users a false notion of cultural and racial understanding based on an episodic, highly mediated experience of travel, an experience rhetorically linked with digital technology use as the ‘information highway’ and the ‘cyberfrontier’, as well as with the burgeoning travel industry. (Nakamura, 2008: 1675) This, according to Nakamura (2008: 1674), relates to ‘an illusion of diversity’ which ‘(…) produces a false feeling of diversity and tolerance born of entitlement’. She (2008: 1674, quoting Gonzalez, 2000: 48) further points to the assumptions held by ‘neoliberal digital utopians’ of (…) the possibility of a new cosmopolitanism constituting all the necessary requirements for a global citizen who speaks multiple languages, inhabits multiple cultures, wears whatever skin colour or body part desired, elaborates a romantic union with technology or nature, and moves easily between positions of identification with movie stars, action heroes, and other ethnicities of [sic] races. The ‘neoliberal digital utopianism’ defined by Nakamura has been in a way replaced by a different kind of neoliberal utopia with the emergence of Web 2.0. The shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 – to a more participatory, accessible and easily modifiable, and hence assumedly more democratic web – has been relatively quick, but significant: in the words of Van Dijck (2013: 10; see also Fuchs, 2014), commercial actors such as Google and Amazon ‘(…) virtually overnight, replaced dot.communism with doc.commercialism’. With the Web 2.0 commercialisation of online spaces emerged the user as entrepreneur: ‘Web 2.0 rhetoric positions us all as entrepreneurial content creators. The Internet’s resurgence and rebranding as Web 2.0 incessantly recruits its users to generate content in the form of profiles, avatars, favourites, comments, pictures, wiki postings, and blog entries’ (Nakamura, 2008: 1680). The transformations are not least due to the emergence of ‘nonymous’ (e.g. Zhao et al., 2008) spaces such as Facebook, i.e. private companies providing social network platforms on which people are encouraged to present themselves with their real names. It would of course be naïve to assume that simply because nonymity is encouraged, everybody now presents themselves with their ‘real names’ – as many of us know from our own contact lists on

34

Introduc t ion

e.g. Facebook. However, nonymity has clearly been a tendency which has to do not only with the changing face of (online) sociality, but also with the interests of private companies offering such services as well as other parties (e.g. governments) with a need to get to people’s ‘real’ identities, and their networks. As to the changing face of sociality, (…) all kinds of sociality are currently moving from public to corporate space; even as little as ten years ago, the coding of social actions into proprietary algorithms, let alone the branding and patenting of these processes, would have been unthinkable. Today, Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter all own algorithms that increasingly determine what we like, want, know, or find. (Van Dijck, 2013: 37) Nakamura (2008: 1674; see also Terranova, 2000) provocatively asks ‘If identity construction and performance in digital space is a process of selection and recombination much like shopping, (…) what types of objects are on offer, what price is paid, who labours, and who profits?’ The commercialisation of online spaces for information retrieval and socialisation, and the emergence of walled gardens – i.e. closed online systems which control the information (and users) inside of them – such as Facebook has been a target of very heavy criticism; Scholz (2010: 242, see also Scholz, 2013) for instance proposes that ‘We are becoming “social workers”’, as ‘On Facebook, the “free” services that we are consuming come at a price. All of our actions produce value for Facebook and other companies (“third parties”)’. With the commercialisation, and the monetisation of people’s networking and semiotic activities, Dean (2003: 104) quite rightly insists that ‘To emphasize its [the internet’s] virtuality displaces attention from its economic role’. The economic role is not necessarily always very visible to ordinary users who ‘buy’ the ‘free’ services by giving away information about themselves. Vaidhyanathan (2011: 113) states that In the twenty-first-century liberal state, domination does not demand social or cultural conformity. The state, like every private firm that employs a sophisticated method of marketing, wants us to express ourselves – to choose – because mere expression of difference is usually both harmless and remarkably useful to the powerful. That is, individuals – encouraged to share their lives, experiences, thoughts and identities on (commercial) online platforms – quite happily do so, and in most cases to no foreseeable harm, in the process yielding profit for the platforms they use in the form of accurate information about themselves. Hence

Superdiverse Times and Pl aces

35

it is not surprising that ‘diversity discourse’ (Vertovec, 2012; also Arnaut & Spotti, 2015) is an integral part of the service production of companies such as Facebook and Google; the latter clearly makes what Vertovec (2012: 291) refers to as the ‘business case for diversity’: Everybody’s searching for something different. Our success hinges on our ability to understand the needs of millions of Google users. That’s why we work hard to ensure that attention to diversity is built into the way we think about our business and develop our products and services. (www.google.com/diversity/users) ‘Diversity’ is also something promoted by Facebook on their official ‘Diversity Page’: At Facebook, we value the impact that every individual can have. We are dedicated to creating an environment where people can be their authentic selves and share their own diverse backgrounds, experiences, perspectives and ideas. (www.facebook.com/facebookdiversity.info) Thompson (2008: np, emphasis original) characterises the kind of mass of ‘information’ that all such sharing of ‘diverse backgrounds, experiences, perspectives and ideas’ amounts to as follows: Each little update – each individual bit of social information – is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. Broadly, we have been moving from ‘identity tourism’ to a different kind of body which still ‘transcends human corporeality’ but at the same time ‘reduces flesh to pure information’ – a ‘data double’ of an individual (Haggerty & Ericsson, 2000: 613) built out of the ‘information’ collected about us (location; clicks and surfing patterns, etc.). Our data doubles ‘(…) circulate in a host of different centres of calculation and serve as markers for access to resources, services and power in ways which are often unknown to its referent’ (Haggerty & Ericsson, 2000: 613). This is the production of a new kind of individual, ‘that comprises of pure information’ (2000: 614).

36

Introduc t ion

At the same time, the nature of ‘information’ has changed, as the pointillism referred to by Thompson above – often consisting of mundane, seemingly unimportant everyday interactions – has become to be seen as a rich source of ‘information’. Online social media is also a good instance of what Haggerty and Ericsson label as ‘the disappearance of disappearance’ – ‘(…) a process whereby it is increasingly difficult for individuals to maintain their anonymity, or to escape the monitoring of social institutions’. In a different take on ‘pointillism’, Cheney-Lippold (2011) defines such information policies as Deleuzian modulation of not individuals but ‘endlessly sub-dividable “dividuals”’. In the context of digital identity ‘(…) dividuals can be seen as those data that are aggregated to form unified subjects, of connecting dividual parts through arbitrary closures at the moment of the compilation of a computer program or at the result of a database query’ (2011: 169). While coded structures and algorithms influence people’s activities on social media and, at the other end (wherever that might be in each case, invisible as these ‘ends’ often are), function to complete the ‘pointillist paintings’, as individuals we are often unaware of their workings. These workings are thus opaque, and not ideologically unproblematic: ‘Defaults’, as Van Dijck (2013: 32) points out, ‘are not just technical but also ideological manoeuvrings (…) Algorithms, protocols, and defaults profoundly shape the cultural experiences of people active on social media platforms’. These coded structures, she (2013: 20) maintains, ‘are profoundly altering the nature of our connections, creations, and interaction. Buttons that impose “sharing” and “following” as social values have effects in cultural practices’. And further: ‘Not coincidentally, Facebook chose a “like” feature rather than a “difficult but interesting” button or an “important” button. “Likes” are not just thermometers of desire but also generators of potential consumer trends’ (2013: 158). Thus, the architecture of the digital environments individuals inhabit shape their practices, and in Van Dijck’s analysis, may have even broader cultural consequences – as such, digital infrastructures may not only be interesting loci of study in themselves, but also warrant examination as broader cultural forces, again problematizing clear dividing lines between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ as distinct spaces. In the meanwhile, ‘Dataveillance (the collection, organization and storage of information about persons) and biometrics (the use of the body as a measure of identity) for instance (…) are now becoming a regular feature of the everyday lives and culture of citizens’ (Simon, 2005: 1; also Lyon, 2003a, 2003b). There is of course the danger that this kind of information collection ‘(…) results in an overreliance on stereotypical categorization as the basis for determining whom to target, and a set of simplistic and rather unproductive working rules as to what behaviours are indicative of criminal intent’ (Norris,

Superdiverse Times and Pl aces

37

2003: 268; cf. Appadurai, 1996 on the ‘colonial panopticon’ for an interesting parallel on flattening idiosyncracies; also Puar, 2007 and Goffman, 1963 on social information and ‘stigma’; Bowker & Star, 2000 on the dangers and challenges of classification). While Norris makes his remarks in the context of CCTV surveillance and criminality, his conclusions can be extended to other contexts, too. Surveillance can no longer be imagined as something to do with secret agents and three-letter agencies, far removed from everyday life – dataveillance is everyday reality, and the activities of e.g. internet companies amount to what Lyon (2003a) calls ‘social sorting’: ‘(…) focus on the social and economic categories and the computer codes by which personal data is organized with a view to influencing and managing people and populations’. The kind of ‘information’ available of us as individuals and nodes in networks is thus not unproblematic – for instance location information or zip codes might be ‘(…) an attractive marker for marketers because they can convey an accurate estimate of a user’s racial and socio-economic background’ (boyd, 2001: 5), but the old idea that ‘you are where you live’ is by no means always accurate, often based on stereotypes of a locality or a person’s social characteristics, and can thus be extremely misleading as a metric (cf. Blommaert, 2013; Phillips & Curry, 2003; Lyon, 2003a, 2003b). Finally, as Norris (2003: 265) puts it, ‘(…) selecting which behaviours are indicative of deviant identity and malign intent is highly problematic. (…) Put simply, behaviours are suspicious if they are unusual’. Here we are again reminded of the frame of ‘(un)expectedness’ outlined above, and can raise the question whether scholars of superdiversity could not contribute, through realistic descriptions of complex realities on the ground, to making ‘diversity as default’ a more mainstream understanding and, at least as far as diversity is concerned, help un-exoticise at least some of what is considered institutionally as ‘unusual’. For ultimately, Bauman and Lyon (2013: 13) suggest, today’s surveillance leads to social sorting, with its potential dangers to individuals not fitting in in the expected categories, and in many cases also to those who do. Bauman (in Bauman & Lyon, 2013: 23) further posits that I believe that the most remarkable feature of the contemporary edition of surveillance is that it has somehow managed to force and cajole oppositions to work in unison, and to make them work in concert in the service of the same reality. On the one hand, the old panoptical stratagem (‘you should never know when you’re being watched in the flesh and so never be unwatched in your mind’) is being gradually yet consistently and apparently unstoppably brought to well-nigh universal implementation. On the other, with the old panoptical nightmare (‘I am never

38

Introduc t ion

on my own’) now recast into the hope of ‘never again being alone’ (abandoned, ignored and neglected, blackballed and excluded), the fear of disclosure has been stifled by the joy of being noticed. Such work of oppositions, and the concerted emergence and apparent peaceful conjoining of contradictions, produce what at least on surface may appear as incongruences, incompatibilities and contradictions – as in the characterisations of the two ‘post’ worlds – the ‘post-colonial’ and the ‘postpanoptic’ that delineate multiply interconnected, complex worlds, with overlapping and interacting ‘heres’, ‘theres’, ‘thens’ and ‘nows’, as in Hall’s formulation of the post-colonial. Such complexity can be productively thought of through the concept of conjuncture, as applied in cultural studies. In Grossberg’s (2006: 5; see also Hay et al., 2013 for a recent discussion) definition: Conjuncturalism looks to the changing configuration of forces that occasionally seeks and sometimes arrives at a balance or temporary settlement. It emphasizes the constant overdetermined reconfiguration of a field producing only temporary stabilities. Some conjunctures may be characterized by a profound – organic – crisis while others are characterized by smaller uncertainties, imbalances and struggle and still others may appear to be settled or at least characterized by more ‘passive revolutions’. Similarly, conjunctures have differing temporal scales: some are protracted and some are relatively short in duration. Conjunctural analysis goes into the spatial and temporal composition of moments, or periods, within longer historical processes and their uneven and intersectional materialisations. Thus, conjunctural analysis gives empirical coordinates for understanding and explaining social formations, and also helps seeing movement within ‘eras’ or ‘periods’ – and outside them. In other words, conjunctural analysis looks in a way both ‘inwards’ and ‘outwards’; what constitutes a specific conjuncture, what makes it ‘particular’, and how it can be placed within longer-term historical developments. Conjunctural thinking is thus not simple chronological ordering, but looks at situated spatio-temporal points in time. Such a conjunctural outlook may help dissecting all of the messy and complex developments discussed above – continuities and discontinuities; con-junctions – the joining together – of different forces and developments. It is then that specific spaces become understandable, and perhaps even the ‘unexpected’ becomes intelligible, if not expected. And yet: explaining a conjuncture does not necessarily take us very far in understanding and analysing how people live the – what at least seem like – messy

Superdiverse Times and Pl aces

39

times of today, and what all this complexity may mean in specific conjunctural contexts ‘on the ground’, as lived and material.

Structures of Feeling Arnaut (2016: 65) suggests that ‘(…) super-diversity may push sociolinguists to go beyond their current limits in an attempt to shape a new moment in the postcolonial history of liberatory and democratising human and social sciences’. Somewhat pessimistically, Rampton (2016: 106, emphasis original) points out that linguistics has not had a very good track record in ‘(…) humanising migrants, seeing them in their embedded complexity as mothers, brothers, uncles, friends and workmates who also make agentive contributions to local sociolinguistic processes’. While Rampton refers specifically to migrants, at least for the sake of an argument, we can extend his criticism to other kinds of subjects, too – either ‘stationary’ or ‘migrant’ – and as we have seen above, these two may not be mutually exclusive categories. Rampton (2016: 92) also observes that Potentially crucial aspects of their [analysts’] informants’ social, political, rhetorical, or linguistic positioning are obscured, and this lets in the romantic celebration of difference and creative agency that has been so common in sociolinguistics, or the presumption of deficit and remedial need in SLA. Further (2016: 92), he warns that ‘the outcome is a set of accounts that look increasingly removed from contemporary reality, obsessed (but inevitably also frustrated) by precisely the kind of simplistic caricature that “superdiversity” alerts us to’. ‘Superdiversity’ as a perspective can be used as a catalyst to for thinking about the structure-agency dividing line (Arnaut, 2016; Arnaut & Spotti, 2015). The question is, how could sociolinguists ‘go beyond their current limits’ (Arnaut, 2016: 65) and attend to humanising the people living superdiversity, post-panopticism and digitalisation, while making sure not to fall into Rampton’s ‘romantic celebration of difference and creative agency’, nor become ‘removed from contemporary reality’? As I suggested above, conjunctural thinking might be a useful frame in at least reminding us of the changing configurations of forces, continuities and discontinuities today. This might be useful, e.g. in exploring whether the ‘post-1991’ discourse of superdiversity might be valid everywhere – ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘then’, ‘now’ – in the same form, or as a self-explanatory description

40

Introduc t ion

of context, spaces and places. Further, apart from conjunctures, to attend to structures and agency, and the actual ‘life-worlds’, perhaps another cultural studies concept – structure of feeling – might also prove useful for sociolinguists (for earlier discussions see McElhinny, 2003; Rampton, 2006, 2013). ‘Structure of feeling’ is a concept introduced by Raymond Williams (1977), and is amongst the most productive and provoking insights he provided cultural studies with. To begin with, the whole concept ‘structure of feeling’ may read like a contradiction in terms – at least if ‘structure’ is taken as something fixed, with an internal logic, and ‘feeling’ as something shapeless, even irrational – something inherently without a structure. Williams introduced the term in trying to make sense of culture and cultural change, with attention to the everyday, the mundane. According to him (1977: 128), ‘In most description and analysis, culture and society are expressed in a habitual past tense. The strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products’. Indeed, to quote Williams (1977: 129) at length, (…) it is the reduction of the social to fixed forms that remains the basic error. (…) The mistake, as so often, is in taking terms of analysis as terms of substance. Thus we speak of a world-view or of a prevailing ideology or of a class outlook, often with adequate evidence, but in this regular slide towards a past tense and a fixed form suppose, or even do not know that we have to suppose, that these exist and are lived specifically and definitively, in singular and developing forms. Perhaps the dead can be reduced to fixed forms, though their surviving records are against it. But the living will not be reduced, at least in the first person; living third persons may be different. All the known complexities, the experienced tensions, shifts, and uncertainties, the intricate forms of unevenness and confusion, are against the terms of the reduction and soon, by extension, against social analysis itself. Williams’ attention to such reduction to ‘finished products’ is very illuminating also in the case of superdiversity. If we consider superdiversity as some kind of a point of arrival, with increased diversity being its defining feature, and focus our analyses on ‘superdiverse spots’ with ‘lots of diversity’, from such a starting point we may ultimately only end up proving that the superdiverse spaces we set out to examine are, indeed, culturally or linguistically superdiverse. While, not least thanks to digitalisation and the ensuing complexity regarding locality on- and offline, superdiversity is best characterised as in process, and unevenly at that, with different outcomes being lived and

Superdiverse Times and Pl aces

41

experienced by individuals at different spatio-temporal points in time. The kinds of changes that Williams (1977: 132, emphasis original) refers to as changes in structures of feeling are ‘social’ in two senses: (…) first, in that they are changes of presence (while they are being lived this is obvious; when they have been lived it is still their substantial characteristic); second, in that although they are emergent or preemergent, they do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action. He thus aims at (…) defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies. (1977: 32, emphasis original) A structure of feeling attends precisely to the relationship between structure and agency; the mediations between the ‘general’ and the ‘particular’ – experiences that are individual, yet beyond the individual, synchronically and diachronically. To attend to a structure of feeling is to describe something that is emerging: ‘(…) structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available’ (Williams, 1977: 133–134, emphasis original). Methodologically, Williams (1977: 132–133) defined a structure of feeling as a ‘cultural hypothesis’, ‘derived from attempts to understand such elements and their connections in a generation or period’. This kind of analysis of course calls for not too much complacency or certainty in assigning explanations either on intentional individual agency or structures. Williams’ approach attends to structured sets of contextual relations in everyday life-worlds, and the ways in which people engage with change in the present. As Rampton (2013: 9, emphasis original) puts it, (…) if you’re looking towards ‘structures of feeling’, you’re pointing to a zone where cultural coherence, patterns and regularity are continually unsettled by – often at war with – the idiosyncracies and unspoken needs and desires of situated individuals. For sure, the individuality we’re interested in is situated rather than transcendent, but in any exploration of

42

Introduc t ion

the cultural constitution of subjectivity, the oxymoron in a phrase like ‘structures of feeling’ insists on the importance of the stuff that lies beyond standard and imaginable vocabularies of cultural analysis. Given the complexity – the indeterminacy and openness, and the simultaneous rigidity and restrictiveness, depending on whose (i.e. what kind of postpanoptic subjects’, or ‘bodies at the terminal’) perspective we take – Williams’ insights on changing social forms and cultural practices, and trying to think in terms of conjunctures and temporal articulations, may prove useful. Conjunctural thinking helps attending to the multiple levels, forces and speeds of movement, and structures of feeling could help us (at least humbly aim at) humanising people (our ‘research objects’) and stay tuned to how they themselves experience the messy complexity of postpanoptic life.

Conclusion I started by framing my discussion with some of the challenges in conceptualising superdiversity, specifically in relation to defining spaces and places as ‘superdiverse’, and proceeded to review some features of the infrastructures of superdiversity, in particular from the perspective of digitalisation. What emerges is a complex picture, with different forces and developments (such as the commercialisation of online spaces and how that shapes the architectures for participation; new surveillance phenomena with their views on the subject scrutinised, etc.) coming together and overlapping. These forces and developments shape both the lives of those we could traditionally see as inhabiting the ‘centre’, as well as those in the ‘margins’, though in different ways – and it might be that centres and margins are not the most fruitful way to look into all of this, but rather take events as occurring at different spatio-temporal points, with temporal stabilities being articulated. With digitalisation, mobility can be the defining mode even when subjects are stationary, although this should not be taken as too empowering an idea either; as we have seen, digitalisation comes also with new practices of localising subjects and ‘putting them in place’, and (consequently) new kinds of inequalities, all of which influences individual experiences of the post-panoptic life. For this reason, sociolinguists of superdiversity might also want to contribute to what might be called ‘media ideological debates’ to critically discuss understandings of the web, and consequently people’s wired lives, both in highly digitised contexts and in places where access to the web and

Superdiverse Times and Pl aces

43

digital gadgets are limited, or non-existent, but are yet shaped by digitalisation by their very exclusion from its web. Gershon (2010: 3), drawing on Silverstein’s (1979) notion of language ideologies, defines media ideologies as ‘a set of beliefs about communicative technologies with which users and designers explain perceived media structure and meaning. That is to say, what people think about the media they use will shape the way they use media’. Media are an important infrastructure for mobility, translocality and interconnectedness, and how they are built and understood influenced by media ideologies does not only have an effect on the way people (can) use them, but also how they are put to use institutionally, for instance for surveillance purposes. Critical sociolinguists of diversity will have a clear picture of the reality on the ground, and can perhaps hence help extend the limits of the imaginable and the ‘expected’ also more broadly: to make diversity and change the default mode of understanding also in this context. The reason why structures of feeling and conjunctures might be so useful in trying to understand superdiversity is precisely the focus on change and process – on things being ‘in solution’. As I mentioned above, superdiversity is perhaps not best applied as a modifier or a label to spaces and places. Superdiversity does not refer to an end point, but aims to capture inchoate phenomena, and can help understand points in time and space where agency is situated in temporal articulations. It would be usefully applied to refer to a process in which horizons of meaning are changing and in motion – not a quantitative change (‘more diversity’), but a change in the quality of social relations and personal experience as social within a specific historical conjuncture. In the words of Williams (1977: 131), ‘What we are defining is a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period’. In trying to capture this, defining spaces as superdiverse a priori based on their perceived and/or expected diversity will not suffice; not least because it may reduce individuals to their ‘difference’ and ‘diversity’, and may only lead to what Rampton referred to as ‘the romantic celebration of difference and creative agency’, not to mention the exoticisation of difference, or the fetishisation and essentialisation of difference that the targeting of quantitatively superdiverse spaces may entail. Williams’ preoccupation with lived culture reminds us to avoid ‘taking terms of analysis as terms of substance’, as he put it, and stay clear from what another cultural studies scholar, Lawrence Grossberg (2006: 7, paraphrasing Derek Gregory, 2005), referred to as the danger – even if inadvertently – of thinking ‘that the world exists to provide illustrations for our concepts’.

44

Introduc t ion

References Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arnaut, K. (2016) Super-diversity: Elements of an emerging perspective. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 49–70). New York/London: Routledge. Arnaut, K. and Spotti, M. (2015) Superdiversity discourse. In The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. and Lyon, D. (2013) Liquid Surveillance. A Conversation. Cambridge: Polity. Bigo, D. (2008) Globalized (in)security: The field and the ban-opticon. In D. Bigo and A. Tsoukala (eds) Terror, Insecurity and Liberty. Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes after 9/11 (pp. 10–48). Abingdon: Routledge. Blommaert, J. (2013) Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2016) Language and superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 21–48). New York/London: Routledge. Bowker, G. and Star, S.L. (2000) Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. boyd, d. (2001) Sexing the Internet: Reflections on the role of identification in online communities. Paper presented at Sexualities, Medias, Technologies, University of Surrey, June 21–22, 2001. See http://www.danah.org/papers/SexingTheInternet.conference. pdf (accessed 28 January 2016). Boyne, R. (2000) Post-panopticism. Economy and Society 29 (2), 285–307. Cheney-Lippold, J. (2011) A new algorithmic identity. Soft biopolitics and the modulation of control. Theory, Culture & Society 28 (6), 164–181. Dean, J. (2003) Why the Net is not a public sphere. Constellations 10 (1), 95–112. Deleuze, G. (1992) Postscript on the societies of control. October 59, 3–7. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ess, C. (2002) Computer-mediated colonization, the renaissance, and educational imperatives for an intercultural global village. Ethics and Information Technology 4, 11–22. Ezzat, H.R. (2004) Beyond methodological modernism: Towards a multicultural paradigm shift in the social sciences. Global Civil Society 2004/5 (pp. 40–58). London: Centre for the Study of Global Governance. Fuchs, C. (2014) Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage. Gershon, I. (2010) Breakup 2.0. Disconnecting over New Media. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gilbert, J. (2008) Anticapitalism and Culture. Radical Theory and Popular Politics. Oxford: Berg. Gilroy, P. (1994) Diaspora. Paragraph 17 (3), 207–212. Goffman, E. (1963) Stigma. Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. London: Penguin. Gonzalez, J. (2000) The appended subject: Race and identity as digital assemblage. In B.E. Kolko, L. Nakamura and G.B. Rodman (eds) Race in Cyberspace (pp. 27–50). New York: Routledge. Graham, S.D.N. (2005) Software-sorted geographies. Progress in Human Geography 29 (5), 562–580. Gregory, D. (2005) The Colonial Present. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Superdiverse Times and Pl aces

45

Grossberg, L. (2006) Does cultural studies have futures? Should it? (Or what’s the matter with New York?) Cultural studies, contexts and conjunctures. Cultural Studies 20 (1), 1–32. Haggerty, K.D. and Ericsson, R.V. (2000) The surveillant assemblage. British Journal of Sociology 51 (4), 605–622. Hall, S. (1996) When was ‘the post-colonial’? Thinking at the limit. In I. Chambers and L. Curti (eds) The Post-Colonial Question. Common Skies, Divided Horizons (pp. 242– 260). Abingdon: Routledge. Hay, J., Hall, S. and Grossberg, L. (2013) Interview with Stuart Hall. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10 (1), 10–33. Hedge, R.S. (2005) Disciplinary spaces and globalization: A postcolonial unsettling. Global Media & Communication 1 (1), 59–62. Häkkinen, A. and Leppänen, S. (2013) YouTube meme warriors: Mashup videos as political critique. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 86. Tilburg: Tilburg University. Leppänen, S. and Elo, A. (2016) Buffalaxing the Other: Superdiversity in action on YouTube. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 110–136). New York/London: Routledge. Leppänen, S., Kytölä, S., Jousmäki, H., Peuronen, S. and Westinen, E. (2013) Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for (dis)identification in social media. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 57. Tilburg: Tilburg University. Lyon, D. (2003a) Introduction. In D. Lyon (ed.) Surveillance as Social Sorting. Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination (pp. 1–9). London: Routledge. Lyon, D. (2003b) Surveillance as social sorting. Computer codes and mobile bodies. In D. Lyon (ed.) Surveillance as Social Sorting. Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination (pp. 13–30). London: Routledge. Lyon, D. (2006) The search for surveillance theories. In D. Lyon (ed.) Theorizing Surveillance. The Panopticon and Beyond (pp. 80–99). Cullompton: Willan Publishing. McElhinny, B. (2003) Fearful, forceful agents of the law: Ideologies about language and gender in police officers’ narratives about the use of physical force. Pragmatics 13 (2), 253–284. Maly, I. and Varis, P. (2015) The 21st-century hipster: On micro-populations in times of superdiversity. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 1–17. Mathiesen, T. (1997) The viewer society: Michel Foucault’s ‘Panopticon’ revisited. Theoretical Criminology 1 (2), 215–233. Nakamura, L. (2008) Cyberrace. PMLA 123 (5), 1673–1682. Norris, C. (2003) From personal to digital. CCTV, the panopticon, and the technological mediation of suspicion and social control. In D. Lyon (ed.) Surveillance as Social Sorting. Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination (pp. 249–281). London: Routledge. Patel, T.G. (2012) Surveillance, suspicion and stigma: Brown bodies in a terror-panic climate. Surveillance & Society 10 (3/4), 215–234. Pennycook, A. (2012) Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Phillips, D. and Curry, M. (2003) Privacy and the phenetic urge. Geodemographics and the changing spatiality of local practice. In D. Lyon (ed.) Surveillance as Social Sorting. Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination (pp. 137–152). London: Routledge. Poster, M. (2004) The information empire. Comparative Literature Studies 41 (3), 317–334. Puar, J.K. (2007) Terrorist Assemblages. Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press. Rampton, B. (2006) Language in Late Modernity. Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

46

Introduc t ion

Rampton, B. (2013) Micro-analysis and ‘structures of feeling’: Convention and creativity in linguistic ethnography. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 77. Tilburg: Tilburg University. Rampton, B. (2016) Drilling down to the grain in superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 91–109). New York/London: Routledge. Rose, N. (1996) The death of the social? Re-figuring the territory of government. Economy & Society 25 (3), 327–356. Rymes, B. (2012) Recontextualizing YouTube: From macro-micro to mass-mediated communicative repertoires. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 43 (2), 214–227. Scholz, T. (2010) Facebook as playground and factory. In D. Wittkower (ed.) Facebook and Philosophy. What’s on Your Mind? (pp. 241–252). Chicago and La Salle: Open Court. Scholz, T. (ed.) (2013) Digital Labour: The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge. Silverstein, M. (1979) Language structure and linguistic ideology. In P. Clyne, W.F. Hanks and C.L. Hofbauer (eds) The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels (pp. 193–247). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Simon, B. (2005) The return of panopticism: Supervision, subjection and the new surveillance. Surveillance & Society 3 (1), 1–20. Stæhr, A. (2014) Metapragmatic activities on Facebook: Enregisterment across written and spoken language practices. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies 124. London: King’s College London. Terranova, T. (2000) Free labour: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social Text 63 (19: 2), 33–58. Thompson, C. (2008) Brave new world of digital intimacy. The New York Times, September 5, 2008. See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html (accessed 28 January 2016). Turkle, S. (1995) Life on the Screen. Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone. Vaidhyanathan, S. (2008) Naked in the ‘nonopticon’. The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 15, 2008. Vaidhyanathan, S. (2011) The Googlization of Everything (and why we should worry). Berkeley: University of California Press. Updated edition. Van Dijck, J. (2013) The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vertovec, S. (2007) Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6), 1024–1054. Vertovec, S. (2012) ‘Diversity’ and the social imaginary. European Journal of Sociology 53 (3), 287–312. Williams, R. (1974) Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge. Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wimmer, A. and Glick Schiller, N. (2002) Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nation-state building, migration and the social sciences. Global Networks 2 (4), 301–334. Zhao, S., Grasmuck, S. and Martin, J. (2008) Identity construction on Facebook: Digital empowerment in anchored relationships. Computers in Human Behaviour 24, 1816–1836.

3

Chronotopes, Scales and Complexity in the Study of Language in Society Jan Blommaert

Recent developments in the study of language in society have moved the field increasingly away from linear models towards complex models. The complexity of timespace as an aspect of what is called ‘context’ is of key importance in this development, and this chapter engages with two possibly useful concepts in view of this: chronotope and scale. Chronotope can be seen as invokable chunks of history organizing the indexical order of discourse; scale, in turn can be seen as the scope of communicability of such invocations. Thus, whenever we see chronotopes, we see them mediated by scales. The cultural stuff of chronotopes is conditioned by the sociolinguistic conditions of scale. This nuanced approach to timescale contextualization offers new directions for complexity-oriented research in our fields.

Introduction The conceptual work that I wish to document in this essay must be seen as part of a bigger effort in linguistic anthropology and adjacent sciences to arrive at more precise and realistic accounts of an object of study which, by exactly such attempts, is bound to remain unstable and subject to perpetual upgrading and reformulation. In the most general sense, the issue is one of adequate contextualization of language signs in an attempt to understand their meaning effects; but as we shall see, precisely this attempt towards adequate contextualization creates objects that are no longer linguistic in the strict disciplinary sense of the term, but more generally semiotic, complex objects. 47

48

Introduc t ion

The particular axis of contextualization I shall discuss here is that of ‘timespace’ – the literal translation of the term ‘chronotope’ designed by Bakhtin in the 1930s (Bakhtin, 1981: 84; Bemong & Borghart, 2010: 4–5). Chronotope refers to the intrinsic blending of space and time in any event in the real world, and was developed by Bakhtin, as we shall see, as an instrument for developing a fundamentally historical semiotics.1 As such, and in spite of the daunting Greekness of the term, it has had an impact on scholarship. The same cannot be said (yet) of the second concept I shall discuss, ‘scale’ – developed initially to point towards the non-unified, layered and stratified nature of meaningful signs and their patterns of circulation. A small amount of work has been done using scale as a conceptual tool, often studies of globalization. In what follows, I shall first set the discussion in a broader issue: that of ‘context’ and contextualization; I shall then introduce chronotopes and scales as potentially useful concepts, after which I shall merge them with the issue of contextualization and show how timespace complexity can (and does) enrich work in our fields of study.

Complicating Context Notions such as scale and chronotope help us overcome two persisting problems in the study of language in society. These problems persist in spite of decades of work offering solutions to them; such solutions, however, are usually relegated to the realm of advanced scholarship, while the problems are part of most ‘basic’ approaches to issues in our fields. The first problem is that studies of language in society tend to apply a simple untheorized distinction in the ‘levels of context’ included in analysis: the micro versus macro distinction. Discourse analysis of spoken interaction, or the sociolinguistic analysis of individual variables in speech would typify micro-analysis, while ideologically oriented critical discourse analysis and studies of language policy and language attitudes would typify the latter. A rough gloss could be: while ‘micro’ approaches examine how people affect language, ‘macro’ approaches would focus on how language affects people. The second problem, closely related to this, is the dominance of onedimensional models of meaning (cf. Silverstein, 1992: 57). There is a widespread assumption that language in actual social use must yield one ‘meaning’, both as a locally emerging behavioural effect pushing participants in a conversation from one turn into the other and from opening to closing, and as a local denotational correlate of correct and intentional morphosyntactic work by a ‘speaker’. This second problem presupposes a vast amount of shared resources

Chronotopes, Scales and Comple x it y in the Study of L anguage in Soc iet y

49

among language users, including agreements about the conventions governing their deployment. Note in passing that I used the term ‘local’ here: in our common analytic vocabulary, ‘micro’ stands for ‘local’ and ‘macro’ stands for ‘translocal’ – spatial metaphors defining a particular scope of context. And ‘local’, in addition, also often occurs as a synonym for synchronic: the things that happen here-and-now in a particular speech event. Space and time are interchangeable features in the way we talk about analysis; I shall have occasion, of course, to return to this point. There is a mountain of literature criticizing the ‘micro-macro’ distinction, very often targeting the inadequacies of ‘micro’ approaches, which, as I said, persist in spite of such critical work.2 Most authors would argue that inadequacies occur precisely at the interstices of several ‘levels’ of context, as when the range of contextual-conversational inferences transcends the scope of what is purely brought about in the ‘local’ conversational context and needs to include broader sociocultural ‘frames’ of contextual knowledge (Goffman, 1974; Gumperz, 1992; Silverstein, 1992); or when what looks like a single and coherent activity – a multiparty conversation, for instance – proves upon closer inspection to contain several different, not entirely aligned or even conflicting, activities, calling into question the levels of ‘sharedness’ in purpose and orientation of the different participants (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1992; Goodwin, 2007; Cicourel, 1992; see also Goffman, 1964). So, what is ‘brought about’ as a joint collaborative activity such as a conversation may obscure deep differences in what is being ‘brought along’ by different participants, and consequently in what is ‘taken along’ by these participants after the activity. As all of us who have done some teaching know, people can walk away from seemingly focused speech events with divergent understandings of ‘what was actually said’. This has a direct bearing on our second problem, that of one-dimensional models of meaning, and the connection between both problems was clearly spelled out by Silverstein (1992), drawing on the new wave of studies of language ideologies moving in at that time. Silverstein distinguished between two views of interaction, one centred on intentionally produced and organized denotation (a one-dimensional view), and another centred on what was achieved indexically by means of a complex mode of communicative behaviour in which pragmatic and metapragmatic (ideological) aspects are inseparable – a multidimensional view in which vastly more is achieved by participants than merely denotational alignment. The language-ideological dimension of semiosis, we have since learned, moves the field of analysis into very different directions: Saussurean language is substituted by a multiplex ‘total linguistic fact’ (about which more in a moment); the analysis of

50

Introduc t ion

communication shifts from intention to effects, of which denotation is just one; and such effects are necessarily unstable and indeterminate – hence ‘creative’ . The nexus of the two problems I identified earlier is indexicality: language-ideologically ‘loaded’ semiotic features (indexicals) come in as a ‘translocal’ but ‘locally’ enacted layer of historical meaning. Indexicality, in Silverstein’s conception, brings into profile the historical dimension of Goffman’s frames: when we perform interpretive work, we draw on relatively conventionalized (and therefore historical) sets of metapragmatically attributive meaning – ‘tropes’ (Silverstein, 1992: 69; also Agha, 1997, 2007) – that are triggered by indexicals providing presupposable pointers to ‘those implicit values (…) of relational identity and power that, considered as an invokable structure, go by the name of “culture”’ (Silverstein, 1992: 57; also Agha, 1997). The interstices between distinct ‘levels’ of context disappear because each ‘local’ (micro) act of contextualization operates by means of locally (in)validated invocations of ‘translocal’ (macro) meanings: The point is that social life as interactions that constantly call up culture (and its deployability or realization in them) and reinvest it with their historicity, is the object of this wider construal of ‘contextualization’. (Silverstein, 1992: 57; also Agha, 1997) And the Gumperzian ‘contextualization cues’ – the target of Silverstein’s critique – re-emerge as semiotic features (indexicals) prompting ‘local’ interpretations grounded in ‘translocal’ historically configured ascriptions of genre, key, footing and identity often captured under the term ‘register’ (Agha, 2005, 2007; Silverstein, 2003, 2006). Which is why uniquely situated activities such as talk in school can, and do, contribute not just to learning but also to membership of social class and other ‘macro’ social categories: ‘Collective socio-historical schemas are continuously reconstituted in within the flows and contingencies of situated activity’ (Rampton, 2006: 344; Wortham, 2006). Meaning in context here appears as a more broadly conceived complex of valuations – indexicals point to what counts as meaning in a specific semiotic event. To make this point relevant for what follows, let us underscore that value and history are central here: we best see ‘meaning’ as value effects derived from local enactments of historically loaded semiotic resources (cf. Blommaert, 2005, Chapter 4; cf. also Agha, 1997: 495). The ‘local’ and ‘micro’, therefore is not ‘synchronic’ but profoundly historical, and the micro-macro distinction (our first problem) has become irrelevant, since every instance of ‘micro’ contextualization would at once be an instance of ‘macro’

Chronotopes, Scales and Comple x it y in the Study of L anguage in Soc iet y

51

contextualization. As for the one-dimensional view of meaning as a singular and linear outcome of interaction (our second problem), it is replaced by a multidimensional package of effects, some of which are ‘locally’ enacted and others occurring later in forms of re-entextualization (Blommaert, 2001; Silverstein & Urban, 1996). What is ‘taken along’ from one semiotic event is ‘brought along’ into the next one. And this is our object of study: the total linguistic (or semiotic) fact is irreducibly dialectic in nature. It is an unstable mutual interaction of meaningful sign forms, contextualised to situations of interested human use and mediated by the fact of cultural ideology. (Silverstein, 1985: 220) This object has become a complex nonlinear and multidimensional thing; the context in which it operates has likewise become a complex dialectics of features pointing at once to various ‘levels’. And due to this fusion of ‘micro’ and ‘macro’, this total linguistic/semiotic fact is intrinsically historical: a reality to which Voloshinov directed our attention long ago. Which brings us to Bakhtin.

Chronotope and Scale Recall that I emphasized value and history, because these notions lead us right to the core of Bakhtin’s view of language and are indispensable in our discussion of chronotope. Let me briefly elaborate both. Bakhtin’s concept of language is a sociolinguistic one, containing not just ‘horizontal’ distinctions such as dialects (linguistic variation) but also ‘vertical’ ones such as genres, professional jargons and the like (social variation). To be more specific, Bakhtin sees language in its actual deployment (as for instance in a novel) as a repository of ‘internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 263). At any moment of performance, the language (or discourse, as Bakhtin qualifies it) actually used will enable an historical-sociological analysis of different ‘voices’ within the social stratigraphy of language of that moment: Bakhtin’s key notion of heteroglossia – the delicate ‘dialogical’ interplay of socially (ideologically, we would now say) positioned voices in for instance a novel – is the building block of a ‘sociological stylistics’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 300); and as he demonstrated in the various essays in The Dialogical Imagination, this sociological stylistics is necessarily historical.3 In actual analysis, it operates via a principle of indexicality, in which the use of genre features such as ‘common language (…) is taken by the author precisely as the

52

Introduc t ion

common view, as the verbal approach to people and things normal for a given sphere of society’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 301; cf. also Rampton, 2003). Form is used to project socially stratified meaning (‘verbal-ideological belief systems’, Bakhtin, 1981: 311), and this indexical nexus creates what we call ‘style’, for it can be played out, always hybridized, in ways that shape recognizable meaning effects ‘created by history and society’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 323). The step from history to value is a small one. The stratified sociolinguistic diversity which is central to Bakhtin’s view of language – its historically specific heteroglossic structure – means that understanding is never a linear ‘parsing’ process; it is an evaluative one. When Bakhtin talks about understanding, he speaks of ‘integrated meaning that relates to value – to truth, beauty and so forth – and requires a responsive understanding, one that includes evaluation’ (Bakhtin, 1986: 125). The dialogical principle evidently applies to uptake of speech as well, and such uptake involves the interlocutor’s own historically specific ‘verbal-ideological belief systems’ and can only be done from within the interlocutor’s own specific position in a stratified sociolinguistic system. Nothing, consequently, is ‘neutral’ in this process – not even time and space, as his discussion of chronotope illustrates. Bakhtin designed chronotope to express the inseparability of time and space in human social action, and he selected the ‘literary artistic chronotope’ where ‘spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole’, in such a way that the chronotope could be seen as ‘a formally constitutive category of literature’ (1981: 84). Identifying chronotopes enabled Bakhtin to address the co-occurrence of events from different times and places in novels. He saw chronotopes as an important aspect of the novel’s heteroglossia, part of the different ‘verbal-ideological belief systems’ that were in dialogue in a novel. I make this point in order to dispel two, in my view misguided, interpretations of chronotope: one in which chronotopes are used as descriptive tools, shorthand for the ways in which time and space are actually represented in discourse (e.g. Crossley, 2006; Wang, 2009); another one in which chronotope is seen as the cognitive theory behind Bakhtin’s work, a memory structure not unlike schemata (e.g. Keunen, 2000). Both interpretations miss what is perhaps the most productive aspect of the chronotope concept: its connection to historical and momentary agency. In Bakhtin’s analyses, chronotopes invoke and enable a plot structure, characters or identities, and social and political worlds in which actions become dialogically meaningful, evaluated and understandable in specific ways. Specific chronotopes produce specific kinds of person, actions, meaning and value. Decoding them is in itself a chronotopic phenomenon, in addition, in which other historicities convene in the here-and-now historicity of understanding.

Chronotopes, Scales and Comple x it y in the Study of L anguage in Soc iet y

53

We shall see how productive this can be for our scholarship. For now, let us gloss Bakhtin’s chronotopes as ‘invokable histories’, elaborate frames in which time, space and patterns of agency coincide, create meaning and value, and can be set off against other chronotopes. Which is why the subtitle to Bakhtin’s essay on ‘Forms of time and of chronotope in the novel’ was ‘Notes towards a historical poetics’ – Bakhtin’s problem was that novels are not just historical objects (Dickens wrote in the mid-19th century) but also articulate complexly layered historicities, the historical ideological positions of narrator, plot and characters, in the form of chronotopes. Chronotopes presuppose the non-uniformity of historical spacetime in relation to human consciousness and agency, and they share this presupposition with that other concept I must discuss here: scale. The origins of the latter concept lie elsewhere, in Braudel’s majestic study La Méditerranée (1949). Braudel distinguished three ‘levels’ of history: the very slow history of climate and landscape (but also including ‘mentalities’, Braudel, 1958: 51) which he called durée, an intermediate cyclical history of ‘conjunctures’, and the day-to-day history of ‘évenéments’. The three levels correspond to different speeds of development, from the very slow change in climate to the very rapid pace of everyday events. These distinctions also coincided with different levels of human consciousness and agency: most individuals are not acutely aware of the bigger and slower historical processes of which they are part, while they are aware of events and incidents punctuating their lives; and while no individual can alone and deliberately change the climate, individuals influence and have a degree of agency over their everyday historical context; and while individual people can influence their own lives with individual actions that take hardly any time (as when they commit a murder), it takes enormous numbers of people and actions spread over a very long time span for the climate to change. Processes developing at the level of the durée, consequently, were seen by Braudel as developing at another ‘scale’ as those happening in the here-and-now, and note that Braudel’s distinction between levels of history includes a range of theoretical statements involving levels of human consciousness and agency. A ‘comprehensive’ history, according to Braudel, had to include all of these different scales, since every historical moment was and is a nexus of all of these scales. Braudel’s concept of history was refined and expanded by Immanuel Wallerstein in an attempt to develop what he called World-System Analysis – a new social science that addressed the many intricate forms of historical linkage and exchange that characterize the emergence of an increasingly globalizing capitalist world (Wallerstein, 2004). Wallerstein rejected the focus on time alone and opted instead for a (by now familiar) unitary notion of timeSpace, with more ‘scales’ than in Braudel’s framework (Wallerstein,

54

Introduc t ion

1998). The details of Wallerstein’s scalar stratigraphy need not concern us here – the point to take on board is that, like Braudel, Wallerstein connects timeSpace ‘levels’ with levels of human awareness and agency; an individual vote for a political party during elections is an action at a different scale than that party winning the elections, which is again different from that party forming a government and implementing a neoliberal austerity program. As mentioned at the outset, while chronotopes have had a relatively rewarding career in scholarship in our fields, scales are relatively under-used so far. When that notion was introduced in sociolinguistic work, it was presented as a concept that might do exactly what Braudel and Wallerstein used it for: to make fine stratigraphic distinctions between ‘levels’ of sociolinguistic activity, thus enabling distinctions as to power, agency, authority and validity that were hard to make without a concept that suggested vertical – hierarchical – orders in meaning making (Blommaert, 2007, 2010; Collins et al., 2009; Wortham, 2006, 2009). In the next section, I will bring chronotopes and scales together and examine how they can contribute to a complexity-oriented, realistic account of context and contextualization which, in turn, affects our views of language and meaning.

Chronotope, Scale and Context I propose to see chronotopes as that aspect of contextualization by means of which specific chunks of history can be invoked in discourse as meaning-attributing resources or, to refer to earlier terminology, as historically configured and ordered ‘tropes’. As for scales, I propose to see them as defining the scope of communicability of such tropes, and in line with what was argued earlier, we can also call this their scope of creativity (see Briggs, 2005). Both are useful to distinguish between two dimensions of context and contextualization: that of the availability of specific contextual universes for invocation in discursive work (chronotope) and that of their accessibility for participants and audiences involved in discursive work (scale). These two dimensions, I have argued in earlier work, are essential sociolinguistic qualifications of discourse-analytic notions of ‘context’; contexts are actual and concrete resources for semiosis, and they are subject to differential distribution and inequality in rights-of-use (Blommaert, 2005: Chapter 3; see also Blommaert & Maryns, 2002; Briggs, 1997, 2005). Let me now clarify these points. In its simplest form, chronotopes as historically configured tropes point us to the fact that specific complexes of ‘how-it-was’ can be invoked as relevant context in discourse. Events, acts, people and themes can be set and

Chronotopes, Scales and Comple x it y in the Study of L anguage in Soc iet y

55

reset, so to speak, in different timespace frames, in such a way that the setting and resetting enable and prompt indexicals ordered as socioculturally recognizable sets of attributions. I am staying quite close to Bakhtin’s chronotopic analyses here, where the invocation of a particular timespace (e.g. that of ancient Greek adventure stories) triggers an ordered complex of attributions that defines the plot (what can happen, and how), the actors (who can act, and how), the moral or political normative universes involved in what happens, the trajectories of plot and character development and the effects of what happens. We get generic types (Bakhtin, 1981: 251) or in Agha’s terms, figures of personhood, of action, of sociopolitical values, of effect; and these figures are then performed through speech by means of indexicals – essentially random features which have now been ordered in such a way that they converge on the ‘figures’ invoked by the particular timescale setting and create a logic of deployment and of expectation (Agha, 2005: 39, 2011). The ‘type’ is converted into recognizable ‘tokens’. To provide a trivial example, a narrative starting with ‘once upon a time’ – the fairy tale genre trigger – prompts a timeless and geographically unidentifiable place in which princes, giants, witches, wizards and dwarfs can be expected alongside imaginary animals (dragons, unicorns) and animated objects (talking trees or moving rocks), with magic, a simple good–bad moral universe and a happy ending as expected features (‘happy ever after’). Bakhtin argued that such chronotopic organization defined the specific genres we culturally recognize. All the features of such a fairy tale have been centred on indexical-ordering ‘figures’, and we follow the logic of performance by deploying them in the right order – a disruption of one feature (e.g. the ‘good prince’ suddenly becoming ugly or arrogant) can disrupt the entire order. Specific features can operate as tropic emblems, because they instantly invoke a chronotope as outlined above and bring chunks of history to the interactional here-and-now as relevant context. They invoke the ‘type’ of which the actual enactment is a ‘token’. Thus, mentioning ‘Stalin’ can suffice to invoke a Cold War chronotope in which Stalinism equals the enemy and in which dictatorial, violent and totalitarian attributions define the ‘figure’ of the Stalinist leader; images of Che Guevara can be used to reset (or ‘align’, to use Agha’s term) contemporary moments of social activism in an older historical lineage of left-wing rebellion, creating an indexical ‘pedigree’ if you wish, very much in the way that ‘-isms’ (‘communism’, ‘liberalism’) do – it creates an endless durée and/or ‘stops time’ by denying the relevance of intervening patterns of change and development (Lemon, 2009). Ethnic and ethnolinguistic labels can have such emblematic effect, invoking chronotopes of ‘tradition’ not necessarily anchored in chronology or concrete historical facts, in which nationalist political ideological positions, the

56

Introduc t ion

moral righteousness of ethnic struggles and essentializing attributes such as (pure) language or religion can be part of the ethnic ‘figure’. Woolard (2013) documents precisely that, in her study of how personal experiences related to Catalan identity and language are captured in three different chronotopes by different respondents, with different chronotopical positions being directed at (and contrasted in reference to) the emblematic notion of ‘Catalan’. We see how contesting the emblematic notion of ‘Catalan’ (invoking the chronotope described above) is contested by means of different chronotopes framing what ‘Catalan’ actually means, always with reference to the ‘typical’ (or dominant) chronotope. Note how this play of chronotopes is argumentative: it creates apart from all the other effects already reviewed also an epistemic-evaluative effect of truth, importance and relevance. More on this in a moment. The chronotopic organization of language as a field of experiential and political discourse proves to be an important part of the language-ideological apparatuses by means of which we decode our sociolinguistic lifeworlds and the ways in which we fit into them (Inoue, 2004); Irvine (2004: 105) sees a deep connection between ‘ideologized visions of available genres and linguistic styles’ (or registers) and temporalities motivating them as coherent frames; and Eisenlohr (2004), in a perceptive paper, shows how such language-ideological temporalities underpin the construction of diasporic identities – with complex lines of affiliation to the Mauritian here-and-now and to a distant Indian past mediated through Hindi and Hindu ritualizations. Differences between ‘being from here’ and merely ‘residing here’ are articulated by invoking different historicities of origin, movement, stability and change. Contemporary forms of European nationalism place people’s ‘national’ belonging in an unbroken line of unspoiled ethnolinguistic transmission reaching back into an unspecified past (the ‘empty time’ of ‘ancestral’ languages, Inoue 2004: 5) and see the contemporary usage of ‘pure’ language (the institutionalized variety of it) as the contemporary normative enactment of that durée (Blommaert & Verschueren, 1992; Silverstein, 1996, 1998). This is a powerful trope, and the rupture of this lineage (for instance by colonization or totalitarianism) leading to language loss can be downplayed by nostalgic appeals to the durée of ideal unbroken transmission (‘heritage’) combined, by absence of the ‘complete’ language, with the emblematic display of small ‘typical’ bits of the ‘ancestral’ language (Cavanaugh, 2004; Karrebæk & Ghandchi, 2014; also Moore, Chapter 4, this volume; Silverstein, 1998). That last point brings us to issues of scales and accessibility. We have seen how chronotopes, as invokable ‘tropic’ chunks of history, have powerful normative language-ideological dimensions. Their invocation and

Chronotopes, Scales and Comple x it y in the Study of L anguage in Soc iet y

57

deployment comes down to a mise en intrigue in which persons, acts, patterns of development and assessments of value can be laid down. Chronotopes are the stuff of Foucaultian discourses of truth, one could say. The delicate play of chronotopes, for instance in narrative, enables us to create epistemic and affective effects that make sense within the invoked context-of-use, and to strategize about outcomes in an argument (as Agha, 1997, demonstrates in presidential debates). Knowledge of such invokable histories – their availability, in other words – is a cultural resource and an asset which allows us to construct, for precisely targeted effects, elaborate patterns of different sociocultural materials in our discourses (e.g. Perrino, 2011; Schiffrin, 2009). Such knowledge makes us understandable. Knowledge itself, however, is not enough; it makes us understandable but not necessarily understood. Available resources are not always accessible to all and differences in accessibility result in differences in meaning effect – misunderstanding, disqualification as irrelevant or untrue, ‘pointless’ or ‘trivial’. Aspects of accessibility have a direct bearing on the scope of communicability: if I have access to the best possible and most widely understood (‘typical’) resources, chances are that my words will be heard (as ‘tokens’) by many; if I lack access to such resources, I lack such chances (cf. Agha, 2011). The issue of Bakhtinian ‘voice’ is thus not just a matter of what exactly has gone into the actual voice, but also – and predicated on – who has the capacity to create voice, to be a creative meaning-maker in the eyes of others and who has access to the resources to make sense of these meanings (Agha, 2011; Hymes, 1996; Wortham, 2006;). I may have lived through important historical events – contexts available to me – but if I lack the actual resources for narrating these events in a way that makes their importance resonate with interlocutors – a matter of accessibility – I will probably end up talking to myself. The actual outcome of communication, thus, is an effect of the degrees of availability and accessibility of adequate contexts creatively invoked in discourse – of chronotopes combined with scales. And while the former is a cultural given, the second is a sociolinguistic filter on it. Thus, trying to invoke a chronotope – e.g. the history of one’s country – requires access to the genred and enregistered features that index the genres of ‘historiography’. (Bakhtin, after all, was interested in the actual forms of time defining the novel.) In a long study on a Congolese painter who produced a grassroots-literate ‘History of Zaire’ (Blommaert, 2008), I explained why this document escaped the attention of professional historians (even when it was given, decades earlier, to a distinguished professional historian). Tshibumba, the author, had no access to critical resources defining the genre: he lacked access to structured information (an archive) and had to rely on his

58

Introduc t ion

own locally inflected memory; furthermore, he lacked crucial literacy skills from the register of ‘historiography’. The effect was that his History of Zaire remained buried at the lowest scale of communicability: in the drawers of a single addressee, who could at best understand it as an anthropological artefact of restricted interest, but not a documentation of ‘History’ to be communicated on the scale level Tshibumba aspired to: the world of professional historians. It took an anthropologist such as I to ‘upscale’ his Histoire by re-entextualizing it for another audience; but that took a very significant amount of re-ordering work. Scale, thus, is best seen as the scope of actual understandability of specific bits of discourse (Blommaert et al., 2015), and whenever we see chronotopes being invoked in discourse, we see them through the scalar effect of recognisability – that is, they can only be recognized by us when they have been performed by means of the register criteria their ‘type’ presumes. And note that such recognitions can occur simultaneously at different scale levels, when different audiences recognize different indexical orders in the same discourse. That in itself tells us something about the author and the audience: their positions in the stratified sociolinguistic economy that produced the discourse, enabling access to the resources required to create meanings that communicate with different people. Bakhtin’s insistence on meaning as socially defined value derived from a stratified sociolinguistic system pushes us to this point: the historical analysis of novels, for Bakhtin, involved questions about how particular novels emerged out of particular social positions. We are capable now to add this mature sociolinguistic dimension to most of the interpretations of chronotope.

Timespace Complexity If we accept the preceding points, the analysis of meaning contains at least to sub-questions: (a) what do we understand? And (b) How come we understand it as such? To return to earlier remarks, answers to both questions will involve aspects usually called ‘micro-’ as well as ‘macro-’ contextual; and to the earlier definition of the total linguistic/semiotic fact we can now add that it is not just mediated by the fact of cultural ideology but also by the fact of sociolinguistic stratification. We will be confronted, in every actual example of discourse, by a complex construction of multiple historicities compressed into one ‘synchronized’ act of performance, projecting different forms of factuality and truth, all of them ideologically configured and thus indexically deployed, and all of them determined by the concrete sociolinguistic conditions of their production and uptake, endowing them with a

Chronotopes, Scales and Comple x it y in the Study of L anguage in Soc iet y

59

scaled communicability at each moment of enactment. These dense and complex objects are the ‘stuff’ of the study of language in society (cf. Blommaert & Rampton, 2016; Silverstein, 2014). Analysis of such objects must not seek to reduce their complexity but to account for it. Preceding developments in our field of study have dismissed the simple linear objects of linguistics as the (exclusive) conduits of meaning, and have replaced them by multiplex, layered, mobile and nonlinear – hence indeterminate and relatively unpredictable – objects which still demand further scrutiny in our quest for precision and realism. Part of that further scrutiny, I have suggested, is to imagine our object as shot through with different timespace frames provoking scaled meaning effects simultaneously understandable at different scale levels for different audiences, and continuing to do so long after they were effectively performed, with different effects at every moment of enactment.

Acknowledgement A version of this chapter appears in the Annual Review of Anthropology 44, 2015. I am grateful to Annual Reviews, Inc. for permission to reproduce it here.

Notes (1) Brandao (2006) discusses the Einsteinian lineage of Bakhtin’s chronotope; Holquist (2010) reviews its philosophical foundations. Since I shall focus on how Bakhtin’s work can speak to contemporary theoretical and analytic concerns in linguistic anthropology, I consider these issues beyond the scope of this essay. (2) The most comprehensive early discussion of these inadequacies, tremendously relevant but rarely used these days, is probably Cicourel’s The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice (1967); see also Silverstein (1992); Hanks (1996); Duranti (1997); Blommaert (2001, 2005) for extended discussions. Two collections of essays, now slightly dated, provide broadly scoped discussions of context: Auer & DiLuzio (1992) and Duranti & Goodwin (1992). (3) It is a truism but very often overlooked or underplayed, for instance by Holquist: Bakhtin worked in an era in which the intellectual milieu was circumscribed by Marxism and in which a lot of work – including so-called ‘dissident’ work – developed in a critical dialogue with various degrees of Marxist orthodoxy. Evidently, Voloshinov’s (and Bakhtin’s?) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1973) is a case in point. Bakhtin’s inclinations towards history and sociology (and the necessity of a historical sociology) are reflexes of Marxist scholarship.

References Agha, A. (1997) Tropic aggression in the Clinton-Dole presidential debate. Pragmatics 7 (4), 461–497.

60

Introduc t ion

Agha, A. (2005) Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1), 38–59. Agha, A. (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Agha, A. (2011) Large and small forms of personhood. Language & Communication 31 (3), 171–180. Auer, P. and DiLuzio, A. (eds) (1992) The Contextualization of Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination (ed Michael Holquist). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bemong, N. and Borghart, P. (2010) Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope: Reflections, applications, perspectives. In N. Bemong, P. Borghart, M. De Dobbeleer, K. Demoen, K. De Temmerman and B. Keunen (eds) Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives (pp. 3–18). Ghent: Academia Press. Blommaert, J. (2001) Context is/as critique. Critique of Anthropology 21 (91), 13–32. Blommaert, J. (2005) Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2007) Sociolinguistic scales. Intercultural Pragmatics 4 (1), 1–19. Blommaert, J. (2008) Grassroots Literacy: Writing, Identity and Voice in Central Africa. London: Routledge. Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. and Maryns, K. (2002) Pretextuality and pretextual gaps: On (re)defining linguistic inequality. Pragmatics 12 (1), 11–30. Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2016) Language and superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Suoerdiversity (pp. 21–48). New York/London: Routledge. Blommaert, J. and Verschueren, J. (1992) The role of language in European nationalist ideologies. Pragmatics 2 (3), 355–375. Blommaert, J., Westinen, E. and Leppänen, S. (2015) Further notes on sociolinguistic scales. Intercultural Pragmatics 12 (1), 119–127. Brandao, L.A. (2006) Chronotope. Theory, Culture and Society 23 (2–3), 133–134. Braudel, F. (1949) La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. Paris: Armand Colin. Braudel, F. (1958 [1969]) Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée. In F. Braudel, Ecrits sur l’Histoire (pp. 44–61). Paris: Flammarion. Briggs, C. (1997) Notes on a ‘confession’: On the construction of gender, sexuality and violence in an infanticide case. Pragmatics 7 (4), 519–546. Briggs, C. (2005) Communicability, racial discourse, and disease. Annual Review of Anthropology 34, 269–291. Cavanaugh, J. (2004) Remembering and forgetting: Ideologies of language loss in a Northern Italian town. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14 (1), 24–38. Cicourel, A. (1967) The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice. New York: Wiley. Cicourel, A. (1992) The interpenetration of communicative contexts: Examples from medical encounters. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds) Rethinking Context (pp. 291–310). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, J., Slembrouck, S. and Baynham, M. (eds) (2009) Globalization and language Contact: Scale, Migration and Communicative Practices. London: Continuum.

Chronotopes, Scales and Comple x it y in the Study of L anguage in Soc iet y

61

Crossley, S. (2006) A chronotopic approach to genre analysis: An exploratory analysis. English for Specific Purposes 26 (1), 4–24. Duranti, A. (1997) Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duranti, A. and Goodwin, C. (eds) (1992) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenlohr, P. (2004) Temporalities of community: Ancesteral language, pilgrimage and diasporic belonging in Mauritius. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14 (1), 81–98. Goffman, E. (1964) The neglected situation. American Anthropologist 66 (6, part 2), 133–136. Goffman, E. (1974) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Goodwin, C. (2007) Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse & Society 18 (1), 53–73. Goodwin C. and Goodwin, M.H. (1992) Context, activity and participation. In P. Auer and A. DiLuzio (eds) The Contextualization of Language (pp. 77–99). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gumperz, J. (1992) Contextualization revisited. In P. Auer and A. DiLuzio (eds) The Contextualization of Language (pp. 39–53). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hanks, W. (1996) Language and Communicative Practice. Boulder: Westview. Holquist, M. (2010) The fugue of chronotope. In N. Bemong, P. Borghart, M. De Dobbeleer, K. Demoen, K. De Temmerman and B. Keunen (eds) Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives (pp. 19–33). Ghent: Academia Press. Hymes, D. (1996) Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice. London: Taylor & Francis. Inoue, M. (2004) Introduction: Temporality and historicity in and through language ideology. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14 (1), 1–5. Irvine, J. (2004) Say when: Temporalities in language ideology. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14 (1), 99–109. Karrebæk, M. and N. Ghandchi (2014) The very sensitive question: Chronotopes, insecurity and Farsi heritage language classrooms. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 118. Tilburg: Tilburg University. See https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/upload/44875901402d-464d-9270-82ce0fc3d875_TPCS_118_Karrebaek-Ghandchi.pdf (accessed 08 March 2016). Keunen, B. (2000) Bakhtin, genre formation, and the cognitive turn: Chronotopes as memory schemata. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture Volume 2/2, article 2. See http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol2/iss2/2/ (accessed 08 March 2016). Lemon, A. (2009) Sympathy for the weary state? Cold War chronotopes and Moscow others. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (4), 832–864. Perrino, S. (2011) Chronotopes of story and storytelling events in interviews. Language in Society 40, 90–103. Rampton, B. (2003) Hegemony, social class and stylization. Pragmatics 13 (1), 49–83. Rampton, B. (2006) Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schiffrin, D. (2009) Crossing boundaries: The nexus of time, space, person and place in narrative. Language in Society 38, 421–445. Silverstein, M. (1985) Language and the culture of gender. In E. Mertz and R. Parmentier (eds) Semiotic Mediation (pp. 219–259). New York: Academic Press. Silverstein, M. (1992) The indeterminacy of contextualization: When is enough enough? In P. Auer and A. Di Luzio (eds) The Contextualization of Language (pp. 55–76). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

62 Introduc t ion

Silverstein, M. (1996) Monoglot ‘standard’ in America: Standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony. In D. Brenneis and R. Macaulay (eds) The Matrix of Language (pp. 284–306). Boulder: Westview. Silverstein, M. (1998) Contemporary transformations of local linguistic communities. Annual Review of Anthropology 27, 401–426. Silverstein, M. (2003) Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23, 193–229. Silverstein, M. (2006) Old wine, new ethnographic lexicography. Annual Review of Anthropology 35, 481–496. Silverstein, M. (2014) How language communities intersect: Is ‘superdiversity’ an incremental or transformative condition. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 107. Tilburg: Tilburg University. See https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/research/institutes-andresearch-groups/babylon/tpcs/item-paper-107-tpcs.htm (accessed 08 March 2016). Silverstein, M. and Urban, G. (eds) (1996) Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Voloshinov, V. (1973) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wallerstein, I. (1998) The time of space and the space of time: The future of social science. Political Geography 17 (1), 71–82. Wallerstein, I. (2004) World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Wang, H. (2009) The chronotopes of encounter and emergence. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 25 (1), 1–5. Woolard, K. (2013) Is the personal political? Chronotopes and changing stances towards Catalan language and identity. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 16 (2), 210–224. Wortham, S. (2006) Learning Identity: The Joint Emergence of Social Identification and Academic Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wortham, S. (2009) Moments of enduring struggle: Review of Ben Rampton (2006) Language in Late Modernity: Interactions in an urban school. Linguistics and Education 20 (2), 200–208.

Classrooms and Schools

4

‘Taking up Speech’ in an Endangered Language: Bilingual Discourse in a Heritage Language Classroom Robert Moore

Faced with the ‘diversification of diversity’ (Vertovec, 2010) that seems to define the contemporary world, some have called for a fundamental reorientation of sociolinguistics: from a focus on languages and speakers to a focus on resources and repertoires; from unitary, localized and countable ethnolinguistic communities to diasporized (or even virtual) ones; and from fully fluent ‘native speaker’ competence to ‘individuals’ very variable (and often rather fragmentary) grasp of a plurality of differentially shared styles, registers and genres’ (Blommaert & Rampton, 2016: 26). The ‘super-diversity’ that prompts such reflections, I argue, can and should be discussed together with what seems to be its opposite: the seeming loss of diversity brought about by processes of language shift, obsolescence and endangerment. Examination of classroom discourse on a US Indian Reservation suggests that in this community, at least, people have long since moved on from the idea that all the competences associated with ‘proficiency’ in language need to coincide in a single person. These students are learning to speak (parler) rather than internalizing a complete grammar (langue); in this respect their project resembles that of (other) denizens of the ‘super-diverse’ metropole.

Introduction Here I describe community efforts to document and teach Kiksht (Wasco-Wishram dialect of Upper Chinookan) in a heritage language classroom on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation (Oregon, USA). I argue that 65

66

Cl assrooms and School s

the discourse strategies adopted in the classroom create new strategies for the capture of speech (De Certeau, 1997) by younger generations interested in the revitalization of this severely endangered American Indian language. Attention to the participation frameworks and production formats (Goffman, 1981) of classroom discourse shows how participants pool their scarce resources and collaborate to produce new voicings of Kiksht in a new register, one that is emblematic of these adult students’ emergent status as new speakers in a context informed by globalization. Most important of all, these new voicings of Kiksht do not depend for their effectiveness on any assumption that all the forms of linguistic competence associated with fluent native speakerhood need necessarily to coincide in the same person. Indeed, the register itself presupposes a distribution of communicative roles – speaker, (over-)hearer, translator/interpreter, repeater and scribe, among others – that is instantly recognizable in the organization of other formal speech events in the local community. The discourse practices developed in the classroom, in other words, enable a set of individuals with dramatically different levels of fluency in the ancestral language nonetheless to use that language effectively in public: to be seen as speakers, not by virtue of their having internalized a complete grammar and lexicon (langue), but rather by virtue of their having taken up speech (parole) in a recognizable way. The pedagogical approach, modelled on the Community Language Learning framework (Curran, 1976; La Forge, 1977, 1983; Rardin, 1977; cf. Larsen-Freeman, 1986), was radically transformed and at least partially indigenized through a series of negotiations that seem, in retrospect, to have been crucial to the project’s success. But before I describe the Wasco Class, as it was known in the community, it is necessary to put this project of language revitalization into a broader context.

Two Dangers A descriptively adequate sociolinguistics of ‘globalization’ might aspire to give a unified account of two developments, both of them widely noticed and remarked upon in scholarly literature and the mass media, though seldom1 discussed together: (a) the emergence of new forms of linguistic superdiversity associated since the 1990s with migration (Blommaert & Rampton, 2016; cf. Vertovec, 2007, 2010); and (b) the apparent contraction, endangerment, and disappearance of small, indigenous, and other threatened linguistic varieties (e.g. Hale et al., 1992; Nettle & Romaine, 2000; cf. Moore et al., 2011).

‘ Tak ing up Speech’ in an Endangered L anguage

67

Though each is often discussed as if it epitomized the contemporary moment, neither phenomenon is entirely new. Migrants have always been acquiring the linguistic resources that enable them to function in new surroundings; sometimes, e.g. under regimes of assimilation (or its European variant, integration), they have been pressured to avoid public use of their ancestral languages, if not to abandon them altogether (Rumbaut et al., 2006; cf. Espiritu & Wolf, 2000; Spotti, 2011; Zhou, 2000). Meanwhile, many communities, swept up in changing dynamics of political and economic power at several scales – local, regional, global – have undergone language shift and replacement, a phenomenon witnessed in various parts of the world at least since antiquity (e.g. Dorian, 1981; Hill, 1983; Swadesh, 1948; see Silverstein, 1998 for a synthetic account of recent developments). Viewed through the language-ideological lens of media discourse in the West, the two developments – sociolinguistic superdiversity brought about by global flows of migration, and language endangerment, framed as ‘the loss of the world’s linguistic diversity’ (Hale et al., 1992: 1, 4) – become mirror-images of each other: on one side, the purportedly ‘free’ movement of speakers (and with them, languages) has resulted in, from some points of view, too much linguistic diversity, too close at hand (e.g. in major European and American cities). On the other side, communities imagined as having remained rooted and immobile in their (faraway) ancestral homelands are seen as vulnerable to seemingly external forces of globalization; like endangered species, these endangered languages are simply overwhelmed and the result is not enough linguistic diversity, on a global or planetary scale (cf. Maffi, 2005). It is important, of course, to understand that the term diversity is being used here in more than one way. In the endangered languages literature, it is most often conceived in terms of the phylogenetic classification of languages and language families as nodes in a branching family tree (Stammbaum). When the (large) Italian-speaking immigrant population in Australia abandoned the use of Italian and shifted to English within a few generations, for example, the Italian language (as if there were any such thing) was still alive, as it were, elsewhere – in Italy, for example, as well as in books, films, TV shows and so forth; this is language shift (see Gal, 1979 for a classic account). When the last speaker of Eyak, Mrs Marie Smith Jones (1918–2008) of Cordova, Alaska, died, a whole language – and, in that case, a major branch of a major language phylum (Na-Dene)2 – is said to have died along with her: a major loss to Mrs Jones’s family and others of Eyak ancestry, and (albeit in a different way) to linguists interested in phylogenetic classification and/or grammatical typology; this is often termed language death (see Dorian, 1981 for a landmark study).

68

Cl assrooms and School s

The concentration of speakers of many languages in linguistically superdiverse (and often insalubrious) neighbourhoods in major European cities, on the other hand, is a crisis of a different sort, especially for liberal theorists and (other) elites in Europe and North America who assume that societal cohesion depends on wide acceptance of a single, common (standardized) language (cf. Kymlicka, 1995). Linguistic diversity in this second sense – conceived not in terms of phylogenetic affiliation but in terms of language barriers inhibiting the free exchange of messages (and strategically ignoring the widespread and obvious fact(s) of multilingualism) – is seen to pose a major threat to democracy and an impediment to the development of a fully functioning public sphere.3 The discourse of language endangerment has remained largely tone deaf to the political implications of framing an apparent decrease of linguistic diversity as a loss to science (Hill, 2002; Mufwene, 2002). In fact, this discourse and the moral anxieties of liberal elites in Europe and North America about increasing linguistic diversity in their own backyards rest on similar foundations: specifically, a shared set of assumptions about the speaker and the nature of linguistic competence. In both discourses, speakers who seem to show limited, truncated, or less-than-complete proficiency – in the standard language of the host community or the ancestral language of the traditional community – are a sign, and a source, of trouble.

When is a Speaker? In this highly charged sociopolitical context, the emerging literature of sociolinguistic superdiversity and the more established literature of language shift and obsolescence converge: both complicate inherited notions of the unitary, fully fluent L1 native speaker as the unmarked case, the baseline, the normal starting-point for description and analysis. An emerging sociolinguistics of globalization has begun decisively to move beyond certain anchoring concepts of an older languages-and-speakers sociolinguistics, chief among them the notion of unitary, localized and countable ethnolinguistic communities, and the notion that the speech of non-mobile fully fluent native speakers4 should serve as the benchmark against which all less-than-full fluencies must be measured (cf. Blommaert & Rampton, 2016; Moore et al., 2011). In their call for a sociolinguistics of superdiversity, Blommaert and Rampton (2016) chart a movement, long underway in sociolinguistics, from a study that takes (named) languages and (native) speakers as pre-theoretical givens to one oriented instead to internally differentiated speaker repertoires,

‘ Tak ing up Speech’ in an Endangered L anguage

69

and to linguistic resources deployed to various effects in various contexts of use. Instead of ‘prioritizing the “native speakers of a language”, treating early experience of living in families and stable speech communities as crucial to grammatical competence and coherent discourse’, Blommaert and Rampton suggest that we ‘dispense with a priori assumptions about the links between origins, upbringing, proficiency and types of language,’ and focus instead on ‘individuals’ very variable (and often rather fragmentary) grasp of a plurality of differentially shared styles, registers and genres, which are picked up (and maybe then partially forgotten) within biographical trajectories that develop in actual histories and topographies’ (Blommaert & Rampton, 2016: 26; cf. Blommaert & Backus, 2011). With this shift of focus, the speaker is no longer positioned as unitary. Blommaert and Rampton (2016) invoke Bakhtin’s (1981) account of double voicing and Goffman’s (1981) concept of production formats to demonstrate the variety of alignments speakers maintain to their different speech styles, which are often parodic, indirect or playful. They go on: So although notions like ‘native speaker’, ‘mother tongue’ and ‘ethnolinguistic group’ have considerable ideological force (and as such should certainly feature as objects of analysis), they should have no place in the sociolinguistic toolkit itself. When the reassurance afforded by a priori classifications like these is abandoned, research instead has to address the ways in which people take on different linguistic forms as they align and disaffiliate with different groups at different moments and stages. It has to investigate how they (try to) opt in and opt out, how they perform or play with linguistic signs of group belonging, and how they develop particular trajectories of group identification throughout their lives. (Blommaert & Rampton, 2016: 26) Certainly in the case discussed below – and arguably in every case of heritage language learning – we see vivid examples of people engaging with ‘linguistic signs of group belonging,’ and ‘taking on’ new linguistic forms and speech practices as part of a broader project of aligning and affiliating themselves with recognized (in the present case, tribal) social groups. The literature on language shift and obsolescence – especially work based on close empirical observation in contracting linguistic communities – has been complicating the notion of the unitary and fully fluent native speaker since the 1970s, albeit more from a structural (grammatical) than a functional (usage-based) perspective. This work has focused on describing the differential fluencies displayed by remaining speakers in communities undergoing language shift, often creating subgroupings based on characteristic

70

Cl assrooms and School s

patterns of linguistic change-in-progress. Voegelin and Voegelin (1977), for example, divided remaining speakers of the Mexican indigenous language Tübatulabal into four groups: (a) speakers of complex sentences; (b) speakers of simple sentences; (c) speakers who insert Tübatulabal words into English sentences and (d) ‘Comprehenders who do not speak Tübatulabal’, claiming to derive their scheme from one used by ‘current speakers of Tübatulabal in classifying varieties of their language’ (Voegelin & Voegelin, 1977: 333, footnote 2). Nancy Dorian, in her landmark studies of the East Sutherland dialect of Scots Gaelic, observed ‘a continuum of proficiency … from full fluency to the barest skills necessary for conversation in the dying language’ (Dorian, 1977: 34). With meticulous care, Dorian charted over a number of years people’s differential control of a number of Gaelic phonological, morphophonemic and constructional features.5 On this basis, Dorian developed her own classification of speakers into (a) older fluent speakers, (b) younger fluent speakers, (c) semi-speakers, (d) low-proficiency semi-speakers and (e) near-passive bilinguals. She reported that this system was sometimes at variance with classifications offered by people in the community, who tended to overestimate the proficiency of speakers who displayed strong language loyalty (Dorian, 1982). The inherited notion of the fully fluent native speaker – someone whose ideal and complete linguistic competence becomes a kind of baseline against which actual language skills are perpetually measured – has also been subjected to severe critique in a number of studies in the fields of educational linguistics and second language acquisition. The idea that native speaker competence should be the goal of all language learning, for example, has been in question in the latter field at least since the work of Firth and Wagner (2007; cf. Creese & Blackledge, 2011). Meanwhile, the ascription to speakers and to whole populations of states of semilingualism – of being able to speak no language tolerably (to paraphrase Bloomfield, 1927) – has been a recurring feature in expert and popular discourses centring on sources of moral panic in contemporary Europe and North America. New versions of this pernicious idea are a robust presence in educational policy discourse and in the media coverage of public education and so-called schools in crisis (Cummins, 1979; cf. De Costa, 2010, Martin-Jones & Romaine, 1986; Pyle 1996). With the advent of a new regime of standardized testing, pupils labelled as ‘low-achieving’ in US public schools once again face the likelihood of being categorized as nonspeakers of any language (Macswan, 2000, 2001). Similar stigmatization awaits migrant populations in European cities when they are accused of poorly integrating themselves into their host societies, as Stroud’s (2004)

‘ Tak ing up Speech’ in an Endangered L anguage

71

study of so-called Rinkeby Swedish clearly shows (compare Spotti, 2011 on Dutch language testing for immigrants). Asylum-seekers who appear – on the basis of antiquated and irrelevant forms of linguistic assessment – not to be fully fluent speakers of their putative national languages are routinely returned into the hands of their tormentors, as Blommaert (2009) and others have shown. Closer to home, as it were, Anne Goodfellow in a recent article asks a number of provocative questions about community-based efforts at language revitalization in Native American communities. ‘When asked about the level of fluency of students coming out of these [community-based programs], presenters [at a conference] claim that the languages are not very strong, that almost everywhere they’re “dying out” and being replaced by English’ (Goodfellow, 2003: 41). ‘Why,’ asks Goodfellow, ‘aren’t these programs working when so much is at stake and so much tireless devotion is put into the goal of keeping these languages alive?’ She continues: In many cases, if [students] do begin to be able to speak the language, it is in a ‘pidginized’ form that often combines English grammatical and phonological structures with vocabulary from the Native American language. The problem is that since this pidgin language is not considered to be the ‘real’ language, we constantly hear of the failure of Native language programs to produce ‘fluent’ speakers. (Goodfellow, 2003: 42) She has a provocative suggestion: ‘Instead of asking why these programs aren’t working … I’d suggest that we look at the issue of language maintenance in a new way. More specifically, we should accept these “pidginized” languages as new forms of Native American languages’ (2003: 42). While I am in sympathy with Goodfellow’s attempt to disrupt pervasive narratives of American Indian failure (Meek, 2011; cf. Powell, 1973 for a fascinating discussion of Quileute language teaching), it leaves some important questions un-asked – for example, the identity of ‘we’. More recently, Jocelyn Ahlers has examined ‘the public use of Native American languages by non-fluent speakers’ from Northern California tribes, and her argument is that foregrounding the metacommunicative/pragmatic function of such language use over referential function highlights a broader Native American identity shared by speaker and audience and creates a discourse space in which a subsequent English speech event is understood by audience members to come from, and be informed by, a Native identity. (Ahlers, 2006: 58)

72

Cl assrooms and School s

Ahlers continues: The question of how to make use of such limited language knowledge in the performance of cultural identity is thus an important one to communities struggling with language revitalization, especially given the central need to find a role for heritage languages in a world which favours the use of dominant languages. The public use of Native California languages and, indeed, Native American languages more generally, by speakers who are not fluent in their heritage languages, provides an example of one answer to this question. (Ahlers, 2006: 58) Accordingly, Ahlers identifies an emerging speech style that she calls Native Language as an Identity Marker (NLIM), which seems to me to rephrase, rather than to answer, the question. It is appropriate, then, to look at a single example in some detail, this from the Warm Springs Indian Reservation community in central Oregon – arguably one of the most-studied such communities in North America.

The Warm Springs Reservation Community Already by the second half of the 19th century, the Warm Springs Reservation community in central Oregon was by any standard a site of considerable linguistic and sociocultural diversity. Three indigenous groups, each associated with a distinct and unrelated language – each with a distinct contact history under colonialism – comprise the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs: Sahaptins, Wascos and Paiutes. Sahaptins, locally known as the ‘Warm Springs tribe’, have always been numerically dominant, and have defined the public face of the traditional Indian culture on display at major ceremonials and before tourists (e.g. at the tribally-owned resort and casino). Typically for a culture of the Plateau type (in the parlance of an older culture-area anthropology), their traditional societies were egalitarian and mobile, the traditional economy based on huntinggathering and fishing. Wascos6 have always been a much smaller group numerically than Sahaptins. Traditionally a polyglot, class-stratified and rank-obsessed society of a Northwest Coast type and centred on permanent winter villages along both banks of the Columbia River, the Wascos and their Chinookan congeners were a slave-holding and slave-trading people. Their mercantile economy rested on the surplus wealth generated by fantastically rich salmon fisheries at the Long Narrows of the Columbia (near the present-day city of

‘ Tak ing up Speech’ in an Endangered L anguage

73

The Dalles, Oregon). Soon after the establishment of the Warm Springs Reservation, the Wascos settled around the Indian Agency headquarters, positioning themselves as cultural and economic brokers. Already by the late 19th century, Wascos were occupying a disproportionate share of economic and political power in the reservation community, especially in roles that called upon their prodigious linguistic skills as interpreters, translators and – more frequently than among either of the other groups – literate, educated users of English. A smaller group of Northern Paiutes arrived at Warm Springs in 1872. Traditionally a monoglot, highly mobile, highly egalitarian people of the Great Basin type, Paiutes had been among the slaves captured, owned and traded by Wascos in pre-reservation times. By the late 19th century, then, multiple displacements of culturally and linguistically distinct indigenous peoples had created a new community at Warm Springs marked by a high level of cultural and linguistic diversity. The three ancestral languages – all of them now considered endangered – are genetically unrelated to each other and typologically very divergent.7 Intermarriage between Wascos and Sahaptins has been going on for centuries; intermarriage between either of these and Paiutes took place only rarely until the Warm Springs community became fully established in the 1870s, but extensively since then. The result, of course, is that the majority of people in the community today can claim ancestral ties to at least two, and often all three, of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs (if not also to fur-trade era French, Scottish and Hawaiian ancestors, as well as to African-American, Filipino and other relatives). It was not until the advent of identity politics in the 1990s, however, that individuals began in a public way to choose which of the three cultural/linguistic traditions to identify themselves with – and this is the context in which the Wasco Class emerged. Despite all the historical and cultural differences between the three tribal groups, since the 1970s it has been a political necessity to ensure that equal time, space, institutional support and resources are given to support the teaching of each of the reservation’s three ancestral languages. Indeed, a tripartite principle governs everything from the logo of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs – three teepees in a row – to the composition of the various Tribal Committees that are responsible for running much of the reservation on a day-to-day basis. In 1992 the principle of three co-equal tribes was further enshrined in the Warm Springs public sphere in a new and important way: in a triballyowned and operated Museum at Warm Springs, whose architecture and exhibit spaces are organized in a relentlessly tripartite fashion.

74

Cl assrooms and School s

The Wasco Class In the fall of 1992, new pilot projects were funded for all three languages at Warm Springs. Instruction in all three continues to this day, but from the start the Wasco Class stood out for a number of reasons. One reason was that many people in the community may simply have considered that Kiksht – the Wasco language – was already dead. Another important reason had to do with its students. Not only was demand for classroom instruction in this notoriously difficult language unexpectedly high; it also came from surprisingly high places in the local community. One active participant was the Director of Economic Development for the Confederated Tribes; another was the president of the tribally owned Warm Springs Power Enterprises, which operates a hydroelectric dam and had at the time an annual operating budget of $30 million; another was Public Information Director for the Tribes, and managed the Tribes’ two commercial FM-radio stations; yet another worked as an administrative assistant to the Tribes’ CEO and Secretary-Treasurer, who himself had served in Washington, DC as the Director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the first term of the Reagan administration. Others included the two Wasco members on the Culture and Heritage Committee – about a dozen students in all, ranging in age from 22 to 50. All were from families with at least some Wasco ancestry, but a notable handful came from families that most people would not have identified as Wasco until now; these people appeared to have made a personal choice to adopt Kiksht as their tribal language. Another reason why the Wasco Class attracted notice and comment was the willingness of Mrs Gladys Thompson – by all accounts (including my own) the best speaker of Kiksht, but someone who had heretofore avoided involvement in language revitalization activities – to take on the role of primary instructor. Mrs Thompson agreed to do this only if two conditions were met: (1) that her friend and fellow Kiksht speaker – really, a semi-speaker (by her own account and mine) – Mrs Madeline Brunoe McInturff, be willing to assist her; and (2) that all duties involving writing the language – including teaching the alphabet (a local variant on standard Americanist orthography) – be handled by the reservation’s Tribal Linguist, a Brooklynite by birth with an undergraduate anthropology degree who had done graduate work in folklore with Dennis Tedlock at Boston University and had been employed by the Tribes since the 1970s. The class met Tuesdays and Thursdays over the lunch hour in a doublewide trailer whose interior had been converted for office and classroom use, nestled behind the old red-brick elementary school (a building laden with

‘ Tak ing up Speech’ in an Endangered L anguage

75

childhood memories for most of the participants – but itself soon to be replaced by a new $5 million Early Childhood Education Center). Someone always brought lunch, and before and after the class session itself the students – high-level executives and administrative personnel on their lunch break – engaged in friendly banter and water-cooler conversation. Classroom activities, as I observed and participated in them in 1992 to 1995, presented a fascinating hybrid. In keeping with the pedagogical framework of Community Language Learning (Curran, 1976), students would come to class with English words and phrases in mind – sometimes written down, sometimes not – for which they requested Kiksht equivalents. They referred to Mrs Thompson and Mrs McInturff as ‘the Grandmas’, but in the classroom their primary addressee was Mrs Thompson. One by one, the students would offer up a sentence or two in English, while the Grandmas (with the Tribal Linguist standing behind them) listened intently. Eventually – sometimes after an extended pause to search her memory, and hushed consultation with Mrs McInturff in Kiksht – Mrs Thompson would respond, usually just once, in her impeccable Kiksht, addressing her answer as much to her counterpart Mrs McInturff as to the student. Mrs McInturff would then turn to face the student, and repeat for the student what Mrs. Thompson had just said, perhaps more loudly, slowly or several times – as many times as needed. The student interlocutor would attempt to reproduce the Kiskht utterance, with active coaching and encouragement from Mrs McInturff, while Mrs Thompson sat impassively, sometimes chuckling as the student struggled with the notoriously thorny phonology of Kiksht. The Tribal Linguist, meanwhile, would have been writing the word or phrase out on a large, easel-mounted newsprint pad visible to everyone, which Mrs Thompson ignored; when I was there, she tended to be sitting with her back to the easel, her arms folded across her chest, facing Mrs McInturff. The whole process was repeated with each student interlocutor in turn. Before proceeding further into the interactional details of heritage language pedagogy in the Wasco Class, it might be useful very briefly to review the framework of Community Language Learning (CLL), which was the model being emulated there. CLL, it will be recalled, grew out of the psychotherapeutic counselling approach of Carl Rogers, and was designed specifically to address the anxieties and fears of adult language learners (Curran, 1976; La Forge, 1977, 1983; Rardin, 1977). It starts from a radical disjunction between the role of the language counsellor (sometimes termed knower) and a group of students (clients), who sit in a circle, outside of which sits the counsellor or knower. As learning progresses, learners gain both language

76

Cl assrooms and School s

knowledge and self-confidence, moving through several stages; a brisk summary of the account offered by Richards and Rodgers (2001: 90–99) will serve our purposes here: STAGE 1 The client is completely dependent on the language counsellor. (1) First, he expresses only to the counsellor and in English what he wishes to say to the group. Each group member overhears this English exchange but no other members of the group are involved in the interaction. (2) The counsellor then reflects these ideas back to the client in the foreign language in a warm, accepting tone, in simple language in phrases of five or six words. (3) The client turns to the group and presents his ideas in the foreign language. He has the counsellor’s aid if he mispronounces or hesitates on a word or phrase. This is the client’s maximum-security stage. STAGE 2 (1) Same as above. (2) The client turns and begins to speak the foreign language directly to the group. (3) The counsellor aids only as the client hesitates or turns for help. These small independent steps are signs of positive confidence and hope. In subsequent stages (3 to 5), the student/client grows in confidence and accordingly the role of counsellor/knower diminishes. In some versions of CLL, individual interactions between each language learner (in turn) and the counsellor are conducted in a whisper, out of the earshot of other students/ clients. What first struck me about the procedures being followed in the Wasco Class was the way that the Grandmas’ whispered consultation with each other – in what seemed to be a mixture of Kiksht and English – took place backstage (Goffman, 1959): the students, the Tribal Linguist and I were obviously unratified overhearers (Goffman, 1981) during this phase of the

‘ Tak ing up Speech’ in an Endangered L anguage

77

activity, and we all behaved accordingly, munching on carrots or returning to our sandwiches. Here was Kiksht actually in use, and it was not only not being documented, it was being politely ignored by the rest of us. When the Grandmas emerged from their backstage consultation, they would retake the floor in a new kind of role-relationship, with Mrs Thompson enunciating the phrase or sentence once and Mrs McInturff repeating Mrs Thompson’s Kiksht utterance to the student, eliciting – in a second layer of repetition – the student’s attempts to reproduce it. Such an arrangement does seem to establish Mrs Thompson in a position of authority, as the preeminent source for all things linguistically Wasco. Her presence was necessary, then, but her own speaking role in the classroom was also quite circumscribed. Some of this is represented in schematic form in Figure 4.1 below.

Figure 4.1 The Wasco Class, 1992 to 1995

78

Cl assrooms and School s

After several sessions, I started experiencing déjà vu. Classroom discourse, loosely based on the principles of CLL, seemed to shift between and among a limited set of recognizable production formats and participant frameworks (Goffman, 1981) that in fact recalled nothing so much as the arrangement of speaking roles that would be in place on any important public occasion in the Warm Springs community. In their memory ethnography of traditional Wasco-Wishram culture, for example, Spier and Sapir (1930) identified a named procedure of Chinookan ritual speech called k’ixwulalix, denoting the practice of ritual repetition of chiefly speech by a special paid functionary: Chiefs were provided with spokesmen … who repeated to the gathering in a loud voice what their principals said. … It is well to note that this is a pattern of Wishram [-Wasco] procedure; a shaman also had his spokesman who repeated aloud what the spirit communicated to the shaman. The characteristic functionary of Northwest Coast chiefs will be recognized here. (Spier & Sapir, 1930: 213) Note that the chief here is the principal in Goffman’s (1981) terms – the one who has a stake in the utterance qua speech act. The spokesman is perhaps both the author (the one who ‘encodes’ the utterance, puts it into words) and the animator, the physical source of the utterance; primarily, at least, the latter. Variants of this participation framework can be observed in what is known about the conduct of shamanistic curing sessions, as David French, drawing on fieldwork at Warm Springs in the 1950s, pointed out: During a curing session, a shaman no longer speaks directly to the others who are present. His voice is low in volume, and he may make disconnected or seemingly incoherent remarks. A Chinookan term, qičemlit (translated ‘he utters’ by an informant), refers to noises made by the shaman that include imitations of guardian spirit animals. … At least some of the remarks and noises of the shaman are repeated to the audience by a functionary hired for that purpose. … The data indicate that the functionary alternates between taking the role of the shaman and playing the role of an observer who is describing what the shaman and the spirit are doing. (French, 1958: 258–259) Notice how in the shamanistic curing session, discourse moves back and forth between two major phases, each with its own characteristic allocation of speaking roles and participant alignments: a backstage phase in which the

‘ Tak ing up Speech’ in an Endangered L anguage

79

shaman imitates the utterance of the guardian spirit animals, and a frontstage phase in which the repeater/translator turns to address the singers and onlookers directly, seemingly alternating between mimetic reproduction of the ongoing dialogue between shaman and spirits (in which s/he is animator only, and the shaman and spirits are authors and principals), and narrating what s/he sees and hears in the third person, as it were (see Figure 4.2). Similar participation frameworks are in place at many public ceremonials at Warm Springs today. At any given time, there are a handful of adults in the community who are known to be available for hire to perform in the role known in local non-standard Reservation English as a Loudspeaker: When a spokesman is hired for one of these ceremonies, it is customary for a sponsor, or a person desiring that an announcement be made, to speak in an ordinary manner; the functionary repeats the words in a louder voice, employing a characteristic style. … An ideal pattern is that neither the sponsoring family, nor any person who is the focus of attention in that family, communicates directly with the public; communications are mediated through a spokesman. (French, 1958: 261–262)

Figure 4.2 Shamanistic curing sessions

80

Cl assrooms and School s

Notice again the shifting back and forth between backstage interaction involving the head of the family sponsoring the ceremonial and the Loudspeaker, and frontstage speech in which the Loudspeaker addresses the public. In the backstage phase, the sponsor might instruct the person functioning as Loudspeaker in a perfunctory manner – perhaps, ‘Tell ’em we’re happy they came’; the Loudspeaker might then turn to face the audience and, in a clear voice appropriate for an occasion of public speaking, say: ‘Dear Friends, the X Family would like to welcome everyone to this Memorial Dinner in memory of their dear deceased relative. …’ Today, all such events make use of modern PA systems for amplification. The instructions from the sponsor to the Loudspeaker take place off-mic; the Loudspeaker’s utterances directed at the public are very much on, and through, the microphone and sound system (see Figure 4.3). Now we can see how the Wasco Class ingeniously laminated a participation framework derived from a long tradition of Chinookan ritual speech onto the pedagogical framework of CLL. In 1992 to 1995, the Wasco Class was a heritage language class for adults, a practicum on linguistic field methods, a ritual performance and a networking opportunity. It was also the backstage area and a rehearsal space for

Figure 4.3 Public ceremonials (chiefly speech in former times)

‘ Tak ing up Speech’ in an Endangered L anguage

81

another event: the Grand Opening ceremonies for the tribally owned Museum at Warm Springs a quarter-mile down the road. The students in this class would appear onstage at this major public event, flanked by Mrs Thompson and Mrs McInturff, and would speak Wasco in public in a way that demonstrated, in a locally newsworthy fashion, the continued presence of the language in the community. As the date of the Grand Opening approached, rehearsal efforts became more concentrated. The Museum’s Grand Opening ceremonies, held on 13 March 1993, had three major segments, one for each of the reservation’s three tribes. The second, entitled ‘Welcome’, was the responsibility of ‘the Wasco Tribe’, who welcomed distinguished guests and outsiders, including the current and former governors of the State of Oregon, and a US Senator. During their segment of the ceremony, the students in the Wasco Class took turns stepping up to the microphone, each reciting his or her own Kiksht utterance, together with its English translation. Some used notecards, others had committed everything to memory (see Figure 4.4).

Analysis and Conclusion The specific case I have discussed involves classroom instruction in Kiksht (Wasco-Wishram dialect of Upper Chinookan), an American Indian language

Figure 4.4 Transformations of event structure and participant roles: From classroom discourse to podium performance

82

Cl assrooms and School s

that would be deemed severely endangered or even moribund by most standards. The students are adult language learners who come to class already heavily invested in learning the language. In fact, for them – American Indian adults on a reservation in Oregon – it is a process of re-acquisition, of re-possessing a language that has in a sense been theirs all along. The students’ predicament – it is their own language, even though they do not know how to speak it – is shared by many who live in communities where one or more ancestral languages is falling rapidly out of use. Their project of reclaiming their own ancestral language – and through it, culture – is not atypical of contemporary indigenous groups caught up in processes of globalization (Silverstein, 1998). Within the Warm Springs community, the Wasco Class was seen by some – not without justification – as an attempt by a local elite to (yet again) seize the advantage by positioning itself in direct proximity to a new and emerging form of cultural capital: an endangered heritage language. The same people who gained an advantage in the 19th century by abandoning their traditional language and traditions and taking up Euro-American dress and language were gaining an advantage in the 21st century by reclaiming their traditional language and culture. But were they the same people? The purpose of the Wasco Class participation in the Museum Grand Opening ceremony would seem to be to assert, and performatively to entail, just such a linkage. And given the complex history of intertribal relations in the Warm Springs community sketched above, what better evidence of cultural continuity could one wish for? But conceived more broadly, in the framework of a contemporary sociolinguistics of globalization, the project of taking up speech (De Certeau, 1997) – of being seen to deploy a linguistic resource effectively in concrete contexts of social interaction – is one that adult language learners in reservation communities share with millions of others who understand themselves as members of diasporized linguistic communities, as migrants, or as newcomers who discover that their host country has placed the onus of integration on them, and is closely monitoring their speech for signs of its incompleteness (Milani, 2007; Spotti, 2011). What seems to set American Indians and other erstwhile indigenous peoples apart is that they became displaced people without ever leaving home. In these communities, a little of the ancestral language goes a long way. What seems to be crucial in a number of cases is not that new speakers control all, or even most, of the resources of the language as it was spoken in previous generations. What is crucial is that they acquire, along with the phonemes and (some of) the morphemes of the ancestral language, a sense of its proper use in display: as a new generation takes proprietary control over

‘ Tak ing up Speech’ in an Endangered L anguage

83

their elders’ language, it is important that they do so with propriety, and in a way that shows respect for those elders and their traditions (cf. Ahlers, 2006; Goodfellow, 2003; Meek, 2011; Nevins, 2004). Even knowing a few words or phrases of an ancestral language – or, perhaps, more robust genres of performance such as traditional songs – enables younger people in these communities to think of themselves, and in fact to be, something other than monolingual speakers of English (Ikuta, 2009). In the process, the endangered ancestral language is neither returned to the status of a primary daily medium of interaction in the community, nor does it completely disappear: it is, rather, transformed so as to take on new and specialized functions. And it is this fact of functional recategorization and (re-)enregisterment of such languages that is reflected in the patterns of structural and grammatical change that we observe in the speech of younger generations of new speakers. What is at issue here and elsewhere, I would argue, are not any putative facts about language attrition in the mental competences of individual speakers and semi-speakers, but a set of sociocultural and functional facts, tied to processes of globalization, that have redistributed the rights and obligations associated with language forms to new kinds of participants, and new frameworks of participation, to none of which the inherited model of the fully fluent native speaker is adequate. The collaboration and pooling of linguistic resources that can be observed in this case is typical both of small and endangered varieties that remain in use on special occasions, and of language learning in contemporary settings of globalization and superdiversity (Blommaert & Rampton, 2016) – but it only becomes visible when we move beyond the analytic baseline provided by the concept of the unitary fluent native speaker and attend instead to the way that the role of speaker can be decomposed, not only into different kinds of speakers and semi-speakers (based on the differential degrees of fluency observed), but also into speech-event role-fractions like animator, author and principal. Indeed, the very effectiveness of the utterances I have been describing in fact rests on the presupposition that the role of speaker can be so subdivided. All the participants in the Wasco Class, in other words, presupposed what contemporary sociolinguistics is only now coming grips with: the fact that speaker is not a unitary role or a pre-theoretical given, but a makeshift, a covering label for a range of footings and participant alignments (Agha, 2007). Now, what of the students as second-language learners? Whose linguistic competence was on display that afternoon at the Museum dedication ceremony? My own informal observations suggest that out of 12 to 15 students, at least three or four became quite proficient, both in colloquial Kiksht and the public speaking register, and enjoyed using the language informally amongst themselves inside and outside the classroom. Others

84

Cl assrooms and School s

acquired a more limited range of usage; some had continuing problems with phonology, and on the day of the Museum Grand Opening produced a memorized string of phonemes. Of course, at the public event, all of the students, whatever their degree of fluency in Kiksht, were in one way or another repeating what they had been taught by the Grandmas – but it is essential to see that that is precisely what made their public utterances legitimate and effective, whatever their individual fluencies or internal grasp of the grammar. This is neither an exotic phenomenon, nor is it specific to situations of language shift and endangerment. The organization of dialogic interaction in the Wasco language classroom is clearly rooted in specific traditions of Chinookan formal speech – but the diversity of participant role-fractions, and the modes of participation they enable, are in fact neither unique nor culturally specific, but typical of multilingual communities. In his now classic study of language crossing among adolescents, for example, Ben Rampton noted that ‘Panjabi was suited to interethnic jocular abuse precisely because of its status as a language learner variety among white and black adolescents’ (Rampton, 1995: 175; emphasis in original). ‘This might seem surprising in view of the value set on linguistic skill in jocular insult exchanges’, writes Rampton, ‘but since most young people of Caribbean and Anglo descent were expected to be almost completely ignorant of the language, even a little knowledge could be lauded as exceptional ability’ (1995: 175). Not only that, but ‘ignorance of propositional meaning and a pressing dependence on the linguistic models just recently provided by bilinguals also meant that rudimentary utterances in Panjabi as a second language were actually well fitted to turn structure in joking abuse sequences’ (1995: 175). What is this but the transformation of an erstwhile linguistic variety (Panjabi) into a register designed to take on specialized microfunctions in minimal forms – just what has been observed of so-called endangered languages in continued use? The performance of the Wasco Class at the Museum Grand Opening in 1993 was a major public success – it wowed the audience. Many people in the community told me that they had not heard so much ‘Wasco language’ spoken in public for decades. After this, many things changed: •

Teaching of Kiksht was expanded to include first and second graders, and continues today. Two younger women – Radine Johnson, Mrs Thompson’s granddaughter, and Val Switzler – took over teaching responsibilities, and continued their own language learning: Ms Johnson via an ongoing Master-Apprentice relationship (Hinton, 1997) with her

‘ Tak ing up Speech’ in an Endangered L anguage

• •

85

grandmother, Ms Switzler by undertaking graduate study in Linguistics. Both are highly proficient speakers of Kiksht. Anglo linguists with easel-mounted pads (or tape-recorders) are no longer a presence in the classroom (both Ms Johnson and Ms Switzler are now fully literate in Kiksht). A vast archive of recordings of Mrs Thompson and Mrs McInturff – a much larger sample of the language than any previous fieldworker has ever managed to collect – continues to be amassed via digital audio and video.

‘Taking up speech’ is an English translation of a French catchphrase, la prise de parole. Today it seems to belong to two distinct registers: one having to do with the activity of public speaking – as an internet search term it turns up the web pages of speech therapists and other professionals with expertise in elocution, corporate communications and media training – and one having to do with the strikes and protests of May 1968 in France. It provides the title of a pamphlet published in October of that year by Michel de Certeau, in which he records his experience of those events: ‘a throng became poetic’, he wrote; ‘everyone finally began to talk: about essential things, about society, about happiness, about knowledge, about art, about politics’ (De Certeau, 1997: 13). The lessons to be learned from the case discussed here are perhaps less dramatic, but both senses of the phrase seem relevant. The more immediate implications were neatly summed up by Ms Johnson in a recent conversation with a visitor to her Wasco Class with first and second graders: Radine Johnson said, ‘Our language doesn’t work on an agenda. It’s learned by hearing and repeating it, and that’s what we do. It will never work in lesson plans, because there’s always so much to learn, even about a single word.’ (A single Wasco verb, for example, can have 40,000 separate conjugations) (Haynes, 2004: 95)

Acknowledgments This chapter was previously published in the University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Educational Linguistics (WPEL) 27 (2), 57–78 (2012). Some of the material has been presented in talks given at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Philadelphia), and at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Göttingen). I am grateful to audiences in both places for their stimulating comments and questions, and to Jan Blommaert for his written comments on an earlier draft.

86

Cl assrooms and School s

Notes (1) See Moore, 2007 for an earlier attempt. (2) The consensus view of historical linguists is that the Na-Dene language phylum is divided into two branches or ‘superfamilies’, Athabaskan-Eyak and Tlingit. The Athabaskan language family includes such well-known entities as Navaho and the Apachean languages. (3) Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. See Gal, 2006 on the anxieties of European elites in the face of new (and old) forms of multilingualism; see Blommaert, 2012 for a sketch of a superdiverse neighbourhood in Antwerp; and see Stroud, 2004 for a case study of language-centred moral panic in Sweden. (4) The reference is to the consultants most favoured by earlier generations of dialectologists, who sought out ‘Non-mobile Older Rural Males (NORMs)’ – ‘informants who were not only elderly but also un-educated and untraveled, because it was felt that this method would produce samples of the “most genuine” dialect’ (Chambers & Trudgill, 1998: 47). (5) Vocative plurals, passives, negative imperatives and obligatory morphophonemic change or ‘mutation’ in the initial consonants of adjectives proved of particular diagnostic value (see Dorian, 1977: 25ff). (6) For a report on Upper Chinookan language and mythology, see Sapir, 1907; for texts in Wishram, see Sapir, 1909; for texts in the closely related dialect of Clackamas, see Jacobs, 1958; for a grammar of Wishram, see Dyk, 1933; for Wasco-Wishram contact history, see French, 1961, and for ceremonialism at Warm Springs see French, 1955; for more recent treatments of Chinookan language and society, see Hymes, 1966, 1974, 1981, and Silverstein, 1976, 1984; for Kiksht as an obsolescent language, see Moore, 1988, 1993, 2009. (7) Sahaptian (the language family to which Sahaptin and Nez Perce belong) and Chinookan were both included by Sapir in his proposed Penutian phylum (Sapir, 1929).

References Agha, A. (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ahlers, J. (2006) Framing discourse: Creating community through native language use. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16 (1), 58–75. Bakhtin, M. (1981) Discourse in the novel. In M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press (original work published 1934–1935). Blommaert, J. (2009) Language, asylum and the national order. Current Anthropology 50 (4), 415–441. Blommaert, J. (2012) Chronicles of complexity. Tilburg Papers in Cultural Studies 29. Tilburg: Tilburg University. Blommaert, J. and Backus, A. (2011) Repertoires revisited: ‘Knowing language’ in superdiversity. King’s College London Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies 67. London: King’s College London. Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2016) Language and superdiversity. In K. Arnaut., J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 21–48). New York/London: Routledge. Bloomfield, L. (1927) Literate and illiterate speech. American Speech 2, 432–439. De Certeau, M. (1997) The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings (Tom Conley, transl.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press (original work published 1968).

‘ Tak ing up Speech’ in an Endangered L anguage

87

Chambers, J.K. and Trudgill, P. (1998) Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (original work published 1980). Creese, A. and Blackledge, A. (2011) Separate and flexible bilingualism in complementary schools: Multiple language practices in interrelationship. Journal of Pragmatics 43, 1196–1208. Cummins, J. (1979) Linguistic interdependence and the educational development of bilingual children. Review of Educational Research 49, 221–251. Curran, C.A. (1976) Counselling-learning in Second Languages. Apple River, IL: Apple River Press. De Costa, P.I. (2010) From refugee to transformer: A Bourdieusian take on a Hmong learner’s trajectory. TESOL Quarterly 44 (3), 517–541. Dorian, N.C. (1977) The problem of the semi-speaker in language death. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 12, 23–32. Dorian, N.C. (1981) Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dorian, N.C. (1982) Defining the speech community to include its working margins. In S. Romaine (ed.) Sociolinguistic Variation in Speech Communities (pp. 25–33). London: Arnold. Dyk, W. (1933) A grammar of Wishram. PhD dissertation, Yale University. Espiritu, Y.L. and Wolf, D. (2000) The paradox of assimilation: Children of Filipino immigrants in San Diego. In R. Rumbaut and A. Portes (eds) Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America (pp. 157–186). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Firth, A. and Wagner, J. (2007) On discourse, communication, and (some) fundamental concepts in SLA research. The Modern Language Journal 91, 757–772 (original work published 1997). French, D. (1958) Cultural matrices of Chinookan non-casual language. International Journal of American Linguistics 24, 258–263. French, D. (1961) Wasco-Wishram. In E. Spicer (ed.) Perspectives in American Indian Culture Change (pp. 337–430). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. French, K.S. (1955) Culture segments and variation in Warm Springs social ceremonialism. PhD thesis, Columbia University. Gal, S. (1979) Language Shift: Social Determinants of Linguistic Change in Bilingual Austria. New York, NY: Academic Press. Gal, S. (2006) Contradictions of standard language in Europe: Implications for the study of practices and publics. Social Anthropology 14 (2), 163–181. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Goffman, E. (1981) Footing. In E. Goffman, Forms of Talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goodfellow, A. (2003) The development of ‘new languages’ in Native American communities. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 27 (2), 41–59. Hale, K., Krauss, M., Watahomigie, L., Yamamoto, A., Craig, C., Masayesva Jeanne, L. and England, N. (1992) Endangered languages. Language 68 (1), 1–42. Haynes, E.F. (2004) Obstacles facing tribal language programs in Warm Springs, Klamath, and Grand Ronde. Coyote Papers 13, 87–102. Hill, J.H. (1983) Language death in Uto-Aztecan. International Journal of American Linguistics 49 (3), 258–276. Hill, J.H. (2002) Expert rhetorics in advocacy for endangered languages: Who is listening, and what do they hear? Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12, 119–133. Hinton, L. (1997) Survival of endangered languages: The California master-apprentice program. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 123, 177–191.

88

Cl assrooms and School s

Hymes, D. (1966) Two types of linguistic relativity (with examples from Amerindian ethnography). In W. Bright (ed.) Sociolinguistics (pp. 114–167). The Hague: Mouton. Hymes, D. (1974) From space to time in tenses in Kiksht. International Journal of American Linguistics 41, 313–329. Hymes, D. (1981) ‘In vain I tried to tell you.’ Essays in American Indian Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ikuta, H. (2009) Endangered language and performance art in an Alaskan Eskimo community. Paper presented at annual meeting of American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia. Jacobs, M. (1958) Clackamas Chinook Texts, I. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, Publication 8. Kymlicka, W. (1995) Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. La Forge, P.G. (1977) Uses of social silence in the interpersonal dynamics of Community Language Learning. TESOL Quarterly 11 (4), 373–382. La Forge, P.G. (1983) Counselling and Culture in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Larsen-Freeman, D. (1986) Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macswan, J. (2000) The threshold hypothesis, semilingualism, and other contributions to a deficit view of linguistic minorities. Hispanic Journal of Behavioural Sciences 22 (1), 3–45. Macswan, J. (2001) The non-non crisis: Knowledge of language and problems of construct validity in native language assessment. Paper presented at annual meeting of American Educational Research Association (Seattle), April 9–14, 2001. Maffi, L. (2005) Linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity. Annual Review of Anthropology 34, 599–617. Martin-Jones, M. and Romaine, S. (1986) Semilingualism: A half-baked theory of communicative competence. Applied Linguistics 7 (1), 26–38. Meek, B. (2011) Failing American Indian languages. American Indian Culture & Research Journal 35 (2), 43–60. Milani, T. (2007) Language testing and citizenship: A language ideological debate in Sweden. Language in Society 37, 27–59. Moore, R. (1988) Lexicalization vs. lexical loss in Wasco-Wishram language obsolescence. International Journal of American Linguistics 54 (4), 453–468. Moore, R. (1993) Performance form and the voices of characters in five versions of the Wasco Coyote Cycle. In J.A. Lucy (ed.) Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics (pp. 213–240). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, R. (2007) From endangered to dangerous: Two types of sociolinguistic inequality (with examples from Ireland & the US). Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 45. London: King’s College London. Moore, R. (2009) From performance to print, and back: Ethnopoetics as social practice in Alice Florendo’s corrigenda to ‘Raccoon and his Grandmother’. Text & Talk 29 (3), 295–324. Moore, R., Pietikäinen, S. and Blommaert, J. (2011) Counting the losses: Numbers as the language of language endangerment. Sociolinguistic Studies 4 (1), 1–26. Mufwene, S. (2002) Colonization, globalization, and the plight of ‘weak’ languages: A rejoinder to Nettle & Romaine’s Vanishing Voices. Journal of Linguistics 38, 375–395.

‘ Tak ing up Speech’ in an Endangered L anguage

89

Nettle, D. and Romaine, S. (2000) Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nevins, E.M. (2004) Learning to listen: Confronting two meanings of language loss in the contemporary White Mountain Apache speech community. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14 (2), 269–288. Powell, J.V. (1973) Raising pidgins for fun and profit: A new departure in language teaching. Proceedings of the Pacific Northwest Conference on Foreign Languages 17, 40–43. Pyle, A. (1996) Teaching the silent student. Los Angeles Times, 11 June 1996. Rampton, B. (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longmans. Rardin, J. (1977) The language teacher as facilitator. TESOL Quarterly 11 (4), 383–388. Richards, J.C. and Rodgers, T.S. (2001) Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (original work published 1986). Rumbaut, R.G., Massey, D.S. and Bean, F.D. (2006) Linguistic life expectancies: Immigrant language retention in southern California. Population and Development Review 32 (3), 447–460. Sapir, E. (1907) Preliminary report on the language and mythology of the Upper Chinook. American Anthropologist 9, 533–541. Sapir, E. (1909) Wishram Texts. Publications of the American Ethnological Society, 1. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Sapir, E. (1929) Central and North American languages. Encyclopaedia Britannica 14th ed., Vol. 5. (pp. 138–141). London/New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica. Silverstein, M. (1976) Hierarchy of features and ergativity. In R.M.W. Dixon (ed.), Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages (pp. 112–171). Canberra: AIAS. Linguistic Series 22; New Jersey: Humanities Press, Inc. Silverstein, M. (1984) Wasco-Wishram lexical derivational processes vs. word internal syntax. In D. Testen et al. (ed.) Papers from the Parasession on Lexical Semantics (pp. 270–288). Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. Silverstein, M. (1998) Contemporary transformations of local linguistic communities. Annual Review of Anthropology 27, 401–426. Spier, L. and Sapir, E. (1930) Wishram ethnography. University of Washington Publications in Anthropology 3 (3), 151–300. Spotti, M. (2011) Ideologies of success for superdiverse citizens: The Dutch testing regime for integration and the online private sector. Diversities 13 (2), 39–52. Stroud, C. (2004) Rinkeby Swedish and semilingualism in language ideological debates: A Bourdieuean perspective. Journal of Sociolingustics 8 (2), 196–214. Swadesh, M. (1948) Sociologic notes on obsolescent languages. International Journal Applied Linguistics 14, 226–235. Vertovec, S. (2007) Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6), 1024–1054. Vertovec, S. (2010) Towards post-multiculturalism? Changing communities, contexts and conditions of diversity. International Social Science Journal 199, 83–95. Voegelin, C.F. and Voegelin, F.M. (1977) Is Tübatulabal de-acquisition relevant to theories of language acquisition? International Journal of American Linguistics 43 (4), 333–338. Zhou, M. (2000) Straddling different worlds: The acculturation of Vietnamese refugee children. In R. Rumbaut and A. Portes (eds) Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America (pp. 187–227). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

5 Rye Bread for Lunch, Lasagne for Breakfast: Enregisterment, Classrooms and National Food Norms in Superdiversity Martha Sif Karrebæk

In the beginning of August 2012, I was interviewed on the morning program on the biggest radio station in Denmark. The invitation was prompted by the story entitled Madpakken gør integration svær1 (‘Packed lunch makes integration difficult’) which was issued by the communication department at my university (University of Copenhagen). One of the main points was that rye bread constitutes an essential part of what is treated as an appropriate and proper Danish lunch-box in schools and that few children with an immigrant background bring this. The rest of the week I was quoted, contacted, or interviewed by journalists from other radio channels, the largest national newspapers, several magazines, the only English language newspaper in Denmark, and the two national television stations, including the Friday evening 9 o’clock news.2 What most of the journalists asked me was ‘What is wrong with rye bread?’; I replied that there is nothing wrong with rye bread per se, but there may be wrong ways to use it socially. Of course, there is no inherent relation between, on the one hand, the societal phenomenon of ‘integration’, which featured centrally in the story sent out by the communication department and the media uptake, and on the other hand, the food item rye bread. Yet although I myself never used the term ‘integration’, I certainly agree that there is in fact a relation. Throughout this contribution I will explain what this relation consists of and how it is constructed, deployed, and imposed. My empirical case concerns food cultural practices 90

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

91

in a classroom in Copenhagen, Denmark, and the specific indexicalities, or social and cultural meanings, that food has obtained here. I will also discuss the cultural conditions that afforded such meanings, and finally I will touch on the relevance of this study of language situated in a particular classroom for the wider frame of what is now known as the ‘Sociolinguistics of Superdiversity’ (Blommaert & Rampton, 2016; Creese & Blackledge, 2010). In the conclusion I return briefly to the media attention.

Language, Registers and Social Relations for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner Agha (2007: 2) writes: ‘(t)he organization of social life is shaped by reflexive models of social life, models that are made through human activities and inhabited through them’. I will show how food encounters is one such human activity which shapes and reflects social life (Ochs et al., 1996), and how food is an important social and semiotic resource. This insight can be traced back to the birth of anthropology (Levi-Strauss, Mead, Douglas etc.). We eat as the ones we want to be like, just as we speak like them, and we construct social relations through language, food and food practices (see Counihan & Van Esterik, 2008; Mintz & Du Bois, 2002). The social models enacted and constructed through human activities are normative. They are understandings of patterns of behaviour which are seen as ‘normal’ by members of a population and which are linked to judgments of appropriateness and value schemes of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. So: do you claim to eat pork – or not? Do you eat rye bread – or not? With such behaviour and orientations you demonstrate to be a particular kind of individual who belongs to a particular social group (Allison, 2008; Karrebæk, 2012, 2013; Vallianatos & Raine, 2008) and who orients to a particular social model (Bradby, 1997). Similarly, other people will assign you to groups on the basis of your linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour. Again, this should be familiar to readers of Bourdieu (1984). Taste is distinction and cultural capital. Food events involve food items and these are sorted into linguistic categories such as healthy, halal, gross, delicious, etc. The typification is one type of indexicality. Indexicality refers to associations between linguistic (and other) performable signs (for instance the lexical item halal) and typical usage, including contexts of use (when do you talk about something being halal) and stereotypes of users (who uses such a word? What is generally characterized as halal?). In fact, all language-in-use is indexical and it thereby points outside of the immediate linguistic context (Silverstein, 2003: 194f) towards normative centres of authority. These influence semiotic conduct,

92

Cl assrooms and School s

and motivate moral evaluations of semiotic conduct in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (Silverstein, 1998: 406). In some cases linguistic categories may name entire repertoires or registers in Agha’s (2007) sense. That is, entire pragmatically usable systems of signs (Agha, 2007). We may hypothesize (and later see) that there exists a register of halal among a certain group of school children. Food items can thereby be regarded as signs and these signs are linked to social groups and social models and to specific pragmatic effects. The pragmatic effects both comprise the assignment of food items to categories and to moral judgments – as wrong or right (Agha, 2007: 97). So, again, who are associated with eating rye bread or pork, and who are not? What is the more moral choice of these two? Also, a particular food item, say a pork chop, may be termed immoral at one occasion and by specific individuals, yet, other or even the same individuals may describe it as delicious and healthy at other occasions. Thereby the linguistic categories make apparent the co-existence of different models of behaviour and centres of authority – even within a single social group (Agha, 2007: 2) – and individuals have the competence to recognize these different models. Yet individuals do not always agree on the social meaning of food items nor of the meaning of social registers. For instance, halal, basically an Islamic concept, will mean something different to a Christian and a Muslim. Also, although most people acknowledge that healthy and moral food is better than unhealthy and immoral food, they may neither agree what food items belong to these categories (Wiggins, 2001, 2004), nor on which occasions and why they should consume healthy rather than unhealthy food (Aronsson & Gottzén, 2011; Paugh & Izquirdo, 2009). Is red wine healthy or unhealthy? Is it moral or immoral, ‘good’ or ‘bad’? How about coffee, chocolate, pork – or guinea pig (Abbots, 2011)? So, we use food to organize and define social space, we do it linguistically, and we draw on cultural models and participate in processes of enregisterment when doing it. In the classroom in which I did fieldwork, I found different prevalent social models and groups, some of which could be labelled ‘the good student’, ‘the incompetent minority child’ (or maybe better: the poorly integrated minority child) and ‘the virtuous Muslim’. And although these are my terms, not the participants’ own, I claim that they reflect the participants’ understandings, that my description is emic. The social models are linked to different registers, the food registers organize food items hierarchically in terms of preference, and the way food items are organized is not necessarily compatible between different registers. In addition, the registers themselves are subject to hierarchical ordering. Jelly beans certainly rank low on the ‘health’ register, but for many children high on what could be a ‘child food’ register. Thereby it becomes possible to use

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

93

food to create social divisions in classrooms between children who bring certain food and those who don’t, children who orient to a particular food model and those who don’t, and children who talk about food in a certain way and those who don’t. In the following I will explore the health register and the religious register associated with Islam in more detail.

Food Socialization As noticed by Language Socialization researchers in particular, family dinner is a fruitful arena for the socialization of children into members of social communities. Dinner (and possibly other meals too) is a recurring situated activity; people eat together every day, and at the dinner table they produce sociality, morality, identities, and local understandings of the world (Anving & Sellerberg, 2010; Aronsson & Gottzén, 2011; Ochs & Shohet, 2006; Paugh & Izquierdo, 2009). The dinner table constitutes a setting for linguistic socialization into what is locally regarded as preferred, valued and appropriate food – and the contrary (Elias, 2000; Ochs et al., 1996; Wiggins, 2001, 2004). In addition, an important part of food socialization takes place in institutional settings, although this seems to have escaped the attention of language socialization scholars (but see Burgess & Morrison, 1998; Golden, 2005; Salazar, 2007; Salazar et al., 2008; Thorne, 2005; Twiner et al., 2009). Most children consume at least one meal per day in institutional settings, and food, health and healthy eating practices certainly constitute a topic for implicit and explicit instruction, even to an increasing extent; I will return to this. Institutional norms of food are communicated by institutional adults, such as teachers, and they may differ from those in children’s homes as food value and food practices are culturally embedded and indexical of social belonging. In extension, in culturally heterogeneous classrooms differences can be rather large. Thereby food occasions and food encounters become potential significant cultural battlegrounds (see Allison, 2008).

Food, Education and Morality In general, health is of growing public concern.3 The average weight of the Western populations increases so fast that obesity is often characterized as an epidemic, and child obesity causes particular concern. Overweight children get welfare related diseases, have reduced working and learning capacities, shorter life expectancies, and poor fertility. As such, obesity is considered a threat against what is seen as the civilized world (also Kulick, 2009). Health

94

Cl assrooms and School s

promotion is used to motivate extensive and sometimes intrusive measures, both with a rather encompassing range (compare the now widespread general ban on indoor smoking in public places) and with a more narrow and individual one (Coupland & Coupland, 2009). The public measures seem to build particularly on two lines of argumentation: one, dominated by nutritional experts, focuses on the intake of different nutritional components. People are assumed to consume food they know is healthy, hence a much-favoured solution to health problems has been to raise people’s knowledge level (see, e.g. Pollard et al., 2009). Another line of argumentation is associated with gastronomes, professional gourmets and food entrepreneurs such as Jamie Oliver and, in Denmark, Claus Meyer. Such people often argue that obesity is caused by a lack of food education, by the fact that nobody knows good food from bad, and nobody knows how to cook. All of this then leads to destructive eating practices. Importantly, to such people, food and health is not just nutrition. It is sensuality, pleasure, and experience, to quote Meyer (2008): ‘Truly great cooking does not kill the eater’. Claus Meyer frames the recent gastronomic movement New Nordic Cuisine for which he is the primary responsible as follows: Over the last 300 years health and nutrition researchers as well as ascetic doctors have formed a frightening partnership with Puritan priests and vicars … Together these fine people have led an anti-hedonistic crusade against the pleasure-giving qualities of food, and against sensuality as such … If you just ate something of inferior taste and did it in a hurry, without enjoying, too much or at all, you would get a long healthy life plus have a very good chance of going to heaven. (Meyer, 2008) The quote is interesting for several reasons, one being that Meyer here draws forward the relations between morality and food. In his interpretation, the church is responsible for such linkages, and in extension, for the eradication of traditional small-scale food production and cooking skills of the modern consumer. In turn, this has resulted in gastronomic numbness. But food and morality have been closely related in all communities, religious or secular, as pointed out by Coveney (2006; also Adelson, 1998; Backett, 1992; Biltekoff, 2002). The well-known motto ‘You become what you eat’ was never about becoming a french fry if you ate one, but was part of a larger moral Greek philosophy concerned with the inter-relations between body and soul and the duties of man to keep both fit (Coveney, 2006). In order to educate the population, some gastronomes join forces with nutrition researchers in school food programs, usually particularly aimed at

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

95

children from disadvantaged social backgrounds. Oliver’s school dinner project is known worldwide (‘Jamie’s School Dinners’; a Channel 4 production), and Claus Meyer is involved in the Danish school food project EAT.4 In Denmark it is generally regarded as a societal obligation to ensure that children receive equal opportunities in life, yet the public attention has only recently returned to the issue of (healthy) food. As a consequence food solutions organized by the school are often interventionist and compensatory. Despite the rise in such initiatives in Denmark, the vast majority of children still eat packed lunch brought from home. According to a recent survey reported by a large Danish newspaper this is true for 92% of Danish schoolchildren (Politiken, 2012).

Methodology and the Emergence of a Research Question The empirical part of this contribution builds on a project on socialization and language use in a class of school starters in Copenhagen, Denmark. I did fieldwork among the approximately 22 5 to 7-year-old children over two school years. The children had about 10 different ethnolinguistic backgrounds, and all – except an Icelandic boy – were born in Denmark. Two female teachers of majority Danish background, Louise and Kristine, were in charge of the class. Both were trained as preschool or nursery school teachers. Louise had eight years of experience and had completed a course on intercultural education and second language acquisition. Kristine had two years of experience and had received no supplementary training. I video- and audiorecorded in class, during breaks and after-school activities (over 200 hours of audio-recording and 70 hours of video-recording). In addition, I interviewed almost all parents, the two teachers, and the school principal. In fact, I never envisioned doing a research project on food and language, nor had I put it into the research proposal that was granted money. My project was in line with more traditional (critical) sociolinguistics and was supposed to focus on language socialization and language use during the first year of formal schooling in an ethnically and linguistically diverse primary classroom in Copenhagen. My initial ideas had to do with sociolinguistic questions such as what linguistic resources the children made use of, if they engaged in hybrid linguistic practices, etc. It was only during my fieldwork it became clear that food played an enormous role in this classroom. My entire project, and thus this contribution, builds on insights and methods from Linguistic Ethnography (Creese, 2008; Rampton, 2007) and Language Socialization (Kulick & Schieffelin, 2004; Ochs & Schieffelin,

96

Cl assrooms and School s

2012). As many other studies in Linguistic Ethnography, it takes an urban school as its empirical field (e.g. Creese & Blackledge, 2010; Rampton, 2006), and similarly to other Language Socialization projects it is concerned with how less experienced participants in social communities (here, as in many other instances, children) are socialized through the use of language to become knowledgeable members. Both frameworks assume that the way individuals speak reflects culturally embedded understandings of human beings; that the analysis of the internal organization of data, verbal and other, is essential; and that connections between language, meaning, social relations, and institutional regimes are specific and cannot be taken for granted. Ethnographic sensitivity is required.

Health in the Local Context Health is important in society as such, but it has particular attention at the focus school. The principal had made the strategic decision to appoint health a priority area. In an interview he argued that this was done in order to educate, as well as nourish, the children from less affluent (often immigrant) families and at the same time to attract middle-class children whose parents, he believed, saw health as an important aspect of education. The teachers at the school were informed that health was a priority area, but besides this, no special measures were taken in order to ensure a homogeneous approach in classrooms. The teachers had to work on the basis of common sense and preconceived ideas about healthy (and unhealthy) food practices. The two teachers in ‘my’ class treated health primarily as a question of lunch-box contents. The only explicit instruction was that the children should bring the traditional Danish variety of rye bread and not white bread for lunch as the teachers argued that rye bread was healthy, white bread unhealthy. The teachers inspected the lunch boxes on a daily basis, and in particular, the lunch boxes of minority children. Clearly, whether children did or did not bring rye bread was related to cultural and ethnic background; all but one of the majority Danish children (a girl) brought it, and only (a few) minority families seemed to ignore the dominant, imposed, food ideology. The teachers never commented on this one exceptional girl and this made a striking contrast to their overwhelming focus on the lunch boxes of several of the minority children. From the beginning of my fieldwork, I did in fact doubt if health concerns were the only issue at stake. For instance, one of the majority Danish boys never brought or, according to himself, consumed, any fruits or vegetables, and his lunch box was certainly not

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

97

healthy according to any understandings of health that I know of. This did not lead to teacher interventions either.

Rye Bread and New Nordic Kitchen The issue of rye bread and of the Danish lunch deserves a few additional words. The traditional rye bread is made out of sour dough, rye flour, rye kernels, salt, and water, and it is treated as an indispensable part of a traditional Danish diet by both media and food historians (Boyhuus, 2005; Meyer & Boyhuus, 2002; Plum, 2010; Skaarup, 2011). Denmark lies in a climate zone which is optimal for growing rye, oats and barley; for centuries these were also the most common types of grain. Rye was introduced around year 0, and by approximately 800 AD we find the first evidence of large ovens in which one could bake bread. Of the three common grains, only rye can make dough rise. Oats were mainly used for horses. To cut a long story short, for many centuries people in Denmark consumed a rye bread-based diet, alternating with barley, and rye bread was eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The word brød (‘bread’) in fact denoted rye bread in many dialects over the country whereas kage (‘cake’) denoted wheat bread (http://dialekt.ku.dk/ dialekter/broed-og-bagning/). Today rye bread is primarily a lunchtime food item, but even here, consumption is reported to decline. Rye bread is being replaced by white bread and this is treated as indexical of a decline in traditional values, parental authority, and the nation’s general state of health (e.g. Hjerteforeningen, 2006). In addition to this, rye bread occupies a prominent place in modern interpretations of good Danish food. For instance, the manifesto of the so-called New Nordic Cuisine lists rye as one of the key ingredients, among which we also find wild berries, apples, sheep, moose, cabbage, pasture-fed animals, rapeseed oil, barley, oats, etc. (Meyer, 2008). No tomatoes, no grapes, only few potatoes, and the status of fennel is contested. This is almost a pre-Columbian interpretation of local food culture where locality, authenticity, and tradition are essential concepts, and the relationship between soil, traditions, and aesthetics/sensuality is continuously emphasized and evoked (cf. Byrkjeflot et al., 2013). The (re)presentation of rye bread and other ‘New Nordic’ food items by restaurants certainly contrasts with the average lunch-box sandwich. Compare for instance http://www.b.dk/mad/noma-opskrift-stenbiderrogn-medgriseoere ‘lumpsucker roe with pig ear and rye bread’ and Figure 5.1. The school, food artists and food entrepreneurs seem to share an understanding that there is a particular Danish pool of food resources which we need to draw on because we are in Denmark. Byrkjeflot et al. (2013) argue, in their analysis

98

Cl assrooms and School s

Figure 5.1 An ordinary Danish lunch box with open-faced rye bread sandwiches and vegetables (© Martha Sif Karrebæk)

of the early development of the New Nordic Cuisine, that this has been a conscious construction, conceptualized and designed primarily by Claus Meyer, and that it responded not the least to the pressures of the local food culture by external influences and globalization. Meyer was also inspired by the (Italian) slow food movement, the Spanish culinary revolution, the French notion of terroir and the simplicity and freshness of Japanese cuisine (Byrkjeflot et al., 2013: 45). Thus, global influences are relevant parameters for understanding the New Nordic Cuisine. Simultaneously, this movement certainly builds on the understanding that we emphasize and create belonging through food, and ‘you become what you eat’ then has an additional, local, variant: ‘eat the Danish soil and you become a little more Danish’. Compare how NOMA – the flagship restaurant of the New Nordic Cuisine – presents its dishes – several of which are from their London venue during the Olympics – with moss, shells and pebbles; Figures 5.2 and 5.3. This certainly seems to be a return to nature (although in an embellished version). The New Nordic Cuisine has experienced an impressive momentum over the last few years (see Byrkjeflot et al., 2013). NOMA was elected the world’s best restaurant by one the most influential food magazines four times, and the hype went so far that Time Magazine listed René Redzepi, the main chef at NOMA, as one of the 100 most influential persons in 2012. Locally, the influence of New Nordic is reflected in diverse areas; even a reform of the Danish school system was named New Nordic School in analogy. University of Copenhagen hosts a very large research centre focusing on ‘Optimal well-being, development and health for Danish children through a healthy New Nordic Diet’ (OPUS; http://foodoflife.ku.dk/opus/english/). Needless to

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

99

Figure 5.2 An interpretation of Nordic food with shells and pebbles by restaurant NOMA (© Restaurant NOMA)

say that rye bread has an important place there, and the number of scientific papers or health experts that promote the health value of rye bread in the media is increasing (e.g. Olsen et al., 2011). In the modern and fancy restaurants the focus on health is certainly downgraded. Yet I hope to have argued convincingly that rye bread is both indexically associated with health and with Danish national heritage. Also, the wide attention, in Denmark and worldwide, to the New Nordic Cuisine probably has some significance for the focus school’s enforcement of what is considered healthy Danish food.

Figure 5.3 An interpretation of Nordic food with moss by restaurant NOMA (© Gastros on tour)

100

Cl assrooms and School s

The Health Register in the Classroom: The Issue of Rye Bread In the following I will demonstrate the interactional enregisterment of the health register. The first excerpt is from the children’s second month in school, the children are having lunch, seated in small groups.

Example 1: Lunch with Bilal Participants: Louise (teacher), Bilal (Moroccan background); September; audio-recording _ 01 Louise: _har du ik rug↑brød med Bilal? didn’t you bring rye↑bread Bilal? 02 (1) 03 Louise: ↓har du ik rugbrød med? ↓didn’t you bring rye bread? 04 Louise: hvorfor har du ik rugbrød med. why didn’t you bring rye bread. 05 (3) 06 Louise: xxx rugbrød? xxx rye bread? 07 Louise: du ska ha rugbrød med. you have to bring rye bread. 08 Louise: ↑ja (.) det husker du lige i morgen. ↑yes (.) you just remember that tomorrow Bilal is eating the white bread he brought from home. When the teacher Louise discovers this, she first asks if he did not bring rye mark (l. 01). The question is in a negative form: ‘didn’t you’ rather that ‘did you’ and Louise thus constructs the present situation (Bilal not eating rye bread) as a negatively evaluated deviation from a preferred and maybe expected situation in which he would eat rye bread. Also, Louise performs an indirect speech act. She topicalizes the preparatory conditions (Searle, 1996) of the preferred situation: ‘didn’t you bring rye bread’ rather than questioning Bilal’s choice of food item. Bilal thereby gets the opportunity to account for what he eats (and does not eat) without her asking. Bilal does not present her with an account and this may have motivated Louise’s continued questioning, now with an explicit demand of Bilal’s reasons for not having brought rye bread: ‘why didn’t you bring rye bread?’ (l. 04). It is unlikely that Bilal is able to answer. Although this is slightly speculative I suggest that Louise may have created the discrepancy between the literal meaning of the question and Bilal’s possibilities of

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

101

answering it intentionally. As an experienced kindergarten teacher she will know that he is probably unable to provide her with the information she asks for, so she uses her question both to make Bilal aware that he has problematic lunch-box items and assume responsibility in the future. The message about the obligatory status of rye bread, and the unwanted status of white bread, is hard to miss. When the child does not bring rye bread, it is treated as an offence against classroom norms and the child is made accountable; Louise has thereby demonstrated a particular lunchtime norm. Although Louise does not mention the connection between rye bread and health in Example 1, this was obvious in many other situations. Example 2 occurred six months into the school year and at that time all children were very aware of the importance of food, lunchtime norms, and teachers’ expectations. Fadime and Muna have just been allowed to open their lunch boxes, and Fadime has discovered a cheese sandwich – on white bread. As an act of self-sanctioning Fadime hides the sandwich under the table while gazing at the teachers’ desk. But instead of making herself invisible, Fadime catches the teacher’s attention, and she walks towards the table. Even before she arrives Fadime exclaims: ‘This is what I got/I brought this’ (l. 01).

Example 2: ‘This is what I got’ Participants: Fadime (Kurdish-Turkish background), Muna (Somali background), Louise (teacher); February; video-recording 01 Fadime: 02 Louise: 03 04 Louise: 05 06 Louise: 07

jeg fik det her med. this is what I was given (to bring)/what I got. hvorfor har du ik rugbrød? why don’t you have rye bread? Louise starts looking into Fadime’s lunch-box. 1det var godt nok usundt det her Fadime (.) hold: da op. this is really unhealthy this Fadime (.) you must be ki:dding. ((1still searching inside Fadime’s lunch-box)) ((2 seconds)) må jeg lige låne din kontaktbog? can I just borrow your report book? Fadime gets up in order to take the report book, Louise goes to the other side of the classroom while looking at the children eating.

Fadime’s initial action shows that she is aware of the classroom lunch norms and of the fact that she is transgressing them. At the same time she denies responsibility and agency with regard to the presence of the transgressive food item, marked by the verbal construction; fik med is literally

102

Cl assrooms and School s

translatable as ‘was given/received to bring’. Louise asks Fadime why she did not bring any rye bread (l. 02), compare her similar question to Bilal in Example 1. Subsequently Louise starts looking into Fadime’s lunch box, an intrusive action, legitimized by the health concern. Then follows an explicit qualification of Fadime’s lunch box: ‘this is really unhealthy Fadime (.) you must be ki:dding’, and finally Louise demands Fadime’s report book (l. 06). Teachers only used the report book for messages to the parents that they found urgent. It usually concerned serious transgressions of classroom norms by either child or parents or issues of what teachers considered a lack of child caring responsibilities. Taking this into account, Louise’s question introduces an aspect of morality as it constructs Fadime’s lunch box as not only unhealthy (which is immoral in itself) but also as the result of an action that demonstrates disregard of the school norms of which the family should be aware. This is a moral transgression, too. When moral transgressions, such as eating white bread, are pointed out, this is often shameful for the transgressor, and Fadime’s next move may indicate that she feels exactly like that.

Example 3: Shame and personal preferences Participants: Fadime (Kurdish-Turkish background), Muna (Somali background), Louise (teacher) 08 Fadime: 09 10 Louise: 11 12 Muna: 13 Louise:

14 15

DET HAR MUNA OSS MED. MUNA HAS BROUGHT THE SAME. ((addressing Louise)) Louise returns to their table. hvor er dit rugbrød henne? where is your rye bread? Louise looks into Muna’s lunch-box and finds a rye bread sandwich. jeg ka ik li den. I don’t like it. det passer ik det har du fået mange gange, (0.5) værsgod, (0.5) det der that’s not true you have had it many times, (0.5) here you are, (0.5) that one de:t usundt. that’s unhealthy. Muna starts to unwrap the rye bread sandwich.

Fadime takes her report book at the same time as she informs Louise that another girl at the table, Muna, has brought something similar (l. 08). Shame apparently gets eased by being shared. Muna tries a new strategy. She uses

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

103

personal preferences as an excuse for not eating the rye bread: ‘I don’t like it’ (l. 12), but this is overruled by Louise who claims that she has had it before, and that she needs to eat it as the other lunch-box item she has is unhealthy (l. 14–15). The result, similar to so many other occasions, is that the child subdues and eats – or at least unwraps – the contested food item.

The Peer Group The teachers’ food ideology was reflected in the children’s peer group conversations. The next example occurred eight months into the school year, where Özlem’s lunch came under scrutiny. Özlem started late in the year, and had only been in the classroom for a couple of days. At the moment of recording she was unaware of the local lunch-box norms.

Example 4a: ‘You can’t bring white bread to school’ Participants: Merve (Turkish background), Özlem (Turkish background); June, video-recording 01 Özlem: det ik hvaf1for noget det xx. it is not what1ever it’s xxx. ((Özlem is unwrapping her food while arguing with Bilal)) 02 Merve: 1man må ik 1you can’t ((watching Özlem’s actions closely.)) 03 Merve: [Man må ik ta you can’t take 04 Özlem: [((turns her head to face Merve.)) 05 Merve: man må ik ta hvidt brød i skole. you can’t bring white bread in school. ((Özlem looks down at something in her lunch-box while holding a pita bread.)) 06 Özlem: hva? what? ((turns head while saying this.)) 07 Merve: man må ik ta: øh hvidt brød i skole. you can’t bri:ng white bread to school. 08 Özlem: ↑hvidt ↓brød. ↑white ↓bread. 09 Merve: jaer. yeah. 10 Özlem: hm. 11 Özlem: looks down at her pita bread.

104

Cl assrooms and School s

12 Özlem: 13 Özlem: 14 Özlem: 15 Merve:

for det vidste jeg ik. cause I didn’t know. °hvorfor må man xxx.° °why can’t you xxx.° [°hvorfor må man ik det.° [°why can’t you do that.° Louise.

Merve points out that Özlem’s lunch constitutes a transgression of school norms (l. 02–03, 05). This entails that Özlem fails to show herself as part of the group of competent and good students; good students do not transgress. As this one of Özlem’s first days she could not have known that there is such a strong pressure on her bringing rye bread. Nevertheless she feels the urge to account and excuse for her – allegedly – transgressive lunch box: ‘cause I did not know’ (l. 12). In itself it constitutes a source of shame to bring an inappropriate lunch box, and even though Özlem is unaware of the motivation for this norm, her sense of guilt is reflected by her excuse. In the end Özlem asks for an explanation. Her question is never responded to directly but when the teacher – Louise – arrives at the table, she sorts out the indexicality.

Example 4b: Rye bread makes you smart and strong Participants: Merve (Turkish background), Özlem (Turkish background), Shabana (Pakistani background), Louise (teacher); June, video-recording 16 Özlem: 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

°hvorfor må man ik det.° °why are you not allowed to do that.° Merve: °Louise. (° (points to Özlem’s food.)) _ _ Louise: _ka du huske og ha rugbrødder med hva smukke _ . will you remember to bring rye breads huh beauty ? ((while taking her seat.)) Özlem: ja har jeg oss. yes I also have. Louise: har du 2rugbrød med? (.) lissom Merve har? did you bring 2rye bread? (.) like Merve? ((2points to Özlem’s food.)) Özlem: ja (.) jeg har yes _ (.) I have. _ Louise: _ja så spis du det først ik oss? _ yes then eat that first okay? . Shabana: Louise:?

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

105

24 Louise: når man går på denne her skole ska man nemlig ha rugbrød med. (.) så when you attend this school you have to bring rye bread. (.) then 25 blir man rigtig klog (.) og rigtig stærk. you become really smart (.) and really strong. After having admonished Özlem that she should bring rye bread for lunch, using endearment terms (beauty) and mitigating formulations (modal verbs, tag questions), Louise finally replies to Özlem’s question of why you cannot bring white bread to school, although in a roundabout way. She points out that rye bread is obligatory (‘When you attend this school you have to bring rye bread’) and then she points to what is usually seen as an implication of healthy food practices: ‘then you become really smart (.) and really strong’. A straightforward conversational implicature is that if you don’t bring rye bread, you don’t become smart and strong. To sum up so far, in this classroom rye bread was regarded as an essential part of the lunch box. The superior value of rye bread was accounted for in terms of health, and this was presented as a fact. It was never questioned or discussed by the teachers, nor were the children offered alternatives. It was even treated as legitimate when teachers forced reluctant children to eat rye bread. Compare this to the rather reasonable assumption that lunch-box providers usually prepare food that they find appropriate; a recent survey report that 5 out of 6 parents think that they provide their child with healthy food (Politiken, 2012). When the teachers qualify lunch-box contents as unhealthy, they demonstrate a lack of recognition of this as well as of lunchtime norms in the children’s homes, and they signal that they find the children’s parents not to demonstrate good parenthood. Characterizations of food do ‘spill over’ to characterizations of people (Agha, 2007: 14, 97; Paugh & Izquirdo, 2009: 187; Wiggins, 2004). The indexical meanings of rye bread consumers – intelligence, health, obedience – were pointed out explicitly on a daily basis in the classroom, but a second type, or a second order (Silverstein, 2003), of indexicality was left implicit. This concerned rye bread’s association with Danishness. Rye bread is associated with proper Danish traditions, most Danes eat it, and those minority children in the classroom who did not failed to pay allegiance to what is generally regarded as a (food) cultural community and to show themselves to be well integrated. This is socialization into Silverstein’s Eucharistic consumption (2003: 226): ‘eat me and you shall become like me’. This impression was validated in an interview I conducted with Louise. I asked her whether she did not think that her focus on rye bread could destroy relations with some of the children’s families. I suggested that they might not wish to conform to the food norms she propagated. Louise responded that

106

Cl assrooms and School s

such families were difficult to cooperate with in general. Lasting lunch-box problems were associated with more general attitudinal problems.

Contextualizing the Local Islamic Food Register I will now turn to the food register associated with Islam. According to Islam food items are divided into those that are permissible and lawful – halal – and those that are forbidden and impermissible – haraam. In the local school context all food in the canteen was halal, and at social festivals there would always be a halal choice. This was announced but not talked about. Almost half of the children in the classroom were Muslims, but the teachers never initiated a talk about halal and haraam, nor did they make a general theme out of religiously based differences in food practices, and the children were never encouraged to tell about their family’s (dis)preferences. At the same time there were striking discrepancies between the Religious register and the Health register. For instance pork chops were explicitly mentioned as healthy. But these differences were not voiced in official discourse. I will now demonstrate enregisterment of the religious Muslim register. As this was never officially discussed, we generally find traces of it, and of the social model of the virtuous Muslim, in children’s peer interactions. In the following excerpt Fadime, Oliver, and Oscar are engaged in a discursive play activity primarily oriented towards transgressions of different sorts. At the same time Muna, the fourth child at the table, tries to attract Fadime’s attention.

Example 5: ‘It’s hala:m’ Participants: Muna (Somali background), Fadime (Kurdish-Turkish background), Oliver (Danish background), Oscar (Danish background); Uni (=Unidentified); February, audio-recording 01 Oliver: 02 Oscar: 03 Oliver: 04 Oscar:

har du lø (.) løverpostej med? did you bring pa (.) paté? ((laughing)) nej no. har du løverpostej med med ristede løg? did you bring paté with fried onions? nej no. …

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

05 Muna: 06 Muna: 07 Uni: 08 Muna:

107

det er hala:m. it’s hala:m. (the others are talking loudly) det er hala:m. it’s hala:m. bukserne ned eller ik eller eller hænderne op. pants down or not or or hands up. Fadime: Fadime det er hala:m. Fadime: Fadime it’s hala:m.

Muna points out that the liver paté discussed (and eaten) by the boys is haraam (or halaam as Muna says). Liver paté is a very common spread on rye bread sandwiches. Haraam, on the other hand, indexes a particular social group to which both Fadime and Muna belong, namely Muslims, and to which the boys do not belong. The word haraam evokes the inverse of the social model that virtuous Muslim girls should be associated with, and it certainly brings about the issue of Islam. Although we cannot know that for sure, Muna may have chosen to bring out the notion of haraam to underline a contrast to the boys and their discursive transgressions (compare the ‘pants down or not or or hands up’; l. 07). Islam becomes a difference that makes a difference, and in general this was how halal and haraam were used: to construct difference and disalignment. The next excerpts further illustrate the understanding of pork according to the religious register. Zaki explains his food ideology to Anton, who is not a Muslim.

Example 6a: ‘You die from eating pork!’ Participants: Zaki (Somali background), Anton (Chinese-Danish background); December; video-recording 01 Zaki: 02 03 Anton: 04 Zaki: 05 Anton: 06 Zaki: 07 Anton:

der svinekød i. (.) der svinekød i. (.) man må ik there is pork in. (.) there is pork in. (.) you are not allowed to spise svinekød så xxx. eat pork then xxx. hva ka du så xx. what can you then xx. du dør. you die. dør? die? mm. ((confirming)) er det rigtigt? really?

108

Cl assrooms and School s

Zaki points out that Anton has brought pork. He claims, first, that you cannot eat pork, and second, when Anton asks for justification, that you die if you eat it. Anton is a cautious child, and he is not entirely convinced by Zaki so he turns to the teacher Kristine.

Example 6b: ‘You don’t die from eating pork’ Participants: Zaki (Somali background), Anton (Chinese-Danish background), Kristine (teacher) 14 Anton: 15 Zaki: 16 Anton: 17 Kristine: 18 Anton: 19 Zaki: 20 Anton: 21 Kristine:

22 23 Zaki: 24 Kristine:

øh (.) Kristine:? eh (.) Kristine? jeg ka ik li svinekød. I don’t like pork. Kristine. ja. yes. øh Zaki sir at. eh Zaki says that. jeg ka ik li svinekød. I don’t like pork. han sir hvis man spiser svinekød så dør man. he says that if you eat pork then you die. aj det passer altså ik Zaki. (.) det gør det ik. (.) men hjemme hos jer nah that is really not true Zaki. (.) it isn’t. (.) but at your place you don’t spiser I ik svinekød. eat pork. det sir xx. that says xx. og det er oss helt i orden men man dør ik af at spise svinekød. and that is perfectly alright but you don’t die from eating pork.

When Kristine arrives Zaki mitigates his original claim (that you die from eating pork). He now says that he does not like pork (l. 15, 19). Claiming dispreference based in personal taste (‘I don’t like …’) is a frequent strategy for children to avoid food they do not want to eat for whatever reason; compare Example 3. The teacher ignores Zaki’s new and softer way of distancing from pork. Instead, Kristine emphasizes repeatedly that it is not true that you die from eating it. She singles out Zaki’s home as a

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

109

special case as she points out that the avoidance of pork is particular to them (‘at your place you don’t eat pork’); Zaki’s home food practices constitute a deviation from the norm. Strikingly Zaki does not receive any support from Muna, who is also present at the table, and who is very aware of this issue, as we just saw. Fighting the teacher’s authority is simply too much of an uphill battle. In sum, Zaki’s account of why you should not eat pork is not validated, but neither does she show much recognition of the religiously based food register associated with Islam. There are clear discrepancies between the dominant understandings in the classroom and those of the Muslim children, and there are clear limits to the negotiability of meanings.

Pork, Muslims and the Other Children The non-Muslim children gradually learned that the Muslim children had a different understanding of meat, although it was rather vague what the difference consisted in. In Example 7, Mathilde, Julie and Bilal are engaged in a playful food sharing activity.

Example 7: ‘Is it pig?’ Participants: Mathilde (Danish background), Bilal (Moroccan background), Julie (Danish background); May, video-recording 01 Mathilde:

02 03 Bilal: 04 Mathilde: 05 Bilal: 06 Mathilde: 07 Bilal:

Julie vil du ha det her? (.) Bilal vil du ha det her? (.) det svinekød. (.) xx du Julie do you want this? (.) Bilal do you want this? (.) it’s pork. (.) xx you nogen svin? some pork/pig? ne:j. no:. har du ik nogen svin? don’t you have some pork/pigs? øh:m øh:m (.) er det gris? erhm erhm (.) is it pig? ja. yes. jeg ka ik li gris. (.) jeg må ik spise gris. I don’t like pig. (.) I am not allowed to eat pig.

110

Cl assrooms and School s

08 Julie: så ka. then can. 09 Bilal: men jeg har gjort det engang. but I did do it once. 10 Bilal looks at Mathilde. _ _ 11 Bilal: ka du huske der hvor vi startede så spisede vi pølsehorn (.) _ _der _ do you remember when we started then we eated sausage rolls (.)_there 12 fik jeg (.) der fik jeg gris_. (.) xxx ovre i fritten. (.) så gik (.) mig og I got (.) there I got pig_. (.)xxx at the after-school center (.) then me and 13 Oliver over og spurgte om må vi gerne få sådan nogen: mmm and Oliver went over and asked if we could have som:e mmm 14 pølsehorn ik? sausage rolls right? Mathilde is play-tempting Julie with slices of crisp bacon which Julie loves. She offers one to Bilal (l. 01), probably just to be friendly, but she also warns him that it is pork. After having received confirmation that this is really the case (l. 07), Bilal refuses the offer, by saying that he does not like ‘pig’ and that he is not allowed to eat it either. Subsequently Bilal confesses that he actually had pork once (l. 09), but this receives no response from the girls. There is a complete lack of recognition of Bilal’s potentially serious social transgression, which makes apparent the children’s significantly different understandings of pork. This comes as no surprise as halal, haraam, and the controversial aspects of pork were never acknowledged and accepted in the dominant discourse. The religious register was much lower on the food register hierarchy than the health register, and the Muslim children were left without social recognition. 5

Total Refusal The lack of social recognition contributed to the alienation of some of the children. Example 8 is from a communal breakfast in celebration of the new canteen. Children were supposed to serve themselves from a selection of rolled oats, rye bread, and honey etc.

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

111

Example 8: ‘I come from Pakistan’ Participants: MSK (researcher), Shabana (Pakistani background), Fadime (Turkish-Kurdish background); March, audio-recording 01 MSK: 02 Shabana: 03 04 05 MSK: 06 07 Shabana:

jeg tror bare selv I ska ta mad. (.) ing? I just think you should take some food (.) right? me:j jeg kan ik ta noget det for det jeg ved ik hva bu:o I can’t take anything it because it I don’t know what jeg ska ha? (.) det ve for jeg kommer fra Pakistan I should have? (.) I don’t because I come from Pakistan (.) og jeg ved ik hva jeg må spise. (.) and I don’t know what I can eat. men der er ik noget du ik må spise. (.) det e:r ost but there is nothing you can’t eat. (.) there i:s cheese o:g brød [og smør. a:nd bread [and butter. [jeg ka ik li det! [I don’t like it!

I see the girls staring at the food and encourage them to serve themselves (l. 01). Shabana is not sure that she can eat anything from the buffet because, as she argues, she comes from Pakistan (l. 02–04). I try to convince her that there is no conflict, that she should not be afraid to transgress any rules (l. 05–06). Shabana refuses (again using personal dispreference as an emergency exit), and in this way she anticipates whatever argument I may present to convince her. Although we cannot know for sure, it seems likely that the repressive tolerance in the classroom and the lack of explicit talk about the differences and similarities in understanding results in insecurity and a complete refusal. As Shabana refuses to take part in commensality, she also refuses to be part of the social community.

Different Meals, Different Norms In this last section I jump to other essential mealtime norms than those associated with rye bread and health. For instance, one needs to learn what you are supposed to eat at which occasions, here: at which meal. In the next excerpts the food occasion under scrutiny is breakfast, and the situation is a

112

Cl assrooms and School s

classroom discussion in which the children are questioned one at a time about what they had for breakfast. First child in the round is Amira.

Example 9: Amira’s breakfast Participants: Louise (teacher), Kristine (teacher), Amira (Iraqi background); March, audio-recording 01 Louise: 02 03 Amira: 04 Louise: 05 Amira: 06 Louise: 08 Kristine: 09 Amira: 10 Kristine: 11 12 Louise: 13 14 Amira: 15 Louise: 16 Amira: 17 Kristine:

okay hva har du fået til morgenmad i dag Amira? okay what did you have for breakfast today Amira? (2) det ka jeg ik huske. I don’t remember. [ka du ik ↑huske det?] ↓det er da ik ret længe siden du har spist [don’t you ↑remember?] ↓it is not that long ago you had [jeg ved (ik) hva jeg jeg ved hva jeg spist] [I (don’t) know what I I know what I had] morgenmad. breakfast. … (a turn from another child erased) spist var det noget du spiste med ske? eat was it something you ate with a spoon? ne:j. no:. ↑nej? ↑no? (.) brød? bread? (2) jeg tror jeg spiste (.) rugbrød me: tsk hh (.) xx (.) med honning I think I had (.) rye bread wi:th tss hh (.) xx with honey o[kay. [xx og en lille smule klat smør. [xx and a little bit lump of butter. ((xx guttural sound)) lille smule klat smør. little bit lump of butter.

Amira is not keen on providing information about her breakfast menu. She hesitates (for two seconds), signalling that a dispreferred response could be on its way (Pomerantz, 1984), then she claims that she does not

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

113

remember (l. 02–03). This response is dispreferred as it does not constitute an answer. It is also highly unlikely to be true – and not speaking truthfully is also dispreferred. This is early in the morning and Amira’s breakfast was not long ago. Louise points this out. Now both of the teachers venture into the topic of Amira’s breakfast. After a couple of specific breakfast suggestions (was it eaten with a spoon, was it bread), Amira finally provides an answer, but this is also produced in a noticeable way. It is preceded by a pause, and it contains several signs of hesitation, distancing, and mitigation. For instance, Amira says that she ‘thinks’ she had rye bread for breakfast (l. 14), and thereby she does not claim full responsibility for the truth value of the suggested breakfast menu. It is also doubtful that Amira had rye bread for breakfast as rye bread is primarily eaten at lunch, even by majority Danes. Also, butter is presented in a mitigated form; it is merely ‘a little bit lump of butter’ (l. 16). This minimizes the import of butter which is also often constructed as unhealthy and as such it constitutes a transgression of the health norm. Why does Amira produce her answer in this marked way? Amira is certainly aware that food is a serious topic, and that her choice of bread indexes her (degree of) respectability. On the other hand, to my knowledge breakfast practices had never been discussed in the classroom, and given her minority background Amira might not be aware whether they differ from lunch time practices (which were discussed extensively), or not, and if so, in what way. Assuming that Amira wants to position as a respectable school child, she has a dilemma: should she tell a lie and claim that she had rye bread? Lying is morally wrong but at this moment it is a face-saving strategy. Or should she reveal that she did not have a morally correct breakfast, that is, a breakfast which did not include rye bread? In the end Amira does a little bit of both, and although her answer is flagged and produced as dispreferred, the teachers accept it. Maybe because she claims to have had rye bread. When Amira has answered, the teachers ask the rest of the children about their breakfast. After a couple of other children, Merve gets her turn:

Example 10: Merve’s breakfast Participants: Louise (teacher), Kristine (teacher), Merve (Turkish), Karen (Danish), Julie (Danish); March, audio-recording 01 Louise:

du har fået cornflakes (.) og Merve hvad har du spist til morgenmad? you had corn flakes (.) and Merve what did you have for breakfast?

114

Cl assrooms and School s

02 Merve: 03 Louise: 04 Kristine: 05 06 Merve: 07 Louise: 08 09 Louise: 10 11 Kristine: 12 Louise: 13 Louise: 14 Merve: 15 Louise: 16 17 Louise: 18 Julie: 19 Louise: 20 Karen:

jeg har spist lasagne. I had lasagne. [til ↑morgenmad? [for ↑breakfast? ((surprised voice)) [til [for (.) ja. yes. her inden du kom i skole? now before you came to school? (1) har du spist lasagne inden du kom i skole? did you have lasagne before you came to school? (1.5) var det varmt eller [xxx. was it hot or [xxx. [da du stod op? (.) her i morges? [when you got up? (.) this morning? da du vågnede fik du så lasagne? when you woke up did you have lasagne? jeg spisede (lidt?). I eated (a little?). da du vågnede? when you woke up? (2) ↑hold da op (.) Julie? ↑you’re kidding me: (.) Julie? hh jeg spiste havregryn. hh I had oats. du spiste havregryn. Karen hva har du spist? you had oats. Karen what did you have? hhhhhha papapa (.) havregryn. hhhhhha papapa (.) oatmeal

Merve produces her answer to Louise’s question ‘What did you have for breakfast?’ without signs of dispreference. But in contrast to its straightforward production the next turns construct it as highly problematic. The teachers immediately and simultaneously start on a response (l. 03–04). Louise wins the turn and exclaims: ‘for breakfast?’ giving the impression of sheer horror. Merve confirms, after a short pause, with the minimal ‘yes’ (l. 06). Louise is not satisfied and continues to ask Merve whether she had

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

115

lasagne before coming to school (l. 07). Maybe she implicitly questions Merve’s understanding of the word ‘breakfast’ as the meal eaten in the morning or maybe it is Merve’s reliability. Now Merve does not reply at all. Louise reformulates: ‘did you have lasagne before you came to school?’ (l. 07). Merve still does not answer. Both teachers continue the questioning in spite of Merve’s reluctance, and although this is not an answer to their questions, Merve finally gives a verbal response, as she says ‘I eated (a little)’ (l. 14). The mitigation may be in order to make the apparently serious transgression appear less offensive. Despite more attempts by the teachers Merve now remains silent. Eventually Louise closes the sequence with an evaluation of Merve’s breakfast with a ‘You’re kidding me!’ (l. 17) after which she continues asking some of the other children. The interactional sequence with Merve and her teachers illustrates that lasagne is not expected to be on the breakfast table. Yet lasagne has not been treated as problematic previously. It is not even among the food items that are often pointed out as unhealthy (e.g. white bread, candy, sugar, crisps, soft drinks, fruit juice, sausages, butter). Lasagne seems to be problematic primarily because it challenges normative breakfast expectations. Any form of oats is the ideal food choice. Louise shows this in two ways: she asks no additional questions if the child reports to have had oats, and in conclusion to the classroom discussion she says: ‘I am happy that so many of you have had oats or porridge’. Even butter, honey, and corn flakes are acceptable choices. But you cannot have lasagne in the morning, it is an inappropriate breakfast food item, in fact, it is not a breakfast food item at all, and if you have lasagne nevertheless, it shows that you are not belonging to this social community. This clearly comes as an unpleasant surprise to Merve.

Conclusions and Perspectives: Food and Education in Superdiversity In this contribution I have demonstrated how food is a semiotic object with indexical value, an object that shapes social life, and that mediates cultural understandings. Food is used to create similarity and difference, to define communities, and in extension to exclude and disalign. It also has the potential to create pleasure as well as guilt. What you bring for lunch or have for breakfast is therefore a moral and a social issue. In classrooms teachers are the institutionally accepted local authorities. In general children need to learn to recognize and juggle different values, in order to become recognized as appropriate and skilful students. These values comprise the values of food

116

Cl assrooms and School s

items. Sometimes children need to learn to suppress norms that are brought along from home, as these are irrelevant, and therefore ignored by teachers, or incongruent with institutionally recognized norms. As shown, some children encounter difficulties when teachers do not acknowledge the culturally specific character of their own understandings and when the relevant norms and expectations are not made sufficiently clear. Children with non-mainstream backgrounds are particularly disadvantaged as they can never be sure that what is considered appropriate in their homes is similarly evaluated in the school context. Chances are that there are differences. Furthermore, what the child brings for lunch, or has for breakfast, and how the food items are linguistically evaluated and enregistered, is consequential for the child’s possibilities for positioning within the single moment, the particular lesson, and the coming years. Teachers and other influential people’s assessment may influence the child’s self-esteem and feelings of belonging (or the contrary) in the long run. Thus, utterances may be evanescent but ‘things that last for seconds can have effects that last for years’ (Agha, 2007: 3). Health is regularly used as an indisputable motivation to perform all sorts of transgression of personal space (Coupland & Coupland, 2009), yet I question whether ‘it is healthy’ is always the most important point to make pedagogically. I believe that teachers should consider their strategies carefully when taking healthoriented measures. In extension, I argue for a more nuanced approach, even to food items that rank high on the health scale, and even if they have a specific position within certain understandings of traditional food culture. I have focused on rye bread. The understanding of rye bread appears to be innocent and self-evident, and therefore it largely remains unquestioned. I have argued that rye bread has become an emblem for being Danish, and due to its unquestionable, or allegedly healthy character, the discussion of the need to consume rye bread may become a proxy for discussing other matters related to integration, cultural encounters etc. And although the rye bread issue may seem to be a very Danish (and slightly peculiar) thing, it is widely demonstrated that assimilative pressures characterize many culturally heterogeneous classrooms; for sure, all communities have their rye bread. The theme of this edited volume is the sociolinguistics of superdiversity. My contribution may be said to use superdiversity as a lens by questioning taken-for-granted notions such as rye bread in encounters, by demonstrating institutional struggles to guard formerly unquestioned meanings and practices (‘we eat rye bread for lunch’), and the denial or erasure of co-existing (simultaneous) and conflicting understandings (halal vs health). It also demonstrates how second order indexicalities may emerge as a consequence of differentiation, diversity, and hegemony

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

117

under threat. Superdiversity may be just as much about pointing to creative work and recombinations of available resources as it may be about the struggles between previously dominant understandings of homogeneity and groupness and new discoveries of the problematics of this. I will finish by first returning to the overwhelming media responses to my seemingly small, marginal, and slightly peculiar research area: rye bread and school lunch. Yet children’s lunch boxes proved to attract attention and to generate emotional reactions. Or maybe it was my heretic contestation of the sacrosanct phenomenon of rye bread that generated such reactions. What took me by particular surprise was an extended discussion on the website of the leading tabloid paper Ekstra Bladet. Some of the writers on the blog quickly transformed the issue (which was ‘the rye bread tyranny’ in Danish schools) into a juxtaposition of ‘immigrants’ versus ‘real Danes’. They wrote for instance: ‘we are the original inhabitants’, ‘the foreigners have to behave like us’, and, referring to people who supported my point that health pedagogy could and should be more culturally sensitive, ‘Denmark is going to be the next Muslim country because of people like you and you haven’t even noticed’. They also shamed me for doing ‘immigrant friendly’ research. What I had discussed in my research – that school lunch is a potential cultural battlefield – became true in a new and unforeseen way. Nobody agreed that teachers had the right to force children to eat rye bread but on the other hand nobody questioned the assumption behind statements such as ‘rye bread makes integration more difficult’ (the headline used by the communication department). This suggests that at some point somebody must have assumed that rye bread should, could, or ought to make integration easier. That is not at all an obvious or straightforward assumption, but it certainly proves the point I made prior to this blog discussion, that to some people minority families consumption of rye bread indexed (degree of) affiliation to traditional Danish culture and thereby their alleged ‘integration’ into Danish society.

Notes (1) http://hum.ku.dk/faknyt/2012/august/madpakken_ goer_integration_svaer/ (2) The list of media that brought the story includes the following: DR1, DR3, Radio 24/7, Radio Scala, TV2 nyhederne, DR’s TV-avisen, Jyske Vestkysten, Jyllandsposten, Politiken, Ekstra Bladet, Børn og Unge, the Copenhagen post. (3) For a Danish example, see http://www.meraadet.dk/gfx/uploads/rapporter_ pdf/ Fedmerapport_www.pdf (4) http://www.eat-kk.dk/ (5) A very recent national debate has made the trauma of Islamic food practices even more relevant. In 2016 a vote in a regional council in a medium sized city made it mandatory to offer pork to all children in public day-care, as pork is considered an important part of the national food culture.

118

Cl assrooms and School s

References Adelson, N. (1998) Health beliefs and the politics of Cree well-being. Health 2 (5), 5–22. Abbots, E.J. (2011) ‘It doesn’t taste as good from the pet shop’: Guinea pig consumption and the performance of transnational kind and class relations in Highland Ecuador and New York City. Food, Culture and Society 14 (2), 205–223. Agha, A. (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ¯ bentos: The lunch-box as ideological Allison, A. (2008) Japanese mothers and the O state apparatus. In C. Counihan and P. van Esterik (eds) Food and Culture: A Reader (2nd edn) (pp. 221–239). New York/London: Routledge. Anving, T. and Sellerberg, A.M. (2010) Family meals and parents’ challenges. Food, Culture & Society 13 (2), 201–215. Arnaut, K. (2016) Super-diversity: Elements of an emerging perspective. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 49–70). New York/London: Routledge. Aronsson, K. and Gottzén, L. (2011) Generational positions at a family dinner: Food morality and social order. Language in Society 40, 405–426. Backett, K. (1992) Taboos and excesses: Lay health moralities in middle class families. Sociology of Health & Illness 14 (2), 255–274. Biltekoff, C. (2002) ‘Strong men and women are not products of improper food’: Domestic science and the history of eating and identity. Journal for the Study of Food and Society 6 (1), 60–69. Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2016) Language and super-diversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 21–48). New York/London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul LTD. Boyhuus, E.M. (2005) Rugbrød og danmarkshistorie [Rye bread and the Danish history]. Denmark: Schulstad’s Newsletter. Bradby, H. (1997) Health, eating and heart attacks: Glaswegian Punjabi women’s thinking about everyday food. In P. Caplan (ed.) Food, Health, and Identity (pp. 213–246). Abingdon/New York: Routledge. Burgess, R.R. and Morrison, M. (1998) Ethnographies of eating in an urban primary school. In A. Murcott (ed.) The Nation’s Diet: The Social Science of Food Choice (pp. 209–284). Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman. Byrkjeflot, H., Strandgaard Pedersen, J. and Svejenova, S. (2013) From label to practice: The process of creating New Nordic Cuisine. Journal of Culinary Science & Technology 11, 36–55. Counihan, C. and Van Esterik, P. (2008) Introduction to the Second Edition. In C. Counihan and P. Van Esterik (eds) Food and Culture: A Reader (2nd edn) (pp. 1–13). New York/London: Routledge. Coupland, J. and Coupland, J. (2009) Attributing stance in discourses of body shape and weight loss. In A. Jaffe (ed.) Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives (pp. 227–250). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coveney, J. (2006) Food, Morals and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating (2nd edn). New York/London: Routledge. Creese, A. and Blackledge, A. (2010) Towards a sociolinguistics of super-diversity. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft 13, 549–572.

Enregister ment, Cl assrooms and Nat ional Food Nor ms

119

Creese, A. (2008) Linguistic ethnography. In N. Hornberger (ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Education (2nd edn 10) (pp. 3424–3436). New York: Springer. Elias, N. (2000) The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Inc. (original work published 1939). Golden, D. (2005) Nourishing the nation: The uses of food in an Israeli kindergarten. Food & Foodways 13, 181–199. Hjerteforeningen (2006) Børn spiser mere slik end rugbrød [Children eat more sweets than rye bread]. See http://boccawired.ipapercms.dk/Hjerteforeningen/Hjertenyt/ Hjertenyt0107/?Page=32 (accessed 26 February 2016). Karrebæk, M.S. (2012) ‘What’s in your lunch-box today?’ Health, respectability, and ethnicity in the primary classroom. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22, 1–22. Karrebæk, M.S. (2013) Lasagne for breakfast: The respectable child and cultural norms of eating practices in a Danish kindergarten classroom. Food, Culture & Society 16 (1), 85–106. Kulick, D. (2009) Fat pets. In C. Tomrely and A. Kaloski Naylor (eds) Fat Studies in the UK (pp. 35–50). York: Raw Nerve Books. Kulick, D. and Schieffelin, B.B. (2004) Language socialization. In A. Duranti (ed.) A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (pp. 349–368/internet edition pp. 1–21). Oxford: Blackwell. Meyer, C. (2008) The New Nordic Cuisine movement; speech held at the meeting of Nordic Ministers of Agriculture and Food. Manuscript (received from author). Meyer, C. and Boyhuus, E.M. (2002) Dansk mad og madkultur [Danish food and food culture]. Manuscript (received from authors) to Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website. See http:// denmark.dk/en/lifestyle/food-drink/danish-food-culture/ (accessed 26 February 2016) Mintz, S.W. and Du Bois, C.M. (2002) The anthropology of food and eating. Annual Review of Anthropology 31, 99–119. Ochs, E. and Schieffelin, B.B. (2012) The theory of language socialization. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs and B.B. Schieffelin (eds) The Handbook of Language Socialization (pp. 1–21). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Ochs, E. and Shohet, M. (2006) The cultural structuring of mealtime socialization. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development 111, 35–49. Ochs, E. Pontecorvo, C. and Fasulo, A. (1996) Socializing taste. Ethnos 61 (1–2), 7–46. Olsen, A., Egebjerg, R., Halkjær, J., Christensen, J., Overvad, K. and Tjønneland, A. (2011) Healthy aspects of the Nordic diet are related to lower mortality. The Journal of Nutrition 141 (4), 639–644. Paugh, A. and Izquirdo, C. (2009) Why is this a battle every night? Negotiating food and eating in American dinnertime interaction. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19 (2), 185–204. Plum, C. (2010) The Scandinavian Kitchen. London: Kyle Cathie Limited. Politiken (2012) Vi guider 11 gode madpakkeråd til voksne madpakkesmørere. (25 August 2012). See http://politiken.dk/forbrugogliv/sundhedogmotion/guidersundhedogmotion/ECE1729002/11-gode-madpakkeraad-til-voksne-madpakkesmoerere/ (accessed 28 January 2016) Pollard, C., Miller, M., Woodman, R.J., Meng, R. and Bings, C. (2009) Changes in knowledge, beliefs, and behaviours related to fruit and vegetable consumption among Western adults from 1995 to 2004. American Journal of Public Health 99 (2), 355–361. Pomerantz, A. (1984) Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turnshapes. In M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (eds) Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp. 57–101). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

120

Cl assrooms and School s

Rampton, B. (2006) Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, B. (2007) Neo-Hymesian linguistic ethnography in the United Kingdom. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11 (5), 584–607. Salazar, M.L. (2007) Public schools, private foods: Mexicano memories of culture and conflict in American school cafeteria. Food & Foodways 15, 153–181. Salazar, M.L., Feenstra, G. and Ohmart, J. (2008) Salad days: A visual study of children’s food culture. In C. Counihan and P. van Esterik (eds) Food and Culture: A Reader (2nd edn) (pp. 423–437). New York/London: Routledge. Searle, J.R. (1996) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (original work published 1969). Silverstein, M. (1998) Contemporary Transformations of Local Linguistic Communities. Annual Review of Anthropology 27, 401–426. Silverstein, M. (2003) Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication 23, 193–229. Skaarup, B. (2011) Bag brødet: dansk brød og bagning gennem 6000 år. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Thorne, B. (2005) Unpacking school lunchtime: Structure, practice, and the negotiation of difference. In C.R. Cooper (ed.) Developmental Pathways through Middle Childhood: Rethinking Contacts and Diversity as Resources (pp. 63–87). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Twiner, A., Cook, G. and Gillen, J. (2009) Overlooked issues of religious identity in the school dinners debate. Cambridge Journal of Education 39 (4), 473–488. Vallianatos, H. and Raine, K. (2008) Consuming food and constructing identities among Arabic and South Asian immigrant women. Food, Culture and Society 11 (3), 355–373. Wiggins, S. (2001) Construction and action in food evaluations: Conversational data. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 20, 445–463. Wiggins, S. (2004) Good for ‘you’: Generic and individual healthy eating advice in family mealtimes. Journal of Health Psychology 9, 535–548.

Youth Contact Zones

6

‘You Black Black’: Polycentric Norms for the Use of Terms Associated with Ethnicity Janus Spindler Møller

In this chapter I discuss encounters in a superdiverse Copenhagen school where adolescents use, highlight and discuss terms associated with ethnicity. Three boys with a minority background repeatedly address each other as ‘negro’, ‘black’, etc. A girl asks them to stop. Her interference only causes the boys to intensify their use of these terms and to come up with combinations like ‘pale nigger’ and ‘black black’ (sorte sort in Danish with sorte being an adjective and sort a noun). I investigate how the students react to each other’s use of language and categorizations, how they explain episodes involving categorizations to the teacher and how they explain such situations to the fieldworkers afterwards. I discuss how the adolescents actively use the resources provided by their superdiverse surroundings for local identity work and how this use reflects, negotiates and comments on constructions of ethnicity.

Introduction Since the 1960s, there has been a shift in Denmark from welcoming uneducated guest workers as a necessary workforce to restricting access to immigrants unless they are well educated and considered ‘resourceful’. Furthermore, the authorities now expect immigrants to move from being ‘foreigners’ to becoming ‘integrated citizens’. An illustration of this development is the ‘citizenship test’ introduced in 2005 and offered to applicants who also need to fulfil a number of other conditions in order to become Danish citizens. The test includes 40 multiple choice questions about Denmark’s system of government, Danish history, the royal family, famous 123

124

Youth Cont ac t Zones

writers, etc. Similar expectations (or indeed demands) to ‘integrate’ challenge pupils with a minority background in the Danish school system, and several studies carried out within the framework of our project show that the pupils are quite aware of this increasing pressure to ‘integrate’. The participants in the present study even used the term ‘integrated’ to label a certain way of speaking (Madsen, 2013; Møller & Jørgensen, 2011). Pupils with a minority background also frequently find themselves being referred to with such categorizations as ‘second-generation immigrant’, ‘person-withother-ethnic-background’ and ‘bilingual’. Generally, in the media landscape and in political debates, immigrants and their descendants are referred to using broad terms like these, dividing people into ‘Danes’ and ‘non-Danes’. From any objective point of view requiring solid and convincing criteria, such divisions are of course highly problematic. Yet, the point to be made here is that on a national level, by the media and by the authorities alike, minority pupils are used to being categorized as ‘the other who needs to integrate to become a Dane’. At the same time, the population in Copenhagen is becoming ever more diverse. In 2012, immigrants and their descendants made up 22% of the population there (Danmarks Statistik, 2012). The area of Copenhagen where our research group conducts fieldwork has a relatively large number of families with a migration background. The participants in the present project represent several different religious affiliations, several different linguistic backgrounds (40 participants reporting as many as 18 different mother tongues), different histories of migration, etc. The linguistic and cultural diversity on the one hand and the societal demand to ‘integrate’ on the other are two very important issues in the adolescents’ school careers and in their lives in general. These societal conditions are reflected in and negotiated through linguistic practices (Madsen, 2013; Møller & Jørgensen, 2011). In this chapter, I address the use of terms associated with race and/or ethnicity across different situations in the adolescents’ daily interactions in school. In one somewhat longer episode, changing constellations of participants and different levels of metalinguistic awareness reveal important aspects of ascribed values and norms involved in the use of these terms. From the participants’ perspective, I will analyse negotiations of the meaning potential and enregisterment (Agha, 2007) of such terms as neger (‘negro’), sorte svin (‘black swine’), etc. Through the use of these terms, adolescents comment on and deconstruct race-related categorizations on the one hand and handle local relations with peers as well as teachers on the other. Among the adolescents themselves, these terms in many instances in which they are used are detached from an understanding of the terms as labels for a specific group of people. This dynamic and fluent orientation

Polycentr ic Nor ms for Ter ms A ssoc iated w ith Ethnic it y

125

towards ethnicity and race changes when teachers are involved. In one recorded example from school and in an incident described in an interview, two teachers use the term neger (‘negro’) in a more traditional way in a historical Danish context as an identifiable category describing a specific group of people. In the episode described in the interview, the adolescents react to their teacher in ways that signal that they find the teachers’ use of these terms problematic. This difference in reactions towards peers and teachers is related on the one hand to the societal conditions of everyday diversity and on the other to public discourse separating people by distinguishing between ‘Danes’ and ‘non-Danes’. Generally, the societal conditions are reflected in the norms for language use that adolescents orient themselves towards in their everyday interactions. One norm centre is based in superdiversity; another is based in dichotomies such as ethnic majority vs. ethnic minorities and black vs. white. My aim in this chapter is to show how this polycentricity in norms becomes explicitly visible in interactions where the participants use labels associated with ethnicity, race or colour.

Languaging in Superdiversity My analytical approach is in line with the theoretical concept of languaging (Jørgensen, 2010), which is based on the fact that, fundamentally, speakers use linguistic features (rather than ‘languages’) in verbal interaction. From a sociolinguistic perspective there is no clear method to determine where one ‘language’ begins and another ‘language’ ends. Languages as separable sets of resources are relatively recent ideological constructions most often connected to nationalist ideologies (Heller, 2007; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). However, speakers do associate linguistic resources with ‘languages’ or registers (Agha, 2007) such as ‘Danish’, ‘Arabic’, ‘Kurdish’, but also ‘street language’, ‘integrated Danish’, etc. Furthermore, speakers associate linguistic resources as well as perceived clusters of resources (such as languages) with groups of speakers, geographical space, types of behaviour, etc. This means that when people use language they are also potentially pointing to spaces, stereotypes, group membership and so on. Languaging is thus the use of language (understood as linguistic features) by human beings, used intentionally in interactions and may be described as ‘what we do when we use the uniquely human phenomenon of language to grasp the world, change the world, and shape the world’ (Jørgensen, 2004: 13). Language is used to handle social relations and to grasp and organize our surroundings.

126

Youth Cont ac t Zones

The surroundings of the participants in our study may be characterized as superdiverse (Blommaert, 2013; Vertovec, 2006, 2007). The human mobility described in the introduction has led to a type of society where classifications such as country of origin, ‘ethnic’ background, religion, linguistic background, etc. in themselves have very limited explanatory power because characterizations like that interplay dynamically with a range of other factors. This interplay, which is described by Vertovec (2006: 3) as ‘a transformative “diversification of diversity”’, leads to an increasing lack of predictability of perceived relations between language, religion, family background, country of origin, etc. A sociolinguistic consequence of the societal condition of superdiversity is that speakers have access to a range of ‘new’ linguistic resources to express themselves and to identify with. As Blommaert and Rampton (2016: 26) observe, this changes the task for sociolinguists: research instead has to address the ways in which people take on different linguistic forms as they align and disaffiliate with different groups at different moments and stages. It has to investigate how they (try to) opt in and opt out, how they perform or play with linguistic signs of group belonging, and how they develop particular trajectories of group identification throughout their lives. The alignment and disaffiliation with groups, the performance and verbal play and group belonging as well as identification on a larger scale are all factors that influence the use of terms associated with race, ethnicity, etc. However, identification is not merely (and in fact rarely among adolescents) a straightforward matter of identifying with an ethnic category. Rather, the terms that are the subject of this contribution are used in a complex interplay of locally enregistered values (Agha, 2007) and broader histories of use.

Identities and Registers: ‘Integrated’ and ‘Street Language’ Linguistic resources are not exclusively associated with languages, language varieties, etc. They also come to be associated with stereotypical users and index positions in wider sociocultural structures. People exploit such ascriptions of value at several levels of interaction. They position themselves and their co-participants according to their own linguistic background and metalinguistic awareness and the expectations they have of language use in different situations and with different interlocutors.

Polycentr ic Nor ms for Ter ms A ssoc iated w ith Ethnic it y

127

Blommaert (2005) presents a dynamic perspective on identity which covers the interplay between language use, other semiotic resources, positioning, identification and access to certain resources. He suggests that we view identities as: particular forms of semiotic potential, organized in a repertoire. People construct identities out of specific configurations of semiotic resources, and, consequently, just as linguistic and semiotic repertoires are conditioned by dynamics of access, identity repertoires will likewise be conditioned by unequal forms of access to particular identity-building resources. (Blommaert, 2005: 207) Blommaert draws attention to the fact that not everyone has access to the same repertoire of resources. With regard to language, limitation of access may be related to people not possessing certain linguistic resources or to speakers not being granted the ‘right’ to use them. Furthermore, it follows from this description of identities that the uptake of semiotic resources is just as important as their production in meaning making. Identities are constructed in an interplay with co-participants and situational factors. From metalinguistic data collected among the participants in our study we know that they are aware of particular ways of speaking as well as ascribed values and norms for their use (e.g. Madsen, 2013; Møller & Jørgensen, 2011). The following quote comes from an essay produced by one of the participants when she and her fellow pupils were asked in one of their school assignments to write about the linguistic rules they are confronted with in their daily lives. It was written by a girl called Lamis in the ninth grade: The rule is that you talk proper in an ‘integrated’ way to the teacher, because that way you show respect. You can’t just walk up to your teacher and say ‘Eow, did you hear what I said.’ It is as if you think that that person is worth nothing. It does not mean that they are worth nothing when you say it to your friends. It is just different to say it to your teacher than to say it to your friends. The friends just think of it as if you are calling them when you talk like that, but if you speak like that to your teacher it is like you’re showing you’re from staden. (Lamis, ninth grade, written essay, my translation. Staden probably refers to Christiania – a famous squatter area near their school) In the example, Lamis describes two ways of speaking. One that is labelled as ‘integrated’ and characterized as proper; the other is exemplified by the

128

Youth Cont ac t Zones

phrase ‘Eow did you hear what I said’. This latter way of speaking is described as the unmarked choice among friends. We have indeed observed that the word ‘eow’ is regularly used by the students to get other students’ attention. Lamis also describes how the linguistic production is interpreted differently in different situations. It is described in detail how the teachers may ascribe social values to specific types of language in cases where the students themselves will not pay particular attention to the form and are instead focused on the pragmatic intention. Lamis is not only describing two ways of speaking, but also what is in fact a meta-pragmatic system, suggesting that one way of speaking is reserved for peer group interaction and another way of speaking labelled ‘integrated’ is used to address adults (such as teachers) and to signal respect. The label ‘integrated’ further indicates there being a relation to macro-discourses in Danish society. As mentioned above, minorities, particularly minority youth, regularly and frequently find themselves confronted with a demand to ‘integrate’ into Danish society (i.e. adopt standard majority Danish cultural characteristics). This demand is omnipresent from the students’ first encounters with Danish institutions, politicians and media. ‘Integrating’ therefore becomes contextually identical to ‘doing what authorities demand of you’. And by extension this also pertains to ways of speaking. From other studies of everyday interaction, interviews and essays concerning language use (e.g. Madsen, this issue; Madsen, 2013; Madsen et al., 2010; Stæhr, this volume; Møller & Jørgensen, 2011) we know that ‘speaking in an integrated way’ is viewed as being the opposite of what the participants label as speaking ‘street language’ (or as ghetto language, slang, perkersprog, etc. – perker being a term associated with immigrants, particularly from Middle Eastern countries. We have observed how ‘eow’ (pronounced differently from ‘yo’ and often associated with Kurdish by the adolescents, cf. Stæhr, 2014: 46) co-occurs with a range of other linguistic features associated with ‘street language’ (e.g. Ag, 2010: 118). The use of ‘eow’ exemplifies a general characteristic trait of street language, namely the juxtaposition of lexical items associated with e.g. Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish with words associated with Danish (Madsen et al., 2010). Other characteristic features are a staccato rhythm (see Pharao & Hansen, 2006) and affricated t-pronunciation (Maegaard, 2007). In another study from the Amager project involving the same age group (Madsen, 2013), adolescents are found to associate street language with ‘toughness, masculinity, youth, pan-ethnic minority “street” culture, [and] academic nonprestige’ (Madsen, 2013: 133). In the passage from the essay by Lamis quoted above, we find the categories ‘friends’ and ‘teachers’ used to exemplify differences in the potential uptake of the same linguistic production. The girl shows a high

Polycentr ic Nor ms for Ter ms A ssoc iated w ith Ethnic it y

129

awareness of how linguistic resources can be applied in different situations with different effects (cf. Møller & Jørgensen, 2011). Lamis’s description illustrates how ways of speaking may become associated with values and norms for use as well as with groups of speakers. She also describes how these resources available to her can be used strategically in everyday languaging.

Categorizations and Ethnicity Like most people, the participants in our project refer to each other and to people in general using a range of more or less creative expressions. Among the participating adolescents we often come across expressions which in one way or another point to ethnic or race-based categories such as kartoffel (‘potato’), neger (‘negro’), nigger, brownie, etc. The terms are used for several purposes such as addressing each other, as nicknames, to tease a person and so on. The terms predominantly occurring in the examples in this chapter are neger (‘negro’), nigger (‘nigger’) and sorte svin (‘black swine’). Among the boys I focus on, these expressions tend to co-occur with other linguistic resources associated with ‘street language’ and may therefore be viewed as a part of this register. Sorte svin in a Danish context is associated with racism and is traditionally used by majority Danes as a derogatory term for immigrants with a Middle Eastern or African background. The term neger has traditionally not been viewed as racist and, following from this, not as particularly inappropriate for use with reference to (groups of) people even though there has been some discussion about whether it is discriminatory or not. There has been some discussion in public fora on whether the term is politically correct, but as we shall see in the analyses to come some teachers use the term as a neutral category. The term nigger has not played a significant role as a widespread term or as an object of metalinguistic discussions in a Danish context. Most people would recognize it as potentially offensive, but several of the adolescents in our field study identify with the term and use it in social media for instance, where they spell the term in ways that point more towards American Hip Hop culture than to a history of slavery. Negasi, who plays a central role in the following examples, uses the forms nigga, niggar and nigha with reference to herself and as nicknames for some of her friends in her Facebook interactions (Nørreby & Møller, 2015). Negasi’s use of the terms illustrates how the adolescents employ terms associated with ethnicity or race to handle social relations on a local level and how these terms may be associated with friendship groups, hip hop, slang, etc. The situational use, reactions to use and

130 Youth Cont ac t Zones

metalinguistic discussions may be viewed as comments on historical patterns of language use as well as on larger systems of power. As Blommaert (2005: 61) points out: Words (…) come with a history of use and abuse (Bakhtin’s intertextuality); they also come with a history of assessment and evaluation. This is where language leads us directly to the heart of social structure: an investigation into language becomes an investigation into the systems and patterns of allocation of power symbols and instruments. The relation between language use and social structure becomes particularly evident when speakers do not agree on the assessment and evaluation of particular words and start debating these. As we shall see, negotiations of the right to use the expressions neger and sort (‘black’) involves metapragmatic commentary as well as a polycentric orientation towards different norms. These negotiations are bound up with positioning and group membership, with perceptions of ethnicity being a central component. My understanding of ethnicity is in line with Brubaker’s (2004) who argues against taking the existence of groups for granted in studies of ethnicity, race or nationhood. Instead, he views these concepts as constructions on a range of different levels such as ‘practical categories, situated actions, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames, organizational routines, institutional forms, political projects, and contingent events’ (Brubaker, 2004: 11). The need for an approach that treats races as constructions rather than as substantial entities is particularly relevant in studies of superdiverse societies when the participants themselves address and question issues of ethnic or race-based category membership. As we shall see in the following analyses, the perceptions of ethnicity are highly dynamic, interact with other types of identification and can literally change from minute to minute in the adolescents’ daily school interactions.

Data Analysis The Everyday Languaging project (Madsen et al., 2016) studies the varied linguistic practices and social behaviour of a group of grade school students in a culturally and linguistically superdiverse urban setting in Copenhagen. Ethnographic data are collected in a range of different everyday contexts and include ethnographic observation, recordings, interviews, focus group conversations, communication on social media, written school assignments, etc. The data I address in this chapter were collected among

Polycentr ic Nor ms for Ter ms A ssoc iated w ith Ethnic it y

131

adolescents that we have followed from seventh through ninth grade (approximate age of participants being 13 to 15). In this particular part of the project we followed some 40 pupils spread over two parallel classes (see also Madsen, this issue). The first two excerpts are from a recording made in the eighth grade during a project week where the normal timetable was suspended and the pupils instead carried out a week-long task in small groups. Four groups were present in a room equipped with several computers. One of the groups consisted of three boys: Thehan, Bashaar and Musad. Thehan’s family emigrated from Sri Lanka and Thehan reports his mother tongue to be Tamil. Bashaar’s and Musad’s families both emigrated from Iraq and they both report their mother tongue to be Arabic (see Stæhr, 2010, for a more detailed description of Bashaar’s background). The boys’ group was situated in the middle of the room and Thehan and Bashaar were wearing radio microphones. Opposite the boys’ table, a group of girls were sitting, which included the earlier mentioned Negasi, whose family emigrated from Eritrea and who identified her mother tongue as Tigrinya. As mentioned earlier, the boys frequently refer to or address each other with labels associated with race or ethnic categories. In these practices of name calling, one of the things sometimes exploited is Thehan’s skin being slightly darker than Musad’s and Bashaar’s (see for example Excerpt 4). But as we can see in Excerpt 1, Thehan also uses the term negro with reference to Bashaar. As mentioned above, Negasi uses terms like nigha and nigga on social media. In the period during which we carried out our data collection in the eighth grade, she also added Brownie to her Facebook profile name. This exemplifies how terms associated with race, skin colour and ethnicity are used as semiotic resources in identity construction among the adolescents. During the specific session referred to above teasing or joking occurred regularly between the boy group and the girl group. I was present at the back of the room taking field notes or helping the groups if they asked for my help. In Excerpt 1, there is no teacher present in the room. In Excerpt 2 the teacher has just arrived. Generally, the pupils were working on their assignment but they also talked about issues unrelated to the task both in and across the groups. The recording in question lasted for approximately one hour and the sequence quoted took place after some 40 minutes. In the recording as a whole the boys frequently referred to each other using expressions like neger, hund (‘dog’) and ussel (‘despicable’). None of them responded to these forms of address as if they felt in any way insulted or hurt. In addition to the forms of address, the boys used a number of other linguistic resources associated with street language (see description above). In the first excerpt, Bashaar and

132

Youth Cont ac t Zones

Thehan are working with their PowerPoint presentation when Fatima walks up to them:

Excerpt 1: 1

Thehan:

2

Bashaar:

3

Thehan:

4

Fatima:

5

Bashaar:

6

Thehan:

7

Bashaar:

8

Thehan:

9

Bashaar:

10

Thehan:

11

Negasi:

12

Musad:

13

Thehan:

hvad med det der billede skal den være der what about that picture does it go there wallah koran jeg jeg er rigtig stresset wallah jeg er wallah koran I I am really stressed wallah I am (.) gå med dig Fatima go away Fatima gå med dig Fatima go away Fatima (imitates Thehan) aaa (.) aaaahaaa hvad laver [jeg aaa (.) aaaahaaa what am I doing (Bashaar is screaming in what I interpret as frustration) [op] med den (.) du er så negeragtig get it up (.) you are so negro-like (1.4) (‘Get it up’ refers to the picture they are placing in their PowerPoint-show) få den ned få den ned igen få den ned get it down get it down again get it down slap af take it easy (2.2) dit fucking sorte svin mand you fucking black swine man sådan der (.) det der sletter vi bare like that (.) that we just delete (Again the boys are referring to the production of the PowerPoint) hallo kan I ikke godt lade være med at bruge ordet sort (.) for en gangs skyld hello can you please stop using the word black (.) just for once neger negro sådan der like that (Commenting their work on the PowerPoint)

Polycentr ic Nor ms for Ter ms A ssoc iated w ith Ethnic it y

14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

133

Bashaar: sådan der sådan stop [stop stop] like that like that stop stop stop (Commenting their work on the PowerPoint) Thehan: [sådan der] magra [del]la like that magra della (Commenting their work on the PowerPoint. Magra della means ‘lean’ and can be used with reference to people and meat such as ham. What it refers to here is not clear from the context) Musad: [ha] (.) Musad: ha ha ha ha (imitated laughter) (Bashaar and Thehan laughs) Musad: ha ha ha (imitated laughter) ?: ssh Bashaar: hvad hvorfor What why Thehan: nigger (.) [nigger] nigger (.) nigger Musad: [ha ha] (imitated laughter) (1.0) Musad: a ha ha ha (imitated laughter) (5.0) (Negasi laughs) Negasi: åh gud (grinende) oh God Thehan: lad være med at trykke mere stop pushing Negasi: Thehan (.) gå tilbage til din plads Thehan (.) return to your seat Thehan: nigger nigger (1.4) (During Thehan’s turns in lines 27–31 Negasi is talking to the other girls and does not react to Thehan) Thehan: blege nigger pale nigger (2.4) Thehan: hey hey hey hey (1.2) Thehan: blege nigger pale nigger (1.3)

134

31 32

33 34 35

Youth Cont ac t Zones

Thehan:

blege nigger pale nigger (0.5) Thehan: der kommer en bleg nigger a pale nigger is coming (1.9) (Thehan giggles, (clatter from chairs)) Bashaar: Thehan dit sorte sort mand Thehan you black black man Musad: din sorte sort you black black Negasi: din sorte sort you black black (said giggling)

At the beginning of the excerpt (lines 1–14), Thehan and Bashaar are struggling to get a picture placed correctly in their presentation. They are focused on this task and their utterances mainly contain suggestions, orders and comments concerning the presentation (lines 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10). In their communication about the presentation the boys use a range of expressions associated with race and ethnicity and this is exemplified in line 6 when Thehan describes Bashaar as negeragtig (‘negro-like’) and in line 9 where Bashaar calls Thehan fucking sorte svin (‘fucking black swine’). All the boys use these (or similar) terms and none of them respond to them as if they were experienced as insults. They just continue to discuss their work on the computer (as we can observe in lines 7 and 10). This interactional pattern indicates that the use of such terms among the boys is a shared practice that unites them and constructs a sense of belonging to the group rather than being experienced as a face-threatening act. Instead of being experienced as individual insults, the terms appear to be engrained as in-group markers signalling toughness and coolness because of their co-occurrence with other features from the register the participants themselves refer to as street language (such as Bashaar’s use of wallah in line 2). At the same time the boys’ use of these potentially racist expressions may point to larger societal discourses. The expression sorte svin is highly stigmatized and generally associated with majority racist behaviour. Using this and other expressions widely considered as racist and taboo may be viewed as a process of revaluation where the terms become enregistered anew as (masculine) youth slang. The boys’ apparently shared norm for the use of these terms is not necessarily shared by peers (and teachers) in their school. In line 11, Negasi, who

Polycentr ic Nor ms for Ter ms A ssoc iated w ith Ethnic it y

135

is only a few meters away from the boy group, comments on the boys’ use of language. It seems likely that she is reacting to Bashaar’s utterance in line 9 since she specifically addresses the word sort (black), but in her formulation she uses a second-person plural form thereby showing that her comment is not only directed at Bashaar. Furthermore, she ends her utterance saying for en gangs skyld (‘just for once’), thereby implying that she has frequently heard them use these terms before. In this sense, her comment categorizes the activity as a shared practice among the boys – a practice that she appears to disapprove of. This disapproval might be related to her own patterns of use and identification with ethnic categories as described above but we can of course not know for sure. Musad responds instantly by saying neger in line 12 and then starts a series of imitated laughing sounds (lines 16–18, 22–23), which in turn makes Negasi laugh. Thehan and Bashaar do not respond directly to Negasi’s remark and their subsequent utterances (lines 13–15) concern their work on the PowerPoint show. It is likely that Thehan has noticed Negasi’s complaint since he says nigger twice in line 21. As mentioned earlier, I was present in the classroom during the recording and I didn’t notice anything that could indicate that this teasing was (understood as) malicious, and as becomes clear from the transcript (e.g. line 23), Negasi laughs through large parts of the incident. At first Musad continues to produce his rather loud imitated laughter. Then (from line 27 on) Thehan takes the lead and repeats ‘nigger’ and ‘pale nigger’ several times. Thehan directs these words at Negasi, but it is not clear from the context whether Thehan says ‘nigger’ with the intention of describing Negasi or just to emphasize a taboo word in response to Negasi’s request to stop using the word ‘black’. The expression ‘pale nigger’, however, is used explicitly with reference to Negasi (line 32: ‘a pale nigger is coming’). Since Negasi has relatively dark skin it is not likely that blege (‘pale’) is used in reference to her appearance. If the expression is a reaction to Negasi asking the boys to stop saying sort (‘black’) it is likely that the ‘pale nigger’ expression targets Negasi’s authenticity to self-identify as ‘black’ and thereby also her right to police their language use. In this sense, the ‘pale nigger’ expression introduces a complexity involving dynamic identities as well as ambiguity. Bashaar is not directly involved in the exchange with Negasi. His exclamation in line 33 is directed at Thehan and I interpret it as a jocular attempt to call Thehan back to work on the assignment. The expression he uses towards Thehan is sorte sort, literally meaning ‘black black’ and consisting of an attributive adjective form ending in the suffix ‘e’ (pronounced as schwa //) and a noun form (sort). Mand at the end of Bashaar’s utterance is a tag corresponding to the English ‘man’. The expression may be viewed

136

Youth Cont ac t Zones

as a parodic version of sorte svin as well as a counterpart of the expression blege nigger. At the same time Bashaar’s expression adds an element of absurdity to the play with categories and category labels because the juxtaposition of sorte and sort creatively plays on the relation between race categories, stereotypes and derogatory names for minorities and highlights the element of construction in these relations. His contribution is evaluated positively by Musad and Negasi, who repeat it and giggle. Negasi’s positive reaction to this is interesting considering her request moments earlier to stop saying sort all the time. The fact that she first criticize the use of the word sort and then a few moments after gigglingly repeats an expression containing the same word shows that it would be wrong to interpret this episode as understood as racially offensive by the participants with Negasi as the victim. Rather the play with expressions and categories by Thehan and Bashaar lead to a deconstruction of the idea that designations involving race or racial characteristics reflect objective facts about the person addressed or referred to. The next excerpt takes place two minutes later when a teacher has entered the room because she heard Thehan and Negasi making noise. She addresses Musad:

Excerpt 2 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Teacher: altså må jeg lige spørge dig hvad var det du sagde som Negasi flipper helt ud over then may I ask you what it was that you said that made Negasi freak out Musad: jeg sagde det til Thehan for sjov I said it to Thehan for fun Teacher: sagde du neger til ham did you say negro to him Musad: ja for [sjov han siger det også til mig] yes for fun he says it to me too Negasi: [nej han kiggede på mig] no he was looking at me Teacher: synes du han ligner en neger do you think he looks like a negro Musad: nej han siger det også til mig no he says it to me too (1.3) Teacher: I sidder og siger neger til hinanden you are sitting there saying negro to each other Musad: ja [for sjov] yes for fun

Polycentr ic Nor ms for Ter ms A ssoc iated w ith Ethnic it y

10 11 12 13

14

137

Thehan: [hvad] what Lærer: er det korrekt is that correct (0.7) Thehan: jeg har ikke sagt det til ham lige nu (.) men [før] I didn’t say it to him right now but before Lærer: [ved] du hvad skete der siden Negasi blev så sur lige før do you know what happened since Negasi got so upset just before (0.5) Thehan: nej no

The teacher tries to find out what happened between Negasi and the boy group. Musad explains that he and Thehan call each other neger for fun. Negasi attempts to interrupt (line 5) but the teacher reacts to Musad’s description and asks him if he thinks Thehan looks like a ‘negro’. A presupposition for asking this question is an understanding of ‘negroes’ as a category based on appearance. Musad explains again that Thehan says it as well. After a short pause, the teacher sums up: ‘you are sitting there saying negro to each other’. From her intonation in line 8, I interpret her remark as drawing a conclusion about the boys’ behaviour rather than confronting the boys with it. This interpretation is supported by her remark in line 13 where she changes her strategy and poses an open-ended question to Thehan about what Negasi was responding to. Generally, this teacher knows the pupils well and I know from other ethnographic observations that she is respected by them. In my opinion the excerpt shows how fast she is able to leave her first impression and understand the situation at hand because she actually listens to the boys. Nevertheless, her first reaction in line 5 ‘do you think he looks like a negro’ points to an interesting difference between the way the categorization is treated by the adolescents and by her. The term ‘negro’ is treated by the teacher as a way of describing a person that can be more or less accurate, based on objective, visual criteria. Musad displays a metalinguistic awareness when he explains to the teacher that he and Thehan are calling each other ‘negro’ just for fun. This explanation further strengthens an interpretation of the potentially offensive categorizations used by the boys in Excerpt 1 as markers of group membership. Summarizing the use of terms associated with ethnicity in Excerpts 1 and 2 we can roughly sketch out at least four different ways in which terms such as neger, nigger and sort are related to race and ethnicity: (a) The terms are used as nicknames or slang and are possibly associated with values similar

138

Youth Cont ac t Zones

to those attributed to ‘street language’ by the adolescents. (b) The terms are used as labels for dynamic identities that people can construct with more or less success. This comes out explicitly in expressions such as blege nigger. (c) The terms become part of creative constructions of ‘new’ expressions and labels such as sorte sort. And finally (d) the teacher uses the term neger as a label that categorizes people on the basis of their external appearance. While the first three types of use serve different purposes they all have in common that they treat the relation between a term and a category as dynamic and negotiable if relevant at all. Shared social histories of languaging seem to play a larger role in the meaning making than perceptions of ethnic (group) characteristics. The excerpts show how values associated with terms associated with ethnicity are negotiable on a moment-to-moment basis and they illustrate how these categories may be used in dynamic and fluent ways that tear down boundaries rather than building them up. This understanding is in line with the explanation Thehan offers a couple of months later when I ask him about the incident in an interview, even though he does not seem to remember what happened specifically:

Excerpt 3 1 2 3 4

5 6

Janus:

da var der noget jeg jeg lagde mærke til jeg tror jeg tror I sad og kaldte hinanden for neger I noticed something, I think you were calling each other negro Thehan: ja det er sådan så noget Bashaar og Musad har startet yes that is something Bashaar and Musad have started Janus: (laughs) Thehan: sådan lige pludselig hvor de lærer alle mulige i alle sprog at sige det altså fordi de kender jo sådan der hvor de bor så er det sådan mange fra u- der er mange forskellige der kommer fra hver land like suddenly where they learn to say it in all languages because where they live there are a lot different people coming from different countries Janus: ja yes Thehan: så har de lært at sige det på hver eneste sprog so they learned to say it in each language

In the interview above I had just mentioned that I was present during the project week and in line 1 I ask Thehan about the practice of calling each other neger. Thehan describes how Bashaar and Musad exploit the linguistic

Polycentr ic Nor ms for Ter ms A ssoc iated w ith Ethnic it y

139

resources made available to them by their surroundings characterized by diversity. In Thehan’s description, learning the word ‘negro’ in ‘all languages’ (line 4) becomes a locally anchored way of speaking among the adolescents. The boys’ playful language use transforms the diversity to solidarity and group membership while at the same time highlighting the (linguistic) diversity. This process is in line with the description of superdiversity as a transformative ‘diversification of diversity’ (Vertovec, 2006: 3) where new connections and patterns take shape. The adolescents use ‘each other’s’ language in linguistic practices to renegotiate group memberships in verbal play (cf. Rampton on crossing, 1995, 2006). The normativity involved in such practices is characterized by a view of diversity as a resource in languaging and in processes of identification. Boundaries between groups become blurred and diversity is exploited to create new unities. This norm centre, which highlights diversity and exploits it as a resource, generally covers the use of terms associated with ethnicity in Excerpts 1 to 3. There are however two occurrences that this explanation does not account for: why did Negasi complain about the use of sort in the first place and what made the teacher ask Musad whether he thinks Thehan looks like a ‘negro’? This indicates that other types of normativity may be influencing the situation as well. The following excerpt from an interview point to certain important tendencies in these different normativities. The excerpt is from a session where a group of boys, including Musad and Bashaar, were invited to our university by two field workers (Thomas Nørreby and Andreas Stæhr) to come and listen to some of the recordings the boys had participated in. The conversation was recorded when the boys were in the ninth grade, almost a year after Excerpts 1–3 were recorded. The third boy participating, named Jamil, tells about an incident that occurred in his class on the same day. Jamil has a Lebanese family background (see Nørreby, 2012, for a detailed introduction of Jamil). As it turns out, the discussion between Jamil and Bashaar explicitly points to issues concerning rights to use the word ‘negro’ and how these rights are associated with perceptions of category membership:

Excerpt 4 1

Jamil:

ved du hvad min lærer i dag sagde hun havde (.) vi havde vi havde øh i dag vi havde kommunikation og IT ikke du har hilst på den lærer den anden gang do you know what my teacher today said she had (.) we had we had er we had communication and IT you know you met that teacher the other time

140 Youth Cont ac t Zones

2 3

4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Andreas: ja ja yes yes Jamil: USA hende der lavede den der USA the one who made that thing dengang vi lavede den der bog der og så noget at the time we made that book and stuff Andreas: mm Jamil: så sagde hun (.) du vi skulle kigge på det der billede hvordan det havde havde sådan attention og sådan noget then she said (.) you we should look at the picture how it had like attention and stuff Andreas: mm Jamil: og så sagde hun øh (.) for eksempel ham der negeren han (.) han fremhæver sig bare hun sagde negeren jeg kigger på hende sådan her waauh and then she said eh (.) for example the negro there he (.) he just puts himself forward she said negro I look at her like that waauh XXX: (several participants giggle) Jamil: jeg gør sådan her til hende I do go like this to her Musad: (giggles) Jamil: så kigger hun på mig sådan der (.) øh han er han er da vel neger (.) hele klassen kigger bare på hende sådan der (.) neej then she looks at me like that (.) er he is a negro I suppose (.) the whole class just looks at her like that (.) noo Musad: [(giggles)] Thomas: [(giggles)] Jamil: de var bare sådan mundlamme hvordan hun sagde sådan neger they were just like speechless how she said like negro Thomas: hvem sagde hun det om about who did she say it Jamil: bare [>] manden på billedet neger just him the man in the picture negro Bashaar: [] yes I call them er I call them black swines [] yes what is the difference if she calls xxx det er en lærer hun er hvid hun er dansker xxx (said laughing) it is a teacher she is white she is a Dane xxx

Jamil talks about a teacher using the word neger in class. She used the word with reference to a person in a picture, after which all the pupils in the class were ‘speechless’ (line 14). As in the other teacher’s reaction in Excerpt 2, the teacher’s utterance ‘er he is a negro I suppose’ (line 11) indicates that for the teachers the term ‘negro’ is used as a designation of a person on the basis of their physical appearance, more particularly the colour of their skin. Jamil, on the other hand, appears to be using different criteria for the designation ‘negro’, as he expresses his surprise and that of his classmates at the teacher’s use of the term with reference to the person in the picture, which they apparently found potentially insulting. What the teacher uses as an essentially neutral term, is experienced as offensive by Jamil. From around line 7 all the other participants are quiet and from line 15 they start asking questions to find out more about what was going on. Thomas wants to know who the teacher was talking about and while Jamil explains, Bashaar answers that it was ‘Thehan’ (line 17), thereby introducing a jocular type of use similar to what he did in Excerpt 1. After this, Jamil states that ‘we have some negroes in the class’ (line 20). This utterance must also necessarily be based on a view of race as objectively determinable. However the important question for the boys seems to be: who has the right to use the word neger? When Bashaar asks whether Jamil is allowed to call a group of people ‘negroes’ he answers that he calls them sorte svin. Jamil thus positions himself as an ingroup member and thereby as one granted the right to use certain expressions, a right that out-group members (such as the teacher) do not have. When Bashaar in line 23 asks Jamil what the difference is between him and the teacher, Jamil answers by pointing to her category membership as white, Danish and teacher, thereby evaluating the teacher’s language use on a majority-minority dichotomy scale that includes institutional power structures. In this sense, the norm he adheres to reflects a strong sense of ‘us versus them’ or ‘Danish versus nonDanish’ boundaries, which results in completely different meaning potentials (such as racism) being attached to the use of terms associated with ethnicity.

142

Youth Cont ac t Zones

Jamil’s story suggests that the norm for language use based in a view of diversity as negotiable resources described above co-exists with a norm for language use based in an organization of people into fixed positions such as Danes and foreigners, blacks and whites, etc. This polycentricism in potential norm centres may also account for Negasi’s complaint about the boys’ language use in Excerpt 1. Sometimes expressions may potentially point to (or trigger) both norms. The expression sorte svin is part of the in-group register among the adolescents. At the same time it comes with a history of being used with racist intentions by majority Danes in reference to all ‘non-white’ minorities. This ambiguity may explain Negasi’s reaction to the use of this particular expression. It may also explain why she laughs through the following exchange. Using the expression in a clearly teasing fashion the boys demonstrate that it is the ‘super-diverse’ norm (and not a norm based in fixed dichotomies) they are oriented on in the situation.

Concluding Discussion In peer group interaction the adolescents participating in our project frequently use and discuss terms associated with ethnicity. As we saw in the analyses, the adolescents’ personal ‘background’ or physical appearance does not necessarily play a significant role in the use of these terms and is treated dynamically as a resource in the negotiations of personal relationships as long as the participants belong to a group of minority youth. Terms related to ethnicity or race interplay with registers of street language that signal toughness and masculinity and are used for handling social relations among the peers. Histories of use of expressions like the stereotypical racist expression sorte svin are exploited as resources and revalued. In their use of these expressions the adolescents seem to be adhering to a norm where ethnicity is not strictly organized in fixed positions, but instead becomes a dynamic resource in practices of languaging as well as processes of identification. This is perfectly in line with the idea of superdiversity where the prefix ‘super-’ underlines the character of a ‘transformative “diversification of diversity”’ (Vertovec, 2006: 3). Therefore, this norm centre can be referred to as a norm based in superdiversity. But as the analyses also show, terms such as sort or neger are sometimes treated as problematic and potentially racist by the adolescents when they explicitly comment and criticize certain peoples’ use of certain words. These instances involve the rights to use certain group labels (without these being regarded as offensive) and following from this they also involve an

Polycentr ic Nor ms for Ter ms A ssoc iated w ith Ethnic it y

143

understanding of ethnicity as fixed groups. In his description Jamil links the norms for language use to interrelated systems of power which can roughly be described as teachers vs. pupils, majority vs. minority and ‘dark-skinned’ vs. ‘white-skinned’. This type of normativity not only becomes relevant in interactions involving pupils and teachers, but may also influence situations involving the peer group as we saw it illustrated in Negasi’s request to the boys. In these instances the participants seem to orient to a norm for language use based in fixed ethnic positions that you either do or do not belong to and in a system of normativity this norm may be viewed as the contrast to the norm based in superdiversity. The analyses suggest that the adolescents know about these types of normativity and negotiate what norms to adhere to in specific situations. The study of the situated use of terms related to ethnicity, colour or race yields a better understanding of the polycentricity in norm centres in the participants’ daily languaging practices. This normativity not only concerns explicit use of terms related to ethnicity but also relates to the description of ‘street language’ and ‘integrated use of language’ because ‘street language’ involves the exploitation of the diverse linguistic background among the participants and ‘integrated language’ involves using language thought to belong to a group of majority Danes with teachers as the stereotypical users. The examples above illustrate how the norm based in superdiversity is to a certain degree restricted to adolescents with a minority background. However, this boundary is negotiable within the peer group. As one of the participants puts it in an essay about language in his daily life: ‘Only Perkers should talk like they talk. […] but Danes born in a housing block with Perkers are in a way allowed to speak the language’ (written by Isaam in the ninth grade, our translation). The access to speaking ‘perker language’ is described as restricted but also as negotiable with regard to ethnic background if other factors such as belonging to the neighbourhood justify the use. Nevertheless the quote points to a central paradox that is highly relevant for the excerpts presented above: the access to orientation towards a norm of superdiversity with its dynamic use of ethnic labels and deconstruction of ethnic categories is in many ways restricted to adolescents with a minority background. Peers with a majority background can be given ‘permission’ to use ethnic labels in the same dynamic and playful way (see Hyttel-Sørensen & Stæhr, 2014, for an example). The fact that the adolescents need to be identified as belonging to a specific category in order to behave according to a superdiverse norm reflects the diversity in the adolescents’ daily surroundings as well as the societal discourse labelling the participants with a minority background as ‘the other’ who needs to ‘integrate’.

144

Youth Cont ac t Zones

This means that if we want to understand behaviour of adolescents in superdiversity it is not enough to analyse how diversity is brought about in interaction. The occurrence of a norm centre based in superdiversity does not mean that all semiotic practice becomes deconstructed and created anew. When we investigate new connections and patterns between people constructed in practices of languaging, one of the central issues to investigate is how the ‘new’ norms for language use interrelate with ‘old’ ones. To understand languaging practices among Copenhagen youth it is of course necessary to study what the adolescents bring about of resources for communication from their individual life trajectories, but it is also necessary to address how they relate to societal demands, to traditional organizations of language and people, and to unequal distributions of power.

Transcription key (1.0) (.) [bla bla] bold (bla bla) xxx (bla bla)

pauses in seconds pauses shorter than 0.5 second overlapping speech loud talk my comments inaudible translation in English

References Ag, A. (2010) Sprogbrug og identitetsarbejde hos senmoderne storbypiger [Language Use and Identity Work among Late Modern Urban Girls] (=Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism 53). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Agha, A. (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2005) Discourse. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2013) Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2016) Language and Superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 21–49). New York/London: Routledge. Brubaker, R. (2004) Ethnicity without Groups. Harvard University Press. Danmarks Statistik (2012) Indvandrere i Danmark 2012 [Immigrants in Denmark 2012]. Danmarks Statistik. See http://www.dst.dk/da/Statistik/Publikationer/VisPub?cid= 16601 (accessed 26 February 2016).

Polycentr ic Nor ms for Ter ms A ssoc iated w ith Ethnic it y

145

Heller, M. (2007) Bilingualism as ideology and practice. In M. Heller (ed.) Bilingualism: A Social Approach (pp. 1–24). London/Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Hyttel-Sørensen, L. and Stæhr, A. (2014) Normativitet som social ressource på Facebook. [Normativity as a social ressource on Facebook] NyS 46, 67–102. Jørgensen, J.N. (2004) Languaging and languagers. In C.B. Dabelsteen and J.N. Jørgensen (eds) Languaging and Language Practices (pp. 5–23) (=Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism 36). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Jørgensen, J.N. (2010) Languaging. Nine Years of Poly-Lingual Development of Young TurkishDanish Grade School Students, Vol. 1–2 (=Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism, the Køge Series K15-16). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Madsen, L.M. (2013) ‘High’ and ‘low’ in urban Danish speech styles. Language in Society 42, 115–138. Madsen, L.M., Jørgensen, J.N. and Møller, J.S. (2010) ‘Street language’ and ‘integrated’: Language use and enregisterment among late modern urban girls. In L.M. Madsen, J.S. Møller and J.N. Jørgensen (eds) Ideological Constructions and Enregisterment of Linguistic Youth Styles (pp. 81–113) (=Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism 55). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Madsen, L.M., Karrebæk, M.S. and Møller, J.S. (2016) Everyday Languaging: Collaborative Research on the Language Use of Children and Youth (=Trends in Applied Linguistics 15). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Maegaard, M. (2007) Udtalevariation og -forandring i københavnsk - en etnografisk undersøgelse af sprogbrug, sociale kategorier og social praksis blandt unge på en københavnsk folkeskole. [Language Variation and Change in Copenhagen Speech – An Ethnographic Study of Language Use, Social Categories and Linguistic Practices among Adolescents in a Copenhagen Elementary School] København: Nordisk Forskningsinstitut, Københavns Universitet. Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A. (eds) (2007) Disinventing and Reconsituting Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Møller, J.S. and Jørgensen, J.N. (2011) Enregisterment among adolescents in superdiverse Copenhagen. In J.S. Møller and J.N. Jørgensen (eds) Language, Enregisterment and Attitudes (pp. 99–121) (=Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism 63). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Nørreby, T.R. (2012) ‘Jamil perkersen Nielsen Rasmussen’ – En sociolingvistisk undersøgelse af identitet og etnicitet I superdiversiteten. [‘Jamil perkersen Nielsen Rasmussen’ – A Sociolinguistic Study of Identity and Ethnicity in the Superdiversity] (=Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism 67). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Nørreby, T.R. and Møller, J.S. (2015) Ethnicity and social categorization in on- and offline interaction among Copenhagen adolescents. Discourse, Context & Media, 8 (4), 46–54. Pharao, N. and Hansen, G.F. (2006) Prosodic aspects of the Copenhagen Multiethnolect. In Nordic Prosody. Proceedings of the IXth Conference, Lund 2004 (pp. 87–96). Frankfurt am Main, etc.: Peter Lang. Rampton, B. (1995) Crossing. Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents. London: Longman. Rampton, B. (2006) Language in Late Modernity. Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stæhr, A. (2010) ‘Rappen reddede os’ – et studie af senmoderne storbydrenges identitetsarbejde i fritids – og skolemiljøer [‘The rap saved us’ – A Study of Late Modern Urban Boys’ Identity Work in Leisure- and School Settings] (=Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism 54). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.

146

Youth Cont ac t Zones

Stæhr, A. (2014) Social media and everyday language use among Copenhagen youth. PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen. Vertovec, S. (2006) The emergence of super-diversity in Britain. Centre on Migration, Policy and Society Working Paper 25. Oxford University. Vertovec, S. (2007) New complexities of cohesion in Britain: Super-diversity, transnationalism and civil-integration. London: Commission on Integration and Cohesion.

7

Social Status Relations and Enregisterment: Integrated Speech in Copenhagen Lian Malai Madsen

Introduction The past two decades’ new migration patterns and intensifying globalisation in Western European contexts have resulted in what Vertovec (2007, 2010) has described as superdiverse societal conditions. Speakers’ allegiance to linguistic and sociocultural resources and categories has become less predictable, and a range of recent work has therefore argued that conventional notions such as language and speech community are increasingly insufficient (Heller, 2007; Jørgensen, 2010; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007; Rampton, 2006). Instead, attention has been drawn to the fact that speakers employ and combine linguistic features regardless of traditional distinctions between languages or varieties to produce hybrid, polylingual practices (Jørgensen et al., 2016). Yet authors have also cautioned against disregarding continuous demands from institutions such as schools, media and political administrations for non-hybrid, pure language use, and it has been noted that speakers’ linguistic practices often play on the friction between purity and hybridity in relations between language and social categories (Creese & Blackledge, 2011; Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010). The study of linguistic practices such as stylised speech and crossing has played a significant part in the documentation of polylanguaging and heteroglossia (Jørgensen, 2010; Møller, 2009; Rampton, 1995, 2011), and concurrent with the increasingly diverse sociolinguistic conditions an interest for metalinguistic activities and stylised, reflexive, non-routine linguistic practices (Coupland, 2007; Rampton, 2006) has grown within sociolinguistics (Blommaert & Rampton, 2016; Jaspers, 2010). Rampton (2009: 149) defines 147

148

Youth Cont ac t Zones

stylisations as instances of speech where speakers produce ‘specially marked and often exaggerated representations of languages, dialects, and styles that lie outside their own habitual repertoire (at least as this is perceived within the situation at hand)’. Stylisations are examples of linguistic behaviour highlighting sociolinguistic reflexivity and thereby the evaluation of linguistic forms and their association with voices and values. Studying overt metalinguistic reflections and interactional stylisations allows us to attend to the sociolinguistic complexities of superdiverse settings by seeing the situated manufacturing of norms and discovering potential changes of sociolinguistic norms in the communities we study. In Blommaert and Rampton’s (2016: 30) words, such studies can make visible ‘the emergence of structure out of agency’. In this chapter, I discuss such an emergence (and change) of sociolinguistic structure by drawing on linguistic ethnographic data from a Copenhagen based collaborative research project on language use among minority children and youth in school and elsewhere (Madsen et al., 2016). In metalinguistic accounts of the participants in our study, ‘integrated’ speech is understood as conservative standard practices (respectful, polite, up-scale and academic) in a general sense. I discuss the meaning contribution of the label ‘integrated’ to the ongoing enregisterment (Agha, 2007) of this way of speaking, and finally, I discuss the metalinguistic accounts in relation to the situated voicing of stylisations of speech corresponding to what the participants refer to as an ‘integrated’ way of speaking. The data I present points to the interconnections between cultural and ethnic diversity and dimensions of hierarchical stratification in the contemporary sociolinguistic order(ing) among Copenhagen youth.

Enregisterment and Meta-Pragmatic Commentary It is well documented in recent research on linguistic and cultural diversity that speakers in practice draw on their collective linguistic repertoires of resources to achieve their communicative aims in a given situation, and this is evident in the linguistic practices we observe among contemporary urban youth. Studies in such contexts have led to re-examinations of the traditional conceptions of a ‘language’ or a ‘variety’ as bounded sets of linguistic features and it has become clear that such concepts are representations of particular language ideologies (Blackledge & Creese, 2010; Jørgensen et al., 2016), and like social categories, the idea of linguistic codes can fruitfully be seen as sociocultural and ideological constructions. Agha’s theory of enregisterment appeals to this kind of approach to language with its emphasis on ‘processes and practices whereby performable signs become recognized (and regrouped) as belonging

Soc ial St atus Rel at ions and Enregister ment

149

to distinct, differentially valorised semiotic registers by a population’ (Agha, 2007: 81), and it has been widely employed and discussed within the past years of sociolinguistic research (e.g. Johnstone et al., 2006; Madsen et al., 2010; Newell, 2009). The theory of enregisterment accounts for the processes through which linguistic codes (or in Agha’s terms registers) are constructed and it takes into consideration meta-pragmatic activities on various levels ranging from widely circulating media stereotypes to local speaker practices. From an enregisterment perspective, speakers’ interactional use of different linguistic forms (re)creates the stereotypic indexical values of the used forms. Hence, in interactional use of resources associated with different registers, the stereotypic indexical values of the registers can be said to be brought into play and used for situational purposes. At the same time, the employment of linguistic resources continuously contributes to their enregisterment, and in this sense the indexical values of the linguistic features used are also (re)created. Johnstone et al. (2006) differentiate between first-, second- and third-order indexicality (building on Silverstein (2003)) in relation to the enregisterment of ‘Pittsburghese’ and thereby describe different stages in the process of sociolinguistic enregisterment. These include, in short, the development from a stage of an identifiable pattern of distributional correlation of a linguistic feature with particular social categories (first order), to linguistic features being available for social work and style shifting on the basis of this correlational pattern (second order) and, finally, the noticing of the second-order stylistic variation and the linguistic features becoming the topic of overt meta-pragmatic commentary (Johnstone et al., 2006: 82). Thus, the construction, maintenance and development of a register involve users’ overtly explicit evaluations, labelling and descriptions of the register (corresponding to third-order indexicality) as well as their use of its characteristic features (first- or second-order indexicality). The data I shall discuss in this chapter can be characterised as (third-order) meta-pragmatic discourse. The interview accounts represent overt metapragmatic commentary. Stylisations occurring during these metalinguistic discussions tend to serve as (often exaggerated) demonstrations of enregistered styles and emphasise associated stereotypic indexical values. Stylisations occurring in peer interactions can of course serve a variety of local communicative purposes, and there can be significant differences between speakers’ reports about language use and their actual linguistic practice. The accounts presented in interviews provide important insights into the speakers’ ideas about linguistic stereotypes, but the study of how linguistic stereotypes are brought into use for situated pragmatic functions in particular interactional contexts may add to and possibly alter the picture (Bucholtz, 2011; Jaspers, 2011; Rampton, 2006 are good examples of this). Still, stylisations are

150 Youth Cont ac t Zones

examples of linguistic behaviour highlighting the evaluation of linguistic forms and their associated values through indexing rather than referencing. In this sense all stylisations are to be considered relatively explicit meta-pragmatic commentary although more indirectly expressed than in interview accounts.

Sociolinguistic Context Before we turn to the data, some brief contextual information on the sociolinguistics of Danish provides a useful entry point for looking at the metalinguistic accounts and the stylisation practices of the Copenhagen adolescents in more detail. Roughly sketched, the overall sociolinguistic development in Denmark is characterised by strong linguistic homogenisation and a dominating standard ideology (Kristiansen & Jørgensen, 2003; Pedersen, 2009). Kristiansen (2009: 168) suggests that Danish today is possibly more homogeneous than any other language with millions of speakers. Currently, there is very little grammatical variation within speech observed around the country. Local ‘accents’ are signified primarily by prosodic colouring, and the existing nationwide variation in segmental phonetics is strongly dominated by developments and spread from Copenhagen speech (Kristensen, 2003; Kristiansen, 2009). However, as recent studies of interaction, language attitudes and language ideologies show (Jørgensen, 2010; Madsen, 2011; Maegaard, 2007; Møller, 2009; Quist, 2005), this does not mean that young speakers in the Copenhagen area grow up without ideas about linguistic differences and their related social values. The dialectal and the traditional sociolectal differences might be close to extinct judging by the number of varying linguistic features, but only a few linguistic signs are necessary to bring out the wider social connotations of particular ways of speaking. Subtle features like prosodic colouring can still have the strong effects of signalling, for instance, a rural or an urban persona. Though, the question is whether traditional sociolectal and dialectal features might not be as readily available and relevant resources of social distinction to contemporary Copenhagen youth. The results of recent attitudinal studies based on matched guise techniques teach us that speech that was formerly associated with specific socioeconomic groups in society now appears to be associated with the following stereotypic indexical values (the results below are based on Maegaard, 2005, but see similar results in Kristiansen, e.g. 2001, 2009): •

Conservative Copenhagen (speech containing features traditionally seen as highstatus): intelligence, articulation, ambition, independence, rationality, conscientiousness.

Soc ial St atus Rel at ions and Enregister ment

•

151

Modern Copenhagen (speech containing features traditionally seen as low-status plus some newer non-standard features): sociability, happiness, liveliness, youth, ‘chic’-ness, creativity (self-confidence, independence).

These results of course suggest that speech styles can be associated with high status in relation to different social dimensions. Kristiansen even suggests that: ‘Young Danes are said to operate with two “standards” for language use: One for the school, where excellence is perceived in terms of “superiority”; and one for the media, where excellence is perceived in terms of “dynamism”’ (Kristiansen, 2009: 189). The different value systems Kristiansen refers to clearly complicate the picture in relation to social status. Social status within the different social domains of school (and business life) on the one side and media on the other seem to be related to different (linguistic) resources. Still, Maegaard’s and Kristiansen’s results confirm that values similar to those associated with traditional higher class-related linguistic codes are relevant within the norm systems related to school. Conservative standard Danish is associated with elites in relation to intelligence, rationality and ambition. These values correspond to those associated with for instance ‘posh’ in a British context (e.g. Rampton, 2006, 2011). At the same time, however, the most recent work on new linguistic developments in Copenhagen overwhelmingly points to influences associated with ethnicity and gender (Maegaard, 2007; Quist, 2005). Ethnicity is considered particularly significant in current sociolinguistic variation because linguistic innovations are found among young speakers in ethnically diverse communities (see Torgersen et al., 2006 for similar findings in London). In what follows, however, I shall argue that the social status relations sketched above are still relevant.

Data and Ethnographic Context From 2009 to 2011 we conducted a collaborative study of linguistic practices in the everyday life of 48 grade school adolescents, in two different classes, in a Copenhagen school (Madsen et al., 2010). The overall focus of our research was to understand how linguistic practices and language norms are acquired, developed and used in various everyday contexts. Most of the participants in our study had a linguistic minority background and they lived in a highly diverse area of the Danish capital. The percentage of students with minority background was 75% and 82% in the two classes; the average of minority students in the younger classes and in general in Copenhagen schools is about 30%. We conducted team-ethnographic fieldwork, and we

152

Youth Cont ac t Zones

collected data in a number of different settings: in school during classes and breaks, in youth clubs, at sports practice, in the local neighbourhood and in participants’ homes. The data include field diaries, largely unstructured qualitative interviews with the participants in groups and individually, as well as with teachers, parents and club workers. We also recorded different kinds of conversations, both researcher-initiated and participants’ self-recordings. In addition, we collected written data in the form of protocols, student essays and Facebook interactions. In the following, I focus primarily on nine key participants; these include five girls: Israh, Fadwa, Yasmin, Lamis and Selma; and four boys: Isaam, Mahmoud, Bashaar and Shahid. The participants were all born in Denmark or arrived as very young children. They were 13 to 14 years old when we began the field work. The extracts I discuss are from the interviews with the key participants and from recordings during school activities as well as the participants’ selfrecordings. The interviews took place about five months into our first year of field work. The adolescents were invited in self-selected groups to the university, and we talked to them in one of our offices. The interview was ethnographic and semi-structured. We went through certain topics such as groups of friends in the class, leisure activities and language, but we attempted to let the participants lead the conversation in the directions of their choice. The researcher usually initiated the topic of language by typically asking ‘in what way’ or ‘how’ the participants talked in various contexts (for instance with the teachers, with friends, in the youth club etc.). I supplement the analyses of the conversational data with extracts from two sets of written essays: ‘Language in my everyday life’ (essay 1) and ‘Rules of language use’ (essay 2) (see also Møller & Jørgensen, 2013). These essays were the results of two language-themed seminars during the first and second year of field work led by two researchers from our team, whereas the interviews were conducted before the seminars. The seminars were integrated into the curricular activities of the school classes we followed, and they were intended as ways of contributing to the discussions in class in return for their willingness to take part in our studies. The researchers opened the first seminar by talking about how we relate language use to certain types and values in a general sense. Their introduction to the topic included two examples: the language use of a Danish rapper and a transcript of Facebook comments involving hybrid linguistic practices. In the discussions of these examples the participants came up with labels for this kind of language use and these were noted on the blackboard. The researchers also asked what ‘the opposite’ of this kind of language use could be, and the participants’ terms for this way of speaking were listed on the blackboard too. The second seminar was opened by the researchers showing excerpts from the participants’ essays from the first

Soc ial St atus Rel at ions and Enregister ment

153

seminar. The instructions for the essays were in the first case, to write about their everyday language use, and in the second case, to elaborate on some of the themes from the first essay by explaining more about rules of language use. Of course the essays were influenced by the discussions in the classroom, but it was in both cases the pupils’ suggestions for speech styles and labels that were the focus of discussion. I have taken the entire corpus of written essays (74) from the students in the two grade school classes into consideration. In general, the speech of the participants in our study is characterised by frequent use of the new phonetic features associated with a contemporary urban youth style (described in Maegaard, 2007, see also Madsen, 2012; Madsen et al., 2010) as well as a characteristic prosody of this style (Madsen, 2012; Pharao & Hansen, 2006). They employ the features they describe as associated with a way of speaking they sometimes refer to as ‘street language’ (Madsen, 2011; Møller & Jørgensen, 2013) in their regular peer interactions (slang, mixing, etc.), and they also routinely produce stretches of speech containing mostly young Copenhagen features where features of slang and mixing, for instance, are left out and the use of non-standard pronunciation features is reduced. All conversational extracts are transcribed according to the conventions presented in the appendix. The original transcripts are presented in the left column and the English translations are presented in the right column. When utterances contain English features in the original version, this is marked by italics in the translation. Stylisations are in bold and reported speech is surrounded by speech marks.

Integration in Public Discourse ‘Integrated’ was introduced to us in the first round of interviews as a label for a certain way of speaking, but as a term, ‘integrated’ related to the notion of ‘integration’ has a particular history of use in Danish public discourse. It has overwhelmingly been employed in dominant macro-discourses on ‘integration as minorities’ adaption to majority society’ (e.g. Olwig & Pærregaard, 2007; Rennison, 2009), and the integration discourses have predominantly been concerned with cultural minorities. During the 1980s to 1990s, the attention to problems related to immigration increased in the Danish public debate. Although the immigrant population in Denmark is one of the smallest in Western Europe (OECD, 2010: 7), Danish election surveys document that during the period 1987 to 2001 a constant part of about 40% of the Danish population have considered immigration a threat to Danish society (Thomsen, 2006: 225). The notion of integration has been very prominent in

154

Youth Cont ac t Zones

this debate since the mid-1990s (Olwig & Pærregaard, 2007: 18). In 2002, the government even established a distinct Ministry of Integration. The government (2013) closed down this Ministry of Integration and instead immigration and integration was dealt with in other ministries such as the Ministry of Law or the Ministry of Social Affairs. This has certainly changed the official political texts about integration. It was emphasised on the former website of the Danish immigration service (www.nyidanmark.dk), that integration had to do with immigrants’ and refugees’ development towards becoming successful members of Danish society through participating in language courses, cultural courses, employment, education and taxpaying. Since, however, political texts such as the ministerial web materials on integration also emphasise newcomers’ rights as well as obligations and they focus less on cultural assimilation. In the general debate, as well as in much research on integration, it is rather unclear what precisely the concept of integration refers to (Ejrnæs, 2002). Rennison (2009) in fact identifies eight different discourses on diversity related to the integration debate in Denmark. Still, the by far most dominant one in the past decade’s Danish media and political debates is an ethnocentric discourse on diversity (Rennison, 2009: 120–158; Yilmaz, 1999: 180–181). The ethnocentric discourse emphasises values related to culture. Cultural differences are understood within the frames of stereotypical ideas of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and the ‘us’ is imagined as a coherent cultural and national community (Anderson, 1991; Rennison, 2009: 128–131; Yilmaz, 1999). The ethnocentric discourse on integration is not an exclusively Danish phenomenon, but characteristic of public debate and policy making in a range of Western European countries (e.g. Blommaert & Verschueren, 1998; Extra et al., 2009; Jaspers, 2005; Yilmaz, 1999). Because of this, history of use ‘integrated’ as a term in the Danish context carries traces of an association with ‘adaptation to mainstream Danish cultural practices’. Excerpt 1 below makes clear that this understanding of integration is relevant to the everyday interactional conduct of the participants in our study. The excerpt is from a self-recording by Bashaar in the youth club. Bashaar calls for the other participants’ attention to tell them about a new rap song he is working on with Mahmoud in their rap group ‘Mini G’sz’.

Excerpt 1 Self-recording in the youth club by Bashaar (Bas); Mahmoud (Mah); Israh (Isr); Selma (Sel). Original 1 2

Bas:

Translation ew har I hørt vores nye omkvæd mig og Mahmoud

1 2

Bas:

ew have you heard our new chorus me and Mahmoud

Soc ial St atus Rel at ions and Enregister ment

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

(det har han ikke) vi skal lave en sang i Mini G’sz

Isr: Sel: Bas:

Mah:

den handler om integration (vi siger sådan der) hvis det er jer der har lavet den [så er den dårlig] [lad være med at ] spille integreret (vi siger sådan der) endnu en fremmed (.) hun er bare en fremmed (.) hun er en dansker på Nørrebro (.) gi’r det ikke mening? næ:

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Isr: Sel: Bas:

Mah:

155

(he hasn’t) we are making a new song in Mini G’sz it’s about integration (we go like) if it’s you who made it [then it’s bad] [don’t play] integrated (we go like) another stranger (.) she’s just a stranger (.) she’s a Dane in Nørrebro ((sings)) (.) doesn’t that make sense? no:

Bashaar calls for the others’ attention to listen to the chorus of their new song and include the information that the song is about integration (line 5). The concept of integration as a process of adaptation involving minority and majority relations is clearly relevant to the lyrics of the rap song. In lines 11–14, Bashaar performs the chorus and by referring to a dansker (‘Dane’) in Nørrebro (an area of Copenhagen known for its highly ethnically diverse population) as a fremmed (‘stranger’) the boys turn the stereotypical societal discourse upside down. A different meaning of integrated is at play in Selma’s teasing comment in lines 9–10. In the expression ‘play integrated’, integrated is employed as a derogative term and in this combination it invokes elements of fakeness. This is also a regular usage of the notion of integrated among the participants in our study to point out peers’ uncool, fake or too (adult/majority/school related) adapted behaviour (see Madsen, 2011, 2013). Excerpt 1 is an example of how the notion of integration and integrated behaviour is also used with a meaning corresponding to the widespread understanding of integration as a process of minorities’ adaptation to majority cultural practices. This meaning is actively employed, brought about and co-exists with the use of integrated as a term for a way of speaking which expands and transforms the minority-majority related meaning as we shall see.

Integrated Speech In the interviews and essays integrated speech was mainly presented as the way of speaking to adults, especially to and by teachers. In Excerpt 2, Lamis emphasises relatively complex and abstract vocabulary as an

156

Youth Cont ac t Zones

important feature of the integrated register and Selma’s stylised performance of the speech also reveals other associated values:

Excerpt 2 Lamis (Lam) in group interview with Selma (Sel); Yasmin (Yas); Tinna (Tin); Interviewer (Lia). Original 1 Lia: hvad taler I så med lærerne 2 i skolen 3 Lam: integreret 4 Sel: integreret 5 Lia: [integreret] 6 Sel: [vil du] gerne bede om en 7 kop te hhh ((shrieky high pitched voice)) 8 Lam: hhh nej der bruger man de 9 der integrerede ord 10 Sel: der [prøver xxx] 11 Lam: [nogle gange]nogle gange 12 når jeg har trip over 13 lærerne så taler jeg det der 14 gadesprog 15 Lia: hvad øh kan du give 16 eksempler på integreret 17 Yas: [integration] 18 Sel: [sådan der] [hvad] laver du 19 Lam: [int] 20 Yas: hhh 21 Sel: har du haft en god dag ((shrieky high pitched voice)) 22 Lam: nej nej nej ikke sådan noget 23 ikke sådan noget sådan noget 24 hvor de kommer med 25 [rigtig rigtig] 26 Sel: [god weekend] ((shrieky high pitched)) 27 Lam: rigtig svære ord 28 Yas: mm 29 Sel: sådan der rigtig 30 Lam: (.)nej nej[nej] 31 Sel: ‘[ube]høvlet’ hhh ((deep voice)) 32 Lam: ja hhh [og sådan der] 33 Lia: [det lyder rigtigt] 34 Lam: ‘det så uaccep[tabelt Lam]’ 35 Yas: [ja men også]

Translation 1 Lia: then what do you speak with 2 the teachers at school 3 Lam: integrated 4 Sel: integrated 5 Lia: [integrated] 6 Sel: [would you] like to have a 7 cup of tea hhh ((shrieky high pitched voice)) 8 Lam: hhh no there you use all 9 those integrated words 10 Sel: there [tries xxx] 11 Lam: [sometimes] sometimes 12 when I have a trip about the 13 teachers then I speak that 14 street language 15 Lia: what eh can you give 16 examples of integrated 17 Yas: [integration] 18 Sel: [like][what]are you doing 19 Lam: [int] 20 Yas: hhh 21 Sel: have you had a nice day ((shrieky high pitched voice)) 22 Lam: no no no nothing like that 23 nothing like that more like 24 where they come out with 25 [really really] 26 Sel: [have a nice weekend] ((shrieky high pitched)) 27 Lam: really difficult words 28 Yas: mm 29 Sel: like this really 30 Lam: (.)no no[no] 31 Sel: ‘[im]pertinent’ hhh ((deep voice)) 32 Lam: yes hhh [and like that] 33 Lia: [it sound really] 34 Lam: ‘it’s so unaccep[table Lam]’ 35 Yas: [yes but also]

Soc ial St atus Rel at ions and Enregister ment

157

When the girls are asked how they speak to their teachers, they claim to speak integratedly. An exception to this may occur when they are angry with the teachers or ‘have a trip’ as Lamis puts it. In such situations ‘street language’ may be used (lines 12–14). Selma demonstrates throughout the sequence integrated speech with a stylised performance marked by a shrieky, high-pitched voice (in bold lines 6–7, 18, 21 and 26). In her performance she emphasises politeness with ritual phrases such as: ‘have a nice day’, ‘have a nice weekend’, and ‘would you like to have a cup of tea’ The politeness, the tea offer and the high-pitched shrieky voice bring about stereotypical associations of higher class cultural practices. Lamis underlines so-called ‘difficult words’ as the significant trait of integrated speech (line 27), and Selma supports this with the example of ‘impertinent’ in line 31. As well as being exemplified with words like ‘impertinent’ and ‘unacceptable’, integrated speech is related to reprimands or corrections of behaviour typically performed by authority figures. So integrated speech appears associated with authority, control and aversion to rudeness, combined with ritual politeness and higher class cultural practices. More generally, when examples of vocabulary are presented in the interview accounts and the written essays, four main aspects are emphasised. About half of the examples in the essays are related to academic activities (e.g. ‘analyse’, ‘criticise’, ‘argue’, ‘curriculum’, ‘lecture’). The other half are almost equally divided between ritual politeness (e.g. ‘have a nice day’, ‘you’re welcome’, etc.), relatively complex and abstract adjectives (e.g. ‘hypothetical’, ‘fascinating’, ‘intelligent’, ‘well organised’) and finally, corrections of behaviour as above. With respect to the stylisations in Excerpt 2, it is worth noting that the integrated performance is accompanied by quite a bit of ridicule in the girls’ representations, detectable for instance in the change of voice and the laughs following the examples of difficult words (lines 31–32). In this manner the girls present a certain distance to this register, and this is emphasised by Selma’s jocular remark on not being able to ‘say it’ in spite of practicing the difficult words ‘in front of the mirror’ (lines 37–39). In fact there are significant differences in the way the girls relate to the integrated register in their constructions during the interviews, and this appears to correspond to their school orientation more generally. Overall, Lamis and Yasmin (and Selma up to a point) presented a positive orientation to academic work and school achievement, both in their everyday social practices at school as well as in their representations in interviews. Although they ridiculed integrated speech in their stylised performances and did not present integrated as their ‘own’ way of speaking (with the possible exception of Lamis in the individual interview, Extract 1), they still claimed to use the integrated register for certain purposes: speaking to teachers (or other

158

Youth Cont ac t Zones

adults) and writing in school. In contrast, there was another pair of girls who didn’t generally orient positively to school, and they claimed not to have access to the integrated register, as we shall see in the next excerpt:

Excerpt 3 Fadwa (Fad) in group interview with Israh (Isr); Jamila (Jam); Interviewer (Ast). Original 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Fad: vi prøver at være integreret ligesom dem men det kan vi ikke Isr: fordi vi ikke er vi er ikke gode til alle de der ord de siger Fad: de der svære ord (du skal) forstå sådan hvordan skal jeg forklare dig det øh Isr: ø:h du skal problematisere dine forklaringer på hvad ordet (.) beskyttelse er ((distinct pronunciation)) sådan nogle der [ting ikke] Fad: [ja sådan] nogle ting ikke Isr: vi er ikke sådan rigtig gode til sådan noget der

Translation 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Fad:

we try to be integrated like them but we can’t Isr: because we’re not we’re not good at all those words they’re saying Fad: those difficult words (you have to) understand like how shall I explain it to you eh Isr: e:h you should problematise your explanations for what the word (.) protection is ((distinct pronunciation)) stuff like [that right] Fad: [yes such] stuff like that right Isr: we’re not really good at stuff like that

Like the girls in Excerpt 2, Fadwa and Israh present examples of integrated words, and these are related to academic activities (‘analyse’ and ‘problematise’), but their self-representations here emphasise a lack of competence with respect to the integrated register. They say they sometimes try, but ‘we can’t’ (lines 2–3), ‘we’re not really good at all those words they’re saying’ (lines 4–6) and ‘we’re not really good at stuff like that’ (lines 16–17). Clearly, Israh is perfectly able to perform examples of integrated speech in the stylisations marked by extra distinctness (lines 10–12), but even so, the two of them jointly emphasise a distance from this register through the references to ‘them’ (in this context the teachers, line 2) and ‘we’ (throughout the sequence). This identity construction is in line with the non-academic personae they practise elsewhere. When the participants had mentioned integrated as a way of speaking, we elaborated by asking the adolescents about who spoke this way. Most of them mentioned teachers, and initially, also the ethnic Danes among them

Soc ial St atus Rel at ions and Enregister ment

159

as typical users. It did turn out after further discussion that in most cases their Danish classmates did not actually use many ‘difficult words’. However, it seemed that to the minority students participating in our study, the integrated register was also partly associated with Danish ethnicity: But the integrated language one usually uses to teachers or other adults. It’s to talk very beautifully and try to sound as Danish as possible. (Mark, 15, minority background, written essay 2) Not all of the participants regarded integrated as predominantly a Danish register. In her essay Lamis presents an understanding of integrated as disassociated from the idea of a specific national language. Instead, speaking integrated seems related to stylistic adjustments: But slang and integrated are also important, because there are some people who cannot tolerate listening to slang, then you have to be able to talk to them so that they are comfortable. But slang and integrated are not just in one language, but they are in English, Danish, Arabic, and all languages there exist … :D (Lamis, written essay 1) In a few of the essays we also find accounts of the use of ‘integrated Arabic’: With my family I speak completely normal/integrated Arabic but when I speak to my cousins it is street language Arabic. When I speak to my family: I speak normal Arabic to my family, I also speak integrated Arabic to show respect. (Jamil, 15, minority background, written essay 2) … but with my parents [I] speak integrated Arabic, like polite. (Fadwa, 15, minority background, written essay 2) In addition, some of the participants referred to Urdu as ‘the integrated Punjabi’. Finally, it is worth noting that several of the students of majority background also in their essays describe ‘integrated Danish’ as a register relevant to their everyday encounters particularly with elderly adults and teachers. This listing of rules of language by a girl of Danish heritage is an example: Speak integrated to people you need to show respect for Speak normal to your relatives Speak normal/street language to your school friends Speak integrated to elderly to show respect. (Marie, 15, majority background, written essay 2)

160

Youth Cont ac t Zones

These observations suggest that ‘integrated’ practices seem to be undergoing reinterpretation. Integrated as a term has originally been (and still most typically is) employed in dominant macro-discourses on ‘integration as minorities’ adaptation to majority society’ from the ethnocentric perspective sketched above (e.g. Rennison, 2009). So as a term in the Danish context, ‘integrated’ carries traces of an association with ‘adaptation to mainstream Danish cultural practices’. Here, however, we see integrated reinterpreted as conservative standard practices (respectful, polite, upscale) in a more general sense. In its use among these adolescents, the term is not tied exclusively to the ‘foreigner’ and ‘Dane’ categorisations typical of dominant integration discourses, even though it may include an ironic reference to these discourses. In fact, there is an account in the written essays which explicitly links successful integration (‘well integrated’) to high socioeconomic status (‘rich’): Integrated can be used by everyone, by and large, but if one speaks integrated language one is considered polite, rich well integrated person because people who speak integrated are like that. (Isaam, 15, minority background, written essay 2) From the overt metalinguistic reflections presented in the interviews and essays, we can see that there is an awareness among these Copenhagen adolescents of a register labelled ‘integrated’. The enregisterment of ‘integrated’ involves accounts or demonstrations of: • •

Performable signs: distinct pronunciation, abstract and academic vocabulary (long, fine words), high pitch, quiet and calm attitude, ritual politeness phrases Stereotypic indexical values: higher class culture (wealth), sophistication, authority, emotional control, aversion to rudeness, academic skills, politeness and respect, (Danishness) (see Madsen, 2013)

It appears part of a social school-positive practice to present integrated as an available linguistic resource, and part of a more school-resistant practice to emphasise distance to this register. A range of different aspects of cultural practice have been drawn into these overt evaluations of integrated speech: ways of orienting to academic skills, ways of engaging with emotions and typical interlocutors. In fact, the associations of the integrated register seem to map on to value ascriptions that allow us to link integrated to the value system that previous Danish sociolinguistic studies associate with ‘conservative Copenhagen’ and school-related standard ideology, where excellence is

Soc ial St atus Rel at ions and Enregister ment

161

perceived in relation to ‘superiority’ (Kristiansen, 2009: 189) and associated with values of intelligence, articulation, ambition, independence, rationality and conscientiousness. Only the speech indexing these values are, by the participants in our study, labelled integrated.

Relations of Authority and ‘Integrated’ Stylisations To include the aspect of situated pragmatic functions to the discussion of integrated speech, I will present two examples of similar stylisations involving two different speakers in two different interactional sequences. I argue that these stylisations correspond to what the participants refer to as integrated speech above. Yet, integrated speech is not an example of a widely enregistered and well-documented sociolinguistic style in Copenhagen (outside our study). Therefore, I will stay close to the level of local practice in these interactional sequences before I compare the examples to the metalinguistic accounts. Excerpt 4 is from one of Bashaar’s (Bas) recordings during a Danish lesson in grade 8. Just prior to this sequence, the teacher, Susanne (Sus) has complained about the students not passing on information about school activities at home and not returning acceptance forms from their parents (in this case a signed form allowing their child to be recorded during a rap workshop). Bashaar has been mentioned as one of those who still have not returned the form and the teacher has claimed that students who have not handed in the form will not be allowed to participate in the recording. To this warning Bashaar has replied jo selvfølgelig (‘yes of course’). So, aspects of criticism from the teacher as well as the teacher’s power to sanction unsatisfactory behaviour (by cancelling parties and not allowing pupils to participate in certain activities) is at play in this stretch of conversation. At the same time Bashaar’s behaviour in the class (in general) as an entertainer and provocateur plays a significant part. In the beginning of this sequence, the teacher explains that they will get to leave earlier another day because they are asked to stay longer on the day of the recordings. The stylised utterances in focus are marked by arrows on the right side of the translation column, and pronunciations noticeably differing from Bashaar’s usual contemporary urban speech style, are highlighted in bold.

Excerpt 4: ‘Of course’ Wireless recording by Bashaar during Danish lesson. Speakers: Teacher, Susanne (Sus); Bashaar (Bas); Jamil (Jam) as well as an unidentifiable boy (Boy) and girl (Girl) from the class.

162

Youth Cont ac t Zones

Original 1 Sus: 2 3 4 5 6 Bas: 7 Sus: 8 9 10 Bas: 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Boy: Girl: Bas: Jam: Sus: Boy: Girl: Sus:

og øh vi kan jo ikke forlange at I skal blive i tre timer og så ikke få noget goodwill [på den måde at I får] [ne:j selvfølgelig ikke] en anden dag tidligere fri så I får tidligt fri om [fredagen i næste uge] [ej hvor flot mand] ((clap and cheering)) tre timer der er stadig IT ikke [ja og xxx xxx Ole han nok dropper der] [det er fandeme flot altså Susanne og Inger I kan sutte min (xxx)] e:h [det bliver han så lige nødt til] [(så er der to timer)] [han dropper også denne her uge så] er der to af dem har han også droppet denne her uge ((several ‘yes’))

Translation 1 Sus: 2 3 4 5 6 Bas: 7 Sus: 8 9 10 Isr: 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Boy: Girl: Bas: Jam: Sus: Boy: Girl: Sus:

and eh well we can’t demand that you stay for three hours and not get any goodwill [in a way that you] [no: of course not] ← another day get to leave earlier so you get to [leave early next Friday] [oh how splendid man] ← ((clap and cheering)) three hours there’s still IT right [yes and xxx xxx Ole he probably skip that] [that’s damned nice ← really Susanne and Inger you can suck my (xxx)] e:h [well he’ll just have to] [(then it’s two lessons)] [he skips this weeks as well so] then its’ two of them has he skipped this week too ((several ‘yes’))

Bashaar’s contributions in lines 6, 10 and 15–17 are interesting as stylisations that are double voiced in more than one sense. They combine linguistic and communicative resources that point in the direction of different speaker personae. Partly because of this they leave the impression of a vary-directional (Bakthin, 1981) voicing of enthusiasm (lines 6 and 10) as well as complaint (lines 15–17). The utterances function as comments on the information and explanations given by the teacher, but they are not direct contributions to the official class room discourse. Rather they are directed at the classmates in the immediate surroundings. They are spoken in overlap with the teacher’s speech and not in a loud voice. On the surface the utterances in lines 6 and 10 are expressions of agreement and approval. In line 6, the initial prolongation and a relatively more fronted and unrounded pronunciation of the

Soc ial St atus Rel at ions and Enregister ment

163

vowel in nej (‘no’) (compared to Bashaar’s more frequent pronunciation of ‘no’) signals inauthenticity. This vowel pronunciation is stereotypically associated with conservative standard speech. Here, it is combined with the expression ‘of course’ which Bashaar has used in a similar utterance four minutes earlier and he repeats twice more within one minute. This recycling and repeating of the expression of agreement contributes to the impression of exaggerated obedience. The utterance in line 6 can be considered a varydirectional stylisation of an obedient and enthusiastic student voice indexed by relatively subtle linguistic features of a conservative standard pronunciation combined with a polite expression of agreement. The utterance in line 10 is partly a similar stylisation. It expresses enthusiastic approval and achieves its marked character predominantly through the choice of vocabulary: ej hvor flot (‘oh how splendid’). Yet this expression of approval with rather conservative and up-scale cultural connotations is combined with a slang expression mand (‘man’) frequently used in the adolescents’ casual speech. In this way the utterance is not only double voiced in the sense that it is another’s voice the speaker uses, but it is also on a linguistic level a combination of several voices. The combination as such further contributes to the inauthentic impression. This is neither an authentic conservative voice nor an authentic contemporary youth voice. The same kinds of voices appear in the last utterance (lines 15–17). Here the features of the swearing fandeme (‘damned’) and the I kan sutte min xxx (‘you can suck my xxx’), whatever it is he suggests they can suck (unclear from the recording), signals casual youth speech. Yet, the flot (‘splendid’) is pronounced with slightly fronted and unrounded vowel connoting conservative standard speech. So through this combination of linguistic and pragmatic features, Bashaar manages to express the opposite of agreement and approval in reaction to a teacher’s criticism and sanctioning to the entertainment of the classmates in his immediate surroundings. In the final example, the dimension of being researched is brought about playfully through a staged interview. A member of our research team, Andreas, has asked Isaam if he can record some freestyle rap with him. So, an academic from the university has talked him into performing some freestyle in the schoolyard. Isaam, though, is the one in control of the recorder. In this sequence he records a pretend interview. Musad acts as the interviewer asking about Isaam’s thoughts about rap.

Excerpt 5: ‘Rap is life’ Self-recording during freestyle rap activity (with ethnographer, Andreas). Speakers: Musad (Mus), Isaam (Isa) and an unidentifiable boy in the school yard.

164

Youth Cont ac t Zones

Original 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Mus: hvad synes du rappen er Isa: men jeg synes det er me:get koncentreret og me:get (.) velfungeret socialt sikkerhedsnet fordi [rappen] Mus: [pas på] (du ikke sutter min finger af) Isa: fordi fordi rappen (0.2) rappen Mus: ja rappen [xxx] Isa: [rappen] det e:r livet og livet det er tærte Boy: hold nu kæft (idiot) Mus: hvad siger du der er nogle der siger at de har ikke noget liv dem der rapper hvad siger du til det Isa: jeg siger de skal hjem og kneppe deres mor så kan de se hvad et liv er

Translation 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Mus: what do you think rap is Isa: but I think it’s ve:ry ← concentrated and ve:ry (.) well functioning social security web because [the rap] Mus: [watch out] (you don’t suck my finger off) Isa: because because rap ← (0.2) rap Mus: yes rap [xxx] Isa: [rap] i:t’s ← life and life is pie Boy: shut up (idiot) Mus: what do you say there’s who say that they haven’t got a life those who rap what do you to that Isa: I say they should go home and fuck their mum then they can see what life is

Isaam’s response to Musad’s question (lines 2–6, 9–10 and 12–14) is predominantly marked by the choice of vocabulary in his description of rap. The expressions ‘concentrated’, ‘well functioning’ and ‘social security web’ are not regularly used by Isaam and here they are combined with prolongation of the vowels in meget (‘very’) as well pauses and repetitions (lines 6, 9, 10 and 12). This combination of features leaves the impression of a thoughtful sophisticated, academic voice presenting the meaning of rap to the interviewer. In lines 12–14, Isaam becomes almost philosophical when he describes rap as livet (‘life’) and the continuation livet er tærte (‘life is pie’) of course emphasises the playfulness of the sequence. In this utterance ‘life’ is pronounced with marked exaggerated distinct pronunciation with a final aspirated plosive (more distinct than a conservative standard near pronunciation). The reference to ‘well-functioning social security web’ also seems to connote sociopolitical discourses of societal integration that corresponds to the understanding brought about in Excerpt 1. Isaam’s performance here is, indeed, reacted to as inauthentic and he is asked to ‘shut up’ (line 15), but Musad teasingly continues to play along with the interview role play and

Soc ial St atus Rel at ions and Enregister ment

165

asks Isaam to comment on the opinion of rappers not having a life. Isaam in his response switches to a more vernacular voice, as he tells those of that opinion to ‘go home and fuck their mum’ (lines 21–22). The stylisations in Excerpts 4 and 5 have in common that they are achieved through: (1) a lack of features associated with the contemporary urban speech style sometimes described by the speakers as ‘street language’ and instead a use of relatively unmarked young Copenhagen pronunciations; (2) a combination of selected extra distinct or marked conservative pronunciations with exaggerated expressions of agreement, enthusiasm or politeness and vocabulary indexing sophistication/academic reflection. In other interactional examples from our data (that I have not treated in detail here), similar features were occasionally also combined with a pronunciation characterised by exaggerated high pitch and a shrieky voice (as in Excerpt 2). The stylisations involve often rather subtly signalled, but still noticeable inauthenticity, and it is achieved as much through semantic and pragmatic features as through altered pronunciation. These combinations of linguistic resources, in fact, correspond quite closely to the features described and demonstrated in the participant’s metalinguistic reflections on the ‘integrated’ register and they are used to bring about similar values of hierarchical relations connected to institutional and educational aspects. The exaggerated polite, sophisticated and enthusiastic stylisations occur in our data in communicative contexts where norm transgressions and/or relations of authority of some kind are at play, and these situations involve either, directly or indirectly, teacher authorities or interviewers/researchers (Madsen, 2014). Thus, a voice bringing about associations of conservative standard up-scale cultural values is inauthentically put on and put on display in contexts where institutional inequalities are spotlighted. In this way, these interactional stylisations and their situated functions emphasise the dimension of symbolic power relations.

Concluding Discussion I set out to investigate the emergence and change of sociolinguistic structure out of agency under the superdiverse conditions of contemporary Copenhagen. I have demonstrated how the notion of integration is brought about in the meta-pragmatic commentary of a group of adolescents. The

166

Youth Cont ac t Zones

employment of ‘integrated’ as a term for academic standard speech practices suggests, on the one hand, an awareness among the adolescents of the dimension of social inequalities embedded in dominating understandings of cultural differences and integration and of minority cultural practices being considered worthless in relation to schooling and societal power. On the other hand, the data I have presented points to a significant sociolinguistic transformation. Linguistic signs that used to be seen as related to migration and an insider/outsider dimension of comparison are now related to status on a high/low dimension as well. This is particularly clear in the young speakers’ association of ‘integrated’ with a notion of conservative standardness that carries across national language boundaries. In this way, our data document processes similar to the ones described by Rampton in Britain (2011), and there are comparable intersections of ethnicity and status relations in Chun (2011), Bucholtz (2011) or Mendoza-Denton (2008), where the conception of race among American adolescents incorporates aspects of class (and gender). Jaspers (2011) also shows how in Belgium, minority adolescents’ stylisations of traditional Antwerp dialect reconfigure its social meaning, so that instead of simply being associated with hostility to migrants, it is used to spotlight institutional inequalities, positioning the young people within the dynamics of high/low stratification, not just inside/outside exclusion. So there is evidence from ethnographically informed studies of linguistic practice in several countries that linguistic styles once associated with migration and minorities are being actively mapped into social stratification and status. Recent Danish sociolinguistics has suggested that social class relations have relatively little contemporary sociolinguistic significance, and instead the discovery of new linguistic practices among youth in culturally and linguistically diverse environments has led to ethnicity being foregrounded. The data I have discussed in this chapter show that high/low stratification is indeed still relevant to contemporary Danish youth. In the values and privileges it evokes, ‘integrated’ is enregistered as a conservative standard code. Social status is profoundly interwoven with ethnicity, both in the metalinguistic descriptions, the situated stylisations and in the linguistic label applied to the register.

References Agha, A. (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. Austin TX: University of Texas Press. Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2010) Multilingualism: A Critical Perspective. London: Continuum.

Soc ial St atus Rel at ions and Enregister ment

167

Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2016) Language and superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 21–48). New York/London: Routledge. Blommaert, J. and Verschueren, J. (1998) Debating Diversity: Analysing the Discourse of Tolerance. London: Routledge. Bucholtz, M. (2011) White Kids: Language, Race and Styles of Youth Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chun, E. (2011) Reading race beyond black and white. Discourse & Society 22, 403–421. Coupland, N. (2007) Style. Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Creese, A. and Blackledge, A. (2011) Separate and flexible bilingualism in complementary schools: Multiple language practices in interrelationship. Journal of Pragmatics 43, 1196–1208. Ejrnæs, M. (2002) Etniske minoriteters tilpasning til livet i Danmark – forholdet mellem majoritetssamfund og etniske minoriteter [The adaptation of ethnic minorities to life in Denmark – the relationship between majority society and ethnic minorities], AMID Working Paper Series 18/2002. Extra, G., Spotti, M. and Van Avermaet, P. (eds) (2009) Language Testing, Migration and Citizenship: Cross-national Perspectives on Integration Regimes. London: Continuum. Heller, M. (2007) Bilingualism as ideology and practice. In M. Heller (ed.) Bilingualism a Social Approach (pp. 1–24). London. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Jaspers, J. (2005) Linguistic sabotage in a context of monolingualism and standardization. Language and communication 25, 279–297. Jaspers, J. (2010) Introduction. Society and language use. In J. Jaspers, J.-O. Östman and J. Verschueren (eds) Society and Language Use (pp. 1–20). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jaspers, J. (2011) Strange bedfellows: Appropriations of a tainted urban dialect. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15, 493–524. Johnstone, B., Andrus, J. and Danielsen, A.E. (2006) Mobility, indexicality and the enregisterment of ‘Pittsburghese’. Journal of English Linguistics 34, 77–104. Jørgensen, J.N. (2010) Languaging. Nine Years of Poly-lingual Development of Turkish-Danish Grade School Students, Vol. 1–2. (=Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism 15–16). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Jørgensen, J.N., Karrebæk, M.S., Madsen, L.M. and Møller, J.S. (2016) Polylanguaging in superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 137–154). New York/London: Routledge. Kristensen, K. (2003) Standard Danish, Copenhagen sociolects, and regional varieties in the 1900s. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 159, 29–44. Kristiansen, T. (2001) Two standards: One for the media and one for the school. Language Awareness 10 (1), 9–24. Kristiansen, T. (2009) The macro-level social meanings of late modern Danish accents. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 41, 167–192. Kristiansen, T. and Jørgensen, J.N. (2003) The sociolinguistics of Danish. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 159, 1–7. Madsen, L.M. (2011) Interactional renegotiations of educational discourses in recreational learning contexts. Linguistics and Education 22, 53-67. Madsen, L.M. (2012) Late modern youth style in interaction. In F. Kern and M. Selting (eds) Ethnic Styles of Speaking in European Metropolitan Areas (pp. 265–290). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

168

Youth Cont ac t Zones

Madsen, L.M. (2013) ‘High’ and ‘low’ in urban Danish speech styles. Language in Society 42 (2), 115–138. Madsen, L.M. (2014) Heteroglossia, voicing and social categorisation. In A. Blackledge and A. Creese (eds) Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy (pp. 41–58). London: Springer. Madsen, L.M., Karrebæk, M.S. and Møller, J.S. (2016) Everyday Languaging: Language Use among Urban Children and Youth. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Madsen, L.M., Møller, J.S. and Jørgensen, J.N. (2010) ‘Street language’ and ‘integrated’: Language use and enregisterment among late modern urban girls. In L.M. Madsen, J.S. Møller and J.N. Jørgensen (eds) Ideological Constructions and Enregisterment of Linguistic Youth Styles (=Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism 55) (pp. 81–113). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Maegaard, M. (2005) Language attitudes, norm and gender. A presentation of the method and results from a language attitude study. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 37, 55–80. Maegaard, M. (2007) Udtalevariation og – forandring i københavnsk – en etnografisk undersøgelse af sprogbrug, sociale kategorier og social praksis blandt unge på en københavnsk folkeskole [Phonetic Variation and Change in Copenhagen Speech – An Ethnographic Study of Language Use, Social Categories and Social Practice among Students in a Copenhagen School]. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A. (2007) Disinventing and reconstituting languages. In S. Makoni and A. Pennycook (eds) Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (pp. 1–41). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Mendoza-Denton, N. (2008) Homegirls. Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs. Oxford: Blackwell. Møller, J.S. (2009) Poly-lingual Interaction across Childhood, Youth and Adulthood. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Møller, J.S. and Jørgensen, J.N. (2013) Organizations of language among adolescents in superdiverse Copenhagen. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education 6 (1), 23–42. Newell, S. (2009) Enregistering modernity, bluffing criminality: How Nouchi speech reinvented (and fractured) the nation. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19, 157–184. OECD (2010) Reviews of Migrant Education. Denmark (authors D. Nusche, G. Wurzburg and B. Naughton). Paris: OECD Programme for International Student Assessment. Olwig, K.F. and Pærregaard, K. (eds) (2007) Integration. Antropologiske perspektiver. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum. Otsuji, E., and Pennycook, A. (2010) Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity and language in flux. International Journal of Multilingualism 7 (3), 240–254. Pedersen, I.L. (2009) Processes of standardization in Scandinavia. In F. Gregersen and T. Kristiansen (eds) Fra folkemål til multietnolekt (pp. 281–309). Oslo: Novus Forlag. Pharao, N. and Hansen, G.F. (2006) Prosodic aspects of the Copenhagen Multiethnolect. In Nordic prosody. Proceedings of the IXth Conference, Lund 2004 (pp. 87–96). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Quist, P. (2005) Stilistiske praksisser i storbyens heterogene skole. En etnografisk og sociolingvistisk undersøgelse af sproglig variation [Stylistic practices in the heterogeneous urban school. An ethnographic and sociolinguistic investigation of linguistic variation]. PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen. Rampton, B. (1995) Crossing. Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. Rampton, B. (2006) Language in Late Modernity. Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Soc ial St atus Rel at ions and Enregister ment

169

Rampton, B. (2009) Interaction ritual and not just artful performance in crossing and stylization. Language in Society 38 (2), 149–176. Rampton, B. (2011) Style contrast, migration and social class. Journal of Pragmatics 43, 1236–1250. Rennison, B.W. (2009) Kampen om integrationen. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel. Silverstein, M. (2003) Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication 23, 193–229. Thomsen, J.P.F. (2006) Konflikten om de nye danskere [The Conflict about the New Danes]. København: Akademisk Forlag. Torgersen, E., Kerswill, P. and Fox, S. (2006) Ethnicity as a source of changes in the London vowel system. In F. Hinskens (ed.) Language Variation – European Perspectives. Selected Papers from the Third International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE3), Amsterdam, June 2005 (pp. 249–263). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Vertovec, S. (2007) Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic & Racial Studies 30 (6), 1024–1054. Vertovec, S. (2010) Towards post-multiculturalism? Changing conditions, communities and contexts of diversity. International Social Science Journal 61, 83–95. Yilmaz, F. (1999) Konstruktionen af de etniske minoriteter: Eliten, medierne og ‘etnificeringen’ af den danske debat [The construction of the ethnic minorities: The elite, the media and the ‘ethnification’ of the Danish debate]. Politica, Tidskrift for politisk videnskab 31, 178–191.

Appendix Transcription key [overlap] LOUD °silent° Xxx (questionable) ((comment)) : ↑ (.) (0.6) Stress Hhh Mm mm mm Italics Bold

overlapping speech louder volume than surrounding utterances lower volume than surrounding utterances unintelligible speech parts I am uncertain about my comments prolongation of preceding sound local pitch raise short pause timed pause stress laughter breathe confirming denying English in original Stylised utterance

8 Languaging and Normativity on Facebook Andreas Stæhr

In this chapter I consider metalinguistic reflections on language use as well as interactional practices on Facebook involving features and values corresponding to the enregistered speech styles of ‘street language’ and ‘integrated language’. By studying these speech styles I investigate how adolescents orient towards different norms of language use on Facebook. The point of departure for my discussion is the public debate on digital communication technologies and spelling skills. In the debate, social media is often claimed to be responsible for the younger generations’ alleged poor spelling skills and linguistic decay. In the analysis I find that the young people orient towards different norms of language use in their interactions on Facebook – that is, both peer group norms and standard orthography. Thereby, this chapter portrays young peoples’ linguistic practices in social media environments as polycentric. Yet, although these environments are certainly polycentric there are also normative restrictions to communications in these social spaces. Some of them are peer governed, but standard orthography still plays a part.

Introduction This chapter addresses the theme of language and normativity in social media communication. By examining young people’s interactional practices on Facebook, I study how they orient towards different norms of language use in such social spaces. Thus, I aim to nuance prevalent assumptions about (1) social media as an unregulated communicative space and (2) linguistic standard norms as irrelevant to social media communication. Characteristic of the adolescent’s Facebook interactions are that they reflect an orientation towards different orders of normativity – that is, both 170

L anguaging and Nor mat iv it y on Facebook

171

standard orthography and peer generated norms. In the study of normativity I examine how the adolescents use two well described speech styles or registers in their written practices on Facebook and I further consider how these written representations of speech styles relate to standard orthography. Furthermore, I look into how these registers are represented in writing and how this contributes to our knowledge about the value ascriptions of these styles. Social media and digital communication technologies are regarded as important aspects in studies of language and superdiversity (Vertovec, 2006). For example, Blommaert and Rampton (2016: 23) highlight how social and demographic changes are complicated by the emergence of new communication technologies and how the research of language in such social spaces reveals further uncharted dimensions to the perspective of superdiversity. In addition, social media sites are good examples of superdiverse spaces as they seemingly offer endless possibilities for communication and self-expression across national and cultural boundaries (Varis & Wang, 2016). Social media communication further reflects processes of superdiversity because language use and mediation of social and cultural practices in such social spaces are increasingly characterized by plurality, heterogeneity and polycentricity of semiotic and linguistic resources and normativities (Leppänen & Elo, 2016: 112). In this sense, the internet clearly opens up a complex space that largely escapes control of the authorities – authorities that have been enforcing the importance of standard normativity (Karrebæk et al., forthcoming). This for example regards correct language use and preservation of standard orthography. However, it does not mean that the internet is a space without norms of social and linguistic behaviour. On the contrary diversity is indeed cultivated in these spaces. Along these lines Varis and Wang (2016: 219) argue that we need to nuance the image of the internet (presented by prevailing internet ideologies) as a social space ‘saturated with opportunities and aspirations where one is able to indulge in infinite creativity in imagining and constructing both self and other’. Also there may be a tendency within research on superdiversity and online language use to focus on the unlimited linguistic creativity of contemporary social encounters rather than normative forces (Varis & Wang, 2016). A similar picture of the internet as an unregulated space is also reflected in the public debate on social media and language use in Denmark. Here deviation from the standard is treated as treachery against the standard language and standard orthography – and in the very end the nation state. Chat, text messaging and social network sites such as Facebook are often criticized for being responsible for the younger generations’ alleged poor spelling skills and linguistic decay. The allegations are widely presented by

172

Youth Cont ac t Zones

some policy-makers, experts and lay persons. For example a former minister of cultural affairs during a hearing in the Danish parliament declared: I actually think that the Danish language has proved itself still to be rich and flourishing […] But we cannot take it as a given that it will remain so considering the challenges that the language faces. The Danish language is threatened by Anglicism, text message language, e-mail language, Facebook language, and all together this contributes to […] the impoverishment and rendering helpless with regard to spelling, orthography, etc. which is getting poorer and poorer. (Per Stig Møller, 2010, my translation) In this quote Møller voices a fear that the use of electronic media and the influence of English will lead to a decrease in Danish language users’ observance of standard orthography, and this is explicitly treated as related to a general threat against Danish as a ‘rich and flourishing language’. Electronic media are described as a leading oppositional force against this highly valued, (personified) vulnerable and fragile Danish language. Many similar statements are voiced in the debate. Furthermore, such statements are not unique to Danish society. Thurlow (2006) has studied similar examples of ‘moral panic’ regarding the decline of the standard language expressed in Englishlanguage news articles. Statements about deviations from the standard (as the ones voiced by Møller) must be viewed in relation to the history of standardization. Standardization in Denmark is, compared to most other European countries, particular powerful or advanced and it is evident in linguistic policies, education and public discourses. In a Danish context, the high level of standardization can among other things be explained on the basis of the existence of a prevalent standard ideology (Pedersen, 2009: 52) that has led to a history of linguistic uniformity of spoken language in Denmark. This has also been the case with respect to written language. Since 1888 there has been a standard norm of written Danish. This has been administered since 1955 by The Danish language board (an institution placed under the Ministry of Culture) which is obligated (by law) to determine Danish orthography and edit the official orthographic dictionary (Gregersen, 2011). This history of standardization might be one of the reasons why the standard has been and still is connected with strong feelings of national unity rooted in the national romantic idea about one nation, one people and one language (Heller, 2007) and it can further explain the motivation behind those who fight to preserve the Danish orthographic standard. Even though the orthographic standard of written Danish has (several times) been doomed under pressure (as in the quote above) there is, in fact,

L anguaging and Nor mat iv it y on Facebook

173

no solid evidence that the standard loses terrain because of peoples’ increased use of social media – although its significance and meaning has certainly changed as it now co-occurs with other orders of normativity (Karrebæk et al., forthcoming). To study how young people relate to and navigate between different normative orders on social media I focus on the following questions. Firstly, how do the participants in our study negotiate norms of language use on Facebook? Secondly, to what extent do their negotiations correspond to public discourses about social media and language use? And thirdly, who are ascribed the rights to use different registers or styles of writing and why? I address these questions by, firstly, analysing metalinguistic statements about norms of language use on Facebook in interviews conducted with Copenhagen adolescents and secondly, I analyse Facebook interactions among the same group of adolescents. In this way I am able to study the relations between the adolescents’ more or less overt metapragmatic activities. On the basis of this, I argue that young people orient towards many different norms of language use and that social media spaces are in fact highly regulated spaces regarding linguistic and social behaviour.

Normativities Normativity can be described as a form of organization and order (Blommaert, 2010: 37) and be perceived as a co-constructed interactional accomplishment that involves understandings of correctness, authority, appropriateness, competence, etc. (Agha, 2007). In this way norms of language use are socioculturally and ideologically constructed (Jørgensen et al., 2016). Thus, correctness has ‘nothing to do with the linguistic characteristics of features – correctness is ascribed to the features by (some) speakers’ (Jørgensen et al., 2016: 146). Furthermore, norms in general are not always (or only) concerned with evaluations of correctness and incorrectness – that is, evaluations linked to codified standards (Agha, 2007: 124). Agha (2007: 126) argues that linguistic norms should be conceptualized as involving different levels of normativity. He distinguishes between three levels of normativity: (1) A norm of behaviour. (2) A normalized model of behaviour. (3) A normative standard. The first level deals with norms in the sense of externally observable correlations such as a statistical norm or frequency distribution in some order of

174

Youth Cont ac t Zones

behaviour (Agha, 2007: 126). A statistical norm or pattern of this type could for example be: people of type X do or say Y. The second level of normativity is defined as ‘a reflexive model of behaviour, recognized as “normal” or “typical” by (at least some) actors, i.e., is a norm for them’. On this level a reflexive model specifies a norm for a given group of people based on their behaviour (peer generated norms fits this description). In this way Agha (2007) describes how some pattern of linguistic behaviour is being normalized in the perception of the given group of people. However, the whole group of people acting in a specific way does not need to view the specific behaviour as ‘normal’. Agha (2007: 125) further speaks of reflexive models as having both a social range and a social domain. The social range covers the people recognized as displaying the behaviour while the social domain covers a category of evaluators that recognize the behaviour. Furthermore, competing models of behaviour co-exist in society. Thus, it is not necessary that every member of society agrees that a given norm is holding for a given social group. For example (some) young people can perceive one way of writing as normal within a specific domain while (some) adults perceive the same way of writing as a violation of a codified standard. Such differences may lead to further group differentiation and new reflexive normative models of behaviour. The third level of normativity is the normative standard which is ‘a normative model, linked to standards whose breach results in sanctions’ (Agha, 2007: 126). On this level patterns of behaviour are not only reflexively normalized, but also standardized. Agha’s (2007) conceptualization of normativity suggests that contemporary sociolinguistic societies consist of multiple layers of normativity. This is the case because people are socialized into orienting towards different normative centres of language use that entail different patterns of linguistic behaviour. Young people, for instance, may orient towards different norm centres such as school and teachers, peer groups and different kinds of popular and sub culture in different situations. Blommaert (2010) describes such an organization of normativity as polycentric. The concept of polycentricity draws on Silverstein’s (1998) concept of ritual centres of authority. Such centres function to warrant and license language use in relation to ‘its cultural dimensionalities of locally understood autonomy’ (Silverstein, 1998: 405). Furthermore, the centres of authority will determine how norms of behaviour are informed by specific voices, genres and registers. In this way they supply information about what is good and bad behaviour and language usage (Silverstein, 1998: 406). Common to such different levels of normativity is that it may have social consequences if they are not complied with. In this sense compliance with a standard (or the standard) is often taken to be influential and highly important (Wilson & Stapleton, 2010: 63).

L anguaging and Nor mat iv it y on Facebook

175

Furthermore, the compliance with a standard is indexical of a moral character in general and connected to images of national homogeneity, beauty and other types of social essence (Agha, 2007: 147). Moreover, language policy at different levels (both state and institutional levels) treats standardization as necessary preconditions for social cohesion. Standard languages and standard orthography are also used to rank individuals and assign them a corresponding place in society (Jaspers, 2006: 135). In this way, deviations from linguistic norms and institutionally established standards have the potential of creating social meaning (Sebba, 2012). The creation of social meaning is, of course, according to Sebba (2012), dependent on to what extent texts are subjected to conform to the set of norms established for a language (assuming there is one). Therefore, Sebba (2012) suggests that texts can be placed on a continuum according to the extent that they are subject to regulation. Written practices such as graffiti are placed in the least regulated end of the continuum because they are often produced in illegitimate spaces. Furthermore, such types of writing often deviate from the orthographic standard. At the other end of the continuum we find highly regulated texts such as newspapers, prose produced for publication by mainstream publishers and school texts. Other texts are placed between these extremes. Importantly, they are not fixed for all time but vary historically as well as from language to language (Sebba, 2012). Interactions on social media such as Facebook are classified as orthographically unregulated by Sebba (2012). This makes sense when viewed from a standard orthographic point of view corresponding to Agha’s (2007) third level of normativity. However, when viewed from the perspective of Agha’s (2007) second level of normativity (e.g. peer group normativity), this type of writing is in fact highly regulated. The aim of my analysis is to show how social media texts are being regulated by the users by looking how young people orient to deviations from different norms of language use. But first I will account for how I collected my data.

Data and Method The data I draw on in this chapter were collected among a group of adolescents in Copenhagen. The adolescents all attended an urban public school at Amager in Copenhagen where the student body was characterized by a high degree of ethnic diversity. As part of a collaborative study (Madsen et al., 2013) I have carried out ethnographic fieldwork in two grade school classes in Copenhagen for almost three years. The project was initiated in 2009 when the participants in our study attended seventh grade and ended when they left school in 2011 (a period of time equivalent to secondary school).

176

Youth Cont ac t Zones

Since then, I continued to meet with some of the adolescents in focus in this chapter. In 2010, most of the adolescents in our study had a Facebook profile and regularly engaged with each other through this social network site. Seeing that, I created a Facebook profile on behalf of the project. I advertised for our new profile among the adolescents and soon we began to receive friend requests on Facebook. Afterwards I followed the young peoples’ social media practices alongside their school and leisure time activities. In this way I have both conducted online ethnography (Androutsopoulos, 2008) and ethnography (Duranti, 1997) in offline settings. This provided me with crucial knowledge about the participants’ social life across online and offline situations. Following the young people both on Facebook and in other everyday situations made it possible for me to gain a wider understanding of the connections between the two contexts regarding social and linguistic practices and friendship relations (see also Stæhr, 2014). This study of norms of language use on Facebook builds on semi-structured sociolinguistic interviews, essays on language use written by the participants, and Facebook interactions from 2009 to 2011. In later sections, I consider the interview data looking at the adolescents’ metalinguistic reflections of different ways of writing, and I attend to the adolescents’ interactions on Facebook.

Participants’ Reflections on Stylistic Norms and Writing The first metalinguistic reflection is from an interview with a 14-yearold girl called Kurima. She is an active user of Facebook and in the interview we talk about different ways of writing. I ask her to explain the different rules of language use on Facebook and in school:

Excerpt 1: ‘On Facebook it’s more free’ Interview (2011) with Kurima (Kur) Original:

Translation:

Kur: en dansk stil det er noget seriøst arbejde, det er noget man får karakter for og ens lærere skal se det […] så det er derfor man tager sig sammen når man skal skrive dansk stil, men på Facebook

Kur: a Danish essay that is something serious, you get marks and your teachers are supposed to see it […] therefore you pull yourself together when you write a Danish essay, but on Facebook it’s more free

L anguaging and Nor mat iv it y on Facebook

er det sådan mere frit fordi der er ikke nogen der siger at du ikke må skrive med stort bogstaver eller noget det må du sådan selv om

177

because nobody says you cannot write in capitals or something like that, you decide for yourself

Kurima describes two different norms of language use which she associates with the domains of school and Facebook respectively. Writing in school is described as something serious, associated with official rules of the teachers and evaluated in relation to grading scales. Writing on Facebook is not associated with any specific rules and is described as ‘more free’. That is, free from the orthographic standard. In this way she reproduces the stereotypical understanding that Facebook is a space that escapes the control of authorities. Later in the interview Kurima states that ‘some people write differently in school and in their spare time and such’. Thus, she voices an awareness of how different practices involve different norms of behaviour. This corresponds to what we find regarding the adolescents’ awareness of how they speak differently in different situations (Madsen, 2013; Stæhr, 2010). In the excerpt Kurima further points out teachers as evaluative authorities who determine what is considered as proper language use in school contexts. Yet, she does not point out similar evaluative authorities in her description of writing on Facebook. Thus, the understanding of the internet as a ‘more free’ space is not only prevalent in the public and political discourse, but also among our participants. Despite that writing on Facebook is described as ‘more free’ the adolescents nonetheless report about use of peer generated norms such as ‘street language’ and ‘integrated language’ in this context. In the following I briefly address the meaning of these categories. ‘Street language’ and ‘integrated language’ are categories we also know from studies of spoken language among Copenhagen youth (Ag, 2010; Madsen, 2011; Møller & Jørgensen, 2011). These categories are the speakers’ own and can be described as a result of an ongoing enregisterment (Agha, 2007) among the young people. The notion enregisterment is described by Agha (2007) as the processes and communicative activities that typify semiotic resources and link these to norms, typical speaker personae and situations. Thus, enregisterment also involves how ways of speaking become associated with different norms, different individuals and social activities. In this way enregisterment happens both on the level of practice and metapragmatic commentary. The enregisterment of ‘integrated language’ and ‘street language’ also involves practices associated with writing, but this has only been examined to a certain extent (see Stæhr, 2015; Karrebæk et al., forthcoming). The two registers represent different ways of speaking which are

178

Youth Cont ac t Zones

ascribed different values. Madsen (2013) finds that street language (also labelled ‘slang’ by some of the participants) is associated with specific stereotypic indexical values such as toughness, masculinity, youth, pan-ethnic minority street culture and academic non-prestige. Furthermore, polylingual practices (Jørgensen et al., 2016) and linguistic creativity is also described as an element of street language. Regarding integrated language Madsen (2013) finds that it is associated with distinct pronunciation, abstract and academic vocabulary and ritual politeness phrases. Moreover, this register is associated with up-scale culture, authority, academic skills, politeness, adults (teachers) and respect (see Madsen, 2013, for a more elaborate description). It is clear that the integrated register and street language invoke different opposing values. According to Madsen (2011, 2013) contrasted values such as academic vs. street cultural, polite vs. tough, stereotypical notions of masculinity vs. femininity and adult vs. youthful are clearly relevant here. Though we have gained insight into the participants’ metalinguistic descriptions of street language and integrated speech, we still need to look further into how these registers are used in online discourse. When reading an essay about everyday language use by one of the adolescents I became aware of that both street language and integrated language are also associated with writing (for further description of the essays see Møller & Jørgensen, 2011). He wrote: ‘You speak slang with your friends/ lads, on the street, when you write (chat), and when you want to express yourself’ (my translation). I followed up on this report of written slang in a second round of interviews carried out with the adolescents. The following excerpts illustrate how some of them describe the use of integrated speech and street language on Facebook. Excerpt 2 is from the same interview with Kurima. I ask her whether it is possible to use street language and integrated language in writing. She answers:

Excerpt 2: ‘They can do that when the write as well’ Interview (2011) with Kurima (Kur) Original: Translation: Kur: ja det kan man godt øh (.) Kur: yes you can eh (.) well some of altså det der gadesprog det er the boys use this street der nogle drenge der bruger (.) language (.) and in street og i gadesproget når de går language when they hang out sådan sammen kan de måske they may mix well if many of også blande altså hvis mange them are Arabs or something af dem er arabere eller sådan like that they use specific Arab et elle andet kan de bruge words while they (.)

L anguaging and Nor mat iv it y on Facebook

nogle arabiske ord mens de sådan (.) siger det der danske på en lidt anden måde og det kan de også når de skriver altså hvis nu at (.) de skal fortælle noget vigtigt så i steder for at skrive ‘hør her’ eller sådan et eller andet så skriver de det med bogstaver det de siger når de skal kalde på hinanden det der eow

179

pronounce the Danish words in another way and they can do that when the write as well that is if (.) they want to something important then instead of writing ‘listen up’ or something like that they use letters to write what they say when they call for each other, eow it is

Kurima points at the ‘mixing of languages’, the use of specific Arab words and a different pronunciation of Danish as characteristic features of street language. She emphasizes that these language practices are also possible when the adolescents correspond with each other in writing. Besides from describing street language as a polylingual practice the adolescents also describe street language as associated with coolness and slang expressions. The use of eow in this extract is an example of that. The expression eow is often associated with Kurdish by the adolescents and is commonly used as a call for attention (like ‘hey’). Furthermore, street language is described as a practice reserved for the boys. This is not an uncommon statement among the female participants in our study, yet as shown elsewhere (Ag, 2010; Ag & Jørgensen, 2013; Madsen, 2011) girls also engage in this practice. The next excerpt describes the difference between written and spoken street language. It is from an interview with one of the participants called Isaam. The interviewer, Lamies, asks whether the term ‘slang’ also is applicable for written practices. Surprisingly he answers that ‘you cannot write slang’. Yet, he is not entirely unequivocal regarding this as he further continues:

Excerpt 3: ‘Slang is more about the pronunciation’ Isaam (Isa) with interviewer (Lam) Original: 01 Isa: 02 03 04 05 06 Lam: 07 Isa: 08

Translation: Men man kan lave sådan nogle (.) agtige (.) hvis man skriver slang bliver man mere sprogspasser på en måde okay hvordan men man kan selvfølgeligt godt skrive slang ‘lad os

01 Isa: 02 03 04 05 06 Lam: 07 Isa: 08

But you can do like (.) such (.) if you write slang you are more like a language fool in a way okay how but you can of cause you can write slang ‘let’s

180

Youth Cont ac t Zones

09 lige daffe ud’ ‘lad os 10 flække den vandpibe’ 11 selvfølgelig men jeg synes 12 mere slang det er mere 13 udtalelsen 14 Lam: og den kan man ikke [skrive 15 Isa: [og den 16 kan man ikke skrive men 17 selvfølgelig der er nogle 18 ord og sådan noget

09 go’ ‘let’s 10 smoke that hooka’ 11 of course but I think 12 slang is more about 13 the pronunciation 14 Lam: and that you can’t [write 15 Isa: [and that 16 you can’t write but 17 sure specific 18 words exist and such

According to Isaam slang is primarily associated with speech because slang ‘is more about the pronunciation’. However, he notes that it is possible to write in slang by using ‘specific words’. In lines 7–10 he gives two examples of specific lexical features associated with slang – daffe (‘let’s get out of here’) and flække (in this case used as ‘smoke’). Still this is not ‘real’ slang to Isaam as one cannot imitate the pronunciation in writing. Isaam further explains how he feels linguistically restricted when writing slang (lines 3–4). However, in Stæhr (2015) I find several examples of written representations of pronunciations associated with street language (and some of them are written by Isaam). In other interviews I find that street language is perceived as cool on Facebook and that it often contains use of abbreviations, missing words and letters and ‘mixed’ language use. Furthermore, street language is often contrasted with integrated writing. A general tendency in the interviews is that you do not necessarily have to follow the orthographic standard on Facebook. Instead you write according to how you want to be perceived. In many of the interviews I find reports of integrated writing being linked to writing novel like (and long) status updates on Facebook. Furthermore, integrated writing in general is associated with more literate or school oriented practices through which you show off your literacy skills (such as in essays and emails to the teachers). This correlates well with Madsen (2011: 22) who describes that integrated speech is enregistered as a code, associated with a notion of conservative standardness and that streetlanguage is partly enregistered in opposition to this. So, while written street language practices are associated with being cool integrated writing is associated with appearing clever. The latter is illustrated in the next excerpt:

Excerpt 4: ‘Ha ha do you feel wise’ Kurima (Kur) with interviewer (And) Original: 01 And: hvad med integreret kan 02 man skrive integreret

Translation: 01 And: how about integrated can 02 you write integratedly

L anguaging and Nor mat iv it y on Facebook

03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Kur: And: Kur: And: Kur:

på Facebook ja eller ja altså har du skrevet integreret nej det tror jeg ikke jeg har (.) ikke på Facebook men (.) der er nogle altså hvis nu (.) altså der er en der prøver at være sådan lidt sjov eller sådan noget i en kommentar kan han godt skrive nogle lidt integrerede ord som der ikke er nogen der forstår og så skriver man ‘ha ha føler du dig klog’ eller sådan et eller andet og sådan And: ja Kur: bare for at gøre det sjovt eller sådan jeg ved det ikke And: så man kan godt se når folk skriver integreret Kur: ja fordi det for man ved det er jo ikke er det sprog han bruger […] 27 Kur: det er noget lidt andet sprog 28 end (.) når man skal skrive 29 sammen og sådan noget

03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Kur: And: Kur: And: Kur:

And: Kur: And: Kur:

[…] 27 Kur: 28 29

181

on Facebook yes or yes well have you written integratedly no I don’t think I have (.) not on Facebook but (.) some people if (.) well if one tries to be funny or something like that in a comment he can write such integrated words which people don’t understand and then you write ‘ha ha do you feel wise’ or something like that and such yes I don’t know just to make it funny or something like that so it’s possible to see when people write integratedly yes because you know that it isn’t this language he uses it is a different language than (.) when you write together and such

Kurima does not recall writing integratedly on Facebook herself, but she knows of people who have done so. The use of integrated words is described as hard to understand and it is a way to write if you want to appear clever. According to Kurima instances of integrated writing are also often met by statements like ‘do you feel clever?’ For that reason she does not believe that people are perceived as serious when they choose to write integratedly on Facebook, rather they do it for fun. She also explains that it is easy to point out when people write integratedly as it appears different from the language the adolescents normally use (lines 24–26). In this way integrated writing is described as a marked register in the context of Facebook. So, integrated language is not a register reserved for written practices on Facebook unless it is used in a jocular way. Yet, Lamis, another participant

182 Youth Cont ac t Zones

in our study, tells me about a more serious use of integrated writing on Facebook:

Excerpt 5: ‘Don’t act clever now’ Lamis (Lam) with interviewer (And) Original: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13

And: […] hvis du kommer til at skrive integreret på Facebook Lam: ja And: og de siger ej lad nu være med altså (.) har du så gjort det sådan med vilje Lam: nogle gange ja hvor det bare er sådan hvor jeg skal vise at jeg er klog så skriver jeg på den måde And: ja Lam: og så siger de ‘lad være med at spil klog nu’

Translation: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13

And: […] if it happens you write integratedly on Facebook Lam: yes And: and they say don’t do that (.) was it then on purpose Lam: sometimes yes then it is just to show that I am smart that’s why I write that way And: yes Lam: and then they say ‘don’t act smart now’

According to Lamis, she does not use integrated writing for fun; she uses integrated language to show how clever she is and to show off. Her use of the register is apparently also perceived this way by others as she reports that peers tell her not to ‘act smart’. This is a common description by the other participants as well. Judging from the adolescents’ metalinguistic statements in this section, it is evident that they see themselves as orienting towards many different norms of language use. Their metalinguistic reflections further reveal that they possess knowledge about different norms, awareness of when and where the different norms are applicable, and finally who makes and enforces the ‘official’ standard norm.

Norms of Language Use on Facebook In the previous section I looked at the adolescents’ explicit metalinguistic reflections on norms of language use – that is, what they say about how they relate to different norms of language use. In this section, I study the adolescents’ interactions on Facebook to get at how they in fact orient to different linguistic norms in their online interactions. More specifically I look at how the participants interactionally relate to and align with the orthographic standard and peer generated norms and how they negotiate rights and ownership of language use. The first excerpt is a status update posted by Jamil on his Facebook wall:

L anguaging and Nor mat iv it y on Facebook

183

Excerpt 6: ‘Have been in the computer’ Facebook extract, Jamil’s wall, 15th of February 2010 Original:

Translation: Jamil: Rasmus: Fatima: Rasmus: Abed:

Have been in the computer for 14 hours today How do you get inside the computer?? ;) I would like to know that as well Haha Jamil, I find it funny when you miswrite/misspell!! The funniest is when you ask whether you can go INTO the toilet, HAHA when will you come out again?

Jamil’s post ‘have been in the computer for 14 hours today’ triggers a string of jocular comments. Rasmus, Fatima and Abed react to what, from a standard orthographic perspective, is a deviant use of the preposition i (‘in’). På (‘at’) would be the standard choice. In his comment Jamil’s classmate Rasmus indirectly brings up a situation from school where Jamil (allegedly) asked the teacher if he could go ‘into’ the toilet. Among the adolescents this story has been used to tease Jamil on various occasions. Thus, the Facebook interaction is part of a more general practice with a linguistic side to it – that is, teasing Jamil with his non-standard use of prepositions compared to the standard use. Yet, here, linguistic correctness per se is obviously less important than local positioning. The reactions to Jamil’s non-standard use of prepositions contrast strikingly with the absence of reactions to other instances of deviation from the orthographic standard. The abbreviations dt and jj in Fatima’s turn dt vil jj også vide (‘I would like to know that as well’) are orthographic non-standard forms for det and jeg. Thereby we see both instances of deviations from standard orthography that are reacted to and instances which are not reacted to. We cannot be sure of the reasons for this difference between the reaction to Jamil and Fatima. Yet, shortened forms similar to those used by Fatima are often found on social network sites such as Facebook and they may even

184

Youth Cont ac t Zones

constitute a generally accepted way of writing in such social spaces. Thereby Fatima’s language use does not create the impression of transgression (intended or not), but instead she appears literate within this particular genre of computer mediated communication. It may also be the case, of course, that Rasmus – and the other participants – just have no motivation for teasing Fatima. Nonetheless the excerpt still illustrates how the young participants both orient to the orthographic standard and other norms within the same conversational sequence. Furthermore, it shows how different norms do not necessarily exclude each other but may function simultaneously. The excerpt also shows that Rasmus’ correction of Jamil must be viewed in the light of correctness as a social resource in the negotiation of social relations rather than it being about correct vs. incorrect language use. This means that correct language use is treated as a resource for local positioning – in this case friendly teasing. The next excerpt also involves local social positioning as it deals with negotiations of rights of language use and co-participants reactions to transgressive linguistic acts such as crossing. Crossing occurs when speakers’ use features which are generally not perceived as a part of their repertoire and thereby crossing involves a sense of transgression of ethnic or social boundaries (Rampton, 2005: 270). Excerpts 7a–7c are examples of crossing. The excerpts are part of a longer Facebook thread. Lamis and another girl are discussing an incident which occurred earlier on the same day in the French class. Their classmate Mark comments on this even though he was not present. This annoys the girls, so Lamis asks him:

Excerpt 7a: ‘Where do you come from’ Facebook extract, Lamis’ wall, 6th of October 2009 Original:

Translation:

Lamis: Mark:

where do you come from .. you didn’t even participate, it was in the French lesson … But Lamis I come from 1. My mother 2. Turkey 3. Poland 4. Italy 5. England … :D

As a response to Mark’s interruption Lamis writes ‘where do you come from’, in the sense ‘you are totally lost’ or ‘what are you doing’. She clearly

L anguaging and Nor mat iv it y on Facebook

185

judges his comment to be inappropriate. Mark replies somehow provocatively ‘But Lamis I come from 1. My mother 2. Turkey 3. Poland 4. Italy 5. England…:D’. He circumvents Lamis indirect reproach – and insult – by orienting to a literal interpretation of her reaction. More importantly, he also reworks the expression ‘coming from’ which is often associated with having a special relation to one geographical location (for instance one’s birthplace or one’s place of residence). We know from our ethnographic observations and our interviews with Mark that his parents come from Turkey and Poland, respectively, that his favourite soccer team is a local Italian team and that he is a big fan of the Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton from England. This is probably the basis of Mark’s answer to ‘coming from’: he does not treat it as essentially concerned with heritage affiliation or home. Rather, in his interpretation the feeling of belonging and origin comes about as the result of different processes and it is related to different people. Thereby Mark introduces a more dynamic and complex approach to ‘place of origin’. This very well illustrates Vertovec’s (2006) insight that in superdiversity belonging is not a zero sum game based on a single nation state. One can simply claim to ‘come from’ and be affiliated to different places. However, Lamis does not agree in this situation. Instead she (from an analyst perspective) introduces a traditional and more essentialist view on the issue. She states that it is only possible to come from one place, but Mark does not react as if this bothers him:

Excerpt 7b: ‘I come from 5 countries’ Facebook extract, Lamis’ wall, 6th of October 2009 Original:

Translation: Mark:

Ååååååååårrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!! it’s so cool that I come from 5 countries….:D Sjuf I’m 100% ‘Perker’….:D Lamis: Yeah but you still not an Arab .. so don’t say Sjuf .. ;D Wordlist: Sjuf = Look Perker = equivalent to ‘nigger’ or ‘paki’

Mark explicitly associates his coming from five different countries, none of which is Denmark, with being a perker. Perker is a Danish equivalent to Paki or Nigger. This term is stereotypically used to refer to people from the

186 Youth Cont ac t Zones

Middle East or North Africa, and in general it is considered derogatory. However, it may also be used as a positive in-group marker. Mark’s use of the word sjuf further demonstrates how this perker identity is associated with a particular language use. Sjuf is associated with both Arabic and street language. Yet, according to Lamis, Mark’s complex (and non-Danish) selfproclaimed understanding of belonging is not sufficient for him to be a perker. He is required to have some relation to the Arab world. Because this is not the case, Lamis claims that Mark does not have the right to use the word sjuf. In other words, Lamis reserves the feature sjuf to people who can use it authentically – that is, Arabs. However, Mark seemingly does not agree:

Excerpt 7c: ‘The same class as all Arabs’ Facebook extract, Lamis’ wall, 6th of October 2009 Original:

Translation: Mark: I say sjuf whenever I want to ….. But that’s what happens when you go to the same class as all Arabs …. It’s a goooood class … :D Lamis: Only 8 out of 23 are Arabs .. and ofc it’s a good class :D To attend a class with ‘all the Arabs’ is according to Mark enough to obtain the right to use the word sjuf. Lamis challenges this view as she points out that there are only eight Arabs out of 23 in the class. The meaning of this statement is not unequivocal. It could either mean that Lamis finds the number of Arabs too low for him to use the feature sjuf or it could mean that she does not accept Mark’s justification (that he obtains rights through his peer group). Either way Mark does seem to be aware of some obstacles with regard to his authenticity as a perker as he puts this word in quotation marks. The laughing in the end of his post also indicates that his interactional contributions are framed as insincere or ‘for fun’. The humorous tone is agreed with by Lamis’ use of smileys. A similar example of negotiation of rights of language use is found on Bashaar’s Facebook wall. This example illustrates how values are associated with different linguistic features and who are allowed to use them:

Excerpt 8: ‘Have shaved’ Facebook extract, Bashaar’s wall, 22nd of November 2009

L anguaging and Nor mat iv it y on Facebook

187

Original:

Translation: Bashaar: Rasmus:

Have shaved HAHAHAHAHAHA … then you don’t have more Shaaarkkk left ;D Bashaar: Hehehe Rasmus: you better teach it to Jamil ;D Fatima: ;OO THAT WAS A DIIIS :P Lamis: Hahahahahaha lol laughing .. ;) Fatima: Oh Rasmus tries to be a Perker Hahaahhhaha laughing :´D Rasmus: Yep I’m a proper sick gangstar, cough cough ;D Mohammed: you dog kill you Rasmus Wordlist: Shark = Hair Perker = equivalent to ‘nigger’ or ‘paki’

In this status update the minority boy, Bashaar, writes about how he has started shaving. Rasmus, who is one of the majority students in our study, is the first to reply. In my analysis of this excerpt I focus on Rasmus’ comment and how the others react to it. The comment can be characterized as an incident of crossing into street language because he laughingly writes ‘then

188 Youth Cont ac t Zones

you don’t have any more shaaarkkk left’ followed by a winking smiley. Shark is a linguistic feature associated with Arabic, meaning hair. However, it is also used as slang among the adolescents and perceived as associated with street language by the participants in our study. Rasmus’ performance of street language appears marked. This is essential to how and why the others react to his comment. His comment can be characterized as marked because it contains the following characteristics. Firstly, the additional a’s and k’s (in comparison to the standard spelling of the word) influences the way a corresponding ‘pronunciation’ can be imagined. Secondly, the winking and laughing smiley in the end of the post frames the utterance as insincere which, thirdly, is supported by the fact that he in writing puts up an exaggerated laughter in the beginning of the comment. These characteristics may be the reason why the majority boy’s use of the feature shark attracts attention among the others. Common to the responses is that the others seem to catch the insincerity in Rasmus’ use of the word. Bashaar is the first who comments. He posts an iconic representation of laughter in writing and thereby appears as if he appreciates the non-serious frame established by Rasmus. After some teasing comments on how Bashaar should teach Jamil (another boys from their class) to shave, Fatima reacts to Rasmus’ utterance by writing: ‘Oh Rasmus tries to be a perker hahaahhhaha laughing :’D’. She ends her comment by writing flækker (slang for ‘laughing’) and with a smiley laughing so much it bursts into tears. By writing this comment she ascribes the use of shark to the category perker (as in Excerpt 7b) and furthermore accuses Rasmus of pretending to be one. Because of the winking and laughing smiley that burst into tears from laughter at the end of the post her categorization must be understood in line with the already established non-serious frame of play and teasing. Rasmus stays in the jocular frame of teasing in his next comment where he acknowledges that he is ‘a proper sick gangster’. Being ‘a proper sick gangster’ is used in the stereotypical sense of a tough immigrant boy. In this way he plays on a stereotypical image of minority boys in Denmark as violent and criminal. The notion of being ‘a proper sick gangster’ became a nation-known description of young minority boys as it was used in a advent calendar shown on television depicting contemporary culturally diverse urban environments from a humoristic and satirical point of view (Madsen, 2008). The fact that he writes ‘cough cough’ further supports the frame of play characteristic of the interaction among the adolescents. So, by his performance of street language, Rasmus plays with a tough masculine immigrant stereotype, and this stereotypical image seems to be reacted to by Mohammed in his post the day after where he playfully threatens to kill Rasmus. On the basis of Rasmus’ performance it is obvious that he signals awareness of the locally negotiated

L anguaging and Nor mat iv it y on Facebook

189

understandings of who are allowed to use specific linguistic features. He also signals awareness of that he in this situation transgresses the social boundaries of the use of features associated with street language. Both Bashaar’s and Fatima’s reaction to his performance supports this. Along the same lines as the two previous examples, Excerpt 9 illustrates how the choice of linguistic features by a participant becomes the focus of attention. This excerpt is a status update about a football match between Iraq and the United Arab Emirates written by a girl called Fadwa:

Excerpt 9: ‘Has one become integrated’ Facebook extract, Fadwa’s wall, 14th of January 2011 Original:

Translation: Fadwa: Iraq wins tomorrow don’t embarrass me I trust you … ♥ […] Massima: Girl get over it, and let us come to terms with that they loose THE END!…..END of discussion ;) Fadwa: ;) Abed: Isn’t it today Iraq loses? Ibrahim: Has one become integrated? Real DANE.

Iraq did not embarrass Fadwa as they won the match 1-0. It was Fadwa who brought my attention to this excerpt and we discussed it in an interview. Fadwa explains how Ibrahim’s utterance should be seen as a reaction to Massima’s use of integrated language and points specifically to the word

190

Youth Cont ac t Zones

indse (‘come to terms with’) as being associated with this way of writing. According to Fadwa, Ibrahim evaluates Massima’s use of integrated language negatively. Thereby Massima’s use of integrated is treated as marked in this context. There are other features in Massima’s utterance that could be perceived as integrated language. For example pigebarn which is an old fashioned expression for girl. Yet, we cannot know for sure whether this word also triggered Ibrahim’s response. Massima ends her comment with a winking smiley which frames the utterance as insincere or fun. However, this does not seem to influence Ibrahim’s evaluation of her language use as his comment is kept in a rather serious tone without emoticons or other contextualization cues. The matter of being integrated is obviously perceived as a serious matter for Ibrahim. Furthermore, being integrated is also connected to being a ‘real DANE’, which is used here as a derogatory term by Ibrahim. As mentioned before we know that the term integrated language is not understood as unequivocal as it appears in this case. The last excerpt illustrates the connection between integrated speech and the orthographic standard. Here Henrik writes a message on their class Facebook page, which the students have created to arrange after school activities such as trips to the movies, parties, etc.:

Excerpt 10: ‘Under the given circumstances’ Facebook extract, Henrik’s wall, 30th of March 2011 Original:

Translation: Henrik: If it happens how many are attending? :) could everybody please write whether they can make it or not and what they feel like doing

L anguaging and Nor mat iv it y on Facebook

191

Safa:

Feel* Henrik, you need to integrate yourself in the Danish language like the rest of us (: Nadia: What are we doing and where and when? :) Zinah: I’m in. I don’t care what we do as long as we do it together Henrik: Under the given circumstances, I would like to ask whether any of you are able to attend or not satisfied Safa XD

Henrik’s post includes what is an orthographic error compared to standard orthography: løst instead of lyst. Safa ironically comments that Henrik (who is of majority Danish background) should get integrated in the Danish language ‘like the rest of us’. Thereby Safa clearly aligns with the standard norm, but also brings in a public and political discourse that connects skilled linguistic competences with being integrated with respect to the Danish language or society as a whole. This adds a minority/majority dimension. Safa compares the widespread societal idea of integration (or ‘being integrated’) to being linguistically skilled in the standard language. By writing the comment she claims to belong to a group of people who is already integrated – that is, a group that can spell. She further compares Henrik to this group or as she writes: ‘the rest of us’. It is unclear who us refers to. It could be the other (minority background) students in their class who (allegedly) have integrated into the school system, or it could be the entire group of immigrants in Denmark, or just those whom Safa considers well-integrated. There is a certain trace of irony in Safas utterance. It is created by the fact that integration is not usually seen to involve majority boys – the smiley in Safa’s post frames her utterance as playful or insincere. There is an additional layer to the integration issue in this excerpt. When Henrik replies ‘under the given circumstances I would like to hear if anybody will have the possibility of attending satisfied Safa XD’, he is clearly writing integratedly, using academic formulations and ritual politeness. He thereby draws in the dimension of the notion of integrated that is connected to the locally established integrated speech register. He also responds to the ironic undercurrent in Safa’s comment as he addresses Safa and asks whether she is satisfied with his style of writing. Again note the smiley – this is friendly teasing. This excerpt shows clear evidence that the young people are able to manoeuvre between different norms of language use. Furthermore, it demonstrates how groups may draw on highly localized language norms, how such local (and peer generated) norms function in interplay with more conservative standards, and how some societally prevalent norms (here that of integration being related to minority citizens) can be renegotiated locally within a frame of play.

192

Youth Cont ac t Zones

Conclusion This chapter suggests that normativity plays a significant role in young people’s social media practices as I have illustrated how they orient towards different normative orders – that is, both the orthographic standard and different peer norms associated with different speech styles. In this way the adolescents’ linguistic practices in social media interaction can be described as polycentrically organized. The adolescents’ Facebook interactions and their metalinguistic reflections in the interviews hint at a well-developed awareness of what values are ascribed to different ways of writing. In addition their interactional practices on Facebook suggest that different genres encompass different linguistic features and that not all people are ascribed the same rights of language use. We have seen how the adolescents’ are reflexive in the way they orient towards different norms of language use on Facebook. In studies of the adolescents’ spoken language practices (Madsen, 2013; Madsen, Møller & Jørgensen, 2010) and in their essays about language (Møller & Jørgensen, 2011) we find similar reflexive language use referring to the same registers and norms of language use. Orientation towards different normative orders on Facebook is the result of an ongoing negotiation among the youth which defines norms and rights of language use. The orientation towards standard orthography and peer generated norms are linked to processes of enregisterment among the Copenhagen youth regarding the street language and integrated speech/ writing registers (see also Stæhr, 2015). Facebook is a communicative space characterized by a particular high level of reflexivity (Weber & Mitchell, 2008). This makes Facebook data well suited to study processes of enregisterment, because they reflect how different features are associated with rights of language use and how different ways of writing are associated with larger discursive meanings and writers’ reflections of social categories and stereotypes. In particular, the analysis contributes to our knowledge about rights of language use regarding the street language and integrated speech/writing registers. For example, we saw how individuals tried out a different voice by crossing (Rampton, 2005) into features (sjuf and shark) associated with recognizable categories (perker and Arab) which they were not conventionally considered to belong to. In this way the adolescents interactional practices illustrates the limitations to the identity one can choose. We have seen an example of how such identity work can be contested by the other participants. One strategy applied was to orient towards right of language use. Such a strategy can be considered as a part of the young peoples’ situated social positioning. The same applies when the adolescents for example correct each

L anguaging and Nor mat iv it y on Facebook

193

other’s use of prepositions in accordance with the orthographic standard, which also reflects social positioning (see also Stæhr, 2016). Contrary to what is suggested in the public discourse about social media and language use, the orthographic standard of written Danish plays a significant role in the young people’s interactions on Facebook. In this way, there is no solid evidence in my data that the standard orthography loses terrain because of peoples’ increased use of social media. However, I find that the significance and meaning of the orthographic standard has changed as it now co-occurs with other normative orders – that is, co-occurrence with local and peer generated norms. However, in the interviews I find that Facebook (in accordance with the public discourse) is depicted as a ‘more free’ space of writing. But what is the reason for such discrepancy between the adolescents’ metalinguistic evaluations and their language use? One explanation could be the high status of the Standard in Danish society because, as Agha (2007: 147) argues, the ideals linked to the standard ‘tends to naturalize perceptions of the register as a baseline against which other registers appear as deviant, defective varieties of the language’. In that sense the strong history of standardization in Denmark influences what people consider as normal behaviour and ‘valid’ norms. In this way the standardization discourse (as depicted in Møller’s quote) seems to influence the adolescents metalinguistic reflections about norms of language use as they tend to evaluate school or standard norms as more serious than writing on Facebook. Also researchers, such as Sebba (2012: 5), argue that ‘the internet and other digital technologies such as SMS have provided spaces where standard spelling norms are frequently disregarded, leading to an expansion of the “unregulated orthographic space”’. Seen from an entirely standard orthographic point of view Sebba certainly has a point. Yet, if we categorize the different kinds of writing young people produce in social media interactions as unregulated there is a danger of oversimplification, because that social media writing (as shown in this chapter) is characterized by various forms of regulation and orientations towards many different and sometimes co-existing norms of language use. This means that interaction in such spaces is regulated both by top down and bottom up movements. Altogether this suggests that linguistic creativity in superdiverse spaces such as the internet and social media is not unlimited, but shaped by normative forces.

References Ag, A. (2010) Sprogbrug om identitetsarbejde hos senmoderne storbypiger [Language Use and Identity Work among Late Modern Urban Girls]. (=Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism 53). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.

194

Youth Cont ac t Zones

Ag, A. and Jørgensen, J.N. (2013) Ideologies, norms, and practices in youth poly-languaging. International Journal of Bilingualism 17 (4), 525–539. Agha, A. (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Androutsopoulos, J. (2008) Potentials and limitations of discourse-centred online ethnography. Language@internet 5 (8), 1–20. Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2016) Language and superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 21–48). New York/London: Routledge. Duranti, A. (1997) Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gregersen, F. (2011) Language and ideology in Denmark. In T. Kristiansen and N. Coupland (eds) Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe (pp. 47–56). Oslo: Novus Press. Heller, M. (2007) Bilingualism as ideology and practice. In M. Heller (ed.) Bilingualism a Social Approach (pp. 1–24). London: Hampshire. Jaspers, J. (2006) Stylizing standard Dutch by Moroccan boys in Antwerp. Linguistics and Education 17, 131–156. Jørgensen, J.N., Karrebæk, M.S., Madsen, L.M. and Møller, J.S. (2016) Polylanguaging in superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 137–154). New York/London: Routledge. Karrebæk, M.S., Stæhr, A., Juffermans, K. and Muhonen, A. (forthcoming) Norms, polycentricity and polylanguaging on social network sites in superdiversity. In D. Duncker and B. Perregaard (eds) Creativity and Continuity. Perspectives on the Dynamics of Language Conventionalization. Leppänen, S. and Elo, A. (2016) Buffalaxing the other: Superdiversity in action on YouTube. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 110–130). New York/London: Routledge. Madsen, L.M. (2008) Fighters and outsiders. Linguistic practices, social identities, and social relationships among urban youth in a martial arts club. PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen. Madsen, L.M. (2011) Social status relations and enregisterment in contemporary Copenhagen. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 72. London: King’s College London. Madsen, L.M. (2013) High and low in Urban Danish speech styles. Language in Society 42 (2), 115–138. Madsen, L.M., Karrebæk, M.S. and Møller, J.S. (2013) The Amager project. A study of language and social life of minority children and youth. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 52. Tilburg: Tilburg University. Madsen, L.M., Møller, J.S. and Jørgensen, J.N. (2010) ‘Street Language’ and ‘integrated’: Language use and enregisterment among late modern urban girls. In L.M. Madsen, J.S. Møller and J.N. Jørgensen (eds) Ideological Constructions and Enregisterment of Linguistic Youth Styles (=Copenhagen Studies on Bilingualism 55). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Møller, J.S. and J.N. Jørgensen (2011) Enregisterment among adolescents in superdiverse Copenhagen. In J.S. Møller and J.N. Jørgensen (eds) Language Enregisterment and Attitudes (pp. 99–121) (=Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism 63). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.

L anguaging and Nor mat iv it y on Facebook

195

Møller, P.S. (2010) § 20-spørgsmål S 123 om det danske sprog. See http://www.ft.dk/ samling/20101/spoergsmaal/S123/index.htm (accessed 19 February 2016). Pedersen, I.L. (2009) The social embedding of standard ideology through four hundred years of standardisation. In M. Maegaard, F. Gregersen, P. Quist and J.N. Jørgensen (eds) Language Attitudes, Standardization and Language Change (pp. 51–68). Oslo: Novus Press. Rampton, B. (2005) Crossing. Language & Ethnicity Among Adolescents (2nd edition). Manchester: Encounters, St. Jerome publishing. Sebba, M. (2012) Orthography as social action, scripts, spelling, identity and power. In A. Jaffe, J. Androutsopoulos, M. Sebba and S. Johnson (eds) Orthography as Social Action, Scripts, Spelling, Identity and Power (pp. 1–20). Berlin: De Gruyter. Silverstein, M. (1998) Contemporary transformations of local linguistic communities. Annual Review of Anthropology 27, 401–426. Stæhr, A. (2010) ‘Rappen reddede os’: Et studie af senmoderne storbydrenges identitetsarbejde i fritids- og skolemiljøer København [‘Rap saved us’: A study of late modern urban boys’ identity work in leisure and school environments in Copenhagen] (=Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism 54). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Stæhr, A. (2014) Social media and everyday language use among Copenhagen youth. PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen. Stæhr, A. (2015) Reflexivity in Facebook interaction: Enregisterment across written and spoken language practices. In S. Leppänen, J.S. Møller and T.R. Nørreby (eds) Authenticity, Normativity and Social Media, Discourse, Context and Media 8, 30–45. Stæhr, A. (2016) Normativity as a social resource in social media practices. In L.M. Madsen, J.S. Møller and M.S. Karrebæk (eds) Everyday Languaging: Collaborative Research on the Language Use of Children and Youth. Berlin: De Gruyter. Thurlow, C. (2006) From statistical panic to moral panic: The metadiscursive construction and popular exaggeration of new media language use in the print media. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11 (3), 667–701. Vertovec, S. (2006) The emergence of super-diversity in Britain. Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Working Paper 25. Oxford: University of Oxford. Varis, P. and Wang, X. (2016) Superdiversity on the internet: A case from China. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 218–236). New York/London: Routledge. Weber, S. and Mitchell, C. (2008) Imagining, keyboarding, and posting identities: Young people and new media technologies. In D. Buckingham (ed.) Youth, Identity, and Digital Media (pp. 25–48). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Wilson, J. and Stapleton, K. (2010) Authority. In J. Jaspers, J.-O. Östman and J. Verschuren (eds) Society and Language Use (pp. 49–70). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Mercantile Spaces

9

Magic Marketing: Performing Grassroots Literacy1 Cécile Vigouroux

Introduction Work on national and transnational migrations has amply shown that geographic mobility often entails the restructuring of social and linguistic practices of both those who move and those in the host population who come in contact with them (Vigouroux, 2008). Blommaert (2006) has convincingly argued that texts, be they oral or written, may not travel as well as people because of the usual discrepancy between the ecology of signs in which a text is produced and that in which it is received, read, and therefore interpreted.2 As ‘circulating entities’ (Latour, 1993, quoted by Urry, 2007: 46), textual artefacts establish relationality between people who would otherwise not be in contact with each other. Semiotic artefacts create social continuity between otherwise discontinuous geographic spaces. Yet, relationality experienced in the here-and-now may have been shaped by previous long-term processes of broader timed-spaced encounters, real and/or imagined, experienced firsthand or entextualized through fictional narratives. Because language is inherently indexical, the activity of making sense of a text is often inseparable from that of categorizing the scriber. In other words, ways of writing become iconic of (projected) ways of being (cf. Gal & Irvine, 1995). The indexical work performed in the activity of reading may be retrospective (e.g. s/he is poorly educated because s/he has ‘poor’ literacy skills) or prospective (e.g. s/he is expected to have ‘poor’ literacy skills because s/he is poorly educated). Work done on social literacy has shown that the activity of reading is shaped by, among other things, overlapping ideologies of what counts as text, as good or bad writing, and as an educated or uneducated scriber (e.g. Barton, 2007; Baynham, 1995; Gee, 1996; Street, 1995). Sociolinguistic work has illustrated how these multi-layered ideologies control people’s access to services, jobs, 199

200

Mercant ile Spaces

education, or asylum (Blommaert, 2001). Less attention has been given to the ways scribers may frame the readers’ indexical work by conforming to the latter’s sociocultural expectations. My contribution here aims at analysing how socially stigmatized ways of writing may be commodified by the scribers themselves in order to reap symbolic and/or financial benefits. I illustrate this point by examining African marabouts’ advertisements in France and how they are interpreted by their French readers. Although it is well established, marabout is a polysemic term in the Islamic societies of the Maghreb and of West Africa. It can denote a holy man (Brett, 1980), a spiritual leader, a healer, a diviner, or a Qur’an Master (i.e. a Muslim who teaches the Qur’an to children). The term covers heterogeneous domains of expertise in and practice of esoteric knowledge (Graw, 2005).3 In West Africa, marabouts belong to the socially mobile elite and are highly praised and rewarded for their powers. Successful practitioners travel transnationally within Africa and to Europe, Asia, and North America to attend to their Muslim and nonMuslim clientele, be they Africans or not (see below). These transnational marabouts, whose reputation spreads via word of mouth, contrast with the local ones, who this chapter is about and who promote their spiritual powers through written advertisements hand distributed on the street, at subway station exits, or in mailboxes in predominantly migrant neighbourhoods. These advertisements promise to bring back unfaithful spouses, to restore virility, to help pass driver’s license tests, and success in business, among many other things. Metadiscursive activity on the marabouts’ flyers is commonly found on the internet: websurfers comment on and display their personal collections, which they typically mock and parody with spelling mistakes and exaggerated poor literacy skills. I argue that what French readers interpret as grassroots literacy (as defined by Blommaert, 2008) with instances of heterography, and vernacular language varieties, should rather be analysed as astroturf literacy, which I define as literacy that imitates or fakes popular grassroots ways of writing. Astroturf literacy implies that second indexical order – i.e. ways of indexing a particular social group, social class, geographic location, or ethnicity – operates both in the production of text and in its reception by readers. The act of writing is therefore intrinsically shaped by the act of reading, more precisely by the expected act of interpreting. In astroturf literacy the production of text is not framed as an individual act but as part of a collective activity of producers; therefore, each individual voice is subsumed by an identifiable collective voice. In other words, each individual voice draws its existence from a collective one. Marabouts’ advertisements are one of the visible and visual aspects of African migrations to France and epitomize a peculiar South-to-North direction of interaction taking place in the North. Yet, as I argue below, we should

Magic Market ing : Per for ming Grassroot s Literac y

201

not hastily subscribe to an approach where these advertisements are unilaterally analysed as an illustration of vernacular literacy, with the marabouts stigmatized because of their ‘peripheral’ variety of French. A diachronic analysis of data doesn’t lead to such conclusions. Nor should we, wellintentioned analysts, stop at legitimizing socially stigmatized ways of writing with fine-grained discursive analyses demonstrating how linguistically and semiotically powerful and elaborate they are nonetheless. I don’t intend to question the usefulness of such studies: They have drawn the attention of analysts and readers alike (often highly literate Westerners) to the different literacy regimes in which inscriptions emerge and circulate and how the latter are stratified in the global system of communication. I argue that, although at first glance it appears to be emancipatory, such a framework of analysis may uncritically subscribe to, and moreover participate in, what De Negroni (1992) calls Afrique fantasme (‘phantasm Africa’), viz., a set of reified and long-lasting images and discourse on Africa and Africans which social sciences and the humanities have partly helped construct. Among the many questions, the material presented here touches upon are those of creativity and unpredictability, which sociolinguistically oriented work on superdiversity has helped articulate (Arnaut, 2016; Blommaert & Rampton, 2016; Blommaert & Varis, 2013; Leppänen & Elo, 2016; see also Deumert, 2014 about creativity and aesthetic in the context of digital superdiversity). Both the production of the marabouts’ cards and their reception by their French readers are inscribed in a longue durée (Braudel, 1969) chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981) shaped by discourse on Africa, Africans, magic, irrationality, and literacy. These ideological representations are then appropriated and reworked by the ‘narrated Other’, whom the local marabouts epitomize, through a performed literacy that appears to meet the readers’ expectations and ratify their representations as ideology free. Stigmatized vernacular literacy is used here as creative semiotic resources for the marabouts to reinforce old ascribed identities (Parkin, 2016) on which they capitalize for economic benefits. Through this semiotic process emerges a new subject that the present analysis helps uncover (see below). On the other hand, the readers’ activity of flyers’ meaning-making partly escapes the marabouts’ control as illustrated by the extent to which their advertisements have been circulated beyond the local environment and the audience they were initially designed for. For instance, they are resemiotized as prized objects of collection (Vigouroux, 2015). The readers’ creative and pleasurable uptake is made ‘affordable’ (Leppänen & Elo, 2016) by the social media that transform the activity of reading cum interpreting into a collaborative one. In addition, these traceable shared readings become links of a potentially endless multimodal entextualization chain.

202

Mercant ile Spaces

I start the discussion below with a presentation of the set of data on which my analysis is based. I then turn to a brief history of marabouts in France where I analyse the emergence of an African ‘economy of the occult’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1999) in relation to the following: (1) the long tradition of clairvoyance and occult sciences in France since the 16th century with the advent of spiritism and theosophy; (2) Europeans’ long-lasting ‘subSaharan fantasies’ (De Negroni, 1992: 128) about Africans’ occult powers; and (3) the proletarization of African migrants coming to France after Independence (1960s). The French’s reading of the flyers in the next section illustrates how multiscalar processes of erasure (Gal & Irvine, 1995) shape the readers’ frames of interpretation. I conclude that marabouts’ advertisements shed new light on the topic of language commodification by showing that marketability does not necessarily equate with ‘authorized language’ (Bourdieu, 1982). Non-standard literacy skills may become marketable commodities, although the practice recycles offensive sociocultural stereotypes from the host population, part of which is also targeted as potential clientele.

Data This study rests on three sets of data: (1) a corpus of 200 Marabouts’ paper advertisements that I collected in Paris, in the 18th and 20th arrondissements (‘neighbourhoods’) between 2000 and 2005, and on the internet in

Figure 9.1 Marabout’s flyer

Magic Market ing : Per for ming Grassroot s Literac y

203

collectors’ personal and collective websites. These advertisements come as flyers slightly bigger than business cards and printed on colourful paper. These cards have been in circulation in France since the late 1970s, along with newspaper advertisements in free Parisian newspapers and in African women and astrology magazines; (2) 36 Cyber advertisements ranging from marabouts’ personal websites to pre-designed advertisements found in clairvoyance websites; (3) Metadiscursive e-comments written by French readers in blogs, discussion lists, and websites. They range from short metadiscursive comments to very caustic diatribes and generalizing comments on the obligation for migrants to command the ‘language of the Republic’, a sine qua non condition to embrace its values (i.e. liberty, equality, and fraternity) and to be ‘integrated’ to the French nation (see Vigouroux, 2015). In order to better understand the ways in which French readers make sense of these advertisements, for example, through parodistic entextualization, I start with an analysis of the sociocultural factors that triggered the emergence of marabouts’ flyers in French society. It will become apparent that, among other things, African occultism advertisements must be analysed within the long tradition of ‘exotic publicity’ which marabouts’ advertisements are a continuation of, though under new forms.

A Short Historiography of Marabouts’ Advertisement Cards Although the first advertisements coincide with the arrival of the first marabouts in France – estimated around the 1960s (Kuczynski, 1992: 47) – the choice of self-advertisement did not apply uniformly to the heterogeneous population of practitioners. Those who were occasional or full-time marabouts before their migration to France would rather resort to their local network among the migrant population, benefiting largely from the reputation they had built in their home country rather than on self-advertisement. Yet, with the increasing pauperization of the African working class in France, it became difficult for marabouts to rely only on their traditional clientele, who could no longer afford to pay for the services they received (Globet & Guillon, 1983). Thus, the circle of potential customers needed to be expanded, but word of mouth was no longer sufficient to reach a population not acquainted with West African maraboutic practices. Self-advertisement also became an option for ‘self-made-marabouts’, who saw clairvoyance as a possible way to overcome economic hardship in the host society and help provide financial assistance to family members who had stayed ‘at home’ (Diallo, 1984; and Kuczynski, 1992: Ch. 2).

204

Mercant ile Spaces

Figure 9.2 Fakir Fhakya Khan, Le Petit Journal Illustré 1925

The emergence of marabouts and therefore their publicity should also be understood within the broader context of occult economy in France since the 16th century. The attraction for occultism pervades both urban and rural environments, including all socioeconomic strata of French society, even intellectuals and artists.4 In a country already very receptive to occult practices, publicity helped clairvoyance gain increasing visibility and possibly legitimacy. In 1925, Le Petit Journal Illustré launched the first advertisement, thus inaugurating clairvoyance with ‘sensational’ predictions by Fakir Fhakya Khan, a real or imagined Indian astrologist living in Paris. In the 1960s, when the first marabouts’ advertisements appeared in France, the exotic Other was no longer Oriental. Since the 19th-century colonization of the African continent, French imagination had been filled with images, stereotypes of, and fantasies about Africa and Africans which were constructed and circulated in political discourse, scientific literature, colonial literary work, and advertising. (For the representation of African colonized in French advertisement see Blanchard & Bancel, 1998.) Conversely, European colonization had constructed Africans’ representations of France and the French. As I am about to illustrate, marabouts’ advertisements can be read as iconizing the encounter of these cross-representations. While entering a French market already open and predisposed to occultism, marabouts also had to display distinctiveness in order to find their niches and become competitive. Yet, for singularity to become an asset, it must conform to existing frames of reference as illustrated by the use of the generalizing category ‘African’ exhibited since the beginning of marabouts’ advertising (e.g. le très célèbre voyant africain ‘the very famous African clairvoyant’). 5 ‘African’ does not locate marabouts in a well-defined sociocultural space but rather refers to a fantasized semiotic space filled with images and discourse on Africanness, entertained by Europeans and Africans alike, be

Magic Market ing : Per for ming Grassroot s Literac y

205

they writers (e.g. Léopold Sédar Senghor, André Gide, Graham Greene among many others), anthropologists (e.g. Marcel Griaule), or lay people. With the category AFRICAN, what seems to be exhibited are images of authenticity and naturalness, with the African ‘living traditionally out of his land and with his land, in and through the cosmos’6 (Senghor, 1945, quoted by De Negroni, 1992: 67) in a culture where ‘spirituality prevails over materiality’ (Griaule, 1948, quoted by De Negroni, 1992: 64). The discourse of authenticity, naturalness, and power of divination associated with Africans has prevailed in Europe since the 15th century, from explorers’ travelogues to acclaimed literary works such as those of Senghor’s just mentioned. Although African marabouts’ advertisements can be read in light of the long tradition of exotic publicity explained above, it is different in some ways. The mise en scene of the exotic ‘Other’ is here performed by the exotized himself, i.e. the marabouts, unlike in the ‘Orientalism’ (Said, 1978) displayed in French publicity where iconography and discourses are imagined and circulated by the French. I suggest that marabouts’ advertisements should be interpreted as an expression of post-orientalism, where stereotypes, phantasms, and projections onto the exotic Other – in this case, Africans – have been reworked and recirculated by African marabouts themselves, for their own benefit. Distinctive ways of writing, as I will suggest, are an essential part of marabouts’ doing being African (see Arnaut, 2011 for a similar analysis regarding the human zoo). But before turning to this point, we first make a detour to the way French readers make sense, if not fun, of them.

Entextualization of Marabouts’ Advertisements Research conducted on marabouts’ clientele in France shows a vast socioeconomic and sociocultural diversity of customers ranging from affluent to working class Hexagonal French, Portuguese, French West Indians, and Africans (Borghino, 1995; Kuczynski, 1992). The sociocultural diversity of the potential addressees of advertisement cards is revealed in the marabouts’ presentations of self. Alignment with French social codes is illustrated by the use of first or last names preceded by Monsieur as a self-reference term: e.g. Monsieur Sakho, Mr Sidikhi. Sometimes, honorification applies as with the title professeur, most commonly used after that of Monsieur.7 Professeur, alternating with Pr, Prof, and Le Professeur, can be interpreted as both an attempt to assert symbolic and cultural capital according to the French value system and as a reference to marabouts’ traditional major activities, i.e. teaching the Qur’an, in the West African system.

206

Mercant ile Spaces

Relocation to a geographic space often triggers new sociocultural practices that enable the ‘relocators’ to insert themselves into new socialization networks and to conform (or not) with the host country’s frames of cultural and linguistic expectations (Kuczynski, 2008). Yet, by conforming with new local frames of production and reception, the producers of those messages also run the risk of being misunderstood by their targeted audiences: on the one hand, the French population that is not familiar with African maraboutic practices and, on the other, West Africans who are more familiar with marabouts’ practices and are most likely to believe them but are otherwise not accustomed to this particular advertising style. For the marabouts, change of geographic space triggers a major shift from an oral mode of ‘promotion of Other’ based on lineages and word-of-mouth in their countries of origin to a written practice of self-advertisement in the host country (see above). Self-advertising one’s own powers is usually considered as a transgression of marabout’s code of conduct because it transforms their powers into commodities while they have traditionally been considered as god’s gifts. That is, power should speak for itself without any need for selfpromotion. Kuczynski (1992) suggests that marabouts in France need to find strategies to accommodate both the pressure from the French market system and that from other marabouts’ competition, while trying to comply with their home tradition, in order to secure their business without drawing malefic attacks from other marabouts. This boils down to asserting one’s visibility while preserving one’s anonymity. For some marabouts, this tension is resolved by adopting several names while at the same time forging one single identity with the same picture, or with the same street address and telephone numbers. In my own collection, for example, Charles alternates with three other identities: Professeur Moro, Professeur Bengali and Pr Mohammed Aly. His four advertisements are almost identical, with two of them displaying the same picture. Yet because readers have other frames of reference where a name is understood to apply to one single identity, such variation and latitude in the presentation of self tend to be associated with fraudulent practice by the French. Although such practices may not completely be ruled out, the display of multiple identities need not be simplistically reduced to fraud. As amply shown in sociolinguistics, social legitimacy is often tied to speakers’ linguistic performance. Failure to speak or write according to the norms or expectations associated with a given space is thought to index a shortcoming if not social backwardness. Marabouts’ flyers are no exception. Their linguistic features become emblematic of illiterate African migrants seeking opportunities in the West, conforming to a scheme of representations in the broader time-space frame of North to South relationships, where Africans are often associated with poor education. On the internet, French

Magic Market ing : Per for ming Grassroot s Literac y

207

readers abundantly comment on the flyers’ supposedly non-standard literacy by pointing out spelling and syntactic heterography. For example, commenting on a ‘generator’ of marabouts’ cards available on the internet, a web user regrets the lack of spelling ‘mistakes’ in the automatically generated cards: e.g. c genial mais il manque les fautes dans le texte ;-) (‘it’s great but mistakes are lacking in the text ;-)’).8 Discourse on heterography or syntactic unorthodoxy often conjures up images of marabouts as dubious characters taking advantage of fragile and naïve souls, as in the following example: Analyse de l’orthographe

Analysis of spelling

Pour un dégrossissage rapide, il vaut mieux éviter tous les marabouts dont les prospectus contiennent des fautes d’orthographe. Idem pour ceux qui ne contiennent que des superlatifs tel celui du «Professeur BANORO», censé être “très célèbre” (une simple recherche sur internet montre bien qu’il n’est pas si connu que ça: “Aucun résultat trouvé”)

To get a quick idea, one should rather avoid all the marabouts whose flyers have spelling mistakes. Likewise for those who have superlatives such as “Professor BANORO,” supposedly “very famous” (a elementary search on the internet shows that he is not as known as he claims: “no result found”).

This excerpt is part of a group of students’ final paper (12 pages, only 7 of which are text) on marabouts’ practices in France and the legitimacy of their advertised gifts, posted on the internet. The students’ criteria to distinguish between real vs. fake or good vs. bad marabouts are clearly based on a homology between social and linguistic order. Interestingly, among the five advertisements they reproduce in their study, only one could possibly qualify as non-standard literacy. This is by far less than the 53 ‘mistakes’ I identified in the students’ seven written pages with among them 13 head noun-adjective disagreements, 14 non-standard spellings, 8 idiosyncratic syntactic ‘niceties’, and so forth. Could such instances of heterography qualify as grassroots literacy although the scribers belong to the highly educated stratum of French society? Or are they just characteristic of the ‘ordinary writing’ (Fabre, 1993) of a significant proportion of native French scribers making them rather unmarked?. I wish to introduce here a distinction between grassroots and ordinary literacy. I suggest to reserve grassroots for a way of READING texts that display non-standard literacy and ordinary for the actual WRITING of a text that would be considered as ‘non-standard’ in reference to an ideology of spelling and syntactic-mistake-free literacy. The students’ comments

208

Mercant ile Spaces

acutely illustrate how their social construction of African marabouts is shaped independently of, or prior to, their reading of the latter’s advertisements and how ‘poor’ linguistic performance is pointed out as post facto ratification of this pre-construction. Therefore what matters is not who writes what nor who reads what but rather who reads whom. Students’ comments are both a production and an entextualized reproduction of stereotypical discourse on marabouts that circulate on the internet in different forms. For example, performance of marabouts and their practices are sometimes staged in amateurish videos reminiscent of minstrelsy, where marabouts are impersonated by white characters wearing Afro wigs, harbouring painted black faces, and speaking with parodic ‘African’ pronunciation (if such a uniform continent-wide phenomenon exists) and highly rudimentary French reminiscent of le Français tirailleur.9 By their parody, these videos participate in the interpretive framing of marabouts as uneducated and dubious characters and as ‘racial Others’. Stereotypical representations also circulate through entextualization in official advertising campaigns such as that of French national lottery where maraboutic practices are turned into derision.10 This video stages an African wearing a ‘traditional’ West African tunic and a skullcap, who is seen performing magic by reciting unintelligible incantations, reading cowries, and spraying air wick on the lotto bulletin in order to discover the combination of winning numbers. The motto at the end of the advertising reads as follows: AUGMENTEZ PLUTÔT VOS CHANCES EN JOUANT À JOKER+

INCREASE YOUR LUCK INSTEAD BY PLAYING JOKER+

This advertisement opposes two belief systems discursively articulated by the adverb plutôt (‘instead’): a shady and irrational African system resting on mysterious and unintelligible oral practices, and a Westernized and tangible one iconized by the materiality of the lotto bulletin. This opposition frames games of chance as rational ones by playing on European internalized representations of African occult practices. Yet, if we pursue a historiography of the marabouts’ association with gambling, we notice that they are the ones who drew it upon themselves by advertising their power to improve luck in gambling. The parodic discourse of the French lottery advertisement then typically illustrates how new meanings emerge from the reinscription into a new context of a text being lifted up from its ‘original’ context of production. New meanings are always selected out of a variety of potential others. In order to make sense to the intended audience they need to conform to existent frames of interpretation, thereby

Magic Market ing : Per for ming Grassroot s Literac y

209

participating in both their construction and circulation. Thus, this applies to both marabouts’ discourse on gambling and that of the national lottery on marabouts. Although derogatory, such entextualizations illustrate how the marabouts have penetrated the French’ semiotic landscape. In a way they also assert that it is the French who creates the marabout, to paraphrase Fanon’s words (1972).11 Yet, as I remarked above, the French interpretative framing of marabouts and their practices has been partly shaped by the marabouts themselves, especially through displaying seemingly grassroots literacy.12 In doing so they conform to linguistic and social schemes of representations in currency in France. Approaching marabouts’ display of literacy as a business strategy, as I do below, gives agency to scribers often deprived of it in our sociolinguistic analysis and helps reframe seemingly ‘poor written’ competence into an economically empowering experience, although this is based on the reworking of sociocultural stereotypes.

Doing Being African by Commodifying ‘Non-Literacy Skills’ In her extensive ethnographic study on African marabouts in Paris, Kuczynski (1992) observes that the early comers, who had been trained as marabouts before migrating to France, were often illiterate in French, having been educated in Koranic schools. Thus, the flyers are allegedly often written by one of the marabouts’ family members, friends, or faithful customers. Consequently, the flyers are hardly designed by or for one individual marabout, but produced from templates used by/for others. Over the past forty years only a few templates have been used, creating the impression of a homogeneous style of writing and a distinctive genre.13 Intertextuality is made obvious by the replication of the entire text, or of short or large strips of thereof, from one flyer to another. Variation emerges from the colour or design of the cards, or from the reordering of the borrowed strips. When reinserted into a new discursive space, the borrowed strips create thematic and discursive heterogeneity as utterances or words follow each other with no apparent systematic discourse structure: e.g. amour, commerce, cheveux, poils, amaigrissement, sexuel, fécondité, chance14 (‘love, business, hair, slimming, sexual, fertility, luck’). Instances of rewording from one advertisement to the other are also common currency: a) Réussit la ou les autres ont échoués b) Réussite là ou les autres ont échoué

‘succeeds the or others have failed’15 ‘success there or others have failed’

210 Mercant ile Spaces

The verb Réussit (‘succeeds’) in (a) becomes the noun Réussite (‘success’) in (b), or the other way around. Grammatical ‘mistakes’ may be multiplied, such as with ou ‘or’ instead of où ‘where’; they may be corrected or imperfectly copied: from la to là (or the other way around) or from les autres ont échoués to les autres ont échoué. In French, the past participle (e.g. échoué) does not agree with the subject noun if preceded by the auxiliary avoir (‘have’). Marabouts’ advertisements share not only common themes (love, professional success, achievements in different domains such as sports, luck games, increase of sexual prowess, fertility, healing of sickness, etc.) but also linguistic features that can be summarized as follows: instances of heterography, typos, lack of agreement, misuse of prepositions, cross-register transfers, misuse of diacritics, and written conventions. (1) Heterography Quite common are artificial word boundaries and word boundaries ‘transgressions’ such as tou tou (toutou ‘pooch’), sur tout (surtout ‘especially’). Others like réussitdanstouslesdomaines instead of réussit dans tous les domaines ‘succeeds in all domains’) appear to be dictated by editorial constraints with the scriber trying to fit a whole sentence in one line. While some spelling unorthodoxy shows good knowledge of word pronunciation, e.g. chutte de cheveux (chute ‘hair loss’), other displays phonetic non-discrimination that often indexes non-nativeness in French, e.g. abondon (abandon). (2) Typos Some marabouts’ flyers display a great number of typos, which can be distracting for the reader but hardly impede understanding: e.g. Guérit l’imuissance instead of Guérit l’impuissance ‘heal impotence’, mal”fique instead of maléfique ‘malevolent’. (3) Lack of agreement Adjective-head noun disagreements are found both for gender, as in entente parfait instead of entente parfaite ‘perfect harmony’, and for number, e.g. l’homme et la femme deviennent inseparable instead of deviennent inseparables ‘become inseparable’. (4) Unexpected use of prepositions Although in some cases misuse of prepositions may not alter meaning such as in Les méthodes de résoudre vos problèmes instead of Les méthodes pour résoudre ‘methods for solving your problems, in others it may say the contrary of the intended meaning: il créera contre vous, une entente parfait ‘he will create a perfect harmony against you’ instead of entre vous ‘between you’.

Magic Market ing : Per for ming Grassroot s Literac y

211

(5) Cross-register transfers These show up mostly in the concurrent display of elements usually associated with written (formal) and oral (informal) registers such as the use of 1) T/V to which we will return below, 2) adverbs’ reduplication for marking emphasis (Guérisseur très très compétent ‘very very competent healer’), and frozen expressions: il courra derriere vous comme le chien derriere son maitre (‘he will run after you like the dog behind his master’) sometimes written with some variants as in Il ou elle sera pour toujours comme un toutou (‘he or she will be forever like a pooch’). The canine reference is so commonly used in marabouts’ advertisements that, over the years, it has tended to epitomize marabouts’ flyers. (6) ‘Misused’ diacritics In French, misplaced or misused accents tend to not impede meaning (e.g. vous à quitté for vous a quitté ‘left you’), but in some cases it may hamper understanding such as in the following example: votre rival repousse à jamais, Here the lack of accent on the past participle repoussé radically transforms the intended meaning ‘pushed away forever’ into ‘your rival pushes back again forever’. (7) Misuse of writing conventions Whereas no clear patterned use of punctuation emerges from the analysis of marabouts’ flyers, usage of capital letters appears to be dictated by meaning rather than writing conventions. In the example n’hésitez pas à me Contacter (‘don’t hesitate to Contact me’), capitalization of the verb is used specifically to emphasize the importance of the requested action as in (…) pour des Résultats bénéfiques garantis (‘for guaranteed beneficial Results’) where the positive outcome of the advertised work is stressed. As illustrated by the following enumeration Amour, Chance, Sentiments, Problèmes familiaux, Situations commerciales… (‘Love, Luck, Feelings, family Problems, commercial Situations’), use of capital letters appears to be far from random; it only applies to head nouns and not to adjectives. The typology presented above should not make us forget variation between marabouts’ advertisements, with some displaying a high degree of non-standard literacy while others conform to written standards. Readers generally overlook this diversity, blowing out of proportion the fautes de français (‘French mistakes’), and emphasizing the most stereotypical and often the least common ones. Evoking marabouts’ lack of or poor literacy in

212 Mercant ile Spaces

French to account for their advertisements’ non-standard variety, as Kuczynski suggests (see above), does not explain why the same spelling or syntactic unorthodoxy has been replicated for the past 40 years. Firstly, it is hard to imagine that nobody close to the marabouts, be they a loyal customer, a cousin, or a brother who has been schooled in France, has never called their attention to these ‘mistakes’ or suggested corrections to them. In addition, Kuczynski (1992: 357), who conducted work with the Parisian printers of flyers, points out that the marabouts allow very little divergence from the circulating norm of writing, valorising the reproduction of a consistent style of advertisement. Lastly, a fine-grained analysis of the spelling and syntactic unorthodoxy that supposedly indexes the scribers’ poor literacy skills shows indeed a patterned use of linguistic features such as usage of capital letters (discussed above) and confusion of T/V pronouns, to which we now turn. According to Coveney (2010: 127) ‘The choice between vouvoiement and tutoiement (henceforth, ‘T/V’) is possibly the most salient of all sociolinguistic phenomena in French’. The T/V distinction has been analysed as highly indexical, signalling the level of formality of the relevant setting, the types of discourse and channels (on-line vs. on-site settings), the degree of deference and intimacy between interactants, and the reproduction of the broader social order (Brown & Gilman, 1972; Brown & Levinson, 1987; and Morford, 1997; Warren, 2006; Williams & Van Compernolle, 2007, 2009, among many others). At first glance, the marabouts’ misuse of pronouns of address tends to corroborate studies arguing that T/V misapplication generally indexes speakers’ non-nativeness in French (Dewaele, 2004; Dewaele & Planchenault, 2006). Two ‘misuse’ features can be noted: (1) the concurrent display of T and V to address readership; and (2) the use of T in public writing. Although, the latter emerged in the 1980s in French advertising, it still remains uncommon to date (Pires, 2009). Every use of T is therefore marked, all the more so when concurrently used with V. Yet, the analysis of data shows a patterned use of T/V by the marabouts: Pour que personne ne te prend ton bien-aimé tout ce qui te tourmente dans la vie et vous saurez le soir que vous aurez votre résultat ce qui ne sera pas tard. L’homme ou la femme parti(E) tu viens ici – tu vas le(la) voir! Vous qui voulez des RÉSULTATS IMMÉDIATS, passez sans tarder!

In order for nobody to take away your (T) beloved one everything that torments you (T) in life and you (V) will know in the evening when you (V) will have your (V) result which will not be late. The man or woman gone you (T) come here – you (T) will see him(her)! You (V) who want IMMEDIATE RESULTS, come (V) with no delay!

Magic Market ing : Per for ming Grassroot s Literac y

213

My findings corroborate those of Pires (2009), who argues that, in flyers where both T/V are displayed, T is generally used when referring to love matters (e.g. a breakup or a spouse’s unfaithfulness), whereas V is left for other problems such as weight issues. In the example above, T aims at establishing closeness with the potential distressed reader by framing the marabout-customer interaction as a helper-helped relationship, whereas V is used when describing services provided by the marabout establishing a business-type relationship with his customer (vous saurez le soir que vous aurez votre résultat ‘you (V) will know (in) the evening when you (V) will have your (V) result’). Of course, because V in French can be either a singular formal term of address or a non-marked plural one, scribers may play with its semantic fuzziness such as below: (…) même si tu as été déçu par un autre medium. VENEZ ME CONSULTER, LA CHANCE VOUS SOURIRA.

(…) even if you (T) have been disappointed by another medium. COME (V) AND CONSULT ME, LUCK WILL SMILE AT YOU (V)

Here, the shift from singular to plural addressee(s) is iconized by a font change from lower to upper case. The marabouts’ seemingly deliberate choice of non-standard literacy appears at first glance counter-intuitive both linguistically and economically. First, France epitomizes what Silverstein (1996) calls the culture of monoglot standardization, where the standard variety is de facto the yardstick against which deviations in language practices are measured. Thus, the marabouts’ way of writing can be expected to trigger acerbic and derogatory comments and therefore may handicap their business. Second, the lack of striking distinctions between flyers appears to be counter-productive in a highly competitive market where the implicit business rule is to display distinctiveness, if not originality, in order to appeal to potential customers. As noted above, it is precisely because they present linguistic peculiarities and they all seem to look alike, that the marabouts’ flyers have become collectors’ items for many French people. Unsurprisingly, their seeming linguistic singularity has favoured their worldwide circulation outside the specific ecology, the urban settings, they were designed for. Although the flyers’ worldwide circulation makes the marabouts and their practices known, it does not necessarily entail economic success. I submit that marabouts’ apparent decision to conform to the same vernacular style of advertisement is part of their attempt to seek legitimacy on the French market of occultism. In a society generally suspicious of foreign occult practices, it is safer to project a collective discourse rather than to

214 Mercant ile Spaces

display conflicting individual voices. Although the marabouts compete with each other on the same business market, their survival as practitioners also depends on their ‘recognisability’ as a group, notwithstanding their expertise and authenticity. Therefore, the interdiscursivity found in their flyers can be interpreted as indexing in-group membership. Second, by performing vernacular literacy they conform to deeply entrenched French stereotypes of Africans as incompetent speakers of French. By performing deviant literacy, they become ‘authentic’ Africans, and therefore legitimate clairvoyants, through meeting the sociocultural fantasies and stereotypes of their host country. This reappropriation of the linguistic stereotypes and the ensuing social categorizations are very similar to Hall’s (1995) description of female fantasy lines. According to her, sex-workers have learned to manipulate female conversation stereotypes, for example, when they use powerlessness forms of women’s language, in order to be empowered economically. However, I don’t share Hall’s conclusion that such practices are both socially and economically empowering for women and bring them money without forcing them ‘to participate in a patriarchal business structure’ (1995: 208). By recycling sociocultural stereotypes through their use of linguistic features, both Hall’s sex-workers and the marabouts participate in the reproduction of the social and moral orders. It is this process that enables French readers to construct the meanings that are found on the internet. If any actual economic benefits are drawn from their endeavour, they are to the detriment of timeless symbolic benefits, i.e. the end of underlying power dynamics that help shape women’s and Africans’ socioeconomic subordination. Nonetheless, the example of the marabouts’ flyers extends linguists’ current reflection on commodification, showing a disjuncture between ‘legitimate’ and commodifiable language. The marabouts’ performed ‘non-literacy skills’ are turned into a marketable commodity, becoming an ‘added value for niche markets’ (Heller, 2010: 103). Astroturf literacy, as I call it, is the commodification of grassroots literacy through: (1) a process of erasure of marabouts’ diversity and that of their literacy skills; (2) an understanding of the local economy of linguistic resources in which values are allocated to ways of speaking and writing, and thus where linguistic stratification is performed; (3) an awareness of the non-referential indexical ordering in currency in the local semiotic ecology (e.g. Africans migrants are poor speakers of French); and (4) scribers’ fitting of readers’ linguistic and social expectations. The analysis of language commodification in local economies draws our attention, once again, to the crucial importance of studying language resources in light of the communicative economy in which they are used and from and within which they are made sense of.

Magic Market ing : Per for ming Grassroot s Literac y

215

The striking difference between ‘non-standard literacy’ performed in paper advertisements and the unmarked one in online publicity tends to corroborate my hypothesis about language commodification in the marabouts’ paper-advertising.16 Although I haven’t yet found marabouts who advertise on both flyers and the web, there is no obvious reason to believe that paper and cyber advertising marabouts represent two distinct groups of people with the ‘traditional’ ones on one side and the technology-savvy ones on the other. I suggest that the differential display of literacy competence in the two advertising modes has partly to do with the ecology of signs in which both texts are inserted. Unlike the streets where flyers are distributed, the web is a discursive space where the marabouts are challenged, criticized and highly stigmatized (Vigouroux, 2015). Standard literacy appears to be used as a counter-discourse to the readers’ widespread derogatory comments on paperadvertisements. Web advertising does not compete with that on paper: it is complementary in that both fit expectations regarding public, formal writing (with un-marked literacy for the first one: for instance none of the 36 websites I consulted displays the T form), and vernacular, grassroots writing. The display of standard literacy helps disconnect web advertisements from paper ones, as if to rehabilitate the stigmatized image of marabouts and reframe the French’ interpretation of maraboutic practices. No data are available yet to evaluate the ways web users read cyber advertisements. The rare comments I found only take notice of the marabouts becoming computer savvy without any mention of their literacy skills, regardless of whether or not they are rated positively. From an analytical point of view, this lack of derogatory comments is as meaningful as their profusion regarding paper advertisements. It illustrates that the marabouts manage to meet their French readers’ frame of interpretation, this time by conforming to the standard literacy expected in business advertising genre. Interestingly by doing so, they once again unsettle the set of representations associated with them, which they helped construct in their flyers. We still have to see to what extent the marabouts’ cyber advertisements will be taken up by their web readers and enter the creative entextualization chain.

Conclusions Stereotypes of African marabouts pervade the French semiotic landscape as is evident from the numerous comments on and entextualizations of their advertisements one finds on the internet. I have advocated reading these advertisements in light of the economy of writing and reading in which they

216 Mercant ile Spaces

are inserted. This economy is characterized as highly normative due to France’s ‘culture of monoglot standardization’ (Silverstein, 1996) since the 17th century, and as ‘monochromic’, with a predominantly white/European public space. Through a process of erasure of France’s cultural diversity, France and Frenchness are typically, if not exclusively, imagined and projected as white and European. These are among the sociolinguistic assumptions that underlie French readers’ entextualizations of marabouts’ flyers. Both the marabouts’ productions of flyers and the readers’ comments give us access to ‘linguistic ideology in action’, with the marabouts displaying a strong metalinguistic awareness by their very act of writing. Indeed, a fine-grained analysis and comparison of both paper and cyber advertisements show that grassroots literacy is performed rather than endured. Interestingly, it is by NOT conforming to the French written norms of literacy, for instance through displaying ‘poor’ literacy skills, that they conform to the latter’s widespread social stereotypes about Africans and Africa. Through the display of non-standard literacy emerges a standardized way of doing being marabout, at least in the flyers. In other words, highly devalued ways of writing become an asset in projecting oneself as trustworthy clairvoyants. In astroturf literacy as I call it, non-literacy skills become a commodity that helps reap symbolic and/or economic benefits. On the other hand, in recycling sociocultural stereotypes through their use of specific linguistic features, the marabouts participate in the reproduction of the social and moral orders that sustain the French readers’ meaning making. Thus what may be economically empowering at an individual level is symbolically detrimental at a collective level. Socially, it is a no-win situation.

Notes (1)

This chapter is a slightly revised version of Vigouroux (2011). I want to thank Karel Arnaut for his constructive remarks which helped me better articulate the issues of creativity and unpredictability pertaining to superdiversity. Needless to say that I am solely responsible for any remaining shortcomings. (2) Yet, this needs to be nuanced, on account of drastic migration policies in Europe and elsewhere that constrain the mobility of targeted people, who often happen to be the same ones whose literacy skills are contested. (3) However, since the colonial period the term has acquired a negative connotation, with maraboutage (i.e. the performance of maraboutic practice) used to refer to ‘heterodox practices that exploit the gullible and the ignorant’ (Gemmeke, 2009: 128). (4) See Favret-Saada (1977) on witchcraft beliefs and experiences in the Bocage of western France. For a study on the relation between surrealism and occultism see Lepetit (2008) and Edelman (2006). (5) To be sure, there are a few advertisements that refer to specific geographic location such as in the following example: l’un des plus grands marabouts de la Casamance Senegal (‘one of the most famous marabouts from Casamance, Senegal’).

Magic Market ing : Per for ming Grassroot s Literac y

(6) (7)

(8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13)

(14) (15) (16)

217

Interestingly, the line following this self-presentation states: Vient d’arrivé [sic] à Paris (‘just arrived in Paris’). Clearly, the mention of a well-identified African location, Casamance, helps construct a sense of authenticity, for both those who are and those who are not familiar with maraboutic practices. Casamance is indeed an important place regarding marabouts and maraboutic practices. All the translations are mine unless stated otherwise. On a collector’s website specialized in marabouts flyers, statistics can be found on the use of terms for self-presentation. 51% of the 1443 flyers collected mainly in France (with a few from other parts of Europe) use the term or its variants Monsieur and 40% Professeur and its variants. See www.megabambou.com/galerie/ stats/. www.megabambou.com/encyclopedie/temoignages/questions Français tirailleur is a non-native variety allegedly used in the French colonial army (‘les tirailleurs sénégalais’) by West African recruits before and during the First World War. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PESGI9K36iU (accessed 18 February 2016). Fanon’s exact words are: C’est le blanc qui crée le nègre (‘it is the white who creates the negroe’) (1972: 29). The same idea is expressed by Fanon (1972: 29) when he states: Mais c’est le nègre qui crèe la négritude (‘But it is the negro who creates negritude’). This genre is found in different parts of the world including (South) Africa (Kadenge & Ndlovu, 2012), Asia, Europe, and Latin and North America. The emergence and spread of a marabouts’ transnational written genre is worth investigating but extends the editorial limits of this chapter. www.megabambou.com/encyclopedie/style/enumeration.html I chose a literal English translation to help the reader grasp the vernacular variety used. Marabout’s web advertising emerged in France in the mid-1990s. With the development of the internet in major African cities, it has also spread to countries such as Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. However, because advertisements are written in French, one may wonder to what extent the audience targeted by Africa-based marabouts is just local. Some cyber marabouts advertise their services on ready-made astrology websites while others create more or less elaborate personal websites. See for example: http://www.marabouts-voyants-africains.com/.

References Arnaut, K. (2011) Les zoos humains, (mauvais) spectacles interculturels. In N. Snoep and P. Blanchard (eds) Exhibitions (pp. 344–365). Paris: Actes Sud. Arnaut, K. (2016) Super-diversity: Elements of an emerging perspective. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 49–70) New York/London: Routledge. Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barton, D. (2007) Literacy. An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Baynham, M. (1995) Literacy Practices. London: Longman. Blanchard, P. and Bancel, N. (1998) De l’indigène à l’immigré. Paris: Gallimard. Blommaert, J. (2001) Investigating narrative inequality: African asylum seekers stories in Belgium. Discourse and Society 12 (4), 413–449.

218

Mercant ile Spaces

Blommaert, J. (2006) Language ideology. In K. Brown (ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 6 (pp. 510–522). Boston: Elsevier. Blommaert, J. (2008) Grassroots Literacy. New York: Routledge. Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2016) Language and superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 21–48) New York/London: Routledge. Blommaert, J. and Varis, P. (2013) Enough is enough: The heuristics of authenticity in superdiversity. In J. Duarte and I. Gogolin (eds) Linguistic Superdiversity in Urban Areas: Research Approaches (pp. 143–158). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Borghino, B. (1995) Clientèle européenne pour Marabouts d’Afrique Noire. Paris: L’Harmattan. Bourdieu, P. (1982) Ce que parlez veut dire. Paris: Fayard. Braudel, F. (1969) Histoire et sciences sociales. La longue durée. Écrits sur l’histoire (pp. 41–83). Paris: Flammarion. Brett, M. (1980) Mufti, Murabit, Marabout and Mahdi: 4 types in the Islamic history of North Africa. Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée 29, 5–15. Brown, R. and Gilman, A. (1972) The pronouns of power and solidarity. In P. Giglioli (ed.) Language and Social Context (pp. 252–281). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books (original work published 1960). Brown, P. and Levinson, S.C. (1987) Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J.L. (1999) Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: Notes from the South African postcolony. American Ethnologist 26 (2), 279–303. Coveney, A. (2010) Vouvoiement and Tutoiement: Sociolinguistic reflections. French Language Studies 20, 127–150. De Negroni, F. (1992) Afrique Fantasmes. Paris: Plon. Deumert, A. (2014) Digital superdiversity: A commentary. Discourse, Context & Media (4–5), 116–120. Dewaele, J.-M. (2004) Vous or tu? Native and non-native speakers of French on a sociolinguistic tightrope. IRAL 42, 383–402. Dewaele, J.-M. and Planchenault, G. (2006) Dites-moi tu?! La perception de la difficulté du système des pronoms d’adresse en français. In M. Faraco (ed.) La classe de langue: Pratiques, méthodes et theories (pp. 153–171). Aix en Provence: Les Publications de l’Université de Provence. Diallo, M. (1984) Les marabouts de Paris. Un Regard Noir, 119–178. Paris: Autrement. Eldelman, N. (2006) Histoire de la voyance et du paranormal. Paris: Seuil. Fabre, D. (1993) Écritures Ordinaires. Paris: P.O.L. Fanon, F. (1972) L’an V de la révolution algérienne. Paris: Maspero. Favret-Saada, J. (1977) Les mots, la mort, les sorts. Paris: Folio. Gal, S. and Irvine, J. (1995) The boundaries of languages and disciplines: How ideologies construct difference. Social Research 62 (4), 967–999. Gee, J. (1996) Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. London/Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis. Gemmeke, A.B. (2009) Marabout women in Dakar: Creating authority in Islamic knowledge. Africa 79 (1), 128–147. Globet F. and Guillon, M. (1983) Les ‘marabouts-voyants’ africains à Paris: Un aspect marginal de l’immigration. Espace, Populations, Sociétés 2, 141–145. Graw, K. (2005) Culture of hope in West Africa. ISIM Review 1 (16), 28–29. Griaule, M. (1948) L’action sociologique en Afrique Noire. Présence Africaine 3, 388–391.

Magic Market ing : Per for ming Grassroot s Literac y

219

Hall, K. (1995) Lip service on the fantasy lines. In K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (eds) Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self (pp. 183–216). London: Routledge. Heller, M. (2010) Commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 101–114. Kadenge, M. and Ndlovu, T. (2012) Encounters with panaceas: Reading flyers and posters on ‘traditional’ healing in and around Johannesburg’s Central Business District. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 30 (3), 461–482. Kuczynski, L. (1992) Les marabouts africains à Paris. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Kuczynski, L. (2008) Attachement, blocage, blindage. Cahiers d’Études Africaines. XLVIII (189–190): 237–265. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Lepetit, P. (2008) Surréalisme et Ésotérisme. Ouvrir les serrurières. Cordes-sur-ciel: Raphael de Surtis. Leppänen, S. and Elo, A. (2016) Buffalaxing the other: Superdiversity in action on YouTube. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 110–136) New York/London: Routledge. Morford J. (1997) Social indexicality in French pronominal address. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 7 (1), 3–37. Parkin, D. (2016) From multilingual classification to translingual ontology: A turning point. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 71–88) New York/London: Routledge. Pires, M. (2009) Peut-on tutoyer le lecteur d’un écrit public? In B. Peeters and N. Ramière (eds) Tu ou vous, l’embarras du choix (pp. 175–196). Limoges: Lambert-Lucas. Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Senghor, L.S. (1945) Chants d’ombre. Paris: Seuil. Silverstein, M. (1996) Monoglot ‘Standard’ in America: Standardization and metaphors of Linguistic Hegemony. In D. Brenneis and R. Macaulay (eds) The Matrix of Language (pp. 284–306). Westview Press. Street, B. (1995) Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education. London: Longman. Vigouroux, C.B. (2008) From Africa to Africa: Migration, globalization and language vitality. In C.B. Vigouroux and S. Mufwene (eds) Globalization and Language Vitality: Perspectives from Black Africa (pp. 229–254). London: Continuum Press. Vigouroux, C.B. (2011) Magic marketing: Performing grassroots literacy. Diversities 13 (2), 53–69. Vigouroux, C.B. (2015) How one reads whom and why? Ideological filtering in reading vernacular literacy in France. In C. Stroud and M. Prinsloo (eds) Language, Literacy Diversity: Moving Words (pp. 92–113). London: Routledge. Urry, J. (2007) Mobilities. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Warren, J. (2006) Address pronouns in French. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 29 (2), 16.1–16.17. Williams, L. and Van Compernolle, R.A. (2007) Second-person pronoun use in on-line French-Language chat environments. French Review 80, 804–820. Williams, L. and Van Compernolle, R.A. (2009) Second-person pronoun use in French language discussion fora. Journal of French Language Studies 19, 361–378.

10 Superdiversity and a London Multilingual Call Centre Johanna Woydack

Introduction In a promotional brochure used by a multinational corporation for advertising the services of its London based multilingual outbound call centre1 to prospective clients, it is stated that they ‘only use “native speakers”’ for calling any country worldwide and translating client-approved calling scripts. This assurance of using ‘native speakers’ in itself is perhaps not surprising given that not only do ‘notions like “native speaker” or “mother tongue” (…) have considerable ideological force (…)’ (Blommaert & Rampton, 2016: 26) but also because they are everyday categories the relevance and naturalness of which are regarded as self-evident for lay persons and outside post-modern sociolinguistics. However, the matter becomes more interesting and complicated when taking into account that the several agents of this particular call centre, which describes itself as speaking 300+ languages, stated during interviews that they liked this job because it allowed them to improve their knowledge of a foreign language. For example, Miguel a Spaniard from Argentina said:

Extract 1 (…) one of the greatest things about this job is that it gave me the opportunity to call in English as well, and I know that my first calls weren’t so good. As is they are now, for example, I really think that in the month and a half I improve a lot in English. Now I feel a lot more confident when I call in English. And that’s really good, that’s really, really good; it’s like to take a course in which you are being paid instead of paying. (Miguel, call centre agent) A similar comment is made by Therese, who is from Sweden but is calling Germany and Austria: 220

Superdiversit y and a London Mult ilingual Call Centre

221

Extract 2 I’m improving my German which is something that I really like (…) Maybe I have to do more German experience [calling in German] that I can, you know, have some reference, I can have the German experience in London. I think if you speak German you have loads of possibilities (…) you have possibilities in London and it’s just a bigger market isn’t it than if you only speak Swedish. (Therese, call centre agent) Conversely, Linda, who is part of a Swedish minority in Finland, complained that she had never been asked to translate a calling script into her native language.

Extract 3 I was given a script in English and I had to [translate] the script in Norwegian (…) Norwegian is not my mother tongue and but (…) still I had to do it in Norwegian which I found a bit frustrating. (…) I have never been given a script in Swedish (…). (Linda, call centre agent) Besides calling in Swedish, she has also made calls in Norwegian, Danish, English and Finnish. As these three reflections by call centre operators suggest, it seems that there is more going on at this ‘native speaker only’ call centre than meets the eye from the brochure. Drawing on long-term participant observation and interviews, I will explore in this chapter how this London call centre advertised in the brochure, and the agents working there, benefit from but also struggle with, ‘superdiversity’. Superdiversity is a phenomenon which has been examined in London and other major urban areas as the ‘diversification of diversity’ (Vertovec, 2007: 1025). In this context, superdiversity stems from the wide range and mix of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds present in this workplace and the numbers of countries contacted by the call centre agents, i.e. those who make the calls and those they may call. It is both the physical and virtual aspects of this workplace, its multi-sidedness, which makes the call centre a superdiverse space, similar to the internet. That is, agents simultaneously place calls worldwide and it is impossible to predict the background of the people with whom they may interact over the phone. Equally, even though the call centre office is located in United Kingdom, it is misleading to conceptualize it within the framework of a nation state. The nature of its business model and its raison d’être is its multilingualism, internationality, temporality, high turnover, and fluidity. From one day to the next the makeup of agents and their background may completely change depending on the campaigns signed off and if agents turn up for work. With half of the

222

Mercant ile Spaces

agents being recruited through an external language agency, the call centre management will not know more about the new agents than that they are ‘native’ speakers of the desired target language. The sites where issues arise are several. They concern for instance the call centre managers’ difficulty of labelling speakers according to commonly used linguistic typologies as well as overcoming the chronic shortage of ‘native’ or ‘bilingual’ speakers of certain languages, and the need to monitor and assess the agents’ linguistic repertoire and performances over the phone. In this chapter, these issues become evident from the reliance on translated calling scripts and the different uses of traditional labels such as ‘native’, ‘bilingual’, and ‘multilingual’ speaker and new ones such as what is referred to in the call centre as ‘semi-fluent’ or ‘semi-multilingual’. Here I will discuss how these labels are understood theoretically by different groups and in practice in the context of superdiversity and London’s language market. I will show how, on the one hand, the call centre’s corporate management relies heavily on traditional labels such as ‘native’ and ‘bilingual’ speakers to attract corporate clients to run campaigns worldwide and highlights the qualitative difference and advantages of the London call centres over those in former colonies such as India and the Philippines. On the other hand, in practice in the call centre itself, there is a forced degree of pragmatism around those terms to cope with the fluctuation in the demand and supply of language speakers, the sheer scale of linguistic diversity, and the limited number of seats in the workplace. It is argued that the pragmatic solutions to issues of recruitment of language speakers and the discreet re-labelling of language competence are not, as one might assume, acts of resistance of the call centre managers against their bosses, the corporate management. Rather, these practices are better understood as ‘getting on strategies’ (Marchington, 1992) which can be seen as part of call centres’ important role in socializing newcomers such as migrants, graduates, and students into London’s labour market and thus providing them with the necessary funds, experience, skills, and linguistic capital for doing so. This research further highlights the importance of translated calling scripts in coping with a linguistically and an ethnically diverse workforce but also for understanding how the organization exists (cf. Smith, 2001). I begin with a general overview of the literature on call centres. Then I provide a brief description of the field site and provide the context for the issues that emerge in this workplace. First I highlight them before then secondly discussing potential solutions to those issues. In the final section, I will explore the implications around the solutions and the use of translated scripts.

Superdiversit y and a London Mult ilingual Call Centre

223

Before I describe in detail what occurs in this call centre, it is helpful to first introduce some background on call centres as well as the empirical data on which this chapter draws.

A London Multilingual Outbound Call Centre and the Call Centre Literature In recent years, call centres, as one of the globalized workplaces where a particular type of ‘language work’ (Heller, 2005) takes place, have been the focus of a number of studies. According to Belt (2002), to date these studies have tended to evoke and shared a ‘negative image of call centres as the digital communication factories of the post-industrial service economy’. In this vein, Holman and Fernie (2000: 1) note that the majority of studies ‘conjure up an image of oppressive, stifling working conditions, constant surveillance, poor job satisfaction’. Moreover, sociologists such as Holtgrewe et al. (2002) suggest that outside of academia call centres also have a particular image, being viewed upon by the public as being low-skilled and standardized work. The derogatory connotations of call centres in both academic and public discourse can be traced back to a focus on the design of call centres around ‘Taylorist standardization’ (Richardson & Belt, 2001), also referred to as ‘scripted Taylorism’ (e.g. Mirchandani, 2004, 2012). Scripts ‘are carefully structured to manage the transaction in the most efficient way not only to achieve organizational targets, but also to present a branded corporate persona’ (Houlihan, 2003: 150). This feature of the design of call centres is said to be best illustrated by call centre scripts that function as a system of control over speech and discourse (e.g. Cameron, 2000a, 2000b). As a result, scripts have been the focus of the critical lenses aimed on these workplaces. The scripted Taylorism is said to be coupled with strict high tech monitoring to record agents’ calls and any click they make on their computers, evoking the idea of Foucault’s panopticon (cf. Taylor & Bain, 1999). More importantly, scripts or scripted Taylorism have been claimed to cause the deskilling of the workforce and form the basis for language commodification and authenticity work (e.g. Heller, 2003; Mirchanandi, 2012), with agents being forced to follow detailed guidelines for how they should speak. In this vein, for example, Mirchanandi claims that (2004: 361) ‘call centre workers (…) experience scripts as de-skilling, repetitive, and tedious’ and that they turn agents into ‘phone clones’ (Mirchanandi, 2012). As Timmermans and Epstein (2010) have suggested, the critique of standardisation in workplaces is not surprising; there has been a longstanding debate in social theory with regard to standardisation, dating back to Karl

224

Mercant ile Spaces

Marx and Max Weber of using standardization in a derogatory sense – as leading to homogeneity, deskilling, and dehumanization. According to Leidner (1993), these analyses still prevail today as most studies on workplace standardization have focused on and lauded workers who resist, insist on keeping their style and decline to smile despite standardization attempts. As she explains, workers who support ‘routinization [standardization] are a theoretical embarrassment to critics of routinization [standarization]’ (Leidner, 1993: 5) since it is thought that all workers must be unhappy with their tightly scripted jobs and resist whenever possible. This is the first point in which this study differs from previous ones: scripts are not considered by default as deskilling or dehumanizing but may, in some circumstances, be useful to workers. The majority of the call centres that have been researched so far and those that form the basis of the (critical) literature are located either in declining industrial regions with high unemployment rates and sometimes a bilingual population (e.g. on French Ontario (Roy, 2003)) or former colonies as part of the global division of labour. The exemplary case of the latter is the relocation of call centres to South Asia offering services to Anglo-Saxon clients (Lockwood, 2010; Mirchandani, 2004; Sonntag, 2009; Taylor & Bain, 2004). A key assumption in most call centre studies is that since ‘call centres allow the spatial separation of the producing firm and final customer’ (Richardson & Belt, 2001: 70), they can be located anywhere in the world, and thus tend to be where rental prices and labour costs are lower. One of the few exceptions to this focus of call centre research is Duchêne’s study (2009) of a multilingual Swiss tourist call centre located in Zurich and London, with the former taking incoming calls in six languages from six European countries (Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium) and the London one all the calls from the United Kingdom. Zurich, commanding one of the globe’s highest rental prices and relatively high labour costs, is deemed, according to the call centre literature, like London, an unlikely candidate for the location of a call centre. This point is the second difference between this study and most previous research: the call centre researched is not in a region with high unemployment and low rents or in an off-shore location, but in central London. Duchêne’s study is further interesting as the call centre is multilingual.2 However, although the Zurich call centre is multilingual, agents have the ability to speak multiple languages and, in line with Switzerland’s strategy to market itself as a multilingual country, agents are assigned to respond in a language to communicate with the client according to the nation from which the call arrives. However, although the Zurich call centre is multilingual and agents have the ability to speak multiple languages, as Duchêne points out, agents are assigned to respond in a language to communicate

Superdiversit y and a London Mult ilingual Call Centre

225

with the client according to the nation from which the call arrives. Alarcón and Heyman (2013: 4) suggest that this ‘rigid, nation-based delineation of customers’ is another aspect most prior call centre studies share. They write: The typical case examined in the call centre literature addresses nation state homogeneity in the destination markets. The operator, wherever she or he is found, and independently of the cultural-linguistic variety in that point of origin, normally serves a market conceived of as homogenous by the business’s communications policies. (Alarcón & Heyman, 2013: 4) This is the third aspect in which my research differs from previous ones. Not only is the call centre multilingual, but there is less of a rigid nation state delineation. The client and the call centre management understand that some countries that are officially multilingual cannot be reduced to one language3. So, for example, agents calling Switzerland or Belgium need to be multilingual4, as there is not only one national language, but agents calling Italy only need to speak Italian even though in some parts of Italy, German and French are also official languages. Thus, this particular call centre’s practices are not as flexible as in a ‘fully bilingual outbound call centre’ in the United States on the border with Mexico as described in Alarcón and Heyman’s (2013) study, where agents speak either Spanish or English depending totally on what they infer is the preferred language of the customer. It is worth noting that the linguistic flexibility which the workers in Alarcón and Heyman’s study enjoy is found in what is known as an ‘outbound call centre’, where agents initiate contact calls with customers. This is in contrast with an ‘inbound call centre’, where incoming calls are first directed to a dial menu asking callers which language they prefer to be spoken to. This is the fourth aspect in which this research differs from most previous call centre studies: it takes place in an outbound call centre, not an inbound call centre. In inbound call centres, agents receive incoming calls often with the aim of providing support, service, or information (cf. McPhail, 2004: 14). In outbound call centres, agents make calls to private customers or businesses for sales, marketing, and customer service or research purposes. As there have been only three studies on outbound call centres to my knowledge, mostly because of access issues, and none of them involving long-term participant observation, little is known about them. One of the first studies of an outbound call centre, by Fernie and Metcalf (1998), is controversial and infamous for denouncing call centre work. Fernie and Metcalf’s paper is often blamed for the negative perceptions of call centres that are widespread in the mainstream media and academia as

226

Mercant ile Spaces

low-skilled workplaces, the new sweatshops, and the ultimate panopticon. For instance, Bain and Taylor (2000) quote a call centre union organizer who laments that whenever the press interviews him, it takes the first 20 minutes of the interview persuading them that they are not prisons: I have tangled with this [the Fernie and Metcalf thesis] on the radio and television on a number or [sic] occasions. It is a ludicrous proposition, borne of academics, who have no experience of the real world. (2000: 3) The second study is Alarcón and Heyman’s (2013) comparative study of bilingual call centres in El Paso, a large metropolis on the border to Mexico. They characterize them in the following way: (…) the employees in this subsector are among the worst paid, with the highest turnover, and worst working conditions in the sector. (…) The poor labour conditions and low wages make it especially difficult for these centres to recruit personnel with high levels of English, drawing mainly on Mexican-born personnel, Mexican-Americans with low education, and university students who seek temporary work. (Alarcón & Heyman, 2013: 14) The third study is Buchanan and Koch-Schulte’s (2000) analysis of gender and the call centre industry in Canada, drawing on questionnaires and semistructured interviews. Several of the call centre workers they interviewed in Toronto suggested that outbound call centres need to be and usually are located in city centres of large multicultural metropolises such as Toronto. This is necessary because of the need for a flexible workforce to deal with the high turnover of staff-related to short-term contract work, which even exceeds that of inbound call centres. Nevertheless, Buchanan and KochSchulte (2000) do not further investigate the workers’ claim about the nature of outbound call centres or their characteristics. Like Toronto, London, as one of the biggest cities in Europe, is an ideal location for the outbound call centre demands of a flexible, multilingual workforce with a high turnover. As Sassen (1998) notes, although London’s status as a global city and as a hub of the global service economy is often linked to the strong presence of the financial services, the stigmatized and often overlooked parts of the service industries, such as call centres, also play an important role for London’s service economy. In fact, London is also home to the pan-European call centre industry, as many headquarters often host their multilingual call centres there, where incoming and outgoing calls from across Europe are coordinated. A recent survey by the government on the

Superdiversit y and a London Mult ilingual Call Centre

227

British call centre industry estimates that more than half of all the UK’s British call centres are located in London (UK Department of Trade and Industry, 2004). Many of those are also so-called outbound multilingual call centres, which carry out a variety of tasks ranging from marketing, sales, survey research to fund-raising.

The Case Study: Methods and the Context of London Socialization This call centre, described in the promotional brochure I mentioned in the beginning, where this research was conducted is one of the multilingual outbound call centres. The methods used included over four years of participant observation and over 60 interviews with the call centre managers, team leaders, agents, and former agents (cf. Woydack, 2014). I worked initially as a call centre agent and subsequently as a team leader in the call centre. The field site is located within the European headquarters of a multinational corporation in central London. The management of the corporation as well as the other departments of the company are located on the top floor of the building. The call centre itself is on a lower floor. For this reason, the call centre management, which consists of four managers, refers to the corporate management as ‘upstairs’ whereas they are ‘downstairs’. People from ‘upstairs’ hardly ever come downstairs and only the call centre management can go upstairs as special electronic passes are required to access the upper floors. The call centre has a casual standard for behaviour partly related to being ‘downstairs’ (cf. Woydack, 2014: Chapter 3).5 There are on average 60 seats in the call centre. All agents are hired by the call centre manager, who is a monolingual English speaker. They ensure and coordinate the recruitment of agents on their own, independently of ‘upstairs’. There are no corporate policy documents that define a native speaker or how many languages are spoken in the call centre. The two factors that determine an agent’s recruitment are their previously submitted CV outlining their language competence and passing a telephone interview in English. Agents are not submitted to any additional language test, unless they are recruited externally through a language agency. All contracts are temporary, most around two weeks, depending on the length of the campaign/project. The turnover of the call centre is high, with around 20 to 30 newcomers starting every week. As a result, it is difficult to quantify the number of employees as this depends on the number of campaigns/projects running. So there might be a few or almost 90 agents, with 60 being the average. There is no fixed seating order. The seating arrangement can be

228

Mercant ile Spaces

compared to that of a plane: deliberately overbooked since not everyone (usually) turns up and there are to be no empty seats. If too many people turn up, and there are no seats left, the late-comers will be sent back home unpaid. The work itself entails contacting IT and business decision makers worldwide for marketing and customer service purposes. Agents only call businesses, never private households. Some of the countries/regions that are regularly contacted are Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South Africa and North America. The most targeted countries are those of Central and Northern Europe. Unlike call centres located in off-shore destinations, no effort is made to hide the location of the call centre and any business can tell its actual location as the call centre’s phone number will be displayed with every call. Despite this acknowledgement of its location, and the benefit that multinational corporations can conduct global campaigns through one call centre in these types of outbound call centres, there seems to be the desire to portray authenticity to people called by employing ‘native speakers’6 or ‘bilingual/ multilingual’ ones for multilingual countries such as Belgium or Switzerland. The assumption made by clients and managers seems to be that ‘native speakers’ ‘have a high level of proficiency in all domains of the language’ (Pennycook, 1994: 176) and that because of their ‘complete and possibly innate competence’ (Pennycook, 1994: 175) they are accordingly thought to be well spoken and professional by the people whom they contact (cf. Woydack, 2014: Chapter 6). Therefore it is an advantage to hire ‘native speakers’. There is also an internal hierarchy as there are three different types of campaigns (engagement, Budget Authority Need Time, and nurturing), that are sold to clients, each with a corresponding script. Engagement campaigns tend to be most standardized and script based and cheapest for the clients. Conversely, on BANT and nurturing campaigns, which are more high end, agents will be expected to have in-depth technical conversations, improvise, and talk ‘off the scripts’ to obtain valuable information. The corporate management claim that they are able to provide native speakers for any language requested and for any of these three types of campaign thanks to (i) London’s multi-ethnic population, and (ii) the (unlimited) pool of newcomers to London’s labour market (e.g. recent graduates, migrants). These often depend on work in call centres as part of their entry into the wider job market and they are ready to work for lower wages. The majority of agents holds at least an undergraduate degree, and have other postgraduate qualifications, including PhDs. During the interviews, agents pointed out that for them, the call centre job is part of a process or trajectory referred to as ‘London socialization’. Linda, the Swedish-Finnish call centre agent, explained this the following way:

Superdiversit y and a London Mult ilingual Call Centre

229

Extract 4 (JW, interviewer; Linda, call centre agent) JW: L: JW: L:

You mentioned that you though that working in the call centre is the first part of London socialization yeah it is Can you expand on that? What do you mean? I think especially people are new in the country or in a city it’s kind of like… it’s one of these places where you should were you are kind of like it’s beginner it’s one of these places like… let’s say you are from Spain, you come here and you know some English but your English is maybe not good enough for you to really work in another you have to be… You need to improve your language skills… Well then you can always call Spain with your (laughs). It’s kind of like it’s yeah… it’s kind of like are slowly getting into this city but still you have these bonds with your country of origin and it’s also a whole thing going into work and you have to, you wake up, and you are commuting to work (…) like other people living here and then you know you are working.

She suggests that agents see themselves as beginners in several senses. Most likely, their level of English will be basic, they might not know the way around the city, and their non-UK based education and any previous professional experiences might not be recognized. Their only ‘skill’ likely to be valued by the local economy at that moment is their expertise in a foreign language as a ‘native speaker’. The first and easiest place to find that recognition for this expertise, which allows its commodification, is the call centre. In this sense, the call centre can represent the first step in becoming a real ‘Londoner’ and for Linda, call centre work is also highly symbolic for this particular beginner state. That is, the moment the individual takes on the call centre work, he/she has not completely arrived in London yet, as through the call centre one still has ‘bonds with your country of origin’. One is, however, ‘slowly getting into this city’. But according to her statement, truly arriving in London implies that one has to leave the call centre to become a Londoner and ‘find a real job’. She therefore considers the call centre job as temporary and its main functions are to serve as an introduction to life in London and to provide an income. On the whole, Linda conceptualizes call centres as a first milestone of a bigger plan, which is finding a real job and thereby becoming a Londoner. According to my observations, scripts were also crucial, in this learning process as they enabled the callers with little proficiency in English to communicate adequately regardless of this. Agents who were beginners or

230

Mercant ile Spaces

intermediate speakers of languages always asked for a translated script before they called and found the standardized scripts very helpful. Out of my interviewees, for instance, Claudia points out that a standardized English language script was important for her English language learning experience.

Extract 5 Well, because I’m not in… well I used a lot of these scripts for one reason and one reason only because, when I started, obviously my level of English was so low… (Claudia, former team leader) In the following, I want to draw on this notion of London socialization and to extend it to show how this affects the labelling of different language speakers. For this purpose it is useful to look more closely these language workers, who they are and how they are recruited.

The Issues Around the Suitable and Legitimate Labelling of Language Speakers Although this call centre is specialized in IT, the only requirement for working there is to be a speaker of a specific language. If one took a map of the world and dotted the backgrounds of the call centre workers, all continents and a great number of countries would be represented on it. However, this kind of mapping, underpinned by the commonly accepted ‘one nation, one language’ model and ideology of modern nation states (e.g. Anderson, 1991) is in fact an issue which I wish to problematize here. It is the idea that every person is imagined to originate from one country, a homogenous fixed nation state, and the monolingual native speaker of the official language of that nation state of their origin (cf., e.g. Doerr, 2009; Piller, 2001). Previous migration waves are commonly ignored as is the fact that certain nation states have never been linguistically or ethnically as homogenous as they are ‘imagined’ (cf. Sassen, 1999 for a detailed discussion of immigration in Europe). Despite post-modern critique and problematizing of the tendency to map people to nation states and of the homogeneity and fixedness of many typologies such as cultures and nationalities (e.g. Gupta & Ferguson, 1992), most of the discussion on migration outside academia is firmly based within the nation state ideology. Migration histories are often discussed (e.g. in newspapers or government publications) drawing on tables listing and counting migrants per nation as a stable fixed group. It is

Superdiversit y and a London Mult ilingual Call Centre

231

equally common for businesses to delineate customers and employees based on a rigid monolingual nation state ideology. In this vein, the London call centre that is the focus of this research advertises in a promotional brochure ‘native speakers only’, while simultaneously selling London’s ethnic and linguistic diversity to clients and relying on this diversity as part of their business model. Even Linda, the call centre agent quoted above (Extract 4) discussed London socialization within the monolingual nation state ideology, although she herself belongs to a Swedish minority in Finland. Within this context, the first issue the call centre management faces is that many agents have mixed and diverse backgrounds that do not fall into the standard ‘native speaker’ or ‘bilingual models’ requested by the clients and the corporate management upstairs. Should they ignore people who do not seem to have a monolingual ‘native speaker’ background even if their language competence is high? What about ethnic return migrants (e.g. from Latin America, Eastern Europe) who often have the appropriate EU passport but were born in the ‘wrong countries’; how about former asylum seekers who have lived considerable time in the country where the target language is spoken? Or general immigrants brought up in the country where the target language is spoken? What about children of American/British soldiers stationed in Germany and Italy who were born and brought up there? Individuals with these kinds of mixed backgrounds no longer constitute exceptions. The second problem is that with the sheer range of languages spoken and recruited, it is often impossible to adequately assess the linguistic repertoire of those speakers in terms of whether they meet the ‘native speaker’ or ‘bilingual’ speaker category (based on some criterion). It is also difficult to monitor them for their ability to function in the language which they were hired to speak. In the literature, the call centre panopticon is believed to exist in a monolingual or bilingual call centre. In the call centre in question it is impossible to find a call monitor who can monitor every language in which calls are made. The third issue is that even if they are considered to meet the traditional monolingual native speaker ideology, as has been amply discussed and critiqued in the literature (e.g. Fraurud & Boyd, 2011; Leung et al., 1997), it remains an ‘idealized’ category. Many of the call centre workers who traditionally would be labelled ‘native speakers’ also discussed that this did not make them these ‘perfect’ language speakers, let alone guarantee success on the phone as is expected of them. For example, several mentioned the difficulty of translating specific terms from English into their ‘native’ languages. For instance, Yannick

232

Mercant ile Spaces

describes how he initially struggled with translating technical terms into his ‘native’ French:

Extract 6 It was very difficult when I started because I never actually worked… or a long time ago, 15 years ago I worked in French but I’ve always done that [worked] in English, so my technical knowledge is stronger in English than it is in French (…). (Yannick, call centre agent) David, a British Portuguese reports a similar experience with his Portuguese:

Extract 7 My Portuguese is not technical (…) I learnt to speak Portuguese at home with my family and friends. So when I translate or I’m calling the IT Managers I don’t know the words for like IT or system and all of these I just try my best to get my point across. (David, call centre agent) Several callers further note that they are uncertain if the technical terms have to be translated. For example, Anna says that in German, the English technical terms are often kept:

Extract 8 One needs to be really careful with technical terms [in German], sometimes you don’t translate those. This has happened to me a couple of times [that she tried to translate them] and was rather embarrassing. (Anna, call centre agent) In fact, the majority of the interviewed agents believe that being a native speaker or being from the country targeted is not necessarily very important for success on the phone. For example, David and Stuart make the following observations:

Extract 9 There are certain people like James for example, who speaks very quickly that’s it. The speed that is his tactic (…) but he receives good feedback [meets his target]. And then there will be other people who are well spoken who speak calmly smoothly and they will just get no interest whatsoever (…) [and then there are other people with] the posh accent (…) trying everything (..) but they do not manage and () then the next person with poor very poor English (…) they will mispronounce half the words and they’ll still get like achieve the goal [target]. (David, call centre agent)

Superdiversit y and a London Mult ilingual Call Centre

233

Extract 10 Having seen people achieve results from all different genders, all different backgrounds and all different ages, I think now possibly from pure practical experience, maybe it [nativeness] is not as important. (Stuart, team leader) Beatrice, a Galician from Spain, who has always made calls in English, told me she is not sure whether she could do this in her ‘mother tongue’ Spanish:

Extract 11 When I start[ed] here I was thinking I couldn’t do this in Spanish (…) it’s like it would take me ages to do anything in Spanish. (Beatrice, call centre agent) Conversely, Alex, a British Portuguese, believes that ‘nativeness’ does matter. He cites the example of British people who he thinks like being called by someone who sounds genuinely British, a native speaker of British English signalling authenticity. This trait further guarantees success on the phone:

Extract 12 I think what made him [a British agent] really successful, he sounded very British. (…) it’s like the analogy of walking into a pub and you have an oriental person serve you, it’s not the same. If you walk into a Chinese restaurant and you have an Indian making your food it’s not the same; you want authenticity. So if you’re receiving a call from a British number you want a person on the line to sound British. It is a bit racist as well, (…) it’s just the British mentality of thinking I’ve grown up here and I know that things get a lot tougher if you’re not British and I do know that. (…) It’s just a nostalgic thing. (Alex, call centre agent) The matter of the ‘native speaker’ is further complicated by the fourth problem, that there is a chronic shortage of certain language speakers and bilingual speakers. The demand for Dutch (Flemish), Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and at times German speakers often exceeds the supply. In the case of Belgium and Switzerland, and more complicated still, bilingual callers of French/Dutch7 and French/German8 are desired. If, for instance, Belgium has to be called, a difficulty arises from the fact that unless a bilingual caller is found, all the data and lists will have to be carefully sourced according to the language between two agents. But employing two agents for a campaign with a small lead target, rather than one bilingual agent, represents a more expensive and inefficient solution.9 In effect, the fifth issue is that with only

234

Mercant ile Spaces

a limited number of seats, and a certain number of campaigns having to be completed within a business quarter, multilingual agents can not only help to increase the efficiency and productivity of the call centre but also increase the certainty that several campaigns may take place simultaneously. The higher the number of languages spoken per seat, the higher the productivity and efficiency of the call centre, as multilingual agents can work on several campaigns and thus over a longer period of time. The call centre could therefore hire fewer people and save money on training and recruitment. But it is very difficult to recruit these multilingual agents and they tend to be expensive. In order to overcome the shortage of native speakers of certain languages (e.g. Swedish or Dutch) and also be able to monitor more agents, a possible solution would be to make calls in what has been claimed to be the global lingua franca, English. However, for the call centre management this is not a desirable solution. Not only has the client hired this London call centre for the main reason that it is able to provide native speakers of any language to conduct campaigns worldwide, it has also paid extra for this service. Therefore the client is strictly against this (cf. Woydack, 2014: Chapter 3). In addition, English is not as widely spoken as often claimed. People often do not understand what is being said or react angrily to phone calls in English, which they perceive as rude. So what happens to resolve these issues, in particular the shortage, of ‘native speakers’ of certain languages?

The Call Centre Management’s (Potential) Solutions A first solution would be to rely on ‘language agencies’ to cope with the demands of ad hoc mass multilingual recruitment. Language agencies abound in London and are specialized in staffing multilingual workplaces and in hiring (and assessing the competence of) ‘native’, ‘bilingual’, or ‘multilingual’ speakers. Yet using their services is an expensive affair; it usually costs 15 GBP per hour per agent. The other issue is that the agencies have different interests than the call centres and they are also seeking profit. Thus if they cannot find a ‘native’ speaker of the language requested, they may send someone who is not proficient. Relying on language agencies too much also has the effect of putting agents more under pressure to meet targets, as the budget will be strained. Although the call centre management tries to avoid this solution and attempts to rely on the less costly solutions to be discussed below, more than half of call centre agents were recruited through a language agency. The second solution is to hire directly, taking a more pragmatic solution of ‘nativeness’ as the benchmark. Based on an agent’s background, anyone is considered ‘native’ if they have the passport of the country where the

Superdiversit y and a London Mult ilingual Call Centre

235

language in demand is an official language, if they have lived there for a certain period of time, or if they have parents from there. There is no preference for any nationality. So for example it does not matter whether the agent is a French ‘native’ speaker from France or from another francophone country like Madagascar, Cameroon or Mauritius10; all are considered fluent in French. Two of the most targeted regions in Europe, Scandinavia and the Benelux countries, not only have comparatively small populations, but also small immigrant communities in London. In the case of Dutch, the management is so desperate that the more readily available Afrikaans speakers are often employed instead. In a market-driven environment, where the demand for ‘Dutch’ speakers outweighs supply, any speaker of ‘Dutch’ (Flemish/ Dutch/Afrikaans) is valued higher and paid more than more easily recruited speakers of some other languages for instance, Italian and Spanish. On the whole, based on my observations the call centre management who recruits agents has a more flexible understanding of ‘native speakers’ than the clients do, for strategic reasons, and it is aware of this fact (Woydack, 2014: Chapter 6). But the managers also know that it is very difficult to find out about this discreet re-labelling, and shift of language criteria, without which many of the campaigns would not be realized. The flexibility further applies to notions of bi/multilingualism, which leads to the fourth solution. In theory, following a common sense definition of bi/multilingualism, these terms mean that agents are fluent in several languages required in the call centre. They have to be able to master the genre of business-related conversations on the phone. Usually, bi/multilingual agents are hired through a language agency. The call centre management knows, however, that translated scripts often reduce the need for fluency and this makes it possible for agents who have beginners’ or intermediate knowledge of a language to make scripted calls in that language. Therefore, in practice, the notion of bi/multilingualism is heavily affected by the knowledge that scripts reduce the need for fluent or native speakers. Out of the different kinds of campaigns, engagement campaigns tend to be the most standardized and script based. Conversely, on high-end campaigns such as BANT and nurturing, agents will be expected to have in-depth technical conversations, improvise, and talk ‘off the scripts’ with clients expecting high-quality leads. ‘Native’ speakers are preferred over bilingual agents to call for those kinds of campaigns. On BANT campaigns, occasional exceptions are made if the call centre cannot find a ‘native speaker’ (whether based on the client’s or some other more flexible definition) of the required language, though the client and the upstairs corporate management will not in this case be informed of this. No exceptions are made on nurturing campaigns, as these are the call centre’s flagship campaigns. Most agents hired

236

Mercant ile Spaces

directly for these kinds of campaigns are recruited on the basis of being ‘native speakers’. Many of these new agents might have beginner or intermediate knowledge of one or more language(s), an information inferred by the managers from agents’ CVs. If the opportunity arises, for instance, at the end of the quarter or when it would otherwise be too expensive to hire further agents, the in-place agents may be asked to call in the other language they speak as ‘semi-fluent’ speakers, using a translated script. However, as explained earlier, the call centre finds it difficult to assess proficiency level; hence it is preferred to put non-native speakers on only engagement campaigns. Although those agents will work in the end in two languages, they will not be paid more as they were not hired as such through a language agency. Since new agents who are semi-fluent in languages like Dutch, Scandinavian languages, German and French are especially valuable to the call centre, potentially increasing the certainty that campaigns can take place in those highly sought-after target markets, and the call centre management will ensure that those agents always have work. This means that those valued agents may even work on English-speaking campaigns, even if their English is hardly good enough to be assigned for calling, just to prevent them from looking for another job. Thus, although call centre work is officially temporary, an individual may be employed almost on a permanent basis if he or she speaks ‘the right’ language(s), i.e. languages which are especially valued by the client or the call centre management. Many agents stressed the necessity of a script in coping on the phone with the required task and in a language they did not speak well. Speaking from the script, they said, helped them to obtain valuable linguistic capital and work experience. In their view, by working in the call centre they advanced their linguistic abilities and were able to find a better job, often because they could then market themselves as fluent or bilingual speaker even though they initially they may have started as ‘semi-fluents’ or ‘semi-multilinguals’. However, as the vignette below shows, in practice the hiring of ‘semi-fluent’ speakers may be controversial, even among fellow agents. Field note entry 1: ‘Translating scripts’

Around 20 new callers were hired for a new campaign. The campaign was supposed to run in twenty different markets. Thus, 19 scripts had to be translated. Every agent was given a script template [with the script’s eight sections] and told to translate the English master script. Once they had done so, it would be printed for them. However, the

Superdiversit y and a London Mult ilingual Call Centre

237

issue was that agents did not necessarily know how to translate the master script with its complex IT vocabulary. For instance, there was a Somali agent who had lived for some time in Norway and was supposed to translate a script into Norwegian as a native speaker. However, he told me that he could not to translate the script as he did not know the vocabulary. His solution was to use Google Translator and copy and paste the different sentences into the template, though in the past, there have been many complaints about agents who had done this. Other agents had said that those translations were so poor that they had to re-translate the entire script. These problems raised the issue how agents who clearly did not speak the language could do any translations. A Polish girl who knew some Russian also struggled with translating a script into Russian. She was rather afraid to translate the script, telling me that she does not know the language that well nor is she sure of how to translate the cultural norms and politeness formulas. In the meanwhile, one of the call centre managers asked me why everyone was taking so long. I told her that several agents were struggling with translating the technical vocabulary. She looked at me angrily and pointed out that all the new callers are native speakers hired through expensive language agencies. Thus, there should not be any problem. She further told me that although they had hired a Danish, Dutch, and Turkish speaking caller, they had not turned up or found other jobs. So they are looking to recruit replacements by tomorrow so those scripts cannot be translated before tomorrow. It also emerges from the vignette that the high turnover implies challenges for the call centre, which are tried to overcome through providing agents with a script. In fact, all agents will be given a paper script that was approved by the client for every campaign. They are required to have it in front of them at all times. Every script is structured to have eight sections. Every agent, should (1) introduce themselves to the receptionist, (2) and (3) handle potential objections, (4) introduce themselves to the contact, (5) introduce the client’s client (6) cover the core points of the pitch and profiling questions, (7) confirm the details, and (8) close the call. There is an occasional call monitor downstairs, a team leader, who will listen to whether agents mention the key points of the pitch (6) during the call, and whether they follow the structure of the master script (the eight sections). Within this structure, agents are taught strategies on how to

238

Mercant ile Spaces

personalize the script, that is, ‘to make it their own’. Only once agents are able to master this skill, they will be taught additional set around adapting the script. The latter skill set is a requirement for high-end campaign such as BANT or nurturing campaigns (cf. Woydack, 2014: Chapter 5). Document 1. The structure of the script

Imagining the master script as a basic structure makes it possible to claim that agents’ calls can be monitored even if they speak another language (cf. Woydack, 2014: Chapter 5). Piia, a former team leader, explains:

Extract 13 I don’t know any Arabic, but when I listened to calls in Arabic, I could tell whether agents followed the script because of their intonation. (Piia, former team leader) In contrast a manager, Jenny, is more cautious about the management’s ability to monitor all the different languages and suggests that the script is merely an attempt to cope with diversity and provide agents with a guideline:

Superdiversit y and a London Mult ilingual Call Centre

239

Extract 14 (…) [The script] regulates what everyone does. We try and regulate what everyone does. It’s not always easy, you know, to make sure everyone’s doing the right thing because we speak 300 languages in here so having someone that understands all those languages isn’t possible but at least it [the script] is a guideline. (Jenny, call centre management) Ada, one of the team leaders, also considers the script a guideline. However, she stresses the importance of making the script one’s own within the eightsection approach.

Extract 15 Using a script, to be honest with you, I believe it’s just like a guideline. At the end of the day, if you give someone a script, I believe the person should use that script, but use it in their own … as in change the words, put it in their own words basically to fit the way they would present it, not the whole, you have to follow a particular script or you have to do this this particular way. It might work for you, it might not work for another person (…) The script thing, as in general is okay because it actually helps people as in: it directs people. (Ada, team leader) The necessity of having to make the scripts one’s own within the eightsection structure is mentioned repeatedly by all the participants in the call centre including the managers, team leaders and agents as the following extracts indicate:

Extract 16 They [scripts] are good… they’re like a good bible, you know, you can… they have good rules and they have a set, a set, you know, target, use this, you know, just outline the most important things and make it your own (…) meaning making it sound like you. (Siiri, team leader)

Extract 17 Because everybody is different and everybody has their own style, so if you make everybody do the same script, it becomes very robotic and nobody wants to hear that on the phone. I think the most successful agents are those who just make it their own; they kind of just get into that role and they just do it naturally, the script is not there, it just comes naturally to them. (…) But yes, that standard should be there; however there should be some leeway around it. (Barbara, team leader)

240

Mercant ile Spaces

Extract 18 Each individual has their own way of delivering a message and the whole idea of a script is to set guidelines around what needs to be said and asked. That’s why I like calling them ‘Call Guides’ instead. (…) We need to make sure all relevant questions are asked in a professional manner and for that reason, a flow is devised in the script to help them stay on track. (Anwar, call centre management)

Extract 19 [Once given a new campaign script] I changed the wording of the script. So it was the same message but with different words but I did write down my own script and I had it in front of me with the original script. (Marta, former call centre agent) Several agents further mention sharing ideas with their colleagues and learning from them. Tina, for instance, told me that she copies others, but she nonetheless claims to adapt the script her way:

Extract 20 If you can’t get any leads you will sit listening to other people. Some people can get a lot of leads, then just listen to them (… ) how they start chat with people, and you copy them (…) in your way. (Tina, call centre agent) Team leaders also like to employ this method. Therefore they seat new agents next to experienced ones calling in the same language. One such case is recalled by Miguel when he was assigned a seat next to Juan, a star caller:

Extract 21 I remember that they put me next to Juan. And I remember that when I read my script for the first time I noticed that I couldn’t use that, you know, as a script just to follow because it didn’t sound natural. And when I was listening to him it sounded really different. So then was when I understood that I had to make my own script. I remember then I went to my house and rewrite my own script. And, yeah, and then I did that with all my scripts from then. (Miguel, call centre agent) According to Vanessa, translating scripts can also be a team effort:

Superdiversit y and a London Mult ilingual Call Centre

241

Extract 22 With the BIS script I found the translation very poor. It looked like it was done with Google translator so we as a team sat together and started reformulating it (…). (Vanessa, call centre agent) In this section, we have observed the centrality of the script for the call centre as an organization. From the management’s point of view it influences monitoring and recruitment. For agents, it has several functions. It allows them to work in the call centre, polish their competence in another language, and do their job well. Let us see what we can conclude from the data presented in this chapter.

Discussion and Conclusion In this chapter, I have explored a specific London call centre’s management and the employees benefit but also struggle with superdiversity. I have suggested that in spite of the controversial and largely pejorative role of scripts in the literature, the script is useful when it comes to understanding how the call centre works and how it deals with superdiversity. A focus on the script also make it possible to see that call centres are not just a ‘deskilling and disempowering place to work’ (Cameron, 2000a: 124; cf. Mirchandani, 2004: 361); or that ‘the nature of work organization used in call centres acts to constrain skill development’ (Belt, 2002: 28). We have seen that the call centre managers discreetly changed labels such as ‘native’, ‘bilingual’, or even ‘multilingual’ according to more flexible and pragmatic criteria. Here the script played a key part in that it enabled not only agents to improve their language competence and/or acquire the necessary experience for it to be considered valued linguistic capital in London’s multilingual language market, but also the call centre to remain competitive and complete its business agreements. I have argued that that the call centre managers do not do this discreet re-labelling because of the desire to disrupt the company or cause conflict but because they think this is in the best interest of the company. They are aware that the existence of the call centre, including its ability to continue to sign clients, depends on the assurance to those clients that they rely on ‘native speakers’ in the traditional sense yet with a shortage of ‘native speakers’, limited seats, and a limited budget, this is not always possible. I would conceptualize these actions as what Marchington (1992) labels ‘getting on’ strategies, with employees wanting to meet a certain standard of professionalism. These employees, in this case the managers, aim to contribute with their competencies to the organization’s

242

Mercant ile Spaces

success rather than sabotaging it. Another concrete example of a ‘getting on’ strategy is the creation of ‘semi-fluent’ or ‘semi-multilingual’ speakers’ and their employment. The call centre management is of course aware of the fact they are not ‘native speakers’ in the common sense definition, but they know if they do not recruit them they will not be able to conduct any campaigns or deliver any leads. Therefore, to keep upstairs and the client happy they recruit a new type of caller. The importance of the calling script further emerged in managing and monitoring the sheer diversity of the number of languages agents make calls in, the transient nature of outbound call centre work, and integrating workers with different backgrounds and linguistic skills into the labour market. Cook-Gumperz (2001: 125) has suggested that ‘a scripted environment provides an ideal site to bring together a culturally diverse workforce’ and that ‘the scripted communicative work environment makes a good learning context for interactional exchange’. Cook-Gumperz’ observation can be seen to apply to this chapter as well. Despite the persuasiveness of the native speaker ideology and the tendency to delineate customers and workers within national categories, the script helps agents who do not in fact have ‘native speaker’ competence to work in the call centre and in the long run find a better job somewhere else (cf. Woydack, 2014: Chapters 6 & 7). Without scripts, many agents would not be able to work in call centres, as most interviewed agents confirmed (cf. Woydack, 2014: Chapter 3).11 The persuasiveness of the native speaker ideology and monolingual ‘one nation, one state’ model has meant that agents because of their mixed or ‘minority’ backgrounds may have been previously discriminated against back ‘home’, (e.g. those who speak Rinkeby Swedish, Kiez German, any other non-standard dialect) as ‘non-native’ or ‘deficient’ speakers. Now in the call centre they find that their linguistic resources are perceived in a different light. Recruiters in language agencies and in the call centre are generally unaware and uninterested in other circulating ideologies in their ‘home’ countries. The agents are now seen and can style themselves as ‘native speakers’ and commodify their language skills. Throughout their employment in the call centre, ‘semi-fluent’ and ‘semi-multilingual’ agents will get paid less than agents who were hired as ‘multilingual agents’ through a language agency. Despite this initial discrimination as ‘semi-fluent’ and ‘semi-multilingual’, in the long run these agents know that making calls in another language in a call centre can provide important legitimacy for other jobs. From the interview extracts, it appears as if some of the agents do not perceive the script as de-skilling; and because of the scale of diversity, there is only limited amount of monitoring possible. Instead, agents suggest that the script helps them to integrate and

Superdiversit y and a London Mult ilingual Call Centre

243

be socialized into the labour market, thereby learning key skills and hopefully finding a better job. In taking a more nuanced approach towards standardization and scripts, we have seen the importance of both, their important role in socializing agents into the multilingual London marketplace, and also illuminating the ‘organized chaos’ or solutions that evolve in those situations. How do my findings link more generally to the literature on superdiversity? Before exploring this in more detail, let me summarize what we have observed: • •

•

•

how agents use scripts to improve their knowledge of another language; that call centres employ ‘semi-fluent’ speakers, with the agents completing calls in languages that they are not fluent in and often, they only have low to intermediate language skills acquired during school education. The term ‘semi-fluent’ speaker is not used pejoratively or to delineate speakers as ‘deficient’. Instead, it describes a temporary state before agents have improved their language skills. It implies that the agents need to put more work into learning a language and it signifies an opportunity to improve their linguistic skills and gain valuable linguistic capital on the job market; several agents also mention how they work in groups or with the person sitting next to them, drawing on each other’s linguistic repertories, pooling all their resources together to improve the (foreign language) calling scripts, and rehearsing for the real calls; semi-fluent agents, like all other agents, are trained on how to work with the script (e.g. personalize it) and hide their use of it on the phone, thus potentially passing as fluent speakers. Agents make use of whatever resources are available to them to complete the calls successfully. As a result, fluency is not measured solely in an agent’s individual native ability to speak ‘a language’, but how well they are able to draw on these resources (most importantly scripts) to improvise convincingly on the phone.

Several connections to these observations can be found in the literature on superdiversity. In their paper outlining a sociolinguistics of superdiversity, Blommaert and Rampton (2016) propose moving beyond taking ‘(named) languages and (native) speakers as pre-theoretical givens’ and call for attending instead to ‘internally differentiated speaker repertoires’, and to ‘linguistic resources deployed to various effects in various contexts of use’ (Moore, this volume, Ch. 4: 69). Blommaert and Rampton (2016: 39) further point out that little is known about ‘language and literacy socialization of individuals

244

Mercant ile Spaces

in superdiversity (…) both in- and outside formal education’. Responding to their call, Moore describes the context of language learning for an endangered language in a classroom on a reservation in the United States. There, he notes that once you move beyond the ‘concept of the unitary fluent native speakers’ and instead focus on ‘how the role of the speaker can be decomposed (…) different kinds of speakers and semi-speakers (based on the differential degrees of fluency observed) (…) can be observed in the classroom’ (Moore, this volume, Ch. 4: 83). According to him, the ‘collaboration and pooling’ that is characteristic of ‘language learning in contemporary settings of globalization and superdiversity (Blommaert & Rampton, 2016)’ has only become apparent now with this pragmatic shift. He argues that processes linked to globalization, ‘have redistributed the rights and obligations associated with language forms to new kinds of participants, and new frameworks of participation, to none of which the inherited model of the fully fluent native speaker is adequate’ (Moore, this volume, Ch. 4: 83). The fact that agents and team leaders are using scripts as linguistic resources and pool their resources to pass as ‘fluent speakers’ on the phone is in line with the superdiversity agenda. This calls for research on language and literacy socialization of individuals outside formal education. It is notable that the call centre management and language agencies seem to have ‘redistributed the rights and obligations associated with language forms’ (Moore, this volume: 83), who is allowed to call in which language ‘to new kinds of participants’ (Moore, this volume: 83). The fact, that this appears to go against upstairs’ pledge to clients that only ‘fully fluent native speakers’ call has been the starting point of this chapter and we have seen how by focusing on the script, contrasting ideologies become apparent but in the process are also resolved. More importantly, this approach has contributed to a new understanding of scripts and their role in this workplace, problematizing previous call centre research and conceptualization of scripts. Similarly, this contribution is likely to be the first to have been applied to a call centre and a mundane object such as a paper copy of a calling script. Finally, I have argued that is important to problematize the nation state ideology. While it is necessary to explore how this ideology affects the individuals, to fully grasp a globalized and fluid workplace such the call centre it is important to move beyond the nation state ideology or migration flows.

Acknowledgement I would like to thank FfWG for helping to fund this research and Martha C. Pennington for helpful comments on an early draft of this chapter.

Superdiversit y and a London Mult ilingual Call Centre

245

Notes (1) This call centre offers contacting IT and business decision makers worldwide for customer service and marketing purposes. It is a business to business only call centre which means that private households are never contacted. (2) Multilingual means here that calls are handled in more than two languages. (3) There is also the tendency to group countries and regions together into markets according to which language they speak. So there is said to be a German speaking market (Germany, Austria, German-speaking Switzerland), French speaking market (France, Wallonia, French-speaking Switzerland), and Dutch speaking market (the Netherlands and Flanders). (4) Although it is desirable to find someone who speaks all of the national languages of each country – and in the Swiss case, even Swiss German because of the difficulty of recruiting these kinds of speakers – the criterion is often lowered to bilingual High German/French, which is still hard to recruit. (5) There is no dress code in the call centre. Many agents take advantage of this policy by cross-dressing, wearing religious clothing, or items that express their affiliation to a youth subculture like punk. Agents are also allowed to pursue other activities while calling such using the internet on their mobile phone, reading newspapers or books, or chatting to their neighbours while on hold. (6) The notion of the native speaker which the client and corporate management share seems to imply that agents are citizens of the nation state where the target language is the national language and that the target language was acquired in early infancy in conjunction with primary socialization (cf. Coulmas, 1981: 4 cited in Fraurud & Boyd, 2011) in a monolingual environment. (7) Even though the call centre management treats Belgium as a bilingual country, it is in fact trilingual. There is a small German speaking region. (8) It is thought impossible to find a trilingual Swiss German, French, and Italian speaker. (9) Following this logic, an agent who is fluent in Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian will be of more value than an Italian/Spanish bilingual. The reason is that it is very easy to find bilinguals of Italian and Spanish and the two respective countries are thought by clients to be less lucrative to target. (10) This is the case even if the language – e.g. French in this case is only one of the official languages. For English, British agents will have the same status as Indian, American, or Australian agents. (11) In fact not a single informant of the call centre researched criticized the existence of call centre scripts (cf. Woydack, 2014: Chapter 7).

References Alarcón, A. and Heyman, J. (2013) Bilingual call centres at the US-Mexico border: Location and linguistic markers of exploitability. Language in Society 42, 1–21. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Bain, P. and Taylor, P. (2000) Entrapped by the ‘electronic panopticon’? Worker resistance in the call centre. New Technology, Work and Employment 15, 2–18. Belt, V. (2002) Capitalising on femininity: Gender and the utilisation of social skills in telephone call centres. In U. Holtgrewe, C. Kerst and K. Shire (eds) Re-Organising Service Work. Call Centres in Germany and Britain (pp. 123–146). Aldershot: Ashgate.

246

Mercant ile Spaces

Buchanan, R. and Koch-Schulte, S. (2000) Gender on the Line: Technology, Restructuring and the Reorganization of Work in the Call Centre Industry. Ottawa: Status of Women Canada. Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2016) Language and superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 21–48). New York/London: Routledge. Cameron, D. (2000a) Good to Talk? London: Sage. Cameron, D. (2000b) Styling the worker: Gender and the commodification of language in the globalized service economy. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4 (3), 323–347. Cook-Gumperz, J. (2001) Cooperation, collaboration and pleasure in work: Issues for intercultural communication at work. In A. Di Luzio, S. Günthner and F. Orletti (eds) Culture in Communication. Analyses of Intercultural Situations (pp. 117–141). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publisher. Coulmas, F. (1981) A Festschrift for Native Speaker. The Hague: Mouton Publishers. Doerr, N.M. (2009) Uncovering another language myth: Juxtapositing standardization processes in first and second languages of English-as-a-second-language learners. In N.M. Doerr (ed.) The Native Speaker Concept: Ethnographic Investigations of Native Speaker Effects (pp. 185–211). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Duchêne, A. (2009) Marketing, management and performance: Multilingualism as commodity in a tourism call centre. Language Policy 8, 27–50. Fernie, S. and Metcalf, D. (1998) (Not) Hanging on the Telephone: Payment Systems in the New Sweatshops. London: Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics. See http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0390.pdf (accessed 19 February 2016). Fraurud, K. and Boyd, S. (2011) The native – non-native distinction and the diversity of linguistic youth profiles in urban profiles of young people in multilingual urban contexts in Sweden. In R. Kälstrom and I. Lindberg (eds) Young Urban Swedish: Variation and Change in Multilingual Contexts (pp. 67–89). Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg. See https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/2077/26570/1/gupea_2077_26570_1. pdf (accessed 19 February 2016). Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. (1992) Beyond ‘culture’: Space, identity, and the politics of Difference. Cultural Anthropology 7 (1), 6–23. Heller, M. (2003) Globalisation, the new economy and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4), 473–492. Heller, M. (2005) Language, skill and authenticity in the new economy. Noves SL. Revista de Sociolingüística, Winter 2005. Holman, D. and Fernie, S. (2000) Can I Help You? Call Centres and Job Satisfaction. Centrepiece Magazine. London: London School of Economics. Holtgrewe, U., Kerst, C. and Shire, K. (2002) Re-organising Service Work: Call Centres in Germany and Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate. Houlihan, M. (2003) Making sense of call centres: Working and managing the Front Line. Unpublished PhD Thesis. University of Lancaster. Leidner, R. (1993) Fast, Fast Talk-Service Work and Routinization of Everyday Life in the Service Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Leung, C., Harris, R. and Rampton, B. (1997) The idealised native speaker, reified ethnicities, and classroom realities. TESOL Quarterly 31 (3), 543–576. Lockwood, J. (2010) What causes communication breakdown in the call centres? The discrepancies in the communication training and research. In G. Forey and J. Lockwood (eds) Globalization, Communication and the Workplace. Taking Across the World (pp. 204–221). London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Superdiversit y and a London Mult ilingual Call Centre

247

McPhail, B. (2004) What is ‘on the line’ in Call Centre Studies? A Review of key issues on academic literature. Toronto: University of Toronto. See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.95.840&rep=rep1&type=pdf (accessed 19 February 2016). Marchington, M. (1992) Managing labour relations in a competitive environment. In A. Sturdy, D. Knights and H. Willmott (eds) Skill and Consent: Contemporary Studies in the Labour Process (pp. 149–185). London: Routledge. Mirchandani, K. (2004) Practices of global capital: Gaps, cracks, and ironies in transnational call centres in India. Global Networks 4 (4), 355–373. Mirchandani, K. (2012) Phone Clones: Authenticity Work in the Transnational Service Economy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Pennycook, A. (1994) The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. Harlow, Essex UK: Longman. Piller, I. (2001) Naturalization language testing and its basis in ideologies of national identity and citizenship. The International Journal of Bilingualism 5, 259–277. Roy, S. (2003) Bilingualism and standardization in a Canadian call centre: Challenges for a linguistic minority community. In R. Bayley and S. Schechter (eds) Language Socialization in Multilingual Societies (pp. 269–287). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Richardson, R. and Belt, V. (2001) Saved by the bell? Call centres and economic development in less favoured regions. Economic and Industrial Democracy 22 (1), 67–98. Sassen, S. (1998) The Mobility of Labour and Capital. A Study in International Investment and Labour Flow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sassen, S. (1999) Guests and Aliens. New York: New Press. Smith, D. (2001) Texts and the ontology of organizations and institutions. Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies 7 (2), 159–198. Sonntag, S. (2009) Linguistic globalisation and the call centre Industry: Imperialism, hegemony or cosmopolitanism? Language Policy 8, 5–25. Taylor, P. and Bain, P. (1999) ‘An assembly line in the head’: Work and employee relations in the call centre. Industrial Relations Journal 30 (2), 101–117. Taylor, P. and Bain, P. (2004) Call centre offshoring to India: The Revenge of history? Labour and Industry 14 (3), 15–38. Timmermans, S. and Epstein, S. (2010) A world of standards but not a standard world: Toward a sociology of standards and standardization. Annual Review of Sociology 36, 69–89. UK Department of Trade and Industry (2004) The UK Contact Centre Industry: A Study. A Report by CMS Insight and Contact Babel on behalf of the Department of Trade. See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20090609003228/http://www.berr.gov. uk/files/file32884.pdf (accessed 19 February 2016). Vertovec, S. (2007) Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6), 1024–1054. Woydack, J. (2014) Standardisation and text trajectories in a London call centre. An ethnography of a multilingual outbound call centre. Unpublished PhD thesis. London: King’s College London.

Nation-states

11 Superdiversity From Within: The Case of Ethnicity in Indonesia Zane Goebel

Introduction With few exceptions, scholarship on linguistic superdiversity has focused primarily on European settings. To brutally summarize one of the early underlying assumptions of this work, we can say that the idea of linguistic superdiversity is conceptualized as a European space inhabited by more foreign others than ever before. In contrast, the current chapter looks at how a nation-state has produced linguistic superdiversity within its geographic boundary. In doing so, this chapter aims to understand how superdiversity has been created from within in contemporary Indonesia and the conditions that have engendered this process. Drawing inspiration from some of the more recent work on superdiversity (Arnaut, 2016; Blommaert, 2013), language in late capitalism (Heller, 2011; Heller & Duchene, 2012), language ideologies (Agha, 2007; Irvine & Gal, 2000), and nation-states’ attempts to manage diversity (Gal, 2012; Moore, 2011), I argue that the linguistic superdiversity that we find in contemporary Indonesia is both a fractal recursion and unintended consequence of the continued ‘recontextualization’ (Bauman & Briggs, 1990) of a familiar language ideology – that of nation-state = language = community – which emerged early in Indonesia’s colonial past. These recursions occurred at multiple scales and were facilitated by changes in the political economy and associated changes in mediating technologies that helped to produce denser semiotic models of ethnolinguistic personhood. Beginning with a synthesis of the above-mentioned scholarship in the next section, in the following sections I look at how ethnolinguistic 251

252

Nat ion-st ates

categorization has proceeded since colonial times. Central to this discussion will be an emphasis on how linguistic features have become associated with particular types of speakers and particular places via one-to-many participation frameworks. One-to-many participation frameworks (hereafter also referred to as ‘frameworks’) include education and media consumption settings, and essentially any type of setting where the sender of semiotic information is outnumbered by receivers (Agha, 2007). Thus, a teacher is the ‘one’ of a classroom, while the students are the ‘many’ or a broadcast is the ‘one’ while the ‘audience’ is the many.

Category Formation and the Creation of the Conditions for Superdiversity From Within There are many ways in which identity categories are formed. Ethnomethodologists see categories as situationally constructed through interaction with others (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998). Some scholars, such as Giddens (1984) and Wenger (1998), suggest that categories are sedimented through repeated interactions among particular participant constellations. Others, such as Bourdieu (1984), see both sedimentation and distinction as playing roles in category formation. Current understandings in linguistic anthropology suggest that to understand category formation and mobilization we need attend to each of these perspectives, while also following Bourdieu’s (1991) suggestion about the need to pay attention to the processes that enable categories to become more widely circulating and valued (Agha, 2007; Blommaert, 2013; Heller, 2011; Inoue, 2006; Irvine & Gal, 2000). In the rest of the section I provide a synthesis of this work while exploring connections between this synthesis and scholarship on superdiversity. The idea of superdiversity, often attributed to Steven Vertovec (2007), is an attempt to characterize contemporary patterns of intercultural contact which are seen as occurring in more social domains and more frequently than in the past (Blommaert & Rampton, 2016; Vertovec, 2007). Typically, the settlement of mobile or displaced persons in neighbourhoods already associated with diversity and multiple languages is accounted for with reference to changes in local and global political economy and technologies that enable and motivate mobility (e.g. Arnaut, 2016; Blommaert, 2013). As a term, superdiversity is used as an alternate to terms like ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’ which are associated with simplistic notions of community, identity, and language along with ideologies that equate one with another, such as a language with a specific community (Arnaut & Spotti, 2014).

Superdiversit y From Within : Ethnic it y in Indonesia

253

In settings characterized as superdiverse, notions such as ‘bilingual’ or ‘multilingual’ do not adequately describe the use of multiple linguistic fragments that are often not the first, second, third, fourth, etc., language of the participants, but rather part of a truncated repertoire (Blommaert, 2013; Blommaert & Backus, 2011). In such contexts, interaction amongst strangers who share few semiotic resources is characterized by the use of just enough of another’s language to be (mis)understood, to perform particular identities, to eke out a living, or to enact particular positions vis-à-vis other participants (Blommaert, 2013; Blommaert & Varis, 2011; Jørgensen et al., 2016). As we learn more about how people access the semiotic resources that make up these truncated repertoires (e.g. Blommaert, 2010, 2013), we see that these repertoires are often an outcome of involvement in one-to-many participation frameworks. These frameworks often produce fractal recursions of older ideologies that equate place with language and community (e.g. Gal, 2012; Moore, 2011). Irvine and Gal (2000: 37) argue that fractal recursion is one of three processes that can help us understand how language ideologies about difference are constructed; the other two being iconization and erasure. Iconization is the process whereby the indexical value of linguistic features that have situation, person and activity specific relationships are transformed to be understood as an essential and enduring feature of groups rather than an individual involved in a specific interaction (Irvine & Gal, 2000: 37). The idea that equates community with language and a nation state is one wellknown example of iconization. ‘Fractal recursivity involves the projection of an opposition, salient at some level of relationship, onto some other level’ (Irvine & Gal, 2000: 38). This process provides the means to split something that has become iconized (e.g. a language community equated with a geographically located nation-state) into new sub or super category based upon the original formula. Fractal recursion can be a product of institutional processes, as in current attempts to recategorize and manage diversity in Europe (Gal, 2012; Moore, 2011), or interactional ones that draw upon more widely circulating categories (e.g. Goebel, 2010b; Inoue, 2006). In both cases, however, what is drawn upon is a simplified version of the semiotic world. In this simplified world, diversity becomes homogeneity and some linguistic features, voices, and repertoires become less valued or invisible, or they become ‘erased’ (Irvine & Gal, 2000). As Blommaert (2010, 2013) points out, these types of processes often occur simultaneously and/or at multiple scales, including locale (e.g. village and city), time period (both historical and interactionally emergent), and different participation frameworks (one-to-one interactions and one-tomany interactions). Each of these scales represent emergent centres of

254

Nat ion-st ates

normativity which formulate and prescribe rules for language use and ultimately contribute to hierarchically organized orders of indexicality (Blommaert, 2013). Of particular relevance here are the inter-related scales of ‘participation framework’ and ‘time period’. For semiotic forms to become widely recognized and used as icons or emblems of a particular category – that is enregistered – they need to be repeated in one-to-many participation frameworks, such as schooling, television, and radio programming, etc. (Agha, 2007). Blommaert (2013) and those working in the field of language in late capitalism (e.g. Gal, 2012; Heller, 2011; Heller & Duchene, 2012) also alert us to the need for considering time period by taking a diachronic perspective that looks at the influence of political economy on the how and why of different one-to-many participation frameworks. While we need to keep in mind critiques of such a hypodermic model (e.g. Ang, 1996; Spitulnik, 1996), these frameworks, nevertheless, play an important role in the circulation of categories. This is so because the way meaning is contested is different to how it is done in face-to-face encounters. Orienting behaviour is carried out in another time and space and typically via another one-to-many participation framework (Agha, 2007). For example, responses to representations of a particular category and/or the semiotic features associated with that category can take the form of letters to the editor, radio talkback sessions, parodies, curriculum and policy reviews, memos, student feedback on teaching, and so on (e.g. King & Wicks, 2009; Loven, 2008; Miller, 2004). The act of commenting on or evaluating representations not only recirculates some of the semiotic information contained in these representations, but it also helps these categories gain more semiotic density; a process that is also mediated by different forms of media. For example, descriptions of social types in novels may have less information about embodied language than descriptions broadcast on radio or television (Goebel, 2013b). In addition to contributing to the enregisterment of stereotypes and actual people who claim to be exemplars, native speakers, or an authentic member of an ethnolinguistic community, the circulation and consumption of semiotic features found in one-to-many participation frameworks adds a further layer of linguistic diversity. This extra layer is made up of ‘competence to comprehend’ (Agha, 2007) and ‘competence to evaluate’ semiotic fragments that do not normally form part of a person’s habitually used semiotic repertoire. Elsewhere, I have referred to this ability as ‘knowledging’ (Goebel, 2013a, 2015). In what follows I look at how multiple ethnic languages and knowledging have emerged via one-to-many participation frameworks in Indonesia since colonial times.

Superdiversit y From Within : Ethnic it y in Indonesia

255

The Emergence and Regimentation of Categories in the Dutch East Indies Missionaries, colonial administrators, school teachers, medical personal, local elite, and scholars from the early to late 19th century all contributed to the construction of ideas of language as linked to place and community in the then Dutch East Indies. This section looks briefly at some of accounts of this, especially codification and spread of these ideas through schooling that was set up by and for the colonial regime. Initially it was the (proto)linguistic work of missionaries that helped to simplify, codify, and categorize linguistic diversity, while linking these new categories and codes to communities who lived within the boundary of a territory (Errington, 2001: 20–24). These categories became ethnic groups. This process also contributed to the social stratification of populations along the lines of literate versus non-literate (Errington, 2001: 25). The valuing of the indigenous Indies population along literate lines also coincided with, drew upon and fed into another process of racial distinction that emerged in one-to-few participation frameworks in Europe and the Dutch East Indies from the 19th century onwards (Stoler, 1995). This process of categorizing people emerged as part of discourses about how to police sexual relations in populations as a way of protecting European and Dutch bourgeois moral sensibilities and ideas about cultural purity and identity (Stoler, 1995). In the mid to late 1800s the increasing need to manage and administer capital, such as plantations, increased the need for mediators between the colonial administration and the local population (Moriyama, 2005). This labour shortfall was met through the introduction of bilingual schools for the local indigenous elite (Moriyama, 2005). These colonial schools played a vital role in the dissemination of ideologies linking language to place and community because they controlled the means of constructing and disseminating these ideologies, while also regimenting distinctions between the product of these ideologies (in this case local languages, Malay and Dutch). These ideas also aligned with Dutch ideas about adat, which encompassed ideas about custom, law, tradition, and territory (Burns, 2004; Fasseur, 1994). By 1872, close collaboration between colonial administrators, European scholars, and local indigenous elites resulted in the standardization of Javanese, Sundanese and Batak. One of these languages along with Malay were taught in indigenous bilingual schools located within Javanese, Sundanese, and Batak territories (Moriyama, 2005: 23). While these languages of locale (regional languages) were used in the earlier years of schooling (from around ten years old), increasingly, a register

256

Nat ion-st ates

of Malay was the language of school textbooks in the later years of schooling (Moriyama, 2005: 75). Along with codification through a dictionary completed in 1877, the enregisterment of a form of spoken Malay from Riau continued through subsequent use of this variety in school textbooks, especially in the fields of math and geography (Moriyama, 2005: 71–72; Sneddon, 2003: 87). In a sense, this was helping to link ‘advanced’ knowledge with this register of Malay. At the same time, regional languages continued to be associated with locale through the use of school readers that had content primarily about the local. While advanced knowledge, making money, privilege, and local elite initially had associations with Malay, by the late 1800s increasing numbers of school children from a commoner background (i.e. not royal or wealthy) were allowed to enter Dutch schools (Moriyama, 2005: 56–59). As Stoler (1995) points out, these changes in schooling practices were in part driven by anxieties about the dangers that uneducated, poor, uncultured, and mixed blood people posed to the colony. The point of this aside is that Malay was already losing its association with elite royal populations through a more heterogeneous make-up of schooling populations. In short, Malay was being revalued from the language of a privileged few to the language of a wider population, while continuing to sit in a hierarchy with Dutch at the top followed by Malay and then ethnic languages, each with their own colonial controlled centres of normativity that prescribed and evaluated usage. During the period between 1902 and 1910 the colonial regime standardized orthography and produced a grammar based on a literary form of Malay (Errington, 1998a: 273–274, 2000: 207–208; Moriyama, 2005; Sneddon, 2003: 92; Teeuw, 1994). As this group of scholars has pointed out, material based on this emerging literary standard was then disseminated through schools, and in colonial training manuals, novels, and short stories that were published by the colonial publisher, Balai Pustaka. In addition to further enhancing the social value of literary Malay, the stories found in novels and in a newspapers printed by a rapidly expanding newspaper industry (Sneddon, 2003: 97) helped to normalize ethnolinguistic stereotypes through the commentaries about places inhabited by social types who spoke differently to the story teller (Cohen, 2006: 182). These commentaries about ethnic communities and ethnic others were a reflex of broader technological change – e.g. the building of road, rail, tram, telephony, telegraph, and electricity networks between 1810 and 1900 (Ả Campo, 2002; Dick, 1996; Mrázek, 2002) – which facilitated more regular encounters with the other by larger numbers of people. One example of this normalization can be found in the novel Sitti Nurbaya. This novel was written by Marah Roesli and published in 1922 by the colonial publisher, Balai

Superdiversit y From Within : Ethnic it y in Indonesia

257

Pustaka, and according to Teeuw (1972: 117), was the most loaned library book in the pre-World War II Dutch East Indies. The main characters are Samsu and Sitti and they are represented as living in Sumatra. The young 18-year-old Samsu migrates to Jakarta to study at the Javanese Doctor School in Jakarta and in one of his letters to Sitti he reports that within the school there are Sundanese, Javanese, Batak, Ambonese, people from Pelembang, Madurese, Menadonese, and Jakartan students who sing all types of songs in all types of languages (Roesli, 1965 [1922]: 108). In addition to normalizing ethnolinguistic stereotypes, novels also added semiotic density to these stereotypes and to other circulating models of ethnolinguistic personhood. The 1932 novel, Si Doel Anak Betawi, published by Balai Pustaka, did all three. In terms of normalizing ethnolinguistic stereotypes, the young hero, Doel, reports to his parents about his first day at school where he met other kids who were Sundanese and Javanese, and who used Sundanese and Javanese and Indonesian with a Sundanese accent (Aman, 1971 [1932]: 102–105). Just as importantly, in his interactions with intimates, such as his mother and friends who live in his locale, Doel is not only represented as speaking Betawi – a point made explicit by the author in his forward to the story (1971 [1932]: 5) and through orthographic representations of Doel and other locals’ speech – but these locals are also represented as having particular types of ‘demeanours’ (Goffman, 1967), as well as economic abilities, social practices, and educational backgrounds. The one-to-many participation frameworks offered via schooling or the consumption of print media represent just a couple of social domains where models of ethnolinguistic personhood were reproduced during the colonial period. Radio, overseas self-help groups, union meetings, and congresses held by political organizations represented other social domains where these models were recirculated. For example, by 1932 the first indigenous radio station was established, and by 1941 there were 20 local radio stations with subscriber numbers growing to 100,000 (Mrázek, 2002: 165–182). These stations often played material associated with the ethnic other. Mrázek (2002: 186–189) points out that in 1942 the sounds of Javanese shadow puppets and gamelan music performances were regularly aired on radio. Elson (2008: 21–26) observes that by the 1920s self-help groups had formed amongst overseas students. Members were reported to be involved in writing for and publishing their own journals, and in much of this writing the term ‘Indonesia’ and ‘Indonesians’ started to be used and these were contrasted with ethnic groups, such as Javanese, Minahasan, and so on (Elson, 2008: 25–26). Models of ethnic personhood continued to circulate in the 1920s and 1930s, while also being indexed with new ideas,

258

Nat ion-st ates

especially nationalism (in the case of Indonesian) and a bounded geographic area increasingly talked about as Indonesia. At the same time, slightly negative associations were being made with ethnicity. Elson (2008: 59–64) points out that from 1926 onwards, more radical nationalist and anti-colonial groups had solidified and that part of their discourse related to the way provincialism held back unity and an independent Indonesia. These groups became political parties whose membership increased toward 20,000 by the mid-1930s (Elson, 2008: 84–85). With increases in membership and meetings there was also a widening of the social domain of these discourses. At one such meeting, the 1928 Youth Congress, participants proposed that Indonesian should be the language of Indonesia and proposed it as the language of both a growing anti-colonial movement and of an independent Indonesian state (e.g. Abas, 1987; Alisjahbana, 1976; Anwar, 1980; Dardjowidjojo, 1998; Foulcher, 2000). Just as importantly, this pledge contrasted with an implied set of regional languages and their associated ethnic social types. At subsequent meetings involving some of those present at the 1928 congress, a variety of Malay was increasingly seen as being the appropriate means of public address (Foulcher, 2000). In 1938 the Greater Indonesia Party (PARINDRA) instructed its members to use only Indonesian when making public statements (Mrázek, 2002: 33). This distinction implied the prevalence of regional languages and thus also indirectly helped recirculate the idea of languages being spoken by regional ethnic social types. In other political and bureaucratic domains, models of ethnic personhood circulated via one-to-many participation frameworks, including via the 1930 census which divided the population into 16 ethnic groups, others, and Chinese (Suryadinata et al., 2003: 12). Elson (2008: 66–67) points out that by this time it became increasingly clear to nationalist leaders that regional organizations were a manifestation of colonial policies of divide and rule. Yet, as he notes, there were also fears of unequal treatment at the hands of a Javanese majority in a new Indonesia. Citing a Minahasan reporter writing in 1938, Elson (2008: 68–70) points out how this reporter wrote about the importance of maintaining Minahasan language as a way of distinguishing Minahasans and their history from other Indonesians. At the same time, there were also calls for a federalist model that would recognize the differences within Indonesia and allow regions to govern themselves. In summing up this period, we can say that the initial simplification of diversity, the subsequent reproduction of ethnolinguistic models via one-tomany participation frameworks operating at different scales, and their interrelationships with political economy created different indexical orders that sat in constant tension. On the one hand, rising nationalist sentiment

Superdiversit y From Within : Ethnic it y in Indonesia

259

started to devalue ethnolinguistic categories in favour of a national one speaking one language (pointing to a fractal recursion toward a super category where place was up-scaled from one locale to all of Indonesia). On the other hand, Dutch sponsored publishing and schooling tended to solidify ethnolinguistic categories, while adding semiotic density to them. While a register of Dutch continued to remain at the top of the indexical order, a nascent nationalism helped a Nationalist register of Indonesian vie for coequal status with Dutch. In a sense, this process was a recursion of sorts that recontextualized many features of Dutch Malay albeit with new indexical meanings. Ethnic languages remained at the bottom of the hierarchy and were seen by colonial administrators as facilitating production in different territories, while nationalists saw ethnic languages as an obstacle to nationalism.

The Japanese Occupation, Independence and the Soekarno Period During the Japanese occupation, the policies, practices, and discourses of the Japanese and Indonesians working with them helped to recirculate ideas that, on the one hand, associated ethnic language with region and person and, on the other, nation with language. As in the earlier colonial years, this was not, of course, in any way uniform and was partly a result of the Dutch East Indies being occupied by different sections of the Japanese military (Elson, 2008; Reid & Akira, 1986; Ricklefs, 1981). During this period, one-tomany participation frameworks came in many forms. As the war drew to a close, Japanese administrators sought to actively encourage Indonesia’s independence. These administrators, for instance, helped independence leaders, such as Soekarno and Hatta, travel to the outer islands, with Soekarno famously giving a speech in Bali where he noted that he was half Balinese (Shibata, 1986). In doing so, Soekarno’s speech helped to recirculate ideas about ethnicity. The rule of thumb in Japanese administrative practice was to utilize existing organizations and structures, while also respecting local customs, religions and feudal dynasties (Shunkichiro, 1986). Thus, while they were opposed to most things Dutch, they, ironically, tended to recirculate ideas of adat that closely resembled those of the Dutch (Bourchier, 2007: 116). These ideas linked adat with history, customs, locale, and authenticity (Bourchier, 2007: 116). While print-based media was censored during this period (Teeuw, 1994: 107–108), it is worthwhile pointing out that some of the short stories and novels published during this period reproduced ethnic categories.

260 Nat ion-st ates

Leaving aside the important issue of reception, political discourses also continued to play a role in the recirculation of ethnic categories. As Elson (2008: 103) point outs, after September 1944 the Japanese premier announced Japan’s intentions to grant Indonesia independence. In May 1945 deliberations at the committee for the investigation of independence (PBUPK) recirculated ideas about ethnicity through discussions about whether an independent Indonesia should be a federation of regions (Elson, 2008: 105–106). News of the declaration of Indonesian Independence on the 17th of August 1945 – an Indonesia that was to be made up of Java and the regions – was quickly circulated throughout the archipelago via the telegraph and radio network which had become heavily utilized during the Japanese occupation (Vickers, 2005: 97). The 1945 constitution, which was drawn up during this period, respected and protected the traditions and rights of the regions (Elson, 2008: 114). This not only recirculated links between a new, named language, Indonesian, and a new Indonesia, but it also repeated ideas linking ethnic social type, region, and linguistic form. For example, Chapter 11 of the constitution concerns regional governments, Chapter 15 (Article 36) concerns the national language, and an addendum to Article 36 related to the preservation of regional languages. In the social domain of elite political discourses, ideas about what form a post-Japanese Indonesia would take came from Indonesian nationalists and the Dutch who wanted to re-colonize Indonesia. In so doing, there was often a recirculation of older ideas about regions and, with this, ideas about ethnic social types. Some of the earliest and most concrete manifestations of these ideologies included the formation of the Komite National Indonesia Pusat ‘Central Indonesian National Committee’; charged with advising President Soekarno and his cabinet. According to Kahin (1970 [1952]: 140), this committee included leaders of ethnic groups from the regions outside of Java because of concerns about representation. In addition, the predecessor of this committee (the Independence Preparatory Committee) decreed on the 19th of August 1945 that Indonesia be divided into eight provinces. These events – and the subsequent administrative and military units that emerged as a result of this decree – also contributed to the recirculation of earlier ideas relating to region (Kahin, 1970 [1952]: 141). As issues of representation within the Central Indonesian National Committee re-emerged in late 1946, Soekarno oversaw a fivefold increase in the number of members from the outer islands (Kahin, 1970 [1952]: 200–201). This helped keep ideas of region and ethnicity circulating in bureaucratic domains. During the late years of the fight for Independence from the Dutch, ideas of ethnicity continued to be recirculated. For example, the Sultan of Yogyakarta promoted the use of Indonesian rather than Javanese as the language of official

Superdiversit y From Within : Ethnic it y in Indonesia

261

communication (Ricklefs, 1981: 208). Legge’s (1961: 29) account of governance also shows that in bureaucratic and legal domains, the promulgation of Law 22 of 1948, which related to powers of governance and autonomy at the provincial, district, and village levels also helped recirculate ideologies about ethnicity. Indeed, this law was specifically designed to accommodate feelings of regional and cultural identity, while reducing grounds for fearing Javanese dominance in the fledgling state (Legge, 1961: 35). During the 1950s, ideas about regionally based ethnolinguistic communities also continued to circulate within political parties and the bureaucracy. For example, regional leaders saw shared language as a sign of ethnic group membership that could be used to gather support for their efforts to gain more autonomy vis-à-vis the Jakartan political elite. In contrast, the Jakartan political elite (including Soekarno and the then Colonel Soeharto) saw ethnicity as a threat to the fledgling Indonesian state (Elson, 2008: 179–180; Feith, 1962: 522). Regionalism and ethnicity became matters for serious and sustained debate within the central government during the 1950s (Legge, 1961: 3). Within the provisional constitution of 1950, for example, a wide ranging autonomy was given to the regions (Legge, 1961: 9). In 1956 sustained debate culminated in Law 1 of 1957 that related to revisions of earlier regional autonomy legislation and laws (Legge, 1961: 60–61). Liddle’s (1972) account of the party system in Northern Sumatra in the early to mid-1960s also shows how ideas of ethnicity were not only recirculated as part of party politics, but how these ideas came to be associated with particular political parties. For example; Masjumi, the modernist Islamic party, attracted many South Tapanuli Bataks; the Christian party (Parkindo) attracted and represented the interests of the North Tapanuli Bataks; and the PNI and PKI attracted many of the Javanese migrants. As the Indonesian communist party (PKI) continued its rise to political ascendency in Java in the early and mid-1960s, ideas about ethnicity and region were also circulated through their congresses and in literature published by those associated with this party. For example, in his 1964 book, the party leader, Aidit, pointed out that a unitary communist Indonesia would be made up of many nationalities (Elson, 2008: 202). As with the pre-war period, literature and the arts continued to circulate ideas that associated region, linguistic form, and social type to form the social category of ethnicity. For example, there were novels that used regional languages when representing the talk of various characters. One such example is that of Firman Muntaco’s series of newspaper short stories set in 1950s Jakarta and republished in the early 1960s as Gambang Djakarté (Tadmor, 2009). While the number of novels written in regional languages, such as Javanese and Sundanese, decreased during the Soekarno period (Quinn,

262 Nat ion-st ates

1992; Teeuw, 1996), what did circulate nevertheless helped recirculate links between language, region, and social type. Within some organizations – such as LEKRA, which supported socialist and communist leaning arts in their broadest sense – there was support for regional literature, arts, and culture, and support for research into these areas (Foulcher, 1986). In addition, there was the formation, in 1947 of a government-sponsored language centre that would eventually be housed at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta (Dardjowidjojo, 1998: 39–40). Under the direction of various ministries with education and culture in their portfolio, this language centre was responsible for the planning and production of materials in regional languages, such as Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese. While access to schooling in the fledgling republic of Indonesia was not uniformly available throughout the archipelago (Bruner, 1959: 53; Geertz, 1959: 28; Goethals, 1959: 20; Palmer, 1959: 47–48), participation rates nevertheless increased rapidly – both in Islamic (pesantren and madrasah) and government schools (Ricklefs, 1981: 226; Soedijarto et al., 1980: 62). This too, helped increase the recirculation of ideas of ethnicity. Although absenteeism, statistic reliability, and variability in the quality of local schooling practices invites caution when viewing these figures (Soedijarto et al., 1980), between 1945 and 1960 the number of primary school and lower secondary school students increased by at least a factor of four, from 2.5 million to 8.9 million and 90 to 670 thousand respectively (Bjork, 2005: 54). In these schools, ideas about ethnicity and difference were circulated, often implicitly through discourses of nationalism. Palmer (1959: 48), for example, points out that tolerance of other groups was promoted in schools through children’s performances of other ethnic groups’ dances. In Balinese and Sumatran schools, however, it was distinctions between local ways of doing and being in contrast with newly introduced ideas of Indonesian ways of doing and being that helped in the circulation of ideas about ethnicity, while also contrasting these with ideas of Indonesian modernity (Geertz, 1959). Since Indonesian independence, radio was also becoming an increasingly important medium for the circulation of ideas about Indonesia, with over a million licensed radios in operation by 1965 (Sen & Hill, 2000: 82). This figure increased massively in the Soeharto years, where there were around 32 million radio sets sold by 1995 (Sen & Hill, 2000: 91). In closing this section, it is worth pointing out that one of the reoccurring themes of the political work done during this whole period centred on how to unify and keep unified such a diverse nation. While these ideas had many similarities with the earlier nationalist thought of the 1920s and 1930, as Elson (2008: 105–108) points out, the idea of ‘unity in diversity’ became institutionally enshrined in the state ideology of Pancasila ‘The five principles’. While, this ideology

Superdiversit y From Within : Ethnic it y in Indonesia

263

meant different things at different times during the Soekarno period, during this and the New Order period that followed, this ideology helped to imply that ‘diversity’ meant ethnic diversity, among other things.

The New Order The New Order period (1966 to 1998) was named as such because of the new ideologies espoused by President Soeharto and his followers, which contrasted with President Soekarno’s anti-West and socialist leaning proclivities. Rejoining ‘Western’ bodies, such as the IMF, World Bank, and the United Nations were seen as necessities given the dire condition of the Indonesian economy (Ricklefs, 1981). This period can be characterized as one concerned primarily with ‘development’ where there was large upscaling and massification of the mechanisms that facilitated the circulation of ideas linking language, region, and ethnic social types. In particular, transmigration projects (government sponsored migration from Java and Bali to other Indonesian Islands), economic migration, investment in education, factories, transportation, and communications all facilitated the repetition of ideologies that had been constructed in the colonial period and recirculated in various forms until the start of the New Order period. In short, during the 1966 to 1998 period linguistic forms became tightly associated with particular regions and equated with ethnic social types to the extent that when Indonesians talked of themselves as speaking a regional language, such as Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, this also frequently pointed to the same ethnic identity. One outcome of this process was that centres of normativity were strengthened with a clear bias towards centres found within the Island of Java. The indexical order that emerged during this period had Indonesian at the top, followed by a Yogyakartan variety of Javanese, then a variety of Sundanese and Balinese, followed by other often endangered regional languages spoken outside of Java (Kuipers, 1998), and then mixed language. During this period schooling was developed on a massive scale (Bjork, 2005; Soedijarto et al., 1980; Thee Kian Wie, 2002) with the number of primary school students in 1960 (8 million) increasing threefold by 1990 (24 million), while the number of lower secondary school students increased from 1.9 million to over 5.5 million in this same period (Bjork, 2005: 54). During this period, central and regional government departments attempted to deliver a number of languages in primary and secondary schools (e.g. Arps, 2010; Lowenberg, 1992; Nababan, 1985; Soedijarto et al., 1980). These languages included the language of the region where the school was located (bahasa daerah), Indonesian, and English. While the success of these efforts

264 Nat ion-st ates

was patchy (e.g. Kurniasih, 2007), the one-to-many participation framework of schooling helped to recirculate associations between linguistic forms, regions and people to further enregister ideas of ethnolinguistic personhood. Just as importantly, ethnolinguistic personhood was also the focus of citizenship classes and part of the reason for the use of Indonesian as the language of education. As students went through school and university, they were introduced to many of Indonesia’s ethnic groups through reference in lessons about other groups’: housing architecture, dress, and folk tales, as well as other signs of region, such as car number plates, monuments, and accents (Cole, 2010; Parker, 2002). Ideas about ‘otherness’ and how to identify others of a different ethnicity are also found within the ideology behind the use of Indonesian as the language of education. Indonesian was not only represented in textbooks, grammars, and classrooms as the language of education and modernity, but its usage among Indonesians from throughout the archipelago was ideologized as the penultimate ‘example of’ and ‘vehicle for’ doing unity in diversity (e.g. Abas, 1987; Alisjahbana, 1976; Dardjowidjojo, 1998; Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1993; Nababan, 1985). This process of institutionalizing a language of inter-group communication, along with recognition and respect for other ethnic groups also came in the form of other frameworks. The government radio broadcaster (RRI), broadcast news in 12 regional languages and village agricultural programs in 48 regional languages (Sen & Hill, 2000: 93–94). Where regional non-government radio was concerned, there were also new regulations that stipulated that programming should be about regional cultures, originate locally, be appropriate to local conditions, and be in a regional language (Sen & Hill, 2000: 86). By the mid-1970s ethnicity had begun to be marketed and commoditized. In some cases, this marketing and commoditization process was often an unintended consequence of nation building activities. A notable example is the Mini Indonesia theme park in Jakarta which opened in 1975. While Taman mini Indonesia, as it is locally known, was initially conceptualized as a model of unity in diversity, it also helped to recirculate ethnolinguistic stereotypes because Mini Indonesia is in the shape of Indonesia and populated by houses, architecture, and distinctively dressed performers of named ethnic groups from around the archipelago (Hoon, 2006). At the same time, the selling of entry tickets to consume ethnic performances represented one domain where ethnicity was gaining economic value. The strengthening of associations of ethnicity with material signs and cultural performances continued with the marketing and commoditization of ethnicity for domestic and international consumption (Adams, 1984; Hooker, 1993; Parker, 2002). For example, during the early 1990s the sale of ethnic music cassette

Superdiversit y From Within : Ethnic it y in Indonesia

265

recordings was around 15% of overall music sales in Indonesia (Sen & Hill, 2000: 170). In places such as Central Java, performances of high Javanese which had in the past been indexically associated with royal courts and the ‘best’ of refined Javanese culture, were increasingly becoming commoditized as a paid for status enhancing addition to wedding ceremonies (Errington, 1998b). While radio, music, and performances of ethnicity for domestic and international tourists added semiotic density to existing ethnolinguistic models of personhood, in the late 1980s a rapidly evolving television network (Kitley, 2000; Sen & Hill, 2000) continued this process while facilitating wider access to these models (e.g. Goebel, 2013a, 2013b, 2015). Government deregulation of media ownership in 1990, the subsequent entry into the market by multiple television stations, and the need to gain and maintain market share led to the creation of ethnic soaps, which then become one of the most popular and widely broadcast television genres in Indonesia (Kitley, 2000; Loven, 2008; Rachmah, 2006; Sen & Hill, 2000). A common feature of these soaps was the use of fragments of regional languages along with enough semiotic information to anchor these fragments to particular regions (Goebel, 2008, 2010b). In doing so, Indonesians who had a cursory familiarity with ethnic social types could now also claim familiarity with the sounds and demeanours associated with these stereotypes. The representation of language alternation also started to challenge ideologies of bounded languages, especially Indonesian, where language mixing was stigmatized through government campaigns relating to speaking pure Indonesian (Errington, 1998b). While ideologies about ethnolinguistic others and interaction among ethnic others was largely associated with positive social relations in Indonesia in the early 1990s, from the mid-1990s onwards, ethnicity was increasingly associated with negative social relations, such as inter-ethnic conflict. Prior to and during the early 1990s, the appropriation of land for logging, mining and transmigration projects in the islands outside of Java brought with them economic migrants. These ethnic and religious others were increasingly perceived as unwelcome guests by receiving populations in places such as Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Aceh and Irian Jaya (e.g. the papers in Davidson & Henley, 2007; Hedman, 2008; Manning & Van Diermen, 2000; Resosudarmo, 2005). They were unwelcome because they were perceived as not only taking part in the illegal or unfair appropriation of their land, but as being unwilling to assimilate to local ways of doing things. These issues were compounded by the severe economic downturn that started in 1997 and continued for over ten years. This economic uncertainty produced social unrest across Indonesia leading to the fall of the Soeharto regime in May 1998 (e.g. Aspinall & Fealy, 2003).

266 Nat ion-st ates

Reformation and Decentralization The end of the cold war in the early 1990s had a number of implications for the way Indonesia handled issues of development and governance. During the cold war there were agreements about allowing import protectionism in exchange for a staunchly non-communist regime, but by the early 1990s this gave way to increased pressures from the United States and other countries for trade liberalization and human rights (Vickers, 2005). This occurred in a context where the Indonesian development program had already produced disparities between urban and rural areas, between the rich and the poor (Vickers, 2005), and, as noted above, in the regions outside of Java (Henley & Davidson, 2007). By 1998 the economic growth rates of earlier years had dramatically dropped. There were several reasons for this, including a rapid decrease in the exchange rate for the Indonesian rupiah, which decreased from 2300 rupiah per US dollar to around 10,000 rupiah per dollar between 1996 and 1998 (Ikhsan, 2003). This plummeting exchange rate was compounded by a severe El Nino drought which brought crop failure and the need to import food, falling oil prices which reduced government revenues, an IMF push to reduce fuel subsidies, and a doubling of inflation rates (Thee Kian Wie, 2001). These events crippled most businesses with foreign loans, resulting in bankruptcy, business closures, a doubling of the unemployment rate, and a doubling of the number of people living under the poverty line (Ikhsan, 2003). Very soon after Soeharto’s resignation, media censorship laws were increasingly ignored and there were increasing numbers of calls for independence coming from many of the regions outside of Java (Aspinall & Fealy, 2003; Bourchier, 2000). While these calls for independence were linked with the development practices noted in the previous section, it was also the case that with Soeharto gone the vast patronage networks that had been set up during his reign started to unravel (Bourchier, 2000). This resulted in many local struggles for power and resources, which were often linked with calls for independence (Bourchier, 2000; Lindsey, 2001). With the centralism of the New Order regime being replaced with localism and the politicization of ethnicity, Indonesia moved to decentralize much of its governance practices. In May 1999 two new laws were introduced, Laws 22 and 25, which devolved political and fiscal powers to cities and districts (Bünte, 2009: 116). More specifically, Law 25/1999 related to a new system of fiscal arrangements whereby districts and cities were to receive a much larger share of revenues earned within their borders (Aspinall & Fealy, 2003: 3). Law

Superdiversit y From Within : Ethnic it y in Indonesia

267

22/1999 devolved political authority to these districts and cities in the areas of education, health, environment, labour, public works, and natural resource management (Aspinall & Fealy, 2003: 3). It is important to note here that decision makers chose to focus on autonomy at the district and city level rather than at the provincial level because it would set up districts as competitors for resources, while not making them large enough to think of separatism (Aspinall & Fealy, 2003: 4). This approach was seen as especially important because of Indonesia’s history of separatist movements (Aspinall & Fealy, 2003: 4). Decentralization helped to recirculate ideas about ethnicity while increasing diversity through fractal recursions of ethnolinguistic personhood. Quinn (2003) notes that Javanese speaking Banten, which was originally part of the province of Sundanese speaking West Java, successfully became a new province in 2000. The reasons for this were based on claims of religious, linguistic, and cultural differences, economic grounds, and claims of political under-representation at the provincial level. In a number of districts there were also efforts to revitalize local languages and include these in school curriculum (Arps, 2010; Jukes, 2010; Moriyama, 2012; Quinn, 2012; Sudarkam Mertono, 2014). This atomization of territory via fractal recursion was common to the extent that by mid-2003 the number of districts had gone from 360 to 416 and the number of provinces had increased from 27 to 30 (Jones, 2004). By early 2007 this number had increased to 487 districts (Bünte, 2009: 116). This territorial fragmentation continues, as pointed out by Aspinall (2011, 2013). In some cases, feelings of localism turned into inter-ethnic or inter-religious conflicts between ‘indigenous locals’ and (trans)migrants in places such as Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Maluku, Aceh, and Papua/Irian Jaya (e.g. the papers in Hedman, 2008). These conflicts over land, rights and the more general contestations about authenticity regularly attracted the gaze of local and national media, as well as major political figures. Discourses about the potential problems of decentralization including localism, adat, and ethnopolitics circulated in 2001 and 2002 in local and national newspapers (Aspinall & Fealy, 2003: 7). Erb (2007: 268) points out that local adat disputes on the island of Flores were covered in the national media. In places such as Bali, there also seemed to be some audience for these news reports with migrants complaining that media reports relating to the push to strengthen Bali adat privileged Balinese locals while marginalizing migrants (Warren, 2007: 174). Ideas linking region, linguistic form and person were also recirculated via national and local policies linked with the decentralization process. For example, a new broadcasting bill (No 32/2002, Article 36, point 2) stipulated that 60% of television broadcasts should contain local material and by 2004

268 Nat ion-st ates

there were 60 private local stations (Rachmah, 2006), many broadcasting in local languages (Yuyun W.I. Surya, 2006). From 2003 until 2009 (a period in which I recorded around four hundred hours of broadcasts) soaps continued to recirculate ideas that linked region to linguistic form and social type, further contributing to the enregisterment of ethnolinguistic stereotypes. Similar in many respects to the ethnic comedies of the 1990s, these comedies were geographically anchored to regions or framed as ethnic via shots of recognizable landmarks, material artefacts (e.g. car number plates), subtitles, narratives describing the region or a combination of these semiotic place-markers. Even so, an increasing number of these comedies and other televised genres represented a number of emergent language practices that contested these essentializing links between language, territory, and person. These included the delinking of language practices to ethnolinguistic membership (Goebel, 2008, 2010b), the representation of habitual language alternation – i.e. codeswitching within an utterance (Goebel, 2015) – the representation of Indonesians having an ability to understand and evaluate languages that could only be accounted for with reference to ideas about one-to-many participation frameworks (Goebel, 2013a, 2015), and the doing of unity in diversity in a language other than Indonesian (Goebel, 2013c, 2015). Like the atomization of territory and groups within those territories, mass-mediated fractal recursions of early models of ethnolinguistic personhood produced multiple centres of normativity which challenged and reconfigured existing orders of indexicality, while creating more diversity from within.

Conclusion This chapter has examined how an ethnolinguistic category has been semiotically constructed and recirculated in Indonesia since Dutch colonial times, how this circulation relates to political economy, and how all of this can provide a perspective on how superdiversity can emerge from within a nation-state. After synthesizing a broad range of scholarship in areas of language ideology, superdiversity, and language in late capitalism, I went on to examine how ideas about social types, regions, and linguistic forms have been circulated in Indonesia from colonial times until the early 21st century. I pointed out the importance of understanding how one-to-many participation frameworks and technological innovation contributed to these processes which, up until the early 1990s, helped to regiment ideologies about regional languages, Indonesian, and their imagined communities of speakers. These participation frameworks included school classrooms where the teacher

Superdiversit y From Within : Ethnic it y in Indonesia

269

represented the ‘one’ and the pupils the ‘many’ and mediated communication (e.g. television, radio, newspapers, novels, magazines) where the broadcasts, newspapers, etc., were the ‘one’ and the readers and audience the ‘many’. A register of Malay eventually became a register of Indonesian, with the most widely circulating reproductions being found in the social domains of schools and bureaucracies, radio, television, and print media. As literary written models of Malay became part of the spoken repertoire of exemplary Indonesians, over time Indonesian also became associated with new knowledge, education, development, expertise, citizenship, nationhood, and authority (whether personal, bureaucratic or political). The idea of a citizen who practiced unity-in-diversity was exemplified by the Indonesian speaking subject. With the enregisterment of multiple ethnic (regional) languages came the emergence of multiple centres of normativity relating to what was good language, ably embellished or laminated with models of ethnic personhood that become increasingly common in Indonesian mediascapes. The existence of multiple centres, each with different social value, helped in the creation of what Blommaert (2010, 2013) refers to as ‘orders of indexicality’. The orders of indexicality that emerged typically had Indonesian at the top of the hierarchy followed by some ethnic languages (e.g. Javanese) and then other (endangered) ethnic languages (Kuipers, 1998), and finally mixed languages (Errington, 1998b). The same processes that enabled the creation of these orders also set up the conditions for their reconfiguration and a further wave of diversification of Indonesian society. While face-to-face interactions in urban neighbourhoods was one place where this occurred (Goebel, 2010a, 2010b), here I focused upon the television representations. What was increasingly common was alternation between fragments of a regional language and Indonesian. These representations presented alternation as unspectacular, mundane, and habitual, while providing models of the doing of unity in diversity that sat in contrast to the state ideology, which linked Indonesian to the doing of unity in diversity. These televised representations also started to present the Indonesians with ‘competence to comprehend’ (Agha, 2007) fragments of languages that they did not habitually speak. I argued that this competence was an unintended consequence of the increasing circulation and consumption of models of ethnolinguistic personhood found in one-to-many participation frameworks. I referred to the practice of comprehending fragments of others’ regional language in interaction as ‘knowledging’ (Goebel, 2013a, 2015). From early 1997 onwards the negative effects of development policy, an ongoing currency crisis, rapid political change, and the emergence across Indonesia of movements whose focus was on the revival of ‘local’ traditions all pushed Indonesia into regime change and change from a centralized to a

270 Nat ion-st ates

decentralized system of governance. While some of these changes helped recirculate older ethnolinguistic models of personhood, they also helped produce fractal recursions of these models as Indonesia rapidly atomized at territorial, political, and linguistic scales. Atomization was assisted through the (re)formation of one-to-many participation frameworks and ultimately helped to reconfigure existing orders of indexicality. This reconfiguration was especially noticeable in television representations where it was increasingly normal to find the practices of language alternation, knowledging, and the doing of unity-in-diversity in a language other than the national language, Indonesian. In building on work on language ideologies, language in late capitalism, and primarily Eurocentric discussion of linguistic superdiversity where migrants are ultimately the driving force of superdiversity (Blommaert, 2013; Gal, 2012; Heller, 2011; Heller & Duchene, 2012), I took seriously invitations to take a historical perspective on the social economic and political conditions that have produced superdiversity from within Indonesia. In doing so, I have also highlighted how these multiple process occurring at multiple scales also ‘sets up’ and ‘sit in constant tension with’ standardizing processes that are outcomes of schooling, television programming, and other one-tomany participation frameworks.

References Ả Campo, J. (2002) Engines of Empire: Steamshipping and State Formation in Colonial Indonesia. Hilversum: Verloren. Abas, H. (1987) Indonesian as a Unifying Language of Wider Communication: A Historical and Sociolinguistic Perspective. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Adams, K. (1984) Come to Tana Toraja, ‘Land of the heavenly kings’: Travel agents as brokers in ethnicity. Annals of Toursim Research 11, 469−485. Agha, A. (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alisjahbana, S.T. (1976) Language Planning for Modernization: The Case of Indonesian and Malaysian. The Hague: Mouton and Co. Aman (1971) Si Doel Anak Djakarta (8th edn.). Jakarta: Balai pustaka. (original work published 1932). Ang, I. (1996) Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World. London: Routledge. Antaki, C. and Widdicombe, S. (eds) (1998) Identities in Talk. London: Sage Publications. Anwar, K. (1980) Indonesian: The Development and Use of a National Language. Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press. Arnaut, K. (2016) Super-diversity: Elements of an emerging perspective. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 49–70). New York/London: Routledge. Arnaut, K. and Spotti, M. (2014) Superdiversity discourse. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 122. London: King’s College London. Arps, B. (2010) Terwujudnya Bahasa Using di Banyuwangi dan peranan media elektronik di dalamnya (selayang padang, 1970–2009). In M. Moriyama and M. Budiman (eds)

Superdiversit y From Within : Ethnic it y in Indonesia

271

Geliat bahasa selaras zaman: Perubahan bahasa-bahasa di Indonesia pasca-orde baru (pp. 225–248). Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Aspinall, E. (2011) Democratization and ethnic politics in Indonesia: Nine thesis. Journal of East Asian Studies 11, 289–319. Aspinall, E. (2013) A nation in fragments: Patronage and neoliberalism in contemporary Indonesia. Critical Asian Studies 45 (1), 27–54. Aspinall, E. and Fealy, G. (2003) Introduction: Local power and politics in Indonesia: decentralisation and democratisation. In E. Aspinall and G. Fealy (eds) Local Power and Politics in Indonesia: Decentralisation and Democratisation (pp. 1–11). Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Bauman, R. and Briggs, C. (1990) Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19, 59–88. Bjork, C. (2005) Indonesian Education: Teachers, Schools, and Central Bureaucracy. New York: Routledge. Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2013) Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Blommaert, J. and Backus, A. (2011) Repertoires revisited: ‘Knowing language’ in superdiversity. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 67. London: King’s College London. Blommaert, J. and Rampton, B. (2016) Language and superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 21–48). New York/London: Routledge. Blommaert, J. and Varis, P. (2011) Enough is enough: The heuristics of authenticity in superdiversity. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 76. London: King’s College London. Bourchier, D. (2000) Habibie’s interregnum: Reformasi, elections, regionalism and the struggle for power. In C. Manning and P. van Diermen (eds) Indonesia in Transition: Social Aspects of Reformasi and Crisis (pp. 15–38). London: Zed Books. Bourchier, D. (2007) The romance of adat in the Indonesian political imagination and the current revival. In J. Davidson and D. Henley (eds) The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics: The Deployment of Adat from Colonialism to Indigenism (pp. 113–129). London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell. Bruner, E. (1959) The Toba Batak village. In W. Skinner (ed.) Local, Ethnic, and National Loyalties in Village Indonesia: A Symposium (pp. 52–64). New Haven: Yale University. Bünte, M. (2009) Indonesia’s protracted decentralization: Contested reforms and their unintended consequences. In M. Bunte and A. Ufen (eds) Democratization in PostSuharto Indonesia (pp. 102–123). London: Routledge. Burns, P. (2004) The Leiden Legacy: Concepts of Law in Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press. Cohen, M. (2006) The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903. Ohio: Ohio University Press. Cole, D. (2010) Enregistering diversity: Adequation in Indonesian poetry performance. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20 (1), 1–21.

272 Nat ion-st ates

Dardjowidjojo, S. (1998) Strategies for a successful national language policy: The Indonesian case. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 130, 35–47. Davidson, J. and Henley, D. (eds) (2007) The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics: The Deployment of Adat from Colonialism to Indigenism. London: Routledge. Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan (1993) Tata bahasa baku bahasa Indonesia [Standard Indonesian grammar]. Jakarta: Balai Pustaka. Dick, H. (1996) The emergence of a national economy, 1808–1990s. In J. Lindblad (ed.) Historical Foundations of a National Economy in Indonesia, 1890s–1990s (pp. 21–51). Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen Verhandelingen, Afd. Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, deel 167. Elson, R. (2008) The Idea of Indonesia: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Erb, M. (2007) Adat revivalism in Western Flores. In J. Davidson and D. Henley (eds) The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics: The Deployment of Adat from Colonialism to Indigenism (pp. 247–274). London: Routledge. Errington, J. (1998a) Indonesian(‘s) development: On the state of a language of state. In B.B. Schieffelin, K.A. Woolard and P.V. Kroskrity (eds) Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (pp. 271–284). New York: Oxford University Press. Errington, J. (1998b) Shifting Languages: Interaction and Identity in Javanese Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Errington, J. (2000) Indonesian(‘s) authority. In P.V. Kroskrity (ed.) Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities (Advanced Seminar Series) (pp. 205–227). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Errington, J. (2001) Colonial linguistics. Annual Review of Anthropology 30, 19–39. Fasseur, C. (1994) Cornerstone and stumbling block: Racial classification and the late colonial state in Indonesia. In R. Cribb (ed.) The Late Colonial State in Indonesia: Political and Economic Foundations of the Netherlands Indies 1880–1942 (pp. 31–56). Leiden: KITLV Press. Feith, H. (1962) The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia. New York: Cornell University Press. Foulcher, K. (1986) Social Commitment in Literature and the Arts: The Indonesian ‘Institute of People’s Culture’ 1950–1965. Melbourne: Monash University. Foulcher, K. (2000) Sumpah Pemuda: The making and meaning of a symbol of Indonesian nationhood. Asian Studies Review 24 (3), 377–410. Gal, S. (2012) Sociolinguistic regimes and the management of ‘diversity’. In M. Heller and A. Duchene (eds) Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit (pp. 22–42). Hoboken: Routledge. Geertz, H. (1959) The Balinese village. In W. Skinner (ed.) Local, Ethnic, and National Loyalties in Village Indonesia: A Symposium (pp. 24–33). New Haven: Yale University. Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goebel, Z. (2008) Enregistering, authorizing and denaturalizing identity in Indonesia. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18 (1), 46–61. Goebel, Z. (2010a) Identity and social conduct in a transient multilingual setting. Language in Society 39 (2), 203–240. Goebel, Z. (2010b) Language, Migration and Identity: Neighborhood Talk in Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goebel, Z. (2013a) Competence to comprehend and knowledging. Language & Communication 33 (4), 366–375.

Superdiversit y From Within : Ethnic it y in Indonesia

273

Goebel, Z. (2013b) The construction of semiotically dense stereotypes in Indonesian soaps. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 83. Tilburg: Tilburg University. Goebel, Z. (2013c) Representations of doing unity in diversity on Indonesian TV. Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 47 (1), 89–114. Goebel, Z. (2015) Language and Superdiversity: Indonesians Knowledging at Home and Abroad. New York: Oxford University Press. Goethals, P. (1959) The Sumbawan village. In W. Skinner (ed.) Local, Ethnic, and National Loyalties in Village Indonesia: A Symposium (pp. 12–23). New Haven: Yale University. Goffman, E. (1967) Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Behavior. New York: Anchor. Hedman, E.-L. (ed.) (2008) Conflict, Violence, and Displacement in Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. Heller, M. (2011) Paths to Post-nationalism: A Critical Ethnogaphy of Language and Identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Heller, M. and Duchene, A. (2012) Pride and profit: Changing discourses of language, capital and nation state. In M. Heller and A. Duchene (eds) Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit (pp. 1–21). Hoboken: Routledge. Henley, D. and Davidson, J. (2007) Introduction: Radical conservatism – the protean politics of adat. In J. Davidson and D. Henley (eds) The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics: The Deployment of Adat from Colonialism to Indigenism (pp. 1–49). London: Routledge. Hooker, V. (ed.) (1993) Culture and Society in New Order Indonesia. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Hoon, C.-Y. (2006) Assimilation, multiculturalism, hybridity: The dilemmas of the ethnic Chinese in post-Suharto Indonesia. Asian Ethnicity 7 (2), 149–166. Ikhsan, M. (2003) Economic update 2002: Struggling to maintain momentum. In E. Aspinall and G. Fealy (eds) Local Power and Politics in Indonesia: Decentralisation and Democratisation (pp. 35–62). Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Inoue, M. (2006) Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Irvine, J. and Gal, S. (2000) Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P.V. Kroskrity (ed.) Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities (pp. 35–84). Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Jones, S. (2004) Political update 2003: Terrorism, nationalism and disillusionment with reform. In M.C. Basri and P. van der Eng (eds) Business in Indonesia: New Challenges, Old Problems (pp. 23–38). Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Jørgensen, J.N., Karrebæk, M.S., Madsen, L.M. and Møller, J.S. (2016) Polylanguaging in superdiversity. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 137–154). New York/London: Routledge. Jukes, A. (2010) Someone Else’s Job: Externalizing Responsibility for Language Maintenance. Paper presented at the fourteenth foundation for endangered language conference: Reversing language shift: How to re-awaken a language tradition, 13–15 September Carmathan, Wales. Kahin, G. (1970 [1952]) Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. King, R. and Wicks, J. (2009) ‘Aren’t we proud of our language?’: Authenticity, commodification, and the Nissan Bonavista television commercial. Journal of English Linguistics 37 (3), 262–283. Kitley, P. (2000) Television, Nation, and Culture in Indonesia. Athens: Ohio University Press.

274 Nat ion-st ates

Kuipers, J. (1998) Language, Identity and Marginality in Indonesia: The Changing Nature of Ritual Speech on the Island of Sumba. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kurniasih, Y.K. (2007) Local Content Curriculum 1994: The Teaching of Javanese in Yogyakarta Schools. Paper presented at the First International Symposium on the Languages of Java (ISLOJ), 15–16 August, Graha Santika Hotel, Semarang, Indonesia. Legge, J. (1961) Central Authority and Regional Autonomy in Indonesia: A Study in Local Administration, 1950–1960. Ithaca: Cornell Uiversity Press. Liddle, R.W. (1972) Ethnicity and Political Organization: Three East Sumatran Cases. In C. Holt (ed.) Culture and Politics in Indonesia (pp. 126–178). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lindsey, T. (2001) The criminal state: Premanisme and the new Indonesia. In G. Lloyd and S. Smith (eds) Indonesia Today: Challenges of History (pp. 283–297). Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Loven, K. (2008) Watching Si Doel: Television, Language, and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press. Lowenberg, P. (1992) Language policy and language identity in Indonesia. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 3 (1), 59–77. Manning, C. and Van Diermen, P. (eds) (2000) Indonesia in Transition: Social Aspects of Reformasi and Crisis. London: Zed Books. Miller, L. (2004) Those naughty teenage girls: Japanese kogals, slang, and media assessments. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14 (2), 225–247. Moore, R. (2011) Standardisation, diversity and enlightenment in the contemporary crisis of EU language policy. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 74. London: King’s College London. Moriyama, M. (2005) Sundanese Print Culture and Modernity in Nineteenth-century West Java. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. Moriyama, M. (2012) Regional languages and decentralization in post-New Order Indonesia: The case of Sundanese. In K. Foulcher, M. Moriyama and M. Budiman (eds) Words in Motion: Language and Discourse in Post-New Order Indonesia (pp. 82–100). Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Mrázek, R. (2002) Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nababan, P.W.J. (1985) Bilingualism in Indonesia: Ethnic language maintenance and the spread of the national language. Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 13 (1), 1–18. Palmer, A. (1959) The Sundanese village. In W. Skinner (ed.) Local, Ethnic, and National Loyalties in Village Indonesia: A Symposium (pp. 42–51). New Haven: Yale University. Parker, L. (2002) The subjectification of citizenship: Student interpretations of school teachings in Bali. Asian Studies Review 26 (1), 3–37. Quinn, G. (1992) The Novel in Javanese. Leiden: KITLV Press. Quinn, G. (2003) Coming apart and staying together at the centre: Debates over provincial status in Java and Madura. In E. Aspinall and G. Fealy (eds) Local Power and Politics in Indonesia: Decentralisation and Democratisation (pp. 164–178). Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Quinn, G. (2012) Emerging from dire straits: Post-New Order developments in Javanese language and literature. In K. Foulcher, M. Moriyama and M. Budiman (eds) Words in Motion: Language and Discourse in Post-New Order Indonesia (pp. 65–81). Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

Superdiversit y From Within : Ethnic it y in Indonesia

275

Rachmah, I. (2006) Watching Indonesian Sinetron: Imagining Communities Around the Television. (PhD dissertation), Curtain University, Perth. Reid, A. and Akira, O. (1986) Introduction. In A. Reid, O. Akira, J. Brewster and J. Carruthers (eds) The Japanese Experience in Indonesia: Selected Memoirs of 1942–1945 (pp. 1–5). Ohio: Ohio University Press. Resosudarmo, B. (ed.) (2005) The Politics and Economics of Indonesia’s Natural Resources. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Ricklefs, M.C. (1981) A History of Modern Indonesia Since c.1300. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Roesli, M. (1965 [1922]) Sitti Nurbaja: Kasih Tak Sampai (11 ed.). Jakarta: Balai Pustaka. Sen, K. and Hill, D.T. (2000) Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shibata, Y. (1986) Shibata shirei cho ¯kan no shuki. In A. Reid, O. Akira, J. Brewster and J. Carruthers (eds) The Japanese Experience in Indonesia: Selected Memoirs of 1942–1945 (pp. 278–287). Ohio: Ohio University Press. Shunkichiro, M. (1986) Jawa senryo¯ gunsei kaikoroku. In A. Reid, O. Akira, J. Brewster and J. Carruthers (eds) The Japanese Experience in Indonesia: Selected memoirs of 1942– 1945 (pp. 114–125). Ohio: Ohio University Press. Sneddon, J. (2003) The Indonesian Language: Its History and Role in Modern Society. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Soedijarto, M.L., Suryadi, A., Machmud, D., Pangemanan, F., Tangyong, A., … Thomas, R. (1980) Indonesia. In T. Postlethwaite and R. Thomas (eds) Schooling in the ASEAN Region: Primary and Secondary Education in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand (pp. 48–96). Oxford: Pergamon. Spitulnik, D. (1996) The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6 (2), 161–187. Stoler, A.L. (1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucult’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (2nd edn, with a new preface ed). Durham: Duke University Press. Sudarkam Mertono (2014) The decentralization of schooling in Palu, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. PhD thesis, Department of Asian Studies, La Trobe University, Melbourne. Suryadinata, L., Arifin, E. and Ananta, A. (2003) Indonesia’s Population: Ethnicity and Religion in a Changing Political Landscape. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Tadmor, U. (2009) Voices from the Past: Betawi Dialects in Firman Muntaco’s Gambang Djakarté. Paper presented at the The Thirteenth International Symposium on Malay/ Indonesian Linguistics (ISMIL 13), 6–7 June Senggigi, Lombok, Indonesia. Teeuw, A. (1972) The impact of Balai Pustaka on modern Indonesian literature. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 35 (1), 111–127. Teeuw, A. (1994) Modern Indonesian Literature I (4th edn). Leiden: KITLV Press. Teeuw, A. (1996) Modern Indonesian Literature II (2nd edn). Leiden: KITLV Press. Thee Kian Wie (2001) Reflections on the New Order ‘Miracle’. In G. Lloyd and S. Smith (eds) Indonesia Today: Challenges of History (pp. 163–180). Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Thee Kian Wie (2002) The Soeharto era and after; stability, development and crisis, 1966– 2000. In H. Dick (ed.) The Emergence of a National Economy: An Economic History of Indonesia, 1800–2000 (pp. 194–243). Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin. Vertovec, S. (2007) Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6), 1024–1053. Vickers, A. (2005) A History of Modern Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

276 Nat ion-st ates

Warren, C. (2007) Adat in Balinese discourse and practice: Locating citizenship and the commonweal. In J. Davidson and D. Henley (eds) The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics: The Deployment of Adat from Colonialism to Indigenism (pp. 170–202). London: Routledge. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yuyun W.I. Surya (2006) The Construction of Cultural Identity in Local Television Stations’ Programs in Indonesia. Paper presented at the Media: Policies, cultures and futures in the Asia Pacific region, Curtain University, Perth, Curtain University, Perth, 27–29 November.

12 ‘Designer Immigrant’ Students in Singapore: Challenges for Linguistic Human Rights in a Globalising World Lu Jiqun Luke

Linguistic Human Rights (LHR) have developed as a prominent response to the threat of linguistic discrimination and marginalization of peoples who speak and use a minority language. This chapter, however, suggests that the superdiversity triggered by globalization and transmigration pose difficult questions for LHR’s normative assumptions regarding language and linguistic practices. I draw on questionnaire data of five individuals, who are part of a specific group of migrants in Singapore previously labelled ‘designer immigrant’ students. With low proficiencies in English, their linguistic human rights may be perceived to be neglected by schools that use only English as medium of instruction. In uncovering their attitudes toward language learning and aspirations, it will be shown that they (a) reported changes in their identities and language use over time; (b) may continue to cross national borders; and (c) exhibit conscious choice in their linguistic and cultural demeanours with some not wishing to be bound to any cultural identities. I argue that LHR’s theoretical precepts regarding language and identity cannot accommodate the sociolinguistic practices of interstitial actors who continue to translocate over time and space.

Introduction and Aims Language and linguistic ideology have often been cited to be crucial in the perpetration of social inequality (Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001; Ricento, 2000). This has come about due to our growing awareness that language 277

278 Nat ion-st ates

serves to proliferate relations of power and domination. A familiar scenario to sociolinguists today depicts individuals who are victims of structural injustice, as they are denied access to valued socioeconomic goods or to participatory rights as citizens within a nation. One major factor for discrimination is said to be the kind and quality of linguistic capital one possesses (Bourdieu, 1991). Linguistic Human Rights has become a prominent response to counter the threat of linguistic discrimination and consequent subordination of peoples (Wee, 2010: 3). The LHR argument1 for social justice is that minority languages and their speakers within a locality should be accorded the same levels of institutional recognition as majority languages and their speakers (May, 2001: 8). More specifically, ‘core’ principles of LHR that ought to have ‘universal validity’ (Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 2008: 4) include: (1) positive identification with a (minority) language by its users, and recognition of this by others; (2) learning a (minority) language in formal education, not merely as a subject but as a medium of instruction; (3) additive bilingual education, since learning the language of the state or the wider community is also essential; (4) public services, including access to the legal system, in minority languages or, minimally, in a language one understands. An appeal to LHR might be justified at a site where I observed ostensible linguistic discrimination. Having spent my entire life in Singapore, I taught English to immigrant students for four years in a top-ranked local secondary school. These were students with initial low proficiencies in English but situated in a school that only uses English as medium of instruction. They were taught no differently than their Singaporean counterparts who are mostly native speakers of English. There was no consideration for any additive bilingual education in the form promoted by LHR proponents (Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 2008: 4). However, I would like to contend that LHR might not be able to resolve the issues of linguistic discrimination I observed in the Singaporean language classroom. LHR might not even be the right lens through which one perceives the situation. My interaction with these immigrant students made me acutely aware of their personal histories, future aspirations and current attitudes toward language use. I noted, as a teacher, that these young people were migrants but they were not bound to a fixed territorial space, and their linguistic and cultural trajectories did not fit in with those prescribed by nation-states and supra-national discourses such as LHR. These students are

‘Designer Immigrant ’ Student s in Singapore

279

mostly from China and part of a sudden surge in labour migration into Singapore since the 1990s (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2010a: v). As a group they are emblematic of the flows of migration and permeability of nation states today. Their increasing prevalence in terms of numbers and salience in Singapore public policy accentuates existing heterogeneity by adding social variables to the Singaporean demographic make-up. As Vertovec (2007) observed of British society, ‘diversity’ cannot be accounted only through a variable such as ethnicity. ‘Differential immigration statuses and their concomitant entitlements and restrictions of rights, divergent labour market experiences, discrete gender and age profiles, patterns of spatial distribution, and mixed local area responses by service providers and residents’ (Vertovec, 2007: 1025) also contribute to the (super-)diverse societal condition. The ‘designer immigrant’ students in Singapore are young students, immigrants and aspiring further migration. They cut across conventional social categories based on ethnic and immigration statuses alone, and can be said to contribute to a societal superdiversity, in Vertovec’s (2007) sense, within the nation of Singapore. A previous study (De Costa, 2010) on the same group of migrants in Singapore labelled them ‘designer immigrant’ students. The term ‘designer immigrant’ was originally coined by Simmons (1999) to refer to immigrants who have been selected by the host nation for particular traits to serve the needs of the economy. I use the term in this chapter, not to depict uniform cultural and linguistic practices for the whole group, but simply to indicate how these students were similarly selected by the Singapore government. Processes of globalization and migration raise questions about the theoretical conception of language and linguistic practices offered by leading LHR proponents such as Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) and Phillipson (2003, 2009). Theoretical critiques of LHR have centred on its essentialism in conflating individual practice with group identity (May, 2001: 8, 2005: 327; Stroud, 2009). Wee (2010) also provides a thorough treatment of the notion of language rights in general and offers a deeper critique of LHR, including its innate flaws and theoretical inconsistencies. The scope of my chapter is limited to LHR’s incompatibility with a specific transnational group of immigrant students. By focusing on a case study of ‘designer immigrant’ students, this chapter will contribute to existing critique by considering the weaknesses of LHR in accounting for peoples who translocate over time and space. I first provide a brief of theoretical critiques regarding LHR. This is done within three broad themes adapted from Wee’s (2010: 48–73, 123–143) arguments against the imposition of LHR–group identity conflation, trajectories over time and space and human agency. This is followed by outlining the background

280

Nat ion-st ates

of ‘designer immigrant’ students in Singapore, during which I explain the label itself and why their linguistic human rights could be perceived as violated according to LHR discourse. I then examine questionnaire data gathered from five ‘designer immigrant’ students. The questionnaire aimed at uncovering their attitudes toward language use and learning, in association with their hopes and aspirations. Particularly important are their selfdescribed national and cultural identities, and indeed their views on ‘identity’. I argue through the data that these students (a) demonstrate changes in their identity and language use over time; (b) constantly cross national borders on their own terms; and (c) exhibit conscious choice in their cultural and linguistic demeanours with some not wishing to be bound to any cultural identity. Implications for the LHR paradigm, as articulated by Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson, will be discussed. The aims of this chapter are thus twofold. In the first instance, I argue that superdiversity, triggered by migration and heightened global mobility, could present various difficulties for LHR. This will be illustrated through an investigation of ‘designer immigrant’ students in Singapore. The flexible migratory trajectories and aspirations of these individuals are associated with their changing cultural identities and linguistic practices. This is incompatible with LHR’s framework of one’s mother tongue2 as an inalienable ‘condition’. In addition, their status as immigrants and non-citizens who might desire future emigration poses ethical questions for how states should manage their language rights. Second, this chapter draws our attention to sociolinguistic behaviours and phenomena that are often left unseen, unaccounted for and unrecognized by essentializing discourses such as LHR. In my informants’ own formulations, they report developing hybrid and complex linguistic identities. I argue that this is a result of them voluntarily engaging in intense transnational mobility. They are thus interstitial actors who are not easily accommodated by LHR, nor by the policies of nationstates like Singapore more concerned with their permanent settlement. My study is not meant to and indeed cannot be a definitive representation of all ‘designer immigrant’ students in Singapore. What such a qualitative investigation does do, however, is to show nuances and complexities that trouble LHR’s purported universality on the issue of cultural identity and language use. It is important to make clear that I do not aim to debunk the empowering principle behind LHR. At times this approach appears to be the best recourse left to minority language speakers who are confronting systemic and substantive discrimination. Rather, I seek to flag the complex realities facing LHR in a late-modern world, those realities and societal changes that the notion and discussion of superdiversity is engaging with. 3

‘Designer Immigrant ’ Student s in Singapore

281

The Essentialism of Linguistic Human Rights LHR is underpinned by an ideological link between language and group identity. The difference between language rights and linguistic human rights has to be clarified. The first concept is obviously much broader … It should undoubtedly be a human right to learn one’s mother tongue … I have suggested that we differentiate between necessary rights and enrichmentoriented rights. Necessary rights are rights which, in human rights language, fulfil basic needs and are a prerequisite for living a dignified life … Only the necessary rights should be seen as linguistic human rights. Enrichment-oriented rights, for instance the right to learn foreign languages, can be seen as language rights but I do not see them as inalienable human rights, i.e., they are not linguistic human rights. (SkutnabbKangas, 2000: 497–498) Skutnabb-Kangas suggests that the learning of one’s mother tongue is necessary and integral to ‘a dignified life’, while the learning of a foreign language is of secondary import. The implication is that the mother tongue of an individual is inalienable and inseparable from its speaker, and is to be distinguished from a foreign language (Wee, 2010: 56). This individual right to learn one’s own mother tongue is further complemented by the collective right of minorities to be able to ‘reproduce themselves as distinct groups, with their own languages and cultures’ (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 498). Where an individual’s mother tongue is not an official language recognized in the country, he/she has the right to learn his/her mother tongue in addition to any official language(s) of his/her own choice (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 502). The LHR paradigm of language and identity is hence one where the mother tongue of an individual is defined to be a non-negotiable sine qua non. An individual’s linguistic practice is incontrovertibly linked to the group’s practice, and these become constitutive of each other. It is LHR’s rigid bind between mother tongue, individual and group that is especially problematic. I go on to provide a brief of LHR’s essentialism on three fronts.

Conflation of group and individual identity A common critique of LHR is that it risks misrepresenting individuals as their particularities in behaviour and aims are unequivocally subsumed under a supposed group (May, 2001: 8). The ‘ineluctable connection between language and (ethnic) identity’ is assumed and taken for granted, rather than

282

Nat ion-st ates

developed from the positions of individuals (May, 2005: 327). This conflation of individuality with collective behaviour is left in no doubt when it is stated that, ‘collective and individual rights are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. Rights pertaining to the use of a given language are an eminent example of the way in which the rights of an individual presuppose their social and collective exercise’ (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1995: 485). In Wee’s (2010: 25–39) account, rights discourses such as LHR that equate individual rights with group rights are in effect defining the authenticity of group practice from the top down. For example, Jaffe (2007) describes how a standardized form of the Corsican language (chosen from a range of dialectal varieties) came to be definitive of Corsican identity, as efforts were made to recognize the language and political rights of the community. Speakers of non-standard varieties came to be accused of cultural duplicity. Instead of group practice being constituted by and reflective of individual practices, rights discourses in the case of Corsican establish an ideal form of behaviour that individuals ought to follow in order to claim group membership. In other words, discourses like LHR predetermine what linguistic practices count as emblems of group (and individual) identity, and what do not.

Neglect of trajectories over time and space Movement over time and space are neglected in the paradigm of LHR, and yet this is an important aspect related to, and embedded in, linguistic practice. In terms of the practical enactment of LHR in specific territories, it must be noted that the legality of human rights continues to be administered by national bureaucracies in their respective spheres of governance. That is, the context of realization for human rights in general remains very much bound in modern systems of State governance and the positions of individuals within this national form of social organization (Bhabha, 1999: 702–704). Consequently, persons who translocate across national boundaries may have a weaker claim to linguistic equality within a nation, whose citizens have priority in the distribution of limited resources (Maher, 2002: 19). The implementation of LHR appears more suited for persons who lead territorially rigid lives, and who are already citizens in their country. Further, LHR discourse divests language from its role in practice, so that a particular named language (i.e. the mother tongue associated with the group) is deemed to be authentic for the individual’s identity, even if the living circumstances for the individual changes. For Skutnabb-Kangas (2000: 105–115), language rights are violated when linguistic minorities who live and work where a majority language is dominant, end up using the majority

‘Designer Immigrant ’ Student s in Singapore

283

language in most formal and informal contexts (i.e. they have shifted from their mother tongue). The presumption here is, again, that an individual’s mother tongue is inalienable, that it lasts a lifetime, and that it is necessary to be distinguished from a foreign language for which LHR does not protect (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 497–498). Phillipson (2009: 82–102) adds to this formulation by framing the increasing use of English in various social domains as objectionable, calling for European nations to implement policies to resist the spread of English. Domain loss in the face of English is expressed as ‘the marginalization of other languages’ (Phillipson, 2009: 215). The implication for individuals has to be that they, too, must resist language shift. It can therefore be argued that LHR does not apprehend the possibility that individuals might reconsider what counts as their own mother tongues as their identities change over time in a process of transforming and being transformed by social structures (Giddens, 1984). This brings us to the issue of human agency.

Neglect of human agency While choice might be made available by LHR regarding which official state languages one may acquire (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 502), this same agency does not appear to apply to one’s mother tongue. It is assumed by LHR that one’s mother tongue is an a priori natural entitlement. This premise is also implicit when the issue of language shift is discussed. In relation to the relationship between languages, it is clear that if parents/guardians, choosing the medium of day-care and education for children, are not offered alternatives or do not know enough about the probable long-term consequences of their choices, the change of mother tongue which mostly is the result of majority-medium education for minorities, cannot be deemed voluntary, meaning it reflects linguistic genocide: the child has been ‘forcibly transferred’ to the linguistic majority group. The parents must know enough about the research results when they make their choices – they must, for instance, know that good MT-medium teaching can also lead to a better proficiency in both the dominant language, for instance English, and in the mother tongue than English-medium teaching. (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 503) It is made explicit in majority-medium education that even if minorities have made a language shift voluntarily, it is deemed an uninformed decision (Wee, 2010: 57). The implication is that what counts as mother tongue and other languages must always remain mutually exclusive. Skutnabb-Kangas insists

284

Nat ion-st ates

that language shift is not borne of true choice, and appears to preclude any human agency in the formulation and inhabitation of one’s own identity. In light of her overall elaboration of LHR, Skutnabb-Kangas’ supposition is that languages defined to be ‘mother tongues’ and concepts of ‘community’ or ‘ethnicity’ are the most significant markers of identity. Within this LHR discourse individuals should always want to protect these aspects of their sense of self. This contrasts with, e.g. Block’s (2008) contention that the metaphor of loss pertaining to language shift may not necessarily be valid for all speakers. Processes of globalization exemplified by migration pose particular problems for these theoretical assumptions. The linguistic and cultural practices of migrants transcend the notions of language and identity assumed by the LHR paradigm. Let us now consider the case of ‘designer immigrant’ students in Singapore.

Background to the ‘Designer Immigrant’ Student Labour migration is commonly seen as involving ‘classical’ migrants who move to adopted countries and stay there permanently; expatriates who choose to live abroad for extended periods with expectations of returning to their country of origin (Block, 2007: 32); and transnationals who have settled in a host country but ‘retain […] and develop […] their cultural and economic links with their homelands, including […] their political loyalties and commitments’ (Jordan & Duvell, 2003: 76). In addition, there is a more recent phenomenon of ‘designer’ migration first highlighted by Simmons (1999). This involves high-achieving individuals who possess cultural capital prized in the global labour market and are carefully selected and welcomed by postindustrial nations such as Canada and Australia. In Singapore, ‘designer’ migration involves offering scholarships to secondary school students from neighbouring countries (e.g. China and Vietnam) who are excellent in math and science, and ‘designer immigrant’ students have now become an increasingly salient feature in the Singaporean education landscape. I taught some of these students in a top-performing secondary school in Singapore between 2007 and 2012. Additional descriptions here are hence from my first-hand experience. Top ranked secondary schools in Singapore routinely visit prominent schools in China and Vietnam in order to headhunt pupils from these localities and attract them to study in Singapore. It is hoped that ‘catching’ them at a young age will increase the probability of them assimilating and deciding to adopt citizenship. This policy not only aims to establish stronger political

‘Designer Immigrant ’ Student s in Singapore

285

ties with geopolitical neighbours, but also to augment a population with one of the lowest birth rates in the world. ‘Designer immigrant’ students should also be seen as part of a wave of general migration into Singapore from the 1990s to 2000s that saw the non-resident population (i.e. non-citizens) increase more than fourfold from 1990 to 2010. Non-citizen immigrants (1.3 million) comprised 25% of Singapore’s total population in 2010 (5.1 million), compared to 10% in 1990 (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2010a: v). One of the other main criteria in recruiting students is that they fit ethnic categories officially recognized within Singapore. Singapore pursues an overt stance of multiracialism and multiculturalism where three races (Chinese, Malay and Indian) and four languages (English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil) are officially recognized and accorded equal prestige by the State in all bureaucratic domains. The Chinese form the majority of the resident population (74.1%), followed by the Malays (13.4%) and Indians (9.2%) (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2010b: viii). As a consequence of racial politics, individuals who are ethnically Chinese form the vast majority of eventual ‘designer immigrant’ students. The rationale for such an apparent racial criterion is presumably to prevent any immigration from upsetting the existing racial balance and status quo, which could incur negative reactions from the polity (Tan, 2003: 773; Chong, 2013: 4). Potential candidates of age 15, with excellent academic attainments, are interviewed for scholastic aptitude and they sit through a series of assessments testing proficiency in Basic English and other subjects. Those young people who accept the scholarship arrive in Singapore at age 16 with free education up until their A-levels at age 19. There is the possibility of further sponsorship, if they do well enough to land a place in any local university. They are generally one year older than their Singaporean counterparts in the same cohort, due in part to their lower proficiencies in English. Their academic performance in Singaporean schools is constantly monitored, with those unable to maintain a minimal grade point average having their scholarships revoked and facing possible repatriation. The selective process that formed this group of students cannot be understated, and makes the label of ‘designer immigrant’ very apt indeed. At this point, there has to be an admission that many ‘designer immigrant’ students are ultimately very successful in Singapore schools. They are often at least of middle class backgrounds in their home countries, and they possess the cultural capital and private resources outside of institutional support to ensure the continuity of their cultural and linguistic practices. They are very different from the less powerful linguistic minorities that the formulation of LHR is meant to aid. Even so, these differences do not detract from the fact that their linguistic needs are not attended to in Singapore schools. First, ‘designer immigrant’ students arrive in Singapore alone and

286

Nat ion-st ates

detached from their families. They live in dormitories on school campuses, and their lives are largely centred around the school environment where the use of English in official settings is pre-dominant. Second, they possess initial low proficiencies in English compared to their Singaporean counterparts, but are taught entirely in English for all subjects with little or no pedagogical differentiation. Such methods have been known as ‘submersion’ and ‘sinkor-swim’ programs criticized by LHR activists for not respecting LHR (Skutnabb-Kangas & McCarty, 2008: 4), as students are disadvantaged in learning the majority language and also risk having their original mother tongues displaced (Skutnabb-Kangas & McCarty, 2008: 8–9). When measured against the benchmark of LHR discourse, the situation of ‘designer immigrant’ students in Singapore does indicate that their language rights are violated prima facie. The eventual academic success of ‘designer immigrant’ students in Singapore must be seen as in spite of their circumstances, rather than a matter of course. However, the purported universality of LHR and its concomitant premises regarding language and identity proves too rigid when compared to the self-reports I received from some actual ‘designer immigrant’ students.

Informants and Data Collection In this contribution, I draw on questionnaire data of five ‘designer immigrant’ students, Yvonne, Xavier, Fiona, Ming and Yan. All five were my former students in a top-performing secondary school in Singapore. I remained in touch with and contacted 20 former students, but only these five individuals agreed to undertake the questionnaire and the extended email exchanges. All five were born in China and lived there until age 15, before moving to Singapore. They reported Mandarin to be the first language they acquired. At the time of data collection in 2011, they were undergraduates in various universities around the world; three of them in the United States, one in the United Kingdom and one still in Singapore. Table 12.1 gives a brief summary of their profiles at the time of data collection. The questionnaire was designed as 35 primarily open-response questions (Brown, 2009) aimed at extracting information regarding personal trajectories in terms of migration, aspirations and attitudes toward language use. Close-response questions aimed at providing a biographical profile of the individual (i.e. age, gender, first languages, etc.). The questionnaire was sent out as a text file in softcopy to be filled in electronically. Data from the questionnaire was bolstered (via email correspondence) by follow-up questions seeking clarification on specific points made by the informants. The

‘Designer Immigrant ’ Student s in Singapore

287

Table 12.1 Summary of informant profiles4 Student name

Gender

Age

School and location in 2011

Yvonne Xavier Fiona Ming Yan

Female Male Female Female Male

22 22 22 22 21

Russell Group university in London, UK One of top liberal arts colleges in the US Top ranked university in Singapore Ivy League university in the US One of top private research universities in the US

entire data collection exercise, from the time the participants received the questionnaires to the end of my seeking clarification on specific statements, occurred from April to July 2011. The following discussion of data is divided into three sub-sections, where LHR’s aforementioned assumptions regarding human agency, trajectories across time and space, and conflation of individual and group identity will be dealt with in turn. Questionnaire responses directly relevant to these three themes will be organized in the same way and provided for analytic discussion. It is important to note that all five respondents’ comments for the questionnaire consistently showed that their migratory goals and desire to learn English were primarily driven by pragmatic considerations of pursuing careers and economic betterment. Having interacted with many such individuals, my impression is that these considerations may also be similar for many other ‘designer immigrant’ students, though I do not claim that these five informants are archetypal in any way. The provision of selected responses in no way means that other comments not included for discussion are contradictory.

Analysis of Data and Implications for the LHR Paradigm Human agency In investigating the notion of choice pertaining to language shift and mother tongue-medium education, it may be instructive to first examine the respondents’ motivations for migration.

Motivations for migration and the value of English My informants’ motivations for moving to Singapore at a young age appear to be largely similar. Besides the pull factor of the scholarship, all of them identified the desire to learn English as one of the key determiners for

288

Nat ion-st ates

their decision. These were elicited in their responses to two linked questions. Q6 What motivated you to want to study in Singapore? Q7 Is the quality of English teaching and prevalence of English in Singapore an important factor in your decision to study in Singapore? Why? (1) Ming: (Q6) I saw the scholarship offered by the Ministry of Education of Singapore as a wonderful opportunity for me to receive my secondary education in not only an English-speaking country, but also in outstanding schools. (Q7) Definitely. Studying in Singapore has laid a solid foundation for my written English. Although the Singaporean accent is not recognized everywhere in the world, I feel that it is easy to change English accents according to the place that you are staying in. (2) Yvonne: (Q6) The scholarship given by the Singapore government. And the bilingual society. And the fact it is safe, clean and very modern. (Q7) Definitely. English is very important. To master a foreign language is definitely an advantage. (3) Yan: (Q6) No reason for me, but my parents wanted me to have more opportunities to enter the western world in the future. (Q7) For my parents, yes. The standard of English in China is not good enough. (4) Fiona: (Q6) I like Singapore due to many different reasons. For instance, friendly people, well-developed infrastructure, sound education system. (Q7) It is an important factor because English is commonly used worldwide. Actually English as educational language encourages me to study in Singapore, considering the increasing importance of English nowadays. We see here two reasons for their choice of Singapore as a migratory destination. One is an understanding that English is very valuable on the global stage. Second, Singapore provides a better platform to acquiring English than schools in China do. Xavier outlines in greater detail why moving to Singapore was more advantageous than staying in China for him. (5) Xavier: (Q6) For one thing, the competition to go to a good college in China is too intense and unfair for students who are not from Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and rich cities where all the good educational institutions are located and my father insisted that I should get out of China and sought other ways to advance my studies. I thought it was a good chance to get again (sic) from my parents and go to a new environment. In addition, the MOE SM1 scholarship was pretty good so the decision

‘Designer Immigrant ’ Student s in Singapore

289

was made. (Q7) Yes. I wouldn’t imagine going to a non-English speaking country for school. That totally defeats the purpose of going abroad. I mean if I was fluent in English, then that won’t be a factor. Moving to Singapore was thus important for Xavier, as remaining in China would have meant less social mobility. As he remarks in his response, he was not from one of the big cities; his hometown of Hubei was considered far from the centres of education and economic prosperity in China. To proponents of LHR, ‘designer immigrant’ students might be perceived as having no alternative but to acquire and embrace English in order to attain social mobility (Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 2008: 8). The application of LHR in Singapore schools (e.g. by teaching English via their mother tongues) in the case of ‘designer immigrant’ students, might therefore allow them to learn English without giving up their ‘pure’ Chinese identities. It is, however, notable that my informants do not sound like oppressed or reluctant immigrants in their responses. As further comments will demonstrate, none of the five informants minded learning English in an Englishonly environment, with some even claiming that it is a better way than learning it through their mother tongue.

Learning English and the lack of Mandarin-medium instruction My question about whether the lack of instruction in their mother tongue (i.e. Mandarin) was going to pose a problem in their schooling resulted in a shared stance. All of the respondents saw it as only a minor impediment that could be surmounted easily. Q8 How did you feel about coming to study in a country that does not recognize your mother tongue as much? Was Singapore’s language policy of only using English (and not Chinese) as the medium of instruction in schools an obstacle that prevented you from making the choice to study in Singapore? Why/why not? (6) Xavier: I didn’t feel anything. Singapore is 70% Chinese and you can pretty much get through speaking Chinese. Using English as the medium of instruction was not an obstacle. (7) Yan: Not for my parents, the English speaking environment is something they wanted for me. (8) Yvonne: I had little knowledge of what I was going to face before coming to Singapore. And after I arrived, I found out that the accent seemed to be the only problem for me to understand people around me. The policy to use English only is one of the factors that attracted me to come to Singapore. So that I can practice more.

290

Nat ion-st ates

(9) Fiona: It is quite OK for me. English as educational language does serve as an obstacle at the initial stage, but it gets better as time goes by. Also, I have to put in a lot of effort in studying English. (10) Ming: I feel that, at least in my school, there are plentiful opportunities to pursue the study of my mother tongue, for example through Chinese literature classes. Singapore’s policy will not prevent me from studying in Singapore. None of them saw instruction in their own mother tongue as crucial in their choice of migration to Singapore (seen in 6–10), and even to future migration (11–15). Q32 How would you feel if your children grew up in Singapore or any other country you migrated to, not being able to learn your mother tongue in schools? Is that a factor you would consider in choosing whether or not to settle down in that place? (11) Ming: I would be concerned about the fact that my child is not taught his mother tongue in school. However, this is not the priority factor in making my immigration decision. I will insist that my child learn the mother tongue at home, though. (12) Fiona: Personally, I feel that it is the parents’ responsibility to teach their children their mother tongue if they think it is necessary. No, this is not a factor. (13) Xavier: It might be but not an important one. I will force them to speak Chinese at home and hire them Chinese tutors. (14) Yan: I would take my children to language classes. It is not a factor in choosing the place I settle down. (15) Yvonne: Yes. I would feel my children lost a lot of the heritage. It is not desirable but not that important. In addition, Xavier and Ming are adamant that teaching English via English is a better method. Q30 Based on your experiences, would you ideally want a country you settled in to change its language policy to suit your linguistic background? (e.g., for the UK to teach Chinese in schools, or to teach English via Chinese? Why/why not? (16) Xavier: No. I think the most effective way to learn a language is to immerse in an authentic environment. Why would I want to come to another country to learn English via Chinese?

‘Designer Immigrant ’ Student s in Singapore

291

(17) Ming: I do not think teaching English via Chinese is effective. In fact, the more advanced schools in China have started teaching English via English … When I was in junior high school in China, teaching English via English was considered the more effective and advanced way, and trust me, it is. Over the years I have come to feel that English and Chinese each has unique expressions, some of which are almost impossible to translate. Moreover, teaching English via English immerses the students in the English language system and teaches them general English expressions, which means much more than what the lesson intends to teach. Xavier and Ming’s responses are significant. Proponents of LHR might advocate mother tongue-medium teaching to preserve people’s original linguistic practices (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 503). However, the challenge for LHR might be how it can accommodate the experiences and views of actual learners of English, in order not to be seen as imposing pedagogies that may be unwelcome and resisted. My informants’ life choices are further explored when we examine their aspirations.

Aspirations and future trajectories To the question of ‘Which is a more important factor for you now in making choices of future migration and settlement (including starting a family): realization of your aspirations or a government that caters to the use and teaching of your mother tongue in schools?’, all five respondents claimed that they would sacrifice the latter in order to achieve their ambitions. Certainly, Yan is seen to display some amount of nonchalance to the entire matter. (18) Yan: Realization of my aspirations. I would sacrifice the latter. It can always be made up in terms of extra classes and daily life. It is not very important to me either. Pragmatism was prominent when they discussed the possibility of accepting Singaporean citizenship and their future aspirations. So, too, was the fact that Singapore was never really their end migratory destination from the outset. Q11 Was taking up Singapore citizenship an option you were willing to consider when you accepted the scholarship? Why? Q24 What are your future plans/aspirations/career ambitions? Where do you see yourself living and working after you have graduated from university?

292

Nat ion-st ates

(19) Xavier: (Q11) I did not think about it. I knew if I did, I would have to serve in the army for two years. I wanted to use Singapore as a steppingstone for something bigger but had no specific plans for those things yet. I knew I would be tied down by money eventually so I just want to do everything right and when the chance came, I would be ready for it. (Q24) Path 1. Going to Wall Street and make some money. Path 2. Go to graduate school and work in Silicon Valley. I will be here in the States and maybe get a Green card. However, I might go back to China or Singapore if there were good job opportunities. For Xavier, Singapore was a mere ‘steppingstone’ to what he perceived as bigger goals. Material incentives certainly would influence his choices, similarly to the other respondents. (20) Yan: (Q11) No. (Q24) I am considering a career in business. I see myself working and living in the United States. (21) Yvonne: (Q11) No. because I was very nationalistic at that time. I was determined to be a ‘chinese’ (sic!). But now when I realize the many benefits of taking Singapore citizenship (visa, health care), I am seriously considering this option. (Q24) To be a civil engineer. I would work in the UK for a few years, then go back to china. (22) Ming: (Q11) Yes. Although I chose to pursue college education in the US, Singapore remains an attractive place for me to pursue my future career due to its Asian roots and my familiarity with it. (Q24) I am not sure yet but probably in Hong Kong. Considering the fact that this summer, I am interning at an investment bank in Hong Kong which I truly like, I expect to continue working there full-time if possible. Moreover, since my family lives in a city near Hong Kong, working in Hong Kong is desirable for me. (23) Fiona: (Q11) Yes, I was willing to consider. Because I do not think that Nationality matters a lot. (24) I would like to first work in the accounting industry and then perhaps in the banking industry, such as investment and private banking. I see myself living and working in Singapore. Instead of cultural and linguistic practice, socioeconomic betterment is prioritized. The young people appear to have no definite migratory goals beyond more pragmatic considerations of where career prospects are best to be found, and for Ming, to also be near her family. This description dovetails perfectly with Bauman’s (2011: 34–35) depiction of the third wave of modern migration, where pathways of migration are no longer determined

‘Designer Immigrant ’ Student s in Singapore

293

by a rush to colonize or conquer new lands. Migrants of today are ‘steered instead by the logic of the global redistribution of living resources and the chances of survival peculiar to the current stadium of globalization’ (Bauman, 2011: 35). These ‘designer immigrant’ students, as part of the third wave of migration, are able to utilize ‘living resources’ to their advantage at various times of their lives, in order to further transpose themselves across other territories where ‘chances of survival’ are more conducive. In our case, one of the major resources these individuals have gained, is indubitably English. It reflects the status of English as a valuable commodity in the global labour market, as well as the motives of economic rationalism undertaken by individuals who prefer linguistic capitals that can be more readily converted into economic capital (Cameron, 2012; Heller, 2003). Compare here the parallel observation by Aihwa Ong (1998) of the Chinese diaspora, mainly in the Pacific Rim, on elites (many of whom are wealthy Hong Kongers) and their strategies of capitalist opportunism. In describing the migratory patterns and aspirations of these individuals, Ong (1998) formalizes the term flexible citizenship: I use the term flexible citizenship to refer especially to the strategies and effects of mobile managers, technocrats and professionals who seek to both circumvent and benefit from different nation-state regimes by selecting different sites for investments, work and family relocation … They readily submit to the governmentality of capital, while plotting all the while to escape state discipline. (Ong, 1998: 136, 156–157) All in all, it is worth comparing this account of what the ‘designer immigrant’ students want regarding migration and how they learn English, with the picture of hegemonic domination through English provided by LHR. The ability of ‘designer immigrant’ students to transmigrate indefinitely, coupled with their personal projects of pursuing a certain lifestyle, makes it difficult to portray them as helpless victims of circumstance who have no choice but to adapt. LHR’s assumption of mother tongue as an a priori entitlement and disdain toward language shift, might only serve to constrain the aspirations of these students who want to acquire English so as to cross international borders on their own terms. The implementation of LHR for people like ‘designer immigrant’ students might be against their own will and overreaching what is ethically expected of human rights. That is, in philosophical terms, an act of supererogation, where the act might be morally good but beyond what is called for.

294

Nat ion-st ates

Trajectories over time and space Regarding their own identities, the respondents all replied that English has now come to be part of their sense of self. Q33 How would you identify yourself now in terms of nationality and cultural identity compared to before you studied in Singapore? Has your identity changed? Why/why not? Q34 Is English and/or your mother tongue an integral part of your identity? Which is more important to your identity? Are they of equal importance? (24) Ming: (Q33) My identity has significantly changed. Now I am more like an international student/worker, as compared to completely Chinese before I came to Singapore. I am a bit confused about my cultural identity, though, like many of my friends who left their home countries to study abroad at a young age. I would say that I have an Asian background, but not necessarily Chinese per se. (Q34) Both languages have become integral parts of my identity. Chinese is more important for cultural reasons, while English is more important in practical considerations, for example finding jobs. (25) Xavier: (Q33) I hold a Chinese passport, have a Chinese upbringing but culturally independent. I identify myself as a freethinking person not tied down to a specific value system. (Q34) Yes. Both are important. (26) Fiona: (Q33) My nationality is still Chinese. I think my cultural identity has changed. I think I have almost adapted to Singaporean culture and I identify myself more with my Singaporean peers because we share more things in common. (Q34) Both English and Chinese are an integral part of my identity. They are of equal importance. (27) Yan: (Q33) Before Singapore, I did not have a real sense of identity because I was too young. Now, I still don’t have any national identity, but culturally Chinese. They have not really changed, since my culture was pretty much determined by my parents, and I think national identity is a stupid thing. (Q34) Both are equally important. (28) Yvonne: (Q33) I still identify myself as a Chinese. Because most of the time in Singapore I would still hang out with the Chinese friends. However, I do feel very close to Singaporeans in the UK now, because we do have a lot of similarities. (Q34) Yes English is important, but Chinese is more of my identity. Because culture, way of thinking, etc., are all related to language. Bearing in mind that all my informants’ first language was Mandarin, it is pertinent to note that they claimed English as part of their identity. Singapore

‘Designer Immigrant ’ Student s in Singapore

295

might not have been the most significant factor for this development for all of them, but it is safe to infer that the respondents’ protracted exposure to English (both in China and Singapore) and their direct immersion in Singapore’s English-medium schools, might have meant that their sense of self were sure to change. ‘Designer immigrant’ students are thus interstitial actors in two coterminous ways: (i) in terms of identity: their identity-making is very much on-going and unstable; (ii) in terms of spatial geopolitics: they portray flexibility in their migratory destinations, which are multiple rather than with intentions of permanent settlement in a specific location. Both (i) and (ii) have had, and will continue to have, a substantive impact on their linguistic/cultural practices. When we consider these changes (both current and potential) in their identities over time, as well as spatial trajectories across international borders, LHR’s paradigm is challenged on two levels. First, LHR appears to be unrealistic in its assessment of how individuals participate in social arrangements over time and space. It conceptualizes one’s mother tongue as a natural entitlement that has to be protected against discrimination and language shift (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000: 497–498). This is problematic as transformations in one’s linguistic and cultural behaviours tend to occur when one moves to new environments (Blommaert et al., 2005: 203; Wee, 2007: 334), just as the practices of ‘designer immigrant’ students were altered as they grew older and moved to Singapore. We have already discussed how these changes were guided by my informants’ own aspirations and priorities in life. Second, the implementation of LHR for de-territorialized individuals remains fraught with difficulties at the level of the state. LHR appears illpositioned to represent the rights of persons like ‘designer immigrant’ students who transcend international borders, even if we assume that their human rights have indeed been violated. LHR activists will be hard pressed to elaborate how groups such as ‘designer immigrant’ students have been disempowered. It is especially so when these groups are seen to appropriate resources from a particular state, so as to transcend its national borders. The current world system is one where human rights and citizenship rights continue to be dispensed and administered by nation-states in spite of their diminishing boundaries, rather than enforced by supra-national organizations like the UN (Bhabha, 1999: 702–704). To national governments like Singapore, the mobilities and aspirations of ‘designer

296

Nat ion-st ates

immigrant’ students may at best be regarded as meaningless, at worst, harmful to the nation and to be discouraged. Having invested substantial resources in these individuals, the Singaporean state’s main concern is for them to be ultimately assimilated as citizens. This probably means that the government will see little urgency in adhering to LHR principles to protect ‘designer immigrant’ students’ original ways of speaking. Further, ‘designer immigrant’ students, as non-citizens, have a weaker claim to linguistic equality within a nation, whose government have an obligation to its own citizens first (Maher, 2002: 19). In Singapore, investing evermore resources in a group of individuals, who are not part of the existing polity, has political repercussions for a tax-paying population already wary and resentful of increasing immigration (Yeoh & Lin, 2012). It poses moral questions of whether non-citizens, who aspire to transmigrate indefinitely, should have the same inalienable rights as citizens to limited resources within nations. This entails that the appeal to LHR, while powerful for groups that have a historical presence in a locality, is different and maybe weaker when group members are dislocated and transmigrate indefinitely.

Conflation of individual and group identity Other issues of identity raise questions when compared with LHR’s paradigm. While all informants exhibited similar responses regarding the altered nature of their sense of self (see 24–28), some, like Fiona and Yan, may even display a fair degree of antipathy to the concept of national identity.

National and cultural identities In (23), Fiona remarked that she does ‘not think that nationality matters a lot’. Both Fiona and Yan were asked to elaborate on what they thought of ‘national identity’ as a conception. In Yan’s case, he was asked why he thought it ‘is a stupid thing’ (see 27). (29) Fiona: I thought that nationality does not matter a lot when I first arrived at Singapore because nationality is sort of something like just a name itself and does not carry much meaning sometimes. Holding a particular nationality does not mean that one cares much or feels much sense of belonging to that country. Yes now I still think this way, especially in view of increasing globalization and workforce mobility. (e-mail response dated 14 July 2011) (30) Yan: I never felt that there was a country that is strictly speaking mine. In Singapore I am different from the locals, especially because of my accent when speaking Chinese, and people have always been able to identify that. But back in China, since I have not lived there for so long,

‘Designer Immigrant ’ Student s in Singapore

297

I feel out of whack with everyone there as well, for instance in terms of usage of language, they use many terms that I do not know of. The entire environment is pretty foreign to me as well. Hence, I do not feel like I am Chinese either. Recently, upon reflection, I feel that the concept of nations and states are very arbitrary. Borders that are here today, weren’t here not so long ago. Some people arbitrarily drew an imaginary line that creates a division between people. This artificial division has led to much senseless bloodshed that only benefits those in power. For almost everyone on Earth, the concept of nationality brings only misery. That’s why I think national identity is stupid. (e-mail response dated 12 July 2011) Besides the downplaying of their nationality as part of their identity, Fiona and Yan’s replies illustrate an understanding that international borders are increasingly porous and fluid. Yan, in particular, has also indicated his inability to fit in with China’s social mores, and he feels more like a foreigner in China today and would be reluctant to see himself as Chinese. Recall that the LHR paradigm conflates group and individual identity as ‘two sides of the same coin’ (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1995: 485). The identities of ‘designer immigrant’ students, however, make it difficult to represent them as a homogenous group with distinctive ways of speaking. Some individuals, like Xavier, admit to ‘not being tied down to a specific value system’ (25), others, like Yan, can no longer see himself as Chinese (30). The issue is made more complex as all my informants also claim English as their identity and an intrinsic part of their lives. Given that they do not fit a conventional (ethnic or national) Chinese identity, how are their peculiar ways of speaking safeguarded by LHR? Can my informants appeal to LHR should they be denied a chance to use English now or in the future? These are real questions that have potential costs for persons reporting hybrid identities and linguistic practices. Blommaert (2010: 153–173) recounts how a refugee seeking political asylum in the United Kingdom was refused entry because he did not fit the linguistic profile of a typical Rwandan and was deemed to be lying about his nationality. In relation to this one wonders about the linguistic rights of ‘designer immigrant’ students who claim to have developed hybrid practices in Singapore, but were repatriated for not making the grade. The cultural identities and sociolinguistic practices of my informants are a result of their transnational mobility and aspirations for what they conceive to be a desirable lifestyle. However, LHR discourse is unable to accommodate the hybridity and heterogeneity of ‘designer immigrant’

298

Nat ion-st ates

students that has been afforded by migration and living in a multilingual space. This is because the LHR paradigm conflates the group with the individual, and establishes a timeless node of authentic practice as an ideal for all group members. Within such a structure, the identities and linguistic practices of my informants become bits of language and behaviour that are irrelevant, glossed over and, perhaps, deemed less worthy of protection.

Conclusion We have now before us a complex picture of five ‘designer immigrant’ students. The prevalence of English in Singapore and in its schools was a key reason for their migration to the country. They do not rank mother tongue instruction in schools as an important aspect of their migratory goals (6–15), preferring instead to prioritize socioeconomic betterment. Parallel to this attitude, is their ability to transmigrate indefinitely in search of career prospects. This lifestyle has led to a concomitant change in their cultural identities and linguistic behaviours that appear incompatible with what LHR presupposes. To individuals like Yan and Xavier, cultural and national identities have been understood as unavailing constructs in their lives [(25) and (30)]. In not wishing to be bound to any cultural identity, it is not difficult to see how some ‘designer immigrant’ students might reject notions of LHR regarding mother tongue and language shift, that seek to govern and define the ambit of their cultural and linguistic practices. In the same way, LHR’s rigid adherence to the links between language, culture and territory, is inimical to some ‘designer immigrant’ students’ personal value systems and desires to be unconstrained by modern political boundaries. In Bauman’s (2011: 81–83) terms, ‘designer immigrant’ students like Yan and Xavier fall into the category of high-achievers who ‘do not harbour a desire for guarantees of communal security, and considering the price of any long-term obligations, do not have much enthusiasm for them either’ (Bauman, 2011: 82). These are people who can rely on their own abilities to pursue whichever option in life they desire. This is in contrast to those who are neither well-off nor capable, who seek empowerment and protection through their communities and act politically on that basis (Weeks, 2000: 182, 240–243), the very group that LHR is well-disposed to aid. The moral imperative for the invocation of human rights and LHR cannot ignore the supposed victim’s apprehension and subsequent rejection or acceptance of these rights. The challenge for LHR now is how it may be

‘Designer Immigrant ’ Student s in Singapore

299

applied in a more nuanced form that successfully differentiates individuals who renounce the communal from those who truly seek it. A normative and blanket application of LHR is in danger of misrepresenting the two groups as one and the same. More broadly, the case of ‘designer immigrant’ students reveals heterogeneous identities and practices that develop and are rather unpredictable over trajectories of time and space. This is partly a result of heightened global mobility and is too complex to be easily explained and accounted for by overarching reductionist models that seek generalizability and universality. While conceptualizations such as ‘flexible citizenship’ (Ong, 1998) and the commodification of language (Cameron, 2012; Heller, 2003) can be useful in explaining certain aspects of a migrant’s life, they might not be the full story. These accounts privilege economics and careerist logic, and there could be other factors such as social networks (Yeoh & Huang, 2011: 688) that contribute to the cultural demeanour and transnational movement of my informants. It is worth considering the possibility that ‘designer immigrant’ students do engage in sociocultural processes of identity making, and developing a sense of belonging and group affiliations while in specific localities, even if they might appear to be deterritorialized over a longer time frame. How then can we better understand and explain the life stories, aspirations, cultural and linguistic demeanours, and migratory trajectories of people like Yan and Xavier? Deleuze (1992) depicts our world as a post-panoptic system where plurality defined in terms of neat divisions is in crisis. Instead, social subjects engage in controls as modulations; ‘they are constantly open for calibration or alignments in variable directions’ (Arnaut, 2016: 56; cf. Fraser, 2003). Consequently, notions to describe human behaviour or identity such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism (Beck, 2002), language commodification (Cameron, 2012; Heller, 2003,) and flexible citizenship (Ong, 1998) need to be empirically grounded and related to actual lived experiences. This is in order to enrich our understanding of how people are variably engaged in and committed to such practices, at different moments, in fluctuating degrees. Arnaut (2016) thus calls for a critical sociolinguistics of diversity, to investigate ‘concrete encounters or events as sites where diversity is being articulated, experienced, and made sense of with communicative and discursive resources that circulate locally or more broadly, reluctantly or more powerfully’ (Arnaut, 2016: 59). The proposition for sociolinguistics is to develop ways to sufficiently and critically engage with human behaviour as an empirical condition − to recognize and examine these modulations and complexities − so that actors are not reduced to an interstitial status whose practices are simply unaccounted for.

300

Nat ion-st ates

Acknowledgements Special thanks to Prof Ben Rampton and Dr Roxy Harris, whose advice and encouragement in the writing of this chapter have been invaluable.

Notes (1) The LHR movement is not the only significant campaign for language rights. May (2005: 319) identifies three separate movements: The Language Ecology movement (Muhlhausler, 2000), the Linguistic Human Rights movement (Kontra et al., 1999; Phillipson, 2003) and the Minority Language Rights movement (May, 2001, 2005). LHR’s enshrinement of language rights as a basic human right and consequent purported universality, however, garners our attention in this chapter. (2) I use and refer to ‘mother tongue’ in this chapter as a received notion that is taken for granted within the LHR paradigm, without necessarily accepting the implications that LHR discourse seems to infer. (3) ‘Late-modernity’ has been used to denote complex societies not completely at a postmodern phase of development, but continuing to portray characteristics of modernity (Giddens, 1991). Also see Bauman’s (2000) similar expositions on Liquid Modernity. (4) Names have been pseudonymized to keep students’ identities private. The names of schools in responses have also been omitted to prevent individuals and institutions from being identified.

References Arnaut, K. (2016) Super-diversity: Elements of an emerging perspective. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 49–70). New York/London: Routledge. Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2011) Culture in a Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. (2002) Cosmopolitan society and its enemies. Theory, Culture and Society 19 (1–2), 17–44. Bhabha, J. (1999) Enforcing human rights in the era of Maastricht: Some reflections on the importance of states. In B. Meyer and P. Geschiere (eds) Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (pp. 697–724). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Block, D. (2007) Second Language Identities. London: Continuum. Block, D. (2008) On the appropriateness of the metaphor of loss. In P. Tan and R. Rubdy (eds) Language as Commodity: Global Structures, Local Marketplaces (pp. 187–203). London: Continuum. Blommaert, J., Collins, J. and Slembrouck, S. (2005) Spaces of multilingualism. Language and Communication 25, 197–216. Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, J.D. (2009) Open-response items in questionnaires. In J. Heigham and R.A. Croker (eds) Qualitative Research in Applied Linguistics (pp. 200–219). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

‘Designer Immigrant ’ Student s in Singapore

301

Cameron, D. (2012) The commodification of language: English as a global commodity. In T. Nevalainen and E. Traugott (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the History of English (pp. 352–364). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chong, T. (2013) Singapore’s population white paper: Impending integration challenges. ISEAS Perspective 9. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. See http://www. iseas.edu.sg/images/pdf/ISEAS_Perspective_2013_9.pdf (accessed 19 February 2016). De Costa, P.I. (2010) Language ideologies and Standard English language policy in Singapore: Responses of a ‘designer immigrant’ student. Language Policy 9 (3), 217–239. Deleuze, G. (1992) Postscript on the societies of control. October 59, 3–7. Fraser, N. (2003) From discipline to flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the shadow of globalization. Constellations 10 (2), 160–171. Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Heller, M. (2003) Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7, 473–492. Heller, M. and Martin-Jones, M. (eds) (2001) Voices of Authority. Westport: Ablex Publishing. Jaffe, A. (2007) Discourses of endangerment: Contexts and consequences of essentializing discourses. In A. Duchene and M. Heller (eds) Discourses of Endangerment (pp. 57–75). London: Continuum. Jordan, B. and Duvell, F. (2003) Migration: The Boundaries of Equality and Justice. Cambridge: Polity. Kontra, M., Skutnabb-Kangas, T., Phillipson, R. and Varady, T. (eds) (1999) Language: A Right and a Resource: Approaches to Linguistic Human Rights. Budapest: Central European University Press. Maher, K.H. (2002) Who has a right to rights? Citizenship’s exclusions in an age of migration. In A. Brysk (ed.) Globalization and Human Rights (pp. 19–43). Berkeley: University of California Press. May, S. (2001) Language and Minority Rights: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language. London: Longman. May, S. (2005) Language rights: Moving the debate forward. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9 (3), 319–347. Muhlhausler, P. (2000) Language planning and language ecology. Current Issues in Language Planning 1, 306–367. Ong, A. (1998) Flexible citizenship among Chinese cosmopolitans. In P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (pp. 134–162). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Phillipson, R. (2003) English-only Europe: Challenging Language Policy. London: Routledge. Phillipson, R. (2009) Linguistic Imperialism Continued. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Phillipson, R. and Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1995) Linguistic rights and wrongs. Applied Linguistics 16, 483–504. Ricento, T. (ed.) (2000) Ideology, Politics, and Language Policies: Focus on English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Simmons, A. (1999) Economic integration and designer immigrants: Canadian policy in the 1990s. In M. Castro (ed.) Free Markets, Open Societies, Closed Borders? Trends in International Migration and Immigration Policy in the Americas (pp. 53–69). Miami: North-South Press.

302

Nat ion-st ates

Singapore Department of Statistics (2010a) Census of Population 2010, Advance Census Release: Key Demographic Trends. Singapore: Ministry of Trade and Industry, Department of Statistics. See https://www.singstat.gov.sg/docs/default-source/default-documentlibrary/publications/publications_and_papers/cop2010/census_2010_advance_census_ release/c2010acr.pdf (accessed 19 February 2016). Singapore Department of Statistics (2010b) Census of Population 2010, Statistical Release 1: Demographic Characteristics, Education, Language and Religion. Singapore: Ministry of Trade and Industry, Department of Statistics. See https://www.singstat.gov. sg/docs/default-source/default-document-library/publications/publications_and_ papers/cop2010/census_2010_release1/cop2010sr1.pdf (accessed 19 February 2016). Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2000) Linguistic Genocide in Education–or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. and McCarty, T. (2008) Key concepts in bilingual education: Ideological, historical, epistemological, and empirical foundations. In J. Cummins and N. Hornberger (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education (2nd edn.): Bilingual Education (Vol. 5) (pp. 3–17). New York: Springer. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. and Phillipson, R. (2008) A human rights perspective on language ecology. In A. Creese, P. Martin and N. Hornberger (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education: Ecology of Language (Vol. 9) (pp. 3–14). New York: Springer. Stroud, C. (2009) A postliberal critique of language rights: Towards a politics of language for a linguistics of contact. In J. Petrovic (ed.) International Perspectives on Bilingual Education: Policy, Practice, and Controversy (pp. 191–218). Greenwich: Information Age Publishing. Tan, E. (2003) Re-engaging Chineseness: Political, economic and cultural imperatives of nation-building in Singapore. The China Quarterly 175, 751–774. Vertovec, S. (2007) Superdiversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6), 1024–1054. Wee, L. (2007) Linguistic human rights and mobility. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 28, 325–338. Wee, L. (2010) Language Without Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weeks, J. (2000) Making Sexual History. Cambridge: Polity Press. Yeoh, B. and Huang, S. (2011) Introduction: Fluidity and friction in talent migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37 (5), 681–690. Yeoh, B. and Lin, W. (2012) Rapid Growth in Singapore’s Immigrant Population Brings Policy Challenges. Migration Immigration Source. See http://www.migrationinformation. org/Profiles/display.cfm?ID=887 (accessed 19 February 2016).

13 Citizenship, Securitization and Suspicion in UK ESOL Policy Kamran Khan

This chapter looks at the increasingly strong links between security and English language policy in the United Kingdom, and it seeks to open a dialogue between sociolinguistics and security studies. It outlines concepts related to securitization, focusing on the processes involved in turning a political issue into a matter of security, and it re-examines English language policy developments from 2001 to 2014. Marking the beginning of a period of increased concern with security, the initial introduction of language tests for citizenship can be characterised as ‘exceptional securitization’. But this commitment to exceptional measures has gradually permeated to other entry and settlement requirements for migrants, and has affected other areas of English language education as well. This subsequent process can be described as ‘assembling suspicion’, and it has been accompanied by increased surveillance through the development of a ‘ban-optican’.

Introduction 2001: A few weeks prior to the 9/11 New York bombings, the national headlines are dominated by riots in the north of England between BritishAsian youths and far-right National Front supporters, also involving riot police. In the aftermath, the Cantle report (Cantle, 2002) concludes that racially segregated ‘parallel lives’ dividing white British and British Asian communities are due in part to supposedly low English language proficiency among the British Asians. This is supported by three other reports on the same region (Denham, 2002; Ouseley, 2001; Ritchie, 2001), and this leads to a dominant discourse which projects a lack of English as a cause for 303

304

Nat ion-st ates

community tension (Blackledge, 2005, 2006). Immigrants’ acquisition of citizenship moves into focus, and in 2005, the LUK (Life in the UK) citizenship test is introduced, requiring immigrants to demonstrate that they possess ‘sufficient knowledge about life in the UK’ and ‘sufficient knowledge’ of English language in order to become British citizens (Home Office, 2002a). 2011: The British Prime Minister David Cameron gives a speech in April which declares that multiculturalism as a form of integration has failed: ‘I believe it’s time to turn the page on the failed policies of the past’ (Cameron 2011a). The setting for this declaration is the Munich Security Conference. The Prime Minister highlights a ‘hierarchy of threats’ which are framed together (Bigo, 2008), ranging from terrorism to migrant language proficiency. Cameron’s speech alludes to NATO, defence spending, overseas military efforts, Islamic extremism, terrorism and violence in the Middle East, and it also deals with English language proficiency which it identifies as a causal factor in potential terrorism. A failure to learn English is viewed as a failure to integrate and a weakness of identity, potentially leading to a predisposition towards terrorist acts against the state. In 2001 and 2011 in the United Kingdom, it was claimed that migrants’ lack of proficiency in the English language constituted a threat to the stability of local communities and the nation, leading to violent social unrest or even to terrorism. To understand how this view of the significance of not knowing much English has developed, this chapter draws on the academic field of security studies, and it describes the way in which a security agenda has come to dominate legislation and political discourse about citizenship and the testing and teaching of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). The chapter acknowledges Piersen’s comment that ‘[c]ontemporary social scientists typically take a ‘snapshot’ view of political life, but there is often a strong case to be made for shifting from snapshots to moving pictures’ (2004: 1), and it describes a period of over ten years. It traces a shift in the way in which English for migrants has been treated as a security issue, starting in 2001 as a matter of exceptional urgency and then developing into a set of more routine practices, interventions and discourses governed by suspicion. In recent years, linguists have produced a good deal of critical analysis of the ways in which language proficiency has become a key part of citizenship (Blackledge, 2005; Extra et al., 2009; McNamara & Roever, 2006; Shohamy, 2006), and there have also been references to the links between language and security (e.g. Blackledge & Creese, 2010: 258; Cooke & Simpson, 2012: 123; Lu & Corbett, 2012: 325). But so far, applied and sociolinguists have not engaged very much with security studies, even though this has itself experienced its own ‘linguistic turn’ (Bigo, 2012: 279; Huysmans, 2006: 13). So this

Cit izenship, Secur it izat ion and Suspic ion in UK E SOL Polic y

305

chapter explores the value of a commensurate ‘security turn’ in sociolinguistics, and it begins by sketching some of the fundamental assumptions in security studies, drawing on the work of the ‘Copenhagen School’ and scholars such as Bigo and Huysmans. It then applies these ideas to the United Kingdom in two stages. In the first, it describes how exceptional measures for testing and teaching migrants English were introduced following the 2001 riots, drawing on political speeches and reports that followed the riots in the north of England. In the second, it outlines the ways in which a climate of suspicion has become normal, gradually intensifying English testing requirements, spreading into education more generally, and finding expression in the development of ever increasing surveillance. After that, the chapter offers some concluding comments on the potential links between security and sociolinguistics.

Dissolving Borders and a Continuum of Threats: Security Studies and Securitisation Borders can no longer be conceived in strictly territorial terms of state sovereignty (Vaughan-Williams, 2009). According to Balibar (1998: 220), borders are ‘multiplied and reduced in their localization … thinned out and doubled … no longer the shores of politics but … the space of the political itself.’ Borders are reimagined, reconstructed, contorted and shaped in many diffuse and sometimes political ways, and the management of these borders requires changes in the ‘security apparatuses’ (Huysmans, 2006). In very simple terms, we can no longer distinguish between an internal order reigning, thanks to the police, by holding the monopoly on legitimate violence, and an anarchic international order which is maintained by an equilibrium of national powers vis-à-vis the armies and diplomatic alliances … When we break down the dichotomy between knowledge of the inside and the outside, the border between the police world and the military world appears to be more permeable. We can thus take account of all the intermediary agencies such as polices with military status, border guards, customs agents, or immigration agents, to better understand the links [that] these agents establish among themselves and how the effects of their positions have implications on their respective narratives. (Bigo, 2008: 14, 16) With the dissolution of a dichotomized inside/outside frontier, there is a diffusion of security and border work from ‘classic’ areas such as border guards

306

Nat ion-st ates

and military to ‘neo modern’ areas like intelligence and antiterrorism (Bigo, 2012). The professionals who do ‘border work’ converge as different professions and fields of knowledge seek to share information and roles, although the ‘field of (in)security’ that emerges is far from unified: the agents, be they governmental or non-governmental, enter into struggles with the goal of settling a specific sphere of action through the various institutions of laws, rules, norms and daily routine knowledge … While it is certainly true that all these agencies have an interest in maintaining the terms that political actors use to label and frame the issues, they overlay and invest these definitions with their own significances and practices. In this respect, the ongoing conflicts between agencies work in conjunction with the struggle that each agency undertakes to be recognised by politicians who still retain the power to abolish or reform them … This struggle also occurs in conjunction with the struggle to exclude other actors (churches, human rights organisations, Red Cross, alternative media) by disqualifying their points of view on the definition of threats and on the public policies to prevent the threats. (Bigo, 2008: 27) Even so, they play a major part in what Rose calls ‘governing the margins’, managing a ‘new territory of exclusion’ (1996: 347) through a range of political, economic, bureaucratic and technological means. With this dissolution of inside/outside borders, ‘a semantic continuum is constructed, with the struggle against terrorism at one end and the reception of refugees at the other’ (Bigo, 2008: 16). This is linked to a continuum of threats (Bigo, 2002), which range from terrorism to the ‘cultural stranger’ whose way of life calls for measures to ensure ‘integration’, including citizenship requirements in which he/she must demonstrate her/his willingness to comply and ability to integrate (Nyers, 2013; Schinkel, 2010). As inside and outside intertwine and international security extends through the ‘societal’ sector, they converge ‘toward the same figure of risk and unease management, the immigrant’ (Bigo, 2002: 77). These developments have been matched by shifts in the academic field of security studies. Traditionally and for many years, security studies tended to be state-centric, focusing on national and military threats (Roe, 2008; Williams, 2010), such as the threat of warfare due to the military capabilities of the old Soviet Union and United States of America during the Cold War (Buzan & Hansen, 2009; Huysmans, 1998). But as post-Cold War political and ideological orders have taken new forms, security studies has reconceptualised what constitutes a ‘threat’ and what it means to ‘survive’ (Buzan &

Cit izenship, Secur it izat ion and Suspic ion in UK E SOL Polic y

307

Hansen, 2009; Buzan et al., 1998; Waever et al., 1993), so that research now ‘explore[s] the social and political processes that render issues into security questions, and the governmental rationales that security practices inscribe in phenomena’ (Guillaume & Huysmans, 2013: 1). Led by Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde, the Copenhagen School has been at the forefront of this reconfiguration, and it has expanded the notion of threat so that this no longer only covers real threats to the state entailing national defence and military capabilities, but also extends to potentially ‘existential’ threats to society itself (Buzan et al., 1998; Collins, 2007; Waever et al., 1993; Williams, 2010). In this way, the Copenhagen School has deepened and widened the field of security from being military and state-centred towards the protection of human collectivities more generally. One of its most valuable contributions has been the notion of ‘securitization’. Securitization moves an issue from ordinary politics into security (Buzan et al., 1998; McDonald, 2008), and it entails the positioning through speech acts (usually by a political leader) of a particular issue as a threat to survival, which in turn (with the consent of the relevant constituency) enables emergency measures and the suspension of normal politics based on this issue. (McDonald, 2008: 567) During securitization, a ‘referent object’ is said to need protection, and the ‘securitizing actor’ performs speech acts in the name of the collectivity which move the issue from politics to security. There is said to be a ‘grammar of security’ within these speech acts, involving (a) the existential threat, (b) a point of no return, and (c) proposals for a way out (Buzan et al., 1998). In addition, at least two conditions must be met for successful securitization to occur. First, there have to be facilitating circumstances, and second, there is an extended process of ‘managing unease’ (Bigo, 2002) that lasts much longer than any single speech act itself. There are more elaborate definitions of securitization available (e.g. Balzacq, 2011),1 and from a sociolinguistic point of view, the ‘speech act’ focus constitutes a rather rudimentary theory of communication (a point developed within security studies by Stritzel, 2007). Nevertheless, the essential elements in the Copenhagen model provide a valuable heuristic for investigating specific empirical cases, and it is worth now turning back to citizenship and ESOL in the United Kingdom, to explore the illumination that this theory of securitisation can offer to an account of the linguistic ideologies and racialized discourses that have mobilised a major shift in policy.

308

Nat ion-st ates

Securitizing English in the UK The initial conditions facilitating the securitization of English in the United Kingdom have already been sketched at the start of this chapter. In the north of England, rising levels of poverty and high levels of unemployment came together with increasing racial tension between the Asian and White communities to create a combustible climate which was heightened by the burgeoning popularity of far-right groups such as the British National Party (Dancygier, 2010; Kundnani, 2007; Pilkington, 2008). In the summer of 2001, riots involving conflict between Asians (mainly second generation Pakistanis and Bangladeshis) and white youth occurred in three towns: in Oldham on 26th and 27th May, in Burnley on 23rd and 24th June and in Bradford on 7th and 8th July (Denham, 2002). On its television screens, the British public witnessed visceral scenes of violence and devastation, as well as anti-rioting police being attacked by Asian youths, and this led to questions about integration and race relations. One of the first securitizing actors was Ann Cryer, the Labour MP for Keighley, a constituency in Bradford. On 10th July 2001, two days after the Bradford riots, the Home Secretary David Blunkett started a House of Commons debate on the disturbances, and Ann Cryer began: The reason why young Asian men were on the streets of Bradford last Saturday could just be that they feel disaffected. They cannot appreciate why the good jobs, the expensive cars and the nice homes should all go the whites. Perhaps we, too, should be asking why … May I suggest that the remedies will not be found in new and better community centres? … In Canada, which has otherwise very similar immigration laws to ours. (Hansard, 2001a) At that point, Cryer was interrupted for not asking a question, but Blunkett picked up on her reference to Canada. He identified this with the Canadian induction programme, involving the acquisition of language and culture, and he went on to state that the Government was in the process of creating a more comprehensive British citizenship. A week later, on 17th July 2001, Ann Cryer returned to her comments. She established her social capital through her local reputation as well as her political authority by saying that as an MP for one fifth of the Bradford area, she had ‘30 years of work and friendship with the Asian community in Keighley’, and that ‘the riots on 7 July in Bradford … took place within a few miles of my home’ (Hansard, 2001b). Then she moved to the point of no return, evoking ‘unease’ with her use of words like ‘anxieties’ and ‘fear’:

Cit izenship, Secur it izat ion and Suspic ion in UK E SOL Polic y

309

Since I was elected in 1997, I have had many anxieties about the underachievement of the Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities in my constituency. Last year, Warwick University published a report confirming my worst fear: the Sikh and Hindu communities are doing extremely well …and the Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities are massively underachieving, both academically and economically. The time has come to ask why. With the riots in the background, she placed community breakdown at the centre of debate: We need to examine why those young Asian men were so keen to join in the criminal activity … Let us consider the causes. There is little point in blaming the situation simply on racism and Islamophobia. We must consider in detail what causes the under-achievement that I have mentioned. The main cause is the lack of a good level of English, which stems directly from the established tradition of bringing wives and husbands from the sub-continent who have often had no education and have no English. As a result, the vast majority of Keighley households have only one parent with any English and children go to school speaking only Punjabi or Bangla. That frequently gets children off to a slow start, which can damage their progress and mean that they leave school with few, if any, qualifications. Many cannot get paid work or find only poor paid jobs. (Hansard, 2001b) If the wives and husbands cannot speak English, she reasoned, their children will not speak the language, or not very well. They will grow up with bleak prospects and few if any qualifications. In the worst case scenario, socialization like this creates disaffected youths inclined to fight with the police in riots, as evidenced just a few days earlier. There is a threat to the collectivity – the alien influence of Asian sub-continental non-English speakers is not only responsible for the ‘importation of poverty’ but also threatens society’s ability to reproduce itself, both as a speech community and as country of prosperity (Buzan et al., 1998). Cryer then proposes the way out (Buzan et al., 1998), or in her own words, ‘remedies’. One remedy is for English to be spoken in the home. Another solution us for English classes to be available. However, it is Cryer’s third ‘remedy’ which is most decisive: The Government should consider an element of English as an entry clearance requirement for husbands and wives who seek permanent

310

Nat ion-st ates

settlement. There should be a further requirement for them to take a full-time English course to reach a reasonable level … My proposals are in line with immigration requirements in many countries, including the United States of America, Canada and the Netherlands. With the remedies in place, Cryer then predicts what will happen if the requisite action is taken, as well as what the consequences of inaction would be: [integration of the Asian community] will be easier to achieve when all members of the Asian community have some grasp of English and when whites and Asians recognize that there can be gain from all sides living together in peace and understanding. Integration, peace and understanding will be possible if the Asian (particularly Pakistani and Bangladeshi) community improve their level of English (which places the blame for the riots on the migrant communities). Alternatively, if action is not taken, the result will be ‘a Belfast-like situation in which we will all be losers including whites’. Northern Ireland has been a site of civil unrest and violence with a British military presence for many years, and this provocative reference adds a harder and potentially violent edge to the threat. Cryer’s ‘speech act’ didn’t operate alone. It cited the Ouseley Report (2001), compiled before the riots, and it fed the wider currency of ‘community cohesion’ as an antidote to the problem of community fragmentation (Kostakapoulou, 2006) – prior to the 2001 riots, the term ‘community cohesion’ had been barely used in public policy and urban planning discourse (Robinson, 2008). Self-segregation and a lack of community cohesion was also linked to the English language in three post-riot reports. Denham (2002: 12) declared that there are a number of reasons why people choose to be close to others like themselves … For ethnic minorities, such as the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham, language may also an important factor if they do not speak English. In an account that was subsequently taken as testimony to the failure of multiculturalism (Turner, 2006), Cantle (2002: 4) spoke of ‘communities leading parallel lives delineated by high levels of segregation in housing and schools, reinforced by differences in language, culture and religion’. And the Oldham Independent Review (Ritchie, 2001: 82) claimed that: ‘there is resentment that many Asians have only a poor understanding of English.

Cit izenship, Secur it izat ion and Suspic ion in UK E SOL Polic y

311

This results in a lack of interaction between the white and Asian communities. This lack of interaction leads to suspicion and fear’. In each case, there is a profound sense of unease (Bigo, 2002), and the burden of blame is firmly attributed to the Asian community and its lack of English proficiency. The ‘panacea’ (Sasse, 2005: 678) to such ills, caused by a lack of English and integration, would lie in new requirements for language and citizenship. Published in 2002, the Home Office White Paper Safe Border, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain (Home Office, 2002b) outlined a set of new citizenship proposals. The legislative response to the riots arrived in the form of Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act (NIAA) 2002 which demanded that immigrants and would-be citizens would require ‘sufficient knowledge’ of English (Home Office, 2002a). This would be secured through ESOL with Citizenship classes or a new test called the LUK test (Life in the UK), focusing on the English language and British culture. Language requirements were now framed within the same legislation that dealt with illegal immigration, asylum and citizenship (Greenwood & Robins, 2002; Walters, 2004), and the new links between these discourses and technologies reified immigrants, irrevocably connecting them to societal instability (Huysmans, 2000). Admittedly, a language requirement for national citizenship had come into existence with the British Nationality Act 1981 (Home Office, 1981), but this was rarely enforced and was instead described as ‘often perfunctory and sometimes uselessly minimal’ by the Crick Commission Report in 2003 (p. 4). But post-2001, the migrant assumed a new burden of demonstrating that s/he possessed a ‘sufficient’ level of English. This represented a form of ‘suspicion’ until proven otherwise (Huysmans, 2014), and this increase in the visibility of language proficiency marks the movement from a reactive post-event form of risk management to a proactive one, aimed at preventative measures to deal with a ‘problem’ before it emerges (De Goede, 2011; Mythen et al., 2013). According to Home Secretary Blunkett, citizenship should be about shared participation, from the neighbourhood to national elections. That is why we must strive to connect people from different segregations, and overcome hostility and ignorance. Of course, one factor is the ability of new migrants to speak English. (Blunkett, 2002: 76) The solutions would lie with the acquisition of both language and culture, in the practical aspects of learning and the symbolic dimension of demonstrating a willingness to undertake such trials. Bigo (2002: 79) places these requirements in a wider context of securitization: ‘The securitization program integrates the social construction of threats and various misgivings

312

Nat ion-st ates

under the designation of problems concerning state, borders, cities, democracy, and citizenship as if they were the consequences of immigration’. These processes were also merged with global events (Bigo, 2008; Diez & Squire, 2008). Just a matter of weeks after the 2001 riots, the 9/11 bombings took place in New York, and in his Building Cohesive Communities report, John Denham stated that ‘the importance of our work has been underlined by the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC on 11 September and the consequent rise in racist attacks and community tensions’ (Denham, 2002: 3). Local community occurrences were now part of the global, and according to Robinson (2008: 15), the link between the riots and bombings now meant that ‘the [previously] empty concept that was community cohesion was imbued with meaning’. Pilkington (2008: 3–5) suggests that both the riots and 9/11 ‘helped to consolidate an emerging discourse that sees institutional racism as less significant than the threat of Muslim disorder/terrorism and identifies the central issue as that of cultural integration’. In successful securitization, governments are able to adopt policies that would not ordinarily have been possible (Bright, 2012). As we have seen, language requirements for citizenship were introduced in extra-ordinary circumstances as the ‘resolution’ to a specific ‘problem’ and as such, they can be regarded as ‘exceptional’. But as Huysmans (2014) notes, in the years that ensue and the modifications that follow, there can be a move from exceptionalism to normality, in a prevalent and pervasive climate of risk and suspicion. In the United Kingdom post-2001, exceptionalist politics have become routinized, suffusing everyday life. The initially ‘exceptional’ move of introducing tests in response to social disturbance has paved the way for further language policy adaptations, and, firmly embedded within entrance and settlement requirements for migrants, these have now become much more ordinary. It is this process that is considered in the next section.

From ‘Exceptionalised Securitization’ to ‘Assembling Suspicion’ The imposition of a language proficiency and testing regime in 2001 was unprecedented in the United Kingdom, and qualifies as a process that Huysmans calls ‘exceptionalised securitization’ (2014). But Huysmans goes on to describe less exceptional measures which can drift towards more diffuse practices, and he characterises this as ‘assembling suspicion’: Assembling suspicion is a continuously developing process by relatively small changes and adaptations. It thus depends less on existential crisis

Cit izenship, Secur it izat ion and Suspic ion in UK E SOL Polic y

313

points and is strongly embedded in – and, driven by – non-exceptionalised activities. It also moves easily across and between security and non-security practice. (Huysmans, 2014: 118) Within this process, the securitization of language can provide a nodal point for several policy interstices, and in the United Kingdom, language, immigration, security, integration, citizenship, adult education and community politics have all become enmeshed in ‘associative securitising’ (Huysmans, 2014; Guillaume & Huysmans, 2013). The UK language tests now have become a shibboleth, serving both as a ‘password’ and ‘transition’ to inclusion into the community (Derrida, 2005; McNamara, 2012). The demands they make are not static but contain with them the capacity to be adjusted and further tightened according to the sociopolitical context. In 2007, the language regime was extended when the LUK test became a requisite for Indefinite Leave to Remain (Blackledge, 2009), and following Prime Minister Cameron’s expression of exasperation that history was not part of the LUK test itself (Cameron, 2011b), by 2013 the test and test preparation material were changed to include history. (Few educational forms of assessment which can have been as directly affected by the comments of a Prime Minister as the citizenship test.) With the introduction of the new handbook for the reformed test, Mark Harper, the Minister for Immigration, stated that ‘the new book rightly focuses on values and principles at the heart of being British. Instead of telling people how to claim benefits, it encourages participation in British life’ (Home Office, 2013). As well as the content and the values which the test represents (Messick, 1989; McNamara & Roever, 2006), there have been changes in the definition of ‘sufficient knowledge’ of English required by the NIAA 2002 (Home Office, 2002a). In 2005, the LUK test required for citizenship involved multiple choice questions, but in 2013, a speaking and listening element was also added, demanding that test takers demonstrated level B1 proficiency on the CEFR. The location for testing was also modified when in 2010, the Government required non-European spouses or partners who were either entering or seeking to settle in the United Kingdom to show their English language proficiency prior to arrival. By pushing the language testing regime beyond territorial borders into areas of sovereignty of other countries, this constituted a form of ‘pre-emptive mobility governance’ allowing for the ‘remote control’ of borders (Broeders & Hampshire, 2013). The close connections between language and security have extended to education itself, and since 2009, over 500 putatively ‘bogus’ colleges have been closed, accused of allowing students to come to the United Kingdom as students for less than reputable courses and then to stay in the country.

314

Nat ion-st ates

According to James Brokenshire, the Minister for Security and Immigration – and note how two hitherto separate portfolios had been merged by 2014 – the student visa regime neither controlled immigration nor protected legitimate students from substandard sponsors. We have reformed the system and more than 700 education providers have been removed from the sponsor register since 2011. We now require students to prove that they have the means to support themselves, imposed rules on colleges to improve course quality and given border force officers the power to turn away people who claim they are coming to the UK to study but cannot speak English. (Brokenshire, 2014) Along with their power to deny entry, Brokenshire’s speech attributed border force officers the ability to judge levels of English proficiency, and it reflected a merging of student and immigrant statuses, both under the category immigrant, conflating the neoliberal mobilities associated with EFL with the migrant mobilities indexed by ESOL.2 Adult ESOL classes and ESOL Citizenship classes have also been identified as an unregulated and porous area, operating with dubious entry requirements which can be exploited (Ofqual, 2010). Infused with new political and security concerns (Cooke & Simpson, 2008, 2012), ESOL for adults has come to be viewed more as a process of integration than education, and the suspicion of ESOL courses and colleges creates a sense of ‘unease’ not only about the students who attend them but also those who provide and teach them. ESOL professionals are quite often required to check the immigration statuses of their students, merging their roles with border patrol, and politicized like this within the citizenship agenda, ESOL classes are characterised by Han et al. (2010: 64) as ‘the front line of government security policy’. While the ESOL with citizenship classes are no longer a requisite for citizenship, the political and security dimension of ESOL is clear. The new relationships between language, migration and security reach much further than entry and transition into the ‘host’ country. Changes in the language test and training requirements are often accompanied by new demands for residency documentation, and the information that a migrant gives for naturalisation or Indefinite Leave to Remain feeds into a system of administration which makes them visible both through the application process and, if successful, in the eventual acquisition and possession of the passport (Torpey, 2000). To borrow from Foucault, the individual applying for citizenship engages with a ‘network of writing’ that ‘engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them. The procedures of examination [are] accompanied at the same time by a system of intense

Cit izenship, Secur it izat ion and Suspic ion in UK E SOL Polic y

315

registration and of documentary accumulation’ (Foucault, 1977: 189). In fact Bigo (2008, 2012) and Huysmans (2014) have extended Foucault’s account of ‘panoptic’ surveillance with the idea of a ‘ban-optican’, an array of previously unrelated discourses, policies, bodies and agencies that focus on unwelcome or undesired minorities in particular. Huysmans explains: The ban-optican is a technique of channelling mobilities and modulating the speed and mode of movement through a surveillant assemblage that spreads in various directions – that is, cut off at places and springing up elsewhere – … Unlike a fortress, the ban-optican does not stop movement – immigrants are rarely stopped – but rather stratifies by differentiating nature (business, tourism, refuge, trafficking and studying) and speed of mobility. (2014: 112) The ban-optican operates in a wide array of areas of policy and everyday life, seeking to monitor both actual and potential immigrants and to influence their entry and settlement.

Conclusion This chapter has drawn on security studies to describe the emergence and development of ‘regulatory instruments’ (Balzacq, 2011), modes of control and surveillance that now shape contemporary ESOL policy in the UK. It has described the securitizing moment of exceptionalism when these measures broke free from existing legislation and from antecedent approaches to language proficiency assessment, and it has shown how a state of exceptionalism has become ordinary in just over 10 years, spreading a sense of the risk associated with particular speakers and groups, developing the ‘management of unease’ across a range of sites, introducing modifications and requirements that are more and more demanding. There certainly are rivalries, conflicts, resistances, contradictions and inefficiencies within this process, making security a field of struggle rather than a unified or comprehensive formation. But the power and reach of securitisation extends far beyond ESOL, as we have witnessed most recently in the ‘Trojan Horse’ moral panic about Islamic influence in schools in Birmingham.3 In these processes, language has featured both as the object of regulative intervention and as a prominent medium for the political articulation of security concerns, and within security studies, there are strands of research that have departed from their traditional base in International Relations and now focus more closely on processes of communication. This

316

Nat ion-st ates

opens a number of lines of potential connection with sociolinguistics. The securitizing moment of exceptionalism is filled with the kinds of public debate that Critical Discourse Analysis engages with, and there are already security studies which feature Fairclough, Wodak and Baker (e.g. McDonald & Hunter, 2013a, 2013b; Stritzel, 2007). But the ban-optican and the effects of assembling suspicion push surveillance and security concerns right down into the details of everyday practice, and this deserves critical attention in ethnographic studies of interaction (Karrebaek & Ghandchi, 2014; Rampton, 2014). Although it is discussed relatively seldom in the literature on language education and intercultural understanding (Charalambous & Rampton, 2011), language teaching itself has profound links with security concerns, and this also warrants much closer scrutiny, potentially covering the role of other language learning not only in heavily securitised states (e.g. Uhlmann, 2010a, 2010b, on Arabic in Israel), but also in processes of de-securitisation (Emmers, 2013; see Charalambous et al., 2014, on Greek Cypriots learning Turkish). ‘Security’ is in fact now a multifaceted and omni-pervasive dynamic in contemporary life, meriting much more extensive critical attention than sociolinguists have so far given it, and this chapter has attempted to open this up, drawing security studies into its analysis of the recent history of migration and language policy in the United Kingdom.

Notes (1) Balzacq’s definition includes multimodal and affective aspects. According to Balzacq, securitization is: ‘An articulated assemblage of practices whereby heuristic artefacts (metaphors, policy tools, image repertoires, analogies, stereotypes, emotions etc.) are contextually mobilized by a securitizing actor, who works to prompt an audience to build a coherent network of implications (feelings, sensations thoughts and intuitions) about the critical vulnerability of a referent object is what is to be secured, that concurs with the securitizing actor’s reasons for choices and actions, by investing the referent subject [the threat] which such an aura of unprecedented threatening complexion that a customized policy must be undertaken immediately to block its development’ (Balzacq, 2011: 3). (2) There was further evidence of this when the 2014 news programme ‘Panorama’ exposed fraud among international students coming to the United Kingdom. Some students were found to be paying more proficient speakers of English to sit examinations in their place, and the Home Secretary, Theresa May, responded as follows: ‘For too long many colleges, particularly private or further education colleges, have been selling visas and not education. It is time for them to face up to their responsibilities as purveyors of education and not abuse … This type of abuse is not acceptable and as criminals, bogus colleges and economic migrants seek new ways to exploit the system, we will continue to change our methods to clamp down on them’ (Guardian, 2014). In this response, May conflates adult education with immigration control,

Cit izenship, Secur it izat ion and Suspic ion in UK E SOL Polic y

317

implicating EFL within a type of ‘black market’ around visas which is often synonymous with illegal immigration. (3) The ‘Trojan Horse’ case refers to a letter sent to Birmingham City Council which warned of a coordinated Islamic campaign to infiltrate schools in majority Muslim schools. The letter is now believed to be a hoax. The ‘plot’ was linked to radicalizing students and linked to extremism and terrorism. Despite positive school inspection reports by Ofsted which made no mention of radicalization two years ago and after intense media debate and political pressure, inspectors were sent back to the schools this time returning with concerns about radicalization. ‘Trojan Horse’ also led to a bitter spat between the Home Secretary, Theresa May and Education Minister, Michael Grove. Both ministers were accused of using the case for their own political gain at the cost of the schools in question.

References Balibar, E. (1998) The borders of Europe. In P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (pp. 216–232). Minneapolis/London: University of Minneapolis. Balzacq, T. (2011) A theory of securitization: Origins, core assumptions and variants. Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve (pp. 1–30). Abingdon: Routledge. Bigo, D. (2002) Security and Immigration: Toward a critique of the governmentality of unease. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27, 63–92. Bigo, D. (2008) Globalized (in)security: The field and the ban-optican. In D. Bigo and A. Tsoukala (eds) Terror, Insecurity and Liberty: Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes after 9/11 (pp. 10–49). London: Routledge. Bigo, D. (2012) Security, surveillance and democracy. In K. Ball, K. Haggerty and D. Lyon (eds) Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (pp. 277–284). London: Routledge. Blackledge, A. (2005) Discourse and Power in a Multilingual World. Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing. Blackledge, A. (2006) The racialization of language in political discourse. Critical Discourse Studies 3 (1), 61–79. Blackledge, A. (2009) Inventing English as convenient fiction: Language testing regimes in Great Britain. In G. Extra, M. Spotti and P. Van Avermaet (eds) Language Testing, Migration and Citizenship (pp. 66–86). London: Continuum Publishing. Blackledge, A. and Creese, A. (2010) Multilingualism: A Critical Perspective. London: Continuum. Blunkett, D. (2002) Integration with diversity: Globalisation and the renewal of democracy and civil society. In P. Griffith and M. Leonard (eds) Reclaiming Britishness (pp. 65–78). Foreign Policy Centre: London. Bright, J. (2012) Securitisation, terror and control: Towards a theory of the breaking point. Review of International Studies 38 (4), 861–879. Broeders, D. and Hampshire, J. (2013) Dreaming of seamless borders: ICTs and the preemptive governance of mobility in Europe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 9 (8), 1201–1218. Brokenshire, J. (2014) James Brokenshire speech to DEMOS. See http://www.demos. co.uk/files/JamesBrokenshireSpeechtoDemos.pdf (accessed 26 February 2016). Buzan, B., Waever, O. and De Wilde, J. (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

318

Nat ion-st ates

Buzan, T. and Hansen, L. (2009) The Evolution of International Security Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, D. (2011a) Prime Minister’s Speech at Munich Conference. See http://www. number10.gov.uk/news/pms-speech-at-munich-security-conference (accessed 26 February 2016). Cameron, D. (2011b) Prime Minister’s Speech on Immigration. See https://www.gov. uk/government/speeches/prime-ministers-speech-on-immigration (accessed 26 February 2016). Cantle, T. (2002) Challenging Local Communities to Change Oldham. Coventry: The Institute of Community Cohesion. Charalambous C. and Rampton, B. (2011) Other-language learning & intercultural communication in contexts of conflict. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies 60. London: King’s College London. Charalambous, C., Charalambous, P. and Rampton, B. (2014) De-securitizing Turkish: Strategies for teaching Turkish in Greek-Cypriot secondary schools. Paper presented at Conflict, Security and The Politics of Language Learning. One day conference at King’s College London, Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication. March 14, 2014. Collins, A. (ed.) (2007) Contemporary Security Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cooke, M. and Simpson, J. (2008) ESOL: A Critical Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cooke, M. and Simpson, J. (2012) Discourses about linguistic diversity. In M. MartinJones, A. Blackledge and A. Creese (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism (pp. 116–130). Abingdon: Routledge. Crick Commission, The (2003) The New and the Old. London: Home Office. Dancygier, R.M. (2010) Immigration and Conflict in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Goede, M. (2011) Blacklisting and the ban: Contesting targeted sanctions in Europe. Security Dialogue 42 (6), 499–515. Denham, J. (2002) Building Cohesive Communities: A Report of the Ministerial Group on Public Order and Community Cohesion. London: Home Office. Derrida, J. (2005) Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (edited by T. Dutoit and O. Pasanen). New York: Fordham University Press. Diez, T. and Squire, V. (2008) Traditions of citizenship and the securitisation of migration in Germany and Britain. Citizenship Studies 12 (6), 565–581. Emmers, R. (2013) Securitization. In A. Collins (ed.) Contemporary Security Studies (pp. 132–143). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Extra, G., Spotti, M. and Van Avermaet, P. (2009) Testing regimes for newcomers. In G. Extra, M. Spotti and P. Van Avermaert (eds) Migration, Citizenship and Language Testing (pp. 1–34). London/New York: Continuum. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish (Alan Sheridan, transl.). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Greenwood, J. and Robins, L. (2002) Citizenship tests and education: Embedding a concept. Parliamentary Affairs 55, 505–522. Guardian, The (2014) Student visas suspended over fraud claims. See http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/feb/10/student-visa-tests-suspended-fraud (accessed 26 February 2016). Guillaume, X. and Huysmans, J. (eds) (2013) Citizenship and Security: The Constitution of Political Being. London: Routledge.

Cit izenship, Secur it izat ion and Suspic ion in UK E SOL Polic y

319

Han, C., Starkey, H. and Green, A. (2010) The politics of ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages): Implications for citizenship and social justice. International Journal Lifelong Education 29 (1), 63–76. Hansard (2001a) Commons Hansard Debates text for 10 July 2001, Vol. 371. See http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/2001/jul/10/disturbances-bradford (accessed 26 February 2016). Hansard (2001b) Commons Hansard Debates text for 17 July 2001, Vol. 372. See http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/westminster_hall/2001/jul/17/urban-communityrelations#S6CV0372P1_20010717_WH_6 (accessed 26 February 2016). Home Office, The (1981) British Nationality Act. London: HMSO. Home Office, The (2002a) Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act. London: HMSO. Home Office, The (2002b) Secure Borders, Safe Haven. Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain. London: HMSO. Home Office, The (2013) New Life in the UK Test goes live. See https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-life-in-the-uk-test-goes-live—2 (accessed 26 February 2016). Huysmans, J. (1998) Revisiting Copenhagen: Or, on the creative development of a security studies agenda in Europe. European Journal of International Relations 4, 479–505. Huysmans, J. (2000) The European Union and securitization of migration. Common Market Studies 38 (5), 751–777. Huysmans, J. (2006) The Politics of Insecurity. London: Routledge. Huysmans, J. (2014) Security Unbound: Enacting Democratic Limits. London: Routledge. Karrebæk, M. and Ghandchi, N. (2014) ‘The very sensitive question’: Political anxieties and the pedagogical structure of the language classroom. Paper presented at Conflict, Security and the Politics of Language Learning. One day conference at King’s College London, Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication. March 14, 2014. Kostakapoulou, D. (2006) Thick, thin and thinner patriotisms: Is this all there is? Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 26 (1), 73–106. Kundnani, A. (2007) The End of Tolerance: Racism in the 21st Century. London: Pluto Books. Lu, P. and Corbett, J. (2012) An intercultural approach to second language education and citizenship. In J. Jackson (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication (pp. 325–339). London: Routledge. McDonald, M. (2008) Securitization and the construction of security. European Journal of International Relations 14 (4), 553–587. McDonald, M. and Hunter, D. (2013a) Security, population and governmentality: UK counter terrorism discourse (2007–2011). Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines 7 (1), 123–140. McDonald, M. and Hunter, D. (2013b) The discourse of Olympic Security 2012: London 2012. Discourse and Society 24 (1), 66–88. McNamara, T. (2012) Poststructuralism and its challenges for applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics 33 (5), 473–482. McNamara, T. and Roever, C. (2006) Language Testing: The Social Dimension. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Messick, S. (1989) Validity. In R.L. Linn (ed.) Educational Measurement (3rd edn) (pp. 13–105). New York/London: Macmillan. Mythen, G., Walklate, S. and Khan, F. (2013) ‘Why should we have to prove we’re alright?’ Counter-terrorism, risk and partial societies. Sociology 47 (2), 383–398. Nyers, P. (2013) Liberating irregularity: No borders, temporality, citizenship. In X. Guillaume and J. Huysmans (eds) (2013) Citizenship and Security: The Constitution of Political Being. London: Routledge.

320

Nat ion-st ates

Ofqual (2010) Bogus Colleges Advice for Students. See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov. uk/20141031163546/http://www2.ofqual.gov.uk/help-and-support/94-articles/308bogus-colleges-advice-for-students (accessed 26 February 2016). Ouseley, H. (2001) Community Pride not Prejudice. Bradford Vision: Bradford. Piersen, P. (2004) Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pilkington, A. (2008) From institutional racism to community cohesion: The changing nature of racial discourse in Britain. Sociological Research Online 13 (3). Rampton, B. (2014) Power, subjectivity and interaction: Gumperz and governmentality in the 21st century. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 136. London: King’s College London. Ritchie, D. (2001) Oldham Independent Review. One Oldham – One Future. Manchester: Government for the North West. Robinson, D. (2008) Community cohesion and the politics of communitarism. In J. Flint and D. Robinson (eds) Community Cohesion in Crisis (pp. 15–34). Bristol: The Policy Press. Roe, P. (2008) Actor, audience(s) and emergency measures: Securitization and the UK’s decision to invade Iraq. Security Dialogue 43 (3), 249–267. Rose, N. (1996) The death of the social? Re-Figuring the territory of government. Economy and Society 25 (3), 327–356. Sasse, G. (2005) Securitization or securing rights? Exploring the conceptual foundations of policies towards minorities and migrants in Europe. JCMS 43 (4), 673–693. Schinkel, W. (2010) The virtualization of citizenship. Critical Sociology 36, 265–283. Shohamy, E. (2006) Language Policy. Hidden Agendas and New Approaches. London/New York: Routledge. Stritzel, H. (2007) Towards a theory of securitization: Copenhagen and beyond. European Journal of International Relations 13 (3), 357–383. Torpey, J.C. (2000) The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, B.S. (2006) Citizenship and the crisis of multiculturalism. Citizenship Studies 10 (5), 607–678. Uhlmann, A.J. (2010a) Arabic instruction in Jewish schools and in universities in Israel: Contradictions, subversion, and the politics of pedagogy. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 42, 291–309. Uhlmann, A.J. (2010b) The subversion of Arabic instruction in Jewish schools in Israel. Review of Middle East Studies 44 (2), 139–151. Vaughan-Williams, N. (2009) Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Waever, O., Buzan, B., Kelstrup, M. and Wiberg, H. (1993) Identity, Migration and New Security Agenda in Europe. London: St. Martins Press. Walters, W. (2004) Secure borders, safe haven, domopolitics. Citizenship Studies 8 (3), 237–260. Williams, P.D. (ed.) (2010) Security Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge.

Index

activities 9, 34, 36–37, 46, 49–50, 61, 74–75, 91, 95, 147, 149, 152, 157–158, 161, 173, 176–177, 190, 205, 245, 264, 313 metalinguistic 147 agency(ies) 3, 14, 19, 29, 31, 37, 39–41, 43, 52–54, 73, 101, 148, 165, 209, 222, 227, 234–237, 242, 244, 279, 283–284, 287, 305–306, 315 human 29, 279, 283–284, 287 language 234, 237, 242, 244 Agha, Asif 8, 18, 20, 50, 55, 57, 59–60, 83, 86, 91–92, 105, 116, 118, 124–126, 144, 148–149, 166, 173–175, 177, 193–194, 251–252, 254, 269–270 American Indian language(s) 66, 81, 88 animator 78–79, 83 assemblages 9–10, 19, 45 astroturf literacy 18, 200, 214, 216 authenticity 11, 30, 35, 97, 135, 163, 186, 195, 205, 214, 217–218, 223, 228, 233, 246–247, 254, 259, 267, 271, 273, 282, 290, 298 inauthentic 163–164 author 4, 13–15, 20, 49, 51, 57–58, 78–79, 83, 119, 147, 168, 257 authority 11, 54, 77, 91–92, 97, 109, 157, 160–161, 165, 173–174, 178, 195, 218, 228, 267, 269, 272, 274, 301, 308

Bigo, Didier 19, 30–31, 44, 304–307, 311–312, 315, 317 bilingual/ism 62, 65, 70, 84, 87, 124, 144–145, 167–168, 193–195, 222, 224–226, 228, 231, 233–236, 241, 245, 247, 253, 255, 274, 278, 288, 302 borders 5, 27, 31, 266, 277, 280, 293, 295, 297, 301, 305–306, 312–313, 317, 319–320 call centre(s) 16, 18–19, 220–237, 239–247 category 7, 52, 125–126, 129–130, 136–139, 141, 143, 174, 188, 204–205, 231, 252–254, 259, 261, 268, 298, 314 formation 252 membership 130, 139, 141 centre(s) norm 125, 139, 142–144, 174 of authority 91–92, 174 of normativity 256, 263, 268–269 Chinookan 17, 65, 72, 78, 80–81, 84, 86–87 chronotope 14, 17–18, 47–48, 51–61, 201 citizenship 23, 88, 123, 167, 247, 264, 269, 274, 276, 284, 291–293, 295, 299, 301, 303–304, 306–308, 311–314, 317–320 flexible 293, 299, 301 classroom(s) 10–11, 17, 26, 61, 63, 65–66, 68, 70, 72, 74–78, 80–86, 88, 90–96, 98, 100–106, 108–116, 118–120, 135, 153, 244, 246, 252, 264, 268, 278, 319 collaborative research 22, 145, 148, 195

banoptic 30 Baumann, Gerd 3–8, 12, 19–20 belonging 28, 56, 61, 69, 93, 98, 115–116, 126, 134, 143, 148, 185–186, 296, 299 321

322

Engaging Superdiversit y

colonial 3, 16, 18, 28, 37–38, 44–45, 204, 216–217, 251–252, 254–259, 263, 268, 270–272, 275 panopticon 37 post-colonial 3, 9, 16, 28–29, 38–39, 45 colonialism 72, 271–273, 276 combinatorial spaces 3, 9–10, 12 commentary 21, 23, 130, 148–150, 165, 177, 218 meta-pragmatic 148–150, 165 commodification of language 11, 18, 202, 214–215, 219, 223, 229, 246, 273, 299, 301 of non-literacy skills 209, 214 community(ies) 7, 17, 19–20, 22–23, 44, 61–62, 65–75, 78–79, 81–84, 86–89, 93–94, 96, 105, 111, 115–116, 120, 147–148, 151, 154, 166, 169, 195, 235, 245, 247, 251–256, 261, 268, 275–276, 278, 282, 284, 298, 303–304, 308–313, 318, 320 meta-community 7 speech 87, 89, 147, 309 super-community 7 competence 65–66, 68–70, 83, 88, 92, 158, 173, 209, 215, 222, 227–228, 231, 234, 241–242, 254, 269, 272 to comprehend 254, 269, 272 conflict 111, 120, 169, 241, 265, 267, 273, 306, 308, 315, 318–319 conjuncture(s) 12, 15, 19, 25, 29, 38, 40, 42–43, 45, 53 conjunctural analysis 15, 38 conjunctural context 39 conjuncturalism 38 convergence 8–10, 12, 15 conversations 16, 103, 130, 152, 228, 235 Copenhagen 5, 11, 16, 18, 90–91, 95, 98, 117, 120, 123–124, 130, 144–148, 150–151, 153, 155, 160–161, 165, 167–169, 173, 175, 177, 192–195, 305, 307, 319–320 conservative (speech) 150, 160 School 18, 123, 151, 168, 305, 307 creativity 3, 13, 23, 30, 46, 54, 151, 171, 178, 193–194, 201, 216 creative 3, 11, 13–16, 18, 29, 32, 39, 43, 50, 57, 117, 129, 138, 201, 215, 319

critical 9, 21, 25, 43–46, 48–49, 57, 59–60, 95, 144, 166, 219, 223–224, 271, 273, 299, 304, 316–320 discourse analysis 48, 316 sociolinguistics of diversity 25, 299 crossing 16, 23, 61, 84, 89, 139, 145, 147, 168–169, 184, 187, 192, 195 cryptopticon 30 cuisine, New Nordic 94, 97–99, 118–119 culture 7, 9, 20–23, 36, 40, 43–46, 50, 60–62, 72, 74, 78, 82, 87–88, 97–98, 116–120, 128–129, 154, 160, 172, 174, 178, 194, 205, 213, 216, 218, 246, 262, 265, 272–275, 294, 298, 300, 308, 310–311 lived 43 Danish 16, 90, 95–99, 105–109, 113, 116–119, 123–125, 128–129, 141, 145, 150–154, 159–161, 166–169, 172, 176, 179, 185–186, 191, 193–194, 221, 233, 237, 245 sociolinguistics of 150, 167 dataveillance 36–37 density 254, 257, 259, 265 description(s) 37, 149, 166, 178, 254, 284 metalinguistic 166, 178 development 13, 27, 29–30, 38, 42, 47, 53, 55, 57, 59, 66–68, 74, 87, 89, 98, 119, 123, 145, 149–151, 154, 167, 217, 219, 241, 247, 263, 266, 269–270, 272, 274–275, 295, 300, 302–303, 305–306, 315–316, 319 digitalisation 25, 27–29, 31, 39–40, 42–43 digital utopianism 33 discourse 5, 8, 13, 20–21, 32, 35, 39, 44, 47–48, 51–52, 54, 56–58, 60–62, 65–71, 78, 81, 86–87, 106, 110, 125, 143–145, 149, 153–155, 162, 167, 177–178, 191, 193–195, 201, 204–205, 207–209, 212–213, 215, 217–218, 223, 258, 270, 274–276, 280, 282, 284, 286, 297, 300, 303–304, 310, 312, 316–320 analysis 48, 316 ethnocentric 154 discrimination 45, 210, 242, 277–278, 280, 295 dividual 36 dynamism 151

Inde x

education 12, 46, 62, 70, 75, 85, 93–96, 115, 119–120, 154, 167–168, 172, 194, 200, 206, 219, 226, 229, 243–244, 252, 262–264, 267, 269, 271, 275, 278, 283–285, 287–289, 292, 302–303, 305, 309, 313–314, 316–319 endangered 18, 65–67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81–85, 87–89, 244, 263, 269, 273 endangered languages 67, 84, 87 English language 90, 230, 291, 301, 303–304, 310–311 enregisterment 8, 13, 18, 20, 46, 60, 83, 90, 92, 100, 106, 124, 145, 147–149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 159–161, 163, 165, 167–169, 177, 192, 194–195, 254, 256, 268–269 entextualization 45, 51, 201, 203, 205, 208–209, 215–216 ESOL 303–305, 307, 309, 311, 313–315, 317–319 essay 16, 20, 24, 47, 51, 53, 59–61, 88, 120, 127–128, 143, 152–153, 155, 157, 159–160, 176, 178, 180, 192, 273 essentialism (cultural) 26, 279, 281 ethnic 4–5, 10–11, 16, 18, 21–23, 46, 55–56, 85, 89, 96, 124–126, 128–131, 135, 138, 143, 148, 158, 167, 169, 175, 178, 184, 221, 228, 231, 247, 254–265, 267–269, 271–275, 279, 281, 285, 297, 302, 310, 317 ethnicity 20, 23, 26, 33, 87, 89, 119, 123–126, 129–131, 134, 137–139, 141–145, 151, 159, 166, 168–169, 195, 200, 246, 251, 258–262, 264–267, 270, 273–275, 279, 284, 299, 301 ethnocentric discourse 154 ethnography 11–13, 17, 20–21, 23, 44, 46, 61, 78, 88–89, 95–96, 118–120, 144, 176, 194, 219, 247, 271 ethnolinguistic 18, 55–56, 65, 68–69, 251, 254, 256–259, 261, 264–265, 267–270 exceptionalism 84, 96, 303–305, 312 Facebook 17, 32–36, 46, 129, 131, 145, 152, 170–173, 175–187, 189–193, 195

323

feeling, structures of 12, 15, 19, 23, 25, 33, 39–43, 46, 185, 301, 317 fluency 66, 70–71, 83–84, 235, 243–244 food 18, 90–101, 103–111, 113, 115–120, 233, 266 socialization 93–95 Foucault, Michel 14, 18, 30, 45, 223, 301, 314–315, 318 fractal 251, 253, 259, 267–268, 270 framework(s) 12, 17, 23, 53, 66, 75, 78–80, 82–83, 96, 124, 201, 221, 244, 252–255, 257–259, 264, 268–270, 280, 317 participation 12, 17, 66, 78–80, 252–255, 257–259, 264, 268–270 friction 147, 302 between linguistic purity and hybridity 147 globalization 5, 8, 20–22, 24, 44–45, 48, 60, 66–68, 82–83, 88, 98, 194, 219, 244, 246, 271, 277, 279, 284, 293, 296, 300–301 Goffman, Erving 37, 44, 49–50, 61, 66, 69, 76, 78, 87, 257, 273 Gumperz, John 49–50, 61, 320 halal 91–92, 106–107, 110, 116 health 18, 92–94, 96–102, 105–106, 110–111, 113, 116–120, 267, 292 socialization 96–102, 105–106, 110–111, 113, 116–117 heritage language education 10, 16, 56, 61, 65, 69, 72, 74–75, 80, 82 heteroglossia 8, 14, 21–23, 51–52, 147, 168 heterography 200, 207, 210 hierarchical stratification 148 human 3–5, 12, 14, 20, 29, 35, 39–40, 44, 46, 51–54, 91, 96, 125–126, 205, 266, 277–284, 287, 293, 295, 298–302, 306–307 agency 29, 279, 283–284, 287 hybridity 147, 273, 297 Hymes, Dell 9, 22, 57, 61, 86, 88

324

Engaging Superdiversit y

identification 7, 16–17, 33, 44–45, 62, 69, 126–127, 130, 135, 139, 142, 278 identity 10, 12–14, 16, 20–23, 27, 32–37, 44, 46, 50, 52, 56, 60, 62, 71–73, 93, 118, 120, 123, 126–127, 131, 135, 138, 144–145, 158, 167, 186, 192–195, 201, 206, 246–247, 252–253, 255, 261, 263, 270, 272–274, 276–277, 279–284, 286–287, 289, 294–301, 304, 320 cultural 72, 261, 274, 276, 280, 294, 298 individual 281–282, 287, 296–297 group 279, 281, 287, 296 national 23, 247, 294, 296–297 ideology 40, 46, 51, 58, 61, 96, 103, 107, 145, 150, 160, 167, 172, 194–195, 201, 207, 216, 218, 230–231, 242, 244, 251, 262–264, 268–269, 273, 277, 301 food 96, 103, 107 language 61, 218, 251, 268, 273, 277 nation state 230–231, 244, 262, 269 native speaker 231, 242 standard 150, 160, 172, 195 immigrant 12, 67, 89–90, 96, 117, 120, 124, 153, 188, 235, 277–281, 283–287, 289, 291, 293, 295–299, 301–302, 306, 314 inauthentic 163–164 Incolas 4–5 indexicality 13, 18, 50–51, 91, 104–105, 116, 149, 167, 219, 254, 268–270 first order 149 second order 105, 116, 149 third order 149 indexical values 115, 149, 150, 160, 178, 253 infrastructure(s) 3, 5, 11–17, 19–25, 36, 42–43, 288 insecurity 44, 61, 111, 317, 319 integration 11, 23, 67, 82, 89–90, 116–117, 146, 153–156, 160, 164–168, 191, 301, 304, 306, 308, 310–314, 317, 319 integrated language 11, 143, 159–160, 170, 177–178, 181–182, 189–190 integrated speech 147, 155, 157–158, 160–161, 178, 180, 190–192 interdiscursivity 214 Islam 93, 106–107, 109

Kiksht (Upper Chinookan) 65–66, 74–77, 81, 83–86, 88 kitchen 97, 119 knowledging 254, 269–270, 272–273 label(s) 19, 30, 36, 43, 55, 83, 118, 124–125, 128, 131, 136, 138, 142–143, 148, 152–153, 166, 222, 241, 280, 285, 306 ethnic 143 labelling 26, 28, 143, 149, 222, 230, 235, 241 of speakers 222, 230, 235, 241 language(s) 6–7, 18, 22–23, 27–28, 33, 56, 65, 67–68, 71–74, 82–84, 86–89, 125–126, 138–139, 145, 147–148, 159, 168, 175, 179, 194, 218, 220, 222, 224–225, 227, 230–231, 234–236, 238–239, 242–243, 245–246, 252, 254–265, 267–269, 272, 274, 278, 281, 283–286, 294, 304, 319 American Indian 66, 81, 88 commodification 11, 18, 202, 214–215, 219, 223, 229, 246, 273, 299, 301 endangered 67, 84, 87 integrated 11, 143, 159–160, 170, 177–178, 181–182, 189–190 rights 279–282, 286, 300–302 shift 65, 67–69, 84, 87, 273, 283–284, 287, 293, 295, 298 socialization 93, 95–96, 119, 243, 247, 249, 309 standard 68, 87, 171–172, 191 street 125–126, 128–129, 131, 134, 138, 142–143, 145, 153, 156–157, 159, 165, 168, 170, 177–180, 186–189, 192, 194 testing 70–71, 88–89, 167, 247, 285, 304–305, 312–313, 317–319 worker 230 languaging 8, 22, 125, 129–130, 138–139, 142–145, 167–168, 170–171, 173, 175, 177, 179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189, 191, 193–195 polylanguaging 16, 22, 147, 167, 194, 273

Inde x

linguistic creativity 171, 178, 193 decay 170–171 discrimination 277–278 Linguistic Human Rights 277–278, 280–281, 300–302 monitoring 19, 36, 82, 223, 241–242 uniformity 172 literacy 18, 58, 60, 180, 199–202, 207, 209, 211–219, 243–244 astroturf 18, 200, 214, 216 schooled 212 skills 18, 58, 180, 199–200, 202, 209, 212, 214–216 vernacular 201, 214, 219 lived culture 43 London socialization 227–231 lunch 74–75, 90–91, 93, 95–107, 109, 111, 113, 115–119 management of (linguistic) diversity 222, 225, 227–228, 231, 234–236, 238–242, 244–246, 272 manufacturing of norms 148 massification 263 media 9, 13, 20–22, 25, 27, 29–30, 32–33, 36, 42–46, 66–67, 70, 85, 90–91, 97, 99, 117, 124, 128–131, 145–147, 149, 151, 154, 167, 169–173, 175–176, 192–193, 195, 201, 218, 225, 252, 254, 257, 259, 265–267, 269–270, 274–276, 306, 317 responses 117 social 29–30, 32, 36, 44–46, 129–131, 146, 170–171, 173, 175–176, 192–193, 195, 201 mediatisation 28 membership 50, 125, 130, 137, 139, 141, 214, 258, 261, 268, 282 category 130, 139, 141 meta-communities 7 metalinguistic 124, 126–127, 129–130, 137, 147–150, 160–161, 165–166, 170, 173, 176, 178, 182, 192–193, 216 activities 147 descriptions 166, 178 meta-pragmatic commentary 148–150, 165

325

minority 88, 92, 96, 105, 113, 117, 123–124, 128, 141–143, 148, 151, 155, 159–160, 166, 178, 187–188, 191, 194, 221, 231, 242, 247, 277–278, 280, 300–301 students 151, 159 mobile 9, 29, 31–33, 45, 59, 68, 72–73, 86, 200, 245, 252, 293 privatisation 29 mobility 5, 12, 19, 25, 27–29, 31, 42–43, 45, 126, 167, 199, 216, 219, 247, 252, 280, 289, 296–297, 299, 302, 313–315, 317 modern Copenhagen (speech) 151 monitoring (linguistic) 19, 36, 82, 223, 241–242 morality 93–94, 102, 118 moral panic 70, 86, 172, 195, 315 mother tongue 69, 131, 220–221, 233, 281–283, 287, 289–291, 293–295, 298, 300 multilingual/ism 8, 18–19, 21–23, 44–45, 68, 84, 86, 144–145, 168, 219–228, 234–235, 241–243, 245–247, 253, 271–272, 298, 300, 302, 317–318 multiscalar 5, 14, 17, 19, 202 museum (tribally owned) 73, 81–84 Muslim 92, 106–107, 109–110, 117, 200, 312, 317 nation 10, 12, 27, 29–31, 46, 97, 118–119, 168, 171–172, 185, 188, 203, 221, 224–225, 230–231, 242, 244–245, 249, 251, 253, 259, 262, 264, 268, 271, 273, 278–279, 282, 293, 295–296, 301–302, 304, 317 nationalism 4, 24, 27, 46, 56, 258–259, 262, 273–274, 301 native speaker(s) 11, 16, 65, 68–70, 83, 220–222, 227–237, 241–242, 244–246, 254, 278 ideology 231, 242 New Nordic cuisine 94, 97–99, 118–119 NOMA (restaurant) 97–99 nonopticon 30, 46 nonymity 33–34

326

Engaging Superdiversit y

normativity 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 15–16, 18, 139, 143, 145, 170–171, 173–175, 192, 195, 254, 256, 263, 268–269 dichotomic 123–125, 143 superdiverse 123–125, 143 norm(s) 11, 86, 90, 93, 101–105, 111, 116, 119, 123–125, 127, 129–130, 142–144, 148, 151, 170–171, 173–177, 182, 184, 191–194, 206, 216, 237, 306 of language use 170, 173, 175–177, 182, 191–193 peer group 170 polycentric 123 observation 6, 69, 130, 221, 225, 227, 242, 293 participant 221, 225, 227 orientalism 205, 219 orthography (standard) 74, 170–172, 175, 183, 191–193, 195, 256 orthographic standard 172, 175, 177, 180, 182–184, 190, 192–193 panic (moral) 45, 70, 86, 172, 195, 315 panopticon 28, 37, 45, 223, 226, 231, 245 colonial 37 post-panoptic(on) 12, 28, 30–31, 42, 299 participant 74, 78, 81, 83–84, 165, 181, 189, 221, 225, 227, 252 observation 221, 225, 227 participation 12, 17, 42, 61, 66, 78–80, 82–84, 244, 252–255, 257–259, 262, 264, 268–270, 311, 313 framework(s) 12, 17, 66, 78–80, 252–255, 257–259, 264, 268–270 peer group norms 170 Pennycook, Alastair 5–6, 22–23, 26–28, 45, 125, 145, 147, 168, 228, 247 personhood 18, 55, 60, 251, 257–258, 264–265, 267–270 ethnic 258, 269 ethnolinguistic 18, 251, 257, 258, 264–265, 267–270 phatic communion 17 poiesis 3, 5, 7, 9, 11–23

polycentricity 15, 28, 125, 143, 171, 174, 194 polycentric norms 123 polylanguaging 16, 22, 147, 167, 194, 273 pork (pig) 91–92, 97, 106–110, 117–118 principal 78–79, 83, 95–96 privatisation 29 production formats 66, 69, 78 public speaking 80, 83, 85 purity 10–12, 147, 255 race 17, 20, 32–33, 44, 124–126, 129–131, 134, 136–137, 141–143, 166–167, 275, 285, 308 recombination 12, 34 recursion 251, 253, 259, 267–268, 270 recursivity 12, 253 reflexivity 148, 192, 195 sociolinguistic 148 refusal 29, 110–111 repertoires 8, 21, 46, 65, 68, 86, 92, 127, 148, 243, 253, 271, 316 research 3–4, 13, 20–23, 42, 47, 62, 69, 87–88, 95, 98, 117, 124, 126, 145, 148–149, 151, 154, 163, 171, 195, 205, 218, 222, 224–225, 227, 231, 244, 246, 262, 270, 272–274, 283, 287, 300, 307, 315, 320 collaborative 22, 145, 148, 195 responses 117, 188, 254, 279, 287–289, 291, 296, 300–301 rights 11, 54, 83, 88, 139, 142, 154, 173, 182, 184, 186, 192, 244, 260, 266–267, 277–282, 286, 293, 295–298, 300–302, 306, 320 risk 45, 206, 286, 306, 311–312, 315, 319 ritual speech 17, 78, 80, 274 scale(s) 5, 7, 11–12, 17, 27, 31, 38, 47–49, 51, 53–61, 67, 94, 116, 126, 141, 148, 163, 165, 177–178, 222, 242, 251, 253–254, 258, 263, 270 multiscalar 5, 14, 17, 19, 202 script(s) (calling/conversations) 18–19, 195, 220–224, 228–230, 235–245 Sebba, Mark 175, 193, 195 security 13, 19, 31, 44, 76, 164, 298, 303–307, 313–320 studies 303–307, 315–316, 318–320

Inde x

securitization 303, 307–308, 311–313, 316–320 sedimentation 8, 16, 18, 252 semi-speaker 70, 74, 83, 87, 244 semiotic 8, 10, 13, 16–17, 34, 47, 50–51, 58, 61, 91–92, 115, 127, 131, 144, 149, 171, 177, 199, 201, 204, 209, 214–215, 251–254, 257, 259, 265, 268 density 254, 257, 259, 265 semi-speakers 70, 83, 244 Shibboleth 19, 313 shift 13, 33, 44, 65, 67–69, 78, 84, 87, 123, 206, 213, 235, 244, 273, 283–284, 287, 293, 295, 298, 304, 307 language 65, 67–69, 84, 87, 273, 283–284, 287, 293, 295, 298 Silverstein, Michael 7, 18, 23, 43, 46, 48–51, 56, 59, 61–62, 67, 82, 86, 89, 91, 105, 120, 149, 169, 174, 195, 213, 216, 219 Simone, AbdouMaliq 9–10, 23 skills 9, 16, 18, 58, 70, 73, 94, 160, 170–171, 178, 180, 199–200, 202, 209, 212, 214–216, 222, 229, 242–243, 245 literacy 18, 58, 180, 199–200, 202, 209, 212, 214–216 social media 29–30, 32, 36, 44–46, 129–131, 146, 170–171, 173, 175–176, 192–193, 195, 201 sorting 32, 37, 45 status 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 159, 161, 163, 165–167, 169, 194 socialization 17, 93, 95–96, 105, 119, 206, 227–231, 243–245, 247, 309 food 93, 105 health 96–102, 105–106, 110–111, 113, 116–117 language 93, 95–96, 119, 243, 247, 249, 309 London 227–231 sociocultural 49, 57, 72, 83, 126, 147–148, 200, 202–206, 209, 214, 216, 299 stereotypes 202, 209, 214, 216 sociolinguistic 3–5, 9, 14, 18, 22, 39, 47–48, 51–52, 54, 56–58, 60, 62, 67–69, 87–88, 95, 118, 120, 125–126, 145, 147–151, 160–161, 165–166,

327

168–169, 174, 176, 199, 209, 212, 216, 218, 270, 272, 277, 280, 297, 307 reflexivity 148 sociolinguistics 4–5, 7, 12, 21, 25, 39, 60, 65–66, 68, 82–83, 88, 91, 95, 116, 118, 120, 147, 150, 166–167, 194, 206, 220, 243, 246, 271, 299–301, 303, 305, 316 critical sociolinguistics of diversity 25, 299 of Danish 150, 167 spaces 3, 5, 7, 9–15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 26–28, 32–34, 36, 38, 40, 42–43, 45, 73, 125, 170–171, 173, 175, 184, 193, 197, 199–200, 202, 204, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214, 216, 218, 222, 224, 226, 228, 230, 232, 234, 236, 238, 240, 242, 244, 246, 300 speaker(s) 7, 11, 16, 48, 65–72, 74, 82–83, 85, 87, 125–127, 129–130, 147–151, 161–163, 165–166, 173, 177, 184, 206, 212, 214, 218, 220–222, 227–237, 241–246, 252, 254, 268, 278, 280–282, 284, 304, 309, 315–316, 319 native 11, 16, 65, 68–70, 83, 220–222, 227–237, 241–242, 244–246, 254, 278 semi-fluent 19, 222, 236, 242–243 semi-multilingual 19, 222, 242 semi-speaker 70, 74, 83, 87, 244 speaking 67, 77–78, 80, 83, 85, 113, 124, 127–129, 139, 143, 148, 150, 152–153, 155, 157–159, 167, 177, 208, 214, 220, 236–237, 245, 257, 259, 263, 265, 267, 269, 288–289, 296–297, 309, 313 public 80, 83, 85 speech 7, 16–17, 48–49, 52, 55, 60, 65–69, 71–73, 75, 77–89, 100, 119–120, 144–145, 147–148, 150–151, 153, 155–158, 160–163, 165–166, 168–171, 178, 180, 190–192, 194, 223, 257, 259, 274, 304, 307, 309–310, 314, 317–318 community 87, 89, 147, 309 conservative Copenhagen 150, 160 modern Copenhagen (speech) 151 ritual 17, 78, 80, 274 stylized 147

328

Engaging Superdiversit y

standard ideology 150, 160, 172, 195 language 68, 87, 171–172, 191 orthography 170–172, 175, 183, 191–193 standardization 62, 167–168, 172, 175, 193, 195, 213, 216, 219, 223–224, 243, 246–247, 255 status 6, 17, 66, 83–84, 97, 101, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 159–161, 163, 165–167, 169, 180, 182, 187, 189, 193–194, 226, 245–246, 259, 265, 274, 280, 285, 293, 299, 305 social 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 159, 161, 163, 165–167, 169, 194 stereotypes 11, 18, 37, 91, 125, 136, 149, 192, 202, 204–205, 209, 214–216, 254, 256–257, 264–265, 268, 273, 316 stereotypic indexical values 150, 160, 178 stratification 12, 17, 51, 58, 148, 166, 214, 255 hierarchical 148 street language 125–126, 128–129, 131, 134, 138, 142–143, 145, 153, 156–157, 159, 165, 168, 170, 177–180, 186–189, 192, 194 structure(s) 3, 7, 12, 14–15, 19, 23, 25, 36, 39–43, 46, 50, 52, 71, 81, 84, 119–120, 126, 130, 141, 148, 165, 209, 214, 237–239, 259, 283, 298, 300, 319 of feeling 12, 15, 19, 25, 39–43, 46 student(s) 11–12, 16–17, 19, 65–66, 71, 74–76, 81–84, 89, 92, 104, 115, 123, 128, 130, 145, 151–153, 159, 161, 163, 167–168, 175, 187, 190–191, 207–208, 222, 226, 252, 254, 257, 262–264, 274, 277–281, 283–289, 291, 293–301, 313–314, 316–318, 320 immigrant 12, 277–280, 284–287, 289, 293, 295, 299, 301 minority 151, 159 study(ies) 4–5, 10, 12, 14, 20–21, 23–25, 38, 40, 43, 45–46, 48–49, 61–62, 70, 86, 88–89, 96, 119, 124, 128, 130, 144–145, 148, 150, 152,

160, 166–169, 171, 177, 192–195, 201, 212, 218–219, 223–225, 247, 271–275, 288, 301–307, 315–320 style 7, 20, 52, 72, 79, 149, 153, 161, 165, 167, 169, 191, 206, 209, 212–213, 217, 224, 239, 242 stylised 147, 156–157, 161, 169 stylised speech 147 stylisation(s) 16, 23, 61, 148–150, 153, 157–158, 161–163, 165–166, 169 super-communities 7 superdiversity 3–8, 10, 12–15, 19–23, 25–28, 31, 37, 39–40, 42–46, 60, 62, 66–68, 83, 86, 90–91, 115–118, 125–126, 139, 142–145, 167, 171, 185, 194–195, 201, 216–223, 225, 227, 229, 231, 233, 235, 237, 239, 241, 243–247, 251–253, 255, 257, 259, 261, 263, 265, 267–271, 273, 275, 277, 279–280, 300, 302 superdiverse surroundings 123 superdiverse workplace 221, 234 superiority 151, 161 surroundings 32, 67, 123, 125–126, 139, 143, 162–163 superdiverse 123 surveillance 27, 30–32, 37, 42–46, 223, 303, 305, 315–317, 320 suspicion 45, 303–305, 311–312, 314, 316 threats 30, 304–307, 311 trajectories 10, 12, 55, 69, 126, 144, 247, 278–280, 282, 286–287, 291, 294–295, 299 over time and space 279, 282, 294 translation 15, 48, 81, 85, 127, 143–144, 153–154, 156, 158, 161–162, 164, 172, 176, 178–180, 182–187, 189–190, 217, 237, 241 uniformity 53, 172 unity-in-diversity 269–270 Upper Chinookan (Kiksht) 65, 81, 86 utopianism 33 values (indexical) 115, 149, 150, 160, 178, 253

Inde x

vernacular 165, 200–201, 213–215, 217, 219 literacy 201, 214, 219 urban 8, 23 Vertovec, Steven 4, 6, 8, 23, 25, 35, 46, 65–66, 89, 126, 139, 142, 146, 147, 169, 171, 185, 195, 221, 247, 252, 275, 279, 302 voicing 66, 69, 148, 162, 168

Williams, Raymond 8, 12, 15, 23, 25, 29, 40–43, 46, 212, 219, 305–307, 320 worker(s) 7, 34, 123, 139, 152, 214, 223–226, 230–231, 242, 245–246, 294 language 230 workplace 221–224, 226, 234, 244, 246 superdiverse 221, 234

329