Fighters, Girls and Other Identities: Sociolinguistics in a Martial Arts Club 9781783093991

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

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: 5

Fighters, Girls and Other Identities Sociolinguistics in a Martial Arts Club

Lian Malai Madsen

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Buffalo • Toronto

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Madsen, Lian Malai. Fighters, Girls and Other Identities: Sociolinguistics in a Martial Arts Club/ Lian Malai Madsen. Encounters: 5 Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Urban dialects–Denmark–Copenhagen. 2. Urban youth–Social aspects–Denmark– Copenhagen. 3. Urban youth–Recreation–Denmark–Copenhagen. 4. Martial arts for children–Denmark–Copenhagen. 5. Linguistic geography–Denmark–Copenhagen. 6. Language and culture–Denmark–Copenhagen. 7. Copenhagen (Denmark)–Dialects. 8. Copenhagen (Denmark)–Languages. I. Title. II. Title: Sociolinguistics in a Martial Arts Club. P40.5.U732D34 2015 306.4409489–dc23 2015009686 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-398-4 (hbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2015 Lian Malai Madsen. 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 Deanta Global Publishing Services Limited. Printed and bound in Great Britain by the CPI Books Group.

Contents

Figures and Tables Transcription Symbols Used Acknowledgements

vii ix xi

1

Preliminaries Cultural Diversity, ‘Counter Culture’ and Integration Language in Heterogeneous Urban Contexts Field Methods, Participants and Data Approaching Identity in Interaction Outline of the Book

1 4 9 13 21 24

2

Sports, Integration and Participation The Nørrebro Taekwondo Club The Field of Association Sports in Denmark Assumptions About Sports and Integration The Nørrebro Taekwondo Club as a Community of Practice Social Practices and Social Positioning in the Club Integration in a Club Community

29 30 40 47 50 53 75

3

Girls, Boys and Interaction Frames, Play and Teasing Social Relationships and Teasing in Interaction Peer Monitoring and Gender Categorisation Competition, Inclusion and Gender Relations

v

81 82 85 96 118

vi

Contents

4

Youth, Language and Ethnic Categorisation The Sociolinguistics of Copenhagen Youth Style in Heterogeneous Urban Environments Situated Functions Stylised Voicing of Ethnic Minorities Aspects of Ethnicity Contemporary Urban Speech and Ethnic Categorisation

121 123 128 140 148 156 161

5

School Orientation in an Out-of-School Setting Schooling, Standard Language and Monolingual Ideologies Coolness and Opposition School Achievements as Symbolic Capital Micro-integration and Enregisterment

167 168 170 173 180

6

Perspectives Fighters, Girls and Other Identities Community Sports and Integration Ethnic Categorisation and Social Inequality

185 186 190 194

References

201

Index

215

Figures and Tables

Figures Figure 1.1 Data collection

14

Figure 2.1 Map of the club

31

Figure 2.2 Hierarchical organisation and activities in the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club

32

Figure 2.3 The groups’ identity positionings

61

Figure 2.4 Girls 1 ‘A day in the club’

68

Figure 2.5 Translation A day in the club

68

Figure 2.6 Girls 1 ‘Girlish and boyish’

73

Figure 2.7 Translation Girlish and boyish

74

Figure 2.8 Girls 2 ‘Girlish and boyish’

74

vii

viii

Figures and Tables

Tables Table 1.1 Participants listed according to friendship group, gender, age, ethnic background, belt colour and parents’ occupation

19

Table 2.1 Order of belt colours according to World Taekwondo Federation’s rules

38

Table 2.2 Groups’ characteristic practices related to membership status and taekwondo orientation

59

Table 4.1 Percentage of the variants [tʲ] and [ʁ ]̥ out of ten occurrences of the variables (‘t’ and ‘r’)

127

Transcription Symbols Used

[overlap] LOUD °silent° xxx (questionable) ((comment)) . ? : >faster< ↑ (.) (0.6) Stress hhh

overlapping speech louder volume than surrounding utterances lower volume than surrounding utterances unintelligible speech parts I am uncertain about my comments falling terminal intonation rising terminal intonation prolongation of preceding sound faster than surrounding utterances local pitch raise short pause timed pause stress laughter breathe

ix

Acknowledgements

I am obliged, in particular, to Ben Rampton, whose work and mentorship continues to be an inspiration for me. I am deeply grateful for the invitation to publish this volume and for your generous engagement and careful editorial feedback. Also I thank Jan Blommaert and the team from Multilingual Matters for helpful editorial advice. Through discussions and collaboration, several colleagues have had an impact on this work. Asif Agha, Roxy Harris, Karel Arnaut, Jürgen Jaspers, Sine Agergaard, Janus Spindler Møller, Martha Sif Karrebæk, Bente Ailin Svendsen and Andreas Stæhr, I am thankful for how you have in various ways (more or less directly) helped shape the thoughts that I express here. Thanks to funding from the University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Humanities and the Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication, I have been able to carry out this research and turn it into a book. But my research was only possible because 16 girls and boys from the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club agreed to participate, and I am immensely thankful for that. I have had a great time with you in the club and I have learned a lot from you. The club would not exist without the committed adults and instructors. You do not only develop excellent young sports talents and achieve impressive results. You also continue to create a recreational space of great importance to a lot of children and you care about all the young members. I thank you for many years of friendship and cooperation in the club and for letting me carry out this study. Especially, I thank you, Lasse, for making a real difference to the children in the club for so many years and for being an important help to me (with research-informational chats as well as neck repairs). Selma, Ziggy and Leslie, you have not had any direct impact on the writing of this book apart from being a (welcome) disturbance, but nothing is more important than you to its author’s well-being. Thank you for being here. xi

xii

Acknowledgements

The support and guidance that I received from Jens Normann Jørgensen at the early stages of this work and far beyond my work life as a mentor, colleague and friend have been invaluable. It has been a privilege to know and work with him, and his sad death in 2013 has left an empty space. I know he would have been pleased that this book has finally been published.

1 Preliminaries Every week, groups of children and adolescents meet in a building in the northern part of central Copenhagen. Most of them are from the local area. They get together with other young people and adults to engage in particular actions, rituals and bodily movements. They agree that what they practice is the martial art of ‘taekwondo’ and that the collective of people who meet in this locality and carry out these practices together constitutes a ‘taekwondo club’. The children and adolescents formally become members of the club when they have filled in a form and have paid their monthly fee. The club, however, is not constructed by such formalities alone, but by regular repeated practices and interactions between individuals. The members interact physically. They dress in certain ways, they move around, shake hands, hug, push, kick and hit each other. A major part of the practice of the sport consists of demonstration, copying, correction and repetition of bodily movements. Yet, the bodily actions are accompanied by verbal conduct, and as in any human community, significant parts of the interactions between the club members are linguistic. Although the club is defined by, and focuses on, the sports discipline during the training sessions, what goes on between the members before and after the sports practice is equally essential to the participation in the club as a social community. It is these interactions around the sports practice which I shall attend to here. This book is concerned with how individuals participate in a recreational social community in a late modern urban setting, how they negotiate their place in the social order, create and maintain friendship groups and relate to different social categories, and, in particular, how they employ linguistic resources and interactional activities to do so. The social order, the status relations, the norms and the rituals of the club community are not constructed anew in a vacuum every time the members meet. The members have a shared history and they also individually bring along histories of interactions, experiences, abilities and memberships of other communities. As the members construct local social structures, they simultaneously draw on resources and practices embedded within wider socio-historical processes and broader cultural frames through their joint practices. The children and adolescents in the taekwondo club interactionally bring about ways of participating in a community, but 1

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they do so under socio-cultural and historical conditions, which resemble the conditions of other youth groups of similar make-up in a range of late modern urban environments. Thus, this book reports on a study of identities and interactions among a heterogeneous group of taekwondo practitioners in the capital of Denmark, but it is not merely about these particular young people in this particular setting. By engaging with the details of the everyday conduct of the children and adolescents in an urban sports club, the book aims to add to our knowledge about contemporary socio-cultural and sociolinguistic processes. The title Fighters, Girls and Other Identities: Sociolinguistics in a Martial Arts Club refers to category labels significant within the club community and thereby emphasises the participant perspective on social categories and relationships employed in this book. In addition, the title illustrates a view of identities and social categorisation as dynamic. ‘Fighters’ and ‘girls’ are only a few of many potentially relevant and interdependent identity aspects and categories brought about by the children and adolescents. Finally, the title underlines the key issues of the book; ‘identities’ and ‘sociolinguistics’, and more importantly, a key assumption of the book, that studying identity categorisation from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective in a specific field contributes to our wider understanding of categorisation processes. My research is driven by an interest in how social differentiation and identity categories work among the young members of the club. I have approached my data with an emphasis on what actually occurs in the interaction, how social categories are made relevant through linguistic acts, and how my findings resemble or differ from phenomena dealt with in existing research and theoretical accounts. In addition, I am concerned with how the conduct of the young club members relates to, reproduces, reinterprets or resists influential ideas about cultural diversity and youth in contemporary Danish society. The ethnographic case study and detailed analyses of interactions reveal wide-ranging aspects of the connection between language use, social categorisation and agency in relation to the broader societal positioning of minority youth. The general insights are achieved in two ways. Firstly, I relate the practices observed among the participants in my study to largerscale discourses about cultural diversity and contemporary youth. The discourses I consider concern a pervasive emphasis on ethnic and cultural differences, integration as adaptation and the persistent understanding of particular youth groups as non-majority. Secondly, I continuously compare the findings of my study to recent research within sociolinguistics and anthropology. The aim of the book is to participate in discussions of

Preliminaries

3

contemporary youth, cultural diversity and the relationship between language and social identities. The book concerns issues of relevance to research within sociolinguistics, (linguistic) anthropology, discourse analysis, additional language acquisition and bilingualism (and other related fields) as well as research within the sociology of sports. In addition, it should appeal to scholars within educational studies with an interest in sociolinguistic processes in out-of-school learning contexts. The interactional construction of social relationships and identities could of course be studied in many different fields. A significant reason for my choice of the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club as my field of study has been my interest in studying child and adolescent interactions in a leisure time community characterised by voluntary participation. A great many sociolinguistic studies of children and youth focus on school environments (e.g. Eckert, 1989; Goodwin, 2006; Jørgensen, 2001, 2003a, 2004; Lytra, 2007; Maegaard, 2007; Quist, 1998, 2005; Rampton, 2006), and school is, admittedly, a major part of children’s life, but leisure time is also highly significant. A study focusing on children and youth during leisure activities of their own choice can add important insights and complement the existing sociolinguistic research carried out in formal educational contexts. In fact, it is a common assumption within current Danish integration-political initiatives as well as among practitioners in the field of organised leisure activities that participation in such activities is related to success in formal education. Common understandings of society, culture and identity that circulate in various communication platforms from mass media to face-to-face communication are central to the way this book contributes to knowledge on this topic. It is by paying close attention to the everyday conduct of young participants in a sports club that this work scrutinises prevailing assumptions about heterogeneous youth groups in Danish society. In the rest of this chapter I shall examine a couple of such currently influential assumptions that are part of discourses on cultural differences, integration and leisure sports, and include understandings of: (1) what culture is and means for social life in contemporary diverse (but previously less diverse) societies, (2) what identity is and how identity relates to culture, (3) what participation in society involves and (4) how organised social activities play a part in successful socialisation into society. After this discussion of what we could call the wider societal relevance of the book, I turn to the relevance and the positioning of my work within the field of research on language, identity and youth. After that, I introduce my fieldwork and present my approach to identity in interaction. Finally, I end this chapter with a brief outline of the book’s content.

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Cultural Diversity, ‘Counter Culture’ and Integration I shall begin the discussion of dominant discourses on cultural diversity by considering the recent Danish research report Mehmet and the Counter Culture1 (Andersen, 2010). The report grapples with explanations for educational underachievement among students of ethnic minority backgrounds, and it represents key elements of a widespread discourse on diversity in Denmark. The understanding of culture and identity within this discourse has been described as ethnocentric in recent Danish research (Eriksen & Sørheim, 2001; Rennison, 2009). This ethnocentric understanding of majority culture as the natural and unquestioned foundation of society seems to be reflected more widely in Danish discussions of integration. In Section ‘Ethnocentric discourses on integration’, I examine this understanding and its predominantly assimilationist approach to integration. Another feature of the research report and current debates about integration is the assumption that organised leisure activities play a central part in societal integration, and I discuss this in Section ‘Discourses on integration through leisure sports’. Mehmet and the Counter Culture1 (Andersen, 2010) reports a study initiated by the Danish Ministry of Education. The project sought to answer a central question in current Danish integration and politicaleducation discourses: ‘Why ethnic minority boys underachieve in Danish compulsory education compared to ethnic minority girls and ethnic Danish boys and girls’ (Andersen, 2010: 1, my translation). The introduction explains how the study is motivated by previous statistical surveys. These surveys document tendencies that include educational underachievement, weaker affiliation with the labour market and less participation in organised leisure activities among so-called ‘persons of an ethnic background different from Danish’2 (Andersen, 2010: 1, my translation, see also Dahl & Jakobsen, 2005; Deding & Olsson, 2009; Egelund, 2003, 2007; OECD, 2006). By including the dimension of organised leisure activities in a study of educational performance from the onset, Andersen’s project is in accordance with the current integration policy in assuming that lack of educational success and no participation in organised leisure activities are somehow connected. Based on statistical surveys of the final results from 2002–2005 of the Danish ‘folkeskole’ (exams in the 9th grade equivalent to GCSE-level), the report’s conclusions claim that: (a) boys with an ethnic minority background underachieve compared to the other groups and (b) it is not socio-economic background, but ethnicity and gender in combination, that correlates with poor school achievements (Andersen, 2010: 12–13). Furthermore, the study

Preliminaries

5

includes qualitative interviews with pupils and teachers in three selected schools with different pupil populations. Based on the interviews, the authors suggest that an explanation for the statistical results can be found in the development of a ‘problem discourse’ related to minority boys in schools with a large population of ‘bilingual’3 boys. According to the authors, the minority boys in these schools experience a lack of acknowledgement in relation to their cultural and linguistic background: The ethnic minority boys generally had a more positive attitude to school than ethnic Danish boys. Still, they also express a ‘trouble-maker mentality’, where they identify strongly with their ethnic community and where they display resistance to the school and the teachers. They generally feel that the school consider their ethnic background a problem and gather in cliques with other ethnic minority boys. (Andersen, 2010: 23, my translation) The main argument of the report is that because the experience of the boys is that their ethnicity is viewed as a problem, they orient strongly towards ethnic categories and develop an oppositional peer-culture: The boys instead find acceptance in the ethnic community, where trouble-making leads to higher status than well prepared homework. (Andersen, 2010: 33, my translation) These observations lead to the concept of ‘counter culture’ being somehow related to communities of ethnic minority boys. This notion is central to the report (as we can see from the title) and it has also been central to the report’s implementation and uptake4. However, there is no further reflection on how orientation to an ‘ethnic community’ might lead to particular cultural orientations towards trouble-making and opposition to school. Furthermore, the idea that ethnic minority boys constitute a distinct group is taken for granted. Mehmet and the Counter Culture in this way reflects characteristics of more widespread discourses on diversity and ethnic minorities in recent Danish debate: (a) Ethnic minority youth, and in particular boys, are considered a central problem for Danish society. (b) Successful participation in Danish society is understood as achieving decent grades in school, taking part in organised leisure activities involving contact with adults (e.g. Andersen, 2010: 2) and eventually getting employment.

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

(c) The boys’ failure to participate successfully in Danish society is explained as predominantly related to their ethnic and cultural background. (d) Ethnic minorities are treated as a collective category. No differentiation is made between different ethnic groups, newcomers or ethnic minorities born in Denmark, different socio-cultural, educational or socio-economic statuses, or other differences within the highly diverse group of individuals that this category encompasses. Ethnic minority youth as problematic to societal cohesion, cultural differences as the key cause, as well as the essentialisation of ethnic minorities as one cultural group are central elements of the ethnocentric discourse that has dominated the Danish debate on integration (Rennison, 2009; Yilmaz, 1999).

Ethnocentric discourses on integration Immigrant workers began to arrive in Denmark in the 1960s. During the 1970s, it became clear that these immigrants were settling in Denmark. When refugees also began to arrive during the 1980–90s, attention to problems related to immigration increased in Danish public debate. Although the immigrant population in Denmark is one of the smallest in Western Europe (OECD, 2010: 7)5, Danish election surveys suggest that during the period 1987–2001, approximately 40% of the Danish population considered immigration a threat to Danish society (Thomsen, 2006: 225). The notion of integration has been very prominent since the mid-1990s (Olwig & Pærregaard, 2007: 18). In 2002, the government of the time even established a distinct Ministry of Integration6. The webpage of the Ministry of Integration makes it clear that this ministry deals with immigrants’ and refugees’ movement towards successful membership of Danish society. From the written information and the links on the page, we can see that this involves participation in language courses, cultural courses, employment, education and taxpaying (see www.nyidanmark.dk). Yet in the general debate as well as in much research on integration, it is rather unclear what the concept of integration refers to, precisely (Ejrnæs, 2002)7. By far the most dominant discourse in Danish media and current policy-making is the ethnocentric perspective on diversity (Rennison, 2009: 120–158; Yilmaz, 1999: 180–81). According to Rennison (2009: 121), this ethnocentric discourse is closely related to a collective ‘moral panic’ which results in resistance to strangers’ cultural practices8 and emphasises values related to native culture. Culture itself is understood as inherited, static and tied to birthplace and nation, and cultural differences are seen within the

Preliminaries

7

stereotypical frames of ‘us’ and ‘them’, with the ‘us’ imagined as a coherent cultural and national community (Anderson, 1991; Rennison, 2009: 128–131; Yilmaz, 1999). Nationalist ideology is central to this discourse and the view of integration is assimilationist. Ethnic minorities are regarded as either ‘un-adapted strangers’ or ‘disciplined strangers’ if they are well integrated (Rennison, 2009: 153), and the goal of integration is reaching mono-cultural coherence by assimilating cultural minorities into the majority culture. In fact, this ethnocentric discourse on integration is not an exclusively Danish phenomenon; it is 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). One of the problems with this discourse is that it takes for granted the existence of an out-group without further specifying the characteristics of the group members (other than their non-majorityness, in this case non-Danishness). As Yilmaz (1999) notes, this construction has serious consequences for the hierarchical positioning within society of members labelled ‘ethnic minorities’: The binary opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’ constructs a reality which defines subject positions before the subject itself. The discourse restricts other ways of categorizing people. The same discourse constructs a tacit ‘us’ in opposition to ‘them’ where ‘we’ represent the norm while ‘they’ are characterized as deviant. (Yilmaz, 1999: 180–181, my translation) These wider discourses on diversity, and the perspectives on minority youth they represent, are central to this book in two ways. Firstly, they constitute a significant part of the discursive environment in which this work as well as the experiences of the participants are situated. Secondly, the data dealt with in this book contribute insights from the local lived realities of Copenhagen youth into issues of school success, cultural values and orientations, as well as large-scale processes of social categorisation. These insights question the assumption that ethnicity is the main defining factor for cultural orientation9, that cultural differences are the key to problems of educational underachievement, that the concept of ‘counter culture’ should be connected to ethnic minority communities, and that integration means assimilation into majority culture. One significant finding of the taekwondo club study is that within this recreational site, minority boys frequently orient towards measures of school success in their peer interactions (they brag about school achievements, discuss school work and compete in spelling). At the same

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time, they employ linguistic practices which are not officially appreciated in school contexts (such as swearing, ritual insults, mixing features of various codes and employing a particular urban vernacular speech style) to engage in school-related topics and activities. The study of young members’ participation in a sports club community reveals how different cultural practices stereotypically associated with school opposition and school ambition are combined in peer interactions. Furthermore, we shall see how culture as ethnic inheritance is only a small part of the participants’ cultural repertoires. Instead, we shall see how, for example, gender matters in situated encounters and how it relates to other identity aspects. The final aspect of the public and political integration debate that is relevant to this study is the assumption that participation in organised leisure activities is connected to successful participation in society in general. We see this reflected in Andersen’s work (2010) on leisure activities as a significant factor in educational outcomes. Likewise, the idea that societal benefits flow from participation in sport clubs is well established within the field of sports, manifesting itself on various levels from policy-making to local participation in club activities and, as the fieldwork revealed, also in the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club.

Discourses on integration through leisure sports Recent work within the sociology of sports amply documents the assumption within sports as well as sports studies that participation in organised recreational activities and sports clubs strengthens the integration of minority and socially marginalised youth into majority society (e.g. Anderson, 2003, 2005, 2006; Agergaard & Bonde, 2013; Boeskov & Ilkjær, 2005), and in fact this idea has international currency (e.g. Bailey, 2005; Coalter, 2007; Dagkas & Armour, 2011; Segaert et al., 2012). However, it is very salient in Danish public discourse that a lack of participation in organised leisure activities (in the form of club membership involving contact with adults) is considered symptomatic of problems with societal integration (Andersen, 2010: 32). Responding to this, there have been a range of sports political initiatives in Denmark focusing on the integration of ethnic minorities through sports clubs. But these projects overwhelmingly aim to merely increase the number of members (and sometimes instructors) with an ethnic minority background in the clubs (I provide a detailed discussion of the sports political initiatives in Chapter 2). They rarely take into consideration exactly how membership of a club leads to ‘a community based on shared values and interest across ethnic, social, and political borders’

Preliminaries

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(integration fund at www.nyidanmark.dk)10. Instead, they assume that participants are accepted into a club community merely based on shared interests. Conditions for participation, community-based power relations and processes of inclusion and exclusion within the community are overlooked. In addition, there is no consideration of the different ways of orienting towards sports skills or the relationship between sports skills and social status hierarchy (Madsen, 2012, 2013). Finally, and in tune with the general Danish integration debate, ethnicity and cultural differences are foregrounded as the central problems. Political integration initiatives through sports overwhelmingly focus on ethnic and cultural minorities gaining knowledge of and adapting to majority cultural practices. A problem with this is a monocentric understanding of societal norms. This kind of integration rhetoric seems to view society as made up by one mainstream, whereas actual interaction within social communities is polycentric and there may be several normative ‘mainstreams’ (Blommaert, 2013; Blommaert & Varis, 2013). My ethnographic and linguistic study interrogates these assumptions by looking in detail at social processes actually occurring among young martial arts practitioners. It points to the importance of reckoning with communityconstructed social hierarchies, peer-practices and the local processes of inclusion and exclusion. From this, a more complex picture emerges making clear that the monocentric view of society and integration is not sufficient and that locally incorporating processes involve much more than just ethnicity. A linguistic ethnographic study of linguistic constructions and sequences of interaction situated in a specific social community makes clear that combinations of age, gender and sports skills all appear as key points of orientation.

Language in Heterogeneous Urban Contexts Of course, I am not the first to suggest that a focus on language use will improve our understanding of social life. The well-established traditions of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology are defined by the study of language in relation to society and culture. There are, however, substantial differences in how this relationship is treated in what is usually referred to as (quantitative) variationist sociolinguistics (e.g. Labov, 1972a) on the one hand, and on the other linguistic ethnography, which builds on the traditions of interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology (e.g. Gumperz, 1982; Hymes, 1980). In this section, I briefly outline recent research on urban youth language within these two perspectives. My own work adapts a linguistic ethnographic approach, but I shall argue that the

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insights derived from the study of interaction can (and should) influence the work within the variationist perspective as well. Matters of linguistic conduct are central to discourses on cultural differences and integration. According to the assimilationist understanding of integration, cultural and linguistic minorities are required to learn the majority language and adapt to majority cultural practices (Jørgensen, 2010: 108; Hogan-Brun et al., 2009) if they are to be successfully socialised as good democratic citizens (e.g. Kristiansen, 2003). In the social and human sciences, most contemporary scholars would claim a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of linguistic and cultural diversity than this, but there is still a significant part of sociolinguistic research on the speech of urban youth which fails to capture the complexity of the relationship between language and ethnicity. In line with the general development of more culturally and ethnically heterogeneous populations in larger European cities, a growing number of sociolinguistic studies have focused on contact situations, with a substantial proportion further focusing on youth. There has been a particular interest in the development of varieties of the majority languages (see Quist & Svendsen, 2010 for a collection of Scandinavian studies and Kern & Selting, 2011 for a collection of European research), and these are often referred to as ‘ethnolects’ (e.g. Androutsopoulos, 2001: 2; Auer, 2003: 255; Christensen, 2003: 141) or ‘multiethnolects’ (e.g. Freywald et al., 2010; Quist, 2008; Svendsen & Røyneland, 2008). In this way, ethnicity is pinpointed as a key factor in the description of these new linguistic practices. In contrast, in this book, I start from the assumption that most of the youth identified as ‘ethnolectal’ or ‘multiethnolectal’ are actually born and raised in the Western European cities where they are studied. Linguistic, ethnic and cultural heterogeneity are now inherent characteristics of the populations, and I try to avoid a priori assumptions about linguistic practice and ethnicity in relation to youth with minority background. My analyses offer alternative interpretations of linguistic resources previously characterised as ethnic. With sustained focus and sensitivity to participant meanings and the interplay of various social categories in identity work, I aim to shift the focus away from predefined classifications, demonstrating instead how the polyphony of semiotic resources available to late modern youth highlights the complex relationship between language and social categories, and the fluidity of linguistic boundaries. Analyses of the situated use of linguistic forms reveal that in many cases ethnicity is not the most relevant interpretation of what is going on when these semiotic resources are employed in interaction.

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Of course, engaging with details of situated identity work entails the application of particular methodological tools capable of capturing language use on the ground and its wider implications across a range of context levels. In this book, I employ linguistic ethnography (Blommaert, 2007; Rampton et al., 2004; Copland & Creese, 2015), which has developed from interactional sociolinguistics (e.g. Gumperz, 1972, 1982; Jørgensen, 2010; Rampton, 1995, 2006) and linguistic anthropology (e.g. Hymes, 1974; Ochs, 1996). This approach sees social categories and structures as being produced and reproduced in everyday life. It starts with the lived local realities and links these to larger-scale socio-cultural processes. Ethnography is central and the combination of the analytical frameworks provided by linguistics with the reflexive sensitivity required in ethnography is a major strength. I start with ethnographic and linguistic micro-analyses of situated interactions among 16 young members of the taekwondo club and relate these to broader processes of social indexicality, social stereotyping and discursive formations. (My theoretical and methodological approach is explicated below.) In several ways, this study of a martial arts club in late modern Copenhagen reflects the diversification of diversity in contemporary globalised societies (Vertovec, 2010), and thus questions simplified understandings of category belonging and relationships between cultural practices and categories. Not only ethnocentric, but also multiculturalist perspectives can be, and have been, criticised for applying a static and conservative view on culture and seeing ethno-cultural communities as harmonious entities – without considering the internal struggles around group identity and belonging (Fraser & Honneth, 2003; Halldén et al., 2008). Ethnicity and culture are concepts that have become increasingly ambiguous in contemporary globalised societies. Vertovec suggests super-diversity as a term to describe these current conditions: Super-diversity is a term intended to capture a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything many migrant-receiving countries have previously experienced. Immigrant superdiversity is distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables, including their country of origin (comprising a variety of possible subset traits such as ethnicity, language[s], religious tradition, regional and local identities, cultural values and practices), their migration channel (often related to highly gendered flows, specific social networks and particular labour market niches), and their legal status (including myriad categories determining a hierarchy of entitlements and restrictions). (Vertovec, 2010: 87)

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

The concept of super-diversity and in particular the social conditions it is intended to describe has received a great deal of attention in recent years of sociolinguistic research (e.g. Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Jørgensen et al., 2011; Leppänen & Häkkinen, 2012). Globalisation results in super-diversity not only because recent patterns of migration have led to increasingly diverse make-up of populations, but also because individuals’ possible expressions of identity and affiliations with socio-cultural values have become more complex and less predictable. This kind of diversity, according to Vertovec (2007: 1044–45), calls for attention to the interaction of multiple social variables and for qualitative studies of the local micropolitics of everyday interaction (Amin, 2002: 960). Micro-ethnographic analysis is well tuned to attend to everyday interaction, pass beyond old binaries of majority/minority and engage with the complexities of situated social identification (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011). Vertovec’s call for microinteractional research rests in the realisation that super-diversity highlights the inadequacy of large scale research counting numbers and categories within sociology. My argument is that this goes for sociolinguistic research as well. Merely correlating speech forms with categories will not capture the sociolinguistic reality of super-diversity. As one of the guiding principles of a sociolinguistics in super-diversity, Blommaert and Rampton (2011: 12) point to the importance of remaining aware of what Silverstein (1985) refers to as ‘the total linguistic fact’, as he notes that the object of study of a science of language should be ‘sign forms contextualised to situations of interested human use and mediated by the fact of cultural ideology’ (1985: 220). This of course means that micro-analysis of contextualised human use should not only inform studies of sign forms, but the study of situated use needs to consider the elements of wider ranging ideology and patterns of available resources as well. Admittedly, this book is mostly concerned with practice and use, but I regularly relate to dimensions of linguistic forms as well as ideology by discussing other research. It is often argued that sociolinguistic research on language in interaction is very different from sociolinguistic research on the distribution of linguistic varieties, and, further, that it answers different types of questions.11 But works such as Sebba (1993), Rampton (1995, 2006) and Jaspers (2005, 2008) show what studies of situated linguistic practice can gain from taking into account the wider sociolinguistic distribution and history of linguistic resources. In addition, I propose that research on situated practice can contribute significantly to the interpretation of broader patterns of distribution and change described by variationist sociolinguistics. In a Danish context, work statistically correlating

Preliminaries

13

linguistic forms with social categories has found that new linguistic forms are predominantly used by ‘multiethnic’ male youth groups. These findings have led to the suggestion that gender and ethnicity are influential in ongoing linguistic developments in the Danish capital (e.g. Quist, 2005; Maegaard, 2007; see Torgersen et al., 2006 for similar findings in London). In addition, recent Danish sociolinguistic studies suggest that language and class are no longer closely associated. Differences in social status, defined in the traditional sense as belonging to a class of a certain educational and occupational level, have lost a clear connection with particular linguistic varieties. Therefore, it is suggested that traditional class-related speech varieties are no longer relevant to adolescents in contemporary culturally diverse environments (e.g. Maegaard, 2007; Kristiansen, 2009), and instead ethnicity is emphasised as the key differentiating category for language use. In this book, I look into the situated use of some of the new linguistic resources that variationist research has identified as multiethnic, and I argue that this approach can reveal a great deal to studies of language variation and change. Studying the functions of particular linguistic resources in identity work helps us gain knowledge about the social values that speakers (rather than analysts) ascribe to language forms, and it shows, for example, that the new linguistic practices previously interpreted as ethnic by variationists (due to their more frequent occurrence among multiethnic groups of speakers), actually often index masculinity and ‘societal low’. Thus, variationist sociolinguistics provides useful insights into the distributional patterns of linguistic forms which in turn tell us something about wider norms. It is the pattern of usage that makes linguistic forms available for language users’ more or less conscious social work and style shifting (Silverstein, 2003). Still, approaches that prioritise pre-defined categories of class and ethnicity inevitably struggle to capture how social power differences are invoked in linguistic practices, but by using the methods of interaction analysis and ethnography we can grasp the interplay of social categories and see that the values of minority/ majority are interwoven with male/female, young /adult and high/low (to mention only the most obvious).

Field Methods, Participants and Data From August 2004 to June 2005, I collected my data in the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club. Before this, I had informed the board of the club about the study and my interest in social relationships and linguistic practice among the children and adolescents. The board members were keen for the club to be the focus of a research project (this was not the first time, see

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

Anderson, 2005, 2006) and did not wish the club’s name to be anonymous. I carried out observation in the club three to four days a week from 4pm to about 7pm, when the youngest members had typically left. I was also present at a few fighting competitions during weekends in the fieldwork period. Based on my observations, I chose to focus on 16 children and teenagers who agreed to participate in my study12. From October 2004, the participants recorded themselves during their time in the club before and after the training sessions. The collection of self-recordings continued throughout the time of the fieldwork. From December 2004, I collected video recordings of group conversations among the participants, after this I carried out group interviews, and towards the end of the fieldwork period, I interviewed each participant individually (all interviews were audio recorded, see timeline of fieldwork in Figure 1.1). I had many years of experience with taekwondo and the club before I began my research. Most of my informants I had known for several years before I carried out my study, and it would be impossible, and also pointless, to leave out my pre-research knowledge. I began practising taekwondo in 1989 in a club in a small town in North West Sealand, where I achieved the black belt in 1995 (At the time of the fieldwork I had achieved the degree of 3rd Dan). Since 1996, I have been a member of the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club and have participated regularly in the adult red-black belt classes. I became a children’s instructor in 1997, and in cooperation with my brother I taught most of the children’s basic technique classes until January 2002. I have been a member of the board in the club from 2000–2004, where I have, in particular, been engaged in children’s matters (and social activities outside training sessions for adult members). I also taught the girls’ class from 2003 until two months before beginning the fieldwork.

Figure 1.1 Data collection

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15

On the one hand, my former relation to the field of study left me with particular advantages. I was, as a familiar co-member, met with an open-minded and trusting attitude towards my research, and I had easy access to the field. I did not have to spend a major part of the time in the field seeking background knowledge, such as information about the characteristics of taekwondo practice and the formal organisational structures in the club. Instead, I could concentrate on the social practices among the youngest members. During interactions with me, the children and adolescents in the club could (and did) refer to past experiences, practices and names without having to explain every detail, and I have, throughout my research, been able to draw on far more extensive knowledge than I could otherwise have obtained during the limited time available for the fieldwork in connection with a funded project. On the other hand, my situation entailed certain limitations and challenges. Participant-observers can fruitfully gain from alternating between high involvement and more distant observation (Duranti, 1997: 102). It is important to approach involvement in the field with an open-minded understanding of the practices, but involvement that is too intense can entail the danger of ‘going native’ (Bryman, 2001; De Laine, 1997), and a degree of distance is crucial to the interpretation and analysis of the observed practices (Gulløv & Højlund, 2003).The fact that I was already a familiar member of the community of the club when I began my observations meant that I could perhaps not as freely undertake a role as a researcher in the club. In my case, it would have made no sense to restrict my interaction with friends and acquaintances I had known for years when I carried out my research in the club, so I did not. I was an involved participant and interacted in the way I would usually do with other club members during the fieldwork. This also meant that occasionally I was disturbed in my observations of the children, for example, if an adult friend wanted to talk to me and I had to change my focus of attention. I was also sometimes expected to carry out other functions in the club while I was observing (such as answering questions from children and parents or fetching games for the children in the café). Yet, although I was treated as a native member of the club, I was, because of my age, obviously not a complete participant in the young members’ peer-group, and in relation to the children and teenagers, I could often assume a more observing role as an accepted by-stander (Duranti, 1997: 101)13. It was a challenge to carry out observations in this very dynamic environment where more than 200 children and adolescents arrived, practised and left during the week. Therefore, I developed criteria of initial selection. I focused my observations on practices and interactions among

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

the children before and after the taekwondo practice. The main reason for this was that the taekwondo sport itself, and the organised training, was never my intended research focus. Rather, I was interested in the young members’ participation in the community of practice surrounding the sports activities. During training sessions, social practices are strictly organised according to specific rules, and linguistic interaction is in principle not allowed (see Chapter 2). This does not mean that linguistic interaction does not take place. There is no doubt that self-recordings from participants during practice would have been an interesting addition to my data collection. Still, wearing recording-equipment while practising martial art (jumping, falling, running, grapping, kicking and punching each other) is difficult and was for reasons of safety not allowed. This meant that I chose the participants of the study from among members who spent time in the club before and after practice, and decided to leave out the members who arrived just in time to change their clothes and left immediately after practice. I focused my initial observations on which members were spending time and repeatedly interacting with each other, but I also aimed to include both male and female participants of varied age, taekwondo experience and ethnic background. Being an adult researcher studying children implies certain issues of power difference. In most communities adults compared to children have more influence, higher status and more access to information. Field roles though, as Gulløv and Højlund (2003) note, are never just ‘(…) direct functions of age. Roles are negotiable and defined by many social parameters and individual interests’ (Gulløv & Højlund, 2003: 91, my translation). As a participant in the taekwondo club I was, nevertheless, in a position to comment on, restrict and correct the children’s behaviour in the club, whereas they were not in a position to direct my behaviour. In addition, as an instructor, I was potentially in a position to give advice and make decisions in relation to technical taekwondo matters; I was in possession of a key to the club; and I could freely use the club facilities, whereas the children were dependent on permission from an adult office-worker. During the fieldwork, I was of course also an academic carrying out a study, but my relationship to the participants during the collection in general was rarely emphasised as that of the role of a researcher. This role became most prominent during interviews. Association with the (former) trainer role did not only entail authoritarian features. A children’s instructor was, compared to other adults in and outside the club, also more familiar to the young members because of shared experiences and frequent interaction. And although I had carried out some disciplinary functions, I had always emphasised friendly, relaxed and humorous contact with the young people in the club. I experienced my

Preliminaries

17

relationship with the participants, in spite of being asymmetric in some ways, as mainly characterised by sympathy and trust developed during our years of mutual engagement in the club activities14. A final aspect, which I found to be relevant to my field relations, was the aspect of gender. I am female, and during the fieldwork, in addition to my usual use of feminine stylistic features outside training sessions (long hair, skirts, make-up and dresses), I transported around with me a visible pregnancy. A pregnant woman was an unfamiliar identity in the club community, and it prevented me from actively practising the sport. In that sense it enhanced my status as former practitioner and instructor. My history of practices in the club and of interactions with the children was not dominated by traditional feminine characteristics. I had shouted Korean commands, demonstrated push-ups, taught the children forceful kicks and always attempted to take a similar approach to the taekwondo practice as the male instructors. During the fieldwork, however, I experienced to a degree, rather classically, that my gender identity was an advantage in relation to the female participants and a limitation in relation to the male participants. It was clear that in particular the younger boys (where the distance in age was also greater) during single interviews were sometimes reluctant to speak to me, but I cannot be sure that this was caused by the gender difference in particular. In general the interviews with the girls lasted longer than the interviews with the boys (apart from interviews with the oldest boys), and the boys appeared more comfortable when I talked to them in groups, which I mostly did. All these field relations, previous experiences and identity categories are potentially relevant to the understanding of the collected data. Still, the effect on the construction of data should not be assumed a priori, but considered in the data analysis.

Participants The 16 participants, chosen on the basis of my initial observations, had all practised taekwondo for a minimum of one year in the club. I chose not to include complete beginners, because I wanted their voluntary participation to be based on repeated experiences as members of the club community. This excluded the most peripheral members among the young people in the club, but the membership statuses among the participants still vary significantly. The main criterion for my choice of participants was the friendship connections between them, observable as frequent interactions and participation in joint practices. The participants appeared to form five different friendship groups. The observed friendship relations among the group members were confirmed in the interviews. None of

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

the groups were gender mixed. In general, I observed noticeably little interaction between male and female children and adolescents. The groups also appeared to be largely divided according to age. I will refer to the three groups of boys as simply: boys, 1, 2 and 3 (with 1 being the youngest boys and 3 being the oldest) and to the two groups of girls as: girls 1 (the youngest) and 2 (the oldest)15. A list of the groups and their members can be seen in Table 1.1. Selected background variables of the participants are also listed in the table. Some are traditional sociological variables such as gender, age and ethnic background, and one, taekwondo experience (belt colour), is more specific to the community of practice (see Table 2.1, Chapter 2, for hierarchical order of belt colours). In addition, I have listed parents’ occupational status in the table as it was explained to me during the individual interviews. Some of the participants, however, were rather unclear in their answers as to what their parents did. Most of the children lived in the local area of Nørrebro, apart from Iris, Anna and Tim, who lived in Emdrup and Frederiksberg (areas stereotypically associated with higher social status than Nørrebro). Ilias attended an Arabic private school and Murat attended a Danish private school, but all other participants went to the local public schools.

Data The data were recorded in interactions with other participants they would otherwise interact with in the club16. The data consist of audio-recorded self-recordings from the participants (on mp3 players); video recorded group conversations, which I recorded on a still camera in a table tennis room in the club while the children, without me present, were engaged in activities (making a poster called ‘A day in the taekwondo club’ from their own photos, or a collage of ‘boyish’ and ‘girlish’ pictures from the free postcards, Go-cards); and audio-recorded semi-structured qualitative interviews. I have recorded one interview with each group listed above (although Ahmet did not participate in any group interview) and one individual interview with each participant17. The group interviews all turned out to be different, some lasted 30 minutes and some 1 hour, and different topics were emphasised in each interview. In all, I collected about 25 hours of recordings. These data are supplemented by my observations (documented by notes, lists, drawings and maps); a range of club documents (lists of members, internal informational documents, meetings reports and texts on the club webpage); the participants’ photo documentation; the posters they produced during the group conversations; participants’ profiles on the internet

Preliminaries

19

Table 1.1 Participants listed according to friendship group, gender, age, ethnic background, belt colour and parents’ occupation. Group/ Pseudonym

Belt colour

Age

Ethnic background

Parents’ occupation

Yusuf

10

Blue with red line

Father: kitchen help Mother: secretary

Tim

10

Green

Father: musician (lives in Spain) Mother: not working

Zaki

10

Moroccan (born in Denmark) Danish-Polish (born in Spain, came to Denmark at the age of 6) Moroccan- Iraqi (born in Denmark)

Red with two black lines

Father: working (but does not know with what) Mother: not working

Pakistani (born in UK, came to Denmark as a baby) Pakistani (born in Denmark) Pakistani (born in Denmark) Palestinian (born in Denmark)

Red with one black line

Father: small shop keeper Mother: not working

Red

Father: works at greengrocer Mother: not working

Blue with red line

Father: taxi driver Mother: not working

Red

Father: hairdresser Mother: hairdresser

Moroccan (born in Denmark) Moroccan (born in Morocco, came to Denmark as a baby)

Blue

Father: retired Mother: not working

Black (1st Dan)

Father: primary school teacher (lives in Jutland) Mother: primary school teacher

Boys 1:

Boys 2: Mohammed

13

Micas

10

Usher

11

Ahmet

11

Boys 3: Fouad

15

Ilias

14

(Continued)

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

Table 1.1 (Continued) Group/ Pseudonym

Age

Ethnic background

Belt colour

Murat

14

Afghan (but parents grew up in Pakistan, born in Denmark)

Black (1st Dan)

Father: retired Mother: incapacity benefits

Girls 1: Anna

11

Danish

Blue

Michelle

12

Danish

Blue

Iris

11

Moroccan (born in Denmark)

Orange

Father: engineer Mother: psychology teacher at nurse college Father: plumber Mother: receptionist Father: work in clothes production Mother: not working

Girls 2: Misha

15

Black belt (1st Dan)

Father: engineer (lives in Taiwan) Mother: educated veterinarian (but pursuing further education in different field)

Ling

15

Green

Father: (lives in Thailand) Mother: no work info

Malena

15

TaiwaneseMexican (born in Taiwan, lived in Mexico and came to Denmark at the age of 3) Thai (born in Thailand came to Denmark at the age of 11) Polish (born in Poland came to Denmark at the age of 7)

Red with two black lines

Father: (lives in Poland) Mother: incapacity benefits

Parents’ occupation

Preliminaries

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chat homepage, Arto; a few replay sessions where I discussed recordings with the participants; and interviews with adult members. During the fieldwork I carried out one interview with the children’s main instructor, but I also had access to transcripts of interviews with black belts from the club carried out by a journalist in connection with a planned publication (see Chapter 2).

Approaching Identity in Interaction The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of my work build on a varied collection of insights and resources from modern sociology (e.g. Bourdieu, 1991; Giddens, 1984), theories of indexicality and interactional sociolinguistics (such as Agha, 2007; Blommaert, 2005; Gumperz, 1982; Heller, 2007; Jørgensen, 2010; and Rampton, 1995, 2006) as well as conversation analytical work (e.g. Goodwin, 2006; Zimmerman, 1998). The theoretical frameworks are introduced and discussed in connection with the empirical analyses in the chapters to come, but an introduction to my overall approach to identity in interaction is useful at this point. Identity has been a central concern in sociology and sociolinguistics for the past 40 years (with the influence of, for instance, Erikson, 1968 and Goffman, 1963) and it is one of the most widely used concepts in social sciences and humanities (Bendle, 2002). While a popular research topic, identity is also a highly contested concept (e.g. Hall, 2000), and its usefulness as analytical category has been questioned (e.g. Bendle, 2002; Brubaker & Cooper, 2000). The problem with identity in contemporary research relates to the highly varied use of the concept resulting in undertheorised and vague accounts (Bendle, 2002: 1). Current approaches to identity within sociolinguistics are influenced by poststructuralist thinking and emphasise the flexibility and fluidity of identities. The account of acts of identity by Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) represents this flexible view in relation to language use, and has been highly influential within sociolinguistics. Since then, sociolinguistic approaches to identity have developed and been significantly nuanced in the pursuit of locating identity work in interaction and linguistic practice. Examples of this are Blommaert (2005) and Coupland (2007), who emphasise that identity work does not merely involve strategic controlled acts, but through semiotic displays social category associations may ‘leak’ from our behaviour in less controlled ways (Coupland, 2007: 111). In addition, a central part of identity work is the ascription and reception of social category belonging by others (Blommaert, 2005: 206; see also Agha, 2007: 234).

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

So, if identity is already so well researched and criticised as an analytical concept, why do we need another book about it? The answer to this is that identity continues to be a relevant category of practice (Brubaker & Cooper, 2000: 4), and this is how it is approached in this study. Ascription of and identification with social categories have important consequences for human social life in general and for processes of social marginalisation and contestation. The field I study is no exception to this. The participants are often categorised as ‘minority youth’, they identify and label others as ‘fighter’, ‘paki’, ‘tough girl’, etc. and they bring about stereotypical associations with identities through their communicative acts. To gain a comprehensive understanding of how the children and adolescents participate in a club community, negotiate their place in the social order and relate to wider societal processes, consideration of identities can hardly be overlooked. Dealing with identity as a category of practice means that the analytical focus is in fact practice; that is, contextualised social, semiotic and linguistic acts. The aim of my research is not to describe what identity is and the end point of my research is not identity as situated achievements of one or another social role. I do not finish my analysis by concluding, for instance, that in these excerpts Ilias performs a streetwise identity. I consider identity work to be stories we tell about social belonging through linguistic and other semiotic practices in situated activities. With the underpinnings of sociolinguistic and interactional approaches to identities and language, I study these practices and their links to reach the end point of my research, namely to contribute to discussions of cultural diversity, language and social categorisation as aspects of the social life and societal conditions of contemporary urban youth. Processes of identification and categorisation involve positioning on different social levels. Participants in a social encounter may relate to different social roles with respect to the activity of interacting (as speakers, listeners, storytellers, etc.), the activity type they are engaged in during the interaction or the genre relevant to the situation at hand (a job interview, casual talk with friends etc.), or more wide scale sociocultural frames (gender, ethnicity, age and class relations). All of these interpretive frames are dealt with under the headline of ‘identity’ in interactional and sociolinguistic research. Indeed, we may not gain much analytical precision from covering this broad scope of social processes with the concept of identity, and accounts of identity in interactional and sociolinguistic work suggest various sub-concepts to separate the levels of analysis (e.g. Coupland, 2007: Chapter 5; Zimmerman, 1998).

Preliminaries

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I combine analytical perspectives addressing different levels of context18. I do this to investigate the links between social categorisation and semiotic practices in the here-and-now situations as well as the historical and socio-cultural embeddedness of the resources used. I take into account a level of what I call a sequential context with an analytical focus on how turns-at-talk relate to one another in a stretch of conversation. What do the individual turns do? What are the displayed reactions and alignments in the following turns by other participants? But also, how are the utterances composed with respect to accent, grammar and word choice, and how does the form relate to their function? In addition, I consider what I refer to as the situational context and the types of activities relevant to the interaction. What are the participants engaged in during the conversation? Where does the interaction take place? Who are present? And what type of conversation is it? There might well be several simultaneously relevant activities going on in a specific situation. They may be playing cards in the café and having a casual chat that involves a ritual insult activity, for instance, or stamping a train ticket at the station whilst discussing their test results in school. I also include a level of relational context which involves the social relationship between the participants, and their former interactional history (to the extent that I have access to this in my data). Finally, I discuss institutional, moral or ideological codes, values and identities possibly made relevant, reproduced or negotiated during a particular sequence of interaction on a level of socio-cultural context. Different normative orientations are relevant within specific socio-cultural domains and spaces, and a multiplicity of these normative domains may coexist19 Thereby the context levels are not treated or to be understood as separate or independent. They are simultaneous perspectives which inform and influence each other, and they correspond to particular analytical conceptions. Incorporating such different analytical perspectives is a way of grasping the multiscalar layering of social interaction (Blommaert, 2010). I start with a close look at what happens in the interactions between the participants. I am aware that these interactions are situated within a particular community and take into account how this is reflected in the conduct of the participants. This means that I also carry out ethnographic analysis across interactions within the club. The community relates to a larger field of Danish association sports in which particular discourses and ideologies are negotiated and to even more global principles of human social organisation (such as widespread social meanings ascribed to gender categories or age differences). Local interactional practices within the club community

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might invoke broader ideological discourses as well as more communityspecific ones. At the same time, interactions between members constitute the club community and its social meaning making.

Outline of the Book In the introduction I laid out the overall argument of this book: that studying the details of interactional activities among a group of young martial arts practitioners significantly complicates the picture drawn by influential societal discourses on cultural diversity. In addition, it complicates the understanding of contemporary sociolinguistic processes that we reach from studying the distribution of language forms. As I have demonstrated, tendencies towards cultural and ethnic essentialism can be traced in public discourses as well as in some recent sociolinguistic research. A central assumption of the work in this book is that complications constructively add to our knowledge of language, identities and cultural diversity (see also Blommaert & Dong, 2010). This way of arguing is characteristic of the epistemology of linguistic ethnography. The relation between the specific case and its wider socio-historical context is dealt with in relation to the studied martial arts club in Chapter 2. The chapter involves an introductory macro-contextualisation and a discussion of the club as part of the field of sports in Denmark as well as considerations of the historical background of the club, its location and the particularities of the sport (building on Bourdieu’s 1994, 1996 theoretical framework). I further consider the individuals’ social practices and identity positioning on the level of the friendship groups in the club and the relevance of social identity categories and sports skills to the social order and status hierarchies within the club informed by the analytical concept of community of practice (Wenger, 1998). I find that an orientation towards sports as competitive activity or mutual social fellowship is central to the participation and positioning in the club, and I discuss these ethnographic observations in relation to the prevalent assumptions in sports-politics and among sports practitioners that leisure clubs are potential sites for societal integration. Thus, for readers with an interest in the sociology of sports, this part of the book is of particular relevance. In the study of a martial arts club, the sports activity itself stereotypically connotes traditional masculine values, and my analyses of the social organisation and conduct of the club members (presented in Chapter 2) indeed suggest that femininity represents a minority category within the club community. The club makes different ways of participating available by offering a gender exclusive girls’ class, and

Preliminaries

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those who choose the girls-only class are positioned as and remain very peripheral members. In addition, aspects of gender identity play a part in both the societal discourses and the sociolinguistic research discussed above. Finally, gender identities are made relevant by the participants in their presentations in interviews where gender stereotypes are reproduced and, in particular by the oldest girls, partly challenged. In Chapter 3, I discuss interactional means of negotiating social status and alliances in playful and less playful interactional practices among the girls and boys in the club. I relate the data to interactional sociolinguistic accounts of frames and contextualisation conventions (based on Gumperz, 1982; Lytra, 2007). In line with Goodwin’s (2006) work on interactional negotiations between school girls, my data suggest that the girls are strongly concerned with processes of inclusion and exclusion. In contrast to this, I find that the boys’ conversations are characterised by explicit demonstrations and claims of competence often embedded within (mostly playful) competitive interactional activity types. This leads me to suggest that the dimensions of competition and social fellowship pointed to in Chapter 2 can be traced on the micro-level of interactional practices among the girls and the boys in the club. A tendency of research in Western Europe over the past three decades has been to focus on particular speech styles developing in urban multicultural communities. As pointed out in Section ‘Field Methods, Participants and Data’, research on these speech styles tends to foreground ethnicity as an explanatory category through the labelling and the interpretations of contemporary urban youth language. In Chapter 4, I discuss how the foregrounding of ethnic relationships in professional research discourse contributes to a particular positioning of minority youth. The chapter includes a description of the major trends in sociolinguistic development in Copenhagen as well as previous research on the heteroglossic speech style of youth in culturally diverse settings. Based on interactional data from the club illustrating the situated use of linguistic resources associated with the contemporary urban speech style in Copenhagen, I discuss the relevance of ethnicity to these practices. Finally, drawing on Agha’s (2007) theoretical framework for understanding situated communication in relation to wider sociolinguistic developments, I consider the consequences of constructing the object of contemporary urban youth language in certain ways. The final chapter concerned with micro-analysis of interactions is Chapter 5. Here the focus is interactional sequences, where orientation towards youth cultural practices and orientation towards measures of societal success (such as school achievements) are brought together.

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

I analyse sequences where the participants engage in classroom-related activities (such as spelling, discussion of essays, etc.), and discuss how the participants incorporate different cultural frames by bringing peercultural speech practices into educationally focused interactional activities. The analyses make clear how the participants challenge and renegotiate dominant assumptions of a contradiction between mainstream societally accepted behaviour valued in school contexts, and resources for gaining social peer-credibility among youth. After that, I consider the wider relevance of such interactional practices in relation to issues of integration and societal positioning of minority youth, and in relation to sociolinguistic enregisterment (Agha, 2007). An attempt to capture the subtlety and complexities of situated identity work and social relationships in a sports club is not likely to lead to simple, straight-forward conclusions. And this book does not draw such conclusions either. Yet in Chapter 6, I outline some main insights gained from this work and I discuss their possible consequences in relation to the societal positioning of ethnic minority youth and the aspects of current sports sciences and sociolinguistics discussed in the introduction. The journey through everyday encounters of young taekwondo club members throughout the next pages will shed a new light on accounts of culture, identity and integration. We should now be ready to set off.

Notes (1) (2) (3)

Danish: Mehmet og Modkulturen. Personer med anden etnisk baggrund. Bilingual is the term employed in official school statistics to refer to pupils from homes where Danish is not spoken. In practice, however, the term seems to be employed mainly to refer to children of Moslem background (see Karrebæk, 2006: 9). (4) The Ministry of Education emphasises ‘counter culture’ in their publications that relate to the report, and the Danish unions of teachers and nursery teachers (Danmarks Lærerforening and BUPL) have employed the concept of counter culture in a joint contribution to the public debate (see e.g. the feature in the national newspaper Information 26.08.2010). (5) 10.4% immigrants including children born in Denmark of ‘foreign-born’ parents (Statistics Denmark 2012). (6) The current government (2014) has closed down this ministry and instead immigration and integration is dealt with in other ministries, such as the Ministry of Law or the Ministry of Social Affairs. (7) Rennison (2009) identifies eight different discourses on diversity related to the integration debate in Denmark. In addition to the ethnocentric discourse, she identifies a rights- and anti-discrimination-discourse, a discourse on ‘broadness’ and acceptance, an empowerment-discourse and a multiculturalism-discourse (mainly characteristic of human rights organisations, particular political organisations

Preliminaries

(8) (9) (10) (11)

(12)

(13)

(14)

(15)

27

and cultural research). She also identifies a market-discourse, an innovationdiscourse and a competence-discourse (characteristic of the field of business and of a neoliberal ideology). These types of discourses all in different ways emphasise the potential benefits of diversity for businesses. Within this understanding, integration is viewed as an economic issue for society (or individual businesses). Thus, successful integration equals contribution to society by minority members through participation in education and the labour market. According to Rennison, one of the initiating forces behind the moral panic in the Danish debate was an immigrant-sceptical campaign run by the tabloid newspaper Ekstrabladet for about five weeks in the spring of 1997. The idea of the pre-eminence of ethnicity is also firmly embedded within disciplines such as cross-cultural psychology (e.g. Sellers et al., 1998 and see overview in Charmaraman & Grossman, 2010) (http://w w w.nyidanmark.dk /dadk /Integration/puljer/puljebeskrivelser/ det_frivillige_integrationsarbejde_og_deltagelse_i_idraets_og_foreningslivet). Quist (2008: 8) argues in relation to the study of new linguistic practices in multiethnic communities in Copenhagen that a variety perspective and a stylistic practice perspective answer different kinds of questions. Because it does not seek to investigate the nature of categorical identities and their linguistic expressions, research within the variety perspective merely employs identity categories as independent variables. However, the systematic methods of this approach are needed when the goal is to describe linguistic variation (Quist, 2008: 17). The participants were not told specifically what my research focus was. They were told I was working at the university and that I was interested in their social lives in the club, that participation in the study would be anonymous, and that it would involve video and audio recordings of interviews and conversations. The same information was given in a letter of agreement to the parents of the participants, and these were returned to me with the parents’ signature before any recordings were carried out. I usually placed myself in the café with a book (and my notebook), occasionally helped with administrative tasks as described above and frequently chatted to the young members. I did not engage in their practices of playing Playstation games, table football, table tennis, playful fighting or warm up exercises in the gym. Some adult members would occasionally participate in these informal practices with the children, but I had never done so before and chose to stay in the familiar role as part of the audience to the various competitive activities. This position appeared the most unremarkable and was a convenient position, in between observation and participation, with good possibilities of note-taking. This attitude to me is suggested, for instance, by the way some of the girls were not afraid to voice a critical opinion about another instructor and did not hesitate to express their dislike for the taekwondo discipline of basic technique, well knowing that I, as their former instructor, had always emphasised the importance and quality of technique. Likewise, the boys openly told me about fellow members’ rule-breaking behaviour. Two of the participants were only partly group members (their pseudonyms are written in italics in Table 1.a). Ahmet caught my interest because I noticed that he did not seem attached to any particular friendship group. Instead, his participation in activities in several different groups appeared to be accepted. One of the groups he interacted with was boys 2, and I decided to include him in the study. I recorded

28

(16)

(17)

(18)

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group conversations between the members of the boys’ group 2 both with and without Ahmet’s presence. The group interview with boys 2 was carried out without Ahmet present. Iris was also only partly associated with girls 1. The younger girls formed friendship dyads rather than groups of three or more. Initially, I asked both Iris and her closest friend in the club to participate, but her friend’s parents did not approve of her participation. Iris did, however, frequently interact with the two other members of girls’ group 1, but would normally be accompanied by her friend. The girls reported an understanding of their relationships as two pairs of best friends. Iris was present at both group conversation and group interview with girls 1. All recorded data, apart from the self-recordings (of which only the sequences in focus are transcribed) were transcribed in a preliminary version by me or a student assistant according to the CHAT-format of the CHILDES conventions (MacWhinney, 1995). I initially chose this format because I was already familiar with the conventions and I was interested in developing a data-corpus potentially suitable for supplemental quantitative analysis as well (in this work I have not made use of this potential). During the micro-analysis I listened through the sequences in focus repeatedly, including the ones from the self-recordings. I spent at least two hours on each sequence (often a lot longer). I adjusted and developed the transcripts during the analysis. The final versions presented here are by large transcribed according to what Steensig refers to as minimal CA conventions (Steensig, 2005) which build on Jefferson’s transcription system (Sacks et al., 1974). During the interview, I attempted a relaxed conversation, but had in advance an idea of a number of topics I wanted to discuss. At appropriate points during the interactions I initiated the topics listed in this loosely structured (memorised) interview guide: Tell me about a recent experience in the club; Friends in the club; Groups in the club (elaborate on gender relations if they are brought up); What is considered cool in the club?; Reasons for practising Taekwondo; Language (which languages do you speak? and when do you use them?). Blommaert (2010) suggests the notion of sociolinguistic scale to grasp the nature of the social situatedness of language. The scale metaphor is a way of operationalising the connection between micro- and macro-levels of social reality and taking into account a dimension of power hierarchies as well. Scale refers to movement in time and space dominated by particular norms and codes, or as semiotised space and time as Blommaert (2010: 35) describes it. Scale ranges from the local, momentary and subjective to the translocal, timeless, objective – with various potential scale levels in between. This coexistence of norm centres is what is referred to as polycentricity (Blommaert et al., 2005; Silverstein, 1998: 405).

2 Sports, Integration and Participation In the introduction, I sketched out the connection between sports clubs and discourses on integration, and in this chapter, I investigate this connection in more detail through the case of the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club and, notably, the practices of the young members in the club. This, therefore, is the chapter that engages most directly with issues of relevance to readers with an interest in sports and social life. It is regularly assumed among Danish politicians and practitioners in leisure associations that one way of strengthening the integration of marginalised youth is through their participation in organised recreational activities and sports clubs (e.g. Agergaard, 2008; Anderson, 2003, 2005, 2006; Boeskov & Ilkjær, 2005; Madsen, 2012). Common understandings of sports and integration, however, often overlook the more unofficial conditions for participation in these organisations. It is supposed that participants are accepted in a sports club because they share an interest and attend regular meetings, but exactly how members are included in or sometimes excluded from the local social relationships in the community is rarely taken into account. The issue of how a sports club becomes a locally produced normative complex in itself, connected – but not always in straightforward ways – to larger patterns of integration and exclusion, is not addressed. Similarly, the ways participants orient towards the sports skills and the relationship between sports skills and the local status hierarchy in a given sports club are not often considered by socio-political projects or by research reporting on such projects. It can, for instance, be vital to be good at the sport to be accepted by the other members, and what it takes to be considered good at the sport may vary among groups of members. Finally, and in tune with the general Danish integration debate, ethnic differences are foregrounded as the main challenge for integration rather than other socio-cultural dimensions such as gender or social class differences. This understanding of sports as contributing to societal cohesion and sensible socialisation exists both among the adult leaders and many of the practitioners in the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club, but the societal benefits of taekwondo are, as we shall see, presented differently by different participants. 29

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This chapter argues that membership of a sports club does not automatically lead to social cohesion, but that different conditions for participation in the sports activities as well as the local social status relations within the club community need to be taken into account if one wishes to know more about socially incorporating processes. As I will show, being more or less competitively engaged in the martial art is significant to the young members’ involvement in this club, as are aspects of gender and age. Ultimately, my study problematises the conceptualisation of social processes entailed by the notion of integration as it is commonly used. I begin the chapter with a description of the historical background of the club, its location and the particularities of the martial art. In this sense, this chapter also provides the contextualisation for the following chapters of the book. Next, I discuss the club as part of the field of sports in Denmark to illustrate how the participants’ ways of being involved in the sport can be linked to more general logics of sports engagement. After this, I consider the participants’ group affiliations and their social positioning on the level of friendship groups. My analysis is informed by Bourdieu’s (1994, 1996) field theory and the concept of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), and it leads to a discussion of integration based on considerations of the relevance of different social identity categories to the social order and power dynamics within the community of practice of the club. In this chapter, I do not go into detailed micro-analysis of the language use and interactions of the taekwondo practitioners. Instead, I draw on participants’ perspectives as they are presented in the interviews and on the ethnographic observations of their regular conduct. I consider, for instance, to what extent the participants engage in practices related to a competitive dimension of the sport, like fighting, training or competitions. How do they view the social groupings in the club? How are the different groups reacted to and referred to by other children and adolescents in the club? And what symbolic qualities are valued? The chapter, then, can be read as the first step of an argument that gives a sense of the relevant social dynamics and categorisations in this community and point? to areas worth considering further when one wishes to investigate sports clubs as socialising and possibly integrating sites.

The Nørrebro Taekwondo Club The Nørrebro Taekwondo Club was founded in 1982. Initially, the training sessions were held in gyms at local schools in Nørrebro and later the club rented rooms in old factories in the area. In the beginning of the year 2000, the club moved to its present accommodation (over 1000 m 2

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divided into three training halls, a café, a gym, changing rooms and offices, see Figure 2.1 for map of the club) in a building owned by a local fund for pensioners (‘Nord-Vest Fonden for Folke-og Invalidepensionister’). An extensive refurbishment of the club was funded partly by the City Council of Copenhagen through the Culture and Leisure Administration, with the purpose of supporting the establishment of sports facilities in the area. The new accommodation meant new possibilities for activities. Within three years of the move, the number of members grew from less than 100 in the year 2000 to more than 300 in 2003. At the time when my data collection took place, the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club was one of the largest taekwondo clubs in Denmark. The exact number of members is difficult to determine, especially among the children and adolescents, since some might pay, but only actively participate a few times, while others might join practice with their friends without paying, and only paying members are registered. Based on my observations of the young people participating in the various classes, at least 200 members between 7 and 15 years of age were active during this period, about 80% of these were boys, and about 90% had an ethnic and/or linguistic minority background. Among the adult members the figures were different, in particular with respects to ethnicity: about 70% were men and about 20% had a linguistic and/or ethnic minority background.

Figure 2.1 Map of the club

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The taekwondo club was partly organised as a traditional Danish democratic association, with a members-elected board in charge of finances and common decisions. At the same time, the club, in accordance with the traditions of the martial art, had an explicit hierarchical structure. The highest authority was the master, who had the most taekwondo experience and this was signified by his belt grade. Age and taekwondo grading influenced the democratic practices as well, because one had to be of a certain age and have a certain belt grade to have voting rights. Age, belt grade, gender and taekwondo discipline all worked as governing principles with respect to the formal structures of the daily activities. Figure 2.2 illustrates the formal hierarchal structure of the club and the activities. The figure is a simplified illustration of the formal hierarchal organisation of the activities in the club, as it is difficult to capture all the principles of hierarchy and division of power in one figure. The figure does not account for the power positions of individuals, since each individual member could be placed in various different boxes in the figure. For instance, a member of the board could be a practitioner in the adult basic technique class of blue-green belts. The individual power positions are highly dependent on context and could be captured through analysis of situated interactions among members (as we shall see in Chapters 3, 4 and 5). The figure only

Figure 2.2 Hierarchical organisation and activities in the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club. The top of the figure represents the top of the hierarchy.

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illustrates the structural hierarchy of the organisation and the position of abstract categories within the club at the time of the data collection. On top of the formal hierarchy was the board. The chairman and the members of the board (six, including the treasurer) were elected by the members according to the democratic rules of the club (as described above). They had the formal power to decide everything to do with the running of the club, and they did so by classical democratic voting processes. In a taekwondo-hierarchical sense though, the master was the absolute authority. The chairman often discussed board matters with him, the master’s opinion was taken very seriously, and it was highly unlikely that the board would decide anything directly against the master’s expressed will. In theory, the board could decide to go against the master’s will (they could even decide to terminate cooperation with him), but in practice the master was treated as the highest authority. Consequently, I have placed master and board next to each other at the top of the hierarchy. By decision of the board a training committee had been established. This committee was not members-elected. The members of this committee were partly members of the board and partly appointed experienced black belt instructors from the club. The committee dealt with all the specific taekwondo issues in the club. It decided what classes should be taught and by whom. It developed the instructors’ education and was in charge of belt graduations. It had the authority to make decisions about these issues independently, but it worked in close cooperation with the board and the master. Since the board had established the committee, I have placed it just under the board and the master in the hierarchy. On the next level, I have placed the various instructors in the club. The instructors were chosen among skilled black belts, and they were given the power to make all decisions during the training sessions they led. They were educated, advised and (to a certain extent) controlled by the board, the master and the training committee. I have placed the instructors higher in the hierarchy than the class of the adult black-red belts. All the instructors were also practitioners in the black-red belt class, which was taught by the master or, if he was not present, the most experienced black belt. But black belts (and red belts) who were not instructors did not have formal power over any practitioners. In the rest of the figure, the classes are placed in the hierarchy according to the level of taekwondo experience (the belt grade and a list of the order of belt colours can be found in Table 2.1 in Section ‘Taekwondo – history, practices, principles and ideologies’). They are also divided according to taekwondo discipline (fighting, basic technique and competition technique), age and one class according to gender. The age division was

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not strict. Members could participate in children’s classes between the age of 7 and 15, but from the age of 12 they could also choose the youth class. The youth class was an option for the 12–17 year olds, but from the age of 15 one was also allowed to participate in the adult classes (very few young members did so before the age of 18). All the classes were gender mixed, except for the girls’ class. The girls’ class was established as an alternative option for girls who might not wish to practise with boys. The class was for girls only and taught by female instructors. It was originally aimed at girls from the local Moslem immigrant community, whose parents (the board assumed) might prefer them not to practise in gender-mixed classes. Instead, it resulted in 80% of the girls in the club between 7 and 15 leaving the gender-mixed classes in favour of this class, only a few of them with Moslem background. All belt colours practised together in this class, since the number of girls was too small to separate them into belt-graded groups. The children’s classes are placed lower in the hierarchy than the adult classes at the same level of experience. This is because age also worked as a structuring power principle, both according to taekwondo traditions and in society as a whole (in particular the relationship between adults and children). During training sessions where adults and children practised together (for example in the fighting class), a black belt adult would be of higher formal authority than a black belt child, but a black belt child would be of higher authority than a blue belt adult. This was, for instance, displayed by their placement during training (higher belts placed in front or to the right of lower belts). The taekwondo club was more than just the training sessions. The café area in the club was open for children every day before and after the martial arts practice and therefore functioned as a place to hang out as well. Children, under the supervision of one or more adult members, played table football, Playstation, board games, listened to music or talked. In the context of the café, the taekwondo experience did not formally count at all. The responsible adult had the authority over any children present no matter what belt grade she or he was. The power relations outside training sessions were not formally structured in the same way as during the sessions, and this is the reason why the café and office workers are placed outside the hierarchical system. A few of the other activities are also difficult to place within the system. These are classes without belt grading: The toddler’s class for children aged 4–6, which was a taekwondo-based play session, the meditation class (open to anyone interested) and the senior class, which was a very gentle version of taekwondo movements aimed at the elderly pensioners. The senior class was taught by the master and was established as part of a project aimed

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at creating trust between the elderly from Nørrebro and young immigrant youth (this particular project is described in Section ‘The club within the field’). The taekwondo club was placed on the border between Nørrebro and the north West area of Copenhagen. The club, however, strongly identified with the local community of Nørrebro (hence the name of the club). This had, of course, a historical explanation – the club had originally been placed in different locations in the centre of Nørrebro. But it also possibly related to the reputation, characteristics and values generally ascribed to the area.

Nørrebro – population and reputation Nørrebro is the area of Copenhagen located beyond the historic city centre and the old Northern Gate of the original city walls (dismantled in 1856). Since the end of the 19th century, when extensive building work was carried out in the area because of the explosive increase of the population in Copenhagen, Nørrebro has traditionally been populated predominantly by working class people. During the 1970s, many working-class families moved to the suburbs of Copenhagen, and many immigrants settled in this part of the city. Today, Nørrebro is one of the most densely populated and heterogeneous districts in the capital. According to the council statistics1 at the time of the fieldwork, 27.9% of the population in Nørrebro was immigrants or children of immigrants, with 22.0% from non-Western countries.2 Nørrebro also has the highest number of citizens receiving social benefits, compared to other areas of Copenhagen.3 Nørrebro, then, is characterised by comparably large multiethnic communities (often described by Danish media as immigrant ghettos) and material disadvantage. But at the same time the district has a high concentration of students, a great variety of cultural activities (clubs, shops and cafés) and a reputation as one of the most urban, metropolitan and diverse parts of the Danish capital. The media attention to Nørrebro, however, often focuses on topics framed as problems related to the multiethnic communities, such as educational underachievement in the public schools with a high concentration of bilingual children (in many of them as high as 80–90% of the pupils), problems with integration, violence, drug dealing and other criminal activities by young immigrant gangs in the area. The specific location of the club in the area is interesting. It was placed right next to one of the so-called immigrant ghettos most frequently mentioned by the Danish media, and it shared the building with an activity centre for local pensioners used mostly by members of the original

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working-class population of the area (the pensioners’ centre in contrast to the club identified with the North West area, hence the name ‘Nord Vest Centret’ (‘The North West Centre’))4. The young members were predominantly local minority children, whereas the adult members were mainly students or well-educated majority members.

Taekwondo – history, practices, principles and ideologies Taekwondo is a Korean martial art. On the official webpage of the World Taekwondo Federation5 as well as in literature aimed at taekwondo practitioners’ theoretical preparation for belt tests (e.g. Fard, 1990; Jensen, 1993; Kyong An, 1988; Whang et al., 1999), the origin of this martial arts system is traced back several thousand years, based on the archaeological findings in Korea of mural paintings on tomb walls picturing humans in fighting positions. Although not necessarily with a solid basis in academic historical research, more or less the same narrative of the development of taekwondo is reproduced within the taekwondo community worldwide. It is typically divided into three main periods: ancient times, modern times during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910–1945) and modern times after Korea regained independence (1945– present). According to this narrative, in very broad terms, taekwondo developed from various organised weaponless fighting systems which were in ancient times mainly practised in military training. During this period the martial art also developed into a form of competitive sport, practised for example at folk festivals. The more philosophical aspects of the training were influenced by Confucianism and Buddhism. When the traditional martial art, as well as other Korean cultural practices, was suppressed during the period of Japanese rule, Buddhist monks played a significant part in keeping the traditional systems alive, as they were practised in secrecy in Buddhist monasteries. After the Korean liberation from the Japanese occupation, the traditional folkloric games resumed their popularity, and the traditional martial arts systems were combined into one standardised system, which was named taekwondo. Taekwondo gymnasiums were opened all over the country, and after the end of the Korean War (1950–1953), taekwondo masters from South Korea began travelling around the world to teach the martial art. In 1971, taekwondo was nominated as the Korean national sport, and in 1973, the World Taekwondo Federation was established. The history of taekwondo in Denmark began in 1968 when two Dutch black belts went on vacation to a campsite in Jutland. During the summer they taught interested Danes, who began teaching the martial art in their hometowns after the vacation. During the 1970s, Korean masters from

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Holland and Germany visited Denmark regularly. In 1975, the Danish Taekwondo Federation was established, and at this time, about 2000 people were practising taekwondo in Denmark in 28 different clubs around the country. In 1976, the first Korean master, Choi Kyong An, was offered the position of Danish national instructor. He was replaced in 1980 by another Korean master, Ko Tai Jeong, who held the position for 19 years. Ko Tai Jeong was, and still is, the master and chief instructor in the Nørrebro Taekwondo club. 1980 was also the year the Danish Taekwondo Federation (DTaF) was accepted in the national sports federation of Denmark (DIF). Today, taekwondo is still a major sport in Korea. It has gained popularity worldwide and became an Olympic discipline in the year 2000. In the field of sports in Denmark generally, taekwondo must still be considered a relatively minor sport. But with 86 clubs and 5,786 taekwondo practitioners registered in DIF in 2007,6 it is the most popular among the martial arts practised in Denmark. The name, taekwondo, could in brief be translated into ‘the way of the foot and the hand’. Tae refers to: ‘foot, leg and the techniques you can do with your feet and legs’, kwon refers to: ‘hand, fist or arm, and the hand and arm techniques’, and do refers to: ‘the spirit and the way of life’. The more elaborate meaning, then, is a system which combines physical arm and leg techniques with a certain way of thinking and acting in life in general. Taekwondo, as it is practised in Danish clubs today, clearly carries traces of both its history as Korean military fighting training and its influence from Buddhist philosophy. The military influence is obvious in many areas of the taekwondo practice. The basic training consists of warm-up exercises, cardio training (like running and jumping), muscular training (like push-ups, sit-ups and back-extensions) and different stretching and flexibility exercises. The taekwondo movements are practised in various ways. They include hitting techniques, kicks and blockings. A central part of the basic technique training is specific forms, called poomsee, where techniques are demonstrated in certain combinations against imaginary opponents. Training also includes special self-defence exercises and, of course, fighting training aimed at competition. Fighting full contact with body and head protection is the most established and popular competition form (and also the competitive Olympic discipline), but within the taekwondo community competition in poomsee is also an option. Denmark has national competition teams in both disciplines. During practice, the Korean terms for techniques and orders are used, and it is part of the curriculum for belt tests to know these. All of the taekwondo practices are carried out within very disciplined and hierarchical structures. During the training sessions, the practitioners stand in straight lines in a particular order according to

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their belt colour, with the highest degrees in the front and the lowest in the back. They wear a type of uniform (a white loose-fitting cotton suit) with a belt tied around it. The belt colours are the taekwondo equivalent of a military rank system (see Table 2.1), and at all times during practice an individual explicitly displays his degree of taekwondo expertise. During large parts of the practice, everyone carries out the same movements at the same time on the command of the instructor, who counts out loud. The instructor is the absolute authority. Pupils show her or him respect by greeting and responding to corrections with a standing bow. The instructor is also in a position to punish pupils if they do not follow orders or obey the general rules. The punishment typically involves push-ups or other physical exercises, much like in military training. It should be noted that within the taekwondo community, and indeed in the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club, the systems of discipline are not understood in relation to military history. Instead, the hierarchical structures are considered to be related to traditional, Korean patriarchal family structures. Instructors frequently make use of a family metaphor to explain the principles of status relations and respect. The master’s role is compared to the family role of the father; the instructors are compared to older brothers and children and beginners to the youngest siblings. This understanding adds a loving and caring dimension to the strict hierarchy and it also concerns ideologies of mutual respect among members. The family metaphor involves the more spiritual side of taekwondo. The spiritual dimension is mostly carried out though moralistic or educational speeches from the instructors. Some training sessions might also include meditation and breathing exercises, but otherwise it is considered to be Table 2.1 Order of belt colours according to World Taekwondo Federation’s rules. The white belt is absolute beginner’s level. Black belt from 1st to 3rd Dan is considered instructor degrees and above 4th Dan is considered master degrees 1st: 2nd: 3rd: 4th: 5th: 6th: 7th: 8th: 9th: 10th:

White White with one yellow line Yellow Orange Green Blue Blue with one red line Red Red with one black line Red with two black lines

11th: 12th: 13th: 14th: 15th: 16th: 17th: 18th: 19th: 20th:

Red with three black lines Black 1st Dan Black 2nd Dan Black 3rd Dan Black 4th Dan Black 5th Dan Black 6th Dan Black 7th Dan Black 8th Dan Black 9th Dan

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through the disciplined and concentrated way of using the body that the ideologies are practised. All taekwondo practitioners are ideally taught to respect the authorities within the taekwondo community (such as older practitioners and practitioners of higher degrees) as well as other people in general, to be well behaved, polite, disciplined, and only use the techniques for self-defence purposes. Instructors emphasise that the ideal spirit of taekwondo is peaceful and therefore it is a defensive, not aggressive, martial art. It clearly varies from club to club and from instructor to instructor how much the traditional principles of discipline and spirituality are emphasised. Of course, there is also variation in how these principles are taken up by Danish youth practising taekwondo. In the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club the practice was strongly influenced by the master, Ko Tai Jeong. He came to Denmark as an extremely skilled taekwondo master, with a background in traditional Korean training methods. During a period in Korea he also practised with Buddhist monks. The training methods in the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club therefore strongly emphasised both traditional discipline and spirituality. Examples of this were the five explicated core values of the club: concentration, patience, responsibility, respect and discipline. These were printed on the wall of the club, displayed on the club web-page7 and regularly referred to by the instructors. Tai Jeong’s approach was characterised by a very modest and polite attitude, which meant that, for instance, showing off taekwondo skills was not appreciated in his view. Since he was the instructor of the black belts’ class and specific instructors’ courses, he had direct influence on the other instructors in the club. This resulted in a relatively uniform approach to the taekwondo instruction throughout the club. In fact, the board would not select black belts as instructors unless they had the so-called ‘right approach’ to taekwondo8. This did not mean that the training was purely built on traditional Korean methods. Danish pedagogical ideas and insights from the sciences of sports influenced the training methods in the club as well. A few examples of this influence were that children were not expected to keep concentration and act disciplined for more than short periods of time, the physical exercise punishments were in general rather symbolic, and in particular during the very frequent competition training on a high level, the strict discipline tended to be replaced by more modern and relaxed methods (the elite fighters did not always stand in lines or wear the taekwondo suit, for instance). One significant aspect of the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club as a community is the specific sports discipline and its inherent principles and practices. These are developed through a combination of the historical background and influence from the science of sports and pedagogy. Another equally

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significant dimension to consider is the club as a participant in the larger field of association sports in Denmark (in Bourdieu’s sense, see e.g. Bourdieu, 1993; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1996). Values and norms circulating in broader discourses within this field could be traced in the everyday practices in the club. In particular, different motivations for engaging in sports played a part in the way the club organised its activities and in the way the children participated in these. The ethnographic study of this martial arts club, however, also nuances the picture drawn by recent sports-sociological work. This describes distinct and contrasting positions within the field of sports as primarily governed by different logics. So, before I show how the logics of welfare and competition (and partly economy) played out in the club and in the participants’ engagement in the sports activities, I will consider a couple of Danish sports-sociological studies in more detail.

The Field of Association Sports in Denmark With a population of just above 5.5 million people, Denmark today has more than 16,000 sports clubs, and 8 out of 10 children have, for a period in their lives, engaged in organised sports (Ibsen & Ottesen, 1996; Pilgaard, 2008). In contrast to what is the case in most countries and elsewhere in Scandinavia (Nordberg, 1998), the Danish field of sports is not structured as one, but as two main organisations on the national level. Both of these receive governmental funds. One is the National Olympic Committee and Sports Confederation of Denmark (DIF), which is the umbrella organisation of 61 national federations (one of them the Danish Taekwondo Federation) and has about 1.7 million members distributed throughout approximately 11,000 clubs. The other is the Danish Gymnastics and Sports Association (DGI) with about 1.5 million members distributed throughout approximately 5,300 clubs. In addition, the Danish Association of Company Sport organises sports activities for company teams, and the Danish Elite Sports Institution, ‘Team Danmark’, deals with sport on an elite level (and cooperates with DIF as well as the individual clubs and associations). DIF and DGI have different historical, geographical and political backgrounds and these have resulted in different views on sport in relation to society and different ideological and political profiles. Anderson (2003) has studied DGI activities from a children’s perspective. She characterises DIF as representing a perspective on sport as cultivated ‘for sport’s sake’, to a higher degree than DGI. DIF views competition as inherent in sports, whereas the dominant perspective of DGI is that sport should be practised as part of a mission to develop society (Anderson, 2003: 61–64). Both organisations, however, emphasise: ‘principles of universalism, social fellowship,

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volunteerism and organizational autonomy’ (Anderson, 2003: 62). Munk and Lind (2004) also discuss these dominant perspectives within the field of sports in Denmark, in a study employing Bourdieu’s field analysis. Their study of the Danish field of sports and the dominant discourses within the field is a useful point of departure for discussing the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club as participant in the field. Instead of analysing societies in terms of predefined classes understood as groups characterised by level of education, occupation and income, Bourdieu (1992, 1994, 1996, 1998; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1996) suggests the concept of field: a social arena in which people act and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources or forms of capital. A field as defined by Bourdieu is a system of objective relations between social positions structured internally in terms of power relationships, and the concept of capital refers to whatever resources are acknowledged as significant between social agents in a given field. Different fields can be either autonomous or interrelated. For a field to be autonomous it has to be possible to identify struggles over specific symbolic capital, different from capital fought over in other fields. Fields are constructed according to an underlying nomos, which Bourdieu defines as a principle of vision and division, and which could be understood as fundamental organising principles that govern practices and experiences within a field. The nomos underlying one field is irreducible to the one underlying another (Bourdieu, 1994). For example, the nomos of the cultural field values cultural capital and in some sense discourages economic capital (Bourdieu, 1992), whereas it is characteristic of the economic field that it aims to transfer the logic of economy to all other social fields (Bourdieu, 1994: 161). What is considered symbolic capital within a field could be said to be the result of the nomos of the field as well as agents’ embodied experiences of repeated practice as participants in the field (this is part of their habitus)9. Munk and Lind (2004) discuss whether the field of sports in Denmark can be considered an autonomous social field. They identify the dominant nomos from different positionings (Bourdieu, 1994: 20) within the field based on interviews with agents in central posts in the national sports organisations. Munk and Lind refer to different logics instead of nomos. They identify three influential logics which could be said to threaten the autonomy of the field of sports because they are representative of other fields. These are: the pedagogical logic, the welfare-ideological logic and the economic logic. The pedagogical logic refers to the aspects of sport related to education, enlightenment and, in sociological terms, cultural and social reproduction. The welfare-ideological logic represents

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

the perspective that sport is a means of improving the common welfare in society. One example of this logic is the idea of integration of marginalised social groups through sport, another is the view of sport as a means of improving the general public’s health. In a classical Bourdieuian field analysis the economic logic, which is dominating in all capitalistic societies, is always considered an influential external field logic (e.g. Bourdieu, 1996). It relates to sport as means of improving profit and sport on a professional rather than voluntary level. It contradicts to an extent the voluntary basis of many of the Danish sport associations. The particular internal field logic is referred to as the cultural logic. Munk and Lind conclude that a specific cultural logic of sports can be identified, and therefore the field of sports in Denmark can be considered an autonomous social field. The cultural logic of sports emphasises the view described by Anderson of sport ‘for sport’s sake’ (Anderson, 2003) and values the particular aesthetic of the skilled sports performance. In accordance with Anderson, they also find that orientation towards the cultural logic of sports is represented to a higher degree by interviewees from DIF, and that orientation towards the pedagogical and the welfare-ideological logics is typical of the interviewees from DGI (Munk & Lind, 2004: 91). The logics described by Munk and Lind are however all influential and present within the field of sports in Denmark. In accordance with a specific logic certain forms of capital are valued. For example, in an association oriented towards a welfare-ideological positioning, health aspects of sport might be considered symbolic capital. If we add a discourse analytical perspective to Bourdieu’s analysis (as, for instance, Connolly (1998) also does), we can say that forms of capital are developed and defined through various discourses and these discourses build on different nomos, logics or ideologies. The struggle over capital in the field of sports could then be said to manifest as conflicting discourses within the field. In other words, what Munk and Lind identify in the interviews could be considered pedagogical, welfare-ideological, economic and sports cultural discourses, although these are not the terms they use. On the basis of her work on DGI-related associations, Anderson (2003) claims that the welfare-ideological and the pedagogical discourses in relation to sport are not characteristic only of DGI (and partly of DIF): I have argued that while DIF’s and DGI’s ideological positions are politically distinctive and constitutive of their respective organizational identities, these ideologies are not in any objective sense ‘theirs’. The ideologies are congruent with salient, normative principles and

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understandings of ‘civil sociality’ in Denmark and probably elsewhere. (Anderson, 2003: 65–66) The ideologies are part of general public, societal and political assumptions and discourses about leisure sport and integration in Denmark (Anderson, 2003, 2005, 2006) and elsewhere. Anderson describes how community sports are seen historically as an arena for civil education of youth in physical and mental health as well as democratic values (Anderson, 2006: 65) and voluntary communities are perceived of as places where marginalised people can be incorporated in local networks and activities (Anderson, 2006: 62). One aspect of this idea is illustrated by the category ‘foreningsløse børn’ (‘club-less children’) which figures in statistics signifying social problems (Anderson, 2005: 168).

The club within the field In their analysis of interview discourses, Munk and Lind (2004) identified several different logics. In their view, the logics of pedagogy and welfare ideology on the one hand, and the logic of economy on the other hand, were in opposition to each other. These three external logics were also considered a threat to the internal cultural logic of sports. Their view was of course directed at identifying the autonomy of the field of sports. Considering not only the statements in interviews, but also the practices in the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club, I will argue that these discourses are not necessarily in opposition to each other in the setting I studied. Instead, they appear to be combined in practices motivated by educational, welfare ideological and economic considerations. Furthermore, these are related to a version of the cultural logic of sports as they are understood (or constructed) within the club community as part of the inherent qualities of taekwondo. Particularly since the move to the present location, the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club experienced a dramatic increase in the number of young members and participated in various projects and initiatives clearly supporting the welfare-ideological and pedagogical perspectives. The project that most influenced the club during the period of my research was ‘Kendskab giver Venskab’ (translates roughly into ‘acquaintance leads to friendship’). This project ran for several years and was part of the sports political programme (Det Idrætspolitiske Ideprogram) funded by the Danish Ministry of Culture (the project is evaluated in Anderson, 2002). It focused on integration on the basis of ethnic background as well as age. The aim of the project was to create friendship and trust between the local

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

elderly majority Danes and the local young minority Danes10. To break down the stereotypes associated with Nørrebro youth as aggressive violent members of immigrant gangs, it involved cooperation and interaction between the taekwondo club and the activity centre. One of the initiatives was the creation of the senior taekwondo class. The children from the club also performed taekwondo shows in the activity centre and open house days were arranged, where the pensioners were invited to the club. A significant part of the project was the full time employment of one of the board members from the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club as project coordinator. He functioned as the contact between the club and the activity centre and coordinated all the activities. The club generally participated actively in many local sports-political initiatives, and it was a significant part of the work of the board to apply for funding for the various activities. In the local community, the club had achieved a reputation as a sports association with a strong profile as childfocused and concerned with social issues. And it did indeed engage a lot of local children in leisure sport11. Through participating in these activities, in interviews with journalists and project evaluators, and through the construction of applications for funding the social projects, members of the club reproduced discourses on educational and welfare-ideological aspects of sport. Through these, the club constructed a view of sport as means of improving society. These discourses were, however, not only governed by pedagogical and welfareideological logics. Although the social work with youth in the club to a large extent was carried out on a voluntary basis, the club also received extensive financial support through its participation in sports-political initiatives. The external funding periodically resulted in a number of paid full-time and part-time workers. A lot of the general activities in the club were highly dependent on this financial support and could not have been maintained at the same level on purely voluntary efforts. The rent of the new facilities (from which all the members benefited) could not have been paid from members’ fees alone. The Culture and Leisure Administration of Copenhagen supported sports clubs economically based on the number of members under the age of 24. Therefore the club’s focus on children and youth was not only motivated by socio-political ideals, but also necessary because the economic support dependent on having a lot of young members. When governments choose to invest in sport, they tend to legitimise the investment by arguing that sports improves public health, democracy, integration and social fellowship. The members of this club were well aware of this. Taking into account the struggle for economic

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support amongst the many sports clubs and other leisure communities in the capital, it is both likely and understandable that experienced adult members emphasised the positive side-effects of taekwondo. The discourses about societal benefits from leisure sport in this sense can clearly also be considered an economic logic. In addition to this socially engaged profile, the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club also prioritised outstanding taekwondo achievements and competition. After the move to the new and larger facilities, the club developed a very successful group of elites. At the time of the fieldwork, 5 out of 9 of the male fighters in the Danish national youth fighting team were from the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club, and the club still (in 2014) dominates the national championships. The elite sports institution, Team Danmark, funded the employment of former Olympic fighters as chief instructors of the elite fighting class in the club, and the club received financial support several times in order to work with talented fighters. Within this area of elite fighting, a sports cultural discourse was of course emphasised, but it also involved economic considerations. In this way, the logic of sport ‘for sport’s sake’ was not necessarily in conflict with the idea of social integration and education, since the idea of the social benefits from sport was understood as closely tied to the taekwondo activity itself. During interviews with black belts,12 many of the members explained individually how competence and values achieved through taekwondo, and the ideological aspects invoked by the sport, lead to some form of social mobility when transferred to other areas of life. The Korean master expressed it this way: Many misunderstand taekwondo and think that it’s only in the club they practise taekwondo. But it isn’t. Taekwondo is about life as a whole. If you’re good at taekwondo, then you’re also good in school. We can think of three different humans (…) perhaps the bad kinds of humans practise taekwondo, and then they can learn to be better humans. (Interview with master, my translation) This version of social integration and education concerns an identity change towards a better and more successful person in general. The master here emphasises the unique qualities of taekwondo as the means of the development. When I interviewed the Chief Children’s Instructor he also described the identity-changing potential of the sport:

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

(…) well there’ve been many cases where where you can say (.) partly there’ve been some cases who balanced on the border of becoming some terrible (0.5) criminals who then through the taekwondo sport (.) through finding some friends here in the club or somebody they can look up to (.) and being able to come here in the club and belong here (.) and even though they have (.) have done some shit then they’ve gotten gotten some chances (.) and been helped by the club right like (.) like a kind of family and then they’ve straightened up (Interview with chief children’s instructor, my translation). The children’s instructor describes the means of development from ‘troublemaker’ to straightened up ‘post-troublemaker’ as a combination of the taekwondo sport and the membership of a family-like community in the club. Overall, it would not be a simple task to place the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club within the field of sports in Denmark in a study like Munk and Lind’s (2004). The club did not represent one clear positioning. Rather, it managed strategic positionings with an orientation towards both elite and community leisure sport. The club was formally associated with DIF and it cooperated with Team Danmark, but it also participated in various council activities and projects emphasising a view of sport which, according to Munk and Lind (2004) and Anderson (2003), is characteristic of DGI-associations. The dominant discourses and ideologies within the larger field of sports in Denmark were all influential. They were not in conflict, but reconstructed and combined by the adult members working on an organisational level in the club. Looking at the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club broadly like this gives us a sense of the socio-historical conditions for the club’s activities and the discussions of practices to come. The club’s geographical placement, the sports ideologies and the organisational characteristics make integration a significant issue to the club activities in several ways. To sum up, I have pointed to: • •

The club’s belonging to an urban area that is stereotypically characterised (and to some extent stigmatised) by political and media discourse as culturally diverse and (therefore) socially problematic. The strong traditions of sports in Denmark being seen as sites for civil education.

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• •

47

The particular ideologies of the martial arts emphasising family relationships, mutual respect and discipline (that extends from the sports practices to other areas of life). The emphasis on social responsibility in the club among the leaders in combination with a strong elite profile.

So having established that integration is indeed a relevant wider societal point of reference to the club, it is now time to have a closer look at how integration is understood and articulated in the particular kinds of integration projects the club takes part in.

Assumptions About Sports and Integration During the time of my fieldwork, the Ministry of Integration initiated several funding schemes aimed at improving integration through participation in leisure sports. One of these was the fund for ‘The voluntary integration work and participation in sports- and association life’13. This funding scheme supported the project ‘Get2sport’ in which the club participated. The description of the overall purpose of the scheme states that: The associations offer a value- and interest-community across the borders of social, political and ethnic divisions. People come together because they share the same interests and people are accepted within the values of the community. (p. 1, my translation) Thus, on this political level the discursive construction of sports as a means of integration builds on the idea that being together and sharing an interest will lead to acceptance in a community. The description of the criteria of success for the projects seeking funding makes it clear that this is measured by an increase in the number of members, by involved parents and by voluntary leaders ‘with an ethnic background different from Danish’. In the description of the purpose, it is further claimed that: Participation in voluntary association life and local sports and association life gives people with an ethnic background different from Danish a good opportunity to learn about the Danish society in general, including democratic rules, Danish values and norms. (p. 1, my translation) This articulation of integration corresponds closely to the common ethnocentric understanding of integration in political and media discourse.

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

It emphasises the goal of ethnic minorities acquiring so-called Danish values and norms. The project Get2sport was partly funded by this initiative (in cooperation with DIF). The name of the project plays on the double meaning of getting people to do sports ‘get to sport’ (suggested by the English pronunciation of two) and sports in the ghetto ‘ghetto sport’ (suggested by the Danish pronunciation of two: [tˢο ]̉ , corresponding to the final syllable in ‘ghetto’). In the project’s description of purpose and its midway evaluation report, the understanding of integration seems more nuanced than the majority assimilationist discourse we find in the description from the Ministry of Integration. Firstly, the project description suggests that the focus of the project is social rather than solely ethnic integration: Get2sport is first and foremost a social integration project. This means that the primary goal of the project is to strengthen the possibilities for children and youth with parents in a difficult position living in the so called ghettos to get involved in the local sports clubs. (Midway evaluation report Get2sport, p. 3, my translation, bold in original)14 The project report does predominantly refer to ‘children and youth with parents in a difficult position’ as the target group and thereby appears to emphasise social inequality rather than ethnic or cultural differences. Secondly, the report mentions the aim of keeping members over the longer term as an important challenge: (...) the main challenge for us has not so much been to make newDanes or more precisely: children with parents in a difficult position to do sports or just to become members of the local sports club. The real challenge has been and is still to keep them as continuous members. (Midway Report, Get2sport, p. 5, my translation, bold in original) However, in spite of this more nuanced approach to integration compared to the political construction of the Ministry of Integration, it is clear in this quote, as well as in other parts of the report, that the ‘children with parents in a difficult position’ are more or less equated with ‘new-Danes’ from ‘ghettos’. New-Danes is the commonly used euphemism in Danish public discourse for immigrants or children of immigrants, and in this quote, the target group is presented as a more specific part of this ethnically defined group. Likewise, in the part of the Get2sport report concerning the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club in particular (Get2sport, 24), the results are measured by the number of ‘new-Danish girls’ and ‘new-Danish instructors’. Here there is no reference to socio-economic position. In addition, ‘cultural

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differences’ and ‘the number of different nationalities’ represented in the ‘so-called ghettos’ are pointed to as special challenges (p. 4). So, the target group for the project is not merely presented as socially underprivileged children in particular residential areas, but more specifically the ‘new-Danes’ with a cultural background posing a challenge for integration. The status report from Get2sport does reflect an awareness of the fact that membership of a sports club does not automatically lead to integration. The goal is to make members stay. It is also emphasised that the abilities for the sports discipline practised in a given club have significance for the participation of the children and youth. Finally, there is an awareness of gender as a relevant aspect, since girls are a particular area of focus. But although these aspects are mentioned, the result of the project is still measured by the number of members belonging to particular social categories, namely ethnic minorities and (ethnic minority) girls. Also, there are no further reflections on how gender relations and sports skills have an impact on participation in sports clubs. Nor are there any reflections on how exactly integration is supposed to happen in the clubs. So, what assumptions about sports and integration do these sportspolitical texts articulate? The ministerial discourses on integration and sports assume that: • • •

Meeting to share an interest will lead to inclusion in a community. Ethnic minorities will learn about democratic and Danish values and norms by being involved in leisure sports. In that way ethnic minorities will become integrated.

The assumptions of the integration project Get2sport run by the practitioners in the clubs (including the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club) are more nuanced and involve the ideas that: • • • • •

The aim for integration is to include children in a socially difficult position in local sports clubs. Diverse cultural and national backgrounds are a significant challenge to this. Membership of a club is not enough – the goal is to keep members. Gaining and keeping female members poses a special challenge. The members’ sports skills have an impact on their participation in a club.

The general ministerial assumptions are easily questioned. To what extent and exactly how does sharing an interest lead to inclusion in a community? What kind of community is a sports club? Do members learn democratic and Danish values, for instance, in a martial arts club practising

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the Korean sport of taekwondo influenced by hierarchical social systems and Buddhist philosophy? Is the goal for integration processes that ethnic minorities learn Danish values? And, what are Danish values in the first place? These are just some of the questions one could pose. A practitioners’ project report on a funding scheme like the Get2sport report will have to speak to the overall purpose of the scheme, and this perhaps explains the dominating focus on ethnic differences, but in fact the Get2sport project report in many ways complicates the picture of integration and sports, as it raises issues of inclusion, gender aspects, social inequality and sports abilities. Still, some questions remain unaddressed, such as: What are the criteria for inclusion and the possible participant positions in a given club community? How are gender aspects and cultural differences potentially significant to the way members participate? What makes members stay or leave? How do sports skills impact on members’ participation? And, ultimately, how can we talk about integration in a sports club? I suggest that looking at the sports club as a community of practice and carrying out an ethnographic analysis of the social dynamics within this community can help answer some of these questions.

The Nørrebro Taekwondo Club as a Community of Practice The social practices the participants continuously engage in form their positioning in relation to other club members. Through the practices they signal affiliation with or distance to values and categories salient within the club (and often also on a larger social scale, for instance, affiliation with streetwise hip-hop culture). In this way participants on the one hand position themselves within the social community. On the other hand, participants are also positioned by others based on their conduct. Social positioning within a social community is crucial to processes of integration. No matter whether integration is understood as complete assimilation into a majority community or as some level of adaptation by all participants involved (Olwig & Pærregaard, 2007), it is difficult to imagine any productive change in the conduct of an individual in a community if this individual is very marginally involved. Wenger’s (1998) learning theory of communities of practice approaches these issues. A community of practice in broad terms refers to some collective of people engaging in doing something together. It is defined by participation through mutual engagement in a joint enterprise and the development of a shared repertoire of resources over time (Wenger, 1998: 73). Central to the original

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understanding of a community of practice is its potential for enabling learning and changing identity (Lave & Wenger, 1991) which makes this a very suitable framework for investigating socially incorporating processes. The concept is now frequently used in studies across social, educational and management sciences, and certainly in sociolinguistics. Through this use, it has been developed, compared and combined with other social theories, such as (critical) discourse analysis (Scollon, 2001; Tusting, 2005) and poststructuralist approaches (Holmes & Meyerhoff, 1999). Sociolinguistic studies of communities of practice typically focus on smaller groups of people in well-defined contexts of repeated face-to-face encounters, such as school classes (Creese, 2005; Eckert, 2000; Maegaard, 2007; Quist, 2005) or workplaces (Rock, 2005; Wenger, 1998) and focus on how a shared repertoire of linguistic resources is developed and negotiated. The empirical emphasis is on situated social meaning making and this is approached through ethnography. Wenger’s use of the concept of practice corresponds to Bourdieu’s (1977) use of the notion. It is not merely doing, acting or speaking. Practice is ‘doing in a historical and social context that gives structure and meaning to what we do’ (Wenger, 1998: 47). Practice includes explicit semiotic features in a broad sense (the use of language, symbols, codified procedures etc.), but also involves implicit underlying assumptions, perceptions and embodied understandings (Wenger, 1998: 47). Practice is always social and involves the social production of meaning. Meaning within the theoretical framework of communities of practice is understood as constituted in processes of negotiation (Wenger, 1998: 52). Negotiation of meaning involves reification as well as participation. Reification refers to the process of giving form to meaning or producing objects reflecting experience. Examples are the creation of linguistic terms, abstractions, symbols or tools (Wenger, 1998: 58–59). The community of practice is a mid-level analytical concept. It is neither a situational social encounter, such as a single conversation, nor an abstract institution or category, such as a nation or a culture (Wenger, 1998: 125). It is exactly through the repeated participation in mutual practices, social negotiation of meaning and reification that members develop a shared repertoire of resources over time (e.g. expressions, procedures, stories, Wenger, 1998: 82–83). Wenger (1998: 167) lists four main forms of participating in communities of practice: full participation (insider), full non-participation (outsider), peripherality and marginality. Both peripheral and marginal participation involve a combination of participation and non-participation. The difference between the two is related to potential development, namely to the participation trajectory. Non-participation with respect to peripheral

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participants is enabling and an opportunity for learning. It is the position of newcomers to a community of practice and it entails the possibility of becoming full participants. We can imagine this form of trajectory as fruitful for social incoporation as it is a process towards increasingly shared values and norms. Marginal participants conversely are restricted by non-participation. Marginality refers to long-standing members kept in a marginal position. The definition of a community of practice covers a sports club very well. Members of the taekwondo club, for instance, mutually engage in the enterprise of practising taekwondo, and through their repeated practices, they develop a shared repertoire of resources such as symbols (e.g. belt colours, club logo), expressions (e.g. practising commands, names of techniques), norms (e.g. standing in line in particular order, pupils keeping silent during practice) and rituals (e.g. greeting the Korean and Danish flag in the beginning and the end of sessions, bowing when greeting the master). All of these resources and their meaning are jointly negotiated in the daily interactions and activities in the club. Newcomers in peripheral positions develop, learn, adopt and affect the meaning of the shared practices and repertoires, and long-term full members strongly influence the negotiation of meaning. Of course, the practices directly related to the sport activity are not the only shared practices, as a whole range of other practices are learnt and negotiated in the club, such as talking, playing games, joking and listening to music just to mention a few. These other forms of practices, rituals and norms are not directly related to taekwondo, but are equally developed through the mutual engagement in the club. Jokes and stories might develop around mutual experiences as members, and certain norms for greeting practices or music preference might develop through the history of participation in this specific community. According to Wenger (1998: 119), institutional boundaries do not necessarily correspond to the boundaries of a community of practice. The club is in fact an institutionalised community. It is formally defined as a community engaged in the enterprise of practising taekwondo, and aspects of the learning of the shared repertoire are likewise formally structured in classes, degrees and curricula. As it turns out, the defining criteria presented by Wenger would allow several social configurations within the institutional frames of the club to be considered communities of practices. There are good arguments for considering the young members who practised in children’s or youth classes as members of a different community of practice from the adult members. Adults and youth did not practice at the same time, and with few exceptions (the adult instructors

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and administrators), they were not present in the club at the same time, they generally did not engage in the same practices, and rarely interacted. The adult community of practice and the youth community of practice from this perspective overlap through the adults who did engage with the youth (in the same sense as the unit supervisor in Wenger’s data, 1998: 105)15. The analytical concept as it is presented by Wenger is flexible. For my purpose a community of practice is useful as a notion referring to the social constellation of the club involving the young members (as they are the focus of my study) as well as the adult members who regularly engaged with the children and adolescents. The enterprise of ‘being a young member of the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club’ was common to all the smaller social groupings among the participants. The ‘club’ as institution or idea, a semiotic sign in itself, was also central to the understanding of the social relations between the participants. Finally, the perspective of the club as one community of practice enables me to engage in the discussion of discursive constructions of association sports as socially integrating. It is exactly assumptions about learning (democratic values and suitable citizenship) enabled by membership of institutionalised communities of practice which underlie such discourses.

Social Practices and Social Positioning in the Club My discussion of the club’s participation in local sports-political projects, the local sports-ideologies and the instructors’ presentations of the affordances of taekwondo reveals that the joint enterprise in this martial arts club involves more than the skilled practice of the sport activity. It also involves educational and ideological aspects, an ideal of personal development focused on explicated core values of the club and social engagement in the local community. Part of the shared repertoire, at least on an organisational level, includes discourses emphasising societal benefits and pedagogical qualities of taekwondo. But it was not only among the adult leaders that this understanding existed. The older boys also presented themselves as role models for and educators of the younger members in the club: Murat:

we try to get the other like the other young from the club [to not]

Lian:

[the young]

Murat:

make trouble at the competitions [and stuff]

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Fouad:

[because] there’s many of them there like one who is a little (.) trouble maker who’s got some problems [who’s doing a lot of stuff right]

Murat:

[yes and perhaps not right] now but it could become something [bigger right]

Fouad:

[but the problem] I know many who developed eh like where they because there’s a lot of those from Mjølnerparken right

Lian:

yes

Fouad:

and a lot of them they look up to the older from Mjølnerparken

Lian:

mm

Fouad:

those who who play smart and [smoke hash and stuff right]

Ilias:

[they shouldn’t do that no]

Lian:

mm

Fouad:

and that’s what we try up here well but then we try to talk to them and try like to make them be like us (.) and stay away from crime and such stuff

(group interview, boys 3, my translation) The boys’ statements during this sequence clearly contain elements of a welfare-ideological and pedagogical sports club discourse, and they reproduce a stereotypical picture of youth in the local estate next to the club (Mjølnerparken) as involved in crime. Murat further told me that he would have most likely gotten into trouble and crime himself, had he not been a member of the taekwondo club. It was not merely in the interview presentations that the older boys’ role as helpers in relation to the younger boys was evident. The observations described in this excerpt from my field notes during a table tennis competition in the café illustrate how Ilias and Murat were socially dominant, but also helpful and guiding in relation to the younger members: Arrived 4.15 pm to a full café. A table tennis competition is going on and a table is placed in the middle of the room (…) Murat and Ilias function as the referees and write the results of the matches on a board. Reza and Micas are playing a match. After the match

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Mohammed attempts to take control and shouts who are the next players. He frequently attempts to direct the others by shouting and he often runs to the score board to check the points and the next players. The beginners are in dobogs [training suits] but the rest are in their normal clothes: Track suit bottoms, caps, football t-shirts and jeans. Some of the younger members sit near the playstation. No girls are present. Murat is playing in the next match. Mohammed begins to clap his hands and Murat tells him to stop. Mohammed claps a few more times, but then leaves the room. Salek arrives and Mohammed returns, hurries to him and pulls him to the score board (which Ilias is in control of) to show him who he is playing against. It turns out Salek is playing Mohammed in the next match. Mohammed is well ahead of Salek, but suddenly Ilias leaves his seat to show Mohammed how to serve. (…) Ilias tells Mohammed to lend him his [Mohammed’s] mp3-player (which he is wearing) – and Mohammed gives it to Ilias. Murat is still in charge of the score board. Some of the younger boys begin to play, but Murat corrects them ‘wait a minute it’s not you’. They stop and hand over the bats and the ball (…) suddenly a very young boy comes in (a younger brother? – doesn’t look like a member) he walks directly to Murat and tells him something. Murat takes his hand and helps him find a boy I believe is his older brother. (my translation of original field notes in Danish 8/9-2004) The older boys also articulated the idea of a family-like relationship and responsibility in relation to the younger members as well as a clear awareness of their own social status in the club partly related to their sports skills (winning the most): Ilias:

sometimes then sometimes then those also sometimes then the children they look at who has (.) won the most and stuff

Lian:

mm (.)

Ilias:

and then they look up to him the most and stuff

Fouad:

also how you like because we help them a lot with with their problems and if they’ve got problems outside taekwondo and or if they’ve got problems with some boys or (.) like with whatever

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Lian:

mm

Fouad:

then we always help them and so therefore they always come to us when there’s something and that’s also what we want right then we always they know we’ll help them right

Lian:

yes

Fouad:

yes [so it’s]

Murat:

[but it’s] just that they they also have to know right when it’s enough like when we also want to be alone a bit

(group interview, boys 3, my translation) Both the dimensions of excellence in sports and social engagement are present in the adolescents’ conversation about their sports club practices, but the young participants in the club orient to these different dimensions in several ways through their everyday activities as well. In everyday activities, the ‘sports for sports’ sake’ and the ‘sports for all’ logics are enacted through orientation towards competition or mutual sociability. One sign that the distinction between competitive and non-competitive orientation was important to the participants was their use of the category label ‘fighter’ for members engaging in the competitive taekwondo activities. Members who did not engage in competitive activities would not be called (or call themselves) ‘fighters’. Being a fighter was related to high social status among the young practitioners, and various signs indexing fighter identities had developed in this community of practice (such as how the training suit was worn or where one changed clothes, as we shall see below). So, let us turn to the practices of distinction and the participants’ social positioning in the club community. The members of the taekwondo club had, as illustrated in Figure 2.2, the option of participating in different taekwondo classes. The only formal restriction on the choice was that if one intended to advance in the belt grading system, one was expected to attend the basic technique class regularly, and one had to have achieved at least the yellow belt to participate in the competition fighting practice. All the participants in the study could potentially participate in the basic technique classes according to their age and level of experience, the competition fighting class and the competition technique class. Furthermore, all the girls could choose to practice either in

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the (gender-mixed) children’s classes, or they could choose the girls’ class. If they were above the age of 12, they could also choose the youth class. Participation in fighting competitions on various levels was potentially an option for all the participants in the study. The most ambitious fighters would normally attend the competition fighting class on a regular basis, but fighting training was also an element of the basic technique classes, and all children were invited to participate in national competitions according to their level of experience. A few times a year, so-called friendship championships or beginner’s championships would be arranged around the country, and all taekwondo practitioners above the green belt grade could participate in the regional championships. If the competition was held in another part of the country at a great distance from Copenhagen, participation would involve travelling and staying overnight with the other participants and the responsible adult instructors from the club. Finally, the members could participate in the competitions as spectators and supporters of the fighters from the club. It varied noticeably how often the participants were present in the club, how frequently they practised and how much time they spent in the club outside training sessions. The club was open to all members on weekdays from 4pm to 9pm, and competition fighting practice took place during weekends as well. A couple of times a year social activities were arranged during holidays or weekends, such as a weekend camp in a cottage, an Easter and summer training camp, football matches during the summer or a Christmas party in the winter. Some of the young members would arrive 15 minutes before their training session and leave 10 minutes after, twice a week. Others would spend every afternoon and evening in the club, and would hang out long before and after the training sessions. In addition to this, what the participants did before and after practice differed, and how they moved around in the rooms in the club. Most of the participants spent some time in the café talking, listening to music or playing cards, board games, table football, PC games or Playstation games. The majority of the members changed their clothes in the changing rooms. Some often stayed and talked in the changing room and very rarely used the café, some changed their clothes in the gym and others habitually played in empty training halls or in the warm-up room (where a table tennis table was placed). Of course, the participants did not always spend an equal amount of time in the club every week engaged in the same activities before and after practice in the same locations. Nevertheless, patterns of typical practices in relation to time, activities and movements in the club were observable, and these practices were related to taekwondo orientation

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and membership status in different ways. A competitive orientation was signified, for example, by frequent participation in fighting practice, expression of competitive ambitions, participation in competitions and frequent reference to these aspects of taekwondo in situated interactions. Orientation towards casual conviviality was signified by the opposite: no participation in the fighting practice and the competitions, no reference to these aspects during interactions, but frequent participation in social activities, and expression of friendship and social fellowship as the main motivation for participation in the community of practice. In addition, the amount of time the members spent in the club, how often and how many other members they interacted with as well as how aware other participants were of them, can be taken as an indication of their degree of involvement in the club and their status as full or more peripheral participants. The characteristic practices of the groups related to membership status and taekwondo orientation (as I observed them during my ethnographic fieldwork) are summed up in Table 2.2, where information on the participants’ reports of their motivation for being members of the club is also added: These observations of characteristic practices and group relationships provide a basis for an analysis of the participants’ social positioning within the club, and this kind of analysis shed light on the relationship between membership status and taekwondo orientation. Although, as such, it is a rather rough analytical abstraction of complex combinations of practices with individual variations, it provides an illustrative overview and a good foundation for discussing the criteria for inclusion and exclusion, the significance of various social categories to members’ participant positions and the way sports skills possibly impact on members’ participation. The analysis of positionings is illustrated in the two-dimensional diagram in Figure 2.3. This illustration is inspired by the frameworks that have informed this chapter and combines aspects of Bourdieu’s field analysis (as in Bourdieu, 1996) and Wenger’s (1998) theory of communities of practice. Instead of field positionings, it illustrates positionings within a smaller social space: the community of practice of the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club. The horizontal axis represents a continuum between orientation towards casual social mutual participation on one end and orientation towards competition on the other, and the vertical axis represents members’ participation status in the community of practice, as a continuum between central and peripheral participants. Wenger accounts for power relationships within a community of practice through his notion of full, peripheral and marginal membership, and Bourdieu relates power to the possession of

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Table 2.2 Groups’ characteristic practices related to membership status and taekwondo orientation Group

Related to membership status

Related to Taekwondo orientation

Boys 3

spent the most time in the club considered the club a ‘second home’ referred to by 10 other participants often referred to as most popular members interacted with many other (mostly male) members

Boys 2

spent a lot of time in the club hung out in several different rooms referred to by 6 other participants interacted with many other (male) members

Boys 1

spent quite a lot of time in the club mostly stayed in café or training hall only referred to by 3 participants did not interact with many other members

very talented and ambitious fighters only (and very often) attended fighting practice and competitions serious attitude to taekwondo often practised on own initiative outside training sessions occasionally participated in social activities frequently discussed fights and competitions emphasised sports skills, ambitions, the fun of winning fights as well as friendships as reason for membership did not often attend fighting practice, but occasionally participated in competitions spent time in the club outside sessions on social activities rather than practice always participated in social activities rarely discussed competition-related topics emphasised fun qualities of the sport and friendships as reason for membership did not attend fighting practice or participate in competitions (only Yusuf once) spent time in the club outside sessions on social activities rather than practice sometimes participated in social activities a few times discussed competitionrelated topics emphasised sports skills as well as friendships as reason for membership (Continued)

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Table 2.2 (Continued) Group

Related to membership status

Related to Taekwondo orientation

Girls 2

did not spend much time in the club outside training sessions, but sometimes in the café referred to by 3 participants rarely interacted with other young members (often with adults)

Girls 1

did not spend much time in the club never spent time in the café, but stayed in changing room and training hall not referred to by any other participants never interacted with members outside the girls’ class

often participated (or in Malena’s case used to participate) in fighting practice and competitions rarely practised outside training sessions occasionally participated in social activities frequently discussed fights and competitions emphasised the fun of fighting as reason for membership never participated in fighting practice or competitions spent time in the club outside sessions on social activities rather than practice participated in social activities around the girls’ class never discussed fights and competitions emphasised cosy fellowship with girl friends as important motivation for membership

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Figure 2.3 The groups’ identity positionings

relevant capital within a given field. Of course, their perspectives on the social world are different. Wenger’s theory, developed through fieldwork in a company, is easily transferable to a sports club, whereas Bourdieu’s concepts are aimed at larger social fields than communities of practice. The central social dynamics in Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of the social world are however present at any level of social interaction. The taekwondo club is not an autonomous field, in Bourdieu’s understanding, but a smaller part of the field, and struggles over relevant capital take place within a community of practice as well as between individual agents. In the context of the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club, I have chosen to refer to central membership instead of full membership. This is because the notion of central reflects the aspect of social status and hierarchy that I argue is important to discussions of inclusion and integration in a community. Members can be ‘full’ in the sense that they are longstanding participants who have learnt and taken part in the practices and symbols of the community, but members who are noticed, known and even admired by many other participants have a higher degree of influence on the development of shared meanings than more peripheral members. In principle, central membership can be obtained both through social and taekwondo professional measures. As the list of characteristic practices and the information from the interviews suggest, the oldest boys among the participants (boys 3) are

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positioned as very central members of the community of practice with strong orientation towards competition. The younger boys (boys 2) are positioned as central members oriented slightly more towards casual social mutual participation than competition. The youngest boys’ (boys 1) positioning with respect to taekwondo orientation is similar to the positioning of boys 2, but they are positioned as more marginal members of the community of practice. The oldest girls among the participants (girls 2) are likewise positioned as rather marginal members, but they orient more towards competition than casual social mutual participation. The youngest girls (girls 1) are positioned as very marginal members with strong orientation towards casual mutual participation. So, this analysis of practices and social positioning suggests that membership status in the club community relates to a combination of taekwondo orientation, gender and age. The participants in the most central social positions are the oldest among the young members, they are male, and they orient strongly towards competition. The participants in the most peripheral social positions are the youngest of the female participants and they do not orient towards competition at all. Yet, central membership status does not correlate in a straightforward manner to any of these categories individually. The girls in group 2 are older, as well as more oriented towards competition than boys 2, but since they are much less involved in activities outside training, are only referred to by 3 other participants, and do not frequently interact with many other club members, they are positioned as more peripheral. The points raised by this abstract illustration of positionings – of sports skills and gender relations being significant to participation in the community – is supported by the understandings of the participants as they were presented in the interviews and the posters they produced during the data collection. So before engaging with how this analysis informs discussions about integration and sports clubs in a wider sense, we shall look in more detail at how the participants reflected on sports skills and gender relationships.

Taekwondo skills and social status In the interviews I initially asked who were the ‘coolest’ in the club when I discussed the different social groups with the participants. This was a way to get talking about social peer status. According to my experience in the field, the term ‘sej’ (cool) appeared more appropriate among the participants than, for example, a term like ‘populær’ (popular). Still, not all participants employed the meaning of ‘sej’ that I expected, a few of them instead presented an understanding of being ‘sej’ as faking social status. Whenever it became

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clear during the interviews that some of the participants did not ascribe positive meaning to ‘sej’, I instead asked how one could achieve respect in the club, who made decisions more often than others, and why. Taekwondo fighting competence came up as a relevant quality in relation to social status during all interviews except for the interviews with the girls in group 1. I described above how boys 3, according to their reports, were aware that other club members looked up to them. Boys 1’s reports supported the viewpoints presented by the older boys. They mentioned fighting on an elite level when I asked them to describe what in their opinion gained respect in the club: Yusuf:

also to be in that elite team

Lian:

to be in elite team that’s also cool

Tim:

also to be in the national team and xxx junior

Lian:

so those who are in the elite team who are good at fighting and stuff

Zaki:

[yes]

Yusuf:

[yes]

Lian:

that’s those who are cool

Tim:

and talent training that that talent competition or what it is

Lian:

would you like that too

Yusuf:

yes it’s just those who have fought for a long time and won a lot

(group interview, boys 1, my translation) When I discussed the social relations in the club with Mohammed and asked questions about who was most likely to make decisions among the young members, he described fighting as such, with no mention of the skills, as an aspect of the means of being in charge: Mohammed:

also it’s good to fight

Lian:

it’s good to fight.

Mohammed:

yes ((whispers))

Lian:

does it help being in charge

Mohammed:

ye:s

(individual interview, Mohammed, my translation)

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Although the participants in boys 1 and 2 did not themselves practise fighting frequently or orient towards the competitive fighting aspects of taekwondo, they still presented fighting and fighting skills as significant for gaining respect and status. Misha, Ling and Malena also frequently referred to fighting skills and to fighting as being the most fun and cool aspect of taekwondo. Misha, however, presented the connection between fighting competence and respect in the club as related to gender issues: Lian:

well what sort of what sort of things should you have as a person

Misha:

eh you should just (.) I don’t know well you should I guess just have the will for it xxx be leader like here to get respect then you have to be like really good at fighting

Lian:

yes

Misha:

among other things it it does not so much it’s mostly boys who come here and they are completely crazy about fighting and stuff

(individual interview, Misha, my translation) Misha here connects the social value of taekwondo fighting to the numerical male domination in the club and thereby seems to imply that the social meaning of fighting is related to masculine values. The social practices of participating in fighting classes and competitions were not the only means of signalling fighter identity. Stylistic construction of fighter identity could also be done through displaying casual attitudes towards the taekwondo dress code during practice. Rolling up the sleeves of the top or the legs of the trousers of the taekwondo suit was a practice which would usually be corrected by the instructor during basic technique training, but it was common among the fighters (possibly to enhance the speed of the movements). Likewise, formally practising without the complete taekwondo suit, wearing a t-shirt with the suit trousers or a regular tracksuit, was common among elite fighters who were allowed this privilege because their very frequent

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practice did not always leave enough time to wash the taekwondo suit in between sessions. I observed children who did not necessarily participate in fighting classes wear their taekwondo suits like the fighters did (although this was against the general rules). In this way they made use of the (high status) associations it signified within the taekwondo community. It is not surprising that excellent skills within the sport discipline in focus in this community of practice were presented as a means of achieving high social status. Still, taekwondo skills could be exercised in other ways than through competition fighting. Members could display taekwondo skills through the achievement of high belt grades, talented performances of techniques during demonstrations or competition results at technical championships. Some participants did mention high belt grades as a means of gaining respect. However, most of the participants said that a high belt grade alone did not imply high social status and respect. Like most of the other participants, Misha emphasised fighter competence as an identity aspect particularly relevant to central membership of the community of practice. When I asked her about the significance of belt grade, she explained how belt grade was less significant for receiving respect by comparing her own social status to Fouad’s: Lian:

eh what about belt colour

Misha:

no

Lian:

that doesn’t mean so much

Misha:

because Fouad he hasn’t got black belt right and it’s a little like and I’ve got black belt and it’s not something like I get huge respect from that

Lian:

okay so it’s more something about being good at fighting than what belt you’ve got

Misha:

because Fouad he’s not got a high belt grade so

(individual interview, Misha, my translation) Misha claims that, in spite of being of significantly higher belt grade than Fouad (whom we both knew had blue belt), she is not as respected, and by pointing out that she does not gain much respect from her own black belt grade, she also hints at a potential relevance of gender differences.

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A masculine imperative? The high social status of the boys and the issue of gender differences raised by Misha suggest that the club as a social market could be viewed to some extent as being governed by a masculine imperative. As the detailed analysis of interactions in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 will show, the different ways of displaying masculinity involved aspects such as heterosexuality, ambition and rule-breaking behaviour. Aspects of heterosexuality were also central to the girls’ situated social negotiations (as we shall see in Chapter 3), but a balance between ‘boyish’ and ‘girlish’ femininity was also relevant to the girls’ identity positionings. A masculine imperative in the taekwondo club potentially relates to traditional male domination within the sport, the described metaphorical reference to patriarchal traditions, as well as stereotypical masculine associations with the martial art. These stereotypical and traditional discourses were to a great extent reproduced among the participants. During the interviews the boys never questioned the gender separation in the club, and they never brought up their gender identity as a significant issue on their own initiative. Among the girls gender was presented as a significant issue, all the girls initiated a discussion of gender in relation to the sport and the club community. This seems to be a case of the deviant category from the (dominant) mainstream treating their minority category-belonging as a central issue. This has been shown to be characteristic with respect to ethnic minority and majority relations (e.g. Bucholtz 2011; Staunæs 2004, discussed further in Section ‘Aspects of Ethnicity’), but also appears relevant with respect to gender relations. Belonging to a male category was treated as unmarked, but a female category was treated as marked by those who were ascribed to this category. When I initiated a discussion of gender in relation to taekwondo, the younger boys, in accordance with common stereotypes, presented general claims about girls not being as skilled as boys with respect to taekwondo, because of a lack of physical strength and a lack of interest in fighting. They did so in spite of the instructor of the highly valued elite class at the time being female (and a former participant in the Olympic Games) and in spite of being interviewed by an experienced female black belt (and their former instructor). When I interviewed the oldest boys they reported not to talk to the girls in the fighting class, but they explained how they used to hang out with a former female fighter:

Sports, Integration and Participation

Murat:

otherwise there was (.) eh I don’t know if you can remember Maria

Lian:

yes sure

Murat:

she went like she talked with us a lot

Fouad:

yes

Lian:

she talked with you a lot

Murat:

yes but she was also like she was actually the only one

Fouad:

she was she was she was ((Murat

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one of us actually a total laugh also like also like boyish laughs))

(group interview, boys 3, my translation) The boys in this excerpt refer to a former member of the club. They report that she is the only female club member they have ever frequently interacted with. This girl is described as ‘one of them’ and as ‘boyish’. Although some of the female participants in my study could be described as constructing more boy-like female identities than others, none of them were presented as ‘one of the boys’ by the male participants. The feminine identity positionings among the participating girls could be categorised as on the one end the ‘girly girls’ (my term) who reject the masculine imperative, on the other end the ‘cool girls’ (participants’ term, ‘sej pige’) who approach the masculine imperative, and somewhere in between the ‘alternative pop-girl’ (my term). The ‘girly girl’ identity was embraced by Iris, Michelle, and partly by Anna. These girls de-selected the male dominated measures of status and symbolic capital in the community of practice of the club. When they practised taekwondo, they often talked and giggled during practice, they did not aspire to strength and toughness, and they claimed that the main reason for being in the club was to have a cosy time with their girlfriends. Prior to the first recording of group conversations, all of the groups were asked to take photographs illustrating a typical day in the club, during the recorded conversation they were asked to present the photos they had taken on a large piece of cardboard. The girls in group 1 somehow failed to

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take the photos, but they instead illustrated a day in the club by drawing on the cardboard. Their poster illustration clearly emphasised the cosy time with girl friends as significant to a day in the club (see Figures 2.4 and 2.5).

Figure 2.4 Girls 1 ‘A day in the club’

Figure 2.5 Translation ‘A day in the club’

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Two thirds of the space on the poster is covered with drawings of two girls talking or playing (throwing a ball and running). The drawings and the added written texts talk about love life (illustrated by the face of a girl, a boy and two love hearts: one entire, one broken), about parents (illustrated by drawings of two adults) and about ball playing, running, the dressing room and two girls sitting very still on the window frames in the training hall (the added text explains that this is to make the movement sensitive light turn off). Only one picture, admittedly the largest one, illustrates two girls and a female instructor practising in the training hall. The girly girls explained during interviews how they disliked practising with the boys and their male instructor because the practice was too tough. They did not dress in hip-hop style clothes, but often dressed in pink and purple colours, jeans (neither tight nor baggy) and occasionally skirts. Their style of clothes was not particularly fashionable, and they did not reveal bare skin. In many ways the girls who chose to practice in the girls’ class instead of the gender-mixed classes appeared to form their own sub-community of practice isolated from other club members. Anna broke out of this community when she began to practise in the youth class once a week, and she presented a slightly more ambitious attitude towards the taekwondo skills compared to Iris and Michelle. During the interview she told me about her considerations related to joining the youth class and explained that she wished to improve her practice: Anna:

I think I think like in the girls’ class there it’s like cosy in the way that of course you learn something but it’s not as tough as in the boys’ class hh so I don’t really know I’ve talked a bit with my mum about perhaps and one of the days like so one of the days to be in the girls’ class and the other in the youth class for it for it to be like a little more (.) practice

Lian:

mm

Anna:

but I think it’s more cosy in the girls’ class and stuff that you’re with your girl friends and stuff

(individual interview, Anna, my translation) Anna here connects more and tougher practice of taekwondo to practising with the boys. Her considerations involve an underlying understanding of the proper way of practising taekwondo as the boyish way. Still, she reports

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being split between the desire to have a cosy time with girlfriends and the ambition with regard to the practice of the sport. In the end, she chose to attend both classes once a week. The tough girl gender identity was practised by Misha and Ling. In opposition to the girly girls, they oriented to the male-dominated measures of symbolic power, they aspired to strength and toughness, and they engaged in many practices with the boys in the club. Therefore, they could be said to approach the masculine imperative to a higher degree than the girly girls. Their reports in interviews, like the girly girls’, point out the lack of contact between the male and the female members of the club. But the tough girls, unlike the girly girls, appeared concerned about the absent interaction and spent a great part of the group interview discussing why the boys in the fighting class did not speak to them. Malena oriented towards the same measures of status and engaged in many of the same practices as Misha and Ling, but the girls did not categorise Malena as a tough girl. During the group interview, the girls explained how Malena had a different feminine identity from Misha and Ling. When we discussed whether the girls felt that they were different from other girls in school because they did taekwondo, Misha and Ling reported to receive more respect from the boys. Malena explained, however, that she was no different from the other girls because she painted her nails and wore high heels. The difference between Misha’s and Ling’s way of being a taekwondo girl and Malena’s girl identity appeared to be related in particular to her looks. Malena, according to the girls, challenged the social stereotypes because she combined masculine sports practices with very feminine ‘pop girl’ appearance: Malena:

but there’s a whole lot who gets surprised that I do taekwondo ((they laugh)) (.)

Ling:

you’re a real girl ((very quiet))

Lian:

a real girl

Ling:

yes

Malena:

yes

Lian:

but then they get surprised because you do taekwondo [because]

Malena: Lian:

[yes] that you wouldn’t normally connect that with a real girl or what

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Ling:

no no but that you can’t really tell from looking at mm Malena hh hh

Misha:

no but Malena she is such a real that (.) poptøs or if you can say it in (.) like that ((poptøs=pop girl))

Ling:

yes ((whispers))

Misha:

nice nails [and stuff]

Ling:

[with her] nail hh hh (.)

Misha:

and pop girls they don’t do taekwondo (.) they don’t do that (.)

Malena:

they do dancing

(group interview, girls 2, my translation) Ling describes Malena as a ‘real girl’. This suggests an orientation to the masculine imperative related to the taekwondo practice, since she presents the understanding that a real girl would not normally do taekwondo. Misha uses the Danish category term ‘poptøs’. Poptøs is a term rooted in the 1980s’ youth culture. The term originally referred to the females orienting to mainstream disco culture rather than street- and subcultures (such as hip-hop at the time), equivalent to the English 1980s’ term ‘bubblegum girl’. It is frequently used with negative connotations in early Danish hip-hop lyrics signifying a stereotype of an unintelligent, superficial and fashionfocused female. Pop girl as it is used in the interview does not appear to involve the same stereotypical connotations, but emphasises enhancement of feminine body features by the traditional feminine stylistic means of clothing and makeup. Malena is presented here as remarkable (she surprises) because she does not look like a girl who practises martial art. Thus her gender identity positioning as it is represented by the girls can be described as alternative pop girl. When Misha and Ling were asked to explain how they acted as girls themselves, Ling emphasised not wearing traditional feminine clothes in public: Misha:

we’re just tough

Malena:

nerds ((they all laugh))

Lian:

you’re tough girls

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Lian:

you’re tough girls

Ling:

like I’m not like some I such girls which I’ve never worn high heels I’ve never worn a skirt right so I’m a little like

Misha:

I’ve seen you with a skirt

Ling:

yes but [not like]

Malena: Ling:

Misha:

[so have] I Ling no not not like to go out and [only only] [no I know]

Ling:

try eh in my room and then put it back [no I daren’t]

Misha:

[cheeky]

Ling:

wear it ((they laugh))

(group interview, girls 2, my translation) Initially, Malena playfully teases the others by referring to them as nerds. Ling then continues by presenting her identity as somewhat in opposition to Malena’s. Ling does so by emphasising that she never dresses as they have previously described as typical for Malena. Ling’s presentation is challenged by the other girls who claim to have seen her wear a skirt. This calls for doubts about the truth of Ling’s report. Ling accounts for this by explaining that she has only tried on the skirt and not worn it in public. Ling here indeed points to the careful construction and play with gender identities in private at home. Gender identities are chosen before presenting oneself in public. In the club, the tough girls typically dressed in street wear style (trainers, jeans and hooded sweatshirts), but in a more tight-fitting version than the boys’ hip-hop style. Although the older girls to some extent approached the masculine imperative they also displayed an oppositional feminist attitude to the male domination, when they described their reasons for practising taekwondo:

Sports, Integration and Participation

Mal:

(.) because it’s fun and (.) I also want to prove the boys that eh [that we’re ] just as good

Lin:

[that gir]

Lin:

Yes

Mal:

Yes that girls are just as good as (.) them like at fighting

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(group interview, girls 2, my translation) Their reports about wanting to prove to the boys that they are just as good have a defensive character and underline their awareness of the masculine imperative related to the sport. Similar oppositional aspects of the female gender construction can be seen in the way both of the girl groups constructed the poster of ‘girlish’ and ‘boyish’ during the recordings of group conversations (see Figures 2.6, 2.7 and 2.8).

Figure 2.6 Girls 1 ‘Girlish and boyish’

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

Figure 2.7 Translation ‘Girlish and boyish’

The girls appeared to engage in the assignment of explicit gender categorising with a teasing demonstration of female power. Girls 1 chose pieces of the written texts: ‘leader’, ‘speed and action’, ‘this is the way it should be done’, ‘everybody has got talent’ and ‘lots of friends’ only for the girl side of their poster.

Figure 2.8 Girls 2 ‘Girlish and boyish’

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The older girls’ illustration on the girl side of the poster contains, for example, a large punching fist with red nail polish, a growling leopard and a large silver car. Half of the boy side of the poster is covered with pictures of very lightly dressed women, a naked female bottom and a large can of beer. The older girls’ interaction during the production of the poster clearly documents their amusement when they discussed the potential consequences and reaction of the older boys to their illustration. So, my analyses of the practices and the reflections of the young members in the club compared to the social peer hierarchy have indeed confirmed that sports skills and gender are important in this context, but what do we learn from this case of wider relevance to discussions about integration and sports?

Integration in a Club Community In 2008, three years after I carried out my fieldwork, only five out of the 16 participants in my study were still members of the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club. The participants who still practised in the club were Murat, Ilias, Fouad, Mohammed and Micas. So the participants who remained members were all boys, they were all positioned among the most central members in the community of practice (according to my ethnographic analysis based on their practices during the fieldwork period) and they all (in the year 2008) practised taekwondo fighting on a competitive level. Murat had great success as a competition fighter and was selected for the Danish senior national fighting team. Ilias had a successful period as a fighter on the Danish national youth fighting team, but for some time suffered from serious sports-related injuries preventing him from fighting. Fouad was still an active member of the club, but in 2008 no longer participated much in competition fighting. He was, however, employed by the club as a café worker and regularly looked after the younger members. Micas, who at the time of the fieldwork did not practise fighting on a competitive level, since became a competition fighter on an elite level and was selected for the national youth fighting team. Mohammed also participated in competition fighting although not on an elite level. Murat and Ilias have both functioned as instructors in the club, but due to lack of time they eventually stopped teaching. Both Fouad and Ilias graduated from the Danish ‘gymnasium’ in the spring of 2008 (equivalent to A-level or high school exams) and Murat graduated from the ‘gymnasium’ in 2009. The idea of sports as socially integrating implies the understanding that a sports club somehow provides a community membership for youth in a socially underprivileged area which prevents potential criminal trajectories and enables societal success.

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If we play along with such ideas, indeed the trajectories of at least three young males with minority background who participated in my study, from a societal perspective, appear promising, but what about the other members who left the club? I posed the questions of what the criteria were for (more, permanent) inclusion in a club community; how gender aspects, aspects of cultural differences and sports skills were possibly related to these; and how meaningful it was to talk about integration in an urban sports club in the first place. I have shown that the idea of integration clearly had an impact within the community of practice of the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club. I have also shown that considering sports for society’s or sports for sports’ sake as contradictory forces that impact on organisation of sports did not adequately account for the practices I observed in the club. The club work and the members’ understandings involved interrelations between welfare and sports-cultural ideologies. Furthermore, those among the young participants in my study, who reproduced aspects of welfare-ideological, sports-related discourses, equally emphasised sports-specific ambitions. To these observations we can add that being included in the community and continuing to be a member of the club appeared closely related to possession of the symbolic capital of sports-specific competition skills. My findings thereby question the assumption within the sociology of sports that there is a clear distinction between elite sport and ‘sport for all’ views (such as in Munk & Lind, 2004 and Anderson, 2003). Nevertheless, these dimensions are highly central to the way Danish sport is organised on a national level as well as in individual sports clubs. In addition, using the community of practice as an analytical unit in my study brings into focus the need for much more nuanced considerations of what it entails to participate in a sports club, what the conditions are for participation and how community-specific power relations play a central part in relation to a sports club’s potential as a site for socialising processes. Anderson (2005, 2006) addresses the simplified assumptions underlying the idea of integration as (ethnic) minorities’ adaptation to the majority society. She carries out her fieldwork in the same martial arts club as I have studied, and she finds that integration processes involve all participants. According to Anderson’s study, the martial arts practitioners’ ascription to various different social categories does not emphasise ethnicity, but rather they orient towards local urban identities and identities as martial arts practitioners. She does not, however, consider different participant positions and status relations among the members. A sports club open to members of different age, gender, ethnic and social background can of

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course formally be described as ‘open to everyone’, as Anderson describes it (Anderson, 2006: 66). But formal membership in a sports club is not the same as social involvement. A possible problem with integration projects and sports sociological work on integration is a tendency to overlook the significance of the peer community as well as the relative autonomy of socialisation and group membership processes in a specific club. The building of shared values and norms does not only happen through transfer from adult role models to younger pupils. The building of social relations between peers is likely to be the most important part of the everyday engagement in a sports club. What I have described in this chapter is, in effect, the local normative conditions for being seen as a member and for the hierarchical organisation of different degrees of membership. We have seen that in the taekwondo club there was a great distinction between participating as an 11-year-old girl practising in the girls’ class and as a 15-year-old boy practising on the elite fighting team. The factors for shaping social involvement were related to aspects of age that intersected with gender and sports skills. Considering a sports club as a potential socialising and unifying community requires accounts of such local normative conditions. Wenger’s (1998) theory offers a tool for describing processes that can be characterised as incorporation into the club. According to the theory of communities of practice, it is the peripheral participant position which enables learning and socialising. All of the participants in my study were, however, already relatively longstanding members at the time of my fieldwork, but in particular the girls, and those who did not engage in competition fighting, remained marginal participants. Surely, taking into consideration the local social hierarchies, the club was not equally open to everyone and it is no surprise that members in the most marginal positions, three years after my fieldwork was carried out, had left the voluntarily based club community. So my study suggests that it is questionable to claim that the taekwondo club enables integration processes involving all participants. I have engaged extensively with political integration rhetoric because it is a significant part of the wider discursive environment surrounding the social life of minority youth, and integration discourse had an important impact on practices and articulations in the taekwondo club as well. The study of practices in the club, however, also bring into relief questions of what integration is in the first place. What actual social processes and actions is integration supposed to encompass? Where do we look for integration? And considering how politically loaded the notion of integration is, is it any good as an analytic concept?

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In a characterisation of Scandinavian anthropological work on integration, Olwig (2010: 180) discusses the relationship between integration as emic and analytic term: Integration is not just an analytic term measuring levels of social incorporation according to pre-defined parameters of achievement within, for example, employment, housing and education. It has become an emic term denoting the ability to conform to social norms and cultural values defined in dominant discourse as basic to proper citizenship. ‘Integration’ therefore has become a powerful notion, designating who belongs* and by implication who does not belong* in society. A way to avoid the risk of legitimising the dominant emic meaning is of course to use a different analytic term like e.g. incorporation (Faist, 2009; Foner & Bertossi, 2011; Glick Schiller & Çağlar, 2009). Yet, if part of the aim of ones’ research is to inform debates about diversity (predominantly framed as issues of integration), it may be important to link analyses to recognisable terms within these debates. In Danish anthropology and sociology of sports, integration has been used as analytic term for the general social processes occurring when individuals gather in social collectivities. In this sense it concerns all participants involved in the maintenance, development and change of social communities (Olwig & Pærregaard, 2007). The theoretical starting point for this research has been Giddens’ definition of social integration (Agergaard, 2008; Agergaard & Bonde, 2013). According to Giddens (1984: 28): ‘“Integration” may be understood as involving reciprocity of practices (of autonomy and dependence) between actors or collectivities’, and he further distinguishes system integration from social integration: Social integration then means systemness on the level of face-to-face interaction. System integration refers to connections with those who are physically absent in time or space. The mechanisms of system integration certainly presuppose those of social integration, but such mechanisms are also distinct in some key respects from those involved in relations of copresence. (Giddens, 1984: 28) Hence, Giddens’ definition of integration describes processes of social transformation involving reciprocity rather than incorporation. System integration refers to processes of reciprocity across time and space, whereas social integration entails co-presence and refers to reciprocity processes in face-to-face encounters. In this way the two-part distinction

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reflects a macro and a micro perspective on integration. Clearly, political integration discourse and sports-political projects work at the level of system integration providing the structural and discursive conditions for potential spaces of reciprocity (although political rhetoric often emphasises assimilation rather than reciprocity). Policy and institutional organisation set the frame for bringing different individuals and groups together, in this case, to do sports. By demonstrating the significance of local norms, identity affiliations and symbolic values to what actually happens when people are brought together in a specific social space, this chapter has, in fact, dealt with tensions between system and social integration in Giddens’ sense. I have so far, however, been more concerned with processes of incorporation into the club community than processes of reciprocity. Also, although my account of the practices in the club has been closer to face-to-face presence than to system-level extending time and space, it has still been a general description of the patterns of behaviour and hierarchical order among the young members. In Giddens’ definition of social integration, there is basis for fine-tuning to investigate practices of reciprocity. To attempt to answer the question of how one can talk about integration in a sports club it is therefore fruitful to look further into how aspects of autonomy and dependence, norms, affiliations and values play out in the face-to-face interactions as well, and in the following three chapters, I will do so.

Notes (1) (2)

http://www.sk.kk.dk The overall average in Copenhagen at the time of the fieldwork was 19.8% immigrants or children of immigrants, 13.9% from non-Western countries (3) At the time of the fieldwork 5142 people above the age of 18 received social benefits, out of a total population of 71,799. The number has increased to 5641 in 2011. (4) The north west area of Copenhagen is in many ways similar to Nørrebro. It is culturally and ethnically diverse, densely populated and characterised by a relatively high concentration of materially underprivileged inhabitants. The north west area has, however, traditionally been a more industrial area, further away from the city centre. It does not have the same status as a hip and metropolitan quarter as Nørrebro does, nor the same cultural life. (5) http://www.wtf.org (6) http://www.dif.dk. The number of members has increased to 8591 divided into 102 clubs in 2011. (7) http://www.sonbong.dk (8) Since 2011, Ko Tai Jeong has been employed as a full time teacher of taekwondo at a Danish People’s College for sports, ‘Bosei’, with a special martial arts profile. This means that Tai Jeong is rarely present in the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club and his responsibilities have been taken over by another senior black belt who has been

80

(9)

(10)

(11)

(12) (13) (14) (15)

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a student of Tai Jeong’s throughout his taekwondo career and shares Tai Jeong’s approach to the martial art. Habitus refers to structuring structures of embodied dispositions which incline (but do not determine) individual agents to act, react and perceive in certain ways. An individual’s habitus is based on experience as participant in various fields and develops in accordance with individuals’ life trajectories. Habitus is to be understood as a practical sense rather than an intellectual consciousness (e.g. Bourdieu, 1991: 123; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1996: 115). The club’s location in the same building as the local pensioners activity centre initially created some problems. The elderly felt insecure about sharing their facilities with a multicultural group of young locals practising martial art. This situation motivated the participation in the project. In 2002, the club was awarded DIF’s prize for best ‘sport for all’ club (‘breddeidrætsprisen’). The club has also several times been mentioned in national newspapers as a successful example of integration of ethnic minority youth (e.g. Jyllandsposten, 22.12.2003, Politiken, 28.04.2005 & 29.04.2005). These interviews were made by a journalist in connection with a planned publication on the history of the club. This was, as it turned out, never published, but I was allowed access to the interviews for my research. ‘Det frivillige integrationsarbejde og deltagelse i idræts- og foreningslivet’ https://www. nyidanmark.dk/NR/rdonlyres/F6D158B0-60F7-45CC-8835-9D05ECE0DD36/0/ Idr%C3%A6t2010.pdf The first half of the project ran from 2003–2008, see: http://www.get2sport.dk/ da/Publikationer/Midtvejsevaluering.aspx Rock (2005) suggests that multi-membership of many communities of practice affects the participation and negotiation of meaning in a particular community of practice. She finds for example that through their negotiation of participation police officers in the same workplace are best described as forming different communities of practice within the workplace although they share a profession. Similarly, among the participants in my study, each group of friends could within the defining criteria also be considered small communities of practice. Most of the friendship groups are stable and several of them engage in mutual practices outside the club community as well, so no doubt they develop shared repertoires of resources specific to their groups. Moreover, as we shall see below, one of the groups of girls attends the club and practises taekwondo on different days from the rest of the young members, and, based on the same arguments as in the case of the adults and the youth, they could be considered a separate community of practice. Still, if the notion of community of practice is to be meaningful as a mid-level analytical concept providing a tool for describing different participant positions, groups of friends in the club are not to be considered individual communities of practice. The groups of friends might well be viewed as forming sub-communities of practice, or different communities of practice overlapping with the club community (in particular, the youngest girls).

3 Girls, Boys and Interaction There are several reasons to think that gender matters to the young taekwondo practitioners. As we have seen, both the formal and informal organisation of activities in the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club point to gender in combination with age as important organising principles, and the sportspolitical initiatives I discussed include awareness of gender as a challenge to integration. In addition, the more widespread concern with the societal challenges of diversity is often articulated as more pronounced in relation to minority boys than girls: the statistical surveys point to minority boys, in particular, as educational underachievers (Andersen, 2010); and stereotypes of school oppositional and gangster-oriented youth target males rather than females (e.g. Dahl & Jakobsen, 2005; Røgilds, 2004). Finally, it is well established in sociolinguistic and anthropological research on urban youth, schooling and style that gender is a significant means of social differentiation (Bucholtz, 2011; Eckert, 2000; Goodwin, 2006; Maegaard, 2007; MendozaDenton, 2008; Quist, 2005). In this chapter, I look into how gender matters by studying in more detail the ways gender relationships figure in the everyday interactions of the participants. I investigate how the participants enact gendered identities within different age groups. I show that gender positioning often occurs during interactional activities framed as playful, but that the seemingly playful conduct does not function merely as entertainment. Playful activities involve serious monitoring of peer relationships and group involvement related to gendered norms, and I argue that the way interaction is practised is a key part of how the girls and the boys maintain and negotiate friendships in different ways. The differences I observe involve more explicit orientation towards competition among the boys, whereas the girls orient towards group involvement and building of alliances. I suggest that the orientations towards competition and group belonging as they play out in peer interactions can be linked to the dimensions of competition and social fellowship pointed to in Chapter 2 and thereby inform the wider discussion of sports clubs as integrating and socialising sites. So, from having considered the groups from a bird’s eye perspective – looking at the clusters of individuals, their general patterns of behaviour in the club and the participants’ overt reflections on the social relationships – we now shift the perspective and investigate how the groupness and 81

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the social relations are actually practised in interaction. I have selected the episodes I attend to in this chapter because they relate to aspects of gender in two ways either (1) by explicitly involving gender categorisation, such as stereotypes of femininity and masculinity and sexual-romantic relationships, or (2) by illustrating practices that were typical of the boys’ and the girls’ management of friendship relations (several examples involve both dimensions). Both of these selection criteria are informed by previous literature on children, youth and gender (and I refer to this in the analyses), but in particular the latter relies on the sense of typical behaviour I gained from the 10 months of repeated observation and by listening through the 25 hours of recorded interaction. As it turns out, almost all of the sequences that include these gender aspects involve elements of teasing or other playful framing. Therefore, I begin by introducing the concepts of play, frames and teasing, and I discuss these concepts in relation to specific interactional episodes. After this, I show how the co-construction and negotiation of interactional frames are important to how the participants manage their interpersonal relationships and, I argue, to how they practise gender.

Frames, Play and Teasing Compared to various other discourses (e.g. adult professional discourse or educational adult–child interaction), children’s and adolescents’ discourse, and indeed casual leisure peer conversation, is characterised by being extensively playful. Lytra (2007) observed how the linguistic practice among the children in the Greek primary school she studied (…) was saturated by the exchange of nicknames (…), playful and less playful jibes and solo singing that would tail off and re-emerge later in talk or turn into multi-voiced full-fledged singing performances. Children experimented with rhyme and rhythm, differences in intonation contours, pitch, volume and repetition. They referred, alluded to and performed recyclable and recontextualizable fragments of talk from music, TV and film as well as mimicked, reconstructed and parodied the voices of their peers and teachers. (Lytra, 2007: 9) Instances of playful talk frequently occurred across conversational contexts in Lytra’s data and her study on social identities demonstrates how playful linguistic practices are crucial to children’s interactions. Lytra’s description of her data above could very well have been a description of the data I collected in the taekwondo club. As we shall see, mock challenges, performance, experiments with pronunciation features, incorporation of

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media discourse and music making was evident in the young taekwondo practitioners’ interactions. In this sense, playfulness was highly salient. Yet, not all their talk was purely playful. Also, seemingly playful conduct can be serious business indeed. Negotiations of participation status and participants’ alignments sometimes resulted in disagreement, and relatively overt serious disputes occasionally occurred. Disagreements, whether subtle or overt, embedded within playful activities or not, are significant to the micro-management of social order and local status negotiations among the participants (see also Goodwin, 1990, 2006). Lytra’s (2007) work on children’s interactions builds on a combination of Goffman’s concept of frame and Gumperz’ notion of contextualisation cues, and she employs play frames as a cover term for a range of verbal activities such as music making and chanting, verbal play, joking and teasing1. Goffman’s notion of frame refers to the organisational premises and cognitive structures that govern definitions of social situations and guide the understanding of and engagement in interactional activities as well as subjects’ involvement in them (Goffman, 1974: 10–11). Frame in this sense is a participants’ conceptualisation of the relevant activity type in a situated social encounter. Social and verbal practices (or clusters of social and verbal acts) set up frames which inform the interpretation of what is going on in a given sequence of interaction. Participants in social interaction employ and interpret practices as contributions to or signals of particular activities, which are recognised as types involving certain characteristics. As Gumperz (1982: 131) suggests, participants recognise aspects of linguistic form, from subtle pronunciation features to code switches, as signalling cues of contextual presuppositions that involve familiar frames or activity types (as Gumperz terms it), and he terms these signalling features contextualisation cues. Through production and reception of semiotic cues the participants make sense of what is going on in an interaction. Is the type of activity, for instance, a dispute or verbal play? Is a challenge from a co-participant to be understood as playful or serious? Gumperz emphasises that contextualisation cues as signs are associated with assumed background knowledge, but that they do not determine meaning. Activity types constrain interpretations in the sense that they foreground certain aspects of our knowledge. Contextualisation cues thus carry meaning by channelling interpretation of interactional activity, but as Gumperz (1982: 131–32) argues: Although such cues carry information, meanings are conveyed as part of the interactive process. Unlike words that can be discussed out of context, the meanings of contextualisation cues are implicit. They are not usually talked about out of context. Their signalling value depends on

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the participants’ tacit awareness of their meaningfulness. When all participants understand and notice the relevant cues, interpretive processes are then taken for granted and tend to go unnoticed. Gumperz further notes that the interpretation of interactional contextualisation cues is often unnoticed unless misunderstandings occur. Lytra (2007) emphasises that interactional frames are set up, constructed and developed dynamically in interactions. Participants might tune into a given frame, but they might also challenge or transform the frame, and more than one frame can be relevant to a sequence of interaction at the same time (Lytra, 2007: 19–20)2. Below we shall see, for instance, how Ilias challenges an established frame of ritual insult by refusing to participate (Excerpt 3.3) and how Michelle deploys ambiguous contextualisation cues signalling playful and serious at the same time (Excerpt 3.2). An interactional activity especially sensitive to interpretations as playful or serious is teasing, because it is ambiguous by simultaneously involving potential challenges or (face) threats and playfulness. Both teasing and joking in Lytra’s definition involve threats, challenges or insults designed as humorous rather than sincere. Lytra separates joking from teasing mainly based on the target of the activity. Teases are always targeted at a present party, while jokes according to her definition might be aimed at an absent third party, an object, a situation or the speaker herself (Lytra, 2007: 100–103). Tholander and Aronsson (2002: 563) define teasing in conversation in a similar manner, namely as interactional practices which point out or hint at co-participants’ shortcomings, norm transgressions or inappropriate behaviour and are directed at a present party.3 The teaser targets a present participant by emphasising shortcomings or by displaying some form of opposition in relation to the teased, but at the same time teasing involves some aspect of playful keying (Goffman, 1974: 45). This can be signalled by, for instance, laughter, change in voice quality, singing voice, etc. Teasing might be instigated or responded to more or less playfully or more or less seriously (Boxter & Cortés-Conde, 1997; Drew, 1987; Tholander & Aronsson, 2002). The excerpts I will discuss in this chapter illustrate that the borders between serious dispute and playful teasing are fluid and negotiated ongoingly in the interaction, and that the construction of teasing as serious or playful depends on responses (see also Lytra, 2007 and Tholander & Aronsson, 2002). Interactional sociolinguistic studies of peer-group teasing have focused on negotiation of social identities, social alliances and teasing as socialising practices (e.g. Eder, 1991; Goodwin, 1990; Lytra, 2007; Tholander 2002), and teasing has been described as engaging multiparty participation (Lytra,

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2007). Teasing is viewed as requiring some level of intimacy among the participants (Eder, 1991; Eisenberg, 1986; Lytra, 2007; Norrick, 1993) and sharing a playful activity might therefore work as an in-group marker. Through eliciting the support of their peers, participants in teasing practices have been shown to negotiate social alliances and local power relationships, and teasing has been demonstrated a means of competing for group leaderships (Goodwin, 1990, 2006; Lytra, 2007; Tholander & Aronsson, 2002). A focus of the research on teasing has been how it involves attributed social roles to selves and others. Through teasing, participants reinforce and monitor social conduct and talk of their peers (Lytra, 2007) and, finally, it has been emphasised that teasing requires skilled performances (Boxter & Cortés-Conde, 1997; Eder, 1991; Kotthoff, 2006). These functions of teasing are certainly significant to the interactions among the participants in the club. The examples I discuss in this chapter show how the girls and the boys ascribe social roles and regulate conduct related to gender and status in the friendship groups through interactional activities, in particular, teasing, but also other activity types covered by Lytra’s notion of play frames.

Social Relationships and Teasing in Interaction I will open the discussion of the participants’ interactional practices by considering three teasing episodes in detail. These examples illustrate some differences in the interactional behaviour among the male and the female participants that will be further elaborated in the following sections.

Jocular self-ridicule In the first sequence from a conversation in the club between Ling, Misha and Malena, the girls establish interpersonal alignments through a joint humorous story, which is instigated by Misha and features Ling as the target of the amusement. Misha reports that Ling yesterday referred to high school classes with the wrong terms. In the Danish context, the correct way of referring to different years in high school (the Danish Gymnasium, therefore ‘g’) would be: ‘first, second, and third g’, but according to Misha, Ling instead said: ‘g one, g two, g three’. By reporting this Misha points to shortcomings of Ling’s knowledge of high school related terms: Excerpt 3.1: Bananas in pyjamas Thirty-three minutes into the group conversation between Ling, Misha and Malena (girls 2). The girls are engaged in the task of gluing pictures on a poster. Ling is standing near a table cutting out pictures from magazines,

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while Misha and Malena are sitting at the table gluing on pictures. The ‘gs’ relate to the Danish term for the three years in high school (in Danish ‘gymnasium’) usually referred to as first, second and third ‘g’. Note that English speech in the original is marked by italics in the translation. 1 2 3

Misha:

hvad var det du sagde i går nej øh g et g to g tre for første anden og tredje g'er ((peger på Ling og derefter Malena))

what was it you said yesterday no eh g one g two g three for first second and third g’s ((points to Ling and then to Malena))

4

Malena:

°hvad° ((alle griner))

°what° ((they all laugh))

5 6 7 8

Misha:

hhh hhh >hun stod bare< hhh hhh vi sad og snakkede om gymasiet ikke så kommer det[sådan der]

hhh hhh >she just stood< hhh hhh we sat and talked about high school right then it comes [like]

9

Malena:

10

Misha:

nej nej øh nej

no no eh no

11

Ling:

((lyset slukker)) aih aih ↑ai:h

((light switches off)) aih aih ↑ai:h

12

Misha:

scream ((dyb stemme, lyset tænder igen))

scream ((deep voice, the light switches back on))

(0.8)

(0.8)

[første g]

[first g]

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Misha:

>så siger hun sådan< nå men hvad så med det der g et og g to og g tre (.) ↑hvad hhh hhh det hedder første anden og tredje g (.)↑nå↓å: hhh

>then she says like< well but what about that g one and g two and g three (.) ↑what hhh hhh it’s called first second and third g (.)↑o↓o:h hhh

20 21 22 23

Ling:

nej så sir jeg nej nej nej det hedder den der gymnasie et to og tre

no then I say no no no it’s called that high school one two and three

24

Misha:

hhh hhh g hvad?

hhh hhh g what?

25

Ling:

me:n det var stadig forkert

bu:t it was still wrong

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Misha:

du ved ligesom i en børnehave og så begyndte hun at sidde og forklare noget om børnehaveklasse og niende klasse så sad jeg der hvad ja du ved g et g to

you know like in a nursery and then she began to sit and explain something about nursery class and ninth grade so then I sat there what yes you know g one g two

Girls, Boys and Interaction ↑hvad hhh hhh

↑what hhh hhh

37

Ling:

hhh hhh ha ha

hhh hhh ha ha

38 39 40 41

Misha:

så sagde jeg det er ikke bananas det er ikke bananas i pyjamas det her

then I said it’s not bananas it’s not bananas in pyjamas this

42

Ling:

b et b to hhh hhh

b one b two hhh hhh

43

Misha:

b et og b to hhh hhh

b one and b two hhh hhh

36

87

Misha directs the question ‘what was it you said yesterday’ (line 1) to Ling (by pointing to her). This appears to be a rhetorical question because she does not wait for Ling to respond. Instead she contributes the reply herself. While answering the question she points to Malena. So here Misha articulates the discourse, but presents Ling as the original author of the content and casts Malena as the addressee of the humorous story (Kotthoff, 2007). The central point of the story, which is in fact delivered already in this first utterance, is Ling’s mistake related to terms for high school classes. This positions Ling as the target of a tease, and the frame of playfulness is contextualised by cues of laughter (in which they all participate, e.g. line 4; 36–37; 42–43). The girls’ conversation is briefly disturbed by the light switching off in the room (controlled by movement censors), and Ling’s screaming sounds and Misha’s playful ‘scream’ in line 11 and 12 are responses to this. After the light switches back on, Misha continues the story. Her telling involves performing quotes of direct speech from Ling and herself. In this way, Misha switches between voices and speaker roles (line 13–19) from reporting on Ling’s conduct during the past episode: ‘then she says like’, to merely quoting Ling: ‘well but what about that g one and g two and g three’, back to quoting herself during the reported event: ‘what - it’s called first second and third g’, and again back to animating Ling’s reaction: ‘oh’. The turn is also produced laughingly, and Ling contributes to the story as co-narrator: ‘no then I say no no no it’s called that high school one two and three’ (line 20–23). Misha’s initiating question could be said to have already made Ling a relevant co-narrator and Ling quotes her own attempted correction of the mistake reported by Misha, but in line 25 she evaluates her own reported suggestion as ‘still wrong’. By participating like this, Ling responds to the indirect tease by contributing to the construction of the telling of a humorous story involving her own shortcomings, and thereby engages in jocular self-ridicule. Towards the end of the sequence, Misha adds an extra comical point to the story, as she presents another self-quote and repeats her own teasing comment from the original incident, and this comment involves language play (line 38–41). She uses the English word ‘bananas’

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instead of the Danish ‘bananer’ when she compares Ling’s mistaken use of terms for high school classes to the names of the bananas in the children’s programme Bananas in Pyjamas (called B1 and B2). Again, Ling responds by laughingly elaborating on the comical aspects of her own mistake through self-ridicule, when she refers to the names of the Bananas in Pyjamas characters ‘b one b two hhh hhh’ (line 42). Based on the reactions of Ling and the sustained playful keying, this teasing episode appears to belong to the friendly and bonding end of the teasing scale (Tholander & Aronsson, 2002). The girls here construct alliances in two ways. An alignment between Ling and Misha is created through the joint telling of a mutually experienced fun episode the day before, in which Malena did not take part. At the same time, alignment between Misha and Malena is emphasised because the framing of Ling’s mistake as funny presupposes that the audience (Malena) shares the knowledge of proper terms for high school classes. So, Malena and Misha appear aligned in their correct knowledge. Although the tease creates friendly in-group markers through the sharing of the playful activity, the tease also brings about aspects of knowledge associated with greater or lesser maturity. The girls are in their last year of secondary school and possibly about to attend high school. Ling’s shortcomings with respect to terms for high school classes are compared to a TV-programme for very young children (Bananas in Pyjamas), and the tease thus involves social connotations of a lack of maturity and experience. Misha in this episode takes on the role as somewhat of a group leader. She initiates the teasing, casts co-participants in interactional roles, manages the alliances and positions herself as the creative performer of the funny points. She claims an identity as mature and knowing and attributes to Malena similar qualities. Ling, however, is categorised as silly, immature and inexperienced, but she goes along with this and actively co-constructs herself in the role as the cause of the amusement.

Socially strategic ambiguity The next example illustrates a similar, but slightly different, practice of actively playing along in response to a tease and constructing an identity as the source of entertainment. Social negotiations of local status relationships are carried out in this excerpt through negotiation of the right to decide what to treat as laughable and how laughable it is, by exploitation of the frame ambiguity involved in teasing. Before this excerpt, Michelle, Anna and Iris sit in silence at the table during a group recording, when Michelle begins to sing ‘butt face’:

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Excerpt 3.2: Butt face From the group conversation among Michelle, Anna and Iris (26 minutes into the recording). Note that English speech in the original is marked by italics in the translation. Anna is engaged in cutting out pictures from a magazine. The two other girls sit still and look at Anna. Suddenly Michelle begins to sing a phrase (line 1) involving the word ‘butt face’ and rhythmical nods. 1

Michelle:

2

butt fa:ce (2.3) butt fa:ce ((sings and nods head rhythmically in between the words))

butt fa:ce (2.3) butt fa:ce ((sings and nods head rhythmically in between the words))

(0.8)

(0.8)

3

Anna:

↑a:d

↑ya:ck

4

Michelle:

hva:d? ((Iris fniser))

wha:t? ((Iris giggles))

5 6

Anna:

hvorfor sidder du og synger numsefjæs ((alle tre piger griner højt))

why are you sat singing buttface ((all three girls laughs loudly))

7 8 9

Michelle:

hhh hhh hhh hhh ha ha ja men det siger Jesper hele tiden ((de griner fortsat))

hhh hhh hhh hhh ha ha yes but Jesper always says that ((loud laugh continues))

10 11 12 13

Michelle:

i:h okay men sådan sidder Jesper hele tiden åh hold op med at grine ((kigger på Iris med alvorligt ansigtsudtryk))

i:h okay but Jesper always sits like this oh stop laughing ((looks at Iris with serious facial expression))

14

Michelle:

åh ham der Jesper

oh him Jesper

15

Anna:

hhh hhh hi hi [numsefjæs]

hhh hhh hee hee [butt face]

16 17

Iris:

18 19 20 21 22 23

[no what’s]

[ej hvad er] klokken?

the time?

Michelle:

butfa:ce didelidelidelidel buttfa:ce ((synger)) nå (.) det er bare fordi Jesper han sidder hele tiden og siger det

butt fa:ce didelidelidelidel butt fa:ce ((sings)) well (.) it’s just because Jesper he always sits there and says it

Iris:

hvad er klokken?

what’s the time?

(0.5)

(0.5)

24

Michelle:

hvad rager det mig

am I bothered

25

Anna:

[I don’t know]

[I don’t know]

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26

Iris:

[åh hhh hhh ha ha] åh åh ((udtrykker fornærmet chok og griner))

[oh hhh hhh ha ha] oh oh ((expresses offended shock and laughs))

27 28

Michelle:

hhh hhh okay det er bare IKke sjov ((Michelle kigger på Iris og smiler svagt)

hhh hhh okay it’s just Not funny ((Michelle looks at Iris and smiles slightly)

Michelle breaks the silence with solo singing (lines 1–2) involving a term of verbal abuse. Such music making does not require reply, but does allow for comments and evaluation by co-participants (Rampton, 2006: 107). In this case, Michelle’s singing does not result in any immediate reaction from the other participants, but eventually Anna responds with an expression of disgust ‘ya:ck’ (line 3) and a question including a Danish translation of butt face: ‘hvorfor sidder du og synger numsefjæs’ (why are you sat singing butt face, lines 5–6). Thereby she repeats the term which caused the disgust and contributes to the amusement. The expression of disgust and the following questioning of Michelle’s use of a repulsive word also work as jocular polarity markers. In this sense, Anna’s contributions involve elements of teasing targeted at Michelle as they suggest that social norms have been broken. The play frame is sustained here and all the girls laugh loudly. Laughingly, Michelle accounts for the use of ‘butt face’ referring to a (to me unfamiliar) boy’s name ‘Jesper’ (lines 8, 11 and 14). By laughing in response to Anna’s playful construction of opposition, Michelle partly plays along with the tease, but at the same time her explanation attributes the original use of the term of verbal abuse to someone else, in fact she repeats the reference to Jesper three times. Suddenly during the laughter (in which all three girls have participated) Michelle looks with a very serious facial expression at Iris and says ‘stop laughing’ (line 13). This appears an ambiguous act. On one level it could be understood as an appeal to the others to end the long and continuous laugh, on another level the serious and direct look at Iris signals contextualisation cues of non-play; it suggests that the comment is directed at Iris in particular, and that she should not be as much part of the fun. Ambiguous utterances directed at Iris evoking subtle hostility were noticeable in Michelle’s interactional behaviour in this conversation overall (see also Excerpt 3.13, lines 1–6). After Anna has repeated the Danish translation of butt face (line 15), Iris in overlap asks what time it is (lines 16–17). Her question is a frame shift away from the play, but it is ignored by the others. In line 23, Iris repeats her question about the time, and this time she receives a response. Michelle’s response (line 24) ‘hvad rager det mig’ (which is a Danish way of impolitely expressing ‘how does that concern me’, equivalent of ‘am

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I bothered’) can hardly be said to be the preferred answer to a question about the time, but, again, Michelle’s behaviour in relation to Iris appears ambiguous. Her utterance involves opposition directed at Iris and it does not include any obvious cues suggesting play. Still, it occurs at a point in the conversation when the girls have just been engaged in play and laughing, and this sequential connection makes an interpretation within the play frame possible. As it turns out, Iris orients towards the play frame and responds to Michelle’s utterance as jocular teasing. She expresses offended surprise and then laughs intensely (line 26). Anna, in overlap with Iris’ reaction to Michelle’s rude answer, also responds to the question about the time ‘I don’t know’ (line 25), and the switch to an English code could possibly be understood as a contribution to the play frame interpretation. Iris’ laugh appears almost exaggerated, and Michelle reacts to this with another double-faced action. She initially laughs along with Iris, but then states: ‘hhh hhh okay it’s just NOT funny’. She strongly emphasises the word ‘not’, she employs a rather serious tone of voice, but at the same time she smiles. Michelle’s utterance simultaneously expresses amusement and points to the inappropriateness of Iris’ reaction. The inappropriateness pointed to, potentially relates to Iris’ wrong interpretation of the interactional frame or to Iris’ exaggerated reaction. The monitoring of social conduct and the interactional behaviour of the participants is evident in Excerpt 3.2. In a relatively sophisticated manner, Michelle plays on opposing contextualisation cues to achieve local social control. She displays alignment to Anna by laughingly playing along with Anna’s initiated teasing, but subtly displays disalignment in relation to Iris, while she still maintains a potentially (playful) appropriate interactional behaviour, e.g. smiling and laughing, and thereby avoids overt dispute.

Conflicting frame orientation The last example I will discuss in this section is from a conversation among the oldest boys, and here the conflicting frame orientation is employed in a more overt manner. It is significant in this excerpt that a competitive ritual tease turns into a disagreement between on the one side Murat and Salim and on the other side Ilias. The competitive activity begins as a playful exchange of insults, but it turns into a less playful dispute about language choice: Excerpt 3.3: Speak English Thirty minutes into a self-recording by Murat and Ilias. Recorded on their way back to Copenhagen on the train, after a regional talent team

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practice. Murat carries the mp3 recorder. Salim, who is another talent team member (but not a participant in my study otherwise), is present as well. Before Murat’s first utterance, the boys have been engaged in playful teasing of Salim (in a stylised stereotyped immigrant speech style, see Excerpt 4.6). Murat initiates a switch into English and further contributes to the teasing frame. Note that English is used in a large part of the original speech (italics in the translation). 1 2

Murat:

you're so desperate that you sleep with goats (0.3) [maybe]

you're so desperate that you sleep with goats (0.3) [maybe]

4

Salim:

[who ?]

[who ?]

5 6 7

Murat:

you could have choose do:gs or ca:ts or even ↑him (1.1) but you choose ↑goats hhh ((amerikanske accent-træk intonation/vokaler))

you could have choose do:gs or ca:ts or even ↑him (1.1) but you choose ↑goats hhh ((American accent features intonation/vowels))

3

8

(1.0)

(1.0)

9 10

Salim:

no goats is better than him.

no goats is better than him.

11

Murat:

åh ha hhh ((griner))

oh ha hhh ((laughs))

12

Ilias:

i lige måde din nar.

you too you fool.

13 14 15

Murat:

jeg kan ikke tale engelsk det hedder i lige måde eggår hhh ((stiliseret jysk))

I can’t speak English it’s called you too right hhh ((stylised Jutlandic))

(1.8)

(1.8)

16 17 18 19 20 21

Murat:

don't try to change the subje subject you've got a exam in what in (.) one week and you start speaking Danish speak English you piece of shit ((amerikanske træk/udtryk))

don't try to change the subje subject you've got a exam in what in (.) one week and you start speaking Danish speak English you piece of shit ((American features/expression))

(0.2)

(0.2)

hhh hhh °piece of shit° hhh hhh((hvisker grinende))

hhh hhh °piece of shit° hhh hhh((whispers laughing))

(1.7)

(1.7)

I love you. ((forvrænget stemme))

I love you. ((distorted voice))

(3.4)

(3.4)

22 23

Salim:

24

Murat:

25

Ilias:

°nå hvad så°

°well what’s up°

26

Murat:

SPEAK ENGLISH.

SPEAK ENGLISH.

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Ilias:

næ ((Murat griner))

no ((Murat laughs))

28

Salim:

(2.9) you have an English exam.

(2.9) you have an English exam.

29

Ilias:

↑hold din kæft. ((intonation karakteristisk for nutidig storbystil))

↑shut up. ((intonation characteristic of contemporary urban speech))

(1.6)

(1.6)

30

Salim:

speak English

speak English

31

Ilias:

↑hold din kæft. ((samme intonation som ovenfor))

↑shut up. ((same intonation as above))

93

Murat’s first utterance (lines 1–3 and 5–8) is an insult which builds on several taboos. It involves shortcomings with respect to sexuality and uncontrollable (or unsatisfied) sexual desires, and it evokes norm transgressions related to animal sex and homosexuality. At the same time it involves contextualisation cues pointing to a playful frame: Murat laughs while he speaks, and the utterance is marked as a performance by a shift into American-accented English (mainly signalled by the stress pattern and the length of the vowels). The employed accent connotes urban American hip-hop culture (e.g. Cutler, 2007), which is also associated with the activity of ritual insult. Salim’s clarifying question in overlap with Murat’s turn: ‘who?’(line 4) and his reaction with a counter insult ‘goats is better than him’ (line 10), indicates that Salim understands himself as the target of the insult and the appropriate responder. The fact that Salim’s response to Murat includes reference to a third person, ‘him’, suggest that he understands Murat’s ‘or even him’ (line 7) to refer to someone different from himself and this is likely to be Ilias who is the only other person participating in this encounter. Thereby Ilias and Salim are both the targets of Murat’s tease. The laughs accompanying the turns and the sequential order of insult, counter insult (line 10) and appreciation (line 11) further suggest that this is not a serious fight, but teasing in the form of ritual insult (Goodwin, 1982; Labov, 1972b,). Salim’s reaction to Murat’s insult is not a direct counter insult, but rather a deflection developed from Murat’s previous turn. Salim also employs English. Thereby he confirms the code choice of Murat, although, Salim’s contributions in English are pronounced with a Danish accent (this could be a matter of linguistic competence). Murat’s response of surprised laughter shows alignment with Salim’s contribution to the activity. Ilias’ response in line 11 is less creative. He simply returns the insult ‘I lige måde’ (you too). This is done in Danish and the turn does not appear to involve playful contextualisation cues, rather the shift of code seems to suggest a

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shift of frame to serious instead of humorous. The choice of language is reacted to and commented on in Murat’s following turn (lines 13–15). In a mocking way Murat pretends to speak as Ilias. He insults Ilias’ competence in English and does so in a stylised Jutlandic regional variant of Danish. This is marked by the final expression ‘eggå’, which is stereotypically considered characteristic for this region. To Copenhagen youth this variety possibly connotes rural life or slight stupidity – at least the stereotype of the people who speak this variety as being rural and naive is commonly used by the Danish media. Murat’s continuing laugh shows his orientation to this as still a humorous activity. He does not get any response though. After a noticeable pause (1.8 seconds, line 16), he chooses the speaker role himself, this time in English referring to school achievements, when he demands Ilias to follow his language choice because of an upcoming exam. He still does this within the frame of the ritual insult, as he finishes his turn by calling Ilias ‘a piece of shit’ (lines 16–21). Salim’s reaction to this is similar to Murat’s display of alignment above: when Salim repeats the insult in a laughing whisper (lines 22–23). Ilias does not respond, although a rather long pause leaves him the opportunity. Murat’s ‘I love you’ (line 24) is likely to be an attempt to make up for the strong offence, but the seriousness of this declaration of love is taken away by Murat’s distorted voice (cheesy sounding). The demands on Ilias to speak English continue throughout the rest of the excerpt. He refuses and sticks to Danish when he tells Murat ‘næ’ (no) and Salim ‘hold din kæft’ (shut up) (lines 27, 29, 31); these utterances involve no playful keying. The excerpt is characterised by some conversational disturbance visible in the long lapses of silence. Part of this silence is caused by Ilias refusing to play along by not responding at all or not offering the preferred response. The practice of ritual insult in this example also serves as a demonstration of not only the skills of constructing offences for the entertainment of the interlocutors, but certainly also in English skills. English skills are explicitly oriented to by the reference to the upcoming exam. Also, the boys discuss achievements in foreign language tests in school and linguistic competence several times both before and after this recorded sequence (I will discuss this in detail in Chapter 5, see also Madsen, 2011a). Ilias fails (or refuses) to demonstrate such skills while Murat has success doing so. Salim appears to act more as a tag-along echoing Murat’s contributions. So Murat succeeds in positioning as competent English speaker and skilled teasing performer. Several stereotypes are brought about in this linguistic identity construction. The insulting practice involves negatively constructed connotations of homosexuality and provinciality attributed playfully to the other participants. Salim attempts a similar identity positioning to Murat and they are somewhat aligned in this, while Ilias does not participate in

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the activity. He is playfully challenged, not only because of the content of the insults, but also because he fails to orient to the appropriate footing by not engaging in the frame the others orient to. He does not treat the insults as laughable, as he is supposed to within this activity type, and he does not follow the others’ language choice. I have now discussed three rather different examples of teasing and the involved frames. To sum up my observations: •

•

•

Excerpt 3.1 was characterised by teasing being embedded within a humorous story. The play frame was sustained throughout the episode and the teasing involved playful contextualisation cues of laughter and playful employment of English. The teasing pointed out lack of competence in high school terms, invoked relations of mature and knowing identities in opposition to childish and silly identities, and was responded to with co-construction of jocular self-ridicule. I argued that the teasing in this sequence partly constructed socially inclusive alliances between all participants, but also partly (although playfully) involved exclusion of the teased party, who did however not resist this. Excerpt 3.2 illustrated aspects of teasing related to playful music making. The play frame was negotiated and the ambiguous relation between dispute and play was exploited in the negotiations among the participants. The sequence involved contrasting contextualisation cues (e.g. serious facial expression combined with laughter, smile and laughter combined with serious tone of voice). The teasing pointed out norm transgressions related to the use of disgusting words and involved rude displays of indifference directed at a present party. The targets of the teases responded playfully, but also double-faced. Excerpt 3.3 illustrated a particular teasing through performance of ritual insult. The play frame was challenged and negotiated throughout the episode, and it involved several playful contextualisation cues (e.g. laughter, ritual practices, code switches, stylisations and prosodic features). The teasing pointed out lack of competence in English and norm transgressions related to sexuality, and it invoked ideas of linguistically competent, heterosexual, urban and streetwise identities in opposition to sexually deviant, rural and linguistically incompetent identities. The targets of the teases responded with competitive other-directed counterattacks and frame shifts. The interactional negotiations in this sequence resulted in disalignment between the participants because of different frame orientation.

So these examples confirm that teasing as playfully framed interactional activity is negotiated ongoingly in the conversation, that frames can be

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resisted, exploited and transformed, and that sustaining a play frame in teasing depends highly on response work and shared understandings. The examples also shows how the construction of interactional frames as such, and the simultaneous potential relevance of dispute, insult and play, can be used as a means of monitoring the social conduct of peers. This was particularly evident in Excerpt 3.2 in which Michelle employed ambiguous contextualisation cues, but also in Excerpt 3.3 where Ilias rejected the play frame. We have seen examples of the target of a tease dealing with the threat by playing along and actively co-constructing an identity as the cause of the fun. We have also seen the target reacting with counterthreats treating the teasing as overtly competitive or indirectly involving hostility in playful responses. Finally, we have seen the target plainly resist the play frame. As I will further document and discuss in the rest of this chapter, negotiations among the boys more generally appeared overtly competitive and competence focused, in particular, in relation to teasing, joint amusement and sometimes disputes, whereas this did not characterise the negotiations among the girls. Instead, these more often involved selfdirected (or self-involved) humour and more indirect means of displaying social inclusion or exclusion (see also Goodwin, 2006). I have attended to the excerpts above with a primary focus on how the frames of activities were established, exploited and developed, but interactional activities like teasing and other jocular (and less jocular) hints at norm transgressions are clearly fruitful for investigating peer normativities. We have already seen how constructing an act as laughable, such as displaying insufficient age-appropriate knowledge or attributing inappropriate sexual desires to someone, also invokes the norms that these acts transgress (which makes them laughable). In the next section I will look into the norms related to gender and groupness as they were invoked in the interactions among the boys and the girls when acts or values were treated in more or less playful ways as transgressive, inadequate or inappropriate. To compare my findings to the wider field of research on gender and youth, I begin the section with briefly considering my data in relation to other ethnographic studies of gender in similar contexts.

Peer Monitoring and Gender Categorisation My observations as well as the participants’ reports discussed in Chapter 2 point to a striking lack of contact between the boys and the girls in the club. Predominantly mono-gendered groupings are described in several studies of children and youth in Copenhagen (Kofoed, 2003;

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Maegaard, 2007; Quist, 1998; Sørensen, 1989; Staunæs, 2004) and elsewhere (Connolly, 1998; Goodwin, 1990). Yet, the nearly total lack of interaction between the groups of young female and male club members is remarkable. Kofoed (2003), who studies 12-year-olds, Staunæs (2004), who studies 13-year-olds, and Maegaard (2007), who studies 15-year-olds, all describe how sexual-romantic aspects of the interactions between boys and girls in Copenhagen schools were significant to the constructions of gender. Thorne (1993) describes how children’s development into biological puberty entails their entrance into the socially constructed heterosexual institution and the heterosexual market. Eckert (2000) notes that the development from childhood to adulthood entails a change from an ascribed to an achieved place in the world, and this means according to Eckert that: ‘their value is largely determined by their ability to command alliances with, and attention from, valued members of the other sex’ (Eckert, 2000: 14). Staunæs (2004) refers to ‘the heterosexual imperative’ as governing the social market within which they have to achieve a place. In particular, construction of female gender is differentiated by practices related to sexual-romantic aspects. Girls appear to have to master a suitable construction of gender according to their age, balancing between boring and promiscuous (Kofoed, 2003; Staunæs, 2004; Maegaard, 2007), whereas the boys’ construction of gender involves an explicit distancing from homosexuality, which is not relevant to the girls (Staunæs, 2004; Maegaard, 2007). Several of the participants in my study were entering or were well into biological puberty, and sexualromantic aspects of their gender constructions were indeed made relevant during group interactions. But during my fieldwork the sexual-romantic orientation towards other club members was not a relevant aspect of the community of practice of the young taekwondo practitioners. The romantic attention was directed outside the club community. Physical play between boys and girls such as play fights or chasing games, according to observed practices in schools (Maegaard, 2007; Staunæs, 2004), would have been expected, but was entirely absent in the club among the young members (sexual-romantic aspects of social interaction were regular among young adult members). When occasionally during formal practice, boys and girls had to engage in mutual physical exercises in pairs, the boys in particular clearly displayed discomfort. In this sense, construction of masculinity among the children in the club appeared to involve displaying distance from sexual-romantic interests. At the same time, though, the display of distance also evoked a preoccupation with sexuality and romance, and, as we shall see, a heterosexual imperative, as described by Staunæs (2004), also applies to much of the interactional identity-work among the participants in my study.

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Performance of rudeness The boys Ahmet, Mohammed, Micas and Usher in group 2 (11–14 years) were often concerned with heterosexual-romantic relations. This concern was ambiguous, because it also involved displaying distance from sexuality and romance. Girls, tabooed expressions for private body parts and more or less overt hints of sexual-romantic activities are by far the most dominant themes of their group conversation, and prove a rich resource for teasing and challenges, but also mutual fun. These topics were often combined with peer-group music making, cross reference to peer-group practices and employment of mutually familiar linguistic tropes. Excerpt 3.4 illustrates a joint musical performance. Before this sequence, the boys had been engaged in chanting the same tune with a lead in Arabic. The tune resembles the chants used by the young members of the club during cheering at fighting competitions. One of the adult members has just asked the boys to ‘shut up’, when this version is introduced: Excerpt 3.4: Her name is Lise From the beginning of one of Mohammed’s, Usher’s and Micas’ selfrecordings. The sequence is recorded in the club café and several other boys are present, as well as a few adult members. The boy leading the musical performance in this sequence is not among the participants in my study. I refer to him as ‘boy’. The lead chant is followed by a joint chorus chant. It is not possible to distinguish the individual voices participating, and therefore I refer to the group of boys performing the chorus as ‘all’. 1

Boy:

jeg hedder Ole. ((synger for gennem hele sekvensen))

my name is Ole. ((chants throughout the sequence))

2

All:

jå ja ((alle synger omkvæd))

yo ya ((all chant this chorus))

3

Boy:

jeg går i skole.

I go to school.

4

All:

jå ja

yo ya

5

Boy:

jeg kender en pige.

I know a girl.

6

All

jå ja

yo ya

7

Boy:

hun hedder Lise.

her name is Lucy.

8

All:

jå ja

yo ya

9

Boy:

hun har en fisse. ((alle griner voldsomt i lang tid))

she’s got a pussy. ((all laughs intensely for a long time))

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The lead singer here performs a new version of the original Arabic chant, but this time in Danish. According to Micas, Mohammed and Usher, the meaning of the lyrics in this Danish version is very different from the meaning of the original one. The boys did not explain the original meaning specifically, but claimed that the chanted tune was often used to playfully make up new lead rhymes in the club as well as in local schools. Part of the entertainment and the point built up to as the chant progresses is the (approximate) rhyme of a girl’s name and a tabooed expression for vagina: ‘Lise’ and ‘fisse’ (and in equivalent translation ‘Lucy’ and ‘pussy’, lines 7 & 9). The performance is very successful judging by the enthusiasm with which the boys sing along and their intense laughter at the end of the sequence. I do not know whether all the boys in the café and the lead singer are aware of the interaction being recorded, but I do know that an adult member has just told the boys to stop singing. The repetition of the song involving rude lyrics and the following laughs might well be a defiant response to the adult’s request. Certainly, this performance reflects the boys’ amusement and preoccupation with matters of the female sex, body parts and sexual associations, as well as opposition to adult evaluations. In Excerpt 3.5, similar issues are brought up by Micas, Mohammed, Usher and Ahmet. Initially, the playful talk develops from reference to the chant illustrated in Excerpt 3.4, but the rude topics are transformed into a football metaphor. Excerpt 3.5: Defenders and goal keeper From the group conversation among the boys 2 (Ahmet, Mohammed, Micas and Usher). The group conversation is recorded a few weeks after Excerpt 3.1, and the sequence appears 31 minutes into the recording. 1 2 3

Ahmet:

jeg siger til Lise at (.)jeg siger til Lise >du har enºfisseº< ((kigger hurtigt på kameraet og så ned))

I say to Lucy that (.) I say to Lucy >you’ve got a ˚pussyº< ((gaze quickly at camera and then down))

4

Micas:

hhh hhh ha ha ((smiler og griner så))

hhh hhh ha ha ((smiles and then laughs))

5

Usher:

hun hedder Lise? ((læner sig forover og kigger på Ahmet))

her name is Lucy? ((leans forward and looks at Ahmet))

6 7

Ahmet:

ja: jeg kender Lise hun har en [lille] ((står op))

yea:h I know Lucy she’s got a [little] ((stands up))

8

Mohammed:

[xxx] ((læner sig over bordet og tager saks))

[xxx] ((leans over table takes scissors))

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9

Ahmet:

HVAD har hun en lille hvad? ((kigger på Mohammed))

WHAT she’s got a little what? ((looks at Mohammed))

10

Mohammed:

en midtbane ((Micas og Usher fniser))

a centre pitch ((Micas and Usher giggle))

11

Micas:

hhh hhh med to forsvarsspillere ((Micas, Usher og Mohammed griner))

hhh hhh with two defenders ((Micas, Usher and Mohammed laugh))

(1.2)

(1.2)

12

Usher:

er gemt inde i den hhh hhh ((Micas smiler))

are hidden inside it hhh hhh ((Micas smiles))

13 14

Micas:

målmanden er helt stor (.) den fylder det hele

the goal keeper is all big (.) it takes up all the space

In the first part of the excerpt, Ahmet initiates a play frame with an utterance building on the final point of the chant illustrated in Excerpt 3.4 (lines 1–3). A playful interactional activity is established between Ahmet and Micas through the contextualisation cues of re-using phrases from the mutually familiar chant and through Micas’ following laughter (line 4). Note that towards the end of his initial utterance, Ahmet gazes at the camera, speaks the last part ‘you’ve got a pussy’ fast in a low volume, and looks down when he utters the final word. Ahmet thereby displays awareness of the camera when he employs the tabooed expression. The playful sequence building on the Lucychant is continued by Usher. In line 5, Usher pronounces a phrase resembling the first phrase from the chant, but in a question intonation instead of the rhythmical prosody of the chant. Usher’s question appears to function as an invitation for further contributions to the playful activity. Ahmet responds in lines 6–7, but although Ahmet did include the tabooed expression for vagina in his initial turn, he ends this turn with ‘little’ instead. Mohammed’s following utterance is unintelligible, and it is unclear whether it refers to the scissors he picks up or whether it is a contribution to the rude chant, but Ahmet reacts with a clarifying question (line 9). It is initially spoken loudly while Ahmet stands and looks directly at Mohammed, which makes the question function somewhat as a challenge to Mohammed to clearly express the rude word they all know is supposed to follow the rhyme with the name ‘Lucy.’ Thereby it functions as a tease by hinting at Mohammed’s potential shortcomings as he is reluctant to finish the lyrics in front of the camera. Ahmet has already proved that he dared express the taboo word. Mohammed hesitates and then responds with a new development in the characterisation of Lucy, as he suggests she has got a ‘centre pitch’. The football expression used here makes sense in the local context as a metaphor for the centre of the female body (and is employed in a similar manner elsewhere in their conversation). The introduction of the football expression is appreciated by the other boys

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with laughter and continuations of the metaphorical speech (Micas, lines 11 & 13–14, and Usher, line 12). The characterisation of the defenders being ‘hidden inside it’ and ‘the goal keeper’ being big and taking up all the space suggests associations with male genitals and actions of sexual intercourse. Whatever the specific representations, the boys here are clearly referring to heterosexual associations and they do so by employing football metaphors. Awareness of the camera seems to underlie the negotiations of the limits to their talk about tabooed topics. Similar demonstrations of daring interactional behaviour with respect to potential taboos (such as sexuality) occurred often in the recordings with this group of boys. In this sequence Micas, Usher and Mohammed meet Ahmet’s rudeness-challenge by elaborating on the sexual topics, but by employing indirect figurative linguistic strategies, they seem to avoid crossing the borders of potential embarrassment. In contrast to this aspect of the younger boys’ interactional behaviour, the female participants never used either direct or indirect references to sexual actions during the conversations I recorded with them. So, the peer interactions among the younger boys regularly involved elements of (playful) rule breaking, and in fact there are episodes where behaving according to the adult-instigated norms and focusing on the task become linked to non-masculinity through mocking stylisation. In the next excerpt, Micas and Ahmet tease Usher because of his task-oriented behaviour by addressing him in an exaggerated female voice: Excerpt 3.6: US↑HE:R Eighteen minutes into the group conversation between the boys 2. 1

Ahmet:

nej lav den anden vej ((kigger i retning af kameraet))

no do the other way ((looks in direction of camera))

2 3 4

Micas:

øh US↑HE:R skal vi tage den her me↑e:d? ((viser Usher billede, udtaler overdrevet og med høj pitch))

eh US↑HE:R shall we take this one too↑oo:? ((shows Usher picture, pronounces exaggerated with high pitch))

5 6 7

Ahmet:

uh uh nej >gør det gør det gør det gør det< ((Mohammed er bagved kameraet))

oh oh no >do it do it do it do it< ((Mohammed is placed behind the camera))

8 9

Mohammed:

jeg kan ikke se en skid kom lidt nærmere

I can’t see shit come a little closer

10

Usher:

HALLO

HALLO

11

Ahmet:

undskyld skat

sorry honey

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The utterances ‘eh US↑HE:R shall we take this one too↑oo:?’ (lines 2–4) and ‘sorry honey’ (line 11) are noticeably marked in comparison to the rest of the utterances in this sequence. The boys are all fooling around in front of the camera (it is clear that Mohammed is behind the camera, as the camera is moving while the other three boys are still in the picture), when Micas shows Usher a picture in a magazine. In a very high pitched voice, he then asks him if the picture should be included. He pronounces this question with a remarkable prosody. In particular, Usher’s name, as Micas calls for his attention (the utterance translates literally to: ‘shall we take this one with’), and the end of the utterance ‘me↑e:d?’ (with), is very high pitched and exaggerated with a prolongation of the vowels. Usher does not respond to this, but in line 10 he addresses Ahmet with an annoyed and loud ‘hallo’ and Ahmet replies with the marked ‘undskyld skat’ (sorry honey) spoken in a husky voice. The opposition between on one side fooling around with the camera and showing ‘naughty’ pictures, and on the other side Usher’s focus on the task is evident here as in many other sequences from this conversation. Micas’ employment of the features of high pitch and vowel prolongation are not in themselves obviously indicative of a particular voice. Exaggerated high pitch could be associated with several stereotypes, such as female characters, young children (who usually speak with a higher pitch), or perhaps with a posh style. However, the utterances do not co-occur with other features connoting ‘posh’ or ‘childish’. Micas’ exaggerated utterance is related to the task, and when Usher expresses annoyance directed at Ahmet and his offtask activities with Mohammed, Ahmet’s inauthentic response includes the stereotypical feminine expression ‘skat’. This underlines the relevance of female identity aspects. The femininity is teasingly associated with Usher and his (task-focused) behaviour. The stylised female voice is employed by Micas in an utterance which contains negative politeness strategies (Brown & Levinson, 1987) and brings back the interactional focus on the task. At the same time it works as a de-authenticating performance by the use of exaggerated features indexing femininity. Ahmet’s use of a stylised female voice appears less marked and is by its form characteristic of a ritual (an apology)4. In both cases, though, the effect of the stylisation is that the polite or ritual functions of the utterances appear insincere. Instead of politely asking for advice on the task or apologising for disturbing the gluing and cutting, Micas initiates a tease of Usher and his task focus and, although it is initially ignored, Ahmet picks up on the mocking association of femininity and behaving according to the rules. The examples from the younger boys’ interactions show how transgressing (adult) norms is part of the peer normativity, and that these practices

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are related to their construction of hetero-masculinity. They also show how they challenge each other to transgress stereotypical norms for child behaviour through reference to e.g. sexual taboos. Internal challenges were also evident in the older boys’ peer interactions. As we saw in Excerpt 3.3, they regulated appropriate behaviour and situated norms through overt competitive interactional activities such as ritual insult. Competition was enacted in several other ways among these boys, and we shall look closer at a couple of sequences where they construct particular masculinities through a spelling game and through talk about a martial arts competition.

Toughness and competition During the self-recording on the way home from talent team practice (see Excerpt 3.3), Murat challenges Ilias and Salim to a spelling competition: ‘giv mig et ord jeg ikke kan stave til jeg sværger giv mig et ord’ (give me one word I can’t spell I swear give me one word, see Excerpt 5.4). Salim and Murat take turns choosing both Danish and English words for the other one to spell and keep a score on successful attempts. Ilias does not participate. On the contrary, he has several times told the others to stop and has disparaged the activity. Prior to the following sequence the spelling competition has been going on for a while and in this excerpt this activity becomes a frame for bringing about masculinities involving provincial and urban qualities: Excerpt 3.7: Slagelse – Copenhagen Fifty-two minutes into Murat and Ilias’ self-recording. Just before this excerpt, Murat challenges Salim to spell the word ‘thong’. It turns out he does not know the word. Murat explains that it means ‘g-string’ and Salim begins to spell: 1

Salim:

(e) eller t h o (.) u ((staver))

(e) or t h o (.) u ((spells))

2 3 4

Murat:

nej (.) jeg vandt t h o n g det ord kender alle sgu da ((staver thong))

no (.) I won t h o n g that word everybody bloody knows ((spells thong))

5 6

Salim:

ja jeg har sgu aldrig hørt det (før)

well I have never bloody heard it (before)

7 8

Murat:

det er fordi du bor ude på Slagelse

that’s because you live out on Slagelse

9 10

Salim:

(flot du kan) stave til thong stav til Slagelse hhh

(nice you can) spell thong spell Slagelse hhh

11

Murat:

s l a g e l s e å j

s l a g e l s e i

i

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12 13

så dum er jeg sgu ikke stav til København

I’m not that bloody stupid spell Copenhagen

14

Salim:

det kan jeg godt finde ud af

I can do that

15 16

Murat:

okay det ved jeg godt stav til øh

okay I know that spell eh

17

Salim:

(du xxx stave) [xxx ]

(you xxx spell)[xxx ]

18

Murat:

[Nørre]bronx

[Nørre]Bronx

Salim attempts to spell ‘thong’ (line 1), but as soon as he mentions the ‘u’, Murat judges the attempt failed, offers the right answer and comments on Salim’s lack of knowledge of the word by referring to it as being something ‘everybody knows’. Salim accounts for the lack of knowledge in lines 5–6, and Murat then offers an explanation for Salim’s shortcomings (lines 6–7); that he does not know the word because he is from Slagelse. He phrases it ‘bor ude på (live out on) Slagelse’. Slagelse is a mid-sized provincial town in the south western part of Sealand. The choice of preposition appears to underline the provinciality of Salim’s hometown. The likely continuation of the sentence ‘ude på…’ in standard Danish would be: ‘…landet’ (the countryside), whereas the standard way of expressing that someone lives in a town would be: ‘i (in) Slagelse’. I can of course not know whether this is the intention or whether this is just part of Murat’s stylistic (contemporary urban youth) practice (which did involve inventive usage of Danish prepositions, see Section ‘Youth Style in Heterogeneous Urban Environments’). But that regional identities are made relevant and negotiated becomes clear from the continuation of the conversation, where Salim and Murat bring about regional identities by challenging each other to spell the names of their respective hometowns (or as in line 18 the specific area Murat lives in). Murat initially does treat the challenge with an orientation towards the ongoing activity as a spelling competition, when he demonstrates his capability to spell the name of the town, but the focus on urban versus provincial identity is visible in his counter-challenges where Copenhagen and ‘Nørrebronx’ figure as oppositional categories to Slagelse. Note as well that the (locally quite common) slang expression for Nørrebro refers to the Bronx and thereby a possible relation to Afro-American (hip hop) culture (Cutler, 2007) or at least emphasises the urban heterogeneous qualities of the area. Murat is also the one to make the regional identities relevant in the first place when he refers to place of origin as an explanation for not knowing certain words. Similar to Excerpt 3.3, Murat here constructs provincial identity aspects in opposition to his own tough urban identity. In Excerpt 3.7, Murat relates the provincial identity to the lack of English

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skills, and in this example he constructs a relation between provincial identity and lack of knowledge of (English) terms for female underwear with sexual connotations. Murat’s insulting practice in the beginning of Excerpt 3.3 similarly invokes negative connotations to homosexuality and a rural lifestyle, and the boys’ interactional practices document that the construction of urban streetwise masculinity clearly involves and interacts with construction of hetero-masculinity. As the analysis in Chapter 2 also indicates, competitive engagement with the martial arts played a central part for the older boys, and orientation towards tough fighter identities was characteristic of their interactional negotiations. Excerpts 3.8 and 3.9 are both from an episode in their group conversation where the topic is the upcoming national taekwondo championships. These two sequences are included and compared because they illustrate two different ways of constructing fighter identities. Ilias’ tough and fearless persona illustrated in Excerpt 3.8 appears unmarked, but the reactions to Murat’s more concerned and sensitive approach in Excerpt 3.9 make this seem marked and norm transgressing: Excerpt 3.8: The dream 1 Twenty-four minutes into the recorded group conversation among boys 3, the boys are discussing possible opponents at the upcoming Danish Championships. SC refers to (the regional) Sealandic Championships. Utterances containing features of the contemporary urban speech style are in bold. English in original is marked by italics in translation. 1

Murat:

det var ja det var til Brande

yes it was at Brande

2

Fouad:

ja men s [jeg jeg er i hvert]

yes but s [I I am definitely]

3 4

Murat:

5 6 7 8

[du var jo med

[well you were

der]

there]

Fouad:

fald glad til jeg er i hvertfald glad for at øh (0.2) nå ham [der]

happy to I am definitely happy that eh (0.2) oh that [one]

9

Murat:

[ham] der Mikkel ham

10

Fouad:

11 12

Murat:

13 14 15

Fouad:

ham den lave [der xxx] ((viser hvor kort han er med hånden))

[that] one Mikkel the short one[who xxx] ((shows how short with his hand))

[ja sådan] en

[yes such] a

lille en

short one

som ligner en mand på fyrre år mand (1.0) næ nej det er ikke ham

who looks like a forty year old man (1.0) no no it isn’t him

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities Ilias:

jeg har altid drømt om at møde ham ((de to andre griner)) jo det fordi for rigtig lang tid siden ikke jeg så ham vinde fighter til et stævne ikke i en en han var en vægtklasse over mig ((Murat ser på Ilias, Fouad ser ned, begge smiler))

I have always dreamt of meeting him ((the two others laugh)) yes it’s because very long ago right I saw him win fighter at a competition right in a a he was in a weight class above me ((Murat looks at Ilias, Fouad looks down, they both smile))

25

Murat:

[hah]

[hah]

26

Fouad:

[hvad for] en vægtklasse?

[which] weight class?

27 28 29

Ilias:

så sagde jeg til ham wallah kom og kæmp mod mig så skal du se ((griner lidt))

then I said to him wallah come and fight me then you’ll see ((laughs a bit))

30 31

Fouad:

ja du kunne [til til SM skal du nok]

yes you could [at at SC you will probably]

32 33

Ilias:

[også Shernan han sagde det også] tror jeg

[and Shernan said it too] I think

34

Fouad:

møde ham

meet him

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

The central part of the sequence is Ilias’ narrative (lines 16–24 & 27–29). Murat and Fouad have just discussed a fighter from a different club and Ilias reports how he has challenged this fighter at a previous competition. He begins the narrative by stating that he has always ‘dreamt of’ meeting him. ‘Dreamt’ in Ilias’ utterance (line 16) is used in the meaning of ‘wished’ and it thereby implies that it would be positive for Ilias to fight him. Murat and Fouad react by laughing approvingly. Ilias emphasises how he challenged this fighter in spite of him belonging to a weight class higher than Ilias’ and having won ‘fighter’ (the prize for the best fighting performance at a given competition). Goodwin (2006) shows how bragging, both direct and more implicitly imbedded in stories, is a regular practice among the children she studies (Danby & Barker, 1998; see also Goodwin, 1990). In particular, the boys are bragging and they brag about, for instance, sports-related achievements (Goodwin, 2006: 157). Bragging is, according to Goodwin, one of the strategies the children use to signal difference in social status in the peer group (Goodwin, 2006: 158). In Excerpt 3.8, Ilias signals high social status based on taekwondo competence. Ilias’ story contains information about the character of his challenge (as brave and admirable) through the description of the fighter he claims to have challenged. Thus, this is an

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example of a narrative implicitly involving bragging. Goodwin further shows how such bragging can result in various kinds of response. The interlocutors can react, for example, with acknowledgement and positive evaluations, rejection and negative evaluation or challenges (Goodwin, 2006: 159–60). Here Ilias’ bragging is not rejected or challenged. Murat and Fouad react by smiling while Ilias speaks, and Murat’s ‘hah’ in line 25 comes across as a positive evaluation. Ilias uses several non-standard linguistic features associated with the contemporary urban speech style in Copenhagen in his utterances and this linguistic practice contributes to underlining the tough persona performed by Ilias (see Chapter 4). Ilias positions as a fearless fighter, and in line 32–33 he underlines his fighter status by adding that Shernan (who is their fighting instructor and thereby an authority figure) also appreciated the challenge (although this claim is partly moderated by the expression of uncertainty). In the next excerpt (which is the immediate continuation of Excerpt 3.8) Murat tells the others about a different kind of dream, and this leads to teasing reactions: Excerpt 3.9: The dream 2 Continuation of Excerpt 3.8. Utterances containing features of contemporary urban speech style in bold. 1 2

Ilias:

det skal jeg nok hvis jeg kommer med

I sure will if I participate

3 4 5

Fouad:

ja ja med mindre [du synes det bliver for hårdt]

yes yes unless you [think it will be too tough]

6 7

Murat:

[JA JEG DRØMTE jeg så] deltagerlisten til hollandske

[YES I DREAMT I saw] the participation list for Dutch

8

Fouad:

jeg drømte jeg kunne flyve

I dreamt I could fly

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Murat:

nej helt seriøst jeg drømte at øh (1.0) jeg kunne huske et eller andet navn ikke også jeg kan ikke huske hvad navnet var men jeg havde set det navn og det navn var åbenbart europamester og sådan noget og Sanchez han skulle møde ham i sin anden kamp hvis han vandt xxx wallah [jeg drømte det hhh]

no seriously I dreamt that eh (1.0) I could remember some name right I can’t remember what that name was but I had seen that name and that name was apparently European champion and such and Sanchez he would meet him in his second fight if he won xxx walla [I dreamt it hhh]

22 23

Ilias:

[hvad fanden er det] [du drømmer om] ((de griner))

[what the hell is it] [you’re dreaming] ((laugh))

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

24 25

Murat:

[nej helt] seriøst jeg ved ikke

[no seriously] I don’t know

26

Fouad:

din perverse [dreng mand]

you pervert [boy man]

27 28 29

Murat:

[OG JEG] SKULLE jeg skulle møde en eller anden øh

[AND I] HAD to meet someone or another eh

In contrast to Ilias, Murat refers to ‘dream’ in the more literal meaning. He reports to have dreamt about the participation list for the upcoming Dutch competition (lines 6–7). Murat’s narrative follows shortly after Ilias’ above, but it is very different. It does not involve the kind of status marking elements that Ilias’ story did and it is certainly not responded to as bragging. The other boys’ reactions are interesting. Fouad initially reacts with a nonserious comment about dreaming of being able to fly, but Murat emphasises that the story is to be taken seriously (line 8) and continues. Both Ilias and Fouad, however, maintain the non-serious responses and contribute teasing comments accompanied by laughing (e.g. ‘what the hell is it you’re dreaming’, lines 22–23). They thereby react to Murat’s dream story as remarkable. Fouad even refers to Murat as ‘you pervert boy man’ (line 26). Pervert is usually an expression used for sexually deviating behaviour (and nothing in my data suggests that it is used in a different way among these boys). The other boys’ reaction to Murat’s sharing of a dream points to the relevance of (heterosexual) gender aspects. By informing the others about a dream about possible opponents to the upcoming competition, he shows that this is something he is concerned about, and this results in a less fearless and tough fighter positioning. Ilias’ and Fouad’s reactions suggest that this more concerned and sensitive persona perhaps challenges the norm of masculinity as Murat is referred to as a pervert. He, in turn, appears to react to their mocking comments and his talk is characterised by hesitation sounds, laughter and markers of insecurity (e.g. lines 24–25). The markedness of this dream story underlines its deviation from the norm. The more accepted frequent construction among the boys was a strong, fearless fighter identity as we saw in Ilias’ story above (a similar example of Murat’s concerned fighter persona is discussed in Excerpt 4.3). As the analysed excerpts of the boys’ conversations have made clear, a central element of the social negotiations among the boys was competition. Local status negotiations were carried out through competition in insults (Excerpt 3.3), taboo terms (Excerpt 3.4 & 3.5), linguistic performance and competence (Excerpt 3.3 & 3.7), fighting skills (Excerpt 3.8 & 3.9) and spelling (Excerpt 3.7). In my recorded data, the negotiations among the girls rarely involved explicit competition. As we have seen, the boys’ internal competitions were predominantly framed as playful interactional activities

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and appeared as a significant part of the construction of male friendship relations (although there are examples of more serious disagreements in Excerpt 3.3 & 4.8). Rather than compete, the girls seemed to bring about social alliances through including and excluding practices (see also Goodwin, 2006), and inclusion involved a display of shared norms, experiences, knowledge and values. In the final section before I conclude this chapter, I look into how the girls oriented towards norms of femininity and female friendships and how they enacted these norms in interaction.

Peer monitoring and alliances As we have seen, the younger boys displayed distance and disgust in relation to sexual association at the same time as displaying an interest in, and a strong preoccupation with, this topic. The younger girls also displayed disgust in relation to sexual topics, but they were not treated as a key source of amusement among the girls in general (in contrast to particularly the boys 2, but also boys 1 and 3). Excerpt 3.10 illustrates a demonstration of the younger girls’ disgust: Excerpt 3.10: Naked lady Anna and Michelle from the girls 2’s group conversation. The sequence appears 24 minutes into the recording 1

Micelle:

↑a::d ((picks up post card))

↑Ya::k

2

Anna:

hvad nu? ((klipper og kigger på saks))

now what? ((cuts and looks at scissors))

3

Michelle:

se det der [xxx(marengs)]

look at that[xxx (meringue)]

4 5

Anna:

[det jo bare] en nøgen dame hhh hhh ↑ad

[it’s just] a naked lady hhh hhh ↑yak

6

Michelle:

du mener med g-streng på

you mean in a g-string

(1.4)

(1.4)

7 8

Anna:

det gør det jo ikke ligefrem bedre

it doesn’t exactly make it better

9

Michelle:

nej hhh hhh

no hhh hhh

Michelle cries out ‘a::d’ (ya::k) and expresses disgust as a reaction to a picture on a post card. When Anna responds with a clarifying question, Michelle shows her the cause of the disgust and adds a comment to the picture which I cannot make sense of (because it is spoken in overlap with Anna’s response). Anna initially reacts by stating that it is just a naked lady,

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but then also laughingly expresses repulsion (lines 4–5). Michelle remarks that the lady is wearing a g-string, and Anna’s reaction ‘it doesn’t exactly make it better’ suggests that wearing a g-string is even more problematic than being naked. The girls’ jocular expressions of repulsion in reaction to the picture of a woman wearing a g-string can be understood as a display of disaffiliation with symbols with sexual associations. Treating a picture of underwear and (almost) nakedness as transgressive suggests that the girls orient towards a norm of more innocent feminine identities, and we see how the two girls align in their mutual judgements. The oldest girls were generally very private about issues related to sexual-romantic identity, but they did not entirely avoid discussing interest and preference in relation to boys. In the next excerpt we see a different kind of distancing from promiscuity in a sequence where Misha and Ling cooperatively evaluate a boy’s desirability and behaviour through joint performances of several voices: Excerpt 3.11: He is nice The end of the recorded group conversation among Misha, Lind and Malena (girls 2). At this point in the interaction, Malena has left the room to tell me that they have finished the poster task, and Ling and Misha are alone. 1 2

Misha:

ºxxx ↑ikke spiller rigtig kostbarº ((xxx = drengs navn, hvisker))

ºxxx ↑right is playing hard to getº ((xxx = boy’s name, whispers))

3

Ling:

hvem?

who?

4

Misha:

ºxxxº ((xxx = boy’s name, whispers))

ºxxxº ((xxx = boy’s name, whispers))

5 6 7 8

Ling:

↑nå: (0.8) ej synes du ikke ham han er sød synes du ikke det?

↑o:h (0.8) well don’t you think him he’s sweet don’t you think?

9

Misha:

hhh hhh øh >bl bl bl bl bl< ((hurtige vrøvlelyde)) ho:ld mu:nd

hhh hhh eh >bl bl bl bl bl< ((fast babbling-sounds)) shu:t i:t

Ling:

måske skulle du hører efter uh >bl bl bl døn døn døn< ((lyde)) ºja ja slap af jeg [hørerº]

perhaps you should listen uh >bl bl bl din din din< ((sounds)) ºyes yes relax I’m [listeningº]

Misha:

[>og så] var der hende der og så var der hende der og så
and then] there was her and then there was her and then
og så ↑hende der hun er rigtig ↑gri:m mm mm mm< men hvorfor skal du så mødes med hende >det ↑ved jeg ikke< hhh hhh så lad være med at mødes med hende >hun er rigtig grim hende der< mm mm mm nå okay

easy now >and then ↑her she’s really ↑ugly mm mm mm< but why are you going to meet with her then >I ↑don’t know< hhh hhh then don’t meet her >she’s really ugly that one< mm mm mm well okay

32

Ling:

ja: ↓ja:

ye:s ↓ye:s

33

Misha:

men han virker meget flink

but he seems pretty nice

34

Ling:

ja

yes

Misha initiates the discussion by whispering and using a particularly low volume when mentioning a name of someone she characterises as ‘playing hard to get’. After Ling has expressed recognition of who Misha is referring to, she evaluates ‘him’ as sweet and we understand that it must be a boy. Ling seeks Misha’s confirmation of this evaluation ‘don’t you think?’ (line 8), but Misha does not react with the preferred response (which would be confirmation), and this is marked by features of initial quiet laughter and a hesitating sound. She continues with a performance of a voice different from the one she otherwise employs (mainly marked by high speed and babbling sounds). Through her utterances in this sequence she gets the message across; I cannot agree that this boy is sweet, he talks too much, sees too many girls and is not critical in his choice of dates, but he seems pretty nice. Misha combines the fast spoken babbling sounds with what appears to illustrate a reaction to the babble: ‘ho:ld mu:nd’ (shu:t i:t, line 10). The characterisation of a very talkative and babbling persona functions as an account for the hesitant reaction to Ling’s positive evaluation of the boy. Ling immediately aligns with Misha’s performance and responds with additional reactions to the parodied extensive and fast speech ‘perhaps you should listen’ (line 11) and ‘yes yes relax’ (line 13). In lines 15–17, Misha adds further characteristics to the parodied male persona by referring to his contact with girls. The two girls co-construct a performance of a dialogue with quoted speech of the parodied boy and their reactions. In Ling’s response to the mentioning of many girls she uses a plural pronoun and thereby seems to speak for both of the girls: ‘we are right here you’ (line 18). We further understand from Misha’s performance that the boy does not only refer to a lot of girls, but he also meets them: ‘but why are you going to meet with her then’ (lines 23–24),

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Fighters, Girls and Other Identities

even if they are ugly (lines 21 and 28). The parody displays reservations with respect to the positive evaluation of the boy as sweet, but at the end, Misha notes that he seems pretty nice. Ling, in spite of initially describing the boy as sweet, aligns with these characteristics and participates in the parodying performances, which thereby gives the impression that it is based on mutual experiences and evaluations. The girls present the boy’s frequent and uncritical encounters with girls (and talking a lot about it) as laughable, and as an obstacle for being categorised as ‘sweet’. Thereby they co-construct disaffiliation with such male behaviour. Still, the boy is not described directly as cheap, and it does not disqualify categorisation as ‘pretty nice’. These examples suggest that distance to promiscuous behaviour was a relevant aspect of the girls’ construction of female identities as well as of their evaluation of boys’ behaviour. We see how the girls signal that this is a shared understanding by confirming each other’s expressions of values. In Excerpt 3.12, however, we see that talk about boys did not only result in alignment. Here, hints of romantic interest are employed as a source for challenging the situated status position: Excerpt 3.12: What did he say? The beginning of the first of Anna and Michelle’s self-recordings, recorded in the girls’ changing room. Just before this sequence, Michelle has asked Anna if she can have a copy of a photo (of a boy). Anna responds that she did not bring the photo and she does not want to give it to Michelle. Anna has just asked Michelle why she wants the photo so badly, when Michelle replies: 1 2 3 4

Michelle:

jamen altså ikke det er bare sådan så jeg ved hvordan han ser ud ↑ikke

yeah but right it’s just so that I know what he looks like ↑right

5

Anna:

jamen du har jo lige ↑set ham

but you’ve just ↑seen him

6

Michelle:

nej jeg har ej

no I haven’t

7

Anna:

det har du jo

you have too

8

Michelle:

det har jeg da ikke

but I haven’t

9 10

Anna:

jo på det der lille billede der

yes in that small photo

11 12

Michelle:

nå ja okay men ikke i virkeligheden vel

well okay but not in real life have I

13 14 15

Anna:

hvorfor vil du se ham i virkeligheden xxx ikke

why do you want to see him in real life xxx not

Girls, Boys and Interaction 16 17

Michelle:

åh det siger jeg jo heller ikke jeg vil ↑vel

oh but I’m not saying that I want to ↑am I

(0.8)

(0.8)

18 19

Michelle:

du har ikke fortalt om mig vel?

you haven’t told about me have you?

20 21 22 23 24

Anna:

næ jeg har bare fortalt fordi han ringede til mig og spurgte hvem du var (.) og så fortalte jeg at du var min veninde

no I’ve just told because he phoned me and asked who you were (.) and then I told that you were my friend

25 26

Michelle:

å:h hvad sagde han hvad sagde han mere?

o:h what did he say what else did he say?

113

Michelle expresses an interest in a boy by claiming a wish to have a copy of a photo of him, and we understand that Anna is in possession of a photo. Yet, instead of offering Michelle a copy, she questions Michelle’s intentions and thereby makes her accountable for her interest in the photo. When Michelle accounts for this interest by explaining, that she has not seen the boy in real life, Anna again treats this as questionable, and by doing so, she puts Michelle in a position where she potentially has to explain her (romantic) interest in the boy on a recording. Thereby Anna’s lack of cooperation and her questioning of Michelle’s accounts challenge Michelle as these acts suggest that wanting to see the boy in real life is not acceptable behaviour, but the girls’ utterances do not contain obvious playful contextualisation cues. Michelle’s defensive response ‘I’m not saying that I want to’ (lines 16–17) confirms the understanding of a real life meeting as problematic and it establishes a serious framing of the encounter. Michelle, however, does display further interest in the boy, when she in lines 18–19 asks Anna if she has told him about her. She phrases the question in a manner that presupposes that Anna has not (negated declaration follow by a question tag), and makes a ‘no’ the preferred response. Anna offers the preferred response, as she confirms that she has not told the boy about Michelle, apart from the information that she is her friend (lines 20–24). Anna’s utterance also includes information about the boy calling Anna and asking who Michelle is. By including this information, Anna displays that she in fact does have contact with the boy in question in real life, as well as being in possession of a photo of him. Michelle’s response to this is a very excited expression and a further question about what he said. This episode illustrates the typical character of these younger girls’ relation to boys. In spite of Anna’s interactional acts making explanations of a romantic interest relevant, Michelle avoids explicit discussions of feelings or romantic desires. The romantic interests are not carried out in direct contact with the boys; rather, talking about these interests is part of the

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girls’ female friendship practices. In fact the talk about boys among these girls seems more central than talk with boys. Michelle’s interest is constructed as involving actions of Anna (to show Michelle or give her a photo, to provide information to and about the boy, as well as provide reports of interactions with the boy). Indirect contact with boys mediated by a female friend is constructed as more acceptable than real life encounters (in Michelle’s case). This also means that any indirect realisation of contact between Michelle and the boy depends on Anna’s cooperation. Anna initially does not react cooperatively. She challenges Michelle and questions her reasons for the interest. Towards the end of the sequence, however, she reports having spoken to the boy about Michelle and to some extent aligns with Michelle by engaging in the topic and providing reports of indirect contact. At the same time she emphasises her own key position as mediator. Contact with and being in possession of photos of desirable boys come across as symbolic hetero-female capital and can be used as means of signalling importance in the female friendship group. Anna by these means achieves local status and control among the two friends in this sequence. In the three excerpts discussed in this section as well as in Excerpt 3.1 and 3.2 (discussed in the beginning of this chapter), we see how the girls construct alignment through displays of shared norms and values and mutual evaluations of what to treat as fun and transgressive. In particular in the examples from the younger girls’ conversations, we also see that more regulating practices and disalignment in the evaluation of situated conduct are part of the interactional management of interpersonal relationships. In the final two excerpts I treat in this chapter, interpersonal relationships and group belonging are more directly addressed. In Excerpt 3.13, appropriate group behaviour and issues of exclusion are explicitly brought about in a playful teasing sequence among the older girls: Excerpt 3.13: Talk behind my back Fourteen minutes into the group conversation among the girls 2. Towards the beginning of the whole recording Ling has left the room to fetch some new glue. This sequence appears sometime after Ling has returned. Ling is cutting out a picture while Malena and Misha look through the post cards. 1

Ling:

hhh hhh hvad nu ((kigger på Misha og Malena)) (1.8)

hhh hhh now what ((looks at Misha and Malena)) (1.8)

2 3

Misha:

der er ikke andre her der er gode ((Misha hoster i pausen)) ((Kigger i stakken af postkort på bordet))

there are no others here that are good ((Misha coughs during pause)) ((looks at stack of post cards on the table))

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4 5 6 7 8

Ling:

åh bare vent hvis I har bagtalt mig ikke jeg kan godt høre det på videoen hhh hhh

oh just wait if you have talked about me behind my back I can hear it on the video hhh hhh

9 10

Misha:

nej fordi det er kun Lian der må se det ha ha ((syngende drillestemme))

no because it’s only Lian who is allowed to see it ha ha ((singing teasing voice))

11

Ling:

ºbare vent bare ventº hhh hhh

ºjust wait just waitº hhh hhh

12 13 14

Malena:

vi har tid vi har snakket om alle dine hemmelighe[der]

we have time we have talked about all your secr[ets]

15

Misha:

16 17

Ling:

hhh hhh ja I har bare sådan (fortæl nå)

hhh hhh yes you have just like (then tell)

18 19 20 21 22

Misha:

om ham der og så ham der og så ham der du var sammen med i går og så i forgårs og ((Malena banker i bordet for at få billederne til at hænge fast på plakat))

about him and then him and then him you were with yesterday and then the day before and ((Malena bangs on the table to make pictures stick to poster))

23 24 25 26

Ling:

er det ikke dig selv du står og fortæller om nu uh hhh hhh (.)den var ikke så god hvad

isn’t it yourself you’re telling about now uh hhh hhh (.) that’s not so good right

27

Misha:

det er jo ikke sjovt Ling

well it’s not funny Ling

28 29

Ling:

øv prøver igen næste gang ikke

too bad try again next time right

30 31

Misha:

du har glemt din humor ovre i Thailand

you have forgotten your humour in Thailand

[ja]

[yes]

Ling initiates the topic of excluding friends from the group through talking behind their back (lines 4–8). She teasingly attacks Malena and Misha in a playful threat and ascribes excluding friendship behaviour to them, but Ling also constructs herself as the victim who is left out. The play frame is sustained throughout the sequence and develops into counter teases primarily targeted at Ling. The teasing of Ling involves attribution of promiscuous behaviour ‘about him and then him…’ (lines 18–22) and lack of a sense of humour ‘you have forgotten your humour in Thailand’ (lines 30–31). Ling, like in Excerpt 3.1, reacts to the teasing with jocular self-ridicule (lines 16–17 & 28–29), but she also employs jocular counter insults directed at Misha: ‘isn’t it yourself you’re telling about now’ (lines 23–25). Malena and Misha partly play along with the constructed identities as excluding friends,

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but their responses also involve counter attacks. As in Excerpt 3.1, Malena and Misha align in their teasing of Ling. Excerpt 3.14 is from the group conversation of the younger girls, and it illustrates the bringing about of social exclusion in a less playful way: Excerpt 3.14: Elif Twenty minutes into group conversation of Michelle, Iris and Anna. Iris is drawing on her hand with one of the pens 1 2 3

Michelle:

okay hvad laver du det der er altså i:kke til ↓hånden ((Iris tegner på sin hånd, Michelle læner sig frem og kigger)

okay what are you doing that is like no:t for the ↓hand ((Iris draws at her own hand Michelle leans forward and looks))

4

Iris:

det ved jeg. ((stopper med at tegne))

I know. ((stops drawing))

5 6

Michelle:

nå hvorfor[gør du det så ]

well why [do you do it then]

7

Anna:

[det er ligesom] Elif ((Michelle rynker brynene og sender øjne til Anna))

[it’s like] Elif ((Michelle frowns and then sends eyes to Anna))

8

Michelle:

[også hernede] ((peger på plakat))

[also down here] ((points at poster))

9

Iris:

[hvem er Elif]

[who’s Elif]

10

Michelle:

hvad

what

11

Iris:

hvem er Elif? ((vender sig mod de andre))

who’s Elif? ((turns towards the others))

12 13 14 15

Michelle:

AAJ (0.2) hallo det er Yasmin (0.8) vidste du overhovedet ikke vi kaldte hende [det?]

NOO (0.2) hallo it’s Yasmin (0.8) didn’t you even know we called her [that?]

16

Iris:

[nåja] ((Michelle kigger på Anna og de ser begge forargede på Iris))

[oh yes] ((Michelle looks at Anna and they both look at Iris with indignation))

17

Iris:

det er rigtigt. ((vender sig væk fra de andre))

that’s true. ((turns away from the others))

Michelle criticises Iris’ use of a pen. Her criticism is constructed as a question about what Iris is doing followed by the argument that the pen is not to be used to draw on the hand. Iris does not contest this argument, but by claiming that she is already aware of the information Michelle has provided,

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she displays resistance to Michelle’s criticism (by pointing to the needlessness of the information). She, however, also stops drawing. Michelle continues by questioning Iris’ action of drawing on her hand just after Iris has stated that she is aware that the pen is not to be used on the hand. Thereby Michelle emphasises the silliness of Iris’ behaviour (line 4). Then Anna compares Iris’ behaviour to the behaviour of another girl: ‘it’s like Elif’. When Iris asks who Elif is, she receives rather strong reactions. Michelle looks at Anna and they both turn towards Iris and look at her with facial expressions displaying indignation. Michelle verbally expresses her indignation and emphasises Iris’ question as unbelievably stupid through the high volume, the stress, the ‘hallo’ and the ‘didn’t you even know’ (lines 10–12). Yasmin, in fact, is Iris’ best friend in the club, but Iris never refers to her as Elif (and her name is not Elif). Elif is a nickname Anna and Michelle for some reason use to refer to Yasmin (I observed them do so and with Yasmin’s acceptance). The reference to the nickname for Iris’ best friend and the way Michelle and Anna react to Iris not recognising the nickname contribute to social exclusion of Iris. Without much resistance from the other girls, Michelle in this sequence regulates Iris’ behaviour and sets the norm for the use of the pen. Iris is openly criticised by Michelle, and towards the end of the sequence, Anna and Michelle align in their employment of a special nickname for Iris’ best friend. In parts of the recorded interactions, both of the girl groups do bring about social status based on competence, as for example knowledge of terms for high school classes (as in Excerpt 3.1). However, in contrast to the boys’ competitive demonstrations and claims of skills and knowledge, the knowledge displayed and negotiated among the female participants is predominantly related to insider-knowledge signalling inclusion in friendship groups and alliances, as for instance personal nicknames. As we have seen, an important dimension of the girls’ interaction is their degree of involvement in mutual friendship practices. They display and confirm their group relations by sharing stories, mutual experiences, fun, personal nicknames and, occasionally, talk about boys. Being included is related to being involved in the mutual practices and inclusion is signalled through demonstration of knowledge of past peer-group practices, experiences, talk and shared values (for instance, disapproving of g-strings, as in Excerpt 3.10 or promiscuity as in 3.11, 3.12, 3.13). The norm among the female friends is to construct closeness through sharing information and practices. This is why suggesting that friends have talked behind one’s back (as in Excerpt 3.12) works as an attack, in this case a playfully cued one. Display and confirmation of inclusion is more central to the social negotiations among the female participants than demonstration and claims of skills. Even when the older girls discussed participation in fighting competitions,

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their discussion concerned who they had talked to and what they said rather than how they fought. In particular, in the conversation among Michelle, Anna and Iris, the importance of knowing of and being involved in shared group practices is used in interactional construction of exclusion. Michelle often used such strategies and Iris was the one to be excluded. Iris was not considered a close friend by Michelle and Anna (and the other way around, see note to Table 1.a), and we have seen several examples of how she was positioned as outsider.

Competition, Inclusion and Gender Relations In this chapter, I have focused on the interactional enactment of friendship relationships and gender identities. I have discussed the different dynamics involved in the micro-management of groupness among the female and male club members, and the examples I have presented underline how negotiation of heterosexual gender identities was significant to this. We have seen how construction of friendship relations based on mutual amusement and playful interactional activities was a central feature of the conversations among the boys as well as among the girls. The co-construction of fun was, however, practised in different ways. The boys engaged in playful competitive practices, direct insults and performance involving tabooed topics and expressions, whereas the girls’ interactional teasing involved more self-targeting related to entertaining performances of silliness. In addition, the girls were occupied with interpersonal relationships and group involvement. I will not suggest that this is to be interpreted as the girls’ interactional style being more cooperative and the boys’ being more power focused, which has been an influential characterisation in earlier gender and language studies (see for instance Coates, 1996, 1998). The indirect and ambiguous strategies we see, for instance, in Michelle’s behaviour need not be considered more cooperative or polite. As Goodwin (2006: 248) argues: ‘Because girls value relationships so intensely, when they want to harm another they do so by damaging friendships and social standing’. This was certainly the case in Michelle’s behaviour in relation to Iris. To some extent the interactions among the young girls appeared far more focused on local status differences than the playful competitive insulting sequences among the boys. I have attended closely to the details of the communicative practices in relatively few interactional sequences. Yet, the knowledge I have gained from the ethnographic observations and the data overall, as well as the fact that my findings in several ways correspond to similar research elsewhere, suggests that the examples I have selected are not exceptional. However, my aim is not to derive conclusions about general gender behaviour from these interactional

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episodes. What makes these observations interesting is the way they link up with the norms and values that impact on the involvement, participation and peer hierarchy in the wider club community. The analysis of interactional practices among the young members sheds light on the ways they interact, and this contributes to understanding the girls’ peripheral position in the club. Through their interactional practices the boys clearly orient towards competence and competition more than the girls. It was evident in the analysis of the club community in Chapter 2 that orientation to competition and competence play an important role for inclusion and attribution of social status in the club. On the micro-level I have attended to here, I have observed differences in interactional practices with respect to how the boys and the girls displayed and gained social status, but my argument is not that these differences are the reason for the peripheral position of the girls. Still, participation in a community of practice consists of repeated interactional encounters like the ones I have discussed here. It is in interaction that individuals take part in the community, position themselves and get positioned in social roles, and therefore there is a connection between the practices we discover when we look closely at how the individuals engage with each other at this micro-level and the wider patterns of positioning and social hierarchy. The boys may orient towards competition and competence in their interactions, because it is valued and related to social status in the club, and perhaps competition and competence has come to be associated with high social status in the community, because the boys (centrally involved and popular in the club) often engage in competition. Paradoxically, the girls are clearly concerned with managing interpersonal belonging and social status in their friendship groups, but the way they go about managing these concerns does not seem to count within the larger group of young members. Finally, it is likely that the numerical male domination in the club (and within the martial arts more widely) impacts on the norms that come to dominate (see discussion on masculine imperative in Chapter 2). But the connection between the situated micro-activities and the wider patterns of social positioning is not best described as a cause and effect relationship. Rather, the practices, preferences and norms on the level of interaction, the level of group practices and the level of club community are to be considered part of the same (multi-layered) process. In this case, a process that involves marginalisation of the girls. In Chapters 2 and 3 I have analytically picked up on this from different perspectives. So, this chapter has focused on the enactment of gender and how it relates to the young members’ interaction and participation in the club. Collectively, Chapters 2 and 3 point to the importance of considering gender, competition and processes of inclusion and exclusion to gain a fuller understanding of the social categorisation, positioning and participation

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in such a leisure community. As I described in the introduction and in Chapter 2, debates about diversity also involve aspects of gender, since minority boys are considered a cause of particular political concern and the main target of integration efforts. Taking into account the wider societal marginalisation of minority boys that the dominating debates entail, an environment like the taekwondo club where a heterogeneous group of boys are centrally involved is valuable. These boys do meet around an interest and develop shared values and a sense of belonging to a collective, but the peer relationships among the young members are hardly gender integrating. From a focus on social categorisation and interactional activities I now turn my attention to the linguistic forms used in interaction and their relation to social categorisation. In the following two chapters I investigate how a speech style stereotypically associated with minority youth is used in interaction in the club, and I look into how the interactional and linguistic practices among the young martial arts practitioners inform, in particular, contemporary sociolinguistic research (Chapters 4 and 5), but also discussions of integration as processes of reciprocity on the level of faceto-face interaction (Chapter 5).

Notes (1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

Verbal play is used to describe various forms of manipulation of linguistic elements to create comic effect, and music making and chanting refer in Lytra’s use to the children’s employment of singing and humming shared popular tunes (music making) or recyclable fragments of talk (chanting) drawn primarily from out-of-school media practices including both solo routines and multi-voiced performances (Lytra, 2007: 106–108, see also Rampton, 2006: Chapter 3) Lytra further describes a number of contextualisation cues used by the children in her study to mark off periods of talk as play. These include: ‘(1) nicknames; (2) mock challenges, threats, commands and insults; (3) prosody (shifts in volume, pitch, rhyme and rhythm, sing-song intonation, overdone or exaggerated speech), laughter, giggling, clapping; (4) snippets of songs; (5) repetition; (6) code and style switches; (7) formulaic expressions and other recyclable fragments of talk (oneliners, punch lines, chants, catchy phrases); (8) terms of verbal abuse; (9) mock acts of aggression (hair pulling, nape slapping, pushing) and (10) untranslatable particles (“re”, “vre”)’ (Lytra, 2007: 109). It should be noted that this list of features was the result of micro-analysis of Lytra’s data set. The features as such should not be understood as inherently signalling play in all contexts. While teasing activities in Lytra’s study are encompassed in the larger category of play frames (in opposition to non-play frames), teasing is in Kotthoff (2007) treated as one of several oral genres of humour. According to Kotthoff, teasing can be described as a ‘personally addressed jocular remark with a bite, often performed in front of a public’ (Kotthoff, 2007: 271). Kotthoff further views teasing as ‘situated practice resting on inference based interpretations’ (Kotthoff, 2006: 6). See Rampton’s (2009) discussion of performance and ritual in relation to stylisation.

4 Youth, Language and Ethnic Categorisation During the past three decades, the language use of youth in ethnically diverse settings in urban Western Europe has received increasing attention both in public discourse and research. In this chapter, I look in detail at the interactions among the adolescents in the martial arts club with a focus on their use of particular linguistic resources and the way cultural and religious affiliation, minority status and particular urban localities are made relevant in their interactions. I discuss my observations in the data in relation to dominating public discourses on cultural and ethnic differences and, in particular, to sociolinguistic research on youth language and ethnic diversity. It is a general concern within a post-structuralist research perspective, in tune with the one I employ, that social construction includes researchers’ own construction of their research objects (e.g. Bourdieu et al., 1991; Butler, 1993; Giddens, 1984). My argument in this chapter is that certain sociolinguistic labels and interpretations of contemporary urban youth language imply a foregrounding of ethnicity. This foregrounding of ethnicity: (1) does not sufficiently reflect the adolescents’ linguistic practices and their situated pragmatic effects, and (2) perhaps entails undesirable socio-political as well as sociolinguistic consequences. The way the object of contemporary youth language is constructed in the media has been a point of discussion in recent research (Androutsopoulos, 2010; Milani & Jonsson, 2012; Stroud, 2004) and the language ideological and socio-political consequences of certain research constructions and naming practices have also been considered (Jaspers, 2008; Cornips et al., 2015; Madsen, 2011b). It varies a great deal what is studied under the title of ‘youth language’ (see an overview in Androutsopoulos, 2005)1, but a significant tendency of the research in Western Europe since the 1980s has been the focus on particular speech styles developing in urban multicultural communities (pioneered by e.g. Hewitt, 1982; Kotsinas, 1988). Sociolinguists have documented the widespread use of linguistic features associated with heritage languages among ethnically mixed youth groups, and crossings (Rampton, 1995), stylisations and language mixing have been described as significant traits

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of these contemporary urban styles (Rampton, 2011a). Yet, sociolinguistic research does not merely describe existing linguistic variation in relation to social categorisation and value ascription. Sociolinguists identify linguistic forms and participate in relating these forms to wider semiotic systems of ‘varieties’ or ‘styles’. Our groupings might be based on distributional patterns, participants’ practices or reported understandings, but when we take up labels for styles, discuss the labelling or study the use of styles, we also contribute to the understanding of certain linguistic forms as belonging together and being associated with particular values, speakers and functions. In other words, we contribute to their enregisterment (Agha, 2003, 2007). By looking at participants’ practices in relation to such wider sociolinguistic processes, I consider how research on speech styles understood as ‘ethnic’ contributes to discursive positioning of minority youth. Thus, overall, this chapter discusses (and questions the degree of) the relevance of ethnic identity aspects to the adolescents’ practices and to current sociolinguistic dynamics. As an entry point for looking at the data in the light of the wider socio-cultural conditions of their production, I shall initially provide a description of the major trends in the sociolinguistic developments in Denmark and, in particular, Copenhagen. After this, I consider Jørgensen’s (2008) understanding of language use as the practice of languaging and Agha’s (2007) theoretical framework for understanding situated metalinguistic activities in relation to wider sociolinguistic developments. These theoretical accounts are central to the critical discussion of the conception of contemporary urban speech styles as (multi-)ethnolects. I present this discussion before considering the linguistic features associated with the Copenhagen version of this speech style and their use in interactions among the adolescents in the taekwondo club. Finally, based on the data from the club, I discuss the ways in which aspects of ethnicity may or may not be relevant to the linguistic practice of contemporary youth in Copenhagen and I consider the consequences of constructing the object of contemporary urban youth language in certain ways. I show that the contemporary urban speech style is not primarily used among the participants to signal ethnic identities. Rather, it functions as a means of signalling mutual affiliation and social peer status and it invokes indexical values of toughness and street credibility. Ethnicity is indexed by marked stylisations that differ from the everyday speech style of the participants. On this empirical basis I argue that a continuous emphasis on ethnicity as a key aspect of contemporary speech practices among youth contributes to keeping particular groups in an ethnically marked position.

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The Sociolinguistics of Copenhagen According to recent Danish sociolinguistics, cultural levelling has been the major development in Danish society during the 20th century (e.g. Kristiansen, 2009; Kristiansen & Jørgensen, 2003;). The levelling is related to the political expansion of the Scandinavian welfare model resulting in relatively small socio-economic and educational differences among the Danes (Brochmann & Hagelund, 2010). Furthermore, the linguistic development in Denmark since the 1900s is characterised by a radical linguistic standardisation. A levelling process appears to have occurred particularly fast in Denmark. The linguistic and social changes which led to the current homogeneous sociolinguistic situation predominantly happened during the 1900s. As Kristensen (2003) notes: In a hundred years Denmark has changed from a society of classical dialects where people from different places often did not understand each other very well, into an area with more or less shared speech where very few speak a classical dialect. The classical dialect speakers, mainly elderly, may be as few as a couple of percent of the population. (Kristensen, 2003: 29) Kristiansen (2009: 168) suggests that Danish today is possibly more homogeneous than any other language with millions of speakers. This is closely related to a conservative standard language ideology that firmly governs linguistic attitudes and policies and is evident in public discourse and education, resulting in orientations towards linguistic uniformity (Kristiansen & Jørgensen, 2003). Currently, there is very little grammatical variation within speech observed around the country2. Thus, recent Danish sociolinguistics emphasises that the socio-economic and linguistic differences within Danish society have diminished throughout the 20th century. Of course, this does not mean that social class has never been considered a significant sociolinguistic variable. Brink and Lund (1975) describe the development of class-correlated variation in Copenhagen speech from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century and the development of Danish sociolects during the 1900s is treated in Jørgensen (1980), Gregersen and Pedersen (1991) and Jørgensen and Kristensen (1994). For centuries, the Danish economic, political and cultural elite have been, and still are, concentrated in and around Copenhagen. This centralisation of power around Copenhagen has of course also influenced linguistic development. Brink and Lund (1974: 69) mention the prestige awarded to

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the powerful capital as one of the explanations for the nationwide spread of Copenhagen’s linguistic features, as well as the fact that Copenhagen, compared to the many diverse and smaller speech communities around the country, represented a larger, more densely populated and relatively homogeneous speech community. The wide spread of Copenhagen features resulted in a standardised national spoken variety of Danish, the rigsmål3. The features of rigsmål are, in theory, place-neutral as they can be found all over the country, but in practice, they index Copenhagen because this is the place the standardised features originate from. The overall picture derived from Danish sociolinguistic studies until the mid-1990s is that the linguistic changes and spread of Danish rigsmål since the 1800s have been influenced by a combination of regional, social, and age-related factors. In a rather rough sense, the sound changes in general standard Danish have been characterised by innovation from speakers who used to be considered working class and spoke what was formerly referred to by sociolinguistics as ‘Low Copenhagen’. This means that the primary pattern of change has been that former workingclass speech forms have eventually become the new standard forms (Jørgensen & Kristensen, 1994; Kristensen, 2003: 32–33). Because of these sociolinguistic and societal developments, recent sociolinguistics give up speech labels indexing social class relations and instead use the term ‘modern Copenhagen’ when they refer to speech containing features formerly associated with working-class speech and ‘conservative Copenhagen’ to refer to speech containing forms formerly associated with middle-class speech (e.g. Jørgensen & Kristensen, 1994; Kristiansen, 2009). These terms emphasise the new and old relationship rather than a low and high relationship. Likewise, studies of language attitudes employ the labels of ‘modern’ and ‘conservative’ to refer to speech samples that contain features formerly associated with class differences (e.g. Kristiansen, 2001, 2009; Maegaard, 2005). The broader development towards linguistic and cultural levelling in Danish society has affected and has been affected by societal and political discourses, media practices and educational politics expressing particular language attitudes. Kristiansen’s (e.g. 1997, 1998, 2001, 2003) extensive research on language attitudes among Danes has documented how Danish public institutions are dominated by a strong standard ideology, and how the strict hierarchical order of Danish varieties represented in this ideology is reproduced in overt language attitudinal displays among the majority of his informants. These recent attitudinal studies teach us that conservative Copenhagen speech (understood by respondents as ‘rigsdansk’, formal

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standard Danish) is rated high on all social dimensions in overt judgements. In covert attitude studies4, modern Copenhagen speech (understood by respondents as ‘Copenhagen speech’) is rated high on social dimensions of ‘dynamism’, while conservative standard-near speech is rated high on ‘superiority’ (e.g. Kristiansen, 2001; Maegaard, 2005). It has been somewhat a paradox to Danish sociolinguists that the low prestige variety forms so strongly influenced the change of the Danish standard variety over time, but the covert attitudes towards the former Low Copenhagen speech as being dynamic and smart found in this research seem to partly explain this development. The levelling processes and the dominant standard ideology have resulted in Danish society becoming highly linguistically intolerant in several ways. In late modern Danish society, the regional dialectal variation is not treated as a threat to the strong standard ideology, as the classical dialects are by and large eradicated. Other forms of linguistic variation now appear to be the focus of concern among gatekeepers in favour of a homogenous linguistic society. The influence of English and minority languages used by part of the Danish population are now the main focus of political language discussions. The dominating attitudes towards the use of English are on the one hand that English is highly appreciated and viewed as a necessary and esteemed key to participation in international society and trade (e.g. Kristiansen & Thøgersen, 2006; Preisler, 2003). This attitude is found both on the political level and among the Danish population (Preisler, 1999, 2003). English is taught to all children in Danish schools from the 3rd grade, and all Danes are expected to be able to get by in English. On the other hand, English used in peer conversation among people able to communicate in Danish is viewed as unnecessary ‘showing off’ (Preisler, 1999, 2003) and especially adolescents’ frequent use of English words is criticised (Jørgensen, 2003b). Recent language political debates also include voices that warn against the invasion of English into all areas of society at the expense of Danish (Davidsen-Nielsen et al., 1999; Preisler, 2003). The linguistic intolerance becomes even more obvious when the discussion concerns minority languages. The most dominating political discourse by far regarding the relationship between heritage languages (other than Danish) and Danish is an assimilationist ‘Danish only’ view and this discourse is also highly influential among educators on many levels of the Danish educational system (Jørgensen, 2003b, see also Holmen & Jørgensen, 1998, 2010). Until 2002, council-funded teaching of minority languages as mother tongues existed in Denmark, but from 2002, the provision for the teaching of heritage languages was stopped.

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From a societal macro-perspective, the attitudes and practices dominating in Denmark on the governmental level among the societal elite and in the educational system are coloured by the intolerant view of linguistic variation and by monolingualism or double (or multi) monolingualism norms, which state that if several languages are used, they should be used separately (see Jørgensen, 2004, 2010: 146). The heterogeneous group of children and adolescents in the taekwondo club surely meet these attitudes in their daily lives. To this we can add the general tendency to negatively evaluate the language use of youth (Jørgensen, 2001, 2002). As we have already seen in several of the excerpts discussed in Chapter 3 and as we shall see in the following sections of this chapter, the young taekwondo practitioners are aware of, but by no means follow, such norms. The participants in my study employ diverse linguistic practices, codes and styles. They represent the linguistic multitude that supporters of monolingualism norms seek to avoid. In addition, the findings of recent correlational studies (Maegaard, 2007) suggest that youth in multicultural urban areas, such as the participants in my study, are among the linguistic innovators in Copenhagen. Maegaard (2007) is the most recent comprehensive study of linguistic variation among young Copenhageners. Maegaard (inspired by studies such as Coupland, 2001; Eckert, 2000; and Quist, 2005) combines ethnographic and social psychological approaches to stylistic practices with a variationist study of phonetic variables among 9th graders in a Copenhagen secondary school. She focuses on the relationship between social meaning and language use. Based on ethnographic work, she delimits eight different style clusters that most of the pupils draw on in their construction of persona. She finds that the style clusters involve social meaning making, in particular, related to gender and ethnicity. Her linguistic analysis of the collected data involves traditional phonetic variables treated in previous sociolinguistic studies, 5 but it also results in the identification of a number of new phonetic variables. The new variants include prevocalic ‘t’ pronounced: [tʲ] with affrication and palatalisation and initial uvular ‘r’ pronounced voiceless: [ʁ ]̥ . Maegaard finds that pupils employing the style cluster that she labels ‘tough ethnically mixed boys’, most frequently use the new variables. Maegaard includes a verbal guise study involving the characteristic language use related to the different clusters. She carries out the verbal guise study both in the school where she conducted the fieldwork and in another school in a different part of Copenhagen. The verbal guise study shows that the social personae identified in one school are also, based on the language use, recognised in the other school. She concludes that social categories of ethnicity and gender, in combination with particular

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constructions of social persona, prove significant to the ongoing linguistic development in Copenhagen.

New variants among the participants To relate the linguistic practice among the participants in my study to the sociolinguistic tendencies described by Maegaard, I have carried out a small similar analysis (see Maegaard, 2007: 68) of the two most frequently occurring new variants identified by her, namely: ‘t’ pronounced [tʲ] as in [tʲið] for ‘tid’ and ‘r’ pronounced [ʁ ]̥ as in [ɡʁ ̥ο·b] for ‘gruppe’. I have carried out audio analysis of the speech of each participant in the individual interviews and have coded the first 10 occurrences of the variables ‘r’ and ‘t’. The results of this analysis for each participant are presented in Table 4.1. Maegaard’s analyses of the variants [tʲ] and [ʁ ]̥ suggest that they are new linguistic features associated with different social meaning in the community of practice she studies. According to her study, [tʲ] is predominantly used as a masculine resource. It is used by boys (and hardly ever girls) and it is used with higher frequency among boys employing the stylistic practices of ‘tough ethnically mixed boys’ than among boys employing different stylistic practices (the average usage among the most Table 4.1 Percentage of the variants [tʲ] and [ʁ ]̥ out of 10 occurrences of the variables (‘t’ and ‘r’) Name/variant

[tʲ]

[ʁ̥]

Tim Yusuf Zaki Mohammed Micas Usher Ahmet Ilias Murat Fouad Iris Michelle Anna Ling Misha Malena

0% 20% 20% 50% 30% 50% 40% 50% 30% 10% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%

0% 20% 30% 80% 90% 40% 30% 100% 70% 60% 50% 10% 0% 40% 0% 40%

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frequent users is 12.5%). Maegaard (2007: 164) therefore describes the variant as a characteristic stylistic feature of the ‘tough ethnically mixed boys’ cluster. The variant [ʁ ]̥ is, according to her, related to broader social categories within the community of practice rather than a specific style cluster, namely the category referred to among her participants as ‘foreigner’ and it is employed by girls as well as boys (in particular girls employing the cluster ‘foreigner girls’ with an average usage of 16.3%). Furthermore, the boys who were ascribed the category ‘Danish’ but otherwise employed stylistic practices of ‘tough ethnically mixed boys’ rarely used this linguistic variant (Maegaard, 2007: 165). I cannot of course directly compare the percentage of the individual participants’ use of the features in my study with Maegaard’s results since I have not carried out a similar analysis of stylistic clusters. She demonstrated that the social meaning of the linguistic practices extended beyond the community of practice of one school, but I cannot assume exactly the same associated social meaning of individual variants in a different community of practice. What I can observe is that the new linguistic variants identified by Maegaard among Copenhagen youth are used by the participants in my study. The variants are furthermore employed by some of the participants in my study with very high frequencies compared to the average usage among the most extreme users of the variants in Maegaard’s study. This suggests that some of the youth in the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club are indeed among the linguistic innovators in Copenhagen. I can also observe that the usage among my participants confirms the use of [tʲ] as a masculine resource and all of the frequent users of [ʁ ]̥ among my participants have ethnic minority background. As we shall see, the most extreme users of the new variants among the participants in my study, who by and large are represented by the boys in group 2 and 3 (see Table 1.a), often position as tough urban boys and some of them emphasise ethnic minority identity aspects as well. Although I have not carried out an equivalent stylistic analysis, the results of my small-scale analysis confirm Maegaard’s results and her suggestion that gender categories and ethnic categories play a part in the linguistic development in Copenhagen. But to enhance our understanding of how these social categorisations are related to linguistic practice, we need to look at the situated use of the features as well as the wider tendencies of their use.

Youth Style in Heterogeneous Urban Environments With the increasing cultural and ethnic diversity brought about by globalisation, the interest in youth language in heterogonous urban environments has grown. A study like Maegaard’s (and also Torgersen

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et al., 2006) focuses on correlation of individual (and new) linguistic features with social groups and stylistic clusters, but a range of studies aim at describing language change more broadly as a result of these contemporary contact situations. Several recent sociolinguistic studies investigate the speech styles developing in culturally mixed urban communities. Some of these studies include situated use and attitudinal aspects (such as Aarsæther, 2010; Jonsson, 2007; Keim, 2007; Madsen, 2012b; Møller, 2009; and partly Quist, 2008). However, the speech of contemporary urban youth in European settings has predominantly been studied with a focus on identifying the speech as a variety6. Kotsinas (e.g. 1988, 1997, 1998) studied ‘Rinkebysvenska’ in Stockholm from a perspective that considered the language in the culturally mixed suburb to be a new variety of Swedish. This view was groundbreaking in the sense that by then, in a Scandinavian context, the version of the majority language spoken in multicultural communities was predominantly considered to be deficientlearner language. Inspired by Kotsinas, Quist (2000, 2005) has studied what she refers to as ‘multi-ethnolect’ in Copenhagen and Christensen (2003) has investigated what she refers to as an ethnolect or ‘araberslang’ in Århus. Youth language in multiethnic urban Swedish surroundings is continuously studied (Fraurud & Bijvoet, 2004; Hansson & Svensson, 2004) and ‘straattaal’ in the Netherlands has been examined by Nortier (2001). Several German sociolinguists have described ethnolectal variation in Mannheim (Keim, 2004, 2007), Hamburg (Auer, 2003) and Berlin (Kern & Selting, 2006), and Torgersen et al., (2006) in their variationist study, find multiethnic friendship groups influential to the patterns of linguistic change among London youth (for more ethnographic accounts of the speech of multicultural youth groups in London, see Hewitt, 1982; Harris, 2006). The identification of phonetic and morphosyntactical features that differ from the standard variety as well as borrowings of lexemes and expressions from the various relevant minority languages is common to the descriptions of the linguistic practice among youth in multicultural areas in these European cities. Less attention has been paid to the processes through which these ways of speaking come to be considered varieties ideologically associated with particular values, how these processes are dynamic and how speakers, as well as mass media, and indeed researchers, participate in constructing the contemporary urban speech styles (though see Jaspers, 2008; Madsen et al., 2010; Madsen, 2012b; Newell, 2009). Attention to these processes is important because they have social consequences for speakers. On a larger societal scale, for instance, it can be crucial whether one’s way of speaking gains the status of an accepted variety or is viewed as a sign of deficient linguistic competence, and on a smaller communicative scale the

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wider associations of linguistic resources can be used to discuss immediate concerns as well as rather big social issues and inequalities.

Languaging and enregisterment 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 (within the restrictions of their abilities and with concern for the abilities of their interlocutors). This is evident in the linguistic practices we observe among contemporary urban youth (but it is not a behaviour limited to this group of speakers). Studies in linguistically diverse contexts have led to re-examinations of the traditional conceptions of a ‘language’ or a ‘variety’ as bounded and separable sets of linguistic features, and it has become clear that speakers’ language use is often not limited by common associations of certain linguistic resources belonging to certain ‘varieties’ or ‘languages’. The everyday communication in such contexts is characterised by a mix of linguistic resources usually associated with different named languages. Speakers may, for instance, use phrases and expressions from foreign languages taught in school (e.g. Jørgensen, 2003a; Rampton 1999b, 2006), linguistic fragments or features encountered in media or travelling activities (e.g. Lytra, 2007; Møller, 2009; Rampton, 2006) or selected features from particular styles of speaking generally thought to belong to a particular group of speakers, e.g. peer group members’ ethno-linguistic groups. This is the phenomenon Rampton (1995) described as crossing (see also examples in Quist & Jørgensen, 2007; Rampton & Charalambous, 2010). In everyday communication, speakers use multilayered combinations of linguistic forms and single forms do not necessarily carry clear distinct connections to specific codes or languages (e.g. Blackledge & Creese, 2010; Jørgensen, 2010; Møller, 2009; Pennycook, 2010). As Jørgensen (e.g. 2004: 13) suggests, human communication is best described as the practice of languaging rather than the use of ‘languages’ and the idea of separate linguistic codes needs to be seen as a socio-cultural and ideological construction rather than an unquestioned linguistic fact. Agha’s theory of enregisterment appeals to this kind of approach to language with attention to how linguistic signs over time become associated with wider cultural formations and how these wider formations interact with everyday communication. The concept of enregisterment 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). With its focus on ‘processes and practices whereby performable signs become recognized

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(and regrouped) as belonging to distinct, differentially valorized semiotic registers by a population’ (Agha, 2007: 81) the theory of enregisterment takes into consideration meta-pragmatic activities on various social scales ranging from widely circulating media stereotypes to local speaker practices. It concerns how we display and enact social functions of language by talking about and employing linguistic resources in particular ways. We label language use, for instance, as ‘upper-class speech’, ‘polite language’ or ‘scientific term’, and such labels link certain ways of speaking with social relations, social practice and identity categories of the speakers: Metalinguistic labels of this kind link speech repertoires to enactable pragmatic effects, including images of the person speaking (woman, upper-class person), the relationship of speaker to interlocutor (formality, politeness), the conduct of social practices (religious, literary, or scientific activity). (Agha, 2007: 145) It is the situated semiotic activities of language users which over time shape the broader socio-historical development of language as social practice. Ways of speaking come to point to, or index, ways of being and acting, because they are repeatedly used in certain types of situations by certain types of speakers or talked about or parodied in certain ways (Agha, 2003; Silverstein, 2003). 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 through ratified usage, and in this sense the indexical values of the linguistic features used are also (re)created. The ascriptions of values to linguistic styles can be more or less explicit. Mass media, of course, plays a significant part in the general take up of value ascriptions to linguistic styles, and linguists’ descriptions and naming of linguistic practice (sometimes re-circulated in media) are of equal importance (Jaspers, 2008; Stroud, 2004; Cornips et al., 2015).

Initial terminological discussion: The notions of (multi-)ethnolect The speech style of contemporary youth in culturally diverse settings is referred to by some researchers – some of whom employ interaction analytical methods – as an ethnolect (e.g. Androutsopoulos, 2001: 2; Auer, 2003: 255; and Christensen, 2003: 141). The concept of ethnolect, as it

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is used in studies of youth language, is mostly defined as a variety of the majority language, which involves phonetic and morphosyntactical features that are different from the standard version of the majority language in a given community and is used by and associated with particular ethnic groups (Androutsopoulos, 2001; Auer, 2003; Clyne, 2000). Auer (2003) distinguishes primary ethnolects, a term which refers to the linguistic practices of minority youth in multicultural urban communities, from secondary ethnolectal representations in the media and tertiary employments of these media discourses in the linguistic practice of majority youth (see also Androutsopoulos, 2001). Recently, however, the concept of ethnolect has also been problematised. Jaspers (2008) argues that using the concept of ethnolect perhaps has undesirable socio-political and sociolinguistic consequences. According to Jaspers, the concept of ethnolect: (...) tends to fuel a sociolinguistics concerned with language/community rather than speech/interaction; it does not recognize current practices of othering and exclusion in western societies nor linguists’ own social position; and it advances a problematic theoretical relation between language and social identity. (Jaspers, 2008: 93) Jaspers’ criticism is related to the more widespread sociolinguistic argument sketched out above against the dominant focus on description and identification of distinct codes. Understanding the linguistic practice of contemporary urban youth as ethnolects reflects a tendency to homogenise a heterogenous linguistic reality. Linguists search for ‘lects’ in a highly hybrid linguistic environment, but speakers may not understand their languaging this way. In addition, the use of a term like ethnolect conflicts with common tendencies within recent sociolinguistics that take into account the complexity of identity work and styling practices, the interrelatedness of various identity categories and the by no means straight-forward relationship between language and specific identities (see for example Androutsopoulos & Georgakopoulou, 2003; Bucholtz & Hall, 2004; Heller, 2007; Lytra, 2007; Quist, 2005; Rampton, 1995, 2006). Finally, Jaspers’ reservations in relation to the concept of ethnolect touch upon the more socio-political consequences of its use by linguists. He notes that linguists need to consider the purpose of the names they invent for registers and the social consequences for those who are thereby pinpointed as speakers of these registers, in particular when the names invoke non-mainstream categorisation.

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Among Scandinavian sociolinguists, the concept of ethnolect has not been frequently used (but see Christensen, 2003 and Kulbrandstad, 2003). Kotsinas (1997) employed the speaker-derived and place-related notion of ‘Rinkebysvenska’, and Hansson and Svensson (2004) similarly used the notion of ‘Rosengårdssvenska’. In the Danish context, Quist (2000), who was the first to study linguistic practice among multicultural youth in Copenhagen and did so from a variationist perspective, instead introduced the term ‘multi-ethnolect’. By the choice of this term she attempted to avoid the essentialist association in relation to the link between ethnicity and language, and this notion foregrounds the multiethnic characteristics of the environments in which linguistic practice has developed in Copenhagen. Quist (2000: 202) argued that the linguistic practice of youth in multicultural communities being named a ‘lect’ signalled a parallel status to sociolects and dialects, instead of a view of the practice as deficient Danish. The term was for Quist then also part of a researchpolitical strategy. Although I find these intentions agreeable, the notion of multi-ethnolect does not avoid the problems of linguistic homogenisation7, and it still prioritises ethnicity as a relevant dimension. One could argue that, in the light of the stereotypical associations connected to multiethnic areas of Danish cities (as ghettos and non-majority), the notion might in a manner similar to the notion of ethnolect, involve a construction of the speakers as non-mainstream. In her later work, Quist (2005, 2008) employs a practice-oriented research perspective and treats multi-ethnolect as one among many stylistic resources used by young Copenhageners, but in this work she nevertheless maintains the term. It should be clear by now that I would suggest using different terms when referring to the language use of youth in heterogeneous urban surroundings. I shall return to this in the discussion at the end of the chapter, and for now, I will continue to refer to these linguistic registers as contemporary urban styles. First, it is worth describing the linguistic features that, according to Danish research, are considered part of the contemporary urban speech style. After this, we shall look into the adolescents’ use of these features.

Linguistic characteristics Quist (2000, 2005), Christensen (2003, 2004) and Pharao and Hansen (2005, 2006) describe certain linguistic features as characteristic of the linguistic practice among youth in Danish multicultural settings. I have observed several of the same features used by some of the participants in my

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study, and I will illustrate them with examples from my own data as well as supplementing the description with other features observed in my study. Finally, I will discuss the purposes of and difficulties with presenting such a list of features.

Lexical features Quist (2000, 2005) and Christensen (2003, 2004) describe the incorporation of words and expressions associated with minority languages such as Turkish, Kurdish and especially Arabic. I find many examples of these lexical features in my data (the expressions associated with minority languages are underlined). Some are as follows: (1) (self-recording) Original Murat: walla det fi ndes

(2) (group conversation) Original Ilias: og bare hvis det er jeg vinder hvis det er jeg får medalje til hollandske det gør jeg nok ikke men Murat: inshallah

(3) (group conversation) Original Mohammed: det er dig der har billederne hvor er de henne (0.5) her er tag den her det er lavet af hash kız kız kız ha.

(4) (group conversation) Original Usher: skrid Micas: jeg kan godt fortælle dig jeg vurder dig

Translation walla it exists ((Arabic: ‘I swear or by Allah’))

Translation and just if I win if I get a medal at Holland Open I probably won’t right but Murat: inshallah ((Arabic: ‘if Allah wishes’))

Translation It’s you who’ve got the pictures where are they (0.5) her are take it here it’s made of hash kız kız kız ha. ((Turkish: ‘girls girls girls’))

Translation piss off I tell you I’ll vur(t)(beat) you ((vur is Turkish, but used here in Danish grammatical form))

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Syntactical features Quist (2000) finds a tendency to use a word order different from the standard Danish use of subject, verb, object order in the main clause following a subordinate clause, when in standard Danish it would be inverted, VSO8. Quist (2000) also finds a tendency to use non-standard common gender where standard Danish would have the neuter gender. I do not find many examples of these features in my data. I do find a few examples of SVO-order where one could expect VSO in standard Danish, one is (5) below (the SVO-order is underlined), but in some cases this feature appears connected to stylised versions of (learner) immigrant Danish (see Madsen, 2008a: 164 and discussion of Excerpt 4.6). Instead, I find a tendency (which I have noticed but not systematically analysed) to use prepositions differently from standard Danish, as in (5) and (6), and to sometimes leave out prepositions, as in (6): (5)(group interview) Original Micas: han han når vi var med hans far vi ((S)) skulle ((V)) til hyttetur ((O)) med bil

Translation he he when we were with his dad we went to cottage trip ((weekend camp)) by car

In Example 5, the preposition ‘to’ (Danish ‘til’) in ‘til hyttetur’ is used instead of the standard ‘on’ (Danish ‘på’) as in ‘på hyttetur’. (6)(self-recording) Original Ilias: ved du hvad jeg var i jeg var i terminsprøve Fransk

Translation do you know what I was in I was in term test French

In Example 6, Ilias uses the preposition ‘in’ (Danish ‘i’) to refer to ‘term test’ in: ‘i terminsprøve’. In standard Danish, one would expect the preposition ‘to’ (Danish ‘til’) as in: ‘til terminsprøve’. Also, Ilias uses no preposition in front of ‘French’ in ‘terminsprøve fransk’, but in standard Danish one would expect the preposition ‘in’ (Danish ‘i’) as in: ‘terminsprøve i fransk’.

Phonetic features Quist (2000) describes a tendency to omit the Danish ‘stød’ (phonetically a form of laryngealisation or creaky voice). It can, however, be rather difficult to predict where one would expect ‘stød’ in stretches of Danish standard

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speech, but some examples where I expected, but did not find, ‘stød’ was in words such as: (8) (self-recording): ter[min]sprøve, instead of ter[mi’n]sprøve ((term test)) (9) (group conversation): [ti], instead of [ti’] ((ten)) Finally, Quist (2000) notices prosodic patterns that differ from the majority pronunciation of Copenhagen youth. Inspired by Quist’s observations, Pharao and Hansen (2005), by experimental methods, systematically compare prosodic features of the speech of young Copenhageners speaking Danish as a mother tongue and young Copenhageners speaking a mother tongue different from Danish. They find systematic differences in the pronunciation of vowels between the two groups. The differences involve the contrast between short and long vowels. The minority speakers do not differentiate in the same manner as the majority young Copenhageners do between long and short vowels in their pronunciation (the majorities’ long vowels are shorter in the minorities’ pronunciation). Pharao and Hansen (2005) also suggest that a distinct tonal pattern characterises the minorities’ spoken Danish. The tonal pattern differs from the typical one in the majority variety spoken by youth in Copenhagen by beginning at a higher pitch and by covering a narrower pitch range. Furthermore, the pitch top appears to fall on the stressed syllable, where it would be expected at the following un-stressed syllable in the majority variant of Copenhagen youth (see Pharao & Hansen, 2005: 40). Interestingly, the tonal pattern appears very significant to the perception of the minorities’ speech style. When majority speakers’ speech was digitally manipulated to resemble the tonal pattern of the minority speakers, it was perceived of as typical minority speech by sociolinguists working with Copenhagen youth language (Pharao & Hansen, 2005: 43). Examples of other features potentially associated with the style characteristic of youth in heterogeneous urban surroundings are the new pronunciations of prevocalic ‘t’ pronounced with affrication and palatalisation and initial uvular ‘r’ pronounced voiceless as described by Maegaard (2007) and discussed in Section ‘The Sociolinguistics of Copenhagen’. Maegaard does not explicitly link these variants to a particular urban speech style, but she does find that the most extreme users of those variants employ stylistic resources associated with personae of ‘tough ethnically mixed boys’ (Maegaard, 2007: 167). I find that the participants in my study who most frequently use the new t- and r-pronunciations also most frequently exhibit such features, such as incorporation of words and

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expressions from minority languages, non-standard use of prepositions, less use of ‘stød’ and the characteristic prosody (Madsen, 2008a: 130). As we shall see, these linguistic resources also often occur in the same stretches of speech suggesting that they may be related to similar associated social meaning and serve similar stylistic and pragmatic functions.

Urban youth speech as enregistered style Describing lists of features belonging to distinct variants, similar to the one I have just presented, is a common endeavour in linguistics concerned with code identification and it is central to variationist approaches to linguistic change. My purpose is to relate linguistic practice, including the use of different styles or registers, to the interactional positionings and alignments. Of course, this kind of analysis becomes impossible without any idea of the broader tendencies and historical pattern of usage of linguistic resources. Silverstein (2003) explains the dialectic relation between microsocial and macro-social frames of analysis with the concept of indexical order. Distinct indexical orders can be seen as stages within a process of enregisterment. According to Silverstein, any sociolinguistic phenomenon can develop from a first order indexical stage, that is, from an identifiable and ‘presupposed’ pattern of usage of particular linguistic forms, including a normative sense of their appropriate use and users (Silverstein, 2003: 193). Since sociolinguistic change entails that new indexical links, when they are widely established, can become new first orders for subsequent change, Silverstein refers to this first order stage in a general sense as ‘n-th order indexicality’. The sociolinguistic pattern of linguistic forms and usage makes them available for more or less conscious social work and style shifting: ‘[…] within the n-th order ethno-metapragmatic perspective, this creative indexical effect is the motivated realization, or performable execution, of an already constituted framework of semiotic value’ (Silverstein, 2003: 194), and, finally, the noticing of such stylistic variation can result in the linguistic features becoming the topic of overt metapragmatic commentary (see also Johnstone et al., 2006 on the development of ‘Pittsburghese’). Thereby, speakers’ contextual, ideologyinvested and sometimes creative usage adds to and possibly transforms indexical links, providing the potential to become new sociolinguistic presuppositions. Hence, situated language use and metapragmatic activities are significant to studies of wider sociolinguistic change: the ‘dialectical effect of micro-realtime indexicality must therefore constitute a major vectorial force in formal linguistic change’ (Silverstein, 2003: 194). So the situated functions and the potential indexicalities of linguistic resources are related to the wider patterns of their use. Therefore, when we carry out micro-analysis

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of interaction it is useful for us to be able to recognise features as belonging to registers, because speakers do draw on the understanding that certain linguistic resources belong to larger systems of resources in their interactional practices. Linguistic abstractions of styles, languages or registers make sense not only to linguists, but to speakers as well. The concept of linguistic codes bound up in ideologies of nations, regions, social groups or cultures is embedded within the social and historical conditions of late modern Western societies. It is reproduced in media, policies and education as well as in everyday interactions. The ideological constructions might even appear unquestioned and be habitually treated and perceived of as real. Accordingly, speakers are of course aware that certain linguistic resources are considered to belong together, and others are not, but sometimes they challenge these associations. They even challenge the very idea of features belonging to distinct languages or varieties mastered as coherent and separate systems (Jørgensen, 2010; Møller, 2009). As with any linguistic borders, the borders of the style considered characteristic of youth in heterogeneous urban communities in Denmark are not clear cut. Moreover, the participants in my study never totally switch into talk where all of the features described above can be identified in the same stretch of speech. Rather, they select one or a few of the features in their utterances. They appear to use the new phonetic variants as well as the prosody more extensively than the lexical and morphosyntactical features. To approach the meaning making among the young taekwondo practitioners related to this youth style, I will consider the individual linguistic features and their situational interactional use. But I will also take into account the broader societal and media-represented discourses associated with the idea of certain features belonging to a ‘way of speaking’. Quist (2005), in a questionnaire, asked the adolescents she studied whether they were familiar with this ‘way of speaking’. They all reported being aware of the style and most of them said that this way of speaking was typical of Copenhagen, immigrant-environments, or the area of Nørrebro (Quist, 2005: 253). I also discussed the use and familiarity of different ways of speaking with the participants in my study. As part of this discussion I told the participants that I had observed the use of Arabic and Turkish expressions such as ‘walla’, ‘jalla’ and ‘kιz’ and asked them whether they or other club members used such expressions. The participants generally said that the use of these expressions was typical of boys in the club and most of the participants linked these expressions to a certain speech style. Interestingly, the oldest boys, although frequent users of the characteristic features in the recorded data, distanced themselves from this style in the interview, as they appeared to relate this

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to an extensive use of swear words, rude language and association with ‘gangster’ identity aspects. They told me that they made an effort to educate the younger boys not to swear so much and claimed that they personally made an effort not to swear in the company of the younger members. These reports in the interviews show that the older boys were very aware of the stereotypical associations with (and the expected adult evaluations of) the speech style. The older girls reported not to speak this way themselves (and this is confirmed by my analyses of the recordings), but they performed a parody of the typical style of the boys in the Nørrebro area: Excerpt 4.1: Say walla Interview with girls group 2 (Malena, Misha and Ling). 1 2 3

Misha:

men ja sådan jeg mødte min fætter i går sig ↑walla

but yes like I met my cousin yesterday say ↑walla

4

Ling:

ja ja

yes yes [xxx]

5 6

Misha:

[ja ja] og så gik vi ned [i xxx xxx]

7

Malena:

8 9

Misha:

[xxx]

[walla det er]rigtigt og så gik vi ned i shawarmabutik sig ↑walla

[yes yes] and then we went down [in xxx xxx] [walla that’s] true and then we went down in shawarma shop say ↑walla

Misha initiates the parody as an example of the characteristics of the boys’ talk. Her turn is constructed as a quotation, signalled by the ‘sådan’ (like) in line 1, and it continues to the end of line 9. Ling and Malena offer confirmative utterances to Misha’s performance (line 4 and line 7). Misha’s parody includes stereotypical associations with this masculine style as connected to meeting a cousin and walking to the shawarma shop. This stereotype corresponds to one presented in certain media representations (see also Madsen, 2012b). Otherwise, the parody is primarily marked by the repetition of the expression ‘sig walla’ (swear by Allah), and this particular expression is pronounced with a prosody similar to the one described above as characteristic of the style. The parody clearly reproduces stereotyped associations with the style and also illustrates awareness of the prosodic pattern. The status of the style in broader Danish society is connected to the association with minority-dominated young urban street culture. In Danish media, for instance, in comedy shows and internet games aimed at a younger audience, stereotypical displays of this style all invoke similar caricatures

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although from diverse humorous perspectives (see Madsen, 2008b; Quist & Jørgensen, 2007). Within this comedy frame they make use of various versions of the characteristic linguistic practice and they play on general stereotypes of urban, oppositional, criminal, street- and gangster-oriented masculine youth with immigrant background. Møller (2009) documents how young informants in Køge relate the speech to similar speaker stereotypes in a guise study. Among the youth in Møller’s study, this particular style appeared to connote street- and gangster-oriented male youth from certain areas of Copenhagen (Nørrebro was frequently mentioned). Jonsson (2007) describes how a similar linguistic practice in Swedish urban environments is related to masculine and streetwise values among the users. Finally, in our most recent study among youth in Copenhagen (2009–2011) we find that the style among its users is associated with stereotypic indexical values of toughness, masculinity, youth, pan-ethnic minority street culture and societal ‘low’ (Madsen et al., 2010, Madsen, 2013). I will return to comparing the data from the club with our other data in Copenhagen in Chapter 5.

Situated Functions I have raised some criticism related to the un-nuanced emphasis on ethnic identity aspects entailed by the view of a particular speech style as (multi-)ethnolect. In the light of this, it is now relevant to consider the use of linguistic resources associated with the contemporary urban style in situated interaction and to discuss what social categories the use of these resources appears to put into focus. Does it invoke broader societal discourses and stereotypes associated with the speech style? Can the use of these resources in situated interaction among the adolescents in the martial arts club be said to be connected to the construction of multi-ethnic identities or bring about aspects of identity in any way related to ethnicity? The examples I will discuss illustrate different characteristic aspects of the interactional use of the linguistic features associated with the contemporary urban youth style as I observed it among the young taekwondo practitioners. I have chosen excerpts where at least two of the features previously described as characteristic of the style occur. The prosodic features are perhaps some of the most salient traits of this style in Denmark. The prosody is easily recognisable when listening to the recordings, but not easily illustrated in the transcript because it is the collective impression of several subtle features combined that characterises the pronunciation. The combination of features work on the level of the utterance rather than as individual local features (as a mixture of the tonal pattern of the utterance, smaller contrast between

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short and long vowels and less use of the Danish ‘stød’), and therefore I have chosen to highlight the utterances that are perceived as pronounced with the characteristic prosody in bold in the transcripts (and my impression has been validated with colleagues during data sessions). This is not to be taken as a sign of a binary distinction between two styles, but simply as a way of noting that these utterances leave the recognisable impression of the particular prosody.

Authority and masculinity First, we shall see an example of how the features of the contemporary urban speech style are used by the 10–13 year old boys in a sequence where a minor dispute over the division of tasks turns into teasing hints at Ahmet’s contact with girls (similar examples are discussed in Chapter 3). Excerpt 4.2: Kız on him man Ten minutes into the recorded group conversation among the boys group 2 (Ahmet, Usher, Micas and Mohammed). The boys are engaged in the task of preparing a ‘girlish and boyish’ poster. They are looking though the postcards and the magazines, cutting out pictures and gluing them on the cardboard. 1 2 3

Ahmet:

jeg jeg maler ikke jeg tager saksen (1.2) og du maler ((tager saksen og samler et magasin op))

I I don’t paint I take the scissors (1.2) and you paint ((grabs the scissors and picks up a magazine))

(0.3)

(0.3)

4

Usher:

fuck dig

fuck you

5 6 7 8 9

Ahmet:

jeg jeg kan godt finde nogle gode piger ikke ligesom dig hundrede år for at finde en pige

I I can find some good girls not like you a hundred years to find one girl

10 11

Micas:

↑nå: fordi du kender nogen ikke (.) sådan duk duk ((’duk’ lydudtryk))

↑o:h because you know some right (.) like duk duk ((’duk’ sound expression))

12

Ahmet:

[det er Kasper Hyldegaard]

[that’s Kasper Hyldegaard]

13

Mohammed:

[han har k1z på sig mand] ((k1z = piger, peger på magasinet))

[he’s got k1z on him man] ((k1z = girls, points to magazine))

14

Micas:

han har k1z k1 z

he’s got k1z k1z

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Ahmet’s behaviour of directly ordering a new division of tasks (lines 1–3) and taking the scissors without asking permission (Usher has until then been using them) does not appear to be appreciated by Usher. In line 4 he responds with a ‘fuck dig’ (fuck you). Usher’s utterance does not argue against Ahmet’s decisions, but merely (and clearly) displays a negative attitude towards Ahmet’s positioning as decision maker. As a reaction to this negative expression Ahmet accounts for his decisions. This account involves criticism of Usher’s ability to find ‘gode piger’ (good, or suitable, girls). All these utterances are spoken with the prosody of the contemporary urban speech style described above. The word ‘maler’ (paint) is pronounced with no ‘stød’, where in standard near pronunciation the a-vowel would be pronounced with ‘stød’. Also, the a-vowel in ‘maler’ is relatively short compared to standard Danish pronunciation. Likewise, the u-vowel in ‘fuck’ and ‘hundrede’ (hundred) and the ‘i’ in ‘piger’ (girls) are relatively short. Considering the situational context of carrying out the task of producing a poster, and the fact that Ahmet sits with the scissors and a taekwondo magazine in his hands, it is most likely that Ahmet’s comment on finding girls refers to pictures of girls suitable for the poster of ‘boyish and girlish’. Micas, however, plays on a different interpretation of the claim when he responds with a tease directed at Ahmet. Micas’ tease involves the reasoning that Ahmet is good at finding girls because he knows ‘nogle’ (some, i.e. girls, line 10). The prolongation of the vowel and the high pitch in Micas’ initial ‘↑nå:’ (oh) signals a teasing frame (Goffman, 1974; Lytra, 2007, see Chapter 3) and the sound expressions at the end of Micas’ utterance appear to insinuate an unspoken mutual understanding of the character of Ahmet’s familiarity with girls. Ahmet seems to ignore the tease and none of the other boys respond with laughter. Ahmet instead comments on a picture in the magazine (of a taekwondo fighter, ‘Kasper Hyldegaard’, line 12), but in overlap with this utterance Mohammed aligns with Micas’ teasing. With the prosody characteristic of the contemporary urban speech style and the incorporation of the Turkish word for girls (kız), Mohammed, referring to Ahmet, states that ‘han har kız på sig’ (he’s got girls on him). I am not directly familiar with this expression, but semantically it invokes associations of having (a lot of) girls around and close to you. Where Micas’ utterance positioned Ahmet as the addressee with the use of a first person pronoun, Mohammed’s utterance with a third person pronoun casts Ahmet in an interactional position as over-hearer (Clark & Carlson, 1982; Zimmerman, 1998). Still, Ahmet does not react. In line 14, Micas echoes Mohammed’s contribution by repeating parts of it in the same speech style and after this sequence the focus of the boys is directed at other matters (such as Mohammed’s sweets).

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In Excerpt 4.2. Ahmet and Usher use features of the contemporary urban speech style in the beginning of the sequence where there is some indeterminacy related to who gets to be in charge of task-related decisions and in control of other interlocutors’ related actions. In addition, the stylistic features are also employed by Mohammed and Micas in the teasing, bringing about age-appropriate masculine identity. The boys here, as in other parts of their group conversations (see Chapter 3), enact heterosexual young masculinities by being concerned with, at the same time as displaying distance to, girls. This is why referring to being familiar with and surrounded by girls works as a tease. The stylistic resources appear to serve the purpose of underlining authoritative and powerful identity aspects, but also relate to masculinity (we saw similar usage in Excerpts 3.3 and 3.6).

Constructing toughness in interactional account In the older boys’ interactions we also see an increased use of contemporary urban stylistic features in interactional sequences involving authoritative positioning, account and construction of toughness. Here is an example from their joint evaluation of a past fighting competition. Prior to this sequence, Ilias has successfully, through a narrative about an earlier competition experience, constructed a fearless, masculine and tough fighterpersona (also employing features of contemporary urban speech style). Here the focus of the talk is Murat’s poor fighting performance at a past competition: Excerpt 4.3: My back walla Twenty-five minutes into group conversation between boys group 3 (Murat, Ilias and Fouad). The three boys are discussing upcoming fighting competitions. 1 2

Murat:

jeg vidste jeg kunne [give mig mere]

I knew I could [give (myself) more]

3 4 5

Fouad:

[at dumme dig ] og lade være med at dumme dig igen

[mess up again]and not mess up again

6 7

Murat:

nej nej det der det sker ikke bare [vent og se]

no no that it won’t happen just [wait and see]

8 9 10

Ilias:

[du tænker] sikkert på skader til de næste kampe [det skal man] aldrig

[you probably] think about injuries at the next fights [one should] never

11

Fouad:

[xxx xxx] ((hvisker))

[xxx xxx] ((whispers))

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12

Ilias:

[nogensinde gøre]

[ever do that]

13 14 15 16

Murat:

[nej nej de:t] nej nej walla [jeg ikke gjorde det er fordi det er fordi inden kampen] ikke

[no no tha:t] no no walla [I did not it’s because it’s because before the fight] right

17 18

Ilias:

[nej det skal man aldrig nogensinde gøre det der]

[no that one should never ever do that]

19

Murat:

[så] steppede jeg lidt

[then] I stepped a little

20

Ilias:

[mm]

[mm]

21 22 23

Murat:

du ved min ryg walla den det det der det var det værste

you know my back walla it that that it was the worst

24

Ilias:

ja

yes

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Murat:

min ryg ikke også så inde i kampen mand du ved man tænker ikke over det men alligevel mine spark de kunne ikke holde jeg fik ondt i ryggen alligevel det var det eneste jeg kunne mærke

my back right so in the fight man you know you don’t think about it but anyway my kicks they wouldn’t hold my back hurt anyway it was the only thing I could feel

In the beginning of this sequence Murat’s performance at the past competition is negatively evaluated. Murat initially claims himself that he could have done better ‘give mig mere’ (give myself more, line 2). However, Fouad continues with a judgement that is clearly more negative as it contains the warning: ‘lade være at dumme dig igen’ (not mess up again). In this way Fouad’s utterance invokes the assumption that Murat potentially would mess up in the upcoming competition. Murat’s face is thereby threatened and his response in lines 6–7 is defensive. He denies that it will happen again and claims that he will prove this: ‘wait and see’. Ilias now advises Murat and thereby projects authority, experience and superiority with respect to fighting competitions. The advice contains a prediction regarding Murat’s potential behaviour at the upcoming competition, namely, that Murat will worry about injuries. At the same time, it involves an evaluation of this predicted behaviour as wrong: ‘one should never ever do that’ (lines 10 & 12). When Murat continues with an account for the behaviour at the past competition, he initiates it with the Arabic expression ‘walla’ (line 13). ‘Walla’ is often used in conversations as an interjectional either as an oath which involves truth obligations of the speaker or as an enhancement stating to which degree the content of

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the utterance is the case (see Christensen, 2004: 37–39). Here it functions as an oath (I swear). Accounts have been shown to occur in sequences of interaction when the speaker has been positioned as accountable (Antaki, 1994; Goodwin, 2006). For a speaker to be positioned as accountable, some previous interactional action of the speaker has to be treated by other participants as problematic. Goodwin (2006: 128–136) shows how accounts in oppositional conversational sequences among children follow various types of polarity markers (i.e. interactional markers of opposition, such as for instance response cries involving pitch raise and prolongation of vowels). In Excerpt 4.3, no explicit oppositional polarity marker responding to any of Murat’s turns has been uttered prior to the account. Still, Murat acts as accountable. The oppositional element in this sequence, which might explain this, lies in the other participants’ negative evaluation of Murat’s behaviour at the past fighting competition and Ilias’ prediction of Murat’s future behaviour. In spite of Ilias’ previous turn referring to future fights, Murat’s account here is oriented towards the past experience, as the explanation relates to his actions at a specific past competition fight. Murat’s defence continues throughout the rest of the excerpt, and from line 13 on, he employs features associated with the contemporary urban style. The features include, apart from the use of ‘walla’, primarily the typical prosody (for instance, relatively short ‘i’-pronunciation in ‘inde’ and ‘alligevel’ and the tonal pattern). Ilias reacts in line 20 and 24 with confirming back channel signals. And Murat’s explanation contains several invitations to such confirmations: ‘ikke’ (right) in line 16, ‘du ved’ (you know) in line 21 and 27. Murat’s account emphasises the physical injury and pains in the back as the reason for the bad fighting performance, instead of the psychological explanation suggested by Ilias, that Murat thinks about injuries. What is intriguing about this excerpt is that Murat appears to style-shift when he constructs the account. In the light of the locally ascribed values to the contemporary urban stylistic features among the boys in the taekwondo club (suggested by the use we have seen in the excerpts discussed so far and in the fearless fighter construction in Excerpt 3.8), this could be viewed as an attempt to draw on the associated values of toughness, status and masculinity in a situation where Murat’s fighter identity is challenged by the other boys (as in Excerpt 3.9). Murat at the same time seems to bring about mutual group affiliation with and confirmation from the other participants in the conversation when through his interactional acts he strives for the other boys’ affirmation of his account of the bad fighting performance. By employing these particular linguistic resources in exactly this sequence

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of the conversation, he seems to appeal to mutuality as well as values of toughness. In this sense, the style could be said to partly serve a solidarityoriented function. As we shall see in the next excerpt, which illustrates a more confrontational (although playful) fight over status, features of this style are not always employed for solidarity-oriented purposes.

Bragging about school results It was not only in combination with peer- and sports-cultural measures of social status that these stylistic features were used. In Excerpt 4.4, the boys’ playful competition builds on more academic capital. Excerpt 4.4: Term test The sequence is from the self-recording between Murat, Ilias and Salim (see Excerpt 3.3). This sequence takes place 34 minutes into the recording. Salim has, just before this sequence, mentioned that he took a test in school earlier that day 1 2 3

Murat:

jeg fi jeg var til prøve terminsprøve engelsk mundtlig jeg fik elleve (.) i dag.

I go I went to a test term test English oral I got eleven. (.) today.

4 5 6

Ilias:

VED DU HVAD JEG VAR I jeg var i i terminsprøve fransk og jeg fik ti

DO YOU KNOW WHAT I WAS IN I was in in term test French and I got ten

(1.2)

(1.2)

jeg (.) (.) (.) (.)

I got eleven (.) ↑TEN (.) (.) ↑TEN (.) (.) ↑TEN (.) (.)[↑TEN (.)

7 8 9 10 11

Murat:

12

Ilias:

fik elleve ↑TI (.) ELLEVE ↑TI (.) ELLEVE ↑TI (.) ELLEVE [↑TI (.) ELLEVE] [↑LUK (.) røven]

ELEVEN ELEVEN ELEVEN ELEVEN]

[↑SHUT (.) your arse]

In these few utterances Murat and Ilias explicitly claim linguistic competence by referring to or bragging about recently achieved results of tests in foreign languages taught in Danish schools. In lines 1–3, Murat tells the others that he received the mark of eleven in a term test in English. He uses features associated with the contemporary urban style. These include pronunciation without the Danish ‘stød’ in ‘terminsprøve’ and ‘engelsk’, leaving out the preposition in ‘terminsprøve engelsk’ (term test English) and a pronunciation on the utterance level with the characteristic prosody (e.g. less contrast between short and long vowels).

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Murat’s utterance could be understood as merely offering information about the experience of the test, but Ilias responds in line 4–6 in a high volume and informs him that he took the term test in French and received the mark ten (the marks of ten and eleven were both high marks in the Danish grading system at the time of the recording). Ilias’ counter information suggests that he reacts to Murat’s utterance as bragging. As discussed in relation to Excerpt 3.8, one of the possible reactions to bragging is challenging reactions to what are perceived as ‘attempts to one-up’ other participants (Goodwin, 2006: 159, see Section ‘Socially strategic ambiguity’) and Ilias’ utterance here resembles a one-up attempt. In his response, Ilias uses stylistic features similar to the ones used by Murat. He pronounces without the ‘stød’ in ‘terminsprøve’, ‘fransk’ and ‘ti’. He uses the preposition ‘i’ (in) in a non-standard manner (‘i terminsprøve’, in term test), and he leaves out the preposition in ‘terminsprøve fransk’ (term test French). He also pronounces the utterance with the characteristic prosody. Both Ilias and Murat pronounce the t-variables in ‘terminsprøve’ (and Ilias also in ‘ti’) affricated and palatalised. The sequential connection, the loud volume in Ilias’ turn and the described following comparative repetition of the test results (by Murat) frame the contributions, and thereby the contributors, in a competitive relationship. The competitive comparison builds on the institutionally defined value of the marks, which is unnegotiable (eleven is higher than ten). For Ilias’ turn to make sense as competitive it also builds on the relative value ascribed to the foreign languages in question, English and French. The relative value is possibly negotiable considering for example the status of the two languages (English being compulsory and taught from grade 3, French being optional from grade 7 or 8). This is not elaborated on and it is clearly not Murat’s explicitly displayed evaluation. The competitive relation is underlined with exclusive focus on the value of the marks when Murat in line 7, after a pause, continuously and rhythmically repeats: ‘ten, eleven, ten, eleven’ etc. (lines 8–11) comparing the two results. He is stopped by Ilias, who in overlap with Murat’s repetition and in the same rhythmical pattern tells him to be quiet: ‘luk røven’ (shut your arse). Murat and Ilias here appear to be engaged in a situational (rather playful) fight over status. The fight could be described as carried out through claims of school-related linguistic skills and a competition about the relative value of these as symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1977). Murat in this case could be considered the winner. The linguistic practice employed by the boys in this sequence, however, is not a practice typically appreciated in educational contexts. Their linguistic practice is characterised by the use of features associated with a rather stigmatised speech style and appears to be related

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to social status within the peer group. Therefore, the linguistic resources are ascribed values usable for negotiations of status in combination with other means, in this case school achievements. The linguistic resources used in this interactional sequence could be said to represent informality, standard deviation and peer socialising and in this sense contrast with formal, mainstream-appreciated, elite-societal connotations. The use of the style by the boys, in combination with ambitious practices at school in this way, results in renegotiations of dominant norms of societal and schoolrelated success being equated with linguistic standard practices (see also Rampton, 2006). The boys thereby manage situated identity constructions as successful, but non-‘nerdy’ students. I return to a discussion of this excerpt and similar excerpts in relation to the dimensions of school-cultural and peer-cultural orientation in Chapter 5. Looking at these typical examples from my data set, which display the participants’ interactional style tuning with attention to its situated pragmatic effects, reveals that ethnic identities are not brought into focus in these extracts. But does this situated use of features of the contemporary Copenhagen youth style still bring about larger-scale categories, values or discourses? It should be clear from the analysis of the interactions that these boys do not construct oppositional, criminal, immigrant identities corresponding to common stereotypical associations related to the use of several of the features they employ. The presented examples illustrate how the boys employ features of the contemporary Copenhagen youth style to negotiate social status based on, for example, school and sports achievements. The tough and streetwise associations appear to be invoked in the boys’ interactions, but they are occasionally renegotiated and combined with ambitious school- and sports-oriented identity positionings. If one considers the stereotypical societal associations related to the speech of youth in multicultural areas, it is reasonable to assume that indexical features of their speech style, in particular in relation to dominant majority culture, might in some situations signal ethnic minority identity and be purposefully used to do so (in fact we shall an example of this in Excerpt 4.5). But this is not the case in the casual in-group use in interactions among the young boys in the club. Signalling ethnic identity aspects is not an inherent consequence of this linguistic practice.

Stylised Voicing of Ethnic Minorities Interaction-oriented sociolinguistic research has directed attention to both conventional styles and more strategic inauthentic speech as two

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manifestations of the same process: language users continuously employ habitual and less habitual semiotic resources in their social encounters to bring about images of self and other (Coupland, 2007; Jaspers, 2010; Rampton, 2006, 2009). According to Jaspers (2010), there is a shift in interest in recent sociolinguistics towards the investigation of the principles of styling rather than the resulting styles. We have looked into some principles for styling among the young martial arts practitioners. The excerpts I have so far discussed involve what can be characterised as relatively unmarked routine style tuning. To take into account examples of more explicit metapragmatic commentary in interaction, I will in this section discuss two examples of stylised performances in different ways involving ethnically marked speech. My point is that the interactional realisation of speech associated with ethnic minority identity differs from the regular peer group use of the contemporary urban speech style that I have documented above. Stylisations are examples of linguistic behaviour highlighting the evaluation of linguistic forms and their associated values. In this way, they are linguistic activities that put on display the simultaneously unique and sociostructural qualities of language forms. Interactional sociolinguistic work on stylisations often draws on Bakhtin’s literary theories. Bakhtin refers to the presence of different speech and speaking positions within an utterance as double voicing, and a stylisation can be described as noticeable double voicing. Some employments of others’ voices are hardly distinguishable from the speaker’s own voice (towards uni-directional, Bakhtin, 1984: 199), and other usages of others’ voices are more clearly separable from the speaker’s own, as the use involves intentions different from the intention of the original voice (towards vari-directional, Bakhtin, 1984: 193). According to Bakhtin, a stylisation involves ‘an artistic image of another’s language’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 362). Two basic elements are crucial, then, to the identification of stylisations: (1) They are artistically marked linguistic productions and (2) they involve associations with languages or voices of another (different from the speaker) (Bakhtin, 1981: 362; Rampton, 2006: 225). With an interest in stylisation as an interactional activity related to wider sociolinguistic processes, Rampton (2009: 149) formulates the definition of 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)’. We notice a linguistic production as stylised in a given situation because it in one way or another stands out compared to a speaker’s general linguistic behaviour as it is known to us as analysts or interlocutors in a given interaction. In cases where a stylisation builds on a version of a voice,

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which is in fact part of the speaker’s ordinary speech repertoire, as in the case in Excerpt 4.5, the identification of the utterance as stylised must rest on a sense of the regular and unexceptional as opposed to the marked and exaggerated. I suggest that an interpretation of a linguistic production as stylised, both by analysts and co-participants, involves the following dimensions (see also Rampton, 2009): •

• • • •

Recipient’s and speaker’s assumed expectations: ◦ About speaker’s own voices. ◦ About broader stereotypical social connotations of used voices. ◦ About characteristic features of various voices. ◦ About a sense of a ‘regular’ spectrum of features associated with voices (against which some practices are perceived as ‘exaggerated’). Interactional history and speaker’s previous linguistic productions. Speaker’s transportable and situated identities (Zimmerman, 1998). Speaker’s and recipient’s comprehension potential (potential for recognising voices). Local conversational context.

Assumptions about expected voices are based on interactional history and experienced previous linguistic productions of the speaker and on stereotypical social associations related to the voices used. Evaluating a voice as more or less a speaker’s own involves both transportable and situated identities of the speaker (Zimmerman, [1998] 2006: 90–91)9. Does the speaker otherwise bring about and bring along identity aspects in correspondence with the identity aspects associated with the employed voices? The recognition of features as belonging to a specific voice or code involving specific social connotations also rests on the interlocutor’s comprehension potentials. As Agha (2007: 192) argues, speakers are likely to employ, and recipients are likely to identify, more nuanced difference in features and their associations if the represented voices are locally familiar. Whereas, for instance, children living in Northern Jutland are possibly able to differentiate and stylise versions of local regional varieties, the participants in my study (who grew up and live in Copenhagen) employ a much broader stereotypical stylisation of Jutlandic as such, not related to any specific part of Jutland (see Excerpt 3.3). Furthermore, the identification of voices derives from the local contextual use. A particular feature might potentially relate to various metapragmatic stereotypes, but the contextual use suggests emphasis on one (or some) over others. An example from my data is exaggerated high pitch used for different stylisations. Combined with ritual politeness phrases,

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these features contribute in some interactional contexts towards stylising a ‘posh’ persona (Madsen, 2013, 2014). Yet, in other cases, the exaggerated high pitch in a different conversational context indexes hyper-femininity rather than poshness (see Excerpt 3.6). Although stylisations are closely tied to the local communicative context in which they occur and their situational effect, the choice of the linguistic features used is not completely arbitrary, but consistent with the indexical field (Eckert, 2008) of the features used. For instance, stylisations involving ‘girlish’ or ‘childish’ qualities involve pitch raise and could not be achieved with an exaggerated lowering of pitch. Finally, noticing something as especially marked involves expectations of something more un-marked, ordinary or regular. Although I have argued that researchers’ and co-participants’ interpretation of interactional actions as stylisations involve the same dimensions, there are obvious differences in the way analysts and participants identify stylisations. A participant’s interpretation is an instant reaction, whereas the sociolinguist interprets through a slower and often theoretically informed process. A few of the differences in the case of this study are as follows: my access to the interactional history of participants was derived from ethnographic work rather than frequent peer interaction; my comprehension potential was influenced by my experience with a range of previous sociolinguistic studies; and my interpretation relies heavily on observation and analyses of the participants’ interactional reactions. Stylisations are perceived in relation to assumed expectations of regular speaker behaviour, regular range of features, regular voices and regular users of voices. Yet, it is worth noting that stylisation as such is not an exceptional practice in interactions among (perhaps in particular, contemporary young) speakers.10

Perker performance The stylised speech presented in Excerpt 4.5 involves the prosodic features characteristic of the contemporary urban speech style, but in this sequence they are employed in a more marked performance embedded within a playful sequence and accompanied by non-verbal signs. The performance plays on a stereotypical urban ethnic minority persona. This social category was referred to as being ‘perker’ (a Danish term with similar connotations as ‘nigger’ or ‘paki’) among the club members. It did not only involve minorityidentity aspects. It also invoked the urban masculine values of toughness and street-credibility as well as association with the local area of Nørrebro. Micas, Usher, Mohammed and partly Ahmet in general displayed affiliation with the perker category, for instance through their appropriation of popular

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cultural resources, and this performance also involves reference to a local rap group. Excerpt 4.5: Perker 2200 Thirty-five minutes into the boys 2’s group conversation. Ahmet is behind the camera and initiates the play where he acts in the role of the camera man and casts Mohammed in the role of a news presenter or reporter: 1 2

Ahmet:

nej Mohammed xxx du skal sige ligesom tvavisen tv-avisen ((er placeret bagved kameraet))

no Mohammed xxx you should say like the tvnews tv-news ((speaks from behind the camera))

3

Usher:

må jeg se ((henvendt til Micas som stiller læser på et kort gennem hele sekvensen))

can I see ((addressed at Micas, who is quietly reading from a card throughout the sequence))

4

Mohammed:

5

Ahmet:

kom nu sig det come on say it ((ser direkte ind i kameraet)) ((looks directly at camera)) kom nu her til Mohammed come now here to Mohammed

6 7 8 9 10 11

Mohammed:

hej jeg hedder Mohammed jeg bor her på toogtyve nul nul du skal ikke fucke med mig for jeg er perker her og en paki hhh hhh ((udfører hip-hop gestik og kigger ind i kamera))

hello my name is Mohammed I live her on twenty two zero zero you shouldn’t fuck with me because I am perker here and a paki hhh hhh ((performs hip-hop gestures, looks at the camera))

The boys on Ahmet’s initiative establish a play frame of news reporting, when Ahmet from behind the camera requests that Mohammed speaks as in the news (on television), and Mohammed responds by requesting an introduction (lines 1–2 and 4). Ahmet provides the introduction (perhaps mimicking the way television presenters introduce reporters) and Mohammed then performs for the camera (and of course the co-participants also figure as audience). Interestingly, he does not employ a stylised news reporter voice. Instead, he employs the prosody characteristic of the contemporary urban speech style and he combines this with elements typical of the rap lyrics characteristic of the group P4L (Perker for life). These include the expressions ‘toogtyve nul nul’ (twenty two zero zero) and ‘jeg er perker’ (I’m perker). P4L is a group of young men of minority descent from Copenhagen. Their music plays on oppositional minority gangster identities. The group was popular among boys 2 at the time of the fieldwork and their song ‘Pansersvin’ (copper pig) was quoted, hummed or sung several times during the recorded interactions. The boys, in particular Mohammed, also displayed preference for this group on the chat web-page Arto.

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Mohammed’s performance in this sequence combines connotations with this underground rap group with relatively authentic Mohammedidentity and linguistic features (the information Mohammed provides about the character he performs could be ‘authentically’ ascribed to himself). The stylisation here suggests little distance between own and other voice (the double-voicing is uni-directional). Although none of the linguistic features employed by Mohammed in this utterance deviate from his regular linguistic repertoire, the utterance still appears performed. The sense of performance is caused by the frame of activity involving the playful introduction, the self-presentation genre of his utterance, the connotations with P4L and the accompanying hip-hop gestures. But the performance does not come across as ironic or parodying. Mohammed performs an identity he affiliates with, a slightly exaggerated version of his own voice. The self-presentation emphasises several interrelated identity aspects: • • • •

Urban local belonging to Nørrebro: ‘bor her på toogtyve nul nul’ (live here on twenty two zero zero – 2200 is the postal code of Nørrebro, line 8–9) Toughness and ‘street-gangster’ associations: ‘du skal ikke fucke med mig’ (you shouldn’t fuck with me, line 10) Local, minority, perker identity: ‘jeg er perker her’ ( I’m perker here, line 11) Specific ethnic Pakistani identity : ‘og en paki’ (and a paki, line 12)

Another interesting aspect of this extract is the performance in relation to the interactional play frame of media presentation. After being positioned in the role of someone related to the television news and being introduced by Ahmet, Mohammed performs with linguistic features and presents identity aspects far from the ones associated with Danish media presenters. News reporters usually represent the adult, mainstream, majority Danish society and standard speech. When Mohammed responds to the request to speak like ‘tv-avisen’ (the news) with a provocative perker voice, he also mocks the adult, standard, mainstream values symbolised by the televised news media. The sequence therefore also involves playful acts of opposition in relation to the media that plays a central part in stereotyping male Nørrebro youths as dangerous criminals or social burdens for the Danish society. This example shows how the stereotype of an ethnic minority gangster persona is not predominantly achieved through exaggeration of the linguistic features associated with the contemporary urban speech style (as described above). The prosody is admittedly a highly significant index of this style, but the stylised exaggerated character of the utterance is marked by the interactional frame as well as the expressions and category labels invoking associations with local popular cultural resources. The minority

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ethnic identity aspects play a part in this performance, but my argument is that this kind of stylisation is very different from the styling observed in the less marked linguistic activities illustrated above. Explicitly referring to ethnicity-related identity labels is part of what makes it marked, and, in fact, ethnically marked speech was only used in such doubled-voiced performances by the participants.

Stylised immigrant Danish A different example of ethnically marked stylised speech is the learner style employed by the boys 3 in Excerpt 4.6. In a situation where they have trouble with the ticket stamping machine, they jointly voice an incompetent Danish learner. Excerpt 4.6: Its dad Twenty-four minutes into the self-recording by Murat and Ilias (with Salim). They are at a train station and experience some problems when trying to stamp their tickets before boarding the train (just before this extract the boys have discussed how many stamps they need). In this sequence they jointly construct playful complaints about the stamping automat not working. 1

Murat: >HVORfor gider den ikke< ((gider udtalt [ɡilʌ]))

>WHY doesn’t it want to< ((’gider’ pronounced [ɡilʌ]))

2 3

Salim: skal jeg prøve (.) du prøver først ((prøver udtalt [prɵʌ]))

shall I try (.) you try fi rst ((‘prøver’ pronounced[prɵʌ]))

4 5

Murat: den gider ikke den siger [til mig] (([ɡilʌ]))

it doesn’t want to it says [to me] (([ɡilʌ]))

6

Ilias: [dens far]

[its dad]

7

Murat: ja det er rigtigt dens far mand

yes that’s true its dad man

Murat’s utterance in line 1 has the form of a question and functions as a complaint expressing annoyance, spoken faster than surrounding utterances and in the beginning at a loud volume. Salim responds to this in lines 2–3 with a question, as he asks if he should try. This could be understood as an offer to help, but at the same time it could be understood as a suggestion that he might be more capable than Murat. The question does not receive any verbal response. Instead Salim continues as the speaker after a pause. From this continuation we understand that he agrees that someone other than himself tries first. In line 4, Murat continues the complaint in a

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playful manner. His utterance has the form of a retelling of what the ticket (or automat) has said to him, that it ‘ikke gider’ (‘does not want to’ or ‘cannot be bothered to’). This personalisation of the problematic item is continued in Ilias’ overlapping utterance (line 6). ‘Dens far’ (‘its dad’) might seem like a rather odd contribution. But my interpretation is that it is to be understood as a curse or insult of the type ‘your mother is ….’ This type of insult is a common element of, for instance, the Afro-American rap culture, and it has become commonly used among Danish youth, also in reduced form and occasionally concerning other family members of the recipient. It involves stereotypical connotations of urban heterogeneous cultures and ritual insulting practices. In this example it is playfully constructed as concerning the father of the ticket or automat. Murat supports this and repeats it in line 7. Reference to a father might also involve connotations of the boys’ parents’ generation as associated with the stylised immigrant Danish employed. Various features used in all of the turns are associated with stereotyped (adult) immigrant Danish: • • •

The pronunciation of ‘d’ in ‘gider’ (line 1 and 4), which in standard Danish is pronounced with the voiced dental fricative [ð], is pronounced [l]. The pronunciation of ‘r’ in ‘prøve’ and ‘prøver’(lines 2–3) is in both cases pronounced with the rolled alveolar consonant [r] instead of the standard uvular fricative [ʁ]. The word order in the superordinate clause ‘den siger til mig’ (it says to me, lines 4–5) is SVO, but would in standard Danish be inverted (VSO).

Although the word order employed in this sequence is described by Quist (2000) as typical of the contemporary urban speech style of Danish (she refers to ‘multi-ethnolect’, see Section ‘Youth Styles in Heterogeneous Urban Environments’), the use here in combination with the other co-occurring features contributes to a joint construction of a voice different from an urban youth voice (also I did not find many examples of omission of inversion among the participants in my study). The features which associate this voice with adult immigrant Danish are in particular the pronunciations of the distinct Danish sounds: [ð] and [ʁ]. These sounds are (stereotypically) considered difficult for learners of Danish as an additional language, but all of the three boys pronounce these sounds in a near-standard manner in all other parts of the recordings (although [ʁ] is, as we have seen in Section 3.1.1, by some mostly pronounced [ʁ ]̥ , but never [r]). The particular pronunciations employed by the boys here index social connotations of an accented learner Danish. The stylisation is initiated by Murat, but the other two boys take on the same voice in their contributions, and the conversation

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develops into a jointly constructed stylised sequence. The interactional function of the utterances in this sequence contains ritual aspects (see discussion of stylisation in relation to ritual and performance in Rampton, 2009).11 The boys’ verbal interaction is embedded within the more practical activities they are engaged in, and this sequence occurs at a point when they encounter difficulties. Although the difficulties are related to the practicality of stamping tickets (rather than interactional problems), they make it hard to continue the conversation without addressing the mutual experience of practical difficulties verbally as well. Also, all of the contributions function partly as evaluations of the experienced difficulties, namely, as expressions of annoyance. At the same time the rituals serve to bring the boys back to the (ordinary) flow of conversation in spite of the practical troubles, and also clearly contain elements of performance and de-authentication. The features initially used by Murat are linguistically marked by the pronunciation and they are appreciated and further mutually developed by all of the participants. The use of the features marks the interactional contributions as vari-directional double-voiced discourse. The voice of an adult immigrant Danish learner in co-occurrence with stereotypical insulting practice directed at a personified ticket automat is employed playfully by the boys at a point of trouble. The boys play on a stereotypical association of deviant strongly accented pronunciation with a lack of competence and construct a ‘dumb immigrant’ persona. The example resembles what Jaspers (2011b) identifies as the practice of ‘talking illegal’ among adolescents in Antwerp. Jaspers observes how the practice of stylising accented or ‘incorrect learner speech’ is used to highlight a general marginal social positioning associated with linguistic incompetence rather than specific ethnic differences. In this sequence, the incompetent associations stereotypically related to adult and newcomer-accented speech are here exploited playfully as (self-)ironic comments on their incompetence with respect to stamping tickets. It is also a way of playfully continuing the flow of interaction. Again, aspects of ethno-linguistic identity could be said to be relevant to the linguistic performance and the voice achieved in this sequence, but (1) it is distinct from the contemporary urban speech style, (2) it is highly marked and (3) the ethnically marked stylisation is not really used here to bring about ethnic relationships.

Aspects of Ethnicity What is otherwise referred to as ethnic minority background in relation to larger Danish society was in fact characteristic of the majority in the club community among children and adolescents (in particular among the

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males). A Danish majority background in the club represented a minority. The reason why only one boy with (partly) ethnic Danish background (Tim) was included in my study was that the other very few boys with ethnic Danish background appeared so marginalised and spent so little time in the club that they did not match my criteria of selection. They typically arrived with their parents just before practice and left immediately after and rarely interacted with other club members (see Section ‘Field Methods, Participants and Data for criteria of selection’). Ethnic minority is a diverse category and it includes various ethno-linguistic and cultural affiliations. Still, ethnic minority background, whatever the specific cultural and linguistic heritage, was clearly an available identity aspect as we have seen highlighted in Excerpts 4.5 and 4.6. My observations and the interviews suggest that ethnicity in general was not often the explicit focus of the participant’s attention. This could be viewed as a parallel to Staunæs’ (2004) observations among Danish school children. Staunæs observes that members of the deviant category from the norm with respect to ethnicity (ethnic minorities) often treat their ethnicity as a significant issue. Members of the majority (ethnic) category, however, rarely address their own ethnicity as a significant issue (see also Bucholtz, 2011 and discussion in Section ‘A masculine imperative?’). Staunæs reports how participants in her study never brought up their whiteness, whereas being a ‘foreigner’ or ‘black’ was frequently discussed. Within the frames of this community of practice, however, ethnic minority categories (in relation to the Danish norm) were not remarkable as here they represented the majority (quantitatively the largest ethnic group was Moroccans, but all Arabic speaking, Moslem members appeared to be considered part of the same socio-cultural category). This does not mean that ethno-cultural aspects of identities were never made relevant. Ilias, for instance, drew explicitly on ethnic identity aspects in his profile on the social media platform Arto. Instead of a photo of himself, his profile picture illustrated a black text on white background: ‘I ♥ MOROCCO’ and the only other photo put up on the profile was a graphic illustration of the text ‘MuRat-IliaS FrinDs-4-LiFe AfghAnisTaN-MaRoQ’ (here reconstructed by me with pseudonyms).12 In the interactions, however, ethnic categories were not brought up among the older boys. In addition, I observed how in particular cultural-religious practices appeared to signal social status and were related to the construction of the fighter identity. Before fights, the elite fighters would go to a quiet room and discreetly pray before competitions, whereas the younger male participants from the club would gather in a large group and explicitly pray in front of all the other participants several times during a competition. Their religious

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practice appeared to be of a much more performative character. Likewise, the younger male members would often compete in their hunger-suffering during Ramadan. They would arrive in the club, but mutually complain how they were too weak to practise, while they emptied a large bag of crisps. The elite fighters likewise did not eat during the days of Ramadan, but they would not discuss it as explicitly in the club. The religious practices were to some extent also treated as stylistic resources by the younger boys, but rather than signifying ethnic or cultural identity in particular, I would suggest they as much signalled affiliation with the high-status masculine elite group. Ahmet, Usher and Micas (boys 2) were the only participants who frequently employed ethno-cultural resources and categorisations. They, for example, explicitly favoured Punjabi love songs (by frequently playing them and singing them) instead of the otherwise dominating taste for hip-hop music in the club. The three boys in group 2 were also referred to by others as ‘the paki-gang’ or ‘the Pakistani group’, and they also often used offensive expressions related to ethnic categories in an interactionally unproblematic way. They would for instance refer derogatively to out-group ethnic categories and playfully offend each other with out-group ethnic terms as for instance ‘Mountain Kurd’, as illustrated in Excerpt 4.7. Excerpt 4.7: Fucking Pakistani Twenty-three minutes into the boys 2’s group conversation. 1 2

Mohammed: gå nu væk med dig din fucking pakistaner mand ((skubber Usher)) (.)

go away you fucking Pakistani man ((pushes Usher)) (.)

3

Mohammed: [du er en bjergkurder mand] ((kigger på Micas))

[you’re a mountain Kurd man] ((looks at Micas))

4

Ahmet:

[du er også selv pakistaner] [you’re also Pakistani]

5 6

Micas:

jeg er ikke et bjerg og jeg er heller ikke en kurder

7

Mohammed: så er du min røv hhh hhh

I’m not a mountain and I’m not a Kurd either then you’re my arse hhh hhh

In line 2, Mohammed, in spite of his own Pakistani background (as noted by Ahmet in line 4), employs the in-group ethnic category ‘pakistaner’ (Pakistani) in an offensive utterance directed at Usher. He continues by referring to Micas as ‘bjergkurder’ (‘mountain Kurd’, line 3) and

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when Micas rejects this membership categorisation (lines 5–6), Mohammed instead bases a new insult on a private body part: ‘min røv’ (‘my arse’). Although these employments mostly appeared playful and were not negatively sanctioned, the final excerpt of this chapter demonstrates that some restrictions to the interactional insulting practices existed among the boys. In Excerpt 4.8, from a couple of minutes before the previous sequence, the crossing of boundaries related to ethnic categorisation results in a strong reaction from Mohammed, who does not respond playfully to Ahmet referring to him as ‘paki’. Excerpt 4.8: ↑paki do:↑di The extract appears 19 minutes into the group conversation between the boys 2, Punjabi is in bold. 1 2

Ahmet:

Mohammed laver ikke noget

Mohammed isn’t doing anything

3

Micas:

ja hvad laver du? ((kigger på kamera og så Mohammed))

yes what are you doing? ((looks at camera and then Mohammed))

4 5

Ahmet:

hvad laver du ↑paki do:↑di

what are you doing ↑paki do:↑di

6

Mohammed: xxx apni charbi dekh xxx xxx xxx look at your fat xxx xxx ((læner sig mod Micas og ((leans towards Micas and ser i retning af Ahmet. gazes in the direction of Mohammed og Micas griner Ahmet. Mohammed and Micas højlydt)) laugh loudly))

Ahmet complains about Mohammed’s lack of participation in carrying out the task (line 1). Micas playfully aligns with Ahmet and asks Mohammed what he is doing (line 2). Mohammed does not respond, but Ahmet takes the floor again and maintains the alliance against Mohammed (based on the playful criticism related to his participation). Ahmet, like Micas, asks what Mohammed is doing, but adds a mocking insult ‘paki’ followed by the sounds ‘do:di’. This sound combination does not form any recognisable word. But because of the combination of sounds, the co-occurrence with ‘paki,’ and the prosody employed (exaggerated pitch shifts and a singing intonation) the last part of Ahmet’s utterance comes across as a stylisation with Pakistani connotations. At the same time the stylisation is performed with associations of silliness. Mohammed reacts by switching to Punjabi (line 6). He leans towards Micas and gazes at Ahmet. Mohammed’s utterance is partly indecipherable, but the part I can decipher is sufficient to understand that Mohammed is producing an insult related to being fat. The gaze at Ahmet and the sequential placements of the utterance (just after

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Ahmet’s) suggest that the insult is directed at him (Ahmet, in fact, was the only one among the four boys who could be considered slightly chubby; the other boys were very slim). Ahmet however, does not understand Punjabi. This means that although the insult is directed at Ahmet, the utterance is addressed at Micas (Mohammed’s leaning towards Micas also supports this). Mohammed’s body language makes it quite obvious that what he is saying is something that involves Ahmet. Furthermore both Micas and Mohammed laugh loudly in response to Mohammed’s contribution. By the switch to Punjabi, Mohammed’s threatening behaviour in relation to Ahmet becomes even stronger. Mohammed excludes Ahmet and leaves him in a rather defenceless interactional position, since he can understand that he is attacked, but not the content of the utterance. The three boys with Pakistani background in general regularly switched between Danish, Punjabi and Urdu when they spent time together in the club, but they rarely used Punjabi or Urdu in the conversation when Ahmet participated. Also, socially excluding behaviour like Mohammed’s in this example was rare. Mohammed’s strong reaction follows Ahmet’s prior crossing into a parodying stylisation signalling Pakistani ethnicity. Ahmet does not use actual Punjabi or Urdu words and in that sense the crossing is not entirely equivalent to the linguistic phenomenon termed crossing by Rampton (1995). Still, Ahmet certainly crosses ethnic boundaries by linguistic means and he is negatively sanctioned for doing so. The stylisation signals a Pakistani code and it involves the term ‘paki’ which is most often understood as a derogative term when used by nonPakistanis. In Excerpt 4.5, we saw how Mohammed in a relatively positive self-presentation used the term ‘paki’. But, in the interactional context in Extract 4.8, embedded within criticism and used by Ahmet, the use of the term is clearly not appreciated by Mohammed. Issues of rights in relation to linguistic codes and expressions related to belonging and not belonging to ethnic categories are brought about in this interactional sequence, and Mohammed’s strong, excluding reaction can be seen as a punishment of Ahmet for violating the peer-group ethnic and linguistic regulations. While the ‘perker’ identity, which did not relate to a specific ethnic category but to minority identity as such, was available to all the boys in the group 2, the ‘paki’ category, it appears here, was restricted to specific Pakistani identity. The category and the interactional use of the category term were therefore not treated as available to Ahmet. The sanctioning for crossing ethnic boundaries in this local context might well be related to the wider context of the community of practice, as the ethnic majority among the young members in the club was represented by Moroccans, but all Arabicspeaking Moslems appeared to form a rather unified social category. Ahmet

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belonged to the category of Arabic Moslems and in relation to this group the Pakistani boys represented somewhat a minority.

Contemporary Urban Speech and Ethnic Categorisation In this chapter I have discussed the participants’ situated use of linguistic resources associated with a particular enregistered style in relation to recent sociolinguistic work on urban youth language. I have argued that there has been a tendency to foreground ethnicity in the labelling and the sociolinguistic interpretation of contemporary urban youth language. Yet, the data from the club show that ethnicity is not the most relevant indexical value brought about in the in-group use of features of the local urban speech style. The presented examples illustrate how the boys employ these linguistic resources as stylistic practices to negotiate social status. The features of the style appear to be used for construction of a tough (masculine) youth identity and their use invokes pragmatic functions of mutual affiliation as well as status claims. Tough and streetwise associations that relate to the stereotypical value ascriptions to the style appear to be invoked in the boys’ interactions, but they are occasionally renegotiated and combined with ambitious sports- and school-oriented identities (more about the school orientation in Chapter 5). When the participants do negotiate ethnic relationships, they use more marked linguistic stylisations as we saw in Excerpts 4.5, 4.6 and 4.8. These stylised performances differ from the more routine use of the contemporary urban stylistic features. In the beginning of this chapter I voiced a concern with the way sociolinguists participate in the enregisterment of contemporary urban speech styles and the socio-political consequences of this participation. Register labels play a key part in the ideologising of speech practices and it is worth returning to the discussion of the labelling in the light of the situated language use I have now documented. In our recent work in Copenhagen we have employed the term late modern urban youth style to refer to the linguistic practices associated with young speakers in contemporary diverse urban settings (Jørgensen, 2010; Madsen, 2008a, 2012b; Møller, 2009). I admit that this name is neither short nor catchy, but it reflects specific research points. The term is clearly not a participant label, but the point of it was to avoid prioritising ethnicity in relation to the linguistic practice of particular youth groups. From a sociolinguistic perspective, the term covers three significant aspects of this cluster of linguistic resources: (1) As a range of studies document, it has

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developed among adolescents and involves significant indexical associations with youth (see for instance overview of research in Quist & Jørgensen, 2007 or Rampton & Charalambous, 2010); (2) it is employed and described as an enregistered style (in Agha’s 2007 or Coupland’s 2007 sense) among its users (Madsen et al., 2010; Madsen, 2013); finally, (3) it is a late modern urban phenomenon in the sense I describe below. It is significant to the speech styles employed by contemporary Western European youth that they are situated in late modern urban contexts. Several of the linguistic features associated with these ways of speaking are very likely to have developed as a result of linguistic contact situations, and some of the features used are clearly linked to linguistic and cultural heterogeneity. I will argue that linguistic, ethnic and cultural heterogeneity by now need to be considered inherently characteristic of late modern Western urban societies. Thus, if we want to avoid terms invoking a priori assumptions about linguistic practice and ethnicity, we can with ‘late modern urban’ cover the heterogeneous conditions related to these speech styles. Cultural and linguistic diversity are of course not exclusively late modern phenomena. What is new in relation to contemporary sociolinguistic processes is the increased scope and intensity of the worldwide travel of people and products and the spread of ideas and signs, usually referred to as globalisation (Blommaert, 2010). Recent sociological theories that describe present time as late modernity (e.g. Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991) emphasise that the characteristic social conditions and understandings of ‘modernity’ have not ended, but rather entered a new phase. The notion of late modernity stresses that ideologies characteristic of modernity are continuously influential in contemporary industrialised societies. It is central to the youthful speech styles which develop in contemporary diverse urban settings that they occur in societies traditionally built on ideas of linguistic and cultural uniformity, such as European societies with a history strongly influenced by nationalistromantic nation-state-language discourses (Heller, 2007; Makoni & Pennycook, 2006). This is due to the fact that it is an important quality of these heteroglossic ways of speaking that they involve an oppositional relation to influential mono-lingual standard-ideologies (Madsen et al., 2010; Madsen, 2013). However, if we put aside these more theoretical sociolinguistic considerations, a term like ‘late modern’ might not be necessary. A recent and different suggestion of an alternative term can be found in Rampton’s (2011a) discussion of heteroglossic speech styles in the London area. Instead of ‘late modern urban’ Rampton refers to ‘contemporary urban’ and he convincingly argues for employing a reconceptualised notion of ‘vernacular’ based on Agha’s theory of registers (e.g. 2007). ‘Contemporary urban

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vernacular’ is a sensible and perhaps less complicated term. It recognises the empirical evidence in the British context that this way of speaking no longer merely reflects youth with respect to social distribution (Rampton, 2011a) and it encompasses its non-standard associations and documented durability among Londoners. In a Danish context, with a shorter history of migration, we do not (yet) have a solid empirical basis for employing the term ‘vernacular’ in Rampton’s sense. Thus, I have so far with a few different variations referred to ‘contemporary urban (youth/speech) style’. The participants in my study would of course never refer to this set of features as contemporary urban youth style. No specific name is consistenly used among Copenhagen speakers to refer to the style. In the context of the taekwondo club, some use the name ‘perker-stil’ (paki-style, or niggerstyle) or ‘perkersprog’ (perker language) and in our more recent study among adolescents in Copenhagen the style is referred to as ‘gadesprog’ (street language), ‘slang’ or ‘perker accent/sprog’ (perker accent or language, e.g. Madsen et al., 2010; Madsen, 2013). The notion of ‘perker’ is meaningful in the sense that it associates the linguistic practice with the ‘perker’ identity, which is positively evaluated within peer-in-group contexts. However, the term ‘perker’ can be highly controversial when used by out-group members such as sociolinguists, since it derives from devaluing and offensive use (like ‘paki’ and ‘nigger’) and is embedded within negative stereotypical associations. The label ‘street language’ carries less stereotypical load and in contexts where it is clear that it is a term used as an ethnographic observation, I do use this (Madsen, 2013). This was, however, not a term used by the taekwondo practitioners. My aim with this discussion is not to argue for the use of a specific term, but to propose that careful attention is given to the terms we choose, the reasons we have for choosing them and the potential consequences of our choices (see Cornips et al., 2015). If we are interested in sociolinguistic processes we need to consider how the way we construct our sociolinguistic research objects plays a part in processes of enregisterment and the ascription of voices to social groups. Finally, it is worth noting that we do of course not always have to construct our sociolinguistic research object with a focus on a specific style. Here I have done so because my aim was to engage in a discussion of a particular tendency in urban youth language research and of researchers’ participation in enregisterment. Some recent studies of linguistic practices in culturally diverse settings construct the linguistic objects differently. This work pays attention to the variety and nuances of voices employed by speakers in interaction and thereby focuses on the heteroglossia and hybridity of speaker practices. Examples are the work of Rampton (1995, 2006) focusing on stylisations of ‘posh’, Cockney, German, Creole and

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Asian English among London adolescents; Keim’s (2007) study of various communication styles and stylisations of the ‘Turkish power-girls’; Jaspers’ (2005, 2011) work on interactional stylisation practices of Moroccan adolescents in Antwerp; or the study of polylingual languaging among Turkish-Danish young men by Møller (2009). Indeed, the linguistic practice of the participants in my study is also characterised by employments of various features associated with several minority languages (such as words and expressions from Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, Punjabi etc.), learner Danish (e.g. certain grammatical and syntactical features), Moslem culture (e.g. Arabic oaths) or popular Western culture (such as hip-hop related expressions), just to mention a few. At the same time, the practice of combining all of these features might bring about associations with urban youth in contemporary multicultural and multilingual cities, and it is not easy to clearly distinguish what features are associated with what registers, codes or social values. In this sense, the linguistic practices some researchers term ‘multi-ethnolect’ or ‘ethnolect’, are prime examples of poly-languaging (Jørgensen, 2010; Møller, 2009). It is not likely to be the intention of any sociolinguist to participate in out-group positioning and there can be many reasons for constructing sociolinguistic objects in certain ways. Yet, we have to be aware that if we continuously emphasise aspects of ethnic origin as relevant to the sociolinguistic processes of today’s urban settings, we participate in keeping particular groups in an ethnically marked position in relation to the majority population. In other words, by our scientific discursive practices we take part in constructing such groups as different from an unmarked ‘mainstream’. In this way we partly reinforce social positioning in a manner similar to the dominating binary constructions characteristic of public discourses, and, in fact, researchers frequently interact with media and through mass communication channels become directly involved in such public discourse. A significant insight gained from a close look at the interactions among the boys in the club is that they challenge the social image of oppositional immigrant identities stereotypically associated with the use of several of the stylistic recourses they employ. We have seen this in their use of features of the contemporary urban speech style in episodes where they orient very positively to school competence. In the final empirical chapter of this book, I will look further into similar sequences where academic achievements and linguistic non-standard practices were brought together (like in the term test example discussed above) and discuss these in relation to the idea of micro-integration and enregisterment.

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Notes (1)

Lately, in fact, even the youthful part of ‘youth language’ has been questioned (Møller, 2009; Rampton, 2010b). The works of Møller and Rampton document post-adolescents and adults using linguistic practices otherwise associated with adolescent speakers. (2) Local ‘accents’ are signified primarily by prosodic colouring, and the existing variation in segmental phonology is strongly dominated by developments within and spread from Copenhagen speech (Kristensen, 2003; Kristiansen, 2009). (3) The term rigsmål refers to a set of actually spoken features and can be defined on the level of word form or linguistic feature as a form or a feature that can be heard everywhere in the country used by speakers who are born and raised where they live (e.g. Brink & Lund, 1975; Kristensen, 2003). (4) Studies using matched guise techniques (Lambert et al., 1960) (5) The traditional variables include prolongation of Danish short vowels (see Brink & Lund, 1975) or the Danish ‘aj’-variable (see Jørgensen, 1980). (6) A similar interest for the development of new varieties in multicultural contexts can be found in work on youth language in urban African settings (see overview in Kießling & Mous, 2004). In both European and African contexts a major focus has been on linguistic descriptions of what have been considered new hybrid versions of a base language (in the European cases the national majority language). (7) Even if one insists on focusing on descriptions of distinct codes and varieties as is characteristic of ‘the variety perspective’ (Quist, 2008; Quist & Svendsen, 2010), and within this view of language understanding ‘multi-ethnolect’ as a parallel to sociolect and dialect, it is not the case that this presumed lect represents variation correlating with multi-ethnicity (which would be the classical linguistic meaning of the concept of lect). (8) See also Selting’s chapter in Kern and Selting (2011) for a discussion of verb-second word order in Turkish German. (9) Zimmerman ([1998] 2006: 90) operates with three notions of identities, namely: discourse identities (interactional roles, such as current speaker, story teller, repair initiator etc.), situated identities (identities brought into play by participants engaging in particular interactional situations and displaying orientation and alignment to particular identities), and finally, transportable identities (…) transportable identities travel with individuals across situations and are potentially relevant in and for any situation and in and for any spate of interaction. They are latent identities that ‘tag along’ with individuals as they move through their daily routines in the following sense: they are identities that are usually visible, that is, assignable or claimable on the basis of physical or culturally based insignia which furnish the intersubjective basis for categorization. (Zimmerman, [1998] 2006: 90–91) (10) Whether or not I consider a stretch of talk a stylisation is informed by my familiarity with the participants. My experience as a speaker with knowledge of available linguistic resources and their social connotations in the context of Copenhagen further helps determine whether utterances should be considered stylised or not. Finally, considerations of the situated interactional context, the co-participants’

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responses and the co-occurring linguistic features in an utterance have informed my analysis of stylised speech (see also Rampton, 2006: 261–63). (11) Interaction rituals are defined by Goffman as a special class of quite conventionalized utterances, lexicalizations whose controlling purpose is to give praise, blame, thanks, support, affection or show gratitude, disapproval, dislike, sympathy or greet, say farewell, and so forth. Part of the force of these speech acts comes from the feelings they directly index; little of the force derives from the semantic content of the words. We can refer here to interpersonal verbal rituals. (Goffman, 1981: 20) Rampton (2009) argues that both performance and ritual are characterised by nonroutine framings, but the distinctive difference between the two is that rituals tend to lead interaction participants past the exceptional and ‘back to ordinary life’, while performances create and enhance disruptions from usual business. (12) Not all of the participants used Arto and not all of those who did allowed me to get access to their profiles. Among the boys, Murat, Ilias and Mohammed agreed to let me study their Arto-profiles (by letting me know their ‘Arto-pseudonyms’). A person’s profile on Arto typically consists of one or more pictures (often of the person), possibly an Arto-name (some used their regular name), and more or less information about the person (such as age, friends, interests etc.).

5 School Orientation in an Out-of-School Setting Discourses of integration often assume a contradiction between behaviour accepted by mainstream society and behaviour valued among peers in urban minority youth communities. The report from Andersen (2010), which I discussed in some detail in the introduction, is a good example of this reasoning. This report suggests that oppositional cultural values in relation to school within peer groups of minority boys are a key explanation for their lack of school success. Moreover, as I have illustrated in Chapters 1 and 2, dominant discourses on integration stereotypically present the understanding that cultural and linguistic minorities are required to learn and adapt to mainstream majority cultural practices to be considered well integrated (see also, for instance, Karrebæk, 2012 on food and health norms). Linguistic practice of course plays an essential part here. Children and adolescents in Denmark in general are expected by mainstream society to acquire certain linguistic practices in order to be successfully socialised as good democratic citizens (Jørgensen, 2010; Karrebæk, 2013; Kristiansen, 2003). The data from this martial arts club, however, point to social and linguistic processes worth discussing further in relation to these assumptions. In Chapters 3 and 4, we have seen examples of how the adolescent boys (boys 3) bring about measures of school success within the frames of the recreational social sites of the sports club. For instance, they brag about school achievements and compete in linguistic skills, but to do so they employ linguistic practices that are not officially appreciated in school contexts. They swear and use slang expressions (Excerpt 3.3 & 3.7). They employ non-standard linguistic features associated with a particular urban youth style (Excerpt 4.4) and they mix features associated with various other codes (Excerpt 3.3). In this chapter, I look further into the interactional sequences concerned with school orientation and linguistic skills and I argue that these episodes illustrate processes that can be considered microintegration. The sense of integration, as it is practised interactionally among these boys, is of course very different from the common understanding of the concept. It does not merely involve adaptation to dominant measures of societal success, but involves incorporating different norms, values and 167

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practices. I will show how the young speakers successfully manage norms of school success and socio-symbolic values among peers and how they enact identity constructions as good students, skilled martial arts practitioners and cool young urban boys of a high social status in the club. I begin the chapter by elaborating on the connection between school success, monolingual- and standard ideologies. Next, I briefly review the findings of other recent sociolinguistic and ethnographic studies with respect to the relationship between school orientation and toughness and relate these to my data. Then I consider the school orientation as it is practised among the boys from the taekwondo club by looking into specific examples and I discuss these interactional episodes in relation to similar findings from another recent study among minority boys in Copenhagen (Madsen, 2011a, 2015; Stæhr & Madsen, 2015; Madsen & Karrebæk, 2015.) and to studies in other European settings (such as Rampton, 2006, 2011b). Finally, I consider the wider relevance of such interactional practices in relation to the issues of integration and societal positioning of minority youth, as well as in relation to ongoing sociolinguistic enregisterment.

Schooling, Standard Language and Monolingual Ideologies As I touched upon in Section ‘Youth Style in Heterogeneous Urban Environments’, the concept of linguistic codes bound up in ideologies of nation and culture has a hegemonic status in late modern Western societies (e.g. Gal, 2006; Heller, 2007; Lippi-Green, 2011), and from this ideological perspective of bounded and pure languages closely tied to national identity, linguistic plurality becomes a threat to the coherence of the nation (Heller, 2007; Gal, 2006). In Section ‘The Sociolinguistics of Copenhagen’, I described how language standardisation in Denmark has been particularly powerful in relation to most other European countries and how the development towards linguistic uniformity has been closely related to a conservative standard language ideology that governs linguistic attitudes and policies in public discourse and education. The ideal of pure (national) standard languages elevates particular linguistic forms as universal, but since these forms are socio-historically associated with particular privileged groups of speakers, it is far from neutral. The linguistic changes of the standard language in a Danish context have actually been influenced by speech forms that were historically associated with less privileged societal groups (former workingclass speech forms eventually became the new standard forms, see Section

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‘The Sociolinguistics of Copenhagen’). However, this does not change the fact that what is considered standard at any given point is the speech forms predominantly used by more socially privileged groups (and the former working-class linguistic features did not become standard features before middle class speakers began using them). The unquestioned idea of standard language has been shown to enhance unequal social relations by excluding those who have restricted access to these linguistic practices because of their socio-historical position (Jaspers, 2006). Educational institutions have been described as key sites for the reproduction of such existing sociolinguistic economies and communicative inequalities (e.g. Bourdieu, 1991), but also as a site for negotiating and challenging the sociolinguistic order and hegemony (Blackledge & Creese, 2010; Jaspers, 2006; Rampton, 2006). One way pupils might potentially challenge pervasive cultural and linguistic hierarchies is by employing non-standard linguistic practices in formal learning contexts (e.g. Rampton, 2006, 2011b). In a Danish context, it has by now been thoroughly documented that young speakers in peer practice challenge hegemonic monolingual- and standard language ideologies (Jørgensen et al., 2011; Jørgensen, 2010; Madsen, 2008b; Møller, 2009). Yet in formal education, children and adolescents still meet teachers that produce statements such as ‘in school we speak Danish’ or ‘this is not proper Danish’, and they may hear politicians in the media claiming that ‘to be integrated into the Danish society you must speak our language’ (see for instance Holmen & Jørgensen, 2010; Jørgensen, 2003b; Kristiansen, 2001, 2003; Møller, 2009). Recent research among school beginners shows how school authorities, parents and children co-create Danish dominance and a linguistic ideology of monolingualism (Karrebæk, 2013). Mastering of an officially acknowledged register is understood as crucial to successful participation in society at large and to gaining access to powerful positions and this understanding appears to be reproduced among adolescents as well (Madsen, 2013). In formal school contexts, educational success is conventionally equated with the mastering of standard linguistic practices (Kristiansen, 2001; Lippi-Green, 2011; Rampton, 2006), and this hegemonic status of standard language in education is related to the idea of an abstract language as the linguistic realisation of rational thinking free of social and historical weight (Briggs & Bauman, 2003; Jaspers, 2006). As Jaspers notes, these associations have led to the imagining of standard languages ‘as a kind of neutral “technology of the intellect” with which one can measure and rank individual people, and assign them a corresponding place in society’ (Jaspers, 2006: 135).

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Coolness and Opposition In studies of children’s and adolescents’ identity work and social relations, the practice of accepting or opposing rules, norms and values of institutions governed by adults has been found to be a significant means of signalling and differentiating memberships of social groups and categories (e.g. Bucholtz, 2011; Connolly, 1998; Eckert, 1989; Jordan, 1995; Maegaard, 2007; Mendoza-Denton, 2008; Quist, 2005; Widdicombe & Wooffitt, 1995). In schools, pupils can display orientation to the school institution and the behaviour it represents in various ways. Pupils can signal attitudes towards school through the way they generally engage in school-related activities (homework, talk about school work, participation during classes, etc.). They can also symbolically display acceptance or resistance in relation to the school institution by the way they use the physical facilities (Eckert, 1989, 2000) or through claims of plans for the future related (or not related) to further education (Maegaard, 2007). Research on youth groups in different school contexts finds different dominating social categories. A general tendency, however, appears to be that non-mainstream cool and streetwise identity practices are usually combined with displays of opposition and negative attitude towards school, while conversely, groups orienting towards school ambition usually do not employ cool, streetwise stylistic resources (e.g. Bucholtz, 2011; Connolly, 1998; Eckert, 1989, 2000; Jordan, 1995; Quist, 2005). My field of study is of course not a school. But like a school, participation in the club involves adult-derived norms of behaviour, adult authorities, teaching of skills and even symbols of achieved skills or good performances (belt colours instead of marks). Still, the skills achieved in a sports club differ from educational skills by not being custumarily linked to societal success. The participants in my study, as we have seen, differed in how they displayed orientation towards formal rules and norms in the club. For some (as we saw in interactional excerpts involving the younger boys), challenging norms and playfully breaking the rules was a central part of their constructions of a tough boy persona, but the oldest boys appeared to combine tough, urban, masculine practices with display of positive attitudes towards and acceptance of the adult-instigated norms in the community of practice of the club. They presented an orientation towards respect, discipline and ambition in relation to their sports practices. Interestingly, although the field work was carried out in a recreational context, the oldest boys also frequently displayed school-related competence during their interactions. Because the task of producing the posters during the group conversations made paper and pens available, these settings potentially involved the writing of text

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(it was not required, but most of the participants did write). This, in turn, possibly made competence in literacy and correct spelling relevant. Among the boys 1 and 2, as we shall see in Excerpts 5.1 and 5.2, this potential was occasionally oriented towards. The boys 3, however, were the only group among the participants who explicitly constructed positive school attitudes and frequently discussed schoolwork.

Spelling during writing activities Let us first consider the younger boys’ engagement with spelling during the group conversations. Excerpt 5.1: Blocking From the end of the group conversation among Usher, Micas and Mohammed. They are occupied with writing text to accompany the photos they have taken to illustrate ‘A day in the club’. Mohammed writes. 1

Usher:

de laver blokade

they’re doing a

2

Mohammed:

vi skriver blokade

we write block

3

Micas:

blo (.) b l o r ((staver))

blo (.) b l o r ((spells))

4

Mohammed:

blok

block

5

Micas:

blo ka de (.) k ((siger de enkelte stavelser))

blo ka de (.) k ((spells syllables in Danish))

6

Usher:

blo k (.) r

blo k (.) r

7

Mohammed:

blokader ing

blokader ing

8

Usher:

r

r

9

Mohammed:

ing

ing

10

block

Usher:

blokering

blocking

11

Mohammed:

i n g ˚blokering˚ ((hvisker ’blokering’))

i n g ˚blocking˚ ((whispers ’blocking’))

12

Micas:

er det ing? ((kigger på Usher))

is it ing? ((looks at Usher))

13 14

Usher:

ja det skal skrives sådan der

yes it should be written like that

15 16 17

Mohammed:

blokering (.) det er så m og s som laver bloke[ring] ((læser))

blocking (.) this is m and s that are doing block[ing]((reads))

18

Usher:

[ring](.)n g ing

[ring](.) n g ing

19

Mohammed:

blokering

blocking

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20

Micas:

i

i

21

Usher:

dobbelt n

double n

22

Mohammed:

lige det sidste billede

just the last picture

In this sequence, Mohammed, Usher and Micas discuss literacy competence. Mohammed is writing an explanatory text for their poster under each of the photos from the club and the others give him advice on the spelling of the word ‘blocking’. Usher seems to be reacted to as the one with a certain spelling authority when he is asked to confirm the correctness (line 12). The literacy competence here is of course intertwined with competence in martial arts terms (should it be block or blocking?). The only time these boys were concerned with issues of linguistic competence and correctness was during these writing activities related to carrying out the tasks I asked them to do. In spite of being older than Micas and Usher, Mohammed often asked the other boys’ advice on correct spelling of words and thereby he did not perform a very school-ambitious identity, but Usher did to a certain extent. In the next example, Tim corrects Zaki’s spelling of ‘my’ on a note to put on someone’s back as a tease (to invite others to kick him for fun without him knowing). Excerpt 5.2: Kick my ass Twenty-two minutes into the group conversation of boys 1, Zaki has written ‘kick me ass’ on a teasing note to stick on the back of someone and Tim picks up the note. English in original is marked by italics in the translation. 1 2 3 4

Tim:

kick me ass der står kick me ass ikke det er sådan her med ((skriver på papiret))y

kick me ass it says kick me ass right it’s like this with((writes on the note))a y

5

Zaki:

med y?

with a y?

6

Tim:

så.

so.

7

Zaki:

der står kick me

it says kick me

8 9 10 11

Tim:

nej der står kick my du du skrev kick me kick me ass det kan man ikke sige

no it says kick my you you wrote kick me kick me ass you can’t say that

Here the orientation to correctness is initiated by Tim and related to English skills when he points out that Zaki has spelled ‘my’ with an ‘e’ instead of a ‘y’. At the same time as involving correctness norms, it is

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embedded within a teasing activity that to some extent can be considered norm breaking (invitation to violence outside the authorised training frame) and, indeed, includes linguistic expressions that are not very school related (‘kick me ass’). In this way, this example involves aspects similar to the older boys’ spelling competition in Excerpt 3.7 and ritual insult in Excerpt 3.3. Yet, this is the only example from my data where the youngest boys engage in this kind of activity. The older boys were in general much more occupied with school-related skills.

School Achievements as Symbolic Capital In several sequences of Murat’s and Ilias’ self-recording, language was not only the means of negotiating local social status, but in fact language and linguistic competence appeared to be the discipline they competed in. The boys engaged in languaging competition, on the one hand by claiming linguistic competence by explicitly referring to school success and on the other hand by demonstrating linguistic competence through a mixture of playful linguistic activities, among them the spelling competition. In Excerpt 4.4, we saw how the boys’ competition related to school competence involved bragging about results of term tests through explicit claims of competence in foreign languages taught in Danish schools. To brag, the boys used linguistic features associated with the contemporary urban speech style, and the example illustrated a competition in linguistic competence involving a mixture of non-standard linguistic practices and references to school success. In Excerpts 3.3 and 3.7 from the same recording we saw how Murat, in particular, demonstrated linguistic competence in English, creative insults and correct spelling of English terms for female underwear. Excerpt 5.3 appears before the other excerpts I have discussed from Murat’s and Ilias’ self-recordings.1 During this sequence, Murat initiates a language shift from Danish to English and the first explicit reference to school achievement occurs. This establishes the first example of a competitive relationship between English and French (which is also evident in the term test Example 4.4). Excerpt 5.3: Un deux trois Twenty-five minutes into the self-recording of Murat and Ilias. The playful complaint about the ticket stamping automat in stylised stereotyped immigrant Danish has just taken place (Excerpt 4.6). English in original in italics in translation, utterances spoken with the intonation of contemporary urban youth style in bold.

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Murat:

2 3 4 5

(0.5) I could hear your xxx ((lyder som ‘bride’ eller ‘bry’ ?, synger)) I don't know (why ask) I'm just bored with it you see I got eleven (.) in English today (.) you know. ((amerikanske accenttræk, intonation))

(0.5) I could hear your xxx ((sounds like ‘bride’ or ‘bry’ ?, sings)) I don't know (why ask) I'm just bored with it you see I got eleven (.) in English today (.)you know. ((American accent features, intonation))

6

Salim:

keep up the good work. ((Dansk accent))

keep up the good work. ((Danish accent))

7

Ilias:

åh hvorfor virker den ikke

ah why doesn’t it work.

8

Murat:

I'm just like that (.) see.

I'm just like that (.) see.

9

Ilias:

un (0.3) deux (0.4) trois. ((tæller, kan høre klippekort blive stemplet))

un (0.3) deux (0.4) trois. ((counts accompanied by stamping ticket sounds))

In line 1, Murat sings a phrase from a song in English. It is not possible for me to figure out what the last word of the lyrics is supposed to be, and I am not sure what song it is either. The shift into English in this case is not particularly remarkable. Singing and humming of popular tunes was a frequently occurring phenomenon in the participants’ conversations. More remarkable is the continuation in lines 2–5. In spite of much concentrated listening I cannot hear any contributions from the other participants immediately before Murat’s turn. In fact, Murat is the self-chosen speaker in the utterance prior to the beginning of this extract as well. Still, it seems like this turn is constructed as an account. I cannot (considering the relatively poor quality of the recording) completely leave out the possibility of one of the others posing some kind of question, while Murat sings. What I can say is that the construction of the utterance ‘I don’t know…’ has the apparent function of an explanation of what appears to be his linguistic choice (of English), and no matter whether it is motivated by some earlier contribution or not, it clearly also has the function of bringing up the topic of Murat’s successful English test. In this sense it is a claim of linguistic competence by reference to the mark (in the same way as in Excerpt 4.4). This claim is, unlike the ones from the term test sequence, performed in English spoken with rather convincing features of an American accent. At the same time as claiming competence in English, Murat also demonstrates it. From this point on he actually chooses to speak English during large parts of the rest of the conversation (as we have seen in Excerpts 3.3 and 3.7). The response to Murat’s utterance is a formulaic expression in English by Salim ‘keep up the good work’, which comes across as rather sarcastic. The

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expression is associated with a type of encouraging teacher discourse. This is a very adequate English response to someone who has just acted (too) pretentiously. Salim successfully follows Murat’s choice of English with a semantically initiating turn and in this sense he also demonstrates his own competence. Murat responds in line 8, still in English, but picks up on the sarcastic tone and emphasises his achievement as something personally natural and normal (‘just like that’). Ilias’ Danish utterance (line 7) is directed at the ticket stamping automat and as such not aligned to this sequence. But his continuation in line 9, although still a comment directed at the ticket stamping activity (counting the stamps) is performed in French. Why choose French to count out loud at this point? No further utterances are spoken in French. From the local sequential context it is only clear that Ilias here chooses a code different from the Danish one, but also different from the one initiated by Murat. It is also clear that he performs an utterance which is not directly addressed to any of the other participants, but marked by the shift into French. This could be playful languaging practice. Not considering the participants’ interactional history, but instead the near interactional future, namely the oppositional claims of competence between Murat and Ilias in the term test sequence, this is more likely to be understood as a demonstration of competence in French. Admittedly, it is not a very impressive demonstration. It does not involve much linguistic knowledge to be able to count to three; rather it is a symbolic one. Ilias is in other parts of the conversation clearly responded to as someone with a competence in French (for example, he is asked to translate the lyrics in French hiphop music, which they listen to while they speak). Murat and Ilias seem to construct a somewhat oppositional relationship symbolised by the two different school languages. At no point in the conversation does Ilias speak English, even though a substantial part of the conversation is carried out in English by the other participants. In Excerpt 3.3, we saw how the status of English and Ilias’ participation (or lack of participation) were negotiated. The use of English in Murat’s and Ilias’ self-recording is remarkably extensive compared to the rest of my data. The conversation can hardly be described as a Danish conversation (even if you include several variants and styles) with occasional English words and phrases, which is a frequently observed linguistic behaviour among Danish youth (e.g. Møller & Jørgensen, 2002). The use of English is complex. The linguistic practice of English by Murat in the beginning of Excerpt 3.3, where he initiates the ritual insult referring to sleeping with goats etc., could with the combination of the content, the accent and the activity, reasonably be described as an instance of performance (Bauman, 1986). Rampton (1999b, 2006) describes the use

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of German by Inner London school boys. He finds that German is used in particular in rituals, music making and performances. There are some parallels to Rampton’s findings in these Danish boys’ use of English, but there are also differences. Firstly, these boys’ command of English appears (based on their productions) to be far more developed than the German skills among the boys in Rampton’s study. Secondly, and possibly as a result of the boys’ competence, English is used in this data for a variety of purposes. In this extract as well as in other parts of the interaction, Murat and Salim are engaged in a conversation where, during particular sequences, English covers all the functions of their otherwise main language of communication, Danish. I do not find any similar use of English by these boys or my other informants in the rest of the recorded data. In this particular conversation, the use of English is likely to be locally motivated by the constructed situational context of the exam considerations and the focus on linguistic competition. The boys’ competing in school related skills did not only involve competence in foreign languages. The boys also competed in more traditional Danish school spelling. Excerpt 5.4 illustrates the sequence where the spelling competition is initiated by Murat during their train journey. Excerpt 5.4 Fifty minutes into the self-recording by Murat and Ilias. Intonation of contemporary urban speech in bold and English in original italics in translation. 1

Salim:

har I haft diktat?

have you had spelling test?

2

Ilias:

nej

no

3

Murat:

JA

YES

4

Salim:

xxx (2.3)

xxx (2.3)

5 6 7 8

Murat:

giv mig et ord jeg ikke kan stave til jeg sværger giv mig et ord

give me one word I can’t spell I swear give me one word

9

Ilias:

xxx

xxx

10

Murat:

okay noget andet kom nu

okay something else come on

11

Salim:

immaterielle

immateriel

12

Murat:

immaterielle i [m] ((udtaler ’imatrielle’ og staver så))

immaterial i [m] ((pronounces ’immaterial’ then spells))

School Orientation in an Out-of-School Setting

[how] do you

[hvo]dan staver du til det

spell it

Murat:

i m a t e r i ((staver))

i m a t e r i ((spells))

16

Salim:

WRONG

WRONG

17

Ilias:

E:H((bib-lyd))

E:H((beeping sound))

13 14

Ilias:

15

177

When Murat challenges the others in spelling (lines 5–8), this is likely to have been triggered by Salim’s earlier question about their spelling tests (presumably referring to the national term tests, line 1). Murat invites Salim and Ilias to suggest a word for him to spell and he implies that they cannot find one he will not be able to spell correctly. His challenge is spoken with the intonation of the contemporary urban speech style and he employs an expression indexical of this style ‘jeg sværger’ (I swear). Salim suggests a Danish spelling trap (with the double ‘m’ and ‘l’) typical of such tests, and in this case, Murat falls into the trap and leaves out one of the ‘m’s. The other boys react with clear signals of failure (lines 16 & 17). The activity continues for a while and, mostly, Salim and Murat are enthusiastically engaged in giving each other spelling challenges and demonstrating their skills. The interactional negotiations involving school success were not only evident in the self-recorded conversation. Murat, Ilias, and also Fouad frequently discussed school work. In the analysed excerpts from the self-recording, Murat overall appeared the most engaged and successful in demonstrating linguistic competence both with respect to school achievements and to more streetwise masculine linguistic practices. In the excerpt below from the group conversation, Ilias is the one to gain local social status through means of school-related skills. Excerpt 5.5: Book report Six minutes into group conversation among boys 3. Intonation of contemporary urban speech in bold and English in original italics in translation. 1 2 3 4 5 6

Fouad:

åh ((gaber))jeg har bare den vildeste boganalyse mand (.)jeg skal læse og hvis jeg ikke laver den ikke så kommer jeg ikke med til eksamenerne

Oh ((yawns)) I just have the wildest book report man (.) I have to read and if I don’t make it then I won’t be allowed at the exams

(0.7)

(0.7)

7

Murat:

det er da at lave den

well it just to do it

8 9 10

Ilias:

du kan bare komme og sige mig om du bare skal tage en af mine

you can just come and tell me if you should just take one of mine

178 11 12 13 14

Fighters, Girls and Other Identities Fouad:

hvad (.) tsk ((afvisende)) hvad skal jeg bruge din til mand når alligevel xxx ((afvisende gestik))

what (.)tsk ((tuts)) what shall I use yours for man when anyway xxx ((rejecting arm gestures))

((lyset slukker))

((light swicthes off))

15

Ilias:

ham der han har gjort det ((nikker mod Murat))

him he has done it ((nods towards Murat))

16 17 18

Murat:

↑HVAD skal jeg bruge din til jeg vil med ↑glæde bruge hans ↑whatever de: e:r ((’whatever’ overdrevet posh))

↑WHAT shall I use yours for I would be ↑happy to use his ↑whatever the:y a:re ((’whatever’ exaggerated posh))

19 20

Fouad:

vi har allerede [valgt en bog i klassen]

we have already [chosen a book in class]

21 22 23

Murat:

[de er syge nok] nå okay hhh hhh (.) så skal du ikke gøre det

[they’re sick enough] ah okay hhh hhh (.) then you shouldn’t do it

Fouad initiates the talk about school work when he reports to have a ‘wild’ book report to do (lines 1–6). He emphasises the serious consequences of not doing the work, but Murat responds ‘just to do it’. By this response, Murat presents an attitude towards school work (such as book reports) as not being a big deal and he does not align with the complaisant attitude presented by Fouad. Ilias’ response appears more supporting of Fouad’s hints of having a hard time because of the book report. He in fact offers Fouad to possibly use one of his reports (lines 9–10). He pronounces the utterance in a prosody characteristic of the contemporary urban speech style. Ilias’ offer could be understood as a helpful gesture. At the same time, the offer invokes issues of breaking the norms for good pupil behaviour; using someone else’s report would be cheating. The offer also potentially suggests that Fouad is not capable of doing his own report (and that Ilias is more capable). Fouad’s reaction to Ilias’ offer is, as it turns out, a display of slight offence (lines 11–14). The offence is expressed with a ‘what’ followed by tutting. He then rejects the offer by questioning what use he would have of Ilias’ report. Fouad also pronounces his utterance in a prosody characteristic of the contemporary urban speech style and employs rejecting arm gestures. With this rejection, Fouad clearly reacts to Ilias’ offer as insulting. Ilias responds in line 15 by claiming that ‘ham der’ (him), Murat – we understand from the nod, has ‘done it’ (i.e. used one of Ilias’ reports). Ilias thereby supports his own suggestion as reasonable, by providing the information that Murat has previously accepted a similar offer. Murat as a response claims that he would be happy to use one of Ilias’ reports and thereby aligns with Ilias.

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He continues the utterance with a ‘whatever’ pronounced in a stylised posh manner. The posh association is marked by an exaggerated high pitch and a very distinct pronunciation of the [t]. Murat begins a description of Ilias’ book reports. When Murat pauses, Fouad takes the floor and the end of Murat’s description of the reports as ‘syge nok’ (sick enough) is spoken in overlap with Fouad’s utterance. Murat’s use of posh English is contrasted by a Danish youth slang expression. The posh stylisation is related to Fouad’s reaction and the youth slang is related to Murat’s own evaluation of Ilias’ reports. Murat’s utterance appears to invoke different ways of orienting towards school work. Not accepting a friend’s offer to use a report (which involves rule breaking) is presented in Murat’s utterance as involving connotations of acting posh, whereas accepting the ‘sick enough’ report happily involves more youthful, streetwise connotations. In lines 19–20, Fouad explains that they have already chosen a book in class. By this explanation he accounts for rejecting Ilias’ offer without contradicting Murat’s evaluation or questioning Ilias’ writing skills and intentions with the offer. Murat accepts the account as reasonable and agrees that in that case he should not use Ilias’ report. The discrepancy between Fouad and the other boys appears restored. In this sequence, the boys negotiate social status-related school competence and ways of orienting towards school work. Ilias is supported by Murat in a construction of a competent school identity, as a book report expert whose reports are sick enough and worth using. Again the orientation to school work is brought about in combination with streetwise urban youthful practices, such as employing contemporary urban stylistic features and youth slang expressions. And in this sequence, a non-streetwise and more posh approach to school work is also brought about. In the conversational sequences involving linguistic competence and school success, the boys in group 3 display identities of more or less successful pupils. But the boys’ self and other categorisations as linguistically skilled successful students also involve aspects of young, urban, streetwise personae – they combine stylistic practices expressing tough persona (such as swearing, the use of slang, ritual insult, urban speech style and orientation to hip-hop culture) and a display of positive attitude towards school achievements. In, for example, Quist’s (2005) and Eckert’s (1989, 2000) work, similar stylistic practices are combined with a negative orientation to school. Murat also displays awareness of the stereotyped connection between very positive orientation towards school activities and the category ‘nerd’. After being engaged in the spelling competition for a while he comments: ‘Lian tænker er du gal nogle nørder de sidder og leger i staveleg i toget’ (Lian thinks are you crazy some nerds they’re playing in a spelling game in the train). The

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broader stereotypes of urban streetwise identity, nerd identity, provincial naïve identity (in the Slagelse-Copenhagen Excerpt 3.7) and the conflicting discourses and values they invoke, are locally renegotiated in Murat’s construction of a streetwise English master persona and Ilias’ construction of a cool urban book report expert. At least on a linguistic level, streetwise and school-wise practices are successfully incoporated in the interactional behaviour of boys 3.

Micro-integration and Enregisterment The study of these situated practices of the boys in the club illustrates how different academic identities are negotiated through various interactional and linguistic means. We have seen how educational skills such as writing and spelling and reference to high marks achieved in school clearly count and are employed as having symbolic value among the youth in their more or less playful negotiations of local social status within the peer group. What is valued among the older boys, in particular, is a non-nerdy academic approach to school work with focus on display of skills and achievements and a relaxed approach to official rules (such as in Excerpt 5.5.). The boys carry out practices associated with classroom activities in leisure contexts and in ways not usually practised in classrooms. For instance, they choose terms for sexy underwear in the competitive spelling test (Excerpt 3.8) and they very explicitly demonstrate and compete in school-related skills and achievements (overt bragging and competition is not usually encouraged in Danish schools). Furthermore, the boys in these examples frequently employ non-standard linguistic features in combination with the school-related interactional activities. Thereby they challenge stereotypical assumptions about an opposition between successful academic and successful urban, streetwise, masculine youth identities. One could say they exhibit academic identities on their own terms different from the adult majority societal expectations. These observations add significant perspectives to both current understandings of integration and to current understandings of the sociolinguistic processes in Copenhagen. With respect to integration, the practices of the boys (1) question the idea of the development of a ‘counterculture’ as the explanation for educational underachievement among ethnic minority boys and (2) illustrate processes on a micro-scale that can inform conceptions of integration. With respect to contemporary sociolinguistics, the boys’ linguistic and interactional behaviour (3) adjusts previous sociolinguistic findings of a connection between non-standard stylistic resources and coolness and (4) points to the relevance of academic versus street cultural values to the enregisterment of contemporary urban youth style.

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To further qualify these four points I will support my observations in this study with some of the conclusions derived from more recent empirical work in a comparable heterogeneous environment in Copenhagen (e.g. Madsen et al., 2010; Madsen et al., 2013; Madsen, 2013; Møller & Jørgensen, 2013; Stæhr, 2010). From 2009–2011, along with a group of colleagues, I have been following two school classes in a Copenhagen public school from the 7th to the 9th grade (the students are 13–15 years old).2 Our research is based on ethnographic observations as well as the collection of audio (and video) recordings in school and leisure settings such as the youth club, sports clubs, the local neighbourhood, at concerts and in the participants’ homes. The data from this recent project document that several of the adolescents with minority background also bring about school focus during leisure activities and they combine non-standard linguistic practices (including features of the contemporary urban youth style) with an orientation towards school success (Madsen, 2011a, forthc.; Madsen & Karrebæk, forthc.; Stæhr & Madsen, 2014; Stæhr, 2010). The fact that we find similar practices in a different but comparable setting of course suggests that the case of the boys in the taekwondo club is not extraordinary, but that the bringing together of peercultural and school-cultural resources is a more widespread phenomenon. The suggested explanation for the educational underachievement among minority boys resting on their supposedly school oppositional peercultural values (Andersen, 2010) is thereby rather strongly questioned. These findings also contradict the connection between non-mainstream resources, school opposition and coolness documented in various previous research on youth identities (such as Eckert, 2000; Maegaard, 2007; Quist, 2000). This could possibly be explained by either a change in the perception of coolness among contemporary urban youth or it could be a matter of different research methods. In Rampton’s interactional study (2006), there are equivalent examples of a boy who employs Cockney pronunciations in connection with school tasks and by bringing together different cultural frames manages a successful school identity in a non-nerdy manner (e.g. Rampton, 2006: 298–300). Renegotiations of dominant norms of societal and school-related success being equated with standard linguistic practices and the management of identities as successful students without acting nerdy is obviously central to the practices of the Copenhagen boys in the analysed excerpts as well. I have argued (in particular in Chapter 2) that there is a lack of reflection on how integration processes are supposed to occur in club communities both on a political level and among practitioners in sports clubs. The bringing together of different cultural norms (as we see in the adolescents’

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interactions) adds a significant point to discussions of social integration in Giddens’ (1984) face-to-face understanding (see Section 2.6). Such encounters show that processes of integration involve more than just the co-presence of diverse groups of individuals. Processes of integration can involve micro-acts of reciprocity between different cultural norms, but to discover this kind of integration it is necessary to take into account the socio-symbolic values of linguistic forms as well as the content and ongoing social activities. This is where a linguistic ethnographic study of interaction contributes important insights into an area of research more often dealt with from sociological or anthropological perspectives. The boys demonstrate the ability to navigate between the normative demands of peer culture as well as majority cultural-elite expectations, but this can of course not be directly attributed to their participation in a sports club (in our other data, for instance, we find similar episodes among boys practising hip-hop music in the youth club; see Madsen, forthc.; Stæhr & Madsen, 2015). Still, it is likely that the leisure environment provides a less restricted social space than a school context and thereby leisure contexts might be considered particularly fruitful sites for such micro-integrating identity practices. The analyses of the interactional sequences I have presented in this book have been based on our sociolinguistic knowledge of the contemporary urban speech style as enregistered with particular social values. With reference to the enregistered values of certain linguistic features (thoroughly discussed in Chapter 4), I have suggested that the combination of these particular non-standard features and school-focused activities results in renegotiations of stereotypical understandings of how school ambitions and linguistic practice are related. The young participants of course also draw on their knowledge of the socio-cultural associations of the linguistic styles they use. At the same time the use observed in the excerpts contributes to the ongoing enregisterment. Excerpts like those I have focused on here illustrate how the everyday reflexive activities of the boys include employing the contemporary urban stylistic features with pragmatic functions of academic identity adjustment. As I argued in Chapter 4, based on Silverstein’s (2003) accounts of indexical order and Agha’s (2003) notion of enregisterment, such situated language use and metapragmatic activities are linked to and inform wider sociolinguistic patterns. Speakers’ contextual, ideology-invested usage adds to and possibly transforms indexical links that can potentially become new sociolinguistic presuppositions. So is the use of contemporary urban speech style for schoolfocused and school-positive purposes a sign of a radical shift in indexical value associations? Do these metapragmatic activities of the taekwondo

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practitioners severely disturb dominating standard ideologies and suggest that linguistic signs that used to be linked to minority youth or street and peer culture are here linked to education? I will argue that this is not the case. The participants show how they are aware of the stereotype of a schoolpositive persona. This is the case in more overt metapragmatic commentary such as the stylised posh pronunciation of ‘whatever’ (Excerpt 5.5) and in the comment on the activity of spelling as linked to a ‘nerd’ category. Through the use of a register not stereotypically associated with education, the boys, in fact, distance themselves from this stereotype and by using these particular linguistic features when they discuss school work and school performance, they locally co-construct less posh and more streetwise academic identities. Thereby they draw exactly on the fact that their linguistic practice is not typically linked to school ambitions and thus participate in the enregisterment of the features as non-posh and streetwise. So, in these sequences, the boys invoke stylistic practices stereotypically associated with ethnic minority aspects, as a contrast to activities and practices indexing intelligence and social elite. This is how the examples I have discussed in this chapter add new insights into the current sociolinguistic positioning of speech styles. The contrast invoked here (and incorporated on a micro-level) is not primarily a contrast between ethnic other and majority Danishness. The oppositional relation between the linguistically hybrid vernacular speech style and monolingual standard Danish (closely linked to traditional educational ideologies) also invokes a dimension of social status previously indexed by speech styles associated with social class (see Section ‘The Sociolinguistics of Copenhagen’). A corresponding contrast between street and elite linguistic codes is presented by the youth in the recent research project described above (Madsen, 2013). These adolescents label the contemporary urban style ‘gadesprog’ (‘street language’) and present this way of speaking in opposition to ‘integreret’ (‘integrated’). According to the participants, street language is characterised by linguistic mixing and slang. It is ‘their own’ way of speaking (only used to teachers when angry) and it involves some associations with hetero-masculinity. Integrated speech corresponds to near-standard ‘correct’ school-related linguistic practice. It is characterised by the use of ‘difficult words’. It is the way of speaking of, and to, teachers and it involves associations of sophistication, poshness and politeness, all of which is ridiculed by the adolescents through stylised performances of the integrated register during the interviews (Madsen, 2013). When we compare the overt meta-pragmatic accounts of the adolescents in the Copenhagen school to the situated use of contemporary urban stylistic resources in the excerpts discussed in this chapter, it becomes clear that we

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need to look beyond ethnic differences to explain the value ascriptions to the contemporary urban speech styles. These speech styles are usually seen as related to linguistic contact and migration, identified as ethnic minority rather majority on an insider/outsider dimension of comparison (e.g. Kern & Selting, 2011; Quist & Svendsen, 2010). However, the contrasting relation to practices indexing societal elite I have pointed to here also suggests status on a high/low dimension as a relevant aspect of the enregisterment. In the final chapter, I elaborate on this and other general perspectives of this study.

Notes (1)

(2)

The chronological order of the analysed episodes of the two boys’ conversation involving aspects of school success and linguistic competence is: (1) Excerpt 5.3 ‘Un deux trois’ (I will discuss this below), (2) The ‘Speak English’ sequence (Excerpt 3.3), (3) The ‘Term test’ episode (Excerpt 4.4) and (4) the spelling sequence ‘Slagelse-Copenhagen’ (Excerpt 3.11). We have carried out team ethnography and collected a wide range of linguistic data in various contexts. The data include field diaries, audio recordings during classes, breaks in school and during leisure activities, written essays, Facebook interactions and various school-related documents. In addition, we have interviewed all participants in groups and individually (as well as teachers, parents and club workers).The overall focus of our research is to understand how language patterns and language norms are acquired, developed and used in various everyday contexts. Most of the participants in our study have a linguistic minority background and they live in a highly diverse area of the Danish capital.

6 Perspectives I set out to investigate how young members of a taekwondo club in contemporary Copenhagen participate in a community, build friendships and relate to wider social categories through their social and linguistic practices. With an emphasis on how social categories were made relevant, how linguistic resources were employed and how the participants’ interactions unfolded, I aimed at gaining an insight into how the young club members reproduced, reinterpreted or resisted influential ideas about cultural diversity and youth in contemporary Danish society. The insights I gained are relevant to discussions of societal processes, sports sociology as well as sociolinguistic research. In this final chapter, I bring together the discussions from the empirical chapters and elaborate on the major sports sociological and sociolinguistic perspectives that have come out of this study. Before reaching these wider conclusions, I engage in some brief methodological post-reflection, and to remind us what we are actually discussing, I proceed with a summary of the findings from the different parts of the study (Section ‘Fighters, Girls and Other Identities’). After this, I discuss the perspectives under the headlines of (1) Community Sports and Integration; and (2) Ethnic Categorisation and Social Inequality. It has been central to this work that it has involved cross-level analyses, or what Rampton (2006: 401) refers to as ‘ecological descriptions’. I have related interactional instances and situational practices to other practices, processes and structures within my field of study and in doing so I have combined ethnographic, linguistic and discourse analytical methodology (see Rampton, 2006: Chapter 10 for elaborate discussion of linguistic ethnography). My second chapter involves ethnographically based analyses of social practices, theoretically informed by Wenger’s theory of communities of practice and Bourdieuian field analysis. Ethnographic knowledge construction in general relies rather heavily on the researcher’s observations, and throughout the book I do make claims of the sort that some practices or phenomena were more characteristic or frequent among some participants than others. Such observations, however, do not stand alone and are not the primary basis of my claims in general. The principal way this study makes claims is based in observation and analyses of interactional microprocesses and this is particularly evident in Chapters 3–5. These analyses are based on data supported by transcriptions that I present along with the 185

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analyses. The extracts are of course selected and transcribed by me, but by explicating procedures of data collection and presenting the extracts, I have made the data and the interpretation open to readers’ evaluation. In my choice of examples, three different, but simultaneously influential, processes were involved: • •

•

A data-driven inductive approach. What did I actually find in the data? What appeared to stick out as marked in relation to the rest of the data? What appeared regular? Concerns related to my research interest in the relationship between linguistic practice and social categorisation and social relationships. Where and how were which identity aspects made relevant? Where and how were friendship and group relationships negotiated? The relationship with the findings of previous studies. What in the data resembled or was different from phenomena dealt with in existing research and theoretical accounts?

The aim of the interaction analyses has not been to address systematic patterns of conversational conduct as such. I have not presented a sample of cases illustrating the same phenomena (contrasted with deviant cases) as conversation analysis, for instance, often does. The primary generalisation potential of the analyses presented in this book lies in the relation between the insights derived from detailed analysis of the specific cases and existing theoretical or lay assumptions as well as existing empirical work.

Fighters, Girls and Other Identities A wide range of identity-building resources and social positions were available to the participants in this leisure setting. Still, my data has shown that it was significant to the participation and to the salience of particular categories and practices that this community was constituted as a sports association, in a specific area of Copenhagen, around a particular sport (with a certain historical background and structure as well as characteristic principles and ideologies). The main empirical points to draw from my data were that: • • •

Competition and social fellowship were central values shaping the understanding of the sport in the club, but not incompatible contrasts. Higher age, masculinity, competitiveness and fighter competence was connected to high social status in the club. Younger female members were marginalised.

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The contemporary urban heteroglossic speech style was used to enact streetwise, tough masculinities. Gender, age and local norms related to the specific sport were more important to the participants’ involvement and interaction in the club than ethnic identities.

Competition and social fellowship The club participated in various local sports-political projects and these activities were founded in the view that involvement in the club enabled social integration. But the taekwondo club was simultaneously understood as a leisure ‘sports for all’ community and as a competitively competent elite community. Furthermore, adult leaders sometimes emphasised both general socialising qualities and sports-specific elite aspects to serve partly economic interests (e.g. in funding applications) and adult members also understood the social benefits as inherent qualities of the sport itself. More importantly, competition and social fellowship were not only relevant to how adult practitioners in national sports organisations or the instructors and board members in the club presented and engaged with leisure sports (as documented in Anderson, 2003; Munk & Lind, 2004 and in presentations in interviews with adult instructors in the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club). These social dimensions also proved significant structuring principles in the social order of the children and adolescents. Through observable practices, the participants in my study indexed identities as fighters or non-fighters. The participants engaged or did not engage in activities directly related to the competitive dimension, such as fighting and competition, and in practices more symbolically indexing fighter identities, such as particular ways of wearing the taekwondo suit, performing religious practices or changing their clothes in the gym rather than the dressing rooms. They also indexed mutual social fellowship rather than sports skill ambitions, through, for instance, game-playing in the café or participation in weekend camps and parties. Thereby the participants positioned themselves (and were positioned) as more or less oriented towards competition or social fellowship. Although these dimensions were related to broader ideologies within the field of association sports, the resources for displaying affiliation with the different identity positionings were part of the shared repertoire specific to the club. The indexicality of, for instance, the practice of getting changed in the gym was locally developed and partly made available by the physical layout of the club (and of course the local shared history among the fighters). Furthermore, orientation towards competition fighting and fighting skills

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was considered valuable symbolic capital among the young members in the club, and those who were the most successful fighters had the highest social status.

Language use and identity practices Not only sports-related identity-building resources were relevant to the participants in the club. I found that the social categories of age, gender and, up to a point, ethnicity also worked as socially differentiating resources. Their availability was related to the location of the club in an ethnically heterogeneous area and to the sports- and club-specific construction of a family-like organisation, the clubs’ diverse group of members, as well as the traditional male domination within the martial art. The fact that the club was situated in the area of Nørrebro next to a housing estate stereotyped as an immigrant ghetto made available linguistic and other semiotic resources associated with metapragmatic stereotypes of tough, streetwise minority youth. But, at the same time, in this community, male minority youth, in particular with Arabic, Moslem background, represented a majority category, and I have shown how the participants’ use of resources stereotypically associated with minority youth in heterogeneous urban settings (among them non-standard linguistic practices), sometimes challenged broader stereotypes. Social dimensions such as attitudes towards school, emphasis on taekwondo competence and acceptance or opposition in relation to adult-instigated rules more generally were treated as central measures of differences and similarities among the participants.We saw an example of gender interacting with opposition to or acceptance of adult instigated rules in Micas’ and Ahmet’s stylisations of a female voice employed as a tease targeting Usher for being task-focused (Excerpt 3.6). The overall picture of the identity practices suggests that the male participants’ identity positioning involved explicit competitiveness and toughness. The female participants’ linguistic and interactional identity constructions rarely involved aspects of streetwise toughness, but were instead characterised by display and confirmation of female friendship in-group relations. The younger boys often opposed rules whereas the older boys enacted positive and ambitious attitudes towards school, linguistic and taekwondo-fighter competence. I did not specifically approach this data to study gender identities. It is central to my approach that I have not studied one identity aspect in isolation from other identity aspects, and my analyses underline the significance of paying attention to the intersections of different social categories. But as it

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turned out, this work has, like most studies concerning youth, involved a whole lot of gender issues. The institutional structure of the club in particular made different ways of participating as female members available by offering a gender exclusive girls’ class and those who chose the pure girls’ class were considered as and remained very marginal members. Some of the participants articulated a construction of a family-like organisation which emphasised respect for older members and responsibility for younger members. This family metaphor influenced the local meaning ascribed to age categories and was constructed in the club as based on the patriarchal traditions within the taekwondo sport. I argued that these patriarchal traditions, the quantitative male domination, as well as more general stereotypical assumptions about gender and martial arts, resulted in a masculine imperative. In relation to the use of particular linguistic features this study has concerned masculinities more than femininities. In my work with the linguistic data, my attention was especially drawn towards non-standard features and non-standard mixtures of features (the preoccupation with non-standard conduct probably represents a more general tendency among sociolinguists). The features of the contemporary urban youth style and various poly-lingual practices in the data I collected were often used by boys as resources for constructing streetwise, tough, masculinity (my findings in this respect correspond to those of Jonsson, 2007 in a Swedish context). I by no means argue that girls do not in general use non-standard practices associated with these kinds of heteroglossic speech styles and studies such as Quist (2005), Christensen (2004), Ag (2010) or Madsen (2013) indeed demonstrate that they do. But the particular girls I studied did not in the recorded conversations employ these tough, streetwise practices (neither did I observe them use these practices during the fieldwork). To not use non-standard practices, is of course equally significant to identity constructions and is also found in Maegaard’s (2007: 167–168) study to be a characteristic feminine resource. In the community of practice of a martial arts club characterised by both quantitative and more socio-symbolic male domination, it is perhaps surprising that none of the girls appeared to linguistically practise more ‘boyish’ identities, in particular because some of the older girls claimed to align with a ‘tough girl’ identity. That the boys and the girls did not appear to share linguistic resources associated with urban toughness is likely to be related to the lack of interaction between the boys and girls in the club, but it is impossible to say whether the distinct gender separation is to be considered an explanation for or a result of the girls’ apparent lack of linguistic display of orientation towards toughness.

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So, this is what I found in my data. In the individual chapters I have already initiated some arguments for the wider relevance of these findings, but in the next two sections I will tie the perspectives together and unfold them further.

Community Sports and Integration Existing work has shown how popular culture as a site of socialisation can incorporate intense forms of cultural and linguistic diversity (e.g. Hall, 1985; Pennycook, 2010) and this is of great interest to contemporary sociolinguistics of globalisation. Still, sociolinguistic studies in sports clubs are rare, and my work in a voluntary leisure community contributes to this field of research by providing an account of both (a) interaction around and affiliation with a popular cultural interest and (b) the wider institutional and discursive contexts within which this takes place. However, with my choice of field of a martial arts club in a heterogeneous urban area, this study offers perspectives of relevance beyond sociolinguistics.

Sports and community Politicians, sports administrators and practitioners all maintain that sports is not only organised and practised for sports’ sake, but that participation in sports and other organised leisure activities benefits society by enhancing cohesion and shared values. Especially in an area with a large minority population, sport is understood to be beneficial for integration. Sports administrators and practitioners emphasise clubs as sites for integration and politicians assume that participation in such communities leads to acquisition of democratic values and, ultimately, to more successful life trajectories. But my study shows that even in a club so keenly engaged in social projects like the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club, the sports skills are still of great importance to inclusion in the club. Ilias, Murat and Fouad can be viewed as successful examples of this kind of integration history. They are adolescents from the local neighbourhood with minority background who are very centrally included in the community of the taekwondo club. They orient strongly towards good school achievements and they have all continued in further education since they obtained the equivalent of upper secondary or high school exams in 2008 and 2009. Murat even says that he would have been in danger of becoming a criminal had he not become a member of the club. All three boys act as guiding role models for the younger boys and they are looked up to by other young club members. There is no doubt that a club like the Nørrebro Taekwondo Club in this sense is an important socialising site for local youth and this is a positive story which should be told.

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However, these three boys also practise the sport for sport’s sake to a very high degree. They all fight on an elite level. Moreover, their sports skills are closely linked to their social status in the community of practice of the club and therefore to inclusion. The members who did not orient towards the competitive dimension of the sports at all left the club eventually. While political funding bodies supporting integration projects in sports clubs present no further reflections on how membership of the clubs supposedly leads to integration, the practitioners who actually carry out the projects do show awareness of the relevance of sports skills, gender and keeping members in the long term (as we saw in the Get2sport project report). However, informed by Wenger’s (1998) concept of community of practice, the analysis presented in Chapter 2 shows how gender, age and taekwondo competence were relevant and connected in this club. This is a significant contribution to the sociology of sports. Measuring successful integration in a sports club by counting the number of members with a minority background, assuming that a club forms one coherent community and that membership equals involvement and development of shared democratic values, turns out to be insufficient. The peer-group norms have a crucial impact on the everyday participation in a sports club among youth and in this club, interest in and abilities for competitive martial arts were closely linked to inclusion in some of the peer groups and to the relationship between the different groups. There is reason to believe that investment in the activities and interests on the one hand and investment in the community around these on the other are both dimensions relevant to participation in leisure clubs more generally (see e.g. Madsen, forthc. on similar discussion of a hip-hop association). Participants in leisure activities can very well combine engagement in the activities and the community, as we have seen, but I have shown that an interest in the sport is not enough to ensure continuous involvement. Sports skills are also important and may impact on the placement in the peer hierarchy. I have shown that for a young sports practitioner interaction with other peers constitutes the community. Since participation in leisure activities is voluntary, the acceptance by others in the peer community is likely to have a great impact on whether participants choose to stay in a club, and, of course, socialising and learning requires continuous involvement.

Gender and integration A problem that has been pointed to in various ways throughout this book is the overwhelming focus on cultural and ethnic differences in societal discourses, political debates and sociological research dealing with

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social problems related to minority youth (as in Andersen, 2010) and in most understandings of integration (Olwig & Pærregaard, 2007; Rennison, 2009). Sports-related integration discourses are no exception to this, and although most sports-sociological research accounts involve an understanding of integration as a more nuanced and mutual process (compared to the assimilationist understanding), ethno-cultural differences remain the key focus point for integration processes in this research in a Danish context (e.g. Agergaard, 2008; Anderson, 2006; Bailey, 2005; Boeskov & Ilkjær, 2005). This prevalent emphasis on ethnic and cultural differences erases other aspects of social differentiation and inequality. In my research site, gender certainly was a point in question. The masculine imperative in the club resulted in the marginalisation of girls to a certain extent. Gender differences are not usually in focus in accounts of integration. If gender issues are treated it is within a cultural differences understanding, in the sense that girls with backgrounds in cultures that are understood as traditionally patriarchal are regarded as a particular challenge to the participation in public activities. This is the way gender was considered in relation to the social work of the taekwondo club (and the reason for making girls a focus point and establishing the girls’ class). I have shown (in Chapter 3) how the boys in the club clearly oriented towards competence and competition more than the girls in the framing of their interactional activities. The social norms that had come to dominate in the wider peer community were in tune with the orientation towards competition and competence and the boys’ and the girls’ different frame orientations played a part in the relatively marginal positioning of the girls in the club.

Practical and methodological consequences My study shows that the taekwondo club was a social site where local children and youth did come to belong to a community and developed shared values, but that this was not the case for children with less investment in competition and martial arts skills as such, or for girls (in particular in the ‘girls only’ class). Therefore sports clubs as socialising sites will not successfully include all types of members in the long run. From a ‘sports for all’ perspective it may be controversial that all sports are not for all, but from a practitioner’s point of view this is probably not surprising. This should not be read, though, as an accusation of the martial arts club (or competitive sports in general) for being gender discriminating and elitist. Firstly, there is a widespread anxiety about male minority youth (explicated in Chapter 1). Hence, a club community that provides a space for pursuing ambitions for boys who are in many ways marginalised in the

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wider society is certainly important. The local currency of sports and school aspirations combined with youth cultural values breaks with the common stereotypical image of male minority youth. Secondly, girls in general are not excluded from the taekwondo communities, and although more males than females practise martial arts, there are indeed girls who are highly skilled and enjoy competition. Rather the lesson to learn is that leisure communities are shaped by the participants and indeed by the interest they evolve around. The measures of social status and values that come to count in such communities (at a certain period of time) may enable a sense of belonging for some, but restrict it for others. A possible political and practical reaction to this may be to ensure a great variety of options for voluntary leisure activities and to target sports-political efforts to a larger extent. When sports projects aim for increasing the number of female and so called ‘new Danish’ members and instructors all at once (like Get2sport described in Chapter 2), they are unlikely to succeed. It may be more fruitful to accept that specific leisure clubs and projects can and need not necessarily be socially integrating and inclusive on all accounts. Taking all this into consideration it follows that integration initiatives need an understanding of integration as located in actual practice rather than in membership lists. Human interaction is polycentric and practices may invoke several norms at the same time. A view of integration as adaptation to one mainstream is therefore inadequate. To capture the development of norms and possible practices of reciprocity in face-to-face encounters more refined methods of evaluating, describing and researching the social life in sports and leisure communities are necessary. In Danish sociology of sports, dominant discourses in the field of association sports and sports clubs have been approached with both ethnographic and sociological methods. I have considered a typical example of such work employing Bourdieuian analysis based purely on interview data (Munk & Lind, 2004). In Anderson’s (2003, 2005, 2006) work on Danish sports clubs, research interviews are combined with ethnographic observations, but the interviews remains a central empirical source. Sociology of course employs social theory and so does the sociology of sports. As I discussed in Chapter 2, Danish work addressing integration through sports specifically considers Giddens’ (1984) division of system integration and social integration (Agergaard, 2008; Anderson, 2009). So there is an awareness that integration does not just happen in institutions, but also between people. Yet, the tools to describe the level of social integration in face-to-face interactions are not sufficient if analysis focuses only on content in interview reports. Besides, there is more to face-to-face interaction than the co-presence of bodies in the same gym engaged in a sports activity and

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a linguistic ethnographic approach offers nuanced accounts of these kinds of encounters. I have argued that the micro-analysis of the interactional data from the taekwondo club shed light on such socially integrating processes, and that attention to interactional activities and language use help us understand how such processes actually occur. This is because analysis of otherwise unnoticed details of speech makes us able to trace the experience and construction of social identities, cultural interpretations, social differentiation and alignments of participants, even though they might not say it in well-formed propositions. In the case I have studied, the reciprocity of practices that Giddens (1984: 28) refers to as integration was particularly relevant to the situated linguistic and interactional conduct of the older boys in the club. By attending to the indexical meanings of the linguistic resources employed in combination with the interactional activities, I have shown how the boys used nonstandard language associated with streetwise peer culture and successfully integrated this with school-positive practices. In this way, they combined different normative orders in their interactional and linguistic behaviour. I have shown that investigating how speakers use available linguistic material in combination with other signs for particular purposes is a way of getting at how they understand, react to and (re)create the social world. So, this book also contributes to the discussion of integration and sports with a significant methodological point: We need different approaches from what is commonly used in sports sociology to grasp how individuals participate in a sports club community and how integrating processes possibly happen.

Ethnic Categorisation and Social Inequality We have seen how different cultural practices stereotypically associated with school opposition and school ambition were combined in situated encounters and the overall picture we get from the data is that culture as ethnic inheritance was only a small part of the participants’ cultural repertoires. These observations question the understanding of integration as adaptation to a specific majority culture. In several ways they also question: (1) the assumption of ethnicity as the main defining factor for cultural orientation; (2) cultural differences as the key to problems of educational underachievement; and (3) the concept of ‘counter culture’ (as school opposition and trouble making) and its connection to ethnic minority communities. In public discourses in Denmark and elsewhere, cultural and ethnic differences are frequently debated and current understandings of ethnic diversity imply a pervasive construction of in- and out-group relations.

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Social class differences are much more rarely discussed (e.g. Eide & Simonsen, 2007; Pedersen, 2007; see Rampton, 2010a for similar discussion of the UK). It may be argued that social class differences are less salient in the context of Denmark, since they have been politically addressed through the Scandinavian welfare system, and, as such, represent less overt societal challenges in public discourses. Hence, socio-economic class relations are not seen as a central factor for explaining societal problems, and consequently, social relations and integration are discussed in terms of ethnicity and culture rather than social class (Halldén et al., 2008). Poststructuralist thinking and the ‘the cultural turn’ in social and political theory has likewise shifted the focus away from larger societal structures, socio-economic inequality and class relations. Class has been problematised and considered irrelevant, it has been proposed that there is a decline in class awareness in particular among young people (Bradley, 1996: 77) and that it is after all unclear what social class refers to in contemporary, rapidly changing societies (Abercrombie & Warde et al., 2000: 148; Halldén et al., 2008: 1; Rampton, 2006: 216) A somewhat horizontal view has therefore been applied to social relations: Within theoretical discourses as postmodernism and globalisation, emphasis has been on fragmentation as characteristic for the modern world, and what commonly is described as the ‘cultural turn’ within social and political theory has led to an increased focus on particular identities and experiences, political struggles among deprivileged groups who demand recognition of their particularity instead of redistribution of resources, and a critique of claims to universalism. (Halldén et al., 2008: 1) But cultural and ethnic categories are also clearly related to material advantage and dis-advantage. As De los Reyes and Mulinari (2005) argue, there appears to be an ethnic or ‘racial’ status order that operates worldwide and privileges those considered ‘white’. Being categorised as an ethnic minority often entails placement in a disadvantaged position in today’s Western heterogeneous societies (Halldén et al., 2008). The fact that ethnic belonging is much more often considered relevant for minorities (Staunæs, 2004) underlines this unequal relation; ‘Ethnicity, or the perception of “ethnicity” as a dividing line between people, is thus highly relevant as a mechanism of social stratification and inequality of opportunities’ (Halldén et al., 2008: 4). From this perspective, looking at how ethnic differences are made relevant on various social scales may be important to discover inequality in contemporary societies. For instance, it can have a crucial impact on a child in Denmark to

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be categorised as ‘bilingual’, as the meaning of ‘bilingual’ in practice has come to have little to do linguistic competence and more to do with placement in the institutional and educational hierarchies (Bundgaard & Gulløv, 2008; Karrebæk, 2006). In this way the articulation of social differences as ethno-cultural may hide the mechanisms of social stratification these differences link up with. The emphasis on ethnic differences becomes particularly problematic when ethnocentric understandings dominate in societal debates and emphasise ethno-cultural characteristics as inherited and static, as in the Danish context. This book adds perspectives to a discussion of ethnic categorisation and social inequality in two ways. Firstly, I have shown that the participants use linguistic forms, which according to previous sociolinguistic descriptions are associated with multiethnic youth groups and ‘(multi-)ethnolects’. However, when they use these linguistic resources in interaction, the performance of ethnicity is in many cases not the most relevant interpretation of what is going on. Based on these observations I suggested that sociolinguists should carefully consider their constructions of linguistic research objects. With inspiration from Jaspers’ (2008) critical reflections on the concept of ethnolects and informed by Agha’s (2003, 2007) notion of enregisterment I have argued that sociolinguists also participate in enregisterment, rather powerfully in their linguistic expert roles and often in combination with media (Androutsopoulos, 2010). It is worth considering how our presentation of and approach to linguistic practices may homogenise hybrid linguistic realities. Also, it is worth paying attention to the processes through which certain ways of speaking come to be considered varieties ideologically associated with particular values and how these processes are dynamic. Not least we need to take into account how speakers, as well as mass media and, indeed, researchers participate in such enregisterment of the contemporary youth styles. In the light of the ethnicity-related inequalities described above it is certainly also worth thinking about whether we participate in these ethnic marginalisation processes through the topics we research, the codes we describe and the names we choose. Secondly, there are actually signs of intersections of ethnicity and class relations in my data and especially when my data is compared to other recent research (such as Jaspers, 2005; Madsen, 2013; Rampton, 2006, 2011b). The contrast between the contemporary urban linguistic resources and school successful resources that was subtly brought about in the management of non-nerdy academic identities points to a nonstandard, societally low positioning of the contemporary urban style in the sociolinguistic economy. Recent research on language use and youth styles within linguistic anthropology and linguistic ethnography

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documents how sociolinguistic indexicality often involves intersections of several social categories (Bucholtz, 2004, 2011; Chun, 2011; Jaspers, 2011a; Mendoza-Denton, 2008; Rampton, 2011). These studies show how linguistic resources associated with, for instance, race or ethnicity might also invoke associations related to gender, sexuality, age and social class. In a Danish context, work statistically correlating linguistic features with social categories has found that new linguistic features are predominantly used by ‘multiethnic’ male youth groups. These findings have led to the suggestion that ethnicity and gender are influential in the ongoing linguistic developments in the Danish capital (Maegaard, 2007). In addition, recent Danish language research suggests that traditional class-related speech is losing sociolinguistic significance (e.g. Maegaard, 2007; Kristiansen, 2009) and this retreat from social class characterises sociolinguistics outside the Danish context as well (e.g. Block, 2014; Coggle, 1993, see discussion in Rampton, 2010a). It is certainly true that the relationship between material conditions, social affiliation and linguistic conduct is not straightforward in contemporary urban globalised environments (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Vertovec, 2010), but this is also the case for the relationship between ethnic inheritance, ethnic alignment and language practice. If social class is abandoned as an interpretive framework in relation to language use on these grounds, the way ethnic differences link up with social stratification and inequality in contemporary sociolinguistic economies may be overlooked. The challenge is how we uncover these links. The problem is not solved by merely pointing to the intersection of various social categories in practice. To inform discussions of wider societal discourses and contemporary sociolinguistic theory it is fruitful to distinguish analytically between different structuring principles of differentiation, to get at how they are interrelated and how this links up with larger-scale social processes. Social class as an analytic tool has been used to condense a range of aspects of an individual’s life, such as income, place of residence, cultural tastes and political orientation, whereas ethnicity involves the idea of territorial groups, nations states and processes of migration, and gender involves aspects of sexuality and understandings of masculinity and femininity (Abercrombie & Warde et al., 2000; Bradley, 1996; Brubaker, 2004; Rampton, 2010a). Based on Williams’ (1977) notion of a tacit (class) sensibility, Reay (1998) and Savage (2003) (among others), Rampton suggests that: (...) if sociolinguistics want to investigate class, we don’t have to bind ourselves to large-scale comparisons of high- and low-placed social groups. In class societies, people carry class hierarchy around inside

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themselves, acting it out in the fine grain of ordinary life, and if we look closely enough, we may be able to pick it out in the conduct of just a few individuals. (Rampton, 2010a: 4) In this way class can be seen as an awareness of a ‘high’ and ‘low’ societal stratification and ethnicity as an awareness of territorial belongings involving ‘inside-outside’ relations. But, most significantly, as an awareness acted out in everyday practice. From such a perspective on class, Rampton (2006, 2011) convincingly argues that social class identities have not lost their significance among youth in late modern Britain. He demonstrates how class ideologies were drawn into small-scale acts of stylisation involving performances of ‘posh’ and Cockney, but also how employments of Creole and Asian English among youth in multi-ethnic environments invoked a symbolic contrast that mapped into a class contrast. In the Danish society by now we do not find the same hegemonic classbased high/low binary as in Britain indexed by particular linguistic varieties and I do not find any usage in my data of linguistic features associated with the traditional Danish equivalents of ‘posh’ and Cockney (such as High and Low Copenhagen). In fact, the only stylisation involving posh associations was performed in British-like English by Murat (Excerpt 5.5). This does of course not mean that there are no status inequalities in the Danish society or that youth have no sensibilities for societal hierarchies, but as suggested above, the social status differences are often articulated through ethnic differences. To the extent that linguistic practices associated with multicultural areas of low social status contrast with measures of high social status, such as educational achievements (see Rampton, 2010a: 15), class differences can be said to be brought about and somewhat denaturalised in small-scale acts among the adolescent boys I have studied (as argued in Chapter 5). The indexicality of features of contemporary urban youth style and features of standard Danish are not as clearly related to class differences as ‘posh’ and Cockney are in the British society, and as I have shown, the contrast between linguistic standard and non-standard practices, as well as between task-focus and off-task activities, were closely related to feminine/ masculine and adult/youth binaries as well. Yet the more recent findings reported in the discussion in Chapter 5 of adolescents’ metalinguistic accounts of ‘street language’ in contrast to ‘integrated’ (Madsen, 2013; Møller & Jørgensen, 2013) strongly suggest that linguistic styles otherwise associated with migration and minorities are also being mapped into social stratification and status in a comparable way to what Rampton’s work demonstrates. Thereby my study of the urban youth style in Copenhagen supports Rampton’s call for more attention to social class in contemporary

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sociolinguistics (Rampton, 2010a; see also Block, 2014) and such work shows that although current rapidly changing societies may complicate the study of inequality in sociolinguistics, it does not mean that socio-economic hierarchies, power or status lose significance. As Coupland (2003: 470) formulates it: It would be naïve to assume that the linguascapes of globalised societies will be less unequal. We can be sure they will be more complex, and therefore that the critical capacity of sociolinguistics will be increasingly tested. But we can only critique what we can theorise, only theorise what we understand, only understand what we see, and only see what we look at. The key argument of this book has been that what we see also depends on how we look at it. I have aimed at seeing (a) language use of contemporary urban youth, (b) sociolinguistics’ conception of such language use and (c) integration in sports clubs in a new light by looking beyond ethnic differences and into details of interaction, and I have argued that the ecological descriptions provided by linguistic ethnography help uncover structuring principles of wider societal currency in low-key practices among youth in an urban martial arts club.

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Web-pages: http://www.dif.dk : The Danish National Olympic Committee and Sports Confederation (Dansk Idræts Forbund) (08.01.2015) http://www.sonbong.dk : Nørrebro Taekwondo Club (08.01.2015) http://www.wtf.org : World Taekwondo Federation (08.01.2015) http://www.sk.kk.dk: Copenhagen City Council (08.01.2015) http://www.arto.dk: Chat home page (08.01.2015) http://www.get2sport.dk : Sports-political integration project (08.01.2015)

Index Afghan, 20, 157 Afro-American, 104, 155 Agha, Asif, 25–26, 122, 130–131, 150, 162, 182, 196 Ambiguity, 11, 84, 88, 90–91, 95–98, 118, 147 American, 92–93, 174 Anthropology (linguistic), 2–3, 9, 11, 78, 196 Araberslang, 129 Arabic, 18, 98–99, 134, 138, 144, 157, 160–161, 164, 188, Authenticity, 102, 148, 153, 156 Authority, 32–34, 38, 107, 141–144, 172, Bakhtin, Mikhail, 149 Bilingual, 3, 5, 35, 196 Blommaert, Jan, 9, 11–12, 21, 23, 24, 162, 197 Bourdieu, Pierre, 24, 30, 40–42, 51, 58, 61, 147, 169, 185, 193, Bragging, 106–108, 146–147, 173, 180, Buddhist, 36–39, 50 Categorisation, 2, 7, 22–23, 30, 82, 96, 112, 119–122, 128, 132, 158–161, 179, 185–186, 194–196 Community of practice, 16, 18, 24, 30, 50–53, 56, 58, 61–62, 65, 67, 69, 75–76, 97, 119, 127–128, 157, 160, 170, 189, 191 Community sports, 43, 185,190 Competence, 25, 45, 63–65, 93–96, 106, 108, 117, 119, 129, 146, 156, 164,170– 179, 186, 188, 191–192, 196 Competition, 14, 25, 30, 33, 37, 39, 40, 45, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 75, 76, 77, 81, 98, 103, 104, 106, 108, 117, 118, 119, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 157, 173, 176, 179, 180, 186, 187, 192, 193

Contemporary urban speech style, 25, 93, 105, 107, 122, 129, 133, 141, 142, 143, 149, 151, 152 ,153, 155, 156, 161, 164, 173, 176, 177, 178, 182, 184 Context levels, 11, 23 Contextualisation cues, 83–84, 90–96, 100, 113 Conversation analysis, 21, 186 Coolness, 170, 180–181 Cooperation, 113–14 Copenhagen, 1, 7, 11, 25, 31, 35, 44, 57, 91, 94, 96, 103–107, 122–140, 148, 152, 161, 163, 168–169, 180–186, 198 Counter culture, 4–7, 194 Coupland, Nikolas, 21, 162, 199 Crossing, 121, 130, 159–160 Dialect, 123, 125, 133, 137, 149 Discourses, 2–8, 10, 23–25, 40–48, 51–54, 66, 76–79, 82–83, 87, 121, 123–125, 132, 138, 140, 148, 156, 162, 164, 167–168, 175, 180, 185, 191–197 Dispute, 83–84, 91, 95–96, 141 Double voicing, 149, 153 Dynamism, 125 Eckert, Penelope, 97, 151, 170, 179, 181 Education, 3–4, 6–8, 13, 26, 33, 35, 38, 41, 43–46, 51, 53, 78, 81–82, 123–126, 138, 147, 168–170, 180–181, 183, 190, 194, 196, 198 Elite (fighters), 40, 45–47, 63–64, 66, 75–77, 123, 157–158, 187, 191 Elite (societal), 126, 148, 182–184 English, 86–87, 89, 91–95, 103–105, 125, 146–147, 172–177, 179–180, 198 Enregisterment, 26, 122, 130–131, 137, 161, 163–164, 168, 180, 182–184, 196 Ethnicity, 4, 5, 7, 9–13, 22, 25, 31, 76, 121–122, 126, 133, 140, 154, 156–157, 160–162, 188, 194–198

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216

Index

Ethnocentric discourse, 4, 6–7 Ethnolect, 10, 122, 129, 131–133, 140, 164, 196 Exclusion, 9, 25, 29, 58, 95–96, 114, 116–119, 132 Femininity, 29, 66, 82, 102, 109, 151, 197 Field analysis, 41–42, 58, 185 Field roles, 16 Fighter, 2, 22, 39, 45, 56–57, 64–68, 75, 105–108, 143, 145, 157–158, 186–188 Frame, 25, 52, 81–85, 87–88, 90–96, 100, 103, 108, Gender, 4, 8, 9, 11, 13, 17–19, 24–25, 30, 32–34, 49–50, 62, 64–66, 69–77, chapter 3, 126, 128, 187–189, 191–192, 197 Generalisation, 186 German, 163, 176 Giddens, Anthony, 78, 79, 162, 182, 193–194 Globalisation, 12, 128, 162, 190, 195 Goodwin, Marjorie, 25, 83–85, 93, 96, 106–107, 118, 145, 147, Hegemoni, 168–169, 198 Heteroglossia, 25, 162, 163, 187, 189 Heterosexual, 66, 95, 97–98, 101, 108, 118, 143 Homosexual, 93–94, 97, 105 Humour, 96, 115 Ideology, 7, 12, 43, 123–125, 137, 168–169, 182, Immigrant, 6, 11, 34–35, 44, 45, 92, 135, 138, 140, 148, 154–156, 164, 173, 188 Inclusion, 9, 25, 49–50, 58, 61, 76, 96, 109, 117–119, 190–191 Indexicality, 11, 21, 137, 187, 197–198 Indexical order, 137, 182 Integration, 2–4, 6–10, 24, 26, chapter 2, 81, 120, 164, 167, 168, 180–182, 187, 190–195, 199 Inequalities, 130, 169, 196, 198 Interactional sociolinguistics, 9, 11, 21 Interactional style, 118, 148 Intersection, 188, 196–197

Intonation, 82, 92, 100, 159, 173–174, 176–177 Jaspers, Jürgen, 132, 149, 156, 169, 196 Jørgensen, J. Normann, 122, 126, 130, 138, 164 Korean, 17, 36–39, 45, 50, 52 Kristiansen, Tore, 123–125 Kurdish, 134, 164 Labelling, 25, 122, 161 Late Modernity, 162 Laughter, 84, 87, 90, 93, 95, 99–101, 108, 111, 142 Languaging, 122, 130, 132, 164, 173, 175 Leisure activities, 3–5, 8, 181, 190–191, 193 Linguistic etnography, 9, 11, 24, 185, 196, 199 Maegaard, Marie, 97, 124–128, 136, 189, 197 Marginalisation, 22, 119–120, 192, 196 Masculinity, 13, 66, 82, 97, 101, 103, 105, 108, 140–145, 183, 186, 189, 197 Masculine imperative, 66–67, 70–73, 119, 189, 192, Media, 3, 6, 12, 35, 46–47, 83, 94, 121, 124, 129, 130–132, 138–139, 153, 164, 169, 196 Metalinguistic, 122, 131, 198 Metapragmatic commentary, 137, 149, 183 Methodology, 11, 21, 185, 192–194 Monolingualism, 126, 169 Moroccan, 19–20, 157, 160, 164 Moslem, 34, 157, 160–161, 164, 188 Multi-ethnolect, 129, 133, 155, 164 Nerd, 71–72, 148, 179–181, 183, 196 Non-standard, 107, 135, 137, 147, 163–164, 167, 169, 173, 180–182, 188–189, 198 Object construction, 12, 25, 121–122, 163–164, 196 Opposition, 5, 7–8, 72–73, 81, 90–91, 95, 99, 140, 145, 148, 152–153, 164, 167, 170, 175, 180–181, 188, 194

Index

Pakistani, 19, 153, 158–161 ‘Perker’, 151–153, 160, 163 Performance, 82, 85, 93, 95, 98–99, 102, 108, 110–112, 118, 139, 149, 151–154, 156, 161, 175–176, 183, 198 Phonetic variables, 126, 129, 132, 135, 138 Play frames, 82–83, 85 Polarity markers, 90, 145 Policy, 3, 4, 6–9, 29, 40, 42–49, 53, 77, 79, 81, 120–121, 123–125, 132–133, 161, 181, 187, 191, 193, 195, 197 Polycentric, 9, 193 Polylingual, 164 Popular culture, 190 Posh, 102, 151, 163, 178–179, 183, 198 Poststructuralism, 21, 51, 195 Prosody, 100, 102, 137–142, 145–147, 152–153, 159, 178 Punjabi, 158–160, 168 Rampton, Ben, 11–12, 90, 121–122, 130, 149–150, 156, 160, 162–163, 169, 175–176, 181, 185, 195–198 Reciprocity, 78–79, 120, 182, 193, 194 Reification, 51 Register, 131–133, 137–138, 161–164, 169, 183 Rinkebysvenska, 129, 133 Ritual insult, 8, 23, 84, 93–95, 103, 155, 173, 175, 179 Ritual politeness, 150 Schooling, 81, 168 School achievements, 4, 7, 25, 94, 148, 167, 173, 177, 179, 190 School orientation, 161, 167–168 Silverstein, Michael, 12–13, 137, 182 Singing, 82, 84, 89–90, 99, 174, Social class, 29, 123–124, 183, 195, 197–198 Social inequality, 48, 50, 185, 196

217

Social integration 45, 48, 78, 79, 182, 187, 193 Social status, 9, 13, 18, 25, 30, 55–56, 61–63, 65–66, 106, 117, 119, 146, 148, 157, 161, 168, 177, 179, 180, 183, 186, 188, 191, 193, 198 Socialisation, 3, 29, 77, 190 Sociolect, 123, 133 Sociology of sports, 3, 8, 24, 76, 78, 191, 193 Sociolinguistic presuppositions, 137, 182 Solidarity, 146 Spelling, 7, 26, 103–104, 108, 171–173, 176–177, 179–180, 183 Sports ideologies, 46, 53 Standardisation, 123, 168 Standard language, 123, 168–169 Straattaal, 129 Style, 8, 13, 25, 81, 92, 102, 107, 118, 120–122, 126, 128–133, 136–167, 173–183, 187, 189, 196, 198 Styling, 132, 149, 154 Stylisation, 95, 101–102, 121–122, 149–151, 153–156, 159–164, 179, 188, 198 Symbolic capital, 41–42, 67, 76, 147, 188 Superdiversity, 11 Superiority, 125, 144 System integration, 78–79, 193 Taboo, 93, 98–103, 108, 118 Taekwondo (history, principles), 36–40 Teasing, chapter 3, 141–143, 172–173 Total linguistic fact, 12 Turkish, 134, 138, 142, 164 Variationist, 9–10, 12–13, 126, 129, 133, 137 Wenger, Etienne, 24, 30, 50–53, 58, 61, 77, 185, 191