Language, Social Media and Ideologies: Translingual Englishes, Facebook and Authenticities (SpringerBriefs in Linguistics) 3030261387, 9783030261382

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN LINGUISTICS

Sender Dovchin

Language, Social Media and Ideologies Translingual Englishes, Facebook and Authenticities 123

SpringerBriefs in Linguistics

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11940

Sender Dovchin

Language, Social Media and Ideologies Translingual Englishes, Facebook and Authenticities

123

Sender Dovchin School of Education Curtin University Perth, WA, Australia

ISSN 2197-0009 ISSN 2197-0017 (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Linguistics ISBN 978-3-030-26138-2 ISBN 978-3-030-26139-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26139-9 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020, corrected publication 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

The original version of the book was revised: Reference style has been consistently followed in all chapters. The correction to the book is available at https://doi.org/10. 1007/978-3-030-26139-9_10

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science: (grant number 17K13504) and Australian Research Council (ARC): (grant number DE180100118) for funding this research project. This book would not have been possible without the valuable input of my research participants—the students at the National University of Mongolia and the University of Aizu, Japan. I also want to express thanks to my Editor at Springer, Nick Melchior, and the whole editorial team. I want to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the proposal and the complete draft of the manuscript. My sincere gratitude goes to my colleagues at Curtin University: Rhonda Oliver, Alan Dench, Tim Pitman, Michele Willson, Rod Ellis, Toni Dobinson, Paul Mercieca, Julian Chen, Qian Gong, Grace Zhang, Craig Lambert, Paul Gardner, Tatiana Bogachenko, Hiroshi Hasegawa, Michael Tindall, Sonja Kuzich, Yvonne Sawers, John Williams, and Samantha Owen. My heartfelt thanks go to my colleagues at the University of Aizu, Japan: Ian Wilson, John Blake, John Brine, Younghyon Heo, Emiko Kaneko, the late Yosuke Kira, Allan Nicholas, Merissa Ocampo, Jeremy Perkins, Kim Rockell, Debopriyo Roy, Arifumi Saito, Takako Yasuta, and Ai Inabayashi. Special thanks to my colleagues, who have directly and indirectly contributed to the successful completion of this book: Alastair Pennycook, Max Spotti, Jan Blommaert, Suresh Canagarajah, Li Wei, Shaila Sultana, Emi Otsuji, Tyler Barrett, Marco Jacquemet, and Jerry Won Lee. I want to dedicate this book to my family: to the loving memory of my beloved mother Erdenechimeg Perliijantsan, my father Prof. Dovchin Yondon, my son Wilson Dovchin Dring, my sister Ulemj Dovchin, and my brother-in-law Max Schönfisch. Lastly, I am thankful to publishers who have allowed me to use some data and discussions which came out earlier as articles and chapters. This book is derived in part from the articles/chapters published in: Dovchin, S. (2020). Inverted youth language in Mongolia as macroscopic and microscopic chronotopes. In J. Swanenberg and S. Kroon (Eds.), Chronotopic Identity Work. Multilingual Matters.

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Acknowledgements

Dovchin, S. (2015). Language, multiple authenticities and social media: The online language practices of university students in Mongolia. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 19 (4), 437–459. Dovchin, S. (2017). The transcultural role of English in the linguascape of EFL university students in Mongolia. In T. Barrett and M. Fellin (Eds.), Transcultural Flows in English Language Education in Asia (pp. 15–33). Lanham, MD: Lexington books.

Abstract

This book seeks to contribute to the critical applied linguistics by investigating the dynamic role of English on social media, focusing on EFL university students in East Asia—Mongolia and Japan. Drawing on sets of Facebook data, this book primarily emphasizes that the presence of English on social media should be understood as ‘translingual’ not only due to its multiple recombinations of resources, genres, modes, styles, and repertories but also due to its direct connections with a broader sociocultural, historical, and ideological meanings. Secondly, EFL university students metalinguistically claim multiple ideologies of linguistic authenticities in terms of their usage of ‘translingual Englishes’ on social media as opposed to other colliding language ideologies such as linguistic purity and linguistic dystopia. The question of how they reclaim the notion of linguistic authenticity, however, profoundly differs, depending on their own often diverse criteria, identities, beliefs, and ideas. This shows that mixing and mingling at its very core, the existence of ‘translingual Englishes’ on social media provides us with a significant view to accommodate the multiple coexistence and multiple origins of authenticity in the increasingly interconnected world. This book concludes the possibility of applying the ideas of ‘translingual Englishes’ on social media in critical EFL classroom settings, in their careful re-assessment of the complexity of contemporary linguistic experiences and beliefs of their EFL learners.

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Contents

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1 4 7 9

Spread of Authenticity . . . . . . . . .

13 13 14 19 22

3 Synchronous and Asynchronous Participants of Facebook . . . . . . . . 3.1 Transtextuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27 31 33

4 African American Vernacular English, Hip-Hop and ‘Keepin’ It Real’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

35 41 42

5 Heavy Englishes and the Enactment of Authentic Self . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

43 47 48

6 Inverted Englishes, ‘In-Group’ Talks and Authenticity . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

51 59 60

7 ‘Ghost Englishes’, and Authenticity . 7.1 Conclusion . . References . . . . . .

63 69 70

1 Peripheralized Englishes, Social Media and (In)Authenticity 1.1 The Standard English and the Ideologies of Authenticity . 1.2 Overview of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2 Translingual Englishes and the Global 2.1 ‘Hey, Maccasdahuu?’ . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Translingual Englishes . . . . . . . . . 2.3 The Global Spread of Authenticity References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Realness, Native Speakerism, ....................................... ....................................... .......................................

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Contents

8 Idiomatic Englishes, Onomatopes, Authenticities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Translingual Englishes, Social Media, Language Ideologies, Critical Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1 Translingual Englishes and Social Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Translingual Englishes and the Language Ideologies of Authenticities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 Translingual Englishes, Social Media and Critical Pedagogy . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 1

Peripheralized Englishes, Social Media and (In)Authenticity

For many EFL university students today, ‘being on Facebook’ is a simple part of their everyday life. As Dovchin et al. (2017, p. 1) emphasize, ‘You do not set aside a time of day to ‘go online’—you simply are online much of the time. It no longer makes sense to view this as some alternative and lesser (virtual) reality: being online is as real as anything else.’ With its slogan ‘connects you with the people around you,’ which has already become a billion-dollar empire with more than one billion active users around the world (Hess and Bowd 2015), Facebook now plays a significant role in real life contexts of its users around the world (Bolander 2017). Remarkably, an increasing number of ‘university students’ worldwide have become avid users of Facebook, in which their daily linguistic practices heavily rely on user-generated applications and new technologies on Facebook (Dovchin 2015; Sultana 2019). It is, thereby, quite logical to leverage the current student generation’s heavy reliance on Facebook, in support of their English learning and using practices (Kabilan et al. 2010). University students are also in a challenging period in time that is oftentimes tantamount to creativity, ingenuity, and enthusiasm, as well as dissatisfaction, disagreement, and dissension. Consider the example below, where EFL university student at the National University of Mongolia, engages with English through social media. Suvd is an exceptionally active Facebook user, and intensively updates her Facebook wall posts almost every day. She publishes her daily activities, including the places she has been to, the photographs she has taken, or the movies she has seen.

Extract 1.1 Translingual Englishes: ‘Ma BF-iin idolshuudee’ Facebook wall post

Translation

Suvd: ‘Paul Walker is dead?!? WTF??? Ma BF-iin idolshuudee. What’s gonna happen with the next franchise now? Plzzz tell me noo ppl!’

Suvd: Paul Walker is dead?!? WTF??? He was my boyfriend’s idol. What’s gonna happen with the next franchise now? Please tell me no people!

Language guide: Mongolian—regular font; English—italicized © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Dovchin, Language, Social Media and Ideologies, SpringerBriefs in Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26139-9_1

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1 Peripheralized Englishes, Social Media and (In)Authenticity

This particular Facebook wall post of Suvd has been produced by the recombination of English and Mongolian resources. Not only is Suvd resourceful enough to remain up to date with the latest celebrity news, but she and her boyfriend are also familiar with cast of ‘The Fast & Furious’ Hollywood franchise. She expresses her shock about the sudden death of Hollywood actor, Paul Walker, using the shortened lingoes, ‘WTF’ (‘What The Fuck’), ‘BF’ (‘boyfriend’), ‘ppl’ (‘people’) and ‘plzz’ (‘please’)—the abbreviated versions of English stem words, a favorite choice of online linguistic orthography for many transnational social media users. She also uses an Anglicized Mongolian ‘ma’, which is perceived as a stylish way of saying English ‘my’, followed by an Anglicized Mongolian term, ‘idolshuudee’ [‘is idol’]—the mixture between the English word ‘idol’ and the Mongolian suffix ‘-shuudee’ [‘is’]. It makes no more sense to demarcate an ‘idol’ as English since it only fulfills proper communicative meaning in combination with the Mongolian linguistic feature, ‘-shuudee’. Just like this fellow Mongolian student, transnational EFL university students, in fact, seem to ‘turn English upside down’: they strategically blend, bend and twist English (Sultana and Dovchin 2017); play and fidget with English (Li Wei and Zhu Hua 2019); ‘commend and applaud’ or ‘condemn and convict’ English (Canagarajah 2007, 2013, 2017a, b; Dovchin 2015), creatively negotiating and reconfiguring the place and role of English on social media (Sharma 2012). They transform English while introducing fresh linguistic arrangements of and attitudes towards English, changing the way and norm how English appears or works (Westinen et al. 2018). Social media users are the architects of ‘peripheralized Englishes’—Englishes that are deemed as ‘ungrammatical, nonstandard, incomplete, interlingual, in-process, or more generally, not normal or legitimate’ (Lee 2017, p. 14). The first aspect of this book, thereby, is to fathom the complicated relationship between English and transnational EFL university students as social media users. Not only are these students exposed to different forms of English through a range of broader available semiotic resources, but they also pick up English pieces and swiftly pass them on into their daily pragmatic lives. They are the designers and upholders of ‘communicative phenomena produced by recombinant identities,’ despite ‘these phenomena lack grammatical and syntactical order,’ or cannot even be recognized as ‘part of a single standardizable code’ (Jacquemet 2005, p. 264). English is part of these dynamic transnational interactions connected through social media, generating a new form of reterritorialization that gives rise to recombinant identities (Jacquemet 2005, p. 264). As Dovchin et al. (2017, p. 8) note, ‘We need to account not only for flows and mobilities, nor only for macro formations of the global economy, geographical positioning and language commodification, but also the operations of globalization from below (the workings of local, informal, cultural and linguistic formations).’ The sudden surge of ‘peripheralized Englishes’ across social media, meanwhile, is the frequent subject of pathologization, triggering certain prophecies of doom over legitimacy and authenticity of English and its users (Jacquemet 2015; Lee 2017). The distortion of English on social media violates the ideology of ‘linguistic purism,’ which advocates the idea that language should be constructed in only one standard form to be authentic and legitimate. This ideology calls for ‘purity’ and

1 Peripheralized Englishes, Social Media and (In)Authenticity

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‘authenticity’—‘any language should be spoken “purely”, i.e., without being mixed with another language’ (Jørgensen et al. 2011, p. 33)—otherwise, the local language is endangered by foreign imperialism, pollution, inauthenticity and contamination (Dovchin et al. 2015; Jacquemet 2015). The spread of ‘peripheralized Englishes’ on social media is, thus, strongly pathologized by the hegemonic ideologies entrenched within the ‘linguistic dystopia’ (Jacquemet 2005, p. 257)—the spread of various foreign languages within local contexts portrayed as the worst possible scenarios such as linguistic imperialism, linguistic corruption, language death, language extinction and so on. Nevertheless, re-visiting Extract 1.1, the Mongolian EFL university student Suvd’s own metalinguistic insight creates another ideological complexity, in which she claims her alteration of English on Facebook is ‘absolutely authentic’, because her Facebook language practice defines who she is as a person and as an individual (Interview,1 September 22, 2010, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia). This is simply how she enacts her linguistic identity on her Facebook. It is meaningful and legitimate linguistic practice, as Suvd describes, ‘This is how we talk on Facebook, and there is nothing wrong about that. This is an authentic part of ourselves’ (Interview, September 22, 2010, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia). Suvd’s viewpoint reminds us of a popular counter language ideology in Mongolia—a ‘linguistic authenticity,’ where young Mongolians seem to rigorously validate their own linguistic practices, claiming to be sociolinguistically authentic and legitimate (Dovchin 2015). The second aspect of this book, thereby, focuses on multiple vigorous claims of authenticity and legitimacy by transnational EFL university students in terms of their complex relationship with English on social media. Toying with English on social media is an essential means of developing one’s own metalinguistic awareness and metalinguistic claims of authenticity—an understanding of not just how to use and learn English, but of how it works and appears and what it means to them. It offers a venture to step back and re-consider the frisky structures and properties of English and the pragmatic meanings and views associated with the mischievous English on social media. When, Yuto, a Japanese EFL student at the University of Aizu, Japan, has subjected himself to ‘peripheralized Englishes’ on Facebook, he straightforwardly identified them as ‘real English’ produced by ‘real people.’ As Yuto acknowledges, ‘I found so many interesting and never before seen English phrases and expressions that were written by Facebook users. I learned English only from the textbooks before. This Facebook experience opened my eyes in terms of how English can be real and engaging. Facebook English was definitely authentic compared to my textbook English.’ (Interview, January 19, 2018, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan). Yuto’s claim on ‘what is authentic English?’ is only one tiny node of multiple claims of linguistic authenticity that are widely circling and colliding within and across transnational language ideologies, urging us to reconsider how else the question of ‘linguistic (in)authenticity’ could be thought of in the superdiverse milieu of social media in late modernity (Arnaut 2015; Blommaert and Backus 2013).

1 All interview accounts used in this book have been translated from Mongolian into English by the

author. Interviews were conducted in English with Japanese students.

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Overall, in the light of these colliding various language ideologies, this book focuses on EFL university students in East Asia—Mongolia and Japan—as the representatives of transnational social media users. The book seeks to address the need to understand the different ways in which the use of English and the language ideologies of ‘authenticity’ occur in diverse social media settings. If critical applied linguistics is to deal in terms of different contexts in which EFL students’ particular characteristics and dispositions that affect both their awareness or idea of English and their attitudes to learning, it needs to pay more attention on how English learners develop their online relationship with the processes of recombination and peripheralization of English; how they further reconfigure and convey their own linguistic views and ideologies through legitimizing their own linguistic practices in the context of a flow of diverse semiotic and cultural forms.

1.1 The Standard English and the Ideologies of Authenticity Despite its image as a remote and grassy land peopled by semi-nomadic animal herders, Mongolia and particularly the capital, Ulaanbaatar (UB), has witnessed a significant shift in its lifestyle since 1990, following the transformation from 70 years of socialist political regime, to a newly democratic country with emerging free market economy. Mongolia was a satellite state of the USSR before 1990, with Russian language and culture being the solitary prevailing foreign influence. The communist Mongolian authorities replaced the classic Mongolian Uyghur script with the Russian Cyrillic alphabet in 1941, which has since remained the official orthographic system of Mongolia (Billé 2010). Nevertheless, the sociolinguistic condition of Mongolia had drastically changed since 1990, when the country allowed itself financial, political, linguistic and cultural liberalization. The new Mongolian government recognized the ‘linguistic diversity,’ welcoming the spread of diverse foreign languages. Once widespread, Russian was now replaced by the immense popularity of English—the language that was once condemned as the ‘capitalist language’ from the ‘Western enemy’ (Marsh 2009, 2010). As Cohen (2005, p. 215) describes, ‘The majority of the population now either knows at least some English or understands that speaking it [English] is a desirable skill to possess in order to succeed in Mongolia’s new market economy.’ English medium high schools and private English specific educational institutions have come to be in increasingly high demand, with their numbers dramatically increasing each year in recent times (Cohen 2004). English is taught across all levels of educational institutions as optional or core subjects, international English tests such as IELTS and TOEFL are frequently taking place in the country, and oral and written English fluency is one of the required criteria for job interviews and job applications (Dovchin 2018; Marzluf 2012, 2017).

1.1 The Standard English and the Ideologies of Authenticity

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While a great deal of concern has been expressed about the positive role of standard and monolingual English in institutional contexts in Mongolia since 1990, there has been less focus on the non-institutional role of English in Mongolia. Social media sites are particularly popular with English, where it is continuously interwoven and intermingled with the Mongolian language. Considering the relatively small population (about 3 million), the statistic report of Internet World Statistics (2019) shows that there are more than two million Internet users in Mongolia, with approximately 2 million Facebook users. Within this impressive online social network, the role of English that appears on the thousands of social media pages is often pathologized as ideologically and linguistically destructive, which is likely to distort the purity and serenity of the Mongolian language (Dovchin et al. 2015). Some scholars, writers and policymakers have started harshly criticizing the role of English in Mongolia: The hegemony of English and the Roman script on social media, and American/Western media or technology resources are frequently condemned as violent (Lodon 2010) and imperialist encroachments that have infested Mongolian language and culture with lice (Nyamjav 2001). This prevalent language ideology was addressed in a ‘Letter to the Committee of the Comprehensive National Development Strategy of Mongolia, Mongolian Parliament, 2007,’ written by a group of Mongolian academics (‘Zuunii Medee’ in June 2008, number 259/2707). The underlying idea of this letter is to protect the Mongolian language from English and other foreign languages, for they are deemed a threat to the overall national security, linguistic and cultural authenticity and legitimacy of Mongolia as an independent nation (Dovchin 2018). In a similar vein to Mongolia, English is also often promoted through its ‘standard’ and ‘pure’ forms in Japan, with a ‘native speakerism of English’ is highly advocated, since its growing popularity in Japan in the past 20 years (Yano 2011, p. 131). Japan is still known for maintaining its linguistic homogeneity, as the Japanese language is viewed as ‘a source of national power and social stability’ (Backhaus 2010, p. 360). Yet, the Japanese government, in a manner akin to the Mongolian government, has not denied the importance of English as an international language, strengthening the English language education since the 1990s. English is deemed as the most important international language of science, technology and the economic wellbeing of the society in Japan (Seargeant 2005, 2009, 2011; Yamagami and Tollefson 2011). The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) of Japan, accordingly, has adopted a series of policies and strategies to apply English language education in the contexts of elementary, secondary and tertiary education (Hashimoto 2007). Meanwhile, despite its popular image as a highly developed and tech-advanced society in Asia (e.g., 70,000,000 Facebook users out of a total population of 130,000,000 (IWS, 2019)), the role of ‘peripheralized Englishes’ that appears on social media is often pathologized as ideologically and linguistically substandard and inferior in Japan. English language promotion is often linked directly with a ‘native’ and ‘pure’ forms of American and British English, accompanied by the Anglo-American socio-cultural values and traditions. As Yano (2011, p. 131) sums it up,

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1 Peripheralized Englishes, Social Media and (In)Authenticity […] Japan remains a typical ‘English as a foreign language’ country, where people faithfully follow the norms of form and usage provided by native speakers, while elsewhere English has developed from local and ethnic languages as British English and American English into an international language on the global scale. From the Japanese Ministry of Education officials, through English learners to ELT professionals, the majority of Japanese think that only native speaker English is real, natural and authentic, and thus worthy of learning. They pursue the impossible dream of attaining ‘native-like’ or ‘near-native’ proficiency in English. It is not uncommon to encounter newspaper and magazine articles saying that since an overwhelming majority of teachers of English are Japanese Japan needs to hire more native speaker English teachers so that the learners can have access to genuine English.

This trend is also evident in the classroom settings as McMillan and Rivers (2011, p. 252) note that ‘a standard English-only approach in the classroom’ appears to EFL educators, students, and other stakeholders in Japan ‘to be a cure for all that ails the English education system.’ In fact, many EFL activities in Japanese university contexts are determined by English textbooks and the restricted language policy of ‘Standard English-only’ (Saito and Ebsworth 2004), which continues to enjoy a hegemonic status in most Japanese EFL university contexts, with students and instructors mainly prevented from using any types of ‘unstandardized English’ (Mishima 2016). Overall, both in Mongolia and Japan, English is the most important foreign language, taught in schools, colleges and universities as a compulsory subject. It is the dominant language of academic discourse in higher education, as textbooks are mostly available only in English. Public and private institutions prefer to employ university graduates with a higher level of proficiency in English, which has become an instrument for economic advantage and improved life chances for many learners and speakers. It is also gaining much popularity outside educational and institutional contexts in both nations, as many Mongolian and Japanese young adolescents use English for varied leisure, social media and entertainment activities (Canagarajah and Dovchin 2019). Nevertheless, the playful use and practice of English in noninstitutional settings such as social media are often abnormalized as ‘inauthentic’ and ‘illegitimate’ by authorities in both countries, despite its dominant online presence. The focus of this book, thereby, is not on a comparison of the two different Asian contexts but to see how EFL university students across transnational borders as social media users may (1) re-invent, take-up and re-utilize English on Facebook in a variety of available transnational resources; (2) build, negotiate and deliver their relationships with English on social media through re-introducing their own ideologies and approaches towards English. The implications of these two primary interests may contribute to a growing need to investigate the new conditions and ways of English being integrated into the local society through media/technoscapes and ideoscapes (Appadurai 1997, 2001, 2006).

1.2 Overview of the Book

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1.2 Overview of the Book In the following chapters, I will develop many of the themes introduced at the beginning at greater length. Chapter 2 provides a closer explanation of the theoretical framework of English on social media, which underpins the overall analytic framework used throughout this book. Moving beyond the conventional terms such as ‘World Englishes’ and ‘linguistic dystopia,’ new translinguistics turn in critical applied linguistics has surged in recent years, which has been variously defined by theorists as translingual English, translanguaging (Li Wei and Zhu Hua 2019), transglossia (Dovchin et al. 2017), polylanguaging (Jørgensen 2008), metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010, 2013), ‘crossing’ (Rampton 2011) and so on. It calls for the recognition, if not celebration, of the complex web of semiotics connected by material and symbolic ties in often unfamiliar ways. Rather than presuming the inherent convenience of English as a language system, translinguistics is organized in a social system and is oftentimes deemed as a critical social science of language. The spread and role of English on social media in this book thus are not seen as separate linguistic codes according to particular language systems, since the users are actively involved with the fusion of linguistic codes, modes, genres, repertoires and styles, i.e., the semiotic reconstructions that are becoming the typical interaction of these users. Chapter 2 further seeks to expand knowledge in the translinguistics turn through integrating the concept of ‘global spread of authenticity.’ The question of what is authentic English is a complex and multi-faceted social process, which should be understood as a relativized process that is often locally generated. It is not a singlehanded fixed principle but rather a range of foci of ‘authenticities,’ which are introduced differently in different local sociolinguistic contexts. There are multiple social meanings of authenticity expressed in language productions that should be grasped with different levels of indexicality. Put simply, the global spread of different ideologies of authenticities is not a product, which is presupposed as an object to be discovered, but instead, it is a process. The metalinguistic claims of EFL students in terms of linguistic authenticity are then perceived as a multivalent notion in this book, which co-exists in combination, reminding us that sociolinguistic reality is not exclusively one-way, but emergent and discursively created. Chapter 3 will introduce the research methodologies used in this book, the research approach and method adopted, as well as the research design and the analytical tools used for textual analysis and post-data analysis. Data used in this book derives from two different larger ‘digital ethnographic research projects’ (Blommaert and Dong 2010) that looked into both synchronous and asynchronous participation of EFL university students on Facebook from two East Asian countries—Mongolia and Japan. The project in Mongolia was steered to examine the synchronous side (real-time interactions, instantaneous exchanges such as live updates, chat rooms or concurrent online messaging) of social media communication of EFL university students at the National University of Mongolia outside their classroom practices. The project in Japan was focused on investigating the asynchronous social media engagement

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(non-real-time and non-simultaneous interactions such as email messages, discussion boards, etc.) of EFL university students in Japan as part of their task-based classroom activity. The chapter concludes with the significance of ‘trans-’ analytical textual framework as the main tools to analyze and code the data materials. Chapters 4–8 present data to illustrate how the translingual English practices of these EFL university students are creatively and strategically reconfigured when it comes to social media space, as they re-invent varied linguistic and cultural resources within their online (and sometimes offline) linguistic practices. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 seek to demonstrate how university EFL students in Mongolia innovatively and creatively re-design English on Facebook through varied resources (e.g., AAVE, hip-hop genres, heavy borrowing from English, inverting English), while metalinguistically claim their translingual English practices as linguistically authentic and legitimate through varied ideas and ideologies (e.g., ‘keepin’ it real’, authentic-self, in-group talk etc.). Chapters 7 and 8 present the outcome of a classroom digital ethnographic research project with Japanese EFL university students. While being involved with task-based English learning Facebook activities, these students appreciate their adventurous and mischievous learning experience with English through getting acquainted with various translingual Englishes that are nothing similar to their textbook English experience (e.g., unfamiliar and mysterious ‘ghost Englishes’ that are absent from dictionaries or textbooks, idiomatic Englishes and onomatopes). Their encounters with ‘translingual Englishes’ on Facebook present us with yet another facets of ideology of linguistic authenticity, as these students raise the questions of ‘authentic English’ through numerous authenticity proclamations (e.g., ‘real English written by real people’, ‘native speakerism as authentic’, ‘English etymology as authenticity’, ‘onomatopes and emotional sincerity as authenticity’). Chapter 9 pulls together the main themes of this book and looks at the pedagogical implications of taking social media and metalinguistic claims of English language learners seriously in terms of understanding English learners’ attitudes, views, and learning approaches. The book concludes that EFL university students’ sociolinguistic realities are mixed at their very core, and it is crucial to consider this reality in critical language pedagogies to reduce the high dependency on language ideologies that promote monolingualism and monoculturalism in the form of strict monolingual approaches that endorse the ideology of linguistic authenticity. It is equally important to introduce the role of translingual Englishes on social media in the critical language curriculums since the increased use of social media amongst EFL university students is continuing to grow in numbers. We as language educators need to find ways to bring these new virtual technologies into pedagogies in order to stay relevant and applicable to the world of our students. Introducing social media and translingual Englishes in the classroom will have the power to bring linguistic and cultural resources our students deploy, and the linguistic choices, desires, pleasures and ideologies they directly bring to class, and everlasting technological advances that they take up and practice, information and interactions with transnational people from around the world.

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References Appadurai, A. 1997. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Appadurai, A. 2001. Grassroots globalization and the research imagination. In Globalization, ed. A. Appadurai, 1–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Appadurai, A. 2006. Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. In The media and cultural studies: Keyworks, ed. M.G. Durham and D.M. Kellner, 584–604. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Arnaut, K. 2015. Superdiversity: Elements of an emerging perspective. In Language and superdiversity, ed. K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton, and M. Spotti, 49–71. New York: Routledge. Backhaus, P. 2010. Multilingualism in Japanese public space—reading the signs. Japanese Studies 30 (3): 359–372. Billé, F. 2010. Sounds and scripts of modernity: Language ideologies and practices in contemporary Mongolia. Inner Asia 12 (2): 231–252. Blommaert, J., and A. Backus. 2013. Superdiverse repertoires and the individual. In Multilingualism and multimodality. Current challenges for educational studies, ed. I. de Saint-Georges and J. Weber, 11–32. Rotterdam, Boston, Taipei: Sense Publishers. Blommaert, J., and J. Dong. 2010. Ethnographic fieldwork: A beginner’s guide. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bolander, B. 2017. Language and identity on Facebook. In Language, education and technology: Encyclopedia of language and education, ed. S. Thorne and S. May, 1–13. Berlin: Springer. Canagarajah, S. 2007. The ecology of global English. International Multilingual Research Journal 1 (2): 89–100. Canagarajah, S. 2013. Translingual practice: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. New York: Routledge. Canagarajah, S. 2017a. Translingual practice as spatial repertoires: Expanding the paradigm beyond structuralist orientations. Applied Linguistics 39 (1): 31–54. Canagarajah, S. 2017b. Translingual practices and neoliberal policies. In Translingual practices and neoliberal policies, ed. S. Canagarajah, 1–66. Cham: Springer. Canagarajah, S., and S. Dovchin. 2019. The everyday politics of translingualism as a resistant practice. International Journal of Multilingualism 16 (2): 1–18. Cohen, R. 2004. The current status of English education in Mongolia. Asian EFL Journal 6 (4): 1–21. Cohen, R. 2005. English in Mongolia. World Englishes 24 (2): 203–216. Dovchin, S. 2015. Language, multiple authenticities and social media: The online language practices of university students in Mongolia. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19 (4): 437–459. Dovchin, S. 2018. Language, media and globalization in the periphery. Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics. New York: Routledge. Dovchin, S., A. Pennycook, and S. Sultana. 2017. Popular culture, voice and linguistic diversity: Young adults on- and offline. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dovchin, S., S. Sultana, and A. Pennycook. 2015. Relocalizing the translingual practices of young adults in Mongolia and Bangladesh. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 1 (1): 4–26. Hashimoto, K. 2007. Japan’s language policy and the “Lost Decade”. In Language policy, culture and identity in Asian contexts, ed. A.B.M. Tsui and J.W. Tollefson. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hess, K., and K. Bowd. 2015. Friend or foe? Regional newspapers and the power of Facebook. Media International Australia 156 (1): 19–28. Jacquemet, M. 2005. Transidiomatic practices: Language and power in the age of globalization. Language and Communication 25 (3): 257–277. Jacquemet, M. 2015. Asylum and superdiversity: The search for denotational accuracy during asylum hearings. Language and Communication 44: 72–81.

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Jørgensen, J.N. 2008. Polylingual languaging around and among children and adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism 5 (3): 161–176. Jørgensen, J.N., M.S. Karrebæk, L.M. Madsen, and J.S. Møller. 2011. Polylanguaging in superdiversity. Diversities 13 (2): 23–38. Kabilan, M.K., N. Ahmad, and M.J.Z. Abidin. 2010. Facebook: An online environment for learning of English in institutions of higher education? The Internet and Higher Education 13 (4): 179–187. Lee, J.W. 2017. The politics of translingualism: After Englishes. New York: Routledge. Li, W., and Z. Hua. 2019. Tranßcripting: Playful subversion with Chinese characters. International Journal of Multilingualism, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2019.1575834. Lodon, T. (2010). [Who are these language violators?]. Retrieved December 3, 2010, from http://orch.blogspot.com.au/2010/10/3.html. Marsh, P. 2009. Horse-head fiddle and the cosmopolitan reimagination of tradition in Mongolia. New York: Routledge. Marsh, P. 2010. Our generation is opening its eyes: Hip-hop and youth identity in contemporary Mongolia. Central Asian Survey 29 (3): 345–358. Marzluf, P. 2012. Words, borders, herds: Post-socialist English and nationalist language identities in Mongolia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2012 (218): 195–216. Marzluf, P.P. 2017. Language, literacy, and social change in Mongolia: Traditionalist, socialist, and post-socialist identities. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. McMillan, B.A., and D.J. Rivers. 2011. The practice of policy: Teacher attitudes toward “English only”. System 39 (2): 251–263. Mishima, M. 2016. Searching for the best medium of instruction: Japanese university students’ views on English-only instruction in EAP courses. The Journal of Rikkyo University Language Center 36: 15–27. Nyamjav, D. 2001. Undesnii ayulgui baidal ba soyol [National Security and Culture]. In Undesnii ayulgui baidliin uzel barimtlaliin shinjlekh ukhaanii undeslel [Proceedings of the 2001 Conference on the scholarly basis of the national security concepts], ed. National University of Mongolia and The Academy of Strategy Studies, 64–70. Ulaanbaatar: Ungut Hevlel. Otsuji, E., and A. Pennycook. 2010. Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity and language in flux. International Journal of Multilingualism 7 (3): 240–254. Otsuji, E., and A. Pennycook. 2013. Unremarkable hybridities and metrolingual practices. In The global-local interface and hybridity: Exploring language and identity, ed. Rani S. Rubdy and Lubna Alsagoff, 83–99. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Rampton, B. 2011. From ‘multi-ethnic adolescent heteroglossia’ to ‘contemporary urban vernaculars’. Language and Communication 31 (4): 276–294. Saito, H., and M.E. Ebsworth. 2004. Seeing English language teaching and learning through the eyes of Japanese EFL and ESL students. Foreign Language Annals 37 (1): 111–124. Seargeant, P. 2005. Globalisation and reconfigured English in Japan. World Englishes 24 (3): 309–319. Seargeant, P. 2009. The idea of English in Japan: Ideology and the evolution of a global language. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Seargeant, P. (ed.). 2011. English in Japan in the era of globalization. Netherlands: Springer. Sultana, Shaila. 2019. Linguistic and multimodal resources within the local–global interface. In The critical inquiries in the sociolinguistics of globalization, ed. T. Barrett and S. Dovchin, 1–20. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Sharma, B.K. 2012. Beyond social networking: Performing global Englishes in Facebook by college youth in Nepal. Journal of Sociolinguistics 16 (4): 483–509. Westinen, E., S. Peuronen, and S. Leppänen. 2018. Superdiversity perspective and the sociolinguistics of social media. In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity, ed. A. Creese and A. Blackedge, 30–42. London: Routledge.

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Yamagami, M., and J.W. Tollefson. 2011. Elite discourses of globalization in Japan: The role of English. In English in Japan in the era of globalization, ed. P. Seargeant, 15–37. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Yano, Y. 2011. English as an international language and ‘Japanese English’. In English in Japan in the era of globalization, ed. P. Seageant, 125–142. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 2

Translingual Englishes and the Global Spread of Authenticity

2.1 ‘Hey, Maccasdahuu?’ Extract 2.1 illustrates a Facebook exchange, which occurred between two Mongolian university students, Anar and Bold. They discuss the plan of eating out together at McDonald’s. In line 1, Anar integrates the English stem—‘Macca’s’—an Australian jocular nickname for ‘McDonald’s’ within the Mongolian question suffix ‘-dahuu?’ [‘Shall we do something?’], creating the unconventional Anglicized Mongolian question phrase ‘Maccasdahuu?’ [Shall we eat out at Macca’s?]. In line 2, Bold answers in English ‘berri naaaaaais, hi 5 haha’ [‘very nice, high five haha’], through the standard phonetic form of English which has been heavily accented by Bold, seeking to parody Borat Sagdiyev, a fictitious Kazakh journalist traveling through the United States recording real-life interactions with Americans in a 2006 British-American mockumentary comedy film, ‘Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan’. This analysis shows how English can be re-invented through the combination of other linguistic, stylistic and cultural resources used by social media users interacting and negotiating across different semiotic and stylistic repertories (Li and Zhu 2019). In real life and everyday usage of English amongst social media users with diverse sociolinguistic and sociocultural backgrounds, English is not easily compartmentalized (Blommaert 2018, 2019). As soon as the standardized form of English comes into contact to other resources, the idealization of the standard system makes no more

Extract 2.1 Translingual Englishes: ‘Hey, Maccasdahuu?’ Facebook conversation

Translation

1. Anar: Hey, Maccasdahuu?

1. Anar: Hi, shall we eat out at Macca’s?

2. Bold: berri naaaaaais, hi 5 haha

2. Bold: very nice, high five haha

Language guide: Mongolian—regular font; English—italicized

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Dovchin, Language, Social Media and Ideologies, SpringerBriefs in Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26139-9_2

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definite sense (Li 2017). The use of English here can be better understood through the perspectives of ‘translingual Englishes’ (Canagarajah 2013, 2018).

2.2 Translingual Englishes Recent debates in the spread and role of English in critical applied linguistics have problematized popular paradigm such as ‘World Englishes’ (WE) for highlighting fixed nation-state boundaries and for its incapacity to account for communicative practices emerged out of complexity and mobility of linguistic and cultural repertoires. When Pennycook (2010, p. 21) refers to the notion ‘global Englishes’, he associates English with creativity and refashioning formed by different semiotic resources, while underlining several flaws embedded within the framework WE, ‘the location of nationally defined identities within the circles, the inability to deal with numerous contexts, and the privileging of ENL over ESL over EFL.’ The process of categorizing new national varieties of English (e.g., Singaporean English, Indian English and so on) may involve a risk of excluding ‘other Englishes’ such as English creoles, vernaculars, and other hybrid forms of local Englishes. As Pennycook (2010, p. 22) cautions, ‘The notion of world Englishes leaves out all those other Englishes which do not fit the paradigm of an emergent national standard, and in doing so, falls into the trap of mapping centre linguists’ images of language and the world on to the periphery.’ It is, thereby, far less relevant when it comes to understanding English in today’s highly globalized world through fixed notions since English users worldwide seem to display signs that their use of English is integrated forms of stylization rather than certain nation-state varieties (Barrett and Dovchin 2019; Sultana et al. 2013). As Canagarajah (2013, p. 61) writes, ‘[…] the WE model leaves out a consideration of the contact between the circles, as it focuses on varieties within the three circles and nation-state boundaries. Whose norm apply when a member from the Expanding Circle talks to one from the Outer Circle? Whose norms apply when someone from other the Outer Circle talks to a member from Inner Circle?’ When we say English in ‘a certain place’ such as ‘English in Japan’, according to Blommaert (2012), it needs to be implied as something that is a result of highly complex patterns of mobility to that particular space, since English is not an immovable thing as its mobility demands adjustment to these rising new complexities. Understanding English through Kachruvian WE paradigm, thus, privileges instances of educated usage of Englishes, while marginalizing Englishes that do not necessarily get codified or categorized (Lee 2017). Notably, according to Seargeant and Tagg (2011, p. 497), WE paradigms have limited applications in regards to ‘(1) the global spread of English and the diverse linguistic practices that have resulted from it; (2) the linguistic practices of computer-mediated discourse (CMD).’ Meanwhile, the recent trend in critical applied linguistics seeks to turn toward the ‘trans-’ perspectives (Hawkins and Mori 2018), in which the diversity of English is often understood as to describe fluid, itinerant and intertwined practices that move

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across, beyond, or through the boundaries. New ‘trans-’ terms have, congruently, emerged, such as: • Translingual practices (Canagarajah 2013; Lee 2017). • Transidiomatic practices (Jacquemet 2005, 2013, 2015). • Translocal Englishes (Blommaert 2010; Leppänen 2007; Leppänen et al. 2009; Pennycook 2007). • Translanguaging (Creese and Blackledge 2010; Li 2011, 2017; Li and Zhu 2013; Li and Zhu 2019). • Transglossic practices (García 2014; García and Kleyn 2016; Dovchin et al. 2017; Sultana et al. 2013). The prevailing ethos of these ‘trans-’ approaches implies that English is organically organized around miscellaneous semiotic resources, while operating in a discursively integrative universe, calling attention to fluid and dynamic English practices without demarcating pre-fixed boundaries among Englishes (Blommaert 2012). It looks at English as dynamic, mobile and embodied sum of resource that is constructed through one’s lived experience (Canagarajah 2013). ‘Translingual Englishes’ capture the transgressive structural properties of lingua-cultural and semiotic diffusions, the relocalization processes and the creative mixed (non)linguistic profusions (Pennycook 2010). Language users are organically entrenched with diverse semiotic resources while operating in a linguistically and discursively integrative universe (Dovchin 2017a, b, c). Note that the term English is mostly in its plural form, ‘Englishes,’ to accurately capture the complex diversity of Englishes used by different people worldwide. The term ‘translingual Englishes’ is, thus, used as an umbrella term in this book to reflect the shared tenet that is embedded within the above mentioned new ‘trans-‘theories and terminologies. One of the underlying concepts incorporated within ‘translingual Englishes’ is, evidently, to recognize the mobility and fluidity of Englishes not so much through the paranoia of linguistic catastrophe or the dystopic homogenization of English (Jacquemet 2015; Kigamwa and Ndemanu 2017). While remaining mindful of the very real inequalities in linguistic and cultural relations globally and the possible threats to local cultural industries and languages (Phillipson 2010; Dovchin et al. 2015), the concept of ‘translingual Englishes’ suggests, by contrast, that English is better understood through a focus on localization and innovation rather than pollution or destruction. If we start looking at English as a dystopic force that is wiping out all other languages, we are, indeed, according to Jacquemet (2015, p. 333), ‘justified in mobilizing a political response to this violence.’ Laments over endangered languages, or the claims that a language is disappearing, are in itself a problematic one, sustaining naive assumptions about language and its evolution. As Jacquemet (2015, p. 333) questions, ‘When did Latin die? Did Hebrew die and was it later resuscitated or has it always lived?’ In fact, behind every claim of the ‘death’ or ‘pollution’ of a language lies the assumption that this particular language has ‘a fixed, immutable, and formal denotational structure and system of pragmatic use.’ These ‘standardized’ and ‘recognizable’ structures are ‘dead’ over time, and language is treated as ‘a living museum.’ This, as said by, Silverstein (1998, p. 422), is “naive Whorfi-

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anism about culture and so-called ‘world-view’,” assuming only the denotational code as ‘the world-view’. As Jacquemet (2015, p. 334) sums it up, ‘the ecolinguistic view is rooted in a fundamentally flawed understanding of the relationship between language and culture, since it essentializes what a “language” is and how it determines its “culture,” strips local speakers of agency, opposes “good” to “bad” languages, disregards the way “foreign” linguistic materials can be used to form new languages, and sensationalizes linguistic loss as social catastrophe.’ It is, therefore, high time, if we treat English as ‘transidiomatic practices’ objecting to monolingual and homogenous orientations to communication. As transnational members integrate all available codes as a ‘repertoire’ in their everyday communication, it is also time to theorise linguistics of xenoglossic becoming and transidiomatic recombinations, co-occurring in local and distant environments (Jacquemet 2005, 2013). Put simply, appreciating English through ‘transidiomatic practices’ is about ‘linguistic innovations with heavy borrowing from English, but any number of other languages’ (Jacquemet 2005, pp. 265–266), saturated by ‘the co-presence of multilingual talk (exercised by de/reterritorialized speakers) and electronic media, in contexts heavily structured by social indexicalities and semiotic codes’—‘transidiomatic practices’ (Jacquemet 2005, pp. 264–265). As Lee (2017, pp. 3–4), in tandem with Canagarajah (2013), echoes Jacquemet’s debate, ‘an increased openness to linguistic plurality is becoming endemic to communication in cosmopolitan global contexts as individuals abandon restrictive grammatical rules and pragmatic conventions in favor of mutually cooperative and spatially resourceful means of communication, reflective of a requisite performative competence.’ Jacquemet’s (2015) problematization of dystopia, in fact, has also been acknowledged by Canagarajah (2007, p. 94), who reminds us that there is actually no meaning for form and grammar outside the realm of practice because language is ‘not a product located in the mind of the speaker; it is a social process constantly reconstructed in sensitivity to environmental factors.’ Intelligibility, education and communicative success are not necessarily predicated on ‘sharedness (deriving from grammar or community identity),’ but preferably on ‘the possibility of diversity and the retention of people’s local identities in the contact zone.’ (Canagarajah 2013, pp. 68–70). In fact, we need more ‘delicate views of sociolinguistic stratification in concrete communities’ (Blommaert 2012, p. 5) instead of neocolonial polity, because ‘such a mythically homogeneous community depends in part on the exclusion or suppression of populations and characteristics which do not fit into its ideal self-definition’ (Doran 2004, p. 93). As Busch (2010, p. 193) recognizes, following Habermas (1990), ‘Homogenization in language use is much more difficult to implement today, under the conditions of globalization, where communication and media flows have become more diverse and multi-directional than in previous times, when communication was organized around a national public sphere.’ For Pennycook (2007, p. 19), the dystopic vision presents us only with ‘an image of homogenization within a neocolonial global polity,’ continually warning us of the threats of English dominance, failing to look at more sophisticated dynamics and complexities of current Englishes. We, therefore, need to look beyond the vision of homogeny, because the studies of global English deserve better than this, ‘as we need

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to understand how English is used and appropriated by users of English around the world, how English colludes with multiple domains of globalization, from popular culture to unpopular politics, from international capital to local transaction, from ostensible diplomacy to purported peace-keeping, from religious proselytizing to secular resistance’ (Pennycook 2007, p. 19). Global Englishes, thereby, are ‘transcultural flows to address the ways in which cultural forms move, change and are reused to fashion new identities in diverse contexts.’ Transcultural flows of Englishes, Pennycook adds (2007, p. 6), refer ‘not merely to the spread of particular forms of culture across boundaries, or the existence of supercultural commonalities (cultural forms that transcend locality), but rather to the processes of borrowing, blending, remaking, returning, to processes of alternative cultural production.’ Just like globalization ‘does not necessarily or even frequently imply homogenization or Americanization’ (Appadurai 1997, p. 17), English does not necessarily imply homogenization or Americanization. The globalization is deeply local, since, according to Appadurai (2006, p. 588), ‘for the people of Irian Jaya, Indonesianization may be more worrisome than Americanization, as Japanization may be for Koreans, Indianization for Sri Lankans, Vietnamization for the Cambodians, and Russianization for the people of Soviet Armenia and the Baltic republics’. So is English. While English is brought into new societies, they tend to become indigenized or localized in one or other way. English becomes only one node of a complex of interrelationships that are changed, contested, appropriated and negotiated in that particular society (Canagarajah 2013, 2017a, b; García et al. 2017). English is, thus, about the myriad ways in which cultural and linguistic forms move beyond boundaries and become localized and recreated in the local. Cultural and linguistic flows are understood not so much as the processes of homogenization but as part of the reorganization of the local—the creative translingual practices of people interacting across different linguistic and communicative codes (Canagarajah and Dovchin 2019). The reassessment of both dystopic or heterogeneous (as in WE) visions of English can be further challenged by emerging works on new technological and social media networks, which elaborate remarkable forms of creativeness and complexity, resisting most conventions about homogeneity, dystopia, heterogeneity, and stability (Seargeant and Tagg 2011). The complexity of English-related forms illustrates a broader semiotic mix of communicative practices since English is seen as bits and pieces of language that is being used, despite the participants all sharing an L1 (Thai). The use of English appears to have become a central element of their social media users in Thailand, offering a broader range of semiotic opportunities (Seargeant and Tagg 2011). Equally, the presence of English in Finnish social media shows a familiar sight, where English is characterised by creativity, constructing specific identities and communalities (Leppänen et al. 2009). Young Finns appropriate English as a communicative resource in different ways to negotiate their meanings, identities and a sense of belonging, along with the various Finnish resources at their disposal. As Leppänen et al. (2015, p. 4) point out, superdiversity on social media is realized by the mobility and mobilization of linguistic and other semiotic resources that are distributed, recontextualized and resemiotized. English, combined with other resources

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should be viewed as ‘translocal practices,’ evoking connections to more global contexts in the local community, as well as going beyond local and global identifications. Social media is indexically organised as translocal activity spaces or communities of practice with their own emergent orders of normativity, a new world of international contacts, and imagined communities (Leppänen et al. 2015). Since the term ‘English’ itself may jeopardize our empirical accuracy, we should, instead, focus more on ‘-languaging,’ in which, for example, the combination between ‘Chinese’ and ‘English’—a kind of ‘new Chinglish’—is constructed through ‘translanguaging’ processes. As Li (2017, pp. 3–4) notes, ‘ordinary English utterances being re-appropriated with entirely different meanings for communication between Chinese users of English as well as creations of words and expressions that adhere broadly to the morphological rules of English but with Chinese twists and meanings.’ ‘Niubility’ is, for instance, the combination of Chinese taboo word ‘niubi’ and English ‘ability,’ which means incredible ability that is worth showing off or boasting about. ‘Geilivable’ is the combination of the Chinese word ‘geili’ (to give force) and English ‘able,’ meaning ‘supportive’ or ‘cool.’ ‘New Chinglish’ is more variable and flexible than an assumed symbol or mimicry of ‘Western’ language, because mixing English and Chinese shows the clear signs that it fits into the morphological scheme and text structures of Chinese, indexing how de/reterritorialized speakers may mobilize their linguistic resources to create new social and communicative spaces for themselves (Li 2017; Li and Zhu 2013). Inspired by Becker’s (1991, p. 34) critics—‘there is no such thing as Language, only continual languaging, an activity of human beings in the world’, Li (2017, p. 8) asserts that language should not be assumed ‘as an accomplished fact’, ‘as a thing made and finished’, but rather ‘as in the process of being made’ (Li 2017, p. 8). English as ‘translanguaging’ is, thereby, neither ‘conceived as an object’ nor as ‘a linguistic structural phenomenon’ to analyse but rather ‘a practice and a process’ (Li 2017, p. 7). It involves not only ‘dynamic and functionally integrated use of different languages and language varieties’, but also ‘a process of knowledge construction that goes beyond language(s)’ (Li 2017, p. 7; see also Pennycook 2017). In other words, understanding English as ‘translanguaging’ compels us to attend whatever linguistic features are at one’s disposal to achieve one’s communicative aims as best he/she can, ‘regardless of how well they know the involved languages; this entails that the language users may know—and use—the fact that some of the features are perceived by some speakers as not belonging together’ (Jørgensen et al. 2011, p. 34; see also ‘polylanguaging’ in Jørgensen et al. 2011). English users may employ features from English although they do not seemingly know very much about the associated ‘languages’ (Ag and Jørgensen 2012). Overall, these emergent ‘trans-’ trends in critical applied linguistics reflect the complexity of demarcating linguistic features, resources, voices, styles, speeches, and repertoires according to specific language categories, as for the transgressive and fluid movement between and across languages requires a different critical vision (Blackledge and Creese 2009). The concept of ‘translingual Englishes’ attends to English users’ full participation in the daily acts of linguistic transgression, even despite their limited exposure or deficient fluency to English. The use of English in

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this book, therefore, is not seen as separate linguistic code consistent with particular language system, because language users are actively involved with the fusion of linguistic codes, modes, genres, repertoires and styles, i.e., the semiotic reconstructions that are becoming the communicative norm of the speakers’ daily interaction.

2.3 The Global Spread of Authenticity As debated in previous sections, ‘translingual Englishes’ may often be in the centre of the allegation and pathologization for being ‘inauthentic’ and ‘illegitimate,’ because the standardized forms of English have been jeopardized by the mobility and fluidity of transnational English users (Lee 2017). ‘Translingual Englishes’ can, thereby, be oftentimes deemed as ‘abnormal’ and ‘faulty,’ because they do not necessarily belong to putative linguistic grammars or basic norms (Dovchin 2015, 2019). Once we, however, start ethnographically engage with the actual users of ‘translingual Englishes’, we see an ongoing metalinguistic legitimization based on how they indeed build, negotiate and convey the idea of authenticity. This book, thereby, seeks to expand the analytic potential of ‘translingual Englishes’ trend by prudently attending to the notion of ‘the global spread of authenticity’ (Pennycook 2007). One of the most prevalent ideologies embedded within global hip-hop is the mantra of ‘keepin’ it real,’ which represents the core hip-hop principle of keeping one’s music, culture, tradition, and language authentic (Cutler 2003, 2009; Rickford and Rickford 2000). Yet, this global ideology is always pulled into multiple local ways of what it means to be authentic. It is a process of localization that makes authenticity dependent on local musicians’ identifications, contexts, languages, and cultures. This tension between the global spread of a cultural principle to stick to authenticity, and its multiple conflicting local linguistic and cultural ways and processes about what it means to be authentic, is framed by Pennycook (2007, p. 98) as ‘the global spread of authenticity.’ Exploring the idea of authenticity is a complex and multi-faceted social process (Terkourafi 2010), and ‘implicitly a polemical concept’ because the ‘issues of authenticity most often come into play when authenticity has been put in doubt’ (Peterson 2005, p. 1083). In fact, as suggested by Coupland (2003), the authentic speaker is indeed hard to find because we need to ask ourselves first, ‘Who is an authentic speaker’? When or if found, ‘the authentic speaker is very much more interesting than we had assumed’ (Coupland 2003, p. 425), because the concept of sociolinguistic authenticity is a relativized phenomenon, which is often generated locally. It is not a single-handed focal principle but rather a range of foci of ‘sociolinguistic authenticities,’ which are introduced differently in different local sociolinguistic contexts. There are multiple social meanings of authenticity expressed in language productions that should be grasped with different levels of indexicality (Coupland 2014). As Peterson (2005, p. 1090) notes, ‘The gifted individual creator may claim authenticity, and the master corporate strategist may, indeed, promote the individual

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or their products as authentic, but other classes of actors are important as the arbiters of authenticity.’ The idea of ‘authenticity’ then, as said by Yang (2018, p. 2), needs to be understood as a version of an identity which is often granted by insiders or outsiders. In particular, contemporary multi-ethnic/multi-racial societies are attached with ‘bountiful discourses on and multiple forms of ethnic and racial “authenticity”.’ ‘Authenticity’ is, thereby, incredibly complicated as it is in the process of ‘the constant shifting, crossing, and contesting of collective boundaries’ (Yang 2018, p. 2). It is ‘understood,’ ‘practiced’ and ‘constructed,’ which is ‘more than the primordial characteristics that are given or assigned to a given group, but is rather the result of authenticating discourses and acts that constantly inform statuses of ethnic identity’ (Yang 2018, p. 13). The ideology of ‘constructed authenticity,’ therefore, depends on situated specific contexts, their accompanying language ideologies, and their persistent roles in shaping ethnic, national and racial boundaries. In fact, according to Peterson (2005, p. 1086), “if authenticity is constructed and subject to continual change, then it clearly takes an effort to appear authentic. Such ‘authenticity work’ can take a number of forms.” In the context of sociolinguistics, authenticity takes many forms, though it is often associated with staying true to one’s own language, culture, and tradition. For example, the Tibetan language has been one of the most definitive factors in Tibetan students’ constant authenticating acts. According to Tibetan students’ narratives, the ideology of authenticity covers multiple acts including the purity of Tibetan blood, the capabilities to speak and write Tibetan, the purity of Tibetan language, and efforts to learn and develop Tibetan language and culture. Drawing on these narratives, Yang (2018, p. 13) characterizes the discourse on ‘authenticity’ through multiple layers of hierarchies: ‘the nomadic and rural are more “authentic” than the urban’; ‘Tibetans from Amdo and Ustang are more “authentic” than those from ‘Kham’; ‘the min kao min are more “authentic” than min kao han’; ‘Tibetan students with a Tibetan studies major are more “authentic” than those with a different major’; ‘“pure” Tibetan is at the top, half Tibetan half Han is in the middle and “fake” Tibetan is at the bottom’ etc. In a similar vein to Tibetans, many transnational young favorite music artists seek authenticity through performing in their ‘native’ or ‘root’ languages. For example, in the United States, the Korean hip-hop artist, Tiger JK, from Drunken Tiger seeks authenticity through rapping in his heritage language, Korean, in order to position himself as a bilingual ‘authoritative orator’ (Lee 2010, p. 145). Norwegian teenagers are more likely to rap in Norwegian instead of English, using their own dialect of Norwegian. In doing so, they seek to express ‘credibility,’ ‘authenticity,’ ‘self-experience’ and ‘belonging to a local place’ (Brunstad et al. 2010, p. 230). The popular German hip-hop group Fantastische Vier urges fellow German rappers to ‘stop borrowing from the Americans and instead turn to “Deutsche Sprechgesang” (German chanting speech)’ (Larkey 2003, p. 140). The promotion of using ‘only Belarusian’ language is prevalent to achieve a degree of authenticity in the context of popular music in Belarus (Survilla 2003). Due to the long period of Russian domination in Belarus, where Belarusian language and culture have endured aggressive censorship under

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the Russian Empire, mixing between English/Russian expressions within Belarusian rock music is perceived as an anti-national and inauthentic identity marker. The quest for ‘authenticity’ is complex and contested in Mongolia, because a majority of popular music groups who heavily rely on AAVE samples and American hip-hop repertoires may also claim themselves to be authentic performers. Despite its heavy dependence on English, some rock groups in Mongolia can also be deemed as ‘authentic’ by their listeners. An alternative rock group, A-Sound, for example, is often celebrated as ‘real and authentic’ performers, because of their appropriation of native-like British accents in their performances. The phonetic resemblance of British English is highly desirable in Mongolia, associated with the ideas of the birthplace of English, ‘Shakespearean English’ and ‘Queen’s English’ (Dovchin 2018). These various discourses on authenticities, thereby, enforce us to treat ‘authenticity’ as an elastic, complex and contested process. As Pennycook (2007, p. 103) sums it up, Hip-hop forces us to confront some of the conflictual discourses about authenticity: those who insist that African American hip hop is the real variety and that all other forms are inauthentic deviations; those who insist that hip-hop must be a culture of the streets and to become popular, to become a commercial success, is to sell out, to lose authenticity; those who insist that to be authentic one needs to stick to one’s ‘own’ cultural and linguistic domain, to draw on one’s ‘own’ traditions, to be overtly local; those who suggest that to be authentically local is a question of using a pure local variety of a language, be that a local English, a creole, or any language of the streets; those who insist that being authentic is a matter of telling people how one feels, that the expression of one’s feelings is an inherently authentic activity; those who claim that authenticity is a question of style and genre, of finding ways to tell a story that resonates with an audience, of achieving agreement about what matters; those who suggest that any recontextualization of language and culture renders it authentic anew. These are the multiple realities that hip-hop presents us with.

In fact, for Pennycook (2007, p. 103), following Shusterman (2005, p. 55), ‘the notion that reality is fundamentally mixed and multiple rather than pure and uniform provides a contrast to Plato’s view of reality as pure, ideal, permanent and changeless.’ In this light, Johnstone (2014, p. 98) underlines that sociolinguistic authenticity is ‘a social meaning,’ since some speakers may think of some linguistic variants as more authentic than others. Some might prefer or avoid particular linguistic patterns or talks as (in) authentic, locating the sociolinguistic authenticity often ‘in the play.’ As Lacoste et al. (2014, p. 1) reiterate, ‘Authenticity may be argued to be a relational concept which accounts for the many ways in which a speaker or agent can be authentic in a given situation in relation to a particular aspect of his or her environment.’ In other words, the global spread of varied linguistic authenticities is not a product, which is presupposed as an object to be discovered, but instead, it is a process (Bucholtz 2003). It is about the spread of validity and a particular kind of modality (Jaworski 2007) that needs to be treated as multiple valid processes and forms of cultural and linguistic identification that speakers actively produce (Higgins 2013, 2014). As Terkourafi (2010) concludes, authenticity should be perceived as a multivalent notion which co-exists collaboratively while reminding us that sociolinguistic reality is not exclusively one-way, but emergent and discursively created.

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Authenticity is understood as an issue of presenting multiple forms of realism within the fields of change and flow—‘a project of realism’ (Pennycook 2007, p. 103)—rather than a question of staying true to a prior set of embedded languages and practices. It should be attended as ‘processes’ through which participants ‘connect semiotic forms with complex sociocultural meanings while also making claims about the realness of language through processes of authentication and denaturalization’ (Bucholtz and Hall 2004). As Peterson (2005, p. 1086) concludes, authenticity, like ‘creativity’ or ‘entrepreneurship,’ does not necessarily inhere ‘in the object, person, or performance said to be authentic.’ Instead, authenticity is ‘a claim that is made by or for someone, thing, or performance and either accepted or rejected by relevant others.’ The notion of authenticity, hence, is not necessarily the persistence of pre-structured forms of objects, but rather as a determination to explore different linguistic possibilities and processes of significance in order to view things as authentic. That is to say, the focus is on how discourses on authenticity and its processes of localization constitute different sociolinguistic realities amongst English users.

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Chapter 3

Synchronous and Asynchronous Participants of Facebook

Data used in this book derives from two different larger ‘digital ethnographic research projects’ that looked into both synchronous and asynchronous social media participation of EFL university students from two East Asian countries—Mongolia and Japan. ‘Digital ethnography’ approach (Varis 2016; Buck 2012)—an ethnographic qualitative research methodology, which specifically looks at the behavior of online users, employing a natural and unobtrusive manner, was primarily applied (cf. Kozinets 2015). This seems to be an appropriate method since it gives recognition to the complexity inherent in the digital language practices observable in the social media, enriched with possibilities and affordances for the diverse reformation of semiotic resources and increased with diverse and novel meanings of these resources (Androutsopoulos 2011, 2015; Horst and Miller 2013). ‘Digital ethnography’ explores ‘real-life cultures through combining the characteristic features of digital media with the elements of story’ (Underberg and Zorn 2013, p. 10). It is especially useful in social media interactions since the users have several multimedia options when it comes to conveying their ideas, opinions, daily activities, relationships, and hobbies. Naess (2017, p. 106) notes that the tools of ‘digital ethnography’ can be used as ‘data-gathering devices due to their interactive characteristics’ and have been reinvented ‘to describe the expanding interactivity enabled by the proliferation of social media like YouTube and Facebook; networked individuals who can simultaneously produce, distribute and consume their own goods or services.’ As Gillin (2007, p. i) sums it up, ‘the real influencers are no longer marketing experts, nor the traditional media that has always controlled and filtered marketing messages, but millions of ordinary people who are determining in direct and powerful ways what people hear, say, and believe.’ It is in this respect ‘digital ethnography’ has transformed into a powerful and rapidly expanding online qualitative methodology, where the ethnographers rely on the virtues of online data by researching people by systematically observing their online lives (Naess 2017). With the borderless world of the Internet, ‘digital ethnography’ thus has a potentially much broader application since it allows people from a variety of physical locations. Even people with a lack of English language may engage in social media and online world on universal themes (Naess 2017). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Dovchin, Language, Social Media and Ideologies, SpringerBriefs in Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26139-9_3

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The first digital ethnographic project was focused on the synchronous side of social media communication of EFL university students at the National University of Mongolia outside their classroom practices. The synchronous communication indicates real-time interactions, live updating or live streaming, instantaneous exchanges such as chat rooms or concurrent online messaging, creating favorable opportunities for a one-to-many or many-to-many uncontrolled and uninhibited online communications (Bueno-Alastuey 2013). The synchronous social media interactions across EFL university students from Mongolia (e.g., Facebook live updates, Facebook live interactions, etc.) have presented us with the real-time spectacles of these students’ involvement with English such as their skills of blending, twisting and intermingling English with other available resources to make their meanings, exhibit their linguistic skills and convey their overall messages and attitudes. Overall, fifty students from various social backgrounds aged between 18 and 29 from the National University of Mongolia (NUM) volunteered to participate in the research between 2010 and 2015. Their socio-economic and regional backgrounds were diverse, varying from affluent to poor and from rural to urban before they gained admission to the NUM. As soon as they decided to become part of this research project, the participants were instantly added to my own Facebook account, which allowed me to observe the participants’ synchronous Facebook practices daily. During this process, a majority of students were interviewed in order to metalinguistically interpret their own multiple inner views, voices, identifications and claims in terms of their own Facebook English practices, and what it actually means to be ‘linguistically authentic.’ Occasionally, the various questions about authenticity naturally emerged during our interviews, but the issue of authenticity was also raised at times for some participants in response to my probing. The names of both individuals and institutions at the National University of Mongolia are pseudonyms to protect anonymity. All interviews were conducted in Mongolian in the context of these Mongolian students and translated from Mongolian into English by the researcher. The second project was focused on investigating the asynchronous social media engagement of EFL university students in Japan both inside and outside classroom contexts. The asynchronous online interaction refers to exchanges and altercations that do not necessarily take place in simultaneous real-time or live-streaming milieu. It enables a kind of one-way interaction in which online participants do not instantly ‘talk back’ to interlocutors as shown in the cases of email messages, discussion boards and so on (Jones and Hafner 2012; Stockwell and Harrington 2003). The asynchronous communication, as a result, places less interactional stress on students, by offering more planning time than required in synchronous communication. The Japan Society of the Promotion of Science—KAKENHI funded the research project, which was conducted at the University of Aizu, Japan (between October 2016 and April 2018), in elective courses titled such as ‘English and Globalization’, ‘English and Cyber Culture’, and ‘English for Active Communication’, with overall 110 students involved in the project. Each student was involved with the project for about a whole semester (around six months). The majority of research participants were primarily exposed to English through English textbooks in the classroom contexts, which are often deemed as the most

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appropriate way of learning English. This research project, however, aimed to create an alternative pedagogical space to help students explore English through alternative eyes and thinking, going beyond traditional English textbooks. A learning environment was developed in the classroom through specific tasks based on asynchronous texts on Facebook, in which the readings and writings emerged out of real-life English texts that were commonly presented on Facebook. A recent trend in task-based language learning and teaching (TBLLT), which advocates for real-world contexts (Jackson and Burch 2017), has been applied in order to develop tasks that stimulate real-life English. TBLLT tends to encourage for computer-mediated social media learning activities that give rise to real-life English use while engaging students in a variety of cognitive processes, stimulating not only four skills of English learners (oral, written, reading and listening), but also giving learners opportunities to negotiate meaning-making practices (Ziegler 2016). The linguistic and cognitive aspects involved in these types of tasks mainly seek to improve the learners’ engagement with the complexity in language use, rather than solely focusing on grammatic accuracy or fluency (Ziegler 2016). While language learners are involved with real-life simulated tasks, they can also develop their interactional competence and to interact with geographically dispersed individuals, to improve their critical socio-cultural and intercultural awareness (Jenks 2018), acquire the pragmatic technology literacy skills necessary to be members of social media communities (Ziegler 2016). As Jenks (2018, p. 339) concludes, ‘The ongoing changes and demands of communicating and collaborating in a larger network of users represent learning opportunities […], but in addition to possessing the competence needed to adjust to group norms as they are presented, social media requires learners to fine-tune their language, in situ, to fit fellow interlocutors’ linguistic and cultural norms and expectations.’ The tasks, thereby, were formulated to encourage students’ asynchronous interaction on Facebook as they were not necessarily involved real-time with other Facebook users. Instead, they observed the asynchronous authentic Facebook texts without obstructive manners both inside and outside classrooms. Students were then directed to make a critical discourse analysis on these Facebook texts, which contained some of the critical local and global issues concerning Japan. The main topic was focused on the disputes surrounding the Tohoku earthquake of 2011 and its devastating aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. This topic was particularly crucial for these students as the University of Aizu is situated in the epicenter of the post-Fukushima disaster. A majority of students are residents of Fukushima, who also personally experienced the disaster in 2011. All students were directed to join the Facebook group, ‘The Fukushima disaster and social media’ created by the instructor (see Fig. 3.1). The instructor started posting a wide variety of articles provided by Western news broadcasters on Facebook (e.g., CNN, BBC, ABC, Sydney Morning Herald, New York Times, etc.), and their accompanying asynchronous comments written by the Facebook users (Fig. 3.2).

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Fig. 3.1 ‘Fukushima disaster and social media’ Facebook group

Fig. 3.2 The examples of Facebook interactions

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Upon joining this Facebook group, the students were instructed to read the articles and commentaries on a daily basis in both inside and outside classroom contexts. They were tasked to make meticulous observations and take notes if they encounter any interesting or attention-grabbing English words, expressions, and sentences. Upon the completion of Facebook text analysis, students were directed to write a critical essay and deliver a presentation in English on the topic of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and its revitalization, and their overall experience with English on Facebook. Students were also instructed to participate in a face-to-face interview with the researcher to share their experience with Facebook and English. They were interviewed in-depth in order to capture the topics, words, expressions, languages, and contents they identified on Facebook, their attitudes and understanding to the content of the Facebook data, their expectations of what they would or would not see as authentic English on Facebook and what they had learned from Facebook. Comments relating to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Facebook English and the idea of authenticity was one of the central questions to the analysis. The names of individuals at the University of Aizu, Japan are pseudonyms to protect anonymity. A majority of interviews were held in English in the context of these Japanese students.

3.1 Transtextuality Although multimodality is deemed as one of the most useful frameworks for analysing situated human interactions on social media, it also prefixes semiotic complexity, overlooking to account for ‘the complex ways in which these “modes” or “modalities” link up with, influence, and transform’ with regard to one another and ‘their arrangement in non-contiguous stretches of time’ (Murphy 2012, p. 1966). Similar to the notion of multilingualism, which tends to pluralize monolingualism rather than complexifying it, the framework of multimodality (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001) tends to signify the use of a plurality of modes rather than a transgressive mixture of modalities. As Pennycook (2007, p. 49) puts it, ‘not only are languages not discrete entities in relation to each other, but the separation of language from the complexity of signs with which its use is associated has limited our understanding of a broader semiotics.’ As critical digital ethnographers, we, therefore, need to address this limitation, focusing on the ‘simultaneous layering of modes in single moments of interaction’ (Murphy 2012, p. 1967). We should aim to understand that ‘the forms or meanings of given modes’ do not necessarily ‘correspond with or support one another,’ but they also seem to ‘exert some degree of sway over the manifestation of subsequent action’ (Murphy 2012, p. 1967). From this point of view, digital ethnographers have started drawing their attention to the ways in which meaning ‘occurs across modes of meaning-making in ways that transgress established beliefs in discrete channels’ (Pennycook 2007, p. 49). New textual analytic frameworks such as ‘transtextual framework’ (Sultana et al. 2014), ‘transmodality’ (Murphy 2012; Pennycook 2007; Shipka 2016; Dovchin 2018) and ‘transliteracies framework’ (Lu and Horner 2013; Stornaiuolo et al. 2017) have been

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introduced in order to unlock the complex textual relations embedded within the translingual turn. The central ethos of these frameworks advocates for ‘the multiple, interconnected, and systemic dimensions of human practice’ (Lu and Horner 2013, p. 587), because difference is treated not as a problem to be solved or corrected, but ‘as a resource for making and negotiating meaning’ (Shipka 2016, p. 251). Communication practices are always already ‘trans,’ and it makes much more sense if we reveal ‘how concretely engaging with different modes, genres, materials, cultural practices, communicative technologies, and language varieties impacts our abilities to make and negotiate meaning.’ (Shipka 2016, p. 251). A way of thinking about English use on social media through transmodality, thus, opens up the ways how English is diffused within and across multiple modes of semiotics (Pennycook 2007). Certain modes cannot be viewed as discrete items outside other meaning-making practices, e.g., ‘bodies, texts, contexts, and histories in which they are embedded’ (Pennycook 2007, p. 49). As Pennycook (2007, p. 49) puts it, ‘not only are languages not discrete entities in relation to each other, but the separation of language from the complexity of signs with which its use is associated has limited our understanding of a broader semiotics.’ Similarly, a ‘transtextual analytic framework’ (Sultana et al. 2015) suggests that texts ‘have meaning not in themselves but only when used; they need to be understood productively, contextually and discursively; because they have histories, they are contextually influenced, and they occur within larger frameworks of meaning’ (Pennycook 2007, p. 53). From this point of view, the data was analyzed through a set of interpretive and discursive tools involving: • pretextual history (socio-historical implications of the text); • contextual relations (the physical location, the indexical meaning in the actual text); • subtextual meaning (the socio-cultural ideologies and the relations of power that affect the text); • intertextual echoes (the covert associations to other texts); • post-textual interpretation (the metalinguistic interpretations of the speakers’ own texts) (Pennycook 2007, pp. 53–54). While the pretextual, contextual and intertextual analyses made it possible to unzip the varied linguistic and cultural styles, genres, codes, modes and resources integrated within the translingual practices, the subtextual analysis opened up the way to understanding the wider socio-cultural and historical sub-meanings, backgrounds, and factors embedded within translingual practices. The corpus data collected from Facebook (e.g., multimodal texts, social media links, emojis, Facebook default languages, paralinguistic signs, videos, comments, interactions etc.) was, thus, analyzed through transtextuality and transmodality, in which one’s English social media practices cannot be viewed as discrete items outside other meaning-making practices. Correspondingly, the English social media practices of research participants were also analysed in integration with participants’ offline sociolinguistic background, linguistic skill, individual desires, life philosophy, and aspirations, supported by the metalinguistic and posttextual ‘interview accounts’ (Copland and Creese 2015) of

3.1 Transtextuality

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these students. During this process, different themes started to emerge in terms of their English learning processes and the ideologies of ‘authenticity,’ which were pulled together to make a conceptual argument for a potential chapter, which was later categorized under the broader category of all data analysis chapters. Chapters 4, 5 and 6, consequently, present how Mongolian EFL university students are synchronically engaged with English and Facebook through linguistic creativity and playfulness in everyday contexts (Swann and Maybin 2007), while metalinguistically claim their own translingual English practices on Facebook as linguistically authentic and legitimate. Chapters 7 and 8, by contrast, illustrate how Japanese EFL university students asynchronically engage with Facebook while claiming their encounters with translingual Englishes as linguistically ‘real’ and ‘authentic.’

References Androutsopoulos, J. 2011. From variation to heteroglossia in the study of computer-mediated discourse. In Digital discourse: Language in the new media, ed. C. Thurlow and K. Mroczek, 277–298. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Androutsopoulos, J. 2015. Networked multilingualism: Some language practices on Facebook and their implications. International Journal of Bilingualism 19 (2): 185–205. Buck, A. 2012. Examining digital literacy practices on social network sites. Research in the Teaching of English 47 (1): 9–38. Bueno-Alastuey, M. 2013. Interactional feedback in synchronous voice-based computer-mediated communication: Effect of dyad. System 41: 543–559. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2013.05. 005. Copland, F., and A. Creese. 2015. Linguistic ethnography: Collecting, analysing and presenting data. London: SAGE. Dovchin, S. 2018. Dissatisfaction and dissent in the transmodal performances of hip-hop artists in Mongolia. In Dissatisfaction and dissent: The sociolinguistics of hip-hop as critical conscience, ed. A. Ross and D. Rivers, 191–213. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dovchin, S., S. Sultana, and A. Pennycook. 2015. Relocalizing the translingual practices of young adults in Mongolia and Bangladesh. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 1 (1): 4–26. Gillin, P. 2007. The new influencers: A marketers guide to social marketing. Sanger, CA: Quill Driver Books/Word Dancer Press. Horst, H., and D. Miller (eds.). 2013. Digital anthropology. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Jackson, D., and A. Burch. 2017. Complementary theoretical perspectives on task-based classroom realities. TESOL Quarterly 51 (3): 493–506. Jenks, C. 2018. Learning through social media. In The Cambridge guide to second language learning, ed. A. Burns and J. Richards, 335–343. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, R.H., and C.A. Hafner. 2012. Understanding digital literacies: A practical introduction. London: Routledge. Kozinets, R.V. 2015. Netnography: Redefined. London: Sage. Kress, G., and T. van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Arnold. Lu, M.Z., and B. Horner. 2013. Translingual literacy, language difference, and matters of agency. College English 75 (6): 582–607. Murphy, K.M. 2012. Transmodality and temporality in design interactions. Journal of Pragmatics 44 (14): 1966–1981.

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Naess, H.E. 2017. Authenticity matters: A digital ethnography of FIA World Rally Championship fan forums. Sport Management Review 20 (1): 105–113. Pennycook, A. 2007. Global Englishes and transcultural flows. London: Routledge. Shipka, J. 2016. Transmodality in/and processes of making: Changing dispositions and practice. College English 78 (3): 250. Stockwell, G., and M. Harrington. 2003. The incidental development of L2 proficiency in NS-NNS email interactions. CALICO Journal 20 (2): 337–359. Stornaiuolo, A., A. Smith, and N.C. Phillips. 2017. Developing a transliteracies framework for a connected world. Journal of Literacy Research 49 (1): 68–91. Sultana, S., S. Dovchin, and A. Pennycook. 2014. Transglossic language practices of young adults in Bangladesh and Mongolia. International Journal of Multilingualism 12 (1): 93–108. Swann, J., and J. Maybin. 2007. Introduction: Language creativity in everyday contexts. Applied Linguistics 28 (4): 491–496. Varis, P. 2016. Digital ethnography. In The Routledge handbook of language and digital communication, ed. A. Georgakopoulou and T. Spilioti, 69–82. London: Routledge. Underberg, N.M., and E. Zorn. 2013. Digital ethnography: Anthropology, narrative, and new media. Austin, USA: University of Texas Press. Ziegler, N. 2016. Taking technology to task: Technology-mediated TBLT, performance, and production. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 36: 136–163.

Chapter 4

African American Vernacular English, Hip-Hop and ‘Keepin’ It Real’

This chapter will examine the translingual social media Englishes formed by EFL university students in Mongolia, whose linguistic practices are entangled with hip-hop oriented texts (e.g., rap lyrics, hip-hop artists’ names and titles, quotes from rappers, musicians’ interviews, parodies from music videos, etc.), and other African American Vernacular English (AAVE) resources. While using and incorporating hip-hop and AAVE within their social media linguistic practices, these students simultaneously claim the idea of authenticity through the hip-hop ideology of ‘keepin’ it real.’ It has been noted in previous studies that many hip-hop fans and listeners expand and improve their daily online/offline linguistic practices, drawing on multiple linguistic and cultural hip-hop oriented resources (Androutsopoulos 2007, 2009; Dovchin 2015; Roth-Gordon 2009; Higgins 2009a, b). Roth-Gordon (2009) recorded the daily linguistic repertoires of young Brazilian hip-hop fans, whose languages are produced by the creative practices of recycling and sampling hip-hop song lyrics, the method she refers to as ‘conversational sampling.’ Hip-hop fans create new and shared meanings for rap lyrics through the juxtaposition of new and old contexts on both local and global levels. Rap song lyrics are ‘easily detachable and highly transportable from one context to another’ when young hip-hop fans joke to each other in the conversation (Roth-Gordon 2009, p. 69). They, for example, transform Rio rapper M. V. Bill’s refrain from his rap song, ‘Pronto para atirar, pronto para matar’ [‘Ready to shoot, ready to kill’] to discuss about a favela youth’s life of crime; lines from Racionais MC’s song to converse about police harassment and the daily experience of racial profiling (Roth-Gordon 2009, p. 69). The conversation sampling from AAVE or hip-hop oriented resources lies in the ‘linguistic creativity, skill, and pleasure Brazilian youth display when they swap familiar lyrics amongst friends,’ and becomes part of ‘a global communicative competence, where transnational linguistic practices inform local identity construction and style.’ (Roth-Gordon 2009, p. 69; see also Lee 2010).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Dovchin, Language, Social Media and Ideologies, SpringerBriefs in Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26139-9_4

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The comment section of a social media site such as YouTube provides a favourable site for discussion among hip-hop song viewers and listeners in Australia (Ross 2018). While the lyrical content and focus of the track are some of the most critical topics integrated within the texts produced by YouTube viewers, there are also diverse discursive and textual interactions and debates among the viewers with differing perspectives. Many instances of prolonged and continuing arguments being incited and the expression of dissent and dissatisfaction towards the content of the lyrics and videos are visible. Some viewers, for example, appropriate a lyric in the YouTube comments of the track of Australian hip-hop group The Herd’s rap song ‘77%’, which opposes to the Australian government’s decision to refuse entry to the asylum seekers aboard the Tampa and the 77% of Australians who supported the decision. These viewers use a lyrical line from the track (e.g., ‘Fuck, I just can’t understand’) in their expressing dissatisfaction against this decision: ‘This song is so flicking right in its attempt. So many people going against it, but the fact is if it was your family on the boat you would change your tune!! Escaping prosecution to enter a prison camp that media staff are refused entry to must be some kind of hell. How people look the other way is beyond me—well, it’s not my problem … Fuck, I just can’t understand.’ (Ross 2018, p. 88). Certain Internet discussion forums related to hip-hop are an extensive collection of natural language material produced by hip-hop consumers, where they recontextualize multiple AAVE-oriented resources mixed with their local language practices (Garley 2010). For example, an online community of German hip-hop fans heavily use AAVE/HHNL term such as ‘Piiz’ or ‘Peaz’—an alternative orthographic version for ‘Peace’; ‘this’ as ‘diz’ or alternative versions’ tha’ or ‘da’ for the definite article ‘the’ (Androutsopoulos and Scholz 2003; Berns and Schlobinski 2003); the local phrase ‘realkeepen’ instead of English ‘keepin’ it real’—an ideology that is interpreted as ‘being true to oneself, one’s local allegiances and territorial identities, and one’s proximity to an original source of rap’ (Cutler 2010, p. 301). Online fans are involved with all hip-hop speech events aiming towards hip-hop fandom including the talks about hip-hop concerts, discussing rap music and lyrics, or interacting on message boards and other platforms of online activities extended to hip-hop focused topics and beyond, and making a hip-hop homepage or weblog, a digital practice called as ‘written representations of colloquial [hip-hop] speech’ (Androutsopoulos 2009, p. 46). Meanwhile, many fans incorporate hip-hop or AAVE oriented resources within their daily online translingual practices as they claim their own ‘authentic’ linguistic versions (Dovchin 2015). As they draw on different samples and modes from AAVE and hip-hop, they are doing far more than just referring to a particular hip-hop video or rap song they like. In fact, using specific hip-hop texts serves within their Facebook linguistic practices as an essential source for expressing their views on linguistic and cultural authenticity. Following the hip-hop mantra of ‘keepin’ it real,’ many young hip-hop fans claim their translingual English practices to be authentic through either their particular usage of hip-hop stylistic repertories or through their import of content and topics that are expressed (Dovchin 2015, 2018). In so doing, they create multiple and conflicting ways of what it means to be linguistically authentic (Terk-

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Extract 4.1 ‘Keepin’ it real’: ‘Dalai Lama Peaz!’ Facebook wall post

Translation 1. My fellow Mongolians! Drink more airag, less vodka! Dalai Lama Peaz!

2. The Mongolian language that we have learned since early childhood is the culture that should never be forgotten. Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj…Big Respect!!!!

Language guide: regular font = Mongolian; italics = English

ourafi 2010). Rather than identifying themselves as marginalized, or as inauthentic hip-hop wannabes, these hip-hop fans seek to redefine their local environments in ‘real/authentic’ terms associated with the global cultural capital of global hip-hop (Higgins 2009b). Hip-hop fans claim their translingual practices as authentic since the incorporation of AAVE is part of their hip-hop identities rather than so-called ‘foreign imports’ (Pennycook 2003). As soon as these speakers start displaying both their strong identification with transnational hip-hop and their strong attachment with their local contexts, it becomes much more complicated to define their import of AAVE as a mere mimicry (Alim et al. 2009). Consider the example below, in which Otgon, an EFL student at the National University of Mongolia, incorporates AAVE resources on his Facebook live wall updates (cf. Lee 2011 on Facebook status updates). Otgon is a very proud young Mongolian man, who seems to have a strong emotional attachment to his traditional Mongolian roots, language, and culture. Yet, he also identifies himself as an avid hip-hop fan, and his life motto is—‘keepin’ [everything] real.’ Otgon is frequent with his Facebook activities, where he updates his Facebook status at least once a day, habitually posting a series of inspirational Mongolian-oriented and patriotic aphorisms by public figures (Dovchin 2015, pp. 445–448) (Extract 4.1). In line 1, Otgon updates his Facebook wall with one of the Dalai Lama’s famous sayings during his visit to Mongolia, where he famously called for Mongolians not to drink too much vodka, as the tradition of drinking vodka was inherited from Soviet times and has dominated the beverage scene in Mongolia ever since. Instead, the Dalai Lama called for Mongolians to stick to their own traditional drink, ‘airag’ [‘fermented mare’s milk’]—a traditional Mongolian beverage, brewed with mare’s milk, containing a small amount of carbon dioxide and up to two percent alcohol. Sharing this message with the public thus refers to the Dalai Lama’s way of saying ‘keepin’ it real’ for Mongolians. Otgon calls for authenticity by supporting local cultural products such as ‘airag,’ instead of the imported product vodka. Clearly,

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the message of the Dalai Lama is vital to Otgon, as Tibetan Buddhism is the main religion in contemporary Mongolia. In line 2, Otgon posts a famous aphorism by the renowned Mongolian novelist, Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj (1906–1937), who was one of the most popular modern classic Mongolian poets and novelists, known as the founding father of contemporary Mongolian literature. Here, Otgon shows his patriotism through the sentiment of keeping the Mongolian language real (Dovchin 2015, pp. 445–448). Linguistically, in lines 1 and 2, Otgon incorporates a very particular African American Vernacular English (AAVE) term, ‘Peaz’—an alternative orthographic version for ‘Peace’ (line 1), and a favorite AAVE phrase ‘Big Respect’ [‘to pay respect to someone’] (line 2). Note also that Otgon uses the common Facebook symbolic resource of a smiling emoticon face ‘☺’ to express his situational happy mood. Overall, Otgon uses Cyrillic Mongolian on these Facebook examples, unlike many other online Mongolian users whose online orthographic choices are often transliterated Mongolian Roman scripts. Using Cyrillic Mongolian is understood through his hip-hop motto of ‘keepin’ it real’: ‘I try to stick to our own Cyrillic more often because we have our own writing system we should be proud of. I also fear that Cyrillic might get replaced by Latin, just like old Mongolian script was replaced during the socialist time’ (Otgon, Interview, March 11, 2013, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia). Here, Otgon feels threatened by Roman script, because of a previous event in 1941, when the Mongolian government authorized the replacement of the classic Mongolian Uyghur script with the Cyrillic alphabet when transcribing the Mongolian language. Since then, Cyrillic has remained the standard orthographic system of Mongolia. What is ironic here though is the fact that Cyrillic Mongolian has replaced the classic Mongolian script, yet Otgon feels threatened by Roman script now since Cyrillic Mongolian is already perceived as ‘authentic’ and ‘Mongolian’ for this student (Dovchin 2015, pp. 445–448). Meanwhile, during the metalinguistic interview sessions, Otgon has also revealed his offline linguistic repertoire, which also somewhat stylized by AAVE and hip-hop oriented resources. See the interview Extract 4.2. Here, Otgon expresses his view on the Mongolian rap music video ‘Freestyle’ performed by the hip-hop group Lumino, where he slams the clip to be inauthentic because it seems to directly copy many modes from the American hip-hop performers. Ironically, Otgon starts mobilizing AAVE (African American Vernacular English) and hip-hop resources in his own linguistic repertoire (Dovchin 2016, pp. 22–24): • Multiple AAVE features are incorporated such as copula deletions; post-vocalic r-lessness ‘playaz’ instead of ‘players’ (line 1); ‘fuckez’ instead of ‘fuckers’ (line 4); substandard subject-verb agreement, ‘it ain’t’ instead of ‘it is not’ (Lee 2004). • English is used through local semiotic and symbolic reconstruction rather than linguistic function as Otgon not only integrates the English titled Mongolian song ‘Freestyle’ (line 1, 3) repetitively in his narrative, but he also incorporates the English stem term ‘hip-hop’ (line 2). Here, Otgon simply refers to the local hip-hop artist’s video rather than directly speaking English. Besides, Otgon only borrows

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Extract 4.2 ‘Mongolian hip-hop is not real?!’: ‘Ain’t real, man!’ Transcription guide …

Texts omitted

“…”

Reporting statements of others

((…))

Non-linguistic features, explanation utterances or situations for readers’ comprehensibility

!

Animated and firm tone

?

Rising pitch/intonation followed by a noticeable pause as at the end of an interrogative sentence

CAPS

Loud & emphatic utterances

Interview extract

Translation

Otgon: 1. … “Freestyle” bol kheden Baruuniig duuraisan playaz

Otgon: 1. “Freestyle” is performed by a bunch of playaz trying to be Westerners

2. Mongol HIP HOP Bish shuuudee! TIIM BIZDEE? ((Sounds annoyed))

2. Simply, it isn’t a real Mongolian Hip Hop! Is it?

3. “Freestyle” bol kheterhii baruuniig khuusun, khungun khiisver zuil kharuulsan ((long pause))

3. “Freestyle” shows too Westernized and shallow stuff

4. Angli rap ni shuud ichguurguigeer Amerikiin emegtei rapperiin ugnees taviaad tuutsan fuckez ((deep voice))

4. English rap part has shamelessly ripped off from the American female rapper’s lyrics, fuckez

5. Ain’t real MAn…

5. Ain’t real man

Language guide: regular font = Mongolian; italics= English

‘hip-hop’ from English because there is no Mongolian equivalent translation for ‘hip-hop’ and everyone uses ‘hip-hop’ as part of Mongolian language nowadays. • Otgon uses Anglicized Mongolian terms such as ‘rap ni’ and ‘rapperiin’ (line 3), which have been used in the local popular music scene since 1990 due to the popularity of hip-hop in new post-socialist Mongolia. The English root ‘rap’ is localized differently here as with the mixture of the Mongolian suffix ‘ni’ [‘is’] as it creates a locally relevant meaning of ‘rap ni’ [‘rap is’]. The combination between the English stem ‘rapper’ and the Mongolian suffix ‘-iin’ [‘apostrophe “s”’] creates the Anglicized Mongolian term ‘rapperiin’ [‘rapper’s’], which is totally indecipherable to English speakers. • When Otgon says ‘man’ (line 5), he uses a sped-up masculine voice and tone, pronounced explicitly with initial stress instead of final stress (‘MA-n’). This practice has also been noted within AAVE, where the initial syllables of some specific words (‘PO-lice,’ ‘DE-troit’) are primarily stressed (Green 2002). Overall, Otgon’s integration of AAVE resources in his linguistic repertoires is better understood through his out of classroom leisure activity where he is extensively

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involved with the hip-hop genre. Otgon also claims that he mainly learns English from American Hip Hop artists such as Eminem, 2Pac and Jay-Z, because he listens to the songs of these artists by learning and translating the lyrics and practicing the skill of rapping (Interview, September 30, 2010, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia) (see also Dovchin 2016). The reference to importing AAVE resources in his social media practice is, thus, interpreted through his strong identification with the hip-hop genre. Otgon demonstrates the ‘loyal fan’ behaviours identified by Perkins (2012, p. 357)— the loyal fans of particular performers seem to identify with the genre within their daily practices and lifestyles. It is also similar to young politically conscious rap fans in Brazil, who seamlessly integrate rap lyrics into their everyday speech (RothGordon 2009). One way of being linguistically authentic for Otgon, thus, means to be loyal to transnational hip-hop through his speech style. Otgon seeks to ‘keep himself real’ by re-emphasizing ‘the elements of verbal skill and wit found in hip hop’s lineage in African American sounding practices’ (Terkourafi 2010, p. 12). What is ironic here is the fact that Otgon’s overall sense of ‘keepin’ Mongolian tradition real’ can be immediately challenged by his frequent idiosyncratic importation of AAVE resources. This also shows the ironic and elastic aspects of the idea of authenticity. To put it differently, we may question whether Otgon sticks to his own tradition by only drinking airag and refusing imported vodka, while he also uses a foreign import such as AAVE (line 1). Alternatively, how can he protect his local language (line 2) while he is also using AAVE here? Why does Otgon call for an authentic hip-hop music video when his speech, in fact, is drawing on multiple AAVE resources (Extract 4.2)? Does it, in the end, make Otgon an ‘inauthentic speaker’ or ‘the imitator of American hip-hop’? Otgon’s metalinguistic and posttextual interpretation on his sociolinguistic authenticity gives us an insight into his importation of AAVE: ‘I’m not a fake Hip Hop fan. I am “keepin’ it real.” I do not just superficially listen to hip-hop, I stick to its main philosophy.’ As much as he is loyal to hip-hop, Otgon also claims that he is an ‘honest’ person in all aspects of his life: ‘“Keepin’ it real” basically means to be loyal and honest for everything I do’ (Interview, March 11, 2013, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia). What it means to be authentic therefore is to be ‘honest’ in whatever you do, no matter what language you use. Thus, the importation of AAVE into his daily repertoires can be perceived as authentic in his view, because it is embedded within his overall ‘honest’ attitude to life. This means that the incorporation of AAVE is part of his identity and his local language practice rather than being a so-called ‘foreign import.’ As soon as this speaker starts displaying both his strong identification with transnational hip-hop and his emotional attachment with his home country, the definition of his importation of AAVE becomes much more complicated than mere mimicry. What it means to be authentic for Otgon, thus, is to stay loyal to tradition, culture and language that he is emotionally attached to (be it Mongolian culture or hip-hop culture), and the integration of AAVE from this perspective should be interpreted as part of his loyalty towards hip-hop culture and its central ideology.

4.1 Conclusion

41

4.1 Conclusion This chapter seeks to expand the existing literature on ‘translingual Englishes’ by illustrating the online (sometimes offline) Facebook linguistic practices of Mongolian EFL student, who happens to be an American hip-hop fan. Data examples indicate that hip-hop oriented resources may play a significant role in enabling translingual English practices among Mongolian hip-hop fans. It is almost impossible to fully apprehend the daily lifestyle of hip-hop fans without understanding their tight involvement with hip-hop culture, expanding their creative textual productivity. They import, recycle and relocalize varied AAVE specific linguistic features, stylistic repertoires, modes, codes and resources from the transnational hip-hop song lyrics, quotes, lines, ideologies, philosophies and so on. They are involved with all types of hip-hop oriented speech events including the talks and criticisms about hiphop albums and music videos; reconfiguration of AAVE or lines from rap lyrics; interactions in message boards and other platforms of online talks about hip-hop. Meanwhile, the translingual English practices of these students cannot be simply understood as the mere mimicry of AAVE, but rather it is better explored through the relocalization of multiple hip-hop oriented transnational resources within their Facebook translingual practices. What it means to be linguistically authentic is directly associated with their strong attachment and bond with the overall hip-hop culture, and its main philosophy—‘keepin’ it real.’ They powerfully demonstrate the ‘loyal hip-hop fan’ behaviours to identify with the hip-hop genre, and one obvious way of being authentic is to be loyal to hip-hop through their speech styles and linguistic repertoires. They desire to ‘keepin’ it real’ by reinforcing the unique elements and features of verbal resources found in hip hop’s lineage in AAVE sounding practices. It is, of course, ironic that their frequent usage of AAVE resources can challenge their sense of ‘keepin’ Mongolian tradition real’. Yet, their metalinguistic accounts reveal that they aspire to be authentic and honest in whatever they do and no matter what language one uses. Thus, the recycling of AAVE into their translingual repertoires can be perceived as authentic in their views, because their linguistic practices are embedded within their overall ‘honest and loyal’ attitude to life. This means that the usage of AAVE is part of their identity and their local language practices rather than being so-called ‘foreign imitators’. What it means to be linguistically authentic for these hip-hop fans, thus, is to stay loyal to local tradition, culture and language that they are emotionally attached to (be it Mongolian culture or hip-hop culture), and the integration of AAVE from this part should also be understood as part of their loyalty towards hip-hop culture and its central ideology—‘keepin’ it real’.

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References Alim, S., A. Ibrahim, and A. Pennycook (eds.). 2009. Global linguistic flows: Hip hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language. New York: Routledge. Androutsopoulos, J. 2007. Bilingualism in the mass media and on the Internet. In Bilingualism: A social approach, ed. M. Heller, 207–232. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Androutsopoulos, J. 2009. Language and the three spheres of hip hop. In Global linguistic flows, hip hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language, ed. S. Alim, A. Ibrahim, and A. Pennycook, 43–63. New York: Routledge. Androutsopoulos, J., and A. Scholz. 2003. Spaghetti funk: Appropriations of hip-hop culture and rap music in Europe. Popular Music and Society 26 (4): 463–479. Berns, J., and P. Schlobinski. 2003. Constructions of identity in German hip hop culture. In Discourse constructions of youth identities, ed. J. Androutsopoulos and A. Georgakopoulou, 197–221. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cutler, C. 2010. ‘She’s so Hood’: Ghetto authenticity on the white rapper show. In The languages of global hip hop, ed. M. Terkourafi, 300–329. London: Continuum. Dovchin, S. 2015. Language, multiple authenticities and social media: The online language practices of university students in Mongolia. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19 (4): 437–459. Dovchin, S. 2016. The transcultural role of English in the linguascape of EFL university students in Mongolia. In Transcultural flows in English language education in Asia, ed. T. Barrett, and M. Fellin. Lanham: Lexington Books. Dovchin, S. 2018. Language, media and globalization in the periphery. Routledge studies in sociolinguistics. New York: Routledge. Garley, M. 2010. Realkeepen: Anglicisms in the German hip-hop community. In The languages of global hip hop, ed. M. Terkourafi, 277–300. London: Continuum. Green, L.J. 2002. African American English: A linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Higgins, C. 2009a. English as a local language: Post-colonial identities and multilingual practices. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Higgins, C. 2009b. From Da Bomb to Bomba. In Global linguistic flows, hip hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language, ed. S. Alim, A. Ibrahim, and A. Pennycook, 95–112. New York: Routledge. Lee, C.K. 2011. Micro-blogging and status updates on Facebook: Texts and practices. In Digital discourse: Language in the new media, ed. C. Thurlow and K. Mroczek, 110–128. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee, J.S. 2004. Linguistic hybridization in K-Pop: Discourse of self-assertion and resistance. World Englishes 23 (3): 429–450. Lee, J.S. 2010. Glocalizing keepin’ it real: South Korean hip-hop playas. In The languages of global hip hop, ed. M. Terkourafi, 139–162. London: Continuum. Pennycook, A. 2003. Global Englishes, Rip Slyme and performativity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4): 513–533. Perkins, A. 2012. How devoted are you? An examination of online music fan behaviour. Annals of Leisure Research 15 (4): 354–365. Ross, A.S. 2018. “77% of Aussies Are Racist”: Intersections of politics and hip-hop in Australia. In The sociolinguistics of hip-hop as critical conscience, ed. A.S. Ross, 69–99. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Roth-Gordon Jr., J. 2009. Conversational sampling, race trafficking, and the invocation of the Gueto in Brazilian hip hop. In Global linguistic flows, hip hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language, ed. S. Alim, A. Ibrahim, and A. Pennycook, 63–79. New York: Routledge. Terkourafi, M. (ed.). 2010. The languages of global hip hop. London: Continuum.

Chapter 5

Heavy Englishes and the Enactment of Authentic Self

This chapter looks at ‘heavy,’ ‘dominant’ or ‘derivative’ usage of English integrated within the translingual English texts formed by the Mongolian EFL university students on social media, while these ‘heavy’ assimilations of English may also signal the idea of linguistic authenticity. Jacquemet (2005, pp. 265–266) reminds us that transnational speakers take up not only ‘linguistic innovations with heavy borrowing from English, but any number of other languages’ along with other semiotic resources that are pragmatically and intertextually involved within their daily lives. This ‘heavy borrowing from English’ is, correspondingly, referred to as ‘derivative linguascapes’ by Dovchin (2018), in which English might superficially appear as if it is a ‘direct mimicry, imitation or even plagiarism’, because EFL users profoundly engage in various derivative linguistic acts, where English may often take dominant place. However, a close analysis may also reveal that ‘derivative linguascapes are a common deliberate performance for varied creative functions and identity purposes’ (Dovchin 2018, p. 69). Heavy borrowing from English do not necessarily repeat the same things but are an act of difference and renewal, since they are about everyday creativity in language, in which language users strategically and wisely reformulate linguistic and other communicative resources to achieve their communicative aims (Dovchin 2018; Maybin and Swann 2006). In other words, social media users may interact on Facebook not necessarily through ‘bits and pieces’ of English but rather through ‘constant,’ ‘prevalent’ and ‘persistent’ incorporation of English. Young Chinese netizens, for example, seem to utilize full English sentences (e.g., ‘Let’s Show’; ‘Hai! Happy New Year!’; ‘Me too.’ etc.); or paragraphs in English (e.g., ‘Me? Simple, mature, calm, and kind. Treasure friendship and hard work, trying to do whatever I can to help my friends… What else?’; ‘I don’t feel sorry for her. She doesn’t play much after all for these two seasons, but her back is still getting worse. Obviously rest is useless to help her healing.’) in their social media participation (Gao 2012, pp. 158–161). Heavy borrowing from English such as the lyrics of English songs and catchphrases from English movies are also observed in the Facebook interaction of young adults in Bangladesh (Sutlana 2012, 2014). In a longer Facebook conversation between three Bangla girls, for example, they are seen to be conversing about a specific teacher and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Dovchin, Language, Social Media and Ideologies, SpringerBriefs in Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26139-9_5

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their crush on him. As one of the girls writes using English exclusively, ‘anyways, i’ve been seriously thinking about asking him out on a date O_o…i mean i’m not his student anymore:$,’ while another replies, ‘brag… or anything… and don’t deny your OWN dreams where i am his gf ((girlfriend))!:p’ (Sultana 2014, p. 51). These direct English voices, however, are not just mere mimicry, as they allow them to ‘cross the boundaries between themselves and the linguistic and cultural other,’ even when they are physically and firmly located in Bangladesh (Sultana 2014, p. 51). Meanwhile, data examples in this chapter, display another facet of linguistic authenticity, in which ‘heavy’ absorption of English in one’s social media practice may also signal the language users’ advanced linguistic skills and high linguistic confidence in their English competence. It is likely the case that the particular language user’s heavy amalgamation of specific linguistic resources is most likely defined by the speakers’ specific socio-economic backgrounds and privileged access to that particular resources. If the specific language user has a higher tendency to incorporate English and broader range of cultural, media and linguistic resources at his/her disposal, it is more likely that the user has greater access to these resources (Dovchin et al. 2016). The less presence of various resources within one’s linguistic repertoire may, otherwise, show that he/she has less access to these linguistic resources. Hence, less linguistic confidence, and minus linguistic fluency and frequency in specific languages (Dovchin et al. 2016). The heavy users of English on social media might, therefore, feel ‘authentic Self,’ ‘natural’ and ‘confident’ to profoundly integrate those English resources without even realizing so. Sultana’s (2014, p. 50) research participant, for instance, explains that using English in social media space is ‘natural’ and that these resources shape her sense of being (cf. Dovchin et al. 2017). Likewise, using substantial English and other considerable amounts of linguistic resources can be deemed as one of the most ordinary and natural linguistic practices for many youths in Mongolia due to their proficient English linguistic skills (Dovchin 2015; Dovchin et al. 2016). The social media users do not deliberately force themselves to take up these English samples but claim to be just acting or speaking naturally (Dovchin 2019a, b). In fact, the heavy online translingual English practices of these students may reflect their skillful, confident and fluent linguistic identity, which is metalinguistically identified by themselves as ‘natural’ and the enactment of ‘Authentic Self.’ We can discuss this argument further based on the example below. Maral is a third-year student at the National University of Mongolia, majoring in American and British studies. She is an active Facebook user, updating her wall posts multiple times a day from uploading many popular music links to videos and celebrity news. The pretextual history of Extract 5.1 is associated with Maral’s real-time Facebook activity, where she is live streaming the new music video of favorite Mongolian diva Sally (her stage name is English-oriented Sally, her real name is Serchmaa), and chatting about Sally’s personal life with her friend Orgilmaa (Dovchin 2015, pp. 448–450). Maral and her Facebook interlocutor, Orgilmaa heavily incorporate English such as full English sentences (lines 1 and 3), combined with some Russian linguistic resources (lines 2, 3). We see no trace of Mongolian except Sally, the English-

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Extract 5.1 The heavy assimilation of Russian and English Facebook text

Translation

1. Maral: Excited! Check this link out! Sally’s new song! Big Likeyyyyyyyy!!!!!

1. Maral: Excited! Check this link out! Sally’s new song! Big Likey!

2. Orgilmaa: Kakoi? Sally? Eto ona zamuj za kitaitsev?

2. Orgilmaa: Which one? Sally? The one who’s married to Chinese?

3. Maral: Da, ocheni bogatii. She is like the girl who has everything …Pretttayyyyy, rich, elegant, Oh the Voice! Angelic ☺

3. Maral: Yes, really rich one. She is like the girl who has everything … Pretty, rich, elegant, Oh the Voice! Angelic

(regular font = Mongolian; italicized = English; bold = Russian)

oriented stage name of Mongolian singer Serchmaa. Focusing on Maral, some phrases are highlighted with the prolonged pronunciation of the vowel sounds (‘Big Likeyyyyyyyy!!!!!’; ‘Pretttayyyyy’) to achieve more dramatic tones. Note also that both Maral and her interlocutor have used the transliterated Roman versions for Russian instead of Cyrillic Russian (lines 2, 3), supported by Facebook symbols such as smiley emoji face ‘☺.’ In fact, Maral’s overall Facebook leading orthographic choice of Mongolian is usually presented with transliterated Mongolian Roman script like many other Mongolian online users, in addition to her frequent substantial integration of English and Russian linguistic resources (Dovchin 2015, pp. 448–450). In terms of her usage of transliterated Roman Mongolian [and possibly Russian], Maral explains, ‘If we want to promote our Mongolian language, we should use more Latin script so that other people engaged with us through the Internet can at least read what we are saying in Mongolian. It’s like when I try to search for my favourite Japanese or Korean songs, I automatically search for the Roman versions because I have no idea what kanji says. […] It is just hard to use only Cyrillic when we are online because we deal with so much stuff [popular culture resources] that cannot be fully described through Cyrillic. Latin is easy, no hassle and convenient.’ (Interview, May 2, 2013, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia). The extensive incorporation of English and Russian is better interpreted through Maral’s sociolinguistic background and linguistic skill (cf. Dovchin 2015, pp. 448–450). Maral was born in Russia, lived in Hungary with her family, and studied at a Russian high school in Ulaanbaatar after moving back to Mongolia during her teenage years. Her favourite subject in high school was English. She also went to Canada for a year or two following her high school graduation. Finally, she moved back to Mongolia to start her undergraduate degree at university. She had early exposure to other languages and cultures due to her family’s movement. Based on her direct access to linguistic and cultural resources, her linguistic skills have expanded. Compared to most other young Mongolians, she is privileged enough to have traveled abroad and attended prestigious educational institutions. Mostly, she can be defined as one of those so-called ‘proper bi/multilingual’ speakers in Mongolia. Russian resources are associated with Maral’s emotional and social exposure: ‘I personally use Russian sometimes because I have graduated from Russian high school. Russian, therefore, is like my good old friend. That means I’m always confident when I use

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Russian because it gives me this sensation of warmth and intimacy’ (Interview, May 2, 2013, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia). Maral then concludes, ‘We grew up reading Russian classical literature, listening to Russian music, and watching Russian movies. Russia is such a historically and culturally rich nation.’ (Interview, May 2, 2013). Maral, therefore, has personal and emotional attachments with Russian cultural elements. This has similarly been noted by Billé (2010, p. 243): ‘what is significant is that for many Mongols Russian does not feel foreign and […] it only takes a little alcohol to tease out a Russian facet that is just there under the surface: when drunk, many Mongols will start speaking Russian.’ Alternatively, by Beery (2004, p. 106): Russian is ‘so entrenched in Mongolia that it was never fully replaced.’ As for the extensive integration of English, Maral describes, ‘Luckily, I was exposed to English from a very early age. I grew up watching English movies and listening to English songs. It is like the air I breathe, the food I eat and the water I drink. It is like the main ingredient to participate in this modern world. If you remove English from my life, I will be like half mute or deaf. I cannot imagine my life without it’ (Interview, May 2, 2013, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia). English is then perceived as part of her daily-lived experiences, as a basic daily need which must always be available. Maral acknowledges that she faces harsh criticism from some people for excessively using English and Russian and that some of her interlocutors often tease her as ‘ongiroo’ [‘a show off’]. However, Maral insists that her importation of English and Russian is just like enacting or expressing her ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ self. She feels ‘natural’ because she is linguistically ‘confident’ using both languages, ‘I don’t force myself to be different. I don’t try hard to look different. I’m confident in using those languages. I know how to speak English and Russian, and this is natural to me.’ (Interview, May 2, 2013). The translingual English practice of Maral, thus, reflects her highly skillful and fluent linguistic identity, which is identified as the enactment of ‘true and authentic Self’ in Maral’s opinion (Dovchin 2015, pp. 448–450). Bujin, a second-year student at the National University of Mongolia, is enthusiastically involved with Facebook, where she is often seen deploying English in multiple ways. In Extract 5.2, Bujin extensively reutilizes English while live-updating her Facebook wall status, with the English farewell phrase ‘Bye Bye Hong Kong!’, indicating that she is checking out from Hong Kong International Airport (Dovchin 2016, pp. 24–25). Note that Bujin follows Facebook’s default application where users have the option of adding the location of their posts by pressing the Facebook button ‘add what are you doing’ (‘travelling to Ulaanbaatar Mongolia’) and ‘add a location to post’ (‘from Hong Kong International Airport’) and ‘tag people in your post’ (‘with Baatar Orgil’). Bujin’s Facebook post here thereby is regulated and organized by Facebook’s language technology. She further integrates an English idiomatic expression ‘it is raining cats and dogs’ to denote the current weather situation in Hong Kong. The deployment of this particular English idiom might simultaneously signal her intermediate/advanced skill in English since it is not very common for basic or pre-intermediate English learners in Mongolia to use any colloquial English idioms or other specific jargons. Bujin also transforms the English phrase ‘God!’ by transforming the pronunciation as ‘gaaaaad.’ The middle vowel ‘o’ is spelled according to its pronunciation ‘a’ but much more lengthened, making it sound very

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Extract 5.2 Almost exclusively English Facebook text

Translation

March 11 at 16:09 Bujin: Bye Bye Hong Kong!—

traveling to

Ulaanbaatar Mongolia with Baatar Orgil from Hong Kong International Airport Yanaa, gadaa it’s raining cats and dogs gaaaaad

Bujin: Bye Bye Hong Kong!—

traveling to

Ulaanbaatar Mongolia with Baatar Orgil from Hong Kong International Airport. Gosh, it’s raining cats and dogs outside, God

Language guide: Mongolian—regular font; English—italics

emphatic and dramatic. Thus, ‘God’ is changed phonologically, and reproduced into the colloquial kind of English, signaling the message that this Facebook user is playful with English although English is being not her first language (Dovchin 2016, pp. 24–25). In fact, for Bujin, it is not surprising to use heavy borrowing from English. The fact that Bujin is majoring in American and British studies at the National University of Mongolia offers her extensive exposure to the language and culture of these two English-speaking nations. She studies English daily both in intuitional and noninstitutional contexts because she enjoys learning English. Her favorite subject has always been English since her teen years. Because of educational and socio-cultural factors, Bujin claims that her heavy usage of English in her daily Facebook practices is ‘only natural,’ ‘Using English is quite natural to me because it is basically a part of what I do every day, at university, at home—everywhere. I listen to English songs, read English magazines, watch English movies when I am not at university.’ (Interview, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, September 22, 2010). Bujin concludes, ‘If you think my usage of English on my Facebook is not authentic, I will take it as an offense because basically, you are denying who I am as a person. English basically is a huge part of who I am. I feel handicapped without English in my life’ (Interview, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, September 22, 2010). Clearly, for Bujin then, her extensive incorporation of English is the expression of ‘authentic Self’ and valid language practice, which plays an essential part in her both institutional and non-institutional life.

5.1 Conclusion This chapter has illustrated the social media linguistic practices of some Mongolian EFL university students to present how translingual Facebook texts can be produced by the substantial, dense and heavy integration of and borrowing from English (Dovchin 2018). Here, one’s translingual English practice on social media can be formulated from partial or full English sentences and paragraphs, or by the integration of other additional linguistic resources such as Mongolian or Russian. Social media users may interact on Facebook not necessarily through ‘bits and pieces’ of English but rather through ‘constant,’ ‘prevalent’ and ‘persistent’ incorporation of English.

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These direct English voices and heavy borrowings are not just mere mimicry, as they allow these students to enact a general deliberate performance for various creative functions and identity purposes. These heavy integrations of English and other varied linguistic resources within one’s social media repertoire can be criticized by others for ‘trying to show off,’ ‘being fake and pretentious’ or ‘being too foreign.’ However, the metalinguistic claims of these research participants elaborate a sense of sociolinguistic authenticity, where one’s translingual practice is legitimized through one’s sociolinguistic history including the linguistic exposure, access to resources, literacy skills and so on. One of the primary explanations for heavy incorporation of English (or any other language), for example, is the statement that these students may have decent linguistic and literacy skills to navigate within and across these numerous linguistic resources. The students also claim that the heavy import of English and other linguistic resources is ‘natural’ and ‘ordinary’ because they are linguistically ‘confident’ and ‘fluent’ using those resources. They do not necessarily try hard or put too much effort to integrate English. They simply know how to speak and own English. English is natural to them. They reflect their highly skillful and fluent linguistic identities, which are identified as ‘natural’ and ‘true’—‘authentic Self’ enactments in their opinions. They are just being themselves. They own these languages. These languages are theirs.

References Beery, K. 2004. English in the linguistic landscape of Mongolia: Indices of language spread and language competition. PhD dissertation, Purdue University. Billé, F. 2010. Sounds and scripts of modernity: Language ideologies and practices in contemporary Mongolia. Inner Asia 12 (2): 231–252. Dovchin, S. 2015. Language, multiple authenticities and social media: The online language practices of university students in Mongolia. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19 (4): 437–459. Dovchin, S. 2016. The transcultural role of English in the linguascape of EFL university students in Mongolia. In Transcultural flows in English language education in Asia, ed. T. Barrett, and M. Fellin. Lanham: Lexington Books. Dovchin, S. 2018. Language, media and globalization in the periphery. Routledge studies in sociolinguistics. New York: Routledge. Dovchin, S. 2019a. Language crossing and linguistic racism: Mongolian immigrant women in Australia. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2019. 1566345 Dovchin, S. 2019b. The politics of injustice in translingualism: Linguistic discrimination. In Critical inquiries in the studies of sociolinguistics of globalization, ed. T. Barrett, and S. Dovchin, 84–102. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Dovchin, S., S. Sultana, and A. Pennycook. 2016. Unequal translingual Englishes in the Asian peripheries. Asian Englishes 18 (2): 92–108. Dovchin, S., A. Pennycook, and S. Sultana. 2017. Popular culture, voice and linguistic diversity: Young adults on- and offline. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gao, L. 2012. English and E-communication in China. In English in Asian popular culture, ed. J.S. Lee and A. Moody, 151–171. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Jacquemet, M. 2005. Transidiomatic practices: Language and power in the age of globalization. Language & Communication 25 (3): 257–277.

References

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Maybin, J., and J. Swann (eds.). 2006. The art of English: Everyday creativity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sultana, S. 2012. Young adults’ linguistic manipulation of English in Bangla in Bangladesh. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050. 2012.738644. Sultana, S. 2014. Heteroglossia and identity of young adults in Bangladesh. Linguistics and Education 26: 40–56.

Chapter 6

Inverted Englishes, ‘In-Group’ Talks and Authenticity

In this chapter, I examine how translingual Englishes on Facebook can be created through a particular linguistic feature that I call—‘inverted Englishes’ (and other languages such as Mongolian) used among EFL university students in Mongolia. The main characteristics of ‘inverted Englishes’ draw on linguistic practices of inverting English (or it can be any other languages) syllables, letters and sounds in the unconventional linguistic, structural sense of ‘back-to-front’ or ‘middle-to-front’ against the conventional sense of ‘front-to-back.’ These ‘inverted Englishes’ remind us the examples of Verlan, a type of youth linguistic repertoire in France, primarily spoken amongst multiethnic youth population living in underprivileged neighborhoods outside Paris. It is characterized by various conversions of Standard French terms, borrowings from languages such as Arabic, English, and Romani, and other certain distinctive prosodic and discourse level features (Doran 2004). One of the most typical characteristics of Verlan is a syllabic inversion, where young French people syllabically inverts certain words, producing colloquialisms which are only comprehensible within in-peers interactions (e.g., méchant ‘mean’ ⇒ chanmé; fatigué ‘tired’ ⇒ guétifa; tout à l’heure ‘just now’ ⇒ leurtoute; faucher ‘to steal’ ⇒ chéfo; tune ‘money’ ⇒ neutu; placard ‘prison’, literally ‘closet’ ⇒ carpla, etc.) (Doran 2004, pp. 97–98). ‘The Jakarta youth backward language (JYBL),’ the distinctive language commonly practiced by Jakarta youth (Dreyfuss 1983), is also relevant here. JYBL has some similar traits to Verlan, in which the speakers invert and combine some areas of words and terms in the creation of new lexical items (e.g., rebut ‘noisy’ birut; habis ‘finished’ bais; tuju ‘direction’ jutu; lebi(h) ‘more’ beli, etc.). Hoogervorst (2015) has also examined the emergence of ‘youth language’ in East Java, Indonesia’s second most populous province. The best-known youth language in this province is called ‘Boso Walikan’—‘inverted language,’ which initially was popularized by students in the dynamic city of Malang. Word reversal is the most productive tool for word formation in Boso Walikan. There are three main alternatives to create new words including the formation of acronyms, the insertion of novel meanings to

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existing words; and the production of entirely new words (e.g., lumayan ‘pretty good’ ⇒ nayamul; mas’ older brother’ ⇒ sam; panas ‘hot’ ⇒ sanap; payu ‘to be in demand’ ⇒ uyap; rabi ‘to be married’ ⇒ ibar; tuku ‘to buy’ ⇒ ukut etc.) (Hoogervorst 2015, pp. 110–111). In modern days, almost everyone in Malang knows Boso Walikan at some level by all age and gender groups. Social media demonstrates that Boso Walikan is also widely used among the Arek Malang communities living in other Indonesian cities and abroad. Meanwhile, it has been noted in the literature that speakers use the similar strategies of linguistic inverting practices for strategic and legitimate purpose of creating in-group talks that are incomprehensible to outsiders (Ag and Jørgensen 2013; Doran 2004; Dovchin 2015). Creating in-group talks offers young people an alternative space to have an exclusive way of speaking within in-peer interactions—their own isolated language, serving its legitimate communicative purposes. It is exclusive to inside audiences, strengthening the sense of ownership of the language, while remaining incomprehensible to outsiders (Dovchin 2015). Ag and Jørgensen have also noted this inclusive/exclusive language ownership (2013, p. 537) in the context of young speakers in Denmark, where they tend to follow different linguistic norms within different situations such as in-classroom or out-of-classroom activities, ‘[…] young language users organize their “languages” and adjust their behaviors according to the demands of the given situation’. They may not ‘use language in the same way with community outsiders as they do with insiders’ (Bucholtz 2003, p. 406). Creating an ‘exclusive’ and ‘in-peer talk’—a secret linguistic code outside the norms of Standard Mongolian—is thereby claimed by many research participants in this study as ‘authentic’ way of speaking because it serves crucial communicative role for these students. As Timur describes, ‘Using a secret code to each other is much more effective than using a normal language. Of course, it is an authentic expression because it actually works really well when we try to be ourselves. Other people won’t judge us.’ (Interview, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, September 23, 2010). Bolor adds, ‘We want to keep the information secret sometimes, and reversing the language really helps us achieve our communicative purposes’ (Interview, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, September 2, 2010). I will expand this discussion based on data examples below. In Extract 6.1, the ‘inverted Englishes’ are created on a word-by-word formation rather than at the whole sentence level. The research participant Bayar updates his Facebook wall, posting a message about his long hard day, where he spent too many hours working on an MS Word document. This Facebook post is complemented by a picture created by Bayar, where he creatively uses the famous Mongolian pop singer Bold’s name and his standing image dressed in a traditional Mongolian outfit, a ‘deel.’ In so doing, Bayar firstly refers to his long day, where he boldly (enthusiastically) started his day working on an MS word document, looking ‘bold’ just like the singer Bold in the image in the left half. However, at the end of the day, Bayar becomes very tired and confused, and this sentiment is expressed through the image in the right half, where Bold’s ‘bold’ image becomes ‘italics’ as if he is about to collapse. He mocks the singer Bold’s name and creatively reproduces his name as part of an MS word document writing features such as bold and italics (Dovchin, forthcoming).

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Extract 6.1 Inverted Englishes: ‘Leems segit!’ # Facebook interaction 1. Bayar

2. Tungalag

3. Altan 4. Bayar

5. Bayar

6. Altan

(continued)

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Extract 6.1 (continued) # 1. Bayar

English translation

After working all day on MS Word document, this came to my mind haha [referring to the picture he has just posted]. Seems legit!

2. Tungalag

Haha, why not? It is a cute creation

3. Altan

You should have italicized the part ‘-chin’ kk

4. Bayar

Yeah, I should have done that

5. Bayar

There you go haha

6. Altan

Haha

In explaining his creation of the image, Bayar uses predominantly Cyrillic Mongolian, while incorporating an English-oriented technology-related term, ‘MS Word.’ This term, however, is never translated into Mongolian, as computer users in Mongolia simply use the English version, ‘MS Word’, to refer to a Microsoft Word document. Note, however, that the term ‘MS Word’ has been Mongolianized by the addition of the Mongolian suffix—‘dp,’ forming a local meaning of ‘MS Word dp’ [‘[working] on MS word document’]. Also, we can also spot the evidence of an ‘inverted Englishes,’ ‘leems segit,’ in which Bayar twisted the English expression ‘seems legit.’ Here, Bayar inverts the Standard English terms, by changing the positions of the initial syllable, ‘se’ in ‘seems’ and the initial syllable ‘le’ in ‘legit.’ Correspondingly, he presents a novel way of using inverted English, where the pair of words can be reversed into one another to achieve a new meaning. Clearly, Bayar’s Facebook friends seem to find his post funny and cheeky as almost everyone who left their comments is laughing and having fun. His friend Tungalag (line 2) laughs and acknowledges that the image was ‘a cute creation.’ The next friend, Altan (line 3) also laughs (‘kk’) while suggesting that it would have been much funnier if the word ‘dyyqin’ [singer] embedded within the centre of the image and its last part ‘-qin’ were italicized to synchronize with the sentiment of the picture. Bayar wholeheartedly agrees with his friend’s idea (lines 4, 5), creating another revised picture, where the original ‘bold -qin’ has been corrected into italicized ‘-qin.’ (Dovchin, forthcoming). In a post-textual interview, Bayar describes his inverted English use, ‘We do it so many times. Sometimes it is just for fun, you know. We just try to tease each other or confuse each other with words. Other times, it really works for us in order to shut people out of our communication. There are many things that we talk to as young people. We don’t want some strangers or some people who judge us based on what we talk about. So, it is better to invert our language sometimes. […] Of course, it is an authentic language for us because all we are doing is just inverting the

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language out there to achieve our own purposes. We haven’t created some kind of inauthentic language. We are just playing around with what is already there [referring to language]’ (Interview, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, September 15, 2011). Here, Bayar reminds us that inverted English is indeed based on ‘authentic’ language and they are only using the ‘authentic’ language (be it Mongolian or English) ‘backwards.’ In Extract 6.2, we see the Facebook example authored by our research participant, Temir. He is a recent undergraduate from the National University of Mongolia (NUM), and is most recently a postgraduate student in Japan, studying his Master’s degree (Dovchin, forthcoming). Temir is fluent in Mongolian, Kazakh (his background is Mongolian Kazakh), Russian and English. His presence on Facebook is intense, composed mainly of multilingual resources, including links and images of variable Western, Russian, Japanese popular music videos, ads, and movie trailers. One of his most frequent linguistic resources integrated into his Facebook is heavy incorporation of English. He uses sentences in exclusive or partial English to interact with his Facebook friends, or he also uses a large amount of English-Mongolian mixed style terms and expressions. He learned English at high school and specialized in English and International Relations at NUM. However, Temir also acknowledges the importance of English cartoons, CNN news and MTV in acquiring his high proficiency in English. In terms of his heavy usage of English on his Facebook page, Temir explains, ‘I use English most of the time on my Facebook because sometimes or most of the time it is easy to express things in English. The nuance is there, and everyone understands English, so you get more responses’ (Interview, October 29, 2014). Not surprisingly, in line 1, Temir updates his Facebook wall post using exclusive English as part of his preferred Facebook linguistic choice. He urges his Facebook friends to invent a new language because the Google Translate program has just integrated the Mongolian language in its system. Temir has revealed that he was quite excited, in fact proud, that the Mongolian language was finally integrated into the Google Translate because he never imagined that the Mongolian language with only three million speakers would be recognized in Google Translate. Nevertheless, he expresses his excitement on Facebook in a tongue-in-cheek way, where he urges his Facebook friends to invent a new language so that Google Translate would not be able to keep up with the Mongolian language (Dovchin, forthcoming). The reactions from his Facebook friends clearly show how inverted language is their very first linguistic choice for inventing a secret language. Using the standard Cyrillic Mongolian orthographic system, Manlai (line 2) suggests inventing a secret language, ‘tongopgo biqvl acyn’ [‘how about writing backward?’]. Not only does Manlai suggest that they can invent a new secret language by writing backward, but also he demonstrates himself how to do it, by syllabically inverting the standard Mongolian form ‘qi qadnaa’ into ‘iq daqnaa’ [you can do it!]. Here, ‘qi’ [you] has been written from back-to-front, while the middle syllable ‘da’ in ‘qadnaa’ [can do it] has been placed as an initial syllable to form the reversed ‘daqnaa.’

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Extract 6.2 Super secret language: ‘Tibgi laxqigana’ # Facebook interaction

1.

Temir

2.

Manlai

3.

Khosoo

4.

Bayar

5.

Dorj

6.

Bileg

7.

Temir

8.

Temir

9.

Temir

10. Tulga

(continued)

6 Inverted Englishes, ‘In-Group’ Talks and Authenticity Extract 6.2 (continued) # 1. Temir

English Translation

Quick! We need to invent a different super-secret language! Since Mongolian is now on Google Translate

2. Manlai

Xaxa how about writing backward? You can do it!

3. Khosoo

Don’t be silly!

4. Bayar

You are overreacting! So are we going to call you a “language” now then (since you are inventing a new language)? The new language called - ‘Хээээл’ or something like that.

5. Dorj

How about Kazakh?

6. Bileg

We need to invent a language with lots of alphabets and letters

7. Temir

Or teach everyone Kazakh

8. Temir

So they added the following languages:

9. Temir

Here's the full list: Hausa (Harshen Hausa) - Nigeria and neighboring countries Igbo (Asụsụ Igbo) - Nigeria Yoruba (èdè Yorùbá) - Nigeria and neighboring countries Somali (Af-Soomaali) - Somalia and other countries around the Horn of Africa Zulu (isiZulu) spoken in South Africa and other south-western African countries Mongolian (Монгол хэл) - Mongolia Nepali (

) - Nepal and India

Maori (Te Reo Māori) - New Zealand 10. Tulga

Honestly, when we look at people who are writing in Mongolian nowadays, it looks like a completely different language. There is almost no one who can write correctly, lol.

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In line 3, Khosoo teases his friend Temir for being silly about inventing a new language for Google Translate. Yet, Khosoo also shows his support for inverted language as a new secret code by inverting the original Cyrillic Mongolian form, ‘bitgi xalqigana’ into ‘Tibgi laxqigana’ [‘Don’t be silly’]. Here, the initial syllable, ‘bi’ and the middle consonant ‘t’ have been swapped to create ‘Tibgi’; while the consonant ‘l’ in the middle of ‘xalqigana’ has been placed at the beginning of ‘laxqigana,’ placing the initial syllable ‘xa’ backward. Note also that the inverted language seems to be executed through the syntactic level rather than lexical level here, as Khosoo writes his short sentence created by reversed vocabulary. In line 4, Bayar uses an inverted language through the whole syntactic level ‘ Рүстэй саанан одоо мачайг гэтвэл хэл хэг үү Хээээл ртн’ [‘You are overreacting! So are we going to call you a “language” now then (since you are inventing a new language)? The new language called—‘Xl’ or something like that.’]. Here, Bayar teases Temir for overreacting about inventing a new language and asks him whether they should call the newly invented language as ‘Temir’ since he invented it. Alternatively, Bayar suggests coining some new and unconventional term like ‘Xl’ for their invented language. ‘ Рүстэй саанан’ [‘You are overreacting’] is the inverted version of Standard Mongolian ‘сүpтэй наасан’ in which the initial syllable ‘ сү-’ is replaced by the middle letter ‘p’ creating ‘ Рүстэй’ ; and the last syllable ‘ca’ in ‘naacan’ is forwarded into the front position, creating ‘caanan’. In the next sentence ‘ ‘одоо мачайг гэтвэл хэл хэг үү’ ’ [‘So are we going to call you a “language” now then (since you are inventing a new language)?’], ‘qamag’ is inverted as ‘maqag’ [you are] through the middle syllable ‘ma’ forwarded at the start replacing ‘qa’; ‘tgvl’ [then] is inverted as ‘gtvl’ through the middle consonant ‘g’ forwarded at the start replacing the initial consonant ‘t’; the standard Mongolian word ‘ ‘ гэх үү’ ’ [‘so are we?’] is inverted as ‘ ‘ хэг үү’’, through writing the word ‘gx’ from back-to-front as ‘xg’. Here, Bayar invents a new name for their new invented language ‘Xl’ lengthening the Mongolian root word ‘Xl’ [Language], followed by the phrase, ‘ptn’ [shortened online version for the expression of ‘something like that’]. It is common for transnational online users to be engaged with multiple orthographic options, including one of the most common orthographic practices of shortening or abbreviating specific phrases and terms. To this end, by omitting the vowel ‘e’ from ‘ene ter’ online users in Mongolia widely uses ‘ntr’, meaning ‘something like that’ or ‘for example’ in English, unfamiliar to non-virtual space users (Sultana et al. 2013; Dovchin et al. 2015). Note that ‘ntr’ is reversed from back to front here as ‘ptn.’ In line 5, typing in English, Dorj suggests using Kazakh since not so many people would not understand the language except Temir, who is a Kazakh-Mongolian. In response to this suggestion, Temir offers to teach Kazakh to everyone instead of using it as a secret language. While the majority of the Mongolian population are Khalkh Mongols, Kazakhs constitute 5% of the population and mostly reside in the far west of the country. They started migrating to Mongolia from the 1860s, mainly from the Xinjiang region of China. The majority of Khalkh Mongolians are Tibetan

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Buddhists, while Islam is the dominant religion among ethnic Kazakhs in Mongolia. The relationship between Mongolians and Kazakhs in Mongolia has been mostly amicable, and Mongolian Kazakhs have enjoyed a comparatively high status in the Mongolian society. Nonetheless, Kazakhs have been strongly encouraged to learn Mongolian in order to be accepted into Mongolian society, and very few Mongolians speak Kazakh or engage with Kazakh cultural practices. Temir is very proud of his Kazakh heritage, as suggested in this FB extract when his friend offers to use Kazakh as a secret language, Temir opposes the idea through insisting the idea of teaching Kazakh to everyone instead. Temir clearly shows his desire that his fellow Mongolian friends should appreciate and take the Kazakh language seriously. In line 6, using Roman Mongolian, Bileg proposes to invent a new language with many alphabets and letters; while in lines 8 and 9, Temir introduces the list of new languages that were added into the Google Translate application. In line 10, while using Roman Mongolian, Tulga refers to the prevailing language ideology in the Mongolian society—‘linguistic dystopia’ (Dovchin 2018a, b). Tulga indicates that the Mongolian language looks like a foreign language anyway nowadays since no one uses it correctly. Thus, there is no need to invent a new language since the standard Mongolian has already been distorted anyway (see also Dovchin, forthcoming). Overall, Extract 6.2 shows that inverted language can be interpreted as a secret language that is primarily defined as youth in-peer communicative practice. Their inverted language is strategically used to keep information secret to outsiders. Temir and his friends informed that using inverted language as a secret code makes it relatively easy to communicate with their mates because they know the pertinent rules, while it is tough for outsiders to comprehend when they have no idea about the specific rules. As Temir reiterates, ‘We speak backward mainly as a secret code because people would not have a clue what we are talking about.’ (Interview, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, September 23, 2010). They often use inverted language when they do not want outsiders, including, most specifically, his parents, grandparents, or some elderly population, to find out their ‘secret plans.’ Secret plans can be anything from planning big parties, to get-togethers, and dating and relationship issues. Temir instantly claims the authenticity of their inverted language because it creates an alternative way of communicating, ‘I cannot say this language is ‘inauthentic’ because it serves an authentic communication purpose for us’ (Interview, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, September 23, 2010).

6.1 Conclusion This chapter seeks to present how translingual social media texts can be produced through very specific linguistic aspects that are called—‘inverted Englishes’ (it can also be other languages), commonly used among EFL university students in Mongolia. The main characteristics of ‘inverted Englishes’ draw on linguistic practices

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of inverting the syllables, letters, and sounds in the unconventional linguistic, structural sense of ‘back-to-front’ or ‘middle-to-front’ against the conventional sense of ‘front-to-back.’ In a similar vein to Verlan, a type of multiethnic youth linguistic repertoire in Paris, ‘inverted Englishes’ are characterized by various conversions of Standard English (or Mongolian) terms, and other certain distinctive prosodic and discourse level features. The syllabic inversion is the main characteristics of ‘inverted Englishes’, where the Mongolian EFL university students syllabically invert certain words, producing colloquialisms which are only comprehensible within in peer interactions. ‘Inverted Englishes’ may serve as an alternative secret and in-group code for some Mongolian EFL university students to achieve their multiple strategic communicative practices. It is not just a random linguistic act, but rather strategic and deliberate communicative practice to make valid and legitimate meanings moving outside the hegemonic norms of standard language system. They are also exclusive to inside audiences, strengthening the sense of ownership of the language, distancing it from outsiders. They are far from distorting the authenticity of the Mongolian language and culture, according to these students, because they are ‘not harmful’ in-group talks, which have no outer negative impact. One of the nodes of multiple claims of linguistic authenticities thus is ‘in-group’ and ‘exclusive’ inverted translingual practices amongst EFL students in Mongolia, because inverted in-group practices create ‘personal,’ ‘valid,’ and ‘real’ communicative space for these students.

References Ag, A., and J.N. Jørgensen. 2013. Ideologies, norms, and practices in youth poly-languaging. International Journal of Bilingualism 17 (4): 525–539. Bucholtz, M. 2003. Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (3): 398–416. Doran, M. 2004. Negotiating between bourge and racaille: Verlan as youth identity practice in suburban Paris. In Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts, ed. A. Pavlenko and A. Blackledge, 93–124. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Dovchin, S. 2015. Language, multiple authenticities and social media: The online language practices of university students in Mongolia. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19 (4): 437–459. Dovchin, S. 2018. Language, media and globalization in the periphery. Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics. New York: Routledge. Dovchin, S. 2018b. Dissatisfaction and dissent in the transmodal performances of hip-hop artists in Mongolia. In Dissatisfaction and dissent: The sociolinguistics of hip-hop as critical conscience, ed. A. Ross and D. Rivers, 191–213. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dovchin, S. forthcoming. Inverted youth language in Mongolia as macroscopic and microscopic chronotopes. In Chronotopic identity work, ed. J. Swanenberg and S. Kroon. London: Bristol, Multilingual Matters. Dovchin, S., S. Sultana, and A. Pennycook. 2015. Relocalizing the translingual practices of young adults in Mongolia and Bangladesh. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 1 (1): 4–26. Dreyfuss, J. 1983. The backward language of Jakarta youth; A bird of many language feathers. Nusa 16: 52–56.

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Hoogervorst, T.G. 2015. Youth culture and urban pride: The sociolinguistics of East Javanese slang. Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia 15 (1): 104. Sultana, S., S. Dovchin, and A. Pennycook. 2013. Styling the periphery: Linguistic and cultural takeup in Bangladesh and Mongolia. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17 (5): 687–710.

Chapter 7

‘Ghost Englishes’, Realness, Native Speakerism, and Authenticity

The previous three chapters (Chaps. 4, 5 and 6) have investigated the synchronous dynamics of EFL university students in Mongolia beyond classroom settings, where they use Facebook mostly for leisure and networking purposes. The focus of next two chapters (Chaps. 7 and 8) is different from these previous chapters, as it seeks to illustrate how EFL university students in Japan are involved with Facebook through asynchronous activities, as part of their task-based English learning activities (see Chap. 3). Chapter 7 will discuss the Japanese EFL university students’ engagement with Facebook, focusing on their social media experiences with unfamiliar and unconventional translingual Englishes. Because translingual Englishes are ‘non-existent’ from their textbooks or dictionaries, they have been nicknamed by these Japanese students as ‘幽霊’ [‘Y¯urei’ ‘ghost’] ‘ghost Englishes.’ For these students, ‘ghost Englishes’ are mysterious and enigmatic, which seem to be profoundly haunting Facebook. The idea of ‘ghost Englishes’ (Deumert 2018) in this chapter, thereby, primarily refers to unpredictable English lexicons and unconventional terms that are either absent from the dictionaries, textbooks, or in the Internet search engine, which, nevertheless, appear to haunt the social media. ‘Ghost Englishes’ can be mystified through mixing, twisting, lengthening, elongating, shortening and abbreviating the syllables, suffixes, letters, and syntax in multiple unexpected ways (Sultana et al. 2013). The pattern of omission or expansion of syllables in words, the process of shortening or lengthening of long/short phrases and expressions are some of the widespread practices in the translingual interactions of social media users (Chun and Walters 2011). The Mongolian social media users, for example, shorten the Mongolian word ‘yostoi’ by omitting the first and last vowels, ‘yo’ and ‘i,’ creating ‘sto,’ meaning ‘really or seriously’. These users shorten the original words to increase the speed of his online writing while avoiding ‘a long mischievous burden’ of typing long words. They may also invent unexpectedly long expressions that cannot be found anywhere, through assembling numerous Mongolian and English cultural and linguistic resources: ‘morinkhuurification’—the combination between the Mongolian root ‘morin khuur’ [‘horse headed fiddle’] with the English suffix ‘-ification’, for example, refers to the cultural practice of using traditional musical instruments and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Dovchin, Language, Social Media and Ideologies, SpringerBriefs in Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26139-9_7

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styles to play something globally popular (e.g., a famous classical music piece performed by ‘morin khuur’) (Sultana et al. 2015). In the online community members in a Finnish discussion forum, they inject English elements into Finnish and vice versa, borrowing from English extreme sports jargons, producing integrative and unconventional forms of Finnish and English (Peuronen 2011). Young adults in Bangladesh add the English suffix ‘-ing’ to Bangla verbs/nouns to give a feel of continuity, action and progression (Sultana 2012), while youth in the Netherlands borrow words or expressions from various languages that are spoken in the multilingual speech community in which they live to create an integrated stylized linguistic repertoire (Schoonen and Appel 2005). The phrase ‘Woelah, die patas zijn flex, man!’ (‘I swear it, those shoes are terrific, man!’) is, for instance, a blend of Arabic’ woelah!’ [‘I swear by Allah’], a Sranan (creole from Surinam) word ‘patas’ [‘sports shoes’] and ‘flex’, a slang modification of the Dutch word ‘flexibel’ [‘flexible’], integrated into Dutch syntax. Examples of such language use abound in contemporary Europe: ‘Rinkeby Swedish’ (Godin 2006), ‘Perker Sprog’ and ‘Integrated Language’ in Copenhagen (Jørgensen et al. 2011; Møller 2008; Nørreby and Møller 2015) or ‘Illegaal spreken’ in Belgium (Jaspers 2011). The encounter with ‘ghost Englishes’, from these students’ point of view, is a serious business, because it presents them (and us) with another ideology of linguistic authenticity, in which it conveys the sense of ‘realness’—the combination of ideas such as ‘native English speakerism’, ‘real life’ and ‘real people’. For many Japanese students, their experience with ‘ghost Englishes’ on Facebook is more ‘authentic’ than ‘textbook English’ or ‘classroom English’ because they are formed not only by ‘native English speakers’ but also ‘real people in real life context.’ The idea of ‘realness’ conveyed by these Japanese students is connected with the dominant language ideology—the idolization of ‘native English speakerism’ in Japan, where Japanese people tend to broadly idolize the linguistic and cultural norms of native English speakers (Yano 2011). However, in this particular case, ‘ghost Englishes’ are created not only by ‘native English speakers’ but also by ‘real people in real-life context,’ which are unswervingly deemed as ‘authentic English’ by many Japanese students. As Kramsch (2006, p. 107) puts it, ‘non-native speakers who have not been socialized in the target culture make quite different associations, construct different realities from those of socialized native speakers. Newcomers to the language apprehend the linguistic system in all its fantastic dimensions: the sounds, the shapes, the unfamiliar combinations, the odd grammatical structures. And they give meaning to all […]’. A good deal of authentic or natural English, therefore, seems to be deemed as ‘real’, ‘playful’ and ‘lively’ ‘native English’ for these students, as they seem to enjoy significantly observing and learning how native English speakers in real-life contexts such as Facebook play with and mess around with English. For many Japanese students, the relative dominance and myth of English and its institutional gatekeeping function in Japan can be highly demotivating and monotonous. They seem to treat English as ‘an object glued to a textbook or classroom,’ and consider English as a compulsory subject or obligation to pass their exams rather than a communication tool and future opportunity. As Kimura describes, ‘I

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have been learning English at university and high school, but despite my efforts, I am still having a hard time with it. The English lessons I’m having at university are not helping much. I get frustrated when I go to English classes because I have boring texts to read and useless grammar patterns to drill. I study English because I have to. Not because I want to because I don’t feel motivated’ (Interview, February 11, 2018, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan). Nevertheless, after completing his Facebook task, Kimura notes that his experience with English feels like a breath of fresh air, ‘As soon as I started observing these odd English expressions on Facebook, I had this urge to chase them. I just couldn’t stop until I found out the meanings. I was so determined. As soon as I found out the meanings, I felt relieved. As if I’ve finally achieved something in terms of learning English.’ (Interview, February 11, 2018, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan). Because of the mystery of these ‘ghost Englishes’, Kimura started desperately and frantically chasing after them, as he has become much more inquisitive and motivated than ever to investigate the enigmatic connotations, existences and inferences further. For Kimura, as soon as the standardized form of English came into to contact with other resources, the idealization of the standard English system made no clearer sense anymore. English was understood not so much through the fixed grammar anymore, but rather through its semiotic resources and cultural genres as each individual on Facebook creatively mobilized and transcended different resources at their disposal and adopt different negotiation strategies to make meanings. This complexity and playfulness of English started bringing enthusiasm, motivation, and zeal for his otherwise ‘boring’ English learning journey, as he started recognizing the pleasure of speaking and writing English differently and the pleasure of recognizing ‘the playful function of the language’ (Godin 2006). Learning ‘ghost Englishes’ has also created a real-life opportunity for Kumira to engage with English less seriously and naturally, creating a less serious topic to discuss in terms of English. For example, in Extract 7.1, Kimura was instructed to analyze the article on Facebook, ‘Radioactive boars roam area near Fukushima in Japan,’ written by the Australian media outlet, Sydney Morning Herald, and its corresponding comments by Facebook users. Kimura has identified some exciting examples of ‘ghost Englishes’: The English stem—‘boar’ is combined with the Japanese movie heroine, ‘Godzilla’—a famous monster dinosaur that was, ironically, formed out of the nuclear radioactivity. This combination creates the unconventional phrase ‘Boarzilla,’ referring, perhaps, to the ‘Godzilla like boars from Japan.’ Other eccentric phrases such as ‘Spiderpig’—the blending of movie ‘Spiderman’ and ‘pig’; ‘nuekiller’—the fusion of Japanese ‘nue’ ‘鵺’ (a legendary Japanese y¯okai or mononoke—ghost, phantom, strange apparition—a class of supernatural monsters, spirits, and demons in Japanese folklore’) and English ‘killer’ [referring to nuclear killer]; ‘The rise of Xboars’—the transformation of ‘The rise of Renegada X’, a popular teen fantasy fiction is morphed into ‘the rise of Xboars’. Kimura has recognized that the standardized form of English is twisted, mixed and bent with some Japanese movie and folklore resources. He became aware that in real life and everyday usage of language amongst English speakers, English is not easily compartmentalized, since diverse resources are being taken up, transformed and remade into new forms of English. Kimura likens the phrase ‘Boarzilla’

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Extract 7.1 ‘Wasei-eigo’: ‘Boarzilla’ Facebook text

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to ‘Wasei-eigo’ ‘和製英語’—a kind of ‘Japanese-made English,’ in which Japaneselanguage expressions are created based on English words or parts of word combinations. Wasei-eigo does not exist in standard English or whose meanings differ from the words from which they were derived, illustrating pseudo-anglicisms. As Kimura notes, ‘I think the Japanese monsters such as Godzilla and “Nue” have created the new kind of ‘wasei-eigo’ here, which is why I could not find them in my dictionary. When I first saw these words, I thought they were English words. However, I realized that it was not possible to find out the meaning of these words if you didn’t know the Japanese movie Godzilla or the Japanese folklore monster “nue.”’ (Interview, February 11, 2018, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan). Meanwhile, the examples of these ‘ghost Englishes’ on Facebook have been identified as ‘authentic English’ by Kimura because they were written by ‘real Englishspeaking people’ in ‘real-life context like Facebook.’ Kimura acknowledges during his interview, ‘Facebook English was real compared to my [English] textbooks. It was fun and exciting for me to learn English based on natural and real-life circumstances’ (Interview, January 19, 2018, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan). Another student, Chihiro similarly adds, ‘Learning these odd English expressions were so cool because that is how native English speakers use English in real-life. I saw English in its most authentic form because native English speakers in real-life contexts wrote it. I prefer real-life English to classroom English. I want to learn English as a native speaker. I want to sound like a native speaker. ‘(Presentation, University of Aizu, Japan, February 13, 2018). The examples of ‘ghost Englishes’, according to these students, thereby, are ‘cool English’ because they help them understand how ‘real native English speakers’ interact in real-life circumstances. This also shows that the idealization of ‘native-speakerism’ is still common across these Japanese EFL university students as they seem to enjoy significantly learning how native English speakers in real-life contexts play with English. In Extract 7.2, students were instructed to undertake textual analysis on the article reported by the Foreign Correspondent of ABC News on Facebook. The article reveals that over 600 tonnes of reactor fuel melted and over 10 million bags of nuclear waste and dirt have been produced after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The exact location of the highly radioactive blobs remains unknown. Students were further instructed to analyze the corresponding comments left by Facebook users in response to this article. Upon completing their assigned tasks, many students highlight the elongation and omission of English terms and phrases across Facebook. Shiori, for example, was not able to find the expression ‘Omgodisridiculous’ (line 2) in her dictionary – the fusion of English expression elongated by the terms such as ‘omg’, ‘god,’ ‘dis’ [‘this is’], and ‘ridiculous,’ referring to ‘Oh my god! This is ridiculous!’ She eventually figured out how this particular expression was structurally formed with the aid of her English instructor. As Shiori explains, ‘First, I thought this was not English. For example, “this” was written as “dis” and my teacher told me this is how some African American people speak. Instead of “this,” they often say “dis.” Now I know how African Americans can speak different English as I did not know that before. I thought all Americans speak pretty much the same English—American

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Extract 7.2 The elongated and omitted Englishes

English.’ (Interview, January 25, 2018, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan). Shiori has started developing an understanding of AAVE, which can also be different from Standard American English. Her critical linguistic awareness towards different varieties of English, in other words, has been well informed, since her Facebook experience has exposed her to more than just single variety of English she knows—Standard North American English. She now understands that even native English speakers may speak different varieties if she is going to interact with many different people. Meanwhile, many students also report that one of the widespread observations they have come across on Facebook is ‘shortened’ English examples that are extremely

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popular on Facebook (lines 3 and 4). Chihiro, for example, reports the phrase ‘pollies’ as the shortened version of ‘politicians’ through removing the last half part of the word ‘-iticians,’ and adding ‘-lies’ instead (line 4). The term ‘the Liberals’ (line 2) has also been shortened as ‘the Libs’ by omitting the middle syllable ‘-eral,’ referring to the supporters of Liberal Party of Australia. After encountering with ‘strong lefties’ (line 3)—a derogatory Australia term for anyone perceived to have left-leaning, liberal or socialistic political or social views, Chihiro recognizes how Australian English can be particular about adding the suffix ‘-ies’ (e.g., ‘sunnies’ for ‘sunglasses’, ‘barbies’ for ‘barbeques’ etc.). Chihiro has now been informed that, unlike Americans, Australian people tend to replace the last morpheme with the suffix ‘-ies.’ Learning ‘shortened Englishes’ has, therefore, been an opportunity to learn ‘authentic Australian English’ for Chihiro, ‘When you see Australians talking to each other in a real-life context, it is tough for me to understand. They use a lot of slangs and difficult words. For me, Facebook English was exactly like that. It showed me how Australians might also “write” so many jargons in their real-life contexts just like their talking. So, I would say that this is real-life “written” communication between native Australians.’ (Essay, February 21, 2018, University of Aizu, Japan). The learning experience of ‘shortened English’ on Facebook, thus, has become a significant ‘real-world’ site for the production of an Australian English linguistic and cultural matrix for this student, which is also strongly associated with the idolization of native speakerism of Australian English.’

7.1 Conclusion For many Japanese EFL university students, the monotonous and monolithic English textbooks and English grammar exercises in the classroom can be highly demotivating and tedious. Many students view English as ‘an object glued to textbooks or classrooms,’ and they seem to take English as an obligation rather than an opportunity. Drawing on data examples of the Facebook task-based digital ethnographic research project, this chapter, by contrast, illustrates how these students find more motivation and interest in learning English through engaging with numerous social media examples of translingual Englishes. Social media is visibly haunted by the surge and mystery of ‘ghost Englishes’—the odd formations of English that are not found in the dictionaries or textbooks, formulated by the fusion, elongation, and omission of the syllables, suffixes and phrases that are unfamiliar and unpredictable to these Japanese students. ‘Ghost Englishes’ are not easy to catch up with, because they are mysterious, which trigger their positive-broadening power of the imagination (MacIntyre and Gregersen 2012). The students, as a result, have started frantically chasing after them, as they have become much more inquisitive and motivated than ever to investigate their enigmatic connotations and existences. Their attitude towards ‘ghost Englishes’ on social media is, therefore, better captured by Kramsch’s (2006, p. 102) suggestion, ‘Seduced by the foreign sounds, rhythms, and meanings, and by the “coolness” of native speakers, many adolescent learners strive to enter new,

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exotic worlds where they can be, or at least pretend to be, someone else, where they too can become “cool” and inhabit their bodies in more powerful ways.’ As they desperately seek to capture the ‘ghost Englishes’ that are haunting Facebook, they instantaneously proclaim ‘ghost Englishes’ ‘as most authentic as they can be’ because they are formed by ‘real native English-speaking people’ in ‘real-life contexts.’ It is evident that the majority of Japanese EFL students still view ‘native speaker’s English’ as authentic, and thus worthy of learning. Yet, Facebook space has opened up another world for these students because these native English speakers are not ‘classroom’ and ‘textbook’ English ‘simulators’ but rather the inventors of ‘realness’—‘real English’ and ‘real life context.’ The learning experience of ‘ghost Englishes’ on Facebook, thus, has become a significant ‘authentic’ site for the production of a native English matrix for these Japanese students as they are still seduced by the mysterious meanings and designs, and by the ‘coolness’ of native English speakers. The ideology of linguistic authenticity is, therefore, claimed through its another node—the ideology of ‘realness’—the idealization of native speakerism, real-life context and real people—by these Japanese EFL university students in this chapter.

References Chun, E., and K. Walters. 2011. Orienting to Arab orientalisms: Language, race, and humor in a YouTube video. In Digital discourse: Language in the new media, ed. C. Thurlow and K. Mroczek, 251–273. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deumert, A. 2018. What about ghosts? OR can we formulate a sociolinguistics of the spectre? In Sociolinguistic symposium, 22, 2018, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Godin, M. 2006. Urban youth language in multicultural Sweden. Scandinavian-Canadian Journal/Études scandinaves au Canada 16: 126–141. Jaspers, J. 2011. Talking like a ‘zerolingual’: Ambiguous linguistic caricatures at an urban secondary school. Journal of Pragmatics 43 (5): 1264–1278. Jørgensen, J.N., M.S. Karrebæk, L.M. Madsen, and J.S. Møller. 2011. Polylanguaging in Superdiversity. Diversities 13 (2): 23–38. Kramsch, C. 2006. The multilingual subject. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 16 (1): 97–110. MacIntyre, P., and T. Gregersen. 2012. Emotions that facilitate language learning: The positivebroadening power of the imagination. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching 2 (2): 193–213. Møller, J.S. 2008. Polylingual performance among Turkish-Danes in latemodern Copenhagen. International Journal of Multilingualism 5 (3): 217–236. Nørreby, T.R., and J.S. Møller. 2015. Ethnicity and social categorization in on and offline interaction among Copenhagen adolescents. Discourse, Context and Media 8: 46–54. Peuronen, S. 2011. “Ride hard, live forever”: Translocal identities in an online community of extreme sports Christians. In Digital discourse: Language in the new media, ed. C. Thurlow and K. Mroczek, 154–176. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schoonen, R., and R. Appel. 2005. Street language: A multilingual youth register in the Netherlands. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 26 (2): 85–117. Sultana, S. (2012). Young adults’ linguistic manipulation of English in Bangla in Bangladesh. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050. 2012.738644.

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Sultana, S., S. Dovchin, and A. Pennycook. 2013. Styling the periphery: Linguistic and cultural takeup in Bangladesh and Mongolia. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17 (5): 687–710. Yano, Y. 2011. English as an international language and ‘Japanese English’. In English in Japan in the era of globalization, ed. P. Seagent125–142. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 8

Idiomatic Englishes, Onomatopes, Authenticities

This chapter will investigate how Japanese EFL university students learn and engage with translingual Englishes on social media through ‘idiomatic’ and ‘onomatopoeic’ Englishes, while concurrently claim the ideologies of linguistic authenticity through the ideas of ‘etymology’ and ‘emotional reality.’ ‘Idiomatic Englishes’ are understood as part of ‘translingual Englishes’ on social media in this chapter, because they are most common in everyday colloquial and informal contexts, while less frequent in standard institutional written English texts (e.g., academic writing, business communication, etc.). ‘Idiomatic Englishes’ are understood through Moon’s (1998) description in this chapter, ‘fixed and semantically opaque or metaphorical’ expressions, such as ‘kick the bucket or spill the beans’ (Moon 1998, p. 4); Fernando’s (1996, p. 1) definition, ‘conventionalized multi-word expressions’ that have ‘pure (non-literal)’ meanings. Idioms are figurative expressions, containing many phrases that are ‘not semantically transparent, whose meaning does not follow straightforwardly from the meanings of their constituent composite parts.’ (Boers 2018, p. 177). When certain words are used in combination, they make non-literal but metaphorical meaning. English idioms, according to Liu (2003, p. 671), are ‘notoriously difficult’ for EFL learners due to their ‘rather rigid structure, quite unpredictable meaning, and fairly extensive use,’ because the learning challenge lies foremost with comprehension. English learners have been found to activate a literal reading of the words that make up figurative idioms, which is not very helpful. Because ‘a single word may have various literal meanings, and learners’ misinterpretation of the literal meaning can all too easily lead them astray as they try to figure out the idiom’s meaning. Often, a learner may not even be able to make any guesses at an idiom’s meaning, due to a lack of familiarity with the source context from which the idiom is derived.’ (Boers 2018, p. 177). However, Liu (2003, p. 671) adds, idiomatic expressions ‘can be a great asset to learners in acquiring a new language,’ and encouraging students to learn idioms may motivate students to be more adventurous and creative in their English learning practices. They may also fulfill vital pragmatic functions for students. Indeed, a majority of Japanese EFL university students in this study have reported that one of their most adventurous Facebook English experiences was learning ‘idiomatic © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Dovchin, Language, Social Media and Ideologies, SpringerBriefs in Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26139-9_8

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Englishes.’ Feeling the urge to find the equivalent idioms in Japanese language; interpreting the literal reading that is congruent with its figurative meaning; and trying to figure out the meaning through tracing back to their origin and etymology have helped these students evoke their mental imagery, which is known, according to Boers (2018, p. 177), to benefit retention and memory. Tracing the origin, etymology and the sociolinguistic history of these idiomatic Englishes has specifically become an adventurous English learning experience for these students as it has raised students’ awareness of literal, metaphorical and etymological underpinnings of idioms they have encountered on social media. Students appreciate the origin of new English terms but also some historical and cultural aspects of English-speaking countries that come as a package with these idioms. In other words, students claim the ideology of linguistic authenticity through ‘idiomatic Englishes’ on Facebook, because the historical and genealogical investigation of these idioms embedded within these translingual Englishes has allowed them to engage with English through its ‘true origin.’ For many students, learning ‘a true origin of English’ in a real-life context such as Facebook is estimated as learning ‘the authenticity of English.’ In Extract 8.1, students were directed to undertake the textual analysis on the ABC News Facebook article, which reports about the reactor fuel that melted after the Fukushima nuclear disaster (see also Chap. 7), and the corresponding comments left by Facebook users. While students worked through the commentary section, they have recognized some complex idiomatic English expressions. A research participant, Kazuaki, for example, highlights that he was perplexed by the multiple forms and usages of the word ‘brain.’ In line 1, Facebook commentator uses the term, ‘no-brainer,’ referring to the nuclear industry as ‘too obvious’ and ‘too simple.’ As Kazuaki explains, ‘I thought the word “no-brainer” meant people who have “no brain,” but it did not make sense in the sentence. I could not translate the sentence into Japanese. However, I discovered that “no-brainer” means “something just too obvious or too simple”’(Presentation, February 21, 2018, University of Aizu, Japan). In a similar vein, Kazuaki further describes that the phrase, ‘my brain spins’ in line 3 did not initially make any sense at all. He could only assume that this expression might refer to ‘someone who is having a headache’ or ‘someone whose head is spinning.’ Eventually, Kazuaki discovered that ‘brainspin’ refers to ‘insomnia’ because of overthinking or getting overexcited. As Kazuaki explains in his presentation, ‘I am glad to know the expression ‘brain spin’ now because I have a personal issue of ‘insomnia due to overthinking.’ This is my kind of word, and I am very thankful to Facebook for allowing me to learn real-life English phrases.’ (Presentation, February 21, 2018, University of Aizu, Japan, Japan). Overall, for Kazuaki, learning idiomatic Englishes on Facebook has been one of the most adventurous but active linguistic practices because he was able to interpret and figure out the complex literal and figurative structures of English vocabulary. This experience immensely helped him memorize new English terms because it left a long-lasting effect, ‘It took me a while to figure out what was going on with these expressions. After I found out the meaning, I was able to understand that not all English words make direct meaning. Instead, in combination with other words, they make a completely new meaning.

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Extract 8.1 Idiomatic Englishes and etymology

I would never forget these phrases. They will stay with me forever’ (Presentation, February 21, 2018, University of Aizu, Japan). Meanwhile, another research participant, Shigeru identifies his experience with an English idiom, ‘tin foil hats’ (line 2), as ‘complicated’ but ‘memorable.’ Shigeru emphasizes that how exploring the etymology of some English idioms have helped him acquire a better understanding of ‘how English can be structured and originated.’ As Shigeru reveals in his essay, ‘I could not understand why “tin foil hats” were used in this comment. It just didn’t make sense. I thought maybe they are using “tin foil

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hats” to protect themselves from the radiation or something. Then I found out from the online Urban Dictionary that “tin foil hats” actually refer to “paranoid people.” It was also interesting for me to explore why they say “paranoid people” as “tin foil hats”’(Written essay, February 21, 2018, University of Aizu, Japan). He has made an effort to trace back its etymology, which is associated with the propaganda designed to cover up a massive government conspiracy in the USA in the late 1970s, where the United States government tried to conceal its radio-wave thought-control program by spreading a false rumor that people could shield their minds from government intrusion by wearing a tinfoil hat. In reality, a tinfoil hat only improves reception and makes it easier for the government to read people’s mind. Upon figuring out the possible origin of this idiom, Shigeru felt more motivated and less discouraged to learn English, ‘I started learning more about English idioms afterward. For example, I learned English idiom, “raining cats and dogs.” It does not mean it will rain with cats and dogs. It just means “to rain heavily.” Its origin is that cats and dogs used to hide in thatch roofs during storms and then be washed out during heavy rains. So, when it rains heavily, cats and dogs used to fall from the roof, as if it looks like raining cats and dogs. It was fascinating for me to learn the real origin of these English idioms. I felt like I was learning the authentic part of English’ (Essay, February 21, 2018, AizuWakamatsu, Japan). In a similar vein, another student, Toku, describes his experience of learning English idioms on Facebook, ‘I started learning how these English idioms were originated in the first place. I like history, and I enjoyed learning history through English idioms. Studying these English idioms has offered me to learn about the true origin of English.’ (Written essay, February 23, 2018, University of Aizu, Japan). In other words, for many students, the ideology of linguistic authenticity was claimed through ‘idiomatic Englishes’ on Facebook, because they have equated ‘the tracing of the origin of English’ to ‘the authenticity of English.’ In Extract 8.2, a group of students claims authenticity through ‘onomatopoeic Englishes’ on Facebook, which are, according to Thurairaj et al. (2015), some of the most popular yet eccentric linguistic features of Internet slangs used by online users. Social media users express their current emotions and situational moods such as anger, happiness, sadness, sympathy and satisfaction through onomatopoeic Englishes (Sultana et al. 2013, 2015). The idea of ‘onomatopoeic Englishes’ is referred to as the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or mimics the sound that it portrays. Every language in the world has words that express sounds. When a person says an onomatopoetic word, the sound of the word copies the natural sound the word is identifying (Sugahara 2011). Common occurrences of ‘onomatopoeic Englishes’, for instance, include animal noises such as ‘woof woof’, resembling the dog; ‘meow meow’, imitating the cat; the sound of an emotional expressions such as ‘haha’; the sound of a clock like ‘tick tock’; or the expression of sleeping like ‘zzzz’ and so on (Sugahara 2011). Overall, a majority of students have reported that the examples of ‘onomatopoeic Englishes’ were some of the most frequently used linguistic features they have encountered on Facebook. Comparing similar sounds across English and Japanese languages and cultures to depict and simulate their sensory information, and that these associations between sound and meaning helped them break out of their rou-

8 Idiomatic Englishes, Onomatopes, Authenticities Extract 8.2 Onomatopoeic Englishes and emotional reality

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tines of regular English learning practices and the narrow assumptions of the textbook English in which they are mostly involved. As young adolescences, they also had fun saying and practicing ‘onomatopoeic Englishes’, which was one of the best ways of memorizing new English words. While students have recognized that ‘onomatopoeic Englishes’ were not necessarily of utmost importance in their vocabulary, they were still able to help them quickly broaden their lexicon, because they were easy to remember, and became a great way to get new words through having fun. Students also described that ‘onomatopoeic Englishes’ could easily draw parallels between the word and the phenomenon they were describing. Onomatopoeic Englishes were valuable ways of promoting students’ understanding and awareness of English word structure, emotional expressions, linguistic play, and banter. As well as students guessing what onomatopoeia represent, they have also started comparing different onomatopoeia between English and Japanese. A Facebook user, for example, makes a sound of the pig, referring to the nuclear radiated wild boars in Fukushima, ‘oink oink oinkkk’ (line 5). As Yuto explains, ‘I learned how English speakers use ‘oink oink’ to make a pig’s sound. In the Japanese language, we pronounce it as ‘buu buu.’ So, it is interesting to see the difference’ (Interview, March 4, 2018, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan). Yuto has realized that different languages make different types of onomatopoetic expressions to represent similar animal sounds. As Yuto adds, ‘I learned from the Internet that when an English-speaker says the word ‘woof woof’ to make the dog sound, a Russian-speaker might not agree, as the dog makes the sound ‘gav gav’ in Russian; or ‘mung mung’ in Korean.’ (Interview, March 4, 2018, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan). These sounds are expressed differently in different languages because every language uses sound in different ways. Playing with onomatopoeic Englishes on social media has become one of the means to develop metalinguistic awareness for this student—an understanding of not just how to use onomatopoeic Englishes, but of how they work in different cross-linguistic and intercultural contexts. They offered a chance for this student to step back and consider the structures and properties of social media English and compare with other languages. Onomatopoeia may also be viewed as a credible literary device because they have been used for centuries to help make writing more expressive and exciting (Guonan 2000). Learning to experience the sounds of English through the eyes of the Japanese speaker had a positive impact to the process of understanding the reality of the language in focus, because ‘onomatopoeic Englishes’ were able to express people’s genuine emotional expressions and reactions in Facebook context. Many students highlighted their encounter with multiple exclamatory spellings of situated moods such as happy and cheerful emotions [e.g., ‘Hahahaha, hehehe, Yaay’ etc. (lines 3, 4, 5)]; surprised and astonished emotions (e.g., ‘Wow’, ‘whoa’ (lines 1, 2, 4)); anger and frustration through swear or religious words [e.g., ‘FU’ meaning Fuck you (line 2); ‘Jesus’ (line 1)]; hesitant and doubtful emotions [e.g., umm, hmmm etc. (lines, 4, 6)]; empathy and sympathy [e.g., The Buddhist prayer ‘om mane ’ heart emojis (line 3)]. Toku notes that the usage padme hung’ (line 7) and ‘ of ‘Duh’—an exclamation used to comment on someone else’s foolish or stupid action—was very common across Facebook users (line 6). As Toku explains, ‘I had no idea why “Duh” was used so many times on Facebook. I know now that “Duh” is

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a rude expression because many Western social media users think that the Japanese government has handled the post-Fukushima nuclear disaster in a very foolish way’ (Interview, January 19, 2018, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan). Takahiro, meanwhile, describes how he noticed different ways of praying through onomatopoeic Englishes on Facebook. Takahiro was not familiar at all with the word, ‘om mane padme hung’ (line 7), but later he realized that it was the way of praying in Tibetan Buddhism. Saying this prayer would equate to reciting ten thousand ‘Dari Ekh’ tantric prayers—known as the ‘Buddhist Mother Tara’ in Tibetan Buddhism. As Takahiro explains, ‘It was so great to find out that so many people were sending their prayers and blessings to Japan. I felt very humbled and honored by these prayers, and the Fukushima nuclear disaster was not forgotten.’ (Interview, March 4, 2018, AizuWakamatsu, Japan). Yuto, on the other hand, recognizes that the expression ‘Jesus’ in line 1 was not necessarily a way of saying a prayer but rather an emotional expression of one’s mild surprise or annoyance using Jesus Christ’s name. As Yuto explains, ‘Maybe something like “nante koto da” [Oh my god!] in Japanese? It is so difficult to translate ‘Jesus’ in Japanese!” (Interview, March 4, 2018, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan). Overall, these Japanese EFL students view ‘onomatopoeic Englishes’ through a ‘sincere expression of emotion’ which can, thereby, be claimed as the ideology of linguistic authenticity. The ‘emotional sincerity’ is a necessary condition of authenticity because one’s real emotion is expressed spontaneously, i.e., ‘emotional authenticity’ as the genuine exhibition of emotion (Salmela and Mayer 2009). As Yuto explains, ‘I found these onomatopoeic English expressions so real and natural because they could be used to express one’s sincere emotions and certain moods. I have always wanted to learn these types of authentic English expressions.’ (Interview, January 19, 2018, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan). Riko, similarly, describes, ‘Expressing one’s true emotion through language is human’s natural behavior. We do not try to fake or pretend when we express our true feelings through language’ (Interview, January 20, 2018, AizuWakamatsu, Japan). From this point of view, ‘onomatopoeic Englishes’ are claimed as linguistically authentic by these students because of their ability to express emotional authenticity with spontaneity and sincerity on social media. Authenticity is viewed as the coherence between the emotion and one’s internally justified moods, expressions, values and beliefs—‘emotional realities’ as the genuine exhibition of authenticity.

8.1 Conclusion Drawing on data examples of a Facebook task-based research project in the context of Japanese EFL university students, this chapter discusses how social media users can be engaged with translingual Englishes on Facebook through two main ways. First, some Japanese EFL university students are dynamically engaged with translingual Englishes on social media through informal and colloquial ‘idiomatic Englishes,’ which are, in the meantime, notoriously difficult for many students. As soon as they start playing around with these idiomatic Englishes, however, they begin to raise

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their awareness in how meanings can be made through non-literal and metaphorical expressions in the English language. Students have started realizing the conventionalized multi-word expressions that have pure and figurative meanings, seeing the difference between the semantically transparent and ambiguous composite parts. Tracing back the origin and history of these idiomatic expressions is part of their adventurous English learning experience, as they appreciate the historical and cultural aspects attached to English. Put simply, students claim the ideology of linguistic authenticity through ‘idiomatic Englishes’ on Facebook, because the historical and genealogical exploration of English has allowed them to engage with English through its ‘authenticity’—its ‘true origin.’ Second, these students have fun saying and practicing ‘onomatopoeic Englishes’ across Facebook—the process of creating paralinguistic expressions that phonetically imitates or mimics the sound that it portrays. Students have encountered multiple examples of onomatopoetic Englishes such as exclamatory spellings of situated moods, emotions, the expressions of prayers, and even the sound that animals make. While students have recognized that ‘onomatopoeic Englishes’ were not necessarily of utmost importance in their vocabulary, they were still able to help them easily broaden their lexicon, because they were easy to remember, and became a great way to get new words through having fun. Students could also easily draw parallels between the word and the phenomenon they were describing through ‘onomatopoeic Englishes.’ They were valuable ways of promoting students’ understanding and awareness of English word structure, emotional expressions, linguistic play, and banter. Meanwhile, for many students, ‘onomatopoeic Englishes’ are deemed as ‘authentic Englishes’ because their expressiveness brings out the real ‘emotional sincerity,’ i.e., emotional moods such as happiness, excitement, anger, frustration, empathy, and sympathy of social media users. Experiencing ‘emotional sincerity’ through ‘onomatopoeic Englishes’ seems to be a necessary condition of authenticity for these students because one’s real emotion is expressed spontaneously and instantly. The genuine exhibition of emotional reality through ‘translingual Englishes’ on social media is, thereby, claimed as another façade of sociolinguistic authenticity by these Japanese EFL students.

References Boers, F. 2018. Learning lexical phrases. The Cambridge guide to learning english as a second language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fernando, C. 1996. Idioms and idiomaticity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guonan, L. 2000. Sense transfer of onomatopoeic words in English and Chinese. Foreign Languages and their teaching 3. Liu, D. 2003. The most frequently used spoken American English idioms: A corpus analysis and its implications. TESOL Quarterly 37 (4): 671–700. Moon, R. 1998. Fixed expressions and idioms in English: A corpus-based approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Salmela, M., and Mayer, V. (eds.). 2009. Emotions, ethics, and authenticity, vol. 5. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Sugahara, T. 2011. Onomatopoeia in spoken and written english: Corpus-and usage-based analysis. https://doi.org/10.14943/doctoral.k9777 Sultana, S., S. Dovchin, and A. Pennycook. 2013. Styling the periphery: Linguistic and cultural takeup in Bangladesh and Mongolia. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17 (5): 687–710. Thurairaj, S., E.P. Hoon, S.S. Roy, and P.W. Fong. 2015. Reflections of students’ language usage in social networking sites: Making or marring academic english. Electronic Journal of e-Learning 13 (4): 302–316.

Chapter 9

Translingual Englishes, Social Media, Language Ideologies, Critical Pedagogy

9.1 Translingual Englishes and Social Media Social media websites such as Facebook have started playing a significant role in the everyday practices of young people around the world (de Bres 2015; Honeycutt and Cunliffe 2010). Scholarship on social media discourses and texts has started emphasizing the critical rise of English diversity and semiotic heterogeneity perpetuated by transnational youth members as some of the social media’s fundamental textual characteristics (Leppänen et al. 2015; Varis and Wang 2011). Throughout this book, I have, therefore, stressed the significance of exploring EFL university students’ language practices with reference to social media. I argue that the overall language practices and language learning processes of EFL university students in social media environment should be taken seriously since these processes are inextricably intertwined with these students’ overall language education, literacy, and identities. It is nearly impossible to address the diversity of English language practices among our students without a focus on their social media engagements (Varis and Blommaert 2015; Horst et al. 2010). One of the primary arguments in this book is, accordingly, to understand the English language engagements of these EFL students with social media from the perspectives of ‘translingual Englishes’ (Oliver and Nguyen 2017). I strived to illustrate how the discourses, texts, and lingos of social media are always tied to the emergent theories of ‘translinguistics.’ I have applied a way of looking at the dynamic linguistic practices of EFL university students in Mongolia and Japan through merging the prevailing ethos embedded within the ‘translingual turn’ (e.g., English as translanguaging, global Englishes, translocal Englishes, transcultural Englishes etc.), with the transtextual, transmodal and transliteral analytical frameworks that investigate ‘texts and signs within the historical, local, discursive and interpretative elements of context’ (Pennycook 2007, p. 44). The combination of diverse multiple linguistic

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resources, repertoires, modes, codes, genres and styles on social media problematizes the traditional concepts such as ‘world Englishes,’ ‘homogeneous English’ or ‘English as dystopia’ (Chap. 2). Data examples in this book have enabled us to analyse the complex web of linguistic, cultural and semiotic resources in relation to social media, presenting a multifaceted interpretation of English that reveals the associations between the semiotic mobility of these participants and the different other resources on which they draw. From ‘conversational sampling’ (Roth-Gordon 2009), relocalization of AAVE resources (Chap. 4), derivative Englishes (Chap. 5), inverted Englishes (Chap. 6) to ‘ghost Englishes’ (Chap. 7), ‘idiomatic Englishes’ and ‘onomatopes’ (Chap. 8), these students as social media users have come to be seen as part of a broader deployment of semiotic resources. A large number of unfamiliar linguistic features and forms are observed alongside the more obvious codes such as English, Mongolian or Japanese. It is, thereby, highly questionable to rely on the idea that these students learn, deploy, use or speak the ‘same’ English while engaging with social media. While questioning the separability and division of English from other multiple modes of interaction on Facebook, I thereby conclude that social media is a transmodal space, whereby its interlocutors seem to re-define the role of English in terms of its existing presence. By incorporating English with their local language, multimodal texts and other available resources with both local and global content, Facebook users are inventively transcending the implication of English (Sharma 2012). Put simply, texts and discourses on social media are often involved with semiotic/linguistic creativity, with social media users re-entextualizating varied multiple modalities and signs to create their own versions of online English (Thorne 2013; Maybin and Swann 2007). This concluding chapter thereby looks at the implications of taking social media seriously in terms of revealing translingual English practices in critical applied linguistics. The book concludes that EFL students’ linguistic realities are more likely ‘translingual,’ ‘transcultural’ and ‘translocal’ than ‘mono,’ ‘bi,’ ‘multi’ -lingual or -cultural, and it is crucial to reflect this reality in critical applied linguistics. Social media allows EFL students to bring multiplicity, flexibility, and creativity to their language learning practices while traversing their linguistic and cultural boundaries. Henceforth, this book recommends that it is imperative in the area of language policy, language education planning and curriculum development to lessen the reliance on a language ideology that endorses separations and divisions in the name of mono-, standard and singular instructional approaches, or policies and ideologies that promote ‘English purism’ at the cost of linguistic diversity in the foreign language education context.

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9.2 Translingual Englishes and the Language Ideologies of Authenticities Social media becomes a vital space for linguistic creativity and cultural/linguistic positioning, as it creates opportunities to look at both sociolinguistic realities in late modernity and sociolinguistic ideologies as language users engage with it in their everyday lives. While these EFL university students are involved with social media either as ‘synchronous’ or ‘asynchronous’ ways, they simultaneously engage in the manners of elaborating specific creations about their linguistic views and ideologies, their discussants, their preferred linguistic and cultural beliefs. With the innovative and creative use of available linguistic resources in social media, these students often engage in multiple metalinguistic claims of ideas and ideologies of what is indeed ‘linguistically authentic’ for them (Jaworski et al. 2004). This book, thereby, seeks to expand the trend of ‘translingual Englishes’ by taking the notion of ‘global spread of authenticity’ seriously (Pennycook 2007; Dovchin 2015). In general, the translinguistics turn is oftentimes pathologized by hegemonic language ideologists and traditionalists for promoting the language practices that should be deemed as ‘non-authentic,’ ‘non-standard,’ ‘fleeting,’ ‘abnormal’ and so forth, which worsening and blurring the communicative practices (cf. Zorn 2015.) The hegemonic language ideologies call for ‘linguistic purity’, ‘linguistic authenticity’ and ‘linguistic standardization’—‘any language should be spoken “purely”, i.e., without being mixed with another language’ (Jørgensen et al. 2011, p. 33)—otherwise, that particular language is in danger of contamination and pollution. Nevertheless, what, in fact, is the real question of linguistic authenticity, is the critical dimension of this book. What is authentic English? Is Standard English only authentic? Are other Englishes inauthentic? What is an authentic way of communicating for English users and English learners? Many recent sociolinguists appear to imply the common ethos in understanding the idea of linguistic authenticity as a complex and multi-faceted social process rather than pre-determined and structured definition (Pennycook 2007; Terkourafi 2010). The ideology of linguistic authenticity is always pulled into multiple local ways of what it means to be authentic. We, as linguists, need to look at a process of how the idea of authenticity becomes dependent on particular language users and learners and particular local settings, cultures, and contexts. This tension between the global spread of a cultural principle to stick to authenticity, and its multiple conflicting local linguistic and cultural ways and processes of what it means to be authentic is something that should be presented at the core. The idea of who is an authentic speaker is complicated, elastic and complex, depending on the particular situations. When or if found, the authentic speakers seem to reveal multiple different conflicting ideas. In other words, the idea of authenticity should not be assumed as a single-handed focal principle but rather a range of foci of ‘linguistic authenticities,’ which are introduced differently in different local sociolinguistic contexts (Naess 2017). There are multiple social meanings of authenticity expressed in language

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productions that should be grasped with different levels of indexicality (Coupland 2014). Data examples in this book, for example, illustrate that the majority of Mongolian students metalinguistically claim their own social media translingual English practices as authentic, maintaining a meaningful and valid socio-cultural communicative aim. It is evident that EFL Mongolian students bend and twist English through multiple ways on Facebook. Yet, these students are self-conscious and self-aware of their use of English on Facebook, while tend rigorously validating their own English language practices on social media, claiming to be authentic and sociolinguistically meaningful speakers (Chaps. 4 and 5). In a similar vein, the Japanese EFL university students recognize that ‘translingual Englishes’ on social media help them understand the multiple ways of speaking, writing, being and learning English. Their social media experience allowed them to see English through critical eyes and create alternative learning and thinking opportunities. The encounter with translingual Englishes on Facebook was deemed as ‘real-life’ and ‘authentic’ English by the majority of Japanese EFL students (Chaps. 6 and 7). These various claims of linguistic authenticities urge us to reconsider how else, as opposed to dystopia, homogeneity, and purism, English could be thought of in the context of linguistic diversity in late modernity. Overall, the numerous interpretations and claims of ‘linguistic authenticities’ and their relation to the translingual Englishes of social media have revealed the myriad ways in which we may look at certain local language ideologies. It is an obvious truism that one of the most popular language ideologies circulating in Mongolia and Japan is the perception of ‘linguistic authenticity.’ The question of how one takes the ideology of authenticity, however, profoundly differs, depending on each individuals’ own often-diverse criteria, beliefs and ideas. What it means to be linguistically authentic and, correspondingly, the different linguistic processes of how this idea of authenticity is realized and performed, have multiple origins. These EFL students employ combinations of both local and more global English-oriented modes, which, I argue, are novel in their own right. From these multiple discourses, it can be argued that linguistic authenticity is better understood ‘as a dialogical engagement with community’ and ‘the project of realism’ (Pennycook 2007, p. 115). Our focus should thereby be on how discourses on authenticity and its various processes of localization reflect different realities. By investigating authenticity in this way, we can understand the ideology of linguistic authenticity as a discursively-mediated mode of epitomizing the local and the real.

9.3 Translingual Englishes, Social Media and Critical Pedagogy In this book, I seek to challenge the assertive one-sided and monolithic ideology of the purity of the standard norm of English per se in the critical language pedagogy. Too frequently, language educators seem to impose a monolithic orientation and

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ideology to sociolinguistic and cultural life to our students (Dovchin et al. 2017). These exocentric language ideologies do not allow for a layered approach, where the real-world issues in local contexts might have value and importance. For example: when Mongolia transformed from a communist regime to democracy in 1990, its overall higher education policy in terms of foreign language education has been drastically reformed. From a heavily Soviet-styled educational system, with Russian language teaching and learning playing the primary foreign language role, to a liberal educational policy that embraces the diversity of languages, students are now allowed to learn English, German, French, Japanese, Chinese and Korean, amongst other languages. Nevertheless, one of the most persistent policies and ideologies in the foreign language education context in modern Mongolia, is ‘a standard English only’ policy (Dovchin 2018), whereby all participants in the language classroom are expected to speak, practice and learn ‘only standardized English,’ and keep the formal and informal English separate, preventing ‘cross-contamination’ (Jacobson and Faltis 1990). Similarly, English is officially given a significant status as the most important foreign language in Japan through the idealization of native-speakerism and ‘standard English only’ policy in the EFL classrooms. Nonetheless, the Japanese EFL students’ English performances inside and outside classrooms have not always been satisfactory. Certain critical questions emerge from these accounts. Data examples in this book show that we are looking at students, whose daily linguistic practices are extensively involved with a range of multimedia, digital linguistic and semiotic resources, closely associated with technology, social media, and the Internet. They persistently claim the many different ideologies of ‘authentic English’ in terms of their own usage of English (like the Mongolian EFL university students) and towards their encounters with other different Englishes on social media (like the Japanese EFL students). They have already formed their metalinguistic ideologies towards what is ‘real’ and ‘false’ English. Social media provide these students with multiple skills to critically engage with ‘English,’ in which English is challenged, converted and negotiated by these students to participate in more than just ‘classroom English’ (Lantz-Andersson et al. 2013). How is it then thinkable for a foreign language education system in a highly globalized today’s world to quest for monolingual and monolithic teaching/learning policies and ideologies, when our students are often socially interactive and vigorously involved with social media and other new technologies? As we have also argued elsewhere, ‘We need therefore to ask ourselves what language myths we perpetuate through the language ideologies we reproduce in our language classes, teaching bounded entities under the labels of French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, Italian and so on. What does it mean to put a language in a spatial and temporal box—Chinese Level 4 at 2:30 in Room 8:407—and to repeat this practice over a period of weeks? What myths are we perpetuating about languages, and particularly in the context of students, whose on- and offline worlds do not resemble such practices?’ (Dovchin et al. 2017, p. 208). Not persistent rule but rather negotiation is more critical for such dynamic linguistic practices. The increased use of social media worlds will continue to grow, with more users adapting to a combined

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online and offline life (Wang 2017). Our students are already ahead of us with their engagement with social media and other new technologies. Language educators, in tandem with this technological advance, need to find new ways to bring these technologies into pedagogies to keep tasks and instructions relevant and applicable to the lifestyle of our students (Fewkes and McCabe 2012). We need to formulate language learning projects that use social media both as a ‘socialization’ and a ‘learning platform.’ Turning social media into ‘knowledge’ should be the foundation of the critical language classroom, creating a dynamic learning environment focused on promoting ‘knowledge’ rather than merely treating social media as a mere source of ‘socialization’ (Fewkes and McCabe 2012). Developing this further from a translingual point of view, I can argue that foreign language education might become a more vibrant space if we are able to integrate translingual features of Englishes on social media that our students enjoy deploying both inside and outside classrooms. As Mayer, Griffith, Jurokwitz, and Rothman (2008, p. 338) reiterate, ‘Particularly because of the immediacy, vividness, and ondemand nature of technology in the classroom, satisfaction may be mistaken for achievement. Thus, more than ever, attention needs to be devoted to the scholarship of teaching and specifically to how technology inside and outside the classroom affects learning outcomes for new generations of students.’ Integrating social media as a language learning tool inside/outside the classroom can, thus, be useful in critical pedagogy to challenge both institutional and non-institutional English language practices of language learners. Our students would learn the difference between the institutionalized and non-institutionalized forms of English from social media since their future socioeconomic success cannot solely rely on informal forms of communication alone. This may also increase students’ aptitudes, capabilities, selfknowledge, and self-awareness, to value and embrace their lifelong learning, while improving their life skills and, to develop their self-confidence. Future research of social media in applied linguistics may examine language learners’ interactions with social media through both ‘synchronous’—unplanned, real-time and natural engagements outside the classroom and ‘asynchronous’—preplanned language learning tasks with specific objectives inside/outside classrooms. As data examples have illustrated in this book (Chaps. 4 and 5), investigating English learners’ synchronous and natural engagements with social media gave us an opportunity learn our students’ socialization, interaction, and engagements with their Facebook friends beyond the classroom. EFL students’ access and engagement with social media were catered to numerous types of language learning styles and one’s daily linguistic practices. Their creative and playful re-invention and relocalization of English on social media such as disassembling and recombining its lexical elements to rediscover new meanings were valuable ways of promoting their English learning journey and developing their English skills into daily practice. They displayed a natural propensity to play with English on social media, as seen in the enjoyment of wordplay, puns, songs, raps, jokes and so on. Students were also vigorously expressive in terms of their linguistic choices, desires, pleasures, and ideologies they bring to Facebook. If we purposefully investigate EFL students’ social media practice outside the classroom, we would better understand how our students bring their own

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language ideologies, linguistic choices, negotiation strategies, desires, and identifications, while doing their ‘own way of learning languages’ back in the classroom. This may also bring everlasting technological advances and multiple online modes from social media that our students take up and practice, information and interactions with transnational people from around the world (Varis and Blommaert 2015). Examining EFL students’ asynchronous practices through pre-planned and taskbased social media approaches, on the other hand, may create a favourable online environment to turn social media into ‘knowledge’ and ‘learning platform.’ As data examples have exhibited (Chaps. 7 and 8), students were instructed to give less attention to their target activities on Facebook (e.g., socialization), while to pay more attention to the learning aspects of English on Facebook. Students, consequently, were able to improve their lexical dexterity, build their intercultural confidence and surge their motivation and positive attitude towards learning English. Their English learning processes of associating sounds and senses, encountering with abbreviations, clippings, onomatopes, and idioms brought an essential means of developing their own metalinguistic awareness—an understanding of not just how to use English, but of how it works. The social media tasks offered them a chance to step back and reconsider the unfamiliar structures and properties of English. They brought us the importance of not losing sight of the pleasure in learning English in classrooms instead of vigorously focusing on learning and teaching English grammar, spelling, and the associated syntax. Besides, students were able to learn the technological advances through navigating various available applications that allowed multiple types of interaction between its users. The new technologies that support Facebook features were able to provide students with practical and pragmatic language-based activities. Most importantly, Facebook fostered the students’ critical sociolinguistic and socio-cultural awareness in order to see English through critical eyes and openmindedness. If formulated strategically as part of an educational project inside the classroom, the same technologies and linguistic features of Facebook would be able to create dynamic and pragmatic learning of English within our EFL students. Turning ‘translingual Englishes on social media’ into ‘learning platform’ may open up the ways where our students would be able to negotiate their differences and similarities in terms of English, which would correspondingly help them become globally mobile and critical citizens (Norton 2016). This knowledge may help students rediscover the joy of learning a new language, while also becoming a useful instrument for the most natural way of language acquisition for these EFL students. To sum up, I argue that the translingual Englishes on social media could be introduced in critical language classrooms, and we as language educators need to challenge ourselves to implement a curriculum that encourages language teachers and learners to see English as an ‘activity’ or ‘practice’ in place of ‘an object glued to textbook’. This will allow our students to start learning language by themselves, and ‘become managers of their learning of English with the help of other members of [Facebook], and their teachers’ (Kabilan et al. 2010, p. 185). After all, by intentionally flouting the artificial and ideological divisions between so-called ‘languages,’ translingual Englishes might empower one and all who are involved—the

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learner and the teacher, transforming the power relations and humanizing the practices of teaching and learning, enhancing the experience, and developing cultural and linguistic identity. English language pedagogy should equally foster learners’ critical awareness on both ‘standard English’ and ‘translingual Englishes’, as students would be able to appreciate that English may either become a constructive and transferable communicative tool or drop its power once it crosses the local ideologies and boundaries, opening up more non-normative views towards their use of English.

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Correction to: Language, Social Media and Ideologies

Correction to: S. Dovchin, Language, Social Media and Ideologies, SpringerBriefs in Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26139-9 The original version of the book was inadvertently published without following consistency in the chapter end references, which have now been corrected. The chapter has been updated with the change.

The updated versions of the book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26139-9 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Dovchin, Language, Social Media and Ideologies, SpringerBriefs in Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26139-9_10

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