Startseite “Hey BCC this is Australia and we speak and read English:” Monolingualism and othering in relation to linguistic diversity
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“Hey BCC this is Australia and we speak and read English:” Monolingualism and othering in relation to linguistic diversity

  • Valeria Sinkeviciute

    Valeria Sinkeviciute is Lecturer at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her main research interests lie in the field of pragmatics of social interaction and discourse analysis with a focus on conversational humour, linguistic (im)politeness, identity construction, social media and reality television discourse. She is the author of a number of papers on these topics in journals and edited volumes, and her recent monograph Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness: A Pragmatic Analysis of Social Interaction (John Benjamins).

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Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 29. Oktober 2020
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Abstract

This paper explores how linguistic diversity gave rise to a multi-party interaction with strong elements of monolingualism and othering. The data analyzed comes from the official Facebook page of Brisbane City Council that very rarely creates posts in languages other than English. One of such rare posts in Korean attracted a number of negative comments in relation to the language used. This paper examines how the discourses of monolingualism and othering are constructed in those comments. The findings of this qualitative study show that, in the analyzed data, monolingualism is primarily indexed through the following discourses: “English only”, English as the language of Australia, English as a national identity and monolingual beliefs, in general. Othering includes such practices as predominantly engaging in the “us vs them” discourse, positioning the non-dominant language and its speakers as the different ‘other’, ascribing negative identity and using impoliteness practices, such as challenges, warnings or accusations.


Corresponding author: Valeria Sinkeviciute, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia, E-mail:

Award Identifier / Grant number: 2018/30/E/HS2/00644

About the author

Valeria Sinkeviciute

Valeria Sinkeviciute is Lecturer at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her main research interests lie in the field of pragmatics of social interaction and discourse analysis with a focus on conversational humour, linguistic (im)politeness, identity construction, social media and reality television discourse. She is the author of a number of papers on these topics in journals and edited volumes, and her recent monograph Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness: A Pragmatic Analysis of Social Interaction (John Benjamins).

Acknowledgment

This study is part of the research project supported by the National Science Centre, Poland (Project number 2018/30/E/HS2/00644). I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Istvan Kecskes, and Marta Dynel for their useful suggestions.

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Published Online: 2020-10-29
Published in Print: 2020-11-26

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