Band 34, Heft 2 - Special Issue: Insults or acts of identity? The role of styling, stylizing, and mocking in multilingual discourse, Guest Editor: Christina Higgins

This article discusses how stylization sheds light on the role of authenticity as an increasingly relevant concept in sociolinguistics. Building on research on style, crossing, and mock language use, the article demonstrates how multilingual stylization provides speakers with a wider range of resources for navigating and negotiating borders and identities. Stylization is increasingly important since modernist linkages between language and the categories of nation and ethnicity still exert authority over how authenticity is ascribed. At the same time, transcultural flows offer speakers more opportunity to cross and challenge borders linguistically. When speakers begin to stylize one another’s languages, however, the thorny issue of interpretation arises since stylized speech can be understood as mocking the speakers of the language being stylized. While studies of dialect stylization have explored these issues for over a decade, research on multilingual stylization is less developed. Accordingly, this special issue examines the role that authenticity plays in the production and interpretation of stylization. A continuum of stylization is presented that places mocking on one end (to refer to stylization that leads to insult) and style on the other (to represent acts of identity), while keeping open the possibility that all acts of stylization can ultimately be understood as acts of identity, given the right framings and stances expressed by the speakers.

The transgressive use of language by out-group speakers, or crossing is used in a variety of ways to achieve both affiliative and disaffiliative ends among youths. However, crossing can also be used as an affiliative resource in asymmetrical power relations between teachers and students. Reporting on the findings of a 1.5 year ethnography of an English/language arts classroom at a multilingual and multiethnic public middle school in Hawai’i, this paper explores one teacher’s use of stylization practices which take the form of crossing. The teacher stylizes students’ voices through ventriloquizing, which is an affiliative resource when strategically embedded in ritual oppositional frames of interaction. However, when embedded in other interactional frames, this transgressive use of language results in acts of insult or mocking. I analyze audio recordings of naturally occurring interaction to explore how Hawai’i Creole (or Pidgin) is used transgressively in reported speech by the teacher, an “out-group” individual, for negotiating interactions in his English language arts classroom. Instances of transgressive language emerge as artfully performed strategies that provide a rich site for the construction of affiliative identities. The use of crossing allows the teacher to take liminal stances between offense and respect to strategically manage student participation in this diverse classroom. These findings point to the important role that crossing plays in acts of identity through reported speech where the performance of crossing within positively valued, jocular oppositional classroom rituals demonstrates the capacity for crossing as a contributing factor to the emergence of a shared sense of community in the classroom.

Taking an interactional sociolinguistic approach, this study explores how multicultural and multilingual siblings interact with their Spanish grandfather and how, through the use of styling and stylization in these interactions, they negotiate and construct multicultural family identities. Using Tannen’s power and solidarity framework, I analyze three excerpts from a seven-hour corpus of naturally occurring face-to-face recorded conversations between my sisters, my grandfather, and myself, from 1984 in Spain to explore how speakers use stylization to identify themselves as legitimate members of a multilingual and multicultural family, ranging from acts of identity to mockery. The analyses show that while stylization provided Abuelo with resources for creating harmony with his granddaughters as he reappropriated their Spanish usage, it also created a source for mockery among the sisters. In their conversations with their grandfather, the granddaughters used stylization to perform acts of identity through reported speech about their experiences in Spain and their feelings about their extended family, and this styled them as dutiful granddaughters. Finally, Abuelo styled himself as the authority figure in the house by speaking English to the girls, albeit an English heavily influenced by his Spanish. In response, the granddaughters stylized him, mocking his authority in the process. The study demonstrates how stylization is intimately tied with acts of identity and underscores the affiliative and disaffiliative interactional stances for creating authenticity in a transnational family.

This study analyzes the narrative-based interview data of three Indian women to examine the manner in which they utilize stylization to construct identity-rich, ideological stances related to discriminatory discourses of Hindi and English medium education in the linguistically rich, albeit complex, present-day context of India. Stylization is understood to be a “knowing deployment of culturally familiar styles and identities that are marked as deviating from those predictably associated with the current speaking context” (Coupland 2001a: 345). The three analyzed voices are stylized by devices such as mock Hindi medium English, Hinglish – a local combination of Hindi and English, and an exaggerated theatricality – realized through a hyperbolic manipulation of pace, volume, pitch, and laughing tones. Analysis of these diverse stylization episodes reveals that while English is typically associated with positions of power for speakers, its actual value depends on the speakers’ interactional framing. The analysis illustrates that stylized speech is variously harnessed by participants to reproduce hegemonic linguistic discourses or to enact oblique, if incomplete, critiques of them. The study is based on data collected for larger projects in which 34 Indian women were interviewed in the North Indian city of Dehradun.

This study presents an analysis of a Nepali comedian’s dialect stylization in a stand-up comedy show performed for the diasporic Nepali community in Bochum, Germany. The analysis shows that through creative deployment of diverse linguistic practices of Nepali speakers, the comedian, Manoj Gajurel, engages in important identity work both in the narrating and in the narrated world of the comedy act. In the narrating world, he discursively constructs a shared identity with the audience as “we Nepalis” who are comfortable in celebrating – but also finding humor in – the linguistic diversity in Nepal. Drawing on contemporary political discourse in Nepal, they imagine a new federal Nepal through Gajurel’s stylization and the audience’s affiliative responses respectively. In the narrated world, the comedian constructs various stereotypical identities of Nepali dialect speakers using multiple speaker footings and revoicings. Although the accuracy of representation can be contested, stylized performances such as this give a symbolic and material value to the traditionally denigrated dialects and serve as a resource for language users to construct and represent a different range of identities in the age of late modernity.

This article analyzes stylized pronunciations of English by Japanese speakers on televised variety shows in Japan. Research on style and mocking has done much to reveal how linguistic forms are utilized in interaction as resources of identity construction that can oftentimes subvert hegemonic discourse (Chun 2004). Within this research area, scholars have primarily explored language among monolingual speakers of English, and immigrant or second generation L2 English multilinguals who have frequent contact with speakers of other languages (Rampton 1995; Chun 2009). What has not been examined is the use of stylized languages in contexts where English is considered a foreign language, such as Japan. In this article, I investigate Stylized native-speaker English (NSE), or English spoken with a highly enunciated hyper-L1 accent, which indexes a degree of social “cool”. I examine the ways in which NSE is stylized in variety shows through an analysis of both oral discourse and textual commentary (telop) produced on the screen for viewers. The article argues that these forms of stylization are used as resources in the social construction of cool identities and demonstrates how the indexical relationship between social cool and Stylized NSE works bi-directionally.