Volume 35, Issue 5 -

This article investigates the manner in which students in Norwegian upper secondary schools negotiate “legitimate speaker” category membership in spoken interactions. It is concerned with adolescents’ linguistic identity as Norwegian speakers, and the language ideologies that inform categorization practices. Three collaborative features are distinguished to identify membership categorization practices: the pragmatic notion of scales of time and place; pronouns, in particular the personal pronouns “we”, “us”, and “they”; and the socio-epistemic notion of object-side assessments. The article asks whether the students’ categories correspond to those of education policy and research, and finds that students operate with more complex membership categorizations than the binary Norwegian/non-Norwegian division found in applied linguistic research and policy documents. It also finds that status as “expert” speaker of Norwegian is negotiable in student interactions, where social factors such as interpersonal relations, perceived social differences and performance of category-bound activities are as important as linguistic factors. The article shows how both non-native and native speakers of Norwegian can discursively construct themselves and others as more or less expert speakers of the language. As such, it contributes with insights on how institutionally defined linguistic markets, linguistic capital and legitimate speakers can be contested at the local level of student interactions.

This article examines how the travel sections of China Daily (CD) appropriate dominant tourism discourses in representing Chinese languages. Incorporating language ideology into critical discourse analysis, an examination of 223 CD travelogues reveals three discourse strands: naming Chinese cuisine, referring to Chinese languages, and metapragmatic comments on Chinese languages. It is argued that CD’s touristic representations of Chinese languages constitute part of the repertoire of dominant tourism discourses rather than a challenge or resistance against them, and CD travel writing does constitute a voice in the “contact zone,” which, however, speaks in a language that is essentially complicit in Othering China for tourist consumption.

This study builds on research into the influence of religion on migrant language maintenance in Australia. In the case of Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus, previous studies have found that religious devoutness has a positive influence on the maintenance of Tamil in the home domain. In the religious domain, an ideology which links the Tamil language to the Tamil Hindu (Saiva) religion works in favour of maintaining Tamil in temple spaces in Australia. However this language-religion ideology is challenged by observations that, for the second generation Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu migrants growing up in Australia, a shift to English and disengagement from the religion is occurring. Through interviews with the leaders of three Tamil Hindu temples, I investigate the roles of different languages in the temples and ask whether the temples are contributing to Tamil language maintenance in the religious domain for the second generation. This paper highlights some of the issues faced by temples in engaging young generations in their heritage language and religion; as well as ways that temples are adapting, in a Western setting, in order to establish the religion for the long-term.

The paper discusses translation challenges associated with the linguistic and multisemiotic stylistic ways (Kress 2010; Coupland 2007) Aganaktismenoi , the Greek indignants’ movement, employ to produce a digital sense of their community and subsequent identities. It argues for the transfer of the cultural and sociopolitical element as being the hardest to translate into languages other than Greek. In light of this challenge, it is suggested that a functional variationist translation model (Theodoropoulou 2007), which takes into consideration the general context and the functions of individual illocutionary acts (Austin 1962), i.e. intended meanings, performed digitally could remedy this weakness by yielding translations that do justice to the original utterances. This is also enhanced by the fact that a multisemiotic style, such as a picture posted on Facebook Wall, offers lots of background information (e.g., colors and facial expressions, to mention just a few), which act synergistically in the deciphering and consequent translation of the text. The expansion of the use of the aforementioned sociopragmatic model of translation into multisemiotic texts is made on the basis of linguistic and multimodal analysis of posts with pictures and text from the Aganaktismenoi pages on Facebook and their translation into English.