Volume 36, Issue 6 -

This article scrutinises language discourse in transnational culture and considers theories on reflexive modernity (Beck et al. 2003) for analysis. I introduce symbolic meanings of language in transnational Communities of Practice constituted by salsa dance, where, depending on dance styles and on local, national and transnational discursive configurations, language ideologies differ, to which data from ethnographic observation and interviews give insight. Both first modern (essentialised) categories and second modern (non-naturalised) constructions of categories are shown to be used within these communities. I study the simultaneous presence of different symbolic functions of languages, relating to first and second modern constructions of categories. As discussed in the final section, the different constructions of language and belonging indicate that reproducing social hierarchies in transnational contexts can be linked to the ability to negotiate multilingual identities as non-essentialist, which is, however, not possible for everyone – and potentially implies neo-liberal discourse. English being a central means in constructing cosmopolitan positions, the article ends with a consideration of the role of English in the transnational sphere, where both first and second modern ideologies are co-present and interlocked, demonstrating the difficulty of taking evaluative stances on language ideology in a globally connected world.

In the present study we investigate empirically how six to seven-year-old children with their teachers take on the challenge of translating the lyrics of a children’s song from Finnish to English, analyzing how translation is collaboratively constituted by the participants. The study is informed by translanguaging theory and a sociocultural perspective on learning. The results show that the children respond to the challenge to translate through talking about how something is done instead of what a word means, and by attending to sound (making sense through a similar sounding word). It is also shown how the teachers scaffold the children who take on the task by introducing synonyms and antonyms, and using meta-markers. The importance of the differentiated set of practices engaged in by the participants for their development of linguistic and metalinguistic awareness is discussed.

This article examines the perspectives of Puerto Ricans living in the United States in response to a publicity campaign that focuses on the correction of linguistic features that appear in some Puerto Ricans’ spoken Spanish. The campaign addresses phonetic, morphological, lexical, and syntactic features, including a specific set of words or phrases that are named as lexical and semantic borrowings from English. Participants were invited to respond to the content and ideologies present in the campaign by means of semi-structured interviews. Through a framework of Critical Discourse Analysis and language (de)legitimation, the article analyzes the ways in which interviewees (de)legitimize loanwords in Puerto Rican Spanish. A Critical Discourse Analytical framework allows for the mapping of spoken and written texts (e. g. the campaign texts) onto discourses about those texts (e. g. Puerto Ricans’ perspectives). On a broader level, the article contributes to current research on dialectal diversity by analyzing speakers’ ideologies in response to prescriptivist discourses that are present within and/or outside of their own speech networks and communities.