A cline of enregisterment and its erasure: Intersections of ideology and technology in minority-language news

Abstract

Audiences often ascribe monolithic linguistic authority to news media institutions, viewing journalists as the bearers of language standards. Yet media are in fact heteroglossic, with journalists across different media platforms negotiating competing practical demands and different understandings of the social purposes and possibilities of their work. This article examines a case of hyperideologized minority-language media to show how the interplay of deep-seated language ideologies, the local sociohistorical context of media, and the material, technological affordances of different platforms produces a cline of enregisterment. It focuses on media produced in Buryat, a Mongolic language of southeastern Siberia whose speakers are shifting to Russian. Comparing journalists’ linguistic practices and audiences’ interpretations across the coexisting media platforms of newspapers, radio, and television shows how media enregisterment and, in turn, the enregisterment of a standard literary language occur along a cline that is shaped by the intersections of ideology with technology. (Media, language ideology, enregisterment, standardization, purism, materiality, Russia, Russian, Buryat)*

Learning Putonghua, (not) becoming Chinese: “Sinicized” figures and intersectional personae on Tibetan peripheries

“…At the same time, in ethnographies that describe intersections of language communities, we also see a proliferation of apparent, by-degree "multilingual," "bilingual," or "monolingual" personae. For instance: A stigmatized "bilingual" figure comes to metonymically represent a gendered and classed category of the Indian maid in highland Bolivia (Swinehart, 2018); An otherwise insignificant news presenter stands out, as someone who is perceived as speaking "pure" Buryat, when mixing Russian has become a source of anxiety for Buryat speakers (Graber, 2021); A Desi teen scene in the Silicon Valley where the performance of English-only "monolingual" norms are associated with an upper-middle class background (Shankar, 2008). Here, I place "bilingual," "monolingual," or "multilingual" in quotation marks, since they are better treated as socio-centric rather than analytical.…”