Geolinguistic Regions and Diasporas in the Age of Satellite Television

Abstract

Studies of the globalisation processes in the communications media have frequently emphasised the planetary-scale diffusion of the dominant cultural and linguistic models. This is undoubtedly a clearly observable tendency of our age. However, at the same time different tendencies can be observed through which globalisation is also affecting other languages and cultures, which have no choice but to globalise themselves since they belong to less favoured communities. This is the case, for example, of the languages that migrant and diasporic populations take with them on their journeys. A detailed analysis of the world panorama of satellite television makes this phenomenon clearly apparent, where the presence of those other languages makes it possible to speak of the formation of geolinguistic regions that cross geographical spaces and the frontiers of the nation state.2

Augmented Realities and Uneven Geographies: Exploring the Geolinguistic Contours of the Web

“…In order to answer the above questions, this paper draws on the fi eld of geolinguistics and uses the notion of geolinguistic region to understand the audiencing of online content [see Albizu (2007) and Liao and Petzold (2010) for similar approaches]. For the purposes of this paper, a geolinguistic region is defi ned as a contiguous area in which a dominant language (2) is employed for communication or representation.…”

Analysing Geo-linguistic Dynamics of the World Wide Web: The Use of Cartograms and Network Analysis to Understand Linguistic Development in Wikipedia

“…2 Leading global search engine Google, for example, provides different interfaces and tools for more than 170 local domains and 120 languages and variations such as Canadian English, U.K. English, and U.S. English. 3 Similarly, Wikipedia, the global user-created encyclopaedia, has over 270 language versions, including improved flexible interfaces for variations of Chinese (Mainland simplified, Singapore/Malaysia simplified, Hong Kong traditional, and Taiwan orthodox) within the Chinese version of Wikipedia (Liao, 2009). 4 Thus, it could be expected that this process of internationalization and localization (which support the everyday interaction and usage in the digital environment) has also reorganized and realigned institutions and users in different ways.…”

‘Fiwi TV:’ Ethnic media and the West Indian diaspora

“…However, this assumption simplifies the actualities of ethnic media industries and their productions. First, with current advances in technology, media content (particularly broadcast) now transcends national spheres (Appadurai, 1993), increasing the possibility of diasporic communities accessing the mass media of their countries of origin (Albizu, 2007). In fact, much of the material disseminated by ethnic media is created in the immigrants’ homelands, and reproduced in the diaspora (Shi, 2009).…”