“…For example, bi-lingual Israeli teenagers in Hebrew-language blogs use ASCII characters, like 'k', 'n', 'Y' and '2', that graphically look like the Hebrew letters for Fakatsa style of writing. Fakatsa is thus a creative orthographic and typographic marriage of Hebrew scripts with ASCII characters (Vaisman 2011). Blommaert (2011, 3) defines all these scripts of communication on the mobile space as 'the dialect of the supervernacular': the supervernacular is 'English' and the dialects are the actually occurring 'world Englishes': specific local or regional realizations of English, tied to and embedded in local and regional sociolinguistics economies and emerged out of processes that bear all the features of dialects.…”
It is commonly assumed in the print media that bilingual young adults in Bangladesh are subjugated by the colonial legacy of English and they are 'polluting' Bangla, the national language of Bangladesh, by their indiscriminate insertion of English in it. However, this ethnographic study on a group of young adults in a university in Bangladesh shows that this assumption is simplistic and inadequate. A close linguistic analysis of extracts from their face-to-face and virtual conversations on Facebook illustrates that they (1) use linguistic and semantic forms of both English and Bangla very creatively, strategically and pragmatically, (2) bring in diversity to Bangla not only from English but also from different genre of discourses, and eventually (3) transgress the boundary of the Bangla language. English in fact provides them with newer metalinguistic and indexical opportunities. The study also identifies that the nationalist stance in favour of Bangla may not allow a fuller appreciation of the complex linguistic scenario in Bangladesh. At the end, the study suggests a prospect of a future research that may provide important insights into the socio-cultural dynamics of bilingualism in English and Bangla in the social landscape of Bangladesh as well as in other multilingual contexts.
“…For example, bi-lingual Israeli teenagers in Hebrew-language blogs use ASCII characters, like 'k', 'n', 'Y' and '2', that graphically look like the Hebrew letters for Fakatsa style of writing. Fakatsa is thus a creative orthographic and typographic marriage of Hebrew scripts with ASCII characters (Vaisman 2011). Blommaert (2011, 3) defines all these scripts of communication on the mobile space as 'the dialect of the supervernacular': the supervernacular is 'English' and the dialects are the actually occurring 'world Englishes': specific local or regional realizations of English, tied to and embedded in local and regional sociolinguistics economies and emerged out of processes that bear all the features of dialects.…”
It is commonly assumed in the print media that bilingual young adults in Bangladesh are subjugated by the colonial legacy of English and they are 'polluting' Bangla, the national language of Bangladesh, by their indiscriminate insertion of English in it. However, this ethnographic study on a group of young adults in a university in Bangladesh shows that this assumption is simplistic and inadequate. A close linguistic analysis of extracts from their face-to-face and virtual conversations on Facebook illustrates that they (1) use linguistic and semantic forms of both English and Bangla very creatively, strategically and pragmatically, (2) bring in diversity to Bangla not only from English but also from different genre of discourses, and eventually (3) transgress the boundary of the Bangla language. English in fact provides them with newer metalinguistic and indexical opportunities. The study also identifies that the nationalist stance in favour of Bangla may not allow a fuller appreciation of the complex linguistic scenario in Bangladesh. At the end, the study suggests a prospect of a future research that may provide important insights into the socio-cultural dynamics of bilingualism in English and Bangla in the social landscape of Bangladesh as well as in other multilingual contexts.
“…Thus, the girls use the rating sites for pleasure and amusement, to feel good about themselves and impress others, and to defy conventional normativity (Vaisman, ). Repeatedly, they constructed being indifferent to others' evaluation as a desired escape from social control, as the following account suggests:Maya: Some girls wear swimsuits and take a picture of themselves in that way.…”
In the wake of a moral panic concerning a Facebook group that invited teenagers to post and rate their photos, this article draws on 6 focus groups conducted with teenage girls to explore how participants reflect upon the economy of visibility in such rating games. Analyzing the girls' discourse, we find that they identify a correlation between sexually explicit images and high ratings, and that they use both psychological and economic frames to interpret this relationship. We suggest that ironically, the quantified explicitness of Liking crystalizes for the girls the price tag for each choice that they make, the double standard that underlies this economy-and their ability to tease and to challenge it.
“…Writtenness is only beginning to be brought to analytic attention particularly in relation to multilingualism, translanguaging and transcripting (see for example Androutsopolous forthcoming; Vaisman ). A key challenge is to develop nuanced ways of engaging with writing which both go beyond textualist‐formalist (see Collins ; Horner ) approaches and avoid relying, implicitly or explicitly, on notions of correctness and error.…”
Section: Bringing Writing Out Of the Closet: Three Key Imperativesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…in multimodal studies, which problematize the treatment of any language use or practice as monomodal (for overview, see Jewitt );in work on the geosemiotics of public space (Scollon and Scollon ), within which we include work in linguistic landscapes (e.g. Gorter ; Leeman and Modan ; Papen ; Stroud and Mpendukana ); andin work on ‘new’ or digital technologies which is forcing us to reconsider how we think about language and communication (Androutsopolous 2006a, forthcoming; Kytölä ; Lee and Barton ; Vaisman ).…”
Section: The Challenge Of Developing a Language Of Descriptionmentioning
In this paper, we argue that writing has largely been ignored as a significant empirical object of study in sociolinguistics. Pointing to the consequences of the specific ways in which writing has been positioned historically within sociolinguistics, we discuss the need to re‐imagine writing as an object of study and problematize the dominant lenses through which writing is understood and analyzed. We draw on recent work to illustrate three key challenges that need to be addressed: firstly, to move beyond a default position on writing in terms of ‘standard’ and ‘error’; secondly, to extend the analytic gaze beyond a monomodal orientation towards writing; and thirdly to avoid the privileging of single moments and sites of production. We conclude by giving an overview of the papers in the special issue and the ways in which they seek to reorient sociolinguistics towards the study of writing.
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