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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1097

Part of Session 135: The sociolinguistics of football (Other abstracts in this session)

Peer normativity and sanctioning of linguistic resources-in-use: on non-Standard Englishes in Finnish football forums online

Authors: Kytölä, Samu Mikael
Submitted by: Kytölä, Samu Mikael (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)

This paper (based on Kytölä forthcoming) approaches co-authored, interactive football web forums from a sociolinguistic viewpoint as layered, socio-culturally developed domains for languages, varieties, styles, memes, and other semiotic means. The cases documented and discussed here come from the largest Finnish online football forums, Futisforum and Futisforum2.org. While their default target audience is framed as Finnish-speaking Finns, the members have, during the forums’ life-spans, developed various multilingual, symbolic discourse practices, which form a heteroglossic constellation with the by-default-Finnish ‘core’ discussion entries (cf. Androutsopoulos 2011). Moreover, rather expectable in a globalizing world, and with a general topic as international as football, not all participants are Finland-based Finns, or understand Finnish, which creates a further potential tension.

Here I discuss how the uses of differently framed ‘non-standard Englishes’, in particular, are negotiated and regulated within the forums’ football/fandom discourse, and how these linguistic resources become – explicitly and implicitly – discussed in skeins of ideology-laden normative meta-language talk and competing views of (online) football fandom. This is illustrated by two different discourse skeins: in the first sequence, an online football fan lacks resources to acceptably and equally participate (non-standard ‘erratic’ English as ‘bad’, ‘inferior symbolic capital’), while the second chain of events illustrates an excess of individual repertoire (dialectal/sociolectal English use as a feature of ‘unauthentic’ football fandom). Both of these are deemed unacceptable in emergent interaction skeins, leading to discriminative discourse sequences. However, both usages of ‘non-Standard’ English also become ‘memes’, new models for key forum members’ discourse styles, and the display of these non-standard varieties quickly becomes emblematic of the ‘savvy’ when used deliberately, ironically with awareness of, and distancing from, the ‘face-value’ original usages.

Drawing from Hymes (1996) and Blommaert (2005, 2010), I suggest that in these ‘ways of writing’ about football, (mis)use of particular communicative resources or features inextricably brings about an imbalance of symbolic capital (in the Bourdieuan sense). This imbalance may then become manifest in downright abuse of (online) influence, where the linguistic and the football-cultural – two potentially volatile topics – become intertwined in a complex of meanings, attitudes and hate-talk. Investigating these controversies with an ethnographic lens adjusted to the world of football sheds light on the dynamics of multilingual communication and metalinguistic awareness – in a world experience now increasingly mediated by computer-based applications.

References:

Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2011). From variation to heteroglossia in the study of computer-mediated discourse. In Thurlow, Crispin & Kristine Mroczek (eds.), Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media. Oxford: OUP.

Blommaert, Jan (2005). Discourse. Cambridge: CUP.

Blommaert, Jan (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: CUP.

Hymes, Dell (1996). Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality. Towards an understanding of voice. London: Taylor & Francis.

Kytölä, Samu (forthcoming in 2012). Peer normativity and sanctioning of linguistic resources-in-use: on non-Standard Englishes in Finnish football forums online. In Blommaert, Jan, Sirpa Leppänen, Päivi Pahta & Tiina Räisänen (eds.), Dangerous Multilingualism: Northern Perspectives to Order, Purity and Normality. Palgrave Macmillan.