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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 784

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

The role of English as an online lingua franca: code choice and translocality on social network sites

Authors: Tagg, Caroline (1); Seargeant, Philip (2)
Submitted by: Tagg, Caroline (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom)

Communication technologies are an integral part of modern city life and yet they often provide for a very different model of sociolinguistic interaction from ‘real-life’ urban groupings. Social network sites such as Facebook, in particular, challenge traditional sociolinguistic conceptions of ‘community’ by allowing individuals to build networks which span geographically-dispersed locations. In this talk, we look at the ‘translocal’ online networks formed by Facebook users based in locations across Europe. Users of Facebook tend to connect with people from all phases of their lives (from primary school friends to ex-work colleagues) and, for our urban, educated and well-travelled informants, these friends include people from various countries and with access to various languages. Due in no small part to its position as a lingua franca across Europe, English tends to be a shared resource across these multilingual groups. The focus of our talk is on how these groups appropriate English as one resource, alongside other languages and other communicative strategies, in constructing and maintaining translocal networks.

Of particular importance for communication via social media is the issue of addressivity. SNSs can be described as ‘semi-private’ in the sense that people can be connected to hundreds of other users, any of whom can potentially read and respond to their postings. Given the fact that SNSs tend to bring together people from different parts of a user’s life into one group, users must adapt strategies for dealing with what boyd and Ellison (2008) call a ‘collapsed audience’. In our talk, we look at how Europe-based individuals switch between English and their vernaculars in order to address particular individuals and interactively construct networks within Facebook.

The talk thus has two specific aims. Firstly, we describe the language choices evident in the communication, looking in particular at the regular use of English as one element of a bi- or multilingual repertoire, and how the participants – none of whom have English as a first language – regularly switch between and mix languages according to audience, topic or circumstance. Our second aim is to show how these language choices contribute to the construction and maintenance of these online communities. The patterns revealed problematise clear-cut distinctions between the idea of vernaculars being used as ‘local’ languages, and English operating as the ‘global’ lingua franca; and highlight the way in which interactively constructed online networks intersect with the (‘real-life’) speech communities typically associated with the people involved.

Reference

boyd, danah m. and Nicole B. Ellison. 2008. Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1): 210-230.