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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 385

Part of Session 156: Mobile Literacies in Late-modern Cape Town (Other abstracts in this session)

Marginal Diversities and Digital Conformities – The Structure of Multilingual Performances

Authors: Deumert, Ana; Klein, Yolandi
Submitted by: Deumert, Ana (UCT, South Africa)

The reflexive individualization of social practices and identities has been identified as a hallmark of late modernity in social theory: ‘We are not what we are, but what we make of ourselves’ (Giddens 1991: 75). As noted by Coupland (2007: 29): ‘modernity tended to keep people in their allotted places’; late modernity, on the other hand, offers ‘release from social strictures ... detraditionalizes and destabilizes life’. Thus, the standardization and homogenization imperative of modernity (and its associated institution, the nation state) has given way to fragmentation, heterogeneity and a general fluidity of boundaries (Bauman 2000). Digital technologies, in particular, have been described as being conducive to the expression of highly individualized communication practices (Wellmann 2001). They facilitate  – together with other social processes such as new patterns of migration – the formation of a social world characterized as ‘super-diverse’ (Vertovec 2007). At the same time, the potential for diversity does not necessarily translate into reality, and social normativities have been shown to interact in complex ways with individual creativity.

In this paper we focus on Cape Town, a multilingual city whose diversity index – as reflected in official statistics – has been on the rise since the early 1990s. Digital data was collected from 2008 to 2012 (ongoing), and includes SMS corpora, screen data (Facebook, Twitter, MXit, Yoza, Kontax), a large-scale survey (N=450), as well as focus group and interview data with a broad range of users (in terms of age, gender, ethnicity and linguistic background). 

Taking a bird’s eye view, the results show a normative expectation of, and strong preference for, ‘English’ (understood as a complex, ideological construct as well as set of linguistic features). However, such a birds-eye view obscures the intricate – although often marginal – multilingual (as well as polylingual) performances that occur regularly in the digital domain. In other words, ‘glocal’ English-linked normativities notwithstanding, a wide variety of ‘local’ languages are used for the expression of authenticity and distinction, as well as for the performance of ‘spectacular’ practices (Blommaert & Rampton 2011). Structurally, they frequently appear at the margins of utterances, within particular communities of practice, or in liminal genres (such a joking or flirting; generally communications of conviviality, but also moments of cultural or emotional gravity). That is, they are located outside of the linguistic space governed by dominant sociolinguistic normativities. In this paper, we will discuss digital performances of three of ‘Cape Town’s languages’ in a comparative and ethnographic perspective: Afrikaans, Arabic and isiXhosa.

 

References:

Baumann, Z. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Blommaert, J. & Rampton, B. 2011. Language and Superdiversity. Diversities 13, 1-22.

Coupland, N. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: CUP.

Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity.

Vertovec, S. 2007. Super-diversity and its Implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, 1024-1054.

Wellmann, B. 2001. Physical Place and Cyber-Place: The Rise of Networked Individualism. International Journal for Urban and Regional Research, 25, 227-52.