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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 389

Part of Session 119: Prefixing lingualism (Other abstracts in this session)

You name it. Professional and amateur labelling of contemporary urban language use.

Authors: Jaspers, Jürgen
Submitted by: Jaspers, Jürgen (University of Antwerp and Research Foundation Flanders, Belgium)

This lecture is about how professional and ‘amateur’ metalinguistic terminology, and the often conflicting ideologies with which they are invested, can be usefully approached and understood. There is a growing awareness among linguists that the concept of a language as an identifiable object is problematic for explaining urban language use. But while linguists fuss over new terms to avoid such problems, non-linguists have less qualms about naming what they (sometimes passionately care to) see as ... languages. Such labels are often skewed, partisan and stereotyping. But if, as emic concepts, they are also constitutive of the linguistic practices informed by them (cf. Hanks et al. 2009), they are a force to be reckoned with in today’s urban linguascapes. I will argue thus that while linguists see labelling specific languages as not done, they will have to find ways to address contemporary urban language use that include non-linguists’ labelling in order to understand an important part of its dynamics.

Some authors indicate that modern media may act as a catalyst for non-professional labels, turning these into vehicles of larger ideological struggles as they appear on the public scene (Androutsopoulos 2010; Milani 2010). They also point out that mass media may become arenas of discursive conflict where various parties, linguists included, struggle over how urban language use is to be named and appreciated. Certainly when linguists are called in as experts they are often forced to take a stand versus non-professional names and suggest appropriate alternatives. These may, however, consequently circulate and be recycled in public discourse, and they may become non-professional labels again as they are recruited in interaction (Cornips et al. 2012). The media themselves may also become players on this discursive field when they stick to amateur labels for urban language use despite linguists’ objections, leaving the latter chew on the fact that their attempts at prefixing urban lingualism are sidelined as a mere ‘semantic’ issue.

I will illustrate these issues through discussing the evolving indexicality of the label ‘talking illegal’ in Antwerp, following how it moved from its use in adolescent interaction as a way of appropriating a dominant discourse that posits the ‘zerolingualism’ of speakers with migrant descent, to its uptake in one mass medium and consequent recycling in another, before it was re-appropriated  by some of the adolescents whose language use was supposedly named by it.

 References:

Androutsopoulos J. 2010. Ideologizing ethnolectal German. In: S. Johnson & T. Milani (eds.), Language Ideologies and Media Discourse. New York: Continuum, p. 182-202.

Cornips L., J. Jaspers & V. De Rooij 2012. The politics of labelling youth vernaculars in the Netherlands and Belgium. In: B.A. Svendsen & J. Nortier (eds.), Language, youth and identity in the 21^st century. Cambridge:  CUP (forthcoming)

Hanks W.F, S. Ide & Y. Katagiri 2009. Towards an emancipatory pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1-9.

Milani T. 2010. What’s in a name? Language ideology and social differentiation in a Swedish print-mediated debate. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14: 116-142.