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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 536

Part of Session 127: Language outside of the city (Other abstracts in this session)

Multilingual carnival in Sámiland: Polyphonic performances across centre-periphery boundaries

Authors: Pietikäinen, Sari Päivikki
Submitted by: Pietikäinen, Sari Päiviki (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)

“Carnival”, argues Bahktin (1968:10) “can be seen as a temporal liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order”.  In this paper, I would like to explore moments and spaces of such carnivalism in a context of shifting and complex multilingualisms in the indigenous, traditionally peripheralized Sámiland. The concept of carnival in the Sámi context seems to provide a way to address changing norms and emerging language and discourse practices across fixed boundaries and categories, now set in motion by the current flows of globalisation. In such a nexus of centralizing and peripheralizing resources and practices – or from a Bahktinian perspective, in a coming together of centrifugal and centripedal forces - we can see creation and commodification of polyphonic performances, important for new identities and creative language practices, and yet at the same time, a challenge to established practices and norms (cf. Pietikäinen 2010, Blackledge & Creese, 2010). 
Such polyphonic performances, as illustrated in this paper, test and tease the prevailing norms and employ both fixity and fluidity to create polyphony in which the previous orders and norms are played with, whereby former opposites collide and merge with each other with a sense of humour, and where reflectivity can be used both as a resource and a commodity. To illustrate this argument, I will draw on my longitudinal ethnographic and discourse analytical research on changing multilingualisms in Sámiland (www.peripheralmultilingualism.fi). I will provide examples of polyphonic performances in Sámi tourism and media spaces, illustrating appropriation and circulation of novel ways of contextualising and materialising Sámi languages and other cultural resources beyond traditional categories, practices, and modalities. The multilingual carnivalism in Sámiland seems to manifest, e.g., in multimodal designs, humour, irony and language play. It is also evident in the deliberate displacement and subversion of the dominant, established interaction orders, rules and norms, and simultaneously plays with and against the norms. In this carnival, Sámi resources are reinvented, relived and renegotiated; the various and often rival languages and practices may come together with different social, ideological and economic values and functions attached to them. As a result, carnival multilingualism in Sámiland can be simultaneously reflective, critical and humorous, allowing ambivalent voices and polyphonic performances to circulate across centre-periphery boundaries in complex and creative ways.
References:
Bakhtin, M. (1968). Rabelais and his world. Trans. H. Iswosky. Indiana University Press.
Blackledge, A. & Creese, A. (2010). Multilingualism: A critical perspective. Continuum.
Pietikäinen, S. 2010. Sámi language mobility: Scales and discourses of multilingualism in polycentric environment. International Journal of Sociology of Language 202, 79-101.