Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 542

Part of Session 191: Language variation, identity and urban Space (Other abstracts in this session)

Grasping sociolinguistic styles of multiethnic urban youth: stance and multilingual resources in interaction

Authors: Lehtonen, Heini Taina Tuulia
Submitted by: Lehtonen, Heini Taina Tuulia (University of Helsinki, Finland)

This paper will explore sociolinguistic styles in interactions among adolescents in multiethnic areas in Helsinki. In recent years, multiethnic youth language has been studied both from grammatical and variationist-dialectal point of view as well as socio-stylistically (Quist 2008; Kern & Selting 2011). I wish to discuss the concept of linguistic style (Auer 2007) as social practice; I treat linguistic style not as a lect (Eckert 2005) but as an inseparable part of social practice through which social reality is negotiated and reformed. I will show ways in which linguistic resources are employed for stylistic practices, and discuss how linguistic styles emerge in a community of practice.

My work falls in the fields of interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography (Rampton 2006). The data were gathered in 2006 – 2009 in two junior high schools and they consist of field diary, recorded interviews with 38 adolescents, and several audio and video recordings of different situations, as well as retrospective interviews. The adolescents are 13 – 18 years old and they speak 16 different mother tongues.

I will approach linguistic style by analysing (socio)linguistic resources of stance-taking (Jaffe 2009) in narrative practices (De Fina & Georgakopoulou 2008), such as constructing a small story of a sensational event in the participants’ recent personal history. Analysis of different speakers engaging in comparable actions, i.e. similar narration, will show stylistic variation between speakers. I will explore the process through which specific linguistic resources become associated with local ethnic and social categorisations (Agha 2007) and the ways in which these associations are employed and negotiated in interaction (Rampton 1995; 2006). For instance, the lexical resource wallahi ‘I swear by Allah’ (cf. Opsahl 2009) is routinely used by some speakers as a stance-taking device with epistemic and performative nature, but it is also used in voicing and stylisation as a contextualisation cue. By expressing stance towards the apparent categorisations, the speakers may position themselves and others in relation to social, linguistic and ethnic boundaries.

References

Agha, Asif 2007: Language and Social Relations. Cambridge University Press.

Auer, Peter 2007 (ed.): Style and Social Identities. Alternative Approaches to Linguistic
heterogeneity. Mouton de Gruyter.

De Fina, Anna & Alexandra Georgakopoulou 2008: Analysing narratives as practices. – Qualitative Research 8: 379 – 387.

Eckert, Penelope 2005: Variation, convention, and social meaning. Paper at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. – http//:www.stanford.edu/~eckert/EckertSA2005.pdf.

Jaffe, Alexandra 2009 (ed.): Stance. Sociolinguistic perspectives. Oxford University Press.

Kern, Friederike & Margret Selting 2011 (eds.): Ethnic Styles of Speaking in European Metropolitan Areas. Benjamins.

Opsahl, Tori 2009: Wolla I swear this is typical for the conversational style of adolescents in multiethnic areas in Oslo. – Nordic Journal of Linguistics 32/2: 221–244.

Quist, Pia 2008: Sociolinguistic approaches to multiethnolect: Language variety and stylistic practice. – International Journal of Bilingualism Vol. 12, Issue ½: 43–61.

Rampton, Ben 1995: Crossing. Language and ethnicity among adolescents. Longman.

Rampton, Ben 2006: Language in Late Modernity. Interaction in an urban school. Cambridge University Press.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Grasping sociolinguistic styles of multiethnic urban youth: stance and multilingual resources in interaction