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Sociolinguistics Symposium 19: Language and the City

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Freie Universität Berlin | August 21-24, 2012

Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 722

Part of Session 185: Superdiversity and digital literacy practices (Other abstracts in this session)

Race and ethnicity in digital vernaculars: the case of Nigerian Pidgin

Authors: Heyd, Theresa
Submitted by: Heyd, Theresa (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany)

Recent African immigration to the United States is among the key factors to challenge existing patterns and perceptions of race and ethnicity in North America (Kretsedemas 2008; Mederios Kent 2007). Thus the interaction of recent African immigrants both with the established African-American community as well as with other ethnic groups has brought forth new notions and stereotypes of what it means to identify as black in America, and may be taken as an instantiation of emerging superdiversity. A sociolinguistic corollary of this process is the emergence of ethnolinguistic repertoires (Benor 2010) such as Nigerian Pidgin, which function as diasporic, deterritorialized and digital vernaculars far beyond their geographic origin.

Digital media play a role not just as a repository, but an actual catalyst for these processes. As Blommaert and Rampton (2011: 3) note, “migration movements from the 1990s onwards have coincided with the development of the Internet and mobile phones, and these have affected the cultural life of diaspora communities of all kinds.” Since race and ethnicity have to be actively performed and constructed by participants in CMC interactions in order to gain visibility, new forms of superdiversity and their sociolinguistic implications become particularly tangible here. As a consequence, such racialized discourse provides ideal material for a sociolinguistic analysis of CMC.

Based on these assumptions, this study focuses on race and ethnicity and their sociolinguistic implications on the web forum nairaland.com, a discussion platform and place of interaction for Nigerian locals, first- and second-generation Nigerian emigrants, as well as participants with other ethnic backgrounds. A corpus based on data from Nairaland, with 17 million tokens and a time span of four years, allows for qualitative and quantitative explorations of racialized online discourse, organized around the following questions:

- How is Nigerian Pidgin employed in the corpus, and how is its use intermeshed with other ethnolinguistic repertoires? How are these repertoires distributed in the data, and how do they correlate with network patterns in the online community of Nairaland?

- How do users construct and perform their own racial/ethnic profile and select linguistic resources from the various racial and ethnic stereotypes that are available to them?  To what degree does their self-ascribed ethnic profile correspond or clash with their linguistic choices?

The results illustrate how the use and (often conscious) selection of ethnolinguistic repertoires contributes to the complex and varied racial/ethnical identities on display in the forum data. In this sense, this study makes a contribution to our understanding of the sociolinguistic implications of superdiversity, and the essential role that digital mediation plays in its emergence.

References:

Benor, Sarah Bunin. 2010. “Ethnolinguistic repertoire: Shifting the analytic focus in language and ethnicity.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 14(2): 159-183.
Blommaert, Jan and Ben Rampton. 2011. “Language and Superdiversity.” Diversities 13(2): 1-22.
Kretsedemas, Philip. 2008. “Redefining ‘Race’ in North America.” Current Sociology 56(6): 826-844.
Mederios Kent, Mary. 2007. “Immigration and America’s Black population.” Population Bulletin 62(4): 3-16.

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