The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture [1 ed.] 9780367764142, 9780367764166, 9781003166849

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction: A Handbook of Language and Youth Culture in the complexity of our times
Part I Language and youth – Traditional approaches and critical reflections
Chapter 1 Sociolinguistic approaches to language and youth
Chapter 2 Critical perspectives on linguistic fixity and fluidity
Part II Language, youth, sexuality, gender and affect
Chapter 3 Affect: Discourse, politics, intersectionality
Chapter 4 “A THIIIEF!”: Humour and affect at a detention home for young men
Chapter 5 Affect, stancetaking and gender in preadolescent peer cultures
Chapter 6 English as “the gay comfort zone” of hybrid youth identities
Part III Vulnerability, survival and safe spaces
Chapter 7 Survival, literacy practices and youth cultural activism in the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro
Chapter 8 Youth in language endangerment and reclamation processes
Chapter 9 Youth activism and safe spaces: Decoloniality and anti-racism online
Part IV Linguistic citizenship and youth activism
Chapter 10 Approaching a politics of youth through Linguistic Citizenship
Chapter 11 Youth, protest and (online) communication
Chapter 12 Black youth and the fight for linguistic citizenship in the United States
Part V Language policy, practice and youth agency in education
Chapter 13 Linguistic diversity in education – Language policy and youth agency
Chapter 14 Youth languaging and the school
Chapter 15 Youth language practices and ideologies of race and class in a UK university: A raciolinguistic perspective
Part VI Teasing, policing and online communication in the family
Chapter 16 Teasing, policing and playful talk among youth in multilingual families
Chapter 17 Digital language practices and youth in the family
Part VII Language and youth identities in aesthetics and digital media
Chapter 18 New languages and new identities of post-socialist Bosnian and Mongolian popular music artists
Chapter 19 Language, hip hop, and identity work on YouTube
Chapter 20 Graffiti
Chapter 21 Drawing Minecraft: Small stories on metagames
Chapter 22 Youth video compositions as multimodal signifier chains: Making meaning with gestures, objects, actions, and speech
Part VIII Language, youth and place
Chapter 23 Youth, language and place
Chapter 24 Contact dialects in urban youth culture and beyond
Chapter 25 Breaking barriers: The recontextualisation of Sheng in Kenya
Chapter 26 How multiethnic is a multiethnolect?: The recontextualisation of Multicultural London English
Part IX Youths speak back: Youth voices and the political youth
Chapter 27 Young people’s political discourse: Voice, efficacy and impact
Chapter 28 ‘Trying (hard), but it’s difficult’: Youth voices on lifestyle matters from a climate perspective
Chapter 29 Citizen (socio)linguistics: What we can learn from engaging young people as language researchers
Part X When youth(s) are talked about: Representations of youth
Chapter 30 Developmentalism and the politics of representing young people in public discourse: Moscovici and Bourdieu
Chapter 31 Representations of youth in Western media: Towards a Southern perspective
Chapter 32 Mediatization of youth voices
Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LANGUAGE AND YOUTH CULTURE

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture offers the first essential grounding of critical youth studies within sociolinguistic research. Young people are often seen to be at the frontline of linguistic creativity and pioneering communicative technologies. Their linguistic practices are considered a primary means of exploring linguistic change as well as the role of language in social life, such as how language and identity, ideology and power intersect. Bringing together leading and cutting-edge perspectives from thought leaders across the globe, this handbook: • • • •

addresses how young people’s cultural practices, as well as forces like class, gender, ethnicity and race, influence language considers emotions, affect, age and ageism, materiality, embodiment and the political youth, as well as processes of unmooring language and place critically reflects on our understandings of terms such as ‘language’, ‘youth’ and ‘culture’, drawing on insights from youth studies to help contextualise age within power dynamics features examples from a wide range of linguistic contexts such as social media and the classroom, as well as expressions such as graffiti, gestures and different musical genres including grime and hip-hop.

Providing important insights into how young people think, feel, act, and communicate in the complexity of a polarised world, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture is an invaluable resource for advanced students and researchers in disciplines including sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, multilingualism, youth studies and sociology. Bente A. Svendsen is Professor of Multilingualism and Second Language Studies at the University of Oslo. Her research interests include citizen science, multilingualism in society across the lifespan, particularly among young people, in the family, in education and in public discourse. She is author of ‘The dynamics of citizen sociolinguistics’ (Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2018), the book Multilingualism – A Blessing and a Burden (2021, in Norwegian), co-editor of Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century (2015) and co-author of Multilingualism and Ageing (2020). Rickard Jonsson is Professor and Head of Section at the department of Child and Youth Studies at Stockholm University. His work explores masculinity, sexuality, race and language use in multilingual classrooms, in texts ranging from critical perspectives on narratives of failing boys in school, to students’ play with tabooed language in ‘Swedes can’t swear’ (2018) in Journal of Language, Identity & Education, or humor and affect in ‘Fear, anger and desire’ (2021) (together with Franzén and Sjöblom) in Language in Society.

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOKS IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics provide comprehensive overviews of the key topics in applied linguistics. All entries for the handbooks are specially commissioned and written by leading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible and carefully edited Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics are the ideal resource for both advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students.

The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis Second Edition Edited by Michael Handford and James Paul Gee The Routledge Handbook of Content and Language Integrated Learning Edited by Darío Luis Banegas and Sandra Zappa-Hollman The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics Volume 1 Language Learning and Language Education, Second Edition Edited by Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics Volume 2 Applied Linguistics in Action, Second Edition Edited by Li Wei, Zhu Hua, and James Simpson The Routledge Handbook of Language Policy and Planning Edited by Michele Gazzola, François Grin, Linda Cardinal, and Kathleen Heugh The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism Second Edition Edited by Carolyn McKinney, Pinky Makoe and Virginia Zavala The Routledge Handbook of Discourse and Disinformation Edited by Stefania Maci, Massimiliano Demata, Mark McGlashan and Philip Seargeant The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture Edited by Bente A. Svendsen and Rickard Jonsson For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www​.routledge​.com​/series​/RHAL

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LANGUAGE AND YOUTH CULTURE

Edited by Bente A. Svendsen and Rickard Jonsson

Designed cover image: skodonnell Creative #183305487 First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Bente A. Svendsen and Rickard Jonsson; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Bente A. Svendsen and Rickard Jonsson to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Svendsen, Bente A., editor. | Jonsson, Rickard, 1971- editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of language and youth culture/edited by Bente A. Svendsen and Rickard Jonsson. Other titles: Language and youth culture Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge handbooks in applied linguistics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023032557 (print) | LCCN 2023032558 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367764142 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367764166 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003166849 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Youth–Language. | Sociolinguistics. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P120.Y68 R89 2023 (print) | LCC P120.Y68 (ebook) | DDC 306.440835–dc23/eng/20230816 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032557 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032558 ISBN: 9780367764142 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367764166 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003166849 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003166849 Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

CONTENTS

List of contributors ix Acknowledgements xvi Foreword xvii Ellen Hurst Harosh Introduction: A Handbook of Language and Youth Culture in the complexity of our times xx Rickard Jonsson and Bente A. Svendsen PART I

Language and youth – Traditional approaches and critical reflections 1 Sociolinguistic approaches to language and youth Jürgen Jaspers and Pomme van de Weerd 2 Critical perspectives on linguistic fixity and fluidity Lian Malai Madsen PART II

1 3 16

Language, youth, sexuality, gender and affect

31

3 Affect: Discourse, politics, intersectionality Tommaso M. Milani

33

4 “A THIIIEF!”: Humour and affect at a detention home for young men Anna G. Franzén and Rickard Jonsson

48



v

Contents

5 Affect, stancetaking and gender in preadolescent peer cultures Ann-Carita Evaldsson

62

6 English as “the gay comfort zone” of hybrid youth identities Brandon William Epstein

79

PART III

Vulnerability, survival and safe spaces

93

7 Survival, literacy practices and youth cultural activism in the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro Adriana C. Lopes and Daniel N. Silva

95

8 Youth in language endangerment and reclamation processes Haley De Korne, Lorena Córdova-Hernández and Frances Kvietok

108

9 Youth activism and safe spaces: Decoloniality and anti-racism online Fanny Pérez Aronsson

121

PART IV

Linguistic citizenship and youth activism

135

10 Approaching a politics of youth through Linguistic Citizenship Lauren van Niekerk, Keshia Jansen, Sibonile Mpendukana and Christopher Stroud

137

11 Youth, protest and (online) communication Ana Deumert and Nkululeko Mabandla

150

12 Black youth and the fight for linguistic citizenship in the United States Kisha C. Bryan, Keisha G. Rogers and Tiffany L. Grayson

163

PART V

Language policy, practice and youth agency in education

177

13 Linguistic diversity in education – language policy and youth agency Henning Årman

179

14 Youth languaging and the school Janus Spindler Møller

191

15 Youth language practices and ideologies of race and class in a UK university: A raciolinguistic perspective Steve Dixon-Smith vi

205

Contents PART VI

Teasing, policing and online communication in the family

219

16 Teasing, policing and playful talk among youth in multilingual families Ragni Vik Johnsen

221

17 Digital language practices and youth in the family Andreas Candefors Stæhr

235

PART VII

Language and youth identities in aesthetics and digital media

249

18 New languages and new identities of post-socialist Bosnian and Mongolian popular music artists Ana Tankosić and Sender Dovchin

251

19 Language, hip hop and identity work on YouTube Matt Garley and Cecelia Cutler

263

20 Graffiti David Karlander

277

21 Drawing Minecraft: Small stories on metagames Pål Aarsand

289

22 Youth video compositions as multimodal signifier chains: Making meaning with gestures, objects, actions and speech 303 Jason Ranker PART VIII

Language, youth and place

317

23 Youth, language and place Marie Maegaard

319

24 Contact dialects in urban youth culture and beyond Oliver Bunk and Heike Wiese

333

25 Breaking barriers: The recontextualisation of Sheng in Kenya Fridah Kanana Erastus, Daniel Ochieng Orwenjo and Margaret Nguru Gathigia

347

26 How multiethnic is a multiethnolect? The recontextualisation of Multicultural London English Christian Ilbury and Paul Kerswill vii

362

Contents PART IX

Youths speak back: Youth voices and the political youth

377

27 Young people’s political discourse: Voice, efficacy and impact Patricia Loncle-Moriceau and Sarah Pickard

379

28 ‘Trying (hard), but it’s difficult’: Youth voices on lifestyle matters from a climate perspective Kjersti Fløttum, Trine Dahl and Jana Scheurer

392

29 Citizen (socio)linguistics: What we can learn from engaging young people as language researchers 407 Bente A. Svendsen and Samantha Goodchild PART X

When youth(s) are talked about: Representations of youth

421

30 Developmentalism and the politics of representing young people in public discourse: Moscovici and Bourdieu Judith Bessant

423

31 Representations of youth in Western media: Towards a Southern perspective Rafael Lomeu Gomes

437

32 Mediatization of youth voices Anastasia G. Stamou

450

Index 463

viii

CONTRIBUTORS

Pål Aarsand is Professor at the Department of Education and Lifelong Learning, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. His research interest concerns children’s digital technology practices and phenomena, such as gaming, playing, identity work and digital literacy. Henning Årman is Researcher at the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. In his work he combines thinking tools from sociolinguistics and critical youth studies. After publishing his thesis Political Corrections: Language Activism and Regimentation among High School Youth (2021), Henning is currently conducting research on antisemitism and right-wing extremism in Sweden. Judith Bessant is a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) and a Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She writes and publishes in the fields of politics, youth studies, policy, sociology, media-technology studies and history. She also advises governments and non-government organizations. Kisha C. Bryan is Associate Professor of Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Tennessee State University, USA. Her research focuses on adolescents’ intersectional identities and the role of language, literacy, and racial ideologies in identity construction and well-being. Her research has been published in Teachers College Record, TESOL Journal and The International Journal of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education. Oliver Bunk is Postdoctoral Researcher at Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany (German in Multilingual Contexts). Their research focuses on multilingualism and language ideologies and their effects on grammar. Recent publications comprise in- and out-group perspectives on Kiezdeutsch (Bunk and Pohle 2019) and left dislocation constructions in Kiezdeutsch (Sluckin and Bunk 2023). Lorena Córdova-Hernández is Professor at the Faculty of Languages, Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca, Mexico. Her collaborative research focuses on language documentation, revitalisation and intercultural education in indigenous communities on the Mexican-Guatemalan border and endangered languages from Oaxaca. She currently coordinates the MA in Translation and Interpretation of Indigenous Languages. 

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Contributors

Cecelia Cutler is Professor of Linguistics at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA. Her recent published work includes Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer-Mediated Communication (2018), with Unn Røyneland (eds.), and Digital Orality with May Ahmar and Soubeika Bahri (2022). Trine Dahl is Professor of English at the Norwegian School of Economics, Norway. She is a member of the LINGCLIM research group and is interested in verbal and visual representations of climate change, notably in media and corporate communication. She publishes regularly in international journals, e.g., Applied Linguistics, Written Communication and Corporate Communications: An International Journal. Haley De Korne is Professor of Multilingualism at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies and a member of the MultiLing Center at the University of Oslo, Norway. She works on minoritized language education and is author of the book Language Activism: Imaginaries and Strategies of Minority Language Equality (2021). Ana Deumert is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research program is located within the broad field of sociolinguistics and has a strong transdisciplinary focus. She has published widely: historical sociolinguistics, language policy and planning, mobile communication, language contact as well as decolonial theory. Steve Dixon-Smith is PhD Candidate in the Department of Educational Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. His research is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. He has recently published a chapter on racializing discourses at university in A. Auer and J. Thorburn eds. (2022) Approaches to Migration, Language and Identity. Sender Dovchin is Associate Professor and Director of Research and Principal Research Fellow at the School of Education, Curtin University, Australia. She is also a Discovery Early Career Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council. She is an Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. She was identified as ‘Top Researcher in the Field of Language & Linguistics‘ under The Humanities, Arts & Literature of The Australian’s 2021 Research Magazine and Top 250 Researchers in Australia in 2021. Brandon William Epstein is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He researches Israeli queer youth languaging, queer pedagogies and linguistic and sexual citizenship within Israel. He recently published in Language and Sexuality (Epstein, 2023) as well as a chapter in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Queer Studies and Communication entitled ‘Queer safe spaces and communication‘ (Pascar et al., 2022). Fridah Kanana Erastus is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Linguistics and Foreign Languages, Kenyatta University, Kenya. Her research interests lie in dialectology, sociophonetics, language variation and contact, multilingualism in Africa, African youth languages practices and English language pedagogy. Ann-Carita Evaldsson is Professor in Education, Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research covers multimodal interactional approaches to children’s peer cultures, language practices and identity-work (gender, age, etnicity, disability) in culturally and linguistically diverse settings. She has extended publications in e.g., Childhood, Research on Children in Interaction, Journal of Pragmatics, Text and Talk, Discourse Studies, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties and Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity.

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Contributors

Kjersti Fløttum is Professor of French linguistics, Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen, Norway. Her research interests include text- and genre theory, narrative structures, linguistic polyphony and discourse analysis, in particular climate change discourse. She is Head of the cross-disciplinary LINGCLIM research group (www​.uib​.no​/en​/rg​/lingclim), and editor of The Role of Language in the Climate Change Debate (Routledge 2017). Anna G. Franzén is Associate Professor at the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research interests include young men in incarceration, violence, affect, subjectivity, humor and masculinity. Franzén has conducted video-ethnographic research in institutions such as detention homes, youth prison and high schools and has recently been published in journals such as Language in Society, New Media & Society, Discourse Studies and Language & Communication. Matt Garley is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English at York College, CUNY, and the Linguistics Program at the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA. His scholarly work focuses on quantitative (corpus) and qualitative analyses of language contact and orthography, particularly in the domains of subculture and computer-mediated communication. Samantha Goodchild is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Galway, Ireland, and Guest Researcher at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research focuses on multilingual and multimodal communicative practices, repertoires and mobility. She is interested in collaborative research approaches. She has peer-reviewed publications in edited volumes and the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Tiffany L. Grayson is a Project Director in the Liberal Arts Innovation Center for Healthcare Access and Equity an Adjunct Instructor at Voorhees University in Denmark, South Carolina. She has presented research on health equity and access in rural communities and participated in numerous youth conferences. Her professional experiences are in public health advocacy and government-sponsored health insurance programs. Ellen Hurst Harosh is Associate Professor in the Humanities Education Development Unit at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research focuses on African youth language practices and multilingualism in education. Recent publications include the volume Youth Language Practices and Urban Language Contact in Africa with Rajend Mesthrie and Heather Brookes, published with Cambridge University Press in 2021. She is a sociolinguistics area editor for the journal Linguistics Vanguard. Christian Ilbury is Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His research explores the interrelation of language variation and digital culture concentrating on the offline (i.e., face-to-face) and online (i.e., social media) linguistic practices of young people. His work has featured in leading journals including Journal of Sociolinguistics and Language in Society. Keshia R. Jansen is a MA student at the Department of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her research focuses on rethinking the notion of multilingualism as social relationalities through a Linguistic Citizenship lens. Jürgen Jaspers is Professor of Dutch Linguistics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. He publishes widely on classroom interaction, urban multilingualism, Dutch language variation, language policy and ideology. He is chief editor (with Eva Codó) of Multilingua, Journal of Cross-cultural and Interlanguage Communication and has edited several special issues and book volumes, including Critical Perspectives on Linguistic Fixity and Fluidity (Routledge 2019, with Lian Malai Madsen). xi

Contributors

Ragni Vik Johnsen is Associate Professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Her PhD explored youth’s (playful) language practices and youth identities in multilingual family contexts. Her current research focuses on newly arrived youths’ experiences in lower secondary school and explores interrelations between language ideologies and multilingualism in the Norwegian school system. Rickard Jonsson is Professor and Head of Section at the department of Child and Youth Studies at Stockholm University. His work explores masculinity, sexuality, race and language use in multilingual classrooms, in texts ranging from critical perspectives on narratives of failing boys in school, to students’ play with tabooed language in ‘Swedes can’t swear’ (2018) in Journal of Language, Identity & Education, or humor and affect in ‘Fear, anger and desire’ (2021) (together with Franzén and Sjöblom) in Language in Society. David Karlander is Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies and Uppsala University, Sweden. He has held positions at Stockholm, Hong Kong (HKU), Freiburg im Breisgau and Örebro. His current research focuses mainly on systems of linguistic thought. Paul Kerswill is Emeritus Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of York, UK. His research focuses particularly on dialect and language contact resulting from migration, which he has researched both in Norway and the UK. His recent publications include (with Torgersen) ‘Tracing the origins of an urban youth vernacular: Founder effects, frequency and culture in the emergence of multicultural London English’, in Beaman et al. (eds.) Socio-grammatical Variation and Change (Routledge 2021). He is co-editor (with Wiese) of Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change: Insights from the Global North and South (Routledge 2022). Frances Kvietok currently completes a MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan of the University of Oslo, Normay. She has recently co-edited a special issue on Quechua language planning and policy for the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Rafael Lomeu Gomes is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo and at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. His research on family multilingualism, media discourse and decoloniality has been published in several peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. He serves as co-editor of the book series Global Forum on Southern Epistemologies (Multilingual Matters). Patricia Loncle-Moriceau is Professor of Sociology at the High School of Public Health, Rennes, France. She teaches in several MAs on youth policy, youth participation, youth work and action research. Her main research topics are the sociology of youth and the sociology of exiled people. Recently, she co-edited Une jeunesse sacrifiée? [A sacrified youth?] with Tom Chevalier (Presses universitaires de France 2021). Adriana C. Lopes teaches applied linguistics, literacy studies and linguistic anthropology at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her research focuses on language, youth culture, African diaspora and education. Based on an anti-racist education perspective, she works as a teacher trainer for marginalized groups. Nkululeko Mabandla is a lecturer at the Sociology Department at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His broad research interests include the fields of settler colonialism, the anti-colonial archive and the black radical tradition. His publications focus on the history of the black middle class in South Africa, land and decolonization.

xii

Contributors

Lian Malai Madsen is Professor in the Psychology of Language. Her research includes linguistic ethnographic and theoretical approaches to cultural diversity, language and identity. She is coeditor of the volume Critical Perspectives on Linguistic Fixity and Fluidity (with J. Jaspers) and in the editorial board of Journal of Language, Culture and Society. Marie Maegaard is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, as well as Adjunct Professor at the University of Greenland. Her current research interests include linguistic ideologies, sociolinguistic change and coloniality. Maegaard is an associate editor for Journal of Sociolinguistics. Her recent publications include the co-edited volume Standardization as Sociolinguistic Change (Routledge 2020), the co-authored ‘Colonial labels and the imagined innocence of past times: Debating language and spatial representations of the Danish/Greenlandic relation’, Language in Society (2022), as well as the co-authored ‘Youth Language’, Handbook of Pragmatics (Routledge 2022). Tommaso M. Milani is George C. and Jane G. Greer Professor of Applied Linguistics, Jewish Studies, African Studies,and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is a critical discourse analyst who is interested in the ways in which power imbalances are (re)produced and/or contested through semiotic means. His main research foci are: language ideologies, language policy and planning, linguistic landscape, as well as language, gender and sexuality. He has published extensively on these topics in international journals and edited volumes. He is co-editor, together with Susan Ehrlich, of the journal Language in Society. Sibonile Mpendukana holds a PhD in Linguistics and is currently a Lecturer at the African Languages and Linguistics department at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His research and publications focus on linguistic landscapes, space, visual semiotics and material ethnography. Particularly, the nexus of place, semiotics/language and race. Janus Spindler Møller is Associate Professor in Sociolinguistics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His research addresses how everyday interaction and language ideologies interrelate in field sites characterized by linguistic diversity. He recently published on the subject in International Journal of the Sociology of Language and Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism. Margaret Nguru is currently pursuing a PhD in German Studies student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. Her research interests include German Literature, Film, Black German Studies and Multilingualism. She has co-authored the chapter ‘Escaping the margins of society: New media and youth language practices across the rural urban divide in Kenya’ in Multilingual Margins (2022). Daniel Ochieng Orwenjo is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at the Technical University of Kenya. His research focuses on multilingualism and education, urban youth language and English language teaching. He recently published the article, ‘Beyond English: Multilingualism and education in Kenya’ (2021), in Africa Education Review. Fanny Pérez Aronsson is Assistant Professor at the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her work focuses on children and youth’s experiences of racism with particular interest in how age, gender and sexualities influence those experiences. Her current research extends with focus on early experiences of racism through a study of children in extended education.

xiii

Contributors

Sarah Pickard is Professor of Contemporary British Politics and Society at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France. Her research focuses on youth civic and political engagement, notably Do-ItOurselves (DIO) politics. She authored Politics, Protest and Young People. Political Participation and Dissent in Britain in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). Jason Ranker is Professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, USA. Recent publications of his can be found in Visual Communication, Multimodal Communication and Social Semiotics. He currently serves on the editorial review board for Written Communication and Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. Keisha G. Rogers is Associate Professor at Winston-Salem State University, USA, in the Rehabilitation Counseling program. Keisha has published on disability related issues, co-occurring disorders, clinical supervision and multicultural issues in counselling. She is the 2022 recipient of the Dr. Bobbie Atkins Research Award presented by the National Association of Multicultural Rehabilitation Concerns, recognizing her volume of exemplary research and associated publications in the areas of multiculturalism and disability. Jana Paulina Scheurer is research assistant in the CLIMLIFE research project at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen, Norway, where she conducted a survey on climate change-related lifestyle issues among local high school students. She holds a MA in Intercultural Communication from European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, and has several years of teaching experience as language teacher in secondary and tertiary education. Daniel N. Silva teaches sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and linguistic anthropology at Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Unicamp, Brazil. His research focuses on language, violence and hope in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. With Jerry Lee, he is working on a manuscript about language as hope in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. Anastasia G. Stamou is Professor of Sociolinguistics-Discourse Analysis in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and director of the MA program ‘Intercultural Communication’. Her research interests focus on the representations of (age, gender, national/ethnic) identities in the media and pop culture discourse. She has guest edited a special issue on the ‘Sociolinguistics of Fiction’ (Discourse, Context & Media 2018). Andreas Candefors Stæhr is Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and PI of the research project SoMeFamily. His research focuses on the communicative functions of social media in people’s everyday lives. He has published his work in journals such as Language & Communication, Pragmatics and Society and Discourse, Context & Media. Christopher Stroud is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and former Director of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He is also Professor of Transnational Multilingualism at Stockholm University, Sweden, and a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa (ASSAf). Bente A. Svendsen is Professor of Multilingualism and Second Language Studies at the University of Oslo. Her research interests include citizen science, multilingualism in society across the lifespan, particularly among young people, in the family, in education and in public discourse. She is author of ‘The dynamics of citizen sociolinguistics’ (Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2018), the book Multilingualism – A Blessing and a Burden (2021, in Norwegian), co-editor of Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century (2015) and co-author of Multilingualism and Ageing (2020).

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Contributors

Ana Tankosić, PhD, is a sessional academic at the School of Education, Curtin University, Australia. Her research focuses on transcultural identities and migration discourses. She is a former Fulbright Visiting Student Researcher at Penn State University, PA, USA. Her volume, “Becoming a Linguist”, co-edited with Eldin Milak, is currently in preparation with Routledge. Lauren van Niekerk is a PhD Linguistics Candidate at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR). She is also co-author of the chapter ‘“I am my own coloured”: Navigating language and race in post-apartheid South Africa’, in the book Struggles for Multilingualism and Linguistic Citizenship (2022). Pomme van de Weerd is Assistant Professor at the Department of Development and Education of Youth in Diverse Societies (DEEDS) at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her research on cultural and linguistic diversity in secondary education has appeared in Ethnography and Education, Journal of Sociolinguistics and Journal of Multicultural Discourses. Heike Wiese is Professor of German in Multilingual Contexts at Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany. She is interested in the (socio-)linguistic dynamics of multilingual settings. Her 2012 monograph on Kiezdeutsch raised awareness of urban contact dialects as a legitimate part of the linguistic landscape. Together with Paul Kerswill, she is the editor of a recent handbook on Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change (Routledge 2022).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are first and foremost grateful to all 54 authors of the individual chapters in this Handbook. We would like to thank each one of them for sharing their theoretical knowledge as well as for their intriguing analyses of language and youth culture in so many parts of the world. We are grateful to the young people who have participated in all the research included. There are so many of them, all helping us to reach a better understanding of the social, linguistic and cultural complexity of the 21st-century young people’s lives, forged by the curve of history, living the contemporary and pointing to the future with hopes for equality and well-being for all. A special thanks to Ellen Hurst Harosh for taking the time to read and comment on the Handbook, manifested in the foreword. At Routledge we would like to thank Elizabeth Cox for reaching out to us, Bex Hume and Amy Laurens for their support, practical guiding and encouragement on the way. The copyeditor Rachel Cook has done a marvellous job on the manuscript. Finally, we would like to thank each other for a good, effective, patient and joyful collaboration in all phases of the book. Thanks to our family and friends for their patience. This Handbook is partly supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme (223265) and the University of Oslo, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, as well as the University of South-Eastern Norway and the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University. Oslo and Stockholm, 24 April 2023 Bente A. Svendsen and Rickard Jonsson

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FOREWORD Ellen Hurst Harosh

Youth culture, seen as “sets of beliefs, values or practices that are specific to youth or young people” (Jonsson and Svendsen, this volume) as a concept is in many ways synonymous with youth politics. Tying this to language and seeing it through a sociolinguistic lens offers a powerful view of the practices of youth and how they are accomplished in different contexts. Many of the chapters in this new volume reflect on youth activism, and youth as agents of change in society. Even where activism is not explicit, youth are involved in redefinitions and reinterpretations of society, identity and cultural practice which reflect agency. The activism of youth is of course not new – as someone who participated in the Criminal Justice Bill protests and the Reclaim the Streets protests in the UK in the mid-90s, many of the current issues and strategies being targeted by youth movements are familiar to me. Similarly, any consideration of significant movements such as the US civil rights movement, the global women’s liberation movement and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa highlights the central role of youth historically as drivers of social change. The studies in this Handbook provide us with a set of up-to-date examples of the force of youth in social life. It has been said that youth are also drivers of linguistic change. The youth phase, Mesthire, Hurst-Harosh and Brooks (2021, p. 2) state, is […] a key stage of experimentation with new forms of behaviour, peer groups, fashion, musical tastes and, above all, language. In modern societies, this is the stage of the efflorescence of teenage slang and innovations of a primarily sociophonetic nature (in intonation, phonation and segmental variation), implicated in new indexicalities and stances pertaining to youth, gender and class. From Labov’s (1972) ‘vernacular culture’ to Eckert’s (1997) ‘movers and shakers’, the force of youth has long been foregrounded (and debated) as central in linguistic variation, contact, innovation and creativity. The focus in this volume on language and youth culture therefore brings us into the contemporary milieu where perhaps youth are more vocal because of the platforms now afforded to them; the ubiquitousness of social media and its ability to evade censorship; and also perhaps because of the sheer numbers of youth. Youth have greater social influence than ever before. 16% of the global population in 2015 was estimated to be between 15 and 24 years of



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age – 1.2 billion young people (United Nations, 2015), a figure which has doubtless increased, and the vast majority of whom are in ‘less-developed’ countries, or the ‘global south’, primarily in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Importantly, this volume has a global focus and examples and perspectives from the ‘global south’ are centrally positioned (also see Van Niekerk et al., this volume on ‘metaphorical souths’). Certainly, this timely book calls attention to the depth and energy of youthful activism, as well as the importance of the everyday practices of youth, both for linguistic and social change, in contemporary society worldwide. The language practices of youth, as this book demonstrates, are irrevocably tied to political and social positioning. According to Van Niekerk et al. (this volume, p. 140), “Much languaging of youth especially can be seen in such terms, as a relocating and re-indexicalizing of speech forms in new materialities and socialities”. Language becomes a site of challenge and contestation, both political and social, and youth voices become key in activist engagements around current issues, reflecting both discursive reframing and macrolinguistic engagement. Throughout the chapters in this book, youth voices emerge as central in key issues such as climate change, decolonisation and gender rights. Milani (this volume) foregrounds institutional racism, misogyny, antisemitism and Islamophobia as key battle grounds for contemporary youth politics. Milani speaks to the decolonisation movement, recalling the #Rhodesmustfall protests in South Africa as a “starting point for a broader critique of institutional racism, unequal access to tertiary education and Eurocentric curricula at UCT and other South African universities”, protests which spread internationally over the following years. He also speaks to the challenges to gender activism and its backlash in the assassination of Marielle Franco “just a couple of hours after attending a round-table discussion on the intersections of youth, race and gender in relation to power structures”. The backlash to activism takes the form of policy and control, including the role of hegemonic structures which constrain agency, as well as active repression and violence. Milani reflects on this control of youth and their politics through censorship and suppression. Van Niekerk et al. (this volume, p. 137) on the other hand, describe “how youth engage with and deploy a politics of marginality through multifarious language practices and language ideological discourses to create alternative political subjectivities” and they point to a “lack of in-depth discussions on language in recent literature on language activism and youth political socialization” (Årman, 2021, p. 7). It is therefore timely to see an acknowledgement in sociolinguistics of the role of language in youth politics. As Van Niekerk et al. (this volume, p. 138 describe, Language politics “with a predominantly rights focus builds on an understanding of language politics that sees affirmation of (named) language as a way to allow participation of historically marginalized voices into a more equitable and just social and political mainstream”. Yet they point out that these kinds of negotiations can actually contribute to the maintenance of the status quo by participating in the ‘liberal framework of selective recognition’, which reproduces the ‘coloniality of language’ (Veronelli, 2016). Today’s youth on the other hand are resisting linguistic coloniality, resisting heteronormative and racionormative discourses embedded in language structures and practices, and resisting the dilution of complexity into forms that fit neatly into the liberal capitalist framework. Language activism is linked to social change through the lens of Linguistic Citizenship in Van Niekerk et al. (this volume), as well as the ‘fugitive listening’ to youth voices and protest, for non-conventional meaning. The key to this book, and the key to youth culture, politics and language, as I’ve hoped to emphasise above, is change. As David Bowie said, once or twice:

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And these children that you spit on as they try to change their worlds Are immune to your consultations They’re quite aware of what they’re going through Ch ch ch ch changes This volume is an important and welcome addition to descriptions of the ways that youth affect social and cultural change through activism and politics and the ways that language both intertwines with that and is also at stake in the discussions. It is a multi-layered snapshot of contemporary youth and will be a volume to return to for many decades.

References Årman, H. (2021). Political Corrections – Language Activism and Regimentation among High School Youth. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Eckert, P. (1997). Why ethnography? In U-B. Kotsinas, A-B. Stenström and A-M. Karlsson (eds.), Ungdomsspråk i Norden (pp. 52–62). Stockholm: Stockholm University, Labov, W. (1972). Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mesthrie, R., E. Hurst-Harosh and H. Brookes (2021). Youth Language Practices and Urban Language Contact in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Veronelli, G. A. (2016). About the coloniality of language, Universitas Humanística, (81): 33–58. United Nations (2015). Global Issues – Youth. https://www​.un​.org​/en​/global​-issues​/youth

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INTRODUCTION A Handbook of Language and Youth Culture in the complexity of our times Rickard Jonsson and Bente A. Svendsen

Introduction This Handbook is the first of its kind. It offers a broad and innovative approach to the interdisciplinary field of language and youth culture, disentangling this extensive field, presenting key topics, critical debates and pointing towards future directions for research. However, ‘language and youth culture’ is not an established research field per se with an existing canon of research literature, and what is more, there are, for example, no centres, conferences or journals named ‘language and youth culture’. This status quo left us – in contrast to many other handbook projects – without a ‘classical’ research field to turn to when embarking on this project. Nonetheless, there are quite a few researchers within sociolinguistics who work exactly in the intersection of language and youth cultural practices, and vice versa, quite a few researchers within youth studies that are engaged in investigating language and discourse. Many of these prominent researchers, established as well as young researchers, are included in this Handbook, and due to them, we are able for the first time to present a state of the art of the research on language and youth culture, offering rich empirical examples from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. Whereas all authors frame their illustrative examples in the state of the art of respective research fields, some of them present brand new material on themes and topics where our knowledge is scarce, for instance by addressing the knowledge gap that currently exists regarding young people’s voices in facing a future marked by climate change and how they see their potential for contribution (see Fløttum, Dahl and Scheurer, Chapter 28), or how young voices in the margins reclaim their voices and respond to the structural racism of violence they are exposed to (see e.g., Bryan, Rogers and Grayson, Chapter 12; Deumert and Mabandla, Chapter 11; Lopes and Silva, Chapter 7). In other words, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture represents more than a review of existing research, it adds to it, bringing existing research forward, demonstrating the affordances of an interdisciplinary take on language and youth culture. While there are many volumes either on youth language or on youth culture (e.g., Best, 2007; Furlong, 2015; Kern and Selting, 2011; Kerswill and Wiese, 2022; Nortier and Svendsen, 2015; Wyn and Cahill, 2015), this Handbook has been written with the intention of drawing on insights from sociolinguistics and critical youth studies combined, as well as from pedagogy, sociology, linguistic anthropology and other established fields that coincide in their interest in critically exploring the entwined relation of language and youth culture. To meet this end, this Handbook xx



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consists of ten parts encompassing a wealth of research, starting out by presenting and critically discussing traditional approaches to language and youth in sociolinguistics (Jaspers and van de Weerd, Chapter 1; Madsen, Chapter 2). These two chapters somehow set the scene for the handbook by showing that we indeed can learn from established approaches, as well as demonstrating that the sociolinguistic interest in language and youth has matured over the years, e.g., by incorporating, in tandem with the digital turn and increased global mobility, linguistic practices in more diverse sites and situations than before. However, as evidenced by these introductory chapters, traditional sociolinguistic approaches to language and youth have indeed been biased towards the global North. This is rather paradoxical since a large proportion of the global population of young people live in the global South (UN, 2022). In contrast, many countries in the global North are prone to higher impacts of the growing elderly population due to traditional high levels of old age consumption (UN, 2019). Further, many youths globally aged 15–24 are engaged in precarious and/or low-paid work or are being unemployed, on an average of 15,6%, i.e., more than three times the adult rate, with more young women than men in the NEET population, i.e., neither in employment, education, nor training (ILO, 2022). There are, however, great regional variations, ranging from Niger with the lowest percentage of young people in the unemployment stock (1%), through e.g., 19% in the European Union, to Djibouti with close to 80% (The World Bank, 2022). In other words, aiming for global sustainability for young people of today and for future generations, researchers need to provide a solid knowledge base – for politicians and other stakeholders – on young people’s voices, practices and experiences, and to listen to and to take on board their voices and agencies across the globe. With The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture we have set out to include young voices globally, incorporating knowledge on language and youth culture achieved by researchers from many regions of the world, as well as by including decolonial perspectives to language, youth and cultural practices in sites and situations in the global South as well as in the global North concerning minoritised and racialised youth. As pointed out by Van Niekerk, Jansen, Mpendukana and Stroud (Chapter 10, p. 146), “there are many ‘metaphorical souths’ in the geopolitical north”, a metaphorical ‘south’ defined by “historical impoverishment and inequities of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity”.

Unravelling ‘age’, ‘language’ and ‘youth culture’ Youth research has a long history, gaining prominence with the Chicago School and Centre of Contemporary Culture Studies of engaging in youth subcultures and to read youth’s cultural practices as comments and resistance to contemporary society (Jensen, 2018). This approach has in turn been criticised for romanticising (male) subcultures, and for neglecting other categories than class in the analysis (McRobbie, 1990). A post-subcultural perspective has emerged emphasising increased fluidity and a mix of global and local cultural influences in analysis of youth cultures (e.g., Bennett, 2011), in tune with sociolinguistic research on multilingual youth’s linguistic practices which is given pride of place in this Handbook. In sociolinguistics, however, age is often a neglected power asymmetry, and questions like what is meant by ‘youth’ or by ‘giving youth a voice’, are to a large extent taken for granted (see Årman, Chapter 13, cf. Coupland, 2016). As pointed out by Stæhr (Chapter 17), age can be understood as chronological, biological or social. Whereas chronological age refers to age in terms of numbers of years, biological age refers to the rate of aging and the “social age or contextual age is tied to life events and one’s family, institutional or legal status” (Stæhr, Chapter 17, p. 237). An (implicit) chronological understanding of age may limit our understanding of youthful linguistic and cultural practices, as well as identity constructions, fixing them to ‘youth’ in terms of age and xxi

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thus construct epiphenomenal connections or explanations. As Jaspers and van de Weerd points out in Chapter 1, one might argue that ‘youth’ goes way beyond teenage years whereof many of us have a somewhat distant relation but nonetheless claim to a trope of ‘still being young’, and consequently relate to “the idea that ‘not young’ is problematic or at any rate unattractive” (Chapter 1, p. 3). By incorporating perspectives from youth studies to the study of language in discourse, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture provides critical perspectives to normative assumptions of age, youth and youthhood, involving examinations of language and cultural practices in the transition from youth to adulthood, or youthhood performed without being ‘young’ in terms of chronological age (see e.g., Karlander, Chapter 20). Nonetheless, this Handbook provides a particular focus on social identities and cultural practices brought into being through language, in discourse, by young people (of age), as well as how young people are talked about or represented in public discourse (e.g., Bessant, Chapter 30; Lomeu Gomes, Chapter 31; Stamou, Chapter 32). Further, the different contributors to this Handbook engage in issues of age and power, including the powerlessness that can emerge from a state of being ‘young’, e.g., as manifested through organising principles of society and/or welfare institutions, such as age-based schooling and democratic rights where expected practices and actions are connected to specific stages of life. Taking this further, we can learn from how temporality is discussed within queer theory e.g., by demonstrating how the performance of intelligible subjects (Butler, 1990) implies, as well as surpasses normative notions of time and expected life schedules (e.g., Freeman, 2010; Halberstam, 2005). Accordingly, this Handbook demonstrates how age intersects in a nuanced and multifaceted ways with race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and language ideologies, e.g., as illustrated by Pérez Aronsson in Chapter 9 on racialised youths in online safe spaces and the ways they conceptualise activism, anti-racism and decoloniality, or by Epstein in Chapter 6 on Israeli queer youth and their perception and explanations of multilingual language practices as resources to identify as both queer and Israeli. Turning to ‘language’, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture is not approaching ‘language’ at one level, e.g., as ‘slang’ which has been of interest to many scholars concerned with ‘youth language’ (e.g., Bembe and Bukes, 2007; Bucholtz, 2007). In this Handbook, ‘language’ is treated as a semiotic resource, including, e.g., spoken, and written language, graffiti, emojis, as well as embodied and materialised expressions or practices, including named languages and translingual practices. Whereas some authors approach ‘language’ as more fixed, others emphasise the fluidity of languages e.g., by highlighting an ontological perspective on language as languaging (cf. Madsen, Chapter 2). By applying a conception of language as one out of many meaning-making sign systems (cf. e.g., Van Leeuwen, 2004) as well as a conception of ‘youth’ as more than chronological age, this Handbook demonstrates how language as a semiotic resource indexes a multitude of youth-based identities and how (young) people act through and with language. Regarding ‘youth culture’, needless to say, there exists no unitary conception of the term. As argued above, ‘youth’ is not restricted to chronological time, and as to ‘culture’, there is a long tradition of discussing the very notion (e.g., White, 1959). Some scholars have even argued that it would be best to get rid of the whole term, accusing it due to its blurred, shifting and fuzzy content to hinder scientific progress (Tooby, 2015). One problem is that ‘youth culture’ as a concept rest somehow on a presupposition that there exist sets of beliefs, values or practices that are specific to youth or young people which are different from those of adults. These purported values, beliefs or practices are of course difficult to pinpoint, and that is not the aim of this Handbook. Rather, by including the long tradition of ethnography and studies of social interaction, investigating participants’ perspectives in their everyday lives and activities, we see the practices and mundane xxii

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activities of youths (or practices indexed as youthful) in itself as contextualised youth cultures. By ‘contextualised youth cultures’ we mean the aesthetic, creative, novel, vulnerable, competent, exposed, marginalised, political and subversive youth practices, experiences and actions in situ across different modalities and temporalities, varying in scale, influenced by participatory, institutional and power dynamics. Thus, the objective of The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture has been to steer away from an enterprise of unravelling the purportedly youth’ cultural practices themselves but rather to focus on the ways social identities, power relations and cultural practices are brought into being, reproduced, challenged, fought against/for or subverted by young people in discourse through a range of semiotic resources, in sites and situations like online interactions, educational settings, peer groups, in the family, in poetry gatherings and in political activism.

Youth voices, activism and political youth In recent years, we have seen a revival of global movements, echoing the emancipatory movements of the 1960s and 1970s fighting for gender, class and race equality and environmental sustainability, propelled by young people in movements such as #Fridays for Future, #Black Lives Matters and #MeToo. Young people often represent, on the one side, hope, the future and the next generation, and on the other, they have become targets and agents of political debates and counteractions. It is a fact that young people of today find other ways of politically expressing themselves than – or in addition to – voting in national and local elections (see e.g., Loncle and Pickard, Chapter 27) which in many ways causes moral panics among adults (see e.g., Bessant, Chapter 30). Choosing alternative forms and platforms does not, whatsoever, mean that young people of today are politically unengaged. To the contrary, and as this Handbook shows, many young people are indeed politically active, in direct action, in youth activism or in civil disobedience, as shown e.g., by Milani in Chapter 3 on language and affect; by Loncle and Pickard in Chapter 27 on the efficacy and political impact of young people’s voice; or by Bryan, Rogers and Grayson in Chapter 12 on raciolinguistics and how Black youths in the US are fighting for linguistic citizenship. Linguistic citizenship is a recurrent concept in this Handbook, and it offers a perspective on language as a tool for material transformation and social progress, as “a way of capturing new selves and new socialites beyond, or on the side of, a more institutionalized ‘linguistic rights’ politics with its focus on a top-down, institutionalised and (linguistically) normative politics of the status quo” (Van Niekerk et al., Chapter 10, p. 138). In contrast, linguistic citizenship is “designed to draw attention to the power of the unheard and unattended voice” (Stroud et al., 2021, p. 1639). Despite the eagerness of ‘giving youth a voice’ or taking youth’s agencies seriously, the status of youth has frequently been acknowledged by granting them recognition of the competencies that were traditionally reserved or acknowledged for adults. As such, children and youth are viewed as competent, capable, agents, with the potential to reshape prevailing norms. However, youth’s agency, as Årman argues in his contribution (Chapter 13), can both be neglected and fetishised in research on language diversity, which in turn raises questions about researchers’ will to treat agency as normative (cf. Coffey and Farrugia, 2014). This Handbook shows, through plenty of examples, that one must also make room for youth’s less agentitative and less mature positions. A suggested way of doing this in this Handbook is e.g., through collaborative methods or handing over the research role to the young people themselves, as argued by De Korne, Hernandez and Kvietok in Chapter 8 on how youth agency and power dynamics intersect when young people are reclaiming (almost) lost languages or by Svendsen and Goodchild in Chapter 29 on citizen (socio) linguistics and what we can learn from engaging (young) people as language researchers. xxiii

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Youth and digitally mediated interaction The hashtag in the above-mentioned global movements reminds us of the role of social media in the diffusion and uptake of these movements. ‘Social media’ is a wide notion and may include social networking sites such as Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok or Facebook, text messaging and messaging apps, YouTube, social gaming tools and more. It would be a truism to say that social media practices and gaming are important cultural practices and form a crucial part of everyday lives of contemporary young people. In Northern Europe, for example, as pointed out by Aarsand (Chapter 21), as many as 79–98 percent of youngsters between 9 and 17 years of age play digital games. Social media influences, as Stæhr (Chapter 17, p. 237) emphasises, “how young people use language, construct identities and negotiate social relationships”. Let alone, social media play an important role in processes of sociolinguistic change (e.g., Coupland, 2014). Consequently, there has over the last decades been a great interest in young peoples’ digital communication practices often rubricated as ‘computer mediated communication’ (CMC) (e.g., Cutler and Røyneland, 2018), relabelled by Androutsopoulos (2021) as ‘digitally mediated interaction’ to detach the digital practices from the computer. Today, as Stæhr (Chapter 17, p. 236) points out, “the computer has been supplemented and sometimes even replaced by a range of digital and mobile devices for interpersonal communication”. As demonstrated in this Handbook, different social media platforms and other digitally mediated interaction provide different technological and semiotic affordances, such as Messenger in family interactions (Stæhr, Chapter 17), YouTube as “an interactive space where users can express themselves and reveal aspects of their identities through language” (Garley and Cutler, Chapter 19, p. 264), how Instagram accounts function as safe spaces (Pérez Aronsson, Chapter 9), how youths become storytellers through digital video production (Ranker, Chapter 22), and how different online games provide different activities and interactions among young people in front of or around the screens but also how games and gaming create other activities (Aarsand, Chapter 21). Nonetheless, in this Handbook, we have chosen not to distil a separate part for example on ‘language in social media’ since we conceive digitally mediated interaction as a habitual part of everyday life, particularly in young people’s lives. Whereas young people’s digitally mediated interaction is forefronted in some of the chapters, others include these practices just as another modality of communication. In other words, we conceive the split between online and offline contexts as artificial (see Stæhr, Chapter 17). As cogently pointed out by Deumert and Mabandla (Chapter 11, p. 150), “online and offline communication articulate with one another, and what affordances they provide, will be different from context to context, requiring grounded analysis rather than universal statements”. Setting out to understand language, youth and cultural practices from a global perspective akin to the worlds’ interconnectedness e.g., through social media, we acknowledge that the linguistic, social and cultural practices of young people – as well as of all people – are accomplished in situ (e.g., Blommaert, 2010).

Language, youth and identity – turning to affect Language is key to identity and has attracted scholarly interest for many years, starting out, according to Auer (1998) with an interest in language as collective rather than social identities, where the construction of Standard languages were projected in the European nation building process in the 18th and 19th century as direct expressions of the nation and of its people (cf. Andersson, 1983). Such an essentialist view on collective identities and imagined communities is also prevalent in much (of the early) dialectological research where a geographically demarcated place serves as the pivot point for expected language use (see Maegaard, Chapter 23). A geographical conception xxiv

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of place has also been central to the 2000s’ sociolinguistic research on contact-based speech styles documented among youths in linguistically and culturally diverse urban neighbourhoods, known in public discourse as for example, Rinkebysvenska, kebabnorsk, Citétaal, Straattaal or Kiezdeutsch (cf. e.g., Nortier and Svendsen, 2015). In Chapter 24, Bunk and Wiese offer, for example, insights into how place plays a crucial role in the enregisterment (Agha, 2007) of Kiezdeutsch, a contemporary urban vernacular (Rampton, 2011, 2015) or what Bunk and Wiese label an urban contact dialect, reminding us of the ongoing discussion within sociolinguistics on the labelling of these speech styles or varieties (e.g., Jonsson et al., 2020; Svendsen, 2015). These speech styles have more than often been understood as indexicalities of ethnicity (e.g., Kerswill and Wiese, 2022), but also of socio-economic background (e.g., Jaspers, 2011), as well as of the so called ‘multicultural neighbourhood’. Arguably, around the turn of the millennium, the interest in these contact-based speech styles were one of the most widely addressed topics within sociolinguistics. Through the last couple of decades, features associated with these speech styles have been widely noted in mediatised popular culture as well as in the informal speech of people outside ‘multi-ethnic’ neighbourhoods. Yet, we have limited and only fragmentary understanding of these processes of recontextualisation (Bauman and Briggs, 1990). As these registers are recontextualised they might bring with them social values from earlier contexts as well as given new or emergent forms, functions and social meanings. Through processes of recontextualisation, Ilbury and Kerswill show in their chapter on Multicultural London English (MLE) that MLE can be understood as Multicultural British English (MBE), and while MLE previously has been understood as untied to a specific ethnicity – hence the notion multiethnolect (e.g., Clyne, 2000), Ilbury and Kerswill argue that MLE and MBE are closely related to Black ethnicity and culture. As shown by Bunk and Wiese (Chapter 24), turning to African contexts, such contact-based speech styles are not ‘new’ at all, and has undergone processes of recontextualisation. Erastus, Orwenjo and Gathigia show in Chapter 25 how Sheng, popularly defined as an acronym for ‘Swahili-English slang’, emerging in “the 1960s in the multicultural environment of Nairobi” (Ferrari, 2014, p. 29), has been recontextualised, conventionalised and commercialised, from being in use by urban dwellers of Nairobi’s Eastland area to frequently being used in mainstream media, in advertising, by politicians in their campaigns as well as in education. Turning our gaze to language contact and recontextualisation processes in contexts of long-standing multilingualism, such as in Kenya or in the Philippines, moving beyond urban to rural areas as well, can increase our understanding of (changes in) the social meaning as well as of the linguistic development of these speech styles or varieties (Svendsen, 2015, p. 23, see Bunk and Wiese, Chapter 24; Maegaard, Chapter 23). Processes of recontextualisations are excellent examples of the fact that language appears in unexpected places (Pennycook, 2012, p. 172) and can thus challenge dominant ideas about which languages ‘belong’ to which specific place. Hence, there has been a call for untying or ‘unmooring’ (Badwan, 2020) this entwined relationship of language and place akin to so much sociolinguistic work (see Maegaard, Chapter 23). By applying a non-essentialist concept of identity many scholars have over the last decades across research fields taken great interest in how social identities – in plural – are brought about, performed challenged, negotiated, reproduced and/or subverted in habitual as well as non-habitual language use, such as in crossing and stylisations in social interaction (e.g., Rampton, 2009), as well as in hip hop cultures where youth apply semiotic resources akin to the global hip hop music scene in combination with local linguistic and other semiotic resources (e.g., Alim et al., 2009). Taking that research further, Tankosić and Dovchin (Chapter 18) demonstrate how youth in postcommunist contexts, apply new forms of local languages; and thus, how new forms of local identities are performed through complex linguistic processes of relocalisation. The Handbook is rich in examples on how identities are negotiated and resisted through linguistic practices, invoking xxv

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different language ideologies, e.g., in educational contexts. With help from Møller’s chapter (14) on multilingual students meeting school’s monolingual norms, we learn that such identity work is restricted by prevailing structures and language ideologies in the school institution. This becomes evident also in Chapter 15 by Dixon-Smith where he provides a raciolinguistic perspective on race, class and identity formation in higher education in the UK. Moreover, whilst language use and identities in educational contexts have been thoroughly researched in sociolinguistics and youth studies, adolescents’ language practices in the family have up until recently attracted less research attention, which is the topic of Johnsen’s chapter (16) engaging with how youths challenge and negotiate authority, identities and agencies, exploring playful aspects of language use in multilingual families. In tandem with the digital turn, over the last decade more research has been devoted to identity construction in and through social media, e.g., as shown by Garley and Cutler in their state-of-the-art chapter on sociolinguistic research on identity constructions on YouTube (Chapter 19) or by Pérez Aronsson in her chapter on how digital media is used among Swedish racialised youth to create safe spaces online (Chapter 9). To conclude, whereas styles and situations, as well as indexicalisations – as emphasised here in this introduction and shown in many of the different chapters – are changing, the symbolic function of language to perform identity is persistent, or in the words of Bucholtz (2000, p. 280), “the symbolic use of language to perform identity will endure as long as language itself”. Whereas much research on language and youth culture has been devoted to language and identity, less attention has been attuned to the intrinsic relation between language, identities and emotions or affect. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture takes language and identity work further by turning to the ways identity work is intertwined with affects in participants interactional or performative work. Such a perspective, employed for instance in Franzén and Jonsson’s chapter (4), considers affects as emergent in interaction. Affects like shame, fear, anger, joy or happiness can stick to specific bodies and become part of the performative work, thus evoking new identity positions. The combined take on language and youth culture in this Handbook enables us to draw on the insights from critical youth studies and to move beyond the more traditional sociolinguistic approaches to youth’s linguistic practices by turning to affect and the ever-growing research interest in how language use is intrinsically linked to (what has been discussed as) feelings, emotions, atmospheres or affective practices. “Ever-growing” might, however, be misleading as research interests in emotions are not new at all. As Milani points out in Chapter 3 (p. 37), whilst discourse analysts have a long history of engaging in various highly emotionally loaded phenomena “their affective dimensions have not been fully appreciated by (critical) discourse analysts because of the theoretical assumptions that favored rationality to the expense of emotions”. Further, Sedgwick (2003) argues, in what she calls ‘paranoid readings’ within discursive and critical theory, that the anti-essentialism in these perspectives often ends up in an analysis that aims to unveil the studied phenomena without counting for embodied experiences and feelings. Including affect enables us to investigate meaning-making in interaction in a way that also accounts for the bodily and affective experiences. At the same time, the affective turn has for many scholars meant a step toward an understanding of affect as something beyond discourse and linguistic practices (Massumi, 2002). However, the contributions in this Handbook understand affect as both an embodied as well as a social meaning-making practice (Wetherell, 2013). As Milani emphasises in Chapter 3, affect does not exceed discourse but is expressed semiotically in different ways. Influential for the handbook’s understanding of affects/emotions in youth’s linguistic and cultural practices, is Ahmed’s (2004) seminal text on how emotions circulate and stick to specific bodies. Referring to Judith Butler, as well as Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, Ahmed (2004) discusses how various emotions (like for example pain, fear, hate or disgust) bring subjects into social existence. As Franzén and Jonsson xxvi

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conclude in their chapter (4), such an Ahmedian perspective adds affect (or emotions) to what performative theory has told us about words: affects do things and are therefore crucial for the study of constructing (youth) identities in interaction, further showed e.g., by Evaldsson in Chapter 5 on how affects are displayed through stance taking and stylisations in preadolescent’s playful peer language practices, demonstrating how affective stances can be crucial resources for gender work in peer groups. In sum, akin to so much ongoing work on language and identity, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture takes that work further by incorporating affect. On that note, we turn to the presentation of the individual chapters of this Handbook.

The chapters of The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture This Handbook consists of 10 parts, 32 chapters, as well as the foreword and the introduction, encompassing a total of 54 authors, presenting a wealth of research on language and youth culture. The individual contributions include, as mentioned above, a state of the art of respective research fields, as well as illustrative empirical examples, pointing to future directions of research. The different parts could of course have been organised differently, and there are no clear-cut lines between the different parts in terms of themes and topics. We are proud and glad to present in the following the individual contributions to this Handbook.

Part I Language and youth – traditional approaches and critical reflections In Chapter 1, Jürgen Jaspers and Pomme van de Weerd discuss why young people have been of such interest in sociolinguistics, highlighting their perceived innovativeness in linguistic and cultural terms, experimentation with social arrangements and accessibility for research. The authors examine various approaches that have focused on young people to explain language change, and the production of youthful identities through interaction. Jürgen Jaspers and Pomme van de Weerd highlight the contributions and limitations of these approaches. In Chapter 2, Lian Malai Madsen discusses how young people’s language use and cultural orientations are understood by sociolinguistic research as both fluid, blending linguistic and cultural resources, and at the same time recognised as distinct youth styles. Based on examples from linguistic ethnographic research on youth, Madsen interrogates these bidirectional linguistic processes of fixity and fluidity and suggests as a possible future direction an approach grasping both linguistic fixity and fluidity, inspired by the notion of enregisterment and combining investigations of participant understandings and situated language use.

Part II Language, youth, sexuality, gender and affect In Chapter 3, Tommaso M. Milani presents and discusses the affective turn in sociolinguistic research. Departing from student protests towards the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the campus of the University of Cape Town, Milani shows how emotions can analytically be thought of as part of political action, and that clashes between marginalisation and the privileged play a key role in the formation, circulation and blockage of affective flows. In Chapter 4, Anna G. Franzén and Rickard Jonsson present a state of the art of research on incarcerated young men, with a specific focus on humour and affect in interaction. Their analysis, drawing on video-ethnographic data from a Swedish detention home for teenage boys, shows how humour practices produce particular social hierarchies and social orders through laughter. These humour practices can produce affective norms in line with previous findings on ‘hyper masculini-

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ties’ among incarcerated men, but also allow youth to enact less tough affective practices such as playfulness and intimacy between male friends. In Chapter 5, drawing on recent work in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics and ethnomethodology on the performative, embodied, and normative character of gender, affect, and stance, Ann-Carita Evaldsson presents ethnographic research on preadolescents’ peer language practices and how they in peer group settings position themselves and others through affective stances and alignments that are playfully exploited by group members for local interactional purposes. Evaldsson thus demonstrates preadolescents’ creativity in taking up stances and building identities and social orders that are important in their social lives. In Chapter 6, Brandon William Epstein examines current literature around multilingualism and queer language practices, focusing on the experiences of Israeli queer youth whose stories may be denied in societal narratives. Epstein focuses on the narratives of Israeli queer youth to explain how they both relate to language ideologies from global North, and how they may use English as a resource to identify as both queer and Israeli in an English ‘outer-circle’ context.

Part III Vulnerability, survival and safe spaces Engaging in the research field of youth cultural activism and literacy practices, Adriana C. Lopes and Daniel N. Silva examine in Chapter 7 how young people in Rio de Janeiro’s peripheries use creative communication and artistic practices to rewrite the socio-historical and material contexts that underlie inequities in Brazil. Through interviews and observation of a poetry gathering and a youth collective focused on literacy, their chapter illustrates how these youth reclaim their voice and respond to structural violence, racism, and stigmatisation by repurposing literacy practices, language regimes and embodied sensibilities. In Chapter 8, Haley De Korne, Lorena Córdova-Hernández and Frances Kvietok take stock over research on youth in endangered language research. They illustrate how youth agency in language endangerment and revitalisation is increasingly recognised and how youth reflexivity and linguistic creativity play a role in transmitting language to the next generation. The authors also review recent research in Latin America on youth as learners and creators of endangered languages, with a focus on the complexities of Indigenous identification and the impact of new media on language use and learning. The chapter concludes with recommendations for researchers, educators and youth activists working to promote endangered languages. In Chapter 9, Fanny Pérez Aronsson provides an overview of research on youths’ antiracist activism and safe spaces online. She examines how issues of activism, anti-racism and decoloniality are discussed in online safe spaces for racialised youth on social media platforms. Employing a narrative approach Pérez Aronsson demonstrates how participants in these spaces conceptualise activism, its relation to decoloniality and anti-racism, and how conflicting views are negotiated in the online community. This chapter focuses on discussions of anti-Blackness and the Black Lives Matter movement, and how these safe spaces are perceived by the ‘adult’ world outside of them, in the news press.

Part IV Linguistic citizenship and youth activism In Chapter 10, Lauren van Niekerk, Keisha Jansen, Sibonile Mpendukana and Christopher Stroud introduce the research field of linguistic citizenship and youth activism by providing a crucial discussion on politics and political subjectivities of the margins. They demonstrate how youth engage with and deploy a politics of marginality through multifarious language practices and language ideological discourses to create alternative political subjectivities. xxviii

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In Chapter 11, drawing on rich examples of past and present youth-led protests in South Africa, Ana Deumert and Nkululeko Mabandla engage in discussion of youth protest and online communication from a southern perspective. They show how social media can become important to the cross-temporal and cross-spatial mediation, recontextualisation and resignification of protest repertoires, but also how intergenerational conflict and solidarity and the interplay of past, present and future, play crucial role in the meaning making of youth’s protest actions. The concept of linguistic citizenship is further conceptualised by Kisha C. Bryan, Keisha G. Rogers and Tiffany L. Grayson in Chapter 12, highlighting major key theoretical concepts appropriate to an understanding of Black youth and linguistic citizenship: critical race theory, raciolinguistics and linguistic racism. The authors show how linguistic racism is deeply embedded in the fabric of the United States. Black people, and in particular, Black youth still encounter discrimination as it relates to their voices being acknowledged and their languages being valued. The authors conclude with a call to action directed at the ‘powers that be’ to use their privilege to show that Black Lives Matter by acknowledging the linguistic citizenship of Black youth.

Part V Language policy in practice and youth agency in education In Chapter 13, Henning Årman presents linguistic ethnographic research in schools, and by doing so, engages in discussion on ‘youth agency’ in sociolinguistic research. The chapter highlights risks of both erasure as well as fetishising of youth agency in research on language diversity. Årman suggests that the longstanding debate on youth agency within critical youth studies can provide a theoretically grounded conceptualisation of youth as a social category in sociolinguistic research on language diversity and language policy in educational contexts. Janus Spindler Møller provides in Chapter 14 a state of the art of research on languaging and in education. Schools have traditionally been influenced by monolingual standard ideologies, but as Møller points out, they have a responsibility to include and acknowledge the uniqueness of children including their linguistic (minority) backgrounds. The chapter includes an illuminating case study that demonstrates how school language ideologies can be analysed from the perspective of youth with a focus on their languaging practices. Chapter 15, by Steven Dixon-Smith, takes stock of the research field of youth linguistic practices in schools, specifically focusing on racialised and classed inequalities in higher education. Dixon-Smith provides a case study of a black undergraduate architecture student and shows through a raciolinguistic perspective how racially hegemonic perceptions and co-constituted hierarchies of race and class inform the discursive strategies of the student.

Part VI Teasing, policing and online communication in the family In Chapter 16, Ragni Vik Johnsen provides an overview of research on playful talk among adolescents and in multilingual families, as well as on discourse analytic approaches to parent-adolescent talk. By using a sociolinguistic interactional analysis of family interactions, she illustrates how adolescents use playful language practices, such as teasing and mock speech, to socially position themselves and their parents and furthermore how they can subvert generational hierarchies, accentuate generational differences and challenge conventional ideas of knowledgeable adults fostering the young. In Chapter 17, Andreas Candefors Stæhr provides a state of the art of sociolinguistic research on youth and digital media and describes how this field of research has paved the way for the study of language and social media in the family. Stæhr argues that situating the study of young peoples’ digital language practices in the context of the family may provide a new and more nuanced take xxix

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on the youth aspect of young peoples’ digital language use. That is, by focusing on both parents and teenagers’ metalinguistic reflections on generational differences and opposing styles of writing, researchers can gain crucial knowledge about what is youthful and what is definitely not.

Part VII Language and youth identities in aesthetics and digital media In Chapter 18, Ana Tankosić and Sender Dovchin provide an overview of research on linguistic practices among young music artists, with a specific focus on post-socialist Bosnia and Herzegovina and Mongolia. Positioned within the global digital practice and the increasing global spread of Englishes, the authors show how these young artists create new forms of local linguistic practices through relocalising available linguistic and cultural resources and perform new modern identities through their musical and lyrical performances. Matthew Garley and Cecilia Cutler summarise in Chapter 19 research on the diverse ways in which identities are performed and enacted by hip-hop artists and fans engaged in the production of Latinx hip hop culture on YouTube. The authors show that the young people through everything from multilingual linguistic repertoires in rap performances to dress, hair, jewellery, tattoos and make-up, hip-hop artists and fans establish credibility, glocal and ethnic positioning, and signal stances of resistance and simultaneous alignment with ultra-local and global hip hop personas. In Chapter 20, drawing on a wide range of graffiti research from the humanities, social sciences, and sociolinguistics, David Karlander explores graffiti both in terms of images and practices. That is, the imagery of graffiti writing is bound up with a wide range of practices, with various social actors and institutions involved. Karlander furthermore discusses the suppression and commodification of graffiti writing, as well as the patterns of mobility and permanence in which graffiti often is encapsulated. This chapter thus provides both a state of the art of the field and engages in key discussions in graffiti research. Pål Aarsand presents in Chapter 21 an overview of research on digital games/gaming in teenagers’ everyday lives and illustrates how teenagers engaged in the digital game Minecraft, talk about the metagame activity of fanart. Here, we meet Finley, who explains how her produced images are comments on the game. Her account opens up for a certain sense of freedom to draw whatever motif she wants based on knowledge of the genre fanart and the game, and how she thereby orientates an affinity space where fanart is made relevant. In Chapter 22, Jason Ranker provides an overview of research on multimodal approaches to youth digital video composition. Applying a semiotic approach and focusing on sign and semiotic resources as analytical units, Ranker discusses how multiple modes in digital video productions can offer opportunities for youth to express meaning. Ranker highlights two examples of youth’s film making, illustrating how the operation of signifiers across modes can be conceptualised as imaginative and agentive.

Part VIII Language, youth and place In Chapter 23, Marie Maegaard offers an overview of research on language and place in ­sociolinguistics and suggests that a perspective that combines insights from both variationism and interactional sociolinguistics is beneficial for the further theorisation of language and place which again can provide us with a better understanding of sociolinguistic change. She discusses two major strands in (socio)linguistics that have focused on language and place in different ways: dialectology, which combines language and geographical place, and multilingual urban studies, which focuses on urban contexts, mobility and language contact. Maegaard argues that a combina-

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tion of these two perspectives will contribute to our understanding of how language and place is constructed as connected by young language users. In Chapter 24, Oliver Bunk and Heike Weise, discuss the broad research field of youth varieties that has emerged in urban areas or cities – in the chapter discussed as ‘urban contact dialects’ (UCD), and understood as part of an urban youth culture. By drawing on research from Western Europe, Germany in particular, and Africa, Bunk and Wiese introduce a continuum which serves as a model for the development of UCDs. They argue that in societies with monolingual language ideologies the UCDs form a variety of the majority language, whereas in societies akin to more multilingual language ideologies, the UCDs develop more into a mixed language. In Chapter 25, Fridah Kanana Erastus, Daniel Ochieng Orwenjo and Margaret Nguru Gathigia present research on language recontextualisation. They investigate processes of recontextualisation of Sheng in Kenya from its previous ‘linguistic spaces’ of a stigmatised code of the ‘ghettos’ to a more prominent linguistic value, as a language that symbolises linguistic innovation and represents the construction of a linguistic ‘third space’ in Kenya. This recontextualisation, it is argued, is evidenced in the increasing presence of Sheng in domains such as mainstream advertising, politics, mainstream media and education. In Chapter 26, Christian Ilbury and Paul Kerswill provide a research overview of Multicultural London English (MLE), traditionally spoken by young, working-class people living in inner-city areas of London. They show how MLE through processes of recontextualisation can be understood as Multicultural British English (MBE). While MLE previously has been understood as untied to a specific ethnicity, Ilbury and Kerswill argue that MLE and MBE are closely related to a contemporary Black British identity and to the acquisition of a cultural capital that speakers use to index their belonging to certain subcultures.

Part IX Youths speak back: youth voices and the political youth In Chapter 27, Patricia Loncle-Moriceau and Sarah Pickard engage in discourses of politically engaged young people in Western Europe. The chapter deals with the expression and reception of prominent political discourse among much of the contemporary young generation. The main question addressed here is to what extent the actions of politically engaged young people enable them to enter dialogue with decision-makers and bring about changes in public decisions. In Chapter 28, Kjersti Fløttum, Trine Dahl and Jana Scheurer present new insights into how the prospect of climate change affects young people in their everyday life choices, and how they express their opinions and attitudes related to this through language. Drawing on a large survey among high school students in Norway, they found high engagement with the topic of climate change, and a clear willingness to contribute through conscious lifestyle choice. However, they also find that the students perceive certain climate-friendly activities as challenging. Bente A. Svendsen and Samantha Goodchild present in Chapter 29 an epistemology and methodology of youth citizen (socio)linguistics, i.e., the engagement of lay people as language researchers in some or all stages of the research process. Starting with a thorough overview of citizen science, and how it is conceptualised in (youth) citizen (socio)linguistics, the authors follow up with an example of a small-scale citizen sociolinguistic project in Oslo, called Youths Speak Back. Through the case study they discuss the impact of engaging young people as language researchers, highlighting the outcomes for the participants and the researchers, as well as ethical and methodological concerns. xxxi

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Part X When youth(s) are talked about: representations of youth In Chapter 30, Judith Bessant takes stock over, by drawing on the work of Moscovici and Bourdieu, the ways young people are represented in public discourse throughout the last centuries, namely as immature, sexually irresponsible and risk-takers in need of protection. Bessant shows how these public discourses of youths are informed by power relations, fears, prejudices and moral schemes, and represents thus a historical and highly political activity. These public discourses have been used, Bessant argues, to justify the exclusion of young people from many adult activities, including politics. In sharp contrast, Bessant demonstrates young people’s capacity to initiate and engage politically in major movements, from civil rights to climate action. In Chapter 31, Rafael Lomeu Gomes presents recent developments in Critical Discourse Studies and its incorporation of discussions around the geopolitics of knowledge production, reconceptualisation of traditional research notions, and critical inquiries into hegemonic discourses of power and privilege. In the chapter, two main groups of young people that have been represented in Western media are identified, i.e., (i) youth in urban spaces and (ii) unaccompanied minors and young asylum seekers and refugees. Lomeu Gomes suggests ways in which media analysis of youth representations can be informed by epistemologies of the South, to unpack understandings of culture, language and integration that often reproduce ethnocentric divides. Chapter 32, the concluding chapter, by Anastasia G. Stamou, scrutinises the research on the ways media portrays youth voices, or rather, how youth voices are mediatised. Stamou identifies three major patterns: ‘youth as universal stage of life’, ‘youth as incomplete adulthood’, and ‘youth as social risk’. These patterns are interrelated and shape the hegemonic discourses that often devalue or even demonise youth voices. Future research, Stamou suggests, needs to draw greater attention to audience’s engagement with the mediatisation of youth voices, by adopting broader, less text-centric views and by incorporating other fields such as social semiotics and film and television studies.

Conclusion and future directions To conclude, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture encompasses a wealth of research on language and contextualised youth cultures in many sites and situations over the world on how social identities, power relations and cultural practices are brought into being, reproduced, challenged, fought against/for or subverted by young people in discourse through a range of semiotic resources; how young people perceive their present and future lives and the ways youth and young people are represented and talked about in public discourse. However, we do not believe that this Handbook covers it all. When we embarked on this project, Russia had not invaded Ukraine. Neither should we forget the many other current conflicts with devastating consequences for children and youth in Palestine/Israel, Syria, Congo-Kinshasa, among others. There is still a need for more knowledge on language and youth in war zones (cf. Milani, Chapter 3), on young (unaccompanied) refugees (cf. Lomeu Gomes, Chapter 31), on young people in the NEET population (see above), as well as on other vulnerable and often marginalised youths, as well as youths in the ‘periphery’. On that note, in order to solve one of the grand societal challenges of today, to create inclusive societies, equity and well-being for all, there is obviously a need for transformative changes. This is – needless to say – a political challenge. We have aimed to safeguard the entire spectrum of perspectives, from research on social interaction where participant perspectives xxxii

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are emphasised, to contributions written in critical or activist traditions, providing knowledge and suggesting ways forward for political change. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture thus contributes to the knowledge base fundamental to the strive for social and lingusitic equity and justice and thus for securing future global sustainability. Finally, we hope that the Handbook will serve as a springboard for future research.

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PART I

Language and youth – Traditional approaches and critical reflections

1 SOCIOLINGUISTIC APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE AND YOUTH Jürgen Jaspers and Pomme van de Weerd1

Introduction If you are reading these words, chances are you are not so ‘youthful’ anymore, at least not as this is often understood, from a perspective that ‘core’ youth refers to the teenage years between, say, 10 and 20. But this view can, and will, often be criticised. Many will argue that youth goes beyond the teenage years and minimally includes the pre- and post-adolescent phase, and several readers in their 40s and 50s may protest that they are, all in all, still ‘young’ – orienting in this way to the idea that ‘not young’ is problematic or at any rate unattractive. Still older readers may add that they are surely young in relation to those they identify as ‘really old’; or they may insist that youth does not depend on one’s objective age but must be seen as a lifelong stance, an enduring personal engagement in cultural practices, a way of life that steers clear of the duties and lifestyle associated with genuine adulthood or retirement. Common-sense debate on the boundaries and essence of youth resonates with scholarly discussion. Important sociolinguistic work has seen youth as the non-negotiable, easily definable phase of adolescence during which speakers innovate away from children’s and adults’ speech until they solidify (some of) these inventions into their routine idiom when they join the ranks of adults (Chambers, 1995). Anthropologists have been emphasising, however, that equating youth with adolescence amounts to adopting a biological lens that sees youth as a pre-final stage in human development which evolves fairly similarly across the globe. Such an approach downplays the elastic boundaries of youth, as well as its existence as a strategic, contestable concept, the exact meaning of which varies across time and space. “[G]eneration is a social, not a chronological category”, Comaroff and Comaroff (2006, p. 274) argue in this sense; consequently, “some people never become youth, [while] others seem unable to outgrow the label, even in middle age”. Youth may be more usefully seen as a ‘shifter’ (Bucholtz, 2002). Like the deictics we, there and tomorrow, it takes its meaning from its use in specific contexts where people sort each other into different age categories. How youth is deployed or understood is informative of the social relations in such contexts and of the cultural assumptions these relations presuppose. Sociological research has in its turn underlined that the experiences of those who fall within the core time period of youth are more heterogeneous than their chronological age leads to believe (Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou, 2003; Lesko, 2012; Lesko and Talburt, 2011). If the proDOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-2

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liferation of a global, electronically mediated, youth culture has reinforced the image of a globally shared, appealing life stage, this has not diminished the grip of economic and political constraints, making many youthful lives not quite as attractive as they are often thought to be (Lesko and Talburt, 2011). Against this backdrop, there have been calls that youths’ cultural practices must be studied in their own right, in relation to their own views, rather than considered a try-out for adult life (Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou, 2003; Lee, 1998; Wood, 2017). Others have insisted that age must not be considered the primary motor of cultural practice at the expense of other dimensions like class, ethnicity, race, gender or sexuality. “The most productive view of youth cultures and youth identities, then, must admit both the ideological reality of [social] categories and the flexibility of [individual] identities” (Bucholtz, 2002, p. 544). We will show in the next sections that the sociolinguistic interest in youth has by and large evolved from an approach that considered youth an easily definable but highly important age group in the synchronic observation of impending language change, to an approach that traces the youthful construction of social meaning in interaction to investigate its possible effect on the vitality or expansion of linguistic varieties as well as on the creation of new social formations and meanings for language. Like youth, the denotation of ‘language’ in these studies has shifted in the process from phonological variants to slang and non-standard morphology, over code-switching and stylization to multilingual, hybrid language. After sketching this evolution, we will indicate matters of debate and discuss the methods that are used to investigate youthful language.

Historical perspectives Linguistic innovation as age effect While youth figured prominently as a separate group or life stage in early anthropology (Mead, 1928) and sociology (Cohen, 1955), sociolinguistic interest in youth emerged as a corollary of its concern with explaining language change. Dissatisfied with the prevailing view that language change could not be observed in progress but only noted after completion, Labov (1966) introduced in the Anglophone study of language change the apparent time method early 20th century French and German dialectologists had been applying (Tagliamonte and D’Arcy, 2009). This “surrogate for the real-time examination of data at different points in history” (Cukor-Avila and Bailey, 2013, p. 240) consists of collecting data of different age groups at one point in time and assumes that current linguistic variation between generations – the apparent time variance – is predictive of (usually, phonological) changes that will occur in the language over actual time. One of the major outcomes of this approach is the so-called ‘adolescent peak’ (Tagliamonte and D’Arcy, 2009): the stable statistical finding that mid-to-late teenagers use the local vernacular more frequently and innovatively than preceding and following generations from the same socio-economic background. The pattern suggests that adolescence is the stage when linguistic innovation can be most acutely observed, before speakers in that stage stabilise their vernacular and leave subsequent innovation to their age successors – hence Eckert’s (1997, p. 1) claim that “[a]dolescents are the linguistic movers and shakers, at least in western industrialized societies, and, as such, a prime source of information about linguistic change”. Explanations for this linguistic vivacity usually refer to adolescents’ relative freedom from adult accountability to social and linguistic norms (Wagner, 2012), and to their compulsory cohabitation in age-segregated institutions like schools. Increased technological possibilities additionally allow adolescents to pursue age-related interaction in leisure contexts while in physical co-presence with adults and children (Androutsopoulos, 2005). 4

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Yet, to account for youthful linguistic vibrancy as more than a mere “developmental watershed” or age effect (Kirkham and Moore, 2013, p. 280), sociolinguists within the variationist strand generated by Labov have proposed to move deeper into the local contexts where adolescents move and shake to observe how innovative and conservative speech variants correlate with the construction of distinctive adolescent groups and practices. This proposal was inspired by studies which revealed that linguistic innovations did not sweep across the adolescent scene in an undifferentiated manner, but were taken up in contingent, locally determined ways. Explaining why adolescents innovate thus minimally needs to integrate the insight that this age group is scarcely homogeneous, and that differentiation is equally if not more important within the age group than with younger and older outsiders (Kirkham and Moore, 2013; see Cheshire, 1982, for an early example). Eckert’s ethnographic study on two youth cultures in Belten High (2000), a secondary school in the Detroit suburban area, famously demonstrated how young people’s view of the world impacts on their language use. She described how so-called ‘jocks’ and ‘burnouts’ cultivated their own, youth style, adopting dissimilar attitudes towards school, posture, substance use, clothing, music, and, not least, language. She then showed how these contrastive orientations correlated with the Northern Cities Shift (a vowel shift in the US pertaining to the mid and low vowels, making words in the Detroit area like fun, bell and friend sound like fawn, bull and frand): the burnouts outpaced the jocks in each of these sound changes by adopting the innovative variant, which Eckert related to the burnouts’ more urban orientation compared to the jocks. Moreover, she found that this adoption played out differently within each group: ‘burned out burnout’ girls espoused sound changes more keenly than ‘ordinary’ burnouts, and more than male burnouts, just as jock girls were slower to adopt these changes than jock boys. And while the jock-burnout contrast could be mapped onto the middle-class vs. working-class divide, respectively, some jocks had grown up in working-class homes whereas several burnouts had middle-class parents. The implications of Eckert’s study were substantial: not only was the uptake of innovative variables shown to be determined by local perceptions of these forms’ meaning; it also appeared that speakers’ origins/sex were less predictive of language use than their social orientation. Eckert in this way contributed to “‘reanalys[ing]’ the study of linguistic forms ‘from symptoms into symbols’” (Auer, 2007, p. 4).

Youthful varieties A second type of sociolinguistic work on youthful language emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and can be categorized under ‘variety approaches’. The interest in these studies is not so much in the functionality of youthful language for explaining ongoing sound change, but in describing young people’s often conspicuously innovative language use per se, going beyond the purview of phonology. This interest has generated ‘vocabulary’ and ‘youth slang’ analyses (Androutsopoulos, 2005). Such studies often involve survey research seeking to document all words and utterances young people identify as youth-specific, often with follow-up interviews to ensure reliability and accuracy (e.g., Appel and Schoonen, 2005). The resulting glossaries age rapidly, however, given the fast turnover of lexemes or their transition into adult/standard language (Agha, 2015). Other research under this heading takes a broader perspective and focuses on youth language as a sociolect or style. It combines an interest in vocabulary with grammaticalisation processes, innovative sounds, discourse markers and verbal performance, often in relation to linguistic contact phenomena among multi-ethnic youth in Western inner cities. Notable examples are descriptions of Rinkebysvenska ‘Rinkeby Swedish’ (Kotsinas, 1988), straattaal ‘street language’ (Nortier, 2001), ‘Moroccan Flavoured Dutch’ (Nortier and 5

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Dorleijn, 2008), Citétaal ‘Township language’ (Marzo and Ceuleers, 2011), kebabnorsk ‘Kebab Norwegian’ (Svendsen and Røyneland, 2008), ‘Multicultural London English’ (Cheshire et al., 2011; cf. Ilbury and Kerswill, this volume), ‘Multicultural Paris French’ (Gadet, 2017), Kiezdeutsch ‘Neighbourhood German’ (Wiese, 2012; cf. Bunk and Wiese, this volume), and ‘multiethnolect’ (Quist, 2008). So, while a phonological interest in vernacular language marks the first approach, this second approach is interested in slang, creative language and heteroglossic styles as youthful activity in its own right. The use of these styles is regularly seen to carry symbolic overtones of independence from adults, streetwise bravado or membership of an ethnic(ally mixed) group or urban cultural scene. Often this work contributes to a broader discussion over how youthful ways of speaking are appropriately represented. Inspired by Labov’s rehabilitation of dialectal speech and Black English Vernacular (1972), scholars have been refuting, sometimes at their own peril (Wiese, 2014), mediatised views of youthful speech practices as ‘deficient’ by insisting on the systematicity, creativity or eloquence of these practices. Such efforts denaturalise predominant views of appropriate language as resting on arbitrary grounds, and challenge those who hold these views to reconsider their preference criteria if they wish to escape the charge of prejudice (Hambye and Siroux, 2008; Jaspers, 2016).

Interactional approaches A third sociolinguistic approach to youthful language, overlapping with work in the first two strands that seeks to avoid fixed form-meaning relationships, can be called ‘interactional’. It sets out to investigate the role of linguistic variation in young people’s lives through the lens of daily interaction at school, at home, on social media or in leisure contexts. Scholars in this strand are attentive to what young people identify as distinctive ways of speaking, and sometimes maintain a holistic notion of style as a conglomerate of verbal and non-verbal resources. There is less interest in describing the emergence, spread and use of language forms and nameable varieties spoken by delineated groups than in knowing “under precisely what conditions […] these forms [are] produced, doing what, when, where, in relation to who else doing what in the vicinity, within what interactional and institutional histories” (Rampton, 2006, p. 18). Approaching language as situated social practice, scholars in this perspective are not content with seeing groups like burnouts and jocks express their identity by producing sounds with a certain regularity. Rather, they wish to understand how these identities come to be constructed in the first place and are made to count in everyday interaction; how language variation allows jocks and burnouts to mediate their relations with peers and adults; and how this variation is used to negotiate conversational, institutional and community norms. Interactional scholars are equally interested in how language is used to construct temporary alliances across the ‘jock-burnout’ divide, splits within each group or an ‘in between’ position; when these youth are doing other things than ‘burnouting’ or ‘jocking’; whether, when and why jocks and burnouts use each other’s style features; how these styles are related to the other styles they deploy; and why they prefer some types of linguistic material over others (‘I’m a burnout’ is in principle equally useful as adopting backed vowels; for some interactional studies, see Jaspers, 2005; Madsen, 2013; Mendoza-Denton, 2008; Pujolar, 2001; Rampton, 1995; van de Weerd, 2020). Here, then, the interest is not so much in how youth mark their youthful identity, group membership or independence from adults, nor in youthful language per se, but in how youths deploy language to distinguish themselves from other youth; create (durable or temporary) forms of togetherness across ethnic, gender, age, social class or institutional divides;

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and in how they attempt to redefine the meaning of their sociolinguistic surroundings and engage with widespread discourses. A crucial insight developed in recent work is that linguistic features have multiple social meanings: “the social meanings of linguistic varieties are complex and multidimensional […] contextual factors impinge crucially on which social meanings are attributed to varieties” (Coupland, 2010, p. 62). Adopting backed vowels in this light does not exclusively signal ‘burnout’, just as a mixed linguistic style does not self-evidently flag ethnicity or toughness. Eckert talks in this regard of the ‘indexical field’, the range of potential meanings that a linguistic feature or variable, can index, “any one of which can be activated in the situated use of the variable” (Eckert, 2008, p. 453). Rather than suggesting that variables can mean anything, this is an invitation to investigate which specific meaning is involved in interaction among the possible ones that speakers are aware of. This requires a good understanding of the speakers and their social context. In addition to this, sociolinguists have been insisting that, once it is clear which meaning is at play, the use of a particular feature must be examined for its interactional relevance: which stance does it allow speakers to take up in relation to the form and content of what is said and, consequently, how do they align themselves with co-present others (Jaffe, 2009; Snell, 2010)? This makes the use of backed vowels or a mixed youth style available for more sophisticated work than a claim to ‘burnout’ identity, toughness or membership of an ethnic(ally mixed) group (Auer and Dirim, 2000; Eckert, 2008). Jaspers (2011b) for example described how students of Moroccan descent in Antwerp, Belgium, regarded Antwerp dialect as the voice of racist, fogyish and griping people. Consequently, they often used Antwerp dialect features to produce loud mock-criticism of classmates’ ostensible transgressions, which invited laughter and created positive affect with the targets of criticism. Yet, they also deployed Antwerp dialect features in non-jocular interaction to disalign themselves from a reprimanding teacher. In such cases, it was not the racist quality of Antwerp dialect which was prominent, but its quality as a vernacular which allowed to take up an unpolished, resilient stance vis-à-vis the reproving, standard voice of authority. To the extent speakers of Moroccan descent in Antwerp repeatedly deploy dialect features in this resilient way, conjuring up a streetwise, non-white, style may necessitate the partial use of ‘white’ Antwerp dialect features. Sociolinguistic research in this way casts a wider net than a focus on language change and rather investigates ‘sociolinguistic change’, that is, how language users “may reallocate values and meanings to existing styles and valorise new ones” (Coupland, 2010, p. 145; cf. Agha, 2015), up to the point that ‘standard’ and ‘vernacular’ styles may “com[e] to hold different, generally less determinate and more complex, values” (Coupland, 2010, p. 145). But youth do not have the only say in these processes, and this leads to a first of a number of critical issues we wish to address.

Critical issues and debate One point of discussion in the sociolinguistic study of language and youth is that the attention to youth has been disproportionate, consigning research into adult and elderly life stages to the margins of scholarly activity. Some authors pinpoint the “cohort continuity model” (Coupland, 2001, p. 191) underlying the apparent time method as a driver for this bias. A crucial assumption of this model is that cohort effects (belonging to a specific age group) prevail over age-grading (changes that people undergo as they age). Since the latter is regarded as relatively rare, adult speakers gradually came to be viewed as ossified versions of the dynamic adolescents they once were, at best useful as a benchmark against which to compare younger speakers, but other than that a relatively uniform, monostylistic mass whose speech is as bland as their clothing and musical preferences (Bowie, 2009; Coupland, 2001; Pichler et al., 2018). The implicit theory behind this model 7

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is that adults must live up to stricter sociolinguistic norms and responsibilities at home and in the workplace and have “slowed down their earlier frenetic attempts to ‘define’ themselves, becoming relatively settled in their tastes and opinions” (Wagner, 2012, p. 375). But if youthful speakers may be considered linguistic experimenters par excellence, there is no reason to assume that the demands and opportunities of adult and elderly life do not require their own, innovative, linguistic response. Like youth, adult and elderly age are not experienced homogeneously, and language plays an important role in addressing these experiences (Coupland, 2001). Neither can we assume that old(er) age is the mainspring of social practice in adult life to the detriment of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. There is evidence that specific professions and pastimes provoke playful, experimental, language among adults that approximates adolescent usage (De Fina, 2007; Jaspers, 2014; Kothoff, 2007). Stæhr and Nørreby (2021) show how the communicative opportunities provided by social media in the family context allow, if not oblige, parents creatively to exploit the choices of, and alternations between, technical and face-to-face modes of communication in interaction with their offspring (cf. Stæhr, this volume). A more fundamental problem for the premiss of cohort continuity is that comparisons of real and apparent time approaches have yielded divergent results. Older speakers do tend to maintain the vernacular they have developed during adolescence, but there are ample indications of ongoing language change during the adult life stage (Bowie, 2009). Sankoff and Blondeau (2007), for instance, in describing the change from ‘apical’ (tip of the tongue) to ‘dorsal’ (back of the tongue) /r/ in Montréal French, demonstrate that a substantial minority of speakers changed their pronunciation in later life, partially due to social mobility patterns. A related issue concerns the idea that youthful linguistic practices are restricted to, and can be adequately explained by, that life stage – as ‘youth language’. As Rampton (2011) notes, there is considerable uncertainty about the durability of young people’s language use. His ethnographic research indicates that the mixed language practices he observed in the 1980s among multi-ethnic adolescent groups in the south Midlands of England (the integration of Creole/Jamaican features in local English, uses of Punjabi by non-Asians) could not only be observed among young people in West-London 25 years later, but also among middle-aged professionals with migration backgrounds. Rather than nostalgically evoking their youth or the associated transgressive peer-group humour, Rampton (2011, p. 287) demonstrates that these professionals adjusted their mixed style (one among the others they used) “to the concerns and constraints of adulthood” when it was, for example, deployed in advice to a close friend in difficulty. If youthful styles endure across the life span, ‘youthful’ hardly pins them down. Rampton instead proposes ‘contemporary urban vernacular’ to highlight the core of working-class English, elements of migrant languages and standard English in this mixed style, as well as the expressive practices through which speakers set this style off from the others that they deploy. If adult language can be innovative and change over the life course, and if ‘youth styles’ fails to capture essential aspects of these styles’ social career, what may explain the overrepresentation of youth in sociolinguistic research? Apart from their heuristic importance in frequency counts, another reason is their relative accessibility: youth are easily found in urban, age-based institutions like schools or sports clubs where they have less sway than adult supervisors and visiting researchers. Another reason may be that researchers are typically interested in life stages that deviate from their own. As Billig (1991, p. 80) notes, “[t]here seems to be little that can be said about things which are familiar to writer and reader alike. Much more impact can be made by delving into the remote corners of society in pursuit of the exotic.” This interest is mediated by class and race considerations. It is no coincidence that working-class, and non-white youth have been overrepresented in two of the three types of sociolinguistic work (including our 8

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own) we mentioned earlier, and that research on “young people seeking middle-class respectability”, let alone “heirs to dukedoms or oil fortunes” (Billig, 1991, p. 80) has been few and far between. One correction to this trend is Bucholtz’s (2011) investigation of white adolescents in a mid-1990s multiracial Californian High School who actively negotiated their position in a racialised social order through daily (talk about) language use. Contrary to the typical association between youth and vernacular language, she describes how one group of ‘nerdy’ white girls avoided vernacular language and any bonus of coolness this is usually seen to bring. Instead, they favoured an overly formal ‘superstandard’ English, by which they “projected a working future firmly within the professional middle class” (Bucholtz, 2011, p. 162) despite their different socio-economic backgrounds (cf. Jonsson, 2018; see van de Weerd, 2020 for a focus on small-town youth). These concerns relate to two other issues. One pertains to the labels that sociolinguists have proposed for youthful ways of speaking. Apart from the question if references to youth are adequate at all (cf. Rampton above), there has been debate about the extent to which the frequent use of features by speakers with particular identity characteristics (e.g., being male and non-white) can be attributed to these identity characteristics. Similar questions are asked about the extent to which everyday, gender-related or ethnicising, categories for language can be adopted for analytical purposes. Several authors have argued, in relation to the first issue, that correlations between feature use and, for example, non-white speakers, do not straightforwardly justify the identification of a ‘(multi)ethnolect’ (Androutsopoulos, 2011; Jaspers, 2008; Quist, 2008). Madsen (2013) explains in relation to the second issue that youthful labels for language in Copenhagen which draw on ethnic difference – speaking in a ‘streetwise’ or ‘integrated’ way – entail ‘high’ and ‘low’ social meanings in young speakers’ metalinguistic reflection, demonstrating the relevance of social class in their understanding of the world. Adopting in scientific analysis everyday lenses on linguistic practices without investigating how these practices are characterised beyond their conventional label, may thus obscure interactional goals and social dimensions that are remote from ethnicity. A final issue pertains to young people’s presumed non-conformist stance, and to its value as an explanation for youths’ distinctive language use. While there is a consensus that young people seek autonomy and distinction from children and adults and use language (among other semiotic signs) to that end, there are frequent calls not to romanticise young people as inevitable rebels nor to see their language use as mainly defined by an anti-establishment stance (e.g., Androutsopolous and Georgakopoulou, 2003; Jonsson et al., 2019). Youth do not just frequently target other youth in their pursuit of distinction rather than adults. Various studies also emphasise their adoption of conservative linguistic attitudes (Bucholtz, 2011; Kristiansen, 2000), or their wavering between critical/positive and conservative/negative stances in relation to the linguistic styles in their environment (Chun, 2009; Jaspers, 2011a). This again shows that contextualisation is key: what linguistic features are taken to mean must be investigated in the detail of everyday life. Hambye and Siroux (2008) formulate a similar argument about the meaning potential of ‘street language’: although young people’s linguistic practices may objectively bear the traces of earlier speakers’ anti-normative, resistant stance, subjectively these practices can be deployed to construe a range of meanings that have little to do with distinction or anti-authoritativeness. The same type of contextualisation is vital in young people’s use of racist slurs. These may objectively reflect the racist society that surrounds them, but they may flag wholly different, at times even affectionate meanings in adolescent friendship groups which overhearers, unfamiliar with their local contextualisation, may interpret in the opposite way (van de Weerd, 2020). 9

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Collecting and analysing youthful language and cultural practices Collecting and analysing youthful language can take a variety of forms. Roughly these can be divided into, first, studies with a predominantly quantitative or qualitative approach, and, secondly, studies with a primary interest in language (while attending to youth culture), and those which analyse language to understand youthful culture and types of social organisation. To demonstrate language change, variationist scholars often decide to (1) identify linguistic variables – such as an ‘apical’ vs ‘dorsal’ /r/ – and (2) quantify how frequently speakers use these sounds in formal occasions (during a research interview or reading test) and informal ones. In addition to identifying speakers from different age cohorts, and depending on their hypotheses, they will often seek to group informants according to their social class, gender or regional origins, examining whether the difference between these groups – in relation to their use of one /r/ or the other – is statistically significant. By revealing correlations between linguistic features and macrosocial identities scholars subsequently hypothesise why these correlations emerge and how they may drive language change. Such a study can be done synchronically to predict language change in progress (cf. ‘apparent time’ above). But some scholars carry out longitudinal analyses, verifying change in real time, either by resampling a community that was studied earlier (a so-called ‘trend study’) or by following the same individuals across time (a ‘panel study’), or by a combination of these. Sankoff and Blondeau (2007), for example, compared data gathered in 1971 and 1984 to demonstrate how Montréal-based speakers’ pronunciation of /r/ correlated with (changes in) their age, gender or social class: while the 1971 data were based on interviews with 120 speakers, the 1984 corpus consisted of interviews with 60 speakers of the 1971 sample, plus 12 new speakers aged between 15 and 25. To compensate for the different mean age and higher social class of the reinterviewed group, Sankoff and Blondeau created a sample of 32 individuals (16 male, 16 female) for the panel study, while, for the trend study, selecting another 32 among the 1971 informants who were not reinterviewed in 1984, matching these with 32 speakers from the 1984 corpus. By coding different /r/ realisations and running chi-square tests, real-time language change could be documented in the community at large, and in the trajectories of individual speakers (for more on quantitative methods, see Chambers and Schilling-Estes, 2013; Tagliamonte, 2006). Sankoff and Blondeau’s work shows that interviews are a common method in variationist work for studying speaker type-linguistic variable correspondences. Montréal-based speakers were asked to talk for an hour about everyday life in the city, past and present. Such broad and familiar topics are meant to elicit casual speech, with as little researcher-influence as possible. To reduce this influence even further, Labov (1972) tended to pose the ‘danger of death question’ (“Were you ever in a situation where you were in serious danger of being killed, where you said to yourself – ‘This is it’?”), hoping to evoke emotions which made a speaker “no longer free to monitor his own speech as he normally does in face-to-face interviews” (Labov, 1972, p. 355). Interviews are also applied in other strands of research. They are used as a follow-up in survey studies to ensure accuracy and reliability, or to elicit metalinguistic commentary that scholars find crucial for understanding linguistic behaviour, based on the premiss that this behaviour is at least partly determined by how speakers understand themselves and the world around them. Scholars often find it useful to interview several young participants simultaneously in order to minimise the institutional and age imbalance between interviewer and interviewees. This also allows interviewers to ‘outsource’ the verification of interviewee responses, since interviewees will often respond to, or sometimes refute, each other’s contributions (cf. Auer, 1995). Interviews can also be seen as social events in their own right. In that case, it is not necessarily a problem that data are researcher-influenced. Scholars can precisely use such data to analyse how self-conscious or fake responses are informa10

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tive of youthful perspectives on appropriate language and on social as well as scientific expectations (cf. Rampton, 1995). Another increasingly popular method for eliciting metalinguistic commentary consists of combining a verbal approach like interviews with a visual one, notably through language portraits. In this method, participants situate their languages in different parts of the body, by colouring them on a picture with a silhouette of a body, explaining their choices while (or after) completing this task. The advantage of this approach is that “[w]hereas the verbal mode favours diachronic continuity and synchronic coherence, the visual mode allows contradictions, fractures, overlappings and ambiguities to remain unresolved more easily” (Busch, 2016, p. 55). Kalaja and PitkänenHuhta (2018) review several methods of visual data collection in applied linguistics (e.g., photographs, timelines, collages). A more time-intensive method than the previous ones is ethnography. This implies spending prolonged periods of time among youth (from several months to, sometimes, years), participating in their activities, to achieve an understanding of (certain aspects of) their lives ‘from the inside out.’ Participant observation can be accompanied by other methods like interviewing, focus groups, language portraits, journaling, etc. The main reason scholars spend so much time in one setting is that they are convinced that language and the social world are “mutually shaping” (Rampton et al., 2004, p. 2). Consequently, it is crucial to obtain a highly contextualised view of how participants understand and use linguistic features and of the social contexts they operate in, as a precondition for explaining how language and social context mutually influence each other. For this purpose ethnographers do not just gather information about informants’ language use, but also on how they relate to each other and the researcher, on the activities they engage in and on the socio-cultural aspects that impinge on language use (e.g., seating arrangements in class, clothing, musical preferences) (for more information on ethnographic fieldwork, see, among others, Auer, 1995; Blommaert and Dong, 2010; Heller et al., 2017). There is no reason however to assume that ethnography must be exclusively qualitative: Eckert (2000) uses ethnographic methods to identify which local social categories are meaningful to secondary school students (rather than assuming that these students orient to macrosocial categories such as gender or social class), and subsequently quantifies how frequently speakers of those local categories produce particular vowels. Various sociolinguists have done ethnographic research on language and youth culture in schools (e.g., Bucholtz, 2011; Heller, 1999; Martín Rojo, 2010; Pérez-Milans, 2013), youth centers, sports clubs and leisure contexts (Deppermann and Schmidt, 2000; Madsen, 2015; Rampton, 1995) or a combination of these (Mendoza-Denton, 2008). One notable effort is the ongoing work at Copenhagen University, where scholars have followed pupils of different ages throughout their educational career, at school as well as in leisure contexts and on social media (Madsen et al., 2015), recently including fieldwork, online and offline, in youths’ own families (Stæhr, this volume). This approach avoids a disproportional focus on youth in easy access settings, shedding light on the entire social world that affects them. Since youth culture in the 21st century has a distinctly digital flavour, there has been a growing interest in the language of young people online. Tagliamonte (2016), for instance, reports on how youth fluidly navigate between different styles and varieties of language in computermediated communication (CMC), ranging from formal to fashionable features, thereby disproving widespread claims that youth’s language is degenerating because of their CMC practices (cf. Barton and Lee, 2013; Androutsopoulos and Stæhr, 2018). Several scholars have started following youth throughout online as well as offline engagements (Leander and McKim, 2003; Nørreby and Møller, 2015; Stæhr, 2014), demonstrating that these are mutually shaping social spaces. 11

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Conclusion Readers of all ages are invited to conclude, in sum, that sociolinguistics has matured in its interest for youthful language. Rather than seeing such language as a mere heuristic for detecting future language change, the discipline now includes accounts that investigate the youthful construction, through language, of social meaning in interaction, in order to gauge the effects of this interaction on more enduring patterns of social and linguistic variation. The discipline has not lost heat, though: avenues for rejuvenation are explored by including age-internal differentiation, other life stages and novel communicative platforms, contributing to an account that explains how linguistic variation, both in its temporary manifestation as in its enduring patterns, is co-constructed by youthful and seasoned speakers in the online or offline contexts they make available to each other.

Note 1 Corresponding authors: Jürgen Jaspers, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Avenue F.D. Roosevelt 50, CP 175, 1050 Brussels, Belgium, and Pomme van de Weerd, Utrecht University, Department of Development & Education of Youth in Diverse Societies (DEEDS), Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS Utrecht, https://orcid​.org​/0000​-0002​-4746​-7420

Further readings Androutsopoulos, J. and A. Georgakopoulou (eds.) (2003). Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Rather than viewing language forms as mapped one to one to social identities, this edited volume considers identity a product of the observable sequentiality in discourse. It includes chapters that focus on peer-group interaction in various settings (at home, school, the youth club, neighbourhood), youthful literacy practices (spelling, letter and lyrics writing), and on young people’s variable self– and other-positionings versus widespread identity discourses (on migration, long-standing conflict, ‘proper’ language and ‘good’ music). Bucholtz, M. (2011). White Kids. New York: Cambridge University Press. This study combines insights from ethnographic fieldwork with various forms of linguistic analysis, thereby exploring how three white youth groups in a Californian High School (preppies, hip hop fans and nerds) use a range of linguistic resources (slang, Valley Girl speech, African American English, affected superstandard English) to construct and negotiate identities based on race and youth culture. It shows how the combination of different approaches to youth language and culture sheds light on how language creates social identities. Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing. Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. In this pioneering book, Rampton analyses how young people from Anglo, Asian and Caribbean descent in a South Midlands town (UK) frequently experiment with each other’s varieties. He demonstrates that this practice occurs during jokes and games, but equally during less ludic occasions where language sharing and exchange processes mediate relations with authority figures and help to create ethnic co-membership and sincere friendship across sometimes closely monitored ethnic boundaries.

References Agha, A. (2015). Tropes of slang, Sign and Society, 3: 306–330. Androutsopoulos, J. (2005). Research on youth-language. In U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K.J. Mattheier and P. Trudgill (eds.), Sociolinguistics (pp. 1496–1505). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Androutsopoulos, J. (2011). Die Erfindung des Etnolekts, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 41: 93–120.

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Sociolinguistic approaches Androutsopoulos, J. and A. Georgakopoulou (eds.) (2003). Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Androutsopoulos, J. and A.C. Stæhr (2018). Moving methods online. In A. Creese and A. Blackledge (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity (pp. 118–132). London: Routledge. Appel, R. and R. Schoonen (2005). Street language: A multilingual youth register in the Netherlands, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 26: 85–117. Auer, P. (1995). Ethnographic methods in the analysis of oral communication. In U. Quasthoff (ed.), Aspects of Oral Communication (pp. 419–440). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Auer, P. (2007). Introduction. In P. Auer (ed.), Style and Social Identities (pp. 1–21). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Auer, P. and I. Dirim (2000). Socio-cultural orientation, urban youth styles and the spontaneous acquisition of Turkish by non-Turkish adolescents in Germany. In J. Androutsopolous and A. Georgakopoulou (eds.), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities (pp. 223–246). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Barton, D. and C. Lee (2013). Language Online. London: Routledge. Billig, M. (1991). The very ordinary life of young conservatives. In M. Billig (ed.), Ideology and Opinions (pp. 79–106). London: Sage. Blommaert, J. and J. Dong (2010). Ethnographic Fieldwork. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bowie, D. (2009). The ageing voice. In C. Llamas and D. Watt (eds.), Language and Identities (pp. 55–66). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bucholtz, M. (2002). Youth and cultural practice, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31: 525–552. Bucholtz, M. (2011). White Kids. New York: Cambridge University Press. Busch, B. (2016). Biographical approaches to research in multilingual settings. In M. Martin-Jones and D. Martin (eds.), Researching Multilingualism (pp. 46–59). London: Routledge. Chambers, J.K. (1995). Sociolinguistic Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Chambers, J.K. and N. Schilling (eds.) (2013). The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Cheshire, J. (1982). Variation in an English Dialect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cheshire, J., P. Kerswill, S. Fox and E. Torgersen (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15: 151–196. Chun, E. (2009). Speaking like Asian immigrants. Intersections of accommodation and mocking at a US High School, Pragmatics, 19: 17–38. Cohen, A. (1955). Delinquent Boys. Chicago: Free. Comaroff, J. and J. Comaroff (2006). Reflections on youth, from the past to the postcolony. In M.S. Fisher and G. Downey (eds.), Frontiers of Capital (pp. 267–281). Durham: Duke University Press. Coupland, N. (2001). Age in social and sociolinguistic theory. In N. Coupland, S. Sarangi and C.N. Candlin (eds.), Sociolinguistics and Social Theory (pp. 185–209). London: Longman. Coupland, N. (2010). Language, ideology, media and social change. In K. Junod and D. Maillat (eds.), Performing the Self (pp. 127–151). Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Cukor-Avila, P. and G. Bailey (2013). Real time and apparent time. In J.K. Chambers and N. Schilling (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (pp. 239–262). Malden: Wiley Blackwell. De Fina, A. (2007). Style and stylization in the construction of identities in a card-playing club. In P. Auer (ed.), Style and Social Identities (pp. 57–84). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Deppermann, A. and A. Schmidt (2000). Disrespecting: A conversational practice for the negotiation of status in juvenile peer-groups, Pragmatics in 2000: 156–164. Eckert, P. (1997). Why ethnography? In U.B. Kotsinas, A.B. Stenström and A.M. Karlsson (eds.), Ungdomsspråk i Norden (pp. 52–62). Stockholm: Stockholm University. Eckert, P. (2000). Linguistic Variation as Social Practice. Oxford: Blackwell. Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the indexical field, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12: 453–476. Gadet, F. (2017). Les Parlers Jeunes dans l'Île-de-France Multiculturelle. Paris: Ophrys. Hambye, P. and J.L. Siroux (2008). Langage et ‘culture de la rue’ en milieu scolaire, Sociologie et Sociétés, 40: 217–237. Heller, M. (1999). Linguistic Minorities and Modernity. London: Continuum. Heller, M., S. Pietikäinen and J. Pujolar (2017). Critical Sociolinguistic Research Methods. London and New York: Routledge. Jaffe, A. (2009). Stance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Jürgen Jaspers and Pomme van de Weerd Jaspers, J. (2005). Linguistic sabotage in a context of monolingualism and standardization, Language and Communication, 25: 279–297. Jaspers, J. (2008). Problematizing ethnolects, International Journal of Bilingualism, 12: 85–103. Jaspers, J. (2011a). Talking like a ‘zero-lingual’, Journal of Pragmatics, 43: 1264–1278. Jaspers, J. (2011b). Strange bedfellows. Appropriations of a tainted urban dialect, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15: 493–524. Jaspers, J. (2014). Stylisations as teacher practice, Language in Society, 43: 373–391. Jaspers, J. (2016). (Dis)fluency, Annual Review of Anthropology, 45: 147–162. Jonsson, R. (2018). Handling the other in anti-racist talk. Linguistic ethnography in a prestigious Stockholm upper secondary school. In S. Hållsten and Z. Nikolaidou (eds.), Explorations in Ethnography, Language and Communication (pp. 15–40). Södertörn: Södertörn Discourse Studies. Jonsson, R., H. Årman and T. Milani (2019). Youth language. In K. Tusting (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography (pp. 259–272). London: Routledge. Kalaja, P. and A. Pitkänen-Huhta (2018). Visual methods in applied language studies, Applied Linguistics Review, 9: 157–176. Kirkham, S. and E. Moore (2013). Adolescence. In J.K. Chambers and N. Schilling (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (pp. 277–296). Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Kothoff, H. (2007). The humorous stylization of ‘new’ women and men and conservative others. In P. Auer (ed.), Style and Social Identities (pp. 445–476). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Kotsinas, U.B. (1988). Immigrant children’s Swedish, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 9: 129–140. Kristiansen, T. (2000). The youth and the gatekeepers. In J. Androutsopolous and A. Georgakopoulou (eds.), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities (pp. 279–302). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Labov, W. (1966). The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Labov, W. (1972). Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Leander, K.M. and K.K. McKim (2003). Tracing the everyday ‘sitings’ of adolescents on the internet, Education, Communication and Information, 3: 211–40. Lee, N. (1998). Towards an immature sociology, The Sociological Review, 46: 458–482. Lesko, N. (2012). Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. New York: Routledge. Lesko, N. and S. Talburt (2011). An introduction to seven technologies of youth studies. In N. Lesko and S. Talburt (eds.), Keywords in Youth Studies (pp. 1–10). New York: Routledge. Madsen, L.M. (2013). ‘High’ and ‘low’ in urban Danish speech styles, Language in Society, 42: 115–138. Madsen, L.M. (2015). Fighters, Girls and Other Identities. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Madsen, L.M., M.S. Karrebæk and J.S. Møller (eds.) (2015). Everyday Languaging. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Martin-Rojo, L. (2010). Constructing Inequality in Multilingual Classrooms. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Marzo, S. and E. Ceuleers (2011). The use of Citétaal among adolescents in Limburg, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 32: 451–464. Mead, M. (1928). Coming of Age in Samao. New York: Morrow. Mendoza-Denton, N. (2008). Homegirls. Malden: Blackwell. Nørreby, T.R. and J.S. Møller (2015). Ethnicity and social categorization in on- and offline interaction among Copenhagen adolescents, Discourse, Context and Media, 8: 46–54. Nortier, J. (2001). Street language in the Netherlands. In A.B. Stenström, U.B. Kotsinas and E.M. Drange (eds.), Ungdommers Språkmøter (pp. 129–141). Copenhagen: Nord. Nortier, J.M. and M. Dorleijn (2008). A Moroccan accent in Dutch, International Journal of Bilingualism, 12: 125–143. Pérez-Milans, M. (2013). Urban Schools and English Language Education in Late Modern China. New York: Routledge. Pichler, H., S.E. Wagner and A. Hesson (2018). Old-age language variation and change, Language and Linguistics Compass, 12: 1–21. Pujolar, J. (2001). Gender, Heteroglossia and Power. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Quist, P. (2008). Sociolinguistic approaches to multi-ethnolect, International Journal of Bilingualism, 12: 43–61. Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing. Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman.

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Sociolinguistic approaches Rampton, B. (2006). Language in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, B. (2011). From ‘multi-ethnic adolescent heteroglossia’ to ‘contemporary urban vernaculars’, Language and Communication, 31: 276–294. Rampton, B., K. Tusting, J. Maybin, R. Barwell, A. Creese and V. Lytra (2004). UK linguistic ethnography: A discussion paper, UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum, 1–24. Sankoff, G. and H. Blondeau (2007). Language change across the lifespan, Language, 83: 560–588. Snell, J. (2010). From sociolinguistic variation to socially strategic stylisation, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 14: 630–656. Stæhr, A.C. (2014). Social Media and Everyday Language Use among Copenhagen Youth. PhD dissertation, Copenhagen University. Stæhr, A.C. and T.R. Nørreby (2021). The metapragmatics of mode choice, Pragmatics and Society, 12: 757–782. Svendsen, B.A. and U. Røyneland (2008). Multiethnolectal facts and functions in Oslo, Norway, International Journal of Bilingualism, 12: 63–83. Tagliamonte, S. (2006). Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tagliamonte, S. (2016). So sick or so cool? The language of youth on the internet, Language in Society, 45: 1–32. Tagliamonte, S. and A. D’Arcy (2009). Peaks beyond adolescence, Language, 85: 58–108. van de Weerd, P. (2020). Nederlanders and Buitenlanders: A Sociolinguistic-Ethnographic Study of Ethnic Categorization among Secondary School Pupils. PhD dissertation, Maastricht University. Wagner, S.E. (2012). Age grading in sociolinguistic theory, Language and Linguistics Compass, 6: 371–382. Wiese, H. (2012). Kiezdeutsch. München: C.H. Beck. Wiese, H. (2014). Voices of linguistic outrage, Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, 120. Wood, B.E. (2017). Youth studies, citizenship and transitions, Journal of Youth Studies, 20: 1176–1190.

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2 CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON LINGUISTIC FIXITY AND FLUIDITY Lian Malai Madsen1

Introduction In the past couple of decades, research on language, youth and culture has been a rife arena for theoretical discussions of sociolinguistic processes and practices. Young people’s language use and cultural orientations have been observed to be fluid in the sense that they transgress and blend sets of linguistic and cultural resources that would not conventionally be seen to belong together. Concurrently, it has been documented how linguistic and cultural resources, however hybrid and blended they may appear from a conventional point-of-view, through repeated use over time become recognized as distinct youth styles – a process involving a sense of linguistic fixity. These bidirectional processes of fixity and fluidity are central to sociolinguistic theory and research beyond youth studies. However, they may be particularly heightened in the practices of young people and they are undoubtedly central to understanding and describing youth language. Certainly, youth language research has contributed significantly to two – in some ways contradictory – theoretical tendencies; 1) concepts like ‘language’ and ‘code’ have been abandoned in favor of new concepts like trans- and polylanguaging covering linguistic fluidity and deconstructing the idea of bounded codes (García and Li Wei, 2014; Jørgensen and Møller, 2014); and 2) numerous studies now employ the concept of enregisterment (Agha, 2003) that in fact covers the processes of fixity resulting in ideas of ‘bounded codes’ (registers). In this chapter, I trace and interrogate these tendencies, reflect on the epistemological contribution of popular conceptions of linguistic fluidity, and critically discuss widespread (con)fusions of descriptive, ontological, pedagogical and political purposes in recent theoretical approaches (Jaspers and Madsen, 2016, 2019). Drawing on examples from linguistic ethnographic research on youth, I suggest, as a possible future direction an approach grasping both linguistic fixity and fluidity, based on the notion of enregisterment, participant understandings and situated language use (through ethnographic accounts and interaction analysis).

Fixity and fluidity in approaches to youth language Sociolinguistic studies in the past couple of decades have attended to the language of youth primarily from three different (but sometimes combined) perspectives. Firstly, there is a perspective 16

DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-3

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on youth language as access to new linguistic developments in relation to wider patterns of linguistic change. This predominantly variationist perspective, although with methodological diversity, is governed by the interest in linguistic innovations and language change (e.g., Eckert, 2002; Kerswill, 1996; Maegaard, 2007; Stenström et al., 2002; Torgersen et al., 2006). Secondly, there is a perspective on youth language as general linguistic practices characteristic of youth, that is as age-distinct (types of) varieties or as age-characteristic linguistic practices such as slang, taboo expressions or ritual insults, which are thought to be more used by young people than other age groups (e.g., Kieβling and Mous, 2004; Kotsinas, 1994; cf. also Nassenstein and Hollington, 2018; Jørgensen, 2002). Finally, there is a social-identity perspective focused on the situated linguistic and interactional means of constructing youth identities embodied within and shaped by contextual factors on various levels (Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou, 2003; cf. also Jørgensen, 2002, 2003; Madsen, 2015; Rampton, 1995, 2006; Widdicombe and Wooffitt, 1995). Admittedly, several studies involve aspects of more than one of these three perspectives. Since the general influence of constructionist approaches to identity and language use, or in Eckerts (2012) words a ‘third wave’ approach, has certainly had an impact on the research on youth language, the majority of the more recent studies include facets of the social-identity perspective (e.g., Nassenstein and Hollington, 2015; Nortier and Svendsen, 2015). Other overviews of the historical development within youth language research have presented this as a movement from ‘a structural variety approach’ to a more ‘practice-oriented approach’ (Jonsson et al., 2019; Quist and Svendsen, 2010). The different perspectives emphasize to varying degrees aspects of what I here refer to as linguistic fixity and fluidity (see also Jaspers and Madsen, 2019). The focus of the youth​-lang​ uage-​as-la​nguag​e-cha​nge-a​pproa​ch and the youthful-linguistic-practices-approach can differ with respect to the degree of linguistic fixity it implies, that is the degree to which it involves a sense of code-construction. If the focus is language change, there is a difference between the object of study being particular language forms, such as new types of pronunciations or grammatical features or whether such observations are seen as signs of change of or within a particular linguistic variety (or code). The latter represents a higher degree of linguistic fixity. Similarly, a study of the language of youth (in a certain place) as an age-related variety (such as Rinkebysvenska, Kotsinas, 1988; Straattaal, Nortier, 2001; Sheng, Ferrari, 2004 or Kiezdeutsch, Wiese, 2012) implies a higher degree of linguistic fixity than studies of general linguistic practices as characteristic of youth (e.g., slang, taboo words, reference to popular culture, integration of different registers or voices). The third approach with its focus on the situated functions and indexical use of particular linguistic practices certainly embraces the fluid aspects of language use, but it might well illuminate how language users themselves employ ideologies of linguistic fixity and (re)construct codes through their practices. Hence, across the three ways of approaching the language of youth, researchers’ perspectives on language can be placed at different points on a scale between linguistic fluidity and fixity with respect to the objectives and methodology of their research. Indeed, researcher’s interests and conceptualizations of language and language use are central to the wider dynamics of linguistic fixity and fluidity, and this has also been addressed within youth language research throughout the past couple of decades (e.g., Jaspers, 2008; Jonsson et al., 2019; Madsen, 2015).

Fluidity turn in language contact theory The approaches outlined above differ in the linguistic objects, they observe and seek to describe. A significant tendency has also been a call for revision of existing conceptualizations and theories of language based on the observed linguistic practices of youth, in particular in linguistically and culturally heterogeneous contexts. Examples of such calls for revision are the works of scholars 17

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in critical language contact studies who have suggested new terms to describe the linguistic fluidity they have detected among youth. One such term is polylanguaging introduced by Jørgensen (2010) and colleagues2 (Jørgensen et al., 2011; Møller, 2009) based on the observed practices of youth in Denmark of Turkish descent in a longitudinal study (carried out from 1989–98, see Jørgensen, 2010). Polylanguaging is defined as a practice of language users who: […] employ whatever linguistic features are at their disposal to achieve their communicative aims as best they can, regardless of how well they know the involved languages. This entails that the language users may know - and use - the fact that some of the features are perceived by some speakers as not belonging together. (Jørgensen et al., 2011, p. 34) Another increasingly popular term is translanguaging (elaborate account in García and Li Wei, 2014) inspired by the linguistic practices of e.g., Latinx and other multilingual students in the US and youth with Chinese descent in the UK in particular in language educational settings (García, 2009; Li Wei, 2011). Translanguaging is described as: (…) an approach to the use of language, bilingualism and the education of bilinguals that considers the language practices of bilinguals not as two autonomous language systems as has been traditionally the case, but as one linguistic repertoire with features that have been societally constructed as belonging to two separate languages. (García and Li Wei, 2014, p. 2) There are differences in the descriptions of the two terms, but they reflect some common points as they both; 1) abandon a view of languages as autonomous systems; 2) focus on speakers’ practices and repertoires; and 3) include awareness of the ideological dimensions of language as societally constructed as features belonging or not belonging together. However, polylanguaging is presented here as a descriptive term for the practices of young language users, while translanguaging is presented as the term for a general approach to language and education. Both of the terms build on the notion of languaging (Becker, 1991; Jørgensen, 2003; Linell, 1998). In language contact studies languaging is used as an ontological concept that broadly refers to the practice of using language rather than communicating through bounded languages or codes. This entails that the idea of ‘a language’ is considered a socio-cultural artefact mediating communication (Linell, 1998, p. 35). The prefixes of the two terms have been inspired by different sources. Poly-languaging draws on Hewitt’s (1992, p. 30) notion of polyculture defined as a collection of cultural practices that “are not (a) discrete and complete in themselves; (b) are not in any sense ‘intrinsically’ ‘equal’; and (c) are active together and hence bound up with change”. Studies of young people’s language use by Jørgensen and colleagues suggest that the language users do not treat linguistic codes as coherent entities, but rather treat the borders between languages as fluid and flexible. Through their polylingual practices language users may enact what is described as a polylingualism norm that entails that they “may know – and use – the fact that some of the features are perceived by some speakers as not belonging together” (Jørgensen et al., 2011, p. 34). Translanguaging is originally a (language) pedagogical concept referring to the integrated use of different languages or codes (Baker, 2011), but as it has developed, translanguaging has additionally come to be presented as a socially transforming type of linguistic practice: 18

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A translanguaging space acts as a Thirdspace which does not merely encompass a mixture or hybridity of first and second languages; instead it invigorates languaging with new possibilities from a site of ‘creativity and power’. (García and Li Wei, 2014, p. 25) The perspectives of both the poly- and translanguaging approaches reflect a wider tendency in critical language contact studies to problematize and abandon conceptualizations of languages as separable bounded entities. Instead, the focus is the fluidity of language use, the repertoire of various linguistic resources and the ideological implications of code-construction. Other similar conceptualizations include, for instance, metrolingualism (Otsujo and Pennycook, 2010), codemeshing (Canagarajah, 2011) and flexible bilingualism (Blackledge and Creese, 2010). Not all of these frameworks are based on empirical studies of youth, but they have in common that they document language use in heterogeneous linguistic and cultural contexts and that the fluidity of the everyday linguistic practices observed here, inspires a deconstruction of the idea of bounded codes. Such deconstructing practices are indeed preeminent in various ways among young people and the study of youth language, therefore, plays a central part in these disciplinary developments. The disciplinary turn towards linguistic fluidity has also, however, been problematized because of the (con)fusion of descriptive, ontological, pedagogical and political purposes entailed by the use and definition of its popular terminology (Jaspers and Madsen, 2016, 2019). As we point out in Jaspers and Madsen (2016, pp. 240–241) the polylanguaging perspective presents languaging as the ontological term for general language use. This includes both the types of language use commonly known as monolingual and other more hybrid and mixed ways of using language and linguistic forms. Polylanguaging, then, is presented as a descriptive term specifically for linguistic practices that defy established code models. However, such practices can both enact a polylingualism norm, as described above, depicting how language users are aware of and exploit transgression of established language categories, and also refer to practices of “speakers employ[ing] linguistic features associated with different languages as a matter of habit” (Jørgensen and Møller, 2014, p. 73). If habitual fluid language use is also to be considered polylingual, this creates, we argue, a challenge related to the perspective from which we are to understand linguistic practices as fluid or resistant. In addition, categorizing all types of linguistic practices that integrate features associated (by some) with different code models as polylanguaging does not lead to much descriptive precision. If we turn to translanguaging, the terminological reach is even wider as we demonstrate (Jaspers and Madsen, 2019, pp. 10–11). When the term is used, it can refer to a number of meanings. In addition to depicting a pedagogical strategy of alternating different languages and, in a more descriptive sense, to the fluid linguistic practices of bilinguals, it also covers a particular instinct (including that of monolingual speakers, see Otheguy et al., 2015, p. 286). As illustrated above, the term equally refers to an approach of language and to an educational philosophy. Finally, it is often presented as covering politically resistant linguistic practices: […] [t]ranslanguaging for us refers to language actions that enact a political process of social and subjectivity formation which resists the asymmetries of power that language and other meaning-making codes, associated with one or another nationalist ideology, produce. (García and Li Wei, 2014, p. 43) Each of these aspects is significant to investigations of young people’s language use, ideologies and identity formation. The political project of emphasizing that fluid linguistic practices are not abnormal and that the bounded code understanding is not to be confused with an unquestioned, 19

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natural way of thinking about language as it has been and is assumed to be, in many institutionalized contexts, is important. In this light, a disciplinary movement towards fluidity has been necessary. However, the way terms for describing language use or naming pedagogical strategies have also come to be used to depict general theories of language, be treated as synonymous with languaging or be framed as inherently liberating, suggest that contributing to theoretical precision has not been at the top of the agenda. In fact, these calls for theoretical and terminological revision are, I will argue, themselves in need of revision, but rather than suggesting more new terms, I will turn to look at existing tools apt for covering various dynamics of linguistic fixity as well as fluidity in everyday language use.

Future directions – revisiting existing framework Alongside the work emphasizing fluid and transgressive language to deconstruct taken-for-granted code concepts, Agha’s theory of enregisterment has been widely employed in youth language research (e.g., Madsen et al., 2010; Madsen, 2013, 2016; Newell, 2009; Reite et al., 2021; Stæhr, 2015). At first glance, this appears, in some ways, a contradictory tendency as it focuses on processes of linguistic fixity in the sense that enregisterment points to the significance of linguistic and cultural codes. With its emphasis on “processes and practices whereby performable signs become recognized (and regrouped) as belonging to distinct, differentially valorized semiotic registers by a population” (Agha, 2007, p. 81), it is, however, fully compatible with a languaging approach as it accounts for the processes through which linguistic codes (or in Agha’s terms, registers) are constructed as socio-cultural phenomena. Such construction involves metapragmatic activities on various social scale levels ranging from widely circulating media stereotypes to situated speaker practices. Through our labels for language use, for instance, or through the way we repeatedly use particular linguistic forms, we (re)create the stereotypic indexical values of the used forms and relate different ways of using language to different sets of language forms (registers or codes). Linguistic registers so come to point to, or index, ways of being and acting (Agha, 2003, 2007; Silverstein, 2003). Work on youth language investigating such processes in linguistically heterogeneous environments, in particular in European and African contexts, have documented how linguistic fluidity and blending of linguistic resources become enregistered as defining features of particular speech styles (e.g., Newell, 2009; Madsen, 2013, 2016; Reite et al., 2021; cf. also Hurst-Harosh and Erastus, 2018). Scholars have observed that linguistic creativity and new combinations of linguistic resources that transgress existing taken-for-granted language borders are highly characteristic of young people’s languaging (Hollington and Nassenstein, 2018; Madsen et al., 2016; Nortier and Svendsen, 2015), but some studies have also documented how such youthful polylingual speech styles develop into urban vernaculars used across generations (Beyer, 2015; Ferrari, 2004; Rampton, 2015). Beyer (2015, pp. 32–33) describes a tendency within youth language research to, at a first stage, depict the juvenile styles as ‘anti-languages’ (Halliday, 1978) and markers of ‘resistance identities’ (Castells, 1998) emerging in (often) male-dominated, low social status milieus (see also Kieβling and Mous, 2004). At a second stage, such styles are observed to gain wider societal prestige as indexical of urban lifestyles (Beyer, 2015, p. 33). Even if not all scholars would agree on the interpretation of such styles as projections of resistance identities, an element of transgression of existing language norms is certainly noted in most youth language research. This may be articulated as renegotiation of norms (Møller, 2009) or as creativity and criticality (García and Li Wei, 2014; Li Wei, 2011). A different way of describing the wider sociolinguistic positioning of youth styles resulting from the processes of enregisterment could be Agha’s (2015, 20

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p. 306) definition of slang registers: “an ideological framework for reasoning about language that defines a class of deviant registers of language”. As we have documented through linguistic ethnographic studies of the urban vernacular in Copenhagen, the mixing of various linguistic features in co-occurrence with particular pronunciation features has come to be conceptualized as slang in this way, that is, ideologized as deviant from a standard (Madsen, 2016). In fact, the investigation of the enregisterment of the urban vernacular in Copenhagen has uncovered an ideological transformation. At the first indexical stage, linguistic signs such as vocabulary from Turkish, Kurdish and Arabic combined with nonstandard grammar and nonstandard prosody could index secondlanguage speakers of Danish. At the next stage, these signs have become enregistered as a contemporary speech style associated with urban youth, cultural diversity and toughness more generally (Madsen, 2015). Finally, this style through its ideological positioning as contrasting to standard has come to involve association with broader values of social status differences intertwined with aspects of ethnicity (Madsen, 2013). So, work based on Agha’s approach to register formation demonstrates that this theoretical framework can capture the dynamic and processual character of code-construction as well as the relation between language use and ideology. Employed in combination with ethnographic and interaction-analytical methodology it helps us gain insight into what counts as fluid transgressional linguistic practices and what counts as codes for participants. Moreover, studies of enregisterment of young people’s seemingly fluid linguistic practices illustrate well the interdependent relationship between fluidity and fixity in sociolinguistic dynamics. As other scholars have also noted “it is important not to construe fixity and fluidity as dichotomous […] but rather to view them as symbiotically (re)constituting each other” (Otsuji and Pennycook, 2010, p. 244, cf. also Jaspers and Madsen, 2019; Jørgensen, 2008; Møller, 2016). Transgression of fixed categories invokes the categories transgressed, and transgressive and fluid practices may themselves become recognizable as traits of particular registers. Finally, transgressive linguistic practice also involves an ideological dimension, and we can think of ideological deconstruction as well as ideological construction of codes. Concepts like translanguaging, polylanguaging and similar notions, if they are to cover all these dynamics, do not help us much in capturing different ways linguistic diversity functions in (young) people’s lives. Therefore, although it may seem peculiar to suggest as a possible future direction to look back, I suggest that it is worth revisiting some code-switching scholarship in the light of the enregisterment perspective (cf. also Jørgensen, 2010, Møller, 2016). Auer’s (1998) edited volume makes similar attempts as in the more recent approaches to overcome the challenges that result from working with the concept of ‘codes’ or ‘languages’ when faced with complex linguistic realities. The key argument of this collection is that language use should be approached with close attention to its conversational function and to participants’ perspectives on the relevant linguistic variation. Some of the chapters demonstrate that linguists’ tendency to equate codes with distinct (national) languages may not correspond well to participants’ understanding and language use. Speech that would appear to a linguist as code-switching may in the eyes of the speakers have to be understood as one linguistically ‘mixed code’ that speakers may alternate with other ‘mixed codes’. (Meeuwis and Blommaert, 1998). At the same time, speech that appears to be ‘use of one code’ may have to be understood as switching between different codes, with significant conversational functions (Alvarez-Cáccamo, 1998). It is argued therefore that what a ‘code’ is and when an actual ‘switch’ occurs must be informed by participants’ understanding of meaningful difference and similarity. The studies in this volume also point out that hybrid linguistic practices are not always a sign that speakers are creatively alternating between codes of which they have elaborate competence, or that such practices occur exclusively to project particular social identities. This leads to a number of terminological distinctions for describing dif21

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ferent types of linguistic hybridity: code-switching (with different discursive or participant-related functions), (mixed) code, and crossing (Rampton, 1995, 1998). Notably, which is the appropriate term in each case is presented as an empirical question based on participant understandings that are to be explored through a combination of ethnographic accounts and close analysis of conversational employment (see further discussion in Jaspers and Madsen, 2019). To illustrate what we can gain from such a perspective, I will turn to discuss a number of examples from studies I have carried out (some with colleagues), which display some of the very different ways linguistic fixity and fluidity play out in practice among youth in Copenhagen.

Linguistic fixity and fluidity in practice The purpose of presenting data examples in this connection is to illustrate particular points of relevance to the theoretical discussion of the chapter. Therefore, detailed accounts of methodology and some analytical steps will be left out, but I refer to published work for such details. First, I will discuss some examples from our collaborative research on young people (13–15 years) in a public school in Copenhagen (Madsen et al., 2016). I include excerpts from an interview and some recorded interactions, but I also draw on the wider ethnographic data collection (observations and field diaries, written essays, other recordings and interviews). Israh:

Astrid: Israh: Astrid: Israh:

outside school then we do also we just talk slang ‘perker’ language talk normally like Arabic Danish use all sorts of strange word in (0.3) [yes] [and] then we every time come up with new words how so like something we make up something new that’s a bit similar to Arabic then we make it opposite a bit

In this excerpt from one of our group interviews (Madsen, 2013, p. 128, 2016, p. 207, Excerpt 1, my translation) the fieldworker (Astrid) and the participant (Israh) discuss ways of speaking, and the participants reflect on the different speech styles the young people use in their everyday. Israh replies to the question: “how do you speak outside school?”. In her reply she refers to the way they speak with different labels: “slang”, “perker language”, “talk normally” and “Arabic Danish” and she describes this way of speaking as using “all sorts of strange words” and even making up something new similar to Arabic (line 12–15). This excerpt can then be seen to illustrate a metalinguistic reflection describing practices that could be characterized as poly- or translanguaging. We learn from her description that such practices in themselves are considered to be a key feature of a recognizable speech style (although it goes by several names, see Madsen, 2013, 2016). As documented elsewhere we find many other examples of similar descriptions like ‘we mix’ and sometimes the name ‘street language’ is also used to depict the style (Madsen, 2013). So, there is reflexive awareness of linguistic fluidity as a feature of an enregistered way of speaking that also involve particular associations (see Madsen, 2013, 2016). Finally, the fact that it is described also as talking ‘normally’ suggest that this is understood as habitual. The next example shows how this way of speaking is used in interaction. The context is a recording of a group of boys left in another fieldworker’s (Andreas’) office with a computer. They 22

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playfully pretend to be thieves stealing the fieldworker’s gum. From line 15, Isaam changes the voice quality so it gives the impression of shouting without the higher volume (Madsen, 2016, p. 211, Excerpt 5).

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Andreas: Isaam:

Shahid: Isaam: Shahid:

Isaam: Shahid: Isaam: Bashaar: Isaam:

Anas: Isaam:

Original nå hyg jer vi kommer lidt senere øh det er min ↑dig mand læg den tʲilbage med dig hhh hhh hhh [walla de tʲager min drink og sådan noget] [xxx kom her med tyggegummi kom her over] med dig mand jeg har ikke stjålet noget tʲyggegummi hhh hhh jalla shuf de er daffet (ja det en dejlig xxx xxx) hhh hhh ha tʲag tʲy:ggegummi fre:mm mand hey hallo bratha vi bliver optʲaget vi er busted xxx det samme ja jeg har stjålet en tʲyggegummi ja fuck det

Andreas: Isaam:

Shahid: Isaam: Shahid:

Isaam: Shahid: Isaam: Bashaar: Isaam:

Anas: Isaam:

Translation well have a good time we’ll come later eh it’s mine ↑you man put it back with you hhh hhh hhh [walla they’re taking my drink and stuff] [xxx come here with chewing gum come over here] man I haven’t stolen any chewing gum hhh hhh jalla shuf they’ve split (yes it’s a lovely xxx xxx) hhh hhh ha take the che:wing gum ou:t man hey hallo bratha we’re being recorded we’re busted xxx the same yes I’ve stolen a chewing gum yes fuck that

Word list excerpt: walla: ‘I swear by Allah’, jalla: ‘come on’, shuf: ‘look’, bratha: ‘brother’

This excerpt could be seen as a stretch of conversation where features of Danish, Arabic and English slang are mixed in combination with a particular nonstandard prosody and t-pronunciation. So this could again be described as poly- or translanguaging as the speakers do not behave as if they are restricted by borders between languages or codes. But this does not tell us much about the way the linguistic resources function in this episode. We know from the wider context and datacollection (and the interview above) that there is an enregistered way of speaking characterized by this kind of linguistic fluidity corresponding to what Rampton (2015) refers to as a contemporary urban vernacular (see Madsen, 2016). In this short episode, we can observe that the key features of the speech style are enhanced in the utterances highlighted in bold in combination with the pretend-shouting quality of the voice. The impression it leaves is a style tuning from a habitual use of the urban vernacular speech style to a slightly exaggerated version of this in Isaam’s performance of the thief persona. This involves playing with links between particular linguistic practices and stereotypic values of rule-breaking. So, on the one hand, the except shows that linguistic fluid23

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ity is part of a habitual enregistered speech style, but the markedness of those utterances in which the fluidity is intensified also, on the other hand, suggests an element of resistance to the traditional pure monolingual behaviour that is in tune with the associations of rule-breaking. In any case, the marked and playful character here point to the linguistic fluidity as part of an identity performance in this episode (Madsen, 2016, pp. 210–211). The next excerpt illustrates another identity performance by Isaam (Madsen, 2016, pp. 208–210, Excerpt 4).

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Musa: Isaam:

Musa: Isaam: Musa: Isaam:

Boy: Musa:

Isaam:

Original hvad synes du rappen er men jeg synes det er me:get koncentreret og me:get (.) velfungeret socialt sikkerhedsnet fordi [rappen] [pas på] (du ikke sutter min finger af) fordi fordi rappen(0.2)rappen ja rappen [xxx] [rappen] det e:r livet og livet det er tærte hold nu kæft (idiot) hvad siger du der er nogle der siger at de har ikke noget liv dem der rapper hvad siger du til det jeg siger de skal hjem og kneppe deres mor så kan de se hvad et liv er

Musa: Isaam:

Musa: Isaam: Musa: Isaam:

Boy: Musa:

Isaam:

Translation what do you think rap is but I think it’s ve:ry concentrated and ve:ry (.) well-functioning social security web because [the rap] [watch out] (you don’t suck my finger off) because because rap(0.2) rap yes rap     [xxx]      [rap] i:t’s life and life is pie shut up (idiot) what do you say there’s some who say that they haven’t got a life those who do rap what do you say to that I say they should go home and fuck their mum then they can see what life is

The excerpt is from a recording during a school break where Isaam and a friend – probably inspired by the fact that they have been asked to record themselves – perform a pretend interview and Isaam acts as a rapper being interviewed (he is involved in rap music). This is an illustration of somewhat the opposite from the previous excerpt. From a form point-of-view this is rather monolingual. All features are Danish and there are no dialectal pronunciation differences either. However, when considering the wider ethnographic and metalinguistic knowledge as well as looking at the conversational acts, there are good reasons to understand this as a code-switch. In addition to the hybrid speech style ‘slang’ or ‘street language’, the participants also described a style – ‘integrated’ – used for respectful interaction with adults and for official school activities and characterized by particular vocabulary – ‘long posh words’ (Madsen, 2013). Looking at the vocabulary here in combination with the pauses, repetitions, prolongations and extra distinctness in Isaam’s turns until line 21, there is a clear impression of a different way of speaking in those turns, from the speech in the last four lines. Isaam talks about a “concentrated”, “well-functioning” “social security web” in a way as if he thinks carefully and even becomes rather philosophical talking about rap as “life”. While at the end when responding to a critical question about rappers, he talks at faster speed, combined 24

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with profanities and slang expressions when he tells critics to “go home and fuck their mum”. So, a stretch of conversation seemingly not linguistically hybrid in fact from a participant perspective is likely to involve different codes. In the next short example from a group recording in a taekwondo club (Madsen, 2015, p. 159, Excerpt 4.8) Ahmet with Lebanese background is interacting with Mohammed and Micas with Pakistani backgrounds. The boys of Pakistani descent referred to themselves as ‘the Paki gang’ and they often used Punjabi in their internal conversation. At the same time, an urban vernacular as we have seen described and used in the public school data, was also very commonly used by these boys.

01 02

Ahmet: Micas:

03 04 05

Ahmet: Mohammed:

Original Mohammed laver ikke noget ja hvad laver du? ((kigger på kamera og så Mohammed)) hvad laver du ↑paki do:↑di xxx apni charbi dekh xxx xxx ((læner sig mod Micas og ser i retning af Ahmet. Mohammed og Micas griner højlydt))

Translation Mohammed isn’t doing anything yes what are you doing? ((looks at camera and then Mohammed)) what are you doing ↑paki do:↑di xxx look at your fat xxx xxx ((leans towards Micas and gazes in direction of Ahmet. Mohammed and Micas laugh loudly))

In the excerpt, Ahmet complains about Mohammed not helping (with a poster they were making). Micas supports the critical questioning of Mohammed and in line 3–4, Ahmet adds a stylized pretend Punjabi expression “paki dodi”. He has no actual competence in Punjabi, but uses particular sound features in combination with the expression ‘paki’, of course, which together seems to point in this direction. The stylization is rather severely negatively sanctioned by Mohammed. Unfortunately, he speaks in a low volume and the whole utterance is difficult to hear, but enough is audible to know he insults Ahmet based on weight or body shape: “look at your fat”. He makes it very clear by switching to Punjabi and addressing Micas while gazing at Ahmet and laughing, that he targets Ahmet and excludes him from understanding. If we again merely describe this episode as an example of the poly- or translanguaging, we miss the micropolitics of ethnic relationships, group dynamics and rights to use particular language forms that this brings about. A more precise description of what happens here would be sanctioned crossing (as coined by Rampton, 1995). As Rampton (1995) has also demonstrated linguistic hybridity is not only a common convivial practice in heterogeneous youth groups there is also the option to exploit the idea that particular groups have rights and access to particular language forms or codes for instance as in this case if there is a local conflict, and a bounded code understanding is crucial to such acts.

Conclusion The examples I have discussed demonstrate how polylanguaging can be a feature of an enregistered code; how subtle shifts from habitually using such a fluid or polylingual code to more marked 25

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use, which play on aspects of resistance, can occur in a short stretch of conversation; how seemingly monolingual speech is sometimes more likely to be seen by the speakers as code-switching and; how the idea of separate codes with links to particular ethnic groups can be exploited in crossing and sanctioned negatively when managing peer-group relations and conflicts. Such examples illustrate the interdependency of the dynamics of linguistic fluidity and fixity on the micro-level in practice. Together with my review of the literature on young people’s language use, which has called for a revision of theoretical perspectives and terminology, such examples point to a number of critical points worth considering. I have argued that describing a range of different types of linguistically fluid practices and phenomena as merely poly- or translanguaging is imprecise. The frameworks raise unclarity about from which perspective language use is seen to be fluid, resistant or habitual and defining particular practices as resistant makes them depend on the models they resist. Furthermore, the relationship between descriptive, theoretical and ideological ambitions is blurred when terms for linguistic fluidity are as all-encompassing as they have come to be used. Finally, there is a tendency to overlook the ideological dimensions of poly- and translanguaging perspectives themselves (Jaspers and Madsen, 2016). Polylanguaging as a notion for the way speakers sometimes observably orient to norms of fluidity different from institutionalized norms of monolingualism or translanguaging as a term for the deliberate pedagogical strategy of breaking with such monolingual norms are each still useful. As a possible future direction, however, I have suggested that it is worth (re)considering earlier approaches to language as a concept and to linguistic diversity. I have shown that the key points of the newer terms and perspectives are not that new, but the challenges of understanding codes as bounded and the suggestion of fruitful alternative approaches to codes and linguistic diversity can be found, for instance, in the edited volume on conversational code-switching (Auer, 1998). Its emphasis on analysis of situated conversational function and ethnographic investigation of participants’ understanding of the (local) language use and variation is particularly useful in combination with an understanding of code in the sense of register and complemented with the theory of enregisterment (Agha, 2003, 2007). Such an approach makes us able to grasp what count as fluid transgressional linguistic practices and what count as codes for participants and thereby investigate the mutually dependent relationship between fluidity and fixity in sociolinguistic dynamics among youth and beyond.

Appendix Transcription key: [overlap] LOUD xxx (questionable) ((comment)) : ↑ (.) (0.6) stress hhh broken line

overlapping speech louder volume than surrounding utterances unintelligible speech parts I am uncertain about my comments prolongation of preceding sound local pitch raise short pause timed pause stress laughter breathe prosody characteristic of contemporary urban vernacular in CPH 26

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Notes 1 Corresponding author: Lian Malai Madsen, University of Copenhagen. Address: Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, Emil Holms Kanal 2, 2300 KBH S, Denmark. Orcid: 0000-0002-2384-5933. 2 Including the author.

Further readings Agha, A. (2007). Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Auer, P. (ed.) (1998). Code-Switching in Conversation. London and New York: Routledge. Jaspers, J. and L.M. Madsen (eds.) (2019). Critical Perspectives on Linguistic Fixity and Fluidity – Languagised Lives. London: Routledge.

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Lian Malai Madsen Jaspers, J. and L.M. Madsen (eds.) (2019). Critical Perspectives on Linguistic Fixity and Fluidity – Languagised Lives. London: Routledge. Jonsson, R., H. Årman and T.M. Milani (2019). Youth language. In K. Tusting (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography (pp. 259–272). London: Routledge. Jørgensen, J.N. (ed.) (2002). De unges sprog. Artikler om sproglig adfærd, sproglige holdninger og flersprogethed hos unge i Danmark. Københavnerstudier i Tosprogethed. Køgeserien bind K9. København: Akademisk Forlag. Jørgensen, J.N. (2003). Linguistic construction and negotiation of social relations among bilingual Turkishspeaking adolescents in North-western Europe, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 24(1&2): 1–12. Jørgensen, J.N. (2008). Poly-lingual languaging around and among children and adolescents, International Journal of Multilingualism, 5(3): 161–176. Jørgensen, J.N. (2010). Languaging. Nine Years of Poly-Lingual Development of Turkish-Danish Grade School Students, vol. 1–2. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Jørgensen, J.N., M.S. Karrebæk, L.M. Madsen and J.S. Møller (2011). Polylanguaging in superdiversity, Diversities, 13: 23–38. Jørgensen, J.N. and J.S. Møller (2014). Polylingualism and languaging. In C. Leung and B. Street (eds.), The Routledge Companion to English Studies (pp. 67–83). London: Routledge. Kerswill, P. (1996). Children, adolescents, and language change, Language Variation and Change, 8: 177–202. Kießling, R. and M. Mous (2004). Urban youth languages in Africa, Anthropological Linguistics, 46: 303–341. Kotsinas, U.-B. (1988). Immigrant children’s Swedish – A new variety? Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 9(1–2): 129–140. Kotsinas, U.-B. (1994). Ungdomsspråk. Uppsala: Hallgren och Fallgren. Li, W. (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain, Journal of Pragmatics, 43: 1222–1235. Linell, P. (1998). Approaching Dialogue: Talk, Interaction and Contexts in Dialogical Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Madsen, L.M. (2013). ‘High’ and ‘Low’ in urban Danish speech styles, Language in Society, 42(2): 115–138. Madsen, L.M. (2015). Fighters, Girls and Other Identities: Sociolinguistics in a Martial Arts Club. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Madsen, L.M. (2016). “You shouldn’t sound like an uneducated person”: Linguistic diversity and standard ideology in Denmark, Sociolinguistica, 30(1): 199–220. Madsen, L.M., J.S. Møller and J.N. Jørgensen (eds.) (2010). Ideological Construction and Enregisterment of Linguistic Youth Styles. Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Madsen, L.M., M.S. Karrebæk and J.S. Møller (eds.) (2016). Everyday Languaging. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Maegaard, M. (2007). Udtalevariation og – Forandring i Københavnsk – En Etnografisk Undersøgelse af Sprogbrug, Sociale Kategorier og Social Praksis blandt Unge på en Københavnsk Folkeskole. PhD dissertation. København: Nordisk Forskningsinstitut. Afdeling for Dialektforskning. Københavns Universitet. Meeuwis, M. and J. Blommaert (1998). A monolectal view of code-switching. Layered code-switching among Zairians in Belgium. In P. Auer (ed.), Code-Switching in Conversation (pp. 76–98). New York: Routledge. Møller, J.S. (2009). Poly-lingual Interaction across Childhood, Youth and Adulthood. PhD dissertation. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Møller, J.S. (2016). Learning to live with ‘languages’, Applied Linguistics Review, 7: 279–303. Nassenstein, N. and A. Hollington (eds.) (2015). Youth Language Practices in Africa and Beyond. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Newell, S. (2009). Enregistering modernity, bluffing criminality: How Nouchi speech reinvented (and fractured) the nation, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 19(2): 157–184. Nortier, J. (2001). Street language in the Netherlands. In A.-B. Stenström, U.-B. Kotsinas and E.-M. Drange (eds.), Ungdommers språkmøter (pp. 129–141). København: Nordisk Ministeråd. Nortier, J. and B.A. Svendsen (2015). Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century: Linguistic Practices across Urban Spaces. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Otheguy, R., O. García and W. Reid (2015). Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages, Applied Linguistics Review, 6: 281–307. Otsuji, E. and A. Pennycook (2010). Metrolingualism. Fixity, fluidity and language in flux, International Journal of Multilingualism, 7: 240–254.

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Linguistic fixity and fluidity Quist, P. and B.A. Svendsen (eds.) (2010). Multilingual Urban Scandinavia. New Linguistic Practices. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing. Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. Rampton, B. (1998). Language crossing and the redefinition of reality. In P. Auer (ed.), Code-Switching in Conversation (pp. 290–317). New York: Routledge. Rampton, B. (2006). Language in Late Modernity. Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, B. (2015). Contemporary urban vernaculars. In J. Nortier and B.A. Svendsen (eds.), Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century: Linguistic Practices across Urban Spaces (pp. 24–44). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reite, T., F.B. Oloko and M.A. Guissemo (2021). Fluid multilingual practices among youth in Cameroon and Mozambique. In S. Swartz, A. Cooper, C.M. Batan and L.K. Causa (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies (pp. 357–370). New York: Oxford University Press. Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life, Language and Communication, 23: 193–229. Stenström, A.-B., G. Andersen and I.K. Hasund (2002). Trends in Teenage Talk. Corpus Compilation, Analysis and Findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Stæhr, A. (2015). Reflexivity in Facebook interaction: Enregisterment across written and spoken language practices, Discourse, Context & Media, 8: 30–45. Torgersen, E., P. Kerswill and S. Fox (2006). Ethnicity as a source of changes in the London vowel system. In F. Hinskens (ed.), Language Variation – European Perspectives. Selected Papers from the Third International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE3), Amsterdam, June 2005 (pp. 249– 263). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Widdicombe, S. and R. Wooffitt (1995). The Language of Youth Subcultures: Social Identity in Action. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Wiese, H. (2012). Kiezdeutsch. Ein Neuer Dialekt Entsteht. München: C.H. Beck.

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PART II

Language, youth, sexuality, gender and affect

3 AFFECT Discourse, politics, intersectionality Tommaso M. Milani1

Introduction An effective way to open a chapter on affect is with some examples that seek to provoke some ‘gut feelings’ in the readers (see Stroud et al., 2019 for an insightful reflection on viscerality in sociolinguistics). In doing so, my intention is not to evaluate emotional reactions as right or wrong/good or bad. Rather, the point is to stimulate in the reader an initial visceral connection to the topic of this chapter, affect and its discursive and political dimensions in relation to mutually intersecting forms of social categorization (i.e., intersectionality). On 9 March 2015, a group of students spearheaded by political science senior Chumani Maxwele tossed a bucket of excrement at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes towering over the campus of one of South Africa’s premier institutions of tertiary education, the University of Cape Town (UCT). In a media interview, Maxwele explained the reasons for the action saying “As black students we are disgusted by the fact that this statue still stands here today as it is a symbol of white supremacy. How can we be living in a time of transformation when this statue still stands and our hall is named after (Leander Starr) Jameson, who was a brutal lieutenant under Rhodes?” (IOL, 10 March 2015). Indeed, the act of poo-throwing was the spark that ignited Rhodes Must Fall, a protest movement for which the questioning of the legitimacy of public memorials of South Africa’s colonial history, such as Rhodes’ statue, was only the starting point for a broader critique of institutional racism, unequal access to tertiary education and Eurocentric curricula at UCT and other South African universities. Semiotically, the movement not only used a variety of embodied and material tactics on campus, but also successfully employed the discursive affordances offered by social media, the hashtag #RhodesMustFall, to fuel a debate that rapidly transcended national boundaries attracting considerable global attention. On 14 March 2018, Marielle Franco, a Black Brazilian bisexual activist, was assassinated together with her driver just a couple of hours after attending a round-table discussion on the intersections of youth, race and gender in relation to power structures. Growing up in one of the largest favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Marielle was a leading figure in the fight against gender violence, military intervention and police brutality against the poor and was an unrelenting advocate for LGBT rights. As Silva and Lee (2021) powerfully argue, Marielle is dead, but her memory lives on, com-

DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-5

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memorated semiotically through language in the slogan Marielle Presente!! (Marielle is here!!), chanted loudly at rallies and demonstrations and represented visually in mosaic and stencil form Finally, in January 2022, the board of a school in Tennessee, USA, unanimously voted for the banning from the curriculum of Maus, the well-known graphic novel about the Shoah created by Art Spiegelman. Among the arguments advanced in order to justify this prohibition was that the novel was not age-appropriate because of its ‘disturbing’ images. As a member of the school board put it: “we don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff…It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids. Why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy” (Smithsonian Magazine 2 February 2022). The decision immediately generated a flurry of heated reactions highlighting how the banning of Maus under the pretence of preventing children’s exposure to violent images is tantamount to censoring the history of the Shoah. Obviously, these three examples are very dissimilar in terms of their geopolitical location and historical legacies. Differences notwithstanding, they share three key elements that are germane to the focus of this handbook on language and youth culture, and in particular on the political dimension of youth. By youth politics, I mean the ways in which young people employ language and other meaning-making resources (such as visuals and the body) “in order to position themselves agentively and to craft new, emergent, subjectivities of political speakerhood, often outside of those prescribed or legitimated in institutional frameworks of the state” (Stroud, 2018, p. 4). Youth politics also includes those acts through which young people, their actions and education are the targets of regimentation and control on the part of other social actors such as parents, teachers, school boards, media outlets and the nation-state. More specifically, the examples above vividly encapsulate how (1) youth politics – like any other form of politics for that matter – has a highly emotional component; (2) such an affective loading is expressed semiotically in different ways ranging from embodied actions and slogans to hashtags and emojis; and (3) there is an intersectional aspect to affect that spans entanglements of age, gender/sexuality, race and social class, and is the terrain on which complex social issues are fought, including institutional racism, misogyny, antisemitism and Islamophobia. In what follows, I begin with a state-of-the-art overview of current debates about language/discourse, affect and emotions, and I then move on to outline a theorization of the intersectional quality of feelings. The presentation of theoretical concepts and debates is exemplified with the help of my own and others’ empirical work. Needless to say, the choice of examples is partial and does not exhaust the immense body of work on discourse and affect/emotions in relation to youth politics.

Discourse and affect: fraught (dis)junctures Emotion versus affect: a brief intellectual history The phenomena variously called affect, emotion, feeling, attachment, atmosphere, and sentiment, have long (pre)occupied Western philosophical thought. While it lies beyond the scope of this chapter to offer an exegesis of these concepts, suffice it to say that Western philosophical tradition has been greatly influenced by René Descartes’s binary distinctions between the soul and the body, between reason and passion. His famous motto cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am – postulates reason as the universal marker defining us as human. Descartes does not discard emotions, though, but gives a detailed account of them in his treatise Passions of the Soul, in which he describes how six basic passions (from the Greek pathos, which means suffering or feeling) – wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness – are the results of a two-way process: the movement of signals or stimuli from the body to the soul, which then make the soul produce a bodily response; hence the now more commonly used word emotion, from Latin ex (out) and movere (to move). Moreover, 34

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for Descartes, passions are connected to ethics in that they can give some guidance in the making of moral assessments about what is good or bad (Kisner, 2018). However, passions can become a problem when “they are not subject to the guidance of reason” (Brassfield, 2012, pp. 468–469) and thus become excessive. In other words, because of the possibility that passions will get out of hand, they should always be subordinated to, and controlled by, rationality. Politically, the priority of reason over emotions has not been innocuous but rather has been the intellectual fuel powering the more or less “hidden violences of a secular, liberal humanism as modernity and the Enlightenment marched across the world” (Macgilchrist, 2016, p. 269). As Bruno Latour suggestively puts it, “rationalists crown the victors by calling them “rational” and deprecate the losers by branding them “irrational”’ (Latour, 1989, p. 105). Besides underpinning colonial projects, the reason/emotion dichotomy has also been overlaid with a sexist patina, whereby women have been consistently portrayed as the “irrational Other of rational man” (Macgilchrist, 2016, p. 269). As a result, female emotionality has been invoked by men to justify inter alia women’s exclusion from suffrage and to control their sexuality more broadly. A completely different theorization was given by Baruch Spinoza, who preferred the Latin words affectio and affectus (both from the Latin verb afficio, which means to exert influence) to label the role played by feelings in human/world relationships. To begin with, Spinoza highlights human beings’ immanence, that is, their fundamental presence in and imbrication with what he variously calls ‘substance’, ‘nature’, ‘God’. This means that it is impossible for humans to detach themselves from the world and take an external observer’s position or a bird’s eye view of it. For ultimately human beings are deeply enmeshed in the world. The entanglements between different entities (both human and non-human), in turn, are characterized by affectus, “those affections that effectively either increase or diminish the powers…of the entities in question” (Slaby and Mühlhoff, 2019, p. 29). As such it could be argued that affectus corresponds roughly to emotions. However, Slaby and Mühlhoff caution that “a premature focus on the categorial sorting, individual enactment, and conscious feeling…can lead us away from acknowledging Spinoza’s principal point, namely that affects-as-affectus are relational phenomena unfolding dynamically and effectively in-between entities…They are not – or not initially – individual human comportments, let alone ‘mental states’” (Slaby and Mühlhoff, 2019, pp. 29–30). Spinoza’s theory has had a major impact on continental philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and more recently Brian Massumi, who is also the translator of Deleuze and Guattari’s monumental oeuvre. As Massumi clarifies in a terminological note about his English translation of Thousand Plateaus: AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L'affect (Spinoza's affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act. L'affection (Spinoza's affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include "mental" or ideal bodies). (Massumi, 2004, p. xvii) Two elements should be highlighted here because they are crucial to understanding current theoretical debates about affect/emotions: the “prepersonal” nature of affect and processes of “augmentation or diminuition”. For Massumi, and other scholars who position themselves within the Spinozian and Deleuzian tradition, affect is autonomous; it is a generative force that pre-exists 35

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individuals and exceeds discourse, encompassing “a realm beyond talk, words and texts, beyond epistemic regimes, and beyond conscious representation and cognition” (Wetherell, 2012, p. 19; emphasis added; see also Seigworth, 2020). Related to this, augmentation and diminuition are indicators of what Massumi calls intensity, “a nonconscious, never-to-conscious autonomic remainder. It is outside expectation and adaptation, as disconnected from meaningful sequencing, from narration, as it is from vital function” (Massumi, 1995, p. 85). From such a perspective, affect constitutes an exciting avenue of investigation, being inherently non-representational, existing outside language and discourse. In contrast, according to Massumi, passions/emotions are analytically trite since they have the “tawdry status of the private” (Massumi, 2002, p. 219), and their potential has been restrained – tamed even – by the straitjacket of discourse.

Intellectual (dis)agreements Quite unsurprisingly, there is no agreement in current scholarship about (1) the distinction between affect and emotions; (2) the relationship between affect/emotions and processes of signification, and (3) the political relevance of analyses of affect/emotions. Let us start with terminological differences: affect or emotion? Sara Ahmed, who is perhaps one of the most influential contemporary cultural theorists of affect, favours the word emotion to affect, but is nonetheless inspired by a Spinozian perspective, as can be seen inter alia in the statement that “emotions…involve bodily processes of affecting and being affected, or to use my own terms, emotions are a matter of how we come into contact with objects and others” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 208, emphasis added). In Ahmed’s view, the analytical purchase of emotions lies in their performativity, that is, their ability to “do things, […] align individuals with communities – or bodily space with social space – [and] mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 119). Such a definition is based on two assumptions about emotions’ ontology (i.e., their essential character): (1) emotions are not states lodged somewhere in people’s minds and therefore invisible. Rather, they are social forces that are produced, circulated and materialized semiotically through discourse; and (2) emotions cannot be relegated purely to the realm of the private but play an important role in sticking the private to the public, the personal to the social, and vice versa. In saying this, Ahmed strongly objects to Massumi’s differentiation between pre-personal and non-intentional affects, on the one hand, and personal and intentional emotions, on the other. Such a distinction, she argues, makes “feminist ears…prick up” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 207). Alluding to the historical meanings associated with men, mobility and the public sphere versus women, private domains and the realm of the personal, Ahmed contends that A contrast between a mobile impersonal affect and a contained personal emotion suggests that the affect/emotion distinction can operate as a gendered distinction. It might even be that the very use of this distinction performs the evaluation of certain styles of thought (we might think of these as ‘touchy feely’ styles of thought, including feminist and queer thought) from affect studies. (Ahmed, 2014, p. 207) Put differently, the affect/emotion dichotomy might inadvertently reproduce the retrograde masculinist logic which, as we saw earlier, lies at the heart of the reason/emotion divide. The second disagreement among scholars of affect pertains to the relationship between language/semiosis and emotions/affect. Massumi is at pain to stress the incommensurability of affect and language; language, he says, “though head-strong, is not simply in opposition to intensity. 36

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It would seem to function differentially in relation to it” (1996, p. 219). According to such a logic, affect and discourse are like oil and water, they cannot blend. However, social psychologist Margaret Wetherell points out that such an understanding unnecessarily narrows discourse to something static and passive; it treats language/discourse as nouns, forms of “‘representation’… identified simply with the formal structure of language in abstract” (Wetherell, 2012, p. 56). In contrast, Wetherell (see also the special issue of Social Semiotics edited by Milani and Richardson (2021)) subscribes to a more dynamic view of language/discourse as verbs, i.e., practices, something that people perform in order to make sense of themselves, others and the world around them. As Wetherell explains it, feelings are not expressed in discourse so much as completed in discourse. That is, the emotion terms and narratives available in a culture, the conventional elements so thoroughly studied by social constructionist researchers, realise the affect and turn it for the moment into a particular kind of thing. What may start out as inchoate can sometimes be turned into an articulation, mentally organized and publicly communicated, in ways that engage with and reproduce regimes and power relations. (Wetherell, 2012, p. 24) This means that affect and emotions are inherently imbricated with meaning-making activities, and therefore should be brought under the analytical microscope of discourse analysis. Not all discourse analysts seem to agree, though, which leads me to the third academic dispute. Influenced by the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory the different strands of research that fall under the shared umbrella term of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) have given precedence to investigations of rational debates in the public sphere, as conceptualized by Jürgen Habermas (see Macgilchrist, 2016 for an insightful analysis of the role played by critique, rationality and validity in CDA). There is no doubt that CDA analyses of rational public debate have been invaluable in unveiling how different social actors compete with one another discursively, rationalising and legitimising their political proposals or conversely debunking and disqualifying those of their opponents. While the analytical and political relevance of this body of CDA work should not be underestimated, what should also be pointed out is its general reluctance to engage with the domain of the affective in politics. indeed, even when an emotion such as fear becomes the explicit focus of investigations within CDA (see e.g., Cap, 2017; Wodak, 2020), affect is not theorized in its own right but is treated as epiphenomenal to discourse rather than as a central element of it. More recently, however, some critical discourse analysts have begun to consider bringing affect into CDA. Ewa Glapka, for example, proposes that: With politics, public debate and media becoming ever more emotional, it is particularly important that the value of discursive analyses of affect is not undermined. Their increasing socio-political relevance makes it all the more necessary that discourse analysts do not forsake affect as uncanny, visceral and inaccessible, and instead pursue its relationship with semiosis. (Glapka, 2019, p. 617) Unlike Glapka, I am not fully convinced that there has been an increase in the emotional intensity of politics, the media-political, media and other public domains, given that these areas of public life are likely to have always been highly emotional. The problem is that their affective dimensions have not been fully appreciated by (critical) discourse analysts because of the theoretical assump37

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tions that have favoured rationality at the expense of emotions. With this caveat in mind, I concur with Glapka (2019) that it is high time for critical discourse analysts and other scholars interested in the role played by discourse in social life to offer nuanced accounts of “fear, desire, anger and other powerful feelings in shaping forms of action” (Lemke, 2008, p. 23). If we return for a moment to one of the examples of the youth politics presented in the introduction above, it would be easy, from a rationalist perspective à la Habermas, to dismiss the act of poo-throwing against the statue of Cecile John Rhodes as an irrational tactic of an incontrollable ‘mob’ that seeks to thwart any form of dialogue. However, such an analysis would be based on a naïve illusion of symmetry, that is, the conviction that debaters carry equal weight and thereby have the potential to win an argument on the basis of the rational quality of their argumentation. Focusing on argumentative rationality, though, is not enough for two reasons: firstly, because of the differences in structural power of the students vis-à-vis the university upper-level administration; and secondly, because of the more or less implicit rules of discursive engagement that benefit some speakers and disadvantage others. Such discursive norms create situations in which “not everyone is able to make statements, or to have statements taken seriously by others” (Mills, 2003, p. 65), because those statements have been made in an allegedly ‘wrong’, ‘bad’ or ‘inappropriate’ variety, genre, register or style (see also Jonsson, 2007; Milani and Jonsson, 2011 for critical discussions about how contemporary urban vernaculars spoken by multilingual youth in Sweden are dismissed as incomprehensible in mainstream media). Furthermore, even when accounting for structural and discursive differentials, an analysis that focuses purely on argumentation would fail to appreciate how the social action of poo-throwing was but a small eruption of a long-standing affective magma fuelled by the collective pain inflicted on Black people in South Africa by colonialism, apartheid state violence and continued excruciating experiences of racial discrimination. Overall, whether overtly acknowledged or not, a Spinozian understanding of affect informs contemporary academic conversations in what can be called the ‘affective turn’ (Clough and Halley, 2007; Leys, 2011) in the social sciences and humanities. Granted, a Spinozian perspective would force us to abandon human-centric analyses and account more precisely for the affective interactions with materiality. However, even without this dimension of Spinoza’s work, his emphasis on the relationality between affecting and being affected reverberates across more anthropocentric analyses of how emotions circulate in and through discourse (e.g., Ahmed, 2014; see in particular Coleman, 2020; Sylwander and Gottzén, 2020 for analyses that draw upon a Massumian perspective to explore affect in relation to the politics of youth; see also Pérez Aronsson, 2020 and Årman, 2021 for Wetherell-inspired investigations on the affective dimension of young people’s political engagement).

Analysing affect through a practice lens At this juncture, readers interested in pursuing empirical analysis might ask themselves: How do we go about investigating the discursive manifestations of affect? For Wetherell, such an analytical pursuit can only be conducted with the help of eclectic methods, “a set of approaches that need to be packed in the researcher’s suitcase” (Wetherell, 2012, p. 96). These include, but are not limited to, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, critical multimodal analysis and discursive psychology. This analytical heterogeneity notwithstanding, Wetherell strongly suggests taking affective practice as the unit of analysis. A focus on practice forces analysts to pay careful attention to who is doing what and for what purpose in specific contexts. As such, a practice approach seeks to avoid decontextualizing affect, and mystifying it as “untethered, a kind of mysterious social 38

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actor in itself” or an object that “seems to swirl, move, and ‘land’ like a plastic bag blowing in the wind” (Wetherell, 2015, p. 159). Instead, taking affective practice as a unit of analysis requires casting a critical eye to the “consequential set of sequences in social, cultural and institutional life, and mak[ing] connections between the emotional performances and other ordering and organizing constituents” (Wetherell, 2015, p. 159). In essence, a practice approach requires analysts to grasp the interconnectedness of affective practices and their trajectories, thus avoiding treating them as idiosyncratic, and capturing instead how affective occurrences in situ relate to broader historical sociocultural processes. Crucially, an analysis of affective practices does not mean losing sight of power. Instead, it implies reorienting our attention to the often subtle ways in which discipline and control operate, not so much through the mobilization of individuals’ “rational capacities to evaluate truth claims but through affects” (Isin, 2004, p. 225). Put differently, an engagement with emotions allows us to tease out how regimes of governmentality operate through “the irreducible entanglement of thinking and feeling, knowing that and knowing how, propositional and non-propositional knowledge” (Zerilli, 2015, p. 266, emphasis added). An example of how such affective governmentality works semiotically is offered by Milani, Levon and Glocer (2019) in a multimodal analysis of a campaign launched in 2013 by the Israeli state with a view to attracting its young adult expats back to ha’arets. In Hebrew, ha’arets means the land and, for Jewish Israelis, it unequivocally refers to the land of Israel. Milani et al. (2019) conduct a detailed analysis of the campaign’s videos and billboards, focusing in particular on the semiotics choices in these media texts. These not only encompass specific words but also props, camera angles, colour choices and gaze. As critical discourse analysts have pointed out, speakers and writers always have to make choices when visually representing or speaking and writing about reality. Whether intentional or not, these choices are never innocuous but are ideologically laden because they entail the inherent exclusion of other possible alternatives. What emerges clearly from the textual deconstruction of the campaign’s media outputs is how the semiotics choices are geared to activating specific emotions such as grief, shame, guilt and fear of loss among Israeli children and young adults who live abroad. In turn, these emotions have been assembled in order to generate a sense of nostalgia, which in Greek originally means ‘desire to come home’ (from nostos ‘homecoming’ and algia ‘desire’). Moreover, the activation of these emotions is bound up with the valuation of two polarized identity categories in Israel, namely ‘good’ Israeli Jews who live in Israel versus ‘bad’ Diasporic Jews, who should be attracted (back) to ha’aretz. In sum, this analysis offers an empirical example of the “relationship between affective and moral economies” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 219) and “the role of feeling in making things (and people) good or bad” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 219). Read through Wetherell’s practice approach, it could be argued that the campaign’s videos and billboards are not static textual artefacts; rather, they are performative: they do something. The choices made by their creators engender a visceral governmentality that crosses the national borders of Israel, and thus “spreads its offshoots of affective sovereignty beyond its demarcated territory, in order to help guarantee its Jewishness not only by attracting Jewish people who have been dispersed for centuries, but also by calling back home expats, who were born in Israel, but left the country for a variety of reasons” (Milani, Levon and Glocer, 2019, p. 53). As the authors point out, these campaign materials are not idiosyncratic but are a recent iteration of a more longstanding “Zionist conviction that only Israel can provide the opportunity for living an ‘authentic’ Jewish life” (Milani, Levon and Glocer, 2019, p. 43). It is fundamental to clarify at this point that, unlike other analytical frameworks such as sentiment analysis (see e.g., Taboada, 2016 for an overview), a practice approach is less concerned with 39

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emotions per se than with their process of production, e.g., the act of loving or shaming, and how such acts ‘stick’ or not, creating attachments and detachments. As a result, a practice approach categorically refuses to posit a priori the polarity of a specific emotion, e.g., shame and anger are ‘bad’ and ‘negative’ while ‘love’ and ‘happiness’ are ‘good’ and ‘positive’. Rather, the relationship between emotional and moral economies should be unveiled through empirical investigation. Let us take shaming as a case in point. Shaming is a key affective component of heteronormativity, understood as “those structures, institutions, relations and actions that promote and produce heterosexuality as natural, self-evident, desirable, privileged and necessary” (Cameron and Kulick, 2003, p. 55). Through the shaming of what is perceived as ‘deviant’ sexual identity and desire, heterosexuality is (re)produced as comme il faut, the unmarked norm of sexual conduct. As a result, shame can be internalized by sexually non-normative individuals, and “experienced as the affective cost of not following the scripts of normative existence” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 107). In this case, shaming works in the service of hegemony in order to police non-normative behaviours and thereby strengthen prevailing norms. That being said, shaming is like a vector whose directionality can be inversed and redirected against the oppressive structures from which it originated. As Gay Seidman cogently points out: “By raising moral questions about previously unnoticed or unchallenged behaviors, activists have used shame to promote new moral visions, by stigmatizing longaccepted behaviors or powerful actors” (Seidman, 2016, p. 351). An example of how shaming can be repurposed politically can be found in the history of queer protests performed by young people and young adults in a critique of the rather mainstream Tel Aviv Pride (Ziv, 2010; Milani, Levon, Gafter and Or, 2018; Milani, Awayed-Bishara, Gafter and Levon, 2021). Once again if one employs an approach à la Wetherell, it is imperative to take practices – what people do with language and other resources – as the starting point of analysis, and understand them in relation to specific social, cultural and political contexts. That shame has been a key affective resource for radical queer Israeli activism is evidenced inter alia by the name of one of its iconic activist groups, Black Laundry. The name is a clever pun on the term “Black Sheep” (as the Hebrew word for “sheep”, kivsa, is phonetically similar to “laundry”, kvisa), at the same time as it invokes the expression “dirty laundry”, which is commonly used (in Hebrew as well as in Arabic and English) to refer to shameful secrets one rarely brings up in public (Ziv, 2010, pp. 537–538). Thus, the name encapsulates the essence of the group’s activism: embracing their status as the proverbial black sheep of the “Israeli family” and airing out the dirty laundry (more specifically the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza) that events such as the pride parade so desperately try to gloss over. As Ziv (2010) explains it, Black Laundry’s protests were built on “exaggerating and drawing attention to those very traits that have been a source of shame and social rejection (e.g., effeminacy in men or masculinity in women)” (2010, p. 547). Put differently, queer lived experiences of being shamed by heteronormative and homophobic practices and structures in Israeli society engendered an emotional alignment – empathy even – with the suffering experienced by Palestinians. Such an affective approximation led to the insight that “in the face of such violations [against Palestinians] it was impossible to keep one’s sense of gay pride apart from one’s sense of shame and accountability as an Israeli” (Ziv, 2010, p. 537). Most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, shame was turned on its head: queer Israelis resignified shame directed at them and reversed its directionality, throwing it back at the Israeli state. Not everyone sympathized with the emotional alignment that queer Israeli activist groups performed towards Palestinian suffering. For example, Haneen Maikey, the (then) director of the queer Palestinian NGO al-Qaws, argued that Tel Aviv Pride should be boycotted altogether. In her view, the shaming of Tel Aviv Pride performed by queer Israeli activists does not slow down or dent the 40

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Israeli occupation. The very acknowledgement of the existence of Tel Aviv Pride is in itself an act of collusion with the very system Israeli activists tried to condemn. To paraphrase Wetherell (2012, p. 3), the shaming of the Israeli state and the ‘righteous indignation’ about Palestinian suffering expressed by queer Israeli activists might actually contribute to upholding the status quo rather than challenging it. This is because emotions carry different values and thereby have different political weight depending on the bodies that perform the feelings – in terms of ableness, age, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality and the histories associated with them. Therefore, a practice approach to emotion should be complemented by an intersectional sensitivity to the mutual constitution of social difference. It is the intersectional weight of affect to which I will now turn.

Adding value to a practice approach: the intersectional weight of feelings As formulated by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality originally aimed to question what she called a “single-axis” analysis common in social right movements and critical scholarship in the 1980s, namely the tendency to “to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” (Crenshaw, 1989). “This single-axis framework,” she argued, “erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification and remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry to the experiences of otherwise-privileged members of the group” (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 140). So, in Crenshaw’s view, approaches – albeit critical ones – which focused on race ignored the gendered inequalities within the category ‘Black’; by the same token, feminism failed to grasp the racial disparities within lived experiences as a ‘Woman’. The “intersectional experience,” Crenshaw explained, “is greater than the sum of racism and sexism.” This means that “any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated” (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 140). In presenting the heuristic potential of intersectionality for sociolinguistic inquiry, Erez Levon provides an important qualification: “categories not only intersect but also mutually constitute one another,” that is, “intersections are not to be viewed as ‘crossroads’ of two or more discrete and already existing categories but…mutual constitution maintains that constructs such as class, race, and gender…depend for their meaning on their relationship to the other categories with which they intersect” (Levon, 2015, p. 298, emphasis in original). Interestingly, Crenshaw’s theorization of intersectionality was indeed geared towards understanding (and redressing) lived experiences of discrimination resulting from the intersection of racism and patriarchy. However, the immense body of literature that has emerged based on Crenshaw’s formulation of intersectionality has tended to foreground the mutual constitution of identities as well as discursive and structural patterns of oppression, leaving the emotional dimensions of life largely undertheorized. Moreover, the emphasis on the category of “Black woman” in Crenshaw’s original formulation has led to disagreements about who counts as a legitimate object of intersectional analysis. Some scholars contend that intersectionality can be used for analysing any nexus of identities; others take a more restrictive approach positing that the concept should be employed exclusively for investigations of positions of multiple marginalization (see Nash, 2008 for an overview). Multiplicity, they go on to argue, can be used instead of intersectionality to capture the mutually constitutive nature of identities that are not bound up with discrimination (e. g. white, cisgender, heterosexual, male) (see also Cashman, 2018). Acknowledging these disagreements, Jennifer Nash stresses that certain strands of intersectional scholarship have offered important analyses of the ways in which “patriarchy, racism, and heterosexism buttress each other” (Nash, 2008, p. 12). In her view, however, the careful attention paid to the “interconnections of forms of subordination” has tended to ignore “the intimate connections between privilege and oppression” (Nash, 2008, p. 12), leading 41

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her to suggest that “[i]n conceiving of privilege and oppression as complex, multi-valent, and simultaneous, intersectionality could offer a more robust conception of both identity and oppression” (Nash, 2008, p. 12). I would argue that Nash’s (2008) understanding of intersectionality as a heuristic through which to explore composite patterns of privilege and oppression can be expanded so as to encompass both identity and emotion. I want to underscore that I am not suggesting here that we should stop studying identity altogether. Rather, my point is that we should investigate the discursive production of identities at the same time as we cast a critical gaze at what lies ‘beside’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 8) and gives affective valence to them. In this regard, Ahmed’s (2014) notions of affective economy and emotional investment can be particularly useful in order to tease out the relationship between identities and affect, and their imbrication in processes of social valuation. Affective economy forces us to examine how and why very different values are “assigned to some figures rather than others and to some emotional displays” (Wetherell, 2012, p. 16). Furthermore, the notion of emotional investment allows us to measure the co-existence in one and the same person or group of complex fluctuations connected to different systems of privilege and oppression. Take, for example, the case of the ‘white middle-class gay man’ who accrues exponentially high ‘dividends’ based on social class, gender and race as a ‘white middle-class man’ while simultaneously being the target of discrimination as ‘gay’.

Affective economies of grief and grievability In order to illustrate how we can go about analysing affective economies, I want to take as a case in point grief and grievability, i.e., the possibility of mourning/being mourned. Ahmed reminds us that “the word ‘mourns’ might get attached to some subjects (some bodies represent the nation in mourning) and it might be attached to some objects (some losses more than others may count as losses for this nation)” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 13). Reasoning along similar lines about the value of feelings connected to death, Judith Butler has argued that One way of posing the question of who “we” are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others – even if it means taking those latter lives. (Butler, 2016, p. 38) Following Butler, an illustrative case of grievable differentials in a war context is offered in an analysis of a mainstream television documentary about the history of LGBTQ+ struggle in Israel (Gafter and Milani, in press). The fact that the Israeli/Palestinian armed conflict is presented in the documentary is not surprising per se. What is notable, however, is how fallen young gay soldiers are portrayed in relation to the image of Israel as a purported LGBTQ+ haven in the Middle East. Due to the conflict that has defined much of Israel’s history, grief over fallen soldiers – especially young soldiers – has come to play a key function in Israeli society. That is, a so-called “culture of bereavement” (Witztum et al., 2016) elevates Israeli military casualties such that they become heroic sacrifices for the nation. This valorization of Israeli military fatalities extends to 42

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“the family of bereavement”, the term used for close relatives of the fallen, who are “viewed as heroic figures in their own sake, worthy of admiration and emulation” (Bilu and Witztum, 2000, p. 13). Against this backdrop, it is interesting how the documentary analysed by Gafter and Milani does not address any of the major traumatic events that have afflicted the Israeli LGBTQ+ community; it does not even consider that the military service itself may be traumatic for those drafted, be they LGBTQ+ or heterosexual, and it treats homophobia in the Israeli army as a long-gone problem. Instead, with the help of interviews with mothers of fallen gay soldiers and other interviewees, bereavement is portrayed as instrumental to LGBTQ+ acceptance. As the director of the documentary put it, “when you’re accepted here, they accept you more than anywhere else in the world, because it is compared with the thought of you not being.” In linking the possibility of death in combat with LGBTQ+ acceptance, Gafter and Milani argue, the documentary blurs the lines between the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights and the “culture of bereavement” in Israel. And, such a discursive move, in turn, is not ideologically innocuous but rather is geared to depicting Israel as exceptional, with regard to acceptance of LGBTQ+ people. While it is true that national exceptionalism in relation to non-normative sexualities is not unique to Israel and has also been found in Sweden and other Scandinavian contexts (see, e.g., Kehl, 2020), there is a key difference. In other contexts, exceptionalism in relation to gender and sexuality works to distinguish a gender and sexually liberated national Self from an imagined retrograde ethnic Other. In Israel, by contrast, exceptionalism works as a sorting mechanism, creating a dichotomy between who is positioned as good and grievable, i.e., young Jewish Israeli soldiers versus the unnamed Other, i.e., Palestinians, who are by extension not grievable. Grievable differentials not only emerge out of armed conflicts but can be created in apparently more peaceful, but no less problematic, contexts like Sweden. It has become typical for far-right politicians in Sweden to pronounce themselves on who can legitimately be considered “Swedish” or not. A salient recent example is the reaction of a far-right politician, Kent Ekeroth, to the deaths of Swedish citizens in the downing of flight PS472 by Iran. Ekeroth tweeted laughing emojis at the representation in a news report of two young victims, who had come to Sweden as unaccompanied refugee children, as “smålänningar” (i.e., from the Swedish region of Småland). In this case, who is deserving of the symbolic investment of being mourned as a fellow citizen? Ekeroth constructs a despicable hierarchy that determines which deaths are mournable, and which are not: we see that the deaths of two refugee children are met with laughter (see also Billig, 2001 for an excellent theorization of humour in racist discourse).

Emotional investments: The case of desire Related to the value that different bodies and emotions accrue is how “subjects become invested in particular structures such that their demise is felt as a kind of living death” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 12; emphasis added); classism, racism and heteropatriarchy are examples of structures in which people invest, intentionally or not. Let us take sexual desire to illustrate how such investments happen discursively. While erotic attraction to specific bodies is often perceived as something purely personal and private – “it’s just a preference” – Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick remind us that “particular desires seek to attach to a variety of bodies, objects, statuses and relationships” in such a way that “differences of race, age or class may be extremely important in some people’s erotic lives” (Cameron and Kulick, 2003, p. 144). This means that “in certain cultural and historical contexts the desire for particular kinds of difference has been more than just a personal idiosyncrasy; it has been socially institutionalized” (Cameron and Kulick, 2003, p. 144). 43

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An example of how sexual desires can be inflected by intersections of social differences is offered in a study of Meetmarket – a South African online community for men who are looking for other men (Milani, 2013). While investigations of language and desire typically employ qualitative methodologies in order to examine spoken data (see e.g., Kiesling, 2013; Mortensen, 2017), Milani (2013) uses corpus linguistic techniques to analyse written texts. This quantitative approach allowed for the interrogating of a large corpus of personal profiles (N: 4738), with a view to mapping Meetmarket’s ‘libidinal economy’ (Lyotard, 2004) and thereby teasing out which identities and desires are valorized by the members of this online community. The analysis of Meetmarket shows how specific nexus points of race and masculinity are consistently imbued with higher value than other identity configurations. Unlike in other discursive contexts of male same-sex desire, age does not seem to play a discriminating role here: the glorification of young bodies co-exists with an appreciation for more mature physiques. That is, the ‘libidinal economy’ of Meetmarket seems to be structured around a well-known hegemonic system of gender ‘normality’ in which masculinity is the most valuable currency and femininity is rejected as worthless and undesirable. On the one hand, it could be said that these men counter heteronormativity by making male same-sex desire visible and heard in a context like South Africa where, despite the official recognition of LGBTQ+ rights, attitudes towards same-sex desire remain largely negative among the majority of the population. Through the valorization of masculinity, they are also countering problematic indexicalities that tie male homosexuality to femininity. On the other hand, through their misogynist attitudes, they are complicit in reproducing hegemonic masculinity, which, in turn, allows them to reap the ‘patriarchal dividend’ (Connell, 1995) of ‘passing’ as a man’s man. Moreover, the content of the online Meetmarket profiles also indicates that the tapestry of same-sex desire is woven in racially monochromatic patterns. Within Meetmarket, comments such as “white only” and more explicitly racist remarks are not innocuous expressions of ‘personal preferences’, as some of the members of the community are at pain to reassure critical viewers. Rather, in contemporary South Africa where the demise of apartheid has been felt as an existential threat to whiteness, they are discursive manifestations of continued investments in discriminatory racial structures that reproduce the enforced racial separation of the past. The intersectional nature of emotional investments is not only apparent when considering discursive pronouncements about a desired Other; it can also manifest itself in what Kevin Whitehead calls “ontological desire”, that is, “the desire to have or emulate qualities of a particular identity” (Kiesling, 2011, p. 214). How such ontological desires tap into and (re)produce patriarchal and racist structures can be seen in recent analyses of far-right media outlets targeting (young) adult heterosexual men. An illustrative case in point is presented by Tebaldi and Burnett (2022) who conducted a multimodal critical discourse analysis of the first six editions of the white nationalist men’s magazine Man’s World. Here pictures of virile muscled men coupled with articles about the physical gains resulting from the intake of raw eggs and uncooked beef liver are discursive incitements to ontological desire; they entice audiences to aspire to be handsome, well-groomed, physically fit and white nationalists. As Tebaldi and Burnett point out, the desire for this particular identity formation goes hand in hand with the disgust for its opposite, “the Globo Homo – an emasculating, feminizing and homosexualizing global culture that is articulated with anti-Semitic dog-whistles”. While these examples might appear extreme, they demonstrate that it is difficult – impossible even – to understand far-right politics, and its appeal, solely through an analysis of rational argumentation. It is only through an appreciation of its affective allure that we can understand how such articulations “have the potential to galvanize young men into horrific, real-world violence” (Burnett, 2022, p. 494). 44

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Concluding remarks and future directions In this chapter, I have provided a summary of current academic discussions about the relationships between discourse, affect and emotion. I began by tracing the historical trajectories of different theoretical traditions privileging affect over emotion and vice versa. Drawing on Wetherell (2012), I illustrated how an analytical approach that takes affective practice as a unit of analysis can provide us with a practical framework through which to tease out the emotional dimensions of young people’s lives, as expressed through a variety of meaning-making means (language, visuals etc.). With the help of Ahmed’s (2004, 2014) notions of affective economy and emotional investment, I went on to show how a practice approach needs to be complemented by an intersectional sensitivity to social difference. This is because emotions ‘weigh’ differently – they have different values – depending on the mutual constitution of different axes of differentiation. This weight differential, in turn, is at the heart of the (re)production of pernicious discriminatory structures that determine inter alia who is grievable and desirable, and who is not. So, what does an affective approach offer to youth studies? While it is impossible to give an answer that is applicable to an entire field of study, I believe that an affective approach is particularly relevant for better understanding the politics of youth, which, as I indicated in the introduction above, refers to (1) the ways in which young people employ language and other meaning-making resources in order to become political subjects, and (2) how young people are talked about by other social actors and political institutions. The examples given in this chapter as well as those presented in many other studies (see e.g., Sylwander and Gottzén, 2020; Pérez Aronsson, 2020; Årman, 2021) teach us that the politics of youth is inherently emotional. Thus, leaving affect out of investigations of youth politics would only lead to partial analyses that do not fully capture the viscerality of everyday life. Engaging with the emotional messiness of youth politics constitutes one of the most pressing challenges that research on language and youth culture needs to address in the near future.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Professor Momoko Nakamura and her sociolinguistics reading group for insightful comments that helped me sharpen my arguments, and Professors Jonsson and Svendsen for their support and constructive critique. I am also indebted to Professor Susan Ehrlich for her thorough proof-reading and stylistic editing of this chapter. All remaining errors are my own.

Note 1 Tommaso M. Milani, The Pennsylvania State University, 234J Sparks, University Park, PA, 16802, USA, https://orcid​.org​/0000​-0002​-7237​-5501

Further readings Ahmed, S. (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Slaby, J. and C. von Scheve (eds.) (2019). Affective Societies. London: Routledge. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: Sage.

References Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective economies, Social Text, 22(2): 117–139. Ahmed, S. (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Tommaso M. Milani Årman, H. (2021). Political Corrections – Language Activism and Regimentation among High School Youth. PhD thesis. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Billig, M. (2001). Humour and hatred: The racist jokes of the Ku Klux Klan, Discourse & Society, 12(3): 267–289. Bilu, Y. and E. Witztum. (2000). War-related loss and suffering in Israeli society: An historical perspective, Israel Studies, 5(2): 1–31. Brassfield, S. (2012). Never let the passions be your guide: Descartes and the role of the passions, British Journal of the History of Philosophy, 21(3): 459–477. Burnett, S. (2022). The battle for “NoFap”: Myths, masculinity, and the meaning of masturbation abstention, Men and Masculinities, 25(3): 477–496. Butler, J. (2016). Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? New York: Verso. Cameron, D. and D. Kulick (2003). Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cap, P. (2017). The Language of Fear: Communicating Threat in Public Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cashman, H. (2018). Queer, Latinx and Bilingual: Narrative Resources in the Negotiation of Identities. London: Routledge. Clough, P.T. and J. Halley (eds.) (2007). The Affective Turn. Durham: Duke University Press. Coleman, R. (2020). The Future Politics of a Ubiquitous Thing. London: Goldsmiths Press. Connell, R. (1995). Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), Article 8, pp. 139–167. Gafter, R.J. and T.M. Milani (in press). The pride revolution: Homonational remembering in an Israeli documentary, Lambda Nordica. Glapka, E. (2019). Critical affect studies: On applying discourse analysis in research on affect, body and power, Discourse & Society, 30(6): 600–621. Isin, E. (2004). The neurotic citizen, Citizenship Studies, 8(3): 217–235. Jonsson, R. (2007). Blatte betyder kompis. Stockholm: Ordfront. Kehl, K. (2020). The Right Kind of Queer: Race, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Constructions of Swedishness. PhD thesis. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg. Kiesling, S.F. (2011). The interactional construction of desire as gender, Gender and Language, 5(2): 213–239. Kiesling, S.F. (2013). Flirting and “normative” sexualities, Journal of Language and Sexuality, 2(1): 101–121. Kisner, M. (2018). Descartes on the ethical reliability of the passions: A Morean reading, Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, 8: 39–67. Latour, B. (1989). Clothing the naked truth. In H. Lawson and L. Appignanesi (eds.), Dismantling Truth: Reality in the Post-Modern World (pp. 101–126). London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Lemke, J. (2008). Identity, development and desire: Critical questions. In C. Caldas-Coulthard and R. Iedema (eds.), Identity Trouble: Critical Discourse and Contested Identities (pp. 17–42). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Levon, E. (2015). Integrating intersectionality in language, gender and sexuality research, Language and Linguistics Compass, 9(7): 295–308. Leys, R. (2011). The turn to affect: A critique, Critical Inquiry, 37(3): 434–472. Lyotard, J.P. (2004). Libidinal Economy. London: Continuum. Macgilchrist, F. (2016). Fissures in the discourse-scape: Critique, rationality and validity in post-foundational approaches to CDS, Discourse & Society, 27(3): 262–277. Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect, Cultural Critique, 31: 83–109. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual. Durham: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2004). Notes on the translation and acknowledgments. In G. Deleuze and F. Guattari (eds.), A Thousand Plateaus (pp. xvii–xx). London: Continuum. Milani, T.M. (2013). Are queers really queer? Language, identity and same-sex desire in a South African online community, Discourse & Society, 24(5): 615–633. Milani, T.M., M. Awayed-Bishara, R.J. Gafter and E. Levon (2021). When the checkpoint becomes a counterpoint: Stasis as queer dissent, Trabalhos em Lingüística Aplicada, 59(3): 1659–1687. Milani, T.M. and R. Jonsson (2011). Incomprehensible language? Language, ethnicity and heterosexual masculinity in a Swedish school, Gender and Language, 5(2): 241–269.

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Affect Milani, T.M., E. Levon and R. Glocer (2019). Crossing boundaries: Visceral landscapes of Israeli nationalism, Sociolinguistic Studies, 13(1): 37–56. Milani, T.M., E. Levon, R.J. Gafter and I. Or (2018). Tel Aviv as a space of affirmation versus transformation, Linguistic Landscape, 4(3): 278–297. Milani, T.M. and J.E. Richardson (2021). Discourse and affect, Social Semiotics, 31(5): 671–676. Mills, S. (2003). Michel Foucault. London: Routledge. Mortensen, K.K. (2017). Flirting in online dating, Discourse Studies, 19(5): 581–597. Nash, J.C. (2008). Re-thinking intersectionality, Feminist Review, 89: 1–15. Pérez Aronsson, F. (2020). Do I Look White? Creating Community in Online Safe Spaces for Racialized Youth. PhD thesis. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Sedgwick, E.K. (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press. Seidman, G. (2016). Naming, shaming, changing the world. In D. Courpasson and S. Vallas (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Resistance (pp. 351–366). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Seigworth, G. (2020). Affect’s first lesson. In B. Dernikos, N. Lesko, S.D. McCall and A. Niccolini (eds.), Mapping the Affective Turn in Education: Theory, Research, and Pedagogies (pp. 87–93). New York: Routledge. Slaby, J. and R. Mühlhoff (2019). Affect. In J. Slaby and C. von Scheve (eds.), Affective Societies (pp. 27–41). London: Routledge. Stroud, C. (2018). Introduction. In L. Lim, C. Stroud and L. Wee (eds.), The Multilingual Citizen (pp. 1–14). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Stroud, C., A. Peck and Q.E. Williams (2019). Visceral landscapes (the inside story), Sociolinguistic Studies, 13(1): 7–14. Sylwander, K.R. and L. Gottzén (2020). Whore! Affect, sexualized aggression, and resistance in young social media users’ interaction, Sexualities, 23(5–6): 971–986. Tebaldi, C. and S. Burnett (2022). The science of desire: Rationalizing the fascist gaze on the hot, hard man. Paper presented at the Communication Research Seminar series, University of Gothenburg, 2 November 2022. Taboada, M. (2016). Sentiment analysis: An overview from linguistics, Annual Review of Linguistics, 2: 325–347. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: Sage. Wetherell, M. (2015). Trends in the turn to affect: A social psychological critique, Body & Society, 21(2): 139–166. Witztum, E., R. Malkinson and S. Shimshom Rubin (2016). Loss, traumatic bereavement and mourning Culture: The Israel example. In Y. Ataria, D. Gurevitz, H. Pedaya and Y. Neria (eds.), Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture (pp. 365–375). Cham: Springer. Wodak, R. (2020). The Politics of Fear. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Zerilli, L.M.G. (2015). The turn to affect and the problem of judgment, New Literary History, 46: 261–286. Ziv, A. (2010). Performative politics in Israeli queer anti-occupation activism, Gay & Lesbian Quarterly, 26(4): 537–556.

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4 “A THIIIEF!” Humour and affect at a detention home for young men Anna G. Franzén1 and Rickard Jonsson

Introduction: masculinity in youth detention Incarcerated men, and young incarcerated men in particular, are often deemed as having emotional trouble in terms of uncontrollable and explosive anger, which can be seen, for instance, in that rehabilitation strategies often are aimed at helping young men control their anger issues (Franzén, 2015; Laursen and Henriksen, 2019). Studies of punitive institutions such as prisons and detention homes for young men and boys, however, have rather illuminated that the institutions themselves are key sites for the reproduction of a particular type of hegemonic masculinity – sometimes described as hypermasculinity (Franzén, 2021; Bengtsson, 2016; Sabo et al., 2001). This type of masculinity builds on a narrow combination of exaggerated characteristics such as physical strength and control, heterosexuality and independence, and not the least, emotional norms including aggression, stoicism, courage and lack of vulnerability (cf. Bengtsson, 2016; de Viggiani, 2012). To date, studies of prison masculinities and emotions among male inmates have primarily focused on these extreme characteristics and primarily on the construction of adult masculinities, while the research with a youth perspective on masculinity and affect in imprisonment contexts is much more limited. However, a few studies of young masculinities in youth institutions have illuminated how rehabilitation strategies implemented may reproduce and enforce hypermasculine ideals (cf. e.g., Franzén, 2021; Laursen and Henriksen, 2019). Moreover, prison studies principally conceptualize emotion work among inmates as strategic and intentional (Goffman, 1959; also see Laws and Crewe, 2016; Spencer and Ricciardelli, 2017), involving primarily a display of certain emotions (i.e., aggression and stoicism) and concealing of others (i.e., vulnerability, love, fear; cf. Abrams et al., 2008; Sabo et al., 2001). Often, this emotion work is described as a deliberate response to the harsh environment in prison – as a survival strategy and a reaction to the real or perceived risk of assault (de Viggiani, 2012; Ricciardelli et al., 2015; Sabo et al., 2001), or as an effect of being deprived of a vital sense of masculine self (Cesaroni and Alvi, 2010). This planned and strategic emotion work is often conceptualized as men wearing a “mask” (de Viggiani, 2012), or putting up a front (Cesaroni and Alvi, 2010; de Viggiani, 2012), thus separating between the men’s “public and private façade” (de Viggiani, 2012, p. 287). 48

DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-6

“A THIIIEF!”

While there are many virtues of the research on men’s strategic display and suppression of emotions in prison, these studies tend to leave out the less agentic aspects of emotional processes relating to youth and masculinity. This chapter illuminates some of the key issues within the field of affect studies and masculinities among incarcerated young men, and gives an example of how to theorize and empirically investigate affect as both discursive and embodied through the employment of the concept of affective practices (Wetherell, 2012; 2013) on a group of incarcerated boys’ humorous interaction. As a contribution to this research field, we suggest an approach that investigates affective practices, as a way to explain what jokes and laughter are accomplishing in talk. Thus, in contrast to the tradition of looking for the strategic display of toughness, physical strength and control in the construction of adult prison masculinities, we shall follow youths’ everyday emotional work in detention homes – youths who use humour and laughter together with affects of joy, pleasure as well as embarrassment, in efforts to be included in the community of other young men.

Affect studies An important strand of research on young masculinities has highlighted the importance of looking for affects. As Wetherell (2013) sketches the field of affect studies, the interest in affect emerged as an attempt to formulate a theory that included the material and the biological together with the social and cultural in the analysis. For many affect theorists (see Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2008), the affective turn in the humanities and social sciences meant a shift away from discourse towards the pre-discursive (cf. Milani, this volume). From this distinction follows a difference in “emotion” and “affect”, where emotion can be understood as how people understand or perform bodily, material and non-discursive affects through language, while affect includes the non-representational, something that goes beyond (or precedes) linguistic practices. Affect, in this understanding, is about the bodily, material and non-conscious. Emotions or feelings, on the other hand, are affects after having been brought into people’s meaning-making practices. As Reeser and Gottzén (2018, p. 5) put it, “to articulate a feeling means that it is already too late to find affect”. However, as Wetherell points out, this way of understanding discourse as “the conscious, the planned, and the deliberate while affect is understood as automatic, the involuntary, and the nonrepresentational” (2013, p. 52, italics in original) creates a dichotomy which does not account for discourse theories’ interest in acts that are out of participant’s control or intention. On the contrary, affect is both an embodied and social meaning-making practice, Wetherell argues (2013, p. 52). This claim is also in line with Ahmed’s (2014) thoughts on emotions as performative. In Ahmed’s understanding, language and texts or the use of categories and labelling practices are crucial to the understanding of the circulation of emotions. Affect is in her understanding neither located exclusively to the individual nor the social but takes shape in the circulation between different objects and bodies in discourse (Milani, this volume; Milani and Richardsson, 2021). Such perspective adds affects to what performative theory has told us about words: they do things. While acknowledging Ahmed’s work, Wetherell (2013) urges us to not forget about participants’ interactional work in such processes. She, therefore, calls for looking at people’s everyday affective practices: “Affective practice focuses on the emotional as it appears in social life and tries to follow what participants do” (Wetherell, 2013, p. 4).

Humour and laughter as affective practices We see humour practices and laughter as forms of affective practices, not with a single meaning though; jokes and laughter can be aggressive and excluding as well as joyful or subversive. 49

Anna G. Franzén and Rickard Jonsson

Humour and laughter are affective practices that in turn may generate new and other affective practices in interaction – like feelings of relief, pleasure, ease, embarrassment, anger or fear (cf. Franzén, et al., 2021). Goffman (1956), in his discussion on humour and embarrassment, saw laughter as a glue which holds the social world together. Participants help each other in social interaction, Goffman says, to deal with and avoid what is embarrassing and humour is a tool for doing that. From Goffman’s perspective, human beings are sympathetic repairers of social festivities. However, Michael Billig (2005) adds, in a commentary on what he calls “Goffman’s nice-guy theory”, that as common as collaboration to avoid embarrassment is the pleasure of laughing at another’s shortcomings. Herein lies the social repression of laughter: laughter may frighten and discipline by working humiliatingly (see Franzén and Aronsson, 2013; Figueroa-Dorrego and Larkin-Galinanes, 2009, p. 623). Humour, Billig writes (2005), is thereby deeply connected to social order and can be used both as a means to upset and to reproduce norms. Humour is normative also in the sense that it is expected of the listener to get the joke and not take what is said seriously (Lakoff, 1990). To be able to understand a humorous framing of an utterance is a conversational skill required in many social contexts. When people joke and laugh, the boundaries of the norms that prevail in a context become visible. This makes humour a fruitful analytical entry point for those who are interested in affective work as well as social hierarchies or construction of young masculinities. As gender and humour scholars have shown, ridicule, banter and aggressive joking can index certain types of masculinities, a ‘lad culture’ (Kotthoff, 2006; Nichols, 2018), or be associated with men’s homosociality i.e., in social interactions within groups of only men (Hickie-Moodey and Laurie, 2017). Abedinifard (2016) has for example shown how humorous teasing may contribute to preserving the gender order, by acting as a tool for identity work and self-regulation, in line with social order. Thus, ridicule or friendly banter plays an important role in the production of desirable subjectivities by making visible both social order and breaches of it through laughter, even at seemingly banal humour (Billig, 2005; see also Schnurr and Holmes, 2009). Both laughter and unlaughter – an absence of laughter where it might be expected (Billig, 2005) – construct identities, and, through the production and uptake of humour practices, people may position themselves vis-á-vis a social order. Methodologically, the tradition of looking for humour in interaction has often combined an ethnographic approach with an interest in detailed analyses of social interaction (Franzén and Aronsson, 2013, Evaldsson, 2005, Tholander and Aronsson, 2002). This research has drawn on methods and theoretical concepts from both discursive psychology (Billig, 2005; Wetherell, 2013) and linguistic ethnography (Duranti et al., 2012; Tusting, 2019). To this state of the art of interactional humour research can also be added the combination of linguistic analyses with other semiotic fields such as embodiment, including gestures, posture and other movements in physical space (Goodwin, 2000). Another fruitful way of investigating humour practices in interaction is through the use of stylizations, defined by Rampton (2009, p. 149) as interactional occasions where participants produce “specially marked and often exaggerated representations of languages, dialects and styles that lie outside their own habitual repertoire (at least as this is perceived within the situation at hand).” This allows speakers to play with “stereotyped personas and genre” derived “from well-known identity repertoires” (Coupland, 2007, p. 154). Through stylizations, participants can make fun of various voices (see e.g., Åhlund and Aronsson, 2015). The voices used in stylizations are recognizable and thus possible to laugh at. Together, these various approaches foreground an understanding of language, affect and humour as performative, taking an interest in what language and affect accomplish in interaction (Wetherell, 2013). This brings us to an example of affective work in a youth detention home. 50

“A THIIIEF!”

Masculinity, humour and affect among incarcerated young men We have so far discussed the research field of prison masculinities, young incarcerated men, and the turn towards affect in language and discourse studies. In the remainder of this chapter, we shall exemplify how one can conduct an analysis of jokes, laughter and unlaughter, as forms of affective practices, among four male participants – Tadek, Jesper, Janek and Markus – who live in a youth detention home in Sweden. The purpose of the following analysis is to show what humour and affect can add to research on young masculinities, and more precisely, to see how some young men in interaction use humour and other affective practices to get included and deal with exclusion at a youth detention home.

The research context The examples are drawn from an ethnographic study, conducted by Anna Franzén, on young men (aged 13–16) in detention home treatment and the staff that worked there (the project was approved by the regional ethics committee). The study drew on standard ethnographic procedures of participant observations and informal interviews over a two-year period, and, as a primary method: video recording of everyday interaction among youth and staff at the home. The video recordings involved the researcher carrying the camera with her during participant observations, setting it up on a tripod during mealtimes or hang-out sessions on the sofa, and at times the boys at the home would be allowed to handle the camera (when the researcher was in the room). The Swedish youth detention home (Sw: ‘särskilt ungdomshem’), where the data is collected from, is a particular residential treatment centre, administered by the state, which detains and treats youth ‘at risk’ (i.e., drug abuse, criminal behaviour or problematic home conditions) through court orders, municipal decisions and at times voluntarily. The age of criminal responsibility in Sweden is fifteen, and all under that age are dealt with by the child welfare authorities and may be admitted to compulsory rehabilitation in a detention home, on an undetermined time basis. The detention home in this study (Stillbrook, pseudonym) admits young men, 13–16 years old and accommodates up to eight residents at a time in home-like conditions, but yet with locked doors, alarms and a locked metal gate to the floor which the boys sleep at night. The staff also have padded isolation rooms at their disposal. All boys at the home were offered rehabilitation that centred on anger and aggressive behaviour, and a behaviour modification program, otherwise commonly used in prison settings and psychiatric institutions (cf. Franzén, 2015). Despite the institutional setting and the heavy focus on security, controlling and correcting aggressive emotions and behaviour, the detention home is a place where the youth live their lives, go to school, eat meals together, play cards or go fishing with the staff. Staff members at times talk about themselves as “extra parents” to the admitted boys, and there is overall frequent teasing and laughing among youth and staff at the home alongside conflicts and disciplinary moves (cf. Franzén and Aronsson, 2013). The sequences analysed below are from two consecutive days during a week when the first author, Anna, was conducting participant observations at the home. As we soon will see, two of the boys, Tadek and Markus, have in common that they both face exclusion from the others. All the names in this chapter are pseudonyms.

The thief: playing with forbidden identities through humour It is Wednesday and the boys at the home have just had dinner. Jesper, Janek and Tadek are sitting on a large corner sofa in the living room, passing time before the evening activities begin. Jesper and Janek are two of the most popular boys at the home, who also appear to be appreciated by both staff and other boys. They have the looks, the clothes, the wit and the urban vernacular (Rampton, 51

Anna G. Franzén and Rickard Jonsson

2015; cf. also Bunk and Wiese, this volume). They often wear sweatpants and buzz-cut hair, and this day Jesper wears a tight tank top, displaying his muscles, and he carries a large silver watch on his wrist, a large chain necklace and diamond (imitations) in his ears. This aesthetic, their use of urban vernacular and mutual drawing on minor criminal activities and experiences in talk and humorous interaction, is reminiscent of what Bengtsson (2012) has discussed as a “gangster” subculture in a Danish secure care institution for young men, or as part of performing a type of “hypermasculinity” (Abrams et al., 2008; Bengtsson, 2016; Sabo et al., 2001). This evening, Janek and Jesper are sitting on one end of the sofa, both leaning back, slouched down comfortably close to each other. Every now and then Jesper touches Janek’s arm lightly. The physical closeness between them can be seen to underline intimacy and the exclusivity of the group the two of them make up. Tadek, who has been sitting on the other end of the sofa, a couple of meters away makes several attempts to approach the other two, using humour. He gets up and laughingly pretends to hide something from the camera but receives no response from Jesper and Janek. He then sits down a little closer to them on the sofa and attempts verbal humour. In excerpt 1, Tadek uses a funny voice, mimicking the famous American rapper Snoop Dogg, in what seems to be an effort to be included in the other young men’s community. Their utterances are translated by the authors and reproduced here in English. Stylized voices are marked within quotation marks. Excerpt 1 45 46

Tadek

”from my shizzle-dizzle” hehe ”from my nizzle-dizzle” ((smiling))

47

Jesper

What did he say?

48

Tadek

“my shizzle my fizzle”

49

Janek

“drizzle drizzle” ((calm voice))

50

Jesper

Nothing there ((filming Tadek’s hands))

51

Tadek

“shizzle fizzle”

52

Jesper

Nothing here ((filming the side of Tadek’s head))

53

Janek

”LOOK AT THAT CHARACTER, A THIE::F”

54

Tadek

”my shizzle my dizzle” hehe

55

Janek

“A bad thie::f, look!”

56

Tadek

West coast ((hand gesture towards camera)) hehe baam!

57

Janek

“look and you’ll see who’s a bad thie::f!”

58

Jesper

Who’s a bad thief?

59

Tadek

((stops smiling – looking towards Janek and Jesper)) ((lines omitted))

81

Jesper

Have you stolen anything?

82

Janek

“No” ((silly voice))

83

Jesper

I take that as very much! Have you ever beaten anyone?

84

Janek

“No” ((silly voice))

85

Jesper

Yea, many fights for you

86

Janek

“No” ((silly voice))

52

“A THIIIEF!” 87 88

Jesper

Yea, you’ve- you haven’t done anything ((mean voice, directed at Tadek))

89

Tadek

No exactly ((quietly)) ((lines omitted))

95

Jesper

What have you stolen? ((towards Janek))

96 97

Janek

(2) “candy, gum, batteries” ((silly voice. Someone laughs))

98

Jesper

Wasn’t it you who stole 40 mopeds in a week?

99 100

Janek

One week? A month! Do you think- ((covers his mouth and laughs))

101 102

((Loud laughter from all boys)) Janek

haha, damn (dork)

Tadek’s humorous talk is acknowledged but dismissed by Jesper (line 47), who then teasingly directs the camera at Tadek’s hand and head, while saying “nothing there, nothing here” as if he is implying that Tadek is stupid (lines 50, 52). Tadek is laughing and continuing on his “izzle-talk” as Janek (lines 51, 54, 56) teasingly invokes a humorous quote from a well-known old Swedish movie on a band of thieves (Jönssonligan), “LOOK AT THAT CHARACTER, A THIE::F”. This is a quote he has been using repeatedly during the week, pronounced loudly in a funny old-fashioned Stockholm accent. Tadek’s first response is content (line 54). He continues happily with his “izzlelanguage” and giggles, looking happy (it may also be a manner of inclusion to be the object of Janek’s humorous quotation). But then the tease begins to turn into something more serious as Janek adds to the quote “a bad thief” (line 55). It takes a few turns and repetitions before Tadek reacts by discontinuing his smile, happiness turned into surprise and irritation (line 59). Jesper’s response also confirms that Janek’s quote is not only funny but also serious by using his everyday voice without laughter, when he asks, “who is a bad thief?” (line 58). A concern among the staff at the home is reproduction of criminal norms, and attempts are made to stop the boys from talking about criminal action in a positive manner. Making jokes about it, however, makes it possible for the boys to engage in this forbidden subject. The fact that it is (somewhat) forbidden is probably also what makes it pleasurable to talk about (Billig, 2005). The playful talk of thieves also prompts Jesper to initiate a “ranking” sequence, supposedly of who has committed the worst crimes (in the omitted lines 60–80). He says “here, listen! Now we’re gonna have like a ranking here.” Turning the camera to the researcher Anna, he begins launching questions: “have you ever stolen anything?”, “hit anyone?”, “robbed anyone?” and “have you ever committed any crime at all?”. Anna uncomfortably answers “no” to all the questions, and Jesper then turns the camera to Janek (line 81). Jesper is not using a funny voice when he engages in this interviewing, but he sounds excited as he is aiming the camera into the faces of his interview victims, ranking them on the grounds of being a good or bad thief. Being a thief here is constructed as something admirable, it is a resource to use in the local masculine community building, and thus, being a “bad thief” (here meaning not having conducted any serious crimes) is laughable. The young men play with different thief-categorizations: the childish thief that shoplifts candy in contrast to the experience and skill of stealing 40 mopeds in a single month. Through this move in and out of the innocent and the experienced, the young men construct a space to humorously talk about criminal experience. However, this play is also disciplinary (Billig, 2005) and full of work on social hierarchies in the group. Tadek is teased for 53

Anna G. Franzén and Rickard Jonsson

being “a bad thief” (ex. 2, lines 53–59, something that is recurrent throughout the fieldwork). The fact that being a bad thief is something negative and laughable is confirmed by the fact that Janek, when it is his turn, uses a silly voice when he answers “no” to the questions (lines 81–86). This is also why it is laughable to only have shoplifted some candy or batteries, as Janek says with a funny voice (line 96–97). What is forbidden is often pleasurable (Billig, 2005). In fact, this humorous game also involves pretending that the topic is more forbidden than it is. The story of Janek and his stolen mopeds is repeated among the boys throughout the fieldwork, both Anna and the staff have heard it before. The story is Janek’s, but when it is mentioned, it is always one of the other boys that brings it up, with apparent pleasure and awe. The way it is brought into the humorous conversation here is cooperative. Jesper initiates it, and Janek plays along. When Janek supposedly says too much, using his own voice (in line 99–100), it draws loud laughter. The culmination of the humorous sequence is thus when Janek (pretends) to fall out of character, and to accidently admit to a crime on camera. The thrill of the joke is thus related to the act of lying and being caught, when questioned about criminal action. At the same time the “experienced thief” is performed, in contrast to a “bad thief”. Through these jokes are about criminal identities, all participants seem for a short moment to be included in the group, although the joke on bad thieves at the same time does disciplinary work and consolidates social hierarchies in the group.

The butt of the joke: love and shame as laughable affects In the next example, from the following day, Markus becomes the object of laughter. Markus is one of the boys at the home with low social status. He does not appear to be close friends with any of the other boys and spends more time talking to and joking with the staff than the other boys. He comes from a small town and does not speak urban vernacular, and he is rarely able to defend himself from teasing attacks which he often is the target of from the other boys. It is Thursday and four of the boys are waiting for dinner. Markus and Janek have both yelled out to the staff to hurry up with dinner, which then led to a “punching competition” when Janek began punching Markus on his arm, and Markus punched back. After a few punches back and forth, Markus said that there is evidence on the camera and turned to Anna, smilingly asking if he can borrow the tape later to make a copy – a joke that may be interpreted as if Markus aligns with adults and does not hesitate to snitch. Janek loudly answers “What, are you gonna show your girlfriend who you know? These are your best friends?”, pointing to himself and Jesper, with a smile, implying that they actually are not his friends or that he has no friends. Markus quietly says “no… no’” whereupon Janek teasingly asks Markus “what’s your girlfriend’s name?” Markus, turning uncomfortably in the chair, does not give a name, even as Janek repeats the question. Now Janek stands up and approaches the camera, he crouches slightly to get his face close and begins speaking in a stylized dialect straight into the camera. Excerpt 2 16 17 18

Janek

“Good day, good day, this is a story of Markus Eriksson, we’re gonna talk a bit about his girlfriend and stuff” ((rubs hands together))

19 20

Tadek

hahaha, damn, you’re gonna laugh when you watch this later ((to researcher)) hahaha

54

“A THIIIEF!” 21 22 23 24

Janek

“This is how it is, look here, look here. This is Markus Eriksson” ((pointing)) “Do you see him there?” ((adjusting the camera to centre Markus)) “He has been in love”.

25

Markus

((embarrassed smile))

26

Janek

Or he IS in love now.

27

Markus

((larger embarrassed smile))

28

Janek

Are you in love?

29 30

Markus

((Laughing without sound, turning in chair and looking embarrassed, scratching))

31

Jesper

Sara, her name is Sara ((whispering))

32 33

Janek

Hey! Are you in love? Well, tell the camera. ARE. YOU. IN. LOVE. ((Omitted lines))

42

Anna

Janek [can’t you interview Jesper instead?]

43 44

Markus

[one’s in love most of the times right ((scratching arm))]

45 46

Janek

Yea come here, me and you, come here, sit down and I’ll mess with you a little ((to Jesper))

47

Jesper

No no no

48

Anna

Markus you can film so- so-

49

Markus

((gets up and gets behind the camera))

50 51

Janek

yea yalla sit here man! We’re just kidding, yalla, don’t take it seriously.

52

Jesper

Okay I’ll come, I’ll come

Markus is here made the object of laughter, and he is primarily teased about shameful affects: that of being in love, and of being embarrassed. This could be understood in relation to Scott Kiesling’s (2018) discussion of a ‘masculine ease’ among young men, as a type of hegemonic masculinity that includes the norm to feel ease. Markus does not manage to defend himself, nor to enact the masculine ease of not being affected by the teasing. On the contrary, what comes across is embarrassment, opposite to aggression, ease or humour, which might have been more successful affective practices. Through the jokes of embarrassing affects, Markus is positioned as the one that feels shame, and as someone who tries to defend himself from the embarrassment but does not succeed in doing so. His exaggerated laughter (line 29–30) confirms his embarrassment and becomes the object of new laughter. The humorous teasing is upgraded as Janek approaches the camera and draws on a stylized dialect putting on a funny voice (Sw. skånska) which marks the playful frame (lines 16–18). At the same time, the heat is turned up in terms of affect (also marked by Janek’s rubbing of his hands, like an evil master in a cartoon forging malicious plans). The clown position that Janek uptakes here, can be seen to be a valued one: Jesper is smiling excitedly and Tadek is laughing loudly and verbally confirming the level of funniness as he comments to Anna that she surely will laugh when watching the videos later (line 19–20). Markus, on his side, is showing multiple signs of embarrassment, which peak at the question of whether he is in love, he is squirming in his chair, laughing 55

Anna G. Franzén and Rickard Jonsson

loudly and looking embarrassed and scratching himself. The enjoyment of the other boys appears to be increasing along with the level of embarrassment of Markus. In the omitted lines, the teasing continues, and Janek draws on a talk show host genre as he sits down, crossing his legs and folding his hands, talking straight into the camera, still using a funny voice. Markus is laughing a loud embarrassed laughter while squirming in the chair – displaying that laughter is not always signalling fun or enjoyment, but here rather clearly embarrassment. As Janek upgrades the teasing of Markus again (by hinting that he might disclose of a secret love letter), Anna breaks in to try and stop the teasing and suggests that Janek interview Jesper instead (line 42). Janek quickly agrees to this and calls Jesper over to the (hot) chair, categorizing and downgrading what happens in the chair as “mess with you a little bit,” rather than as something malicious (line 45–46). It is clear, however, that this game is not only for fun and that the stakes are high. Jesper, who often plays in front of the camera and jokes a lot with the staff and other boys here displays a moment of fear, saying “No, no, no”. Janek’s directive “Yalla sit here man! We’re just kidding, yalla, don’t take it seriously” (using his own voice – not a playful voice) involves encouraging Jesper to display a masculine ease (cf. Kiesling, 2018), Janek thus tells Jesper to not worry (saying that the situation is not face-threatening), at the same time as he softly disciplines Jesper’s displayed affects of fear. The affects that are disciplined here, primarily Markus’ but also Jesper’s fear, are in line with the above-mentioned large bulk of previous findings on hypermasculine emotion work among (primarily adult) males in prison (Franzén, 2021; Bengtsson, 2016; Sabo et al., 2001), that show that emotions related to vulnerability are consciously controlled and concealed (cf., Abrams et al., 2008; de Viggiani, 2012; Jewkes, 2005). The interaction makes visible this affective norm and reproduces, strengthens it through the mutual (disciplinary) laughter at Markus’ presumed love and displayed embarrassment. However, we argue that the humorous setting allows both for drawing on a repertoire of playfulness and spitefulness (in the sense of creating misery in Markus that the others can take pleasure in). As Billig (2005) writes, what is embarrassing generates laughter since it is pleasurable to see others break norms, and the situation in Excerpt 2 involves several breaches of affective norms. The affects of being in love and feeling embarrassed seem not to be normative in the masculine homosociality. Hence, these norm-breaching affects generate a disciplinary laughter (Billig, 2005). Markus is not able to keep cool (Kiesling, 2018). Nor is he delivering any comeback to the teasing, something that several studies have shown to be a preferred response to save face when being teased (Tholander and Aronsson, 2002) as well as crucial for the construction of masculine identities (Evaldsson, 2005, Haugh and Bousfield, 2012; Milani and Jonsson, 2011). Instead, Markus’s low social status and position in the local order is reinforced, something which is managed primarily through affective practice in the interaction in Excerpt 2.

The cinnamon bun theft: childish humour and criminal experience Following ex 2 above, first Jesper and then Tadek was called to the “hot chair” and they too were first questioned on the subject of love. Tadek played along, drawing on humorous resources such as a specific dialect (Sw. skånska), body language and stuttering. Jesper and Janek cooperated in constructing a humorous and challenging battery of questions, and soon the interview took the shape of an interrogation. After a while, Jesper, who was behind the camera, requested to take over from Janek. “Janek, take over here and I’ll do a police interview!” Just as they are about to begin, one of the staff members (Henke) breaks in and initiates a discussion about the plot. Janek holds his hand over the lens of the camera and makes sounds to mask the brief discussion. 56

“A THIIIEF!”

Excerpt 3 129 130

Jesper

EY START THE VIDEO! ((deep voice)) Hello my name is Jesper Svensson, criminal institute at Stillbrook

131

Tadek

((playing drunk, head hanging down))

132 133 134

Jesper

It is the case that there has been yet another instance of bun-theft, and we suspect that you have been part of that bun-theft.

135 136

Janek

Hold up, can the gypsy raise his face so we can see it “yall know”

137 138

Jesper

Where were you on Saturday the seventh (1) of the fifth (1) two thousand and eight?

139

Janek

((giggles))

144

Tadek

I w- w- w- was h- h- h- home

145

Jesper

But is it the case that you don’t have any teeth?

146

Tadek

Well I mean (1)

147 148

Jesper

Is it the case that you are here at Stillbrook just to be here at Stillbrook?

149 150

Janek

((puts hand over camera)) hold up, shoplifting some candy!

151 152

Tadek

I stole some candy, you know, and then I had to come here

153 154 155

Jesper

Now it’s the case that this bun-theft took place then when- the seventh of the fifth, and it was about ten buns that were stolen- CINNAMON buns!

163

Jesper

Are you sitting here, lying straight to my face?

164

Tadek

No I’m not, I solemnly swear

165

Henke

He’s lying ((walking by in the background))

166 167

Jesper

He’s lying, yea I know, I can see that. Okay, so this matter with the buns-

168 169

Tadek

IT WAS MARKUS, IT WAS MARKUS, I’M INNOCENT! ((waving his arms, pretending to cry))

170 171 172

Jesper

Let’s take him to the psyche ward boys, come on ((grabbing Tadek over the neck and arm, pulling him out of the picture))

173

Markus

hahahaha

((Lines omitted))

Again, a childish repertoire (this time stealing buns) is intertwined with the more adult theme of criminality, as well as the use of urban vernaculars (lines 129–131, here only heard in the pronunciation). The play here has some serious undertones as it draws on a criminal discourse, and there is less use of funny and nonsense voices. Through the pretend police interrogation, the young men show competence in this context. On the other hand, the interaction is less serious, and the mood is light and cheery – it is a performance, apparent to all 57

Anna G. Franzén and Rickard Jonsson

and therefore also less personal. The boys use several resources to construct the playframe, such as Janek covering the camera lens and making sounds when they discuss the plot, and Jesper using a deep voice and his own, commonly used, urban vernacular intonation when he commands Janek to resume filming, and then a different, more quiet voice when interrogating (lines 129–130). Furthermore, the subject of laughter is no longer the participant’s own affects (of love and embarrassment), but rather a made-up scenario of theft of cinnamon buns. This involves the joy of taking part in what is childish: the boys are playing thief and police in an investigation about lost buns. Again, the theme appears to centre on lying and on laughably petty crimes. In lines 145–155 Jesper and Janek seem to imply that Tadek is a “bad thief” (comparing this to the interaction the day before), that he hasn’t stolen any buns (because he has no teeth, line 145), that he is staying at the detention home voluntarily (as opposed to for actual crimes, line 147–148), or that he has only shoplifted candy (line 149–150). The interaction both invites the participant to have fun and to enjoy playing with a childish position, while at the same time, it constructs a norm of the experienced, grown-up, real criminal persona, as opposed to the laughable “bad thief”. Notably, Tadek is more successful in the sense that he is included in his humorous interaction in this sequence than he usually is at the home (exemplified in ex 1 above) and he is using a plethora of humorous resources as he is put to the test in the interaction: physical humour (line 131), verbal humour (including stuttering, line 144), as well as humour drawing on a criminal identity or a ‘convict’s code’ of not snitching (line 168–169; cf. Laursen, 2017). The interaction also exhibits affective practices as Tadek manages to enact a cheerful humour even as he is being put to the test, and he does not enact any fear or hesitation (as compared to Jesper in ex 2, line 47) or embarrassment (as compared to Markus in ex 2). This success in being included in humorous interaction, and not being rejected further evokes joy. However, he is invited in the joyful interaction on same conditions as previously: a subordinated position in the group as “the bad thief”. The ending of the playful, improvised skit appears as particularly funny, and draws both on a convict’s code of not snitching – where Tadek is making a fool of himself by ratting out Markus to the police – and a shared knowledge of the local treatment culture where it is possible to be brought to a padded isolation room by the staff. To sum up, the research field of young masculinities and locked-in men often highlights toughness, strength and coolness, thereby risking to define young masculinities in prison as too unitary, highlighting primarily the hyper-characteristics (but, for examples of more varied constructions of masculinities, see Crewe, 2014; Ricciardelli et al., 2015). In the three presented examples, we have seen how humour is used as an affective practice that in turn disciplines other affects such as shame and embarrassment, and how these affects are produced and dealt with through mocking laughter in the young men’s homosocial community. We have thus added perspectives from affect theory and critical humour studies to the state-of-the-art research on young, imprisoned masculinities. Our analysis shows that the humour practices, presented in the examples, work in at least four ways: (a) they produce social hierarchies and social order through laughter and unlaughter; (b) while the humour practices produce affective norms in line with previous findings on ‘hypermasculine’ emotion work including concealing of vulnerability (Abrams et al., 2008; Bengtsson, 2016; de Viggiani, 2012), humour also (c) allows for the boys to enact less tough affective practices such as playfulness, joyfulness and intimacy between male friends; and at the same time, (d) through these humour practices, the participants can play with various identity positions linked to age, criminality and masculinity.

58

“A THIIIEF!”

Conclusion and future directions Needless to say, youth detention centres are highly emotional places. Despite this, there are surprisingly few studies of youth in locked institutions that take affective work as their starting point – and those who do have most often a focus on hyper-masculine emotions. In this chapter, we have given an example of the more mundane affective work among incarcerated men, which is also our call for further research. We have seen how Tadek initiates different jokes and funny voices but is met by unlaughter from the others in a way that consolidates his subordinated place at the detention home. We have also shown how Markus’ affects of shame and being in love are made the target of laughter, which in turn further reproduces social order in the group. We argue that humour practices can be seen as forms of affective practices, effective to use in male bonding, border work and in the construction of a homosocial community. Moreover, by taking a close look at interaction we have illuminated how affects not (only) are strategically displayed or withheld, but how they are simultaneously embodied and coconstructed in interaction (Wetherell, 2012). Markus is embarrassed and the one who is laughed at. He is the object of laughter which constructs him as different from the others and as excluded from the group. These affects thus work performatively and are important aspects of subjectivity (Ahmed, 2014). Consequently, humour practices both draw on, and thus discipline, some affects – romantic love and embarrassment – and bring about other affects, like embarrassment, fear and discomfort, or pleasure from being included or confirming bonds of friendship. We have further illuminated playfulness and humour practices together with the flows in and out of maturity and immaturity – which in turn can cast a new light on the research on masculinities among men in correctional institutions. Through the jokes about the innocent vs the criminally experienced, the participants move in and out of practices which index both maturity and immaturity, childishness and adultness, seriousness and play. An analysis of humour in detention homes, we argue, may capture how young men move in and out of the immature and childish in contrast to the long research tradition of looking for maturity, toughness, physical strength and control in the construction of prison masculinities. By turning to humour and affect, we have shown how childishness can be embraced in shared stories about stealing cinnamon buns or in using stylized funny voices. To conclude, the position as tough young adult with criminal experience in the male community, can enjoy the pleasure of drawing on a childish repertoire together with other young men, at the same time as excluding practices are played out very clearly through the interaction – a play where Tadek and Markus need to do a hard interactional and affective work to not be excluded from the group.

Transcription notations : […] [word] (.) (2) ((word)) Word word-

Prolonged syllable Omitted lines Overlapping talk Micropause Pauses in seconds Comments from the transcriber Emphasized utterance Abrupt cut-off

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Funding This work was supported by The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet 2019-04988) and the National Board of Institutional Care, Sweden (SIS, grant number 1.2007/0007.3). SIS has not been involved in the research process.

Note 1 Corresponding author: Anna G. Franzén, Department of Child- and Youth Studies, Stockholm university, SE-106 91, Stockholm. Orcid: 0000-0003-0466-1220. Rickard Jonsson, Department of Child- and Youth Studies, Orcid id: 0000-0002-2001-6136.

Further readings Billig, M. (2005). Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London: Sage. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: Sage.

References Abedinifard, M. (2016). Ridicule, gender hegemony, and the disciplinary function of mainstream gender humour, Social Semiotics, 26(3): 234–249. Abrams, L.S., B. Anderson-Nathe and J. Aguilar (2008). Constructing masculinities in juvenile corrections, Men and Masculinities, 11(1): 22–41. Åhlund, A. and K. Aronsson (2015). Stylizations and alignments in a L2 classroom: Multiparty work in forming a community of practice, Language and Communication, 43: 11–26. Ahmed, S. (2014). Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. Bengtsson, T.T. (2012). Learning to become a “gangster”? Journal of Youth Studies, 15(6): 677–692. Bengtsson, T.T. (2016). Performing hypermasculinity: Experiences with confined young offenders, Men and Masculinities, 19(4): 410–428. Billig, M. (2005). Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London: Sage. Cesaroni, C. and S. Alvi (2010). Masculinity and resistance in adolescent carceral settings, Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 52(3): 303–320. Coupland, N. (2007). Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crewe, B. (2014). Not looking hard enough: Masculinity, emotion, and prison research, Qualitative Inquiry, 20(4): 392–403. De Viggiani, N. (2012). Trying to be something you are not: Masculine performances within a prison setting, Men and Masculinities, 15(3): 271–291. Duranti, A., E. Ochs and B.B. Schieffelin (2012). The Handbook of Language Socialization. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Evaldsson, A.C. (2005). Staging insults and mobilizing categorizations in a multiethnic peer group, Discourse & Society, 16(6): 763–786. Figueroa-Dorrego, J. and C. Larkin-Galiñanes (eds.) (2009). A Source Book of Literary and Philosophical Writings about Humour and Laughter: The Seventy-Five Essential Texts from Antiquity to Modern Times. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press. Franzén, A.G. (2015). Responsibilization and discipline: Subject positioning at a youth detention home, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 44(3): 251–279. Franzén, A.G. (2021). ‘Hypermasculinity’ in interaction: Affective practices, resistance and vulnerability in youth prison. In A. Cox and L. Adams (eds.), Palgrave International Handbook of Youth Imprisonment (pp. 333–354). Cham: Palgrave Macmillian. Franzén, A.G. and K. Aronsson (2013). Teasing, laughing and disciplinary humor: Staff–youth interaction in detention home treatment, Discourse Studies, 15(2): 167–183. Franzén, A.G., R. Jonsson and B. Sjöblom (2021). Fear, anger and desire: Affect and the interactional intricacies of rape humor on a live podcast, Language in Society, 50(5): 763–786. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.

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5 AFFECT, STANCETAKING AND GENDER IN PREADOLESCENT PEER CULTURES Ann-Carita Evaldsson1 Introduction This chapter presents ethnographic research on preadolescent girls’ and boys’ peer language socialization practices, focusing on the emergent and changing nature of stance and social identities (gender, class, age, race, ethnicity), and how affective alignments and positions come into being and are playfully exploited in their social life with peers (Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2011, for an overview). Studies have shown how preadolescents create unique peer cultures while they engage in a number of stancetaking practices in peer group interaction to evaluate group members with respect to valued behaviors and categories in their larger social world. Such stance practices sit at the core of the social processes through which children and youths create alignments and lay claims to particular identities and statuses in their peer group, while exploiting normative patterns associated with (masculine/feminine) gender and affect. In line with the shift that has occurred in the field of language and gender, this research implies a shift from gender as manifested in static gender differences to a focus on the distributed diversity of gendered identities and the variability of language practices across different peer groups and settings (Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2014, for an overview). Viewed from the perspective of the larger social dynamic, a number of ethnographic studies demonstrate an increasing diversity of divisions (e.g., by gender, social class, ethnicity, race, age and language) in preadolescent peer cultures affecting norms of interaction regarding friendship processes, peer group status, popularity, heterosexual relationships and relationships with adults (Corsaro, 2018, Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2014, for overviews). As Eckert (2002, p. 1) notes in her sociolinguistic work, preadolescents are “embarking on the transition from childhood to adolescence and the transition, like other transitions, is a location in itself”. Following this line of argument, this chapter presents research on how preadolescent boys and girls in different peer group settings, in forming social relationships and peer cultures, are exploring affective ways of being in the world while they appropriate important social categories and cultural norms in interaction with other group members (cf. Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2011). Data from two video-ethnographic studies will be presented to investigate how preadolescent girls and boys are provided with powerful means of positioning themselves in relation to others in ongoing peer interaction in stylized performances. As Goodwin and Alim (2010, p. 182) show in their multimodal interactional analysis of preadolescent girls’ argumentative talk, “stylization is a form of stance taking and positioning of self and other”, in which the stylist makes use of both 62

DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-7

Affect, stancetaking, and gender

speech and embodied gestures to index multiple cultural meanings simultaneously in ongoing interactions. The cases analyzed here will provide insights into how preadolescent girls and boys make use of a range of semiotic resources in playful and mocking stance displays, and stylizations of others to co-construct a peer-based social order whereby affect, embodiment, gender and age norms come into being and are more or less foregrounded. Before proceeding with the detailed examination, I will first provide a brief overview of peer language socialization research on preadolescent children’s and youths’ language practices, looking at how they co-construct their peer cultures and emerging heterosexual relationships across groupings and settings. Thereafter I will bring up some key theoretical and methodological issues in regard to the empirical study of affect, stance and gender that are of relevance for both the detailed analysis and for future research.

Research on peer language socialization and gender The body of studies reviewed here privileges preadolescent children’s and youths’ agency and their everyday peer language practices and peer cultures as a crucial ethnographic site of observation (Corsaro, 2018; Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2011, 2014). Particularly Goodwin (1990, 2006, 2011), in her ethnographic research, has shown the important role conflict plays in preadolescent girls’ peer cultures for constructing social and moral order, in regard to important social categories in the group. In analyzing a he-said-she-said gossip event among African-American neighborhood girls aged 7–12, Goodwin (1990, p. 187) found that they used multiple types of stories to elicit a statement from an offended party, which led to her confronting another offending party. Other researchers such as Eder, Evans and Parker (1995), Evaldsson and Svahn (2012, 2017), Mendoza-Denton (2008), Eckert (2002) and Shuman (1986) demonstrate how preadolescent and adolescent girls with diverse ethnicities but sharing a working-class background stage gossip disputes and insults in which they justify offensive actions and assertiveness as central to their gender. In an ethnographic study of Latina gang girls in Northern California, Mendoza-Denton (2008) found how a form of gossip, here called ‘talking shit’, was used both to portray others unfavorably and to brag about one’s own fights. In a similar vein, Evaldsson’s (2007) study of working-class girls’ relational talk in a multiethnic friendship group refutes simplified notions of preadolescent girls as mainly cooperative and caring. Negatively charged activities – including fighting, exploiting others, lying, and talking behind people’s backs – were repeatedly invoked to position a targeted girl as a ‘bad friend’ and ‘friendless’, thereby excluding her from the group. Goodwin (2006) also found that aggressive stance acts in the form of mocking stance displays and stylizations of others were performed by a peer group of mostly white upper-class girls, situating an African-American working-class girl at the margins of the group. Through embodied stancetaking and transmodal stylizations, the girls mimicked the talk, voice and embodied actions of the targeted girl to position her “as a member of a very different social class/ racial category from the other girls” (Goodwin and Alim, 2010, p. 190). Through teasing, ridicule and insults, promoting ‘toughness’, ‘fighting back’ and ‘not acting cowardly’, boys also socialize with one another to mark their own masculinity while strengthening in-group solidarity (e.g., Evaldsson, 2002, 2005; Fine, 1987; Kehily and Nayak, 1997; Morgan, 2002; Renold, 2005; see also Franzén and Jonsson, this volume). For example, Morgan (2002) found that AfricanAmerican preadolescent boys used a particular form of ritual insults, including creative, obscene and often sexually oriented mockery such as ‘mother insults’ to learn the cultural categories that were relevant to their social group. Success relied upon skills in taking what one’s opponent had said and turning it against him, encouraging the boys to behave in an expressive and assertive manner (Goodwin, 1990). Evaldsson (2005, p. 764) also shows how preadolescent boys in a multiethnic low-income peer 63

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group setting in Sweden display cultural skills in insult practices that contribute to the “production of, and innovation in, a local masculine order” promoting toughness, having fun and competition. Studies also demonstrate the emergence of a peer-based social order among preadolescent boys and girls in which status and popularity become linked to heterosexual practices (cf. Eckert, 2011). For example, Fine (1987), shows how preadolescent boys (aged 9–12) in little league baseball build up a reputation as ‘cool’ and sexually knowledgeable through (sexual) joke talk, insults and evaluative commentaries on girls. In her ethnographic school study, Swain (2004) found that gay labeling was used among British school boys to police and produce ‘acceptable’ heterosexual masculinities, contributing to the construction of gender hierarchies and a heteronormative order (cf. Renold, 2005). In Thorne’s (1993) study on gender play, teasing also provided important resources for elementary school boys to address and deal with feelings of embarrassment tied to romantic love and heterosexual relationships (cf. Andreasson and Evaldsson, 2022). Simon, Eder and Evans (1992; cf. Eckert, 2011), studying peer group interaction at an American middle school, observed how adolescent females draw upon a variety of discourse strategies, ranging from playful language activities to more serious ones, to communicate and reinforce feeling norms involving heterosexuality, exclusivity and monogamy. Similar to findings in Eckert’s (2011) study of preadolescent girls’ stylistic practices, the girls’ knowledge of and engagement with romantic heterosexual relationships were linked to status and popularity in the friendship group. The social and affective arrangements that emerge among fifth and sixth graders, as Eckert (2011, p. 88) notes, are “about the relationship between heterosexuality, and social status and dominance”. Overall, the findings demonstrate children’s and youths’ creativity in using a range of linguistic and cultural practices for building social relationships and for exploring social categories such as gender, social class, ethnicity, race, sexuality and age that are important to them in their social life, also allowing them to subvert normative patterns and cultural stereotypes.

Stance, affect/embodiment, and gender: key concepts and research perspectives The research presented in this chapter draws on recent work in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and/or ethnomethodology (EMCA) on the performative, embodied and normative character of gender, affect and stance (e.g., Bucholtz, 2009; Evaldsson, 2021; Goodwin, 2006; Mendoza-Denton, 2008; Rampton, 2006). Central here is that stancetaking is inherently dialogic, relational and interactional; it involves moral positioning and indexes normative cultural assumptions of how to perform actions and express emotions, consequential to how social actors establish social relationships and draw social boundaries (cf. Jaffe, 2009, for an overview). Goodwin’s (2006) work on preadolescent girls’ peer group practices highlights the importance of analyzing how stance, in the form of embodied displays of affect and affective alignments, cuts across various modalities including not only talk, gesture, the face, posture and prosody but also the material environment (cf. C. Goodwin, 2000). The embodied display of emotion is approached here as situated interactive cultural practices entailed in speakers’ performances of affective stance (Goodwin, Cekaite and Goodwin, 2012), defined as referring to “feelings, moods, dispositions and attitudes associated with persons and/or situations” (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1989, p 7). A multilayered discursive notion of affect that brings forward the embodied and evaluative aspects of stancetaking proposes an interactional and dynamic approach to identity. Goffman’s dramaturgical work on frame analysis (1974) and interactive ‘footing’ (1981; cf. C. Goodwin, 2007) serves as an important framework for investigating how social actors do the work of evaluations, alignments and positioning that is central to stancetaking (cf. Goodwin, 1990; Goodwin and Alim, 2010). Goffman’s notion of animator and figures allows for an examination of how speakers not only manipulate their 64

Affect, stancetaking, and gender

actual selves but also display multiple representations of self and others (animator and discursive figures) in storytelling performances (Goodwin, 1990). Linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic work brings together the analytical frames of stance and stancetaking in interactional research with the sociolinguistic work on style and stylization in relation to social categories such as gender, age, class and race (Bucholtz, 2009, p. 146; Goodwin and Alim, 2010, p. 181; Mendoza-Denton, 2008; Rampton, 2006). This work demonstrates the importance of focusing on the multifaceted interactional process through which stylized performances of speaking and acting, associated in the first instance with interactional stance, come to be enregistered or culturally coded as gendered. Ochs’s (1992) work on indexing gender provides an analytical framework for exploring how repeated stance performances have an indirect link to gender as mediated by stance. In this perspective, social identities and subject positions are interactionally achieved and inferred through the interlocutors’ “cultural understanding of how acts and stances are resources for structuring particular social identities” (Ochs, 1993, p. 289). Research on stancetaking and stylization (e.g., Goodwin and Alim, 2010; Mendoza-Dento, 2008; Rampton, 2006), drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of stylization as “an artistic representation of another’s linguistic style, an artistic image of another’s language” – also show how youths in “styling the Other” use language and discursive resources “to appropriate, explore, reproduce or challenge influential images and stereotypes of groups that they don’t themselves (straightforwardly) belong to” (Rampton, 1999, p. 421). Thus, by looking closely at both social identities as accomplished through local acts of stancetaking (Goffman, 1981; Goodwin, 2006) and the role of indexicality (Bucholtz, 2009; Mendoza-Denton, 2008; Ochs, 1992), the analysis can move beyond notions of social identities as linked to fixed gendered forms of behavior. Entanglements of affect/embodiment, stance and gender in preadolescents’ peer language practices have not previously been foregrounded much in research (but see Goodwin, 2006, 2011; Goodwin and Alim, 2010; see also Evaldsson and Svahn, 2017). I argue here for the importance of using a multimodal interactional approach to affect as situated interactive practices (cf. Goodwin, Cekaite and Goodwin, 2012), combining linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic notions of affect, stance and stylization, to investigate the role of language and embodiment in preadolescents’ identity constructions and positionings of self and others (cf. Goodwin and Alim, 2010). The video excerpts have been transcribed following conventions developed within CA (see Transcription notations). Line drawings are used to highlight how the children orient to the bodies and actions of others in a spatio-material environment (cf. Goodwin, 2000). All names, and persons in the excerpts are pseudonymized and the line drawings are created to obscure the personal identity of the participants. It will be demonstrated how preadolescents combine and assemble talk, body actions, affect and material contexts in situated actions for negotiating a peer-based social order while appropriating normative forms of (masculine/feminine) gender and affect that are important in their community.

Staging hypothetical fights through stylized playacting In the first ethnographic data set, the often unrecognized – organizing force and normative character of anger and social aggression in preadolescent girls’ gossip dispute practices (e.g., Eckert, 2002; Evaldsson, 2021; Evaldsson and Svahn, 2017; Goodwin, 1990, 2006; Mendoza-Denton, 2008) will be explored; here, constituting a valued assertive stance, crafting a tough female identity. The video recordings are from everyday peer group activities in a low-income, multiethnic school setting, focusing on a peer group of 11–year-old girls with a long interactional history. The data was collected by Johanna Svahn as part of a project on school bullying (e.g., Evaldsson and Svahn, 2012). The selected instances (Excerpts 1 and 2), will show how the peer group of girls engage in gossip 65

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disputes in which they commit themselves to take action against reported offenses (Evaldsson, 2021; Evaldsson and Svahn, 2017). We will be looking at how the girls prepare themselves by staging a hypothetical fight in which they make fun of a targeted girl by invoking a stereotypical feminine behavior of a “cat fight” in “a deliberate stylized play-acting” (Goodwin, 2011, p. 268; Goodwin and Alim, 2010). As Jaffe (2009, p. 14) notes, “speaker stance in styling is operationalized through processes of selection (of sociolinguistic variants) and elements of performance that deploy a range of semiotic resources”. Excerpt 1 will demonstrate how the peer group of girls manipulate their talk, voices and bodies i) in styling a stereotypical fight style associated with the figure (i.e., the targeted girl Zhara) they are styling, and in so doing iii) they invite the audience to display their affective engagements and alignments (Figures 5.1a and 5.1b). Excerpt 1

Figure 5.1a and b   The peer group of girls stage a hypothetical fight performance

1. FATIMA:

*VI KAN BRÅ:KA MED Zhara (.) ↑KO↑::M WE CAN FI:GHT WITH ZHARA, ↑COME ↑O::N ↑ ((Smiles))

2.

(2.0)

3. AZRA:

>ja hatar henne↑ jag kommer sl↑åss >I hate her↑ I’ll fi↑ght

4. AMINA:

*Ja har lust att ba↑ [så hä:ra om du var hon= I feel like j↑ust [like thi:s if you were her=

5.

[((grabs Azra)) ((Figure (5.1b))

6.

[=↑DA:::NG ↑DA:::NG ↑DA:::NG

7.

[((pretends to knee Azra three times))

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8. AZRA:

om du va ho:n -om du va ho:n ja [skulle så hä↑r if you were he:r –if you were he:r I [would like thi↑s

9.

[((pulls Amina’s ponytail))

10. AMINA:

↑WHOA::::H↑

11.

((starts laughing))

12. TARA:

ca:↑t fight hon ska göra ca↑t fight ((laughs at Yasasmiin)) ca↑t fight she’ll do a ca↑t fight

13.

(1.8)

14. AMINA:

↑hon tar ca:t fight ↑she takes a ca:t fight

15

Ja gör så här D↑A:::NG D↑A:::NG↑ I do like this D↑A:::NG D↑A:::NG↑

16

[((pretends to knee Azra twice))

17. LEA:

((looks into the camera))

18.

(hh.) ja:: (.) det h↑är e:: (.) galna ungdomar (hh.) yea::h (.) th↑is i::s (.) crazy youths

Already in the second turn, Azra displays her affective alignment with the assertive embodied stance taken by Fatima, “we can fight” in line 1. In an exaggerated voice, she displays a negative affective stance of anger toward the non-present targeted girl Zhara, “I” in “I’ll fight” (line 3), thereby indexing a subjective feminine stance of “standing up for oneself” and “taking a fight” (Evaldsson, 2021). The performative character of the embodied stance act transforms the actor into a stage performer, in Goffman’s (1986) terms, setting the stage for the girls in the audience to co-participate in the stylized mock fight. One of the girls, Amina now affectively aligns and takes the lead, directing Azra to act as the imaginary target, Zhara: “if you were her” (line 4). Amina then pretends to hit her through exaggerated pretend knee-kicks and a loud voice animating the sound effects of actual hits “↑DA:NG ↑DA:NG ↑DA:NG” (line 6). In response, Azra literally pulls Yasmiin’s ponytail (line 4–5, see Figure 5.1b). The girl’s playful stylization of a pretend fight, caricatures and mimics the embodied and emotional behavior of the non-present target (Zhara). Amina’s stylized embodied performance is keyed through high-pitched prosody, excessive screams, and joint laughter (lines 6–7 and 10–12). Thus, showing that the excitement lies not only in “having fun” but also in affectively aligning in degrading a targeted girl for not managing to fight back. Tara’s (de)evaluation of Azra’s stylized embodied performance of hairpulling as a “cat fight” (line 12) indexes a stereotypical feminine fight style, “girl fight”, as derogatory or belittling. Thereby indexing the “cat fight” associated with the targeted girl (Zhara) which she is styling, as “transgressive” for their gender (Speer, 2005, p. 119). In the excerpt, the girls build up a contrast between self and other through their playful and embodied stylization of two different fighting styles. In direct connection, Amina performs a contrastive fighting behavior: “I do like this D↑A::::NG, D↑A::::NG” (lines 14–16) and in a loud voice animating the sound effects of actual hits, indexing a masculine fighting style that position herself as “a real fighter”. The event ends with that Lea renders a commentary on the girls’ stylized playacting, turning to the camera, (hh.) yea::h (.) th↑is i::s (.) crazy youths (lines17–18) with a smile (line 19). It could 67

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thus, be argued that the entire performance of the stylized playacting combines a childish playful style (of a pretend fight) with a tough (pre)adolescent style, allowing the girls to cultivate, test and exploit “fighting back” as a valuable peer group behavior for girls (cf. Eckert, 2002).

From stylized playacting to aggressive mock-fights and sexual insulting The second excerpt (2) will illustrate how the girls as they move through space shift from stylized playacting into an aggressive stylized mocking stance of “fighting back” (see Figure 5.2). Salma now takes the lead and in a loud voice, accusing the targeted girl Zhara of having sexually offended her: “WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME A SL↑U::T” (Excerpt 2, line 1). The stylized and embodied mocking stance display has a strong performative character in that it creates a micro-political environment for the girls in the audience to support the current accuser, thereby giving the offended girl the right to fight back. Excerpt 2

Figure 5.2   The girls end up chasing Rana, with Samina taking the lead 1. SALMA:

VARFÖR KALLAR DU MEJ H↑O::RA ((runs after Zhara))

(↑Zhara)

WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME A SL↑U::T

2. FATIMA:

ä::rligt du har gjort de’ förut också:: ((runs after Zhara))

(↑Zhara)

ho::nestly you’ve done it before too::

3. AYA:

Zhara håller käften Zhara will shut up

4. SALMA:

ingen annan går på:: henne:: ((turns to the other girls)) no one else atta::cks he::r

68

Affect, stancetaking, and gender 5. ZHARA:

SLUTA FÖLJA EFTER MEJ ↑HOROR (.)

6.

VAD S↑ÄGER NI? ((turns towards the others)) STOP FOLLOWING ME ↑SLUTS (.) WHAT ARE YOU S↑AING? ((turns towards the others))

7. SALMA:

((starts walking faster toward Zhara))

8. AYA:

[((tries to hold Salma back))

9.

[ski:t i henne [never mi:nd her

10. SALMA:

KALLA ’RU OSS ↑HO::ROR? ((shouts at Zhara))

(↑ZHARA)

AR’ YOU CALLIN’ US ↑SLU::TS?

11.

((shakes off Aya’s hand and starts running toward Zhara))

Although Salma is the person uttering the derogatory sexual insult, it becomes separated from its author. Instead, the discursive figure (here Zhara), who here is also confronted in person, is the one who becomes “responsible” for speaking badly about others – “WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME A SL↑UT” (line 1) – and is therefore not to be trusted (Evaldsson, 2002; Goodwin, 1990). By blaming the victim, the girls avoid being accountable for coming across as “bad girls”, indexing a contrastive subject position for themselves as loyal to their gender. As shown in other research, calling someone a “slut” is a sexually derogatory insult that functions as a form of regulating girls for coming across as “bad girls” (Brown and Chesney-Lind, 2005). Indeed, what becomes evident here is that the sexual insulting is treated not only as transgressive of one’s gender but is charged with local consequences for the target, who risks losing her membership in the peer group. In what follows, another peer, Fatima accuses the target, “you’ve done it before too::” (line 2), to strengthen within-group alignments and build mutual animosity toward the reported offender. At this point, the accused and chased party, Zhara, suddenly stops running and turns towards the others, making attempts to defend herself, in a shooting voice asking the others literally to: “STOP FOLLOWING ME (.) ↑SLU::TS (.) WHAT ARE YOU S↑AING?” (lines 5–6). However, the fact that Zhara uses the sexually derogatory insult, “sluts”, in addressing the others, is immediately turned against her by Salma: “Ar’ you callin’ us “↑SLU::TS”?” (line 10), in a shouting voice. In that way the peer group manages to transform the targeted girl into the perpetrator and the collectivity of girls into “victims of a sexual offense”. The aggravated ways in which the girls confront the target for the sexual insult do not directly construct a feminine identity linked to sexuality. Rather, the reported sexual insulting in cooccurrence with the girls’ intensified embodied oppositional stances, using exaggerated prosody, vivid gestures and rapid bodily movements, allow the peer group of girls to strengthen withingroup alignments in the midst of creating powerful positions in relation to a target, to index an assertive and confrontational stance at the same time. Thus, rather than simply presenting themselves as “successful aggressors”, their assertive feminine style serves to assert that the girls have been seriously offended (Shuman, 1986, p. 172). This encodes the aggressive stances taken toward the accused party as justified and concordant with shared group norms in the peer culture of “fighting back” and “standing up for oneself” as justifiable feminine conduct for the girls in the peer group. 69

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Playful stylizations of romantic love and romantic relationships The second ethnographic data set approaches the underresearched field of how preadolescent boys negotiate ambiguous feelings of excitement and embarrassment in their engagements with romantic love and (heterosexual) relationship (cf. Andreasson and Evaldsson, 2022). The data is from an ethnographic study based on video recordings among boys and girls, aged 11–12 years, attending a fifth-grade class in a multiethnic low-income, school setting conducted by Fredrik Andreasson as part of his doctoral thesis. In the first excerpt (3) we meet two boys, Khalil and Diego, who are close friends and often socialize with a girl in their class named Ellen. In this context, playful evaluative commentaries on boyfriend-girlfriend relationships are commonly treated as face-threatening acts, especially among the boys in their peer culture. It will be shown how the boys display ambiguous feelings of excitement and embarrassment in their playful engagements with heterosexual relationships and in doing so shift between humorous playful stances and more serious mock-fights. To start with, Diego, playfully transforms Khalil’s innocent look at Ellen (line 1) into a romantic male gaze: “But you know Khalil is in love with you” (line 3). ​ Excerpt 3

Figure 5.3  Diago starts to tease Khalil, who is talking to Ellen

1 2

Ellen:

Sluta titta på mej ((gently hits Khalil)) Stop looking at me (1.5)

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Affect, stancetaking, and gender 3

Diego:

4

Khalil:

5

Ellen

6

Diego:

men du vet ”Khalil e kär i dej” but you know “Khalil is in love with you” Nä::j= No:::= =Nä::j =No::: ((continues working))

7

Alex

((laughs))

8 9 10

Ellen:

11

Diego:

12 13

Khalil:

14 15 16 17 18 19

Diego Ellen:

Diego:

(pause) du va i- (xxx) ”vill du va ihop me- mej” i- Warcraft ((laughs)) you were in-(xxx) “do you wanna go steady with m- me” in Warcraft de där asså- de där kommer ja aldri glömma ((laughs)) oh that- I will never forget that ((gazes at Ellen)) ((laughs and gazes at Diego)) (1.0) hallå ja kommer skjuta den ↑hä::r hey I will throw ↑this ((swings the hammer)) (xxx) så här jättelå::ngt ”I- I lo::ve you::” (xxx) like a very lo::ng “I- I lo::ve you::” (pause) fuck you. fuck you. ((ironic smile))

Diego’s playful and romantic commentary, “Khalil is in love with you” (line 3), positions Khalil and Ellen as animated figures in an imaginary love story. This allows Diego to playfully comment upon and evaluate the other two children’s romantic feelings in their presence. To start with, both Khalil and Ellen actively resist the implied engagement in a romantic relationship (lines 4–5). However, instead of pursuing a stance of resistance, Ellen aligns with the playful framing of the teasing (9–10). She now positions Diego as a discursive figure replaying how he literally has asked her “to go steady” (line 10). The playful stylization of the reproduced utterance is emphasized by the affective stance of the narrator, Ellen, both voicing Diego’s romantic affective stance of love toward her and signaling her affective co-involvement. In stylizing the Other through reported speech, Ellen makes use of a form of “double-voicing” whereby “in one discourse, two semantic intentions appear, two voices” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 189). Interestingly, Diego also shifts footing and responds to Ellen’s playful stylization with an affective alignment confirming his affective co-involvement in the romantic relationship, enforced by smiling and looking at Ellen (lines 11–12). At this point, Khalil starts to laugh while looking at Diego (line 13), who in response takes on a mocking but playful stance toward Khalil, threatening to hit him while swinging the hammer: “I will throw this” (lines 15–16). One way to understand Diego’s rapid shift in footing from a playful romantic stance to a more aggressive but playful, mocking stance display is that showing romantic 71

Ann-Carita Evaldsson

feelings of love for a girl in the presence of another boy is a face-threatening act perceived with a mixture of fear and excitement especially among the boys (Eder, Evans and Parker, 1995). In this case, Khalil’s laughter along with Diego’s playful, but mocking stance display triggers Ellen to elaborate the romantic telling with more details. In line with Goffman’s dramaturgical nature of talk, the boy and the girl in co-telling the love story are “[…] not engaged in giving information, but in giving shows” (Goffman, 1974, p. 508). Citing Goffman’s (1974) work on frame analysis, Goodwin (1990, p. 230) argues that “by telling a story a speaker is able to bring alive in the midst of ordinary conversation what is, in essence, a vernacular theatrical performance”. Through the affective reported speech, “I love you” (line 17), Ellen not only reports about the two children’s past romantic dialogue but playfully replays and comments upon it while reframing the stylized performance through her exaggerated affective stance toward the reconstructed dialogue: “like a very long” (line 17). The theatrical and humorous dramatization enables the audience to re-experience and react to the events as they unfold (Goodwin, 1990). The fact that Diego responds with a playful insult, “fuck you”, bodily keyed with an ironic smile (line 19), indicates the boys’ ambiguous orientation toward talk about romantic love as both exciting and face-threatening, along with a desire to downplay embarrassing acts.

From playful stylizations to serious comebacks and gay labeling The last two excerpts will illustrate how the potentially face-threatening act of disclosing a romantic relationship triggers the boys to shift into more aggravated comebacks. In what follows, Diego targets Khalil and Ellen, restaging their romantic relationship within a scripted fairytale structure: “That was the day when Khalil …” (Excerpt 4a lines 1–2). The scripted storytelling format provides an imaginary framework for Khalil to stage an upgraded comeback by transforming the two boys into discursive figures in an emerging romantic homosexual relationship: “[…] when Diego and Alex got married” (line 5): Excerpt 4a 1 2 3

Diego:

↑De va da:gen när Khalil insåg att han e kär i Ellen ↑That’s the da:y when Khalil realized he’s in love with Ellen [((smiles at Alex))

4

Alex

[((smiles at Diego))

5

Khalil:

Ja ser dagen när Alex å Diego gifte: se::j I see the day when Alex and Diego go:t marrie::d

6

Ellen:

Ahh va

[gu:ll-

Ahh how [cu:e7

Khalil:

[ för att dom va så ↑FUCKIN BÖGIGA dom där [because they’re so ↑FUCKIN FAGGY

8 9

Ellen:

Kom [(hit) ni e faktis gulliga (xxx)- e bättre Come[(here) you are actually cute (xxx)- is better [simultaneously turning around))

10 11

Alex

[ja:o [yea:hhh ((smiles, closes his eyes, nods at Khalil))

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The scripted framework of a romantic fairytale (“that was the day”) is socially powerful, transforming Khalil and Ellen into discursive figures in an emergent “love relationship” (compare to Excerpt 3 line 4). The playful styling of a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship is performed through the use of stereotypical attributes of “a boy being in love with a girl”, displaying the boys’ interest in the normative heterosexual form of love (Eckert, 2011; Renold, 2005). The playful romantic teasing limits the boys’ ability not only to be friends with girls but also to display intimate alignments of friendship with other boys. When Alex who is a close friend of Diego, looks at him encouragingly, the third boy Khalil playfully transforms their affective alignments into an imaginary homosexual relationship (lines 3–5). The playful stylization of the two boys’ homosexual relationship is presented in an ambiguously playful turn that invites both serious and playful responses. The playful framing allows Ellen to render positive commentaries on their imaginary homosexual relationship as being “ahh how cu:e” (meaning “how cute”) (line 6). In so doing she exploits linguistic forms that are linked to a more traditional view of sexuality as primarily based on heterosexual relationships of love. At this point Khalil, who started the homosexual teasing, shifts footing now openly displaying his disgust with the two boys, calling them “FUCKING FAGGY” (line 7). In response Alex, silently distances himself from the derogatory gay labeling, closing his eyes and nodding, simultaneously whispering “yea:hh” (lines 10–11), Thereby he indirectly aligns with the playful stance previously displayed by Ellen (lines 6 and 8–9), which defies a normative heterosexual pattern of love. Diego, on the other hand, shifts footing and responds with a mocking stance, taking the form of a competitive intra-male contest to playfully undo his peer to avoid being laughed at (Excerpt 4, Figure 5.4a, line 13). Excerpt 4b

Figure 5.4a and 5.4b The boys shift in footing from mocking to playful embodied stances

13

Diego:

((pretends to hit Alex with a hammer)) (Figure 5.4a)

14

Alex

[((laughs))

15

Khalil:

([(laughs))

73

Ann-Carita Evaldsson 16

Diego:

17

Alex

((stands up and throws a piece of paper on Khalil))

18

Diego

((smiles and laughs while looking at Alex)) (Figure 5.4b)

Kolla han e ↑dachri ((pekar)) ja ä inte ↑dachri Look he’s a ↑cock ((points at Alex)) I’m not a ↑cock

Triggered by the two boys’ laughter (line 14), Diego upgrades his aggravated but playful mocking stance display by delivering a code-switched sexual insult: “look he’s a cock”, using the word “dachri” in Arabic for “cock”) (line 16). Here, a code-switched sexual insult produced with heightened affect functions both to affectively align with Khalil, and to distance himself from the embarrasing embodied forms associated with a homosexual relationship of love with his friend Alex. Simultaneously, the contrastive use of the first-person pronoun “I” in the utterance “I’m not a cock” indexes a boastful heterosexual masculine stance for Diego. At this point, Alex suddenly appropriates a theatrical playful stance accompanied by laughter while he in an upright bodily position stages a comeback by throwing a piece of paper at Khalil (line 17). The playful comeback functions both to distance himself from Kahlil and to display his affective alignment with his close friend Diego, who now joins with laughter (Figure 5.4b line 18). Thereby the two boys index their affective alignments and friendship as neither “cu::te” nor “fucking faggy”. At the same time, the boys’ playful but aggravated stance displays demonstrate how cultural norms enter into their peer interaction, and can police and produce ‘acceptable’ (heterosexual) masculinities, and maintain both gender and sexual peer group hierarchies (cf. Renold, 2005, p. 133; Swain, 2004).

Conclusion and future directions In her work on affect and discourse, Wetherell (2013, p. 364) shows how Goodwin’s (2006) multimodal interactional approach to the embodied meaning-making practices that make up girls’ friendship groups “puts both affect and discourse back where they should be within emergent patterns of situated activity, and makes these patterns, as they need to be, the main research focus”. In line with this argument, in this chapter, I have presented ethnographic research within linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics and ethnomethodology that pays careful attention to how preadolescent girls and boys build their own social worlds in moment-to-moment interaction through affective stancetaking practices. Importantly, these studies indicate that an ethnographic approach combined with multimodal, and indexical perspectives on affect and stance permits us to examine how cultural concerns enter into preadolescent children’s peer interaction through which they affectively align themselves and hence build identities and local orders while they index normative forms of gender, sexuality and affect in local peer group contexts (cf. Evaldsson, 2021; Goodwin, 2006). The interaction visible in Excerpt 1 shows how a peer group of girls display highly affective stances by using language, the body and the spatial environment, in a deliberately stylized playacting of a ‘catfight’ in response to a transgressive peer group behavior– and, in short, to make fun of and strengthen peer-group alignments and build mutual animosity toward the reported offender (cf. Evaldsson and Svahn, 2017). Through these stylized affective stance acts, the girls justify their right to display a powerful aggressive stance of fighting back while they index broader cultural stereotypes of feminine gender into their performances (see also Excerpt 2). By repetitively staging gossip disputes and derogatory insults, animating and stylizing others in constant micro dramas in school, the girls collaboratively engage in and socialize themselves into performing a tough (adolescent) feminine style (cf. Goodwin, 1990, 2006; Eckert, 2002; Eder, Evans and Parker, 1995; Evaldsson and Svahn, 2012, 2017; Mendoza-Denton, 2008). 74

Affect, stancetaking, and gender

The ethnographic studies reviewed here demonstrate the creative agency of preadolescents not only in collectively displaying negative affect such as anger and aggression indexing negative categorizations of peers, but also in doing so through jointly performed playful and humorous stances, rendering their mocking stance displays highly creative and highly dynamic. A central finding is that preadolescents are provided with powerful means in stylized performances of others to enact, test and even challenge authoritative stances and to explore relations among different voices that are important both to the local order at hand as well as to the continuing production of social categories (gender, sexuality, age, class, ethnicity and race) that are available to the peer group in the broader community (cf. Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2011). For example, Excerpts 3 and 4 illustrated how a peer group of boys engaged in playful stylized performances of imaginary romantic relationships to address feelings of excitement, fear and embarrassment, indicating that heterosexuality had a special significance, linked to status and popularity, in the boys’ peer culture (Andreasson and Evaldsson, 2022; Eckert, 2011; Renold, 2007). The boys used mocking stance displays and sexual insults to undercut a friend’s teasing, to avoid the embarrassment of being laughed at and to build popularity while simultaneously establishing social status and social solidarity while calling into question a transgressive peer group behavior. The playful styling, framed with laughter, in which the boys orient around traditional norms of heterosexuality and the status and relationships in the peer group these norms create (cf. Eckert, 2011) thus shows, as Renold (2005, p. 45) notes, “how (hetero) sexuality and childhood intersect and are negotiated as children make sense of their emerging gender and sexual identities and relation(s)/hips”. In summary, this chapter demonstrates the importance of exploring the complex relationship of language, affect/embodiment and gender in the stancetaking practices of preadolescent girls and boys with respect to how they use multiple elements of performance in their interaction, including language, the body and the material/spatial environment to manipulate stereotypical cultural norms and images while creating multiple representations of self and others (cf. Goodwin and Alim, 2010; Rampton, 2006). As Eckert (2002, 2011) notes, preadolescents are on the move from childhood toward a youth or adult culture, as manifested here in how they appropriate both a playful childish style and a tough teenage one in their peer culture. These emerging developments suggest that conventionalized, stereotypical dimensions of gender, age and sexuality, invoked through local acts of stancetaking, in turn, create new indexicalities that become targets for new acts of stance (Bucholtz, 2009, p. 15). This chapter has provided ethnographic examples of how preadolescents across groupings and cultures are provided with powerful means through acts of stancetaking and stylization of affectively aligning with others and of positioning self and others, allowing them to playfuly test, appropriate and even challenge normative forms of masculine/feminine gender, affect and sexuality in everyday peer group interactions. This calls attention for future research to combine ethnography with interactionally grounded research for examining the creative role that affect through stancetaking and stylized performances play in preadolescents’ peer group interactions for constituting often hybrid identities and social orders, that index stances – and hence build styles and identities – that comes to associate affect with gender and other social categories in local interactional contexts.

Transcription notations Transcripts are based on Jefferson (2004) notation. bu-u- [ ]

a cut-off of the preceding sound an overlap of speech

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Ann-Carita Evaldsson

= (.) so:::rry you ↑ ↓ DOG here, did. °soft° .>quick< ( ) ((walking))

no break or gap between turns brief interval (less than 0.2 seconds) within or between utterances a sound stretch, the number of colons indicating a prolongation underline indicates emphasis shifts into high pitch shifts into low pitch loud talk is indicated by upper case a comma indicates continuing intonation a full stop indicates falling, final intonation softer, quieter sounds talk speeds up talk slowe down talk is not audible non-verbal activity

Note 1 Corresponding Author: Ann-Carita Evaldsson, Department of Education, Uppsala University, Sweden. Orcid: 0000-0002-6556-4494.

Further reading Bucholtz, M. (2009). From stance to style. Gender, interaction and indexicality in Mexican immigrant youth slang. In A. Jaffe (ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives (pp. 146–170). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eckert, P. (2011). Language and power in the preadolescent heterosexual market, American Speech, 86(1): 85–97. Evaldsson, A.-C. (2021). Examining girls’ peer culture-in-action: Gender, stance and category work in girls’ language practices. In J. Angouri and J. Baxter (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality (pp. 304–319). London: Routledge. Goodwin, M.H. and A. Kyratzis (2011). Peer socialization. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs and B. Schieffelin (eds.), The Handbook of Language Socialization (pp. 365–390). Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.

References Andreasson, F. and A.-C. Evaldsson (2022). Jocular language practices in young boys’ performances of romantic relationships within their local peer culture, Childhood, 29(4): 471–477. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. M. Holquist (ed.), translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Brown, L.M. and M. Chesney-Lind (2005). Growing up mean: Covert aggression and the policing of girlhood. In G. Lloyd (ed.), Problem Girls: Understanding and Working with the Troubled and Troublesome (pp. 74–86). London: Routledge Falmer. Bucholtz, M. (2009). From stance to style. Gender, interaction and indexicality in Mexican immigrant youth slang. In A. Jaffe (ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives (pp. 146–170). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corsaro, W.A. (2018). The Sociology of Childhood. 5nd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pin Forge Press. Eckert, P. (2002). Constructing meaning in sociolinguistic variation. Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, November 2002. Eckert, P. (2011). Language and power in the preadolescent heterosexual market, American Speech, 86(1): 85–97. Eder, D., C. Evans and S. Parker (1995). School Talk: Gender and Adolescent Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Affect, stancetaking, and gender Evaldsson, A.-C. (2002). Boys’ gossip telling: Staging identities and indexing (non-acceptable) masculine behavior, Text, 22: 1–27. Evaldsson, A.-C. (2005). Staging insults and mobilizing categorizations in a multiethnic peer grou, Discourse & Society, 16(6): 763–786. Evaldsson, A.-C. (2007). Accounting for friendship: Moral ordering and category membership in preadolescent girls’ relational talk, Research on Language and Social Interaction, 40(4): 377–404. Evaldsson, A.-C. (2021). Examining girls’ peer culture-in-action: Gender, stance and category work in girls’ language practices. In J. Angouri and J. Baxter (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality (pp. 304–319). London: Routledge. Evaldsson, A.-C. and J. Svahn (2012). School bullying and the micro-politics of girls’ gossip telling. In S. Danby and M. Theobold (eds.), Disputes in Everyday life: Social and Moral Orders of Children and Young People (pp. 297–322). Bingley: Emerald. Evaldsson, A.-C. and J. Svahn (2017). Staging social aggression. Affective stances and moral character work in girls’ gossip telling, Research on Children and Social Interaction, 1: 1–27. Fine, G.A. (1987). With the Boys: Little League Baseball and Preadolescent Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of Talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction, Journal of Pragmatics, 32: 1489–1522. Goodwin, C. (2007). Interactive footing. In E. Holt and R. Clift (eds.), Reporting Talk (pp. 16–46). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, M.H. (1990). He-said-she-said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Goodwin, M.H. (2006). The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion. Oxford: Blackwell. Goodwin, M.H. (2011). Engendering children’s talk. In E. Stokoe and S. Speer (eds.), Conversation and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, M.H. and S. Alim (2010). ‘Whatever (neck roll, eye roll, teeth suck)’: The situated coproduction of social categories and identities through stance taking and transmodal stylization, Linguistic Anthropology, 20(1): 179–194. Goodwin, M.H., A. Cekaite and C. Goodwin (2012). Emotion as stance. In A. Peräkylä and M.-J. Sorjonen (eds.), Emotion in Interaction (pp. 16–42). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodwin, M.H. and A. Kyratzis (2011). Peer socialization. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs and B. Schieffelin (eds.), The Handbook of Language Socialization (pp. 365–390). Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Goodwin, M.H. and A. Kyratzis (2014). Language and gender in peer interactions among children and youth. In S. Erlich, M. Meyerhof and J. Holmes (eds.), The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality (pp. 509–528). London: Wiley-Blackwell. Jaffe, A. (2009). Introduction: The sociolinguistics of stance. In A. Jaffe (ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives (pp. 3–28). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction, Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, 125: 13–34. Kehily, M.J. and A. Nayak (1997). Lads and laughter: Humour and the production of heterosexual hierarchies, Gender and Education, 9(1): 69–88. Mendoza-Denton, N. (2008). Homegirls: Symbolic Practices in the Making of Latina Youth Styles. Oxford: Blackwell. Morgan, M. (2002). Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, E. (1992). Indexing gender. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (pp. 335–358). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, E. (1993). Constructing social identity: A language socialization perspective. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 26: 287–306. Ochs, E. (1996). Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In J. Gumperz and S. Levinson (eds.), 407– 437). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, E. and B. Schieffelin (1989). Language has a heart, Text, 9: 7–25.

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Ann-Carita Evaldsson Rampton, B. (1999). Introduction to Special Issue: Styling the Other, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3(4): 421–427. Rampton, B. (2006). Crossing. Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Routledge. Renold, E. (2005). Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities: Exploring Children’s Gender and Sexual Relations in the Primary School. London and NY: Routledge. Renold, E. (2007). Primary school “Studs”: (de)constructing young boys’ heterosexual masculinities, Men and Masculinities, 9(3): 275–297. Shuman, A. (1986). Storytelling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts by Urban Adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simon, R., D. Eder and C. Evans (1992). The development of feeling norms underlying romantic love among adolescent females, Social Psychology Quarterly, 55(1): 29–46. Speer, S. (2005). Gender Talk. Feminism Discourse and Conversation Analysis. London: Routledge. Swain, J. (2004). The resources and strategies that 10–11-year-old boys use to construct masculinities in the school setting, British Educational Research Journal, 30(1): 167–185. Thorne, B. (1993). Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. Buckingham: Open University Press. Wetherell, M. (2013). Affect and discourse – What’s the problem? From affect as excess to affective/discursive practice, Subjectivity, 6(4): 349–368.

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6 ENGLISH AS “THE GAY COMFORT ZONE” OF HYBRID YOUTH IDENTITIES Brandon William Epstein1 Introduction Few English-language studies have been published about Israeli youth performances of non-normative and/or queer2 sexualities (Brooks, 2017; Glikman and Elkayam, 2019; Pizmony-Levi et al., 2019). Moreover, those studies mostly presented quantitative analyses and thus little is qualitatively known about how Israeli queer youth linguistically position themselves in relation to their nationality and sexuality. In addition, the Israeli Knesset (2018) demoted Arabic from official language to an undefined, nebulous special status as part of its Nation-State Law. As the direct effects and affects of the law are still unknown, many concerns about actual linguistic practices have been raised. Some include: in what language will queer, Arab youth feel most confident in expressing themselves and their stories? Does this also affect the Hebrew-speaking queer youth equally? To what extent and how do queer Israeli youth use another different linguistic code to describe themselves more accurately? By applying a qualitative lens, this chapter provides some preliminary answers to these questions by illuminating how some queer Israeli youth use English instead of Hebrew and/or Arabic as a discursive resource for national, gender, and sexual identity practice since Hebrew and Arabic do not implement gendered morphosyntax. Firstly, this chapter presents key approaches to youth languaging. By drawing on the work of Higgins (2003) on inner and outer circles of English, that is English mother-tongue communities and English-language learning communities, this chapter provides a brief overview of research on queer youth communicative practices with peer groups. Secondly, I connect resources from the fields of language ideology paradigms, queer theory, and queer pedagogies to show how youth use language in and out of more formal contexts. Finally, I close the chapter with an example taken from my research on how Israeli queer youth use English as a resource to identify both as queer and Israeli in an outer-circle context3. In turn, by sharing this data, I call for a shift within the youth languaging field having youth voices narrate their own journeys into and of language.

Queer youth language practices This section draws on the seemingly disparate fields of youth cultures, queer linguistics, education, and multiple literacies. There are three main reasons for this synthesis. Firstly, it challenges DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-8

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the existing split between research about queer English mother-tongue communities and scholarship about queer English-language learning (ELL) communities. This split is problematic not just because it follows arbitrary geo-sociopolitical lines drawn by governments, but because it also creates linguistic borders that do not explore (ethno)linguistic contact. This also extends to the data presented as there is a dearth of data presented outside of the global North and West (Schreuder, 2021). Secondly, the split also shows a clear lack of a working definition for ‘youth’ and their locations. As it relates to age, the title ‘youth’ ranges anywhere from 13 up until those enrolled in university programs. In addition, there is no general definition of ‘youth’ widely accepted and employed within the field. Thirdly, because youths spend so much of their time within the classroom studying and being socialized at school, it is surprising that most studies regarding youth languaging about sexuality exist outside of the classroom favoring community and/or after-school programs. Finally, existing data as presented in the following subsections has explored how youth performed one identity and rarely how their identities intersect and interact. In what follows, all the studies included in this brief research review show how youth simultaneously used language to identify as queer, perform sexual desire, and discursively construct themselves within their communities of practice (henceforth, CoP) (Jones, 2016).

Queer English mother-tongue communities Studies in this section explore language as an agentive practice for inner-circle English speakers (Higgins, 2003). Therefore, because the participants were all from English mother-tongue communities and locations, their linguistic code remained unmarked unless otherwise stated. Moreover, authors did not explicitly mention immigration or citizenship status or if translation was needed for/by the participants. To begin, Blackburn (2005) argues that the Black, queer youth in her study used language agentively. Her study took place in an after-school program for queer, urban youth in Philadelphia where the participants explain their use of Gaybonics, or gay ebonics. Building on Gee’s (1996) definition of discourse and Anzaldúa’s (1987) theory of borderlands, Blackburn argues that her participants used language as a ‘borderland discourse’. This means that they coded and hybridized their identities while racially identifying and protecting themselves from homophobic face threats outside of their CoP. Gaybonics yielded both in-group pleasure and outside subversion of power to the user (ibid., p. 101). In such a way, her participants’ borderland discourse became a means of taking back power from their oppressors simultaneously fighting against them. Vetter’s (2010) findings, however, differed from Blackburn’s. Whereas Blackburn’s participants used language to synthesize and hybridize their identities, Vetter reported (p. 104) that her participants used language in their school assignments to appropriate and separate their identities. She worked with African American lesbian and gay youth during their writing activities while observing their English-Language Arts classroom. During this time, students were tasked to write an essay in response to their reading and connect it to their own lives outside of school. Interestingly, the students used language as a discursive practice of resistance and distance; they talked around their queerness without ever expressly stating it. Similar to Vetter, Blackburn and Clark (2011) used a discourse analysis approach to problematize where certain ways of talking about LGBTQ literature during a community after-school program could be solely liberatory or solely oppressive. This combated the institutionalized heteronormativity found within schools as well as caricatures of LGBTQ representation within literature. In such a way, the participants in Blackburn and Clark’s study operationalized homonor80

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mative talk around LGBTQ literature as ‘post-gay’ (see Ghaziani, 2011). This means that sexual identity was no longer a site of struggle (‘them versus us’ discourse) but instead is an unmarked social category (‘them and us’ discourse) (Blackburn and Clark, 2011). Despite seemingly more liberatory speech, Blackburn and Clark (2011, p. 244) also found queer discourses problematic because they “might actually serve to reinforce the hypersexualization of LGBTQQ people and the heteronormative notion that people who are not straight are not normal”. Jones (2016) found comparable queer discourses within a British LGBTQ youth group she studied. She argued that youth constructed their queer identities as post-gay because they grew up during the peak of neoliberal British society. She continued that their identities were not just discursively constructed within their CoP, but they were also mediated by larger cultural discourses and ideologies (Jones, 2016, p. 130). Thus, to construct their in-group identities, the youth enacted racist discourses towards South Asian people as their CoP assumed the inherent homophobia of all South Asian and Muslim communities. Moreover, Jones (2018, p. 64) argued elsewhere that because the youth explained prior harassment due to their queerness, they understood that they must reject anything that could index heightened expressions of sexual deviance such as campness. This is not to argue that they experienced internalized homophobia or indexed homonormativity. On the contrary, youth that participated in her Northern England LGBT youth group “[did] not simply normalise their gayness by likening it to heterosexuality, but actively reject[ed] the significance of their sexuality in an effort to make it unremarkable” (p. 72). Thus, their discursive strategies were less for their own approaches about identity construction and more about those othering them. Not unlike Jones (2018), Romeo et al. (2017) argued that urban, Midwestern American youth used homophobic and misogynist language to index and regulate solidarity with friends demarking in-group versus out. In turn, they found that homophobic and misogynist terms indexed masculinity and femininity rather than specific gender expression and sexual orientation. Interestingly, the participants of their study did note, however, that the intent behind their use of these terms mattered more than the terms themselves; they would never use the terms with someone they did not know (ibid., pp. 417–418). In doing so, it was important for youth to think about how using these terms for solidarity may have provided more insight into relational contexts and begin to combat heteronormative systems of power. Proving this point, Johnson (2017, p. 14) argued that […] schools and classrooms […] uphold[ing] hegemonic ideologies by privileging Standard English as well as heteronormative ways of being […] may alienate students who are linguistically diverse, […] minority populations, […] gender nonconforming, and/or who identify (or are perceived) as [LGBTQ] […] As a result, education can act as a practice of dominance and oppression for these youth. Thus, Johnson (ibid.) explored the writing and literacy practices queer Black youths in a high school writing club. She found that because writing constructs and enacts spaces and identities both socioculturally and ontologically, the youths expressed and negotiated their hybrid identities by their own standards during club writing rather than school assignments.

Queer English-language learning communities Studies included in this section focus on sexual identities that were translated from and/or in relation to their mother tongues other than English. More specifically, these studies either existed in outer-circle (Higgins, 2003) contexts or remained within an inner-circle context but centered 81

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around ELLs. Therefore, research included below specifically noted which language and/or linguistic code the youth used to story themselves. Firstly, Bucholtz and Skapoulli (2009, p. 3) argued that identities, especially sexual identities, emphasize “the local, as both a geographic place and a cultural space […] embedded within a global semiotic and material milieu […] As a result, young people increasingly move through a mosaic discourse space, participating in its reproduction and transformation”. Therefore, CoP analyses of discourse cannot and do not fully explain or generalize (sexual) identity practice for ELL youth. Their identities are mediated and negotiated not just by those around them but also through their own cultural and sociopolitical perspectives. Thus, Bucholtz and Skapoulli state that an intersectional approach must be included in an analysis of youth language because the local and the global exist synergistically. Nelson (2010) explored this point within a classroom setting to investigate what resources (dis)allowed a student from constructing his gay identity across both Spanish and English. In doing so, Nelson (ibid., p. 448) argued that for many queer-identified ELL students the “English language functions as a sort of gay lingua franca that facilitates entry into a global gay community”. As such, English afforded the student the ability to freely escape the confines of Spanish and Mexican culture as English was not bound to the same cultural and sociopolitical ideologies. Nelson (2012) continued this point when she argued that classrooms, specifically ELL and other multicultural classrooms, serve as a central location for identity negotiation. She argued that classrooms must account [for] how transglobal gay discourses yield new subject positions that can counter wounded identities; how gay-victim discourses are being countered by “normal”-queer-youth discourses; and how these different discourses circulate in tandem in classroom interactions. (ibid., p. 95) Therefore, she continues, classrooms must use pedagogies of inquiry to queer the classroom. These pedagogies include being more student-centered in voice and approach; problematizing both hetero- and homonormativity; and finally deconstructing safe space discourses (Pascal et al., 2022) as normative because they reify the heterosexist curriculum and are abject/absent of sexuality (Paiz and Coda, 2021). Although Bristowe et al. (2014) did not explicitly research the intersections of queer youth identities and language, they provided further insight into how ELLs choose the linguistic codes in which they express themselves. They agreed with Blommaert (2010) that a linguistic repertoire approach is much more equipped for analyses of youth languaging because “multilingualism is […] a collection of specific resources which include concrete accents, language varieties, registers, genres and modalities […] grounded in people’s biographies” (Bristowe et al., 2014, p. 230). In their study of South African high school learners, they explored students’ discourses and ideologies around the diverse languages they spoke in relation to their status as ELLs. They worked to show how youth attached language to different ideas of selfhood external to the everyday subject. This point was important because youth (re)produced their identities based on everyday approaches to citizenship, family, gender, race, sexuality, and socio-geopolitics.

Queer(ing) Israeli youth voices In this section, I share my own data on queer youth mediating and negotiating their hybrid identities via English, though outside of the Global North/West and as ELLs. The purpose of sharing 82

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this data is three-fold: (1) it documents linguistic performances of socio-geopolitical identity as simultaneously Western and non-Western; (2) it looks at the cross-linguistic influence of an additional language on the development and re-indexing/re-imagining of mother tongues and sexual identities; and (3) it addresses a dearth of non-normative sexualities in second language development research. The data below come from a larger case-study where Israeli queer youth map their life-histories socioculturally, nationally, and (ethno)linguistically via their multilingual and hybrid identities. The study attempted to answer how Israeli queer youth use English to identify and perform their Israeliness and queerness. I collected the data between 2020 and 2022 using a case-study approach (Houser, 2015). Participants signed up on the project’s website after initial contact via social media, Israel Gay Youth’s newsletter, or recommendation from parents, teachers, or friends who assumed their interest in the study. Thereafter, I conducted between four and five hour-long, semi-structured, ethnographic interviews with each participant via Zoom outside of school hours due to COVID-19 restrictions put in place by the Israeli Ministry of Education. In subsequent interviews, I explored English use both inside and out of the classroom. Both because the study was about their English language use and my developing Hebrew, English served as a common language between me and the participants. Though I recognize the potential limitations to my data in using only English between us, it also served to purposefully select (Houser, 2015) participants for this case-study. Despite differences in ethnicity, geographic location, and linguistic competences, two of the six total youth narratives from my study, Dayan and Rafael, will be shown below. They demonstrated their navigation and mediation of their sexual, national, and linguistic identities via English while being physically located in Israel. I thematically coded (Hammersely and Atkinson, 2007) their narratives and analyzed them via critical discourse analysis (Lazar, 2007) and narrative analysis (Wortham, 2001). This combination of methods best problematizes regimes of power and language ideologies (Woolard and Schieffelin, 1994; Cavanaugh, 2020) within their narratives simultaneously. In turn, this section explores the queer and multiple discursive strategies Dayan and Rafael used in search of sexual and (ethno)linguistic citizenship.

English as the “gay comfort zone” Dayan, 21 from Ashdod, identified as non-binary using the pronouns they/their/theirs. Dayan considers themself to be a native bilingual4 of Hebrew and English despite their parents being immigrants from Georgia. However, Dayan’s story was not always neatly located having spent much of their childhood between London and the Tel Aviv suburbs. In London, they felt like an “alien” because of their use of Hebrew and “stuck” because they only interacted within the Jewish community due to their religious upbringing. In the suburbs of Tel Aviv, however, they felt like a “weirdo” because of their knowledge and use of English in addition to their queerness. For them, English provided an “escape” and therefore solace within their sexual and linguistic identities. Dayan started by locating themself as queer/non-binary, a part of GenZ, and Israeli. They discussed the weight of English in their life because they couldn’t find themselves within the boundaries of Hebrew as a language. They explained that: English provided me with not only like a lot of terms. It provided me with a whole, brandnew culture […] I didn’t have any type of idea that I was like this non-binary person until I’ve heard it because I never heard a term for a non-binary person in Hebrew. I never heard that: never from my environment, never from like textbooks, from my teachers, from my 83

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parents. I have never heard that [here] […] For pretty much all [of] everything stems from English. My whole identity stems from English. For them, English surveyed a space to explore different and multiple gender identities whereas Hebrew denied them that opportunity. For Dayan, English acted as not just a compass, but it was also a means of escape by providing a “whole, brand-new culture”. They continued on about the dearth of linguistic and agentive possibilities for them in their day-to-day environment, albeit in textbooks or through teachers and/or parents. Instead, they found their whole self through English having to exit Israel via readings, travel, and the internet. Throughout this quote, Dayan used vocabulary related to location, movement, and orientation. For example, their use of “space” and “escape” began to map the borders that linguistically blocked them from agency within Hebrew that English reconfigured. This proves that life-histories and identities do not always take a straight route; the journey often queers itself, having to meander and balance expectations from home, school, work, etc. (Ahmed, 2006). Compounding that with a linguistic code that set-ups gendered and sexual roadblocks, they found themself searching for resources elsewhere outside of the geo-sociopolitical borders of their home country and the linguistic bounds of their mother tongue. Thus, for Dayan, existing, mediating, or even negotiating a sexual and linguistic identity was next to impossible in Hebrew due to very restrictive linguistic reliance on gendered speech. Although they did not explicitly state it, Dayan further separated themself not just from Israel but also from Hebrew towards the end of this quote; they repeated their point of “I never heard that” three times. Moreover, although they didn’t explicitly say “I never heard that here”, it could be argued that here meaning that Israel is logically implied but omitted. This means that Dayan separated sociolinguistic practices within Israel as a queer person from those they either see/hear/use abroad or digitally produce. Therefore, because it exists outside of the geosociopolitical and ethnolinguistic boundaries and realities in and of Israel, “English, it could be argued, is […] a possible arena for bringing both populations closer” (Awayed-Bishara, 2021, p. 7). In addition, as shown in Blackburn’s (2005) study, Dayan’s use of English as a borderland discourse allowed them to try on different linguistic styles of identity practice. In such a way, once afforded the lexical and metapragmatic tools that English provided, Dayan faced a conscious decision: either balance a life in linguistic exile or feel trapped within a language and community that denied them entry. English as an act of resistance, therefore, became a borderland discourse that helped them to negotiate their linguistic (Milani et al., 2020) and sexual citizenship5 (Hartal and Sasson-Levy, 2017). Dayan furthered this last point very clearly in their last two sentences above. For Dayan, nothing in Hebrew allowed them to identify themselves effectively or accurately; they just did not linguistically exist within Hebrew. In metaphorically crossing the linguistic border, however, Dayan was no longer subjectively disjoint; they became whole. They finally had space to successfully mediate and negotiate their identity as well as what it meant to be queer for them and within English juxtaposed to their Israeliness. In a sense, this allowed Dayan to explore and meet an imagined community (Anderson, 1991) because Hebrew was constraining and restraining their modes of self-identification and expression. This can also be found throughout Rafael’s story into English. Rafael, 19 from Jaffa, identified as a cisgender, gay male who used the pronouns he/him/his. He considers himself to be a native bilingual of both Arabic and Hebrew. Although Rafael identified as Arab, he “denied” and “avoided” Arabic culture and language throughout his childhood until now. He explained that English is a more “favorable” language due to “difficulties” understand84

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ing people through Arabic. He also noted that it was a conscious choice to embody and empower English over both Arabic and Hebrew because of his localized and internalized ideologies towards the title of Arab. He explained: I don’t know why[, but] I just find the English language a lot easier to open up […] not only to people but also to myself […]When I was little, I really denied or sort of avoided [Arab culture] and I just really didn’t like learning Arabic a lot […] Most of the time, I really have a difficult time when people talk to me in Arabic […] I guess I just really didn’t feel comfortable with the title Arab […] [M]y entire environment being mostly Arabs that do are like troublemakers […] I guess I didn’t really want to fit in in the same category as them, so I guess I kind of like denied the entire culture as a whole, which, by the way, if it’s [of] any relevan[ce], I do regret that […]. In the except above, Rafael seamlessly combined ideas of ethnolinguistic, sexual, and sociocultural identities in addition to locating himself within multiple imagined communities. He began by distinguishing himself primarily as an English speaker over a Hebrew or Arabic speaker. He also argued that he felt much more at ease both within himself and in conversing with others in English. As he expressed, Rafael assumes less of an affective filter through English than when he tries to express himself or convey a message in either Hebrew or Arabic. This is seen furthermore in his “denial” and “avoidance” of Arabic culture and language. Rafael thus entered two different imagined communities notwithstanding his mentioning of his sexual identity from the onset. On the one hand, he entered an imagined community where English sheltered and nurtured his burgeoning sense of identity. He also described this community as one in which it was easier to communicate with himself and others. On the other hand, he entered into his version of the Arab community from which he so desperately wished to distance himself. In this community, Rafael felt compared to his “troublemak[er]” peers. Thus, he sought to cross the border to English where he was no longer burdened by this comparison. However, he admittedly regretted this conscious decision to linguistically border cross into English as he now feels disconnected from his local, tangible community. Moreover, when denied access to ethnolinguistic or sociocultural equity, agency, and/or power in his CoP, Rafael felt he must use English to feel at home, bordered, and secure. In such a way, like Dayan, Rafael used English as a borderland discourse because he “work[ed] to create such a border […] that distinguish[ed] safe from unsafe and us from them so that communication among some [was] facilitated while that among others, particularly potential oppressors, [was] hindered” (Blackburn, 2005, p. 91). In a sense, English allowed Rafael to redirect his identity mediation and negotiation on his own terms. This was more explicit on a lexical level. Firstly, in his discourse surrounding English, Rafael used mostly affirmative structures where he expressed himself and others generally positively: “comfortable”, “everybody”, “easier”, and “open up” are examples. These grounded and positioned him as part of a group, at ease within himself and that imagined community. Secondly, in his discourse around Hebrew and Arabic, he generally morphosyntactically negated or deflected his positionality. For example, tokens such as “denied”, “avoided”, “didn’t like”, “didn’t feel comfortable”, “those people”, and “troublemakers” distanced Rafael from both his physical community and his imagined community of Arabs. These specific structures and the use of this self-imposed lexicon together further exposed the alienation and distance Dayan also described. 85

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Language ideologies and the socialized self The ways Dayan and Rafael spoke about and around Arabic, English, and Hebrew proved crucial to understanding not just how they queered and used language but also how they performed and synergized their identities. Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) argued that these language ideologies are “not predictable, automatic refle[ctions] of the social experience of multilingualism in which [they are] rooted; [they make their] own contribution as an interpretive filter in the relationship of language and society” (p. 62). In turn, language ideologies synergize the self and/to a linguistic code within a given context. This means that linguistic performances of self cannot be separated from cultural mores or ideologies of/about citizenship or gender and sexuality. Furthermore, language ideologies “link language and power, but also elaborat[e on] the multifunctional nature of language in use, recognizing that language, for instance, doesn’t just express ideas[. It] also forms relationships and moves people to action” (Cavanaugh, 2020, p. 53). Language, therefore, is neither apolitical nor unfixed within a society or culture; it serves a purpose and wields power. For example, Zionist ideologies about the sovereignty and need for a Jewish State are heteronormatively imbedded within Hebrew and its revival (Levon, 2010). This means that gender and sexuality are marked both explicitly on a morphosyntactical level and implicitly on an ideological level. In turn, this indexes what it means to be Israeli and embody a good, Israeli citizen (Levon, 2014). Hebrew, therefore, constrains gendered and sexual performances of identities linguistically and ideologically (Bershtling, 2014). This is not to argue that queer Israelis do not flout these norms by using prescriptively incorrect linguistic norms because in practice they do (Morse, 2008; Levon, 2015). It instead shows that queer Israelis use and purport their own ideologies of language as discursive practices. Dayan and Rafael were no different. Accordingly for Dayan, English became “dominant” and “exclusive” bringing their world into focus “in a much clearer way”. They reflected: The use of English, to me, is not only […] dominant it’s also something that is […] exclusive […] From a young age […] I only used English because […] what I was interested [in] wasn’t available in Hebrew. [So,] I see the world in a much clearer way in English […] [I]t was only in the past couple of years [that] I started to see the beauty of Hebrew. The majority of my life, I only use[d] English in ways to expose myself to the universe. It was my only way to communicate in a way […] as I haven’t found myself within the Hebrew language […] You said that exclusive can mean special. I guess you can; [English] is really special to me. In this interview, Dayan began outlining their ideologies of English as a dominant force in their life. For them, English was also exclusive. They further explained that, in its exclusivity, English allowed for an exploration of everything unavailable to them in Hebrew. Structurally, Dayan separated their ideologies surrounding both English and Hebrew in their word choice. On the one hand, when speaking about and around English, they used militant and hegemonically masculine adjectives like “dominant”, “exclusive”, and “clearer”. They also modified their description of English and its use with the adverb/adverbial phrase “only” three times expressing a comparison. Furthermore, Dayan enacted English through their sense of sight with mainly visual infinitives such as “to see”, “to expose”, and “to find” with an added ability afforded by “to communicate”. English, therefore, discursively allowed Dayan not just to see the world but also themself and themself within it. 86

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Hebrew, on the other hand, remained intangible when they referred to its “beauty”. In this excerpt, Hebrew was neither enacted nor embodied, maybe even going as far as to have problematized Hebrew as effeminate despite its Zionist and masculinist underpinnings (Levon, 2014, 2015). In such a way, both Hebrew and English were “thingified” or commodified via Dayan’s redefinition of “exclusive”. For Dayan, English was special and personal; it was attainable and accessible. Hebrew was not. It remained unattainable and inaccessible. Although they now admittedly find Hebrew beautiful, they explained that their connection, or lack thereof, to Hebrew existed because their bullies used language “incorrectly” and thus violated both their person and Hebrew as a language. However, Dayan explained that their ideas and use of Hebrew are in a renaissance: When I use Hebrew, it’s like I’m […] reconnecting with my roots […] I keep seeing it as a holy thing; it’s something sacred to use […] [W]hen you speak it correctly, when I write it correctly, it’s something that is completely […] bonding. Whenever I speak Hebrew […] I see it as […] holding an ancient artifact that I could break [at] every single moment […] It’s like a fine china […] I don’t think I use it perfectly. I don’t think anyone does actually […] I guess you could say that my connection with the Hebrew language is so personal that sometimes it kept me from actually enjoying it. In this excerpt, Hebrew reconnected Dayan to their roots be that religious, linguistic, and/or geographic. Interestingly, their description of Hebrew was twofold: both as a tangible thing and as a religious dogma. Firstly, they used a simile to commodify Hebrew likening it to fine china. Similar to that fine china, Dayan looked upon Hebrew for its beauty, status and value, but it was never used fearing improper use or even breaking it. In such a way, Dayan recognized that this reverence for Hebrew had deterred them from entering into Hebrew linguistically as it was so personal and they feared misusing it. However, they also explained that Hebrew is “a holy thing” and “sacred”. These could more specifically be the “roots” Dayan mentioned at the beginning of this excerpt and thus linguistically synergized their ideas of selfhood and agency to Hebrew. This shows both an ideological and ontological evolution. Therefore, Dayan’s use of the gerund “bonding” was especially poignant and astute. Bonding pointed to both a personal and relational connection while also gluing back together something that was broken like fine china, to use Dayan’s simile. Like Dayan, Rafael detailed his ideas surrounding language as context dependent. Interestingly, Rafael also invoked ideologies of holiness and national identity when talking about Hebrew just like Dayan. This changed, though, when explaining his ideologies around Arabic as previously discussed. He instead felt othered and unconnected. However, Rafael agreed that English is both usable and equitable. In the excerpt below, Rafael explained how English is the “gay comfort zone”. He expounded: I hardly connect with the gay community in Israel […] I guess I subconsciously just connected the two [English and queerness]. (pauses slightly) [It’s] the gay comfort zone. It’s like gay culture can happen anywhere. You don’t need to go someplace. You don’t need a holy land to go to. Like, okay, cool. You’re queer, great! Put up a flag […] [G]reat, but what now? *chuckles* […] [English is also] not located anywhere, it’s all around. Here, Rafael separated between imagined communities: Israeli gays versus gays using English more generally without geolocation. Because he did not feel at ease within the Israeli gay community, Rafael labeled English as “the gay comfort zone”. This is not unlike Nelson’s studies (2010, 87

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2012) above where queer language learners use English as a “gay lingua franca”. In such a way, Rafael ironically analogized the lexical tokens “holy land” and “flag” for three different discursive purposes. Firstly, by saying “You don’t need a holy land to go to”, Rafael added to Dayan’s ideologies in that Hebrew is bound to both ethnolinguistic traditions as well as a geopolitical location. Rafael therefore directly indexed Israel when stating “holy land” without having to state where the language was bound. This also makes being an Arab citizen of Israel near linguistically impossible per the execution, jurisdiction, and legislation of the 2018 Nation State Law. Secondly, Rafael entered the larger imagined community of anglophonic gays more globally. This imagined community then has English as the unifying factor across cultures and transnationally. He no longer needed to code-switch or negotiate identities based purely on group context; he could fully hybridize his identities because the group has a neutral linguistic code. Finally, in using English as the great equalizer, Rafael orientalizes (Said, 1979) both Hebrew and Arabic by indexing them as lacking or intolerant of hybrid identities. Therein, Rafael’s use of English separates and whitewashes his linguistic and sexual citizenship erasing him of his ethnolinguistic histories and ideologies. This goes further when analyzing Rafael’s inculcation of a “flag” as to raise a flag is to establish one’s voice and power, demanding respect and exaltation from its peers (Hartal and Sasson-Levy, 2017). Moreover, within the “gay comfort zone”, Rafael went on to explain that English eased and calmed him linguistically. In English, he does not need to overthink; he just is. He continued that: It’s a lot easier for me in English because I can say whatever I want […] and I won’t regret it after. In Hebrew, most of the times I just rethink my sentence [a] thousand times and even when I say *snickers lips* Well, I should have said something else or said it like that or maybe explain[ed] it a little more. It’s like in English, I could just straight up say what I want to say without going into too many loops. Structurally, Rafael clearly delineated English from both Hebrew and Arabic. English for him was “a lot easier”, understandable, and comfortable. Through English he was clear and succinct. English was also actionable through the verb “to say” and therefore he could express himself. Conversely, in Hebrew, Rafael felt trapped in “too many loops” or had to “rethink [his] sentence [a] thousand times.” The Rafael that spoke Hebrew was pensive, cognitive, and cerebral through verbs like “to rethink” and “to explain”. These differ from “to say” because, for Rafael, what was said upon first utterance was comprehended at face value without need for further expansion or description. In addition, Rafael’s ideologies around Hebrew were discursively negated when he snickers his lips. This is interesting because, depending on linguistic code and culture, snickering your lips has a nuanced meaning. For Hebrew and Arabic speakers, snickering lips culturally and discursively indicates negation as in Rafael snickers his lips to signal that he was changing and/or negating his previous statement. However, for Anglophones, snickering lips indexes disapproval, distaste, disagreement, and/or disrespect. This nuanced discursive and metalinguistic practice innately imbued how Rafael viewed himself within Hebrew but also Hebrew as a linguistic code.

Conclusion and future directions In this chapter, the use of English was ideologically an act of linguistic and sexual citizenship that problematized and maybe even contradicted ethnolinguistic policies such as the aforementioned Nation State Law or other culturally contingent identity practices. By Rafael and Dayan using 88

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English, they enacted a bottom-up and queered approach to language use forcing “real, legal” Israeli citizens to see, feel, and hear policies enacted and embodied by the people they affect. This was demonstrated in their queer use of English to subvert several different hegemonies all at the same time. English, firstly, allowed Rafael and Dayan to exit the restrictions imposed upon them via Hebrew and Arabic and they were thus free to practice multiple identities concurrently. Secondly, their English use escaped ethnography and demographics as it exited their mother-tongue ideologies and paradigms. This in turn allowed for entrance into a global queer imagined community outside of the Israeli queer community. Thirdly, English helped them to escape national borders and ideas of citizenship as they were not discursively confined to Israel socio-geopolitically. In conclusion, this chapter followed Nelson’s (2012, pp. 95–98) call for research to include emerging queer epistemologies as it sought to “think queerly”; “think linguistically, multimodally, and educationally”; and “think transdisciplinarily and transnationally”. It did so by centering on queer youth voices in situ using their narratives to explain their own language practices and multilingual, hybrid identities. It also exited the global North and affixed itself to a geolocation that is queerly simultaneously Western and Eastern. In addition, it used an interdisciplinary approach in combining literature and analysis from different disciplines within sociolinguistics, citizenship studies, literacy and education studies. Future research ought to further this multilingual and transnational exploration. It should also include multimodalities and intersections of youth identities online. This research will contextualize and more richly show how youth discursively perform, mediate, and negotiate their hybrid identities through different linguistic codes, media, and locales.

Notes 1 Corresponding author: Brandon William Epstein, The Gender Studies Program, Bar-Ilan University, 604 Katz Building, 3rd Floor, Ramat Gan, 5290002 Israel. Orcid: 0000-0002-3607-0225. 2 By queer, I refer to the vast continuum of gender identities and sexualities expressed in different communities of practice. This is not to negate the ongoing academic and activist debate discussing the function of queer as either a noun, verb, and/or adjective. Instead, I am using queer primarily as an adjective modifying both a youth identity and how language plays a role therein. 3 According to Higgins (2003, p. 618), inner-circle contexts refer to those whose mother tongue is English whereas outer- or expanding-circle contexts refer to those learning English as an additional language either due to colonialist exploits or additional diasporic need. Higgins (ibid.) continued, however, that this distinction is problematic as it continues to idealize native-like language expectations over innovations and developments of English within local contexts. 4 Native bilinguals learn several languages simultaneously and from an early stage. For example, Dayan is a native bilingual of both Hebrew and English because they developed both languages at the same time. This term does not, however, take into consideration the proficiency balance between the two and remains problematic as it furthers discourses of nativeness and hierarchy in language varieties/ideologies. 5 Sexual citizenship queers ideas of citizenship as it includes and normalizes queer people into definitions of the citizen. This means that heteropatriarchal definitions of family, law, and nation can no longer exclude and/or discriminate against queer people.

Further readings Jones, L. (2020). Subverting transphobia and challenging ignorance: The interactive construction of resistant identity in a community of practice of transgender youth, Journal of Language and Discrimination, 4(2): 202–225. King, B.W. (2017). Querying heteronormativity among transnational Pasifika teenagers in New Zealand: An Oceanic approach to language and masculinity, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 21(3): 442–464.

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References Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Fronteras: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. Awayed-Bishara, M. (2021). Linguistic citizenship in the EFL classroom: Granting the local a voice through English, TESOL Quarterly, 55(3): 1–23. Bershtling, O. (2014). “Speech creates a kind of commitment”: Queering Hebrew. In L. Zimman, J. Davis and J. Rawclaw (eds.), Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality (pp. 35–61). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blackburn, M.V. (2005). Agency in borderland discourses: Examining language use in community center with Black queer youth, Teachers College Record, 107(1): 89–113. Blackburn, M.V. and C.T. Clark (2011). Analyzing talk in a long-term literature discussion group: Ways of operating within LGBT-inclusive and queer discourses, Reading Research Quarterly, 46(3): 222–248. Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bristowe, A., M. Oostendorp and C. Anthonissen (2014). Language and youth in a multilingual setting: A multimodal repertoire approach, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 32(2): 229–245. Brooks, O. (2017). IGY: A new model for LGBTQ youth groups? Journal of LGBTQ Youth, 14(2): 191–210. Bucholtz, M. and E. Skapoulli (2009). Introduction: Youth language at the intersection: from migration to globalization, Pragmatics, 19(1): 1–16. Cavanaugh, J.R. (2020). Language ideology revisited, International Journal of Sociolinguistics, 263: 51–57. Gee, J.P. (1996). Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses (2nd ed.). London: Taylor & Francis. Ghaziani, A. (2011). Post-gay collective identity construction, Social Problems, 58(1): 99–125. Glikman, A. and T. Elkayam (2019). Addressing the issue of sexual orientation in the classroom-attitudes of Israeli education students, Journal of LGBT Youth, 16(1): 38–61. Hammersley, M. and P. Atkinson (2007). Ethnography. London: Routledge. Hartal, G. and O. Sasson-Levy (2017). Being [in] the center: Sexual citizenship and homonationalism at Tel Aviv’s Gay Center, Sexualities, 20(5–6): 738–761. Higgins, C. (2003). “Ownership” of English in the outer circle: An alternative to the NS-NNS dichotomy, TESOL Quarterly, 37(4): 615–644. Houser, R.A. (2015). Single-case and single-subject research designs. In R.A. Hauser (ed.), Counseling and Educational Research (3rd ed., pp. 109–120). Los Angeles: Sage Publications, Inc. Johnson, L.P. (2017). Writing the self: Black queer youth challenge heteronormative ways of being in an afterschool writing club, Research in the Teaching of English, 52(1): 13–33. Jones, L. (2016). “If a Muslim says ‘homo’, nothing gets done”: Racist discourse and in- group identity construction in an LGBT youth group, Language in Society, 45: 113–133. Jones, L. (2018). “I’m not proud, I’m just gay”: Lesbian and gay youths’ discursive negotiation of otherness, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 22(1): 55–76. Knesset. (2018). Basic Law: Israel – The Nation State of the Jewish People (S.H. Rolef, Trans.). https://knesset​.gov​.il​/laws​/special​/eng​/BasicLawNationState​.pdf Lazar, M.M. (2007). Feminist critical discourse analysis: Articulating a feminist discourse praxis, Critical Discourse Studies, 4(2): 141–164. Levon, E. (2010). Language and the Politics of Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays in Israel. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Levon, E. (2014). Sexual subjectivities and lesbian and gay narratives of belonging in Israel. In L. Zimman, J. Davis and J. Rawclaw (eds.), Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality (pp. 101–128). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levon, E. (2015). ‘The ideal gay man’: Narrating masculinity and national identity in Israel. In T.M. Milani (ed.), Language and Masculinities: Performances, Intersections, Dislocations (pp. 133–155). London: Routledge. Morse, T. (2008, April 11–13). Hebrew GaySpeak: Subverting a gender-based language [Paper presentation]. Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Symposium about Language and Society – Austin. Texas Linguistic Forum 52, Austin, TX (pp. 204–209). Milani, T.M., M. Awayed-Bishara, R.J. Gafter and E. Levon (2020). When the checkpoint becomes a counterpoint: Stasis as queer dissent, Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada, 59(3): 1659–1687.

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English as “the gay comfort zone” Nelson, C.D. (2010). A gay immigrant student’s perspective: Unspeakable acts in the language class, TESOL Quarterly, 44(3): 441–464. Nelson, C.D. (2012). Emerging queer epistemologies in studies of ‘gay’-student discourses, Journal of Language and Sexuality, 1(1): 79–105. Paiz, J.M. and J. Coda (eds.) (2021). Intersectional Perspectives on LGBTQ+ Issues in Modern Language Teaching and Learning. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pascar, L., Y. David, G. Hartal and B.W. Epstein (2022, September 15). Queer safe spaces and communication. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/acrefore​/9780190228613​ .013​.1197 Pizmony-Levi, O., A. Rogel and G. Shilo (2019). Pride and the true colors of the holy land: School climate for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students in Israel, International Journal of Education Development, 70: 1–10. Romeo, K.E., E. Chico, D. Darcangelo, L.B. Bellinger and S.S. Horn (2017). Youth’s motivations for using homophobic and misogynistic language, Journal of LGBT Youth, 14(4): 411–423. Said, E.W. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vantage Books. Schreuder, M.-C. (2021). Safe spaces, agency, and resistance: A metasynthesis of LGBTQ language use, Journal of LGBT Youth, 18(3): 256–272. Vetter, A.M. (2010). “‘Cause I’m a G”: Identity work of a lesbian teen in language arts, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(2): 98–108. Woolard, K.A. and B.B. Schieffelin (1994). Language ideology, Annual Review of Anthropology, 23: 55–82. Wortham, S. (2001). Narrative in Action: A Strategy for Research and Analysis. New York: Teacher’s College Press.

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PART III

Vulnerability, survival and safe spaces

7 SURVIVAL, LITERACY PRACTICES AND YOUTH CULTURAL ACTIVISM IN THE PERIPHERIES OF RIO DE JANEIRO Adriana C. Lopes and Daniel N. Silva1 Introduction This chapter draws from fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro peripheries to examine how young research interlocutors marshal semiotic resources, the metapragmatics of language and networks of cooperation to rewrite the socio-historical and material subtexts that underlie inequities in Brazil. In dialogue with sociolinguistic studies on youth, racialisation and hierarchisation (Back and Zavala, 2018; Borba, Fabricio and Lima, 2022; Bucholtz, 2002; Fabricio, 2014; Jonsson, Arman and Milani, 2019; Milani, 2022), this study more specifically details the ‘culture of survival’– a cultural trope that emerged in 2012 in conversation with Raphael Calazans, a research participant. Our research group has through the years deployed the notion of survival to understand the creative and agentive ways whereby peripheral youths in Brazil resist marginalisation and structural violence, while simultaneously participating in a creative economy, doing culture, becoming agents of literacy practices and regauging registers (see e.g., Facina, 2022; Facina et al., 2021; Lopes et al., 2017, 2019; Maia, 2017; Silva, 2022, 2023; Silva and Maia, 2022). This chapter builds on three case studies to unpack different dimensions of the culture of survival. The first one, in conversation with Calazans and Janaina Tavares, another young interlocutor, unpacks the notion of ‘literacies of survival’, a concept that we have devised to think through literacies in a context of survival to violence, structural racism and systemic inequities (see Lopes et al., 2017). The second case study engages with the Rede Baixada Literária (‘Literary Baixada Network’), a grassroots collective geared to promoting literacy practices in Rio’s peripheries. In a vignette we build about a young Black library participant who was framed as illiterate by mainstream media discourses, this case documents the friction between stigma and youth activism. The third case study focusses on metapragmatic features of Calazans’s discourse to discuss the creative ways with which he speaks back to elite registers that are used to preclude Blacks from economic redistribution and symbolic recognition. In our fieldwork, we have aimed to throw into sharp relief the voices and worldviews of youth who inhabit Rio de Janeiro’s peripheries. While talk about Brazilian youth is ubiquitous in the public realm, such a sphere is not shaped by what the young population says about themselves, but rather by what is said about them by (adult) others. On the face of it, this chapter zooms in DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-10

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on what a stretch of Brazilian youth, situated at urban peripheries, says about themselves. As is widely known, youth is not simply a biological state, but a linguistic and historic construction that can only be understood in its sociocultural locatedness (Bucholtz, 2002; Gadelha and Alencar, 2021; Mannheim, 1952). This heterogeneity notwithstanding, words such as rebelliousness, irreverence, violence, insolence and subversion are variously used by essentialist discourses to describe 21st youth as though it were possible to universalise a model of ‘being young’ (see Hall, 1996; Hebdige, 2012; Yudice, 2004). Campos and Nofre (2021), for instance, propound that such homogenisation of a radically diverse group is predicated on a dichotomy through which contemporary youth is (mis)understood. On the one hand, youths (and especially poor Black youngsters who live at the margins of society) are oftentimes an object of analysis, control and diagnosis since they are frequently viewed by public authorities as a social problem. On the other hand, such categorisation of youth is hyper-represented in social media and the cultural industry, which contributes to the creation of idols, myths and juvenile behavioural patterns. Such a contrast undergirds an ambivalent narrative that portrays youth as a transitory condition and youngsters as the carriers of socially valued qualities such as energy, dynamism and creativity. This common-sensical understanding is, however, easily challenged by decades-long socialscientific analysis of youth as a cultural phenomenon. The most prominent theoretical tendencies derive from classic ethnographic studies in anthropology about rites of passage (Malinowski, 1929; Mead, 1928), the sociology of youth (Parsons, 1962; Whyte, 2005) and the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (Hall, 1996; Hebdige, 2012). For Bucholtz (2002), youth studies are an ample interdisciplinary field where youth is not framed as an immutable ontological condition, but, instead, as a fundamentally local phenomenon embedded in highly interconnected and mutable global contexts (see Jonsson et al., 2019; Rampton, 2011). Tackling the complexity of defining youth in general terms, Bucholtz (2002) understands it as a shifter (Silverstein, 1976), i.e., as a sign radically dependent on and constitutive of the contexts where it appears. In Bucholtz’s (2002, p. 528) terms, “youth is a context-renewing and a context-creating sign whereby social relations are both (and often simultaneously) reproduced and contested.” Viewing youth as a shifter, hence, brings historicity and cultural locatedness to the centre of analytical attention. This is particularly relevant to our purposes here since, in our research, youth cannot be disentangled from the reality of Latin American and, more specifically, Brazilian peripheries. Social and educational inequalities, systemic racism, criminalisation and the marginalisation of the working classes are conspicuous features of Brazilian society that shape the ways youth is signified in public debates. For example, expressive cultures of the peripheral youth, such as concerts of funk music, a musical genre originating from favelas, tend to be treated by the state and the corporate media as a ‘police case’ (e.g., as spaces for sexual abuse of minors or drug traffic) and not as expressions deserving specific cultural policies (see Lopes, 2011; Facina and Palombini, 2017). This process of stigmatisation also has a significant weight on the strategies youngsters devise to deal with their daily lives and reinvent ways of existing in the world. This context where the lives of Black peripheral youth are precarised and frequently exterminated provides the canvas against which their voices are brought to the fore in our ethnographies. Grounded on ethnographic data, this chapter challenges this portrayal since our focus is not the violence and suffering that are part and parcel of life in these locales. Our aim, instead, is to analyse how youths mobilise various semiotic resources as they do culture, become agents of literacy practices and regauge registers. To do so, we engage with the culture of survival both as an emic cultural trope and an analytic thinking tool. For the Black young music composer Raphael Calazans, art and culture in peripheries are not abstractions; rather, they stem from practices of 96

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surviving the long-standing precarisation of Blacks. Some of the cultural events that we discuss ahead, including the poetry gathering Sarau V and the literacy socialization promoted by a network of community-based libraries, draw from the culture of survival. Fundamentally, these are urban interventions promoted by the Black youths in Rio de Janeiro. As such, they iterate modes of surviving plantation capitalism and other legacies of the transatlantic slave trade (Gilroy, 1993). This expressive culture opposes the criminalisation and mass incarceration of the Black youth by producing language regimes, bodily sensibilities and forms of practical reasoning oriented towards hope. We use interviews and participant observation to parse the youth’s ‘work of hope’ (Bloch, 1986; Borba, 2019; Silva and Lee, 2021), i.e., their semiotic calibration of text, talk and bodily action geared to devising practical and collaborative actions for surviving inequities and flourishing as ethical agents. This chapter, thus, joins in Robbins’s (2013) criticism of the ‘suffering slot’ in anthropology, pursuing instead a ‘sociolinguistics of the good’ among our interlocutors. Robbins (2013, p. 457) voices his critique of the suffering slot in anthropology in these words: today, it is hard to miss the importance of work on suffering. But it is also possible to spot a number of lines of inquiry that […] may be poised to come together in a new focus on how people living in different societies strive to create good in their lives. We thus set out to speak to the ways whereby youth in Nova Iguaçu and Complexo do Alemão recreate life through art and literacy practices against the grain of financial inequity and anti-Black violence which disproportionately impact Black youth in Brazil.

Literacies of survival among peripheral youths We conduct fieldwork in Complexo do Alemão, a group of favelas in the northernmost part of Rio de Janeiro, and Nova Iguaçu, a city in the metropolitan area known as Baixada Fluminense. Favelas are neighbourhoods built by residents themselves, usually on squatted land due to the historical absence of housing policies for the poor. They were first formed at the end of the 19th Century by former enslaved people, who were not provided with employment and housing policies. Compared to more affluent urban areas, favelas usually face precarious healthcare, housing and employment conditions, with less access to cultural and leisure equipment. Around 120,000 people live in Complexo do Alemão, a neighbourhood that has historically been associated with drug trafficking in elite discourses. Nova Iguaçu is a municipality located in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, with a population of some 850,000 people. The city has structural similarities with Complexo do Alemão – for example, both locations have a similar Human Development Index (0.713 for Nova Iguaçu and 0.711 for Complexo do Alemão), compared to higher indexes of Gávea (0.970) and Leblon (0.967), located in affluent regions of Rio de Janeiro. Further, both peripheries are similarly construed in hegemonic discourses as places of crime, violence, and poverty and, thus, deprived of the advantages of Western civilization (such as sanitation, education and culture). Our collaboration with anthropologist Adriana Facina in the project ‘Mapping cultural Productions and literacy practices in three favelas in Complexo do Alemão’ gave us the opportunity to interact with dwellers, activists, artists and teachers in Alemão between 2012 and 2016. Prominent participants of the project were youth activists (Facina et al., 2021; Lopes et al., 2017; Silva, Facina and Lopes, 2015). In 2012, we first met Raphael Calazans, the Black young funk composer we introduced above. Calazans is adamant to point out that culture and art in the favela are paramount to the way dwellers structure their lives. For him, the lack of proper housing leads people to act collectively. From this collective experience, they forge new knowledge, art, literacy 97

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practices and modes of social interaction. In 2017, at the request of the first author of this chapter, Calazans wrote an essay about his trajectories with literacy practices at and outside school. Below, we display an extract of this text (for the whole biographical text and an expanded analysis, see Lopes et al., 2017). Living through the dramatic danger of violence in the day-by-day of police operations and the errands of daily life in order to invent survival, I started reading the world around me. If, on the one hand, poverty, the lack of public infrastructure, the lack of sanitation were like prisons that did not allow us to leave these place, on the other, it was because of this scarcity that I began to learn how to read and write […] my friends and I, even not knowing how to write, wrote about everything we lived and felt in the Complexo. Our games were writing “raps”, about this world where opposites attract and make a frame through which we draw life. Here, living and dying, crying and laughing, pain and happiness were synonymous. (Authors’ translation) Challenging mainstream discourses that associate poverty with crime, the young MC weaves narrative threads from an angle that does not foreground the lack of culture and education. Instead, he speaks of how he came to see writing and knowledge production from within lingering structures of precarisation (see Facina, 2022). For him, learning how to read and write is neither tethered to an Enlightenment understanding of modernity nor to schooling. Rather, it emerges as a response to violence, a kind of survival literacy that needs to be reinvented on a daily basis. Survival has been approached from several philosophical and cultural vantage points. Among these, Derrida (1979) stands out as central to understandings of survival as a cultural imperative. He argues that surviving exceeds the modern life/death dichotomy that is tantamount to discourses of the nation, viewed as an organic substrate that wins over the violent past of pre-modern barbarism. Contra this modern assumption, Derrida (1979, p. 108) propounds that survival “goes beyond both living and dying, supplementing each with a sudden surge and a certain reprieve.” In Calazans’s narrative, this overflow of the notions of life and death is translating the necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003) – that is, “politics as the work of death” (p. 16) – that disproportionately causes the death of young Black men from the periphery by police violence and by the confrontation between state and ‘crime’ in favelas (see Alves, 2018; Machado da Silva and Menezes, 2019). In different interviews, Calazan elaborated on the proximity of death in situations such as the approach of the Caveirão, or ‘Skull’, a war-like police tank that raids favelas in search of ‘criminals’ (see Duncan, 2021). In one particular situation, Calazans found himself ‘dead’ when the traffic scouts announced the arrival of the Skull (see Silva, 2023). Another liminal situation was an occasion when he witnessed the death of a relative in his own home in a violent police raid. This young funk composer’s experiences with writing are thus linked to situations of liminality that differ quite pointedly from those of white middle-class youths in Brazil. Calazans’s metacommentary about his literacy practices as well as that of other young men and women with whom we interact in our fieldwork – such as Janaina Tavares’s, which we discuss later in the chapter – leads us to view culture and literacies of survival not as rudimentary undertakings, but as communicative practices that challenge modern boundaries between life and death. Inspired by de Certeau (1984), we eye survival literacies as encompassing cultural tactics that “reinvent life from within what denies life itself” (Lopes et al., 2019, p. 42). Literacies of survival and the cultural practices stemming from them are forged in inventive and political relations between youths and their territories. Our next example comes from Sarau V, a poetry-reading gathering whose producer, Janaína Tavares, is a young female MC. Janaína became 98

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a central interlocutor in our research. This was due to the fact that she had already been an informal cultural producer in Nova Iguaçu and subsequently became a student of Adriana Lopes at the Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro. Their encounter allowed us to closely follow local cultural projects by Janaína, including Sarau V. Taking place monthly in Baixada Fluminense, Sarau V gathers peripheral youths to read poems, sing and engage in other artistic performances. Janaína underlines that, although the area is bereft of extreme violence, belonging to this territory is a source of pride for the youth. Artists, poets, writers, dancers, cultural and literary activists that host several artistic and cultural events in the region define themselves as baixadenses – a sign that indexes the constitution of a local peripheral identity. However, being a baixadense entails more than having been born in any of the cities that compose Baixada Fluminense. It centrally encompasses ways of inscribing oneself artistically in the territory through practices of belonging and subjectivation. As the artists of Sarau V repeatedly say, só não tem orgulho do seu próprio território quem não faz nada sobre ele (‘those who do not feel proud about their own territory are those who do nothing to improve it’). Our fieldwork in Nova Iguaçu and Complexo do Alemão as well as the rich exchanges we have developed with young artists there show that their calibration of semiotic resources is also a political statement, whereby the peripheral youths build art, culture, language and practical life from otherwise debilitating and precarious conditions. A conspicuous example of this pragmatic regearing is Janaína’s Master’s thesis in applied linguistics, which she wrote under Adriana Lopes’s supervision. In the excerpt below, she scrutinises the reorientation of semiotic resources and everyday practices by peripheral youths: If there is no goalpost on the streets, slippers are used to that end; if there are no traffic pylons, cars are used to close off the streets; if there is no money, a whip-around helps to buy beer and food, a seamstress makes the team’s jerseys, the bloke who owns the grocery store lets people use its restrooms; we are builders, we reclaim what is available, we jury-rig what we need; come rain or shine there is nothing that cannot be solved collectively […] Peripheries are inventive and unflagging. We always deliver. Bridal showers, birthday parties, folkloric festivals, R&B and pagode balls on the sidewalks, funk in the backyard, soccer matches, religious cults. Each street, each evangelical church, each slab and each yard in the periphery become cultural centers. (Tavares, 2022, p. 129) In her portrayal of life in the peripheries of Rio, Janaína showcases how precarisation does not prevent dwellers from devising ways to live liveable lives. Rather, cultures and literacies of survival are predicated on the artistic effervescence and collaborative web that connects people’s lives in these territories. In such a way, everyday spaces are transmogrified into ‘cultural centres’. In Brazil, cultures and literacies of survival, hence, challenge the one-sided story about peripheries told by mainstream actors and institutions by taking over different perspectives in which peripheries are ‘inventive and unflagging’. The life stories of young activists such as Calazans and Janaína showcase collaborative practices whereby youth transform what their territories lack in the raw material on the basis of which to reorient knowledge, daily practices, themselves and the locales where they live.

Reading and enregistering the culture of survival Literary Baixada Network: the periphery that reads Sarau V is but one example of many practices of cultural production, reorientation of artistic knowledge as well as writing and reading that make up youth’s everyday lives in the peripheries. 99

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In an attempt to bring this effervescence of grassroots knowledges, Adriana Lopes hosted an extracurricular course in 2018 titled Letramentos em Direitos Humanos (Human Rights Literacies’) in Instituto Muldisciplinar of the Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro in Nova Iguaçu. The territory of this course is relevant here as it amasses several layers of political change in Brazil. The Instituto Multidisciplinar was built during the progressive governments of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016). Their public policies for democratising higher education for working-class youth changed the class, racial and territorial configuration of public universities (Camargo and Araújo, 2018; Windle and Fonseca Afonso, 2021). An outcome of a partnership between a democratised university and the Literary Baixada Network (henceforth, LBN), the course aimed to foster fruitful exchanges among grassroots literacy agencies and the university. The LBN has had a central role in fomenting writing and reading habits of several young students at the Instituto. Like Calazans and Janaína, these youths are the first generation in their families to access higher education. Importantly, while Nova Iguaçu has low indexes of economic development, it also has a long history of social mobilisation. Inspired by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, LBN is currently composed of young women, most of whom are Black. It oversees 16 community-based libraries in Nova Iguaçu. The female activists and reading facilitators foster pedagogical work whose aim is to widen access to literacy as a tool of social transformation. At this juncture, the LBN young activists bring different narratives that reorient knowledge about territory and literacy practices. For them, facilitating reading activities is not merely a matter of associating language with the referential world. Rather, this is for them a political act whereby they may remake their territories. The activist-facilitators thus weave engaged narratives about themselves, their local attachments and their belonging. Yet, these literacy practices of survival take place against the grain of insidious mainstream discourses that portray peripheral youth as illiterate and pre-modern. The friction between grassroots non-representational views of literacy and hegemonic modernist understandings of the written word is egregious in a narrative vignette we build below about Liliana, a young Black girl who attended the community library’s initiatives.

Liliana: who can be literate before learning how to read? Liliana is a Black 7-year-old girl, resident of Rancho Fundo, a neighbourhood in Nova Iguaçu. Liliana enjoys playing and going to Paulo Freire library. Those who walk through the unasphalted streets cannot imagine that, behind a wooden gate, they will find a colourful oasis full of texts, books and life. In the Paulo Freire library, in addition to bookshelves filled with donated books, there are bulletin boards on the walls with information about ongoing activities, rules and schedules, as well as pictures of books and of people reading. There are also many poetry texts by local authors or statements, such as A Baixada que lê (‘The Baixada that reads’), written on colourful paper or cloth posters, decorating the space and indicating that reading there is a political act. From a very young age, Liliana felt very comfortable there. It was not by chance that the girl won an award as an outstanding reader. The prize recognised her ability to read many books in a short time. Happy about the achievement, the activist-facilitators posted a photo of the reading girl on the library’s Facebook profile, announcing that she had read no less than twenty-three books in a month! At a dizzying speed, Liliana became famous: news about the award spread across social media. Till then, very few people knew the oasis of the Paulo Freire library. People had no idea of her address but were impressed by the peripheral young girl who read many fiction books. Possibly to portray an affirmative story, Quebrando o Tabu (or ‘Breaking taboos’), a left-wing website, shared Liliana’s story on its social media. After this, her story reached an even wider cir100

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culation, resulting in ‘misunderstandings’ that show us a glimpse of ideologies about peripheries and their literacies. The first misunderstanding occurred when Marcelo Freixo, a left-wing politician, decided to share Liliana’s story on social media. However, he mistakenly said that the Paulo Freire Library was in the famous Favela da Maré and not in Rancho Fundo. Although Favela da Maré does have a school library named after Paulo Freire, we think that this event points to certain generalisations that white Brazilian elites hold about peripheries. Lopes’s (2011) research on funk carioca shows that in Brazilian elite discourses, these spaces are frequently referred to generically as ‘favelas’. However, in funk music, favelas have their own proper names and are represented as heterogeneous. Each favela with its own specificity is sung by funk singers as places of reinventing daily life. Although the politician’s mistake was not intentional, we understand that this confusion is indexical of scalar practices (Carr and Lempert, 2016) in elite discourse. That is, through scaling, peripheries and favelas are interpreted in socially loaded perspectives invested by power relations and institutional disputes that define forms of segmenting, territorialising and saying. Thus, in the scalar perspective of the Brazilian elites, it does not matter if we are speaking of neighbourhood Rancho Fundo or Favela da Maré, both are circumscribed as generic spaces of otherness. From the Paulo Freire library’s webpage to Freixo’s social media profile, Liliana’s story circulated broadly. It was even noticed by Fátima Bernardes, who at that time hosted a morning talk show on Globo Television Network. As Bernardes’s staff searched for Liliana to interview her, they found out that the Paulo Freire library was not located in the well-known Favela da Maré, but in the unknown neighbourhood of Rancho Fundo. Eventually, Bernardes’s staff managed to locate Liliana and contacted her mother to invite the girl to appear in the show. The team of journalists was enthusiastically welcomed to Liliana’s home by her family and the community-based library activists. On this very same day, a second misunderstanding percolated Liliana’s story. When they met the girl, Rede Globo’s team realised that Liliana instinctively followed the ritual of collective reading to which she was introduced at the Paulo Freire library. She picked up the book, looked at it, turned it page by page and told the story to a fictitious audience. However, she did not decode the words. In their eyes, Liliana did not align with the image of the reader in the autonomous model of literacy (Street, 2009). The team realised that it was not exactly an individualistic, exceptional, meritocratic story of overcoming difficulty that could be told about the girl, a regular visitor to the Paulo Freire Library. For them, not being able to decode words was the same as being illiterate. For them, Liliana didn’t read, Liliana made it up. The girl was therefore uninvited from the show, which may have triggered rather hopeless feelings. This second misunderstanding – or elitist scalar perspective – about Liliana’s reading performance points to ways in which peripheral subjects challenge hegemonic imaginations of literacies – imaginations based on principles of rationality and individualism that separate illiterate from literate subjects in a binary way (see Bauman and Briggs, 2003; Heller and McEllhinny, 2017). In her analysis of reading practices in North American families, Heath (1982) highlights that white middle-class kids perform reading even before they are literate. At kindergarten age, these children know how to extract meaning from books, relate them to their surroundings and talk about them. This familiarity with reading and the social practices that undergird it derive from exposure to books in bedtime reading events that frequently took place in the households of the white middleclass families in Heath’s research. Citing Scollon and Scollon’s (1979) discussion of how their daughter was literate before she learned how to read, Heath (1982, p. 55) shows that white middleclass kids’ reading performances are positively valued by institutional literacy practices at schools since they are seen as being able to model their oral skills from written sources. In this scenario, 101

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Liliana’s case illustrates that the ways we interact with books are socially constructed and encompass a much wider set of skills that exceed the ability to merely decode words. The journalists’ contempt towards Liliana’s reading is exemplary of a gruelling paradox. White elite kids’ reading performance is regarded as natural and is highly valued. However, performed by Black working-class kids, whose parents hardly had any time to read them bedtime stories, this same kind of reading performance is seen as a caricature not to be commemorated. Otherwise stated, the examples of Liliana (who reads even before knowing how to decode) and Calazans (who writes before knowing how to write) show that being called literate is circumscribed to a very specific racial and class group (see also Bauman and Briggs, 2003; Duncan, 2021; Heller and McEllhinny, 2017; Morris, 2007).

Calazans: peripheral youth speaking to the point The second case study returns to Complexo do Alemão. This section’s protagonist, Raphael Calazans, is the young Black activist we mentioned before. In this section, our aim is to unpack the ways Black peripheral youth resist stigmatising views through imagining semiotic resources and features of enregisterment (Agha, 2007). An interview with Calazans in November 2012 was pivotal to our understanding of the semiotic and linguistic grounds of the culture of survival which underlies peripheral youth’s literacy and cultural practices. When we asked him to explain practices of cultural production in Complexo do Alemão, he said the following: There would be no Complexo do Alemão without culture. And culture is not only art, you know? Graffiti, rap and samba. I think it’s a culture of survival. For example, gatonet [clandestine internet connection] is nothing more than a practice of universalising internet access, right? Gato luz [clandestine electricity] is nothing more than a survival practice that universalises access to electricity. Culture in the favela and mainly in Complexo do Alemão, has been stemmed from solidarity. Then, so, if you live at the bottom part of the hill and have access to the internet, I, living at the top of Grota should also have it. Right? So, we get the wires, connect them to reach everyone. If you live at the bottom of the hill and have basic sanitation, bro, pipe it up from God knows where, connecting the pipes, make the gato, however tough it is, right? So this kind of culture I think is the most important kind of culture, big time, it's incredible, this kind of survival, right, based on solidarity, on an identity like a brotherhood that I think people value the most. And when it is valued they want to legalise it. “Oh, we’ll install cable TV and prohibit gatonet” but this is a culture the favela created. Lan houses, which was invented in the favela and gives access to the internet. And we also have moto-táxi [motorbike taxis]. So the first culture we have is a culture of survival. As Facina (2022) discusses in her account of this interview, Calazans, instead of listing cultural practices in the favela, offers a philosophical explanation of survival as an undergirding trope for culture as it is produced in the favela. Calazans stresses the agency, solidarity and resistance to economic inequality on the grounds of which the favela is invented by its dwellers. The longstanding collaboration we established with him helped us understand how the culture of Complexo do Alemão has always challenged hegemonic discourses about the city. Calazans shows that the favela and its dwellers forge creative solutions to the lack of housing policies – a lingering colonial legacy in Brazil, a country that failed to reintegrate the former enslaved population, who were forced to start the first favelas after the Brazilian monarchy, in 1888, reluctantly abolished the longest and most populous slave-based regime in the Americas. This way of resisting State 102

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abandonment and precarisation and reinventing youth cultural practices is at once a powerful sociolinguistic practice, a plea for social transformation and a political statement. Calazans mobilises semiotic resources such as gatonet, gato luz, gato água (‘clandestine connections of Internet’, ‘electricity’ and ‘water’), moto-táxis and lan houses. Viewing these tropes as semiotic resources is in line with recent sociolinguistic and pragmatic scholarship that considers parts of languages not as compartmentalised, but as “actual situated resources as deployed by real people in real contexts and recontextualized by other real people” (Blommaert, 2010, p. 43). Calazans, in fact, mobilises these resources as indexes of the creative economy of the favela: gatonet, lan house and moto-táxi constitute Complexo do Alemão’s survival economy. Semiotically, Calazans connects these economic tropes to people, practices and perspectives about belonging to the favela. He, thus, employs the reflexive dimension of language use, i.e., its metapragmatic layer, in ways that embed the survival of peripheral youth in forms of sociality as well as material and economic practices of solidarity. Importantly, central to our analysis of Calazans’s discourse is not only the propositional content of his utterance on survival but also its metapragmatic features. He calibrates his talk in line with what Silva (2022) identifies as the papo reto (‘straight talk’) activist register. Typical among peripheral activists and youth, in such a register, contextual communicative acts are delivered in direct, unencumbered ways, eschewing thus the circumlocutions and politeness strategies frequently associated with elite registers such as Standard Brazilian Portuguese. Before an audience of middle-class researchers with whom he had little acquaintance at the time of the interview, Calazans ignores politeness expectations and employs indexical tropes that position him as a favelado (‘a favela dweller’), for instance: if you live at the bottom of the hill and have basic sanitation, bro, pipe it up from God knows where, connecting the pipes. Otherwise stated, Calazans employs a direct reflexive stance that is directly aligned with the informality of daily practices of Black youth. This becomes even more conspicuous when he opposes this direct and informal language to elite registers, such as the bureaucratic language of the formal economic market: when [the culture of survival] is valued they want to legalise it. “Oh, we’ll install cable TV and prohibit gatonet”. The way Calazans gauges the papo reto activist register and the economy of survival in the favela suggests that his reflexivity on the culture of survival goes beyond the propositional content of his narrative and spreads to the very metapragmatics – or ideological framing (Silverstein, 1993) – of his discourse. As a young peripheral activist, Calazans’s language use is ideologically oriented towards survival; and when talking about survival he reflects on language metapragmatically. His evaluative comments shape linguistic forms and inform the ways these forms are entextualised. Calazans circulates in several networks, in and out of Complexo, which points to the contagious character of peripheral Black youth’s activism.

Conclusion In this chapter, we focussed on the notion of survival as a major cultural trope animating communicative and cultural practices of peripheral youths in Brazil. We first looked to literacy practices within the culture of survival. In the materials we examined, literacies of survival emerge as a response to the liminality between life and death in Brazilian (in)securitisation and as creative modes of producing networks of collaboration, portraying the periphery in more liveable terms and rewriting youth spacetimes. Next, we focussed on the Literary Baixada Network, a Black youth collective that fosters literacies in Baixada Fluminense. Liliana, a child attending one of the libraries from this literacy collective, was fiercely stigmatised in hegemonic media and digital networks for mimicking reading abilities that she had not yet fully mastered. While the reading 103

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habituation of white middle-class children tends to be valorised (even if such children do not yet decode the written word), Liliana’s reading performance was rendered in hegemonic discourses as an icon of the degeneration of Black peripheries. Liliana’s case thus signals the backdrop of stigma and prejudice that peripheral young people have to deal with on a daily basis. Yet the collective of young people promoting reading does not surrender to stigma; instead, they have been steady in promoting literacies and human rights. Finally, we engaged with the metadiscourse of the young funk carioca MC Raphael Calazans. In his perspective on the culture of survival, he unpacked the agentive and iterable dimension of practices of improvisation and creativity in favelas. Youths like him have been reinventing their daily lives and producing art and literacies from the indeterminacy between death and life that distinguishes the necropolitical management of peripheries in Brazil. Calazans and other peripheral youths calibrate a number of communicative practices, including the papo reto activist register, whereby the youths ‘speak to the point’ – that is, they engage with metapragmatic moves such as directness and indexically valorised tropism and oppose upscale registers and other semiotic formations that preclude Black youths from having access to economic redistribution. In these case studies, we have emphasised the stigmatisation and criminalisation of Black youth in the favelas and peripheries of Rio. These patterns of inequity and violence have very material effects as Brazil is the country with the highest incidence of Black youth homicide in the world (see Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, 2022). At this juncture, the election of far-right populist president Bolsonaro in 2018 was unsurprising. His political image has been predicated on the idea of a Penal State (Wacquant, 2009) grounded on necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003) for the poor. Bolsonaro lost in the 2022 national election to progressist former president Lula. Yet he received almost half of the votes, which points to the popular support of an anti-Black reactionary political leader. In this context, this chapter argues that throwing Black youth’s point of view about their cultural productions, art and literacy practices into sharper relief is a scholarly strategy to counter their physical and symbolic annihilation. While eschewing common tropes that romanticise suffering and homogenise youth, in this chapter we discussed how our ethnographic interactions with young artists and activists who inhabit marginalised and peripherical territories affected our understandings of culture and literacy. As such, we avoided stereotypes, variables and fixed social typologies. Rather, shaped by ethnographic reflexivity from fieldwork to the writing of this chapter, our focus relied on singular histories that allowed us to understand how literacy practices serve as survival strategies for peripherical youths in Brazil. Such culture of survival percolates youths’ doings, narratives and daily lives and underscores their struggles against racism, segregation, the Penal State and the criminalisation of their culture and beings that follow. Further, our engagement with the creative ways Calazans, Janaína and many other youths in Brazilian favelas and peripheries juggle the precarisation of life illustrates a ‘sociolinguistics of the good’ (Robbins, 2013) embedded in the peripheral youth’s work of hope (Bloch, 1986; Borba, 2019; Silva and Lee, 2021), whereby they mobilise various forms of practical reasoning towards reinventing otherwise debilitating social conditions.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Rodrigo Borba for discussing with us the general design of this chapter and translating most of the text into English. We are also thankful for the dialogue with Bente A. Svendsen and Rickard Jonsson, who helped us frame the ideas here in more critical terms. Any remaining inconsistencies fall under our responsibility. 104

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Note 1 Corresponding authors: Adriana C. Lopes, Department of Education and Society, Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro, Av. Governador Roberto Silveira s/n. Moquetá. Nova Iguaçu, RJ, Brazil. Orcid id: 0000-0002-6068-8308. Daniel N. Silva, Departamento de Linguística Aplicada, UNICAMP, Rua Sergio Buarque de Holanda, 571, 13083-859, Campinas, SP, Brazil. Orcid id: 0000-0002-6098-5185.

Further readings Bucholtz, M. (2002). Youth and cultural practice, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31: 525–552. Facina, A., D. Novaes, V. Moraes, M. Gomes and C. Palombini (2021). Survival arts: Peripheral urban cultures in the city of Rio de Janeiro. In R. Campos and J. Nofre (eds.), Exploring Ibero-American Youth Cultures in the 21st Century (pp. 151–174). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

References Agha, A. (2007). Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alves, J. (2018). The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Back, M. and V. Zavala (eds.) (2018). Racialization and Language: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Peru. London: Routledge. Bauman, R. and C. Briggs (2003). Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloch, E. (1986). The Principle of Hope. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Borba, R. (2019). Injurious signs: The geopolitics of hate and hope in the linguistic landscape of a political crisis. In A. Peck, C. Stroud and Q. Williams (eds.), Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes (pp. 161–182). London: Bloomsbury. Borba, R., B.F. Fabrício and F. Lima (2022). ‘Living memories of the changing same’: Rio’s linguistic landscape at the crossroads of time and race, Language in Society, 51(5): 797–818. Bucholtz, M. (2002). Youth and cultural practice, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31: 525–552. Camargo, A.M.M. and I.M. Araujo (2018). Expansão e interiorização das universidades federais no período de 2003 a 2014: Perspectivas governamentais em debate, Acta Scientiarum. Education, 40(1): e37659–e37659. Campos, R. and N. Nofre (eds.) (2021). Exploring Ibero-American Youth Cultures in the 21st Century. Creativity, Resistance and Transgression in the City. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Carr, E.S. and M. Lempert (eds.) (2016). Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Derrida, J. (1979). Living on. (Transl. by J. Hulbert). In H. Bloom (ed.), Deconstruction and Criticism (pp. 62–142). London: Continuum. Duncan, J. (2021). Researching Protest Literacies: Literacy as Protest in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro. London: Routledge. Fabrício, B.F. (2014). The empire blogs back: Gendered and sexualized cultural ‘others’ in superdiversified digital trajectories, Discourse, Context & Media, 4–5: 7–18. Facina, A. (2022). Sujeitos de sorte: Narrativas de esperança em produções artísticas no Brasil recente, Revista de Antropologia, 65(2): e195924. Facina, A. and C. Palombini (2017). O patrão e a padroeira: Momentos de perigo na Penha, Rio de Janeiro, Mana, 23(2): 341–370. Facina, A., D. Novaes, V. Moraes, M. Gomes and C. Palombini (2021). Survival arts: Peripheral urban cultures in the city of Rio de Janeiro. In R. Campos and J. Nofre (eds.), Exploring Ibero-American Youth Cultures in the 21st Century (pp. 151–174). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública. (2022). Anuário Brasileiro de segurança pública 2022. https:// forumseguranca​.org​.br​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2022​/06​/anuario​-2022​.pdf

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Adriana C. Lopes and Daniel N. Silva Gadelha, S. and C. Alencar (2021). Youth. In T. Spyros (ed.), Critical Reflections on the Language of Neoliberalism in Education: Dangerous Words and Discourses of Possibility (pp. 174–180). London: Routledge. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Hall, S. (1996). New ethnicities. In D. Morley and K.-H. Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (pp. 442–451). London: Routledge. Heath, S. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school, Language in Society, 11(1): 49–76. Hebdige, D. (2012). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Heller, M. and B. McElhinny (2017). Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jonsson, R., H. Årman and T.M. Milani (2019). Youth language. In K. Tusting (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography (pp. 259–272). London: Routledge. Lopes, A. (2011). Funk-se Quem Quiser no Batidão Negro da Cidade Carioca. Rio de Janeiro: Bom Texto. Lopes, A., A. Facina and D. Silva (2019). Nó em Pingo d’Água: Sobrevivência, Cultura e Linguagem. Rio de Janeiro: Mórula. Lopes, A., D. Silva, A. Facina, R. Calazans and J. Tavares (2017). Desregulamentando dicotomias: transletramentos, sobrevivências, nascimentos, Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada, 56(3): 753–780. Machado da Silva, L.A. and P. Menezes (2019). (Des)continuidades na experiência de ‘vida sob eerco’ e na ‘Sociabilidade Violenta’, Novos Estudos, 38(3): 529–551. Maia, J. (2017). Fogos Digitais: Letramentos de Sobrevivência no Complexo do Alemão/RJ. Doctoral Dissertation. State University of Campinas. Malinowski, B. (1929). The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Malanesia. Boston: Beacon. Mannheim, K. (1952). The problem of generations. In P. Kecskemeti (ed.), Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (pp. 276–322). London: Routledge. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics, Public Culture, 15(1): 11–40. Mead, M. (1928). Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. New York: Blue Ribbon Books. Milani, T.M. (2022). Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel and the mediatization of street art, Social Semiotics, 32(4): 545–562. Morris, R.C. (2007). Legacies of Derrida: Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, 36: 355–389. Parsons, T. (1962). Youth in the context of American Society in youth: Change and challenge, Daedalus, 91(1): 97–123. Rampton, B. (2011). From ‘multi-ethnic adolescent heteroglossia’ to ’contemporary urban vernaculars’, Language and Communication, 31(4): 276–294. Robbins, J. (2013). Beyond the suffering subject: Toward an anthropology of the good, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19(3): 447–462. Scollon, R. and S.B.K. Scollon (1979). The Literate Two-Year-Old: The Fictionalization of Self. Fairbanks, AL: Alaska Native Center. Silva, D. (2022). Papo reto: The politics of enregisterment amid the crossfire in Rio de Janeiro, Signs and Society, 10(2): 239–264. Silva, D. (2023). “When I saw the skull approaching, I died”: Transatlantic communicative flows in response to racial terror in Brazil, Atlantic Studies, 1–20. 10.1080/14788810.2023.2250966 Silva, D. and J. Maia (2022). Digital rockets: Resisting necropolitics through defiant languaging and artivism, Discourse, Context & Media, 49. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.dcm​.2022​.100630 Silva, D. and J.W. Lee (2021). “Marielle, presente”: Metaleptic temporality and the enregisterment of hope in Rio de Janeiro, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 25(2): 179–197. Silva, D., A. Facina and A.C. Lopes (2015). Complex territories, complex circulations: The “pacification” of the Complexo do Alemão in Rio de Janeiro, Pragmatics and Society, 6(2): 175–196. Silverstein, M. (1976). Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In K.H. Basso and H.A. Selby (eds.), Meaning in Anthropology (pp. 11–55). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Silverstein, M. (1993). Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In J. Lucy (ed.), Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics (pp. 33–58). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Street, B. (2009). Ethnography of writing and reading. In D. Olson and N. Torrance (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy (pp. 329–345). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Survival, literacy practices and youth activism Tavares, J. (2022). Sujeita Baixadense: Uma Autoetnografia do Primeiro Sarau de Rua da Baixada Fluminense. Master’s Thesis, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Wacquant, L. (2009). The body, the ghetto and the penal state, Qualitative Sociology, 32(1): 101–129. Whyte, W. (2005). Sociedade de Esquina. A Estrutura Social de Uma Área Urbana Pobre e Degradada. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editora. Windle, J.A. and E. Fonseca Afonso (2021). Building anti-racist education through spaces of border thinking, Critical Studies in Education, 63(5): 606–621. Yúdice, G. (2004). The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham: Duke University Press.

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8 YOUTH IN LANGUAGE ENDANGERMENT AND RECLAMATION PROCESSES Haley De Korne, Lorena Córdova-Hernández and Frances Kvietok1 Introduction In this chapter, we consider youth in endangered language research. While many of our examples are drawn from research in the Americas, we aim to consider themes that are relevant globally. Beginning with a discussion of how youth have been positioned in research on language endangerment over time, we then examine some of the research methods in this area and present key findings from recent research in Latin America. We conclude with a summary of future directions, including recommendations for researchers, educators and youth activists who aim to support endangered languages. We consider these audiences because these are the people we work most closely with; in addressing these audiences we are not arguing that all youth do or should identify as activists in support of endangered languages. As discussed further below, youth’s experiences and identities may vary, along with their choices to identify as speakers or non-speakers of Indigenous languages. We understand ‘language’ broadly as oral and visual communication practices. Indigenous language scholars have corrected narrow definitions of language as structure or verbal communication only, illustrating the significance that communication has for identity and social relationality, among other factors (Henne-Ochoa et al., 2020; Leonard, 2017). Many Indigenous languages and language varieties around the world are threatened or endangered in that they are not being transmitted across generations and are used in reduced social domains (Hinton et al., 2018). Indigenous languages are threatened to different degrees, for example in relation to their sociopolitical status, number of speakers, proficiency of speakers, and domains of use (Tsunoda, 2013). We understand ‘endangered Indigenous languages’ as ways of communicating that are socially, politically, economically and/or ideologically marginalized in the place where they were previously vital and in use. There are numerous diaspora and immigrant languages which could also be categorized as endangered in certain settings; however, these are beyond the scope of this chapter, and we choose to keep a narrower focus on Indigenous languages. Indigenous language revitalization can be defined as “activities designed not only to maintain but also to increase the presence of an endangered or dormant language in the speech community and/or the lives of individuals” (Hinton et al., 2018, p. xxvi). In line with the broad understanding of language as social relationality, however, it is important to note that language endangerment and revitalization are not just about words and 108

DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-11

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speakers, but are sociopolitical processes. Leonard (2012, 2017) has argued for a shift away from a focus on the revitalization of language as an object, and towards a focus on language reclamation, or “a larger effort by a community to claim its right to speak a language and to set associated goals in response to community needs and perspectives” (Leonard, 2012, p. 359). These needs may include land rights, education programs, or resisting racist stereotypes, in conjunction with efforts to reclaim authority over language and to promote language use. Efforts to promote the use of threatened Indigenous languages are fundamentally bound up in politics, and in both individual and collective forms of identity. As Hornberger and King (1996, p. 440) emphasize, revitalisation initiatives such as these are not so much about bringing a language back, but rather, bringing it forward; who better or more qualified to guide that process than the speakers of the language, who must and will be the ones taking it into the future? The needs and perspectives within a community may also be diverse, and the voices of youth are among the multiple voices that influence language use and shift within a community. We acknowledge that social categories such as ‘youth’ are culturally relative, and that an 18-year-old may be considered to be a youth in certain contexts and an adult in others (Suslak, 2009); we share the notion that ‘youth’ is often better understood by locally-grounded social roles and responsibilities (Mendoza et al., 2020). Youth in endangered language communities may claim the right to speak the language, or the right not to speak it; in most cases their choices do not fall into a simple binary of promoting or resisting endangered language use, but are more complex, as examined below.

Orientations to youth in endangered language research Research on youth in endangered language communities, like research on youth more broadly, has increasingly recognized youth as agents. While youth have sometimes been presented as passive receivers or victims of intergenerational language shift, recent research emphasizes youth’s reflexivity and linguistic creativity. The tensions that youth face as they negotiate pressures of tradition and social change are also brought to the fore, as discussed below. Early scholarly approaches to language endangerment focused on macro-factors influencing language use, including the effects of colonization and globalization, rather than on the micro level of social actors. For example, Fishman’s pioneering work on language shift analysed the domains in which languages were spoken (Fishman, 1991). He argued the importance of adults establishing “a variety of youth groups, young people’s associations, young parent groups and finally, residential communities or neighbourhoods, all of which utilize (or lead to the utilization of) Xish [the threatened language]” through which older generations could succeed in “changing the overt behavioral patterns of the young” (1991, p. 91, italics original). Fishman’s discussion of how older community members may change youths’ behaviour puts the focus on young people as pawns in the larger game of reversing language shift. Fishman and others were concerned with establishing conditions in which intergenerational transmission of languages would occur, while paying less attention to the motivations and perspectives of the individuals who made up those ‘generations’. Scholarship on the role of schools in language endangerment has helped to introduce more attention to social actors within these institutional spaces, despite the overarching focus at the societal and institutional levels. Hornberger and King’s (1996) ethnographic research on language use in and around schools in the Andes described the emergence of a dialect among younger speakers of Quichua who were influenced by the written norm taught in school (Unified Quichua), which was different from the dialect spoken by older members of the community. They observed that “Some older members have stated that they do not like, understand, nor wish to speak Unified 109

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Quichua, while younger members claim that ‘authentic Quichua’ is mixed with Spanish, and therefore, impure and lacking ‘a good structure’ ” (1996, p. 433). Tension between older norms and newer norms is common in minoritized language communities (Gal and Woolard, 2001). Youth have a significant presence in this line of research, yet the focus is tilted towards their role as students, and the influence of schooling on their language practices and beliefs. Similarly, in an ethnographic study of the use of Southern Tutchone in a school in the Yukon, Canada, Ferguson (2010) notes the agency of both teachers and students in creating bottom-up language policy at the school, while remaining focused on the public space of the school and on teachers’ actions in particular. Along with a focus on social actors in processes of endangerment and revitalization in general, there has also come an increasing focus on youth as a unique kind of social actor. For example, Meek’s (2010) ethnography of language revitalization in the Yukon shows how youth can be discouraged from speaking by being criticized by more senior members of the speech community, bringing more fine-grained attention to social actors, with a focus on how external factors affect youth. Youths’ psychological and emotional experiences with language endangerment and reclamation have been increasingly considered, such as the difficulties faced by young adult learners as they struggle to be viewed as legitimate speakers (King and Hermes, 2014). Research in social psychology has identified links between engagement in heritage culture and language and improved mental health among Indigenous youth in Canada (Hallet et al., 2007). Interdisciplinary scholarship further argues for links between language use and well-being not just for youth, but across generations (Whalen et al., 2016). These studies show that there is a need to consider youth as complex, emotional beings who may experience both positive and negative aspects of being part of an endangered language community. Emphasizing youth as agents and drivers of change, Wyman (2012) provides a longitudinal ethnography of youth in a Yup’ik community, illustrating how cohorts of youth with only a small age difference took up different positions as Yup’ik (non)speakers. Wyman draws on the concept of ‘survivance’ (a synthesis of survival and resistance) coined by Ojibwe scholar Gerald Vizenor. Wyman (2012, p. 269) discusses how youth contribute to linguistic survivance “in the ways that they developed new hybrid practices, appropriated political, social, and religious rhetorics, and used new forms of media in relation to longstanding and emerging challenges”, even among cohorts who used less Yupik. Similarly, Wyman, McCarty and Nicholas’s (2014) edited volume on Indigenous youth and multilingualism: Language identity, ideology, and practice in dynamic cultural worlds provides a rich collection of studies from North America that set youth and youth agency in focus as they navigate the changing language ecologies around them, highlighting their roles as de facto language policymakers (McCarty et al., 2009). Phyak (2019) explores how Limbu youth in Nepal develop a critical awareness of linguistic discrimination and act to counter negative ideologies in their context. Although youth are clearly impacted by the language practices and ideologies that they encounter within and beyond their communities, they are also capable of reflecting, criticizing and taking an active role in changing the language ecology around them. Young peoples’ decisions about what to speak, or what not to speak, influence processes of language endangerment, and without youth participation language revitalization is unlikely to occur.

Methodological approaches to researching youth experiences in processes of language endangerment and reclamation Research methods that have helped to shed light on the position of youth in language endangerment and revitalization, including bringing greater attention to youths’ agency, include ethnography, digital ethnography, participatory action research and arts-based methods. Common among 110

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these methods is the focus on research participants’ perspectives, and the effort to capture the complexities and contradictions of their experiences. In their influential work on language research, Cameron, Frazer, Harvey, Rampton and Richardson (1992) argued against research which objectifies or patronizes human subjects by conducting research on or for them, and advocated for a collaborative relationship where research is conducted with participants, and their goals and aspirations shape the research goals. Their framework grew from their ethnographic work on the language practices of (primarily) different youth populations in the UK. Czaykowska-Higgins (2009) has applied their framework to research on Indigenous languages, arguing additionally for research that is by members of the language community. The co-creation of knowledge with participants is well-aligned with ethnography, and even more so with participatory action research and arts-based methods (see also Svendsen and Goodchild, this volume). Ethnographic inquiry aims to illuminate emic, or insider perspectives through long-term participant observation on the part of the researcher. Studies such as those of Meek (2010) and Wyman (2012), mentioned above, use ethnographic methods to better understand the insider perspective of members of endangered language communities, including youth. Wyman resists presenting Indigenous youth as “passively caught in cultural contradictions, as mere victims or tragic heroes, or as authentic or inauthentic Indigenous people based on imposed criteria such as the ability to speak a heritage language” (2012, p. 268), instead seeking to represent their full and complex social lives. Huerta-Cordova et al. (2019) examine participatory ethnography with children and adolescents as a promising approach for changing power dynamics in research. Whether the researcher is also a member of the language community, or an outsider, this requires sensitivity to context and respectful relationships (Anthony-Stevens, 2017; Davis, 2018). No matter how thorough, an ethnography can never capture the full diversity of perspectives of community members, and is always constrained to what the researcher has been able to grasp from their standpoint. It is also possible that findings from ethnographic research are not disseminated or taken up by participants to inform their own goals. Digital ethnography provides a tool for examining a domain in which more and more interaction occurs, that of digital or virtual space. Youth in Indigenous communities are active across a range of media channels, as in the rest of the world. The digital realm has also been used as a space of activism for the promotion of Indigenous languages (Coronel-Molina, 2019). The creation of multimedia learning materials and the visibility and audibility that digital media enables helps to raise awareness and status of marginalized languages (Schwab-Cartas, 2018). Limachi (2020) proposes a digital ethnography of speaking as a qualitative method that can include digital observation, interviews and linguistic autobiographies, as well as on-site fieldwork to show how youth draw on translanguaging as a discursive strategy to participate in WhatsApp and Facebook digital communities. Key to his methodological proposal is transcending the digital vs. physical dichotomy in order to better capture youth’s lived experiences. Both traditional and digital ethnography can be combined with efforts to achieve positive social change, or action research, in multiple ways. One approach is ethnographic monitoring, whereby the researcher(s) use their understanding of emic goals to engage in some form of intervention, while continuing to observe and monitor the ensuing results (De Korne and Hornberger, 2017; Hymes, 1980). Observing and analysing the outcomes, and setting new goals in collaboration with participants, leads to an action research cycle of description, evaluation, and intervention (Ali and McCarty, 2020). Other approaches to participatory action research put less emphasis on ethnographic observation, and instead may rely on interviews or other forms of data to monitor the outcomes, and to launch new cycles of action. First-person reports by language educators and 111

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activists present the strategies and outcomes of their interventions, such as efforts at language revitalization in the family (Hinton, 2013) or the development of new higher education programs (Czaykowska-Higgins et al., 2017). Participatory action research has been successful in projects with youth, leading to the extensive work within the framework of youth participatory action research (YPAR) (Caraballo et al., 2017). For example, a study in the Philippines by Bonifacio et al. (2021) with young speakers of the Binukid language employed ethnography and action research in pursuit of effective language learning. The study was developed in a university setting with the goal of strengthening conversational skills in the Binukid language and was successful in increasing communication proficiency. A more recent development in language research is the inclusion of visual and arts-based methods, such as drawing a language portrait (Busch, 2018) where participants represent their communicative repertoires and the historical and affective experiences they have had in relation to their languages. Pietikäinen et al. (2008) use a combination of language portraits, interviews and observations to explore the experiences of a multilingual Sámi boy in Finland. Use of multimodal storytelling is another approach, and has been used as a method and epistemology by Stó:lō people in Canada, supporting better understanding between youth and young adults (Chan, 2021). This method helps the transmission of knowledge and is a way of reclaiming stories. All this is strengthened by digital media, where young people use video, rap music, photography, etc., allowing for creative expression and cultural ownership. Another approach is that of documenting the linguistic landscape by taking photos of personally-significant places. Cost and Lovecraft (2020) describe a project with Iñupiaq secondary school students in Alaska who were asked to create scenarios about the future of their community in the face of environmental and social change. Creating imagined scenarios helped to identify factors that youth viewed as key to a resilient and sustainable community. Representations of personal experience through visual, theatrical, and other sensorial modalities can provide new windows for researchers to understand the complex lives of youth who are members of endangered language communities, and also offer youth new ways of raising their voices. Storytelling and collaborative methods are also aligned with and often embedded in Indigenous methodologies, which seek to make complex wholes visible and ultimately centre Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies and axiologies in research activities (Chilisa, 2012; Smith, 1999).

Youth in Indigenous language endangerment and reclamation – Examples from Latin America The following cases from Latin America highlight several key aspects of youth in Indigenous language endangerment and reclamation, including diversity of speakerhood, the role of schools, norms and pressures from within and from outside Indigenous communities, and resistance and creativity in youths’ language practices.

Youth as Quechua and Kichwa learners and speakers in the Andes Youth experiences and agency within processes of Quechua revitalization have gained attention across Andean rural and urban contexts in the last decade (Firestone, 2017; Sumida Huaman, 2014; Zavala, 2019)2 . Kvietok Dueñas’ (2019) ethnographic study in Cusco, Perú with youth who grew up in rural communities with Quechua as a first language, bilingual valley youth and youth who claimed not to speak Quechua, offers a window into the heterogeneity of youth’s communicative repertoires. Youth repertoires are not homogenous or fixed, they expand and contract at different rhythms across their lives. Their configurations, meanings and uses are linked to social 112

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relationships, identity positionings, racialized trajectories and discrimination, as well as ideologies which invisiblize youth proficiency and interest in Quechua, forces which youth at times recreate, question and, above all, negotiate on a daily basis. Youth identity research has explored the multiple and dynamic Quechua subjectivities and Quechua speakerhood, or “cultural models of personhood indicative of what it means to speak and be a speaker of a language” (Kvietok Dueñas, 2021, p. 2), that youth are assigned, take up, sustain and question and its consequences for Quechua reclamation processes. One model of long duration is the rural quechua hablante (‘Quechua speaker’) which represents a Quechua monolingual with a rural hometown and is associated with traits of inferiority, backwardness, and ignorance (ibid.). This model is often invoked through metacommentaries and acts as a social regulator limiting youth’s identification with and use of Quechua. Through documentation of youth stylizations of Quechua and mock Andean Spanish practices, Kvietok Dueñas (2019) shows how youth’s playful use of language in high schools can also contribute to ongoing processes of racialization of dominant-Quechua-speaking youth, despite youth’s positive evaluation of Quechua and broader school Quechua education efforts. These language practices, which are naturalized as seemingly inoffensive and jocular, run counter to the goals of Quechua education and push many youths away from the language. Addressing a recent bottom-up initiative for Quechua language education in the Peruvian capital of Lima, Zavala (2023) identifies a new Quechua subjectivity which seems to challenge and transcend Quechua speakers’ identification as rural quechua hablantes. Embedded in processes of commodification and neoliberalism, university-educated, urban-dwelling and middle-class citizens with knowledge of English align to Quechua in celebratory and celebrated ways without having to risk being identified as ‘Indians’. Zavala asks, however, whether this is a position available to all speakers and how it will contribute to transforming the continued racialization experienced by subalternized individuals. While early educational research in the Andes focused on the experiences of rural-dwelling, L1-speakers of Quechua, recent scholarship also examines the identities and experiences of emergent bilinguals of Quechua, particularly in urban contexts (Sichra, 2006). Looking at the year-long social identification trajectory of T’ika, a high school student, Kvietok Dueñas (2021) documents the specific process through which the identity of youth indifference is constructed in schools. Being misidentified by teachers as a Quechua denier – “someone who allegedly knew Quechua, but did not care to show it or learn it” (p. 1) – a label which included the over assignation of language proficiency, impacted T’ika’s sense of self as a learner and speaker and limited her access to classroom learning opportunities. Drawing on language socialization, language policy and biographical traditions, research also highlights how youth come to be socialized and socialize their family members into Quechua and Indigenous bi- and multilingualism. Youth across Ecuadorian and Peruvian contexts have been identified as family language policy actors, who socialize their parents, siblings, and other family members into and away from Kichwa and Quechua, as well as prestige and minoritized varieties of Spanish (King and Haboud, 2011). Increasingly, scholarship has shown how outside high altitude and rural communities, the home – often upheld as a stronghold of intergenerational transmission – is not necessarily a space where youth are socialized into Quechua language practices and identities. The home can be a space where youth’s standing as legitimate Quechua speakers is ignored, teased, or questioned given divergent lived experiences and ideologies about young people, Quechua use, and learning across generations, underlying youth’s longingfor more conversational solidarity from their elders (Kvietok, in review). It can also be a space where the lack of affective relationships across generations disfavours youth’s Indigenous language use and learning (Sichra, 2016). Youth identities, endangered language learning opportunities and language prac113

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tices are further embedded within socio-economic and political process such as transnational and internal migration experienced by families (Firestone, 2017). Methodologically, sociolinguistic youth research in the Andes has combined ethnographic, narrative, questionnaire and visual methods, among others. Most recently, scholars push us to take up a decolonial stance in our engagements, especially those conducted with youth. Based on a photovoice project carried out together with Quechua-Spanish university students in Cusco, Peru, Surandina researcher Kenfield (2021) points out the limitations of collaborative research that fails to engage with Andean saberes-haceres (‘ways of knowing-doing’). In contexts where Eurocentric epistemologies and ontologies permeate our everyday interactions and are embodied in often subconscious ways, Kenfield calls on researchers to make deliberate efforts to enact Andean pedagogies, or Andean knowledges, methodologies and practices, a call that can pertinently extend to other contexts. This decolonial engagement demands ongoing monitoring and critical reflections from all participants and carries the hope for language research to better connect to Quechua communities and contribute to meaningful problem solving.

Youth as members of local and global communities in Mexico In the last decade, Indigenous youth of Mexican origin have begun to have more agency in revitalizing their languages both in the national and transnational context (Mexico-United States). For more than two decades, academic research and community actions in favour of endangered Mexican languages have been directed towards the teaching of these languages in the framework of Intercultural Bilingual Education for Indigenous children from both state policies and Indigenous teachers’ initiatives (Messing and Nava, 2016; Meyer, 2018). The reestablishment of intergenerational transmission between children and elders through the ‘language nests’ method that has had positive results in New Zealand, Hawaii, Canada and elsewhere, has also been an area of focus (McIvor and Parker, 2016), along with the development of playful revitalization methodologies (Flores Farfán, 2015). However, although children began to learn these languages, there was a generational gap, since the future of languages was placed with the children and the adults, without considering the processes through which youth develop into learners, language teaching professionals and parents. In the last decade, the professionalization of youth and the use of digital technologies have allowed some youth to take a more visible role in revitalizing their languages (Cru, 2015). Notably, youth are beginning to organize themselves into regional collectives to generate training and community cultural strengthening. For example, in the municipality of La Trinitaria (Chiapas), where languages of the Mayan family are spoken, university students and young professionals of Chuj and Q’anjobal origin have formed the Hakib’al collective. The collective members are from communities located on the Mexico-Guatemala border. Their parents and grandparents come from Guatemalan Chuj and Q'anjobal communities that arrived in the 1980s searching for refuge in Mexican territory. The Hakib’al collective works on the development of meetings and festivities in which more youth participate to strengthen identity in their communities, which were formed after the refugee migration in the 1990s (Córdova-Hernández, 2014). Although the Mexican state recognizes them, they do not have the same services and institutional representation as other Indigenous communities of Mexican origin (Valtierra, 2020). They are also constantly stigmatized and discriminated against because of their Guatemalan and Indigenous origin. In this sense, language displacement is widespread in these communities, and, as a result, most of the members of the collective are heritage speakers of these languages, with varying levels of proficiency. Therefore, their current initiatives strengthen their Indigenous affiliation, identity and language proficiency. 114

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Another important process in Mexico is the growing professionalization of Indigenous youth since 2000. This is thanks to the emergence of intercultural universities in different Indigenous regions of the country. Although they may show various contradictions, they aim to facilitate access to higher education “for marginalized populations, and through its engaged teaching, research and community engagement also contributes to environmental protection, health, livelihoods, gender equality and a range of other goals” (Perales and McCowan, 2021, p. 69). In this way, many revitalizing initiatives emerge from this training process, without depending on the presence of researchers or actors from outside the communities, which strengthens the agency of the youth. Literacy is often important in professional contexts, and work on Indigenous language literacy has also received attention in Mexico and elsewhere, including the many challenges that a standards-focused approach to literacy can present (De Korne and Weinberg, 2021) The strengthening of youth participation has led to a greater presence of Indigenous languages in digital media, as well as teaching and artistic proposals of various kinds (Cru, 2015; SchwabCartas, 2018). The agency of youth is becoming increasingly broad and youth have begun to generate spaces for the dissemination and reproduction of their languages and cultures beyond Mexico and into the broader Latin American context. For example, in the context of the COVID19 pandemic, youth have created spaces on social networks such as Facebook to disseminate language teaching workshops. Likewise, on Twitter the rotating account @ActLenguas is hosted each week by a young activist who provides information of various kinds about their language, making it easier for the public to get closer to their communities’ linguistic and cultural characteristics. In this way, thanks to youth participation in digital media, awareness and use of Indigenous languages have increased. However, it is essential to add that not all youth have linguistic proficiency or desire to learn. While some use the Indigenous language as a means of family or community communication, others are only promoters but not speakers of the language. This is especially true for languages such as Chocholteco and Chontal in Oaxaca, which have a high degree of displacement and are mostly only spoken by adults and grandparents. However, many youth in Mexico are currently heavily involved in the revitalization process regardless of their knowledge of these languages, marking a shift from previous generations.

Future directions and recommendations For researchers Researchers have been helping to direct attention to youth as key actors in language reclamation processes (e.g., Cru, 2015). Future research can go further in this direction through heightened sensitivity to the social categories that are salient in each context and exploration of how generations are constructed and understood in diverse cultural settings. Another social category that has often been over-simplified and under-examined in language revitalization is gender. Closer attention to culturally-specific gender norms and identities and how these influence language practices and access to language learning and use opportunities are needed (Ahlers, 2012). As youth transition from childhood towards adulthood, gender norms may be especially salient, and should be considered in relation to both the specific culture and the stage of social development. (Socio)linguistic research has begun to attend to race and racialization to a greater degree. Despite the prevalence of racism towards Indigenous groups in many parts of the world, research on language reclamation has rarely taken this up explicitly and has rather left it implicit as part of the conditions of coloniality and marginalization. Recent scholarship has begun to address raciali115

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zation and Indigenous language reclamation more directly (Leonard, 2020), and more work in this direction would be welcome. Finally, the experiences and aspirations of youth are heterogeneous, and future research can help to represent a wider range of voices and perspectives. Adopting participatory methods, such as those exemplified in this chapter, can help to break down the assumptions and norms that researchers may bring with them and open up to more dialogic forms of knowledge production. A growing body of research by (often young) Indigenous scholars is leading the way in this respect (Chew et al., 2015; Davis, 2018).

For educators The younger generations of speakers and learners of Indigenous languages are often under multiple kinds of pressure; the pressure to carry on the heritage of their community and the pressure to adapt to changing times and circumstances. Strict standards of language use based on norms from previous generations may be distant from youths’ current communication practices. Depending on how language is presented in educational contexts, students may come to view the language as theirs, something that they have the right to speak and own, or they may come to view it as something that belongs in books or museums, that they are not legitimate users of (Chew et al., 2015; De Korne and Weinberg, 2021). In order to reverse the long history of schooling as a place where Indigenous languages are suppressed and erased, it is important to make space for language learning within a speech community. Getting to know learners’ communicative repertoires and language learning trajectories, working together with youth to identify language learning goals and demands, establishing meaningful community-school ties, as well as caring educator-learner relationships, and engaging in reflection of the ways in which language, heritage and Indigenous knowledges are to be promoted in educational programs are important dimensions to consider.

For youth language activists Language activists are often faced with ideological challenges from both inside and outside their communities; from the outside, prejudice, racism and monolingual ideologies may be formidably present in everyday life. From the inside, perennial debates such as choosing whether or not to claim an Indigenous speakerhood, whether a so-called pure or monolingual version of a language should be promoted over a more mixed variety, and which spoken variety(ies) should be promoted are likely to crop up again and again. On top of this, the practical challenges of limited time, money and collective organizing among people with different priorities can be daunting. Without dismissing any of these challenges, we suggest that it may be helpful to view them as normal, rather than exceptional. Youth activists are not alone in experiencing these challenges (De Korne, 2021). There is no correct way to be a language activist or a multilingual speaker. Trying to be a socalled ‘balanced bilingual’ or a model activist can be discouraging. An individual’s experience of being multilingual can change throughout their life, and is often emotionally-laden, with each language having a certain history and meaning (King and Hermes, 2014), and language activism taking on socio-cultural, political, and spiritual dimensions (Cru, 2021) among others. Speakers who use both minoritized and dominant languages may feel like they are shuttling between different worlds, but hopefully can come to feel at home and legitimate in both. Youth are especially talented at appropriating and adapting what is available in the moment, leading the way in putting 116

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technologies to use to document, express and share their languages and realities. This creativity deserves to be celebrated and supported.

Notes 1 Author 2 and author 3 are listed alphabetically. This work was partly supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265. Haley De Korne, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, Postboks 1102 Blindern 0316 Oslo, Norway. Orcid id: 0000-0002-2522-0400. Lorena Córdova-Hernández, Facultad de Idiomas, Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca, Av. Universidad, Oaxaca 68120, Mexico. Orcid id: 0000-0002-2681-7102. Frances Kvietok, Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (MultiLing), University of Oslo, Postboks 1102 Blindern 0316 Oslo, Norway. Orcid id: 0000-0001-6064755X. 2 Quechua is recognized by linguists as a language family of more than 8 million speakers and includes varieties with different intelligibility; it is considered an endangered language given the historical discrimination faced by speakers and its weakened transmission across generations (Kvietok and Hornberger, 2023).

Further readings Cru, J. (2015). The Role of Youth in Language Revitalisation. Barcelona: Linguapax International. Wyman, L.T., T. McCarty and S. Nicholas (2014). Indigenous Youth and Multilingualism: Language Identity, Ideology, and Practice in Dynamic Cultural Worlds. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

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9 YOUTH ACTIVISM AND SAFE SPACES Decoloniality and anti-racism online Fanny Pérez Aronsson1 Introduction While neither youth activism nor the adult world’s distress over youth’s political engagement is new, social media and the opportunity for online activism seem to be particularly ridiculed and dismissed as frivolous by the adult world (Jenkins and Shresthova, 2016; Earl et al., 2017). Without attributing too much political power to social media, it has opened up new possibilities for organising and formulating political and social movements (Stornaiuolo and Thomas, 2017). Research on social media and activism is a large and diverse field, ranging from focusing on political groupings or issues, specific platforms, activism born out of communities and the study of specific phenomenon, such as safe spaces (cf. Liliequist, 2019; McCosker, 2015; McCracken, 2017). Against this backdrop, this chapter focuses on online activism, and how youth employ safe spaces to discuss and navigate politics and identity in relation to anti-racism.

Key issues and debates: anti-racist and youth activism online Safe spaces have historically formed a part of various political movements, such as the feminist movement where women-only safe spaces or lesbian separatism have been used as political strategies (Kenney, 2001). Today, safe spaces are increasingly found online, often youth led. During the #metoo movement, safe spaces functioned as meeting places for specific groups or industries to organise (Hinchcliffe Voglio, 2019; Mendes et al., 2019). Safe spaces for youths have been explored in a variety of research, such as schools (Hackfoord-Peer, 2010) as well as online and offline (Earl et al., 2017). Safe spaces are frequently created as a strategy for marginalized peoples to meet, speak, and organise together, free to speak without fear of retribution from those positioned as oppressors (Lewis et al., 2015). Safe spaces are a contentious issue, as they are often identity-based, requiring exclusionary practices. The effect of online activism has been extensively debated (Barber, 1998; Fuchs, 2013; Kamau, 2016; Serup Christensen, 2011), but the everyday online political conversations between youth are nevertheless interesting and fruitful to study (Earl et al., 2017; Jenkins and Shresthova, 2016; Steele, 2018). Online communities provide a rich area of study to examine the ways in which people find and create communities (Shapiro, 2004), whether focusing on diasporas (Marino, 2016) DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-12

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or queer safe spaces (Liliequist, 2019), especially as social media has become an integral part of the everyday life of youth (Sylwander, 2020). Further, some researchers argue that newer online media can amplify and remediate traditional storytelling and afford an increased visibility to marginalized voices (Mendes et al., 2019; Papacharissi, 2014). For youth and marginalized groups, it can also provide new contexts to find like-minded people and provide significantly safer activist activities than similar ‘offline’ contexts (Earl et al., 2017; McCosker, 2015; Mendes et al., 2019; Steele, 2018). Additionally, unexpected spaces such as fandoms, i.e., forums for people interested in a specific popular cultural work or phenomenon, seem to also create opportunities for youths to explore their political ideals and find new avenues for activism (Earl et al., 2017; McCracken, 2017). In this chapter, the use of online safe space for ‘racialised youth’ are used to exemplify how issues of activism, identity and decolonization are navigated by youth online. This chapter explores (1) how the position of activist is claimed in these spaces; (2) how anti-Black racism is discussed and conceptualised in the same spaces; and (3) how these spaces are constructed as ‘identity political’ by outsiders.

Decolonial perspectives on youth activism Decolonial theories are a larger theoretical framework to conceptualize the ways in which colonial thought and structures continue to permeate contemporary society (Quijano, 2001). Coloniality and modernity are intrinsically tied together, and decolonization in this perspective signifies not only the formal process of colonies becoming independent, but an ongoing process of undoing and unlearning hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms of thought (de Sousa Santos, 2011; Grosfoguel, 2011). Decolonial theories can, and have been, employed to understand youth anti-racist activism and the creation of safe spaces in a variety of ways. Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism (Linscott, 2017; Moten, 2013; Sexton, 2011) are two such critical frameworks which describe the ongoing effects of racism, colonialism and historical processes of enslavement in the US primarily, to analyse the different perspectives on Blackness and anti-Blackness, that is the specific form of racism experienced by Black people. Afro-Pessimism describes the ongoing effects of racism and colonialism, focusing on structural conditions as well as historical processes. As the term implies, it is a highly pessimistic framework, studying Black people as ‘living dead’, a group whose lives (and categorisation as living beings) are always in peril (Linscott, 2017; Mbembe, 2003). Black lives are within this framework also characterized by ‘social death’, that is not being fully accepted as human by society at large. Black Optimism, by contrast, emphasises the possibility for Black life and resists some of Afro-Pessimism’s view of structural conditions as total. Black Optimism finds space for struggle and resistance that is not futile, and space for joy (Linscott, 2017). Although the two concepts have mainly been applied in a US American context, the close ties between Swedish youth and North American pop culture and discourse, as well as the shared experiences of anti-Blackness, make these terms useful to explore in a Swedish context as well (cf. Pérez Aronsson, 2020). These theoretical concepts, along with decolonial theories, are particularly helpful in the study of youth activism and youth culture, as they focalize the structural conditions and paradigms of thought in relation to which youth activism and culture forms. In this chapter, I use decolonial theories as a point of departure to analyse the participants’ exploration of racism, racialisation and colonial effects on self-esteem. Further, I draw inspiration from the concepts of Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism to analyse material from two Swedish Instagram accounts with ‘safe space’ guidelines, meaning only ‘racialised’ youth are allowed to 122

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participate in discussions, which are moderated, where weekly ‘guest posters’ share their experiences. The Instagram posts were categorised according to (sometimes overlapping) categories based on topic (Pérez Aronsson, 2020). The entries cited in this chapter have been chosen as they are representative of general discussions and perspectives in the spaces (cf. ibid.). Many participants use a mix of Swedish and English. In the translations, English in the original posts has been italicized. Additionally, editorials and op-eds from news press were collected from 2014–2018 to analyse the (periodically) ongoing debates about identity politics, anti-racism and safe spaces, as similar spaces to those studied here were frequently mentioned in the debates. The editorials and op-eds have been analysed as representative of some of the most common attitudes towards the topics of identity politics, anti-racism and safe space at the time of the project (cf. ibid.).

Claiming activism and exploring anti-Black racism While safe spaces can be argued to be inherently political and activist spaces, as they are formulated on a basis of oppression, critique of power and a will to promote change, the position as a ‘real’ activist holds some ambivalence for the youth in this study. Negotiating identity claims form a central rhetorical quandary in the safe spaces, where several strategies are employed to make those claims, while one’s claims also need to be balanced and humble. The activist is at once a desirable position, and something to aspire to and one that is difficult to claim in the safe spaces. As Suki, a Japanese-Swedish guest poster, writes in her introductory post of the week: Hi! My name is Suki, I’m 19, lesbian and activist, I guess. (Though my activism is mostly about stumbling to protests and chanting slogans and then going home.) I’ll be talking about whiteness in the wlw community and how much it destroys (wlw = women loving women, aka all lesbian, bisexual, pansexual and polysexual women who like women). [Image description: A photo of me, taken this summer when there was sunlight.] Tina: Junko: [Original in English italicized.] Suki’s introductory post and self-positioning in relation to activism are emblematic of the spaces, in that it introduces her as both belonging in the space and illustrates some of the rhetorical strategies the participants use to manage the stakes of their identity claims. She both claims the position as an activist and qualifies her activism through a humble downplaying of it, both with the disclaimer “I guess”, and the additional parentheses describing a casual participation in acts such as protests. Referring to herself as “stumbling to protests”, chanting and returning home, seems to imply an almost accidental or spontaneous activism, through which she is the kind of activist who partakes in actions, but is not the kind of activist who organises them. In other posts similar to Suki’s, activism and political organisation is upheld as an important ideal, but the ways in which one organises are less important. From direct action to emotionally supporting one’s ‘siblings’ online, it seems important to describe some level of political and activist engagement, but the stakes are high when it comes to making large claims about one’s own importance. This is a tension that is evident in many discussions in the two safe spaces, where the relatively privileged participants in particular struggle to simultaneously convey experiences that motivate their presence in the space and emphasize that they do not experience oppression to the 123

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same extent as others (Pérez Aronsson, 2020). Humility regarding one’s own role or importance (D’Errico, 2019), disclaimers, and acknowledgements of privilege all form vital rhetorical devices to balance one’s self-positioning acts. The activist position holds the same kind of ambivalence and tension as other identity claims, in that it is important to engage in activism, but the label of ‘activist’ is bold to claim without qualifying or negotiating. While claiming the position of the activist is highly important and frequently performed in the safe spaces studied, one’s own experiences of racism are equally important to explore. The discussions observed in these safe spaces took place in 2017. That places the discussions in this chapter after the protests during the American national anthem began, such as Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling at football games as the anthem plays and a few years after the founding of the organisation Black Lives Matter. Although rarely mentioned explicitly, the Black Lives Matter movement and incidents in primarily the US nevertheless appear to influence the youths’ ways of discussing and thinking about Blackness. Rather than mention BLM, however, they tend to lean more towards terms such as ‘antiBlackness’ to discuss the racism that Black people experience. Further, emphasis in the safe spaces is placed on the specific experience of being a Black woman, at the intersection of anti-Black racism and sexism. Nevertheless, the #BlackLivesMatter and #BLM hashtags do appear in the material, and due to the rather decentralized nature of the movement (Linscott, 2017), I argue that the discussions of anti-Blackness in these safe spaces can be understood in the context of, and as a part of, the broad Black Lives Matter movement (cf. also Pérez Aronsson, 2020). Although these safe spaces have been formed to create safety from, and safety to discuss white people as a shared oppressor, they also create opportunities for tension within the community. For example, Ubah, a teenager of Somalian descent, spends a large portion of her week describing her experiences of anti-Blackness from other racialised people. Ubah’s second post on the normalisation of the n-word captures the frequently discussed topic of ‘NBPOC’ (Non-Black People of Colour) and anti-Blackness: The normalisation of the n-word. I’ve seen other POC abusing/misusing the n-word more than white and it really shouldn’t matter, because it’s as wrong and demeaning from both directions because privilege is still involved. But another POC should still understand some of what it is to be offended. Yeah, a NBPOC will never experience even a smidge of what it is to live as a Black individual in society, but they should still have some sort of understanding – at least that’s something I used to expect. Anyway, I don’t expect that anymore, because I’ve had it made loud and clear to me that that’s not the case, which is a pity. This whole ideology that all racialized have each other’s ‘backs’ is just bullshit, because it only applies to a certain extent. In this case it doesn’t apply at all, because the person who shouts about ‘blattar2’ backing each other is the same person who thinks it’s okay to say the n-word to my face. [Image description: A large sign held up by a Black individual where it says, in big and bold letters, ‘bury the n-word.’] Amanda: I’m also shocked when NBPOC use that word. I distance myself from it. I’ve been called it myself while growing up but also ‘turk’ as a slur and you’d think all POC would at least respect and understand each other more and skip the n-word and more? [Original in English italicized.] Ubah’s post specifically focuses on NBPOC and their use of the n-word. From Ubah’s perspective, although she explores white people’s racism in other posts, NBPOC are positioned as the 124

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main perpetrators of unexcepted or at least the most blatant anti-Black racism. As Ubah writes, “it shouldn’t really matter” that NBPOC misuse it more than white people, because it is wrong either way and comes from a position of privilege, but she goes on to describe why it does matter to her. On the one hand, she argues that NBPOC should understand how it feels to be subjected to racism, causing the speech act to feel particularly hurtful. On the other hand, Ubah argues that there is an idea that racialised people “have each other’s backs”, caring for each other and acting in solidarity, but that this idea is “bullshit”. Amanda builds on Ubah’s post through a kind of positive alignment (Georgakopoulou, 2016), agreeing that the use of the n-word is particularly shocking when it comes from other POC. She also reports being referred to as the n-word, and repeats Ubah’s assertion that all POC should respect and understand each other. Here, anti-Blackness emerges as a particular brand of racism, understood as separate from other forms of racism against people racialised as non-white and one can be perpetuated by NBPOC. Further, the n-word seems to be either a term that non-Black people of colour consider themselves permitted to use, or a term that is weaponized against Black people when conflict arises. If it is the first, the permission to use the n-word as an NBPOC implies a broadness of racialisation which erases differences between different racialised groups and erases the idea of anti-Blackness as a specific structure (Linscott, 2017; Wilderson, 2010). If it is the second, the weaponization of the n-word reveals or lays bare how embedded anti-Black racism is in society, where Black people can be disciplined with the use of the term when they act the ‘wrong’ way. In both cases, the term is obviously offensive, but points to different levels and expressions of anti-Blackness amongst non-Black people of colour. Amie, a guest poster who doesn’t share much personal information about herself, also writes about anti-Blackness amongst NBPOC during her week as guest poster, focusing even more on the feeling of betrayal and hurt of the experience. Rather than a specific focus on the n-word, Amie examines the general lack of solidarity for Black people amongst other people of colour: Anti-Blackness amongst nbpoc. Something I’ve experienced lately is being belittled by NBPOC. Every discussion I’ve had about racism, there’s always someone who isn’t Black who will say ‘don’t take it so seriously, forget about it, just let it go’. Nope, I can’t. Don’t ask a Black woman to shut up about the oppression she experiences on the daily. To be belittled for my thoughts, opinions and feelings it the WORST thing. It’s humiliating. Never silence a Black woman, we’re already silenced by society. Last semester I had a presentation about racism and colorism. Of course some Becky questioned if you’re allowed to hate your oppressors (in this case, white people). I tried to give a short answer, but I didn’t have the energy that day and honestly I don’t even know why I chose to do a presentation on racism when half my class are ‘smygrassar’ pretending to be anti-racists. Anyways, the discussion got heated and my teacher had to back me up and then the lesson ended. You can imagine how I felt after. [...] After lunch a girl in my class (who is a NBPOC) came up to me and asked WHY I was so annoyed? [...] One thing led to another, she excused their racist behaviour and belittled my feelings by telling me to let it go. [...] [Image description: a quote that says ‘all the women. in me. are tired.’] As with Ubah’s post, Amie focuses on feelings of betrayal. She describes feelings of being belittled by NBPOC, who argue that she takes things too seriously and needs to let things go. Further, she describes frequently being silenced, and being in a class with ‘smygrassar’, translating to sneaky or stealthy racists, pretending to be anti-racists. While her teacher takes Amie’s side fol125

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lowing a presentation, she describes being challenged by ‘some Becky’. ‘Becky’ refers to a white woman who is unaware and takes advantage of her racial privilege and is sometimes paired with the term ‘basic’ (‘basic Becky’) to further emphasize how plain, unoriginal or mainstream a person is Merriam-Webster, 2019​. As the ‘Becky’ character is described as primarily annoying, the real sense of betrayal comes when an NBPOC classmate confronts her after and questions her feelings about the situation. Further, Amie’s reaction to the situation is portrayed as the key issue. Although her classmate does not outright deny racism, there is a frequent tendency in colourblind contexts in particular to position the person pointing out racism as the actual problem (Ahmed, 2012; Linscott, 2017). In Amie’s retelling of her school experiences, she is similarly positioned as the troublesome character who is unable to “let it go”. Amie’s initial thoughts about the silencing of Black women as an ongoing, everyday occurrence in society, further reinforce the idea of anti-Blackness as a structural condition (Linscott, 2017; Wilderson, 2010). Invoking multiple people who silence her by telling her to let it go, and to not take it too seriously, Amie also portrays ongoing questioning about the existence of antiBlackness specifically. In writing Don’t ask a Black woman to shut up about the oppression she experiences on the daily. To be belittled for my thoughts, opinions and feelings it the WORST thing. It’s humiliating. Never silence a Black woman, we’re already silenced by society, I argue that Amie also ascribes herself, and other Black women, the position as a legitimate or ‘authentic’ speaker (Bucholtz, 2003; Coupland, 2003). The ‘authentic speakers’ is here understood as a successfully performed, relational speech act, rather than something static or essential, which is contextually authenticated and understood as legitimate (Coupland, 2003). Questioning her, or silencing her, signifies a reproduction of anti-Black structural conditions in everyday life. Following Amie’s post, a lengthy discussion ensues, when Maryam disputes her point of view: Maryam. No, no. You can’t ask that someone doesn’t question or to just back you up unconditionally. You’ll just start a new oppression. Forget it. Never. We should discuss. No one should be silenced. Fatima. Amina [to Maryam]. how is she supposed to oppress someone who is racially privileged and in more power than her? Discussion is great, but you can’t say no to someone’s feelings and experiences. Are you going to deny something that happens in someone else’s everyday life? Maryam [to Amina]. You can’t decide if something is racism just on experiences. There has to be an argument too. Some people […] experience the tiniest slight against them as the worst treatment in history and sometimes that same person can heavily demean other people without thinking it’s wrong. Amina [to Maryam]. and experience where the privilege upholds racist structures and benefit from their privilege at the detriment of others is racist. It’s a typical example of how an oppressor can ignorantly ignore and minimize something because they’ve never had to understand the depth of the issue, because of the luxury they have. […] And to encourage someone to listen is not the same as silencing them. Discussion is natural but if you’re set on not listening or discussing but only questioning and pretending you want to discuss – then that’s wrong. 126

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Maryam [to Amina]. I always listen. I’ve scrolled back and gone through this whole account. […] For me it was a dream to come to Sweden as a five-year-old in 1993 and live in peace, and we got everything. I often feel like immigrants are ungrateful and hypocritical. It’s not a given to do what Sweden did. If we’re going to talk racism, let’s talk about my Yugoslavian brothers and sisters who killed each other... How can we complain about Swedes who are angels by comparison? [Original in English italicized.] Maryam’s argument is based on the idea that Amie’s stance entails another form of silencing, where questioning her claims is discouraged. Further, she invokes her own position as an immigrant to reinforce her own claims. Building on the context she herself came from (Yugoslavia in the 1990s), Maryam attempts to build so-called ‘category entitlement’ through lived experience, as an immigrant coming from a worse context than Sweden. Category entitlement relies on categorical belonging, in this case being an immigrant, as a means of ascribing authenticity or an ability to speak on a particular issue (Gal and Woolard, 1995). Arguing that immigrants in Sweden are “ungrateful”, when Swedes “are angels by comparison”, Maryam dismisses the idea of racism as something that can be defined on the basis of someone’s personal experience. Maryam is, however, unsuccessful in her arguments. While Amie does not reply, Amina and other participants step in and argue with Maryam, defending Amie’s stance. A semantic discussion takes place, with Amina emphasizing the difference between silencing someone and encouraging them to listen. Arguing that Amie is promoting the second, Amina disputes Maryam’s claims that listening to Black women and taking their experiences as valid descriptions of anti-Black racism, serves as a means of silencing someone else and creating “a new oppression”. While Maryam does not concede, and rather continues the discussion it is eventually ended by the admins of the account: Admins: Racism exists in Sweden and is a societal problem. We have to talk about racism because of that. Saying ‘immigrants are ungrateful’ is inappropriate and problematic. Why should immigrants be thankful about racism? It doesn’t fit here – we, the admins, ask you not to follow this platform. /all admins. While Instagram has since introduced moderating measures such as limiting comments to a post or temporarily closing a comment section completely, the ending of discussions during the time of this study was done simply by the admins deleting any discussion that followed. While this kind of visible intervention with statements from the admins is relatively rare in the material, it most often arises in these kinds of disputes where arguments either lead to some form of denial of racism (mainly related to anti-Blackness) or evolved into discussions of particular points of conflicts (most often the Armenian genocide). With the admins stepping in, they make it clear that Maryam’s stance is unwelcome, specifically referencing some of her arguments. As such, they reject ‘whataboutism’, meaning to dispute or critique someone by pointing to other issues, as a device in discussions, re-centring the discussion on Amie’s personal experience. Overall, in the material collected from the safe spaces, the stories from Black participants are characterized by Afro-Pessimism (cf. Linscott, 2017; Moten, 2013; Sexton, 2011). From the viewpoint of Afro-Pessimism, anti-Blackness is immanent in Western modernity (Linscott, 2017), and claims such as those that Amie describes above, that Black women are already silenced, are largely accepted as true. Similarly, Quijano (2001) argues that coloniality (and by extension, racism) and modernity are inherently linked – one does not exist without the other. In that sense, anti127

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Blackness is almost inescapable, not only in everyday life and interpersonal encounters, but in the world as we know it as a whole. While Ubah and Amie’s posts align with a more afro pessimist line of thinking, focused on the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in wider society, Yasmine, another Somalian teen, makes a post that offers an opening for Black optimism (Linscott, 2017; Moten, 2013; Sexton, 2011): The road to being a carefree Black woman. I constantly notice how I tone myself down to satisfy white people in my surroundings. To not talk too loudly, not share my opinions, not take up too much space, but fuck that. To be carefree is a mindset I want to achieve. A mindset where I don’t have to worry about my existence upset the white. To feel like I don’t owe white people anything. I can’t say I’m really there yet, but I’m on my way. Sometimes I catch myself shushing my (racialized) friends, so that they won’t laugh too loudly on the tram. I don’t do that with my white friends. After this “enlightenment” I try to change my mindset and I’ve decided to live as a carefree muslim Black woman free from societal norms. ❤Come live carefree with me ❤. [Image description: a selfie of me on my balcony enjoying the sun. In the photo I’m wearing sunglasses and turning my head to the side.] Idil. Yess Maria. Aida. So much recognition... (embarrassingly enough). Cleo. ❤ Paniz. ❤❤❤ you’re the best! Omar. ❤ Senait. Awesome!!!! Somar. my love Laila. So right! You go girl Bilan. Selma. Yessss Fatumo. ❤❤❤❤❤ [Original in English italicized.] Describing her experiences of being silenced and feeling the need to be quieter around white people, Yasmine implicitly references the idea of the loud immigrant, which aligns closely with both the idea of the angry Black woman, as ill-mannered and ill-tempered (West, 2017). Drawing on Svensson’s (2017) idea of racialisation as a process of becoming marked, the marking process leads to certain bodies being conceived of as taking up more, and too much space. A marked body, such as that of a Black woman, is already noticeably taking up space and thus any additional behaviours deemed to be out of place become a further nuisance. Blackness, and other forms of 128

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racialisation, are both constructed in the moment, and build on previously existing ideas of specific bodies, behaviours and characteristics (Fanon, 1967; Quijano, 2001). In that sense, Yasmine aligns with Afro-Pessimism similarly to Ubah and Amie, describing the inescapability of anti-Blackness and racism in everyday life. Nevertheless, there is an element of optimism during Yasmine’s week as guest poster. Yasmine’s wish and determination to live ‘carefree’ points to an opening and possibility to do so, and an imagined future self that has succeeded. She acknowledges that it is not an easy task, in that “I can’t say I’m really there yet”, but it is a mindset she strives for. Focusing on her own mindset, decolonization in this context becomes a primarily mental and individualized process of “enlightenment”, as Yasmine herself calls it. At the same time, Yasmine urges the other participants, or her imagined audience, to join in, urging them to “❤come live carefree with me❤”. Additionally, Yasmine’s post elicits a highly positive response from other participants. In various ways, the participants engage in positive alignment, agreeing with and confirming Yasmine’s narrative (cf. Georgakopoulou, 2016). Emoji such as hearts❤, fire , raised hands , raised fist and applauds , all serve as reinforcers of the participants’ written response, as well as complete responses on their own. While Aida’s “so much recognition… (embarrassingly enough)” implies recognition related to the self-aware part of Yasmine’s narrative, the positive responses also build on the more optimistic element of the post. Laila’s “So right! You go girl ” as well as the other similar responses can be read as an affirmation of carefree-part, encouraging and agreeing with Yasmine’s urge for the others to join in to “live carefree with me”. As her struggles to achieve this goal imply, Black Optimism does not entail a blind belief that change is reachable on your own, but rather a commitment to an ongoing attempt to challenge anti-Blackness in society and imagine a more hopeful future.

Who has an identity? Labelling identity politics At the core of discussions of anti-racism in Sweden, and specifically regarding safe spaces, is the issue of identity politics. ‘Identity politics’ is frequently used as a shorthand reference to political causes and movements that rely heavily on racial, ethnic and gender non-conforming identities to formulate needs and goals. As such, it is positioned as contrasting to the traditional left-to-right spectrum of politics, which is claimed to deal less with identity and more with ideological beliefs (Clifford, 2000; Fukuyama, 2018). In the discussions about identity politics, anti-racism and safe spaces on the editorial and op-ed pages of news press, views on identity politics both vary and share some core traits. These discussions took place leading up to and during the period when I collected data from the Instagram accounts, and therefore captures discussions of the same phenomena in different places and from different positions, namely those of youth (online) and adults (in mainstream news press) (cf. Pérez Aronsson, 2020). Following a televised debate on SVT, the national broadcasting company, about safe spaces and the Afro-Swede group BlackCoffee3 in particular, journalist Ivar Arpi argues in the conservative newspaper Svenska Dagbladet that: Racialization is a relatively new term, but one hasn’t been able to shake the terminology, figures and categories of biological racism. Just like old-time racism people are judged by the colour of their skin.… This separatist ideology doesn’t need any racists, no burning crosses, to get its definition of racism to work. It is enough for white people to be there with 129

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their gaze, their skin colour and their thoughts. This racism is so structural that everybody becomes racist, except for the racialized themselves who are perceived to be in such subjugation that they can never be conceived as guilty (Arpi, 2016). Previously, and resulting in a wave of discussion regarding identity politics, editor of the social democratic Aftonbladet Åsa Linderborg writes: The topic I want to discuss, identity politics, is so complicated I don’t have anything other than questions.… Identity politics has a terminology that is difficult to handle for those who are not themselves active in the discourse. The linguistic pitfalls are everywhere, many falling in spite of wanting nothing more than to show empathy and solidarity.… Then there is not much left of feminism. And there is nothing left of leftist systemic critique when it all boils down to an extreme individualistic micro level.… To me, as a socialist, the equal value and opportunity of all humans is a given, it is the emancipation project itself. But identity politics as it is right now is beginning to acquire a heavy liberal leaning (Linderborg, 2014). Linderborg and Arpi share a scepticism of identity politics, while formulating their critiques from vastly different political standpoints. While Arpi aligns himself with a more colourblind rhetoric (cf. Bonilla-Silva, 2015), as he distances himself from the whole discussion of racialisation and race, Linderborg declares herself a feminist and anti-racist but critical of “micro-identities”. Linderborg’s stance can be understood as what Grosfoguel (2012) refers to as the radical antiessentialism of the occidental left, wherein all identities and outside of their own (classed and gendered) are critiqued and dismissed. In the liberal Dagens Nyheter, a variety of voices are published. Journalist Nina Björk argues that the economic dimension is lost when the left becomes too identity political, aligning herself with Linderborg’s stance (Björk, 2014). Erik Helmersson, a journalist at the newspaper clearly aligned with its liberal values, displays a kind of regretful and humble acknowledgement of past failings and the continued existence of racism in some of his writings, arguing that “we have been disproportionately enraged by separatist coffee activities but belittle, for example, discrimination on the labour market […] ‘we have been naïve’ ” (Helmerson, 2016). At the same time, he is as critical of Linderborg and Arpi towards identity politics, claiming it polices and hinders discussions. What emerges most clearly in the discussions is that few are keen to claim identity politics as their own. Identity politics is continuously othered, either as a leftist project gone too far by the right or as a neoliberal project in a leftist costume by the left. It is something ‘other’ than what politics is supposed to be, and in many ways a bastardization of ‘good’ politics. For both the liberal and right-leaning participants in the debate, identity politics point to a ‘new’ shift in political discussion. Interestingly, leftists opposing identity politics for ‘derailing’ the leftist cause, can provide this criticism while simultaneously claiming specific class and (cis) gender identities. Therefore, specific identity-based categories emerge as beyond simple ‘identity politics’ because they have been largely accepted into the ideological belief system already. Class and (cis) gender identities can therefore be claimed to have a significant material impact on people’s lives, while racial and ethnic identities, as well as gender identities outside of the cis binary, are considered too specific, too micro, too ‘neoliberal’ (Linderborg, 2014). These different stances not only display different relationships between identity politics and ‘traditional’ politics, but the tension between youth activism and the ‘adult’ world. Identity politics is a label that, to a large extent, is primarily placed on youthful social movement, often representing anti-racist and queer causes (Clifford, 2000). While the political child is conceived of as a hopeful figure of a better future to come, the teenage or young adult activist who defies the traditional 130

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political order is infantilized and criticized for not aligning with the existing political left-to-right spectrum (Earl et al., 2017; Jenkins and Shresthova, 2016). The youth engaged in identity political struggles is projected as disruptive, naïve, and unknowledgeable, and ultimately dismissed for not understanding basic political theory or labelled as ‘dangerous’ (Clifford, 2000; Fukuyama, 2018).

Concluding remarks and future directions Decolonization is a complex concept, not least when studying fragmented parts of youth discussions online. However, with the help of concepts such as Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism, and a specific focus on anti-Blackness and the Black Lives Matter movement, some ideas of decolonization emerge. The safe spaces in this study show an oscillation between the two, and the ways in which they inform each other. While anti-Blackness is described as permeating wider society, there are also openings for change. Scholarly work on online communities or spaces enables us to think about how place-specific concepts, such as race, travel online, and are being adopted and reconceptualized to fit new contexts – both in activist circles and in academia. A key debate in research on social media is the impact that online activism has on political life (Barber, 1998; Fuchs, 2013; Kamau, 2016; Serup Christensen, 2011). From a decolonizing perspective, these online safe spaces function as spaces where racialised youth, and Black youth especially, can meet and discuss their experiences of racism and anti-Blackness in their everyday life. They can also provide somewhat of a breathing space and a possibility of speaking without experiencing the same marginalization as outside of the spaces (Earl et al., 2017; Steele, 2018). Further, the spaces allow for both harsh discussions and a shared imagining of possible futures that are better for Black people, as shown in this chapter. Through elevating and emphasizing the positive aspects of racialisation and Blackness, young people can, or at the very least attempt to, reconceptualize what it means to be Black in Sweden today, while also acknowledging and exploring the painful reality of anti-Black racism. As the debate in traditional news press illustrates, these are not issues simply explored in hidden spaces online, but rather a part of larger societal discussions on identity and politics. While the effects of online activism are difficult to measure, it nevertheless plays a key role in political discussions today, and research on how social media is used for activist purposes allows us to further examine how youth culture and politics are influenced by each other.

Notes 1 Corresponding author: Fanny Pérez Aronsson, Department of Child and Youth Studies, Svante Arrhenius väg 21 A, Frescati, Stockholms universitet, Stockholm, Sweden. Orcid ID: 0000-0002-2533-4096 2 The term ‘blatte’ (or the plural) ‘blattar’ is a broadly applied derogatory term for dark-skinned or largely ‘non-Swedish’ appearing people that has, to a certain extent, also been reclaimed as an identity marker, similar to terms such as queer. 3 Black Coffee is described as an organisation for African Swedes, which arranges meet ups centred on ‘fika’ or coffee.

Further readings Mendes, A. and L. Lau (2022). Wither the plurality of decolonising the curriculum? Safe spaces and identitarian politics in the arts and humanities classroom, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 21(3): 223–239. Ohito, E.O. and K.D. Brown (2021). Feeling safe from the storm of anti-Blackness: Black affective networks and the im/possibility of safe classroom spaces in predominantly White institutions, Curriculum Inquiry, 51(1): 135–160.

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References Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included. Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press. Arpi, I. (2016, September 26). Ett eget kafferum. Svenska Dagbladet. Barber, B. (1998). The new telecommunications technology: Endless frontier or end of democracy? In R.G. Noll and M. Price (eds.), Communications Cornucopia (pp. 72–98). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Björk, N. (2014, November 12). Ingen makt är större än den ekonomiska makten. Dagens Nyheter. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2015). The structure of racism in color-blind, ‘post-racial’ America, American Behaviorial Scientist, 59(11): 1358–1376. Bucholtz, M. (2003). Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(3): 398–416. Clifford, J. (2000). Taking identity seriously: The contradictory, Stony Ground... In P. Gilroy, L. Grossberg and A. McRobbie (eds.), Without Guarantees. In Honour of Stuart Hall (pp. 94–122). London and New York: Verso Books. Coupland, D. (2003). Sociolinguistic authenticities, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(3): 417–431. de Sousa Santos, B. (2011). Introducción: las epistemologias del sur. IV Training seminar de jóvenes investigadores de dinámicas interculturales (pp. 9–22). Fundación CIDOB. D’Errico, F. (2019). Too humble and sad: The effect of humility and emotional display when a politician talks about a moral issue, Social Science Information, 58(4): 660–680. Earl, J., T.V. Maher and T. Elliott (2017). Youth, activism, and social movements, Sociology Compass, 11(4): 1–14. Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. The Experiences of a Black Man in a White World. New York: Grove Press. Fuchs, C. (2013). Social Media: A Critical Introduction. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Fukuyama, F. (2018). Identity. The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Gal, S. and K. Woolard (1995). Constructing languages and publics. Authority and representation, Pragmatics, 5(2): 129–138. Georgakopoulou, A. (2016). From narrating the self to posting self(ies): A small stories approach to selfies, Open Linguistics, 2(1): 300–317. Grosfoguel, R. (2011). Decolonizing post-colonial studies and paradigms of political-economy: Transmodernity, decolonial thinking and global coloniality, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(1): 1–37. Grosfoguel, R. (2012). El concepto de “racismo” en Michel Foucault y Frantz Fanon: ¿teorizar desde la zona de ser o desde la zona de no-ser? Tabula Rasa, 16(enero-junio): 79–102. Hackfoord-Peer, K. (2010). In the name of safety: Discursive positionings of queer youth, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29(6): 541–556. Helmerson, E. (2016, Oktober 3). Svenska liberaler sviker i antirasismen. Dagens nyheter. Hinchcliffe Voglio, G. (2019). Jaget, laget, dotterbolaget: En studie av feministiskt nätverkande och rummets betydelse. Uppsala: Uppsala University. Jenkins, H. and S. Shresthova (2016). It’s called giving a shit! What counts as ‘politics’? In H. Jenkins, S. Shresthova, L. Gamber-Thompson, N. Kligler-Vilenchik and A.M. Zimmerman (eds.), By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (pp. 253–289). New York: New York University Press. Kamau, S.C. (2016). Engaged online: Social media and youth civic engagement in Kenya. In B. Mutsvairo (ed.), Digital Activism in the Social Media Era: Critical Reflections on Emerging Trends in Sub-Saharan Africa (pp. 115–140). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kenney, M. (2001). Mapping Gay L.A.: The Intersection of Place and Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Kozinets, R. (2015). Netnography: Redefined. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Lewis, R., E. Sharp, J. Remnant and R. Redpath (2015). ‘Safe spaces’: Experiences of feminist women-only space, Sociological Research Online, 20(4): 105–118. Liliequist, E. (2019). Digitala förbindelser. Rum, riktning och queera orienteringar. Umeå: Umeå University Press. Linderborg, Å. (2014, November 7). Det ska fan vara politiskt korrekt. Aftonbladet. Linscott, C.P. (2017). All lives (don’t) matter: The Internet meets Afro-pessimism and Black optimism, Black Camera, 8(2): 104–119.

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PART IV

Linguistic citizenship and youth activism

10 APPROACHING A POLITICS OF YOUTH THROUGH LINGUISTIC CITIZENSHIP Lauren van Niekerk,1 Keshia Jansen,2 Sibonile Mpendukana3 and Christopher Stroud4 Introduction There is mounting evidence that youth not only take part in more conventional politics in the form of institutionalized politics of rights claims, claiming public spheres at different scales (local, global and national), but also actively engage in less institutionalized, imaginative and creative processes. These processes “challenge the narrow and restrictive definitions of what counts as politics” (Pickard and Bessant, 2018, p. 8) and serve, in fact, to regenerate politics, establishing “new sites for deliberative practice, community building, critique and mobilization” (p. 7, cf. also Loncle and Pickard, this volume). Turner (2016) captures this type of involvement on the ‘political side-lines’ in the notion of marginality, a space that offers conditions for forms of political becoming and the emergence of alternative modalities of the political beyond traditional rights-based and deliberative citizenships. From being an important resistance on the side-lines of ‘real’ politics, marginality (1) is productive of alternative political subjectivities (emergent solidarities, political beings); (2) brings into focus a more divergent set of subjects, sites and scales of political struggle; (3) offers a lens on the political that goes beyond institutionalized rights claims (Turner, 2016, p. 141). This chapter deals specifically with politics/political subjectivities of the margins, specifically with how youth engage with and deploy a politics of marginality through multifarious language practices and language ideological discourses to create alternative political subjectivities. To date, few studies of youth politics have given much due to language, with, for example, Årman, (2021, p. 81) in an overview of studies noting that “there is a noticeable lack of in-depth discussions on language in recent literature on language activism and youth political socialization”. Årman (2021, p. 7) argues that youths’ “negotiations of language are central in the formation of young political subjectivities” and play a pivotal role in the shaping of youths’ political and activist selves”. In re-signifying and jostling with local linguistic economies, youth produce new social spaces, carve out faultlines across social groups, form new political subjectivities, and feelings of belonging and exclusion, and more” (Årman, 2021, p. 80). Just as careful consideration of youth politics may gesture towards a regeneration of politics and a rethinking of where the political is located in youth, so does attending to language in youth

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politics invite consideration of where the political is located in language. To the extent that language has figured as a modality in political [claim making] beyond the issue of language itself, it has tended to be used as a forum or conduit for political rights more generally. Language politics with a predominantly rights focus builds on an understanding of language politics that sees affirmation of (named) language as a way to allow participation of historically marginalized voices into a more equitable and just social and political mainstream. However, as a strategic approach to equity and justice, a singular rights perspective has a tendency to rather bolster the status quo, to the extent that marginalized speakers through language ‘rights’ become institutionally ‘invited into’ a liberal framework of selective recognition as constituencies of speakers, ethnicities, races, genders, etc, that is, the very ‘diversities’ that have served historically to pin inequities in place. The construct of language through which ‘minority’/indigenous/vernacular speakers are granted affirmation is the very same construct – cut to the same cloth – as those forms of language used to dispossess and marginalize; they replicate forms of ‘understanding language’ that have historically served to oppress. It is an approach that rests on an identitarian understanding of language and selfhood that replicates colonial governmentality, what Veronelli (2016) has called ‘coloniality of language’. Such a politics instantiates what Ranciere (1999) calls ‘policing’, that is, business as usual, a politics of the unremarkable everyday, that reproduces structures in an orderly fashion and that attends to only certain voices articulated in specific formats. In other words, a predominantly rights-based politics of language risks morphing into one more technology of liberal governmentalities that “re-affirm (and keep firmly in place) rather than question or topple assigned injurability” (Sabsay, 2016). In a world desperately seeking radical change, there is a need to find how to capitalize on the transformative power of language in order to go beyond the status quo, and to source other ways of living and other ways of doing politics. Reinvigorating politics requires reinvigorating language as a modality of politics, which eases the way for other subjectivities beyond those determined by institutional rights to appear and be heard, one that will also allow for those already ‘recognized’ to be seen differently. This would be a politics in the sense of Ranciere (1999) that changes the conditions of play through events that allow the participation of voices previously heard as noise, as phonos, the cackle and ravings of the dispossessed and forgotten. In this chapter, we approach such a politics with due regard to the radical imaginations and practices of youth, and from the perspective of Linguistic Citizenship (LC) (Stroud, 2001, 2015, 2017). Originally formulated as a critique of a narrow liberal Linguistic Human Rights (LHR) perspective, LC offers a perspective from which to view language as a material modality for transformation and social change, a way of capturing new selves and new socialities beyond, or on the side of, a more institutionalized ‘linguistic rights’ politics with its focus on a top-down, institutionalized and (linguistically) normative politics of the status quo. Linguistic Citizenship as an approach to agency and voice “is designed to draw attention to the power of the unheard and unattended voice” (Stroud et al., 2021p. 1639) and provides an inroad to listening for non-conventional meaning and non-normative selves.

Linguistic Citizenship Linguistic Citizenship emphasizes language as a primarily political modality. The pairing of Linguistic with Citizenship is intended to highlight the importance of linguistic, more generally semiotic, practices that engage with a plurality or fellowship of broad affinity with others, rather than communities or constituencies of like-selves. Whereas LHR approaches look to how (named) languages circumscribe communities of ‘like subjectivities’ (races, ethnicities, nationalities and 138

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languages), practices or acts of LC facilitate the building of wider constituencies of speakers that cut across such divisions and borders, and that negotiate co-existence/co-habitation outside of common ground in recognition of equivocation, or what the Argentinian feminist philosopher Lugones (2006) calls, complex communication. This is the “praxical awareness of one’s own multiplicity and a recognition of the other’s opacity that does not attempt to assimilate it into one’s own familiar meanings” (2006, p. 75). Linguistic Citizenship thus attends specifically to how political subjectivities may emerge ‘otherwise’ in new communities/fellowships of speakers. The ability to engage with different others, to recognize different others as interlocutors, and to similarly be recognized and engaged by a plurality of others is, as the philosopher Arendt (1998) has noted, a prerequisite for agency – to be heard, seen, and to have one’s voice counted by others. The notion of Linguistic Citizenship is about transforming the self in transforming language through engagements and encounters in new social and material worlds. It is a decolonial and Southern notion that captures the reciprocity and mutual dependencies between linguistic agencies and political subjectivities and links the active semiotically intense socio-political engagement with and around language with social change. Acts of Linguistic Citizenship instantiate acts of languaging as ‘going beyond’ the current, institutionalized status quo. It is about how speakers strive to recuperate historically marginalized linguistic agency, practicing, performing and thinking with and through language (more broadly, semiotic materials) as both target for change and simultaneous medium of transformation of self and others in new constituencies of speakers. Acts of Linguistic Citizenship are where speakers bring languages into recognition on their (speakers’) own terms and in ways that may ultimately help historical structures of inequity by (re)establishing audibility of marginalized voices together with the material means that sustain them. Re-articulating Linguistic with Citizenship opens our eyes to the possibility of radically reimagining ourselves through language rather than language using us to affirm the inevitability of the status quo. To engage in acts of Linguistic Citizenship is to take part in jointly orchestrated reimaginings – becomings (Delueze, 1994) – in pursuit of non-determinant futures, as openness to the plurality of others may gestate ripples of continuous change. At the same time, engaging others is a source of novelty that carries the seeds of change and transformation, while simultaneously engendering ‘vulnerability’, the productive unmooredness of self when we feel and hear ourselves through the scripts and interactions with the plural others with whom we engage in fellowship – in Linguistic Citizenship. However, a new fellowship of new selves/subjectivities is only one side of the double-edged sword of (structural) transformation. Linguistic Citizenship acknowledges the bivalency of ‘language’ in the sense that Fraser (1995) uses the term to reference how “neither socioeconomic maldistribution or cultural misrecognition are an indirect effect of the other, but […] both are primary and co-original” (pp. 77–78. Essentially, subjectivities and representations of selves and others are intimately entwined with the structural and material conditions of life, such that new selves require new structures (economic, material) and new structures require, are embodied, in new selves. This is one of the core meanings of Linguistic Citizenship. The problem with LHR is that it attempts to conjure into existence new linguistically mediated selves and engagements outside of radically altering the fundamental structural conditions of redistribution. It is no coincidence that LHR gained traction in the 70s and 80s with the neoliberal replacement of class consciousness with a politics of identity that found expression in ethnic revivals and language maintenance (cf. also De Korne et al., this volume). Linguistic Citizenship seeks to provide a framework for critically interrogating the historical, socio-political and economic determinants of how languages and subjectivities are constructed, ideologized and practiced, at the same time as laying bare the structural, institutional, affective and representational conditions necessary for change. Fundamentally, 139

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LC locates our understanding of language in a different discursive archive and historical debate. This is one that finds articulation in decolonial, postcolonial and postcapitalist thought, where we sense the contours of a politics of language for the postcapitalist world that will supersede our neoliberal condition (cf. also Magnusson, 2022). In the following sections, we follow calls by scholars of youth political socialization (e.g., Gordon and Taft, 2011, Younis, 2002) to (1) investigate peer socialization among youth (p. 81); (2) recognize, with Pickard and Bessant (2018) the “imaginative, and politically regenerative nature of much youth political activity; and (3) engage Årman’s (2021) emphasis to carefully contextualize rich studies of the role of language in political subjectivity. We look at three cases, or vignettes, of Linguistic Citizenship illustrating how the notion can serve as a lens on three sets of youth practices around language; firstly, ‘youth becoming otherwise’ through language ideological discourses, that is, speakers navigating a newly constituted porosity of linguistic borders, and building broad political affinities that upset traditional social indexicalities of language and racialized identities. We label this case ‘fissures’ so as to pinpoint the location of semiotic activity in the spaces between labelled languages (cf. van Niekerk, Jansen and Bock, 2022). The second case is youth actively ‘dismantling’ language and manipulating fragments of linguistic codes to again go beyond normativities of language and identity in order to creatively explore their ‘Otherness’. In particular, the role here of art forms such as aesthetics and performance (such as Hip Hop and stand-up comedy), where ‘language’ is deconstructed/dismantled reveals the productivity of going beyond a sole focus on conventional linguistic structure to capture youth politics on the margins and in flux (Jansen, unpubl). In both of these cases, language is used transformatively in imaginative political activisms, with registers of talk emerging out of embodied, corporeal stylizations that articulate alternative agencies, and other knowledges, what Lugones (2006) calls ‘playful world travel’. Our third case study explores how LC allows us to “hear[i] the other into speech” (Horwsell, 2006) in contexts where voices are judged as noisy and discordant, and classified to be beyond meaning and reason. Youth protests are a prime case in point. Taking a recent South African student as an example (Mpendukana and Stroud, 2019), we suggest how an LC approach navigates the violence of protest to unearth significance in the ‘ruins’ of the semiotic-social edifice. Each of these acts of linguistic citizenship engage with the otherness of others, sharpening sensibilities of listening, and fine-tuning practices of sounding out of resonances of unspoken desire, and of utopic pre-figurings. Each case reveals rich seams of linguistic citizenship, as well as lay bare the fractured, simultaneous and multi-layered subjectivities that inhabit us.

Linguistic fissures: Speaking selves emerging from the in-between Pennycook (2010) speaking of English remarks on its ‘translocality’, its fluidity and fixity, and how it moves across speakers and contexts, while at the same time embedding itself, and its speakers, in the materiality of localities and social relations (cf. also Madsen, this volume). Although clearly the case for English in all its globality, much the same could be said of any language or languaging. Much languaging of youth especially can be seen in such terms, as a relocating and re-indexicalizing of speech forms in new materialities and socialities. This dimension of flux, fluidity and fixity pertaining to the indexical associations of named languages as centres for speakers’ normative orientations is one of the key dimensions attended to in the framework of Linguistic Citizenship (cf. also Madsen, this volume). Acts of LC are among other things, where speakers themselves exercise control over their language, deciding what languages are, and what they might mean, and where language issues are discursively tied to a range of social issues – policy issues and questions of equity. (Stroud, 2001, p. 353). 140

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In acts of Linguistic Citizenship, speakers move beyond being used by language to affirm the status quo towards using language to (radically) reimagine selves on their own terms. We see enactments of linguistic citizenship in this sense in the South African context, where the materialities and socialities of language post-apartheid are vibrant scenes for plays of emerging identities scripted in re-indexicalized languages. A prime illustration of this is found among speakers of Kaaps, a so-called (sociolectal/geolectal) variety of Afrikaans. Kaaps is primarily spoken in the Western Cape and its surroundings (Cartens, 2003 and Hendricks, 2012). It is a southwestern variety of Afrikaans which includes many “Asian, Malay, Creole Portuguese and English influences” (Hendricks, 2016; Van Rensburg, 1989). Historically, the variety has long been specifically associated with the racial designation ‘coloured’, that is “a person who is not a white person nor a native” (Population Registration Act of 1950) (cf. Posel, 2001, p. 85). Increasingly, however, the sociolinguistic market is undergoing re-indexicalization, and young bilingual English and Kaaps speakers are navigating the complexities in languaging to reimagine being otherwise that challenge and subverts the essentialized, ethnolinguistic identities historically indexed by these languages. Examples of this are seen in the narratives of youths who are attempting to move beyond the historical stigma attributed to Kaaps speakers as ghetto and uneducated, as well as distance themselves from attributions or expectations that they necessarily master Afrikaans because of their racial designation as coloured. One such speaker is Lee who recounts that while visiting a bar in a farming town in the Western Cape, he enters into conversation with another client, a white middle-aged man, seated close by (cf. Van Niekerk, Jansen and Bock, 2022). The man asks him to converse in Afrikaans, because, as he says: “Nee jys van die Kaap (‘No you are from the Cape’)/ jy praat Afrikaans (‘you speak Afrikaans’)/ en jys coloured jy praat Afrikaans….(‘and you are coloured, you speak Afrikaans…’)”. These utterances from a person that Lee labels in his narrative as the ‘white guy’ serve to reinscribe an ethnolinguistic identity that stems from the apartheid era in which people were racially classified by their appearance, language and place of abode or birth. However, Lee tells us that he rejects this positioning, by responding with: ha ah ek praat engels (‘No I speak English’). While Lee is challenging this restrictive positioning and ideology by stating that he speaks English, he is using Afrikaans to establish that he is a ‘coloured English speaker’, a positioning he explicitly displays in the ambiguity of juxtaposing the indexicalities of speakership associated with each language (cf. Årman, 2021, p. 7) re-indexicalizating ‘the racio-linguistic landscape through claims to preferential linguistic mastery (cf. Oostendorp, 2022) of English. A second example of how mastery mediates a linguistic remapping of colouredness is Brandon, a young English speaker who narrates a story about his mother. Despite the fact that she is a welleducated and proficient English speaker and works in a corporate space where she daily meets many people through English, she is constantly told that she “speaks well for a coloured lady” a clear instance of what Rosa calls “looking like a language, and sounding like a race” (Rosa, 2018). At the same time that Brandon protests the facile assumption or expectation that the mother – all so-called coloureds – have only a non-native mastery of English, he is also asserting a particular middle-class social status and mobility indexed in the very claiming of English as a ‘native’ language. More interestingly, by staking claims to masterful juxtaposition of Kaaps and English, Brandon, as does Lee, is speaking from a particular location in social, economic and political space, a space that focuses on transition and mobility, speaking from a space, a fissure, unnamed and un-fixed between named languages and their ideological positionings of speakers. Speaking from the fissure, is ideologically construed differently to being a ‘bilingual’ in, say English and Afrikaans. This latter speakership has historically had a firm root in an (often white) identity as Afrikaans speaking or English speaking, with a particular history and politics attached to being 141

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bilingual. However, speaking from the fissure is rather speaking from a space of ambivalence, a space emerging (rather than mapped), one loaded with a very special significance of political transformation, and for this reason an instance of an act of Linguistic Citizenship where language is used transformatively. This is a place of becoming and potentiality in an emerging or changing community rather than a non-place, or a bare outsider-ness only. Speaking from this place called into existence in the juxtaposed normativity of language is with Povinelli’s (2011, p. 7) term, speaking from a ‘space of otherwise’, engaging in a quasi-event that is rich with potentiality for another way of living. It is a community emerging out of a re-signified English and a reindexicalized Kaaps, offering speakers such as Brandon’s mother and Lee a space of ambivalence where identities are remapped through the juxtaposition and mastery of both English and Kaaps, where other subjectivities can appear and be heard, and for those already ‘recognized’ to be seen differently (Stroud, 2021). These are voices actively contesting historical marginality, illustrating Turner’s point on the power of the margins (potentially) to script/frame a political position that would otherwise not be available in more institutionalized discourses. Brandon and Lee illustrate “the multifarious ways in which youth engage with marginality through language practice and ideological discourse and create alternative political subjectivities (Stroud, 2021). Acts of linguistic citizenship are thus at work here in how speakers are not being fixed into identities or into felt (imposed) subjectivities, but rather negotiating and transcending language in such a way that they are constantly in a state of becoming. Speaking from the fissure means that these speakers can align themselves with those who identify as part of this group or community (colouredness and Kaaps), while also being able to move beyond and reimagine what Kaaps and its linguistic practices mean to them. Adjirakor (2020 p. 2) makes a similar point with regard to the urban identity of Tanzanian youth and their use of English with hip-hop, noting “how this language choice is rooted in a desire to mark opposition to the dominant hegemonic legacy of Swahili in Tanzania and thus to re-define narratives of identity, belonging and authenticity” (cf. Erastus et al., this volume, for Sheng in Kenya).

A community of fragments In the preceding example, we saw how normativities of language were abandoned, in new fellowships of becoming. Mäkilähde, Leppänen and Itkonen (2019) note the importance of the notion of normativity to the philosophy and methodology of linguistics, pointing to how normativity is commonly contrasted with doing something incorrect by violating a “corresponding norm” (2019, p. 3) for every mistake. The following vignette illustrates how a Linguistic Citizenship lens may offer insight into how youths use language to break away from normativity in order to create more ‘liveable,’ liminal spaces for engagement with a plurality or fellowship of broad affinity with different others, rather than communities or constituencies of like-selves (Stroud, 2021). The youths in the following sidestep imposed normativities through acts of Linguistic Citizenship that create fellowships around fragments of language comprising the semiotic means whereby they create and perform new emergent subjectivities that go beyond their assigned racial, linguistic, and social identities, as well as public normativity. Sethu, a 22-year-old black South African female and final-year student at a public university in the Western Cape gives us a glimpse into how this comes about. Sethu is a senior member of an internationally acclaimed South African choir. The choir is made up of youths from various parts of the country, and prides itself in its diverse musicality and the diversity of its members which enables it to create and perform original multilingual choral works. The diversity of culture of the choir is constantly depicted in their online media presence, 142

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and is also highlighted in the traditional African attire during performances, and the languages they choose to sing in (cf. Ligidima and Makananise, 2020). Contrasting with the performance policy of using multiple ‘rainbow languages’ to refract the new South Africa is an ‘English only’ policy mandated by the choirmaster, in the interests of transparency, for all interactions among choir members in rehearsals, thereby also reinforcing the de facto role played by English as the link language for everyday communications across the silos of South African linguistic diversity. Although the choir may be multilingual and diverse, and all invariably as university students would have a good mastery of English, members nevertheless experience difficulty in engaging and relating to the various selves or subjectivities conventionally linked to these languages. In fact, they typically feel that they are constrained in how they wish to engage each other and seek other ways of ‘becoming-together’. In the following extract, Sethu shares how choir members went about circumventing the stipulated multilingual norms of the choir space: So I would greet her in Afrikaans every time I see her and she would greet me in isiXhosa from then on after that we realized we hate this rule of just English we speak primarily English and whatever but now you forcing me to do this it was it was weird uhm from then on certain people would would we started teaching each other so I asked her to help polish up my Afrikaans because I felt like it was lacking I wasn’t speaking it enough anymore and I didn’t have the high school incentive of getting good marks or whatever uhm … and she wanted to learn more Xhosa so that she can communicate with other co-workers better at work and whatever and we started basically a trend to a certain degree where if I greet you I will greet you in Afrikaans or whatever language and you greet me in isiZulu or Setswana or whatever and to this day that happens where now we’ve started greeting each other and teaching each other in every rehearsal at least one word that’s not a swear word because you know how people teach each other swear words. From Sethu’s account, we see how members of the choir had started to create smaller interactions in which they chose to teach and learn from each other instead. An initial reading may lead one to conclude that this is simply an example of code-mixing or even translanguaging. However, what this highlights is the dismantling of the normative or the institutionalized. Bristowe et al. (2014) report findings along similar lines in that there is a break away from using traditional perceptions of language towards exploring how youths use their linguistic resources to achieve ‘agentive purposes’ (Hurst-Harosh, 2020). In the study, the authors explore how participants use their linguistic resources to draw on multiple identities in diverse spaces. In the case study specifically, Sethu and her friends approach the ‘language policy’ agentively in order to transform the space and engage with one another on their own terms. Beyer (2015) notes that youth language research has long been polarized by, on the one hand, the emergence of structural linguistic youth codes, and on the other, a more holistic approach which considers socio-cultural contexts and factors Research on African youth languages for example, is largely built around the idea of named languages. For example, Kießling and Mous (2004) posit that all African youth languages are named, and that these names are known by their speakers. However, Hurst-Harosh and Erastus (2018) acknowledge that not all African youth languages are named as they exist as language resources, registers or styles utilized by a multilingual youthful population (cf. also Erastus et al., this volume). The authors explain that these constitute a repertoire filled with standard and nonstandard varieties. In the example from Sethu, we see how this multilingual youth population is building plural engagements out of spontaneous, momentary and fleeting fragments of named languages in seeking new ground on which to capture mutual, constantly evolving, co-constructed new subjectivities. They are 143

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engaging in acts o Linguistic Citizenship in how they are seeking ways to go beyond language to engage across the barriers of their differences. In so doing, they draw on the normative resources available to them to form new ways of interacting which goes against what has been prescribed and to forge communities and fellowships out of linguistic fragments. Menash (2016, p. 3) states that: In this way, youth language is both reactive and enterprising. Speakers shape, make and break the rules of engagement at will. Young people use language to conceptualize identity, enhance solidarity, foster group integration and reinforce anti-establishment and resistant behaviour. Youth language is therefore an essential element in the creation of subcultural capital.

Sounding out /seeking voices beyond the ruins/whispers among the ruins Why is it that us whose mother tongue is riot are not spoken to. Kgafela oa Magogodi, poet and academic activist.

Youth protests are ubiquitous: they are often perceived as provocative, disruptive of orderly management of conflict and prime exemplars of un-mannered engagement. They are frequently seen as violent. In the context of South African protests, non-violent engagements are seldom an option in a country where structural violence reproduces counter-hegemonic and guerrilla es que moments of violence during protests. In fact, Norgaard (2023, p. 623) notes that “South African residents, police, military, and state/political officials have internalized genre knowledges of violence […]”. Violent encounters have pervaded the social fabric of the country and the memory of people politically and socially. In essential respects, violence as an act of communication and citizenship is the modus operandi of both (post)colonial dehumanization and resistance to it, with a long history of “members of subordinated groups [who] have defended […] anger as morally and politically appropriate response to daily injustices” (Bailey, 2018, p. 93). The student youth protests manifested as #FeeMustFall is an example of youth engaging ‘violently’ as a conscious and intentional site of struggle with an anger informed by knowledge of thriving coloniality. Chowdhury (2021, p. 291) highlights how being subjected to inherited inequities motivated the students to “challenge the entire colonial legacy and injustices”, among other ways, through the creation of new modes of being and new ways of protesting; new forms of language, as well as discourse on language and epistemic justice articulated across a variety of semiotic modalities played a major role in the protest (see Mpendukana and Stroud, 2019). Much of the protest was in reaction to, what the students perceived to be, a historical and colonial devoicing of themselves in the institutional denial of language and concomitant dehumanization that has long been a central technology of coloniality of language. Historical dichotomies of subject formation prescribe who is heard/listened to and who can speak or not, within the confines of established sensibilities of social normativities (see Mbembe, 2019; Rabaka, 2010; Spivak, 1999), with the grammar of coloniality (MaldonadoTorres, 2007) still dictating what voices are audible and which are silenced or erased. Brooks (2020 captures what is at stake with the student protests in what he terms “Western post-Enlightenment values” that drive the duality of othering voices when he states: The question and problem of who is afforded a voice – of which voices are heard as speech and which voices are heard as noise (if they are even heard at all) – is connected to an epistemological project rooted in the making of categorical distinctions, a project that brings with 144

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it the violent processes of racial categorization and racialization, as well as class stratification, gender binarization, and patriarchal heteronormativity. (Brooks, 2020, p. 29) Brooks’ observations resonate well in South Africa’s context, framed as it is by fraught racial histories of categorization and hierarchization of voices and ways of speaking. The long durée of violence upheld in a democratic South Africa through the structural lack of opportunities and denial of the humanity of the Other has continued to produce voices that go unheard. The racialization of language and acts of protests “is but one modality of creating a purely distinct category as a means to confront and contend with difference” (Brooks, 2020, p. 29). The othering and labelling of others removes the issues from their structural and historical basis. Youths in protest seek to ‘escape restrictive and prescriptive’ senses of language and to become audible on their own terms. In #FeesMustFall, students’ language issues were framed in, and constitutive of, more violent articulations of grievance, such as the burning of artwork and the destruction of vehicles. In this context, Žižek (2016, p. 2) explains that “language and the renunciation of violence” are often seen as two sides of the same coin, and that since man is ‘a speaking animal’, the renunciation of violence defines the very core of human-being”. This not only suggests an explicit link between ‘speaking’ and ‘being human’ but encourages or opens up for a further implication that ‘being (fully) human’ resides in particular non-violent forms of languaging. Not surprisingly, the students’ rhetorical use of language was seen as ‘inciting violence’, ‘illogical’ and as a refusal to engage in institutionally acceptable ‘rational’ and discursive deliberation. Over time, this led to a change in how they were perceived and the withholding of popular support (see Mbembe, 2015; Luescher, 2016; Langa, 2016; Chantiluke et al., 2018). In other words, the occurrence of violent protest was taken to signify the ruin of sense, and the abandonment of voice, a lack of will on behalf of students to engage rationally and sensibly. Thus, a central issue in ‘rehabilitating’ those behind protest is “how do we hear each other into speech (fugitive listening); how do we speak each other into hearing” (Morton, 1985, p. 122). Instead of “can the subaltern speak?” (Spivak, 1999) (without the violence of colonial revoicing), the more important question to ask is “how to decipher his/her voice from the multiple utterances that form hegemonic discourses?” How to listen (intensely) to what youth are saying, listening/ hearing ‘between the lines’, seeking ‘the charge of the word’ (Fanon, 1967) and attending fugitively to represent and “witness” happenings ethically without distortion or appropriation. This is basically, then, about how to construct a habitable edifice out of ruins – sense out of what is institutionally deemed to be nonsense. Žižek reminds us that during protests, despite the anger and the ferocity of the crowd, “we should never forget the placards they are carrying and the words which sustain and justify their acts (2016, p. 3). But, more specifically, “in what way can the dispossessed and beaten give voice and exercise any agency for change, when, no matter how much voice and agency is accorded, it’s always at the cost of what is worth voicing about in the first place” (Stroud et al., 2021 p. 1641), when voices become appropriated. In an attempt to address this challenge, and to distil audible voices from the mesh of trammelled senses we bring two notions into dialogue with the notion of Linguistic Citizenship, namely fugitive listening (Brooks, 2020; Harney and Moten, 2013) and complex communication (Lugones, 2006). Fugitive listening is a mode of engagement that “attends to sonic practices that refuse the given grounds of representation” (Brooks, 2020, p. 25). It is a mode of listening to those who are cast into the abyss of non-being, the subaltern (Spivak, 1999) and those of the undercommons (Harney and Moten, 2013), whose silence(s) “is made possible if not expected” (Ibrahim, 2011, p. 620) and whose words “are not heard at all” (Bailey, 2018, p. 96) – the undercommons – a situation charac145

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terized by inaudibility and regulation. It is a space that embraces the breaking up of normalcy and a space of refusal to stay and to be defined, providing a moment of embracing disorder as reality and as a means to augment what is outside the scope of sensibilities and regimented orders. This is an approach that dispels rigid notions of what counts and what does not count. The second construct relevant to getting sense out of the violence of youth protest, ‘complex communication’ (Lugones, 2006), denotes how “we create and cement relational identities, meanings that did not precede the encounter, ways of life that transcend nationalism, root identities, and other simplifications of our imaginations” (2006, p. 84), that is, a “creative space” (ibid.). In complex communication, there is an abandoning of old selves, and an embracing of new selves and new socialities. Medina (2020, p. 215) builds on these ideas and argues that “complex and deeply transformative communication among oppressed subjects involves travelling to each other’s worlds – understanding by world a shared horizon of meaning and interpretation that discloses possibilities for experiences and action”. Linguistic Citizenship as a construct engages with both fugitive listening and complex communication. With fugitive listening, Linguistic Citizenship “is designed to draw attention to the power of the unheard and unattended voice” (Stroud et al., 2021 p. 1639), providing an inroad to listening for non-conventional meaning. In like manner with the notion of ‘complex communication’, Linguistic Citizenship “captures and embraces ‘new’ and ‘irregular’ constituencies that fall outside of, or go beyond, the institutionalized and regimented, liberal, idea of communality/ sociality/citizenship” (Stroud et al., 2021, p. 1641). In contradistinction to both these constructs, Linguistic Citizenship engagements across and within differences in a new community of selves, a multivocality and dialogical engagement across difference, retaining ‘opacity’. LC is thus less about engaging in new identity fields than negotiating becomings and differences. Thus, wedding Linguistic Citizenship to fugitive listening and complex communication could open for a broader perspective on how to engage complex texts and semiotic modes; attending to Linguistic Citizenship in how we approach ‘hearing’ can assist researchers, authorized through forms of disciplinary representation that undermine competency to hear an ‘other’ to cultivate a virtue of ‘response-ability in order to make audible other voices beyond stereotyping tropes (Hoagland, 2020, pp. 49–50), a becoming-with.

Conclusion and future directions Born out of the material and linguistic inequities of a multilingual and (barely) postcolonial Southern Africa (Stroud, 2001), Linguistic Citizenship sought to provide a semiotic perspective within sociologies of absence and emergence (de Sousa Santos, 2018). As such it is a decolonial and southern construct, a rear-guard theory in the sense of de Sousa Santos. The ‘south’ here is understood as the ‘metaphorical’ South that is, less a geopolitical south than a south defined by historical impoverishment and inequities of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, a ‘south’ that is also found in abundance in the geopolitical north (de Sousa Santos, 2018). The fact that there are many ‘metaphorical souths’ in the geopolitical north speaks to the need for, and applicability of, a decolonizing construct such as Linguistic Citizenship. It also informs the point made by Nortier and Svendsen (2015) who highlight how “the evolution of ideologically productive youth linguistic practices shows commonalities and differences in how young people experience, act and relate to the contemporary social, cultural and linguistic complexity of the twenty-first century” (Mensah, 2016, p. 2). Our argument in this chapter has been that a notion of Linguistic Citizenship is able to capture the contextual and political specificities of these global youth commonalities, while recognizing their shared conditions of non-normativity and resistance to the hegemony of linguistic coloniality. In doing so, we have attempted to lift for146

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ward how LC can capture the importance of agency and facilitate audibility and comprehension of different voices as youth engage in new reimaginings and becomings through actualizations of Linguistic Citizenship. Linguistic Citizenship also carries methodological implications for engaging as researchers with the politics of youth language, namely the ethical imperative to find or discover an analytical voice that can hear the evocative voices of youth on the margins without reducing these voices through appropriation to the strictures of normative and scripted disciplinary representations of language, youth and politics. This is a question of developing “epistemic skills/virtues, not in order to be right but in order to engage outside of dominant constructions” (Hoagland, 2020, p. 58, italics in original).

Notes 1 Corresponding authors: Lauren van Niekerk, Department of Linguistics and the Centre of Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR), University of the Western Cape, Robert Sobukwe Road, Private Bag X17, Belville, 7535, South Africa. Orcid id: 0000-0002-1772-4262. 2 Keshia Jansen, Department of Linguistics and Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research, Faculty of Arts, University of the Western Cape, Robert Sobukwe Road, Private Bag X17, Belville, 7535, South Africa. Orcid id: 0000-0002-7156-6461. 3 Sibonile Mpendukana, Department of African Studies and Linguistics, Harry Oppenheimer Institute Building, Engineering Mall, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa. Orcid id: 0000-0002-0701-3846 4 Christopher Stroud is an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and former Director of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) at the University of the Western Cape. He is also Professor of Transnational Multilingualism at Stockholm University, and a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa (ASSAf). Orcid id: 0000-0002-0154-3539

Further readings Alim, H.S., Q.E. Williams, A. Haupt and E. Jansen (2021). “Kom Khoi San, kry trug jou land”: Disrupting White settler colonial logics of language, race, and land with Afrikaaps, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 31(2): 194–217. Stroud, C. (2023). Linguistic citizenship in multilingualism. In C. McKinney, V. Zavala and P. Makoe (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, 2nd Edition. London and New York: Routledge.

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Lauren van Niekerk et al Chowdhury, R. (2021). From black pain to Rhodes Must Fall: A rejectionist perspective, Journal of Business Ethics, 170(2): 287–311. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. de Sousa Santos, B. (2018). The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham: Duke University Press. Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skins, White Masks. New York: Groove Press. Fraser, N. (1995). From redistribution to recognition: Dilemmas of justice in a post-socialist age, New Left Review, 1(212): 68–93. Gordon, H.R. and J.K. Taft (2011). Rethinking youth political socialization: Teenage activists talk back, Youth & Society, 43(4): 1499–1527. Harney, S. and F. Moten (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions. Hendricks, F. (2012). Die Aard en Konteks van Kaaps: ’n Verledetydse, Eietydse en Toekomsperspektief. Ongepubliseerde referaat gelewer by die Kaaps in fokus-simposium. 19 Julie, Universiteit van Wes-Kaapland. Hendricks, F. (2016). The nature and context of Kaaps: A contemporary, past and future perspective, Multilingual Margins, 3(2): 6–39. Henning, Å (2021). Decolonizing Political corrections: language activism and regimentation among high school youth. Retrieved in 2023 http://su​.diva​-portal​.org​/smash​/record​.jsf​?pid​=diva2​%3A1588824​ &dswid​=8642 Hoagland, S.L. (2020). Aspects of the coloniality of knowledge, Critical Theory of Race, 8(1–2): 48–60. Horswell, M.J. (2006). Decolonizing the Sodomite: Queer Tropes of Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hurst-Harosh, E. (2020). Youth language in Africa: Introduction to the special issue, Linguistics Vanguard, 6(4). https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/lingvan​-2020​-0069 Hurst-Harosh, E. and F.K. Erastus (2018). African Youth Languages: New Media, Performing Arts and Sociolinguistic Development. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillian. Ibrahim, A. (2011). Will They Ever Speak with Authority? Race, post‐coloniality and the symbolic violence of language, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43:6, 619–635. Multilingualism as social relationalities: A linguistic citizenship approach (Unpublished master's thesis). University of the Western Cape, Cape Town. Kießling, R. and M. Mous (2004). Urban youth languages in Africa, Anthropological Linguistics, 46: 303–342. Langa, M. (2016). #Hashtag: An Analysis of the #FeesMustFall Movement at South African Universities. Johannesburg: Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. Ligidima, M. and F.O. Makananise (2020). Social media as a communicative platform to promote indigenous African languages by youth students at a rural based university, South Africa, Gender & Behaviour, 18(2), 15824–15832. Luescher, T.M. (2016). Student representation in a context of democratisation and massification in Africa: Analytical approaches, theoretical perspectives, and #RhodesMustFall. In Luescher, T.M, Klemenčič, M and Jowi, J.O (eds.), Student Politics in Africa: Representation and Activism. Cape Town and Maputo: African Minds. Lugones, M. (2006). On complex communication, Hypatia, 21(3): 75–85. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being, Cultural Studies, 21(2–3): 240–270. Magnusson, S. (2022). Boosting Young Citizens’ Deontic Status: Interactional Allocation of Rights-to-Decide in Participatory Democracy Meetings (Doctoral dissertation, Södertörns högskola). Retrieved from https://www​.diva​-portal​.org​/smash​/record​.jsf​?pid​=diva2​%3A1693392​&dswid=​-7927 Mbembe, A. (2015). Exorcise Our White Ghosts. Retrieved in 2016 https://www​.news24​.com​/citypress​/ Voices​/Exorcise​-our​-white​-ghosts​-20150918 Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Medina, J. (2020). Complex communication and decolonial struggles: The forging of deep coalitions through emotional echoing and resistant imaginations, Critical Philosophy of Race, 8(1–2): 212–236. Mensah, Eyo (2016). The dynamics of youth language in Africa: An introduction, Sociolinguistic Studies, 10(1–2): 1–14. Morton, N. (1985). The Journey is Home. Boston: Beacon Press. Mpendukana, S. and C. Stroud (2019). Of monkeys, shacks and loos: Changing times, changing places. In A. Peck, C. Stroud and Q. Williams (eds.), Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes (pp. 183–200). Great Britain: Bloomsbury.

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11 YOUTH, PROTEST AND (ONLINE) COMMUNICATION Ana Deumert and Nkululeko Mabandla1

Introduction It is a common assumption in the literature on digital media that young people “have taken up the affordances of digital communication more fervently than any other age group” (Cutler and Røyneland, 2018, p. xviii). The 2022 report of the International Communication Union indicates that globally three-quarters (75%) of those aged 15 to 24 years, use the internet (compared to 65% per cent of older users; ITU, 2022a). The theme of ‘the most connected generation’ also surfaces in the Global Connectivity Report (ITU, 2022b) which dedicates a full chapter to ‘The digital lives of children and youth’. In addition, there has been an association of political protest and youth: young people shaped, for example, the turbulent politics of the 1960s and – throughout history – were at the forefront of a wide range of political struggles, from the Naródniki movement in Russia and the Young Turks, to the 1908 youth activism (pemuda) in Indonesia, the ‘Arab spring’, the antiausterity protests in Spain and Greece as well as global environmental activism in the context of the climate catastrophe. What happens if one brings these two discourses into conversation, and looks at how youth use social media – and other media – in articulating and organizing political protest, mobilizing solidarity and expressing visions of a different future? Recent protest movements – from #Occupy Wallstreet to #YenAMarre, from #BlackLivesMatter to #RhodesMustFall have been hashtagged – a visual sign that indicates their presence on the digital streets and that has contributed to their circulation, reach and visibility (see, for example, Valenzuela, et al., 2012, Boulianne et al., 2020, Poell, 2020). Key concepts for this chapter are ‘youth’ (see below for further discussion), ‘protest’ / ‘activism’, and ‘(digital) media’. Even though young people often show limited interest in ‘conventional’ forms of politics (such as voting, cf. Loncle and Pickard, this volume), they are certainly not apolitical or apathetic. Rather their political engagement tends to focus on specific issues and frequently favours protest repertoires, including demonstrations, direct action and civil disobedience (for an overview of the debates on youth political engagement, see Furlong, 2015). Recent work on the Arab uprisings has shown that, even though digital media played a role, their power could only unfold in tandem with face-to-face communication. Thus, how online and offline communication articulate with one another, and what affordances they provide, will be different from context to context, requiring grounded analysis rather than universal statements (Ozgul, 2020; cf. also Bennett and Segerberg, 150

DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-15

Youth, protest and (online) communication

2013). Youth activism, as argued by Henry Jenkins and his colleagues (2016), will communicate by ‘any media necessary’, re-shaping discourses and creating new political imaginaries (Castells, 2012). Looking at the mediatization of protest, we note the presentism of much work on digital media – as well as their focus on contexts where digital access is plentiful – and we suggest that it is helpful to look at protest media more broadly, across time and space (following Downing, et al., 2001). The focus of our discussion in this chapter is on South Africa, which is a country with a long history of youth-led protest. It is also a country – situated in the majority world of the global south – where ongoing capitalist-colonial exploitation and white supremacy shape the experience of ‘being young’ in fundamental ways; as well as a country where, as elsewhere in the global south, a large proportion of the population falls into the category ‘youth’. Indeed, it is estimated that around 80% to 90% of youth live in the global south and ‘southern youth studies’ are thus central, not marginal, to understanding youth from a global perspective (Roberts and France, 2021; Phillips, 2018). And finally, South Africa is a country where digital access is relatively widespread, but still limited for many (especially when compared to near-universal access in the global north). The most recent ITU statistics suggest that over two-thirds of the South African population (70%) use the internet. As points of comparison, one could mention Pakistan and Norway, where the percentages are 25% and 99% respectively.2 In this chapter, we trace how the past and present of youth-led protests articulate with one another in South Africa, how digital inequalities shape the articulation of protest, and how social media have become important to the cross-temporal and cross-spatial mediation of protest repertoires. The argument that we present in this chapter is grounded in local experiences and histories. A note on definitions: so far, we have used the term ‘youth’ rather loosely, as if we know what we mean by it. Yet, the age bracket that defines ‘youth’ is contested, and any definition of youth will intersect with the injustices brough about by, inter alia, race, class, gender/sexualities and disabilities, as well as diverse cultural and historical conceptions as to what constitutes youth. The United Nations define ‘youth’ as those aged 15 to 24 years. Yet, other organizations use different definitions: the OECD uses the age bracket 15 to 29 years, and the African Youth Charter (2006) includes those aged 15 to 35. Because of deep socio-economic inequalities that are linked to the longue durée of colonialism, young people in the global south transitioned into adulthood – which requires financial independence – later than this used to be the case in Europe and North America. Thus, persistent poverty and high levels of unemployment keep many young people in a liminal state. In South Africa, for example, youth unemployment was over 40% in 2022 (compared to just over 30% for the general population). However, one should note that the lengthened transition from youth to adulthood is no longer unique to Africa and the global south: socio-economic precarity is now a global phenomenon and young people in the global north also experience high levels of unemployment as well as prolonged – and often seemingly unending – periods of ‘waithood’; that is, an extended temporal transition between the dependency of childhood and the full autonomy of adulthood (Honwana, 2019). When reflecting on definitions of ‘youth’ one needs to remain cognizant that, through one’s research, one might be creating ‘figures of youth’ (youth-as-fun, youth-aslost, youth-as-struggling, youth-as-revolutionary, youth-as-risk-takers, youth-as-dangerous, etc.); that is, representations – some of which empowering, others stigmatizing – that can constrain one’s thinking, that can become blindspots as well as filters in one’s analysis by constructing young people as a singular rather than inherently heterogenous subjectivity (Threadgold, 2020).

Youth protests in South Africa, then and now The important role of youth in the struggle against apartheid is well-documented and is remembered in South Africa every year on 16 June. This is the day on which, in 1976, a peaceful march 151

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of high-school students was met by police brutality. They faced not only teargas and batons but were shot at with live ammunition. Hundreds of students lost their lives, others were arrested and put into detention. The protest soon spread nationally, leading to a situation where resistance was everywhere. While the Soweto uprising is perhaps the best-known youth protest in South Africa, it was not the only one, nor was it the first one. It was preceded by a long history of resistance to oppression that went back to the seventeenth century. Yet, early resistance – and the historians who wrote about it – did not necessarily conceive of youth as a separate political and social category. This changed in the twentieth century when young people emerged not only as an object of sociological analysis, but also as political actors who positioned themselves in opposition to what Les Switzer (1990, p. 96) called ‘petitionary protest’. This was a form of respectable and nonconfrontational resistance that operated within the confines of the colonial state and resisted “any strategy of protest that promoted racial consciousness, or advocated strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience” (p. 91). Petitionary protest, which had emerged after the suppression of militant anti-colonial resistance in the late nineteenth century, was associated with the older generation, whereas a new generation of activists sought to continue the militant struggle. Early youth protest took place at schools and at the University College of Fort Hare. It was in the context of mission-run boarding schools that students, male and female, became politicized and many political leaders in the liberation struggle “cut their political teeth” at mission schools, which provided access to education, while at the same time trying to control and contain this education in ways that benefited the colonial system (Massey, 2010, p. 8; Stanley, 2018). Student politics gained momentum in the 1940s with the formation of the Youth League of the African National Congress (1944). Young cadres no longer believed that change would be possible through compromise and accommodation and began to explore more militant approaches to challenging white supremacy and colonialism-apartheid (similar generational dynamics are evident in the US, with the formation of the Red/Black Power movements, see Shreve, 2011). The founding Manifesto of the Youth League located youth struggles firmly within the project of national liberation, and articulated student-worker solidarities: [Youth] wants action and is in sympathy with the rank and file of our oppressed people. It is a challenge to Youth to join in force in the national fight against oppression. (Lembede, 1996, p. 65) The Youth League drew strength from the student protests that had occurred regularly since the 1920s, the early student organizations to which they had given rise and the defiant repertoires of struggle that had developed. The protests at schools and universities did not occur in a vacuum: news about mine worker strikes in Johannesburg, the Italian attack on Ethiopia in the 1930s, the independence of Ghana in the 1950s, Sharpeville and the Congo Crisis in the 1960s, the insurgencies of the 1970s (in Namibia, Angola, and Mozambique), as well as the pan-African philosophy of Garveyist thought, reached students via word-of-mouth, newspapers and the radio. Political education also happened face-to-face, such as when Edward Roux, a member of the Communist Party, taught Marxism/ Leninism clandestinely to university students (Massey, 2010). Letters from family and friends were another source of information. Conscientized, politically active teachers also played an important role, and assisted with the circulation of banned literature. And on the campus of Fort Hare, Robert Sobukwe and others posted, in the 1940s, a daily commentary on the political situation, titled Beware, on public noticeboards. Thus, schools and universities, as spaces where young people gathered and often lived together, became sites of political education and activism. Young 152

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people, in conversation with one another, imagined their futures, learnt to mobilize and established connections with broader political movements. Protest and resistance went underground when the Youth League was banned on the Fort Hare campus in 1949. Yet, this did not mean that it lost its militancy: “cell groups operated to foster discussion on Marxism, banned by the apartheid state, and to organize acts of resistance linked to groups off-campus in civil society” (Johnson, 2019, p. 9). In the 1960s, when the armed struggle was inaugurated with the formation of Poqo and Umkhonto we Sizwe, youth protests became overtly political and spread from the mission-owned schools and colleges to urban day-schools, culminating in the 1976 uprising and continuing throughout the 1980s, when a strong studentworker alliance emerged. It was during the 1980s, especially, that ‘the youth’ became established as a political category central to resistance: discursively, young people were constructed as those who had the energy and power to challenge the oppressive system most vigorously (Bundy, 1985). Young people of this generation were known as the Young Lions, highly politicized and willing to fight for their freedom. They were shaped by the politics of Black Consciousness and many joined the liberation movement in exile, dedicating their lives to the struggle for freedom and leaving their homes at ages as young as 16 and 17 years. The majority of the young fighters were male, with women accounting for roughly one-fifth of recruits (Magadla, 2015). In the 1990s, when the African National Congress (henceforth ANC) suspended the armed struggle, many, especially young people, contested the settlement since the conditions of their lives had not improved, and they felt that, for them, a luta continua, ‘the struggle continues’. These tensions are still present in South Africa’s political landscape and continue to shape the contours of youth political engagement (Marks, 2001; for a broad overview of youth politics with special attention to West Africa, see Van Gyampo and Anyidoho, 2019). Contemporary youth protests in South Africa draw on the rich protest culture and history outlined above. Protest repertoires include, among others, marches and strikes, collective boycotts, disruptions, physical blockades as well as songs and dance, including the toyi-toyi, a high energy dance that became popular during the youth protests of the 1980s. During the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall protests (2015 and 2016) students across the country disrupted lectures and blocked the entrances to universities in their struggle for free, decolonized education; they gathered, marched and drew on freedom songs, whose lyrics they adjusted to reflect the current struggle (Mabandla and Deumert, 2020). In addition, they used social media to organize their actions in-real-time and to establish networks of solidarity and political affect (on social media activism during #RMF and #FMF, see Bosch, 2019). Twitter statistics show that the #RMF hashtag was able to spark a national debate about the presence of colonial statues in less than a week, and activists used digital tools such as Dropbox to circulate political readings about Pan-Africanist thought, Black consciousness and Black radical feminism. In addition, Twitter and Facebook were used to coordinate activities and to raise awareness, building a national movement across campuses in South Africa and beyond (on #RhodesMustFallOxford and other international connections, see Ahmed, 2020). Protest action was not limited to universities but occurred at educational institutions more broadly. In August 2016, black students at Pretoria High – a historically white school – protested against the school’s hair policy, which victimized students who wore dreadlocks and afros. They also protested against the school’s language policy, which penalized students for speaking African languages on the school grounds. The students took to social media to give visibility to their demands. Hashtags, especially, were central in creating a sense of a shared struggle for students (see also Hiss and Peck, 2022). Schools and universities have been central to youth resistance as they provided a “base for common experience and also a geographical space for meeting and organizing” (Marks, 2001, 153

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p. 41). However, those who belong to the broad category of ‘youth’ are not always located in educational institutions. Some have found precarious employment, others have joined the unemployed. Following a time of relative quiet from the mid-to-late 1990s – the early years of the post-apartheid era – South Africa has seen an exceptionally large numbers of protests since 2000. Estimates speak of several thousand protests per year, and most of these take place in townships and informal settlements, outside of suburban neighbourhoods and the central business districts of major metropolitan areas. They often start in response to a particular issue, are highly localized and involve those who live at the margins of society: the poor and the youth, with many activists being both (Dawson, 2014). The fact that these protests occur with high frequency across the country, suggests that we might see what Peter Alexander (2010) called a “rebellion of the poor” and of the ‘youth’, a persistent demand for socio-economic rights, for more meaningful citizenship, and a grassroots critique of neoliberal policies and the legacies of colonialism. Yet, few of these protests are reported in the media, and fewer still obtain hashtag-visibility. Only some of these grassroots organizations, such as Abahlali baseMjondolo (‘the shackdwellers’ movement), have a substantial online media presence. In many cases the protests are grounded in what Jérôme Tournadre (2020, p. 320) calls “a regime of the near”: local and personal ties are the basis of these insurgent movements and create a sense of ‘community’ in a physical and localized way.

Remember Marikana, not every protest is tweeted In South Africa – as well as in neighbouring countries such as Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe – rural-to-urban labour migration frequently marks the transition to adulthood for young men. At the same time, the exploitative conditions at the mines, combined with low salaries, ensure that this transition is only ever partial, Nokuthula Hlabangane (2018, p. 248) notes that “mine work has failed to emancipate generations from poverty” as it creates conditions of ‘bare life’ in which the workers’ dignity and sovereignty is consistently undermined. 2022, the year in which we started writing this paper, marks ten years since the Marikana Massacre in South Africa; ten years since striking miners were killed by the police. Their work was to mine minerals in the platinum metals group, minerals that are needed to produce phones and computers. It is thus the very labour of these miners that makes digital engagement possible; their lives are entangled not only with histories of global capitalism, but also with our digital present. The miners’ lives in Marikana were abysmal: pay was low, working conditions were hazardous and toxic, housing was deplorable and many miners had become heavily indebted. The Marikana strike – for higher wages and better living conditions – was a “turning point in South African history”, a ‘rupture’ which led to ever more widespread – and more militant – strike actions, stoppages and protests across the country (Alexander, 2013, p. 606). Of the miners who were gunned down by the police, more than half were 35 years old and younger; thus, belonging to the category of ‘youth’ as defined by the African Union.3 Mine work is physically demanding, and as a result most miners are young, often not much older than their compatriots who engage in protests at schools, universities and colleges (Ehrlich et al., 2018). Although mining is a mostly male profession, it is also attractive to women since salaries are higher than in other sectors available to female workers (on women miners, see Benya, 2017). The young age of many miners notwithstanding, mine work has rarely been discussed with reference to the idea of ‘youth’. Rather, the miners’ working-class status and their embedding in the migrant labour system has been the focus of existing studies in South Africa (an exception are Moodie and Ndatshe, 1994, who write about the presence of youth organizations in the mines). 154

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Social media applications have played an important role in several protests in the twenty-first century, creating online public spheres. Yet, Rabab El-Madhi (2011) notes with reference to Egypt that online public spheres reflect middle-class activism, while working-class protesters, the unemployed and those who live in rural areas remain largely invisible in global and national media coverage. The situation is similar with regard to the Marikana strike, an intergenerational collective action that was not tweeted. Reading the report of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry (2015), social media scholars will note immediately that the approximately 3000 striking miners did not communicate through digital texts, photos and videos: there were no tweets from the miners, no Facebook groups to organize the protest, no images on Instagram, no updates on Twitter. Even placards were minimalist: Sifuna 12500 (‘We want 12500’) reads one, R 12500 another one. This was the demand of the miners: a monthly salary of Rand 12500 (approximately $730). The miners certainly had mobile phones – they are mentioned several times in the report – but given the low pay miners received, these were low-end models, which allowed for little more than calls and text messages. Moreover, charging phones is not easy without regular electricity supply and data costs are high in South Africa. We know from the evidence that the striking miners would call or text their families regularly: in the mornings before going to the place of protest – where they switched off their phones – and again late at night when their returned to their sleeping quarters. Digital communication, in other words, was intimate not public.4 Mobile phones were also used to reach – via call or text – fellow strikers and comrades in Marikana. Only one, non-personal phone call is attested to have been made beyond the local space of Marikana. It was on 16 August 2012, as the police started to break down the strike. Bishop Seoka, who had visited the miners, received a call as he was driving back to Pretoria. It was a short call, in isiXhosa, a cry for help: “Bishop, where are you, we are being killed by the police” (Marikana Commission of Inquiry, transcripts, day 12, p. 1368–69; day 279, p. 35802).5 And after the massacre, miners used their phones to call one another, to find out who survived (Alexander et al., 2012, pp. 86–87). The protest of Marikana was local and material; not virtual, reaching out to a larger national and international constituency. The focal point of resistance was a physical space that was also a nonurban space: ‘the mountain’, surrounded by gravel and bushveld, was where the striking miners gathered daily. As noted above, there were very few placards, the strikers did not march, they did not shout slogans. This stands in contrast to the urban spaces – Tahir Square (Egypt), Gezi Park (Turkey), Puerta del Sol (Spain), and Wall Street (US) – that have been at the centre of protests with a strong online presence. The mountain is also a space that links back to the histories of rural anti-colonial resistance in South Africa, which often involved prolonged gatherings on mountains, removed from the centres of colonial power (Kepe and Ntsebeza, 2012; Bruchhausen, 2015). Thus, the miners drew on a resistance repertoire – involving also song, dress and attire – that was unfamiliar to urban-based, mostly middle-class journalists. Consequently, the miners actions, notwithstanding the young age of miners, were dismissed as ‘backward’ and ‘traditional’; their protest – which disrupted the global mining industry – was illegible for many as it did not ‘look like a protest’; that is, a form of political action that has been associated with the figure of ‘urban youth’ and a particular repertoire of resistance (Hlabangane, 2018; Mokoena, 2014). While the media engagement of the miners was limited, the police made ample use of digital media. The Marikana Commission tried to trace the communication structures of the police force: Who phoned whom at what time using what technologies? What orders were given, or not given, and by what digital means? Was ammunition ordered by call or a text message? In addition, using professional police cameras as well as high-end mobile phones, the police put the miners under constant visual surveillance. As a result, many of the videos and images we have of the strike show the positioned gaze of outsiders, of the police as well as of journalists (Chiumbu, 2016). 155

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In August 2012, the voices of the miners were not heard by the national and international media, their experiences were not seen, their forms of protest were largely misunderstood. They did not engage in acts of digital citizenship, nor used the internet to articulate their demands to a wider national and global public. This, however, changed subsequently and Marikana became a rallying point for those engaged in radical politics. For example, the graffiti crew Tokolos Stensils continues to populate urban spaces, as well as social media spaces, with the stylized figure of Mambush Noki, one of the murdered miners (aged 30), and the memory of Marikana is kept alive in student-staff alliances at universities (such as the Marikana Forum at the University of Cape Town; Thomas, 2018). And a quick search on Twitter shows that Marikana is still visible in online discussions ten years later. Thus, over time, a physical, untweeted strike, involving many young miners, gained long-term online visibility and political afterlife, through art activism and memorial events across the country; thereby challenging the episodic temporality and presentism of much social media communication (Poell, 2020). In this section we have shown that digital inequalities can shape how a protest unfolds, and that ‘being young’ does not mean that every protest action will be digitally mediated beyond the local context (see also Schoon et al., 2020, on digital media use in the global south). Moreover, the strike of the miners shows that protest action can be cross-generational, and that intersectionality is important in understanding resistance and media use: age, race, gender/sexualities, class and disability shape engagement at every moment, including practices, ideologies and media representations (see Noble and Tynes, 2016).

Remembering the future, recontextualizations In this section we consider the digital life of the South African worker’s song Yini isocialism?, ‘What is Socialism?’, and the ways in which it has been appropriated, and re-mediatized, by political actors, circulating the song across time and space. It is uncertain how old the song is, but there exists oral testimony that it was sung by South African freedom fighters, the Young Lions, in the 1980s. Mostly this happened outside of the country, on the military bases of the ANC (in, for example, Angola). There exist no scholarly texts about this song – no books or articles are available – and, thus, the lyrics below are based on conversations and memories. Thina silwa impi enkulu, madoda, kumhlaba wonke Imibuso emibini emhlabeni iyaphikisana! Yeyiphi le mibuso mibini, mfowethu? Isocialism necapitalism, ziyaphikisana. Kethe yakho! Mna ndifun’isocialism, mfowethu! Manje yini isocialism, mfowethu? Umhlaba wonk' ezandleni zabantu, Akukho muntu onomhlaba wakhe yedwa, Ayabaleke amabujwa onke, Ngoba befuna ukusetyenzelwa ngabanye. ‘We are fighting a big war, comrades, throughout the world, Two regimes in the world are antagonistic! 156

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Which are these two regimes, my friend? Socialism and capitalism are antagonistic. Pick yours! I want socialism, my comrade! But now, what is socialism, my friend? All the land should belong to the people, There should be no private property, The bourgeoisie is running, Because they want others to work for them.’ The song has a call-and-response structure: it starts with a freedom fighter explaining the current state of the struggle. Upon hearing this the listener – maybe a worker, maybe a farmer – asks: ‘What is socialism?’, Yini isocialism? The question is followed by a chorus which explains the meaning of socialism, emphasizing the end of land as property (on African socialisms, see Blum et al., 2021). Yini isocialism belongs to the repertoire of struggle songs in South Africa. It is still sung and circulates in the public sphere. In the following, we look at recontextualizations of the song, starting with one performance that was captured on video and circulated digitally. The performance took place in the South African parliament in May 2019, during the swearing in of newly elected parliamentary members, including the president. The proceedings were slow at times and parliamentarians of two parties especially, the ANC and the Economic Freedom Fighters (henceforth EFF), started singing. Among the songs they sang was Yini isocialism. The ANC is the traditional liberation party. The EFF is an opposition party that describes itself as ‘Marxist-Leninist-Fanonian’ and that is especially popular among younger voters. The two parties had recently presented a united political front on the contested issue of returning stolen lands to their rightful owners. Land is a central topic in political debates in South Africa and ownership statistics reflect centuries of dispossession: over 70% of land is still owned by white South Africans; Black South Africans own less than 5% of the land (for further discussion, see Deumert, 2019). Thus, to see the bourgeoisie running, to see the end of exploitation, and to fight for the return of the land, are not political demands of the past, they remain demands of the present – remembering the future that liberation had promised. The moment when the two parties joined in song was captured on a cell phone and spread digitally. It was an emotional moment for many and Minister of Social Development Lindiwe Zulu, a long-standing ANC member and freedom fighter, posted on Facebook a reflection of what the song means to her, remembering the times of struggle and resistance, the times of Umkhonto we Sizwe and exile. Yet, in its digital circulation the association of the song with the ANC was sidelined. The video that circulated widely, prioritized the EFF, focusing on their high energy performance of the song, a performance that was also visually striking due to their parliamentary attire: red workers’ overalls, the stylized uniform of domestic workers, and red berets – a symbolic statement of their politics; that is, their ideological links to working-class activism and radical politics. The video featured prominently on the EFF Facebook page, where it obtained 78.000 views with over 300 comments, and over 2000 reactions.6 It is not that the ANC parliamentarians did not sing with political passion, but they are mostly older, belong to a different generation, and their performance lacked the youthful physical energy of the EFF. Thus, the EFF positions ‘being young’ as normative for revolutionary action and radical change. Moreover, the ANC favours neoliberal policies, which stand in direct contrast to their struggle history and the political vision of the song. The version of the video shared on the ANC Facebook page, which included visuals of both 157

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parties singing, was much less popular: 17.000 views, 75 comments and just over 200 reactions.7 This pattern is not limited to Facebook, it is also noticeable on YouTube: the video that shows both parties singing has 13.000 views and 5 comments; the video that focuses on the EFF performance has 227.000 views and 160 comments.8 Reflecting on these differences in performance, political affiliation, age and audience engagement, one might want to think of youth not necessarily as an age-based transition into adulthood, but rather in terms of generation; that is, a group of people whose youth – and life – was shaped by the historical context in which they grew up, creating distinct subjectivities (Roberts and France, 2021). Generational thinking is evident in terms such as boomers, millennials or netizens. In the South African context, one encounters terms such as Young Lions (discussed above) and Bornfrees. The latter are those who were born towards, or after, the end of apartheid, and who are now between 18 and 35 years. They have grown up in a society where universal suffrage did not mean the end of exploitation and where decolonization remained an unfinished process. Thus, as in the 1940s, radical politics articulate generational conflict: the young activists challenge the neoliberal present and position themselves as the revolutionary vanguard. Rofhiwa Mukhudwana (2022, p. 36) describes the political activism of the EFF as “revolutionary youth radicalization”, mobilizing young people into “political positionality and political action within an ideology of ‘blackness’ ”. This broad Africanist orientation is visible in the multilingual comments supporters made online. Writers celebrate the party (‘viva EFF’, ‘amen mafighters’, ‘kubo red berets’) and how the song reflects an ‘African spirit’, the project of ‘African liberation’, and the promise that land will be returned (lizobuya izwe lethu, ‘our land will be returned’). They describe the performance as ‘youth in action’, as an expression of revolution, and they relate affectively (‘I feel like crying’, ‘Spirit vibe shuuuu this song makes me emotional’, ‘I love the song!’). And not only South Africans take note, solidarity statements also come from Namibia and Kenya. Common emojis include the revolutionary fist, variations on the heart emoji, and the fire emoji (indicating that it is ‘lit’). Thus, viewers relate to the song in the current moment, recontextualizing its meaning to post-apartheid South Africa. Those who comment are clearly aware of the power of music, remembering how music was banned under apartheid because of its ability to stir up political consciousness and how this song will put fear in the heart of settlers. Thus, struggle songs like Yini isocialism are not about nostalgia and history, they are about the future and pan-African solidarities – the song, once performed in military camps in exile, has regained political presence in the here-and-now. The song resonates in different spaces: it is sung at political events such as the EFF Vladimir Lenin Political Lecture (a performance that is then remediated online), but also circulates as political commentary on Twitter. Thus, an update on the high earnings of mining companies or the lavish lifestyle of politicians might be accompanied by the pithy comment ‘yini iscocialism’, pointing to the rampant capitalism and consumerism of the neoliberal present while, simultaneously, keeping the possibility of a socialist world alive. Yet, the online presence changes the performance. For example, the lyrics of the song are often truncated. Thus, the recorded audio-versions that circulate online focus on the question ‘yini isocialism?’, and the final four lines. Written recontextualizations abbreviate the song even further, often including just the title and the first line (that ‘all the land should belong to the people’); thereby reframing socialism as being primarily about the return of the land, and the end of settler colonialism. The following two examples come from Twitter: Yini i socialism,umhlaba wonke ezandleni zabantu... Yini isocialism….🎶🎶🎶Umhlaba wonke ezandleni…. 158

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Gargi Bhattacharyya (2020) discusses similar practices in her work on the Black radical tradition, noting that “the extension of political speech into the realm of social media” has led to “an enormous increase in the visibility of such speech as an aspect of how participants in social justice movements speak to each other and how movements are presented to an ‘outside’ world” (p. 61). She further observes that in this process activists prioritize the circulation of aphorisms, thereby creating a form of “mantric poetics”, which gains its power through “repetitive chanting” (p. 63). This is what one observes with Yini isocialism: the title alone, and the chorus, are used by young people to signal their political affiliation to a broadly socialist, anti-colonial vision and to articulate their critique of settler colonialism. The other parts of the song, its theoretical analysis of a binary world and the global socialist struggle for freedom, are often elided in the online performances. Yet, it is this recontextualization of the song that makes it a powerful weapon in the struggle: even in its shortened form (or perhaps because of this), it continues to shape discourses and political engagement far beyond its point of origin.

Conclusion: youth and radical alternative media Our writing is shaped by a feeling of urgency: the world is in a bad shape and ‘the youth’, especially, will carry the burden of this troubled future (on the present as a troubled time, see also Deumert and Makoni, 2023). Through various forms of protest, young people make visible their quest for a different future; that is, for a future that is free of oppression and exploitation. In doing so, young people engage and have engaged, with a diversity of media. John Downing and his colleagues (2001) refer to them as “radical alternative media”; that is, media that challenge existing hegemonies, that build solidarity, and that can occur in many shapes and formats. They include jokes, music and dance, placards, flyers, posters and photographs, graffiti and dress, theatre and culture-jamming, film, radio and cassette tapes, physical protests as well as various forms of digital activism. Focusing on South Africa, we have shown how young people drew on different media at different times, and how mediatization was never far when protest action took place. Moreover, the discussion showed that youth struggles are also intergenerational struggles: they can reflect conflict as well as cross-generational solidarity. While it is not only young people who fight for a better world, their contributions have been central, their energy and commitment important. Providing a grounded discussion of one context, apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, raises the question of comparison and generalization. In ‘Street Sociology and Pavement Politics’, Colin Bundy (1985) opens his text with three quotes. The reader, expecting a discussion of South African student politics, might well read them as illustrations of the South African situation, and they make sense when read in this way. Yet, the quotes come from very different contexts: the Indonesian anti-colonial revolution, Tsarist Russia and “student opposition in the twilight days of Franco’s Spain” (p. 2). Such comparisons draw our attention to important similarities across student activisms; yet, at the same time, they risk side-lining the particular. For example, how does what we described here resonate with digital activism in Egypt, or the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong? This is perhaps the most important desideratum for future work: to understand a diversity of contexts in their uniqueness, and to begin the work of comparison. Other avenues for research could consider the significance of physical space/place in digitally mediated protests, the importance of intersectional struggles and the media ecologies on which they draw, the role played by international solidarity and the dangers of online surveillance. 159

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Notes 1 Corresponding authors: Ana Deumert, University of Cape Town, 7701 Rondebosch, South Africa; Nkululeko Mabandla, University of Cape Town, 7701 Rondebosch, South Africa. 2 https://datahub​.itu​.int 3 https://mg​.co​.za​/article​/2016​-08​-16​-remembermarikana​-the​-37​-miners​-killed​-at​-marikana​-on​-13​-and​-16​ -august​-2012/ 4 The transcripts of the commission are available at http://www​.marikana​-conference​.com​/index​.php​/commission​-transcripts. 5 The transcripts of the commission are available at http://www​.marikana​-conference​.com​/index​.php​/commission​-transcripts. 6 https://www​.facebook​.com​/watch/​?v​=305175477070727 7 https://www​.facebook​.com​/watch/​?v​=1232913103534764 8 Following Bhattacharyya’s (2020) argument that social media research can get quickly caught up in practices of surveillance, we decided not to reproduce any comments verbatim.

Further readings Downing, J.D.H., with T. Villarreal Ford, G. Gil and L. Stein (eds.) (2001). Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hefferman, A. and N. Nieftagodien (2016). Students Must Rise. Youth Struggles in South Africa, Before and Beyond Soweto. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

References Ahmed, A.K. (2020). # RhodesMustFall: How a decolonial student movement in the Global South inspired epistemic disobedience at the University of Oxford, African Studies Review, 63: 281–303. Alexander, P. (2010). Rebellion of the poor: South Africa’s service delivery protests. A preliminary analysis, Review of African Political Economy, 37: 25–40. Alexander, P. (2013). Marikana, turning point in South African history, Review of African Political Economy, 40: 605–619. Alexander, P., T. Lekgowa, B. Mmope, L. Sinwell and B. Xezwi (2012). Marikana. A View of the Mountain and a Case to Answer. Sunnyside: Jacana. Bennett, W.L. and A. Segerberg (2013). The Logic of Connective Action. Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benya, A. (2017). Going underground in South African platinum mines to explore women miners’ experiences, Gender & Development, 25: 509–522. Bhattacharyya, G. (2020). The poetics of justice: aphorism and chorus as modes of anti-racism, Identities, 27(1): 53–70. Blum, F., M. Benedita-Basto, P. Guidi, H. Kiriakou, M. Mourre, C. Pauthier, O. Rillon, A. Roy and E. Vezzadini (eds.) (2021). Socialisms in Africa. Available at: https://hal.science/view/index/identifiant/ hal-03233367. Bosch, T. (2019). Social media and protest movements in South Africa: #FeesMustFall and #ZumaMustFall. In M. Dwyer and T. Molony (eds.), Social Media and Politics in Africa (pp. 66–83). London: Zed. Boulianne, S., M. Lalancette and D. Ilkiw (2020). “School strike 4 climate”: Social media and the international youth protest on climate change, Media and Communication, 8: 208–218. Bruchhausen, S. (2015). Understanding Marikana through the Mpondo revolts, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 50: 412–426. Bundy, C. (1985). Street Sociology and Pavement Politics: Aspects of Youth/Student Resistance in Cape Town. History Workshop, University of the Witwatersrand. Castells, M. (2012). Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. New York: John Wiley & Son. Chiumbu, S. (2016). Media, race and capital: A decolonial analysis of representation of Miners’ strikes in South Africa, African Studies, 75: 417–435.

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Youth, protest and (online) communication Cutler, C. and U. Røyneland (eds.) (2018). Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer-Mediated Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dawson, H. (2014). Youth politics: Waiting and envy in a South African informal settlement, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40: 861–882. Deumert, A. (2019). Sensational signs, authority and the public sphere: Settler colonial rhetoric in times of change, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23: 467–484. Deumert, A. and S. Makoni (2023). From Southern Theory to Decolonizing Sociolinguistics. Voices, Questions and Alternatives. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Downing, J.D.H., with T. Villarreal Ford, G. Gil and L. Stein (eds.) (2001). Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ehrlich, R., A. Montgomery, P. Akugizibwe and G. Gonsalves (2018). Public health implications of changing patterns of recruitment into the South African mining industry, 1973–2012: A database analysis, BMC Public Health, 18: 1–12. El-Madhi, R. (2011). Orientalising the Egyptian uprising. Available at: https://www​.jadaliyya​.com​/Details​ /23882​/Orientalising​-the​-Egyptian​-Uprising. Furlong, A. (ed.) (2015). Handbook of Youth and Young Adulthood. New Perspectives and Agendas. London/ New York: Routledge. Hiss, A. and A. Peck (2022). Turbulent Twitter and the semiotics of protest at an ex-model C School. In Q. Williams, A. Deumert and T.M. Milani (eds.), Struggles for Multilingualism and Linguistics Citizenship (pp. 140–162). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Hlabangane, N. (2018). Of witch doctors, traditional weapons and traditional medicine: Decolonial meditations on the role of the media after the Marikana massacre, South Africa, African Identities, 16: 234–259. Honwana, A.M. (2019). Youth struggles: From the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter & beyond, African Studies Review, 62: 8–21. ITU (International Communication Union) (2022a). Measuring Digital Development. Facts and Figures. Available at: https://www​.itu​.int​/en​/ITU​-D​/Statistics​/Pages​/facts​/default​.aspx. ITU (International Communication Union) (2022b). Global Connectivity Report. Achieving Universal and Meaningful Connectivity in the Decade of Action. Available at: https://www​.itu​.int​/itu​-d​/reports​/statistics​ /global​-connectivity​-report​-2022/. Jenkins, H., S. Shresthova, L. Gamber-Thompson, N. Klingler-Vilenchik and A.M. Zimmerman (2016). By Any Media Necessary. The New Youth Activism. New York: New York University Press. Johnson, P. (2019). Dissidents and dissenters: Student responses to Apartheid at the University of Fort Hare, Southern Journal for Contemporary History, 44: 1–25. Kepe, T. and L. Ntsebeza (2012). Rural Resistance in South Africa. The Mpondo Revolts after Fifty Years. Cape Town: UCT Press. Lembede, A.M. (1996). Freedom in Our Lifetime. The Collected Writings of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede. Ed. by R.R. Edgar and L. ka Msumza. Athens: Ohio University Press. Mabandla, N. and A. Deumert (2020). Another populism is possible: Popular politics and the anticolonial struggle. In M. Kranert (ed.), Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines: The Return of Populists and the People (pp. 433–460). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Magadla, S. (2015). Women combatants and the liberation movements in South Africa: Guerrilla girls, combative nothers and the in-betweeners, African Security Review, 24: 390–402. Marks, M. (2001). Young Warriors. Youth Politics, Identity and Violence in South Africa. Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press. Massey, D. (2010). Under Protest: The Rise of Student Resistance at Fort Hare. Pretoria: Union Press. Mokoena, H.A. (2014). Youth: “bBorn Frees” and the predicament of being young in post-apartheid South Africa, Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, 38: 119–136. Moodie, T.D. with V. Ndatshe (1994). Going for Gold. Men, Mines and Migration. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Mukhudwana, F.R. (2022). Conspicuous and performative Blackness as decolonial political branding against the myth of the post-colonial society: A case of the EFF. In B. Karam and B. Mutsvairo (eds.), Decolonising Political Communication in Africa. Reframing Ontologies (pp. 26–44). London/New York: Routledge. Noble, S.U. and B.M. Tyness (eds.) (2016). The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture Online. New York et al.: Peter Lang. Ozgul, B.A. (2020). Leading Protests in the Digital Age. Youth Activism in Egypt and Syria. Cham: Palgrave.

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Ana Deumert and Nkululeko Mabandla Philipps, J. (2018). A global generation? Youth studies in a postcolonial world, Societies, 8: 14. Poell, T. (2020). Social media, temporality and the legitimacy of protest, Social Movement Studies, 19: 609–624. Roberts, S. and A. France (2021). Problematizing a popular panacea: A critical examination of the (continued) use of ‘social generations’ in youth sociology, The Sociological Review, 69: 775–791. Schoon, A., H.M. Mabweazara, T. Bosch and H. Dugmore (2020). Decolonising digital media research methods: Positioning African digital experiences as epistemic sites of knowledge production, African Journalism Studies, 41: 1–15. Shreve, B.G. (2011). Red Power Rising. The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Stanley, L. (2018). Protest and the Lovedale Riot of 1946: ‘Largely a rebellion against authority’? Journal of Southern African Studies, 44: 1039–1055. Switzer, L. (1990). The ambiguities of protest in South Africa: Rural politics and the press during the 1920s, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 23: 87–109. Thomas, K. (2018). “Remember Marikana”: Violence and visual activism in post-Apartheid South Africa, ASAP/Journal, 3: 401–422. Threadgold, S. (2020). Figures of youth: On the very object of youth studies, Journal of Youth Studies, 23: 686–701. Tournadre, J. (2020). Between boredom, protest and community: Ethnography of young activists in a South African township, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 49: 318–344. Valenzuela, S., A. Arriagada and A. Scherman (2012). The social media basis of youth protest behavior: The case of Chile, Journal of Communication, 62: 299–314. Van Gyampo, R.E. and N.A. Anyidoho (2019). Youth politics in Africa. Oxford Research Encyclopaedia, Politics. Available at: oxfordre​.com​/politi​cs.

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12 BLACK YOUTH AND THE FIGHT FOR LINGUISTIC CITIZENSHIP IN THE UNITED STATES Kisha C. Bryan, Keisha G. Rogers and Tiffany L. Grayson1 Introduction It has been over 150 years since U.S. African Americans2 were granted citizenship and less than 60 years since the Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Yet, U.S. Americans of African ancestry are still fighting for all that U.S. citizenship promises – liberty, justice and the unfettered pursuit of happiness. This chapter will specifically engage in black youth culture and the linguistic racism they continue to face in the U.S. In 1988, the acclaimed rap group, Public Enemy, released their chart-topping hit, Fight the Power. Fight the Power was later used as the anthem for director Spike Lee’s movie, ‘Do the Right Thing,’ which explored how conflict was driven by racial inequality in a predominantly African American community in New York City. Though nostalgic, this song continues to serve as an anthem for Black youth as they continue to assert their agency in ‘fighting the powers that be’ for their voices to be acknowledged and their languages valued. We pay homage to Public Enemy by addressing the ways in which Black youth have fought for (and in many cases have won) a seat at the proverbial table. In the first part of the chapter, we conceptualize linguistic citizenship and highlight major key theoretical concepts appropriate to an understanding of Black youth and linguistic citizenship: critical race theory, raciolinguistics and linguistic racism. Next is a critical discussion of how U.S. society profits from Black youth culture and language while questioning their intellectual capacity and linguistic abilities. We then examine the prevalence of raciolinguistic appropriation, or looking and sounding Black without actually ‘being Black’ in U.S. youth culture. The conclusion is a call to action directed at the “powers that be” to use their privilege to show that Black Lives Matter by acknowledging the linguistic citizenship of Black youth.

The research field and key concepts In the following we shall present four key concepts and helpful analytical tools in research on racism and black youth’s linguistic rights and practices. But before we begin, a few words on our own positions. As African American mother scholars, it is important that we acknowledge our positionality. Our lives are powerfully mediated by race and fundamentally shaped by our racialized DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-16

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consciousness and identities – including that of ‘mother.’ We highlight our role as mothers because we are first and foremost mothers to Black youth who must navigate a racialized society. Second, we are scholars employed by historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) whose mission has been to give African American youth an option for higher education when they had none (Albritton, 2012). Throughout our youth and into adulthood, we have questioned the role(s) that our racial and linguistic identities play in situations where we were selected (or not) for various opportunities. These questions still exist for our own children who identify as Black and multidialectal. Therefore, we bring these questions in a dialogue with the research field engaged in critical race theory, raciolinguistics, linguistic racism and linguistic citizenship.

Critical Race Theory Critical Race Theory (CRT) highlights the relationship between racist systems, race and the changes needed to bring systemic equality for Black people in the United States. Critical legal studies (CLS) is the predecessor to CRT, where the legal ramifications and the law as it pertains to the injustices of poor and marginalized individuals are critiqued. CRT has been expanded as the basis of corresponding theories to highlight the marginalization of other groups. These include Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LatCrit), Asian American Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit), and Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory (DisCrit). CRT has expanded and extended beyond legal foundations and has made its way into other disciplines such as healthcare, ethnic studies and education. Many scholars in the field of education use CRT to “understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, affirmative action, high-stakes testing, controversies over curriculum and history, bilingual and multilingual education, and alternative and charter schools” (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017, p. 26). Critical race theory consists of six basic tenants and themes as outlined in Table 1. First, the continuance of racism, whether conscious or unconscious, is commonplace, and “race and races are products of social thought and relations” (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017, p. 28). Second, interest convergence, which suggests that people of color are able to achieve progress when it benefits and serves the interest of whites. The third tenant, differential racialization, examines how people of color are racialized based on the needs of dominant white groups. Fourth, intersectionality examines how race and other identities of an individual interconnect, especially for people of color. Fifth, the ‘voice of color’ considers that marginalized people are able to speak on experiences regarding race and racism and its effects. Lastly, colorblindness and meritocracy, expresses that racial inequalities can be remedied through awareness to make change. ​

Raciolinguistics Raciolinguistics espouses many of the tenets of CRT and integrates the critical race perspective in sociolinguistic research. Raciolinguistics was first popularized by Flores and Rosa (2015) and extended by Alim et al. (2016). It highlights the socially cyclical relationship between race, racialization and language, language as used to construct race (i.e., languaging race) and perceptions of race influencing how language is used (i.e., racing language). A central concern of raciolinguistics is understanding the complex meanings and implications of speech coming from a racialized subject. This framework has been utilized particularly well to conceptualize the ways in which sociolinguistic variation is intertwined with social and political factors. Of particular importance are the ways in which ‘appropriateness’ has been defined by the language of the dominant culture. As such, raciolinguistic ideologies and hierarchies uphold certain linguistic practices as norma164

Black youth & linguistic citizenship in the U.S. Table 12.1 Themes and Tenets of Critical Race Theory CRT Themes/Tenets

Definition

Historical and Contemporary Sources

Permanence of racism in the U.S.

Racism, both conscious and unconscious, is a permanent component of U.S. American life Significant upward mobility for Blacks is achieved only when the goals of Blacks are consistent with the needs of whites When the dominant society racializes different minority groups in different ways at different times, in response to its shifting needs Considers the intersection of race and other identities

Bell (1992); Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995); Liggett (2014)

Interest convergence

Differential racialization Intersectionality Counter storytelling and the ‘voice of color’

Highlighting the voices of the marginalized by countering majoritarian narratives that have been assumed as factual

Social change critiques colorblindness and meritocracy

Knowledge learned through examination of racial inequality should be used for social justice and make social change

Bell (1980); Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995); Kelly (2018); Dorner and Cervantes-Soon (2020); Palmer (2010) Delgado and Stefancic (1998); Motha (2016); Han (2014) Crenshaw (1991); Romero (2016, 2017); Collins and Blige (2016); Migliarini and Stinson (2021) Matsuda (1995); Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995); Delgado and Stefanic, (2001); Solorzano and Yosso, (2001); Cooper and Bryan (2020); Lin et al. (2004) Crenshaw (1998); Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995); Curtis and Romney (2006); Kubota (2002)

Note. See Bryan et al. (2022) for full references; Adapted from Horsford (2010)

tive and others as deficient are promoted (Ramjattan, 2019). A number of studies in education and anthropology have applied raciolinguistics to the experiences of minoritized youth in U.S. society. Using both historical quotes about native Americans made by white men and data collected in a school setting, Rosa (2016) highlighted how ideologies of language standardization and languagelessness (i.e., the belief that certain speakers are not proficient in any language) interact with one another, and how assessments of particular individuals’ language use often invoke broader ideas about the linguistic (in)competence and (il)legitimacy of entire racialized groups.

Linguistic racism Linguistic racism refers to the systemic and institutionalized discrimination of language used by people of color, ethnic minorities and indigenous people (Dobinson and Mercieca, 2020). This concept explores how individuals that are bilingual/multilingual are at a disadvantage when their first language is not standard English, or they speak multiple languages. Dovchin (2020, p. 805) refers to linguistic racism as “the violation of one’s fundamental human rights based on how one speaks certain languages and how one’s entitlements are denied and discriminated against in both institutional and non-institutional settings due to how one speaks English and other additional languages”. Linguistic racism developed as a means to highlight the language disparities and discrimination that one may face due to social constructs such as race, gender and class. 165

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Furthermore, linguistic invisibility refers to the idea that some language varieties remain periphery or unacknowledged, while others remain dominant (Dobinson and Mercieca, 2020). This establishes the notion that there are “ideologies, structures and practices that are used to legitimate, effectuate, and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources between groups defined on the basis of language” (Dovchin, 2020, p. 805). The discrimination and inequalities one may face regarding language serves as a basis to the term ethnic accent bullying. Ethnic accent bullying refers to the mistreatment of foreign language speakers based on their dialect or speech. Ethnic bullying may look like mocking a second language speaker’s culture, background and/or customs. This may also look and sound like racial slurs and indirect or passive forms of aggression. One example of a passive form of aggression in a U.S. context is someone stating, “Your English is so good”. Conversely, linguistic privilege refers to the advantages and privileges one is afforded when Standard English is their first language. Kroskrity (2021) explores the potent role of covert linguistic racisms as practices critical for maintenance and transmission of white supremacy. He asserts that although most whites benefit from the structural violence of white supremacy, many disclaim their belief in racial hierarchies or participation in racism. Though they reject overt racism, they are more accepting of the effects of covert racism in reproducing racialized categories and naturalizing the patterns of political, economic and social stratification associated with white supremacy. In this instance, covert racism is a product of harmful language ideologies (Kroskrity, 2021) involving the white listening subject, his/her ‘folk theory of racism’ (Hill, 2009) and the deployment of indexicality and anonymity.

Linguistic Citizenship Finally, we also utilize historical and contemporary conceptualizations of linguistic citizenship (LC). We rely on Stroud’s (2001, p. 353) encompassing belief that LC seeks to capture situations where “speakers themselves exercise control over their language, deciding what languages are, and what they mean, and where language issues […] are discursively tied to a range of social issues – policy issues of questions of equity. We also embrace Williams’ (2022) reconceptualization or ‘remixing’ of LC to demonstrate the complexities of language use and how historically marginalized (and racialized) speakers of marginalized languages use these languages to make sense of their agency and promote their voices through popular culture (i.e., hip hop, social media, comedy, etc.).

Race(ism), Black language and threats to linguistic citizenship in the U.S. context It is our belief that critical discussions of the ways in which African American youth’s linguistic citizenship are ignored must consider aspects of CRT and the effects of raciolinguistics and linguistic racism (Song et al., 2021; Baker-Bell, 2020). To make sense of the plight of Black youth today, we must truly understand how the United States of America came to be. According to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the U.S. was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”, but ironically began as a society where the Afro-descended were enslaved as chattel and eventually only viewed as three-fifths of a person. Over the course of 250 years, approximately 12 million enslaved Africans spent 80 days packed together on or below decks without space to sit up or even move around. Once in the colonies, the attempted stripping of their cultural identities began. Slavers sought to dispirit and dishearten the very essence of these enslaved peoples. The prevailing wisdom was that deprivation of self-identity weakened one’s will and made the enslaved more docile and thus, more prone to yield to subjugation (Hannah-Jones 166

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et al., 2021; Thomas, 1997). During the Middle Passage, members of the same tribes and villages were purposely separated from one another to restrict their oral communication (Smitherman, 1986). Upon arrival to the New World (present day U.S.), Africans were assigned Anglicized names and forced to renounce their African identity. They were prohibited from using their native tongues and forced to adopt English. Complicating the matter is the fact that enslaved people were denied access to literacy. In fact, it was illegal to teach enslaved Africans how to read and write, furthering their isolation from standard English (Baugh, 1999; Comminey, 1999; Smitherman, 1986). These early ancestors, who did not initially speak English, created a pidgin language to communicate with white slaveholders. This language evolved into a creole with the use of West African words in place of English ones but with the same rhythm and structure of their native language (Baugh, 1999, 2005; Comminey, 1999; Smitherman, 1986, 1998). Through the horrors of enslavement, our ancestors developed their own variety of language, Gullah, a hybrid of African languages and English, uniquely African American and born out of the desire and determination to hold on to the cultures of Africa. Gullah language and culture persist today in the sea islands of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Though the nature of the relationship between Gullah and other African American Language (AAL) varieties has remained a topic of contention, creolist theories that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) derived from a Gullah-like plantation creole that de-creolized following the breakdown of the plantation system seem likely (Weldon and Moody, 2015; Wheeler and Swords, 2004). The formal institution of slavery ended in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. However, for African Americans, the end of slavery was just the beginning of the quest for democratic equality and citizenship in the broadest sense. Fast forward 400 years and it is evident that Black youth have preserved aspects of the cultures, languages and oral traditions of their African ancestors. While scholars of CRT (e.g., Crenshaw, 1991; 2010; Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995; Solórzano, 1998) have analyzed the ways that racism permeates major societal institutions and results in African Americans languishing in societal backwaters, it is only within the past 20 years or so that language has been included in such discussions (Baugh, 1999, 2005, 2015; Bonilla-Silva, 2003). Critical race theorists argue that colorblind racism serves to perpetuate existing intergroup inequalities and the view of language as neutral reinforces the highly racialized social practices of linguicism (Baugh, 2005) or “linguistically argued racism” (Skutnabb-Kangas 1989, p. 13). We define linguicism as “a form of social discrimination that privileges one language variety over another” (Austin, 2009, p. 253) and serves as a legal and subtle way of discriminating against people whose dialect or language does not align with a standard language (Austin, 2009; DeBose, 2007). Linguicism is a result of standard language ideologies. In the broadest sense, the term ‘language ideology’ can be conceptualized as “the shared bodies of common-sense notions about the nature of language in the world” (Rumsey, 1990, p. 346, as cited in Schieffelin et al., 1998, p. 4). As suggested by Alim (2004b), those who have conducted long-term research in schools are well aware that teachers’ language ideologies are remarkably consistent in their elevation of the “standard” language variety and their devaluation of all other varieties (Alim, 2004a, 2004b). In fact, one could argue that most members of any society are deeply, if unconsciously, invested in the hegemony of a ‘standard’ language (DeBose, 2007). One of the earliest movements that characterized standard language ideology and linguistic racism in the U.S. context was Better American Speech Week in 1918 where U.S. citizens were expected to pledge their allegiance to a standard American English (SAE). U.S. Americans were asked to demonstrate their love for the country by not leaving off the last syllables of words; avoiding hash tones, speaking pleasantly and sincerely; and learning to correctly articulate one word a 167

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day for one year. The Better American Speech initiative was a direct assault on the linguistic citizenship of African Americans and Native Americans as they are the two groups whose responses are exemplified in this written promotion. As such, it is clear that past and present discourses of racialized linguicism are aligned with the normalized way in which differences become the source of establishing a hierarchy of power and domination (Baker-Bell, 2020; Cho, 2017; Song et al., 2021). Racism and linguicism in the U.S. reinforce the established linguistic (and racial) hierarchies. It most often privileges white over Black and/or Brown, and a perceived ‘standard’ American English over indigenous languages and English language varieties.

Racialized language ideologies in U.S. schools and society Teachers’ perceptions of their students (including their languages) have long been considered an important precursor to a range of educational opportunities, including assignment to school services (e.g., special education and gifted programs), higher ability grouping and grade promotion (Redding, 2019). When Black youth engage in similar language practices as their white peers, their language use (and by extension their person) is still marked as inferior (Flores and Rosa, 2019). Wheeler and Swords (2004, p. 470) expressed concern that teachers viewed African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers as “slower, less able, and less intelligent” as compared to SAE-speaking classmates, which often leads to the teacher’s standards being reduced for AAVE speakers (Strickland, 2014). In her quest to restore Black youth’s linguistic citizenship by dismantling anti-Black racism in English language arts classrooms, Baker-Bell (2020) highlighted the impact of linguistic racism on Black youth as she showed how they often internalize standard language ideologies and linguistic racism. Her data showed that for these students, smart and good, became synonymous with white linguistic and cultural norms, yet they conflated words and images such as ‘disrespectful’, ‘thug’, ‘ghetto’, ‘bad’, trouble’, ‘skips school’ and ‘gets bad grades’ with Black linguistic and cultural norms (ibid., p. 12). We agree with Baker-Bell’s analysis when she states that “the only thing worse than Black students’ experiencing anti-black linguistic racism in classrooms is when they internalize it”. (ibid., p. 10). When Black students internalize messages that imply that [Black language] BL is deficient and unintelligent, this causes internalized anti-blackness and negative self-perceptions. Within the realm of English as a second language (ESL) pedagogy, Curtis and Romney (2006) and Kubota and Lin (2006) are some of the first in the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) literature to highlight the need for critical discussions of race in (English) language teaching in the global context. Von Esch et al. (2020) provide an extensive analysis of research on race and language that highlights a) the impact of standard language ideology and racial hegemony (Lippi-Green, 2012; Nero and Stevens, 2018; Orzulak, 2015); b) the idealized native speaker and racial labeling (Grant and Lee, 2009; Nero, 2006; Rivers and Ross, 2013; Taylor-Mendes, 2009; Yamada, 2015); c) racial hierarchies of languages and language speakers/users (Anya, 2017; Collins, 2017; Kubota and Catlett, 2008); d) racialization and teacher identity (Varghese et al., 2016; Vitanova, 2016; Austin, 2022); and e) race-centered approaches to pedagogies and educational practices (Michael-Luna, 2009; Roy, 2016). This form of anti-Black linguistic discrimination in the U.S. has repercussions that extend beyond schools. In the legal system, the testimonies of Black youth are delegitimized and leveraged against them to discredit their lived experiences and their freedoms (McMillan, 2021; Rickford and King, 2016). For example, on the evening of February 26, 2012, in Florida, George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old neighborhood watch coordinator fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin as he was returning home from the store. In a widely reported trial, Zimmerman was 168

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charged with murder for Martin’s death, but acquitted at trial after claiming self-defense. The testimony of Rachel Jeantel, a close friend of Trayvon Martin and the prosecution’s star witness in the trial of George Zimmerman, was the subject of considerable commentary in the summer of 2013. Don West, defense attorney for Zimmerman, asked Jeantel (a U.S. American citizen), “Are you claiming in any way that you don’t understand English?”, though she had been answering his questions in fluent English throughout much of the previous day. Jeantel, who was born and raised in Miami, insisted that she did, but West was not convinced. He asked her once more whether perhaps, because her first language was Haitian Creole, if she had any trouble understanding English. West was not alone in his indictment of Jeantel’s linguistic abilities. In her commentary “Rachel Jeantel’s Language is English – Just Not Your English”, Bolotnikova (2013) reported that in the days that followed Jeantel’s testimony, the internet was ablaze with comments about Jeantel’s “poor English”, some of them willfully mean-spirited and others prescribing well-intentioned solutions to the perceived problem of widespread ungrammatical English. Bolotnikova (2013) asserted that “well-intentioned or not, ungrammaticality is not a problem that Jeantel had. We need to look elsewhere to understand the strange phenomenon of being accused of not speaking your own language” (para. 1). The tenets of critical theory and the aforementioned discussions on standard language ideologies, linguistic racism and raciolinguistics provides a theoretical frame for understanding the role of language ideologies in this case. Black youth, like Jeantel, have had to fight for (linguistic) citizenship throughout history. Despite this truth, Kynard (2013) reminds us that Black youth in the U.S. are responsible for consistently questioning the validity of centering the realities and languaging of white teachers over their own practices and thus shifting “the possibilities and contours of literacy” (p. 24). Asserting their agency is important because white monocultural ideals (Austin, 2022) of language remain a rampant form of anti-Blackness in language instruction today. Black languaging broadly speaking reflects specific realities for Black peoples from within the U.S. (Baker-Bell, 2020) and in other Black nations (Milu, 2018; Smith et al., 2020). Still, Black youth in the U.S. have been pathologized (Smitherman, 1998) and refused instruction (Baugh, 2015) due to their language practices.

Co-opting, appropriating and cashing in At this point, it should be clear that whiteness is embraced, and Blackness is marginalized through standard language ideologies and language colonialism in educational contexts and beyond (Liggett, 2014; Flores and Rosa, 2015). It should also be evident that dominant public discourses around Standard American English (SAE) versus non-SAE varieties are highly racialized (Liggett, 2014), rendering users of SAE more legitimate than users of other Englishes (Motha, 2006). Yet, there is a clear double standard when it comes to whiteness and standard language ideologies. ‘Being white’ holds so much capital that it transcends the norms of standard language ideologies. The appropriation, exploitation and capitalization of Black bodies and languages have become the norm. This cultural appropriation occurs when members of a majority group adopt cultural elements of a minority group in an exploitative, disrespectful, or stereotypical way for financial gain or influence without acknowledging the origins of that cultural practice or reinvesting the financial gains into the community from which the culture was taken (Baker-Bell, 2020; Arya, 2021; Encyclopedia Britannica, 2022). At the heart of the matter is the inherent power imbalance between the two groups and the act of taking. Some argue that culture itself is ambiguous and therefore cannot be distinguished from one another, making it difficult to appropriate (Arya, 2021). However, when this concept is examined through a historical lens, it is clear that those with power exploit those with less power and do not give back to the group that the culture was taken 169

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from, as in the example of British colonialism and American slavery. Thus, whether intentional or unintentional, cultural appropriation is both harmful and unethical. While there are a plethora of examples of white celebrities (and average white folks) capitalizing on Black phenotypes by enhancing, coloring or purchasing body parts to ‘get the look’, we provide the example of Brian Henry, who is the owner of Palmetto Cheese and the mayor of Pawleys Island, South Carolina. During the height of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, Henry was forced to apologize for a racially insensitive Facebook post about BLM. At the same time, Henry’s company was using the image of a Gullah woman to promote their product. One commenter posted, “I guess Black lives only matter when it is used to market and sell white products, huh?” Gullah Geechee Chamber of Commerce founder and president Marilyn Hemingway responded to Henry’s hypocrisy by calling for the immediate end of “cultural appropriation of the Gullah Geechee language, food and cooking traditions, worship experience and artistic expressions for the financial gain of those who cannot or are unwilling to trace lineage to the enslaved, Black persons who built this country through their blood, sweat and tears” (Dillard, 2022). Another example of cultural and linguistic co-opting for marketing purposes, is the 2021 Kroger Company 30-second animated spot that opens with a customer who, after saving money on chicken, starts dancing in the grocery store to Low by FloRida (featuring T-Pain). This ‘corporate cool’ (Roth-Gordon et al., 2020) trend of appropriating Black culture as a marketing strategy has become commonplace. We pose the following question: How and why does a marginalized culture and language spoken by a marginalized group become so well-embraced for entertainment and marketing purposes but loathed in academic, religious and business settings? And who ultimately benefits? In 2016, Bhad Bhabie whose real name is Danielle Bregoli set social media on fire with her use of blaccent. Bregoli went viral at age 13 after appearing on an episode of Dr. Phil that highlighted her out-of-control behavior. During the show, she challenged the audience – yes, the entire audience – to a fight, screaming, “Cash me outside, how bout dah?” When Dr. Phil inadvertently displayed his stance on linguistic diversity and asked whether she was speaking English, Bergoli proudly proclaimed that her accent came “from the streets”. Seven years later and Bregoli’s marketing of her “blaccent” has resulted in her millionaire status. At age 19, she will have generational wealth the native users of AAVE will likely never have. Both Lum and Bergoli are privileged in that their racial and cultural identities shield them from the types of discrimination that Black Americans encounter. The linguistic appropriation by non-Black people is best explained in the work of bell hooks. She states, the “over-riding fear that is cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white plate—that the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten” (hooks, 1992, p. 359). The ideas, bodies, knowledge or artifacts of others are taken by whites for their own pleasure and gain, with no regard or reward for the marginalized group from whom they take. The Bhad Barbie example clearly demonstrates the lack of respect for diversity that is ever present in cultural appropriation and further highlight that there is no benefit or reward for the “Other” whose essence has been commodified. Based on our experiences, both personal and professional, we concur with Baker-Bell’s (2020, p. 14) claim that Black language [and Black bodies] is one of the features that “white America loves to hate, yet loves to take”. Baker-Bell explains that while Black language is devalued and viewed as a symbol of linguistic and intellectual inferiority, it is acceptable if it can be used and capitalized on by white people for marketing, play and pay. They are able to imitate Black language without taking on the troubles of Black people; profit from their mockery, while fostering racism through their appropriation of Black culture. 170

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Conclusion and future directions Black youth are facing a public health crisis of racism (Ransom, 2020) and linguicism (Baker-Bell, 2020). It is within the U.S., a country in which extreme asymmetries of power are demarcated along lines of ethnicity and language, that these youth are exercising control over their language, showcasing their agency and voice (Stroud, 2001, 2003) as their language and narratives become sites where identity juxtapositions are laid bare, and Black youth’s racial and linguistic identities are reimagined through music and protest. So, while linguistic citizenship is premised on the individual claim and exercise of the right of citizens to voice, to be heard and to act upon whichever dimension of their linguistic repertoire may be useful, agency also rests with the community where responsibilities for communal wellbeing should be co-owned (cf. e.g., Heugh, 2017; Stroud and Heugh, 2016; Watson and KnightManuel, 2017). As such, we provide a call to action for teachers, researchers and policymakers – especially those who enjoy white privilege and majority status. We call on them to use their privilege to make Black lives matter by providing space for the voices of Black youth to be heard. To do this, we recommend a radical doctrine that is based on Bettina Love’s (2019) ideas of abolitionist teaching (i.e., teaching for freedom). We extend this framework to research and policymaking that impact Black youth. Abolitionist teaching/research/policymaking is reframing education, research, and policymaking so that Black youth feel welcome, are able to learn and grow and discover and can be seen in their full humanity. Abolitionist teaching, research and policymaking do the following:



1. Requires us to think about what we can do NOW within systems created, reproduced and sustained by racist policies and white supremacy ideology; 2. Insists that white people confront their racism and privilege; it insists that whiteness and SAE are decentered even, and perhaps most explicitly, in classrooms, research arenas and boardrooms that are made up of all white students, researchers and policymakers who identify as white; 3. Obliges us to tear down the system as a whole – to abolish it – and to reconceive education, research and policymaking differently, possibly replacing it with another model; 4. Compels us to create environments wherein Black youth narratives are not only heard, but they are also taught to resist, protest and struggle against injustice, against white supremacy; and 5. Engenders joy in the struggle and joy in and with communities that struggle.

In conclusion, we urge global citizens, but especially white Americans, to become co-conspirators in the struggle and activists for change, for that is the only way that meaningful change will actually happen. Transformation of the system is going to take willingness from all of us to stop oppressing others via language ideologies, to stop participating in systemic racism, to stop participating in white supremacy in all its forms and to take a stand that Black lives (and by extension, Black languages and literacies) matter.

Notes 1 Corresponding authors: Kisha C. Bryan, Department of Teaching & Learning, Tennessee State University, 3500 John Merritt Blvd. Nashville, Tennessee 37209. Orcid id: 0000-0002-6592-3901. Keisha G. Rogers, Winston-Salem State University, 601 S. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Winston-Salem, NC 27110. Orcid id: 0000-0001-6144-2767. Tiffany Grayson, Academic Affairs, Voorhees College, 481 Porter Drive, Denmark, SC.

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Kisha C. Bryan et al. 2 African American (without the hyphen) will be used throughout this paper to refer to Black people in the U.S. who cannot trace their roots or histories across the Atlantic Ocean. Black American or Black youth will be used as a more inclusive term to refer to both African Americans and people of African ancestry who are citizens and whose families’ immigration patterns can be traced to countries other than the U.S. (e.g., West Indians, Nigerians, Haitians, etc.).

Further reading Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. Routledge.

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PART V

Language policy, practice and youth agency in education

13 LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY IN EDUCATION – LANGUAGE POLICY AND YOUTH AGENCY Henning Årman1 Introduction Education is one of the most researched sites in sociolinguistics. This may come as no big surprise as educational contexts provide fertile ground for researchers interested in a variety of languagerelated issues. The informal peer interaction among youth in the classrooms and hallways of the school offers rich material for scholars to study the interplay between youth´s linguistic performance and subjectivity (e.g., Kerfoot and Bello-Nonjengele, 2016). As an institutional setting, the school also offer possibilities to study language policies and how dominating language ideologies find their expression in curricula and teaching (Lorente, 2017), and the way such language ideologies and language policies set the conditions for youths’ language socialization and youths’ subjectivities (e.g., Duff, 2010). Such matters are predominantly studied with a focus on linguistic diversity and the management of societal and individual multilingualism (e.g., Martin-Jones et al., 2012). From a critical sociolinguistic perspective, the management of language diversity in education is understood as embedded in political and economic societal processes and a key site for the (re-)production of social categories, inequalities, and relations of power (Heller and Martin-Jones, 2001). As a case in point, researchers have shown how language teaching and language policy in education constitute an important arena for colonial processes as well as de-colonial struggles (Antia and Dyers, 2019; García, 2009; Harries, 1988; Heller and McElhinny, 2017; Heryanto, 1995; Macedo and DeGraff, 2019). The school setting thus provides opportunity to analyze how youth react to, negotiate and contest the language practices, policies and ideologies that manifest themselves in educational settings. Researchers have also increasingly started to recognize that youth not only react to the linguistic and social hierarchies in their school context but are also themselves active in producing linguistic normativities relating to multilingualism (Ferrada et al., 2020; Phyak and Bui, 2014). This chapter will present arguments for an interdisciplinary research agenda where theorizing within the field of critical youth studies informs sociolinguistic research on language diversity and language policy in education. Critical youth studies, I will argue, can provide a more theoretically grounded conceptualization of youth as a social category in sociolinguistic research. The current text constitutes an effort to create a dialog between the two fields of research and engages with the question of youth agency in research on the management of linguistic diversity in school conDOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-18

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texts. That is, the chapter focuses on the question of how to conceptualize youth’s capabilities to act and impact the social context in which they live. First, the chapter provides a brief overview of recent developments and debates in sociolinguistics relating to the study of language policy in education, developments that create the conditions for a fruitful interdisciplinary dialog between sociolinguistics and critical youth studies. Second, the chapter describes how youth agency is understood in sociolinguistic research on language diversity and language policy in education. Despite the recent developments towards recognizing the important role of local actors, there is a tendency within language policy research to overlook youth agency in language policy processes. On the other hand, those studies that do acknowledge youth as active in political struggles over language in multilingual settings tend to portray youth agency as something inherent in young subjects. I will argue that this way of conceptualizing youth agency runs the risk of producing new problematic erasures and contradictions. I will claim that there is an opportunity to draw on the long-standing debate and theorizing on youth agency within critical youth studies (e.g., Coffey and Farrugia, 2014; James, 2009; Raby, 2005) to create a more nuanced approach to youth agency in sociolinguistic research on linguistic diversity and language policy in education.

The conditions for an interdisciplinary research agenda There are considerable overlaps between critical youth studies and current forms of language policy in education research. This can partly be attributed to two paradigmatic and intersecting shifts within language policy research. Namely, the critical turn (Martin-Jones and da Costa Cabral, 2018; Tollefson, 2006) combined with an increased interest in ethnography as a research program (Johnson, 2011; McCarty, 2011). The critical turn in language policy research has been described as the incorporation of critical social theory in language policy research and adjacent sociolinguistic fields of research (MartinJones and da Costa Cabral, 2018). Drawing on theorists like Bourdieu (1993) and Foucault (1971) critical language policy researchers take an interest in the power invested nature of language in policies and its role “as a as a gatekeeper regulating access to the legitimate language and to recognition as a legitimate speaker” (Lorente, 2017, p. 488). Thus, they situate the study of language policy in the domain of studies of social inequality, ideology and power relations (da Costa Cabral, 2021; Heller, 2007). As one important example, scholars have shown how language in education policies in multilingual settings in the global south has been a major ingredient in the reproduction of colonial relations (Chimbutane, 2021). The critical turn also meant a rethinking of language policy as an object of study. Moving beyond an understanding of language policy as top-down, overt, and institutionalized efforts to manage language use, researchers started to view language policy as something that takes many different forms and exists in all levels of society (Cameron, 1995; McCarty, 2011). Contemporary studies tend to approach language policy in education as a multilayered and situated practice where actors on different societal levels engage in diverse and shifting forms of language regimentation (Hornberger and Johnson, 2007). The critical turn also entailed an increased interest in ethnography as a theoretical and methodological program of research. Following the shift towards an interest in language policy as a power invested and local practice, ethnography has become a frequently used approach in the study of language policy in education. Ethnography, with its origin in anthropology, will put people, their practices and relations, at the very core of study and researchers have turned to ethnographic methods to capture multilayered and situated language policy practices and critically study their social consequences (e.g., Heller et al., 2017; Johnson, 2009, 2011; Martin-Jones and da Costa Cabral, 2018). The counter-hegemonic potential of ethnography (Blommaert and Jie, 2010) has been uti180

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lized to study language policy as entangled with a wide range of social issues in educational contexts. For example, Phyak (2021) use ethnography to engage with language policy in education as a site for local actors’ decolonial struggles as they challenge the language ideologies that lead to the erasure of indigenous language skills; Li and Zheng’s (2021) ethnographic fieldwork among Myanmar students in China enabled them to illuminate how neo-liberal discourses frame Chinese learning a desirable commodity; and Nørreby (2020) works ethnographically to study the interplay between multilingualism and social stratification in Denmark. Through his fieldwork in a high prestigious school in Copenhagen he shows how some particular forms of (elite) multiculturalism and (elite) multilingualism can be framed positively despite dominating monolingual norms in Danish society (Nørreby, 2020). These historical developments in the study of language diversity and policy in education paves the ground for a productive dialog with critical youth studies. Critical youth studies is a large academic field with fuzzy boundaries (Ibrahim, 2014). However, one of its fundamental tenets is the application of critical theory in the analysis of young people’s living conditions and youth culture (e.g., Hall and Jefferson, 1976; McRobbie, 1990). Further, the ethnographic tradition is strong within the field. Ever since the publication of the foundational texts within the field (e.g., Hebdige, 1979; Willis, 1977), critical perspectives are regularly operationalized through ethnography. This long tradition in critical youth studies of using ethnography to study youth and youth culture through a critical theoretical lens has also included a reflexive debate. There are perennial issues that recurrently are being discussed within the field: how to conceptualize youth as a social category, how to understand youth as agentic subjects and what does it mean to ‘give voice’ to youth? Insights from this long-standing debate in critical youth studies has the potential to inform the study of young speakers in sociolinguistics. That is, theorizing within critical youth studies can be used to critically reflect on how youth are being positioned in research on language diversity and policy in education. Children and youth are of course fundamental categories in research on the management of language diversity in education. Yet, I argue that the way these categories are being described and positioned within sociolinguistic studies could benefit from a critical discussion inspired by the long debates within critical youth studies. In the following, I will consider the way children and youth are being represented in language policy in education research, with a focus on the key aspect of youth’s agency.

Erasure and celebration of youth agency in language policy research As a field of scholarship critical youth studies engages with a range of topics, such as youth culture; young people’s identity formation, well-being, and political participation; youth and social justice (Wyn and Cahill, 2015). In addition to highlighting youths’ living conditions, critical youth studies challenge traditional ways of conceptualizing and defining youth. That is, critical youth studies challenge dominant “discursive frameworks within which children and young people are understood, managed, and administered” (Wyn, 2015, p. 4) both in society at large as well as in academia. This is an important theoretical task. The way youth are conceptualized does of course heavily influence the way (researching) adults understand and recognize the youth’s capacity to impact their own social context and political processes in their everyday life (Smith, 2015). One important contribution of critical youth studies is a rethinking of youth’s political subjectivity, agency and citizenship as youth are being theorized as agentive subjects. That is, “active in the construction of their own lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live” (James and Prout, 1990, p. 8). The understanding of youth as active in the shaping of their own life conditions also has methodological implications. Meaning that it entails a shift from 181

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regarding youth as objects to be studied, towards a view on youth as reflexive participants with voices worth listening to in research practice (Allison and Christensen, 2017; Halldén, 2003). This may not seem a radically new outlook on youth, but social sciences and humanities have traditionally viewed children and youth as “passive subjects of social structures and processes” (James and Prout, 1990, p. 8). Language policy in education research is no exception from this wider trend. I would argue that the field historically has suffered from an erasure of children’s and youth’s agency. Youth is traditionally positioned on the receiving end of language policy and adults’ language socialization rather than described as agentive and active in language political struggles in educational contexts. The capacity to influence policy is attributed to the state and its institutions (e.g., Takam and Fassé, 2020) or teachers (e.g., Lin, 2013). This research conjures a world where adults act in a capacity of policymakers or teachers while children and youth are, at best, reacting to adults’ exercise of power. It is not that children and youth are always erased from the research. In, for example, language policy research that focuses on the status and vitality of minority language, children and youth are ascribed great importance as the future speakers or “as the last line of defense in indigenous-language maintenance” (Wyman et al., 2013, p. 3). However, they are then often positioned either as victims in a process of language shift or obstacles to be overcome as they chose not to speak the language that needs to be saved from language death (Wyman et al., 2013; Zavala, 2019). There are of course important exceptions to this trend. There is a considerable body of sociolinguistic work that take a more affirmative approach to youth, understanding them as capable agents to be studied in their own right (e.g., Bucholtz, 2002; Bucholtz and Hall, 2005; Eckert, 1989; Jørgensen, 2008; Rampton, 1995, 2006). Following this tradition, scholars writing on language policy in education have highlighted the capacity of youth to take a more active role in language policy processes (Albury, 2016; Bucholtz et al., 2018b; Hornberger, 2012; Pietikäinen, 2013). Far from being described as victims or obstacles, this research often sets out to display youth as agents, capable of exercising power and impact on their own social situation. Instead, the research tends to underscore youth’s agency as co-researchers or language activists that struggle against problematic linguistic hierarchies and normativities (Ferrada et al., 2020; Phyak and Bui, 2014). In relation to the theme of this section of the current book, it could also be noted that the neighboring field of language socialization has a long history of regarding youth as agents (Aronsson and Rundström, 1989; Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986). Language socialization is considered a relational process where not only the child is being socialized into certain ways of speaking and being. The child also simultaneously socializes the adult (Kulick and Schieffelin, 2009). From this vantage point, research within the field of family language policy has been recognizing children and youth’s active participation in processes of language socialization and language policy within the context of the family (Johnsen, 2021; Kheirkhah and Cekaite, 2018; Lanza and Lomeu Gomes, 2020, cf. Johnsen, this volume). The current efforts to recognize youth as agents in language policy in education research is commendable. It is an important step away from the problematic erasure of youth’s agency in ideological struggles over language. However, I would argue that there are reasons to address the way youth agency is being conceptualized in language policy in education research. In research on language policy in educational contexts, youth agency tends to come across as undertheorized and treated as a given. Hence, this presents an important opportunity for transdisciplinary synergies. The long-standing debate on agency within critical youth studies can be used to add nuance and provide a more theoretically sound approach to youth agency in language policy in education research. Not in the sense that a critical youth studies’ perspective can be used to highlight youth agency, quite the contrary. Whereas earlier texts within the field of critical youth studies and child182

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hood sociology aimed at challenging the erasure of childrens’ and youths’ agency in research (e.g., James and Prout, 1990), later work has questioned the celebratory way youth agency came to be portrayed within the field (Coffey and Farrugia, 2014; Raby, 2005). Turning our gaze towards the field of sociolinguistics, the same critique is relevant here as youth agency sometimes is fetishized and unproblematized. In the following, I will discuss three interrelated themes on the topic of youth agency in sociolinguistic research on language diversity and language management in educational contexts: 1) the structure vs. agency construct; 2) youth resistance and researcher normativity; and 3) the empowerment of youth. I will argue that in relation to these issues, critical youth studies can offer important insights. The aim is neither to produce a complete overview of the different ways agency has been conceptualized within critical youth studies nor to provide a definitive answer on how I think youth agency should be theorized within sociolinguistic studies on language policy in education. Instead, the following problematization should be seen as a call for further interdisciplinary dialog. I will draw on a few key texts on how youth agency has been understood within critical child and youth studies to exemplify how the debate on agency within this field can be helpful to push sociolinguistic theorizing further. Importantly, this should not be understood as a critique of researchers’ commitment to highlighting youth as capable agents. Rather, I engage in dialog with these researchers with the ambition to support this shift by discussing different ways to theorize youth agency and its implications.

Agency versus structure? If earlier research on language policy has erased youth agency, the opposite can be said about the efforts to remedy this problem. Demonstrating youth agency almost becomes an objective in and of itself. As important as this effort to highlight youth agency is, I would argue that it is mostly done without a more nuanced discussion on what youth agency is and how it is manifested. And this creates new problematic issues and raises important questions regarding who is understood as an agentic subject. What way of being young is regarded as agentic? What actions are understood as resistance? And importantly, how does this relate to the political commitment of the researcher? In their efforts to highlight youth agency, sociolinguistic researchers interested in linguistic language management in education tend to focus the analysis on how youth resist problematic sociolinguistic structures that in different ways constrain them. Such an approach builds on a view of agency as something youths have or possess, but that is blocked or distorted by social structures. Class, structural racism, institutional or generational orders are examples of sociocultural forces that are taken to circumvent young peoples’ free will or capacity to act. This is a way of understanding agency that is recurrent in both public discourse as well as in research and that could be labeled as the agency vs. structure construct (Coffey and Farrugia, 2014). From this vantage point, agency is located in the youth themselves and conceptualized as always in opposition to structures. As commonplace as this way of understanding agency is, there are reasons to scrutinize the ontological presuppositions that underlie it. As Raby (2005) notes, the agency vs. structure construct builds on a modernistic dualism between individual/society or agency/structure that takes “a rational, pre-discursive, internally coherent, acting subject” (Raby, 2005, p. 155) as the point of departure. The construct presupposes an already formed subject with free will that is then acted upon by structural forces that impose constraints on its capacity to act according to this free will. However, this is a modernistic take on subjectivity that does not sit well with much of the ontological foundations of critical sociolinguistics. Critical sociolinguistic research often has a more post-structuralist take on subjectivity (Heller et al., 2017; Jonsson et al., 2019). That is, identity and subjectivity are both something 183

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that is intersubjectively construed and “identity is best viewed as the emergent product rather than the pre-existing source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore as fundamentally a social and cultural phenomenon” (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005, p. 588). From this point of departure, an agency vs. structure construct becomes a problematic simplification. From a post-structuralist perspective, there is no pre-defined subject with absolute free agency and will. Instead, the subject is seen as coming into being in and through systems of power relations and discourse. If this is the ontological point of departure, one cannot describe, or analytically operationalize, agency as an inherent trait of youth that is blocked by external forces. A more theoretically coherent way to approach agency would instead be to treat agency, like subjectivity, as the result of social, discursive and material processes, as “a social and interactional phenomenon brought about through the relationship between entities, actions, and effects” (Casillas et al., 2018, p. 4). Agency is then not blocked by structural forces acting on a coherent subject. On the contrary, such forces are the very conditions for subjectivity and thus also for agency. Far from being an essential trait residing within young speakers, agency as it is manifested in political struggles over language in educational settings, is brought about through the very processes of subjectification (Foucault, 1984). This way of understanding youth agency in language political processes has consequences for the way research is designed and how we describe youth’s engagement in language political struggles. And importantly, the way we understand agency will impact who is researched and what behavior is seen to deserve our analytical attention.

Resisting youth and researchers’ political commitment From an agency vs. structure perspective youth agency will be manifested as the resistance against problematic linguistic norms or language policies in education. And this becomes the focus for analysis. In the words of Bucholtz and colleagues (2018a, p. 2), it is an analysis that focuses on “the practices of individual and collective youth agency that challenge and dismantle power”. One question that arises from this is how to identify those actions that “challenge and dismantle power” (Bucholtz et al., 2018a, p. 2). If we theorize youth agency as the resistance against structural forces, as intentional actions that challenge structural constrains, then how do we conceive of those actions that do not dismantle power? What about the youth that for example are conforming to linguistic norms, or that performs identities that are not regarded as subversive? Should this kind of social behavior and ways of existing be considered the product of social structures and understood as un-agentic? This is a question that is closely linked to political and normative commitments of language in education policy researchers. Discussing research in critical youth studies, Coffey and Farrugia (2014) argue that researchers tend to see youth agency in actions that challenge and resist social injustices that the researcher on beforehand has identified as problematic. Agency is identified when youth partake in the researcher’s own project of social critique and “certain kinds of identities and actions [are] defined in advance as agentic in accordance with the political commitments of the researcher” (Coffey and Farrugia, 2014, p. 462). The critical youth scholar Pérez Aronsson (2020) also argues that research that takes an interest in the voices and opinions of youths tend to favor young subjects that speak with a clear voice and that use that voice to confirm the political values of the researcher. Other young subjects that perhaps are less articulate or refuse to partake in the researchers’ critical project are less interesting and often not visible in research. Turning the same critical gaze towards language policy in education research, I would argue that we find a similar tendency. The favorite young subject seems to be the youth who, in an articulate way, identify and challenge problematic linguistic norms and language policies. And 184

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does so in a way that conforms with the critical commitment of the researcher (e.g., Ferrada et al., 2020; Llompart-Esbert and Nussbaum, 2020; Sterzuk, 2020). Is there a risk that researchers are ‘playing favorites’ in research on youth and that some youth are regarded as agentic and others as not? Scrutinizing my own research practices, this critique could also legitimately be aimed at my own work (Årman, 2018). There is no easy remedy to this problem. (And perhaps some researchers would claim that this is not a problem at all.) But I would argue that revisiting the ontological premises for how we understand agency and acknowledge that ‘resistance’ to power never is a straightforward thing, could make researchers less prone to playing favorites. In the debate on youth agency within critical youth studies scholars have argued that youth practices that at first glance seem to be subversive, also function to reproduce social inequalities and structures that uphold them (e.g., Gonick, 2006; Hall and Jefferson, 1976; McRobbie, 1980; Willis, 1977). Further, departing from a view of power as productive, Raby (2005, p. 161) argues that resistance “is not against power, but imbricated within it”. Meaning that there is often no clear cut between domination and subversion, between power and resistance. They are always entangled in each other and power, both hegemonic and subversive, is fragmented and unpredictable (Raby, 2005). From this vantage point, it is the researchers’ task to unpack the way youth’s actions can (re)produce normativities at the same time as the same actions can work to transgress and liberate. This does not necessarily involve criticizing youths’ actions, but it could open up for a more nuanced analysis where youth’s actions are not (implicitly) sorted into either resistance or submission. Further, it is significant to recognize that agency can manifest itself in social action that does not align with the political agenda of the researcher. But it is also imperative to take notice of the less activistic and more compliant youth and make them visible in research too.

‘Pure’ youth agency? A related issue is the question of whose agency we are observing as youth question or resist problematic norms or policies in education. In recent literature it has become imperative to underscore that youths’ capacity to act is the result of their agentive nature. I would argue however, that this ideal of finding and highlighting youth’s own capabilities does create a risk of downplaying the impact of the presence of the researcher. In classic sociolinguistic literature, the relationship between researcher and participants has been articulated through the notion of the ‘observer’s paradox’ (Labov, 1978). In a positivist tradition, it became a problem that participants in a study would be aware of their being observed and that this fact made them alter the way they spoke. This became a methodological problem in the pursuit of data that was not ‘contaminated’ by the research practices used for its elicitation. As I will discuss below, this ideal of the ‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ seems to reappear in present-day sociolinguistic research on youth, albeit in the search for uncontaminated youth agency. The objective, detached researcher with a gaze from nowhere (Haraway, 1988) is luckily no longer an unchallenged ideal in social research. The “hubris of the zero point” (Mignolo, 2009) has been troubled by critical theorizing within both critical youth studies and sociolinguistics (e.g., Heller, 2008; Kelly and Kamp, 2015). Feminist and postcolonial discourses challenge the idealized model of the researcher as an objective, apolitical speaker of truths. Within critical strands of research, including the study of language policy in education, researchers engage in the social context they study, working to change problematic practices and encourage social change (Bucholtz et al., 2014; Copland, 2019). For example, Cameron and colleagues (1993, p. 87) argue in favor of ‘empowering research’, that is, “research done on, for and with social subjects”. 185

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In their seminal paper, Mary Bucholtz and colleagues (2014) also depart from a commitment to social change and argue for a sociolinguistic research project that encourages “self-determination for linguistically subordinated individuals and groups in sociopolitical struggles over language” (Bucholtz et al., 2014, p. 145). But importantly, they challenge the notion of ‘empowering’ youth on the basis that the idea risks producing a problematic image of a knowledgeable agentic researcher that through the process of ‘empowerment’ transfer agency from the researcher to a young subject. Conceptualizing research as an act of empowerment risks erasing youth’s own linguistic and social expertise, they argue. This would be problematic because youth has just as much to teach the researcher as the other way around (Bucholtz et al., 2014, p. 149). The same stance on youth agency is taken in the long-running research program “School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society” (SKILLS). When describing the program, the research team writes that “our goal is not youth empowerment, which presupposes an asymmetrical distribution of power and knowledge, but rather accompaniment, which involves joint activity and mutual learning among all participants” (Bucholtz et al., 2018b, p. 167). It is an ambition to show agency as emanating from the youth themselves, rather than being something that is handed down to youth from an empowering research team (Ferrada et al., 2020, p. 91). As commendable as this effort is, I would argue that such idealization of a ‘pure’, ‘uncontaminated’ youth agency creates a risk that researchers downplay their own role in the researched context and the impact of their own presence and actions as they research on, and together with, youth. In a sense, the way the researchers downplay their own impact resembles the efforts to overcome the ‘observers’ paradox’ to elicit natural speech (cf. also Svendsen and Goodchild, this volume). To continue to use the SKILLS program as an example, there is a contradiction between the efforts to downplay the ‘empowering’ facet of research practice and the descriptions of a research process as a practice of “fostering” and “nurturing young people’s affective agency” (Ferrada et al., 2020, p. 92) and as “efforts to sustain the languages and cultures of the young people” (Bucholtz et al., 2018a, p. 11). Again, the theorizing on youth agency within critical youth studies can be helpful to rethink youth agency and defuse the symbolically charged question of whose agency we are observing. It does not mean a return to a view on agency as something some actors possess more or less of, and that can be redistributed through ‘empowerment’. Theorizing power and agency as described above, as relational, produced in an assemblage of discursive and material forces, and always entangled in processes of subjectification (Coffey and Farrugia, 2014; Raby, 2005; Raithelhuber, 2016), the very premise for analysis is that agency cannot be understood as an inherent property of a single individual or group. Instead, agency becomes an unstable, relational accomplishment, an “agentic potential [that] is distributed among various people, institutions and practices” (Raithelhuber, 2016, p. 103). The analysis must then consider that the research process itself might be an important part of an ongoing production of subjectivities, and a legitimation of some ways of being and acting and not others. But just as much as the researchers take an active part in influencing the conditions for agentic behavior, so does youth.

Concluding remarks and future directions In a comment on sociolinguistic debate, Jaspers (2020) cautions against ‘schismatic discourse’. That is, the habit of scholars to imagine and portray the state of a field of research in such a way that their own suggested ‘new perspective’ comes across as original. In this text, I have claimed that, at large, sociolinguistic research interested in the management of linguistic diversity in education could benefit from a more theorized understanding of youth agency. And the ‘new perspective’ offered here is the theorizing on youth agency found within critical youth studies. But the 186

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ambition of this text is not to dismiss the interesting discussions on youth as active participants in language political struggles that indeed do exist in the field (Casillas et al., 2018). In a situation where scholars aim to redeem the historical trend to overlook youth agency, the present text should be understood as an attempt to further support this effort. The study of language diversity in education from the perspective of language policy has seen the rethinking of some of its core concepts. For example, the translanguaging debate has challenged the way language is understood (García and Li Wei, 2014; Makoni and Pennycook, 2006), forcing researchers to articulate their theoretical foundations for their respective position, thus pushing the field forward. As mentioned above, the implementation of critical theory in the study of the management of language diversity in school has shed light on the power-invested nature of such practices. Further, the move to acknowledge local actors in language policy (Hornberger and Johnson, 2007) has paved the way for efforts to highlight youth as competent language political actors (Casillas et al., 2018; Ferrada et al., 2020; Phyak and Bui, 2014). In this tradition of critically scrutinizing and rethinking theoretical vantage points and analytical thinking tools, I argue that it is time to overhaul the understanding of youth agency in language diversity and language policy in education research. The discussion on youth agency in critical youth studies can in this regard be used to produce a more theoretically grounded analysis of youths’ active participation in struggles over language. There is great potential in the interdisciplinary dialog as critical youth studies can inspire a more nuanced way of conceptualizing youth and youth agency. Such interdisciplinary conversation would not result in an Alexandrian cut, doing away with all inconsistencies or erasures of youth agency within sociolinguistic research. The long-standing reflection on youth agency within critical youth studies has in no way produced a final, coherent and all-encompassing theory of youth subjectivity and agency. The debate is still open, but the insights it has produced so far can be of use to further the analysis of youth as they navigate their sociolinguistic geographies.

Note 1 Corresponding author: Henning Årman, Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Svante Arrhenius väg 21A, 114 18 Stockholm, Sweden.

Further readings Coffey, J. and D. Farrugia (2014). Unpacking the black box: The problem of agency in the sociology of youth, Journal of Youth Studies, 17(4): 461–474. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/13676261​.2013​.830707 Parish, A. and H. Kira (2020). Agency. In J. Stanlaw (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology. Wiley.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Lucas Gottzén and other colleagues at the Department for Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University for interesting discussions on agency within critical youth studies and to Rickard Jonsson and Tommaso Milani for comments on my earlier writing on youth agency within sociolinguistics. Thanks also to the editors of this volume for valuable comments.

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14 YOUTH LANGUAGING AND THE SCHOOL Janus Spindler Møller1

Introduction Public schools are cultural products of socio-historical developments that often play central roles in national self-understanding. At the same time, they reflect societal developments such as migration patterns and transnational flows. Language is at the core of these processes. On the one hand, regimes of national standard language(s) play central roles in school curricula. On the other hand, the pupils may represent a number of different linguistic backgrounds. This dilemma has been studied intensively within the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography. This chapter addresses the relation between languaging and schooling in Western societies and presents an overview of the main topics within this field of research. The first topic concerns the ethnolinguistic assumption (Blommaert et al., 2012) that links national standard languages to national identities in the context of Western nation states and how this influences educational institutions and their pupils. The second topic deals with the theories of languaging (Jørgensen, 2008) and translanguaging (García and Li Wei, 2014) including a discussion of the complexity of introducing translanguaging practices into contexts characterized by monolingual language ideology. The third topic addresses the role of schools as sociolinguistic norm centers in polycentric systems of normativity (Blommaert, 2010). Here, it is argued that a combination of a Foucauldian understanding of power (Foucault, 1977, 1983) and the theory of enregisterment (Agha, 2007) can help us understand how certain ways of speaking become linked to institutional power. Finally, in order to show how these topics can be studied from the perspective of young pupils the chapter presents a case study from the Everyday Languaging project (Madsen et al., 2016). More specifically, the study demonstrates what can be achieved from a detailed interactional analysis of how young language-minoritized pupils perceive and parody the language ideologies of their school and their own position in it.

The ethnolinguistic assumption and schooling A particularly influential idea concerning the relation between language and schools in Western societies is what has been called the ethnolinguistic assumption, i.e., “[…] the assumption that aligns language use and ethnic or cultural group identity in a linear and one-on-one relationship and in which the modern subject is defined as monolingual and monocultural” (Blommaert et al., 2012, pp. 2–3). DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-19

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The definition contains two important points. The first concerns the linking between a way of speaking and an identity. In this understanding, speaking Danish equals being Danish and vice versa. The second point addresses the side effect of the assumption that citizens (or modern subjects) are supposed to have one mother tongue linked to one nationality. In relation to Western school systems, this leads to the perception that the ‘normal’ pupil is monocultural and monolingual. It is easy to deconstruct the logic behind the ethnolinguistic assumption (see for example Blommaert et al., 2012, p. 3). Nevertheless, it is necessary to acknowledge its importance in people’s social lives. For instance, the idea of a population sharing a language that enables general education is central to the formation of nation states as imagined communities (Anderson, 1991; Edwards, 2009) not least when it comes to public schooling. Gogolin (1997) describes the influence of the ethnolinguistic assumption on schooling in Germany as a monolingual habitus referring to the routine nomination and use of a language (often ‘the national standard’) as the one that counts in school systems and the concomitant erasure of minority languages. She explains the influence of the monolingual habitus historically. The development of the school as a national institution was a constitutive element in the development of Germany as a nation state in the 19th century (1997, p. 41). Based on this historical explanation, Gogolin suggests that the monolingual habitus is influential across a broad range of Western societies characterized by the construction of nation states in the 18th and 19th centuries. Piller (2016) relies on studies from Hungary, New Zealand, Japan and Britain to show how the monolingual habitus in school systems has a number of consequences for speakers of minority languages and may lead to societal inequality. A central concept in this connection is the paradox of submersion referring to circumstances where pupils need to learn a language simultaneously with the curriculum being taught in the language (Piller, 2016, pp. 104–105). Piller outlines how submersion may predict different types of low performance such as not graduating and failing papers (2016, p. 107). She concludes that the continued challenges submersion poses for societies is in itself proof of “the persistence of the monolingual habitus and the exclusions this produces” (2016, p. 113). Studies from Norway show that even if societies specifically acknowledge and make allowance for minority languages at the level of national law and school curricula this does not guarantee the acknowledgement and practical use of minority languages in the teacher-controlled part of school life (Svendsen, 2021). Based on a larger quantitative questionnaire study about language use among teachers in Norwegian classrooms as well as a research review (Svendsen, Ryen and Ims, 2020; in Svendsen, 2021), the authors conclude that Norwegian schools still to a large degree are influenced by the monolingual habitus. Møller (2021) shows how ethnolinguistic assumptions and monolingual habitus also influence interactions carried out in daily life in a linguistically heterogeneous school in Denmark. An example is the question “it’s difficult to be bilingual, right?” posed by a teacher with a language-majoritized background to a pupil with a language-minoritized background, who reacts with frustration (Møller, 2021, pp. 124–125). The question constructs “to be bilingual” in a binary opposition to being monolingual which is considered to be the normal and preferable. Møller labels this type of interactional sequence as ethnolinguistic cornering defined as a speech act that positions the interlocutor(s) in relation to an ethnolinguistic assumption and a reaction from the interlocutor(s) indicating that they disalign with the positioning (ibid.). Apart from representing a central focus for recent sociolinguistic school research, the ethnolinguistic assumption points to a central dilemma for teachers in Western schools: On the one hand, they are expected to maintain and further establish the ideology of national standard languages. On the other hand, they are obliged to acknowledge the uniqueness and individual resources of each 192

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pupil including those with a language-minoritized background. An important approach to work with this dilemma can be found in the theory of languaging and the subsequent development of a translanguaging pedagogy.

Languaging, translanguaging pedagogy and ethnolinguistic identities At the most basic level, languaging denotes the activity where language users (or languagers) employ linguistic resources (for example lexical, grammatical or prosodic) at their disposal to grasp, influence and shape their social world (Jørgensen, 2008). A central distinction is that linguistic resources are not the same as the use of languages (such as Danish, Arabic or Kurdish) or any other labelled way of speaking. Within the theory of languaging, languages are understood as socio-historical constructions where clusters of linguistic resources over time become named languages because groups of people invoke and enforce the right to categorize it as such (see also Blommaert and Rampton, 2011; García and Li Wei, 2014; Heller, 2007; Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015). Several sociolinguistic studies have shown the ordinariness of practices of languaging that involve linguistic resources associated with several different languages (Dovchin, 2017; Møller, 2016; Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015). This means that for people with access to linguistic resources associated with several named languages, ‘speaking a language’ simply means restricting themselves to use only linguistic resources associated with this language. However, the idea of languages as coherent entities plays a considerable ideological role in people’s lives – not least in terms of derived identities such as ‘native speaker’ or ‘mother tongue speaker’ (Blommaert and Rampton, 2011, p. 5). Such ideological constructions are similar to the ethnolinguistic assumption discussed above. An important point here is that the solution is not to exclude terms such as ‘mother tongue’ from the sociolinguistic toolbox. In a study conducted among youth in Malaysia, Albury (2017) finds that some of his participants report having a mother tongue, which they do not speak. As a participant states: “Because we are Chinese so we must learn our mother tongue” (2017, p. 17). This serves as a reminder to sociolinguistic scholars that the purpose is not to deconstruct notions such as mother tongue speakers but to understand what it means to the individuals applying it. The perspective of languaging has become influential over the last two decades in what is sometimes referred to as critical sociolinguistics (Blommaert and Rampton, 2011, see also Madsen, this volume.) Especially the notion of translanguaging (Garcia, 2009; García and Li Wei, 2014) has inspired critical research and development of new pedagogical approaches in educational settings. Garcia explains translanguaging as “the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximize communicative potential” (García, 2009, p. 140). A central point in connection to the monolingual habitus discussed above, is that acts of translanguaging have the potential to challenge “fixed language identities constrained by nation-states” (García and Wei, 2014, p. 21). In translanguaging pedagogy, the focus is on the learner’s linguistic repertoire and not on the expectations from the institution. The aim is to make space for the voices of language-minoritized students (Creese and Blackledge, 2015). The theoretical work on translanguaging has inspired the development of a number of ways to implement translanguaging approaches in daily teaching practices (see for example Svendsen, 2021; Wedin, 2017; Holmen and Thise, 2021). Straszer et al. (2020) have further shown how the visual and spatial organization of mother tongue tuition classrooms may contribute to creating a translanguaging space (Li Wei, 2011) while simultaneously linking to other classrooms and activities in the school.

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Translanguaging pedagogies have, for instance, been criticized for overlooking that pupils are expected to master a national language when they leave the national school systems while the ability to translanguage is not generally recognized as an asset (Jaspers, 2018). As stated by Jaspers in a reply to critiquing teachers for not embracing minority languages enough: “Multilingualism may recently have been hyped, but this hasn’t relieved teachers from the duty of transmitting a monolingual standard variety in view of pupils’ access to higher education and the labour market” (Jaspers, 2022, p. 288). This serves to remind us that while the inequalities resulting from monolingual language ideologies certainly deserve analytical attention, it is less fruitful to blame individual teachers for doing their jobs. Another important aspect of translanguaging pedagogies is that they are implemented in societies that are often heavily influenced by monolingual ideologies and derived ethnolinguistic identities. In line with the notion of ethnolinguistic cornering discussed above, teachers insisting on translanguaging practices in classroom spaces may unknowingly ascribe ethnolinguistic identities to pupils that the pupils are uncomfortable with and more or less directly reject. The following three examples illustrate the potential problems of introducing translanguaging practices into settings that are generally influenced by a monolingual habitus. The first example comes from a study conducted in a school placed in the Greek-Cypriot part of Cyprus (Charalambous et al., 2016). The study examines the role of Turkish in educational contexts in light of the conflict between the Greek-Cypriot part and Turkey. Among the participating pupils is a group with a Turkish-Bulgarian background, all of whom speak Turkish. However, it is very rare for this group to use Turkish in school contexts. As part of the research, the participating teachers were asked to prepare ‘peace education lessons’. One of the participating teachers chose to use a short story that contains both Turkish and Greek with the aim of including Turkish in the generally Greece-speaking context as a symbolic way of building bridges in the conflict. The teacher then urged the Turkish-speaking pupils to tell in Turkish what the character had said. As it turned out, it proved very difficult to get the pupils to do this. One of the pupils explicitly stated that he was ashamed (Charalambous et al., 2016, p. 342). In the words of the authors, the pupil’s reluctance could be explained by “a fear that ‘speaking Turkish’ could be taken as ‘being Turkish’” (Charalambous et al., 2016, p. 327). While the teacher attempted to exploit linguistic resources for symbolic bridge-building in the conflict, the pupil was afraid of being identified as ‘the enemy’ as a product of an ethnolinguistic assumption. The second example comes from a project that combines linguistic ethnography and action research in a school in Helsinki (Lehtonen and Møller, 2022). The pupils represent a number of different linguistic backgrounds and are 11–12 years old. The purpose of the project was to create awareness of linguistic diversity and make the linguistic competencies of different groups of students visible. It should be mentioned that the project generally succeeded in this goal. One of the first times the project workers visit the class the following incident takes place: The pupils are sitting in a circle and the teacher is leading a discussion concerning feelings about language. Several Arabic-speaking pupils are present. Two of them are Faroqh, who speaks fluent Finnish, and Nasir, who has fewer skills in Finnish because he arrived from Iraq only four months earlier. During the session, the teacher asks Faroqh to pose a question to Nasir in Arabic. Faroqh reacts with silence and a bodily display of discomfort. When the teacher asks again, Faroqh stands up, walks to Nasir and tries to whisper the question to him. The teacher reacts by stating that it is “nice” if everybody in the class hears the question posed in Arabic (Lehtonen and Møller, 2022, p. 74). In the words of the authors “Arabic is showcased and not treated as an equal form of interaction with Finnish” (2022, p. 76). The reason behind the teacher’s request seemingly is to construct the classroom as embracing linguistic diversity by inviting linguistic resources associated with minority languages 194

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into the teacher-led activities – perhaps in honor of the visiting scholars doing fieldwork. The problem is that in the celebration of diversity, a pupil is requested to step into the role as ‘different’ in the generally Finnish-speaking classroom. Åhlund and Jonsson (2016) analyze a similar case except that what is requested is not linguistic resources, but food associated with ethnic minorities. In a class for newly arrived refugees and migrants in a Swedish school, the pupils generally comply with the purpose of learning the Swedish language and being able to pass as ‘mainstream students’ in the Swedish school system. However, the pupils also occasionally experience to be ascribed identities as the non-Swedish other. An example is when the school is arranging an ‘international day’ and the students in the class are asked to prepare the food. The students display reluctance by ironically suggesting that they make meatballs (an iconic mainstream-Swedish dish). The teacher, who also takes a critical stance towards the international day ironically suggests that it then must be Peruvian meatballs. The authors conclude that the school as institution needs the pupils to perform “the ethnic Other in order to display its celebration of diversity” (Åhlund and Jonsson, 2016, p. 173). The three examples illustrate different attempts to discursively construct schools as promoting peace, building bridges, highlighting multilingualism and celebrating diversity. The examples also show that a reason why such attempts prove to be unsuccessful is that they are evaluated as untrustworthy in the light of the already prevailing ethnolinguistic assumptions. In Cyprus the use of Turkish is refused because of the risk of being perceived as Turkish (and thereby the enemy). In Helsinki and Stockholm, the pupils are reluctant to speak minoritized languages in class and produce food associated with ‘the ethnic Other’ because this would cause a symbolic distance to the regime of monolingual and monocultural ideologies in the school as institution. The examples show that acts of translanguaging are not necessarily transformative in their own right. The pupils also need to see this as a meaningful endeavor in the local context of schooling (see Svendsen, 2021, p. 197 for a similar point). Before turning to the case study, I discuss how languages of power are produced, maintained and resisted and how these processes can be theorized.

Schools and the enregisterment of the language of power In line with Heller’s (2012, p. 27) description of institutions from a sociolinguistic perspective, schools can be viewed as “discursive sites that are particularly important because of the value of the resources they distribute”. In this view, the school as an institution represents a sociolinguistic norm center (Blommaert, 2010, p. 39) – an evaluating authority that pupils may orient to in their languaging practices whether an authority figure (such as a teacher) is present or not. It is of course also possible for pupils to do the opposite of the authorities’ expectations. To understand how sociolinguistic norm centers influence individuals’ languaging practices a Foucauldian perspective on power is useful (Foucault, 1977, 1983). Foucault situates the dynamics of power at a micro level. Power is produced, enforced and circulated on the level of everyday interaction. He describes how “[…] power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their action and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (Foucault, 1977, p. 39). Here, power is understood as circulating and dynamic. It is expressed in actions and moves through and becomes entrenched in bodies and often works through self-justice and selfcorrection (Gore, 1995). In this way, power is productive in the sense that it has the potential to move people towards, for example, educational goals. A central point in connection to this is that norms or ideas of what is ‘normal’ are never neutral. They are always societal constructions that inevitably fit certain groups better than others and a good example is the monolingual habitus that favors speakers of a majoritized language. 195

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In order to understand how clusters of linguistic resources become socially meaningful over time, the notion of enregisterment (Agha, 2007) is helpful. The theory understands registers as any way of speaking that is recognizable to a group of people (from national languages to jargon in a workplace or slang in a youth group). The concept of enregisterment covers how linguistic registers are formed and become recognizable over time and how they become associated with understandings of stereotypes, places, situations, types of behavior and sociolinguistic categorizations (such as the labelling of languages) and the processes in which these linguistic registers become valorized and imbued with meaning (cf. also Madsen, this volume). In other words, enregisterment denotes the processes that connect language use to social life. Acts of enregisterment are inseparable from the activity of languaging. If, for example, a way of speaking is enregistered as institutionally acknowledged (or the opposite) in the context of schools this sociolinguistic knowledge can be strategically exploited in acts of languaging. A combined analytical gaze of enregisterment and languaging asks how ways of speaking become shaped and categorized, how they become socially meaningful and how they are employed in interaction and with what consequences. The processes of enregisterment are closely connected to the micro mechanisms of power in terms of producing an institutionally acknowledged language of power. The following case study addresses how such language norms influence the languaging practices and ideologies of a group of young Copenhageners with language-minoritized backgrounds. It also addresses how the pupils exploit enregistered ways of speaking to position the school in a societal frame as well as their own position in it.

Case: the school as norm center in the language practices of youth This case study draws on data from the Everyday Languaging project (Madsen et al., 2016) where a team of researchers followed groups of pupils in a public school from 2009 until 2019. The school is situated in a culturally and linguistically heterogeneous area of Copenhagen. The overall aim of the Everyday Languaging project is to study processes of enregisterment (Agha, 2007). The data presented here was collected in 2018 among a group of pupils (13–14 years old) when they attended 7th and 8th grade (see also Møller, 2021; Slotte et al., 2023). The pupils figuring in the excerpts have participated in the project since the 1st grade. They have in common that their families migrated to Denmark, and they represent a number of different language-minoritized backgrounds. The excerpts represent key moments in relation to the interplay between languaging (Jørgensen, 2008), enregisterment (Agha, 2007) and schools viewed as discursive sites of particular sociolinguistic importance (Heller, 2012). I argue that a detailed study of how these ways of speaking are enregistered and employed in interaction provides an understanding of how the participants interpret and relate to the phenomenon of ‘school’ as a societal institution and an influential factor in their life. I apply the method of interactional sociolinguistics (Jaspers, 2011; Rampton, 2006) where the basic assumption is that communicators are constantly engaged in the sense-making of communicative production. This goes for the communication of denotational meaning as well as for how this meaning is communicated in terms of signaling identifications, nuances and stances in the textual fine-grain (Rampton et al., 2014, p. 4). In this process, the interlocutors draw on their sociolinguistic knowledge and their views of the world more broadly. Their reactions provide information about these understandings to the interlocutors and the method of interactional sociolinguistics aims to “provide a microscopic and insider view on larger social processes that crucially depend on these small-scale actions” (Jaspers, 2011, p. 141). Central here is the principle of sequentiality inspired by conversation analysis (Schegloff and Sachs, 1973). The 196

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next speaker's turn demonstrates how they interpret the previous speaker’s contribution, and the study of these uptakes is central for the analyst in order to understand how linguistic resources are evaluated in interaction. The first excerpt is from a recording of a social science class where the teacher Poul is giving feedback to the pupils on a recent test. Excerpt 1: Classroom recording, Participant: Poul (teacher). Author’s translation from Danish Poul:

 here were as you know a lot of new (1.2) lots of new words t that you had to explain in this test and these are of course words that we in both Denmark and from the school and from my eh point of view would like you to then start using or start having at the back of your mind

The teacher (here called Poul) links the learning and use of linguistic resources (“lots of new words”) to the expectations from a “we” explained to include Denmark and the school including the teacher himself. In line with Foucault’s theory, the power of knowledge is here discursively constructed as floating from the abstract notions of the nation and the school to the more specific bodies of Poul and (optimally from Poul’s perspective) the minds of the pupils. In line with Heller’s view of institutions as discursive sites, the use of particular linguistic forms is enregistered as signaling understanding of the Danish political system, and by implication indexing membership of the nation state. In this sense, the entrenchment of linguistic resources is coupled with the identity as a Dane. The excerpt exemplifies how ‘productive power’ interrelates with enregisterment at a micro level of interaction. Poul establishes a norm for the use of certain linguistic resources, which he urges the pupils to internalize and reflect upon. Furthermore, he monitors this process through the test and rewards them accordingly with grades. In this way, the correct understanding and use of a register becomes intimately connected to a membership of the group of ‘we, the Danes’. The next example, excerpt 2, unfolds during an arranged group conversation about language where the pupils were asked to discuss relatively open-ended questions such as “how do you speak with your friends?” and “how do you speak in school?” It should be mentioned that the project workers did not necessarily expect specific or precise answers. Rather, the methodical idea behind this was to create a space for reflection. First, the pupils were left to themselves to discuss the questions. In the excerpt, the project worker has returned to the group and asks them about their discussion: Excerpt 2: Group interview, Participants: Gül (pupil), Thomas (project worker). Author’s translation from Danish Thomas:

how do you speak in school that was the last

     

((passage left out))

Gül:

 hen Poul he is there you know then I say like for examw ple if I say shut up then Poul does like this ((Gül puts her hands to her heart and turns her eyes up)) and then he throws himself on the floor and then I say relax Poul you are old you need to take care of your heart

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The project worker repeats one of the questions for the group concerning how they speak in school. As part of the answer, Gül explains how Poul (the teacher also appearing in excerpt 1) reacts by simulating chest pains when he hears her using the linguistic resource “hold kæft” (shut up). In the opening sequence of the narrative “when Poul he is there”, Gül introduces an element of surveillance as Poul is described as a person who may be listening in if he is present. Rather than an authoritative reprimand, Poul’s reaction to unwanted linguistic resources is a staged performance of how certain linguistic resources make him sick. By positioning himself as a victim, he places the responsibility on the offender. In this way, his act can be seen as a plea for self-justice among the pupils when it comes to the use of certain linguistic resources when he is around. Interestingly, Gül challenges this perspective by describing how she urges Poul to take it easy and watch his heart. I interpret this as a way of describing how Poul’s performance in her eyes is a bit exaggerated and thereby as a reminder that norms may always be negotiated and challenged. Excerpt 1 and 2 viewed together illustrate how Poul discursively construct himself as a sociolinguistic norm center (Blommaert, 2010) distinguishing appropriate from non-appropriate linguistic behavior in the context of the school. Appropriate behavior is rewarded with membership of the imagined community of Denmark (Anderson, 1991). Inappropriate behavior makes him ill. The effect on the pupils is illustrated by the fact that Gül chooses to present the story for the interviewers. From this follows that Poul’s norms for expected linguistic behavior are present for the pupils even when he is not physically present himself. The next two excerpts address linguistic behavior that the pupils are familiar with and in some cases identify with but choose to keep away from the teachers’ gaze. Excerpt 3 is from the same recording as excerpt 2, but from before the project workers reappear so the pupils are discussing by themselves. They just reached the question “Which ways of speaking do you know?”. Excerpt 3: group conversation, participants: Lina (pupil), Aisha (pupil), Aida (pupil), original included, translation by the author in italics 1 Lina:

hvilke måder at tale på kender I what

     

which ways of speaking do you know – what

     

((passage left out))

2 Aisha:  eller mig det der slang ew jeg sværger jeg topper dig din fucking hund        or me that slang hey I swear I top you you fucking dog 3 Aida:  jeg kender ikke så meget for jeg taler på en meget normal måde        I don’t know that much because I speak in a very normal way 4

så er der nogen som der siger tyve eller sådan noget

       then there are some people who say twenty or something like that      

((twenty pronounced with palatalized t, tjyve))

5 Lina:

nej kom til Tåstrup abi

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Youth languaging and the school      

no come to Tåstrup brother

       ((to and Tåstrup Tjåstrup))

pronounced

with

palatalized

t,

tje

In the excerpt, the pupils reproduce a way of speaking that Aisha in line 2 categorizes as “slang”. They highlight the feature of palatalized t (“tjyve”, “tje", “Tjåstrup”) and use a number of linguistic resources associated with other languages than Danish (“ew” is associated with Kurdish, “abi” is associated with Turkish, “fucking” is associated with English). In this sense, “slang” is enregistered as a recognizable way of speaking that alongside other features is characterized by clustering linguistic resources associated with different languages. What the participants here call “slang” relates to what has been labelled contemporary urban vernaculars in sociolinguistic research (Rampton, 2010) and corresponds to the findings of a number of sociolinguistic studies from large parts of the world (see Kerswill and Wiese, 2022, for an overview). In Denmark, this phenomenon has been studied in several different contexts. Two important findings are that this way of speaking is stereotypically associated with young people with a minoritized ethnic background (Hyttel-Sørensen, 2017) and that it is perceived as in opposition to a monolingual standard regime (Karrebæk and Møller, 2019; Madsen, 2013; Møller and Jørgensen, 2013). Both findings are reflected in excerpt 3. In line 3 Aida states that she speaks in a “very normal” way and opposes this to the ”slang way”. In line 5, Lina uses “kom tje Tjåstrup abi” (come to Tåstrup brother) as an example of slang. Tåstrup is a suburb of Copenhagen stereotypically associated with a large migrant population and as mentioned above, the linguistic resource “abi” (brother) is associated with Turkish. The excerpt exemplifies how linguistic resources are socially meaningful and have become valorized in processes of enregisterment. The participants label a way of speaking, categorize it as “slang”, reproduce iconic linguistic resources, connect these to stereotypical places (and thereby the people living there) and finally position themselves in relation to these patterns. When I in the rest of the chapter refer to slang as a way of speaking it is in accordance with the girls’ description of this contemporary urban vernacular. Excerpts 4 and 5 below illustrate that slang also plays a central role in the pupils’ understandings of the school as a sociolinguistic norm center and as a societal institution. Excerpt 4 is from the same type of group conversation as excerpt 3 but from another group without the presence of researchers. The participants have just finished discussing the question “how do you speak with your friends?” and have agreed that they speak ‘slang’ (see also Slotte et al., 2023). We know from our fieldwork observations that slang for them refers to a way of speaking similar to the one described in excerpt 3. The group then turns to the next question, which is “How do you speak in school?” Excerpt 4: group conversation, participants: Alexei (pupil), Isaam (pupil), Mehmet (pupil). Author’s translation from Danish 1 Alexei:

how do you speak in school

2 Isaam:

same way

3 Mehmet:

noo (.) in front of the teachers we speak like

4 Alexei:  in front of the teachers we do not speak like this 5 Mehmet:

yeh [they view it as] gang

6 Isaam:

[there we speak]

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Janus Spindler Møller 7 Mehmet:  there we speak polite and nice and we say good morning        ((changes voice significantly in “polite” and “nice” and “good morning”, high pitch, distinct pronunciation, exaggerated standard Danish prosody))

When Isaam in line 2 answers “same way”, this refers back to the “slang” way of speaking. The two other participants disagree in lines 3 and 4. In line 5, Mehmet states, “they see it as gang” in the sense that teachers (or other authorities) would ascribe an identity as gang members to them if they heard them talk like that. Thereby Mehmet displays an awareness of being monitored combined with an understanding of the stereotypical immigrant gang persona the people monitoring him associate with slang. Simultaneously, Mehmet indicates that he does not align with the connection between gang membership and slang by pointing out that it is “they” (and thereby not him) that view it as “gang”. In line 7, Mehmet parodies what he does instead when authorities are present. He describes this way of speaking as “nice” and “polite” and underlines his point by pronouncing the words distinct with a higher pitch and with an exaggerated standard Danish prosody. He further exemplifies this behavior by parodying the polite greeting “good morning”. In this way, Mehmet describes two ways of speaking: one characterized as “nice” and “polite” that should be used when authorities are present, and “slang”, which should be kept out of their hearing range. The excerpt illustrates another dimension of productive power, which is not primarily compliance with a norm, but rather the ability to strategically select linguistic resources depending on who is in ear range. The last excerpt is from a different type of recording. Lina (the same as in excerpt 3) is equipped with a sound recorder. The class is walking from their classroom to the library and Lina and her friends playfully interview each other about what they think about the teachers and the school: Excerpt 5: self-recording, participants: Lina (pupil), Selda (pupil), original included, translation by the author in italics 1 Lina  men siden [inspektørens navn] kom har jeg følt at skolen er        but since [the principal’s name] arrived I have felt that the school is 2  rent fængsel og jeg håber det her kommer videre til kommunen        like a prison and I hope this is brought forward to the municipality 3  fordi så de så de kan gøre noget ved det because then they can do something about it 4  og hvis de ikke gør noget ved det fuck deres far        and if they do nothing about it fuck their father ((line 1-4:exaggerated distinct standard Danish pronunciation)) 5 Selda  okay for det første Lina hun fedter rigtig meget lige her        okay first of all Lina is sucking up a lot right here      

((word order differs from standard Danish))

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hun spiller meget sød

     

she plays very sweet

7  normalt så bander hun ud af hun bander ud af landevejen yani        normally she curses all she curses all along you know      

((“yani” associated with Turkish)) ((line 5–7: slang prosody))

The playful use of the recorder leads to a carnivalesque frame (Bakhtin, 1984) where the more general structures of power are turned upside down. In this frame, Lina constructs herself as the one monitoring the principal and informing the relevant authorities accordingly. Lina’s contribution in lines 1–4 displays an understanding of institutional power where the municipality watches over the principal who is responsible for the well-being of the students. Apart from the last three words in line 4 (“fuck their father”), Lina produces her critique in exaggerated (monolingual) standard Danish characterized by distinct pronunciation thereby pointing to standard Danish as the relevant cluster of linguistic resources when addressing societal authorities. In this way, Lina strategically exploits the linguistic resources endorsed by the school as academically appropriate to criticize the same school for being “a prison”. I interpret Lina’s last three words “fuck their father” in line 4 as a way of framing the rest of her contribution as playful performance and stepping back into the local context with her friends and the use of “father” as a way to disalign from the more masculine expression ‘mother fucker’. In the uptake, Selda also addresses the recorder directly – this time to inform future listeners that Lina is pretending to be someone else than her ‘normal’ self. Selda evaluates Lina’s way of speaking as “sucking up” (line 5) and “playing sweet” (line 6). In this way, Selda playfully accuses Lina of being inauthentic. In the accusation, Selda draws on a number of linguistic resources associated with the way of speaking referred to as “slang” in excerpt 3 (grammar diverging from standard Danish in line 5, a word associated with Turkish in line 6, lines 5–7 conducted with slang prosody). We know from our ethnographic observations that this is not how Selda generally speaks including when she is among friends. In this light, Selma’s use of slang is interesting because it indexically points to youth with a minoritized background. Viewed together, Lina constructs monolingual standard Danish as the language of power in terms of addressing societal institutions, and Selda then positions them as inauthentic users of exactly this way of speaking. By using multilingual slang to pose the critique Selda symbolically points to their linguistic minoritized background as part of the reason for being inauthentic speakers of standard Danish.

Concluding remarks and future directions To conclude, the case study has shown how a sociolinguistic norm center representing “nice”, “polite” monolingual standard Danish become established and entrenched through dynamic processes of power wielding. We have also seen how the pupils describe multilingual slang as central in their daily social life on the one hand and stigmatized by the school authorities on the other. Finally, we have seen how these two enregistered ways of speaking are exploited in playful performances that address the school as a societal institution and their own position in it. More generally, the analysis has shown how the school as a discursive site foregrounds certain linguistic resources and downgrades others, and how these processes of enregisterment are exploited in daily interac-

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tion among the pupils to demonstrate how they grasp the school as an institution embedded in a larger societal frame and as an important factor in their daily life. The chapter has shed light on the relationship between languaging and contemporary schooling. It has been argued that in studies of languaging in relation to schools, scholars need to address the existence of possibly competing sociolinguistic norm centers and take into consideration how these norm centers relate to larger societal patterns, and how they are made sense of, maintained and challenged by pupils, teachers and other actors in practices of languaging. Against this background, the chapter suggests that future research of languaging and schooling pay attention to such languaging practices and ethnolinguistic assumptions. A way forward is to study how this plays out in daily interactions involving instances of ethnolinguistic cornering (Møller, 2021) which serves as a window to the institutional language ideologies as well as their consequences for people in general and language-minoritized pupils in Western school systems in particular.

Transcription key [overlap] ((comment)) (.) (0.6)

overlapping speech my comments short pause timed pause

Note 1 Corresponding author: Janus Spindler Møller, University of Copenhagen, Address: Emil Holms kanal 2, DK2300 København S. Orcid: 0000-0002-6343-6739.

Further readings Madsen, L.M., M.S. Karrebæk and J.S. Møller (2016). Everyday Languaging: Collaborative Research on the Language Use of Children and Youth. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chapter 4 in particular)

References Agha, A. (2007). Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Åhlund, A. and R. Jonsson (2016). Peruvian meatballs? Constructing the other in the performance of an inclusive school, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 6(3): 166–174. Albury, N.J. (2017). Mother tongues and languaging in Malaysia: Critical linguistics under critical examination, Language in Society, 46(4): 567–589. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. New York: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. and B. Rampton (2011). Language and super-diversity. In J. Blommaert, B. Rampton and M. Spotti (eds.), Language and Superdiversities, Diversities, 13(2): 1–20. Blommaert, J., S. Leppänen and M. Spotti (2012). Endangering multi-lingualism. In J. Blommaert, S. Leppänen, P. Pahta and T. Räisänen (eds.), Dangerous Multilingualism. Northern Perspectives on Order, Purity and Normality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 1–24 Charalambous, P., C. Charalambous and M. Zembylas (2016). Troubling translanguaging: Language ideologies, superdiversity and interethnic conflict, Applied Linguistics Review, 7(3): 327–352.

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15 YOUTH LANGUAGE PRACTICES AND IDEOLOGIES OF RACE AND CLASS IN A UK UNIVERSITY A raciolinguistic perspective Steve Dixon-Smith1 Introduction Research into youth language practices in urban educational settings has drawn attention to the ways in which these practices index racialised ethnic identities and social class positionings, which are negotiated through sets of binary distinctions. Rampton (2011a) demonstrates this with reference to datasets from two schools in London and the South Midlands of England in which young people employ style contrasts to position themselves in a muti-ethnic class society. The first involved inside/outside binaries negotiated through style polarisation between Creole and Asian English; the second analysed high/low binaries negotiated through posh/Cockney stylisations. Rampton argues that both instances of stylisation draw on a high/ low dualism that he notes as central to class stratification (2011a, p. 1237). Similarly, Preece (2010, 2014) documents the stigmatisation of the language practices of ethnically minoritised working-class multilingual users of ‘London English’ in a London university and the use of a posh/slang dichotomy among minority ethnic students to contrast the language practices used with their peers and those of the academic community. Madsen (2013) identifies a similar trend among young people in Copenhagen in the metapragmatic reflections of students in which speaking ‘integrated’ is counterposed to the use of slang or ‘street language’ in a high/low binary distinction that orients to academic success and shows the salience of social class. Jaspers (2011) also points to the negotiation of a high/low axis of socioeconomic status alongside insider/outsider dichotomies in documenting the stylised use of Antwerp dialect at a multi-ethnic school in Belgium. Noting the incorporation of class (and gender) to constructions of race documented in ethnographically informed work taking place in educational settings in the US, Madsen (2013) points out that there are ethnographic studies in several countries mapping linguistic styles once associated with migration and minorities onto stratifications associated with social class. These include inter alia Chun (2011) on classed and gendered stereotypes invoked in strategies of reading race; Bucholtz’ (2011) study of white identities and youth culture and Mendoza-Denton’s

DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-20

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(2008) account of the language and cultural practices of Latina gang girls. A similar pattern can be seen in research into urban speech styles associated with youth extending beyond educational settings, which has highlighted language ideologies that position users of these speech styles as low status, ethnic Others associated with social problems (Androutsopoulos, 2010; Jonsson et al., 2019). Raciolinguistic perspectives emphasise the role of such language ideologies in shaping perceptions of the language practices of racialised populations through “the continued rearticulation of colonial distinctions between Europeanness and non-Europeanness—and, by extension, whiteness and nonwhiteness” (Rosa and Flores, 2017, p. 662). Whiteness here is understood as “an historical and contemporary subject position that can be situationally inhabited both by individuals recognized as white and non-white” (Haney-Lopez, 1996, in Rosa and Flores, 2017, p. 628). Despite foregrounding processes of racialisation, raciolinguistics scholars see race as intersecting with class and other modes of social differentiation and racism as “part of a global system of capitalist oppression” (Alim, 2016, p. 6) with race and class understood as co-constituted hierarchies (Rosa and Flores, 2017, p. 638). In the field of education, this has meant centring analysis on the “interpretive and categorizing practices of racially hegemonic perceiving subjects” rather than the “empirical linguistic practices of racialised subjects” (Rosa and Flores, 2017 p. 628; see also Flores and Rosa, 2015; Rosa, 2019; Corona and Block, 2020). Cushing and Snell (2022) take such an approach to show how racially hegemonic perceptions coupled with standard language ideologies inform the policing of language through governmental inspections of schools, highlighting the role of such language ideologies in the maintenance of hierarchies of race and class in the UK. In this chapter, I set out a raciolinguistic approach to youth language practices to provide a case study illustrating how inequalities rooted in co-constituted hierarchies of race and class are navigated in everyday interaction in a university architecture studio in the UK.

Race and class in UK higher education While the sociolinguistic and raciolingistic research outlined above is attentive to the ways in which ethnic identities of young people are negotiated through language practices and the ideologies that attend them, UK policy discourse has been critiqued for employing essentialising, static categories of ethnic difference. Wetherell (2009, p. 9), for example, argues that an “outdated sociological lens” presents ethnic groups as acting “like a set of mini states or uni-minority cultures against the backdrop of the majority uni-culture.” Ethnic identity is usually presented as an unambiguous, singular and reliable predictor of behaviour, attitudes and values (Wetherell, 2009, p. 10). Scholars influenced by Stuart Hall’s work on race and ethnicity in Britain note longstanding problems with such framings of ethnic identity. St Louis (2009, p. 568) argues they produce “the reification of racial Others as the embodiment of social problems.” Noting similar issues, Harris and Rampton (2009) have taken a linguistic ethnographic approach to analysis of classroom interaction, providing empirical support for Hall’s position. A further shortcoming of UK policy discourse is its reliance on a separate framing of ethnicity and classed identities that obfuscates the mutual constitution of race and class. Hall (2021 [1980], pp. 235–236) insists that racism cannot be explained without accounting for its articulation with other social relations in “specific historical conditions”. Recent scholarship in sociology and political economy has shown how the undeserving characteristics of those occupying the low of the high/low binary of class and the racialised outsider of inside/outside

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binaries have been constructed in a mutually constitutive fashion in Britain (Virdee, 2019; Shilliam, 2018). Virdee (2019) details “the genesis of structural racism” as a class project of the English colonial state designed to break the ties formed across multi-ethnic sub-altern groups (Virdee, 2019, p. 3). This began as a strategy to quell revolt in the colonies by bestowing enhanced status on English indentured labours over their African and indigenous counterparts but has ever since been a key element of the management of capitalism’s social contradictions through the production of social differences in the service of white elites (Virdee, 2018, p. 10). Shilliam (2018) interrogates these social distinctions in an account that stretches from the abolition of slavery and poor law reform to Brexit, charting “a moral relationship – but not quite coincidence – between whiteness and deservedness and blackness and undeservedness” (ibid., p. 7) in relation to the poor. Shilliam documents how elites of left and right have mobilised these ‘racialised and re-racialised’ distinctions, which draw on moral sanctions between free and unfree labour with their roots in African enslavement. In its most recent incarnation, the distinction is mobilised by the populist right to locate a deserving constituency in the ‘left behind’ white-working class, who are constructed as distinct from and under threat from the undeserving racialised outsider. On this account, there is no politics of class that is not already racialized and race is fundamental to political economy (Shilliam, 2018, p. 180). Yet, Shilliam (ibid.) has argued that in contemporary Britain “economic inequality is seen as a class issue proper, […] which race is safely derivative of.” Such an approach can be seen in the policy discourse of UK Higher Education (henceforth, UK HE), to which I will now turn. Persistent racial inequalities in UK HE are revealed by ethnic monitoring of degree attainment (Universities UK, 2019) initially put in place through legislation (Race Relations Amendment Act, 2000) enacted to address institutional racism. The models of ethnic identity used in monitoring inform policy discourse within education, which has been criticised for constructing students of colour as deficient and failing to take account of systemic factors that perpetuate this discourse (Bhopal and Pitkin, 2020, p. 543). This can be illustrated by the framing of a report by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), the UK public body responsible for funding research into ethnic inequalities, detailing a recent large-scale quantitative survey of these inequalities in Higher Education. The title of the report: Differences in Student Outcomes: The Effect of Student Characteristics (HEFCE, 2018) uses the word ‘effect’ to present differences in outcomes as caused by student characteristics. Furthermore, the category used by the report to refer to socio-economic status is ‘educational disadvantage.’ Student characteristics here, then, are relationships of structural disadvantage. Student characteristics that relate to ethnicity, on the other hand, are determined by ethnic categorisations directly connected to individual students. This framing appears to corroborate Shilliam’s observation above that while economic inequality is a class issue proper, race only makes sense as discrimination. Notwithstanding these limitations, ethnic monitoring points to significant racial inequality in UK HE in the context of its move from a largely elitist to a mass system of education. Underway since the 1980s, this widening participation in HE has become a key concern of government policy (Pilkington, 2009, p. 16). While significant issues with access to more prestigious institutions remain (Boliver, 2015), students whose ethnic backgrounds are minoritised in the UK are now more likely to access university education than the white population (Lammy, 2015). Despite this, students from minoritised ethnic backgrounds experience significant and persistent inequalities of outcome (Universities UK, 2019). These are particularly

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pronounced in architectural education. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA, 2017) shows the Black British percentage of the student population at entry to undergraduate study to be 6.8%, dropping to only 1.2% on full qualification. The site of the case study presented in this chapter is a school of Architecture situated in a provincial UK university. It has a socially and ethnically diverse student body and suffers from the inequalities of attainment seen throughout UK HE. With these inequalities in mind, I will now turn to sociolinguistic research into youth language practices that has drawn attention to the role of language ideologies in reproducing racialised and classed disadvantage.

Language ideologies and youth language practices Jonsson et al. (2019 p. 262–63) note that language ideologies around urban speech styles associated with youth, sometimes referred to as ‘ethnolects’ and more commonly as Contemporary Urban Vernaculars (henceforth CUV, Rampton, 2015), have become indexical signs of ‘ethnic Otherness’ and social problems in urban areas. To account for this phenomenon, studies of CUVs have drawn on the concepts of iconization and fractal recursivity, identified by Irvine and Gal (2000, pp. 37–38; see also Gal and Irvine, 2019) in their account of semiotic processes by which people construct ideological representations of linguistic differences (e.g., Androutsopoulos, 2010; Jonsson et al., 2020; Svendsen and Marzo, 2015). Fractal recursivity refers to a process through which oppositions at some level of a relationship are projected onto some other level providing “different levels of contrast within a cultural field” (Irvine and Gal, 2000, p. 38). The concept of iconization describes how linguistic features indexing social groups come to appear as a social group’s essence or inherent nature (Irvine and Gal, 2000, p. 37). In an analysis of German media representations Androutsopoulos (2010, p. 198) uses these concepts to show that youth ‘ethnolects’ have become iconic of ‘dangerous ghetto kids’ who, through a process of fractal recursivity, are represented as ‘problem youth’ and “portrayed as low-status, socially problematic (marginal, ghettoized, criminal, threatening) or lacking in cultural skills and taste.” The process by which such ideologies are negotiated in everyday interaction is explained by the concept of indexicality in which interactants create “semiotic links between linguistic forms and social meanings” (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005, pp. 592–594). Indexicality relies on “ideological structures for associations between language and identity [that] are rooted in cultural beliefs and values – that is, ideologies – about the sorts of speakers who (can or should) produce particular sorts of language” (ibid.). These indexical links between linguistic features and the social world are activated in day-to-day interactions as “speaker[s] agentively work […] the boundaries of sociolinguistic space, navigating from one footing to another in pursuit of local concerns” (Rampton, 2015, pp. 28–39). The sociolinguistic account of the process by which this occurs is set out by Silverstein (2003) in his concept of indexical order, which links micro-level processes of interaction with the macro-level social order. While identity work can be seen as an agentive process, it is “restricted or influenced by [this] indexical order of signs” (Svendsen, 2015, p. 14). The language ideologies that inform these restrictions position speakers of styles associated with youth both socioeconomically and ethnically. In respect of research on youth language practices, Jonsson et al. (2019, p. 263) point to a process of ‘ethnification’ of youth language in which other social categories are ignored. In particular, Madsen (2013, p. 116) notes a tendency to “emphasize ethnicity and abandon social class as a differentiating category in relation to language use” (cf. above). Madsen (ibid.) provides an account of class as ‘an awareness of a ‘high’ and ‘low’ societal stratification and ethnicity as an awareness of ter208

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ritorial belongings involving ‘inside/outside’ relations. The case study that follows provides an example of how these systems of differentiation rely on mutually constitutive ideologies of race and class.

Raciolinguistic ideologies in UK HE – a case study The case study focuses on the experiences of Archer (pseudonym), a first-year undergraduate architecture student, who is black, as he navigates sociolinguistic space of the university architecture studio. Taking Linguistic Ethnography (henceforth LE) as its methodological approach, the analysis combines post-structural linguistics and ethnography to investigate the local and particular to provide situated accounts of social action (Rampton et al., 2015; see also DixonSmith, 2022). This single case study approach utilises LE’s capacity for unpicking “taken-forgranted assumptions about groups, categories and peoples” (Copland and Creese, 2015, p. 26). An interview with Archer about his educational journey revealed that on the basis of his parents’ occupations and level of education he would be considered to be from a privileged socio-economic class background for the purposes of attainment monitoring. Narrative accounts of the discursive strategies Archer employed through his first year will be analysed from a raciolinguistic perspective to address racially hegemonic perceptions in language ideologies surrounding youth language practices that attend Archer in the everyday racialization he encounters in the studio. The data produced in these examples requires recognition of the key role played by my own subjectivities and the relationship between researcher and researched in the production of the research (Patino-Santos, 2020). I am a white researcher who has never been subject to racist oppression. I also occupied a Learning and Teaching role at the university in which the research took place. In this sense, the racialised and institutional aspects of my positionality meant that I felt I might be understood to be affirming the very constructs my research aimed to challenge. In part, the research design responded to this by asking participants to record themselves without my presence and by emphasising that their participation was aimed to at researching the context of HE through recording and reflecting on their contextually dependent language practices. Overall, Archer collected over ten hours of audio-recorded interactional data while working on group projects in the studio. He took part in two informal interviews with me: the first focused on his ‘educational journey’ to university; the second reflected on his studio interactions over the course of the academic year. He also took part in a later playback interview. In this chapter, I draw on both of Archer’s informal interviews and his playback interview.2 The audio recordings collected by Archer showed relatively infrequent interaction and use of jocular mockery to negotiate issues of race in the studio. His interviews suggested these practices might be understood as discursive strategies that responded to racialising ideologies. The excerpts of interview data selected for analysis here were chosen because of their relevance to those strategies. The LE methodology implied a combination of ethnographic attention to context and micro-analysis that attended to the moment-by-moment unfolding of interactions to account for how “each utterance […] responds to what came before while simultaneously setting up expectations for what can follow through data” (Snell and Lefstein, 2012, p. 4). In our second informal interview, Archer identified strategies of restraint in his interactions with students, suggesting a need to appear neutral and inconspicuous. He related these to strategies employed by his parents in their experiences as immigrants. 209

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Excerpt 1   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Archer

Steve Archer

Steve Archer Steve Archer Steve Archer

Steve Archer

I feel like (1.0) when I’m friends with people I’m a lot more (.) opinionated and that that’s the only difference like but when I’m talking to someone I’m not that close with it’s kind of a (1.0) n:e:u:t:r:a:l ((very slowly)) (1.5) not viewpoint but kind of neutral behaviour (.) I just kind of keep to myselfdon’t make too big of a (1.0) buzz’ yeah (.) why why why do you think that is? erm (.) £probably something to do with my £upbringing£ £I don’t know£ [((lau[ghs)) [((laughs)) ahh and you said it was like counselling last time [((laughs)) [((laughs))yeah £errwha do you do wanna say anything£ about it erm (.) well ((slowly)) cause (1.0) m:y parents are immigrants >well well so< am I-errmm well it’s it’s it’s always like / keep to yourself ((whispered))/ you know r:i:g:h:t really? don’t make too much er too much trouble

​ rcher contrasts the more (.) opinionated (line 4) approach to interactions he employs among friends A with a n:e:u:t:r:a:l (line 10) approach when talking to people he is not that close with (line 6–7), describing this as a kind of neutral behaviour (line 13). He elaborates, I just keep to myself, don’t make too big of a buzz (lines 15–17). In this way, neutral behaviour (line 13) is constructed as that which is inconspicuous and requires the exercise of restraint in interaction with others in order to avoid the excitement or commotion that would attend him to behave otherwise. When I invite Archer to speculate on the reasons for this strategy (line 19), he smiles and tentatively suggests it might connect to his upbringing before adding I don’t know (lines 20–22). My response (line 25) references the fact that a fellow participant had said that Archer told him the first interview was a bit like therapy. I had jokingly mentioned this to Archer in a pre-interview chat and we had laughed about it. After, I ask him if he 210

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wants to say anything about it, Archer slowly suggests a connection with his parents’ immigrant status in the UK (line 31) before also positioning himself as an immigrant. Archer has lived in the UK since the age of 10. The statement >well well so< am I is spoken quickly and appears to serve a corrective function. It reformulates a potential disalignment between Archer and his parents. Despite aligning his discursive strategies with his parents’ immigrant status, the fact that, in the first instance, Archer refers only to his parents as immigrants might suggest he sees their position as immigrants as differing from that he ascribes to himself. In a recontextualization (Bauman and Briggs, 1990) of his earlier description of the interactional strategy he adopts in the studio I just kind of keep to myself (line 14), Archer manipulates the form of the utterance, whispering the reported speech that constitutes his parents’ advice keep to yourself (line 34). This performative recontextualization emphasises the force of the advice while lending it a furtive quality by excluding potential overhearers. Following the surprise indexed in my elongated question r:i:g:h:t really? (line 35) Archer elaborates, adding don’t make too much er too much trouble (line 36). This further recontextualizion of don’t make too big of a (1.0) buzz (lines 15–17), elevates the severity of the consequences of failing to keep to oneself from making too big of a buzz to making trouble, further emphasising the alignment between the two statements. Applying Irvine and Gal’s (2000 p. 37) notion of fractal recursivity, Archer is describing insider/outsider, conspicuous/inconspicuous oppositions that provide discursive resources for him to navigate between different levels of cultural fields he experiences at home and at university. That is, the oppositions that he applies to the experience of his parents’ navigation of the wider community of his hometown appear salient to his navigation of the architecture studio. The connection with his parents’ experiences suggests the relevance of postcolonial racist ideologies in which non-white immigrants are seen as troubling racialised outsiders to the white British nation (cf. Virdee, 2014). Archer’s discursive strategies for navigating these racialised inside/outside binaries are geared to the perceptions that he considers attending him in the studio and the behaviour he describes as neutral appears geared toward making him a less conspicuous outsider. The following excerpt comes from later in our interview as Archer is reporting something he often says to a friend about how he would like to be perceived. The perceptions Archer describes might be described as racially hegemonic in that they are shaped and overdetermined by colonial distinctions between whiteness and non-whiteness (cf. Rosa and Flores, 2017).

Excerpt 2

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Archer:

Steve Archer

when I enter a room I I want to be seen as a man who is Black-a man who just so happens to be black rather than a black man in a way obviously, you can’t avoid the obvious but I want like OK but what’s he like then? oh… he’s also this like that’s kind of like a side thing but you know that’s not the way that everybody thinks so you think that you that people define you by your colour when they see you? yeah in a lot of ways in subtle like ways kind of like they do things and then you’re like ok cool ((laughs with exhale))

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​Archer describes being positioned by others’ perceptions in ways that are activated visually and precede interaction (line 1). Contrasting how he is perceived as a black man (line 4) with how he wants to be perceived as a man who just so happens to be black (line 3) he draws attention to the essentialising nature of racially hegemonic perceptions (lines 8–11). He distinguishes between essentialising and non-essentialising positionings, making clear that he is not suggesting that he does not want to be seen as black (line 5), only that he would like to be free of essentialising positionings that make his blackness a dominant characteristic that eclipses others. He is resigned to these perceptions, which suggests they are hegemonic (lines 10–11), forming part of his everyday social calculations. When I ask so you think that that people define you by your colour when they see you?, his response, yeah in a lot of ways in subtle like ways kind of like they do things (lines 14–15) suggests that he recognises when being positioned in such ways and treats it with wry acceptance and then you’re like ok cool ((laughs with exhale)). The racially hegemonic perceptions (Rosa and Flores, 2017) Archer describes position him according to racially-unmarked white norms against which phenotypical blackness is raciallymarked. In the studio this racial-markedness appears to articulate with high/low binaries of class. To establish whether Archer experiences these perceptions in the studio, I ask if he is finding this at university as well:

Excerpt 3   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Archer Steve Archer Steve Archer

Steve Archer

Yep yeh erm well it’s a bit less because I feel like people are a bit more exposed but still kind of yeah Can you is there is there any kind of example you might give or something like that? erm well people always assume that I’m cause apparently I have a Londonish accent right so people always assume I’m from London and then they kind of make judgements and then they meet me and they’re like oh so you’re not you’re not like a roadman or whatever ((laughs with sigh)) ((laughs with sigh)) yeah OK honey ((sarcastically))

​ rcher suggests the assumptions shaping others’ perception of him are due to his Londonish A accent (line 6). His use of apparently (line 6) suggests this is something he has been told rather than something he recognises for himself. In fact, in over 10 hours of audio recordings this is not something I was able to discern either. I noted one example of an interaction in which Archer employed some features of CUV (Rampton, 2015), or what Ilbury and Kerswill (e.g., this volume) label Multicultural London English (henceforth, MLE), in interaction with a group of female students he had gone for lunch with: 212

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Excerpt 4 I don’t know I was out wiv (1.0) I was out with Sarah However, this was notable as a one-off example of socially strategic stylisation or accommodation, followed by a possible ‘self-correction’, rather than a more commonly detectable feature of his language use in this context. In general, I was not able to discern any phonological or grammatical features associated with regional variation in Archer’s speech. His speech tended to align with standardised norms that are indexical of middle-class status in a UK setting (Snell, 2010). Despite the absence of linguistic features that might be associated with London, Archer reports that in the first year, people said it a lot (playback interview) and even comments that he hears it when listening back to the recordings. Nonetheless, Archer contends it is this apparent Londonish accent that leads people to assume he is from London and in turn that he is a roadman or whatever (line 12). Roadman is a term used to describe young men affiliated with working-class urban street culture and is indexically associated with exaggerated/strong-form CUV/MLE (cf. Ilbury and Kerswill, this volume). The Cambridge English Dictionary (2021) entry for ‘roadman’ reads: “someone, usually a young man, who spends a lot of time on the streets and may use or sell drugs or cause trouble.” Ilbury (in press) has analysed the use of ‘roadman’ as a stylistic identity in parodic video performances on the social media platform TikTok. He shows how stylisation around features of MLE in the videos are used to circulate ‘anti-poor and anti-black’ representations of working-class men evoking “colonial logics that equate Blackness with hypermasculinity, violence, and criminality”. As such, Ilbury (ibid.) documents a process of ‘raciolinguistic enregisterment’ in which “signs of race and language are naturalized as discrete, recognizable sets”. That is, the linguistic features of youth speech associated with the ‘roadman’ have become iconic racialised representations of working-class males (cf. Irvine and Gal, 2000, p. 37). This leaves the question of why people always assume (line 8) on the basis of his speech that Archer is a roadman from London, despite an absence of these recognisable linguistic features, before they get to know him. This can be explained by the phenomenon of indexical inversion (Rosa and Flores, 2017, p. 628) in which language ideologies are associated with social categories in ways that “produce the perception of linguistic signs”. That is, rather than emanating from Archer as a racialised subject, the language practices are produced by raciolinguistic ideologies that systemically stigmatise “linguistic practices of racialized populations […] regardless of the extent to which these practices might seem to correspond to standardized norms” (Rosa and Flores, 2017, p. 628). It appears that he is frequently heard as a roadman or whatever (line 12) despite an absence of linguistic features evident in the repertoire he employs in the studio because of youth language ideologies by which urban youth speech has come to index low-status, ethnic Otherness of the roadman (from the perspective of the white perceiving subject) and social problems (Androutsopoulos, 2010; Jonsson et al., 2019; Ilbury, in press). The mutual constitution of ideologies of class and race means that Archer is racially positioned by others in the studio as low status on the high/low binary despite the relatively high status attributed to his middle-class background and indexed by his language use. When I refer Archer back to his earlier comment regarding the judgements people make about him (Excerpt 3, line 9) and ask what kind of things he thinks they assume, he describes a strategy of working across indexical orders to navigate perceptions that position him as aggressive in the context of the studio. 213

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Excerpt 5   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Archer

Steve Archer

Steve Archer

I think they assume your temperament erm they just assume the way that you conduct yourself and I’m I feel like I’m quite lucky er like if I might be wrong ((laughs)) but I feel like if you speak to me for like a very short period you get the impression that like I’m just a chill person mhhm er whereas someone else who is just like genuinely a nice person but they’re more confident blah bah blah and you speak to them for a bit like it might not break that that I don’t know that first impression of you straight away right and it might linger for a bit and just become like the permanent way that they think of you

​ rcher considers himself lucky (line 4) in that the assumptions about his temperament and A conduct (lines 1–3) that attend him in the studio can be dispelled through interaction that gives the impression he is just a chill person (lines 6–8). To better understand why he considers this impression might be formed, it is worth returning to Archer’s reflections on his interactional strategy in excerpt 1. The kind of neutral behaviour (Excerpt 1, line 13) that Archer employs with students he is not that close with (Excerpt 1, lines 6–7) appears to be a response to perceptions that would position him as black and therefore not chill. Archer is describing an indexical order that is activated in the studio. In his judgements of appropriateness to context, he shows restraint at a pragmatic micro-level in order to mitigate presuppositions of his temperament and conduct that draw on metapragmatic associations with blackness in this institutional setting. Such strategies of restraint have been noted by black participants in studies of racialization in elite institutional spaces (Meghji, 2017 p. 238; Evans and Moore, 2015). In Evans and Moore’s (2015) study across settings in Law schools and the commercial airline industry, one participant’s account of having to “fly under the radar” (ibid., p. 447) in conversations with colleagues resonates with Archer’s neutral behaviour of keeping to himself (Excerpt 1, line 14). Another participant in Evans and Moore’s study says, “I try to voice my opinions and give my information in the calmest way that I can because I don’t want them to think that I am the angry black man” (ibid., p. 446). This careful management of perceptions when expressing opinions shows similarities with Archer’s contrast between the a lot more (.) opinionated (Excerpt 1, line 4) approach adopted with friends and the n:e:u:t:r:a:l (1.5) not viewpoint but kind of neutral behaviour (Excerpt 1, lines 10–13) he adopts with people he is not that close with. 214

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Given that through a process of indexical inversion, Archer is positioned as a lower-class ‘roadman’ associated with violence and criminality, such strategies appear well-founded. Outward projections of confidence with people who do not know him yet would perhaps risk making too big of a (1.0) buzz (Excerpt 1, lines 15–17) and result in him being permanently positioned as conforming to the racialised stereotype. Archer suggests that black students who fail to attend to the racially hegemonic constraints of first impression (Excerpt 5, line 15) in this indexical order risk permanent stigmatisation simply through projecting confidence in this context (Excerpt 5, lines 12–19).

Conclusion and future directions This chapter has explored the interrelation between race and class noted in much research on youth language practices and education. It has taken an approach that, in line with Madsen and Svendsen (2015, p. 228), treats such racialised and classed categories as “sociopolitical (and political) interpretations signified by certain cultural and linguistic practices, rather than as existing bounded groups reflecting biological, place-related or socioeconomic facts.” At the same time, it has emphasised their continued existence as social realities for those subjected to racialised and classed oppression (Alim, 2016, p. 6). This has been illustrated through analysis of the role of raciolinguistic ideologies in mutually constitutive racialising and classed positionings that constrain Archer’s interactions in the studio context. Archer considers himself to be lucky that through extended interaction he can negotiate these constraints. Nonetheless, we have seen that this requires him to carefully calibrate his discursive practices. Lo and Chun (2020) note that such efforts place an unequal burden of sociolinguistic labour on racialised subjects as they respond to linguistic regimes embedded in structures of power. Because of the interrelation of class and racialised ethnicities, Archer has to attend to issues of class that are not predicted by the way he would be categorised in monitoring of ethnicity and class employed in UK HE. Histories of race and class in the UK context (Shilliam, 2018; Virdee, 2019) suggest that the framings offered by such institutional initiatives obscure the existence of race as a structural issue. The capacity of sociolinguistic approaches to analyse the ideological in the everyday suggests the potential for further research that can provide empirical analysis of the interrelated structural inequalities of race and class in education without understanding these as inherent in individuals. We have seen that the co-constitution of high/low and inside/outside binaries poses questions for their separate treatment in policy discourses around inequality in UK HE, with the result that class is seen as structural and race a matter only of discrimination. Lo (2020, p. 297) notes a similar pattern in the study of language in which “race is often understood in terms of racists – those who harbour bias or inflict harm upon others – while class is framed as more immanent within a system.” Future research could usefully move beyond a focus on speakers to engage with the structural and systemic through analysis of discursive processes that enable the ideological separation of race and class across political and institutional scales in policy and practice in educational contexts (cf. Lo, 2020, p. 302). This would require situated attention to the specific historical conditions in which colonialism and capitalism, whiteness and nonwhiteness are articulated.

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(1.0) ___ : (( )) £ £ > < (???)

pause of about 1 second emphasis sound stretching author’s comments smile voice fast speech inaudible

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Archer for his engagement with this project. I would like to thank Vally Lytra for her generous support and advice with the various iterations of this chapter, likewise the editors. The chapter has benefitted greatly from discussions with the Sociolinguistic Working Group on Race and Language (Sibo Kanobana, Julie Tay, Adrienne Lo, Liesa Ruehlmann, Christina Shoux Casey, Vincent Pak, Mi-Cha Flubacher). I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council UKRI with my doctoral studies. All shortcomings are my own.

Notes 1 Steve Dixon-Smith; Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW. Orcid: 00090003-6436-1171. 2 For a fuller account of the methods employed, see Dixon-Smith (2022).

Further readings Alim, S., J.R. Rickford and A.F. Ball (2016). Raciolinguistics: How Languaguage Shapes Our Ideas about Race. Oxford University Press. Nortier, J. and B.A. Svendsen (2015). Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century. Linguistic Practices across Urban Spaces. Cambridge: CUP.

References Alim, S. (2016). Introducing raciolinguistics: Racing language and languaging race in hyperacial times. In S. Alim, J.R. Rickford and A.F. Ball (eds.), Raciolinguistics: How Languaguage Shapes Our Ideas about Race (pp. 1–30). New York: OUP. Androutsopoulos, J. (2010). Ideologizing ethnolectal German. In S. Johnson and T.M. Milani (eds.), Language Ideologies and Media Discourse: Texts, Practices, Politics (pp. 182–202). London and New York: Continuum. Bauman, R. and C.L. Briggs (1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social Life, Annual Review of Anthropology, 19: 59–88. Bhopal, K. and C. Pitkin (2020). Same old story, just a different policy: Race and policy making in higher education in the UK, Race, Ethnicity and Education, 23(4): 530–547. Boliver, V. (2015). Exploring ethnic Inequalities in admission to Russell group Universities, Sociology, 50(2): 247–266. Bucholtz, M. (2011). White Kids: Language, Race and Styles of Youth Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bucholtz, M. and K. Hall (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach, Discourse Studies, 7(4–5): 585–612. Chun, E. (2011). Reading race beyond black and white, Discourse & Society, 22: 403–421. Copland, F. and A. Creese (2015). Linguistic Ethnography: Collecting, Analysing and Presenting Data. London: Sage.

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Youth language practices, race, and class Corona, V. and D. Block (2020). Raciolinguistic micro-aggressions in the school stories of immigrant adolescents in Barcelona: A challenge to the notion of Spanish exceptionalism?, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 23(7): 778–788. Cushing, I. and J. Snell (2022). The (white) ears of Ofsted: A raciolinguistic perspective on the listening practices of the schools inspectorate, Language in Society, 1–24. doi:10.1017/S0047404522000094 [Accessed on 10.01.2023]. Dixon-Smith, S. (2022). ‘How are you Brown?’: Orienting to racializing discourses and exclusion at university in Brexit Britain. In A. Auer and J. Thorburn (eds.), Approaches to Migration, Language and Identity (pp. 253–287). Oxford: Peter Lang. Evans, L. and W.L. Moore (2015). Impossible burdens: White institutions, emotional labor, and micro-resistance, Social Problems, 62: 439–454. Flores, N. and J. Rosa (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education, Harvard Educational Review, 85: 149–171. Gal, S. and J.T. Irvine (2019). Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, S. (2021 [1980]). Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance. In P. Gilroy and R.W. Gilmore (eds.), Selected Writings on Race and Difference (pp. 195–245). Durham and London: Duke University Press. Harris, R. and B. Rampton (2009). Ethnicities without guarantees: An empirical approach. In M. Wetherell (ed.), Identity in the 21st Century (pp. 95–119). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. HEFCE. (2018). Differences in Student Outcomes: The Effect of Student Characteristics. Available at: https:// dera​.ioe​.ac​.uk​/31412​/1​/HEFCE2017​_05​%20​.pdf [Accessed on 22.05.2020]. Ilbury, C. (in press). The recontextualisation of Multicultural London English: Stylising the ‘Roadman’, Language in Society. Irvine, J.T. and S. Gal (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P.V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Politics and Identities (pp. 35–84). Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Jaspers, J. (2011). Strange bedfellows: Appropriations of a tainted urban dialect, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(4): 493–524. Jonsson, R., H. Årman and T.M. Milani (2019). Youth language. In K. Tusting (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography (pp. 259–272). London: Routledge. Jonsson, R., A.G. Franzen and T.M. Milani (2020). Making the threatening other laughable: Ambiguous performances of urban vernaculars in Swedish media, Language and Communication, 71: 1–15. Lammy, D. (2015). Foreword. In Aiming Higher: Race, Inequality and Diversity in the Academy (pp. 3–4). London: Runnymede. Lo, A. (2020). Systems, features, figures: Approaches to language and class vs. language and race, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 24: 293–307. Lo, A. and E. Chun (2020). Language, race, and reflexivity: A view from linguistic anthropology. In H.S. Alim, A. Reyes and P.V. Kroskrity (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race (pp. 24–46). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Madsen, L.M. (2013). “High” and “low” in urban Danish speech styles, Language in Society, 42(2): 115–138. Madsen, L.M. and B.A. Svendsen (2015). Stylized voices of ethnicity and social division. In J. Nortier and B.A. Svendsen (eds.), Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century (pp. 24–44). Cambridge: CUP. Meghji, A. (2017). Positionings of the black middle-classes: Understanding identity construction beyond strategic assimilation, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(6): 1007–1025. Mendoza-Denton, N. (2008). Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs. Oxford: Blackwell. Patino-Santos, A. (2020). Reflexivity. In K. Tusting (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography (pp. 213–228). London: Routledge. Pilkington, A. (2009). The impact of government initiatives in promoting racial equality in higher education: A case study, Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World, 1(2): 15–25. Preece, S. (2010). Multilingual identities in higher education: Negotiating the ‘mother tongue’, ‘posh’ and ‘slang’, Language and Education, 24(1): 21–39.

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Steve Dixon-Smith ———. (2014). ‘They ain’t using slang’: Working class students from linguistic minority communities in higher education, Lingusitics and Education, 31: 260–275.Race Relations (Amendment) Act (2000) Available at: https://www​.legislation​.gov​.uk​/ukpga​/2000​/34​/contents [Accessed: 30.08.2023] Rampton, B. (2011a). Style contrasts, migration and social class, Journal of Pragmatics, 43: 1236–1250. ———. (2011b). From ‘Multi-ethnic adolescent heteroglossia’ to ‘Contemporary urban vernaculars’, Language and Communication, 31: 276–294. ———. (2015). Contemporary urban vernaculars. In J. Nortier and B.A. Svendsen (eds.), Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century (pp. 24–44). Cambridge: CUP. Rampton, B., J. Maybin and C. Roberts (2015). Theory and method in linguistic ethnography. In J. Snell, S. Shaw and F. Copland (eds.), Linguistic Ethnography: Interdisciplinary Explorations (pp. 14–50). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. RIBA. (2017). RIBA Education Statistics 2015/16. London: RIBA. Rosa, J. (2019). Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. Oxford: OUP. Rosa, J. and N. Flores (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective, Language in Society, 46: 621–647. Shilliam, R. (2018). Race and the Undeserving Poor. Newcastle: Agenda. Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life, Language and Communication, 23: 193–229. Snell, J. (2010). From sociolinguistic variation to socially strategic stylisation, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 14(5): 630–656. Snell, J. and A. Lefstein (2012). Interpretative and representational dilemmas in a linguistic ethnographic analysis: Moving from interesting data to a publishable research article, Working Papers in Urban Languages and Literacies, 90: 1–24. St Louis, B. (2009). On the “necessity and impossibility of identities”, Cultural Studies, 23(4): 559–582. Svendsen, B.A. (2015). Language, youth and identity in the 21st century: Content and continuations. In J. Nortier and B.A. Svendsen (eds.), Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century (pp. 24–44). Cambridge: CUP. Svendsen, B.A. and S. Marzo (2015). A 'new' speech style is born: The omnipresence of structure and agency in the life of semiotic registers in heterogenous urban spaces, European Journal of Applied Linguistics, 3(1): 47–85. Universities UK. (2019). Black, Asian and Minority Student Attainment at UK Universities. Available at: https://www​.universitiesuk​.ac​.uk​/policy​-and​-analysis​/reports​/Documents​/2019​/bame​-student​-attainment​ -uk​-universities​-closing​-the​-gap​.pdf [Accessed 26.04.2020]. Virdee, S. (2014). Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider. London: Macmillan. Virdee, S. (2019). Racialised capitalism: An account of its contested origins and consolidation, The Sociological Review, 67(1): 3–27. Wetherell, M. (2009). Introduction: Negotiating liveable lives – Identity in contemporary Britain. In M. Wetherell (ed.), Identity in the 21st Century (pp. 95–119). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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PART VI

Teasing, policing and online communication in the family

16 TEASING, POLICING AND PLAYFUL TALK AMONG YOUTH IN MULTILINGUAL FAMILIES Ragni Vik Johnsen1 Introduction This chapter explores adolescents’ language practices within the family context, particularly the creative and playful language practices of (multilingual) adolescents’ families. There is a substantial body of research on youth language in peer groups, and in heterogeneous, urban areas (e.g., Kern and Selting, 2011; Nortier and Svendsen, 2015). Many of these studies highlight creative and innovative aspects of youth language, and the role of performance and stylizations in youth’s language practices and identity constructions. Since adolescents often have been studied outside their families, there has been a blind spot in research regarding how adolescents use language, construct identities and maintain and forge relationships with their family members. This chapter brings together research on (multilingual) adolescents’ playful and creative language use and research on (multilingual) family discourse and demonstrates how playful talk in families is a rich site for investigating how youth challenge and negotiate authority, identities and agencies in their families. The chapter is structured as follows. First, key concepts in the study of playful talk are outlined. Further, an overview of research on parent-adolescent talk in discourse analysis and on playful talk in multilingual families is presented. Then, four empirical excerpts of family interactions are analyzed as examples of how adolescents use playful talk in their families. Lastly, I conclude and point out areas of future research.

Key concepts and developments in the study of playful talk Scholars interested in language play have often operated with a distinction between playing with and playing in language (Bell, 2012; Cook, 2000), where the former refers to instances where language itself is manipulated in language play, while playing in a language refers to constructing and engaging in playful activities, e.g. fantasy-based play (Haugh, 2016). However, the two are often intertwined: For example, to engage in language play, interactants are reliant on cues or keyings that can be signaled through manipulation of language itself, such as change of speech style or dialects (Coupland, 2007). According to Cekaite and Aronsson (2014, p. 200) “[l]anguage play covers both play with linguistic structure and play with language use or pragmatics, that is, both metalinguistics and metapragmatics”. This chapter draws on Lytra (2017, p. 185) who also understands playful talk DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-22

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in broad terms, as a category that captures “a wide range of verbal activities and routines, including teasing, joking, humor, verbal play, parody, music making, and chanting”. She connects these verbal activities to Bauman’s (2000) understanding of verbal performances in that they are situated activities that emerge during interaction and are motivated by communicational needs. In linguistics performances “the act of expression is put on display, objectified, marked out to a degree from its discursive surroundings” (Bauman, 2000, p. 1). Linguistic performances require a high degree of reflexive and metalinguistic awareness to be perceived and evaluated in line with the performers’ intentions. Performances direct attention towards socio-cultural meanings, normativity and connections between language use and social personas and are considered key sites for investigating identity negotiations. Stylization is one kind of performance which is defined as performing “non-current-firstperson personas” (Coupland, 2001, p. 345). In doing this, speakers draw on “specially marked and often exaggerated representations of languages, dialects and styles that lie outside their own habitual repertoire (at least as this is perceived within the situation at hand)” (Rampton, 2009, p. 149). Stylizations tend to invoke or represent identities and reproduce social stereotypes and are often drawn upon to comment on and reflect issues of social class, ethnicity and social difference (Coupland, 2007; Rampton, 2006). It should be mentioned that although these are verbal activities associated with play, they are employed in interaction as more than ‘artful performances’ (see Rampton, 2009).

Playful talk among children and adolescents Playful language often becomes more complex during adolescence: Bell (2012) suggests that the performative aspect of play is a particular characteristic of adolescent and adult language learners which contrasts the more private play and formulaic playfulness of younger children. In language learning contexts, playful language is an important metalinguistic and metapragmatic resource that draws learners’ attention to linguistic form and creates a space where linguistic and social norms and rules may be tested out (Bell, 2016; Lytra, 2017; Poveda, 2011; Åhlund and Aronsson, 2015). Playful talk creates a space for students to position themselves as both participants and non-participants in classroom activities. In a study of Danish minority students who also spoke Turkish, Møller and Jørgensen (2011) show how playful talk opens for engagement in school activities while simultaneously allowing pupils to forge peer relationships. In Jaspers’ (2005, 2006) studies of Moroccan adolescents in Belgian schools, he shows how the boys were ‘doing ridiculous’ with different linguistic varieties, through which they negotiated their participation in school-related activities. In these studies, students use playful frames, impersonations and performances to navigate and comment on (imposed) linguistic norms and to negotiate with authorities. Similarly, Blackledge and Creese (2010) show that students in complementary schools used clowning and laughter as rebellious humor (cf. Billig, 2005) to impose and contest the teachers’ and school’s static understandings of cultural heritage. In multilingual peer groups, children and adolescents target linguistic production or academic performances to ascribe particular (unwanted) identities to peers in teasing attacks (Lytra, 2007; Svendsen, 2004; Özkan et al., 2015). Blackledge and Creese (2009) found that students used stylized and parodic performances in ‘unofficial’ classroom discourses to mock and socially sanction lower proficiency language learners, and to mock teachers and challenge their authority. Rampton (2006) reports from a study of adolescents in London that the teenagers recycled phrases learned in German class as well as sound properties of German in mock speech performances (cf. Jaspers, 2006). This was interpreted as commenting on and playing with the school’s language curricula. Playful talk in educational settings is a means to shift 222

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between institutional and more informal keys, but also a rich site for identity work among peers. Thus, employing playful language is a “double opportunity space” (Blum-Kulka and Ehrlich, 2014, p. 211) where children and adolescents simultaneously co-construct social bonds and peer cultures as well as develop cognitive, social and linguistic skills. Moreover, the mere presence of various languages may stimulate and generate playful language practices.

Adolescents in (multilingual) families Discourse studies of families foreground how families are created in part through talk (Kendall, 2007). Family roles and relationships are negotiated and mutually co-constructed through social interactions (Gordon, 2009; Pontecorvo et al., 2001; Tannen, 2007) and embodied practices (Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018). During adolescence, parent-adolescent interactions undergo transformations as both parents and children (re)negotiate their social roles and relationships with each other. Parents and adolescent children negotiate conflictive needs of authority and autonomy. Such negotiations often surface in disputes and arguments (Goodwin, 2006; Hofer, 2003; Luvera Del Prete, 2015). The negotiation of control and autonomy of the child vis-à-vis its parents is a prime example of how adolescence as a socio-cultural and developmental transformation affects family interactions (Goodwin, 2006). Drawing on an interactional analysis of a dispute between an adolescent boy and his father, Goodwin (2006, p. 458) argues that issues between adolescents and their parents often emerge through “patterns of interaction that include not only a child’s difficulties in moving from the family to the school, peer group, and greater autonomy, but also from a parent’s reluctance to give up that child”. Parents oscillate between socializing their children into desired behaviors and socializing with them, to enjoy their company (Blum-Kulka, 1997; Tannen, 2007). Power dynamics within multilingual families have received considerable attention in recent sociolinguistic work on family language policy (King and Fogle, 2017) and in research on language brokering in the family (e.g., Antonini, 2016). Adolescents may challenge and resist parents’ suggestions and thereby shape and influence the language practices at home (Caldas and CaronCaldas, 2002; Fogle and King, 2013; Obojska, 2019; Revis, 2016). Obojska (2019) shows how a father and a daughter in a transnational Polish family living in Norway, have diverging opinions about the position of the language Norwegian: The father suggested speaking Norwegian at home to practice the societal language, an idea that was strongly opposed by the daughter Kasia, partly because of their diverging linguistic competences in Norwegian. This exemplifies how transnational families and migration experiences may influence the power dynamics between parents and children. A different example can be found in Caldas and Caron-Caldas (2002), who documented their own three children’s language preferences through a longitudinal study (72 months) of taped family dinner conversations in the family’s US home and French-Canadian summer house. They argue that the parental influence on children’s language preferences decreases as the children move through adolescence and, moreover, that the children gradually started to speak more like their peers, also when speaking with their parents. Relating to agency and authority, these studies indicate that children in multilingual families can exert agency by resisting certain languages. However, agency is more than resistance and can also be interpreted in terms of taking control and participating (Ahearn, 2001; Al Zidjaly, 2009). Ag (2016) investigates messages about right and wrong behavior in five multicultural and multilingual families in Copenhagen, and builds on interactional approaches to authority as dialogical and co-constructed in interaction (cf. Tannen, 2007). She finds that authority relations between the family members are dependent on different contextual factors, such as participant constellation, age and conversational topics. Moreover, parents in her study report that their adolescent children often express expertize in Danish and 223

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that this practice gives them authority to (de)evaluate parents’ Danish competences. The parents, however, viewed this as a jocular ritual. To sum up, language choices in multilingual families can be expressions of both power and solidarity (Tannen, 2007), and adolescents may exert agency through resisting or complying with their parents’ language choices.

Playful talk in families Playfulness and creativity are intrinsic to families’ mundane talk and serve various social and interactional functions. Parents and children mutually seize opportunities to explore the poetic dimensions of language for learning and pleasure (Fasulo et al., 2002; Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018), and improvisation and innovativeness play a vital role in children’s linguistic and social development (Aronsson, 2011; Duranti and Black, 2011). Aronsson (2011, pp. 468–469) reviews verbal play in language socialization, and foregrounds how playful activities, such as teasing, sensitize children to different conversational frames, footings and social positions (cf. Goffman, 1967/2005). Playful talk can also express affect. Teasing and joking in families may, for example, contribute to strengthening in-group identification and solidarity (Eisenberg, 1987; Everts, 2003). Teasing requires personal knowledge of the participating interactants, and interpreting teasing requires metacommunicative work for the tease not to be interpreted literally and trigger a real dispute (Boxer and Florencia, 1997; Miller, 1987). Through humor and playfulness, family members develop and confirm social relationships and create family cultures. As Gordon (2009) shows, family members create meaning through complex intertextual references and repetitions, many of which are set off by playful interactions. Such agreed-upon shared meanings may through time crystallize into unique emblems of family identity. Instances of playful talk in families sometimes bear resemblance to the way language learners use playfulness to comment on language structure and to negotiate social positions in classrooms (cf. Kheirkhah and Cekaite, 2015; cf. above). In a former study, (Johnsen, 2022), I studied playful talk in families with Spanish-speaking Latin-American heritage in Norway. In the two families, playful talk was used by parents in attempts of informal language instructions at home (see also examples below). However, the adolescent children did not necessarily accept being positioned as learners and used language in playful ways to (re)negotiate their social positions in the interaction. These activities were always metalinguistic, and family members drew attention to linguistic norms and competences. Despite a general tendency of youth language research to focus on fluidity (cf. Madsen, this volume), research on family language practices in multilingual families has to a great extent prioritized fixity. One reason for this may be the heavy influence of Joshua Fishman and his view of the family as a domain of language use and language policy (Fishman, 1991; Spolsky, 2004, 2019). Research on family multilingualism has been criticized for its focus on language maintenance, the transmission of ‘whole’ languages and a uniform, westernized conceptualization of family. Current debates in the field involve questions of how to conceptualize ‘family’ and ‘(heritage) languages’ (Canagarajah, 2019; Gomes, 2018; Hiratsuka and Pennycook, 2019; Wright, 2020). Hiratsuka and Pennycook (2019) suggest viewing multilingual practices in multilingual families as ‘translingual family repertoires’, that are products of individual family members’ competences and contact with social networks across their life spans. When drawn upon in mundane family interactions and events, a translingual family repertoire becomes a resource and a prerequisite for a functional daily, multilingual family life. Investigating the ways in which adolescents use linguistic resources creatively and playfully in family contexts may expand our understanding of the dynamics of multilingual family lives and how multilingual resources are drawn upon to (co-) construct and negotiate the social organization of families. 224

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A few studies have investigated playful talk in multilingual families through analyses of interactional data. De Fina (2012), for example, investigates family interaction in a three-generation Italian American family, and suggests that performances and metalinguistic comments (expressed through, for example, teasing and joking) are linguistic strategies through which family members, particularly younger generations, show engagement in their Italian heritage. De Fina (2012, p. 355) argues that linguistic creativity in families is “more constrained than in peer communication as parents and (in the case of multigeneration families) grandparents are usually either linguistically less flexible than their children, and/or ideologically more conservative”. However, based on recorded interactions from the homes of young multilinguals living in Copenhagen, Ag and Jørgensen (2013) show how language practices were characterized by polylingual norms, and that the adolescents used both the heritage language and the societal language, Danish. This illustrates, they argue, that polylingual norms are developed and learned at home, as well as in informal interaction in peer groups. In a similar vein, Canagarajah (2012) investigates how youth in a Tamil diasporic community employ ‘self-styling’, as opposed to styling the other (or crossing, cf. Rampton, 1995). The young people in his study used “language tokens associated with their in-group for in-group identity work” (Canagarajah, 2012, p. 126). He argues that the Tamil youth use self-styling as a strategy to socially construct ethnic belonging and to construct place in the family and community. By using stylized Tamil features in both playful and more serious ways, young community members affirm and strengthen family bonds and construct heritage identities. Stylization of multilingual resources between family members is also the topic in Vidal (2015), who studies communication between a Spanish-speaking grandfather living in Spain and his three granddaughters living in the USA. She shows how linguistic competences and stylistic language practices are exploited by the younger family members to negotiate social positions, authority, authenticity and in-group belonging. She also argues that multilingual, transnational families may use language as interactional resources in ways that are less obvious in more linguistically homogeneous families. Similar findings are also reported in Johnsen (2020b): The family members who spoke English, Spanish and Norwegian daily, targeted each other’s linguistic competences in teasing attacks. Language formed an additional layer of meaning that was drawn upon to construct family identities, as well as to subvert family-specific age hierarchies and generational orders.

Case studies: teasing and policing in multilingual families In the previous section, I have reviewed the literature on playful language use among adolescents and families and the literature on adolescents and family discourse. In this section, I draw on my own work on multilingual adolescents’ language use with their families (Johnsen, 2021) to add to the knowledge gaps demonstrated above. The data is collected in three where at least one of the parents has Latin-American descent, but they have different migratory trajectories. Family 1 consists of Tania and her mother, who have moved to Norway from Germany, where Tania was born. The mother is from a country in South America and Spanish is her first language. Family 2 consists of two parents and five children who have moved from a Central American country to Norway. The family members have different first languages and preferences and speak English, Spanish and Norwegian. They have lived in Norway for about four years at the time of the recording. Family 3 consists of a Norwegian mother, a father from Peru and their two teenage daughters. The context for each excerpt will be explained in greater detail below. The excerpts are selected to illustrate some functions of playful talk in family interactions, and to demonstrate how playful language relates to negotiations of authority positions and social hierarchies between family members. 225

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Language as a resource in negotiating age hierarchies The first two excerpts show how adolescents may use differences in linguistic competence as a resource to subvert age hierarchies between them and their parents. Excerpt 1 below is from a family interview with adolescent Tania (12) and her mother. During the quite informal interview, Tania told a story about her father who had texted her and used the expression lol. (‘laughing out loud’), often associated with computer-mediated language. This had caused Tania a lot of mirth, and she explained to me, the outsider and visitor, how it happened, which is where the excerpt starts. The excerpt is translated into English from Norwegian by the author. Notice how the mother insists on a playful keying and how Tania positions herself as an authority, and how playfulness and metalinguistic talk intertwine:

Excerpt 1 “it’s a modern word” 1

Tania

but I- it- I think I sent him something funny and then that message there came

2

Mother

he he he

3

Tania

I wa(h)s like “doe- does it say that? Perhaps he meant something else”

4

Mother

5

Researcher

6

Tania

L. O. L ((spelling the letters))

7

Mother

but did you understand what it was?(1.6)

8

Mother

no(h) but I mean seriously because you don’t use that [expression]? (1.)

9

Tania

of COUrse we use IT

10

Mother

you use it?

11

Researcher

yes. Yes, right?

12

Tania

↑what do you THINK? ((condescending tone))

13

Mother

=eh I- I thought you only used eh [emotikons ↑HA HA HA HA (high-pitched loud laughter)

14

Tania

15

Mother

because- HE HE HE

16

Tania

you haven’t understood it yet haven’t you? This here is a modern word, I know

17

[he he he he he

did you not understand?

[(tongue click, tsk) That is why it is so funny,

that it in a way has returned from the nineties or something like that, it is REALLY

18

Mother

19

Tania

20

Mother

21

Tania

22

Mother

23 24

[ha HA HA ((laughing increasingly louder))

[ah So:: modern, or it has become a bit less so now though, and it is something that everybody uses [yes yes oh right say [it- it is such modern youth language [he he he he ((rhythmic laughter)) and THEN DAD COMES AND JUST “LOL”, I was like-

Mother

HA HA HA ((laughing loudly))

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The excerpt shows how laughter and ridicule are used in a metalinguistic discussion of registers to construct social identities and to exercise knowledge authority. The metalinguistic discussion in the excerpt is sparked off by a misunderstanding: The mother asks a clarification question (7) through which it becomes clear that she and Tania have differing conceptions of why Tania’s story is funny. The mother seems to think that lol indexes something ‘uncool’ and that it pertains to an outdated repertoire (7–8). Tania, on the other hand, interprets the father’s use of the expression as a trespass into a repertoire he has access to, but does not have the right to use. Tania’s story does not dwell on why her father employed this feature: It might have been a strategy to gain her social approval, an attempt that clearly failed and was not accepted by Tania. The use of the expression is sanctioned by laughter and ridicule, and from line 12 Tania starts to explain to her mother why. Her exaggerated emphasis and the change of pitch signal a slightly condescending attitude (12). The tongue click (14) is an affective marker signaling disapproval. Her mother continues in a playful and joyful key, which the multiple laughing particles indicate (13, 15, 22). Haugh (2016) argues that playfulness and laughter can be drawn upon as a resource during sensitive interpersonal actions. In this case, the daughter’s criticism and mocking of her mother is met by laughter that renders the teasing harmless. As Eckert (2017/1997, p. 163) states, adolescents tend to construct identities in opposition to and independent of their parents, which becomes particularly evident in the excerpt above. Tania clearly distances herself from her mother and socially positions herself and both her parents in different social categories. Based on Tania’s explanations from line 12, it seems clear that for Tania, lol is a feature that belongs to a youth register (Agha, 2007) and thereby a register that her parents should not appropriate. Both through the narrative and more explicitly when correcting her mother’s interpretation of the story, she ‘polices’ her father’s language use and demonstrates authority when deciding who can and cannot use such features. Moreover, she teases her mother for her lack of knowledge about youth language, but still, paradoxically, expects her to have knowledge of how to use youth repertoires.

Teasing, policing and language learning Language competences, as well as metalinguistic and metapragmatic knowledge can be used to manifest authority, as we saw in the previous excerpt. In the data material, there were several examples of similar exploitations of language competences in establishing and subverting social hierarchies, where adolescents positioned their parents as learners and themselves as linguistically more competent. Excerpt 2 below from Family 2, shows how the teenager Samuel (15) corrects his mother’s pronunciation of a Norwegian word. The excerpt is presented in its original form:

Excerpt 2: Cakebeans2 1 2 3 4 5 6

Adrian Mother Samuel Mother Samuel Mother

7

Samuel

8

Samuel

it doesn’t look dry it looksaccording to Samuel it wouldn’t be that good what wouldn’t [be that good? [but I won’t give him any what wouldn’t be that good? Mom? kakebunner base layer cake kakebønner (2.1) cake beans cake beans?

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In this excerpt, Samuel (15) teases his mother’s pronunciation of a Norwegian word. The mother produces the Norwegian vowel /ʉ/ more openly, and it sounds like an /ø/. Produced with an /ø/ the word changes meaning from cake base layer to cake beans. Samuel repeats the error but emphasizes the wrong vowel and the changed meaning (line 7). However, as he does not receive any response, he translates the Norwegian mistake to English, which accentuates that the error led to a change in meaning. As I show in Johnsen (2022), there were several instances in the data material of the mother being a 'victim’ for the children’s linguistic corrections. Targeting linguistic productions (or mis-speeches) can be a strategic way to socially position oneself and to subvert hierarchies and perceptions of authority and status. In this excerpt, Samuel exploits the family’s multilingual repertoire and uses the unevenly distributed competences to construct an expert position in a way that subverts the age hierarchy (cf. Ag, 2016; Aronsson and Gottzén, 2011). In both Excerpts 1 and 2 the adolescent family members identify norm breaks and use normative comments and teasing to correct their parents’ Norwegian and restrict their access and legitimacy to use certain repertoires. The parents also acknowledge the children’s superior position in these language matters, and thereby reinforce their position as the more knowledgeable, both concerning youth language (Excerpt 1) and the majority language (Excerpt 2). Adolescents actively use language to create group identities and to demarcate distance from their parents. In both excerpts, we also see how the adolescents linguistically discipline their parents, and thereby also challenge and subvert generational hierarchies.

Playfulness as entertainment The two previous excerpts focused on how the adolescent family members exploited and targeted linguistic competences to position themselves socially in interaction and tease their parents. In the two subsequent excerpts, the adolescents play with the language medium and thereby create playful and humorous frames. The first example is taken from Family 3

Excerpt 33 Christmas Eve-ito 1

Sol

2

Father

3

Sol

4

Father

ja men æ kan spise LITT ribbe yes but I can eat a LITTLE bit of rib si quieres comer ribbe para navidad [de ahoif you want to eat rib for Christmas, from no[((burping sound/vomit sound)) escucha, desde ahora deberias ir a comer una vez por semana un listen, from now on you should go and eat once a week poquito de carne si hasta acust- [que- QUE

5

a little bit of meat until you get us- that- THAT 6

Sol

[pero no no no quiero, But I don’t don’t don’t want to yo quiero eh [eh ju- juksar en la julaftenito.

7

I want to eh eh ch- cheat-ar on Christmas Eve-ito 8

Father

[está mejor si va acostumbrando it’s better if you get used to it

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Matilda

10

Mother

11

Father

12

Matilda

13

Sol

14

Matilda

15

Sol

16

Father

[$ juksar$ ((while laughing)) cheat-ar [he he (..) he he ((laughter increases)) ((laughing)) ((laughs loudly)) ((joins in laughing)) ju- julaftenito faktisk chr- christmas eve-ito actually HA $ ja$ ka e julaften på spansk? HA yes what is Christmas Eve in Spanish [como? what?

17

Matilda

[navidad christmas)

18

Sol

NAVIDAD (1.) jamen navidad e jo jul. Ka e julaften? CHRISTMAS yes but navidad is Christmas, what is Christmas Eve

19

Father

[eh: víspera de navidad eh evening of Christmas (literal translation)

20

Sol

ja men det har vi ALDRI hørt før så det går bra yes but we have NEVER heard that before so that’s allright

In the excerpt, we witness a small dispute between Sol and her father that stems from Sol realizing that as a vegetarian she should not eat the traditional Norwegian Christmas food, pork ribs. Sol wants just a little taste, while her father questions this, fearing that she will get sick if she suddenly starts to eat meat. Following Goodwin (2006), the opposing views become visible through the counterarguments and absence of agreement. As described in Johnsen (2020a), Sol manages to change the footing of the interaction from line 6, as she switches to a Spanish-Norwegian mix that is met by laughing outbursts from the other family members. The mixing of features can be interpreted as a performance, and bears resemblance to the ‘self-styling’ described by Canagarajah (2012): Sol draws upon linguistic resources from the family repertoire to do positioning work and, perhaps, to align herself with her father and reach an agreement. Through the shared laughter, the family members establish in-group solidarity as they draw on common linguistic resources and common perceptions of linguistic norms (cf. Johnsen, 2020a). During the last turns of this excerpt, Sol initiates a language learning sequence, where she asks how to say Christmas Eve in Spanish (15–20). She thereby positions herself as a learner and the other family members, particularly the father, as more knowledgeable. Her older sister responds, but Sol is not satisfied by her suggestion and seeks a more precise word (17–18). Then the father responds, but Sol does not fully accept the position as a novice in this situation and responds that she had never heard the word before and that it is okay (19–20). Her response can be interpreted as an attempt to negotiate or reject the role as the least knowledgeable in the situation. Language competences are also a topic in the conversation represented in Excerpt 4 below. Here, four siblings and the father in Family 2 are discussing language competences and language learning, and they share stories of language learning and language confusion (cf. Johnsen, 2020b for another example). Before the turns presented in the excerpt, the father had brought up that the oldest sibling 229

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David (17) has started learning Italian, to which David responds by ‘documenting’ his Italian skills by uttering the Italian phrase mangia la mela (‘he eats the apple’). The younger brother Adrian quickly positions himself as a learner of Italian as well (I started learning you guys are behind…). The father challenges Adrian and asks him to say something in Italian, which is where the excerpt below starts:

Excerpt 4 – La pizza e bella 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Father David Adrian Erick Samuel Adrian Erick Father David David Samuel

12 13

David Adrian

what do you know? what do you know- remember? What- say something mm: bella es pizza HA HA HA: that’s my boy (giggling) (giggling) he he la pizza E bella not [»la bella pizza bella» [la pizza e bella spaghetti bolognese ((exaggerated, mock Italian)) (Erick and Adrian are giggling) la pizza bella HA HA la bella e la pizza (laughing)

While Adrian is thinking about what to say, the youngest brother Erick takes the floor and utters an Italian-like phrase. His utterance is taken up humorously, and the father and the brothers start to laugh in lines 5–7. The utterance is produced in what might be characterized as ‘mock Italian’. Mock language is a type of transgressive language practice, that does not necessarily require any level of linguistic competence. It is often connected to racism and stigmatization (Hill, 1998; Tebaldi, 2019), although in this particular case it seems to be of a more benign and innocent kind. Samuel follows up in line 11 with a more elaborate example. Of particular interest here is how the participants create meaning out of seemingly ‘meaningless’ utterances (cf. also Fasulo et al., 2002). Seemingly, the younger brothers use mock Italian to build a teasing attack on the older brother David: The mock-Italian utterances can be interpreted as a devaluation of his proclaimed Italian skills and reduces them to nonsense phrases about stereotypical Italian food. The stereotypical Italian dishes (which are stereotypical images of Italian culture) serve as indexes of ‘Italianness’ (cf. e.g. Karrebæk et al. (2018) on language and food). The excerpt demonstrates how the linguistic repertoires of the siblings also consist of languages they have minimal experiences with, and how even small bits of a language (and nonsense language) can be used in humorous performances and to reverse and suspend age hierarchies between the siblings.

Conclusion and future directions This chapter has shown that the playful, norm-transgressing language practices that characterize adolescents’ talk with peers outside their family circles, also exist in their homes and in communication with their parents and siblings. The family is a creative space, and creative and playful practices are vital in family communication, where family members negotiate identities, in-group solidarity, authority, autonomy and power. Previous research on adolescents’ agencies in multilingual families has shown how adolescent children oppose parents’ language choices, and thereby demonstrate resistance. In viewing agency as an interactional achievement (cf. Al Zidjaly, 2009), adolescents also exert agency when negotiating social positions, conversational frames, communicational aims and 230

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identity categories to thereby (temporarily or permanently) change the social realities of the family. As the excerpts have shown, all such negotiations can emerge and be carried out in playful talk. The examples in this chapter draw attention to how adolescents participate in the formation and reproduction of linguistic and social norms in the family, create family bonds and consequently (re) produce the family as a multilingual community of practice. The analysed examples show how the adolescents socially position themselves and their parents by employing linguistic practices associated with youth, which in turn accentuate and reinforce the generational differences between them and their parents. The examples show how adolescents use playful talk, such as teasing, to subvert age-related hierarchies. By linguistically sanctioning their parents and claiming authority and expert positions, the adolescents also challenge the idea of the knowledgeable adults ‘fostering’ the young. Another object of this chapter has been to explore the potential of interactional sociolinguistic analyses of family discourse. Such context-sensitive approaches and turn-by-turn analyses of social interactions can provide nuanced insights into parent-(adolescent)child relationships and family cultures that are hard to obtain through interview studies alone. Studying the social interactions of adolescents and their family members can reveal micro-level processes of how named languages and particular language practices become social resources to family members. As families stretch beyond national borders and spatio-temporal axes, there is a need for more knowledge on the role of intertextuality in transnational families that may involve youth and their (pop-) cultural practices from various parts of the world, mediated communication and creative ways of engaging with heritage languages, which could further expand our knowledge of both multilingual family life and youth cultures. Moreover, as humor and playfulness in language may display both affective, transgressive and unfiltered dimensions of the socio-political reality, a way forward for future research could be to investigate how young people respond to and comment on hegemonical language ideologies and socio-political issues of media discourses with their families. Lastly, recent contributions in the field of family multilingualism have challenged a domain approach to the family and a view of language use in multilingual families as a result of language maintenance strategies and language policies (Gomes, 2018; Hiratsuka and Pennycook, 2019; Johnsen, 2021). However, there is still a need for more research that focuses on family multilingualism from the perspective of adolescents and young adults. Exploring how youth and adolescents use and play with heritage languages in the family context, may shed light on how linguistic resources serve shifting purposes, decided by the situation at hand (e.g., being challenged by a younger brother, negotiating social positions). Investigating playful language use in families can provide insights into how family members create, negotiate and constitute the family as a social unit through fluid and playful language use.

Transcription key xxx MAJ underscored [ ((nonsense word)) (word) : , (1.) - ↑ “word”

Unintelligible utterance Louder than surrounding speech Emphatic stress Onset of overlapping speech Researcher’s comments Uncertain transcription/guess at unclear word Stretched sound Short pause (shorter than 1 second) Timed pause (longer than 1 second) Interrupted talk Pitch shift up Reported talk; spoken in another voice 231

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w(h)ord ? italics & bold bold Calibri font unmarked italics

Laughing while talking Rising intonation, as in a question In Norwegian In Spanish In Italian In English (in original) English translations

Notes 1 Corresponding author: Ragni Vik Johnsen, Department of Education, UiT The Arctic university of Norway P.O. Box 6050 Langnes, 9037 Tromsø, Norway. Orcid: 0000-0001-5839-6763. 2 A more elaborated analysis of this excerpt was analyzed in Johnsen (2022a). 3 A shorter version of this excerpt was analyzed in Johnsen 2020a.

Further readings Aronsson, K. (2011). Language socialization and verbal play. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs and B.B. Schieffelin (eds.), The Handbook of Language Socialization (pp. 464–483). Blackwell. Bell, N. (2016). Multiple Perspectives on Language Play. De Gruyter. Lytra, V. (2017). Playful talk, learners’ play frames, and the construction of identities. In S. Wortham, D. Kim and S. May (eds.), Discourse and Education (pp. 161–172). Springer International Publishing.

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Ragni Vik Johnsen Johnsen, R.V. (2021). Flerspråklig ungdom og familien: språklige praksiser, aktørskap og identiteter. Doctoral dissertation, UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Johnsen, R.V. (2022). Norsk som en del av et flerspråklig familierepertoar i en trespråklig familie. NOA Norsk Som andrespråk, 38(1). Retrieved from: http://ojs​.novus​.no​/index​.php​/NOA​/article​/view​/2099 Karrebæk, M.S., K.C. Riley and J.R. Cavanaugh (2018). Food and language: Production, consumption, and circulation of meaning and value, Annual Review of Anthropology, 47(1): 17–32. Kendall, S. (2007). Introduction: Family talk. In D. Tannen, S. Kendall and C. Gordon (eds.), Family Talk: Discourse and Identity in Four American Families. Oxford University Press. Kern, F. and M. Selting (2011). Ethnic Styles of Speaking in European Metropolitan Areas (Vol. 8). J. Benjamins Pub. Kheirkhah, M. and A. Cekaite (2015). Language maintenance in a multilingual family: Informal heritage language lessons in parent–child interactions, Multilingua, 34(3): 319–346. King, K.A. and L.W. Fogle (2017). Family language policy. In T. McCarthy and S. May (eds.), Language Policy and Political Issues in Education. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Luvera Del Prete, D. (2015). Mother-Adolescent Daughter Interaction: How Maternal Roles affect Discursive Outcomes (Publication Number 3704495) [Ed.D., Teachers College, Columbia University]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. Lytra, V. (2007). Play Frames and Social Identities: Contact Encounters in a Greek Primary School. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Lytra, V. (2017). Playful talk, learners’ play frames, and the construction of identities. In S. Wortham, D. Kim and S. May (eds.), Discourse and Education (pp. 161–172). Springer International Publishing. Miller, P. (1987). Teasing as language socialization and verbal play in a white working class community. In B.B. Schieffelin and E. Ochs (eds.), Language Socialization across Cultures. Cambridge University Press. Møller, J.S. and J.N. Jørgensen (2011). Linguistic norms and adult roles in play and serious frames, Linguistics and Education, 22(1): 68–78. Nortier, J. and B.A. Svendsen (2015). Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century: Linguistic Practices across Urban Spaces. Cambridge University Press. Obojska, M. (2019). ‘Ikke snakke norsk?’ – Transnational adolescents and negotiations of family language policy explored through family interview, Multilingua. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/multi​-2018​-005 Özkan, F.H., L.M. Madsen, I. Keçik and J.N. Jørgensen (2015). Verbal teasing among young people in Køge and Ekişehir. In J. Nortier and B.A. Svendsen (eds.), Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century: Linguistic Practices across Urban Spaces (pp. 231–246). Cambridge University Press. Pontecorvo, C., A. Fasulo and L. Sterponi (2001). Mutual apprentices: The making of parenthood and childhood in family dinner conversations, Human Development, 44(6): 340–361. Poveda, D. (2011). Performance and interaction during ‘reading hour’ in a Spanish secondary school, Linguistics and Education, 22(1): 79–92. Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. Longman. Rampton, B. (2006). Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge University Press. Rampton, B. (2009). Interaction ritual and not just artful performance in crossing and stylization, Language in Society, 38(2): 149–176. Revis, M. (2016). A Bourdieusian perspective on child agency in family language policy, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 22(2): 177–191. Spolsky, B. (2004). Language Policy. Cambridge University Press. Spolsky, B. (2019). Family language policy – The significant domain. In S. Haque (ed.), LW 59: Politique Linguistique Familiale / Family Language Policy. INALCO. Svendsen, B.A. (2004). Så lenge vi forstår hverandre: språkvalg, flerspråklige ferdigheter og språklig sosialisering hos norsk-filippinske barn i Oslo. Doctoral thesis, University of Oslo, Unipub. Tannen, D. (2007). Power maneuvers and connection maneuvers in family interaction. In D. Tannen, S. Kendall and C. Gordon (eds.), Family Talk – Discourse and Identity in Four American Families. Oxford University Press. Tebaldi, C. (2019). Mock translanguaging and whiteness. In J. Won Lee and S. Dovchin (eds.), Translinguistics: Negotiating Innovation and Ordinariness (pp. 206–216). Routledge. Vidal, M. (2015). Talking with Abuelo: Performing authenticity in a multicultural, multisited family, Multilingua, 34(2): 187–210. Wright, L. (2020). Critical Perspectives on Language and Kinship in Multilingual Families. Bloomsbury Publishing.

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17 DIGITAL LANGUAGE PRACTICES AND YOUTH IN THE FAMILY Andreas Candefors Stæhr1

Introduction Mobile and social media are an inherent part of many young people’s daily lives and everyday communicative repertoires. Furthermore, young people have traditionally been perceived to be particularly keen and creative users of social media and they are often seen as such by their parents. In recent years, however, the parent generation (and older generations in general) have also embraced social media and the many linguistic and semiotic resources they afford for linguistic creativity and interpersonal communication. This has, for instance, resulted in (new) family communication cultures where digitally mediated interactions between family members play an important part in everyday family communication (Lexander and Androutsopoulos, 2021 Palviainen, 2021; Ag, 2022). For instance, social media has become a means for family members to organize and co-ordinate everyday life, attend to family relations and not least have fun – that is, both when being apart (Madianou and Miller, 2012a; Palviainen, 2021) and when being co-present at home (Stæhr and Nørreby, 2021). The central status of social media in many families’ communication cultures has not only resulted in an increase in everyday writing in the family, but also in a pluralization of norms of digital language use. Thus, the sociolinguistic reality of many contemporary families is characterized by cross-generational everyday online interactions, which can be seen as a (relatively new) context where linguistic, semiotic and normative differences become visible and negotiable among young people and their parents. Yet, such generational differences in digital language use and norms for digital writing in the family remain largely unexplored within sociolinguistics and have only recently attracted the attention of media-focused language research. This chapter focuses on digital-mediated interactions and generational differences in the context of contemporary family life. More specifically, it focuses on Copenhagen teenagers (16–18 year-olds) and their parents’ (33–56 years old) digital correspondences and on their metalinguistic accounts of different norms of digital language use in interviews. The chapter has three aims. Firstly, it addresses the key concepts of social media, digitally mediated interaction and social age. Next, it provides an overview of sociolinguistic research on youth and digital language practices and describes how such research has paved the way for an incipient sociolinguistic trend of studying (young peoples’) digital language use in the context of the family. Finally, by drawing on examples from linguistic ethnographic research on language and social media in the family, the chapter argues that studying young peoples’ digital language practices in the context of the famDOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-23

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ily provides a new and maybe more nuanced take on the youth aspect of young peoples’ digital language practices. Before we look further into this, we need to address the notion of social media and how to conceptualize the digital language practices such media afford.

Chasing a moving target – defining social media, digitally mediated interaction and social age The notion of social media can be defined in various ways and it is a term that is continuously adjusted in accordance with techno-social developments in how people use social media in their everyday lives (e.g., Madianou and Miller, 2012b). In this chapter, social media is used as a cover term for digital web and smartphone applications, which enable users to create, share and circulate usergenerated content (Leppänen et al., 2015) and thus enable people to engage in social interactions with other users through a wide variety of linguistic, semiotic and visual resources. This broad definition of social media, for instance, includes social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat), Internet fora, blogs and various mobile applications that facilitate private text messaging (e.g., SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Direct Messages on Instagram). When studying younger and older family members’ digital language practices it is rarely sufficient to focus on one social medium, because people often rely on a range of social media, which are organized in a polymedia repertoire (Tagg and Lyons, 2021). According to the concept of polymedia (Madianou and Miller, 2012a, p. 169), social media are perceived as one common “communicative environment of affordances rather than as a catalogue of ever-proliferating but discrete technologies”. This entails, that every social medium exists in a state of synergy with other social media; meaning that the affordances of each medium need to be understood in relation to the wider polymedia repertoire (Madianou and Miller, 2012b, p. 125). Polymedia repertoires can be seen as connected to individuals or shared by a group of (often likeminded) people (e.g., a community of practice). Therefore, the polymedia repertoires you will find in a family are often only partially shared and only overlapping to some extent because teenagers, their siblings and their parents often engage in different digitally mediated communities of practice besides the family. Yet, this chapter focuses on the intersecting parts of the families’ polymedia repertoires. When zooming in on the linguistic, semiotic and interactional practices social media affords, they are best described by the bracket term digitally mediated interaction (DMI) (Androutsopoulos, 2021, p. 709). This term is suggested to replace the earlier terminology of computer mediated communication (CMC). This relabeling entails an understanding of a techno-social shift from the computer, which was the main technology of CMC and most CMC research. Today the computer has been supplemented and sometimes even replaced by a range of digital and mobile devices for interpersonal communication. This contextual shift in the material circumstances of the digital mediation of language is important because each device comes with its own technological, material and semiotic affordances. When studying social media use and digitally mediated interactions in the context of the family, social categories such as ‘children’, ‘teenager’ and ‘youth’ or ‘adult’, ‘old’ and ‘parent’ are often used in family members’ metalinguistic accounts on digital language practices, norms of language use and generational differences (Hansen and Stæhr, 2021). From a participant perspective, such categories often become relevant when language users more or less explicitly activate indexical links between specific (groups of) language users and particular styles of writing. Therefore, such categories are both relevant as participant and analytical categories, which call for a critical and dynamic understanding of the notion of age. The concept of age has been subjected to critique within sociolinguistic research and especially within the sub-field of language and aging (see Coupland, 1997; Eckert, 1997; Coupland, 2004). Eckert (1997) emphasizes the differences between chronological, biological and social age. For instance, chronological age – the standard 236

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means to measure an individual’s age in much (Western) social science – only takes us so far when measuring speakers’ age-related place or identity in society. Conversely, social age or contextual age, which is a similar term used by Coupland (1997, p. 34), is, for instance, tied to life events and ones’ family, institutional or legal status. These life events and societal statuses are, according to Eckert (1997, p. 156), associated with different life stages such as childhood, adolescence and adulthood, which are often used to explain linguistic and social behaviors. As suggested within much sociolinguistic research (e.g. Eckert, 1997; Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou, 2004; Leppänen, 2007) such categories of social age cannot be uncritically linked to linguistic styles. Rather than making a priori assumptions, the categories of ‘youth’ and ‘adults’ need to be defined socially and contextually by the researcher. Thus, being ‘young’ or an ‘adult’ are flexible categories (or identities) which are best perceived as being linguistically and semiotically constructed often in relation to each other. In this way, ‘youth language’ (or ‘adult language’ for that matter) cannot be ascribed the status of a register which is associated with a physiologically or biologically delineable group in society called ‘youth’ as opposed to e.g., ‘adults’. Rather, such linguistic styles are best understood as sets of linguistic and semiotic recourses, which are used within particular social, cultural and ideological frameworks to construct and negotiate ‘youth’ and ‘adult’ cultural practices and identities (Leppänen, 2007, p. 151). Therefore, it is only on the basis of such linguistic constructions that we are able to distinguish between ‘youth’ and ‘adults’ (see also Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou, 2004). In the next section, I provide an overview of research on digitally mediated interaction in youth and family contexts, respectively.

The sociolinguistics of youth, family life and social media Language, social media and youth Most sociolinguistic research on digital language use has focused on the linguistic, cultural and social practices of young people; either implicitly by drawing on data collected among young people (often focusing on particular linguistic phenomena and not the specific age group) or explicitly by attending to specific youth-related phenomena such as ‘youth language’ (cf. Jonsson et al., 2019 for a critique of this label). Much media and communication research has also focused on young people’s social media use and in particular, how digital media affords new possibilities for identity work, selfrepresentation and peer connectivity (e.g., boyd, 2007; Buckingham, 2007; Ito et al., 2010). Because such aspects of social life are inherently tied to the use of language, the connections between identity, social (dis)identification and digitally mediated language use have also been a core interest within youth and media-centered sociolinguistics. For instance, some research focuses on how digital representations of dialect features become relevant in the creation of a sense of belonging (Mortensen, 2020), in the stylization of place (Sultana et al., 2013) or simply as a resource for local identity performances (Hilte et al., 2019; Stæhr et al., 2020; Monka, forthc.). Other research, focuses on written representations of contemporary urban youth styles and how such styles are employed in the construction and negotiation of ethnic identities (Nørreby and Møller, 2015; Dovchin, 2015), processes of (dis)identification (Leppänen et al., 2017), maintenance of diaspora connections (Heyd, 2014; Hollington and Nassenstein, 2018) and not least digital creativity such as “textpl@y” (Deumert, 2014, p. 122). Based on such research, it is safe to assume that the omnipresence of social media influences how young people use language, construct identities and negotiate social relationships (e.g., see Androutsopoulos and Juffermans, 2014, p. 5). In fact, Buchholz (2000) already predicted such influences of social media on language a little more than two decades ago. In a paper on the topic of language and youth culture, she sketches out the possible implications of young people’s use of what she at that time (rightfully) called new media. She argues that “language will necessarily take on new forms and uses in a world in 237

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which communication has become mediated to a heretofore unprecedented degree” (Bucholtz, 2000, p. 281). She further argues that digital technologies (and the Internet) would afford the production of innovative youth cultural styles and introduce new contexts for identity work and not least that much of this online identity work would be associated with young people who at that time were considered “the most enthusiastic, expert, and creative users of new media” (Buchholz, 2000, p. 281). Despite a tradition of trivializing the influence of media (in its broadest sense) on everyday language use (see Kristiansen, 2014, p. 100), Buchholz turned out to be right in the sense that social media has become an influential factor in processes of sociolinguistic change. This is supported by more recent empirical work and theorizations of mediatization as a factor in processes of sociolinguistic change (Androutsopoulos, 2014; Maegaard et al., 2020). Thus, it is no longer a question if social media influences young people’s sociolinguistic realities, but rather how. Although more research is needed to fully understand how social media influences processes of sociolinguistic change, existing research has already contributed knowledge on how digital language practices play a crucial role in the enregisterment (Agha, 2007) of regional/local dialects (Johnstone, 2011; Androutsopoulos, 2013; Stæhr and Larsen, 2020) and contemporary urban youth styles (Stæhr, 2015). Such studies broaden the scope of what counts as everyday language use, break down the artificial divide between online and offline contexts and contribute knowledge on how social media influences the formation of contemporary styles, registers and dialects; maybe in more comprehensive ways, than Buchholz ever could have imagined some 20 years ago. Although being far from comprehensive, the overview of research presented in this section illustrates how young peoples’ digital language practices are by now a well-studied phenomenon within sociolinguistics. However, the empirical and theoretical knowledge this field of research has spawned, should also be seen as a solid foundation upon which much research on digital language practices in the family rests.

Digital language practices and social relations in the family Social media and the smartphone have not only changed the everyday lives of many teenagers, they have also altered the everyday lives and communication cultures of many families. Within the field of media and communication studies, the increasing use of social media in the context of the family has been widely studied during the past decades (e.g., Madianou and Miller, 2012b; Clark, 2012; Livingstone and Blum-Ross, 2020). Yet, only very recently, sociolinguistic research has devoted its attention to the study of digitally mediated interactions in the context of the family. Therefore, the literature on this topic remains scarce. The existing literature both focuses on digital language practices of nuclear families living under the same roof (including multilingual families) and transnational families where family members live apart. Despite focusing on different types of families with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, most research within this field of research more or less explicitly addresses the question of how social media affects the everyday lives, communication cultures and processes of language socialization in contemporary families. In multilingual families, social media has not only influenced the daily communicative routines, but also family members’ engagement with language(s) and family identity (Lexander, 2020). For instance, studies show how the use of social media supports informal heritage language learning and polylingual development (Said and Hua, 2018; Lanza and Lexander, 2019). Furthermore, social media are argued to function as a means to maintain heritage language and culture (Szecsi and Szilagyi, 2012; Little, 2019) and not least facilitate family members’ linguistic and semiotic engagement with diaspora relations (Lexander and Androutsopoulos, 2021). Palviainen and Kedra’s (2020) study of multilingual families in Finland, for instance, illustrates how the use of WhatsApp with the extended family renders possible language development and informal literacy learning in ways that are evaluated as meaningful 238

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for children and young people in these families (see Lanza and Lexander, 2019 for similar points). One of the most profound influences of social media on transnational family life is how social media has been found to affect the ways in which family relationships are experienced, organized and managed (Madianou and Miller, 2012a). For example, Palviainen and Kedra (2020) describe how video-calling routines support a sense of cohesion and emotional togetherness in transnational families. Furthermore, Palviainen (2021) argues that in some families where the parents live in different countries, social media (particularly in audio-visual communication) facilitate co-parenting practices and language learning in ways that would not be possible without the digital synchronicity afforded by such media. While such research focuses on families where (some) family members live apart, other studies of family life with media focusses on families who live together in different constellations such as nuclear, blended and other kinds of families. In a study of involved parenthood in Danish nuclear and blended families, Ag (2022), for instance, concludes that social media (and texting in particular) are central to how the parents carry out practices of parental involvement. In fact, she argues that parents and teenagers interactionally co-contribute to such practices. She does so, by studying texting practices where teenagers, for instance, ask questions and seek advice from their parents while doing housework, cooking or other everyday tasks and how parents reach out and keep tabs on their teenagers’ whereabouts while being apart. Interestingly, Ag finds that such digitally mediated practices of parental involvement do not necessarily limit teenagers’ development towards autonomy. Rather, according to Ag (2022, p. 58), such social media interactions can also facilitate an “interactional space for independent decision making”. This chimes in with similar findings of Clark (2012), who also describes how the mobile phone may function as a tool to promote independence. In a related study of Danish families, I investigate how texting affords parents to construct teenagers as being either able or unable to live up to family norms while being apart and how teenagers use such correspondences to question their parents’ norms and deal with issues of independence (Stæhr, forthc.). Along this line of thinking, the idea or status of the family as being a private social space centered around the home, has also been challenged; not least, when it becomes entangled in (semi)public discourse through family vlogs and blogs (Lanza, 2020), homing blogs (Jäntti et al., 2018) and family members’ photo sharing practices on various social networking sites. Thus, the (semi)public social media contexts can be said to situate the family somewhere in between the private and the public sphere, where the delineation of boundaries relies on family members’ negotiation of family norms and individual or shared media ideologies and practices (Gershon, 2010). All of the studies mentioned in this section focus on how social media is used when family members are apart – either during the day in the nuclear family or during longer periods in transnational families. In fact, it is a common conception that social media interactions primarily occur between interlocutors across distances in time and space and that digitally mediated interactions are not relevant in situations where family members are co-present at home. However, as suggested by a recent study by the author and Nørreby, social media plays important communicative and social functions in co-present everyday family interaction (Stæhr and Nørreby, 2021). We show that the smartphone has enabled language users to choose (and sometimes alternate) between digitally mediated and verbal modes of communication while being under the same roof or even co-present in the same room. Based on this, we argue that family members’ polymedia repertoires should be perceived and studied as a part of their broader communicative repertoires (Stæhr and Nørreby, 2021, p. 778). The overview of youth and family-focused research in this section suggests that most attention has been devoted to understanding young people’s use of social media and digitally mediated language practices in peer contexts and less attention has (so far) been paid to the study of family relations and how digital language practices are relevant to contemporary family life. No research (at least to my knowledge) has so far focused specifically on digital practices associated with youth language in the context of the family. In the remaining sections of this chapter, I address this particular topic. 239

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Everyday writing in the family – pluralization of norms, differences and opposition One of the arguments for focusing on peer-contexts when studying young people’s digital language practices is that teenagers are often on top of the social and cultural agenda in these contexts (Ito et al., 2010, p. 9). Yet, when studying peer-interaction in such settings it may be difficult to analytically pinpoint the youth element of such interactions. The particular youth aspect may, however, become more visible in the context of the family, because much identity work of teenagers relies on teenagers defining themselves in relation or opposition to parents and younger siblings (Erikson, 1992), as I will also illustrate in the analyses. In the small case study in this section, I focus on how parents and teenagers describe their own linguistic and communicative practices as being associated with the social categories of ‘youth’ and ‘parents’/‘adults’ and how such practices are often perceived to differ or be in opposition to each other. I rely on a combination of interview data and text messages to study how the digitally mediated styles of writing associated with these identity categories differ on the level of linguistic practice as well as on the level of (language) ideology. The data originates from a collaborative multi-sited ethnographic research project called SoMeFamily (‘Language and Social Media in the Family’), which studies the communicative functions and sociolinguistic implications of digitally mediated interaction in contemporary Danish families (see also Stæhr and Nørreby, 2021 and Ag, 2022 for details of the families and data collection). The adolescent participants (59) of the project are 16–18 years old while the parents’ (24) ages range from 33–56. Due to the rather large age difference in the parent group, they cannot be considered a part of the same generation on the basis of their chronological age. However, based on their social age (i.e., their common status as parents to teenage kids who attend the same high school) they can be considered representatives of a common group. Thus, when I refer to the age categories of either young people/teenagers or adults/parents I do so on the basis of their social age and identity role as family members. In this sense, the question of which digital language practices are associated with the youth (and their parents) is based on age as a social category, rather than a number on a metric scale. Before we look further into the case study, I will provide some contextual knowledge about the parents’ and adolescents’ digital language practices, which builds on a recent study by Hansen and the author (Hansen and Stæhr, 2021). In this study, we focus on the adolescent and the parents’ language use in private social media contexts such as text messages and Facebook Messenger correspondences. Based on interviews and interactional data we show how the adolescents and parents orient toward different norms of language use when looking at the use of abbreviations (e.g., wtf (‘what the fuck’) and idk (‘I don’t know’)), emoji use, proofreading practices and length of messages. In general, we describe how many of the adolescents orient towards a preference for a high communicative flow, which they compare to having ‘a normal conversation’. This involves a style of writing where it is important to write and respond swiftly and, in this way, appear ‘present’ or ‘attentive’. They do so by using abbreviations and producing short turns-of-writing sometimes in quick succession. Also, they do not spend time on what they call “time-consuming” proofreading practices (including orientation towards the orthographic standard), which will also become apparent in the analyses of this section. Concerning the parents’ private social media correspondences; they are characterized by a preference for more linguistically correct messages (from a standard orthographic perspective), which some of them proofread before sending. In addition, they produce longer and according to themselves “more coherent” turns-of-writing, which contains more frequent use of emojis compared to their children (ibid., p. 148). The analyses of the following three excerpts serve as an example of how to study young peoples’ digital language practices in the context of the family. The analyses focus on the participants’ 240

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metapragmatic reflections on proofreading practices and their more or less explicit interactional orientations towards linguistic correctness and the orthographic standard. In the first excerpt, we see how two of the young participants, Lea and Maya, compare their own more liberal everyday writing practices to their parents’ preference for linguistic correctness and proofreading. Before this excerpt, I ask the girls whether they proofread their digital messages. Maya answers:

Excerpt 1: “You can very well see what it says” Interview. Participants: Adam (ADA) 17 years old, Lea (LEA) 15 years old and Maya (MAY) 16 years old. Interviewer: Andreas C. Stæhr (XAS). Author’s translation from Danish. 01 MAY: 02 03 04 05 06

well also when I like write to Lea then I don’t use punctuation (.) I don’t care about commas and such when I write to Lea (.) but my mom she she can’t even send a message to one of her close friends without using like

[…]

((Lines omitted, ADA interrupts shortly))

07 08 09 10 11 12

MAY:  using commas correctly and spelling everything in the correct way (.) well I just send it LEA: mm no no I don’t care either if I make a typo when I write to: (.) yes yes like when it says ”ye” when I should have written “yes”

[…] 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

((Lines omitted))

LEA: well it doesn’t matter my mom is more like (.)  ”I can’t read what you’re writing could you please write it correctly” ((stylizes her mother’s voice)) like eh you can very well see (.) what is says (.) yeah haha MAY: yes like ((laughing))(.) you understand it perfectly well

In this excerpt, Maya and Lea describe their own writing practice as being different from and in opposition to a norm of standard orthographic correctness – a norm which is explicitly associated with their mothers’ digital writing practices (l. 4–6, 4–16). This view on correctness in a private online context is shared by many of the adolescents, who, like Maya, “don’t care about commas and such” (l. 3) and do not bother to “spell everything correctly” (l. 7) because it will not disturb the communicative content (l. 18–19). Furthermore, it appears as if Maya finds it marked to proofread one’s messages and to orient towards the orthographic standard, when the recipient is a close friend. This becomes apparent in the way she distances herself from her mother’s proofreading practice by saying that she “can’t even” (l. 4) send a message to a friend without proofreading it beforehand. In an interview with Maya’s mother, Sarah, she aligns with this description of her need to proofread messages. She explains how she sometimes gets a bit “pernickety” (‘pernitten’ in Danish) when it comes to proofreading messages. She says: “I always read my messages to see whether the spelling is correct”. In line 13, Lea also disassociates herself from her mother’s 241

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proofreading practices. Yet, this time it has to do with the mother’s tendency to correct Lea’s messages. This disalignment is partly realized through a stylization in lines 14–15, where she imitates her mother’s critique. The subsequent laughter in line 17 further contributes to emphasizing her distance from this practice. In this way, she ridicules the mother’s correction practice and in the following turn disregards typos and spelling mistakes as being a communicative disturbance. In general, this excerpt shows how the adolescents explicitly describe their own linguistic practices as being in opposition to their parents’ texting practices, proofreading culture and normative orientation in private messaging. In this way, they seem to articulate a communication culture and stylistic preferences partly on the basis of underscoring linguistic differences. In the next excerpt, we see how Maya’s mother and stepfather engage in a similar practice by describing their own digital language practices as being in opposition to their daughter’s digital language use. During the interview, I use the knowledge I gained from the round of interviews with the teenagers in which many of them describe how their parents write differently from young people on social media (Hansen and Stæhr, 2021). In Excerpt 2, I try to make Maya’s parents reflect on this claim.

Excerpt 2: “She almost misspells on purpose” Interview. Participants: Sara (SAR) 33 years old and Brian (BRI) 35 years old (Maya’s parents). Interviewer: Andreas (XAS). Author’s translation from Danish. 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13

XAS:  then they ((i.e. the teenage participants)) say that (.) that you write differently (.) than they do SAR: yes XAS: on social media (.) is this something you have thought about BRI: eh well I don’t know if we do but in relation to Maya then we do (.) but Maya wriSAR: Maya she doesn’t give a damn BRI: she is she is lazy when she writes SAR: she almost misspells on purpose BRI: ”well that was wrong” ((stylizes a lazy teenager)) SAR: haha yes BRI: so it s- it really needs to go fast

My question about generational differences leads to a metalinguistic description where Brian and Sarah co-operate in describing Maya’s digital language use as being “lazy” (l. 9) and being indifferent in terms of spelling (l. 8 “she doesn’t give a damn”). Sarah even suggests that she makes spelling mistakes on purpose (l. 10). In this way, they construct a stereotypical image of a lazy teenager with an intentional laissez-faire attitude towards linguistic correctness. This might be an example of how parents sometimes re-articulate macro discursive stereotypes about teenagers and spelling, which sometimes appear in mass media discourse. This is similar to how the young people (in Excerpt 1) re-articulated the stereotype about parents being too meticulous (and lame) when it comes to linguistic correctness in private digital messages. In line 13, it appears as if Brian recognizes the norm of a ‘communicative flow’ (shared by many of the adolescent participants), which might be interpreted as an alternative explanation of her spelling mistakes, which highlights writing speed as the reason for her misspellings rather than them being intentional. Interestingly, it appears as if Brian has not thought about whether he writes differently compared to younger people when asked by the interviewer (l. 6). Yet, when it comes to describing his (and her wife’s) 242

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language use in relation to Maya’s online language practices, it appears easier to him. Thus, the lines 7–13 can be interpreted not only as a description of Maya’s online language use and (alleged) lazy and indifferent attitude towards spelling, but also as an indication of Brian and Sarah’s own normative ideals. In this way, Brian and Sarah’s description also contributes knowledge of how they definitely do not use language online. In this way, the excerpt illustrates that is not only adolescents who sometimes rely on defining themselves in opposition to their parents (as in Excerpt 1); parents may also rely on their children’s language use to position themselves linguistically in the sociolinguistic ecology of the family. When looking at Maya’s private text message correspondences with her parents, there is indeed much variation in spelling and many typos. This chimes in with the metalinguistic descriptions in Excerpts 1 and 2. In this respect, linguistic practice and ideology seem to be consistent. However, the majority of the typos, variations in spelling and deviations from the orthographic standard are not commented on or corrected. Only some of them are. In the next excerpt we shall see what happens when Maya and her parents’ normative and stylistic differences collide in practice. Excerpt 3 is from a text message correspondence between Brian and Maya. Brian writes a text message while in the local supermarket (‘Netto’). He asks whether Maya would prefer a salad instead of pizza for dinner. She answers:

Excerpt 3: “Do YOU shop in netto” Text message correspondence. Participants: Maya, 16 years old, daughter (right, dark grey in printed version) and Brian 35 years old, stepfather (left, light grey). ​

Figure 17.1  Do YOU shop in netto

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Translation 1. Maya: Yes very much 2. Brian: Something particular..? 3. Maya: Do y shop in netto? 4. Brian: Yes y can shop in netto 🤣 5. Maya: 😡 6. Maya: Do YOU shop in netto 7. Brian: 😜😜 8. Brian: yes I can do so In message 3, Maya asks if he plans to buy the salad in the supermarket (“Netto”). Yet, while doing so she makes a typo by writing “u” instead of “du” (you). Since “u” is not used as an abbreviation for the Danish word “du” (you) among the adolescents or their parents it is likely to be interpreted as a typo. The subsequent turn is particularly interesting because Brian explicitly orients toward the typo by repeating it in a gibberish sentence followed by a laughing emoji. The laughing emoji, the fact that the “u” in the sentence does not make sense, and my ethnographic knowledge of Brian’s humor (observed in other messages), suggests this turn can be ascribed to the genre of a dad-joke. In this way, he jokingly puts her typo on display. Based on our knowledge of how Brian evaluates Maya’s digital writing practices as being “lazy” (in Excerpt 2), this stylization of her spelling skills can be seen as a metalinguistic comment on her (alleged) sloppy attitude towards spelling. Although his metalinguistic comment is carried out within a frame of making fun, it can nonetheless be interpreted as a subtle moment of language socialization into taking her spelling more seriously or at least as an attempt to heighten her linguistic awareness when texting. Maya’s subsequent reaction (the unhappy and angry emoji), suggests that there is something at stake here as she appears to be somehow annoyed with Brian’s metalinguistic comment. In fact, one can argue that she treats Brian’s stylization as an act of correction as she in the subsequent turn corrects her previous utterance by writing the correct form “DU” (YOU) in capitals. Finally, the two winking emojis posted by Brian can be interpreted as a strategy to downplay or take the edge off his metalinguistic comment to thus establish the interactional order. In general, this excerpt shows how parents and teenagers also orient towards different norms of language use and correctness in practice. It also shows how such norms sometimes collide and become a topic of metalinguistic negotiations – in this case, in the middle of grocery shopping. Furthermore, we see how Maya explicitly disaligns with and disassociates herself from parental norms of linguistic correctness in practice. This is similar to how she also disaligned with her mother’s orientation to linguistic correctness in Excerpt 1. In this way, we see a continuity in her normative stance across ideology and practice. Finally, the analyses of Excerpts 1 and 3 illustrate how corrections of typos and orientations towards linguistic correctness in private text messages are evaluated negatively by the adolescents, because they do not disturb the intended meaning of the message (Excerpt 1, l. 18–19).

Concluding remarks and future directions This chapter has shed light on an incipient sociolinguistic trend of studying digital language practices in the context of the family. By bridging the theoretical concepts of polymedia, digitally mediated interaction and social age, the chapter has suggested a framework for how future

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research could pursue the study of young peoples’ digital language practices outside peer contexts and in this way provide a more nuanced take on the youth aspect of young peoples’ digital language practices. The case study indicated how the sociolinguistic reality of families’ private digital encounters is characterized by a pluralization of norms – that is, a norm of linguistic liberation associated with the youth and a (standard) norm of linguistic correctness associated with parents. Thus, social media correspondences between family members constitute a family context where linguistic and normative differences become visible and exploitable for both young people and their parents (Excerpts 1–3). The analyses of the case study show how such differences are made relevant in explicit metalinguistic activities in practice (such as Brian’s correction in Excerpt 3) and in negative evaluations of other generations’ language use in interviews (Excerpts 1 and 2). Based on the analysis of Excerpts 1–3, it is safe to assume that the linguistic liberation (characteristic of vernacular writing) constitutes a crucial part of the sociolinguistic economy of the young participants’ private social media writing among peers (see also Hansen and Stæhr, 2021; Madsen and Stæhr, 2021). Yet, if we only look at adolescents’ digital language use in peer contexts, it may be difficult to describe the use of specific linguistic features and communicative styles as a particular youth phenomena. As I have shown in the analyses in this chapter, the indexical links between the category of youth and linguistic forms, communicative practices and normative orientations became explicitly activated in the family contexts – that is, in the adolescents’ and parents’ metalinguistic accounts of digital language use in the family (Excerpts 1 and 2) and in the interactional encounter between the father and daughter (Excerpt 3). Thus, by focusing on normative differences and how styles of writing are treated as being in opposition, we are able to pinpoint what specific communicative practices are associated with the category of youth. And by relying on data from both interviews and family members’ text messages we are able to illustrate how such norms are made relevant both in metalinguistic accounts and in practice. Overall, the data suggests that young people and their parents describe their digital language use in relation to each other. In other words, they actively exploit their knowledge of other generations’ ways of writing to highlight linguistic differences when describing their own (age-specific) linguistic and stylistic practice. In this way, we partly gain metalinguistic and metapragmatic knowledge about how young people use language online and just as importantly how they do not use it. Thus, such metalinguistic reflexivity of generational differences and opposing styles of writing contribute crucial knowledge about what is youthful and what is definitely not. Against this backdrop, this chapter suggests that future studies of linguistic styles associated with the youth should also include contexts outside the peer-group, because such broader research designs render it possible to study how teenagers define themselves in opposition to their parents (and other perceived authorities). Also, it enables us to study how teenagers in practice construct identities and take normative positions by underscoring the differences between themselves and those outside the youth category. Such differences and opposing ideologies may not be fully captured when (only) choosing the young people we study on the basis of their biological age. Rather, future research should consider taking age as a social and relational category as a point of departure when studying aspects of sameness and difference in young people’s digital language practice. Also, the chapter suggests that situating youth research in the context of the family may provide new and more nuanced understandings of the youth aspect of young peoples’ (digital) language practices as it enables the researcher to describe the youth from both their own and their parents’ perspectives.

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Note 1 Corresponding author: Andreas Candefors Stæhr, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, Emil Holms Kanal 2, 2300 Copenhagen S. Orcid: 0000-0002-4036-4613.

Further readings Ag, A. (2022). Involved parenthood in digitally mediated interaction, Language and Communication, 83: 49–60. Lanza, E. and K.V. Lexander (2019). Family language practices in multilingual transcultural families. In I.S. Montanari and S. Quay (eds.), Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Multilingualism (pp. 229–251). Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.

References Ag, A. (2022). Involved parenthood in digitally mediated interaction, Language and Communication, 83: 49–60. Agha, A. (2007). Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Androutsopoulos, J. (2013). Participatory culture and metalinguistic discourse. Performing and negotiating German dialects on YouTube. In D. Tannen and A. Trester (eds.), Discource 2.0. Language and New Media (pp. 47–71). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Androutsopoulos, J. (2014). Mediatization and sociolinguistic change: Key concepts, research traditions, open issues. In J. Androutsopoulos (ed.), Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change (pp. 3–48). Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter (linguae and litterae 36). Androutsopoulos, J. (2021). Introduction. Polymedia in interaction. In J. Androutsopoulos (ed.), Polymedia in Interaction (pp. 707–724), Pragmatics and Society, 12(5): 707-724. Androutsopoulos, J. and A. Georgakopoulou (2004). Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities (pp. 1–26). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Androutsopoulos, J. and K. Juffermans (2014). Digital language practices in superdiversity, Discourse, Context and Media, 4–5: 1–6. boyd, d. (2007). Why youth (heart) social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life. In D. Buckingham (ed.), Youth, Identity, and Digital Media (pp. 119–142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bucholtz, M. (2000). Language and youth culture, American Speech, 75(3): 280–283. Buckingham, D. (2007). Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark, L.S. (2012). The Parent App. Understanding Families in the Digital Age. New York: Oxford University Press. Coupland, N. (1997). Language, ageing and ageism. A project for applied linguistics? International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7: 26–48. Coupland, N. (2004). Age in social and sociolinguistic theory. In J.F. Nussbaum and J. Coupland (eds.), Handbook of Communication and Aging Research (pp. 69–90). London: Routledge. Deumert, A. (2014). Sociolinguistics and Mobile Communication. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dovchin, S. (2015). Language, multiple authenticities and social media. The online language practices of university students in Mongolia, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 19(4): 437–459. Eckert, P. (1997). Age as a sociolinguistic variable. In F. Coulmas (ed.), The Handbook of Sociolinguistics (pp. 151–167). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Erikson, E. (1992). Identitet: Ungdom og Kriser. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Gershon, I. (2010). Media ideologies. An introduction, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 20(2): 283–293. Hansen, M.H. and A.C. Stæhr (2021). Sproglige generationsforskelle på de sociale medier. NyS, 59: 113–156. Heyd, T. (2014). Doing race and ethnicity in a digital community: Lexical labels and narratives of belonging in a Nigerian web forum, Discourse, Context and Media, 4/5: 38–47. Hilte, L. R. Vandekerckhove and W. Daelemans (2019). Adolescents’ perceptions of social media writing: Has non-standard become the new standard?, European Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7: 189–224. Hollington, A. and N. Nassenstein (2018). African youth language practices and social media. In A. Ziegler (ed.), Youth Languages: Current Perspectives of International Research (pp. 807–828). Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Mouton.

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Digital language practices and youth in the family Ito, M., S. Baumer, M. Bittanti, d. boyd, R. Cody, B. Herr-Stephenson, H. Horst, P. Lange, D. Mahendran, K. Martínez, C. Pascoe, D. Perkel, L. Robinson, C. Sims and L. Tripp (2010). Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out. Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Jäntti, S., T. Saresma, S. Leppänen, S. Järvinen and P. Varis (2018). Homing blogs as ambivalent spaces for feminine agency, Feminist Media Studies, 18(5): 888–904. Johnstone, B. (2011). Making Pittsburghese. Communication technology, expertise, and the discursive construction of a regional dialect, Language and Communication, 31(1): 3–15. Jonsson, R., H. Årman and T. Milani (2019). Youth language. In K. Tusting (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography (pp. 259–272). London: Routledge. Kristiansen, T. (2014). Does mediated language influence immediate language? In J. Androutsopoulos (ed.), Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change (pp. 99–126). Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter (linguae and litterae 36). Lanza, E. and K.V. Lexander (2019). Family language practices in multilingual transcultural families. In I.S. Montanari and S. Quay (eds.), Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Multilingualism (pp. 229–251). Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Lanza, E. (2020). Digital storytelling: Multilingual parents’ blogs and vlogs as narratives of family language policy. In L.A. Kulbrandstad and B.G. Steien (eds.), Språkreiser. Festskrift til Anne Golden på 70-årsdagen 14. juli 2020 (pp. 177–192). Oslo: Novus Forlag. Leppänen, S. (2007). Youth language in media contexts. Insights into the functions of English in Finland, World Englishes, 26(2): 149–169. Leppänen, S., J. Møller, T. Nørreby, A. Stæhr and S Kytölä (2015). Authenticity, normativity and social media, Discourse, Context and Media, 8: 1–5. Leppänen, S., E. Westinen and S. Kytola (2017). Social Media Discourse, (Dis)identifications and Diversities. New York: Routledge. Lexander, K.V. (2020). Norsk som digitalt samhandlingsspråk i fire familier med innvandrerbakgrunn – identitet og investering, Nordand, 15(1): 4–21. Lexander, K.V. and J. Androutsopoulos (2021). Digital polycentricity and diasporic connectivity. A Norwegian-Senegalese case study, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 25(5): 1–17. Little, S. (2019). ‘Is there an app for that?’ Exploring games and apps among heritage language families, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 40(3): 218–229. Livingstone, S. and A. Blum-Ross (2020). Parenting for a Digital Future. How Hopes and Fears about Technology Shape Children’s Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Madianou, M. and D. Miller (2012a). Polymedia. Towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16(2): 169–187. Madianou, M. and D. Miller (2012b). Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia. London and New York: Routledge. Madsen, L.M. and A.C. Stæhr (2021). Sociale medier. Standardsvækkelse og sproglig liberalisering. In A. Holmen and T. Kristiansen (eds.), Sprogets Status 2031 (pp. 64–78). Københavner Studier i Tosprogethed. Maegaard, M., M. Monka, K.K. Mortensen and A.C. Stæhr (2020). Standardization as Sociolinguistic Change. A Transversal Study of Three Traditional Dialect Areas. Routledge Studies in Language Change. London: Routledge. Mortensen, K. (2020). Northern Jutland: Local positioning and global orientation. In Maegaard, M., M. Monka, K.K. Mortensen and A.C. Stæhr (eds.), Standardization as Sociolinguistic Change. A Transversal Study of Three Dialect Areas, 80–113. London: Routledge. Nørreby, T.R. and J.S. Møller (2015). Ethnicity and social categorization in on- and offline interaction among Copenhagen adolescents, Discourse, Context and Media, 8: 46–54. Palviainen, Å (2021). This is the normal for us: managing the mobile, multilingual, digital family. In L. Wright and C. Higgins (eds.), Diversifying Family Language Policy. Pennsylvania: Bloomsbury. Palviainen, Å. and J. Kędra (2020). What’s in the family app? Making sense of digitally mediated communication within multilingual families, Journal of Multilingual Theories and Practices, 1: 89–111. Said, F. and Z. Hua (2018). No, no Maama! say «shaatir ya ouledee shaatir"!». Children’s agency and creativity in language use and socialization, International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(3): 771–785. Stæhr, A.C. (2015). Reflexivity in Facebook interaction: Enregisterment across written and spoken language practices, Discourse, Context and Media, 8: 30–45.

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PART VII

Language and youth identities in aesthetics and digital media

18 NEW LANGUAGES AND NEW IDENTITIES OF POST-SOCIALIST BOSNIAN AND MONGOLIAN POPULAR MUSIC ARTISTS Ana Tankosić and Sender Dovchin1 Introduction The youth is one of the main forces behind the spread of various forms of linguistic and cultural creativities. Particularly in the 80s, 90s and 00s, new generations of young people, the so-called protest generation or millennials (Milkman, 2017), are a driving force of modern transformative identity as they are actively participating in the globalised changes in their communities but also advocating for human rights and diversities. Some of the publicly most noticed examples of this generation, including the new politically active Generation Z, would be the Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg in the Global Climate Strike movement and the young undocumented immigrant Dreamers in the US. In low-income countries, contrary to some of their leaders, politicians, teachers and parents, who still nurture homogenous ideologies and reject foreign influences (see Dovchin, 2018), modern millennials do not shy away from being exposed to the global contexts and engage in a creative interplay with distinct linguistic and cultural repertoires to adapt them to their own needs and local environments. Some of them survived atrocities (the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 90s), strong political regimes (Mongolia in the Soviet era), and most of them grew up in a world with enhanced climate and social issues. Therefore, this new generation protests the current global situation through their linguistic expression. As Blommaert (2010, p. 2) explains, language cannot be understood as an autonomous object devoid of the changes and influences of globalisation, but as something “far more dynamic, something fundamentally cultural, social, political and historical”. Therefore, in saying that it is millennials that are the most active participant in this dynamic, we imply that they have all the necessary resources to lead the linguistic and cultural movements because of their constant exposure to and interaction with and within different transnational scapes (Appadurai, 2001; Dovchin, 2018) in which the society lives. This new protest generation is sophisticated, tech-savvy, better connected and actively confronts racism, gender inequality, discrimination against sexual minorities and socioeconomic inequalities (Milkman, 2017). In order to understand ways in which millennials actively participate in the re-negotiation of their local and global identities and reuse available linguistic resources to do so, we need to understand their histories, origins, as well as semiotic and cultural packages (Blommaert, 2010). DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-25

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Through observation of the current literature, we can understand that the music scene, with its aesthetics, beat, lyrics and melodies, has been a space for the articulation of empowerment, political rebellion, life philosophies, trends and identities (Dovchin, 2018; Pennycook, 2007). While this music scene comes with distinct genres in which the youth express their needs, desires and dislikes, the main purpose remains the same – being a part of the global movement while remaining local and ‘fighting’ for their own rights and a better future (Dovchin, 2018). In the sociolinguistic research on music, hip-hop culture, for instance, has been understood as “transgressive art” and a “challenge to norms of language, identity and ownership” (Pennycook, 2010, p. 34). Such culture transformed the context of a ghetto from a place of terror and fear to a place of art, graffiti and sensory consumption (Xie et al., 2007). The idea of ‘ghetto’ became a space for people to sound their opinions and fight against oppression. Hip-hop, being a transgressive cultural movement, acquired many different forms and shapes as it relocalised to different contexts – e.g., Mongolia (Dovchin, 2018), France (Swedenburg, 2001), Denmark (Preisler, 1999). This chapter extends the previous sociolinguistic research on the use of music for social movements and investigates how different forms of hip-hop and its fusion with other genres are being used to combat the oppression in other parts of the world. Likewise, it presents a form of review of this cultural and identitarian development in low-income countries. More specifically, this chapter investigates transformative identities of young pop artists in post-socialist contexts of Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia) and Mongolia, as contexts that share a similar political history, but also as current low-income countries that fight for their spot in the global scene. We understand these identities as transformative because they exhibit rebellious ideations of social actions against the current sociopolitical status of these countries using a creative linguistic process of relocalisation in their lyrics. The process of relocalisation represents a movement, innovative repetition and reuse of translingual practices through “their relationship to speakers, places, histories, textual and cultural references, discourses and interpretations” (Dovchin et al., 2015, p. 5). It stems from the view that translingual practices are always local, but they relocalise with every new use in the new space-time context (Pennycook, 2010). These young alternative pop artists reuse English words and phrases to negotiate cultural taboos in their countries as this allows them to express new local youth cultures in a new alternative music wave. The chapter shows how the critique of their local societies through relocalisation of English repertoires aims to redesign post-socialist contexts as based on the current trends of the global youth – rebellion, equal human rights and freedom, as well as more controversial trends such as sex, drugs and money. However, their transformative identities do not position them as passive recipients of global culture but as active and powerful producers of glocal (Robertson, 1995) trends and emerging linguistic and cultural identities (Dovchin, 2018). Drawing on the linguistic practices of popular music artists in post-socialist Bosnia and Mongolia, this chapter, thus, addresses two main questions: (1) how new forms of local languages are performed through the complex linguistic processes of relocalisation; (2) how new forms of local identities are performed through the complex linguistic processes of relocalisation. Research in linguistically and culturally rich contexts such as Bosnia and Mongolia is important because these are spaces where global sociolinguistic practices come to life. An insight into trajectories of the sociolinguistics of globalisation in different local settings across the world presents us with a real portrayal of diversity and individuality of diverse societies. This chapter shows how 252

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low-income countries do not succumb to the trends of Western imperialism (Pennycook, 2007), but use global resources to fight for their own cause. The music scene in such local contexts becomes the frontier for the linguistic and cultural practice and begins to represent a place for youth identity construction, negotiation and practice (Pennycook, 2007).

Sociolinguistic representation of post-socialist contexts Although diverse and placed across different continents, Bosnia and Mongolia, as post-socialist countries, have several important things in common: they are both low-income countries in the global periphery with unresolved political issues, low socioeconomic status and social inequalities; they are still tied with homogenous linguistic purism ideologies in which standard language forms are observed as “essentially unaffected by globalization” (Blommaert, 2010, p. 2); their local language repertoires are still perceived as symbols of their ethnic and national identities (see Kordić, 2010; Dovchin, 2018); and their creative and modern sociolinguistic context is largely unexplored in the scholarly literature. Furthermore, the former connections to the communist regimes and the Eastern bloc still mark the local identities of these contexts in the global sociolinguistics, loosely presenting them as linguistically subordinated to the Russian language and identity in the eyes of the world (see Dovchin, 2018). In that sense, the creative attempts at the linguistic and cultural transformation of Bosnian and Mongolian youth identities remain unnoticed and perceived as almost unremarkable for the current trends in sociolinguistics. However, the sociolinguistic portrait of Bosnia and Mongolia is anything but simple and typical. The linguistic and cultural diversity of the youth in these contexts diverges from prescribed norms, while language creativity and interplay using diverse language repertoires have intensified not only in the context of social media (Dovchin, 2015; Dovchin et al., 2015; Dubravac and Skopljak, 2020; Tankosić and Dovchin, 2021a, 2021b), but also in the popular music scene, where it is more frequently being used as a form of rebellion against the current social and political situation. Therefore, to expand the current literature on the creative use of language for social action, this chapter provides an overview of post-socialist contexts of Bosnia and Mongolia and shows ways in which linguistic relocalisation in diverse music genres can be used to respond to and protest social taboos, politics and current corrupt power in these countries.

Bosnia and Herzegovina Bosnia and Herzegovina, as one of the six former ex-Yugoslavian republics with the capital centre Sarajevo, experienced a major sociopolitical transformation after the war in the 1990s. The greatest change could be noticed in the local contested linguistic context, where three local repertoires of the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian translingual core are used to intentionally separate between ethnic and religious affiliations and deepen the divisive political ideologies among people (Tankosić and Litzenberg, 2021). While the internal sociolinguistic and political conflict is brewing under the surface, foreign presence in the country seems to appear as a neutralising agent which keeps the opposing political sides at bay. Although languages such as English, German and French have been welcomed by the former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia even back in the 1950s when, as a post-World War II ally of the Soviet Union, it separated from the Eastern bloc (Imamović and Delibegović Džanić, 2016), the English language gained an even greater status after Dayton Accords – the main constitution of Bosnia which ended the war – was originally written in English (no official translation has been accepted since). In other words, even though the English language has been used in more internationally affected contexts such as technology, fashion, science and business during the ex-Yugoslav era, it also started being used in other discourses 253

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and areas of life (Imamović and Delibegović Džanić, 2016). Starting from the 1950s and 1960s, the Western-oriented urban youth in ex-Yugoslavia were involved in the era of consumerism and modernisation, as well as urban and pop culture (Imamović and Delibegović Džanić, 2016). The global music scene at the time (jazz, rock’n’roll) and Hollywood film industry influenced their desire to learn English. What is more, its influence on the local repertoires has already been noticed in local studies (Dubravac, 2016; Dubravac and Milak, 2016; Skopljak and Dubravac, 2019). We take an interest in the new and unexplored context of Bosnia – the avant-garde dub rock music scene – where English is being used creatively as a form of rebellion, protest, anti-war movement and social action. Avant-garde dub rock is a fusion of hip-hop, ska, punk, reggae and electronic sounds, and its purpose, as with all the genres it encompasses, is to take control of our lives and self-expression. In exploring the ways in which English is relocalised in local repertoires we support the expression of the youth voice which is dissatisfied with the current social politics and cultural taboos.

Mongolia Mongolia is a landlocked nation in Central Asia, characterised by “the nomadic dwellings, horses, […] and Genghis Khan, the emperor of the Great Mongol Empire of the 13th century” (Dovchin, 2018, p. 6). However, this romanticised image of Mongolia, which is actively used to construct the façade of the Mongol identity (Myadar, 2011), is far from modern urban Mongolia today where the youth are drawn to the Western and modern lifestyle (Sargaltay, 2004). Mongolia, with its capital centre Ulaanbaatar, went through a significant shift in the political design of the country in the 1990s when it transitioned from 70 years of communism as a satellite of the Soviet Union to a newly democratic nation. Western influences started dominating the country as young Mongolians welcomed open trade and urbanisation. The linguistic transformation was portrayed in different linguistic and cultural movements slowly re-orienting from Russian towards English, as well as towards J-pop and K-drama spaces. Although Mongolia has not experienced many migrations and transnational mobilities, it is still an active participant in the global transcultural and translingual flows (Dovchin, 2018), particularly in terms of its youth sociolinguistic practices. Similarly to the context of Bosnia, this chapter will provide an overview of the transformative identities of youth in the Mongolian hip-hop music scene where they express their desires for economic equality, political fairness and “keepin’-it-real” (Dovchin, 2018, p. 112).

Transformative youth identities and relocalisation: Music, language and protest Transformative identities emerged as a part of the trans- paradigm, and the idea of transgressive theory, which represents an “approach that takes us beyond the ‘posts’ and the ‘critical’ [… and which] pulls together numerous ‘trans’ concepts (transculturation, translation, transtextuality, transmodality)” (Pennycook, 2007, p. 37). At the same time, transformative identities are revolutionary, empowering and transformational in the social scene. Their translingual practice through the process of relocalisation paves the way for the masses and represents a protest movement for a change in the sociopolitical landscape and homogenous ideologies that persist in post-socialist societies. Linguistic relocalisation, as a linguistic process, is already well established in the scholarly literature (Dovchin, 2018; Pennycook, 2010; Tankosić and Dovchin, 2021a, 2021b). It is defined as a new local meaning-making process in which “language is examined in terms of its ‘relocality’, space and place” (Tankosić and Dovchin, 2021a, p. 40), and in which “language users not only borrow, repeat and mimic certain linguistic resources available to them but they also make new local linguistic connotations” (Tankosić and Dovchin, 2021b, p. 5). Relocalisation, as an agentive 254

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process whereby youth engage with the sociopolitical environments, extends on more traditional notions of linguistic borrowing and code-switching to critique their inability to capture flexible linguistic practices and continuous attempts at language countability (Tankosić and Dovchin, 2021a). On the other hand, it is quite complementary with practices of codemeshing and translanguaging, in a sense that they all accommodate use of linguistic and semiotic resources for meaning making. The difference, however, lies in the context in which they are being explored – while linguistic relocalisation is more applicable to the construction of sociopolitical identities, translanguaging and codemeshing are situated in the classroom (see Canagarajah, 2011). Linguistic relocalisation entails the constant mobility of translingual practices, which always localise differently and “create the space in which they happen” (Pennycook, 2010, p. 128). In this vein, Pennycook (2007) argued that cultural movements, such as hip-hop, have always been local, as people relocalise specific linguistic and cultural resources and give them local characteristics – hip-hop becomes sedimented and localised as it problematises local issues and represents local ethos. Transformative identities are developed among youth, who most often engage in creative linguistic process of relocalisation of language resources from English and other languages to express their current interests, beliefs, values and youth culture. Such relocalising language process contrasts with the competing metaphor of the Trojan Horse, which aims to trick low-income countries into subjecting to trends and movements of “Western cultural imperialism” (Pennycook, 2007, p. 1), or a fascination with the foreign fashions, but it is a form of youth expression and development of a glocal identity of the new generation. Once translingual practice is relocalised, it goes through a sociolinguistic transformation, so only those who are aware of the local social and cultural setting at a specific time and have already developed a local linguistic repertoire can understand its meaning and reference (Dovchin, 2018). The youth in post-socialist contexts express their desire for the transformation of their current social settings through language relocalisation in diverse music genres – from avant-garde, which on its own is a mix of diverse musical influences, to the already well-established hip-hop. Their music does not follow global trends per se, nor does it copy-paste the Western way, but it uses local flavours to enrich the tones and lyrics and to create something that has global overtones but is primarily local. The avant-garde dub rock music scene in Bosnia, characterised by “ska, punk, reggae, electronic, hip-hop” together with “local Balkan flavors”, emerged to create a space for cultural and political expression among youth and to present, “not quietly, but kicking and screaming […] no-go topics front and center […] demanding to be heard” in the region which “was reeling from deep moral and economic stagnation” (Dubioza Kolektiv, 2021). Similarly, in Mongolia, hip-hop has been used to create a space for political debate and help the youth in Mongolia find their voice in the post-Soviet world (Dovchin, 2018). Such music genres and cultural movements in post-socialist countries are being seen as “a set of transgressive semiotic practices, breaking the rules of dancing, scratching against the groove, rapping against the status quo, tagging the public space” (Pennycook, 2007, p. 36). They represent “a set of ‘post-apocalyptic’ cultural forms set against decaying, post-industrial urban spaces around the world” (Potter, 1995, p. 8), challenging language use “by transgressing fundamental ideas of ‘speakerhood’” (Hill, 1999, p. 551). Language relocalisation by transformative youth identities in avant-garde and hip-hop is then used to protest taboos and inequalities, to express dissatisfaction, but also to find their own voice and develop their own cultural identity. In the following sections, we will explore how new forms of local languages and transformative youth identities are performed in the Bosnian and Mongolian music scene, through the use of linguistic relocalisation. We discuss ways in which these linguistic and identitarian movements aim to empower the youth, to protest taboos as well as socioeconomic and political inequalities and to ‘be loud’. 255

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Bosnian music scene – A Case Study of Dubioza Kolektiv The music scene in Bosnia has been characterised by different genres and preferences, as well as various Western and Eastern influences. Such external influences in music have also been noticed linguistically. Bosnia has historically been conquered by the Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire before becoming one of the six republics of former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia and later gaining its independence (Alexander, 2006). Hence, the sociolinguistic landscape is characterised by Latin, Germanic (English and German) and Turkish linguistic relocalisations, to say the least (Imamović and Delibegović Džanić, 2016). Sociolinguistic research in the context of Bosnia is scarce, particularly as the local academia mostly focuses on traditional linguistic analyses; it is led by the separatists’ linguistic ideologies; and still gives significant attention to the celebration of American and British English as prestigious English varieties (see Dovchin et al., 2017). Meanwhile, translingual perspective in terms of language practice is still relatively new despite the ordinariness of translingual practice in the public space (Tankosić and Litzenberg, 2021), as well as the natural linguistic relocalisation in various spheres of life in Bosnia. Global influences have particularly been noticed on social media in Bosnia, as the youth and influencers relocalise available global resources and make them local, adapting them to their culture and ethos (Milak and Tankosić, 2022; Tankosić and Dovchin, 2021b). As social media appeared as an already global context, taking an insight into linguistic creativity that happens in a more local setting such as the music scene shows us more closely how youth in Bosnia are not blindly following globalised practices and trends but relocalising them to transform their local discourses. An avant-garde dub rock music band, Dubioza Kolektiv (‘Collective Dubiosis’), is just one out of many bands which relocalise multiple linguistic resources in their song lyrics, where we could find German, English, Spanish and other resources which enrich their linguistic expression. Their music has led to the development of the transformational identity that aims to directly challenge the existing social and political outlook but indirectly challenge the active linguistic purism ideations. Their transformational identity is an act of performativity as it is produced in their performance (Pennycook, 2007). What is more, they not only perform it but also disseminate it across their audiences, inviting them to take action together. The meaning behind the name of the band indicates the transformational identity, considering that their latest explanation behind it was, ime je nastalo iz kolektivne dubioze u kojoj se svi nalazimo zadnjih 20tak godina (‘the name arose from the collective dubiosity we have all been in for the last 20 years or so’) (Punks, Rockers and Metalheads, 2014). Dubioza Kolektiv does not merely use English resources for the purposes of prestige and embellishment, but for symbolic purposes of rebellion and a call for action against the norms with an aim to change the present situation in the country. Their linguistic interplay is meant to destabilise the political corruption which has led to the socioeconomic inequalities in Bosnia. In doing so, they employ English resources that imply locally perceived taboo actions (reference to drugs and sex), as a symbolic attempt to attract the rebellious youth. Their music performance at the World Forum for Democracy in the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in November 2021, gave a peek into the transformative identity that they are actively constructing as members of the youth, as musicians and as human activists (Council of Europe, 2021). For this chapter, we will take a peek into the way they relocalise available global resources to mock, protest and challenge higher levels of Bosnian politics. For example, one of their songs called Blam blam (‘Shame, shame’) critiques the sociopolitical and economic situation in the country and mocks children of the rich and corrupt people on higher political levels who live comfortable lives in comparison to the rest of the population. Song lyrics explain how the boredom of 256

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these children who do not need to work is shameful and how the author (Dubioza Kolektiv) is in desperate need to escape their reality. This escapism is then portrayed through the use of illegal substances: “Kakav speed, kakav ex” [Who needs speed, who needs E]; “Bolje ganja, onda sex” [Better ganja, later sex]2 (Dubioza Kolektiv, 2021). Blam, blam is a part of the Firma ilegal (‘Illegal Enterprise’) album which addresses the sociopolitical situation in Bosnia and discusses corruption and nepotism. The band relocalises English linguistic resources throughout the song in a creative way simultaneously creating rhymes (e.g., ‘beat’ and ‘heat’; ex (‘E’) and ‘sex’; ‘stress’ and ‘mess’) between relatively novel English resources as well as the ones that have long relocalised to the Bosnian/Croatian/ Serbian (B/C/S) language and became a part of it. That is to say, relocalised English involves more than just English, and it is characterised differently based on the time-space trajectory of when it came to be in use. The purposeful rhyme in this sense entails the ways in which individuals mobilise various semiotic resources to make local meanings (Canagarajah, 2013). For example, ex (‘E’) referring to Ecstasy and ‘sex’ are both relocalised English resources that localised in B/C/S and became a part of the local context much earlier. Even a shortcut has been made in terms of Ecstasy to demonstrate that global trends came to Bosnia, but they have been Bosnianised to represent a social everyday practice that is both global and local at the same time. The words ‘text’ and ‘stress’ have also been in the B/C/S linguistic expression for a while, but Dubioza Kolektiv rhymes them with ‘next’ and ‘mess’ respectively, which the band introduced as novel English resources in B/C/S linguistic practice. This form of linguistic creativity challenges the idea of discrete language systems while demonstrating the naturalness and fluidity of translingual practice (Canagarajah, 2013). This is an important part of Dubioza Kolektiv’s transformative identity as they are active participants in the transformation of not only sociopolitical, but also linguistic perspectives in Bosnia. With their lyrics, they challenge the norm in every possible sense and creatively advocate freedom. The use of rhyme to connect diverse linguistic resources, in a way, shows that this linguistic relocalisation is very much intentional. By relying on the ‘cool’ nature of the English relocalisation and its analogy to the ‘street-culture’, Dubioza Kolektiv purposefully aims to attract the rebellious millennial youth who do not fear social activism. This is also supported by the fact that they relocalise English resources together with slang to refer to illegal substances – ‘heat’ (ref. to heat pills; party drug), ‘shit’ (any type of controlled substance), ‘speed’ (e.g., amphetamine, methamphetamine), ‘ex’ (Ecstasy), ‘ganja’ (marihuana) – although some more local resources exist. Words such as ‘beat’ and ‘groove’ directly connect to their music discourse and serve to represent them as a glocal band (Dovchin, 2018) – i.e., they follow the global trends, but are not their blind reproducers; rather, they relocalise them in their own social contexts and for local purposes (to fight the government corruption, poverty, unemployment and crime). The complexity of Dubioza Kolektiv’s linguistic expression is analogous with their multidirectional music genre as they create “circuits of flow” by using “snatches of borrowed English” as well as “more locally produced English” (Pennycook, 2007, pp. 125–126), together with German creative coinage from two French components (blam – from B/C/S blamaža; in German blamieren + -age = blamage [‘public disgrace’] ), and local B/C/S creative expressions (“pukla je ko keks” (lit. ‘it blew like a cookie’ [it is gone already] ) (Dubioza Kolektiv, 2021). To put it more succinctly, circuits of flow birth “the constant mixing, borrowing, shifting and sampling of music, languages, lyrics and ideas” (Pennycook, 2007, p. 126). From a more social perspective, we may assume that the reason behind this linguistic play is an active attempt to escape their reality (“I don’t belong to all that mess”) (Dubioza Kolektiv, 2021). If we take a look at other parts of the song, we notice that it explains how they need drugs to dis257

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tance themselves from what is implied to be corrupt politics and inequalities (“If I were my dad’s son; if I had money and a fast car; I wouldn’t need a job or a goal; I just wouldn’t care” (Dubioza Kolektiv, 2021). This reminds us of Canagarajah’s (2013) analysis of Sri Lankan hip-hop artiste M.I.A., where he discusses how the use of slang words for drugs and referring to illegal substances in hip-hop suggests the need for psychedelic experiences to “transcend the violence in people’s immediate environment” (p. 2). Dubioza Kolektiv speaks to commoners and for commoners. They refuse to be pinned down as they reflect “the fluxes and fluidity of contemporary life, unsettling binary oppositions established in earlier phases of modernity (tradition/contemporary; authentic/inauthentic; local/global)” (Connell and Gibson, 2003, p. 44). In their songs, they relocalise English linguistic resources and employ various linguistic repertoires to simultaneously describe their current desires to leave the country but also to problematise the need for such escapism, as well as to, through the use of linguistic creativity awaken the youth to fight for the transformation and a better future. Although one needs to be a member of the local community in order to fully understand the implication behind Dubioza Kolektiv’s lyrics, the idea of escapism is still very apparent in their song USA3, which is fully written in English: I am from Bosnia, take me to America; […] Forget this dreadful story, escape the stone age; I’m waiting for a chance to get out of the cage; I feel like a slave on a minimal wage. (Dubioza Kolektiv, 2021) The tripartite reasoning behind English relocalisation is well thought of, planned, developed and authentic. It is a plan for the social action in itself, as they use various means to explore “different horizons of significance in order to make things local” (Pennycook, 2007, p. 100) and to achieve the goal of rebellion and protest against the unfair treatment and low socioeconomic situation. Overall, it portrays the transformative identity of the current Bosnian youth culture.

Mongolian hip-hop scene Young urbanites in Mongolia have been very active in expressing their desires and having their voices heard. It was their voices that sparked the need for the transformation in the late 1980s to abolish the communist regime, and again, it was their voices that led to Mongolia becoming a democratic nation in the early 1990s, which marked the beginning of the free market economy, new sociopolitical order and a free democratic Mongolia (Dovchin, 2018). Western cultural trends came to Mongolia and started to influence some aspects of Mongolians’ lives. In his interview for the National Public Radio, a popular Mongolian DJ Ardal Jargal problematises the early stages of the hip-hop music scene in Mongolia for trying to incorporate Western trends, possibly at the expense of its local authenticity (refs.). (Lim for NPR, 2009; see also Dovchin et al., 2015); He also claims that a real ‘authentic’ Mongolian hip-hop was born when they started dealing with the country-internal issues and exploring their own identities. Limited accessibility to the other languages (except Russian) in socialist Mongolia resulted in a great influx of a mixture of various languages and cultures, predominantly English, which were primarily used for prestigious and aesthetic purposes. Hence, Mongolian artists, such as B.A.T., opted for mixing English into their lyrics to “ornament the song […] decorate the tunes […] sound more modern, fashionable and cool” (Interview with B.A.T., Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 27 August 2010 in Dovchin, 2011, p. 323). However, hip-hop in present Mongolia is slightly different from what it was before. Today, it focuses on issues of Mongolian identity, celebrates traditions and also represents an arena for a 258

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political debate. For instance, Ice Top, one of the leading hip-hop bands in 21st century Mongolia, features English relocalised linguistic resources, hence generating some new local meanings which are not readily understandable to non-Mongolian speakers – e.g., “showdahad (‘to party’)” (English ‘show’ is expanded by the Mongolian suffix -dahad [‘to’] ); “baaraar (‘around the bars’)” (English ‘bar’ is followed by the Mongolian suffix -aar [‘around’] ) (Dovchin, 2018, pp. 113–114). The word baaraar even relocalised further in the context of Mongolia to refer to different entertainment places in Mongolia (e.g., clubs, karaoke bars, etc.). In these examples, we notice the glocalisation of Mongolian youth discourse as they use both English and Mongolian linguistic resources to transform their own characteristic local practices. The Mongolian hip-hop scene is not only bound to the confinements of the English language, but their linguistic and cultural resources are further expanded by other global influences including Japanese, Russian, Chinese, French, Korean and so on. Consider the example below, where Japanese sumo-related terminology started relocalising in the Mongolian language. In their song entitled Dalan Hudalch (‘Compulsive Liar’), Ice Top band portrays the examples of the sumocised Mongolian by relocalising Japanese resources to Mongolian (Example 1). Example 1

1 2 3

Original lyrics

English translation

Baij baigaad araliin Yapond ochij baigaad Gurvan sariin hatsu bashod 50 huviaa hiidgeeree hiicheed Takamisakarig tsupparidsiin …

… After a while, [they] go to island Japan And [watch how the Mongolian sumo wrestlers make] their success of 50% in March sumo tournament And did the tsupari trick on Takamisakari …

© [Ice Top]. Reproduced by permission of Ice Top.

The lyrics of this song principally refers to ‘oligarch’ or rich Mongolians who travel to Japan to view the professional Japanese sumo tournaments (Dovchin, 2017, pp. 154–156). In line 2, Japanese はつ芭蕉 (‘hatsu basho’) has been integrated into the Mongolian prepositional suffix -d (‘in’), creating a Japanised Mongolian expression – hatsu bashod (‘in hatsu basho’). While Japanese hatsu basho indicates the first sumo tournament of that particular year – an opening tournament of January, the artists from Ice Top mistranslate hatsu basho as the sumo tournament of March (Gurvan sariin) in their lyrics, instead of the January tournament – a more accurate translation. This mistranslation may elaborate that these hip-hop artists are using Japanese on a symbolic level rather than linguistic level, since they are not necessarily proficient in Japanese language. In line 3, a former Japanese professional sumo wrestler, Takamisakari Seiken’s (高見盛精彦) first name Takamisakari, has been integrated into the Mongolian preposition suffix -iig (‘on’), producing a novel Japanised Mongolian phrase, Takamisakariig (‘on Takamisakari’). The former Japanese sumo wrestler, Takamisakari is widely respected by Mongolians due to his wild and eccentric behaviours on the sumo stage. Moreover, a Japanese root word, tsupari – one of the very popular Japanese sumo-wrestling tricks, in which an open hand strike is directed at the face or the trachea, has been incorporated into the Mongolian suffix -dsiin (the past simple form of the verb ‘to do’), resulting in tsuparidsiin (referring to ‘did tsupari trick’). Once Japanese tsupari is in contact with the Mongolian linguistic resources, it starts making a novel but locally meaningful communicative repertoire. Overall, the integration of Japanese linguistic resources in the hip-hop artists of Mongolia can be described in terms of Japanese cultural and linguistic resources spreading around postMongolia post-1990. These Mongolian hip-hop artists are using sumocised Mongolian where the 259

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circulation of Japanese sumo-related resources has started becoming popular with the arrival of Japanese sumo in Mongolia in 1991. Many rich Mongolians in post-socialist context have started declaring their passion and obsession with Japanese sumo, mainly due to the multiple reigning Mongolian champions in the professional Japanese sumo-wrestling world (Dovchin, 2015) such as Mongolian-born champions including Hakuho, Asashoryu and Harumafuji. Consequently, many Japanese sumo-driven linguistic repertoires and resources have been re-invented in Mongolia through inserting Mongolian features into Japanese features and vice versa. Through linguistic creativity in their song, and by using Japanese sumo-related resources, Ice Top criticises the privileges of the rich to travel and watch popular sports, while poverty and social inequality prevail in the country. They aim to awaken the youth to take action and fight for their own rights and equalities. What initially appears to be the celebration of the popular sport is, as a matter of fact, the portrayal of panem et circenses (transl. from Latin ‘bread and circuses’) lifestyle of the rich Mongolians and their superficial appeasement at the expense of the commoners. Mongolian hip-hop artists actively relocalise their available linguistic resources to create new practices and new transformative identities. Their transformative identities are loud and persistent as they are actively trying to transform Mongolia from a Soviet nation to a democratic country; who cherish their own traditions and identities; as well as from the corrupt sociopolitical society towards a place of socioeconomic equity.

Concluding remarks and future directions This chapter investigates the relocalisation processes and emergence of new identities in the postsocialist Bosnian and Mongolian music scene and shows how these modern societies critique their sociopolitical and economic situation as well as celebrate their own cultures and traditions through the processes of language relocalisation. Their sociolinguistic identity is transformative as they are active advocates for freedom and the equity of human rights, and their linguistic relocalisation is a practice that empowers the masses and demands change in the sociopolitical discourse of these countries which are characterised by situated homogenous ideologies. These transformative identities in post-socialist countries are developed predominantly among youth, who very often participate in the relocalisation practices of diverse linguistic resources, such as English, German, French, Japanese and others, to express their present beliefs, desired values and youth culture. Such transformation is simultaneously global and local as practices, which relocalise in these postsocialist settings, become characteristic of these regions and their local ethos. In other words, they do not merely imitate and appropriate global trends but relocalise them in their local sociolinguistic practices to present their own discourses (Dovchin, 2018). We presented a case study of Dubioza Kolektiv, an avant-garde dub rock band, in the context of Bosnia and made a brief overview of the Mongolian hip-hop scene to show ways in which new forms of local language resources and youth identities are performed through the process of relocalisation. The common factor in both contexts was precisely the emerging transformative identities considering that relocalisation of practices has occurred in order to change the present situation, but also to empower the younger generations to make their countries a space where they can live freely, comfortably and authentically. Dubioza Kolektiv in Bosnia, for instance, has a tripartite reasoning behind linguistic relocalisation. Referring to substance abuse, they describe the need for escapism but simultaneously problematise it since the youth need to stay in their country and demand a transformation and a better future. Their lyrics do not imitate English or German, but they relocalise them in a planned and creative way characteristic of their local discourse. Similarly, Mongolian hip-hop artists, such as Ice Top, relocalise diverse linguistic resources to 260

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critique the appropriation of foreign trends as well as socioeconomic inequity in the country and to express a need for transformation. Transformative identity in Mongolia started in the late 1980s when Mongolians fought for a democratic society and loosening of Soviet influence in the country. Their linguistic relocalisation is glocal as they relocalise global resources (English, French, Japanese, etc.) to express love for their traditions, histories and cultures in modern Mongolia. Their relocalisation practice is real and meaningful to the extent that a non-Mongolian speaker would not be able to understand the context of their lyrics (Dovchin, 2018). Research in culturally and linguistically rich contexts such as Bosnia and Mongolia is particularly important as they present a space where global sociolinguistic practices come to life as they use them in their own ways and for their own purposes. This gives us, as researchers, the ability to have an insight into trajectories of the sociolinguistics of globalisation in diverse local settings across the world, consequently presenting us with a more concrete picture of diversity, authenticity and individuality of diverse societies. However, in order to understand ways in which these societies re-negotiate their glocal identities, in future research it is paramount to develop an understanding of their origins, historical trajectories and semiotic and cultural resources (Blommaert, 2010). Future studies might further explore relocalisation practices in some other contexts where transformative identities become expressed through creative artistic outputs. This will further the idea that the music scene represents the frontier for linguistic and cultural practice, as well as a place for the development of youth identities.

Notes 1 Corresponding authors: Ana Tankosić, School of Education, Curtin University, Kent St, Bentley WA 6102, Australia. Orcid: 0000-0003-1658-6678. Sender Dovchin, School of Education, Curtin University, Kent St, Bentely WA 6102, Australia. Orcid: 0000-0003-4327-7096. 2 For full lyrics, please visit https://www​.musixmatch​.com​/lyrics​/Dubioza​-kolektiv​/Blam​/translation​/english (accessed in May 2023). 3 For full lyrics, please visit https://www​.musixmatch​.com​/lyrics​/158164​/13815476 (accessed in May 2023)

Further readings Dovchin, S., A. Pennycook and S. Sultana (2017). Popular Culture, Voice and Linguistic Diversity: Young Adults On-and Offline. Springer. Milak, E. and A. Tankosić (2022). Translingual online identities in the global South: The construction of local ‘gang cultures’ in the social media spaces of Balkan and South Korean artists, Discourse, Context & Media, 50: 1–11.

References Alexander, R. (2006). Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, a Grammar: With Sociolinguistic Commentary. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Appadurai, A. (2001). Grassroots globalization and the research imagination. In A. Appadurai (ed.), Globalization (pp. 1–21). Durham NC: Duke University Press. Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Canagarajah, S. (2011). Codemeshing in academic writing: Identifying teachable strategies of translanguaging, The Modern Language Journal, 95: 401–417. Canagarajah, S. (2013). Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London: Routledge. Connell, J. and C. Gibson (2003). Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place. London: Routledge. Council of Europe (2021). World Forum for Democracy 2021: Artistic programme. https://www​.coe​.int​/en​/ web​/world​-forum​-democracy​/artistic​-programme​-2021​#109244581​_109256051​_True

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19 LANGUAGE, HIP HOP, AND IDENTITY WORK ON YOUTUBE Matt Garley and Cecelia Cutler1

Introduction Building on a substantive body of research about language and identity in hip hop, particularly in the Internet sphere, this chapter summarizes the state of the art and then highlights the authors’ own explorations of Latin hip hop culture in the US. The overall focus of the studies presented in the chapter is on the multitude of linguistic and attendant paralinguistic practices that artists and fans use in constructing (and challenging) identity and expertise and in establishing credibility and authenticity within hip hop scenes. Such practices include multilingual/heteroglossic use of linguistic repertoires in rap performances along with other forms of semiosis such as dress, hair, jewelry, tattoos and make-up, as well as digital practices of selecting YouTube channel branding and interaction with fan comments. As the studies surveyed in this chapter suggest, one of hip hop’s main appeals to youth worldwide is its intersection with the political; simultaneously dismissed by its critics and adored by its fans, hip hop has provided, for rappers around the globe, a space for bold and controversial societal critiques (Alim, 2009; Ross and Rivers, 2018). This notion of hip hop as a space of levity, reinforced by the historical subgenre of ‘party rap’, allows rappers to address very serious social issues, but in a space and genre that are not taken as seriously, and consequently allow for a larger discourse space beyond the routine and acceptable, as more common forums for political action. Broadly speaking, rap artists’ multimodal performances are rich semiotic/linguistic displays of identity. Through sartorial choices, references to locally significant events and Discourses (Gee, 2004), language choice, musical style and the blend of rap and traditional musical genres, young rap artists express their social and political affiliations, ethnicities, nationalities and their own musical journeys as artists. The choice to rap in a non-mainstream code may signal resistance towards monolingualism, linguistic homogenization and the silencing of indigenous/marginalized codes (Nascimento, 2018, p. 28). Fans, on the other hand, can take up positions towards the musical content, the lyrics, the artist’s appearance and style to express their own preferences and tastes in likes/dislikes and comments. Through language choices that often align with those of the song, viewers position themselves as co-ethnics, members of diasporas or people with similar experiences (e.g., Cru, 2018). In their metalinguistic and metapragmatic comments, they express language ideologies that affirm or reject language choices made by the artist and validate the propDOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-26

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osition that rapping in a particular language is a legitimate act (or not). Viewers also express identities and alignments with styles and communities of practice by using particular languages/varieties in various types of performative acts (e.g., repeating lyrics or bits of language in their comments, performing the song themselves in their own videos or replicating the sound of language in the video orthographically). In sum, YouTube allows both artists and viewers to express a great deal of information about themselves and their thoughts and feelings about the extant linguistic order.

Hip hop and YouTube The sociolinguistic importance of YouTube as an interactive space where users can express themselves and reveal aspects of their identities through language is based on its interactive, visual and linguistic affordances. YouTube has allowed many young and often quite geographically and/or economically marginalized rap artists to build a fan base, be discovered by the music industry, create a revenue stream through YouTube’s partnership program and even sell merchandise and songs on streaming platforms (e.g., Indigenous Rappers | YouTube Culture and Trends Report). Despite the rapid rise of TikTok, YouTube is still by far the most popular platform among teenagers ages 13–17 in the US according to Pew Research from 2022 (Atske, 2022). Although some artists never achieve a large degree of fame, many are still able to reach far more people locally and globally than would ever have been possible under the traditional music label system. For young rap fans, YouTube is one of the first places to go to explore new rap content and view other similar artists. Through the consumption of content, posting comments and other fan practices, YouTube affords users space to express a connection to the artist and to other viewers, blurring the distinction between content creator and audience and allowing artists to interact with fans. Thus, YouTube can be seen as a kind of commons where an artist performs a song and fans gather around and respond to one another and to the artist. YouTube’s democratizing potential lies in the ability of any artist with a smartphone and broadband access to reach a potential audience of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of viewers around the world. The fact that there are no barriers to entry (YouTube is free) means that YouTube attracts young fans who do not have credit cards and who are reluctant to pay for subscription accounts on places like Spotify. Indeed, the success of certain types of music on particular platforms and trends away from trying to appeal to a wider audience has been dubbed the ‘nichification’ of the music industry. Moreover, artists who are big on YouTube often have comparatively younger and niche audiences and yet can sometimes sell more tickets than higher-profile artists on tour (Shah, 2020). In addition, YouTube has been a key platform for multilingual rap artists from migrant backgrounds living in Europe and North America (Cutler and Røyneland, 2015; Garley, 2019; Stæhr and Madsen, 2015) and for indigenous rappers, performing in local (endangered) languages (Cru, 2018; Nascimento, 2018; Swinehart, 2018). While the studies reviewed here generally feature low-budget, locally produced rap music videos that appeal to small, globally diverse audiences, critiques of YouTube’s democratizing potential point to its transformation towards monetization through Google’s algorithm which selects and promotes content that attracts viewers and ad revenue (Burgess and Green, 2018). Despite the fact that YouTube still allows rappers to connect with fans for free, one looming concern is that all content is owned by Google and regulated by its terms of service, making it difficult or impossible for content creators to post certain content, remove their videos or have a say in how their content is presented. A second huge concern is the fact that Google gathers data on its users and uses that data in order to track users’ location and generate targeted advertising as well as other purposes. The following sections review recent work on language, hip hop and identity work on YouTube, examining counter-hegemonic and hegemonic voices, issues of belonging among rappers from 264

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migrant backgrounds and indigeneity in hip hop on YouTube. We follow this with two case studies from our own work, Cutler (2018) and Garley (2019), both of which focus on Latin rappers in the US context.

Studies of youth language and identity construction in YouTube hip hop videos This section presents findings from a maximally diverse global selection of studies engaging with the theme of identity work and hip hop on YouTube, organized first by methodology and then by aspects of identity construction. It is divided into two main subsections: First, studies which concentrate on the artists’ contributions through YouTube music videos and lyrical content, and second, studies which focus on both the production and reception of hip hop, examining YouTube videos alongside user interaction through comment sections.

Artist-focused analyses of glocal hip hop identities This set of studies, which are particularly salient in terms of connections to political personae, are often multimodal in nature, focusing on artists’ construction of identities aligning with or opposing particular ideological positions. These studies are often influenced by Pennycook’s (2006) notion of ‘global transcultural flows’, and they are notable for their geographic range – from Brazil (Morgado, 2021) to China (Liu, 2014), Russia (Denisova and Herasimenka, 2019), Denmark (Stæhr and Madsen, 2015) and the Thai-Myanmar border (Hill, 2021).

Hip hop, the local and the vernacular In Liu’s (2014) study, she argues that by using regional/local languages (fangyan) in hip hop, Chinese youth “construct an alternative subcultural space outside that defined by adult culture and hierarchical institutions” and the local languages “assert an oppositional, counterhegemonic voice against the Chinese education system, high official culture, and mainstream discourse” (p. 266). Liu thus points to the symbolic nature of the vernacular language in rap, and the way linguistic choices challenge institutional power. Simultaneously, songs in regional languages “articulate a distinct musicalized, collective local identity for urban youth, by mobilizing the generic convention of hip-hop in representing one’s hood” (p. 266). Similarly, Stæhr and Madsen (2015) focus on local meanings in rappers’ linguistic choices. Their study combined online and offline ethnography of minoritized Danish youth, finding a surprising disconnect: young rappers engage in hybrid and minority-language practices offline, but conform to standardized language practices on YouTube and social media. Interviews with the rappers in this case reveal a metalinguistic desire to assimilate to mainstream Danish linguistic sensibilities. As a rapper notes, ”[...] if you can get to the ethnic Danes themselves and [they] think it’s cool then you have success” (p. 78). These studies underline and reinforce the ways in which the globalized and globalizing subculture of hip hop is used in local meaning-making worldwide, and the tensions of place as the global meets, recontextualizes and is ultimately recontextualized by, the local.

National and political identities Two studies which use similar multimodal methods (Hill, 2021; Morgado, 2021) examine the ways in which youth express political identities directly through hip hop on YouTube. Hill (2021) analyzes youth ethnopolitical identities among Karen refugees encamped on the Thai-Myanmar 265

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border. Despite concerns among elders that youth are culturally and politically disconnected, Hill (2021, p. 32) finds that YouTube “enable[s] young Karen to re-work a certain kind of Karen-ness and export it to a global Karen diaspora”). Through multimodal discourse analysis, Hill examines the ways in which Karen youth harness the technological affordances available, like mobile phones, to reinforce a political and cultural Karen identity (‘long-distance nationalism’) in hip hop songs and videos to a global diasporic community, challenging notions of refugee powerlessness. For the youth in Hill’s study, YouTube is “a lived place, especially when physical mobility and offline life are extremely restricted” (ibid., p. 32). Morgado (2021) likewise turns to multimodality in examining hip hop as political discourse on YouTube. Morgado examines resistance discourses in the track Primavera Fascista (‘Fascist Spring’), which was released during the election that placed far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro in power. Morgado discusses the construction of resistance through “a complex of sound, visual and musical elements as well as creative use of language” (p. 2025). The rappers “become the agents of resistance in times of a crumbling democracy” (ibid., p. 2043; cf. Ross and Rivers, 2018) and the medium of YouTube promoted the track’s success – released four days before the election, it was able to reach millions of views. Its success was also attributed to the artists’ choice to entextualize audio clips of Bolsonaro within the song’s criticism.

Analyses of artist and fan constructions of identity on YouTube The second set of studies we survey examines not only the artists’ construction of identity through YouTube, but also viewers’ uptake and engagement with these identity constructions in YouTube comments.

Political identities challenged Denisova and Herasimenka (2019), like Hill and Morgado above, conduct a critical discourse analysis on Russian rappers’ engagement with political debates, but crucially also include audience discourses from the video comments. The authors analyze videos from three Russian rappers. The inclusion of a pro-regime rapper, Timati, is particularly noteworthy as hip hop has often been cast as inherently anti-authoritarian or counter-cultural, but, as the authors note, “rap music is not restricted to resistant ideologies but can be appropriated as the mouthpiece of hegemonic regimes” (Denisova and Herasimenka, 2019, p. 3). In terms of responses, the ‘dislike’ feature on YouTube was used to express negativity about Timati’s pro-Putin video in particular, with dislikes outnumbering likes and prominent jokes in the comments about the number of dislikes. The authors found that “the democratic interface of the digital platform highlights the prevailing comments without censoring them” and […] even when a video does not mention politically sensitive cases, users exploit the comments section as the public stage for a debate […] the substantial conversation thread that occurred under Timati’s pro-Putin video was devoted to the conflict in Ukraine. The audience […] turned the review of the song into a political discussion about Russia’s involvement in a foreign conflict. (p. 8) The authors also find that Russian rappers across the ideological spectrum engage in the objectification of women, and the top comments and corpus keywords suggest little criticism from viewers on this topic. 266

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Place and belonging Place and belonging are key to identity in hip hop; and the globalizing platform YouTube provides a virtual space where claims to place can flourish. Audience responses can ratify and reinforce, or alternatively question and challenge, these claims. Strong and Ossei-Owusu (2014) examine Naija Boyz, a Nigerian-American duo who perform remixes and parodies of popular hip hop songs aimed at the Nigerian (and a broader African-descent) diaspora. The authors problematize the Naija Boyz’ cultural production, questioning whether the videos “represent a form of cultural and economic opportunism that deploys problematic tropes of Africa and black America” (Strong and Ossei-Owusu, 2014, p. 190). Comments on the videos are sometimes positive, but also critical of perceived inauthenticity. The study finds that the process of affirming a larger African identity through the ‘African Remix’ genre “is rife with contradictions, fissures and contestations at the level of production and consumption” (ibid., p. 198). Leppänen and Westinen (2017) and Røyneland (2018) are two studies focusing on identity construction and negotiation through the examination of minority rappers on YouTube in Scandinavia – Somali-Finnish rapper Bizzyiam in Finland in the former case, and Norwegian-Peruvian-Chilean rapper Pumba’s video Hvor jeg kommer ifra (‘Where do I come from’). In both cases, the rapper negotiates ‘belonging’, and the comments sections are revealing. Both rappers’ videos attract xenophobic and racist comments, but in both cases, other fans challenge these views and support the rappers’ claims. Overall, Leppänen and Westinen find that “rap and its mediatized performances serve as a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) in which artists can deliberate their belonging, often with others like them, as well as with people who understand them and sympathize with them” (p. 21), whereas Røyneland centers metalinguistic commentary, finding that in some cases, standard orthography legitimates claims to national identity, while dialectal features can be used to marginalize others. In the YouTube comments, the “social meanings of dialectal features are actively contested and used for different, often opposing purposes.” Crucially, this is also the case with “multiethnolectal features and more generally […] multilingual practices,” which are associated alternatively with “a lack of linguistic competence,” or “as an expression of young people with minority backgrounds’ mixed identity and multiple affiliations” (Røyneland, 2018, p. 167).

Indigeneity and identity in Latin America In another chapter from Cutler and Røyneland’s (2018) edited volume Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer-Mediated Communication, Swinehart (2018) examines indigenous Andean rappers, with YouTube as a multilingual CMC context […] a site where dispersed, yet digitally connected, persons maintain, contest and sometimes reject practices, particularly linguistic ones, associated with Andean indigeneity and other forms of group membership, including membership in a global hip-hop music scene. (p. 171) Swinehart finds that Wayna Rap, a collective from Bolivia, mobilizes resources from Hip Hop Nation Language (Alim et al., 2009), a diverse and global repertoire of linguistic practices associated with hip hop culture, alongside Spanish and Aymara. In a close examination of incredibly diverse comments from interlocutors around the globe, written with the resources of Spanish, English, Aymara and Quechua, Swinehart (ibid., p. 184) finds that 267

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this multilingualism functions as one of the mechanisms for staking out varied sorts of footings with regard to one another and to Wayna Rap’s music […] these digitally dispersed individuals orient not just to one another but also to larger social aggregates of group belonging. Cru’s (2018) analysis of YouTube videos and comments also focuses on indigeneity through an analysis of two videos by Latin American rappers: Pat Boy and El Cima, in the Yucatec Maya language in Mexico, and Luanko, working in the Mapudungun language in Chile. Cru finds hip hop on YouTube an effective medium for language revitalization, considering YouTube comments “key to understanding the ideologies underlying processes of indigenous language reclamation” (p. 5, cf. De Korne et al., this volume). An analysis of comments reveals that “rapping in an indigenous language is viewed by the audience as an extraordinary choice which is worth commenting upon” (Cru, 2018, p. 6) and finds counter-hegemonic language ideologies in the comments; thus, “it is individual agency from the grassroots, in this case through a cumulative effect, rather than institutional planning that influences the way these indigenous languages are viewed in this popular digital domain” (ibid., p. 14). Along with the theme of marginalized languages in Latin America and connecting to the political identities found in analyses of hip hop YouTube worldwide, Mendoza-Denton (2016) investigates the subcultural and linguistic divides between Norteño and Sureño (Chicano regional/ gang-affiliated) identities constructed and negotiated through gang-affiliated hip hop videos and comments. She considers cyberspace a potential context where young people become political analysts (and actors) and synthesize their understanding of the larger processes of race (various forms of Latinidad), language (multiple regional, ethnic and mock varieties of both English and Spanish), capital structures and global power relations. (ibid, p. 135) In particular, her analysis challenges expectations that minoritized Latino youth engage primarily with local concerns and identities. Instead, artists and fans engage with complex meanings related to places and spaces (chronotopes) including both Chicano history in the US and an even broader geopolitical remit.

The bigger picture The existing literature on identity, hip hop and YouTube, of which these studies represent only a sample, is broad, both in the artists’ and fans’ geographic bases, and in the variety of themes, discourses and ways in which both artists and fans construct and negotiate identities through the use of multimodal resources. However, a specific set of concerns and themes emerge from this work. First, the connection of hip hop with the political; from party politics to indigenous movements, hip hop on YouTube is a locus for the negotiation of ideologies and claims to belonging and nationality. While hip hop has long been associated with resistance and counter-hegemony, the literature underlines that it can also promote hegemonic and reactionary ideals. Methodologically, this survey tells us that attention to multimodality and the contextualization and situation of performances and discourses is paramount in building an understanding of the ways in which artists and fans attend to identities which are not monolithic, but rather granular, shifting and negotiated. In the following sections, we detail two of our own recent studies, Cutler (2018) and Garley (2019), 268

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which take cues from this existing literature and focus on the specific ways in which orthography and linguistic varieties interact in order to highlight different aspects of identity.

Case Study #1: Hybrid spelling and stances of resistance among Mexican-American YouTubers Prevailing views on language and identity contend that identity emerges in interaction rather than residing in individuals as a permanent and enduring aspect of the self. It is seen as a process shaped by ongoing social and political actions and is inscribed on the body through sedimentation of habitual action (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005; Bourdieu, 1977, [1972] 1978; Butler, 1990). In other words, identity is something we do rather than something we are. The lack of biographical information on users forces us to look for micro-identity moves in the positionalities and stances staked out by individual commenters and the larger discourses that underlie them. To illustrate this approach, the remainder of this section, adapted from Cutler (2018), looks at Spanish language commentary posted in response to a video by the Mexican-American rap artist Jae-P of the song Ni de aqui ni de allá (‘Neither from here nor from there’) and analyzes creative orthography as a space where commenters express nuanced aspects of their identities (see Cutler, 2018). The song title references the experience of many first- and second- generation immigrant youth who do not feel entirely at home in the country of their heritage or in the country where they live (e.g., the United States). The comments, broadly speaking, contain expressions of ethnic pride, Mexican nationalism and/or territorial claims as well as insults or ethnic slurs aimed at ‘gringos’ (white Americans) and other people of Mexican ancestry and/or other Latinos. The analysis focuses on viewers’ creative multilingual orthographic practices and use of Mexican Spanish in order to project aspects of identity in their comments (Darics, 2013; Iorio, 2009; Sebba, 2007; Shaw, 2008; Soffer, 2010). A number of patterns illustrate users’ awareness and strategic use of two different orthographic systems. Some of these forms can be analyzed as bivalent (Woolard, 1998) in the sense that they blend the norms of two different systems. For example, in (1) below, the grapheme stands in for a syllable as we see in forms like escucha (‘listen’), estar (‘to be’); escuchando (‘listening’); esto (‘this’). In these examples, must be read according to how the name of the grapheme is pronounced in English (i.e., /εs/) rather than its sound as an isolated phoneme (i.e., /s/). This form also metalinguistically contrasts the phonotactics of English in which words may start with consonant clusters (speak, stamp) with Spanish in which these clusters are broken up with the initial vowel /e/ (e.g., e.spa.güeti ‘spaghetti’). Omitting the initial in Spanish lexemes also makes them look more like English, which as may be true for a number of these patterns, performatively alludes to commenters’ bilingual, US-based, in-between, ‘neither from here nor from there’ identities. Thus, initial syllabic carries symbolic significance, pointing to the author’s awareness of two different codes but with a visual and aural impact, lending the utterance a clipped, somewhat menacing tone. The author heightens this tone through a collection of non-standard spellings including double in , morphemic (for the Spanish clitic se) and curse words (hijos de su puta guanga garrapstrosa madre ‘sons of a fucking, slutty whore of a mother’). (1) ChIckyz3 se ke soy rruka y k c skucha mal... pero aki tienen ke star los hijos de su puta guanga garrapastrosa madre skuchando sto! I know that I am a gang girl and that it’s hard to hear...​.b​ut here they come along, sons of a fucking, slutty whore of a mother, listening to this! 269

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The example above also contains instances of phonemic and morphemic uses the grapheme . Sebba (2003) has analzyed spellings with in Spanish as a marker of resistance and otherness, linked to counter-cultural groups. In the present data, is sometimes used phonemically as in aqui (‘here’), but in other instances, it is deployed as a morpheme in place of que ‘that’ (e.g., ) which relies on an English pronunciation of the grapheme (/keɪ/) rather than the Spanish counterpart (/ kɑ/). The function of these orthographic variants creates a sense of ‘otherness’ and resistance to standard language norms (cf., Sebba, 2003). It may also intersect with the ethos of ‘keepin’ it real’ (Cutler, 2003) by trying to stay true to actual pronunciation as these forms hew closely to spoken language. Multilayered, heteroglossic juxtapositions of English and Spanish are also evident in example 2 below. The polyphonous graphemic utterance in the example reflects the commenter’s knowledge of English spelling, while simultaneously voicing a generalized complaint about white Americans (pinches gringos ‘fucking white people’). It illustrates how Spanish speakers monitor white mispronunciation of Spanish as a way to reclaim power and disrupt the dominant sociolinguistic order (cf., Mason Carris, 2011, p. 476). Combining the English morphemes and for pinches (‘fucking’) signals how we ‘hear’ the vowels by inscribing auditory information onto a written utterance and “signaling how the verbal message should be understood by the reader” (Darics, 2013, p. 144). The high tense vowels /i/ and /e/ in pinches are re-presented as the lower, lax English vowels, /ı/ and /ε/ in the English lexical items and . Similarly, the digraph in voices the diphthongal vowel pattern found in American English, in contrast to the monophthongal /o/ of Spanish. This example illustrates how the surface-level interpretation of a curse acquires additional layers of meaning through the polyphony of the written utterance which is at once both Spanish and English, and a heteroglossic, bivalent, mocking rendition of an English speaker mispronouncing Spanish (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984; cf. Splilioti, 2020). As Deumert (2014, p. 109) writes, rather than arbitrary mixtures of linguistic forms, such “highly crafted utterances […] combine forms for maximum effect” allowing writers to “articulate different voices” and create “artful tensions and semantic conflicts” which draw from the writer’s entire repertoire. (2)

PedroG

pink chess gring gous pinches gringos ‘fucking gringos’

These examples of written ‘oral’ data illustrate how Latinx youth contest their marginalized status in the US by choosing to express themselves predominantly in Spanish, a discursive move that asserts their linguistic rights while connecting them to the Mexican diaspora and to an even larger transnational networked community of Spanish-speaking youth on YouTube. Despite the dominance of Spanish in the corpus, many Latin rap fans signal their multilingual competence by deftly blending elements of English and Spanish orthography, phonology, hip hop lexis and Chicano slang in their posts. For these young people, YouTube is a place where native language rights and other kinds of privileges are asserted, such as the right to speak Spanish and inhabit territories that were once part of Mexico. Defying the hegemony of English, flouting standard written norms and transgressing language boundaries is a defiant act of identity for multilingual hip hop youth that signals a re-fashioning of their identities and language practices as hybrid and transnational (Zentella, 2007, p. 36).

Case Study #2: The complex construction of Latinidad in US-Latin hip hop videos2 Garley (2019) examines four Latin hip hop tracks on YouTube and their comments, including artists from different regions of the US (Houston, Los Angeles, New York City) and of different 270

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Latin ethnicities, including Afro-Latino artists The Beatnuts (of Colombian and Dominican heritage) and Chicano artists Chingo Bling and Sick Jacken. The study uses discourse-centered online ethnography (Androutsopoulos, 2008) and computer-mediated discourse analysis (Herring, 2013) to examine the connection between language (and in particular, orthographic stylization and creativity) and other signifiers, identity construction and negotiation and how each context complicates and challenges viewers and commenters’ notions of Latinidad as expressed through relationships to multiple varieties of Spanish and English. In Chingo Bling’s video for Cerveza (‘beer’), the Houston-based rapper draws linguistic resources from a repertoire encompassing Border Spanish and African American English as well as Hip Hop Nation Language (Alim et al., 2009). Sample lyrics follow: (3) Lucy I’m home, Chingo Ricardo, I get my superpowers out this lil tequila bottle / the world is my piñata, I break it with my riata, who the lil ese puttin Houston on the mapa In the lyrics, Chingo Bling draws on AAE (single preposition out rather than out of, copula deletion in who the lil ese) features found in multiple non-standard Englishes (lil for ‘little’ and -in gerunds). In addition to English varieties, Chingo Bling uses Spanish mapa, common Spanish borrowings into English (tequila, piñata, fajitas and torta) and Caló, an argot predating hip hop originating along the US-Mexico border (the double entendres of riata ‘lasso’, as well as the term ese ‘dude’). In terms of content, the reference to Cuban-American TV character Ricky Ricardo from I Love Lucy indexes a broader Latino and Latin American identity. Fan comments reinforce and validate Chingo Bling’s hybrid linguistic practices, as in (4a-c): (4a) ORALE!!!!! CHINGO BLING FKN BOMB ASS ROLA (4b) Hey chingo que paso wey salu2 desde mcallen tx whats up with the rancho you had over here man te la lavas y te tomas el aqua (4c) juan hunna mexican !💯 viva guerrero ala verga 🔥🔥 In examining these comments, it is evident that varieties of Spanish and English are blended and merged together, and categorizing something like juan hunna mexican in (4c) as written in a variety of one language or the other becomes a difficult proposition. Here, the Spanish name Juan substitutes near-homophonically for English ‘one’, the novel form hunna for ‘hundred’ and the ‘100’ emoji provides the context for the missing ‘percent’. Established strategies for orthographic creativity, like the truncated FKN in (4a) or the use of the character 2 in salu2 ‘saludos/greetings’ in (4b) further demonstrate the playful shared register used by Chingo Bling’s fans. Here, the interaction between the primary text (YouTube video and lyrics) and audience reactions (fan comments) creates a virtual space for constructions and negotiations of Latinidad. From the New York City area, two videos were examined for the Beatnuts’ Se Acabo (‘It’s Over’). Two versions of the song exist: the album version with Dominican-American artist Magic Juan, and a remix with rapper Method Man. Each version features (different) verses by the Beatnuts members, Dominican-American rapper JuJu and Colombian-American rapper Psycho Les. Comparison of the two versions of the song reveals stark language-choice differences; in the album version, nearly the entire song, including the Beatnuts’ verses, are in Spanish with minimal code-switching or use of English borrowings. Comments on this version are also more readily identifiable as monolingual in some variety of Spanish or English, unlike the language mixture evidenced in Chingo Bling’s comments. Alternative orthography here reveals itself primarily in the Spanish comments, with forms like ‘buen’, ‘boricuas’ and for 271

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‘güero’. The second version, featuring non-Latino rapper Method Man, is notable for the Beatnuts’ monolingual English verses, but while the Latin rappers avoid Spanish here, Method Man engages in emblematic code-switching with well-known set phrases: (5)

I fuck wit Beatnuts, Livin la vida loca Callete la boca, see the Spanish fly on the sofa

This can be analyzed as a kind of linguistic crossing (Rampton, 2005), the performance of an identity that one does not usually have access to (and which may be contested). Comments on the remix show far less orthographic stylization than found on the original version or on Chingo Bling’s video. Here, the linguistic repertoires in use by commenters and lyricists reflect a less hybrid and more emblematic linguistic construction of Latinidad. The final video included in the analysis is La Coka Nostra’s Brujeria (‘witchcraft’). While La Coka Nostra is an Anglo rap group, this song features an all-Spanish verse from Los Angelesbased Chicano rapper Sick Jacken. An interesting element here is the storyline; In the lyrics, the three Anglo rappers from La Coka Nostra are headed to the barrio to buy cocaine from a Spanishspeaking drug dealer. Sick Jacken’s verse (as the dealer) in Spanish is interpolated with Slaine, one of the Anglo rappers, interjecting “What’d he say?” and “What the fuck is he talking about?” After Sick Jacken’s verse, Slaine raps, “You so fucking crazy, I’m freaking, let’s vanish / I don’t even know if what he’s speaking is Spanish.” Slaine’s reaction within the storyline reveals ideological orientations towards Spanish (and by extension its speakers) as dangerous and incomprehensible, an orientation reinforced by the song title of Brujeria. The song reinforces stereotyped narratives of Latin criminality and threat; however, within the quasi-fantasy outlaw narrative of hardcore/ gangster rap, audiences respond in positive ways. English-variety reactions in the comment section bear this out: (6a) That Spanish part is so tight.. “what is he sayin?”, “wtf is he talking about?” Lmao (6b) fuckin love the energy in this track, sick jacken fits this track perfectly, i got no fucking clue what he’s sayin really, but that just makes it THAT much better haha A number of comments involve code-mixing, and these tend also to be positive about both La Coka Nostra’s contributions along with Sick Jacken’s, while displaying strategies of orthographic creativity and hybridity, with representing the /i/ pronunciation of the grapheme from Spanish to felicitously express ‘these’, idiosyncratic use of punctuation, as a single lexical item which fits into the Spanish-variety frame of that part of the comment: (6c) this vatos are bad on the mic,, they have a nice flow,, y con el sick jacken,,, si la rifan estos whiteboys, [these dudes are bad on the mic,, they have a nice flow,, and with sick jacken,,, these whiteboys brought it,] Overall, the discrepancy between the language mixing in the comments on the Chingo Bling and La Coka Nostra videos and the distinct presentation of language varieties on the Beatnuts comments can be explained by the more ethnically homogeneous but culturally hybrid Chicano community which Chingo Bling and Sick Jacken appeal to. The two videos by the Beatnuts revealed the more compartmentalized language practices of Latin rappers affiliated with the ‘core’ hip hop culture – where the boundaries of ideologized Spanish and English linguistic identities are 272

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more clearly delineated, and identification with national origin is more often expressed through emblematic linguistic features.

Concluding remarks and future directions As we can see in the literature and case studies described here, it is evident that both hip hop and YouTube are interdependent tools for young people to connect around a set of shared practices and raise important questions about the political systems in which they live. As we see in the various analyses of the videos, the lyrics and the comments, YouTube provides hip hop youth with a space for debating important social, political and linguistic issues with locals, members of diasporic communities and others around the globe. The centrality of language and identity in these debates is evident both in artist-focused and more user-focused work as many hip hop youth align with and gravitate towards local, nonstandard, hybrid, bivalent, indigenous and multilingual repertoires as a counter-hegemonic stance against top-down social, political and/or educational control as we see in work by Liu (2014), Cutler (2018), Garley (2019), Mendoza-Denton (2016) and Cru (2018). This tendency is particularly notable for indigenous rappers and their fans who rap and comment about the use of Aymara (Swinehart, 2018), Yucatec Maya in Mexico and Luanko (Cru, 2018). These instances can be analyzed as micro-level, grassroots, cumulative efforts to change how indigenous languages are evaluated, as Cru (2018) argues. On the other hand, language choices made by rappers do not always reject hegemonic language norms, as Stæhr and Madsen (2015) show for Danish youth from migrant backgrounds whose everyday multi-ethnolectal speech style contrasts with their conformity to standard Danish in their rap songs. In sum, language variation, whether rejecting or embracing standard language ideologies, constitutes stances that convey how rappers and their fans think about language. Turning to identity, the studies reviewed reveal a range of expressions from the desire to belong, the desire to be seen and recognized and various political identities from left-wing/progressive to right-wing/pro-government. For youth from migrant/immigrant backgrounds in Europe and the US, there is an evident desire to belong, and ambiguity about whether one is – and what it means to be – Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, or US/American as an immigrant and particularly as a person of color. These desires and debates are expressed in the song titles (‘Where am I from’ (Røyneland, 2018); ‘Neither from here nor from there’ Cutler (2018)), the lyrics (Cutler, 2018; Røyneland, 2018), hybrid sartorial choices (Garley, 2019) and viewer comments (Leppänen and Westinen, 2017; Røyneland, 2018). In other cases, rappers express the desire to connect with larger international diasporas and be ratified and recognized as a legitimate group in their own right (Hill, 2021; Strong and Ossei-Owusu, 2014; Swinehart, 2018). Other forms of identity expression take the form of political alignments including those who loudly resist fascism and right-wing demagoguery (Morgado, 2021) as well as those who embrace such values (Denisova and Herasimenka, 2019). Studying language and identity in the context of hip hop and YouTube involves the analysis of many types of data, from the moving images, clothing, dance styles and lyrics of the rap artists’ performances, to the various forms of audience participation (e.g., likes/dislikes, commenting and/ or sharing) These studies collectively point to the significance of multimodality, context, discourse and orthography through which rap artists and fans engage in identity work. In line with poststructuralist understandings (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005), identities are neither static nor monolithic, but rather constantly shifting and subject to negotiation across interactions and performances. The tools best suited for analyzing these various types of identity performance are ‘multisemi273

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otic’ (Leppänen and Westinen, 2017) and include discourse analysis and discourse-analytic tools such as Goffmanian footing and frame analysis (Cru, 2018; Denisova and Herasimenka, 2019; Røyneland, 2018; Swinehart, 2018), multimodal analyses (Garley, 2019; Leppänen and Westinen, 2017; Mendoza-Denton, 2016) and attending to orthographic and multilingual language practices (Cutler, 2018; Liu, 2014; Stæhr and Madsen, 2015). While not an exhaustive list, these tools form the basis of a ‘starter kit’ for those interested in studying language and identity in the context of hip hop on YouTube, but also for analyses of other musical genres around which informal communities develop. Based on our overview of the state of the art of work on hip hop language and identity on YouTube, we have several recommendations for future work in this area. In line with recent work by Lee (2018), Valentinsson (2020), Jenkins (2012) and others, future work might include explorations of fandom surrounding hip hop on YouTube to investigate fan engagement, media consumption, language practices and other practices. Linking with work on indigenous language revitalization and reclamation as well as the growing number of studies of indigenous Aymara, Yucatec Maya and Luanko rap (Cru, 2019; Swinehart, 2018), we would particularly like to see additional analyses of indigenous rap and diasporic hip hop communities as well as more work on languages other than English and from parts of the world outside of Europe and North America on YouTube. Finally, we see great potential for multisemiotic analyses of rap and hip hop in digital spaces, particularly more attention to the musical subgenres within rap music, the presence and significance of musical blends within rap music, the semiotics of various hip hop dance styles and forms of hybridity within the musical and linguistic practices of rappers and their fans.

Notes 1 Corresponding authors: Matt Garley, York College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, York College Department of English, 94-20 Guy R Brewer Blvd, Jamaica, NY 11451, USA, ORCID: 0000-0002-1023-5239. Cecelia Cutler, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, Graduate Center Linguistics Program, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA, ORCID: 00000003-2292-0505. 2 Portions of this section’s content are adapted from Garley (2019) and are adapted here with permission of the copyright holder.

Further reading Alim, H.S. (2009). Translocal style communities: Hip hop youth as cultural theorists of style, language, and globalization, Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), 19(1): 103–127.

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20 GRAFFITI David Karlander1

Introduction On a Saturday morning in early November 2021, I crossed the Schwabentorbrücke bridge over the river Dreisam in Freiburg, a medieval university town in southern Germany. On the riverbank below me, half a dozen graffiti writers were working on a newly coated wall. They painted slowly and calmly, frequently pausing, chatting, or stepping back to get a better view of their work: a sequence of pieces celebrating the fortieth birthday of BEAT, a fellow writer. The smell of paint mixed with the Black Forest air, dissolving over belfries, tiled roofs and a nearby vineyard. The scene was at once typical and atypical. It embodied some of the central dynamics of graffiti writing while simultaneously complicating some of the most widely reiterated representations of graffiti writing. While graffiti is commonly associated with young people breaking the law, these writers were approaching middle age and painted legally, on one of Freiburg’s designated graffiti walls. And while graffiti is often viewed as symbiotic with urban decay and destitute inner-city neighbourhoods, BEAT’s birthday wall was being painted in one of the most picturesque and affluent regions of Europe, half a world and half a century apart from the US East Coast cities where contemporary graffiti first arose. These tensions are, arguably, constitutive of the present state of graffiti writing (Ferrell, 2016; Ross et al., 2017; Ross, Lennon and Kramer, 2020). Graffiti often finds itself strained between local practice and global processes of diffusion, between legality and illegality, between suppression and mainstream acceptance, between its history and its contemporary inflections. In this chapter, I use some of these constitutive oppositions as a narrative scaffold for a review of recent and (some) canonical scholarship on graffiti. The point of this approach is to avoid reducing graffiti to some supposed essence – be it ‘art’, ‘vandalism’, ‘subculture’ or the like – and instead direct attention to the manifold meanings and inflections of contemporary graffiti, presenting new and energizing input to sociolinguistic research on writing in public space. In this spirit, I discuss graffiti as image and practice, covering attempts to suppress and commodify it, as well as the various forms of mobility to which it is subject. I account for scholarship in a range of fields, including sociology, art history, criminology and graffiti studies, before summing up and considering some implications for sociolinguistics and neighbouring fields. DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-27

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Image and practice Graffiti is a broad term, definitions of which may include a range of textual and visual genres. Its everyday use may cover subcultural graffiti, political graffiti, gang graffiti, toilet graffiti, or simply unauthorized writing of any kind. The temporal scope of the term has been extended to large sections of history, all the way back to humans’ first experiments with script. This chapter does not cover all these facets and phases of public writing. Instead, it focuses on the type of graffiti which arose in US East Coast cities in the late 1960s, exploded in New York during its urban and fiscal crises in the 1970s, and subsequently spread across the world, from the 1980s and onwards (Ferrell, 2016; Iveson, 2007; Snyder, 2009). Arguably, the emphasis placed on form, colour, style, aesthetics and faithfulness to genre, as well as its internal lines of development embodied sets apart this type of graffiti from other – aesthetically disinterested – forms of public writing (Ferrell, 2016; Ross et al., 2017). Delineated in this way, the term graffiti denotes images and practices which align with a cultural or subcultural tradition, bound by its history and defined by its aesthetic, generic and formal coherence, its common choice of media and techniques, and its internal systems of value. It implies an emphasis on letters and on graffiti writers’ pseudonyms or monikers, which typically constitute the text of tags (signatures), throw ups (quickly executed combinations of letters) and pieces (elaborate combinations of letters), the main genres of graffiti (Castelman, 1982; Ferrell, 1998; Snyder, 2009). The term likewise points to an anarchic genesis – to unlicensed acts of public writing – and to an incessant circulation, persisting across time, diffusing graffiti across the world and adapting it to local conditions. Finally, it connotes a specific history, key events and agents, a production of lore and documentation, as well as a formation of new visual practices and modes of artistic production. Graffiti has gradually been granted access to the institutions of mainstream society, including art galleries (Hansen and Flynn, 2015; Weill, 2021) and academic research (Ferrell, 2016; Ross et al., 2017). It has engendered new forms of visual expression, such as ‘postgraffiti’ and street art, a conglomerate of visual and material genres – stencils, posters, figurative and non-figurative painting, knitting (‘yarn bombing’), mosaics, sculptures and so on – which have grown out of graffiti writing since the 1980s (Ross, Lennon, and Kramer, 2020; McAuliffe, 2012; Ross, Wacławek, 2011; Wells, 2016). Graffiti, following these specifications, was first written by adolescents in New York and Philadelphia in the late 1960s and early 1970s – “youths armed with marker pens and cans of spray-paint” who, as Baudrillard put it in a reflection on the emerging graffiti scene, managed to “scramble the signals of urbania and dismantle the order of signs” (Baudrillard, 1993 [1976], p. 80ff.). Graffiti writers usually wrote and painted without permission – on subway trains, in subway stations, on walls. Their practice was driven by an aim to show style and skill and of accruing recognition and fame among peers – ‘getting up’ (one’s name) across the city. It involved, and still involves, strongly competitive traits, with graffiti writers – alone or in crews – striving for fame through stylistic and spatial dominance (Castleman, 1982; Halsey and Pederick, 2010; PabónColón, 2018). From its inception, graffiti has been intimately connected with the city, as writers harness a close, often affectionate, relationship with urban space (Austin, 2001, pp. 184–186; Ferrell and Weide, 2010; Halsey and Young, 2006). Yet, the global spread of graffiti has, if not reworked, at least expanded this spatial frame, with some graffiti practices emerging or developing in periurban and rural places (Bondurin, 2014; Naguib and Farstadvoll, 2019; Smith, 2017; Weide, 2016). The rise of graffiti has been treated as a subcultural moment, at which urban youths – typically boys and young men from the lower end of the social hierarchy – collectively crafted a new 278

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visual mode of expression, embedded in new frameworks of evaluation and action (Austin, 2001; Pabón-Colón, 2018; Snyder, 2009). Much scholarship has affirmed the suggestion by Lachmann (1988) that graffiti, as a social and aesthetic practice, follows predictable trajectories – subcultural ‘career paths’ or ‘subculture careers’ – extending from amateurish and casual writing to mastery and enduring fame (Halsey and Pederick, 2010; Iveson, 2007; McAuliffe, 2013). As this line of work indicates, it is difficult to construe graffiti solely as a ‘youth culture’. The careers of some graffiti writers are known to stretch across several decades, with some pioneers from the 1970s and early 1980s remaining active in the 2010s and early 2020s (Jacobson, 2020; Pabón-Colón, 2018; Wacławek, 2011). The trajectories of graffiti writing may, furthermore, reach deep into mainstream society, as some graffiti writers manage to integrate into the established art scene or use their artistic prowess in creative professions (McAuliffe, 2012; Schacter, 2014; Snyder, 2009). Some graffiti writers have become scholars of graffiti, embarking on academic careers in art studies, sociology or related disciplines (Ferrell, 2017; Ross et al., 2017). While it would be exaggerated to frame graffiti as a certain key to social mobility, some writers from marginalized backgrounds have nonetheless stressed that graffiti endowed their lives with meaning, pleasure and direction, keeping them away from more “destructive activities” (Austin, 2001, p. 180; also Christen, 2009). Some scholars are cautious of the generality of such accounts, emphasizing instead that many writers have a middle-class background, carrying a positive view of art and of the possible social profits of artistic sacrifice (Bloch, 2012; Macdonald, 2001; Schneider, 2006). Other scholars have challenged the ingrained image of writers as (young) men, calling attention to the works and practices of women involved in street art and graffiti (Chang, 2019; Fransberg, 2019; Pabón-Colón, 2018). While no comprehensive study of graffiti writer demographics is currently available, it is nonetheless certain that generalizations about writer archetypes are at risk of overlooking the multiplicity and variation of the images and practices of graffiti. It is nonetheless relatively safe to say that graffiti is not only confined to closed networks of young people. Its modes of production, circulation and uptake are sprawling and mutable – socially, spatially and aesthetically – extending far beyond a single age-group. For some writers, graffiti remains a temporary interest, practiced during a few years in one’s youth. For others, however, the commitment to graffiti writing lasts for several decades, continuing with shifting intensity over a large part of one’s life. Graffiti embodies a high level of symbolic continuity, with some writers maintaining a steady presence in the social and stylistic consciousness of the scene across several decades. Yet, the association of graffiti with urban ‘youth culture’ appears to stand strong, at least outside specialist circles. The stereotypical idea of graffiti writers as young male vandals is ingrained in the public consciousness (Fransberg, 2019; Pabón-Colón, 2018). It can only be challenged if graffiti is treated analytically as a practice, since pseudonymously painted images alone often reveal little about their creators. Grasping the minutiae of graffiti writing may accordingly help to yield a better understanding of how age categories are performed or obscured, disciplined or challenged – by graffiti writers and other social agents. Accounts produced within the graffiti scene, such as books and interviews recounting long graffiti careers (e.g. Mirando, 2014; SABE, 2017; Sjöstrand, 2012), as well as a greater sensitization to questions of age in research on graffiti, are instrumental to this end.

Suppression and commodification Graffiti is an integral part of the fabric of late-modern cities. Yet, its presence is often unstable and its meanings often unpredictable, being shaped and reshaped as social agents grapple with each other, and with each other’s interests in and visions of the city. Graffiti may be met with public 279

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and private attempts at suppression, but also with efforts to make it a valued good, a commodity from which symbolic and economic profits can be reaped. These dynamics are overlaid with struggles over the control of public space, over property rights and over the legal status of individual instances of graffiti (Iveson, 2007, 2013; McAuliffe, 2012; Ross et al., 2017). These struggles have, in turn, significantly shaped the reception and development of graffiti writing, endowing it with transgressive and felonious indexicalities. While far from all graffiti is painted illegally or without permission (Chang, 2019; Kramer, 2017; McAuliffe, 2013; Young, 2014), unauthorized graffiti has, to a large extent, come to denote graffiti pars pro toto. As such, it has been targeted by lawmakers, courts and law enforcement since its emergence in the early 1970s (Cresswell, 1992; Dickinson, 2008; McAuliffe, 2012; Young, 2014). Unauthorized graffiti in public space is not only policed by law enforcement agencies and courts of law, but likewise targeted by systematic attempts at physical erasure. The continuous removal of graffiti from public space is an integral part of officially authorized routines of urban upkeep and maintenance, intended to preserve the sanctioned semiotic order of a city (Denis and Pontille, 2021; Graham and Thrift, 2007; Karlander, 2019). Such anti-graffiti regimes date back to the early days of graffiti. The proliferation of graffiti on the subway trains and walls of New York City in the 1970s was met with systematic attempts at erasure – a ‘war on graffiti’ first declared by city authorities and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in 1972 (Austin, 2001; Cresswell, 1992; Dickinson, 2008; Iveson, 2007, 2010). Following this watershed moment, tags and pieces were painted over or washed away with strong solvents, with the public transport system evolving into the main visual battleground. The New York subway was soon equipped with industrial-scale automated cleaning facilities, nicknamed ‘the Buff’ by graffiti writers. Public authorities all over the world have since appropriated this response to graffiti, pursuing by default a hard-line approach to unauthorized semiosis (Bloch, 2020; Kimvall, 2013; Young, 2014). As a result, unauthorized graffiti – and sometimes also authorized graffiti – tends to be visually suppressed: scrubbed off, covered up or erased in some other way. Under such conditions, the nonexistence of graffiti is a goal and an object of desire, resonating with fantasies of visually silent space or poised modernist elegance, absolute in its smoothness and lack of adornment (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2012). At the same time, the clashing of graffiti writers with the sanctioned visual order has never been a purely aesthetic conflict, but one with political and economic causes and ramifications. It interrelates with urban planning and development, corporate interests, neighbourhood politics and popular opinion. Attempts to suppress graffiti are, thus, usually not manifested solely in acts of erasure (Denis and Pontille, 2021; Karlander, 2019; Kimvall, 2013). As Iveson (2010) argues, an ambitious anti-graffiti regime is likely to result in thoroughgoing changes in urban space, at times verging at a partial militarization of the city. Waging ‘war’ on graffiti means installing defensive structures (e.g. fences, barbed and razor wire, alarms) and surveillance systems (e.g. CCTV, motion detectors, acoustic sensors, spray paint detectors) in train depots and high-visibility spots. It also involves establishing designated anti-graffiti law enforcement units and systematic intelligence gathering (Dickinson, 2008; Eley and Rampton, 2020; Iveson, 2010; McAuliffe, 2012). Such interventions modify cities in a more permanent and more thoroughgoing fashion than do the mere erasure of graffiti. They rework the very structure of urban space and thereby modify the conditions of urban life. The systematic erasure of graffiti from public space tends moreover to interrelate with discursive action aimed at vilifying and delegitimizing graffiti. Such interventions may accomplish more than simply reiterating the legal status of unauthorized writing, branching out into discussions of spatial orderliness in a more general sense. The rise of graffiti in 1970s New York was portrayed by local authorities and media as pollution – as a new form of dirt, garbage or obscenity con280

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taminating urban space (Austin, 2001; Cresswell, 1992; Dickinson, 2008; Iveson, 2010; Kramer, 2010). This rhetoric has been reiterated in many cities across the globe (Denis and Pontille, 2021; Kimvall, 2013; Young, 2010, 2014). In all cases, such discourses are underlain by a vision of disrupted order and shattered normality, which frames graffiti as out-of-place, that is, as a social transgression inherently incompatible with the proper form and meaning of the city (Cresswell, 1992, 1996). This conception of urban normality has been coupled with visions of graffiti as inimical to economic growth and conducive to delinquency, poverty and urban decay (Bloch, 2012; Dickinson, 2008; Iveson, 2010; Kramer, 2010; Young, 2014). The so-called ‘broken windows theory’, which postulates that the presence of minor urban disruptions – like a tag on a wall – paves the way for more advanced crimes, is an impactful upshot of this vision (Austin, 2001; Bloch, 2020; Kramer, 2010). Within this ideological framework, marginalized boys and young men may simultaneously be construed as victims and culprits, at once corrupted by the antisocial spirit of graffiti and complicit in maintaining its damaging presence in urban space. ‘Saving’ the city becomes coterminous with ‘saving’ the youth, with both goals serving to rationalize and legitimize policing and surveillance (Arnold, 2019; Dickinson, 2008; Ferrell, 1995; Iveson, 2010). But repression, suppression and erasure are not the only official responses to graffiti. More recently, some cities have made a concerted effort to curate the presence of unsolicited images in public space. A driving idea in such cases is to separate desirable ‘artworks’ from unwelcome ‘vandalism’, and consequently protect (some) instances of the former category while erasing instances of the latter (Denis and Pontille, 2021; Hansen and Flynn, 2015; Young, 2014). Legal walls may play a part in this mode of regimentation, not least in states where freedom of speech is restricted (Chang, 2019; Valjakka, 2015). These strategies may veer on repressive tolerance, accepting a narrow category of desirable, sanctioned graffiti, while discounting the acceptability of its unauthorized counterparts. This double bind is not, however, specifically restricted to strategies of spatial and semiotic control. As Cresswell (1996) observes, graffiti has a paradoxical relationship with mainstream society, insofar as it can be “at once reviled and admired, removed and preserved” (p. 52). Indeed, graffiti can simultaneously be criminalized and authorized. A similar paradox pertains to the relationship of graffiti to symbolic and economic markets. Official efforts at suppressing graffiti have often developed in parallel to attempts at commodifying it. The work of graffiti writers and street artists has long attracted the attention of agents operating in the art market, such as gallery owners, curators, auctioneers, art dealers and patrons (Lombard, 2013; Ross, Lennon and Kramer, 2020; Weill, 2021). Already in the early 1970s, graffiti made its way into art galleries, with (ex)writers like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring gaining international acclaim as respectable avant-gardists by the early 1980s (Wacławek, 2011; Wells, 2016). The arrival of graffiti in Europe in the early 1980s, mediated by films (e.g. Silver, 1983) and books (e.g. Cooper and Chalfant, 1984) documenting the New York scene, produced a similar interest among certain collectors, European dealers and cultural institutions (Weill, 2021). Graffiti, street art and ‘post-graffiti’ – art and artistic practices derived in one way or another from graffiti writing – have had a notable and steady, albeit quantitively limited, presence in the cultural mainstream since the 1980s. This interest intensified in the early 2000s, when the works of artists like Seen, Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Space Invader and many others started to command relatively high prices on the international art market, featuring in exhibitions at renowned institutions and museums (Ross, Lennon and Kramer, 2020; Weill, 2021; Wells, 2016). The commercial reception of graffiti and street art has, to some degree, involved symbolic purification. It has not only decoupled commodified works of graffiti from charges of legal transgression, but likewise from public space, increasingly – if not exclusively – placing graffiti on 281

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transportable surfaces (e.g. canvases, panels) located in galleries and other semi-public sites as well as in private space. At the same time, as Chang (2019) and Weill (2021) have argued, illegal writing may be converted into symbolic capital on the legal art market, allowing writers, gallerists and art collectors to place claims on authenticity and faithfulness to origins, and thereby assert the comparative originality of a particular artist or piece (see also Gonçalves, 2022). The commodification of graffiti does not, hence, fully unravel the tangled relationship between illegality and legality underlying a commodified instance of graffiti. The commercial viability and increased popularity of graffiti and street art have helped to galvanize other modes of commodification, many of which transcend the limits of the art market. The existence of a ‘vibrant’ graffiti and street art scene is sometimes presented by corporate and public actors in the tourism industry as a reason to visit a city (Dovey, Wollan and Woodcock, 2012; Pennycook, 2010; Young, 2010). In other cases, the presence of graffiti and street art may simply be an integral part of a commodified tourist experience (Farkić and Kennell, 2021; Milani, 2022; Vamvakas, 2020). Sites, streets, neighbourhoods and cities with attractive or sellable imageries – colourful murals, street art or elaborate pieces, rather than tags – can be sightseen at graffiti and street art tours, sometimes organized by local stakeholders, sometimes by profit-driven companies (Ross, Lennon and Kramer, 2020). Graffiti and street art may be coopted or incorporated into marketing operations, and accordingly recontextualized onto product labels, consumer goods, advertising material or interior design (Jacobson, 2017; Lombard, 2013). Some scholars have deemed street art, perhaps more so than graffiti, a harbinger of gentrification, lending a subcultural cool to brutal forms of urban renewal (Lennon, 2009; Schacter, 2014; Zukin and Braslow, 2011). The commercial viability of graffiti is moreover tangible in businesses which take stock in the proliferation and suppression of graffiti and street art. The global spread of graffiti has been coupled with the rise of a graffiti scene-oriented industry, most notably spray paint and ink manufacturers, fashion companies and, though perhaps to a lesser extent, specialized publishing (Iveson, 2010; Ross, Lennon and Kramer, 2020). Just like spray paint manufacturers, the graffiti removal industry profits handsomely from the continued existence of graffiti. Without graffiti writers, both lines of business would lose their main source of revenue, and eventually fade away. The commodification of graffiti may, thus, target the images and practices of graffiti writing, as well as the pursuit of erasing or suppressing them.

Permanence and mobility It seems clear enough that graffiti is bound up with various forms of mobility. Graffiti, to be sure, is often fleeting. Its form, meaning and presence are not fixed, but interlaced with change, ephemerality and movement. While graffiti may be seen as an integral part of a city a neighbourhood or a street – by graffiti writers or the general public – its existence is by no means permanent. As Jørgensen (2008, p. 237) notes, graffiti typically has a “relatively little chance of lasting for very long”. Much graffiti, as an effect of prevailing anti-graffiti regimes, is erased before becoming a routinized feature of urban space (Bloch, 2020; Denis and Pontille, 2021; Kimvall, 2013; Young, 2010). While some graffiti might become intimately connected with the site in which it was painted, this relationship does not result in absolute permanence (Dovey, Wollan and Woodcock, 2012; Hannerz and Kimvall, 2019). The mobility of graffiti is, furthermore, not limited to acts of removal. Graffiti, as image and practice, transcends its immediate spatial settings, moving within different networks of circulation and recontextualization, through specialized publishing, audiovisual and social media (Blommaert, 2016; Jacobson, 2020; MacDowall, 2019; MacDowall and de 282

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Souza, 2018). Rather than producing ephemerality and fleetingness, such forms of mobility endow graffiti with a degree of permanence. The mobilities of graffiti thus work in different ways and to different ends. If public authorities or commercial actors are successful in erasing unauthorized graffiti or if a particular writing spot is popular among writers, the lifespan of a given piece will be circumscribed. The ability to select good writing spots is consequently an important skill for attaining visibility (Ferrell and Weide, 2010). Good spots may range from walls with high visibility or high risk, enhancing the symbolic profits of writing, to secluded spaces where writers may spend more time on their work without the risk of disturbance. Untouched – ‘clean’ or unpainted – yet highly visible surfaces command a particularly high value for writing. Writers’ ability to find such spots, as Ferrell and Weide (2010, p. 49) argue, rests on an ‘intimate knowledge’ of urban geography, public transport systems, patterns of visibility and mobility, official tactics of surveillance and policing and phases of urban renewal and decay. While graffiti is a form of public address (Iveson, 2007, p. 143), its capacity of addressing an audience depends on the capacity of writers to assert their visual presence in urban space, that is, to ‘get up’ (Castleman, 1982; Halsey and Pederick, 2010; Pabón-Colón, 2018; Snyder, 2009). As any form of address, graffiti grapples with competing voices and may often remain unnoticed. But there is more to the picture. The mobility of graffiti is not exclusively contained in the dialectics of erasure and retention. It is likewise manifested as movement through physical space, epitomized by the mobility of train graffiti. Contemporary graffiti developed in and around New York’s subway, as writers singled out subway trains as the most significant locus for writing graffiti (Austin, 2001; Castleman, 1982; Snyder, 2009). The mobility of a train destabilizes the relationship between context, place and semiosis. Insofar as an instance of train graffiti makes its way into a public transit system, its visibility and circulation will be determined by the movement of the train. Moving train graffiti will appear in a sequence of spaces – stations, bridges, tunnels and so on – where it may be viewed by a continuously shifting audience. It may move between different train lines and neighbourhoods, or simply tour one part of the system for a limited time, depending considerably on the intensity and effectiveness of the anti-graffiti regime upheld in certain places (Fernández-Barkan, 2022; Karlander, 2018, 2019). It was these affordances of mobility that first allowed early graffiti writers to accrue fame and recognition beyond their own neighbourhoods in New York during the early 1970s, and to view and emulate works and styles from other parts of the city (Austin, 2001; Castleman, 1982; Dickinson, 2008). As graffiti spread across the world from the 1980s and onwards, this logic was appropriated and reiterated by writers in other cities. If a city has a graffiti scene, some of its activity will most likely be directed at train writing. Anti-graffiti regimes may of course reduce the presence of graffiti on trains. Maintaining ‘clean’ – graffiti free – trains is often a key priority in the suppression of graffiti (Austin, 2001; Denis and Pontille, 2021; Dickinson, 2008; Kimvall, 2013; Iveson, 2010). While such regimes have sometimes succeeded in reducing the presence of graffiti in a certain public transit system, they have at once contributed to moving graffiti to new sites, inciting writers to move ‘above ground’ – to streets, buildings and other transportation systems (Austin, 2001; Kramer, 2010; Pabón-Colón, 2018). Train graffiti is not only painted on trains which move along the central arteries of urban mobility – the subway, the underground, the métro, the U-Bahn, and so on – but also on more peripheral systems: commuter trains, long-distance trains and freight trains (Ferrell, 1998; Fraser and Spalding, 2012; Bordin, 2013). A particular train type affords a specific set of mobilities, bringing graffiti to new places and new audiences, and determining its patterns of duration. Freight train writing, for instance, has mobilized graffiti across continents (e.g. Europe; North and Central America), making it available in rural settings (Ferrell, 1998; Bordin, 2013; Weide, 2016). Writers may also exploit the 283

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mobility of delivery trucks, buses and other vehicles to circulate their work (Austin, 2001; Ferrell and Weide, 2010). The commodification and musealization of graffiti follow different routes of mobility, moving works and practices away from the settings where they originated. The adaptability and resourcefulness of graffiti writers frequently expand the frontiers of graffiti. Partially to circumvent the security systems installed in train depots in the 1990s, some European writers started to paint backjumps – graffiti pieces executed on trains during their prolonged stops at terminal stations. The temporary stillness of a train en route, which in a metro system lasts for five to fifteen minutes, gives a lone writer enough time to finish a piece. By collaborating on a single train, groups of writers have been able to complete backjump whole cars or even whole trains (Cooper and Ninja K, 2017; Karlander, 2018). Some writers do not simply wait for trains to stop at a terminus but create an unexpected interruption in the mobility of the train by pulling its emergency break or blocking its doors at a strategically chosen station. The interconnected mobility and immobility produced by a public transport system seem to create a possibility for overcoming anti-graffiti measures upheld within the same system. It is not, however, sufficient to construe the mobility of graffiti as only a matter of moving surfaces, as it extends beyond the movement of individual pieces and tags. Since the early 1980s, graffiti has diffused across the world, giving rise to local adaptations and traditions (Ross, 2016; Avramidis and Tsilimpounidi, 2017; Singh, 2021). As a result, graffiti is readily written in characters other than those of the Latin alphabet, including Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Hebrew, Korean and others (see El Seed, 2014; Iezzi, 2018; Singh, 2021; Zhang and Chan, 2021). It is no longer confined to relatively large and cosmopolitan cities but frequently appears in small towns and villages, along rural roadsides and railroads, and in sparsely populated countryside settings (see El Seed, 2014; Naguib and Farstadvoll, 2019; Smith, 2017; Weide, 2016). Such patterns of diffusion may likewise usher in new styles, techniques and modes of expression. The appropriation and use of audiovisual and print media have been instrumental in the globalization of graffiti culture and graffiti(-inspired) aesthetics. The production of graffiti ‘zines’ – subculturally edited magazines and booklets – as well as professionally produced films and books on the New York scene facilitated the transcontinental and international diffusion and uptake of graffiti (Austin, 2001; Ferrell, 2017; Jacobson, 2020). Moreover, graffiti writing has not only remained closely connected to practices of documentation and mediatization but has also made use of new media. Like most other cultural practices, graffiti has an online presence. It dates back to the 1990s, when writers and graffiti enthusiasts launched and used websites, blogs and discussion forums to document and propagate graffiti. Social media currently offers the most widely used channels for disseminating images and films of graffiti and street art. These routes of online circulation have made it possible for graffiti writers to reach new and larger audience and gain fame beyond their immediate spatial setting. Digital platforms also function as repositories, affording a possibility to access graffiti and street art after they have been erased or covered up. (Avramidis and Drakopoulou, 2015; MacDowall, 2019). The online life of graffiti may be intertextually reflected in ‘offline’ graffiti, as some graffiti writers mark their work with cross-references to digital infrastructures, like hashtags or names of Instagram accounts (Blommaert, 2016; MacDowall and de Souza, 2018). The forms of mobility bound up with graffiti are, in these ways, perpetuated in contemporary cities, and beyond.

Implications, possibilities and concluding remarks Research on graffiti spans a number of fields, and explores its object in relation to tension-ridden questions of power and social control, aesthetics, social practice, space, mobility, social media 284

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and political economy. The central position of language in graffiti – embodied in its preoccupation with writing, names and letters – is likewise a recurrent or even a unifying theme in much of this research. Here, it is easy to see a point of connection and possible cross-fertilization with sociolinguistics. Although some of the first studies of graffiti writing in the 1920s and 1930s were conducted by sociolinguistic pioneer Allen W. Read (see Read, 1977), sociolinguistic research on graffiti has developed mainly over the last two decades, in conjuncture with the field’s rising interest in the semiotics of public space (e.g. ‘linguistic landscapes’, ‘geosemiotics’). Often conceptualizing graffiti text rather than as practice, this research has, however, remained somewhat detached from research on graffiti in other disciplines, experiencing only a limited uptake outside its own subfield. And while sociolinguists are increasingly orienting towards an understanding of graffiti as image and practice, their presence in graffiti studies has been limited (see Ferrell, 2016; Ross et al., 2017). Conversely, graffiti scholars trained in other traditions have been relatively absent from sociolinguistics (see Kramer, 2022). An important point of this chapter has been to spell out the existing and possible connections between sociolinguistic research – or perhaps sociolinguists’ research – on graffiti and kindred research in other fields. I have made a few distinctions between studies produced in sociolinguistics and those emanating from other academic camps, placing them on equal footing because of their shared outlook on a shared object. The construal of graffiti as image and practice (rather than as text) – attested in Jørgensen (2008), Pennycook (2010), Blommaert (2016), Eley and Rampton (2020), Singh (2021) and other sociolinguistic studies discussed in this chapter – sits well with the current transdisciplinary interests of sociolinguistics. It embodies a concern for situated action, ideology, material culture and visual semiotics, uniting sociolinguistic research on graffiti with neighbouring fields, including graffiti studies, cultural sociology, human geography, criminology and art studies. Sociolinguistics’ interaction with these strands of research is desirable, as many themes and topics of investigation already cut across disciplinary borders. This chapter contributes to, and further advances, this exchange.

Note 1 Corresponding author: David Karlander, Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University. Box 527, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden.

Further readings Jacobson, M. (2020). Graffiti, aging and subcultural memory, Societies, 10(1). Ross, J., J.F. Lennon and R. Kramer (2020). Moving beyond Banksy and Fairey: Interrogating the co-optation and commodification of modern graffiti and street art, Visual Inquiry, 9(1–2): 5–23. Weill, P.-E. (2021). From the train yard to the auction house connecting the graffiti subculture to the art market, Cultural Sociology, 16(1): 45–67.

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21 DRAWING MINECRAFT Small stories on metagames Pål Aarsand1

Introduction Assuming that young people are social and cultural beings indicate that they are producers as well as consumers of culture. Digital game culture is an example of practices that involve young people in their everyday life (Aarsand, 2022). In Northern Europe, as many as 79–98 percent of youngsters between 9 and 17 years of age play digital games (Medietilsynet, 2020 Medierådet, 2019; Ofcom 2021). Digital games are no longer just seen as popular culture, entering into museums and archives, “[…] video games are in the process of becoming valued culture” (Eklund et al., 2019, p. 445). While the consumption of digital games as cultural and historical objects has been discussed (Eklund et al., 2019; Garcia-Fernandez and Medeiros, 2019; Zeiler and Thomas, 2021), young people’s cultural production tends to receive little attention from cultural heritage institutions (e.g., Patterson, 2021; Sparrman and Aarsand, 2022). In cases where their production gets attention, descriptive metadata regarding what, why and how these ‘objects’ came into being are often deficient (e.g., Sparrman and Aarsand, 2022). The absence of young people’s voices in cultural heritage institutions is striking, in particular when it comes to how objects and collections are created and interpreted (e.g., Patterson and Friend, 2021). One way to deal with this problem is to generate more knowledge about young people’s social and cultural practices, how these are organized and accomplished within their everyday lives and make their tellings matter in the work of archives and museums. In the present chapter, it will be demonstrated how narrative analysis of small stories may generate knowledge about young people as cultural producers at the intersection between making pictures and digital games. First, there will be a presentation of previous research on young people as participants in digital game activities. Then, the potential of the narrative approach will be illustrated through an analysis of an interview with a girl who talks about her creation of digital pictures and the game Minecraft.

Studies of young people’s participation in game activities Participation is a key concept in the study of young people’s use of digital games (e.g., Aarsand, 2022; Abrams and Lammers, 2017; Danby et al., 2018; Ito et al., 2013). Participation raises questions such as who, when, where, what and how do young people engage in game activities. DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-28

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Research within the field of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) has studied how gaming is socially organized and accomplished in situ. Piirainen-Marsh (2010) has shown how code-switching, alternating between Finnish and English, works as a resource for orienting to central elements in coordinating action and organizing gaming. In a study of peers, Aarsand and Aronsson (2009) have described how young gamers use various verbal resources, such as response cries, animation and sound making, to create an intersubjective understanding of game situations and upcoming tasks. Danby et al. (2018) have illustrated how children organize their gaming through instructions and monitoring of each other’s game activities, thereby creating a collaborative activity with shared knowledge and goals. Games and gaming are also made relevant for young people when it comes to game design and programming. In a study of how young people design digital games in educational settings, Øygårdslia (2018) has shown how the students switch between acting as game designers and acting as students. She also points out that the participants gain relevant experiences and knowledge from games and gaming in educational situations. In a similar study, Bowden (2019) displays how students position themselves as consumers and producers in design activities, and how they use different strategies, such as asking the teacher, looking at other games and mobilizing peers, to learn the skills needed in designing and programming at school. Lately, EMCA studies have directed attention to how materiality contributes to the organization of activities (e.g., Mondada, 2019). Combining EMCA and Actor Network Theory, Aarsand and Sørenssen (2021) have shown how digital technologies, tablets and applications, and their scripts, contribute to the social organization of game activities in peer groups. These interactional studies are based on video recordings and exemplify how everyday activities are socially organized and how games and gaming are used as interactional resources. While EMCA studies tend to focus on what happens while young people are gaming, Ito et al. (2013) have identified how young people engage with games in various ways and out of different reasons. In their collaborative ethnography they refer to three forms of media engagement: Hanging out, messing around and geeking out. Hanging out is described as children using digital games to get together, where their main motive for participating is to socialize. Messing around is described as an interest-driven orientation to games where the main motive is to master the game. Geeking out is explained as an intense engagement with games and technologies. This type of engagement requires both time and space, but equally important technological resources that enable the participant to pursue his/her interest. Furthermore, it underlines that engaging with digital games consists of much more than finishing the game, and that researchers need to investigate how young people participate in and accomplish these activities. While much research has focused on the game activities in front of and around screens, others have looked into how games and gaming generate other activities (e.g., Dezuanni, 2020; 2018; Kahila et al., 2021; Newman, 2008). Activities that take place outside of but are related to the game have been called metagames (Boluk and Lemieux, 2017; Elias et al., 2012). In a study of 142 boys and girls, Kahila et al. (2021) identified six different metagame activities: 1) game-enabling activities that include purchasing, modifying and organizing the game, 2) strategizing, which includes planning, reflecting, analyzing and mastering the game, 3) discussing game progress, game features and user-generated content, 4) seeking information about game features, game progress and user-generated content, 5) creating and sharing information, art and entertainment, and 6) consuming information, art and entertainment. If we look at metagame practices, such as live streaming and creation of user-generated content, it can be seen how these activities transgress the consumer/producer dichotomy. For instance, recordings of gaming and live streaming enable inexperienced players to observe more experienced players when they are gaming and/or involved in related game practices (Carter et al., 2020). The complexity of game and metagame practices can be described as ecologies of literacy practices (Dezuanni, 2020). The notion of literacy practices implies participation in terms of 290

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understanding, using and creating knowledge, tools and narratives. Dezuanni shows how Minecraft consists of multiple practices, involving, for example, reading books, clothing, playing with lego and talking with friends, in addition to the games and gaming. This can be seen as “a form of digital material assemblage” (p. 366) in which traditional dichotomies, such as online/offline, material/ non-material and producer/consumer, are transgressed. Moreover, research on metagames expands the notion of game practices as they include multiple activities that young people are involved in as consumers and producers of games and challenge the belief that playing games is similar to screen time. Even though it is debated, there is a fear in the western populations that spending (too) much time in front of screens may result in various psychological as well and physiological problems (e.g., American Academy of Child and Adolecent Psychiatry, 2020; Blum-Ross and Livingstone, 2016)2. Game design, story making and drawings can be seen as part of a participatory culture (e.g. Jenkins, 2006, 2018). When these activities are related to a particular book series, movie or person in which the participants share an intense engagement, they are often described as fandom (or fan communities). If fandom activities are related to a particular game or a game character, then these could be seen as meta-game activities. Fan studies explore the phenomenon of participants as creators of fiction, video, digital games or art. These activities also occur in educational settings, but within fan communities the participants are not bound by institutional rules. Here, they decide the characters’ fate (e.g., Busse, 2017; Hetrick, 2018), and they may place them in new situations and relationships. Even though fandom often involves “admiration and pleasure toward a person or text, there are also moments where disappointment, shame, and displeasure occur” (Williams and Bennet, 2022, p. 1038). Williams and Bennet (2022) point out that fandom has come to be more political as it has developed into different fields. Prefixes such as anti-, toxic- and reactionary- fandom point to some of the controversies within the research field. Within fan studies, the creation of pictures, digital as well as analogue, has been called fanart. In a study of 69 informants between 14 and 24 years of age, Manifold (2009) argues that fanart can be seen as the creation of culture by underlining how the participants create, display, learn and comment on pictures within their communities. According to Newman (2008) “fanart often serves as means by which gamers may explore characters and games in more detail, bringing them into a closer, more personal relationship” (p. 72). For this reason, it can be argued that fanart is a way of becoming familiar with, for instance, a game, a game narrative and the game characters, in other words, going beyond the surface of the game (Schott and Burn, 2007). Manifold (2009) argues that skilled participants often reinterpret the original narrative through, for instance, non-canonical visual representation and create “new complexities of characters’ psychologies” (p. 13). Fanart may challenge existing norms and political stances (e.g., Moreno, 2020; Williams and Bennet, 2022), however, it can be pointed out that much artwork is based on reproductions, such as copying pictures and scenes from games or other fan artists (e.g., Manifold, 2009; Schott and Burn, 2007), and reproduction of ideologies and power relations (e.g., ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion and age) (Moreno, 2020). The field that appears in, across and between gaming and metagame activities can be approached as affinity spaces (e.g., Abraham and Lammers, 2017; Gee, 2003, 2018). Affinity spaces have been described as “loosely organized social and cultural settings” (Gee, 2018, p. 8) where attention is drawn to how people are gathered around a shared interest, for example, Minecraft. Some watch ‘unknown’ people play digital games on Twitch, others create fanart or dress up as a character from games, cosplay (e.g., Newman, 2008). In the present text, affinity space is used to investigate how digital drawings may be organized in relation to the game Minecraft. The notion directs attention on situated practices in which space, place and materiality are interwoven. Bearing this in mind, the analytical focus in the upcoming narrative analysis will be on how young people display and talk about the production of pictures, and how these stories orient to other places, spaces and practices. 291

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A narrative approach to the creation of digital pictures In the second part of this chapter, it will be illustrated how a narrative approach could be used to scrutinize young people’s digital picture making. The present chapter uses data from interviews with ten youngsters from 10 to 18 years of age. The interviews were conducted in the informants’ homes and lasted from one to two hours. They were semi-structured and ‘hands-on’ in the sense that the participants displayed pictures they had made simultaneously as they talked about the creation of digital pictures. Thereby, the participants were positioned as experts when it came to creating digital pictures and other metagame activities. The interviews are seen as assemblages consisting of talk, text, pictures and technologies, such as computers and tablets. The data is part of a larger research project entitled: Children’s cultural heritage – the visual voices of the archive3. The main purpose of the interviews was to talk about young people’s creation of digital pictures to learn more about how they create and deal with visual expressions. In the present text, the focus is on Finley, 16 years old, and her narratives about her creation of fanart. These narratives are seen as ‘small stories’ that include tellings of ongoing and future events, things that one wishes and longs for, happenings that they share with others as well as allusions and deferrals (Georgakopoulou, 2006). Small stories are the kind of tellings that takes place in everyday life when (young) people meet, in front of the game console, at the dinner table or, as in this case, in research interviews. Analytically, I have approached the small stories about fanart from an EMCA perspective (e.g., Goodwin, 2000) where focus is on how participants use linguistic, embodied material and cultural resources to create their stories (e.g., Aarsand and Sørenssen, 2021). The analyses address the emergent properties of tellings, for instance how these are designed to create an intersubjective understanding as well as trustworthy stories. The analyses thus trace how the narrative gradually evolves; how Finley produces intelligible and accountable actions while interpreting and acting upon publicly displayed responses. Here, the focus is on both what the stories tell us about the teller’s identity and what they tell us about the performance of the metagame activity. According to De Fina (2021, p. 53) “[…] the focus on the content of stories cannot be divorced from the study of how practices are put in place through specific structures of participation and how they are connected to other practices at different levels and scales”. Thus, the interviews can be seen as a socio-material practice in which unfolding the organization of talk entangled with material practice sheds light on talk about how fanart is accomplished and relates to other places, persons and activities. Three excerpts have been chosen from the same interview to illustrate how teenagers participate in metagame practices through talk about and creation of fanart. The case and excerpts were chosen because they are parts of a particularly rich interview and because they show how the stories were developed, nuanced and adjusted along the trajectory of the interview. Written consent has been obtained from all the youths and when necessary, also from the parents. All the participants have chosen their pseudonyms. The interviews have been transcribed verbatim using a transcript convention developed within the field of conversation analysis (see Appendix A). The participants are speaking Swedish, but translations into English are provided in the transcripts. The project has been approved by the regional research ethics committee (Dnr 2021-04088).

Talking about the drawing of Minecraft The present analysis explores how Finley talks about making fanart. As will be shown, these are stories that tell us how games and gaming slip into different activities in young people’s everyday lives. In these narratives, game design, stories and episteme are presented as central to the informant’s involvement in the metagame activity. Previous studies have used questionnaires to investi292

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gate how game narratives inspire players to create fanart and fan fiction, followed by interviews and content analysis (Greting et al., 2022). However, approaching young people’s tellings as small stories even highlights how these are told and how they display their own identities in relation to, in this case, fanart. Thereby, the present text takes the existing research on metagames and fanart further.

Game design and fanart Excerpt 21.1 Game design and fanart ​ Participants: Finley (Fin) and interviewer (Int.) Time: 00:30 1

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Du vet vad Minecraft är? You know what Minecraft is? M:: E:h↑ det finns en en en server (.) på Minecraft som ehm: (0.5) några olika personer E:h↑ there is a a a server (.) on Minecraft that ehm: (0.5) some people spelar på (0.8) eh: så det är e::n (.) en fanart av det eh: av den (0.2) eh: scenen har are playing on (0.8) eh: so it’s a: (.) a fanart of it eh: of that (0.2) eh: the scene doesn’t >inte mycket med det och göra< men karaktärerna är därifrån (.) så det >är liksom en >have much to do with that< but the characters come from there (.) so it >is kind of a role:play-server< eh: på Minecraft (.) >som jag tycker om< eh: många HEHE en del av role:play-server< eh: on Minecraft (.) >that I like< eh:many hehe some of det kommer va på den för de är det som jag gö:r fanart av (.) mest ehm it will be on it because they are what I make fanart from (.) mainly ehm av Minecraft? of Minecraft? Eh: av den servern (.) eller dom personerna på den här servern eh:m så gör jag Eh: of that server (.) or those personas that are in that server eh:m so I do mycket som inte är färdigt också för jag är inte (0.2) fanartist i grunden men (1.0) det a lot that is not finished mainly because I´m not (0.2) first and foremost a fanartist but (1.0) som jag gillar me: med just den är att (2.0) ehm du vet ju vad Minecraft är för du har what I like abo:ut that one is that (2.0) ehm you know what Minecraft is because you’ve ju sett gubbarna (.) som är (0.5) dom är inte så detaljerade seen the characters (.) that us (0.5) they are not particulary detailed (see picture 2) Näe No: Eh: vilket gör att det finns liksom ingen tydlig design av karaktärerna (.) så det finns Eh: which means there kind of isn’t a clear design of the characters (.) so there’s väldigt mycket rum för eh en själv att (0.2) eh bestämma >hur dom ska se ut< och a lot of space for eh for (0.2) yourself to decide >what they should look like< and även scener i det är också bara i Minecraft av block (1.0) eh så man ka:n bestämma even scenes are from Minecraft blocks (1.0) eh so you can decide a lot sjä:lv väldigt mycket hur det ser ut i ens eget huvud så är det väldigt mycket öppet by yourself how it looks like in your head so there’s a lot open fö::r (0.2) egna idéer och eh: egna tolkningar (.) vilket jag gillar med det to:: (0.2) your own ideas and eh: interpretations (.) which is what I like about it M:: M::

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Figure 21.1  Finleys picture on her screen

Metagame activities involve both consuming as well as producing drawings based on the game or other persons’ drawings of the game. In the interview with Finley, it was obvious that Minecraft was consumed in different ways. Besides playing the game by herself, she liked to watch it on Twitch, a live streaming platform, and on YouTube. In the first excerpt, the focus is on how Finley talks about making drawings based on Minecraft and what she considers to be important. ​ Being the interviewee, Finley is expected to not only answer the questions asked but also to be the most knowledgeable on the topic being discussed. How she tells these stories is closely related to the interview situation as well as to how she evaluates the interviewer when it comes to, for instance, experiences and what the interviewer knows about the topic (e.g., Drew, 2013). When Finley both shows the picture and checks out if the interviewer knows about Minecraft, she is signalling tellability at one and the same time (line 1). The answer helps Finley to position the interviewer as someone who is familiar with Minecraft, which in turn has consequences for how the upcoming story is designed. She moves right on, without explaining how the game works, and says that her drawings have been inspired by a group of people who play Minecraft on this particular server. To be mentioned, within the field of fandom, Minecraft is one of the most popular games (Greting et al., 2022). According to Finley, she is doing fanart (line 4). She explains that the picture (Picture 1) is not a scene from the game, but is a drawing of one of the characters in this game (line 5). Note that when presenting the game, she uses the concepts of character and scene. To many gamers, the notions of avatar and level are more common to use. However, the concepts of character and scene are often used in online Minecraft communities and can be related to movies and theatres (cf., Goffman, 1959). She tells the interviewer that the game takes place on a ‘roleplay-server’ (line 6), which means that she is talking about a particular version of Minecraft. She continues by telling the interviewer that the Fanart she makes is mainly from games on this server. Then, she also indicates that her interest is not Minecraft per se but Minecraft games and the involved characters on this particular roleplay-server. When Finley tells the interviewer that she does fanart ‘mainly’ based on Minecraft on a particular roleplay-server, she displays that she even makes fanart that is not related to these games (lines 7–8). However, she downgrades her own position when she claims that she is just a person who does fanart, she is not a fanartist. This is underlined when she says that several of her drawings are 294

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not even completed. On a speculative note, it could be claimed that disclaimers like these indicate that she is not yet having the right to call herself a fanart artist, that she is not skilled enough yet. This is in contrast to the idea that affinity spaces are non-hierarchical (Gee, 2003). After telling this she takes a second pause (line 10) before she tells the interviewer what she really likes about Minecraft, the personas and the server. But before that, she takes a rather long pause. Once again, entering the position as an expert in this situation, she checks if the interviewer knows Minecraft and what she is talking about, this time by referring to the design of the characters (line 14) and the landscape (line 16). To make her points to the interviewer, she needs to clarify the differences between her drawings and the characters as they appear in the game (see Picture 2). The simplistic design of the game is presented as an advantage that makes it possible to decide what the figures and landscapes should look like. The design makes it possible to have experiences using her own ideas and interpretations (lines 16–18). In sum, Finley tells us about how she does fanart but also that this is restricted to a Minecraft game that takes place on a roleplay-server that includes a group of particular players. First and foremost, she argues that the simplistic design is a precondition for her work because it enables her to use her own ideas and interpretations of the game (see also Greting et al., 2022). According to Finley, her metagame activity is rooted in the freedom to create what she wants, which can also be seen in how the picture is not a copy of the original characters in the game. Rather, she has kept the name of the characters but changed how they look and placed them in a new setting. In fact, what helps the interviewer to recognize this picture as part of the Minecraft ecology is the fact that Finley presents it as such.

Game stories and fanart Finley has stated that she is not a fanartist, but rather just doing fanart that is related to the Minecraft game. To understand her interest and engagement in this metagame activity, we will now move further into her telling about pictures that she has made and the way in which Minecraft on this particular roleplay-server actually matters to her work. Later in the interview, the design of Minecraft reappears as important to her fanart, however, this time it is related to Dream SMP, which Finley has talked about in between excerpts 1 and 2. Dream SMP is a survival multiplayer Minecraft game created by two Youtubers, Dream and GeorgeNotFound, in 2020, and the players have to be invited to get to play on the server. The participants livestreamed their gaming on Twitch and YouTube, and quickly gained huge popularity.4 ​

Excerpt 21.2 Storytelling and fanart​ Time: 11:00 1

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Jag har en sak jag [kan säga= There is one thing that I [can say= [A:: gör det ja gör det [Yeah: do it do it =Ah: det här med ju:st Dream SMP att det är do:m (0.4) här små Minecraft=ah: about Dream SMP that are (0.4) those small Minecraft figurerna som inte har (1.5) jättetydliga designer dom har designer i små små pixlar figures that don’t have (1.5) a very clear design they are designed in small small pixels

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(0.3) eller ganska stora pixlar (0.3) som eh:m:: det blir (0.5) man får som sagt mycket (0.3) or quite large pixels (0.3) that eh:m:: that will be (0.5) as I said you get a lot liksom frihet att göra egna saker (0.5) och eftersom att det är en roleplay-server så har kind of freedom to do your own things (0.5) and because it’s a roleplay-server they dom också (0.2) dom har gått igen ganska mycket så: (0.2) en sak som jag tycker väldigt as well (0.2) they have reoccured quite a lot so: (0.2) one thing that I like very mycket om (1.5) när jag gör och när andra gör (1.0) ehm:: för att >det är inte bara jag much (1.5) when I do and when others do (1.0) ehm:: because >it’s not only me som gör det här< hehe eh jag tycker väldigt mycket om nä:r (0.2) folk tänker på dom that is doing this< hehe eh I like very much whe:n (0.2) people think of those historierna när dom gör designen och gör en design runt liksom en karaktär och vad en stories when they do the design and make a design related to a character and what this karaktär har vart med om (0.7) till exempel eh på honom ((pekar på halsen till figuren character has experienced (0.7) for example eh on him ((points to the neck of the det där är lite så här stylized (.) bränn brännskador det är inte character)) that is kind of stylized (.) burn burns that are not jätte (0.2) ja hehe verkligt kanske men eh:m: så: det är det dom är i alla fall ehm:: och very maybe (0.2) yes hehe real but eh:h it i:s as it is ehm:: and det är inte med på den här lilla pixel-designen= it’s not part of this small pixel design= =Just det= =Exactly= =det finns ehm åtminstone en person som har gjort ett så här eh:: ärr från en roleplay= at least there ehm is a person that has done a eh: scar from a roleplay händelse >på sitt skin< eh::(0.2) vilket är den lilla gubben eh: men e: dom flesta gör det appearing >on the skin< eh:: (0.2) it’s that little man eh: but most don’t inte (0.7) så: (0.7) den typen av detalj ehm:: sätts dit i liksom (0.3) när man ritar den do it (0.7) so (0.7) that kind of detail ehm:: is kind of placed there (0.3) when you draw it själv (1.0) e:hm vilket ä:r som sagt som hans brännskador yourself (1.0) e:hm that is as I said like his burns

Figure 21.2  Finley’s picture on her screen

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Even in this excerpt, Finley starts by displaying tellability, that there is more to tell about Minecraft and her fanart as well as her right to tell this story (line 1). Once more, Finley points to Dream SMP as the origin of her fanart. Also, this time she makes it clear that the design, or what she sees as not ‘a very clear design’ (line 4), frees her to create the pictures that she wants, as she wants, and does not have to stay close to the game as such (line 7). Then, she changes focus and starts to talk about the characters that can be observed on the server. Note that she does not talk about the players as such, but rather the characters in the roleplay. She tells the interviewer that they have a history, they have been through many things, indicating that the characters have experiences from happenings in the game that are of importance for the creation of fanart. Then, she makes an extreme case formulation (Pomerantz, 1986), emphasizing that she likes ‘very much’ when she, and others, consider the history of the characters (lines 7–8). She displays that she is not the only one creating pictures from this game, this is something that others do as well. In this way, she indicates that her creation of fanart is related to social and cultural settings consisting of other people also creating pictures. We know that fanart is often published in particular fanart communities, or on webpages where followers can post comments, or just watch. However, Finley once more makes an extreme case formulation, underlining how much she actually appreciates that the people who create pictures have the stories in mind, or experiences of the Minecraft characters, and that this should be discernible in the picture. Despite the fact that she and others are free to do what they want, it is preferable that drawings of characters relate to context and places (lines 10–14). It could be argued that this turns her fanart into an epistemic field where something should be known and done. Then, she shows how she has marked the character in her drawing with a burn on his neck as a result of a roleplay happening in which he was involved. She also states that the players usually do not create such marks on their skin, which refers to how their character is displayed in the game (lines 17–18). However, it could be argued that visualizing the character’s personal history is a preference of fanartists like Finley. In sum, even though Finley experiences the freedom to create drawings of Minecraft as she wants to, she also tells us that within this affinity space, there are certain restrictions related to what she evaluates as good, or what she really likes. This means that characters are not to be drawn ‘out of context’, or with no history, rather the drawings should include the game narrative. Thus, she also displays an expected necessary relation between consuming Dream SMP and the production of fanart.

Episteme and fanart Game narratives seem to be of the essence when Finley evaluates and creates her fanart. Game narratives, or stories of what happens in the game can be seen as a matter of knowing the game and its characters. Knowledge is important when producing fanart, but as will be shown in Excerpt​, it is equally important when it comes to consumption of fanart and how she presents it as an epistemic field. Excerpt 21.3 Episteme and fanart Time: 14:45 1 2

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Så d: för att kunna förstå den hä:r (.) bilden så ska man (0.5) egentligen vara ganska So e: to be able to understand th:is (.) picture you should (0.5) actually be quite insatt i= (see picture 1) an expert= (see picture 1)

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=M:: =M:: Minecraft och just den hära server[n (0.2) och lite grann annan fanart Minecraft and this particular serve[r (0.2) and some fanart [M::          m:: jo precis [M::         m:: exactly M:: M:: Eh: om man vill liksom helt förstå vad det är som händer (0.3) eh hehe med alla Eh: if you would like to completely understand what happens (0.3) eh hehe with dessa som till exempel (0.5) eh (0.5) hans ansikte (0.5) hans små ehm (0.5) dom här everybody that for example (0.5) eh (0.5) his face (0.5) his tiny ehm (0.5) these ärren ((pekar på vänstra figurens kind)) (1.5) han är ehm (0.5) allergisk >I guess< mot scars ((points to the cheek on left person) (1.5) he is ehm (0.5) allergic >I guess< to vatten water Okej Okay Eh: han är också inte världens gladaste person så Eh: and he’s not the happiest person in the world so (Xxx)

The interviewer sums up what they have been talking about so far by concluding that to understand this particular picture (Picture 1) one has to be quite an expert on Minecraft and the particular server that they are talking about, and one has to have knowledge about fanart (lines 1–4). Finley agrees with this (lines 3 and 5) and tells the interviewer that this knowledge is of importance if you ‘would like to completely understand what happens’ (line 7). Note that she emphasizes ‘completely’, thus indicating that one can look at these pictures without fully understanding them. Hence, she argues that there is a difference between those who see and those who are less competent, or not a fan. She then goes on to display herself as one of the persons able to create fanart based on knowing Dream SMP and the history of the game characters. As a museum guide, she directs our attention to the picture and points at the cheek of one of the characters in the picture, telling her interviewer that they are now looking at small scars that are the result of his being allergic to water. Even though she adds ‘I guess’, and, by saying it in English, she displays an epistemic primacy where the character is described as allergic. Displaying uncertainty can be seen as a way of telling that she does not know exactly if it is water or something else that the character reacts to. Then, she continues by telling the interviewer more about personal traits of this character, ‘he is not the happiest person in the world’ (line 12). As such, the Minecraft characters are more than just avatars that build environments, hunt monsters and fight, they are also psychological and biological beings that have allergies and can be sad or depressed. This is similar to what has been seen when young people animate their avatars and opponents when gaming (Aarsand and Aronsson, 2009). In sum, the epistemic field that appears in Finley’s telling clarifies that if the participants are supposed to understand everything about her fanart, they have to be familiar with Minecraft, they should know about the particular roleplay-server and they should know different game narratives, as well as the history of characters in the game. Moreover, they should also know something about fanart. Then, she acts as a museum guide who tells the interviewer where and what to look for, 298

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as well as the history behind the characters in the picture. It could be argued that Minecraft is the gateway into her fanart, but knowing the game is not enough.

Concluding discussion and future directions When young people’s cultural objects, such as drawings, are collected, categorized and stored in archives and museums, we need descriptive metadata about how these drawings came into being as well as the context in which they were created (Sparrman and Aarsand, 2022). As an example of how this can be done, I have shown how small stories about fanart give insights into how games and gaming are part of young people’s everyday lives. Investigating talk about digital drawings, or more precisely, seeing drawings as being part of metagame practices, is one way to approach young people’s perspectives on how they see, understand and act when it comes to digital games and gaming. The key to these stories was the young people’s display of their own pictures. In contrast to previous research on metagames (Elias et al., 2012; Kahila et al., 2021), the present analysis has displayed how Finley deals with fanart, how she handles and tells stories about Minecraft, and how she orients to affinity spaces for inspiration and guidance in her picture making. It has been argued that fanart is one way to move beyond the surface of the game, to explore characters in more detail and to enter into a more personal relationship (Newman 2008; Schott and Burn, 2007). In the interview, it can be seen that through the creation of pictures Finley explores the game as well as the characters in the game by telling stories of happenings when she explains what can be seen in the picture she has made. According to Finley, Minecraft’s minimalistic design gives her the possibility to draw what she wants and this is the main reason why she finds it interesting to use this game as a source of inspiration. At first glance, creating pictures of the characters in the Minecraft universe seems to be an activity that is appreciated because it lacks norms and guidelines for what is considered to be fanart. Finley presents this as individual freedom. However, the creation of fanart is not only an individual exploration of Minecraft, it also brings into consideration watching, meeting, displaying, analyzing and discussing what happens in and around gaming and metagame practices. Finley tells us that knowing the history of the characters and their experiences from the game matters. The game characters are presented like people from a movie, or someone she knows outside the game. The Minecraft Dream SMP narrative includes not only the description of episodes and happenings as real, in the traditional sense, but also descriptions of the characters, as if they were persons with feelings, problems and health issues. This gives the impression of game characters that are highly present in Finley’s everyday life and underlines the personal relationship (e.g., Newman, 2008; Schott and Burn, 2007). In the interview, stories about Minecraft were in fact stories about Dream SMP and the history of the characters in the game. This means that Finley does not talk about Minecraft in general but about game narratives and performances of particular players on one particular server, available through live streaming on Twitch and YouTube. Even though it is not mentioned in the interview, game narratives of Dream SMP can also be read, written, discussed and criticized on fan sites, or at various wikis. The references to this group of players as well as other creators of fanart point out that Finley’s picture-making is related to an affinity space. This is supported by several code switches, from Swedish to English using such words and phrases as ‘roleplay-server’, ‘roleplay’, ‘stylized’, ‘skin’, ‘fanart’ and ‘I guess’, where she displays a relation to English talking/writing domains. In short, Finley’s fanart is part of multiple practices. Finally, recognizing young people as producers of cultural heritage, museums and archives need to do more than just collect and store the items that they produce. Finley’s small stories about 299

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her production of fanart show that her work is related to an epistemic field, and that this field is of the essence when it comes to understanding the drawings as well as the processes of creating them. If we are to understand cultural heritage produced by young people, we also need to include their stories about work processes in the archives and museums. In Western countries, digital games, gaming and metagames are parts of young people´s everyday lives. More research is needed to understand how young people’s metagame activities reproduce and challenge social and cultural structures. We also need to know more about how young people use and contribute to affinity spaces in terms of expertize as well as social mechanisms that include and exclude participants (cf. Abram and Lammers, 2017). When it comes to cultural heritage, more research on how to access and include young people’s cultural production and perspectives on their production in cultural heritage institutions is needed. In order to do this, interdisciplinary approaches where experiences from different research fields like game studies, child and youth studies, heritage studies and fan studies could increase our understanding of young people’s everyday life.

Notes 1 Corresponding author: Pål Aarsand, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway. ORCiD: 0002-9878-117X 2 American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (2020) Screen Time and Children. AACAP: https://www​.aacap​.org​/AACAP​/Families​_and​_Youth​/Facts​_for​_Families​/FFF​-Guide​/Children​-And​ -Watching​-TV​-054​.aspx 3 https://liu​.se​/en​/research​/childrens​-cultural​-heritage 4 https://en​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/Dream​_SMP

Acknowledgment Thanks to the Swedish Research Council, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and Kungliga Vitterhetsakademin for their generous funding.

Appendix A Transcription conventions adapted from Jefferson (2004). [] = (0.8) (.) .,? :: word WOrd ↑ >< (( )) ()

Overlapping talk Equal signs indicate no break or gap between the lines. Numbers in parentheses indicate silence. A dot in parentheses indicates a micropause less than 5/10 of a second. The punctuation marks indicate intonation. The period indicates falling intonation, the comma continuing intonation and the question mark indicates a rising intonation. Colons are used to indicate prolongation or stretching of the immediately preceding sound. A hyphen after a word indicates a cut-off or self-interruption. Underlining indicates some form of stress or emphasis. The more the underlining the greater the emphasis. Especially loud talk is indicated by upper case. The up arrow marks a sharp rise in pitch. Right/left carats indicate that the talk between them is speeded up. Double parentheses are used to mark the transcriber’s descriptions of events. Empty parentheses indicate that something is being said but no hearing can be achieved.

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Further readings De Fina, A. (2021). Doing narrative analysis from a narratives-as-practices perspective. Narrative Inquiry, 31(1): 49–71. Kahila, J., M. Tedre, S. Kahila, H. Vartiainen, T. Valtonen and K. Mäkitalo (2021). Children’s gaming involves much more than the gaming itself: A study of the metagame among 12- to 15-year-old children. Convergence, 27(3): 768–786.

References Aarsand, P. and Sørensen, I. K. (2021). “And then it’s my turn”: Negotiating participation in tablet activities in early childhood education and care. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​ /14687984211030614. Drew, P. (2013). Turn design. In J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (eds.), The Handboook of Conversation Analysis (pp. 131–149). Wiley Blackwell, 32(10): 1489–1522. Greting, M., X. Mao and M.P. Eladhari (2022). What inspires retellings - A study of the game Genshin impact. Interactive Storytelling. Springer International Publishing. Hetrick, L. (2018). Reading fan art as complex texts. Art Education, 71(3): 56–62. Ito, M., S. Baumer, M. Bittanti, D. boyd, R. Cody, B. Herr-Stephenson, H. Horst, P. Lange, D. Mahendran, K. Martinéz, C. Pascoe, D. Perkel, L. Robinson, C. Sims and L. Tripp (2013). Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. The MIT Press. Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In G. Lerner (ed.), Conversation Analysis. Studies from the First Generation (pp. 13–31). John Benjamins Publishing. Jenkins, H. (2018). Fandom, negotiation, and participatory culture. In P. Booth (ed.), A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (pp. 11–26). John Wiley & Sons. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. University Press. Kahila, J., M. Tedre, S. Kahila, H. Vartiainen, T. Valtonen and K. Mäkitalo (2021). Children’s gaming involves much more than the gaming itself: A study of the metagame among 12- to 15-year-old children. Convergence, 27(3): 768–786. Manifold, M.C. (2009). Fanart as craft and the creation of culture. International Journal of Education Through Art, 5(1): 7–21. Medierådet (2019). Ungar & medier 2019 (The Swedish Media Council, ‘Children & media 2010’) [Swedish]. Medietilsynet (2010). Barn og digitale medier 2010 (The Norwegian Media Council, ‘Children and digital media 2010’) [Norwegian]. Medietilsynet (2020). Barn og medier 2020: 9–18 åringers medievaner (The (The Norwegian Media Council, ‘Children and media 2020: Main findings ’), [Norweigan]. Mondada, L. (2019). Contemporary issues in conversation analysis: Embodiment and materiality, multimodality and multisensoriality in social interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 145: 47–62. Moreno J.A. (2020). Game rules vs. fandom: How Nintendo’s animal crossing fan-made content negotiates the videogame meanings. Ámbitos. Revista Internacional de Comunicación, 47: 212–237. Newman, J. (2008). Playing with Videogames. Routledge. Ofcom. (2021). Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report 2020/1. Ofcom. https://www​.ofcom​ .org​.uk​/research​-and​-data​/media​-literacy​-research​/childrens​/children​-and​-parents​-media​-use​-and​-attitudes​-report​-2021 Patterson, M. (2021). Toward a critical children’s museology: The anything goes exhibition at the National Museum in Warsaw. Museum and Society, 19(3): 330–350. Patterson, M.E. and R. Friend (2021). Beyond window rainbows: Collecting children’s culture in the COVID crisis. Collections, 17(2): 167–178. Piirainen-Marsh, A. (2010). Bilingual practices and the social organisation of video gaming activities. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(8): 3012–3030. Pomerantz, A.M. (1986). Extreme case formulation: A new way of legitimating claims. Human Studies, 9(3): 219–230. Schott, G. and A. Burn (2007). Fan-art as a function of agency in oddworld fan-culture. In A. Clarke and G. Mitchell (eds.), Videogames and Art (pp. 238–254). Intellect Books Ltd. Sparrman, A. and P. Aarsand (2022). Children’s cultural heritage: The micro-politics of the archive. The Nordic Journal of Cultural Policy, 25(3): 201–217.

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22 YOUTH VIDEO COMPOSITIONS AS MULTIMODAL SIGNIFIER CHAINS Making meaning with gestures, objects, actions, and speech Jason Ranker1 Introduction A number of scholars have studied the digital video composing processes of youth by employing a multimodal lens (Burn and Parker, 2003; Doerr-Stevens, 2016; Dahlström, 2021; Domingo, 2011; Fulwiler and Middleton, 2012; Gilje, 2010; Höglund, 2022; Ranker, 2015a; Vasudevan, Schultz, and Bateman, 2010). These studies have examined multimodal composing with digital video as it relates to the ways in which youths’ lives outside of school become part of multimodal, digital composing. This type of multimodal composing affords youth a means of making further meaning out of important elements in their lives, fashioning critiques of aspects in their lives and worlds and constructing narratives and identities. This body of work has also led to new pedagogical approaches, such as the inclusion of students who have otherwise been marginalized, and the uses of digital video in order to achieve meanings that can only be realized through the combination of multiple modes that is a feature of the medium. Multimodal approaches to youth digital video productions highlight many of the purposes and means by which youth achieve their composing aims through digital video as a particular mode, with its particular affordances (Kress, 2003), or “distinct possibilities and limitations for making meaning that media, modes (such as the visual, audio, spatial, written, or spoken modes), and technologies offer” (Ranker, 2015a, p. 568). Digital video offers many possibilities for youth to explore their experiences and ways of representing their sensibilities and lives through multimodal communication. When youth are allowed to explore these multimodal, digital potentials of video, it may not be immediately apparent what they are doing and a semiotic lens offers a way of describing and understanding their work. Research in this area is thus necessary so that we “have a language to speak about bodies, voices and performance”, without which “it risks being misunderstood, unplanned for, unrecognized beyond the reach of pedagogy” (Burn, 2003, p. 11). A number of studies have emerged that highlight the new curricular and pedagogical possibilities that are possible when youth engage in multimodal composing with digital video (Fulwiler and Middleton, 2012; Höglund, 2022; Ranker, 2015a). For example, Fulwiler and Middleton (2012) studied the digital video composing processes of youth through a multimodal lens, illustrating how the new media practices of youth

DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-29

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require a new model and terms to account for the cultural investments of youth and the ways that the multiple modes of digital video facilitate those investments. When youth engage in digital video creation, they draw on a wide variety of semiotic material, including images, gestures, language and objects, bringing these elements together into new arrangements in novel ways. Many of these new ways of composing are subtle, difficult to detect and even unconscious on the part of the composers. In addition, youth often compose in ways that adults and educators are not accustomed to attending to, as these are new, emerging compositional approaches that engage multimodality in imaginative ways. Scholars have thus sought to build upon the available knowledge in this area of study in order to articulate a vocabulary for capturing and pedagogically supporting youth video composition practices that may be difficult to detect or conceptualize since their meanings and ways of representing meanings are not obvious or easily identified. For example, Burn (2003, p. 20) studied the ‘signifying properties’ of digital videos created by adolescents and examined how they were incorporated into multimodal compositions, which “demand an expanded vocabulary from us if we are to describe them adequately”. It is through a turn toward the signifying properties that Burn (2003) refers to that, in his chapter, I will present an expanded vocabulary and knowledge that can be developed further by reaching more deeply into a semiotic perspective and attending more closely to the precise structure and operation of the signs that occur in youth-produced digital videos. Such an approach can unveil the micro-level meaning productions that can occur with the use of the component modes of digital video. In particular, I will outline parameters of how researchers can grasp, theorize and apply the concept of a sign to the study of youth digital video production as discursive production. This chapter will thus discuss examples from previous research that illustrates the deployment of the concept of a sign or semiotic resource as a framework for the understanding of youth video composition as a phenomenon of youth cultural production (Burn, 2009; Hull and Nelson, 2005; Mills, 2011; Ranker, 2008), and then adding new dimensions to this discussion of a semiotic approach by presenting examples from my recent research on this topic (Ranker, 2017, 2018).

Multimodal studies of youth digital video production Multimodality refers to the copresence and coordination of multiple modes in text production and communication (Jewitt, 2007; Kress, 2010). Identifying the various modes that are part of everyday communication and text production illustrates how language, which is commonly assumed to be the primary or only mode of communication, is only one available mode and that communication can further be divided into the visual mode, audio mode, object-based mode, gestural mode and actional mode, amongst others. Scholars have made progress in examining how the lives and experiences of youth outside of school come into play and interaction with their multimodal composing with digital video in school (Dahlström, 2021; Doerr-Stevens, 2016; Domingo, 2011, Vasudevan et al., 2010). For example, Dahlström (2021, p. 403) found that youth composers’ lives outside of school became the subject matter for their digital video composing, highlighting how meaning-making in relation to multimodal composing can “happen anywhere and at any time”. Doerr-Stevens (2016) employed a multimodal framework to examine the digital video composition of a group of youth as a multimodal ensemble, or configuration of texts and semiotic resources that come together to create new forms of meaning that are not possible with each of the component modes alone. Her findings highlight how the youth composers took up particular textual elements and rejected others, which reflected a process of critical social positioning. 304

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Vasudevan and her colleagues (2010) also examined the multimodal composing processes of youth as they engaged in digital video production in an urban, public-school classroom. They found that the shift to multimodal composing increased the available modes of participation, which changed the dynamics of student engagement and authorship. Students who had previously been positioned as marginalized were able to integrate their lives and stories into school-based narratives in new ways. In addition, Domingo (2011) examined the digital video production of one youth through a multimodal lens by applying a Bakhtinian approach in order to examine how the layering of various modes such as image, language, gesture, color and sound effects mirrored the youth creator’s layering of cultural investments and belonging in various discourse communities. For example, this layering of modes could be traced across various contexts from which ideas were drawn in the composition of digital video, including home, social networks and performance halls and also included layering of multiple languages and discourse communities (such as discourse communities related to ethnicities, national identity, hip hop and popular culture). Ranker (2015a) applied a multimodal lens to understand the video production processes of youth in an urban, public-school classroom who produced a digital video about the topic of fast food. For example, the youth composers juxtaposed images, text and narration through the use of montage in order to produce nuanced messages that both expressed their interest in as well as critical analysis of the topic of fast food. Further, montage facilitated the youth producers’ critique of deceptive advertising, inhumane treatment of animals in the production of fast food and the disproportionate role of the US in relation to the rest of the world in the consumption of fast food. Taking a multimodal perspective, Höglund (2022) studied youth creation of digital-video-based interpretations and productions in response to poetry in a lower secondary school context. In particular, the study examined how youth use sound and its associated affordances, or ways of making meaning as tools for activating their social agency and engaging in social commentary. As discussed in this section, research on youth digital video productions thus far has illustrated how youth use the modes that comprise digital video in order to represent, critique and realize elements of their lived worlds, discourse communities and cultures. This has resulted in the development of a set of terms and vocabulary that can be used to describe how youth can combine various modal elements in specific and novel ways that speak to the unique affordances of digital video as a medium. In the following section, I will further outline research that has employed a semiotic framework, specifically, in the effort to bring further specificity and insight to the study of youth digital video creation.

Youth digital video compositions as semiotic and multimodal The concept of a signifier, which plays a key role in the model and terminology that is presented in this chapter, is originally derived from de Saussure’s (1916/1983) conceptualization of the sign as consisting of two parts, the signifier and signified. de Saussure described the signifier as the signal that points to, indicates, or takes on the role of representing meaning. The signified, which corresponds to an individual signifier, is the concept or meaning that is indicated by the signifier. Since de Saussure’s original formulation, the concept of a signifier has expanded to other types of forms and modes. For example, Barthes (1964) has expanded the notion of the signifier onto other sign systems or modes such that a signifier can be considered an image, gesture, or sound, for example. In the work that has been carried out in semiotics since de Saussure, the signifier has gained increased importance and focus since it is the more identifiable aspect of the dyad of the sign as the mediating element that points toward the indicated meaning. However, the designated meaning, or signified, is elusive, dependent on subjectivity and affected by what Lacan (1966/2002, p. 145) 305

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referred to as the “sliding of the signified under the signifier” – the action whereby a signifier is referred to another signifier rather than a definite signified. This has led poststructuralist theorists such as Derrida (1981) to declare that there is no “transcendental signified,” a signified meaning that exists independently of or that ‘transcends’ a particular signifying context, or existing above or outside of the play of signifiers that produces possible meanings. Researchers have begun to investigate youth video as multimodal by using a semiotic lens (Burn, 2009, Gilje, 2010; Hull and Nelson, 2005; Mills, 2011; Ranker, 2008), employing the concept of the sign, and the related semiotic concept of a semiotic resource, which refers broadly to semiotic material as "resources for representation" (Kress, 2010, p. 8) or resources for making meaning. For example, in his study of youth video production, Burn (2009) used the semiotic term syntagm, which refers to groups or combinations of signs. In the context of digital videos, a synchronic syntagm thus refers to a combination of signs within a particular frame in the video, or at a discrete point in time. On the other hand, a diachronic syntagm refers to how video frames can be combined across and through time. Burn (2009) also refers to processes or ways that syntagms are manipulated in student-produced videos through processes that he refers to as transformation; (re) combination; (un)fixing; and interaction. Hull and Nelson (2005) conducted a close multimodal analysis of a youth’s video composition from a semiotic perspective, identifying semiotic patterns as seen in the relations between individual bits of semiotic elements that are connected and related through co-present modes. For example, in the focal video in their study, title slides were used with words that were presented in a particular way (without images and oral narration linked up with them). This was a semiotic phenomenon referred to by Hull and Nelson (2005) as a ‘word image’, an artful presentation of the word itself that is presented to the viewer in order to conjure up the corresponding image in the mind of the viewer. The semiotic-based studies of student-produced digital videos conducted to date have examined how youth produce digital videos by drawing upon semiotic resources from across modes, ‘orchestrating’ (Kress, 2010) the accessed resources in various ways through intermodal and crossmodal interactions, and to various effects. This focus on broader and inclusive concepts of semiotic material – such as semiotic resources, the sign, semiotic elements or resources for making meaning – as units of analysis have led to insights into how modes, and the specific affordances of modes, shape the possibilities for meaning-making that digital video offers youth. However, without full attention to the signifiers that comprise signs and semiotic resources, digital video production cannot be fully theorized and researched as multimodal discourse. There are many discursive processes and agencies that are specific only to the signifier, and that cannot be understood through a more general approach to semiotic resources or the sign. For example, notion of the sign always includes the signified, and thus the problematics of the signified and difficulties involved with identifying particular meanings as stable or somehow ‘transcendent’ (rather than resulting from constantly shifting signifier interactions) cannot be avoided. Further, the concept of a semiotic resource is a general notion that captures many other aspects of meaning-making, such as the signified, as well as structural elements that are part of modes. Therefore, it is important that researchers develop an approach that attends to the function of the signifier, specifically, as the key aspect of the dyad of the sign (signifier and signified) and means by which digital video can be conceptualized as discourse. The ground-breaking insights related to the problematics of the signified and difficulties involved with pinpointing meaning-making have drawn attention to the signifier as the fundamental unit of discourse (Derrida, 1981; Lacan, 2002; Laclau, 1996; Metz, 1982; Silverman, 1983). These theorizations of the signifier have led to profound insights into how meanings and texts are shaped and realized in subtle and intricate ways that result from the actions of discursive agen306

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cies, yet these insights have not been systematically applied to the analysis of youth digital video production. This focus on the signifier is necessary in order to carry out such a theorization, which approaches the identification of meaning more tentatively, shifting the research focus away from youth video-creators’ conscious reflections on meaning-making and onto the ways in which the signifiers that they create and engage also engage discursive agencies and processes which shape the parameters and potentials for representing meanings. In the next section, in order to illustrate such an approach, I present two examples from two studies that I previously conducted that take up the signifier as the unit central to theorizing youth-produced digital video as multimodal discourse (Ranker, 2017, 2018). Through my presentation of these examples, I will illustrate a model that is based upon examining individual signifiers and how they interact, which I refer to as a signifierbased discourse analysis.

Signifier-based discourse analysis: two examples of a new model and approach to youth digital video production This section presents two signifier-based discourse analyses (Ranker, 2017, 2018) of youth-produced digital videos. This analytical approach focuses on the video itself as multimodal discourse in which signifiers can be identified and involves the 1) isolation of individual signifiers and 2) the articulation of the relations between signifiers. Also central to signifier-based discourse analysis is the mapping or illustration of the relation of signifier relations as they occur in a signifying chain or signifier network, which offers a visual representation of connected the signifiers and their relations. This signifier-based approach is based upon the understanding that it is in the relations between signifiers within a signifier chain or network that the discursive dimensions of meaningmaking can be detected.

Example 1: Multimodal signifier complexes and operations in ‘Child Stars: The Life of Johnny Stars’ This section presents an example of a youth-produced digital video entitled, Child Stars: The Life of Johnny Stars, which was one minute and 32 seconds in length (Ranker, 2018). Specifically, this study employed signifier-based discourse analysis in order to examine the multimodal signifier operations that were encoded or inscribed in the film. This digital video was produced by a group of five students (ages 11–12) who worked together to produce it: Megan (age 12), Tracey (age 11), Eric (age 12), Oliver (age 12), and James (age 11) (pseudonyms). “Child Stars: The Life of Johnny Stars” was modeled after the mockumentary genre, and is an absurdist ‘mockumentary’ about a (fictional) troubled student at their school named Johnny Stars, a “child star” who ends up dying a tragic death just ‘outside the school’. The students played the following roles in the video: Megan (show host, grieving friend or relative); Tracy (grieving friend or sister of Johnny Stars); James (unidentified character); Eric (narrator); and Oliver (Johnny Stars’s father).

The operation of metonymy in ‘Child Stars: The Life of Johnny Stars’ The video, which was produced by the focal students, Child Stars: The Life of Johnny Stars consists of ‘interviews’ with those who ‘knew’ Johnny, including his projected friends, father, and a psychologist. Johnny Stars is never featured in the video, though he is projected as the main protagonist of their plot. This posits ‘Johnny Stars’ as a spoken signifier that is not linked with any particular signified or anchored in its meaning, and as such is left to act as a floating signifier (Laclau, 1996; Levi-Strauss, 1987), or a signifier without a clear meaning. A floating signifier’s 307

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meaning can thus be established by forging new connections or associations with other signifiers, causing it to take on the meaning that is produced by these connections or associations. Since ‘Johnny Stars’ is a floating signifier, it is especially susceptible to the effects of metonymy, a discursive process whereby one signifier that is part of a video can act as a replacement or container for another signifier with which it comes into direct contact (Metz, 1982; Ranker, 2018; Silverman, 1983). However, before one signifier can act as a replacement or container for another signifier within a video through the operation of metonymy, it must first come into contact with or become contiguous with the other signifier. Contiguity refers to signifiers that are in “direct contact” with one another (Metz, p. 201), spatially speaking, and thus occur next to one another or adjacent to one another within the video. Silverman (1983, p. 112–113) describes metonymy as a semiotic condition “in which one term [signifier] stands in for another to which it is in some way contiguous”, allowing for one signifier to be replaced by or take the place of another signifier (either partially or completely). In the following section, I illustrate how the operation of metonymy occurred amongst key signifiers in the young film producers’ video Child Stars: The Life of Johnny Stars.

Semiotic equivalence between Johnny Stars and trees: An example of the operation of metonymy Since Johnny is a floating signifier, other signifiers have to pick up, so to speak, the job of visually indicating ‘Johnny’ in the film. The idea of a tree, and the specific idea of the tree that Johnny jumped out of, took on this discursive role. And so, the spoken signifier, ‘tree’, and the image of the tree as signifier, took on this function of visually and materially indicating Johnny as present in the video (in the absence of an actual image of him). This was accomplished through linkages of contiguous signifiers across multiple instances in the film, which collectively, sequentially and accumulatively came to take on the signification of ‘Johnny Stars’. Figure 22.1 illustrates the operation of metonymy that was accomplished through the linkage of signifiers of Johnny to signifiers of the tree that he ‘jumped’ from. This figure depicts the three instances in which this linkage through metonymy was accomplished through repeated associations of signifiers of Johnny Stars and signifiers of the tree (images of the tree and spoken references to the tree). Since the spoken signifier ‘Johnny Stars’ was a floating signifier, with no clearly identified signified, the new signified, ‘tree’, could easily be attached to it and become the container for its meaning. These repeated associations caused ‘Johnny Stars’ to become equivalent to the tree as a signifier, thus taking on the same meaning or significance within the video. The three instances from scenes in the video are featured in numbered boxes. Within each of these boxes, the spoken signifiers indicating Johnny Stars and trees are in bold, and a line illustrates the linkage between a signifier of Johnny Stars and a signifier of tree (spoken and image-based). This is illustrated by the box in the center of the figure, which indicates how the overall operation of metonymy was comprised of these three instances from the video. At the top of Figure 22.1, in the square numbered one, is a representation of an instance during the video in which Johnny’s relative or friend (character is unclear/undefined in the video) states, “He was jumping out of a tree and I couldn’t stop him – I just couldn’t.” In this instance, as illustrated below the quotation, the spoken signifier ‘he’ was linked in a metonymic relation with the spoken signifier, ‘tree’, which is illustrated with the line that connects these two spoken signifiers (bolded). Instance two is illustrated in the box numbered two (bottom-left corner of the figure) in which Johnny’s projected ‘psychologist’ states, “He liked to jump off trees.” In this instance, the spoken signifier ‘he’ is again linked up metonymically with the spoken signi308

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Figure 22.1  Illustration of metonymic operation between ‘Johnny Stars’ and ‘tree’.

fier ‘tree’. In instance three, (bottom-right corner of the figure) the metonymic relation between Johnny and the tree is achieved both as a metonymic linkage between spoken signifiers and also visually, with an image. Specifically, the image of the tree that Johnny Stars jumped out of is linked with the spoken signifiers ‘24-year-old man’ and ‘he’, as illustrated by the lines showing the semiotic linkage between these spoken signifiers (which indicate ‘Johnny Stars’) and the tree image. In addition, the spoken signifiers, ‘24-year-old man’ and ‘he’ are also linked to the spoken signifier ‘tree’ as illustrated by the lines showing the metonymic linkage between spo309

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ken signifiers that indicated Johnny Stars (‘24-year-old man’ and ‘he’) and the spoken signifier, ‘tree’. In the next section, I present another example of how a signifier-based discourse analysis can be employed to understand youth-produced digital video as multimodal discourse. The types of signifiers and signifier operations of metonymy (though widely found in discourse) were particular to the video that I examined in this section. Therefore, I will present another example in order to illustrate other types of signifiers and signifier relations that are possible from this perspective so that this terrain is not conceptualized too narrowly. Discursive theorizations of signifier operations (Derrida, 1981; Lacan, 2002; Laclau, 1996; Metz, 1982; Silverman, 1983) have been depicted in a wide variety of ways, so there are broad possibilities for their application to the study of youthproduced digital video.

Example 2: Multimodal signifier complexes and operations in the youth-produced video, ‘Dolls’ This section presents another example of a signifier-based discourse analysis (Ranker, 2017) of a short artistic video, Dolls, which is 5 minutes and 30 seconds in length, created by a 13-yearold student in an urban, public-school classroom. The video featured Wendy, the video creator, holding up various stuffed figures that she selected from home and brought in for the recording of the video. These figures included the following: a stuffed panda, a stuffed rabbit, a doll, a stuffed moose and a troll figure. The video features Wendy holding up each stuffed figure, displaying and describing each one in turn. From a semiotic perspective, the video can be understood as an arrangement of signifiers in the form of a combination of facial gestures, actions, objects and speech. In this multimodal discourse analysis of Dolls (Ranker, 2017), I identified the relations between contiguous (adjoining) signifiers in the video as occurring along a continuum ranging from convergence to divergence. This analysis focused on how signifiers gain their meaning from the signifiers that they come into contact with, through the nature of the linkage or contact between adjoining signifiers. When two adjoining signifiers have a similar meaning, the two signifiers have the effect of convergence toward the same meaning. When two adjoining signifiers have different meanings, they affect one another by diverging toward different meanings. Figure 22.2 illustrates this continuum of divergence to convergence that was used to characterize relations between contiguous signifiers in Wendy’s video. The left-hand side of the continuum in Figure 22.2 is labeled as divergent signifier relation, describing a situation in which the contiguous signifiers were characterized by a maximum level of divergence from one another (difference rather than similarity), causing the associated signifiers to

Figure 22.2  Continuum of signifier relations in Dolls.

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‘float’, or have an undetermined meaning. Figure 22.3 illustrates these types of signifier relations in the form of a signifier map for the first four signifiers in the section on Fuffy, the stuffed rabbit. As seen in Figure 22.3, as the video moves from spoken signifier 1 (‘Fuffy’) to signifier 2 (‘Not Fluffy’), these two signifiers diverge from one another, or introduce two different meanings. This creates a situation whereby the two signifiers do not affect one another by determining or fixing their meanings. At the other end of the continuum, the right-hand side of Figure 22.2, is labeled convergent signifier relation in order to designate instances in which two contiguous signifiers were similar or even similar enough to be equivalent. This relation is also characterized as a fixing of the signifiers, since when contiguous signifiers become equivalent through similarity, one signifier can ‘fix’ or pin down the meaning of the other signifier with which it comes into contact. In Figure 22.3, a convergent signifier relation is featured in Dolls in the movement between signifier 2 (‘Not Fluffy’) and signifier 3 (‘Fuffy’). The relation between these two signifiers is one of similarity, since ‘Fuffy’ (signifier 1) points toward the same meaning as ‘Not Fluffy’ (signifier 2), by deferring to the initial meaning (Fuffy, the stuffed panda) that was introduced with signifier 1 (‘Fuffy’). The scheme in Figure 22.2 illustrates the degrees of divergence and convergence in the signifier relations by use of a continuum (Ranker, 2017). Beginning at the left-hand side of the continuum (at the left of the figure corresponding with divergence), and then moving toward the right along a continuum (toward the pole of convergence), is the term combination, which referred to Hjelmslev’s (1959) concept of two signs in relation to one another that do not imply one another. Hjelmslev's concept of combination describes situations in which two signifiers were drawn upon from any mode and put into relation with one another (thus becoming contiguous) and can be characterized by a maximum degree of openness in the relation. In signifier relation of combination, the two signifiers do not limit one another’s possible meanings, but rather allow each signifier to diverge toward its own separate meaning potential. Continuing to move toward the right in Figure 22.2, toward convergence, is the term relay. In Barthes’s (1977) conception of relay, he describes how text and an image can enter into a complementary relationship and interaction, influencing one another’s meaning in a complex way that can only be determined by referring to the broader signifying structures in the message. In the context of digital video, a relation of relay describes a situation in which a second signifier compliments the one with which it is in contact or relation, affirming (in part) the meanings in the first signifier, while also taking it in a new direction and adding important meanings to it. My analysis of Dolls as shown in Ranker (2017), as well as illustrated in this chapter, drew upon the term relay to refer to instances in which the two contiguous signifiers did slightly limit signification, but were mainly characterized by a significant degree of openness that allowed for signification to diverge rather than be completely limited. In Figure 22.2, moving further still to the right (from the term ‘relay’), the next term, implication, describes a sort of middle ground between convergence and divergence of contiguous signi-

Figure 22.3  Segment of the signifier chain map for the section in Dolls on Fuffy, the stuffed panda.

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fiers. The concept of ‘implication’ was used by Hjelmslev (1959) to describe a relation in which one sign implies the other without reciprocity. In my analysis of Dolls, (Ranker, 2017), and further illustrated here, the descriptor, ‘implication’, was thus adopted to indicate a situation in which one signifier implied another signifier with which it was contiguous. However, this process was not mutual and the other signifier in the relation was not fully bound or circumscribed by the other signifier. This relation was one that was more open, partially limiting one signifier while the other was unbound by the one with which it was in contiguity. In this type of signifier relation, there was thus a degree of boundedness in circumspection of the meaning at the same time that there was openness in other aspects of the signifier relation. Moving still further to the right-hand side of the figure, along the continuum toward the pole of convergence is the term solidarity, a term that Hjelmslev (1959) used to indicate a situation in which contiguous signs imply one another. This concept was used to indicate instances in which two contiguous signifiers implied one another and thus created a ‘solidarity’ with one another, or a connection that mutually determined and circumscribed possible meanings for those signifiers. The next term along the continuum is labeled as anchorage, a concept developed by Barthes (1977) to describe a situation in which a written sign ‘anchors’ the possible meanings of an image as sign. The term ‘anchorage’ was adopted in this analysis of Dolls (Ranker, 2017), and as further illustrated here, to indicate instances in which one signifier in any mode anchored or significantly delimited the possible meanings of a contiguous signifier in a sense less restrictive than that suggested by solidarity since both signifiers do not delimit one another, but, rather, one delimits the other.

Conclusion and future directions The vocabulary presented in this chapter has focused on conceptualizing youth-composed videos as comprised of multimodal chains or networks of signifiers that are related to one another in a particular way, and with a particular effect on meaning-making. Mapping signifier chains and networks provides a way to multimodally represent the phenomenon of signifiers being linked to one another, which is significant since signifiers interact with one another, thus producing the dynamics and parameters for making meaning. In digital videos produced by young people as shown in this chapter, signifier chains and networks are thus made out of linkages between images, spoken words, actions and gestures that are coordinated with and related to one another. Conceptualizing youth videos as signifier chains and networks is a way of articulating and expanding a vocabulary for understanding and pedagogically supporting the subtle, complex and often hidden meanings that youth explore through video composition. By enabling the creation of signifier chains and networks, digital video offers a medium that facilitates the creation of what Barthes (1972) refers to as second-order semiological systems, or newly constructed sign systems in which signifiers are taken up and acted upon to produce new types of meanings that explore the in-betweens, the non-official, ironic and not-immediatelyobvious. Barthes illustrates how these new sign systems are created as new semiotic material is created from previously introduced or already-available semiotic material or “constructed from a semiological chain that existed before it” (Barthes, 1972, p. 115). Digital video as a tool for constructing new sign systems allowed the youth producers that were featured in this chapter to take up ordinary or everyday signifiers (such as trees, hallways and stuffed figures) as elements in their multimodal compositions, providing them with new opportunities to produce meanings beyond their everyday significance by creating novel ways of representing them. As these everyday signifiers were taken up into the new signifying systems that were created using digital video, 312

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they took on new, particular meanings that were aesthetically realized or stylized in multimodal discourse. Further, from a semiotic angle, the digital, multimodal composing processes of youth such as those considered in this chapter can also be understood as “the work of the imagination in ordinary life” (McCarthy, 2004, p. 131). In particular, the digital videos presented in this chapter offer a vocabulary for articulating the working of the creative imagination in youth digital video production through a semiotic lens (Ranker, 2015b). This involves conceptualizing youth-composed digital video compositions as drawing upon semiotic material, such as signifiers, from across multiple modes, which are then combined or coordinated in novel ways to produce new effects. As described in this chapter, these creative processes involve discursive agencies and signifier processes such as metonymy, signifier divergence and signifier convergence. It is in the specific types or associations of signifiers that creativity can be understood from a semiotic perspective. This resonates with Vygotsky’s (1950/2004) theorization of the working of the creative imagination as involving a process of association of various, diverse, disparate and dissociated individual semiotic elements. From this perspective, digital video offers youth composers a way to access and create signifiers that are drawn from various aspects of their sensibilities, lives and experiences. Digital video allows everyday elements to be distilled down into images, words, actions, objects and gestures, which are then re-associated in a way that allows for a new type of exploration of the cultural material drawn from daily life. It is through this particularly semiotic process that elements of youths’ cultural worlds can act as signifiers which enter into signifier complexes in ways that employ discursive agencies such as those that were explored in this chapter. Within this semiotic framework, the use of digital video in the creation of new sign systems can also be conceived of as a discursive response to one’s daily life and the signifiers that comprise it. The digital videos that I featured in this chapter can thus also be conceptualized as agentic in that they involve taking up elements of one’s lived world and making meaning out of them (Dahlström, 2021; Doerr-Stevens, 2016; Domingo, 2011, Vasudevan, Schultz, and Bateman, 2010). Youth digital video productions can thus be seen as multimodal approaches to what McCarthy (2004, p. 131) refers to as “coordinating the fragments of the materials of everyday life”. Further, when youth engage in digital video production about topics of their choosing from their lived worlds, they engage in agencies that are created through their own composing decisions, but that also involve discursive agencies such as metonymy, signifier convergence, signifier divergence and the discursive tendencies toward signifier chains and networks. I have taken up this conceptualization of agency, through a discursive lens, in order to conceptualize digital video as a medium – with its own particular discursive agencies – shapes meaning production. These are agencies that are produced by multimodal discourse itself, and digital video as a medium and cannot be attributed to only human actors. Esser et al. (2016, p. 9) describe such a reconceptualized and multifaceted form of youth agency by noting that “agency is therefore not a quality that children possess by nature; instead, it is produced in conjunction with a whole network of different human and non-human actors, and is distributed among these”. As noted above, in this chapter, I have focused on signifiers as non-human actors, as discursive agents that, once produced, interact in ways that accord to their own logics and operations. Since meaning-making agencies can be located in non-human actors such as modes and media, researchers of digital video within the multimodal paradigm have gravitated toward a semiotic approach, through which the ways that modes and semiotic resources shape youth meaning-making with digital video can be illustrated (Burn, 2003, 2009; Hull and Nelson, Mills, 2011; Ranker, 2015a, 2017, 2018). Though these researchers have begun work in this terrain, relatively little is known about how multimodal semiotic agencies shape youths’ digital video compositions. Although 313

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youth compose digital videos in a deliberate and conscious manner, the intricacies of the signifier operations themselves remain unconscious and their meaning undetermined. In this chapter, I have outlined a trajectory for further illuminating these signifier operations, drawing upon my own research in order to provide illustrative examples (Ranker, 2017, 2018). Although the research to date has advanced a semiotic understanding of youth digital video production, in order to continue the development of a new vocabulary for describing how signifier operations and discursive agencies shape the parameters of meaning-making, further research is needed. In order to do so, insights from discourse studies that rely upon the signifier as the fundamental unit of discourse (Derrida, 1981; Lacan, 2002; Laclau, 1996; Metz, 1982; Silverman, 1983) need to be further applied to the theorization of youth digital video production as discourse. Conceptualizing youth digital video as discourse allows for a tentative approach to meaning, and taking an approach to the interpretation of youth digital video production that involves characterizing the discursive processes and agencies that contribute to the possibilities for making meaning. In this chapter, I have outlined a few of the discursive agencies and effects associated with signifier operation that have been explored thus far, such as metonymy, signifier divergence and signifier convergence (cf. also Ranker, 2017, 2018). However, given the vastness of multimodal discourse operation and the extensive theorization available in this area, many other types of signifier operations could be further explored. Future research could describe other types of discursive agencies and signifier arrangements in order to conceptualize how youth tap into them using various modes and media to create new, creative responses to their lived worlds and this approach could be further developed and applied to digital video creation in other contexts. In addition, there is still a need to conduct research on how other discursive effects and signifier operations contribute to the discursive agencies that youth engage with the use of creative imagination in digital video production. Research in this area would lead to a better understanding of what constitutes imaginative composing as realized in signifier chains and networks.

Note 1 Corresponding author: Jason Ranker, Portland State University, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, P.O. Box 751 Portland, Oregon, United States 97207-0751. Orcid: 0000-0002-2663-3880.

Further readings Burn, A. (2009). Making New Media: Creative Production and Digital Literacies. New York: Peter Lang. Ranker, J. (in press). The operation of “différance” in a student-produced digital video: Insights into differing and deferring signifier operations and relations in multimodal discourse. Visual Communication.

References Barthes, R. (1964). Elements of Semiology. New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, R. (1977). Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang. Burn, A. (2003). Poets, skaters and avatars—Performance, identity and new media. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 2(2): 6–21. Burn, A. (2009). Making New Media: Creative Production and Digital literacies. New York: Peter Lang. Burn, A. and Parker, D. (2003). Tiger's big plan: Multimodality and the moving image. In C. Jewitt and G. Kress (Eds.) Multimodal literacy (pp. 56–72). New York: Peter Lang. Dahlström, H. (2021). Students as multimodal text designers: A study of resources, affordances, and experiences. British Journal of Educational Technology, 53: 391–407. Derrida, J. (1981). Positions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Videos as multimodal signifier chains Doerr-Stevens, C. (2016). Drawing near and pushing away: Critical positioning in multimodal composition. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 11(4): 335–353. Domingo, M. (2011). Analyzing layering in textual design: A multimodal approach for examining cultural, linguistic, and social migrations in digital video. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 14(3): 219–230. De Saussure, F. (1983). Course in General Linguistics. Chicago: Open Court (Original work published in 1916). Esser, F., M. Baader, T. Betz, and B. Hungerland. (2016). Reconceptualizing agency and childhood: An introduction. In F. Esser, M. Baader, T. Betz, and B. Hungerland (eds.), Reconceptualizing Agency and Childhood: New perspectives in Childhood Studies (pp. 1–16). New York: Routledge. Fulwiler, M. and K. Middleton. (2012). After digital storytelling: Video composing in the new media age. Computers and Composition, 29: 39–50. Gilje, Ø. (2010). Multimodal redesign in filmmaking practices: An inquiry of young filmmakers’ deployment of semiotic tools in their filmmaking practice. Written Communication, 27(4): 494–522. Höglund, H. (2022). The heartbeat of poetry: Student videomaking in response to poetry. Written Communication, 39(2): 276–302. Hjelmslev, L. (1959). Essais Linguistiques. Copenhagen: Nordisk Sprog-og Kulturfolag. Hull, G. and M. Nelson. (2005). Locating the semiotic power of multimodality. Written Communication, 22(2): 224–261. Jewitt, K. (2007). A multimodal perspective on textuality and contexts. Pedagogy, Culture, and Society, 15(3): 275–289. Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge. Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. New York: Routledge. Lacan, J. (2002). Écrits: A Selection. New York: W.W. Norton and Company (Original work published in 1966). Laclau, E. (1996). Emancipation(s). London: Verso. Levi-Strauss, C. (1987). Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (F. Baker, Trans.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. McCarthy, C. (2004). Thinking about the cultural studies of education in a time of recession. In N. Dolby, G. Dimitriadis, G. and P.M.A. Willis (eds.), Learning to Labor in New Times (pp. 130–140). New York: Routledge. Metz, C. (1982). The Imaginary Signifier. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mills, K. (2011). “I’m making it different to the book”: Transmediation in young children’s multimodal and digital texts. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 36(3): 56–65. Ranker, J. (2008). Composing across multiple media: A case study of digital video production in a fifth-grade classroom. Written Communication, 25(2): 196–234. Ranker, J. (2015a). The affordances of blogs and digital video: New potentials for exploring topics and representing meaning. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 58(7): 568–578. Ranker, J. (2015b). Redesigning the everyday: Recognizing creativity in student writing and multimodal composing. Language Arts, 92(5): 359–365. Ranker, J. (2017). The role of signifier differences, associations, and combinations in creative digital video composing: Making meaning with gestures, objects, actions, and speech. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 12(2): 196–218. Ranker, J. (2018). The sliding of the signified: Multimodal sign operations in a youth-composed experimental digital video. Visual Communication, 17(3): 337–362. Silverman, K. (1983). The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford University Press. Vasudevan, L., K. Schultz, and J. Bateman (2010). Rethinking composing in a digital age: Authoring literate identities through multimodal storytelling. Written Communication, 27(4): 442–468. Vygotsky, L.S. (2004). Imagination and creativity in childhood. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 42(1): 7–97 (Original work published in 1950).

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PART VIII

Language, youth and place

23 YOUTH, LANGUAGE AND PLACE Marie Maegaard1

Introduction Research on language and place is usually focused either on rural places and older people, or on urban places and younger people. In this chapter, I will present another perspective – a perspective which combines insights from both variationism and interactional sociolinguistics, and situates these within the broader theoretical frame of sociolinguistic change. I will do this by presenting and discussing two major strands in (socio)linguistics, which more or less explicitly have focused on language and place, however in two very different ways. The first is dialectology, which is usually defined in ways that combine language and geographical place (see below). The other is less clearly delimited, but concerns what we might call multilingual urban studies. This research strand centres its attention on urban contexts, mobility and language contact. In this chapter, I argue that a combination of the two, especially when it comes to young people, will contribute to our understanding of how language and place are constructed as connected by language users. Neither dialectology nor multilingual urban studies have any explicitly defined group of preferred participants (or informants), but youth plays a significant role in both. In the former youth is seen as peripheral in relation to the discipline, whereas in the latter youth is often the centre of interest. The place under study is, however, often explicitly delimited, and participants are often chosen based on their relation to the particular place. Regarding dialectology, this place will usually be rural, whereas youth studies generally tend to focus on urban areas and this goes for studies of youth language as well.

Place in dialectology Dialectology is usually conceptualized as a science combining the linguistic and the geographic. This relation can, for instance, be formulated as “Dialectology is the study of dialect, or regional variation in language” (Boberg, Nerbonne and Watt, 2017, p. 1). Even though Boberg and colleagues explain that geographical variation often coincides with social variation, the centre of attention and the point of departure for most dialectological studies, is the geographical, the regional, the local; i.e. the place. In traditional dialectology place is not described as an analytic concept in much detail; rather it is presented as the ‘natural’ factor delimiting one way of speaking from another. A common way of displaying this is by the use of dialect maps, where different DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-31

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linguistic features are placed in different geographical places on the map. This is of course a simplification of the relation between language and place, since linguistic features are not independent phenomena, separable from human communication. This means that interpreting a dialect map entails an understanding of how those forms ended up on the map. Were they spoken by somebody in that particular place? How were they elicited? Through natural conversation, dialect elicitation forms or something else? Who were the participants? All this is important if we are to understand the relationship between place and language in traditional dialectology. Most dialect atlases and maps are constructed through metapragmatic conversation. That is, the researcher uses an elicitation scheme to find out which forms the informant will establish as belonging to the local place and dialect. It does not necessarily mean that the informant themself uses these forms, but that they know them. Consequently, dialect maps and dictionaries will usually seek to describe a period of time prior to the time the data were collected. All this means that the age of the informants is highly important, as older informants will generally tend to have more knowledge about language use in earlier times than younger informants. I will return to this below. Place, then, is in traditional dialectology construed as a factor determining language use. This understanding is implicit in many dialectological writings, as place is presented as a natural factor influencing language use. Issues of language contact are important in this view of dialect and place, and the idea is that the less contact there has been between people from different places, the ‘purer’ the dialect will be. Often natural phenomena like large forests, rivers, seas, mountains etc. will be obstacles making human interaction difficult between places, and conversely culturally established institutions like churches or schools will facilitate contact between people from a specific parish or district. This view conceptualizes place as a rather concrete and physical phenomenon, facilitating or preventing contact between people. This view of language, people, time and place made the older informants who had stayed in the same place their entire life the core informants in traditional dialectology. Some newer work within dialectology view place in a different way (e.g., Johnstone, 2011), which I will get into below.

Place in multilingual urban studies The research strand that I have termed multilingual urban studies is a research tradition which is focused on multilingualism, language contact, mobility and urban contexts. Whereas dialectology is usually concerned with the rural, this research strand is concerned with urban centres. The notion of place in many of these studies is almost as implicitly stated as in dialectological texts – whereas dialectology focuses on rural places, multilingual urban studies focus on urban places. This choice of location is not random, but is based on a perception of cities and urban contexts as especially rich sites for language contact and change. As argued by Kerswill and Wiese (2022, p. 1) “in particular, urban speech communities are increasingly multilingual and foster new and creative ways of speaking”. Thus, urban contexts are seen as particularly multilingual and as hotbeds for the production of new and creative registers. I do not disagree with this view of the city as a site of increased variation, contact and mobility, but in this chapter, I wish to propose that sociolinguists interested in variation, contact and mobility additionally turn to rural sites of investigation. In more peripheral areas we find other types of multilingualism and variation (see Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes, 2013; Pietikäinen et al., 2016), and we find use of traditional dialect side by side with newer mediatized registers (Mortensen, 2020, p. 105). Rural youth is generally absent in contemporary sociolinguistics, and below I will present some ideas and findings from a recent research project involving exactly that (Maegaard et al., 2020). The urban setting has in some ways been fetishized in sociolinguistics (see Britain, 2012, 2017, 2022 for a discussion of this tendency), and multilingual urban 320

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studies is no exception. The urban is the starting point for many of these studies, and often there is an implicit association between urbanness and youth, which I will get back to below (see also Stæhr, Møller and Maegaard, 2022; Jonsson and Åhlund, 2020, for a discussion of this). Within youth studies more generally, we also see a clear preference for urbanity and a norm of being mobile (e.g., Halloway and Valentine, 2000). This line of research reproduces the rural as a safe, but perhaps boring, place that young people orient away from – into the city. Thus it is not only linguistic studies of youth, which has tended to be metro-centric, but also the wider field of youth studies.

The social meaning of place The view of place as a rather concrete and physical phenomenon, leading to increased or limited contact between speakers has been dominant in much dialectological and sociolinguistic work. However, the concept of place is becoming an object of increasing theoretical debate, and trends within sociology and social geography view place as both outcome of historical processes, and as a situated achievement of social agents (Pred, 1984; Cresswell, 2004; Tuan, 1991; Massey, 1995). In terms of language, this means that linguistic practice not only reflects but also defines or constructs place (Britain, 2010, 2013, Johnstone, 2011, Stjernholm, 2013, Quist, 2010, 2018). Consequently, the meaning of a place is neither stable across time nor across individuals or communities, and the linguistic practices of people who in certain ways claim attachment to the place may or may not be similar. This complexification of the concept of place makes it increasingly difficult for sociolinguists and dialectologists to measure the meaning of place using traditional methods, and the use of ethnographic methods becomes more common. In recent writings on commodity chain analysis, Thurlow calls for an expanded sense of context and a discourse-centred ethnographic analysis (Thurlow, 2020, p. 356). He refers to the geographer Doreen Massey when arguing that place needs to be understood both as a spatial and temporal construct: “if space is rather a simultaneity of stories‐so‐far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power‐geometries of space” (Massey, 2005, p. 130). The multilingual urban spaces discussed above will be narrated in a variety of ways depending on the narrator, the context and the purpose of the narration. However, the different narratives will not necessarily be independent of each other, they may intersect and influence each other in unpredictable ways as people make sense of the place. Thus, a politician may comment on a crime committed in a specific neighborhood by referring to the ethnic and linguistic composition of the area, and this may, in turn, be repeated or opposed by other agents involved in the construction of the place (e.g., the local inhabitants). Within cultural geography, the connection between youth (and children) and place is specifically addressed in the subfield Children’s Geographies (see Holloway and Valentine, 2000). However, work within this field is not concerned with language. Like Thurlow, Quist (2021) argues that sociolinguistics ought to engage more with the understanding of a place as connected to historical processes and personal trajectories. She and her colleagues show that a qualitative approach to the analysis of a group of young people living in the urban area of Vollsmose offers insights into the relation between place and language, which could not have been achieved with traditional measurements (Monka et al., 2020).

Youth in dialectology In traditional dialectology, the prime informant is the non-mobile older rural male (often referred to as the NORM, cf. Chambers and Trudgill, 1998, p. 33). This type of participant is preferred because he will fulfill all the requirements based on the underlying assumptions of traditional dialectology. First of all, it is assumed that a person will ‘speak like their place’, meaning that there is a direct relationship between place, language and person, and the longer you stay in a place, the more ‘authentic’ 321

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you will speak the language of that particular place. The older speakers will supposedly have access to older linguistic features than the younger, and for a science that cherishes the old language, older speakers are bound to be more relevant than younger ones. The participants of traditional dialectology are rural, because the language of rural places is seen as less affected by language contact caused through mobility than urban places, and thus as purer and more authentic. Finally, research shows that male speakers are less likely to change their language in the direction of the standard language, and this leads to the preference for male speakers in dialectological studies. Youth is in many ways envisioned as the opposite of the NORM: young, mobile and urban and thus uninteresting to traditional dialectology. Based on the very same assumptions that make the NORM the perfect participant in dialectology, young people are generally considered to be less authentic speakers of the dialect than the older generations. When young people feature in dialect studies, they will usually be interpreted as the drivers of language change and standardization, since their language will often be closer to the standard than older generations’ will (e.g., Maegaard et al., 2020; Wolfram, 2006). The pattern is even referred to as ‘dialect death’, because if the young people do not speak the dialect, then it will eventually disappear. The finding that young people are linguistically more standardized than older speakers is the typical result in dialect studies, and to a field that considers its main objective to be “the historical study of dialects” (Hickey, 2017, p. 23), investigating the language of young people becomes irrelevant to many dialectologists. However, understanding the social meaning of the local language to young people can turn out to be crucial if we wish to understand their perception of place and the relation between the place and their linguistic practices and ideologies (see below).

Youth in multilingual urban studies Multilingual urban studies are generally focused on young language users. Studies of older speakers exist, but they are usually of a different sort. When the focus is on younger speakers, very often the research is concerned with analyzing uses of linguistic material conventionally thought to belong to different registers or languages and there is often a strong focus on what is seen as creative uses of linguistic material. This is the case in the early studies of so-called multiethnolect from the 2000s where researchers were showing how the use of linguistic resources from different languages resulted in quite coherent new registers (Quist, 2008, 2010; Svendsen and Røyneland, 2008; Wiese, 2009; Nortier, 2001; Cheshire et al., 2011; Doran, 2002). It was the task of the researcher to show the structuredness and the regularity of these new registers, in order for the public to acknowledge them as legitimate dialects (quite similar to William Labov’s work on so-called ‘Black English Vernacular’ from the 1960s). Even though focus has changed from the description of these types of language use as dialects or varieties, and towards more focus on the situated use of linguistic resources as well as on ideological processes (e.g., Møller, 2010; Madsen, 2015; Milani and Jonsson, 2012), the engagement with youth as particularly creative language users have remained (cf. also Jaspers and van de Weerd, this volume). The implicit assumption of a relationship between youth and creativity (and change) has been discussed by several linguists (e.g., Pichler et al., 2018; Coupland, 2001; Coupland and Ylänne-McEwan, 2008; Eckert, 1997), and as accounted for by Coupland and Ylänne-McEwan “the assumption that people are communicatively unchanging and ‘set in their ways’ is part of the pernicious mythology of old age” (2008, p. 2335). They call for a sociolinguistics which includes older creative language users, people who change their language later in life, and generally warn that perhaps the association between youth and creativity ought to be hedged a bit. In a recent, edited volume, the editors Kerswill and Wiese refer to the notion of urban contact dialects as: “[U]rban vernaculars that emerged in contexts of migration-based linguistic diver322

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sity among locally born young people, marking their speakers as belonging to a multiethnic peer group” (Kerswill and Wiese, 2022, p. 1, see also Bunk and Wiese, this volume). This definition is useful to the authors because it is broad enough to encompass contact varieties emerging from quite different social and geographical contexts, while at the same time narrow enough to distinguish these from e.g., learner languages. This definition is especially useful in research that wishes to focus on register differentiation and to compare across linguistic systems. However, there is an interesting aspect of this definition, which is not touched upon by Kerswill and Wiese, but which is of great importance to the current discussion of the concept of youth in these types of studies. This is the criterion that the variety emerged among “locally born young people” (emphasis added). This criterion is not further discussed or elaborated upon, and so youth is here even more implicitly presupposed than the urban nature of these registers. There may be several reasons for this, but one explanation might be the general assumption of the crucial role of young people in language change (see above). The very aspect of youth that renders them unsuitable for traditional dialectology is what makes them attractive in studies of urban language contact.

Language, youth and rural place As part of a larger project on dialect use and ideology in Denmark, together with a group of colleagues, I investigated how dialect was used among young people and how it was perceived and associated with social meaning (Maegaard et al., 2020). In the following I will offer four brief examples from this research, each exemplifying how place matters to the young people’s linguistic practices and, related to this, their linguistic ideologies.

“Real Danish” The first example is from Southern Jutland where Malthe, a 15-year-old boy, talks to the fieldworker about language (see Example 1, author’s translation). Example 1 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12

Int: Mal: Int: Mal: Int: Mal: Int: Mal: Int: Mal: Int:

um (.) how do you think that you yourself talk (.) or wh- what would you call the way you speak Southern Jutlandic mm Danish yes real Danish I would say real Danish (.) ha yes that’s what we say down here right yes (.) who says so we:ll (.) those of us who speak Southern Jutlandic probably do mm

In the project we observed, recorded and interviewed three generations of speakers in each field site (young people in 9th grade, their parents and their grandparents). The excerpt in Example 1 shows many of the language ideologies that we meet in the interviews across the three generations under study. It is exceptional in that it touches upon so many different aspects of the local language ideologies in a fairly short stretch of time. Asked about how he would label the way he speaks, Malthe 323

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answers “Southern Jutlandic” (line 3), then “Danish” (line 5) and finally “real Danish I would say” (line 7). When the interviewer repeats “real Danish” and laughs, Malthe specifies by pointing to an ingroup/we-group placed in a geographic area: “that’s what we say down here” (line 9). The term “down here” as a way of delineating the area where the dialect is spoken is used across all three generations. The we-group is made up of “those of us who speak Southern Jutlandic” (lines 11), by at the same time linking this to the specific place “down here” (line 9), and this link between the dialect and the place is not exclusive to Southern Jutland, but is a common representation of dialect and not surprising in this context. However, the link between the dialect and ‘real’ Danish draws directly on the specific Southern Jutlandic history of German occupation and liberation, as Southern Jutlanders are known by locals to be “the most Danish of Danes”, since they voted themselves ‘back to Denmark’ in 1920 (see Monka, 2020). Furthermore, during the period under German rule, there was no standard Danish influence in Southern Jutland, and the Southern Jutlandic dialect was seen as in opposition to German, not Danish. Thus, we see here how a language ideology based on events that took place a hundred years ago is still highly relevant, even for a 15-year-old boy, and we see how the meaning of the local place is central in this ideology.

Bornholmian stylizations On the island of Bornholm the local dialect is generally not used by the youngest generation, even though it is used to a very high degree by their parents and grandparents (see Maegaard and Monka, 2020). This makes the condition resemble a situation of rather sudden dialect death, where we see very abrupt changes in use of the dialect from one generation to the next. In many ways, this pattern is exactly the reason why the language of young people is not traditionally regarded as interesting to dialectologists. However, our findings reveal that the young people have not lost their connection to the dialect completely, neither in their linguistic practice nor in their expressions of dialect ideologies. Even though quantitative analyses showed that the young generation hardly uses any local dialect, other – qualitative – analyses showed that they do in fact use it, however for specific purposes, situations and functions. Example 2

Figure 23.1  Messenger chat, William and Dennis, Bornholm.

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Translation 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09

Wil: Den: Wil: Den: Wil: Den:

What about that (deng) free ticket huh Now you chill buddy Freeloading buddy You offered it (deng) Yeah yeah but it’s still a long time until the harbor (‘hamna’) festival 2 days For goodness sake You’ll get it tomorrow you bastard I’ll just drive to Birkevej

Figure 23.1 shows an example of a Messenger exchange between two friends, William and Dennis, 16 years old. Both boys are locally born, and their parents and grandparents speak Bornholmian dialect as their unmarked everyday language. However, the boys, like other young people in Bornholm, do not normally use the dialect. In the interaction in Figure 1, the two friends nevertheless use writings which resemble local dialect (instances of dialect writing are underlined in Example 2, and Swedish is in Italics). In the excerpt, William brings up the subject of a free ticket for a harbor festival, which Dennis has promised to give him. He uses the spelling “deng” for standard den, which presumably points to the palatalized pronunciation of the nasal in traditional Bornholmian dialect (sometimes it is spelled with a j). During a play-back session, where a fieldworker went through William’s Messenger interaction together with him, William reads the messages aloud, and here it is clear that the ng-spelling indicates that the entire message is to be interpreted as Bornholmian. In the exchange, William uses Bornholmian dialect to mitigate a potential face threat. His quite direct question about the ticket risks being perceived as impatient or ungrateful, and this could potentially turn the conversation into an uncomfortable situation for both him and Dennis. The use of Bornholmian dialect features mitigates the threat and brings proximity and solidarity to the conversation. Dennis does not react to this immediately, but is calling William a ‘freeloader’ and argues against the need to deliver the ticket straight away, writing in standard Danish orthography, thus adding to the potential tension in the conversation and not downtoning it, neither through the use of dialect nor other strategies. However, in line 5 he uses the word hamnafesten, where hamna (‘harbor’) is mock Swedish, something the boys often use, both orally and in writing to mark something as fun and playful. Here, then, Dennis acknowledges William’s dialect play, and continues or develops this using (mock) Swedish. The avoidance of potential face threats or other uncomfortable situations through the use of dialect is something we found in many cases involving the use of both oral and written dialect by the young people (see Stæhr and Larsen, 2020, for further analyses). Thus, they use the register of the place, Bornholmian dialect, in their communication with peers, signaling a decreased social distance and a degree of un-seriousness in relation to the content. Bornholmian dialect is not just any type of register to these young people. On several occasions the young participants refer to the Bornholmian dialect as their “mother tongue”, and this is even the case, when they themselves do not in fact speak it. As one of the participants, Malene (age 15), explains: “I think we should learn more Bornholmian because it’s our mother tongue and it is dying out […] quite a lot […] so I think it’s such a shame that it will be lost just like that because Copenhageners are coming here.” Malene is not herself a dialect speaker, but she nevertheless refers to the dialect as her “mother tongue”, and she is not the only one. Though the young people do not speak it themselves, referring to Bornholmian as their “mother tongue” associates the dialect with an emotional attachment, and not necessarily with actual competencies in speaking 325

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the dialect. Thus, the language is connected to bodies, not through concrete practices of speaking it, but through past generations’ use of it, or through heritage or ‘blood’ (Hutton, 2010, p. 645). In the participants’ accounts, language becomes physically attached to both bodies and places. Bornholmian dialect belongs to the place of Bornholm and to the people who live there and whose families speak it presently or have done so in earlier times (see Scheuer et al., 2020).

The visual creation of place in Northern Jutland In Hirtshals in Northern Jutland, the young people do not use local dialect to a very high extent. They use some regional features, but they are little aware of the regional nature of these features, and they generally refer to their own way of speaking as ‘normal’ and ‘neutral’ (Mortensen, 2020). In Hirtshals, then, local language is not seen as an important resource in place-making among the young people. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the local place is not important to them, but they signal their belonging in different ways. One of the more complex examples is the way Liam uses language and other semiotic material on SnapChat. Liam is a young man (age 16) of a migration background. He arrived in Denmark and Northern Jutland some years prior to the fieldwork, and attends the local school in Hirtshals. Since arriving in Denmark, he never lived anywhere outside Northern Jutland and we might expect this to have influenced his linguistic practice in the direction of the regional Northern Jutlandic register spoken by his classmates (see Monka and Hovmark 2016 for a description of this type of linguistic behavior in Southern Jutland). However, Liam has adopted another way of speaking, namely what could be termed street language (Madsen, 2013), multiethnolect (Quist, 2008) or multiethnic youth style (Skovse, 2018). He does not use any of the regional Northern Jutlandic features, but instead uses a specific prosodic pattern associated with street language as well as palatalized /t/ (Maegaard, 2010) and fronted /s/ (Maegaard, 2010, Pharao et al., 2014, Maegaard and Pharao, 2016). Apart from Liam, no one else spoke this register in school. However, the register is present in many other ways, especially through media and Liam has picked up this mediatized register and accommodated it to his own usage. The register has been seen in previous research to be associated with a specific type of streetwise, cool masculinity, when used by young male speakers (Madsen, 2013; Maegaard and Pharao, 2016). In much research, though, it is also connected to urbanness, and this is somewhat complexified in Liam’s use of the style. Liam is not orienting towards Copenhagen, Aalborg or other urban centres when he talks about his life and his future plans. He is proud to be from Hirtshals, he says, and he enjoys local fishing and other leisure activities. At the same time, he constructs a persona which draws on global mediatized resources associating him with an urban and cool persona. Figure 23.2 shows two images from Liam’s SnapChat story. Here, he makes use of a geosticker automatically provided by SnapChat, based on the GPS coordinates of the phone. The Hirtshals sticker is only available when you are actually in the Hirtshals area, and so using this sticker places Liam at a particular place at a particular time. Furthermore, Liam has chosen the sticker with an image of the local lighthouse in the place of the i in the name of the town, pointing to a local attraction. Additionally, the text is set in blue color and the color as well as the the wave running through the text can be seen to connote the ocean. The geo-sticker is placed at the bottom of the photos, both photos display the sea, however in different ways. The left photo shows the sea in a somewhat dramatic tilted angle, and the clouds and generally dark colors furthermore enhance this meaning of the photo. The right photo displays big ships in the ocean under a pink sky – probably manipulated through the use of a filter. In both cases, Liam has put some work into the aesthetic composition of the scenes. In the foreground of both images is shown what is presumably Liam’s arm wearing a rather big men’s watch and his hand holding a cigarette – in the right 326

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Figure 23.2  SnapChat story images from Liam, Northern Jutland.

picture further resting on the steering wheel of a car. These accompanying visual elements in the pictures all draw on traditional masculinity and coolness and thus place Liam’s cool and streetwise style in the surroundings of Hirtshals. The combination of the peripheral place of Hirtshals and the urban style displayed by Liam could be perceived as ironic. However, as explained by Mortensen (2020, p. 108) there was nothing ironic about Liam’s feelings of attachment to Hirtshals. He was passionate about both the town and the cultural and natural values attached to it (e.g., fishing, the harbor and the ocean), and he proclaimed to the fieldworker that he felt that Hirtshals was where he came from. What we find in the case of Liam, then, is a construction of local belonging which is not based on a use of traditional local dialect or a regional register. Rather, Liam composes a complex persona drawing on globally mediated linguistic resources, which in combination with constructions of the local place as a dramatic and perhaps even dangerous place, creates the impression of a cool, tough, streetwise young man, who is at the same time globally oriented and locally attached (see Mortensen, 2020, for further analyses). The three examples above (from Bornholm, Southern Jutland and Northern Jutland) illustrate the complex nature of the relationship between language and place. In all instances place is made meaningful, but in very different ways, and not always with linguistic consequences. The young people in Bylderup in Southern Jutland have an understanding of the local place, which ties it strongly to the local dialect and it is not possible to be a real sønderjyde (‘Southern Jutlander’) without speaking the dialect. As shown above, this understanding is based on historic events that took place a hundred years ago, but which are still important to the local youth. On the island of Bornholm history is also 327

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important, here understood as the heritage of the young people, and to them Bornholmian dialect has the position of a heritage language, rather than being the local vernacular. That is, the language is not necessarily spoken by the young people themselves, but it is perceived as the language of their ancestors and the language that belongs to the island, and which connects the young people themselves to the island and to history. Finally, the example from Northern Jutland shows the importance of the local place to the young man, Liam, as a place to which he is connected through his engagement in local culture (e.g., fishing), and through his connections to other members of the same minoritized background who also live in the area. To Liam, then, his own trajectory as a migrant to the area is part of his personal history, but this does not exclude him from feeling and expressing a strong sense of belonging to the area. Rather, it connects him in a particular way to the place, and it shows how migration, mobility and contact are not constituting the opposite of place attachment. Instead, we might say that it constitutes another type of attachment, which may seem more complex than the ‘old’ dialectological idea of sedentarism (Britain, 2016), but is quite sense-making to the people experiencing and ‘living’ place in these ways.

Conclusion and future directions Returning to the discussions by Massey, Thurlow and Quist introduced earlier, we have seen how history – both at the personal and the community level – is paramount if we are to understand the relation between language and place today. Massey discusses how different understandings of the history of a place are underlying many contemporary conflicts over places, and she stresses that pointing to the past through, for instance, names, language or narratives is not just a way of maintaining a particular world: It is also that a (historical) world is created. If the past transforms the present, helps thereby to make it, so too does the present make the past. All of which is really a way of saying that in trying to understand the identity of places we cannot – or, perhaps should not – separate space from time, or geography from history. (Massey, 1995, p. 187) So, the meaning of a place is never stable, but is always a process and different agents may have different conceptualizations of it, depending on the way they understand the relation between the place, its past and its future, and their own position in this relationship. Massey is not very concerned with the way language plays into this, but she recognizes it as one way to claim legitimate ownership of, and belonging to, a place (Massey, 1995, p. 187). In Quist’s discussion of this, language is central, and Quist argues that history and personal trajectories are essential in understanding an individual’s relation to a place, and that this relation is influencing language in important ways (Quist, 2021, p. 170). However, it remains a challenge how we should operationalize the analysis of this relation generally, but in Quist and colleagues’ work an index measuring the person’s local attachment has been constructed, and then correlated with their linguistic practices (see Monka et al., 2020, Quist, 2019, Skovse, 2018). In this chapter I have tried to sketch out an approach to the study of language and youth, which does not presuppose the importance of place or the lack thereof, but instead takes the specific context and the specific people under study as the starting point, to then examine if and how place matters to them. It is clear from the above that place in sociolinguistic studies of youth has been mainly used in two ways. The first is as a delineating concept, demarcating the people under study from others, typically through their place of birth, place of residence or their family’s origins. This 328

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approach may seem objective and easily operationalizable, but it has important limitations, as we have seen above, for instance since it excludes participation from people who do not necessarily meet the criteria, but who might nevertheless have important relations to the local place. The other is a focus on the meaning of place to people and to their language. In sociolinguistic studies of traditional dialect this aspect has been central from the beginning of the field (e.g., Labov, 1963), however often with a focus on spatial orientations – is the individual oriented towards or away from the local place? This has proved an important way to measure ‘place attachment’ in connection to linguistic practice, but it is just one way to think about place. The meaning of place may be more complex than that, as we have seen, and the implications for language and how to study it will need more theoretical and methodological work in the future. The examples I have offered in this chapter are from rural or peripheral areas, exemplifying how place matters, and often dialect too, also to young people living in these areas. Another line of argument would take the urban contact areas as a point of departure, and then focus on other speakers than the ones we usually meet in these studies (see also Svendsen, 2015, pp. 22–23). As noted by Britain: We need research on older speakers, and on the retention of multiethnolectal features into adulthood, on elite, privileged, ‘White’ multiethnolects, on rural multiethnolects, on the intersection of multiethnolects and gender and sexuality, on multiethnolects outside of the Global North, on multiethnolects then and not just now. (Britain, 2022, p. 334) Studies of youth, language and place have offered many sociolinguistic insights so far, and many theoretical aspects have been discussed and developed in the process. The next steps towards a clearer conceptualization of place and a clearer understanding of age will undoubtedly bring further valuable insights into the sociolinguistics of youth and place. However, an important point from this chapter is that language, youth and place cannot be seen as detached from each other but should rather be seen as co-constructed and intersecting. This way, dialect not only indexes geographical place, but can also index age, history and a particular imaginary of the place, among other things. Likewise, youth is not always connected to urbanity, but can be constructed in many other ways, with the use of language or other semiotic material.

Note 1 Corresponding author: Marie Maegaard, University of Copenhagen, Department for Nordic Studies and Linguistics, Emil Holms Kanal 2, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark. Orcid: 0000-0002-7674-4749.

Further readings Cresswell, T. (2004). Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Massey, D. (1995). Places and their pasts. History Workshop Journal, 39: 182–192.

References Boberg, C., J. Nerbonne and D. Watt (2017). Introduction. In C. Boberg, J. Nerbonne and D. Watt (eds.), Handbook of Dialectology (pp. 1–15). London: Blackwell. Britain, D. (2010). Conceptualisations of geographical space in linguistics. In A. Lameli, R. Kehrein and S. Rabanus (eds.), The Handbook of Language Mapping (pp. 69–97). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Quist and B.A. Svendsen (eds.), Multilingual Urban Scandinavia: New Linguistic Practices (pp. 127–141). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Nortier, J. (2001). “Fawaka, what’s up?” Language use among adolescents in mono- ethnic and ethnically mixed groups. In A. Hvenekilde and J. Nortier (eds.), Meetings at the Crossroads. Studies of Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Oslo and Utrecht (pp. 61–72). Oslo: Novus. Pharao, N., M. Maegaard, J.S. Møller and Kristiansen, T. (2014). Indexical meanings of [s+] among Copenhagen youth: Social perception of a phonetic variant in different prosodic contexts. Language in Society, 43 (1): 1–31. Pichler, H., S.E. Wagner and A. Hesson (2018). Old age variation and change: Confronting variationist ageism. Language and Linguistics Compass, 12 (6). https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/lnc3​.12281. Pietikainen, S. and H. Kelly-Holmes (eds.) (2013). Multilingualism and the Periphery. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pietikäinen, S., A. Jaffe, H. Kelly-Holmes and N. Coupland (2016). Sociolinguistics from the Periphery: Small Languages in New Circumstances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pred, A. (1984). Place as historically contingent process: Structuration and the time-geography of becoming places. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 74 (2): 279–297. Quist, P. (2008). Sociolinguistic approaches to multiethnolect: Language variety and stylistic practice. International Journal of Bilingualism, 12: 43–61. Quist, P. (2010). Untying the language, body and place connection: Linguistic variation and social style in a Copenhagen community of practice. In P. Auer and J.E. Schmidt (eds.), Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation. Vol. 1: Theories and Methods. Mouton de Gruyter. Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, 30 (1) (pp. 632–648). Berlin: De Gruyter. Quist, P. (2018). Alternative place naming in the diverse margins of an ideologically monolingual society. In L. Cornips and V. de Rooij (eds.), The Sociolinguistics of Place and Belonging: Perspectives from the Margins (pp. 239–260). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Quist, P. (2019). Indgruppe-variabilitet blandt flersprogede unge – Stil, kontrol og lokal tilknytning. Nordand – Nordisk tidsskrift for andrespråksforskning, 14 (2): 158–176. Quist, P. (2021). Nålepude eller kludetæppe? – Teoretiske konceptualiseringer af sted. In T. Kristiansen and A. Holmen (eds.), Sprogs status i Rigsfællesskabet 2031, Københavnerstudier i tosprogethed. Studier i parallelsproglighed, C13 (pp. 164–172). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Humanities. Scheuer, J. A. Larsen, M. Maegaard, M. Monka & K. K. Mortensen (2020). Language ideologies as a key to understanding language standardization. In M. Maegaard, M. Monka, K. K. Mortensen & A. Stæhr (eds.), Standardization as sociolinguistic change, (pp. 190–218). London: Routledge. Skovse, A.R. (2018). Udgangspunkter og orienteringspunkter. En undersøgelse af unges stedstilknytning, hverdagsmobilitet og sproglige praksis to steder i Danmark. Danske Talesprog, 18: 1–316. Stjernholm, K. (2013). Stedet velger ikke lenger deg, du velger et sted. Tre artikler om språk i Oslo. PhD dissertation, Institutt for lingvistiske og nordiske studier, University of Oslo. Stæhr, A.C., J.S. Møller and M. Maegaard (2022). Youth language. In F. Brisard, S. D’hondt, P. Gras and M. Vandenbroucke (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics (pp. 199–223). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Stæhr, A.C. and A. Larsen (2020). Bornholm: The terminal stage of dedialectalization. In M. Maegaard, M. Monka, K.K. Mortensen and A.C. Stæhr (eds.), Standardization as Sociolinguistic Change: A transversal Study of Three Traditional Dialect Areas (pp. 114–144). London: Routledge. Svendsen, B.A. (2015). Language, youth and identity in the 21st century: Content and continuations. In J. Nortier and B. 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24 CONTACT DIALECTS IN URBAN YOUTH CULTURE AND BEYOND Oliver Bunk and Heike Wiese1,2

Introduction In this chapter, we focus on new ways of speaking that emerged in the context of linguistically diverse urban youth culture, which we understand as new urban dialects (henceforth, UCD, Wiese, 2022). We describe placemaking through linguistic practices and language ideologies surrounding these contact dialects and discuss how different macro ideologies to multilingualism affect the development and use of UCDs, in particular hegemonic monolingual ones and ones that normalise multilingualism. We take an interest both in how UCDs are used and what attitudes these linguistic practices meet in contexts with monoglossic ideologies (dominant in Europe) as well as contexts embracing multilingualism as normalcy (dominant in Africa). We argue that macro societal language ideologies influence the development of UCDs which can be seen as a continuum with UCDs as varieties of the majority language on the one pole and UCDs as mixed languages on the other (see Svendsen, 2015, for the importance of uncovering this connection between macro and micro levels). Against this background, we present the concept of communicative situations (comsits, Wiese 2021, see below) as a way to understand the micro context of UCDs, and discuss how multilingualism contributes to placemaking in urban youth culture, supporting dynamic UCDs even under conditions of a monolingually biased larger society. Finally, we discuss how UCDs can spread beyond their initial places and get associated with new (and broader) communicative situations. We concentrate on ‘Kiezdeutsch’, a German UCD, as our primary focus, but we also draw on other UCDs, including those from Sub-Saharan Africa for comparisons allowing us a broader view on UCDs in general.

Research on UCDs: state of the art and key debates As the term UCD indicates, these varieties emerge in urban areas or cities. Cities provide an interesting testing ground for studying linguistic dynamics, and this is particularly true for young people who grow up in urban diversity. Adolescents are generally considered to be at the forefront of language variation and change as language plays an important role in constructing identities and social groups, which are key aspects of the transition from childhood to adulthood characterising adolescence (cf. Kerswill, 1996; Eckert, 2000). DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-32

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Today, many adolescents grow up in urban neighbourhoods that are characterised by a great multi-ethnic and multilingual diversity that has its roots in earlier immigration from other countries and regions. These adolescents form a new, locally born generation with an urban identity that can transcend ethnic borders and is reflected linguistically, as adolescents develop new linguistic varieties that can function as group markers. These linguistic varieties among youths have given rise to an entire research field, including a great deal of interdisciplinary discussions. Following Wiese (2022), we refer to these varieties as new urban contact dialects, defined as “urban vernaculars that emerged in contexts of migrationbased linguistic diversity among locally born young people, marking their speakers as belonging to a multi-ethnic peer group” (see also Rampton, 2015, p. 43, on the concept of urban vernaculars). In this context, ethnicity is to be understood as a social category that “demarcates social and sociolinguistic groups that are believed to share a common descent – typically geographically associated – and culture” (Wiese, 2022, p. 120; see also Fought, 2002; Moran, 2014). UCDs have been a focus of interest in sociolinguistics and contact-linguistics over the past decades, with two strands of research targeting UCDs from North-western Europe (see Quist and Svendsen, 2010; Källström and Lindberg, 2011; Kern and Selting, 2011; Nortier and Svendsen, 2015) and from Sub-Saharan Africa, respectively (see Hurst, 2014; Nassenstein and Hollington, 2015; Mensah, 2016; Hurst-Harosh and Erastus, 2018). Kießling and Mous (2005), Dorlijn et al. (2015), Wiese (2022), as well as Kerswill and Wiese (2022) provide integrative views of these two strands. Generally, studies approached these ways of speaking from two perspectives: a structural and a sociolinguistic one (Hinskens 2007, 2011; Quist, 2008; Svendsen and Quist, 2010; Nortier and Svendsen, 2015), which the concept of UCDs aims to integrate. Structural perspectives approached UCDs as linguistic varieties and identified grammatical, lexical and pragmatic patterns that characterise different UCDs. One of the major findings in this strand is that UCDs are systematic options and not “results of poorly acquired skills in the majority language” (Svendsen and Quist, 2010, p. XVI). Sociolinguistic perspectives approached UCDs as styles or stylistic practices and revealed the fluidity of linguistic resources, their integration into larger repertoires and the role they played in speakers’ choices in signalling social identities, belonging and group membership. The term ‘dialect’ avoids the opposition between the two perspectives mentioned above, i.e., ‘style’ (or sociolinguistic aspects and communicative practices) and ‘variety’ (i.e., grammatical and phonological aspects), integrating sociolinguistic perspectives on linguistic practice and functional-grammatical analyses of linguistic structure (Kerswill and Wiese, 2022). Crucially, UCD is to be understood as an analytical category that allows us to look for systematic patterns, and not as an attempt at reifying and homogenising a highly variable and fluid phenomenon (see Wiese, 2022, for a detailed terminological discussion). Focussing on the problem of reification, another debate around UCDs targets the question of labelling (cf. e.g., Svendsen, 2015; Cornips et al., 2015; Jonsson et al., 2019; Dorleijn et al., 2020; Kerwill and Wiese, 2022; Wiese, 2022). Sociolinguistic approaches both from Europe and from Africa point out that labelling practices for urban contact dialects can contribute to reifying fluid practices, (mis-)constructing them as homogeneous and distinct and providing an anchor for negative ascriptions in the public debate (e.g., Jaspers, 2008; Kerswill, 2014, for European examples; Brookes, 2014, for South Africa). However, as studies from both strands emphasise, labels can also counteract negative perceptions by putting emic perspectives to the fore and/or signifying the systematicity of a variety, in contrast to perceptions as random errors (e.g., Slabbert and Myers-Scotton, 1996 for South Africa; Nassenstein, 2014 for DR Congo; Wiese, 2013, 2015 for Germany). 334

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Another key debate within the research field is placemaking, and more specifically how UCDs can be a resource in placemaking practices. To capture the contact-linguistic settings supporting the development of UCDs and their relationship with placemaking, we draw on a concept of communicative situations (short ‘com-sits’) introduced by Wiese (2021). Com-sits are defined as “settings of social activities centred around language production and perception” (Wiese, 2021, p. 6). In general, we can understand com-sits as the linguistic dimension of place, i.e., those aspects of places relevant to the ways of speaking associated with them. Place and the construction of place have been the focus of research across scientific fields. Following research from human geography, we understand place as a physical area with socially constructed associations (Agnew, 1987; Tuan, 1991; cf. Maegaard, this volume). It is imbued with meaning through shared experiences, conceptions, ideas or ideologies that are (re-)produced and communicated through social practices (Cresswell, 2009). Social groups drawing on such features as age, gender or socioeconomic status can share the same ‘sense-of-place’, i.e., a specific attachment to certain places (cf. Agnew, 1987). The process of constructing place through ascribing social meaning can be understood as placemaking, and in this process, language plays an important role (cf. Lefebvre, 1991; Tuan 1974; Cresswell, 2009). Johnstone (2011, p. 211) highlights that “spaces become human places partly through talk, and the meanings of places shape how people talk”. Hence, associations with specific places influence different ways of speaking, and these ways of speaking, in turn, contribute to placemaking. In this process, language can also modify places. Tuan (1991, p. 685) describes as an example of how “a warm conversation between friends can make the place itself seem warm”, while “malicious speech has the power to destroy a place’s reputation and thereby its visibility”. Thus, places are constantly (co- and re-) constructed and modified, and sense-of-place can be modulated through language. Vice versa, place influences our associations with a specific linguistic variety and contributes to adding meaning to language, as in the case of UCDs. Com-sits for UCDs are characterised as peer-group settings among adolescents growing up in multi-ethnic and multilingual urban neighbourhoods. In general, com-sits support linguistic differentiation, i.e., particular linguistic patterns are used in and associated with particular situations and can thus be the basis for grammatical systems, as witnessed in the linguistic systematicity found for UCDs. When certain ways of speaking become associated with specific com-sits, these ways of speaking can then further imbue com-sits with social meaning. For UCDs, their primary association is often with marginalised urban youths. Their root in urban youth culture can support more general associations with such social meanings as ‘coolness’, ‘urbanity’ or ‘youth’. This can also make these dialects attractive for other speakers, and UCDs can spread to wider contexts, e.g., they might be used in com-sits among adolescents in general, not just those in specific urban settings. The spread of UCDs from a way of speaking indexing marginalised groups to generally signalling youth culture in urban settings has been observed in many African countries (see de Féral, 1989; Kießling, 2005; Kamdem Fonkoua, 2015 for Camfranglais; Nassenstein, 2014 for Yanké, Erastus and Kebeya, 2018, Erastus et al., this volume, for Sheng). In Europe, we can observe similar tendencies (Wiese, 2022). This is reflected and reinforced through the use of UCDs in pop culture and in media. For instance, Kiezdeutsch has a strong presence in rap music (cf. Canoğlu, 2012) and Sheng is used in advertisements, talk shows, TV programmes and films, in particular when young people are the main target audience (Erastus and Kebeya, 2018, cf. Erastus et al., this volume). In the UK, Multicultural London English is appropriated as “fashionable” (Kerswill, 2014, p. 452). Along the same lines, Boutin and Dodo (2018, p. 66) state that with its use in mass media, Nouchi is “no longer under the control of its original creators in the ghettos”. Interestingly, such broadening of associations with certain speakers’ groups can also be reversed somewhat, as 335

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described by Ilbury and Kerswill (this volume) for Multicultural London English, which seems to have become recontextualised lately, resulting in a primary association with Black speakers.

Societal attitudes towards UCDs UCDs provide an interesting test case for how speakers perceive and (d)evaluate linguistic variation and speakers of these varieties based on language attitudes and ideologies. In Europe, negative attitudes often play out in a devaluation of UCDs on linguistic and social grounds, up to ‘proxy racism’, i.e., a “projection of ‘ethnic’ and xenophobic demarcations and exclusions onto the linguistic plane” (Wiese, 2015, p. 363; see also Stroud, 2004, on attitudes towards ‘Rinkebysvenska’ in Sweden; Zentella, 2007, on attitudes towards ‘Spanglish’ in the US). In media representations, speakers of UCDs are ethnised and portrayed as “the immigrant Other” and often characterised by gangster images including “tough masculinity” (Jonsson et al. 2019, p. 265) and aggressive behaviour (Androutsopoulos, 2007; Kerswill, 2014; Milani et al., 2015; Quist, 2016; cf. Ilbury and Kerswill, this volume; Stamou, this volume). Wiese (2015) discusses public debates on Kiezdeutsch peaking in 2012 with the publication of a monograph on this UCD (Wiese, 2012). Her analysis was based on a corpus of online commentaries and emails posted in reaction to media reports3 and revealed strong devaluations of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers. From a discourse-analytic perspective, four central, interacting topoi emerged in the discussion, devaluating Kiezdeutsch and its speakers at linguistic (i and ii) and social (iii and iv) levels (see Wiese, 2015, p. 353): (i) ‘Broken language’ — “Kiezdeutsch is a deficient version of German.” (ii) ‘Language decay’ — “As a result, it threatens the integrity of German.” (iii) ‘Opting out’ — “Speakers refuse to integrate into the larger society.” (iv) ‘Social demolition’ — “As a result, they threaten national cohesion.” These topoi constitute powerful social and linguistic ‘us’ / ‘them’ dichotomies, marginalising speakers of Kiezdeutsch. Similarly, negative attitudes became apparent in an open-guise study presented by Bunk and Pohle (2019) who used as stimuli, recordings of two young people from a multilingual urban neighbourhood who described a car accident in two different com-sits using two different varieties of German. In the first, the interlocutor was a police officer (= formal language, close to standard), in the second, the interlocutor was a friend (= informal language, Kiezdeutsch). Participants listened to these stimuli and were asked to describe, in each case, their associations with the speaker. They were explicitly told that the same speaker produced both informal and formal recordings. Two groups of participants were included to evaluate the speakers’ voices: (1) out-group participants represented by teachers and social workers (n = 5), and (2) in-group participants represented by young adults from a multilingual urban neighbourhood where Kiezdeutsch was common in peer-group communication (n = 16). In their qualitative analysis, Bunk and Pohle (2019) observed that the out-group constructed Kiezdeutsch speakers as ‘incapable’ of adapting their language to the formal com-sit, while the in-group described Kiezdeutsch as a linguistic choice in specific com-sits, namely informal conversations among friends, and as part of broader speaker repertoires that also included formal registers of German. These results suggest a devaluation of Kiezdeutsch speakers by the out-group 336

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and reflect monoglossic language ideologies and Othering of multilingual speakers. Monoglossic ideologies were also present in the in-group, particularly in the form of standard language ideologies, which lead to a devaluation of the UCD even among the speakers themselves (cf. also Labov, 1972, on linguistic insecurity reflecting similar patterns with other dialects). Such monoglossic ideologies are characteristic of societies in Europe and former European settler colonies (e.g., the US or Australia): in the wake of European nation-state building, many European societies developed a ‘monolingual habitus’ (cf. Bourdieu, 1977, Gogolin, 1994), to support an association of ‘one nation – one language’ (Webb, 2002; Edwards, 2009). This led to a conceptual erasure of linguistic (and cultural) diversity in favour of ‘purist’ attitudes involving monolingual and monoethnic norms and standard language ideologies. Even though in contrast to Germany, and other West-European states, multilingualism is accepted as the norm in many African countries (e.g., McLaughlin, 2009a; Mufwene, 2008; Kerswill and Wiese, 2022), we also find devaluations reflecting standard language ideology here. This has been described, for instance, for African UCDs as Nouchi in Côte d’Ivoire (Newell 2009) and urban Wolof in Senegal (McLaughlin, 2009a). At the same time, speakers might favour devaluated UCDs over established languages since they are perceived as new, informal varieties not underlying norms of speaking ‘correctly’, thus causing less linguistic insecurity (see Schröder, 2007 for Camfranglais in Cameroon; Kube-Barth, 2009 for Nouchi in Côte d’Ivoire; Bunk and Pohle, 2019 for Kiezdeutsch).

Macro context and types of UCDs UCDs draw on the rich contact-linguistic settings in which they emerge. Firstly, they involve direct cross-linguistic influences such as lexical and grammatical transfer, i.e., transmission of structure and material from one language to another, and secondly, they take up and expand internal language change (Wiese, 2020). These dynamics can play out in different ways depending on the societal macro context. In particular, in a societal macro context characterised by strong monoglossic ideologies, the contact-linguistic setting can have less far-reaching effects at the structural level than in a society that embraces multilingualism. In the first case, a monolingually oriented society restricts the impact of language contact and thus somewhat impedes the development of UCDs. In such a society, the majority language is highly dominant in everyday life, across public and private domains. As a result, UCDs remain close to that majority language and tend to constitute new varieties of that language. In contrast, UCDs in multilingual societies are not so much restricted by monoglossic ideologies but develop in a context where multilingual practices are acknowledged as normal. As a result, they tend to integrate material from different languages more systematically and can represent new mixed languages. An example of the first kind of UCD is Kiezdeutsch in German. Kiezdeutsch has a number of characteristic grammatical features; however, these are closely integrated into the general structural layout of German. A case in point is the V3 pattern that is salient in Kiezdeutsch, both in the public discussion and in linguistic accounts as illustrated below and in (Wiese, 2013, p. 232): (1)

dann die  sind zur  Ubahn gerannt then they  are to the subway run ‘Then they ran to the subway.’

In this pattern, the verb is preceded by two elements, rather than one, making this a deviation from the verb-second (V2) pattern commonly described for German declaratives. V3 has also 337

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been described in other North-western European UCDs (see Kotsinas, 1998; Quist, 2008; Opsahl, 2009; Freywald et al., 2015). Some earlier accounts described V3 in Kiezdeutsch as an SVO4 order associated primarily with multilingual speakers. For instance, Auer (2003, p. 259) describes V3 as a “restructuring of German XV to SVO” and characterises such variation as something that “intervenes deeply into the structures of autochthonous German in its standard as well as its nonstandard forms” (Auer 2013, p. 37).5 If this were the case, we would have a more dramatically new variety here than might be expected in the strong majority language context of Germany and given that Kiezdeutsch speakers have grown up with German as a first or early second language in this setting. However, subsequent analyses showed that what we see here is a verb-third (V3) pattern representing a variant of canonical V2 and closely fitting into the syntactic configurations of German syntax, rather than a categorically new SVO order (Wiese, 2013; te Velde, 2016; Walkden, 2017). In contrast to SVO, V3 preserves the German sentence brackets (‘Morgen ich werd meine Zigaretten mitbringen’, not ‘Morgen ich werd mitbringen meine Zigaretten’), it systematically co-occurs with canonical V2, including object-first V2 declaratives and it represents an information-structurally motivated option much less frequent than V2 (Wiese and Müller, 2018). Not surprisingly, then, V3 has also been shown to occur in more monolingual settings outside Kiezdeutsch (Wiese, 2013; Schalowski, 2017; Bunk, 2020), and psycholinguistic evidence from monolingual groups suggests that it is processed as an integral part of German syntax (Bunk, 2020). Comparative data indicates a quantitative advantage for UCDs but no qualitative differences (Wiese and Rehbein, 2015). Thus, V3 structures are prime examples of European UCDs taking up tendencies occurring within the respective majority language and further expanding them. In contrast, UCDs in multilingually oriented societies tend to represent new mixed languages. In these cases, one language typically acts as the source for grammatical features, and other languages contribute to the lexicon. An example of this is Camfranglais, as illustrated in Kießling and Mous (2004, p. 5): (2)

On    a kick mon agogo. GENERIC.PRON.3PS. has steal my watch ‘They stole my watch/ Someone has stolen my watch.’

In this example, Cameroonian French provides the grammatical frame and some function words and integrates such elements as kick and agogo (‘watch’) from English and Hausa, respectively. This kind of mixed language represents a more novel variety than the majority language variants typically found in Europe, reflecting the stronger linguistic dynamics under a multilingual societal habitus (Wiese, 2022). Note though, that it is the societal macro context that is relevant here, not the geographical region. Accordingly, in cases where we do find a monolingual societal habitus in Africa, the UCD patterns with those in Europe. This is the case for Lugha ya Mitaani, a UCD spoken in Tanzania. Tanzania promotes Swahili as the sole national language and has a monolingual habitus similar to that of many European countries. As a result, Swahili has become a strong majority language, even though Tanzania is linguistically highly diverse with several regional languages like Arabic, Bemba and Datooga. Under this societal habitus, Lugha ya Mitaani is not characterised by the kind of intense and integrated language mixing known from other African UCDs, but rather constitutes a non-standard register of Swahili (Reuster-Jahn and Kießling, 2006). Hence, the societal macro context can have a differential impact on the contact-linguistic form UCDs can take (cf. Wiese, 2022; Kerswill and Wiese, 2022). Importantly, the differences between such new mixed languages and new majority language variants are gradual rather than categorical. 338

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While in Kiezdeutsch, language mixing is less strong than, e.g., in Camfranglais, although we find a range of lexical insertions for instance from Arabic and Turkish. While contact-linguistic grammatical transfer is rare, there is at least one example for a Turkish-based pattern in Kiezdeutsch that is located at the interface of syntax and the lexicon, namely m-reduplication, i.e., echo word formation where a word is repeated by a phonologically modified word where the first constituent is replaced by /m/, e.g., ‘Cola-Mola’ (see Wiese and Polat, 2016 for a detailed analysis of this pattern in Kiezdeutsch). This points to the power of com-sits in these developments (Wiese, 2021): the multilingual urban youth settings associated with UCDs can support new contact-linguistic developments not just in societies that embrace multilingualism, but also in ones with a strong monolingual habitus. Com-sits are distinguished by speakers through a number of language external factors, including cultural, psychological and social ones (Wiese, 2021). Place might be one of these factors, as com-sits can be seen as the linguistic dimension of place. In the next section, we further investigate these local settings and discuss the way multilingualism contributes to the construction of place in urban youth culture in a monolingually oriented society taking Berlin as an example.

Urban placemaking through UCDs Urban settings fostering UCDs are characterised by an integration of a large range of linguistic resources and as we have argued in the previous section, they are influenced by the societal macro setting leading to different types of UCDs. Internal and external immigration contributes to a linguistic diversity, shaping the linguistic landscape. Many young people grow up with multilingualism as a normal part of everyday life. Whereas members of older generations (often parents or grandparents of the speakers) might have closer ties between ethnicity and language, interactions between the younger, locally born generation are characterised by systematically crossing such borders (cf. Kießling and Mous, 2004; Nassenstein, 2014; Wiese, 2022). Speakers acquire new linguistic resources from a range of heritage languages as well as global English, through social media platforms, friends, at kindergarten and school, and use them in multilingual practices of language choice, language mixing and integration (cf. Kouassi and Hurst-Harosh, 2018). Making use of such multilingual resources is an important aspect of the construction of urban places. This aspect of placemaking is not only a feature of youth culture in such places but constitutes informal settings in such urban neighbourhoods in general, and young people experience this kind of multilingualism in a range of contexts. A good example is markets in such neighbourhoods. As a hub of trade and commerce, markets have always been hot spots of linguistic diversity and integration, with a constant and rapid change of communication partners who bring a range of linguistic resources with them. In Berlin, the Maybachufer market is situated at the border of BerlinKreuzberg and -Neukölln, two multi-ethnic and multilingual inner-city neighbourhoods where Kiezdeutsch is used among young people. While German, as the majority language, is a dominant language at the market, sellers and customers integrate diverse linguistic resources in their communication, most notably Turkish as a heritage language of many sellers and customers, but also a range of other heritage languages, tourists’ languages and English as a global lingua franca. This kind of linguistic diversity contributes to the placemaking at the market, as well as being a selling point. The integration of such diverse linguistic resources leads to new lexical, grammatical and pragmatic patterns involving abundant language mixing (Duman and Daiying, 2021; Wiese, 2020, 2021; Yüksel and Duman, 2021). This makes such a market more similar to the settings in African countries: they are places of a multilingual normalcy that defies the general monolingual habitus. 339

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Such multilingual integration is part of everyday life in these neighbourhoods, and young people growing up here encounter this from a young age. In a country like Germany, with its strong monolingual habitus, the majority language, German, will always play a prominent role, and German will typically be also an important resource for young people in family communication – at least among school-age siblings, but often also with older family members. However, this is complemented by a range of heritage language resources, in addition to English as the language of globalisation and as a dominant part of pop culture for young people. Multilingual practices support a UCD such as Kiezdeutsch; however, the societal monolingual habitus restricts this to com-sits characterised by informality and peer-group conversations. These are not the only characteristics of the com-sits associated with Kiezdeutsch though. A salient additional feature is the linguistically diverse neighbourhood which is constructed as a particular place. In the study mentioned above, Bunk and Pohle (2019) found that for speakers of Kiezdeutsch the UCD signals a specific local identity, associated with Berlin-Kreuzberg and -Neukölln. These are inner-city neighbourhoods well-known for their multilingual and multi-ethnic character, but also associated with low socioeconomic status and social and educational disadvantages (Bunk and Pohle, 2019). This was highlighted when several participants pejoratively described the social persona reflected in the Kiezdeutsch recording, e.g., as Pennermädchen (‘hobo-girl’) or Assi (‘low-life’). Both out-group and in-group participants labelled the place associated with Kiezdeutsch as a ‘ghetto’. The ‘ghetto’ is also a recurring theme in public debates on Kiezdeutsch (see Wiese, 2015), where this UCD is related to a specific place primarily constructed through negative stereotypes involving socioeconomic but also ethnic associations. The term ‘ghetto’ constructs an urban place whose inhabitants are socially and economically marginalised and dissociated from the larger society. The ‘ghetto’ thus serves as a place primarily identified through negative attributes which are then associated with Kiezdeutsch. In the construction of this place, specific ethnicities are foregrounded, while others are erased, leading to a stereotypical Othering: typical speakers are constructed as Turkish, Arabic or Kurdish and excluded from and by the German in-group which is perceived as dominantly monolingual and monoethnic (cf. Şimşek and Wiese, 2022). Speakers of Kiezdeutsch reproduce this notion of ‘ghetto’: Kiezdeutsch is associated with neighbourhoods suffering from a ‘ghetto’-image, marking it as the language of societal outsiders from underprivileged backgrounds. We also find this for some African UCDs: in Kenya, a radio station claiming to be the “Sheng official radio station” calls itself “Ghetto radio” (Erastus and Kebeya, 2018, p. 40), playing with this image (cf. Erastus et al., this volume). Importantly, in such cases of in-group perception, the demarcations involved in placemaking are the ones of social class, not of ethnicity. While, for instance, the typical outside perspective constructs Kiezdeutsch speakers as belonging to a specific, non-German ethnicity such as Turkish or Arabic (cf. above), the linguistic reality on the ground crosses ethnic boundaries (cf. e.g., Aarsæther, 2010; Quist, 2008; Bunk and Pohle, 2019). In-group participants also included stereotypes of ethnic Germans from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds in their descriptions, as illustrated in the following quote from the open-guise study described above (Bunk and Pohle, 2019, p. 107): (3)

Asocial Germans, you know, those Chantals and Pascals.

In addition to the pejorative term Assi (‘antisocial’, which was used by several participants), the proper names Chantel and Pascal call up stereotypes of adolescents from monolingual German families facing socioeconomic disadvantages and low educational success (cf. Kaiser 2010). Such adolescents are included in the construction of Kiezdeutsch speakers as long as they grow up in 340

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the ‘ghetto’, highlighting that Kiezdeutsch is not associated with a specific perceived ethnicity, but rather with socioeconomic features of its urban place: as Kiezdeutsch functions as a marker of the local identity, it can also function as a marker of adolescents in underprivileged multilingual urban areas in general (cf. e.g., Madsen and Svendsen, 2015, for similar findings). The fact that Kiezdeutsch indexes low socioeconomic status rather than perceived ethnicity, highlights that urban areas supporting UCDs are places where ethnic boundaries are transcended, giving way to a new, multi-ethnic urban youth identity. Whereas older generations of immigrants brought with them ethnolinguistic associations that can still have an impact on daily life, young people born in these neighbourhoods grow up in highly multi-ethnic environments. In these environments, they forge a new identity as members of a multilingual urban generation and it is this aspect that can be expressed by UCDs. In the monolingually oriented context of many European countries, this is in opposition to prevailing monoethnic and monolingual societal ideologies, while African UCDs can express an urban identity in opposition to different ethnolinguistic regional associations (cf. Wiese, 2022). This leads to new, “post-ethnic, urban” identities (McLaughlin, 2009b, p. 13) in young speakers in Europe and Africa. Such new urban identities can explain why certain urban vernaculars arise in the first place, given that both kinds of contexts already have languages traditionally used for inter-ethnic communication. In the European context, the majority languages generally serve this purpose, while in the African context there are existing, traditional lingua francas. In fact, several UCDs in Africa are based on such lingua francas, and different regional lingua francas in the same country can thus support different local UCDs (see e.g., Goyvaerts, 1988, for Indoubil drawing on Lingala in Bukavu, but on Swahili in Kinshasa, or Slabbert and Meyers-Scotton, 1996, for Tsositaal and Iscamtho in South Africa, drawing on Afrikaans and Zulu, respectively). UCDs do not only serve as a means of communication between ethnolinguistic groups, but express new identities through their association with multi-ethnic urban youth culture. Hence, UCDs are an integral part of urban youth culture going beyond the ethnic Othering we observed in Germany which is still predominant in the public discussion and out-group attitudes towards Kiezdeutsch. This paves the path for UCDs to spread to new contexts, moving out of their initial place. In the next concluding section, we integrate a discussion of this for contexts dominated by a monolingual habitus and those with multilingual openness.

Conclusion and future directions As discussed above, UCDs are initially associated with com-sits characterised as informal peergroup settings in particular urban neighbourhoods. These neighbourhoods are constructed as socially disadvantaged places in both public discourse (Wiese, 2015) and within the in- and outgroup (Bunk and Pohle, 2019), engendering a multilingual and multi-ethnic urban youth culture. However, this association with specific places can change as UCDs gain broader associations with urban youth in general. The spread of UCDs to other contexts can gain further impetus through digital social media in a globalised world. Such media represent a new, dynamic domain where new linguistic patterns emerge rapidly and can spread beyond the places they are originally associated with. They provide a way to communicate across the globe, and they are particularly popular with adolescents and young adults (cf. Røyneland and Cutler, 2018). Digital spaces provide com-sits for informal conversation outside the realm of standard language norms and can contribute to constructing and negotiating youth identities (e.g., Erastus and Kebeya, 2018) and new communities of practice (Kouassi and Hurst-Harosh, 2018). Such communities can support a new identity within a glob341

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ally connected youth culture that is no longer restricted to urban places but integrates rural areas as well (Eastus and Keyeba, 2018). Digital spaces thus provide a platform for communication going beyond physical places and the physical separation of the speakers from each other (see Røyneland and Cutler, 2018). Consequently, UCDs are taken out of their place and put in a digital sphere where every user can engage in them. Taken together, this suggests that place seems to lose its connection to the physical world and is transferred to the digital sphere. UCDs lose their traditional association with marginalised urban youth and develop, first to markers of urban youth in general and then to markers of globalisation and modernity. They can still be relevant for placemaking of particular urban areas, but they can also transcend to digital global networks. It therefore seems that the ‘global village’ is rather a ‘global city’ (see Exenberger and Strobl, 2013), and through language, we can have a glance at how this global city is shaped by a new generation of globally connected youth. Within this context, we might wonder what impact the exchange within this global city will have at structural and sociolinguistic levels, how monoglossic ideologies might be further contested and multilingual practices might be further normalised even in formerly monolingually oriented societies. We leave these questions for further research.

Notes 1 Corresponding authors: Oliver Bunk, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 610099 Berlin. Orcid: 0000-0003-4505-4873. Heike Wiese, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät, HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin. Orcid: 0000-0002-6310-3045. 2 Research for this article was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) for the Research Unit "Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations" (FOR 2537, Projects P8/313607803 and P9/313607803) and the CRC 1412 “Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational Variation” (Project C07/416591334). 3 The corpus is available (open access) via www​.kiezdeutschkorpus​.de (KiDKo/E). 4 Languages with an SVO structure have a basic subject – verb – object order that places the verb after the subjects, with optionally adverbials in front. German has a basic SOV structure with a V2 rule for main declaratives that places the finite verb in the second position with one constituent occupying the preverbal position, while leaving non-finite verbs and verbal particles in final position. 5 German in the original; our translation (O.B. and H.W.)

Further readings Hurst-Harosh, E. and F.K. Erastus (2018). African Youth Languages. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Kerswill, P. and H. Wiese (2022). Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change: Insights from the Global North and South. London: Routledge.

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25 BREAKING BARRIERS The recontextualisation of Sheng in Kenya Fridah Kanana Erastus,1 Daniel Ochieng Orwenjo2 and Margaret Nguru Gathigia3 Introduction Sheng is believed to have originated from among the urban dwellers of Nairobi’s Eastland area, as a constantly evolving youth linguistic code based on Kiswahili and English and largely influenced by many vernacular languages spoken in the multicultural Kenyan capital. The roots can be traced to the colonial period in Kenya, which was marked by a high incidence of rural-urban migration as various Kenyan communities moved from rural environments to the city of Nairobi in search of employment. The status and classification of this code has been highly contested in literature. Questions have been asked as to whether it should be considered a lingua franca (Aseka, 1990), an argot (Mazrui, 1995), a pidgin (Mkangi, 1985; Osinde, 1986) or a creole (Spyropoulos, 1987). While there have been various disagreements about its nature, there is a general consensus of its being a contact language (Bosire, 2006; Githiora, 2002; Osinde and Abdulaziz, 1997; Spyropoulos, 1987). The linguistic structure of Sheng is not as controversial as its characterisation though. While it is based on the grammatical structure of Kiswahili, it is lexicalised by, among others, English, Kiswahili, other Kenyan languages, Hindi and American slang, albeit with linguistic manipulation. Lexical borrowing in Sheng is often accompanied by truncation, semantic manipulation and/ or adaptation of the borrowed items in order to fit them within its structure. Another route for lexical enrichment in Sheng is the incorporation of words from topical issues, such as war and genocide. Examples include Kosovo, which means ‘dangerous place’, and Rwanda, which means ‘to beat up or kill’. These are derived from the Bosnian War and the Rwandan genocide, respectively (Garnier, 2020). Finally, the Sheng lexicon is supplemented by unique coinages taken up by more speakers. Once borrowed, the words undergo other linguistic processes such as truncation, semantic expansion, form manipulations and so on (Kanana Erastus and Kebeya, 2018, p. 33). Initially, Sheng was faced with stigmatisation and rejection by adults (Mutonya, 2007; Rudd, 2018;). However, it has since developed more systematic linguistic patterns, becoming the primary language of a growing community of young speakers and parents who are themselves imparting it to their children. Thus, it has evolved from its initial use as a vehicular language for new urban dwellers drawn from different regions to a vernacular of most urban youth in Kenya (Bosire, 2006; Ferrari, 2005; Githiora, 2018). Most school-going children and teenagers in Kenya’s cities DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-33

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today are active speakers of Sheng. It has evolved from a stigmatised code from the ‘ghettos’ to a prominent language that symbolises linguistic innovation, identity-based rebellion, youth and the rejection of tribal identities, expanding outside Nairobi to other urban centres and rural spaces in Kenya (Garnier, 2020). Sheng is a crystallisation of a linguistic third space between tradition and modernity, between Kenya and the globalised world. From its contextual origins as a restricted secret youth code, Sheng is now present in contexts that were hitherto a preserve of mainstream languages, such as in education (Githinji, 2013; Githiora, 2016; Momanyi, 2009), advertising (Kariuki, Kanana and Kebeya, 2015; Mose and Ombati, 2018; Mutonya, 2008), new media, mass media and social media (Ferrari, 2012; Kanana Erastus and Kebeya, 2018) and pop music (Ferrari, 2007; Furaha and Kamara, 2019). This chapter interrogates this apparent recontextualisation of Sheng in Kenya’s linguistic repertoire and the trajectories of new options for the re-use that such a recontextualisation has created.

Recontextualisation of Sheng: key issues and critical debates Language can be viewed from different perspectives depending on the epistemological lenses and the geopolitical orientations that come into play in our daily cognitive endeavours. Ruiz (1984), for instance, proposed three perspectives: language as problem, language as resource, and language as a right. Viewed as a problem, language is seen through highly puritanical and conservative lenses which perceive inherent threats in the use of a non-dominant language, especially in the school system. In Kenya, the dominant view of Sheng has been that of a problem (Githinji, 2008, 2013; Githiora, 2013; Momanyi, 2009). It is seen to be disrupting the sociolinguistic fabric and interfering with the learning outcomes of school-going children. Sheng has been blamed for spoiling ‘pure’ languages such as English, Kiswahili and other Kenyan languages and to have negative impacts on Kiswahili learning in schools. For instance, there has been a concerted effort to banish not only Sheng, but also other native Kenyan languages from the school system. There are extreme instances where teachers have meted out instant corporal punishment to learners who break the school rule that bans the use of native languages within the school precincts. This arises out of the language in education policy in Kenya which, itself, is symptomatic of a disconnect between the national language policy on one hand, and the language in education policy on the other. While the national language policy in Kenya seems to appreciate the diversity of the nation and the value and function of the local languages, the language in education policy, ironically, still elevates English to a higher pedestal at the expense of the local languages. Thus, the local languages are used as a medium of instruction in the first three years of primary schooling only, after which they, like Sheng, are totally banished not only from the curriculum, but also from the entire school environment. Orwenjo (2012, p. 301) has pointed out the pedagogical pitfalls and hurdles that are faced by Kenyan learners due to this state of affairs: Their language skills do not serve them, because their language has no place in the classroom. Instead, textbooks and teaching are in a language they neither speak nor understand. Their learning and problem-solving experiences and their knowledge of ‘how things work’ in their own culture and social setting do not serve them because the culture of the classroom, the teachers and the textbooks is that of the dominant society. The conception of language as a resource (e.g., Barwell et al., 2016; Ellerton and Clarkson, 1996; Wagner, 2007) is a direct reaction to the perception of language as a problem. Within this framework, 348

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the use of an additional language besides English is viewed as a resource that should be supported and used to the benefit of all, that is, “the learning of a new language often does more to broaden one’s perception of the world than many courses in cultural sensitivity” (Martinez-Brawley and Brawley, 1999, p. 33). Essentially, this perspective affirms the value of transcultural and bilingual language policies. Pugh (1996) also positions language as a political resource for marginalised ethnic communities, in terms of either asserting identity or excluding dominant language groups. Sheng has also been viewed as a resource (Njoki, 2013; Saina, 2016; Samper, 2002; Wamaitha, 2019) by the youth who are its originators and dominant users, and who see it as a means of freedom of expression and of group identity. Accordingly, Kenyan youth reappropriate these languages within Sheng, opening up avenues for renegotiating their own hybrid identities and cultures. Finally, language can also be viewed as a human right. The freedom to express oneself through a language of choice is considered a fundamental human right, since effective communication of personal thoughts, ideas, wishes and needs is deemed to be key to basic survival. Language is also a vehicle for participation in community and cultural life. A rights perspective on language essentially advocates for the entitlements of individuals and groups to actively use and maintain their languages in the social arena, and for access to interpreter services and tuition in the majority language. Allied to this perspective are three tenets, namely: language as a basic but undervalued human right; the limitations of legislation for addressing monolingual attitudes; and education as a key strategy in changing language attitudes (Pugh, 1996). With regard to Sheng and the Kenyan context, the rights perspective has been totally ignored because there is no mention of Sheng in the Kenyan constitution, yet indigenous languages, English and Kiswahili are recognised. A reading of the Kenyan Constitution promulgated in 2010 confirms this assertion. In chapter 2, article 7 on “National, Official and Other Languages”, this is what it says:

1. The national language of the Republic is Kiswahili. 2. The official languages of the Republic are Kiswahili and English. 3. The State shall a. promote and protect the diversity of language of the people of Kenya; and b. promote the development and use of indigenous languages, Kenyan Sign language, Braille and other communication formats and technologies accessible to persons with disabilities.

The obvious conclusion that one may draw from this absence of reference to Sheng is that it is not considered a language or “other communication formats”. Of the three perspectives on language elucidated above, the view of language as a resource seems to be the one that adequately accounts for the recontextualisation of Sheng in Kenya. Linell (1998, pp. 144–145) defines recontextualisation as the dynamic transfer-and-transformation of something from one discourse/text-in-context (the context being in reality a matrix or field of contexts) to another. Recontextualization involves the extrication of some part or aspect from a text or discourse or from a genre of texts or discourses, and the fitting of this part or aspect into another context, i.e., another text or discourse (or discourse genre) and its use and environment. Within linguistics, recontextualisation is the process of transferring text, signs or meaning from its original context and reusing it in another context. Recontextualisation delinks language and place and makes the former a free element. 349

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Recontextualisation in different domains We shall now move on to analyse how some Kenyan language users appropriate the view of language as a resource and proceed to recontextualise Sheng by using it in other places and spaces than it is originally associated with. Examples presented below include the domains of education, social media, broadcast media, politics and advertising. We are particularly concerned with the transfer of Sheng (a system of signs) from a restricted domain of urban youth secret code to a code that is used in various official and unofficial domains across the rural–urban divide. It is our contention that Sheng has acquired an unassailable rise in popularity over the years, leading to a growing acceptance in spaces formerly deemed too formal for it. This is despite enduring negative connotations associated with it as being a language for the uneducated, unsophisticated, poor troublemakers from the ‘hood’.

Education Sheng has experienced a gradual but steady spread in the domain of education. Several studies (Githiora, 2018; Njoki, 2013; Saina, 2016; Samper, 2002; Wamaitha, 2019) have reported the use of Sheng in Kenyan classrooms, especially during language (English and Kiswahili) lessons and outside the formal classrooms. Its influence is noticeable in English and Kiswahili examination performances, in teacher-student classroom interactions during lessons, in written compositions of students in both English and Kiswahili and in student-to-student interactions during co-curricular activities such as sport, drama and music festivals. However, almost all these studies (Githinji, 2008, 2013; Githiora, 2013; Momanyi, 2009; Samper, 2002) point to the fact that this situation has had a negative impact on student performance and learning outcomes. It is also viewed as a thorn in the flesh for parents and language pedagogists. This has led to an orchestrated outcry by parents and other stakeholders such as teachers, school administrators and education ministry officials. They point to an urgent need to lock Sheng out of the classrooms. Many signs in secondary schools in Kenya proclaim the message: ‘speak in English’. Most of these protests appear informed by the earlier negative perceptions and stigmatised attitudes that were attached to Sheng at its point of emergence. In countering this attitude, the Kenya Publishers Association in 1996 announced that it was considering publishing schoolbooks in Sheng. This was met with a lot of uproar, to the extent that The East African Standard, a leading Kenyan daily, responded with a commentary titled ‘Leave Sheng to Matatu Touts and Musicians’ (Ramani, 2006). However, some scholars (e.g., Orwenjo, 2022) have argued for the potential of Sheng as a pedagogical resource in Kenyan classrooms and suggested that it be used as a medium of instruction in a multilingual framework. This is the same as the view of language as a resource elucidated earlier in this paper.

Social media Sheng has metamorphosised to meet the needs of its users, especially, through internet-enabled computers and smartphones which are unavoidable in the digital era. These gadgets provide a platform for communication, employment and advertising, especially, through social media handles like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Telegram and YouTube. This evolution has diminished the polarisation of rural and urban societies in Kenya, with content creators targeting the youth in both settings. The contemporary trends are geared towards inclusivity, with youth-related programmes that cut across the urban-rural divide e.g., start-ups, music and film production and other activities where youth take centre stage. This drives the motivation to use language that is not alienating the youth in any way. YouTube showcases a variety of content aired in Sheng such as Sheng Talk 350

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Kama Kawa (‘Sheng talk as usual’) and Mtaani Show (‘hood show’). The interviews highlight musicians, businessmen and others who speak on topical issues in Sheng. The show “Sheng Talk Kama Kawa” airs predominantly in Sheng on YouTube. It first gives a news round-up of current happenings in Nairobi’s settlements mtaani (from Kiswahili mtaa, meaning ‘estate’), followed by highlights of national news, all in Sheng. Later Sheng Talk transitions to music and showbiz, various celebrities are interviewed in Sheng. With a subscription of over 1900 viewers, there is an apparent interest in the topics discussed by the hosts and guests in Sheng; the viewers express their opinions in the comment section as a way of engaging with the hosts. Interestingly, more content creators seeking attention from the public, as innovators of Sheng, have resorted to truncating existing Sheng words further to produce comic relief or lyrics for songs which enjoy a big audience among the Kenyan youth. For example, one video composed in Shembeteng4 aimed to captivate viewers with the alterations of the existing Sheng words. These modifications drew some sensationalism in recent music videos and social media sites, as indicated below. Plug TV Kenya is another online digital TV station that airs content in Sheng. In some of the shows they have featured a youth group from Nairobi’s Kayole area, located in Eastlands, where Sheng is dominantly spoken (see https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=PKBDVtPCnrA) In this interview, modifications made to Sheng words and expressions, their etymology and what the group perceived as the newest Sheng in town, i.e., Shembeteng, are explained. The 493,000 views recorded in July 2022 illustrate the interest in the new coinages, as more Kenyans sought to demystify the new form of Sheng which had quickly spread across the country through film, music and other social media applications such as TikTok. This is a demonstration that evolution of Sheng in Kenya is rapid and is spread in formal communication spheres, e.g., education, advertising, film and music and social media. The shift in language use and practices is also slowly being embraced by figures of authority. Religious leaders, policemen and politicians use Sheng jargon to expound their political agendas. With this paradigm shift, and sometimes defying odds to become one of the most preferred languages among Kenyan youth, Sheng is being entrenched in other domains, with sociolinguistic implications that deserve investigation.

Broadcasting media (radio and TV) Radio is the most popular and accessible medium of information dissemination in Kenya. About 95% of Kenyans are said to listen to the radio regularly, because radio is affordable and broadcasts reach the most remote parts of the country (Media Council of Kenya, 2011). Moreover, telecommunication companies offer affordable mobile telephones with radio facilities. The youth are attracted to radio because of the music entertainment offered by FM stations (Nyabuga et al., 2013, p. 17). A recent Kenya – Media Landscape Report by the BBC Media Action indicates that the radio sector is thriving, with over 100 FM radio stations (BBC, 2018). About 50% of these are based in Nairobi. According to this report, in 2015, about 81% of Kenyans also had access to TV. In the 2018 survey, 67% of the urban respondents and 40% of rural respondents had access to a TV in the home. The largest television stations in coverage and viewership are KBC, NTV, KTN, Citizen TV and K24. The GeoPoll Media Measurement Service (Kenya Q3 2017 Radio & TV Audience Ratings Report) found that Citizen TV has the highest number of viewers at 28%, KTN at 14%, NTV at 11%, K24 at 6% and KBC at 4% (BBC, 2018). Their emphasis is on news and information dissemination. There are also international channels and together with the local channels they make up the over 50 TV channels available for Kenyan viewership (Infoasaid, 2010). 351

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Although the main broadcasts and talk shows are made in standard English and Kiswahili, Sheng forms are embedded in entertainment programmes to attract young viewership. Whether in print or electronic media, mainstream or localised, digital or traditional, Sheng is becoming popular in the local media, as presenters use it to identify with the large and growing group of speakers who cut across linguistic and social barriers. Local television and radio stations have increasingly given space to Sheng, with specific programmes either entirely dedicated to it or use it to broadcast some of their programmes alongside Kiswahili and English. The stiff competition for consumer base and market share has led media houses to introduce programmes that would woo the youth who do not necessarily have to own a radio or TV to listen to either because they can access the same content through their internet-enabled smartphones. Table 1 below gives examples of some top media houses and some of the programmes that they air exclusively in Sheng or with elements of it. In these programmes, Sheng is tolerated. ​ Despite the visible and steady uptake of Sheng in Kenya’s mass media, it is restricted to specific programmes, except in Ghetto radio, which airs all content, including prime-time news and disseminates information or advertises for products in Sheng. As shown in the poster image (Figure 25.1) below, Sheng is intended to captivate, to inform both rural and urban dwellers about what is happening in the political arena and social spheres, and to discuss issues affecting the youth, such as mental health, drugs, security or lack thereof. The youth are encouraged to actively participate by sharing their opinions on the station’s social media platforms. It is intriguing that the FM radio station, as captioned on the poster in Figure 25.1, can be received from as far as Kisumu and Mombasa. The headline in Sheng: mboto ya DP Ruto imego viral akimekiwa luku na majunior wake kwa wedo ya siz yao mbigi, Jane Ruto (‘a photo of DP [deputy president] Ruto has gone viral with his sons adjusting his looks on their eldest sister, Jane Ruto’s, wedding.’) was so captioned because, while weddings in Kenya are big celebrations of cultural importance, often accompanied with opulence, the deputy president’s daughter’s wedding was kept under wraps by the family. It was an invite-only event, but Ghetto Radio captured the moment for its viewers and listeners. In view of this, it suffices to say that Sheng has impacted present-day journalism. It makes marketers, politicians and government agencies to rethink their advertisement strategies in a bid to reach the youth as will be seen in the subsequent sections. Angalia (2017) suggests that the transmission of content on radio in Sheng is on the increase, perhaps due to decentralisation of the youthful population in rural areas due to the establishment of universities or deployment of the workforce in other towns. This means the circular migrations from rural–urban and urban–rural areas increase the transmission of Sheng in rural spaces. Also, major stakeholders have realised the long-term benefits of media operations in Sheng, and this probably has led to investments, like Ghetto Radio, from a commercial perspective. Ghetto Table 25.1 The penetration of Sheng in Kenya’s mainstream media 1 2 3

Media House Ghetto Radio Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) Citizen Television

3 4

Kenya Television Network (KTN) Nation Television (NTV)

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Programmes all programmes vihoja mahakamani mashtaka tahidi high inspekta mwala machachari, makutano hapa kule news churchill show

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Figure 25.1  # SHENGNEWS © Ghetto Radio Limited

Radio’s journalistic approach incorporates a unique format in its reporting which entails a mix of street language, local culture and urban music that the youth are conversant with.

Politics Iraki (2009) observes that the political elite in Kenya continue to favour the development of English over Kiswahili and indigenous languages, but this trend continues to change over time. Today, Sheng is much more used in political discourse in Kenya. Iraki argues that, while political discourse is mostly conducted in English and is the primary language of political manifestos and party constitutions, politicians will struggle to speak in Kiswahili, and Sheng, as a way of attracting votes from ordinary Kenyans. Indigenous languages are viewed as embodiments of culture and are used for intra-ethnic communication. The vernacular languages are also used as political tools in the rural areas where indigenous cultural practices are more entrenched. Sheng in the political discourse has expanded in interesting ways in Kenya since 2002. Kenya had a momentous general election in 2002 that ended Kenya African National Union’s (KANU) 40-year rule. During the campaigns, the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) party, which was the opposition alliance then, employed a slogan from a hit song unbwogable (‘undeterred’/’unafraid’) by a band in Nairobi in its campaign strategy. The word is a conjugation of English negative prefix un, Dholuo root, bwogo, which means to scare or deter someone, and the adjectival English suffix, -able. The head of state who was elected under the coalition used the term in his official speeches, including the presidential inaugural speech. Often, in his limited Sheng repertoire, the President 353

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would end his official speeches by urging Kenyans to go home and enjoy themselves. The term kuji-enjoy (‘have fun’) was almost his signature way of saying ‘have fun’, ‘enjoy your holidays’ or likewise. Two decades later, more and more politicians have used Sheng in their endeavour to woo young voters. In the 2022 election campaigns, there was a dramatic shift from the usual official languages (English and Kiswahili) only messages, to include Sheng on the campaign billboards. In Figure 25.2, the political aspirants pose the question “what do you want in Nairobi?” to the electorates by truncating the word Nairobi (Nai-) and then listing the constituencies that make up Nairobi County on the billboard. The decision to include a Twitter handle, Facebook page and Instagram on the billboard in this example also strongly communicates who the targeted audience is. The youth are the tech-savvy in Africa, and as aforementioned, availability of affordable smartphones and internet allow them access to digital content in unprecedented ways. In the first image, a gubernatorial aspirant and his running mate seeking to be elected to office in the capital Nairobi, set up billboards with the slogan “Youth Access to capital from The wezesha biashara fund….” (the enabling or supporting a business fund) to endear the youth to vote for the duo. The slogan is a form of intra-sentential code-switching between English and Kiswahili, packaged to convince the youth that they would access cheap loans to grow their businesses. The second billboard uses truncation to generate Nai mwataka nini? (‘what do you want in Nairobi?’), and #Naitunavyoitaka (‘Nairobi like we would want it’), and then lists neighbourhoods that are their target. Another presidential aspirant used Sheng with the catchphrase Omoka na Jimi (‘get rich with Jimmy’). His slogan capitalises on wealth creation and richness. There were integrity questions about how he made his wealth; he however tried to use the slogan to lure voters with the promise to “take off (omoka) (‘flee’) from poverty”. The decontextualisation and recontextualisation of Sheng in the political domain can be best illustrated using what we described in the foregoing as Shembeteng. In an interview with NTV Kenya, in May 2022, the founders of Shembeteng explain this innovation, how to speak it and coin new words. Then, it was unimaginable that Shembeteng would be picked up by politicians for political slogan(s). Shembeteng relies on the infixation of certain stems – the stems strictly adhere to vowel harmony in forms such as mbata, mbete, mbiti, mboto and mbutu. While the users of Shembeteng could not explain what these stems meant; they had a logical way of generating new words. The structure of Shembeteng is such that when the nucleus of the first syllable in a word begins with vowel a, then the word mbata is added after it, if it is e then the infixed stem would be mbete. For example, wangu (‘mine’ in Kiswahili) would become wambatangu, zote (‘all’) would generate zombotote and Sheng Shembeteng. Shembeteng appeared on a campaign billboard of a leading presidential candidate in the 2022 general elections as shown in Figure 25.3. Here, the phrase Tunawalombotove (we love you) is generated by applying these rules. Thus, tunawalove becomes tunawa+lo+mboto+ve.The infixation is on the English word ‘love’. What began as a simple wordplay and was considered nonsensical by the Kenyan public was recontextualised and given new functions in the political campaign. The use of Shembeteng and Sheng forms therefore corroborates our theoretical underpinning of language as a resource. Apart from individual politicians seeking to woo voters, the government of Kenya, through institutions such as the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) – the body mandated to oversee elections in Kenya, and the National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), a government watchdog over public incitement and hate speech, has used Sheng to create awareness about voter registration and the importance of promoting peace during elections. Phrases such as elections bila noma; vote bila noma and youth bila noma (‘elections without a problem (violence)’, ‘vote without violence’ and ‘youth without violence’ respectively) call for a 354

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Figure 25.2  Nairobi Governor political aspirant’s billboards © Polycarp Igathe Kamau

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Figure 25.3  Presidential campaign billboard “Baba na Martha” © Adsite Limited

peaceful voting process. The youth, who are believed to be gullible targets of politicians who bribe them with handouts to cause mayhem, especially those from poor neighbourhoods, are called upon to shun violence during elections. The peace campaign posters also target the entire electorate using Sheng as they emphasise the need for peaceful elections. A phrase like Amani Kwa Ground Nimuhimu (‘Peace at the grassroots is important’) restates the importance of a peaceful election process. Kwa ground is derived from the phrase vitu kwa ground ni different, whose meaning has been conventionalised and is understood by the Kenyan public. It first hit the Kenyan social media circles in 2019 to mean that the reality is different from what is expected.

Advertising The effectiveness of adverts depends on how properly words and other symbolic representations are employed and received (Neelankavil et al., 1995). As a symbol of globalisation, English is popularly used in advertisements in many non-native English-speaking markets around the world (e.g., Crystal, 1997; Voigt, 2001). However, little is known about mixed language approaches across borders, more so where nonstandard language varieties like Sheng are involved. Kariuki et al. (2015) argue that the use of Sheng as a marketing strategy is not well documented, but that anecdotal evidence in Kenya suggests that it is common practice. We provide new evidence that Sheng is used in marketing, advertisements and awareness campaigns targeting the youth, and to make the adverts appealing to the urban wannabes and the Kenyan public in general. 356

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The liberalisation of Kenya’s economy in the 1980s opened the markets to competition and invigorated a market that was traditionally dominated by monopolies like Unilever, British American Tobacco (BAT), East African Industries, East African Breweries among others. Mutonya (2008) notes that the change in economic policies initiated a gradual language shift from the traditional use of English and Kiswahili in advertising to other languages. This shift redefined established linguistic boundaries and articulated new identities. Today, Sheng has found a larger mainstream audience; it provides a rich vocabulary of persuasion preferred by marketers and advertisers, effectively allowing them to expand their horizons and to reach new consumers. Sheng has gained currency in the domain of advertising due to its ability to transcend linguistic, gender, age and cultural gaps. Many urban youths who are Sheng speakers are not fluent in their ethnic language, which creates a tendency to operate in subtraction and exclusion rather than addition of cultural orientation. The recognition of Sheng as a hybrid language and an ingroup marker, with remarkable potential in influencing the Kenyan population linguistically and in consumerism habits, has prompted advertising agencies to shift their promotion strategies so as to reach as many clients as possible. The advertisement phrases below from condom manufacturers, Kenya Commercial Bank and former Barclays Bank (currently ABSA Bank) use Sheng to sensitise the youth about safe sex and bank products designed to empower young people financially. A condom advert with two Sheng phrases on it: Nalike vile unanimind (‘I like the way you care about (mind) me’) and nakufeel (‘I feel you’) aims to encourage safe sex through the use of condoms, as a way of expressing love, care, being mindful of the partner’s health and preventing HIV/AIDS and other STIs. A promotional advert from Kenya Commercial Bank urges customers to increase their bank deposits with the hope of winning a car with the phrase Jaza Ujazike na KCB (‘Fill up and be Filled up with KCB’). Barclays Bank advertises a type of loan that is pegged on one’s salary as security with the slogan mkopo wa salo reloaded (‘a salary loan (credit) reloaded’) It’s back. It’s better. It’s bigger. This means the apparently suspended loan facility is back, better and bigger. From these and numerous other examples above, we see commercial advertisers resorting to Sheng to market their products. The examples discussed so far on the changing social dynamics in advertisement give the impression that Sheng adverts only target consumers in the lower end of the society. However, this is not accurate. The development of Sheng and its catchy, provocative phrases also attract the up-market youth and has greatly influenced modern-day advertising across the city of Nairobi, not to mention the use of social media pages as platforms to commercialise products in an emotive yet fashionable way allowing the youth to own the product. To achieve this, advertisers allow consumers to comment on their pages and express how they feel about the product and what improvements they would like to see. For example, a comment on a Coca-Cola Kenya Instagram page reads: Weekend inakaribia. Swali unafaa kujiuliza na mabeshte ni kama mtapitia kwa baze ya choma ama itakuwa order in? (“the weekend is approaching and the question you should ask yourself is if you will drop by at the nyama Choma base or it will be order in (take away)?”). The phrase weekend utapitia au nikupitie (“will you drop by this weekend or should I drop by you [your place]”) basically asks the followers if they would be enjoying the beverages at their favourite Nyama Choma (“roast or barbecued meat”) joint or at home. The responses on the thread are usually interesting samples of youth language practices. Below is a further illustration of Sheng as adopted by foreign companies in advertisements as a way of conquering the market in a language the youth relate with. KFC advertises home deliveries with the phrases Alar! [Exclamation expressing surprise] Ishakam? (“Alar! it has already arrived?”). On the chat, KFC writes: Usipatikane bado unafanya laundry juu for sure rider wetu atafika chap chap. 🙆Treat yourself to a Finger Lickin’ Good meal delivered 357

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Fast. 😋 Enjoy less wait and more yum. #KFCFastDelivery (“Do not be caught up doing laundry because for sure our rider (motorcyclist) will arrive in no time [chap chap]. Treat yourself to a finger licking meal delivered fast. Enjoy less wait and more yum [delicious meal] #KFCFastDelivery”). In the foregoing, it is obvious that the market segment is aware of innovations in youth language and taps into the resource. On the whole, Sheng is extensively used in marketing, advertising and political campaigns, to attract customers or voters (see also Muaka, 2018, p. 129); it is a face-saving tool while marketing products considered taboo (e.g., condoms and sex), but the education domain seems more restrictive and not so embracing of the same linguistic practice. In this sense, we would argue that consumerism and capitalism are more open to linguistic heterogeneity than the educational sphere, albeit with different purposes, information campaigns or financial gains – or likewise, Sheng is also used as a commodity, and that consumerism and capitalism are very different from education – liberal market versus educational policy.

Concluding remarks and future directions The recontextualisation of Sheng in Kenya has continued to be evident based on its ubiquity in advertising, mainstream media and social media networks and in many other official and nonofficial domains as seen in the examples discussed in this chapter. Sheng has had a divisive linguistic function owing to its language structure and lexicon that was exclusive to the urban and youthful population. Moreover, there has been constant rejection of the language in education and by some adults, who view the language as abusive and derogatory and unsuitable for communication in formal settings. Sheng has been unequivocally considered an unstable, random and fluid language that is used by youth as an ingroup marker, for solidarity building, and was used to shut out older generations (Muriuki, 2015). However, as exemplified in this chapter, this has changed over the years due to its recontextualisation, thus giving Sheng a high degree of ubiquity in hitherto uncharted domains and to erase previously clearly marked generational boundaries (Garnier, 2020). This chapter has demonstrated that the use of Sheng by adults and politicians is a way of identifying with the youth and an attempt to get closer to them. Another effect of the recontextualisation of Sheng is in the functional shift of the code. Sheng has increasingly widened its functional load to include official/formal categories like news reporting, product advertising and political campaigns. This functional shift has been strengthened by the social media. With the widespread use of internet-enabled operations, Sheng continues to permeate the semi-urban and rural areas in Kenya, thus creating the impetus for marketing and advertising for products using a language the youth can identify with. Sheng has also formed a strong linguistic base for many youths who develop content online in the language. New genres of music such as Gengetone,5 whose primary language is Sheng, emerged. These opportunities provide a source of income to a majority of unemployed Kenyan youth who might have otherwise engaged in criminal activities. However, one domain that has stubbornly remained impenetrable to Sheng despite the rapid recontextualisation of the code is the classroom. This situation is not unique to Sheng but applies to most African Youth Languages. The urban languages are resisted very strongly in the formal language-learning domains, where the ‘standard’ is upheld, and ‘pure’ forms of African languages are valorised (Hurst-Harosh, 2020). The scenario above obtains mainly from the fact that any systematic incorporation of Sheng into the classroom would require an element of standardisation which is in conflict with the acknowledged status of these varieties as transient youth styles, used for alterity, to mark difference from the norm. 358

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What then are the future directions of Sheng? Scholars see a positive evolution, a sign that “the new generation of urban Kenyans could be breaking free from the ethnic hostility and communitarianism that currently reign in the country” (Garnier, 2020, para. 12). Garnier argues that this does not mean the Sheng-speaking youth dissociate with their ethnic heritage; rather, they include their native language lexicons in the construction of the language. However, they also embrace their unity as an interethnic entity, as a group whose identity is more than just ethnic identification. From this perspective, Sheng has a ‘detribalizing effect’,6 imparting “hope for a more united country” (Garnier, 2020, para. 15). Those united by the language consider themselves Nairobians’ with no tribal/ethnic inclinations. While Sheng emerged from a desire to construct a new identity in the late 40s for the urban youth in slums, following generations have embraced it, it is now a language that represents cultural and linguistic diversity and it symbolises a desire to bridge the divides that pervade in Kenyan society. As this chapter has demonstrated, Sheng is not just a youth slang intended to embody generational rebellion and shun the older generation, but a language resource. The recontextualisation of Sheng to more formal domains is one of the trajectories towards bridging gaps and breaking the linguistic barriers of conventional language use and puritanism.

Notes 1 Corresponding author: Fridah Kanana Erastus, Department of Literature, Linguistics and Foreign Languages, Kenyatta University Kenya, P.O. Box 43844 – 00100 Nairobi: Orcid: https://orcid​.org​/0000​ -0001​-5928​-769X 2 Daniel Ochieng Orwenjo, School of Language and Communication Studies, The Technical University of Kenya, P.O. Box 52428 - 00200. Nairobi- Kenya. Orcid: https://orcid​.org​/0000​-0003​-3906​-3984 3 Margaret Nguru Gathigia, School of Language and Communication Studies, The Technical University of Kenya, P.O. Box 52428 - 00200. Nairobi- Kenya. Orcid: https://orcid​.org​/0009​-0003​-1780​-3395 4 Shembeteng ia variety of Sheng which is created through infixing a specific set of ludlings. The word Shembeteng is derived from inserting the word mbete medially to the word Sheng. 5 Gengetone has been considered by artists as an identity of the Kenyan youth and not just a genre of music. Some information about the group is available on https://newsroom​.spotify​.com​/2021​-08​-31​/for​-kenyan​ -artists​-the​-emerging​-gengetone​-genre​-is​-a​-way​-of​-life/ 6 This is attributed to Prof. Mutonya on a blog interview in 2017 accessed from: https://blogs​.stlawu​.edu​/ gs302fall17​/2017​/12​/13​/research​-blog​-8/

Further readings Angalia, J. F. (2017). The growth of Sheng and its effect on media strategies for targeting the youth market. American Journal of Communication, 1(1), 19 - 32. Githiora, C. (2018). Sheng: Rise of a Kenyan Swahili Vernacular. New York/Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer. Hurst-Harosh, E. and F. Kanana Erastus (2018). African Youth Languages: New Media, Performing Arts and Sociolinguistic Development. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Nassenstein, N. and A. Hollington (eds.). (2015.) Youth Language Practices in Africa and Beyond. Berlin: De Gruyter.

References Aseka, F.M. (1990). An emerging interdialectal variation: A comparative study of Kariokor, Jericho and Kangemi Sheng varieties. Unpublished MA Thesis, University of Nairobi, Kenya. Barwell, R., L. Chapsam, T. Nkambule and M.S. Phakeng (2016). Tensions in teaching mathematics in contexts of language diversity. In R. Barwell, P. Clarkson, A. Halai, M. Kazima, R. Barwell, P. Clarkson, A. Halai, M. Kazima, J. Moschkovich, N. Planas, M. Setati-Phakeng, P. Valero and M. Villavicencio Ubillús (eds.), Mathematics Education and Language Diversity: The 21st ICMI Study (pp. 175–192). New York: Springer.

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Fridah Kanana Erastus et al. BBC Media Action November. (2018). Kenya –Media landscape report. https://www​.com​muni​tyen​gage​ menthub​.org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/sites​/2​/2019​/09​/Kenya​-Media​-Landscape​-Report​_BBC​-Media​-Action​ _November​-2018v2​.pdf Bosire, M. (2006). Hybrid languages: The case of Sheng. In O.F. Arosanyin and M.A. Pemberton (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (pp. 185–193). Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Crystal, D. (1997). English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellerton, N.F. and P.C. Clarkson (1996). Language factors in mathematics teaching and learning. In A.J. Bishop, K. Clements, C. Keitel, J. Kilpatrick and C. Laborde (eds.), International Handbook of Mathematical Education (pp. 987–1033). New York: Springer. Ferrari, A. (2005). Description et Analyse Sociolinguistique du Sheng, Langue Mixte Parlée à Nairobi (Kenya). Doctoral Dissertation, Paris, INALCO. Ferrari, A. (2007). Hip Hop in Nairobi: Recognition of an international movement and the main means of expression for the urban youth in poor residential areas. In N. Kimani and H. Maupeu (eds.), Songs and Politics in Eastern Africa (pp. 107–128). Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyoka Publishers & Nairobi: IFRA. Ferrari, A. (2012). Émergence d’une Langue Urbaine: Le Sheng de Nairobi. Collection Afrique et Langage. Louvain-Paris: Peeters. Furaha, E. and E. Kamaara (2019). Interrogating Sheng in gospel music in Kenya: An analysis of fundi wa mbao and Missi. In G.G. Atindogbé and A.E. Ebongue (eds.), Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Perspectives of Youth Language Practices in Africa: Codes and Identity Writings (pp. 261–282). Cameroon: Langaa RPCIG. Garnier, S. (2020, September 8). Shaping new identities: Sheng, youth, and ethnicity in Kenya. Harvard International Review. https://hir​.harvard​.edu​/sheng​-in​-kenya/ Githinji, P. (2008). Ambivalent attitudes: Perception of Sheng and its speakers. Nordic Journal of African Studies, 17(2): 113–136. Githinji, P. (2013, July 16). Sheng and language pedagogy. Paper presented at Sheng Language in Kenya: Structure, Uses and Pedagogy Conference, IFRA, Nairobi. Githiora, C. (2016). Sheng: The expanding domains of an urban youth vernacular. Journal of African Cultural Studies, – . 30(2):105–120 Githiora, C (2002). Sheng: Peer language, Swahili dialect or emerging Creole? Journal of African Cultural Studies, 15(2): 159–181. Githiora, C. (2018). Sheng - Rise of a Kenyan Swahili Vernacular. New York: Boydell and Brewer. Hurst-Harosh, E. (2020). They even speak Tsotsitaal with their teachers at school: The use (and abuse) of African urban youth languages in educational contexts. Africa Education Review, 17(1): 35–50. Infoasaid. (2010). Kenya: Media and Telecoms Landscape Guide. http://infoasaid​.org​/sites​/infoasaid​.org​/files​ /kenya​_media​_landscape​_guide​_3rd​_draft​.pdf Iraki, F.K.E. (2009). Language and political economy: A historical perspective on Kenya. Journal of Language, Technology & Entrepreneurship in Africa, 1(2): 229–243. Kanana Erastus, F. and H. Kebeya (2018). Functions of urban and youth language in the new media: The case of Sheng in Kenya. In E. Hurst-Harosh and F. Kanana Erastus (eds.), African Youth Languages: New Media, Performing Arts & Sociolinguistic Development (pp. 15–52). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Kariuki, A., F.E. Kanana and H. Kebeya (2015). The growth and use of Sheng in advertisements in selected businesses in Kenya. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 27(2): 229–246. Linell, P. (1998). Discourse across boundaries: On recontextualisations and the blending of voices in professional discourse. Text, 18(2): 143–157. Martinez-Brawley, E. and E. Brawley (1999). Diversity in a changing world: Cultural enrichment or social fragmentation? Journal of Multicultural Social Work, 7(1/2): 19–36. Mazrui, A.M. (1995). Slang and code-switching: The case of Sheng in Kenya. Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere: Schriftenreihe des Kölner Instituts für Afrikanistik, 42: 168–179. Media Council of Kenya. (2011). The Performance of Vernacular Radio Stations in Kenya September/ October 2011 Monitoring Report. Nairobi: Media Council of Kenya. Mkangi, K. (1985). Sheng: flag of a people’s culture. The Standard [Nairobi], 30th Augst 1985, 17–18. Momanyi, C. (2009). The effects of ‘Sheng’ in the teaching of Kiswahili in Kenyan schools. The Journal of Pan African Studies, 2(8): 127–138.

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Breaking barriers Mose, E.G. and O.B. Ombati (2018). Creative use of urban youth language in advertisements: A case of mixing codes. In E. Hurst-Harosh and F. Kanana Erastus (eds.), African Youth Languages: New media, Performing Arts & Sociolinguistic Development (pp. 147–158). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Muaka, L. (2018). The impacts of youth language on linguistic landscapes in Kenya and Tanzania. In E. Hurst-Harosh and F. Kanana Erastus (eds.), African Youth Languages: New Media, Performing Arts & Sociolinguistic Development (pp. 123–144). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Muriuki, G.M. (2015). Language, communication and marketing: Contexualizing the use of Sheng language in advertising in Kenya. Journal of Business Management Science, 1(12): 1–10. Mutonya, M. (2007). Redefining Nairobi’s streets: A study of slang, marginalisation, and identity. Journal of Global Initiatives, 2(2): 169–185. Mutonya, M. (2008). Swahili advertising in Nairobi: Innovation and language shift. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 20(1): 3–14. Neelankavil, J.P., V. Mummalaneni and D. Sessiona (1995). Use of foreign language and models in print advertisements in East Asian Countries. European Journal of Marketing, 29(4): 24–38. Njoki, C.E. (2013). The Influence of Sheng and Non-Target Structures on Performance of Kiswahili Composition: A Case Study of Selected Schools in Nairobi. Unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya. Nyabuga, G., N. Booker, M. Dragomir, M. Thompson, A. Jamaï, Y.Y. Chan and C.S. Nissen (2013). Mapping Digital Media: Kenya. Open Society Foundations. Orwenjo, D.O. (2012). Multilingual education in Kenya: Debunking the myths. International Journal of Multilingualism, 9(3): 294–317. Orwenjo, D.O. (2022). Beyond English: Multilingualism and education in Kenya. Africa Education Review, 18:3–4: 112–141. Osinde, K. (1986). Sheng: An Investigation into the Social and Cultural Aspects of an Evolving Language. Unpublished BA Thesis, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya. Osinde, K. and M. Abdulaziz (1997). Sheng and Engsh: The development of mixed codes among the urban youth in Kenya. International Sociology of Language, 125: 43–63. Pugh, R. (1996). Effective Language in Health and Social Work. London: Chapman and Hall. Ramani, K. Mr. (2006, September 29). Leave Sheng to matatu touts and musicians. The East African Standard. Rudd, P.W. (2018). A case study of the stigmatized code Sheng: The AUYL syndrome. Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, 40(1): 155–174. Ruiz, R. (1984). Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal, 8(2): 15–34. Saina, B.M. (2016). The Influence of Sheng on Composition Writing among Pupils in Public Primary Schools in Eldoret Municipality, Kenya. Unpublished MEd Thesis, Moi University, Eldoret, Kenya. Samper, D.A. (2002). Talking Sheng: The Role of a Hybrid Language in the Construction of Identity and Youth Culture in Nairobi, Kenya. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Spyropoulos, M. (1987). Sheng: Some preliminary investigations into a recently emerged Nairobi street language. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 18: 125–136. Voigt, K. (2001 June 11). Japanese firms want English competency: Fluency is seen as a way to internationalize industry, country. Wall Street Journal, B.7A. Wagner, D. (2007). Students’ critical awareness of voice and agency in mathematics classroom discourse. Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 9(1): 31–50. Wamaitha, K.R. (2019). Assessment of Language Shift Among the Youth in Nairobi County, Kenya. Unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya.

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26 HOW MULTIETHNIC IS A MULTIETHNOLECT? The recontextualisation of Multicultural London English Christian Ilbury and Paul Kerswill1 Introduction In this chapter, we explore the ‘recontextualisation’ (Bauman and Briggs, 1990) of the multiethnolectal variety spoken in London which has been termed ‘Multicultural London English’ (henceforth, MLE; Cheshire et al., 2008, 2011). Research first defined MLE as a new variety spoken by young working-class individuals living in inner-city London, such as the boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets. A key claim in the earlier research is that, based on the lack of any apparent ethnic stratification, MLE could be described as a ‘multiethnolect’ (Clyne, 2000). That is to say, features of MLE are used by speakers from a diverse range of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. This chapter poses the question of just how ‘multiethnic’ such a language variety may be in practice. Drawing on ethnographic insights, media discussions and metalinguistic comments, we consider the ways in which MLE features have become recontextualised and have taken on new social meanings. We explore whether, and if so how, there has been a shift from a highly variable working-class inner-city youth repertoire shared across many ethnic groups, to a linguistically more focused variety with a much more sharply etched set of indexicalities closely related to a Black ethnicity and culture. Specifically, we discuss the ‘enregisterment’ (Agha, 2003) of MLE with regard to three main developments. First, we consider the association between MLE and Black British music cultures, such as grime. Second, we explore the symbolic function of MLE in the emergence of a contemporary Black British identity. And third, we conclude by considering the broader recontextualisation of MLE as a type of cultural capital that individuals may use to index their identification with particular (youth) cultures.

The origins of Multicultural London English The term MLE was originally chosen by the authors of Cheshire et al. (2008, 2011) in preference to ‘Multiethnic’ or ‘Multiracial’ London English in order to reduce any perceived emphasis on either ethnicity or race as essentialised categories. ‘Multicultural London English’ is, however, now entrenched in public discourse, though it remains an academic and media-driven term: speakers of MLE tend to refer to MLE as ‘slang’ (Kerswill, 2013, p. 149; Ilbury, 2019). We 362

DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-34

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recognise both ethnicity and race as socially constructed, with race seen as a component of ethnicity. First described in the ‘Linguistic Innovators’ project (2004–2006; see Cheshire et al., 2008), MLE is characterised by a number of distinctive phonological, discourse-pragmatic, lexical, and grammatical features. Whilst a full taxonomy of MLE is outside the scope of this chapter, we provide a list of some of the more common features of this variety below to specify how we define MLE in this chapter (see Cheshire et al., 2008, 2011; Cheshire, 2013; Fox and Torgersen, 2018; Pichler, 2021; Kerswill and Torgersen, 2021; Kerswill, 2022):

• Near-monophthongal FACE vowel: /eɪ/ is raised to [eɪ] or often [eː], hence [phleɪs] or [phleːs] • • • • • • •

for place (cf. traditional London English (‘Cockney’) [phlɛɪs]) Backed and raised GOAT vowel (traditional London [ɐʊ̟] MLE [o̟ʊ]) TH-stopping: /θ/ is sometimes realised as /t/ in a restricted set of words including thing [tɪŋ] and youth [jʉːt] Pronominal man: can we go cos man’s hungry? Must have as a direct evidential: basically, must have been in some party and there were fields man The invariant tag, innit: the car was really fast, innit? Sentence final styll (‘to be fair’): she’s got a nice car, styll New lexis: leng (‘nice’), skeng (‘knife/weapon’), safe (‘good’), bare (‘lots of’), roadman (identity label), my G (address term), bunda (‘backside’), blud (address term)

The emergence of MLE can be attributed to large-scale socio-demographic changes in East London in the post-World War II period. This saw migration from the heavily bombed East London to new towns and neighbourhoods outside the city. This was followed by large-scale immigration from the Commonwealth, from where people were actively encouraged to relocate to the UK to help tackle post-war labour shortages. This included the ‘Windrush generation’ – those who arrived between 1948 and 1971 from Caribbean countries, particularly Jamaica. Later migrants came from other Commonwealth countries, especially those in South Asia and, subsequently, Africa. Many of these migrants faced social and economic exclusion. Against this hostile background, in part born of racism, there was initially weak inter-ethnic mixing with limited social interaction between the migrant and indigenous populations. However, contacts did arise between young White and Caribbean people – many of the latter being the children of the settlers. Since the appearance of both Black and White American soldiers in the War, American – particularly Black – music had become popular and ‘cool’ (Fuhg, 2018, p. 8). The arrival of Caribbean, especially Jamaican, migrants in the post-war years continued the link between migrant and Black culture. From this, new youth cultural practices emerged based largely on music and style, much of it with strong Jamaican influences, especially through ska and reggae. The language of these genres was Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English (on reggae, see Sebba, 1993, p. 8; see also Back, 1996). Since the creoles spoken by the majority of the immigrants were, at least at the lexical level, variably intelligible to the local population, and the immigrants were largely literate in English, interaction between the two groups was relatively unaffected by linguistic barriers, compared to the situation for migrants from the Indian Subcontinent and Africa, whose vernaculars were not related to English – notwithstanding a degree of English literacy and the presence of West African Pidgin English. Moreover, whilst (as we have noted) there were housing challenges, the Caribbean immigrants were not residentially segregated (Dorling, 2005), and this doubtless facilitated the second generation in acquiring a form of London English that was largely indistinguishable from 363

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the indigenous ‘Cockney’ variety (Sebba, 1993, pp. 66–70). These contacts during the 1950s, 60s and 70s did not, however, lead to the emergence of any new, transformed, inter-ethnic vernacular variety of English in the capital spoken by a cross-section of the young population; instead, there was what Hewitt (1990, pp. 191–192) calls a ‘multiracial vernacular’ used by both Black and White youth in inter-ethnic encounters. This language variety was not a default, routine ‘vernacular’ in the Labovian sense of a variety that becomes entrenched during adolescence (Labov, 1972; Sharma, 2018). Rather, it was contextually contingent and so can be characterised as a ‘style’. What is interesting for us is that Hewitt emphasises its ‘multiracial’ nature, thus foreshadowing similar claims for MLE. Importantly for the argument we develop later, the interaction between White and Caribbean, mainly Jamaican, youth from the 50s to the 80s led to a heightened salience for Jamaican language and culture that has remained significant for the development of MLE down to the present. At around the same time as the multiracial vernacular was emerging, we see the rise of another youth language, given the label ‘London Jamaican’ by researchers such as Sebba (1993). This was a version of Jamaican Creole influenced by London English and often used as part of codeswitching with London English. It was used not only by young Jamaicans, but also by those with ancestry elsewhere in the Caribbean. It was, it seems, not used by young White people except in acts of ‘crossing’ (Rampton, 1995). The stage was now set for the emergence of MLE from the 1980s onwards (Kerswill and Torgersen, 2021, p. 264). MLE emerged in the context of greatly increased migration and a growing number of second-generation Londoners (the children of immigrants) from a much wider range of language and geographical backgrounds. And whilst we are concerned mainly with varieties used by Black (African Caribbean and African) speakers in this chapter, their language today must be placed in a wider linguistic, demographic and cultural ecology. Caribbean immigration had dropped markedly from the 1960s, whilst that from Africa rose, with the result that by 2001 Londoners of direct African descent had overtaken those with a Caribbean heritage. Already in 1991, both were far exceeded in number by people of a South Asian, predominantly Indian, origin. In fact, the proportions of speakers of all Black origins have been relatively small, and half that of South Asians: according to the 2011 census, Black Caribbeans constituted 3.69% of London’s population, the corresponding figure for Black Africans being 8.31%. South Asians, however, constituted 14.53% of the population. Figure 26.1 shows the ethnic composition of London in 2011. Their comparatively small numbers notwithstanding, Black Caribbean communities and their varieties (particularly Jamaican Creole) have had a substantial influence on the character of MLE. MLE is the outcome of what Winford (2003, p. 235) has called group second-language acquisition, by which community-wide language shift is followed by (relatively unguided) acquisition of a new language. Thus, adult and adolescent second-language varieties of English form a major part of the input to MLE. Because MLE has multiple inputs, it is usually not possible to establish the origin of a particular feature. Kerswill and Torgersen (2021), Kerswill (2022) and Ilbury (2019; 2023) provide further discussion of the origins, linguistic characteristics and social indexicalities of MLE.

MLE as a multiethnolect The emergence of new, distinct varieties of the host languages in multilingual, workingclass neighbourhoods can be seen in other European countries, too, where new varieties have emerged in contexts that have similarly seen large-scale patterns of migration and language 364

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Figure 26.1  Ethnic composition of London based on figures obtained from the ONS survey in 2011. Ethnicity is ‘self-selected’ (ONS, 2019)

shift (see Nortier and Svendsen, 2015; Kerswill and Wiese, 2022). These varieties have often been referred to as ‘multiethnolects’ – a term Clyne (2000) uses to refer to a newly-formed contact variety of a mainstream, majority-community language in contexts of high immigration leading to multilingualism (though see Madsen, this volume, on issues related to labelling and describing speech styles). Central to this term is the claim that speakers from a wide range of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds are seen to use the variety. Clyne noted that members of minority groups use the multiethnolect “collectively to express their minority status and/or as a reaction to that status to upgrade it” (2000, p. 87). He also notes that “in some cases, […] members of the dominant (ethnic) group, especially young people, share it with the ethnic minorities in a ‘language crossing’ situation [...] It is the expression of a new kind of group identity”. The lack of ethnic stratification was also argued for in the case of MLE. Earlier research concluded that speaker ethnicity did not appear to be the motivating social factor in the use of the variety, and this led the researchers to label it a multiethnolect (Cheshire et al., 2008, 2011). Indeed, Cheshire et al. (2008, p. 5) were not able to “isolate distinct (discrete) ethnic styles”, but rather conclude that it is the diversity of the individuals’ social network that predicts the use of MLE, with individuals with more ethnically diverse networks using more MLE features. This leads the authors to conclude that MLE is an “ethnically neutral variable repertoire” (Cheshire et al., 2011, p. 157).

From MLE to MBE In the time since the earliest research on MLE, however, there appear to have been several developments in the spread and use of the variety. The first development is the diffusion of MLE, with some of its features appearing in cities outside London. For instance, Fox et al. (2011) observe MLE-type features in Birmingham, the largest city in the Midlands, whilst Drummond (2018), in an analysis of youth language in the North West city of Manchester, observes that the young 365

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people used similar consonantal and lexical features (e.g., TH-stopping (use of [t] in words such as thing), peak ‘bad/unfair’ and safe ‘good/cool’) and had comparable vowel systems to those in the MLE projects. The similarities between the two varieties have led Drummond (2018) to argue for the emergence of ‘Multicultural (Urban) British English’ (MBE) which he defines as an overarching variety of English which incorporates features of MLE and the local regional variety. The second development is that features of MLE appear to have acquired some type of symbolic capital such that they are sometimes used stylistically by speakers to index their alignment with certain youth and musical cultures. For instance, Drummond (2018) explores the use and distribution of an MBE feature, TH-stopping, in relation to speakers’ social practices. He finds that, like Cheshire et al. (2008, 2011), the distribution of this feature could not be accounted for by the speakers’ ethnicity. Rather, he argues that, amongst young speakers in Manchester, TH-stopping was used to index speakers’ alignment with and participation in the grime music scene – a genre of music which originated in Black communities living in East London in the early 2000s. Potentially, then, these developments signal a type of ‘recontextualisation’ (Bauman and Briggs, 1990) of MLE. We can say that features/varieties have become ‘recontextualised’ when they appear in contexts that are distinct from those in which they were originally used. Although the current status of MLE is relatively underexplored, evidence for the recontextualisation of MLE is striking, and we explore this across three sociocultural dimensions: MLE and Black music genres, MLE and Black British identity, and MLE as cultural capital. We first consider this development with reference to the relationship between MLE and Black music genres such as grime.

MLE and Black music genres Below are the opening lines from the song ‘Shut Up’ by the international multi-award-winning grime artist, Stormzy. The extract contains several lexical, grammatical and discourse-pragmatic features which are considered characteristic of MLE. This includes the negative tag innit (Pichler, 2021), the pronoun man (Cheshire, 2013), and lexis such as rudeboy (Jamaican English equivalent to ‘badman’), repping (‘representing’), and cuz (‘cousin’, used as an address term; Adams, 2018). Stormzy: Shutup (2017) State your name, cuz Stormzy, innit? What we doing today? Repping, innit? Yeah, fucking repping, innit? Yeah, fire in the park, let’s go! Man try say he’s better than me Tell my man, shut up Mention my name in your tweets Ay, [kisses teeth] rudeboy, shut up Better than me? Shut up Stormzy also has a fairly canonical MLE vowel system in both his rap and his (interview) speech. For instance, his GOOSE vowel (i.e., /uː/) is very fronted in the word rudeboy, approaching [ʏː]. That Stormzy uses features of MLE is, perhaps, unsurprising. Born in 1993 to a Ghanaian mother, 366

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Stormzy grew up in Thornton Heath, an ethnically diverse area of South London. During the formative years of Stormzy’s life, the grime music scene, which had emerged in the East London area of Bow, had rapidly spread across London. Grime music is often compared with hip hop, but it developed out of UK garage and is heavily influenced by other Black musical genres such as drum ‘n’ bass, dancehall and jungle (Stratton and Zuberi, 2014). Unlike hip hop, which depicts the aspirational, grime music can be considered the “cri de coeur of the dispossessed, the narrative form of urban life” (Melville, 2004, p. 31). The lyrics of grime reflect the lived experiences of the challenging urban environments where the artists, such as Dizzee Rascal, resided (Barron, 2013). The emergence of grime music in the early 2000s coincides with the origins of MLE. Prior to this, grime’s predecessor, jungle, had already attracted young inner-city Londoners with its “MCs speaking in their local accent instead of mimicking American slang and lyrics, as well as music that was completely original yet fused cultures we had all grown up on” (Joseph [aka DJ Target], 2018, pp. 24–25). The jungle MCs’ ‘local accents’ varied from a form of Jamaican Creole to an early, Jamaican-influenced MLE, as well as Cockney or other British accents. Grime, on the other hand, appears to signal a move towards a genre that is explicitly tied to the British lived experience (Collins and Rose, 2016), with artists adopting a linguistic style that references the London roots of this genre: MLE. Earlier music genres which were popular in London, like dancehall and reggae, originated not in London, but in Jamaica; London-based artists like Smiley Culture routinely referenced the Jamaican immigrant experience. Their successor, jungle, was British based, and the music was largely electronic. As with the MCs’ spoken performance, jungle lyrics were a mix of Jamaican Creole and more standard versions of English; there was little engagement with local concerns. Grime’s focus on the inner-city experience placed language front and centre: grime music entailed ‘authentic’ language – and this meant MLE. The shift from Jamaica-based language to MLE in the 90s and early 2000s is indicative of their shared genealogies: MLE and grime emerged at the same time in the same ethnically diverse communities in inner-city areas of London, more specifically the working-class estates of (East) London. It is therefore unsurprising that MLE has become associated with this genre, given that many popular grime artists at the time (e.g., Dizzee Rascal, J Hus, Kano) grew up in speech communities where MLE was becoming widespread. As we have seen, there is a clear distinction between the powerful association between MLE and grime from the early 2000s and earlier, looser, associations between Black language and music genres. Although the link between MLE and grime most likely dates from the time of the emergence of both – a point we return to below – we would suggest that the indexical linkage between grime and MLE has, in recent years, become more visible. This is likely due to the fact that grime has been transformed from a fringe musical genre to a mainstream cultural orientation, as signalled by the visibility of well-known artists such as Dizzee Rascal, Stormzy and Skepta, who have received numerous accolades for their work (e.g., The Mercury Prize). What was once a niche musical subculture in London has since spread across the UK with local grime music scenes cropping up in geographically disparate cities and areas (e.g., Manchester and Birmingham; Boakye, 2017, 2019). Given that we have already established that many London-based grime artists rap in MLE, it is plausible to assume that artists from elsewhere will also adopt a similar style. Indeed, this is what we find. Grime artists from elsewhere in the UK appear to use features of MLE combined with elements of the local vernacular – evidence for Drummond’s (2018) claim of an MBE. Consider, for instance, the excerpt below taken from the lyrics of ‘Morgue Freestyle’ by the Manchester-born grime artist, Shotty Horroh:

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Shotty Horroh: Morgue Freestyle (2016) This my ting, time I stand my ground Sick of these pricks tryna jack my sound You are 2015 but it’s my time now I'm an Outlaw, man’s quite back right now slash Kevin Nash I am gonna jackknife hounds I remember when I never really had 5 pounds Shotty Horroh’s lyrics and rap appear to resemble very closely the MBE style defined by Drummond (2018). His rap weaves both local features of the Manchester accent and features typically found in MLE (e.g., TH-stopping in thing, pronounced [tɪŋ]; the pronoun man). Similar practices can be found in the lyrics of other grime artists not from London including Tremz (Liverpool), Lady Leshurr (Birmingham) and Coco (Sheffield). In this sense, the link between MLE/MBE and grime music is somewhat comparable to the relationship between African American English (AAE) and hip hop (Alim, 2015), in that the shared genealogies of the music culture and the linguistic variety leads to the association of the two. Whilst grime music may be partly responsible for the spread of MLE, some research suggests that MLE lexis has diffused out from London through geographically proximate urban areas where there are sizeable Black British communities (Ilbury et al., 2021).

MLE as Black British identity We have already discussed the interrelation between MLE and Black British culture, focusing specifically on a particular type of cultural innovation: grime music. However, beyond grime, we argue that MLE has acquired more generic social meanings, specifically as a marker of a wider Black British identity. In this section, we discuss some contemporary accounts which describe MLE as a vernacular variety which is intrinsic to a contemporary Black British identity. The general perception of MLE as a Black British ethnolect is widespread in popular discourse. For instance, in her book on Black history, culture and politics in contemporary Britain, writer Afua Hirsch describes MLE as a “black, inner-city language” (2018, p. 7). Similarly, in a recent exposition of Black British identity and culture, cultural commentator, author and broadcaster Jeffrey Boakye (2019, p. 363) concludes that MLE could be described as a “street parlance connected intimately to the black diaspora”. These descriptions appear to be at odds with how MLE has been conceptualised in academic research on the variety, in which it is referred to as an “ethnically neutral variety” (Cheshire et al., 2011, p. 157). Why then do the ethnic associations of MLE exist, at least in popular discourse, given that these claims appear to contradict the empirical evidence on the social distribution of MLE? In what follows, we consider four possible explanations for this association, whilst advocating future research on the issue which could help shed light on these dynamics.

MLE wasn’t ever truly ethnically (or racially) neutral Contrary to Cheshire et al.’s conclusions (2008, 2011), some research does identify ethnic stratification in the use of MLE features. In identifying this stratification, it is clear that the authors are referring to racial groups. For instance, Kerswill (2013) finds that some lexical items were exclusively used by ‘non-Anglo’ speakers (i.e., those with a non-British heritage) and, in some cases, 368

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only by African Caribbean individuals. A case in point is the use of the pragmatic marker blud (an informal male address term of Jamaican origin). Of the 58 tokens in the corpus, 55 were produced by non-Anglo speakers. Of these, 26 are produced by two African Caribbeans. The address term mate, on the other hand, occurs 119 times, with almost all of the tokens produced by five Anglo speakers. The address term bruv shows a similar ethnic differentiation, being used more by African Caribbean boys than other groups (Kerswill 2013, p. 144). Using the same data, Torgersen et al. (2018) find that young people with non-Anglo backgrounds used the pragmatic marker you get me at a much higher rate than Anglo participants. The authors did not report the relative contribution of different ethnic groups within these categories; however, an inspection of the original data, in which ethnicities are listed, readily shows that male teenagers with an African Caribbean, African or mixed Black/non-Black heritage are proportionally by far the most frequent users of this phrase. However, despite this differentiation at the lexical and discourse-pragmatic levels, in the same paper, Kerswill (2013, p. 146) concludes that the sharp ethnic divide identified in these areas of variation is “not reflected in either the phonetic data (vowels) or the morphosyntactic features and quotatives”. Nevertheless, there are significant differences in the vowels between non-Anglos and Anglos, though the extent is ‘slight’. He further notes that the alignment in vowels is as much geographical in origin as ethnicity-based, with inner-city (Hackney) Anglos more similar to inner-city non-Anglos than they are to Anglos in the outer-city suburbs (Havering) (ibid.). These conclusions certainly do not negate the relevance of ethnicity even in the earlier period covered by the research we have reported. It is likely that the macro-level approach adopted in the earliest research on MLE which categorised speakers into ‘Anglo’ and ‘non-Anglo’ ethnic groups was too broad to capture more fine-grained ethnic differentiation in the use of MLE. Other research on multiethnolects elsewhere has shown that a ‘variety-based approach’ as used in the original work on MLE cannot capture more specific social meanings that are (indirectly) linked to ethnicity (see for example Quist, 2008). Simply because both Black and White speakers use (or do not use) features of a particular variety does not mean to say that there is a lack of ethnic differentiation, or that the indexical meanings which are evoked are the same for all ethnic groups. Rampton’s (1995) interactional analyses of ‘language crossing’, for instance, demonstrate that White youth stylise and also appropriate aspects of ethnic varieties spoken in London. These practices may, in turn, become habitual over time, bringing them closer to the Labovian idea of ‘vernacular’ (see also Hewitt, 1986). Similarly, Gates’s (2018) ethnographic work in an East London secondary school demonstrates that there are distinct MLE-type repertoires that can be distinguished on the basis of the main ethnic identity of the friendship group; in Gates’s case, a group of mainly White girls used more traditional Cockney vowel realisations than their peers. And in other work, Gates and Ilbury (2019) demonstrate that young people often refer to ethnic differences in metalinguistic commentaries on language use.

MLE is underspecified An alternative explanation of the ethnic association of MLE is that we, as academics, are using the label MLE to describe something more specific – a linguistic system – than in popular discourse where it may be used to describe something more narrow, e.g., particularly, lexical features, ignoring other levels. In other words, it is possible that the connection between MLE and Black ethnicities – particularly Jamaican – reflects a difference in how this term is defined. This is a plausible conclusion given that many popular descriptions of MLE focus primarily, if not exclusively, on lexis. For instance, in her definition of the term, Hirsch (2018, p. 296) writes that MLE merges “West Indian and South Asian, cockney, and Estuary slang”. Similarly, in his overview of the 369

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variety, Boakye (2019) provides a set of MLE examples, but cites only lexical features and the pronoun man. Perhaps if we just focus on MLE lexis, we too would reach similar conclusions: that MLE is a Black variety, heavily influenced by Caribbean Creoles and Englishes. Indeed, most of the distinctive lexis of MLE is derived either indirectly (i.e., similar concepts) or directly (i.e., borrowing) from Black diasporic, notably Jamaican, varieties of Creole or English. Words and phrases such as yard ‘house’, batty boi ‘homosexual man’, and wha gwaan ‘what’s going on’ have been borrowed directly from Jamaican English and are common in MLE. Other languages contribute too to the lexical ‘feature pool’ of MLE (e.g., Arabic: Wallahi ‘swear to God’; see Oxbury, 2021) but they are outnumbered by the sheer number of borrowings from and adaptations of Jamaican Creole and English. Beyond lexis, however, the influence of Jamaican language is much less clear (Kerswill and Torgersen, 2021, p. 253). Solely focusing on lexis is a problematic method to define someone as an ‘MLE speaker’ since lexical features are widely appropriated and many MLE words have become circulated as a more general youth style. This approach is likewise at odds with the sociolinguistic approach which defines an individual as an ‘MLE speaker’ on the basis that they use linguistic elements of a variable repertoire that comprises multiple linguistic levels (see Cheshire et al., 2008; 2011). Nevertheless, it is difficult to isolate exactly what or how many features a speaker needs to use to be categorised as an MLE speaker. In other words, what is the threshold of MLE categorisation? We do not attempt to answer this question here (it needs further investigation) but rather suggest that differences in how MLE is defined may, in part, explain the claim that MLE is associated with a Black British identity. It is also the case that not all those involved in the grime music industry are Black, even though they can be heard speaking MLE: this is true of the rapper Shotty Horroh, mentioned earlier, and the rapper Morrisson, who are both White. However, being White goes against expectations: in an interview, Morrisson comments that people around him were surprised to discover his racial background (BBC Radio 1xtra Official YouTube channel, 2019).

MLE has become associated with a Black British identity A third explanation is that MLE was not initially ethnically stratified but has since become ideologically elaborated, coming to be associated with a contemporary Black British identity. We should note here that this (potential) explanation does not negate the discussion above where we explored the possibility that ‘MLE’ is underspecified. It is possible that this association has developed precisely because the term is underspecified. As the term entered public discourse, social commentators contributed to the ‘enregisterment’ (Agha, 2003) of MLE, which links this variety to a particular ethnic group. The enregisterment of MLE could be motivated precisely because social commentators appear to have focused solely on describing features which were largely derived from Jamaican varieties, particularly lexis. Our earlier discussion of the relevance of grime music, too, seems to add support for this interpretation. We have already argued that grime music substantially increased the visibility of MLE, catapulting this variety onto the global stage. Given that grime emerged in Black communities, it is only a short deductive step to associate the language of grime (MLE) with the entire Black community – even though MLE developed in ethnically and linguistically very mixed communities. The suggestion that MLE has become recontextualised and associated with a specific ethnic identity arguably dovetails indirectly with some of the findings of Cheshire et al.’s (2011) research. The study examined the vowel systems of four age groups of young people, 4–5, 8–9, 12–13 and 16–19, with a view to logging the acquisition of vowels along gender and ethnic lines using an apparent 370

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time methodology. A total of one hundred young people were recorded in Hackney and neighbouring inner-city boroughs. The youngest non-Anglo children (8 females, 9 males, all non-Anglo) had already acquired an MLE vowel system (e.g., raised FACE and GOAT vowels; Cheshire et al., 2011, p. 165). Unfortunately, it had not proved possible to record any Anglo children in this age group. However, data for the next age group up, 8–9-year-olds, included both ethnicity groups (3 Anglo females, 3 Anglo males, 9 non-Anglo females, 5 non-Anglos males). It showed that all the groups at this age had MLE realisations for F1 and F2 of FACE and GOAT, with no gender or ethnicity effects (p. 169). However, the next older group, 12–13-year-olds (7 Anglo females, 5 Anglo males, 7 non-Anglos females, 8 non-Anglos males), showed a marked gender effect, leading to a correlation (albeit non-significant) with ethnic group. Here, Anglo girls seem to be adopting more Cockney-like realisations of some vowels, a pattern also shown in the adolescent data (ibid., p. 170). This gender/ ethnicity pattern is similar to that noted above for a different dataset in the East London borough of Newham (Gates, 2018). What we are witnessing here is the acquisition of both gender and ethnicity differentiation in the early part of the lifespan, moving from an absence of such differentiation to its presence. What is unexpected, however, is that the baseline for the speakers appears to be an MLE-type vowel system, with a more traditional Cockney system being used later by Anglo girls as they approach adolescence. Gates’s (2018) work shows the kind of group identity construction that can lead to precisely this result. What we are faced with is a gradual ethnic differentiation through childhood and adolescence; rather than traditional Cockney, the starting point seems to be a relatively homogeneous MLE-like variety without any link with social or gender identities. In this sense, we can say that MLE is not initially linked to specific ethnic groups; however, this may well be an artefact of normal sociolinguistic acquisition rather than any changes in the social indexicality in real time of the language varieties at the community level. This further analysis of the Cheshire et al. (2011) results allows us to reach a new conclusion: that ethnic and gender differentiation has been present from the start of the emergence of MLE.

MLE and a Black British English The fourth and final explanation for the association between MLE and Black identities is that there may be a Black British English that shares features with MLE. The notion that there is a ‘Black British English’ exists both in academic publications and as used by at least one campaigning organisation. For Sebba (2007) ‘British Black English’ refers to the use of Creole, mixed with English, as used by Londoners with a Caribbean heritage. For the organisation Black Learning Achievement and Mental Health (BLAM UK, 2021), the term refers to the speech/language of young Black people, defined in a way that makes it clear that it is close to our definition of MLE. Thus, the term ‘MLE’ is not in competition with Sebba’s ‘British Black English’, but it is clear that for some people and organisations the two terms are near synonyms – though in most cases probably unbeknownst to them. As we will see, this equivalence is a significant component in the enregisterment of MLE as a Black speech variety (see also Walcott, 2022).

MLE as ‘cultural capital’ So far, we have discussed the ‘recontextualisation’ (Bauman and Briggs, 1990) of MLE with reference to the formation of a distinct Black British identity and Black music genres. However, it is also clear that MLE has acquired a type of ‘cultural capital’ amongst speakers from different ethnic backgrounds more generally, not just Black speakers. On the one hand, many MLE features, particularly the lexis, have entered into more widespread youth styles. And on the other, MLE features are used by individuals from a broad range of backgrounds to index their align371

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ment with subcultures that are rooted in a Black British consciousness. Drummond (2018), for instance, has argued that young speakers in Manchester use features of MLE/MBE stylistically to index their participation in the grime music scene, whilst Ilbury (2023) demonstrates that speakers often exploit the indexical association between grime music and so-called ‘road culture’ – a Black British interpretation of North American ‘street culture’ (Gunter, 2008; Boakye, 2019). Even within the genre of grime music, MLE – including vocabulary derived from Jamaican Creoles and Englishes – appears to be used equally by artists with Caribbean and African heritage, as well as White artists with Anglo backgrounds (as we have noted) and British Asian artists, too. What we are describing is the recontexualisation of MLE from a variety of English spoken by working-class individuals residing in inner-city neighbourhoods in London to a style used by speakers from a range of ethnic backgrounds to index their belonging to or alignment with Black cultures. This recontextualisation seems to be motivated by the recent mainstreaming of cultures and practices that were once considered ‘fringe’, as signalled by the considerable influence of Black culture on the formation of contemporary British youth cultures (see Boakye, 2019). The recontextualisation of MLE as a type of cultural capital is comparable to the resemiotisation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). In the case of AAVE, speakers from a wide range of backgrounds are seen to recruit features of AAVE – or the ‘Hip-Hop Nation Language’ (HHNL) for stylistic purposes (Alim, 2015) – to index their alignment with this musical culture. We propose that a similar phenomenon can be seen in the practices of youth in the UK in relation to MLE. This could well be a more focused style than the variety we have described as MLE, containing a more restricted, and possibly different, set of features.

Conclusion This chapter started with the question: ‘How multiethnic is a multiethnolect?’. Our focus has been on the ‘recontextualisation’ of MLE and its association with particular types of cultural practices and communities. We would suggest that the earlier definition – an ‘ethnically neutral variety’ spoken by young working-class inner-city Londoners – does not accurately account for the ways in which MLE is currently being used nor how the term ‘MLE’ is defined in the media. We have, instead, identified three main ways in which MLE has taken on new meanings:



1. MLE and Black music genres: We have argued that MLE and Black music genres, such as grime, are highly imbricated. This relationship is predicted by the similar genealogies of MLE and grime: both emerged within similar communities – Black inner-city London neighbourhoods – at similar time points – the early 2000s. In this sense, it is perhaps unsurprising that MLE (or MBE in Drummond’s 2018 terms) has become strongly associated with grime music. This has been facilitated by the fact that, unlike its predecessor genres, grime aims to represent the local inner-city experience of the artists. 2. MLE as a Black British English: Though earlier research argued that MLE was an ethnically neutral variable repertoire, contemporary (media) accounts have often described MLE as a variety associated with the Black British community. We have argued that the association of MLE with Black speakers stems from the enormous popularity and visibility of grime through a number of artists who have become household names over 20 years. These artists are mainly, but not exclusively, Black, and have grown up with a musical and cultural heritage from the Caribbean (though they do not necessarily have Caribbean origins themselves). It can be argued that this association serves to popularise MLE, whilst also strengthening its association with Black culture. It is these complex associations that lead commentators to claim that MLE is a Black British variety (see also BLAM UK, 2021). 372

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3. MLE as cultural capital: Linked to our earlier discussion of the relationship between MLE and grime is the argument that MLE has acquired a type of ‘cultural capital’ which speakers from a range of ethnic backgrounds can deploy stylistically to index their alignment with particular (youth) cultures which are rooted in a Black British consciousness. The most obvious indication of this is the use of MLE features by young people to index their participation in the grime music scene (see Drummond, 2018) and/or so-called ‘road’ culture (Ilbury, 2023). MLE is used by some speakers in much the same way that AAVE – or HHNL – is used by White speakers in the USA to index their participation in the hip hop music scene (Cutler and Røyneland, 2015). These developments have been enabled by the recent mainstreaming of Black music cultures (see Boakye, 2019).

Multiple factors have, then, led to the recontextualisation of MLE, and it is clear that the process stretches over twenty or more years. However, claims that MLE is ‘multiethnic’ continue to be supported by some evidence. As sociolinguists, we must accept that we are dealing with two separate phenomena, each differing in terms of ideology and language production (Cheshire and Kerswill forthcoming): one is that MLE is observationally multiethnic/multicultural (Cheshire et al., 2011; Kircher and Fox, 2019) with a variable repertoire. The other is that MLE is linguistically more narrowly defined and allied to Black communities and identities (Boakye, 2019; BLAM UK, 2021). Whether or not a Black British English should be recognised is, in the end, a matter of ideology and identity construction.

Note 1 Christian Ilbury, the University of Edinburgh, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Dugald Stuart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD, 0000-0001-9289-271X. Paul Kerswill, the University of York, Department of Language and Linguistic Science, Vanbrugh College, University Road, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, 0000-0002-6540-9312’

Further readings Ilbury, C. (2023). The recontextualisation of multicultural London English: Stylising the ‘roadman’. Language in Society [Online first]. Kerswill, P. (2022). United Kingdom: Multicultural London English. In P. Kerswill and H. Weise (eds.), Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change: Insights from the Global North and South (pp. 282–299). London: Routledge.

References Adams, Z. (2018). “I don’t know why man’s calling me family all of a sudden”: Address and reference terms in Grime music. Language & Communication, 60: 11–27. Agha, A. (2003). The social life of cultural value. Language & Communication, 23(3): 231–273. Alim, H.S. (2015). Hip hop nation language: Localization and globalization. In J. Bloomquist, L. Green and S.J. Lanehart (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of African American Language (pp. 850–863). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Back, L. (1996). New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives. London: UCL Press. Barron, L. (2013). The sound of street corner society: UK grime music as ethnography. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 16(5): 531–547. Bauman, R. and C.L. Briggs. (1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19: 59–88.

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Christian Ilbury and Paul Kerswill BBC 1xtra Official YouTube Channel. (2019). https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=XPXb1bfl6fc. Accessed 20 March 2023. BLAM UK, Black Learning Achievement and Mental Health (2021). Black languages throughout the diaspora. https://blamuk​.org​/2021​/07​/05​/black​-english​-languages​-throughout​-the​-diaspora/#:~​:text​=Black​ %20British​%20English​%20is​%20a​,as​%20well​%20as​%20English​%20vernacular. Accessed 20 March 2023. Boakye, J. (2017). Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials, and the Meaning of Grime. London: Influx Press. Boakye, J. (2019). Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explored. London: Dialogue Books. Cheshire, J. (2013). Grammaticalisation in social context: The emergence of a new English pronoun. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(5): 608–633. Cheshire, J., S. Fox, P. Kerswill and E. Torgersen (2008). Ethnicity, friendship network and social practices as the motor of dialect change: Linguistic innovation in London. Sociolinguistica, 22(1): 1–23. Cheshire, J., P. Kerswill, S. Fox and E. Torgersen (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(2): 151–196. Cheshire, J. and P. Kerswill (forthcoming). Multicultural urban Englishes. In E. Moore and C. Montgomery (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of British Englishes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clyne, M. (2000). Lingua franca and ethnolects in Europe and beyond. Sociolinguistica, 14(1): 83–89. Collins, H. and O. Rose. (2016). This is Grime. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Cutler, C. and U. Røyneland. 2015. Where the fuck am I from? Hip-Hop youth and the (re)negotiation of language and identity in Norway and the US. In J. Nortier and B.A. Svendsen (eds.), Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century: Linguistic Practices Across Urban Spaces (pp. 139–164). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dorling, D. 2005. Why Trevor is wrong about race ghettos. The Observer, 25 September, pp. 14–15. Drummond, R. (2018). Researching Urban Youth Language and Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fox, S, A. Khan and E. Torgersen (2011). The emergence and diffusion of multicultural English. In F. Kern and M. Selting (eds.), Ethnic Styles of Speaking in European Metropolitan Areas (pp. 19–44). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fox, S. and E. Torgersen. (2018). Language change and innovation in London: Multicultural London English. In N. Braber and S. Jansen (eds.), Sociolinguistics in England (pp. 189–213). London: Palgrave. Fuhg, F. (2018). Ambivalent relationships: London's youth culture and the making of the multi-racial society in the 1960s. Britain and the World, 11(1): 4–26. Gates, S.M. and C. Ilbury. (2019). Standard language ideology and the non-standard adolescent speaker. In C. Wright, L. Harvey and J. Simpson (eds.), Voices and Practices in Applied Linguistics: Diversifying a Discipline (pp. 109–125). York: White Rose University Press. Gates, S.M. (2018). Language Variation and Ethnicity in a Multicultural East London Secondary School. Unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London. Gunter, A. (2008). Growing up bad: Black youth, ‘road’ culture and badness in an East London neighbourhood. Crime, Media, Culture, 4(3): 349–366. Hewitt, R. (1986). White Talk Black Talk: Inter-racial Friendship and Communication Amongst Adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hirsch, A. (2018). Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. London: Penguin Random House. Ilbury, C. (2019). Beyond the Offline: Social media and the social meaning of variation in East London. Unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London. Ilbury, C., J. Grieve and D. Hall (2021). Exploring the diffusion of Multicultural London English lexis through Twitter data. NWAV49, The University of Texas at Austin, online. October 2021. Ilbury, C. (2023). The recontextualisation of multicultural London English: Stylising the ‘roadman’. Language in Society [Online first]. Kerswill, P. (2022). United Kingdom: Multicultural London English. In P. Kerswill and H. Wiese (eds.), Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change: Insights from the Global North and South (pp. 282–299). New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Kerswill, P. and E. Torgersen. (2021). Tracing the origins of an urban youth vernacular: Founder effects, frequency and culture in the emergence of Multicultural London English. In K. Beaman, I. Buchstaller, S. Fox, S. Levey and J.A. Walker (eds.), Sociogrammatical Variation and Change: In Honour of Jenny Cheshire (pp. 249–276). London: Routledge.

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How multiethnic is a multiethnolect? Kerswill, P. and H. Wiese (eds.) (2022). Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change: Insights from the Global North and South. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Kerswill, P. (2013). Identity, ethnicity and place: The construction of youth language in London. In P. Auer, M. Hilpert, A. Stukenbrock and B. Szmrecsanyi (eds.), Space in Language and Linguistics: Geographical, Interactional, and Cognitive Perspectives (pp. 128–164). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Kircher, R. and S. Fox. (2019). Attitudes towards Multicultural London English: Implications for attitude theory and language planning. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 40(10): 847–864. Labov, W. (1972). Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society, 1: 97–120. Melville, C. (2004). Beats, rhymes and grime. New Humanist, https://newhumanist​.org​.uk​/articles​/822​/beats​ -rhymes​-and​-grime [accessed 28.08.23]. Nortier, J. and B.A. Svendsen (2015). Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century. Linguistic Practices across Urban Spaces. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Office for National Statistics, ONS. (2019). Population estimates by ethnic group, England and Wales. https:// www​.ons​.gov​.uk​/peo​plep​opul​atio​nand​community​/culturalidentity​/ethnicity​/datasets​/pop​ulat​ione​stim​ates​ byet​hnic​grou​peng​land​andwales. Accessed 6 July 2022. Oxbury, R. (2021). Multicultural London English in Ealing: Sociophonetic and Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in the Speech of Children and Adolescents. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Queen Mary University of London. Pichler, H. (2021). Grammaticalization and language contact in a discourse-pragmatic change in progress: The spread of innit in London English. Language in Society, 50(5): 723–761. Quist, P. (2008). Sociolinguistic approaches to multiethnolect: Language variety and stylistic practice. International Journal of Bilingualism, 12(1–2): 43–61. Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. Sebba, M. (1993). London Jamaican: Language Systems in Interaction. Abingdon: Routledge. Sebba, M. (2007). Caribbean creoles and Black English. In D. Britain (ed.), Language in the British Isles (pp. 276–292). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sharma, D. (2018). Style dominance: Attention, audience, and the ‘real me’, Language in Society, 47(1): 1–31. Target, D.J. [Darren Joseph] (2018). Grime Kids. The Inside Story of the Global Grime Takeover. London: Trapeze. Torgersen, E., C. Gabrielatos and S. Hoffmann (2018). A corpus-based analysis of the pragmatic marker You get me. In E. Friginal (ed.), Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics (pp. 176–196). New York: Routledge. Walcott, R. (2022). A Tweet at the Table: Black British Identity Expression on Social Media. Unpublished PhD Thesis, King’s College London. Winford, D. (2003). An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. Stratton, J. and N. Zuberi (2014). Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945. Farnham: Ashgate

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PART IX

Youths speak back: Youth voices and the political youth

27 YOUNG PEOPLE’S POLITICAL DISCOURSE Voice, efficacy and impact Patricia Loncle-Moriceau and Sarah Pickard1 Introduction Young people around the world have become increasingly vocal in recent years about issues that are important to them centred on climate change, as well as multiple situated injustices and discriminations, such as misogyny, racism, homophobia and poverty. There are plenty of relevant examples. First, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was launched by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in July 2013 (Evans, 2020). Second, the #MeToo movement was started in 2006 by Tarana Burke and taken up worldwide in the aftermath of Harvey Weinstein’s arrest in 2018. Third, the School Strike for Climate (Skolstrejk för klimatet) was initiated by Greta Thunberg, in August 2018, which grew rapidly into the global Fridays for Future (FFF) movement (Collin and Matthews, 2021; Pickard et al., 2022).2 By young people, we mean secondary education age youth through to those in young adulthood, as the age thresholds of ‘youth’ are extended and the transition prolonged due to precarity. While the current young generation is not nationally or internationally homogeneous (Pickard, 2019a; Bessant, 2020), the issue that has been mobilising young people the most is the environment with young people’s political discourse expressing hope for a better, greener and more just world with fewer inequalities (Pickard et al., 2020, cf. Fløttum et al., this volume). This reflects a shift towards more post-materialist and “cosmopolitan-left” values in Britain “and many other established democracies” among the young generation compared to older generations (Sloam and Henn, 2018, p. 11). Other explanations can be found in the fact that a greater proportion of the population is going into further and higher education (where students come into contact with other young people), the development and democratisation of digital technologies (that provide access to information and enable mobilisation) and globalisation (Pickard, 2022). Thus, around the world, and in particular in the Global North, younger generations today tend to be more educated, more informed and more in contact with peers than previous ones, which develops political socialisation, awareness, knowledge and participation. For many of these knowledgeable, aware and connected young people (Henn et al., 2021) political participation within formal and traditional political structures has become less appealing (Grasso, 2017). However, non-institutional types of political participation, such as demonstrations, occupations and other more creative forms of disruptive non-violent direct action are DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-36

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increasingly being used by young people, in order to attract public, media and political attention to issues (Pickard and Bessant, 2017; Giugni and Grasso, 2019, 2021). The raised voices of young activists are mostly aimed at politicians and other powerholders urging them to ‘do’ something (Pickard and Van de Velde, 2021). In this way, much of the young generation’s political participation can be conceptualised as Do-It-Ourselves (DIO) politics, whereby young people feel the need to do something and so act together outside formal political institutions in collective ways that provide political efficacy and empowerment (Pickard, 2019a, 2022, see below). They are making their voices heard. This chapter deals with the expression and reception of prominent political discourse among much of the contemporary young generation, especially in Western Europe. The main question addressed here is: to what extent do the actions of politically engaged young people enable them to enter into dialogue with decision-makers and bring about changes in public decisions? To answer this question, we provide an analysis of political discourses produced by young people and politicians at a macro-sociological level, in combination with material from our field research in neighbouring countries France and Britain. The chapter shows the impact of the young generation’s political discourse on policymaking is not always very effective because the ambivalent status of young people means their voices are not always acted on by powerholders to any real effect.

Evolutions in the discourses of young people’s political protest: mobilisations and repertoires of action Young people have been increasingly politically mobilised since the global financial crisis (2007– 2008) and the resulting implementation of austerity measures in Europe and around the world (Giugni and Grasso, 2019, 2021). Along with mass national and international protest actions primarily about educational matters (e.g., funding and fees) via traditional marches and rallies came further dissent about socioeconomic inequalities, expressed by the occupation of public spaces for extended periods, sometimes months (Bessant et al., 2021). However, over the past decade, there has been a distinct evolution in the expression of young people’s political dissent, both in terms of the issues and repertoire of action, as well as the critical mass of youth involved in global movements.

Young people’s expressions of dissent and support about specific political issues It is widely acknowledged that the current young generation displays less interest in expressing its political views and beliefs through traditional political parties (Grasso, 2017). Young people tend to be less drawn to hierarchical and top-down structures with a fixed ideology communicated through a set menu of policies laid out in formal manifestoes. Indeed, there is a general trend towards growing distrust in elected politicians and traditional political structures, although, levels vary across countries, depending on the political offer and welfare system (Chevalier, 2018). These doubts and distrust are reflected in lower turnout rates in elections among younger age cohorts than older ones and former young generations across many countries. Researchers have shown that young generations today tend to feel alienated from party politics, i.e., there is a problem with the supply side of politics (Hay, 2007), whereby politicians provide neither the political environment that encourages young people to take part, nor the will to change election logistics to make voting more youth-friendly (in terms of when, where and how, e.g., electronic voting).3 In this way, the onus for low youth turnout rates is primarily on politicians not being active enough in enabling and encouraging the youth vote, rather than young people not being interested in politics or elec380

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tions (Henn and Weinstein, 2004; Pickard, 2019). As a result, young people tend to be politically alienated rather than politically apathetic (i.e., disinterested or lazy). Therefore, they are locked out, rather than being let into electoral politics.4 Consequently, around the world, young people are increasingly being drawn to political structures that are less hierarchical and more horizontal (Bessant et al., 2021). These include issue-led political networks and movements that are often deliberately leaderless and claim internal democracy. Thus, there is more scope for input and output from the grassroots, i.e., for young people to get involved, use their efficacy and have a voice: to do something and have an impact (Pickard, 2022). Researchers in diverse disciplines (political sociology, political science and youth studies, among others) have observed a widening of the issues young people support and protest about in recent years. Overwhelmingly, these issues reflect socially liberal or ‘open’ values that Sloam and Henn (2018) call ‘cosmopolitan’ values (see also Keating, 2021). Such left-leaning values translate a shift towards more post-materialist values (Inglehart, 1977) in younger generations, especially those with tertiary level studies, and are particularly noticeable among young women (Sloam and Henn, 2018). Moreover, this attachment to post-materialist values emerges despite the lack of opportunities for social mobility, as well as the presence of material obstacles for many in the young generation. In this way, there are clear intergenerational socioeconomic inequalities and intergenerational differences, sometimes referred to as the ‘cultural backlash’. Distinctive matters that have mobilised many young people over the past decade around the world include identity and justice issues, such as gender discrimination and racism, while by far the most prevalent issue is the climate crisis. Our numerous interviews with young environmental activists in Britain and France show that young people experience a variety of strong emotions that act as a brake or a trigger to their participation (see below). The targets of youth mobilisations as political protests are mainly politicians and other powerholders, as well as the mainstream media and the general public. To draw attention to these issues, alter perceptions and have an impact, mobilised young people are raising their voices through a growing repertoire of contention.

The discourses of contention and protest actions employed by young people Young people’s political participation can, as mentioned above, increasingly be conceptualised as DIO politics (Pickard, 2019). Do-It-Ourselves (DIO) politics is a helpful concept to understand when citizens take politics into their hands and act collectively, generally to influence political and corporate decision-making. The emphasis on ‘doing something’ underlines the importance of acting to bring about change often because participants consider powerholders are not doing enough or are not doing the right thing. By ‘doing’ something together, young citizens feel part of a collective movement. Moreover, the taking part brings crucial joy and hope in a somewhat hostile landscape for many young people, as well as feelings of agency, political efficacy and empowerment. DIO politics can be expressed through lifestyle politics and more collective online/offline protest actions. Lifestyle politics is living in harmony with one’s values through everyday actions with thought and care. Lifestyle politics can involve living authentically according to one’s morals within the private sphere, such as adopting a plant-based diet, avoiding private transport and political consumption, i.e., using economic agency to boycott or buycott certain brands, services, producers and products (Pickard, 2019; Kyroglou and Henn, 2020). Clearly, depending on the age and situation of the young person, they have variable amounts of financial autonomy and availability to adopt certain lifestyles, but they can influence peers and family members around them by talking 381

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about the issue. In addition, while lifestyle politics can be viewed as an individualised action, it forms part of a broader movement that cumulatively impacts and creates a sense of belonging and efficacy. Thus, private lifestyle actions form part of a public political persona. Nevertheless, many young environmental activists report in interviews that they consider such actions are not enough to bring about significant policies and concrete transformations regarding climate change from politicians and other decision-makers (cf. Fløttum et al., this volume; Pickard, 2022). Moreover, there is a synergy between offline and online participation, especially among younger digitally connected generations, whereby both feed into each other boosting engagement on different scales. Campaigns started within schools or on the street by activists, then go to social media and develop an online presence, bringing in other young people (Tufecki, 2017). What all these movements have in common is that they are driven mainly by young people (although not exclusively), and due to social networks, they are growing organically, globally, nationally and locally. These young people act as bold and vocal role models for the young generation and their raised voices have a certain impact on policy making.

Reactions to youth discourses among policymakers The links between youth-led or youth-supported political mobilisations, the political evolution of societies and the reception of these mobilisations by decision-makers have been ongoing questions in recent decades. Focusing on the past half-century, the work of historians and sociologists has demonstrated the influence of young people at key turning points in history, for instance, during both the civil rights movement in the United States and the 1968 movement around the world (Bantigny and Jablonka, 2009; Lewis, 2009). More recently, the occupations of public squares and the Indignados movement in Spain have drawn scholarly attention to such relationships (Pleyers and Glasius, 2013; Nez and Dufour, 2017) and especially regarding student protests (Bessant et al., 2021). Historically and currently, we can see that social movements led by young people give rise to two main types of reactions from adults, the mainstream media and policymakers. Firstly, protest movements reject the status quo, thus engendering fear and/or incomprehension among older generations. Secondly, protest movements make societies evolve through political decisions at different levels and occasionally through more discreet changes in organisations. This ambivalence is examined in more detail below.

Young people considered too radical, idealistic and immature The first reaction observed among older generations towards social movements led mainly by young people comes in the shape of societal rejection of the demands and protests themselves. This stance can be interpreted as a form of generational conflict that has always existed. Societies tend to react to the cultural changes brought about by young people in the form of moral panics (Cohen, 1972), which often underline and exaggerate anything that might be disturbing to the rest of society (Jones, 2009). More specifically, in the political domain, researchers have shown (for some decades now) that young people are frequently criticised due to their higher abstention rates during elections in most Western countries (Pickard, 2019). They are seen more as citizens in the making (Van de Velde, 2008) experiencing a political moratorium (Muxel, 2018), than as individuals capable of taking part in public debate (Furlong, 2013). As a result, their political mobilisations tend to be condemned for being too radical or too ‘idealistic,’ ignored or repressed by the police in sometimes extreme ways (Pickard, 2019). In this respect, we can take the examples of the Nuit Debout (Pickard and Bessant, 2018) 382

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and the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movements in France, as well as Extinction Rebellion (XR). Although based on different values, these two movements both question the traditional forms of the political setup and generate incomprehension in other parts of the population, as well as severe forms of repression that in turn reinforce collective identities (Poupin, 2019).

Young people and the renewal of public debate However, despite these adverse reactions that reject young people’s raised voices and youth mobilisations, we can also observe converse reactions, which rely on these protest actions to bring about profound societal changes at different levels. The various kinds of changes stemming from youth mobilisations can lead to the implementation of concrete measures on various scales. Sometimes, these changes are mainly discursive. For example, the European Commission’s launch of its ‘Green Deal’ at the end of 2019 can be seen as an indirect consequence of protest actions by young environmental activists. However, many voices have been raised (notably that of Greta Thunberg) to denounce the greenwashing operations at work in such initiatives and lip service paid out of electoral interests. Sometimes, the changes are more concrete, with the link to youth mobilisations being more indirect and oblique. For example, we can deduce that the election of 30-year-old Léonore Moncond’huy as the ‘green’ mayor of the city of Poitiers (France), in 2020, is a consequence of the mobilisations of young people in favour of the environment almost everywhere in the country, as well as the upsurge in the popularity of the Green Party across Europe. Moreover, Feldman (2021) demonstrates how universities have seized on youth climate mobilisations as a lever for introducing more sustainable and environmentally friendly ways of operating.

Political youth discourses and policymakers: A French case study The involvement of young people in (political) decision-making processes has been a common issue in youth policy going back to the end of the Second World War in many Western countries. Since then, many attempts have been made to involve young people in decision-making processes, in order to adapt the public response to their needs and demands. Such consultative phenomena in France and Britain have been well documented by historians (Davies, 1999; Bantigny, 2007; Barriolade et al., 2020), as well as by sociologists and political scientists (Loncle, 2008; PercySmith and Thomas, 2010; Bright et al., 2018). The trend towards the systematisation of formal youth participation initiatives (such as Youth councils or Youth assemblies) developed from the 1990s onwards, in the wake of many general and specific findings. We can highlight the widespread difficulty of public policies to reach the very parts of the population that are the most distant from the public authorities; the rise in uncertainty about a certain number of public problems; the growing demand of citizens to be more involved (Blondiaux, 2008). Regarding findings especially concerning young people, specific points stand out: their apparent lack of interest in public affairs based on the fact that they vote less than older citizens; and the violence of young people in neighbourhoods facing distinct social difficulties (Geddes, 2002; Loncle and Rouyer, 2004). Despite attempts by decision-makers at different levels of public policymakers to consolidate these processes, several shortcomings remain that ultimately seem quite challenging to overcome (Loncle et al., 2012; Walther et al., 2019). These limitations occur at several points in the decisionmaking process and occur mainly because the field of youth participation is not very standardised and professionalised, unlike other public policy sectors, such as environmental and urban policies, which have benefited from a greater increase in expertise (Mazeaud, 2012). 383

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Prior to the launch of formal youth participation initiatives, the issue of selecting the young people likely to participate is often problematic. Indeed, research in other fields has shown that the participants should be as representative as possible of the beneficiaries of the participation mechanism. In this respect, selection techniques (such as voting or drawing lots) have proved the most convincing (Sintomer, 2018). However, it is rare for such practices to be employed in the case of young people. On the contrary, since elected officials are often afraid that young people will not play the democratic game, or not decide the ‘right thing,’ they tend to involve young people who have already demonstrated their goodwill in this respect (Walther and Lüküslü, 2021). They tend to recruit either class reps or young people already involved in various bodies (particularly associations). The result of this first bias is that the young people recruited do not feel out of place, but they are not necessarily representative of all the young people concerned by the schemes. During initiatives to encourage youth participation, other difficulties can arise, all of which are related to a tendency towards paternalism and tokenism on the part of those responsible for the initiatives (Walther et al., 2019). Firstly, young people are rarely allowed to choose the topics they will work on during the consultation. These initiatives are almost always consultative and strongly frame the issues to be addressed. In particular, young people are largely confined to topics that are thought to concern them most directly and are rarely consulted on topics such as the economy or spatial planning. Secondly, young people are seldom accompanied in their work by professionals in the field of participation, and they are more often followed by youth workers who are not always trained in the requirements of these initiatives. Thirdly, young people rarely receive training in participation that would enable them to improve their skills, particularly in terms of speaking in public and presenting projects (Walther et al., 2019). All these elements converge to make the recommendations formulated by young people somewhat diluted in most cases. Finally, the acknowledgement and taking into account of young people’s recommendations often creates problems. This observation is not specific to the youth field and can frequently be found in this type of experience (Demoulin and Bacqué, 2019). However, when it comes to young people, this problem is particularly severe. On the one hand, it is not uncommon for elected officials to take the results of consultations and not acknowledge or mention the work put in by young people. On the other hand, sometimes, young people’s recommendations are not considered at all, or only partially, while later on, due to the time it takes officials to make decisions, nothing is done by them to explain to the young people involved about any decisions that were finally made (Breviglieri, 2014). Moreover, as the time taken to decide is often much longer than the time taken to participate, very often, the young people who made the recommendations are no longer involved in the process and cannot see the results of their work implemented. In other words, the voices of these young people are ignored, sidelined and repressed. All these problems mean that young people involved in participatory experiences are often less convinced about public affairs at the end of the consultation than at the beginning (Loncle, 2008). Those who remain are often young people who have longer-term goals and ultimately wish to pursue a political career; they, therefore, see participation mechanisms as a way of becoming more professional and gaining recognition (Walther and Lüküslü, 2021).

Discourses and mobilisations of young people at a local level A typology of young people’s political engagement at a local level The collective research project Partispace (a Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Commission) looked at how young people in eight European cities (Frankfurt, Rennes, Bologna, Zürich, Plovdiv, Göteborg, Manchester and Eskişehir) defined participation and engagement at the 384

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local level between 2016 and 2018. In particular, the project aimed to consider the full range of local forms of participation, focusing on analysing the discourses of young people and political and community leaders, the kinds and styles of participation and the biographical trajectories of young people involved in these initiatives (Walther et al., 2019; Walther and Lüküslü, 2021). One of the critical results of the research was that it highlighted the wide variety of areas of youth mobilisation in the eight cities studied. In terms of formal, non-formal and informal participation, young people were politically mobilised in all spheres of social life: including politics, the environment, support for the most disadvantaged, exiles, LGBTQ+ people, culture and sport. Depending on the experiences studied, young people were mobilised, either due to initiatives stemming from decision-makers and youth professionals, or on their own initiative. They participated in the elaboration and implementation of public policies or came to extend or replace the actions of public authorities (particularly in the field of care for exiled persons). In terms of the subversive potential of these initiatives, we have observed that young people operate on a continuum from conforming to the expectations of adults, and more specifically of policymakers, to a total rejection of the policy offer, as it exists in their local environments. Janet Batsleer et al. (2019, p. 203) have proposed a synthesis of these mobilisations as represented in Figure 27.1:

From loyalty to voice, the variety of discourses from politically engaged young people – Examples from France and Britain In order to gain a more detailed understanding of how committed young people express themselves concerning politics, this section gives examples from the French and British contexts. The French fieldwork took place in Rennes, a medium-sized student city (200,000 inhabitants) in the north-west of the country. Rennes is characterised by having many youth organisations (like all the cities studied in the project). The local youth policy benefits from a long history, and it is somewhat

General relevance Representation Services Explicit political activities Living social alternatives

Conformity

Deviance

Pedagogical supervised leisure Exploring interest, performing skills

Own spaces

Particular interest

Figure 27.1 Recognition of different forms of practice in public spaces (Batsleer et al., 2020, p. 203)

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representative of French local practices in this field (the policy exists and is well-organised but is not especially ambitious or well-funded). The data was gathered through twelve group discussions with young people and from an MA dissertation written by a student on eight radical associations that developed dissident attitudes towards decision-makers (Boutin, 2016). The data was also collected throughout the four in-depth local case studies that concerned youth-led organisations (the Nuit Debout movement, an online magazine, an association that promotes youth citizenship through cultural activities, and an association that supports asylum seekers).5 When analysing the data, it became clear that youth-led organisations adopted the three ranges of attitudes classified according to Hirschman’s (2004) typology ‘voice’, ‘exit’ and ‘loyalty’. Furthermore, Neveu (2000, p. 29) suggests the following definition of these three reactions: “the ‘exit’ strategy is silent, it translates for example into non-renewal of an adhesion card, withdrawal from the association; ‘loyalty’ to the movement means accepting its defects, the decline in its merits; finally, ‘voice’ expresses a protest against the performance of the firm, the service, the movement”. However, as underlined by Neveu (2000) and Le Bourhis and Lascoumes (2014), beyond its apparent simplicity, the typology of voice, exit and loyalty may be used in a very heuristic way to embrace the complexity of the relationships established between youth organisations and local authorities. Below, we will turn to how these three strategies work in practice.

‘The exit strategy’ Inside the ‘exit’ strategy group, while all young people shared grievances regarding the institutional definition of social exclusion, three types of strategy were observed. Two of them were rather individual and correspond to what Warin (2016) has analysed as a ‘non-taken up’ phenomenon, the last one was more collective and intended to create an alternative to the system. The first attitude could be labelled as a “non-request” behaviour; it was mentioned during a group discussion led by an informal group of young people from disadvantaged areas. Two participants expressed their grievances towards the institutional definition (and thus the framing of the public delivery). The young people interviewed asserted they no longer trusted local governmental institutions, considered them useless, and therefore decided to stop applying for public support. Their strategy consisted in staying on the margins of public delivery. The second exit strategy was observed during observations of the association Welcome, whose aim is to support asylum seekers, in order to compensate for the absence of public action. What was even more interesting here was that as the mobilisation issue was highly political because the volunteers benefited from a collective framework, one could have imagined that they would have developed a “voice” strategy. Nevertheless, it did not occur during the research, and the association stayed outside the political system. The third exit strategy was quite different and was identified among more radical leftist associations. This attitude could have become a “voice strategy.” This is because partisans of the exit strategy clearly rejected the governmental institutions and their norms and promoted alternative projects. Notwithstanding, it remained an exit attitude as long as the associative members refused to have anything to do with local governmental institutions.

‘The voice strategy’ ‘The voice strategy’ was, to a certain extent, easier to identify as it supposed the creation of social mobilisation, it was also all the more visible as it took place in public spaces. In the research project, two trends embodied this strategy. On the one hand, the student mobilisations that took place 386

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in 2016 against new labour legislation. On the other hand, the Nuit Debout movement was particularly well-established in Rennes. The ‘voice’ strategy here consisted of “redressing grievances in the political arena” (cf. Pfaff and Kim, 2003, p. 404). However, young people wanted to stay at the margins of the traditional decision-making process and provide their own frames and solutions.

‘The loyalty strategy’ Young people employing what we recognised as the ‘loyalty strategy’, accepted establishing contact with public authorities, receiving funding money, and getting involved in various local partnerships. By collaborating, they hoped to influence the context and improve young people’s living conditions. This strategy was identified in the actions and discourses led by several youthled organisations (actions developed respectively in unemployment, media and culture). In one of these associations, from the very beginning, the young leaders asserted their will to challenge the content of local youth policies, which they considered ill-adapted to young people’s needs. Nevertheless, they agreed to enter into dialogue with local governmental institutions. Inevitably, the ‘loyalty’ strategy was the easiest to deal with from the point of view of local decision-makers: they integrated young people’s initiatives into their actions after a period of observation during which they verified their ‘seriousness’ and their compliance capacity. Furthermore, they asked them to adopt the same political priorities. These three types of discourse – voice, exit, loyalty – show the different perspectives at work for young people who mobilise in the public space and choose whether to enter into contact with public actors and try to influence public action. In Britain, young people have been particularly engaged in environmental activism going back to the 1970s and 1990s (Carter, 2019). Their engagement has been especially evident since late 2018. Young environmental activists have been taking part in school climate strikes, Fridays for Future (FFF) and other networks, such as UK Youth Climate Coalition (UKYCC) and Global Justice Now events and/or Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests in different locations around Britain, most notably in March 2019 and then during September and October 2019 (before the COVID pandemic struck early 2020). The making and doing is a vital part of participating for young environmental activists in the biggest global youth-led movement. In interviews before and during protest actions, young FFF activists speak of how they decided what to put on their placards – text and images – what they made them from and with whom. Young environmental activists involved in Extinction Rebellion (XR) have been particularly creative in their repertoire of action. Drawing on examples of direct action employed by radical activists in the 1970s and 1990s, they have been emphasising the importance of peace, kindness and non-violent direct action, such as lock-ons, fake blood and funeral processions (Pickard et al., 2020). Their clear aim is to raise their voices and disrupt the public and police, in order to garner media and political attention. At the same time, both XR and FFF use apocalyptic narratives and dramatic language to mobilise activists and garner reactions from politicians (Pickard, 2021). For this chapter, we focus on three sets of interviews carried out with young environmental activists between the ages of 12 and 34 in Britain, as part of an ongoing research project focusing on youth activism in the environmental movement, in order to understand their messages, motivations and methods (Pickard, 2021, 2022). First, in Nottingham city centre, on Friday 20 September 2019, during the Global Climate Strike initiated by Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future (FFF). Interviews lasting between 10 and 15 minutes took place in the field as the protest was happening. Then, in Sheffield, at the university, young activists were interviewed in pre-arranged one-hour interviews a few days before the Extinction Rebellion ‘International Rebellion’ fortnight. Some 387

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participants were planning to travel to London where the third and last group were interviewed: XR activists who were approached in Trafalgar Square, London, on 20 October 2019. In the field, interviews began with participants being asked to describe their placards – the words, the images and the materials – and other artefacts they had on display, such as patches and stickers. They spoke of the importance of the terms and expressions they used. The discourse used by both environmental movements (FFF and XR) transmits the emergency and gravity of climate change via apocalyptic narratives. The language and narratives have changed from global warming to climate change to the climate crisis to ecological breakdown to environmental justice (Pickard, 2021). The use of such language by youth seeking to transmit the urgency and scale of the issue within apocalyptic scenarios underlines intergenerational responsibility and the social contract. The language and protest actions also focus on drawing attention from the public, mainstream media and politicians who have impacted political discourse, official declarations and policymaking. Yet, many young environmental activists spoke about how their voices were not being heard by politicians or that powerholders were not doing enough. Responses from politicians have varied considerably, from condemnation to celebration. Some political leaders from the political right (e.g., Donald Trump and Scott Morrison) have denounced publicly young environmental activists for being immature, irresponsible and illegitimate (Pickard et al., 2022). Such age-based and gender-based negative reactions can be considered proof that the discourse and actions of Greta Thunberg and fellow young environmental activists are having an impact on world leaders. Conversely, other politicians have sought to be seen publicly supporting Thunberg by heaping praise on her, be it with conviction or cynicism. Clearly, the discourse and expressions of concern about the environment initiated by young environmental activists have had an impact on the political elite. During a House of Commons debate about the climate crisis, in early May 2019, certain Members of Parliament (MPs) reacted by commenting they were only debating the issue due to the young environmental activists protesting outside (Pickard, 2021). The debate’s outcome was that the Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, immediately declared a climate and environmental emergency, followed by the European Parliament on 28 November 2019. Subsequently, the next Prime Minister, Boris Johnson announced commitments in the run-up to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Conference of the Parties (COP26) held in Glasgow, Scotland, at the start of November 2021. Since then, he and the French government have been keen to show their green credentials, suggesting they have been listening to young people’s voices.

Conclusion: young people’s political discourse – voice, efficacy and impact In this chapter, we have shown how West European young people’s political participation has evolved in the twenty-first century. This evolution can be seen in the expression of their politics and politicians’ reception of their discourse. Many young people around the world have become more vocal about issues that are of special interest to them. Socially liberal, left-leaning values and issues resonant the most with the environment, racism and feminism being very prominent. Many in the young generation do not engage with traditional political parties and voting as a channel to express their political views. This is primarily due to youth-unfriendly logistics, ill-adapted communication and distrust in elected politicians both in France and Britain, but also more widely. The latter tend to merely pay lip service to young people’s mobilisations and/or sideline young people from the policy development process. Many in the young generation prefer more hands-on 388

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direct action that can be conceptualised as DIO politics when both the doing and doing collectively are crucial. A wide variety of emotions act as a brake and trigger for youth mobilisation. Young people are expressing strong emotions in their bold political discourse aiming for change, primarily via fluid, leaderless movements. They are discovering their agency and efficacy in collective ways that bring hope. Clearly, the young generation’s political discourse is having an impact on policymaking, however, the ambivalent status of young people means politicians do not always listen attentively to their voices.

Notes 1 Corresponding authors: Patricia Loncle-Moriceau, EHESP, avenue du professeur Léon Bernard, 35043 Rennes, France. Orcid: 0009-0007-2585-4810. Sarah Pickard, Université Sorbonne nouvelle, Maison de la recherche, 4 rue des Irlandais, 75005 Paris, France. Orcid: 0000-0002-3303-208X. 2 It is noteworthy that many high-profile activists are girls and young women. For example, Greta Thunberg (born 2003), Emma González (born 1999), Amika George (born 1999). 3 For detailed analysis, see Pickard, 2019a. 4 In France, in the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections, young people voted much more for the political extremes – the far left and the far right – than for most centrist candidates, and a significant proportion voted blank (Muxel, 2018). In the United Kingdom, young people bucked the world-trend in the 2017 and 2019 general elections, with growing electoral turnout rates, especially for candidates from the Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn with very youth-friendly manifestoes and peer-led communication. 5 The cities studied in the Partispace project were: Frankfurt, Rennes, Manchester, Bologna, Goteborg, Plovdiv, Eskişehir and Zürich. As mentioned above, in each city, six local case studies were carried out. The criterion was to identify two formal initiatives (created by public authorities such as Youth councils), two non-formal initiatives and two informal initiatives. In this chapter, we do not consider formal initiatives because inside them young people have very limited power to act upon the definition of youth social exclusion. For more information about this project, see: PARTISPACE – Formal, non-formal and informal possibilities of young people’s participation in European cities.

Further readings Bessant, J. (2020). Making Up Young People: Youth, Truth and Politics. London: Routledge. Pickard, S. (2022). Young environmental activists and Do-It-Ourselves (DIO) politics: Collective engagement, generational agency, efficacy, belonging and hope. Journal of Youth Studies, 23(10): 730–750. Walther, A. and D. Lüküslü (2021). Who are the young people who engage as youth representatives? Routes into formal youth participation. Youth & Globalization, 3(1): 195–214.

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28 ‘TRYING (HARD), BUT IT’S DIFFICULT’ Youth voices on lifestyle matters from a climate perspective Kjersti Fløttum, Trine Dahl and Jana Scheurer1 Introduction Climate change affects how we think about everything from our personal lifestyle choices and political behaviour to how we perceive the future. Building on previous research related to young people’s perceptions of the multi-faceted climate change phenomenon, this chapter reports on a linguistics-based study of how young people in Norway relate the existential challenges of climate change to their lifestyle and everyday life choices. They represent the generation that will have to manage and live with the consequences of climate change today and in the future. Recent years have seen a growing awareness across the globe of young people’s engagement with climate matters (Fløttum et al., 2016; Ojala and Lakew, 2017; Ojala and Bengtsson, 2019), including lifestyle issues (Ojala, 2015; Pickering et al., 2021; Ojala, 2022; Piscitelli and D’Uggento, 2022). According to Ojala (2012), the feeling of hope can act as a motivational force in young people’s behaviour related to climate change and sustainability. The young (of different ages, from teenagers up to 25 years old in previous studies) are citizens that are not afraid to let their voices be heard. Youth-organized climate protests like Fridays For Future (FFF) and more local initiatives – many inspired by the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg – have become arenas for social activism (Han and Ahn, 2020; Reis, 2020), with political action and climate justice as important aims (Elsen and Ord, 2021). The young protesters are described as “strikingly direct and unvarnished” (Marris, 2019), reflecting a new sense of empowerment (Tucker, 2019). Support for their impatience can be found among investors turning to greener assets (Raval and Mooney, 2018) as well as influential media drawing attention to the cost of inaction on climate and ecological damage (Financial Times, editorial board, 2021). As regards the key phenomena involved in the current study, youth voices, climate and lifestyle, few studies so far have taken a linguistic approach. However, we would like to mention two studies that offer interesting connections to our research field, Ojala and Lakew (2017) and Wormbs and Søderberg (2021). Ojala and Lakew (2017) present an overview of research involving young people and climate communication. Which messages get them involved; what is the role of social media in their engagement with the issue; can art and entertainment approaches to climate change increase their feelings of engagement and empowerment? As for Wormbs and Søderberg 392

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(2021), their qualitative study from Sweden focuses on the lifestyle issue of flying. Through open and closed answers to survey questions, people who had already given up flying were asked about this choice. A generational aspect is reflected through the survey participants’ references to their children or grandchildren as moral guides in climate-related lifestyle activities. The present study builds on the research mentioned above and will contribute with new and rich data specifically related to lifestyle matters and political influence as perceived by young people. As regards the value of our study for research on climate change from a societal perspective, we address the knowledge gap that currently exists regarding how the generation facing a future marked by climate change expresses their potential for contribution. The study is part of the interdisciplinary CLIMLIFE project2 and represents a research collaboration with Norwegian high schools in 2021, carried out as a survey including 381 students in the age group 16–19, complemented with discussions with the participants and their teachers. Norway, we argue, is an interesting setting for such a study, being a highly developed welfare state, mostly due to its large production and export of oil and gas. However, this fossil fuel production and export is also strongly criticized and debated, both in Norway and abroad. At the same time, climate change is high on the Norwegian political agenda and widely covered in both legacy and social media. Some would point to this as a paradox, viewing Norway as a climate concerned but also an oil-rich nation (Fløttum et al., 2016). Earlier experience involving the same age group as in the present study has documented the impact that collaboration between researchers and young people can have on awareness about and engagement with the climate challenge (Fløttum et al., 2016; on ‘citizen science’, see Svendsen, 2018; cf. Svendsen and Goodchild, this volume). Two of the broader aims of the study are therefore to strengthen the students’ feeling of empowerment regarding climate issues and to provide input to teachers by bringing new content and discussions of lifestyle problem-solving to the age group we engage with. We address these issues through the following research questions: (1) How do young people (16–19 years old) view their role in lifestyle matters?; (2) How do they perceive so-called “green living”?; (3) In what way do they think they can influence climate politics?; and (4) How do they conceive of the future? Our data consists of opinions and language used to express these perspectives, obtained through both closed-ended and open-ended questions (Tvinnereim et al., 2017). Recent years have seen a substantial growth in the literature on linguistic perspectives of climate change communication (Fløttum, 2016; Pearce et al., 2015; Tvinnereim and Fløttum, 2015). However, there seem to be few studies on how lifestyle issues related to climate are communicated and responded to (however, see De Boer et al., 2016; Atanasova, 2019; Wormbs and Söderberg, 2021), and, as already indicated, even fewer on young people’s communication on this. The chapter continues with a description of our material and methods before we present our results. Then follows a discussion of these in light of our research questions, before we draw some conclusions and suggest some avenues for further research.

Material and methods Semi-open survey In order to explore how young Norwegians perceive and communicate about climate-related lifestyle issues, we decided to conduct an anonymous, semi-open survey among local high-school students in the Bergen area. Having both descriptive and explanatory aims, we opted for a mixedmethod approach, providing both quantitative and qualitative data. 393

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The survey questions were discussed and formulated in collaboration with the CLIMLIFE research group. To facilitate a comparison with a similar survey carried out in 2013 (Fløttum et al., 2016), conducted by the LINGCLIM research group, we aligned some questions with those of the 2013 survey, while the majority were new questions formulated to address specific lifestylerelated questions. In total, the survey comprised 14 questions, six open-ended and eight closed-ended.3 The closedended questions were followed by optional comment fields, allowing the students to elaborate on their replies. As the research group has a special interest in wording and linguistic devices in climate change discourses, these comment fields – together with the replies to the open questions – provide valuable thick research data, allowing for a dense description (Geertz, 1973). Moreover, such an open design allows respondents to express their opinions freely and extensively, without being bound by default answer options, thus providing deeper insights into the topic at hand (Elsen and Ord, 2021). The questionnaire survey was set up using the program SurveyXact, allowing for easy digital distribution and analysis. Before the questionnaire was put into practice, we conducted a pilot study to test it for reliability. A class of 27 first-year high-school students at one school were asked to complete the survey, and to comment on clarity and comprehensibility of the questions. The overall feedback was positive; only smaller adjustments had to be made.

Student recruitment and data collection In collaboration with teachers, we recruited 15 classes from nine schools, comprising 381 students between the age of 16–19 (51% female, 45% male, 4% ‘other’). Most of the students (63%) attend general university preparatory classes (Norwegian, hereafter, NO: ‘studieforberedende’), but also sports students (NO: ‘idrettslinje’) (26%) and vocational students (NO: ‘yrkesfag’) (11%) participated. Data collection for the main study took place in the period January 2021−March 2021. All classes were given a brief introduction before being asked to complete the survey individually. Afterwards, an open discussion was initiated, where the students could discuss and comment on specific questions as well as the survey in general, first in small groups and then all together. Due to pandemic restrictions, some school visits happened digitally with the research assistant participating via video call, while others allowed for physical attendance. Both settings proved to be suitable, even though direct interaction was easier in the physical meetings. The research assistant was present in all meetings.

Data structuring and validation After data collection was completed, all responses were exported into an Excel file, allowing for statistical calculations. The replies from the open-ended questions were coded and categorized. Here, an inductive approach was chosen: The replies were first manually scanned for especially prominent topics, which then were chosen as preliminary categories. Subsequently, these categories were used to code all replies, with slight revisions and refinements of the category system along the way. In order to control the coding, word frequency analyses were undertaken of all answers to open-ended questions (also giving us quantitative results on frequent words used; a word is here defined as a lemma with all its forms included). Two months after the survey was carried out, we invited all participating classes to a digital conference, which about 100 students attended. Here, we asked the students to comment on our findings, providing an opportunity for respondent validation. Given that the study has a strong qualitative dimension, we considered it crucial to get feedback and have our analysis and assump394

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tions commented on. The students stated that they, to a large extent, could identify with the results. They further pointed out that they appreciated the opportunity to reflect upon climate-related questions and express their opinions freely, with regard to both content and form. Thus, they particularly appreciated the open-ended questions with the opportunity to provide more comprehensive answers in the free text field.

Analysis of polyphony and evaluative expressions The free-text answers were also submitted to more qualitative analyses, focusing on markers of both polyphony (multivoicedness) and evaluative expressions. As regards polyphony, we know that climate change discourses are typically polyphonic or multivoiced, given their inclusion – explicitly or implicitly – of many points of view and thereby different voices in interaction (Fløttum, 2016, 2017; Fløttum et al., 2006 (chapters 4 and 6); Fløttum et al., 2020). To fully understand the answers and assess to what extent our students are influenced by and interacting with current opinions in society, it becomes important to unveil the polyphonic nature of their answers. These considerations motivated us to include the linguistic theoretical framework known as the Scandinavian theory of linguistic polyphony, ScaPoLine (Nølke et al., 2004). This approach is clearly inspired by the linguistic sketch of polyphony presented by the French linguist Oswald Ducrot (1984) of Mikhail Bakhtin’s original literary understanding of polyphony, and further developed by Scandinavian linguists into a coherent linguistic (mainly semantic) theory. According to this theory, the speaking subject can include other voices in one and the same utterance, with which various relations are constructed, e.g., acceptance, hesitation, refusal. A classic example of explicit polyphony is reported speech (citations), where one voice gives the floor to a second voice (as in “Prime Minister X concluded as follows: “...”). However, the advantage of the ScaPoLine approach is that it also helps to reveal implicit voices, in more or less hidden interaction. Polemic negation is often mentioned as typical of implicit polyphony, i.e., where the source is not explicit. In the sentence “Climate change is not caused by humans”, there are two points of view: one, from a hidden source, expressing that “climate change is caused by humans” and another, of which the speaker is responsible, refuting this through the negation not. Another frequent polyphonic marker is the connective but in its concessive meaning (NO: ‘men’), linking two points of view in contrast, which may correspond to different claims. In the construction ‘p BUT q’, there is no disagreement; the speaker accepts p, but an argumentation is presented, where the q point of view is considered the most important (according to the linguistic instructions embedded in but). In addition, the p point of view is oriented towards a conclusion (often implicit) and the q point of view towards another one, in an implicit deliberation. ScaPoLine covers a wide range of relevant linguistic markers signaling the presence of voices other than that of the speaker at the moment of utterance (Nølke et al., 2004; Fløttum et al., 2006). In this chapter, we limit the polyphonic perspective to negation and concession, two among many subtle rhetorical ways of polemising without identifying with whom. As regards evaluative expressions (e.g., Hunston and Thompson, 2000), it is not only the choice of lexical item for situations (e.g., challenge), actions (e.g., fight) or states of mind (e.g., worried) addressed in the discourse that reveals the communicator’s evaluation. A more fine-grained lexical analysis may also provide insights into, e.g., the strength of beliefs (will as opposed to may make a difference) and the up- or downscaling of a problem or solution (increased recycling; more and more instances of extreme weather; Martin and White, 2005). In the present context, some observed trends regarding evaluative expressions in the students’ free395

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text replies as well as selected alternatives in the closed-ended questions will be commented on (for more detailed studies involving climate discourse and evaluative resources, see e.g., Dahl, 2021).

Young voices on lifestyle matters, green living, policy impact and the future In this section, we present the main results of the survey, limited to the questions that most directly address the research questions (RQs) outlined in the Introduction. Each of the four sub-sections below deals with one RQ. In addition to the quantitative results, we provide some qualitative linguistic considerations of text in comment fields as well as of answers to open-ended questions. For illustrative purposes, we add examples of the answers given by the students. These examples serve as representatives of several similar ones in the dataset.

How do young people view their role in lifestyle matters? With young people’s growing awareness of and engagement with climate issues, we find it particularly interesting to study how they relate the various challenges of climate change to their everyday life choices. With this as a point of departure, our first research question can be considered as an overarching one. Four of the survey questions are particularly relevant and provide data for answering this RQ. The first (survey Q5) asks to what extent the students want to live in a climate-friendly way. The responses are distributed as shown in Table 28.1, revealing that more than half of the respondents want to live in a climate-friendly way to a large (39%) or very large extent (15%). The questionnaire followed up with an open invitation (survey Q6) to the students to tell us about activities they perceive as climate friendly that they already undertake. This provided a series of activities, the majority of which represent two categories: recycling (35%) and environmentally friendly transportation (29%). However, 10% of the respondents stated that they do “nothing” that is climate friendly. In addition to listing what they actually do, many also commented on their contribution. Linguistically, these comments were often marked by the connective but (NO: ‘men’) in its concessive meaning: (1) we recycle at home which is often mentioned as something very good, but often feel that this is not enough4 (2) I must honestly admit that I fly quite a bit in order to see my family who live in other countries. But I would very much have liked to take the train instead if that had been possible

Table 28.1 Wanting to live a climate-friendly life To a very large extent To a large extent To some extent To a small extent Not at all

15% 39% 35% 7% 3%

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(3) I teach myself to sew my own clothes with organic material and try to have things that will last a long time. I also take the light rail or walk to school, but it’s such a short distance, so that does not really count (4) I do not eat meat and also try to be conscious about where the other food that I eat comes from and the production method. For instance, I try to avoid farmed fish. Still, I am far from perfect in these matters. Otherwise I nearly always use public transport, and very rarely fly. (…) This is what I try to do, but I also often fail. In all these answers, but reflects an internal deliberation between two points of view oriented towards different implicit conclusions. This can be illustrated in the following way: (p) I do some/a lot BUT (q) I should/must do more. The third question included here (survey Q7) was formulated as follows: If you were to live in a more climate-friendly way, what do you think would be the most important you could do? The majority of the replies focus on three areas: more climate-friendly transportation (25%), diet/eating habits (17%) and consumption/shopping (15%). Many of the students point to actions that should be avoided (manifested by the negation not, NO: ‘ikke’), such as in “not buy more clothes”, “not travel by air”, “not throw food”. Others are less categorical, stating that they should do certain things less (NO: ‘mindre’), or that they can do more (NO: ‘mer’) (see example 5 below). A minority of 34 respondents (9%) admit that they do not know or are uncertain about what would be the most important action to take. The answer in example 6 in addition points to the responsibility of politicians, an issue also raised by the young people taking part in a Nordic Council survey on sustainable consumption (Ravnbøl and Neergaard, 2019). (5) It is probably mainly small-scale measures I otherwise can undertake, but would have liked to contribute more to organizations that are contributing for example. (6) Don’t know, feel that this is mainly for the politicians Then we asked the students whether there is anything they would not be willing to give up, even if they knew it was harmful to the climate (survey Q8). Again, transportation stands out as the most frequent topic (35%, with equal distribution between car use and holiday flights), with meat in second place (21%); 13% of the respondents replied “don’t know” to this question. To sum up, the majority of the students display a clear willingness to live in a climate-friendly way, with recycling and transportation as the main areas. At the same time, common activities related to transportation (e.g., holiday flights) and eating meat may also be difficult to give up. Finally, we note that 13% say they don’t know what they are not willing to give up; many use the word ‘difficult’ when answering this question, explained to some extent by the fact that they had not thought about this before.

How do young people perceive so-called green living? There is no one generally agreed understanding of what green living (NO: ‘grønn livsstil’) means, and we therefore wanted to find out more about how the students perceive this somewhat vague notion. In survey Q9, we first gave examples of what a climate-friendly way of life could imply, such as reducing flights, reducing shopping and becoming a vegetarian. Then we presented a list of 16 adjectives from which they could choose the ones they found to be appropriate labels 397

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for green living. The adjectives were (Norwegian in parenthesis) cool (‘kul’), cheap (‘billig’), fun (‘gøy’), easy (‘enkel’), widespread (‘utbredt’), rebellious (‘rebelsk’), stupid (‘teit’), expensive (‘dyr’), boring (‘kjedelig’), difficult (‘vanskelig’), weird (‘sær’), virtuous/honourable (‘prektig’), exciting (‘spennende’), challenging (‘utfordrende’), admirable (‘beundringsverdig’), controversial (‘kontroversiell’), other (‘annet’). The respondents selected the following as the most appropriate: challenging (78%), difficult (63%) and admirable (42%). At the other end of the scale, virtuous/honourable5 (4%), widespread (7%) and rebellious (10%) were considered least appropriate. These results indicate that while the students find green living admirable to some extent, their very clear preference for the alternatives challenging and difficult reveals that they do not perceive it to be an easy or straightforward way to live.

In what way do young people think they can influence climate politics? With the worldwide engagement witnessed in the climate issue by young people in the past few years, we wanted to examine what the students thought about their potential influence with regard to climate politics (survey Q11). The question first focused on whether the students feel that they have any influence at all, resulting in 59% affirmative and 41% negative answers. Those who said yes were presented with a follow-up question (survey Q11a) offering eight alternatives for action. They were asked to tick the three they considered most important. The alternatives provided were the following: Write op-eds; Participate in school strikes for the climate; Influence my family and friends to take care of the climate; Influence my parents to vote for a political party prioritising the climate; Join the youth wing of a political party; Join an environmental organization; Spread information about climate change in social media; Change own lifestyle to show politicians that it is possible for people to undertake such kinds of climate measures. The three alternatives opted for as most important were 1) Influence my family and friends to take care of the climate (68%),6 2) Participate in school strikes for the climate (54%) and 3) Change my own lifestyle to show politicians that it is possible for people to undertake such kinds of climate measures (45%). More than half of the respondents thus think they can have a certain influence in/on climate politics, in particular through raising awareness within the context of family and friends. We also note that they point to school strikes for the climate (e.g., Reis, 2020) and lifestyle change as important in influencing climate politics. For more developed perspectives on youth environmental agency, see O’Brien et al. (2018). The students who answered no to survey Q11 were invited to explain their responses (survey Q11b). The answers mainly reflect that they feel that they are not important enough (“little me”), that they have little interest in politics and lack the knowledge or competence to participate in political debates. However, some also claim that the reason is that the politicians do not listen to them. We illustrate some of these opinions in the examples below. (7) I am just one person, just a 16–year-old. I also don’t like to speak in front of large audiences so I don’t feel that participating in the climate debate/politics is something for me. (8) I am just an ordinary young person. politicians do not take young people very seriously. These two examples illustrate a quite commonly seen explanation, i.e., that the students feel too young and therefore have little formal power in society, often linguistically expressed by the 398

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downscaling adverb just (NO: ‘bare’). This is sometimes linked to the perception that they do not have the ear of the politicians, as explicitly stated in the following answer: (9) Because the politicians will not listen to what I have to say. We note the use of polemic negation (not) in both (8) and (9), which in polyphonic terms can be understood as a refusal of an underlying point of view, as expressed by many politicians: “We do listen to you”. Several respondents also point to what they consider a lack of sufficient knowledge to participate in debates and to have any influence (also mentioning the fact that they are too young to vote): (10) don’t have enough knowledge about it (11) because I am too young to vote and I don’t know enough about the topic Some proclaim a lack of interest in political activities: (12) Because I am not interested in politics (13) Because I don’t have the energy Finally, there are some students in this ‘no’ category who elaborate on their opinion polyphonically, bringing in other points of view that they consider most important in this context, marked by the connective but: (14) I can’t do so much alone to influence policy but if more of us try together to influence then I think it may make a difference (15) I would have liked to, but I feel that the only way to do this is to join the youth wing of a political party and possibly be heard from there. Wish there were smaller organizations or meetups where young people could participate and express their opinions, as well as get a better insight into what the politicians are doing for our climate. The future of young people. In general, the answers and comments related to the question about the influence on climate politics reflect a particularly deliberative and polyphonic tone, mostly marked by the negation ‘not’ or the concessive connective ‘but’. We observe that the students claim their environmental (in) expertise through multivoiced stance-taking.

How do young people conceive of the future? The future is something that most climate-engaged people worry about (Ravnbøl and Neergaard, 2019; The Policy Institute, 2021), and in this section we want to provide more knowledge about how young people conceive of it. In many youth action events, slogans such as “Stop stealing our future” and “It is our future you are destroying” are seen, bringing intergenerational justice to the foreground of the public debate (Andersen and Fløttum,2022; Diprose et al., 2019). Greta Thunberg has often accused the older generations of acting irresponsibly, having failed the young, and stolen their dreams, childhood and future. 399

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In our survey, we asked the students to what extent they are worried about climate change (survey Q3), implicitly presupposing that worry is related to what our society will be like in the future. The results are shown in Table 28.2, where we see that 49% of the respondents are worried (36%) or very worried (13%) about climate change. These results correspond quite well with results from the same question posed to the Norwegian population, in several rounds of the Norwegian Citizen Panel (section 2), where young respondents (age 18–30) expressed more worry than the older ones (Gregersen, 2021; see however, The Policy Institute, 2021 report, which finds little support for a generational divide on climate action). In order to know more specifically what the students think of the future, we asked how they envisage the future in 20 years’ time (survey Q12). We constructed four scenarios and asked the students to rank them from 1 (most likely) to 4 (least likely). The results are shown in Table 28.3. If we look at ranking 1 and 2 (most probable and second most probable), we see that the conception of the future as “strongly influenced by climate change” is supported by 77% of the respondents (37% and 40%, respectively). However, there is also a strong belief in new technology, with 66% of the respondents thinking that technology will facilitate a way of living so that it impacts the climate only to a small degree. Such an optimistic view corresponds well with the earlier study undertaken in 2013 (Fløttum et al., 2016). In contrast to the importance attached to technology, the students express relatively little belief (33%) in a green society where energy consumption has been cut to a level that impacts the climate only to a small degree. Finally, and interestingly, 56% of the respondents held the view that our society in 20 years in fact will be very much like the one we have today. However, the interpretation of this is somewhat problematic, since we did not ask them about how they assess the society of today. Nevertheless, our general impression is that they express a rather pessimistic view of the future, and more so than the students of the 2013 survey. Table 28.2 Worry about climate change Not at all worried Little worried Somewhat worried Worried Very worried

5% (20) 14% (53) 32% (122) 36% (136) 13% (50)

Table 28.3 Conceptions of the future

In 20 years, our society will be strongly affected by climate change. In 20 years, we will have reduced our energy consumption to an extent which enables us to live in a “green” society barely affecting climate. In 20 years, we will have developed many technological innovations that enable us to live in a modern society barely affecting climate. In 20 years, our society will be similar to the one we live in today.

1 (Most likely)

2

3

4 (Least likely)

37%

40%

19%

3%

5%

28%

49%

18%

12%

54%

27%

7%

15%

41%

30%

14%

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In the above sub-sections, we have touched on topics related to what young people do or refuse to do related to living a climate-friendly life. The last question in this future-related sub-section deals with more general activities considered to be more or less relevant in terms of caring about the climate, and thus contributing to a sustainable future society. We asked which one of 4 alternatives they consider as the most important (survey Q13). The results are as follows (note that some students have ticked more than one alternative): Green lifestyle: 53% (200 respondents), Engagement in party politics: 48% (182 respondents), Climate strike: 26% (98 respondents), and Influence on family and friends: 26% (99 respondents). Concerning the Climate strike response alternative, we note that, relatively speaking, our respondents do not consider it a very important contributor to achieving a sustainable future society. In the answers to question Q11 (cf. above) on the other hand, school strike was listed as number 2 in terms of importance for influencing climate politics.

Trends in climate change debates on lifestyle issues among young people The aim of our study has been to obtain knowledge on trends in climate change debates on lifestyle issues among young people as well as potential explanations for these trends. Taking all the survey questions and discussions with the students into consideration, our general and overarching impression is that they have solid knowledge about the phenomenon of climate change, and that they are aware of common everyday actions that may contribute to the mitigation of it. We also see a clear willingness to contribute through lifestyle choices but note that 10% of the respondents say they do “nothing” that is climate friendly. Thus, even though we see great engagement with the climate issue, it is not possible to conclude that this engagement is a general one for all those participating in the survey. In a democratic society it is important to acknowledge this and be open to both consensus and disagreement in climate deliberation. These general considerations partly answer our first and overarching research question, about how the students view their role in lifestyle matters (cf. above). However, in addition to the expressed engagement in a climate-friendly lifestyle and insight into what they could do better, the students are also explicit about what is difficult to give up, viz. car transport, holiday flights and meat. The emphasis on keeping holiday flights may perhaps be contributed to the geographically isolated position of Bergen as well as to the lack of freedom to travel during the pandemic. The emphasis on car transport displayed by some participants may indicate an urban-rural divide, given that some of the students live in rural areas with poor public transport, making cars a necessity. In the classroom discussions, after the survey, many said it was difficult to answer the question of “what not to give up”, because it was an issue they had not been thinking about. This indicates that this topic could benefit from further discussion in the classroom or other settings, facilitating a more comprehensive understanding of the lifestyle challenges (see Randall, 2009). This finding also offers an interesting avenue for future research on issues related to the framing of climate action campaigns. Concerning our second research question (3.2), on the perception of green living, the general response was clear: As many as 42% find green living admirable, but not an easy or straightforward way to live; rather, it implies something challenging (78%) and difficult (63%). Importantly, the word difficult (NO: ‘vanskelig’) is also frequently seen in answers/comments to other questions. Interestingly, however, the word was not used about understanding climate change as a phenomenon. We can conclude that the majority of the students consider a climate-friendly lifestyle as something important that should be part of everyday life, but simultaneously as something very demanding, which will necessitate change in several ways. 401

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In the previous sub-section, the focus was on how the students think they can influence climate politics. The most interesting finding was that they do not consider school strikes as the most important way of influencing climate politics. Rather, the most important action turned out to be putting pressure on family and friends to take care of the climate (see Lawson et al., 2019), implicitly understood as making them vote for climate-conscious political parties. This may be explained by the fact that the large majority of the participants are too young to vote themselves, and thus have no formal political influence. Another point that should be considered more deeply than we have done in this study is how young people conceive of politics. The students’ answers also show awareness of how their own activities may serve as examples for others, perhaps in particular showing politicians that it is possible to undertake climate-friendly activities. However, we also observed that as many as 41% of the participants said no to the question about having a potential influence on climate politics. The reasons were diverse, but many expressed that “my voice counts little”. This conception of “little me” is also present in several surveys undertaken by the Norwegian Citizen panel, in a representative sample of the Norwegian population (Falck Langaas et al., 2020). There may be several explanations for this. One may be that such an argument may serve as an excuse for not being engaged, another may reflect a perceived lack of attention from politicians, as expressed in example 9 above (cf. Loncle and Pickard, this volume). Even though the different scenarios discussed among scientists and politicians clearly reflect the uncertainty about what our planet will look like in 50 or 100 years,7 many conceptions of our future are envisaged both in factual and fictional discourses (Johns-Putra, 2019), and also in various forms of art (Hulme, 2017). A large majority of our survey participants find it likely that “In 20 years, our society will be strongly affected by climate change”, indicating that they are influenced by the many alerts and perhaps also doom-and-gloom scenarios presented in different contexts. This bears witness to a pessimistic conception of the not-so-distant future. The students in fact seem more pessimistic now than those participating in the 2013 survey, even though both groups reveal a strong belief in new technology. However, the survey responses also reflect engagement and belief in everyday lifestyle changes through activities considered to be useful in taking care of the climate, and thus contributing to a sustainable future society. Among the four alternatives listed (Q14 above), more than half of the students selected green lifestyle as the most important. Above, we commented on some linguistic features, mainly connected to words with an evaluative or argumentative effect, such as the adverb just, the adjective difficult and the polyphonic markers not and but. However, there are other relevant and frequent linguistic phenomena that we have not commented on in this chapter, but which deserve further analysis in future research. One such example is the issue of reference, for example through the use of indefinite pronouns and determiners such as all, some, many, and the personal pronouns I and especially we (see Andersen and Fløttum, 2022). A qualitative analysis of instances of we may reveal interesting insights into which voices and actors are included or excluded in climate-related lifestyle discourse among young people. We also fielded an open-ended question about the word shame (NO: ‘skam’) as in flight shame and meat shame that revealed interesting attitudes, where 45% of the students found the use of this kind of word very negative and even silly (for more research on the use of shame, see Andersen, 2022). In future research it would be interesting to discuss with young people not only the presence of various value-laden words in climate change discourse but also why such words are used. 402

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Concluding remarks and future directions The present chapter has provided important insights into how young people think of various complex questions related to climate change and lifestyle and how they express their opinions and attitudes through language. This has been possible through a rich empirical data set produced by high-school students’ answers to both closed-ended and open-ended questions. The answers to open-ended questions, where the students are allowed to express their opinions freely and extensively, have been particularly interesting with regard to the role of language. Through analyses theoretically based on linguistic polyphony we have seen how the students interact with various voices, either in internal deliberation with themselves (often marked by the contrastive connective but as in “I do some, but I should do more”) or in tougher discussions where voices from the broader public debate on climate change are refuted (marked by the polemic not as in “politicians will not listen”). This kind of linguistic interaction provides new awareness of how language is used within an engaged youth culture. Our findings from a Norwegian context have given insights into a youth culture that is marked by worry about the future of our climate, but also by dedicated efforts to make a difference. For many − but not all − the issue of climate change represents a substantial and important part of their lives. This preoccupation is something they share with their parents, even though the older generation’s way of living is also criticized by the young. The participants in our study therefore found it important to try to influence their parents on climate matters, as this generation may exercise more formal political influence at the ballot box. So, what is the role of young people in the climate debate today? Can they be sustainable changemakers, an expression used in the report on Nordic youth (Ravnbøl and Neergaard, 2019)? The perspectives on a sustainable lifestyle expressed by the high-school students in our study to some extent reflect an ambition to be changemakers at a local level, related to family and friends. Some point to Greta Thunberg’s efforts, but otherwise no other potential role models are mentioned as inspiration to live climate-friendly lives. The feeling of not being heard may strengthen the conception of “little me” having a very limited impact on ongoing efforts to mitigate climate change. Our survey shows that the students do support both personal and societal responsibility (cf. Tolppanen and Kärkkäinen, 2021), but also that they find it difficult to undertake individual lifestyle changes involving high-impact mitigating actions, such as holiday flights (cf. ibid.). Interestingly, compared to our study of a similar age group in 2013 (Fløttum et al., 2016), today’s students do not find climate science difficult to comprehend. This can perhaps be attributed to recent years’ efforts by climate scientists to communicate the complexities of climate change to lay audiences. The main takeaway message from our study may thus be directed at the politicians, to pay more attention to the generation that will have to live with the consequences of actions taken – or not taken – today. The media may also play a role in supporting the young generation by reporting more extensively on what this group think about and do to live sustainably. In order to meet the students’ expressed interest in climate questions and the wish to discuss and learn more, it could also be appropriate to set up more informal meetups for interaction with scientists, politicians and journalists. The schools already have a strong focus on climate change and are likely to have played an important role in forming the students’ good understanding of the phenomenon of climate change. However, the present study provides insights into the students’ thoughts on motivations for and barriers to a climate-friendly lifestyle. We therefore hope our findings can serve as inspiration to teachers to initiate new projects and classroom discussions on individual action on climate change, creating empowered citizens of tomorrow driven by hope and energy rather than pessimism and inaction. 403

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Acknowledgements We would like to thank the high-school students agreeing to share their views and reflections on climate and lifestyle with us, and their teachers for inviting us into their classroom. We are also very grateful for feedback received from our colleagues in the cross-disciplinary LINGCLIM research group (https://www​.uib​.no​/en​/rg​/lingclim).

Notes 1 Corresponding author: Kjersti Fløttum, Department of foreign languages, University of Bergen, P.B. 7805 5020 Bergen, Norway. Orcid: orcid​.org​/0000​-0003​-0834​​-824X. Co-authors: Trine Dahl, Department of Professional and Intercultural Communication, NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Helleveien 30, 5045 Bergen, Norway. Jana Scheurer, Department of foreign languages, University of Bergen, P.B. 7805, 5020 Bergen, Norway. 2 https://www​.uib​.no​/en​/rg​/lingclim​/135434​/climlife 3 See survey questionnaire: https://www​.uib​.no​/sites​/w3​.uib​.no​/files​/attachments​/climlife​_sporreskjema_​ .pdf 4 Our translations into English have been kept as close as possible to the Norwegian original, in terms of wording and punctuation. 5 Note that ‘prektig’ may have somewhat negative connotations. 6 We consider influencing family as having a potential political consequence of voting for a particular party. 7 Our survey was carried out before the publication of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (August 2021; The Physical Science Basis), which paints a very serious picture of the state of the future unless swift and comprehensive climate action is undertaken.

Further readings O’Brien, K., E. Selboe and B. Hayward (2018). Exploring youth activism on climate change: Dutiful, disruptive, and dangerous dissent. Ecology and Society, 23(3): 42. Ojala, M. and Y. Lakew (2017). Young people and climate change communication. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/acrefore​ /9780190228620​.013​.408 Wormbs, N. and M.W. Söderberg (2021). Knowledge, fear, and conscience: Reasons to stop flying because of climate change. Urban Planning, 6(2): 314–324.

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29 CITIZEN (SOCIO)LINGUISTICS What we can learn from engaging young people as language researchers Bente A. Svendsen and Samantha Goodchild1 Introduction In this chapter, we present and discuss how citizen science is conceptualised and applied in (socio) linguistics and explore epistemological, methodological and ethical considerations as well as the impact of engaging (young) people as language researchers. There is, as we will return to below, no clear-cut understanding of citizen science (henceforth, CS), but the various definitions all imply different levels of “participation of non-professional contributors in the production of scientific knowledge” (Kasperowski et al., 2021, p. 14). Regardless of conceptualisation, the notion of ‘citizens’ is by no means linked to any state-given, legal or national citizenship. ‘Citizens’ are, to the contrary, understood in a universalistic human way, as any person across the globe, as ‘social citizens’ (cf. Bellamy and Kennedy-MacFoy, 2014), and consequently, as ‘(socio)linguistic citizens’ (cf. Stroud, 2001). Sociolinguistics is in many ways premised on the participation of “non-professional contributors” in research, e.g., as participants in studies of linguistic variation where speakers’ linguistic practices are correlated with facts about their social background (cf. e.g., Eckert, 2012), or as participants in studies of the role of language in social life, such as the social meaning of crossing, code-switching or (trans)languaging (e.g., García and Li Wei, 2014; Rampton, 2006). However, the tradition of involving people in sociolinguistic research is most often based on an epistemology where scholars set the research agenda, proceed to collect data on the (socio)linguistic behaviour of the people involved, further analysed and interpreted by scholars, or in other words, an epistemology where scholars inhabit the role of experts, often from the ‘outside’, ‘looking in’. In recent years, (socio)linguists have advocated a stronger involvement of people in the research process arguing that engaging people as (co)researchers, in research by and with people instead of about them, will open new avenues for (socio)linguistic knowledge, methodology and impact, such as democratisation of research, increased scientific literacy and social change (e.g., Escott and Pahl, 2019; Heinisch et al., 2021; Nielsen et al., 2020; Purschke, 2017; SturtzSreetharan et al., 2019; Svendsen, 2018). Drawing on the growing impetus of CS, this recent call embraces an epistemology that recognises that people themselves know more than anyone else about why and how language matters to them, and that they themselves are experts and can contribute (with some training) as researchers, in doing (socio)linguistic research. It is important to note that this episteDOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-38

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mological call is by no means new (cf. e.g., Cameron et al., 1992), and it echoes the epistemology of folk linguistics (e.g., Niedzielski and Preston, 2003), linguistic ethnography (e.g., Tustin, 2019) and linguistic anthropology (e.g., Duranti, 1997). However, this recent turn differs in its emphasis on the affordances – as well as the challenges – of engaging lay people as language researchers in some or all stages of the research process. A CS approach in sociolinguistics, or citizen sociolinguistics (see below), might encourage “participatory citizen agency which, in many ways, redefines or reimagines the relationship between the researcher and the researched” by virtue of turning the researched into the role of the researcher and thus nurturing a relation of equality and interdependence (Svendsen, 2018, p. 138). Further, and importantly, by recognising (young) people’s knowledge and capacity to do research, by acknowledging their data as legitimate and listening to their voices and lived sociolinguistic experiences, citizen (socio)linguistics has the capacity to explore and monitor forms and levels of equality by including citizens’ data and knowledge on how language may function as a (covert) mechanism for prestige and discrimination, and to push towards sustainable inclusive societies through e.g., education, language planning and policy. As such, a CS approach in sociolinguistics communicates with the United Nations’ recent acknowledgement of CS as an important way forward for providing additional and local knowledge data for achieving the 17 sustainable development goals (henceforth, SDG; and in sociolinguistics, pertaining particularly to SDG no 10: Reduced inequalities; cf. Fraisl et al., 2020). Over the last decade, CS has, as we will outline in this chapter, gained momentum across scientific fields, in research policy and planning. We present the ten principles of CS developed by the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA, 2015) which serve to delimit the following state of the art of CS in (socio)linguistics. These principles, as well as the impact of engaging young people as language researchers, are discussed considering insights gained from a small-scale citizen sociolinguistic project in Oslo, Norway, Youths Speak Back, where we engaged young people as researchers in multiple stages of the research process. As such, we aim to contribute knowledge on qualitative CS approaches which feeds into the general lack of impact studies within CS (e.g., Somerwill and Wehn, 2022). Our insights are, furthermore, informed by a previous large-scale CS study in sociolinguistics (Svendsen, 2018, see below). Hence, in this chapter, we apply an inductive approach to citizen (socio)linguistics where we also point out matters to be considered as we move towards future citizen (socio)linguistic efforts.

The background and momentum of citizen science Although the tenets of CS are rather old (Kasperowski and Hillman, 2018), the term ‘citizen science’ was coined independently at the same time by Irwin (1995) and Bonney (1996), laying the ground for two related but parallel conceptualisations of the term (Hecker et al., 2019). Whereas Irwin (1995), from a sociological perspective on environmental threat and sustainability, put forward CS as “a means for democratization of science, public engagement, equity, and justice in the discourse of science and in setting the research agenda”, Bonney (1996) anchored CS to “the natural sciences and public involvement in scientific research, with members of the public partnering with professional scientists to collectively gather, submit, or analyse large quantities of data” (Hecker et al., 2019, p. 3). Although CS was earlier primarily used in Bonney’s (1996) sense, in biological studies of ecological changes in natural habitats, CS has recently gained prominence across scientific fields. Citizen humanities and citizen social science are established as distinct fields of inquiry and provide, as CS studies in general, ample opportunities for transdisciplinary research (Hecker et al., 2018; Heinisch et al., 2021). 408

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CS challenges the traditional linear relation between science and society in which scientific knowledge is produced by researchers and then disseminated to the public. In CS, the public is engaged in the (co-)production of scientific knowledge, and it is often linked to “outreach activities, science education or various forms of public engagement with science” (European Commission, 2016, p. 54). The most common type of participation is when volunteers take part in data collection on scientists’ initiatives, often collecting large quantities of data (Kasperowski et al., 2017). Other types of CS projects require a closer collaboration between citizen scientists and professional researchers, where people engage in multiple stages of the research process, in formulating research questions, in data collection, analysis, interpretation and discussion as well as in the dissemination of results, also referred to as extreme citizen science, pertaining to a high level of collaboration in multiple or all stages of the research process (Chiaravalloti et al., 2021). Yet another type is when the citizens themselves initiate research, often for providing arguments to solve a specific (local) problem and sometimes inviting researchers to participate (Kasperowski et al., 2017), resembling traditional action research. Although there are many definitions of action research (e.g., Costello, 2003), it is generally characterised by having a practical, problem-solving emphasis where “action is undertaken to understand, evaluate and change” (ibid., p. 5). CS is in other words a broader approach than traditional action research and can range from crowdsourcing data for instance through different apps, i.e., contributory CS, to a greater level of citizen participation in multiple stages of the research process, i.e., collaborative CS (Hecker et al., 2018; Pocock et al., 2018). Although crowdsourcing reflects the more traditional science epistemology where researchers set the agenda (Purschke, 2017), it can also include a higher level of citizen engagement where people participate e.g., in the analysis (Hedges and Dunn, 2017). Still, a smaller number of participants enables in-depth investigations of the impact of co-researching and co-producing knowledge, as well as increased opportunities for including the participants’ research interests (cf. Svendsen, 2018). Whichever type of CS is used, CS has gained momentum internationally, in research, as well as in research policy. CS is recognised as an open science priority (European Commission, 2019) and funding agencies are emphasising public participation and engagement. CS associations have been established, such as the Citizen Science Association in the US in 2013, followed by the European Citizen Science Association and the Australian Citizen Science Association in 2014. In 2016, Citizen Science Asia was established, and the first African citizen science assembly was held in November 2021, i.e., CitSci Africa Association. Many of these associations are further joined, in collaboration with the UN, in the Citizen Science Global Partnership (established in 2017). Despite the recent global reach, there has been a global North bias in CS (Pocock et al., 2018) as well as a lack of CS studies engaging minoritised groups in the global North (Robinson et al., 2018). However, there is an increase of CS studies – both contributory and collaborative – in the global South (cf. e.g., Skarlatidou and Haklay, 2021). Furthermore, numerous CS labs and networks have been established, as well as citizen observatories, where citizens can find resources and toolkits to start up their own projects without collaboration with scientists (EU, 2022). In sum, the recent development, spread and uptake of CS is so extensive that Kasperowski et al. (2021) describe the CS turn as a scientific paradigm shift. Nonetheless, the lack of recognition in academia and the missing integration of CS in education are common concerns among researchers conducting CS across scientific fields (Hecker et al., 2018).

The ten principles of citizen science To foster academic excellence in CS research projects as well as in policy processes, a consensus on what CS is and how it should be implemented is needed. ECSA has contributed to this by 409

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developing ten principles of CS which are shown in Table 29.1. These principles are based on what underlies best practice in CS “regardless of the academic discipline or cultural context in which it is applied” (Robinson et al., 2018, p. 28). They are aimed at researchers and project leaders, governments and decision-makers to provide them with “a common set of core principles to consider when funding, developing or assessing citizen science projects” (ibid., p. 27). Furthermore, the principles are important to reduce the risk that research funders and politicians take advantage of CS as a seemingly cost-effective way of collecting big data. CS can indeed be applied to collect big data over a large spatial and temporal scale, but it is not, as these principles underscore necessarily cost- nor time-effective. CS projects are, by nature, resource-demanding (e.g., Hecker et al., 2018). Moreover, CS can, as discussed in this chapter, be of a qualitative nature. In other words, CS is an additional approach to research, not a replacement for other approaches. In this chapter, we align with the ECSA’s (2015) principles in our understanding of and application of CS, although not all of them will be discussed here. Rather, we use these principles to define CS in linguistics as well as to delimit our overview of CS approaches are applied in (socio) linguistics. In what follows, considering ECSA’s principle 6, i.e., the fact that CS is “a research approach like any other, with limitations and biases that should be considered and controlled for”, we discuss ethical and methodological concerns including issues of recruitment, mutual trust and motivation, some of them more pertinent when including data from (young) people within citizen humanities and in citizen social science. Table 29.1 The Ten Principles of Citizen Science (ECSA, 2015) 1 Citizen science projects actively involve citizens in scientific endeavour that generates new knowledge or understanding. Citizens may act as contributors, collaborators or as project leaders and have a meaningful role in the project. 2 Citizen science projects have a genuine science outcome. For example, answering a research question or informing conservation action, management decisions or environmental policy. 3 Both the professional scientists and the citizen scientists benefit from taking part. Benefits may include the publication of research outputs, learning opportunities, personal enjoyment, social benefits, satisfaction through contributing to scientific evidence, for example, to address local, national and international issues, and through that, the potential to influence policy. 4 Citizen scientists may, if they wish, participate in multiple stages of the scientific process. This may include developing the research question, designing the method, gathering and analysing data, and communicating the results. 5 Citizen scientists receive feedback from the project. For example, how their data are being used and what the research, policy or societal outcomes are. 6 Citizen science is considered a research approach like any other, with limitations and biases that should be considered and controlled for. However, unlike traditional research approaches, citizen science provides opportunity for greater public engagement and democratisation of science. 7 Citizen science project data and metadata are made publicly available and where possible, results are published in an open-access format. Data sharing may occur during or after the project, unless there are security or privacy concerns that prevent this. 8 Citizen scientists are acknowledged in project results and publications. 9 Citizen science programmes are evaluated for their scientific output, data quality, participant experience and wider societal or policy impact. 10 The leaders of citizen science projects take into consideration legal and ethical issues surrounding copyright, intellectual property, data-sharing agreements, confidentiality, attribution and the environmental impact of any activities.

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Citizen (socio)linguistics – conceptualisations and uptake By explicitly drawing on CS as used within natural sciences, the term citizen sociolinguistics was first coined by Rymes and Leone (2014). They define ‘citizen sociolinguists’ as “people who use their senses and intelligence to understand the world around them. Citizen sociolinguistics, then, is the study of these understandings” (Rymes and Leone, 2014, p. 26). In Rymes (2020, p. 5), the same definition is applied, namely “the study of the world of language and communication by the people who use it”, and later elaborated as “the work people do to make sense of everyday communication and share their sense-making with others” (p. 57). This conceptualisation differs from for instance Purschke (2017) and Svendsen (2018) who both conceive CS in (socio)linguistics as the engagement of lay people as researchers in some or all stages of the research process. There is thus a parallel, albeit related, development of CS in linguistics, where one direction understands citizen sociolinguistics as the metapragmatics of lay people, how people talk about language, as the sociolinguistics of citizens (e.g., Badwan, 2021; Rymes, 2020; Rymes and Leone, 2014). Whereas the other, where we position ourselves, conceives CS in (socio)linguistics as engaging people in doing (socio)linguistic research (cf. Table. 29.1, e.g., Heinisch et al., 2021; Purschke, 2017; SturtzSreetharan et al., 2019; Svendsen, 2018). Both directions, however, share the epistemological orientation of the importance of people’s (socio)linguistic knowledge, comments on, experiences with and sentiments about language (cf. above). Instead of narrowing the field of CS in linguistics to citizen sociolinguistics, as both Rymes (2020) and we ourselves previously have done (Svendsen, 2018), we argue that there is, in principle, no difference between a CS approach in sociolinguistics and other fields of linguistics, such as in linguistic landscaping or in semiotics. We therefore prefer the term citizen linguistics (cf. Heinisch et al., 2021), a notion to be further specified according to the different subfields of linguistics, such as citizen linguistic landscaping, citizen pragmatics or citizen sociolinguistics. Currently, there is a growing number of studies within citizen linguistics, as well as calls for greater exploration of CS in different subfields of linguistics (e.g., Albury and Diaz, 2021; Lexander and Androutsopoulos, 2021). Below, we give a brief overview of citizen linguistic studies framed in the latter direction above, highlighting studies involving young people. CS has proved fertile in the field of linguistic landscapes (e.g., Heinisch et al., 2021; Nielsen et al., 2020; Purschke, 2020). In the project Lingscape - Citizen science meets linguistic landscaping, participants were asked to take pictures of signs and multilingual lettering in public spaces, tag them with geographic location and the use of language(s), and upload them via the app Lingscape, a free research tool for Android and iOS smartphones (Purschke, 2017). The project had an explicit goal of “establishing a citizen science approach to linguistic landscaping” (Purschke, 2017, p. 249). Similar projects that can be seen as CS are, for example, Gaiser and Matras’ (2016) LinguaSnapp documenting multilingual Manchester, Leemann and his colleagues’ (2016) crowdsourcing data on language change through smartphone apps, as well as the project Language Landscape which aimed to document and raise awareness of linguistic diversity through an online platform and outreach events (Grzech and Dohle, 2018, founded with the second author). By allowing anyone with an internet connection to add language recordings to a world map, Language Landscape enabled communitybased language documentation, whilst aiming to provide a realistic mapping of multilingual language use. Another project, On everyone’s mind and lips – German in Austria, combines different approaches, such as citizen linguistic landscaping and gamification, contributing to Lingscape by investigating the use and perception of German varieties in Austria (Heinisch, 2021). There are also studies within citizen pragmatics, such as studies of so-called fat talk, i.e., self-disparaging talk about the body (e.g., SturtzSreetharan et al., 2019). 411

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The citizen linguistic studies above include people of all ages. Applying a citizen sociolinguistic frame, Escott and Pahl (2019) investigate the social and embodied understandings of spelling among a group of young people in the North of England, an area hit hard by postindustrialisation and loss of the mines. In co-created research, school children produced short films through which they acted out their own interpretation and affective understandings of the significance of poor spelling and prescriptivist beliefs about language. Through co-researching and co-producing knowledge with young citizen scientists, Escott and Pahl (2019, p. 14) demonstrate how “the potential for poor treatment of others, justifications for perceived authority, and inhumanity” can be tied into mainstream literacy practices. In two large-scale CS projects among young people in Sweden and Norway, analogue bulletin boards in the Swedish public landscape were investigated (e.g., Nielsen et al., 2020), whereas, in Norway, perceptions of multilingualism and language diversity were investigated (e.g., Svensdsen, 2018). Both projects were conducted in schools where students in all grades across the two countries were invited to participate as language researchers. In the Norwegian project, a total of 4509 students in 86 schools across the country participated with most participants in secondary school (13–16 years old). Half of the students acted as researchers and surveyed their peers using questions developed in tandem with students in a school class to include their research interests. After first having completed a survey themselves and having interviewed their peers, they registered their peers’ data in an open database and thus produced a large-scale data set including their own and their peers’ data. The answers were immediately available online so that the students and teachers could compare their own results with others e.g., nationally or locally. In the Swedish bulletin board project, students in 96 classes in 46 schools collected and tagged 1516 images of bulletin boards’ messages. In both projects, the students were trained by their teachers in how to do research, guided by the researchers, and open databases were developed for the children and teachers to analyse and discuss the data. At the end of the projects, the students and teachers received a report on the results in easy-to-understand language. In Norway, some of the citizen data was included in a language exhibition, Oslo sier. Språk i byen (‘Oslo says. Language in the city’) at the Oslo City Museum (2016–2018, cf. YouTube, 2023). The students in both projects reported increased language awareness, and that it had been a fun project. In the Swedish project, some of the teachers stated that they subsequently included CS approaches in their curriculum. In these large-scale projects the actual research and co-production of knowledge happened in sites and situations where the professional researchers only occasionally participated in the classrooms, in their local area. These two projects could not have been conducted without the efforts of the many enthusiastic teachers involved (Nielsen et al., 2020; Svendsen, 2018). In other words, a greater number of participants involved reduces the potential for direct collaboration between lay researchers and professional researchers (cf. above). Motivated by this knowledge, we set out to engage a small number of adolescents as youth researchers, targeting the impact of youth citizen (socio)linguistics as well as new (socio)linguistic knowledge from the perspective of the young people themselves, namely through the explorative and extreme CS project (cf. above) Youths Speak Back. In the next sections, we present some of the insights we gained.

What we can learn from engaging young people as researchers: Youths Speak Back – an explorative youth citizen sociolinguistic study Drawing on the CS project Youths Speak Back (henceforth, YSB), we discuss ethical and methodological concerns and outline some of its outcomes for the participants themselves as well as for us as professional researchers. A common experience in CS projects is that it can be difficult to 412

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recruit citizen scientists and retain them (West and Pateman, 2016). People need to be motivated to participate. As pointed out by the first author, “schoolteachers, heads and pupils may have grown tired of being under research lenses as objects”, and the “collaborative nature of CS, where the pupils’ research needs are included, will most definitely ease access” (Svendsen, 2018, p. 154; cf. also the Forthem Alliance, 2023). Recruiting young people individually outside of school, however, requires other considerations. Studies on motivation for taking part in CS projects show that young people are found to be more motivated by career opportunities than adults (Alender, 2016), who are the ones participating most, although there is still little general knowledge of participant demographics (Paajanen et al., 2021). Adults are found to be more driven by learning opportunities and by contributing to science (Alender, 2016). Hence, when recruiting young people outside of school contexts incentives are likely to be required (cf. principle 3, Table. 29.1). The amount of work is an important factor when considering different incentives for engaging young citizen researchers. Engaging young people in multiple stages of the research process demands e.g., more time and effort from young researchers, as well as from professional researchers. Depending on the type and scale of the project, the incentives might include e.g., a formal certificate of the young people’s participation, engagement in outreach activities such as public debates, but also payment if appropriate. Payment is of course more challenging when there are many young researchers involved. In YSB, we set up an outreach stand with different language-related activities in a public square in a suburb of Oslo with the aim of recruiting young language researchers aged 16 years or above. According to the Norwegian Centre for Research Data and their ethical guidelines, youths aged 16 and over can give their own consent to participate in research. In public discourse, the suburb where we set up the stand is often associated with youth gangs and youth criminality, as well as the contact-based speech style frequently named kebabnorsk (‘Kebab Norwegian’) (cf. Stamou, this volume). Among several visitors to the stand throughout the day, we recruited one 16-year-old boy who then through a snowball method recruited others. In all, three 16-year-olds, Mohammed, Tiana and Olivia (self-chosen pseudonyms), became youth language researchers during a threemonth period (February–April 2022). Working with a small group was advantageous for qualitative research and for dedicating enough time to training and analysis sessions. In the course of the project, we conducted four sessions with the young researchers of which three were held in the Socio-Cognitive Lab at the University of Oslo (UiO). The sessions were video-recorded and transcribed in NVivo. They lasted for 2–3 hours in the afternoon, and importantly, coming directly from school, the youth researchers were served pizza, fruit and drinks on each occasion. They were also offered payment in the form of honorariums. To be granted the honorariums to the youth researchers from the university department, we had to put forward solid arguments after consulting with ECSA, reminding us of the fact that CS is a relatively new approach often lacking resources and acceptance within academia (Roche et al., 2020, cf. above). The youth researchers in YSB were enthusiastic about participation when they learnt that they would be paid an honorarium. Indeed, participating in a research project run by a university can have prestige in itself. In our case, in addition to payment, we offered the youth researchers a certificate from UiO confirming their participation and describing their training and roles within the project. The participants expressed excitement about this as it enabled them to add the certificate and training to their CVs, and in fact two of the youth researchers requested that the first author provide a reference for a job interview. Young people (like people in general) can be unsure about researchers’ motives (Siffrin and McGovern, 2019), and it is thus crucial to establish mutual trust. In the first session, to reduce the impact of (c)overt power asymmetries, differences in age, education and traditional roles 413

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(researcher vs researched) were made transparent and discussed (cf. above). The aim of the project was explained, namely engaging them as co-researchers with the intention of giving them the opportunity of formulating and exploring their interests in the role of language in social life, how language matters to them, and that they are the experts that we need to learn from. Further, we talked about topical issues, school and cultural events to get to know each other aiming for an informal and relaxed setting also by having something to eat and drink. To further build rapport and mutual trust, the first author kept in contact with the young researchers between the sessions, such as when collecting audio recorders and consent forms from them. On these occasions, she met their families, which also helped to establish legitimacy and trust. Regarding ethical considerations, there can be tensions between the requirements of citizen (socio)linguistics and the ethics standards of principle 7 of the ECSA (cf. Table. 29.1), namely that the data are made publicly available. This principle can indeed be more difficult to adhere to within citizen humanities and citizen social sciences when spoken material is used as data. The General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR – which are implemented in the European Union and associated countries such as Norway) consider voice recordings to be identifiable data, so to make interviews between youth researchers and their participants publicly available, the participant would need to freely choose this option, as anonymisation may not be sufficient to ensure non-identification. However, this concern is covered by principle 10 (cf. Table 29.1), that it is up to the leaders of a CS project to ensure that the project is in accordance with legal and ethical issues, and importantly, “when working with children, permission from national ethics boards and parental consent are required” (Svendsen, 2018, p. 19). Another issue for careful consideration is data storage. In the large-scale citizen linguistic projects in Sweden and Norway, publicly available databases were developed and monitored to secure that no sensitive data was uploaded (e.g., Svendsen, 2018). In YSB, we used the UiO-developed Nettskjema which is an online survey tool as well as an app for taking pictures. Nettskjema meets the GDPR requirements and ensures that no data is stored on mobile devices. In CS studies where people are apprenticed as researchers, there are expectations that participation will increase participants’ scientific literacy, as well as increased agency through learning (e.g., Svendsen, 2018; West and Pateman, 2016). However, the extent to which this is the case is not well explored. One noteworthy example from the first session in YSB, was a discussion concerning how the young researchers understood the scientific process and research in general. Whilst the project was being explained, Tiana interrupted by asking “but what is your hypothesis?”, demonstrating her prior knowledge of research and at the same time asking us what we wanted from them, bringing about general presuppositions of the researcher as the expert. They were all positively surprised learning that it was their research interest that was our focus and that we saw them as experts on the role of language in their own and their contemporaries’ lives. This subsequently enabled a discussion of different research approaches including qualitative paradigms and inductive research which does not necessarily require hypotheses. We learnt that they already had an understanding of research processes in general, although one that skewed towards quantitative scientific approaches. In this first session, we discussed various data collection methods, including online questionnaires, interviews and an app to collect linguistic landscape data (Nettskjema, cf. above). Ultimately, the youth researchers collected online survey responses and conducted interviews, but none chose to take photos and study linguistic landscapes. Each youth researcher conducted two interviews with friends, family and teachers using the survey as a guide. By encouraging the youth researchers to think of their own research questions on the topic of language, the project explicitly 414

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incorporated their local knowledge, expertise and concerns, how language in society matters to them. This was particularly evident in Mohammed’s case who wanted to know what other people think when he uses Somali on the streets with his mother. As an example of the process, they thus contributed the following question, translated to English from Norwegian: What is your experience when someone next to you is using a language which you don’t understand? The question then had numerous tick boxes which the respondents could choose and included answers that the young researchers suggested, as well as a text box where the respondents could elaborate on their answer, such as:

• I think it’s fine. People should be able to express themselves however they like. • I’m worried that they are excluding me. In all, the survey contained 22 both open-ended and closed questions, further tested and circulated by the young researchers and completed by 26 respondents. In the second session, after having received, in their view, too few responses, the youth researchers were very quick in redistributing the online survey. In fact, they immediately took out their smartphones and shared the link to the online survey through their social media networks, resulting in the majority of responses to the questionnaire being sent in that same day, in fact, eight were contributed during the session itself, which enabled some live co-analysis of fresh results. In the analysis and discussion of the results of the survey, Mohammed expressed a certain relief in learning that most of the respondents (73.1%) answered his question above with: “I think it’s fine. People should be able to express themselves however they like”. Thereby, the young citizen sociolinguists experienced how research can address concerns in their daily lives. As mentioned above, CS challenges the traditional one-way model of science communication. CS encourages a two-way dialogue between citizen scientists and professional researchers where communication of the (co-produced) results and knowledge might take many different forms (e.g., Roche et al., 2020). For youth researchers, motivation regarding communication activities and suitability should be taken into consideration. Youth researchers may well have different audiences in mind than academic researchers or be motivated by more public activities. In YSB, one session concerned dissemination where two of the youth researchers (one was unable to attend) participated in a public debate on ‘Kebab Norwegian’, organised by the Faculty of Humanities at UiO. Initially, the faculty organisers were rather hesitant about including the youth researchers, questioning their ability to conduct valid research and thereby provide insightful interpretations suited to this type of dissemination event, reminding us of the general scepticism in academia towards CS as pointed to above and perhaps particularly towards young citizen researchers. Nonetheless, the youth researchers took part in the event, competently presenting their results and afterwards debating some of the key topics which arose from their findings, demonstrating the ability of young people to conduct and disseminate research. The youth researchers were very enthusiastic and explicitly expressed their satisfaction with the event. The public debate was filmed and posted by the organisers on YouTube (2022). In sum, engaging the public and particularly young people in doing research requires careful consideration of the research process, from recruitment and incentives, through engaging them in the analysis as well as communication of the data. Ethical issues must be carefully evaluated, ensuring their own (and when working with children: parental/guardian consent) and also third 415

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parties’ consent when the citizen researchers e.g. interview others. A potential critique of CS, and consequently (youth) citizen (socio)linguistics, is that the professional researcher might use the citizen scientist as a mouthpiece. This risk is of course potentially present in citizen linguistics as in other research areas, yet the professional researcher is ethically obliged to stay true to the data as well as be transparent in describing the research process (cf. principle 10, Table 29. 1; and Svendsen, 2018, for a discussion of the reliability of citizen sociolinguistic data and of what counts as legitimate data). Including youths as researchers in citizen (socio)linguistic projects might impact our thinking of topics which could be of social pertinence to research. As the youth participants are encouraged to contribute questions and topics, we as professional researchers obtain knowledge of issues that are of relevance and importance to them. In our case, the research questions and the co-analysis revealed that Oslo is perceived as a very divided city, linguistically, economically and socially. This divide is confirmed by statistics (Oslo Municipality, 2023; Ungdata, 2021), and its existence has often been highlighted in sociolinguistic literature. However, there is very little sociolinguistic research on how young people of today experience, relate to or act against this divide, prompting us professional researchers to investigate from a sociolinguistic perspective how this divide is perceived, (re-)produced and (re-)constructed and with what consequences for the young people of today in their sociolinguistic realities (cf. also Stamou, this volume).

Concluding remarks and future directions of (youth) citizen (socio)linguistics In this chapter, we have presented a state of the art of (youth) citizen (socio)linguistics framed within CS across scientific disciplines. We have discussed the epistemology and methodology of citizen (socio)linguistics and the impact of engaging youths in doing sociolinguistic research. Citizen linguistics is consistent with the shift towards open science, as well as recent calls for increased public engagement and democratisation of research. Citizen linguistics corroborates the civic role of universities and challenges the linear way of knowledge production and scientific communication and how we engage with it. Citizen linguistics can thus, as emphasised in this chapter, increase the relevance of (socio)linguistics as well as the citizen scientists’ expertise. However, there is a continued need to scrutinize the ways in which we go about communicating results from collaborative research, such as citizen engagement in (academic) writing and publishing results. The call for studies on the impact of CS inter alia through stronger collaborative approaches (cf. above), can benefit from decolonial approaches to language which encourage – as CS – research with people instead of about (or instead of ‘looking in’, cf. above), highlighting the importance of local knowledge and lived experiences in education, for language policy and planning (e.g., Kenfield, 2021). An inclusion of decolonial theories and approaches could in other words contribute to further develop citizen (socio)linguistics. Further, including a CS take on young researchers’ voices on the environment and climate change would support the emerging environmental turn in linguistics (cf. e.g., Fløttum et al., this volume). If CS and/or citizen (socio)linguistics is to contribute to sustainable inclusive societies it is crucial that it includes people’s local knowledge and lived experiences of linguistic, social, racial, economic, political and/or environmental discrimination or privilege, including (long-standing and profound) asymmetries in power relations, (perceived) authority and the justifications of it. This cannot, however, be obtained without a greater involvement of the public in formulating the research questions. Against this background, there is a need to promote collaborative research (in all or

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multiple stages of the research process) in future citizen (socio)linguistic initiatives. Moreover, it is necessary to expand the scope to include local ways of knowing and living in a variety of contexts across the globe, including different levels of online access and literacy, as well as under different political regimes (Svendsen and Goodchild, 2022), reminding us that not all people are free to volunteer and participate in conducting research. Recognising (young) people as competent to (co-)develop research questions, to co-create data, interpret, analyse and disseminate their work, as demonstrated in this chapter, is a cornerstone of citizen linguistic-inspired projects. Including topics of relevance to the participants is also at the core of youth participatory action research (henceforth, YPAR) in social sciences, a collaborative method “examining issues of social inequity with minoritised youth in school and community settings” (Siffrin and McGovern, 2019, p. 168). Future initiatives of youth citizen sociolinguistics can indeed benefit from YPAR, particularly from its drive for socio-political change which aligns with a critical CS epistemology’s focus on people’s agency and capacity. Key issues to address are the relative power of youths, the extent to which youths are positioned as actual agents of social change, their lack of access to adults with decision-making power (cf. Table 29.1, principle 3), as well as the extent to which their voices are heard (cf. Loncle and Pickard, this volume). The relativity of civic agency and power feeds into a general discussion of what democratisation of research is and what it can contribute to, reminding us of the relativity of empowerment (e.g., Christens, 2019). Perhaps there is a need to apply a processual perspective on the impact of CS and that its most important impact may be the participation itself. Nonetheless, what we experienced in YSB is that the teenagers were more than competent in all stages of their research projects, underscoring young peoples’ knowledge and capacity to do research with some facilitation, training and collaboration. However, there is still a need for more knowledge on the impact of citizen linguistics as of CS in general, for citizen scientists as well as for professional researchers (cf. principle 3, Table 29.1) concerning science communication, scientific literacy, democratisation of research and social change. Further, it is important that citizen linguistics includes and discusses its relation to the epistemology, methodology and knowledge gained from numerous decades of research within folk linguistics, linguistic anthropology as well as linguistic ethnography (cf. above), to explore whether and how CS and consequently citizen (socio)linguistic approaches can contribute to increased critical thinking, social justice and diverse, sustainable inclusive societies. What we can achieve in the future by co-researching with adult and/or youth citizen (socio)linguists will, however, depend on the extent to which and how different linguistic subfields apply and consequently critically engage in discussions of the epistemology, methodology and impact of citizen (socio)linguistics.

Acknowledgements This work is partly supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme (223265), and the University of Oslo, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies. Thanks to Mohammed, Tiana and Olivia for their work as researchers in the project Youths Speak Back. We are grateful to the two other project members Rafael Lomeu Gomes and Gavin Lamb, as well as to research assistant Rolv S. Robøle. We would like to thank Dennis R. Preston, Rickard Jonsson, Gavin Lamb and Rafael Lomeu Gomes for their valuable comments on this chapter. The responsibility for any mistakes or lack of clarity is of course our own.

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Note 1 Corresponding authors: Bente A. Svendsen, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, P.O. Box 1102 Blindern, NO-0317 Oslo, Norway. Orcid: 0000-0002-5993-3687. Samantha Goodchild, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Galway, University Road, Galway, H91 TK33, Ireland. Orcid: 0000-0003-2551-3681.

Further readings Heinisch, B., K. Oswald, M. Weißpflug, S. Shuttleworth and G. Belknap (2021). Citizen humanities. In K. Vohland, A. Land-Zandstra, L. Ceccaroni, R. Lemmens, J. Perelló, M. Ponti, R. Samson and K. Wagenknecht (eds.), The Science of Citizen Science (pp. 97–118). Cham: Springer. Svendsen, B.A. (2018). The dynamics of citizen sociolinguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2(2): 137–160.

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When youth(s) are talked about: Representations of youth

30 DEVELOPMENTALISM AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTING YOUNG PEOPLE IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE Moscovici and Bourdieu Judith Bessant1 Introduction Young people have always been central to public conversation and politics, although typically they are represented in contradictory ways. They can be hapless victims of government policy or of social and economic processes like globalisation, while also posing threats to democracy from both the left and right-wing ends of the political spectrum. They are represented as apathetic, indolent and lazy and as entrepreneurs of the future and new ‘harbingers of hope’ for democracy. There is nothing new about the profusion of ways young people are discussed in public discourse (Brocklehurst, 2003; Bessant, 2021). If we track back in time, we see how young people have long played prominent roles in the public sphere. Five to six decades ago, we would have encountered images of young masked French university students trapped in clouds of tear gas, throwing rocks at armed riot police during ‘Mai 68’ in Paris. Four years later, in 1972, the image of nine-year-old Kim Phuc, running naked and screaming towards the camera with other terrified children trying to escape the horrors of a US napalm air strike that destroyed her village of Trang Bang, achieved iconic status globally. Recall also the stories told during the Tampa Affair of September 2001 when Australia’s Howard government claimed asylum seekers had thrown their children from a crowded boat into the sea before sinking their boat in a bid to have the Australian navy rescue them. Their ‘crime’ was that they breached a government policy that refused all seafaring asylum seekers entry to Australian waters. This ‘children overbroad affair’ as we came to know was part of a government operation designed to justify Australia’s punitive ‘border protection’ policy. These narratives about children and young people variously as ‘casualties of war’, ‘stolen generations’, ‘pawns in international disputes’, ‘school truants’, ‘criminals’ and ‘climate warriors’, remind us that young people are always in the public eye (Brocklehurst, 2006 ). While these stories differ in many ways, they share a common assumption: that it is possible and desirable to generalise about young people in the ‘public sphere’. By the ‘public sphere’, is meant firstly both traditional media (e.g., newspapers, magazines, scientific journals, newsletters, radio and TV news and DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-40

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current affairs shows), as well as newer, digitally mediated platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Wikipedia, Twitter, TikTok, blogs, vlogs and podcasts). The ‘public sphere’ also includes traditional institutional spaces like the streets, conferences, galleries, museums, colleges and universities, learned societies and NGOs and their contemporary digital presences. While the idea of the public sphere is a central concept in the social sciences, it is also a controversial idea. Since Habermas (1984) linked the ‘public sphere’ of the eighteenth century (i.e., coffee shops, aristocratic salons, clubs and early newspapers) and the democratic revolutions of America and France, there have been debates about what the public sphere is, how it changes, and what role if any, it still has in enhancing democratic practices and institutions (e.g., Calhoun, 1992; Barney, et al., 2016). The stories about young people circulating in the public sphere are best understood as representations. In this chapter, I ask several questions. What are ‘representations’ and how should we understand them? I draw on the work of Serge Moscovici (1981, 1990) and Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Together, their work helps to think about representations of young people in the public sphere. Drawing on these writers, I demonstrate how representations of young people are intrinsically political and historical. The ‘political’ refers to collective practices, like discourses and performances in the public sphere and political fields, used to determine what a good life looks like and how to achieve it (e.g., Sluga, 2014). The ‘political’ also refers to the exercise of power and authority that is always present in determining how we reach collective decisions. Thereafter, I ask how we can understand the production and circulation of stories and images of young people in the public sphere. In addressing this question, I do not assume that these stories and images are the product either of straightforward, empirically verifiable ‘data’ or of ‘objective’ ‘evidence’ that provide accurate accounts of real ‘entities’ in the world (for classic influential examples see Durkheim 1895 (1982); Hall, 1905; Parsons,1951). The assumption that our social world is an ‘external’ and ‘objective’ reality and that humans are ‘objective’ independent, unitary and separate entities (often referred to as ‘individuals’) relies on ‘naive realism’. This epistemological position is the default assumption relied on by many conventional empirical social scientists and bio-medical researchers (e.g., Steinberg, 2007). My own position offers a more critical, reflexive framing. It is one akin to work by Prout and James (1990), James et al. (1998) and Wall’s (2022) approach to understanding representations of the kind developed by Alanen (2012) in their relational account of sociology of childhood and young people. There are good reasons for rejecting the dominant epistemological disposition and for recognising instead how the words and images that ostensibly describe young people, are never literal descriptions of the qualities or attributes said to define them. Rather, we encounter layers of metaphors, symbolic interpretative frames and ethical evaluations, which comprise representations of ‘them.’ In this way, accounts of young people as ‘victims’, ‘threats to social order’ or ‘messengers of hope and futurity’, are never innocent or neutral descriptions. They are also political representations in that these representations help constitute the political via the role they play in public debates. What is more, and importantly, they result from political processes and relations themselves and are thus co-constitutive (something that is not always recognised or acknowledged). Representations are also historical (Kosselleck, 2002). The semantic, metaphorical and philosophical elements operating in them are the product of particular historical and cultural practices. As Donald (2001) argues, our cognitive capacity for recursivity, (i.e., to engage in ‘mental time travel’ by thinking historically or by projecting forward into the future) owes much to our relationship with the technologies we created. Our modern consciousness e.g., relies on our capacity to think theoretically, historically and into the future. This capacity owes much to our relationship with the technologies we use to ‘outsource’ human consciousness and memory – expressed 424

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in external symbols or signs and stored in writing, books, archives, libraries and smartphones (Donald, 2001; Bessant, 2018). Bearing in mind the historical and political character of all representations of young people, how then did certain dominant representations of young people come into being? This chapter focuses on the late nineteenth century, and traces different lines of thought that coalesced into theories of human development represented as ‘natural’ or biological stages of development. That project produced highly influential and still dominant representations of young people as ‘immature’, ‘unformed’, irrational, ‘primitive’ and even ‘savage’. As I argue, those dominant accounts are informed by ‘adultist’ aged-based prejudices, fears and fantasies and are relied on to justify various discriminatory practices like the exclusion of young people from the public sphere, from formal decision-making forums, and they are used to justify various kinds of discriminatory treatment that would not be tolerated if applied to other cohorts (Young-Bruehl, 2012; Wall, 2022).

Thinking backwards: hegemonic developmentalist representations of ‘youth’ ‘Developmentalism’ is a Eurocentric worldview that represents ‘youth’ as if ‘it’ is an undifferentiated stage in an inevitable, irreversible and progressive process of development. Highlighting the idea of developmentalism helps explain why we have categories like ‘the child’, ‘adolescent’ or ‘youth’, based on the idea these are natural stages of development in which ‘infancy’ and ‘childhood’ is followed by ‘adolescence’ and ‘youth’ which evolves into ‘adulthood’. Historically and anthropologically, this narrative (that relies on a stadial metaphor i.e., the idea of ‘universal stages of development’) ignores the influence and significance of different cultures and histories on how young people live and how they are represented. The authority and global influence of developmentalism owe much to its origins in European social and biological sciences of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (Fernandez-Armesto, 1997; Vartija, 2020). The Enlightenment narrative of European civilisation representing the high point of human development, was used to explain the superiority of European trade, science and power when Europe encountered ‘inferior’ ‘primitive’ societies. As historian Fernandez-Armesto (1997) demonstrates, Enlightenment writers (e.g., Miller, Fergusson, Smith, Hegel and Comte) constructed a stadial narrative informed by accounts of the ‘civilisational process’. Scientific anthropologists represented indigenous people e.g., as inferior by reference to their alleged incapacity for abstract logic thought and morality. Those working in these proto-social sciences spoke of ‘mankind’ with origins in the state of nature or savagery, from which societies progressed through stages of evolution to their advanced form i.e., a modern, ‘commercial’ or ‘civil’ society. Political theorists like Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Condorcet talked about ‘mankind’ moving from a ‘state of nature into ‘civil society’ courtesy of a ‘social contract’. The result was a worldview that assumed European superiority producing evolutionary stories of cultural progress as humans moved through a series of stages from a ‘primitive state of nature’ through agriculture, slavery, feudalism to civil society. Such civilised societies and the ‘individuals’ in them, were deemed superior to Others. They were promoted as exemplars against which all others were evaluated and expected to emulate. This was a universalised and naturalised western universal history that also functioned to sustain inequalities and fantasies which had very real adverse effects on local communities (Bühler-Niederberger and van Krieken, 2008). This historical narrative also authorised the civilising processes mediated through the spread of Christianity, reason and trade. Significantly, claims about the evolutionary superiority of ‘civilised people’ mobilised Enlightened experts were used to pave the way towards ‘modernity’. The modern taxonomic systems of botanical and biological classification pioneered in the eighteenth cen425

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tury by Linnaeus and expanded in the mid-nineteenth century by social Darwinists subsequently promoted a biological reductionist and racialised account of ‘natural’ inequality. This produced a hierarchical colour code in which ‘white’ was the civilisational apex and ‘black’ epitomised savagery. The expectation was that non-Europeans would sooner or later ‘evolve’, adopts ‘civilised’ practices or ‘fade away’. The notion that ‘natives’ were ‘childlike’, immature, with all the deficiencies and ‘charm of children’ became standard motif from the sixteenth century on. It was a story used to justify the subordination of peoples subject to European imperialism (Fernandez-Armesto, 1997, p. 95). This developmental narrative provided justifications for mandating ‘civilising’ and tutelary interventions that ‘enlightened western societies’ were ‘obliged’ to provide to the ‘savage people’.

This stadial metaphor was applied to the development of children In the nineteenth century, the stadial concept was applied to individual human development drawing on the idea that ‘ontogeny’ recapitulates ‘phylogeny’. That is, if we examine the development of humans from embryo to adulthood, we see in micro every stage of human evolution. Accordingly, ‘individuals’ go through the ‘stages of development’ in the ‘life-cycle’, they experience an evolutionary process akin to the evolution of human cultures (Walkerdine, 1993: 451–469. One effect of this idea was to regard ‘children’ and ‘adolescents’ as ‘little savages’, as ‘natives’ (Fernandez-Armesto, 1997). Human capabilities like language, intellectual ability, emotional judgement or spiritual life were said to evolve as the infant became a child and then an adolescent before becoming an adult. In that respect, a child and an adolescent were the ‘native’, ‘unformed’ ‘savage’ or ‘uncivilised’ – and less than the European (male) adult. Because children and young people were ‘savages’ and ‘primitives’ they needed tutelary regulation and control until they completed the developmental ‘life-cycle’. By the early twentieth century, this developmental paradigm was absorbed into various professional interventions by bio-medical, welfare and allied experts in the burgeoning fields of psychology, education and welfare. G. Stanley Hall’s (1905) influential representation of ‘the adolescent’ shaped the scientific imaginary of modern psychology preoccupied with mapping and prescribing the development milestones as children and adolescents navigated the difficult transition to adulthood. Psychological work by Freud, Hall, Burt, Kohlberg and Erickson further shaped developmental theory to represent young people as deviant, delinquent or criminal. Fernandez-Armesto (1997) highlights how the psychologist Piaget’s ideas had a major impact on how experts came to know the intellectual and emotional development of young people. As Fernandez-Armesto (1997, p. 18) argued, generations of young people were “deprived of challenging tasks because Piaget said they were incapable of them [...] If young people perceived things differently, they were classed as rationally inferior”. Like many western experts, Piaget believed young people and ‘primitives’ – like indigenous people – were capable only of ‘pre-logical, ‘primitive’ thought’, while adults (males) were ‘naturally’ more rational and cognitively superior. A burgeoning suite of professions including education, child-care, social work, youth work, criminologists and parole workers and parents were receptive to these representations. It provided mental maps for understanding human development – central to which was ‘child’, ‘adolescent’ and ‘youth’ development. The result has been a long repertoire of metaphors and representations that feed popular anxieties, hopes and dreams about young people. A universal, European, male figure of ‘youth’ became a central representation and norm against which any differences (‘deviations’) could be recognised, known, measured and used to regu426

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late and ‘normalise’. The degree of deviation from the norm could be scientifically measured to determine the pathology, or abnormality to which normalising interventions (welfare or medical intervention) were applied. They are representations constructed within specific milieu and transferred to various sites for the purpose of governing and constituting certain kinds of people. As Walkerdine (1993) argues, identifying such practices encourages the possibility of thinking in historical and geographical terms about specificness practices in ways that do not fetishise western rationality as the universal pinnacle of development. In short, the idea of development has a long history as part of an enlightenment project that presumed the ‘natural’ superiority of the ‘Global North’. As mentioned, it also informed a variety of disciplines and fields of professional practice. When applied to young people e.g., developmentalism was central to the eugenics movement, and more generally to fields of medicine and nation and empire-building projects. ‘Healthy youth’ and associated representations were considered essential to national development and empire building, to ‘mental’ and ‘racial hygiene’, and thus became central ideas in various professional practices from child-saving, to education, medicine (psychology) anthropology and the law. From this activity, we saw associated scientificlegal categories like maladjusted youth, and the delinquent. Portrayals of certain young people as undeveloped and inherently irresponsible, on a ‘precarious’ ‘pathway’ to adulthood were presented as an objective truth and became 'common knowledge’, common sense and a dominant way of representing young people. All this raises the question of representations, to which I now turn.

Representations, what are they? Debates about whether our understandings of reality correspond with the world as it actually is, have a long history in western philosophy and in the social sciences. There are ‘naive realists’ who say we can know things directly and objectively (as they actually are). Empiricists are not so sure on this point because they understand how direct access to what is there, is thwarted by cognitive or sensory obstacles. Social scientists committed to the doctrine that reality is socially constructed, claim our knowledge of the world is always mediated by the cultural and political lens through which we see. The Kantian tradition of transcendental idealism and the more recent Representational Theory of Mind, involve debates about whether, and if so, how our common-sense mental states (e.g., ideas thoughts, beliefs, desires, perceptions and imaginings) are true or convey dependable knowledge about our world. As Rorty (1979) demonstrated, from the beginning of the scientific revolution that began in the seventeenth century, it was generally agreed that we ‘know’ the world by using symbols like language or numbers, inductive reasoning (empirical or sensory data from senses like eyesight, smell or touch) and deductive logic (e.g., geometry or syllogistic deduction). In this context one idea was prominent: that we need experts (e.g., philosophers, social scientists, medical specialists or theorists) and their mastery of methods or techniques to help us access to truth and to know what is real. In these ways, we create and use representations in their many forms (e.g., mathematical, artistic, political, theoretical) as ways of ‘accessing’ the world. It is also worth noting that social statistics and modern census which became popular in the nineteenth century also played a critical role in classifying and counting people (e.g., according to gender, age, occupation or religion). It involved creating and imposing certain categories on people that often had little if any connection to the lives of those being talked about (Poovey, 1995). In what follows, I discuss the different but complementary theories of representation by Moscovici and Bourdieu. I turn to Bourdieu and Moscovici for the following reasons. Both writers in different ways appreciated that to understand representations, it is critical to study the culture, the nature of 427

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our material, social and symbolic worlds, as well as the individual mind in which those classifications emerged. This is important because paying attention to the content and processes involved in making and sustaining social representations reveals the interests and politics inform them. Both also recognise how representations are constitutively informed through human relations that are shaped by power differences and struggles over different capitals (resources). For Bourdieu, categories like ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ are part of a symbolic order constructed in fields of cultural power which owe much to expert knowledge and practices carried out in institutions like universities, the state and its legal systems, churches and schools, the media and the law (Bourdieu, 1979). Bourdieu and Moscovici also appreciated the recursive and changing nature of representations and how representations are not descriptions of ‘youth’, the ‘adolescent’ etc. like photographs are said to be and which capture an after-the-event likeness of what is ‘really’ there. Rather, they highlight the constitutive and co-constitutive role representations play in the formation of social and political life.

Moscovici and representations Moscovici (2000, p. 3) offers a historical, cross-disciplinary theory of representations focusing on the role played by experts. Although he is a social psychologist, Moscovici belongs to the ‘sociology of knowledge’ tradition: one that acknowledges that while we have an (objective) world we have many symbolic systems and knowledge claims about ‘it’. Proponents of this approach also recognise that what we believe can help bring into being certain phenomena like social institutions and practices that are real. As Berger and Luckmann explained, a sociology of knowledge is concerned with “the empirical variety of ‘knowledge’” in human societies and with “the processes by which any body of ‘knowledge’ comes to be established as ‘reality’ ”(1967, p. 15) Moreover, the everyday life-world: […] is not only taken for granted as reality by the ordinary members of society in the subjectively meaningful conduct of their lives. It is a world that originates in their thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these. (Berger and Luckmann, 1967, p. 30) Thus, “knowledge about society is a realization in […] apprehending the objectivated reality, and in the sense of ongoingly producing this reality” (Berger and Luckmann, 1967, p. 8). The task then is to understand how the objectification of subjective processes creates common-sense worlds shared with others and that appear self-evident. Moscovici, like Berger and Luckmann, accepts that a theory of social representations “focuses as much on the way in which men think or create their shared reality as on the content of their thinking” (1981, p. 181). In this way, social representations mediate between the world they constitute and the subjects who create them. Crucially, he provides a rationale for why we need a theory of social representations. To do this, he offers an account of different collective systems of knowing focusing on the evolution from ‘primitive thought’ based on ‘a belief that thought act on reality and so shapes reality’ and ‘determine the course of events’, to modern scientific thought which involves a methodologically grounded reaction to reality (Moscovici, 2000, p. 18). This means that while proponents of ‘primitive thought’ believed that objects emerge as a replica of thought, exponents of modern scientific perspectives treat “thought as a replica of the object” as exemplified e.g., in empiricist and positivist epistemic traditions (ibid). According to Moscovici, however, modern scientific thought is problematic because: 428

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• We are often blind to what is before our eyes. Certain people (e.g., young people, or women) can be ‘invisible’ to others.

• We can engage in wilful ignorance when facing uncomfortable knowledge. • Often facts that appear to be intuitively obvious and verifiable, are untrue (e.g., the sun goes around the earth).

• Some representations we rely on to tell us what is what happens actually give us incorrect accounts (we see an overturned car and emergency vehicles and call it an ‘accident’, when often there was nothing accidental about that event).

Representations also “direct us towards that which is visible and to which we have to respond, or which relate appearance and reality … which define this reality” (Moscovici, 2000, p. 20). This however does not imply “that such representations don’t correspond to something we call the outside world” (Moscovici, 2000, p. 20). Rather what matters is one’s capacity to judge when it can be said that a representation corresponds to the external or natural world as distinct from the social or symbolic world, and when they do not (my emphasis). This raises questions about knowledge and reality that have long been pondered. Philosophers and others have asked how we can know what is true. How can we know anything with certainty – as opposed to having an opinion or belief? What justifies a belief? What is the nature of reality? Moscovici advocates a version of social constructivism, claiming social representations are constitutive of reality: [Social] representations are capable of creating and stipulating a reality by naming and objectifying notions and images, by directing material and symbolic practices towards this reality which corresponds to them. In short, giving a kind of public reality ‘out there’ and ontological status to our representations and to the verbal and iconic symbols that represent them and act on our relationships and practices. Thereby, we situate ourselves in a world of shared reality. (Moscovici, 1994, p. 7) Given that Moscovici sees social representations as having constitutive power, (i.e., power to give existence to ‘parts’ of the world), he does not provide causal explanations. He does not try to explain relations between people or give reasons for what they do or think. Instead, he offers a dialectical understanding of social representations. In this way, he encourages a relational approach to understanding why and how a group converts their representations into social relations and practices, material objects, social institutions that shape a collective reality. Moscovici (2000, p. 30) is also indebted to Durkheim’s work on religion, showing how categories we use originate in collective human actions (Durkheim, 1912). According to Durkheim, we do not experience reality as a direct response to experiential stimuli or direct observation. Rather, we know reality through communal beliefs and theories. Durkheim referred to ‘collective representations’ to talk about categories that express and construct reality. For Durkheim, collective representations are historically constituted and can be passed on across generations. These representations impart social cohesion, integration, consensus and solidarity to any social group. Following Durkheim, Moscovici (2000) said we can talk about ‘collective representations’, ‘collective thought’, or ‘common representations’, while also pointing to the ways social representations have a ‘collective origin’ and are “shared by all and strengthened by tradition” (ibid., p 27). Yet, while Moscovici recognised diversity, he was also influenced by Durkheim’s holistic vision of society claiming that “stamped by the symbolic and the ritualistic, social representations are constitutive of bonds and common actions” (Moscovici, 1993, p. 161). Like Durkheim, 429

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Moscovici offers a model of society that looks like a gemeinschaft social order, i.e., a unified, integrated, undifferentiated and unchanging organic community. This ignores the divisions, diversity, tensions and inequalities that typify all complex, modern multicultural societies. Surprisingly, Moscovici does not express interest in the power inherent in relations in social groups. Moscovici assumes a general equality existed between members of groups or communities as they built consensual, ‘common-sense’ knowledge around important issues (Moscovici, 1981, p. 181). We cannot however overlook the significant gendered, ethnic, age-based, religious and other intersectional relations of inequality. This is where Bourdieu’s insight is helpful.

Bourdieu: relations, inequality and representations In this section, I outline below Bourdieu’s account of representations, before connecting what he says back to the politics of young people. Like Moscovici, Bourdieu thought representations provided a “systematic view of the world and human existence” (Bourdieu, 1987, p. 126). Bourdieu was also influenced by Durkheim, accepting e.g., that representations are performative; that they bring social institutions and practices into being. However, unlike Durkheim and Moscovici, Bourdieu does not see ‘society’ as a single, homogenous symbolic order. Rather, modern societies are always characterised by inequality, competition and struggle. Again, unlike Durkheim and Moscovici, Bourdieu does not believe experts, scholars or scientists are uniquely responsible for generating a single set of collective social representations. Rather, modern scientists are e.g., involved in a “[…] game whose stake is the power of governing the sacred frontiers, that is, the quasi-divine power over the vision of the world, and in which one has no choice, if one seeks to exercise it (rather than submit to it), other than to mystify or demystify” (Bourdieu, 1991, pp. 227–228). Indeed, Bourdieu is interested in those “representations through which people imagine the divisions of reality and which contribute to the reality of the divisions” (1991, p. 228). While Moscovici and Bourdieu both consider how expert or scientific knowledge works, Bourdieu makes a distinction between representations produced by scientific practice and lay or ‘commonsense’ representations developed in the world of everyday people (Bourdieu, 1991). In these ways (and especially with his focus on differences between scientific research and practical everyday judgement), Bourdieu offers a perceptive relational account of how representations are embedded in competitive struggles. He emphasises the fractured and unequal distribution of capitals involved in producing representations which makes his approach different, but complementary to Moscovici’s. Bourdieu also draws on the Marxist tradition to develop a relational account of how we all use and compete for different unequally distributed resources. He expanded Marx’s concept of ‘capital’ beyond its economic meaning. Like Marx, he defined capital as accumulated labour, but went further enlarging Marx’s economistic theory of capital by describing other kinds of capital and showing how they are simultaneously deployed and distributed unequally in a ceaseless competitive struggle. For Bourdieu, capital can present itself in three guises: […] as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the forms of property rights; as cultural capital, which is convertible, […] into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of educational qualifications; and as social capital, made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital. (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 242) 430

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These capitals can be further distinguished. Cultural capital can e.g., be embodied in lasting dispositions of the mind and body (Bourdieu, 1983). The idea that ‘cultural capital’ can be embodied highlights the complex inter-relations operating between ‘capitals’, ‘practices’, ‘fields’ and ‘habitus’, which make up the key themes in Bourdieu’s work. All ‘capitals’ involve labour or ‘practices’, because accessing and accumulating them involves work, while competition and rivalry determine the share of the resources. The competition for ‘capitals’ occurs in ‘fields’, e.g., the economic field, the cultural field or the political field. Those fields are defined by and constitute the space in which the competitive struggles happen. ‘Habitus’ refers to the embodied and habitual ways we acquire, shape, enact and are shaped by our practices and by the ways those resources are embodied and become our own dispositions to act, think, desire, dress or feel in particular ways. According to this relational approach, capitals, practices, fields and habitus are not things or entities but relations and processes constitutive of each other (my emphasis). Bourdieu’s relational perspective recognises how representations result from mutually constitutive relations and processes that are always political. That is, they always result from struggles over who gets to name the world and what is in it. Bourdieu’s theory of practice focuses on relations not things because: “What exists in the social world are relations not interactions between agents or inter-subjective ties between individuals, but objective relations” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 97). This highlights how our practices constitute individuals like the child, youth as being certain kinds of people. Bourdieu stands in the philosophical relational tradition that rejects the dominant substantialist approach foundational to western philosophical and social-scientific thought. This matters because our use of language has helped make substantialism become the naturalised default way of thinking about the world and thus difficult for us to recognise (Elias, 1978). As Elias observed, thinking about the social world in substantialist ways is embedded in the nouns we use (to name things) and in verbs (to name the actions that things do): Our languages are constructed in such a way that we can often only express constant movement or constant change in ways which imply that it has the character of an isolated object at rest, and then, almost as an afterthought, adding a verb which expresses the fact that the thing with this character is now changing. (Elias, 1978, p. 111) Unlike many working in the social sciences and bio-medical fields who use a substantialist approach, Bourdieu rejects that tradition, and the common-sense “perception of social reality of which sociology must rid itself” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 15). All this has direct relevance for understanding representations of young people and their effects.

Bourdieu: the politics of representations of youth In his interview on ‘representations of youth’, Bourdieu highlighted the classificatory “struggle between the young and the old” (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 95). ‘Youth’, he said, “is just a word” (Bourdieu, 1978 Bessant et​.al​., 2019; Pickard, 2019). He also acknowledged that age is natural as “one is always somebody’s senior or junior” (1993, p. 95). “That is why the divisions, whether into age-groups-brackets or into generations, vary and are subject to (deliberate) manipulation [...]” (ibid.). This fact, however, is interpreted in ways that are “variable and subject to manipulation”: “What I want to remind you, quite simply is that youth and age are not self-evident facts, but are constructed socially, in the struggle between the young and the old” (ibid., my emphasis). With this 431

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in mind, Bourdieu argued that social scientists ought to refrain from thinking they can use ‘youth’ to assume they are reporting on naturally existing entities or objects. This is because ‘youth’ and ‘age’ are constructed “through struggles between the people” (ibid.). While paying attention to representations of ‘youth’ and other concepts, Bourdieu focused on power relations highlighting how they work in particular spaces; an approach that reveals the politics that shape those classifications (Purhonen, 2016, p. 100). In doing so, he pointed to the ways those who own or control capitals (e.g., symbolic capital, economic capital, political capital or cultural capital) use them to gain and keep more of those capitals that they then use to (name) and affect the world. Thus, he highlighted how power is exercised in continuous political competitions that shape – in this case – how young people are represented: […] the logical division between young and old is about power, about the division (in the sense of sharing) or the distribution of power with classifications according to age (but also gender or social class). (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 95) In addition to not seeing ‘age’, ‘gender’, ‘class’ etc. as natural entities, Bourdieu adds that it is critical to think about these concepts in the context of relations between those people who created them. What is represented as youth, ethnicity or nation reflects relations of union and separation, of association and disassociation operating in the social world (Bourdieu, 1993). The significance of this observation becomes apparent when considering how Bourdieu uses his concept ‘field’. For Bourdieu, the classificatory struggles happen inside fields that are ‘spaces’ regulated by ’laws’. Each field has specific laws about ageing. To know how to divide society into generations, we have to know the specific laws operating in that particular field, and what the struggles make possible (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 96). This raises political questions about relations between scientific categories (used in research), common-sense ideas and practices (used within families, schools and workplaces). Bourdieu distinguishes, e.g., between categories like ‘unemployment’, ‘working class’, ‘poverty’ etc. that academics use and analyse which often have little connection with the experiences of being jobless or trying to live on insufficient incomes. His interest is in the different consequences that the practices of academics or experts and ordinary people have. According to Bourdieu, the interests that inform the work of academics and experts when making representations differ to those of ‘ordinary’ people when they do it. Age-based representations used by experts like the ‘child’, ‘adolescent’ etc. as part of scientific research, typically involve using ‘scientific criteria’ that draws on models of ‘normal’ human or adolescent development. When the state promotes and has an interest in that research, the goal is often to create specific effects by imposing particular ways of seeing young people (e.g., as cognitively undeveloped, as naturally irresponsible) so as to impose norms and regulatory regimes on them (e.g., electoralvoting rules, night curfews, bans on certain activities). Either way, whether they be scientific or lay representations they are the result of classificatory struggles over who has the power to set definitional criteria, make people see and believe in certain classifications or divisions of the world and in doing so make and unmake groups. Bourdieu also argued that the work of academics is also likely to be informed by an interest in advancing their status, career and employment security. This in turn can motivate scholarly disputes. Similar but different struggles occur in families and workplaces. Conflict can also be seen between fields. When some researchers and policy makers claim e.g., young people have ‘adolescent brains’ that ‘cause’ them to be ‘impulsive and ‘inherently prone to risk-taking, young 432

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people can reject those accounts demonstrating through their words and deeds their capacity to be responsible, competent and able to exercise good judgement as much as any age group. Scientists also claim they use logically controlled and empirical criteria to produce objective descriptions, explanations and predictions. Yet, as Bourdieu says: Nothing is less innocent than the question, which divides the scientific world, of knowing whether one has to include in the system of pertinent criteria not only the so-called ‘objective’ categories (such as ancestry, territory, language, religion, economic activity, etc.), but also the so-called ‘subjective’ properties (such as the feeling of belonging), i.e. the representations through which social agents imagine the divisions of reality and which contribute to the reality of the divisions. (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 119) The point Bourdieu is making is that no question is innocent as they are based on typically unrecognised assumptions. As such they are invisible and work to constrain or direct how we see and represent the issues in question. Moreover, claims social scientists make about there being ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ categories that we can clearly distinguish and use to place various ‘properties’ is neither innocent nor defensible. It is, however, a practice idea that works to contribute to beliefs that there is a reality in such distinctions. Equally, the claim or hope that we might be objective and impartial and therefore detached from research is dangerous. All we can do is to be reflective in a bid to recognise those hidden assumptions and the influence of our doxa or unquestioned beliefs by being vigilant about our own dispositions and their influence on us and others. The best we can do is to engage in reflective practice about the political nature of our representations and the politics informing claims about objective categories, methods and research. This is because there is no escaping that even scientific research is political. As pointed out by Bourdieu, political contests are intrinsic to scientific processes: When, as their education and their specific interests incline them, researchers try to set themselves up as judges of all judgements and as critics of all criteria, they prevent themselves from grasping the specific logic of a struggle in which the social force of representations is not necessarily proportional to their truth-value (measured by the degree to which they express the state of the relation of material forces at the moment under consideration). (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 119) Here, Bourdieu recognises the recurring attempts to impose the legitimate definition of the divisions of the social world. Yet, one problem with representations made by those speaking on behalf of others is that it encourages the belief we can see “those kinds of people” and what is happening clearly when we cannot: “A series of symbolic effects that are exercised every day in politics rest on this usurpatory ventriloquism, which consist of giving voice to those in whose name one is [allegedly] authorised to speak” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 211). Such ‘usurpatory ventriloquism’ has become the norm when it comes to young people.

Concluding remarks and future directions Young people have long been central to public debates and conversations as objects of policy and political actors, represented variously as heroes, victims and threats. Theories of representations offered by Moscovici and Bourdieu help to understand such claims about who certain groups and ‘kinds of people’ are and to recognise the politics that informs those accounts. Representations 433

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also change with time and context. In modern times, dominant representations of young people characterise them as naturally incapable of ‘proper’ political participation. They are accounts that tell us much about the work of various expert networks and the symbolic power they enjoy that allowed them to dominate in classificatory struggles. Such ‘scientific’ representations become normalised, become popularised and shape how young people come to be known, how being young is experienced and how many young people see themselves. This is not to suggest that those representations are not contested and rejected by young people themselves (Bessant and Lohmeyer, 2021). The focus of this chapter is on modern representations of young people in public discourses. It is about how deficit accounts of them as ‘naturally’ immature, cognitively, emotionally and psychologically undeveloped and lacking political knowledge, good judgement and independence said to be necessary for participation in democratic practices are used to set criteria for determining who is formally included and excluded from the public sphere. Those representations provide a basis for determining who gets to participate in political activities like voting and holding office and who enjoys effective participation in decision making about substantive matters. Significantly, they also inform how young people who dare to engage in politics are seen and responded. The developmentalist account of ‘adolescence’ and ‘youth’ has constrained how young people are represented generally with adverse effects in general and in the field of politics in particular. This has generated a range of harmful effects. It is a theoretical practice that precludes the possibility that children and people are autonomously capable of choosing what it is they want to do or identify their version of the good life, or of acting to pursue that good life. It is a disposition that also disadvantages the broader community as it means that young people’s interests, rights, abilities and voice are denied. Many young people are interested in and engage with political questions and want to take part. Given the ailing state of our democracies and the existential crises humanity face, fresh voices and a renewal of the kind younger people can bring to the public sphere are needed more than ever before. These considerations indicate why more work is needed, scholarship that documents the near-hegemonic ways age-based prejudices or ‘adultism’ occludes the promises young people offer in the form of political renewal being included in deliberative and electoral processes. Such research could involve detailed mapping of the power relations and strategies used to (re)produce contemporary misrecognitions of young people operating in representation of them in the public sphere and in contemporary scholarship.

Note 1 Judith Bessant, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Orcid: 0000-0001-7385-5358.

Further readings Bessant, J. (2021). Making-Up People: Youth, Truth and Politics. London: Routledge. Wall, J. (2022). Give Children the Vote: On Democratising Democracy. New York: Bloomsbury.

References Alanen, L. (2012). Moving towards a relational sociology of childhood. In R. Braches-Chyrek, C. Röhner and H. Sünker (eds.), Childhood Companies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Childhood Research (pp. 21–43). Leverkusen-Opladen: Verlag Barbara Budrich. Barney, D., G. Coleman, C. Ross, J. Sterne and T. Tembeck (2016). The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Developmentalism: youth in public discourse Berger, P. and H. Luckmann (1967). The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor Books. Bessant, J. (2018). The Great Transformation, History for a Techno-Human Future. London: Routledge. Bessant, J. (2021). Making-Up People: Youth, Truth and Politics. London: Routledge. Bessant, J. and B. Lohmeyer (2021). Politics of recognition when students protest. In J. Bessant, A. Mejia Mesinas and S. Pickard (eds.), When Students Protest: Secondary and High Schools (Vol. 1, pp. 37–54). Lanham: Roman Littlefield. Bessant, J, S. Pickard and R. Watts (2019). Translating Bourdieu into youth studies. Journal of Youth Studies, .23: 1: 76–92. Bourdieu, P. (1979|1984). Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1983). Forms of Capital General Sociology, Volume 3: Lectures, the College de France 1983– 84. Translated by P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood. Bourdieu, P. (1987). Keynote to the Dean’ Symposium on Gender, Age, Ethnicity and Class: Analytical Constructs or Folk Categories?Translated J. Loïc, D. Wacquant and D. Young. The University of Chicago. https://edisciplinas​.usp​.br​/pluginfile​.php​/2290040​/mod​_resource​/content​/1​/Bourdieu​%20-​%20What​ %20makes​%20a​%20social​%20class​.pdf. Accessed 15. Dec. 2022. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Identity and representation: Elements for a critical reflection on the idea of region. In Language and Symbolic Power. Translated by G. Raymond and M. Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. and L. Wacquant (1992). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago. Bourdieu, P. (1993). ‘Youth’ is just a word. In P. Bourdieu (ed.), Sociology in Question (pp. 94–102). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Brocklehurst, H. (2003). Kids ‘R’ us? Children as political bodies. International Journal of Politics and Ethics, 3(1): 79–92. Brocklehurst, H. (2006). Who's Afraid of Children? Children, Conflict and International Relations, Hampshire: Ashgate Buhler-Niederberger, D. and Van Krieken, R. (2008). Persisting Inequalities: Childhood between global influences and local traditions. Childhood: a global journal of child research, 15(2): 147–155. Calhoun, C. (1992). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press. Donald, M. (2001). A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: Norton. Durkheim, E. (1912–1995). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by K. Fields. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1982). The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method. Translated by W.D. Halls and S. Lukes. New York: Free Press. Elias, N. (1978). On the Process of Civilisation: The Collected Works of Norbert Elias, Vol. 3. Dublin: UCD Press. Fernandez-Armesto, F. (1997). Truth: A History and Guide for the Perplexed. London: Black Swan. Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalisation of the Life World, Vol. 1. Boston: Beacon Press. Hall, G. (1905). Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, Vol. 1 & 2. New York: Appleton and Company. Harre, R. (2003). Social Being. Oxford: Blackwell. James, A., C. Jenks and A. Prout (1998). Theorizing Childhood. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kosselleck, R. (2002). The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Translated by T.S. Presner. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Moscovici, S. (1972–1994). La Société contre Nature. Paris: Seuil (Second Edition). Moscovici, S. (1981). On social representations. In J.P. Forgas (ed.), Social Cognition: Perspectives on Everyday Understanding (pp. 181–209). London: Academic Press. Moscovici, S. (1990). Social psychology and developmental psychology: Extending the conversation. In G. Duveen and B. Lloyd (eds.), Social Representations and the Development of Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moscovici, S. (1993). Introductory address. Papers on Social Representations, 2(3): 160–170. Moscovici, S. (1994). The proof of the Pudding is Still in the Eating, paper presented, second international Conference on Social Representations. Rio de Janeiro. Moscovici, S. (2000). Social Representations: Explorations in Social Psychology. Cambridge: Polity.

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31 REPRESENTATIONS OF YOUTH IN WESTERN MEDIA Towards a Southern perspective Rafael Lomeu Gomes1 Introduction This chapter examines discourses circulating in Western media about youth with immigrant background. This is achieved by surveying recent literature on media discourses about two groups: youths in urban spaces and unaccompanied minors seeking asylum and young refugees. The focus on these groups has gained particular salience, both in the media and in academia in the past decade or so. Current dynamics in global migration flows might help to explicate this increased interest. From 2010 to 2020, for example, the number of international migrants increased by about 60 million people and the number of people who have been forcibly displaced within the same period went up from 41.06 million to 82.38 million (UNHCR, 2023; IOM, 2022). Within this period, representations in Western media about the two groups focused upon here have, oftentimes, engendered liberal ideals of social cohesion as they foreground assimilationist discourses that might deepen the (supposed) divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Therefore, the particular focus on cases of youths in urban spaces and unaccompanied minors seeking asylum and young refugees can help us better understand the role of the media in (re)producing stereotypical understandings about the racialised Other. Upon surveying recent literature focusing on these groups, I illustrate with two recent case studies how the notions of abyssal line (de Sousa Santos, 2014, 2018), coloniality, and coloniality of being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) may provide relevant theoretical anchoring for ongoing and future Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) research. More precisely, this epistemological gesture sheds light on how certain representations of youth with immigrant background (and their purported linguistic practices) in Western media have drawn on essentialist understandings of culture that can be traced back to colonial times. Thus, apart from reviewing recent publications on Western media representations at the intersection of youth, language, culture and immigration, this chapter engages with calls for (1) attending to southern perspectives in youth studies (Swartz et al., 2020) and (2) decolonising and southernising critical discourse studies (Motha, 2020; Lazar, 2020; Resende, 2021).

Decolonising and southernising critical discourse studies Scholars concerned with issues pertaining to language and society have presented, for many years, critiques of the epistemic imbalances present in current systems of academic knowledge DOI:  10.4324/9781003166849-41

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production and circulation (Lazar, 2007; Milani and Lazar, 2017; Pardo, 2010). More recently, debates around decoloniality, southern theory and epistemologies of the South (Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel, 2007; Connell, 2007; Cusicanqui, 2019; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018; de Sousa Santos, 2014, 2018) have become more prevailing in language-related disciplines (e.g., Deumert et al., 2020; Hamid, 2022; Heller and McElhinny, 2017; Heugh et al., 2021; Lomeu Gomes, 2021; Makoni et al., 2022; Motha, 2020; Pennycook and Makoni, 2020). Exhaustively tracing the repercussions of these debates is beyond the scope of this paper. Yet, three important directions that these repercussions have taken can be useful to consider in this chapter. That is the case precisely because, although these repercussions have also manifested in CDS, explicit engagement with synergies between decoloniality, Southern epistemologies and CDS merit further elaboration. The first direction concerns critiques of ways in which colonial reasoning has been deeply tied to central disciplinary tenets, exposing the complicit relationship between linguistics and colonialism (Heller and McElhinny, 2017; Hutton, 1999). Second, in attempts to reimagine and enact academic knowledge production within frames of cognitive, epistemic and social justice (Motha, 2020; Lazar, 2020; Resende, 2021). Third, the use of specific concepts in original theoretical and analytical frameworks in CDS research, broadening its epistemological scope beyond the Eurocentric canon (e.g., Lomeu Gomes and Svendsen, 2023; Lomeu Gomes et al., forthcoming; cf. Resende, 2021). While the teasing out and separation of these developments in three directions may be useful for analytical purposes, it is important to note that they are interrelated. In what follows, I elaborate on ways in which these developments have manifested in CDS. Resende (2021, p. 27) has noted an over-reliance on Eurocentric traditions of discourse analysis in Latin America, which reflects “the colonized nature of the field”. As a way of redressing this imbalance, she proposes three converging paths towards decolonising CDS. The first path involves acknowledging the limitations and false universalism of Northern theories from British and French CDS traditions, commonly ‘imported’ in Latin American scholarship; the second path entails the need for critically engaging with these theories so that they can be creatively contextualised and purposefully employed locally; the third path sheds light on the need for exploring the potentialities of the tension between subalternity and empowerment that characterises academic subject positions in the global South. In turn, Lazar (2020, p. 6) notes a consonant relationship between CDS and southern epistemologies in that “both are modes of critical intervention into hegemonic discourses of power and privilege, aligned with marginalized communities and agree that knowledges are not apolitical, but rather are invested in structures of power and ideology”. Yet, Lazar (2020) draws attention to imbalances in the current geopolitics of knowledge production whereby knowledge and perspectives from the South tend to be neglected. One step towards redressing this imbalance involves conceptualising the South as the convergence of geographical location and geopolitical marginality marked by experiences of (post)coloniality where localised “ways of seeing, listening, and relating” (Lazar, 2020, p. 7) engender particular forms of knowing. That is, the South is conceived of as a geopolitical and epistemic location of legitimate knowledge production, or an ex-centric locus of enunciation (Lazar, 2020; see also Diniz de Figueiredo and Martinez, 2021; Mignolo, 1989). Similarly, Lomeu Gomes and Svendsen (2023) note that the ‘main theoretical attractors’ (e.g., Marx, Foucault, Critical Theory) of various CDS approaches as proposed by Wodak and Meyer (2009, p. 20) are markedly limited by its Eurocentricity. An unintended consequence of this is that the theoretical and analytical frameworks operationalised in these approaches might fail to scrutinise and critique the conditions of oppression that impact the lives of minoritised groups in the global South. Further, Lomeu Gomes and Svendsen (2023) propose that, even though CDS has served as a generative set of theoretical and methodological frameworks for scholars interested in 438

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interrogating and exposing “the semiotic dimensions of power, injustice, abuse, and political-economic or cultural change in society” (Fairclough et al., 2011, p. 357), efforts towards southernising CDS should involve the explicit engagement with theories of decoloniality, southern theory, and Southern epistemologies. Recognising the global South as a legitimate geopolitical and epistemic location of knowledge production and advocating for Southern epistemologies, thus, can be understood as efforts towards decolonising academic knowledge and, specifically, CDS. Importantly, this does not necessarily mean that Northern theories should be completely dismissed or ignored. Milani and Lazar (2017), for example, have proposed that, instead of following exclusionary, dichotomous logics, the South could be understood as a heuristic vantage point, or “an interstitial space from which North-South, SouthNorth, South-South and other engagements become possible, not in a way that necessarily transcends borders but that offers a contingently situated pluri-sitedness/pluri-sightedness” (ibid., pp. 310–311).

Representations of youth with immigrant background in Western media In this section, I present an overview of recent publications that have analysed media representations of youth with immigrant background in Western media. Particularly, I focus on two main (sometimes overlapping) groups that have drawn the attention of scholars primarily in the past decade or so, namely, (i) youth in urban spaces and (ii) unaccompanied minors and young asylum seekers and refugees. As such, this chapter contributes to the increasing body of research on media representations of youth with immigrant background, an area of research that still merits further scholarly attention (Strom and Alcock, 2017). In an initial step of selecting the publications to be reviewed here, I used the search engine Oria, which covers the university and research libraries of Norway. Using Boolean search tools, the selection criteria required the use of the following terms: ‘media discourse(s)’ OR ‘media representation(s)’ AND ‘immigration’ AND ‘youth’. The publication dates were between 2011 and 2022. More studies were added to the selection of articles to be reviewed based on cross-references and the centrality of the theme. The selected articles focused on media representations of youth in Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden and the United States. Mirroring a pattern identified by Resende (2021) in her analysis of CDS scholarship in Latin America (see also Pardo, 2010), a number of these publications oriented towards theoretical and analytical frameworks developed in the Global North including Fairclough’s and van Dijk’s approaches to CDS (Catalano and Mitchel-McCollough, 2019; Patil and McLaren, 2019; Strom and Alcock, 2017) and works of French philosophers and sociologists (Cui and Worrel, 2019; Eksner, 2013; Ibrahim, 2020; Patil and McLaren, 2019). Themes covered by the articles included (i) integration, belonging, national affiliation, (ii) the discursive construction of the racialised Other, and (iii) public debates co-opted/shaped by politicians for political gains. Notably, the articles had considerably varied degrees of transparency in terms of reporting on the methodological procedures in relation to the data analysed. Moreover, while youth in urban spaces have been within the scope of media discourse analyses for a longer period, unaccompanied minors and young refugees have become a central topic in analyses of media discourse only in the past decade or so (Catalano and Mitchell-McCollough, 2019).

Youth in urban spaces Exploring the interface between language ideology, media discourse studies and sociolinguistics, various scholars have generated insightful knowledge centred around the interconnections 439

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between representations of ways of making meaning in the media and processes that (re)produce structures of social differentiation. Some of these studies have investigated discourses circulating in news media about ways of speaking – but also dressing, walking, gesturing – typically associated with youth with immigrant background residing in urban spaces in Europe (Androutsopoulos, 2010; Ims, 2014; Stroud, 2004; Svendsen, 2014; Svendsen and Marzo, 2015; cf. Stamou, this volume). In doing so, they have shed light on ways in which hegemonic ideas are sustained and/or challenged (Milani and Johnson, 2010). The discursive construction of differentiation along axes of race, gender, and religion has been a central topic in analyses of media representations of urban youth with immigrant background in Europe (Cui and Worrel, 2019; Schuster-Craig, 2015). Eksner (2013), for example, investigated the ways in which discourses around the notion of ‘ghetto schools’ were perceived by groups of teenagers with German Turkish and German Arab background in Kreuzberg and Neukölln, Berlin. Employing Wacquant’s (2007) concept of territorial stigmatisation, Eksner (2013, p. 342) examined how youth with immigrant background in Berlin experience “discursive ghettoisation, i.e., the ascription of the ghetto onto specific and marked residents of zones stigmatised as ‘ghetto’”. Oftentimes represented as “frustrated, unruly, violent and fully disengaged from schooling”, youths’ behaviour tends to be represented as a result of “their upbringing in families who were ethno-culturally stereotyped as backward and violent” (Eksner, 2013, p. 340). Eksner went on to propose that the notion of ‘ghetto’ could be understood “as a spatialised symbolic representation of the relationship between dominant and non-dominant groups” (Eksner, 2013, p. 348). As such, youths have evaluated the term differently. While younger participants positively appropriated the term, older youths and young adults reflected upon the negative consequences of living in stigmatised urban spaces. Also interested in the reception of media discourse around cultural difference and integration, Schuster-Craig (2015) identified racialising and stigmatising tropes along axes of race and religious identity in media coverage of the social work organisation ‘Projekt Heroes’, based in Germany. As a way of opposing the prevailing stereotypical representations of youth with immigrant background in German media, the organisation aims to train young men with immigrant background to speak publicly and to conduct workshops in schools about violence and gender roles. Media coverage of ‘Projekt Heroes’, Schuster-Craig (2015) claimed, oftentimes misrepresents the target group of the organisation by labeling them ‘young Muslims’. In doing so, the project’s emphasis on “self-determination, tolerance, and the disruption of traditional gender roles” (Schuster-Craig, 2015, p. 129) is overlooked. Finally, Schuster-Craig (2015, p. 140) highlighted the complex and somewhat ambivalent relationship between media professionals and ‘Projekt Heroes’ staff because even though the staff members might benefit from media attention, they ‘can only do so if they participate in the conversation by respecting the terms offered to them’. That is, while engaging with the media might be beneficial for the organisation in that it would bring more visibility to their work – which could, ultimately, lead to a change in stigmatising discourses about youth with immigrant background in Germany – the media professionals are the ones who make editorial decisions that frame the youth in particular ways. In their study of TV and press journalism in Italy in 2012, Sredanovic and Farina (2015) attended to issues of voice and representation of youth with immigrant background in debates about the Italian citizenship law and belonging. Sredanovic and Farina (2015) claimed that representation of people with immigrant background in Italian media relies on essentialist understandings of culture and ethnicity. Moreover, the authors pointed out that research on youth with immigrant background was still incipient. Yet, a difference between representations of boys and girls with immigrant background was identified: while boys were typically associated with criminality and 440

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gang membership, girls were either connected with stories about celebrities and high-achieving professionals or with stories about human trafficking, patriarchal families and oppressive religions. Due to the Italian citizenship law in force during the time of Sredanovic and Farina’s (2015) study, children born in Italy to immigrant parents could only gain Italian citizenship after turning 18 years of age (which is one of the requirements that had to be met). Therefore, the life conditions of youth with immigrant background (including their rights and sense of belonging) generated debates where differing positions were presented in Italian media. In their analysis of 40 news reports broadcast by the TV channels RAI and Mediaset and 115 newspaper articles, Sredanovic and Farina (2015) claimed that, even though youth with immigrant background have their voice represented in media debates, differences tended to be either negated or universalised. That is, in media discourse that supported the gain of citizenship for Italian-born children to immigrant parents, what made these children deserving of “legal ‘Italianness’” was that they were considered “socially and culturally ‘Italian’” (Sredanovic and Farina, 2015, p. 704). Moreover, Sredanovic and Farina (2015) noted that while there was a tendency of presenting youths from a biographical perspective, which risks minimising the political and collective aspects of the debate, the power of affecting specific policies lies in the hands of local actors (see also Loncle and Pickard, this volume). In Canada, Cui and Worrell (2019) examined the ways in which Chinese Canadian youth perceived racialising media discourse to affect their identity construction and sense of belonging. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and symbolic violence, the authors interviewed 35 Chinese Canadian youths between 15 and 24 years of age. Cui and Worrell (2019) identified three main themes that emerged from the interviews in which participants were prompted to talk about factors affecting their identity construction in the home and at school and their contact with Canadian mainstream media: representation (or lack thereof) of Asians in the media, the racialisation of bodily features, and Chinese immigrants as a social threat. The authors suggested that racialising discourses employed by Canadian media had important (and potentially negative) consequences for the ways Chinese Canadian youth made sense of their Chinese identity and their self-identification as Canadians. Cui and Worrell (2019, p. 251) concluded, then, that “[s] ymbolic violence occurs when [participants] desire to have bigger eyes and speak English without ‘accents’, when they believe in the inferiority of their ethnic cultural heritage, and when they experience anxiety, embarrassment and low-confidence due to a failure to conform to the norm”. Yet, participants tended to respond to symbolic violence in different ways, some of them questioning stereotypical portrayals of Asians by the media. In turn, Macaulay and Deppeler’s (2020) study focused on the reception of media representations of Sudanese and South Sudanese youths in Australia. The authors pointed out that media representations of Australian Sudanese and South Sudanese youths portrayed them “as symbols of fear relative to crime and gang violence” (Macaulay and Deppeler, 2020, pp. 213–214) in a context where whiteness has been historically represented as the norm. Also focusing on the reception of discourses circulating in the media, in this study the authors interviewed both youths attending programmes offered by non-profit organisations and representatives of these organisations. Four main themes emerged from the analysis: racism, political belonging, powerlessness, and diminished opportunities (Macaulay and Deppeler, 2020, p. 218). The authors concluded that the racialised media representations of Australian Sudanese and South Sudanese youths undermined their sense of belonging in Australian society. This may further contribute to these youths perceiving themselves as powerless, impact their wellbeing and impede them from thriving. Finally, in a recent study, Svendsen and I investigated media representations of the urban youth with immigrant background in Norway and their linguistic practices (Lomeu Gomes and Svendsen, 441

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2023). After building a corpus of articles published in Norwegian print media between 2015 and 2021, we focused on a debate that followed a controversial statement made in 2020 by the then-head of the media and communications firm GK. When asked in an interview about GK’s concrete measures to ensure diversity in the firm, the executive responded that “Kebabnorsk is not good enough at GK”. Kebabnorsk (‘Kebab Norwegian’) is a term commonly used to describe the speech styles of urban youths with immigrant background mostly in Oslo, the capital of Norway (Ims, 2014). In our study, we combined CDS tools with epistemologies of the South (de Sousa Santos, 2014) to better understand the discursive conflation of race and language practices in Norwegian media. That is, drawing on the premise that in contemporary Scandinavia, where racist discourse is unacceptable, and thus language practices function as a proxy for race (cf. Stroud, 2004), we employed the notions of ‘nomination’ and ‘predication’ to investigate the discursive construction of what de Sousa Santos (2014) refers to as an abyssal line. We claimed that ‘Kebab Norwegian’ has been oftentimes mobilised in media debates to discursively construct an axis of differentiation (i.e., us vs. them) where ‘us’ is a category that encompasses ‘ethnic Norwegians’ who uphold Western values and speak standard Norwegian, while ‘them’ describes those who have ethnically minoritised backgrounds, uphold ‘non-Western values’, and speak ‘Kebab Norwegian’. We also employed the notion of coloniality – which “refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administration” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243) – to argue that combining this theoretical framework with CDS tools allowed us to identify a long-standing, essentialist understanding of culture (re)produced in the media where different groups can be hierarchically organised based on the different (purported) ways in which they speak.

Asylum-seeking unaccompanied minors and young refugees As noted, scholars interested in media representations of youths have contributed to a growing literature on asylum-seeking unaccompanied minors and young refugees. Particularly, studies have covered media representations in countries such as Australia, France, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States (Catalano and Mitchell-McCollough, 2019; Ibrahim 2020; Lomeu Gomes et al., forthcoming; MacDonald, 2017; McLaren and Patil, 2016; Patil and McLaren, 2019; Patler and Gonzales, 2015; Strom and Alcock, 2017; Windle, 2017). The focus of Patler and Gonzales’ (2015) study was on the media coverage of the immigrant policy process in the United States. The authors focused on the coverage of print, radio, and online news of campaigns against deportation run by two organisations of undocumented youth between 2009 and 2012. A content analysis of the data allowed the authors to shed light on the apparent contradictions that permeated coverage of these campaigns. That is, on the one hand, the coverage of certain cases in deportation proceedings in their data tended to positively portray undocumented immigrants. Yet, and in line with previous research, media coverage of these groups could also contribute to the reification of anti-immigrant stances by reinforcing “the idea that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ immigrants” (Patler and Gonzales, 2015, p. 1470). In turn, Strom and Alcock (2017) drew on a socio-cognitive approach to CDS (van Dijk 1998, 2008) to examine representations of Latin@2 immigrant children in the United States media. Despite analysis of media coverage of immigrants being common in CDS, the authors claimed, a focus on immigrant children was still incipient. Their dataset consisted of articles published in the newspapers The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times (which was motivated by their large numbers of circulation) employing the terms ‘unaccompanied minors’, ‘Latino migrant children’, ‘unaccompanied youth’, ‘unaccompanied migrants’ and ‘youth migrants’ throughout the year of 442

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2014. Building on previous research that indicated the use of lexical items associated with water to report on immigration, the authors focused on the use of the terms ‘surge’, ‘wave’ and ‘flood’ to represent immigrant children. Strom and Alcock (2017) concluded that, despite immigrant children being an under-investigated cohort in CDS, the way this group was portrayed in the media resonates with research on media representations of immigrants. That is, coverage of Latin@ immigrants in the United States media reproduced an understanding that “child immigrants should be feared and dealt with as a problem rather than as a humanitarian crisis that requires immediate aid for at-risk children” (Strom and Alcock, 2017, p. 454). Media representations of migrant children in the United States were also the focus of Catalano and Mitchell-McCollough’s (2019). Particularly, the authors analysed the role of metonymy and metaphor in online news articles using terms such as ‘migrant children’ and ‘central American children’ in 2016. Moreover, they analysed interviews with child migrants in published national media between 2014 and 2016 and interviews conducted by humanitarian organisations with unaccompanied children. Similarly to the findings presented by Strom and Alcock (2017), described above, Catalano and Mitchell-McCollough (2019, p. 23) identified “a dominance of water/movement scenarios which equate migrant children to dangerous water and present them as a threat”. Conversely, analysis of the media that contained interviews with children allowed the authors to present the children’s own experiences and reasons to migrate. This, the authors suggested, may serve to counter the prevailing dehumanising narratives presented in media coverage in their data set. In Australia, McLaren and Patil (2016) investigated media representation of so-called ‘boat children’. The authors analysed texts published between 2013 and 2015 in the five newspapers with the largest readership numbers in Australia: The Age, The Australian, Herald Sun, Sydney Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph. Employing a discourse analysis approach, the authors drew on Huckin’s (2002) taxonomy of manipulative silences, which assumes that silences are informed by ideological work. The use of terms such as ‘suicide asylum boy’, and ‘detained boat children’, the authors claimed, contributed to portraying children “as ‘illegal’, ‘prone to suicide’, ‘criminal’ and undeserving of Australian empathy” (McLaren and Patil, 2016, p. 609). In terms of the manipulative silences identified in the analysis, the authors drew attention to the absence of the legal implications of the Australian government detention policy as well as the government’s humanitarian obligations. The authors, then, concluded that media representations of asylum-seeking children drive public attention away from the political, legal and humanitarian issues that subject these children to inhumane conditions. More recently, Patil and McLaren (2019) investigated Islamophobia in Australian media representations of asylum-seeking youth. Combining a Foucauldian approach to discourse and van Dijk’s (1983, 1993) notions of ‘evaluative propositions’ and ‘factual beliefs’, the authors analysed news pieces published between 2010 and 2011 in the same Australian newspapers mentioned above. As in their previous study, the notion of ‘manipulative silence’ (Huckin, 2002) was also relevant in this analysis, in that the media largely disregarded the impact of governmental immigration policies on asylum-seeking children. Moreover, the representations of asylum-seeking children contributed to an understanding that their parents might have used them for immigration purposes and to argue for stronger regulations. Finally, similar to discourses that circulated in Australian media in 2001 (Poynting, 2002; Kabir, 2007), “the children were subtly framed within discursive frameworks that mimicked moral panics associated with Islamophobic discourses” (Patil and McLaren, 2019, p. 9). In turn, MacDonald’s (2017) study investigated the extent to which media representations of young refugees in Melbourne, Australia might have contributed to a landscape of social exclusion where a ‘fear’ of refugees is merged with news reports on youths with ethnic backgrounds 443

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as responsible for events of public violence. MacDonald (2017) suggested that the tightening of restrictions regulating the entry of refugees in Australia and the negative perceptions of refugees, which the media tends to perpetuate, led to refugees being subjected to racist and xenophobic incidents. Analysis of articles published in two of Melbourne’s newspapers (i.e., The Age and Herald Sun) allowed MacDonald (2017) to identify recurring topics such as inappropriate or violent behaviours of youth African Australian men, police discrimination and racial profiling. By portraying a particular public housing estate, home to many former refugees, as a site of crime and conflict, many news articles further contributed to its stigmatisation. Reporting on a preliminary exploration of the data, in this study MacDonald (2017) called for further investigations of media representation of young refugees in Australia, particularly from African and Pasifika nations. Also in Australia, Windle (2017) employed CDA to analyse racialising discourses around refugees. With a particular focus on schooling spaces, Windle supplemented his analysis of media reports with interviews with parents of school children. The concentration of refugees from Africa, Afghanistan, Burma and the Middle East in pockets within inner-city Melbourne, Windle noted, was reflected in the composition of the student body of these schools. That is, one group of schools was known for catering to wealthy “locals” while other schools are known as “refo” (Windle, 2017, p. 1130). Windle’s examination of Australian media reports highlighted the sensationalisation of ‘African gangs’ in media discourses that represent young refugees as invaders of urban spaces, “violent, lawless, war-like, African, young, animalistic, (usually) male subjects” (Windle, 2017, p. 1137). These representations fed into parental discourses, including refugee parents, who might have avoided enrolling their children in schools with a greater number of refugee students and prefer the schools that cater to wealthy ‘locals’. This can have negative consequences for schools facing a drop in the number of enrolments in a marketised educational system where funding is linked to the number of enrolments. At the same time, some parents might still choose to enrol their children in the otherwise stigmatised schools due to the value placed on diversity and care in the school environment. In turn, Ibrahim (2020) analysed how child refugees in Calais, France were represented in British media between 2008 and 2018. Analysis of the media was supplemented by policy discourses between 2002 and 2018 as well as discourses in the UK parliament. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of hauntology, Ibrahim conceptualised shifts in the enactment of the child refugee as consisting of three phrases: from invisibility to selected visibility (2008–2009), the risky child (2014–2015), and the child as the suspect figure (2016–2018). Throughout these phases, Ibrahim (2020, p. 7) claimed, child refugees were represented “as spectral entities amenable to the myth of British humanitarianism and equally morphing into suspect figures not deserving pity or refuge”. From 2002 to 2008, the figure of the child was largely absent from media reports. It was only with the demolition of the camp in 2009 that child refugees become more visible in media reports of Calais. In the second phase (2014–2015) media representations of child refugees included those covering the risks of being exposed to sexual or labour exploitation by adults, and the tragic bereavements of children who tried to cross into the UK as stowaways aboard vehicles of holidaymakers and in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Such conditions led to greater public attention and calls for a humanitarian response. The third phase, Ibrahim proposed, was marked by questioning the figure of the ‘man-child’, that is, a suspicious figure who might try to lie about their age to authorities in order to pass as a child. The empathy, goodwill, and hospitality of British society, displayed in the previous phase, was perceived to be abused at the same time as technologies of age assessment became more commonly discussed

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in the media, albeit not without contestation. In conclusion, Ibrahim (2020, p. 9) proposed that the figure of the child functioned as a spectre in the British political landscape where attempts to rescue children represented “token gestures to retain the UK’s symbolic commitment to being deemed a humanitarian nation”. The representation of unaccompanied minors in print media was also investigated in Norway, where colleagues and I unpacked the discourses around the role of the State in shaping family formations (Lomeu Gomes et al., forthcoming). The article reported on the analysis of 30 articles published in four Norwegian newspapers between 2016 and 2017, a period during which notions of kinship, integration and identity were particularly salient. Our analysis revealed a polarised debate around the notion of anchor children, a term used to refer to children who might surreptitiously be sent to host countries so that their relatives could join them later (see also Hedlund, 2015). Assuming the family role as proxy, Norway is referred to as a Nanny State, making decisions for these children regarding not only their wellbeing, but also their education and language learning. These minors arriving in Norway are divided into two groups: under 15 and from 15 to 18 years of age. Municipalities decide their residence with the younger usually placed in foster homes while the older live in reception centres. Some municipalities engage a foster family with the same country background in the transition through language, religion, and ethnic affiliation, while others do not. The Norwegian Child Welfare Services has been criticised with some cases brought to the European Court of Human Rights (Purkarthofer et al., 2022). This scenario presents a challenge for current notions of family, opening up for more fluid kinship and family processes in the child’s integration into society and for a more complex framework for analysing the child’s identity construction and language learning (Lanza and Lomeu Gomes, 2020; Lomeu Gomes, 2018). Our investigation drew on Maldonado-Torres’ (2017) notion of coloniality of being to unveil and problematise two opposing understandings of culture that were identified in the corpus and shaped the debate: cultures as hierarchically organised and cultures as commensurable. According to Maldonado-Torres (2017, p. 258), “The coloniality of Being is thus fundamentally an ontological dynamic that aims to obliterate—in its literal sense of doing away completely so as to leave no trace—gift-giving and generous reception as a fundamental character of being-in-the-world”. While the former understanding of culture identified in the corpus, namely cultures as hierarchically organised, may be understood as resting upon a social ontology where difference is seen as a threat (cf. Eriksen, 2013), the latter (i.e., cultures as commensurable) favours a more horizontal, two-way relationship between the so-called host society and unaccompanied minors where the conditions for generous reception to exist are forged.

Concluding remarks In this article, I reviewed recent studies on media representations of youth with immigrant background. Within this broad cohort, two main groups were identified: youth in urban spaces and asylum-seeking unaccompanied minors and young refugees. Apart from surveying the main theoretical and methodological frameworks employed in current literature concerned with representations of these groups in Western media, the review undertaken in this chapter had as a backdrop a call for decolonising and southernising CDS (cf. Lazar, 2020; and Resende, 2021). Interestingly, and expanding the scope of media studies to the reception of media materials, some of these studies were concerned with the ways in which youth with immigrant background

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perceived media representations in debates around national identity, belonging and citizenship (e.g., Cui and Worrell, 2019; Eksner, 2013; Macaulay and Deppeler, 2020). Moreover, advancing knowledge about the role of discourse in the construction of divides between ‘us’ and ‘them’, some studies highlighted the centrality of normative understandings of language whereby a standard language seems to operate as an idealised way of belonging to the nation state. In contrast, language practices of youth with immigrant background are rendered deviant (e.g., Cui and Worrell, 2019; Lomeu Gomes and Svendsen, 2023). Also, although media representations of immigrants (and scholarship about these representations) have tended to focus on adults, it is worth noting the increasing attention to children and youth in media representations of immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees (cf. Catalano and Mitchell-McCollough, 2019; Ibrahim, 2020; Strom and Alcock, 2017; cf. also Stamou, this volume). The articles considerably varied in relation to the degree to which they described and reflected upon the methodological steps that constituted their analysis. Moreover, while the studies also varied when it comes to the ways in which they engaged with broader theories to explicate the social realities, most of them did so within Northern epistemological matrices (Bourdieu, Derrida, Foucault and CDA as approached by van Dijk and Fairclough). This mirrors a trend noted by Resende (2021) in CDS studies in Latin America, namely, an over-reliance on Eurocentric epistemologies to theoretically frame the studies. In contrast, I presented two recent studies where colleagues and I have combined CDS tools with Southern epistemologies and theories of decoloniality in analysis of media representations of youth and children with immigrant background in Norwegian media. The studies reviewed here, particularly those explicitly engaging with CDS, contributed important insights concerning the social conditions and local histories of the discursive construction of difference along lines of race, gender and religion enacted in media representations of youths. Yet, if we are to consider de Sousa Santos’ (2018) concern regarding the limitations of Northern epistemologies, including critical scholarship, in providing adequate theoretical grounding for explicating the structural oppressive conditions that lead to the invisibility of the Other, then other epistemological frames need to be explored. Southern epistemologies and theories of decoloniality, as I have tried to illustrate by showcasing two studies conducted by colleagues and myself, might be examples of such frames.

Acknowledgements This work was partly supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265. I would like to thank the editors, Bente A. Svendsen and Rickard Jonsson, for their feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. Their insightful engagement with this manuscript has helped me to sharpen my ideas and present them more clearly.

Notes 1 Corresponding author: Rafael Lomeu Gomes, MultiLing – Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan (University of Oslo) and UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Orcid: 0000-0003-2634287X. 2 The employment of ‘Latin@’ in this chapter reflects the lexical choice made by the authors in their article (Strom and Alcock, 2017). For a historical account of the usage of ‘Latin@’ and ‘Latinx’, see GuidottiHernández (2017).

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Further readings Maria de Barros, S. and V. Resende (2022). Coloniality in Discourse Studies: A Radical Critique (1st ed.). London: Routledge India. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003315131 Ndhlovu, F. (2022). Revisiting the true purpose of the discourse on decolonising. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 17(3): 240–254. https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2022.2119990

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32 MEDIATIZATION OF YOUTH VOICES Anastasia G. Stamou1

Introduction The present chapter addresses the ways the media portray how youth speaks and sounds, namely how youth voices are mediatized. The concept of mediatization is defined in multiple (and not always mutually inclusive) ways (see Androutsopoulos, 2014), such as referring to the process involving the social transformations that occurred due to the prevalence of the media in many aspects of social life (Lundby, 2009), or to the changes involved in media products because of commodification (Agha, 2011). Jaffe (2011), on the other hand, defines mediatization as the sum of the representational resources, stylistic choices and devices used by the media for the production and editing of their products. Evidently, the practice of naming (youth) speech styles is problematic, since it tends to reify and oversimplify what are in fact complex sociolinguistic realities (Madsen, 2013, cf. Madsen, this volume). Against this backdrop, the label of ‘youth voice’2 is selected here as a working term to refer to the ways the media represent young people’s language. As we shall see, the media, through practices of labelling and other processes of enregisterment (Agha, 2007), have a prominent role in constructing youth voices as fixed and objectified linguistic entities and thus, making them socially recognizable and distinct linguistic codes. Drawing on the ideas of mediatization (as conceptualized by Jaffe, 2011) and enregisterment of youth voices, the focus of this chapter is not evidently on how young people actually talk, but rather on how their linguistic practices are talked about in the (traditional) media. Although youth linguistic practices are flagged as being at the heart of sociolinguistics and youth studies (e.g., see Tagliamonte, 2016), a focus on youth language representations and ideologies is equally necessary, as language use is tightly knitted to ideological processes. A concept highlighting the ideological premises of language use is that of indexicality (Silverstein, 1976), which refers to the process through which particular linguistic forms become associated with particular social meanings. Yet, such associations reside in shared representations and beliefs, that is, in language ideologies, about what sorts of speakers (can or should) use what sorts of language. Consequently, the media substantially contribute to the indexical processes about what sounds like ‘youth’. It is to these ideological resources, internalized as metapragmatic stereotypes (Silverstein, 1985), that speakers orient themselves while using and interpreting language in a specific socio-cultural context. 450

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In what follows, an attempt is made to map the central theoretical perspectives and current trends related to the research on the mediatization of youth voices. Moreover, for the purpose of the present chapter, a focus is put on two ‘traditional’ media genres, namely, news and fiction, as they differ in the ways they articulate metalinguistic discourse. On the one hand, news involves the production of media texts by journalists, who directly or incidentally discuss and evaluate particular speech styles (Androutsopoulos, 2010a). On the other hand, in fiction, metalinguistic discourse is manifested in the speech of characters, which contributes to the character construction and interpretation, known as fictional characterization (Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla, 2017). As fiction concerns a broad range of heterogeneous discursive resources and spaces (e.g., film, TV series, advertising, literature, music), in the present chapter, the focus is on audiovisual fiction (i.e., TV series, TV commercials, films), since common semiotic modes (visual, aural) are employed, together with language, for the mediatization of youth voices.

Theoretical perspectives: language ideologies and post-variationist sociolinguistics The research on the mediatization of speech styles, including youth voices, puts to the foreground the ways the media are key arenas for the (re)production of language ideologies through the representation of sociolinguistic diversity. Hence, it is in dialogue with two major theoretical strands: the linguistic anthropological tradition of language ideologies and post-variationist sociolinguistics. The field of language ideology, far from being homogeneous (for its diversity, see e.g., Gal and Irvine, 2019), has put to the fore that linguistic codes are symbolic resources unequally reproduced in society, as they are socially ranked, resulting in the perpetuation of linguistic discrimination (Blackledge, 2000). One ideology prevailing in many linguistic communities is the standard language ideology, which resides in taken-for-granted ideas about the superiority of the standard variety (Lippi-Green,1994), to the exclusion of any sociolinguistic diversity (e.g., youth speech styles). Although the media are considered one of the dominant blocs supporting this ideology (Lippi-Green, 1994), it has been argued that the language ideologies field has largely examined the macro-level sociopolitical processes underpinning the formation of language ideologies to the expense of their material (textual) enactment in the media (Milani and Johnson, 2008).3 Post-variationist or ‘third-wave’ sociolinguistics (e.g., Coupland, 2007; Eckert, 2012) is another theoretical strand which informs relevant research on the mediatization of sociolinguistic diversity. Departing from social constructionist theories, post-variationist sociolinguistics has shifted the focus from the traditional (variationist) concept of linguistic variation, which is seen as a reflection of pre-determined social structure, to style, which is viewed as a sociolinguistic resource upon which speakers creatively (but also within social constraints) draw for the construction of their identities in a particular context (Coupland, 2007). Besides, as a term, style is not only construed as speech style to be restricted to language, but it also includes the wider semiotic systems which create, together with language, a visible distinctiveness among different social groups, such as clothing, movement, patterns of consumption and so on (Eckert, 2002). Consequently, through style, post-variationist sociolinguistics is more tightly knitted to neighboring fields, like cultural studies and semiotics. This is of particular importance for the study of the mediatization of sociolinguistic diversity, given the multimodal character of the media. More importantly, post-variationist sociolinguistics offers a perspective from which to engage with the media as linguistic data, since it nicely fits with the view of the media as actively shaping instead of passively mirroring sociolinguistic realities. Conversely, as early 451

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sociolinguistics sought to capture the ‘authentic speaker’ and collect ‘naturally occurring’ talk, the media were considered ‘inauthentic’ and were largely excluded from linguistic analysis because of their anti-empirical character (Dynel, 2011). Therefore, a focus was put on looking for gaps and inconsistencies in linguistic data from the media, based on the assumption that the media should mirror the sociolinguistic diversity ‘out there’ (Androutsopoulos, 2010b). Conversely, post-variationist sociolinguistics puts an emphasis on the ideological role of the media in reflecting and transporting particular versions of language and the world (Stamou, 2014). Besides, it has brought to the fore issues of ‘authentication’ (Bucholtz, 2003), which are not only characteristic of mediatized language, but can be also found in everyday interactions. All this fertile epistemological ground for the use of the media as sources of linguistic data plus the increasing visibility of non-standard styles in today’s late modern mediascapes (Coupland, 2014) have given a boost to relevant sociolinguistic research in the last decade. Indicative of this interest is the publication of special issues/collected volumes (e.g., Androutsopoulos, 2012; Mortensen et al., 2017) and literature reviews (e.g., Planchenault, 2017; Stamou, 2014), as well as the suggestion for the establishment of distinct sociolinguistic fields on particular media genres, like the ‘sociolinguistics of fiction’ (Stamou, 2018a). There has been also a proliferation of recent research on media fictional genres, drawing on pragmatics (e.g., Locher and Jucker, 2017), or on a combination of pragmatics, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics (e.g., Bednarek, 2018). Besides, the collected volume edited by Werner (2018) on the ‘language of pop culture’ offers an interdisciplinary linguistic perspective on broader media genres, like comics and music. Despite the abundance of recent studies on the mediatization of speech styles, research has largely focused on the social categories of ethnicity and gender (e.g., Hiramoto, 2015; Petrucci, 2008). Instead, to the best of our knowledge, there is a paucity on the mediatization of youth styles.

Topics in current research: the demonization and the ‘celebration’ of youth voices In this section, an attempt is made to sketch the key topics related to the research on the mediatization of youth voices in the media genres of news and audiovisual fiction rather than to provide a comprehensive literature review. Moreover, research is mostly drawn from a Western European context. As already mentioned, news and audiovisual fiction are two media genres which articulate metalinguistic discourse in a distinct manner. Yet, common mediatization patterns are identified in the ways they represent youth voices, so that both genres will be discussed together. After a careful study of the relevant research, three key mediatization patterns are detected, based on the semiotic processes of Irvine and Gal (2000), through which ideologies of linguistic differentiation are manifested. Particularly, the Irvine and Gal’s semiotic process of erasure suppresses and makes invisible any linguistic difference, homogenizing sociolinguistic realities. In contrast, fractal recursivity is the opposite process, as it intentionally underlines or creates linguistic differences through the projection of distinctions between speech styles / social groups. Finally, iconization refers to the essentialization and naturalization of linguistic differentiation, namely, the construction of linguistic differences as being natural (iconic) of the social differences they index. These semiotic processes will be combined with post-variationist sociolinguistic, linguistic anthropological and critical sociological work on youth and childhood (e.g., Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou, 2004; Bucholtz, 2000; James et al., 1998; Jenks, 1996; Wood, 2017). 452

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Specifically, as we shall see below, the mediatization patterns of youth voices detected are: ‘youth as universal stage of life’ (related to erasure), ‘youth as incomplete adulthood’ (related to fractal recursivity) and ‘youth as social risk’ (related to iconization). These patterns, rather than being antagonistic, are interrelated and are usually drawn upon all together in the media, shaping the hegemonic discourses through which youth voices are often devalued, or even demonized. Furthermore, in the case of audiovisual fiction, an additional mediatization pattern is identified due to the appropriation of youth voices by the creators of fiction: ‘youth as commodity and lifestyle’. This pattern tends to ‘celebrate’ youth voices.

Mediatization patterns of youth voices Youth as universal stage of life This mediatization pattern echoes traditional perspectives of youth, according to which it is seen in developmental terms, as a distinctive phase of life. Hence, the developmental approach to youth is linked to its construal as a universalized and homogenized experience, which is the same for all young people irrespective of place and time. This idea has been challenged by post-variationist sociolinguistics (e.g., Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou, 2004) as well as youth and childhood studies (e.g., James et al., 1998; Wood, 2017), which have paved a new course for conceptualizing youth as a socio-cultural construction, framed through particular discourses and shaping the ways we think and talk about youth in a specific social, cultural and historical context. So, emphasis is given on the rich and local construction of youth in particular contexts. Yet, omitting diversity and fluidity of youth and of their linguistic practices depending on context, through the process of erasure, media discourse tends to homogenize it, by representing it as a fixed age group speaking all the same, as indicated in the studies of Androutsopoulos (2010a), Milani (2010) and Stroud (2004). Except for age, as shown by Svendsen and Marzo (2015), young people using speech styles spoken in urban and multilingual environments, like kebabnorsk in Norway, are often also mediatized as being united by their migrant background, forming a ‘panethnic minority group’. The fact that these styles are also employed by youth with Norwegian-born parents is omitted. Furthermore, the press has contributed to the universalized and homogenized imagery of youth voices, through the use of lifespan labels, like ‘millennials’ and, ‘generation Y’. Often, these labels are combined with a digitalized lexis, to refer to the allegedly tight connection of young people’s linguistic practices with the new technologies and (social) media, like ‘keyboard’, ‘net’ or ‘mobile generation’, ‘cyberkids’, ‘wired teens’ and so on, as shown in the study of Thurlow (2007), using a wide dataset of English-speaking news articles coming mostly from Britain and US, but also from other Western (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland) and non-Western countries (Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia). In this way, youth is constructed in developmental terms, and it is defined solely with respect to its use of communication technologies. As Thurlow claims, this simplification of youth voices distorts the fact that new technologies are not a terrain of young people only, while it conceals major socio-economic inequalities with respect to new technologies access. In audiovisual fiction, the construction of youth as a distinct and homogeneous age group is manifested via an erasure of the variability in the linguistic practices of young people and a focus on the depiction of a limited number of linguistic features indexing youth. For example, in the study of Stamou et al. (2012) on Greek TV commercials, it was found that the advertisers tended to exploit the most conspicuous and widely recognized characteristics of ‘Greek youth language’, which recur from spot to spot, in order to activate the audience’s stereotypical 453

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sociolinguistic knowledge. On the other hand, in the analysis of a scene from a Greek TV series by Stamou (2018b), the teenage characters were found to be represented as employing digital language, in order to index a youth identity, similar to the study of Thurlow (2007). It is worth noting, though, that this simplification in the depiction of youth voices is also related to the tendency of fiction to activate a speech style through “relatively slight textual cues” (Fowler, 1996, p. 191), as long as it becomes ‘authentic’, namely it is recognized as ‘real’ by others. This is achieved by not drawing necessarily upon ‘precise’ but rather upon emblematic stylistic features, which are ‘enough’ to index an identity (for the concept of enoughness, see Blommaert and Varis, 2011). Besides, due to the multimodal character of audiovisual fiction, the visual images constructed for young people further contribute to their homogenization and universalization. For instance, in a Greek TV series examined by Saltidou and Stamou (2014), the three teenage characters were depicted as fans of the culture of hip-hop, by all wearing baggy clothes, sneakers and having trendy haircuts. In a similar vein, in Greek TV commercials (Stamou et al., 2012), the visualization of young people is uniform, since advertisers show a preference for male protagonists4, dressed in sportswear and black colors and having extreme haircuts. On the other hand, in Danish comedies, multiethnic youth styles are usually employed by characters who have a name indexing an ethnic Arabic background and show a preference for the wearing of sports clothes, caps and golden chains, as well as for a street-gangster style, like fast cars and guns (Quist, 2016). Finally, the notion of the “communicatively inept young person” (Thurlow, 2007, p. 215), who “just speaks this way” (Androutsopoulos, 2010a, p. 197), is a recurrent topic in the news representation of youth voices, which also results in the homogenization and simplification of youth. Similarly, in audiovisual fiction, young characters tend to be represented as lacking communicative competence, being unable to style switch to other speech styles depending on the context. For instance, in Greek TV commercials, young people are depicted as monolithic language users, by employing a very restricted linguistic repertoire irrespective of who their interlocutor is (e.g., another young person or their parents) (Stamou et al., 2012).

Youth as incomplete adulthood This mediatization pattern is also linked to traditional developmental perspectives of youth, which view it as a transitory stage of life to adulthood. In this way, young people are constructed as “notyet finished human beings” (Bucholtz, 2002, p. 29), who are in the transitory state of (immature) adolescence as opposed to a (mature and thus, complete) adulthood (Lee, 1998). This traditional perspective of young people, putting adulthood as the ‘gold’ standard against which young people are judged deficient, has been contested in contemporary youth and childhood research, so that young people are not anymore seen as ‘becomings’ but rather as ‘beings’ (Qvortrup, 2005), that is, as active participants in social life, who form their own experiences and practices (James et al., 1998; Jenks, 1996; Wood, 2017). However, instead of underlining the heterogeneity and difference characterizing different groups of young people (Bucholtz, 2006), the media, through the process of fractal recursivity, tend to constantly create dichotomies between young people and adults, sustaining the so-called ‘generation gap’. Specifically, a recurrent pattern found in the press is the mediatization of youth voices as ‘divergent’ from the standard or the national language. Hence, youth voices are viewed as disturbing the imagined homogeneous linguistic community. For instance, in the study of Thurlow (2007), the journalists were found to employ an array of negative evaluative lexis to refer to the detrimental effects of young people’s new media language on standard English, like ‘destroy’, ‘damage’, 454

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‘corrupt and ‘ruin’. On the other hand, when youth voices are tightly knitted to a migrant background, they are also seen as a threat to monolingualism or to a standard language. Hence, in the studies of Stroud (2004) and Milani (2010), Rinkebysvenska is evaluated by the media as ‘bad’ and ‘deviant’, which is spoken by non-Swedish young men. In a similar vein, ethnolectal German is constantly juxtaposed by journalists to ‘normal’ and ‘non-foreign’ German (Androutsopoulos, 2010a), while kebabnorsk and Citétaal are contrasted to ‘pure’ standard Norwegian and Dutch, respectively (Svendsen and Marzo, 2015). In all the above-mentioned cases, the distinction of young people from adults is not made explicit, but it is rather implicitly manifested, since the standard or national language, from which youth voices allegedly diverge, is assumed to be spoken by (indigenous) adults. In audiovisual fiction, the sociolinguistic differentiation of young people from adults is made more salient, when adult characters are depicted as negatively evaluating the teenage characters’ speech. For example, in the Greek TV series examined by Saltidou and Stamou (2014), the grandmother of the teenage protagonist characterizes his speech as ‘bad’ and ‘rude’. On the other hand, in Danish comedies, the standard (adult) voice is constructed as calm and rational, while the multiethnic youth one is mediatized as the exact opposite, namely, as aggressive and emotional (Quist, 2016). Another pattern underscoring the dichotomy between young people and adults is the mediatization of youth voices as being secret, needing deciphering by adults. The impenetrability of youth voices to adults is mostly associated with young people’s new media and digital linguistic practices, being characterized in the press with hyperbolic terms, like ‘new hieroglyphics’, ‘mysterious lexicon’, ‘code’ or ‘secret language’ and so on (Thurlow, 2007). This imagery sustains the divide between youth and adults, since youth voices are considered incomprehensible for the adult outgroup only. In a similar vein, in audiovisual fiction (Stamou, 2018b; Stamou et al., 2012), the use of digital language on the part of young characters provoke misunderstandings and communicative gaps with their parents, often leading to hilarious events. For instance, as shown in the study of Stamou et al. (2012), in a Greek TV commercial about internet services, when the father is asking his daughter what is wrong with her, because she looks rather sad and worried, she starts describing the problem she had with her computer, by using a very specialized English jargon. As the father does not understand her concern, he finally asks her if she has told her mother about it, evoking stereotypes of an allegedly closer relationship between mothers and daughters. Moreover, visualization further contributes to the differentiation of youth from adulthood in audiovisual fiction. Specifically, in most of the cases in which adults were represented as interacting with young people in Greek TV commercials, they were depicted as being in sharp contrast to young people, often because of their conservative appearance (Stamou et al., 2012). In this way, the adults’ – youth’s divide is intentionally further underlined.

Youth as social risk This mediatization pattern concerns young people’s attachment to negative social traits, through which they are stigmatized and made part of the ‘other’. More importantly, through the process of iconization, the associations between young people’s speech style and particular negative social characteristics are constructed as being automatic, so that their linguistic differences (from the adult society) are viewed as being natural (iconic) of the social characteristics they index. The construction of youth as a problematic social group, being a risk for society, is related to the socalled ‘puritan discourse’, a construction of an 18th century ‘moral panic’ (Cohen, 2002) about 455

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young people, according to which, they are seen as being inherently evil, angry and violent, putting themselves and society in danger (Jenks, 1996). Hence, according to this discourse, youth has universal negative qualities and is in need of control and surveillance on the part of adult society (Rose, 1989). In the press, immigrant youth voices have been often constructed as iconic of social deviance. For example, ethnolectal German has been associated with marginalized and threatening images of young immigrants (Androutsopoulos, 2010a). In the Danish news media, multiethnic youth styles have been linked to a street-gangster style and to Islamist ideology (Quist, 2016), while in the Norwegian and Flemish press, a causal relationship is usually constructed between speaking kebabnorsk or Citétaal, unemployment or poor professional prospects and being a young man with a ‘minority background’ (Svendsen and Marzo, 2015). Similarly, Rinkebysvenska has been enregistered in the Swedish media as a symbol of ethnic otherness, social and educational problems, as well as sexist and homophobic masculinity (Milani, 2010; Stroud, 2004).5 Yet, more recent ethnographic data suggest that urban youth styles are not dismissed by Swedish schools and even become part of teaching activities (Jonsson, 2018), or are commented on by students through their engagement with the school linguistic landscape (Årman, 2018). Also unfavorable is the mediatization of young people who are not associated with a migrant background. Specifically, due to the allegedly tight connection of young people’s linguistic practices with the new technologies, they are given pejorative labels, such as ‘fickle teenagers’, or worse, as ‘hooked’ and ‘addicted’ (to technology), as found in the study of Thurlow (2007) on a great range of English-speaking news articles coming from Western and non-Western countries. Likewise, the young people’s use of technologies is characterized as a ‘craze’ and ‘youth obsession’. All these journalistic evaluations reside in the idea that young people are unable to control their use of the new media. Similarly, in a Greek TV series analyzed by Saltidou and Stamou (2014), the teenage characters were depicted as being spoilt, irresponsible, indifferent about school and with low professional aspirations. On the same page, in Greek TV commercials, young people tend to be associated with inactivity, as they are never represented as working or studying, but only as having fun and sitting in a very lazy way (Stamou et al., 2012). Interestingly, their negative manners may also become the object of criticism on the part of adults, deepening the divide between them. For instance, in the above-mentioned Greek TV series analyzed, the character of the grandmother is often depicted as being judgmental of her grandson’s and his friends’ lack of manners (e.g., their habit of putting their feet on the couch or on the table), while the character of the mother is represented as having constant quarrels with her son about his low school performance.

Youth as commodity and lifestyle Except for devaluing, or even demonizing youth voices, the media may also appropriate youth voices, with the aim to exploit their indexical values for marketing, so that they are employed for symbolic rather than communicative purposes and hence, functioning as a ‘linguistic fetish’ (Kelly-Holmes, 2000). A characteristic example is the growing use of Sheng in Kenyan advertising, as explored by Kariuki et al. (2015) and Mutonya (2008). Although Sheng was originally associated with the urban young people in Nairobi, whereas advertising showed a preference for standard forms of language only (i.e., either standard Swahili or English), it is now increasingly employed as a marketing strategy in Kenyan TV commercials related to mobile phone companies and banks. This allows marketers to reach out to the urban youth as potential consumers. Specifically, mobile phones are no longer the privilege of wealthy people, so younger people have 456

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become the target for companies. Similarly, the banking sector has expanded and is targeting a younger clientele, like university students (see also Erastus et al., this volume) As youth voices enter the advertising text and are transformed into a commodity, they may also acquire different indexical values, being not directly associated with youth, reflecting the “decontextualization and transportability of performed speech” (Coupland, 2007, p. 171). This is the case with the mediatization of Rinkebysvenska and Tsotsitaal in the TV commercials analyzed by Milani et al. (2015) in Sweden and South Africa, respectively. Rinkebysvenska was reframed from the language of “the intimidating, dangerous, sexist young man”, as it is usually enregistered in the media, to that of “an unthreatening and comic but nonetheless real and smart character” (Milani et al., 2015, p. 135; for more examples on the humorous reframing of Rinkebysvenska, see Jonsson, Franzén and Milani, 2020). Similarly, Tsotsitaal was not associated with deviant male youth, but functioned as an index of “an economically streetwise woman, someone who proves she is able to exploit the situation to her advantage” (Milani et al., 2015, p. 130). Another instance of appropriation of youth voices in the media involves cases in which other age groups are depicted as crossing into youth speech styles, with the aim to embrace a youthful sensibility (e.g., Harwood and Giles, 1992). Hence, in this case, youth is not viewed as a biological stage of life but as a lifestyle. In marketing, this youthful lifestyle is knitted to the so-called discourse of ‘perpetual adolescence’ (Gennaro, 2013). The ‘perpetual adolescent’ is a consumer with an adult wallet and a youthful mentality, that is, s/he is ‘young at heart’. Besides, in late modern discourses, a non-linear trajectory of ‘growing sideways’ (Bond Stockton, 2009) and a shift from rigid to more fluid age boundaries have been noted, so that several scholars have talked about hybrid age categories (Kenway and Bullen, 2008; Kinder, 1995). In studies on Greek TV series (Saltidou and Stamou, 2018) and TV commercials (Stamou, 2018c), instances in which characters of children and older women are represented as endorsing youth voices have been also detected. Specifically, children with a youth voice are depicted as having business skills or as advising their parents about sexual issues, whereas older women are portrayed as adopting a youth voice, in order to show their interest in adventurous activities like bungee jumping, considered to be part of a youthful lifestyle. Yet, this blurring of age boundaries creates illusionary subject positions (Kinder, 1995). In the case of ‘adult’ children, it seems to give the impression of empowerment for children who want to accelerate their growing up by entering the consumer and business culture of adults. In the case of ‘youthful’ adults, it might give the illusion of the prolongation of youth by consuming fashionable products.

Concluding remarks and future directions The present chapter aimed to chart the central topics and concerns related to the research on the mediatization of youth voices in the media genres of news and audiovisual fiction, by synthesizing key research findings and spotlighting major mediatization patterns. However, with the exception of some studies from the South African and Kenyan contexts, most research was drawn from a Western European context. Although this selective presentation reflects to a great extent the underresearch of other socio-cultural contexts in the relevant literature, it gives an inevitably partial picture of the ways youth voices are mediatized and raises the need for expanding the scope beyond Western settings in the future. Moreover, certain issues have remained untouched, which are also still under-researched in the relevant literature. Specifically, the division between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media was kept discrete, focusing on particular genres of the former. Nevertheless, their boundaries are increasingly becoming less clear and phenomena of transmediality are frequently observed. For example, old 457

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media, like TV series and commercials, are being uploaded to new media platforms, such as YouTube and hence, they become a material for new media uses (e.g., production of parodic videos, commenting by viewers etc.). Furthermore, TV programs are increasingly encouraging viewers’ active participation through social media during their live shows. Consequently, future research needs to address the ways old media intersect with new media and how the ones affect the other. Besides, a greater focus on the new media and on their interrelation with the old ones may at the same time draw a greater attention to the audiences and to how they engage with the mediatization of youth voices. In fact, there is lack of audience-oriented studies in the relevant research (for some notable exceptions, see the study of Wiese (2015) on the analysis of reactions to media reports on Kiezdeutsch, that is, a speech style spoken in German multilingual urban neighborhoods). Adopting an audience perspective would be particularly useful for humorous representations of youth voices, which are abundant in specific media genres, like audiovisual fiction, as they are ambiguous as to whether they recycle or subvert stereotypes (see Jonsson, Franzén and Milani, 2020; Milani et al., 2015). However, there is a need for broader approaches to audience or reception studies, which move away from traditional processes of ‘text decoding’ (Hall, 1973/1980) and encompass less static and text-centric views, such as how people take up media language fragments in their own linguistic practices, or how they embody mediatization patterns through other social practices. Finally, despite the broad conceptualization of style in post-variationist sociolinguistics, which is not restricted to language, and the multimodal character of audiovisual fiction, several scholars have criticized the language-centered approach generally employed in the sociolinguistic research on film and television fiction (e.g., Richardson, 2010; Stamou, 2014; 2018a). Consequently, another direction in need of further development is the closer engagement of the research on the mediatization of youth voices with other fields, like social semiotics and film/ television studies. Undoubtedly, young people are greatly disadvantaged and disempowered by adults’ control of the media. In light of this, research on the mediatization of youth voices can disclose the ways in which the media establish power relations that shape youth experiences (Giroux, 2000). Therefore, this research strand “is likely to say as much about adults as it does about young people” (Thurlow, 2007, p. 215).

Notes 1 Corresponding author: Anastasia G. Stamou, School of German, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124, Thessaloniki, Greece. Orcid: 0000-0002-3725-0068. 2 A well-known conceptualization of voice after Bakhtin (1981), which is not, however, utilized here, includes the different perspectives in the text (e.g., the author’s, the reader’s, the narrator’s and the characters’ voices in a novel). 3 Works of reference for the mediatization of language ideologies are the seminal study of Lippi-Green (1997) on the role of Disney films in ‘teaching’ children to discriminate against nonstandard speech styles and the contributions in the collected volume edited by Johnson and Milani (2010). 4 It is noteworthy that the media tend to homogenize young people (also) in terms of gender, either by not touching on gender issues at all, through the use of generic labels (e.g., see the study of Thurlow 2007), or by associating youth voices mostly with men (see also how Rinkebysvenska has been associated with young [immigrant] masculinity in the Swedish media, as found by Milani 2010 and Stroud 2004). 5 Except for the media, the very same analytical concepts selected by scholars to be used for the characterization of speech styles, such as ethnolect or youth language contribute further to their iconization as ‘ethnic’ or ‘youth’ (Jonsson, Årman and Milani, 2020; for the role of scholars in interplay with the media on the enregisterment of speech styles, see also Svendsen and Marzo, 2015).

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Further readings Milani, T.M., R. Jonsson and I.J. Mhlambi (2015). Shooting the subversive: When non normative linguistic practices go mainstream in the media. In J. Nortier and B.A. Svendsen (eds.), Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century (pp. 119–138). Cambridge University Press. Stamou, A.G. (2018). Sociolinguistics of fiction. Discourse, Context and Media, 23: 1–5. Thurlow, C. (2007). Fabricating youth: New-media discourse and the technologization of young people. In S. Johnson and A. Ensslin (eds.), Language in the Media (pp. 213–233). Continuum.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures, bold indicate tables in the text, and references following “n” refer to notes. Aarsand, P. 289–302 abyssal line 437, 442 action research 409 activism 121–131; decolonial theories 122–123; identity politics 130–131; linguistic citizenship and (see linguistic citizenship (LC)); see also online activism; protests; social media Actor Network Theory 290 Adjirakor, N. 142 adolescence/adolescents: linguistic innovation and 4–5; playful talk 221–231; see also preadolescent peer cultures adolescent peak 4 adult language 8, 237 advertisements: Sheng in 356–358, 456 affect 33–45; embodied 64–76; emotion vs. 34–38; grief and grievability 42–43; humour and (see humour); intersectional aspect 34; intersectionality 41–42; practice approach 38–41; sexual desire 43–44; stance/ stancetaking 64–76; see also preadolescent peer cultures affectio 35 affective: economy 42–43; practice 38–39, 45, 49–50, 51, 58; theory 49, 58 affect studies 49 affectus 35 affordances 303 African American Language (AAL) 167 African-American preadolescents 63–64 African Americans 163; cultural appropriation 169–170; linguistic appropriation 170; linguistic citizenship 166–170; racialized language ideologies 168–169



African American Vernacular English (AAVE) 167, 372 African National Congress (ANC) 153, 156, 157–158 African Union 154 African Youth Charter 151 Afro-Pessimism 122–123 Ag, A. 225 age xxii, 3, 4; concept 236–237; of criminal responsibility 51; linguistic innovation and 4–5 age-based representations 432 agency: critical youth studies 185, 186; empowerment 185–186; language policy and 181–186; power and 184, 185, 186; pure or uncontaminated 186; vs. structure construct 183–184 aggressive mock-fights 68–69 Agha, A. 20–21 Ahmed, S. 36, 42, 45, 49 Alcock, E. 442–443 Alim, S. 62–63, 164 anchorage 312 anchor children 445 Androutsopoulos, J. 208, 453 Angalia, J. F. 352 anger 38, 48, 50; as a negative affect 40, 75 anti-Black racism 123–129; inescapability 129; NBPOC and 124–126; personal experiences 124–129 anti-graffiti regimes 280 anti-languages 20 anti-racist activism: decolonial theories 122–123 Antwerp dialect 7 Anzaldúa, G. 80

463

Index apparent time method 4, 7 Arab uprisings 150 Årman, H. 137, 140, 179–190 Aronsson, K. 221, 224 Arpi, I. 129–130 arts-based language research methods 112 Auer, P. 21, 338 Australia: asylum-seeking children 443; detention policy 443; Islamophobia 443; racialised media representations 441; social exclusion 443–444; Sudanese and South Sudanese youths 441; young refugees 443–444 Australian Citizen Science Association 409 authentic speakers 126 autonomy 223 Aymara 267, 273, 274 backed vowels 6, 7 Baker-Bell, A. 168, 170 Bakhtin, M. 395 Barclays Bank 357 Barthes, R. 305, 311, 312 Batsleer, J. 385 Beatnuts 271, 272 Bell, N. 222 belonging: YouTube hip hop videos and 267 Bennett, L. 291 Berger, P. 428 Bergson, H. 35 Berlin 339 Bessant, J. 423–436 Better American Speech Week 167–168 Bhad Bhabie see Bregoli, D. (Bhad Bhabie) Bhattacharyya, G. 159 Billig, M. 8–9, 50, 56 Bizzyiam 267 Björk, N. 130 Black British identity: Multicultural London English (MLE) as 368–371, 372 Black British Vernacular 6, 322 Blackburn, M.V. 80–81, 84 BlackCoffee 129–130 Black Learning Achievement and Mental Health (BLAM) 371 Blackledge, A. 222 Black Lives Matter 124, 170 Black music genres: grime music 366–368; Multicultural London English (MLE) and 366–368, 372 Black Optimism 122–123, 128–129 Black radical tradition 159 Black women 41 Black youth: African Americans (see African Americans); peripheral 95–104 Blam (‘Shame, shame’) 256–257 Blommaert, J. 82, 251, 285 Blondeau, H. 8, 10

Boakye, J. 368, 370 boat children 443 Boberg, C. 319 Bolotnikova, M. 169 Bonifacio, R.M. 112 Bonney, R. 408 Bornholmian dialect 324–326 Bosnia 253–254; music in 256–258 Bourdieu, P. 180, 424, 427–428, 441; on capital 430–431; on representations 430–433 boys see preadolescent peer cultures Brazil: culture of survival in 95–104; inequities 95 Bregoli, D. (Bhad Bhabie) 170 Bristowe, A. 82, 143 Britain see United Kingdom British Black English 371 broadcasting media, Sheng in 351–353, 352 Brooks, N.A. 144–145 Brujeria 272 Bryan, K.C. 162–175 Bucholtz, M. 9, 82, 96, 184, 186, 205–206, 237–238 Bundy, C. 159 Bunk, O. 333–346, 336, 340 Burn, A. 304, 306 Burnett, S. 44 burnouts 5, 6, 7; see also jocks Butler, J. 42 Calazans, R. 95–98, 99, 100, 102–103, 104 Caldas, S.J. 223 Cameron, D. 43, 111, 185 Campos, R. 96 Canada: Chinese Canadian youth 441; racialised media discourse 441 Canagarajah, S. 225, 229, 258 capital: Bourdieu on 430–431, 432; competition for 431; cultural 431 Caron-Caldas, S. 223 Catalano, T. 443 category entitlement 127 Cekaite, A. 221 Chang, T.C. 282 childish humour 56–58 childish humour, among male inmates 56–58 child refugees: media representations 444 children: in language policy research 182; language preferences 223; multilingual families 223–224; playful talk (see playful talk) children overbroad affair 423 children with a youth voice 457 Child Stars 308–310 Chinese Canadian youth 441 Chinese youth 265 Chingo Bling 271–272 Chowdhury, R. 144 chronological age xxi, 236–237 Chun, E. 205, 215

464

Index Citétaal 6, 455, 456 citizen humanities 408 citizen observatories 409 Citizen Science Asia 409 citizen science (CS) 407–417; background and momentum 408–409; collaborative 409; contributory 409; global North bias 409; principles 409–410, 410; projects 408, 412–416; as scientific paradigm shift 409 Citizen Science Global Partnership 409 citizen social science 408 citizen (socio)linguistics 408, 411–417; defined 411; future efforts 416–417; landscaping 411; as metapragmatics of lay people 411; pragmatics 411; studies 411–412; youths as researchers 412–416; see also youth participatory action research (YPAR) CitSci Africa Association 409 civilised societies 425 civilising processes 425–426 Clark, C.T. 80–81 class 205, 206–208, 213, 215 climate change 392–403; conceptions of the future 399–400, 400; data collection, structuring and validation 394–395; evaluative expressions 395–396; lifestyle matters 396– 397, 401–402; politics 398–399, 401, 402; polyphony 395; semi-open survey 393–394; worriedness 399, 400, 400 climate crisis debate in British Parliament 388 climate politics 398–399, 401, 402 CLIMLIFE project 393 Clyne, M. 365 Cockney 364, 367, 369, 371 code(s) 21–22; mixed 21, 22 code-construction 17 codemeshing 19, 255 code-switching 21–22, 26, 255, 271–272, 290, 354, 407 Coffey, J. 184 cogito ergo sum (Descartes’motto) 34 cohort continuity model 7–8 collaborative research 416–417 collective representations 429 coloniality 437, 442 coloniality of being 437, 445 coloniality of language 138 commercial viability of graffiti 280 commodification of graffiti 281–282 commodity, youth as 456–457 communicative situations (com-sits) 335, 340; see also urban contact dialects (UCD) complex communication 139, 146 computer mediated communication (CMC) 11, 236; see also digitally mediated interaction (DMI) condom advertisements 357 Conference of the Parties (COP26) 388

Contemporary Urban Vernaculars (CUV) 208, 212, 213 contextual age see social age convergent signifier relation 311 Copenhagen University 11 co-research 412 co-researcher 182, 414, 417 Cost, D. 112 Coupland, N. 237 creative imagination 313, 314 creative space 146 Creese, A. 222 Crenshaw, K. 41 creoles 363–364 Cresswell, T. 281 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 37–38 Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) 437; decolonising 437–439; socio-cognitive approach to 442; southernising 437–439; theoretical attractors 438 critical legal studies (CLS) 164 Critical Race Theory (CRT) 164; themes and tenets 164, 165 Critical Youth Studies xxi–xxii Cru, J. 268, 273 Cui, D. 441 cultural capital: MLE as a type of 371–372 cultural progress 425 culture of bereavement 42–43 culture of survival 95–104; literacies 97–99; reading and enregistering 99–103; resisting stigmatising views 102–103 cultures: as commensurable 445; as hierarchically organised 445 Cushing, I. 206 Cutler, C. 263–276, 265, 267, 268, 269 Czaykowska-Higgins, E. 111 Dagens Nyheter 130 Dahl, T. 392–406 Dahlström, H. 304 decolonial perspectives; see also decolonial; decolonialty; theories of decoloniality deductive logic 427 De Korne, H. 108–120 De Fina, A. 225 Deleuze, G. 35 democratisation of: digital technologies 379; research 407, 417; science 410 Denisova, A. 266 Denmark: Bornholmian dialect 324–326; Northern Jutland 326–328; place-making and language 323–328; Southern Jutland 323–324 Deppeler, J. 441 Derrida, J. 98, 306, 444 de Saussure, F. 305 Descartes, R. 34

465

Index design, game 293–295 desire: sexual 43–44 de Sousa Santos, B. 146, 442, 446 Deumert, A. 150–162 developmentalism 425, 427; see also human development Dezuanni, M. 291 dialectology: place in 319–320; youth in 321–322; see also urban contact dialects (UCD) Differences in Student Outcome (HEFCE) 207 digital ethnography 110, 111 digital games/gaming 289–300; affinity spaces 291, 295, 297, 299, 300; metagame activities (see metagame activities); narrative approach 292–299; participation 289–291 digital language practices 237–245; families and 238–239; proofreading 240–242; spelling mistakes 242–243; typos 244; writing 240–245 digitally mediated interaction (DMI) 236 digital video composition/production 303–314; multimodal studies 304–305; semiotics 305–307; signifier-based discourse analyses 307–312; see also signifiers distinction 9; binary 34, 205; terminological 21–22 divergent signifier relation 310–311 Dixon-Smith, S. 205–218 Doerr-Stevens, C. 304 Dolls (digital video) 310–312 Domingo, M. 305 Donald, M. 424–425 Dovchin, S. 165, 251–262 Dr. Phil 170 Drummond, R. 365–366, 367, 368, 372 Ducrot, O. 395 Durkheim, E. 424, 429–430 The East African Standard 350 Eckert, P. 4, 5, 7, 11, 17, 62, 63, 64, 76, 227, 236–237 Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) 157–158; Vladimir Lenin Political Lecture 158 economic inequality in UK 207 Eder, D. 63, 64 education: higher education in UK (see United Kingdom); language diversity 179–187; Sheng in 350 educators: language endangerment and reclamation 116 Ekeroth, K. 43 Eksner, H.J. 440 El Cima 268 elderly life 8 El-Madhi, R. 155 embarrassment and humour 50 embodied performances of affect see stance/ stancetaking

emotion(s): affect vs. 34–38; passions as 34–35; priority of reason over 35; see also affect emotional investments 43–44 empowerment 185–186 endangered language research see language endangerment and reclamation England see United Kingdom English 140; as gay comfort zone 83–88; as gay lingua franca 88 English-language learning communities 79, 81–82 English mother-tongue communities 79, 80–81 Enlightenment 98, 425 enregisterment 16, 20–21, 102, 191; digital language practice 238; languaging 196–202; linguistic resources 196, 199; mediatization and 450; Multicultural London English (MLE) 362, 370, 371; productive power 197; raciolinguistic 213; schools and 195–202 entertainment, playfulness as 228–230; see also playful talk environmental activism 387–388 episteme 297–299; see also metagame activities Epstein, B.W. 79–91 Erastus, F.K. 347–361 erasure of graffiti 280–281 erotic attraction 43 Escott, H.F. 412 ethnically neutral variety: MLE as 368–369 ethnography 11, 110, 111 Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) 290 European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) 408, 409–410, 410, 413, 414 European civilisation: Enlightenment narrative of 425; evolutionary stories 425 Evaldsson, A.-C. 62–78, 63 evaluative expressions 395–396 Evans, C. 63, 64 evolutionary superiority of civilised people 425 exceptionalism 43 exit strategy 386 explicit polyphony 395 Extinction Rebellion (XR) 387–388 extreme citizen science 409; see also citizen science (CS) Facina, A. 97, 102 families: digital language practices and 238–239; playful talk 223–230 fanart 291, 292–299; design and 293–295; episteme and 297–299; stories and 295–296 Farina, F.G. 440–441 Farrugia, D. 184 favelas 97–98, 101 #FeesMustFall 144 feminist movement 121

466

Index Fernandez-Armesto, F. 425, 426 fiction 451 fictional characterization 451 fight, playful stylization of 66–70 Fine, G.A. 64 Fishman, J. 109, 224 fixity see linguistic fixity and fluidity flexible bilingualism 19 floating signifiers 307–308 Flores, N. 164 Fløttum, K. 392–406 fluidity see linguistic fixity and fluidity folk linguistics 408, 417 forbidden identities 51–54 Foucault, M. 180 fractal recursivity 208, 211, 452–453, 454 France: child refugees 444; political discourse 385–388 Franco, M. 33–34 Frankfurt School of Critical Theory 37 Franzén, A. 48–61, 51 Frazer, E. 111 Fridays for Future (FFF) 387, 392 fugitive listening 145–146 Fulwiler, M. 303–304 functional shift 358 funk music 96 Gafter, R.J. 43 Gaiser, L. 411 Gal, S. 208, 211, 252 games/gaming see digital games/gaming Garley, M. 263–276, 265, 268, 270–271, 273 Gates, S.M. 369, 371 Gathigia, M.N. 347–361 Gaybonics 80 gay labeling 64 Gee, J.P. 80 gemeinschaft social order 430 gender: humour and 50; peer language socialization and 63–64; stance/stancetaking 64–76 General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) 414 Generation Z 251 Germany: Kiezdeutsch (see Kiezdeutsch (German UCD)); Projekt Heroes 440; youth with immigrant background 440 Gettysburg Address (Lincoln) 166 ghetto schools 440 girls see preadolescent peer cultures GK (Norwegian media firm) 442 Glapka, E. 37–38 Global Climate Strike 387 Global Connectivity Report (ITU) 150 Global Justice Now 387 Global North 427 Global South 151, 438, 439

Glocer, R. 39 Goodchild, S. 407–420 Goffman, E. 50, 64–65, 67, 72 Goffman’s nice-guy theory 50 Gonzales, R.G. 442 Goodwin, C. 229 Goodwin, M.H. 62–63, 64, 72, 74 Gordon, C. 224 graffiti 277–285; commercial viability 280; commodification 281–282; erasure 280–281; genres 278; images and practices 278–279; media on 280–281; mobility 282–284; social media and 284; social mobility 279; as subcultural moment 278–279; suppression 279–281; train 283–284; unauthorized 280 Grayson, T.L. 163–175 Green Deal (European Commission) 383 green living or lifestyle 397–398, 401, 402 grief and grievability 42–43 grime music 366–368 Grosfoguel, R. 130 Guattari, F. 35 Habermas, J. 37, 38, 424 habitus 431 Hakib’al collective 114 Hall, G. S. 426 Hall, S. 206 Hambye, P. 9 happiness 40 Harvey, P. 111 hauntology 444 Heath, S. 101 hegemony: shaming and 40 Helmersson, E. 130 Hemingway, M. 170 Henry, B. 170 Herasimenka, A. 266 heteronormativity 40 heterosexuality 40 Higgins, C. 79, 89n3 Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) 207 higher education in UK 205–215; ethnic monitoring 207–208; language ideologies 208–209; policy discourse 206–207; race and class 206–208; raciolinguistic ideologies 209–214 high-school student 152, 393, 394, 403, 404 Hill, C. 265–266 hip hop music 263–274; identity construction 265–273; in Mongolia 258–260; YouTube 263, 264–274 Hip-Hop Nation Language (HHNL) 372 Hiratsuka, A. 224 Hirsch, A. 368, 369 Hirschman, A.O. 386

467

Index Hirtshals, Northern Jutland 326–328; see also Northern Jutland historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) 164 historical representations 424–425 Hjelmslev, L. 311, 312 Hlabangane, N. 154 homosociality 50 hope: as a motivational force 392; work of 97, 104 Hornberger, N.H. 109 Huckin, T. 443 Huerta-Cordova, V. 111 Hull, G. 306 human development: civilising processes 425–426; cultural progress 425; life-cycle 426; stadial concept 426–427 Human Development Index 97 humour 49–58; as affective practices 49–50; embarrassment and 50; gender and 50; incarcerated young men 51–58; interaction and 50; as normative 50; playfulness and 224; see also affect; laughter Hurst Harosh, E. xvii–xix hypermasculinity 48 Ibrahim, Y. 444 iconization 208, 452 identities: forbidden 51–54; hybrid 80, 81, 82, 83, 88, 349; intersectionality and 41–42; laughter and unlaughter 50 identity construction, YouTube hip hop videos and 265–273; indigeneity 267–268; local and vernacular languages 265; national identity 265–266; orthographic practices 269–270; place and belonging 267; political identities 265–266 identity politics 129–131 Ilbury, C. 212, 213, 336, 362–375, 364, 369, 372 illusion of symmetry 38 immanence 35 immigrant youth: voices as social deviance 456; Western media representations 439–445, 447 implication, signifier 311–312 implicit polyphony 395 implicit theory 7–8 incarcerated young men: childish humour 56–58; emotions 48–49; forbidden identities 51–54; humour 51–58; love and shame 54–56; prison studies 48–49 Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) 354 indexical field 7 indexical inversion 213 indexicality(ies) 44, 65, 76, 140, 141, 166, 208, 280, 362, 364, 371, 450 indexical order 208, 213–215

Indigenous communities 111, 112, 114 Indigenous languages 108; endangerment and reclamation 112–117; see also language endangerment and reclamation Indigenous youth and multilingualism (Wyman, McCarty and Nicholas) 110 inductive reasoning 427 institutional racism 207 Instituto Muldisciplinar of the Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro 100 interactional approaches to language 6–7 International Communication Union 150 intersectionality 41–42; as a heuristic 42 interviews 10–11 involved parenthood 239 Iraki, F.K.E. 353 Irvine, J.T. 208, 211, 452 Irwin, A. 408 Islamophobia 443 Israel: armed conflict with Palestine 42; culture of bereavement 42–43; exceptionalism 43; LGBTQ+ rights 42, 43; queer protests 40–41; Tel Aviv Pride 40–41 Italy: citizenship law 441; youth with immigrant background 440–441 Itkonen, E. 142 Iveson, K. 280 Jae-P 269 Jaffe, A. 66 James, A. 424 Jansen, K. 137–149 Jaspers, J. 7, 3–15, 19, 186, 194, 205, 222 Jeantel, R. 169 Jenkins, H. 151 jocks 5, 6; see also burnouts Johnsen, R.V. 221–234, 229 Johnson, B. 388 Johnson, L.P. 81 Jones, L. 81 Jonsson, R. xx–xxxiv, 48–61, 195, 208 Jørgensen, J.N. 18, 222, 225, 282, 285 Kaaps 141–142 Kariuki, A. 356, 456 Karlander, D. 277–288 Kasperowski, D. 409 Kebabnorsk (Kebab Norwegian) 442 Kędra, J. 238–239 Kenfield, Y.H. 114 Kenya: Constitution 349; election campaign 354–356; liberalisation of economy in 357; Sheng in (see Sheng) Kenya African National Union (KANU) 353 Kenya Commercial Bank 357 Kenya Publishers Association 350

468

Index Kerswill, P. 320, 322–323, 334, 336, 362–375, 364, 368–369 KFC advertisements in Sheng 357–358 Kichwa learners and speakers 113 Kiezdeutsch (German UCD) 333, 335; com-sits and 340; grammatical features 337–338; language mixing 339; multilingual practices 340; placemaking 340–341; societal attitudes 336–337; Turkish-based pattern 339 Kim Phuc 423 King, K.A. 109 Kiswahili 347, 348, 349, 350, 352, 353, 354, 357 Kroskrity, P.V. 166 Kulick, D. 43 Kvietok Dueñas, F. 112, 113 labeling: gay 64, 72–76; urban contact dialects (UCD) 334 Labov, W. 4, 5, 6, 10, 322, 364, 369 Lacan, J. 305–306 La Coka Nostra 272 Lakew, Y. 392 language: as agentive practice 80–81; attitudes 336, 349; as borderland discourse 80; codes and 21–22; enregisterment (see enregisterment); as a human right 349; perspectives 16–17; as a problem 348; as a resource 348–349; as a semiotic resource xxii, 63, 99, 103, 235, 306; as a sociolect or style 5–6; sociolinguistic approach to 4–7, 16–17 language activists 116–117 language change 4; Anglophone study of 4 language competence 226–230; manifesting authority 227–228; subverting age hierarchies 226–227 language contact theory 17–20 language endangerment and reclamation 108–117; educators and 116; future directions 115–117; Indigenous language 112–117; language activists 116–117; recommendations 115–117; research and methodology 109–112; researchers and 115–116; schools and 109–110 language ideologies 251; socialized self and 86–88 Language Landscape 411 language of pop culture 452 language policy 179–187; agency vs. structure construct 183–184; critical social theory 180; critical youth studies 179, 180, 181; empowering/empowerment 185–186; ethnography 180–181; youth agency and (see agency) language portrait 112 language preferences 223 language reclamation 109 language revitalization 108, 110, 268, 274

language socialization 63–64; as relational process 182 languaging: language contact studies 18; as ontological term for language use 19; school and (see school/schooling) Lascoumes, P. 386 Latin America: CDS 438, 439, 446; indigeneity and identity 267–268; Indigenous language endangerment and reclamation 112–115 Latin hip hop 270–273 Latinidad 270–273 Latour, B. 35 laughter 49–58; see also affect; humour Lazar, M.M. 438, 439 ‘Leave Sheng to Matatu Touts and Musicians’ (Ramani) 350 Le Bourhis, J.P. 386 Lee, J.W. 33–34 Leonard, W.Y. 109 Leone, A.R. 411 Leppänen, S. 267 Leppänen, V. 142 Letramentos em Direitos Humanos (Human Rights Literacies) 100 Levon, E. 39 LGBTQ+ 43; literature 80–81 lifestyle: climate change and 396–397, 401–402; youth as 457 Limachi, V. 111 Linderborg, Å. 130 Linell, P. 349 Lingscape (app) 411 Lingscape - Citizen science meets linguistic landscaping 411 LinguaSnapp 411 linguistic appropriation 170 linguistic anthropology 65, 451 linguistic citizenship (LC) 138–147; acts of 139, 140–141; concept 138–140, 166; fragments of language 142–144; speakers’ normative orientations 140–142; United States and 166–170 linguistic contact phenomena 5–6 linguistic ethnography 209 linguistic fetish 456 linguistic fixity and fluidity 16–26; language contact theory 17–20; polylanguaging 16, 21, 25–26; in practice 22–25; problematizing 19; transgressive linguistic practice 21; translanguaging 18–19 Linguistic Human Rights (LHR) 138–139 Linguistic Innovators 363 linguistic performances 222 linguistic racism 165–166 linguistic variables 10 literacies of survival 95, 97–99; see also culture of survival

469

Index Literary Baixada Network (LBN) 99–100 Liu, J. 265, 273 Lo, A. 205, 215 local languages: YouTube hip hop videos and 265 Lomeu Gomes, R. 437–449, 438–439 Loncle-Moriceau, P. 379–391 longue durée 151 Lopes, A. 95–107, 99, 100, 101 Los Angeles Times 442 love 40; as laughable affects among male inmates 54–56; see also romantic love and relationships Lovecraft, A.L. 112 loyalty strategy 387–388 Luanko 268, 273, 274 Luckmann, H. 428 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio 100 Mabandla, N. 150–162 Macaulay, L. 441 MacDonald, F. 443–444 Madsen, L.M. 9, 16–29, 19, 205, 208–209, 215, 265, 273 Maegaard, M. 319–332 Maikey, H. 40–41 Mäkilähde, A. 142 Maldonado-Torres, N. 445 male inmates see incarcerated young men man-child 444 Manifold, M.C. 291 manipulative silences 443 Man’s World 44 mantric poetics 159 marginality 137 Marikana Commission of Inquiry 155 Marikana Massacre in South Africa 154–156 marketing, Sheng in 356–358 Martin, T. 169 Marzo, S. 453 masculinity: affect/emotions 48–49, 51–58 (see also humour); hegemonic 48; heterosexual 64; prison studies 48–49; see also incarcerated young men Massey, D. 328 mass media 242, 335, 348, 352 Massumi, B. 35–37 Matras, Y. 411 Maus 34 Maxwele, C. 33 May, T. 388 McCarthy, C. 313 McCarty, T. 110 McLaren, H. 443 mediatization: defined 450; youth voices 452–457 Medina, J. 146

Meek, B. 110, 111 Meetmarket 44 Mendoza-Denton, N. 63, 205–206, 268, 273 metagame activities 290–291; design 293–295; episteme 297–299; narrative approach 292–299; stories 295–297 metapragmatic stereotypes 450 metonymy: concept 307; operation of 307–310 #metoo movement xxiii, 121 metrolingualism 19 Mexico: Indigenous youth revitalizing language 114–115; Intercultural Bilingual Education for Indigenous children 114 Middleton, K. 303–304 migration 437 Milani, T.M. 33–47, 39, 43, 44, 439, 453, 455, 457 millennials 251 Minecraft 289, 291–297; see also digital games/ gaming miners strike in Marikana 154–156; see also Marikana Massacre in South Africa Mitchell-McCollough, J. 443 mixed code 21, 22 mobile phones 456–457 mobility of graffiti 282–284 Møller, J.S. 191–204, 222 Mongolia 254; hip-hop in 258–260 monolingual habitus 192 Morgado, M. 266 Morgan, M. 63 ‘Morgue Freestyle’ (Shotty Horroh) 367–368 Moroccan Flavoured Dutch 6 Mortensen, K.K. 327 Moscovici, S. 424, 427–430; see also social representations motivation 413, 415 Mpendukana, S. 137–149 Mtaani Show (‘hood show’) 351 Mühlhoff, R. 35 Mukhudwana, R. 158 Multicultural British English (MBE) 366, 367–368, 372 Multicultural London English (MLE) 335–336, 362–373; as Black British identity 368–371, 372; Black music genres 366–368, 372; as cultural capital 371–372, 373; defined 362; diffusion 365–366; enregisterment 362; as group second-language acquisition 364; lexical features 369–370; as multiethnolect 362, 364–365; origins 362–364; recontextualisation 366–372; as slang 362; variety-based approach 369 Multicultural Paris French 6 multiethnic youth style 326 multiethnolect 322; Multicultural London English (MLE) as 362, 364–365

470

Index multilingual families: power dynamics within 223; social media 238–239; teasing and policing 225–228 multilingualism: urban contact dialects (UCD) 339–341 multilingual urban studies: place 320–321; youth 322–323 Multilingual Youth Practices in ComputerMediated Communication (Cutler and Røyneland) 267 multimodality: defined 304; digital video production (see digital video composition/production); semiotics and 305–307; see also signifiers multimodal storytelling 112 music: Bosnian 256–258; grime 366–368; Mongolian 258–260 Naija Boyz 267 narrative approach to digital picture making 292–299 Nash, J. 41–42 National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) 354 national identities, YouTube hip hop videos and 265–266 National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) 353 nationality 79, 192, 268 NBPOC (Non-Black People of Colour) 124–126 necropolitics 98, 104 Nelson, C.D. 82, 87–88, 89 Nelson, M. 306 neoliberal present 158 Nettskjema 414 Neveu, É. 386 Newman, J. 291 news 451 The New York Times 442 Nicholas, S. 110 Nofre, N. 96 Noki, M. 156 non-binary 83 non-mobile older rural male (NORM) 321–322 non-normative behaviours 40 non-request behaviour 386 Norgaard, S. 144 Nørreby, T.R. 8, 181, 239 Northern Jutland: place-making and language in 326–328 Norway: citizen science (CS) projects 412–416; climate and lifestyle 393–402 (see also climate change); Kebab Norwegian 442; as Nanny Stat 445; unaccompanied minors in 445; youth with immigrant background 441–442 Norwegian Citizen panel 402 Nuit Debout movement 387

Ochs, E. 65 Ojala, M. 392 On everyone’s mind and lips – German in Austria 411 online activism 121–129; anti-Black racism and 124–129; authentic speakers 126; claiming position 123–129; communities 121–122 ontogeny 426 Orwenjo, D.O. 347–361, 348 ‘Oslo says. Language in the city’ 412 Ossei-Owusu, S. 267 Pahl, K.H. 412 Palviainen, Å. 238–239 papo reto (straight talk) activist register 103, 104 Parker, S. 63 participation, digital games 289–291 participatory action research 110, 111–112 Partispace 384–385 passions 34–35; ethics and 35; rationality for 35 Passions of the Soul (Descartes) 34 Pat Boy 268 Patil, T.V. 443 Patler, C. 442 peer language socialization 63–64 Pennycook, A. 140, 224, 255 Pérez Aronsson, F. 121–133, 184 peripheral youths in Brazil 95–104; expressive cultures 96, 97; literacies of survival 95, 97–99; resisting stigmatising views 102–103; writing and reading 99–102 perpetual adolescence 457 petitionary protest 152 Phyak, P. 110, 181 phylogeny 426 Piaget, J. 426 Pickard, S. 379–391 pieces 278; see also graffiti Pietikäinen, S. 112 Piirainen-Marsh, A. 290 place/placemaking: dialectology 319–320; language and 323–328; multilingual urban studies 320–321; social meaning 321; urban contact dialects (UCD) 335, 339–341; YouTube hip hop videos and 267 playful stylization: aggressive mock-fights 68–69; comebacks and gay labeling 72–76; hypothetical fight 66–68; romantic love and relationship 70–72; sexual insulting 68–69 playful talk 221–231; affect 224; children and adolescents 222–223; concept 221–222; educational settings 222–223; as entertainment 228–230; families 223–230; multilingual families 223–224; teasing and policing 225–228 Plug TV Kenya 351

471

Index Pohle, M. 336, 340 political discourse 379–389; decision-making process 383–384; Do-It-Ourselves (DIO) politics 381; exit strategy 386; French and British cases 385–388; lifestyle politics 381–382; local level political engagement 384–385; loyalty strategy 387–388; overview 379–380; reactions to 382–383; Sheng in 353–356; voice strategy 386–387 political identities, YouTube hip hop videos and 265–266 political representations 424, 425 polylanguaging 16, 21, 25–26; defined 18; as a descriptive term 18, 19; translanguaging vs. 18 polymedia 236 polymedia repertoire 236 polyphony: concept 395; explicit 395; implicit 395 pop culture: language of 452 Poqo 153 post-variationist sociolinguistics 451–452 power relations 432 preadolescent peer cultures 62–76; aggressive mock-fights 68–69; comebacks and gay labeling 72–76; language socialization 63–64; romantic love and relationships 70–72; sexual insulting 68–69; staging hypothetical fights 65–68; stance/stancetaking 64–76 Preece, S. 205 Primavera Fascista 266 prison masculinities see incarcerated young men Projekt Heroes, Germany 440 proofreading: digital language practices 240–242 protest generation see millennials protests: and digital inequalities 151, 156; Marikana strike 154–156; overview 150–151; schools and universities 152–154; social media and 153, 154–159; Soweto uprising 152; violence 144–146 Prout, A. 424 Public Enemy 163 public outreach 409, 411, 413 public sphere: concept of 423–424; as controversial idea 424 Pugh, R. 349 Pumba 267 puritan discourse 455–456 Quebrando o Tabu (Breaking taboos) 100 Quechua learners and speakers 112–114 queer: defined 89n2; English-language learning communities 81–82; English mother-tongue communities 80–81; hybrid identities 82–88; language practices 79–80; protests 40–41; theory 79; youth and language practices 79–80, 82–83

Quijano, A. 127 Quist, P. 321, 328 Raby, R. 183, 185 race and class 205–216 “Rachel Jeantel’s Language is English – Just Not Your English” (Bolotnikova) 169 racial discrimination 41 racialisation 128–129 racialised youth 122 raciolinguistics/raciolinguistic ideologies 163, 164– 165; in UK higher education 106, 209–215 radical alternative media 159 radio broadcast in Sheng 351, 352–353 Rampton, B. 8, 23, 25, 50, 111, 205, 206, 222, 285, 369 Ranker, J. 303–315, 305, 311 Read, A.W. 285 reading: peripheral youths and 99–102; see also writing recontextualisation: defined 349; of Multicultural London English (MLE) 366–372; of Sheng 349–359; see also Sheng Rede Baixada Literária see Literary Baixada Network (LBN) relocalisation 254–255 Representational Theory of Mind 427 representations 423–434; Bourdieu on 430–433; collective 429; as historical 424–425; human development 425–427; Moscovici on 427–430; as political 424, 425; politics of 431–433; social 428–430; Western media (see Western media representations) researchers: language endangerment and reclamation and 115–116 research training 384, 413 Resende, V.M. 438, 439, 446 resistance identities 20 revolutionary youth radicalization 158 Rhodes, C. J. 33 #RhodesMustFall 153 Richardson, K. 111 Rinkebysvenska: ethnic otherness 456 Rio de Janeiro 95, 97 Road culture 372 roadman 213 Robbins, J. 97 Rogers, K.G. 163–175 romantic love and relationships: homosexual relationship 72–76; playful stylizations of 70–76 Romeo, K.E. 81 Rorty, R. 427 Rosa, J. 164, 165 Rousseff, D. 100 Roux, E. 152

472

Index Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) 208 Røyneland, U. 267 rural 319, 320, 352 Rymes, B. 411 safe spaces 121; anti-Blackness experiences 123–129; identity politics and 129–131 Saltidou, T.P. 454, 455, 456 Sankoff, G. 8, 10 Sarau V (poetry gathering) 97, 98–99 ScaPoLine 395 Schieffelin, B.B. 86 School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society (SKILLS) 186 school/schooling 191–202; ethnolinguistic assumption and 191–193; language endangerment and reclamation 109–110; languaging 193–202; as norm center 196– 202; translanguaging pedagogies 193–194 school strike 401 Schuster-Craig, J. 440 Scollon, R. 101 Scollon, S.B.K. 101 Se Acabo (Beatnuts) 271 Sebba, M. 270 second-order semiological systems 312 Seidman, G. 40 selective recognition 138 semiotics/semiotic resource 305–307; concept 306; signified 305–306, 308; signifiers (see signifiers) sex discrimination 41 sexual citizenship 84, 88, 89n5 sexual desire 43–44; intersections of social differences 44 sexual insulting 68–69 shame/shaming 40; as laughable affects among male inmates 54–56; open-ended question 402 Shembeteng 351, 354, 359n4 Sheng: in advertisements 356–358, 456; in broadcasting media 351–353; in education 350; as hybrid language 357; linguistic structure of 347; in marketing 356–358; overview 347–348; in political discourse 353–356; as a problem 348; recontextualisation of 349–359; social media and 350–351 Sheng Talk Kama Kawa (‘Sheng talk as usual’) 350–351 Shilliam, R. 207 Shotty Horroh 367–368 Shuman, A. 63 Shutup (Stormzy) 366–367 Sick Jacken 271, 272 signified or designated meaning 305–306, 308; see also signifiers

signifiers 305–312; contiguity 308; convergent 311; discourse analysis 307–312; divergent 310–311; fixing 311; floating 307–308; implication 311–312; operation of metonymy 307–310; solidarity 312 Silva, D.N. 33–34, 95–107 Simon, R. 64 single-axis analysis 41 Siroux, J.L. 9 Skapoulli, E. 82 Slaby, J. 35 slang 5, 6 smålänningar 43 Snell, J. 206 Sobukwe, R. 152 social age 237; see also chronological age social death 122 socialized self and language ideologies 86–88 social meaning of place 321 social meanings of linguistic varieties 7 social media: activism (see online activism); defined 236; graffiti and 284; language use and 237–238; multilingual families 238–239; protests and resistance 153, 154–159; Sheng and 350–351 social mobility of graffiti 279; see also mobility of graffiti social representations 428–430; constitutive power 429; relational approach 429; theory 4228 social risk: mediatization of youth as 455–456; puritan discourse 455–456 Socio-Cognitive Lab at the University of Oslo (UiO) 413, 414 sociolinguistic approach to language 4–7; age effect 4–5; interactional 6–7; variety 5–6 sociolinguistic change 7 sociolinguistics: of the good 97, 104; postvariationist 451–452; variationist 5, 10, 451 see also citizen (socio)linguistics sociology of knowledge 428 Söderberg, M.W. 392–393 SoMeFamily 240 South Africa: digital or internet access 151; linguistic citizenship 141–142; Marikana Massacre 154–156; Soweto uprising 152; violence of youth protest 144–146; see also protests Southern Jutland: Danish influence 324; placemaking and language in 323–324 Soweto uprising 152 spelling mistakes: digital language practices 242–243 Spiegelman, A. 34 Spinoza, B. 35, 38 Sredanovic, D. 440–441 Stæhr, A.C. 8, 235–248, 239, 265, 273 Stamou, A.G. 450–461, 454, 455, 456

473

Index stance/stancetaking 64–65; playful stylization 66–76 stancetaking in preadolescent peer cultures 62–76 Standard American English (SAE) 169 standard language 167, 168, 169, 337, 451 stories, metagame activities 295–297 Stormzy 366–367 storytelling 112 street language 9, 22, 24, 205, 326 ‘Street Sociology and Pavement Politics’ (Bundy) 159 Strom, M. 442–443 Strong, K. 267 Stroud, C. 137–149, 147n4, 166, 453, 455 stylization 25, 50; concept 65, 222; multilingual resources 225; playful (see playful stylization) stylized playacting see playful stylization suffering slot in anthropology 97 suppression of graffiti 279–281 survival culture see culture of survival Svahn, J. 63, 64 Svendsen, B.A. xx–xxxiv, 192, 329, 438–439, 453 Svenska Dagbladet 129–130 Svensson, T. 128 Swain, J. 64 Sweden: age of criminal responsibility 51; antiBlack racism 123–129; citizen science (CS) project 412; exceptionalism 43; far-right politicians 43; identity politics 129–131; Instagram posts 122–129; lifestyle issue of flying 393 Swinehart, K. 267 Switzer, L. 152 syntagm 306 tags 278; see also graffiti Tampa Affair of September 2001 423 Tankosić, A. 251–262 Tavares, J. 95, 98–99 teachers, language use among 192, 194 teasing 44, 50, 51, 54–56, 71, 73, 75, 222, 224, 225–228; language learning and 227–228; personal knowledge and 224 Tebaldi, C. 44 Tel Aviv Pride 40–41 television broadcast in Sheng 351–352 territorial stigmatisation 440 text messages, digital language practices and 240, 243 Thorne, B. 64 Thousand Plateaus (Massumi) 35 throw ups 278; see also graffiti Thunberg, G. 251, 387, 388, 392, 399, 403 Thurlow, C. 321, 328, 453, 454–455, 456 Timati 266 Tokolos Stensils 156

Torgersen, E. 364, 369 train graffiti 283–284 transcendental idealism 427 transformative identities 252, 254–261; pop artists 256–261; relocalisation 254–255 translanguaging: concept 18; pedagogies 193–194; as socially transforming linguistic practice 18–19 typos 244 UK Youth Climate Coalition (UKYCC) 387 Umkhonto we Sizwe 153 unauthorized graffiti 280 United Kingdom: climate crisis debate 388; economic inequality 207; environmental activism 387–388; language ideologies 208–209; media representation of child refugees in 444; political discourse 385–388; race and class 206–208; raciolinguistic ideologies 209–214; roadman 213 United Nations 151; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Conference of the Parties (COP26) 388 United States: Black youth (see African Americans); cultural and linguistic co-opting 169–170; immigrant policy process 442; Latin@ immigrants 442–443; linguistic citizenship in 166–170; migrant children 443; racialized language ideologies 168–169; undocumented youth 442 University College of Fort Hare 152–153 University of Cape Town (UCT) 33 urban contact dialects (UCD) 333–342; as analytical category 334; communicative situations (com-sits) 335, 340; context and types 337– 339; labelling 334; media representations 336; multilingualism 339–341; placemaking 335, 339–341; societal attitudes 336–337; as systematic options 334 usurpatory ventriloquism 433 van der Weerd, P. 3–15 van Dijk, T.A. 439, 443 van Niekerk, L. 137–149 variety approaches to language 5–6 variety-based approach 369 Vasudevan, L. 305 verb-third 338 vernacular language 6; YouTube hip hop videos and 265 Veronelli, G.A. 138 Vetter, A.M. 80 Vidal, M. 225 violence of youth protest 144–146 Virdee, S. 207 vocabulary 5

474

Index voice strategy 386–387 Vygotsky, L.S. 313 Wacquant, L.J.D. 440 Walkerdine, V. 427 Warin, P. 386 Weill, P.-E. 282 Werner, V. 452 Western media representations: child refugees 444; immigrant children 442–443; unaccompanied minors 445; urban youth 439–442; youth with immigrant background 437, 439–445 Western post-Enlightenment values 144–145 Westinen, E. 267 Wetherell, M. 37, 38–39, 40, 41, 45, 49, 75, 206 Wiese, H. 320, 322–323, 333–346, 334, 335, 336, 458 Williams, Q. 166 Williams, R. 291 Windle, J.A. 107, 444 Windrush generation 363 Woolard, K.A. 86 Wormbs, N. 392–393 Worrell, F. 441 worry: about climate change 400, 400 writing: digital language practices 240–245; peripheral youths and 99–102; see also reading Wyman, L.T. 110, 111

Yini isocialism 156–159 Ylänne-McEwan, V. 322 Young Lions 153, 156, 158 youth: as adolescence phase 3; agency (see agency); boundaries and essence 3; core 3; as a cultural phenomenon 96; cultural practices 4; defined 151; with immigrant background (see immigrant youth); language 205, 208– 209, 357, 358; as a shifter 96; sociolinguistic interest 4; studies xxi–xxii Youth League, South Africa 152–153 youth participatory action research (YPAR) 112, 417 youth politics 34 Youths Speak Back (YSB) 408, 412–416 youth voices, mediatization of 452–457; as commodity and lifestyle 456–457; as divergent 454; as incomplete adulthood 454–455; migrant 456; as social risk 455–456; as universal stage of life 453–454 YouTube: hip hop music videos 263, 264–274 (see also identity construction, YouTube hip hop videos and); Sheng content on 350–351 Yucatec Maya 268, 273, 274 Zimmerman, G. 168–169 Žižek, S. 145

475