The chapters in this section form a fascinating combination in describing how quite different types of speakers negotiate a radical uprooting of their self-understanding, sense of place, and belonging. From the Bosavi villagers struggling to redefine themselves in the face of religious colonization in Bambi Schieffelin’s chapter, to the elderly miners still honoring their local speech style long after the forces of deindustrialization atrophied their community in the chapter by Peter Auer and Leonie Cornips, to the isolated Japanese expatriate wives who are trying to (re)create some kind of connectedness in Anna Banaś’ chapter, in each of these analyses we see speakers maintaining ways of belonging in the face of serious adversity. Below I will first explain that ideas of language, place and belonging are strongly influenced by discourses of modernity, and that sociolinguists have been trying to go beyond the legacy of this master narrative, before addressing the linguistic ways in which the speakers discussed in these chapters set out to construct a sense of place, group, and belonging.
From the time we are small, senses of place organize and give meaning to our everyday activities. Little is known, however, about the role language plays in how people come to inhabit or lose a sense of place. Using the theoretical paradigm of language socialization to examine these processes (inclusion and emplacement, and exclusion and displacement), this chapter uses ethnographic and linguistic data from Bosavi (Papua New Guinea) to demonstrate how young children’s everyday verbal activities include place-naming, identification, and representation to index on-going activities and relationships, establishing strong affective connections to place. In contrast, Christian missionization, with its sense of space, changed local meanings of place, and the ways in which Bosavi speakers talked about it and each other.
In the late 1930s and 1940s, locally born children of immigrant coal miners in Tuinwijk, a neighborhood in the village of Eisden in Belgian Limburg, developed a way of speaking among themselves which they later labelled Cité Duits. Having become coal miners themselves, they continued to use Cité Duits as an in-group language throughout their lives when working underground as well as in their private lives. We will show that Cité Duits is a hybrid variety resulting from combining elements of German, Belgian Dutch and the Maasland dialect spoken in Belgian Limburg through focusing and sedimentation. We argue that Cité Duits developed and continues to be employed as a symbolic language for expressing group identity
This study examines the linguistic practices of a group of Japanese immigrant women temporarily living in Amstelveen, and their ways of constructing belonging. Taking as an example three linguistic variables: (i) personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘we’; (ii) specific ethnic labels (single self-referring label Nihonjin ‘The Japanese’ versus multiple labels Orandajin, Oranda no hito/hitotachi, Orandajin no hito/hitotachi, Oranda ‘The Dutch’); and (iii) the use of non-standard Osaka Japanese negation I discuss how speakers in this group (re)create various boundaries, and how they draw on ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy as a way of achieving group cohesion.
The three chapters in this section make a mutually informing set that is as intellectually rewarding as it is fun to read. They share a center-periphery analytic frame with other contributions in the volume, but they are distinguished as a set by their shared focus on what Sari Pietikäinen (2016) calls carnivalesque critique, quite literally in the Limburgian event that Lotte Thissen examines. In all of these cases, minoritized speakers use humor, parody, and/or ritualized spectacle to disrupt the center-periphery framework and to subvert peripheralization. In turn, the three cases differ from and complement each other by revealing varying techniques that actors in specific marginalized communities use to carry out such disruption. In the following sections of this commentary I will first examine some facets of the center-periphery theoretical framework that seem especially relevant to sociolinguistic work. I will then consider both the shared and the different techniques of humorous contestation that these papers illuminate.
This contribution analyses a case of carnival celebration in Maasniel, Limburg, the Netherlands, a village that was annexed as a neighborhood of the larger city of Roermond in 1959. During the event, the Dutch ritual of Sinterklaas was combined with the carnival celebration, resulting in a staged language conflict between Dutch and dialect. I argue that this language conflict was used by the actors on stage to engage in the politics of place-making and belonging. These politics express who and what practices are perceived as in and out of place during this particular carnival event. I show that the actors of the event, through Bakhtinian carnivalesque manners, centralize the carnival celebration, dialect use, and Maasniel while peripheralizing Sinterklaas celebration practices, the use of Dutch, and the city of Roermond. I argue that the eventual switch from Dutch to dialect may be considered as a way to resist and subvert dominant center-periphery ideas.
This contribution focusses on the languagecultural politics played out in performances of André Rieu, the World’s King of the Waltz. At stake are stereotypical oppositions made within the Netherlands between ‘the nation’s center’ (‘Holland’) and the ‘peripheral’ province of Limburg. During his concerts in the Limburgian capital Maastricht, Rieu’s hometown, Rieu negates the Hollanders-centered, taken-for-granted, perspective that foregrounds Standard Dutch and its speakers as the normative neutral. Presenting himself as a global-cum-local performer alternating local language with English, Rieu marginalizes Standard Dutch as irrelevant, in the Dutch language-scape usually the position of dialects. Rieu’s languagecultural political messages are persuasive because of his strategic, jocular use of various linguistic and cultural resources, all to highlight his belonging to Maastricht.
This chapter discusses linguistic strategies employed by the author of the Facebook page Koe ima po grad (What’s up in the town), who in his posts discusses various events and issues from local urban life of Leskovac, a city in Southeastern Serbia. Combining dialect with recognizable genres and discourses, he makes local idiom appropriate for use in diverse realms of communication, as well as an effective medium for place-making. Leskovac depicted in the Koe ima po grad texts is the place marked by deindustrialization, impoverishment, and the dysfunctional administration. Its citizens use dialect to critically and self-ironically relate to this reality. At the same time, they love their city and the local, real, and symbolic geographies that define it, and enjoy the sociality based on the use of local dialect.
In the chapter I argue that focus on place and place-making is crucial when trying to explain differences in language change in two municipalities situated in distinct Danish dialect areas, Vinderup in Western Jutland and Tinglev in Southern Jutland. Quantitative analyses of data from a real time panel study show different patterns of language change among the informants. In the early recordings, the language use in both municipalities contained substantial amounts of dialect features. The new recordings show that there has been a decrease in the use of dialect in Vinderup, whereas there has been a minor increase in Tinglev. Qualitative analyses point to how differences related to place-making processes affect the informants’ conceptualization of the perceived relations between language and place in the two municipalities. This affects the informants’ metalinguistic awareness and attitudes towards the local dialect which again may explain the different patterns of language change and dialect leveling.
This chapter presents an analysis of the sociolinguistic practice of giving places unofficial names, i.e. the practice of ‘alternative place naming’. The theoretical starting point is a discussion of ‘place’ as a topical challenge in sociolinguistics. While place as a holder of linguistic variation can be criticized and links between people, languages and places can be deconstructed as symbolic formations, strong ideologies of monolingualism and a place-people-language unity remain to dominate in society. The chapter studies this encounter between the national ideological construction of a mono-lingual society on the one hand and the practice based polylingual reality of young people on the other. Analyses of hip-hop and graffiti practices in Copenhagen, Denmark, suggest that alternative place naming may be a means of managing diversity in the context of a monolingualism ideology. Through the use of unofficial names, the young people create their own symbolic links between themselves, their places and languages.
This ethnography explores interpretive practices in the multimodal landscape of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a remote and rural region in the United States, to examine the role of tourism in discursive representations of identity. The study is distinct from other linguistic landscape research in that it investigates the role of commodified enregistered features in redefining cultural values about identity and its relationship to place in the periphery. The indexes communicated through enregistered features in signs, souvenirs, monuments, digital media, and news accounts lead to new and limited meanings. More significantly, as commodities, these contextualized features function not only to sell souvenirs, but also to sell the idea of a dialect, a sense of place, and a regional persona, but only because their meanings are recognizable, valued, and valuable. Their value lies in regenerated ideological schemas that have emerged from sociohistorical processes and events and related discursive practices. At the center of this intersection is tourism, which affects enregisterment and commodification, and the semiotic practices that link identity, and place.
The chapters in this section form a fascinating combination in describing how quite different types of speakers negotiate a radical uprooting of their self-understanding, sense of place, and belonging. From the Bosavi villagers struggling to redefine themselves in the face of religious colonization in Bambi Schieffelin’s chapter, to the elderly miners still honoring their local speech style long after the forces of deindustrialization atrophied their community in the chapter by Peter Auer and Leonie Cornips, to the isolated Japanese expatriate wives who are trying to (re)create some kind of connectedness in Anna Banaś’ chapter, in each of these analyses we see speakers maintaining ways of belonging in the face of serious adversity. Below I will first explain that ideas of language, place and belonging are strongly influenced by discourses of modernity, and that sociolinguists have been trying to go beyond the legacy of this master narrative, before addressing the linguistic ways in which the speakers discussed in these chapters set out to construct a sense of place, group, and belonging.
From the time we are small, senses of place organize and give meaning to our everyday activities. Little is known, however, about the role language plays in how people come to inhabit or lose a sense of place. Using the theoretical paradigm of language socialization to examine these processes (inclusion and emplacement, and exclusion and displacement), this chapter uses ethnographic and linguistic data from Bosavi (Papua New Guinea) to demonstrate how young children’s everyday verbal activities include place-naming, identification, and representation to index on-going activities and relationships, establishing strong affective connections to place. In contrast, Christian missionization, with its sense of space, changed local meanings of place, and the ways in which Bosavi speakers talked about it and each other.
In the late 1930s and 1940s, locally born children of immigrant coal miners in Tuinwijk, a neighborhood in the village of Eisden in Belgian Limburg, developed a way of speaking among themselves which they later labelled Cité Duits. Having become coal miners themselves, they continued to use Cité Duits as an in-group language throughout their lives when working underground as well as in their private lives. We will show that Cité Duits is a hybrid variety resulting from combining elements of German, Belgian Dutch and the Maasland dialect spoken in Belgian Limburg through focusing and sedimentation. We argue that Cité Duits developed and continues to be employed as a symbolic language for expressing group identity
This study examines the linguistic practices of a group of Japanese immigrant women temporarily living in Amstelveen, and their ways of constructing belonging. Taking as an example three linguistic variables: (i) personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘we’; (ii) specific ethnic labels (single self-referring label Nihonjin ‘The Japanese’ versus multiple labels Orandajin, Oranda no hito/hitotachi, Orandajin no hito/hitotachi, Oranda ‘The Dutch’); and (iii) the use of non-standard Osaka Japanese negation I discuss how speakers in this group (re)create various boundaries, and how they draw on ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy as a way of achieving group cohesion.
The three chapters in this section make a mutually informing set that is as intellectually rewarding as it is fun to read. They share a center-periphery analytic frame with other contributions in the volume, but they are distinguished as a set by their shared focus on what Sari Pietikäinen (2016) calls carnivalesque critique, quite literally in the Limburgian event that Lotte Thissen examines. In all of these cases, minoritized speakers use humor, parody, and/or ritualized spectacle to disrupt the center-periphery framework and to subvert peripheralization. In turn, the three cases differ from and complement each other by revealing varying techniques that actors in specific marginalized communities use to carry out such disruption. In the following sections of this commentary I will first examine some facets of the center-periphery theoretical framework that seem especially relevant to sociolinguistic work. I will then consider both the shared and the different techniques of humorous contestation that these papers illuminate.
This contribution analyses a case of carnival celebration in Maasniel, Limburg, the Netherlands, a village that was annexed as a neighborhood of the larger city of Roermond in 1959. During the event, the Dutch ritual of Sinterklaas was combined with the carnival celebration, resulting in a staged language conflict between Dutch and dialect. I argue that this language conflict was used by the actors on stage to engage in the politics of place-making and belonging. These politics express who and what practices are perceived as in and out of place during this particular carnival event. I show that the actors of the event, through Bakhtinian carnivalesque manners, centralize the carnival celebration, dialect use, and Maasniel while peripheralizing Sinterklaas celebration practices, the use of Dutch, and the city of Roermond. I argue that the eventual switch from Dutch to dialect may be considered as a way to resist and subvert dominant center-periphery ideas.
This contribution focusses on the languagecultural politics played out in performances of André Rieu, the World’s King of the Waltz. At stake are stereotypical oppositions made within the Netherlands between ‘the nation’s center’ (‘Holland’) and the ‘peripheral’ province of Limburg. During his concerts in the Limburgian capital Maastricht, Rieu’s hometown, Rieu negates the Hollanders-centered, taken-for-granted, perspective that foregrounds Standard Dutch and its speakers as the normative neutral. Presenting himself as a global-cum-local performer alternating local language with English, Rieu marginalizes Standard Dutch as irrelevant, in the Dutch language-scape usually the position of dialects. Rieu’s languagecultural political messages are persuasive because of his strategic, jocular use of various linguistic and cultural resources, all to highlight his belonging to Maastricht.
This chapter discusses linguistic strategies employed by the author of the Facebook page Koe ima po grad (What’s up in the town), who in his posts discusses various events and issues from local urban life of Leskovac, a city in Southeastern Serbia. Combining dialect with recognizable genres and discourses, he makes local idiom appropriate for use in diverse realms of communication, as well as an effective medium for place-making. Leskovac depicted in the Koe ima po grad texts is the place marked by deindustrialization, impoverishment, and the dysfunctional administration. Its citizens use dialect to critically and self-ironically relate to this reality. At the same time, they love their city and the local, real, and symbolic geographies that define it, and enjoy the sociality based on the use of local dialect.
In the chapter I argue that focus on place and place-making is crucial when trying to explain differences in language change in two municipalities situated in distinct Danish dialect areas, Vinderup in Western Jutland and Tinglev in Southern Jutland. Quantitative analyses of data from a real time panel study show different patterns of language change among the informants. In the early recordings, the language use in both municipalities contained substantial amounts of dialect features. The new recordings show that there has been a decrease in the use of dialect in Vinderup, whereas there has been a minor increase in Tinglev. Qualitative analyses point to how differences related to place-making processes affect the informants’ conceptualization of the perceived relations between language and place in the two municipalities. This affects the informants’ metalinguistic awareness and attitudes towards the local dialect which again may explain the different patterns of language change and dialect leveling.
This chapter presents an analysis of the sociolinguistic practice of giving places unofficial names, i.e. the practice of ‘alternative place naming’. The theoretical starting point is a discussion of ‘place’ as a topical challenge in sociolinguistics. While place as a holder of linguistic variation can be criticized and links between people, languages and places can be deconstructed as symbolic formations, strong ideologies of monolingualism and a place-people-language unity remain to dominate in society. The chapter studies this encounter between the national ideological construction of a mono-lingual society on the one hand and the practice based polylingual reality of young people on the other. Analyses of hip-hop and graffiti practices in Copenhagen, Denmark, suggest that alternative place naming may be a means of managing diversity in the context of a monolingualism ideology. Through the use of unofficial names, the young people create their own symbolic links between themselves, their places and languages.
This ethnography explores interpretive practices in the multimodal landscape of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a remote and rural region in the United States, to examine the role of tourism in discursive representations of identity. The study is distinct from other linguistic landscape research in that it investigates the role of commodified enregistered features in redefining cultural values about identity and its relationship to place in the periphery. The indexes communicated through enregistered features in signs, souvenirs, monuments, digital media, and news accounts lead to new and limited meanings. More significantly, as commodities, these contextualized features function not only to sell souvenirs, but also to sell the idea of a dialect, a sense of place, and a regional persona, but only because their meanings are recognizable, valued, and valuable. Their value lies in regenerated ideological schemas that have emerged from sociohistorical processes and events and related discursive practices. At the center of this intersection is tourism, which affects enregisterment and commodification, and the semiotic practices that link identity, and place.