Cover not available
Article published In:
Anxiety, Insecurity, and Border Crossing: Language Contact in a Globalizing World
Edited by Mie Hiramoto and Joseph Sung-Yul Park
[Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 24:2] 2014
► pp. 261–273

Hypersubjectivity

Language, anxiety, and indexical dissonance in globalization

| University of Colorado
This commentary responds to papers in a special issue on “Anxiety, Insecurity, and Border Crossing: Language Contact in a Globalizing World.” The discussion considers how anxiety emerges as transnational subjects seek semiotic stability in the global economy’s shifting terrain of indexical relations. Although contact zones informed by neoliberalism valorize linguistic flexibility, they also hierarchize certain kinds of communicative competence as more flexible than others. When linguistic practice is divorced from its temporal and spatial roots, it is readily essentialized as indexical of particular kinds of personhood, only some of which are viewed as appropriately global. The ambiguity of what counts as linguistic capital in the global economy leads speakers to defend their behaviors through appeals to authenticity, often confirming the very ideology that positions them as linguistically inflexible.
Keywords: communicative competence, globalization, anxiety, language, linguistic flexibility, identity, indexicality, subjectivity, superdiversity, linguistic insecurity, neoliberalism, zombie categories, transnationalism
Published online: 22 December 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.24.2.06hal
References (43)
Alsagoff, L. (2010). English in Singapore: Culture, capital, and identity in linguistic variation. World Englishes 29(3):336–348. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
. (2006). Liquid times: Living in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Beck, U., & Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002). Individualization. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Beck, U., Bonss, W., & Lau, C. (2003). The theory of reflexive modernization: Problematic, hypotheses, and research programme. Theory Culture Society, 20(2), 1–33. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Besnier, N. (2013). Language on the edge of the global: Communicative competence, agency, and the complexity of the local. Language & Communication, 33(4), 463–471. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, J., & Rampton, B. (2011). Language and superdiversity. Diversities, 13(2), 1–21.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, M. (forthcoming). The elements of style. In A. Mahboob, D.N. Djenar, & K. Cruickshank (Eds.), Language and identity across modes of communication. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logo
Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2004). Theorizing identity in language and sexuality research. Language in Society, 33(4), 501–547. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4-5), 585–614. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2008). Finding identity: Theory and data. Multilingua, 27(1-2), 151–163. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cameron, D. (2005). Communication and commodification: Global economic change in sociolinguistic perspective. In G. Erreygers & G. Jacobs (Eds.), Language, communication, and the economy (pp. 9–24). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Canagarajah, S. (2007). After disinvention: Possibilities for communication, community, and competence. In S. Makoni & A. Pennycook (Eds.), Disinventing and reconstituting languages (pp. 233–239). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Castells, M. (2009). The power of identity: The information age. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coupland, N. (2007). Style: Language variation and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cazden, C.B. (2011). Dell Hymes’s construct of “communicative competence.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 42(4), 364–369. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Comaroff, J.L., & Comaroff, J. (2009). Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: Chicago University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Eckert, P., & McConnell-Ginet, S. (1992). Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community-based practice. Annual Review of Anthropology, 211, 461–490. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hall, K. (2005). Intertextual sexuality: Parodies of class, identity, and desire in liminal Delhi. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 125–144. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2009). Boys’ talk: Hindi, moustaches, and masculinity in New Delhi. In P. Pichler & E. Eppler (Eds.), Gender and spoken interaction (pp.139–162). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2013). “It’s a Hijra!” Queer linguistics revisited. Discourse & Society, 25(5), 634–642. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hall, K., & Nilep, C. (forthcoming). Code switching, identity, and globalization. In D. Tannen, H. Hamilton, & D. Schiffrin (Eds.), Handbook of discourse analysis, 2nd edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(4), 473–492. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2010). The commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 391, 101–114. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hiramoto, M. (2014). Inked nostalgia: Displaying identity through tattoos as Hawaii local practice. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hymes, D. (2001[1967]). On communicative competence. In A. Duranti (Ed.), Linguistic anthropology: A reader (pp. 53–73). Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Jaffe, A. (2000). Comic performance and the articulation of hybrid identity. Pragmatics, 10(1), 39–60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2013). Minority language learning and communicative competence: Models of identity and participation in Corsican adult language courses. Language & Communication, 33(4), 450–462. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kataoka, K., Ikeda, K., & Besnier, N. (2013). Special issue on “Decentering and recentering communicative competence.” Language & Communication, 33(4), 345–350. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kramsch, C., & Whiteside, A. (2008). Language ecology in multilingual settings: Towards a theory of symbolic competence. Applied Linguistics, 29(4), 645–671. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, W. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Lo, A., & Kim, J.C. (2012). Linguistic competency and citizenship: Contrasting portraits of multilingualism in the South Korean popular media. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16(2), 255–276. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Makoni, S., & Pennycook, A. (2007). Disinventing and reconstituting languages. Disinventing and reconstituting languages (pp.1–40). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Park, J.S.-Y. (2010). Naturalization of competence and the neoliberal subject: Success stories of English language learning in the Korean conservative press. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 20(1), 22–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pratt, M.L. (1987). Linguistic utopias. In N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant & C. MacCabe, (Eds.), The linguistics of writing: Arguments between language and literature (pp.48–66). Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Rampton, B. (1998). Speech community. In J. Verschueren, J.-O. Östman, J. Blommaert, & C. Bulcaen (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics (pp.1–34). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (1999). Deutsch in inner London and the animation of an instructed foreign language. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3(4), 480–504. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, M. (1998). Contemporary transformations of local linguistic communities. Annual Review of Anthropology, 271, 401–426. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Urciuoli, B. (2008). Skills and selves in the new workplace. American Ethnologist, 35(2), 211–228. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Woolard, K. (1998). Simultaneity and bivalency as strategies in bilingualism. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 8 (1), 3–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (21)

Cited by 21 other publications

Shi, Yu (Aimee)
2024. Discursive formation of personalities: life trajectories of a transnational doctoral student between the UK and China. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2024:285 ► pp. 111 ff. DOI logo
Al-Alawi, Wafa
2023. English at the center of the periphery: ‘Chicken nuggets’, chronotopes, and scaling English in Bahraini youth. Language in Society 52:4 ► pp. 645 ff. DOI logo
Licata, Gabriella, Tasha Austin & Aris Moreno Clemons
2023. Raciolinguistics and Spanish language teaching in the USA: from theoretical approaches to teaching practices. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching 10:2 ► pp. 121 ff. DOI logo
Narayanan, Sandhya Krittika
2023. gender of language contact. Gender and Language 17:2 ► pp. 125 ff. DOI logo
Tsiola, Anna
2023. Social actors in the Singaporean LL. Linguistic Landscape. An international journal 9:1 ► pp. 59 ff. DOI logo
Ghandchi, Narges
2022. “We Explain”: Interaction and Becoming a Family in Migration. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 32:3 ► pp. 520 ff. DOI logo
Karimzad, Farzad & Lydia Catedral
2022. Chronotopic resolution, embodied subjectivity, and collective learning. Language, Culture and Society 4:2 ► pp. 189 ff. DOI logo
Papuc, Oana Teodora
2022. Exploring Liminal Aesthetics: the “Glitchy and Decayed” Worlds of Vaporwave, Semiotic Assemblages, and Internet Linguistics. Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia 67:4 ► pp. 165 ff. DOI logo
Singh, Jaspal Naveel
2021. Overstandin: Upscaling reading positions and rescaling texts/signs. Applied Linguistics Review 12:3 ► pp. 445 ff. DOI logo
Yip, Vivian & Lydia Catedral
2021. Perceiving (non)standardness and the indexicality of new immigrant Cantonese in Hong Kong. Language & Communication 79 ► pp. 81 ff. DOI logo
Hall, Kira
2019. Middle class timelines: Ethnic humor and sexual modernity in Delhi. Language in Society 48:4 ► pp. 491 ff. DOI logo
Hall, Kira
2021. Language in the middle: Class and sexuality on the Hinglish continuum. Journal of Sociolinguistics 25:3 ► pp. 303 ff. DOI logo
Sanei, Taraneh
2019. Investigating Multilingual Identities and Ideologies among Iranian Communities in Contexts of Mobility. In The Sociolinguistics of Iran’s Languages at Home and Abroad, ► pp. 225 ff. DOI logo
Sanei, Taraneh
2022. Globalization, linguistic markets, and nuanced identity performances: Farsi-English code-switching in Iran. International Multilingual Research Journal 16:2 ► pp. 163 ff. DOI logo
Sanei, Taraneh
2022. Normativity, power, and agency: On the chronotopic organization of orthographic conventions on social media. Language in Society 51:3 ► pp. 453 ff. DOI logo
Catedral, Lydia
2018. Discursive scaling: Moral stability and neoliberal dominance in the narratives of transnational migrant women. Discourse & Society 29:1 ► pp. 23 ff. DOI logo
Karimzad, Farzad
2016. Life here beyond now: Chronotopes of the ideal life among Iranian transnationals. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20:5 ► pp. 607 ff. DOI logo
Karimzad, Farzad
2019. Mobility, Identity, and Complexity: Iranian Azerbaijanis in the U.S.. In The Sociolinguistics of Iran’s Languages at Home and Abroad, ► pp. 251 ff. DOI logo
Karimzad, Farzad
2020. Metapragmatics of normalcy: Mobility, context, and language choice. Language & Communication 70 ► pp. 107 ff. DOI logo
Hall, Kira & Chad Nilep
2015. Code‐Switching, Identity, and Globalization. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ► pp. 597 ff. DOI logo
Hiramoto, Mie
2015. Who’s really normal?. Journal of Language and Sexuality 4:2 ► pp. 183 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.