Sender Dovchin, Alastair Pennycook, & Shaila Sultana, Popular culture, voice and linguistic diversity: Young adults on- and offline. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. Pp. xxi, 222. Hb. 103,99 €.

Abstract

In the last few years, sociolinguistics has expanded its theoretical vocabulary and methodologies to account for the dynamics of multilingualism, local cultural practices such as popular culture, and the performance of voice and linguistic diversity. We have had to do so to account for a world that is increasingly defined by global flows and frictions, a world that is now revealing the dynamic and often unequal ways multilingual speakers can and are allowed to access linguistic and nonlinguistic resources in online and offline spaces. For the authors of Popular culture, voice and linguistic diversity, this is uniquely true for multilingual speakers in the global South. Dovchin, Pennycook, & Sultana take up many of the positions and arguments initiated in the sociolinguistics of popular culture and globalization initiated by Pennycook and Jan Blommaert, respectively. What is significant about this book is that we see a solid attempt to advance many of the ideas and theoretical suggestions made by Pennycook (2007). In fact, the reader will discover in this book that the data on translinguistics—in both online and offline contexts—is doing a great service of documenting the multilingual practices of young adults in Mongolia and Bangladesh. The authors’ argument, a familiar one by now, is that the online and offlineworld are ‘intertwining’ and are ‘as real as anything else’ because technology is nowmore than ever a necessary feature of everyday life. But so is popular culture—an important aspect of young adults’ daily communication activities that involve almost always the mixing and mashing up of languages, and the uptake of linguistic and nonlinguistic resources. This is not unique to Asian peripheral practices, as the authors (to their credit) point out—that is, cultural and linguistic mixing of resources can be found in the smallest to the largest of places (urban/rural) around the world. Nevertheless, what the reader will find unique and novel in this book is that young adults in the Asian periphery identify with certain translinguistic practices that provide further proof that translinguistic practices are not static or cannot