Russian and English as Socially Meaningful Resources for Mixed Speech Styles of Lithuanians

Abstract

Russian and English are the two principal non-native resources Lithuanians draw on for a variety of purposes. The focus of this chapter is on informal speech mixing including various elements from Russian (RU) and English (EN) in an otherwise Lithuanian text. We investigate adolescents’ daily interactions with peers and adults’ social networking on Facebook and explore the indexical field of the social meanings of mixed speech styles. Among the universal indices our informants construct via stance taking, show-offish performance and voicing of different personae are ‘in-groupness’, ‘creativity’ and ‘playfulness’. The social meanings ‘toughness’ and ‘masculinity’ are assigned to particular RU resources whereas critical stylization of ‘Westernness’ and ‘Russianness’ exploits both metalinguistic awareness and contrastive use of EN and RU. Local identity work appears closely connected to global ideological processes and geopolitical identifications of the community; therefore, the study may offer a comparative perspective of mixed speech styles in other Eastern European settings.