Alexandra Jaffe

Defining the new speaker: theoretical perspectives and learner trajectories

Abstract This article addresses the concept of the new speaker from both a theoretical/definitional perspective and from the standpoint of a situated, ethnographic analysis. The more general and theoretical focus addresses some of the presuppositions and entailments of the new speaker concept, both as an “on-the-ground” concept that gets operationalized by social actors and as an analytical category used by researchers. In particular, it considers how the new speaker concept elucidates criteria in relation to which minority language-speaking communities of practice are conceptualized and enacted. The ethnographic focus, on Corsican adult language classrooms, explores how new-speakerness is invoked implicitly in Corsica, where the term “new speaker” itself is not in circulation, but is a target of language planning strategies. This ethnographic research reveals complex identity and language ideological issues that are raised about the legitimacy, authority and authenticity of Corsican language learners in a sociolinguistic context in which both formal/institutional and informal/social use of the minority language is quite restricted.

Sociolinguistics from the Periphery: Small Languages in New Circumstances

In Saariselkä, a centre for Lapland tourism in northern Finland, a longstanding hotel has branded its new conference facilities and accommodation block with the Northern Sámi word Gielas, which refers to the geographical location of the resort. This is the first time that a Sámi word has been used in this tourist context to brand a hotel. On the island of Corsica, vendors sell plain black and white T-shirts adorned only with the Corsican language name of a local brand, Bianc’è Neru (‘black and white’). The Corsican language brand is presented in an unexplained, minimalist way, in the style of a global brand such as Hollister or Ralph Lauren. Meanwhile, in Ireland, a thriving web-based enterprise markets T-shirts printed with Irish language slogans such as ‘Luke, is mise d’athair’, a direct translation of ‘Luke, I am your father’, the catchphrase of Darth Vader from Star Wars, the global media phenomenon. And, finally, to round up our anecdotes, we come to Wales, where a brand of organic, artisan potato crisps uses Welsh-language-branded sea salt, Halen Môn, to complete a distinctive and exclusive brand identity. These four small-scale, local branding activities exemplify the kinds of shifts that brought us to the writing of this book. To the four of us, working in different sociolinguistic contexts, phenomena such as these seemed increasingly to represent a growing and more widespread trend, a new moment for what we call ‘small languages’. That is, while the commercial use of these languages is not a new phenomenon, the particulars of their use in these examples – ranging from playful appropriation of mainstream and even global iconography (Irish) to discreet normalisation (Corsican) to indexing high-end or luxury products by recontextualising ‘old’ and traditional places and values (Sámi, Welsh) – are novel, reflecting both new sociolinguistic developments and an increasingly reflexive stance towards language and culture. Further, it seemed to us that this new moment might represent not just an interesting trend in the use of small languages in peripheral spaces but one that was also illustrative of much broader sociolinguistic shifts whose significance may extend beyond these immediate contexts and indeed beyond the field of minority language sociolinguistics.

Staging language on Corsica: Stance, improvisation, play, and heteroglossia

This article uses the concept of stance to examine a series of activities and plurilingual heteroglossic performances and improvisations in a Corsican language-planning event. It focuses on how stances taken by performers attribute stances to the audience, as well as how stance objects (language, community, heritage) are construed in performance. This analysis is used to examine how these language-planning events mediate ideological tensions in Corsican language planning, specifically between traditional monolingual/purist ideologies and plurilingual, polynomic ones. (Stance, Corsica, performance, ideology, heteroglossia) *

Introduction: Heteroglossia, performance, power, and participation

In this special issue, we1 build on Bauman’s seminal observation about performance, that ‘the act of expression is put on display, objectified, marked out to a degree from its discursive surrounding and opened up to interpretive scrutiny and evaluation by an audience’ (2000:1). More recently, scholars have moved to examining the performative role of heteroglossia, that is, the use of multiply sourced, semiotic (verbal and nonverbal) forms.2 In particular, this line of research has shown how attention to heteroglossic performances and their local interpretations can illuminate the subtle politics of dominant and nondominant identities in different ethnographic contexts. This is particularly true of what Coupland (2007) calls ‘high performances’, which, as Bell & Gibson (2011:558) write, are privileged sites for allowing participants to indexically associate expressive forms with social personae. Thus, while all performances are inherently reflexive, heteroglossic performances particularly amplify that reflexivity with respect to their multiple frames, voices, and stances that they presuppose and establish. The articles in this special issue thus investigate the diversity of heteroglossic resources, associated processes of social identification, participation frameworks, and political implications at stake in performance. The articles examine how performers evoke, stage and implicitly evaluate recognizable voices from the larger social world, and how audiences respond to and display their recognition of performers’ aesthetically and politically charged stagings of those voices. As a collection, the articles then also explore how people use sets of semiotic resources to gradiently challenge and/or reinscribe normative ideologies and locally recognized, hierarchically organized identity categories.

Indexicality, stance and fields in sociolinguistics

In the recent history of the field of sociolinguistics, the concept of indexicality has been a productive lens for a central disciplinary focus on conventional/stereotypical relationships between linguistic forms and social meanings. These conventionalized associations have been the basis for studies of a wide range of communicative practices, where they are building blocks or resources in performance and stance-taking and components of styles or registers. They also underpin many critical sociolinguistic projects focused on the social evaluation of communicative practice and its social, political, and ideological implications. Indexicality has also been central to the understanding of linguistic practice as context-sensitive and context-creating (see Kiesling 2009: 177) and the companion perspective on meaning as both conventional and emergent . In this chapter, I review these principles with an emphasis on processes of indexicalization : how indexical meanings accrue to particular forms, how indexicals at one level (or “order”) are projected onto subsequent orders (Silverstein 2003), and how indexicals are organized into fields (Eckert 2008). I argue that taken together, these approaches constitute a motivated, empirically grounded framework for documenting and understanding sociolinguistic continuity and change. In this examination of processes of indexicalization, I join many other scholars in focusing on ideology. I make a modest effort to expand this conversation by drawing attention to the sometimes implicit ways in which analyses of indexicality and indexicalization in sociolinguistic analyses have been framed in relation to iconicity and iconization. In doing so, I treat Peirces famous trichotomy of sign modalities into symbol, index, and icon according to the relationship between the sign and what it stands for (its “object”) not just as a typology but as itself a set of dynamic relationships that frame the production and interpretation of meaning. The distinction that Peirce formalized between indexes and icons revolves around the degree to which particular signs are treated as “fused” with their objects. Indexes have a relationship of contiguity (pointing/association) with what they stand for; icons have relationship of formal (“natural”) similarity or resemblance; icons are thus more “fused” with their objects than indexes. Much sociolinguistic work on processes of indexicalization has focused on the way in which indexical associations come to be conventional, potentially so conventional as to undergo iconization as “styles” (Coupland 2007), “persona styles” (Coupland 2002; Eckert 2008: 456), or “registers” (Agha 2007).

Differentiated eliteness: socialization for academic leadership

ABSTRACT This article examines how different forms of eliteness are reflected and produced in discursive practices in texts and participant testimonials published on two websites describing American university leadership development programs. It emphasizes the way that these practices operate to thematize and differentiate forms of eliteness (academic vs. administrative) that have a long tradition of being represented as antithetical forms of knowledge, expertise and ways of life, and to socialize participants with claims to one kind of eliteness to another. Through the examination of the use of titles, characterizations of program participants as pedagogical subjects, narratives of personal transformation and “skills discourses” [Urciuoli, B. 2008. “Skills and Selves in the New Workplace.” American Ethnologist 35 (2): 211–228.], the analysis shows how discourse is implicated in the production and reproduction of neoliberal subjects and perspectives on institutional functions and roles.

Small languages in new circumstances

This leading team of scholars presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users. The authors refer to this network of interlinked changes as the new conditions surrounding small languages (Sámi, Corsican, Irish and Welsh) in peripheral sites. Starting from the conviction that peripheral sites can and should inform the sociolinguistics of globalisation, the book explores how new modes of reflexivity, more transactional frames for authenticity, commodification of peripheral resources and boundary transgression with humour all carry forward change. These types of change articulate a blurring of binary oppositions between centre and periphery, old and new, and standard and non-standard. Such research is particularly urgent in multilingual small language contexts, where different conceptualisations of language(s), boundaries and speakers impact individuals’ social, cultural and economic capital and opportunities.