Jürgen Jaspers

Sociolinguistics in a languagised world.: Introduction

Abstract The idea that there exist separate, enumerable languages has in the last decades been widely criticised, and it has led scholars to propose various new terms and concepts such as ‘polylingualism’, ‘metrolingualism’, and ‘translanguaging’, among others. As these terms are attracting considerable acclaim within the academy, this paper argues it is time to reflect on their occurrence, provenance and pertinence for future research and theorisation. We devote particular attention to the risk of confusion if newly proposed terms interchangeably serve descriptive, ontological, pedagogical and political purposes; to the continuing relevance of language separation outside as well as inside the academy; and to the purported transformative and critical potential of fluid language practices in education and beyond. We suggest a close consideration of each of these concerns is central to a sociolinguistics of rather than for particular linguistic practices.

The politics of labelling youth vernaculars in the Netherlands and Belgium

This chapter critically analyses the labelling of youthful language use in Belgium and the Netherlands. Urban youthful speech practices have in recent years been assigned a variety of labels, some of which have gained currency among insiders as well as outsiders. Linguists have not infrequently contributed to (the success of) this labelling process through their scholarly descriptions and public communication about their work (see e.g. Labov 1969, 1972a, on ‘Black English vernacular’ or ‘ebonics’). We argue, however, that regardless of the terms chosen, the practice of labelling language use has epistemological and ideological implications that must be addressed in sociolinguistic research. Our chapter presents two case studies to illustrate this. The first shows how linguists’ labels can begin to live lives of their own as they are ideologized in public discourse (cf. Chapter 2). The second demonstrates how an ostensibly technical labelling attempt may be resisted and de-neutralized by those who are labelled. We suggest that making a principled distinction between labels as ethnographic facts and labels as professional acts is a prerequisite for engaging with the intricacies of labelling youth vernaculars.

From unwanted to so-called expertise: Ideologizing sociolinguistics in mainstream media

This article discusses how expertise over language is reconfigured in mainstream media. Based on two different cases, it describes how journalists’ and sociolinguists’ conflicting interests can lead to unwanted attributions of expertise or to the staging of sociolinguists as so-called experts, useful as a foil for redefining what is viewed as more reasonable knowledge over language. Rather than proposing that such altercations illustrate the plight of honest scientists, however, I will argue that they offer the necessary building blocks for developing a better understanding of the transactions between experts and media in late-modernity.

Stylisations as teacher practice

Studies on stylised language use have tended to focus on the creative exploitation of linguistic heteroglossia among urban multi-ethnic youth. This article argues that there are good reasons for exploring how such practices can also be initiated by norm-enforcing white adults such as teachers. I report on linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in one mixed-ethnicity class at a Brussels Dutch-medium school and describe how one teacher often produced the creative, stylised language use one usually associates with younger speakers. The analysis emphasizes that while teacher stylisations provided alleviation from the friction between linguistic expectations and the reality of the classroom floor, they were also functional in maintaining the school linguistic policy inasmuch as they typified nonstylised, nonaccented, and standard language use as normal and expected. These findings suggest that stylisations can be closely tuned to linguistic normativity and reproductive of wider patterns of sociolinguistic stratification. (Stylisations, urban heteroglossia, crossing, classroom interaction, Brussels, Dutch, enregisterment). Copyright

Double-Edged Valorizations of Urban Heteroglossia

Teachers’ opinions about pupils’ home languages are often in tune with official language policy. Also in Flanders (Belgium), survey and case study research frequently demonstrates teachers’ negative attitudes towards pupils’ non-standard and non-Dutch home languages. This chapter however reports on ethnographic research at an ethnically mixed Brussels secondary school where at least one teacher could be observed valorizing his pupils’ home languages in and out of class. These valorizations facilitated a positive classroom climate, but they were also indebted to longer-standing representations of language and thus embedded in larger stratification patterns. Pending structural changes, I suggest this is the fate of much behaviour at school that negotiates the current language political status quo. Careful attention to these negotiations is vital for understanding contemporary education.