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Invited Speakers
Nishaant Choksi, IIT Gandhinagar, India
The linguistic ecology of war and India’s ‘battle’ against COVID-19
Kristina Hultgren, The Open University, United Kingdom
Language ideologies in lay and academic circles
Mie Hiramoto, National University Singapore
Thematic Panel: Counter-hegemonic discourses
Dripta Piplai (Mondal), Lekshmi Rekha, Suma Chisti, Abhijith N Arjunan, IIT Kharagpur, India
Respondent: Dimitris Trimithiotis
The contexts of Bengal and Kerala are testament to how the ideas of language and learning systems show a certain kind of pre-colonial heterogeneity which get redefined with the arrival of centralised colonial practices. The education systems and the policies put forward by the colonial empire legitimized the marginalisation of pre-colonial heterogeneities and indigenous knowledge systems over time. However, the newly formed state of Kerala and Bengal after the division witnessed movements that attempted to decolonise the education system and restore the balance between indigenous and emerging tendencies. The methods of achieving the process of decolonisation in both the states employed language and curriculum as tools and followed parallel trajectories. This paper tries to understand whether the language-in-education policies drafted after the independence re-examined pre-colonial tendencies and were retrospective of earlier educational models that involved indigenous systems or led to alternative frameworks that addressed new issues that emerged in education. It also explores the different trajectories the states followed in integrating the national language into the post-independence education policies. Another area of focus is how the language-in-education policies drafted after the independence attempted to establish a balance between indigenous knowledge and modern education
Dimitris Trimithiotis, Andria Christofidou, Nicos Trimikliniotis, University of Cyprus
Greek Cypriot Dialect: an essential element of the counter hegemonic discourses?
Respondent: Ariella Lahav
This paper discusses the usages of the dialect as a discursive praxis of resistance to dominant ideological narratives. It examines the discursive conditions and modalities (i.e. nomination, predication, perspectivation) under which the dialect/language operates as an essential element in the discursive construction of counter-hegemonic political identities. The study focuses on the usage of the Greek-Cypriot dialect in the discourse of recent and emerging social movements in the Republic of Cyprus (RoC). Since 1974 the island is de facto divided: the south, Greek-Cypriot, controlled by the RoC; and the north, the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”. Since the de facto partition, the Greek demotic language in the RoC is prescribed as the only legitimate language in education and the official public sphere. The paper approaches the Greek demotic language as a solidified instrument of the official identity for the ‘Greeks of Cyprus’ and the subaltern Greek-Cypriot dialect as having political and ideological linkages, as an aspect of the Cypriot ideological identity that puts forwards the reunification of the country. The analysis combines Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus linguistics approaches to examine 2000+ Facebook posts of three movements which have been appeared during the last decade.
Ariella Lahav, Tel Aviv University
Respondent: Crispin Thurlow
A satirical Israeli TV program aired in 2017 mocked Yair Lapid, then (and to-date) an opposition leader aspiring to become Prime-Minister, for his campaign: “Loving Israel is loving the Israelis”. Lapid has used LOVE before: i.e., in a speech given in Sweden, in 2016, he called upon the audience to chant along with him: “We love Israel.” Usage of love in politics may seem peculiar, especially with the global rise of hate speech. This work will zoom-out from Israeli politics to explore different meanings of LOVE, as used in politics, by freedom fighters such as Gandhi, politicians such as May, and movements such as We Stand in Love, ranging from compassion to solidarity, patriotism and more. It will question the role of love in politics and review opinions of thinkers such as Harris, Nussbaum or Ahmed. It will then zoom-in to focus on an analysis of the rhetoric of love used by Lapid, in particular on social media, suggesting that such speech is being used as an antidote to the divisive speech of Netanyahu, in view of potentially paving Lapid’s way to become PM, an outcome still uncertain even following the closing of the fourth elections within two years.
Crispin Thurlow, University of Bern, Switzerland
Besides hegemonic multilingualism: Wheelchair users, language users, and the spectre of assimilation
Respondent: Dripta Piplai (Mondal)
My conceptual paper takes as its starting point the far-right expression of an otherwise mainstream attitude: hegemonic multilingualism. This is a language-ideological formation projecting a vision of societal cooperation-cum-integration greatly at odds with the on-the-ground indignities and traumas it entails. Just because multilingualism is ordinary does not make it harmless. In this regard, I align myself with recent scholarship on “elite multilingualism” and efforts to “decolonize multilingualism”. Is there, I ask, a way to move not necessarily beyond hegemonic multilingualism, but to live beside it (with it) and, thereby, to uphold a way of living besides it (in spite of it)? One important starting point is confronting the sinister spectre of assimilation which haunts the mobilities of so many people struggling to become local language users. This is a symbolic violence many disabled people recognize only too well, one meted out daily and often with the best will in the world. In this regard, I present the radical practices/politics of Universal Design as a model for creating environments to uphold the substance of people’s speech rather than the cosmetics of their speech. And this means being proactive – willing to make the first move.
Thematic Panel: Populism
Michael Kranert, University of Southampton
Populist linguistic nationalism – A discursive shift in German metalinguistic discourses
Respondent: Ahuactzin Carlos
Linguistic nationalism has a long discourse history in the formation of Germany as a national state and seems to return regularly at historical turning points. The latest reincarnation are the language-ideological debates introduced by the German right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which have been described as a new level of “Language Battles” (Lobin 2021). There are, however, longstanding post-1990 discourses in Germany that have prepared the ground for the “populist” uptake of this debate by the AfD. Using a discourse historical approach, I will analyse the discourse history of these recent language ideological debates as a process of discursive shift (Krzyżanowski 2018), demonstrating how three discourses about ‘Leitkultur’, ‘language requirements for migrants’ and about the status of the German Language in the constitution have prepared the ground for the strategic use of language ideological topoi by the AfD. These three discourses where historically only weakly connected but have been strategically combined by the AfD in a populist move: On the one hand, the combined discourse of national identity, language and democracy is picking up different audiences, indicating that “Elites” have neglected there concerns – a traditional populist move. On the other hand, the return to linguistic nationalism is central to the purist right-wing ideology ethno-pluralism underpinning the political positions of the AfD.
Krzyżanowski, Michał (2018): Discursive Shifts in Ethno-Nationalist Politics: On Politicization and Mediatization of the “Refugee Crisis” in Poland. In Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 16 (1-2), pp. 76–96. DOI: 10.1080/15562948.2017.1317897.
Lobin, Henning (2021): Sprachkampf. Wie rechte Parteien das Thema Sprache für sich nutzen. 1. Auflage. Berlin: Bibliographisches Institut; Duden (Duden-Sachbuch).
Ahuactzin Carlos and Enrique Matrínez, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico
Respondent: Alexander Alekseev
In the scenario of the Mexican presidential election 2018, the candidates presented their proposals based on the use of media resources, to transmit a favorable political image to the electorate. The study, based on the approach of the Critical Analysis of the Discourse, deepens in the strategies of narrative construction of the candidate of the Coalition Together We Will Make History, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, within the framework of the audiovisual political publicity. The research considered a corpus of television spots that were broadcast during the campaign, from March 30 to June 27, 2018, with a normative regulation by the National Electoral Institute. The levels of analysis considered the narrative modes of the populist discourse, according to the actors, spaces and times, within the framework of the studies of the discourse. The main results reveal that the candidate generated a positioning of his political profile from an axiological base that strengthened the political identity with the electorate. Finally, the study establishes the necessary conditions to achieve an effective correspondence between the discursive strategies for the narrative construction and the search for political legitimacy within the framework of the democratic model.
Alexander Alekseev, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Language of Human Rights and (Changing) Political Discourse of the Populist Radical Right
Respondent: Dani Heffernan
This study explores the relationship between political discourse and language ideology of human rights by examining how the populist radical right uses references to democracy and rights in its political discourse. This research perspective allows to explore discursive mechanisms, developed by the PRR to construct social reality in accordance with its ideological core of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. The research focuses on a case of the PRR party that, over the course of the past decade, has been both in government and in opposition: the Polish Prawo i Sprawiedliwość. This case selection allows to analyse the link between (transforming) party discourse and its (changing) access to power. At the heart of the study lies the analysis of verbal forms of political propaganda, especially electoral speeches given by the party leader Jarosław Kaczyński. The research relies on methods and techniques of the discourse-historical and discourse-conceptual approaches to CDA, combined with elements of the morphological analysis of ideology. The study shows that the PRR has transformed into an active contester in the ongoing interpretive struggle over the concepts of democracy and rights: instead of adhering to liberal democratic interpretations, the PRR has creatively redefined these concepts in the spirit of its ideology.
Dani Heffernan, University of California Los Angeles
Respondent: Michael Kranert
Scholars of political discourses have long contended with the concept of ‘the people’ as it relates to governance. Invoking ‘the people’ is a hallmark of populist discourses, which claim to represent the interests of the democratic populace as a whole, rather than a segment of the public (Canovan 1999). This paper investigates how the concept of ‘the people’ is operationalized linguistically within a political debate contextualized by former U.S. President Donald Trump’s populist rhetoric (Lacatus 2021). I examine excerpts from the 2020 U.S. Vice Presidential debate, arguing that the candidates’ numerous references to “the American people,” a nation-specific variant, are part of the discursive strategies they employ to legitimize their views (Reyes 2011), and to maintain their ‘existential coherence’ (Duranti 2006) as political actors. An expanded analysis grounded in a historical view of populism in the United States (Lowndes 2017) considers how the candidates, while apparently invoking a cliché phrase of American politicians, constructed opposing versions of “the American people” – as 'limitable' and liberalist, or 'unlimitable' and populist (Ochoa Espejo 2017) – aligned with differing political stances. Here, attention to a political ideology enriches the discursive examination of a linguistic token, offering insight into both how and why it was utilized.
Thematic Panel: Non-standard varieties
Yu-Xian (Claire) Huang, University of Oxford
Respondent: Büşra Can
Taiwan, home to diverse languages, including Austronesian languages, Hakka, Mandarin, and Taiwanese, has gone through two National Language Movements which have had immense influence on its sociolinguistic hierarchy: one established during the Japanese colonisation (1896-1945) and one by the Nationalist government of the Republic of China, which took over Taiwan when WWII ended and resulted in the hegemony of Mandarin. Taiwanese, Hakka, Japanese, and Austronesian languages faced oppression. Mandarin speakers dominated Taiwanese politics and were the majority of people with higher status, government officials, social elites, and educators. Mandarin, thus, has been associated with prestige, whereas other languages with lower status, lack of education, and vulgarity. With the end of martial law, a new Taiwanese identity emerged, resulting in shifting language ideologies. While the changes in ideology towards these languages have been widely studied, the attitudes toward the Mandarin varieties coloured by contact with them still need more discussion. This paper aims to provide a more complete picture of the topic and investigates the language attitudes associated with two ‘non-standard’ Mandarins: Taiwanese-influenced and aboriginal-influenced Mandarin. By examining three interviews, literature, news, and online material, this paper discusses whether attitudes towards Taiwanese-influenced and aboriginal-influenced Mandarin have changed in contemporary society.
Büşra Can, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Respondent: Marina Zagidullina
This study investigates the attitudes of standard accented Turkish speakers towards non-standard Kurdish accented speakers of Turkish. Given the fact that there are strict language policies in Turkey, this paper analyzes the effect of such standard language ideologies on listener attitudes using a mixed-methods design. The study included 50 Turkish participants with ages ranging from 19 to 51. Participants completed a survey and could volunteer to also participate in an interview. Using a matched guise technique in the survey, a Kurdish accented speaker was recorded both in standard and non-standard accented Turkish. Survey responses were divided into groups with young adults (under 30) and adults. For qualitative data, 13 respondents were interviewed. The Kurdish accented speaker received the lowest scores among all the speakers and were perceived negatively in all categories. When the standard accent was performed by the same speaker, the ratings increased. The attainment of the standard accent also effected the identification of the speaker as respondents identified the Kurdish speaker as “Kurdish” when they heard the non-standard, and “Turkish” when they heard the standard accent. During the interviews, one nation-one language ideologies which was promoted in the country through education and the standard language ideologies have been observed.
Marina Zagidullina, Chelyabinsk State University, University of Economics and Human Sciences in Warsaw
Grammar-Nazi: When culture becomes racism (on sociology of linguistic norms)
Respondent: Yu-Xian (Claire) Huang
This presentation focuses on the problem of “grammatical perfection”. The author starts from the example of the “Grammar-Nazi” group on the Russian Internet and theorizes on this phenomenon and on similar cases. Relationships between different parts of a state (such as between metropolis and peripheric), are shown to be organized under the logics of colonialism, fertilized soil of “grammar imperialism” (or normativism), where a specific linguistic choice has been established as the only possible option. Sociology of linguistic normativism and regulation can be considered through the lens of colonialism: for example, the destiny of dialects in different countries have rarely been analyzed as the destiny of minorities’ languages (or in terms of linguistic diversity). The policy of all-nation literacy and educational language standards have problematized linguistic minorities and stigmatized people with deviations from the standard as “illiterate” or “low-culture”. The author predicts that this linguistic normativism should soon become (under the logics of the worldwide fight for human rights) the next target of liberal reforms.
Thematic Panel: English as a neoliberal language
Gonzalo Pérez Andrade, London Metropolitan University
Respondent: Katy Highet
In non-English speaking contexts, English language teaching (ELT) programmes play a crucial role in providing future teachers of English with the necessary tools that they need to become effective English language users and professionals. In these courses, pre-service teachers are inevitably exposed to ideas of correctness and desirability in English language use, as well as constructs that are deeply embedded in the English language teaching profession, such as the notion of the native speaker and Standard English. As such ideas and concepts are directly connected with social structures, it is therefore expected that the beliefs about English - or language ideologies - that circulate in these programmes have profound implications for the practices of prospective English teachers, which may result in the preference of certain varieties and the stigmatisation of others. This paper explores the beliefs that teacher educators in Chilean ELT programmes hold regarding the English that they speak, teach and conceive as suitable for teachers of English. The purpose of such an exploration is to unveil the dominant language ideologies that are promoted, reproduced, and challenged in discourse and practice in the training of English language teachers. Findings from a multiple case study, which involved interviews, classroom observations, and document analysis, uncovered clear tensions between the dominant advocacy for prestigious native varieties and an understanding of English as a tool for intercultural communication. More importantly, this paper presents evidence of a growing discourse of resistance among some of these teacher educators that reveal awareness of and opposition to hegemonic language ideologies in the English language teaching profession.
Katy Highet, UCL Institute of Education
Respondent: Yonatan Puón Castro
Within scholarship on English in India, much research has highlighted increasing pride in what is often termed ‘Indian English’. In doing so, however, the politics, complexities and consequences of certain language practices are obscured. In this paper, I demonstrate how, for some, the notion of ‘Indian English’ is delegitimised, as ‘English’ is discursively constructed as a bounded entity premised on a binary of correct/incorrect which finds its roots in the colonial, class and caste history of the language. Drawing on an ethnography of an English-teaching NGO in Delhi, I show how students negotiate their relationality to the language and their positionality in a larger national and transnational, stratified, imagined community of English speakers, arguing that their ability to see themselves as legitimate speakers of English is constrained by their own sense of nation, race, class and caste. This paper thus raises critical questions about the politics of English teaching/learning and pushes us to be cautious in our calls to encourage fluidity in the classroom, particularly given the discursive rejection of this by these students, which is fuelled by their recognition of the damaging social and economic consequences of using stigmatised forms of English that marginalised students in particular may face.
Yonatan Puón Castro, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, University of Southampton
Mexico’s foreign language policy: the implications of dominant ideologies in ELT
Respondent: Maybritt Woodcock
When the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was singed in 1993, Mexico started what some have called ‘neoliberal period’ in domestic policy making. This, in addition to the OECD and World Bank recommendations, imposed a neoliberal agenda which was materialized through a series of ‘strategic’ reforms (tax, labour, energy and education). In the education domain, traces of neoliberalism can be found in curriculum (competency-based), teacher labour rights (demetallation of syndicates), and ELT. Drawing from a political economy (Block, 2018 & Holborow, 2015) and Lo Bianco’s (2009) three-dimensional CDA approach to LP, public discourses (official documents and speeches) and institutional practices were analysed to identify the ideological orientations which underpin Mexico’s government policies and, consequently, its English language policy and how the institutional practices reproduce the ideology underpinning Mexico’s English language policy. Findings indicate that official documents and public discourses served the purpose to a) introduce the neoliberal agenda as a desired scenario for domestic policies and b) legitimate the implementation of neoliberal policies and strategies. Developing from this, the official ELT documents and public discourses analysis revealed that the contemporary ELT programmes a) legitimise the necessity of implementing English, as a public policy, by reducing it to a desired labour market skill, which resonates with the characteristics of a commodity, b) represent an extension of neoliberal strategies in education, particularly regarding teachers’ labour rights and c) have created a very profitable language qualifications and teacher training market for transnational ELT companies.
Maybritt Woodcock, University of Greifswald
Language policies, practices and their effects on human trafficking survivors in England
Respondent: Gonzalo Pérez Andrade
The English language has acquired a hegemonial state forming social reality and fuelling a “global power code” (Piller 2016: 177) leading “into a world in which not to have English is to be marginalised and excluded” (Graddol 2010: 10). This language ideology particularly affects people of displacement and involuntary migration and adds to structures of social marginalisation and trauma. Survivors of modern-day slavery who were trafficked across (linguistic) borders are majorly affected by these developments. Previously deprived of access to learning the language, they face severe disadvantages and difficulties as they try to integrate into society and establish a life in England. This presentation will reflect on interviews conducted with people from the community and the Immigration and Asylum Unit to provide insight into the effects of language policies and practices on trafficking survivors in England. They identify linguistic injustice which limits and prevents successful integration into society leaving victims in isolation and vulnerable to re-entering slavery. This underscores the importance of critically reflecting on language ideologies as they “can have a tremendous impact on people’s experience, their social inclusion, on fairness, and their happiness” (Piller 2011: 174).
Thematic Panel: Political discourse online
Rashid Mustafin and Valery Shulginov, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Speech aggression and ideology in Internet communication
Respondent: Olivia Inwood
Speech aggression is one of the main methods of ideology formation in Internet communities. It expresses the values of a social group through demonstrating offense to people outside that community. This phenomenon can be characterized as “spiral of speech aggression”, which is the opposite process to “spiral of silence” (Hayes 2007). According to this theory, regular aggressive messages engage new participants into aggressive discourse and participation in conflicts becomes one of the ways to express politeness in terms of norms of a particular community. Thus, model creation for automatic aggression detection is related to the task of studying ideologies and their discursive features in social networks. This article studies the characteristics of implicit and explicit aggression in the comments of a Russian social media. As it is hypothesized that expression of aggression depends on local norms, the dataset contains the comments collected from a single social media community. Trying different combinations of data preprocessing, we discovered that lemmatization and replacement emojis with placeholders contribute to better results. We tested several models (Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, Linear Classifiers with SGD Training, Random Forest, XGBoost, RuBERT) and compared their results. This approach identifies key themes of aggressive discourse in social media.
Olivia Inwood, University of New South Wales
Analysing affiliation and legitimation in conspiratorial discourse
Respondent: Daniel Leisser
Over the years, extreme right-wing communities have formed on YouTube, spreading discourses of white supremacy and conspiracy. In this presentation I will be applying a combined communing affiliation (Zappavigna and Martin, 2018) and legitimation (Van Leeuwen, 2007) framework to YouTube data about the Notre Dame Fire, one of the most googled news events of 2019, and an event that ignited hate speech by white supremacists and conspiracists who blamed various innocent religious groups and governments for instigating the fire. My presentation will discuss seven key personae discovered in the YouTube comments dataset, and the key bonds (social values) that these personae share or contest. These bonds will also be understood in relation to legitimation strategies, and I will discuss how this can be visualised. Overall, this presentation will show how key bonds are working in tandem with (de)legitimation strategies and how different personae construct evidence to support their ideologies.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2007). Legitimation in discourse and communication. Discourse & Communication, 1(1), 91-112.
Zappavigna, M., & Martin, J. R. (2018). # Communing affiliation: Social tagging as a resource for aligning around values in social media. Discourse, Context & Media, 22, 4-12.
Daniel Leisser, University of Vienna, Austrian Association for Legal Linguistics
Law, order and the Corona crisis in right-wing discourse: an explorative study of two online portals
Respondent: Olga Malysheva
Right-wing populism is on the rise in Europe and is associated with a shift in “performance, style, rhetoric and ideologies” (Wodak 2015: 2). The investigation of the construction and representation of law and legality in right-wing discourse across media genres generally and social media specifically may provide insights into how the Corona crisis has facilitated the authoritarian turn in Austria. Building on Gruber (2019), Spitzmüller and Warnke (2011) and van Dijk (2009), in this presentation a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 300 blog entries of two online portals, namely fpoe.at and unzensuriert.at, is presented with a view to making explicit the discursive practices involved in the construction of legality and legitimacy. It is hypothesised that a co-optation of participatory communication strategies has taken place during which agents of right-wing populism, consciously or not, adopt the role of self-proclaimed wardens of legality and the legal system at large. In the presentation, I seek to provide answers to the following two research questions: (1) How are legality and legal certainty discursively constructed and recontextualised in the blog entries? (2) Which linguistic devices, discursive strategies and legal mechanisms are used in the blog entries to justify the necessity of a ‘strong state’? It will be argued that what is perceived by critics as a move towards an authoritarian turn in the Austrian legal system is constructed as a process of reform and restoration in right-wing discourse. It follows that this shift in style and rhetoric also requires a shift regarding the analysis of discursive practices and the formulation of social critiques (Reisigl 2017).
Olga Malysheva, Natalia Ryabchenko and Gnedash Anna, Kuban State University
Networked populism: the study of discursive fields generated by Trump’s presidential campaigns
Respondent: Rashid Mustafin
D. Trump's triumph in the 2016 elections triggered ‘networked populism’ – a wave of populism around the world. Trump's networked populism was based on binary online discursive fields, whose aim was to contrast “crooked and corrupt elite of Washington” and “generous and righteous people of America”. The formation of such fields allowed D. Trump to bond with the voters bypassing all information intermediaries—other politicians or mass media—in the first electoral cycle. The voters thought, D. Trump was the person capable of Making America Great Again, and it made him a president. D. Trump's second election campaign in 2020 was also based on networked populism. However, negative information background, which was Covid-19, Black Lives Matter, diverted and split the online discursive fields he formed. He lost the election and was banned from popular social media platforms. These cases show that populist ideas and networked populism practices are effective for consolidating and mobilizing the ‘core electorate’. The empirical base of the study, focused on modelling and analyzing online discursive fields, was formed by Twitter messages published by users and D. Trump's team during 2015-2020. To analyze the obtained data sets the authors used network linguistics and graph theory methodology.
Thematic Panel: Education
Mirjam Hauck, The Open University
Language use, identity and positioning in collaborative online international learning
Respondent: Diane de Saint Lége
In language education collaborative online international learning, formerly known as telecollaboration (Belz,2003), is hailed as an experiential learning opportunity that affords participants (semi) authentic interactions with peers, mediated by technology. All telecollaborative exchanges are - by default - multilingual as they bring learners from different linguistic backgrounds together. Yet, this does not necessarily mean that they provide multilingual learning contexts or experiences. The language arrangement in telecollaboration usually reflects the language ideology of those who organize the exchanges, often without this being made explicit in their design. In her foundational article, Ortega (2017) highlights the monolingual language ideologies that permeate computer-assisted language learning (CALL) research, including the telecollaboration literature, and identifies new CALL-SLA research interfaces which point towards equitable multilingualism. Our contribution is inspired by Ortega’s research questions (Ortega, 2017, p. 298), in particular, we explore how different language ideologies are indexed in the design of telecollaborative exchanges, and how they impact on participant identities and, in turn, on how they position themselves during an exchange. Moreover we ask how we can include, or at least gesture towards inclusive and equitable multilingual and/or translanguaging practices in collaborative online international language learning.
Diane de Saint Léger, The University of Melbourne
Respondent: Attallah Alanazi
This paper focuses on institutional discourse and the legitimisation of a language reform presented to the French parliament in 2013. The controversial reform sought to amend the Toubon law to facilitate the internationalisation of higher education by enabling the use of a language other than French as the medium of instruction. The study draws on a discourse-historical framework of analysis and uses techniques derived from corpus linguistics to unpack the discourse which unfolded in mainstream online media at the time of the controversy. The corpus data comprised sixty-one online articles and associated reader comments (a total of 126, 737 words). The analysis will first show how the term expanded from the field of the economy to ‘extra-economic’ domains during that time (Martín Rojo, 2018). It will then demonstrate the place and role of attractivité as a slogan (Krieg-Planque & Oger, 2010) to legitimise language policy change in neo-liberal contexts, and as a conceptual update and extension of the discourse of Pride (Duchêne and Heller, 2012) that the term rayonnement traditionally fulfilled in French national narratives. The centrality of attractivité as a means to soften or erase particular realities associated with globalisation processes will also be discussed.
Attallah Alanazi, University of Southampton
Students’ language ideologies and identities: Views of English as a Lingua Franca
Respondent: Tinghe Jin
This study on the phenomenon of English as a lingua franca (ELF) perception investigates the language ideologies and identities that students hold in order to understand their views about ELF. Both language ideologies and identities are examined within contextual aspects that likely to produce key and deep understanding of students’ perception of English. Even though Saudi students realise the importance of English as a global language of communication, there are views see English language associated with western cultures and ideologies. This difference between local culture and English language native culture is seen problematic in Saudi English education (Al‐abed Alhaq and Smadi, 1996; Argungu, 1996; Al-Brashi, 2003; Glasser, 2003; Karmani, 2005; Mahboob and Elyas, 2014). As a result, students do not see relationship between the English they learn and their local values (Maherzi, 2011) which explains their low achievements as they commonly tend to accomplish the minimum requirement of their English learning (Al-Seghayer, 2014). Thus, English as a communicational tool is appreciated in Saudi Arabia. Yet, it is not a neutral language which is burdened with political, religious, and socio-cultural associations. This paper investigates the conflict between native English and Saudi culture which developed boundaries between students and their English learning.
Tinghe Jin, University of East Anglia
British Government policy engagement with the teaching and learning of Chinese language
Respondent: Mirjam Hauck
Perspectives on the teaching and learning of Chinese in the UK have evolved in response to changing state and cultural ideologies. This paper examines a range of report statements including UK Government policy documents since the mid- twentieth century that have sought to address ways of attending to the shortage of teaching and learning modern languages including Chinese. It considers two questions: what can be learned from key top-down policy documents over the last 75 years regarding the changing understanding of the strategic value of languages for the UK? and what implications might this have for the UK's current and imagined future situation? The research identifies a history of how Chinese Language Studies has moved from the margins to the mainstream of language teaching and learning in UK universities. In spite of the history of concerns about the lack of language capacity in the UK generally, there is a parallel history of failure to address such concerns in practice and this has been due to a lack of clear government policy and direction. A key factor identified has been the impact of neoliberal thinking on UK higher education which has placed language studies in a vulnerable position.
Thematic Panel: Minoritising languages
Deepa Vanjani, PMBG Science College, Indore
The politics of language minoritisation
Respondent: Stuart Dunmore
There is more and more engagement with the manipulative and persuasive power of language in recent times, and understandably so, since media has made in roads into the social-political-cultural fabric of our lives. The question of hegemony of languages in postcolonial discourse has also been receiving critical attention. Linguistic hegemony holds sway in multiple domains, and leads to of societies and communities, while pushing certain linguistic groups to the periphery. This minoritisation of languages. Since language is an identity marker, minoritising it is a way to minoritise or marginalise the identity of a group, an ethnicity, or a community. Social preferences and prejudices, the stereotypical approaches towards prevalent notions , and political intervention, invasions and wars, have all played a role in subverting languages to a minority . The story ‘ The Last Lesson’ by French novelist Alphonse Daudet, for instance,portrays poignantly the last French lesson after Prussia’s take over of France during the Franco-Prussian War ( 1870-71). The present paper will attempt to problematise the question of minoritised languages , and reposition the issue so that these languages can be seen in a new light.
Stuart Dunmore, University of Sussex
Respondent: Beatriz Hermida Ramos
This paper will examine Gaelic revitalisation policy in Scotland, and among disparate diasporic communities in Nova Scotia, Canada and New England, USA. Notwithstanding the considerable extent of intergenerational disruption within contemporary Gaelic communities, including parts of the Western Isles where the language is most widely spoken at a local level, second language teaching has been prioritised in official Scottish language policy to create new cohorts of speakers. Based on five years of ethnographic research in Scotland and Canada, this paper examines 7 such new speakers' narratives concerning future prospects for language revitalisation in each country. I will also outline a scheduled 3-month research scholarship in Massachusetts, a major destination for Nova Scotian emigrants. This forthcoming research will assess how Gaelic learners in New England construct and convey their linguistic ideologies and identities, and how these may relate to the better-known Boston Irish diaspora. I show that challenging sociodemographic circumstances in the remaining Gaelic-dominant communities in Scotland and Nova Scotia contrast with current policy discourses concerning the language’s future prospects. In particular, I consider Nova Scotian ‘new’ speakers’ relative sense of optimism for the future of their language in the province, compared to Scottish speakers’ language ideologies concerning revitalisation prospects.
Beatriz Hermida Ramos, Complutense University of Madrid
Language ideologies, Galician and the Spanish state in the context of late capitalism
Respondent: Anna Augustyniak
The imposition of monolingualism as a means of economic, social and political control is particularly recent in the history of Spain, with the Francoist dictatorship ending in 1975. Even though the following decades were pivotal for the normalization, protection and legal recognition of what we now refer to as cooficial languages, these are still minorized varieties. Not only that, but their diglossic situation has been exacerbated by the rise of the extreme right and their ideas regarding ethnonationalism and linguistic purification, as well as the popularization of neoliberal discourses that commodify and assign value to different varieties depending on their number of speakers. Moreover, it is crucial to note that the conversation surrounding cooficial languages in Spain tends to focus only on Euskera and Catalan, while Asturian and Galician, the latter being the focus of this proposal, tend to be either excluded or forgotten. This paper seeks to analyze the discursive representation of Galician in political and journalist texts in an attempt to explore how language ideology and stereotyping are specifically projected towards Galician in the context of the Spanish state, focusing on how the aforementioned capitalist and far right rhetoric affects the perception of Galician speech communities.
Anna Augustyniak, ISCTE-Lisboa
Space, scale and identity among migrant learners of Basque
Respondent: Deepa Vanjani
This paper investigates the representations of space and their interconnections with language ideologies, identity and scaling processes (Blommaert et al. 2005, 200) among migrant learners of Basque. Particular spaces are created through spatialization, as “social actors invest material space credentials with social meanings” (De Fina 2009, 11). This contributes to the creation of linguistic hierarchies which are realised in terms of scales as “both individuals and groups use scales in aligning or challenging” them (Collins and Slembrouck 2009, 23). Migrants step onto constituted spaces (such as national spaces) “and those who have an investment in those spaces (...) often feel the need to reassert their validity” (Pujolar 2009, 84). However, migrants also project their investment in the space they enter, by opposing or accepting the existing hierarchies.This paper explores how migrant learners of Basque construct the space they enter. It looks at how migrants position themselves in relation to that space and whether and what language resources are used to legitimise this positioning. It explores the implications that spatialisation and scales have for migrant identity and belonging. The approach to data analysis is ethnographically oriented, done through a thematic discourse analysis. The data comprises Basque language classroom observations, ethnographic interviews with a diverse sample of 63 participants and policy related documents.
Blommaert, J., Collins, J. & Slembrouck, S. (2005) Spaces of Multilingualism. Language & Communication, 25, 197-216.
Collins, J. & Slembrouck, S. (2009) Goffman & Globalisation: Participation Frames and the Spatial & Temporal Scaling of Migration-Connected Multilingualism. In: COLLINS, J., BAYNHAM, M. & SLEMBROUCK, S. (eds.) Globalization and Language in Contact: Scale, Migration, and Communicative Practices. London: Continuum.
De Fina, A. (2009) From Space to Spatialization in Narrative Studies. In: COLLINS, J., BAYNHAM, M. & SLEMBROUCK, S. (eds.) Globalization and Language in Contact: Scale, Migration, and Communicative Practices. Harrisburg, PA: Continuum.
Pujolar, J. (2009) Immigration in Catalonia: Marking Territory through Language. In: BAYNHAM, M., COLLINS, J. & SLEMBROUCK, S. (eds.) Globalization and Language Contact: Spatiotemporal Scales, Migration Flows, and Communicative Practices. London: Continuum.
Thematic Panel: Political discourse
Lyubov Guervich, Moscow State Linguistic University
Invectives in political discourse: “Agonal” signs or pragmatic borrowings?
Respondent: Michalis Tastsoglou
The political tensions escalation is basically preceded by aggressive political rhetoric initiated by the government officials. As a rule, this process is accompanied by the increase of invectives and bellicose rhetoric towards their perceived adversary party. According to Sheigal, invectives are considered to be “agonal” signs, or the signs of verbal aggression, targeted to political confrontation between nations (Sheigal, 1999). On the other part, this problem concerns the social role strain in political discourse, when politicians subconsciously violate the norms of diplomatic conduct and dwindle to the level of trivial social interaction. The invectives, in this case, take on the role of pragmatic borrowings, alien to diplomacy and politics in general. For the purpose of this paper, social frames elements will be described on the examples of aggressive political rhetoric. This analysis is expected to distinguish “agonal” signs and pragmatic borrowings in their functioning and propose the methodology of social roles strain problem determination. This research is supposed to represent an integrative approach combining the Political Discourse theory (texts, words and semiotics), the Frame Semantics theory and the Social Roles theory.
Michalis Tastsoglou, University of Athens
Principles of neoliberalism in Memoranda discourse: Government officials and opposition leaders
Respondent: Yating Yu
This analysis aims to describe the fundamental principles of neoliberalism and their constitutive role in the emergence of Memoranda discourse during the Greek crisis. Therefore, the research scrutinizes relevant discourses under the scope of discourse analysis. The research under suggestion conscripts the question of what principles of neoliberalism are included in related political speeches. In 2010, the Greek parliament voted for the first Memorandum of Understanding. Two more followed in 2012 and 2015. However, the mitigation of crisis was delayed and, even when the Greek state came out of this adventure, the country’s GDP was reduced comparing 2009 to 2018. Hence, the research examines 32 political speeches that took place in eight different voting dates to reveal the neoliberal principles that dominate this kind of discourse. Three of them concern Memorandum of Understanding voting dates, while the rest of them concern voting for Medium-term budgetary frameworks. The 32 speeches come from a prime minister, a minister of Economics, a leader of opposition, and a leader of a smaller party per each voting date. The results will be classified according to the subject’s identity into left and right discourses, as well as governmental and oppositional.
Yating Yu, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Respondent: Dimitrii Tolkachev
“A community with a shared future for humankind” has become a dominant concept in China’s foreign policy in the last decade. Although this concept has been investigated by several studies in different domains, little attention has been given to its discursive legitimation in China’s media communication from a linguistic perspective. To fill this gap, the present study employs critical metaphor analysis to investigate how the aforementioned concept is legitimised via the predominant discourses associated with COVID-19 in 111 news articles collected from China Daily, a state-owned Chinese English-language newspaper. The findings show that COVID-19 is represented as a common enemy of humankind, other nations of the world are constructed as China’s allies, and the World Health Organisation is depicted as the leader of the global fight against the pandemic. These representations are constructed by the interplay of “war” metaphors and other linguistic processes, and hold ideological implications for collectivism and humanitarianism. The findings shed light on the use of language by China Daily in promoting official ideologies, projecting China’s national image, and improving China’s international relations amid a global health crisis.
Dimitrii Tolkachev, Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Policy evaluation of "non-traditional sexual relationships" regulation in Russia
Respondent: Lyubov Guervich
In 2013 the Russian federal law “For the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values” had been adopted. Before this law successfully passed the Russian parliament, several ‘prohibition of homosexual propaganda’ laws were at the regional level. The state has got into a sphere that clearly highlights the private/public dichotomy problem and refers to the moral policy. This attempt to regulate citizens’ private lives through the ‘traditional values’ is challenged by existing legal norms regulating human rights. Public policy theory allows explaining results (outputs, outcomes, impact) of the ‘Propaganda’ law implementation and regulation of homosexuality in Russia using policy feedback theory (PFT) and critical discourse analysis (CDA).
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