Linguistic ethnography

The PI conducted linguistic ethnographic fieldwork at a youth radio station serving a highly diverse urban area in Germany. Linguistic ethnography enabled the PI to explore journalists' sociolinguistic realities and to shed light on their complex translingual and transmodal practices at work. It also enabled a thorough investigation of how the context in which language is practised at the station shapes journalists' representations and constructions of a collective urban youth identity. Observation of the newsroom and individual observation of journalists including interviews at work allowed to examine journalists both as ‘radio personalities’ and as individuals, the latter including how they think about language and culture in their community and try to make ethical and aesthetic decisions. Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of media materials (i.e. broadcast/podcasts and website/social media content) and audience responses to these messages (e.g. on the station's social media sites) allowed to examine how discourses of power, identity and inequality become entextualised.

Translingual and transmodal meaning-making

The PI views language from a spatial orientation as a social practice and therefore as a set of semiotic resources (i.e. speech, images, music and sounds). This perspective, rooted in critical post-structuralist thinking, overcomes socially and politically constructed boundaries between ‘languages’ and provides a holistic view on language and culture (i.e. commodities and practices) as mobile resources (Appadurai, 1996; Blommaert, 2010). Important concepts for the CIDoRa project are translingualism in a wider semiotic sense (Canagarajah, 2013) and transmodality, the orchestration of various semiotic resources (including language) in meaning-making (Pennycook, 2007). Together with notions of mobility and global cultural flows, these concepts allow for an examination of linguistic and cultural practices as entangled in wider historical and social contexts.

Identity

The CIDoRa project applies a critical perspective on identity as performative and therefore as “a discursive construct that emerges in interaction” rather than as a pre-existing given (see Riley, 2007) and on identity formation as a multi-layered process (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005). The PI therefore considers how journalists construct urban space and urban youth identity with their listeners in relation to macro-level and locally rooted, specific cultural practices. Based on critical theory of global capitalism and commodification of culture, this includes practice-based identities in the form of ‘lifestyle’ or consumer identities (Machin & Van Leeuwen, 2010). In this regard, the PI also considers what role, amongst other linguistic and semiotic resources, English linguistic resources (which are frequently used on German radio; see Schaefer, 2024) and popular culture play in the construction of urban youth identity between journalists and listeners and in the creation of a community of listeners.

Sociocultural context

In line with a spatial orientation to language, the PI conceptualises the urban sociocultural context not as a bounded geographical space, as often done by previous research (cf. Redder et al., 2013), but as a social space constructed through communicative practices between the radio station and its audience. This practice-based conception of urban space and community allows urban youth culture to be conceived as both local and translocal with a reach beyond immediate geographical locales (see Lave & Wenger, 1991). Urban youth identity then refers to a community's identification with a social space formed by a nexus of local and global youth cultural practices, which enables notions of a global youth cultural community across socially constructed boundaries.

Superdiversity

Originally coined to describe demographic fragmentation resulting from increasingly complex migration flows (see Vertovec, 2007), the concept of superdiversity is often treated as a feature of static context set apart from linguistic structure in analyses of urban language practices. Within the CIDoRa project’s spatial approach to language practices, superdiversity, however, becomes an inherent quality of all social activity and therefore of language itself. Every participant in social interaction avails of a unique semiotic repertoire and is situated in a unique assemblage of spatiotemporal contexts, which ultimately makes every social encounter an encounter with difference. This connects the concept of superdiversity to the larger discourse on cultural globalisation theories and the concept of hybridity and ongoing mixing as unremarkable and as an essential feature of culture (see Nederveen Pieterse, 2009).

References

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. University of Minnesota Press.

Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge University Press.

Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445605054407

Canagarajah, S. (2013). Translingual practice: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. Routledge.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.

Machin, D., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2010). Global Media and the Regime of Lifestyle. In N. Coupland (Ed.), The handbook of language and globalization (pp. 625–643). Wiley Blackwell.

Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2009). Globalization and culture: Global mélange (2nd ed.). Rowman and Littlefield.

Pennycook, A. (2007). Global Englishes and transcultural flows. Routledge.

Redder, A., Pauli, J., Kießling, R., Bührig, K., Brehmer, B., Breckner, I., & Androutsopoulos, J. (Eds.). (2013). Mehrsprachige Kommunikation in der Stadt: Das Beispiel Hamburg. Waxmann.

Riley, P. (2007). Language, culture and identity: An ethnolinguistic perspective. Continuum.

Schaefer, S. J. (2024). New Perspectives on Language Mobility: English on German Radio. Bloomsbury Academic.

Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), 1024–1054. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870701599465