Following on from yeterday’s post I have just read an interesting paper by Jan Blommaert, James Collins and Stef Slembrouck. (It came from here but is no longer available as has been published in Language and Communication.) It looks at
Spaces of Multilingualism.
One of the sentences that popped out at me, was where they say:
‘….space in itself demands closer investigation if we intend to analyze the way in which multilingualism operates in and across societies nowadays. Every communicative event develops in a particular space, and this space may influence the event in non-arbitrary ways’.
Although this paper is about different languages being used in different ways in a world where travel and cultural exchange is more frequent, the way they talk about language as ‘an ideologoical object’ is relevant to me in looking at ways in which language is used in online spaces. It is about the idea of language being invested with social and cultural interests, not just a vehice for denotational, neutral meaning. I want to look at the way in which language is used in specific ways in online spaces, so that in a particular online space, meaning becomes imbued with specific cultural and social messages in that space. In this way the words beging to work differently in the space and help to define that space - so that words are both constitutive and agentive.
Spaces of multilingualism: Blommaert, J., Collins, J., Slembrouck, S. (2005)Language & Communication 25: 197-216
But if you think this is all a bit OTT this may be more up your street - about reading shop windows.
This is a nice illustration I found:
p>When I was a kid my Mum and Dad used to sometimes have ‘visitors’ for tea on a Sunday. Sundays were actually VERY boring when I was a kid - there was nothing to do, EVER.
This was OF COURSE pre everything. No tv on in the day (that started in about 1981 in the UK I think); no Internet of course; we did not even have a tape recorder till I was twelve (and then it ran on batteries that my Mum and Dad could not afford to replace).
My sister Jane had a record player which we played 45s on - Blackberry Way by The Move was Jane’s first single. Mine was Crackling Rosie by Neil Diamond (don’t know how I can admit that.)
Anyway it was the olden days OK? So when we had visitors my Mum would cook cakes from Good Housekeepings Cookery book - maybe cheese straws, maybe butterfly cakes; maybe date and walnut cake.
( I now have my own copy of Good Housekeepings - bought off e-bay. It’s fab.)
And we always had to Look Nice. So after Sunday dinner, ( a proper roast - I always hid the meat in my serviette and then chucked it in the coal bunker immediately afterwards), we had to go upstairs and get changed with clean clothes on.
Weird, huh? Seems so OLD.
Then the visitors would arrive and we had to go downstairs for a while to be polite. But it was always boring so we would usually go back upstairs, play, and then come down for tea - sandwiches and cake. Sometimes we sat in a line on the settee and someone (usually if Stan came, with his ‘proper’ camera), would take our photograph. This would appear in a frame later if we were really unlucky.
But anyway they always did this boring kind of talk as if they were on a special conversation display. And it was called ‘being polite’ I think. You had to act like a proper family which was weird as we already were a proper family. What reminded me of this was when I read about Vygotsky who had observed two little girls who were sisters and they said to each other ‘Let’s play sisters’.
Fantastic.
I knew what those little girls meant. And I felt like when the visitors came, my whole family played families. And it was as if we were in a pretend house with special visitor food. And we had to wear itchy clothes.
There is something in here about the relationships between space, language and identity. And about how there is a push-pull relationship amongst them all; they all influence each other so that you change in the space, or the space can change, and you change your language to change the space, but the space changes your language. And you end up being like a visitor in your own house.
