Making Pittsburghese: Communication technology, expertise, and the discursive construction of a regional dialect

Johnstone, Barbara

doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2010.08.010

Cited by 19 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…Given the sociolinguistic variation present for any signing or spoken language population, language recognition projects—which include SLC‐R collaboration—contribute their own forms of invention, particularly through privileging of certain language usage groups over others within a local or national context. This is one way that language researchers become, to use Johnstone's phrasing, “part of the language‐making process” (2011:14).…”

Section: Analyzing Linguistic Practices In Relation To Social Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Signed Language Community‐Researcher Collaboration inViệtNam: Challenging Language Ideologies, Creating Social Change

Cooper

Nguyễn

2015

J Linguistic Anthropol

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Examining linguistic practices and description involved in signed language community‐ researcher collaboration in Việt Nam, this article contributes a case supporting analytic efforts to study the ways “people take up literacy for their own purposes” (Bialostok and Whitman 2006:390). Emerging at the juncture of national speech‐based Deaf education, one signed language–based education project, and Deaf community organizing, these collaborations coalesced in a political climate in which “signs” were construed as a compensatory system for “real” language (Woodward, Nguyễn, and Nguyễn 2004) and as “backward” relative to Vietnamese grammatical structure (Cooper 2014). Using original ethnographic data, microanalysis of two texts reveals that the ways presenters mobilize stances toward linguistic description and one another accrues legitimacy and authority for Deaf sociolinguistic knowledge and Deaf agency while implicitly challenging prevailing language ideologies and hierarchies. Discussion centers on processes of legitimation of Deaf social voices, language invention/disinvention, interpretation/translation, and the significance of ethnography to the present analysis.

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Section: Analyzing Linguistic Practices In Relation To Social Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Signed Language Community‐Researcher Collaboration inViệtNam: Challenging Language Ideologies, Creating Social Change

Cooper

Nguyễn

2015

J Linguistic Anthropol

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“…As we “look beyond dominant institutional discourses about language to consider other discourses that may be in play” and “think about the technological constraints on whose voices are heard when” (Johnstone 2011:13), we can note that opportunities for any given sociolinguistic value project to be continuously recycled can be enhanced through upscaling , or by being made available through mediatization to wider audiences. The fact that mediatized value projects go on to serve as the input for uncountably many postmediatized mediation projects (Agha 2011b) magnifies this effect.…”

Section: Implications and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, there are no widely circulated grammars of or courses on how to do this, though Johnstone's work on locally produced resources for local ways of speaking English in Pittsburgh (e.g. Johnstone 2011) may point to changes in the availability of such educational materials.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Uptake (un)limited: The mediatization of register shifting in US public discourse

Cole¹,

Pellicer²

2012

Lang. Soc.

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A B S T R A C TWe observe that MEDIATIZATION (Agha 2011b) creates and maintains the conditions by which some messages and uptake formulations remain unavailable to larger audiences while others are continuously recycled and increasingly accessible. We argue that the maintenance of the unequal divisions of semiotic labor in ways that mirror socioeconomic inequalities at an increasingly global scale can be facilitated by mediatization as currently practiced. An analysis of the way that the uptake formulations of a mediatized fragment of a register-shifting event varied in its pre-and postmediatized contexts reveals how premediatized value projects can be systematically replaced during mediatization, limiting the availability of premediatized value projects for wider uptake. We observe that value projects attached to mediatized fragments work to maintain the hierarchy of perduring semiotic registers (Goebel 2010) in US public discourse in which Standard English repertoires continue to dominate all others. (Mediatization, Standard, semiotic register-shifting, black preaching style) I N T R O D U C T I O NTo ignore the performativity of value projects, their felicity conditions and fragility under conditions of uptake, is to allow anxieties about hegemony to infect moments of decontextualized reflection, even as our actual conduct remakes what we fear. (Agha 2011a:28) In the spring of 2007, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were contending for the nomination of the Democratic Party during the US presidential campaign that ended

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“…(2) What role does YouTube play in shaping and disseminating language attitudes towards dialects/ styles/accents? With regard to the first question, people who viewed these four YouTube videos about the New York City accent are presented with specific linguistic features which they assimilate into their own prior frames of knowledge; however, they are also presented with comments containing metalinguistic and metapragmatic information about language variation that may shape their understanding of what kind of people speak this way (Johnstone, ). This information may then influence the degree to which particular individuals align or disalign with this speech variety and shape their own aspirational linguistic choices.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Metapragmatic comments and orthographic performances of a New York accent on YouTube

Cutler

2019

World Englishes

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This paper adopts a metapragmatic approach (Urban, 2006) to analyze responses to YouTube videos on ‘how to talk like a New Yorker’ in a corpus of YouTube comments (N = 2,649). The analysis illustrates how linguistic features associated with this way of talking are experienced and negotiated by locals and non‐locals in their metapragmatic comments and performances of the accent and how they come to be socially recognized as indexical of a certain set of speaker attributes (Agha, 2005; Bolander, 2016). Analyzing user‐generated reactions to linguistic variation complements traditional variationist work by illustrating how people experience sociolinguistic difference (Leone‐Pizzighella & Rymes, 2017; Rymes, 2014). It also shows how digital sharing and commenting practices expose shifts in language ideologies that mirror the changing status of American English within the Inner Circle.

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Making Pittsburghese: Communication technology, expertise, and the discursive construction of a regional dialect

Cited by 19 publications

References 50 publications

Signed Language Community‐Researcher Collaboration inViệtNam: Challenging Language Ideologies, Creating Social Change

Signed Language Community‐Researcher Collaboration inViệtNam: Challenging Language Ideologies, Creating Social Change

Uptake (un)limited: The mediatization of register shifting in US public discourse

Metapragmatic comments and orthographic performances of a New York accent on YouTube

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