Social relationships and shifting languages in Northern Thailand1

Abstract

This paper explores how speakers' understandings of the conduct of social relationships mediate changing and socially distinctive syncretic language practices in a Northern Thai community. Although a shift away from vernacular (Kam Muang) speech styles to Standard Thai was emblematically tied to young and urban speakers in nostalgic discourses, syncretic speech styles and metalinguistic discourses also reflected local and socially positioned understandings of institutional roles and social relationships. I argue that scholars of language change and shift should foreground the mediating role of social relationships in speakers' uses and understandings of their communicative repertoires across multiple timescales.

Making the Shift From a Codeswitching to a Translanguaging Lens in English Language Teacher Education

“…Based on that, it is implied that multilingual minds could still clearly differentiate the language boundaries and cross them strategically upon necessity in spite of having a unitary semantic repertoire. This implication validates codeswitching research in under‐researched, newly independent, newly diverse, or postconflict regions where the functions and power dynamics of languages are undergoing covert and overt changes (e.g., Bonacina‐Pugh, 2012; Chimbuctane, 2013; Howard, 2010; Kharkhurin & Wei, 2015; King & Chetty, 2014; Probyn, 2009).…”

How Postindustrial Families Talk

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