Learning English Through Social Interaction: The Case ofBig Brother 2006,Finland

In line with recent Conversation Analytic work on language learning as situated practice, this article investigates how interactants can create language learning opportunities for themselves and others in and through social interaction. The study shows how the participants of BigBrother Finland, a reality TV show, whose main communication is in Finnish, take up resources provided by English and use them for learning in their interaction. This interaction is characterized by an orientation to both the local context and the television audience, a mixture of activity types and translanguaging. It focuses on one of the participants who explicitly evaluates his own proficiency in English as limi…

Authenticity, normativity and social media

Social Media Discourse, (Dis)identifications and Diversities

Doing gender and sexuality intersectionally in multimodal social media practices

The chapter focuses on how members in participatory cultures engage in everyday, informal, and interest-driven social and discursive practices primarily on social media but also in ways that relate to the material and physical contexts of their lives. We show how social actors operating in these sites construct gender and sexuality intersectionally and multimodally. We argue that gender and sexuality are always constructed at intersections with other identity categories. With respect to both digital and physical participatory activities, multisemioticity is, in turn, necessary as an analytic perspective: it allows the investigation of how participants routinely draw on and deploy a range of…

Planting in the pandemic : surveillance on social media

This article looks at interest-driven and informal social media practices that have flourished in the pandemic period and its ensuing renaissance of domesticity. It investigates how tending plants and discussing them on social media serve as a particular site for connecting around loving and taking care of plants. Its focus is on the discursive means with which posters – guided by social media algorithms – rhetorically co-construct a morally acceptable version of a pandemic lifestyle around houseplants. More specifically, drawing on multimodal discourse studies, critical sociolinguistics and work on digital surveillance, it investigates how members of a Finland-based social media site obser…

Does Finland Need Raciolinguistics?

A growing number of applied linguists and language educators in the US/North American context advocate for and from a scholarly perspective which views language issues in relation to racial issues and vice versa. The emergent field of raciolinguistics highlights the relationships between language and race/racism and has brought about research that investigates their intersections. Should scholars in Finland adopt (and adapt) such an approach to scholarly work? Three Finland-based scholars explore this question in a question ("prompt") - response format.

YouTube meme warriors: Mashup videos as political critique

Experimenting with computer conferencing in English for Academic Purposes

Investigating multilingualism and multisemioticity as communicative resources in social media

This chapter discusses the role of multilingualism and multisemioticity as key resources in communication in contemporary interest-driven social media. We approach social media as translocal arenas for social interaction and (trans)cultural activities (Leppänen 2008, 2012; Kytölä in press) which complement and intertwine with participants’ offline realities in different ways. In particular, we show how the investigation of such activities can benefit from a multi-dimensional framework drawing on insights from several fields, including online ethnography, the study of multimodality, and research into computer-mediated discourse (CMD). peerReviewed

Kansallinen kyselytutkimus englannin kielestä Suomessa : käyttö, merkitys ja asenteet

Revisualization of classed motherhood in social media

Young People's Translocal New Media Uses: A Multiperspective Analysis Of Language Choice And Heteroglossia

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the particularities of the linguistic, social and cultural action of young Finns in translocal new media spaces, and the ways in which they themselves make sense of and account for their actions. We present findings from 4 case studies, each of which illustrates aspects of translocality in young Finns' new media uses. Theoretically and methodologically the case studies draw on sociolinguistics, discourse studies, and ethnography, making use of the concepts of language choice and linguistic and stylistic heteroglossia. Through the 4 cases in focus, the paper shows how young people's linguistically and textually sophisticated new media uses are geared…

Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for identification in social media

Drawing on insights provided by linguistic anthropology, the study of multisemioticity and research in computer-mediated discourse (CMD), this chapter discusses how entextualization (Bauman & Briggs, 1990; Silverstein & Urban, 1996; Blommaert, 2005, pp. 46–8) and resemiotization (Iedema, 2003; Scollon & Scollon, 2004, pp. 101–3; Scollon, 2008) are key resources for identity work in social media. Three key arguments inspire and give direction to our discussion, each of them laying down touchstones for language scholars who wish to investigate identity in social media. First, for many individuals and social or cultural groups, social media are increasingly significant grassroots arenas for in…

Sociolinguistic upsets and people of color in social media performances

Abstract Particularly since the refugee “reception crisis” in 2015, Finland has started transforming into a more diverse and multicultural society. These societal changes have also been accompanied by sociolinguistic change, as well as language ideological debates and tensions, often manifesting in explicitly racist and xenophobic bursts of upset. In this article, our focus is on social media as a space where such societal and sociolinguistic upsets are articulated and re-worked. Drawing on recent sociolinguistic and discourse analytic work on transformative and critical popular cultural practices in social media, and studies on rap and belonging, we discuss how, in a mediatized society suc…

Dog blogs as ventriloquism: Authentication of the human voice

This paper looks at personal blogging by dog owners in an international, English language blogsite in which dog owners from around the world report and reflect upon their dogs and their lives with dogs, and do so by using the dog׳s voice. It approaches dog blogs as an example of the strategic use of pervasive but contentious anthropomorphic western discourses about animals and discusses how dog bloggers use anthropomorphism as a discursive means for crafting and collectively ratifying authenticity in a translocal, interest-driven and informal social media context in which traditional territorial and demographic parameters of authenticity are not easily available or relevant. More specifical…

Buffalaxed Super-diversity: Representations of the Other on YouTube

Superdiversity perspective and the sociolinguistics of social media

This chapter shows how the superdiversity perspective suggested in recent critical sociolinguistics provides the study of social media discourse and communication with a useful approach to conceptualizing and empirically investigating complex and multiple axes of diversity and difference in social media practices. It discusses recent work in sociolinguistics of social media, highlighting how social media practices illustrate many of the aspects of contemporary social life and communication that are considered symptomatic of superdiversity. It shows how research in this field has moved from viewing superdiversity as a quality or quantity characterizing specific places, spaces, groups and net…

Migrant rap in the periphery

Abstract Focusing on a YouTube performance by an emergent Finnish Somali rapper and the audience responses it has generated, this paper looks at ways in which rap music engages with the issue of belonging. Drawing on recent theorizations of belonging as a multi-dimensional, contingent and fluid process, along with sociolinguistic work on globalization and superdiversity, Finnish hip hop culture and popular cultural practices in social media, the paper investigates how belonging is performatively and multi-semiotically interrogated in its online context. It shows how rap can serve as a significant site and channel for new voices in turbulent social settings characterized by rapid social chan…

Youth language in media contexts: insights into the functions of English in Finland

ABSTRACT:  Recent research has shown that the role of English in Finland is now changing. In particular contexts, it is sometimes used as a lingua franca, an intracultural means of communication, and an additional language, along with Finnish. An interesting domain in terms of the spread and changing role of English is also youth language – the focus of the present paper. Approaching youth language from a discourse-analytic and sociolinguistic perspective, this paper investigates an electronic game session, hip-hop lyrics, fan fiction and weblogs. As in youth language in other bi/multilingual speech communities, the paper argues that the uses of English in these Finnish youth language conte…

Homing blogs as ambivalent spaces for feminine agency

This article discusses a form of lifestyle blogging where women blog about their homes and everyday lives. In these homing blogs, selfrepresentations are characteristically spatially demarcated within the private sphere of the home. As these repeated representations of women in their homes take place in the public space of the internet, homing blogs work towards naturalizing the home as a women’s sphere. Written and commented on mostly by other women, homing blogs represent a feminine form of self-expression and communication that functions as a discursive expression of ongoing social, economic, and cultural changes in affluent Western societies. In this article, Finnish versions of these h…

Introduction : spaces of upset in the Nordic region

Abstract This introductory article opens the thematic issue Spaces of Upset in the Nordic Region. It introduces the contributions of the issue, outlines the concepts that unite them, and discusses the sociolinguistic area in which they are set: the Nordic region. Centering on Denmark, Finland and Sweden, the article offers an overview of some of the sociolinguistic, ideological and political characteristics of the region and the countries it comprises. The Nordic region is widely seen as a paradigm case of social stability, consensus and cohesion. This vision is, however, a mirage. To be sure, upset often lingers below the discursive veneer of Nordic harmony, concord and agreement. Breaking…

Introduction: Social Media Discourse, (Dis)Identifications and Diversities

The focus in this volume is on social media discourse, (dis)identifications and diversities. It demonstrates how particular ways of mobilizing verbal, discursive and other semiotic resources serve as means for identity work (Bucholtz, 2003; Blommaert, 2003), involving acts, processes and practices of (dis)identification as essential aspects of sociality in social media. It will also illustrate how such social action also increasingly engages with a range of diversities in social media. peerReviewed

Languaging in Ultima Thule: Multilingualism in the Life of a Sami Boy

Abstract In this paper we investigate multilingualism as a phenomenon which pervades different social and cultural levels but is manifested in the everyday life of multilingual individuals. As an illustration, we examine multilingualism from the perspective of a young Sami boy, Ante, and explore how different languages function as a complex – but at times problematic – set of resources for him. To capture the complexity and fluidity in the relationships between various languages in his life, we base our theorising on such concepts as ‘linguistic resources’, ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘languaging’. With the help of multimodal data we examine how the linguistic resources present in Ante's daily life…

Migrant rap in the periphery : performing politics of belonging

Focusing on a YouTube performance by an emergent Finnish Somali rapper and the audience responses it has generated, this paper looks at ways in which rap music engages with the issue of belonging. Drawing on recent theorizations of belonging as a multi-dimensional, contingent and fluid process, along with sociolinguistic work on globalization and superdiversity, Finnish hip hop culture and popular cultural practices in social media, the paper investigates how belonging is performatively and multi-semiotically interrogated in its online context. It shows how rap can serve as a significant site and channel for new voices in turbulent social settings characterized by rapid social change and co…

Further notes on sociolinguistic scales

AbstractThis short paper seeks to reformulate and refine the notion of sociolinguistic scales as relative scope of understandability, thus drawing the notion fully into the realm of semiotics, rather than in the rather unproductive sphere of spatiotemporal and distributional interpretation where it has been deployed. Differences in scope of understandability are differences in the presupposability of signs, and such differences are not equivalent but stratified in a polycentric environment. Scales, in that sense, point towards the non-unified and hierarchical-layered nature of the sign and of meaning making practices. Scalar effects, once established, can furthermore be carried over into di…