Language and (Trans)nationalism
Language and (Trans)nationalism
- Kinga KozminskaKinga KozminskaBirkbeck, University of London
Summary
Language has always been entangled in vernacular-cosmopolitan visions. Transnational modes of transformation in the 21st century cannot, therefore, be understood without a close examination of changing ideals of linguistic legitimacy, their entanglement in politics of listening and embodied knowledges of the “listener.” A close examination of these developments enables us to see how language has been historically linked to modernity, rationality, technology, and society, and how an ideal of standard language ideology emerged in relation to particular politics of modernity and history of colonial legacy. This in turn has shaped the global order and contributes to social inequalities worldwide. To search for strategies for “understanding how time and space feel” and get transformed through interactions between the material and the social in the 21st century, research focuses on scale-making practices among transnational individuals and groups, their embodied enactments and entanglement in network cultures and specific rearrangements of materials. By doing so, it highlights sociolinguistic research’s capacity to counter unequal expectations in transnational space. Collected evidence promotes a holistic study of discourse, where recognition of changing research possibilities, positionalities, ecologies of media, and aesthetics may enable a better understanding of the continual processes of political linguistic figuration, see all communication as care, and study how its multiple readings are embedded in theory, politics, and technology.
Keywords
Subjects
- Linguistic Anthropology