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Andrea Moll

University of Freiburg

Authenticity in dialect performance? A case study of diasporic Cyber-Jamaican

 

Concentrating on spontaneous, unmonitored speech as the only way to elicit ‘authentic’ data, sociolinguists have long dismissed dialect performance as artificial and stylized. However, Coupland not only argues that the traditional sociolinguistic interview involves ‘setting the stage’ for personal narrative (2007: 185), but he also claims that ‘everyday talk’ is becoming increasingly characterised by aspects of performativity and linguistic styling (2007: 28). In the age of ‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec 2006), this process includes speakers’ more or less self-conscious selection from a pool of globalised linguistic resources for purposes of sociolinguistic styling and identity management (cf. Blommaert 2010). In addition, Schilling-Estes’ research on dialect performance blurs the ‘boundary’ between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ data even further by demonstrating that “[…] performance speech may well display quite regular patterning, rather than the irregularity traditionally associated with a shift toward an exaggeratedly vernacular version of one’s dialect” (1998: 54).

 

Assuming dialect performance to be an essential part of communicative practices, this paper investigates a large-scale corpus of postings from an online discussion board (16.8 million tokens) frequented mainly by Jamaicans living in the diaspora. Besides paying close attention to processes of ‘enregisterment’ (cf. Agha 2003; Johnstone (2004; forthcoming), the data is analysed as to the role that different types of dialect performance might play for the discursive negotiation of ‘second-level authenticity’ (cf. Coupland 2003; 2007).

 

References

Agha, Asif. “The Social Life of a Cultural Value,” Language and Communication 23 (2003): 231-273.

Blommaert, Jan. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010). 

Coupland, Nikolas. “Dialect Stylization in Radio Talk,” Language in Society 30 (2001): 345-375. 

---. Style, Language Variation and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). 

Johnstone, Barbara. “Dialect Enregisterment in Peformance,” Journal of Sociolinguistics (forthcoming).

----. “‘Pittsburghese’ Online: Vernacular Norming in Conversation,” American Speech 79.2 (2004): 115145. 

Schilling-Estes, Natalie. “Investigating ‘Self-Conscious’ Speech: The Performance of Register in Ocracoke English,” Language in Society 27 (1998): 53-83.

Vertovec,Stephen. “The emergence of super-diversity in Britain,” COMPAS Working Papers 25 (Oxford: University, Centre of Migration, Policy and Society, 2006): 1-42.

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