![]() Communities of practice develop, she writes, as the result of shared intention, through joint activities and a commitment to mutual understanding. ![]() What do these actions mean within the wider context?įor Bailey, the rationale for linguistic selections is not always conscious Eckert (2006), meanwhile, is concerned with much more volitional ideas. While it is possible that specific implementations of mixed linguistic feature sets might not be interpretable on a moment-by-moment basis, it is not beyond reason to assess them nevertheless as the result of conscious decisions to emphasize relations with cultural objects or to maintain social connections. Here, as elsewhere, Bailey argues, one must attend to the sociopolitical histories evidenced by such activities. To search for meaning in the codeswitching of the teens in Bailey’s example would thus not necessarily be wise in isolation. Key to heteroglossia are the notions of simultaneity and conflict: what are the various sign-sets that one uses, and what are the relative sociohistorical meanings and conflicts of these sets? Multilingualism and multi-variantism are essential to this understanding monolingualism is not the default. The remaining authors, however, treat language much more directly.īailey (2012) presents the concept of heteroglossia, an idea conceived by Bakhtin. There is room in Bourdieu’s examination of social capital for linguistic investigation, as well–analyses of the effects of CMC on the construction and maintenance of social groups, for example–but the entanglement of language and social function here is implicit only. ![]() As a shared cultural object, language exists as an aggregate system to be employed at-will by those who have made the appropriate cultural investments. When the subject is explicitly addressed, Bourdieu’s views are somewhat opaque however, he seems to treat linguistic items as fixed assets, elements beyond the full control of yet manipulable by the individual. ![]() Language is of concern to Bourdieu only as a particular manifestation of cultural capital, an example of the accumulated assets which establish and contribute to the negotiation of one’s societal stature. According to Bourdieu, economic capital underpins all else, though the privileged might try to conceal it cultural capital accrues primarily as a matter of heritage and education, though there are many factors in play and social capital accumulates according to one’s investment in building social networks. More precisely, each article to some extent considers the fluidity of these ideas and the power of individual intention to shape them.īourdieu (1986) presents a theory of material and symbolic capital, those assets which may be exchanged for social profit. The prevailing theme for this week’s readings is the intersection and interaction of language, community, and identity. ![]()
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