Citizen Sociolinguistics 2019

The readings this week were very thought-provoking and I liked that they gave us different perspectives of what a context collapse truly could look like in various situations. The one that resonated with me the most was Moore’s (2019) version of drawing commonalities between collapses “IRL” (in real life) and those done digitally. This week as I was thinking about context collapses, I thought about the gag reels or “bloopers” at the ends of movies. I love to see the actors “break” character for a moment and watch their worlds collapse into one as they become their own self again for a brief amount of time. I do not know why I love the bloopers so much, but that moment of rupture engages me so much. On reflecting on that I thought about how much it must resonate with other people as well, or else why would they include them at the ends of films? Maybe people like them so much because it reminds them of themselves, a regular human being.   In the bloopers, they no longer “act” as ...

Part I In his “unapologetically presentist reading of Goffman’s dissertation,” Dr. Moore presents several points with the intention of increasing our understanding of what is common and different in online and offline interaction, and I would like to begin the first part of my blog discussing one that resonated with me the most.   One of the points that I found relevant for understanding communication interaction was the idea of “faulty participant,” which I understood as needing more than verbal cues to successfully communicate (see p. 280). This notion is relevant to me, as it goes back to the idea that there are layers of meaning to what we say. For example: Chilean friend 1: Hey buddy! Do you want to join me for ‘ once’ (Pronounced “awn-say,” it translates as ‘eleven,’ but it is actually the equivalent of ‘dinner’ in the US). Chilean friend 2: Nah! I have stuff to do. Chilean friend 1: Are you sure? It’s my treat. Chilean friend 2: No, I am...

In sociolinguistics, we learn about diamesic (from Greek dia - across and mes - medium) variation, or language variation across media. Traditionally the word is used to describe the difference between oral and written speech. But in today’s reality, media takes on a whole other meaning. So does diamesic now also encompasses the variation across various online platforms (if that’s even a thing)? When looking up diamesic online, I found a more recent and up to date definition provided by " Raj Bhuptani , Harvard '13 (Statistics)" on Quora: “diamesic - variation in a language across medium of communication (English over the phone versus English over email versus English over IM)” but the list could go on and on: over Facebook over Twitter over Snapchat… [For those who are not familiar with Quora, it is a participatory Q&A website that works in a similar fashion as Urban Dictionary, as anyone can provide answers which then get up or d...

I’ve been struggling to connect my disparate thoughts on this week’s readings into a semi-coherent post. Yet I’m realizing that at the crux of my various reflections are the notions of borders, ruptures, and thresholds: aspects of our environment that exist in natural and man-made capacities, and that can simultaneously serve welcoming and exclusionary purposes. So far in class we’ve emphasized the locally-specific duality of linguistic practices: for instance, the way that pronouncing “Greenwich” as “GREN-itch” in Philadelphia reveals you’re not from South Philly, while pronouncing it the “Philadelphia-proper” way of “GREEN-witch” in NYC shows you’re not from the village. Both pronunciations of “Greenwich” are right, and both are wrong; and the practice of “citizen sociolinguistics” exists at the border of these separate/connected worlds. I want to situate the practice of “citizen sociolinguistics” in this way, because I think the “Greenwich” example illustrates the complexity ...