In the last few years, sociolinguistics has expanded its theoretical vocabulary and methodologies to account for the dynamics of multilingualism, local cultural practices such as popular culture, and the performance of voice and linguistic diversity. We have had to do so to account for a world that is increasingly defined by global flows and frictions, a world that is now revealing the dynamic and often unequal ways multilingual speakers can and are allowed to access linguistic and nonlinguistic resources in online and offline spaces. For the authors of Popular culture, voice and linguistic diversity, this is uniquely true for multilingual speakers in the global South.
Dovchin, Pennycook, & Sultana take up many of the positions and arguments initiated in the sociolinguistics of popular culture and globalization initiated by Pennycook and Jan Blommaert, respectively. What is significant about this book is that we see a solid attempt to advance many of the ideas and theoretical suggestions made by Pennycook (Reference Pennycook2007). In fact, the reader will discover in this book that the data on translinguistics—in both online and offline contexts—is doing a great service of documenting the multilingual practices of young adults in Mongolia and Bangladesh.
The authors’ argument, a familiar one by now, is that the online and offline world are ‘intertwining’ and are ‘as real as anything else’ because technology is now more than ever a necessary feature of everyday life. But so is popular culture—an important aspect of young adults’ daily communication activities that involve almost always the mixing and mashing up of languages, and the uptake of linguistic and nonlinguistic resources. This is not unique to Asian peripheral practices, as the authors (to their credit) point out—that is, cultural and linguistic mixing of resources can be found in the smallest to the largest of places (urban/rural) around the world. Nevertheless, what the reader will find unique and novel in this book is that young adults in the Asian periphery identify with certain translinguistic practices that provide further proof that translinguistic practices are not static or cannot be stratified, and that life history, colonialism, globalization of capitalism, and the sustaining of the nation-state are core to understanding language use in the periphery. The authors argue that sociolinguistic models that privilege binaries miss the point of how translinguistic practices are complicated in flows and transmodalities and the stylization of new types of individual and community practices. They suggest that we take seriously transglossia of translinguistic practices, and go on to outline that framework.
A transglossic framework, as the authors so powerfully put forward, seeks to investigate language at multiple levels, analyze a complex of voices, and understand the intersection between popular cultural practice, the mixing of language practices, and transmodal and transtextualities (that is, the performance of multilingual pronunciation, morphemes, spelling, subtextual meanings, and expressive features). Here, the authors further develop the framework by drawing on the rich work of Mikhail Bakhtin to help us understand, unpack, and analyze the transmodal movements of signs and transtextual practices that focuses on pretextual, contextual, intratextual, subtextual, intertextual, and posttextual—gifting a powerful and novel framing of the analysis of popular culture, multilingualism, and voice.
In the core sections of the book the framework is applied to a range of data and contexts: popular music, film, sport, and so on. Each chapter analyzes how linguistic diversity and voice manifest in the online and offline interactions, opening up an interesting line of analysis for researchers of the sociolinguistics of globalization. In ch. 3 the authors explore the linguistic creativity of popular music by their participants. Their approach to popular music—and this would be familiar to sociolinguists interested in the study of Hip Hop culture—is not only that it is consumed, but that engagement with and performance of such music enable what the authors refer to as transglossic language use. Here the reader is treated to an analysis of how participants are wrapped up in ‘never ending textual productivity’ of popular music. We find—and this links with many recent publications on the localization of Hip Hop lyrical performance—that highlighted in transglossic practices in the empirical context is a relocalization of lyrics that in turn provides insight into the significance of voice as tied to ‘cultural and linguistic resources’.
These examples of analyzing localized lyrics, through a transglossic framework, help us understand that transglossic practices are inserted into the local performance of transglossoic melodies (those transtextualities) often fixed to transglossic modalities and an everyday feature of interactions in online contexts and offline contexts. As they put it: ‘Transglossic melodies are used for the playful function of the language, most often used for joking, teasing, or simply having fun for these speakers’ (67).
In ch. 4, the authors move on to analyze the transglossia of film. Here they explore how their participants are engaged in an interactional poetics (in part) via the genre of film. The authors produce a novel take on communication by exploring participants’ stylized communication through filmic discourses. They find that the interactions demonstrate that transglossic practices are ‘by no means limited to mixing identifiably different language resources’ (105). Instead, as in the case of the transglossia of popular music, a specific type of interaction emerges—a form of stylization—that gives rise to what they call, a ‘filmic way’ of speaking.
The authors are by no means celebratory of transglossic practices, as they do recognize that through such practices inequalities remain, particularly along gender lines. In ch. 5, for example, they analyze the transglossia of sport and demonstrate that such a practice in such a context demonstrates not only affiliations across sporting activities, but reveal hypermasculinity where you would expect it—the example of cricket and the perpetuating of imperial manliness counts, but also the enhancing of participants’ repertoire with, for example, Japanese as a result of participating in sports such as wrestling. In the analysis of the data, the authors demonstrate that participation in sport is eschewed by perpetuating gender inequality via ‘hypermasculince ideals’ and a clear stylizing of filmic double voicing that reaccentuates mainly masculine utterances, or mock perceived masculinity, or reveal an engagement of male playfulness through double-voiced discourses. This, the authors point out, indicates that transglossia is ultimately multivocal.
In the final two analytical chapters, the authors demonstrate that if we explore closely transglossic practices in cyberspace and begin to understand how multilingual speakers engage the online and offline spaces in translinguistic and transglossic ways, it becomes obvious (as is always the case) that there remains an uneven distribution of linguistic and nonlinguistic resources across those spaces (ch. 6). A context of translinguistic practice and the performance of transglossia such as the cyber infrastructure is fraught with inconsistencies and disparities, and in a world of unequal economies, though multilingual speakers desire an alternative and chart an alternative, as the authors point out, the local constraints of cyber transglossic practices are such that class trumps playfulness, and that social prestige, wealth, and power sustain inequality. But there is hope: multilingual speakers who invest in translinguistic and transglossic practices ultimately know how to combine resources, modes, codes, and diverse linguistic and cultural resources, tailored to their voice (ch. 7). And this helps them circumnavigate linguistic inequality.
Dovchin, Pennycook, & Sultana have contributed to the field of sociolinguistics a novel approach to the study of language in online and offline contexts. This book should be key to any course on the sociolinguistics of the internet, computer-mediated communication, or the study of multilingualism more generally.
