INTRODUCTION
While interest in ‘affective processes’ has led to an ‘affective turn’ in cultural studies (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004; Gregg & Seigworth Reference Gregg and Seigworth2010; Knudsen & Stage Reference Knudsen, Stage, Knudsen and Stage2015), in sociolinguistics this perspective has been given far less attention, despite the stated ‘audacity of affect’ in fields focal to sociolinguistic inquiry (McElhinny Reference McElhinny2010; cf., however, e.g. Goodwin & Goodwin Reference Goodwin, Goodwin and Duranti2000; Pavlenko Reference Pavlenko2002; McEwan-Fujita Reference McEwan-Fujita2010; da Silva Reference da Silva2015; McLaughlin Reference McLaughlin2015). One such field is the ongoing revaluation of minoritised languages in contemporary globalisation, effected, among other things, by the increased circulation of these languages in new media domainsFootnote 1 (Heller Reference Heller2011; Pietikäinen & Kelly-Holmes Reference Pietikäinen, Kelly-Holmes, Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes2013; Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes and Androutsopoulos2014; Pietikäinen, Kelly-Holmes, Jaffe, & Coupland Reference Pietikäinen, Kelly-Holmes, Jaffe; and Coupland2016). In this connection, research has investigated how access to new media spaces and genres can create new values and functions for minoritised languages often regarded as old-fashioned and unglamorous (e.g. Honeycutt & Cunliffe Reference Honeycutt and Cunliffe2010; Jones & Uribe-Jongbloed Reference Jones and Uribe-Jongbloed2013; Moriarty Reference Moriarty and Androutsopoulos2014; Pietikäinen Reference Pietikäinen and Androutsopoulos2014). Although these investigations lean towards mention of affective processes, they fail to make these central to an exploration of how the revaluations are shaped by affective investments embedded in broader sociopolitical processes.
Combining recent theorising on affect with insights from sociolinguistic research (e.g. Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004; Kelly-Holmes & Atkinson Reference Kelly-Holmes, Atkinson, Johnson and Ensslin2007; Moriarty & Pietikäinen Reference Moriarty and Pietikäinen2011; Wetherell Reference Wetherell2012), the present study directs the ‘lens of affect’ (McElhinny Reference McElhinny2010) on two examples: music video covers from two minority languageFootnote 2 contexts—Irish and Sámi—uploaded on YouTube and performed in Irish and Sámi respectively. The Irish video is a remake of the global hit Wake me up by the Swedish DJ and producer Avicii, made by the Irish language summer school Coláiste Lurgan. The Sámi performance, made by the Sámi female comedy duo Märät säpikkäät/Njuoska bittut, is a parody of the popular song Missä muruseni on ‘Where is my sweetheart’ by Finnish pop singer Jenni Vartiainen. Both performances received considerable attention on YouTube when they were first launched there. Moreover, both became part of a larger phenomenon: while the Irish performance became an international (media) phenomenon in its own right, the Sámi video was launched as a teaser for a comedy show broadcast on a national TV channel in Finland. Most importantly for this article, however, both videos elicited an abundance of affective comments expressing a range of emotions towards not only the performances, but also the minority languages and their speakers.
Focusing on this affective-discursive practice (Wetherell Reference Wetherell2012) of YouTube commentary, this study analyses nodes of ‘affective investment’ (Kølvraa Reference Kølvraa, Knudsen and Stage2015) emerging from the web of comments. The analysis shows how affective investments create a space around the two minoritised languages, their speakers, and the related ethnicities/nationalities filled with positive affects: enthusiasm, admiration, love, solidarity, and pride. At the same time, however, these apparently ‘happy’ spaces are shaped and cut through by boundaries and divisions within and between ethnolinguistic communities, marked by scorn, anger, and shame. Examining further the sociohistorical embeddedness of the affective investments, the study discusses how many of these are expressions of, to a greater or lesser degree, a banal ‘everyday nationalism’ (Billig Reference Billig1995; Jones & Merriman Reference Jones and Merriman2009), connected in complex ways to the colonial histories of the two countries—Ireland and Finland. Overall, the investigation sheds light on how social media operates as a catalyst for socially conditioned affective investments contributing to a (re)valuation of minoritised languages, speakers, and ethnic and national belongings at the crossroads of ‘banal globalisation’ and ‘everyday nationalism’ (Jones & Merriman Reference Jones and Merriman2009; Thurlow & Jaworski Reference Thurlow and Jaworski2010).
AFFECT, LANGUAGE, THE SOCIAL MEDIA, AND EVERYDAY NATIONALISM
Following the view of Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004) among others, affect is understood in the present study as more or less synonymous with emotion or feeling. What sets the notion of affect apart from the conventional notion of emotion, however, is that affects are seen as fundamentally relational, emerging and existing only in relation to another (human or nonhuman) body. Affects can be thought to travel between and to ‘stick’ to bodies (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004), making them sites of ‘affective investment’ (Kølvraa Reference Kølvraa, Knudsen and Stage2015; see also Knudsen & Stage Reference Knudsen, Stage, Knudsen and Stage2015). Affects are understood not only as relational, but also as socially conditioned and performative; affects not only shape their objects—individual and collective bodies to which they ‘stick’—but also create alignments, divisions, and boundaries between those bodies. It is these social dimensions that connect affects inseparably to the ‘cultural politics of world making’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004:12).
What is more, affects are understood here as something that can be expressed via language, not as ‘an “extra discursive” event’ (Wetherell Reference Wetherell2012:350; cf. Massoumi Reference Massoumi2009). Understood this way, affects lend themselves to ‘textual’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004; Knudsen & Stage Reference Knudsen, Stage, Knudsen and Stage2015), or rather, in the present study, discourse analytical, examination. In her powerful critique of approaches separating affect and discourse, Wetherell (Reference Wetherell2012) introduces the term affective-discursive practice to underline the inseparability of affect and discourse. The YouTube comments on which the present study focuses are a tangible illustration of such practice.
Regarded as ‘objects, mediators and repositories of affect’ (Kuntsman Reference Kuntsman2012:6), social media sites, YouTube among them, have attracted a growing body of research in cultural and media studies (e.g. Karatzogianni & Kuntsman Reference Karatzogianni and Kuntsman2012; Knudsen & Stage Reference Knudsen, Stage, Knudsen and Stage2015; McBean Reference McBean2014; Reestorff Reference Reestorff, Knudsen and Stage2015). Kuntsman (Reference Kuntsman2009), among others, has studied what might be termed, following Billig (Reference Billig1995), ‘hot’ nationalism in cyberspace. The present study draws on the notions of hot and banal nationalism as introduced by Billig (Reference Billig1995), hot nationalism referring to the more extreme and visible expressions of nationalism, banal nationalism pointing to the rather routine and often imperceptible reproduction of national belonging. Nevertheless, the study contributes to the critique of the underlying dualism problematised by empirical contexts, such as the social media site examined here, where there is a mixture of more or less ‘banal’ or ‘hot’ acts of nationalism which, moreover, can be interpreted as more or less banal or hot by different actors (cf. Jones & Merriman Reference Jones and Merriman2009). As an overarching concept seeking to overcome the dualist inclination, the study adopts the notion of everyday nationalism introduced by Jones & Merriman (Reference Jones and Merriman2009), aimed at highlighting not the quality but the everydayness of nationalist acts.
THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXT OF (THE) IRISH AND (THE) SÁMI
Both Irish and the languages can be characterised as minoritised languages from peripheralised sites (cf. Pietikäinen & Kelly-Holmes Reference Pietikäinen, Kelly-Holmes, Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes2013), although the respective languages have very different positions in the context of the respective nation states—Ireland and, in this study, Finland. The following outline presents some aspects of both contexts as a background for the analysis below.
Although Irish is the first official language in the Republic of Ireland, and as such is promoted especially through the medium of education, it occupies rather a marginal position in many other areas of everyday life, such as business and the media, where English is the dominant language (Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2011; Moriarty Reference Moriarty and Androutsopoulos2014; Brennan & Costa Wilson Reference Brennan and Wilson2016; for an overview of Irish in the media see Kelly-Holmes & Atkinson Reference Kelly-Holmes, Atkinson, Johnson and Ensslin2007). As Moriarty (Reference Moriarty and Androutsopoulos2014:471) has pointed out, ‘the limited space for Irish language in the public domain has increased the association of the language with schooling’, strengthened the notion of the language as old-fashioned and backward and sustained a view in which ‘speaking Irish has been afforded little indexical value in Irish society’ (Moriarty Reference Moriarty and Androutsopoulos2014:468). Kelly-Holmes & Atkinson (Reference Kelly-Holmes, Atkinson, Johnson and Ensslin2007:176–78) have described the relation of the Irish people to the language in terms of two continua, both running from superiority to inferiority. The first continuum relates to the societal status of the language, with ‘Irish as a marker of ethnolinguistic belonging’ at one end and the notion of ‘Irish as a dead language with no relevance in the world’ at the other. The second continuum, relating to competence, emerges against the backdrop of the prevailing ideology that ‘complete competence in Irish is the only possibility’ (Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2011:531). Having the ‘“élite” of fluent Irish speakers’ at one end, the ‘majority of non-fluent ones’ at the other, the continuum makes clear the division between ‘them’ and ‘us’ (cf. Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2011:521). The ideology, along with the perceived division, might also at least partly explain the somewhat curious fact that although Irish is a compulsory subject throughout the years of compulsory schooling in Ireland, in the 2011 census only 41.4% of the population reported an ability to speak Irish.Footnote 3
By contrast, of the nine Sámi languages, the native languages of the indigenous Sámi people, three have the status of an official language in the Sámi domicile area in the north of Finland,Footnote 4 a country that otherwise has two national languages—Finnish and Swedish.Footnote 5 The most vibrant of the Sámi languages, Northern Sámi, is estimated to have around 30,000 speakers in total; other Sámi languages have only a couple of hundred speakers, and all nine languages are classified as endangered. Today, around a half of the Sámi speak some Sámi language to a varying degree. The historical trajectory of the Sámi languages echoes that of many other minoritised languages (including Irish), involving deliberate marginalisation and stigmatisation on the part of the dominant nation states and, in the past couple of decades, attempts at language revitalisation, especially among young people (see e.g. Pietikäinen Reference Pietikäinen2008; Pietikäinen & Dlaske Reference Pietikäinen and Dlaske2013). Despite the gradual strengthening of the position of the Sámi languages in the Sámi domicile area, in the rest of Finland, in public domains including the media, the Sámi languages remain marginal. (For a recent overview of the Sámi languages in the media in Finland see Pietikäinen Reference Pietikäinen and Androutsopoulos2014.)
What the majority of Finns know, not only about the Sámi languages but also about the Sámi people in general, remains rather sketchy, being shaped primarily by the popular media and its imagery of the Sámi as backward, dirty, over-sexed drinkers, and by the Lapland tourism industry, which maintains an image of the Sámi as pristine but primitive people leading their lives far away from modern civilisation (see V. Lehtola Reference Lehtola, Tuominen, Tuulentie, Lehtola and Autti1999; Dlaske & Jäntti Reference Dlaske and Jäntti2016; Näkkäläjärvi Reference Näkkäläjärvi2016). Notwithstanding these rather negative conceptions, the attitude of the Finns towards the Sámi is characterised by a kind of ‘double-entanglement’ (McRobbie Reference McRobbie2009): while on the one hand othered and repudiated, on the other hand the Sámi are regarded as a kindred nation living within the borders of the Finnish nation state, as ‘our’ indigenous people. Both of these viewpoints reflect present-day colonial discourses circulating in Finland (cf. Näkkäläjärvi Reference Näkkäläjärvi2016).
In both the Irish and Sámi contexts, access of the languages to new media spaces and genres, such as radio satire, rap, stand-up comedy, and TV comedy shows, has contributed to shifts in values and indexicalities attached to the languages (e.g. Kelly-Holmes & Atkinson Reference Kelly-Holmes, Atkinson, Johnson and Ensslin2007; Pietikäinen & Dlaske Reference Pietikäinen and Dlaske2013; Moriarty Reference Moriarty and Androutsopoulos2014). The two music video covers examined in the present study exemplify further circulation of the two languages and their speakers in new media domains.
THE TWO MUSIC VIDEO COVERS
The video from the Irish context, entitled Avicii Vs Lurgan – “Wake me up” as Gaeilge [‘in Irish’],Footnote 6 is a remake of the global mega hit Wake me up, by the Swedish DJ and producer Avicii, launched on July 29, 2013. The Irish version is a joint production of teachers and students from Coláiste Lurgan, an independent, nonprofit, but self-supporting, Irish language summer school in Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking region on the west coast of Ireland where many Irish teenagers spend a couple of weeks in the summer to improve their Irish. Producing Irish-language versions of globally popular pop songs and the related videos has for a few years been part of the course work and a way of learning Irish at Coláiste Lurgan. The video examined here, then, is not unique. What makes it special, however, is the (media) attention it gained and the huge popularity it achieved. Just to give a few examples, the performance was praised by newspapers and online magazines, which also circulated the video through their websites; radio stations took the song on their playlists, not only in Ireland, but also in Australia and Canada; and part of the group starring on the video were invited to perform on the Late Late Show, broadcast on the national channel RTÉ1.Footnote 7 The performance was noted even by Avicii himself, who linked the video on his Facebook page and posted ‘This one is so cool! I can't understand a word but I love it’. (Ó Fátharta Reference Ó Fátharta2013). Arguably aided by this link, in its first two months on YouTube the video gathered two million views. A year later, the figure had risen to over four million (being, at the time of data collection, in February 2016, 4,988,004.) In February 2016, the performance had received 34,974 likes, 1,253 dislikes and 5,550 comments. Most of these are written in English, but around 900 are in Irish or include some Irish, while a handful are written in other languages, such as Spanish, Russian, Polish, German, French, and Italian.
The video from the Sámi context was uploaded on YouTube in autumn 2011Footnote 8 as a teaser for the TV comedy show, Märät säpikkäät/Njuoska bittut,Footnote 9 conceived, co-written, and presented by two young Sámi women, Suvi West and Kirste Aikio, whose professional background lies in documentary film and Sámi radio journalism. The show ran for two seasons, the first in spring 2012, the second a year later. The series was the first ‘Sámi comedy show’ shown prime time on national Finnish TV. As such, it was widely noticed and promoted by newspapers, weeklies, and women's magazines, which published puff pieces, reviews, and interviews with the presenters of the show. Elsewhere (e.g. Pietikäinen & Dlaske Reference Pietikäinen and Dlaske2013; Pietikäinen Reference Pietikäinen and Androutsopoulos2014) we have described the show as a hybrid that mixes different genres (documentary, music videos, sketches), languages (Finnish, northern Sámi, English, Swedish), styles, and other resources to ‘reflect on ethnic, sexual, gender, and geographical stereotypes and categories’ (Pietikäinen & Dlaske Reference Pietikäinen and Dlaske2013:91). In the show, the presenters themselves embody a kind of postfeminist girl power, while at the same time, they are giggling, hyperactive and in-your-face, hyper-sexual, and ‘always up for it’ (Gill Reference Gill2008; Dlaske & Jäntti Reference Dlaske and Jäntti2016). The video in the focus of the present study appeared in the first episode of the show as the first part of the series of similar parodic music video covers that were a regular part of the show. On YouTube, by February 2016 the video had gathered 327,660 views, 1,335 likes, forty-seven dislikes and 230 comments, written mostly in Finnish, with a few short ones in Sámi (seven comments) and English, and one in Spanish. Although the number of comments on the two videos differs rather significantly (5,550 vs. 230), qualitatively the two data sets converge, as we see in the analysis below, on a number of points.
Before moving on to the description of the analytical approach and the actual analysis of the comments, it is necessary to briefly introduce the two videos (for a detailed analysis of the videos, see Dlaske Reference Dlaske2016). In the Irish remake of Avicii's Wake me up, the makers have taken up the original song, freely translated the lyrics into Irish, and altered the composition by adding a choir to the chorus and a number of instruments (e.g. accordion and flutes) to give the melody a distinctive Irish twist. The visual storyline, situated in the original version partly in a village in early twentieth-century United States, partly in Avicii's concert, has been changed for the purposes of a summer-school project. In the Coláiste Lurgan version, the video features over 300 students and teachers in a huge hall. Most of the performers are gathered along the sides, forming a stage in the middle for the lead singer, a mixing table, and two female dance groups, one performing graceful ballet movements, the other traditional Irish dance. Some of the performers along the sides accompany the action on various instruments (piano, flutes, accordion, drums, violin), others form a huge singing and dancing choir that join in the chorus. The faces and clothes of some of the performers are painted with phosphor paint, which glows in the dimmed hall lit with blue, red, and purple spotlights. The video is edited to consist of quickly shifting close-ups of the (remarkably good-looking) lead singer and the different groups of performers, zooming in rather often on pretty girls in the crowd. While the boys are dressed in jeans and t-shirts, many of the girls, especially those in the close-ups, are wearing white tops and tight hot pants. The performance clearly taps into what Helen Kelly-Holmes (Reference Kelly-Holmes2011:511) has called ‘a newly emerging discourse of “sexy Irish”’, signifying ‘Irish speakers as young, beautiful and mediatisable’ (cf. also Dlaske Reference Dlaske2016).
The Sámi performance, by contrast, preserves more of the visual story while altering the lyrics of the song, and this gives the whole a parodic twist. The original song by Jenni Vartiainen, Missä muruseni on ‘Where is my sweetheart’, is a popular love song about longing for the other in a long-distance relationship. Entitled Leivänmuruseni ‘My breadcrumb’, the Märät säpikkäät/Njuoska bittut version plays with the polysemy of the Finnish word muru, which means both ‘sweetheart’ and ‘crumb’. The remade version is sung in (northern) Sámi but subtitled in Finnish. Preserving a few words from every line to maintain a connection to the original, it tells a story about a Sámi woman who embarked on a hike in the fells but ate up all her provisions too quickly and is now starving. Through this story line the remade version makes a parodic allusion to the hardships of the traditional Sámi way of life. (For a more detailed examination, see Dlaske Reference Dlaske2016.) The visual story seemingly reproduces the visuals of the original, but instead of being on a desolate shore, like Vartiainen in her video, the two women find themselves on the treeless uplands of Lapland, exactly the surroundings the women sing about. In both videos, the young women are clad in long, black close-fitting chiffon dresses, embodying a kind of femme fatale aesthetic with their pale faces, dark eyes, and, in the case of Märät säpikkäät/Njuoska bittut, excessively blushed cheeks, which gives also their physical appearance a parodic twist. Their dark, free-flowing hair blows in the wind as they move to the music, representing with exaggeratedly passionate gestures the woman of their story on her long journey. At this point, I would like to suggest that despite the exaggerated and parodic twist, by representing Sámi speakers as ‘young, beautiful, [sexy] and mediatisable’ (Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2011:511), the performance mobilises a discourse of ‘sexy Sámi’. We come back to this suggestion below in the analysis.
READING FOR AFFECT: THE ANALYTICAL APPROACH
Although questions of method and methodologies in affect research have been of increasing interest in recent years and empirical studies on textual, especially (social) media, material, proliferate (e.g. Wetherell Reference Wetherell2012; Mcbean Reference McBean2014; Knudsen & Stage Reference Knudsen, Stage, Knudsen and Stage2015; Reestorff Reference Reestorff, Knudsen and Stage2015; for more linguistically oriented studies, see e.g. Chiluwa & Ifukor Reference Chiluwa and Ifukor2015; Malmquist Reference Malmquist2015), more work needs to be done to explore analytical approaches to ‘reading for affect’ at the micro level of language use.Footnote 10 The present study seeks to make a contribution in this direction.
The analysis of the data proceeded in three steps, or cycles. The first cycle involved reading the comments to identify ‘nodes’ of intensified ‘affective investment’ (Kølvraa Reference Kølvraa, Knudsen and Stage2015), that is, topics or themes in the web of comments that particularly gathered affective reactions from the users. Through this reading, I identified four main nodes of affective investment, which I introduce below. The second cycle consisted of grouping the comments relating to these nodes together for a systematic analysis. The third cycle was an examination of these comments for the kinds of affective investments they involved, together with an examination of the sociohistorical embeddedness and performative power of, as well as the dynamics between, the affective investments. To better describe the topography of the affective investments, I resent some quantitative data along with the qualitative analysis (cf. Knudsen & Stage Reference Knudsen, Stage, Knudsen and Stage2015:18).
Although, as Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004:13) holds, ‘texts [can] name or perform different emotions’, the question of how to analytically pin down ‘the emotionality of texts’, or linguistic utterances, is another matter. Certainly, affects can have a tangible linguistic expression in the form of verbs or (predicative) adjectives (I love this version! This makes me proud to be Irish!), but more often than not, this is not the case. What I found in the analysis was a continuum of cues ranging from naming an affect/emotion (I'm proud) to (para)linguistic cues (e.g. exclamation marks, emoticons), to (ever) more subtle indexical cues, where the meaning, or in this case affect, could not be ‘read off’ the linguistic content but rather emerged in connection with contextual factors, as part of the ‘metalinguistic’ meaning of the utterance (cf. Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003; Blommaert Reference Blommaert2005:252; Dlaske & Jäntti Reference Dlaske and Jäntti2016). To be able to attend to these various ways that affects are expressed in the data along with their sociohistorical embeddedness, the analysis follows discourse analytical and sociolinguistic approaches (e.g. Fairclough Reference Fairclough1992; Blommaert Reference Blommaert2010) in combining textual cues with contextual information for interpretation.
The four nodes of affective investment mentioned above emerge from the accumulation of affects relating to: (i) the two performances, (ii) the performers, (iii) Irishness and Sáminess as an ethnic/national category, and (iv) the Irish and Sámi languages. Comments relating to the first node (the performance) account for 41% of the comments in the Irish context and 24% in the Sámi/Finnish context; the second node (the performers) accounts for 8% of the comments in the Irish and 16% in the Sámi/Finnish context; node (iii) (Irishness and Sáminess as an ethnic/national category) accounts for 8% in the Irish and six comments in the Sámi/Finnish context; and node (iv) (the Irish and Sámi languages) 16% in the Irish and 31% in the Sámi/Finnish context. In node (iv), the comments linked to the languages of the performances extend from (a) affective-evaluative comments on the languages themselves to a multifaceted and multivoiced debate on (b) speaking and (c) learning the languages. This ‘language dimension’ can thus be seen as a node of affective investment comprising at least these three thematic subnodes. In the following, necessarily linear examination, we focus on each node in turn.
NODES OF AFFECTIVE INVESTMENTS IN THE WEB OF COMMENTS
The performances
The vast majority of comments on both the Sámi and the Irish performance are positive in tone. The video by Märät säpikkäät/Njuoska bittut attracted expressions of approval, at times even high praise, with positive affects expressed mostly through linguistic means (verbs, intensified predicative adjectives), and also, at times, through paralinguistic means (exclamation marks, emoticons).
-
(1)
-
C1–Footnote 11 Really good, I liked;) Footnote 12
-
C2– This is damn great!
-
C3– BRILLIANT!! :)
-
The postings on the Coláiste Lurgan performance, by contrast, create an atmosphere of overwhelming enthusiasm and excitement, evoked especially through the abundant use of paralinguistic resources, but also the choice of linguistic means.
-
(2)
-
C4– LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-
C5– Omg I love this video sooooooooo awesome!
-
C6– Is aoibheann liom ea!!!!!!!!!!! (I love it)
-
C7– Absolutely unreal
-
The above are just a few examples from among over two thousand similar ones expressed in both English and Irish, but also in other languages, such as Polish, French, and Spanish.
In both the Sámi/Finnish context and the Irish context, some of the commentators praise the performance for its contribution to language revitalisation. In Finland C8 remarks: “This was nice to watch. Great way to introduce Sámi to the gray mass :)”. In relation to the Coláiste Lurgan performance, similar comments read: “I can't believe how good this is, and I'm so glad to see that Irish is being promoted in this way!” (C9), and “The great comeback for the Irish language. You cannot get more sexy than this. Riverdance part 2” (C10).
In both contexts, a number of posters (215 in the Irish; five in Sámi/Finnish) suggest that the cover version is “way better than the original”. In the Irish context, the relatively high number of these comments is likely to have been provoked by the juxtaposition in the title of the cover, Avicii Vs Lurgan – “Wake me up” as Gaeilge. In both contexts, moreover, several commentators suggest that the performance “should be sent to the eurovision” to represent Ireland or Finland, respectively. In the Irish context, the fans even set up a Facebook page to promote the initiative. The Eurovision Song Contest may be seen as a manifestation of banal nationalism (Billig Reference Billig1995) par excellence. If in both contexts the suggestions reflect a nationalist sentiment, in the light of the colonial histories of the two countries they have opposite effects. In the Irish context, the suggestion can be seen as an expression of an aspiration to linguistic decolonisation. In the Sámi/Finnish context, the suggestion is a tangible example of present-day banal colonialism, arising from the notion that the Sámi culture somehow belongs to the Finns (Näkkäläjärvi Reference Näkkäläjärvi2016).
Furthermore, what is striking in relation to the Irish performance is the discursive work done for ‘affective attunement’ (Massoumi Reference Massoumi2009); not only are most of the comments overwhelmingly positive towards the performance, but the few negative ones are quickly ‘policed down’, with wordings indexing not only considerable affective investment in the performance but also aversion towards ‘affect aliens’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed, Gregg and Seigworth2010); viewers unwilling to participate in the general celebration. In example (3) below, this is indicated most clearly by the stylistically vulgar command “stop whining and just fuck off”, and the abusive name-calling “you fucking twat”, on the part of C12.
-
(3)
-
C11– Good songs should not be mutilated by changing the language. It does nothing but take away from the great work of the original artist. But if people want to ruin songs, fine I just wont listen
-
C12– You musnt be irish. Stop whining and just fuck off and dont watch this
-
you fucking twat.
-
Another discursive strategy that commentators employ to construct the performance as a ‘happy object’, invested with positive feelings, is to keep a record of and comment on the dislikes the video has received. Suggesting at times irritation, at times amusement, some of these comments read as follows.
-
(4)
-
C13– Wow amazing.. i love it.!! the people dislike this video is stupid!
-
C14– Screw those 670 people who disliked
-
C15– 1000 people watched this upside down
-
Above in (3), C2 notes that C11 disliking the video means he/she ‘musnt’ (i.e. cannot) be Irish. The implication that it is normative to like the video if one is Irish not only reinforces the notion of the performance as a ‘happy object’, but it provides another instance of the intertwining of affectivities with banal nationalism. We encounter the same sense of normativity and further, more or less banal acts of everyday nationalism (Jones & Merriman Reference Jones and Merriman2009) in relation to affectivities around the Irish language and Irishness in the investigation below. First, however, let us examine further the affects attached more directly to the performance itself, moving on to comments relating to the performers.
The performers
The comments relating to the performers can be divided into two types: (i) one relates to the performers as social actors, as the makers of the videos, and (ii) the other as part of the performances. In both contexts a number of posters address the performers directly to congratulate, compliment, encourage, and thank them, thereby expressing admiration and enthusiasm, as well as gratitude. In the Irish context, moreover, several posters comment admiringly on the talent of the group. Comments on the performers as part of the performance in both contexts focus especially on their voice and appearance. The great majority of these comments are positive in tone. In the Irish context, C16 writes, “unreal! his voice is great :)”, while in the Sámi/Finnish context C17 comments, “The girls got great voices” and C18 notes, “the girls sing beautifully”.
More numerous than comments on the performers’ voices (thirty-five in the Irish, six in the Sámi/Finnish context) are comments on their appearance (135 in the Irish, twenty in the Sámi/Finnish context), as evident in the Irish context in (5) below.
-
(5)
-
C19– Irish people are very beautiful! :o and the song is very good too! :)
-
C20– Besides the language, there's another mandatory requirement to join the band: must be good looking. I only see super cute girls, and this version is absolutely fantastic
-
C21– the lad singin is h.o.t.t HOTT!!
-
C22– the women r bang-ing-ing-in
-
C23– haha 50% listening 50% drooling at stiofan [the lead singer]
-
While some of the comments indicate rather straightforward aesthetic affection (C19 in (5) above), in many cases this spills over to include (a hint of) sexual attraction, often presented in a humorous tone.
In the case of the Märät säpikkääät/Njuoska bittut performance, sixteen of the twenty comments relating to the appearance of the women allude to their sexual appeal.Footnote 13
-
(6)
-
C24– Great epic video! These women bewitched me… for a hundredth time already and which voices they have and had we Jenni Vartiainen join them we would be close to perfection!
-
C25– cute chicks, one could move to Lapland ;)
-
C26– fuckable looking creatures…
-
C27– I'd well hit both on a reindeer skin by a campfire
-
C28– I would gladly offer my dried meat to the girls if they came across in the fell feeling very hungry
-
While some of the comments are rather favourable, even adulatory (cf. C24, C25), many others are strikingly offensive (cf. C26), with some of them evoking scenes reminiscent of porn fantasies (cf. C27, C28).
Although the comments on the appearance of the performers do not make up a very large proportion of the data in quantitative terms, they are significant in how they echo the discourse of ‘sexy Irish’/‘sexy Sámi’ manifest in the performances, as discussed above. As the comments suggest, the affects this discourse evokes are of two different kinds, characterised, roughly speaking, by desire and admiration in the one context, desire and derogation in the other. These affective orientations have different implications, and I return to them in the concluding section, in which I discuss the examination in relation to the results of the whole analysis. Now I would like to continue the investigation of the user comments, focusing first on the affectivities attached to Irishness and Sáminess as an ethnic/national category and then moving on, against this background, to the language dimension.
Irishness and Sáminess as ethnic/national category
In both contexts, the performances triggered affective comments on Sáminess and Irishness as an ethnic/national category. While this dimension is not particularly prominent in the Sámi/Finnish context—there are six comments that include a reference to the Sámi cultural tradition—in the Irish context, comments professing pride in being Irish are perhaps the most striking feature of the stream of comments. Commenting on the performance by Märät säpikkäät/Njuoska bittut, C29 praises it thus: “The girls got great voices, the Sámi language sounds beautiful in songs!!” and adds, “I wish people with Sámi blood could finally be PROUD of their heritage!”. While C29 him/herself does not express pride in the Sámi heritage, but refers to the Sámi in the third person plural, which suggests that he/she might not be Sámi, in the Irish context the posters speak of themselves. If Irish people usually identify positively with Irishness, what is happening here is more than positive identification; this is (a demonstration of) pride gone viral, a manifestation of the contagious nature of affectsFootnote 14 (Brennan Reference Brennan2004). While some of the altogether over 260 postings make a connection to the video, most simply state, ‘“proud to be Irish”, as in (7) below.
-
(7)
-
C30– Proud to be Irish after watching this…. Go Huinteach [sic] [‘great’]
-
C31– I'm Irish and so Proud to be
-
C32– Proud 2 be Irish maith Thu ! :- [‘good on you’]
-
C33– proud to be irish :D
-
C34– bródúil as a bheith Gaeilge!❤❤❤❤ [‘proud to be Irish’]
-
What seems to have happened is what C35 urged: “Keep listening to it and spread the word about it brings out the Irish in us all :)”. Thus we can also read exchanges like the one between C36 and C37 in (8) below.
-
(8)
-
C36– As an Irish American I can say this make so proud to be Irish. Simply amazing
-
C37– as an irishman i can say you're not Irish you have nothing to be proud of except mcdonalds
-
Examples in (9) show other more or less subtle acts of legitimating oneself and excluding others not considered to be ‘Irish enough’.
-
(9)
-
C38– Proud To Be 100% Irish Go Maith xxxx [’good’]
-
C39– Proud to have Irish blood!
-
C40– Makes me proud to be irish
And yes I was born, raised and still live in Belfast, Ireland Im not an american who thinks they are half irish because their aunties cousins goldfish nextdoor neighbour was a quater irish :/
-
And yes I was born, raised and still live in Belfast, Ireland 
Im not an american who thinks they are half irish because their aunties cousins goldfish nextdoor neighbour was a quater irish :/Referring to ‘blood’ and geographical origin as two central tropes of authentic Irishness and using mockery as an additional resource, these comments perform boundary work, attempting to demarcate the ‘right to pride’. In this connection, the use of Irish language, and especially the tokenistic way in which many of the posters use it (e.g. C30 and C32 in (7) and C38 in (9)), can also be seen to have a self-legitimating and authenticating function, to which we discuss further below.
Along with the expressions of pride in being Irish, we find a handful of supportive exclamations cheering, ‘Up the Irish!’. Inspired arguably by these exclamations on the one hand and the declarations of pride in being Irish on the other, some viewers post ‘Up the ra!’, an expression of support for the Irish Republican Army (IRA). While these short postings are likely to be meant humorously, at the same time they remind us how the ever-so-banal expressions of nationalism are never far away from its ‘hotter’ manifestations (Billig Reference Billig1995), not separated from but rather joined to them, blending here into a mixture of everyday nationalism (Jones & Merriman Reference Jones and Merriman2009). This is even more clearly indicated by cases in which the expression ‘Up the ra’ is used in less humorous exchanges, such as in (10).
-
(10)
-
C41– Bloody Irish can't help but ruin everything, GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!
-
C42– #FuckTheEnglish
-
C43– up the ra
-
These are accompanied by further, rather toxic exchanges, as in (11).
-
(11)
-
C44– Fuck the Irish language, no need for it! You speak English and that's it!!!
-
C45– hah, there is need for irish language u uneducated fool and is amazing language and proud we do speak irish and happy bout that, but we would be more fluent if wasnt for ye stupid english cunts invading our country!!
-
C46– 1200 West Brits dont like this? Who gives a fuck…
-
C47– Fuck Those danm cock sucking pride shitting brits
-
If there is boundary work going on to demarcate the ‘right to pride’ among those who wish to identify themselves as Irish, as analysed above, these exchanges indicate boundary making on another front, namely between the Irish and the English or the English-minded ‘West Brits’. On many occasions, these exchanges take on features of hate speech (Butler Reference Butler1997), indicated above most clearly by the abusive name-calling, “u uneducated fool”, “ye stupid English cunts and those damn cock sucking bride shitting brits”. The lines of inclusion and exclusion, of solidarity and separation, that have emerged here in relation to Irishness and Sáminess take on new dimensions when we move on to examine the affectivities relating to the Irish and Sámi languages.
The language dimension
As suggested above, in the web of comments, the ‘language dimension’ constitutes a node of affective investment, which can be divided into at least three subnodes: affects related (i) to the two languages, Sámi and Irish, themselves, (ii) to speaking, and (iii) to learning Sámi and Irish. In the following, I examine each of these three subnodes in turn.
Sámi and Irish language
In both contexts, the performances triggered affective comments on the two languages. Mostly the languages were praised for sounding ‘beautiful’, ‘awesome’, or ‘amazing’, suggesting that the languages were experienced as a source of aesthetic pleasure. In the Irish context, moreover, a number of commentators express their ‘love’ for the Irish language, as shown in (12).
-
(12)
-
C48– holy shit im embarrassed to say i didn't even know this language existed! Sounds amazing.
-
C49– What an Incredibly talented group… Never knew the irish language sounded so Awesome!!!
-
C50– So this is Irish? Cool!
-
In the Sámi/Finnish context, there are similar comments, as in (13).
-
(13)
-
C51– Sámi language does sound beautiful although I don't understand any of it :)
-
C52– sounds grand that Sámi language
-
In the first four comments the posters indicate more or less directly that they are not familiar with the Irish or Sámi language. In his/her comment, C52 refers to Sámi with the deictic pronoun that, which in this context can be interpreted as referring to the language in the video and indicates a rather distant relationship to the language. The nonfamiliarity with the languages suggests that these posters are writing from outside the Irish or Sámi community, belonging, in the latter case, to the Finnish majority. In contrast to the rather toxic relationship between some English and Irish people indicated by the exchanges examined above, these positive evaluations of Sámi suggest a positive affective investment on the part of the Finns. As we see further below in the section on Learning Irish and Sámi, this grows into emphatic expressions of solidarity and support, albeit not without ulterior motives.
In the Irish context, a number of those who comment on the language explicitly identify themselves as writing from another country. In these comments, the expressions of love and encouragement also both suggest and at the same time forge ties of solidarity between groups of (minority language) speakers.
-
(14)
-
C53– Guys you are great! I love your language! We love it here! Let it live forever! Russia's with you, friends!
-
C54– Great way to popularize the Irish language (which is very beautiful to me). Keep going the Irish! Greetings from Ukraine!
-
C55– Keep your language alive, guys. Great job :D hugs from a Basque here
-
In the Irish context, however, we also find a steady stream of comments, such as in (15).
-
(15)
-
C56– i love irish i also love this song :)
-
C57– Is brea liom an teanga seo. Gaeilge abú [‘I love this language, irish forever’]
-
C58– I hate irish but I love the song
-
C59– How can you hate Irish? I live in Louth, I'm 13 and I've been learning Irish since I was 3, now I have my fáinne (That means I'm completely fluent) Irish is a class language and everyone should know it
-
These commentators expressing their love or hatred of the Irish language are arguably members of the Irish (speaking) community, and so these expressions begin to mark the sensibilities of the affective space around the Irish language and its subtle but multiple divisions crossing with Irishness, which takes fuller shape in the course of the analysis.
Besides the commentators professing their love for the Irish language, there is another group of posters triumphing over the ‘truth discourse’, which constructs Irish as a dead and/or useless language (Kelly-Holmes & Atkinson Reference Kelly-Holmes, Atkinson, Johnson and Ensslin2007; Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2011).
-
(16)
-
C60– at least the Irish language is still alive over 1 million views #proud
-
C61– And there's ppl out there who say our beloved Irish language is dead?
-
Watch this and they'll know that's not true!
-
C62– Go on Gaeilge [‘Irish’]
-
C63– gaeilge abú :) [’Irish forever’]
-
In this atmosphere, postings putting forward the ‘truth’ discourse trigger heated responses.
-
(17)
-
C64– this is SHIT the language is DEAD no one uses it .. pointless
-
C65– Jack Daniels are u even Irish?? If ya are you'd be proud of our language
-
and culture not writing uneducated stupors fucking comments
-
Although the brief comments that see the Irish language as useless or dead (cf. also the exchange between C44 and C45 in (11)) can be read as instances of casual trolling,Footnote 15 like the ones running down the Irish people or the performance itself, they do open up cleavages which the heated responses deepen and broaden. While suggesting considerable affective investment in the Irish language, many of the responses also posit pride as a normative attitude towards ‘our language and culture’ ‘if ya are [Irish]’, thus reinforcing the nationalist spirit around Irish and Irishness.
Speaking Irish and Sámi
In the Irish context, the ability to speak Irish emerges as a node of affective investment in its own right. Although in the Sámi/Finnish context, in this discursive space, speaking Sámi is not an object of similar meta discourse, the comments in Sámi can be read, it can be argued, as instances of affective investment in speaking the language.
In the Irish context, the performance triggered meta comments on ‘speaking Irish’ that express joy and pride, accompanied by a sense of defiance, but also of solidarity.
-
(18)
-
C66– I'm proud to be able to speak fluently Irish and although I agree that not many people speak Irish.. We are still pushing through and more and more people are speaking the language ..
-
C67– Tá sé seo ar cheann de na hamhráin is fearr na hÉireann, Is féidir aon rud stop a chur leis an Gaeilge go bhfuil muid i gcónaí ar bun le haghaidh troid! Labhairt liom i bhfad Gaeilge agus tá mé Gaeilge. [‘This is one of the best songs of Ireland, nothing can stop the Irish that we are always up for a fight! I speak much Irish and I am Irish.’]
-
C68– I know how to sing the hole song because I speak IRISH
-
C69– This is the language of my people!
-
C70– say tá [’yes’] if you live in Ireland and can speak Irish or can speak a little bit of Irish
-
Evoking at the same time the tropes of status and competence (Kelly-Holmes & Atkinson Reference Kelly-Holmes, Atkinson, Johnson and Ensslin2007) by referring to the inferiority of Irish on the one hand and to her own superiority as a fluent speaker on the other, C66 declares pride in being fluent in Irish, combined with a sense of solidarity but also of pugnaciousness (“we are still pushing through”), like C67 (“I speak much Irish and I am Irish”, “we are always up for a fight!”). Along with pride and joy, the comments of C69 and C70 express and elicit rather feelings of belonging and solidarity (cf. Kelly-Holmes & Atkinson Reference Kelly-Holmes, Atkinson, Johnson and Ensslin2007). The invitation of C70 has so far received seven “tás”, while the statement by C68 has drawn thirty likes.
In this context, then, as also in the context of the Sámi performance, being able to actually use Irish/Sámi to express oneself is arguably a source of joy, pride, and belonging. This is an opportunity, both in the sense of a discursive space where the languages can be used and in the sense that the speakers are ‘speakers of choice’ (Ó Laoire Reference Ó Laoire, Kaplan and Baldauf2008): they could use Finnish/English or some other language instead, as many others have. Especially in the Irish context, however, using Irish also involves courage, at least for those who are not ‘able to speak fluently Irish’ and who thus do not match up to the dominant view ‘that complete competence in Irish is the only possibility’ (Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2011:531). Some of them try, as suggested by spelling errors, mixed language practices, and apologies for their shortcomings. They are greeted by posters such as C70 in (18), who acknowledges also people who “can speak a little bit of Irish”, and Seo linn (a band involved in making the performance) who, echoing newer language-policy efforts (e.g. Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2011) commented delightedly: “Great to see the entire Gaelgóirí posting in Irish, and everyone using their cúpla focail [‘couple of words’] aswel;)” (C71).
If the expressions of pride, joy, and solidarity forge ties of belonging among those (considering themselves as) able to speak Irish, at the same time they perform boundary work in relation to those who cannot occupy this position. As a counterpart to the expressions of pride and joy we can find postings indicating shame, anger, sadness, jealousy, and the wish to be fluent.
-
(19)
-
C72– I am Irish but am ashamed to say I don't understand a word of this but i still love it…
-
C73– Makes me Proud to be Irish and sickens me that I can't understand a fu#king word
-
C74– I just like the song
I can't even speak my own language
-
C75– very good video, unfortunately i hate the language and envy those who are fluent in it. Nonetheless well done
-
C76– I'm so jealous of them all. Wish I could speak the language of my own country!!
-
I can't even speak my own language 
Those who are not so fluent find themselves surrounded, on the one side, by the expressions of pride and joy of those considering themselves fluent in Irish and, on the other, apart from a few expressions, indicating recognition by sarcastic and dismissive remarks.
-
(20)
-
C77– I love how the most of you ‘Irish’ are commenting in English
-
C78– all the people on here are claiming that they love Irish and they're proud of their language, yet they don't have a clue of basic grammar or spelling, just band wagoners…
-
C79– Tá mé go Maith
-
C80– I am good? Sorry dude you failed. Tá go maith, “Its good” or Is maith liom ar “I like this”
-
Joining the dozens declaring pride in being Irish and tagging their comments with a few words in Irish for purposes of authentification or otherwise, C81 posts: “proud to be irish an bothar cailin bainne”, which translates as ‘the girl road milk’. The posting makes an allusion to a TV advertisement for Carlsberg, in which some Irish men going into a bar in Rio de Janeiro are asked ‘to do something Irish’ ‘to prove their Irishness and authenticity’ (Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2010:30). The men start reciting random phrases and words associated with school Irish, among which is the line ciúnas, bóthar, cailín, banne ‘quiet, road, milk, girl’. Although C81's reference can be read as a humorous reference to the advertisement, it can also be interpreted as making fun of those struggling to use the language to be recognised as Irish to have their share in the right to pride. (For an analysis of the advert, see Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2010.)
Among the voices of posters celebrating their competence in Irish and of those mourning their lack of it, there are other voices as well.
-
(21)
-
C82– Im irish and i dont have a clue what hes [e.g. the singer] saying!
-
C83– I dont even understand wat hes sayin ugh but still love bein irish :)
-
Despite the merely declarative appearance of these statements, in the context of the dominant ideology normatively mapping linguistic competence on nationality, sustained here through the multiple small acts of everyday nationalism as analysed above, these individual statements can be seen as subtle acts of insurgency against this ideology. In the flow of comments, however, they provoke few responses, except for the occasional likes.
Learning Irish and Sámi
The final node of affective investment analysed here relates to the topic of learning Irish and Sámi. This is a prominent node in both contexts, although it takes different shapes in each, partly due to the different positions of the languages in the respective societies.
In the Irish context, many of the comments reflect affective stances towards learning Irish in school. While some people say they love learning and speaking Irish, announcing by the same token that they go to an all-Irish school and are fluent in Irish, others express rather negative sentiments towards Irish in educational settings (cf. Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2011; Moriarty Reference Moriarty and Androutsopoulos2014), as in (22) below.
-
(22)
-
C84– I really dont like that irish is my worst subject in school :/ the same goes for my year, it would have been awesome to learn to speak irish but the teachers who teach irish are very bad and make it more of a memory game than a language. The teachers who teach irish are a part of the reason why irish is becoming non existent slowly.
-
At the same time, other comments suggest that the Coláiste Lurgan performance has moved the viewers’ ideas about learning Irish in school. While some regret not having paid attention in class, others seem content that they did, after all.
-
(23)
-
C85– makes me wish I had listened in school and could speak irish! :(all them years learning irish and I still cant put an irish sentence together! lol :)
-
C86– 12 years of learning Irish in school, this actually makes it worth it. Haha
-
The comment of C86 has drawn fifty-six likes. Alluding to the way ‘the educational system has approached the teaching of Irish’ (Moriarty Reference Moriarty and Androutsopoulos2014:478), thematised also in the comment by C84 in (22), C87 expresses her fascination towards the Coláiste Lurgan project: “Fantastic that is the way to teach Irish. Those kids are terrific. Love it. Proud to be Irish” and C88 comments, “One way of making Irish sexy to students to study it!”. In accordance with these meta comments, over sixty posters announce along the lines of C89, “Have to learn this for school…YAY!!! :D”, and over twenty express the wish, “Really wanna go Lurgan this year!!” (C90).
If the Lurgan performance has had an impact on attitudes towards learning Irish in educational settings, it seems to have also been the inspiration for informal learning. C91 writes, “This cover and all the other covers that you guys have done have inspired me to learn Irish again, but this time for pleasure, and as a real language… not only to pass the leaving cert! Love it! Go h- iontach!”. Besides the comments from Irish viewers, there are also a couple of posts from abroad, like the one by C92, who expresses her wish in Portuguese and English: “aah, como quero aprender o irlandês! [‘Oh, how I want to learn Irish’] As I want to learn the Irish language!!!”. On a perhaps more serious note, a handful of others inquire where one could learn Irish outside Ireland.
Also in the Sámi/Finnish context, a number of comments suggest the performance provoked some interest in learning Sámi.
-
(24)
-
C93– Thanks girls! Hey, you need to teach that language to us!
-
C94– Oh, it would be lovely to be able to speak Sámi or Japanese :)
-
C95– That's it. I'll start learning Sámi:D
-
C96– Are there lyrics available to this?? :DD Would like to learn myself that grand, beautiful language <3
-
C97– Aaaaargh! Tell me where I could learn Sámi! Other than university
-
While the various expressions of interest in learning Irish or Sámi may or may not result in any actual learning, what they do, nevertheless, is to construct the languages as objects of interest and desire, as languages worth learning—often by others who are not Sámi/Irish themselves.
In the Sámi/Finnish context, too, a number of the comments relate to learning Sámi in school. For the most part, however, it is not the Sámi themselves who debate this, but the majority Finns, who import into this discussion forum the ‘mandatory Swedish’ debate, a debate fuelled by nationalist sentiments that have gained strength in recent years in Finland (Hult & Pietikäinen Reference Hult and Pietikäinen2014). Part of the discussion is given in (25) below.
-
(25)
-
C98– Learning Sámi should be part of the all-round education in Finland… and not some fucking Swedish!
-
C99– are you serious after all there are a few more Swedish speakers than Sámi speakers lol
-
C100– However, we Finnish speakers care more about these Sámi speakers, even if they are fewer in number, than about the greater number of Swedish speakers. At least I do.
-
C101– I agree. Rather mandatory Sámi than mandatory Swedish ;) It's strange how one minority is given such a position. It's sad. The Finland-Swedes are the most papered minority in the world. How about the Sámi? GO SáMI.
-
In the debates on ‘mandatory Swedish’ in the media, Sámi is not usually mentioned (see Hult & Pietikäinen Reference Hult and Pietikäinen2014). Here, the performance prompts some viewers to not(ic)e how the kindred language, Sámi, is ‘an achingly beautiful language’ and to draw the Sámi language(s) and speakers into the debate, making them into an object of solidarity and support (only) to oppose the position of Swedish in Finland. If the comments quoted above expressing interest in learning Sámi index some sincerely positive affects towards Sámi, in this strand of discussion, the ‘love’ for Sámi is inspired by ‘hatred’ of Swedish; rather than uniting, it tears apart ‘in the name of love’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004).
MINORITISED LANGUAGES AND THE POLITICS OF EMOTION
While interest in affective processes has led to an ‘affective turn’ in cultural studies, among other fields, in sociolinguistics this perspective has been given far less attention. Focusing on two music video covers exemplifying the current circulation of minoritised languages and their speakers in new media spaces, this study investigated how the sociohistorically conditioned affective investments of YouTube users contribute to a (re)valuation of the two minoritised languages, Irish and Sámi, their speakers, and the related ethnic/national belongings. In so doing, the study adds a new angle to the current strand of research examining the ongoing revaluation of minoritised languages in contemporary globalisation (e.g. Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes and Androutsopoulos2014; Pietikäinen et al. Reference Pietikäinen, Kelly-Holmes, Jaffe; and Coupland2016).
The study shows how affective investments create a space around the two languages and how speakers of these languages are filled with positive affects: enthusiasm, admiration, love, desire, solidarity, and pride. At the same time, it demonstrates how these apparently ‘happy’ spaces are shaped and cut through by boundaries and divisions within and between ethnolinguistic communities, marked by scorn, anger, bitterness, and shame. Many of these affectivities—of both kinds—are enactments of more or less banal ‘everyday nationalism’ (Billig Reference Billig1995; Jones & Merriman Reference Jones and Merriman2009), connected in complex ways to the colonial histories of the two countries: in the case of Ireland to England, and in the case of Finland to Sweden and the Sámi.
In other words, both videos mobilise everyday nationalism. In the Sámi/Finnish context, the suggestion that the Sámi performance should be sent to the Eurovision Song Contest to represent Finland actualises not only banal nationalism, but also present-day banal colonialism. On another front, the support for and solidarity with the Sámi arises from an antipathy towards the former colonial power, Sweden. In the Irish context, besides the outpouring of expressions of (the normative policing of) ethnic/national pride evoked by the video, a feeling of national pride may be one reason why the video itself went viral. The discussion forum provides a space where the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ identified by Kelly-Holmes (Reference Kelly-Holmes2011) can be challenged—‘us’ being here the often repudiated Irish language speakers and ‘them’ the majority with less competence in the language. Despite this reversal of the usual power balance, the (normative) mapping of language on nationality, implicit in the video, explicit in the comments, leaves the ‘us’ emerging here with rather elitist and nationalist overtones.
While the discourse of ‘sexy Irish’/‘sexy Sámi’ arguably plays its part in the production of the positive space around the two languages, as was indicated in the analysis, it is also enmeshed in the reproduction of both banal nationalism and banal colonialism, demarcating further divisions. In the Irish case, the discourse is liable to buttress the notion of ‘the Irish language élite’, superior not only on ‘the competence continuum’ (Kelly-Holmes & Atkinson Reference Kelly-Holmes, Atkinson, Johnson and Ensslin2007:177; Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2011) but, as suggested by the video, also in terms of looks. Pushed a little further still, the division is not only symbolic, but also material: a three-week-course at Coláiste Lurgan costs over 900 eurosFootnote 16 and thus the video also represents young people with parents wealthy enough to pay for their participation. As such, this Irish language élite in the making adds a rather significant dimension to recent mediatised attempts to associate the Irish language with attractive individuals from the urban middle class (Kelly-Holmes Reference Kelly-Holmes2011). In the Sámi/Finnish context, by contrast, the discourse of ‘sexy Sámi’ harks back to an old colonialist notion of Sámi (like other indigenous) women as overly sexual (Bird Reference Bird1999; J. Lehtola Reference Lehtola2000). The expressions of sexual desire echoing porn fantasies and including marked references to Sámi culture (“I'd well hit both on a reindeer skin by a campfire”) posted by viewers, at least some of whom are non-Sámi Finnish men, are decidedly derogatory. They therefore create a relation of domination not only between men and women, but between white men and indigenous women, reproducing old colonial power relations along ethnolinguistic divisions in a new guise.
In conclusion, the study sheds light on how social media operate as a catalyst for affective investments involved in an ethnolinguistic (re)ordering of languages and their speakers at the intersection of ‘banal globalisation’ and ‘everyday nationalism’ (Jones & Merriman Reference Jones and Merriman2009; Thurlow & Jaworski Reference Thurlow and Jaworski2010). The lens of affect opens up a vital angle on the ‘cultural politics of world making’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004:12) and, as such, it is also a perspective worth developing in sociolinguistic research.
