Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 10, Issue 4, 2011

The focus of this special issue is on the opportunities presented and challenges posed by the thematisation of multilingualism in the media. A number of case studies from a variety of linguistic, media, political, social, economic and educational contexts are presented, with the objective of addressing the challenges and opportunities that arise when multilingualism becomes thematised. In this introduction, we would like to address two main theoretical and methodological issues: (1) what we mean by multilingualism; and, (2) what we mean by thematising.

Following Ruiz’s discussion of orientations in language planning, distinguishing between language as right, resource and problem, this paper unpacks the ways in which related discourses are circulated in the Luxembourgish print media. Particular attention is paid to how these discourses are interwoven with debates on education and citizenship and how they draw on deeply entrenched language ideological beliefs about language and society, e.g. that “valuable” forms of individual multilingualism are a desirable goal, whereas linguistic heterogeneity constitutes a problem. Moreover, the analysis shows that the texts thematizing multilingualism are bound up with a discourse of rights and duties, and that right and duty, as well as problem and resource, need to be conceptualized as two intersecting continua informing language ideological debates.

Thematising Irish in the media reflects the complex and contradictory sociolinguistic and language-ideological situation in Ireland. This article explores some of that complexity by investigating a thread on an online discussion forum on the subject of the first ever party leaders’ debate in Irish that took place during the 2011 general election in Ireland. In the discussion thread, three particular discourses emerge: a “discourse of truth” about Irish as lacking both authority as a national language and authenticity as a minority language of a recognizable ethnic group; a discourse of “them and us”; involving a differentiation between “Irish speakers” and “non-Irish speakers”, largely based on notions of competence; and, finally, a newly emerging discourse of “sexy Irish”, which signals a commodification of Irish speakers as young, beautiful and mediatisable. The features of the forum and the online, real-time evolution of the discussion thread impact in a number of ways upon these discourses and ideologies. However, despite the possibilities afforded by the forum, which are utilized by posters for performing Irish in different ways, these everyday practices are effectively erased and invalidated by the prevailing discourses, which rely strongly on the notion of bilingualism as parallel and discrete monolingualisms.

Wikipedia defines itself as “the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the internet”, thus featuring an explicit language policy in its mission statement. Bearing in mind that the site has become the most popular source of encyclopaedic information online, its significance for public encounters with multilingualism should not be underestimated. This article offers a critical and multimodal discourse analytical approach to Wikipedia’s explicit and implicit multilingual policies and practices. I examine, under “explicit metalinguistic practice” (Woolard 1998), public disclaimers and exemplary user practice and talk on the “Multilingual Coordination” entry. Under “implicit metapragmatics”, I shall offer a multimodal analysis of Wikipedia’s multilingualism-oriented interface design; the corporate logo and its paratextual meta-commentary on a number of linguistic and journalistic websites; and a code-critical reading of Wikipedia’s “Babel” user language templates. My observations are discussed against the backdrop of postcolonialist theories on the role of English as lingua franca of the information age.

This article explores the attribution of authority and authenticity to speakers of “accented” or dialectal speech portrayed in the American documentary on dialectal diversity, “Do You Speak American?”. The focus is on the role of mediation and mediatization in this fundamentally political and ideological process: that is, the extent to which particular sequences of the documentary foreground the work of representation being done by media producers. The central claim made in the analysis is that speakers’ authenticity is produced through the backgrounding of this work of representation, but that speakers are attributed greater authority when they are depicted as having some control over how their images and speech are mediated and mediatized. Speakers who have both authority and authenticity benefit, it is argued, from media verisimilitudes: they are understood by media audiences as having control over the believable rather than the “real”.

This paper takes as a point of departure the website of the “Voices” project, a large media enterprise on languages in the UK conducted by the BBC in 2003–2005. With the help of the notions of language ideology and the analytical tools of multimodal critical discourse analysis, the paper shows how representations of languages on the website are a discursive terrain on which negotiations of national identities are played out. Essentially, the argument is that there is a constant tension between centripetal (unifying) and centrifugal (particularising) forces which strive for the production of different, concomitant and often conflicting national identities. Whereas the BBC seeks to represent the UK as a happy and unified multilingual nation, the many postings on the website show how multilingualism is not always perceived by speakers as a happy and unproblematic phenomenon, but is a politically-fraught issue that creates strong disagreements about the values of different languages in British society as well as their functions as markers of different national identities.