Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 45, Issue 2, 2022

This article engages with the theme of the proposed special issue in a perhaps unexpected way: for me, the ‘translinguistic movement’ is a pertinent reminder to move beyond the boundaries of language and other visible/audible modalities that are involved in semiosis. It also encourages us to move beyond the naïve empiricism that has shaped sociolinguistic work over the decades. The ‘sociolinguistics of the spectre’ that I develop in this article is rooted in philosophies of radical empiricism; it acknowledges the sensuous and affective nature of social life, and refuses to work with the ‘boundaries, binaries and demarcations’ that are located within the temporal ‘linearity of modernity’ (Garuba, 2013). In doing so, I will look at a particular time-space: the postcolony. It is a time-space where the ghosts of the past are ever-present and shape translinguistic practices; a time-space where time is always somehow ‘out-of-joint’.

Funeral and mourning rites capture so many aspects of the Iranian traditional and religious rituals and provide members of society with cultural tools of lamenting the dead. The study presents socio-cultural considerations in connection with social space and action, linguistic interactions, and semiotic resources of rituals used in mourning ceremonies for Shiite Muslims in the city of Nur, Iran. The paper relies on a mediated discourse analysis approach as a theoretical framework from which to develop a semiotic analysis of the linguistic practices and mediational means that appear in the mourning events. To this end, I shall draw upon video and audio recorded interactions of mourning rituals personally collected at funerals. The paper demonstrates that while mourning rituals are culturally and religiously framed in Shiite Muslims, one must also include the social space, the discourse cycle, the trajectories of the material resource of individual’s historical bodies and of text.

Considering the contradictions in the structured and static approaches to the nation and national identity observed world-wide and fluid trans- approaches to language in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, the paper explores how national identity is constructed and sustained nowadays, specifically in digital spaces both discursively and non-discursively. Based on the notion of ‘practice’ by Theodore Schatzki (2002), the paper focuses on the translingual practices in relation to national issues and events in Bangladesh drawn from digital spaces through a virtual ethnography. The findings in this paper show that translingual practices and national identity may apparently seem fluid in digital spaces. However, actors nurture beliefs, values, and ideologies in their translingual practices with reference to a territory-based notion of nation, religion, and national identity. Their discursive construction of nation and national identity also seems entangled with a non-discursive bundle of activities and symbolic and material artefacts within material arrangements of spaces. Verbal violence and terrorism accentuating nationalism get immediacy and are concretized in materially mediated semiotized spaces. With an immediate focus on spatial dynamics, while acknowledging the ethos of the post-structuralist approach to language, the paper, hence, indicates the necessity of transgressing the ‘logocentrism’ in language and identity research in applied linguistics and contributing to the recent development in the post-humanist applied linguistics.

Research on translingual repertoires has highlighted the diverse semiotic resources that individuals access in communication, but little research has considered how spatial factors permit or limit access to these resources. Furthermore, as translingual studies have predominantly focused on interactional analysis, there is a paucity of studies on how social networks shape the repertoires of users. To fill this gap, we examine the communicative practices of an international spouse temporarily living in the United States. Through interview data and mobility maps, we analyze the participant’s subject positioning and its relation to his use of spatial resources in different spaces. Despite the participant’s low English proficiency, he engaged in conversations in many spaces through strategic employment of semiotic resources, including multiple languages and material objects. He also adopted certain positionings that afforded him more opportunities to interact. Thus, we argue that the usefulness of semiotic resources is tied to the spaces in which they are employed and that access to these resources is shaped by subject positioning.

While previous studies have outlined the advantages of semiotic resources for meaning making and relationship building, not all semiotic resources are equal in their ability to enhance these features. Using linguistic ethnographic interviews and focus group discussions, this article examines whether mobile phones provide sufficient semiotic resources for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) migrants to effectively communicate, particularly for service situations regarding finances where they often have to speak in English with unknown interlocutors. Two important elements are uncovered regarding EFL migrants’ difficulty in using phones as a semiotic resource – (1) linguistic superiority, where they are judged by their English-speaking interlocutor as engaging in inferior English practices, and (2) paralinguistic insufficiency, where the lack of gestures and facial expressions takes away their ability to make meaning. These elements combined make telephone conversations difficult for many EFL migrants, affecting their expressiveness and ability to effectively communicate, leading to negative outcomes such as avoidance behaviors, and feelings of anxiety and disempowerment. Such difficulties lead to the finding that EFL migrants must be better accommodated when engaging in service transactions, with other, semiotically richer resources required to better aid their understanding and ease feelings of anxiety.