Language, Culture and Society - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2021

This article explores the theme of food translation, based on research conducted in Italy in 2018 with a group of asylum seekers from different West African countries. It concentrates on a community gardening project revolving around the cultivation of okra: a vegetable that is a staple in many African cuisines, but not very popular in Italy, which provided the occasion for the participants to communicate their home foodways.

As something that is linked to the most basic human needs, and yet bears high cultural significance, food can be used as a lens to explore the shifting relationship between language and other embodied forms of meaning. Translating food means engaging with a complex interplay of language, sensory experiences, and socio-cultural norms. Drawing from recent semiotically-oriented developments in translation studies as well as applied linguistics, and the semiotics of food, I analyze key participants’ involvement with the project.

By following a sociolinguistic, ethnographic approach, this paper explores the intricacies behind the construction of a collective identity in the practices of a community radio station, off- and on-air, that serves the Spanish speaking Latin American community in London. The analysis of the information gathered from a 6-months ethnography conducted in a well-established radio station in South London, allowed me to document how the politics of identity delivered on air, far from being a straightforward process, entails some decisions regarding what to say and how, in order to deliver harmonious relations. The shared use of the Spanish language, albeit in different varieties, and some perceived shared values, become the salient markers to present this harmonious identity. Projecting a unified group identity is seen as an important aim for migrants when navigating diaspora in the UK.

This analysis interrogates one of the most highly recognizable, but little understood metalinguistic descriptors of language in the contemporary Philippine linguistic scene: the concept of “deep language.” Here, “deep language” is explored as a complex, polysemous term generally used to describe homegrown conceptualizations of “pure” forms of Philippine-type languages and speakers. The contemporary understanding of “deep language” in the Philippines is theorized to have been informed by a complex combination of folk and academic discourses that have percolated throughout shared ideologies and conceptualizations of language since national independence at mid-20th century. The metric of “depth” in the analysis of language is shown to function centrally as a conceptual metaphor that enables everyday speakers to theorize person-types and the passage of time in a folk chronotope reckoned through the sign of language.

Focusing on the move from gakusei ‘student’ to shakaijin ‘working adult, lit. fully socialized adult’ during a period of continuing economic stagnation and social dislocation, the current study analyzes contemporary Japanese university students’ alignments with respect to ideologies surrounding adulthood including entering the job market and marriage. Data includes naturally occurring conversations with male and female students at a mid-high ranked city university on the outskirts of Yokohama as well as media materials associated with job-hunting practices. Analyzing individuals’ discursive (re)-framing of economic practice, this study demonstrates how individuals convey complex alignments towards future economic and social practices and their attendant ideologies. These complex alignments are analyzed as instances of ‘making do’ (de Certeau, 1984). Attending to subtle shifts in discursive (re)-framing, this paper demonstrates how micropolitical alignments are enacted in language at the level of everyday, ordinary practice.

This paper focuses on the sociolinguistic effects of tightening job markets in applied linguistics, and situates the discussion within the time-space compression of late modernist capitalist enterprises using frameworks in the sociolinguistics of mobility, political economy and raciolinguistics. The paper focuses on single-utterance speech acts of reservation conspicuously invoked to frame the discourse of dissent on the part of committee members in high-stakes interview encounters. Focusing on locally-sourced data collected in a publicly-funded, U.S. university, the paper examines how macro-contexts of skill oversaturation in the job market serve to frame enactments of stance in these high-stakes interactional microcosms while pointing to novel epistemological trending in complexity, conviviality and cosmopolitan encounter.