The current era is marked by high degrees of mobility and deterritorialization alongside increased nationalism, disenfranchisement, and xenophobia. It is therefore increasingly important to understand how language functions as... [ view full abstract ]
The current era is marked by high degrees of mobility and deterritorialization alongside increased nationalism, disenfranchisement, and xenophobia. It is therefore increasingly important to understand how language functions as a means of expressing social relations with regard to place and space. In sociolinguistics, place has often been presented in a static fashion, with first and second wave sociolinguistics treating geographic places and social networks in places as explanations for language variation and change. These frameworks viewed variation in language as “incidental fallout from social space” (Eckert 2012, p. 94). This colloquium contributes to the third wave of sociolinguistic inquiry into space, place, and language by reversing the orientation. Rather than taking space and place for granted, this work treats social and geographic spaces, and identities associated with place, as the outcome of human activity and language practices (e.g., Agha, 2003; Johnstone, 2013). From this point of view, language is interpreted with a materialist perspective and is theorized as the nexus of human activity at the interstices of semiotic and material affordances and assemblages. Building on recent work in sociolinguistics that takes a spatial view of language (Blommaert, 2013; Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015), this colloquium considers language as part of the nexus of material and communicative activities that constitute social relations within social and geographic spaces. Key questions the colloquium papers investigate include: How does a spatial view of language expand present understandings of social relations, language and place? What are the semiotic, material, and linguistic components of place-making for people from different walks of life? How are places and spaces contested through language practices? And, how do human activities, materialities, and language practices change over time to create new senses of place? Using ethnographic methods, the papers examine how space and place operate with regard to people's experience with novelty, nostalgia, belonging, marginality, and exclusion.
