Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T02:41:45.276Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

‘No, we don't mix languages’: Ideological power and the chronotopic organization of ethnolinguistic identities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2017

Farzad Karimzad*
Affiliation:
Salisbury University, USA
Lydia Catedral*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Farzad Karimzad Department of EnglishSalisbury University1101 Camden Ave. Salisbury, MD 21801, USA[email protected]
Lydia Catedral Department of LinguisticsUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign4080 Foreign Languages Building 707 S. Mathews Ave, MC-168 Urbana, IL 61801, USA[email protected]

Abstract

In this study we address ethnolinguistic identity using Bakhtin's (1981) notion of chronotope. Taking an ethnographic approach to linguistic data from Azerbaijani and Uzbek communities, we trace the impact of various chronotopes on our participants’ acts of ethnolinguistic identification. Building on Blommaert & De Fina (2017), we illustrate how ethnolinguistic identification is an outcome of the interaction between multiple levels of large- and small-scale chronotopes. Furthermore, we argue that chronotopes differ in terms of their power, depending on the ideological force behind them. We demonstrate how power differentials between chronotopes can account for certain interactional and linguistic patterns in conversation. The power inherent in chronotopes that link nationhood with specific languages makes the notions of discrete languages and static identities ‘real’ for our participants. Therefore, discussions of language and identity as flexible and socially constructed, we argue, must not obscure the power of these notions in shaping the perceptions of sociolinguistic subjects. (Chronotope, ethnolinguistic identity, power, Uzbek, Azeri/Azerbaijani, nationalism, language mixing, language ideology)*

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This article would not have been possible without the assistance of Rakesh Bhatt. Thank you also to Marina Terkourafi, Michele Koven, and the members of the Discourse, Social Interaction, & Translation lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We are also grateful to the University of Illinois Language and Society Discussion reading group where the idea for this article was originally discussed. Finally, thanks to Jan Blommaert and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. All errors and omissions are our own.

References

Adams, Laura (2010). The spectacular state: Culture and national identity in Uzbekistan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Agha, Asif (2007). Recombinant selves in mass mediated spacetime. Language & Communication 27:320–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Donald (2011). Major and minor chronotopes in a specialized counting system. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21:124–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atkinson, Maxwell, & Heritage, John (2006). Jefferson's transcript notation. In Jaworski, Adam & Coupland, Nikolas (eds.), The discourse reader, 2nd edn., 158–65. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bani-Shoraka, Helena (2003). A revitalization of the Azerbaijani language and identity? Orientalia Suecana 51–52:1724.Google Scholar
Bani-Shoraka, Helena (2005). Language choice and code-switching in the Azerbaijani community in Tehran: A conversation analytic approach to bilingual practices. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (1996). Language planning as a discourse on language and society: The linguistic ideology of a scholarly tradition. Language problems and language planning 20:199–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2015). Chronotopes, scales, and complexity in the study of language in society. The Annual Review of Anthropology 44:105–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan, & De Fina, Anna (2017). Chronotopic identities: On the timespace organization of who we are. In Fina, Anna De & Wegner, Jeremy (eds.), Diversity and super-diversity, 1–14 . Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary, & Hall, Kira (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7:585614.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Castells, Manuel (2010). The power of identity: The information age: Economy, society, and culture, vol. 2. 2nd edn. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Dick, Hillary (2010). Imagined lives and modernist chronotopes in Mexican nonmigrant discourse. American Ethnologist 37:275–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doi, Mary Masayo (2002). Gesture, gender, nation: Dance and social change in Uzbekistan. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12:453–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fierman, William (1995). Problems of language law implementation in Uzbekistan. Nationalities Papers 23:573–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finke, Peter (2014). Variations on Uzbek identity: Strategic choices, cognitive schemas and political constraints in identification processes. New York: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart (1996). Introduction: Who needs identity? In Hall, Stuart & Gay, Paul du (eds.), Questions of cultural identity, 1–17 . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.Google Scholar
Hirsch, Francine (2005). Empire of nations: Ethnographic knowledge and the making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Irvine, Judith, & Gal, Susan (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Kroskrity, Paul (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, polities and identities, 3583. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Jørgensen, Jens Normann (2008). Polylingual languaging around and among children and adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism 5:161–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jørgensen, Jens Normann; Karrebæk, Martha Sif; Madsen, Lian Malai; & Møller, Janus Spindler (2011). Polylanguaging in super-diversity. Diversities 13(2):2338.Google Scholar
Karimzad, Farzad (2016a). Life here beyond now: Chronotopes of the ideal life among Iranian transnationals. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20:607–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karimzad, Farzad (2016b). Optimal choices: Azeri multilingualism in indigenous and diaspora contexts. International Journal of Bilingualism. doi: 10.1177/1367006916651733.Google Scholar
Karimzad, Farzad (2018). Language ideologies and the politics of language: Azerbaijanis in Iran. In Djuraeva, Madina & Tochon, François V. (eds.), Language policy or the politics of language: Re-imagining the role of language in a neoliberal society, 5375. Blue Mounds, WI: Deep University Press, in press.Google Scholar
Karimzad, Farzad, & Sibgatullina, Gulnaz (2018). Replacing ‘THEM’ with ‘US’: Language ideologies and practices of ‘purification’ on Facebook. International Multilingual Research Journal, in press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koven, Michele (2016). Essentialization strategies in the storytellings of young Luso-descendant women in France: Narrative calibration, voicing, and scale. Language and Communication 46:1929.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Landau, Jacob, & Kellner-Heinkele, Barbara (2001). Politics of language in the ex-Soviet muslim states: Azerbayjan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, Paul; Gary, Simons; & Fennig, Charles (eds.) (2016). Ethnologue: Languages of the world. 19th edn. Dallas, TX: SIL International. Online: http://www.ethnologue.com.Google Scholar
Li, Wei (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics 43:1222–35.Google Scholar
Mirvahedi, Seyed Hadi (2012). The role of satellite channels in language shift/maintenance: The case of Tabriz, Iran. Proceedings of FEL XIV, 36–41 . Auckland: Foundation for Endangered Languages.Google Scholar
Pavlenko, Aneta (2008). Russian in post-Soviet countries. Russian Linguistics 32:5980.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rampton, Ben (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Reyes, Angela (2004). Asian American stereotypes as circulating resource. Pragmatics 14:173–92.Google Scholar
Schlyter, Birgit (2012). Language policy and language development in multilingual Uzbekistan. In Schiffman, Harold F. (ed.), Language policy and language conflict in Afghanistan and its neighbors: The changing politics of language choice, 176207. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Sheyholislami, Jaffer (2012). Kurdish in Iran: A case of restricted and controlled tolerance. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 217:1947.Google Scholar
Siltaoja, Marjo (2013). Moral panic, moral regulation and essentialization of identities: Discursive struggle over unethical business practices in the Finnish national media. Culture and Organization 19:6284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wirtz, Kristina (2016). The living, the dead, and the immanent: Dialogue across chronotopes. AU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6:343–69.Google Scholar
Woolard, Kathryn (2013). Is the personal political? Chronotopes and changing stances toward Catalan language and identity. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 16:210–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar