Zocker, Şeker, Azúcar. Sugar packets as evidence of a changing power balance.

Another thesis done! This is a link to the full thing.


Me with 4 of the copies on the train. Photographer: Gintarė

Abstracts (English, Nederlands, Español):
The position of a language in society is a type of discourse. Even the most banal artefacts with language choices on them are not just results of but participants in that discourse, and they can reinforce it, or challenge and transform it. In this thesis, sugar packets are presented as small samples or fossils of historical language power balances, which can be used to reconstruct shifts in those balances. As a form of ready-collected data, a number of online sugar packet catalogues are used, from which some key information is however missing such as manufacturing dates and finding places. The thesis' methodology is an attempt to utilize the potential of the data by investigating it through four different approaches. After a global overview of differences between the used catalogues, the scope is limited in two different ways. First, the focus is on one city, The Hague, for which the language choices on old and new sugar packets are compared. Next is a comparison of the packets released during the history of three different Dutch department stores. Finally, the study zooms in on a single sugar packet, to trace in detail its journey and the choices made during it. The data show a clear difference between “linguistic fetish” type use of foreign languages, whereby they are employed to call up positive connotations, and “instrumental” use, which is directly related to the companies' cross-border activities. Specifically this “instrumental” multilingualism occurs ever more often, as a result of the dynamics of franchising and foreign expansion during the period which is researched.

De machtspositie van een taal in de maatschappij is een diskoers. De taalkeuzes in of op welke tekst, uitspraak of onbeduidend object dan ook zijn niet alleen resultaten van dat diskoers, maar nemen erin deel, door het te herhalen en voort te zetten, of door het aan te passen en een nieuwe richting te geven. In deze scriptie worden suikerzakjes aangegrepen als kleine staaltjes of fossielen van historische taalbalansen, die kunnen worden gebruikt om de verschuivingen daarin te reconstrueren. Bij wijze van kant-en-klare data maakt de studie gebruik van een aantal door verzamelaars bijeen gebrachte online catalogi van suikerzakjes, waarin echter bepaalde cruciale informatie mist zoals wanneer de zakjes zijn gedrukt en waar ze zijn gevonden. De methodologie van de scriptie is een poging het potentieel van de data tot bloei te brengen met vier benaderingen in toenemende mate van detail. Na een overzicht van onderlinge verschillen tussen de catalogi volgen twee verschillende manieren om het bereik van de studie te beperken, eerst met een focus op suikerzakjes uit één stad, namelijk Den Haag, waarbij taalkeuzes op nieuwe en oude zakjes worden vergeleken, en vervolgens met een vergelijking van de suikerzakjes uitgebracht gedurende de geschiedenis van drie Nederlandse warenhuizen In de laatste analyse wordt de focus verscherpt op één enkel suikerzakje, om het door het zakje afgelegde pad te traceren en de daarbij gemaakte keuzes in hun context te plaatsen. Uit de data blijkt een onderscheid tussen „dwepend“ gebruik van vreemde talen – waarbij ze worden ingezet om positieve associaties op te roepen – en „instrumenteel“ gebruik, direct gerelateerd aan grensoverschrijdende economische activiteit van de bedrijven. Specifiek deze „instrumentele“ meertaligheid komt steeds meer voor als gevolg van het ontstaan van franchises en toenemende internationalisering van bedrijven tijdens het door het onderzoek beslagen tijdsbestek.

La posición de un idioma en la sociedad es un discurso. Cada texto, objeto o acto de habla, junto con las selecciónes de idioma que se encuentran en estos, incluso en los más triviales, no son solamente resultados de este discurso sino que también hacen parte de éste y pueden reforzarlo, rebatirlo y transformarlo. En esta tesis, los paquetes de azúcar se presentan como muestras o fósiles de equilibrios históricos de poder lingüístico, cuyos cambios pueden ser reconstruidos mediante el análisis de estos vestigios. Como “corpus prefabricado” se utilizan catálogos en línea de paquetes de azúcar, recopilados por coleccionistas. Sin embargo, faltan informaciónes tales como las fechas de producción o los lugares donde se hallaron los paquetes. La metodología de la tesis busca aprovechar el potencial de dichos paquetes desde cuatro enfoques de investigación diferentes. Se empieza presentando un panorama general de las diferencias entre los catálogos y entre los sistemas nacionales de distribución de azúcar. Luego, para limitar el alcance de los datos, se comparan las selecciones de idioma hechas, en primer lugar, en paquetes nuevos y antiguos de la ciudad de La Haya, y, en segundo lugar, en los paquetes creados a lo largo de la historia de tres almacenes neerlandeses. Por último, la investigación se enfoca en un único paquete para observar en detalle su recorrido y las decisiones tomadas en este proceso. Los resultados muestran una clara distinción entre el uso de idiomas extranjeros de dos maneras: como “fetiche lingüístico” y de forma “instrumental”. En la primera, los idiomas son usados para evocar asociaciones positivas, mientras que la segunda está directamente relacionada a las actividades transfronterizas de las empresas. Este tipo de plurilingüismo “instrumental” particular occure cada vez más seguido, como resultado de las dinámicas de creación de franquicias y de expanción internacional durante el periodo investigado.

Pitbull: Little Man or Great Woman?

In the series of finished assignments, here an analysis of the following song. I applied the theory from "Language and Racism" by our professor J.J. Weber to it.



“International Love” is a rap song from 2011 by rapper Pitbull and R&B singer Chris Brown, in which they sing about sexual escapades with women all over the world. The song touches on a lot of the themes discussed in this class. It celebrates the ‘international’ but seems to confuse nations and states, stereotypes women from different countries, and uses translanguaging to express loyalty to a particular identity. Through close analysis, the processes of identity construction in the song can be made visible.

A somewhat warped pdf version of the whole assignment (including the lyrics!) available here

the Discourse-Historical approach

Picture from a cool article by T. Mills Kelly at The Conversation

In the chapter "Linguistic Analyses of Language Policies", Ruth Wodak suggests that a discourse analysis method can be helpful in studying language policies (2006: 170-193), so I decided I would try to implement this in my research. To prepare, I read How To Do Critical Discourse Analysis by David Machin and Andrea Mayr (2012).

One thing that has become clear from reading the book is that Wodak's approach is much more extensive and thorough than that described by Machin and Mayr. They see her work as an extension of an approach that is already a bit wider than the "common" critical discourse analysis (CDA) method, namely Van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach. In the "common" method, as described by Machin and Mayr, a few texts are picked out that are deemed representative of a particular kind of discourse by the analyst. He or she then analyses what semiotic choices are made that conceal the underlying ideology of the text. The purpose of CDA is to bring out and challenge hidden power relations, which they believe are created and reinforced through language and through specific discourses.

In my post on "discourse dissemination across social boundaries" I  talked about some of my hesitations with this approach, such as that it did not take into account who produced the text for which kinds of readers, and how those readers react to it. The conclusion of Machin and Mayr's book actually goes into these kinds of criticisms; that it does not consider the background and context of the production and consumption of the texts, on the one hand, and that it is too selective and subjective on the other hand.

In the discourse-historical approach described by Wodak, these issues are resolved to an extent. Background reasearch and ethnography are used to provide the actual context and history of certain discourses, to understand how they come about and what function they serve. Because of the large amount of data that are gathered, the selection problem of CDA is less acute of a problem. CDA becomes less of a focus on its own and more of a tool used to show how the discourses work in practice. It is also suggested that quantitative analysis (e.g. Corpus-based) be integrated, which would make the interpretation less subjective.

As a whole the approach probably makes for a PhD-size project per proper implementation. The next step for me is to think about how I could realistically integrate this into my own project. I'm now interested in ethnography and corpus linguistics though, and I'll be reading up about those. Also for next week I will try to apply my new CDA knowledge onto some of the articles I posted on here before.

Discourse dissemination across social boundaries

Picture by brooklynpix

Having embarked on the mission to find out how to do Critical Discourse Analysis, it was nice to find out that one of the staff of the School of English and a former teacher of mine, Dr Mayr, has recently brought out a book with exactly that as the title. I've borrowed it from the library (a hassly affair as it is only available as a short loan, which has me running to the library through the rain at 3:45pm to return it before I get fined at exactly 4pm) and eventually decided to purchase it as it's useful and because I feel a sense of pride at owning books from people who have taught me.

The book intends to show precisely how the "semiotic choices" authors make (authors here referring to journalists and writers as well as photographers, singers, visual editors and whoever engages in communication) are influenced by and feed into discourses, or frameworks of interpretation, which are in turn ways to obscure the ideology of the text. These ideologies form the hegemony of the higher classes, and eventually serve to convince the lower classes that the way the higher classes control and oppress them is in fact legitimate. 

Let me first say that the book does a really good job of showing how these semiotic choices work. I will be writing more on this later as I will most likely be basing a lot of the analysis I'm going to do on what's explained in the book. As of yet I am working my way through it to form a sort of plan for how to do the analysis. 

So although I really do admire the minute detail they go into when analyzing texts, some of the underlying ideology shall we call it irks me to the max. The idea that - even in a democracy - the higher/educated/managerial classes, the ABC, control the lower and working classes, the DE, through the media (such as the Daily Mail which a lot of the examples in the book are drawn from) is in fact almost belittling as it implies that the lower classes have very little agency of their own. 

This is a quote from the book:

Power comes from privileged access to social resources such as education, knowledge and wealth, which provides authority, status and influence to those who gain this access and enables them to dominate, coerce and control subordinate groups. (...)

Power can be more than simple domination from above; it can also be jointly produced when people are led to believe that dominance is legitimate in some way or other. (...)

Power, at least in democratic societies, needs to be seen as legitimate by people in order to be accepted, and this process of legitimation is generally expressed through language and other communicative systems. (Machin and Mayr, 2012: 25)

To do a little analysis here; in the second part of the quote "people" are an object of a passive verb: they are led to believe that the dominance is legitimate rather than that they just believe it, which would imply more agency on their part. Who is the implied actor here? Who leads them to believe it? With reference to the first part of the quotation, it is suggested that "those who gain this access" are the ones who lead the "people" on and who are apparently not "people" themselves. Also, "dominance" could have been phrased in a more neutral manner, as "reign", "regime" or "government". Dominance is a very charged word which implies that the one group is controlling the other. The rather explicit suggestion throughout is that those who have money and who are educated are controlling and coercing the poor and the uneducated.

However if we are talking about how the higher classes control the lower through ideology, then it makes no sense that most of the examples in the analysis are from a paper (the Daily Mail) that espouses views almost exclusively held by the lower classes, as opposed to the Guardian or the Times, which communicate ideas more popular with the higher and middle classes. Clearly there is a question here about who actually writes the articles; who communicates these ideologies and why is it in their interest to do so. Also, one needs to know what the actual readership of the articles is like.

I am under the impression that the Daily Mail is written for and by people from working class environments and communicates ideas held by some people in this group, though certainly not all. The ideology of the educated classes is more so represented by papers like the Guardian, which is also written by people who come from ABC environments. (I should warrant that I am working on impressions, but I would be surprised if I were proven wrong.A research project to back up this hypothesis could take the form of a survey for journalists of the various papers, to ask about their and their parents' education, type of work and income and their political leanings.)

Now, if both groups actually read papers written by their own group, then where does the transfer of ideology happen?

Another source of material analysed in the book is the Cosmopolitan. Machin and Mayr show how its imagery and articles paint a streamlined, idealised and kind of vapid picture of what women's lives are or should be like, and then promote the accesoires that belong with such a lifestyle. It is very entertaining to read their minute analysis of the high-pitched lighting and absolute absence of any clue as to what type of work the stylishly dressed women are doing.

A question that they leave open, which is fair enough to them I suppose, is "who actually buys this crap?" Who are these women spending actual money to read the magazine? Who takes the barely obscured sales pitches and laughable advice serious? Now beside all the people who read the magazine for a laugh, although that may very well be a majority of the readership, I believe that the intended audience of the newspaper is a group of girls and women who do in fact have an image of what their own lives are or should be like that matches the image sketched in the Cosmopolitan. They buy the magazine because they would actually like some advice on what make-up products are available and how they could go about wooing a man, in the same way that I bought the How To Do Critical Discourse Analysis book because I wanted to know precisely that.

If this is true it means that the group who reads the magazine does so because they already share its ideology. The same may be true for the newspaper choice; the Daily Mail readership shares its fairly explicit racism, its sense of humour and its obsession with "crazy murder beasts" who batter little children. The Guardian readership would indeed like to be informed about the latest developments in the NSA debacle or what's on show in the country's modern art museums. That's why they buy the paper.


In conclusion, ideological hegemony via newspapers may not work in the way the authors seem to suggest - ideas "produced" by a powerful group that serve to prolong their domination over the less powerful group. In a democracy, this theory belittles the wit and agency of those supposedly subordinate groups. Rather, each group communicates their ideology to other members of the same group, who are not "led to believe" new discourses but who in fact already agree, which is the premise that their voluntary consummation of the information is based on. Within the groups discourses develop organically, but they will be slower to filter down from the one group to the other.

Rather than media, education may be a key to how some discourses are communicated across social boundaries. Again it should be asked who decides on the content, who communicates it to the children, and how much of it the children actually believe and internalise.

I'm collecting opinion articles on SA language policy

The unfounded fears of a Zulu hegemony by T.O. Molefe

Quote:

Mabuza’s comment underlines what has perhaps been the most surprising aspect of the reaction, which is that some of the backlash has, for various reasons, come from black South Africans against what is perceived as an act of Zulu domination.

I'm thinking articles like these would be useful for critical discourse analysis, though of course the first article I come across has to be one of which I share the outlook.

So is this one: KZN University: A Storm in a (Zulu) Teacup by Pierre de Vos (whose blog happens to be my home page), although I don't fully support his stance on Stellenbosch as an Afrikaans-medium university seeing as how Afrikaans is itself threatened by English dominance as well. It should make space for black students, probably through steering away from Afrikaans only, but it wouldn't be unfair to ask the students to take a class in Afrikaans along the side. Vice-versa the university can offer isiXhosa classes to the Afrikaans-speaking students. The ideal, I believe, would be to have a number of multilingual universities throughout the country, each of which has a main emphasis on the language that is dominant in the particular region but also offers courses in the second and third language of the region. I haven't yet figured out how to make this workable.

Link to a page on the actual language policy considerations of the University of Stellenbosch (in Afrikaans).


UL multilingualism

The new KwaZulu-Natal University policy is not unlike the policy of the University of Luxembourg, which I will be visiting next week for a conference. In their founding text (from 2003) it stipulates that multilingualism is one of the main founding principles:

 « le fonctionnement de l’université se fonde sur (…) le caractère multilingue de son enseignement ». Les langues de l’Université sont : le français, l’anglais et l’allemand.

Le multilinguisme est un point essentiel du développement stratégique de l’UL car il peut apporter l’atout unique d’un diplôme bilingue, ce qui est un créneau indéniable et abordable du fait du contexte multilingue dont bénéficie l’UL : Luxembourg pays aux trois frontières, au cœur de l’Europe, abritant de nombreuses institutions européennes. Le multilinguisme apparaît comme un élément incontournable, voire même central de la renommée internationale de l’UL.

What they're saying is that because of Luxembourg being geographically wedged in between France, Germany and Belgium and its central position in Europe (again, mostly geographical), multilingualism is "inescapable".

In fact, the UL goes much further. All courses are in fact taught in German, French and English and by the time you graduate, fluency in all three is expected. Moreover the staff need to be able to converse in Lëtzebuergesch as well in order to facilitate interaction with students.


Conversational languages

The difference is of course that there is a plethora of universities teaching in any of the UL's three languages already, whereas isiZulu and isiXhosa are more like Lëtzebuergesch: the native language of the majority of the population of the region where the university is situated, but seen as a language of conversation rather than writing, or god forbid, universitary teaching.(I'm not sure whether UKZN staff are required to be able to hold a conversation in isiZulu; I believe that that is in fact one of the purposes of their new policy.)

Dissertation methodology

Picture by Frank Bohbot taken from ignant.de


I've started the work for the dissertation I'm going to be doing all year. I'm still in the blissful first stages: swimming around a bit and reading very broadly, all I can get my hands on. In the past two weeks I made good acquaintance with an introduction to sociolinguistics by Mesthrie et al. and now I have moved on to a stack of books on the methods and assumptions of critical discourse analysis (less fun to read, not as many cartoons).

The research question as of yet is: which linguistic analysis methods are useful in the study of language policy and planning?

This is different from what I had thought of initially. At first I wanted to research the impact of language policy and planning (LPP) on internal language change. This was my abstract:

Language planning and policy are a well-researched area of study, but the focus is strongly on the political side of things; how can we ascertain that people have the right to use their language for administrative purposes? In which language should education be provided in multilingual countries? The purely linguistic aspect of language policy has been given less attention. The question this dissertation will attempt to answer is what influence language policy has on internal change of the affected languages, thereby tying in to a bigger question of what factors trigger language change.  

In this dissertation I will first make a classification of types of language policies based on actual policy decisions with regards to language planning and regulation. For each type of policy I will investigate how this might affect internal language development and provide examples from languages affected by these policies. The conclusion will reflect on how these findings relate to the bigger debate on language change in general.

The feedback I got for my first proposal suggested that the chapter "Linguistic Analyses in Language Policies" by Ruth Wodak was a good start for such a dissertation. That chapter didn't mention my proposed idea at all though, but instead seemed to suggest that the only feasible method of linguistic analysis in LPP is critical analysis of texts proposing language policies. Hence I now feel that I ought to try this method also.

To criticise my own idea that you can evaluate language policies by analysing the way they impact on the languages they police; it goes against the principle of sign arbitrariness of De Saussure. The language is not better or worse at signifying meaning before or after a change, no matter whether that change be onset by a policy of some kind. However there are some social aspects - e.g. language attitudes and economic benefit - that do get better or worse as language policy changes.

Another assumption underlying my original proposal that I now don't agree with is that you can draw a clear line between linguistics and sociology or politics. There are more and less "social" approaches to studying language and LPP but they blur into each other and overlap very much. Moreover I implicitly made the assumption that this distinction is meaningful and important. It serves to delineate the number of topics that need to be discussed in a degree on any of the subject fields, but that does not mean that it is a good reflection of reality.

What I feel I have to do now is try out a set of different methods and approaches, preferably on and to the same case study. The choice will focus on the more "linguistic" type of investigation as that would be what I can get the most assistance with within the School of English. The purpose to my mind is to get an idea of the relative benefits and helpfulness of each of the methods and the type of information that can be acquired via them. I still want to look at language change and variation, but I also want to critically analyse texts surrounding my case study, and perhaps I can investigate language attitudes as well.

The book I've started reading at the minute is "Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis" by Titscher et al. I found it hard to read at first but then I employed the tried and trusted "line per paragraph" summarising strategy. Then I got into the flow and stopped summarising as it was a bit tedious, but by now (a few hours later) I have forgotten what the bit that I didn't take notes for said. The main point they have made so far is that all research methods are, implicitly or explicitly, related to particular theoretical assumptions. They then went on to set out a four-step research design decision procedure. The first step is to decide what the research is for; finding explanations, testing hypotheses or describing. The researcher then needs to decide how involved they have to be with the source of research data, how critical they want to be of predetermined categories, and whether they want to do a snapshot or track changes. More on this later.