User talk:Oliverst

In this first entry of 'my talk', I will describe the course which is the immediate context of my page and formulate some reflections on a text which we read for the first course session.

The initial context of the ideas and discussion I hope to deliver through this page is a postgraduate course, situated at Örebro university and using wiki as a main medium, called 'Communication and Identity Issues in Institutional Arenas'. The main aim of the course is to explore and generate understanding of the concept of intersectionality as well as various perspectives on identity, multilingualism and culture. The link to the course plan will give you further information and the literature list.

The first text I will share a few reflections on is 'Styling the Other:Introduction' by Ben Rampton which can be accessed online from the 'Journal of Sociolinguistics 3/4, 1999: 421-427.

The collection of articles that this text introduces is inspired, among other sociolinguistic themes, by Rampton's concept of crossing which is defined as "speakers' use of apparently outgroup linguistic styles" (421). Rampton spotlights the common theme these articles explore by describing the studies as focusing on "a range of ways in which people use language and dialect in discursive practice to appropriate, explore, reproduce or challenge influential images and stereotypes of groups that they don't themselves...belong to." This theme is further described as a departure from the 'linguistics of community' (a conventional sociolinguistics view) to embrace a 'linguistics of contact'. In my words (always a challenge), the concept of a 'linguistics of contact' refers to the increasingly common practice of borrowing and customizing language which is different from habitual speech patterns and with 'other' ideological value for promoting group identity and forging new significance "in an already saturated semiotic marketplace."

Terms and phrases I will discuss in the following paragraphs include: Bakhtin's concept of 'doube-voiced discourse'...... (Text under construction)