Conference Agenda

Digital technologies have given rise to a host of ‘new’ communicative modes, relationship dynamics and identity performances. These digitally mediated forms of meaning-making are increasingly becoming the key discursive sites for the society. Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) scholarship has already set solid traditions in engaging with contemporary socio-political issues through the prism of discourse. Media technologies are entangled with assumptions of discursive power albeit in different ways. Social Media Communication paradigm of communication is impacting the content, style, and characteristics of discourses. The suggested notion of Techno-Discursive analysis is simply about focusing on the processes of sense-making at the intersection of digital mediation and discourse consumption (KhosraviNik 2018). This paper tries to flag the importance of tackling the new distributary environment of digital discourse by discussing specific theoretical views, introducing analytical tools, and showing how they would work for a social media CDS approach. The paper particularly discusses Digital Ethnography, Social Network Analysis, and aspects of Sentiment Analysis in response to the identified context and nature of digital discursive practice i.e., paradigmatic distribution change, complex nature of who speaks to whom under what circumstances, and the general trend of automatic affectivity in SMC communication (Esposito and KhosraviNik forthcoming).

Esposito, E. and KhosraviNik, M. (2023) Digital Distribution Processes and “New” Research Tools in SM-CDS. In M. KhosraviNik (Ed) Digital Discourse and Society: Connecting the digital with the social. John Benjamins. DAPSAC series.

KhosraviNik, M. (2023) Introduction; Connecting the digital with the social in digital discourse. In M. KhosraviNik (Ed) Digital Discourse and Society: Connecting the digital with the social. John Benjamins. DAPSAC series.

KhosraviNik, M. (2018) “Social Media Techno-Discursive Design, Affective Communication, and Contemporary Politics”. Fudan Jour. of Hum. & Soc. Sci. 1-16.

In 2008, the Yale law professor and First Amendment scholar wrote, “the most important decisions affecting the future of freedom of speech will not occur in constitutional law; they will be decisions about technological design, legislative and administrative regulations, the formation of new business models, and the collective activities of end-users” and thus, “the First Amendment seems increasingly irrelevant” (Balkin 2008). This paper argues that Balkin’s assessment is just one indication of a broad shift that the internet cannot be understood as a space of unregulated language use. This opens an important opportunity for language policy scholars because governments, inter-governmental organizations and social media companies themselves across the globe are engaging in new attempts to deal with hate speech, misogyny, racism, genocide and violence that proliferate on social media. This paper will show how the expanding definition of language policy in the past few decades now includes all those alternatives to constitutional law (and official language policy) that Balkin lists (e.g. Johnson 2013). It will survey key developments in government legislations and other attempts to regulate social media through the lens of language policy showing how it provides deeper and needed insight into the overly simplified for-or-against regulation that usually pervades such discussions.

Balkin, Jack (2008). “The Future of Free Expression in a Digital Age,” Pepperdine Law Review, Vol. 36, 101-118.

Johnson, David Cassels (2013). Language Policy (London: Palgrave).

Online space, with its complexity, trans-locality, multiplicity of actors, and multisemioticity/multimodality, has created a platform for social actors to agentively and creatively play around with language and engage in meta-linguistic conversations where they perform various acts of identification. This paper focuses on Persian-speaking Iranian social media (henceforth SM) users and gives an overview of areas where SM, and the multisemiotic communication happening therein, have been clashing with the top-down language policies issued and exerted by the government through different apparatus. Focusing on SM users’ non-standard and multilingual online language use, specifically Persian-English code-switches, Persian-English/English-Persian transliteration, and cases of patterned deviations from standard orthography, I draw on data from my on-going online/offline ethnographic project (started in 2016) to explore how SM communication, specifically in Iran, has complexified issues of language and identity and language ideologies as well as the dominant one-nation-one-language approach. I use ethnographically-grounded discourse analysis (Wortham & Reyes, 2015) to investigate users’ semiotic/linguistic practices and their meta-pragmatic commentary, both online and offline, unveiling the processes through which the ‘dominant’ ideologies, that top-down governmental language policies draw from, are reproduced and/or contested in users’ positionings relative to specific non-standard and multilingual language use in their everyday interactions. The findings reveal a tension between different ideologies and show that users’ uptake of governmental policies and their identity concerns play a crucial role in their practices/positionings: non-standard and/or multilingual forms are used, and positively evaluated, by some users to mobilize certain social indexicalities and authenticate (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005) a more ‘modern’, ‘global’, ‘non-mainstream’ identity; the same forms are discouraged and negatively evaluated by other users as they appeal to the dominant discourses that have historically established ties between standard Persian, national identity and Persian-ness, differentiating themselves from the “iconoclasts”. The study contributes to online sociolinguistics and the sociolinguistics of grassroots/multi literacies.

Yiddish has been spoken by Ashkenazi Jews for over one thousand years and persists as a daily vernacular within Hasidic Orthodox communities. However, as the use of Yiddish in secular Jewish communities in North America has declined, the language has faced allegations of endangerment and loss. This perceived sense of loss, which Avineri (2014) calls phenomenological endangerment, has mobilized metalinguistic communities devoted to Yiddish language and culture—that is, communities which speak about Yiddish but not necessarily in Yiddish (Avineri, 2014; Shandler, 2006). Many heritage users in North America incorporate Yiddish words into English-dominant repertoires to index cultural, ethnic, and regional affiliations (Benor, 2012). However, such users may not aspire to speak the language 'fluently,' and their heritage speech communities may be English-dominant. Thus Yiddish may not fit neatly into existing models of heritage language socialization and maintenance. On the social networking platform TikTok, “Yiddish Word of the Day” videos are a dominant genre on “YiddishTok,” a virtual community which creates linked content through hashtags. This study adopts a discourse analytic approach (Wortham and Reyes, 2015) to analyze 20 videos alongside user comments. Preliminary analysis suggests that younger viewers do not view themselves as language learners but instead construct “heritage repertoires” based on metapragmatic models of older Yiddish speakers, while articulating ethnoreligious and regional identities through Yiddish and English mixing.

Avineri, N. (2014). Yiddish endangerment as phenomenological reality and discursive strategy: Crossing into the past and crossing out the present. Language & Communication, 38, 18–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2014.05.002

Benor, S. B. (2011). Mensch, bentsh, and balagan: Variation in the American Jewish linguistic repertoire. Language & Communication, 31(2), 141–154. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2010.08.006

Shandler, J. (2006). Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular language and culture. University of California Press.

Wortham, S., & Reyes, A. (2015). Discourse analysis beyond the speech event. Routledge.