This book deals with the language of young adults in both online and offline environments . The very fact that we can talk of āofflineā environments points to the salience of life online: for many young people today, being onlineāon Facebook , Twitter, Whatās App, texting, chatting, Skypingāis part of everyday life. You do not set aside a time of day to āgo onlineāāyou simply are online much of the time. It no longer makes sense to view this as some alternative and lesser (virtual) reality: being online is as real as anything else. These online and offline worlds are also interlinked, with offline worlds becoming part of the online and online affecting face to face interactions. So this is the first context of this book: the intertwined worlds of online and offline conversations, postings, comments and chats.
Why young adults ? By and large, this is where the action is, and these are also the people who interest us as educators. These are the people who have grown up with the new technologies , who learned to āswipeā a page at an early age, whose fingers move comfortably across mobile keyboards, messaging, adding emoticons, chatting, watching and multitasking. They are also at an age of flexibility, happy to try stuff out, exploring identities, messing around with language and engaged with popular culture. They are sitting in our university and other classes, watching us (now and then), checking their mobile devices (more often) and living in multiple linguistic , cultural and spatial worlds. These are also the consumers of popular culture , people for whom music , TV dramas, films form not just a backdrop to their daily lives, not just a pastime when they are not doing something else, but a fabric around which parts of their lives are built.
The book is about three particular aspects of this young adult action. First, we are interested in the way they use, mix and mash up language. In line with contemporary trends in sociolinguistics , we no longer view this through a lens of bilingualism or code-mixing, but rather take this use of multiple linguistic resources as the norm. Young people are exposed to and take up a range of linguistic and broader semiotic resources in their daily communications. These young adults are also the drivers of innovation, the setters of new trends, the ones bending the rules, making up the terms and changing the way language works. As they communicate in and across various social groups, these new trends may move rapidly around the globe, getting picked up and passed on from online forum to Twitter account, from YouTube clip to cafƩ discussion, while at the same time they may also define subcultural language uses, showing who is in and who is out, who knows how to mess with language and image in this way and who does not.
Second, we are interested in the sources from which they draw these multiple resources. While language classes, travel and other more traditional modes may provide some of the input into their linguistic repertoires , it is a popular culture that plays a major role here. These young adults tend to be highly engaged with music , dance, film , gaming and multiple forms of popular culture, which provide not only content to be discussed or parodied but also voices and linguistic resources . They take up and play with the voices of popular culture, and in so doing gain access to a range of languages, ideas and ways of articulating the world. The linguistic creativity , parody and play, therefore, involve voices, sounds , images and phrases drawn from a variety of cultural forms, from well-known songs to film scenes, from information about sport stars to details about technology.
Third, we are interested in how these relations get played out in the Asian periphery . Much has been made of the diversity brought about by migration to European cities, but much less attention has been paid to the diversity that now occurs in contexts marked by online rather than physical mobility. The Asian focus allows us to turn the attention away from Europe and North America, which are so often the focus of such studies and instead to look at the vibrant and emerging Asian scene, which again, we might suggest is where the action is, as Asian and non-Asian forms of popular culture circulate through the digital pathways. The peripheral focus adds a further dimension to this, allowing us to look in depth at two contexts that have to date received little attention in the literature: Bangladesh and Mongolia . At the same time, this peripheral focus draws attention to questions of access and distribution: Who gets to play around with language and culture in what contexts?
Eye Shopping: gĆ¼zel Ƨanta
Before exploring these themes of language mixing, popular culture, digital literacies and the periphery in greater detail in the following sections, a couple of examples may serve to show the kind of thing that is going on. Here in Excerpt 1.1, for example, is a Facebook (FB) posting by Altai, a 20-year-old female third-year chemical engineering student at the National University of Mongolia. The examples below have been retrieved from Altaiās daily FB wall status updates, where she actively posts about her daily activities, including the places she has been to or the photographs she has taken, or the movies she has seen (Dovchin 2015) . A general guide to transcription conventions is provided at the end of the chapter, while specific guides to language identification conventions are provided before each excerpt. All data examples were translated from Mongolian and Bangla into English by the authors, and all the names used for the research participants are pseudonyms to protect their real identities.
Excerpt 1.1
Language guide: regular font = Mongolian; italics = English; bold = Turkish; underlined bold = Korean; underlined italics = French
Facebook status | Translation |
|---|---|
1. Altai: Undraa! Ƨok gĆ¼zel ƧıkmıÅsınız tatlımā¦zondoo unsey hairtai shuuā¦ annesine benziyorā¦love n miss | Altai: Undraa! you look so pretty sweetieā¦ lots of kisses love youā¦looking like your mother love n miss |
2. Altai: Ai syopping @ Louis Vittonā¦ gĆ¼zel Ƨantaā¦ | Altai: Window shopping @ Louis Vuittonā¦lovely bagsā¦ |
In the first line, Altai uploads a photograph of her friend (Undraa) with a caption combining Turkish and Mongolian in Roman script and a popular transnational online phrase ālove n missā to show affection. This is a typical example of her Facebook repertoire, where the extensive incorporation of Turkish is often integrated either with Mongolian or English resources. As will become clear throughout this book, the identification of a linguistic and cultural origin of such resources is rarely without problems: To say here that ālove n missā(a common globally available phrase) is in English, or that āAi syoppingā (a phrase from Korean English) is Korean, or that āLouis Vittonā (a popular brand name) is French is not so much to tie such terms to a language of origin, but rather to point to the already-mixed cultural and linguistic resources these young people draw on (Dovchin 2015).
The rather unexpected use of Turkish here can be explained by her high school experience, which has resulted in the development of linguistic skills in Turkish and English. Altai is originally from Khentii Province in the East of Mongolia , bordering Russia. Her family moved to the capital, Ulaanbaatar (UB), where she attended a Turkish high school. Initially, Turkish high schools were established in Mongolia from the mid-1990s, when large numbers of Turkish people started coming to the country. Today, there are five Turkish schools still operating in Mongolia. Turkish schools are well known for their Turkish and English-medium teaching, targeting natural science specialized studies, and are regarded as some of the best high schools in Mongolia, with extremely strict entrance examinations. Students who gain entrance are often provided with a comfortable dormitory and free-of-charge study materials. Many graduates of these schools get impressively high scores in state examinations. More recently, these schools have also become the target of controversy due to their alleged association with the exiled Muslim cleric Fethullah GĆ¼len, who is now blamed for masterminding the military coup in Turkey. In fact, it is alleged that GĆ¼len-associated Turkish schools are currently operating in 173 countries. Since the failed military coup attempt, Turkey has escalated its all-out campaign to put pressure on dozens of countries around the world to shut down GĆ¼len-linked Turkish schools.
In line 2, Altai updates her Facebook status, echoing the anglicize...