The first project in Chapter 1 invites you to conduct short interviews with participants to explore the different ways they speak and what kinds of prestige or social values they assign to them.
- Before starting any interview with participants, it is important to prepare in advance some questions and create an interview plan.
- Using an interview plan to collect data from interviews is very useful as it allows you to ask more or less the same questions and therefore compare participants’ answers.
- You can also use interview plans with semi-structured interviews. These are interviews which somehow follow the interview plan but not in strict terms, giving space to participants to talk about certain things that might be important for them.
- It is highly advisable to pilot the interview plan with a couple of people to ensure that the questions are clear. Once the pilot is complete, you can then make changes to improve your interview plan, if necessary.
- Interviews can be recorded and this will enable you to go back and listen again, especially if you are transcribing the data.
- Make sure that you inform the participants about your study and obtain their consent before starting your data collection. For more information about ethics, see Appendix 3.
Project 4 asks you to collect texts from a particular social context and analyse the different communicative resources used to assemble these texts, and the kinds of competencies needed to interpret them.
- It’s important that you choose a clear and defined ‘context’ and ensure that the texts you collect are relevant to this context so that, at the end of your project, you can say something about the role of different resources/competencies in this context. Possible contexts are workplaces, organisations (such as student societies), and online contexts such as particular online games.
- When you analyse the texts, focus first on codes (‘languages’). Remember, some of these codes may be non-verbal, that is, they may involve images or symbols or other modes (e.g. music).
- When you are analysing register, pay attention the ‘style’ of the language used and ask yourself whether or not it is associated with a particular ‘kind of person’ or a particular social practice or activity. Online gaming sites, for instance, may contain registers that are specific to online gaming, or even to a particular game.
- Genres are particularly important resources when it comes to understanding the role of communication in ‘holding communities together’. People who study genre analysis note that genres are kinds of texts that enable people in communities to work together to get things done, and that competence in a genre is not just a way to participate in a community but also to show others that you are a competent member.
- When you think about what kinds of competences are needed to interpret these texts, think of the different kinds of competences Blommaert and Bakus (2013) talk about : Maximal competence, partial competence, minimal competence, and recognising competence. In asking yourself, what kinds of competences are necessary for participants in this community, you will need to imagine what participants need to do with these texts. You might also want to consider the fact that there may be different kinds of participants in these communities (e.g. novices, experts).
If you’re doing your project on topic 4, you will need to conduct small ethnographic fieldwork in your classroom or club you belong to. Ethnography is widely used in sociolinguistics, however it is not easy to conduct, and it may also be time-consuming. These tips will help you conduct your fieldwork effectively:
- One of the tricky things with ethnography is gaining access to the population under investigation. The good news is that being an insider (i.e. already a member of a club or classroom) means that access is no longer an issue. Also, another positive is that you already have a very good understanding of the context under investigation.
- You can start your fieldwork with some participant observation. This observation will help you identify the different kinds of social groups that exist. Pay close attention on how they behave and how they use language. What are the different group affiliations? How do group members use semiotic resources to present themselves?
- During the participant observation process make sure you keep detailed notes carefully noting down what you observe. Your observations and notes will enable you to come up with some preliminary findings.
- You may then choose to support your preliminary findings with some additional data. At this stage either interviews with some participants or recordings can be useful. Whichever you choose, make sure that you pilot the recording equipment that you are using.
- If you opt for interviews, you can ask your participants specific questions about the groups they belong to and the kinds of linguistic and semiotic resources they use (to show that they belong to that group. This will help you obtain more insights from participants in the form of views and opinions.
- If you opt for recordings, then you can ask one participant to carry recording equipment with them when they interact with their friends. This will give you some authentic data that you can use to analyse language in use.
- Remember that before you start collecting data, you need to inform all your participants that they are taking part in a study. Also, don’t forget to obtain written consent from them.
Watch Prof Barbara Johnstone give her suggestions on doing projects in the area of language variation.
In Project 2 you are asked to collect and analyse memes. There are a few different ways you might go about this and different kinds of things you might look at.
- This first thing you will need to think about is your sampling strategy, and this will depend a lot on what kinds of things you want to find out. You might, for example, want to collect different variations of the same meme and look at the different ways people have changed the meaning of the meme by adding different words or adding the meme’s ‘catchphrase’ to different images, as suggested in the book. Or you might decide to collect memes on a particular topic or theme. One example of this is Erhan Aslan’s study of COVID lockdown memes.
- The best pace to search for memes is a meme database. The most popular is Know Your Meme, but there are others, such as Memebase.
- One thing that you will want to pay particular attention to is intersemiotic relations – that is, the relationship between the words and the images. Ask yourself how the meaning of the images changes when different words are added, and also how the image might affect how people interpret the words.
- To extend this project, ask yourself how these memes fit into the broader social order. For example, are they political in nature, or do they advance a particular ideology. Also ask yourself what makes these memes ‘sharable’—is it just because they are funny, or do they help people to express more ‘serious’ opinions. Finally, ask yourself what kinds of people might share these memes, and what social meanings the act of sharing them might have.
Watch Dr Erhan Aslan give his suggestions on doing project in the area of language and digital media.
If you’re doing your project on topic 4, you will need to find a social media influencers and analyse how they use different resources from their linguistic repertoire to project different kinds of identities and connect with their audience. Here are some tips to help you with your project:
- First you need to find a social media influencer to investigate. You can find social media influences in different social media platforms. Try YouTube, Instagram or TikTok.
- Then you need to select the one to investigate. There are so many social media influencers out there so at this point you might need to set some selection criteria. To ensure they are popular you may want to check how many followers they have. If you are interested in a particular location then you will consider where they are from and where they operate. If you are interested in how they use different codes you might choose one who is multilingual. If you are focusing on a given event you might choose a specific timeline.
- Once you have chosen your social media influencer then you need to choose 5 posts to analyse. Go through their profile and do your selection setting again some criteria, e.g. the most recent posts, ones that they talk about a specific topic, etc. In your report make sure you provide adequate background information about the influencer to enable your reader understand their specialty, interests, skills etc.
- If you are collecting video posts then you will have a lot of material to analyse. At this point, you may consider using Multimodal Discourse Analysis as this method will enable you to explore how meaning is made through multiple modes of communication (Jones, 2012). This means that you can analyse influencer’s communicative practices holistically by looking at both the different visual aspects as well as the language they use.
- Pay attention to their embodiment (movements), the sounds they use, any emojis and text that they include in their posts, and also what they say and how. Consider how they use all these different resources to create an identity for themselves and to reach their audiences.
Listen to Prof Li Wei give some suggestions on doing projects about translanguaging.
Project 2 ask you to collect songs and to analyse them for stylistic features. Here are some suggestions on how you might do that.
- The first question is, what songs are you going to collect? You might collect songs from different singers or groups so you can compare the phonological, grammatical, or lexical features that they use, or you may collect songs from the same artist/s at different times in their careers or singing different genres of songs. The most important thing to think about at this point is what kinds of comparisons you think you will be able to make once you have done your analysis.
- The second thing you need to do is to decide what features you are going to pay attention to. You can’t pay attention to all of the stylistic features in the songs—you need to choose a few key ones. You might, for example, choose one or two features associated with American pronunciation, or one or two grammatical features associated with African American Vernacular English. This will allow you to count the number of times these features appear in different songs and compare them.
- After you have made your comparisons, ask yourself why you got the results that you did? Can you explain them using any of the concepts that you encountered in Chapter 6 (e.g. audience design, referee design)?
- The classic article looking at style in pop music is Trudgill (1997), but there are others that you can also consult such as Jansen and Westphal’s (2017) work on Rhianna. And don’t forget to check out Lisa Jansen’s blog.
Project 4 invites you to examine how people appropriate the voices of people from different groups on TikTok and how norms about what kind of appropriation is socially acceptable are worked out. Here are some tips on how you might do this.
- Of course, voice appropriation is very common on TikTok—lip syncing the words of popular songs or the soundtracks of other people’s videos is a very popular practice on TikTok, so the first thing you will want to do is to narrow down what kinds of appropriation you want to focus on (e.g. white creators appropriating African American voices, or non-Asian creators appropriating Asian voices).
- It is very difficult to perform systematic sampling on TikTok, first because there are so many videos, and second because the kinds of videos you see is determined by an algorithm. One strategy for sampling might be to choose a particular hashtag to search for videos on a particular theme. Another might be to choose one soundtrack that might be controversial and explore how different people appropriate it. A good example is the controversy around white creators appropriating the soundtrack of Nicki Manaj’s song ‘Black Barbie’.
- There are two kinds of things you can analyse in this project. One is how creators stylise the soundtrack that they are appropriating using their bodies, movements, clothing, and other visual features, and whether or not this reinforces or challenges racial/ethnic stereotypes. Another thing you can analyse is metalanguage—what other people say about these acts of appropriation in comments, duet videos, and other forms of commentary, and what these debates tell you about what people think about language appropriation.
The third project in Chapter 3 invites students to carry out research online to find digital manifestations (i.e. images and videos) of the Black Lives Matter protests.
Digital ethnography, namely the systematic observation of online activities, is a very prominent method of data collection in sociolinguistics. Although most studies that use the linguistic landscape approach explore physical spaces, some scholars have turned their interest to virtual spaces (Biró, 2018; Chun, 2014; Ivkovic & Lotherington, 2009; Keles, Yazan & Giles, 2020). Finding research material from digital environments can be easy because data is readily available. But at the same there is also a vast amount of data. Here are some tips on how to conduct your own project:
- To find relevant data you can implement the ‘following the object’ approach (Lash & Lury, 2007). This is an ethnographic method used to obtain deep insights into the use of a ‘mobile’ object. The ‘mobile’ object in this case are photos and videos that are circulated through different media platforms in digital spaces.
- Follow and observe the ‘object’ over a period of time and in various digital spaces. This will enable you to gain a holistic insight into the kinds of communicative practices (linguistic, semiotic etc) that were used during the protests.
- Try not to restrict the focus to only one digital manifestation of protest signage. This can risk overlooking important aspects.
- Consider the limitations of this approach. For instance, mapping the course of a sign completely is almost impossible.
References
Biró, E. (2018). More than a Facebook share: Exploring virtual linguistic landscape. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 10(2), 181–192.
Chun, C. (2014). Mobilities of a Linguistic Landscape at Los Angeles City Hall Park. Journal of Language and Politics. 13 (4), 653-674.
Ivkovic, D. & Lotherington, H. (2009). Multilingualism in cyberspace: Conceptualising the virtual linguistic landscape. International Journal of Multilingualism, 6(1), 17-36.
Keles, U., Yazan, B., & Giles, A. (2020). Turkish-English bilingual content in the virtual linguistic landscape of a university in Turkey: exclusive de facto language policies. International Multilingual Research Journal, 14(1), 1-19.
Lash, S., & Lury, C. (2007). Global culture industry: The mediation of things. Cambridge: Polity.
Project 3 asks you to examine the family language policy of a multilingual migrant family. A family language policy consists of the sets of norms, rules and practices a family follows that determines what languages are used when, where and how. It might, for example, consist of expectations about what language a child should speaking when interacting with a particular parent, or what language should be used in particular situations (such as at the dinner table).
- If you want to do this project, the first step will be finding a family that is willing to let you spend time with them. Often it is best to choose friends or friends of friends. You will also want to make sure to explain to the family members exactly what kinds of data you want to collect and what you want to do with it and to get their informed consent. Remember, there are always special considerations when children are involved in research projects, so check with your instructor or with the ethics office of your institution.
- Having family members keep language diaries is a good way to get a fairly objective picture of what languages they speak and when. There are lots of different ways you can get your participants to record this information, but the most popular way is to use templates on which they record information like time, place, activity, and interlocutors (see e.g. De Meulder & Birnie, 2020; Sparks & Lee, 2010).
- You will also want to interview the different members of the family to find out what they think the family language policy is, and the ideas they have about different languages and when they should be used. It’s good to interview them separately since they may have different idea and opinions.
- Studying family language policy can be a good way to think about how linguistic contact and flows manifest on a local level. When you are doing this project, try to draw some connections between what is happening in the family and what is happening in the wider community, and what this can tell you about things like language change, the maintenance of heritage languages, and the different ‘scales’ on which language policies are formulated (e.g. how the language policy at school might affect the language policy at home).
Watch Dr Tony Capstick give his suggestions on project ideas.
References
De Meulder, M., & Birnie, I. (2021). Language diaries in the study of language use and language choice: The case of Flemish Sign Language and Scottish Gaelic. Language Awareness, 30(3), 217–233. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2020.1781873
Starks, D., & Lee, J. (2010). Rethinking methodology: What language diaries can offer to the study of code choice. Language Awareness, 19(4), 233–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2010.502578
