Search results for Sociolinguistics

The topic of awareness and control is an elephant in the room in sociolinguistic research. To what extent are speakers aware of sociolinguistic variables? Are there different types or levels of awareness? Is 'control' of these variables a conscious or unconscious process, or is it some combination of the two? Are the variables we are aware of necessarily those we control, and vice versa? The extent to which speakers are aware of sociolinguistic information and use it strategically may drastically affect our understanding of the role that sociolinguistic cues play in the development of structural categories. This volume constitutes the first concerted effort to understand the nature of awareness and control using all the methodological and theoretical tools at our disposal. The contributors employ a variety of perspectives to address the relationship between awareness and control in sociolinguistic research.

Why are different varieties of the Japanese language used differently in social interaction, and how are they perceived? How do honorifics operate to express diverse affective stances, such as politeness? Why have issues of gendered speech been so central in public discourse, and how are they reflected and refracted in language use as social practice? This book examines Japanese sociolinguistic phenomena from a fascinating new perspective, focusing on the historical construction of language norms and its relationship to actual language use in contemporary Japan. This socio-historically sensitive account stresses the different choices which have shaped Japanese and Western sociolinguistics and how varieties of Japanese, honorifics and politeness, and gendered language have emerged in response to the socio-political landscape in which a modernizing Japan found itself.

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In any society discursive practice has its own dynamics. As Pierre Bourdieu suggests, the genesis of an official dominant discourse within a society takes place in the process of a discursive struggle for symbolic power, for the formatting and reformatting of the mental structures expressed in language (Bourdieu 1991: 48).

Satire has at all times been one of the most highly marked forms of counter-discourse, of those forms which enter into dialogue with the dominant language and resist it (Terdiman 1985), though its counterdiscursive features and temper depend to a large extent on the discourse which it is intended to oppose and which creates and fills with dominant meaning the signs which satire is called upon to deconstruct.

This chapter notes the appearance of a syndrome of distorted speech and aphasia as a feature belonging to the satirical counter-discourse of the time of Dmitrii Medvedev's official presidency. These properties will be further explored as mechanisms of satirical semiosis in the series of internet clips called ‘Rulitiki’. The question to be answered in this chapter is what the distortion of speech and aphasia in oppositional discourse mean in the context, on the one hand, of the pseudo-liberal Medvedev period, and, on the other, of the extended influence of the semiotics of the Internet.

The material for the research on which this work is based consists of thirty-seven video clips made by Oleg Kozyrev over two years of the ‘Rulitiki’ project (2008–10) and posted on the web site of the electronic publication Ezhednevnyi Zhurnal [Daily Journal].

SATIRE: A CHANGE OF GENERATIONS

Although there is no doubt that when Medvedev formally came to power in 2008 the régime remained basically the same as it had been, it is important when discussing the discursive practices of the time of his presidency to take account of the fact that the Medvedev period coincided with the beginnings of widespread computer use in Russia. This was the time when the use of the Internet became a daily mass means of receiving information, social intercourse and unification. According to Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) data for the spring of 2011, Internet users made up 46 per cent of the population of Russia, or 59.2 million people (FOM 2011).

Summary

Public meetings, which were so characteristic of the first decades of the Soviet regime, have recently become, if not a widespread phenomenon, at least a significant one. Alongside absolutely new forms of communication at a distance (such as the internet) private ‘kitchen conversations’ (some of which have moved out into restaurants and cafés) are becoming once again a notable part of social life. However, it is hard to find anything in post-Soviet life analogous to the Soviet meeting (the party, trade union, factory meeting and so on) as a means of creating an ideological and disciplinary ‘attachment’ of the individual to the authorities. Perhaps to a certain degree the church service is attempting to take on its role, but it is hard to say to what extent such attempts have so far been successful.

The Soviet meeting occupied a position somewhere in between the ‘public square’ and the ‘kitchen’, and remained for a long time the space in which – successfully or not – the socially significant communication strategies typical of the USSR were tried out and, along with other factors, generated a persistent state of universal pseudo-agreement. In attempting to understand how the Gestalt of this movement towards unity was created, it is hard to ignore the aesthetic sphere. There is not much point in making yet another demonstrative appeal to the experience of the new historicism with its idea of ‘the social presence of the world’ in literature, nor to that of other methodologies, close to it in this respect, in order to confirm the hypothesis that art ‘reflects’, and to a certain extent constructs the everyday models characteristic of its age. Without exhausting history in the slightest, art remains a part of it, and, within a discussion of public language, it may be thought that this perspective justifies the use not only of the sphere of ‘real’ communication, but of fiction as well.

The problem of selection and self-limitation in attempting to outline some sort of ‘prolegomena’ to an ‘artificial’ history of the Soviet meeting is extremely important. It is hard to find any work in the Soviet creative heritage which does not contain a description of a meeting or at least a mention of one.

Summary

The statement that the traditions of public discussion are weak, and public politics practically non-existent in Russia, long ago became a commonplace. It is no accident that defenders of the first Opposition Co-ordinating Council (2012–13), in answer to the perfectly wellfounded claims of its critics, assert that even though its activities had no significant results, it did fulfil its most important function: it created an arena for political discussions and demonstrated that people with the most diverse political convictions are capable of carrying on a dialogue around the same table. In other words, the very possibility of public discussions in Russia needed to be proved, and the proof of it was (or was not, in some people's opinion) the elections to the Co-ordinating Council and its subsequent activities. It will be understood that the fact that the question is posed in this manner says in itself a great deal about the situation: it is hard to imagine that it would occur to anyone to demonstrate the possibility of public political discussions in, say, Britain, with its age-old tradition of parliamentary debates. Forays into history (see, for example, the chapters by Dmitrii Kalugin and Michel Tissier in the present volume) also confirm this regrettable diagnosis: the culture of political discussion in Russia has practically no institutional support and is not part of everyday practice.

An important element in the underdeveloped character of the public sphere, as is also shown by the research collected in the present volume, is the inchoate state of what one might call the language of public communication – a means of communication between people when they are settling questions that go beyond their private affairs and personal relationships. The dichotomy between the official (‘Soviet’) language and the ordinary everyday language (see Nikolai Vakhtin's chapter in the present volume) leaves no room for a ‘middle’ sphere of public interaction. As research into the concepts of the social and public in Russian society (Fedorova 2011) has shown, ‘society’ is always present in our speech in practice, but it is present as an empty shell, a set of sounds without meaning which evokes no response and assumes no common action.

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter we draw the reader's attention to a public style of speaking about one's private life that is new for Russian culture and is being formed in the sphere of the post-Soviet media, namely the therapeutic language based on popularised postulates of psychology and a psychologised interpretation of interpersonal relationships and the emotional life of the personality (Matza 2009; Salemenniemi 2010; Lerner 2011; Salemenniemi and Vorona 2013). This language is emerging in the post-Soviet period together with the assimilation of a global therapeutic culture (Rieff 1987; Furedi 2004; Illouz 2007) with its patterns of life and technology of social intercourse, which are being imported into Russia or re-invented here.

The foundations of therapeutic culture itself are rooted in the deep interpenetration of the american version of post-freudian psychology and capitalist culture as a way of life and organisation of economic activity (lasch 1979; 1984; hochschild 1983; cushman 1990; 1995; rose 1990; furedi 2004). with the americanisation of psychology, the post-freudian economic discourse has been gradually penetrating the economic institutions of the usa and is finally beginning to dominate them. in parallel with this, the intimate, private and ordinary spheres are undergoing rationalisation and objectivisation. that is, not only are the emotions being recruited to the service of economic production, not only do they serve in the organisation of industrial relations, but the emotions themselves, the feelings and the private sphere are subjected to rational management and translated into the language of the market economy. the result is the development of a single language which is used to describe all spheres of life: the rational language of the emotions, the language of therapeutic culture (illouz 2008). the technologies of mass culture (electronic media, self-help literature) translate the psychological therapeutic narrative into comprehensible simplified discursive forms of talking about oneself and one's personal relationships and private, emotional and intimate life and career (illouz 2003; 2008). the reality genre in western pop culture, and makeover projects in particular, are regarded by intellectual criticism as genres producing and maintaining popular therapeutic culture, since they blur the distinctions between the documentary genre and fantasy, between the private and public spheres, and between the personal and collective narratives.

Summary

In the middle of the 1970s I made the acquaintance of a young graduate student from Sweden, who was spending a period of study at Pushkin House and had by that time already lived several months in Leningrad. His spoken Russian was good, and during these months he had made friends with half the city and was always being invited to different places. In the course of one conversation with me he made a remark which I remember to this day: ‘You Russians have a peculiar way of arguing. When people argue in Sweden, one of them speaks and the others listen and try to understand what he means. But here one person speaks, and the others wait their turn.’ I was struck with the accuracy of the expression. This was my first, unconscious encounter with a phenomenon that I learnt the names of twenty years later: analysis of communicative interaction, conversational analysis, ethnography of speaking (Hymes 1962), sequence of utterances, change of turn (Hudson 1990: 116–21), overlap (Tannen 1982: 219), and so on. That is what this introductory chapter is concerned with: the traditional peculiarities of a ‘Russian argument’ and the contemporary peculiarities of the discourse of argumentation and their consequences for the future.

Two reservations must be expressed from the start:

Summary

This chapter will examine the concept of Newspeak, invented by George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and its relationship with the actual processes taking place in the Russian language, and also the word novoiaz, the Russian translation of Newspeak. (It is the Russian word that will be considered, not Orwell's neologism.)

THE LEXICOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF NOVOIAZ

The word began to appear in Russian dictionaries only recently, at the end of the twentieth century: it is not to be found in any of the defining dictionaries on the slovari.ru website, nor in such dictionaries as A. P. Evgen'eva's Slovar’ russkogo iazyka (MAS), the Tolkovyi slovar’ by S. I. Ozhegov and N. Iu. Shvedova (SOSH) or the Semanticheskii slovar’ edited by N. Ju. Shvedova (SemS).

The noun novoiaz is found in the Bo'shoi tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka (BTS) edited by S. A. Kuznetsov, published in 1998. It is marked as ‘pejorative’, and defined as

referring to the language of the Soviet period, distinguished by its ideological nature, heaviness and cumbersome bureaucratic phrases. → The word originated in the Russian translation (by V. Golyshev) of George Orwell's 1984.

In the Tolkovyi slovar’ iazyka Sovdepii (TSJaS), the first edition of which also appeared in 1998, the word novoiaz has two definitions, which may evidently be taken together as a sort of curious lapse resulting from ignorance of the origin of the word and of its true meaning:

Summary

On 15–17 January 2013 an international conference on ‘Russian Society in Search of a Public Language: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow’ was held at the European University at St Petersburg (EUSP). The idea of the conference was (quoting the call for papers distributed in the spring of 2012) as follows:

Twenty years have passed since the last revolutionary transformation of Russia, but no effective mechanisms for the public discussion of vital problems have yet been developed in that country. The organisers of the conference start from the position that a ‘syndrome of public aphasia’ is not the least of the causes of this, and that it is the result of the underdevelopment of what might be called the ‘public register’ of the Russian language.

The ‘official register’ of modern Russian is well developed – the linguistic, stylistic and genre peculiarities of official speeches have been inherited in their entirety from the Soviet period, when strict regimentation and highly ritualised speech were combined with an extreme level of responsibility for anything spoken in public, and the result of any ‘discussion’ was known in advance. No less well developed – perhaps even better – is our ‘private register’: friendly, confidential conversations ‘in the kitchen’ are a distinctive characteristic of Russian late Soviet and post-Soviet culture. However, the register that would serve for the situation of speaking in public in front of an audience that is unknown and not necessarily friendly, which would help to convey one's point of view to one's opponents and successfully bring the two positions together, is almost totally lacking in modern Russian.

In these conditions either the official or the private register usurps the role of the public register in situations that ought to require it. The use of the official register in public discussions immediately evokes the sense of ‘being organised’, excessive formalisation and a pre-determined result, whereas the use of the private register is associated with the sense that there is no need to arrive at any result at all, and rather to defeat one's opponent than to try and find a compromise together.

Summary

In his famous article ‘Politics and the English language’ (1946), Orwell drew together questions of liberty and questions of style. Obscure and cloudy writing, he thought, was a means of hiding the true nature of things from the reader, and was thus a form of political manipulation, or ‘brainwashing’:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. (Orwell 1946, cited from Orwell 2010; italics in the original)

Orwell concluded that ‘if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought’. Such problems, in his opinion, were not confined to English:

I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship. (Orwell 1946, cited from Orwell 2010)

Orwell's attitude to the ‘mechanisation’ of language under authoritarian régimes, which was shortly afterwards to be the inspiration for ‘Newspeak’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four (and if a great deal in the dystopian world of the novel is derived from the symbolism of Evgenii Zamiatin's We, the characterisation of this world of ‘absolute aesthetic submission’ (Zamiatin 2011: 141) from a linguistic point of view must be regarded as Orwell's own achievement), had in turn a great influence on the perception of ‘totalitarian society’ by political scientists in the USA and Western Europe and in Soviet dissident circles in the 1970s and 1980s, and also in the post-Soviet period. It became a commonplace that Soviet language was an extremely specific expression of the régime's ‘power game’. As a correlative, the opinion emerged that it would be enough to reform public language in order to create a new public (what in Soviet times would have been called a new social milieu (obshchestvennost).

The first book to offer a detailed exploration of the condition of public debate in Russia, this pioneering volume presents a truly interdisciplinary perspective on Russian language and society making it essential reading for advanced students and specialist.

Summary

What is public language? What elements, semantic or stylistic, are necessary to it? If we take the opposition between the two predominant registers of language in Russian social reality, the official and the private, what relation can public language have to either of them? On the one hand it may be understood that it is important to ask these questions in the search for effective communication in the social discussions of modern Russia. On the other, it is no less important to consider how the opposition between the official and the private has itself come into being, and when the question of whether it is possible to establish something like a public language first arose in Russian history.

From this point of view it is interesting to study the pre-revolutionary period of Russian history – the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century – when the legitimacy of the autocracy was becoming less and less evident. This was a time of rapid changes and of growing criticism of the existing hierarchy in social and cultural relationships, using ideas of democracy, and of the need for a final emancipation of ‘the people’ (narod), that is, as contemporaries saw it, the peasants. Still, our present understanding of ‘the public’ (and therefore of so-called public debates) can hardly coincide with the ideas and with the life and cultural level of the people that predominated at that time. Paradoxical though it may be, the very notion of ‘society’ (obshchestvo) was still closely connected with those same strict hierarchies that were being so severely criticised among the educated part of the population, which considered itself to be ‘society’. A certain level of education seemed to be a necessary condition for being allowed to take part in ‘social’ discussions. Therefore the opposition between the official and private registers could hardly have been the most important distinction in connection with the evolution and conduct of such debates. It was more important to have access to a certain level of education – even in the opinion of those who saw the ordinary people as the basis for their desired transformation of the political and social order.

Summary

As dancers must know the basic steps so as not to look silly, so it is desirable for participants in a discussion to have basic debating skills so as not to make themselves a public laughingstock.

Mary McAuley, from her contribution to the final discussion at the ‘Russian Society in Search of a Public Language: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow’ conference, European

University at St Petersburg, 17 January 2013

A LAND OF THE ‘DUMB’?

The majority of Russians today are not well acquainted with the ‘basic steps’ of public discussion and experience communicative difficulties when they discuss their common affairs and try to solve their common problems in a collegial manner. The speakers cannot formulate their position so as to be understood, nor can they criticise other people's opinions in a polite and well-founded manner. Observations of the practice of public discussion in St Petersburg in 2008–12 have shown up a lack of skills in public discussion and the underdeveloped state of the language of public debate itself. The inability, typical of our compatriots, to listen and speak to Others in the presence of Others (i.e. publicly) results in the communicative stupor denoted in this chapter by the metaphor of ‘public aphasia’.

Perestroika, which opened up the possibility of the public expression of one's opinion, did not in the end create a new public language in which it would be possible to come to agreement or work out a common position without sliding into the informality of ‘kitchen conversations’ or the clichés of officialese, which were the fundamental communicative registers of Soviet society. Mary McAuley, who conducted research at the end of the 1980s in Perm’, Tomsk province, Krasnodar territory and Leningrad, notes that neither the ‘Soviet’ language of the party meeting nor the ‘anti-Soviet’ language of private conversation in the kitchen was really adequate for the new possibilities of public expression which had suddenly been opened up to the Soviet people by the policy of glasnost:

It appears that in the new world the structures and practices inherited from the Soviet experience had lost their former functions and become dysfunctional. […] People now had for the first time the opportunity and necessity of telling each other in public something of personal importance, divorced from the ritual formulas that they had learnt.

Summary

Even when we were thinking like human beings (who wants war?) we spoke the language of ideology.

(Cherniaev 2008: 19)

INTRODUCTION

The author quoted in the epigraph – Anatolii Sergeevich Cherniaev – worked in the apparatus of the supreme state power in the USSR for over twenty years. His individual culture, upbringing and way of life in no way corresponded to what he had to do at work for the greater part of those twenty years. Cherniaev writes truthfully and frankly about what he heard and read and took part in. The words quoted from his diary, to which I shall be referring as an invaluable source, were written in 1972, at the beginning of his career in the apparatus.

Cherniaev's diary is full of evidence for how and why the members of the apparatus switched from ‘human’ to official language. There were several reasons. First, they were under pressure from the notion of the state as an ideological power, part of the international communist movement, engaged in the struggle for the affirmation of communist ideas. Second, the decades had taught them to represent any phenomenon only in ideological terms. Third, ideology was the source of the livelihood of a vast number of people, the whole social and party mechanism. Fourth, ideology helped them to settle personal scores and keep science, culture and art under control. Fifth, ideology had merged with the false propaganda of success. It was the chief means of maintaining the status quo and at the same time a tool for hiding the true state of things (grain was constantly being imported!) at a time when the West was always ‘lying’, proclaiming our ‘difficulties’ to the whole world.

The scale on which this language was churned out made one think not only of its limitless potential, but also of its ubiquity and immanence. Everyone had to learn the science of Marxism from the same textbook, namely the Short Course of the History of the ACP(b). In fifteen years, from 1938 to 1953, it was published 301 times, with a total print-run of 42,816,000 copies in 67 languages, and was a means of unifying the national consciousness on the basis of the ideas of Stalinism, the personality cult of Stalin, and the concept of barracks socialism.

Summary

In 2011 we published a book, which ended by proposing to develop a public register of language in Russia (Kharkhordin 2011a). As research by Boris Gladarev showed, there were many differences between contemporary civic associations (for example, the St Petersburg ‘Living City’ movement) and their predecessors of the time of perestroika (for example, the Rescue Group, which defended the Angleterre Hotel and Delvig's house in Leningrad from demolition in 1986), but they retained one feature in common. Both were incapable of discussing their problems in a language which was neither that of intense personal emotion (like posts in blogs or on Facebook) nor that of official government pronouncements (at the municipal, regional or federal level). Between the language of love and hate and the dispassionate language of officialdom there was no register of public language in which a group could swiftly and efficiently come to a decision about, firstly, what it wanted or, secondly, what it was going to do and how it was going to do it (cf. Chapter 6 in this book).

One of the conclusions of our book was a call to take a textbook of parliamentary procedure (or its American adaptation to associations of civil society) and adapt its translation to the needs of contemporary Russia (Kharkhordin 2011b: 525). However, discussions during the conference on public language in Russia that took place in January 2013 made me change my opinion. I still think that it would be useful to translate a short textbook of parliamentary procedure and run it past a few focus groups of potential users. Perhaps such an attempt at cross-cultural translation might draw our attention to some aspect of Russian life that remains at present unnoticed. Besides, we would understand more about other countries in Europe and in North America.

But considering that there have already been such attempts at translation, and that they have not been successful, it now seems to me that an attempt to develop our own Russian textbook of the procedures of public language would stand more chance of success.

Sociolinguistics

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8753 results in Sociolinguistics

Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistic Research

The Social Life of the Japanese Language

12 - Distorted Speech and Aphasia in Satirical Counterdiscourse: Oleg Kozyrev's ‘Rulitiki’ Internet Videos

Summary

6 - Between the Street and the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of the Social(ist) Meeting in Literature and Cinema

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10 - ‘Distances of Vast Dimensions …’: Official versus Public Language (Material from Meetings of the Organising Committees of Mass Events, January–February 2012)

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Frontmatter

11 - Insides Made Public: Talking Publicly about the Personal in Post-Soviet Media Culture (The Case of The Fashion Verdict)

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1 - The Discourse of Argumentation in Totalitarian Language and Post-Soviet Communication Failures

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2 - Russian and Newspeak: Between Myth and Reality

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Introduction

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5 - ‘How to Write to the Newspaper’: Language and Power at the Birth of Soviet Public Language

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Name Index

Public Debate in Russia

4 - Legal Literature ‘for the People’ and the Use of Language (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century)

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Notes on Contributors

8 - Attempts to Overcome ‘Public Aphasia’: A Study of Public Discussions in Russia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century

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7 - Was Official Discourse Hegemonic?

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13 - The Past and Future of Russian Public Language

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Subject Index

Contents

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8753 results in Sociolinguistics

Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistic Research

The Social Life of the Japanese Language

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Public Debate in Russia

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