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Humor (re)positioning ethnolinguistic ideologies: “You tink is funny?”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2015

Emanuel Da Silva
Emanuel Da Silva*
Affiliation:
CREFO, OISE-University of Toronto252 Bloor St. W., Toronto, ON, M5S 1V6Canadaemanuel.dasilva@utoronto.ca University of Jyväskylä, Department of Languages, P.O. Box 35, FI-40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finlandemanuel.dasilva@jyu.fi
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Abstract

This article examines how essentializing ideologies of language and identity in Toronto's Portuguese ethnic market, constructed as monolingual and monocultural within the larger mainstream market of English-speaking Canada, provide the background for humorous sociolinguistic performances that playfully acknowledge, reproduce, and challenge ethnolinguistic stratification. After more than sixty years, the dominant spaces of the local Portuguese market continue to exclude most Portuguese-Canadian youth by rarely legitimizing the use of English, bilingual code-switching, or ‘broken’ or ‘Azorean’ Portuguese. By choosing YouTube as a space in which to engage audiences in ideologies of language and identity through performances of sociolinguistic caricatures, three young Portuguese-Canadian amateur comedians negotiate sociolinguistic boundaries with an ambivalent agency. The mocking performances are legitimized by the performers' in-group status and reveal, among other things, how a stigmatized variety of Azorean Portuguese and certain ethnolinguistic stereotypes can be reappropriated and reinforced relative to sociolinguistic hierarchies. (Language ideologies, ethnic humor, performativity, heteroglossia)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 44 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Heteroglossia and performance , April 2015 , pp. 187 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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