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Switching between Codes, Social Personas and Seminar Activities. A Case Study of Localized Hypersubjectivities Constructing a Laboratory-Based Superdiverse Micro-Community

Oana Papuc

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Introduction

The catalyst behind the concept of the current paper stems from the final conclusions drawn from the study of the sociolinguistic behaviours of a localized multilingual micro-community of tri-/tetra- and pentalingual students from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine[1], in Cluj-Napoca. The two groups of case study participants engaged in the daily tasks of Physiology-related activities, resorted to much more than a mere use of technical jargon and English internationalisms when communicating with fellow peers and seminar professor and student staff (English being the medium of interaction for the teaching/learning process).

            In fact, the author argues it was specifically due to the pliable, flexible strategies created with the help of the myriad of apparent ‘discontinuities’ that successful communication occurred. These interruptions took the appearance of code-switches, breeches of the ‘formalized context of an academic environment’, transitions to recurring, context-specific jokes, informal terms of address, and theatrical social personas, to name but a few. With the help of these observations, intriguing connections between identity performance and emotions in the classroom revealed their influence on bringing to life a micro-community specific language in superdiversity. The socio-linguistic dances unfolding in the confines of the laboratory setting revealed some of the mechanisms at play at macro-level as well, especially when taking into account the paradigm shift brought about by the rise of social media and accelerated patterns of migration of recent decades.

These changes reflect on the one hand, a movement towards the uniformizing mechanisms of globalization including the monopoly of English (in its differently defined varieties) and the concurrent rise of opposing forces nurturing and requiring individualization. The proliferation of localized ‘Englishes’ (Canagarajah 2007) in the sense of the development of not only multiple varieties of locally infused styles of the same code, but the recognition of the various methods of using the same go-to-choice (English as Lingua Franca) in superdiverse multilingual interactions (if not at the forefront of interactions, at least as a safe backup) mirror these changes at a linguistic level.

            However, since these interactions and the act of ‘languaging’ (Jørgensen and Varga 2011) itself are not created in a void, what count as significant factors in determining the appearance and use of these linguistic strategies are elements pertaining to the socio-cultural context of the interactions. Furthermore, a more interesting take on the same issue is revealed by the importance of speaker emotions. Idiosyncratic emotional cues become associated with the various codes part of not only their linguistic repertoire and part of the social scripts encapsulating experience (Dewaele 2004, Panicacci and Dewaele 2018), but with the co-created, common linguistic ‘pool of resources’ comprised by the various linguistic elements used by the multilingual speakers of this micro-community, as well. In other words, since factors such as linguistic priming (Kootstra and Muysken 2016) take precedence in interaction, the speakers’ desire to express social convergence, the ease of resorting to plurilingual communication in the multilingual classroom, alongside the fast-paced switching from one social persona to another have been so clearly influential in the successful progression through seminar tasks, some remarkable insights into current configurations of otherness have also come to light.

These observations of micro-scaled behaviours can also be correlated with what David Chaney (1994) termed ‘the cultural turn’ in the sense of the visible rise of micro-, almost niche-like subcultures of highly individualized microcosms in the contemporary globalized cultural landscape. Chaney (1994) predicted their appearance as the natural result of the push-and-pull mechanics opposing forces of globalization. On the other hand, locally tinted micro-cultures developing a more nuanced and individualized sense of self, are also rising to the surface, despite the predilection towards adopting the universal markers of the ‘global citizen persona’. These markers would mostly amount to making use of simplified variants of English(es) as the backup, unmarked code in interactions, and various other Internet-based paraphernalia part of contemporary culture.

            In a similar vein, the case study participants’ sociolinguistic behaviour, studied through the lens of the Matrix Language Framework (Myers-Scotton 2005, 2017), Zimmerman’s three-fold theory of identity (1998) and the Grounded Theory approach (Charmaz 2014), reflects a similarly individualized use of the micro-community created pool of resources available in the backdrop of an ‘informalized’ academic setting. The fact that no communication breakdowns occurred in the midst of such a diversified back-and-forth between students and professor, might seem unexpected. However, it is specifically due to the appearance of these disparate elements that enough room was created to allow a fluid, free-flowing emergence of individually tweaked personas, code-switches and linguistic blends to come to the speakers’ aid in ad-hoc interactions. Since the laboratory-based environment partly mirrored the relationships established outside the ‘confines’ of this particular space, similar patterns of communication and social hierarchies emerged during the audio and video recordings of the case study participants’ seminar interactions. Furthermore, these patterns were both reinforced and challenged by the imposed seminar goals and the macro-imposed unmarked linguistic choice of English. This consisted of a mixture of elements of English for Specific Purposes, academic English, domain-specific jargon, ‘informal’ English and idiosyncratic uses of all linguistic varieties available for the micro-community, between students and seminar professor.

Thus, the case study participants managed to walk the fine line between finding enough common ground between their differently developed linguistic repertoires and accompanying cultural and social scripts, as well as developing a highly individualized micro-community specific language composed of niche-like, idiosyncratic particularities expressed by speakers in interaction. In fact, out of the majority of speakers, it was mainly the English Lx (‘non-native’) speakers, and not the English L1 (or ‘native-English’) interlocutors that set the tone for what turned out to be the dominant, recurring micro Rules and Obligations sets (R-O sets)[2] that were influenced by, but also determined recurring pair- and group-based configurations to emerge during laboratory hours. In simpler terms, it was the great diversity and particularities of socio-linguistic strategies that informed the necessary forces of standardization for successful communication to take place in a compressed superdiverse environment, caught between the pressures of unspoken linguistic policies imposed at university level, as well as various metrics determining levels of academic success. It is worth mentioning that these metrics were understood at an ideological level by the seminar professor, as following more traditional teaching approaches - solely using English as Target Language in the Content and Language Integrated Classroom (CLIL). These beliefs were largely reflected in the questionnaires that were administered to the case study participants as a follow-up data gathering instrument. The discrepancies between what the participants (students and professor) actually performed in practice, in the heat of ad-hoc seminar conversations, versus their beliefs and reported self-perceptions in regards to the concept of multilingualism, as well as perceptions of sociolinguistic behaviour and use of linguistic repertoire were evident.

For better understanding the correlations between these observations and the case study participants’ performance of otherness in a localized, as well as personalized multilingual microcosm, emphasis will be placed in the following pages on the emotional and identity-related factors that came into play in such circumstances. The author argues that similar mechanisms can be observed in similarly diverse contexts, especially in the socio-cultural landscape of contemporary physical and virtual spaces that include a multitude of fragmented composites of overlapping and even conflicting ‘personas’, all equipped with the sociolinguistic markers of niche-like subcultures, expressed in the form of hypersubjectivities (Hall 2014 ).

 

General theme of research & theoretical background

            In order to better understand the ‘outer edges’, perhaps more peculiar concluding notes stemming from the analysis of entangled expressions of social distance/closeness, personality traits and emotionality via code-switching practices (Berthoud et al. 2013, Pavlenko 2017), a brief description of the larger scope of the study is needed. Thus, what initially started as a largely linguistic-oriented doctoral thesis, in a field that lacked a larger framework of reference for other local analyses done on the themes of multilingualism and multilingual practices, has transformed over the course of a four-year period, into a heavily imbued sociological and identity-based study. The work, now titled Multilingual Practices: Languaging and Code-switching Expressions of English Lx and English L1 Erasmus Students in Superdiverse Academic Environments - A Case Study - aimed to reconcile the latest and most substantive of works in the fields of linguistics, sociology and identity theory with a thorough review of ‘classic’ literature on code-switching phenomena. The glue holding the various themes of this interdisciplinary research together is strongly connected to Jørgensen’s concept of ‘languaging’ (Ag and Jørgensen 2012), a term that seeks to essentialize and simplify multilingual terminology, in such a way to make reference to much needed current reconceptualizations of broadly used concepts like ‘code’, ‘multilingual speaker’, ‘multilingual practices’, but feverishly debated over the years and misused for legitimizing political stances.

Essentially, the terms ‘languaging’ and ‘languaging practices’ are aiming to place the emphasis on the speakers’ intentionality, creativity, co-constructed effort and strategies in continuously arranging and rearranging the flow of the interactions they engage in. Therefore, the study is firmly placed in the background of the interactionist perspective, multilingual speakers being seen as active, autonomous agents in charge of manoeuvring their linguistic repertoires as they see fit for each interaction. The basic premise reiterated not only from a theoretical standpoint, but also noticed during on-site interactions was that the speakers made heavy use of a creative bricolaging effect by utilizing all available linguistic features, regardless of their level of development, and irrespective of how other speakers might have assessed these conglomerations of code-switches and bilingual blends as necessarily ‘belonging together’ (Myers-Scotton 2005). However, the fact that no communication breakdowns occurred in ad-hoc interactions, signals that a level of understanding between these heterogeneous expressions of niche-like microcosms can be established specifically by drawing from and incorporating the most wide-ranging diversified elements into a co-constructed ‘uniformized’ pool of resources, equally meaningful and available to each individual part of the micro-community. This is possible through a reiteration of these disparate elements on a recurring basis, by key players in the social landscape of the seminar. This micro-scaled social capital (Bourdieu 1986) attributes meaningful values to the expressions of both common-ground Membership Categories[3] (Housley and Fitzgerald 2002) entangled with terminology-specific jargon and elements of academic English which create a uniformizing basis for all speakers to draw from in order to accomplish seminar tasks and reach the seminar-imposed goals. Nonetheless, meaning and value were equally attributed to the idiosyncratic expressions of individual seminar roles and overlapping ‘formal’ and ‘informalized individual roles’ through similarly miscellaneous sociolinguistic expressions of identity. In time, these sociolinguistic routinized strategies became sociolinguistic scripts deemed as valid and ready for use in the seminar environment.

 

Research questions

The mechanisms uncovered through the analysis of the micro-community in question revealed the answers to the main research questions: how do multilingual speakers operating with differently developed linguistic repertoires interact in an educational setting, during a seminar? Secondly, how can this situation be understood at micro- and macro-levels, when identifying the factors and outcomes specifically linked to languaging phenomena, such as code-switching practices? These questions informed the author’s progression through the data and applied inductive approach to the first stages of data interpretation. The aim of the thesis was that of formulating a generalized theory based on the analysis of the localized, particular manner in which a majority of young English Lx speakers made use of both a co-constructed English as Lingua Franca (ELF) and a variety of other plurilingual practices in the background of a Romanian university setting.

            The hours-long audio-video recordings of the interactions of a multilingual mix of undergraduate English L1 and English Lx students of the case study sample showcased the particular intricacies of this micro-community’s languaging practices, alongside the self-assessed and other-perceived identity markers, polydirectionality and fluidity of interactions. The interweaving of beliefs and attitudes about the individual use of linguistic features versus the reality of actual practices put to use in the immediacy and unpredictability of everyday seminar interactions are revealed through the analysis of the recorded data and administered questionnaires.

Seeking to bridge the ‘new’ with the ‘old’, the results are highlighted by analysing the sequencing of interactional practices through Conversation Analysis, in the context of undergraduates studying the veterinary sciences, discourse analysis in disentangling the topical organisation of turns in interaction, together with recent research on the observed didactic and cognitive advantages of using plurilingualism in higher educational settings, here included the CLIL framework. These methods were also paired with an ethnographic observation of the micro-community in question and a qualitative analysis of the answers provided by the students, specifically in regards to their own assessment of the features comprising their linguistic baggage and its use. Consequently, the research’s findings were ripe for outlining a current, updated description of young languaging speakers. Furthermore, making use of Myers-Scotton’s Rational Choice and Markedness models (2005), together with membership categorization theory helped outline the complex webbing of the identities and social roles performed by the participants in the confines of ad-hoc seminar interactions.

The unexpected weight of those issues pertaining to identity and the emotional associations with specific code features that arose during data analysis, showcased how code-switching phenomena was inherently linked to each speaker’s subjective assessment of the self and others in interaction. Issues related to identity appeared most visibly in the changes from code to code, and from English unmarked features, as part of the macro imposed R-O set, to various other features pertaining to co-constructed micro R-O sets of individual student work-groups. These occurrences were also influenced by the speakers’ physical movement through the space of the laboratory environment, the drive to covertly express convergence or divergence with interlocutors, and emotionally-driven reactions to the unexpected character of events unfolding during laboratory hours, to name just a few.

 

Case study participants

The research was conducted by using a purposive sampling technique. Two groups of second year Physiology students, of fifteen individuals each, were chosen for on-site observations, as well as audio and video-recordings of peer-to-peer and student-to-seminar professor conversations. The case study participants were specifically chosen due to their differing cultural and linguistic backgrounds: Canada, Romania, France, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Tunisia, Mauritius, Israel, Germany, South Africa. The micro-community was thus composed of a majority of English Lx, and two English L1 speakers, all ranging from having developed a repertoire of bi- to tri/tetra/pentalingual linguistic repertoires. The setting was therefore, one where intercultural communication took precedence, speakers being ranked according to the diversity of linguistic baggage, functionally used L1s (native tongues), Lxs (codes acquired through formal and non-formal learning) and English fluency and competence, the seminar professor being a Romanian L1, English Lx user. Thus, English was both the medium of instruction, as well as the medium of taught content language materials. More informal varieties of the same code, were also used by the students during laboratory hours, when progressing through seminar tasks, English being the go-to-language in interaction, especially between speakers of differing L1s.

            The innovative touch brought about by the author of the research to the realm of multilingual studies, was that of choosing a mixed methods approach that mostly made use of an inductive type of analysis onto the recorded data sets. Furthermore, Conversation Analysis was applied to each transcripted line of recorded exchanges between the case study participants. Every identified code-switching instance was taken note of, translated to English (if it was required) and the following details were taken into account: number of turns-at-talk for each switch, topic of switch (seminar related or other miscellaneous topics), the socio-cultural circumstances informing the framework of each exchange, including goal of interaction, interlocutors’ configuration of linguistic backgrounds, type and length of switch. What were also thoroughly analysed were the effects produced by the switch and assumed intended purpose - whether the switch was picked up by the interlocutor(s) to whom it was intended to or not. The level of completeness and successfulness of seminar tasks when speakers resorted to switching tasks, roles and linguistic features were also taken into account (Masats et al. 2007). These steps were followed by the administration of the follow-up questionnaires mentioned previously and the data results were further correlated with not only the respondents’ self-reported use of features and attitudes towards multilingualism, but with the 2018 version of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). These were all performed to contrast and compare the combined results of the ethnomethodological observations made on-site, with the data analysis interpretations, the follow-up questionnaire data and finally, the plurilingual and pluricultural descriptors of the CEFR to ensure data validity, reliability and reach an in-depth radiography of languaging phenomena through triangulation.

 

Discussion of findings - superdiversity & hypersubjectivity

The following section of this paper will focus on those results related to the metrics identified as being crucial to the successful unfolding of seminar tasks via plurilingual speech acts in the CLIL classroom - speaker identity, speakers’ Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) and Anxiety in the classroom (FLAC), (Dewaele 2016) and elements of positive psychology. This rather holistic approach to framing the teaching/learning/evaluation sequences taking place in an academic environment, has only recently been used in the literature and Foreign Language classroom. The results were also drawn from the continued data retreival process, recordings being taken on three separate occasions, to ensure that both significant patterns of routine behaviours and roles would come to surface (to ensure the validity of results and minimize researcher bias), as well as significant differences in the adopted sociolinguistic strategies between distinct teaching sequences, student performance and seminar goals would also be identified.

            What immediately stood out were the frequent code-switching occurrences, as result of the environment’s flexible and linguistically tolerant nature, which was heavily influenced by the seminar professor’s personal stance on multilingualism and modern-day approach to teaching. She made sure her students would have enough autonomy and agency in her classroom when solving seminar tasks in pair or group-work, by not insisting they use English Lx as the obligatory code-in-interaction between peers, but only when addressing her or student staff. Code-switching was also indicative of Membership Categories relevant to speakers, determining speaker relationships and allowing speakers the freedom to assume and create a variety of different social roles, here included sequences where students who exhibited clear signs of extraversion took upon themselves to enact various ad-hoc roles - ‘narrator of peers’ activities’, ‘informal behaviours instigators’, etc. Even though some of these instances were clearly prompted by the presence of the recording devices and author herself, they proved to be rich enough in demonstrating speakers’ sociolinguistic versatility and linguistic creativity in what merely amounted to the unexpected character of any communicative instance these speakers might have come across. In other words, these instances fall somewhere on the outskirts of the ‘authentic data’ spectrum, but still hold a valuable place in data interpretation, since they showcase the hyperbolized social personas created specifically for the seminar environment. Therefore, they reveal the environment-bound, localized and adapted sociolinguistic strategies employed by these speakers ad-hoc, to further individual and communicative purposes.

            Still related to the findings mentioned above, is the emergence of content-related peer-teaching sequences, where students switched from their usual routine, to adopt a ‘professional identity/expertize-related’ persona for peers. Some would borrow from the examples set by the seminar professor herself, due to these scripts being regarded as not only valid but easy to assume due to repeated occurrence during laboratory hours. Therefore, the ‘functional factor’ (as in ‘necessary for the successful accomplishment of seminar tasks’), alongside that of linguistic priming[4], as well as the emergence of the ‘informal seminar persona’ that the professor intentionally and unintentionally let slip out under the guise of switching to Romanian features in humorous asides with students, worked together to create successful teacher-student exchanges.

            Other surprising manifestations of otherness and identity came to being in this academic setting under what the author labelled as the process of ‘informalizing the formal laboratory environment’ (Lytra and Møller 2011) and created an added set of complexity to speaker expectations, relationships and implicitly, interactions in the routinized laboratory activities. These rather individualized, idiosyncratic expressions of identity were termed ‘informal’ for being just that - not strictly related to seminar goals or academic sociolinguistic scripts. They also mirrored social dynamics established between the case study participants outside of the classroom, meaning that the social hierarchies created outside of academic life also tended to be similarly reproduced and influenced the flow and directionality of turns-at-talk, as well as group pairings based on personal preferences and matches in speaker personality (Ożańska-Ponikwia and Dewaele 2012), when the seminar professor herself did not directly manage speaker configurations.

            These markers of informal behaviour in the classroom were composed of: using expletives between peers sharing a close social relationship, creating informal terms of address from code-switches, instances of rapping, laughing, singing, meowing, barking, recurring jokes, and lastly, the performance of ‘skits’, dancing, jumping, play-fighting. Evidently, these case study participants’ metalinguistic awareness was often activated in such a challenging multilingual environment. Lastly, all the elements and strategies mentioned above are part of what became the code specific to the case study participants’ micro-community, so the means to enter or being given the group membership badge of acceptance if used appropriately.

            Therefore, the emergence of switches was influenced by speakers’ internalized attitudes to multilingualism, their degree of emotional attachment to the various codes in their linguistic repertoire and comfort in using recently acquired features in a socially risky environment. However, a crucial factor influencing turns-at-talk was respondents’ habitual preference for using certain features for the purpose of creating a narrative of experience, code-switches thus becoming a means to index social scripts that became ‘appropriate’ for use in these particular social situations. In time, they have the potential to index social relations developed in said situations. Code-switches thus become expressions, constructions and perceptions of the self in interaction, at the transportable level of identity (Zimmerman 1998). They can become an internalized part of speaker identity in interaction, a preferred mode of speech, overlapping with roles assumed at discourse and situated levels (Zimmerman 1998).

            Code-switching thus becomes a strategy in creating a ‘bricolaged’ sense of identity, reflected by and created with the help of speech (among other means). It can be used as a tool in aiding cognitive processes related to acquiring both content and code-related skills in educational environments, especially when FLE and FLAC influence communication in CLIL seminars, mediated through a bricolaged English as Lingua Franca.

These apparent discontinuities in the form of code-switches act as necessary composites, creating an easily adjustable safety net for the complex superdiverse multilingual seminar environment and its languaging speakers. Code-switching could therefore be also seen through the lens of the rise of ‘niche’ subcultures, microcultures at individual level, the primacy of self-expression taking center stage, due to the rise of social media and socially mediated expressions of the self. The observable outcome then becomes the rise of ‘hypersubjectivities’ in superdiversity (Hall 2014).

Correlations can thus be made between the micro and macro-scales of sociolinguistic behaviour by observing the exchanges mediated through a co-constructed micro-community specific lingua franca, in parallel to ad-hoc negotiations of social personas enacted in the classroom. Then, the increased use of code-switching at micro-level mirrors a similar outcome on the macro level of accelerated patterns of migration, rise of ‘nomadic’ lifestyles, the primacy of message transmission trumping the traditional attention paid to grammatical accuracy, as predicted by Blommaert’s ‘transmobility’ (2005) and culturally anticipated by David Chaney’s view of ‘the cultural turn’ (1994).

Hypersubjectivity can similarly manifest as ‘linguistic hyperattention’ that can easily turn into an anxiety specific to superdiverse environments (Hall 2014). Hypersubjectivity is, in this case, a response to the anxiety felt in the face of semiotic instability (Hall 2014), linguistic practices indexing personhood rather than time and spatial coordinates, as they used to. In fact, Hall’s argument is central to that predicted by Chaney (1994) according to which central to contemporary culture’s appeal to authenticity as a response in the face of shifting terrain, social and linguistic fluidity and ambiguity. So then, what is it that amounts to linguistic capital nowadays? Among many symbols used to express contemporary otherness, the author argues that code-switching would be one of these main tools, as was observed in the respondents’ case. Identity, as destabilized as it seems to have become, also creates a boomerang effect in the form of nurturing a need for developing hyperawareness of metacultural and metalinguistic markers of identity, this new competence being key in deciphering and successfully navigating the interplay between ‘the local’ and ‘the global’. Robinson (2012) identifies these effects as being produced by an openness to “globalized circuits of accumulation”, financial, cultural and linguistic capitals being all intricately intertwined.

Hypersubjectivity can therefore be said to appear as a result of the competence of managing the destabilization of both communal and an individual sense of identity, as an effort to overcome the sense of getting lost in the vastness of globalization. If taken to its extremes, associated risks would clearly fall under the umbrella of narcissistic tendencies being nurtured in a cultural landscape favouring hyperindividuality, these being the elements that could potentially become obstacles in successful intercultural, plurilingual communication.

In the Tyranny of the Subjective, Elizabeth Finne posits the question of whether this hyperfocus that is placed nowadays on subjectivity might not in fact be felt as stifling. The digital agency at our fingertips, the flow of hyperdiversity that we must navigate on a daily basis, in correlation with easy access to online modes of creation and response create in a sense, a conglomeration of schematized niche-cultures. To be successfully navigated, their language(s) and particular paraphernalia must be deciphered, so in the face of this challenge, is it impossible to achieve this result, against the anxiety occurring during ‘analysis paralysis’? It is the lived experience, the narrative of the subjective that has become central to our culture and been given the power to legitimize claims to power, as Finne states in her article. It could even be argued that the appeal to authenticity and displays of (hyper)subjectivity are now being attributed some of the highest positions in the hierarchy of social and linguistic capital. At the same time, once the peak will be reached, due to the outcomes of the various processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization we are witness to in today’s times (Jacquemet 2005), Hall argues that this shall determine an increasing depletion of traditional meanings and values attributed to linguistic competence. In other words, linguistic competence will become, according to Hall’s predictions, a “zombie category” (2014). Thus, the author argues that code-switching could be used as a solution for resolving the “indexical dissonance of social and linguistic meanings” (Hall 2014) occurring as a result of the rise of hypersubjectivities in superdiversity.

 

Conclusions

Multilingual communicative competence has become now, perhaps more than ever, a crucial ability to develop. In the current sociocultural context, the centrality of understanding otherness and configurations of identity are directly correlated with the primacy of authenticity. Seeing how code-switching and resorting to an assortment of languaging strategies can be seen as a natural response to the linguistic diversity we are facing more and more, it can be argued that when and if these patterns become internalized as coping strategies and creative adaptations to the ever-changing interlocutors and environment around us, they become accepted social scripts indexing identity. All the moreso, if this process of internalization is done repeatedly, in various social contexts, with a variety of different speakers that may or may not respond positively to such linguistic occurrences, code-switching may become a significant portion of individual self-expression, becoming a crucial part of one’s identity performance, even in spaces where code-switching might have previously appeared unavailable as linguistic capital. Depending on the linguistic heterogeneity of interlocutors engaged in interaction, and depending on how these agents of linguistic change choose to perform their identity in communication, frequent code-switching instances may occur as collective markers of social convergence and individual markers of flexibility and of a creative communicative competence. These apparent discontinuities in the flow of the conversation, can actually relieve the tension felt during ad-hoc interactions between multilinguals. If the coordinates of these interactions create a state of multilingual and multicultural superdiversity, then the primacy of message transmission definitely takes precedence over grammatical accuracy. The sociolinguistic characteristics of contemporary modes of interaction seem to be moving towards increasingly fluid, co-constructed states of being, reflecting speaker emotionality, relational habits and incongruences, and an overall shift towards transient, embodied expressions of being, in other words, the rise of hypersubjectivities.

Linguistic practices in contemporary times seem to rather reflect the transitory spaces and timelines concurrently occupied by speakers, previous importance of linguistic identity pointing to individuals’ origins being less significant or meaningful. What rather seem to matter are authentic (even imperfect) displays of inhabiting several sociolinguistic networks all at the same time. These networks overlap to varying degrees, but also hold enough space for the emergence of otherness, in the liminal spaces left unoccupied between them. The author argues that it is specifically in these unoccupied spaces, which can be viewed as being both on the outskirts of more cohesively stable subcultural formations, as well as providing the core for multimodal, linguistically hybrid composites to come to life, that speakers can freely intervene, through code-switches and code-mixes to bridge the open spaces between the central sociolinguistic nodes we tend to gravitate towards, in the networks we inhabit.

 

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