English at the center of the periphery: ‘Chicken nuggets’, chronotopes, and scaling English in Bahraini youth

Abstract

With the spread of English in Bahrain, ‘chicken nugget’ emerged as a term aimed at English-dominant, typically private-school-educated youth. Drawing on data from Bahraini youth, I show how participants orient to different timespaces as they negotiate their identities relative to the ‘chicken nugget’ figure of personhood. Applying discourse analytic methods to participants’ metacommentaries, I demonstrate how they utilize scaling to elevate this label to a fractally recursive bundle of discursive processes, deeming a wider range of people as chicken nuggets depending on the chronotopic conditions of different timespaces. I further show how speakers evoke different exogenous and endogenous styles of English to allow for complex identification processes: the English of chicken nuggets is excessive and exaggerated, as opposed to English as a necessary communication tool in neoliberal contexts. Thus, this article has implications for our understandings of fractal recursivity, English use in globalized contexts, and the sociolinguistics of identity. (Scales and scaling, chronotope, center-periphery, English/Englishes, authenticity, bilingualism, Bahrain, Arabic)*