Sociolinguistics going ‘wild’: The construction of auratic fields

Abstract

This paper sets out to focus the “linguistic construction of publics” (Gal & Woolard, 2014 [2001]: 1) in a sense of the word that is often excluded from sociolinguistic discussion of linguistic action in the public sphere: it discusses how the public is constructed as an indexical (‘auratic’) arena, and a field for positioning, in sociolinguistic research. The paper attempts to point out how the public is (and has been for a long time), on the one hand, envisaged as a sort of counter-field for academic linguistics (associated with “threatening” metalinguistic practices such as prescriptivism; Cameron, 1995: 5) and thereby juxtaposed to linguistics itself as an allegedly separate field of action, and on the other hand as that appealing place of ‘authentic’ linguistic practice (‘the field,’ ‘the real world,’ etc.) socially oriented linguists ultimately want to explore. The notions of wild publics and creativity are discussed as cases in point.