Heteroglossia and language creativity in multilingual boys’ chat-communication

Abstract

This study uses Bakhtin’s dialogical approach to heteroglossia for examining the diverse linguistic practices and norms multilingual (Swedish-Kurdish-Turkish-Arabic) children exploit in performing identities and negotiating relationships in social media environments. The study combines ethnography with multimodal conversation analysis, examining multilingual boys’ (i) chat-communication and (ii) co-present interactions around the screen. The analysis demonstrates how the boys use a hybrid mixture of (i) textspeak (abbreviations, typos, emoticons), blended with (ii) urban youth style, (ii) heritage language forms, and (iii) monolingual standard orthography for achieving status and peer group sociality. At other moments group members enact voices of adult authority staging corrective practices around Swedish orthography and online rules for proper language use to display expertise and elicit laughter. The findings highlight multilingual children’s playful juxtaposition of diverse voices, styles and ways of speaking/writing indexical of normative tensions between (i) diversity and heteroglossic forms and (ii) standardization and monolingual norms, for negotiating belonging in transcultural peer cultures.