Lian Malai Madsen

Young people's language use and cultural orientations have been observed to be fluid in the sense that they transgress and blend sets of linguistic and cultural resources, but it has also been observed how they over time become recognized as distinct youth styles-a process involving a sense of linguistic fixity. This chapter interrogates these bidirectional linguistic processes of fixity and fluidity, which may be particularly heightened in the practices of young people, but are central to sociolinguistic theory and research beyond youth studies. The chapter reflects on the evidence, rationale and epistemological contribution of popular conceptions of linguistic fluidity, and critically discusses widespread (con)fusions of descriptive, ontological, pedagogical and political purposes in recent theoretical approaches. Based on examples from linguistic ethnographic research on youth, the chapter suggests as a possible future direction an approach grasping both linguistic fixity and fluidity, inspired by the notion of enregisterment and combining investigations of participant understandings and situated language use (through ethnographic accounts and interaction analysis).

This article approaches on-going sociolinguistic processes in Copenhagen by focusing on the overt metalinguistic activities of a group of adolescents. The article sheds light on how social power differences are refracted in the metalinsguistic activities of these adolescents in spite of the relatively homogenous (or hegemonic) sociolinguistic conditions of Danish society. In the article, I investigate how social status relations understood as cultural interpretations of societal “high” and “low” are relevant to on-going social value ascriptions to the contrasting ways of speaking labelled “integrated” and “street language.” The metalinguistic data I present points to a sociolinguistic transformation. Linguistic signs that used to be seen as related to migration, on an insider/outsider dimension of comparison, are now related to status on a high/low dimension as well. (Sociolinguistic transformation, ethnicity, social class, enregisterment, metalinguistic reflections)*

This article investigates a space of upset related to the smartphone with its communicative affordances and implications. The notion of moral panic can be seen as a way of conceptualizing spaces of upset and their discursive frames. Informed by this concept and accounts of the panic discourses particularly directed at media, I examine the upset articulated in Danish media panic discourses, which grants authority from a medical perspective. In addition, I draw on the concept of medicalization and discuss how it becomes sayable within the space of upset related to digitally mediated communication that human interaction through a technological device is not (always) communication, but habit or addiction, to unpack the socio-cultural and sociolinguistic assumptions and implications of this perspective. Empirically, the article focuses on a particularly preeminent voice in the public debate in Denmark about the impact of social media and smartphone use, namely the voice of a medical doctor who has been granted the authority as "digital health expert" and frequently appears in Danish print, broadcast and social media.

This article investigates hip hop activists within different organizational structures and their approach to hip hop as cultural form in itself, their cultural assumptions and educational ideologies as well as their relationship to institutional education, the music market and the citizen formation related to the Danish state's integration projects. We argue that while hip hop has certainly proven to be a fruitful alternative to traditional educational practices, it also involves its own dilemmas and challenges.

In this chapter I discuss how the relationship between sport, social identities and language has been treated within the sociology of sports and in discourse and sociolinguistic studies.  I reflect on what we can learn about language, identities and super-diversity from studying sport and whether sport as such makes a distinctive contribution to sociolinguistic research. I describe some trends in the sport-focussed research related to social identities and language, namely: A concern with confirming sport as significant and distinctive research object; an increasing interest in the discursive and representational aspects of sport (linguistic practices) and in sport as globalized, transnational and super-diverse; sport as closely related to social stratification and categorisation (ethnic, national, gendered, classed etc.) and therefore also inequality and power; but also as civilising and thereby potentially socialising and a means for overcoming differences. In addition, I consider some of the methodological and theoretical issues raised by these research trends, and engage in a more detailed discussion of assumptions about the political and pedagogical potential of sport to create societal coherence based on insights from a multilevel sociolinguistic and ethnographic case study of an urban martial arts community. This lead me to conclude that although sport constitutes an important research area for human and social sciences we need to be aware that sport is not just sport. Like other popular cultural forms sport relates to a range of different social arenas and activities, and we need to be clearer and more specific about what kinds of social and linguistic processes we want to investigate and how sport relates to that, if we wish to study linguistic practices and social identities, rather than engage in disciplinary confirmation of sport as an independent field.

The understanding of languages as bounded, enumerable codes closely tied to distinct national and ethnic cultures has been questioned from a range of perspectives for the past three or four decades. Alternative ways of seeing and studying language have been contributed by research affiliated with the strand that has become known as linguistic ethnography and combines ethnographic methodology (observations, interviews etc.) with micro-analysis of recorded interactions (employing tools from conversation analysis and linguistics). This chapter unfolds the theoretical and empirical directions suggested by the linguistic ethnographic approach through examples of situated use of forms of English from research conducted among youth in heterogeneous urban contexts in Denmark. Through this lens the chapter presents the foundation for the recent debates about the conceptualisation of language and discusses their relevance to the study of English. Thereby the chapter illustrates the potential of starting with the lived local realities of language users and linking these to larger-scale socio-cultural processes through an ethnographic perspective and a close investigation of contexts.

... with common tendencies within recent sociolinguistics to take into account the complexity of identity con-struction, the interrelatedness of various identity categories, and the complex re-lationship between language and speci???c identities (see for example Bucholtz 8: Hall 2004 ...

In this paper I focus on sequences of interaction among youth where the participants engage in classroom related activities (such as spelling, discussion of essays, etc.). My paper is based on interactional and ethnographic data collected among youth in two different leisure contexts. I discuss how the participants by employment of various interactional and linguistic means, including the use of non-standard linguistic features, integrate different cultural frames by bringing out-of-classroom practices into educationally focused interactions, as well as by bringing classroom related activities outside the classroom and into recreational contexts. In these interactional sequences, the participants challenge and renegotiate dominant assumptions characteristic of educational discourses, of a contradiction between mainstream-societally accepted behaviour valued in school contexts, and semiotic measures of social peer-credibility among late modern urban youth. I consider how the adolescents’ interactional practices and their situated use of particular linguistic features reflect as well as contribute to ongoing enregisterment (Agha, 2007) of a speech style in contemporary Copenhagen. Finally, I discuss to what extent the bringing together of peer-culture and school orientation can be viewed as re-negotiations of social class relations. This discussion involves a comparison to the British context and to work by 0190 and 0195.▶ I discuss adolescents’ use of non-standard linguistic resources in school-oriented activities. ▶ The speakers bring together different cultural frames in interaction. ▶ Thereby they challenge assumptions of an opposition between youth- and school-cultural frames. ▶ This can possibly be viewed as local renegotiation of social class relations.