This
paper focuses on mediatised, performed identities in the context of Irish
English and asks questions about how they might help us to describe the
relationship between language and society in Ireland. In doing so, it contributes
to the growing body of work which critically examines high performance genres (e.g.
Coupland 2007), and the significant role mass media culture plays in shaping –
and reflecting – the sociolinguistic realities of speech communities. We draw
on humorous texts in order to explore the role of the media in reproducing
normalised (Irish English) language ideologies, an issue of critical
significance for sociolinguists, and the potential of these humorous texts to
throw into relief the construction and reception of linguistic identities. The
theoretical foundations for the research lie in the sociolinguistics of
performance (e.g. Bell & Gibson 2011), and its potential in enabling hidden
discourses to be traced back to their origin via mediatised stylisations and
representations. This, in turn, invokes and adds an extra dimension to Bell’s
(1984) postulation of audience design, in the potential for the audience to
respond to the performed (linguistic) identities either to ratify or contest
these performances via social media, for example.
In order to explore these
dimensions of the construction of (Irish English) linguistic identities, we
examine some examples of performed identities in the media – comedy sketches
that send up disparities between performers and the identities they are performing
(The Mario Rosenstock Show), and the
performances of a Irish comedy duo, The
Rubberbandits. We present discourse-based analyses of the performances, and
disassemble and reassemble the linguistic evidence of the performances/audience
responses using the tools and data views associated with corpus analysis. We discuss how the performers use
salient linguistic features to evoke a certain social image; and how, in so
doing, they implicitly reframe notions of class and place, and the role of
playful voice in challenging dominant ideologies in Irish society.
References
Bell,
A. (1984) ‘Language style as audience design,’ Language in Society, 13(2): 145-204.
Bell, A. & Gibson, A. (2011) ‘Staging language: An introduction to the sociolinguistics of performance,’
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(5):
557-572.
Coupland, N. (2007) Style: Language Variation and Identity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.