Christian Ilbury

Thankkk you!! Yes, we thought the overdetermination point was one that was important too. In fact, there's probably a whole other paper just on that, tbh.

You're doing a pretty good job "impersonating" - you're one of us now 😉

‘Gen Z Language? Y'all Mean AAVE’: The Appropriation of African American Vernacular English as ‘TikTok Language’ Sociolinguistic research has long documented the appropriation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) across media including film, music and advertising. In this article, we add to this body o...

First up, @christianilbury.bsky.social and Rianna Walcott explore how AAVE features get digitally recontextualised as "Tiktok" language 👇
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Absolutely! I think few people know what AAVE is beyond "Black (American) English" outside of academic circles/those who have habitual interaction with AA speakers.

We had a few videos which tongue-in-cheek proposed a set of WAVE (White American Vernacular English) terms but we didn't have space to analyse them in any detail!

Welllll, just for balance, not all new lexis (or what people call "slang") is from AAVE - e.g., in the UK: "youth slang" isn't just wholesale AAVE. But, yes, general point that appropriation of AAVE lexis has happened for a long time.

EMC CPD Face-to-Face: Language Change and Discourses <p>Exploring contemporary language change: new words, new meanings &amp; new methods. <em>NB: This is a repeat course.</em></p>

We've got this @engmediacentre.bsky.social sky.social course coming up early next term and it should be a good one because it features @christianilbury.bsky.social stianilbury.bsky.social as co-presenter!
www.englishandmedia.co.uk/courses/cfe8...

Looking forward to it!

Thank youuuuu!

+ I really hope this paper finally stops the requests to review papers that uncritically use terms like "Gen Z" and "social media" language (!!!!).

And maybe also that (socio-)linguists would stop adding to the fire by subscribing to the view that social media has generated a whole new lexicon.

In sum, we think this paper makes a number of contributions to work on social media and sociolinguistic change. We argue that more work should engage with popular understandings of the effects on social media, to provide an empirically driven account of what's actually happening.

3. Overdetermination: Because of the participatory nature of social media, anyone can debate and contest the nature of AAVE (and other varieties). Some of these representations are accurate, whilst others are not, e.g., the belief that <naur> is AAVE.

2. Authenticity: traditional understandings of Sociolinguistic authenticity are based on the conferral of authenticity in offline speech communities. Social media complicates this as those users may now appear transgressive.

1. Linguistic context collapse: We argue that the label - 'TikTok language' emerges precisely because social media collapses traditional speech communities into one context.

The analysis not only provides a sociolinguistic perspective on a topic that has been debated at length in popular media, and in the AAVE speech community, but it also complicates three other issues in sociolinguistics

i) indexical bleaching and erasure of the origin community (i.e., BAs) implict in the circulation of the term "TikTok language"
ii) ungrammatical use of AAVE by non habitual speakers
iii) linguistic colonisation, where features are dropped by non-habitual users when they lose their 'cool'

We find that users understand TikTok language to be the product of White ignorance - i.e., a lack of understanding about AAL and it's uses. From this, we identify three main components of this rejection:

We find that the bulk of what is framed as "TikTok slang/language" is actually just lexical features of AAVE, e.g., bussin', cheugy, etc.

We then go on interrogate a dichotomy that emerges: Users who accept the label, and those who reject it, focussing on the latter group.

We follow very many Black media creators/commentators have framed this development as appropriation. We use CTDA to emphasise the views of the community under study - i.e., Black Americans.

In this paper, we critically interrogate the metadiscursive label "TikTok language". Our goal is to unravel what features are said to comprise this register, and how users on the platform contest the label itself.

A common claim in media and society today is that TikTok (and social media) have led to language change.

One of the most common ideas is that TikTok has caused the emergence of a new "slang"/"language".

The label "TikTok language/slang" is widespread in media and on the platform itself.

Super happy to see our paper (w/ @riannawalcott.bsky.social) in Journal of Sociolinguistics: "‘Gen Z Language? Y'all Mean AAVE’: The Appropriation of African American Vernacular English as ‘TikTok Language’ 🧵

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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I actually contradicted a lot of what is written in this article about the influence of TikTok on everyday language but that didn't make it in (!). I guess at least I got my point about the diversity of reading across.

MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships at Tampere University | Tampere universities Tampere University welcomes applicants to jointly prepare successful applications for the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship program. The program is targeted for researchers ...

Would you like to apply for the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships at Tampere University with me as your PI and join our masterclass to prepare your app? Get in touch with me (or another prospective supervisor from @pluraltampere.bsky.social) by 27.4.

www.tuni.fi/en/research/...

Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Society), 3 positions (Tampere Institute for Advanced Study, Tampere IAS) / Tutkijatohtori (Yhteiskunta), 3 tehtävää (Tampereen yliopiston tutkijakollegium)

Tampere Institute for Advanced Study is advertising paid postdoc and senior fellow positions (Society). You can be affiliated with Plural Research Centre if you work on a relevant topic - check out our website to find the research groups and projects!
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Universität Basel: Professor in English linguistics (open-rank) A position as Professor in English linguistics with a focus on English as a lingua franca in the digital age is to be filled at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Basel...

English linguists
#world Englishes
Open rank professorial position at the university of Basel, Switzerland
jobs.unibas.ch/offene-stell...

Hey! Unfortunately we're not planning for this conference to be hybrid as it's three parallel sessions + keynotes and we don't have capacity to run an online option. Sorry about that!

Just over a month to go until the deadline!!!

A reminder, we're inviting submissions for Lavender Languages 32 to be held at the University of Edinburgh, 2-4 September (@schoolofppls.bsky.social)

Submit here: lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk

Congrats!! Massive achievement 👏