Minority positioning in physical and online spaces

Abstract

Abstract The study examines how a Sweden Finnish minority language activist group positions themselves by inserting graffiti-like stickers into the Swedish Linguistic Landscape, and how the majority populations in Sweden and Finland react to these revitalisation efforts. Protesting by placing stickers in physical environments is classified as an act of linguistic citizenship (Isin 2009) and, from the majority’s point of view, these acts are a threat to the shared cultural moral order. The data consists of pictures posted on Instagram that depict actual physical environments where activists have placed stickers that encourage the minority to “speak their own language”. The activists utilise temporal, spatial, textual, and multimodal elements in their discursive construction. As a theoretical framework, I apply Harré and Langehove’s (1991) positioning theory. The results show how minorities position themselves in relation to the Swedish majority population with the aim of justifying their status and their right to exist.