Abstract
One perspective bound to rouse interesting ideas in relation to efforts of mapping out World Theory, especially in the interplay between ‘local cultures’ pinned against the backdrop of globalization, might just come in the form of sociolinguistics. The author argues that the code-switching practices (polylingual practices, cf. Jørgensen) observed taking place between two groups of highly creative tri-/tetra-and pentalingual Erasmus students solving Physiology-related tasks during laboratory hours, are the perfect site for studying a superdiverse micro-community. The clash and intertwinement of not only every student’s linguistic baggage, but of their various background cultures and performed social personas, in the midst of switching back-and-forth between their locally co-constructed English(es) as Lingua Franca(s), are reflective of the challenges posed by accelerated patterns of migration. This linguistic behavior is also emotionally-driven and socially fluid. Therefore, micro- and even niche-subcultures exhibit a tendency to be reduced to hypersubjectivities co-existing in ad-hoc micro-communities (Hall).
Highlights
The catalyst behind the concept of the current paper stems from the final conclusions drawn from the study of the sociolinguistic behaviours of a localized multilingual micro-community of tri-/tetra- and pentalingual students from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine1, in Cluj-Napoca
The mechanisms uncovered through the analysis of the micro-community in question revealed the answers to the main research questions: how do multilingual speakers operating with differently developed linguistic repertoires interact in an educational setting, during a seminar? Secondly, how can this situation be understood at micro- and macro-levels, when identifying the factors and outcomes linked to languaging phenomena, such as code-switching practices? These questions informed the author’s progression through the data and applied inductive approach to the first stages of data interpretation
In the current sociocultural context, the centrality of understanding otherness and configurations of identity are directly correlated with the primacy of authenticity
Summary
The catalyst behind the concept of the current paper stems from the final conclusions drawn from the study of the sociolinguistic behaviours of a localized multilingual micro-community of tri-/tetra- and pentalingual students from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, in Cluj-Napoca. Since factors such as linguistic priming (Kootstra and Muysken 2016) take precedence in interaction, the speakers’ desire to express social convergence, the ease of resorting to plurilingual communication in the multilingual classroom, alongside the fastpaced switching from one social persona to another have been so clearly influential in the successful progression through seminar tasks, some remarkable insights into current configurations of otherness have come to light These observations of micro-scaled behaviours can be correlated with what David Chaney (1994) termed ‘the cultural turn’ in the sense of the visible rise of micro-, almost niche-like subcultures of highly individualized microcosms in the contemporary globalized cultural landscape. These sociolinguistic routinized strategies became sociolinguistic scripts deemed as valid and ready for use in the seminar environment
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