Epilogue: crossing, interactional sociolinguistics and North/South research relations

ABSTRACT

Written from the Global North, this paper offers an account of the interactional sociolinguistic underpinnings of research on language crossing, discusses the five papers in this special issue, and sets them both within the broader context of North/South knowledge production.

KEYWORDS:

• Crossing
• interactional sociolinguistics
• methodology
• Global North and South

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Ben Rampton is Professor of Applied & Sociolinguistics and Director of the Centre for Language Discourse and Communication at King's College London (www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc). He does interactional sociolinguistics, and his interests cover urban multilingualism, ethnicity, class, youth and education. He is the author of Crossing: Language & Ethnicity among Adolescents (Longman 1995/Routledge 2018) and Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School (CUP 2006), and a co-author of Researching Language: Issues of Power and Method (Routledge 1992). He co-edited ‘The Language, Ethnicity & Race Reader (Routledge 2003) and Language & Superdiversity (Routledge 2015), and he edits Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacy (https://kcl.academia.edu/WorkingPapersinUrbanLanguageLiteracies). He was founding convener of the UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum, and was the Director of the King’s ESRC Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Centre from 2011–2014.

Notes

1. Neighbour, pupil, trouble-maker, goalkeeper, card-dealer, joke-teller, bore etc. etc. – see e.g. Zimmerman 1998 on ‘transportable’, ‘situated’ and ‘discourse’ identities.

2. My definition of crossing and stylisation has remained fairly stable over time (e.g. Rampton 1995, 270–1; 2009, 149): crossing involves reflexive communicative action in which a person performs specially marked speech in a language, dialect or style that can be heard as anomalously ‘other’, raising questions of legitimacy and entitlement for the participants; stylisation also breaks with ordinary modes of action and interpretation, but doesn’t entail a strong sense of social or ethnic boundary transgression. It is maybe also worth noting that although most of my work focuses on ethnicity, from the outset the definition has referred to ‘social or ethnic’ boundaries, leaving open the possibility of crossing centred on gender, class and other identities.

3. Whereas my 1995 book shows that adolescent participants were less dominated and divided by discourses of race than one might have imagined from public media at the time, my 2006 book contradicted widespread claims in the 1990s and 2000s that social class no longer mattered, describing a much sharper sensitivity to class stratification than the media, policy and academic literature suggested (Rampton 2006, Part IV).

4. Understanding the political and institutional situation has had to come first, through participant observation, ethnographic interviews and document analysis.

5. There are other points in the collection where a commitment to precise definition results in oversimplification, at least with regard to my own work (cf §1 & Rampton 1995, though see Canagarajah 2012, 2013; Creese & Blackledge 2015). So in Lee’s paper, ‘metro-ethnicity’ provides a very suggestive pointer to Jina’s relatively individualistic positionality and experience, but its differentiation from crossing seems at times a little bit forced, since the latter can also be ‘below the radar’ (1995, Ch.7.5), sometimes ‘superficial’ (Ch.8.1), connected to the consumption of popular culture (Part IV), the focus of a great deal of ideological metacommentary (accessed through interviews) (Ch.2), contributing to the formation of a different sense of community through linguistic performance. Makoni’s characterisation of crossing is also somewhat different from mine: crossing isn’t confined to speech production in my own account of it – the hearers’ potential and actual interpretations are vital; crossing is by no means always genuine or sincere; the shifts in linguistic form can be slight and fleeting; and embodied activity is hugely important to the analysis, which reckons with games, smoking, queues, corridor meetings etc.

6. Indeed at the review stage in the submission of a recent article of mine about crossing, one reviewer said s/he couldn’t actually see how it figured at all in the paper!