Unimagined communities

It was with great pleasure that the Ethnicity, Race and Racism Research Seminar in the Department of English and History recently welcomed Dr Mark Sebba to present his thought provoking study, ‘Unimagined communities: print languages, prescription and language contact in writing'.

Based at Lancaster University within the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Dr Sebba's wide ranging career has been dedicated to undertaking pioneering research into how language and society interact and the way identity is communicated.  

Mark began his talk by discussing Benedict Anderson's ‘nationally imagined community', which places printed language at the central point of creating a national consciousness, therefore empowering dominant dialects and vernaculars at the expense of others, giving the language used  a fixed regulation and conformity.  

Explaining how society has established a highly standardised, almost purist, monolingual norm within its texts, signage and journalism which allows it to be closely monitored, Mark described how this nation-state use of language is continually challenged.   

Alongside this, he illustrated how technological and social developments within digital media has increased societies access to unregulated genres, bringing about models which coexist alongside this highly standardised monolingualism, thereby producing different contributions to the content of text.  

The first example Mark discussed was that of advertising and marketing campaigns for global products, particularly in countries such as Canada, Spain and South Africa where the use of English is blended and switched with alternating words or sections of text.  

Secondly, the rise of SMS text messaging and social networking tools was explored, discussing how these have allowed grammatical and phonological variations to develop, creating non-standard composition which often incorporates monolingual text juxtaposed with numbers or symbols.  

The final example was that of websites, whether mono or bilingual, describing how, depending on their composition and target audience, different strategies are undertaken with a variety of languages sitting next to each other onscreen, switching from one to the other, such as body text, links and message boards.  

Mark concluded that these examples suggest that previously ‘unimagined communities' are forming which are based on multilingual and multimodal, rather than monolingual and monomodal literate practices.