Rodney H. Jones
University of Reading

ABSTRACT

The Sociolinguistics of TikTok

Much of the work in language and digital media studies has focused on language variation – the new forms of language and new multimodal configurations that people use when they communicate online. There has been less attention to how people manage embodied displays of language use online, and how new ways of embodying language made possible by digital media change the kinds of social meanings people can make. Issues of embodiment are especially important in communication that takes place on the popular video sharing platform TikTok, which provides users with a range of ways to play with the relationship between language and the body, including the ability to appropriate the voices of others and perform them through practices of lip-synching and transmodal stylization. These performances often involve users appropriating voices of racial, ethnic, regional or gender groups other than their own, which inevitably ensnares them into metapragmatic negotiations about identity, appropriation and authenticity.These negotiations, not surprisingly, often spill over into wider political debates about privilege and power, as well as activist interventions around race, gender, sexuality and personhood in which binaries are challenged and boundaries are transgressed. In this talk I will examine voice appropriation on TikTok as a form of ‘citizen sociolinguistics’, exploring both how embodied performances of language on the platform challenge traditional sociolinguistic notions of style, identity and authenticity, and how communities of usersthemselves use the affordances of the platform to negotiate the ‘ethics’ of voice appropriation by creatively commenting on and critiquing one another’s performances. I end my talk by arguing for an integration of concepts from queer and posthuman studies with more traditional sociolinguistic approaches to stylization and embodiment, an integration which will allow us to move away from simplistic notions of ‘mimicry’ and ‘appropriation’ and see these performances as ludic entanglements of bodies, voices, music, material spaces, and digital technologies which uniquely empower users to collaboratively debate complex issues of race, gender, sexuality, self and other. 

BIOGRAPHY

Rodney H. Jones is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Reading. His research interests include language and digital media, health communication and language and sexuality. He has published fourteen books and over one hundred journal articles and book chapters. Among his publications are Health and Risk Communication: An Applied Linguistic Perspective (Routledge, 2013), Spoken Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2016), and Understanding Digital Literacies: A practical introduction, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2021). He is also the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Language and Creativity (2015), and the recently published collection Viral Discourse(Cambridge University Press, 2021). He is particularly interested in the ways digital media are changing norms and practices around visibility, learning and community.

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