Volume: 2  Number: 2  Page: 115–130  doi:10.2167/md089.0

Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis: Orders of Indexicality and Polycentricity

Jan Blommaert1 1School of Culture, Language and Communication, Institute of Education, University of London, UK and 2University of Jyvä skylä , Finland

Developments in the structure of societies, such as globalisation processes, compel us to devote more attention to issues of sociolinguistic variation in discourse, because features of such variation become ever more important to users. Yet a lot of discourse analysis starts from an old monolingual ideal, in which the sociolinguistic dimensions of the linguistic resources used by people remains underproblematised. This paper argues that our discourse analytic toolkit needs to be complemented with some seriously useful sociolinguistic tools and presents two such tools in this paper: orders of indexicality and polycentricity. Both concepts are designed to observe forms of linguistic and cultural variation that characterise Late Modern diasporic environments.

Keywords: multilingualism, orders of indexicality, polycentricity, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, variation, Late Modernity, globalisation

© 2007 J. Blommaert

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