GLOBE TALK â CONSTRUCTED BY AND CONSTRUCTING ...

GLOBE TALK – CONSTRUCTED BY AND CONSTRUCTING GLOBALIZATION1 MARIA GEORGIEVA Globe Talk is a term commonly associated with English used for international communication. Observations of real life communication in different local contexts, however, show that English globalization is just one aspect of the present day sociolinguistic situation. Owing to massive integration processes diverse social practices and cultural entities designed for global consumption are infiltrated into local discourses through English and then refashioned and recontextualized to become suitable for local use. Having reached a certain critical saturation point, these external entities lead to the emergence of new discourses, termed Globe Talk in this chapter. As a local enactment of ‘supercultural’ discourse practices, Globe Talk involves mixing, merging and blending of “outside” and “inside” entities to meet people’s cherished desire to level social differences and build identities and speech behaviour bearing the mark of prestige and worldliness. Globe Talk is a hybrid that may emerge in any sociocultural situation but this chapter discusses how it is manifested in the Bulgarian context. With the linguistic analysis of a Bulgarian youth magazine, High-club, covering events from the entertainment domain I try to show how local people select , appropriate , and creatively utilize materials transmitted to them by a dominant culture, shaping and reshaping them to make them appear as their “own”. In the course of the analysis I identify some distinctive features and functions of Globe Talk as a transcultural product that reflects and simultaneously partakes in the changes associated with the global world as an ultimate horizon for action. Key words: globalization, Global English, Globe Talk, intercultural communication, code-mixing

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Originally published in Georgieva, M & A. James (eds.) 2010. Globalization in English Studies, pp. 129 – 156. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge scholars publishing.

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1. Globalization and Globe Talk Globalization is generally used to refer to the set of processes generating a multiplicity of linkages and interconnections that transcend territorial and social boundaries which make up the modern world system (McGrew 1992:65). As a “vogue” word, often associated with McLuhan’s idea that the world has shrunk to a “global village” through the shared, simultaneously spread information of electronic media, globalization is a subject of heated debates amongst scholars from different fields of study and a concept imbued with varied senses depending on scholars’ theoretical background and analytical perspective. Researchers commonly agree that globalization is not a single phenomenon but embraces a complex and multifaceted set of ever intensifying integration processes, but their opinions tend to diverge markedly on such more specific issues as the scope, intensity or effect of global developments on world societies. For some, global processes are predominantly concentrated in the political and economic spheres of life, unleashing huge transnational and inter-regional flows of finance, goods, resources and workforce and causing de-territorialization of markets, homogenization of production and universalization of goods and standards. For others, the scope of integration processes is significantly broader, spanning almost all spheres of social life – economy, polity, culture, environment and defense – and leading to spatial compression and a growing interconnection and interdependence amongst and within different functional subsystems. The effects of global processes in the contemporary world have their fervent admirers and fierce critics. Globalist enthusiasts who associate globalization with the spread of the freemarket, knowledge-based economy to practically all countries speak with excitement about the opportunities it opens for participation in networks and activities of interest across geographical and cultural boundaries and the freedom it gives to people to break away from the narrowness of their homeland and travel the world mixing with other peoples and cultures. Globalist skeptics, in turn, bring into prominence such less attractive aspects of globalization as the aspirations of some social and political forces to achieve and sustain a territorial dominance of neo-liberal capitalist ideology on the planet thus cementing their hegemony and all the benefits that global control can bring them. In consequence, they argue, smaller societies are in danger of fragmentation and reduction of functionality caused by weakening of the ties between culture and place and mingling of cultures and values which undermines the security of belonging to a particular place. There is no agreement on the starting time of the phenomenon either. Adherents to cyclic theories of social development claim that there have been globalizing tendencies for many centuries. Accordingly, the processes we are witnessing today are nothing other but the next cycle peak, commensurate in social significance with the industrial revolution of the 19th century that led to the zenith of nation-states and

Globe Talk – Constructed by and Constructing Globalization

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international trade. Contrariwise, their opponents consider globalization a radically distinct and unparalleled phenomenon, related though not equal to postmodernity, possessing its own specific features and course of development that might arguably lead to the decline of nation states. (Cf. for discussion McGrew 1992, Prado 2001, Flowerdew 2002, Holland 2002, Blommaert 2003, Fairclough 2006, Pennycook 2007) All differences notwithstanding, there seems to be a general agreement that in the complex of transformations, transnational flows and networks embodied in globalization, language plays a crucial role. All linkages, interconnections and interdependences that bind together companies and organizations from most distant geographical areas are actualized and put into practice through language and in a language shared by all those involved. All networks, communities and community activities crucially include and depend on a shared language code for their existence and proper functioning. In consequence, the language used for the operationalization of global activities is also subject to changes conducive to the emergence of new discourses specialized for wider, transnational interaction where “commonalities of practices increasingly transcend linguistic differences” (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999:80). In that sense, scholars argue, it is partly language that is globalizing and globalized (Fairclough 2006:3). In this paper I would like to describe a specific manifestation of global discourse in a Bulgarian communicative context which, for want of a better term, I have called Globe Talk (a la Robertson 1992 as quoted in Flowerdew 2002:213). By Globe Talk (GT) I understand a specific mode of communication involving mixing of languages and appropriation of linguistic and cultural entities from outside sources as a legitimate practice of language using. It is widespread in most globalized social domains especially amongst Bulgarian young people, by and large, serving to signal “difference” from the conformism of local traditions and allegiance to world values of democracy and freedom. Although the corpus I analyze is demonstrative of mixing Bulgarian and English, I want to argue that GT is not tied to any specific language but emerges as a specific discursive practice of what Bhatt, following Bhabha (1994), refers to as “third space”. “Third space” is a specific semiotic space where two systems of representation “converge and are comodified and commodified in response to the global-local tensions on the one hand, and the dialogically constituted identities, formed through resistance and appropriation, on the other” (Bhatt 2008:178). As a theoretical construct it is used, according to the author, to account for the struggle across difference in cultural models between competing cultural collectives which generates new sociolinguistic structures and socio-political relations. Accordingly, I shall argue that GT is an emergent sociolinguistic structure of “third space” constructed of intricate strategies of borrowing, mixing, merging, blending, altering and appropriating foreign concepts and forms to meet people’s cherished desire to level differences

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caused by divergent lifestyles and social inequalities and fashion identities and speech behaviour deemed appropriate to cross-cultural contexts of use. Since GT involves not just mixing of language structures but also appropriation of concepts, ideas and images, it may also be viewed as a convenient channel of transmission of “global”, or “Western” values and cultural models through the medium of language.

2. Communication in a Global context In Applied Linguistics, language globalization is commonly discussed in relation with English which, owing to a host of geo-historical, socio-political, economic and technological reasons, has fast grown into a world language (Crystal 1997, Graddol 1997, Spolsky 2004). Global English has aroused tremendous scholarly interest not only because of the intensity and magnitude of its growth but also because of the inextricable connection found to exist between its spread and the integration processes running in all spheres of social life. In some sense, Global English has turned into a product, a driver and also a symbol of world globalization. This understanding of the phenomenon has significantly broadened the subject of Global English research. From a macro-perspective, scholars have set out to explore the sources, drivers and scope of globalization in an attempt to build veritable models of the family of Englishes that are currently in use in the world (e.g. Kachru 1985, McArthur 1998). On a micro plane, research has focused on establishing the nature, functional status and structural characteristics of the English variety used for international communication (Seidlhofer 2002, McKay 2002). Some scholars insist that as a solely nonnative speaker prerogative Global English, particularly the variety used as lingua franca, deserves to be treated as an autonomous variety in its own right (Seidlhofer 2001, House 2003, Jenkins 2006). A Global English variety, it is argued, is a real product of globalization: it is “denationalized” and “de-territorialized” as it is used by speakers of different languages and cultural backgrounds with the sole function of “language for communication” unlike mother tongues which alone can serve as “language for identification” (House 2003:256). As a language not confined to a particular socio-economic elite but spreading across different social strata and territorial boundaries Global English is of necessity unstable, hybrid, fragmented allowing great fluctuations in patterns of use or speakers’ proficiency level. Hence, to avoid too wide a dispersion of usage norms that might be detrimental for its communicative effectiveness, lingua franca English has to be appropriately codified with some sensible standards established to make it “ feasible, acceptable and respected alternative to native speaker English in appropriate contexts of use” (Seidlhofer, 2001:150). There are also scholars, however, who argue that local adaptations of lingua franca English, largely existing as self-normative spoken


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practices, are difficult to characterize in terms of their own structural properties (Bruthiaux 2006, Meierkord 2006, James 2008). The varieties used for functional purposes amongst speakers in inter- and transnational contexts, respectively, seem beyond deliberate codification and restandardization and should better be treated as specific contact dialects (Meierkord 2006) or genres (James 2008) which, though also oriented towards native speaker norms, are “very susceptible in realization to the pressures of the communicative situation” (James 2008:100). The debates over English for international communication have also a strong pedagogical resonance. An increasing number of scholars have expressed reservations about the currently dominant communicative approaches based on native-speaker norms of use (e.g. Seidlhofer 2001, Alptekin 2002, Georgieva 2002) but there still is a lot of vacillation as to what code or teaching strategies would be most appropriate to help foreign language learners/ users deal with the challenges of intercultural communication (cf. Seidlhofer 2002, Wallace 2002, Canagarajah 2002). What adds more spice to the debate is that both the choice of code and method are culturally and ideologically loaded instruments and can have strong sociopolitical and economic consequences. The diversity of issues, topics, approaches and forecasts concerning global English attests to the enormous complexity of the phenomenon, awareness of which has made many scholars abandon such over-polarized and over-politicized dichotomies as global/ local, centre-periphery or native/nonnative and start searching for solutions that better conform with current sociocultural conditions. There is a growing understanding amongst scholars that the paradigms of analysis focused on Global English alone are too narrow and too tied to the homogeneous, monolingual, nation-centred linguistics of the 20th century to be able to account fully for the creative recontextualization of global designs into new forms of worldliness in local contexts, “engendering processes of resistance, change and appropriation” (Pennycook 2007:30). Globalization, it is argued, does not necessarily imply uniformity or homogeneity whereby the current preoccupation with Global English tends to unduly reinforce its role as an instrument and product of globalization (Pennycook 2007). Moreover, it obscures the plethora of transnational cultural products showing how people use language to signal affiliation to world affairs in situations where there is no objective justification for doing so since they neither belong to multicultural communities nor are involved in intercultural communication. At the same time, there are some transcultural communication practices based on local languages that can rightfully claim recognition as discourses of globalization. As any communication practice emerging in “third space” they involve mixing and merging of “outside” and “inside” entities though operationalized differently by diverse communities of practice depending on their ability to utilize creatively the possibilities of language crossing and accommodation of new elements.

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Furthermore, such locally-oriented hybrid varieties throw light on the role of agency, in particular, on how speakers’ attitudes to global designs and capacity to influence public opinion can affect the outcome of appropriation of foreign elements. It is worthy of note that my point is not to discredit English as a “key player” in globalization processes and networks. Rather, by bringing to readers’ attention a particular locally-oriented discursive practice which appears to have counterparts in different geographic localities as a marker of worldliness and/or prestige ( Hjarvard 2004, Holland 2002, Flowerdew 2002, Pennycook 2007), I want to emphasize that today’s sociolinguistic situation is more complex than it is generally represented in the discussion on Global English and deserves a more profound and comprehensive analysis.

3. Globe Talk as constructed by Globalization To understand Globe Talk we need to map it against a reasonably comprehensive examination of globalization processes and specify the kinds of pressures exerted upon languages and language use in the contemporary world. This is not an easy matter for, as mentioned in the beginning, globalization research tends to be an arena of heated controversy and the stances taken generally have a strong socio-political and ideological resonance. In this chapter, however, I intend to take a neutral position on issues of ideology and focus instead on texts and how properties of globalization networks and patterns are indexed in texts. The textual orientation will help, I believe, to uncover how notions of globalization are represented in and through discourse; how by taking the course of going global, speakers renovate and modify their cultural models and discursive frames as condensed moments of their new practical experience, divested of the narrowness of locality and open to the broad world. Moreover, by choosing to analyze globalization features as indexed in Bulgarian texts I hope to show how local communities select, appropriate, and creatively utilize materials transmitted to them by a dominant culture and how by shaping and reshaping, altering and mixing “outside” and “inside” they manage to “cook their own globalization stew”. One of the properties globalization is characterized by is “space/time compression” resulting from the establishment of a multitude of linkages, relationships and interaction practices across large distances. Stretching over large geographical areas, the numerous transnational and international institutions functioning today diffuse flows of cultural commodities through virtual networks so complex and magnitudinous that the effective relocation of items in particular countries could only be done through skilful discursive coordination and accommodation. This process, commonly referred to as “recontextualization” (Fairclough 2006:35) may produce different forms of syncretism: local adjustments, imitations, even parodies of external or globalized practices


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depending on agents’ selection strategies and capacity to persuade and/or mobilize people. Put another way, when relocated and appropriated in local contexts external entities are not just transposed from one place to another but tend to be refashioned and given new meanings. They may be hailed as symbols of progress but also opposed, ridiculed or fiercely resisted. In a sense, Globe Talk may be regarded as an outcome of recontextualization of global notions on home ground exemplifying how they have been refashioned and rescaled to be made palatable to local people. It may also be considered exemplary of the “democratization” of social relations and discourses in global societies (Fairclough 1992:201), for it is predominantly informal, lacking overt markers of power and social asymmetry obviously to imply that merit is given precedence to social distinction. Globe Talk tends to favour interactive, solidarity-oriented styles with code-mixing largely contributing to the establishment and enhancement of rapport. Globalization is also characterized by a large -scale interconnection and interdependence of different subsystems - political, economic, social and cultural – causing deregulation and deterritorialization of production and social practices. This is particularly true of non-material spheres – finance, information exchange, advertizing, entertainment and high technologies – in the so-called “knowledgebased” economies where management tends to be concentrated into huge transnational and transatlantic corporations spread out at numerous geographically distant localities and run by linguistically and culturally motley crews of managers and work teams. As a result of their globalization, the social practices in these spheres involve numerous crossovers, mergers and mixes that are in constant need of harmonization and restructuring to bring them into accord with contextual conditions. The new properties of such globally oriented social practices are inescapably reflected in the discourses serving as their linguistic representation. They, too, are marked by “fragmentation” which involves, according to Fairclough (1992:220), greater variability and fluidity of discourse formats, lower predictability of discursive frames and choices which presupposes continual negotiation of courses of action and, finally, greater permeability to external elements. The effect of fragmentation on Globe Talk is as if local discourse models have suddenly fallen short of efficacy and have “opened up” for global flows to pour freely into inside spaces. The visible consequence of this process is “interdiscursive hybridity” (Fairclough 2006:32) resulting from mixing up of elements from different codes, scripts, genres and styles. Unlike lingua franca varieties commonly enacted in intercultural communicative situations, Globe Talk is a variety for local use where code-mixing serves as a valuable resource for signaling prestige, worldliness or solidarity. Globalization also involves an expanded grass-root awareness of the world as a global whole. This is commonly accounted for by the increased opportunities for people to travel abroad for study, work or tourism, to work for international

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companies and organizations in their native or some foreign country, and last but not in importance, to surf the Net and “chat” with people from practically every part of the world. Upwardly mobile individuals seeking careers in international companies often have to team up with people with different language and cultural backgrounds and hence communicate in a language adopted as lingua franca. In such complex language situations marked by differences in speakers’ language proficiency and / or negative transfer from their native tongues, mutual understanding is commonly enhanced through purposeful intervention, or “administration” (Coulmas 2005:175), focused on leveling the differences. The result of such external administration is what Fairclough (1992: 215) calls “technologization” of the language. This includes the homogenization of a specialized lexicon, utilization of numerous prefabricated formulae and the simplification of discourse frames and structures through the elimination of culture-bound elements. Then, due to the specific language property of reflexivity (Gee 2005:97), a good part of these consciously designed discursive models are reintroduced in the social practices they have been made to represent and permeate into local professional lingos, recontextualized and appropriated in conformity with local norms and interests. Thus phrases like “whole life learning”, “outsourcing”, “call centre”, “benchmark" and “Internet traffic” have diffused into local languages and can be used without translation as indexes of worldliness and prestige. Recontextualized in particular locally-based social practices, such ready-made phrases of global significance can be absorbed in Globe Talk which comes to imply that “technologization” may arguably be considered also a GT property. However, upwardly mobile individuals are not the only ones experiencing the effects of world compression. In their daily existence ordinary people are being constantly bombarded through TV, the printed media and the Net with products interlocking the local and the global that challenge them away from the conformism of native traditions and towards the broad world of power, wealth or adventure. The inflow of global commodities however comes along with a massive influx of global discourse and, also, English that confronts people with hitherto unknown problems with understanding their local media. They soon realize that in order to gain access to the world’s treasure trove of knowledge and culture they need, in addition to a channel such as the Internet, TV or any other form of electronic communication, also a language for world communication. In practical terms, this leads to a change of attitude towards English and a soaring demand for learning the language (Georgieva 2005). The interest in English is so great that some scholars suggest that it is being commodified as a valuable resource for one’s professional advancement (Heller 2003). In spite of highly expanded TEFL services however, the demand for English is still very great, especially in the states with new democracies in Europe. So, a lot of people have to make do with what Coulmas defines as “unadministered” language (2005:175),


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that is, some foreign language knowledge “picked up” from various sources such as ads, songs, films in a quasi natural fashion and marked by all kinds of idiosyncrasies – deviant pronunciation of words, reinterpretation of meanings, crossovers, mergers and the like. The level of competence of such “quasibilinguals” is truly too low for work abroad, but enough to justify the use of Globe Talk as a perfectly legitimate mode of communication by the media. It may be argued that the occurrence of Globe Talk in the local media serves manipulative purposes. On the surface, the philosophy underpinning GT use is fairly simple: if you can’t travel round the world we can bring it to you through a selection of news pieces, a mixture of concepts and ideas for global consumption and bits and pieces of Global English. Yet, below the surface level concern for people’s great interest in worldly affairs, there is always the fact that the selection of items on offer is actually the result of someone’s conscious design to “model” public opinion in a particular way.

4. Globe Talk as a transcultural social practice I have defined Globe Talk as a specific, transcultural mode of using language to emphasize that in its concrete enactment it can not be tied to any particular language or culture. It transcends territorial and cultural boundaries and exists as a specific hybrid mode of communication in “third space”, accepted, or at least tolerated, by people as a “badge” of globalization. Globe Talk reflects and operationalizes on local ground the “supracultural” discursive practices of transnational news media and entertainment industries, of finance and business corporations, of political and science organizations and can be discerned in almost any globally oriented public domain in every country. However, as a phenomenon that has started to attract scholars’ interest only recently, it is perhaps studied most extensively in relation to the entertainment media, particularly songs lyrics , film and song titles (Hjarvard 2004, Omoniyi 2006, Pennycook 2007, Low et al. 2009), electronic communication ( Grozdanova, this volume), commercial nomenclature ( Dimova 2008) and politics (Flowerdew 2002, Holland 2002, Fairclough 2006). The sociolinguistic situations described in these studies differ markedly in terms of geographical location – Japanese or Nigerian hip hop music, Macedonian brand and company names, Indonesian political speeches and so forth – which comes to testify that GT is not meant to replace local codes. Heller argues that code switching as a form of language practice offers wide opportunities for manipulation of the value of linguistic resources in pursuance of definite conversational or political purposes (1995:161). In a similar vein, I shall argue that the mixing and alternating of codes we witness in GT is inherently political and related to a general shift in attitude towards identity, cultural diversity and the compression of global space, most visible amongst younger generations (Low et al.

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2009). Put another way, the cases of mixing, blending and reshaping of linguistic resources from various sources is not driven by the need to negotiate meanings but rather by speakers’ desire to “ express plural identities and ties to many social networks” in a fast globalizing world (Low et al. 2009:65). The following excerpt from the lyrics of a Bulgarian song that used to be in the Bulgarian pop charts a couple of years ago provides an illustration of the type of discursive practices that underlie Globe Talk in music with Bulgarian as a matrix language. Example 11: Song title: Let me да те love you (1) Singer:Svetlyo (1) You know what I mean-ke (2) Такъв situation, направо съм yeah, изгубих търпейшън (3) Погали лицето ми and I feel better (4) И си помислих “сега или never” (5) Сам съм не виждаш ли? Take me forever! (6) Eла ме kiss-ни както си требва! Gloss: Let me love you You know what I mean In this situation, I just feel, yeah, I lost patience You stroke my face and I feel better And I thought “now or never” I am single can’t you see? Take me forever! Come and kiss me and do it the right way

The extract provides a good example of GT hybridity. The ratio between English and Bulgarian is nearly half - half but it is doubtful whether a monolingual English speaker would understand the text meaning even though in the written version the borrowed items are spelled in the Latin script. Similarly, there is nothing in the context to suggest to a monolingual Bulgarian listener/ reader the general sense of the English expressions. On the face of it, the mixing of codes appears quite random. Thus, the Bulgarian additions in the song title are actually redundant (1a). Line one seemingly in English ends up with a nominal vocative suffix added to a verb presumably seeking phonological similitude with the proper name occurring in the colloquial Bulgarian expression taken as a counterpart to the English sentence (1b). In line three, “situation” rhymes with a curious Bulgarian blend. ‘Търпейшън’ is based on a favourite strategy of Bulgarian parodists to imitate “English speech” by adding the suffix “-ation” to every word (1c). Then,


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line four and five are split half -half between the two codes without any cue to help monolingual Bulgarians, and in line six an English root is attached to a Bulgarian imperative suffix (1d). To top it all, there are also some mixes on the morphological level: for instance, the expression “такъв situation” (literally, “this situation”) follows the Bulgarian rule for gender concord between modifier and modified, but the gender of the noun is defined according to the ending of the English word and is therefore “masculine” while the Bulgarian noun, “ситуация”, is feminine and the correct expression should be “такава ситуация”. да те love you to you love you

1a. Gloss:

Let me Let me

1b.

Do you know what I mean-ke? Сещаш ли се како Минке? (Seshtash li se kako Minke?)

1c.

situation vs. търпейшън (the Bulgarian root morpheme of ‘търпение’ (patience) is attached to the English suffix ‘-ation’ transliterated in Bulgarian as ‘-ейшън’ producing a nonexistent word.)

1d.

kiss + ni ( cf. целуни – the imperative of целувам (kiss); sounds like ‘kiss me’)

Reading this “hotchpotch” of a text one might presume that it was totally incomprehensible to monolingual Bulgarians. In fact, young people loved it and found it really funny. Looking for contextualization cues that might have contributed to its easier interpretation we find that in fact the mixing of codes is not at all random but is an element of well thought out strategies. The English words and phrases are embedded in local structures according to common phonological or semantic principles – similarity of meaning or sound (e.g. kiss me (English) – kissni (GT). Most of the longer structures are virtually taken ready-made from English songs that a Bulgarian audience is familiar with and are relocated as “quotes” in the local context . Put another way, intertextuality is used strategically and comprehension problems are more apparent than real. From a social perspective, the instances of code-mixing seem loaded with special significance. In the first place, they serve as indexes of social group affiliation: it is obvious that the song is addressed to a kind of “community of likeminded people”, that is, people who love, hate, laugh at the same things and share the same taste in music regardless of their ethnocultural background. Written in the genre of “street rock” the song is also intended to challenge, reconstruct and affirm. By infusing elements of a global language into a product of local relevance, the lyrics author is arguably trying to defy the rigid cultural boundaries and mainstream view of languages as isolated, autonomous systems; he is trying to

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resist the stereotypes of social grouping and affirm instead, in tune with the spirit of rebellion pervading young people’s communities, his aspirations for “a world without borders”. So, although sprinkled with indexes of globalism the text, it seems to me, is seeking an effect that is “local, generational, cultural and distinctive” (Pennycook 2007:104). This explains why it sounds more like a spoof of global discourse. English structures are like “decorations” serving predominantly to groom the surface appearance of the text rather than to add any important meaning. It seems as if the lyrics writer wants to bring into relief his power as a social agent to handle symbolic resources in a way that best serves the communicative and social purposes he is trying to accomplish.

5. Globe Talk in the printed media It might be argued that the domain of music is not a good example of how Globe Talk is put into practice. The use of English in popular music is very common, indeed, but it may be motivated by anything from possibilities of economic success to a belief that the language is better suited to musical genres or for signaling global identity in general. Yet, it is worthy of note that Globe Talk refers to a specific mode of communication regardless of the political or cultural motivation for its use. Song lyrics may be taken to provide a fertile soil for GT not for any external, sociocultural or economic reason, but because of the symbiosis of language and music that reinforce each other as media of symbolic expression and diffuse more easily through territorial and cultural boundaries. In this chapter, though, I have chosen to mainly investigate not songs but printed media as another well-established channel for the inflow of ideas of global relevance. In particular, I focus attention on a popular Bulgarian youth magazine entitled High-club, which covers diverse activities from the entertainment domain. My initial expectations were of a more limited occurrence of GT in the magazine since printed media coverage is always mediated through language and therefore compliance with norms and conventions of language use is an essential prerequisite for the success of communication. Unlike popular music, concerned in the main with evoking feelings and attitudes, the mission of magazines is basically to inform readers on a broad and diverse range of topics and a crucial condition for accomplishing this mission is the intelligibility of texts. Even magazines that can profile their readership accurately need to be careful not to put off their readers by using language that is too high, or too low, or mixed with too many foreign elements to be comprehensible. Taking all this into account, I assumed that music and magazine genres will utilize different instruments to establish intersubjectivity and a sense of commonality even in cases when their target audience is roughly the same.


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On the other hand, the influx of Anglicisms in most languages of the world is a well attested fact in the research literature. Some authors (Griffin2001, Hjarvard 2004) also report on the trends for advertisements, film and song titles to appear in English in the local media and readers’ comments pages of online editions of local newspapers and magazines teem with examples of mixing English with local codes. Against the backdrop of such clear signals of the Anglicization of media genres, some reasonable questions arise. Firstly, can we speak of the emergence of Globe Talk in the printed media; that is, have recent trends in borrowing and codemixing brought about a level of text hybridity and fragmentation that would permit defining it as Globe Talk? If the printed media as main conduits for ideas and values in global circulation are also involved in reinforcing and spreading them locally, how are external elements recontextualized, reshaped and rescaled to help local people understand them more easily? Last but not in importance, how are changes caused by the diffusion of foreign elements reconciled with local cultural norms for intelligibility, appropriateness and acceptance? The analysis in the last section of this chapter is an attempt to provide some answers to the above questions.

6. Corpus description For the purposes of the present investigation I have examined a corpus of 307 sample texts containing elements of Globe Talk excerpted from six random editions of the youth magazine High-club. The samples are delimited on the basis of content and usually contain more than one GT feature. The corpus thus compiled is subjected to qualitative analysis to identify properties of Globe Talk instances of code-switching, script-mixing, blending, word coinage, borrowing and reinterpretation of global concepts – from a sociolinguistic and linguistic perspective. The analysis is centred on changes related to current globalization processes so borrowings long established in the language are not considered. As an outcome I expect to show how Globe Talk is constructed for and by young Bulgarian readers. It is presumed that the readership of the magazine is predominantly monolingual, with a large group of the readers also possessing some low-level proficiency in English received from learning the language as school subject.2 There is evidence showing that Bulgarian young people have a strong motivation to learn and use English out of class ( Georgieva 2005), but their knowledge is rather fragmentary, unorganized and picked up from anywhere between chatrooms on the Net, computer games, MTV and Cartoon Network. What seems to unite High- club readers more than English, however, is that they all are with minds and hearts open to the wide world, so the magazine providing pieces of gossip about practically anybody and anything in the world of music, TV, film-making and fashion is held in high esteem.

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7. Globe Talk – a linguistic perspective 7.1. Script crossing The corpus analysis reveals instances of Globe Talk at all levels of discourse. A cursory look at the texts brings into relief an awkward mixture of Latin and Cyrillic script that makes them look like a funny kind of mosaic. To an outsider, the mixture of scripts may appear too hard to swallow at times, but both writers for the magazine and readers seem to accept it as perfectly normal; the former seeing in it a useful strategy of impressing on their readers the relativity of borders, the latter considering it an important facet of the cosmopolitan identity they aspire to. That the mixture of scripts is a game both parties enjoy is visible from the examples below, (2a, 2b) written by news reporters and (2c) - by a reader. Example 2: (2a) Music Idol-ите Невена, Нора, … също се борят да влязат в сърцата на хората… , (The Music Idols Nevena, Nora, … also fight for the hearts of the people) (2b) Първият български филм за тийнейджъри е t33ND@Y (The first Bulgarian film for teenagers is called: t33ND@Y) (2c) Hi to Хай! (Hi to High(club magazine))

7.2. Lexico-semantic mixes The impact of Globe Talk is perhaps most salient on the level of meaning where global concepts, attitudes and values are ingrained in local contexts through numerous strategies of addition, extension, crossover or reinterpretation of meaning. Limited space does not permit going into detail, but even a cursory survey of the lexico-semantic and pragmatic changes found in the corpus will suffice to show that all “innovations” are related to social practices affected to a lesser or bigger extent by globalist developments and ideology. Here are some of the main patterns through which the semantics of Bulgarian words and structures is refashioned in Globe Talk via the appropriation of external elements. a) Reinterpretation of meaning leading to uncommon collocations. See e.g. (3)


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Example 3. Тук ще намерите отлични условия за туризъм, посещения на Врачанската екопътека, интерпретативни маршрути „Горска пътека на приказките” (This is a perfect place for tourism, you can visit the eco-path near Vratsa or take some of the interpretative itineraries “Fairy tale paths through the woods”)

In terms of mainstream norms of use, “interpretative itineraries” does not make much sense. However, related to eco-activists’ globally proclaimed ideas like “living close to nature”, “lifelong learning” and “humanizing our surroundings”, the expression is perceived as a link between “knowledge” and “nature” and acquires special social significance. Similarly in example (4), the collocation “stationary actor” would be meaningless if not interpreted against the broader context of intensive mobility characterizing our age where actors, even less singers, rarely hold regular jobs. Example 4. Искахме да имаме стационарен артист - с нея ще правим шоу програми... (We wanted to have a stationary actor – she’ll participate in show programmes…)

b) Extension of word meanings by appropriating elements of new social practices, e.g.(5). Example 5: Amy … много държи на точността на профила си във Facebook (Amy … insists on the precision of her Facebook profile)

The basic meaning of the Bulgarian word ‘профил’ (profile) as ‘side view of someone’s head’ is now extended to also mean ‘details about a person’s life’ obviously under the influence of the international use of the word on the Net. c) Meaning crossover, i.e. transfer of an image or concept from one domain into another owing to a perceived similarity between the two, e.g.(6). Example 6: Обзаведе се с ново 250 кубиково деколте (literal translation: She furnished herself with a 250c.cm décolleté)

The measurement unit “cubic centimeters” in (6) actually refers to silicone breast implants which are the dream of many young girls willing to imitate world celebrities. The collocation based on a rather weird metonymy was obviously meant to produce a humorous effect but also provides information on the values of modernity. d) New meanings of borrowed words resulting from “recontextualization”, i.e., the appropriated external entity is imbued with new values, or new ways of being in the local context (7).

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These examples demonstrate how speakers “appropriate” borrowed words and make them their own by reinterpreting their meanings or changing their forms according to local norms to an extent that could make them really unrecognizable. Thus “survivor” and “idol” refer to participants in popular reality shows in Bulgaria and the indefinite reference of “famous girlfriend” would certainly baffle most native speakers of English. e) Meanings emerging as a result of intertextuality (10). Example 10: Материалното момиче ще е една от първите пътнички на космическия самолет „Спейсшип 2”. Не дай си боже, космонавтката да остане не само 4 Minutes, а във вечна орбита около Земята, някъде там Miles Away. (The material girl will be one of the first passengers on “Spaceship2” spaceship. God forbid if the astronaut stayed there not just 4 Minutes but went in an everlasting orbit round the Earth, somewhere there Miles Away)

Intertextuality, as a strategy of embedding within a text of elements from another text (Fairclough 2003: 47), is a very productive resource of new meanings. The borrowed elements are commonly film or song titles or other public events that Bulgarian readers are familiar with. Thus in the example above the Bulgarian word “материален” (material) has acquired the new meaning of “someone fond of material things” through the title of Madonna’s famous song which is directly quoted in the text. Judging by the much braver instances of code-mixing further on, paralleled with mixing of scripts to boot, we can assume that the author is not only aware of the force of intertextuality as a compensatory strategy but takes for granted his readers’ familiarity with information that is, so to say, transcultural.

7.3. Lexico-grammatical mixes Though quite common, the appropriation of meanings is not as salient as the appropriation of new forms. The variety of patterns of code-mixing on the level of


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grammar is impressive ranging from mixing of clauses and phrases to borrowing and coining new words through imported word-formation patterns, to , finally, a kind of amusing mixing of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts apparently to bring the hybridity into higher relief. Lexical borrowings are by far the biggest group and in many ways are demonstrative of the processes of change running currently in the language. They can be divided into several groups: a) Direct borrowings – e.g. лавър ( lover) , тийнове (teens), блокбастър ( blockbuster), хипхопър ( hip hopper), лейбъл ( label), скейтъри и блейдари (skaters and bladers), блогър ( blogger), рап ( rap), рапира ( to rap), etc. b) Newly coined Bulgarian words containing borrowed lexemes that have been reshaped to fit “inside” norms, e.g. Хай клуб – in which “high” has been recontextualized as a word-formative prefix. See also – “хайсредите”, (high-class circles), “хайтехнологии” (high-tech). Similarly “hit” in “хитпарче” (lit. hit song), “хитсериал” (lit. hit serial), etc. Some of these newly coined words do not contain whole words at all but just parts of words, as in “тишъртка” (T-shirt), “тийнове” (teens), or abbreviations, for instance, the adjective “пиарски” (номер) ( p.r. trick). At other times the borrowed word has a linguistic equivalent in Bulgarian but through some phonological and graphological changes is made to appear different. For instance, (hard substance) metal ме’тал ( with stress on the 2nd syllable) (music genre) Heavy Metal Хеви ‘метъл, ‘метълски, ‘метъли, (with stress on the 1st syllable and vowel change in the 2nd syll.)

c) Words coined through borrowed patterns of word formation Clipping: инфо (info), плс (pls - please), сай фай (sci fi – science fiction) Compounding: сърцетуп (heartbeat), хаусдива (house diva), метълсписание (Heavy Metal magazine), чалгавълната (chalga/ pop-folk-wave), etc. N + N modification: ъндърграунд книжле (underground-booklet), риалити звездата (reality star), Мадона парти (Madonna party), сай фай лентата Inception (the sci-fi movie Inception), etc. All these patterns appear very productive although they affect the Bulgarian language in different ways. Whereas N+N modification is a completely new pattern which is fast gaining ground in Bulgarian, the other two exist but are applied differently. Coinages like ‘плс’ (pls) and ‘сай фай’ (sci fi) which are absolutely meaningless in Bulgarian obviously show that the clipping must have taken place before the borrowing. Contrariwise, with compounding the pattern has been changed in that the new compounds do not contain an infix as required by Bulgarian norms. d) Code-mixing on phrase and clause level

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In their code-mixing strategies, writers also skillfully utilize the semiotic opportunities offered by globalized phenomena such as film festivals, music awards and other world events. Naturally, when the “outside” entities are longer they are more careful to produce enough clues to facilitate understanding. This explains why when translated into English some of the texts sound weird (11, 12). Intersentential mixing can occur in the presentation of both Bulgarian and world events which gives me grounds to suggest that it is a specific GT communication strategy and does not result from the transposition of readymade English structures. See for example a news piece about a Bulgarian singer, e.g. (13). Example 11: Ако искате да разчупите монотонното всекидневие start a party е купонът за вас. (If you want to break away from the monotony of everyday life start a party is the party for you.) Example 12: Изборът на тийновете … избрани са носителите на тазгодишните награди Teen Choice … по шест приза получиха The Jonas Brothers и телевизионното шоу Gossip Girl ... (Teen Choice (headline)… They have announced the winners of this year’s Teen Choice Awards. The Jonas Brothers and the TV show Gossip Girl got six prizes each... Example 13: Новият, четвърти студиен албум на Руши Post Sleep вече е факт. Тавата съдържа 10 трака включително и синглите Go Ahead и Beautiful Dirt. (Rushi’s fourth new album Post Sleep has been released. The LP contains 10 tracks including the singles Go Ahead and Beautiful Dirt. )

8. Globe Talk – a sociolinguistic perspective The relationship between language and society is neither simple nor unidirectional. Yet, there are several crossing points between language and society that are especially salient and are commonly considered by sociolinguists to outline the “building tasks“ of language-in-action (Gee 2005:11). Amongst the key roles of language as a mediating tool in constructing social practices are the “framing” of events and activities, identity building, the regulation of interpersonal relations and the diffusion of ideas and values through communities of practice. In all these roles, language shows sensitivity to global processes, which comes to imply that they must provide fertile soil for the spread of Globe Talk. For this reason I have chosen these roles as a framework for the current analysis.


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8.1. Globe Talk in the framing of events and activities We use language to create our world of events and activities, following more or less routine models or frames passed down from one generation to the next but also shaped and reshaped in accord with the conditions of time. These patterns embody a whole constellation of meanings, cultural values and attitudes, inherited and newly formed, that in their totality set the measure for what is “normal and acceptable”. The changes our contemporary world is undergoing under the influence of globalization are, as noted, reflected in the discourses of their representation. This also includes cultural models and discursive frames. In the analyzed corpus, I have established two main patterns of refashioning mainstream framing of events and activities that can be referred to Globe Talk. One has to do with a specific crossing of “outside” and “inside” entities to mark the obfuscating of borders in our global world where everything is equally important whether or not it happens in Bulgaria. The hybridity of means of expression stands out most clearly in the layout of the pages. Thus on the “Entertainments” page, all rubrics are labeled in English but in a specially designed frame of the page readers can read the Bulgarian counterparts of the English names in case they have difficulty understanding any of them. Headlines of news pieces are given either in English (14) or translated/ transliterated in Bulgarian (15). Example 14: Роби Уилямс: Reality killed the Video Star (Robbie Williams: Reality …) Example 15: Кунг-фу-Панда (Kung-Fu-Panda).

Likewise in the shopping section, pieces of clothing labeled in Bulgarian occur side by side with trademarks in English, shop signs in either English or Bulgarian, etc. See for instance, the following advertisement (16) in which all words except the price and address are borrowings presented in a mixture of Latin and Cyrillic script. Example 16: Тишърт Forest Jeans, 12.45 лв. ... София, Sky City Center, ул. „Коста Лулчев” (T-shirt Forest Jeans, 12.45 lv…Sofia, Sky City Center, … Kosta Lulchev St.)

On the whole, there is not any strict regularity in the choice of English or Bulgarian in the “Fashion” rubric. It is a well attested fact that the fashion industry is globalizing fast these days and trademarks and article names of dominant international companies are widely known the world over. So, presenting items of clothing with their English names is obviously considered to add a touch of “worldliness”, all the more so since for those not knowing the language there is always a photograph to facilitate understanding.

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The second strategy of framing events and activities is through what was termed the “technologization” of discourse to ensure higher predictability and calculability of meanings. The underlying idea is that readers can work out the general sense of a text containing a large number of foreignisms if it is based on a familiar, maximally simplified discourse frame. This strategy is widely employed in the description of musical events in my corpus, which tend to be stripped of any detail that could detract the reader from the sheer essentials: performer, location and quality of performance and impact on audience. Moreover, the lexis utilized for the purpose is fairly limited and repetitive. In general, performers are always glamorous, world famous, lords of (ska) rhythms, cult figures in dance music, kings of underground music, legendary, genius, etc; performances are smashing, killer, sensational, explosive, hurricanes of sound, etc.; and the audience is enthralled, enchanted or enraptured. Block (2002:121) calls such a rationalized manner of framing of events McCommunication to emphasize its global relevance. He argues that McCommunication is gradually establishing itself as a mode of wider crosscultural communication due to its simplicity of framing conducive to eliminating or bringing comprehension problems to a tolerable minimum. I want to argue that Globe Talk performs a similar function on home grounds. As a mode of communication it, too, involves simplicity of frame and predictability of lexis as compensatory strategies to help monolingual speakers cope with the excess of foreignisms. The technologization of discourse in Globe Talk also implies efficiency and control which are highly valued in modern societies. It is noteworthy that both patterns are strategic by nature. Neither are events as simple as represented, nor is code-mixing as random as it appears. In the majority of cases the context contains enough clues to facilitate the inferential process and ensure comprehension. Respectively, external elements, particularly those introduced in the Latin script, have a much greater symbolic role. Serving as a connecting point between readers and the global world, they are generally valued as an emblem of the prosperity and progress associated with globalization.

8.2. Globe Talk as conduit of global ideology Globalist beliefs, attitudes and values diffused in local communities through Globe Talk represent a second form of interaction between the “inside” and the “outside” which may, or may not, have an overt linguistic expression. Influences of this kind are very difficult to capture as they pervade the whole magazine, from topics to language and layout. The following excerpt from a thirteen-year-old girl’s letter to the editor provides a good idea of how transcultural ideals of social relations have begun to supersede traditional social norms in young people’s valuesystems. The girl, nicknamed “Tokiohotel”, writes:


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Example 17: И ти като много други личности мислиш, че Бил е женствен. ... според мен не трябва да съдим по външния вид ... Това че си слaга черен молив, че си лакира ноктите, няма нищо общо с характера му. Ако прочетеш малко повече материал за него ще видиш, че си е съвсем нормален. (Тоkiohotel_girl, 13 години) (You, like many others, also think that Bill is rather feminine … but I think that we should not judge people by the way they look … The fact that he pencils his eyebrows or polishes his nails has nothing to do with his character. If you read a bit more about him you’ll see that he is quite normal. Tokiohotel_girl, 13 years old.)

The girl’s interest in such global issues as the equality of sexes, and even more so, the opinion she expresses on the issue are an obvious result of today’s more active transcultural contacts. As a young person in the process of building her identity, her judgment of “normality” is still rather hazy but it is quite clear that she is trying to break away from provincial conservatism and backwardness and tackle the issue as an independent-minded citizen alert to the latest trends in the world. Viewed from this perspective the occurrence of Globe Talk in the magazine can not be perceived as a mechanical mixing of languages. It has a clear symbolic function to signal modern identity involving, amongst many other things, a new way of thinking, a new way of talking about the surrounding world.

8.3. Globe Talk as an instrument of enhancing rapport between people Reading through the magazines, one can’t help but see Globe Talk as a kind of secret code, at times funny and weird owing to the illogical mixture of scripts and codes, but accepted and treasured by its users as a symbol of solidarity and trust in “co-membership”. The strategies of rapport building are numerous: the editor addresses readers using diminutive forms to emphasize the clubby atmosphere (18); efforts are made not to discriminate against local or foreign celebrities in the coverage they receive (12. 13 above); writers adopt a conversational style often with a touch of irony to signal friendliness and sociality (19); readers exchange posters and music through the pages of the magazine and so forth. Example 18: Здравейте хайклубчета! (Hello, young club members! - …-клубчета is a diminutive form that literary means ‘little clubs’; the metonymic use of the word to refer to the people belonging to a club would be inappropriate according to mainstream norms of use.) Example 19. Шът, тихо. Джей Зи пише роман ...Нещо гангста? Не ни се вярва защото пак тегли към автобиография. ... Сай фай? Вампири? Всичко е възможно.

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Maria Georgieva (Hush, quiet! Jay-Z is writing a novel… Something gangsta? We don’t believe it because it’s like autobiography again …Sci Fi? Vampires? Everything is possible.)

As seen from the examples, Globe Talk is actively employed in solidarity strategies. Thus it contributes to creating a feeling of belonging to a “special” community of practice, held together by shared aspirations for involvement with world cultural life, and “sealed” with a common mode of talking.

9. Conclusion In this study of Globe Talk I have tried to uncover its properties and functions as made manifest in a Bulgarian youth magazine. In the course of analysis I have repeatedly pointed out that Globe Talk as a specific transcultural product is fluid and unstable, strategically adapted to the contextual conditions of the time and place of use. Its fluidity ensues from the continual inflow of ideas, values, and forms of linguistic expression in different cultural and social contact situations. It was also shown however, that the appropriation of external elements into local spaces is not entirely haphazard and uncontrollable. It is implemented by social agencies who have the power to select, borrow, blend, mix and refashion novel entities to adjust them to existing practices and discourses and make them fit local people’s notions of “normality” and “appropriateness”. In the process of recontextualization, speakers gradually begin to “feel” appropriated entities as their own which contributes to establishing a relative fixity of GT. The degree of fixity will arguably be different in different domains depending, on one hand, on the authority of the agencies through which the external elements are being appropriated, and on the other, on how the new appropriations resonate with peoples’ social expectations and aspirations. Young people are generally regarded as a powerful driver of innovation and change. By creatively utilizing the new transcultural ideas, values and practices transmitted to them through the media, they construe their own vision of the global world. That vision, in which global influences and local traditions are conflated, in which selection and appropriation are commonly in the hands of powerful agencies, and in which values and attitudes are continually shaped and reshaped may not be an accurate representation of reality but it provides a useful initial model of reference. Like any cultural model, it may influence people’s judgments about what course of action is “normal” and “acceptable” to feel a worthy citizen of the world. Thus as a constituent of cultural models, Globe Talk may be said to be not just constructed by globalization but also to be contributing to the construction of contemporary globalizing society.

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Notes 1

All Bulgarian texts are followed by glosses in English. I have tried to keep as close as possible to the original text which accounts for the clumsiness of some of the translations. 2 In Bulgaria, foreign language learning is introduced as a subject in the second grade of school, age 7-8. Although students can choose amongst several of the major European languages, the dominant language is English.

GLOBE TALK â CONSTRUCTED BY AND CONSTRUCTING ...

GLOBE TALK â CONSTRUCTED BY AND CONSTRUCTING ...

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