[lg policy] Linguist List Issue: Applied Ling/ Socioling: Lenihan: 'The Interaction of Language Policy, Minority Languages and New Media: A study of the Facebook translations application'

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Message1: Applied Ling/ Socioling: Lenihan: 'The Interaction of Language Policy, Minority Languages and New Media: A study of the Facebook translations application'
Date:15-Jul-2013
From:Aoife Lenihan aoife.lenihan at ul.ie
LINGUIST List issue http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-2922.html 


Institution: University of Limerick 
Program: PhD Applied Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2013 

Author: Aoife Lenihan

Dissertation Title: The Interaction of Language Policy, Minority Languages and
New Media - A Study of the Facebook Translations Application 

Dissertation URL:  http://academia.edu/2470294/The_Interaction_of_Language_Policy_Minority_Lan

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                     Sociolinguistics


Dissertation Director(s):
Helen Kelly-Holmes

Dissertation Abstract:

The site of this research is new media, primarily the WWW. Language policy 
has traditionally been seen as the work of governments and their institutions 
and not related to domains such as Web 2.0. The primary research question 
of this thesis is to consider: what impact do new media have on language 
policy, in particular with regard to minority languages? It focuses on both the 
'top-down' language policy and the increasingly 'bottom-up' language 
practices in new media. It is situated within the field of 'new media 
sociolinguistics' and aspires to move the focus of this area from the issue of 
linguistic diversity to the issue of language policy. What differentiates it from 
previous work is its attempt to link practice on the WWW with language 
policy. The method of investigation is virtual ethnography, which involves 
looking at computer-mediated communication (CMC) in online networks and 
communities, analysing the language content and observing the online 
interactions at the level of the users. It is used here to observe and 
investigate the de facto language policies on Facebook. It was the potential 
use of the community driven Facebook Translations app as a mechanism of 
language policy by 'bottom-up' interests, which first drew the researcher's 
attention. In terms of language policy, Facebook, the Irish language 
community and their members act in both a 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' sense 
depending on the context of the situation, and thus the current research 
demonstrates that the assumed dichotomy of 'bottom-up' forces opposed to 
'top-down' forces is not always in evidence. It conceptualises language policy 
as a process, ongoing and fluid, developed discursively and via the practices 
of commercial entities and language speakers. Furthermore, it finds that 
language ideologies play a primary role in language policy processes and 
considers if the future of language policy will be driven by 'produsers' (Bruns, 
2008). 


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