Digital spaces are opening the doors to developing types of registers within languages that rely on computer mediated communication. Participants in the video game community have enregistered language that is concise and efficient for the purposes of game play to make snap decisions. However, the register is being borrowed by 4chan users, adapted to their sociocultural needs, and employed by some to communicate threats of violence. The aim of this thesis is to understand the structure of gaming language both inside and outside of a gaming platform and to examine how some users of 4chan make use of this less commonly understood register for expressions of violent intent. I observe professional eSports athletes in game play, interviews, and news articles to establish a baseline of gaming terminology and examine the structure within this enregistered facet of language. I found that much of gaming terminology is derived through processes already common in the development of slang and other forms of language change, and I used the results of this analysis to generate a survey about understanding of these language forms. This survey was distributed to participants who had different amounts of experience with video games (mega gamers vs. non-mega gamers) to determine each groups' awareness of gaming terminology and their understanding of certain phrases as communication of a threat. The survey revealed that mega gamers more commonly define terms in relation to video games than non-mega gamers, but that they were not more likely to identify phrases with gaming terms as threats except in a few isolated cases. / Master of Arts

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / In highly mobile societies, the voice and agency of speakers will differ across contexts depending on the linking of forms and functions. This thesis is thus about the complexities introduced to the notion of (form-function linkages) multilingualism in late-modern globalizing and mobile Cape Town in transition. Essentially, it takes its point of departure in the idea that multilingualism is a 'spatial concept', i.e. the form that interacting languages take, how they are practiced by speakers and how multilingualism is perceived, is determined to a large extent by the affordanees of particular 'places'. In order to research this, I postulate that a major parameter in the organization and differentiation of places is that of scale. The thesis studies two research sites that can be considered as diametrical opposites on a scale from local (descaled) to translocal (upscaled), namely Hip-Hop performances at Stones, Kuilsriver, and Mzoli's Meat at Gugulethu. Although both sites are found in local townships, they differ in terms of their basic semiotics. That is to say, to what extent the interactions, physical spaces, and activities, are infused with local meaning and local values (downscaled in the case of Hip-Hop) - granted this may be a problematic concept - and to what extent the semiotics of place areoriented towards upscaling or transnational values and practices (upscaled in the case of Mzoli's Meat). Each of these sites is characterized in terms of the assemblage of trans modal semiotics that contribute to defining it as a place of descaling and upscaling (buildings, linguistic landscapes, patterns of interaction and movement and posture, stylizations of selves, artifactual identities (car makes, et cetera). We find that the Hip-Hop site is 'predominantly' local in branding, in who participates, and in the linguistic landscape and the aesthetics of photographic embroidery. Mzoli's Meat, on the other hand, with its ATMs, sit-down-for-tourist-spaces, and international website, is very much more upscaled. A discussion of 'normative orders of multilingualism' pertinent or dominant in each site is also provided. Thus in the local or descaled site of Hip-Hop, a core ordering of multiple languages is in terms of economic value (consumption) with respect to what each language, or variety of language, contributes to 'keeping it real', that is, creating 'extreme locality'. Repertoires are 'ordered' - discussed - and seen to evolve and gain value in terms of a particular social trajectory of speakers, namely their trajectory and history - as temporally narrated - towards becoming a Hip-Hop head and a key actor in 'keeping it rear. In the context of Mzoli's Meat, the semiotics of the upscaled market generate talk about and perceptions of multilingualism in terms of the translocal encounter -linguistic/multilingual repertoires are seen as relevant to, or organized along the lines, of the temporary encounter, and in respect to the value of the languages in facilitating translocal engagements (Dutch, English). Thus, we note how the notion of repertoire is a fluid concept that can be organized and talked about in relation to different standards, trajectories, determined by normative orders of different scaled spaces. Returning to the key question addressed of how these spaces are semiotically constituted and how they constrain or 'prototypically' facilitate particular kinds of voice and agency in more detail, the thesis introduces key concepts of performance, stylization, entextualization and enregisterment. A key feature of doing or constituting places from spaces is the kind of interactions, participants and linguistic eonstruals/productions that take place there. In a highly multilingual society, places/spaces are often normatively contested or contestable. The theoretical concepts provide the framework for charting how different personae are voiced through, that is, entextualized and stylized in the interaction of different languages (in relation to the normative order or in how the combination of languages in voices and their competition more or less successfully enacted or perform the personae/voice), and how these voices/personae are enreqistered, thatis, the competitive processes in the linguistic conventionalization of the voices, and in the simultaneous construction of the downscaled and upscaled spaces. Thus, in the Hip-Hop context, the multilingual voices are designed to produce local personae, whereas in Mzoli's Meat, the performed personae on linguistic display are various and normatively transgressing, emphasizing polycentric normativities as against the mono centric normativity of the downscaled and extreme local context. Enregisterment is shown in the Hip-Hop context to be driven by the construction of extreme locality, whereas in Mzoli's Meat, the performance by the comedian of translocal and mobile voices serve to enregister a translanguaged variety of multilingualism. Thus, we see here how different normative orders of multilingualism (that is different values, forms and combinations oflanguages) that are afforded by the scaled nature of particular places, are layered into and through different social personae or voices. In fact, it is the (semiotic) work in stylizing and entextualizing these voices, and in enregistering them that help produce these differently scaled places (in conjunction with other semiotic means as noted above). How then do these findings inform the issue of linguistically mediated agency in mobile societies? Much politics takes place outside of the formal spheres and institutions of society. Popular spaces are central political sites where a variety of everyday micro and macro-sociopolitical issues are dealt with. In this thesis, we find among other issues dealt with is that 'authenticity' within the Hip-Hop context is a predominant issue, and in Mzoli's Meat, the social political issues of the day are racialized encounters and their implications. In each of these sites, language and multilingualism is paramount in (a) positioning political interests (through personae and voices) and (b) in contesting and working through the normativities of the place in question. Thus, agency emanates from the ability of the speaker to appropriately position the (linguistically mediated) voice/personae in a contested and scaled space in a way that this voice becomes enregistered, and thus legitimated and 'heard'. This is a process of possible transgression - or at least competition - on the one hand, as well as creative 'conformity' or repetition of registers and repertoires according to fluid, constructed normativities. What this then reveals is the value of a concept of linguistic or multilingual citizenship, which is here taken to refer to the agency constituted through non-institutional means where language negotiations are transgressive and central to the creation of a normative order of (local) voices. Therefore, this thesis provides an insight into the complexities of agency (en registered, scaled voice) in mobile, multilingual and scaled Cape Town.

By approaching dialect and standard language from a folk linguistic perspective, this thesis aims to investigate how laypeople perceive, talk about and orient towards dialect and standard language in a dialect area close to the perceived linguistic and administrative centre of Sweden. It consequently focuses on dialect and standard language as socially meaningful entities, rather than as sets of linguistic features, and studies a dialect area as it is understood by those who identify with it. To explore these issues, group interviews, a set of quantitative tests among adolescents and a ‘mental mapping’ task were used. Participants’ descriptions of the local dialect suggest that many of them regard the dialect and the standard language as separate language systems. The standard language, strongly associated with writing, is perceived as formal and artificial. In contrast, dialect is understood simply as speech signalling local belonging. Variation expressing local belonging typically not regarded as dialect by dialectologists, is mentioned by participants more than once. The extent to which dialectal resources are described to be expected depends on the participants’ understanding of place, context and interlocutors. In some contexts, using dialect seems to be a way of overtly signalling one’s belonging to the local community. In this way the dialect is still important, perhaps even as a means of consolidating the local community’s existence. At the same time, however, the prototypical speaker is described as being old, indicating that spoken dialect is not particularly relevant today. By examining dialect and standard language as cultural phenomena in the area at the present time, it is shown how they can be used to construct one’s own group in relation to others, both regionally and locally within the area investigated. Although the local spoken language is considered close to the standard, the mechanisms controlling how language users determine their own dialect boundaries are arguably the same as in more complex dialect areas. Linguistic differences need not be large, or even in current use, to be perceived as distinct and important.