Talk’s title: ‘Chicken nugget’ affect and scaling English(es) in Bahraini Youth
Abstract:
Within the Bahraini educational system, English is unequally distributed in terms of the availability of, and access to both single-sex Arabic-medium state schools, and co-education English-medium private schools. As such, ‘chicken nugget’ emerged as a term describing English-dominant, typically private school-educated youth. Drawing on data from state school-educated youth (aged 19-25), I show how participants orient to different timespaces (Bakhtin 1981; see also Agha 2007) as they negotiate their identities relative to the ‘chicken nugget’ figure of personhood (Agha 2005). Applying discourse analytic methods to participants' metacommentaries, I demonstrate how they utilize scaling (see Canagarajah & De Costa 2016; Carr & Lempert 2016; Catedral 2018; Djuraeva & Catedral 2020; Gal 2016) to elevate this label to a fractally recursive bundle of discursive processes, deeming a wider range of people as chicken nuggets depending on the chronotopic conditions of different timespaces. I further show how speakers evoke different exogenous and endogenous styles of English to allow for complex identification processes: the English of chicken nuggets is excessive and exaggerated, as opposed to English as a necessary communication tool in neoliberal contexts. Thus, this study has implications for our understandings of fractal recursivity (Irvine & Gal 2000), World Englishes (Kachru 1986, 1992), and the sociolinguistics of identity.
