Join us for this exciting installment of the Linguistics Seminar Series!
- Talk Title: "Black language" on TikTok: Black discursive practice, digital representation, and raciolinguistic ideologies
- Abstract: In this talk I analyze how the digital community known as “Black TikTok” represents linguistic diversity within the Black diaspora in ways that challenge dominant ideas about what constitutes “Black language.” I analyze how U.S.-based Black TikTok creators highlight variation within African American English, give a platform to language varieties often marginalized within the broader category of African American Language (including Black American Sign Language, Gullah/Geechee, and creoles), and represent multilingualism and multivarietalism as social and linguistic skills. I demonstrate how Black language on U.S. Black TikTok is more diverse than (a) dominant raciolinguistic ideologies and (b) scholarly fields including linguistics and anthropology portray or have historically conceptualized it as. I argue that this is made possible by TikTok’s uptake by Black people from around the world, TikTok’s support of multimodal content, and the agency of representation that social media affords it users. I conclude with a discussion of how Black TikTok’s discourses about Black language often contradict contemporary theories of language and race that aim to denaturalize the perceived relationship between the two, and the productive tension that this creates in the critical study of language, race, and Blackness
