Involvement in ongoing projects at MultiLing
In 2016, Professor Androutsopoulos was hired as Professor II at MultiLing as one of three highly reputable international scholars. He is a member of MultiLing’s core group as a part of Theme 2: Multilingual practices. Androutsopoulos also plays a leading role in the MultiLing flagship project Multilingualism and mediated communication, made possible by the University of Oslo’s funding for world leading research communities.
Guest lecture on multilingual resources in German ethnic comedy
In his guest lecture Multimodal enregisterment in German ethnic comedy, Androutsopoulos talked about one of his current research projects on ethnic comedy performances in YouTube video-clips. In his research, he is examining how stylistic choices, language-ideological distinctions and ethno-cultural stereotypes by which exemplary “Foreigners”, “Turks”, “Africans” and “Germans” are constructed in video-clips by German ethnic comedians, and he thereby locates and discusses the place of multilingual resources in the comedians' repertoires.
Methodological workshop on digital multilingual practices
During his stay at MultiLing, Androutsopoulos hosted the methodological workshop, Digital multilingual practices: familiar issues, new directions in method and theory. At the workshop, Androutsopoulos presented an ethnographic approach to digitally mediated multilingual communication, and he proposed a number of practical techniques of data collection and analysis, i.e. the YouTube Comment Scraper, which lets you download (scrape) all comments from a given YouTube video, the Facebook comment scraper and TAGS tweet collector.
Familiar issues as well as new challenges were presented to the participants. All along, the participants questioned received theoretical assumptions in the field: Is digital multilingualism simply a transposition of spoken language patterns to a different semiotic mode? To what extent is it technologically determined? And how do we integrate media affordances and networked publics with the analysis of multilingual practices?
About Jannis Androutsopoulos
Androutsopoulos’ interests include language style, language and identity, language ideologies, written language and literacy, multimodality, new forms of public communication in the digital age, the relationship between media and linguistic change, and, not least, mediated multilingualism. He did his first study of multilingual practices in the late 1990s, and multilingualism has been one of his core areas in research and teaching ever since.
For more information, visit Professor Androutsopoulos’ personal page at the University of Hamburg (external link).
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