About the project
This project sets out to investigate how societal multilingualism is dramatized in films and TV series produced between 2008 and 2013 in Flanders, the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Its goals are:
- to analyse to what extent films and series allow for the presence of linguistic heterogeneity
- to chart the social meanings or indexicalities of linguistic codes in telecinematic discourse
- to lay bare indexical tendencies, i.e., to investigate whether and how these codes are ‘enregistered’ through recurrent association with particular social stances, activities and identities
- to investigate what ideological assumptions play a part in that process
- to trace the impact of the policies that TV stations pursue towards ethnic and linguistic diversity on multilingual practices in telecinematic discourse.
Methodologically, this project combines an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of telecinematic discourse with an ethnographic study of its policy and production context. In doing so, this project will provide current debates on the representation of ethnic and linguistic diversity in the media with empirical food for thought, and contribute to the development of a sociolinguistic research framework on telecinematic discourse.
Duration
2013–2015