Sociolinguistic Studies

Editor-in-Chief’s acknowledgements

Xoán Rodríguez-Yáñez — 2023-03-16

Challenges of multilingualism across times and places

Maria Yelenevskaya — 2023-03-16

Chronotopic Identity Work: Sociolinguistic Analyses of Cultural and Linguistic Phenomena in Time and Space Sjaak Kroon and Jos Swanenberg (eds) (2020) Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Pp. 217 ISBN: 9781788926614 (hbk) ISBN: 9781788926607 (pbk)

Decolonising Multilingualism: Struggles to Decreate Alison Phipps (2019) Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Pp. 112 ISBN: 9781788924054 (hbk) ISBN: 9781788924047 (pbk) ISBN: 9781788924078 (ebk)

The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language Rosemary Salomone (2022)

Geoffrey K Pullum — 2023-03-16

The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language Rosemary Salomone (2022) New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 485
ISBN: 9780190625610 (hbk) ISBN: 0190625619 (eBook)

Multilingual Perspectives from Europe and Beyond on Language Policy and Practice Bruna Di Sabato and Bronwen Hughes (eds) (2022)

Stephen Joseph McNulty — 2023-03-16

Multilingual Perspectives from Europe and Beyond on Language Policy and Practice Bruna Di Sabato and Bronwen Hughes (eds) (2022)
London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Pp. 196 ISBN: 9780367363475 (hbk) ISBN: 9780429351075 (eBook)

Linguistic Landscapes and Educational Spaces Edina Krompák, Víctor Fernández-Mallat and Stephan Meyer (eds) (2021)

Sanita Martena — 2023-03-16

Linguistic Landscapes and Educational Spaces Edina Krompák, Víctor Fernández-Mallat and Stephan Meyer (eds) (2021) Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Pp. 312 ISBN: 9781788923859 (pbk) ISBN: 9781788923866 (hbk) ISBN: 9781788923873 (eBook)

When Words Trump Politics: Resisting a Hostile Regime of Language Adam Hodges (2020)

Elizabeth Carreon — 2023-03-16

When Words Trump Politics: Resisting a Hostile Regime of Language Adam Hodges (2020) Stanford: Stanford Briefs. Pp. 181 ISBN: 9781503610798 (pbk) ISBN: 9781503610804 (eBook)

Research Companion to Language and Country Branding Irene Theodoropoulou and Johanna Tovar (eds) (2021)

Cedric Deschrijver — 2023-03-16

Research Companion to Language and Country Branding Irene Theodoropoulou and Johanna Tovar (eds) (2021) London: Routledge. Pp. 434 ISBN: 9780367343590 (hbk) ISBN: 9780429325250 (eBook)

Kinetic intensities and moral registers of pandemic place branding

Aurora Donzelli — 2023-03-16

Emblematic of late capitalist modes of value creation, place branding draws on semiotic processes as well as on affective mobilization both to structure the representation and fruition of specific locales and to produce publics. Such governmental projects of people and places, however, are always open to possible acts of recontextualization. This article discusses the complex forms of social and semiotic regimentation (and subversion) underlying place-branding projects by exploring two social media campaigns that involved the city of Milan during two key moments of the Covid-19 outbreak. Revolving around different moral discourses of speed, both campaigns resulted in a partial or failed uptake. The initial (February 2020) celebration of fast-paced metropolitan work ethics evoked by #MilanoNonSiFerma (‘Milan doesn’t stop’) – a marketing and political faux pas – was followed (in May 2020) by a reparatory campaign #UnPassoAllaVolta (‘One step at a time’), aimed at endorsing the meditative quality of slow temporality. These morally inflected shifts in kinetic intensity materialized alternative forms of ethical sociality and disciplinary practices, showing how the semiotic regimentation of affects through moral registers and chronotopic formulations plays a key role within the fusion of media and capital characteristic of our post-Fordist present.

A different kind of branding

Daniel N Silva — 2023-03-16

This article argues that Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of Covid-19 in Brazil was consistent with his ‘different kind of branding.’ Contrary to the expectations of marketing experts and place branding scholars, Bolsonaro’s branding tactics were predicated not on portraying Brazil positively to commoditize it to (trans)national audiences but on producing the image of Brazil as a white conservative Christian country through maintaining epistemic and informational crises, delegitimizing expert systems, and engaging in necropolitical calculation. Methodologically, to describe the ‘brand-new’ Brazil projected in Bolsonaro’s presidency (2019–2022), I build three case studies centering on the boycott of Covid-19 vaccines, his strategy of letting the virus spread freely in favor of a supposed herd immunity, and the ‘shadow board’ that helped him build a necropolitical strategy. I suggest that Bolsonaro’s ‘chaotic’ branding project harnessed features of currently existing neoliberalism, including informational entropy, the digital production of ‘alternative facts’, entrepreneurial ethos, the delegitimization of expert systems, and the association between free market and political conservatism.

Branding a pandemic response

Rebecca Carlson — 2023-03-16

Although there is little consensus on the precise reasons Japan managed to maintain a relatively low number of Covid cases overall in 2020, the Japanese government was quick to publicize their approach as a success, calling it the ‘Japan Model’. Drawing on interviews with physicians working in Tokyo area hospitals during the pandemic as well as Japanese and English language media, we argue that this promotion is an example of the way nation branding is a form of biopower. Although physicians ultimately critiqued the government for its failure to implement clear public health policies, they simultaneously relied on its promotion of Japan’s superior culture to rationalize publicized epidemiological successes. This paper argues that as branding works to metapragmatically frame, and then activate, messages already in public circulation, it coopts individuals to independently take up branding practices, symbolically displacing those messages from government programs.

The taming of the shrewd

Raymund Vitorio — 2023-03-16

The travel restrictions, health and safety protocols, and the stigmatization of traveling for leisure brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic have significantly affected the tourism industry. In this article, we investigate the current discursive efforts of the Department of Tourism (DOT) of the Philippines to revitalize the country’s tourism industry. We examine seven official DOT video advertisements to determine how the government construes pandemic-safe tourism and rebrands the country as a safe tourist destination. We argue that these videos capitalize on technologies of the self: the onus to negotiate the risks of traveling during the pandemic with the benefits of the tourism experience is premised on the tourist’s willingness to unilaterally take care of oneself. We also contend that the videos’ cautious deployment of emotions enables the government to portray their efforts to combat the pandemic as effective and downplay their heavily criticized draconian measures. This article demonstrates how tourism, an activity that is typically characterized as hedonistic and shrewd, is being tamed as an attempt to remain relevant in the context of the pandemic.

The force of nature

Adam Wilson — 2023-03-16

In one way or another, tourism often sits at the heart of place branding. Transformations of tourism induced by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic have led to shifts in tourist demand and target markets, thus provoking changes in tourist place branding. In this article, I
explore these changes from a sociolinguistic point of view by examining the ways in which a rural tourist destination in Alsace (France) mobilises language and discourse to adapt its tourist place branding strategy in response to rising demand for nature tourism. First, using data gathered during ethnographic fieldwork undertaken following the easing of lockdown restrictions, I show how ‘nature’ is positioned as a central trope in defining the essential characteristics of the destination, its population, and the activities that can be undertaken there. Second, I look at how this positioning contributes to the elaboration of a coherent destination brand whilst also shaping tourist experiences and thus tourist, geographical, and spatial imaginaries. Finally, I explore the dynamics of commodification that underpin this foregrounding of nature in the (re)framing of people and place.

The role of language in place branding during the Covid-19 pandemic and post-lockdowns

Johanna Tovar — 2023-03-16

The articles in this issue examine the transformations and adaptations of place branding during the Covid-19 pandemic and post-lockdowns. Using five case studies, they examine how Covid-19 has changed place branding in Italy, Brazil, Japan, the Philippines, and France during different stages of the pandemic. The articles explore questions concerning how to (re)brand a global viral hotspot; the interplay of Covid-19, place branding and tourism; populism, nation (re)building and Covid-19 management; as well as the political nature and impact of place branding such as nation-building and nationalism during the Covid-19 pandemic and in a post-lockdown world. The articles examine place branding as semiotics with respect to how campaigns are entextualized and re-contextualized. They focus on tropes such as morality, fun, (lack of) mobility, and the future/time. Overall, this issue argues that Covid-19 is an event for place branding and that new tropes are likely to continue to emerge and endure.