“Hey BCC this is Australia and we speak and read English:” Monolingualism and othering in relation to linguistic diversity

Abstract

AbstractThis paper explores how linguistic diversity gave rise to a multi-party interaction with strong elements of monolingualism and othering. The data analyzed comes from the official Facebook page of Brisbane City Council that very rarely creates posts in languages other than English. One of such rare posts in Korean attracted a number of negative comments in relation to the language used. This paper examines how the discourses of monolingualism and othering are constructed in those comments. The findings of this qualitative study show that, in the analyzed data, monolingualism is primarily indexed through the following discourses: “English only”, English as the language of Australia, English as a national identity and monolingual beliefs, in general. Othering includes such practices as predominantly engaging in the “us vs them” discourse, positioning the non-dominant language and its speakers as the different ‘other’, ascribing negative identity and using impoliteness practices, such as challenges, warnings or accusations.