A Discourse Analytic Approach to Practices of Hawaiian Language Revitalization in the Mass Media

Abstract

Scholars of language policy and planning (LPP) have recently started using ethnographic and discourse-analytic methods. Examining the collaborative sense-making activity of language users can shed light on how they construct their version or versions of reality by using semiotic resources, creating intertextual links, and referring to language ideologies. This study investigates an under-researched area in LPP: spoken discourse in media talk, specifically in media involved in indigenous language revitalization in Hawaiʻi. Using audio recordings of Ka Leo Hawaiʻi (The Hawaiian Voice) broadcast from the 1970s for over 25 years, the study explores the multilingual practices of the hosts, the guests, and the call-in listeners of the translingual contact zone of this Hawaiian language radio show by analyzing these participants' metapragmatic comments on the use of English and their bivalent utterances.