'Cash me ousside': a citizen sociolinguistic analysis of online metalinguistic commentary

Aslan, E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4174-5493 and Vásquez, C. (2018) 'Cash me ousside': a citizen sociolinguistic analysis of online metalinguistic commentary. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 22 (4). pp. 406-431. ISSN 1360-6441 doi: 10.1111/josl.12303

Abstract/Summary

This study examines online metalinguistic commentary related to an Internet meme (i.e., “Cash me ousside/howbow dah”), in order to explore Internet users’ language ideologies. The meme, and its related YouTube metacommentary, places at its center a “non-standard” utterance produced by a young teenage girl on a U.S. television talk show, which went viral. Drawing on citizen sociolinguistics – a means to explore how everyday citizens make sense of the world of language around them – the study offers an analysis of metalinguistic evaluations made by YouTube commenters about this particular utterance and its speaker. Our findings reveal that the teenager’s sociolinguistically ambiguous manner of speaking is perceived as indexing multiple social categories including race, region, education, and class-linked imagined “spaces” (e.g., ghetto, hood, the streets) – and that these categories overlap in complex, and not always predictable, configurations. Our analysis also highlights how evaluations regarding the authenticity and intelligibility of the speaker’s performance interact with several of the aforementioned social categories.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/78314
Identification Number/DOI	10.1111/josl.12303
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Language and Applied Linguistics
Publisher	Wiley
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