Transidiomatic practices: Language and power in the age of globalization

This article seeks to assess the communicative mutations resulting from the intersection between mobile people and mobile texts. Sophisticated technologies for rapid human mobility and global communication are transforming the communicative environment of late modernity. Until recently the majority of linguistic studies which concerned themselves with global phenomena tended to depict the worst possible scenarios: linguistic imperialism, endangered languages, language death. In this paper, I argue that the experience of cultural globalization, and the sociolinguistic disorder it entails, cannot be understood solely through a dystopic vision of linguistic catastrophe, but demand that we also take into account the recombinant qualities of language mixing, hybridization, and creolization. Using communicative data from the Adriatic region, this paper calls for a reconceptualization of what we consider the communicative environment, which must be no longer restricted to its default parameters (focused, monolingual, and face-to-face), but should also account for communicative practices based on multilingual talk (most of the times exercised by de/reterritorialized speakers) channeled through both local and electronic media. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.