The Englishes of popular culture

Linguistic data from popular culture has typically been overlooked in sociolinguistic literature because the data are neither ‘spontaneous’ nor ‘naturally occurring’, but instead represent a type of edited creative linguistic production. Recent attention toward sociolinguistic performance highlights the importance of linguistic data from popular culture and ways that they illustrate attitudes toward linguistic stereotypes, model iconic language behaviours, and predict linguistic innovation and changing social norms. The chapter outlines a methodological framework (and justification) for treating ‘popular culture’ as multi-modal and multilingual sites for linguistic analysis. The framework will argue in favour of two dimensions of analysis of popular culture: 1) a horizontal analysis that examines influences across different cultures, languages, nations and regions, and 2) a vertical analysis that examines influence across different popular culture genres, including, but not limited to, television/radio, cinema, music, art (e.g. comics), advertising, etc. Finally, the chapter will examine various uses of English within popular cultures of societies that are not monolingual English-speaking societies and make generalizations about the role that English in this context functions.