Linguacultural identity paths in the blog Me4Change

Abstract

The debate on migration, identity and power has been thriving over the last decades. It is now a priority not only in the context of current television programmes and talk shows but also across different genres and social media, among which a pivotal role is played by websites and blogs. In the latter, the issues of identity, power, contact and belonging come into play more than in any other domain, pushing us towards ‘translanguaging’ ethnographies and ‘superdiversity’ (Blommaert and Rampton 2011), as well as to new forms of discourse which result from a process of complex adaptation (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008). The aim of this paper is to gain some insights into the use of language as a means of identity expression on the part of migrants belonging to different lingua-cultural backgrounds. More specifically, we propose some excerpts taken from the website and blog Me4Change as expression of transnational uses of English as a Lingua Franca (Seidlhofer 2003, 2011) at both linguistic and multimodal level. The analysis of case studies taken from the corpus is meant to add new points for discussion to the already-existing literature on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) variations and highlight new features for its creative use, which are beyond any regional and national boundaries. The contribution is also meant to provide additional tools for the interpretation of the discourse of migrants, also in practical terms, by intercultural mediators operating in the field of humanitarian aid and support to migrants and asylum seekers.