Exploring impoliteness in multilingual contexts
Wednesday 25th January, 1-2pm
County South B89
The case of Congo-Brazzaville
Jean Mathieu Tsoumou, La Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain
Impoliteness research is increasingly going from western-centric grounds into exploring other societies and cultures such as Asia and Africa. Despite this progress, impoliteness research in Congo-Brazzaville is still non-existent. The aim of this talk is to explore impoliteness in Congo-Brazzaville, a country whose diversified sociolinguistic and sociocultural environment as well as its political instability have long stood out as recipes for interactional frictions. The talk will examine impoliteness as it manifests through political discourse both online (i.e., Facebook) and Offline. One of the arguments to be made is that the interpretation of impoliteness in Congo-Brazzaville is co-constructed on the basis of the users’ abilities to interpret and negotiate the meaning behind the use of not just one, but the various languages in the interaction.