Narration, knowledge and expertise in cultural vlogs
In recent years, social networks such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram have increasingly attracted vloggers who report on life in a culture that is foreign to them. The vloggers in question often describe their channels as intercultural or ascribe to them the purpose of dealing with intercultural experiences. My contribution is dedicated to content creators living in Germany who talk in English about their everyday life in Germany and who define themselves as not belonging to the German culture.
This form of interculturality is often problematized in intercultural communication and cultural studies because it presupposes a homogeneous understanding of culture – here the Germans, there the non-Germans. At this point, the lay understanding of interculturality seems to run counter to the academic perspective, where concepts of transculturality, third space and cultural interference have gradually replaced ideas of cultural identity (cf. e.g. Bhaba 1990, Hall 1996, Reckwitz 2001).
Against this background, the aim of the study is to examine the linguistic devices used by the vloggers to address their cultural affiliation, how they describe the other culture and how they use cultural features to create humor. To create online specific content the vloggers have to put their experiences into a narrative form. They often use short forms to narrate to the point and create a funny story about their experiences. Therefore, they have to apply different strategies to pin down their main assumptions and statements. In the contribution, the relevant linguistic strategies and patterns are identified and systematized. The background of the analysis is the broad narrative research in linguistics following Labov et al. 1967 (cf. e.g. Iyanga-Mambo 2021), but also pragmatic approaches to knowledge, common ground and humor, especially in intercultural constellations (cf. e.g. Deppermann 2018, Diedrichsen 2023, Ehlich/Rehbein 1977, Kotthoff 1996, Kotthoff 1999, Senkbeil 2023). A sample of short videos from the above-mentioned intercultural vloggers is analyzed with regard to the narrative and illocutive structure and markers of knowledge and common ground. Code switches, language mixtures and borrowings are used to mark up knowledge about a culture (and indicate affiliation to a culture), but other devices and patterns are used as well.
The examination of these forms of intercultural narratives provides information about linguistic procedures in certain media settings, about the linguistic structuring of experience, but also about the perception of interculturality in quotidian life.
References
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