Language shaming practices on Youtube : ideologies of English in Vietnam

Abstract

As English has gradually become the global language, users of this lingua franca find themselves constantly challenged and intimidated by a new wave of linguistic attack online known as “language shaming practices on YouTube.” Language shaming in general or English shaming in particular can be understood as any forms of interaction that degrade any certain ways of using language.

This study investigates English shaming in the context of Vietnam. More specifically, it aims to examine how Vietnamese YouTube users, by responding to a video of a Vietnamese beauty queen speaking in what is deemed “bad” English, articulate the existing local ideologies surrounding English in an era of globalization. Employing the theories of language ideologies and indexicality as the foci of this study’s conceptual framework, I will illustrate the discursive “shaming” processes by which Vietnamese users attribute new indexical values to English. In terms of research methodology, I apply notions from New Media Sociolinguistics on a macro-level and a three-phased inductive coding on a micro-level.

Findings indicate a complex network of intertwined first and second-order indexicalities associated with the role and status of English in Vietnam. Particularly, English is not merely seen as a popular foreign language but may potentially serve as a powerful index of: 1) education and intelligence level, 2) beauty queen standard, 3) national prestige, and last but not least, 4) an imagined, superior globalness. Overall, findings from this research provide an impetus for the problematization of Western-centric globalization and mythos of a “standard” English variety.