Sociolinguistic effects of mobility: Iranian Azerbaijanis in the U.S.
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation investigates the sociolinguistic effects of mobility. I mainly focus on three analytic dimensions of language use: (a) migration discourses; (b) language ideological discourses; and (c) sociolinguistic grammars, and claim that these three dimensions collectively present a conceptual understanding of a sociolinguistics of mobility and migration. The empirical data motivating my analytic framework come from Iranian Azerbaijanis in the U.S. Scholarship on the sociolinguistics of mobility appears to favor unpredictability with respect to the sociolinguistic effects of mobility and migration – i.e. a rather chaotic situation brought about by the mobility of people and of linguistic resources in a ‘superdiverse’ globalizing world in which patterns of language use are unpredictable. This study attempts to determine what sociolinguistic behaviors change as a result of migration and why, and whether or not some sociolinguistic effects of mobility are indeed predictable. I follow an ethnographically-grounded discourse analytic approach in which I incorporate knowledge of social, cultural, and situational factors obtained through observational and interview data along with detailed transcriptions of interactions to reach a better understanding of the discursive practices of the community under study. To do so, a total of 25 hours of audio-recordings were collected over the past 4 years in two different contexts: Iran and the U.S. In chapter 5, I illustrate that past migration trajectory and current migration status affect migrants’ (re)-construction of spatiotemporal representations of the ideal life, using Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of chronotope. In particular, through comparing the educational migrants with those of the U.S. Green Card lottery winners from Iran, I argue that there are discursively realized differences in how these two groups construct chronotopic images of the ideal life. Moreover, I argue that migration discourse does not necessarily deal wi…
abstract: This dissertation investigates the sociolinguistic effects of mobility. I mainly focus on three analytic dimensions of language use: (a) migration discourses; (b) language ideological discourses; and (c) sociolinguistic grammars, and claim that these three dimensions collectively present a conceptual understanding of a sociolinguistics of mobility and migration. The empirical data motivating my analytic framework come from Iranian Azerbaijanis in the U.S. Scholarship on the sociolinguistics of mobility appears to favor unpredictability with respect to the sociolinguistic effects of mobility and migration – i.e. a rather chaotic situation brought about by the mobility of people and of linguistic resources in a ‘superdiverse’ globalizing world in which patterns of language use are unpredictable. This study attempts to determine what sociolinguistic behaviors change as a result of migration and why, and whether or not some sociolinguistic effects of mobility are indeed predictable. I follow an ethnographically-grounded discourse analytic approach in which I incorporate knowledge of social, cultural, and situational factors obtained through observational and interview data along with detailed transcriptions of interactions to reach a better understanding of the discursive practices of the community under study. To do so, a total of 25 hours of audio-recordings were collected over the past 4 years in two different contexts: Iran and the U.S. In chapter 5, I illustrate that past migration trajectory and current migration status affect migrants’ (re)-construction of spatiotemporal representations of the ideal life, using Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of chronotope. In particular, through comparing the educational migrants with those of the U.S. Green Card lottery winners from Iran, I argue that there are discursively realized differences in how these two groups construct chronotopic images of the ideal life. Moreover, I argue that migration discourse does not necessarily deal wi…
author: Karimzad Sharifi, Farzad
language: en
keywords: Sociolinguistics, Discourse analysis, Mobility, Migration, Azerbaijani/Azeri, Diaspora, Chronotope, Language and identity, Language ideology, Ethnolinguistic identity, Code-switching, Multilingualism
date published: 2017-09-29T17:45:15Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:35Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/98180