On high horses: Transnational Nepalis and language ideologies on YouTube

In this paper, I investigate transnationalism as one major dimension of contemporary superdiversity. In doing so, I examine how Nepalis in the diaspora employ YouTube as a discursive site to express their collective identity by responding to the video of speech delivered in ‘bad’ English by Nepal׳s minister for health at a UN meeting. Focusing on ideologies of English in the context of Nepal, I discuss three key themes that emerged in the video texts and comments: language ideologies in the entextualization of the videos, language ideologies and discourses of prestige and disgrace, and the relationship of language ideologies with political ideologies. Overall, the analysis shows that YouTube brings superdiverse participants together with their multiple subjectivities, identities and attitudes, and their demonstrated language competence is characterized by varied forms of linguistic repertoires in English and in Nepali. Ideologically, the comments seem to reproduce the modernist view of language as a bounded system, but linguistic resources used to construct these comments show a number of linguistic peculiarities and heteroglossic uses that challenge the writers’ own conscious conceptualization of language. Finally, the study provides insights for understanding the role of transnational digital media for a sociolinguistics of superdiversity.