Gathering everyday metacommentary: A methodology to counteract institutional erasure

This article reports on preliminary research investigating linguistic diversity on a college campus by analyzing individuals' everyday comments about their own language. We developed a three-phase method to gather metacommentary from members of the university community, then analyzed these comments by attending to distinctions participants themselves made about their own repertoire variation across contexts. We illustrate how individuals' fine-grained distinctions about their own language use can be a highly socially relevant tool for disaggregating broad, institutionally generated labels for linguistically, nationally, and culturally diverse groups. Our findings suggests that further research that accounts for the fine distinctions within everyday metacommentary may counter processes of homogenization-discussed herein in terms of erasure (Gal, 1998) and 'lumping'-coming from both within and outside of institutionally labeled groups.