Making the invisible language visible in the digital landscape: Linguemes and infusion for symbolic functions

Focusing on the dual capacity of a shared heritage language to construct in-group identity and demarcate community boundaries despite low proficiency levels, this presentation presents the case of a Kurdish metalinguistic community (Avineri 2019; Avineri and Kroskrity 2014) residing in Kawaguchi, Japan. Analyses of two artefacts from the virtual linguistic landscape and supporting interview data show ways in which Kurdish retains important symbolic functions for this population in spite of widespread Turkish-language dominance. Within in-group contexts, Kurdish identity emerges through post-vernacular (Shandler 2006), ethno-linguistic infusion (Benor 2019) in which Kurdish-language words are inserted into the matrix language of Turkish. Moreover, iconic images and Kurdish-language names work together to index a proud historical narrative and “performatively memorialize” (Leopold 2020) an age-old struggle against assimilation. The presentation of Kurdish identity for the local Japanese community also incorporates ethno-linguistic infusion in the matrix language of Japanese by using a lingueme (Ivković, 2015), a linguistic device that primarily expresses cultural – rather than semantic – meaning. Contributing to the existentially authentic (Wang, 2000) framing of Kurdish culture that is packaged for local Japanese consumption, linguistic strategies such as these co-opt stereotypes in ways that ultimately enhance the group’s visibility and distinguishes it from its Turkish counterparts.