Ideologies of Personhood: A Citizen Sociolinguistic Case Study of the Roman Dialect
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The status and role of Italy’s dialetti (dialects) in contemporary Italian society are contested among both citizens and sociolinguists, and their nuanced uses have begun to circulate (with commentary) around social media. This report adopts a citizen sociolinguistic approach (Rymes & Leone, this volume) to analyze a single controversial case about the Roman dialect via YouTube and Facebook, drawing on social media users’ metacommentary and recontextualizations (Rymes, 2012) of an interview with two young women at the beach. Rather than attempting to identify static and isolated characteristics of the Roman dialect based on this interview, this report analyzes the social values and linguistic characteristics that citizen sociolinguists attribute to these young women’s particular ways of speaking, acting, and being.