social practice // powerplay

social rules - use of language

‘Defining a word can be seen as challenging, because people have different views of what a word is. Language tells a lot about the way of life, the social interaction with others and in what ways they are developed as a culture. Generally, people in Sweden live far apart from each other, resulting in a less socially linguistically developed country than: for example China (‘s big cities). They have very specific words for specific occasions’. Just like most languages, that still make use of masculine and feminine words. And so on… We are about to explore the different facets or events in language, from code switching to generation friction, to body language and (facial) expressions.

By Vincent
& Samantha

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Our map focuses on a small part of language - how we feel about the words we use, how we feel about the words being used around us, and how we have deliberately altered the language we use over the course of our lives. More specifically, we focused on lavender (LGBTQ) language as well as gendered language. This started as a way for us as collaborators to understand each other better despite our vastly different experiences - one of us being someone who never put much thought into this at all, the other having spent years doing just that.