The ordinariness of youth linguascapes in Mongolia

Abstract

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Drawing on varied offline and online contexts, this article indicates that youth linguistic diversity in contemporary Mongolia is better understood from the perspective of ‘the ordinariness of linguascapes’. The notion of ‘linguascapes’ is important in capturing the rising complexity of youth mixed language practices fundamentally produced by the amalgamation of transnational linguistic resources that are intersecting with other social landscapes. However, these youth linguascapes in Mongolia are neither novel nor eccentric linguistic productions as mostly imagined in the local language ideology. Instead, youth linguascapes in Mongolia should be understood as part of young people's everyday, mundane and ordinary linguistic practices. Consequently, it is important for language educators and language policy-makers in Mongolia to reconsider youth linguistic diversity in globalisation through the eyes of sameness of differences or the ordinariness of the diversity.