New languages and new identities in post-socialist Bosnian and Mongolian popular music artists.

Abstract

This chapter explores transformative identities of young pop artists in post-socialist contexts of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Mongolia, as contexts that share a similar political history, but also as current low-income countries with unresolved political issues, social inequalities and strong ethnic and national ideologies. Drawing on linguistic practices of these post-socialist pop artists this chapter addresses two main questions: (1) how new forms of local languages; and (2) how new forms of local identities are performed through the complex linguistic processes of relocalisation. Positioned within the global digital practice and the increasing global spread of Englishes, these young pop artists relocalise English words and phrases to negotiate cultural taboos in their countries as this allows them to express new local youth cultures in a new alternative music wave. They also perform new transformative identities through their musical and lyrical performances and exhibit rebellious ideas against the current sociopolitical status of their countries. This shows that young post-socialist Bosnian and Mongolian music artists should better be understood as active and powerful popular culture producers contrary to those prevalent discourses which position peripheral youth as passive recipients of global culture.