Mobile language practices in Gujarat: developing the capacity to aspire

This paper promotes the idea that the linguistic and communicative practices associated with digital communication can be encouraged to strengthen people’s capacity to aspire (Appadurai, 2004) through the development of voice (Hymes, 1996). People aspire to all sorts of things – for example, to enhanced educational opportunities, which might in turn lead to a greater material standard of living, social mobility, and political recognition. Voice is not only the ability to speak but more importantly the capacity to be audible, to ‘generate an uptake of one’s words’ (Blommaert, 2005, p.68). Our concern is with the potential of the use of digital technology to enable people to be audible, and the consequent promise of audibility to combat failure of aspiration. We locate voice in terms of what people want to aspire to, and how their interactions and uses of particular linguistic and communicative resources within their networks might support these aspirations. Our paper discusses aspects of a new project in development which will document the communicative practices of marginalised people in the west-Indian state of Gujarat as they use mobile phones. This research aims to ascertain how the use of mobile and networked digital technology might challenge established marginalisation, and will inform other development contexts worldwide. Poverty is many things, all of them bad (Appadurai, 2004, p.64)