Czenglish memes about this divný národ : Kavárna strikes back (or does it?)
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Twitter and Facebook, apart from serving as platforms for fast (real and fake) news dissemination, political marketing and public discussion, have also become a site of political carnivalism. In this paper, I argue that CzenglishMemy, a Twitter and a Facebook profile with the subtitle Czenglish memes about this divný národ, may present a fine example of such political carnival site by combining images featuring current news stories with Czenglish captions. First, I analyze the linguistic and multimodal means through which the humorous effect is created (post-image-caption interplay, lexical choice, code-switching patterns, syntactic violations, etc.). Next, I discuss the target audience of the Czenglish memes and critically examine their potential impact. I argue that since the interpretation of the memes requires good proficiency in English (the access to which may still be a challenge outside of major cities in the Czech Republic), the intended political carnivalism remains but a creative word-play accessible mainly to the members of the privileged strata of Czech society. |
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