What is Slanguages? How are slang and community languages related to the creative economy? Why should we care?

This presentation will seek to answer these questions by drawing on the work of a major 4-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded £4m research project that explored creativity and multilingualism between 2016 and 2020. By working with a wide variety of artists and creatives who use different languages in their practices, a range of examples will be illustrated to show how formal and slang forms of languages have been used for self-expression, community representations, and communicative purposes. Creatives on our project used at least one other language in their work in the creative industries alongside English. They have also played with the spoken form and performance of languages, sometimes blending and mixing languages to speak, sing or perform through slang, and sometimes creating their own unique slang as a result. By drawing on these examples a case will also be made as to how the creative economy is enhanced and could be developed further through creative and academic interactions.

Dr Rajinder Dudrah is Professor of Cultural Studies and the Creative Industries at Birmingham City University, UK. He has researched and published widely across film, media, culture and the creative industries and is the author and co-editor of 15 books, including South Asian Creative and Cultural Industries (2020). He has led international research projects across the creative economy and academia, including being a Co-Investigator on the £4m AHRC funded ‘Creative Multilingualism’ project with the University of Oxford (2016-2020), and leading on the ‘India-UK Creative Industries at 75’ project (2022) which brought together 30 artists from India and the UK across fashion, live performance, and the screen industries. He is also a founding Co-Editor of the scholarly journal South Asian Popular Culture published by Taylor and Francis and is currently working on his new book as part of a Leverhulme funded Major Research Fellowship entitled ‘E-Bollywood: Popular Hindi Cinema in the Age of New Media’.