Who Owns Language in Online Real-Time Interactions?
Keywords:
conversation analysis, epistemic stance, epistemic status, intercultural communication, L2 language educationAbstract
Research on epistemics in conversation has shown that various difficulties arise in conversation when there is no symmetry in knowledge, and how interlocutors navigate the asymmetries introduced by epistemic status and epistemic stance (cf. Heritage & Raymond, 2005). Yet, there is no empirical study which shows how these asymmetries are navigated between German native speakers (L1 speakers) and language learners (L2 speakers). The data presented in this paper entail examples where language learners of German are more knowledgeable (K+) about the target culture and native speakers are less knowledgeable (K-) about their own culture. It shows that there is an ongoing competition between L1 and L2 speakers, specifically between their status-based authority, which addresses what native speakers should know, given their status (Drew, 1991) and source-based authority, which deals with actual experience (Enfield, 2011).
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Copyright (c) 2026 Budimka Uskokovic (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Linguistic Forum – A Journal of Linguistics is an open-access journal. All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License. Authors retain copyright while granting the journal the right of first publication. The CC BY 4.0 License permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction, adaptation, and commercial reuse in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and appropriate credit is given to the author(s) and the journal.
