English at the center of the periphery: ‘Chicken nuggets’, chronotopes, and scaling English in Bahraini youth

With the spread of English in Bahrain, ‘chicken nugget’ emerged as a term aimed at English-dominant, typically private-school-educated youth. Drawing on data from Bahraini youth, I show how participants orient to different timespaces as they negotiate their identities relative to the ‘chicken nugget’ figure of personhood. Applying discourse analytic methods to participants’ metacommentaries, I demonstrate how they utilize scaling to elevate this label to a fractally recursive bundle of discursive processes, deeming a wider range of people as chicken nuggets depending on the chronotopic conditions of different timespaces. I further show how speakers evoke different exogenous and endogenous styles of English to allow for complex identification processes: the English of chicken nuggets is excessive and exaggerated, as opposed to English as a necessary communication tool in neoliberal contexts. Thus, this article has implications for our understandings of fractal recursivity, English use in globalized contexts, and the sociolinguistics of identity.