Towards a material ethnography of linguistic landscape: Multilingualism,mobility and space in a South African township1

The study of multilingual landscapes promises to introduce a new perspective into theories and policies of multilingualism, and to provide essential data for a politics of language. However, the theorization of space and language underlying the notion of linguistic landscape is not able to capture the manifold complexities of (transnational) multilingual mobility that is characteristic of many late‐modern multilingual societies. Basing our argument on signage data from a contemporary South Africa in a dynamic phase of social transformation, we argue that more refined notions of space coupled to a material ethnography of multilingualism could provide a theoretically more relevant and methodologically refocused notion of (multilingual) linguistic landscape. Specifically, we take an approach to landscapes as semiotic moments in the social circulation of discourses (in multiple languages), and view signs as re‐semiotized, socially invested distributions of multilingual resources, the material, symbolic and interactional artifacts of a sociolinguistics of mobility.     

Found in Transliteration: Translanguaging and the Polyvocality of Xiqu Centre

This article illustrates how the linguistic‐anthropological notion of axes of differentiation can illuminate translanguaging practices. Through an analysis of media texts, it explores the ways in which multilingual Hongkongers draw on their semiotic repertoires to make sense of Xiqu Centre as the English name of the recently inaugurated center for traditional Chinese theater in their city. Against the backdrop of different axes of differentiation, supporters and detractors contrast the Putonghua word xìqǔ “traditional Chinese theater” with its equivalents in English and Cantonese respectively, thereby arriving at diametrically opposed interpretations of the name. While many detractors engage in interpretive practices that challenge the discreteness of linguistic systems, others who use their multilingual knowledge to criticize the name appeal to ideologies of linguistic purism. To fully understand multilinguals’ production and interpretation of signs, we need to examine not only communicative practices that disrupt language boundaries but also those practices that do not.     

Metrolingual multitasking and spatial repertoires: ‘Pizza mo two minutes coming’

Drawing on data from two restaurants in Sydney and Tokyo, this paper describes the ways in which linguistic resources, everyday tasks and social space are intertwined in terms of metrolingual multitasking. Rather than the demolinguistic enumeration of mappable multilingualism or the language‐to‐language or language‐to‐person focus of translingualism, metrolingualism focuses on everyday language practices and their relations to urban space. In order to capture the dynamism of the urban linguistic landscape, this paper explores this relationship between metrolingual multitasking – the ways in which linguistic resources, activities and urban space are bound together – and spatial repertoires – the linguistic resources available in a particular place – arguing that a focus on resources, repertoires, space, place and activity helps us understand how multilingualism from below operates in complex urban places.     

‘First things first,I'm the realest’: Linguistic appropriation,white privilege,and the hip‐hop persona of Iggy Azalea

The ‘hip‐hop nation’ is a multiethnic, transnational community that originates from and privileges urban African American experiences. Scholars have explored ways that non‐African Americans worldwide use linguistic features of African American English (AAE) as a way of constructing hip‐hop affiliated identities. The current paper ties these strands together in a study of the linguistic patterns of white Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, who makes use of AAE in her music, but not in other public speech. Our study presents a variationist analysis of copula absence in her lyrics. Findings show that her rates of this hallmark feature of AAE are extremely high, when compared to similar analyses of other rappers. We argue that her overzealous application of AAE features in her music, in order to create a specific linguistic style, enables a success that rests ultimately on the appropriation of African American language and culture, and the privilege that whiteness affords.     

Normalizing bilingualism:The effects of the Catalonian linguistic normalization policy one generation after1

This study examines the evolution of language attitudes of linguistically diverse adolescents in urban Catalonia a generation after the instauration of Linguistic Normalization, official language policies favoring Catalan. Woolard (1984, 1989) and Woolard and Gahng's (1990) classic Catalan/Spanish matched guise studies are used as a baseline. Current data come from a modified and expanded replication of those original studies. Findings show: (1) differences in attitudes between youths of Spanish and Catalan background have softened; (2) disparities in Status and Solidarity have evened out; (3) language choice can be highly gendered; and (4) bilingual proficiency is now valued by and for both communities. The support for bilingualism and the easing of divisions are understood as signs of increased ‘linguistic cosmopolitanism,’ a stance that looks beyond parochial own‐group communities and favors bridging linguistic boundaries. The significance is that minority languages can be valued when they take on such symbolic roles.     

Gender norms and styling in Japanese conversation: A multilevel analysis

The observation that gender differences in Japanese language use are becoming less prevalent as women increasingly use ‘men's language’ appears in popular media from time to time. Some empirical studies support this view. However, such observations are usually based on the consideration of only one or two linguistic features, especially sentence-final forms and personal pronouns. In contrast, this study analyzes the use of multiple linguistic and paralinguistic features related to gender, regarding them as resources for styling identity. According to our analysis of eight same-gender and mixed-gender dyadic conversations of college students, these speakers’ use of features other than sentence-final forms, which we found to vary little by gender, is normatively gendered to a large extent. The study thus demonstrates that the analysis of multiple and multilevel variables enables us to better understand the complex process of styling through the speaker's negotiation of linguistic gender norms in actual practice.     

Socio‐economic stratification of English in globalized landscapes: A market‐oriented perspective

Globalization has dramatically altered the urban societies of Amsterdam and Brussels over recent decades, with intensified socio‐economic inequality, unprecedented levels of multilingualism and the increasing importance of English. In this paper, I examine the use of English in the linguistic landscape of socio‐economically stratified commercial shopping streets in these two second‐tier global cities. I adopt a market‐oriented, contextualized approach to quantitative and qualitative variability in how English emerges in these particular commercial ‘linguistic markets’. McDonaldization in midscale shopping streets occurs alongside downscale and upscale uses of English which are more susceptible to local commercial dynamics, in particular in Brussels. As such, global English in these single city contexts emerges as a heterogeneous and scaled phenomenon shaped by specific local commercial and linguistic market conditions.     

Movers as early adopters of linguistic innovation

Long‐distance migration is a primary source of language contact. Those who voluntarily migrate, though, may not resemble the broader population: psychological research suggests some factors that predispose people to become migrants also tend to lead to more openness to trying new things, potentially including linguistic features. This implies differential reactions to language contact, so inferences drawn from migrants may not generalize to the language‐contact process more generally. To test this hypothesis, this article examines lexical patterns in the 1940 United States census, focusing on who used the title mortician or funeral director rather than the traditional undertaker. Individuals who had moved from their state of birth were particularly likely to use the newer terms, even when explicitly controlling for the distribution of titles among the states from which the movers relocated. The personal characteristics leading people to encounter new linguistic environments may also independently affect their choices within those environments.     

Appropriation of African American slang by Asian American youth1

This article explores the ways in which Asian American teenagers creatively appropriated two African American slang terms: aite and na mean. While some teens racialized slang as belonging to African Americans, other teens authenticated identities as slang speakers. Through close analysis of slang‐in‐use and particularly of the metapragmatic discussions such uses inspired, this article examines how the teens specified relationships between language, race, age, region and class, while achieving multiple social purposes, such as identifying with African Americans, marking urban youth subcultural participation, and interactionally positioning themselves and others as teachers and students of slang. As slang emerged with local linguistic capital, the teens used slang to create social boundaries not only between teens and adults, but also between each other. The discursive salience of region implicitly indexed socio‐economic status and proximity to African Americans as markers that teens drew on to authenticate themselves and others as slang speakers.     

The backstage work negotiators do when communicating with persons in crisis

When a person in crisis threatens suicide, police negotiators engage them in a conversation to prevent death. Working in small teams, the primary negotiator's role is to talk directly to the person in crisis. A secondary negotiator, working “behind the scenes,” supports the ongoing negotiation. Using 31 hours of audio‐recorded British negotiations, we uncover the backstage work of secondary negotiators. We use conversation analysis to identify the sequential position, linguistic form, and action of the secondary negotiator's interventions on (1) the delivery (e.g. “sound angry”) and (2) next actions (e.g. “say please,” “try asking them to move”) of the primary negotiator, and how the primary incorporates them into the negotiation. Our analysis shows that, while some suggestions were effective, others disrupted the flow of the negotiation as well as the alignment between primary negotiator and person in crisis. The paper augments current sociolinguistic understandings of the high‐stakes language activity of crisis negotiation and highlights the importance of attending to linguistic features of interaction when training negotiators to work better as a team.     

Ethnolinguistic repertoire: Shifting the analytic focus in language and ethnicity1

This paper addresses a contradiction in research on language and ethnicity: how can we discuss distinctively ethnic ways of speaking and still account for the variation and fluidity that characterize them? The theoretical construct introduced in this paper enables researchers to avoid this contradiction. ‘Ethnolinguistic repertoire’ is defined as a fluid set of linguistic resources that members of an ethnic group may use variably as they index their ethnic identities. This construct shifts the analytic focus from ethnic ‘language varieties’ to individuals, ethnic groups, and their distinctive linguistic features. It addresses problems of inter‐group, inter‐speaker, and intra‐speaker variation, as well as debates about who should be considered a speaker of a dialect. This approach, which can also be applied to social groupings beyond ethnicity, is discussed in relation to other approaches and is supported with data on language use in African American, Latino, and Jewish communities in the United States.     

Nationality and the European union competing identities in the visual design of four European cities 1

In this study, we integrate visual and linguistic research to analyze the relationship between a city's regional, national, transnational, and European identities as the face of four cities depicts it. We explore the cultural identity of Brussels, Luxembourg, Munich, and Dortmund through the study of public signs found in these cities. We examine how the choice of language, layout, typography, accompanying images, and positioning of city signs reflect the tensions involving the change from a national or regional identity to a Pan‐European identity. Our methodology combines an ethnographic approach and neutral observations with interviews of city inhabitants. By combining interpretive analysis with a meta‐discursive approach to how signs are read and perceived, we consider both the production and reception ends of the signs.     

What does it mean to be a girl with qizhi?:Refinement,gender and language ideologies in contemporary Taiwan1

This study investigates the relationship between ideologies of language and gender as manifested through sociolinguistic interviews conducted on college campuses in Taiwan. The interviews consistently and systematically revealed the use of a term, qizhi– roughly equivalent to ‘refined disposition.’ This paper examines the implications of this preoccupation. Through an examination of the contextual use of qizhi, this study shows that, first, qizhi is commonly associated with a range of social practices, among which linguistic practices play a significant role. Second, qizhi is often used to describe, evaluate, and further regulate women's ways of speaking, although its use is not gender exclusive. Third, common linguistic varieties in Taiwan, such as Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Taiwanese‐accented Mandarin, are associated with qizhi to varying degrees. This study demonstrates how talk centered on qizhi serves as a meeting ground of social evaluation, linguistic and discursive practices, gender ideologies, and language ideologies.     

(Mis)interpreting urban youth language: white kids sounding black?

The language of young people is often viewed very negatively by some sections of the mainstream media and by some social commentators in the UK. While this is nothing new – older generations routinely despair of how the youth of today are ruining the language – what is different now is the added element of ethnicity, whereby young people of various ethnicities are perceived as using some kind of ‘ghetto grammar’ or ‘Jafaican’ which carry often explicit connotations of ‘sounding black’. This paper challenges the mainstream view by firstly introducing the linguistic take on this emerging Multicultural Urban British English, and then exploring the views of young people themselves on how they use language by taking qualitative data from a linguistic ethnography project involving 14–16-year-olds in a non-mainstream urban educational setting. The young people provide insights into their language that are in complete opposition to the views so often expressed in the media, and which instead suggest that linguistic features that were previously strongly associated with specific ethnicities are being used in new and innovative ways. Refreshingly, it would appear that for many young people ethnicity is simply not a consideration, at least in relation to language.     

Semiosis,interaction and ethnicity in urban Java1

This paper teases out the interdiscursive relations between local and perduring signs of personhood and their recontextualization in situated talk. In doing so, I aim to provide further evidence of the utility of incorporating ethnography, linguistic anthropological work on semiotics and work on face‐to‐face interaction. My empirical focus is on two consecutive men's meetings that occurred in an urban Indonesian milieu. In particular, I draw upon work on semiotic register formation and processes of social identification to flesh out how signs from different temporal‐spatial scales figure in the social identification of a non‐present neighbor as deviant and Chinese. By taking an interactional view I also attempt to fill a gap in the scholarship on such inter‐ethnic relations in Indonesia, which has hitherto primarily been historical in nature.     

Contact,the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English

In the multilingual centres of Northern Europe's major cities, new varieties of the host languages are emerging. While some analyse these ‘multiethnolects’ as youth styles, we take a variationist approach to an emerging ‘Multicultural London English’ (MLE), asking: (1) what features characterise MLE; (2) at what age(s) are they acquired; (3) is MLE vernacularised; and (4) when did MLE emerge, and what factors enabled this? We argue that innovations in the diphthongs and the quotative system are generated from the specific sociolinguistics of inner‐city London, where at least half the population is undergoing group second‐language acquisition and where high linguistic diversity leads to a heterogeneous feature pool to select from. We look for incrementation ( Labov 2001 ) in the acquisition of the features, but find this only for two ‘global’ changes, BE LIKE and goose ‐fronting, for which adolescents show the highest usage. Community‐internal factors explain the age‐related variation in the remaining features.     

YOUR LANGUAGE OR MINE? THE NONCOMMUNICATIVE BENEFITS OF LANGUAGE SKILLS

Do languages matter beyond their communicative benefits? We explore the potential role of preferences over the language of use, theoretically and empirically. We focus on Catalonia, a bilingual society where everyone is fully proficient in Spanish, to isolate linguistic preferences from communicative benefits. Moreover, we exploit the language‐in‐education reform of 1983 to identify the causal effects of language skills. Results indicate that the policy change has improved the Catalan proficiency of native Spanish speakers, which in turn increased their propensity to find Catalan‐speaking partners. Hence, the acquisition of apparently redundant language skills has reduced endogamy. (JEL C26, C78, I28, J12, J15, Z13)     

A Cross‐National Investigation of the Relationship Between Infant Walking and Language Development

The acquisition of walking has recently been linked with infant language development (Walle & Campos, 2014). If this relation reflects the consequence of an epigenetic event, then it should be present regardless of when the infant typically begins to walk, the infant's culture, and the infant's native language. This study sought to replicate the previously reported link between walking and language development in American infants and investigate whether this relation exists cross‐nationally in typically developing Chinese infants exposed to Mandarin. Urban Chinese infants not only provide a distinct linguistic and cultural population in which to study this relation but also typically begin walking approximately 6 weeks later than American infants. Our results demonstrated that (1) walking infants in both the American and Chinese samples had greater receptive and productive vocabularies than same‐aged crawling infants, (2) differences between crawling and walking infants were proportionally similar in each sample, and (3) the walking‐language relation was present for both noun and non‐noun vocabularies. These findings provide further support of a relation between infant walking onset and language development, independent of age. Avenues for future research of the processes involved in this relation, as well as additional populations of interest to investigate, are discussed.