Metrolingualism

Language in the City

Alastair Pennycook, Emi Otsuji

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415831635
• eBook ISBN: 9781317530305
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book is about language and the city. Pennycook and Otsuji introduce the notion of 'metrolingualism', showing how language and the city are deeply involved in a perpetual exchange between people, history, migration, architecture, urban landscapes and linguistic resources. Cities and languages are in constant change, as new speakers with new repertoires come into contact as a result of globalization and the increased mobility of people and languages.

Metrolingualism sheds light on the ordinariness of linguistic diversity as people go about their daily lives, getting things done, eating and drinking, buying and selling, talking and joking, drawing on whatever linguistic resources are available. Engaging with current debates about multilingualism, and developing a new way of thinking about language, the authors explore language within a number of contemporary urban situations, including cafés, restaurants, shops, streets, construction sites and other places of work, in two diverse cities, Sydney and Tokyo. This is an invaluable look at how people of different backgrounds get by linguistically.

Metrolingualism: Language in the city will be of special interest to advanced undergraduate/postgraduate students and researchers of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.

1 Morning markets and metrolingual multitasking

DOI: 10.4324/9781315724225-1

The Produce Market: Salamu alaykum mate

It’s a little after five o’clock in the morning. While much of the rest of the city is still asleep in the predawn gloom, Sydney Produce Market is alight and buzzing. As we travel across the dark city in time for the busiest period of the morning, we traverse the rhythmic urban patterns as the city breathes in and out. Unlike the quiet of the tree-lined suburbs, Oxford Street is alive and noisy, brawny dark-clothed bouncers watching nightclub patrons spilling out onto the pavement. Taxis hover: The night shift changed over at 3 a.m., and fresh drivers are patrolling the streets looking for a late night (for the clubbers) or early morning (for the drivers) ride before public transport gets moving. Early morning garbage trucks are starting up; road workers are closing up after a night job.

Meanwhile, the produce market is humming with activity: Giant trailer trucks are pulled up alongside loading bays, stacked high with bananas and other tropical fruit (transported down south from Queensland overnight), or packed with vegetables and stone fruit from Canberra and Shepparton to the southwest, or apples from Tasmania even further south. Their cargoes of fruit and vegetables are whisked away on forklifts. Everywhere forklifts – hundreds of them, lights on, hurtling backwards (the loads piled up on the forks make driving forwards impossible), turning in tight circles, moving pallets of oranges, onions, pineapples, bananas, beetroot, potatoes from one place to another.¹ This is the largest fresh food market in Australia, and one of the largest in the world. It is estimated that 2,500,000 tonnes of fresh fruit and vegetables are sold through this market annually, through the hundreds of wholesalers, produce growers and flower grower-sellers.

Among the movements of products and people, Muhibb and Talib are busy.

Excerpt 1.1 (M: Muhibb, T: Talib, P: Passerby)

(Transcription conventions are provided in appendix 1) Arabic: italics; English: plain (translation in brackets)

1. M: Hey! Johnny fix up the stand! Here move these cherry tomatoes put them with them. Let them do it. Let them do Hog’s Breath … If you wanna do anything … if my dad’s not doing it start here.
2. T: Ed da calaphak? Etnan? (How much did it cost you? Two?)
3. M: Sorry. Eh tnanan dollar! (Yeah two dollars)
   [Ten seconds pause]
   [phone conversation]
4. T: Joe … good morning, Can you send me one ras one blues please. Thank you very much. See ya buddy! Coles is on special. Dollar seventy and dollar sixty on u::mm on on what do you call it … two dollars.
5. P: Salamu alaykum mate (Peace be upon you, mate)
6. M: Wa alaykum assalam (Peace upon you too)

At their stall on the floor of the giant warehouse – the size of three football pitches – Talib and Muhibb are hard at work. The different areas are being set up, pallets of goods piling up for sale. Each area has a portable desk, dropped off and removed by a forklift. This is where the deals are done, the paperwork is shifted, the cash changes hands. They are surrounded by food on the move, workers loading and unloading fruit and vegetables, forklifts picking up loaded pallets and bringing new loads of tomatoes or beans or strawberries or onions.

This is the north end, generally understood as the ‘Lebanese section’ (a walk from the south of the warehouse takes one through sections recognized as Chinese, Vietnamese, Maltese, Italian, Lebanese). On the side of the brothers’ desk is a Ramadan calendar. The brothers – second generation Lebanese Australian – are strongly built, hair cut short, beards bulky. In T-shirts, they are dressed to work. Others in the warehouse wear the traditional leather market aprons. The two brothers run this movable business with their father and one other brother (and seven other employees of Turkish, Pakistani, Moroccan, Sudanese-Egyptian, Somalian and Filipino backgrounds), a business that comes and goes with the forklifts. As we discuss further in the next chapter, the ‘Lebaneseness’ of this section of the market is also constructed from a sense of Lebanese being the default Arabic community in Sydney, whereas, as we see from the backgrounds of these co-workers, there are in fact far more complex sets of linguistic, regional, religious and migrationary affiliations at play across the workforce.

Such interactions capture much of what we wish to get at in this book: They are, first of all, an example of what we have elsewhere (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2014 a) called metrolingual multitasking, a term we use to capture the ways in which linguistic resources, everyday tasks and social space are intertwined. The seamless management of linguistic resources and interlinked practices are very evident in the previous extract as the two brothers organize their working area (line 1) with instructions to their other workers, work out prices (lines 2 and 3), call suppliers (line 4) and greet other workers (lines 5 and 6). The linguistic resources of this workspace are generally drawn from English and Lebanese Arabic, though the two brothers use a considerable variety of styles and registers (modifying both their English and their Arabic according to different customers and contexts). They employ a particular local variety of ‘market talk’: ‘one ras one blues’ for raspberries and blueberries, and elsewhere ‘caulies’ for cauliflower, ‘rocky’ for rockmelon, alongside alternations between mixed terms such as allettuce and khass (using the Arabic article ‘al’ with ‘lettuce’ in the first case, and the Arabic word for lettuce in the second). They frequently mix English and Arabic (Sorry. Eh tnanan dollar!), as do other people in the market (Salamu alaykum mate).

For Wood and Landry (2008) ‘the market – both as a concept and a physical location – is central to any understanding of intercultural exchange’ (p. 148). The market place, they go on, ‘for many throughout history – and still today – is the place where, for the first time, people physically encounter someone who is visibly distinct from them, who speaks and dresses differently and who offers unusual cultural goods and experiences’ (p. 148). Markets, more than any other city space, perhaps define human engagement with difference. While language is crucial for Talib and Muhibb in getting their business done, they are not ‘language workers’ in the sense that language is a central tool of their trade (unlike, say, call centre workers, translators, teachers, lawyers). Language is important to them in their constant transactions but so too is the price of parsley. This is a place where stuff gets done, where the quality and price of the onions convinces a buyer; and as we shall discuss later (Chapter 8), the languages of these markets – spoken in interwoven mixes by working people – may indeed have little ‘market value’ in the broader sense. It is also a place where the longstanding relation with the customer matters, where the ability to convince the buyer about the cucumbers, mangoes or zucchini is a skill, and where the interaction between workers and customers, buying, selling, loading a pallet for pickup or delivery, getting more produce brought in on a forklift, happens multimodally.

Our aim in this book is to develop an understanding of the relationship among the use of such diverse linguistic resources (drawn from different languages, varieties and registers), the repertoires of such workers, the activities in which they are engaged, and the larger space in which this occurs. This focus brings together metrolingual practices and the city; it is about getting things done, everyday language use and local language practices in relation to urban space (see Chapter 2). The focus on metrolingualism is part of our attempt to understand linguistic resources in relation to the city, to show how everyday multilingualism operates in markets, cafés, streets, shops and other social city spaces. The term metrolingualism, which will be explored throughout this book, was originally developed by extending the notion of metroethnicity (Maher, 2005) to refer to ‘creative linguistic conditions across space and borders of culture, history and politics, as a way to move beyond current terms such as multilingualism and multiculturalism’ (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010, p. 244). As we defined the term then, metrolingualism ‘describes the ways in which people of different and mixed backgrounds use, play with and negotiate identities through language’. Rather than assuming connections between language and culture, ethnicity, nationality or geography, metrolingualism ‘seeks to explore how such relations are produced, resisted, defied or rearranged; its focus is not on language systems but on languages as emergent from contexts of interaction’ (p. 246).

Since then, as explained in further detail in Chapter 3, our use of the term has shifted away from a focus on playful or wilful creativity towards an understanding of everyday language use in the city. Like other recent thinking that has sought to challenge the language of bilingualism, code-mixing and code-switching, and instead has focused on the mobility of linguistic resources (Blommaert, 2010), translanguaging (Blackledge & Creese, 2010; Garcia, 2009; Li Wei, 2011), transglossia (Garcia, 2013, 2014; Sultana, Dovchin & Pennycook, 2015) or polylingual languaging (Jørgensen, 2008 a; Møller, 2008), we have aimed to open up a way of thinking about multilingualism centred around the everyday use of mobile linguistic resources in relation to urban space (McQuire, 2008). Unlike these approaches, however, with their focus on resources and individual repertoires, metrolingualism makes central the relations between language practices and the city.

This chapter raises a number of the central themes of this book by sketching some of the language practices of the Produce Market complex and looking at the interrelationship between language practices, spatial relations and getting things done. We are not so much interested therefore in a mundane mapping of the languages used, nor the impossible task of grasping the entirety of language practices in the market, but rather are focusing on ‘mobile resources rather than immobile languages’ (Blommaert, 2010, p. 197). We are interested in the dynamic ways in which the layered languages, tasks, practices and spaces combine together to produce spatial repertoires (Chapter 4) and the metrolingua francas (Chapter 8) of such urban markets. That these interactions will involve a diverse array of linguistic and other resources we take as a given, and while we note with a certain delight the possibility of an Australian-Lebanese-Arabic phrase such as ‘Salamu alaykum mate’ as one worker passes a stall in the predawn business of the Market, we do not intend to emphasize the ‘mixing’ or ‘hybridity’ of such language use but rather to take it as the norm (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2014).

Languages of the market: lingo-ing in their own language

How, then, might we go about understanding the languages of this market? As already suggested, we are not so much interested in a demolinguistic approach to this – mapping percentages of language backgrounds – but in the daily practices. Joseph, who runs the two cafés at either end of this vast expanse of fruit and vegetables, is useful on this. The cafés, which open at midnight, provide the expected breakfast foods – burgers, bacon and eggs – but also a mix of other foods. While the café his son runs at the other ‘Lebanese’ end of the warehouse has food such as Lebanese bread with za’atar, Joseph’s café, at the more ‘Chinese’ end has a range of other dishes, such as wonton soup, satay chicken and Mongolian beef hotpot, among Portuguese chicken and bacon and egg rolls. The staff are of various backgrounds: the cooks Chinese, the woman making the coffee Korean, the owner, Joseph, Lebanese. English is a common language of the café, but others, especially Arabic and Cantonese, are also in use.

This market is where Joseph has always worked – selling vegetables, driving a forklift – since he arrived in Sydney 36 years before: ‘Well, put it that way, they picked me up from the airport … drove me to the bottom gate down there, and I’m still stuck over here in this maze, I haven’t got out of that maze yet!’ (Joseph, interview, August, 8, 2012). His 24-year-old son runs the other café. As he explains, his son speaks English to his second generation Lebanese Australian mother but ‘speaks Lebanese, fluent Lebanese with me. Fluent. On the same dinner table, we’ll be together, he turns around, I’m on the left he goes he speaks to me in Lebanese, and he speaks to his mother in English’. We shall return particularly in Chapter 6 to the significance of the combination between food, language and eating together (commensality), the intertwining of culinary and linguistic resources. For Joseph it is the dinner table that is a site of sociolinguistic interaction, which he discusses in everyday local language terminology (‘fluent Lebanese’), both a picture of the very ordinariness of mixed language use and also a source of pride.

The overarching common language of this market is, not surprisingly, English (whatever exactly is meant by that label), but what gets used when and with whom also depends on the day of the week, who is buying from whom and where the interaction takes place. ‘But if between a buyer and a seller that is a common language of their background is spoken they do use it, OK, they feel more comfortable they feel more comfortable lingo-ing in their own language’ (Joseph, interview, August, 8, 2012). The two dominant languages of the market are Lebanese Arabic and Cantonese, though this varies by area:

Door 1, 2, down to door 5 … very very populated area with Lebanese background people. And they use, very often they use broken English and lingo in Lebanese. Past that area there’s no traders of Lebanese people, so we go back to different nationalities. Maltese, Italian, Greeks, we go back and use our common language, our first language is English.

(Joseph, interview, August 8, 2012)

At weekends it changes too: ‘on a Saturday, it goes back to different languages, more Italians and Greeks and so on.’ Joseph’s account of the language patterns of the market is centred on the traders, a view that differs from the public signage aimed at customers (see Image 1.1) here in English, Vietnamese, Arabic and Chinese. More importantly they show again the everydayness of language flows ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of images
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Morning markets and metrolingual multitasking
• 2 Constructing affiliations and growing foreign vegetables
• 3 Mobility, rhythms and the city
• 4 Kitchen talk and spatial repertoires
• 5 Convivial and contested cities
• 6 Talking food: commensality and the city
• 7 Layers, spaces, signs, networks
• 8 Metrolingua francas
• Appendix: transcription conventions
• References
• Index