Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes

Chronicles of Complexity

Jan Blommaert

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781783090426
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Soziolinguistik

Superdiversity has rendered familiar places, groups and practices extraordinarily complex, and the traditional tools of analysis need rethinking. In this book, Jan Blommaert investigates his own neighbourhood in Antwerp, Belgium, from a complexity perspective. Using an innovative approach to linguistic landscaping, he demonstrates how multilingual signs can be read as chronicles documenting the complex histories of a place. The book can be read in many ways: as a theoretical and methodological contribution to the study of linguistic landscape; as one of the first monographs which addresses the sociolinguistics of superdiversity; or as a revision of some of the fundamental assumptions of social science through the use of chaos and complexity theory as an inspiration for understanding the structures of contemporary social life.

1 Introduction: New Sociolinguistic Landscapes

These days, sociolinguists do not just walk around the world carrying field notebooks and sound recording equipment; they also carry digital photo cameras with which they take snapshots of what has, in the meantime, become known as ‘linguistic landscapes’. Such landscapes capture the presence of publicly visible bits of written language: billboards, road and safety signs, shop signs, graffiti and all sorts of other inscriptions in the public space, both professionally produced and grassroots. The locus where such landscapes are being documented is usually the late-modern, globalized city: a densely multilingual environment in which publicly visible written language documents the presence of a wide variety of (linguistically identifiable) groups of people (e.g. Backhaus, 2007; Barni, 2008; Barni & Bagna, 2008; Barni & Extra, 2008; Ben-Rafael et al., 2006; Coupland & Garrett, 2010; Gorter, 2006; Jaworski, 2010; Landry & Bourhis, 1997; Lin, 2009; Shohamy & Gorter, 2009). Excursions into less urban and more peri-urban or rural spaces are rare, even though they occur and yield stimulating results (e.g. Juffermans, 2010; Stroud & Mpendukana, 2009; Wang, 2013; Juffermans also provides a broad spectre of signs in his analysis of The Gambia). In just about a decade, linguistic landscape studies (henceforth LLS) have gained their place on the shelves of the sociolinguistics workshop.

I welcome this development for several reasons. The first and most immediate reason is the sheer potential offered by LLS. This potential is descriptive as well as analytical. In descriptive terms, LLS considerably expand the range of sociolinguistic description from, typically, (groups of) speakers to spaces, the physical spaces in which such speakers dwell and in which they pick up and leave, so to speak, linguistic deposits, ‘waste’, signposts and roadmaps. Note that older sociolinguistic traditions such as dialectology also included space into their object – the typical scholarly product of dialectology was the dialect-geographical map. But space was a secondary concern in dialectology, as we shall discuss in greater detail below. The spaces of the dialect atlases were empty, unsemiotized spaces onto which speaking people were plotted. In LLS, space itself is the central object and concern, and this is an important extension of the traditional scope of sociolinguistics (see Stroud & Mpendukana, 2009).

I will elaborate this descriptive and analytical potential further in what follows; but before that, another important potential of LLS needs to be mentioned. I see LLS as one branch of sociolinguistics that could be of immense interdisciplinary value. The reason is the clear overlap between LLS and disciplines such as social geography, urban studies and the anthropology and sociology of diversity. The overlap is in the terrain covered by LLS: as said, space is now sociolinguistically thematized and examined, and the space covered by LLS is the same as that covered by several other disciplines. We have here an opportunity to show the relevance of sociolinguistic investigation, the ways in which attention to sociolinguistic aspects of space can contribute to better and more precise analyses of social space in general, of space as inhabited and invested by people. And the relevance we can have is sited in the potential of LLS, to which I can now return.

The descriptive potential is indeed quite formidable, for it comes with several quite interesting side effects, of which I shall briefly review some.

• One, LLS can act as a first-line sociolinguistic diagnostic of particular areas. It offers the fieldworker a relatively user-friendly toolkit for detecting the major features of sociolinguistic regimes in an area: monolingual or multilingual? And in the case of the latter, which languages are there? From such a quick and user-friendly diagnosis, one can move into more profound investigations into the sociolinguistic regime, and feed those back to the diagnosis. This book hopes to provide an example of that.

• Two, given this diagnostic value, LLS will at the very least protect researchers from major errors – as when an area identified as the research target proves not to offer the multilingualism one had expected to meet there, on the basis of an exploration of published sources or less reliable travelers’ accounts. Thus, LLS can be used as an excellent tool for explorative fieldwork and will enhance the realism of research proposals. The potential is thus also practical.

• Three, and more fundamentally, LLS compels sociolinguists to pay more attention to literacy, the different forms and shapes of literacy displayed in public spaces. This is blissful, for traditional sociolinguistics can thereby shed some of its historical bias towards spoken language forms and incorporate crucial sociolinguistic views developed in (the at present rather parallel universe of) literacy studies. The specific place of literacy in sociolinguistic economies has traditionally been downplayed in mainstream textbooks. The unfortunate consequence of this is that important sociolinguistic features that can only, or most persuasively, be read off literacy artifacts have not been incorporated into considerations of the sociolinguistic system. In that sense, sociolinguistics has never really been comprehensive in my view.

• Finally, I will also try to show that LLS compel us towards historicizing sociolinguistic analysis. The arguments for that will be elaborated in the remainder of the book; I firmly believe that renewed and deepened LLS heralds the end of the dominance of a synchronic (or achronic) perspective in linguistics and sociolinguistics. More, in particular I intend to show how LLS can detect and interpret social change and transformation on several scale-levels, from the very rapid and immediate to the very slow and gradual ones. This could be an important contribution of LLS to other disciplines: we can detect indexes of change long before they become visible in statistics or other large-scale investigations.

The potential of LLS is not just descriptive; it is also analytical. While a ‘light’ version of LLS can act as a useful tool in the sense outlined above, a higher-octane version of it can do vastly more.

The reason for that is at first sight rather simple. Physical space is also social, cultural and political space: a space that offers, enables, triggers, invites, prescribes, proscribes, polices or enforces certain patterns of social behavior; a space that is never no-man’s-land, but always somebody’s space; a historical space, therefore, full of codes, expectations, norms and traditions; and a space of power controlled by, as well as controlling, people. We know all of that. Yet, it is not enough to merely exclaim this; it needs to be demonstrated and therefore requires careful and meticulous moves. The move from a physical to a social space (from dialectology to LLS, in other words) and from a synchronic to a historical space is not automatic and self-evident, but is precisely lodged in a deeper analysis of the linguistic landscape as indexing social, cultural and political patterns. The sociolinguistic diagnostic mentioned above can thus become a diagnostic of social, cultural and political structures inscribed in the linguistic landscape.

This I see as the greatest potential offered by LLS, and this will be the object of this book. The book has emerged out of an understanding of this fantastic potential, and of an awareness that this potential can only be realized when LLS are analytically deepened and theoretically matured – both points currently representing major weaknesses of the young discipline. I welcome LLS, therefore, also for another reason than the potential it offers: I welcome the analytical and theoretical challenges it offers us. It represents a genuine opportunity to improve our science. Through work on LLS, I believe we can make the whole of sociolinguistics better, more useful, more comprehensive and more persuasive, and to offer some relevant things to other disciplines in addition. This book aspires to offer some tentative lines into that task.

The range of issues we are required to address is both vast and complex. In what follows I shall engage with some of the major themes that demand attention, and I shall specify my own position in their regard.

Superdiversity

I must open with a sketch of the background for this work – the wider panorama in which we will locate and dissect linguistic landscapes. That wider panorama is a form of social, cultural, economic diversity for which Steven Vertovec coined the term ‘superdiversity’ – diversity within diversity, a tremendous increase in the texture of diversity in societies such as ours (Vertovec, 2007, 2010). This increase is the effect of two different but obviously connected forces, emerging at the same moment in history and profoundly affecting the ways in which people organize their lives.

The first force is the end of the Cold War. Since the early 1990s, the ‘order’ in the world has fundamentally changed. This ‘order’, during the Cold War, was quite clearly defined: people from one camp did not often or easily travel to or interact with people from the other camp; if they did that, it would be under severely conflictual circumstances, as refugee or dissident. The effects of that order included the fact that one would literally never see a car with, e.g. Bulgarian or Romanian license plates on Western European roads. Migration prior to the early 1990s was a well-regulated phenomenon, organized on a cross-national basis in such a way that the profiles of ‘migrants’ into Western European societies were rather clearly defined and predictable. Migration into Belgium, for instance, would include several waves reflecting agreements between governments about migration. First, people from Italy and other countries north of the Mediterranean would arrive; then people from Morocco and Turkey would be attracted. Migration was labor migration, and very little migration happened in other categories, such as asylum seeking.

The end of the Cold War changed the patterns of human mobility in the world, and one visual feature of that is that nowadays one can observe hundreds of vehicles with Bulgarian, Romanian, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech license plates on almost any highway in Western Europe. Another one would be the presence of students from the People’s Republic of China on almost every university campus in the Western world. The robust boundaries that contained populations were all but erased, and in combination with growing instability in many parts of the world (not least in the former Warsaw Pact countries), massive new migrations were set in motion. Labor migration in the old fashion sense became less prominent; asylum seekers became, from the early 1990s onwards, the single biggest category of immigrants in Europe, and crises in the asylum systems have been endemic for about two decades now. In general, more people from more places migrated into more and different places and for more and different reasons and motives than before (Vertovec, 2010); and the outcome was an escalation of ethnic, social, cultural and economic diversity in societies almost everywhere. Unstable, highly volatile and unpredictable demographic and social patterns evolved, and they were further complicated by the second force behind superdiversity: the internet.

The world went online at more or less exactly the same moment as that of the end of the Soviet Union. In the early 1990s, the internet became a widely available infrastructure, and by the late 1990s Web 2.0 was there, offering a vast and unparalleled expansion of the means for exchanging long-distance information and for developing and maintaining translocal ties (documented early on by, e.g. Appadurai, 1996; Castells, 1996; Lash & Urry, 1994). Mobile phones became widespread at approximately the same time, and their effect was to detach possibilities for communication from fixed spaces, like the phone booth or the phone corner in the living room. So from the mid- to late-1990s onwards, communication patterns in the world changed dramatically, and with them the capacity to maintain virtual networks and communities, to circulate, produce and absorb information, and to engage in entirely new forms of social interaction, such as in social media and mass online gaming. The effects on how we lead our social and cultural lives are the object of an exploding literature, and while all sorts of questions can be asked about specific patterns of online conduct, the fact is that the impact of the internet and other communication technologies is fundamental and pervasive (see e.g. Davidson & Goldberg, 2010).

The interaction of these two forces – new and more complex forms of migration, and new and more complex forms of communication and knowledge circulation – has generated a situation in which two questions have become hard to answer: who is the Other? And who are We? The Other is now a category in constant flux, a moving target about whom very little can be presupposed; and as for the We, ourselves, our own lives have become vastly more complex and are now very differently organized, distributed over online as well as offline sites and involving worlds of knowledge, information and communication that were simply unthinkable two decades ago.

This is superdiversity. It is driven by three keywords: mobility, complexity and unpredictability. The latter is of course a knowledge issue, which pushes us to a perpetual revision and update of what we know about societies. This, I believe, is the paradigmatic impact of superdiversity: it questions the foundations of our knowledge and assumptions about societies, how they operate and function at all levels, from the lowest level of human face-to-face communication all the way up to the highest levels of structure in the world system. Interestingly, language appears to take a privileged place in defining this paradigmatic impact; the reasons for that will be specified below, and the privileged position of language as a tool for detecting features of superdiversity is the reason why I write this book.

Complexity

I have outlined the background against which we will have to operate and set our work in this book. Let us now dig into some of the conceptual tools needed for the work ahead of us. I will of course focus on language in society, but while doing that I will also introduce themes that we share with some of the other disciplines mentioned earlier.

I have for several years tried to address the effects of globalization on various aspects of the study of language in society, and this book can be seen as an extension and deepening of earlier attempts: on discourse and discourse analysis (Blommaert, 2005b), on literacy and how to address it (Blommaert, 2008) and on the sociolinguistic study of globalized environments (Blommaert, 2010). The central notion in these earlier attempts was mobility: I assumed (and still assume) that thinking about language in society in terms of mobility is a major theoretical effort, for it disrupts a very long tradition in which language, along with other social and cultural features of people, was primarily imagined as relatively fixed in time and space.

Disturbing mobility

A language or language variety was seen as something that ‘belonged’ to a definable (and thus bounded) ‘speech community’; that speech community lived in one place at one time and, consequently, shared an immense amount of contextual knowledge. That is why people understood each other: they knew all the social and cultural diacritics valid in a stable sociolinguistic community and could, thus, infer such contextual knowledge in interactions with fellow members of that speech community. Roles and expectations were clear and well understood in such contexts – children had respect for elder people and so forth. And people reproduced patterns that were seen as anchored in a timeless tradition – the rules of language usage are what they are, because the rules of society are what they are (for a critique, see Rampton, 1998). Social and linguistic features were members of separate categories, between which stable and linear correlations could be established.

Labov’s (1963) study of Martha’s Vineyard (not by coincidence an island, I believe) can serve as a prototype of such assumptions of fixedness and stability; the work of Joshua Fishman on macro-sociolinguistics equally articulates these assumptions (Fishman, 1972; Fishman & Garcia, 2010; see also Williams, 1992, for a critique).

Gumperz and Hymes (1972), however, quickly destabilized these assumptions, and they did so with one apparently simple theoretical intervention: they defined social and linguistic features not as separate-but-connected, but as dialectic, i.e. co-constructive and, hence, dynamic. Concretely: the reiteration of specific patterns of language usage – say, the use of ‘yes sir’ as an answer in a hierarchical speech situation – creates a social structure (hierarchy), which in turn begins to exert a compelling effect on subsequent similar speech situations. It has become a ‘rule’ or a ‘norm’ and so becomes an ideologically saturated behavioral expectation; but such ‘rules’ or ‘norms’ have no abstract existence, they only have an existence in iterative communicative enactment. People need to perform such ideologically saturated forms of behavior – their behavior must be iterative in that sense – but small deviations from that ‘rule’ have the capacity to overrule the whole of normgoverned behavior. Saying ‘yes sir’ with a slow and dragging intonation, for instance, (‘yeeees siiiiiiiir’) can express irony and so entirely cancel the norm, and even become the beginning of an alternative norm.

The importance of this simple but fundamental change in perspective is massive, for it introduced a dimension of contingency and complexity into sociolinguistics that def...