Language and Superdiversity 9781138844575, 9781138844582, 9781315730240

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: Superdiversity and Sociolinguistics
PART I Sketching the Paradigm
2 Language and Superdiversity
3 Superdiversity: Elements of an Emerging Perspective
4 From Multilingual Classification to Translingual Ontology: A Turning Point
PART II Sociolinguistic Complexity
5 Drilling Down to the Grain in Superdiversity
6 Buffalaxing the Other: Superdiversity in Action on YouTube
7 Polylanguaging in Superdiversity
8 ‘A Typical Gentleman’: Metapragmatic Stereotypes as Systems of Distinction
9 Mobility, Voice, and Symbolic Restratification: An Ethnography of ‘Elite Migrants’ in Urban China
PART III Policing Complexity
10 Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis and Social Change: A Case Study
11 Superdiversity on the Internet: A Case from China
12 Translating Global Experience into Institutional Models of Competency: Linguistic Inequalities in the Job Interview
13 Sociolinguistic Shibboleths at the Institutional Gate: Language, Origin, and the Construction of Asylum Seekers’ Identities
Index

Citation preview

LANGUAGE AND SUPERDIVERSITY

A first synthesis of work done in sociolinguistic superdiversity, this volume offers a substantial introduction to the field and the issues and state-of-the-art research papers organised around three themes: sketching the paradigm, sociolinguistic complexity, and policing complexity. The focus is to show how complexity rather than plurality can serve as a lens through which an equally vast range of topics, sites, and issues can be tied together. Superdiversity captures the acceleration and intensification of processes of social “mixing” and “fragmentation” since the early 1990s, as an outcome of two different but related processes: new post-Cold War migration flows, and the advent and spread of the Internet and mobile technologies. The confluence of these forces has created entirely new sociolinguistic environments, leading to research in the past decade that has brought a mixture of new empirical terrain – extreme diversity in language and literacy resources, complex repertoires and practices of participants in interaction – and conceptual challenges. Language and Superdiversity is a landmark volume bringing together the work of the scholars and researchers who spearhead the development of the sociolinguistics of superdiversity. Karel Arnaut is Associate Professor, Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities

Research Centre (IMMRC), Faculty of Social Sciences, KU Leuven (Belgium). Jan Blommaert is Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization and Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University (The Netherlands), and is also affiliated to Ghent University (Belgium) and University of the Western Cape (South Africa). He coordinates the InCoLaS consortium and is one of the group leaders of the Max Planck Sociolinguistic Diversity Working Group. Ben Rampton is Professor of Applied and Sociolinguistics at King’s College, London (UK). He is the Founding Convenor of the UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and an Honorary Doctor at Copenhagen University. Massimiliano Spotti is Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at Tilburg University and

Deputy Director of the Babylon Center (The Netherlands).

Earlier versions of these papers were published in two special issues of the UNESCO Journal Diversities (13/2 and 14/2) (http://www.mmg.mpg.de/ subsites/diversities/home/) Permission is granted by UNESCO to publish revised versions in this edited volume.

LANGUAGE AND SUPERDIVERSITY

Edited by Karel Arnaut, Jan Blommaert, Ben Rampton, and Massimiliano Spotti

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Arnaut, Karel, editor. | Blommaert, Jan, editor. | Rampton, Ben, 1953– editor. | Spotti, Massimiliano, 1974– editor. Title: Language and superdiversity / edited by Karel Arnaut, Jan Blommaert, Ben Rampton, Massimiliano Spotti. Description: New York ; London : Routledge, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015012481| ISBN 9781138844575 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138844582 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Multilingualism—Social aspects. | Languages in contact. | Language and languages—Variation. | Sociolinguistics. Classification: LCC P115.45 .L36 2016 | DDC 306.44—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015012481 ISBN: 978-1-138-84457-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-84458-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73024-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

In memory of Jens Normann Jørgensen (1951–2013)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Superdiversity and Sociolinguistics Karel Arnaut, Jan Blommaert, Ben Rampton, and Massimiliano Spotti

ix 1

PART I

Sketching the Paradigm

19

2 Language and Superdiversity Jan Blommaert and Ben Rampton

21

3 Superdiversity: Elements of an Emerging Perspective Karel Arnaut

49

4 From Multilingual Classification to Translingual Ontology: A Turning Point David Parkin

71

PART II

Sociolinguistic Complexity 5 Drilling Down to the Grain in Superdiversity Ben Rampton

89 91

viii Contents

6 Buffalaxing the Other: Superdiversity in Action on YouTube Sirpa Leppänen and Ari Elo 7 Polylanguaging in Superdiversity Jens Normann Jørgensen, Martha Sif Karrebæk, Lian Malai Madsen, and Janus Spindler Møller

110

137

8 ‘A Typical Gentleman’: Metapragmatic Stereotypes as Systems of Distinction Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese

155

9 Mobility, Voice, and Symbolic Restratification: An Ethnography of ‘Elite Migrants’ in Urban China Jie Dong

174

PART III

Policing Complexity

195

10 Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis and Social Change: A Case Study Jan Blommaert and Ico Maly

197

11 Superdiversity on the Internet: A Case from China Piia Varis and Xuan Wang 12 Translating Global Experience into Institutional Models of Competency: Linguistic Inequalities in the Job Interview Celia Roberts 13 Sociolinguistic Shibboleths at the Institutional Gate: Language, Origin, and the Construction of Asylum Seekers’ Identities Massimiliano Spotti Index

218

237

261

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The intellectual genesis of this book is described in the introductory chapter, and we can be brief here. The book is a truly collective achievement, the foundations of which are open dialogue and mutual generosity; all InCoLaS members deserve accolades for that. This congenial atmosphere was greatly stimulated by our dear friend and colleague the late Jens Normann Jørgensen, whose untimely death we still mourn. This book, to which he contributed so much, is dedicated to him. At various points in our history as a group, we benefited hugely from the constructive input of Steve Vertovec, Rob Moore, Cécile Vigouroux, Asif Agha, Michael Silverstein, Christopher Stroud, Susan Gal, Marco Jacquemet, Charles Briggs, and many of the doctoral students who have attended InCoLaS meetings. We hope they will recognize their voices in parts of the book. Editorially, pulling this book together was very far from straightforward, and the point is simply that without Karin Berkhout of the Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg University, this book would never have materialized. Karin deserves more than just a routine expression of gratitude here – the title of “executive editor” of this volume is appropriate. We are grateful to Naomi Silverman of Routledge US for her enthusiasm about this project, and for her infinite patience and tolerance while we struggled to make this book.

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1 INTRODUCTION: SUPERDIVERSITY AND SOCIOLINGUISTICS Karel Arnaut, Jan Blommaert, Ben Rampton, and Massimiliano Spotti

This book brings together some of the work developed in a network of sociolinguistic research groups that have collaborated for several years, with ‘language and superdiversity’ as a broad thematic heading.1 This introduction sketches: (1) what we mean by ‘superdiversity’ and why we see it as a useful cover term; (2) key features of our approach and our collaboration; and (3) areas linked to superdiversity, where further work seems especially important (securitisation and surveillance).

Superdiversity: What and Why? Over the past two and a half decades, the demographic, sociopolitical, cultural, and linguistic face of societies worldwide has been changing due to everexpanding mobility and migration. This has been caused by economic globalisation and by major geopolitical shifts – the collapse and fragmentation of the Soviet communist bloc, China’s conversion to capitalism, India’s economic reforms, the ending of apartheid in South Africa. The effects are a dramatic increase in the demographic structure of the immigration centres of the world. These places are now no longer restricted to ‘global cities’ such as London or Los Angeles, but also include smaller provincial locations. The following charts show these evolutions in the Belgian coastal town of Ostend between 1990 and 2011 (Maly 2014). The quantity of people migrating has steadily grown, the range of migrantsending and migrant-receiving areas have increased, and there has been radical diversification not only in the socio-economic, cultural, religious, and linguistic profiles of the migrants, but also in their civil status, their educational or training background, and their migration trajectories, networks, and diasporic links. To capture all this, Steven Vertovec coined the term ‘superdiversity’:

2 Karel Arnaut et al.

TUNESIE

JAPAN

MAROKKO

TURKIJE APART GENOMEN SERVIE EN

U.S.A. SPANJE DUITSLAND

ALGERIJE

POLEN

NEDERLAND

FRANKRIJK

ITALIE

PORTUGAL GRIEKENLAND

VERENIGD KONINKRIJK

LUXEMBURG

FIGURE 1.1

The population of Ostend, 1990

Source: © Ico Maly 2014

Superdiversity: a term intended to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything . . . previously experienced . . . a dynamic interplay of variables including country of origin, . . . migration channel, . . . legal status, . . . migrants’ human capital (particularly educational background), access to employment, . . . locality . . . and responses by local authorities, services providers and local residents. (2007a: 3) And whereas many accounts of global change post-1989 have focused on spatial and economic transformations and on national and ethnic groups moving across borders and boundaries, Vertovec sought closer attention to the human, cultural, and social intricacies of globalisation, often focusing on very specific migrant trajectories, identities, profiles, networking, status, training, and capacities. In addition, faster and more mobile communication technologies and software infrastructures have affected the lives of diaspora communities of all kinds (old and new, black and white, imperial, trade, labour, etc. [cf. Cohen 1997]). While emigration used to mean real separation between the emigré and his/her home society, involving the loss or dramatic reduction of social, cultural, and political

Introduction

3

roles and impact there, emigrants and dispersed communities now have the potential to retain an active connection by means of an elaborate set of longdistance communication technologies. These technologies impact on sedentary ‘host’ communities as well, with people getting involved in transnational networks that offer potentially altered forms of identity, community formation, and cooperation (Baron 2008). There is, of course, a very large, rich, and wide-ranging literature covering contemporary social change,2 and this raises the question: Why choose ‘superdiversity’ as a cover term for the social processes studied in a book about language? Our answer is as follows. When compared with the range of other terms on offer – for example, ‘translocality’ (Greiner & Sakdapolrak 2013), ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000), or ‘global complexity’ (Urry 2003) – Vertovec’s ‘superdiversity’ comes across as a primarily descriptive concept, limited in ‘grand narrative’ ambitions or explicit theoretical claims, committed instead to ethnography (see Vertovec 2009). It spotlights the ‘diversification of diversity’ as a process to be investigated but it doesn’t pin any particular explanation onto this. Indeed, the term ‘superdiversity’ is itself relatively unspectacular – ‘super’ implies complications and some need

TUNESIE

U.S.A. AFRIKA CANADA LANDEN

BRAZILIE AFRIKA

OOSTENRIJK

DENEMARKEN

MAROKKO ANDERE REP. DEM. CONGO LANDEN VAN AZIE

SPANJE

DUITSLAND

ALGERIJE

ANDERE

FRANKRIJK

PAKISTAN ISRAEL VOLKS- THAILAND REP.

VERENIGD KONINKRIJK

CHINA

PIJNEN

JAPAN

FILIP-

INDIA LUXEMBURG

TURKIJE APART GENOMEN EUROPA LANDEN ANDERE

GRIEKENLAND SERVIE EN

IERLAND

MONTENE- GRO (EX JOEG.)

ITALIE PORTUGAL NEDERLAND

BOSNIE- HERZE-GOWINA RUSLAND VAN / FED. ROEMENIE

FIGURE 1.2

POLEN

The population of Ostend, 2000

Source: © Ico Maly 2014

ZWEDEN

4 Karel Arnaut et al.

for rethinking, but ‘diversity’ aligns with a set of rather long-standing discourses. Proposing change while invoking continuity like this, there is nothing very radical or dramatic here. But this has two advantages. First, it gives the term strategic purchase in the field of social policy. In the “normative discourses, institutional structures, policies and practices in business,

Moldavië

Cuba ZuidAfrika

Dominicaanse Rep.Bhutan Indonesië Ierland Soedan Ethiopië Kameroen Tsjechië

Hongarije Guinee Mauritanië

Letland Kenya Venezuela Palestina

Angola Sierra Leone

Erithrea

Ecuador Azerbeidzjan

Zweden Oostenrijk IJsland Litouwen

Somalia Togo Viet Nam Jemen Mongolië VSA Japan Luxemburg Brazilië Missing SlovakijeMacedonië Griekenland Bulgarije

Suriname

Tanzania

Bosnië-Herzeg.

Israël

Congo Republiek Canada

Rusland

Kirgizië

Ghana Belarus Kosovo

Servie + Monten.

Libanon Spanje Oezbekistan EgypteRoemenië Georgie

Nederland

Congo Syrië (Dem. Nepal Rep.) Turkije India Frankrijk

Nigeria Portugal Polit. vlucht., onb. Polen

Afghanistan

Thailand Kazachstan

Irak Verenigd Koninkrijk

Oekraïne Albanië

Italië Iran

China Armenië

Filipijnen Tunesië

FIGURE 1.3

Duitsland

The population of Ostend, 2011

Source: © Ico Maly 2014

Pakistan

Marokko Algerije

Introduction

5

public sector agencies, the military, universities and professions” (Vertovec 2012: 287), the word ‘diversity’ has very considerable currency. Superdiversity goes beyond this and points to major problems facing traditional multicultural understandings of diversity – social categorisation has itself become a huge challenge for policy and politics, and according to Kenneth Prewitt, former Director of the US Census Bureau: classification is now a moving target. [There are] two possible outcomes: either a push toward measurement (like censuses) using ever more finelygrained classifications, or system collapse – the end of measurements of difference. In either case, . . . it is increasingly doubtful that policies aimed at making America more inclusive will centre, as they did in the 1970s, on numerical remedies using statistical disparities as evidence of discrimination. (reported by Vertovec 2012: 303–304) But in suggesting change with continuity instead of radical overturn, Vertovec’s formulation makes it easier for policy to embrace these issues,3 and its effectiveness is evident in its adoption in a wide range of different local government arenas (e.g. Amsterdam, Birmingham, Frankfurt, Ghent). Of course, this adoption is itself a complex process deserving close critical analysis, as Arnaut emphasises in his contribution to the collection, and there is much more involved than just an authentication of civic diversity.4 Even so, the capacity to engage with local political and institutional discourse is important for the research covered in this volume, and in this respect superdiversity is a useful banner. It offers “an awareness that a lot of what used to be qualified as ‘exceptional’, ‘aberrant’, ‘deviant’ or ‘unusual’ in language and its use by people, is in actual fact quite normal” (Blommaert 2015: 2, emphasis in the original). Second, for sociolinguistics itself, it is also fitting that superdiversity marks a shift of footing without disconnecting from what went before – a desire for synthesis rather than for a new sub-discipline. Diversity has been a central concern in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology for much of the twentieth century, both as the focus for empirical description and as a political commitment: “[d]iversity of speech has been singled out as the main focus of sociolinguistics” (Hymes 1972: 38; see also e.g. Boas 1912). Furthermore, sociolinguists are now very familiar with the problems of group identification and the critiques of essentialism that give superdiversity much of its relevance. In 1969, Dell Hymes called the idea of discrete sociolinguistic groups into question when he said that “the relationship of cultures and communities in the world today is dominantly one of reintegration within complex units” (1969 [1999]: 32), and 20 years later Mary Louise Pratt reiterated this in the deconstruction of what she called the ‘utopian linguistics of community’, proposing a ‘linguistics of contact’ in its place (1987, emphasis in the original). Indeed, terms such as ‘hybridity’, ‘heteroglossia’, and ‘fluidity’ proliferate in the contemporary sociolinguistic and linguistic

6 Karel Arnaut et al.

anthropological literature. But as an encapsulation of these concerns, ‘superdiversity’ not only has greater currency in public policy discourse, but is also often associated with an interrogative stance, openly proposing that new forms of understanding are now needed to make sense of the contemporary social landscape (e.g. Fanshawe & Sriskandarajah 2010). Well-established social categorisations are now being challenged, the argument runs, along with the macro-theories and models of society built around them, and in their place superdiversity calls for meso- and micro-scale accounts, focusing on lower levels of social organisation. So here we hear calls for social scientists to turn their attention to informal processes, seeking new principles for social cohesion in local ‘conviviality’ and low-key ‘civility’ (Gilroy 2006; Vertovec 2007a; Wetherell 2010). For sociolinguists, who specialise in the rigorous and disciplined description of smallerscale processes such as these, this sounds like a summons, and the challenge to traditional sociological analysis potentially ends up enlarging the agenda of linguistics. Of course, if it is correct that more of the responsibility for producing plausible descriptions of contemporary cultural processes now falls to disciplines such as sociolinguistics, we need to double-check that our apparatus is actually equal to the role. Blommaert and Rampton start to do this in their opening chapter, and they begin their review of the sociolinguistic instrumentarium by invoking “the pioneering work of linguistic anthropologists such as John Gumperz, Dell Hymes and Michael Silverstein [starting in the 1960s, as well as] the foundational rethinking of social and cultural theorists such as Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Foucault, Goffman, Hall, and Williams.” They go on to say that “with this kind of pedigree, ‘robust and well-established orthodoxy’ might seem more apt as a characterisation of these ideas than ‘paradigm shift’ or ‘developments’.” But contemporary conditions have repositioned and intensified the relevance of this apparatus, and once again the encapsulation of both continuity and change in ‘superdiversity’ seems particularly apposite. Everyone in sociolinguistics is familiar with ‘diversity’, but ‘super’ signals something more, requiring a retuning or realignment of parts of the machinery, sometimes even the shaping and development of new elements. So in signalling selective renovation rather than wholesale reinvention in this way, ‘language and superdiversity’ is an apt and indeed rather parsimonious reformulation of the sociolinguistic enterprise, adjusting it to new times. So what can the ‘sociolinguistic enterprise’ be expected to look like in a book with ‘language and superdiversity’ in the title?

Our Approach and Our Collaboration As already indicated, our work seeks to integrate linguistics with ethnography, with ethnography understood as an epistemology rather than simply a method of data collection. So it is assumed, for example, that the meaning of a form or

Introduction

7

practice involves an interaction between a number of different dimensions of sociocultural organisation/process; that the researcher’s own cultural and interpretive capacities are crucial in making sense of the complex intricacies of the situated activities being studied; that tuning into these takes time and close involvement; and that questions may change during the course of an enquiry, with a dialectic between theory, interpretation, and data being sustained throughout (cf. Hymes 1980a; Blommaert & Dong 2010; Rampton et al. 2014). One of ethnography’s key characteristics is its commitment to taking a long hard look at empirical processes that make no sense within established frameworks, often because of an intrinsic complexity that defies inclusion in well-known categories (Van der Aa & Blommaert 2015). So if superdiversity announces the collapse of traditional classificatory frameworks, then ethnography is a vital resource. The combination of ethnography and language analysis is, of course, central to North American linguistic anthropology (LA), and the tradition of Hymes, Gumperz, Ochs, and Silverstein is an absolutely vital reference point for the papers in this collection (cf. Silverstein 2014). But in terms of academic positioning, perhaps there are two notable differences between LA and the work reported here, highlighting the value of transatlantic dialogue.5 First, in the socialisation of linguistic anthropologists in North America, the study of field sites away from home plays a crucial role, but in this book and its companion volume most of the papers focus on environments where researchers work and/or have grown up or spent much of their lives.6 So they have often been motivated by an interest in linguistic configurations, inequalities, and divisions noticed locally, more or less ‘on the doorstep’. Across the studies in these two collections, there is engagement with, for example, local refugee centres and immigration and asylum procedures, workplace production and interviewing processes, complementary schools, primary and secondary education, literacy programmes, and popular cultural production (cf. Hymes 1980c; Van der Aa & Blommaert 2015, on ‘ethnographic monitoring’). The authors and/or their research groups have often been involved in turning research findings into support material for non-academic stakeholders, and in fact this reflects the influence of a lot of the funding policy in Europe, where the potential practical ‘impact’ of research is an increasingly prominent funding criterion. Second, linguistic anthropology has very little institutional presence outside the United States, and it is hard to find any graduate programmes in linguistic anthropology in Europe. Intellectually, this potentially increases the need for nonUS linguists interested in society and culture to talk to other kinds of social scientist, while at the same time it also means that there is less oversight of the reproduction or revision of canonical frameworks and procedures, leaving quite a lot of room for innovation (even though this may be quirky and short-lived). Organisationally, sociolinguists in Europe have responded to this gap by setting up the Linguistic Ethnography Forum (LEF), which started in 2001, and now has over 600

8 Karel Arnaut et al.

members, and builds interdisciplinarity as well as practical relevance into both its rationales and its training programmes.7 Within this book and the collaborative network that informs it, virtually all of the contributors received their research training in Europe, a substantial group received their initial research training in applied linguistics, and only a small minority are trained anthropologists.8 Admittedly, there is always a risk of exaggerating the differences between US LA and the linguistic ethnography developed in Europe.9 But whatever the actual extent of this divergence, the projects informing this book have drawn a great deal of impetus (a) from personal everyday experience of the major changes associated with superdiversity; and (b) from a collective feeling that to make sense of the societies we live in, we can and should rework/update our analytic vocabularies. Since 2009, these sentiments have gained greater collective momentum with the formation of the International Consortium on Language & Superdiversity (InCoLaS). Although there was already a very substantial track record of bi- and multilateral collaboration between the research groups that formed InCoLaS,10 superdiversity first moved centre stage at an ESF Exploratory Workshop convened by Blommaert and Vertovec in Tilburg in October 2009. Since then, InCoLaS has met at two-day sessions approximately twice a year, supported with funding from, inter alia, the Göttingen Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious & Ethnic Diversity, the Danish Council for Strategic Research, the Dutch National Science Foundation, the Finnish Academy, and a range of local sources. Attended by 15–25 researchers from at least five or six of the constituent research groups, half of the programme at InCoLaS meetings has usually been dedicated to organisation (projects and project applications; publications; meetings, conferences, and panels; visits and exchanges), and half has focused on substantive research, with papers presented by PhD researchers, postdocs, junior and senior faculty, as well as other invited contributors. Debates within the group were and are by agreement exploratory, less focused on what is already known than on what remains to be examined and established. The consortium is supported by several local publications, two of them online – Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism,11 Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies,12 and Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies13 – and this has facilitated the publication of ideas and reports at a much cheaper and faster rate than is possible through the usual book and journal outlets. InCoLaS also organised an international conference on Language and Superdiversity attended by over 250 people in Jyväskylä in June 2013, and this book and its companion, Engaging with Superdiversity, edited by Arnaut, Karrebæk, and Spotti, present a cross section of our theoretical and empirical thinking.

Superdiversity and Its Shadows Superdiversity is certainly not a flawless concept, but in this introduction we have attempted to answer some of the most common criticisms (see e.g. Makoni 2012;

Introduction

9

Reyes 2014). So to the challenge that superdiversity is a banal idea, we say that it is accessible, as attested by the municipalities that have adopted it. What some see as theoretical vacuity, we see as an openness to the kinds of exploratory sociolinguistic theorisation that we have tried to elaborate. Against the charge of ethnocentricity, we reflexively accept the inescapability of our historical particularity and embrace the opportunities for local engagement. And when people say that superdiversity is naïve about inequality, we can point to sorting, stratification, and/or exclusion as central issues in chapters in this book. Indeed, if the continuing circulation and application of anachronistic social categories contribute to the old and new inequalities that mark contemporary globalisation, superdiversity invites us to dissect these categories critically, and to try to replace them with descriptors better tuned to complexity. That said, we have adopted ‘superdiversity’ as a timely rather than enduring notion, aware that alongside the timestamp, there is sure to be a sell-by date. Indeed, we can already see that to make better sense of contemporary environments of intensified migration, mobility, inequality, and exclusion, ‘superdiversity’ needs to be supplemented with close attention to two other burgeoning processes that in many respects act as its shadowy counterparts: securitisation and digital surveillance. With varying degrees of emphasis, these feature, here and in our companion volume, in the papers by Arnaut, Khan, Spotti, Varis, and Wang, as well as elsewhere in Varis (forthcoming) and Rampton (2014). But as well as growing alongside the diversification of diversity, securitisation and surveillance themselves present sociolinguistics with substantial challenges, and it is worth briefly turning to these. As noted above, the onset of globalised superdiversity in recent times is often linked to the fall of the Berlin Wall (e.g. Blommaert & Rampton 2011: 2). But this period is also associated with the emergence of a huge transnational field of security professionals, which is “larger than that of police organisations in that it includes, on one hand private corporations and organisations dealing with the control of access to the welfare state, and, on the other hand, intelligence services and some military people seeking a new role after the end of the Cold War” (Bigo 2002: 63, 64). In this context, migration and superdiversity are: increasingly interpreted as a security problem. The prism of security analysis is especially important for politicians, for national and local police organizations, the military police, customs officers, border patrols, secret services, armies, judges, some social services (health care, hospitals, schools), private corporations (bank analysts, providers of technology surveillance, private policing), many journalists (especially from television and the more sensationalist newspapers), and a significant fraction of general public opinion, especially but not only among those attracted to ‘law and order’ . . . The professionals in charge of the management of risk and fear

10 Karel Arnaut et al.

especially transfer the legitimacy they gain from struggles against terrorists, criminals, spies, and counterfeiters toward other targets, most notably transnational political activists, people crossing borders, or people born in the country but with foreign parents. (Bigo 2002: 63) And while the development of new communication technologies has major implications for the maintenance and development of diasporic networks and other types of collectivity (Blommaert & Rampton 2011: 4, also this volume; Tall 2004), it also plays a major role in surveillance. As we have noted, superdiversity presents a huge challenge to the forms of social classification with which states and institutions have traditionally monitored their populations, and scholars argue that instead of relying on essentialist identity categories, research should focus on practices. But with ‘transactional surveillance’, digital technologies overcome these problems: [s]ubjects . . . are very active consuming, swiping credit cards, walking streets, phoning. These activities and transactions are an immediate interaction with and through technology. The interaction creates data that are used to govern subjects and their activities . . . As Amoore and De Goede state in their exploration of the increasing importance of transactions for security practice and its political implications: “[T]ransactions people make are, quite literally, taken to be traces of daily life, they are conceived as a way of mapping, visualising and recognising bodies in movement” (2008: 176). Ruppert and Savage speak of transactional governance (2011). While traditional data sources engage subjects as identities or fixed populations, transactional governance derives information directly from the interactions and transactions. “Subjectivity or identity is less an issue and instead associations and correlations in conduct are deemed more empirical and descriptive than subjective and meaningful” (Ruppert 2011: 228). Transactional governance decentres subjects into transactions: what matters is not subjects with opinions or identities but transactions that take place. It is a mode of governing that seeks to quickly adapt delivery of services, control and coercion to changing behaviours deriving and processing information directly from the everyday ‘doings’ of people. Transactional surveillance is increasingly important in security practice. (Huysmans 2014: 166–167) Certainly, there are major struggles, inefficiencies, and disjunctures both in digital surveillance and in the field of security professionals, and neither amounts to Orwellian totalitarianism (Bigo 2006; Haggerty 2006; Bauman et al. 2014). Even so, the implications for sociolinguistics are very considerable.

Introduction

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First, if superdiversity sometimes tempts us to foreground Bakhtin, heteroglossic translanguaging, and creativity in public culture, securitisation and surveillance emphasise the relevance of Foucault’s ideas about control, normativity, and subjectification. Foucault’s continuing significance is evidenced in vigorous debates about new forms of post-panoptic governance, combining a capillary web of small-scale practices that deliberately “attempt to shape conduct in certain ways in relation to certain objectives” (Rose 1999: 4) with the systematic cultivation of fear and unease as modes of control (Haggerty 2006; Los 2006; Lyon 2006; Khan 2014; Rampton 2014; Arnaut this volume). Second, and much more radically, the study of digital surveillance presents a huge challenge to the semiotic repertoire of contemporary sociolinguistics, dependent as it is on verbal and visual signs. As Haggerty and Ericson explain, digital surveillance: [breaks the human body] down into a series of discrete signifying flows . . . For example, drug testing striates flows of chemicals, photography captures flows of reflected lightwaves, and lie detectors align and compare assorted flows of respiration, pulse and electricity. The body is itself, then, an assemblage comprised of myriad component parts and processes which are broken-down for purposes of observation . . . [The body’s] movements through space can be recorded, [and] a person’s habits, preferences, and lifestyle [can be reconstructed] from the trails of information which have become the detritus of contemporary life. [The practices of surveillance visualise] a host of heretofore opaque flows of auditory, scent, chemical, visual, ultraviolet and informational stimuli. Much of the visualization . . . exists beyond our normal range of perception . . . The capture of flesh/ information flows of the human body [is standardised], . . . transforming the body into pure information, such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable. Such processes are put into operation from a host of scattered centres of calculation . . . Such centres of calculation can include forensic laboratories, statistical institutions, police stations, financial institutions, and corporate and military headquarters. In these sites the information derived from [surveillance is] reassembled and scrutinized in the hope of developing strategies of governance, commerce and control. (2000: 611, 613) Cheney-Lippold elaborates on what this means for something such as ‘gender’: [o]nline a category like gender is not determined by one’s genitalia or even physical appearance. Nor is it entirely self-selected. Rather, categories of identity are being inferred upon individuals based on their web use. Code and algorithm are the engines behind such inference[, constructing]

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identity and category online. We are entering an online world where our identifications are largely made for us. A ‘new algorithmic identity’ is situated at a distance from traditional liberal politics, removed from civil discourse via the proprietary nature of many algorithms while simultaneously enjoying an unprecedented ubiquity in its reach to surveil and record data about users. (2011: 165) Digital surveillance certainly doesn’t exclude the human processes of interpretation traditionally studied in sociolinguistics, and “[r]ather than being accurate or inaccurate portrayals of real individuals, [algorithmic identities] are a form of pragmatics: differentiated according to how useful they are in allowing institutions to make discriminations among populations” (Haggerty & Ericson 2000: 614, emphasis added). Indeed, the multitude of designers, analysts, and clients operating in these ‘centres of calculation’ are prone to the full range of human bias and error in their construction and construal of surveillance data (cf. e.g. Liddicoat 2008: 132–133; Bauman et al. 2014: 125). Nevertheless, in social media, for example, “[s]ociality is not simply ‘rendered technological’ by moving to an online space; rather, coded structures are profoundly altering the nature of our connections, creations and interactions” (Van Dijck 2013: 20). If we are to assess the accuracy of such claims, it is first necessary to gain access to the ‘algorithms’ and ‘coded structures’ concealed in these spaces, and then to try to understand their computational reasoning. But this is not at all easy, and it lies quite a long way beyond current sociolinguistic training and practice. Of course, there is still plenty to keep us very busy, and even in the state of development reached in the exploration of superdiversity, sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography can generate a lot of insight into issues such as the lived everyday experience of surveillance and securitisation, which are still relatively under-researched (Ball 2009: 640; Goldstein 2010: 488; Bauman et al. 2014: 141–143). Nevertheless, the frameworks and procedures that we have updated and applied to superdiversity will only take us so far, and may falter when we seek to understand the influence of algorithmic identities and “ ‘data subjects’ [with] a conditional form of existence whose rights are dependent up its behaviour within digital networks” (Bauman et al. 2014: 129). If the critical illumination of contemporary life continues to feature as an aspiration for sociolinguistics, then the development of tools for delving far deeper into the dynamics of securitisation and digital surveillance is now one of our biggest methodological challenges.

Notes 1. Further papers produced by participants in the InCoLaS network will be found in a companion volume, Engaging with Superdiversity, edited by Karel Arnaut, Martha Karrebæk, and Max Spotti, and published by Multilingual Matters.

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2. The ideas underpinning classic multiculturalism and identity politics – ideas about groups being culturally distinct and about gender and ethnic identities being fundamental and unwavering – are challenged by scholars and writers such as Gilroy (1987), Hall (1988), Mercer (1994), Brubaker (2002), and Fanshawe and Sriskandarajah (2010), and accounts of intersectionality have drawn attention to “the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axis of differentiation – economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential – intersect in historically specific contexts” (Brah & Phoenix 2004: 76). The perspectives underpinning talk of ‘communities’ and ‘societies’ have been deconstructed as ‘methodological nationalism’ and the ‘ethnic lens’ (Wimmer & Glick Schiller 2003; Glick Schiller et al. 2006), and critiques of essentialism in anthropology date back to the 1960s and 1970s (Wolf 1964; Fabian 1978, 1998; Hymes 1980b; see also Arnaut 2012). Studies of globalisation, diaspora, and transnationalism document and theorise the processes and formations that are altering contemporary experience (Appadurai 1996; Castells 1996), and these are taken further with ideas such as, for example, ‘translocality’, which goes beyond transnationality in being “less scripted and more scattered” (Lionnet & Shu-mei-Shih 2005), allowing for finer, intra-urban distinctions in connectivity and scale (Van Dijk 2011), opening up to spaces far beyond global cities, in rural towns and in seemingly more marginal sites worldwide (see Arnaut and Spotti in press). 3. Easier, at least, than terms that are either broader or more theoretically encumbered such as ‘neo-liberal globalisation’ or ‘intersectionality’. 4. As Rose notes, there is often a neo-liberal logic underpinning the reassertion of local community: “Government of the social in the name of the national economy gives way to government of particular zones – regions, towns, sectors, communities – in the interests of economic circuits that flow between regions and across national boundaries. The economic fates of citizens within a national territory are uncoupled from one another, and are now understood and governed as a function of their own particular levels of enterprise, skill, inventiveness and flexibility” (1996: 338, 339). 5. For further discussion of the relationship between North American linguistic anthropology and linguistic ethnography, see Rampton (2007, 2008, 2009), Faudree & Schulties (2015). 6. So, for example, Blackledge, Rampton, Roberts, and Spotti all came into research through teaching in schools or adult education. 7. For LEF rationales, see e.g. Rampton et al. (2004), Rampton et al. (2007), and Rampton et al. (2014); for training programmes, see Key Concepts into Ethnography, Language & Communication (ESRC 2007) and Researching Multilingualism: Multilingualism in Research Practice (ESRC 2010–2013). 8. We have also played a significant part in LEF. Rampton, Blommaert, Roberts, Blackledge, and Creese have all taught on the LEF-affiliated training courses, and Rampton, Creese, Madsen, and Woydack have been or are members of the LEF executive committee. 9. After all, the idea of ‘bringing it all back home’ was central to Hymes’ proposals for Reinventing Anthropology (1969), and there are very powerful examples of this in, for example, the work of Ochs and associates (e.g. Ochs & Kremer-Sadlik 2013), as well as in linguistic anthropological research on education (e.g. Wortham & Rymes 2003). Specifically on superdiversity, Blommaert recently commented that he saw “less of a European-American divide in addressing diversity as a field of inquiry than several other observers. In fact, much of what is presented as a chasm between both ‘worlds’ seems to revolve around differing opinions about the ‘center’ of a dialogue . . .” (Blommaert 2015: 84). 10. Attendance at InCoLaS meetings has varied, but the individuals and groups participating most regularly have been based at the University of Tilburg, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious & Ethnic Diversity at Göttingen University of Copenhagen,

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University of Jyväskylä, King’s College London, University of Birmingham, the University of the Western Cape, University of Pennsylvania, and most recently Leuven University. 11. See www.webshophum-en.ku.dk/shop/copenhagen-studies-in-127s.html. 12. See www.tilburguniversity.edu/research/institutes-and-research-groups/babylon/tpcs/. 13. See http://kcl.academia.edu/WorkingPapersinUrbanLanguageLiteracies.

References Amoore, L., & De Goede, M. 2008. Transactions after 9/11: The banal face of the preemptive strike. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33(2): 173–185. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Arnaut, K. 2012. Super-diversity: Elements of an emerging perspective. Diversities, 14(2): 1–16. Arnaut, K., & Spotti, M. 2015. Superdiversity discourse. In C. Ilie (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons (in press). Ball, K. 2009. Exposure: Exploring the subject of surveillance. Information, Communication and Society, 12(5): 639–657. Baron, N. 2008. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bauman, Z. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z., Bigo, D., Esteves, P., Guild, E., Jabri, V., Lyon, D., & Walker, R. 2014. After Snowden: Rethinking the impact of surveillance. International Political Sociology, 8(2): 121–144. Bigo, D. 2002. Security and immigration: Toward a critique of the governmentality of unease. Alternatives, 27: 63–92. Bigo, D. 2006. Globalised (in)security: The field and the Ban-opticon. In N. Sakai & J. Solomon (eds), Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 5–49. Blommaert, J. 2015. Commentary: Superdiversity old and new. Language and Communication, 44: 82–88. Blommaert, J., & Dong, J. 2010. Ethnographic Fieldwork: A Beginner’s Guide. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Blommaert, J., & Rampton, B. 2011. Language and superdiversity. Diversities, 13(2): 1–21. Boas, F. 1912. The instability of human types. In Gustav Spiller (ed.), Papers on Interracial Problems. Boston, MA: Ginn & Co., pp. 99–103. Brah, A., & Phoenix, A. 2004. Ain’t I a woman? Revisiting intersectionality. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 5(3): 75–86. Brubaker, R. 2002. Ethnicity without groups. Archives Europeenes de Sociologies, 43(2): 163–189. Castells, M. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. London: Blackwell. Cheney-Lippold, J. 2011. A new algorithmic identity: Soft biopolitics and the modulation of control. Theory, Culture and Society, 28(6): 164–181. Cohen, R. 1997. Global Diasporas. London: UCL Press. Fabian, J. 1978. Popular culture in Africa: Findings and conjectures. Africa, 48(4): 315–334. Fabian, J. 1998. Moments of Freedom: Anthropology and Popular Culture. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.

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Fanshawe, S., & Sriskandarajah, D. 2010. ‘You Can’t Put Me in a Box’: Super-Diversity and the End of Identity Politics in Britain. London: Institute for Public Policy Research. Faudree, P. & Schulties, B. 2015. The Social Life of Diversity Talk. Special Issue of Language & Communication, 44, 1–88. Gilroy, P. 1987. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. London: Hutchinson. Gilroy, P. 2006. Multiculture in times of war: An inaugural lecture given at the London School of Economics. Critical Quarterly, 48(4): 27–45. Glick Schiller, N., Çağlar, A., & Guldbrandsen, T.C. 2006. Beyond the ethnic lens: Locality, globality, and born-again incorporation. American Ethnologist, 33(4): 612–633. Goldstein, D.M. 2010. Toward a critical anthropology of security. Current Anthropology, 51(4): 487–517. Greiner, C., & Sakdapolrak, P. 2013. Translocality: Concepts, applications and emerging research perspectives. Geography Compass, 7(5): 373–384. Haggerty, K. 2006. Tear down the walls: On demolishing the panopticon. In D. Lyon (ed.), Theorising Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond. Devon: Willan Publishing, pp. 23–45. Haggerty, K., & Ericson, R. 2000. The surveillant assemblage. British Journal of Sociology, 51(4): 605–622. Hall, S. 1988. New ethnicities. ICA Documents, 7: 27–31. Huysmans, J. 2014. Security Unbound. London: Routledge. Hymes, D. 1969 (1999). The uses of anthropology: Critical, political, personal. In D. Hymes (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 3–79. Hymes, D. 1980a. Speech and language: On the origins and foundations of inequality among speakers. In Language in Education: Ethnolinguistic Essays. Washington, DC: Centre for Applied Linguistics, pp. 19–61. Also in Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality. London: Taylor & Francis, pp. 25–62. Hymes, D. 1980b. What is ethnography? In Language in Education: Ethnolinguistic Essays. Washington, DC: Centre for Applied Linguistics, pp. 88–103. Also in Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice. London: Taylor & Francis, pp. 3–16. Hymes, D. 1980c. Ethnographic monitoring. In Language in Education: Ethnolinguistic Essays. Washington, DC: Centre for Applied Linguistics, pp. 104–118. Khan, K. 2014. Citizenship, securitization and suspicion in UK ESOL policy. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, #130. Available at: www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc (accessed 10 January 2015). Liddicoat, A. 2008. Language planning and questions of national security: An overview of planning approaches. Current Issues in Language Planning, 9(2): 129–153. Lionnet, F., & Shu-mei-Shih. 2005. Thinking through the minor, transnationality. In F. Lionnet & Shu-mei-Shih (eds), Minor transnationalism. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–23. Los, M. 2006. Looking into the future: Surveillance, globalisation and the totalitarian potential. In D. Lyon (ed.), Theorising Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond. Devon: Willan Publishing, pp. 69–94. Lyon, D. (ed.). 2006. Theorising Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond. Devon: Willan Publishing. Makoni, S. 2012. A critique of language, languaging and supervernacular. Multas Vozes, 1(2): 189–199. Maly, I. 2014. Superdiversiteit in Oostende. Antwerp: KifKif.

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Mercer, K. 1994. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge. Ochs, E., & Kremer-Sadlik, T. (eds). 2013. Fast-Forward Family: Home, Work and Relationships in Middle-Class America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pratt, M.L. 1987. Linguistic utopias. In N. Fabb et al. (eds), The Linguistics of Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 48–66. Rampton, B. 2007. Neo-Hymesian linguistic ethnography in the United Kingdom. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(5): 584–607. Rampton, B. 2008. Disciplinary mixing: Types and cases. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(4): 525–531. Rampton, B. 2009. Dell Hymes’ visions of enquiry. Special issue of Text and Talk – ‘On Hymes’, 29(3): 359–370. Rampton, B. 2014. Gumperz and governmentality in the 21st century: Interaction, power and subjectivity. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, #136. Available at: https:// kcl.academia.edu/WorkingPapersinUrbanLanguageLiteracies (accessed 9 January 2015). Rampton, B., Maybin, J., & Roberts, C. 2014. Methodological foundations in linguistic ethnography. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, #125. Available at: https:// kcl.academia.edu/WorkingPapersinUrbanLanguageLiteracies (accessed 8 January 2015). Rampton, B., Maybin, J., & Tusting, K. (eds). 2007. Linguistic ethnography in the UK: Links, problems and possibilities. Special issue of Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(5). Rampton, B., Tusting, K., Maybin, J., Barwell, R., Creese, A., & Lytra, V. 2004. UK Linguistic Ethnography: A Discussion Paper. Available at: www.lancaster.ac.uk/fss/organisa tions/lingethn/documents/discussion_paper_jan_05.pdf (accessed 10 January 2015). Reyes, A. 2014. Linguistic anthropology in 2013: Super-New-Big. American Anthropologist, 116(2): 366–378. Rose, N. 1996. The death of the social? Re-figuring the territory of government. Economy & Society, 25(3): 327–356. Rose, N. 1999. The Power of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruppert, E. 2011. Population objects: Interpassive subjects. Sociology, 45(2): 218–233. Ruppert, E., & Savage, M. 2011. Transactional politics. Sociological Review, 59(2): 73–92. Silverstein, M. 2014. How language communities intersect: Is ‘superdiversity’ an incremental or transformative condition? Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, #107. Available at: www.tilburguniversity.edu/upload/89a37ed3-3c2d-4d2b-bfb3-e907550f 38f0_TPCS_107_Silverstein.pdf (accessed 10 January 2015). Tall, S. 2004. Senegalese émigrés: New information and communication technologies. Review of African Political Economy, 99: 31–48. Urry, J. 2003. Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity. Van der Aa, J., & Blommaert, J. 2015. Ethnographic monitoring and the study of complexity. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, #150. Available at: www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc (accessed 9 January 2015). Van Dijck, J. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Dijk, R. 2011. Cities and the social construction of hot spots: Rescaling, Ghanaian migrants, and the fragmentation of urban spaces. In N. Glick Schiller and A. Çağlar (eds), Locating Migration: Rescaling Cities and Migrants. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 104–122. Varis, P. forthcoming. Digital ethnography. In A. Georgakopoulou & T. Spilioti (eds), Routledge Handbook of Language & Digital Communication. London: Routledge. Vertovec, S. 2007a. New Complexities of Cohesion in Britain: Superdiversity, Transnationalism and Civil-Integration. Oxford: University of Oxford: COMPAS.

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Vertovec, S. 2007b. Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6): 1024–1054. Vertovec, S. 2009. Conceiving and researching diversity MMG Working Paper, 9(1). Vertovec, S. 2012. “Diversity” and the social imaginary. European Journal of Sociology, 53(3): 287–312. Wetherell, M. 2010. The field of identity studies. In M. Wetherell & C.T. Mohanty (eds), The Sage Handbook of Identities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 3–26. Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. 2003. Methodological nationalism, the social sciences, and the study of migration: An essay in historical epistemology. International Migration Review, 37(3): 576–610. Wolf, E.R. 1964. Anthropology. New York: Norton. Wortham, S., & Rymes, B. (eds). 2003. The Linguistic Anthropology of Education. Westport, CT: Praeger.

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PART I

Sketching the Paradigm

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2 LANGUAGE AND SUPERDIVERSITY Jan Blommaert and Ben Rampton

This chapter explores the scope for research on language and superdiversity.1 Following a protracted process of paradigm shift, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology are well placed to engage with the contemporary social changes associated with superdiversity. After a brief introductory discussion of what superdiversity entails, the paper outlines key theoretical and methodological developments in language study: named languages have now been denaturalised, the linguistic is treated as just one semiotic among many, inequality and innovation are positioned together in a dynamics of pervasive normativity, and the contexts in which people orient their interactions reach far beyond the communicative event itself. From here, this chapter moves to a research agenda on superdiversity and language that is strongly embedded in ethnography. The combination of linguistics and ethnography produces an exceptionally powerful and differentiated view of both activity and ideology. After a characterisation of what linguistic ethnography offers social science in general, this chapter sketches some priorities for research on language and communication in particular, emphasising the need for cumulative comparison, both as an objective in theory and description and as a resource for practical intervention.

Superdiversity There is a growing awareness that over the past two decades, globalisation has altered the face of social, cultural, and linguistic diversity in societies all over the world. Due to the diffuse nature of migration since the early 1990s, the multiculturalism of an earlier era (captured, mostly, in an ‘ethnic minorities’ paradigm) has been gradually replaced by what Vertovec (2007) calls ‘superdiversity’.

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FIGURE 2.1

A notice in an Antwerp shop window

Superdiversity is characterised by a tremendous increase in the categories of migrants, not only in terms of nationality, ethnicity, language, and religion, but also in terms of motives, patterns and itineraries of migration, processes of insertion into the labour and housing markets of the host societies, and so on (cf. Vertovec 2010). The predictability of the category of ‘migrant’ and of his/her sociocultural features has disappeared. An example can start to show some of the communicative effects. Consider Figure 2.1. This small piece of text was found in the main street of an inner-city area of Antwerp, Belgium (see Blommaert 2013 for details). It is handwritten in ‘Chinese’ (though this itself will need to be qualified). In English translation, the text reads “apartment for rent, first class finishing, water and electricity included, 350 Yuan per month,” followed by a mobile phone number. The text is mundane, and unless one has a particular interest in it (as sociolinguists do), it is easy to overlook. But when we pay closer attention, we discover a very complex object, and here are some of the issues: (1) The text is written in two forms of ‘Chinese’: a mixture of the simplified script, which is the norm in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the traditional script, widespread in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and earlier generations of the Chinese diaspora. (2) The text articulates two different styles or voices, that of the producer and that of the addressee(s), and the mixed script suggests that their styles are not identical. In all likelihood, the producer is someone

Language and Superdiversity 23

used to writing traditional script, while the addressee is probably from the PRC. (3) The latter point is corroborated by the use of ‘Yuan’ rather than ‘Euro’ as the currency, and (4) the mixed character of the text suggests a process of transition. More specifically, it suggests that the producer (probably an ‘older’ diaspora Chinese person) is learning the script of the PRC, the unfinished learning process leading to the mixing of the scripts. Thus (5) this text points towards two very large-scale phenomena: (a) a gradual change in the Chinese diaspora, in which the balance of demographic, political, and material predominance gradually shifts away from the traditional diaspora groups towards new émigrés from the PRC; and (b) the fact that such a transition is articulated in ‘small’ and peripheral places in the Chinese diaspora, such as the inner city of Antwerp, not only in larger and more conspicuous ‘Chinatowns’ such as London (Huang 2010). So, this text bears the traces of worldwide migration flows and their specific demographic, social, and cultural dynamics. Migration makes communicative resources such as language varieties and scripts globally mobile, and this affects neighbourhoods in very different corners of the world. In this Antwerp neighbourhood, Chinese people are not a very visible group, and in fact this handwritten notice was the very first piece of vernacular Chinese writing observed here (the two Chinese restaurants in the area have professionally manufactured shop signs in Cantonese, written in traditional calligraphic script). Still, the notice shows that the neighbourhood probably includes a non-uniform and perhaps small community of Chinese émigrés, and the marks of historical struggles over real and symbolic power are being transplanted into the Antwerp inner city. Plainly, there are distinctive communicative processes and outcomes involved in migration, and this chapter argues that the detailed study of these can make a substantial contribution to debates about the nature and structure of superdiversification. In fact, these demographic and social changes are complicated by the emergence of new media and technologies of communication and information circulation – and here an orientation to communication necessarily introduces further uncharted dimensions to the idea of superdiversity. In the first chapter of this book, we already noted the historical coincidence of new migration flows since the early 1990s, and the emergence of the Internet and mobile communications technology in the same period. The latter have affected the ways in which diasporic lives, both old and more recent, can be organized and managed (e.g. Faudree 2015; Goebel 2015; cf. Cohen 1997). Access to such ICT resources provides migrants with access to knowledge, translocal networks and sustained bonds with (and involvement in) their places of origin.2 Evidently, these new technologies also affect the ‘host’ communities, and they do so in similar ways (Baron 2008). In the first instance, these developments are changes in the material world – new technologies of communication and knowledge as well as new demographies – but for large numbers of people across the world, they are also lived experiences and sociocultural modes of life that may be changing in ways and degrees that we have yet to understand. In the meantime, it is safe to

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assume that these new technologies have profoundly reconfigured the sociolinguistic economy of very large parts of the world (see below). If we are to grasp the insight into social transformation that communicative phenomena can offer us, it is essential to approach them with an adequate toolkit, recognising that the traditional vocabulary of linguistic analysis is no longer sufficient. In fact, the study of language in society has itself participated in the major intellectual shifts in the humanities and social sciences loosely identified with ‘post-structuralism’ and ‘postmodernism’ (see e.g. Bauman 1992). It is worth now turning to this refurbished apparatus, periodically aligning it with questions that the notion of superdiversity raises.

Paradigm Shifts in the Study of Language in Society Over a period of several decades – and often emerging in response to issues predating superdiversity – there has been ongoing revision of fundamental ideas (a) about languages, (b) about language groups and speakers, and (c) about communication. Rather than working with homogeneity, stability, and boundedness as the starting assumptions, mobility, mixing, political dynamics, and historical embedding are now central concerns in the study of languages, language groups, and communication. These shifts have been influenced by the pioneering work of linguistic anthropologists such as John Gumperz, Dell Hymes, and Michael Silverstein, the foundational rethinking of social and cultural theorists such as Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Foucault, Goffman, Hall, and Williams, as well, no doubt, as substantial changes in the linguascape in many parts of the world. In fact, with this kind of pedigree, ‘robust and well-established orthodoxy’ might seem more apt as a characterisation of these ideas than ‘paradigm shift’ or ‘developments’. Nevertheless, superdiversity intensifies the relevance of these ideas, and if the exposition below sometimes sounds a little gratuitously alternative or oppositional, this is because the notions they seek to displace continue with such hegemonic force in public discourse, in bureaucratic and educational policy and practice, and in everyday common sense, as well as in some other areas of language study.

Languages There is now a substantial body of work on ideologies of language that denaturalises the idea that there are distinct languages, and that a proper language is bounded, pure, and composed of structured sounds, grammar, and vocabulary designed for referring to things (Joseph & Taylor 1990; Woolard et al. 1998). Named languages – ‘English’, ‘German’, ‘Bengali’ – are ideological constructions historically tied to the emergence of the nation state in the nineteenth century, when the idea of autonomous languages free from agency and individual intervention meshed with the differentiation of peoples in terms of spiritual essences (Taylor 1990; Gal & Irvine 1995). In differentiating, codifying, and linking ‘a language’ with

Language and Superdiversity 25

‘a people’, linguistic scholarship itself played a major role in the development of the European nation state as well as in the expansion and organisation of empires (Said, 1978; Robins 1979: Chapters 6 and 7; Hymes 1980a; Anderson 1983; Pratt 1987; Gal & Irvine 1995; Collins 1998: 5, 60; Blommaert 1999; Makoni & Pennycook 2007; Errington 2008), and the factuality of named languages continues to be taken for granted in a great deal of contemporary institutional policy and practice. Indeed, even in sociolinguistic work that sets out to challenge nation state monolingualism, languages are sometimes still conceptualised as bounded systems linked with bounded communities (Urla 1995; Heller 2007: 11; Moore et al. 2010). The traditional idea of ‘a language’, then, is an ideological artefact with very considerable power – it operates as a major ingredient in the apparatus of modern governmentality, it is played out in a wide variety of domains (education, immigration, education, high and popular culture, etc.), and it can serve as an object of passionate personal attachment. But as sociolinguists have long maintained, it is far more productive analytically to focus on the very variable ways in which individual linguistic features with identifiable social and cultural associations get clustered together whenever people communicate (e.g. Hudson 1980; Le Page 1988; Hymes 1996; Silverstein 1998; Blommaert 2003). If we focus on the links and histories of each of the ingredients in any strip of communication, then the ideological homogenisation and/or erasure achieved in national language naming becomes obvious, and a host of sub- and/or transnational styles and registers come into view, most of which are themselves ideologically marked and active (Agha 2007). Instead, a much more differentiated account of the organisation of communicative practice emerges, centring on genres, activities, and relationships that are enacted in ways that both official and common sense accounts often miss. Indeed, this could be seen in Figure 2.1.

Language groups and speakers Deconstruction of the idea of distinct ‘languages’ has followed the critical analyses of ‘nation’ and ‘a people’ in the humanities and social sciences (Said 1978; Anderson 1983), and within sociolinguistics itself, anti-essentialist critique has led to the semi-technical notion of ‘speech community’ being more or less abandoned (Pratt 1987; Rampton 1998; Silverstein 1998).3 ‘Speech community’ has been superseded by a more empirically anchored and differentiating vocabulary that includes ‘communities of practice’, ‘institutions’, and ‘networks’ as the often mobile and flexible sites and links in which representations of groups emerge, move, and circulate. Historically, a good deal of the model-building in formal, descriptive, and applied linguistics has prioritised the ‘native speakers of a language’, treating early experience of living in families and stable speech communities as crucial to grammatical competence and coherent discourse. But sociolinguists have long contested this idealisation, regarding it as impossible to reconcile with the facts

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of linguistic diversity, mixed language, and multilingualism (Ferguson 1982; Leung et al. 1997). Instead, they work with the notion of linguistic repertoire. This dispenses with a priori assumptions about the links between origins, upbringing, proficiency, and types of language, and it refers to individuals’ very variable (and often rather fragmentary) grasp of a plurality of differentially shared styles, registers, and genres, which are picked up (and maybe then partially forgotten) within biographical trajectories that develop in actual histories and topographies (Blommaert & Backus 2011; cf. also Rymes 2014; Busch 2015). Indeed, speech itself is no longer treated as the output of a unitary speaker – following Bakhtin’s account of ‘doublevoicing’ (1981) and Goffman’s ‘production formats’ (1981), individuals are seen as bringing very different levels of personal commitment to the styles they speak (often ‘putting on’ different voices in parody, play, etc.), and of course this also applies with written uses of language. So although notions such as ‘native speaker’, ‘mother tongue’, and ‘ethnolinguistic group’ have considerable ideological force (and as such should certainly feature as objects of analysis), they should have no place in the sociolinguistic toolkit itself. When the reassurance afforded by a priori classifications such as these is abandoned, research instead has to address the ways in which people take on different linguistic forms as they align and disaffiliate with different groups at different moments and stages. It has to investigate how they (try to) opt in and opt out, how they perform or play with linguistic signs of group belonging, and how they develop particular trajectories of group identification throughout their lives. Even in situations of relative stability, contrast and counter-valorisation play an integral part in linguistic socialisation, and people develop strong feelings about styles and registers that they can recognise but hardly reproduce (if at all). So, as a way of characterising the relationship between language and person, the linguist’s traditional notion of ‘competence’ is far too positive, narrow, and absolute in its assumptions about ability and alignment with a given way of speaking. Habitually using one ideologically distinguishable language, style, or register means steering clear and not using others (Parkin 1977; Irvine 2001; see below), and notions such as ‘sensibility’ or ‘structure of feeling’ are potentially much better than ‘competence’ at capturing this relational positioning amidst a number of identifiable possibilities (Williams 1977; Harris 2006: 77–78; Rampton 2011b). In fact, much of this can be generalised beyond language to other social and cultural features treated as emblematic of group belonging, and this will become clear if we now turn to ‘communication’.

Communication Linguistics has traditionally privileged the structure of language, and treated language use as little more than a product/output generated by semantic, grammatical and phonological systems, which are themselves regarded either as mental structures or as sets of social conventions. But this commitment to system-

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in-language has been challenged by a linguistics of communicative practice, rooted in a linguistic-anthropological tradition running from Sapir through Hymes and Gumperz to Hanks (1996), Verschueren (1999), and Agha (2007). This approach puts situated action first, it sees linguistic conventions/structures as just one (albeit important) semiotic resource among a number available to participants in the process of local language production and interpretation, and it treats meaning as an active process of here-and-now projection and inferencing, ranging across all kinds of percept, sign, and knowledge. This view is closely linked to at least five developments.

Indexicality First, the denotational and propositional meanings of words and sentences lose their preeminence in linguistic study, and attention turns to indexicality, the connotational significance of signs. So, for example, when someone switches in speaking and/or writing into a different style or register, it is essential to consider more than the literal meaning of what they are saying. The style, register, or code they have moved into is itself likely to carry associations that are somehow relevant to the specific activities and social relations in play, and this can “serve as the rallying point for interest group sharing,” “act[ing] as [a] powerful instrument . . . of persuasion in everyday communicative situations for participants who share [the] values [that are thereby indexed]” (Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz 1982: 7). To achieve rhetorical effects such as this in the absence of explicit statements about group interests, there has to be at least some overlap in the interpretive frameworks that participants bring to bear in their construal of a switch. The overlap does not come from nowhere – it emerges from social experience and prior exposure to circumambient discourses, and if the interpretations are almost automatic and unquestioned, this may be regarded as an achievement of hegemony (as in, for example, common evaluations of different accents). Indeed, the relationship here between, on the one hand, signs with unstated meanings and, on the other, socially shared interpretations, makes indexicality a very rich site for the empirical study of ideology (cf. Hall 1980: 133). In fact, this can also extend far beyond language itself.

Multimodality This is because meaning is multimodal, communicated in much more than language alone. People apprehend meaning in gestures, postures, faces, bodies, movements, physical arrangements and the material environment, and in different combinations these constitute contexts shaping the way in which utterances are produced and understood (Goffman 1964; Goodwin 2000; Goodwin 2006; Bezemer & Jewitt 2009). This obviously applies to written and technologically mediated communication as well as to speech (Kress & Van Leeuwen 1996), and

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even when they are alone, people are continuously reading multimodal signs to make sense of their circumstances, as likely as not drawing on interpretive frameworks with social origins of which they are largely unaware (Leppänen et al. 2009). In fact, with people communicating more and more in varying combinations of oral, written, pictorial, and ‘design’ modes (going on Facebook, playing online games, using mobile phones, etc.), multimodal analysis is an inevitable empirical adjustment to contemporary conditions, and we are compelled to move from ‘language’ in the strict sense towards semiosis as our focus of inquiry, and from ‘linguistics’ towards a new sociolinguistically informed semiotics as our disciplinary space (Scollon & Scollon 2003, 2004; Kress 2009).

Non-Shared Knowledge Together, indexicality and multimodality help to destabilise other traditional ingredients in language study – assumptions of common ground and the prospects for achieving intersubjectivity. Instead, non-shared knowledge grows in its potential significance for communicative processes. The example of code-switching above shows indexical signs contributing to rhetorical persuasion, but this is by no means their only effect. Indexical signs are also unintentionally ‘given off’, with consequences that speakers may have little inkling of (Goffman 1959: 14; Brown & Levinson 1978: 324–325). When speakers articulate literal propositions in words, they have quite a high level of conscious control over the meaning of what they are saying, and even though there are never any guarantees, their interlocutor’s response usually provides material for monitoring the uptake of what they have said (see e.g. Heritage & Atkinson 1984: 8). But these words are accompanied by a multimodal barrage of other semiotic signs (accent, style of speaking, posture, dress, etc.), and the interlocutor can also interpret any of these other elements in ways that the speaker is unaware of, perhaps noting something privately that they only later disclose to others. So, if we look beyond literal and referential meaning and language on its own, we increase our sensitivity to a huge range of nonshared, asymmetrical interpretations, and in fact many of these are quite systematically patterned in relations of power. Looking beyond multimodality, diversity itself throws up some sharp empirical challenges to traditional ideas about the achievability of mutual understanding and the centrality of shared convention. First, if it brings people together with very different backgrounds, resources, and communicative scripts, diversity is likely to pluralise indexical interpretation, introducing significant limits to negotiability, and this impacts on the idea of ‘negotiation’, a notion with axiomatic status in some branches of interactional linguistics. In Barth’s (1992: 27) hard-nosed empirical approach to the concept: ‘[n]egotiation’ suggests a degree of conflict of interests . . . within a framework of shared understandings [, but . . . t]he disorder entailed in

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. . . religious, social, ethnic, class and cultural pluralism [sometimes . . .] goes far beyond what can be retrieved as ambiguities of interest, relevance, and identity resolved through negotiation. In situations where linguistic repertoires can be largely discrepant and nonverbal signs may do little to evoke solidarity, or alternatively in settings where there is a surfeit of technologically mediated texts and imagery, the identification of any initial common ground can itself be a substantial task (Barrett 1997: 188–191; Gee 1999: 15ff). The salience of non-shared knowledge increases the significance of “knowing one’s own ignorance, knowing that others know something else, knowing whom to believe, developing a notion of the potentially knowable” (Hannerz 1992: 45; Fabian 2001). The management of ignorance itself becomes a substantive issue, and inequalities in communicative resources have to be addressed, not just ‘intercultural differences’. It would be absurd to insist that there is absolutely no ‘negotiation of meaning’ in encounters where the communicative resources are only minimally shared. But it is important not to let a philosophical commitment to negotiation (or co-construction) as an axiomatic property of communication prevent us from investigating the limits to negotiability, or appreciating the vulnerability of whatever understanding emerges in the here and now to more fluent interpretations formed elsewhere, either before or after (Gumperz 1982; Roberts et al. 1992; Maryns 2006). A second empirical challenge that diversity presents to presumptions of shared knowledge can be seen as the opposite of the first. Instead of focusing on communicative inequalities in institutional and instrumental settings, there is an emphasis on creativity and linguistic profusion when sociolinguistic research focuses on non-standard mixed language practices that appear to draw on styles and languages that aren’t normally regarded as belonging to the speaker, especially in recreational, artistic, and/or oppositional contexts (and often among youth). These appropriative practices are strikingly different from dominant institutional notions of multilingualism as the ordered deployment of different language, and they involve much more than just the alternation between the home vernacular and the national standard language. Instead, they use linguistic features influenced by, for example, ethnic out-groups, new media, and popular culture. The local naming of these practices is itself often indeterminate and contested, both among users and analysts, and scholarly terms referring to (different aspects of) this include ‘heteroglossia’, ‘crossing’, ‘polylingualism’, ‘translanguaging’, ‘metrolingualism’, and ‘new ethnicities and language’ (Bakhtin 1981, 1984; Rampton 1995, 2011b; Madsen 2008; Harris 2006; Jørgensen 2008a, 2008b; Creese & Blackledge 2010; Otsuji & Pennycook 2010; Leppänen; 2012; for reviews, see Auer 2006; Quist & Jørgensen 2009; Rampton & Charalambous 2010). Understanding the relationship between conventionality and innovation in these practices is difficult, and there are a variety of traps that researchers have to navigate (Rampton 2010). It is easy for a practice’s novelty to the outside analyst to mislead

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him/her into thinking that it is a creative innovation for the local participants as well (Sapir 1949: 504; Becker 1995: 229). And then once it has been established that the practice is new or artful in some sense or other, it is often hard to know how much weight to attach to any particular case (and not to make mountains out of molehills [see also below]). It can take a good deal of close analysis to identify exactly how and where in an utterance an artful innovation emerges – in which aspects of its formal structure, its timing, its interpersonal direction, its indexical resonance, etc., and in which combinations. The ideal may be for researchers to align their sense of what’s special and what’s routine with their informants, but there is no insulation from the intricacies of human ingenuity, deception, and misunderstanding, where people speak in disguise, address themselves to interlocutors with very different degrees of background understanding, etc. Still, it is worth looking very closely at these practices for at least two reasons. First, they allow us to observe linguistic norms being manufactured, interrogated, or altered, or to see norms that have changed and are new/different in the social networks being studied. We can see, in short, the emergence of structure out of agency. And second, there are likely to be social, cultural, and/or political stakes in this, as we know from the principle of indexicality. So when white youngsters use bits of other-ethnic speech styles in ways that their other-ethnic friends accept, there are grounds for suggesting that they are learning to ‘live with difference’ (Hewitt 1986; Rampton 1995; Harris 2006), and when people put on exaggerated posh or vernacular accents in mockery or retaliation to authority, it looks as though social class hasn’t lost its significance in late modernity (Rampton 2006; Jaspers 2011). Practices of this kind certainly are not new historically (Hill 1999: 544). Linguistic diversity invariably introduces styles, registers, and/or languages that people know only from the outside – attaching indexical value to them perhaps, but unable to grasp their ‘intentionality’, semantics, and grammar4 – and there is a powerful account of the potential for ideological creativity and subversion that this offers in, for example, Bakhtin’s work on the Rabelaisian carnivalesque (1968). But there has been exponential growth in scholarly attention to these practices over the last 15 years, and perhaps this reflects their increase in superdiversity (see also next section). So when Androutsopoulos proposes that “linguistic diversity is gaining an unprecedented visibility in the mediascapes of the late twentieth and early twenty first century” (2007: 207), he associates this with different kinds of heteroglossia/polylingualism. For example, non-national language forms are now widely stylised, starting in advertising but extending beyond nationwide media to niche, commercial, and non-profit media for various contemporary youth-cultural communities: [w]hen media makers devise an advertisement, plan a lifestyle magazine or set up a website, they may select linguistic codes (a second language, a mixed code) just for specific portions of their product, based on anticipations of

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their aesthetic value, their indexical or symbolic force, and, ultimately, their effects on the audience. (Androutsopoulos 2007: 215) Alternatively, diaspora media often have to reckon with the fact that much of their audience has limited proficiency in the language of the homeland, so producers position “tiny amounts of [the] language . . . at the margins of text and talk units, . . . thereby” “exploit[ing] the symbolic, rather than the referential, function,” “evok[ing] social identities and relationships associated with the minimally used language” (Androutsopoulos 2007: 214; also Varis & Blommaert 2015; Blommaert & Varis 2015). And in addition: [i]n the era of digital technologies, the sampling and recontextualisation of media content is a basic practice in popular media culture: rap artists sample foreign voices in their song; entertainment shows feature snatches of otherlanguage broadcasts for humour; internet users engage in linguistic bricolage on their homepages. (Androutsopoulos 2007: 208)

Metapragmatic Reflexivity When shared knowledge is problematised and creativity and incomprehension are both at issue, people reflect on their own and others’ communication, assessing the manner and extent to which this matches established standards and scripts for ‘normal’ and expected expression. This connects with another major contemporary concern in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology – metapragmatic reflexivity about language and semiotic practice. Even though it is now recognised that reflexivity is actually pervasive in all linguistic practice, this is a substantial departure from sociolinguists’ traditional prioritisation of tacit, unselfconscious language use, and it now features as a prominent focus in a range of empirical topics. As we saw with ideologically differentiated languages above, research on public debates about language shows how these are almost invariably connected to (and sometimes stand as a proxies for) non-linguistic interests – legislation on linguistic proficiency as a criterion for citizenship, for example, often serves as a way of restricting access to social benefits and/or rallying indigenous populations (see e.g. Warriner 2007; Blackledge 2009). In enterprise culture and contemporary service industries, metapragmatic theories and technologies of discourse and talk are closely linked to regimes of power in ‘communication skills training’, ‘customer care’, and ‘quality management’ (Cameron 2000). In visual design and the production of multimodal textualities in advertising, website development, and other technologically mediated communication, linguistic reflexivity plays a crucial role (whether or not this is polylingual) (Kress & Van Leeuwen 1996). And ordinary speakers are also perceived as evaluating and reflecting on the cultural images of people and activities indexically conjured by particular

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forms of speech – this can be seen in a very substantial growth of sociolinguistic interest in artful oral performance, where there is heightened evaluative awareness of both the act of expression and the performer, not just on stage or in heteroglossic speech mixing, but also in, for example, spontaneous storytelling (Bauman 1986; Coupland 2007).

Entextualisation, Transposition, and Recontextualisation In research on stylisation, performance, and visual design, linguistics extends its horizons beyond habit, regularity, and system to distinction and spectacle, and if a spectacular practice or event is actually significant, then there has to be some record of it that gets circulated over time and space. In this way, the focus broadens beyond the workings of language and text within specific events to the projection of language and text across them, in textual trajectories. With this extension beyond use-value to the exchange-value of language practices, entextualisation, transposition, and recontextualisation become key terms, addressing (a) the (potentially multiple) people and processes involved in the design or selection of textual ‘projectiles’ that have some hope of travelling into subsequent settings, (b) to the alteration and revaluation of texts in ‘transportation’ (i.e. the ways in which mobility affects texts and interpretive work), and (c) to their embedding in new contexts (Hall 1980; Bauman & Briggs 1990; Silverstein & Urban 1996; Agha & Wortham 2005). So meaning-making and interpretation are seen as stages in the mobility of texts and utterances, and as themselves actively oriented – backwards and forwards – to the paths through which texts and utterances travel (Briggs 2005).5 As well as encouraging a multi-sited description of communications beyond, before and after specific events, the analysis of transposition can also be factored into interaction face-to-face. In situations where participants inevitably find themselves immersed in a plethora of contingent particularities, where there are no guarantees of intersubjectivity and indexical signs can communicate independent of the speakers’ intentions, analysis of what actually gets entextualised and what subsequently succeeds in carrying forward – or even translating into higher scale processes – can be central to political conceptions of ‘hearability’ and ‘voice’ (Hymes 1996; Mehan 1996; Briggs 1997; Blommaert 2005). This perspective is clearly relevant to the circulation of ideological messages, to technologically mediated communication (think of ‘shares’ and ‘retweets’ on social media) and to global and transnational ‘flows’ more generally. It also invites comparative analysis of the scale – the spatial scope, temporal durability, social reach – of the networks and processes in which texts and representations travel (Scollon & Scollon 2004; Pennycook 2007, 2010; Blommaert 2008, 2010a; Androutsopoulos 2009; Varis & Blommaert 2015). In other words, it encourages a layered and multi-scalar conceptualisation of context (Cicourel 1992; Blommaert 2010a). The contexts in which people communicate are partly local and emergent, continuously readjusted to the contingencies of action unfolding from one

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moment to the next, but they are also infused with information, resources, expectations, and experiences that originate in, circulate through, and/or are destined for networks and processes that can be very different in their reach and duration (as well as in their capacity to bestow privilege, power, or stigma). In cultural forms such as hip hop, for example, resources from immediate, local, and global scale-levels are all called into play. As well as shaping each line to build on the last and lead to the next, rappers anchor their messages in local experiences/ realities and articulate them in the global stylistic template of hip hop, accessing a global scale-level of potential circulation, recognition, and uptake in spite of (and complementary to) the restricted accessibility typically associated with the strictly local (Pennycook 2007; Wang 2010). Similarly, the multi-scalar dimensions of diasporic life in superdiversity account for the complex forms of new urban multilingualism encountered in recent work in linguistic landscaping (Scollon & Scollon 2003; Pan Lin 2009; Blommaert 2013). The local emplacement of, say, a Turkish shop in Amsterdam prompts messages in Dutch; the local emplacement of the regional diasporic ethnic community and its transnational network prompts Turkish; and other local, regional, and transnational factors can prompt the presence of English, Polish, Russian, Arabic, Tamil, and others. In a multi-scalar view of context, features that used to be treated separately as macro – social class, ethnicity, gender, generation, etc. – can now be seen operating at the most micro level of interactional process, as resources that participants can draw upon when making sense of what’s going on in a communicative event (see the example of style shifting above). Most of the extrinsic resources flowing into the nexus of communication may be taken for granted, tacitly structuring the actions that participants opt for, but metapragmatic reflexivity means that participants also often orient to the ‘multi-scalar’, ‘transpositional’ implications of what’s happening. After all, messages, texts, genres, styles, and languages vary conspicuously in their potential for circulation – itself a major source of stratification – and sometimes this can itself become the focus of attention and dispute, as people differ in their normative sense of what should carry where. In this way, here-and-now interaction is also often actively ‘scale-sensitive’, mindful of the transnational, national, or local provenance or potential of a text or practice, overtly committed to, for example, blocking or reformatting it so that it does or doesn’t translate up or down this or that social or organisational hierarchy (Arnaut 2005).

Methodologically Virtually all of the work reported here holds to two axioms: (a) The contexts for communication should be investigated rather than assumed. Meaning takes shape within specific places, activities, social relations, interactional histories, textual trajectories, institutional regimes, and cultural

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ideologies, produced and construed by embodied agents with expectations and repertoires that have to be grasped ethnographically. (b) Analysis of the internal organisation of semiotic data is essential to understanding its significance and position in the world. Meaning is far more than just the ‘expression of ideas’, and biography, identifications, stance, and nuance are extensively signalled in the linguistic and textual fine-grain. If traditional classificatory frameworks no longer work and ethnic categorisation is especially problematic in superdiversity, then this combination seems very apt. One of ethnography’s key characteristics is its commitment to taking a long hard look at empirical processes that make no sense within established frameworks. And if critiques of essentialism underline the relevance of Moerman’s reformulation of the issue in research on the ‘Lue’ – “The question is not, ‘Who are the Lue?’ but rather when and how and why the identification of ‘Lue’ is preferred” (1974: 62; see also e.g. Barth 1969) – then it is worth turning to language and discourse to understand how categories and identities get circulated, taken up, and reproduced in textual representations and communicative encounters. Admittedly, the methodological profile of linguistics has not always made it seem particularly well suited to this terrain. During the heyday of structuralism, linguistics was often held up as a model for the scientific study of culture as an integrated system, making the rest of the humanities and social sciences worry that they were “pre-scientific” (Hymes 1983: 196). Indeed, in Levinson’s words, “linguists are the snobs of social science: you don’t get into the club unless you are willing to don the most outlandish presuppositions” (1988: 161). But in this section, we have tried to show that these ‘outlandish presuppositions’ no longer hold with the force they used to. Instead, we would insist on bringing an ethnographer’s sensibility to the apparatus of linguistics and discourse analysis, treating it as a set of ‘sensitising’ concepts “suggest[ing] directions along which to look” rather than ‘definitive’ constructs “provid[ing] prescriptions of what to see” (Blumer 1969: 148), and this should be applied with reflexive understanding of the researcher’s own participation in the circulation of power/knowledge (Cameron et al. 1992). But once the apparatus is epistemologically repositioned like this – repositioned as just the extension of ethnography into intricate zones of culture and society that might otherwise be missed – then linguistics offers a very rich and empirically robust collection of frameworks and procedures for exploring the details of social life, also providing a very full range of highly suggestive – but not binding! – proposals about how they pattern together. Among other effects produced by this combination of linguistics and ethnography, a distinctive view of ideology emerges. Rather than being treated only as sets of explicitly articulated statements (as in much policy and interview discourse analysis), ideologies are viewed as complexes that operate in different shapes and with different modes of articulation at a variety of levels on a range of objects. Explicit statements are, of course, included, but so too are

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implicit behavioural reflexes operating in discourse practices (turning these into ideologically saturated praxis). Intense scrutiny of textual and discursive detail discloses the ways in which widely distributed societal ideologies penetrate the microscopic world of talk and text, how ideologies have palpable mundane reality.6 Indeed, this layered, multi-scalar, and empirically grounded understanding of ideology is perhaps one of the most sophisticated ones in current social science. Such, then, is the refurbished toolkit that currently constitutes linguistic ethnography (linguistic anthropology/ethnographic sociolinguistics). It is now worth reflecting on some of the questions and issues that it could be used to address.

An Agenda for Research There are at least two broad tracks for the study of language in superdiversity, one that adds linguistic ethnography as a supplementary perspective to other kinds of study, and another that takes language and communication as central topics. As the perspective outlined in the previous section is itself inevitably interdisciplinary, the difference between these tracks is mainly a matter of degree, and the dividing line becomes even thinner when, for example, Vertovec asks in a discussion of superdiversity and ‘civil integration’ what “meaningful [communicative] interchanges look like, how they are formed, maintained or broken, and how the state or other agencies might promote them” (2007: 27; see also e.g. Gilroy 2006 and Varis & Blommaert 2015, on low-key ‘conviviality’; and Boyd 2006, on ‘civility’). Still, there are differences in the extent to which research questions and foci can be pre-specified in each of these tracks.

Adding Linguistic Ethnography as a Supplementary Lens Wherever empirical research is broadly aligned with social constructionism (e.g. Berger & Luckmann 1966; Giddens 1976, 1984), there is scope for introducing the kinds of lens outlined in the previous section. If the social world is produced in ordinary activity, and if social realities get produced, ratified, resisted, and reworked in everyday interaction, then the tools of linguistic, semiotic, and discourse analysis can help us understand about a great deal more than communication alone. So if one rejects an essentialist group description such as ‘the Roma in Hungary’, and instead seeks to understand how ‘Roma’ circulates as a representation in Hungarian discourse, how it settles on particular humans, how it comes to channel and constrain their position and activity, then it is vital to take a close look at language and discourse (cf. Tremlett 2007; see also Moerman 1974). There is no retreat from larger generalisations about ethnicity, history, or superdiversity in this linguistic focus, but it is driven by a view that in the process of abstracting and simplifying, it is vital to continuously refer back to what’s ‘lived’

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and expressed in the everyday (itself understood as layered and multi-scalar) (cf. Harris & Rampton 2010; cf. Cicourel 1972). Without that anchoring, discussion is often left vulnerable to the high-octane dramatisations of public discourse, panicked and unable to imagine how anyone copes. Talk of ‘multiple, fluid, intersecting, and ambiguous identities’ provides little recovery from this, assuming as it often does that the identities mentioned all count, and that it is really hard working out how they link together. Indeed, ‘fluidism’ of this kind can be rather hard to reconcile with everyday communicative practices. A close look at these can show that people often do manage to bring quite a high degree of intelligible order to their circumstances, that they aren’t as fractured or troubled by particular identifications as initially supposed, and that they can be actually rather adept at navigating ‘superdiversity’ or ‘ethnicities without guarantees’, inflecting them in ways that are extremely hard to anticipate in the absence of close observation and analysis. This kind of analytical movement – holding influential discourses to account with descriptions of the everyday – is of course a defining feature of ethnography per se, and the perspective outlined here could be described as ethnography tout court. But it is an ethnography enriched with some highly developed heuristic frameworks and procedures for discovering otherwise un(der)-analysed intricacies in social relations (cf. Sapir 1949: 166; Hymes 1996: 8). In a field such as sociolinguistics, scholars certainly can spend careers elaborating this apparatus, but as the cross-disciplinary training programme in Ethnography, Language and Communication7 has amply demonstrated, it doesn’t take long for the sensitive ethnographer with a non-linguistics background to be able to start using these tools to generate unanticipated insights.

Language and Communication as Focal Topics A full consideration of issues for research focused on language and communication in superdiversity would take far more space than is available here, but before pointing to two broad areas, it is worth emphasising three general principles that should be borne in mind throughout.

Guiding Principles First, even though there is sure to be variation in the prioritisation of its elements, it is essential to remain cognisant of what Silverstein calls ‘the total linguistic fact’: [t]he total linguistic fact, the datum for a science of language is irreducibly dialectic in nature. It is an unstable mutual interaction of meaningful sign forms, contextualised to situations of interested human use and mediated by the fact of cultural ideology. (Silverstein 1985: 220)

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And, of course, this in turn is grounded in a basic commitment to ethnographic description of the who, what, where, when, how, and why of semiotic practice. Second, it is vital to remember just how far normativity (or ‘ought-ness’) reaches into semiosis and communication. For much of the time, most of the resources materialised in any communicative action are unnoticed and taken for granted, but it only takes a slight deviation from habitual and expected practice to send recipients into interpretive overdrive, wondering what’s going on when a sound, a word, a grammatical pattern, a discourse move, or bodily movement doesn’t quite fit. There is considerable scope for variation in the norms that individuals orient to, which affects the kinds of things they notice as discrepant, and there can also be huge variety in the situated indexical interpretations that they bring to bear (‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘art’ or ‘error’, ‘call it out’ or ‘let it pass’, ‘indicative or typical of this or that’). These normative expectations and explanatory accounts circulate through social networks that range very considerably in scale, from intimate relationships and friendship groups to national education systems and global media, and of course there are major differences in how far they are committed to policing or receptive to change. All this necessarily complicates any claims we might want to make about the play of structure and agency. It alerts us to the ways in which innovation on one dimension may be framed by stability at others, and it means that when we do speak of a change, it is essential to assess its penetration and consequentiality elsewhere. But at least we have an idea of what we have to look for, and this may help us past the risk of hasty over- or under-interpretation (either pessimistic or romanticising). Third, in view of the volume of past and present research on diversity, we have reached the stage where individual and clusters of projects can and should now seek cumulative comparative generalisation. ‘Superdiversity’ speaks of rapid change and mobility, and to interrogate this, it is important wherever possible to incorporate the comparison of new and old datasets and studies, as well as to address the perspectives of different generations of informants. Multi-sited comparison across scales, mediating channels/agencies, and institutional settings is likely to be indispensible in any account concerned with ideology, language, and everyday life. But there is also now an opportunity for comparison across nation states and different parts of the world. Among other things, this should help to clarify the extent to which the orderly and partially autonomous aspects of language and interaction reduce superdiversity’s potentially pluralising impact on communication, resulting in cross-setting similarities in spite of major difference in the macro-structural conditions (Goffman 1983; Erickson 2001).

Two Broad Areas for Language and Communication Research The general commitments themselves imply a number of specific questions for investigation. So, for example, the call for comparison invites examination of just how varied the interactional relations enacted in heteroglossic practices actually

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are, while longitudinal research should illuminate their historicity and biographical durability across the lifespan (cf. Rampton 2011a). Similarly, longitudinal work allows us to consider whether, how, and how far the development of digital communications are changing face-to-face encounters, pluralising or refocusing participation structures, re- or decentring the communicative resources in play. Interaction has always hosted split foci of attention – making asides to bystanders, chatting with the TV on, taking a landline call in the kitchen during dinner, dipping in and out of some reading – but are there situations where the acceleration of digital innovation has now produced a quantum shift in the arrangements for talk and the dynamics of co-presence? Exactly which, how, why, with what, and among whom? And where, what, how, etc., not or not much (Eisenlohr 2006, 2009; Leppänen & Piirainen-Marsh 2009)? The investigation of particular sites and practices will often need to reckon with wider patterns of sociolinguistic stratification in societies at large, as well as with the linguistic socialisation of individuals. Superdiversity has potential implications for these as well, so it is worth dwelling on each a little longer. Writing about the United States during the twentieth century, Hymes (1980a, 1996) used the phrase ‘speech economy’ to refer to the organisation of communicative resources and practices in different (but connected) groups, networks, and institutions. In doing so, he was making at least three points: (i) some forms of communication are highly valued and rewarded while others get stigmatised or ignored; (ii) expertise and access to influential and prestigious styles, genres, and media is unevenly distributed across any population; and, in this way, (iii) language and discourse play a central role in the production and legitimation of inequality and stratification. This account of a sociolinguistic economy is broadly congruent with Irvine’s Bourdieurian description of registers and styles forming “part of a system of distinction, in which a style contrasts with other possible styles, and the social meaning signified by the style contrasts with other possible styles” (Irvine 2001: 22, emphasis in the original).8 And Parkin extends this view of the relational significance of styles, languages, and media when he uses research on newly formed polyethnic urban spaces in 1970s Kenya to suggest that the relationship between languages and styles can provide: a framework for [the] expression of [both emergent and established] ideological differences, . . . a kind of template along the lines of which social groups may later become distinguished . . . Within . . . polyethnic communities, diversity of speech . . . provides . . . the most readily available ‘raw’ classificatory data for the differentiation of new social groups and the redefinition of old ones. (Parkin 1977: 187, 205, 208) Set next to the discussion of superdiversity, this raises two closely related questions.

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First, following Parkin, how far does the sociolinguistic economy in any given nation state itself serve as a template bringing intelligible order to superdiversity? How far does it operate as an orientational map or as a collection of distributional processes that draws people with highly diffuse origins into a more limited set of sociolinguistic strata, so that they form new ‘super-groupings’ (in Arnaut’s formulation; see Arnaut 2008) and their ethnic plurality is absorbed within traditional class hierarchies (Rampton 2011a)? Alternatively, how far are national sociolinguistic economies being destabilised, their formerly hegemonic power dissipated by people’s diasporic affiliations and highly active (and digitally mediated) links with sociolinguistic economies elsewhere? Blending these questions, should we look for a multiplicity of sociolinguistic economies in superdiversity, a kind of ‘scaled polycentricity’ made up of communicative markets that vary in their reach, value, and (partial) relations of sub- and superordination? Looking back to the mixed speech practices increasingly identified in European cities (in the previous section), should we view these non-standard heteroglossias as an outcome of this interplay between processes of diffusion and refocusing, as the expression of emergent multi-ethnic vernacular sensibilities formed in opposition to higher classes? Are these higher classes themselves now drawn towards elite cosmopolitanism and multilingualism in standard languages? And as a non-standard vernacular emblem with global currency, where does hip hop figure in this dynamic? Mapping the central reference points in these sociolinguistic economies will inevitably draw us more towards a bird’s-eye overview, but it still requires close ethnographic observation to understand how the elements are related and sustained, and we will need to focus, for example, on the kinds of conflict or compromise that emerge in institutions of standardisation such as schools when heteroglot urban populations encounter the models for language learning, teaching, and assessment propounded in, for example, official documents such as the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (cf. Jaspers 2005, 2011; Lytra 2007).9 Following on from this, second, the language and literacy socialisation of individuals in superdiversity also requires a lot more research, both inside and outside formal education (see Duranti et al. 2011: Chapters 21–27; Lillis 2013). Accounts of socialisation in community complementary schools are now increasing in number (Li Wei 2006; Creese & Blackledge 2010), as are analyses of peer socialisation in multilingual youth networks (Hewitt 1986; Rampton & Charalambous 2010). But there is very little work on intergenerational language socialisation within families, and this is likely to vary in degrees of formalisation as well as in the directions of influence, depending on whether it covers old or new languages, styles, technologies, and approaches to interculturality, and whether it occurs in domestic, recreational, community, and religious settings, locally, virtually, or in the countries where people have family ties (cf. Zhu Hua 2008). With words such as ‘freshie’ and ‘FOB’ (fresh off the boat) gaining currency

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in and around settled minority communities, the sociolinguistic and cultural positioning of co-ethnic adult and adolescent newcomers merits particular attention (Pyke & Tang 2003; Sarroub 2005; Talmy 2008, 2009; Reyes & Lo 2009), and there is a great deal of new work to be done on the Internet, mobile phones, and practices such as gaming, chatting, and texting as sites of language learning (Leppänen 2009; Blommaert 2010a; Deumert 2014). In all of this, it is important to avoid the a priori separation of ‘first-’ and ‘second-language’ speakers – among other things, linguistic norms and targets change (Blommaert et al. 2005: 201; Rampton 2011c) – and it will also need careful clarification of potential links and necessary incompatibilities in the idioms commonly used to analyse heteroglossia, on the one hand (‘double-voicing’, ‘stylisation’, ‘ideological becoming’, etc.) and standard second-language learning, on the other (e.g. ‘transfer’, ‘noticing’, ‘interlanguage development’).

Impacts Linguistics has its very origins in the practical encounter with diversity and difference (e.g. Bolinger 1975: 506ff), and as well as contributing to the formation of nation states, there is a very large and long tradition of interventionist work in the field of applied linguistics, focusing on a very full range of issues in institutional language policy and practice. Here, too, there has been ongoing argument and change in the guiding models of communication (Widdowson 1984: 7–36; Trappes-Lomax 2000; Seidlhofer 2003), and in general there has been a lot less susceptibility to ‘outlandish presuppositions’ here than in formal, nonapplied linguistics. Post-structuralist ideas have also been working their way through applied linguistics, and there is now growing discussion of whether and how contemporary developments in language, ethnicity, and culture require new forms of intervention (Leung et al. 1997; Rampton 2000; Pennycook 2001, 2010). So when the programme of perspectives, methods, and topics sketched in this chapter is called to justify itself in terms of relevance and impact beyond the academy – as is increasingly common for university research – there is a substantial body of work to connect with. Even so, in a sociopolitical context often characterised by deep and vigorous disagreements about policy and practice for language and literacy in education, politics, commerce, etc., the models of language and communication critiqued before are still very influential. In addition, non-experimental, non-quantitative methods of the kind that we have emphasised are often criticised as ‘unscientific’ and then excluded from the reckoning in evidence-based policymaking. So, strategies and issues around impact and application require extensive consideration in their own right. But perhaps Hymes provides the fundamental orientation for this environment (1980a; see also Blommaert 2010b). In a discussion of ‘ethnographic monitoring’, in which ethnographic researchers study events and outcomes

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during the implementation of intervention programmes in education, health, workplaces, etc., Hymes describes ethnography’s practical relevance in a way that now resonates quite widely with experience in linguistic ethnography:10 of all forms of scientific knowledge, ethnography is the most open, . . . the least likely to produce a world in which experts control knowledge at the expense of those who are studied. The skills of ethnography consist of the enhancement of skills all normal persons employ in everyday life; its discoveries can usually be conveyed in forms of language that non-specialists can read . . . (Hymes 1980b: 105) He then goes further: Ethnography, as we know, is . . . an interface between specific inquiry and comparative generalisation. It will serve us well, I think, to make prominent the term ‘ethnology’, that explicitly invokes comparative generalisation . . . An emphasis on the ethnological dimension takes one away from immediate problems and from attempt to offer immediate remedies, but it serves constructive change better in the long run. Emphasis on the ethnological dimension links . . . ethnography with social history, through the ways in which larger forces for socialisation, institutionalisation, reproduction of an existing order, are expressed and interpreted in specific settings. The longer view seems a surer footing. (Hymes 1980c: 121, 1996: 19) It is this surer footing that we should now target in a coordinated programme of research language and superdiversity.

Notes 1. Blommaert and Rampton drafted this text, but it is the outcome of substantial discussion and revision involving Adrian Blackledge, Jens Normann Jørgensen, Sirpa Leppänen, Roxy Harris, Max Spotti, Lian Madsen, Martha Karrebæk, Janus Møller, Karel Arnaut, David Parkin, Kasper Juffermans, Steve Vertovec, Ad Backus, and Angela Creese. 2. Thus, while a dissident political activist used to forfeit much of his/her involvement by emigrating, such activists can today remain influential and effective in their dissident movements back home (cf. Appadurai 2006, on ‘cellular activism’). 3. For a long time, linguists considered a speech community to be an objective entity that could be empirically identified as a body of people who interacted regularly, who had attitudes and/or rules of language use in common, and it would be the largest social unit that the study of a given language variety could seek to generalise about. 4. Bakhtin puts it as follows: “for the speakers of [particular] language[s] themselves, these . . . languages . . . are directly intentional – they denote and express directly and fully, and are capable of expressing themselves without mediation; but outside, that is, for

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5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

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those not participating in the given purview, these languages may be treated as objects, as typifications, as local colour. For such outsiders, the intentions permeating these languages become things, limited in their meaning and expression; they attract to, or excise from, such languages a particular word – making it difficult for the word to be utilised in a directly intentional way, without any qualification” (1981: 289). This obviously complicates notions of ‘authorship’ and it is directly relevant to discussions of ‘authenticity’ and the ‘originality’ of texts (as in ‘the original version of X’). See also the discussion of ‘normativity’ in this chapter. See www.rdi-elc.org.uk. “[S]tyles in speaking involve the ways speakers, as agents in social (and sociolinguistic) space, negotiate their positions and goals within a system of distinctions and possibilities. Their acts of speaking are ideologically mediated, since those acts necessarily involve the speaker’s understandings of salient social groups, activities, and practices, including forms of talk. Such understandings incorporate evaluations and are weighted by the speaker’s social position and interest. They are also affected by differences in speakers’ access to relevant practices. Social acts, including acts of speaking, are informed by an ideologised system of representations, and no matter how instrumental they may be to some particular social goal, they also participate in the ‘work of representation’ [Bourdieu 1984]” (Irvine 2001: 24). The CEFR assumes bounded languages that can be divided into clearly identifiable levels of acquisition and proficiency, and it is a good illustration of what we argued earlier, that traditional modernist ideological constructs of language are prominent and hugely influential material realities. For a critique, see the essays in Hogan-Brun et al. (2009). In the UK at least, linguistic ethnography has close family links with applied linguistics (Rampton 2007: 586–590).

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3 SUPERDIVERSITY Elements of an Emerging Perspective Karel Arnaut

This chapter is an attempt to reflect upon diversity in contemporary globalising society from within the disciplinary frontier of anthropology and sociolinguistics. This reflection is meant to explore the potential of ‘superdiversity’ as a perspective or lens for looking at diversity as discourse and as social practice. The chapter first looks into the notion of superdiversity, which marks a sea change in the global design of transnationalism. Moreover, superdiversity seems to indicate that a new approach is needed to replace the model of orderly multiculturalism by taking into account the fluidities and complexities of diversity in the age of heightened mobility and digital communication. Second, this chapter recognises that over the last two decades, a hegemonic ‘diversity’ discourse has emerged in a ‘post-panoptical’ configuration of governmentality that manages these complex forms of diversity. The challenge of the superdiversity perspective is to relate to this hegemonic discourse while not losing track of the exciting dynamics of messy and creative commonplace diversity in everyday interaction and low-key cultural production. In order to perform this task, the chapter proposes a ‘critical sociolinguistics of diversity’ that is presented as part of a new moment in the postcolonial history of the human and social sciences, almost half a century after the earlier decolonising moves by scholars such as Johannes Fabian and Dell Hymes.

A New World of Diversity? The anthropological point of vantage is that of a world culture struggling to be born. As a scientist, the anthropologist both represents its embryonic possibilities and works to create it. If that culture fails, so will anthropology. (Wolf 1964: 96, emphasis added, quoted in Hymes 1972: 19, and cited again on p. 30)

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The above is a key passage from Hymes’s Reinventing Anthropology (1972), an edited volume that fostered a crisis in anthropology by questioning the discipline’s societal relevance and scientific legitimacy, while raising important ethical issues related to its changing position in a new, postcolonial world. Hymes’s programmatic introduction tried to lay out the basis of anthropology’s reinvention within a long (Western) tradition of dealing with – describing, explaining, and managing/ governing – diversity vis-à-vis universal human nature and culture (Hymes 1972: 22). Two facets of this undertaking are of particular interest: the idea of universality in progress, and that of infinite diversity within a closed system. When Hymes (1972: 34) states that it was the task of anthropology “to establish the study of the cultural as a universal and personal dimension of human efforts toward the future,” he situates the future explicitly in ‘a world society’ and in the ongoing human quest for commonality and reciprocity through communication (1972: 35). These ideas have been re-articulated more recently by Bruno Latour as vital elements of his theory of ‘compositionism’. The universality that the humanities are searching for, Latour (2010: 474) argues, “is not yet ‘there’, waiting to be unveiled and discovered.” Bringing in the element of diversity, he specifies that this common world in the making will have to be built “from utterly heterogeneous parts that will never make a whole, but at best a fragile, revisable, and diverse composite material” (Latour 2010: 474). Like Hymes, Latour situates the general trajectory of universality in a concrete global history of uncertain unification. For Hymes, the postcolonial world heralds the end of diversity as we know it. Diversity, he argues, should no longer be located in an ongoing trend of diversification – through dispersion and fragmentation in an ever-expanding world – but in processes of “reintegration within complex units” (Hymes 1972: 32–33, emphasis in the original). The finite world that is evoked here resembles the one Paul Valéry (1931: 11) saw as following on “the era of free expansion” (see Birkett 2006), and which, for Wolf, radically rekeys our way of dealing with human diversity. “For the first time in human history,” Wolf claims, “we have transcended the inherited divisions of the human phenomenon into segments of time and segments of space” (Wolf 1964: 95). Instantly gauging the theoretical implications of this global repartitioning and the (avant la lettre) compression of space-time, Wolf predicts that “no one stationary perspective will any longer exhaust the possibilities of man” (Wolf 1964: 95). Finally, he casts the newly emergent analytical gaze in terms of multiplicity and mobility: We have left behind, once and for all, the paleotechnic age of the grounded observer who can draw only one line of sight between the object and himself. We have entered the physical and the intellectual space age, and we are now in a position to circumnavigate man, to take our readings from any point in both space and time. (Wolf 1964: 95)

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For Wolf, this decentring of dominant segmentations and static ‘points of view’ requires anthropologists to discard simplicity, predictability, and stasis, and to confront the “variability and complexity of human life” (1964: 96–97). Moreover, agility and suppleness enable anthropologists to take sides – and throw in their fate – with their interlocutors, and lay the basis for a more democratic and emancipatory science of the human life experience based on mutuality and exchange. In that respect, Wolf and, more explicitly, Hymes (1972: 39, 53, 57, 1975: 869) display a Bakhtinian susceptibility for the liberatory potential of the humanities (see Hirschkop 1986; Blommaert 2009). Around the same time of Hymes’s and Wolf ’s postcolonial anthropology, members of the Italian so-called autonomist ‘movement of 1977’ started theorising the post-Fordist condition of mass diversity (‘the multitude’) and its reproduction in a global environment (Virno & Hardt 1996). Among them, Antonio Negri (2008) identifies the human creative potential/energy by referring to Spinoza’s notion of potenza (Ruddick 2010). While globalisation signifies the end of the world having ‘an outside’, Negri contends, potenza realises itself in the “recomposition of the sensible,” the “poetic reconstruction of life from the inside” in a world that is finite and yet limitless (Negri 2008: 68–69, 239). This potenza, Negri (2008: 7) argues, will increasingly be realised through what he and others call immaterial labour, in which communication and the creation of “linguistic, communicational, and affective networks are key elements.” Negri thus shares with Virno the idea that at the present stage of globalisation – whether you call it ‘empire’ (Hardt & Negri 2000) or ‘post-Fordism’ (Virno 2004), or as we shall see presently ‘postmodernism’ – the means of production consist to an increasing extent of communicative techniques, procedures, and competencies (Virno 2004: 61). From the early 1990s onwards, postmodernist theorists have equally tried to come to terms with human agency and creativity in a ‘finite yet limitless’ world. In Zygmunt Bauman’s seminal text, this world is epitomised by the ‘habitat’ that: offers the agency the sum-total of resources for all possible action as well as the field inside which the action-orienting and action-oriented relevancies may be plotted, the habitat is the territory inside which both freedom and dependency of the agency are constituted . . . (Bauman 1991: 36) Subsequently, Bauman characterises this new habitat as complex and highly unpredictable, not in the least because of its polycentric character, there being ‘no goal setting agency with overall managing and coordinating capacities or ambitions’. Within this habitat he situates the processes of self-assembly (close to Virno’s notion of ‘individuation’) or contingent, inconclusive self-constitution and stresses how much they depend on the availability and accessibility of resources (“tokens for self-assembly”) (Bauman 1991: 36–40). In a later text,

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Bauman (1996:18) summarises the finite nature yet the inexhaustible possibilities of these processes by saying, “the catchword of modernity was creation; the catchword of postmodernity is recycling.” Finally, Bauman (1991: 46) conceives of the researcher: as participant . . . of this never ending, self-reflexive process of reinterpretation . . . In practice, . . . a clarifier of interpretative rules and facilitator of communication; this will amount to the replacement of the dream of the legislator with the practice of an interpreter. Perhaps because of Bauman’s focus on issues of communication and semiotisation, Rampton (2006: 12–16) engages with several of Bauman’s key points in order to start mapping out his own sociolinguistics of late modernity. As I hope will become clear, the present chapter shares some of these aspirations. This chapter is an attempt to reflect upon diversity in contemporary globalising society from the disciplinary frontier of anthropology and sociolinguistics embodied in the section above by scholars such as Hymes, Wolf, and Bakhtin. This reflection is meant to generate elements for elaborating ‘superdiversity’. While this notion has the ambition of summarising the new guise of diversity in this age of complex transnationalism, it has the potential, I argue, of becoming a perspective or lens with which to look at diversity as social practice, of course, but also as discourse. This I wish to do in three steps.

Overview In the first section, I briefly look into the notion of superdiversity. The latter wants to mark a new historical condition of transnationalism stemming from the fact that the global flows of people have been undergoing profound quantitative and qualitative changes since the late 1980s. Apart from marking a sea change in the global design of transnationalism, superdiversity also indicates that a new approach is needed to replace the inadequate model of multiculturalism by taking into account the fluidity and intricacies of the new diversity in the age of heightened mobility and transnational communication. In the second, I explore the ways in which a hegemonic diversity discourse has emerged over the last two decades. This chapter explores the breadth and depth of this discourse and situates it in a configuration of governmentality that it identifies as post-panoptical. This leads to the question of how superdiversity can relate to this hegemonic diversity discourse while not losing track of the exciting dynamics of commonplace diversity in everyday interaction and lowkey cultural production. In the third section, I argue for the concept of superdiversity to foster a ‘critical sociolinguistics of diversity’ that pursues (a) a sustained critical analysis of the emergent hegemonic diversity discourses as well as ‘older’, residual but still

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competing discourses of multiculturalism or multilingualism, while (b) addressing the way diversity in combination with transnationality is being shaped and reworked in language use and communicative practices. The latter’s study, I argue, demands a radical ethnographic openness in order to deal with the unpredictability as well as the transient and emergent nature of these practices, networks, and spaces. This combination of ethnographic openness and a keen awareness of hegemonic dynamics situates the critical sociolinguistics of diversity as part of a new moment in the postcolonial history of the human and social sciences, almost half a century after the earlier decolonising moves by the likes of Johannes Fabian and Dell Hymes.

First Step: Gauging Superdiversity’s Theoretical Umwelt The concept of superdiversity marks the new condition of transnationalism since the late 1980s and arguably accounts for the ‘reintegration within complex units’ to which it gave rise. Already in its earliest definitions, superdiversity (Vertovec 2006) linked major geopolitical changes, notably the end of the Cold War, with the rise of new migration flows and the diversification of migration patterns and practices worldwide. This diversification applies not only to the range of migrantsending and migrant-receiving countries, but also to the socio-economic, cultural, religious, and linguistic profiles of the migrants, as well as to their civil status and their migration trajectories. In contrast, the pre-1990 (and mainly post-World War II) labour or elite migrations to Europe were conceived as transparent and orderly because the migrants stemmed from a limited number of countries – from Mediterranean ‘labour reservoirs’ or former colonies in Africa and Asia – and had rather similar socio-economic, cultural, religious, or linguistic backgrounds (Blommaert 2011; Parkin & Arnaut 2012). The diversity following these post-war migrations was conceived and indeed governed and managed as a ‘multiculturalist’ constellation of regimented ethnocultural segments (Hall 2000: 209). Although it had always been contested, by the 1990s this system of governance, according to Hall, was close to its ultimate demise, playing as it was against “the reconfiguration of social forces and relations across the globe” (Hall 2000: 212). Post-1990s transnationalism presented a different picture altogether and is, in the words of Vertovec (2007b: 1024), “a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade.” Concurrently, superdiversity scorns the false transparency and neatness of ‘multiculturalism’ – a concept or set of policies whose pluralism Vertovec (2010: 90) aptly characterises as legitimising “a retreat into culturally and physically separate minority communities.” In its sustained critique of multiculturalism, one may sense superdiversity’s aspiration to pass from being merely a ‘summary term’ to becoming an emergent

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approach or a perspective (Fanshawe & Sriskandarajah 2010; Vertovec 2010; Blommaert & Rampton 2011). An important step in this direction consists in inventorying the many variables of present-day transnationality in order to grasp “their scale, historical and policy-produced multiple configuration and mutual conditioning” (Vertovec 2007b: 1026). This could form the basis of ‘calculi’ or topographies of diversity variables and their intersections. Here, it becomes obvious how ‘simultaneity’ is potentially an important element of the emergent perspective of superdiversity. Apart from being constitutive of superdiversity, simultaneity also catches the imagination of the human and social sciences, and thus serves to embed the former in the latter – as I will presently try to do. The notion of simultaneity is built into that of superdiversity by Vertovec’s observations concerning multiple belongings in diasporic configurations (Vertovec 2007a: 34) or by referring to other authors who observed that people “can engage in multiple transnational processes at the same time,” hence the need to “explore how transnational practices and processes in different domains relate to and inform one” (Levitt & Glick Schiller 2004: 1028). Sociolinguists have also been engaging with the notion of simultaneity, for instance, in connection with multimembership in different communities of practice (Barton & Tusting 2006: 97; see also Wenger 2000), the co-presence of a multiplicity of communicative channels, from face-to-face to mass media (Jacquemet 2005: 217), or the copresence of different languages or codes in the same word or segment (Woolard 1998), as well as in code-switching, which, according to Rampton (1995: 278), functions as a kind of “double vision,” an “interaction between co-present thoughts,” or a “transaction between contexts.” The existing toolkit of sociolinguistics appears rather well equipped to deal with phenomena of space-time compression (Vigouroux 2008; Blommaert 2010; Coupland 2010; Blommaert & Rampton 2011). The transidiomatic practices and communicative recombinations that Jacquemet (2005), for instance, maps out across genres, media, and transnational public spaces, acutely indicate how people operate in multiple layers of identification (Alim 2009: 104). Simultaneity, in other words, helps us to look at migratory or diasporic spaces as spatialisations of time, that is, as successive palimpsests of multiple trajectories (see Massey 2001: 259). That is where the popular notion of scale often comes in, consciously or not, conceived as part of a production process of ‘gestalts of scale’ (or glocal scalar fixes) in states or cities by unequal groups (see e.g. Swyngedouw 1997). Two recent cases demonstrate how a scalar approach to cities elicits urban fragmentation even at a very microlevel. Blommaert (2012) and Van Dijk (2011) both look into very similar diasporic hotspots – globalisation gateways in train station neighbourhoods in Antwerp and The Hague, respectively. Against ‘methodological urbanism’, Van Dijk (2011: 121) stresses that what goes for neighbourhoods does not necessarily apply to cities as a whole, given the fragmented and unequally transnationalised nature of the global city. In his linguistic landscaping research, Blommaert (2012:

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124) goes so far as to observe “ ‘layered simultaneity’ both in single signs as repositories and ‘nexuses’ of complex and ‘synchronized’ histories, and in the neighbourhood at large.” Ultimately, the analysis of complex simultaneity also directs attention to the spatiality and, perhaps paradoxically, the diachronicity of transnational processes in virtual environments. Here, the sheer speed and geographical reach of Internet communication may compress but does not eliminate time and space. The speed at which resources on the Internet circulate, are reworked or resemiotised, and re-channelled, demands a conceptualisation in terms of simultaneity as layered traces of short-term communicative actions (Leppänen & Peuronen 2012). In studies of political protest or social movements, the concept of ‘scale’ has been used to map out the transfer of resources across scales, that is, across publics of different reach both transversally (widespread mobilisation) and hierarchically (more high-up, power-laden zones) (Howitt 1993; Arnaut 2005; see also Marston 2000: 222). Following a decade or so of intense popularity, the notion of scale is currently under heavy attack, more particularly its conceptualisation as (a) a territorial container and (b) a geographical hierarchy of everyday power relations. In their critiques, Moore (2008) and Marston, Jones, and Woodward (2005) argue against scales as pre-given, horizontally bounded, and vertically or hierarchically ordered so as to open space for the dynamics of rescaling in social and discursive practices of activism, networking, neighbourhood building, etc. I will come back to this later, when situating this in a ‘critical sociolinguistics of diversity’. Whether we measure this in terms of scales or not, simultaneity reaches ‘down’ to the level of the individual, or rather the ‘dividual’, and ‘upwards’ to that of the globe. Starting with the former, it is noteworthy how, apart from postmodernism, postcolonial critiques of identity and diversity (indeed colonial multiculturalism) have also embraced models of identification and multiplex subjectivities. Commenting on postmodern models of ‘dividuality’, Bennett (1999: 605) claims they see ‘persona’ of the same individual move “between a succession of ‘site-specific’ gatherings and engage in ‘multiple identifications’ while producing a self which can no longer be simplistically theorized as unified.” From a postcolonial perspective, Englund argues that: multiplicity is not so much a feature of a post-colony that comprises several distinct ‘cultures’ or ‘communities’ than of post-colonial subjectivity that accommodates multiple identities within a single subject. Complex relations cross cut each other as persons belong to this or that church, swear allegiance to one or another ethnic group, belong to a secret society and a political party, are business partners as well as civil servants, and so on. (Englund 2004: 14) In his writings on the postcolony, Mbembe elaborates a persona-like model of the postcolonial subject and its tactics of ‘impersonation’ in diverse settings

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(Mbembe 1992; Mbembe & Roitman 1997). In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, he extends this claim to “the world” as “a multiplicity of worlds” whose “unity is the mutual sharing and exposition of all its worlds – within this world” (Mbembe & Nuttall 2004: 351). In conclusion, the contrast between multiculturalism and superdiversity is perhaps best theorised by Deleuze (with reference to Foucault) in the distinction between disciplinary and control societies, and more specifically between moulds and modulations. For Deleuze (1992), the postmodern crisis is the crisis of plurality of neat divisions, which he calls enclosures or moulds. Such moulds can best be understood as compartments in Bentham’s panopticon (as remodelled by Foucault) in which a subject’s conduct is shaped, cast, or moulded. In contrast, in so-called post-panoptical systems, subjects engage in controls as modulations: they are constantly open (‘on’) for calibrations or alignments in variable directions (see Bauman 2000: 11; Fraser 2003, for post-panopticon). Cheney-Lippold (2011) shows how this control society manifests itself in a broad range of surveillance schemes (ranging from CCTV to GPS-traceable mobile phones), checks and feedbacks (administrative or commercial), mostly through ICT and often based on government or corporate databases: And modulation [creates] not individuals but endlessly sub-dividable ‘dividuals’. These dividuals . . . the recipients through which power flows as subjectivity takes a deconstructed dive into the digital era . . . dividuals can be seen as those data that are aggregated to form unified subjects, of connecting dividual parts through arbitrary closures at the moment of the compilation of a computer program or at the result of a database query. (Cheney-Lippold 2011: 169, emphasis added) It is far beyond the scope of this chapter to expand on modulation theory and on profiling as subjectification. It suffices to realise that once one starts exploring the theoretical habitat in which superdiversity is both intelligible and relevant, one realises that individuality and diversity are key-zones of broader systems for ordering and regulating societies at different levels (simultaneously). In other words, when dealing with models of global and local diversity and how they are imagined as evolving over time, it is difficult to steer clear of ‘discourse’ and ‘governmentality’. One of the critical issues identified so far, by looking at superdiversity through the lens of simultaneity and, hence, scalarity, is the degree of openness, flexibility, and thus novelty that ‘reintegration within complex units’ affords. What seems to return continuously is the seemingly paradoxical combination that Hymes and Wolf foregrounded by characterising postcolonial late modernity as unfolding in a ‘finite and yet limitless’ universe. Stated otherwise, do we solve this paradox by directing our attention to the finite resources and categories with which one starts off (but when?) or to the limitless outcomes of their interplay? This indeed seems to be at stake when looking at diversity in a

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governmentality configuration, which, for want of a better term, I label postpanoptical.

Second Step: Delving into Diversity Discourses – ‘Diversity’ and ‘Counter-Diversity’ In a recent paper, Steven Vertovec (2012) explores the swift rise of what he calls ‘diversity’ (in quotation marks) – ‘discourses about diversity’ – the worldwide upsurge of which is resulting in the ubiquity of diversity in the ‘policies, programmes, campaigns and strategies’ of private corporations, public institutions, civil society organisations, etc. Vertovec’s pungent analysis reveals not only (a) the breadth of ‘differences’ that comprise ‘diversity’, but also (b) the extent to which diversity discourses, policies, and practices penetrate the lives of people and groups of people. (a) Over the last decade, the number of diversity categories that are taken into account has soared and now ranges from the classics (such as race, gender, ethnicity, and social class) to less obvious and far more open-ended ones such as opinions and beliefs, backgrounds, and experiences. Most revealing in this respect are the expectations of Kenneth Prewitt, former director of the US Census Bureau, who sees two possible outcomes of the rising complexity and uncertainty of diversity profiling. For Prewitt, the unlikely prospect is that measurements of difference will become evermore fine-grained, while the more likely one is a meltdown of the measurement system as we know it (Vertovec 2012: 289–290). (b) When presenting what he calls the different facets of ‘diversity’, Vertovec (2012: 296–301) demonstrates compellingly how the latter permeates the everyday political, economic, affective, and civil lives of people as it gains prominence in mechanisms of redistribution and recognition, in systems of representation and organisation as much as in calibrating the provision of public services and in codirecting companies’ production and sales strategies. Taking these two observations together, we may seem to be heading towards a situation in which ‘diversity’ gains immense presence and authority in management and governance worldwide, but at the same time pays the price of its success by losing transparency and calculability. One way of resolving this conundrum is arguing that the infinitesimal finesse of diversity could drive a potently flexible system of expression and control. If that is the case, ‘diversity’ may be productively approached as a(n emergent) discourse in the Foucaultian sense of the word: as an attractor of individual and collective ideas, words, and actions, scattered in corporate policies and civil society activism, scaffolding the modernity of nation states and the future of cities, driving individual consumer patterns and collective claims for recognition and redistribution. Attributing to ‘diversity’ the status of a (dominant) discourse is not an end in itself and has certain heuristic advantages. First of all, one realises that ‘diversity’ is more than a collection of ideas and (action) models concerning all sorts of differences, rather it is a widely spread, globally recognisable

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and legitimate discursive space in which people from very unequal positions imagine, formulate, and work on their individual and collective identities. However, diversity discourses are essentially local – very much in the same sense that ‘global English’ is local (Pennycook 2007) – and cannot be safely taken as more or less close offshoots of more global versions. For each locality, the topography of its diversity discourses, constitutive of its very local ‘diversity’, must be mapped out. In all, such a conceptualisation of ‘diversity’ challenges us to consider to what an extent ‘superdiversity’ is academia’s contribution to ‘diversity’ in mapping out the relevant differences and their intersections. Or could ‘superdiversity’ possess more of a critical potential? The first steps that this section proposes for exploring such critical potential are: (a) looking (very briefly) into a comparable case of dominant discourse, namely that of ‘development’, a now largely residual discourse that widely dominated understandings of the ‘global south’ during the second half of the twentieth century; and (b) trying to situate ‘diversity’ in a broader frame of reference, which, for want of a better term, I call the post-panopticon, arguably an emerging discourse that tries to grasp the complexity and multiplicity of communication and interaction in such exemplarily translocal spaces such as cities and cyberspaces.

Development One notorious instance of anthropologists spotting a dominant discourse while trying to estimate its global magnitude and pervasiveness dates back to the 1990s and concerned ‘development’, ‘that twentieth-century global project’, according to one of its main critics, James Ferguson (1997), who elsewhere characterised it as ‘a dominant problematic’ or an ‘interpretive grid’ for dealing with the nonindustrialised, non-Western countries (Ferguson 1994: xiii). Like ‘diversity’, ‘development’ can be taken as a discourse for positioning or mapping ‘otherness’. With reference to the previous point about expansion and integration, ‘development’ fits an expansive universe, with others ‘out there’ progressing in all sorts of ways, rapidly or slowly, while ‘diversity’ rather suits an integrating pluriverse in which so many social, cultural, linguistic, etc. trajectories intersect. Furthermore, the comparison of ‘diversity’ and ‘development’ raises issues that cannot be dealt with in any detail here, but which help us elicit some of ‘diversity’s’ main features. These issues concern normativity, hegemony, and efficacy. As far as normativity is concerned, ‘development’ presumes a sense of direction (a telos) while ‘diversity’ appears less driven than floating, more ‘bricolage’ than ‘engineering’. However, that does not preclude ‘diversity’ from featuring in global hegemonies. With regard to hegemony, a question once formulated by Escobar and Ferguson vis-à-vis ‘development’ can be asked of ‘diversity’: Is ‘diversity’ not another attempt by the centre, the site of privilege named ‘the West’, to structure/regiment ‘the rest’, its others, through the diacritics of their differences or ‘fragmented otherness’? After the disorientation and fragmentation (or

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‘decomposition’) of modernity – say ‘development’ – according to Ferguson (2005), these ‘others’ have come to realise that when it comes to creating new life chances, changing the dynamics (‘developing’) of their places (the global south) is less effectual than changing places (migrating) altogether. Correspondingly, while ‘development’ was essentially geared towards managing the other from a distance – or even keeping the other at a distance – ‘diversity’ rather deals with the (immigrated) other within. Finally, the issue of efficacy – of whether these discourses are able to bring about real changes – seems pertinent. In the case of ‘development’, Ferguson argued that development projects do not need to be successful in attaining their goals, what matters are the windows of opportunity they create for (powerful) stakeholders, such as local or national authorities, transnational agencies, etc., who can pursue political goals under the veil of socio-economic development – hence Ferguson’s labelling of ‘development’ as ‘the anti-politics machine’. A similar question is asked by Vertovec (2012: 304) with regard to ‘diversity’: How much of ‘diversity’ is about reducing discrimination of ‘others’? Otherwise, perhaps ‘diversity’ is more about obtaining access to people’s practices and strategies of identification rather than about working towards the enfranchisement of those who are discriminated or marginalised on the basis of one or the other aspect of their identity, bodily dispositions, or lifestyle. In other words: Was diversity as a potential instrument of empowerment from below turned into a precision tool of manipulating difference ‘from above’? Rather than pursuing the above similarities and parallelisms between ‘development’ and ‘diversity’ in their own right, the latter could learn one important lesson from the rather merciless scholarly controversy surrounding Ferguson and Escobar’s ‘discourse’ thesis: that a productive way of investigating the workings of ‘development’ discourses is not to assume their existence and speculate on their ubiquity and influence, but to observe and analyse how they play out in manifold concrete development encounters and interactions (Grillo 1997; Olivier de Sardan 2005). This is precisely what I will argue in favour of when proposing a critical sociolinguistics of diversity. The latter takes concrete encounters or events as sites where diversity is being articulated, experienced, and made sense of with communicative and discursive resources that circulate locally or more broadly, reluctantly or more powerfully. Without blindly reifying the more powerful and global resources, these characteristics can be taken to indicate their hegemonic character. The struggle of this chapter is, as we will see, a Bakhtinian one in that a focus on practices and emerging structures/normativities does not preclude a topography of (relative) inequality, of ‘high’ and ‘low’.

Post-Panopticon Before pursuing this, it is essential to come to grips with how discourses such as ‘diversity’ work in broader configurations of global governmentality.

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The prevalent configuration is the one I choose to qualify, after Bauman (2000), as ‘post-panoptical’. Post-panopticon is derived from Foucault’s panopticon (1975) as a scopic technology and a centralist, static regime of power/knowledge of which the interactive deficit is indicated by the contrast between an all-seeing, authoritative viewer and a defenselessly exposed and ‘blind’ target, as well as the basic condition for unequal transparency and accessibility. Contrarily, the postpanopticon is interactive and decentralist, even messy and opaque. The term ‘postpanopticon’ has been applied to, and seeks to elicit parallels between, such diverse domains as governance, knowledge systems, and media use (Kaplan 1995; Mathiesen 1997; Bauman 2000; Weibel 2002; Haggerty 2006; Maguire 2009; Mirzoeff 2011). Four characteristics stand out: transnationality, multidirectionality, polycentricity, and the intertwining of visibility and mobility. Above anything else, the post-panopticon needs to be situated in the ‘new geographies of governmentality’ (Gupta & Ferguson 1992), which are exemplarily those of cities (Appadurai 2001: 25) and cyberspaces (Mirzoeff 2011). In contrast to the top-down, unilateral interactions of the panopticon, those of the postpanopticon are multidirectional, muddled (Valentine 2008), and transversal (Simone 2005). One of the most telling instances of such multidirectionality is what Nielsen (2011) described as ‘inverse governmentality’, whereby in casu marginalised people living on the fringes of the city in sub-Saharan Africa themselves shape ‘the governing powers which condition their everyday interactions’ “by drafting and implementing (illicit) urban plans” (Nielsen 2011: 353). These interventions closely resemble those described by Appadurai among homeless organisations in Mumbai that engage in self-enumeration and selfsurveying as strategies of ‘auto governmentality’ or ‘counter-governmentality’ (Appadurai 2001: 34). Simone also marks the importance of similar “planning from below” (Simone 2003: 231), but points out that urban publics in such interventions work towards transcending arrangements (‘forms of being together or of being connected’) rather than “coming together to consensually decide the common rules of participation” (Simone 2010: 288). The normativity of such counter-governmentality is perhaps best illustrated by the story of the Internet: a military panoptical technology that was appropriated, transformed, and expanded into a composite global infrastructure of communication, socialisation, and learning. Lastly, in media studies the post-panoptical relates to the omnipresence of digital technology and mobile communication, and looks at how deep mediatisation is changing the classic ‘panoptical’ relations (Koskela 2004; Andrejevic 2006). Two principal shifts can be argued to make up the postpanopticon: (a) the shift away from neatly hierarchised media transfers between senders and receivers towards the capillary dissemination and emerging ubiquity of media production and consumption (Hand & Sandywell 2002); and (b) the shift from static to hyper-mobile media use (Corner 1997). The first shift consists in the radical democratisation of the uses of media. Whitaker’s (1999) ‘participatory panopticon’ and Guattari’s (1990) ‘post-media’

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combine inspection ‘from above’ with ‘self-surveillance’ from below. Video and surveillance cameras (CCTV), the Internet, webcams, smartphones, etc. produce still as well as moving images, and circulate them at great speed over large distances. For Boyne (2000: 301), “the machinery of surveillance is now always potentially in the service of the crowd as much as the executive.” This horizontality and reciprocity of the post-panopticon stands in stark contrast to the hierarchical verticality of the panopticon as described by Foucault (1975: 256). The hyper-mobile aspect of the post-panopticon relates to the fact that media devices become evermore compact and mobile, enabling media users to increasingly encroach on each other’s personal/private spaces (Fetveit 1999: 791). This not only applies to individual smartphones or to Web communication, but also to the professional media such as television formats and genres that make abundant use of ‘scopic mobility’ (Corner 1997: 15). One of the eminent exponents of this development is the multifarious genre of reality television. Dovey (2000: 26) calls this “first person media” because it relies on the “constant iteration of ‘raw’ intimate human experience.” The deep sharing that comes with the relative media mobility stands in sharp contrast to the encapsulation or compartmentalisation that (together with verticality) Foucault (1975: 256) identified as one of the two basic characteristics of the panopticon. In terms proposed recently by Mirzoeff (2011), post-panoptic visuality is the key element of the present-day ‘global counterinsurgency’ predicament that combines extreme forms of (often digital) visualisation (e.g. computer warfare) with new strategies of optical invisibility through chaotic, informal, or under-the-radar operations and counter-surveillance from below – what Cascio (2005) calls ‘sousveillance’. The type of diversity that fits the post-panopticon sketched above is one that is steeped in contingent processes of articulation and results in fluid and unpredictable ‘metro-identities’. For Stuart Hall, identification is the changing outcome of a ‘relation of subject to discursive formations’ conceived ‘as an articulation’ in the sense worked out by Laclau, whereby “all articulations are properly relations of ‘no necessary correspondence’ ” (i.e. founded on that contingency which “reactivates the historical”) (cited in Hall 1996b: 14). In the context of intensified transnationalism in urban and cyber contexts, Maher coined the term ‘metro’, which he first used in combination with ethnicity (Maher 2005) – in the sense of Hall’s new ethnicities – and later also with language. In tune with what I described above as the post-panoptical, ‘metro’ for Maher (2010: 577) “points to phenomena that travel below the radar of bordered perceptions of ethnicity and language; more underground (metro) than overground.” Metroethnicity and metrolinguistic styles are typically situated in the fast and fluid spaces of metropolitan urbanity and the Internet. Finally, by virtue of their inherent capriciousness and ephemeral nature, ‘metro’ phenomena retain an oppositional potential: they resist “reified essentialist ethnic, religious, and cultural identities” (Maher 2010: 577). But, even if transient metro-identities are bound to elude the unwieldy apparatus of multiculturalism and multilingualism, they may be recuperated by

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the more supple and pervasive ‘diversity’, particularly in its consumerist dimension. The mobility and flexibility of identification in what Bauman (2000: 90) calls a “shopping around” type of life, are not so much ‘vehicles of emancipation’ as ‘instruments of the redistribution of freedom’. This, of course, is a thorny matter and it is not quite clear whether Bauman is being cynical. The way I understand it is that ‘diversity’ gets under people’s skin in often very sophisticated ways; it gets to people in whatever way they identify or not, seek to align with or distance themselves from certain facets of identity, patterns of consumption, lifestyles, etc. In sum, ‘diversity’ inscribes choices as ontological facets of identity, grounds them as items of one’s being that require to be accommodated, looked after, catered for, or taken care of. That opens myriad ways of consumption and commodification – a predicament Bauman (2000: 90) aptly summarises as “divided we shop.” Here, ‘diversity’ appears as a post-panoptical system of control/management/ subjectification and self-realisation. Such, of course, does not preclude the fact that ‘diversity’ or the identifications to which it gives rise are resisted or reworked in metro-identities of some kind or other. Although all this is very speculative and approximate, it is important to see the immense possibilities ‘diversity’ or ‘counter-diversity’ offer for self-realisation by individuals and for entrepreneurs, authorities, and markets to deliver the goods and services and to assist in that multiplex self-realisation. A critical sociolinguistics of diversity is called upon to address this.

Third and Last Step: Towards a Critical Sociolinguistics of Diversity The critical sociolinguistics of diversity, whose contours are explored in this section, is an attempt to answer two related questions concerning superdiversity as an emerging perspective: (a) why does sociolinguistics need superdiversity, or what can superdiversity offer present-day sociolinguistics?1 and (b) can the notion of superdiversity be situated in the debate on postcoloniality, or could superdiversity be a second important step in the decolonisation of the human sciences? In the opening section of this chapter, we looked at how in the 1960s and 1970s a significant attempt was made from within the frontier zone of anthropology and linguistics to further the decolonisation of the human sciences by reconceptualising cultural production in terms of complexity and mobility. Therefore, the question now is double: If superdiversity could contribute to anthropology and sociolinguistics, would this contribution add another impulse to their decolonisation trajectory? Before dealing with the former issue of contribution, let us first look at how superdiversity could fit into the story of decolonisation. One such recent and relevant story is the one Mbembe (2010) told in connection with Africa and the way its decolonisation confronts presentday complexity and mobility.

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The first massive, often violent move of decolonisation consisted in breaking down the panoptical system of differentiating and territorialising racial identities, ethnic characters, and (tribal) cultural-linguistic units (Chauveau & Dozon 1987; Mamdani 1996; Makoni & Pennycook 2007). For Mbembe (2010), this older moment of decolonisation and transgression (of the 1960s) has been supplemented by a second moment of intensified migration and the formation of new diasporas in the course of the 1990s. This dispersion and circulation is resulting in a multipolar Africa and is made up of processes of “metissage and vernacularization” in an overall “aesthetics of interlacement,” which Mbembe calls “afropolitanism” (Mbembe 2010: 228–231). It does not require much of an argument to equate the second moment in the postcolonial worlding of Africa with the moment of superdiversity in Europe. The sociolinguistic counterpart of this operation is what Makoni and Pennycook (2007) call disinventing and reconstituting languages both in the exmetropoles and their former colonies. This operation, again, corresponds in its most basic aspects with what Blommaert and Rampton (2011) put forward as contemporary sociolinguistics’ potential contribution to the study of superdiversity. In a nutshell, Makoni and Pennycook (2007) denounce multilingualism, which, in the case of (colonial) Africa, was an ‘instrument of exploitation’. Programmatically, they do not opt merely for disinventing and exceptionalising languages as separate and enumerable categories, but also for a radical creolistics, which posits the normality of transidiomatic practices and creoles against all claims to know, count, name, and define languages. These suggestions indeed come very close to what many others have suggested in the way of heteroglossic blending, such as Jørgensen et al.’s polylingual languaging, Rampton’s crossing and styling, Creese and Blackledge’s translanguaging, etc. (see Blommaert & Rampton 2011: 7, for an overview). The counterpart to Makoni and Pennycook’s exceptionalising move consists in looking for emerging structures and normativity in this pool of fluidity, creativity, and communicative agency – ‘something identifiable, nameable, [and] determinate’ (Rampton 2013) or ‘patterns offering perceptions of similarity and stability’ such as registers (Blommaert 2007: 117). These affinities between the explicitly ‘decolonising’ sociolinguistics of Makoni and Pennycook and the main ingredients of what Blommaert (2010) calls a “critical sociolinguistics of globalization” largely confirm what sociolinguistics can contribute to the study of superdiversity. However, these affinities also carry strong indications of the reverse type of dependency relation: why sociolinguistics needs superdiversity as an emerging perspective. The very provisional answer to this question is a threestep trajectory in which Fabian and Bakhtin are our main guides. A critical sociolinguistics of diversity (hereafter CSD), it seems, must set off from superdiversity’s transgressive moment, which consists of discarding the false certainties of multiculturalism and its endorsement of established differences and hierarchies. This is sociolinguistics’ entry into the post-panopticon of unregimented, messy, transversal interactions among actors who enjoy the relative

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openness of performing ‘dividuality’ in metrolingualism, in styling and crossing, in activating certain repertoires, in engaging in certain alignments, etc. This is nicely summarised by Fabian albeit in the idiom of theatre: Moral and political multiculturalism are the privilege of the powerful and the protected. Courage, imagination, and practice are needed to meet otherness in its everyday theatrical forms of self-presentation with all its tricks and props, postures and poses, masks and costumes, white-face and blackface. (Fabian 1999: 30) The second step consists in CSD embracing the radical unpredictability that comes with the meltdown of the diversity measurement system that superdiversity has provoked. Directly linked to superdiversity’s special focus on transnationalism, CSD engages with foreignness as never before (Riley 2007: 162) and can only overcome its lack of familiarity through painstaking interaction, which Fabian (1979) described some time ago: As it seems now, sociolinguistics is at odds with the ‘changing’, processual, creative and emergent characteristics of communication because its rules only catch established features and, perhaps, some variation within established features. It has, therefore, considerable difficulties with communicative exchanges between speakers who are not members of the same community, who do not share systems of rules, at least not fully, and whose interaction is such that in all probability they will never share all the rules. This is the case of the foreigner or stranger who settles in another society and whom sociolinguists, tellingly enough, tend to view as an irritating deviant, not as a person who creatively transcends confines of socially sanctioned rules of communication. (Fabian 1979: 18) There is little doubt that contemporary sociolinguistics is fairly well equipped both theoretically and methodologically to deal with the challenges of ‘the unexpected’, not in the least because the latter is increasingly thematised as such (Blommaert 2012; Pennycook 2012). Key to this unexpectedness is that actors, speakers, and writers, participants in communication, are endowed with enough agency to transcend the established correlations between the variables of their speech and certain predetermined social categories. The third wave of variationist studies, Eckert (2012: 97–98) argues, mainly referring to Silverstein’s ‘indexical mutability’ and Agha’s ‘enregisterment’, has reversed the relation between language and society: speakers have become ‘stylistic agents, tailoring linguistic styles in ongoing and lifelong projects of self-construction and differentiation’ (see also Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz 2008: 540). In a similar vein, for Pennycook

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(2012: 124), genres, discourses, and style need to be understood “as practices that form the texts, knowledge and identity of which they speak. This position then makes it possible to see language practices as part of the formation of the social.” Taken together, CSD’s espousal of unpredictability is culturally critical in that it wipes away the false certainties of how, or the lines within, people construct meaning in interaction. It is critical in the sense of counter-hegemonic in that it destabilises established systems of difference or regimes of diversity. As we have seen exemplarily in Eckert’s eulogy of agency, it appears as though actors build up meaning single-handedly, conjuring up the orders of indexicality of their predilection. The last step towards a CSD consists in adding social critique to cultural critique by bringing in power relations. The third step consists in CSD engaging with superdiversity’s dimension of ‘counter-diversity’. The latter includes a range of phenomena that I have situated in dynamics ‘from below’ – countering, reworking, or simply escaping established identities, categories, standards, registers, styles, etc. Without for that matter having to resort to the concept of class as such, it is essential that any (socially) critical human science retains a general sense of ‘above’ and ‘below’, in order to grasp processes of standardisation, enregisterment, named and enumerable languages, styles, genres, etc. In this, Bakhtin and Volosinov provide a firm basis. According to Hall (1996a: 297): Volosinov’s account counterposed the exercise of cultural power through the imposition of the norm in an attempt to freeze and fix meaning in language to the constant eruption of new meanings, the fluidity of heteroglossia, and the way meaning’s inherent instability and heterogeneity dislocated and displaced language’s apparently ‘finished’ character. It is clear that in what White calls Bakhtin’s ‘critical sociolinguistics of culture’ (White 2002: 129), the high and low are thought in an exemplarily monocentric world with the state, the highly coded, the prestigious, and the monoglossia, on the one hand, and the ‘folk’, the dispersed, the subordinated, and the heteroglossia, on the other hand (Bakhtin 1981: 271; White 2002: 116, 126, 131). For White (2002: 117), this dialogic interaction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of language is critical in Bakhtin’s model and “prevents the concept of heteroglossia from degenerating into a mixed bag of sociolinguistic variables.” By taking this on board, CSD should be equipped to inscribe itself in the dynamics of countergovernmentality and counter-diversity described above. In conclusion, it appears that superdiversity’s contribution to contemporary sociolinguistics is important. It is there to remind sociolinguistics of the complex dynamics of diversity both as social and cultural practice and as (hegemonic) discourse and regulation. Moreover, superdiversity may push sociolinguists to go beyond their current limits in an attempt to shape a new moment in the postcolonial history of liberatory and democratising human and social sciences.

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Note 1. This question was asked to me by Lian Madsen in August 2012.

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4 FROM MULTILINGUAL CLASSIFICATION TO TRANSLINGUAL ONTOLOGY A Turning Point David Parkin

Superdiversity and Language In addressing the issue of ‘superdiversity’ as defined by Vertovec (2007), the chapters in this volume indirectly address an historical turning point. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw major geopolitical changes coinciding with those of rapid communications technology and the maturing of the digital age. There was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which Ernest Gellner called the most momentous occasion since the French Revolution; the ensuing collapse of communism; its conversion to a new kind of capitalism in China following that country’s reforms of the 1980s; the remarkably swift effect of India’s own economic reforms; and the ending of apartheid in South Africa. That these politico-economic events occurred within a few years of each other is a good illustration of the knock-on effects of crises in relation to each other. Not necessarily related, at least in the first instance, was the way in which an already slowly growing globalisation following the Second World War was further helped through increasing use of mobile phones and the Internet, a change that has since been accelerated at a pace and to a geographic extent that leaves us bewildered in the very moment of experiencing it. The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, allegedly partly organised through digital communication, is surely a precursor of more of the like to come, as are the burgeoning new patterns of international population movement, with new, smaller, and more ethno-culturally diverse groups of migrants caulked upon earlier, long-standing migratory patterns. National boundaries, for all the attempts of powerful nations to patrol them, are becoming more porous. They are part of a global demographic shift in the making, punctuated by savage curbs but redefining ineluctably and irreversibly the very idea of a self-recognising population.

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It is true that prior to the late 1980s, there was already a speed of communication and contact that made it feasible to speak of a new kind of globalisation different in these respects from any predecessors. But in this earlier globalisation, politicoeconomic and sociocultural diversity was seen as made up of supposedly discrete elements brought together in conjunction and not yet so merged as to lose their respective remembered lines of differentiation. The diversity then was really that of parallelisms and pluralities. Ethnic pluralism, cultural pluralism, medical pluralism, and linguistic pluralism referred in liberal quarters to the side-by-side relations of distinctive entities or knowledges that were encouraged to celebrate their distinctiveness and, despite real differences between them of power, privilege, and resources, to take their place as equals before each other. Ideologies cannot last for long without material or substantive reinforcement and, cross-cut by increasing inequalities, the ideal-based pluralisms gave way at their edges to fuzzy boundaries or no boundaries at all. In the words of Rampton (Chapter 5, this volume), it is “where the old predictabilities dissolve and forms, acts, and social categories no longer co-occur in the patterns that we once expected.” A key notion here is what Arnaut (Chapter 3, this volume) calls a new kind of post-panoptic governmentality that has developed since the late 1980s and which tries to control this diversity. This is different from an earlier view of governmentality as, ultimately, a centre controlling subject populations and institutions. The new post-panoptic hegemonic discourse is of rules, regulations, exactions, and punitive stigma set up by various, and often unrelated, interests seeking to curb and direct what they see as the random spread of new migratory, linguistic, and semiotic agents and activities. Arnaut importantly reminds us not to forget, however, that alongside this new ramifying hegemonic configuration, superdiversity has also opened up spaces for creativity of a kind not easily available beforehand when society was internally made up of relatively constant and therefore constraining boundaries (e.g. of class, ethnic, educational, and professional differentiation and commensurate lifestyles). Some of this ‘new’ creativity is seen as in fact the ‘recycling’ of the many disparate and overlapping elements that make up what we call social and linguistic communication and interpretation in socalled postmodernity. To extend the metaphor, but also to invite contestation, it is as if the bricoleur is seen as having taken up much of the space in public culture and opinion previously occupied by the scientist. The concept of superdiversity tries to capture the implications of the alleged development from the coexisting, side-to-side (and sometimes back-to-back) relations of relatively bounded entities to the reverberative, criss-crossing, and subdivision of different parts of these entities. In the field of linguistic ethnography, the latter is a process that Rampton (1995, 2010) has called crossover speech or crossing, in which a range of diverse linguistic particles are borrowed, transformed, returned, and employed as communicative ‘resources’, to use the notion much evident in many chapters of this volume and which I examine below. The resources make up what Blommaert and Backus (2011) call a speech

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‘repertoire’, and which are deployed in what Jørgensen and others (Chapter 7, this volume) call ‘polylanguaging’ and Creese and Blackledge (2010) refer to as ‘translanguaging’. The key position adopted in this volume is that such processes are more than just code-switching. To coin a phrase, everyday speech is becoming more and more a matter of constant polythetic classification with social impact, as speakers juggle the limits of face-to-face intelligibility at any one time with new styles of expression made up of ever-changing linguistic resources. Varis and Xuan (Chapter 11, this volume) similarly talk of a struggle between semiotic creativity and normativity. As Rampton showed for urban Britain, ethnicity from the 1980s and 1990s began to lose its predominance as a driver of youth speech in favour of social class and the crossing of different speech ‘styles’, a class-based heteroglossic vernacular that seems to have lasted into some speakers’ middle age and is not just a cyclical generational characteristic (Rampton 2006, 2011). So what is the difference between this new theoretical position and, say, early 1960s/1970s descriptions by Joshua Fishman (1966, 1971) of ‘language shift, maintenance, and stability’ and the code-switching studied by those such as John Gumperz (1961, 1982) and Dell Hymes (1962) as part of an ‘ethnography of speaking’?

From Multilingual Classification to Ontological Processes One difference between crossover speech and code-switching (seen as speech alternating within single sentences between use of morphemes recognisable as deriving from different languages) is of focus. We can say that, while the earlier studies of detailed cases of code-switching could be called micro-sociolinguistics, the approach of Rampton and his colleagues is that of nano-sociolinguistics. It is concerned with conversation analysis (CA), whose constituent features are smaller than those making up codes and require longer within any stretch to decipher. It underlines a tendency and perhaps a need, given the greater complexity of superdiversity, to analyse minute fractions of the borrowings and exchanges characteristic of much speech in late modern urban settings. This perspective is a methodological response to the new and more varied population and linguistic flows whose intermingling of boundaries and identities invites a closer look at how elements of a communicative act cohere. Language ideology, its forms, and the way these are expressed in social interaction constitute a three-part interrelationship (some would say dialectic). Thinking of this interrelationship as a triangle (see e.g. Hanks 1996: 230), we can say that it has been stretched into more triangular shapes than was the case before the polycentric normative effects of modern superdiversity. Wide differences among interlocutors as to the relative value, modes of articulation, and interpersonal relevance of particular speech features need not nowadays seem to be a ‘foreign’ incursion into a ‘mainstream’ speech variety, but can be thought of as belonging within a broad notion of ‘normality’.

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For example, Rampton (2013) examines the speech of a man who only started speaking English in the UK as an adult. He shows that the man’s ‘learned’ English unconventionally combines features that are, however, spread among other speakers who would not be regarded as learners. The point is that it is nowadays harder to separate as a category those who have learned English as a second language from other speakers, because these other speakers may also use such combinations in English as a first language. They are together making use of the variety of language resources available through superdiversity. Consider not only Rampton’s examples, but also those of Jørgensen et al. (Chapter 7, this volume) in their analysis of the deployment of fractional features. In one of their cases, overlapping features of standard Danish, youth Danish, English, Spanish, Turkish, and Arabic are used by three Copenhagen girls in the space of just a few exchanges of conversation. As in youth language generally, such features are adopted rapidly (and in some cases discarded swiftly), many of them stylised for effect, a development to which I return below. It is difficult consistently to attribute the variable use of these features to changing topics or conversational domains. Gumperz and some of his colleagues acknowledged this in the 1970s. On the one hand, drawing on his earlier work, Gumperz recognised that there were occasions when a particular speech variety and a particular social event or setting would go together and that a change in the language or variety might change the social setting, and vice versa (Blom & Gumperz 1970; Gumperz & HernándezChavez 1971). On the other hand, he also provided contrary instances of conversational code-switching between words of English and Spanish where such close correlations did not apply nor could be predicted. He showed, moreover, that switching between codes or varieties did more than communicate the meaning of the particular words used, but also metaphorically drew on the social associations each variety might have – to articulate a particular speech variety was to take on some of the stereotypical social characteristics of its speakers. Gumperz here took a step in a movement away from classification, and nowadays this is even greater. As represented in many of the chapters in this volume, the features making up codes can no longer be regarded as unambiguously belonging to particular languages, for they are imperceptibly merged with other features of different provenances and do not necessarily alter by topic. Fishman’s interest was more macroscopic than the later Gumperz and was tied to the idea of a language as belonging to a group whose speakers would each share a loyalty to their distinctive language (Parkin 1974; Spotti 2011a). He described language shift and stability. This illustrates the most obvious case of languages seen as relatively bounded entities subject to change from contact with others or able to withstand such change or, as in some of Fishman’s examples, incorporating some changes while preserving an ‘original’ essence. Fishman’s recorded material, especially on the relation in the urban United States between Spanish and English, is exemplary and did indeed at that time suggest both an

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ideological and practised distinctiveness of two languages seen analytically, as well as indigenously separable, a distinctiveness that then, as now, has ideological-cumpolitical significance in defining acceptable citizenship. It is a view of integrated speech, in Jørgensen’s terms (Chapter 7, this volume), in which a noticeable degree of language distinctiveness is maintained, and which educators and policymakers assume is ‘natural’. So, just as the world has allegedly undergone the transition within a generation from (urban) diversity to superdiversity as a result of historical developments, is there a commensurately different linguistic horizon today in much of the world from that which existed in, say, the 1960s and 1970s, to say nothing of even earlier periods? It would be indulgent to dwell long on one’s own researches at that time in the cities of Nairobi in Kenya and Kampala, Uganda. But it should be mentioned that migration to each city, as in many African cities consequent on the expulsion in the early 1960s of French, British, and Belgian colonialism (Portuguese 15 years later), consisted heavily of new migrants from rural areas, many of which were, if not monoglot, at least defined in terms of a self-perceived single ‘mother tongue’ vernacular hedged around with other languages used at trading centres and markets. Nairobi under the British, after all, discouraged Africans from becoming permanent residents in the city and so urban ethno-linguistic admixture was small compared with today. A non-colonial ‘traditional’ city such as Kampala was, by contrast, already ethnically and linguistically mixed, though even there LuGanda, the language of the dominant BuGanda kingdom, was seen by everyone as the ideological standard to which one should aspire if one wanted the benefits of Ganda ‘citizenship’. But it was the British and other imperialists of Africa who insisted on falsely demarcating peoples as unambiguously belonging to ‘tribes’. It was false because precolonial movement, trade, intermarriage, and alliances had precluded set boundaries and borders (Southall 1970). But in imposing them, the imperialists in fact created a sense of bounded ethno-linguistic distinctiveness that became partially reinforced in practice and has become the bane of modern national politics. The colonial project of ethno-linguistic essentialism did not in practice curb language mixing, and indeed studies were made of it in Nairobi and Kampala (Parkin 1971, 1974). But colonial essentialising did foster an ideological view on the part of African speakers of the coexistence of not just ethnic groups, but also languages as discrete entities, which could be found in allegedly ‘pure’ form somewhere, perhaps in a notional rural heartland. There was, in other words, the coexistence of, on one hand, an ideology of linguistic pluralism and individual purity, and, on the other hand, increasing heteroglossia, especially with greater urban migration. Such language mixing may indeed be said now to have grown more complex in conjunction with denser urban settlement, and yet still juxtaposed to colonially derived ideas of language separateness and purity. The two, language ideologies of purity, and crossover talk, continue today, reflecting a similar duality in Europe.

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Precolonial extensive African networks of trade, political absorption, movement to new farming, pastoral, and hunting land, and intermarriage did spread the use of a number of vernaculars. To that extent, there was some indigenous linguistic diversity. But it was hardly on the scale of modern superdiversity. For, by the latter, we understand the situation in late modern urban settings, and, with predictions that the majority of the world’s population will be living in cities by about 2025, there clearly has been a qualitative shift. More research on older archives and records is needed to say more about this shift and to compare earlier with present periods. Underlying such history of apparent polylingual change is a theoretical distinction. In the English language, we can interrogate the verb, ‘identify’, with reference to the ways in which allegedly different speech varieties are classified and have effect on social relations. For a speaker to identify a speech variety as different from others is to classify it as one might an object. The act sets up a classificatory grid that is ideological insofar as it is based on a perception and claim that may depart from the fact that the variety is not really that neatly distinctive of others and in some respects overlaps with them. By contrast, for a speaker to identify with a speech variety is to embody it or, perhaps, to be embodied by it, with echoes of empathy and Levy-Bruhl’s notion of ‘participation’ by which the speaker and the variety share in each other’s being: I do not just speak it, for it is part of my being even when I do not speak it. To identify with is then ontological and not just classificatory. I raise this distinction because I have the impression that earlier sociolinguistics tended towards the ‘objective’ classification of speech varieties and their social and conceptual correlates. A primary task was to show how speakers make, or are induced to make, choices as between varieties or registers according to the socio-cultural domain in which they are operating or the topic on which they are speaking. As mentioned above, the later Gumperz was different in that his approach to metaphorical code-switching understood varieties as coming from different settings and informing speakers with identities built on such variation. It was to that extent moving towards a view of conversations as ontological processes and not just one of speakers collectively classifying and being classified by the languages around them. The chapters in this volume are in part heirs to Gumperz but go further and strongly depict the use of not just spoken language, but also other semiotic resources (text, visual, dress, music). Their usage is seen as intrinsic to and part of the migratory and social superdiversity that for at least a generation characterises cities and can be seen as a kind of further diversification of pre-existing diversity. Such constant involution of semiotic resources lends itself to what Blommaert and Maly call ‘ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis’ (ELLA). ELLA investigates not just the ‘permanent’ features of language and signs in a Ghent neighbourhood, but also those that come and go quickly and would be ignored as unimportant in conventional studies of language diversity, but which are in fact intrinsic to the socio-demographic layers and dynamics of the neighbourhood (Chapter 10, this volume).

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I deal with the notion of semiotic resources in more detail below. But I should here briefly note that it is different from the notion of urban language resources as used in the late 1960s in Nairobi by Parkin (1974), who explicitly adopted a transactionalist market model in which sellers and buyers of different, unambiguously defined ethnic groups at a market made challenges and concessions to each other by including parts of each other’s language in a game to gain custom or a lower price. The resources were seen as directly deriving from ethnic languages whose boundaries were maintained despite the reciprocal borrowing in the market transactions. It was a view of resources in the economic sense and of ethnic groups regarded by townsfolk as distinctive of each other. The classificatory predominated over the ontological, with only strains of the latter identified (e.g. Parkin 1971).

The Semiotic Creation of Identity Use of semiotic resources in the current volume does not unambiguously classify social strata and ethnic groups, but creates and draws from communicative outlines that cut across them and blur their contours. While this appears increasingly to characterise late urban modernity, it was to some extent evident earlier (Parkin 1977). I contend that the chapters address two consequences. One is that contemporary polylanguaging is an ontological act on the part of speakers to empower themselves or to project a desired or appropriate personal image, perhaps in accordance with some kind of network membership but not tied to a domain or topic in the broader sense given above. The other is that this creation of identity is through semiotic stylisation, which by non-standard means projects new identities or reinforces existing ones, sometimes allowing change from one to the other. The distinction between the earlier tendency to classify on the basis of language varieties and the current concern to show individuals’ ontological and stylistic deployment of semiotic resources is not watertight. But it does seem to constitute a broad if overlapping shift. Referring again to John Gumperz, Levinson says Gumperz in his early days was: interested in how social groups express and maintain their otherness in complex societies. Gumperz started as a dialectologist interested in tracking down the forces of standardization and particularly those of differentiation, and it was the search for where these forces are located that has led him inexorably from the macro-sociological to the micro-conversational perspective; it was a long journey from the study of regional standards, to ethnic groups, to social networks, to the activation of social boundaries in verbal interaction, to discourse strategies. (Levinson 1997: 1, 2003: 31; see also Gumperz 1982, 1984)

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Levinson points out that Gumperz’s later work on code-switching tried to reconcile the macro- (the group classification effect) with the micro- (the discursively strategic) through analysis of the individual speaker. He also wanted to explain how a speaker’s utterance could be interpreted in different and sometimes conflicting ways among interlocutors depending on their own respective backgrounds. In this attempt, he turned to “the careful analysis of prosody, the neglected acoustic cues that might help to explain how we can possibly mean so much by uttering so little” (Levinson 2003: 33). I recall Gumperz in London in the 1980s describing how the distinctive prosody of immigrant South Asian bus conductors in speaking to passengers sometimes came across as impolite and even hostile, marking and so making them different from the indigenous ‘mainstream’. They were regarded by passengers as not just different speakers of English, but as different persons of different behavioural disposition (personal communication). A recent example of how the ontological may be at the root of misunderstood polylanguaging is provided by Blommaert and Backus (2011). They show how, in the United Kingdom, an asylum seeker claiming Rwandan nationality did not speak Rwandan (KiNyaRwanda or OruNyaRwanda) as his first language. For a person not to know well the language of his/her official nationality is quite common in that region of east-central Africa where wars and drastic population displacement have thrust people into numerous speech enclaves away from their or their parents’ natal origin, often to the detriment of any so-called ‘mother tongue’, to use that Eurocentric misnomer. The British Home Office rejected the application on the grounds that a person must have an original nationality and should therefore be able to speak the language of that nationality. In this case, a man’s alleged mother tongue should not only define his very being, its apparent absence disqualifies him from acceptable being, a classic case of the ‘methodological nationalism’ (where the modern nation, state, society, or ethnic group is regarded as the natural analytical or investigative starting point) that is critiqued by several chapters in this volume. Let me give some examples of the ontological turn in linguistic ethnography from the chapters in this volume. Similar to Blommaert and Backus’ description above of the Rwandan refugee in the United Kingdom, Spotti (Chapter 13, this volume) analyzes the case of an Arabic-speaking Sudanese asylum seeker. He shows how Dutch and other European immigration authorities use language tests that focus on immigrant applicants’ accents and/or the use of certain words in their speech as clues to where they come from. The authorities are therefore not just discovering who the asylum seekers are but are in effect (re-)constructing their identities. This assumed perfect fit of language to territory simply does not reflect the actual linguistic diversity, as would be evident even in a European capital. In anticipation of such tests, there has grown a whole industry of private Dutch language courses for applicants, who are in effect being constructed in this way as acceptable Dutch citizens (Spotti 2011b). It is not enough to know the host

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society’s cultural norms. Proficiency in an idealised version of its language is also required. Moreover, for immigration authorities, applicants who can demonstrate such linguistic competence through being tested are in effect being assessed as to whether they may become a productive member of the society. In this way, the language makes the person, or perhaps remakes him/her. Roberts’s analysis of British job interviews (Chapter 12, this volume) shows how they are a form of institutional gatekeeping. It describes how judgements about immigrants’ fitness as potential employees (and, by implication, citizens) becomes based on a standardised mode of linguistic competence and often disregards their work experience in another country prior to coming to the UK. The interviewees are in effect penalised for not using the language of assumed competence despite their previous skills. They may not be the ‘right’ person for the job in the ears, if not the eyes, of the interviewers, despite the late modern legal and institutional prohibition of such discriminatory barriers as ethnicity and class. The irony, as with all the various European entry tests, is that ordinary everyday speech of most or many citizens bears sometimes limited resemblance to the formal language that the applicants have to learn. The heteroglossic urban vernaculars characteristic of all European cities nowadays are in fact what the new immigrants will have to learn for everyday purposes, including that of getting a job and being the productive member of society that is desired by government. But urban mixed vernaculars have ambivalence. They may not help the applicant in a formal job interview where language proficiency based on measurable, standard features is demanded. They may, however, help the immigrant get a job in the so-called informal employment sector where forms of non-standard English are in common use among small-scale employers of both indigenous and immigrant origin. Moreover, it can be suggested that use of the urban mixed vernaculars may among some people offer a kind of resistance to official government language and educational policy (cf. Urla 1995, on Basque) rather like breakaway religions in some societies resisting formally established faiths. In absorbing these urban vernaculars, people set themselves apart as a separable category. An extension of the irony, therefore, is that it is not the monoglot English, Dutch, or other mainstream European language that is likely to define the person, whether new immigrant or long-settled, but their capacity for polylanguaging through knowledge of urban mixed vernaculars, as is the case to some degree for much of the population. So-called BBC standard English is, after all, consistently spoken by only a minority of the country’s population. The case of African marabouts’ self-advertisements in France shows how even writing styles can effect an ontological ‘realignment’ of the person. The marabouts deliberately cultivate the impression of poor French literacy in their written advertisements for their clairvoyant and divinatory skills, for this is how best to persuade potential French clients that they are truly authentic African practitioners, conforming therefore to French stereotypes of them. Thus self-classified, they take on the behavioural characteristics of the stereotype in their relations with customers.

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Shading into speaking and writing as elements of semiosis are the visual signs and productions that punctuate most forms of everyday discourse. Elsewhere in the introductory section of this volume, Blommaert and Rampton provide an example of a calligraphic text found on a building in Antwerp that advertises rental accommodation and is written in two forms of Chinese language script. The traditional script probably indicates the writer as a long-standing Chinese immigrant from outside the People’s Republic of China (PRC) while the more modern script seems aimed at newer arrivals from within the PRC. It also gives the rent in Yuan rather than Euro and overall suggests a transition in the population of the Chinese diaspora as well as telling us something of the writer and the intended addressees. The visual is implicated in the linguistic in such a way, then, that two quite different social subcategories are defined within the wider category of Chinese incomer: new ones from the PRC and older ones from outside it. They are defined separately according to different language scripts whose effect is visual as much as it is textual. The view that meaning is multimodal in this way highlights different kinds and intensities of communication, which range from propositions to moods (e.g. phatic communion). But, like semiosis and indeed as part of it, ontological personmaking is also multimodal. It may start with a person being fitted into a stereotypical class or category of persons on the basis of visual and acoustic signs distinguishing him/her. But, ingrained in habitus over time, each person so classified reproduces, exaggerates, and believes in the semiotic features allegedly making up that stereotype. In addition to the example of the Antwerp advert linguo-visually setting up two categories of Chinese, there is that of the YouTube genre of ‘buffalaxed videos’ described by Leppänen and Elo (Chapter 6, this volume). These are made up of fragments of films and music videos taken from different cultural backgrounds. The production as a whole is subtitled in the language of the maker, which is, however, homophonic with words drawn from other languages in which the video clips are presented. These original languages are commonly unknown to the video producer and viewer. The juxtaposition and co-occurrence of homophonic subtitles and original language snippets lend themselves to interpretation as new meanings, and so provide what the authors call ‘affordances’ in which identities and relationships can be represented or, as I would suggest, can be made. Every viewer can find something in the mixture that speaks to his/her own identity. Indeed, it is a form of identity-making that transcends, through its superdiversity, that of conventional contours of ethnicity. It also achieves much of its effect through humour that belittles the many forms of Otherness, justified as harmless fun by some but rejected by others as politically incorrect. It is an ambivalent genre for which stand-up comedians are noted. Comedians are successful to the extent that they can draw a line between the acceptable and unacceptable while straddling but not crossing it. But their reputations can plunge should they fail in this by saying something regarded by enough people

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as unambiguously ‘racist’, ‘classist’, ‘sexist’, or ‘ageist’. These labels are the modern demarcators not just of moral behaviour, but of the proper person, who avoids being so labelled, and vice versa. The videos are then more than representational. As is evident through the use of the ecological concept of affordances, they allow viewers to see how they might fit into ontological spaces provided by the mix of identity and relationship possibilities: as in one example, is one gay or straight in one’s relationship to an available girl? The ontological is about being and presence and, as such, is commonly expressed through the body or body parts. Goffman throughout his work shows how the ‘presentation of self’ is not just the giving out of cognitive cues, but is also to do with posture, gesture, physical and bodily orientation, distance in relation to others, and facework or ways of looking at and speaking with. In China, the metaphor of ‘face’ has been much documented as a fundamental feature of status qualification: appearance is everything – at whatever level of social class – and it is seen and assessed from the ‘front’, whether of a house or a person, for the ‘back’ has no face and value, and can even be neglected. While most societies have a similar form of interpersonal evaluation, the notion of face in China does seem to have special significance in occupying an inordinate area of people’s concerns in daily interaction (cf. Hu 1944; Qi 2011). What is interesting, therefore, in Dong’s account is the importance of ‘voice’ in contemporary China. Of Bakhtinian origin, this is her term and not that of her informants, though they are perfectly aware of the effects of different modes of language articulation. She uses voice in a conjoined metaphorical and direct manner to refer mainly to types of language use. But we may see how it can be extended in other situations to include differences between high and low status speech varieties, as in Dong’s case, and of dialect, pronunciation, pitch, talk-speed, politeness, prosody, and other features of speech, including its absence (i.e. silence) as also being semiotic. ‘Face’ appears to be about maintaining integral and honourable selfhoods between equals, as for instance between a shop buyer and seller. The main concern is not to lose face more than gaining face. ‘Voice’ tends towards the assertive insofar as it seeks to advance or defend selfhood and is less concerned to maintain it or create equality between speaker and listener. We may speculate on whether superdiversity and greater interpersonal competition for goods, lifestyles and influence in rapidly urbanising, capitalist China has made ‘voice’ a more prevalent feature of semiotic interaction than ‘face’, which belongs more to an earlier premise of equality.1 Dong’s account is set among Chinese elite migrants who define themselves in terms of class and status hierarchy. Her self-selected group of wealthy Saab automobile owners reject use and even knowledge of such regional speech varieties as Shanghainese, which they regard as limited in its communicative and status value. The Saab car defines them as an exceptional elite whose expensive consumer interests converge and who come together in order to save the Saab company from bankruptcy and themselves from loss of their status symbol.

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As cosmopolitans rejecting the regional language as demeaning, they celebrate instead their knowledge both of Putonghua, the national Chinese language, and English. Dong’s theoretical point is that having the ‘right voice’ enables people to be heard more widely than through regional vernaculars such as Shanghainese. It gives them what she calls repertoires of mobility, one throughout China by means of Putonghua and the other internationally through English. This is an important argument about the dynamics of voice and social stratification and is analysed with the broad sweeps of the brush that current sociolinguistic stratification in China invites. One can apply the same argument more microscopically however to situations on which we have data. For example, differences of accent in the United Kingdom, where much class prejudice, antagonism, and rejection rest on the polarisation of so-called lower-class and middle-class pronunciations (e.g. ‘estuary’ and ‘posh’), pitch, and tone, with regional accents variably rated, sometimes treated as lower class and sometimes as standing outside it. Similarly, though in terms of regional rather than class differentiation, Swahili in Kenya is broadly distinguished as either up-country (ya bara) or coastal (ya pwani), the latter regarded as ‘correct’ and ‘pure’, and the former as at best of pragmatic usefulness only. Such distinctions belie the complicated realities. Coastal Swahili is itself further distinguished both regionally through its many, sometimes mutually unintelligible forms, and as to whether it contains more Arabic than Bantu expressions. It is likewise difficult to talk unambiguously of up-country Swahili, given such rapid transformations of the Sheng type, which challenge the very idea of a single Swahili diatype. Estuary English similarly varies across much of central and southern England and in fact may overlap with regional types and residues, with middle-class posh English rated above estuary but below ‘royal’ or ‘aristocratic’ speech of the ‘hise’, ‘trizers’ (for ‘house’ and ‘trousers’) variety. Here, we see ‘voice’ as the individual speaker’s ability or inability to communicate successfully in a specific situation, doing so through adoption of a particular conventionalised ‘style’, the appropriateness of which determines the success or failure of the communication. As Rampton notes, “style/voice tension is experienced in many social sites, as people struggle to match their expressive resources to the requirements of the situation” (personal communication, March 2012). ‘Voice’ in this sense may then hover over the possibility either of deriving from or building on the stylisations of social categories that, like the speech varieties and registers, are in fact much more diverse than their stereotypes. ‘Higher’ speech forms embedded unambiguously in social hierarchies seem moreover to move up and away when threatened from below. Thus once the voice immediately below begins to approach in imitation the one above it, the latter develops new aspects of voice, principally pronunciation but also other speech elements and lexicon. Rampton’s findings in London suggest that this process will become evermore complicated through superdiversity, as older ethnic and class differences

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are cut across by new kinds of hierarchised speech forms under the pressure of, and in partial ‘resistance’ to, standard language regimes. An interesting question is whether voice, as an expression of assertiveness, will develop a kind of autonomy of movement that precedes the creation of recognised social groupings. That is to say, will new experimental forms of voice, as defined above, be used at a pace that exceeds that of observable social differentiation? To put it simply, is class in the older sense already lagging behind voice in some late modern cities such as London, at least among the young and those older speakers exposed earlier to the process? Imagine a lower-class speaker of either immigrant or indigenous origin working in the City of London, retaining his version of Estuary, but with like-speaking colleagues setting themselves up as a desirably successful reference group in moneymaking skills and conspicuous consumption. Certainly media exploitation of class and regional styles, as in television adverts and some soaps, often celebrates what were once low status attributes. Back with Dong’s case, we note that the elite status of the Saab owners is threatened by the possibility that a reduction in the price of the automobile will bring in ‘other’ people who can now afford it but who are not regarded as of their status. The elite then distances itself further through even more consumerism by buying expensive wines, cigars, and playing golf, in addition to continuing to buy Saab cars. Through semiosis, a status category of relatively unconnected individuals develops a common interest and agency. Semiosis thus mediates the transition from classification to ingrained ontology. It is the equivalent of the British upper classes traditionally altering pronunciation, prosody, and vocabulary in order to distance themselves from evident imitation by lower strata, a subtle process that occurs slowly and perhaps largely unconsciously. Continuing with China, we have a case where ‘vernacular’ does not connote the regional limitations that the Saab owners ascribe to Shanghainese. Varis and Wang show how a particular form of hip-hop rapping in Beijing makes use of various global vernacular varieties. They make up a mix and create what the authors call supervernaculars. These are ‘global ways of fashioning identities, forms of communication, genres, etc., recognizable for members of emergent supergroups’ (Varis & Wang 2011: 75). They share indexical orders, and ‘supercommunities’ are constructed through them. This coordination and bringing together of the different bits and pieces of global vernaculars is made possible through the Internet, or at least the Internet makes it possible for the mix to reach very many more people than would otherwise be the case. The difference between the more face-to-face ‘club’ of Saab owners and the Internet hip-hop rappers and audience, both within China, illustrates two uses of English. Saab club English complements Putonghua but both are viewed as relatively distinct and bounded, for that is how they can be stratified. Shanghainese is rejected and cannot therefore ‘muddy’ either of the two main languages, whose discrete boundedness is therefore reinforced through non-interference by the vernacular. By contrast, English for the Beijing rapper ‘is the supervernacular

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template’, into which are inserted the chosen elements of Chinese and Korean (related to current Chinese enthusiasm for Korean pop culture). Moreover, this template provides ‘affordances’ (to use again the term employed in two of the chapters in this volume, i.e. Leppänen & Elo, and Varis & Wang) because it is made up of such a variety of language use, clothing, and other signs taken from different sources that speakers can creatively make up new combinations in the rapping lyrics and images. The thrust of Varis and Wang’s chapter is indeed to show how such creativity jostles with normative constraints in a kind of search for authenticity: ‘true’ rap or hip hop is African American and yet is presented with a Chinese accent, and so is also ‘really’ Chinese, possessing rebelliousness and yet working within limits of Chinese public acceptability. One image presented in the chapter is of “a young Afro male, suggesting an alignment with ‘hip-hop authority’ embodied in blackness – being and doing ‘black’.” It reminds us again of the marabouts doing and being ‘African’ so as to conform to Parisians’ stereotypes of them. This is clearly an ontological consequence (i.e. creating an identity), which draws on semiotic resources. It is to the theme of these resources, central to all the presentations, that I now turn. Indeed, ‘resources’ is a word that occurs more than any other in the chapters.

Semiotic Resources, Repertoire, and Style The concern with resources presupposes speakers as agents. They are agents not in the unsubtle or logocentric sense of calculating beforehand the effects of speech, but as having an effect on listeners without necessarily intending that effect. Insofar as we can distinguish it, this is communicative intention, which is implicit to speaking in context. In other words, we may intend something but may also elaborate on meaning as we go along, as part of performing the utterance. Putting this crudely, we often know the full sense of what we have said only after we have said it and observed its effect on the listener, sometimes to our dismay but usually without cause or wish to reflect on that sense. Resources are, by definition, there to be used or exploited, and so we must be talking about processes of speaking that draw on them as part of the speech act but without singular, aim-directed consciousness. This view of the relationship between resources and action departs from a much earlier view prevalent in the 1960s of transactional analysis. This argued that actors are impelled to maximise gains at minimal cost, using resources consisting not just of material goods, but also of emotions, reputations, and interactional skills (Barth 1966). In Nairobi in the late 1960s, Parkin (1974) looked at the use of language resources in an urban marketplace. There, sellers and buyers of different, unambiguously defined ethnic groups made challenges and concessions to each other by including parts of each other’s language in a serious game to gain custom or a lower price. The resources were seen as directly deriving from ethnic languages whose boundaries were maintained despite the reciprocal

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borrowing in the market transactions. It was a view of resources in the economic sense and of ethnic groups regarded by townsfolk as distinctive of each other. The classificatory predominated over the ontological, with only strains of the latter identified (e.g. Parkin 1971). Whereas that view focused on actors’ strategies, with language resources waiting as objects to be gathered for use, the chapters in this volume place greater emphasis on the wider range of semiotic resources as comprising the non-verbal as well as verbal, how they are created and used for new forms of communication, and on how they are inextricably part of the (changing) selfhoods of their speakers. Their approach is concerned with the evolution of environments of linguistic opportunity resulting from the superdiversity of semiotic modes and sensibilities operating together. This approach does, of course, set up (the outlines of) social categories of users, as discussed above. I perceive, however, something near to a generative explanation: superdiversity produces ‘affordances’ and opportunities for semiotic crossovers that produce further diversity at an often bewildering pace, as seemingly befits the current global age. A couple of authors even talk of superdiversity as a generative logic, which is not unreasonable at a certain level of analysis but raises the question of what are the triggers of choice and change among speakers. Perhaps this is to ask how semiotic resources become what Blommaert and others have referred to as a semiotic repertoire (Blommaert & Varis 2011, 2012). That is to say, resources exist out there ready to be garnered; a repertoire is a particular ordering of them. How do we get from the first to the second? And how do speakers/communicators avoid the hazards of being unfamiliar with harvestable signs and voices and of not understanding them? In other words, resources may be out there but we cannot always know them well enough to arrange and use them to good effect. More confidently, Varis and Wang (Chapter 11, this volume) suggest that “the meanings attached to semiotic signs . . . are not random, but systematic, stratified, and context-specific: we attribute meaning to signs according to conventionalised normative patterns.” Similarly, Dong (Chapter 9, this volume) asserts that “Linguistic resources are never distributed in a random way . . . (they) are distributed according to the logic of the social system, and sociolinguistic analysis has from its inception addressed these nonrandom aspects of distribution.” However, the chapters also talk of the creativity involved in building up and presenting new multimodal semiotic repertoires. Creativity presupposes nonnormative innovation (i.e. by transcending the non-random norms). So how can we be creative (i.e. non-normative) if meaning is drawn from the normative? The answer seems to be that it is by taking norms out of their conventionalised patterns, mixing them, and presenting them for effect. The effect would seem to be to highlight a message or to package it in a special way. Its packaging is therefore likely to be a matter of style as well as of communication. That is to say, the way we communicate and create ‘truths’ about ourselves and our

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interlocutors is conveyed by a changing variety of styles and is not governed by a uniform logic. This emphasis on style comes out directly or indirectly in many chapters, most evidently as an aspect of the various forms of youth speech and pop culture, including visual, acoustic, and dress, and especially as a feature of late modern urban society. It is true that ‘style’ has a standard linguistic connotation of identifying a linguistic variety. Jørgensen et al. suggest that, in this sense, it is one of a number of unacceptably delimited ways of analysing language, because it does not reflect the reality of speech for which the idea of semiotic resources is necessary instead. Style is, of course, also used in a number of different ways, for example as mode or register, covering form, interaction, and ideology, and not just delimited speech varieties. There is also the distinctive, everyday social connotation of trying to impress an audience, of being a discursive strategy, or style or stylisation as ontologically enacted. The chapters give many examples: the use of English and Afro images in Chinese hip hop/rap; of highly rated Creole among South London schoolchildren; the choice of ‘cool’ music and lyrics from different cultures as in the buffalaxed videos; the display of magic in ‘doing African’ of the Paris marabouts; the status-conscious brandishing of cigars, wine, cars, and golf club membership among the Chinese Saab owners; and, reaching out for the classification that may provide the conditions for national acceptance, the almost ceremonial parading of lavish language test certificates for migrants and asylum seekers in European cities. Being culturally defined, the absence of style contributes to communicative disadvantage or is regarded as linguistic incompetence, as among the immigrant jobseekers unfamiliar with British styles described by Roberts. Style for impression management is clearly both semiotic resource and part of a repertoire. It is likely also to be consubstantial with bodily use and images, as the examples just given suggest. The linguistic is part of this semiotics but seems almost to be drowned in its multimodality. However, we can see such multimodality as creating a stylised semiotic package, in which speech, texts, nonverbal sounds, and the visual intertwine. The packages serve two main demands made of interlocutors: to act ontologically in the sense of interacting with others on the same semiotic wavelength, and to impress listeners and bystanders. That they also classify, instruct, persuade, admonish, and promise seems to me to follow in the wake of style in actual social contexts in conditions of late modern urban superdiversity. Our interest may indeed be in a general semiology, of which language is but one strand, possibly absent altogether in, say, silent rituals lacking verbal and textual comment. But, as a matter of heuristic choice rather than of theoretical stance, it can be argued that language normally provides an empirically convenient starting point for tracing out the other different visual and acoustic sign systems that accompany, substitute for, blend with, and shadow speech. The caveat is not to return to bounded, essentialised speech varieties and languages as the initial building blocks of what we observe and study.

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Acknowledgements I thank Ben Rampton for very extensive and insightful comments on this paper, most of which I have been able to address, Jan Blommaert and Max Spotti for some useful references, and Karel Arnaut for comment and advice.

Note 1. Based on an observation made by Rampton.

References Barth, F. 1966. The analytical importance of transaction. In Models of Social Organization, Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper 23. Glasgow: RAI, pp. 1–11. Blom, J.P., & Gumperz, J.J. 1970. Social meaning in linguistic structures: Codeswitching in Norway. In J.J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (eds), Directions in Sociolinguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, pp. 404–434. Blommaert, J., & Backus, A. 2011. Repertoires revisited: ‘Knowing language’ in superdiversity. Working Papers in Urban Languages and Literacies, #67. London: King’s College, University of London. Blommaert, J., & Varis, P. 2011. Enough is enough: The heuristics of authenticity in superdiversity. Tilburg Papers in Cultural Studies, #2. Tilburg University. Blommaert, J., & Varis, P. 2012. Culture as accent. Tilburg Papers in Cultural Studies, #18. Tilburg University. Creese, A., & Blackledge, A. 2010. Translanguaging in the bilingual classroom: A pedagogy for learning and teaching? The Modern Language Journal, 94(1): 103–115. Fishman, J.A. 1966. Language Loyalty in the United States: The Maintenance and Perpetuation of Non-English Mother Tongues by American Ethnic and Religious Groups. The Hague: Mouton. Fishman, J.A. 1971. Bilingualism in the Barrio. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Gumperz, J. 1961. Speech variation and the study of Indian civilization. American Anthropologist, 63: 976–988. Gumperz, J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, J. 1984. Communication and social identity. In A. Jacobson-Widding (ed.), Identity: Personal and socio-cultural. Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology, 5. Gumperz, J., & Hernández-Chavez, E. 1972. Bilingualism, bidialectalism, and classroom interaction. In C. Cazden, V. John, & D. Hymes (eds), Functions of Language in the Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press, pp. 84–108. Hanks, W. 1996. Language and Communicative Practices. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Hu, H.C. 1944. The Chinese concept of ‘face’. American Anthropologist, 46(1): 45–64. Hymes, D. 1962. The ethnography of speaking. In T. Gladwin & W.C. Sturtevant (eds), Anthropology and Human Behaviour. Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington, pp. 13–53. Levinson, S.C. 1997. A review of John J. Gumperz’s contribution to the academic community. In S.L. Eerdmans (ed.), Discussing Communication Analysis 1. Lausanne: Beta Press, pp. 24–30.

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Levinson, S.C. 2003. Contextualising ‘contextualization cues’. In S.L. Eerdmans, C.L. Prevignano, & P.J. Thibault (eds), Language and Interaction: Discussions with John J. Gumperz. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 31–39. Parkin, D.J. 1971. Language choice in two Kampala housing estates. In W.H. Whiteley (ed.), Language Use and Social Change. London: University of Oxford Press for International African Institute, pp. 347–363. Parkin, D.J. 1974. Chapters 5–8 in W.H. Whiteley (ed.), Language in Kenya. Nairobi and London: University of Oxford Press. Parkin, D.J. 1977. Stabilized and emergent multilingualism. In H. Giles (ed.), Language, Ethnicity and Inter-Group Relations. London/New York: Academic Press, pp. 185–210. Qi, X. 2011. Face: A Chinese concept in a global sociology. Journal of Sociology, 47: 279–296. Rampton, B. 1995. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. Rampton, B. 2006. Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, B. 2010. An everyday poetics of class and ethnicity in stylization and crossing. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, #59. London: King’s College, University of London. Rampton, B. 2011. From ‘multi-ethnic adolescent heteroglossia’ to ‘contemporary urban vernaculars’. Working Papers in Urban Languages and Literacies, #61. London: King’s College, University of London. Rampton, B. 2013. Styling in a language learned later in life. The Modern Language Journal, 97(2): 360–382. Southall, A.W. 1970. The illusion of tribe. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 5: 28–50. Spotti, M. 2011a. Modernist language ideologies, indexicalities and identities: Looking at the multilingual classroom through a post-Fishmanian lens. Applied Linguistics Review, 22: 29–50. Spotti, M. 2011b. Ideologies of success for superdiverse citizens: The Dutch testing regime for integration and the online private sector. Diversities, 13(2): 39–52. Urla, J. 1995. Outlaw language: Creating alternative public spheres in Basque free radio. Pragmatics, 5(2): 245–261. Varis, P., & Wang, X. 2011. Superdiversity on the Internet: A case from China. Diversities, 13(2): 71–83. Vertovec, S. 2007. Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29(6): 1024–1054.

PART II

Sociolinguistic Complexity

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5 DRILLING DOWN TO THE GRAIN IN SUPERDIVERSITY1 Ben Rampton

In the situations that the term ‘superdiversity’ is used to describe,2 there has been a ‘diversification of diversity’. The old binaries – minority/majority, migrant/host – no longer work, and there is widespread recognition that social and ethnic classification is now a serious problem both for social science and for public institutions. In socio- and applied linguistics, researchers are philosophically well tuned to this, and the critiques of traditional concepts such as ‘native speaker’, ‘bilingual’, ‘speech community’, or ‘English’ have wide currency. But how does this actually work through into the process of practical analysis? It is certainly clear that to get beyond the binaries and engage with the complexities of situated social identification, ethnography and indeed micro-ethnographic analysis are now necessary (Blommaert & Rampton 2011: Sections 2.3.6, 3.1, 3.2.1) – standard survey and experimental methods take too much for granted to be reliable. But how far down into the smallest particles do we now need to drill in order to grasp the communicative ramifications of superdiversity? What are the nitty-gritty challenges and implications when it comes to any nose-to-data examination of tiny strips of spoken interaction? Do we really have the tools to follow the challenge of superdiversity down, for example, into the analysis of individual sounds? Indeed, if we are operating in the potentially dizzying ambience of superdiversity, poststructuralism, late modernity, etc., how do we even start to conceptualise what the job of really fine-grained linguistic description actually entails? These are the issues addressed in this chapter, and I shall start by taking Gumperz and Silverstein as my foundations. Gumperz argued early on that we need “closer understanding of how linguistic signs interact with social knowledge in discourse” (1982: 29), and Silverstein formalised this as the ‘total linguistic fact’ (TLF): [t]he total linguistic fact, the datum for a science of language is irreducibly dialectic in nature. It is an unstable mutual interaction of meaningful sign

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forms, contextualised to situations of interested human use and mediated by the fact of cultural ideology. (1985: 220; see also Hanks 1996: 230) The proposal is that linguistic forms, situated discourse, and ideology need to be analysed together, without in any way conflating them,3 and this actually is not such a standard practice. So, for example, in Variationist Sociolinguistics, there is attention to linguistic form and ideology (in work on attitudes and evaluation), but there is not much attention to situated interaction; Conversation Analysis focuses on interaction, cares about linguistic form, but neglects ideology; in Critical Discourse Analysis, there is form and ideology, but not nearly enough on situated interactional processing; and in research on Second Language Acquisition, there is form + interaction without ideology in the input and interaction tradition, and interaction + ideology without much sustained attention to linguistic form in the critical tradition. But so what if form, discourse, and ideology are not routinely treated together? Does this really matter? I think that it does, because if analysts do not look empirically at the missing third element – whichever it happens to be – then they tend to fill the gap with the default assumptions characteristic of their sub-disciplines. Potentially crucial aspects of their informants’ social, political, rhetorical, or linguistic positioning are obscured, and this lets in the romantic celebration of difference and creative agency that has been so common in sociolinguistics, or the presumption of deficit and remedial need in SLA. With a neglect of proficiency with linguistic form, it is all too easy for specific instances of rhetorical success to tempt the sociolinguist to forget the longer-term constraints that individuals face, while in SLA, informants are intuitively framed as ‘learners’ if there is no engagement with ideology. And in both cases, the outcome is a set of accounts that look increasingly removed from contemporary reality, obsessed (but inevitably also frustrated) by precisely the kind of simplistic caricature that ‘superdiversity’ alerts us to. To illustrate the alternative – to try to overcome these blind spots and the reductive and inadequate portraits that they generate – I shall focus on a man who says that he really only started to speak English when he migrated from India to London in his late twenties. In the case study presented here: (a) I will address the challenge of social classification by trying to locate this informant in the local speech economy, reckoning with the fact that longstanding transnational links can blur the boundaries between ‘host’ and ‘migrant’, so that what sounded ‘foreign’ 30 years ago may no longer do so today.4 In other words, in the first instance, I will resist the traditional practice of placing L2 speech and its associated unpredictabilities in a segregated category, hived off on their own. (b) After that, my analysis will be guided by the principles of the ‘total linguistic fact’, looking closely at this man’s stylistic performance, trying to identify

Drilling Down to the Grain 93

some of the ideological categories, social scenes, and stances he evokes through the non-referential, socially indexical possibilities of local English. In doing so, crucially, I will attend to the likelihood that in a second language, the formal, interactional, and ideological dimensions of sociolinguistic sensibility develop at different rates, and I will try to demonstrate the importance of recognising that the abilities (i) to distinguish different social types, (ii) to recognise the ways of speaking associated with them, and then (iii) to reproduce them with the right linguistic forms do not develop all together at the same time.5 Together, these two goals chart a line between the Scylla of L2 exceptionalism and the Charybdis of sociolinguistic romanticisation. In the first goal, my refusal to separate L2 immigrants from L1 locals a priori is surely only a reasonable recognition of the quotidian contemporary fact that there are a great many families and couples composed of people who grew up speaking different languages in different parts of the world. But with the second, I shall try to stay alert to issues of proficiency in my account of style – plainly, migration is often associated with an unequal distribution of material, cultural, and linguistic resources, and it is important not to erase this either. My data come from a 2008–2009 ESRC project, Dialect Development and Style in a Diaspora Community, conducted with Devyani Sharma, Lavanya Sankaran, Pam Knight, and Roxy Harris, and it was based in Southall in West London, where, in 2001, 48 per cent of the 89,000 inhabitants were ethnically South Asian, 38 per cent were white, 9 per cent were black, and overall, 43 per cent were born outside the UK. In our study, there were approximately 75 mostly adult and mainly ethnic Punjabi informants, born both in Britain and abroad, and the focal informant here, Mandeep, came to London in 2001 aged 28. With Mandeep, our data collection involved approximately 5.5 hours of audio recordings – two interviews with Lavanya Sankaran, and four self-recordings (with a group of colleagues at work [one Anglo and several people born in India]; with an Indianborn friend; with a newly arrived relative; on his own in the car). We can start to build an understanding of Mandeep’s social and ideological positioning if we now turn to the interviews.

What Mandeep Told Us in Interview In interview, Mandeep told us he had been a teacher in the Punjab, and he had left India to find a better life. Soon after arriving, he had found work as a newsreader and editor in a local Southall Punjabi-language radio station, but now he was working there only part-time because he wanted to do postgraduate teacher training and first he had to do a year’s maths enhancement course. He had not had any family in London when he had arrived, but he had known three or four people from home, and now he’d married a healthcare professional from India.

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His cultural taste in music and media hadn’t changed, he said, but “it’s developed . . . opened up new branches,” and although he didn’t get any spare time to watch the game, he said he would support England in cricket against India – after all, there were now two Punjabis in each team (Harbhajan and Yuvraj versus Panesar and Bopara). Mandeep said that he “wasn’t speaking English at all” until he came to England aged 28, but actually, he had had a lot of exposure to the language through study, and, among other things, most of his MA in Economics had been in English. Since arriving in the UK, he had done a year’s GCSE in English, and he regarded soaps with teletext on British TV as a great resource for language learning. With the British-born English speakers on his maths course, he said, “it’s fine, you always mingle with them, talk with them, joke with them – obviously you don’t know every single joke,” but that’s no reason for feeling “you are . . . being excluded.” He did not like it when people with Punjabi backgrounds born in Britain called him a ‘freshie’, but he was convinced that “if you are calibre enough, no one can stop you” and his stock reply was that at least he was not “worn out” and stale like them. With the Anglos in his maths classes, he said he avoided the Punjabi pronunciation of his name, while with people who were weak in English but could not speak Punjabi, he would de-anglicise his pronunciation of English. Lastly, he was conscious of social stratification in English speech: accent is to do with . . . watching telly, talking to the other people . . . Sometimes, say in English, you’re swearing a lot, and ‘yo mate yo mate’ or something you’re doing, and then- you’re glorifying yourself, some other people are glorifying you, then you develop that accent for the whole of your life. Then your family says, “no, that’s not the way how you speak.” And dispositions such as these were not just restricted to Anglos: the children of Indian sub-continent, [the] third generation . . . know other things as well – pub culture, these sorts of things – [and] now they are as bad as white partners and as good as white partners – they are now normals . . . of this country. So, to sum up before moving on to an investigation of how Mandeep actually used English himself, there are at least three points to take from his interview commentary: (a) Second-language learning is not just our own external analytic attribution: learning to speak English as an additional language had been a significant issue for Mandeep in London, even though English had also been important in his education in India.

Drilling Down to the Grain 95

(b) It is worth looking at at least two major axes of local sociolinguistic differentiation: not just Indian versus Anglo, or newcomer versus local, but also high versus low, posh versus vulgar. (c) At the same time, it looks as though the stereotypic links between language, ethnicity, and class have all been scrambled up, and we could go seriously wrong if we just accepted the traditional image of a minority ethnic L2 speaker migrating into a host society dominated by an L1 ethnic majority. In fact, we will see the significance of Mandeep’s residence among born-andbred Londoners with family links to the Indian subcontinent if we now turn to a quantitative analysis of stylistic variation.

Quantitative Analysis of Style-Shifting across Contexts In our analyses of style in Mandeep’s English, we first carried out a quantitative variationist analysis of his style-shifting in three settings, conducting an auditory analysis of the use of Punjabi and Anglo variants in his English. Table 5.1 shows what we examined: Ls, Ts, and the FACE & GOAT vowels, in three contexts (in self-recorded interaction with an Indian friend who was himself a fluent speaker of standard Indian English; in one of the interviews with Sankaran [brought up in southern India and Singapore, and a non-speaker of Punjabi]; and at work, conversing together with an Anglo L1 English-speaking man and several L2 Indian English-speaking women). What we found was that, yes, there was quantitative style-shifting: Mandeep used most Punjabi variants with his Punjabi friend at home, and fewest at work (in the presence of an Anglo colleague), and this is broadly in line with the findings of other studies of L2 speech. The plot thickens, however, when we bring in other informants and discover that even though these other speakers have been speaking English since TABLE 5.1 Linguistic variables used in the analysis of Mandeep’s situational style-shifting

Linguistic variable

Punjabi variant

Standard Vernacular British English British English variant variant

(t) in the environments vt#, #tv and vtv (as in ‘eight’, ‘time’, ‘thirty’)

Retroflex [†]

Alveolar [t]

Post-vocalic (l) as in ‘will’ or ‘deal’

Light [l]

Dark [5∞ ]

(e) – ‘FACE’ (e) as in ‘say’ and ‘game’

Monophthong Diphthong [e] [eI]

(o) – ‘GOAT’ as in ‘don’t’ and ‘road’

Monophthong Diphthong [␱] [@U]

Glottal [ʔ]

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Mandeep 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10

Mandeep with Indian interlocutor

FIGURE 5.1

dark l

diph-e

diph-o

alveolar t

light l

glottal T

mono-e

Mandeep in interview

mono-o

retroflex T

dark l

diph-e

diph-o

alveolar t

light l

glottal T

mono-e

mono-o

retroflex T

dark l

diph-e

diph-o

alveolar t

light l

glottal T

mono-e

mono-o

retroflex T

0

Mandeep at work

Mandeep: distribution of Punjabi and Anglo variants across three settings

TABLE 5.2 Mandeep’s English with an Indian friend Retroflex

% Tokens Total N

Monoph- Monoph- Light

Glottal

Diph-

Diph-

thong

thong

t

e

␱

l

0 0 28

30 12 40

30.8 4 13

13.3 2 15

38.5 5 13

Glottal

Alveolar

Diph-

Diph-

Dark

thong

thong

e

␱

thong

thong

†

e

␱

l

ʔ

57.5 23 40

69.2 9 13

86.7 13 15

61.5 8 13

Alveolar

Dark

TABLE 5.3 Mandeep’s English in interview Retroflex

% Tokens Total N

Monoph- Monoph- Light thong

thong

†

e

␱

l

ʔ

t

0 0 45

50 7 14

76.9 10 13

40 6 15

3.3 1 30

97.8 44 45

50 7 14

l

23.1 3 13

60 9 15

TABLE 5.4 Mandeep’s English in mixed white and Indian company at work Retroflex

% Tokens Total N

Monoph- Monoph- Light

Glottal

thong

thong

†

e

␱

l

ʔ

4.4 2 45

0 0 15

13.3 2 15

0 0 15

6.7 2 30

Alveolar

Diph-

Diph-

thong

thong

Dark

t

e

␱

l

82.2 37 45

100 15 15

86.7 13 15

100 15 15

Drilling Down to the Grain 97

Anwar 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10

Anwar with Sri Lankan maid

Anwar in interview

Anwar with school friend from

dark l

diph-e

diph-o

alveolar t

light l

glottal T

mono-e

mono-o

retroflex T

dark l

diph-e

diph-o

alveolar t

light l

glottal T

mono-e

mono-o

retroflex T

dark l

diph-e

diph-o

light l

glottal T

alveolar t

mono-e

mono-o

retroflex T

dark l

diph-e

diph-o

light l

glottal T

alveolar t

mono-e

mono-o

retroflex T

0

Anwar with family

Southall

FIGURE 5.2

British-born Anwar: distribution of Punjabi and Anglo variants across four settings

early childhood, the patterns are broadly similar. So, for example, here are the bar-charts for Anwar, a British-born 40 year old who ran a successful local business and travelled a lot between London and Pakistan. Mandeep is obviously different from Anwar in his non-use of glottal T, and I will return to this later. But before that, the comparison suggests that: (a) nowadays, retroflexion, postvocalic clear Ls and monophthonged ‘FACE’ and ‘GOAT’ vowels are not foreign any longer in British-born London speech, so Mandeep would not have to completely erase them in order to sound local; and (b) the directionality of Mandeep’s stylistic adjustment with these four variants was broadly in line with the directions of shift produced by people who have been speaking English all their lives, so on the Anglo versus Indian axis of social differentiation, Mandeep’s socio-stylistic sensibility seemed to be roughly in tune with natal residents’. In interview, Mandeep said that if you come from Punjab to Southall, “you won’t feel like you are living abroad,” and there is support for this in these quantitative analyses of style. In addition to the fact that Punjabi itself has a lot of local currency in Southall, the Britain-India link is inscribed in the patternings of local English. Of course, quantitative measures such as this have clear limitations: there is no control for the talk’s discursive development – for changes of footing, topic, genre, etc. – and if you just look at only four out of potentially umpteen linguistic variables, you cannot tell whether overall, Mandeep’s speech sounded more Anglo or more Indian at different times with different people. So let’s now turn to some discourse.

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Styling in Narrative Discourse Mandeep told a lot of stories in his interviews with Lavanya Sankaran, and it was in the performance of character speech in stories that his accent became most Anglo. Here is an example from an account of the difficulties he had finding a job when he first arrived in England, where he found that all the employers were asking for experience, even in basic jobs: Extract 1: ‘okay wait wait’ Mandeep in interview with Lavanya Sankaran (female; aged 25–30). (Key: Anglo variants; Punjabi variants) 1

-then I was sa y in g [Sen a wz seng]

2

''t'no:

3个 so

h

[neu ai

[SD]

I

have any- \Mat sort of ex 丨ptfrience"

hAv

8ni

dset so tD v

8 k s p i : Jiens]

. hh

i#4ey were [de

+

don

dD

va

g iv in g giviQ

me

mi

''o:\kay: 8Ukhei]

5

(0.3)

6

and Wen "after- (0.5) xtwo- (0.3) xtwo months [8n d8n aftn8 tshu thu mAns]

wait

iwait"

w e lt h

w e lt h]

In line 5, Mandeep marks the difference between the narrating and the reported speech with shifts in tempo, becoming much slower in reported speech, and he renders the voice of the employers in exclusively British variants. So Mandeep could do some pure Anglo, and indeed the fact that he mixed Anglo and Punjabi features elsewhere in the story – for example, in line 2’s ““个 'no: I don have any- \Mat sort of eX|p«rience ” – doesn’t itself necessarily mark Mandeep as an L2 speaker. Mixing occurred even in the relatively formal English of Punjabis born and raised in the UK, and we can see this, for example, in Anwar’s business talk with an RP-speaking barrister (cf. Rampton 2011c): the reason ( (n a m e ) )

why I caCCed you is e : :h 工 jus wanted to let you k n o w th a 於 he came.. and e ::h we decided not l\thing

个 1shouting

a x/yOK and Wen

八

swearing \even

Mandeep describes the character as ignorant, drunk, uncouth, informed only by the (very lowbrow) popular press – in effect, as a stereotypical lower-class white racist – and there are two things worth noting. First, Mandeep locates the white British lower class in a global economy, and he portrays this group as the ignorant victim of restricted mobility and very limiting national horizons. Second, the segmental phonology used to enact the man’s speech in line 5 sounds more Anglo than Indian – (“- you Nbloody 'Asians 'why you 'come to 'my Country..” But does it sound more vernacular? Here it is again in a more detailed transcript: Extract 3: ((pitch step-up with shift to tense muscular phonation)): 个 you 'bloody 'Asians 'why y o u 1 come to [ju b u+ A d i : eijnz wai ju khAm tu

'my mai

Country kn八ntji:]

Segmentally, the onsets of the diphthongs in ‘Asian’ and ‘why’ sounded RP, as they lacked the backed vowel quality of traditional working-class London,6 and in fact there was also a detectably Punjabi influence in country’s unaspirated word-initial consonant. Even so, there are lots of semiotic cues showing that Mandeep was aiming for more than just ordinary British: • •

•

Segmentally, the onset of the diphthong in ‘my’ was relatively backed, as in popular London speech.7 “You bloody Asians” is also very marked supra-segmentally with abruptly raised pitch and tenser muscular non-modal phonation. This gives the impression of shouting without actually doing so, and when this is linked to swearing, it is often typed as vulgar. In addition, of course, Mandeep used an explicit metalanguage of social types to characterise the speech/speaker both before and after (‘drunk’, ‘white’, ‘reading Sun’).

So, even though the segmental phonetics were not especially vernacular, this was not rhetorically incapacitating. Yes, if you extracted this impersonation of a ‘white London lout’ from its narrative context, it probably wouldn’t carry very far, and the groups and networks where it would be rated or even recognised

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for what is intended might be limited. But within the specific narrative world and narrating event in which it was produced, the social typification worked reasonably well, and the voice can be heard as Anglo vernacular English.8 So, even though Mandeep was not terribly good at doing traditional London vernacular vowels and consonants, he knew that they sounded different and he didn’t mind trying to impersonate it. In fact, there is other evidence that he was aware of vernacular London features without accurately reproducing them, and here we can also see that his apprehension of the vernacular’s connotational potential extended beyond social group stereotypes to typifications of stance. In his interview comments on accent, Mandeep linked ‘swearing a lot’ to saying ‘yo mate yo mate’, and in fact he pronounced ‘mate’ as “yo [me] yo [me].” In contemporary vernacular London, the post-vocalic T in ‘mate’ is a glottal, not an alveolar stop, and it looks as though Mandeep got halfway – he removed the alveolar, but didn’t replace it with the glottal, doing a zero realisation instead. In fact, the quantitative style-shifting analysis showed that he hardly ever produced glottal Ts – three out of 88 possible realisations (Tables 5.2–5.4), and Sharma and Sankaran’s survey (2011) showed that he was very similar in this to a great many other informants born in India.9 But this did not stop Mandeep using zero T strategically in constructed dialogue. In the excerpt below, Mandeep is continuing the argument that accusations of racism are often exaggerated. He has just been talking about the notorious Shilpa Shetty episode in Celebrity Big Brother, and he has taken the line that when the other contestants criticised Shilpa for touching some food, they were not being racist – the complaint was “just normal talk.” He now follows this up with a story about being ticked off by his mum when he was small, the overall point being that there is very little to distinguish these two episodes: Extract 4: Spoiled carrots (cf. Extract 5; MI.50.01, 0.59.9) Mandeep in interview with Lavanya Sankaran. (Key: Anglo variants; Punjabi variants) 33

one \day

(. )

• hh 1 was V er y 'little [a] [w] [t]

( .)

34

and er my mum

bought some \carrots [t] [t]

35

an I put 'all tde [ai] [t] [o+ ds]

36

er- as

37

so I 1s p o ile d xev e r y W in g [d] [th]

38

so 1she

丨

caffits i n : : [r] [t]

(•)

'outside in- on tde xsand [t]

1s l a :p p e d xme

( .)

(.)

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Ben Rampton

39 L : ((very quiet laugh:) ) hehe 4 0 M : ({half-laughing in 41 42 今 43

Mat 'xll [d2eth ai

'bought' and ythatr :))

'bough '^a fo 'us b3ho: 0 dx0 $o:w as]

1.04

(0.2) a :nd 'you [send jiu

pu tAe xeveryMing a ,way/r (.)

pu0^ds?

44

hh ~so

45

th- th- t h - 个

evjithig

?swei]

[9 U ] s not xracism ( .)

[d260S]

[0]

46

~tAa s xsimple 'talk as |w e ^ [0]

47

~and that was the- (0.2)

48

and Nother thing is ((Mandeep continues about another aspect))

The distribution of alveolar and zero Ts is shown in Table 5.5. In the part leading up to the reprimand, there are seven potentially variable T sounds, and all of them are alveolar.10 But in the direct reported reprimand in lines 41–43, all three Ts are zero realisations (‘bough[ø]’, ‘tha[ø]’, ‘pu[ø]’), and after that, the zero realisations are carried into the evaluation in lines 45–46 (‘tha[ø]’, ‘no[ø]’, ‘tha[ø]’). Now in the quoted utterance in lines 41 and 43, Mandeep’s approximations of vernacular London contribute to a character portrait that is very different from the white working-class figure in the Sun reader episode. Here, the speaker is Mandeep’s mum; she is saying the kind of thing that Mandeep approves of (‘simple talk’ that only the misguided would read as racism); and indeed in its incorporation of zero Ts in the evaluation, there is a ‘fusion’ of the narrating and the quoted voices.11 So if it is not just unruly working-class types that Mandeep is trying to index with the concentration of zero-Ts in lines 41–43, what is it? If we turn TABLE 5.5 Realisation of the post-vocalic Ts in Mandeep’s ‘spoiled carrots’ story

Environments

V_#C, V_#V, V_C

The setting, events, and actions leading up to the reprimand (lines 33–38)

The reprimand in direct reported speech (lines 41–43)

The evaluation (lines 44–46)

[t]

[ʔ]

[{]

[t]

[ʔ]

[{]

[t]

[ʔ]

[{]

7/7

0

0

0

0

3/3

0

0

3/3

Drilling Down to the Grain 103

back to Anwar and look back at the quantitative data on Anwar’s style-shifting, T-glottaling increased with family and friends (Figure 5.2), and of course this pattern is repeated not just with other locally born individuals in our survey, but in British society much more generally. Vernacular forms often index not only types of person, but also types of stance and relationship, and in the quoted speech in the carrots story, the glottal-T approximations seem designed to evoke the intimacy or informality of a mother-son relationship,12,13 a relationship that Mandeep seemed quite happy to inhabit. So yes, Mandeep’s reproduction of the linguistic specifics of emblematic vernacular English forms is only partial, but his grasp of the social meaning is not restricted to the stereotypes of people and groups that you might expect with speech styles seen from afar. Which is not to say that the partiality of this approximation was itself cost-free, or that the impersonation was as effective as it had been with the white lout in the earlier extract. Compared with the extract earlier, there is very little supplementary characterisation of Mandeep’s mum in the tale of spoiled carrots, and the sociolinguistic iconography associated with ‘mums’ is generally much more indeterminate. Admittedly, low levels of T-glottaling are common in the English of local people born in India, so local people born in India might well constitute a social network where the social indexicality of the zero-Ts in the ‘carrots’ narrative could be easily appreciated.14 But beyond those networks – and maybe even within – Mandeep’s stylised performance of his mum sounds odd rather than indexically resonant, and it certainly took our research team quite a lot of time and analysis to generate a plausible interpretation of the social typification being attempted. Let’s now move to a more general discussion.

Discussion So how exactly does this case study connect with superdiversity, and what does it tell us about larger issues? I shall take this in three stages, focusing first on London as a sociolinguistic space, second on Mandeep’s position there as an L2 speaker, and third on the key methodological moves underpinning my analysis. At a number of points in the account, I have referred to traditional imageries being scrambled: you don’t feel like you’re living abroad if you come to London from the Punjab; retroflexion and other traditionally Indian immigrant features now form part of the local London vernacular; children of the Indian subcontinent are fully incorporated into pub culture; Punjabis play cricket for England. But this mixture does not end up in kaleidoscopic chaos – the analysis has not descended into what Wimmer and Glick-Schiller call ‘fluidism’, in which “structures are replaced with fluidity [and researchers spend their time] breathlessly hunting after signifiers shooting around the globe, driven by new techniques of communication and globalised markets” (2002: 326). Our analyses of style have shown Mandeep position himself within a quite well-defined sociolinguistic space – a space formed at the historical intersection of socio-economic stratification

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within the UK, on the one hand, and migration and movement between Britain and the India subcontinent, on the other. In this space, class and ethnic processes have drawn different sets of linguistic forms, practices, and evaluations into the environment, and over time these sociolinguistic forms and practices have been configured in a series of conventionalised contrasts – Punjabi versus English, vernacular versus standard English, high versus low.15 As we have seen, Mandeep made energetic use of these coordinates, and elsewhere I have suggested that this kind of sociolinguistic cartography provides a way of simplifying superdiversity in communication, making ethno-linguistic plurality more intelligible (see Blommaert & Rampton, this volume). What about Mandeep’s position as a second-language speaker? When compared with people who had grown up in the neighbourhood such as Anwar, Mandeep’s English appeared more limited in a number of ways: in the range of English phonological variants that he commanded; in the number of identifiably distinct English styles that he performed;16 in the duration of the speech in which he sustained artful stylisations; and in the discursive actions achieved with switches of style.17 Nevertheless, in spite of these relative limitations, it would be wrong to locate Mandeep as an L2 speaker outside the London sociolinguistic economy, aspirationally looking in. Mandeep insisted that in his maths class, “I am perfectly fine,” and in the interview stories, he presented himself as a now-established citizen of multi-ethnic London, among other things, siding with the Anglos criticising Shilpa Shetty and dismissing white racism as just parochial lower-class ignorance. Beyond this explicit self-placement, there were a number of similarities between Mandeep’s stylistic practices and Anwar’s, which invited us to treat both of them together as active participants in broadly the same sociolinguistic space. Anwar was more fully engaged with the stylistically differentiated positions in the local sociolinguistic economy, but Mandeep also actively oriented to these schemata. He referred to high/low and Anglo/Indian contrasts explicitly, and he performed them in narrative stylisations. In the quantitative analysis, several of the contextsensitive variables in Mandeep’s speech were similar to others’, and the directionalities of shift were also broadly similar (more Punjabi variants with speakers of English brought up in South Asia, and more Anglo ones with people brought up in England).18 His reproduction of the high/low, standard/vernacular binary traditional in Anglo English had its limitations, but he could exploit the contrast between Punjabi- and Anglo-accented English, and far from being simply confined to people born abroad, this Punjabi-Anglo contrast was itself widespread and well established as a local practice. Indeed, Sharma and Sankaran (2011) have shown that over time, the presence of people such as Mandeep have made a major contribution to the development of this. So even though Mandeep only started to speak the language as an adult, he displayed a practical sensitivity to key dimensions of local English sociolinguistic structure, and it is obvious that a label such as “immigrant learner of English” does not do justice to his position in the local London speech economy.

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Finally, what of the analytic moves that have led to this conclusion? First and most obviously, we consciously avoided the a priori separation of L1 and L2 English speakers in our variationist survey, and discovered that L1 speakers do not talk quite as we might have expected. So plainly, if anyone wants to talk about a ‘target language’, it is essential to be rather careful, both in a specification of the forms that compose the ‘target’, and in an assessment of the linguistic distance that newcomers would need to travel to reach it. But then after that, for the second-language speech itself, it has been vital to slow right down, looking at stylistic moves individually, breaking them down into the linguistic forms, discursive acts and socio-ideological typifications that compose them, considering each of these in turn, and then looking at the effects of their combination. As a result, we have developed a rather nuanced picture of Mandeep’s L2 English, showing how it forms part of larger sociolinguistic structures and processes, without, I hope, either romanticising or remedialising him by erasing or exaggerating the differences and limitations. So, with Extract 4, we have seen that a grasp of the indexical relationship between stance and vernacular style need not be matched by accurate reproduction of the canonical structural forms, and this could make the interpretation quite tricky. At the same time, Extract 2 showed that an imperfect grasp of vernacular Anglo forms was not automatically an expressive handicap in the impersonation of a lower-class white man. Reviewing the argument as a whole, there have been some rather striking differences in the scale of the processes addressed. On the one hand, we have considered globalisation and diaspora, migration and social class, London as a communicative space and the incorporation of newcomers – all topics that are relevant to sociologists and anthropologists. At the same time, speech practices have been subjected not just to micro, but to ‘nano’ analysis, identifying indexical values separated from their conventional linguistic forms and recruiting, inter alia, para-linguistic shifts and non-vernacular, hybrid forms such as zero-T into the account. These are processes that other social scientists certainly are not likely to engage with, but it is very important for linguists to try to reach this level of detail, and to avoid quick-fire (romantic or remedial) interpretations of the interactional effects and ideological meanings produced by a particular form. Superdiversity, in other words, is not just a problem for sociologistics and anthropologists; it points to a scrambling of traditional patterns that reaches right down into the relationships between sign forms, pragmatic functions, and indexical significance. This scrambling probably is not much of a problem for ordinary communication, which, after all, draws on a host of different semiotic resources and has all sorts of redundancies built in, so that incongruities on one dimension are minimised by intelligibility on others. But it is a challenge for linguistics, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

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When it comes to humanising migrants, seeing them in their embedded complexity as mothers, brothers, uncles, friends, and workmates who also make agentive contributions to local sociolinguistic processes, linguistics isn’t always especially effective. Yes, it is quite easy to focus on the structural details of secondlanguage speech, or alternatively to study the impact of newcomers as ideological emblems, uniting long-term residents in opposition. But the old categories and distinctions cannot account for the generative splits and alignments emerging in contemporary urban environments, and we need to be very careful about the a priori distinctions we build into our research. But there is a route past these premature reifications, celebrations, and exclusions in the total linguistic fact, or at least that is what I have tried to argue in this analysis.

Notes 1. Much fuller and more fully referenced treatments of this dataset can be found in Rampton (2011b, 2013). 2. “Superdiversity: a term intended to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything the country has previously experienced . . . a dynamic interplay of variables including country of origin, . . . migration channel, . . . legal status, . . . migrants’ human capital (particularly educational background), access to employment, . . . locality . . . and responses by local authorities, services providers and local residents” (Vertovec 2007: 2–3). 3. Hanks notes the risks: “It is tempting, depending upon one’s own commitments, to try to treat activities as if they were formal systems, or language structure as if it were no more than the temporary product of activity, or ideology as merely the projection of verbal categories or the misconstrual of action. But all such attempts distort their object by denying its basic distinctiveness. The challenge . . . is not reduction of this to a by-product of that but integration of distinct phenomena into a more holistic framework” (1996: 231–232). 4. Blommaert, Collins, and Slembrouck note, “[p]rocesses such as diaspora [that] develop over long spans of time . . . result in lasting . . . social, . . . sociolinguistic and discursive reconfigurations that have effects across a wide range of situations” (2005: 201). 5. According to Kramsch, “imagined identities, projected selves, idealisations or stereotypes of the other . . . seem to be central to the language-learning experience [even though . . .] they are difficult to grasp within the current paradigms of SLA research” (2009: 5). 6. [e] not [VI], and [aI], not [QI]. 7. [I] not [aI]. 8. Admittedly, immediate audience response would be the best indication of the success of Mandeep’s performances. Audible laughter followed Mandeep’s quoted speech performances elsewhere, and there were other signs of the story recipient’s involvement: laughter elsewhere, and supportive intervention at moment of disfluency. So overall, it sounded as though the interview was enjoyable for both participants, but in the absence of a video-record, it is impossible to track the impact of all Mandeep’s narrative performances in any detail, and we have to rely on the more distantiated analytic assessment offered above. 9. Across the wider population we sampled, glottal Ts were very rare among people born in India, more common among Punjabi-descended people born in the UK in the 1960s, and very often used by those UK-born in the 1980s (Sharma & Sankaran 2011). The analysis of glottal-T involved 18 informants born in India (9F, 9M), 10

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born in the UK in the 1960s (6F, 4M), and 14 born in the UK in the 1980s (6F, 8M). The results are shown in Figure 5.3. lines 33–38: ‘li[t]le’, ‘bough[t]’, ‘carro[t]s’, ‘pu[t]’, ‘carro[t]s’, ‘ou[t]side’ ‘tha[t]’ Bakhtin (1984: 199). As we know from other data that his mum has always lived in India and only talks to Mandeep in Punjabi, we can be confident that it isn’t an accurate copy of her speech. In another rendering of a scolding from his mum later in the interview, Mandeep brought off a glottal T: “If I have to shou[t] at my wife so I will be getting a shou[t] from my mum ‘how dare you to say tha[ʔ]’ yea so it is always good” ((laughter from interviewer)) (MI627 39.58). Elicitations tests could be developed to investigate this (cf. Gumperz 1982: 31). Rampton (2011a). Anwar’s English-style repertoire was much more extensive, and included Cockney, standard Indian English, Indian English foreigner talk, and London multi-ethnic vernacular (which included elements of Jamaican; Rampton 2011c). Anwar’s shifts of style occurred with a far wider range of footing changes, and contributed to the management of non-stylised, non-artful, routine interaction as this moved between business and personal matters, between greeting and reason-for-call in telephone conversations, and so forth (Gumperz 1982, especially pp. 75–84; Rampton 2011b, 2011c). In contrast, Mandeep’s switches were overwhelmingly limited to narrative character speech. In at least one interpretation of quantitative style-shifting (Bourdieu 1991: Part 1; Rampton 2006: 229), the Punjabi–English binary had now worked its way into Mandeep’s ‘habitus’, taking ‘habitus’ as the preconscious disposition to hear and speak in specific ways inculcated into the individual through long-term experience of the purchase that their language resources provide in different kinds of setting. To borrow metaphors of depth, we can say that central features of local English sociolinguistic structure were now part of Mandeep’s explicit awareness and his practical understanding.

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References Bakhtin, M. 1984. Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Blommaert, J., Collins, J., & Slembrouck, S. 2005. Spaces of multilingualism. Language and Communication, 25: 197–216. Blommaert, J., & Rampton, B. 2011. Language and superdiversity. Diversities, 13(2): 1–21. Also Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, #70. London: KCL Centre for Language Discourse & Communication. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Oxford: Polity Press. Gumperz, J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanks, W. 1996. Language and Communicative Practices. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Kramsch, C. 2009. The Multilingual Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rampton, B. 2006. Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, B. 2011a. Style contrasts, migration and social class. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(5): 1236–1250. Rampton, B. 2011b. Style in a second language. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, #65. Available at: www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc (accessed 7 June 2014). Rampton, B. 2011c. From ‘multi-ethnic adolescent heteroglossia’ to ‘contemporary urban vernaculars’. Language & Communication, 31: 276–294. Rampton, B. 2013. Styling in a language learned later in life. Modern Language Journal, 97(2): 360–381. Sharma, D., & Sankaran, L. 2011. Cognitive and social forces in dialect shift: Gradual change in London Asian speech. Language Variation and Change, 23(3): 399–428. Silverstein, M. 1985. Language and the culture of gender. In E. Mertz & R. Parmentier (eds), Semiotic Mediation. New York: Academic Press, pp. 219–259. Vertovec, S. 2007. New Complexities of Cohesion in Britain: Superdiversity, Transnationalism and Civil-Integration. London: HMSO. Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. 2002. Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nationstate building, migration and the social sciences. Global Networks, 2(4): 301–334.

Transcription Conventions Segmental phonology [] text text

IPA phonetic transcription English pronounced with Anglo variants English pronounced with Punjabi variants

Intonation _ 7 ` '

low fall low rise high fall high rise

Drilling Down to the Grain 109

`' '`   

fall rise rise fall high stress high unaccented prenuclear syllable pitch step-up pitch step-down

Conversational features (.) (1.5) [ [ CAPITALS .hh >text< o texto ( ) (text) ((text:)) “text” 

micro-pause approximate length of pause in seconds overlapping turns loud in-breath more rapid speech quietly spoken speech inaudible speech hard to discern, analyst’s guess ‘stage directions’ direct reported speech words and utterances of particular interest to the analysis

6 BUFFALAXING THE OTHER Superdiversity in Action on YouTube Sirpa Leppänen and Ari Elo

In this chapter, we investigate how the ‘Oriental other’ is represented in translocal disparagement culture on YouTube. More specifically, we look at two typical buffalaxed videos as examples of social media practices in the era of superdiversity, and show how, through subtitling and editorial commentary, they appropriate the figure of the other to Western audiences, producing images that are ambiguous and multilayered. On the basis of our analysis, we will argue that while the videos repeat and remodify aspects of the stereotypical and discriminatory Western heteronormative metanarratives of the Orient, they also depict the other in ways in which his/her otherness is no longer the simple antithesis of ‘us’ – the Western subject – but, occasionally, aligned with or even very much like us. In these ways, this chapter shows how buffalaxing highlights typical ways in which interest-based, informal, and parodic social media culture are engaging with superdiversity, and in these active resemiotisation of transculturally available media content is in a key role.

Buffalaxing as Resemiotisation of Otherness Informal and interest-based social media provide Internet users with a range of affordances for discourse practice, social (inter)action, and cultural production. Through these affordances, topics that interest the participants – political issues, cult phenomena, and mass-mediated popular cultural products, for example – are appropriated in various ways. If enough people with shared interests and agendas chip in, their contributions may grow into veritable memes that multiply, mutate, and spread on social media in a pandemic way. One infectious meme like this is the genre of buffalaxed videos.1

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Typically, buffalaxed videos are parody versions of snippets of motion pictures, TV broadcasts, or musical performances that are originally in a language incomprehensible to most Westerners and that feature such ‘others’ as Bollywood characters or Oriental pop singers. When a video is buffalaxed, it is given subtitles for what the producer thinks the oral material in the video sounds like in his/her own language. More specifically, in order to create new content, he/she uses the so-called mondegreen or soramimi2 technique – a deliberate mishearing of something said or sung – in producing new subtitles that are as closely homophonic as possible with words said or sung in the original footage. Thus, a new video is created, with new meanings generated not only via the subtitles, but also through their co-occurrence and juxtaposition with the original image and audio. What buffalaxing entails – to use a notion originally suggested by Rick Iedema (2001, 2003) – is a specific type of resemiotisation. Resemiotisation can be defined as translations of meaning that occur between different semiotic systems and their materialities (Iedema 2001: 24) in which meaning-making shifts from context to context, from practice to practice, or from one stage of a practice to the next, from some groups of people to others (cf. Iedema 2003: 41; Scollon & Scollon 2004; Scollon 2008; Leppänen et al. 2014). Resemiotisation is an evolving, dialogic process, and as such it calls for “sociohistorical exploration and understanding of the complex processes which constitute and surround” meaning-makings (Iedema 2003: 48). In more concrete terms, in buffalaxing resemiotisation shows in the way in which the original source video and its characters are modified and complemented with new material so as to produce a new context of interpretation and meaning-making for new communicative purposes and audiences. Much of the new meaning and effects of buffalaxing derive, in fact, from the juxtaposition and tension between the old material – features and patterns that are carried over (Iedema 2003: 43–44) in a homological way (Bourdieu 1984, 1990) from earlier contexts, experiences, or manifestations – and the new material, here, subtitling. Buffalaxing is typically something that Western media audiences engage in: more often than not, the videos and figures being buffalaxed by them are representatives of the Orient. While there are complex historical and political reasons for this, in many cases the buffalaxed videos strive to construct the Orient and the Oriental subject as something the West and the Western subject is not, as their counter image, by modulating a particular system of knowledge about the Orient accepted in and proliferating into the general culture (see Said 1978/2003: 4–7). Within the scope of this kind of Orientalising discourse, the self is seen as superior in comparison. However, as our analysis will show, the process is more complex than a simple dichotomy of good and bad imagination (Baumann 2004): buffalaxed videos also assign some aspects of otherness onto Oriental subjects that could be seen as positive in nature, as well as project otherness onto the Western subject, too, and thereby point to some similarity between the Occident and Orient. In this sense, the buffalaxed videos could be argued to other

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discourses of otherness besides the Orientalising one, according to which alterity is not the antithesis of the self, but something associated with particular, intersecting aspects of identity (Baumann & Gingrich 2004; Anthias 2011).

Buffalaxing and Superdiversity Buffalaxed videos highlight ways in which social media practices are increasingly characterised by features and processes of superdiversity. This shows in at least three interrelated ways. First, social media constitute forums for activities and interactions by groups who can themselves be superdiverse, in other words, diverse across a wide range of variables (Vertovec 2007). In this sense, social media spaces can resemble superdiverse urban social spaces, which Susanne Wessendorf (2013), for example, has described as locations in which diversity has become ‘commonplace’. These social spaces are characterised not only by a multiplicity of different populations, ethnic and migrant identities, but also by differentiations in terms of migration histories, religions, educational backgrounds, legal statuses, length of residence, and economic backgrounds. In such spaces, complex diversity and patterns of social relations and interactions across categorical and traditional boundaries are experienced and perceived as a normal part of social life. In many respects, the relations and interactions on social media by individuals with varied and complex identities congregating around shared interests, regardless of where they come from or what their background is, are a good example of this kind of superdiversity. In such social media practices, communication and interaction often are linguistically and discursively heterogeneous, such heterogeneity providing participants with concrete means for identifications that are not organised on the basis of local, ethnic, national, or regional affiliations and allegiances only, but that can be increasingly translocal (Leppänen 2009, 2012). Second, social media engage with superdiversity by offering users a discursive space and a set of semiotic resources with which they can strive to make sense of and evaluate their experiences relating to superdiversity. Accounts, analyses, discussion, debates, critique, and disparagement of superdiversity encountered in physical or mediated environments abound on social media, effectively foregrounding how superdiversity is emerging as a particular nexus for participation and material for further meaning-making spreading via the rhizomes provided by the Internet. Third, translocal, informal and interest-based social media engage with superdiversity, because on them, language use, discourse practice, communication, dissemination of information, and mediation of cultural practices and products increasingly feature mobility, plurality, heterogeneity, and polycentricity of semiotic resources and normativities (Varis & Wang this volume; Leppänen et al. 2014). Social media practices are often culturally and politically transgressive and playful in nature, involving complex multimodal processes of crafting and

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recontextualisation (see e.g. Leppänen et al. 2014). The ways in which the two videos discussed in this chapter simultaneously incorporate different stances towards the Oriental other can be seen as a manifestation of this kind of cultural and discursive superdiversity. In our discussion, all three aspects of superdiversity will be highlighted. We will show how buffalaxed videos mobilise a complex set of semiotic resources – particularly resemiotisation – to construct an image of the Oriental other for social media audiences for whom superdiversity is increasingly a commonplace phenomenon, at least in its mediated form via Oriental films, music videos, and popular culture, for example. More specifically, with the help of two buffalaxed videos and audience comments they have inspired, we wish to examine how participants in the translocal culture centering on buffalaxing make sense of and represent the superdiverse Oriental other. In our analysis, we will show how subtitling and its juxtaposition with the original footage are employed by buffalax producers to create new semiotic and interpretative potential. We will show how the other – whose language is incomprehensible to Westerners but who has become an increasingly recognisable and proximal figure to them not only in everyday life, but also through popular culture and the media – is made to speak to audiences in ways that may index a range of different stances. Just as the Orient has never been a fixed idea, but a dynamic discursive project (see Said 1978/2003), the Oriental subject in buffalaxed videos – we wish to argue – is not only an embodiment of traditional Western racist dichotomies of ‘us’ and ‘them’, but something much more challenging and nuanced.

YouTube: Convergent and Divergent Media Prosumption The reason why YouTube has become such a popular platform for the production and consumption of media content has a great deal to do with its capacity to offer a multidimensional space for mediated cultural activities and products. This, on the one hand, allows interconnections and intertwining of a range of media platforms and products, and, on the other hand, offers relatively free and nonmoderated opportunities for staking a niche medium for specific groups and interests. In other words, YouTube is characterised by a mixture of convergence and divergence. Since its launch in 2005, YouTube has given rise to hypes on how it can open up new opportunities for communication, empowerment, and agency. While the claim for the hypes can be justifiable, it is also important to remember that neither convergence nor divergence were born with YouTube. As early as some 30 years ago, Ithiel de Sola Pool (1983: 58) argued that thanks to “the hability of digital electronics,” the historically separated modes of communication (e.g. conversation, theatre, news, and text) were becoming one grand system. Likewise, media divergence was visible as early as in the 1970s and 1980s with

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the increase and diversification of media services and technologies – newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, programs, networks, information services, video games, and video tapes. Well before the 1990s, mass media had already evolved into a segmented and diverse “blip culture” consisting of short, modular blips of information – adverts, theories, and shreds of news, for example (Toffler 1981: 182). In this ongoing process of massification and de-massification, the Internet and YouTube represent, nevertheless, the next step. They have enabled and brought about a veritable explosion of media products and outlets. As one of the most popular online video broadcasting platforms and social media, YouTube is a case in point: it is not only a medium in which people watch videos, listen to music, broadcast their own videos, and archive their audiovisual material (see e.g. Burgess & Green 2009; Snickars & Vonderau 2009), but it also provides a forum for DIY cultures to flourish, for commercial media conglomerates to promote their products, and for niches and memes to breed, multiply, and diversify. In it, individuals and groups representing different traditions and backgrounds can find their own communicative and sociocultural niches. From the perspective of convergence culture (Jenkins 2008: 274), YouTube is a forum in which different media, producers, amateurs, professionals, consumers, uses, and ideologies come together and in which the boundaries and borderlines between them are blurred. As there is no clear distinction between production and consumption, consumers can be active in the creation and circulation of new content (Jenkins 2008: 3; see also Burgess & Green 2009: 10). Hence, many YouTube users are, in fact, ‘prosumers’ (see Toffler 1981) as we have moved from traditional one-directional ‘read-only’ media consumption towards a ‘readwrite’ culture (Hartley 2008, as cited in Burgess & Green 2009: 48). Prosumption and convergence are also characteristic of buffalaxed videos: while they often originate in specific media contexts, they are transferred to and embedded within other mediated spaces. First, the producers use their own computers, tablets, or phones to modify the original footage to create bricolage in ways not unlike professional film editing. Second, the edited product is published on YouTube or other online video broadcasting platform, where it can be viewed, discussed, and evaluated in ways that may resemble watching and discussing videos with your friends. However, as was suggested above, divergence is also apparent in how YouTube content is remediated (Bolter & Grusin 2002; Grusin 2009) in other media forms and outlets. The same content can be dealt with in a range of genres: in vlogs (video blogs), instructional videos, presentations, shreds, uploaded and digitised snippets from TV and film, and spoof videos, just to mention a few. The divergence of buffalaxed videos is particularly visible in how they represent the favoured genre for a segment of the YouTube audience. This is also one of the reasons why buffalax producers are willing to be involved in this type of voluntary late modern cottage industry and its rather laborious and time-consuming

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processes of remediation and editing: they have an enthusiastic audience who value their products and the opportunities they create for commentary, discussion, and interaction.

YouTube Humour and Liquid Racism The prevalent YouTube culture tends to be playful and affective entertainment (Burgess & Green 2009: 103). While humorous videos can sometimes be subversive in nature (Häkkinen & Leppänen 2014), their humour generally is quite conservative and geared towards supporting and preserving the dominant social order, traditional authority, and gender and racial hierarchies (Jenkins 2008: 292–293). The humour in buffalaxed videos fits in this picture partly: it often focuses on social and cultural groups and cultures that are seen as being in some way distinct from the hegemonic groups and cultures of the buffalax producers. In representing these groups, buffalaxed videos can recycle conventions of nationalistic or ethnic humour that, to use Christie Davies’s (1996: 4) words, are invariably aimed at the “pinning of some undesirable quality on a particular ethnic group in a comic way or to a ludicrous extent.” While doing so, Davies (1996: 312) argues, ethnic humour contributes “to a people’s sense of their own identity and character,” thereby reinforcing the sense of “vicarious superiority” of the person voicing the humour. As a cultural practice, the representation of the other can have material, social, cultural, and personal consequences for those who end up as in- and out-groups (see e.g. Raisborough & Adams 2008: 3). And, as a consequence, this kind of disparaging humour – which “denigrates, belittles, or maligns a social group” (Ford & Ferguson 2004: 79) – can create and enforce hierarchies of value. In addition, voice – possibilities and resources for communicative and social agency – can be unevenly distributed among participants (Burgess & Green 2009: 81–82; Jenkins 2009). While in technologically advanced and affluent countries even young children can be quite savvy in mediated contexts such as YouTube, in other contexts, due to a lack of technological resources or know-how, not everyone has the opportunity to fully take part in buffalaxed activities. In more concrete terms, this may have the result that those buffalaxed as the Oriental others do not have the capacity to buffalax back (but cf. Häkkinen & Leppänen 2014). From this perspective, buffalaxed videos could well be seen as an example of disparagement humour, serving as a means of marking boundaries and building ideological hierarchies of value (Billig 2005; Raisborough & Adams 2008). In the same way as, for example, Beverley Skeggs (2005: 969) has argued in regard to the representation of class on TV, the representations of the other in buffalaxed videos are also typically made “through cultural values premised on morality” where the lack of hegemonic moral value is a crucial attribute often assigned to the other. Further, as YouTube and, in particular, the buffalaxed videos are taken by many as providing simple fun, it is possible to mount cultural representations

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in ways that are not politically correct – the pretext being that, after all, it is all just ‘harmless’ entertainment and nothing serious. A similar point has also been made by Angela McRobbie (2005: 104), who has argued that in the current “postpolitically correct times,” and in “the space of relaxation and enjoyment provided by the media and entertainment,” mocking discourse has become accepted by both media industries and their audiences. Disparaging humour is not, however, the only material that buffalaxed videos draw on and recycle: in fact, they seldom simply repeat the traditional dichotomous and stereotypical conceptions of what are taken to be the inclusive and exclusive groups and cultures. Rather, as is perhaps typical of what has been referred to in more general terms as “multicultural humour” (Rainbird 2004), they foreground multiple possibilities for interpretation, and include an implausible element without which they would otherwise be considered serious – or simply nonsensical. At its best, YouTube can even function as a site for cosmopolitan cultural citizenship (Burgess & Green 2009: 79). As a great deal of YouTube content originates in people’s everyday lives, it creates affordances for people to represent their identities and perspectives, engage with self-representations by others, and reflect on cultural difference (Burgess & Green 2009: 81). Within the buffalaxed activity culture, traces of such orientations are occasionally present as well. For example, the YouTube comments the videos have inspired sometimes reveal that the original footage is seen as an instance of globally shared culture, rather than being an example of narrowly defined nationalistic or ethnic culture. Because of this ambiguity, buffalaxed videos could also be considered as examples of what Simon Weaver (2010) has called “liquid racism.” Along the lines of the term “liquid modern” (Bauman 2005), the notion of liquid racism refers to situations and societies in which the conditions directing and shaping people’s actions change so rapidly that their ways of acting do not get to evolve into habits or routines before the conditions change again (Weaver 2010: 678). What is typical of liquid racism is that it uses recognisable embodied and culturally racist signs, but at the same time includes various layers of meaning, which make multiple interpretations possible (Weaver 2010: 679). For example, in liquid racism, the forms of racism purported may be so subtle and deeply nested in familiar and ‘natural(ised)’ metanarratives about diversity, that they can be interpreted as only humour – as not racist at all. And if according to these familiar metanarratives something is regarded as being merely humorous, the responsibility of interpretation shifts to the recipient, which easily leads to judging the recipients as having no sense of humour if they find the humour somehow problematic (Howit & Owusu-Bempah 2009: 48).

Buffalaxed Videos in Focus In this article, we will investigate two buffalaxed videos as typical representatives of their genre. The first one of them is Crazy Indian Video . . . Buffalaxed!

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(aka Benny Lava) – the American video after which the genre of ‘buffalaxed videos’ was quickly dubbed. In addition, to show how buffalaxed videos quickly emerged as a translocal activity culture, we will look at a Finnish video, Terojen koettelemus (The Trial of the Two Teros). While both videos have the same overall goals, and modify original footage in a similar way, they also highlight the variation and diversity of the buffalaxed genre and its reception. In this sense, they are examples of the perennial translocality of YouTube. They align with the globally convergent prosumption culture, but they also have their divergent proximal audiences and dimensions of meaning that are more apparent locally. For example, Benny Lava – partly because its subtitles are in English – is truly a global product. At the same time, as we will show below, it is clear that its primary intended audience is North American, whose social, cultural, and mediated reality has for a long time been saturated by superdiversity. The Finnish video, in turn, illustrates the ways in which the buffalaxed format has been domesticated for Finnish audiences with Finnish subtitles, and by aligning with the Finnish context in more subtle ways. Most significantly, the video shows how, in a time when Finland is slowly transforming from a relatively homogeneous society into a more diversified one, social media offer Finns new means with which they can make sense of, discuss, and tackle the diversity they increasingly encounter both in different societal contexts and via mediated channels. Our analysis of the videos draws on insights provided by sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse studies, film studies, and the study of fan culture (Leppänen 2009, 2012). We approach the videos as semiotic phenomena within the social, cultural, political, and historical context of which they are part (Blommaert 2010: 3). Through buffalaxing, transidiomatic mobilisation (Jacquemet 2005), and entextualisation (Bauman & Briggs 1990; Silverstein & Urban 1996: 74), the videos have been decontextualised from their original cultural and media context and recontextualised within another context. This process crucially involves resemiotisation (Iedema 2003: 40–41; Leppänen et al. 2014): with the addition of mondegreen subtitling and editorial commentary, the original material is reinterpreted and remediated via another media context to new audiences and given new meanings through the process. We will, in particular, pay attention to the features and meanings of the homophonic subtitles, and the ways in which they are combined and juxtaposed with the original visual and audio footage, and show how the new video text emerging from this discursive and linguistic mashupping is a heterogeneous construct (Leppänen 2012), an ambivalent parody, indexing through the mobilisation of varied semiotic resources different ideological stances towards the other. In addition, to gain insight into how the actual audiences position themselves in relation to the buffalaxed videos and the representations of the other, we will also investigate audience comments on both videos.

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The Superdiverse Oriental Other in Buffalaxed Videos Benny Lava: Setting the Scene for Buffalaxing the Other Benny Lava3 is a resemiotisation of a song and dance number from a South Indian Tamil motion picture, Pennin Manathai Thottu (Touching the heart of a girl, 2000). The film depicts a romance between a famous heart surgeon, Sunil (Prabhu Deva), and Sunitha (Jeya Seel), who seeks his help for a child with a heart problem. Eventually, it turns out that the two had been in love in college but that the man had deserted her at a crucial time. This misunderstanding is finally overcome and the two protagonists are united again. Indian film has fans outside India as well: audiences around the world have become familiar with and keen on the conventions of Indian romantic dramas. At the same time, their difference from Western, particularly mainstream Hollywood, romantic drama is something that puzzles many Western viewers. For example, their highly indirect and implicit means of hinting at love, erotic tension, and desire may appear as quite alienating to Western viewers who are used to more explicit presentations. The original scene from Pennin Manathai Thottu used in Benny Lava is a dancing scene choreographed for a large group of young women and men on a green mountain slope. The scene represents the flirtation and wooing going on between the two main characters. The lyrics of the Tamil song Kalluri Vaanil in the original film, their English translation, and the buffalaxed subtitles are attached at the end of the chapter.

FIGURE 6.1

(YouTube) Still from Benny Lava: the leading couple with their entourage

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The original lyrics of Kalluri Vaanil are almost entirely in Tamil, with the exception of occasional English expressions and words (e.g. “Urgent aa/operation,” “I love you endraayae,” “college,” “stethoscope”). Benny Lava picks up some of these contextual elements – for example, it also depicts the characters as students falling in love. The original lyrics also describe the characters’ romantic and erotic feelings, but do so with quite indirect means through poetic comparisons (“As Haiku, poetically she said I love you”) and metaphor (“dolphins,” “springs,” “floods”). A similarly covert description of the romantic relationship is conveyed through the dancing. There is very little physical contact between the romantic couple; instead, there are suggestive looks, symbolic gestures, and a great deal of whirling and circling around each other. In contrast to the original, the buffalaxed lyrics are very explicit in their sexual references (e.g. “I told a high school girl . . . I love you inside me”), allude to sodomy (“Who put the goat in there?”), and to the sexual fetish of peeing (“I’d love to see you pee on us tonight!”). These kinds of transformations of the metaphoric, indirect, and poetic expressions of feelings in the highly moderated Indian romantic films into almost pornographic declarations of sexual desire are, in fact, a recurrent discursive strategy in buffalaxed videos. As explicit breaches of the taboos underlying the cinematic narration of the original story, they also constitute one of the sources of humour in them. The subtitles are not, however, the only means for creating humour in buffalaxed videos. Another means is the way in which they are combined and contrasted with the image, music, singing, and dancing. This is also evinced by audience comments as many of them repeat some of the particularly transgressive lines with iconic indications that the commenter has found them extremely funny. Consider the following:4 HA HA! my fav line is “Now poop on them Oliver!!!!” LOL! Haha “I’ll lay a friend of yours.” :) In addition, Benny Lava contains many references to Western phenomena, names, places, and cultural products. For example, English names (“Ed,” “Benny,” “Oliver,” “Donna”), expressions (“punk,” “Fucking A”), and place names (“Seattle”) are all in the buffalaxed lyrics. Such insertions function to recontextualise the video and the story depicted in it as if it were simultaneously taking place in the Indian and American contexts. Along with the sexually explicit language, these recurrent multiple localisations of the video content contribute to the fact that the exotic and foreign story begins to appear as comically understandable to a Western audience. The localisation is also apparent in audience comments: on the one hand, they voice half-serious bafflement (“Who is Benny Lava? After listening to the song around 50 times, I’m still a bit unsure”), and, on the other, foreground how the juxtaposition of the Oriental and the Western is seen as a comic one. For example,

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viewers have made comments in which Prabhu Deva’s looks and dance style are compared to George Michael and Michael Jackson (e.g. “indian george michael lol,” “He thinks he is crossed between George Michael and Michael Jackson . . .”). Such comparisons are, however, not simply humorous as both of the Western singer-dancers have been depicted in the media as sexual others. The foreignness and strangeness of the male protagonist is thus accentuated by implying that his ethnic otherness is identified with a sexual other of the same ethnicity – a recurrent feature, as we will see in our other example too, of many buffalaxed videos. Another typical feature in buffalaxed videos is the incoherence and absurdity of the new stories emerging in them. As the driving force behind the new subtitles is to transcribe the otherwise incomprehensible original lyrics according to what they could sound like in the video producer’s own language, the outcome is necessarily fragmented. In addition to the large number of ‘transgressive’ references to drugs, sex, homosexuality, and bodily functions, as well as double entendres (e.g. “You need a bun to bite Benny Lava!”), another key characteristic in buffalaxed lyrics is indeed that they do not form a coherent text. Each new line rarely, if ever, refers to or links up with the previous ones. Consider, for instance, the following: Have you been high today? I see the nuns are gay! My brother yelled to me . . .

FIGURE 6.2

(YouTube) Still from Benny Lava: the male protagonist Sunil (Prabhu Deva)

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I love you inside Ed My looney bun is fine, Benny Lava! Minor bun engine made Benny Lava! This is also something the audience seems to enjoy. A very typical audience comment is, in fact, a reaffirmation that this kind of nonsensicality and incoherence is highly comic (e.g. “It veri funny . . . It really sound like english . . . Thnx to this, alot ppl will smile n laugh . . .”). On the whole, then, Benny Lava transforms the Oriental others into culturally incongruous figures. It resemiotises their image and identity and shows incomprehension of their values and communication code. The others in the video still remain characters from a recognisable Indian romantic film, but they also acquire new attributes that disrupt the uniformity of their moral and cultural identity. In a way, this kind of polyvalence and ambiguity can be argued to effectively foreground what may be more generally happening to the other in superdiverse social and cultural settings: the traditional classificatory ideological apparatus that segments the complexity of the social world into mutually exclusive compartments of the self and the other is beginning to look distinctly outdated. Instead, what we are beginning to see are new conceptualisations that are more liquid in nature. In their liquidity, however, they may very well be equally problematic in new ways, thus highlighting the kind of instability and unpredictability that is often associated with superdiversity (Blommaert & Rampton 2011; Parkin & Arnaut 2014). That said, it could nevertheless be argued that, while these ways of representing the other can clearly be considered as disparaging and denigrating, they are not necessarily entirely negative. As also witnessed by the massive viewer commentary, for the fans of Indian film the buffalax industry – in exactly the same way as fan fiction and fan art in general – is also an expression of their attachment and appreciation of the cultural object (see also Leppänen 2009, 2012). The entextualisation and resemiotisation practices so typical of fan cultures, in this respect, are a sign of active prosumption – of searching for new ways of re-crafting the cultural product that are not always derogatory and problematic, but which also accentuate and add to its appreciation. This is nicely encapsulated by one of the commentators of Benny Lava when he/she wrote that “The funny thing about these faux translations is I end up fucking loving the songs!”

Terojen koettelemus (The Trial of the Two Teros): Othering Them and Us The erosion of the relevance of the traditional classificatory system is also brought into sharp focus in our second example. This popular Finnish buffalaxed video Terojen koettelemus (The Trial of the Two Teros)5 depicts a scene from a popular 1975 Bollywood action adventure film Sholay (Fire) by Ramesh

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Sippy. Sholay tells the story of two convicts who are hired to capture a ruthless bandit. The film is generally considered one of the greatest classic films in the history of Bollywood, which is why it is well known outside India as well. In the buffalaxed scene, the two main characters are driving an old sidecar motorbike in the countryside, vigorously singing a song called Yeh Dosti (This Friendship), a literal celebration of their friendship. Their trip is interrupted by the sight of a pretty young woman on the side of the road, and they decide to toss a coin to decide which one gets to woo her. The original lyrics and their translation into English, as well as the buffalaxed Finnish lyrics and their translation into English, are attached again at the end of the chapter. In the buffalaxed version, the original story about the two men’s everlasting friendship is transformed into an exalted depiction of homoerotic love. Again, this is done by juxtaposing the subtitles with the joyful, happy, and uplifting song, and with the cinematic narrative that, even in the original, could be interpreted as suggesting a homoerotic subtext. The buffalax editor thus manages to suggest to viewers the interpretative possibility that this video really is a homoerotic love story. More specifically, the lyrics – amplified by energetic singing and expansive body language – drive home this interpretation by their sexually explicit lexical choices. For example, the two men are depicted as having ‘fucked’ and being ‘gay’, while the refrain states “Tero saatana, s’olet gay” (“Damn, Tero, you’re gay”).

FIGURE 6.3

(YouTube) Still from Terojen koettelemus: the new punchline: Tero saatana, s’olet gay (‘Damn, Tero, you’re gay’)

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FIGURE 6.4

(YouTube) Still from Terojen koettelemus: ‘I’m gay, this is OK’

In the same way as seen with audience comments linking Prabhu Deva to George Michael and Michael Jackson, the representation of these two men may indicate that in cultural representations of the other – especially the male other – there may, in fact, be a tendency to view ethnic otherness as also sexual otherness. Otherness thus could be argued to appear here not as the representative of the Oriental other purported in traditional orientalising discourse rooted in the us/them dichotomy, but as a complex intersectional and superdiverse notion. Another scene that further subverts the heterosexuality of the two men is the brief encounter with a young woman. The original scene has no dialogue or lyrics, but the buffalaxed video producer has added subtitles that assign new meanings to the encounter (e.g. ‘the sexual orientation of the two Teros is put to the test/This woman will turn even a queer into a straight guy’). In the same way as the intertitles in silent films, the subtitles in this video thus function as narrative commentary steering the interpretation of what we are seeing in the scene in a particular direction. In the scene ‘narrated’ by the buffalax producer, the men turn their attention to the woman and no longer to each other. The woman gives the men a leering look, and they toss the coin to decide which of them gets to approach her. The interpretation of the original and the subtitled lyrics is the same: to get the girl.

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FIGURE 6.5

(YouTube) Still from Terojen koettelemus: ‘This woman will turn even a queer into a straight guy’

However, whereas the original film depicts this scene entirely without dialogue, the buffalax lyrics, again, employ sexually explicit language (e.g. “Let’s toss a coin: tails I get laid, heads you”). The coin tossed lands sideways. The men turn their heads to the woman as the decision is now handed over to her. She disappears into the wilderness, becoming unattainable. When the male characters look disappointed at what happened, the subtitled narrative plays with idioms that tie the interpretation back to the topic of being gay. The subtitled narrative states that “banging ladies is for straight guys anyway” (“akkojen köyriminen onkin heterojen hommaa”), reversing the discriminatory Finnish idiom that if something is stupid, it is “a job for gay guys” (“homojen hommaa”). The episode is thus narrated as a temporary and futile aberration from heterosexuality, and is quickly backgrounded by the continuation of the two men’s jubilant journey. Part of the humour of the video also derives from the way in which it introduces and makes relevant a Western interpretative frame to the story told in it. One example of this is how it recontextualises and resemiotises aspects of Westernstyle biker films as part of a coming out story. Within this frame, the two men keep looking and smiling at each other fondly, holding hands, riding their bike, and opening themselves up to the world. They appear to be proud of what they are, and, in a similar way as in the original, they are celebrating male bonding – only now their mutual erotic love. At the same time, it also seems clear that their

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homosexuality is here viewed from a Western heteronormative perspective: in their unrestrained confessional delivered in an ancient sidecar motorbike, the characters do appear rather silly. For one thing, they bear no resemblance to Western homoerotic cult biker icons – such as Tom of Finland characters, for example. Perhaps because of this incompatibility with homoerotic imagery, the video has given rise to comments that also question the sexual orientation of the characters: “this isn’t a gay film, they just sound like they are gay.” The Western frame also becomes apparent in the way in which the theme of homosexuality is represented in the video from the perspective of Nordic men. It becomes evident especially in how both of the characters are named “Tero,” using a very common Finnish male name. In this way, it could be argued, some of the otherness of the Oriental man is projected onto the Finnish man as well. In other words, while the two characters are represented as the unequivocal other, for example by subtitling them as speaking in ways in which immigrants and foreigners are often taken to speak Finnish – doubling the length of consonants: [sa:tana] becomes [sa:t:ana] and the [ä] sound becomes an approximation between [a] and [ä] as [tämä] becomes [tãm:ã] – they are also represented as the Finnish self, blurring the distinction between the self and the other. Hence, also the Finnish (man) can be the other – as far as his sexuality is concerned. This interpretative possibility was noticed by the viewers as well, some of them implying that also their lifeworlds include a number of Teros (e.g. “One of my friends is called Tero . . .”). Another example of the sexual othering of the local Nordic man was the way in which several viewers compared the two characters to Swedes. For example, the highest rated comment the video got on YouTube described it as the “national folklore of Sweden.” Another viewer wrote that “these are the Aryan cousins of Swedes from the bend of the Indus.” While comments such as these link the video with the notorious tradition of Finnish ethnic humour, which takes all Swedish men to be homosexuals, they also, once again, resemiotise the difference of the Oriental man so that it is made to characterise his otherness on another scale, with the help of a reference to the closest neighbouring other of Finns, the Swedish man. Thus, once more what we see in the video is a representation of otherness as a constellation of intersecting features, rather than a monolithic embodiment of difference of the other from the self. In the same way as in the case Benny Lava, the humour in Terojen koettelemus arises from its subversion of the original story contents and its characters. Even those who have not seen Sholay can safely assume that it does not deal with homoerotic love, and humour is evoked when we realise that a celebration of homoerotic love would indeed be extremely out of place in a Bollywood film (see e.g. Morreall 2009: 68). However, perhaps due to the uplifting and exalted tone set by the music and the activities on the screen, the representation of the Oriental other in the video is, once again, not altogether problematic. In fact, many viewers have interpreted

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the video as a coming out story and have used their YouTube comments to celebrate the characters’ ride to freedom: for example, there are comments such as, “I wanna be gay too if they have so much fun :)” and, “this joy of coming out doesn’t cease to delight me.” In addition, some of the most prejudiced and hateful comments by viewers have been flagged as inappropriate by other viewers. YouTube viewers have thus wanted to background the overt racism and homophobia in support of the story about coming out and liberation.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have suggested that YouTube, as a particular example of convergent and divergent social media culture, engages with superdiversity in three ways. We have argued that it is: (1) a forum for activities and interactions by groups who can be superdiverse and for whom complex diversity is a commonplace phenomenon; (2) a discursive location where superdiversity can be represented, made sense of, and evaluated; and (3) a site where language use, communication, dissemination of information, and mediation of cultural practices are marked by complexity, mobility, heterogeneity, and polycentricity of semiotic resources and normativities. All three ways of engaging with superdiversity have been highlighted in our analysis: we have shown how buffalaxed videos, as an example of a particular translocal YouTube activity culture, by mobilising affordances provided by the medium, deal with the superdiverse other through parodic and humorous resemiotisation. The reason why the other has become a recurrent topic for this kind of semiotic work, we have argued, has to do with the fact that he/she is someone who can no longer be readily categorised with traditional classificatory schemes. The other, an increasingly visible and proximal figure in real life as well as in mediated and online contexts, is characterised by diversity across a range of variables. And this complex and shifting diversity calls for new reinterpretative work. Such reinterpretative work was highlighted in our analysis of two buffalaxed videos. In our analysis, we showed that the representation of the other on YouTube depicts otherness no longer as simply the antithesis of the self. Instead, these videos foreground the unpredictability, ambiguity, and intersectionality of the other – all attributes that have been associated with superdiversity (Blommaert & Rampton 2011; Parkin & Arnaut 2014) and liquid racism (Weaver 2010). On the one hand, we have traced ideological stances that recontextualise and resemiotise well-established disparaging and discriminatory discourses about the other. In the videos, the other was depicted as a multifaceted negative being: as a nonsensical, naïve, over-sexualised, homosexual, and perverse figure. We have shown that he/she was represented as a fundamentally incongruous creature and argued that this incongruity is, in fact, responsible for much of the humour of the buffalaxed videos. Along the lines suggested by McRobbie (2005), our analysis confirms that buffalaxed videos can well be seen as one particular example

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of the post-politically correct entertainment sites in which it has become acceptable to mock and denigrate, in the name of humour. More specifically, the messages assigned to the other were presented as absurd ramblings not adding up to a coherent story and the new lyrics gave him/her a voice that was systematically in conflict not only with the language, messages of the original footage, and the culture it springs from, but also with the conventions, values, and norms shaping the depiction of the characters. In both videos, implicit, indirect, and symbolic descriptions of the characteristics of the Oriental subject, his/her culture, and, in particular, his/her emotional, romantic, and erotic attachments were consistently converted into pornographic imagery. Furthermore, the male other was depicted not only as an ethnically and culturally different creature, but also as the sexual other – as a hyper-sexualised heterosexual/homosexual/sodomite whose otherness is multiply overdetermined. We concluded that in cultural representations of the male other, there may even be a tendency to conflate and fuse together ethnic otherness with sexual otherness. On the other hand, our conclusions are not entirely pessimistic. While traditional dichotomous Orientalising metanarratives of the other were made use of and recontextualised and resemiotised in our materials, we also detected polyvalence and ambiguity both in the ways of representation and reception of the other. Significantly, in some instances, it was not entirely clear who the other was. Interestingly, the (sexual) otherness of the Oriental man in our Finnish example was rescaled and projected onto the local Nordic man, the Finns, and the Swedes. While in some viewers’ comments this was suggested in a derogatory way, in others it remained ambiguous, and in still others it was considered a positive thing: sexual otherness can be a feature of the self, and it is not necessarily a sign of immorality or corruption. Furthermore, as our analyses highlighted, the videos also give rise to multiple interpretations and debates. We noted how at times even disparaging depictions of the other could, nevertheless, lead to a deeper appreciation of the original source product. In sum, we hope to have shown how buffalaxed videos can be seen as taking part in the discursive construction of the Oriental other in ways that make use of and go beyond the traditional Orientalising process and engage with the unpredictability and polyvalence of superdiversity. To a large extent, we think that buffalaxed videos thrive on the tension between disparagement, on the one hand, and ambiguity, on the other. The question whether they only provide humorous entertainment, or whether they are at the same time disparaging and discriminatory sometimes remains unresolved. Such complicated patterns of othering and tensions that buffalaxing demonstrates may also mirror the difficulties involved in any attempts at genuine interaction with and understanding of others in a superdiverse world. In some way, in the encounter with the other, we may be wired, as Kristeva (1991: 191–192) has argued, to deny our own difference – the stranger within us.6 In the light of this conceptualisation, what we fear in the other is the uncanny way in which his/her strangeness reminds us of our own

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otherness. In a similar vein, as Freud has reminded us in his discussion of the psychodynamics of jokes (Freud 1905/1991; see also Billig 2009: 34–35), with complex humour such as buffalaxing we may not always be absolutely aware of ourselves: we may think that we are laughing at its cleverness, but in reality we cannot be quite sure whether we are laughing because of its tendentious, discriminatory aspects.

Notes 1. The term buffalax was originally the YouTube username for the editor who produced Benny Lava. Later, when buffalax’s videos had become global YouTube hits, the term was adopted by others as the label for the whole genre. 2. For more information, see, for example, the Wikipedia articles for Mondegreen and Soramimi (a Japanese-originated word used explicitly for multilingual mondegreens) 3. Crazy Indian Video . . . Buffalaxed! is available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=twlqYxQF3KM (accessed 21 September 2015). 4. All the audience comments were collected between January and May 2011 from the YouTube comment section of the original videos. Later, buffalax’s user account was removed from YouTube and along with it all the original videos and comments. To protect the identity of the commentators, their aliases are not given here. 5. Terojen koettelemus is available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v= RradOrYKF8U (accessed 21 September 2015). 6. In a similar vein, Cameron and Kulick (2003: 122) have argued that homophobic talk can be both a performative enactment of the speakers’ own heterosexuality, and an indication of the fear of the possibility of their own homosexual desire.

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Parkin, D., & Arnaut, K. 2014. Super-diversity and sociolinguistics – a digest. Tilburg Papers in Cultural Studies, #95. Available at: www.tilburguniversity.edu/upload/2c968b77-f60644c5-8d1f-dc90a0185ae7_TPCS_95_Parkin-Arnaut.pdf (accessed 15 June 2014). Pool, I. de Sola. 1983. Technologies of Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rainbird, M. 2004. Humour, multiculturalism and ‘political correctness’. Paper presented to the Australasian Political Studies Association Conference, University of Adelaide. Raisborough, J., & Adams, M. 2008. Mockery and morality in popular cultural representations of the white, working class. Sociological Research Online, 13(6): 2. Available at: www.socresonline.org.uk/13/6/2.html (accessed 19 June 2014). Said, E.W. 1978/2003. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin. Scollon, R. 2008. Discourse itineraries: Nine processes of resemiotization. In V. Bhatia, J. Flowerdew, & R. Jones (eds), Advances in Discourse Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 233–244. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S.W. 2004. Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. New York: Routledge. Silverstein, M., & Urban, G. (eds). 1996. Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Skeggs, B. 2005. The making of class and gender through visualizing moral subject formation. Sociology, 39(5): 965–982. Snickars, P., & Vonderau, P. (eds). 2009. The YouTube Reader. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden. Toffler, A. 1981. The Third Wave. London: Pan Books. Varis, P., & Wang, X. 2011. Superdiversity on the Internet: A case from China. Diversities, 13(2): 71–82. Available at: www.unesco.org/shs/diversities/vol13/issue2/art5 (accessed 19 June 2014). Vertovec, S. 2007. Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6): 1024–1054. Weaver, S. 2010. Liquid racism and the Danish prophet Muhammad cartoons. Current Sociology, 58(5): 675–692. Wessendorf, S. 2013. Commonplace diversity and the ‘ethos of mixing’: Perceptions of difference in a London neighbourhood. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 20(4): 407–422.

15) Male: April May eppodhum 16) Female: Veppaththil veppaththil

[Original lyrics unknown]

15) Male: The months of April & May are always 16) Female: Under the influence of baking heat (x2)

15) Male: You fill me up with doom 16) Female: Quit looking up at me!

Choir: 13) I’d love to see you pee on us tonight! 14) I’d love to see you pee on us tonight!

11) I told a high school girl . . . 12) I love you inside me

11) As Haiku, poetically she said 12) I love you

Have you been high today? I see the nuns are gay! My brother yelled to me… I love you inside Ed

11) Haikuvaai haikuvaai . . . 12) I love you endraale . . .

5) 6) 7) 8)

Female: 9) My looney bun is fine, Benny Lava! 10) Minor bun engine made Benny Lava!

O! Haiku! You came to me In high-speed like a Haiku On raising your eyebrows You said I love you

Female: 9) Are you the moon that shined in college’s sky? 10) That grazed all juvenility of students’ heart?

5) 6) 7) 8)

Female: 9) Kalluri vaanil kaayndha nilaavo? 10) Maanavar nenjil meyndha nilaavo?

Haikuvae haikuvae . . . High speedil vandhaaye . . . Eyebrowai male thookki I love you endraaye . . .

Male: 1) My looney bun is fine Benny Lava! 2) Minor bun engine made Benny Lava! 3) Anybody need this sign? Benny Lava! 4) You need a bun to bite Benny Lava!

Male: 1) Are you the moon that shined in college’s sky? 2) That grazed all juvenility of students’ heart? 3) That descended and laid on my laps? 4) That came to me to be with me?

Male: 1) Kalluri vaanil kaayndha nilaavo? 2) Maanavar nenjil meyndha nilaavo? 3) En madi meedhu saayndha nilaavo? 4) Ennidam vandhu vaayndha nilaavo?

5) 6) 7) 8)

CRAZY INDIAN VIDEO . . . BUFFALAXED! English subtitled lyrics: buffalax

Translation from Tamil to English*

KALLURI VAANIL Music & lyrics: S.A. Rajkumar

TABLE 6.1 Lyrics for Crazy Indian Video . . . Buffalaxed!

21) 22) 23) 24)

21) 22) 23) 24)

21) 22) 23) 24)

Female: 25) OOOO DADDY! / Just Say It! / 26) You know the hole to put it Male: 27) Just sing it! / You love me! / 28) Your pundit got armor! Female: 29) You send me . . . / Offended . . . / 30) You know the hole to put it! Male: 31) Just sing it! / You love me! / 32) Your pundit got armor!

Female: 25) You’ll cause / nuiscance / 26) ‘enough is enough’ Male: 27) All these / nuiscances / 28) are joy, aren’t they? Female: 29) You may / make / 30) kissing noises Male: 31) Well with me / these noises / 32) are kisses indeed

Female: 25) Unnaale / imsaigal / 26) undaagum podhum podhum

Male: 27) Imsaigal / ellaamay / 28) inbangal thaanammaa . . .

Female: 29) Ichchendra / saththangal / 30) undagak koodum koodum . . .

Male: 31) Saththangal / ellaamay / 32) muththangal thaanammaa . . .

[original line cut from the buffalaxed video] Male: We’re looking in a pill! Female: All of them like the bun! Male: Now poop on them Oliver!

19) Female: Don’t think I do love her 20) Male: We’re looking in a pill!

19) Female: Won’t the Dolphins jump about 20) Male: In the hearts, in the hearts

19) Female: Dolphin gal thullaadhaa . . . 20) Male: Ullaththil ullaththil [Female: Springs inside . . . ] Male: . . . In floods, in floods Female: You mischievous boy Male: Shall I play ‘pooppandhu’

17) Male: You got a minute girl? 18) Female: The puppy had a fee!

17) Male: Nevertheless the thoughts are 18) Female: In cool water pool (x2)

17) Male: Endraalum ennangal 18) Female: Theppaththil theppaththil

[Female: Ullukkul undaghum] Male: Vellaththil vellaththil Female: Pollaadha aadavaa . . . Male: Naan pooppandhu aadavaa?

CRAZY INDIAN VIDEO . . . BUFFALAXED! English subtitled lyrics: buffalax

Translation from Tamil to English

KALLURI VAANIL Music & lyrics: S.A. Rajkumar

TABLE 6.1 continued

Male: 35) Are you the moon that shined in college’s sky? Female: 36) That grazed all juvenility of students’ heart?

Male: 35) Kalluri vaanil kaayndha nilaavo?

Female: 36) Maanavar nenjil meyndha nilaavo?

45) 46) 47) 48) 49) 50)

45) 46) 47) 48) 49) 50)

Male: 51) Urgent aa / operation / 52) seygindra case um undu

Male: 51) There are urgent / operation / 52) cases, you know

Male: Inside your body Female: What is it? What is it? Male: Without the use of scanning Female: Tell me, tell me Male: Is it sinful if I see it? Female: Come and see after fixing a date

43) Female: Without using a stethoscope 44) Male: I can tell, I can tell

43) Female: Stethoscope vaikkaamal . . . 44) Male: Solvaenae solvaenae . . .

Male: Sevvaazhai maynikkul Female: Ennaiyaa ennaiyaa? Male: Scanning naan seyyaamal Female: Sollaiyaa sollaiyaa Male: Naan paarththaal paavamaa? Female: Naal paarththu paarkka vaa . . .

41) Female: What’s the lady’s pulse? 42) Male: I saw it, I saw it

41) Female: PennOda pulse enna? 42) Male: Paarththene paarththene . . .

[Original song has a high-pitched melody line here, but no singing]

Female: 33) The bouquet will have to 34) Struggle through the storm

Female: 33) Puppuppu poochendae . . . 34) puyalil poraadum . . .

Male: This boar ain’t very cool. Female: You need a Hindi yew! Male: Got into seattle. Female: I’ll lay a friend of yours! Male: I fought a barber man! Female: We know what’s in butter rum! Male: 51) A jet pack . . . / operation . . . / 52) Send him the crazy Hindu!

45) 46) 47) 48) 49) 50)

43) Female: That stuff is pink colored! 44) Male: Some day i sell DNA!

Female: 36) Minor bun engine made Benny Lava! 37) (i like to swim in it) ⎫ 38) (i like to swim in it) ⎪ ⎬ ×2 39) (i like to swim in his) ⎪ 40) (beeeeejaaaaayyy!) ⎭ 41) Female: A nerd to punk a nerd. 42) Male: Im bleeding Fucking A!

Male: 35) My loony bun is fine Benny Lava!

Female: 33) Who put the goat in there? 34) The yellow goat i ate!

Female: 64) You need a bun to bite Benny Lava! 65) Male: Have you been high today? 66) Female: I love you inside me!

Male: 55) If you stay / stay within the boundary / 56) my heart will push me to shatter it Female: 57) O! Dear! / Our love is not / 58) The Kargil war Male: 59) Don’t push me too much 60) My youth can’t accept it Male: 61) Are you the moon that shined in college’s sky? Female: 62) That grazed all juvenility of students’ heart? Male: 63) That descended and laid on my laps? Female: 64) That moon which came to you to be with you? 65) Male: As Haiku, poetically she said 66) Female: I love you

Male: 55) Ellaikkul / nil endraal / 56) en nenjam meerum indru

Female: 57) Kannaalaa / nam kaadhal / 58) Kargil war por alla

Male: 59) Tha tha tha thallaadhay . . . 60) ilamai yerkaadhae . . .

Male: 61) Kalluri vaanil kaayndha nilaavo?

Female: 62) Maanavar nenjil meyndha nilaavo?

Male: 63) En madi meedhu saayndha nilaavo?

Female: 64) Unnidam vandhu vaayndha nilaavo?

65) Male: Haikuvae haikuvae . . . 66) Female: I love you endraayae . . .

* A video including the translation and explanations of the original Tamil lyrics was posted on YouTube by user mmanoba and can be viewed at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wyp7D2Nzib0 (accessed 12 November 2015). See also a blog post analyzing the subtitled English lyrics of Benny Lava by comparing them to the original Tamil lyrics at http://descriptively.blogspot.com/2007/10/benny-lava-revisited.html (accessed 12 November 2015).

Male: 63) Anybody need this sign? Benny Lava!

Female: 62) Minor bun engine made Benny Lava!

Male: 61) My loony bun is fine Benny Lava!

Male: 59) I put papaya there. 60) You love me inside there!

Female: 57) Tell Donna . . . / No collar . . . / 58) I’ll do what body loves!

Male: 55) I lick you . . . / Belinda . . . / 56) The ninja made a movement.

Female: 53) Whatever! / My Sadist! / 54) All baked and cooked alive!

Female: 53) O! Come my love / desire is not / 54) an operation case

Female: 53) Anbay dhaan / naan seyyum / 54) operation case alla . . .

CRAZY INDIAN VIDEO . . . BUFFALAXED! English subtitled lyrics: buffalax

Translation from Tamil to English

KALLURI VAANIL Music & lyrics: S.A. Rajkumar

TABLE 6.1 continued

Both: 9) But not leave each other

Both: 9) tera saath na chhodenge

Both: 9) Tero saatana, s’olet gay

Male 2: 8) Olen gay, tämä käy

Male 1: Male 1: 7) We won’t give up this friendship 7) Jee, nussittiin, ainakin olen gay

Male 1: 7) Yeh dosti hum nahin todenge

Male 2: 8) We can give up breathing

Male 2: Male 2: 4) We won’t give up this friendship 4) Jee, nussittiin, ainakin olen gay 5) Olen gay, tämä käy 5) We can give up breathing 6) Tero saatana, s’olet gay 6) But not leave each other

Male 2: 4) Yeh dosti hum nahin todenge 5) Todenge dam magar 6) tera saath na chhodenge

Male 2: 8) Todenge dam magar

Male 1: Male 1: 1) We won’t give up this friendship 1) Jee, nussittiin, ainakin olen gay 2) Olen gay, tämä käy 2) We can give up breathing 3) Tero saatana, s’olet gay 3) But not leave each other

Male 1: 1) Yeh dosti hum nahin todenge 2) Todenge dam magar 3) tera saath na chhodenge

TEROJEN KOETTELEMUS Subtitled Finnish lyrics: Vitsailija

THIS FRIENDSHIP Translation from Hindi to English*

YEH DOSTI Music: Rahul Dev Burman Lyrics: Anand Bakshi

TABLE 6.2 Lyrics for Terojen koettelemus (The Trial of the Two Teros)

Both: 9) Damn, Tero, you’re gay

Male 2: 8) I am gay, that’s okay

Male 1: 7) Yeah, we fucked, at least I’m gay

Male 2: 4) Yeah, we fucked, at least I’m gay 5) I am gay, that’s okay 6) Damn, Tero, you’re gay

Male 1: 1) Yeah, we fucked, at least I’m gay 2) I am gay, that’s okay 3) Damn, Tero, you’re gay

THE TRIAL OF THE TWO TEROS Translation of the subtitled Finnish lyrics: SL & AE

Both: 14) We won’t give up this friendship 15) We can give up breathing 16) But not leave each other

THIS FRIENDSHIP Translation from Hindi to English

THE TRIAL OF THE TWO TEROS Translation of the subtitled Finnish lyrics: SL & AE Subtitled text (not sung at all): 10) The sexual orientation of the two Teros is put to test 11) This woman will turn even a queer into a straight guy 12) Let’s toss a coin: tails I get laid, heads you

13) Well, banging ladies is for the straight guys anyway Both: 14) Yeah, we fucked, at least I’m gay 15) I am gay, that’s okay 16) Damn, Tero, you’re gay

TEROJEN KOETTELEMUS Subtitled Finnish lyrics: Vitsailija

Subtitled text (not sung at all): 10) Terojen seksuaalinen vakaumus joutuu koetukselle 11) Tämä nainen tekee homostakin heteron 12) Heitetään kolikkoa: klaavalla minä pääsen pukille, kruunalla sinä 13) No, akkojen köyriminen onkin heteroiden hommaa Both: 14) Jee, nussittiin, ainakin olen gay 15) Olen gay, tämä käy 16) Tero saatana, s’olet gay

* Translation posted on Yahoo! Answers (Canada) by user Kaul, who is a native Hindi speaker. Translation available at (accessed 12 November 2015).

Both: 14) Yeh dosti hum nahin todenge 15) Todenge dam magar 16) tera saath na chhodenge

The coin lands sideways, the woman walks away, men shrug their shoulders and ride on together.]

They toss a coin to decide which one gets to approach the woman.

[A silent film-like scene in the middle of the song where the two men meet a young woman by the road side. Both are interested in the woman.

YEH DOSTI Music: Rahul Dev Burman Lyrics: Anand Bakshi

TABLE 6.2 continued

7 POLYLANGUAGING IN SUPERDIVERSITY Jens Normann Jørgensen, Martha Sif Karrebæk, Lian Malai Madsen, and Janus Spindler Møller

Introduction Human beings use language to achieve their goals, and with a few exceptions by using language to other human beings. It is a widely held view that language as a human phenomenon can be separated into different ‘languages’, such as ‘Russian’, ‘Latin’, and ‘Greenlandic’. This chapter is based on the recently developed sociolinguistic understanding that this view of language cannot be upheld based on linguistic criteria. ‘Languages’ are sociocultural abstractions that match real-life use of language poorly. This means that sociolinguistics must apply another level of analysis with observed language use. The first part of this chapter is based on analyses of observed language use among young languagers in superdiverse societies. We show that the level of feature is better suited as the basis for analysis of language use than the level of language. In the second part of this chapter, we present our concept of languaging, in particular polylanguaging. We use the level of (linguistic) features as the basis for understanding language use, and we claim that features are socioculturally associated with “languages.” Both features individually and languages are socioculturally associated with values, meanings, speakers, etc. This means that we can deal with the connection between features and languages. In this chapter, we do so.

Real-life Language Use This section contains examples of observed language use among youth in a superdiverse environment. To demonstrate the advantages of using linguistic features (and not languages) as the analytical level, we describe the linguistic behaviours of young speakers in metropolitan Copenhagen. We show how concepts of languages or ‘ways of speaking’ become meaningful to them, and we

138 Jens Normann Jørgensen et al.

show how a feature-based approach to the analysis of behaviours contributes to our understanding of social processes happening in the interaction involving the young speakers.

Example 1 Facebook conversation between three Danish girls (in the translation, we have marked the associations of the features with ‘languages’ as follows: English in italics, standard Danish in roman, youth Danish underlined, other language in bold): Maimuna 13:45: har købt the equipment, skal bare finde tid til at lave en spektakulær én kun tje dig morok, den skal være speciel med ekstra spice :P, sorry tar mig sammen denne weekend! insAllah translation: have bought the equipment must just find the time to make a spectacular one just for you morok, it must be special with extra spice :P, sorry pull myself together this (weekend)! insAllah Ayhan 15:20: gracias muchas gracias!! jeg wenter shpæændt gardash ;-)) love youuu. . . translation: gracias muchas gracias! I am waiting excitedly gardash ;-)) love youuu. . . İlknur 23:37: Ohhh Maimuna, Du havde også lovet mig en skitse. . . Og

du sagde, at det ville været efter eksamener, men??? Still waiting like Ayhan, and a promise is a promise :D :D :D translation: Ohhh Maimuna, You had also promised me a sketch. . . And you said, that it would be after exams, but??? Still waiting like Ayhan, and a promise is a promise :D :D :D In Example 1, three girls (all successful university students) discuss a promise that Maimuna, who is quite an artist, has made to Ayhan and İlknur. She has promised to provide drawings for the other girls. In the immediately preceding context, they have begun to criticise her (in a very low-key way) for not providing the drawings. The first line in Example 1 is Maimuna’s reaction to this. Maimuna uses several words that are English (i.e. which are conventionally associated with the sociocultural construction labelled English), and there are several words that are Danish. Some of these words are standard Danish, but other words appear in forms that are not standard Danish. For instance, the spelling tje corresponds to a pronunciation (of the word usually spelled til) that has developed among young Copenhagen speakers in recent years. Besides indexing youth Danish, the feature may index stylised Turkish accent in Danish. Among Danish second-language scholars, the feature has traditionally been considered typical of

Polylanguaging in Superdiversity 139

Turkish-accented pronunciation of Danish words beginning with a ‘t-’. On the other hand, the feature has also been documented as spreading among young Copenhageners regardless of ethnicity (Maegaard 2007). When we asked the girls about the feature in this context, whether it was one or the other, their answer was that it was both. In addition, Maimuna uses the word morok, which historically is an old Armenian word moruk (‘old man, father’) that has been integrated (‘borrowed’) into Turkish (Türk Dil Kurumu 1988) meaning the same. The feature is here further ‘borrowed’ by Maimuna, who does not speak Turkish, to address a close friend, roughly as in ‘you old geezer’. She closes her line with the Arabic insAllah. In her answer, Ayhan first uses words associated with Spanish, and then continues with words spelled in a way that reflects young Copenhagen speech. Next, she uses the word ‘gardash’, an adapted version of the Turkish word kardeş, which means ‘sibling’. Among young urban speakers in Denmark, it means ‘friend’. The last line, İlknur’s contribution, is partly associated with Danish, partly with English, both in vocabulary and in grammar. It makes little sense to classify this exchange as belonging to one or the other language. It makes no more sense to try to count the number of ‘languages’ involved. There is a gradual shift in association and meaning from Armenian moruk to young Copenhagen ‘morok’, and there are several overlaps, for instance between standard Danish and young Copenhagen Danish, such as the words skal være (‘must be’), and ‘gardash’ cannot very easily be classified anywhere. If we attempted to analyse this short exchange at the level of ‘languages’, we would run into a number of difficulties. First, we could not without quite substantial preparations determine what languages to account for. Would ‘youth Danish’ be one language, separate from ‘Danish with an accent’ and ‘standard Danish’? We would have to distinguish somehow. Otherwise, we would miss some of the crucial meanings of the exchange. Second, we would have a hard time determining how many languages are represented. Third, some features would be difficult to categorise in any given language. This exchange cannot be analysed at the level of ‘languages’ or ‘varieties’ without important loss of its content. On the other hand, we cannot and should not either discard the level of ‘languages’ as irrelevant. The analysis of features must involve if and how the features are associated with one or more ‘languages’. This example could mislead to the idea that speakers do whatever comes to their minds without any inhibitions. This is not the case (as Rampton 1995 shows). Even the young, creative speakers with access to a wide range of resources will carefully observe and monitor norms, and uphold them with each other. In the Everyday Languaging research group (Madsen et al. 2015), we have collected written descriptions by the young informants, about their relations to language. This material has revealed a vast range of attitudes, insights, descriptions of practices – and norms. A strong norm is expressed by a 15-year-old boy in Example 2.

140 Jens Normann Jørgensen et al.

Example 2 Grade 8 written assignment from the Amager Project by a minority boy [the word perker is a controversial term for a minority member, particularly Moslem]: Efter perkersprog skal kun ‘perker’ snakke som de snakker. På grund af det vil være mærkeligt hvis nogle dansker med dansk baggrund hvis du forstår hvad jeg mener, talte perkersprog, men (danskere) som er født i en bolig blok med (perkere) må sådan set godt tale det sprog. Translation: After perker language only ‘perker’ should speak as they do. Because it would be awkward if some Danes with a Danish background if you understand what I mean, spoke perker language, but (Danes) who are born in a housing block with (perkers) are in fact allowed to speak that language. This statement assigns the right of use of perker language to two specific groups: (1) the perkers themselves; and (2) ‘Danes’ who happen to live in areas that are stereotypically seen to house a relatively high share of minority members. Others are not accepted as users of perker language. We know from earlier work (Madsen et al. 2010: 92–97) that this is an enregistered concept that is seen as an opposite to integrated speech. Integrated speech represents an academically oriented, upscale culture, and also politeness and adult speech. The opposite, alternatingly labelled as perker language, ghetto language, and other terms represents streetwiseness, minority membership, and youth. The students give many examples of features that they associate with each of these two ways of speaking. Some of the features associated with perker language are typically described as loans from minority languages such as Arabic, Urdu, and Turkish. In Example 3, we observe a majority member using precisely such a feature.

Example 3 Facebook exchange involving grade 9 students from the Everyday Languaging Project. Original comments on the left-hand side, translations on the right-hand side. In the first line, a minority boy announces that he has shaved himself (a contentious issue among teenage boys). A majority boy reacts with a comment that signals loud laughter, and adds, “then you have no more shaarkkk left” followed by an emoticon. The use of the word shark (English ‘hair’) is found elsewhere in the Amager material, and it is cited as an example of perker language, being a loan from Arabic. The fact that this feature is used by a majority boy

Polylanguaging in Superdiversity 141 TABLE 7.1

Original Facebook conversation

Translation

Bashaar Har barberet mig

Have shaved myself

Rasmus HAHAHAHAHAHA. . . Så har du ikke mere Shaaarkkk tilbage ;D

HAHAHAHAHAHA. . . then you have no more Shaaarkkk left ;D

Bashaar hehehe

hehehe

Rasmus Så skal du lære Jamil det ;D

Then you just need to teach it to Jamil ;D

Fatima :OO DET VAR DIIIIS :P

:OO that was diiiis :P

Lamis Hahahahahaha lol flækker.. ;)

Hahahahahaha lol cracking.. ;)

Fatima Oh ham det Rasmus Prøver være Perker Hahaahhhaha Flækker :’D

Oh him Rasmus Tries to be a Perker Hahaahhhaha Cracking :’D

Rasmus Ja jeg er ornlig syg gangstar, host host ;D

Mohammed din hund draber dig Rasmus

Yeah I’m a really cool gangster, cough, cough ;D

Rasmus your dog kill you

does not go unnoticed by the participants. Another minority member adds a few lines later that “Rasmus tries to be a perker” followed by laughter and the comment “cracking [up].” The relatively gentle reaction leads the majority boy to a selfironic remark: “yeah, I’m a really cool gangster,” followed by “cough, cough”, a reference to a cliché way of expressing doubt or scepticism. In Example 3, we see references to the norm that was overtly formulated in Example 2. The sanction following the majority boy’s use of language to which he is not entitled is mild compared to other kinds of sanctions, but both interlocutors show that they are aware of the norm and react accordingly. Polylanguaging (the use of resources associated with different ‘languages’ even when the speaker knows very little of these [see below]) is frequent among these informants, but it is not a free-for-all.

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Language and Languages We suggest here that ‘languages’ (conceptualised as different entities) are sociocultural constructs, and we suggest a different understanding of the human activity of using language, based on features. Over the past decades, sociolinguists have increasingly questioned the traditional, structural concept of languages. The idea of separate languages as bounded systems of specific linguistic features belonging together and excluding other linguistic features is found to be insufficient to capture the reality of language use, at least in late modern superdiverse societies, and perhaps altogether. Instead, the concepts of languages as separable entities are seen as sociocultural constructions that certainly are important, but rarely represent real-life language use. A critical understanding of the delineability of separate languages is not new. It has long been realised that it is not possible, on the basis of linguistic criteria, to draw clear borders between languages such as German and Dutch (see e.g. Romaine 1994: 136), or for that matter between what is thought of as separate dialects of the same language (e.g. Andersen 1969: 22). Hudson (1996: 24) concludes, “it may be extremely hard to identify varieties corresponding even roughly to traditional notions.” The recent critical discussion of the concept of languages as separate and separable sets of features takes this insight further and sees the idea of individual languages as based on linguistic normativity, or ideology, rather than real-life language use. According to Makoni and Pennycook (2006: 2), “languages do not exist as real entities in the world and neither do they emerge from or represent real environments; they are, by contrast, the inventions of social, cultural and political movements.” These sociocultural movements are generally taken to coincide with the nationalist ideologies, which developed in Europe in the 1700s (Heller 2007: 1). Makoni and Pennycook find that the concept of ‘a language’ is a European invention, and one that Europeans have imposed on colonised peoples in other parts of the world. They observe that many names for languages have been invented by Europeans, not by those to whom the languages were ascribed: While it is interesting at one level to observe simply that the names for these new entities were invented, the point of greater significance is that these were not just new names for extant objects (languages pre-existed the naming), but rather the invention and naming of new objects. (Makoni & Pennycook 2006: 10) Heller (2007: 1) explicitly argues “against the notion that languages are objectively speaking whole, bounded, systems,” and she prefers to understand language use as the phenomenon that speakers “draw on linguistic resources which are organized in ways that make sense under specific social circumstances.”

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Blommaert (2010: 102) similarly refers to ‘resources’ as the level of analysis. He observes that “[s]hifting our focus from ‘languages’ (primarily an ideological and institutional construct) to resources (the actual and observable ways of using language) has important implications for notions such as ‘competence’.” There are indeed a range of consequences to be drawn from that shift, for concepts such as ‘speech community’, ‘native speaker’, and ‘bilingualism’, to mention a few key concepts in sociolinguistics. We return to that below. The insight of current sociolinguistics is then that ‘languages’ as neat packages of features that are closely connected and exclude other features are sociocultural constructions that do not represent language use in the real world very well. This insight must, of course, be extended to any set package of features, regardless of the term used for such a package. Rather than being natural objects, comprising readily identifiable sets of features, ‘dialects’, ‘sociolects’, ‘registers’, ‘varieties’, etc., are sociocultural constructions exactly as ‘languages’ are. We realise that it makes sense to talk about ‘language’, but not necessarily about ‘a language’, at least if we want to base our distinctions on linguistic features. This does not mean that sociolinguistics cannot work with the concept of separate ‘languages’. There are good reasons to account for the ways in which ‘languages’ are constructed, and what the consequences of the constructions are. A view of human language that allows categorisation of ‘different languages’ considers language as a range of phenomena that can be separated and counted. This is reflected in the terminology used to describe individual language users. Without much consideration, words such as ‘monolingual’, ‘bilingual’, and ‘multilingual’ are used to characterise individuals with respect to their relationship to ‘languages’. This terminology is based on the assumption that ‘languages’ can be counted: one, two, three, etc. Bailey comments on this in his ‘heteroglossic’ approach to language: approaching monolingualism and bilingualism as socially constructed does not change their social force at the level of lived experience, but it does show that this social force is not a function of formal, or inherent linguistic differences among what counts as languages. (Bailey 2007: 271) Languages are socioculturally, or ideologically, defined, not defined by any objective or observable criteria, in particular not by criteria based on the way language is used, neither by criteria based on who are the users of ‘the language’. The idea of ‘a language’ therefore may be important as a social construct, but it is not suited as an analytical level of language practices. This means that whatever term we use for a concept of a set of features, such a concept cannot function as an analytical level with respect to the languaging (Jørgensen 2010) of real people, at least not in superdiversity. If we attempt to analyse language production at the level of separate languages, we will reach conclusions such as

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‘this utterance is in language X’, or ‘this stretch of speech code-switches between language X and language Y (and perhaps more)’. First, this will prevent us from dealing with language production that cannot be ascribed to any individual ‘language’. Second, we will inevitably simplify the range of resources employed by speakers, as shown in the analyses of the examples above. This insight also means that people are unlikely to use ‘pure’ language. There are many relevant criteria on which a choice of linguistic features is made by a given speaker under given circumstances. These criteria do not only include with what ‘language’ the features are associated. The features’ associations with values, speakers, places are just as important – and they are involved in complex indexicality (see below) just like the association between feature and ‘language’.

Linguistic Features In the concept of language we use here, the central notion is not that of a language, but language as such. We suggest that the level of linguistic features, and not the level of ‘language’, is better suited for the analysis of languaging in superdiverse societies (if not everywhere). Speakers use features and not languages. Features may be associated with specific languages (or specific categories that are called languages). Such an association may be an important quality of any given feature, and one that speakers may know and use as they speak. Gumperz’s (1982: 66) concepts of “we-code” and “they-code” point to that relationship. Minority speakers’ use of features associated with their minority language as a ‘we-code’ (i.e. the code that is in opposition to majority language) signifies values such as solidarity and closeness. The features associated with the minority language index these values. Indexing values is one important type of indexicality. The notions of ‘varieties’, ‘sociolects’, ‘dialects’, ‘registers’, etc. may appear to be useful categories for linguists. They may indeed be strategic, ideological constructs for power holders, educators, and other gatekeepers (Heller 2007; Jørgensen 2010). However, what speakers actually use are linguistic features as semiotic resources, not languages, varieties, or lects (Jørgensen 2004, 2008; Møller 2009). It is problematic if sociolinguistics habitually treat these constructs as unquestioned facts. Blommaert and Backus (2011) have proposed the term ‘repertoires’ for the set of resources that the individual commands or ‘knows’. Although they still refer to ‘languages’ in the traditional sense (for “didactic” reasons [Blommaert & Backus 2011: 2]), they also work analytically at the level of features, in their terminology: resources. Whether or not a particular word, combination or pattern actually exists as a unit in the linguistic knowledge of an individual speaker is dependent on its degree of entrenchment. ‘Having’ a unit in your inventory means it is entrenched in your mind. (Blommaert & Backus 2011: 6)

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A consequence of the attention paid to the ideological character of the construction of ‘languages’ would be giving up the focus on identifying varieties in observed language use and the insistence on naming observed behaviours among real-life languagers, for instance as it has happened in the discussions about names for the developing youth styles in European cities (see Madsen 2008; a similar criticism is offered by Jaspers 2007; see also Androutsopoulos 2010). Instead, sociolinguistic descriptions of language use could fruitfully include a focus on the use of linguistic resources and how they come to be associated with particular social values and meanings. Blommaert (2008, 2010) points out that such values are not easy to transport, for instance in connection with migration. Value associations do not travel well. For instance, values associated with ‘English’, ‘Turkish’, and ‘Danish’ by the local majorities in London, Lefcosia, Ankara, and Copenhagen are probably very different. In addition, the value associations may not last very well. Values (and meanings) are susceptible to challenges, revaluation, or even opposition. In other words, they are highly negotiable.

Features and Associations In this section and the next, we take up some of the ways in which features are associated with languages, on the one hand, and meanings and values, on the other hand. Features are associated directly, as features, with values, but they are also indirectly associated with values by being associated with ‘languages’. This is because the ‘languages’ are themselves associated with values. It is a crucial point that these associations are fluid and negotiable. There are many other associations with language, for instance with places and times, but we do not go into detail with them. Learning ‘a language’ is then, with the statements we have made thus far, of course impossible in a purely linguistic understanding. One can learn a number of features associated with a specific sociocultural construction, for instance ‘Spanish’. Since there is no linguistic way to determine precisely what is ‘Spanish’, schools cannot devise a criterion by which their students can be classified as ‘having learnt Spanish’ or having failed to ‘learn Spanish’. To overcome this obstacle, decision-makers in education usually select a number of features that they associate with ‘Spanish’. The students are tested whether they have entrenched these features the same way as certain official documents require. If so, they are constructed by the authorities as ‘having learnt Spanish’. If not, they are classified as having failed to. Blommaert and Backus (2011: 4) present a scathing criticism of these practices: “Such practices and methods have met debilitating and crippling criticism from within the profession . . .; yet they remain unaffected and attract more and more support among national and supranational authorities.” There is an important sociolinguistic task in studying how and what features become elevated this way, and what features are relegated, from, for example, ‘Spanish’ in schools.

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The passing of tests in ‘Spanish’ provides the students with a claim to be in a position with respect to Spanish, which allows them to say ‘I speak Spanish’. Such a position is greatly valued in some places, and it is therefore potentially socially translatable into power and positions (see more below about the positioning of individuals in relation to ‘languages’). The value associated with ‘learning Spanish’ is usually not the same as the value associated with ‘learning Greenlandic’. As pointed out, values do not travel well, and they are negotiable. It is safe to assume, however, that in most parts of the world, more value would be associated with ‘having learnt Spanish’ than with ‘having learnt Greenlandic’. The Arctic is, of course, a notable exception, and so are specific other contexts and special places such as the North Atlantic culture house and its human environment in Copenhagen, or perhaps certain academic circles. Our point here is that under any given circumstances, ‘languages’ are associated with values, and the use of features associated with a language may index the associated value – as Gumperz describes it. But not only ‘languages’ are associated with values. Individual features are also (see also Hudson 1996: 22). Linguistic features appear in the shape of units and regularities (Blommaert and Backus’ ‘word, combination or pattern’). Units are words, expressions, sounds, even phonetic characteristics such as rounding. Regularities are traditionally called ‘rules’, but they are not rules in the legal sense, or even the normative sense. They are regularities of how units are combined into larger units in processes through which the larger units become associated with meanings. A consequence of this view of linguistic regularities is that there is no such thing as inherently correct language. Correctness is social convention about the characteristics of specific linguistic features. Correctness has nothing to do with the linguistic characteristics of features – correctness is ascribed to the features by (some) speakers. A widely assumed meaning of ‘incorrect’ is that it denotes a use of a feature that violates ‘the rules of the language’ (which people who think of themselves and each other as ‘native’ speakers of a given language do again and again with the very language they think of as their ‘mother tongue’, but that is beside the point here). The assumption is based on the notion of languages as packages of features that comprise certain features and excludes all others. When it comes to concrete features, the features that are specifically associated with speakers of low education or low socio-economic status (or with speakers who are categorised as non-native) are typically considered ‘incorrect’.

Speakers and Associations In this section, we describe how ‘languages’ are associated with specific speakers, or groups of speakers, and conversely how individuals can position themselves vis-à-vis ‘languages’. It follows from this that features can similarly become associated with individuals.

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Speakers ascribe different values to features, some features are ‘vulgar’ or ‘ugly’, whereas others are ‘posh’ or ‘poetic’. Some features are ‘primitive’, others ‘sophisticated’. Speakers also associate ‘languages’, ‘dialects’, etc. with specific other people. A given feature associated with a ‘variety’ will then index these speakers, and possibly a number of values. An addental s-pronunciation is stereotypically associated with superficial teenage girls, or with male homosexuality. This is not, of course, a given association. Maegaard (2007) has demonstrated how the use of addental s-pronunciation may also index oppositional, streetwise, minority masculinity. The values associated with the features – and the ‘varieties’ – are negotiable and context-dependent. The values ascribed to sets of features may easily develop into stereotypical characters, such as the (Hollywood-propelled) stereotypes of German as rough and rude and Russian representing jovial peasantry. The use of (Hollywood) German may therefore be used precisely to index roughness, to stylise (Coupland 2007) someone as rough and rude. Such ascriptions are also context-dependent. In the tradition among Danes, Norwegian stereotypically indexes happy-go-lucky naïvety, and this is indeed possible under many circumstances. However, Norwegian may also index Scandinavian brotherhood. The association in a given context is determined by that context (in a wider sense). Speakers also position each other in relation to ‘languages’. Terms such as ‘Greenlandic mother tongue speaker’ and ‘English learner’ are such associations of people with ‘languages’. Social categorisations of speakers involve stereotypes about their relationship to specific ‘languages’. In some cases, this relationship is (comparatively stable and) described with the term ‘native speaker’. In this way (and in other ways), concepts and terms of individual ‘languages’ make sense as having relationships with individuals. The notion of ‘native speaker’ denotes such a relation. A ‘native speaker’ can claim a number of rights with respect to the ‘language’ of which he/she is a ‘native speaker’. The ‘native speaker’ of ‘a language’ can claim to have ‘access’ to that language, to have ‘ownership’ of the language. He/she can claim legitimacy in the use of the language and can claim that the language ‘belongs’ to him/her (for a discussion of ‘native speaker’, see Leung et al. 1997: 555–556; Jørgensen 2010). In varying degrees, non-native speakers can claim ‘access’, ‘ownership’, ‘legitimacy’, etc., depending on the acceptance by others of their ‘having learnt’ the language. Such acceptance may be authoritative as happens through language proficiency exams, but the acceptance may also be negotiable and depend on the context. This underlines the fact that such associations are socioculturally constructed. The ‘native speakers’ of Danish is a group of people who by convention see themselves as native speakers of Danish – and exclude others from the category. In principle, there is nothing in nature or the world that prevents, for instance, members of the Danish minority in Southern Schleswig to think of themselves as ‘native speakers’ of Danish, and the members of the German minority in

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Northern Schleswig to think of themselves as ‘native speakers’ of German. Some of them do, in fact, and the minority schools on both sides of the border treat their children as such. However, in the sociolinguistic literature, the two groups are prime examples of minorities whose ‘mother tongues’ are precisely not the ‘languages’ associated with their cultural allegiance. The legitimacy of the claim of such groups is negotiable.

Features and Use Below, we emphasise that speakers may use whatever features are at their disposal without regard to norms of linguistic purity. ‘Purity’ is a notion that may involve both an idea of language use that only includes features associated with one and the same language and an idea of language use that avoids certain features that are considered ‘impure’ or ‘improper’ or ‘incorrect’ in and by themselves. This means that one can violate the purity ideal both by using ‘foreign’ stuff and by using ‘dirty’ stuff. Speakers know the widespread mainstream ideals of ‘pure’ language, but do not live up to them, as demonstrated in the examples above. In particular, there is nothing in the nature of language that prevents speakers from combining in the same stretch of speech features that are associated with Greenlandic, Tagalog, and Cree. It is entirely possible, and speakers constantly produce speech of such kind (although not often with this combination). However, there are other reasons why speakers refrain from using forms they have access to and may even have ‘entrenched’. Just as speakers are thought to have ‘rights’ to specific ‘languages’ or ‘varieties’, there are also people who are not thought to have these rights – all depending on context. This means that speakers may meet and store (‘entrench’) features that are in most, if not all, contexts believed to ‘belong’ to others. The ‘access’ may not be restricted, but the usability is. Teachers generally have access to youth language in this sense, but they can only use it as stylisation – and preferably flagged. Rampton (1995) describes in detail such a set of rights and options in a group of adolescents. The term ‘language crossing’ (or ‘code-crossing’) refers to the use of a language that is not generally thought to ‘belong’ to the speaker. Language crossing involves a sense of movement across quite sharply felt social or ethnic boundaries, and it raises issues of legitimacy that participants need to reckon with in the course of their encounter (Rampton 1998: 291). O’Rourke and Aisling (2007) describe how Irish university students of Irish Gaelic who consider themselves ‘native speakers’ develop a problematic relationship with fellow students of Irish Gaelic who are not accepted as ‘native speakers’. Conflicts sometimes lead the ‘native speakers’ to refuse the use of Irish Gaelic to the other group: “There is an image that native speakers project, that they have better Irish than you and they speak English back to you. They know that you learned Irish” (O’Rourke & Aisling 2007: 7).

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To take stock: individual linguistic features are taken to be representatives of sets of features. Speakers refer to these socioculturally constructed sets of features as ‘languages’ (or ‘dialects’, etc.). Educational systems similarly refer to the teaching of language as ‘teaching of languages’. It is by now a trivial observation that this does not represent the reality of language use. Nevertheless, language behavioural norms, which are firmly enforced by school systems, media gatekeepers, and other powerful forces, emphasise linguistic purity, or so-called ‘monolingual’ behaviour at all times: individuals may be so-called ‘multilinguals’, but their behaviour at any given time should be ‘monolingual’.

Norms of Language Behaviour Now we turn to describe the different norms of behaviour with respect to ‘different languages’ that are oriented to by speakers. We characterise most norms as ideologically based and unable to account for language use as observed in the examples above. We suggest the term polylanguaging (i.e. the use of features associated with different ‘languages’ even when speakers know only few features associated with [some of] these ‘languages’) as a term for the practices in the examples. Until the rise of sociolinguistics in the 1960s, code-switching was generally considered deviant linguistic behaviour, and bilingual individuals were thought of and described as imperfect language users. The corresponding characterisation of a bilingual person often applied in educational discussions is that of a ‘double semi-lingual’ (i.e. a person who is described as not knowing any language ‘fully’, but having only two ‘half’ languages) (Hansegård 1968). This leads us to the norms of bilingual behaviour, as we can observe them in society, including schools. In public debates, and definitely in the schools’ teaching, one meets a strong norm of bilingual behaviour, the so-called ‘double monolingualism’ norm. This norm is the basic normative idea about bilingual individuals (i.e. double monolinguals). It is impossible to disentangle this view from the ideologically constructed view of ‘a language’ as a unique and separate set of features. Only with this concept is it possible to maintain the double (or multiple) monolingualism norm. The (double or multiple) monolingualism norm: Persons who command two (or more) languages should at any given time use one and only one language, and they should use each of their languages in a way that does not in principle differ from the way in which monolinguals use that same language. According to the double monolingualism norm, any language should be spoken ‘purely’ (i.e. without being mixed with another language). This is obviously a notion that can be met not only among the general public, but also among some linguists. To give just one example: Davidsen-Nielsen and Herslund (1999), two language professors whose first sentence runs (in my translation): “The Danish language suffers from the English Disease,” a pun on the popular term

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for ‘rachitis’ (i.e. engelsk syge), and the paper goes on to lament the use of English loans in Danish, especially among the youth. In many real-life situations, we can observe how speakers follow a completely different norm of bilingual behaviour. They may code-switch between utterances, in the middle of utterances, sometimes in the middle of a single word, and they may switch back again. It is, of course, possible to talk about ‘code-switching’ even with our critical view of the traditional concept of ‘code’ – a code-switch is the juxtaposition of features associated with different codes when both producer and recipient of the resulting complex sign are in a position to understand this juxtaposition as such (cf. Auer 1995: 116). Speakers use features belonging to the different languages they ‘know’ (i.e. which are ideologically constructed and normatively considered to be different languages or possibly dialects) without paying attention to any of the monolingualism norms (even though they may at other times carefully follow a monolingualism norm). Such behaviour has led to a differently based norm of language choice behaviours, the multilingualism norm. The bilingualism (or multilingualism) norm: Persons who command two (or more) languages will employ their full linguistic competence at any given time adjusted to the needs and the possibilities of the conversation, including the linguistic skills of the interlocutors. In this understanding, bilingualism (or multilingualism) becomes a resource, which involves more than the skills of using one language in some situations, and other languages in other situations. Bilingualism is more than the sum of competence in one language plus competence in one more language. It also involves competence in switching between the languages. Multilingualism is similarly considered integrated when speakers in their linguistic behaviour uses the codes that they somehow ‘know’. The systematic introduction of features from languages that the speakers do not ‘know’ was first described in detail by Rampton (1995). With this, we move one step further away from a Reinheitsgebot and on to even closer combination of linguistic features. The Australian speaker who uses a Scots English accent for his refusal to lend a friend money stylises himself and thus contributes to shape the interlocutor’s understanding of the situation and the message. The use of features from languages one does not ‘know’ is not restricted to urban late modern youth, although the examples we have analysed here involve only such individuals, and most current sociolinguistic studies of such behaviours do in fact focus on urban youth. In this case, we assume that the Australian speaker is not very competent in Scots English. At least the exchange is possible without very much Scottish competence on either side. We can all refer to stereotypes by adding just a bit of dialect, sociolect, style, etc. to any utterance. We can also invoke values ascribed to languages, such as the widely associated value of Latin as the language of the learned. Such behaviour follows the polylanguaging norm, which is different from the multilingualism norm we described above. The multilingualism norm takes it for

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granted that the speakers have a minimum of command of the involved languages. With the multilingualism norm follows the concept of ‘a language’, which assumes that languages can be separated also in use, and in this view it is also possible to determine whether an individual ‘knows’ a language or ‘has’ a language. The term multilingual covers the (more or less ‘full’) command of several languages, whereas the term polylanguaging also allows for the combination with features ascribed to other languages, such as described by Rampton. The polylingualism norm: Language users employ whatever linguistic features are at their disposal to achieve their communicative aims as best they can, regardless of how well they know the involved languages; this entails that the language users may know – and use – the fact that some of the features are perceived by some speakers as not belonging together. In other words, the behaviours we documented in the analyses of Examples 1–3 above can be characterised as polylanguaging. The different types of associations contribute to the formation of language norms (i.e. the social expectations with respect to language use that speakers administer to each other, and the rights of language use that people assign to each other). The balance of rights and norms contributes to the uneven access to resources, which is also characteristic of late modern superdiverse society. This balance regulates the behaviours of speakers much more than traditional norms of ‘pure’ language, which are routinely violated by speakers who use features they have access to without regard to monolingualism norms, but with a very acute sense of rights and values associations. All of this means that polylanguaging is not a free-for-all. First, certain ways of speaking are not available to some speakers. The uneven distribution of linguistic features among different population groups is frequently accompanied by an uneven distribution of other resources, and the resources accessible to the few tend to become highly valued by educational systems, gatekeepers, and otherwise in power centres. Second, resources that are available to speakers, in the sense that the features are used around them every day, may not be at the service of all of them. If features are associated with a specific group of speakers, this group is also typically seen to have the right to deny others the active use of the given features. In other words, normativity influences linguistic practices in more than one dimension.

Conclusions Now let us return to our analyses of Examples 1–3 above. These analyses of language practices make sense, in other words, because they are based at the level of features. Such analysis includes how features are associated with languages, and how these languages are associated with values in the given context. The analysis accounts for any ascription of values to the individual features when such ascription is independent of the ascription of value to the given language. Furthermore, the analysis accounts for the ways in which features, and the

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languages they are associated with, are positioned with respect to (groups of) speakers, and the analysis accounts for the ways in which speakers involved in the given interaction are positioned by themselves and each other with respect to the languages that are being relevant in the interaction (by being used or avoided). All of these lines of analysis take into account that the described associations are dynamic and negotiable. We would be pressed to obtain similar insights if we insist on analysing at the level of ‘languages’ (or ‘dialects’, ‘varieties’, ‘registers’, etc.). This being said, there is no doubt that the concept of ‘national languages’ is very strong. It is a political fact. The European educational systems would break down overnight if they were forced to teach language the way people really use language. The concept of national languages also has political implications. Some nations (Denmark is an example) prescribe language testing of applicants for citizenship, and interestingly enough such testing can be carried out by amateurs whose only skill is that they ‘know’ the language (for instance, police employees without the slightest trace of training in language assessment; see Fogtmann 2007). It seems to be considered self-evident that if you ‘know’ a language, then you can also judge whether other people ‘know’ it. This amounts to a sweeping categorisation of large groups of people with respect to specific ‘languages’. The concept of ‘languages’ as separate and bounded packages also pervades everyday life. The way we, including sociolinguists in everyday conversations, speak about language, language learning, and language behaviour is heavily influenced by the concept. If we want to describe language and go beyond this concept, we are sometimes forced into cumbersome expressions, of which we have used a few here (such as ‘a word that is generally taken to be English’ and not ‘an English word’). In other cases, we have just taken it for granted that the reader would understand our point. For instance, we have said about Maimuna that ‘she does not speak Turkish’. It should now be clear that by this, we mean that she ‘does not (know or) use (very many) features that are generally associated with Turkish (and particularly not grammatical ones)’. The traditional way of understanding what ‘languages’ are is not on its way out. It gives us problems, precisely because it is unclear how it relates to the behaviour of real people in the real world. One thing is socially constructed norms, another is individual behaviour. It follows from our observations that language is both individual and social. Language is individual in the sense that – as far as we know – no two people share precisely the same features, because they have met and now remember exactly the same words and meanings, the same pronunciations, associate the same meaning with everything, etc. For all we know about language, it is individual. On the other hand, language is also social – in the sense that every feature we do ‘know’ or ‘possess’, we share with somebody else. We cannot imagine a linguistic feature that is unique to one person (with the possible exception of an innovation that has still not been used by the innovator in interaction with others);

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the very basis of language is that it enables us to share experience, images, etc. Our relations to the socioculturally constructed phenomena called ‘languages’, etc. are thus social categorisations, not naturally given relations, and certainly not a consequence of the nature of language.

References Andersen, P. 1969. Dialektgeografiske kort. Københavns Universitet. Androutsopoulos, J. 2010. Ideologizing ethnolectal German. In S. Johnson & T.M. Milani (eds), Language Ideologies and Media Discourse. London: Continuum, pp. 182–202. Auer, P. 1995. The pragmatics of code-switching: A sequential approach. In L. Milroy & P. Muysken (eds), One Speaker, Two Languages: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on CodeSwitching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 115–135. Bailey, B. 2007. Heteroglossia and boundaries. In M. Heller (ed.), Bilingualism: A Social Approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 257–274. Blommaert, J. 2008. Grassroots Literacy: Writing, Identity and Voice in Central Africa. London: Routledge. Blommaert, J. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J., & Backus, A. 2011. Repertoires revisited: ‘Knowing language’ in superdiversity. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, #67. London: King’s College. Coupland, N. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davidsen-Nielsen, N., & Herslund, M. 1999. Dansk han med sin tjener talte. In N. Davidsen-Nielsen, E. Hansen, & P. Jarvad (eds), Engelsk eller ikke engelsk? That Is the Question. København: Gyldendal, pp. 11–18. Fogtmann, C. 2007. Samtaler med politiet: Interaktionsanalytiske studier af sprogtestning i danske naturalisationssamtaler. Københavns Universitet. Gumperz, J.J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hansegård, N.E. 1968. Tvåspråkighet eller halvspråkighet? Stockholm: Aldus. Heller, M. 2007. Bilingualism as ideology and practice. In M. Heller (ed.), Bilingualism: A Social Approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–22. Hudson, R.A. 1996. Sociolinguistics (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jaspers, J. 2007. In the name of science? On identifying an ethnolect in an Antwerp secondary school. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, #42. London: King’s College. Jørgensen, J.N. 2004. Languaging and Language Practices. Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism 36. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, pp. 125–149. Jørgensen, J.N. 2008. Poly-lingual languaging around and among children and adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism, 5(3): 161–176. Jørgensen, J.N. 2010. Languaging: Nine years of poly-lingual development of young Turkish-Danish grade school students, vol. I–II. Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism: The Køge Series, vol. K15–K16. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Leung, C., Harris, R., & Rampton, B. 1997. The idealised native speaker, reified ethnicities, and classroom realities. TESOL Quarterly, 31(3): 543–560.

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Madsen, L.M. 2008. Fighters and Outsiders: Linguistic Practices, Social Identities, and Social Relationships among Urban Youth in a Martial Arts Club. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. Madsen, L.M., Møller, J.S., & Jørgensen, J.N. 2010. ‘Street language’ and ‘integrated’ language use and enregisterment among late modern urban girls. In L.M. Madsen, J.S. Møller, & J.N. Jørgensen (eds), Ideological Constructions and Enregisterment of Linguistic Youth Styles. Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism vol. 55. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, pp. 81–113. Madsen, L.M., Karrebæk, M.S. & Møller, J.S. 2015. Everyday Languaging. Collaborative Research on the Language Use of Children and Youth. Berlin: Mouton. Maegaard, M. 2007. Udtalevariation og -forandring i københavnsk – en etnografisk undersøgelse af sprogbrug, social kategorier og social praksis blandt unge på en københavnsk folkeskole. Danske talesprog, Bind 8. København: C.A. Reitzel. Makoni, S., & Pennycook, A. 2006. Disinventing and reconstituting languages. In S. Makoni & A. Pennycook (eds), Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 1–41. Møller, J.S. 2009. Poly-Lingual Interaction across Childhood, Youth and Adulthood. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen. O’Rourke, B., & Aisling, N.B. 2007. Whose language is it? Struggles for language ownership in an Irish classroom. Paper presented to the International Conference on Minority Languages, July 2007. Rampton, B. 1995. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. Rampton, B. 1998. Language crossing and the redefinition of reality. In P. Auer (ed.), Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 290–317. Romaine, S. 1994. Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. New York: Oxford University Press. Türk Dil Kurumu. 1988. Türkçe Sözlük 1–2. Yeni Baskı. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basım Evi.

8 ‘A TYPICAL GENTLEMAN’ Metapragmatic Stereotypes as Systems of Distinction Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese

Introduction Superdiversity refers not only to the effects of new migration patterns, but also to the outcomes of generations of migration. Recent changes in the demography of urban centres do not, of course, erase the experience of established populations. In superdiverse contexts, as elsewhere, language in use has a significant role in shaping society. In this chapter, we analyse interactions in a Panjabi-heritage family and peer group, and suggest that social differences are regularly produced in the deployment of metapragmatic stereotypes. The study we report is the United Kingdom section of an international linguistic ethnographic research project, ‘Investigating Discourses of Inheritance and Identity in Four Multilingual European Settings’.1 The project investigated the range of language and literacy practices of multilingual young people in the four European settings, explored the cultural and social significance of these practices, and investigated how their language and literacy practices were used to negotiate inheritance and identities. The focus of the present chapter is linguistic ethnographic research conducted with students and teachers associated with a Panjabi complementary (also known as ‘community language’, or ‘heritage language’) school in Birmingham, UK. The main purpose of the school is to teach Panjabi to young people of ‘Panjabi heritage’. In this chapter, we consider the discursive means by which families and peer groups create systems of distinction between categories of persons. As we examined the abundance of linguistic material collected through observational field notes, interviews, and audio- and video-recordings, we noticed that very often, speakers commented on the way other people spoke, made verbal representations of other people’s speech, and invoked metapragmatic stereotypes to evaluate other people and, at times, themselves. This ‘metacommentary’

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(Rymes 2014) served as a resource to reproduce the existing social order. As such, metacommentary and the representation of metapragmatic stereotypes were recruited in the service of social relations with respect to class, ethnicity, and national belonging. In order to discuss the deployment of these resources, we first engage with the notions of ‘register’ and ‘stereotypes’.

Register People constantly evaluate each other, forming impressions based on a range of observable signs. Not the least of these signs are linguistic. That is, we think we know what people are like by listening to them speak. This is because, over time, certain ways of speaking come to be linked to, or associated with, certain social practices. These repertoires are ‘registers’, “historical formations caught up in group-relative processes of valorization and countervalorization, exhibiting change in both form and value over time” (Agha 2004: 25). Registers are not fixed, but are liable to change; they also overlap. Formation of a register, and change to the register, involves the identification of recurrent, or typical, speech forms as linked to recurrent, or typical, social practices (Møller & Jørgensen 2012). Agha points out that registers are reproduced and transmitted in a diverse range of settings, including within the family unit, and in certain professions: “one cannot become a doctor or lawyer, for example, without acquiring the forms of speech appropriate to the practices of medicine or law, or without an understanding of the values linked to their use” (2007: 156). Speakers use labels to describe linguistic repertoires (sets of linguistic resources) that are associated with certain social practices and types of persons; for example, in the present chapter, labels such as ‘public school’,2 ‘gentleman’, ‘Westerner’, and so on. Such labels provide a shorthand with which to make evaluative statements about speakers. In order to be ‘public school’, it is necessary to speak as those who attend public schools are believed to speak; in order to be described as a ‘gentleman’, it is a requirement to speak as we expect (or imagine) a ‘gentleman’ to speak. However, evaluations of people based on the way they speak is far more nuanced than merely ascribing them to broad social categories. A speaker’s linguistic repertoire may be the basis on which he/she is described as, for example, a ‘social climber’, ‘politically aware’, or ‘conservative’ (Gal 2009: 327). Evaluation of speakers based on their linguistic repertoires consists of metapragmatic discourse, “accounts which describe the pragmatics of speech forms” (Agha 2004: 26, emphasis in the original). Labelling of speech registers, descriptions of ‘typical’ speakers, correction of speakers’ language use, and positive or negative assessments of the social worth of the register are common metapragmatic discourses. Such discourses are only effective as evaluations because the register (or features of resources common to the register) observably recurs. We can only say ‘he’s such a social climber’ based on how someone speaks because a certain register, or a type of speech emblematic of the register, has come to be

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associated with certain social practices. The register, recurrrent over time, becomes ‘enregistered’ (Silverstein 1996); furthermore, metapragmatic evaluation of the register also recurs over time. Encounters with registers are not merely encounters with voices, but “encounters in which individuals establish forms of footing and alignment with voices indexed by speech and thus with social types of persons, real or imagined, whose voices they take them to be” (Agha 2005: 38). In practice, a register’s linguistic repertoires often comprise only a part of its semiotic range, as linguistic repertoires are routinely deployed in conjunction with non-linguistic signs (Agha 2007: 279). Attitudes to, and beliefs about, certain registers play an important role in creating systems of distinction between categories of persons. The creation of social boundaries through evaluation of groups of people based on how they typically speak and behave relies on ‘stereotypes’.

Stereotypes Reyes (2009) argues that stereotypes are not necessarily or always discriminatory and prejudicial. Nor is it crucial to determine whether they are ‘true’ or ‘false’. Rather, they are typical features, approximate descriptors that individuals need to move about the world. Without stereotypes, people would be unable to draw on prior understandings of objects or people (Reyes 2006: 6). Stereotypes are often constituted through metapragmatic evaluations (Silverstein 1993). Rymes (2014) refers to comment about language as ‘metacommentary’. In any interaction, metacommentary signals an understanding of what a sign means by pointing to that sign’s situated communicative value. Comments about how language is functioning are ‘metapragmatic’ because they are calling attention to how utterances are functioning in a particular context. This can happen explicitly, as when one of the young people in the study reported here says of her ‘posh’ friend, “Emily she talks like that,” and goes on to represent Emily’s voice in a stylised fashion. More often, however, metacommentary is not explicit, but signals the function of a communicative act through implicit metapragmatic activity. Rymes proposes that every utterance is saturated with metapragmatic function. ‘Metapragmatic stereotypes’ are essentialisations or reifications that are not only based on what others do; they also help us to deal with others, to do whatever we do with them or to them (Agha 1998). They are features with which speakers position themselves and others in socially meaningful ways (Reyes 2009: 53). They are not ideas in the head, but “observable behaviours that evaluate the pragmatic properties of linguistic expressions” (Agha 2007: 154). Typifications include the relation of some aspects of behaviour (predication) to a certain category of persons. Speakers may locate themselves as members of both a typical behaviour (including linguistic behaviour) and a particular person type. For typifications to develop into stereotypes, they must be shared at the level of groups or societies (Reyes 2006). Typifications “constitute stereotypes insofar as they recur in the reflexive evaluations of many language users” (Agha 2007: 279). That is, for evaluation of

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a register to be a stereotype, it is necessary for it to recur in the metapragmatic discourse of the many. This raises the question how many similar utterances constitute ‘recurrence’, and how many language users uttering similar metapragmatic evaluations constitutes ‘enough’ for an evaluation to become a stereotype. The answer lies in the context: a family unit may recurrently invoke metapragmatic typifications as a means of identifying the family as a group, reproducing social identification across generations; in other cases, stereotypes make possible “the large-scale replication of register stereotypes across social populations” (Agha 2004: 27). Reyes (2009) suggests that metapragmatic stereotypes are circulating resources that can be creatively recontextualised in interaction. Metapragmatic stereotypes are not only constituted in explicit commentary on typifications, but also in the stylised representation of typifications (Rampton 1995, 1999, 2006, 2013). That is, one of the ways in which speakers comment on how others speak, and therefore on how types of persons are, is by representing their speech in a way that sets it apart from the ongoing interaction. In the study reported here, stylisations of voices that do not straightforwardly ‘belong’ to the speakers recur with some regularity. Although these are not the main focus of the present article, the production of stereotypes is characterised by stylisations of ‘British’, ‘posh’, ‘African American Vernacular English’, and ‘American English’ voices. Some of these instances are merely playful, indeterminate, and difficult to pin down politically. Others resonate with ongoing commentary on social and ethnic categories. The circulation of stereotypes precipitates certain beliefs among individuals, but these are experienced “with varying degrees of intensity, durational constancy and force over a life span” (Agha 2007: 154). Agha (2003) and Reyes (2006) propose that the circulation of stereotypes occurs in speech chains, and “the existence of a stereotype relies on continuous streams of speech chains” (Reyes 2006: 6). The ‘speech chain’ metaphor, derived from Bakhtin, may need more nuanced elaboration to describe the emergence of stereotypical discourses in trajectories that can be circular, tangential, centrifugal, centripetal, convergent, dispersed, and so on. However, the notion of speech chains takes us some way at least towards an understanding of the transmission of stereotypes over time and across space. Reyes acknowledges that stereotypes can be fragile as well as stable, and circulated in media discourses with national and global reach, as well as in local discourses. In her ethnographic study of Asian American young people in the United States, Reyes found that although stereotypes were sometimes seen as oppressive, at other times they were appropriated as sources of power, good humour, and in-group cohesiveness. These various understandings of stereotypes made her aware of their “slippery and elusive” nature (2006: 16). She found that Asian Americans often stereotype themselves, and in doing so “stereotypes became intricate and flexible tools with which to fashion their identities and relationships with others” (Reyes 2006: 28). Reyes concludes that stereotypes “can be incorporated into people’s lives to various effects, and sought out as a means of identifying and imagining oneself, others, and connections between individuals and groups” (2009: 58).

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Investigation of the ways in which people interactionally define and deploy stereotypes in everyday speech contributes to an understanding of how participants perceive and construct their identities. In the remainder of this chapter, we consider how metapragmatic stereotypes are deployed in the identification and imagining of multilingual speakers in a city in the United Kingdom.

Research Methods The study reported here is a 30-month collaboration between universities in Birmingham, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Tilburg. In Copenhagen, researchers spent a year observing linguistic practices in a large secondary school with a multilingual student constituency; in Stockholm, researchers conducted detailed investigations in two bilingual schools (Sweden Finnish and Swedish Spanish); in Tilburg, researchers studied linguistic practices in a Chinese complementary school. The focus of the present chapter, though, is research conducted in a complementary school in Birmingham, UK. The main purpose of the school is to teach Panjabi to young people of ‘Panjabi heritage’. The school operates across two sites in Birmingham, on Saturdays throughout the academic year. Complementary schooling is additional to regular (full-time) schooling, and is largely funded by communities. Across the two sites at this school, there are 15 teachers and teaching assistants, teaching 200 pupils who range from the ages of 5 to 18 years. The teachers do not have teaching qualifications officially recognised in the UK, but do have qualifications in Panjabi. Researchers spent five months observing and writing field notes in all classes in the school. At the end of this initial five months of observation in all classes in the school, one class on each site was identified for closer observation. In negotiation with the teachers of these classes, two students and the teacher and teaching assistant in each class were identified as ‘key participants’, for focused observation. After further observations in these two classrooms, the key participant students, teachers, and teaching assistants were issued with digital voice recorders so that they could audio-record themselves during class time. The key participants were also asked to use the digital voice recorders outside of the classroom to record their (and their families’ and friends’) linguistic repertoires at home and in other environments. The researchers also interviewed 15 key stakeholders in the schools, including the key participant teachers and administrators, and the key participant children and their parents. In addition, classroom sessions on each of the sites were video-recorded. The three interactional examples we present in this chapter are more or less similar to many others collected over the course of fieldwork in Birmingham. Two of the recordings were made at home by Prabhjot, a teaching assistant, and one was recorded at home by Komal, a student. In Example 1, 19-year-old Prabhjot is at home with her friend Shivani (18), and her younger sister, Sushil (15). They are discussing which restaurant they should choose to celebrate Prabhjot’s birthday.

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Example 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Prabhjot: I think Jamie Oliver’s Jamie Oliver’s Shivani: I’ve heard that’s really expensive you know Sheetal she told me it’s five pounds for a bowl of chips Prabhjot: yeah but it’s a birthday party it’s for your birthday it’s Sushil: and it’s Italian he doesn’t do pizza Prabhjot: he does do pizza Shivani: he’s famous for his fish Prabhjot: fish is meant to be good Shivani: I don’t like fish Sushil: neither do I, I like fish fingers I don’t like fish Shivani: I like fillet o’ fish but I don’t like fish Prabhjot: fillet o’ fish is nasty Shivani: (XXX) Sushil: and I don’t like I don’t like fish and chips like why would you have fish and chips for? Shivani: I haven’t had McDonald’s in ages Prabhjot: because British people are famous for fish and chips Shivani: [stylised ‘posh’ English accent:] well it’s British food that’s why Sushil: still Prabhjot: what do you mean still? So Jamie Oliver’s out of the question? Sushil: yeah it’s expensive Shivani: what about erm Sushil: [shouts:] Pizza Hut Prabhjot: no we went Pizza Hut last week

This is everyday conversation of an unremarkable kind, as the three young women negotiate their preferences for certain restaurants, and balance these against affordability. Prabhjot makes clear her preference for Jamie Oliver’s, both directly (line 1) and in response to her interlocutors (4, 6, 8). She also expresses a dislike for one of the menu options at McDonald’s (12). However, for the purposes of our argument here, lines 14–18 are salient. The discussion of the relative merits of fish dishes at McDonald’s and Jamie Oliver’s segues into Sushil’s assertion, “I don’t like fish and chips,” followed immediately by her question, “why would you have fish and chips for?” Her sister answers with the deployment of a familiar stereotype: “because British people are famous for fish and chips.” Shivani responds to the question with a similar explanation, but in doing so assumes a highly stylised ‘posh’ English accent: “well it’s British food that’s why.” Prabhjot’s invocation of the stereotype that British people like the typically traditional food presupposes the category ‘British people’ as a certain (if generalised) type. Shivani’s highly exaggerated representation of a ‘British’ voice, in “stylised posh” (Rampton 2006), represents a ‘British’ voice that appears to negatively evaluate the ‘British’

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group. In his discussion of stylised ‘posh’ and ‘Cockney’, Rampton proposes that it is key to ask what kinds of politics stylisation seems to be associated with – “what aspirations, solidarities or oppositions?” (2006: 269). At the same time, Rampton cautions against too easily reading off identity positions from what may after all be no more than playful banter. In the episode here, the young women may be making a comment on a type of ‘Britishness’ that is characterised by a voice associated with the elite upper classes. That is, the deployment of stylised ‘posh’ may be a comment on social hierarchies, as is persuasively demonstrated by Rampton (2006). However, it is more likely that the stereotype, which includes ‘British people’ and ‘British food’, and is represented in a stylised ‘British’ accent, serves as a resource to reproduce an in-group cohesiveness (Reyes 2006) among the young women, who (at least in this moment, and in this space) do not identify themselves as ‘British’. The stereotype of Britishness invokes the British as ‘other’, as Prabhjot, Shivani, and Sushil identify who they are by defining who they are not. In Example 2, a student, Komal (17), is at home having dinner with her brother Pavandeep (19), her younger sisters Manika (15) and Amrita (14), and her mother and father. Komal and her sisters are students at an independent, fee-paying school that had consistently been ranked top of the national examination league tables, and which had been nominated ‘Independent School of the Year’. Their father was a doctor, and their mother a qualified nurse. In the interaction here, Komal and her father have returned from a visit to Cardiff University for an ‘open day’, as Komal is considering applying to the university to study Medicine. A further dimension of the context here is that the family had recently sold their house in another part of the country and moved to Birmingham.

Example 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Komal: yea New York cheesecake is good New York cheesecake is good Pavandeep: don’t be racist but not many things American are good Komal: oh I hate Americans but New York cheesecake is good yea their music is pretty good yea Pavandeep: no that was a pretty sweeping statement but no I was just using it to get away from the (xxxx) Komal: so wireless internet yep sorted [laughter] you kinda fold it mum Manika: you know you know the guy who bought the house I always thought that he got married you know you know you see adverts on the computer 10 they’re like [loudly, media voice:] find your Russian match [laughter] 11 Komal: [loudly, media voice:] Russian women take care of their men 12 Manika: Russian women like Asian no no what was it like er European men they say

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13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Komal: something like that Manika: really weird Amrita: does he have children? Mother: very English Father: [laughing] no (xxxx) they like English they like English men because Russian men are usually drunks Komal: yea Mother: he’s very English Komal: and English men are drunks as well Manika: that’s the Irish Father: he’s he’s old school old money you can tell he’s public school Komal: ah so he’s a gentleman Father: typical gentleman Manika: his voice Komal: [stylised ‘posh’ English:] so is Emily she talks like that Komal can you tell me about Cardiff when you go there [normal speaking voice:] yeah ok [stylised ‘posh’ English:] thank you Father: so when we saw the dissecting room and all the students Manika: the what Komal: dissecting room it’s like it’s like a warehouse of dead bodies it’s kinda cool Father: but Manika: does it smell Father: but Komal Komal: smells of [loudly, faux American accent:] formaldehyde Father: Komal noticed the accents of the of the students Komal: [shouts:] none of them were Welsh I loved it Father: there were no there was a Komal: they were all from England Manika: were they Irish? Komal: no it was one Irish bloke but they were all from England Father: what type of school did they go to mainly? Komal: oh they were all yeah of course they were public school Father: mainly public schools

The interaction is replete with stereotypes, ranging from typifications of national characteristics to metapragmatic evaluations of types of persons based on their accent. An initial exchange between Komal and her brother is broadly antiAmerican (lines 1–4). In his comments “don’t be racist but,” “that was a pretty sweeping statement,” and “I was just using it to get away from,” Pavandeep offers a metacommentary (Rymes 2014) on his own deployment of stereotypes.

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Silverstein (1993) refers to “denotationally explicit metapragmatic signs” that draw attention to the stereotype at the same time as deploying it as a resource. In line 8, Manika initiates gossip about the man who bought their previous house. This is not proscribed, but received with enthusiasm, and therefore appears to be a normative register (and is consistent with other audio-recorded interactions in this family setting). Two stereotypes are introduced in Manika’s intervention (lines 8–10), one of which represents a type of man who finds a wife on international dating sites, and the other of which typifies Russian women who offer themselves for sale as Internet brides. The stereotype is represented through direct speech, in a metapragmatic evaluation of both the social practice of buying and selling spouses in online sites, and certain types of ‘Russian women’. Manika’s somewhat stylised representation of the media voice of commercial advertising (“find your Russian match”) is taken up and recontextualised by her sister, Komal: “Russian women take care of their men.” Although Manika slightly fluffs her lines in attempting to keep the mini-drama going (line 12), the production of these metapragmatic stereotypes works to partition off the sisters from the sort of people who engage in cross-national online dating. The interpretation that this evaluative metapragmatic discourse is a ‘family register’ gains ground as the girls’ father joins in, jokingly adding that “they like English men because Russian men are usually drunks” (lines 17–18). Here, the stereotype is extended, as certain social practices (drunkenness) are held to be associated with certain types of people (Russian men). The stereotype of the drunk is then associated with other stereotypes, in Komal’s assertion that “English men are drunks as well” (21), and Manika’s correction “that’s the Irish” (22). Despite apparently casting their net wide in their attribution of drunkenness to several national stereotypes, this is far from random. The typification is recognisable as a stereotype because it has been said before in other times and places. That is, certain evaluative discourses about certain social practices recur in the mouths of the many, and come to precipitate certain beliefs about groups of people. In the family discourse, the stereotype relates aspects of behaviour (drunkenness) to a certain category of persons (Russian, English, and Irish men). While Komal, Manika, and their father are representing national stereotypes in relation to drunkenness, the girls’ mother quietly repeats that the man who bought their house was “very English” (lines 16 and 20). Here, ‘very’ acts in the same way as ‘typical’, or ‘always’, as a discursive feature that “indexes typicality” (Reyes 2009: 51). The phrase ‘very English’ relies on the interlocutors having a common knowledge, or presupposed understanding, of what constitutes ‘English’. It also seems to rely on the notion that Englishness is a continuum, rather than an absolute state. As the interaction progresses, it appears that ‘Englishness’ is indexed by the way the ‘guy’ sounds when he speaks. Father says, “he’s old school, old money, you can tell he’s public school” (line 23). Here, ‘old school’, ‘old money’, and ‘public school’ are all typifications that index a particular social class, and a particular

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type of person. Perhaps more significant still, however, is the phrase ‘you can tell’. This may refer to appearance and behaviour – perhaps the English man wears a cravate, combs his hair in a certain way, or keeps a stiff upper lip. However, Manika’s response is “his voice” (26). It is clear in the audio recording that Manika is referring to the gentleman’s voice, and that both Manika and her father are making metapragmatic evaluations of the English man based on his speech. If this is at first implicit metapragmatic commentary (Rymes 2014), it becomes explicit in the interaction. Komal responds to her father’s “you can tell he’s public school” with “so he’s a gentleman” (24), and Komal’s father in turn explicitly indexes typicality in the phrase “typical gentleman” (25). The typification appears to refer more to the English man’s voice than to other signs. This is borne out in the succeeding utterance from Komal, in which she adopts a highly stylised ‘posh English’ accent to refer to her friend Emily, saying “so is Emily.” Assuming that Emily is not a ‘typical gentleman’, Komal appears to indicate that her friend has at least one of the defining characteristics of the English gentleman’s social position: a particular way of talking that is typical of a certain social class. Komal’s metacommentary here is of two types. First, she explicitly comments on Emily’s speech: “she talks like that.” Then she represents a stylised version of Emily’s voice, in a mini-drama in which Komal plays the role of Emily in a stylised posh English accent (“Komal can you tell me about Cardiff when you go there”), then of herself (“yeah ok”), and then ‘posh’ Emily again (“thank you”). Both types of metapragmatic evaluation, the explicit comment and the stylised representation, are examples of metacommentary, as Komal calls attention to how a certain accent constitutes a distinction between herself and Emily, and by association between her family and the ‘typical gentleman’. The family appears to align with neither the typical gentleman stereotype nor with ‘old money’. In her interview with us, Komal said, “I remember my granddad telling me stories about how ‘I came to this country with £3 in my pocket you know, I worked as a bus driver’.” If anything, Komal positions her family as a self-made business success: “they have a string of nursing homes, like a chain of them.” In this context, it is clear that her father’s reference to ‘old money’ constitutes the deployment of a metapragmatic stereotype that distances him and his family from the social group represented by the typification. In the remainder of the interaction (lines 30–45), Komal’s father is determined to relate a mini-narrative of the visit to Cardiff University, prompting his daughter to tell the story, saying, “Komal noticed the accents of the students” (37). Here, Komal’s father remarks on Komal’s comments on the communicative value of the students’ accents, in what might be described as ‘meta-metacommentary’. Komal does not immediately pick up the hint and make the point her father wants her to, shouting in response, “none of them were Welsh, I loved it.” Her addition that “they were all from England” does not satisfy her father as the account he wants retold. He is finally forced to offer Komal a more explicit prompt, “what

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type of school did they go to mainly?” (line 43), and she takes it up in the required way, “yeah of course they were public school.” Now satisfied with Komal’s answer, he repeats, “mainly public schools.” Accent is more than a set of phonological features. Rather, it “invokes a social schema that relationally situates particular categories of persons as linked to differential sound patterns. Only within such systems of distinction do accents gain meaning” (Reyes 2006: 37). At stake here is social positioning. This is a family apparently at ease with its status – socially mobile, aspirational, relatively affluent, with younger members either at university (Pavandeep) or attending a much sought-after fee-paying high school (Komal, Manika, Amrita). In their metapragmatic commentary on others, they position themselves in nuanced and shifting ways. For sure, they do not see themselves as aligned with drunken Russian, English, or Irish men, nor with people who engage in Internet dating. They are not that sort of family. At the same time, they distance themselves from the ‘typical gentleman’, and from Komal’s posh friend, Emily. They do not view themselves as ‘old school’, or ‘old money’ – the stereotype of traditional ‘posh’ Englishness becomes a resource that enables them to say who they are by pointing to who they are not. They do not orient towards the version of ‘public school’ represented by the stereotype of the typical English gentleman, and in the stylisation of Emily’s voice; but the second invocation of ‘public school’, perhaps imposed upon Komal by her father, reads as double-voiced. It is not clear that Komal and her father create the same distance between themselves and the ‘public school’ university students as between themselves and the public school typical gentleman. It may be that at the same time as keeping clear water between themselves and the posh public school stereotype, their (or at least the father’s) orientation is towards the public school students in the university department to which Komal is applying. It may be that Komal’s father sees such students as good company for his daughter to keep. In the third example, as in the first, the teaching assistant Prabhjot (19 years) recorded herself at home with her friend Shivani (19) and her sister Sushil (15). Here, they are watching on television a trailer for the 2011 film West is West.

Example 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Prabhjot: what you watchin’? [Trailer for the film West Is West is playing in the background] Shivani: West Is West Prabhjot: we should watch that Shivani: West Is West? I’m not (.) yeah Prabhjot: but you have to watch East Is East first Shivani: I haven’t seen East Is East Sushil: my mum and dad have

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Prabhjot: it was on the other day [coughs] it was on More4 Shivani: well I’m sorry if my Sky dish has Prabhjot: well it went off Shivani: [laughs:] well what’s East Is East about? Sushil: him when he’s little Prabhjot: it’s about Sajid when he was a kid Shivani: whos Sajid? Prabhjot: Sajid’s a boy Shivani: ha my supervisor’s name’s Sajid ha sorry Prabhjot: no and it’s about how the dad’s like a control freak and he wants ’em to be more Asian but they’re not they’re like typical typical Angrezi

Shivani: Westerners? Typical Angrezi Sushil: [shouts:] Sajid’s getting married Prabhjot: oh that’s why they’re in Pakistan? [coughs:] I thought cos he’s [Sajid’s older brother] getting married Shivani: is this basically a follow up from East Is East? Prabhjot: yeah Shivani: ah crap I need to Prabhjot: it’s like in twenty how many years time? I think after ten years Shivani: when was East Is East made? Prabhjot: 1999 or 2000 (3) the dad looks really old now (.) Om Puri Shivani: [laughs] Prabhjot: no in the old one they had his old obviously old cos made in 1960 something supposedly so the old Bollywood songs should hear mom sing along to em (5) He’s like a dirty git though this is like a dirty film Shivani: I think that’s probably why I didn’t watch it before ’cos my mum and dad were like she can’t watch it Prabhjot: yeah but my parents have let us watch it’s not super dirty they’ve like Shivani: I wasn’t into all this though. Prabhjot: now you are? [West Is West trailer ends] Shivani: it looks funny Prabhjot: you were more like a gori back in the day though Shivani: huh? Prabhjot: you you were more like a gori back in the day Shivani: still am to be honest Sushil: shall I show you the trailer? Prabhjot: it’s only now Shivani: it’s only when I hang around with you lot I don’t Sushil: look East Is East this is the trailer Shivani: when I’m in uni the other side comes out

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49 Prabhjot: she’s like a typical gori 50 Shivani: and when I’m at work it’s just mixture The story is set in Manchester in 1975, and is a sequel to another film by the same writer, East Is East. In the film, an immigrant from Pakistan, George Khan, is worried that his youngest son, Sajid, now 15, is turning his back on his Pakistani heritage, so he decides to take him for a visit to Pakistan. In the young people’s discussion about the film, stereotypes constitute resources through which they locate themselves socially in nuanced ways. After some initial discussion, Prabhjot briefly explains the plot of the film: “it’s about how the dad’s like a control freak and he wants ’em to be more Asian but they’re not, they’re like typical, typical Angrezi” (lines 18–19). Just as Komal’s mother’s “very English” in Example 2 implies a continuum, so does Prabhjot’s “more Asian.” Asianness, like Englishness, is performable and negotiable, rather than a fixed, immutable state. Shivani joins in with Prabhjot’s utterance (line 20), repeating “typical Angrezi” to consensually affirm her point. In referring to ‘Angrezi’, Prabhjot and Shivani construct a category to which they do not appear to belong. The category seems to refer to ethnicity rather than nationality, and to ‘white English people’, or, in Shivani’s alternative, “typical Westerners.” The explicit recognition of this typification (in the repetition of ‘typical’) is a further example of Silverstein’s (1993) denotationally explicit metapragmatic sign. Again, ‘typical’ acts as a discursive feature that indexes typicality (Reyes 2006: 104). Here, though, ‘typical’ is a discursive feature that does a particular kind of work: the phrases ‘typical Angrezi’ and ‘typical Westerners’ rely on what Reyes (2006) refers to as a ‘local’ rather than a ‘widespread’ typification. ‘Typical Angrezi’ and ‘typical Westerners’ index a stereotype of a certain kind of social practice that identifies some Asian people as ‘Westerner’ or ‘Angrezi’. That is, ‘typical’ here is almost antithetical, as it denotes not a typical Westerner, or a typical English man in the sense in which the phrase ‘typical gentleman’ did when used by Komal’s father (Example 2). Rather, it denotes a person of Asian heritage (whether or not born in Britain or elsewhere in the ‘West’) whose behaviour (including linguistic behaviour) and/or appearance is identifiably oriented towards a Western, or English, identity position. Reyes (2006) argues that some typifications are localised within certain groups, and proposes that (for example) while the stereotype of the ‘Asian shopkeeper’ in the US is widespread, the stereotype of the ‘Asian minivan driver’ is more localised. In the case here, while the ‘typical gentleman’ and the ‘Westerner’ are widely circulating stereotypes, the domains within which the ‘typical Angrezi’ stereotype circulates are likely to be more restricted. ‘Typical’ here does not straightforwardly index typicality; rather, it is a shorthand for ‘typical Asian oriented behaviourally or in appearance towards a Western/Angrezi identity’. It is restricted and ‘local’ because it is a stereotype that is more likely to circulate among people of Asian heritage than among others.

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As the three young women continue to chat, they are watching the trailer to the film on television. It is clear from repeated listenings to the audio recording that Prabhjot is expressing pride in her mother’s knowledge of the old Bollywood songs when she says: “should hear mom sing along to ’em” (line 32). A section of the trailer portrays the protagonist, Sajid, with his (male) Pakistani cousin, as they watch a group of young women carrying water jugs. In the dialogue, Sajid says, “I want to find Munir [his brother] a wife.” The shot cuts to a close-up of women milking a cow. Sajid’s cousin says wistfully, “I think I would like to get married soon.” Sajid’s comic rejoinder is, “If they all milk cows like that, I might [get married].” Both boys laugh uproariously. It is while watching this moment in the film trailer that Prabhjot says, “He’s like a dirty git though, this is like a dirty film” (line 33). This comment precipitates a negotiation between Shivani and Prabhjot, in which Shivani explains that her parents would not allow her to watch such a film (lines 34–35), while Prabhjot recovers ground, positioning her own family as more liberal than Shivani’s, and more liberal than Prabhjot herself had seemed a moment ago: “yeah but my parents have let us watch, it’s not super dirty” (line 36). Prabhjot appears to indicate that in her family, somewhere between ‘dirty’ and ‘super dirty’, there lies a liminal space through which leads a permitted (if not permissive) path. The negotiation between Shivani and Prabhjot relies on a stereotype of Asian families as relatively illiberal in granting permission to their children to engage with some aspects of popular culture. At first, Prabhjot is willing to inhabit the stereotype (“this is like a dirty film”); a moment later, however, she steps outside of the stereotype, positioning her family and herself as relatively liberal (“my parents have let us watch, it’s not super dirty”). The typification becomes a resource with which Prabhjot is able to negotiate her subject position, shifting her ground slightly on the continuum from proscription to permission. When Shivani takes a neutral course, saying that anyway she “wasn’t into all this,” and the film “looks funny,” Prabhjot invokes another typification, saying that her friend was “more like a gori (‘white girl’) back in the day.” In her interview, Prabhjot told us that she was born in Birmingham, while her father was born in Tanzania before moving to India at the age of 2, and then England at the age of 5. Her mother was born in Panjab and moved to the UK when she married. She said, “my life is more or less Panjabi Panjabi and more Panjabi.” Prabhjot’s biography forms part of the context of her metacommentary on her friend’s identity positioning. In the study, we heard a number of references to typifications of ‘gori’ identity positions (see also Rampton 2013). As with ‘Englishness’ and ‘Asianness’ (and, elsewhere in the study, ‘Indianness’; see Blackledge et al. 2013), it is possible to be more or less like a ‘gori’, depending on the performance of certain behaviours. Shivani initially sounds perplexed, and Prabhjot repeats her point (line 42). Shivani then accepts Prabhjot’s analysis, saying “still am to be honest” (43), as she “willingly inhabits the stereotype” (Reyes 2006: 107). In fact, she goes further, suggesting that when she is with Prabhjot

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and Sushil, she is less like a ‘gori’; when she is at university, “the other side comes out” (48); and when she is at work, “it’s just a mixture” (50). Shivani seems comfortable that she is able to inhabit different stereotypes in different social settings. Prabhjot, however, insists (in the third person now) that “she’s like a typical gori.” Here again, ‘typical’ indexes a typification, but does not straightforwardly index a typical ‘white girl’; rather, it is again a shorthand for ‘typical Asian oriented behaviourally towards a white girl identity’. As before, this is a subtle and nuanced local stereotype, but is no less significant for that. It is not certain which features of the behaviour of the characters in the film West Is West mark them out as ‘typical Angrezi’; nor is it certain which features of Shivani’s behaviour lead her friend to refer to her as a ‘typical gori’. However, it is likely that in both cases, these features include aspects of linguistic behaviour. The nominations ‘typical Angrezi’ and ‘typical gori’ are therefore examples of metacommentary, in each case metapragmatic evaluations of a set of signs that include the way Shivani and the characters in the film speak.

Discussion In the evidence considered here, and in fact throughout the material collected in this project, typifications of the pragmatics of language use and associated signs emerge as resources through which speakers position themselves and others in socially meaningful ways. Frequently evaluative, these metapragmatic stereotypes ratify or rectify behaviour, and in so doing reproduce social positions. The reproductive strategies that privileged families produce, including the deployment of metapragmatic stereotypes as a resource, “have the effect of contributing to the reproduction of existing positions in the social order” (Bourdieu 2000: 145). Rampton defines ‘class’ as “a sensed social difference that people and groups produce in interaction” (2010: 3), and points out that people carry class hierarchy around inside them, acting it out in the fine grain of ordinary life. When we look closely, we are able to pick it out in the conduct of just a few individuals. One set of resources commonly deployed in the production of social difference is metapragmatic stereotypes. Rampton (2005) argues that if we want to find out about class-consciousness, we need to get closer to how people respond to one another as they go about their daily business. When we look closely at interactions between family members in Birmingham, metapragmatic stereotypes become evident as an aspect of the “ways of being and doing” constituted in the transmission of values, virtues, and competencies, which are the basis of the sense of distinction, in privileged families (Bourdieu 1984: 77). Metacommentary and metapragmatic stereotypes are resources with which this family reproduces social difference in interaction. In his study of the peer-group speech of young people in multi-ethnic settings in the UK, Rampton found that the young people’s stylised, reflexive language

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use “tacitly ratified and reproduced the semiotically marked distinctions and hierarchies that configure British social class” (2011: 1241). In peer-group interactions between young people of Panjabi heritage in Birmingham, subtle social distinctions were reproduced and negotiated. Families and peer groups thus have a powerful and important role in the reproduction and transmission of norms. Evaluation of the speech of others takes a number of forms here. One means of metacommentary is explicit, for example strategically stylising the voices of others. When Shivani (Example 1) speaks in a stylised ‘posh’ English accent to comment on the stereotypically English meal of fish and chips (“it’s British food that’s why”), she evaluatively comments on a stereotype of Britishness, and positions herself as one who does not (straightforwardly, at this moment and in this place) belong to the group represented by the stereotype. Similarly, but in a slightly more complex way, when Komal (Example 2) adopts a highly stylised ‘posh English’ accent to represent her friend Emily, she makes both implicit and explicit evaluations of the social class, and perhaps the type of person, to which (in her view) Emily belongs. Another dimension of metacommentary is a more direct evaluation (rather than stylised representation) of other people’s voices. In their commentary on the man who bought their previous home, Komal’s family refers more to his voice than to other signs. Komal’s father categorises the man as ‘old money’, ‘old school’, ‘public school’, and a ‘typical gentleman’. The main evidence for this evaluation appears to be the way the man speaks. Although certain metrics may suggest that they are not of a very different social class from the house buyer, the family members position themselves at some distance from him. They do so by deploying metapragmatic stereotypes of the ‘typical’ English gentleman. Metacommentary, a metapragmatic evaluation of how language functions in particular cases, allows the family to articulate their consensus position that they are not the same as the typical gentleman, or those he symbolically represents. Metacommentary allows the family members to position themselves in nuanced ways. They are also capable of the deployment of cruder typifications, as we see in the discussion of national stereotypes. Not all of the stereotypes in play in these interactions are as straightforward as that of the ‘Russian drunk’, however. Metapragmatic stereotypes may be contested, negotiated, imposed, and willingly inhabited. They may also be apparently contradictory. In Example 3, ‘typical’ has different connotations when describing ‘Angrezi’, ‘Westerner’, and ‘gori’ subject positions than when describing the ‘typical gentleman’ of Example 2. A common (indeed typical) discursive feature that indexes typicality when metapragmatic stereotypes are deployed as a resource, here ‘typical’ when applied to ‘Angrezi’, ‘Westerner’, and ‘gori’, has a more subtle meaning than merely indexing clearly observable social regularities of metapragmatic typification. In fact, rather than ascribing to the person concerned, the observable behaviours of a stereotype of white, English people, ‘typical’ refers to

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a stereotype of a person of Asian heritage with some observable orientation towards a white, English subject position. A local rather than widespread metapragmatic stereotype, circulating within limited parameters, it nonetheless is deployed to evaluatively comment on certain behaviours. We also saw that stereotypes may be ‘inhabited’ as well as deployed as evaluations of others. Shivani willingly ascribes to herself characteristics with which her friend Prabhjot seeks to negatively evaluate her, agreeing that she is a “typical gori,” but that “when I’m in uni the other side comes out,” and “when I’m at work it’s just mixture.” Shivani seems comfortable inhabiting different stereotypes in different times and spaces. Metapragmatic discourse is underpinned by particular cultural values and beliefs that appear naturalised (Silverstein 1993). In the evidence here, a peer group and a family deploy metapragmatic discourse to reinforce certain cultural values and beliefs, and at times to negotiate a path between certain sets of values and beliefs. In play here are the aspirations, solidarities, and oppositions (Rampton 2006) of young people and their families. These include orientations to social class, nationality, ethnicity, gender, transnationalism, and identities, which are reproduced in the deployment of metapragmatic stereotypes, through metacommentary on other people’s speech, and in evaluative stylisation of the voices of others. We have seen that the social life of language, and of language users, is pervasively organised through and around reflexive activities (Agha 2007). A focus on the reflexive activity of metapragmatic stereotypes has much to offer in understanding the organisation and reproduction of social life. The changing set of conditions and social configurations that constitutes the diversification of diversity in contemporary life (Vertovec 2014) is not, of course, limited to changes in the ethnic or linguistic make-up of Western populations. Rather, we have seen greater complexity in residents’ differential legal statuses, divergent labour market experiences, discrete configurations of gender and age, and patterns of spatial distribution (Vertovec 2007). Blommaert and Rampton (2011) argue that with this greater complexity has come a limit to the predictability of the category of ‘migrant’ and of his/her sociocultural features. However, in this chapter, we propose that the complexity of superdiversity incorporates not only apparently new demographies, but also old, established distinctions. Unpredictability coexists with predictability, and both are features of the complexity of superdiversity. In order to understand the new complexity, we should be careful not to (in the English idiom) ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’. Established social patterns and structures of power are recognisable as we peel away the layers of superdiversity. They become clearly visible when we focus our gaze on metapragmatic stereotypes as the means by which language reproduces social relations.

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Notes 1. The project ‘Investigating discourses of inheritance and identities in four multilingual European settings’ (09-HERA-JRP-CD-FP-051) is a 30-month collaboration between universities in Birmingham, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Tilburg, and financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info), which is cofunded by AHRC, AKA, DASTI, ETF, FNR, FWF, HAZU, IRCHSS, MHEST, NWO, RANNIS, RCN, VR, and the European Community FP7 2007–2013, under the Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities programme. The research team was as follows: Adrian Blackledge, Jan Blommaert, Angela Creese, Liva Hyttel-Sørensen, Carla Jonsson, Jens Normann Jørgensen, Kasper Juffermans, Sjaak Kroon, Jarmo Lainio, Jinling Li, Marilyn Martin-Jones, Anu Muhonen, Lamies Nassri, and Jaspreet Kaur Takhi. 2. Here, ‘public school’ refers to the elite, fee-paying (that is, ‘private’) school sector in the United Kingdom.

References Agha, A. 1998. Stereotypes and registers of honorific language. Language in Society, 27: 151–193. Agha, A. 2003. The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication, 23(3): 231–273. Agha, A. 2004. Registers of language. In A. Duranti (ed.), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. New York/Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 23–45. Agha, A. 2005. Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1): 38–59. Agha, A. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blackledge, A., Creese, A., & Takhi, J.K. 2013. Beyond multilingualism: Heteroglossia in practice. In S. May (ed.), The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual Education. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 191–215. Blommaert, J., & Rampton, B. 2011. Language and superdiversity. Diversities, 13(2): 1–22. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. New York/London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gal, S. 2009. Perspective and the politics of representation. In A. Reyes & A. Lo (eds), Beyond Yellow English. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 325–330. Møller, J., & Jørgensen, J.N. 2012. Enregisterment among adolescents in superdiverse Copenhagen. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, #28. Rampton, B. 1995. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. Rampton, B. 1999. Styling the other: Introduction. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3(4): 421–427. Rampton, B. 2005. Late modernity and social class: The view from sociolinguistics. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies. London: King’s College. Rampton, B. 2006. Language in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, B. 2010. Social class and sociolinguistics. Applied Linguistics Review, 1 (ed. Li Wei): 1–22. Rampton, B. 2011. Style contrasts, migration and social class. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(5): 1236–1250. Rampton, B. 2013. Contemporary urban vernaculars. In J. Nortier & B.A. Svendsen (eds), Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century: Linguistic Practices across Urban Spaces. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 24–44. Reyes, A. 2006. Language, Identity, and Stereotype among Southeast Asian American Youth: The Other Asian. New York/London: Routledge.

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Reyes, A. 2009. Asian American Stereotypes as Circulating Resource. In A. Reyes & A. Lo (eds), Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 43–62. Rymes, B. 2014. Marking communicative repertoire through metacommentary. In A. Blackledge & A. Creese (eds), Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy. New York: Springer, pp. 301–316. Silverstein, M. 1993. Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In J. Lucy (ed.), Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 33–57. Silverstein, M. 1996. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. In R. Ide, R. Parker, & Y. Sunaoshi (eds), SALSA III: Proceedings of the Third Annual Symposium about Language and Society. Austin, pp. 266–295. Vertovec, S. 2007. Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6): 1024–1054. Vertovec, S. 2014. Reading ‘super-diversity’. In B. Anderson & M. Keith (eds), Migration: A COMPAS Anthology. Oxford: COMPAS.

9 MOBILITY, VOICE, AND SYMBOLIC RESTRATIFICATION An Ethnography of ‘Elite Migrants’ in Urban China Jie Dong

Introduction Social class is a highly contested notion in contemporary Chinese society because of its historical development. Nevertheless, one can observe the progressive formation of new social groups and hear articulation of class-consciousness in everyday social practices (Lu 2002; Li 2007a, 2007b). A case in point here is that after 30 years of accelerated economic growth, a sizable new ‘middle class’ is emerging as a social layer in China, often consisting of people who have relocated to the country’s urban centres such as Beijing and Shanghai with higher academic or professional qualifications. Given the peculiar historical development of China’s social classes, it can be problematic to identify them using ‘hard’ criteria such as income, occupation, education, and social origin. Consequently, ‘soft’ criteria, such as semiotic resources, lifestyle, and taste, offer alternative perspectives on and insights into social classification. This chapter investigates the deployment of semiotic resources by a group of highly mobile ‘elite migrants’, in an attempt to understand social change and class (re)stratification that characterise contemporary Chinese society. The elite migrant participants of the present study are a group of Saab car possessors who have moved to and lived in Shanghai for a prolonged period of time, and have situated themselves in the middle strata of the host society. An expanding body of literature addresses the recent phenomenal migration inside China (Han 2001; Lu & Zhang 2001; Zhang et al. 2003; Fan 2004, 2005; Woronov 2004; Lu 2005), and the linguistic aspects of labour migrants attract increasing research attention (e.g. Dong 2009, 2011; Dong & Blommaert 2009, 2010). However, we know little about the sociolinguistic aspects of elite migrants beyond the fact that they have a number of languages or language varieties at

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their disposal, and that they go through an upscaling process in which they are able to draw on their linguistic resources and negotiate their positions in the social order of the host society. Elite migrants often escape research attention, partly because in the field of migration studies the emphasis tends to be placed on marginality and inequality. Getting more in-depth understanding of elite migrants becomes a more pressing issue as they bring along with them diverse cultural and linguistic features, and together with labour migrants, transform urban centres into superdiverse metropolises (Vertovec 2006, 2007; Blommaert 2011a). Superdiversity is a notion coined to describe a new form of transnational migration since the late 1980s. The transnationalism is characterised by an unprecedented diversification of migrants, in terms of their nationality, ethnicity, religion, culture, language, migration motives, patterns, practices, trajectories, and migrants’ insertion into the host societies (Vertovec 2010). Both types of migration investigated in this study – labour as well as elite migration – are part of the bigger and more general process of globalisation, in which we observe fast flows of capital, people, goods, and information across country borders and across continents (Blommaert 2011b). Along with the increase of GDP and the development of a huge industrial proletariat, the emergence of elite migrants is also a social and cultural effect of globalisation in China. In what follows, I will distinguish two sets of semiotic resources that the elite migrant participants have control of: first, their linguistic repertoire of mobility, and second, the in-group discourses that flag their social distinction. Bringing the two sets of semiotic resources together, I will demonstrate how different forms of voice articulate the different angles and directions of their class distinction. Before I go into the fieldwork data, a brief sketch of the theoretical tools is in order.

Social (Re)stratification and Its ‘Soft’ Indicators In contrast to the situation in Northern America or Western Europe where there are more or less established class systems, social class is a concept that is subject to heated debates among laypeople as well as academics in contemporary China. The established view is that the present state was born out of a proletarian revolution in the first half of the twentieth century, in which the proletariat seized public power and founded the nation on the basis of the scientific socialism ideal of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist tradition. During the 30 years or so of the planned economy era (roughly between 1949 and 1979), class structure was rather neatly defined: there was a peasant class and an industrial working class, which included a class fraction of intellectuals and the party cadres. Both classes belonged to the proletariat, and the means of production were turned into state property (Lu 2002; Li 2007a). The economic reform of the 1980s, however, has confronted this class categorisation with theoretical as well as practical challenges. Theoretically, a social

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group that emerges out of the now partly privatised economy, and which thus has the control over the capital and over the means of production, can hardly fit into either class. Practically, we have witnessed reshuffles of classes and class fractions in at least three respects: first, the rapidly polarised distribution of power and social wealth has given birth to such groups as the ‘new rich’ and the ‘privileged’; second, the glory of the working class that used to be emblematic of the advanced and revolutionary social force has quickly faded, and in this process being an urban industrial worker is downscaled, at least in the eyes of laypeople, from a source of prestige to an unwanted identity; third, the transitional period has created a special class fraction – rural-urban migrant workers (Dong 2011). Therefore, we observe an ongoing process of social restratification: the old order of class-based distinction can no longer hold as valid, and new statusbased hierarchies are taking shapes. In the related field of social stratification studies, the phenomenon of changing one’s social class is usually called ‘class mobility’, which presupposes a relatively fixed categorisation of social classes. Scholars of this field compare social positions across three generations and analyse their class mobility (Treiman 2012; Hertel & Groh-Samberg 2014). In China, however, the notion of ‘class mobility’ can hardly capture the dramatic changes of social positions in the last century, let alone illustrate the redefinition of social classification. I therefore use the term ‘social restratification’ to show the complex, dynamic, and ongoing processes of social changes in class and classification. As for the Chinese middle class, the debates are centred around the question of how to define it. A remarkable similarity shared by all members of the middle class is their denial of middle-class membership. ‘I am not rich enough’ and ‘there is no middle class in China’ are among the most frequently heard answers. Because there is no widely accepted criterion in China, they compare themselves to the middle class of the United States and conclude that, measured against US standards, there is no middle class in China. Perhaps the confusion surrounding the term is not unique to China, but it is remarkable to find it in China because of its communist orthodoxies in the past and because of the theoretical difficulties the term presents to the social frame at present. We also often find the term ‘people of middle income’ (zhongdeng shouru zhe) being used in the mass media and other public and official discourses (Li 2007a, 2007b). This term, however, is inadequate, at least for a social scientist, because income does not necessarily coincide with social class, and members of the middle class may not fall within the middleincome category in a society. It is beyond the scope of the present research to conclusively define the Chinese middle class; yet it is safe to say that there is a group of people, and perhaps a very large group, who socio-economically fall between the working class and the (relatively small but powerful) ‘upper class’ of ultra-rich in contemporary Chinese society. In addition, following Bourdieu (1984), the middle class will define itself through specific activities – class praxis – reflecting and fortifying class-consciousness. Such activities include forms of consumption, the discursive and semiotic

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expression and display of ‘taste’ in a variety of cultural and consumer domains, and these activities will be of particular interest here. Taste, according to Bourdieu (1984), is an acquired disposition towards cultural goods and practices, both reflective and formative of social class positions. It is closely related to education level and social origins. The formulation and articulation of individual taste is through a scheme of habitus, the socialised body that is progressively inscribed with social structure in the course of individual and collective history. Taste is the systematic expressions of habitus, and in the lifestylerelated subspaces such as furniture, clothing, language, food, and body hexis, people tend to display fairly consistent dispositions and practices. “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (Bourdieu 1984: 6). It therefore functions as a ‘soft’ indicator that produces social groups and marks space boundaries by bringing certain people together and keeping others apart. A working-class man would find spending big money on a wedding party wasteful, but such expenditures could be a prime necessity and indeed required behaviour for middle-class people. The latter might see the costly wedding party as a successful investment in social capital and in networking, which consequently generates social as well as physical separation of life spaces (Bourdieu 1984: 375). Taste groups people and posits them in certain circles and spaces by means of complexes of recognisable, emblematic features of behaviour, comportment, consumption, and speech (cf. Blommaert & Varis 2012b). Another notion used in this chapter is that of voice, which is an aspect of the way in which the semiotic resources are deployed. The concept of voice has a complex history of development and has acquired diverse meanings and models of application in the course of its formation. One main theoretical source is the Bakhtinian notion of voice, which distinguishes social voice from individual voice and emphasises the social dimension of this notion (Bakhtin 1981, 1984). Another line of conceptualising voice emphasises the form-function relationships. This can be traced back to Jakobson’s structuralism, and it is more clearly formulated in Hymes’s (1964) and Gumperz’s (1982) work. Following this tradition, Blommaert (2005: 68) argues that voice is primarily the capacity to make oneself understood by others. It is, in other words, the capacity to realise intended functions by mobilising semiotic resources available to oneself, the capacity of people to create preferred interactional effects by mapping semiotic forms onto functions. Blommaert and others underscore that voice fundamentally is a social issue complicated by globalisation, because the mobility of semiotic instruments and skills in a globalised context always affects the functional efficacy of these resources. Mobility and space hence become pressing concerns for voice in a globalised context (cf. Dong & Blommaert 2009; Blommaert & Dong 2010). Some linguistic resources, such as standard accents, are highly mobile and index prestige, while others are stigmatising and strictly locked in local and private domains. As Hymes (1996) and Blommaert (2005) define it, voice always happens in combination with power effects and with the risk of not being understood. Voice exists because of ‘non-voice’:

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such a capacity [viz., being able to make oneself understood] is not selfevident . . . [it] is subject to several conditions and constraints . . . when people move through physical and social space . . . they move through orders of indexicality affecting their ability to deploy communicative resources. (Blommaert 2005: 68–69) An example of being ‘voice-less’ can be found in Dong and Blommaert (2009), which describes an episode where a migrant worker – a cleaner who worked in an urban recreation centre in a middle-class residential neighbourhood in Beijing – was effectively silenced by her urban interlocutors. The elite migrants of this study also display subtle and complex voices, perhaps in a less straightforward manner in terms of power effects and constraints of their own voices, but it is useful to consider the voice problem they create for others who do not have access to the highly mobile linguistic resources. Let us take a closer look at the elite migrants and their voices.

Situating the Group and Data Collection The data of the present research were drawn from my ethnographic fieldwork between 2010 and 2012 among a group of elite migrants who share the common feature of being Saab car drivers in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen. The group members are scattered over various cities because they are brought together initially through an online forum in which they exchange technical information on Saab cars, their driving experiences, as well as their passion for the brand. Their interactions gradually become ‘offline’ around 2009 when they discover more similarities among themselves than just their shared preference for a brand of automobiles. For instance, they all play golf, they travel abroad frequently, and all the male members smoke cigars and have a handsome collection of wines. A majority of them hold foreign academic diplomas and have spent prolonged periods of time in another country. Another factor that led the participants to form a circle is that Saab car dealers lowered their prices in the Chinese market in 2009, as a result of which Saab cars became more affordable to those who were ‘not exactly the same type of people’. Interestingly, it seems that when Saab became more democratic, the group – the earlier generation of Saab fans – created exclusivity by adding more features of exclusivity such as travelling, golf, cigars, etc. More features, in other words, become part of the ‘register’ of identity that they construct. It is no longer enough just to be a Saab fan; one now needs to show and perform all the enregistered features of distinction in an ordered way to create identity. Sociolinguistically, Shanghai has its distinct language variety – Shanghainese – an umbrella term for the vernaculars spoken in Shanghai and its adjunct area. Shanghainese and other Chinese languages and language varieties, such as Mandarin and Cantonese, are mutually unintelligible. Shanghainese used to be a

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regional lingua franca, given the economic power of its speakers since the late Qing dynasty (AD 1644–1911), until the recent introduction of Putonghua as a national linguistic standard (Dong 2010). Moreover, the large number of internal migrants has profoundly changed the ‘linguistic landscape’ of the city. Shanghai is one of the largest and richest cities in China. Of its 23 million plus inhabitants, more than two-fifths are immigrants from other parts of the country, many from surrounding regions such as Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, but increasingly from farther removed provinces such as Henan, Sichuan, and Jiangxi.1 Internal migrants bring along diverse linguistic and cultural baggage and turn to Putonghua as a common platform of effective communication (Lei 2009; Tsou 2009; Van den Berg 2009; Xu 2009; Yu 2009). Even though it is shrinking to the largely private domain of social life, Shanghainese still serves as a strong marker of local identity, and perhaps still is a symbolic source for pride among a relatively small number of ‘pure’ Shanghainese people (Hu 1995). About half of the elite participants are ‘pure’ Shanghainese people; the other half are originally from various other parts of the country. The immediate context of this chapter is the wedding party of one of the members of the Saab group. The newlywed couple invited their guests to a golf resort in suburban Shanghai, where the wedding ceremony was held. There were more than 200 guests, and roughly one-third of them stayed overnight. Apart from the expenditures involved in the ceremony and banquet, all the hotel rooms of the guests were provided and paid for by the couple (my hotel costs excepted). Such a luxurious wedding might sound unnecessarily expensive to many; but for the couple, it perhaps was, in the Bourdieuan fashion, an inevitable investment in social capital with foreseeable materialisation. The couple generously allowed me to participate in the event as an ethnographic researcher. I was able to observe the event, to participate in the activities, to collect documents such as leaflets, and to interview the guests. All participants gave their consent for the data to be used in reporting the research results and in the possible publication. I managed to interview five participants at length (about two hours each), plus a number of other individuals and groups in shorter interviews (ranging between five and 30 minutes). Interviews were conducted in an informal conversationlike manner, and the topics were organised around their life stories and their perceptions of lifestyle, hobbies, social class, and language varieties such as Putonghua, English, Shanghai local dialect, and their home dialects (e.g. the Northeast dialects, the Henan dialects). All interviewees involved in the present research happened to be male, because the members of the Saab group are overwhelmingly male. The interviews were carried out in Putonghua right before, during, or immediately after the wedding ceremony. I translated the transcripts into English. Other data types included observed episodes recorded in my field notes, online digital data on and around this group, and documents collected during and after the wedding.

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So far, I have addressed the ‘soft’ indicators of social classification in the Chinese context – or, more specifically, in the urban centres such as Shanghai; we have situated the group of participants in the macro-social and linguistic contexts of contemporary Shanghai, as well as in the micro-contexts of a costly wedding on a golf course in suburban Shanghai. Their symbolic restratifying behaviour revolves around a cluster of features and details, of which the semiotic resources are one part. Next, I will illustrate the two sets of semiotic resources – repertoire of mobility and in-group discourses – through interview data and online documents produced by and for the group.

Repertoires of Mobility Linguistic resources are never distributed in a random way. In every society, varieties of language, genres, styles, and registers are distributed according to the logic of the social system. From its inception, sociolinguistic analysis has addressed these non-random aspects of distribution (cf. Hymes 1996). Turning to linguistic resources can therefore lead us straight into the heart of class stratification and restratification in China. The first set of resources is the participants’ linguistic repertoire of mobility. The group members distinguish themselves by means of repertoires of mobility, articulated in two directions. First, they have adopted Putonghua, the national linguistic standard, which offers them pan-Chinese mobility. Second, they have acquired English, which offers them global mobility. Let us first take a look at the interview of a group member on his evaluation of Shanghainese, his home dialect (a Northeastern accent), and Putonghua.

Language of Internal-Chinese Mobility Interviewee C is a senior manager working in the financial industry. He is in his early forties. He spent his youth in Dalian, a coastal city in Northeastern China, obtained his bachelor’s degree in Shanghai, went on to the UK for postgraduate studies, and returned to Shanghai 10 years ago. His leisure activities include playing golf with business partners and friends, smoking cigars, and reading books. He is married and has two children. Extract 1: ‘I don’t feel like speaking Shanghainese’2 1 DJ: So do you {nin, 您, the respect form of ‘you’} speak Shanghainese? 2 Interviewee C: No I don’t {quick reply, different from his usual slow pace of utterance}. 3 DJ: You did your undergraduate studies in Shanghai? 4 Interviewee C: *That’s right*. 5 DJ: Didn’t you have to learn Shanghainese when you were in college, being here for so many years?

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Interviewee C: Well, (I) *rather* reject . . . DJ: Reject learning Shanghainese? Interviewee C: No, just I *don’t feel like speaking* (Shanghainese) DJ: Then do you feel inconvenient sometimes? Interviewee C: *I don’t* feel that way. DJ: In your daily life, go shopping . . . and so on? Interviewee C: Nope, it’s fine *as long as (we) understand* (each other). DJ: You just said you don’t like the language, why is that? Interviewee C: It is a personal thing. Shanghainese isn’t masculine enough, so I never really made any effort to learn it. And (I am) a bit rebellious, many people want to squeeze into Shanghai, want to learn Shanghainese, my college mate, a big bloke from the North {make noises and gestures mimicking a big guy learning the rather ‘feminine’ speech; laughing voice of DJ and the interviewee} did his best to learn Shanghainese, in order to ‘integrate’ (into the local society), it is the same with us who were abroad, deliberately learn their accent, a ‘pure’ London accent, it is too deliberate, and I don’t feel like that, language is a communicative tool 15 DJ: Do you ever feel you are a Shanghainese? 16 Interviewee C: (hesitant) I am, I am, I am quite confused, what should I be, the boundaries of regions and countries become rather vague . . . but it is true that ‘in one place, people are alike (yifang shuitu yang yifang ren)’, their language, their characteristics, their temperament, and so on, there are similarities, I find it difficult to define where I came from, my father was from Anhui, my mother is Manchu, and I used to live in various places too. I spent about 15 or 16 years in Dalian, but it’s been long (since I left there), I don’t really like the culture there. [Fieldwork recording-2011-12-09-V21-28:00]

The interview is a passage of metapragmatic discourse of an elite migrant on his perceptions of local Shanghainese, of the culture of his home town, and of his identities. This example is primarily concerned with the voice of Interviewee C – his way of articulating meaning in a given social environment – but in his utterances, we can distinguish voices of his college mate and voices circulated at a public level as meaning-making moments. As a whole, it shows the relationships between Shanghainese and Interviewee C’s home dialect, and Putonghua is seen as the ‘background colour’ taken for granted in the conversation. In the analysis, the interview can be subdivided into three parts according to the style of the interviewee’s utterances. The first part (turn 1–12) consists of quick turns and short answers. This is the negotiation stage of the interview in which the ethnographer is eager to draw out more detailed answers while the interviewee adopts a defensive mode and withdraws to a safe zone by giving brief responses

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such as “That’s right” (turn 4), and “I don’t feel that way” (turn 10). I use the polite form of the second person pronoun ‘nin (您, you)’, in order to show him my respect, instead of the usual ‘ni (你, you)’, but I also use it to stress that I am harmless and that he could be less defensive in talking to me. Although Interviewee C gives quick and short answers in this part, his utterances are produced in a low and slow manner, which may signal hesitation and being careful giving opinions. However, there is something unusual in turn 2: he responds with a quick and definite answer “No I don’t” to my question whether he can speak Shanghainese. He moved to Shanghai in his late teens, spent significant years both before and after his stay in the UK, and therefore one would have expect that the local language might have become part of his linguistic repertoire. He might have considered it, judging by his unusually quick reply, and might feel strongly about it. He uses a strong word ‘rejected (paichi, 排斥)’, to voice his idea about learning Shanghainese (turn 6). In part two (turn 14), our conversation proceeds to a more comfortable stage marked by longer and more fluent responses given by Interviewee C. He articulates an elaborate comment on Shanghainese and explains two reasons for rejecting the language. The first reason is related to the stereotypical idea circulating among laypeople that Shanghainese is a rather ‘feminine’ language, and therefore not a language for him, a man from the Northeast. In the sociocultural geography of China, regions are associated with stereotypical attributes, the Northeast being regarded as a place for ‘real men’, the South as being more ‘effeminate’ (Long 1998). Note that such metadiscursive labels personify speech and impose social distinction by connecting sound patterns to attributes of speakers (cf. Agha 2003). The second reason, which is related to the first, comes from a negative reaction to the prevailing phenomenon that many people are attempting to establish themselves in Shanghai and to ‘become’ Shanghai people. Entering and settling down in the city, however, does not automatically qualify one as a local. Accent usually is a conspicuous and persistent marker of social space, and in order to achieve a locally ratified identity, one has to be able to speak the local language in a ‘proper’ way. The ‘big bloke’ – Interviewee C’s college mate – makes serious efforts to learn Shanghainese in order to achieve a local identity. Here we observe another voice being used (in Bakhtin’s sense), a mixture of Shanghainese with a Northern accent represented in an amusing way, a performance that triggers laughter. Presenting an accent in an amusing way in fact disqualifies it; rarely would anyone suggest Putonghua as being ‘funny’ or ‘terrible’ – Putonghua is simply ‘normal’ (Dong 2010; cf. Silverstein 1996, for a discussion of a similar phenomenon in American English). While others are eager to acquire the local language and to achieve a local identity, Interviewee C is able to bypass such boundaries through the use of Putonghua in the process of establishing himself in the urban centre. His rejection of Shanghainese can be seen as part of the distinction: I am in Shanghai as an ‘elite’ migrant, which is why I do not speak the local vernacular.

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Part three (turn 16) is concerned with Interviewee C’s complicated migration trajectory and the evaluation of his own identities. Being asked identity-related questions, Interviewee C resumes his slow pace of articulation and hesitates for about three seconds before giving his answer. He rejects a Shanghai identity, and one would expect him to claim a Dalian identity, a place where he spent most of his youth. However, he is critical toward the culture of Dalian and does not ascribe a Dalian identity to himself. Throughout the interview, he hardly shows any trace of a Dalian accent. This historical trace of locality has been erased. Putonghua has been the language that has enabled him to move to and live in various places in the country, including his prolonged stay in Shanghai. Earlier, he has explicitly rejected the Shanghai local vernacular and the identity indexed by the language; and here he actively articulates distance from his home dialect. It is clear that he rejects a specific regional identity; his preferred language – Putonghua – signals his distinction: he is not locked into a specific place, and he is mobile all over China. Putonghua therefore appears to be the language of panChinese mobility, the linguistic resource of a growing class of professionals whose specialised labour can be deployed in any part of China.

The Language of Global Mobility While Putonghua is the language of internal mobility, command of English is another mobility-related resource that distinguishes the elite migrants from most other people. One of the recurrent topics among the elite participants is the choice of emigration to another country. It is reported that of the 1,070,000 plus people who have studied abroad since 1978, a mere one-quarter return to China (Zhang 2011). With the recent US policies of attracting foreign investments to revive its economy comes a new policy of legal immigration into the US. One can obtain a US permanent resident permit upon spending more than 50,000 USD in the US to purchase a house.3 ‘Becoming an American’ seems to have become a cheaper and easier way4 of getting out of China, compared to the traditional route of obtaining a foreign diploma and competing in the labour market of the host society. Other immigration destinations such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are also attractive to those who can afford it. Let us look at an elite interviewee’s evaluation of emigration. Extract 2: ‘Sooner or later to send my child abroad’ 1

Interviewee P: Well, about this (emigration), anyway, hmm, it is also something that puzzles me, a confusing factor, (I am) hesitating (about it), actually deep in my heart I feel I am a Chinese, although there are many problems here (in China) . . . but being here doesn’t mean (we can) pass (the good things) onto (our children), so I am not clear about that, anyway, emigration is something to do sooner or later, the question is when.

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2 3

DJ: Emigration is something to do sooner or later Interviewee P: Yeah, at least to sooner or later (for me) send my child (abroad). (I) have to consider many factors, of course economic factors, there are more opportunities to make money in China. [Fieldwork recording-2011-12-09-V22-1:00:42]

In this short extract from an interview, Interviewee P gives rich information on the push and pull factors of emigration. Like Interviewee C, Interviewee P is a professional in the financial industry. He is around 40, and he has spent more than 10 years in Shanghai. This interview is triggered by the input into the conversation of several group members, in which emigration is a recurrent topic causing debate with arguments in favour and against being raised. I therefore decide to modify the interview plan and ask him about his perceptions of emigration. Among the various factors that Interviewee P has to take into consideration, providing his children with a better education appears to be a decisive reason for emigration. In a transitional society such as China is today, while the poor are struggling to move upward to the middle ranges of society, people who are already in the middle layer have to secure their social position by moving further up (Dong 2011). One way of maintaining their social status is to maximise their economic and cultural capital and to get the most out of the educational system. Consequently, we observe parents and children collectively engaged in a ruthless race for academic qualifications, from kindergarten onward at an individual level, and at a societal level, an increasingly competitive labour market (cf. Bourdieu 1984: 132). The notorious ‘commercialisation of education provision’ makes this even worse. One possibility of escaping such competition is to send young children to elite private schools and have them prepare for the US SAT or the UK ALevels, rather than the Chinese National University Entrance Examination. This route is extremely costly, but the elite migrants who are not only mobile within China, but also at a global level, find it offers real prospects for them, because they have acquired the language of global mobility: English. As Interviewee P points out, that “to sooner or later (for me) send my child (abroad)” (turn 3). His knowledge of English, as well as his global experience, are necessary conditions that enable him to realistically consider the prospect of emigration, at least the emigration of his children. And only those who have English in their linguistic repertoire can entertain such ideas realistically. English is acquired in their personal histories of mobility, and it enables their further and continued global mobility. Apart from emigration, there are various other forms of global mobility that the elite migrants demonstrate through their use of English at the wedding party and beyond. For instance, Figure 9.1 shows a mixture of English and Chinese used in an entry of the online Saab discussion forum. English is used for the blogger’s user ID (vvspy), the name of the British television series about motor vehicles (TOP GEAR), Saab, and the American automobile manufacturer GM.

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Mixture of English and Chinese in the online forum Translation: TOP GEAR 18 shows a test of SAAB 9-5, the petrol consumption is amazingly low [smily face] Almost 4l/100KM. Fxxk GM. . . [This message is edited by vvspy at 16:07 12-02-2012]

FIGURE 9.1

The blogger discusses an episode of Top Gear5 in which the low petrol consumption of a Saab car is discussed. Interestingly, Top Gear is not broadcast by Chinese official TV stations, and thus its fans can only download it from the Internet. Moreover, the episodes accessible on the Internet do not have Chinese subtitles, which requires a high level of English proficiency on the part of its viewers, as well as a certain cultural background knowledge, for them to be able to understand what is going on. In the virtual world, where movement seems to be freer and easier, there are also barriers, maybe less salient ones, but people still have to mobilise certain resources such as, in this case, proficiency in English in order to access information from the other side of the world, to achieve effective communication, or to voice their opinions. Another telling example where the group are trying to get their voice heard globally through English is their recent effort to ‘Save Saab’ from bankruptcy. We know that Saab is a niche brand, and that Saab drivers tend to show a high level of brand loyalty. When Saab filed for bankruptcy, the Chinese Saab drivers voluntarily organised an informal gathering to voice their determination to save Saab (Figure 9.2). Figure 9.2 shows the participants in the event lined up and holding a red banner with the English slogan ‘SAVE SAAB’ and its Chinese equivalent in white. Some participants hold up smaller white signs with the same slogan ‘SAVE SAAB’ but only in English and in black ink. The rest of the photo is filled with the participants’ cherished vehicles. The postures of the participants, the colour of the banner, and the Saab cars lined up behind them all voice the participants’ ambition to change the gloomy prospects of the brand. Their voice is made explicit by the slogans. While all participants are Chinese, interestingly, the slogans are

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FIGURE 9.2

‘SAVE SAAB’ gathering

bilingual, and the majority of them are in English: on the big red banner, English comes first, followed by Chinese, and the smaller signs are in English only. It is very well possible that the participants are voicing their opinions not (only) to a Chinese audience – although the photo was circulated widely on Chinese web pages and online forums – but also to a global audience, to a worldwide community of Saab fans, to the car manufacturer in Sweden, and to the US and the Dutch owners of the brand. Moreover, it voices the particular identity of the participants – passionate supporters and possessors of a global brand of high-end automobiles – and drawing on English gives this identity a really global relevance. The data presented so far show that the elite migrants have acquired the language of national mobility – Putonghua – in their linguistic repertoire and are thus claiming a pan-Chinese identity. They also have the language of global mobility – English – at their disposal so that they are able to access information otherwise inaccessible to Chinese people, to voice their opinions as well as identities, and to see emigration as a realistic prospect. They therefore are mobile at a pan-Chinese scale thanks to their proficiency in Putonghua, and they are mobile globally because they have English at their disposal. I would therefore like to define their repertoires as repertoires of mobility at various scale-levels, which points back to their personal histories of mobility and forward to their continued mobility. Further, these resources – the first set of resources discussed in this chapter – shape conditions for voice in relation to out-groups: the resources enable mobile voices, voices that can speak and be heard anywhere and are not ‘determined by place’ or confined to a particular place.

Markers of In-Group Discourses The second set of resources is in-group discourse, that is, particular ways of speaking about themselves that flag their distinction. A remarkable in-group marker

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that appeared again and again in the conversations of the elite migrants is the Chinese word mensao (闷骚). In the interviews, a number of the elite migrants explicitly referred to the word in an attempt to explain why they went for Saab cars as well as their ‘choice’ of each other as members of a group. The word thus emerges from the data pool as an important element, a key to understanding their in-group dynamics, or a discursive resource that positions them in a particular social order (Kroon & Sturm 2007). Mensao refers to both males and females who appear to be calm and inconspicuous on the surface but deep down inside they are extremely passionate and ready to ‘explode’ into performance if required. This is a kind of ‘coolness’ highly valued among the group members. Let us take a look at how Interviewee A constructed it in the following extract from the interview. Extract 3: ‘Mensao ( 闷骚)’ 1 . . . noise, laughter in the hall, people chatting on the phone, wedding in preparation, people checking into their hotel rooms} 2 DJ: So what are the similarities of this circle of people? 3 Interviewee: You mean us? 4 DJ: = hmm. 5 Interviewee A: = How should I put it, well to be straightforward about it, it is the personality of *‘mensao’* {smiling voice, lower voice than the rest of the utterance, excited, a mixture of being embarrassed and being proud} 6 Interviewee A: Hehehe {laughing loudly} 7 DJ: {laughing with a low voice} 8 Interviewee A: That is to say {his tone becomes calmer and more serious}, people of our circle are not those who love to show off their wealth, everyone is rather sincere, that’s about it, everyone, inside everyone, it’s not arrogant, but deep inside (we are) quite selfconfident, and we want to show (ourselves), but not show off openly, Saab is like that 9 DJ: = not flaunting . . . 10 Interviewee A: = yeah not flaunting. And yeah Saab is like that, the appearance of Saab car isn’t very attractive, but its technical advantages, its performance, really fast when accelerating . . . there is another side (of Saab), but (both Saab and us) don’t like showing off, because of the shared characteristics, we feel comfortable in each other’s company [Fieldwork recording-2011-12-10-V31-3:31] Interviewee A is in his early thirties and works as a senior manager in the financial industry. He has been in Shanghai since 2003 when he returned from the UK, has obtained his undergraduate diploma from a prestigious British university, and got his initial working experiences in the financial City of London.

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He originally is from Henan province in central China. The interview is centred around mensao as a shared characteristic of the group members, as well as the attractiveness of a Saab car to its fans. Immediately prior to the interview, Interviewee A is talking about the price of Saab cars, a price tag for which they could have opted for a BMW or a Mercedes. Saab in actual fact is much less known than these and stylistically understated. This evaluation subsequently leads to the topic of the interview. Before spelling out the word mensao, Interviewee A is calm and smooth, speaking in a flat tone. However, he becomes a little hesitant when he is searching for a word “How should I put it” in turn 5, and quickly “to be straightforward about it.” This moment of hesitation indicates that he is trying to find a more indirect way of labelling himself and his fellow group members, but realises that there is no better word than mensao. It is possible that he may be considering whether I, the researcher, am a harmless person with whom he can be “straightforward.” He spells out the word with a voice that is lower than the rest of his utterance, as if he is telling me a secret. Moreover, his loud laughter (turn 6) right after pronouncing the word is rather sudden, and perhaps too loud, which signals a sense of embarrassment. In fact, such a reaction is found in every interview when the elite migrants are trying to describe themselves: hesitation, pronouncing the word mensao, and giggling or laughing out loud. It is clear that the word points to subtle but important in-group meanings that are not normally shared with outsiders such as the researcher. Thus, mensao is a particular kind of ‘coolness’ they have constructed, and that they modelled on the coolness they saw exemplified in Saab cars. Interviewee A describes their kind of ‘coolness’ in turn 8 and says that “Saab is like that,” and he repeats this point in turn 10 “there is another side (of Saab), but (both Saab and us) don’t like showing off.” Mensao therefore is not only the shared characteristic of the group members, but also that of the Saab car. Interestingly, a similar image was constructed in a Saab commercial (Figure 9.3). Figure 9.3 shows a Saab commercial released in 2007.6 The English slogan ‘Release Me’ is the title of the commercial song, which tells a story of longing for passion and freedom. Its Chinese equivalence, ‘释放无可抵挡 (shifang wukedidang)’ means ‘set me free, nothing can stop me’. In the photo, a silvercoloured Saab car, shining its front lights, is in motion, stirring up a wave of clear blue water. The commercial (the photo, the song, the commercial music video) projects an image of the car of ‘coolness’, ‘passion’, and ‘longing for freedom’. The car owners internalise these qualities into their own habitus, and tend to think of these images as a reflection of their personality features. They not only buy a Saab car. They develop their identities in relation to consumption patterns, that is to say, they convert a consumption act (purchasing a car) into a consumer identity act (something that can reveal ‘who I am’). The group members have a shared taste and it is this taste that leads them to the car and to each other. Taste is like a matchmaker, “it marries colours and also people . . . two people can give each other no better proof of the affinity of their tastes than the tastes they have

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FIGURE 9.3

Saab car ad: release me

for each other” (Bourdieu 1984: 243). Taste organises social as well as physical space so that some people are brought together – such as the group members – and others are separated. Marcuse (1964) argued in One-Dimensional Man that the European and US middle classes increasingly organised their identities with reference to consumption patterns (Blommaert & Varis 2012a). The Saab group members who mark themselves mensao serve as an explicit illustration of how people model and describe themselves in relation to features of a commodity, in this case a Saab car. The second set of resources I have discussed in this chapter is the particular kind of in-group discourse, instantiated by and revolving around the word mensao, in articulating the desired personality features projected by their consumption patterns that distinguish them from outsiders. These personality features are explicitly organised around Saab cars. These discursive and identity resources shape conditions for in-group voice: this is the register by means of which they self-identify and shape, identify, and evaluate behavioural expectations in their own group.

Conclusions I have identified two sets of semiotic resources and argued that they are different forms of voice and articulate the different angles and directions of class distinction: (a) external criteria of membership, expressed by their control of resources that are not tied to one place, but offer the mobility that characterises their class; (b) internal criteria of membership (mensao) connected to and predicated

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on knowledge of particular consumption commodities, in this case Saab cars. It is through the resources discussed here that the Saab friends create an identifiable ‘middle-class’ voice in contemporary China. They acquire and display prestige linguistic resources such as Putonghua and English, and they develop a particular in-group register for talking among, as well as about, themselves. As we can see, these ‘soft’ resources are anchored in a more objective range of factors: elite consumption patterns, international educational backgrounds and prestige functions in very well paid industrial branches. The ‘hard’ diacritics of class (such as income, profession, and family background) need to be – and will be, according to Bourdieu – reflected in an ordered range of ‘soft’ diacritics (including taste) by means of which these people create and maintain class boundaries between themselves and others. Significantly, what sets this group apart is mobility across different scale-levels, nationally as well transnationally. They are mobile within China and they are members of a globally mobile community who can entertain plans for leisure travel abroad as well as emigration to other parts of the world. Class stratification appears to be strongly connected to the mobility potential that one can realistically claim. The ‘soft’ capital offering such forms of mobility is lodged in specific linguistic repertoires, and thus in the capacity of these people to make themselves understood in various places, in different social environments and across the different scale-levels that are involved in global professional and personal mobility. Needless to say, this mobility potential is still quite an exclusive commodity in contemporary China. The rapid expansion of the class of well-paid young urban professionals should not obscure that most Chinese are not in a position now to entertain realistic plans of international mobility; this fact is not likely to change in the near future. A mobile group of people – people for whom mobility is a possible choice rather than a necessity – is something that reshuffles the social hierarchies of contemporary China. It restratifies China both by means of new forms of distribution of ‘hard’ resources – income, economic power – and ‘soft’ resources such as language varieties and discourses of the self and of the way the world is. The interplay of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ resources leads to the emergence of new middle-class strata and the symbolic, multi-scalar restratificaiton intensifies what we call ‘superdiversity’ – diversification of diversity – in the contemporary Chinese society. Sociolinguistic attention to ‘soft’ resources and their patterns of distribution is therefore a rather sensitive tool for understanding the rapid social changes and the increasing social and cultural superdiversity of China.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Jan Blommaert, Sjaak Kroon, and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments on this chapter. My gratitude goes to Xiaoli, Yunya, Pingyao, Jeff, Buyi, EJ, whose insights open my eyes to their world and who help me theorise of their voice.

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Notes 1. The sixth national population census: www.stats.gov.cn/zgrkpc/dlc/ (accessed 23 October 2012). 2. Transcription conventions: ‘_’ (underline) stress ‘=’ interruption or next utterance following immediately ‘{ }’ transcriber’s comment ‘* *’ segment quieter than surrounding talk, or weaker than the rest of the sentence ‘( )’ omitted part in the utterance 3. Information collected from conversations among the elite participants. 4. One could hardly afford a one-bedroom flat in Beijing or Shanghai with only 50,000 USD to spend. 5. See: www.tudou.com/programs/view/v1V__Zh_YHg/, the online episode of Top Gear 18-1 (accessed 23 October 2012). 6. See: www.tudou.com/programs/view/ivBGBPOY9i8/ (accessed 23 October 2012).

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Tsou, B. 2009. Transitional triglossia and language shift: Accelerated urbanization in China and language planning. Paper, 7th International Symposium on Bilingualism, Utrecht, July 2009. Van den Berg, M. 2009. Developing bilingualism in southern China language behaviour in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Paper, 7th International Symposium on Bilingualism, Utrecht, July 2009. Vertovec, S. 2006. The emergence of super-diversity in Britain. Centre on Migration, Policy and Society Working Paper, #25. Oxford: University of Oxford. Vertovec, S. 2007. Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30: 1024–1054. Vertovec, S. 2010. Towards post-multiculturalism? Changing communities, contexts and conditions of diversity. International Social Science Journal, 199: 83–95. Woronov, T.E. 2004. In the eye of the chicken: Hierarchy and marginality among Beijing’s migrant schoolchildren. Ethnography, 5(3): 289–313. Xu, D. 2009. The leveling of tones in the Kundulun speech community. Paper, 7th International Symposium on Bilingualism, Utrecht, July 2009. Yu, W. 2009. Language contact effects on language identity: A case study of the high school students in Changzhou city. Paper, 7th International Symposium on Bilingualism, Utrecht, July 2009. Zhang, M. 2011. ‘Haiwai yiminchao’ beihao de zhongmei boyi (Sino-US policy game behind the ‘emigration currents’). Zhongguo Jingji Zhoukan (China Economics Weekly), 44: 21. Zhang, Q.L., Qu, Z.Y., & Zou, H. 2003. Liudong ertong fazhan zhuangkuang diaocha (An investigation of the development of migrant children in four cities). Qingnian Yanjiu (Youth Research), 9: 11–17.

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PART III

Policing Complexity

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10 ETHNOGRAPHIC LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS AND SOCIAL CHANGE A Case Study Jan Blommaert and Ico Maly

Introduction Whenever the composition of a neighbourhood changes, the place sounds and looks differently. We realise that it has changed because we hear and read different languages than the ones we expected or were used to. Language, in that sense, is the most immediate and direct identifier of people and the most immediately sensitive indicator of social change. And disciplined attention to language can help identify the nature and direction of such processes of change, sometimes years before such changes show up in official statistics. Over the past decade, a new branch of sociolinguistics called Linguistic Landscape Studies (LLS) has emerged, as an attempt to produce accurate and detailed inventories of urban multilingualism. LLS investigate 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 grass roots. The locus where such landscapes are being documented is usually the late-modern, globalised 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. Landry & Bourhis 1997; Ben-Rafael et al. 2006; Gorter 2006; Backhaus 2007; Barni 2008; Barni & Bagna 2008; Barni & Extra 2008; Pan Lin 2009; Shohamy & Gorter 2009; Coupland & Garrett 2010; Jaworski 2010; Blommaert 2013). 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; Wang et al. 2013; Wang forthcoming).

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LLS offer considerable potential, to wit: •

•

•

•

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 towards more profound investigations into the sociolinguistic regime, and feed those back to the diagnosis. 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 travellers’ 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 compel 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 and incorporate crucial sociolinguistic views developed in (the at present rather parallel universe of) literacy studies (Lillis 2013). The specific place of literacy in sociolinguistic economies has traditionally been downplayed in mainstream studies. The unfortunate consequence of this is that important sociolinguistic features that can only, or most persuasively, be read off literacy artefacts have not been incorporated as elements of the sociolinguistic system. Finally, LLS compel us towards historicising sociolinguistic analysis, at least when certain conditions are met. 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, all gathered in a ‘synchronic’ space. A detailed and nuanced LLS can thus describe the layered, multifiliar and nonlinear nature of sociolinguistic phenomena – in other words: it opens the way to a sociolinguistics of complexity (see Blommaert 2013: 6–18).

In what follows, we shall apply the tools of LLS to a particular space, the Rabot neighbourhood in Ghent, Belgium. We shall use these tools in a particular way, however, and before engaging with the neighbourhood we will briefly sketch our own approach to LLS.

Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis The early stages of the development of LLS were dominated by a quantitative approach, in which publicly visible languages were counted and mapped as to

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distribution over a specific area (Backhaus 2007 is an example). While this approach yielded useful indicative ‘catalogues’ of areal multilingualism, it failed to explain how the presence and distribution of languages could be connected with specific populations and communities and the relationships between them, or with the patterns of social interaction in which people engage in the particular space. Such levels of analysis require a more maturely semiotic approach, in which the signs themselves are given greater attention both individually (signs are multimodal and display important qualitative typological differences) and in combination with each other (the landscape, in other words). Drawing on works such as Scollon and Scollon (2003) and Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996), qualitative LLS are possible, especially when we take the following points into account: 1.

2.

3.

Public spaces are social arenas – circumscriptions on which control, discipline, belonging, and membership operate and in which they are being played out. Furthermore, public space is also an instrument of power, discipline, and regulation: it organises the social dynamics deployed in that space. The public space of a market square or a highway is, in contrast to the private space of, for example, one’s dining room, a shared space over which multiple people and groups will try to acquire authority and control, if not over the whole of the space, then at least over parts of it. It is an institutional object, regulated (and usually ‘owned’) by official authorities whose role will very often be clearest in the restrictions they impose on the use of space (prohibitions on smoking, loitering, littering, speed limits, warnings, and so on). Public spaces are normative spaces. Communication in the public space, consequently, is communication in a field of power. The question thus becomes: How does space organise semiotic regimes? (cf. Blommaert et al. 2005: 198; see also Stroud & Mpendukana 2009). This question assumes that regimes can be multiple and competing but that they nevertheless function as regimes (i.e. as ordered patterns of normative conduct and expectations, authoritative patterns of conduct to which one should orient). All signs can be analysed by looking at three ‘axes’: (i) Signs point towards the past, to their origins and modes of production. Elements of material and linguistic make-up are indices of who manufactured the signs, under which conditions they were manufactured, which resources were used, and thus available and accessible to the producers of the sign. The history of the sign, thus, leads us towards the broader sociolinguistic conditions under which the sign has been designed and deployed. (ii) Signs point towards the future, to their intended audiences and preferred uptake. Signs are always proleptic in the sense that they address specific

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addressees and audiences with specific effects in mind: a non-smoking sign is intended specifically for smokers and intends to prevent them from smoking (not from standing on their heads, for instance). (iii) Signs also point towards the present, through their ‘emplacement’ (Scollon & Scollon 2003): their location is not a random given, and neither is their ‘syntagmatic’ position relative to other signs.

4.

Given these three axes, we can understand the social function of public signs: signs demarcate public space, they cut it up into smaller fragments, and regulate these in connection to other fragments. Signs thus always have a semiotic scope – the communicative relationship between producers and addressee, in which normative and regulative messages are conveyed (e.g. local authorities messaging ‘don’t smoke’ to smokers), and a spatial scope (‘don’t smoke here’). They are always specific in terms of meaning and function, and qualitative differences between signs are thus of utmost relevance. The three axes and their functions turn LLS into an ethnographic and historical project, in which we see signs as indices of social relationships, interests, and practices, deployed in a field that is replete with overlapping and intersecting norms – not just norms of language use, but norms of conduct, membership, legitimate belonging, and usage; and not just the norms of a here-and-now, but norms that are of different orders and operate within different historicities. The linguistic landscape has been turned into a social landscape, features of which can now be read through an analysis of the public signs.

We can call this ‘ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis’ (ELLA), and we shall now use it on a specific case: the urban working-class neighbourhood known as Rabot in the city of Ghent, Belgium. Following a research template developed in Jan Blommaert’s (2013) study of the Antwerp inner-city area of Oud-Berchem, extensive fieldwork was conducted in Rabot by Ico Maly in 2013 and early 2014. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate that ELLA enables us not just to identify with a very high degree of accuracy the demography of the neighbourhood – who lives here? – but also the particular dynamic and complex features of the social fabric of a superdiverse neighbourhood.

Introducing the Field The central target of our research is Wondelgemstraat, the central shopping street of the Rabot neighbourhood in the nineteenth-century belt around the historic city of Ghent. The road connects the historic centre of Ghent with a more recent suburban district. The street and its neighbourhood, located along a canal and equipped at the time with a railway station, were methodically laid out in the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of the Industrial Revolution,

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revolving around the textile industry in Ghent. Several major industrial plants were built, and the neighbourhood rapidly developed into a densely populated and predominantly working-class neighbourhood with some presence of company executives and a flourishing commerce in Wondelgemstraat. Though the Rabot neighbourhood was part of the (semi-)periphery of Ghent, for its inhabitants at the end of the nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth century, it became a centre in its own. And within the neighbourhood, different centres attracted different workers and classes. Parts of the neighbourhood had a very poor reputation, partly based on the physical layout of the area (small and poorly equipped houses) and on political grounds: a local pub was the hotbed of local communism (Van den Abeele 2010: 37). But socialists, Catholics, and liberals also had their infrastructure in the neighbourhood. The Catholic workers’ movement was organised around the neogothic Saint Joseph church, and organised youth clubs, Christian unions for men and women, cooperative stores, a theatre association, a party hall, a library, and even a local Catholic newspaper. In 1877, the liberals established their workers’ association in the neighbourhood. This resulted a few years later in the establishment of a local chapter of the Liberal Party and a liberal infrastructure including a pension fund, a football club, a gymnastics club, theatre shows, singing nights, concerts, and many more. The socialists were also prominently visible in this industrialised neighbourhood. Socialist workers could watch movies in the movie theatre Vooruit (De Wilde 2007: 80). There was a socialist pharmacy, a grocery shop, and a large party hall where the socialists organised fairs, shows, and lectures. They also issued a monthly magazine. Until well into the twentieth century, Rabot stayed mainly a (‘native’ Flemish) working-class neighbourhood where the socialist, Catholic, and liberal ‘pillars’ were quite prominent. After the Second World War, the textile industry experienced its last major, but short, revival. Most of the textile factories of the Rabot neighbourhood survived the war without much damage and could restart production soon after the war. From the 1950s, its technological edge started to dwindle and the industry found itself in heavy weather. The companies had to increasingly compete on a global scale and the technological progress of the other countries required a further ‘rationalisation’ of production: the raising of productivity and lowering of wages. From the 1960s, the textile industry tried to recruit immigrant workers from countries with which Belgium had bilateral agreements. As a result, 196 immigrant workers were employed in 1962 in the local textile industry (De Wilde 2007). In the early stages, these workers migrated from Italy and Spain, later from Algeria and Tunisia. From 1963, Turkish labour migrants arrived (Verhaeghe et al. 2012). Within the next decades, this latest group became the dominant immigrant community in the neighbourhood. Their migration was a consequence of the industrialisation of agriculture in Turkey as part of the Marshall Plan, which rendered many young Turks unemployed (De Wilde 2007 provides a detailed discussion).

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These first Turkish migrants in Ghent had a fairly ‘homogeneous’ profile. The vast majority were men between 25 and 40 years old, coming from previously rural areas such as Emirdag, Piribeyli, and Posof. They spoke Turkish, were often poorly educated, and mostly professed a non-orthodox Islam. These labour migrants initially intended to return to their countries of birth after a few years; the de-industrialisation of the neighbourhood, however, ensured that the majority stayed and started families there. The presence of these workers ended up in chain migration of family and friends of these pioneers. This migration profoundly changed Rabot. In 1973, 843 foreign nationals lived in the Rabot neighbourhood, which represented 6.67 per cent of the total number of migrants in Ghent at that time. Native Belgian workers, often retired, started leaving the neighbourhood and immigrants became house owners. As a result of this changing demography and the decline of the textile industry, the flourishing (largely ‘native’ Flemish) commercial middle class gradually disappeared from the Wondelgemstraat, to be replaced by ‘ethnic’ (largely Turkish) commerce. The three ideological and social ‘pillars’ also lost their basis in the neighbourhood and were replaced by Islamic mosques. Today, nearly 50 per cent of the population in the neighbourhood has foreign roots, which is the highest percentage in Ghent.

Who Lives Here? Now that Rabot has been identified, let us turn to our first issue: the demographic composition of the area. In the perception of many citizens of Ghent, the Wondelgemstraat is a ‘Turkish’ street, on the one hand, and a decaying neighbourhood, on the other hand. Crime, dirty streets, dense traffic, and young male migrants ‘hanging around’ are the emblematic features of this image, which is shared by politicians, intellectuals, citizens of Ghent, and of the suburbs beyond the neighbourhood. Even Turkish residents of neighbouring cities see Wondelgemstraat as ‘marginal’, often pointing to the rural and ‘backward’ roots of its Turkish inhabitants (Emirdag) as an explanation. Today, Rabot is the most densely populated district in Ghent, with 9,465 people per square kilometre,1 and Wondelgemstraat with 14,761 people per square kilometre (2007 figures, SumResearch 2008). Rabot also has the highest unemployment rate of the city and the lowest average income (SID 2012). Rabot is superdiverse, densely populated, and poor.2 The street and its neighbourhood, however, are no longer just ‘Turkish’. If we look at the origins of the (officially registered) people, we see that the district has 22.4 per cent residents with Turkish roots, and this percentage is declining. From 2007, the year of Bulgaria’s membership of the European Union, the number of Bulgarian migrants steeply rose from 112 in 2006 to 285 in 2007. In 2012, more than 800 people, or 10.4 per cent of the residents of the Rabot, were Bulgarian migrants. Turks and Bulgarians together with the native Belgians form the three dominant ‘ethnic’ groups in the district.

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Diversity, however, does not end there, and this is where ELLA comes in handy. If we look at the visible languages in the neighbourhood, we notice a reflection of the demographics in the dominance of Dutch, Turkish, and Bulgarian. In the summer of 2013, 11 visible languages could be found in the Wondelgemstraat: Dutch, Turkish, English, Polish, French, Spanish, Chinese, Slovak, Arabic, Italian, and Bulgarian. Some of these languages, such as Dutch and Turkish, are not only common, but they are also consistently present over time. Although Turkish is still quite dominant in the neighbourhood, it is important to note that Dutch operates as the cross-group lingua franca in the neighbourhood (a feature also noted elsewhere; see Blommaert 2013, 2014). Customers whose backgrounds are unknown are addressed in Dutch, and Dutch dominates the public space. It serves as the dominant language for top-down communication (monolingual street signs, posters, public maps, etc.) and for bottom-up communication. Most of the ‘ethnic’ shops are multilingual. Concretely, this means that beside Turkish or Bulgarian, we see translations in (sometimes truncated) Dutch. In terms of frequency, Turkish is the second language in the neighbourhood and is prominently visible on shop windows, posters, menus, and cars. Several places are monolingually Turkish, such as coffee houses and some shops, but in most cases Turkish is accompanied with Dutch, and in some cases also with English. Thus, Dutch and Turkish are stable and persistent languages in the neighbourhood; and while Bulgarian is on the rise in the neighbourhood, it is almost always accompanied by Dutch. Besides these three dominant languages, we see a highly diverse kaleidoscope of smaller languages. This kaleidoscope is dynamic, and what is found today is not necessarily what will be found in the next days, weeks, or months. For example, we counted 11 languages in August 2013, while in February 2014, 16 languages were present. Besides the languages we already mentioned above, we also came across Nepalese, Hindi, Romanian, German, Farsi, and Thai, while Polish had vanished. Let us dig a little bit deeper in the ‘disappearance’ of Polish and underscore a methodological point. The Polish sign observed in August 2013 was seen on the back of a van with a Polish license plate (Figure 10.1). On the back, we see a professionally lettered Polish name of the company: ELSTUK. Next to the company name, we see the activity of the company announced in Polish (left) and Dutch (right), namely plastering. Note that both languages are visibly equal and written in the same font and size. At the bottom, we see the website with Polish extension posted together with two mobile phone numbers: a Polish and a Belgian number. On the company website, we read that ELSTUK operates on an international scale: the company works for the multinational KNAUF and has projects in Poland, but also in several locations in Belgium. Classic Linguistic Landscape research would probably not see this as a significant item since the sign is not ‘permanent’. The Polish van, however, was present in the neighbourhood for several months, after which it disappeared, probably together with its (Polish) driver and

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FIGURE 10.1

Polish van in Wondelgemstraat

passengers – the Polish ‘population’ of Wondelgemstraat. It is attention to such non-permanent, temporary, or even accidental signs that defines our ethnographic Linguistic Landscaping approach and generates sensitivity to rapid and unpredictable social and cultural change. Rapid social and cultural change defines the superdiverse neighbourhood and its permanent demographic turnover: many people move in, but as many move out of the neighbourhood or change location within the neighbourhood itself. We shall see more examples of this below. These rapid changes may seem chaotic, but they are patterned and ordered: the different migration waves translate in a layered and stratified district where some layers are relatively stable across time and others change rapidly.

A Layered and Stratified Population The different populations do not just live together; the neighbourhood is stratified. On the basis of the frequency and specific forms of emplacement of signs in the area, we see the following ‘layers’ in Wondelgemstraat: 1.

The basis of the neighbourhood is made up of the homeowners and shopkeepers largely consisting of native Belgians and immigrants with Turkish roots. The natives are a diverse group made out of old working-class people and lower middle-class shopkeepers, and a more recently arrived community of younger

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2.

3.

4.

people, notably students and recent graduates. The people with Turkish roots purchased their houses and shops in the 1980s and 1990s; some of these older migrants have left Rabot to resettle in the twentieth century suburban districts beyond Rabot. Their homes were changed into rental accommodation for new migrants, often of dubious quality but generating substantial cash incomes. The influx of new superdiverse migrants results in new forms of exploitation and in the rise of a Turkish middle (and suburban) class. Since the early years of the twenty-first century, new immigrants arrived in the neighbourhood as a result of the further unification process of Europe. In an early stage, Albanian people arrived together with substantial numbers of Roma. The influx of large numbers of Bulgarian immigrants since 2007 has been noted above, and while most twenty-first-century migrants use the neighbourhood as a temporary station in complex migration trajectories, the Bulgarian immigrants are resident in the neighbourhood. Some of these Bulgarian migrants speak at least some Turkish. That does not entail that the relationship between Turkish people and the people with Bulgarian roots is optimal and friendly; it merely means that there is a medium of communication between Bulgarian migrants, Turkish shopkeepers, and Turkish employers. And here again we see that the different layers are characterised by inequality: they are stratified. Bulgarians, especially those whose legal status is obscure, get exploited as high-yield tenants and as cheap labour force. Besides these three dominant groups, we find recent (often temporary) migrants from various parts of Europe together with migrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East: French, Moroccans, Nigerians, Pakistanis, Ghanaians, Slovaks, Poles, Spaniards, and Russians all live together in this small neighbourhood. Many of these migrant groups are either statistically insignificant or invisible (if they are clandestine immigrants), yet they colour the district and have started to define its linguistic landscape. Apart from their native languages, which have started to appear in the neighbourhood, this superdiverse and highly volatile layer of the population is also responsible for the rise of English in Rabot. Migrants from Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, and Pakistan, for example, are potential new tenants and customers, and they are addressed in English. It is in this third layer that we find fast changes, notably with respect to the presence of Latin American migrants (see below), Polish, and Slovakian people. We have seen that the Polish labour migrants stay for some weeks or months in the neighbourhood. Their presence does not translate in an enduring infrastructure of shops or bars, but we see their vans in the street and we also observe that night shops adjust their supplies to include Polish beer and phone cards offering cheap rates for calls to Poland. A fourth layer consists of the users of the district often coming from the outskirts of the city. In this layer, we can distinguish two major categories. One group consists of effective users of the neighbourhood, such as customers of the

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many ‘ethnic’ restaurants and snack bars and the (cheap) groceries there; visitors of one of the many places of worship or students of the local schools. The other group of uses Wondelgemstraat merely as a transit street to and from work in central Ghent.

A Flexible and Dynamic Infrastructure We now know who populates the area; so let us turn to our second analytical target. We can use ELLA to get an accurate picture of the dynamics and the complexity that characterise superdiverse environments. The clue we shall use for this is the infrastructure of the neighbourhood: the enormous range of inscribed and semiotised material facilities in the area. We shall see how the dynamic and stratified demographic composition of the neighbourhood is reflected in its infrastructure: new population configurations in the neighbourhood generate new infrastructural demands, and the outcome is a complex array of different but connected facilities, which can be described as follows. We have seen earlier that Wondelgemstraat was historically a flourishing shopping street, catering for the traditional working-class and bourgeois textile workers in the area. The decline of the textile industry, together with the immigration of sizeable numbers of Turkish migrants, caused a shift in the shopping infrastructure: discontinued ‘native’ businesses were (cheaply) purchased and replaced by new shops and bars owned by Turkish migrants and their

FIGURE 10.2

An image of ‘decline’

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descendants. This evolution caused a shift in the semiotic landscape, with the emerging visibility of the Turkish language and Turkish symbols (such as the Turkish flag and the evil eye) in the streets. It also caused a shift in the public (i.e. ‘native’) perception of the street and its infrastructure: the new shops are ‘cheap’, and this change is perceived as a decline in status. A classic image of the decline, from a native middle-class perspective, is this vegetable shop, where an older Dutch sign is still visible behind the overlay of Turkish signs (Figure 10.2). The image of decline, however, fails to capture the intense dynamic and layering that goes on in the local infrastructure. There are clear signs of ‘upgrading’ of more traditional small-scale Turkish businesses, reflecting greater affluence in the community and a rising demand for more diversified commodities in the neighbourhood: a full-blown Turkish-owned supermarket opened its doors, together with fancy hair salons and upmarket lunch restaurants. In addition, the construction of a regional Court of Law in the neighbourhood and the presence of a University Professional College attract new users to the neighbourhood. Every day, 2,000 students arrive in the Rabot, while the new courthouse attracts around 1,700 people on a daily basis.3 The presence of these new users of the neighbourhood is promptly reflected in infrastructural changes. Several new lunch restaurants target the (largely middle-class) students, visitors of the courthouse, and new middle-class residents. The Turkish kebab restaurant Göreme at the beginning of the Wondelgemstraat also tries to cash in by explicitly focusing on the student population (Figure 10.3).

FIGURE 10.3

Göreme restaurant

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The window of the restaurant is revealing. We can distinguish four different languages: Turkish (the name of the restaurant), Dutch, French, and English. The general description of the place uses three languages: Dutch (student eethuis), which carries an ‘accent’ (a more preferred term is studenteneethuis), French-Dutch (brasserie), and English (‘Since 1993’). While the Dutch and the Dutch-French inscriptions carry a purely informative message, the English words are emblematic and gesture towards a global commercial culture and its ‘quality’. This also counts for the French-Dutch term brasserie, which usually points towards a more upmarket segment of catering. And it also counts for the sticker of the ‘Justeat.be’ platform, referring to a website of restaurants that do home deliveries. By joining the online platform ‘Do not cook, just eat.be’, the restaurant expands its customer base beyond the neighbourhood. Most of the other messages on the window are in ‘ecumenical Turkish’: words such as döner, pizza Turka, dürüm are also know by Dutch-speaking young people. Even though the restaurant clearly started as a Turkish restaurant aimed at a local Turkish customer base (we still see monolingual Turkish light panels above the window), we notice that the restaurant has adjusted itself towards the new users of the neighbourhood and the new communication technologies to reach out to a broader customer base. The examples above are indicators of broader change in the infrastructure of the district, in sync with the sociodemographic dynamics of the neighbourhood. We can again distinguish different layers of infrastructure. The first and oldest layer consists of two types of infrastructure. On the one hand, we see ‘native’ facilities targeting a local-native clientele: some old-school cafes, the native butcher who sells pork, and a music shop specialising in Dutch music. All these shops use monolingual Dutch signage. On the other hand, we find nativeowned shops that reach out to the superdiverse clientele of the neighbourhood: the recently retired artisan shoemaker – a ‘classic Flemish shop’ serving a superdiverse clientele – and a laundrette now called QuickWash, but with the old (very 1960s) advertising panel ‘Wasorama’ still showing. Most of the native shops have disappeared over the years. The ones that stayed have adjusted their selections of goods and services. A good example is the local supermarket, Proxy Delhaize. While Delhaize supermarkets tend to attract a middle- and upper-class clientele, the Wondelgemstraat branch has adjusted itself to the neighbourhood: ‘typical’ Turkish products can be purchased and the supermarket also houses a branch of Western Union – a typical infrastructure of superdiversity. Similar adjustments can also be spotted in the weekly Sunday market nearby. The many visitors are superdiverse and some market vendors are responding to this by adjusting their merchandise to local tastes and preferences, now including Turkish peppers, honey melons, and flat parsley. Thus we see that an important part of the ‘old’ infrastructure of the neighbourhood has been affected by its new environment. A second layer consists of shops, coffee houses, cafes, hair salons, and betting offices that have a relatively stable presence serving the old and the new audiences in the

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district. They focus on the socially disadvantaged. This layer consists of several cheaper shops with household appliances, kitchen material, and food and shop names such as ‘Exit Euro Crisis’ provide utmost clarity in this respect. Besides these local stores, we see several low-cost chain outlets. The neighbourhood infrastructure includes a major segment of low budget facilities. Call and Internet shops are of course very well represented in the street and almost all the night shops sell prepaid phone cards. The street is replete with posters of cheap international providers such as Ortel Mobile or Lyca Mobile. The same is true for the betting shops. They individually pop up and disappear but their presence as a category of facilities is permanent. There is no shortage of usually Turkish-origin barbers in the street, and the street is also known for its ‘Turkish shops’: the old and the new butcher, several bakeries, greengrocers, and shops selling (cheap) household appliances. Even though most of these shops have Turkish names, they serve an ecumenical audience, as opposed to most of the Turkish cafes and coffee houses, populated mostly by customers of Turkish origins. A third layer consists of businesses with a shorter history. This layer can be seen as the infrastructural translation of the superdiversity in the neighbourhood. Bulgarian-run facilities have, thus, become a rather stable presence in the last number of years. Their presence became visible when the Turkish bar Gecem Bar suddenly had a new name written on the windows: Café Bar Bulgariya. Today, there is a Bulgarian restaurant, a Bulgarian coffee house, and two Bulgarian

FIGURE 10.4

Bulgarian-owned shop

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grocery stores, testifying to the remarkable swiftness with which the Bulgarian immigrants have settled in the neighbourhood. The reason for this lies in the fact that Bulgarian newcomers were eagerly employed by Turkish subcontractors – not generally known to offer good working conditions. As an effect of this, Bulgarian immigrants started their own businesses and immediately adapted to the superdiverse environment. The lettering and multilingualism on the shop window in Figure 10.4 can serve as an example of this. The store clearly tries to attract different groups in the neighbourhood. Bulgarian migrants living in the neighbourhood are evidently included: in the upper left corner some typical home made Bulgarian food is shown and the potential customers are addressed with monolingual Bulgarian text. But the main inscription on the window, Bulgaarse producten (‘Bulgarian products’), is written in flawless standard Dutch, the lingua franca of the neighbourhood, and invites everyone. And it becomes even more complex. Besides Bulgarian and Dutch, we also find Spanish on display, in a Bulgarian-owned store that also aims at the recently arrived South American migrants: an Ortel Mobile poster in Spanish and Dutch advertises the cost per minute for a call to the following countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Peru (countries of which the national flags are also shown). Note that the presence of recent Latin-American immigrants is a ‘below the radar’ phenomenon: if we look at the figures of the SumResearch report, only 0.10 per cent of the entire population of Ghent has Latin-American roots. The official statistics for Wondelgemstraat do not even mention a LatinAmerican presence. This poster functions as an ‘early warning’ indicator of the presence of a group that does not yet show up in the statistics. We observed the poster in August 2013; several months later the first Latin-American shop popped up in the street. And again, this must be seen both as an indicator of demographic changes in the neighbourhood and as a local reflex of global change. Most of the Latin-American migrants come from Columbia and the Dominican Republic. They migrated to Spain in the 1980s, and left for Belgium in the wake of the recent economic crisis in Spain, to be employed, mostly, in the industrial cleaning sector. Other new shops appear and old ones disappear at a fast pace, each time pointing towards new forms of presence in the area. A Jordanian butcher, who explicitly advertised in Arabic to reach out to another niche of local residents than the Turkish butchers, has disappeared, to be replaced by an African-Asian (Indian-Pakistani) shop that opened its doors in March 2014. A new supermarket called ‘Mix Markt’ opened and uses four different languages to welcome and to thank its customers, namely Dutch, Russian, Romanian, and Bulgarian (Figure 10.5). A fourth layer consists of shops and businesses that received an ‘upgrading’ makeover, targeting a wider and less economically vulnerable audience and distinguishing themselves from the newer shops. Examples are a dog grooming business, a new

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FIGURE 10.5

Mix Markt

bicycle shop, and several catering businesses. Some Turkish shops have received a visual makeover and new, more upmarket clothes and food shops are started. All these businesses have clearly invested in the appearance of their store. The facade of a Turkish-owned driving school is finished in black marble and the cars with which the student drivers are learning to drive are new BMWs. Previously, these stores were selling mainly cheaper Turkish products; their upgrading has given the neighbourhood the budding reputation of an attractive food shopping area for Turkish-origin people in the wider region. Such changes document a strong upward mobility within the Turkish community. Turkish migrants from the second, third, and fourth generation have become middle class and now start businesses that demand higher qualifications: there are Turkish dentists, doctors, lawyers, and psychologists in the neighbourhood. The Turkish community is upwardly mobile, and this mobility is reflected in its changing infrastructure. Observe, by way of illustration, Figures 10.6 and 10.7. Both pictures document a restaurant owned by the same Turkish-origin family; only, both pictures are separated by some months in which the original restaurant was closed and the new one reopened in another location. And while the original restaurant was a monolingually Turkish-language place serving home-style traditional Turkish food, the new Selâle Restaurant has a menu in Turkish and Dutch, as well as English text above its window – pointing to new middle-class and cosmopolitan ambitions and identity aspirations with its owners. Budgets and tastes move in close harmony, as Pierre Bourdieu taught us some decades ago. The fifth layer consists of the different shops and restaurants that target users from outside the district. Restaurants and sandwich bars near the courthouse serve visitors from the courthouse and college students, and some of them have acquired a

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FIGURE 10.6

Emirdag Köftecisi

trendy reputation. One very fashionable Moroccan-owned hairdresser chose the name ‘She Bio Salon’ and focuses on a wealthier clientele, a majority of whom are ‘native’ Flemish. The hair salon specialises in treating women who received chemotherapy – a niche market catering for a very wide catchment area. A sixth layer consists of religious buildings. There are five mosques in the wider neighbourhood, distinguished on linguistic, historical, and political grounds. There are, in addition, Catholic, Protestant and evangelical churches. Recently, an African evangelical church has started operating in the broader neighbourhood, mainly attracting African visitors. The church is located in what was formerly a night shop; it is now called the ‘End of Time Divine Chapel’ and can accommodate over 100 people. The seventh and last layer in the neighbourhood consists of the official and civil society infrastructure in this area. We already mentioned the courthouse and the college. Apart from that, the City of Ghent and many civil society organisations have invested in the neighbourhood and have had a lasting impact on the neighbourhood. One example with a considerable impact is The Site.4 Located on the premises of the former gas factory and a telephone company, The Site gathers more than 10 projects: a mini allotment, a city field, a city farm, a playground, a soccer field, an encounter container, a beekeeper, etc. Besides installing a green area in this densely populated district, the project also has socio-economic and participatory targets. The complex array of different infrastructures in Rabot provides important clues as to patterns of interaction, social trajectories, and mobility in the

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FIGURE 10.7

Selâle Restaurant

neighbourhood. The neighbourhood has a very large number of meeting spaces – ecumenical places where people of all directions can come and meet – and lines of mobility, consequently, intersect at numerous points. While some parts of the infrastructure are ‘segregated’ on socio-economic or other grounds – think of the pork butcher, the Western Union booth, the churches, or some Turkish coffee houses – most places in the neighbourhood are ‘open’, and their owners seem to be aware of the benefits of an ecumenical orientation, invariably expressed through Dutch or (to a lesser extent) through English. It is hard to avoid certain kinds of people in the neighbourhood, as hard as it is to spend one’s time exclusively with a specific kind of people. The complexity of the infrastructure, or its inherent instability and changeability, do not prevent significant amounts of social interaction from occurring and a remarkable level of social cohesion to emerge, even in the face of sharp inequality and various forms of exploitation – those seemingly opposing forces do not seem to exclude each other in practice (cf. Blommaert 2014; see also Simone 2010). The changes in the infrastructure clearly reflect the changes in historical and demographic layers of the population. Some layers are subject to rapid changes, while others remain relatively stable over a long time span. Some native shops and cafes have been there for decades, while others have closed their doors. The Turkish migrants are clearly visible in the infrastructure, and these layers are quite stable over time; the most dynamic and changeable layer is that which characterises the recent patterns of migration. The neighbourhood has rapidly morphed from a multicultural neighbourhood into a superdiverse one.

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What ELLA Can Do for Us Repeated ethnographic observation focused on public signage and design in an area such as Rabot has shown us: (i) A precise and detailed image of the demography of the neighbourhood: we have been able to inform ourselves about the different communities who live there. (ii) This in itself, however, equals the outcomes of more traditional quantitative LLS. The edge provided by ELLA is that we do not just get a distributional image of the population, but a stratigraphy in which old groups can be distinguished from newer ones, small groups from bigger ones, predominant ones from hardly visible ones. (iii) In addition, we have been able to connect this stratified and complex image of the population to an equally layered and multifiliar view of the neighbourhood’s infrastructure – we have seen, in other words, how the different groups in the neighbourhood organise practices and relationships between themselves, by creating and adjusting infrastructural facilities tailored for the needs of communities in the neighbourhood. (iv) And finally, we have been able to see sociocultural phenomena such as (commercial) ambition and identity aspiration in the deployment of multilingual (‘posh’) resources. We thus begin to see the local ways in which people organise indexicals of social mobility and identity around the deployment of specific semiotic resources – we see, in other words, emergent orders of indexicality and patterns of enregisterment giving shape to the neighbourhood (cf. Blommaert 2005: 73–78; Agha 2007). (v) Throughout, we have seen these things in a dynamic and multifiliar historical process of transformation, in which the old working-class and ‘pillarised’ neighbourhood gradually transformed into a multicultural (‘Turkish’) one, and after that into a superdiverse one, in such a way that ‘sedimentation’ of older stages of the process remains readable during more recent stages of that process. Let us briefly pause and consider the last point. Recall Figure 10.1 –the PolishBelgian construction workers’ van – and Figure 10.2 – the Turkish grocery that still bore the inscriptions of its ‘native’ Flemish predecessor. What we see in this neighbourhood, and on the basis of what we called ELLA, is how different historicities coincide in one social space: slow and long histories such as the gradual decline of ‘native’ Flemish business and its replacement by Turkish-owned commerce in Figure 10.2, as well as fast and short histories such as the occasional ‘commuting’ of Polish construction workers in areas such as Rabot. The stretch of history recorded in Figure 10.2 is perhaps longer than half a century; that recorded in Figure 10.1 probably spans just a few weeks or months. In between both, we

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see the relatively fast and recent transformations documented in Figures 10.6 and 10.7, in which upwardly mobile members of the old Turkish community convert their business from an ‘ethnic’ into a ‘cosmopolitan’ one, and from a low-key and understated into a fashionable and trendy one. We begin to see, thus, the fine fibre of superdiversity: the way in which recent history has turned urban spaces such as Rabot into complex and dynamic spaces not ruled by one set of forces, but by multiple ones, with aspects of the neighbourhood developing slowly while others develop at terrible speed, often in unforeseen directions – Appadurai’s (1996) ‘vernacular globalisation’ in full glory. The different forces at play in these processes compel us to reflect on scale issues. We have seen how the arrival of Latin American immigrants was triggered by the grave economic crisis in Spain – their presence in Rabot is thus an immediate effect of global socio-economic changes – while Bulgarians and Slovakian immigrants entered the area as an effect of the expansion of the European Union – an effect of political processes on a European regional scale. The presence of all of these groups, however, considerably changed the strictly local dynamics as well, notably through the economic opportunities (through rented accommodation and cheap labour) it offered to the resident Turkish-origin community. And this tendency towards class upgrading coincided with the opening of the courthouse in the area, now attracting large numbers of ‘native’ middle-class and highly qualified people to the neighbourhood and offering yet again new and attractive opportunities for more upmarket and cosmopolitan bars, restaurants, and snack bars. All of these differently scaled processes coincide in one ‘synchronic’ arena, the neighbourhood – where they are ‘vernacularised’, to borrow Appadurai’s term once more. At the end of the sociolinguistic process, language is always a local phenomenon shot through with the accents of all its users (Blommaert 2010: Chapter 3; Pennycook 2010). The texture of this vernacularisation, though, is not smooth or uniform; in fact, we may witness not one, but several, different but connected processes of vernacularisation: at least one ‘inward’, where the locally residing communities are adjusting to the new environment, and another one ‘outward’, where these adjustments reach new audiences beyond the neighbourhood – as when ‘native’ Flemish lawyers working in the courthouse have a nicely served Turkish dish for lunch in one of the newly refashioned local snack bars such as Selâle Restaurant, ordered from a now bilingual menu. For the time being, therefore, it may be best to put scare quotes around terms such as ‘synchronisation’ and ‘vernacularisation’: even if we cannot yet get to the bottom of it at present, we suspect a more complex set of phenomena there than what is suggested in these singular terms.

Acknowledgements This chapter extends collaborative work reported in Maly et al. (2014), and we wish to thank Joachim Ben Yakoub for his input, feedback, and support.

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Notes 1. See: http://gent.buurtmonitor.be/quickstep/qsreport.aspx?report=wijkmon_z_t&geo level=wijk&geoitem=7 (accessed 14 October 2014). 2. See: www.nieuwsblad.be/article/detail.aspx?articleid=DMF20121012_024 (accessed 14 October 2014). 3. See: www.oogent.be/sites/default/files/page/documenten/klein%20formaat%20Fiche% 20Rabot-Blaisantvest10_WF1540_Fichelv1.pdf (accessed 14 October 2014). 4. See: www.rabotsite.be/nl/de-site (accessed 14 October 2014).

References Agha, A. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Backhaus, P. 2007. Linguistic Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in Tokyo. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Barni, M. 2008. Mapping immigrant languages in Italy. In M. Barni & G. Extra (eds), Mapping Linguistic Diversity in Multicultural Contexts. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 217–244. Barni, M., & Bagna, C. 2008. A mapping technique and the linguistic landscape. In E. Shohamy & D. Gorter (eds), Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery. London: Routledge, pp. 126–140. Barni, M., & Extra, G. (eds). 2008. Mapping Linguistic Diversity in Multicultural Contexts. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ben-Rafael, E., Shohamy, E., Amara, M.H., & Trumper-Hecht, N. 2006. Linguistic landscape as symbolic construction of the public space: The case of Israel. International Journal of Multilingualism, 3: 7–30. Blommaert, J. 2005. Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. 2013. Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Blommaert, J. 2014. Infrastructures of superdiversity: Conviviality and language in an Antwerp neighbourhood. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 17(4): 431–451. Blommaert, J., Collins, J., & Slembrouck, S. 2005. Spaces of multilingualism. Language and Communication, 25: 197–216. Coupland, N., & Garrett, P. 2010. Linguistic landscapes, discursive frames and metacultural performance: The case of Welsh Patagonia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 205: 7–36. De Wilde, B. 2007. Gent-Rabot: De teloorgang van de textielnijverheid. Ghent: Gent Cultuurstad-Lannoo. Gorter, D. 2006. Introduction: The study of the linguistic landscape as a new approach to multilingualism. In D. Gorter (ed.), Linguistic Landscape: A New Approach to Multilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 1–6. Jaworski, A. 2010. Linguistic landscapes on postcards: Tourist mediation and the sociolinguistic communities of contact. Sociolinguistic Studies, 4(3): 469–594. Juffermans, K. 2010. Local languaging: Literacy products and practices in Gambian society. PhD Dissertation, Tilburg University.

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Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Landry, R., & Bourhis, R.Y. 1997. Linguistic landscape and ethnographic vitality: An empirical study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16: 23–49. Lillis, T. 2013. The Sociolinguistics of Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Maly, I., Blommaert, J., & Ben Yakoub, J. 2014. Superdiversiteit en democratie. Berchem: EPO. Pan Lin. 2009. Dissecting multilingual Beijng: The space and scale of vernacular globalization. Visual Communication, 9(1): 67–90. Pennycook, A. 2010. Language as a Local Practice. London: Routledge. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S.W. 2003. Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. London: Routledge. Shohamy, E., & Gorter, D. (eds). 2009. Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery. London: Routledge. SID. 2012. Beleidsplan etnisch-culturele diversiteit 2012–2014, bijlage 1: Onderzoek en Cijfers. Stad Gent. Available at: www.gent.be/docs/Departement%20bevolking%20en% 20Welzijn/Integratiedienst/Beleidsplannen/Onderzoek%20en%20cijfers_ECD_20122014.pdf (accessed 30 June 2014). Simone, A. 2010. The social infrastructures of city life in contemporary Africa. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Discussion Paper 51. Stroud, C., & Mpendukana, S. 2009. Towards a material ethnography of linguistic landscape: Multilingualism, mobility and space in a South-African township. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13(3): 363–383. SumResearch. 2008. Een kwantitatieve analyse van de bevolking in Gent. Available at: www.kenniscentrumvlaamsesteden.be/beleidsdomeinen/wonen/Documents/Woons tudie%20van%20de%20stad%20Gent/01%20Kwantitatieve%20analyse%20bevolking. pdf (accessed 30 June 2014). Van den Abeele, T. 2010. De geschiedenis van de Technologiecampus KAHO-Sint Lieven. Ghent: KAHO-Sint Lieven Hogeschool. Verhaeghe, P.P., Van der Bracht, K., & Van de Putte, B. 2012. Migrant zkt Toekomst: Gent op een keerpunt tussen oude en nieuwe migratie. Leuven: Garant. Wang, X. forthcoming. Authenticities and globalization in the margins: A study of Enshi, China. PhD Dissertation, Tilburg University. Wang, X., Spotti, M., Juffermans, K., Cornips, L., Kroon, S., & Blommaert, J. 2013. Globalization in the margins: Toward a re-evaluation of language and mobility. Applied Linguistics Review, 5(1): 23–44.

11 SUPERDIVERSITY ON THE INTERNET A Case from China Piia Varis and Xuan Wang

This chapter presents the case of the Chinese rapper MC Liangliang and his online activities to illustrate superdiversity on the Internet. It is clear that the Internet offers unprecedented opportunities for individuals to participate in global cultural flows such as hip hop, and make use of the highly creative ways of identity-making that the Internet enables. In the case of MC Liangliang, this creativity means, for instance, that he blends the global resource of English with other languages; he depicts himself as a rebellious, black rapper; and his activities are part of those of a virtual hip-hop crew that operates online. Hip-hop culture is essentially about authenticity, ‘keeping it real’, and Liangliang makes use of the means provided by the Internet in creating his own authenticity as a rapper very creatively. Yet, this online freedom and creativity also appear to be influenced and structured by multiple levels of norms. A close analysis of a sample of Liangliang’s online performance suggests that these include state-imposed norms (the censoring of profanity) as well as peer-imposed (the struggle over what is ‘authentic’ and ‘real’ versus ‘fake’ hip hop) and self-imposed norms (the choices Liangliang makes in his own performance according to what he believes ‘real’ hip hop to be about). Each of these sets of norms contributes, in its own way, to the making of the particular kind of hip-hop authenticity Liangliang constructs. Our analysis suggests that a balanced and nuanced understanding of superdiversity on the Internet requires attending to both creativity and normativity, and their dynamic interrelations. It seems that forms of superdiversity are better explained by attending to systems of normativity that, as the chapter suggests, are ultimately governed by the ideology of authenticity.

Introduction: Internet and Superdiversity The Internet can be seen as a major mechanism in globalisation processes and in the creation of superdiversity (Vertovec 2006, 2010). The World Wide Web

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opens up entirely new channels of communication, generating new linguistic and cultural forms, new ways of forming and maintaining contacts, networks and groups, and new opportunities for identity-making (e.g. Sundén 2003; Baron 2008; boyd1 2009). Technology has made it increasingly easy to transgress one’s immediate lifeworld, extend it to and beyond the screen, and engage in local as well as translocal activities through previously unavailable means. All of this cannot be ignored in explaining the world today, and discussions on superdiversity should take into account the significance of the Internet in complexifying the nature of human communication and engagement with others, of transnational movements and migration, and of social and cultural life in general. However, we should also be wary of too much optimism in this respect. The so-called ‘Internet revolution’ witnessed in the past three decades or so entices many with the promise of a superdiverse space par excellence – a space of seemingly endless possibilities for self-expression, individual life projects, and community formation. Prevailing Internet ideologies often present us with an image of an online world saturated with opportunities and aspirations where one is able to indulge in infinite creativity in imagining and constructing both self and other. While it may be a truism that life on the Internet is overwhelmingly innovative and diverse, it is necessary to recognise that this happy heterogeneity is only part of the scene. Much like in the offline world, rules and norms are also to be complied with in online spaces. As we have demonstrated elsewhere (Varis et al. 2011), constraints do not only exist online, but are as important as the opportunities offered by the Internet: they have determining effects on the way Internet users are able to deploy and develop identity repertoires, engage with others, and form communities. While enabling continuous ‘diversification of diversity’ (Vertovec 2006: 1), the Internet is also a space where diversity is controlled, ordered, and curtailed. This control involves both explicit forms of normativity (e.g. policies for Internet use as observable in different geopolitical contexts such as China) and more implicit ones that emerge and are negotiated and monitored in online micro-practices. Normativity online is no less important or complex than normativity offline; on the contrary, life online is also overlaid by the overwhelming speed and scope of communication, as well as unprecedented heteroglossia, all of which further complicates the picture (cf. Leppänen & Elo, this volume). As both a result and consequence of this heterogeneity and polycentricity, engaging in new diversity-ridden online environments often requires orientating in specific ways towards much more nuanced and more mixed, scaled forms of normativity than before, as a broad range of scales of orientation influences actions online. That is, in order to successfully communicate and engage in (sub)cultural action, it may be necessary to observe several different layers of normativity through which superdiversity (online) is controlled and shaped by multi-scalar forces. Attending to these dynamics between freedom, creativity, and normativity is crucial for obtaining a detailed and nuanced understanding of superdiversity on

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the Internet; yet the way in which such dynamics work, and, more fundamentally, what forms of normativity are at play and to what extent they organise online practices, still needs to be further interrogated. Attention to the work of order, coercion, and power in cyberspace is needed to meet the current agenda for enriched theorisation of concepts such as ‘superdiversity’ and ‘globalisation’ in social sciences (see Blommaert & Rampton; Arnaut, this volume; Blommaert 2010; Blommaert & Varis 2011; Varis forthcoming). This chapter is committed to the tasks outlined above, and we illustrate the exercises of normativity and creativity on the Internet by examining a case from China2 – a Beijing-based rapper and his online engagement with the global flows of hip-hop cultures. There are compelling reasons for this focus, the most elementary one being that it offers a rich instance of semiotisation (i.e. meaningcreation using various semiotic resources) in online communication and identitymaking in the context of globalisation. Its use of multimodal (texts, pictures, and acoustics) and multilingual (Chinese, English, and Korean) resources and its metapragmatic narrative on cultural practices (how to do hip hop online), as we shall see soon, are all sites for the production of creativity as well as normativity. Second, as ‘Internet hip hop’ – both created in online spaces and published online – it brings together two typical forms of superdiversity in the context of cultural globalisation. Hip hop is “the most profound and the most perplexing cultural, musical and linguistic movement of the late 20th/early 21st century” (Alim 2009: 3), with highly heteroglossic, innovative language and other cultural practices (e.g. Pennycook 2003, 2007a, 2007b; Alim et al. 2009; Westinen 2014), and its emergence online as an Internet subculture hugely expands its potential for superdiversity while at the same time appears shaped by normative forces. As will surface later, the involvement of the two vehicles of superdiversity in our case (i.e. the semiotisation of Chinese hip hop) does not necessarily lead to doubled freedom and creativity in discursive behaviours. Rather, each opportunity for creativity goes hand in hand with normativity that is multiply layered and operates on different scale-levels. Further, our case study assumes an empirical, ‘bottom-up’ ethnographic approach (e.g. Hymes 1996; Blommaert 2005; Rampton 2007; Cora Garcia et al. 2009; Juffermans 2010). This allows us to develop more detailed and sophisticated understandings of this new communicative environment and how it works through the fine-grains of language use by the Internet users, as argued for in the introductory section of this volume. Finally, we engage critically with China, which, though at times projected as being in the periphery from the globalisation centres such as the nation states in Western Europe, provides an interesting case of engagement with both superdiversity and normativity in the virtual space. China’s Internet development is impressive, but is also known for stringent control and censorship, this being a clear example of ‘language policing’ (Blommaert et al. 2009) from the state level. As our case suggests, however, there is more to it than this: normativity can also be imposed from below – by oneself or one’s peers – and this introduces

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further, intricate local and translocal systems of normativity – the micropolitics of language and/or cultural policing that can be found in all interactions in different social spaces and contexts. In what follows, we first situate our case through a discussion on the emerging superdiversity on the Internet in China, and hip hop in China. We will then move on to discuss our Chinese case to illustrate how what could be termed a global super-vernacular (i.e. the global hip-hop culture; see e.g. Blommaert 2011) is creatively employed by a Chinese rapper online, and how this super-vernacular is spoken with an original ‘local Chinese accent’ – all the while strictly adhering to a certain complex of norms. The complex of creativity and norms will ultimately lead us to the notion of authenticity, which, essentially, is about discursive orientations towards a specific configuration of norms in order to ‘pass as’ someone or something (see Blommaert & Varis 2011). Instead of locality or localisation, it is authenticity that is the driving force in the ‘superdiverse’ effort examined here.

Internet Cultures in China China became a more active participant in globalisation processes two decades ago, and soon became considered a rising member of the global ‘network society’ (Castells 1996/2000, 2004) via rapid, large-scale adoption of new technologies, such as the Internet, to facilitate and advance its economic modernisation. Today, China is home to the largest number of Internet users in the world, reaching over 600 million by the end of 2013, and its Internet penetration rate has reached over 45 per cent.3 All these developments have taken place within the short span of just over a decade. The speed, volume, and intensity of these developments are astonishing, even if rather uneven in terms of geographical and social distribution and accessibility (see Lu et al. 2002, for an overview of the Internet development in China). The impact of “the spirit of Chinese informationalism” (Qiu 2004: 99) is not, however, exclusively economic. Like in other parts of the world, in China the Internet is playing an evermore prominent role in the transformation of the public sphere and civil society, fostering the formation of an emerging network society and virtual communities, offering new space and resources for transnational and translocal engagements, and giving rise to enhanced social mobility and various empowering political, cultural, and personal manoeuvres and contestations (see e.g. Yang 2003a, 2003b, 2003c; Lo 2009; Leibold 2010; Li 2010). The scope of opportunities, creativity, and freedom introduced and sustained by the Internet is tremendous, even though China also implements explicit regulations on Internet use through heavy censorship (Qiu 1999/2000; MacKinnon 2008). The new opportunities are perhaps most notable in relation to political movements addressing questions such as freedom of speech, citizen activism, and democracy in Chinese society (e.g. Qiu 2004; MacKinnon 2009; Yang 2009), not to

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mention the fast expansion of e-business and consequently booming economic and social infrastructures based on telecommunications (e.g. Liang 2010). The emergence of Internet subcultures is another remarkable aspect of the transnationalisation of diversity in Chinese society, especially in mediating the global flows of different forms of popular culture, such as movies, fashion, and music. Hip hop today is linguistically and culturally an emblematic ‘superdiverse’ phenomenon, with local interpretations of the global flourishing, also – and perhaps particularly so – on the Internet. ‘Internet hip hop’ is also a good example of an Internet subculture – or, using different terminology, a ‘super-group’, in Arnaut’s terms (see Blommaert and Rampton, this volume) – that brings together great numbers of individuals who via the Internet engage with, circulate, appropriate, and modify global hip-hop flows otherwise less visible and accessible for them. This is particularly prominent and relevant in China, as ‘Internet hip hop’, known as wangluo xiha, occupies much of the hip-hop scene there. While still negotiating its way into the highly normative cultural and social mainstream, the globally available format of hip hop is spreading rapidly and, primarily, via the Internet among the grass-roots Chinese. Even if the visibility of the translocal practices of hip hop is largely restricted to the online space, the degree of diversification in their uptake in China is extraordinary. Complex translocal, transnational networks are developed, and large numbers of locally appropriated versions of hip hop begin to emerge on the Internet, varying greatly in terms of language features, cultural styles, and political motivations. MC Liangliang (the focus of this study), whose online engagement with hip hop has gained him considerable credibility among hip-hop and youth communities in China, and connected him to the wider part of global hip-hop flows, is one example of these processes. The translocal flows, thanks to the Internet, also reach marginalised individuals in remote locations, as in the case of a dialect rapper from Enshi – the periphery of globalisation in China – that we have recorded elsewhere (see Varis et al. 2011; Wang 2012). This mobility offered by hip-hop globalisation online is also observable in other parts of the world, for instance in the case of Amoc, the Sami rapper in Lapland of northern Finland (e.g. Ridanpää & Pasanen 2009; Leppänen & Pietikäinen 2010; Pietikäinen 2010). The opportunities in such cases are as much about having access to and being able to participate in the global as they are about the appropriation and (re)invention of the local. What is at stake in the mixture of global and local is authenticity – the defining feature of global hiphop ideology (e.g. Pennycook 2007a). To ‘keep it real’ (i.e. to be authentic in hip-hop terms) involves the creative blending of local and translocal resources while also orienting towards different normative scales that are brought together at the moment of creation. To ‘keep it real’ is indeed to speak a ‘resistance vernacular’ (Potter 1995) that demonstrates rebelliousness and deviation, or creativity by rendering what is global with local features. But creativity is always tied to normativity (how to be authentic and ‘keep it real’), and such dynamics are also relevant on the Internet – if not

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particularly so because of the reduced prominence of locality in online spaces. Further, even though the Internet has hugely expanded our potential for creativity, normative systems do impinge upon online meaning-making. This, in the Chinese case examined here, also includes the state-imposed control of ‘unacceptable’ online behaviour by means of content and/or even website removal; that is, the products of one’s creativity can even be completely removed should they fail to adhere to the prevailing norms established for online behaviour. The dynamics between normativity, especially in relation to the production of hip-hop authenticity, and creativity will be of central concern in our examination of a 26-year-old Beijingbased rapper and his online hip hop (i.e. the products of his (sub)cultural activity that he posts online).

‘Real Hip Hop’ in China: Creativity and Normativity Online Upon entering the world of online Chinese hip hop, it should be observed that posting music and lyrics online is, of course, not specific to Chinese hip hop or even hip hop in general – all kinds of artists all over the world publish their products online. This has fundamentally changed the economy and distribution of music as such: the world of music has become notably smaller and more accessible in many respects, and it is perhaps realistic to say that music producers independent of big industries can much more easily gain visibility for themselves and speak to audiences otherwise out of their reach. This also means that, despite the control (and homogenising, de-diversifying influence) of huge industries in the business, the availability of different kinds of cultural products is, thanks to the Internet, more widespread than ever before. That is, the Internet allows for the emergence and visibility of cultural forms otherwise relatively, if not entirely, invisible to audiences and thus facilitates the diversification of culture and forms of cultural production in circulation. The Chinese case investigated here – MC 良良, or MC Liangliang4 – is a case in point: we are looking at a rapper now based in Beijing (where he migrated several years ago) who without the Internet would probably have much less visibility, and be able to reach far fewer people.5 The Internet allows him to post his music and lyrics online and also to embrace a certain kind of identity – to engage in the global hip-hop semiotics in an unprecedented manner. Online environments offer us these possibilities, simply provided that there is access to a device with an Internet connection. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that without the Internet, none of this would happen, or that this rapper in Beijing would not have the global semiotics and cultural flows at his disposal – it is rather that the Internet facilitates all this, and allows for forms of engagement and participation that would not exist without it. The Internet, of course, is not only a space for unlimited and unrestrained flows. The rules of engagement have (at least in many cases) not been established

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a priori (i.e. norms are emergent) and this goes for all kinds of norms – those of communication, (sub)culturalisation and identity-making. The fact that, in many cases, the norms have not been pre-established does not, therefore, mean that there are no norms, but that they are often (re)worked in the process of engagement on online fora. It should also be borne in mind that the global cultural flows within our reach thanks to the Internet are not only liberating and allowing for more diversity, but also provide templates and blueprints for (sub)cultural action, and therefore also constrain online creativity. Global cultures, codes, and flows, however, do not work according to a deterministic logic: they are not swallowed without chewing, so to speak. In this process of ‘chewing’ the global semiotic resources, potentially very interesting things happen, as ‘global’ and ‘local’ resources become creatively blended. As a result, global codes with a local accent appear. Global codes or templates are what we can call super-vernaculars – global ways of fashioning identities, forms of communication, genres, etc. recognisable for members of emergent super-groups (see Blommaert 2011; Velghe 2011, 2012; Blommaert & Velghe 2012). These super-vernaculars become recognised as certain things because they share certain recognisable features, and through the re-enactment and re-circulation of these, super-communities are created and subsequently sustained. To put it otherwise, certain shared indexical orders6 are acknowledged and recognised as belonging to a certain super-vernacular – for instance, in the case discussed here, that of ‘hip-hopness’. These global orders offer different affordances – resources and opportunities for meaning-making – for those appropriating these large-scale scripts and blending them with local orders, and one such affordance is de-globalisation. As a result, of such appropriations, dialects of the super-vernacular appear (Blommaert 2011). This is what we shall now illustrate through the case of MC Liangliang and his posse.

MC Liangliang and His Crew: The Semiotisation of Authenticity Let us start with the rapper himself, MC Liangliang, or Liangliang as many of his fans refer to him. This name, as is common for both online and hip-hop names, is of course a pseudonym, although, interestingly, ‘Liang’ is taken from his real name. His name also mixes the global hip-hop English ‘MC’ with the Chinese ‘Liangliang’, marking him as a member of the global hip-hop community, and, simultaneously, as a member of a narrower hip-hop niche (i.e. the Chinese hiphop community). However, what is equally intriguing is that according to Liangliang, he is not an ‘MC’ in its globally recognised meaning (Master of Ceremony). Instead, he claims that his full hip-hop name is ‘Month Catamenia Liang Liang (yuejing Liang Liang)’.7 One way of interpreting this is that the global symbol of ‘MC’, as part of the hip-hop package, is localised and reinvented by Liangliang for his own purposes, while this shift towards local also involves items

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that are atypically local (in English) and incomplete (his use of ‘month’ instead of ‘monthly’). This appropriation is about creativity as well as rebelliousness by taking the liberty to reject the global norm and to create something new. The outcome of the new invention, ‘Month Catamenia’, is also about rebelliousness as the phrase in Chinese (which is also explicitly used by Liangliang in the Chinese version of his hip-hop name) is a culturally sensitive word often replaced with a euphemism. The transgression apparent in the selection of the term iconicises both the cultural and the countercultural sides of hip hop. Here, we already begin to see alignments towards – and resistance against – different sets of indexicalities and markers of identity and identification, and observing MC Liangliang’s online presence will take us a step further in seeing how the global becomes enmeshed with the local. MC Liangliang appears actively on several Internet platforms, primarily the website www.oyinyue.com for publishing his songs, and the Baidu message board and Sina microblog for chats and blogs related to his artistic work, and other more general topics – that is, to engage with his audiences. He raps both independently and as part of a crew called 乱感觉 (‘MessFeel’). Several of the members of this group live in his hometown region in North-Eastern China; so, apart from himself, none of the group members is currently based in Beijing. The collaborative work of composing and performing is therefore done entirely online, and the group uses QQ (a Chinese program used for instant messaging, blogging, gaming, etc.) to exchange ideas and inspiration, to relay bits of work or simply to socialise with one another. Their artistic production is, then, essentially a virtual and translocal enterprise. Such a virtual and translocal enterprise of course implies a number of liberties and gains that can be achieved only through such methods of artistic production. Thanks to the Internet, MC Liangliang and his partners are able to produce and circulate their own music online, without the limitations of time and space and the ‘editorial’ restrictions (by, for example, record companies) present in ‘offline’ artistic work. The group is able to collaborate ‘off-the-scene’, and to create, organise, and engage with their peer groups and communities of practice that are either non-existent or invisible in their immediate corporeal world – whether these are people from back home, or elsewhere outside Beijing. The Internet also allows for going with the global flows of hip hop; in online environments, it is easier than ever before to participate in and take influences from the transnational hip-hop scene. MC Liangliang’s online pursuits, however, are not only about liberty and chances for participation in global activities, but also about the pursuit of authenticity as a rapper. In this sense, the scene is also one that functions according to certain regularities and normativities. We open our analysis by examining the first stanza of a song published online by MC Liangliang and his crew to illustrate the points made above, but first a few words about the hip-hop semiotics by which the song is framed. Online, MC Liangliang does not only produce music or lyrics, but also performs the

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essential identity act of ‘being hip hop’. We can see that his choice of profile pictures on www.oyinyue.com and Baidu message board point to familiar ways of fashioning hip-hop identities. Figure 11.18 features a young Afro male, suggesting an alignment with ‘hip-hop authority’ embodied in ‘blackness’ – being and doing ‘black’. Figure 11.29 is different: there, we see, in a way, a more ‘authentic’ image of Liangliang in the sense that this is an actual picture of him. The features of his face are obscured, but the emblematic signifiers indexing ‘real hip hop’ are there: he wears a baseball cap and a sport top, both iconic of the globalised hip-hop fashion; the raised middle finger and the cigarette in his mouth point to a particular hip-hop attitude – a certain coolness, rebelliousness, and subversiveness – the kind of ‘badness’ familiar from urban hip-hop scenes. It is also worth noting that the image features his hip-hop name in a particular way, with the English letters ‘MC’ printed much larger than the Chinese characters ‘良良’: in this way, the appropriation of the global semiotics becomes highlighted. In a way, these two images are very different, yet both point to a certain

FIGURE 11.1

MC Liangliang’s profile on www.oyinyue.com

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FIGURE 11.2

MC Liangliang’s profile on Baidu Message Board

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‘hip-hopness’, the creation of which is afforded by the different semiotic resources offered by the Internet (creating a profile, using different multimodal means to do this, being creative in doing this, etc.), and based on what MC Liangliang believes hip hop is about. Let us now move on to the actual product of MC Liangliang’s group (i.e. one of the songs he posted online). The song by MC Liangliang that we use here to illustrate our point is called 中国HIPHOP – Chinese HIPHOP. This already suggests to us something about the content of the song, as well as the kinds of orders of indexicality evoked in this cultural artefact. Dissecting the title into its constituent parts is quite simple – it consists of two parts, ‘Chinese’ and ‘hip hop’. However simple this may seem at first glance, these two point to different sets of indexicals, and different layers therein: that of the global phenomenon of – or the super-vernacular of – hip hop, as well as its Chinese ‘accent’. We shall further delve into these different layers next. The vocals for the song here are split into two parts, as in the lyrics posted online in written form the first part of them is not included. However, the song can also be listened to online, and in the audio version we can see that the written lyrics provided online do not include everything. Here is the missing part, assisting us in orienting towards the kinds of indexicalities at play here: [chorus] The real hiphop, the real hiphop [Liangliang] Yea, the real hiphop, Chinese hiphop [chorus] The real hiphop, the real hiphop [Liangliang] Yea, yea, hum The first thing to note here is that this is English – a resource that can without doubt be recognised as belonging to the global hip-hop vernacular, whether or not we subscribe to the view that the Afro-American format is the global format. With the starting lines, we see a move from ‘real hiphop’ to ‘the real hiphop, Chinese hiphop’, suggesting that Chinese hip hop is, in fact, the real hip hop. It might be suggested that there is an interesting contradiction here, as the implication that Chinese hip hop is the real hip hop is made by the means of English (although here we could also make the assumption that the English part is left out from the written lyrics posted in order to make the song appear more ‘Chinese’). However, from the point of view of authenticity, there is no contradiction here, as the language of authentic hip hop is, indeed, English – the super-vernacular that becomes appropriated and ‘chewed’ here to serve certain purposes. As for the written lyrics themselves, posted online at www.oyinyue.com,10 we can already make one observation without even reading them (i.e. by simply looking at them). Let us have a look. The observation to be made is that, in the lyrics – which are mainly in Chinese – there are English elements embedded into it. Or, vice versa, it would be equally,

Superdiversity on the Internet 229 Chinese H IPH O P M C Liangliang open the curtains I see again the crowded noisy street many H IP H O P styled kids in white T-shirts wearing B L IN G B L IN G , twinkling and shining in caps with N Y , white sneakers and reggae-fashioned hair but do you understand H IP H O P ? B A B A Y China’s R A P is fake, you’ll become stupid i f you listen too much most o f it is 4-4 beat, like shulaibao endlessly double rhyming beats you to sleep shhh. •• please turn o ff the speakers B A B Y China’s so-called H IP H O P M U SIC is unbearable to listen to bragging *** as their mouths open, that they have AK-47 from Shanghai to Beijing, transporting their K IN G * * ' Chinese H IP H O P predecessors are perilous • * ' these rappers，mouths have no strengths 拿拿'

Y O Chinese H IP H O P predecessors are perilous

***, seeing the bunch of bogus H IP H O P I wanna listen to opera

FIGURE 11.3

The opening stanza of the lyrics of ‘Chinese HIPHOP’, translated by the authors

if indeed not more, justified to say that the Chinese is embedded into the English, as the global super-vernacular provides a template for the Chinese to appear. In any case, the English elements here are very conspicuous due to the use of capitalised Roman script for writing them. The lyrics are, then, an interesting linguistic mix of different scripts and of Chinese and English, the latter appearing to give the lyrics a (Western) hip-hop flavour. Linguistically, English is not the only ‘non-Chinese’ resource present in the lyrics, though: listening to the song, later on we also hear Korean, rapped by Joonjoon, a Korean-speaking member of MC Liangliang’s group. In the written lyrics, however, Korean is not visible, due to the absence of Korean within the repertoire of the person who produced the lyrics in the written form and posted them online (i.e. MC Liangliang). Thus, what is linguistically actually more complex and diverse than this version suggests, and is of course there in the audio version, is reduced in this written online version into a mix of only certain (linguistic) resources due to factors constraining the presentation. It is clear, however, that there is an orientation here towards what hip hop globally ‘really’ is about. We shall return to this issue (i.e. the mix of Chinese, Korean, and English) in more detail below, but let us first consider another feature in the lyrics that we can spot simply by looking at them: the small asterisks used to mask the ‘inappropriate’ word ‘fuck’. Here, we encounter perhaps the most explicit level of normativity shaping the lyrics. Even a less perceptive reader will notice the asterisks that disrupt the otherwise ‘normal-looking’ hip-hop lyrics – ‘normal’ in

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the sense of meeting the expectation we have when we see them, and how they are organised. The little stars, however, are there for the precise function of making the lyrics ‘normal’, but on another scale: ‘normal’ in the sense of sanitising them to be acceptable for the online environment in which they appear. What the little stars suggest is intervention by the state, mediated by Internet providers – often seen in the case of blogging in China, for instance, as bloggers may find individual (inappropriate) characters censored from their posts within minutes after their publication online, or even automatically censored at the moment of writing due to automatised censoring systems (as was the case with MC Liangliang here). Similar phenomena can, of course, be observed elsewhere as well (e.g. on YouTube, and also when ‘Western’ lyrics, including what are considered profanities, are posted online on certain sites). This is, however, a typically Chinese intervention in the sense that the realisation of norm-imposing (i.e. judgement on what is unacceptable, undesirable) is consistently marked with the little stars and, more importantly, is implemented by the state. This clearly illustrates that even in a supposedly free, global online environment, interventions from strictly local powers (in this case, the state) do take place. However, we might even suggest that in this online space, the stars even function as adding a further layer of ‘hip-hop authenticity’ to the lyrics – what the stars cover is the very stuff that makes it recognisable as certain kind of hip hop, namely the kind inspired by rebellion and deviation for the purpose of creativity, and consequently authentic as such. We have seen the imposition of two different normativities already: those of the state, and those of the global hip-hop culture. The appropriation of ‘dirty’ words (such as ‘fuck’, which is replaced by asterisks) in the lyrics is, of course, a feature of the global super-vernacular of hip hop, and here, in what can be labelled as a local dialect of that super-vernacular, this feature is appropriated and produces an effect of authenticity. Interestingly, although the words cannot be seen here – they can only be heard when listening to the song – and they are replaced by the little stars, it can be argued that not being able to see them online further contributes to the ‘hip-hopness’ of the lyrics (i.e. their authenticity): the stars mark something that is outside the established norms, transgressive and deviant, and therefore pointing to the core of what (certain kinds of) hip hop are about. Two indexical scales (both ‘good’ and ‘bad’) and, consequently, two different normativities, are evoked with the same signs. To return to the mix of Chinese, Korean, and English, a number of observations can be made. Both English and Korean hip hop are, although on different scales and of different value, transnational global flows. Both English and Korean also have purchase in the local Chinese scene, and it can be suggested that their value here is purely indexical: they get their value within the local Chinese economy of signs. Korean might seem to have less hip-hop prestige for Western audiences, but not so in China, where Korean hip hop is upmarket hip hop (see e.g. Shim 2006, for a discussion on the rise of Korean popular culture

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in Asia). The role of English is something more familiar for larger, global audiences: it is the super-vernacular template that is essential in creating hip-hop authenticity. It is also worth noting here that the use of English is by no means random: it is not any English that we find in the lyrics, but rather the recognisable hip-hop English – the global elements that are iconic of hip-hop culture. Hence the expressions hiphop, blingbling, baby, rap, NY: they are part and parcel of what constitutes a core vocabulary of hip hop. Hip-hop authenticity is not, however, only about what is there: as Potter (1995: 71, emphasis in the original) observes, “hip-hop’s authenticity, like that of jazz, is continually posed against that which it is not.” This is something we already pointed to, as the global resources employed (‘wrong, bad language’) meet a different set of norms (one that disapproves of such language). Another way in which this is visible is the juxtaposition of Chinese hip hop with more traditional Chinese cultural forms: Chinese opera, and shulaibao (a northern Chinese folk theatrical form consisting of recitation accompanied by clapperboard rhythm). Here, the authenticity of hip hop is contrasted with specific spatial understandings of authenticity: the authenticity of the rapper’s region of origin (shulaibao) and of his country of origin (Chinese opera). Thus, in making this Chinese hip-hop song about Chinese hip hop, there are a number of normative levels to attend to: it is acceptable to be ‘local’ by using Chinese, but authenticity cannot be tied down to local or regional emblematic cultural forms. For authenticity effects, MC Liangliang distances himself from traditional Chinese culture on two levels: the specifically local (shulaibao) and the national (Chinese opera). These cultural forms index tradition (i.e. reproduction of what is already there), and this does not mix well with the new, transgressive, innovative, and hybridised hip-hop Chineseness. MC Liangliang’s act of distancing himself from both shulaibao and opera in general illustrates the complexity and polycentricity of the scales of orientation here: being an authentic Chinese rapper requires rejecting both the specifically local shulaibao and the national tradition – that is, tradition on two scale-levels – and instead orienting towards the global super-vernacular of hip hop. A further normative level we can observe in the lyrics is indeed the metadiscursive level on what authentic hip hop is all about. MC Liangliang makes a clear difference between ‘inauthentic’ Chinese hip hop and Chinese rappers who do perform the right moves, so to speak, but are nevertheless not attentive enough to normativity: they dress and talk ‘hip hop’, but they are not ‘real hip hop’. The white T-shirts, the blingbling, the NY caps, and the references to AK47 are there, but it is ultimately fake. What distinguishes MC Liangliang and his crew from other Chinese hip-hoppers is perhaps not entirely clear, as in the end the means with which MC Liangliang creates hip-hop authenticity are ultimately the same as the ones he rebukes – the appropriation of the global hip-hop supervernacular (i.e. the global template with its recognisable features and indexicalities). What is clear, however, is that this is indeed authentic hip hop: it turns the strive for authenticity into a competition over who is the most authentic one, and this

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is where the ‘correct’ use of the global template becomes crucial: its appropriation is by no means random, and creativity not limitless. Creative authenticity, online or offline, has to follow certain norms.

Discussion It is time to draw some tentative conclusions about our case here, going back to the points we raised above. As has become evident here, and as pointed out earlier by Pennycook (2007a: 103, emphasis in the original): One of the most fascinating elements of the global/local relations in hiphop, then, is what we might call the global spread of authenticity. Here is a perfect example of a tension between on the one hand the spread of a cultural dictate to adhere to certain principles of what it means to be authentic, and on the other, a process of localization that makes such an expression of staying true to oneself dependent on local contexts, languages, cultures, and understandings of the real. What Pennycook is describing in his analysis of hip hop is a process of localisation. Rather than being specifically about locality, we suggest that what we have observed here is a project of authenticity, involving several normative scales that need to be attended to in order to make the project successful – in order to ‘pass as’ something. The multimodal project of authenticity observed here entails different levels of recognisability: it can be recognised as ‘Chinese’, as ‘hip hop’, and, finally, as ‘Chinese hip hop’. Hence, this is not simply about global hip hop being localised, or local hip hop being globalised. Ian Condry (2006: 19) made a similar observation in his examination of ‘Japanese’ hip hop: “the opposition between globalizing and localizing turns out to be a false dichotomy,” as “hip-hop cannot be seen as straightforward Japanization of a global style, nor as simply Americanization” (Condry 2006: 11). What is at stake here is being ‘Chinese enough’, as well as being ‘hip hop enough’ – attending to different sets of normativities that are essentially about being authentic (see Blommaert & Varis 2011). That is, what we see here is not about “the hip-hop ideology of keepin’ it real as a discursively and culturally mediated mode of representing and producing the local” (Pennycook 2007a: 112, emphasis added). Essentially, what is produced is authenticity, and this is done by orienting towards different multi-scalar – and hence polycentric – sets of normativities, embracing others and becoming censored by others. Authenticity is, of course, very much part of hip-hop discourse in general, and that is something that has already been established by others before (see e.g. Ghandnoosh 2010). As we have seen here, the global template of hip hop enables new, creative semiotisations of authenticity – it provides affordances for local actors for doing so. In these creative semiotisations, it is the employment of bits and pieces of the global template – the global super-vernacular – that makes

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it recognisable as hip hop, whereas the local elements make it locally significant within a particular economy of signs and meanings. As MC Liangliang has helped us observe, cultural processes and artefacts are often complex linguistic and (sub)cultural mixes, employing global super-vernaculars with a local (here, Chinese) edge to them. We might even say that the bits and pieces of the global template are purely indexical (in our case, indexing ‘hip-hopness’), and, as they become de-globalised, they enter a different system of signs and help project images of, for instance, globalness and urbanness. To return to the issue of superdiversity, and conceptualising it in order to explain the diversification of diversity we witness – and all of it increasingly in online environments – we suggest that (super-)communities of today are not organised around the indexicals of locality, but rather of authenticity, and that authenticity revolves around blending multi-scalar resources in particular ways. The fact that global resources are localisable expands the scope of ‘authenticity’, and as global resources – the familiar, recognisable templates that we can either embrace or choose to ignore (although more often than not having to opt for the first choice) – become de-globalised, they can be used to creatively make new meanings, new identities, and new communities. As we have emphasised already, however, this creativity is not unlimited. We have used the Internet and a specific Internet subculture, Internet hip hop, here to illustrate our point, but without a doubt our observations can be extended elsewhere. Rather than only localising global flows, there is much more to the transnational cultural processes that we see around us. This has implications for our research agenda, and the questions we ask of the research objects that we conceptualise as superdiverse. Such superdiverse realities – the fashioning of identities, the construction of communities and subcultural meanings, the semiotics we employ in order to belong, to be authentic as someone or something – involve normative processes: procedures of orienting towards and thereby constituting several centres and orders of indexicality. In observing superdiversity on the ground, normativity will have to be on our agenda.

Acknowledgements This chapter has been written in the context of the research project Transformations of the Public Sphere (TRAPS) at the Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg University.

Notes 1. danah boyd does not use capitals in writing her name and we adopt this preference when referring to her. 2. The case discussed here is based on (Internet) fieldwork by Xuan Wang between autumn 2010 and spring 2011 as part of her PhD research. The fieldwork involved an initial four-month period of online observation of hip-hop-related activities surrounding MC

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3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

Liangliang and his crew (musical performances, blogging, online discussions with fans and ‘enemies’). After some online interaction and interviews with MC Liangliang by the researcher from outside China, a focused interview with him was conducted in Beijing in early 2011. This was followed by further ongoing contacts and observations via the Internet. See, for example: www1.cnnic.cn/AU/MediaC/rdxw/hotnews/201401/t20140117_ 43849.htm, on a report by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). All translations from Chinese to English in this paper are ours. It is important to note that although we describe Beijing as MC Liangliang’s ‘base’ in the sense of physical location, we regard his hip-hop activities as translocal rather than bound to locality (i.e. Beijing) as these activities are essentially Internet-based. The specific relevance of the locality of Beijing is beyond the scope and outside the focus of the present paper, and is addressed elsewhere (Wang 2011). ‘Indexical orders’ captures the idea that the meanings attached to semiotic signs (be they forms of language use, pieces of clothing, etc.) are not random, but systematic, stratified, and context-specific: we attribute meaning to signs according to conventionalised, normative patterns. For an accessible account, see Blommaert (2005). See an online interview with MC Liangliang at: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_ 5074792a01008o9f.html (accessed 4 July 2014). See: www.oyinyue.com/10774528 (accessed 4 July 2014). See: http://tieba.baidu.com/i/98805018?st_mod=pb&fr=tb0_forum&st_type=uface (accessed 4 July 2014). See: http://yc.oyinyue.com/420/699/1008699.shtml (accessed 4 July 2014).

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Potter, R.A. 1995. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Qiu, J.L. 1999/2000. Virtual censorship in China: Keeping the gate between the cyberspaces. International Journal of Communications Law and Policy, 4: 1–25. Qiu, J.L. 2004. The Internet in China: Technologies of freedom in a statist society. In M. Castells (ed.), The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 99–124. Rampton, B. 2007. Neo-Hymesian linguistic ethnography in the United Kingdom. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(5): 584–607. Ridanpää, J., & Pasanen, A. 2009. From the Bronx to the wilderness: Inari-Sami rap, language revitalisation and contested ethnic stereotypes. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 9(2): 213–230. Shim, D. 2006. Hybridity and the rise of Korean popular culture in Asia. Media, Culture & Society, 28: 25–44. Sundén, J. 2003. Material Virtualities. New York: Lang. Varis, P. forthcoming. Superdiverse times and places: Media, mobility, conjunctures and structures of feeling. In K. Arnaut, M. Karrebæk, & M. Spotti (eds), Super-Diversity and the Critical Sociolinguistics of the Interstices. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Varis, P., Wang, X., & Du, C. 2011. Identity repertoires on the Internet: Opportunities and constraints. In L. Wei (ed.), Applied Linguistics Review 2. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 265–284. Velghe, F. 2011. Lessons in textspeak from sexy chick: Supervernacular literacy in South African instant and text messaging. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, #1. Available at: www.tilburguniversity.edu/upload/5328eb9d-43bb-47d3-9dbc-f9bc38727c6e_tpcs%20 paper1.pdf (accessed 3 July 2014). Velghe, F. 2012. ‘I wanna go in the phone’. Illiteracy, informal learning processes, ‘Voice’ and mobile phone appropriation in a South African township. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, #40. Available at: www.tilburguniversity.edu/upload/392e4d3e-cc2f-4744a1da-1e1c2e1cf931_TPCS_40_Velghe.pdf (accessed 3 July 2014). Vertovec, S. 2006. The emergence of super-diversity in Britain. Centre on Migration, Policy and Society Working Paper, #25. Oxford: University of Oxford. Vertovec, S. 2010. Towards post-multiculturalism? Changing communities, conditions and contexts of diversity. International Social Science Journal, 64(199): 83–95. Wang, X. 2011. The Internet, Hip-Hop and Languages in China. Paper presented at the 16th World Congress of Applied Linguistics, Beijing, 26 August. Wang, X. 2012. ‘I am not a qualified dialect rapper’: Constructing hip-hop authenticity in China. Sociolinguistic Studies, 6(2): 333–372. Westinen, E. 2014. The Discursive Construction of Authenticity: Resources, Scales and Polycentricity in Finnish Hip Hop Culture. Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities 227. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. Yang, G. 2003a. The co-evolution of the Internet and civil society in China. Asian Survey, 43(3): 405–422. Yang, G. 2003b. The Internet and the rise of a transnational Chinese cultural sphere. Media, Culture & Society, 25L 469–490. Yang, G. 2003c. The Internet and civil society in China: A preliminary assessment. Journal of Contemporary China, 12(36): 453–475. Yang, G. 2009. The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

12 TRANSLATING GLOBAL EXPERIENCE INTO INSTITUTIONAL MODELS OF COMPETENCY Linguistic Inequalities in the Job Interview Celia Roberts

Introduction While globalisation requires a reinterpretation of the traditional notions of multilingualism, migration and the mobility of citizens around the world has also put new demands on competence in the dominant language. This response is part of the production of new ways of regulating and establishing what counts as linguistic capital. This regulation and capitalisation of language (Duchêne 2009; Heller 2010) has, in some types of workplaces, led to the valuing of multilingualism because it is profitable (Piller & Takahashi 2013). However, in the public sector and much of the private sector, the response to migration has been to standardise and raise the level of requirements in recruitment and selection (Allen 2013; Roberts 2013). This in turn produces new tensions between the standardisation of bureaucratised institutions and increasingly diverse societies. A central contradiction in the way institutions manage and defend themselves is that between standardisation and responding to diversity. On the one hand, they are expected to regulate their procedures so that they can be defended as objective and consistent but, on the other, they are required to acknowledge, be responsive to, and even celebrate the fact of difference in their workforces. The job interview is a key gatekeeping site where this contradiction has to be managed and its outcomes defended as fair. The role of foreign work experience (FWE) within the interview is a telling case of how these tensions are played out as candidates from migrant groups and mobile citizens present their past. FWE is problematic in the British job interview in three different ways: first, the

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unfamiliarity and assumed lack of fit of FWE; second, the central role of stories of past experience in the current discursive regimes of the interview; and third, the additional linguistic capital required to deal with both of these. This chapter will: (a) discuss the linguistic penalty that the current discursive regimes of selection interviewing have produced; (b) consider how competency frameworks require convincing stories of past work experience and how these imply a blend of institutional and personal discourses and are underpinned by current discourses of diversity; (c) examine how FWE is either dismissed or, in its negotiation, puts additional contextual and equivalences burdens on candidates from migrant groups; (d) contrast the negotiation of FWE with the valuing of local work experience; and (e) in conclusion, suggest that the linguistic regulation of the job interview masks the tensions it creates.1 First, we will look at an example of a candidate, Suhil, originally from India, who is applying for a job as a receptionist in a hospital department where he will be dealing with patients and their records. He is typical of candidates born abroad applying for low-paid work, in that most of his work experience was not in the UK and he is a graduate (with an MA): Example 1 (See below for transcription conventions. These examples show not only the words of the interview, but also how both sides interact together (i.e. how they take turns, interrupt, or overlap each other’s talk, etc.) since these are aspects of behaviour crucial to the judgement of candidates and to the production of comfortable or uncomfortable moments.) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

I:

If you werent successful would you (.) um (.) like to be considered for .h a position behind the scenes S: well [fI: or] are you [specifically S: For me] its not [very important] I: patient ok] S: whether Im working behind the scene or in front of the scene hh actually speaking because I worked as a ward clerk Ive handled the reception Ive got two years working= I: =Yeah I [understand that S: experience also] so Im not afraid of anything I: But thats obviously [in India S: right] I: not here ((laughs loudly)) S: ((nods)) thats in India yeah All: (laughter) S: But patients are patients

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18 I:

((Clears throat loudly)) ((looks at interviewer 2 still laughing)) [debatable 19 I2: well ( )] 20 S: Im not here to debate because you are more experienced 21 I: Yeah 22 S: So I dont because (.) obviously I mean I-I’m here to give my best= 23 I2: =mhmm= 24 I: =[yeah I appreciate that 25 S: and Im here to convince you] if I if Im able to convince you 26 Im fortunate if Im (.) I cannot convince you Im [unfortunate 27 I: Yeah]= 28 I2: =mhmm= Suhil is being assessed on his competence in dealing with people, one of a set of typical competencies that currently regulate the British job interview. These competency frameworks are designed around past experience, but in this case Suhil’s foreign work experience is dismissed at lines 12 and 18, despite his attempts to show its relevance. The interviewer response ‘debatable’ appears to leave Suhil with nowhere to go within the competency framework. Instead, he grasps at the apparent cue to ‘debate’ the issue, which leads to a sequence where he shifts from the conventional display of relevant past experience to a commentary on his role in the interview. This has no place within the discursive regimes of the job interview since it does not conform to its rules of evidence.

Discursive Regimes and the Linguistic Penalty In order to comply with equal opportunities legislation, organisations are expected to produce rational, accountable, and standard bureaucratic procedures along Weberian lines (Du Gay 2000) aimed at ensuring equality in the judgement of individuals. Weber’s arguments for objective and rational forms of work were in part designed to cater for what were already perceived in the mid-twentieth century as increasingly diverse societies, helping to create, for example, fair and objective procedures in selection processes. However, these modernist goals of objectivity and accountability have produced their own inequalities since they require competence in institutional talk and text, the special reasoning and inferencing that goes with understanding how institutions work and the modes of talk to display this. Such knowledge is, of course, not equally distributed among all groups, and those with least access to it are most disadvantaged. These goals and the inequalities they produce are one of a set of discursive regimes, here defined as a set of ideologies and systems of regulation that take for granted certain ways of knowing (as in Foucault’s ‘regimes of truth’) and certain institutionally sanctioned modes of text and talk. In Bourdieu’s terms, these forms

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of discourse can be interpreted as linguistic capital, given value over other styles (Bourdieu 1991), and have crucial indexical meaning. In other words, talk and interaction – as in the examples in this chapter – are linked to speakers’ social and moral character and, crucially, to the assessment of their competence in a stable and recognisable way (Blommaert 2012: 38). The gatekeeping interview is a product of these standardised procedures and its formal processes are an example of increasingly textualised (Iedema & Scheeres 2003) and language-mediated gatekeeping encounters (Erickson & Shultz 1982; Gumperz 1982b), each one producing its own discursive regimes. This is starkly illustrated in the regulation of migrant groups through gatekeeping encounters for the right to asylum (Blommaert 2001; Jacquemet 2005; Maryns 2006), the offer of a work permit (Codó 2008), and the selection for internships (Tranekjær 2015). The employment interview is no exception to this trend. Two contrasting tropes used in the prevailing discourses of job selection in the UK sum up the language loading that these processes now bear. In the 1960s, it was commonplace to hear recruiters talking of ‘a pair of hands’ to fill a job; by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ‘language of talent’ with its celebratory image of the successful communicator had superseded it. Discourses of mission statements, the regulation of human resources through competency frameworks, guidelines for the structuring and managing of job interviews, and the length of such interviews, even for low-paid work, are all evidence of this languaging work.2 So, for example, ‘How does an organisation manage change?’ asked at an interview for a low-paid job, puts a large inferencing load on the candidate to get from this huge and complex question to the key competence of ‘flexibility’ and whether the candidate can show that he/she is flexible. There is then the question of whether candidates can attune to this notion of flexibility as highly significant and how it can be demonstrated in their response, using work experience that is familiar enough to the interviewer to provide evidence of this competence. These brief examples begin to illustrate that the discursive regimes of the selection process embrace an elastic notion of ‘linguistic capital’ described by Bourdieu. They require the social knowledge to make the right inferences and the presentation of self in institutionally sanctioned ways, including how to narrate past experience and present FWE legitimately. While the discursive regimes of any selection process put linguistic demands on all candidates, access to these regimes is differentially distributed. They can serve to reproduce inequalities of class, as well as linguistic and ethnic inequality. Some research in selection interviewing and assessment has explored class inequality in selection at professional levels where ethnicity was either irrelevant or not attended to (Silverman & Jones 1976; Adelsward 1988; Komter 1991; Scheuer 2001) and has shown that, at professional levels, the interview/assessment can disadvantage on the grounds of social class. However, ethnic minority and

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migrant candidates who were born and educated abroad and with FWE fare even less well than their white British counterparts in applying for professional level jobs (Auer & Kern 2000; Roberts et al. 2008). In addition, research on interviews for low-paid, routine jobs and low-level vocational training shows that migrants experience inequalities even at this ‘entry level’ where no qualifications are required (Gumperz 1992; Roberts et al. 1992; Sarangi 1994; Roberts & Campbell 2006), and suggest that the job interview is a key site of linguistic gatekeeping and produces for candidates from certain migrant groups a linguistic penalty.

Linguistic Penalty The idea of a linguistic penalty focuses on the role of language in producing inequality in employment. It is drawn from two different sources. The first is a concept from the sociology of ethnic relations, the ‘ethnic penalty’ (Heath & Cheung 2006). The ‘ethnic penalty’ is a term used to describe the processes in the labour market that lead to Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) jobseekers being less likely than their white counterparts to gain employment. The second draws on notions of the capitalisation of language and the valuing and (re)production of certain types of symbolic, and specifically linguistic, capital (Bourdieu 1991). A ‘linguistic penalty’ is a combination of all the sources of disadvantage that might lead a linguistic minority group to fare less well in the selection/evaluation process generally, and specifically in the labour market. This penalty derives from both the largely hidden demands on candidates to talk in institutionally credible ways, drawing on taken-for-granted sociocultural resources on how to perform the institutional self (Cook-Gumperz & Gumperz 2002), and from any other disadvantage related to linguistic minority status. In the case of the job interview, the erasure, or, if it is mentioned, the recognition, presentation, and receipt of foreign work experience (FWE) is one area where this penalty is produced. Those who experience a linguistic penalty are doubly disadvantaged, since their minority ethnic social identity as migrants or mobile citizens, embodied in their FWE, may already penalise them, and the language-mediated gatekeeping interview adds to this penalty.

Competency Frameworks Competence-based selection developed as a response to social change brought about by globalisation and the new capitalism (Wood & Payne 1998). It is perceived as something of a silver bullet, solving the problems of how to select the flexible, self-managing candidate and also provide equality of opportunity in an increasingly diverse labour market. A competency framework, it is argued, selects for broad capabilities that can be tuned to changing situations and also provides a strong element of structure and regulation to meet equality requirements (Kandola 1996). No tension is seen between the standardisation and

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consistency required of equal opportunities legislation and bureaucracy, on the one hand, and, on the other, the impact of the neo-liberal ideology of the new capitalism and the requirements of the dynamic, flexible ‘enterprising self’ (Du Gay 2000).

Competency and Diversity Discourses The recent discourses of diversity contribute to, in Bourdieu’s term, the misrecognition of any tension or conflict between standardisation and equality in ethnically stratified societies. Discourses of equal opportunities and affirmative action of the 1980s and 1990s have shifted to discourses of ‘diversity’. These new discourses are about judging everyone as individuals on the basis of their competencies within a new discourse of unity, and the ‘common culture’ of an organisation (Gagnon & Cornelius 2000; Zane 2002).3 Diversity discourses no longer speak of discrimination, but of individual competence, which includes, unsurprisingly, fitting into the cultural categories of the ideal employee. So, whatever your background, if you present yourself as a culturally appropriate teamworker and your experiences are invoked in linguistically acceptable ways, then you are likely to be successful at selection. The fact that these judgements are determined by the taken-for-granted linguistic and cultural norms of institutional life is hidden by the very discourses that realise them. Asking each candidate the same competency questions gives a veneer of standardisation and thus fairness, but making the ‘correct’ inferences about these questions assumes shared conditions for negotiating understanding in what is a highly culturally specific setting (Gumperz 1982a). Diversity and competency discourses thus blend into an overarching discursive regime that further reinforces the competence-based interview (Scheepers 2011).4 In contrast to the earlier period, where equal opportunity concerns could challenge institutional conventions, diversity discourses support them. This illustrates the complexity of relationships around ‘diversity’ and the hidden processes that mask the use of diversity discourses in regulating and controlling difference (Vertovec 2011). While the rhetoric of variety and difference remains, in the actual practices of the job interview it is routinely suppressed, as the role of FWE shows.

Competencies and the New Capitalism The ‘new managerialism’ and ‘fast capitalism’ of the global market (Gee et al. 1996) requires companies to be ready to change product lines over night and this in turn has an effect on how people are managed. Traditional, hierarchical management has given way to a more flexible structure in which workers are expected to be more self-managing and no longer wait for decisions from a long command chain. As new responsibilities are pushed down to workers and hierarchies are flattened, shop-floor staff are expected to understand more of

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the organisation’s goals and strategies. Workers are expected to develop an ‘entrepreneurial self’ (Du Gay 2000), responsible, self-aware, and self-managing. So, although ‘personality’ is rarely mentioned in the discourses of competency, the ideology of the new capitalism focuses on personality and character (Grugulis & Vincent 2009) and the importance of individuals buying into the core organisational values in the ‘enterprise’ culture (Du Gay 2000). Typical competencies at all levels of jobs are: teamwork, the ability to selfmanage and self-organise, flexibility, and the ability to cope with change. These in turn are derived from competence clusters such as ‘drive’, ‘reasoning’, and ‘interpersonal’ qualities, and are set out in human resources policy statements and guidelines. In promotion and junior management selection interviews, these competencies are reworked to give explicit focus to managing people and tasks in teams, innovation and self-development, and learning from experience, particularly from failures. Frequently, competencies are presented in verb/object phrase form in some habitual, open space, particularly as in: ‘juggles priorities’, ‘takes ownership’, ‘manages change’, ‘inspires people’, ‘drives results’, ‘seeks improvement’, ‘focuses action’. Implied in these abstract formulations are notions of agency, trustworthiness, communicative ability, and the value of reflection, and, laminated over all of them, a sense of the ‘entrepreneurial self’. In other words, these competencies stretch far beyond any narrowly defined set of skills or abilities, to engage with the identity of the ideal candidate as a particular type of person within the organisation (Roberts 2011). These widely used competencies are made up of the so-called soft skills (Urcioli 2008) rather than particular manual, craft, or technical skills that were the basis for selection for low-paid and technical jobs until the latter part of the twentieth century (Payne 2000; Grugulis & Vincent 2009). These under-defined and yet elastic competencies can only be realised in relatively abstract terms that place a heavy inferential load on candidates. Only intense participation in this abstract semiotic world of constructed objectivity can make it accessible (Iedema 2003), and for many candidates such participation is not available. In some competence-based interviews, these competency phrases are explicitly referred to (see Example 5), while in others they are only implied. However, because they are relatively open categories, even their more explicit use still requires some of the special inferences of the job interview and its associated social and cultural knowledge.

Narratives and Blended Discourses There is a further routine component, associated with the competency framework of these interviews, that creates a linguistic penalty for candidates from migrant backgrounds. This is the requirement to produce narrative answers to competency, and other more analytically framed questions. While the competency framework is relatively abstract, requiring candidates to infer what the interviewer is looking

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for, the narratives are expected to be structured in prototypical Anglo ways (Labov & Waletzsky 1967). The STAR structure widely used in North American and British job interviews (Situation, Task, Action, and Result) assumes that candidates will give particular examples of their work experience relevant to the competenceframed question and based on stories structured in this way. Indeed, some organisations use the STAR structure to fit such stories into the boxes on the interview forms (Roberts & Cambell 2005). These forms are designed with a box for each element of the STAR structure so that interviewers can fill them in as the story unfolds. In our research, while most white and British minority ethnic candidates produced acceptably structured stories, candidates from migrant backgrounds were less likely to tell stories or to structure them according to the STAR formula. This led to empty boxes on the interviewers’ forms or negative comments since, in institutional terms, the story appeared unstructured. Within this structure, candidates are expected to produce what the social psychologist Michael Bamberg calls a storied self (Bamberg 1997). This self is a particular take on the speaker that emerges through the details of the story. For example, one candidate, Trenton (and see Example 5), describes how he reacted when a customer lost her purse: Example 2 1 C: e:r (1) a customer lost their (.) purse (.) in the actual club you know 2 obviously they had to fill out a crime reports 3 and obviously I I came forward (.) to help them do that 4 otherwise I would have stayed behind a little bit after work 5 wait for the police to arrive and everything (.) This storied self is presented, as the story unfolds, as responsible, helpful, and with initiative. Trenton only stands outside the story as a narrator of it when they reach the ‘R’, the result or evaluation stage, later in his answer: 24 25

so I just took it upon my own initiative (.) you know to just do as much as I could ((8 seconds of interviewer writing))

While candidates are expected to reveal themselves through detailed and vivid stories, the ‘R’ element is crucial in showing how they can analyse and evaluate themselves in institutionally appropriate ways to show that they are selfreflexive and can use this to be entrepreneurial. In job interview training, it is also common to train interviewers to ‘drill down’ further by asking more evaluative questions about candidates’ thoughts and reactions. In other words, candidates have to blend elements of the more personal modes of talk in the action of the story with more analytic or institutional ones. This more institutional discourse is characterised by abstract formulations (Iedema 2003), such as

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the competency categorisations described above, by discretion, balance, and euphemisation (Bourdieu 1991), and the more analytic framing of talk, as Trenton does at line 24. The STAR structure is constructed for candidates to show their competence first through stories and only then make more general claims after their experience has spoken for itself. Bold, unmitigated claims about your ability (e.g. “I am not frightened of anything”) (in Example 1) in the early stages of an answer are routinely sanctioned on two counts: first, they replace the vivid showing of the self; and second, they are not sufficiently euphemised. Similarly, deontic modes of talking (e.g. “You should be always alert”), which are more frequent among candidates born abroad than other groups, are not well enough anchored in individual experience and appear too distancing. Indeed, any presentation of the self that does not align with both the organisation’s vision of the entrepreneurial, self-reflexive individual and with the grounded, modest self who shows but does not show off, can fuel a negative evaluation, even for the type of low-paid, routine jobs discussed here. So, the standardised competency framework calls for and calls up a blending of institutional and personal discourses in a managed form of familiarity that we might call, as something of an oxymoron, bureaucratic intimacy. The tightly scripted design of the late twentieth century equal opportunities interview has given way to a hybrid of regulation and improvisation in which institutional and personal discourses are interwoven (Campbell & Roberts 2007). The distancing of institutional discourses is held in check by the familiarisation of the candidate through ‘experientially grounded’ (Edwards 1991) stories and the interviewers’ engrossment in them. As Edwards suggests in his discussion of the Watergate accounts, detailed and lively accounts are perceived as convincing and are rapidly transformed into judgements of trustworthiness (see also Kerekes 2003, on trust in the job interview). In turn, these stories are distanced from their telling and made ‘bureaucratically processible’ (Iedema 2003) by more institutional modes of talk that are more abstract, analytic, and euphemised. Competencies are routinely assessed through narratives of past experience, on the assumption that what candidates say they have done and how they reflect on this past experience is more useful and fairer than asking hypothetical questions (Huffcutt & Roth 1998). These narratives of previous work experience provide the core evidence on which assessments are formally made. In most cases, for candidates born abroad, this means foreign work experience.

Foreign Work Experience (FWE) FWE is problematic in the British job interview in three different ways: the fact of its unfamiliarity and assumed lack of fit, the central role of stories of past experience in the interview, and, most importantly, the additional linguistic capital required to deal with both of these within the discursive regimes of the job

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interview. First, FWE may be erased all together, dismissed early on, or, in organisations where equality issues in selection are taken seriously, be accepted but require protracted sequences to make the strange familiar. By contrast, candidates born and educated in the UK, and working there, bring experience that is imaginable by the interviewers, who collaborate with candidates in producing this shared world, as is discussed below. Second, in our data, candidates spend more time telling stories of past experience elicited from competence questions than on any other subgenre of the selection interview. The occupational psychology research, although not entirely consistent, suggests that so-called ‘behavioural’ questions (about past experience) are fairer than ‘situational’ ones (that ask about hypothetical cases) (Huffcutt & Roth 1998). Most competence-designed interviews, therefore, elicit past experience answers in the form of stories (see narrative structure above). The widespread use of such a structure suggests that organisations assume that it is institutionally acceptable. And most of the discourse-based studies of job interviews do not focus on the elicitation of past work experience as being inherently problematic, but rather on its display and receipt.5 Third, and most crucially, for candidates whose work experience has been wholly or substantially overseas, translating global experience into institutional models of competency requires additional linguistic capital to manage the discursive regimes of the interview, where FWE has to be explained and defended, and where its display can produce new interactional difficulties. With the exception of Auer and his colleagues (Auer 1998; Auer & Kern 2000; Birkner & Kern 2000; Birkner 2004), discussed below, there has been little attention paid to the role of foreign work experience, the gap in sociocultural knowledge between interviewer and candidate in negotiating its acceptance, and how this interacts with other linguistic penalties. Drawing on Hinnenkamp (1987: 144), the problematics of FWE are both brought into the interview and brought about in it.

FWE Brought into the Interview and Its Potential for Dismissal Both candidates and interviewers bring to the interview experiences and stances that make FWE problematic. Most of the candidates in our data who were born abroad, both from the EU and elsewhere, brought to the interview qualifications and experience incommensurate with the job. Only two of the 19 had any substantial work experience in the UK and all of them came from professional backgrounds and/or had higher education, often to MA level. For this group of candidates, their insertion into the labour market has led to a loss of symbolic capital in terms of unrecognised qualifications and work experience that has no easy fit with the job on offer (GLA 2005). Fitting into available job slots leads to deprofessionalisation and decapitalisation. Unlike other groups of migrants such

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as elite cosmopolitan groups (Block 2007) or bilingual professionals (Day & Wagner 2007), this group were not only applying for routine, low-paid jobs for which they were overqualified, but were also much less likely to be offered them. However, and this is a further disadvantage, they were similar to other non-elite migrant groups in that the embodied competencies of flexibility, self-management, and managing change (evidenced by the experience of migration itself) are trumped in the job interview by the linguistic competence to talk about such capabilities in institutionally acceptable ways. FWE is presented as interactionally problematic by candidates through hesitation and other markers of doubt, with comments that frame the experience as possibly inappropriate (e.g. “but that was a bit different”) or explicit checks with interviewers that they are allowed to include it. This suggests that it is brought into the interview by candidates as already tagged of questionable validity within the discursive regimes of the institution. There is also plenty of evidence that interviewers also treat FWE as problematic. It may not be referred to at all either in interviewer forms or training and its mention is treated differently by different interviewers, accepted by some (Example 4) and dismissed by others (Example 1). Where no space is made in the interview for FWE to be included at all, some candidates insert it without mitigation, where they can, even if its sequential location at that point in the interview structure is problematic. For example, a food-processing worker, when told he will have to pass a numeracy test, informs the panel that he was a maths teacher. This is barely acknowledged and instead one of the interviewers asserts the importance of passing the test.

FWE Brought about in the Interview The struggles around FWE are not only brought into the interview, but are brought about in it. The talk becomes problematic since FWE requires more negotiation if it is to be accepted. Candidates born in the UK can use their work experience to claim some solidarity and familiarity with interviewers, but FWE distances candidates from interviewers as they try to fit their stories into boxes (Roberts & Campbell 2005). This affects the relative intimacy or mutuality of the encounter as it becomes interactionally asynchronous (Erickson & Shultz 1982) and less bureaucratically processible (Iedema 2003). Candidates face two specific problems: the contextual burden and the equivalences burden. Managing this additional load requires candidates to work harder with less linguistic capital and in doing so the narrative structure can be disrupted, which has a further negative impact on the candidate. In their studies of East and West German styles of interviewing, Auer and his associates (Auer 1998; Auer & Kern 2000; Birkner & Kern 2000; Birkner 2004) discuss the work of making FWE relevant and the highlighting of sociocultural

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differences in the different discursive regimes of East and West German selection interviews and the presentation of self within them. The 19 candidates in our research who were born abroad are from 15 different countries, so it is not possible to talk about contrastive communicative styles nor to assume that interviewers are familiar with the ‘foreignness’ of candidates’ FWE as they were in the German studies. Rather, we look for a blend of plausible explanations based on differences and difficulties with linguistic resources, communicative styles, asymmetries of knowledge, and sociopolitical differences; in sum, both contextual and equivalences problems, as the examples below illustrate.

The Contextual Burden While candidates may have to design carefully how they introduce FWE (through explicit comments and requests, as described above), the hard interactional work to connect it to the competences required in a convincing way has only just begun. Considerably more contextual explanation is required to make the fit. The more different the experiences and resources of institutional interviewer and interviewee, the more discursive effort is required of the latter, as studies of asylum seeker stories in eligibility determination interviews have shown in an acute form (Maryns 2006). The candidates’ task is to contextualise their individual stories well enough for interviewers to make appropriate inferences for purposes of evaluation and selection. The problem for the candidate lies in knowledge asymmetries – what does the interviewer need to know? – and in the time and structural constraints of the interview.6 For example, Renard, a Polish sports teacher, has to give considerable contextual background in order to relate the competency of ‘satisfying customers’ to his own work with children and working in a distance learning company. The conundrum for both interviewer and candidate is that the company is controlled by the state and the ministry of education lays down the procedures that have to be followed so that Renard cannot stand out as behaving exceptionally well, as this would not be following official policy (Kulesza 2002). This has echoes in the German research where East German candidates orientate to and try to compensate for the relative lack of individual decision-making in the former communist Eastern bloc. A further problem is that Renard gives no evidence in his replies that he has picked up the cues in the opening question. These cues are designed to call up a local context and set of inferences (Gumperz 1982a, 1982b, 1996) that should channel his response into a story about how he showed individual agency and commitment in relation to a particular customer – in other words, the Action of the story. Renard never gets beyond the S and T of the STAR structure. The comments from the interviewer when giving feedback from the interview support this analysis.

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Example 3 “In customer service, Renard generalises a lot – he doesn’t use the personal pronoun enough, and while he explains the reasons why customers might be upset he doesn’t explain what he would do about this. I feel that Renard is repeatedly missing the point as he explains about the book company he was working for and their policies, but doesn’t realise that I am trying to look at how he has gone beyond this.” These difficulties cannot be readily explained by an ethicised notion of cultural clash. Rather, the negative evaluation of this candidate stems from several factors. First, there are the sociopolitical discourses and work practices of states where such competencies as ‘team playing’ or ‘customer satisfaction’ have no or different resonances. In this instance, in Poland, and in the German studies discussed above, the ideological values of communism have structured work and workers’ relationship to it in terms of state requirements and the collective, in contrast to Western discourses of individualism. Second, the structuring of accounts and stories with considerable context setting begins to disrupt the institutional narrative structure and prevents its completion. And so much time is spent on context setting and clarifying the environment where ‘customers could be satisfied’ that the action, and then crucially the result and reflection on the experience, are not elicited. This is a type of collusion between interviewers asking for more detailed accounts to produce something experientially grounded and relevant, and candidates anxious to sell their stories, compensate for interviewers’ lack of knowledge, and comply with the requests for details. Lastly, as shown in interactional sociolinguistic studies of Chinese and Indian speakers of English and on the German studies discussed above, the structuring of candidate responses may be drawing on communicative styles that elaborate on the context before coming to what in these STAR discourses would be perceived as the main or most relevant point (Young 1994; Gumperz 1996; Auer 1998).

Equivalence Burden Candidates who are aware that they have to make their experience familiar and thereby relevant will attempt to translate specific terms used in their FWE into UK equivalences. However, where whole categories of work have no institutional equivalence in the UK, the burden of aligning two such different systems adds to the linguistic penalty since the candidate has to produce an extended comparative explanation. Luis was a type of civil engineer in the Philippines whose job was a combination of engineer, surveyor, draughtsman, and tax inspector in the land tax department of the national government.

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The problem for Luis is that his professional work was complex, cut across normative British categories of professional work, and involved him in conflicts of a different order from the imagined irate customer of the competency question. Since these are low-paid jobs, interviewers expect the irate customer question to elicit relatively straightforward examples of dissatisfied customers in routine service encounters that would reflect experience of the kind of low-paid work that organisations expect candidates to have. A similar equivalence burden is faced by many migrant candidates from professional backgrounds. Both the categories of their work are often different but also, as professionals, they conceptualise their jobs in terms of general processes and talk about them in the more abstract register of institutional discourses when the question was asking for a specific example. The upshot from such interviews is to disrupt the expected narrative structure, leaving empty boxes on the form, to penalise candidates whose work experience cannot be easily realised as evidence of the competences required, and to raise more general questions about candidates’ communicative skills on two counts. First, their ability to make appropriate inferences about the question and the additional linguistic labour needed to contextualise and find equivalences requires more complex communication than that expected of other candidates. Second, this linguistic labour highlights communicative competence, which is likely to be the most challenging competence for those from migrant backgrounds with little or no experience of the British job interview and its requirements to align with the cultural categories of the ideal candidate and employee.

FWE Penalties and Linguistic Penalties The next example, a revisiting of Example 1, has elements of the problematics of FWE described above but also shows where even a fluent speaker of English presents himself in ways that, in Blommaert’s (2005) words, do not ‘travel well’. Suhil, an unsuccessful candidate, has told the two interviewers about being a ward clerk for two years in India, where he describes the records system he worked with, a one-year post handling students in a college in London, and a temporary job in the same hospital as the job he is now applying to. He is then asked if he prefers working behind the scenes to front-line jobs. While interviews for this post, in this organisation, are not designed around explicitly stated competencies, the implied competence here is that of working face-to-face with the public and so of customer relations and satisfaction. Example 4 29 30 31 32 33

I: S: I: S:

If you werent successful would you (.) um (.) like to be considered for .h a position behind the scenes well [for] are you [specifically for me] its not [very important

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

I: S:

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

I2: S: I: S: I2: I: S:

I: S: I: S: I: S: All: S: I:

I: I2:

patient ok] whether Im working behind the scene or in front of the scene hh actually speaking because I worked as a ward clerk Ive handled the reception Ive got two years working= =Yeah I [understand that experience also] so Im not afraid of anything But that’s obviously [in India right] not here ((laughs loudly)) ((nods)) thats in India yeah (laughter) But patients are patients ((Clears throat loudly)) ((looks at interviewer 2 still laughing)) [debatable well ( )] I’m not here to debate because you are more experienced Yeah So I dont because (.) obviously I mean I-I’m here to give my best= =mhmm= =[yeah I appreciate that and I’m here to convince you] if I if Im able to convince you Im_fortunate if Im (.) I cannot convince you I’m [unfortunate Yeah]= =mhmm=

It is not clear from the opening question whether the interviewer is pressing Suhil on whether he is more of a backstage than frontstage person or whether the interview is setting up the possibility of Suhil being considered for other jobs. His subsequent turns at lines 33–40 shift the rhetorical grounds of this phase of the interview from grounded stories of competence to what Goffman calls podium talk (Goffman 1981: 137–140), an appropriate dramaturgical footing for the subject of front and backstage work, but not one that fits with either the narrative structures and display of self through example, or the euphemised institutional discourse that regulates the job interview. This shift happens gradually until lines 49–54, when Suhil’s rhetoric, “I’m not here to debate . . . I’m here to convince you,” elicits only minimal responses from the interviewers. The shift occurs between lines 33 and 39, with Suhil’s initial formulation and the main interviewer’s closing receipt of this information at line 39. Yet, at line 37, Suhil introduces new information about the ward clerk job in India, the fact that he worked in reception. The main interviewer attempts, at line 39, to close down what may be seen as repetition (the fact that he worked for two years as a ward clerk), rather than what it is, an expansion that gives evidence of his front-

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line experience. Suhil recaptures the floor with an extreme claim: “so I’m not afraid of anything.” In the interviewer’s next turn, at line 41, the FWE is dismissed with laughter, which Suhil attempts to cap with a gnomic saying, at line 46, “But patients are patients,” shifting his stance from the expected storied self with telling examples, to an aphoristic self, instructing the interviewers on the nature of patients in general. The main interviewer, at line 47, responds with several paralinguistic cues, a shift in gaze and the comment “debatable,” designed to encourage the second interviewer to collude in her rejection of Suhil’s attempt to make his FWE skills transferable. At this point, the rhetorical shift moves Suhil into a general bid to convince the panel of his worth, presenting the ‘I’ as a commentator on the interview process rather than a contributor to it. In narrative analysis terms, Suhil has shifted the focus from the storied or narrated self to the narrating self (Bamberg 1997; Georgakopoulou 2003), so that neither personal and grounded accounts nor euphemised, analytic talk are produced. The negotiation of FWE has drawn Suhil into a discursive space that is negatively valued. In the wash-up session afterwards, the interviewers judged him as not telling them enough about his skills and experience and, crucially, not showing how these could be transferred to a London setting. In the interview itself, he was interrupted when he tried to do just this. Also, the rhetorical shift to explicit selfcommentary, “so I’m not here to debate,” and his subsequent pronouncements, may have fed into the evaluation of the lack of grounded, transferable skills. Instead of talking about what he had learnt from his experience and its relevance for the current post and evaluating his skills in a grounded way, he spends time evaluating his presence at and the purpose of the interview. While “But patients are patients” is Suhil’s attempt to show that his skills learnt in India are transferrable to London, the style in which he does this, gnomic and distancing, is not the expected competency-based style that is detailed and experiential. So while Suhil understands that showing transferability is important, the style he uses to do this is not evaluated positively. An unacceptable style is turned into an unacceptable fact.

Mutually Figured Worlds In contrast to the examples given already, candidates with entirely or largely British work experience, whatever their linguistic or ethnic background, are able to present themselves through the familiarity of such experience. It is imaginable to the interviewers. Drawing on Holland’s “figured worlds” (Holland et al. 1998) and Gumperz’s scenarios (Gumperz 1982a), types of work experiences are envisaged as situated activities learnt over time and recreated in interaction. Stretching Holland et al.’s definition a little, figured worlds are “socially produced and culturally constituted activities” (Holland et al. 1998: 40–41) through which people are “made familiar to others” and “are sorted,” in the sense, here, that they can be categorised and judgements made. So, for example, the shop assistant,

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catering, manufacturing, or reception work displayed by candidates is readily called up and aligned to, as candidates tell their stories. A mutually figured world is jointly produced as interviewers share assumptions with candidates: “I imagine . . .”; “so that must have been different from . . .”; “you said about . . . so . . .”; and “so how does the system work then (.) do the er:m schools contact you guys and say can you come and do some (.) e:r sessions” (taken from the candidate discussed below). In these cases, the interviewers both align with the candidate and do some of the work by partially answering their own questions. All of this is readily done where speakers and listeners call up broadly the same picture or plot as the account unfolds. These scenarios are produced both through shared knowledge of the world and shared resources for interpreting speaker performance (Gumperz 1982: 156–163). The figured world of the candidate becomes shared with the interviewer to produce more collaborative phases, more joint argumentation or reasoning, and more familiarity and solidarity. Structurally, the stories are not disrupted and the grounded experience displayed is made more vivid by recruiting interviewers’ visualisations of it. So, both culturally, in envisaging shared scenarios, and socially, by creating overall behavioural smoothness, candidate and interviewer are part of the same figured world. The final example is that of Trenton, a successful black British candidate applying to the same large delivery company as Renard. The opening competence is about working with people, and Trenton describes his work as a part-time coach at a large football club in London. He explains how he helps run a Saturday football club for local schools. As in Renard’s interview, the second competence question is about customer satisfaction. And like Renard, Trenton is cued to give a specific example when he ‘went out of his way’. His first story, briefly given above, is drawn from when he worked on the door of a nightclub, and it uses the STAR structure. Example 5 6 C: e:r (1) a customer lost their (.) purse (.) in the actual club you know 7 obviously they had to fill out a crime reports 8 and obviously I I came forward (.) to help them do that 9 otherwise I would have stayed behind a little bit after work 10 wait for the police to arrive and everything (.) (four lines deleted) 11 I: en- do you have to have like a (.) 12 do you have a set procedure that you follow 13 if someone come comes and says [(that erm) 14 C: there wasnt] actually

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15 16 I:

a set procedure for lost property okay [(so you just fill in the report)

(six lines deleted) 17 18 19

there wasnt like a lost property room or anything like that so I just took it upon my own initiative (.) you know to just do as much as I could ((8 seconds of interviewer writing))

Trenton picks up the special inferences in the interviewer’s question both at line 8 and lines 11–19. He first positions himself, in practice and metaphorically, as the one who stood out, “obviously I came forward.” Then when the interviewer asks about set procedures, he interprets this question as less about the company’s policy and more about how he went out of his way, “I just took it upon my own initiative.” This collaborative phase is enhanced by the interviewer’s imagining what happens to lost property so that Trenton only has to agree with him. Another example is then given with Trenton returning to his football coach experience and what happens when parents come late. He draws the interviewer into his figured world, “imagine parents coming late,” and sets up two vivid connecting stories about how he supports the children if their parents are late or they experience bullying. This collaborative phase is sealed by the interviewer, showing his engrossment and understanding of the story not only with an imagined action, but also in endorsing Trenton’s stance. The experience brought into the interview is immediately familiar and recognisable to the interviewer, so the STAR structure is displayed in full and, collaboratively, Trenton’s competence in people-handling skills and his flexibility in dealing with situations as they arise are responded to and institutionally recorded.

Conclusion Local British candidates such as Trenton can make the appropriate inferences, draw on experiences that are readily imaginable to the interviewer, and use their everyday storytelling resources to produce a bureaucratically processible response. By contrast, migrants and other groups educated and with work experience from overseas are penalised in multiple ways. The regulation and management of foreign work experience both provides an additional penalty and serves to reinforce other linguistic penalties brought about in the interview. Dealing with these penalties effectively distances the candidates from the interviewers and the organisational values they represent. They are constructed as the ‘other’ and more likely than other groups to be excluded from work opportunities. The process of ‘othering’ drawn from critical social theory and anthropology, and well summed up in Hallam and Street (2000), works in four different ways

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in the treatment of FWE: (i) the unfamiliarity with the discursive regimes of the British job interview, which value certain styles of presentation, such as the blending of institutional and personal modes of talk and the STAR narrative structure, and not others. (ii) The disruption of the conventional narrative structure to establish equivalences, understand the context, and negotiate the relevance. This means that candidates are less able to produce vivid, coherent and compelling stories and their experiences are less likely to be bureaucratically processed; they have either told too little or too much. (iii) Contextualising their experiences, by attempting to make the strange familiar, manage criticisms of their selfpresentations, and negotiate the problems that their FWE has produced, which requires harder interactional and linguistic labour from candidates with FWE than that demanded of British candidates with local work experience. (iv) The interactional distancing that stems from this disruption and this labour produces the social distancing that ‘others’ them and leads to a much higher exclusion rate than that experienced by British candidates. Competency and diversity discourses and the practice of standardised and equal for all competence-based interviews demonstrate a public rhetoric of equality and fairness, and institutions can therefore defend themselves as their processes are regulated, scrutinised, and legitimated. Yet migrant groups, such as those discussed here, face inequalities based on the implicit linguistic demands and constraints of the interview and the valuing of certain styles of talk. While the language of competencies is carefully regimented by institutions, the fact that candidates bring different resources to their interpretation is not attended to. The discursive regimes of the interview exclude those candidates who are not linguistically ‘acceptable’ ( Jenkins 1986) and render invisible the linguistic penalties they face. The job selection interview for low-paid work is therefore a key setting where language masks the contradiction between apparent fairness and unequal outcomes (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977; Bourdieu 1991; Duchêne & Heller 2011). These discursive regimes require particular ways of talking and interacting while claiming a general fairness. This is one of three tensions, at different levels, that coalesce and are played out in the job interview. There is the tension between, first, standardisation and diversity; second, between regulation in line with equal opportunities and the entrepreneurial self; and third, between institutional distancing and propriety and between conversational involvement and familiarity. These tensions are masked by the language of interviews. They illustrate the “co-existence of oppositions” (Bourdieu 1998: 121) and how institutional discourses and language practices gloss over these oppositions and sequester away the inequalities that selection interviews produce. The analysis of such tensions contributes to our understanding of some of the processes of exclusion that migrants face, despite the diversity discourses, and shows how in bureaucratised organisations, superdiverse candidate populations face a linguistic penalty despite their transferable skills.

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Transcription Conventions Where there is more than one interviewer, the interviewers are labelled I1 and I2. The report uses the transcription conventions shown below, which are adapted from Psathas (1995). [

]

=

(.) (0.5) : Yes (s’pose so/ spoke to) (xxxxxx) ((child’s name)) ((laugh))

Beginning of overlap e.g. T: I used to smoke[a lot B: he thinks he’s real tough End of overlap e.g. T: I used to smoke [a lot B: he th]inks he’s real tough Latching (i.e. where the next speaker’s turn follows on without any pause) A: I used to smoke a lot= B: =He thinks he’s real tough Untimed brief pauses Timed pauses approx. seconds and tenths of a second e.g. (0.5)/(0.1)/(2.0) Sounds stretch e.g. I gue:ss you must be right Cut-off prior word or sound e.g. ‘I thou- well I thought’ Emphasis (i.e. perceived stress indicated by volume and pitch change) Unclear talk/possible hearings in the case of multiple possibilities Unrecognisable talk, words replaced by insertion marks to indicate length of talk Description of named person anonymised name e.g. ((interviewer’s name)) Description of vocal sound that interrupts talk e.g. ((cough))

Notes 1. This paper is based on two research projects funded by the Department of Work and Pensions: Talk on Trial (2006) and Talking Like a Manager (2008). While the discussion of competency-based interview draws on both projects, the examples and the main argument are largely based on Talk on Trial, which looks at selection interviews and low-paid work in supermarkets, a delivery company, a hospital, a further education college, a food processing company, and a manufacturing company. 2. On language testing, see McNamara and Roever (2006), Shohamy (2001), and Gal (2006). 3. The notion of a shared or common culture clearly resonates with wider societal discourses of cultural nationalism (Gilroy 1993) and linguistic nationalism (Billig 1995), in which a common culture and language are seen as the cohesive elements of the nation state.

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4. Scheepers, in her study of Belgian discourses of diversity, quotes from a Flemish action plan: “the at first sight heterogeneous composition of the personnel (men, women, emigrants, older workers, starters, disabled people . . .) will become one homogeneous unity because we all work for one goal. The organization has to be characterized by one common culture, in which there is room for valuing differences.” 5. An exception is Scheuer’s suggestive study that subtle class-based differences related to relative success in interviews for managerial and professional posts stem from different topoi about how work is experienced: the extent to which candidates identify themselves and their sense of fulfilment through work or not (Scheuer 2001). 6. In our data, successful candidates talked between 50 and 70 per cent of the time, mostly at the lower end. Candidates from migrant backgrounds averaged 74 per cent, suggesting that they had to spend more time contextualising their FWE.

References Adelsward, V. 1988. Styles of success: On impression management as a collaborative action in job interviews. Linköping Studies in Arts and Science 23. Linköping: University of Linköping. Allen, K. 2013. Skilling the self: the communicability of immigrants as flexible labour. In A. Duchêne, M. Moyer, & C. Roberts (eds), Language, Migration and Social Inequalities: A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 56–78. Auer, P. 1998. Learning how to play the game: An investigation of role-played job interviews in East Germany. Text, 18: 17–38. Auer, P., & Kern, F. 2000. Three ways of analysing communication between East and West Germans as intercultural communication. In A. Di Luzio & S.Günthner (eds), Culture in Communication: Analysis of Intercultural Situations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 89–116. Bamberg. M. (ed.). 1997. Narrative Development – Six Approaches. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Billig, M. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Birkner, K. 2004. Hegemonic struggles or transfer of knowledge? East and West Germans in job interviews. Journal of Language and Politics, 3(2): 293–322. Birkner, K., & Kern, F. 2000. Impression management in East and West German job interviews. In H. Spencer-Oatey (ed.), Culturally Speaking: Managing Relations in Talk across Cultures. London: Cassell Academic, pp. 255–271. Block, D. 2007. Second Language Identities. London: Continuum. Blommaert, J. 2001. Investigating narrative inequality: African asylum seekers’ stories in Belgium. Discourse and Society, 12(4): 413–449. Blommaert, J. 2005. Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. 2012. The Sociolinguistics of Globalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Edited by John Thompson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1998. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. 1977. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage.

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Campbell, S., & Roberts, C. 2007. Migration, ethnicity and competing discourses in the job interview: Synthesising the institutional and personal. Discourse and Society, 18(3): 243–272. Codó, E. 2008. Immigration and Social Control. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Cook-Gumperz, J., & Gumperz, J. 2002. Narrative accounts in gatekeeping interviews: Intercultural differences or communicative misunderstandings? Language and Intercultural Communication, 2(1): 25–36. Day, D., & Wagner, J. 2007. Bilingual professionals. In P. Auer & L. Wei (eds), Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 390–404. Du Gay, P. 2000. In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber, Organisation, Ethics. London: Sage. Duchêne, A. 2009. Marketing, management and performance: Multilingualism as commodity in a tourist call centre. Language Policy, 8: 27–50. Duchêne, A., & Heller, M. (eds). 2011. Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit. London: Routledge. Edwards, D. 1991. Categories are for talking: On the cognitive and discursive bases of categorisation. Theory and Psychology, 1(4): 515–542. Erickson, F., & Schultz, G. 1982. The Counsellor as Gatekeeper: Social Interaction in Interviews. New York: Academic Press. Gagnon, S., & Cornelius, N. 2000. Re-examining workplace equality: The capabilities approach. Human Resource Management Journal, 10(4): 68–87. Gal, S. 2006. Minorities, migration and multilingualism: Language ideologies in Europe. In P. Stevenson & C. Mar-Molinero (eds), Language Ideologies, Practices and Policies: Language and the Future of Europe. London: Palgrave. Gee, J., Hull, G., & Lankshear, C. 1996. The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin. Georgakopoulou, A. 2003. Looking back when looking ahead: Adolescents’ identity management in narrative practices. In J. Androutsopoulous & A. Georgakopoulou (eds), Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins, pp. 75–91. Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. GLA. 2005. Country of Birth and Labour Market Outcomes in London: An Analysis of Labour Force Survey and Census Data. DMAG Briefing 2005-1, London: Greater London Assembly. Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell. Grugulis, I., & Vincent, S. 2009. Whose skill is it anyway? ‘Soft skills’ and polarization. Work, Employment and Society, 23(4): 597–615. Gumperz, J. 1982a. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, J. (ed.). 1982b. Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, J. 1992. Interviewing in intercultural situations. In P. Drew & J. Heritage (eds), Talk at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 302–327. Gumperz, J. 1996. The linguistic and cultural relativity of conversational inference. In J. Gumperz & S. Levinson (eds), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 374–406. Hallam, E., & Street, B. (eds). 2000. Cultural Encounters: Representing Others. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Heath, A., & Cheung, S.Y. 2006. Ethnic penalties in the labour market: Employers and discrimination. Department for Work and Pensions Research Report 341. Heller, M. 2010. Language as a resource in the globalised new economy. In N. Coupland (ed.), Handbook of Language and Globalisation. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 349–365. Hinnenkamp, V. 1987. Foreigner-talk, code-switching and the concept of trouble. In: K. Knapp, W. Enninger, & A. Knapp-Potthoff (eds), Analysing Intercultural Communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 137–180. Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. 1998. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Huffcutt, A., & Roth, P.L. 1998. Racial group differences in employment interview evaluations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83(1): 179–189. Iedema, R. 2003. Discourses of Post-Bureaucratic Organizations. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Iedema, R., & Scheeres, H. 2003. From doing work to talking work: Renegotiating knowing, doing and identity. Applied Linguistics, 24(3): 316–337. Jacquemet, M. 2005. Transidiomatic practices: Language and power in the age of globalisation. Talk and Text, 31(4): 475–498. Jenkins, R. 1986. Racism and Recruitment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kandola, R. 1996. Putting competencies in perspective. Competency, 4(1): 31–34. Kerekes, J. 2003. Distrust: A determining factor in the outcomes of gatekeeping encounters. In G. House, G. Kasper, & S. Ross (eds), Misunderstanding in Social Life. Harlow: Pearson Education, pp. 227–257. Komter, M. 1991. Conflict and Co-Operation in Job Interviews. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kulesza, M. 2002. Methods and techniques of managing de-centralising reforms in CEE countries: The Polish experience. In G. Peteri (ed.), Mastering De-Centralisation and Public Administration Reforms in Central and Eastern Europe. Budapest: Open Society Institute, pp. 189–214. Labov, W., & Waletzsky, J. 1967. Narrative analysis. In J. Helm (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, pp. 12–44. Maryns, K. 2006. Asylum Speaker. Manchester: St Jerome. McNamara, T., & Roever, C. 2006. Language Testing: The Social Dimension. Oxford: Blackwell. Payne, J. 2000. The unbearable lightness of skill: The changing meaning of skill in UK policy discourses and some implications for education and training. Journal of Education Policy, 15(3): 353–369. Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. 2013. Language work aboard the low-cost airline. In A. Duchêne, M. Moyer, & C. Roberts (eds), Language, Migration and Social Inequalities: A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 95–117. Psathas, G. 1995. Conversation Analysis: The Study of Talk-in-Interaction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Roberts, C. 2011. ‘Taking ownership’: Language and ethnicity in the job interview. In K. Pelsmaekers, C. Rollo, T. van Hout, & P. Heynderickx (eds), Displaying Competence in Organisations. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 10–26. Roberts, C. 2013. The gatekeeping of Babel: Job interviews and the linguistic penalty. In A. Duchêne, M. Moyer, & C. Roberts (eds), Language, Migration and Social Inequalities: A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 81–94.

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Roberts, C., & Campbell, S. 2005. Fitting stories into boxes: Rhetorical and contextual constraints on candidates’ performances in British job interviews. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2(1): 45–73. Roberts, C., & Campbell, S. 2006. Talk on Trial: Job Interviews, Language and Ethnicity. Sheffield: Department of Work and Pensions Research Report 344. Available at: http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd5/report_abstracts/rr_abstracts/rra_344.asp (accessed 10 July 2014). Roberts, C., Campbell, S., & Robinson, Y. 2008. Talking Like a Manager: Promotion Interviews, Language and Ethnicity. Sheffield: Department for Work and Pensions Research Report 510. Available at: www.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd5/report_abstracts/rr_ abstracts/rra_510.asp (accessed 10 July 2014). Roberts, C., Davies, E., & Jupp, T. 1992. Language and Discrimination. London: Longman. Sarangi, S. 1994. Accounting for mismatches in intercultural selection interviews. Multilingua, 13(1/2): 163–194. Scheepers, S. 2011. Equality for those who are competent: Discourses on competencies, diversity and equality in the public sector. In K. Pelsmaekers, C. Rollo, T. van Hout, & P. Heynderickx (eds), Displaying Competence in Organisations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 27–44. Scheuer, J. 2001. Recontextualisation and communicative styles in job interviews. Discourse Studies, 3: 223–248. Shohamy, E. 2001. The Power of Tests: A Critical Perspective of the Uses of Language Tests. Harlow: Longman. Silverman, D., & Jones, J. 1976. Organizational Work: The Language of Grading, the Grading of Language. London: Collier Macmillan. Tranekjær, L. 2015. The Power of Categories: Gatekeeping, Nationality, Language and Religion. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Urcioli, B. 2008. Skills and selves in the new workplace. American Ethnologist, 35(2): 211–228. Vertovec, S. 2011. The cultural politics of nation and migration. Annual Review of Anthropology, 40: 241–256. Wood, R., & Payne, T. 1998. Competency Based Recruitment and Selection. Chichester: Wiley. Young, L. 1994. Crosstalk and Culture in Sino-American Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zane, N.C. 2002. The glass ceiling is the floor my boss walks on: Leadership challenges in managing diversity. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 38(3): 334–354.

13 SOCIOLINGUISTIC SHIBBOLETHS AT THE INSTITUTIONAL GATE Language, Origin, and the Construction of Asylum Seekers’ Identities Massimiliano Spotti 1

The ‘Super’ about Diversity The face of migration in Europe has changed quite dramatically after 1991. If we take the fall of the Berlin wall as an arbitrary changing point in world-order structure, we can see that, prior to this event, institutions engaged with mapping the presence of diversity in a country could rather easily circumscribe migrants in groups. With time, and thanks to favourable immigration law, these groups became sedentary recognisable immigrant minority communities in their own right in the host country (see Spotti & Kroon 2011). This understanding of diversity as group based has witnessed the emergence of a research tradition – that goes under the label of ‘migration research’ – that primarily dealt with migrants’ acculturation strategies, their children’s (often underachieving) educational trajectories, as well as with the linguistic diversity that typified their presence in the host society and on the labour market (cf. Hermans 1995; Verlot & Sierens 1997; Phalet & Swyngedouw 2002; Extra & Yağmur 2004; Zanoni & Janssens 2004). The aftermath of 1991 has testified the emergence of new patterns of migration across many European urban and non-urban conglomerates involving a far more diverse population originating from the former Eastern European block but also from Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Post-1991 migratory patterns therefore differ from the former ones for two reasons. First, migration is not supported anymore by fairly liberal labour policies, such as those that characterised northern Europe during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Second, immigrants themselves are well aware that the country of arrival is but the beginning of yet another migration trajectory that often brings them further chances of success either elsewhere in Europe or beyond. In the same fashion, the motives and forms of migration have changed. Immigrants do not enter solely as unskilled labour

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force. Rather, they enter as asylum seekers, commuting migrants, working migrants, circular migrants, transitory residents, highly skilled labour forces, and the like. The blending of ‘old’ and ‘new’ migration categories gives way to a new form of diversity for which the term ‘superdiversity’ has been coined (Vertovec 2006, 2010). This type of diversity, in essence, seeks to quantify and qualify the new conditions of emergent migration flows that are not only steadily rising, but also adding, through their uneasy-to-pin-down classifications, new facets to the concept of transnationalism. Research on the societal and sociolinguistic implications of superdiversity is well on its way addressing its complexities and implications across several institutional arenas both within onand offline environments (see Blommaert & Rampton 2011; Arnaut & Spotti 2014). Taken from an administrative viewpoint, superdiversity is a real challenge to those institutional gatekeepers who have to determine migrants’ legal positions. The intricacy in pinning down the right administrative categorisation of a migrant also calls for questioning the rationale behind admission of some and rejection of others often due to the omnipresent supremacy of the majority’s perspective within gatekeeping institutions that are in charge of handling and consequently approving or rejecting their cases (cf. Leung & Lewkowicz 2006; Spotti 2011; Duarte & Gogolin 2013; Khan forthcoming). It is against this background that the present case study focuses on the institutional machinery put in place by nation-state governments and strives to uncover how a high modern understanding of language linked to a determinant of origin is used in the Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin (henceforth LADO) of asylum-seeking migrants. More specifically, while providing an insight into how LADO is put into practice by the Dutch immigration and naturalisation authorities (IND), the case study focuses on the case of an Arabicspeaking Sudanese asylum seeker. This case is mainly analytical, yet it has also practical implications for applied linguistics. Authorities work towards constructing the identity of an applicant through a sociolinguistic analysis that addresses language as a resource of origin. Rather, what emerges here is that a LADO analysis ought to be driven by an understanding of language as a spatio-temporal resource, linked to macro-sociopolitical events that have characterised the life and the migration history of the applicant.

Language Ideologies, Indexicalities, and Identification Language ideologies are socially and culturally embedded metalinguistic conceptualisations of language and its forms of usage. They serve nation states and their institutional ramifications – such as gatekeeping institutions – in setting up and maintaining national order (Bauman & Briggs 2003; see also Silverstein 1996, 1998). Language ideologies present languages as codified objects that have a name (e.g. Dutch, Turkish, Arabic, Wolof) and that come with a cohort of codified linguistic amenities such as grammars and dictionaries (Blommaert 2008) that are

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elected as proof of their codification and of their legitimate existence. Further, the speakers of these languages have clearly definable identities based on ethnolinguistic traits that bring gatekeeping institutions to rely on the ideal equation that someone is ‘a speaker of language X’ and that therefore this person is ‘a member of group Y’. There are therefore two tenets around these ideologies of language, identity, and territorial belonging. The first is the one that establishes a standard or norm for language behaviour that is common to all inhabitants of any nation state. The second is the rejection of hybridity and ambivalence in any form of linguistic behaviour. Of these two closely related tenets, the former is the goal towards which the latter is seen to contribute. That is, the rejection of hybridity is embedded in the search – whether in writing or in pronunciation – of a ‘standard’ (see Agha 2003, for a comprehensive explanation of the emergence of Received Pronunciation of English [RP]). Further, given that languages are understood as finite entities bound by syntactical rules and grammars, their usage can be assessed and used to indexicalise the truthfulness and provenance of someone who claims to be a member of a certain community. This point leads me to a second concept, that of the indexical value of language. The power of language to encode preconceived ‘stereotypes’ based solely on accent is an example of indexicality. For demonstrations of (higher or rarefied) indexical orders, Michael Silverstein discusses the particularities of “life-style emblematization” or “convention-dependent-indexical iconicity” that is prototypical, as he claims, of a phenomenon he dubs “wine talk,” though register shibboleths seems more appropriate for this study (Silverstein 2006). What Silverstein eloquently illustrates is how professional wine critics use a certain ‘technical vocabulary’ that is ‘metaphorical’ of prestige realms of traditional English gentlemanly horticulture. Thus, a certain ‘register’ is created for this wine that entails certain cultural notions of prestige and social class. When ‘yuppies’ use this genre for wine flavours created by these critics in the actual context of drinking wine, Silverstein argues that they become enregistered in the ‘well-bred, interesting (subtle, balanced, intriguing, winning, etc.) person’ that is iconic of the metaphorical ‘fashion of speaking’ employed by people possessing high social registers, demanding notoriety as a result of this high level of connoisseurship. In other words, the wine-drinking language user becomes a refined, gentlemanly critic and, in doing so, adopts a similar level of social refinement. To bring this discussion on the indexicalisation of language closer to the object of this study, that of language being used for the determination of origin, any bits of language use are potentially subject to evaluation. Language(s), their words, their accents, and the fine-grained details of their morpho-syntactic structures therefore carry an ideological load because all of what makes up for language is subject to the values at play at the time and in the space in which a certain bit of language is uttered (Blommaert 2005: 222–223; Spotti 2007). A poignant example of this indexicalisation process is the evaluation of accents, which often comes across as embedded in people’s discourse on language use (e.g. “he speaks like a farmer” or “he surely is from the capital

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city”). Indexicality, here, can be best pictured by being the connective cement that links language use to social meanings, biographical and topographic location of someone’s origin, and all this is done through evaluative discourses of belonging. This means that in any act of language use, there is always identity work involved. As it is shown in this study, every utterance, even those ones that are not explicitly about identity and belonging, constitute an act of identity inhabitation.

The LADO Tests: Shibboleths at the Institutional Gate There are strong indications that ideologies anchored on the linear correspondence between the indexicalisation of language and territory during the process of someone’s identification are the main foundation of the criteria used by the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service (Immigratie en Naturalisatie Dienst, henceforth IND) to determine asylum seekers’s origin. These Language Analysis tests for the Determination of Origin, acronymised as LADO, were developed in the early 1990s by the Swedish Immigration Service SIV (Statens Invandrarverk) in response to a growing number of asylum seekers who, for a number of reasons, lacked official documents through which their identity and/or origin could be verified (see Nygren-Junkin 2009). During their development of LADO tests, the Swedish immigration authorities were led by the Shibboleth principle. That is, the notion that accents and/or the use of certain words in one’s speech as clues to the topographic origin of an individual. Professionalised and semiprivatised by 1997, both the concept and product of these LADO tests were successfully exported to a growing number of Western (European) countries. Faced with an unexpected influx of mainly non-Western asylum seekers, the IND, following some preliminary pilots with Iraqi asylum cases, established its own Language Bureau (Bureau Taal, later named as Bureau Land en Taal) in 2000. With the implementation of the new Aliens Act 2000 on 1 April 2001, LADO tests were adopted at a large-scale level. With the juridical approval by the Dutch Council of State (Raad van State), the weight of these language tests in the final assessment of asylum requests by the IND has grown to a point where a negative language analysis report combined with the absence of identity documents gives sufficient grounds to reject an asylum-seeking application. Yet, the design and inset of these LADO tests have been highly controversial. At its onset, several Scandinavian linguists and Africanists positioned themselves as staunch critics of the Swedish language tests, describing these as “characterized by a lack of professionalism,” “unreliable,” and “of no value whatsoever” (Hyltenstam & Janson 1998), and pleading for these tests to be abandoned. In 2004, an international group of linguists, faced with the import and implementation of these LADO tests by the immigration services in their respective home countries, published a set of guidelines “intended to assist governments in assessing the general validity of language analysis in the determination of national origin, nationality or

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citizenship” (Language and National Origin Group 2004; see also Arends 2005, for the Dutch case). In the Netherlands, the focal point in the ensuing debate on the validity of LADO tests thus far has been the use by the IND of native speakers with no academic background in linguistics as language analysts.2 Voicing their criticism, scholars from the perspective of their respective fields of expertise have described a number of complicating factors and pitfalls in the LADO process that in their view substantiate the need for LADO tests to be carried out by professional linguists with an up-to-date expertise in the language in question (Baumann 2002; De Rooij 2003; Corcoran 2004; Abu-Manga 2005; Ten Thije 2008; Verrips 2010). Notwithstanding this unwavering criticism from scholars during the past decade, to date, in its stance, the IND has remained unmoved: the Dutch Immigration Office remains adamant that its method of using native speakers – under the supervision of a professional linguist – as language analysts is the best course of action to achieve valid results in the forensic field of LADO (Cambier-Langeveld 2010a). Any substantiating peer-reviewed evidence endorsing this approach as a valid and reliable forensic tool has, however, yet to be brought forward. When an asylum seeker lacks documents and/or the IND has expressed doubt about his/her truthfulness, the applicant is requested to take part in a language analysis interview, and although described as voluntary its refusal may have negative consequences for the application. During this recorded interview, the asylum seeker is asked by an immigration officer a string of questions in Dutch. These questions are then translated by a translator in the claimant’s mother tongue or second language, often a cross-border lingua franca, such as English, Portuguese, French, or Arabic. LADO is also applied in cases where the asylum seeker’s speech variety belongs to an African cross-border language, such as Swahili, Lingala, or Kikongo. BLT Senior Linguist Cambier-Langeveld has confirmed that when confronted with minority languages in the Dutch asylum procedure, LADO is rarely applied because these can be identified by a linguist by use of “a questionnaire including a word list and consulting the literature. In the context of LADO, the more common task is to distinguish between related varieties within cross-border languages” (Cambier-Langeveld 2010b). The questions posed to the asylum seeker in the language analysis interview then deals with his/her native country, the village/city from where he/she fled, his/her ethnicity, and the characteristics of the ethnic group to which the applicant claims to belong. To these questions, the asylum seeker is summoned to answer in his/her mother tongue and/or second language or – in some cases – third language. The interview, which, on average, takes between 30 and 45 minutes, is then analysed by an anonymous language analyst, who writes up the answers given by the applicant into a report (see Maryns & Blommaert 2001). Before the report and the result of the LADO test are made known to the IND and the legal representative of the asylum seeker, the findings are discussed with and checked by one of the four linguists working for Bureau Land en Taal. Of these linguists, it is known that they have a specialisation in, respectively, Berber languages and

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calligraphy, Himalayan languages, general linguistics, forensic linguistics, and the Italian language. Considering LADO is applied in the Dutch asylum procedure mainly ‘to distinguish between related varieties within cross-border languages’ and taking into account that, for instance in African cases, most of these language varieties have barely been mapped, researched, and analysed, the question arises with which expertise these linguists select native speakers as language analysts and train, support, and spot-check them in their linguistic analyses. Any attempts to gain access to the protocols the IND employs to conduct these language analysis interviews have thus far proven futile, as the IND argues that disclosure would disproportionately benefit the asylum seekers who still have to face a LADO test (IND 2007). A similar restrictive information policy is witnessed for the disclosure of sources substantiating the claim by the IND that its LADO tests are “valid, reliable, objective, accountable and repeatable.” The validity of this claim has become more questionable since Bureau Land en Taal acknowledged in 2008 that the theoretical foundation of its LADO test is based upon an assumption, of which the validity has thus far not been sufficiently examined, but which it views as belonging to a category of “criteria which can be judged on their merits by common sense and, subsequently, in principle, are not controversial” (Bureau Land en Taal 2008: 169). This assumption comprises of the notion that “one may expect from an individual that he/she will have an active knowledge of at least one of the languages and/or language variants commonly used in daily life in the area, where he/she claims to have resided for a substantial period of his/her life.” In the following section, examples of how this theoretical foundation and subsequent sociolinguistic world view are being translated into actual IND’s authored policy and practice adopted are described for the case of an asylum seeker claiming Sudanese-Nuba origin.

The Case of Sudanese-Nuba Refugees A situation where asylum seekers are confronted with unfounded linguistic ‘criteria’ by the IND is witnessed in the cases of Sudanese claiming a Nuba ethnic background, where the term Nuba is used to categorise a group of ethnolinguistically diverse tribes whose traditional homeland lays in the Nuba mountains, a hilly semi-arid region in the central Sudanese South Kordofan province. Here, we observe this assumption coming into operation in the requirement put forward by the IND that every Sudanese-Nuba applicant is to have a certain degree of proficiency in their respective tribal language, despite the public knowledge that the traditional homeland of the Nuba peoples has been subjected to unceasing government-instigated arabisation campaigns since Sudanese Independence in 1956. Moreover, a number of small-scale language surveys conducted in the northern part of the Nuba Mountains (Ismail 1978; Rottland & Salih 1988; Hammad 1998; Mugaddam 2006) show incontestably that the Arabic language has been gradually replacing the use of tribal languages

Sociolinguistic Shibboleths 267

in daily life. A recent language survey conducted in the provincial capital Kaduqli, located in the south of the Nuba Mountains, confirms this asserted process of language shift among the Nuba peoples, with all of the 1,020 survey participants, selected on the basis of an equal representation of age, gender, and location per each quarter (of the 17 different quarters of Kaduqli), stating to speak some form of Arabic, and 66.3 per cent presenting themselves as monolingual in Arabic (Manfredi 2013). It is noteworthy that this process of language shift from tribal languages to the Arabic majority language is not limited to the Nuba Mountains, but has been attested in several small-scale language surveys conducted among non-Arab populations across the entire Northern Sudan (see Miller & Abu-Manga 1992). The only asserted exceptions here are the Beja people on Sudan’s eastern border regions and the West African immigrants living across the Sudanese territory (Miller 2006: 4). In this questionable language proficiency claim, the IND is – somewhat remarkably – supported by the Dutch representative of the Nuba Mountains Solidarity Abroad (NMSA), an international organisation set up by exiles of Nuba origin. International Nuba organisations-in-exile, such as the NMSA and Nuba Survival, have played a pivotal role in raising awareness across the globe about the plight of the Nuba peoples. Yet, their general portrayal of the multi-ethnic Nuba to the outside world is an unrealistic one as the tendency to disregard the ethnic heterogeneity of the Nuba peoples in their newsletters and writings are prevalent. In these, the Nuba peoples are generally presented through a charactereological approach that sees them as a monolithic entity, maintaining strong and lively linguistic, cultural, and ethnic practices, having defied decades of Arab domination, and sharing a “unity of culture” (Abu Ras, Nuba Survival) and aspiring the same goals in the face of unrelenting adversity. and has showed that, when it comes down to the ethno-cultural image of the multi-ethnic Nuba people to the outside world, these organisations fall back into a politically inspired rhetoric portraying the multi-ethnic Nuba as having defied decades of Arab domination and maintaining strong and lively linguistic, cultural, and ethnic practices. Nevertheless, decades of civil war and ensuing mass internal displacements, famine and ethnocide, an Arab-dominated economy, and an ongoing process of urbanisation have not left the Nuba peoples untouched, and an altogether different reality is found on the ground. In response to this subjective discourse and portrayal of the Nuba peoples, the Norwegian anthropologist Leif O. Manger (2001: 56), who has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Nuba Mountains, points to large Nuba communities as “Islamised,” “Arabised,” and “Sudanised” to a degree that carry little resemblance to the Nuba as portrayed in newsletters such as Nafir (Nafir is one of the two newsletters edited by Nuba Survival). And yet, in its policy towards Sudanese asylum seekers claiming a Nuba origin, the IND ignores the academic findings attesting to a vigorous process of language shift from tribal languages to Arabic among the non-Arab peoples of North Sudan (Nuba, Fur, Zaghawa) and bases its rigid language proficiency claim solely on a – in this case – third-party politically motivated portrayal of an

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ethnicised ‘imagined community’. As stated, this ethnic vitality discourse, which also holds a language component, has little to do with the reality on the ground. We now take, as a case in point, a Sudanese male claiming to belong to the Nuba tribe of the Ghulfan and to have been born and raised in Dilling, the second largest city situated in the northern part of the Nuba Mountains. The LADO test, as implemented by a language analyst from BLT, concluded ‘with utmost certainty’ that the applicant did not originate from the speech and cultural communities of the Nuba Mountains and that his Arabic comes from the region of the Sudanese capital Khartoum.

The Right Language for the Right Origin From the reviewing analysis and transcription of the interview,3 it was ascertained that during the length of the recorded conversation, the interpreter did not address the asylum seeker in any Sudanese variety of Arabic, but confined himself for the most part to the use of Modern Standard Arabic, as we read: (IND)

Hoe kan u een stamgenoot herkennen? Hoe kan dat, uiterlijk gezien? [How can you recognise a tribe member? How can you do that, from appearance?] (Interpreter) ‘igūl, kayfa tastaṭī’u ‘an tata’arraf ‘aw tumayyiz šahsan min nafs qabīla bitā’tak? [Say, how do you know or recognise a person from the same tribe as you?] (IND) Ik wil graag de naam weten (van deze controleposten). [I would like to know the name of these checkpoints.] (Interpreter) ‘asāmihum ‘ē? [What’s their names?] The setup of the language interview did not take into account the well-known sociolinguistic fact that any native speaker of Arabic is by default a diglossic speaker in that he/she masters to a greater or lesser extent two varieties. Consequently, when faced with a prestigious – in this case, the most prestigious – form of Arabic speech, the applicant will accommodate his/her speech and switch to the bits of Arabic of a higher variety that he/she has at his/her command. Not doing so would be index of a lack of schooling in the Arabic language. Taking into account the fact that the objective of a language interview, upon which the language analysis is based, is to elicit the speech variety as it is used by an individual in his/her daily doings in the country/region of origin, the identification and use of an appropriate interpreter during these interviews is pivotal for the validity and reliability of the language material. Considering that the IND predominantly applies LADO to distinguish between related varieties within cross-border languages, there

Sociolinguistic Shibboleths 269

is the real danger that the use of an interpreter using a variety different from that of the asylum seeker can lead the latter to switch to a variety with a higher status, which in most cases is also used outside the asylum seeker’s own region of origin. In their dealings with individual LADO tests, several linguists have independently made reference to the negative role the interpreter played in the language analysis interview they reviewed (see, for the case of Sudanese Nuba asylum seekers, AbuManga 2005; De Graaf & Van den Hazelkamp 2006; Detailleur 2010). The IND, on its part, has not deemed it necessary to adjust its protocols with regard to the selection criteria in its use of interpreters for the language analysis interviews, as we read in the following quote: De wijze waarop de IND het toewijzen van tolken bij taalanalyse-gesprekken heeft georganiseerd kan tot gevolg hebben (dat), los van capaciteitsproblemen in een bepaalde moeilijke taal, niet altijd de qua taal meest gewenste/geschikte tolk kan worden ingezet. [The manner in which the IND has organised to assign interpreters to language analysis interviews can, irrespective of the capacity problem for a certain ‘difficult’ language, lead to the use of interpreters that are less appropriate from the perspective of the investigated language variety.] (Pinxter 2008: 5) Moreover, since its founding, all public documents issued by Bureau Land en Taal – and the IND for that matter – that clarify the procedure and use of the LADO tests do not mention the danger of language accommodation and/or any precautionary measures taken to avoid its negative impact. One may expect that the party that invokes and applies a forensic tool within a legal procedure under the rule of law is to do its utmost to ensure that all precautionary measures are taken to obtain valid and reliable data upon which the forensic analysis is based. It would seem that the Dutch Immigration Authorities’ priority lies not with the latter, but with ensuring that the nation state’s machinery to regulate the entry of migrants is kept on track. Returning to the case at hand, the conclusion of the language analysis report states the following: The text produced by the analyst for the case of this Arabic-speaking Sudanese asylum seeker claiming a Nuba-origin states that “Arabic is without any doubt

Echtheid van de / het gebezigde ta(a)l(en) / dialect(en) Het Arabisch is eenduidig de moedertaal van de vreemdeling. Er is niets in de spraak van de vreemdeling dat wijst op een herkomst uit of een langdurig verblijf in de Nuba-bergen. Hoe de vreemdeling zijn gehele Ieven in Dilling heeft kunnen doorbrengen zonder ten minste iets op te steken van de inheemse taal van Dilling is onduidelijk.

FIGURE 13.1

270 Massimiliano Spotti

Commentaar taalanalist

De vreemdeling Is niet in staat om gedetailleerde en correcte informatie te verstrekken over zijn beweerde herkomstgebied. Zijn kennis is beperkt tot enige namen van wijken e.d. Zijn informatie over de taalsituatie in de stad Dilling en binnen de Ghulfan-stam is onjuist. "Raish" is niet de naam van een substam van de Ghulfan. De informatie over de bruidsschat is onjuist. Het is aannemelijk dat de vreemdeling de stad Dilling ooit heeft bezocht (hij kent namen van wijken), maar het is niet aannemelijk dat hij, zoals hij beweert, zijn gehele ieven in deze stad heeft gewoond.

code analist

FIGURE 13.2

the mother tongue of the foreigner. There is nothing in the speech of the man in question that suggests an origin from or long-term stay in the Nuba Mountains,” and that “It is unclear how the foreigner could have spent his whole life in Dilling without acquiring at least something of the local language of Dilling.” In the first part of the report, in which the country information is reported as provided by the asylum seeker during the interview, the language analyst concludes the following: The commentary reports that: the foreigner is not capable to give detailed and correct information about his alleged region of origin. His knowledge is limited to some names of districts. The information he holds about the language situation in the city of Dilling and within the Ghulfan-tribe is not correct. ‘Raish’ is not the name of a sub-tribe of the Ghulfan. The information about the dowry is incorrect. However, when we turn to our interview transcript, the following fragment gives us an insight in the reaction of the asylum seeker to the questions brought before him about the language situation in Dilling and among his tribe, as it reads: (IND)

Iedereen spreekt Arabisch? [Everyone speeks Arabic?] (Interpreter) kullu wāḥid yatakallam ‘al-luġa ‘al ‘arabiyya? (Asylum seeker) ‘aġlab, ya’nī, hamsa tamanīn fi ‘l miyya yatakallam ‘arab f ī dillinǧ [Most, I mean, 85 per cent speak Arabic in Dilling.] (IND) Waarom spreekt u geen Nuba-taal? [Why don’t you speak any Nuba language?] (Interpreter) limāda lā’ tatakallam luġat ‘an Nuba? ¯ (Asylum seeker) wallayhi, ‘ana gunub bāki da gabīlatni kida ‘asāsan [I, that has never belonged to my tribe, that’s all.]

Sociolinguistic Shibboleths 271

(Interpreter) Zo ben ik opgegroeid. In onze stam is ’t zo. [I have been brought up like that. In our tribe it is like this.] In the referral to the information as provided by the asylum seeker about the language situation in Dilling as incorrect, the language analyst provides no substantiating sources in the report. Yet, in fact, it is contradicted by the data of a language survey, conducted by Mugaddam (2006) among the multi-ethnic inhabitants of the city of Dilling, which corroborates the asylum seekers’ statement concerning the language situation. According to Mugaddam’s findings, 89.23 per cent of Dilling residents used Arabic as the primary language in daily life outside their home, of which 61.76 per cent used Arabic only. Furthermore, the findings of Rottland and Salih (1988) that children from Ghulfan peoples in the traditional homeland of the Ghulfan were speaking Arabic as their mother tongue, are corroborated in the findings of Mugaddam, which show that among the Ghulfan residents in Dilling, less than 12 per cent of the older generation wanted their children to learn the tribal language. This percentage reduces significantly among the younger generation (20–39), where only 3.25 per cent were in favour of their children learning the tribal language (Mugaddam 2006). Another unsubstantiated remark put forward in the report by the language analyst as a ‘corroboration’ of the aforementioned conclusion about the origin of the asylum seeker is that the statements about the dowry customary among the Ghulfan (‘two or three cows, or two sheep’) are incorrect, thereby suggesting that this dowry is fixed. That this is not the case is illustrated by the anthropologist Davidson, who, following his field research in the Ghulfan village of Somasem, recounts how the village elders attempted to reduce the traditional dowry of four or five cows and an amount of food and clothes so as to prevent it from becoming a trade impediment in the undertaking of marriage in the village (Davidson 1996). Furthermore, in the second part of the report, the language analyst provides a number of examples from the – in this case – Arabic speech of the asylum seeker under a number of subdivisions (pronunciation, choice of words, grammar), intended to support the conclusion of the analyst – as shown directly above – that the man in question “speaks Arabic as it is commonly used outside the Nuba Mountains, in the capital region of Khartoum.” Enclosed below is the ‘grammar’ section from the report in question, which portrays no more than three 4.

Beschrijving van de spraak van de vreemdeling

A/ffe/rteert De vre em d eling spreekt A ra b isc h zoats het g a n g b a a r is b uiien het N u b a -g c b ie d . in de regio Khartoem .

FIGURE 13.3

272 Massimiliano Spotti

Grammatica

[tiatta lu hum burt^unu] [deel bilbisu w dee] ma bilbisu]

[ya*»ni, masalan, fi lzawaa?ij, ya^ni, bikuun

almahar, yaSni zayy bagarteen, aw talaat bagaraat aw xarufeen]

"..zelfs als zij een stamtaal spreken..." "Sommigen dragen het, anderen niet•”

“Eh, bijvoorbeeld, bij trouwfeesten, eh, is er

een bruidsschat, eh, zoiets als twee koeien, of drie koeien, of twee schapen.”

FIGURE 13.4

entextualised examples of the asylum seeker’s language use from the language analysis interview, see Figure 13.4. Remarkably, the provided examples of the asylum seeker’s verb conjugations in support of the analysts’ identification of his speech as Khartoum-Arabic (Sudanese Colloquial Arabic [SCA]) rather invalidate these findings as these conjugations are more approaching of the Western Sudanese Arabic (WSA). burṭunu  (SCA) biyirṭunū  (WSA) bartunu (3de ♂ mv.: ‘zij spreken een stamtaal [they speak a tribal language]’) bilbisu  (SCA) biyilbisū  (WSA) balbisu (3de ♂ mv.: ‘zij dragen (kleding) [they wear clothes]’) Aside from this, the recordings of the language analysis interview clearly reveal that the speech of the asylum seeker in question, while approaching the language variety of Khartoum Arabic, displays a number of distinct and recurrent anomalies on a phonetic, morphological, and syntactical level that cannot be traced back to Khartoum Arabic and could be so-called ‘distinctive linguistic markers’ of a local Arabic language variety (Miller & Abu-Manga 1992). Examples of the asserted anomalies are the recurrent deletion of both vowels and consonants, and sometimes entire syllables, both at the end and middle of words, such as: šamā’ Kurdufān (‘Noord-Kordofan [North-Kordofan]’) takkās (‘taxi’s [taxi]’) zawā’ (‘huwelijk [wedding]’) The pronunciation of the voiceless tā’ [t], t̠ ā’ [ɵ] en sīn [s] as the voiced zāy [z] in a number of words, such as: zǝrīf (‘luxueus [wealthy]’) mazalan (‘bijvoorbeeld [for example]’) zuzumiyya (‘negentig [ninety]’) The realisation of the Arabic sound gīm [dʒ] as yā’ [j], whereby it is realised as /dy/ [ʒ] in Khartoum Arabic:

Sociolinguistic Shibboleths 273

yanūb (‘zuiden [south]’) mawyūd (‘aanwezig [present]’) yabal (‘berg [mountain]’) Last, but not least, the dialect levelling towards the prestigious Khartoum Arabic is not uncommon among the multi-ethnic Nuba and Baggara native Arabic monolinguals inhabiting the Nuba Mountains’ regional capital Kaduqli, as has been asserted by Manfredi on the basis of his linguistic fieldwork (Manfredi 2013). Manfredi distinguishes at least four different Arabic varieties in the multi-ethnic regional capital of the Nuba Mountains. First, there is documentation of the emerging Kaduqli Arabic, a native variety spoken by arabophone multi-ethnic non-Arab groups, born in Kaduqli; second, there is the Baggara Arabic, spoken by Arab cattle-herders; third, there is the prestigious Sudanese Koine (Khartoum Arabic) spoken by the Jallaba immigrants; fourth, and last, there are nonnative Arabic varieties, spoken by multilingual non-Arab people residing there. Those varieties that fall under the four groupings proposed here are spoken by multilingual individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds that have only recently settled themselves in Kaduqli.4 With early urbanisation being the main factor stimulating the non-Arab Nuba inhabitants of Kaduqli to shift from their tribal language to Arabic, and taking into account the city’s recent process of urbanisation, to date, its multi-ethnic city dwellers of both Arab as well as nonArab origin lack a common urban Arabic dialect. Moreover, as Manfredi asserts, “the prestigious status occupied by the Sudanese national Koine undoubtedly inhibits the affirmation of an innovative urban dialect and reduces the maintenance of regional rural dialects (i.e. Baggara Arabic)” (Manfredi 2013). To date, very little (socio)linguistic research has been conducted on the Arabic (non-)native language varieties common among the Nuba peoples in the Nuba mountains region. Following the case study at hand, this lack of research has not prevented the language analyst from making bold unsubstantiated statements and drawing conclusions on the identity of the applicant. Based on the asylum seeker’s own Arabic language use and portrayed social, cultural, and geographical knowledge, the analyst states – with the highest degree of certainty – that the asylum seeker’s own origin is situated in the larger Khartoum area. Any factual evidence brought forward in the language analysis report, substantiating the analyst’s unambiguous conclusion, is inadequate and on several aspects even outright flawed. Moreover, the analyst omits to report the recurring anomalies in the speech of the asylum seeker, nor does he/she include the fact that the asylum seeker was a secondary school teacher in Arabic for many years. Last, the analyst does not point out that during the recorded language analysis interview, the asylum seeker’s approach to the Khartoum variety of Arabic could be the result of language accommodation to the highest Arabic variety at his disposal, the prestigious Sudanese Koine, following the confrontation with an interpreter addressing him in Modern Standard Arabic.

274 Massimiliano Spotti

Conclusions The case in question has brought several aspects of LADO. These aspects point to problems with the foundation upon which the IND rests its language analyses for the determination of origin. Taking into account similar experiences described by (socio)linguists in their dealings with the (Dutch) LADO tests over the past years, there are strong signs that the IND approaches language, culture, and identity in a modernist fashion and subsequently fails to take into account the actual sociolinguistic realities, the geopolitical distributions, and the societal intricacies that language varieties undergo in specific non-Western regions. The assumption that lies beneath the LADO tests can be summed up as follows: “a person who claims to have spent a substantial part of his life in a certain area, may be expected to command actively at least one of the languages or language varieties that are widely spoken in the region in question” (Bureau Land en Taal 2008: 169). This reasoning, which could seem commonsensical at first, has an institutional ideological effect. The IND and the BLT seem to adopt this line of thought, in fact, with the sole purpose to espouse an understanding of a speaker’s identity as something static and territorially bound. It is only with the matching of the knowledge held by the authorities about traditions and tribes’ rights, languages, and social practices – a knowledge that every asylum-seeking applicant seems to mismatch – that positive proofs of identity can be delivered. These proofs mostly appear to look at non-Western communities through a lens of heavily ideologically Westernised measurement and understanding of the relationship between language, language varieties, and society (Blommaert 2009). It is in accordance with the centring socialising fixture of which someone is either part of, or tries to gain access to, that someone’s identity is constructed as that of a ‘good’ (belonging) member or that of a ‘bad’ (estranged) member. This is done on the basis of either how successfully, or unsuccessfully, someone manages to embrace the complexity of the language indexicalities at play. In official hearings, as shown here, the evaluative discourses that work towards the ascription of identities are based on either the respect or trespass of situated language norms as these norms are thought to be indexical of the origin of the applicant and thus of his/her identity. It follows that an understanding of language as a means of identification based on the fact that both language, identities and belonging are finite matching entities, as well as an understanding of language use according to sedentary patterns of origin and belonging, both result in sharp contrast with the ‘translocal’ nature of migration and with the language repertoires that characterise asylum-seeking applicants (see Spotti 2014). Faced with the influx of foreigners seeking refuge and a better life, (Western European) nation states reinforce their national borders and set themselves the task of sustaining the national order. They do so by establishing institutional processes and means, such as LADO tests and their analysis. Despite efforts put in place to accommodate the needs of asylum seekers, ethnographic evidence as the one gathered here shows that the practices

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linked to the asylum-seeking procedure for the determination of origin still remain a battlefield where the presupposed indexicality of the applicant’s language use relies on high modern ideologies of proficiency and territorial belonging. Such an opposition has far-reaching consequences for asylum seekers’ identities, for their destiny, and for their lives.

Notes 1. The present article draws on the data collected by Joachim Detailleur, and presented in working paper format in Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacy series (WPULL) as Detailleur and Spotti (2012). 2. It should be pointed out here that the Dutch ‘tandem method’, with which LADO is performed by native speakers who lack a linguistic academic background and who have been selected, trained, and are monitored in their language analyses by an academically schooled linguist employed by BLT, is not the only method currently available with which LADO is applied. The Swiss immigration authorities, in their effort to develop a reliable working method to assess the origin of asylum seekers, have conducted and evaluated a number of trial projects in the late 1990s, among which the ‘tandem method’ currently applied in the Netherlands. The Swiss eventually embraced an approach with which they conduct LADO to date, which has become known as the ‘Direct Analysis’ method: an independent and academically trained linguist, with an expertise in the language varieties in question, conducts a recorded telephone interview with the asylum seeker, following which the linguist assesses the origin of the asylum seeker based on the latter’s provided country of origin information and language use in the interview. The ‘tandem method’ was ultimately rejected by the Swiss, on the basis of two findings: (1) ‘The increasingly diverse and complex linguistic areas’ and ‘the more complex biographical backgrounds of the subjects’ compelled the Swiss Immigration authorities ‘to find people who did not only speak the languages concerned and were familiar with the regions in question, they also had to be able to deal with questions of dialectology, language interference, multilingualism, sociolinguistics, language acquisition or language identification . . .’ (2) The immigration officers conducting the language analysis interview lacked the necessary experience and expertise to steer the interview and to gather enough information adequate for LADO. In addition, the use of interpreters for most language analysis interviews was deemed a disadvantage. For more information on the Swiss ‘Direct Analysis’ method, see Baltisberger and Hubbuch (2010). 3. The analysis and transcription of the recording of this particular language analysis interview have been performed by Joachim Detailleur within the framework of his MA thesis in Arabic Language at Leiden University (2010). In order not to be (dis)advantaged vis-à-vis the language analyst of Bureau Land en Taal in this case and in conformity with the standard procedure as implemented by Bureau Land en Taal, Joachim Detailleur confined himself in his reviewing analysis by using only the recorded language analysis interview and the language analysis report. Subsequently, in their analysis of this case, both Detailleur and the language analyst did not have access to any information/details about the asylum seeker’s journey to the Netherlands, length of stay, and the reasons for his asylum request. 4. Of the 1,020 participants to the language survey, conducted from January until May 2008, a staggering 83.2 per cent of respondents identifying themselves as multilingual had settled themselves in Kaduqli no more than 15 years before the survey was taken (Manfredi 2013).

276 Massimiliano Spotti

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INDEX

acculturation strategies 261 Agha, A. 25, 27, 32, 42, 64, 156–158, 171–172, 182, 191, 214, 216, 263, 276 algorithm 11–12 analysis: conversation 73, 92, 259; discourse 34–35, 44, 66, 92; ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis see ELLA; historicising sociolinguistic 198; language 7, 262, 264–266, 268–269, 272–273, 275–278; linguistic 24; security 9; semiotic 117 applied linguistics 8, 15, 25, 40, 42, 47–48, 88, 91, 172, 217, 236, 259–260, 262 Arabic 33, 74, 78, 82, 139–140, 203, 210, 262, 265–273, 275, 277; language 266, 268, 272–273, 275; Kaduqli Arabic 267, 273, 275; Khartoum Arabic 268, 271–273, 277–278 Arnaut, K. 1–2, 4–6, 8–14, 16, 33, 39, 41–42, 49–50, 52–56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68–70, 72, 87, 121, 126, 130, 220, 222, 236, 262, 276–277 ascription of identities 274 asylum 7, 46, 78, 86, 240, 248, 257, 259, 261–262, 264–278; seeker 248, 265–270, 273–275, 277; seeking 262, 264, 274–275, 278

authenticity 42, 48, 84, 87, 217–218, 221–225, 228, 230–236; global spread of 232, 235; ideology of 218; semiotisation of 224 awareness 5, 21, 32, 53, 107, 267 Bakhtin, M. 6, 11, 24, 26, 29–30, 41–42, 52, 63, 65–66, 68, 70, 107–108, 158, 177, 182, 191 Bauman, Z. 3, 10, 12, 14, 24, 43, 51–52, 56, 60, 62, 66, 116, 128 biographical durability 38 Blackledge, A. 13, 29, 31, 39, 41, 43–44, 63, 68, 73, 87, 155–156, 158, 160, 162, 164, 166, 168, 170, 172–173 Blommaert, J. 1, 5–10, 13–14, 16, 21–22, 24–26, 28, 30–36, 38, 40–44, 46–48, 51, 53–54, 63–64, 66, 72, 76, 78, 80, 85, 87, 91, 104, 106, 108, 117, 121, 126, 128, 143–146, 153, 171–172, 174–175, 177–178, 189–192, 197–200, 202–204, 206, 208, 210, 212–217, 220–222, 224, 232, 234–235, 240, 250, 257, 262–263, 265, 274, 276–277 Bourdieu, P. 6, 24, 42–43, 107–108, 111, 129, 169, 172, 176–177, 184, 189–191, 211, 239–242, 245, 255, 257

280

Index

buffalaxing 110–113, 117–118, 127–128; buffalaxed videos 80, 86, 110–120, 126–127; deliberate mishearing 111; homophony 80, 111, 117; mondegreen technique 111, 117, 128; soramimi technique 111, 128 burden: contextual 247–248; equivalence 249–250 call and Internet shops 209 categorisation, 5–6, 34, 143, 147, 152–153, 175–176, 192, 245, 262 category 7, 9–12, 22, 34, 56–57, 63–65, 69, 72, 74, 79–80, 82–83, 85, 92–93, 106, 144, 147, 155–158, 160, 163, 165, 167, 171, 176, 205, 209, 235, 242–243, 249–250, 258, 260, 262, 266 change: cultural 204; in demography 155, 210, 213; in diaspora 23; geopolitical 53, 71; global 2, 210, 215; infrastructural 207, 208, 213; polylingual 76; social 3, 21, 23, 69, 88, 174, 176, 190, 197–198, 204, 241; in superdiversity 6 China 1, 3–4, 22, 71, 80–83, 88, 130, 174–177, 179–185, 187–193, 217–223, 225, 230, 234–236 code 11, 27, 30, 54, 73–74, 99, 121, 144, 150, 224; coded structures 12; codeswitching 28, 46, 48, 54, 73–74, 76, 78, 87, 129, 144, 149–150, 153–154, 259 coercion 10, 220 communication technologies 2–3, 10, 16, 208; technologically mediated communication 27, 31–32 competency 51, 169, 239, 242–243, 245, 247, 249–250, 259–260; framework 239, 241, 243, 245 complex 5, 7, 13, 22, 33–34, 49–53, 55–56, 65, 75, 77, 111–113, 123, 126, 128, 144, 150, 170, 176–178, 200, 205–206, 210, 212, 214–215, 219, 221–222, 229, 233, 240, 250, 275 complexity 2–3, 7, 9, 16, 43, 45, 49, 51, 57–58, 62, 66, 69, 73, 89, 91, 106, 108, 121, 126, 171, 195, 198, 206, 213,

216, 231, 242, 262, 274; global 3, 16; sociolinguistics of 198 consonant 100–101, 125, 272 context 13, 21, 27, 29, 32–33, 44, 48, 54, 61, 69, 86, 95, 111, 114–115, 117, 119, 126, 146, 148, 155, 180, 193, 216, 219, 221, 232, 236 control 9–11, 14, 28, 41, 56–57, 62, 66–67, 72, 97, 166–167, 175–176, 189, 199, 219–220, 223, 258 convention dependent indexical iconicity 263 convergence see media conviviality 6, 35, 44, 48, 216 cosmopolitans 82 creativity 11, 29–31, 51, 63, 72–73, 84–85, 218–225, 230, 232–233 Creese, A. 13, 16, 29, 39, 41, 44, 63, 68, 73, 87, 155–156, 158, 160, 162, 164, 166, 168, 170, 172–173 cross-border languages see language crossing 10, 29, 42, 47, 63–64, 69, 72–73, 80, 88, 148, 154, 172 crossover speech 72–73 cultural taste 94 de-globalisation 224 determination of origin 262–264, 274–275 development 59 dialect 7, 36, 44, 46, 48, 81, 91, 93, 108, 142–144, 147, 149–150, 152, 173, 179–181, 183, 191, 222, 224, 230, 234, 236, 273; rural 273; of the supervernacular 224, 230, 234; urban 46, 273 diaspora 2, 13–14, 22–23, 31, 44, 63, 67, 80, 93, 105–106 digital: surveillance 9–12; technologies 10, 31 dimensions of language norms 7, 14, 33, 93, 104, 117 discourse 4–6, 12, 14, 24–25, 27, 31, 34–38, 42–46, 48–49, 52–53, 56–59, 65–68, 72, 77, 80, 87, 91–92, 97–99, 108, 110–112, 116–117, 123, 126, 129–130, 153, 155–156, 158, 163, 171–173, 175–176, 180–181, 186,

Index 281

189–192, 216–217, 232, 234–235, 238, 240, 242–246, 249–251, 255–260, 263–264, 267–268, 274, 276, 278; development 59; diversity 52, 57–58, 242, 255, 278; evaluative 163, 274; ingroup 186, 189; metapragmatic 156, 158, 163, 171, 173, 181 discursive regimes 238–240, 245–248, 255 disparagement culture see humour disparaging see humour divergence see media diversity 3–6, 8–9, 13–15, 17, 21, 26, 28–30, 37–38, 40, 44, 47–59, 61–67, 69, 72, 75–76, 78, 85, 87–88, 91, 108, 112, 116–117, 126, 128, 130, 171–173, 190, 193, 203, 216, 219, 222, 224, 233, 236–238, 242, 255, 257, 260–262, 276–278; discourse 52, 57–58, 242, 255, 278 Dong, J. 7, 14, 81–83, 85, 174, 176–180, 182, 184, 186, 188, 190–192 early warning indicator 210 ecumenical places 213 elite migrant 174–175, 181, 247 ELLA 76, 197–201, 203, 205–207, 209, 211, 213–215, 217 Elo, A. 80, 84, 110, 112, 114–116, 118, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128–130, 219 emblematic 26, 39, 103, 106, 156, 176–177, 202, 208, 222, 226, 231, 263 emigration 2, 183–184, 186, 190, 193 entextualisation 32, 117, 121 epistemology 6, 17 ethnic 2, 8, 13, 15, 17, 21, 29–30, 33–34, 39–40, 43, 48, 55, 61, 63, 69, 72, 75, 77–78, 82, 84–85, 87–88, 91, 93, 95, 104, 107–108, 112, 115–116, 120, 123, 125, 127, 129–130, 148, 158, 169, 171, 173, 193, 202–203, 206, 215, 235–236, 240–241, 244, 252, 259, 265–268, 271, 273; categorisation 34 ethnicity 14–15, 22, 29, 33, 35–36, 40, 45–47, 57, 61, 69, 73, 79–80, 88, 95, 120, 129, 139, 154, 156, 167, 171–172, 175, 236, 240, 258–260, 265

Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis see ELLA ethnography 3, 6–8, 12–13, 15–16, 21, 34–36, 41–43, 45, 47, 66–67, 72–73, 78, 87, 91, 174, 192–193, 216–217, 235–236 ethno-linguistic essentialism 75 evaluation 27, 42, 81, 92, 102, 104, 156–158, 162–164, 169–171, 180, 183, 188, 217, 241, 244–245, 248–249, 252, 259, 263 Fabian, J. 13–14, 29, 44, 49, 53, 63–64, 67 face 1, 14, 21, 27, 81, 87–88, 95, 97, 226, 261 flexible and dynamic infrastructure 206 fluid 36, 61, 145 foreign work experience 237, 239, 241, 245–246, 254 forensic field 265 Foucault, M. 6, 11, 24, 56, 60–61, 67–68, 239 fragmentation 1, 16, 50, 54, 58, 69 function 13, 31, 54, 87, 105, 116, 119–120, 123, 143, 157, 170, 173, 177, 190, 199–200, 210, 225, 230 Fur 267 gatekeeping 79, 237, 240–241, 258–260, 262–263 gender 11, 13, 33, 43, 48, 57, 108, 115, 130, 171, 267 Ghulfan people 268, 270–271 global flow 52, 220, 222, 225, 230, 233 globalisation 1–2, 9, 13, 15, 21, 51, 54, 66, 71–72, 105, 175, 177, 191, 215, 218, 220–222, 224, 237, 241, 257, 259 governmentality 14, 16, 25, 49, 52, 56–57, 59–60, 66, 69, 72 Gumperz, J. 6–7, 16, 24, 27, 29, 45, 64, 67, 73–74, 76–78, 87–88, 91, 107–108, 144, 146, 153, 177, 192, 240–242, 248–249, 252–253, 258 Häkkinen, A. see Elo, A. Hall, S. 6, 13, 15, 24, 27, 32, 43, 45, 53, 61, 65–67

282

Index

hearability 32 heterogeneity 65, 112, 126, 219; ethnic 267 heteroglossia 5, 29–30, 39–40, 46–47, 65, 75, 88, 108, 129, 153, 172–173, 219 heteronormative see racism hip-hop 33, 39, 42, 66, 83–84, 86, 218, 220–226, 228–236; Chinese 86, 220, 223, 228, 231–232; culture 218, 221, 230–231 historicity 38, 200, 214; coinciding historicities 200, 214 homeland 31, 266, 271 humour 31, 80, 115–116, 119, 124–130, 158; disparagement culture 110; disparaging 115–116, 121, 126–127; multicultural 116; nationalistic 115; parody 26, 111, 117 hybridity 5, 105, 231, 236, 245, 263 Hymes, D. 5–7, 13, 15–16, 24–25, 27, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40–41, 45, 49–53, 56, 66, 68, 73, 87, 177, 180, 192, 220, 235 identification: of 29, 34, 156, 272; with 76, 200 identity 2–3, 10–14, 17, 29, 31, 34, 36, 44–48, 55, 58–59, 61–63, 65–67, 69, 73, 76–78, 80–81, 83–84, 87–88, 106, 112, 115–116, 121, 128–130, 153–155, 158–159, 161, 167–169, 171–172, 176, 178–179, 181–183, 186, 188–189, 191, 193, 211, 214, 218–219, 223–226, 233–236, 241, 243, 257–259, 261–264, 273–275, 277–278 ideology 21, 24, 27, 34–37, 44–46, 48, 72–73, 75, 86–88, 92, 99, 106, 114, 142, 153, 191, 218–219, 222, 232, 239, 242–243, 258, 262–264, 275–276, 278; language 48, 75, 88, 153, 258, 262; of proficiency 275 image: of decline 207; distributional image of the population 214 immigration 1, 7, 14, 25, 48, 69, 78–79, 183, 206, 258, 261–262, 264–265, 269, 275 impression management 86, 257 IND 262, 264–270, 274, 277

indexicality 27–28, 30, 65–66, 88, 103, 144, 178, 214, 225, 228, 231, 233, 262–264, 274–275; order of 65–66, 178, 214, 228, 233 indexical value 105; of language 263 inequality 7, 9, 15, 21, 29, 38, 45, 59, 72, 175, 192, 205, 213, 235, 237, 239–241, 243, 245, 247, 249, 251, 253, 255, 257, 259 integrated speech 75, 140 interaction 7, 10, 12, 14, 16, 21, 32–33, 35–38, 44–47, 49, 52, 54, 58–60, 63–65, 69, 73, 77, 81, 86–88, 91–92, 95, 107–108, 112, 115, 126–127, 138, 152, 154–155, 157–158, 161–164, 169–170, 178, 199, 212–213, 221, 234, 240, 252, 258–259 interactional 28, 33, 37, 84, 92–93, 105, 159, 177, 246, 248–249, 255 Internet 23, 31, 40, 42, 46, 48, 55, 60–61, 67–68, 71, 83, 88, 110, 112, 114, 129–130, 161, 163, 165, 185, 209, 218–225, 227–231, 233–236; in China 221, 235–236 interpretations: remedialising 105; romanticising 105 intersection 54, 58, 69, 103, 128 intersectionality 13–14, 126 interview: job 79, 237–239, 241–245, 247, 249–251, 253, 255, 257–259; language analysis 265, 266, 269, 272–273, 275–276 Jørgensen, J.N. 29, 41, 46–47, 63, 73–75, 86, 137–138, 140, 142–144, 146–148, 150, 152–154, 156, 172 Karrebæk, M.S. 8, 12, 41, 137, 154, 236, 277 knowledge 23, 27–29, 31, 34, 41, 60, 65, 67, 72, 79, 81–82, 91, 111, 144, 163, 168, 184–185, 190, 239–240, 243, 246, 248–249, 253, 257, 266, 270, 273–274 LADO 262, 264–266, 268–269, 274–277 language: accommodation 269, 273; analysis 7, 262, 264–266, 268–269,

Index 283

272–273, 275–278l ; Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin see LADO; (analysis) test 264; Language Bureau 264; cross-border 265–266, 268; ideology 48, 75, 88, 153, 258, 262; languagers 137, 145; learning 39–40, 48, 94, 152, 192; norms 151, 274, see norm; proficiency 79, 147, 267; (small-scale) survey, 266–267; testing 43, 45, 152, 256, 259, 277; use 26, 31, 41, 45–46, 53, 81, 84, 88, 112, 126, 129, 137, 142–143, 145, 148–149, 151, 154, 156, 169, 192, 200, 220, 234, 263–264, 272–275; varieties 23, 41, 77, 174, 178, 179, 190, 266, 269, 272,–275 layer 54, 76, 116, 171, 204–205, 208, 213, 219, 228 Leppänen, S. 28–29, 38, 40–41, 46, 55, 68, 80, 84, 110–118, 120–122, 124, 126, 128–130, 219, 222, 235 linguistic: anthropology 5, 7, 13, 16–17, 21, 31, 35, 42, 45, 47–48, 67, 70, 117, 172–173, 278; behaviour 137, 149–150, 157, 167, 169, 263; capital 237–238, 240, 245–247; ethnography 7–8, 12–13, 16, 21, 35, 41–42, 47, 72, 78, 236; features 25, 29, 137, 142–144, 146, 149–151, 175; penalty 238–239, 241, 243, 249, 255, 259; repertoire 26, 44, 156, 175, 180, 182, 184, 186 linguistics 5–6, 8, 15–16, 25–28, 32, 34, 36, 40, 42–48, 54, 62, 88, 91, 105–106, 172, 192, 217, 235–236, 259–260, 262, 265–266, 276–277; applied linguistics 8, 15, 25, 40, 42, 47–48, 88, 91, 172, 217, 236, 259–260, 262 liquid modernity 3, 14, 66 literacy 7–8, 15–16, 39–40, 43–44, 46–48, 78, 87–88, 108, 153, 155, 172, 191, 198, 216, 234–236, 275–277 local dynamics 215 localisation 119, 221, 232, 235 lower-class 82–83, 100, 104–105 low-key civility 6 Madsen, L.M. 13, 29, 41, 46, 66, 137, 139–140, 145, 154

Maly, I. 1–4, 15, 76, 197–198, 200, 202, 204, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214–217 meaning-making 32, 111–112, 181, 223–224 media 12, 23, 29–32, 37–38, 42, 45–46, 48, 54, 60–61, 66–67, 83, 94, 110–114, 116–117, 120, 126, 128–129, 149, 153, 158, 161, 163, 176, 235–236; blip culture 114; consumption 60, 113–114, 176–177; convergence 113–114, 129; divergence 8, 113–114; prosumption 113–114, 117, 121 metacommentary 155–157, 162, 164, 168–170, 173 metanarratives see racism metapragmatic: discourse 156, 158, 163, 171, 173, 181; evaluation 157–158, 162–164, 169–170; reflexivity 31, 33; stereotype 155–159, 161, 163, 165, 167, 169–171, 173 methodological nationalism 13, 17, 78, 108 methodology 276 middle-class 16, 82, 176–178, 190, 204, 207, 211, 215 migration 1–2, 9, 16–17, 21–23, 43–44, 47, 53, 63, 68–70, 75, 93, 104–106, 108, 112, 145, 155, 172 –175, 183, 191–193, 201–202, 204–205, 213, 219, 236–237, 247, 257–262, 274, 277–278; studies 175, 261 mixing 16, 23–24, 32, 46, 75, 85, 98, 129–130 mobility 1, 9, 24, 32, 37, 49–50, 52, 60–62, 69, 82, 100, 112, 126, 174–177, 180, 183–184, 186, 189–190, 192, 211–214, 217, 221–222, 235–237; upward 211 Møller, J.S. 41, 137, 144, 154, 156, 172 mother tongue 26, 75, 78, 146–147, 192, 265, 270–271 movement 10–11, 27, 36–37, 41–42, 51, 55, 66, 71, 74–75, 83, 104, 134, 142, 148, 185, 191, 219–221 multicultural 5, 66, 116, 213–214, 216, 277 multiculturalism 13, 48–49, 52–53, 55–56, 61, 63–64, 69, 130, 193, 236, 278

284

Index

multiculturalist 53 multilingualism 13, 26, 29, 33, 39, 43, 46–47, 53, 61, 63, 68, 88, 108, 150–151, 153, 172, 197–199, 210, 216–217, 235, 237, 258, 275, 277–278 multimodality 27–28, 46, 86, 129; multimodal meaning 27, 80, 228; multimodal textualities 31 multiplicity 39, 50, 54–56, 58, 112 multi-scalar 32–33, 35–36, 190, 219, 232–233 mutually figured worlds 252 Nafir 267 narrative 3, 15, 43, 45, 98–101, 103–104, 107, 122–124, 164, 192, 220, 235, 243–247, 249–252, 255, 257–259, 277 native speaker 26, 46, 91, 143, 147, 153, 268 negotiation 28–29, 159, 168, 181, 238, 247, 252 new capitalism 241–243, 258 norm 30, 37, 40, 43, 79, 85, 127, 139, 148–152, 170, 200, 218–219, 221, 223–224, 230–232, 242, 274; dimensions of language norms 7, 14, 33, 93, 104, 117; the bilingualism norm 150; the monolingualism norm 149–151; the polylanguaging norm 150 normativity 11, 21, 37, 42, 58–60, 63, 73, 112, 126, 142, 151, 218–223, 225, 229–233; from below 220 Nuba 266–271, 273, 276–278; SudaneseNuba refugees 266 offline 178, 219, 225, 232, 262 online 8, 12, 14, 28, 43, 88, 114, 126, 129–130, 163, 178–180, 184–186, 191, 208, 218–225, 228–230, 232–236, 278 origin: determination of origin 262–264, 274–275; topographic origin 264 Panjabi/Punjabi 93–101, 103–104, 106–108; heritage 155, 159, 170 Parkin, D. 26, 38–39, 41, 47, 53, 69, 71–72, 74–78, 80, 82, 84–86, 88, 121, 126, 130 parody see humour

participatory culture 129 performance 32, 43, 92, 98–99, 103, 106, 111, 128, 168, 182, 187, 216, 218, 234, 253, 258, 260 policy 4–7, 14–15, 24–25, 34, 40, 43, 46, 53–54, 57, 67, 79, 183, 192–193, 219, 235–236, 243, 248–249, 254, 258–259, 261, 266–267, 277–278 polycentricity 39, 60, 66, 112, 126, 219, 231, 236 polyethnic 38, 47 polylanguaging, 73, 77–79, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149–151, 153 postcolonial 49–51, 53, 55–56, 63, 65, 67 post-panoptical 49, 52, 56, 60–62 post-panoptic governmentality 72 pronunciation 81–83, 94, 138–139, 147, 152, 263, 271–272 public culture 11, 68, 72 Rabot (the Rabot neighbourhood) 198, 200–202, 207 racism 47, 99, 101–102, 104, 115–116, 126, 130, 259; heteronormative 110, 125; liquid 115–116, 126, 130; orientalising 111–112, 123, 127; othering 121, 125, 127, 255 Rampton, B. 1, 6–7, 9–11, 13–14, 16, 21–22, 24–26, 28–30, 32, 34, 36, 38–42, 44–48, 52, 54, 63, 66, 69, 72–74, 80, 82, 87–88, 91–92, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104, 106–108, 121, 126, 128, 139, 148, 150–151, 153–154, 158, 160–161, 168–169, 171–172, 220, 222, 236, 262, 276 refugee 7, 78, 266, 277 register 25–27, 30, 38, 63, 65, 76, 82, 86, 143–144, 152, 156–158, 163, 172, 178, 180, 189–190, 250, 263 reinterpretation 117; recontextualisation 31–32, 113, 260; resemiotisation 110–111, 113, 117–118, 121, 126 repertoire 11, 26, 29, 34, 43–44, 64, 73, 82, 84–87, 107, 144, 153, 156–157, 159, 173, 175, 180, 182, 184, 186, 190, 219, 229, 236, 274, 277; of mobility 175, 180

Index 285

resource 7, 21, 23, 27–29, 33, 37–38, 51, 55–56, 59, 72–74, 76–77, 82, 84–86, 93–94, 99, 105, 107, 112–113, 115, 117, 126, 129, 139, 141–145, 150–151, 156, 158, 161, 163, 167–170, 174–175, 177–178, 180, 183, 185–187, 189–190, 199, 214, 218, 220–222, 224, 228–229, 231, 233, 236, 240–241, 243, 248, 253–255, 259, 262, 277 restratification 174, 176, 180; social 176; symbolic 174 Roberts, C. 13, 16, 29, 47, 79, 86, 237–238, 240–248, 250, 252, 254, 256–260 scalarity 56 scale 6, 11, 13, 23, 32–33, 37, 44, 47, 54–55, 68–69, 76, 79, 105, 125, 158, 186, 190–191, 198, 201, 203, 207, 215, 217, 219–222, 224, 230–232, 235–236, 264, 266–267; scale-level 33, 186, 190, 198, 220, 231 second language 30, 47, 74, 92, 108, 203, 257, 265; acquisition 92 semiotic: landscape 207; resources 27, 76–77, 84–86, 105, 112–113, 117, 126, 144, 174–175, 177, 180, 189, 214, 220, 224, 228; semiotics 28, 86, 223, 225–226, 233 sexual other 120, 127 Sheng 82 Silverstein, M. 6–7, 16, 24–25, 32, 36, 46, 48, 64, 91, 108, 117, 130, 157, 163, 167, 171, 173, 182, 192, 262–263, 278 simultaneity 54–56, 68, 70 social: category 9, 64, 72, 82, 85, 156; class 30, 33, 47, 57, 73, 81, 105, 108, 163–164, 170–172, 174–177, 179, 240, 263; classification 10, 92, 174, 176, 180; distinction 175, 182; meaning 38, 87, 103, 264; media 12, 32, 48, 110, 112–114, 117, 126, 129; stratification 82, 94, 176, 192 sociolinguistic regimes 198 sociolinguistics 1, 5–6, 9–12, 16, 21, 25, 31, 35–36, 43–47, 49, 52–53, 55, 59, 62–67, 70, 73, 76, 87, 92, 117, 128,

130, 137, 143–144, 149, 153–154, 172, 191, 197–198, 216–217, 234–236, 257, 275, 277 Southall 75, 88, 93, 97 speech community 25, 41, 43, 47, 91, 143, 193 Spotti, M. 1, 8–9, 12–14, 41, 43, 74, 78, 87–88, 217, 236, 261–264, 266, 268, 270, 272, 274–278 standardisation 39, 46, 65, 237, 241–242, 255 stratification 9, 33, 38, 82, 94, 103, 174–176, 180, 190, 192 stratigraphy 214 style 22, 25–30, 33, 38–39, 44–45, 47, 61, 64–66, 73, 79, 82–86, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103–105, 107–108, 120, 145, 150, 153–154, 172, 180–181, 211, 222, 232, 240, 247–249, 252, 255, 257, 260, 263; style shifting 95, 101, 103, 107 styling 45, 63–64, 66, 88, 98–99, 108, 172 stylisation 32, 40, 47, 77, 82, 86, 99, 104, 148, 158, 161, 165, 171 subcultural 219, 223–224, 233 subculture 66, 220, 222, 233 subject 10, 12, 14, 16, 55–56, 61, 68, 72, 74, 108, 110–111, 113, 127, 130, 168, 170–171, 175, 178, 213, 251, 263, 275 subjectification 11, 56, 62 subjectivity 10, 16, 55–56 sub-Saharan Africa 60, 261 Sudan 267, 276–277 super-community 224 superdiverse environments 206 superdiversity 1–3, 5–14, 16, 21–25, 27, 29–31, 33–39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 52–54, 56, 58, 62–66, 71–76, 80–82, 85–88, 91–92, 103–106, 108, 110–113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125–130, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 171–172, 175, 190, 208–209, 215–216, 218–221, 223, 225, 227, 229, 231, 233–235, 262, 276–278; fibre of 215 super-vernacular 221, 224, 228–233; dialect of 224, 230, 234 Swahili 82, 265

286

Index

syllable 98, 107, 109, 272 synchronic arena 215 technology 2–3, 10, 16, 23–24, 31, 39, 44, 114, 130, 208, 221, 236 text 29, 32–33, 42, 65, 86, 129, 220 third language 265 totalitarianism 10 total linguistic fact 36, 91–92, 106 tradition 7, 27, 40, 50, 92, 114, 125, 147, 175, 177, 231, 261, 274, 277 translanguaging 11, 29, 44, 63, 73, 87 translocal 23, 46, 58, 66, 110, 112–113, 117, 126, 129, 219, 221–222, 225, 234, 274 translocality 3, 13, 15, 117 transnationalism 15–16, 49, 52–53, 61, 64, 69, 108, 171, 175, 262 transposition 32 tribal language 266–267, 271–273 typification, 42, 101, 103, 105, 157–158, 162–164, 167–170 units 5, 31, 50, 53, 56, 63, 146 unpredictability 53, 64–65, 92, 121, 126, 171 upgrading 207, 210–211, 215 upscaling process 175 uptake 28, 33, 199, 222 urban 8, 13, 15–16, 32–33, 38–39, 43–44, 46–48, 54, 60–61, 66, 69, 73–77, 79, 84, 86–88, 106, 108, 112, 117, 130, 139, 150, 153–155, 172, 174–183, 185, 187, 189–193, 197, 200, 215–216, 226,

234–235, 261, 273, 275–277; spaces 16, 38, 69, 172, 215 validity of language testing 264–266, 268 variationist sociolinguistics 92 Varis, P. 9, 16, 31–32, 35, 43, 48, 73, 83–85, 87–88, 112, 130, 177, 189, 191, 218–222, 224, 226, 228, 230, 232, 234, 236 vernacular English 101, 103, 158 vernacular globalisation 215 vernacularisation 215 Vertovec, S. 1–3, 5–6, 8, 16–17, 21–22, 35, 41, 48, 53–54, 57, 59, 69, 71, 88, 106, 108, 112, 130, 171, 173, 175, 193, 218–219, 236, 242, 260, 262, 278 visual design 31–32, 46, 217 voice 15, 22, 26, 31–32, 45, 81–83, 85, 98, 101–102, 115, 119, 127, 153, 157–165, 170–172, 174–175, 177–178, 181–182, 185–190, 192, 235–236, 276 vowel 95, 97, 100–101, 272 Wang, X. 9, 33, 48, 83–85, 88, 112, 130, 197, 217–218, 220, 222, 224, 226, 228, 230, 232–234, 236 wine talk 263, 278 working class 130, 175–176 YouTube, 80 110–111, 113–131, 134–135, 230 Zaghawa 267