Market Lingos and Metrolingua Francas

© , Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Drawing on data recorded in two city markets, this article analyzes the language practices of workers and customers as they go about their daily business, with a particular focus on the ways in which linguistic resources, everyday tasks, and social spaces are intertwined in producing metrolingua francas. The aim of the article is to come to a better understanding of the relationships among the use of diverse linguistic resources (drawn from different languages, varieties, and registers), the repertoires of the workers, the activities in which they are engaged, and the larger space in which this occurs. Developing the idea of spatial repertoires as the linguistic resources available in particular places, we explore the ways in which metrolingua francas (metrolingual multilingua francas) emerge from the spatial resources of such markets

Lingoing and everyday metrolingual metalanguage

While the ways in which people talk about their everyday language use suggest that they live in a languagised world (a world in which language labels and enumerations are the common stuff of everyday language talk), their understanding of what those language labels mean may be both diverse and flexible. It is important not to make top-down assumptions about the meanings behind language labels. In this paper we are interested in the metrolingual metalanguage people use to describe everyday language use. This is not a question of a disjuncture between a delanguagised realm of academic analysis (such as the recent move towards translingual terminology) and a languagised realm of everyday metalanguage (where languages are named and labelled along normative lines), but rather a call to make visible what lies beneath such everyday terms and linguistic labels. Through an analysis of various discussions of everyday language use, we argue that although people often appear to talk in terms of fixed languages, such accounts are often flexible, negotiable and contestable. This is not therefore best understood in terms of a polarity between fixity and fluidity but rather as a flexible array of entangled language ideologies

Multilingual Repertoire Management and Illocutionary Functions in Yiddish Signage in Manchester

Drawing on a corpus of annotated images that capture the linguistic landscape of a residential neighbourhood in Greater Manchester (UK) with a large Hasidic-Haredi (so-called ‘ultra-Orthodox’) Jewish population, we show how choices within a multilingual repertoire are both indicative and constitutive of different communicative acts and illocutions. Written Yiddish is embedded into an established tradition of literacy where creativity is accompanied by authoritative citations from Hebrew scripture. We discuss the use of Yiddish in affective, appellative, mobilising, regulatory and prohibitive actions. Semi-public use of written Yiddish is directed at participants who share a repertoire of closely intertwined social, religious and linguistic practices. Unlike many other lesser-used languages, the use of Yiddish in Haredi communities is not restricted to indexical identity flagging or commodification purposes. We show how in this multilingual setting, the indexical ordering of languages on written artefacts does not represent a hierarchy of absolute valorisation but rather a complementarity of functions that draws on simultaneous activation of several repertoire components

Mundane metrolingualism

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Drawing on data from a Bangladeshi-run mixed-goods store in Tokyo–a site of diversity in terms of customers, the products and interactions–we argue in this paper that in order to understand translinguistic ordinariness, or what we call mundane metrolingualism, we have to explore both the ideas of ordinariness and of diversity in greater depth. Ordinariness, or the cluster of other terms that have been similarly used (everyday, unremarkable, mundane, from below) has been employed to address four principal concerns: Difference–social, cultural, sexual, economic, racial–rather than commonality is the core experience of human life; diversity is not exotic or something that others have, but key to all experience; diversity has temporal dimensions as part of repeated everyday practice; and difference as everyday practice is part of the non-elite world of struggle for recognition. Focusing on two particular spatiotemporal themes, everydayness and simultaneity, we examine the ways in which different activities, conversations and artefacts may be brought together through mobile technologies. These mundane metrolingual assemblages are both central to the activities of the shop but also part of simultaneous worlds of engagement and activity

Making scents of the landscape

Moving away from logocentric studies of the linguistic landscape, this paper explores the relations between linguascapes and smellscapes. Often regarded as the least important of our senses, smell is an important means by which we relate to place. Based on an olfactory ethnography of a multicultural suburb in Sydney, we show how the intersection of people, objects, activities and senses make up the spatial repertoire of a place. We thus take a broad view of the semiotic landscape, including more than the visual and the intentional, and suggest that we are interpellated by smells as part of a broader relation to space and place. Understanding the semiotics of the urban smellscape in associational terms, we therefore argue not merely that smell has generally been overlooked in semiotic landscapes, nor that this can be rectified by an expanded inventory of sensory signs, but rather that the interpellative and associational roles of smells invite us towards an alternative semiotics of time and place

Metrolingual practices and distributed identities: people, places, things and languages

Drawing on various distributive frameworks – distributed cognition, distributed agency, distributed language – this paper makes a case for understanding identity along similar lines. While poststructuralist approaches to identity usefully undermined monological cognitive approaches to identity (where identity is a characteristic of the individual) – emphasizing instead the discursive construction of subjectivity as multiple, conflictual and flexible – many failed by and large to escape the constrictions of methodological individualism, or to account adequately for non-discursive factors, the place of agency or the material world. Distributive frameworks, by contrast, seek to break down the barriers between inside and outside, between humans and their surrounds, between language and context. From this point of view, language, cognition and agency are not solely properties of individuals bur rather operate through larger networks, assemblages or entanglements. In this paper we draw on recent data from our ten-year metrolingualism project to explore ways in which identity may be understood as a relational quality of an assemblage of people, places, things and linguistic resources

Metrolingual multitasking and spatial repertoires: 'Pizza mo two minutes coming'

Drawing on data from two restaurants in Sydney and Tokyo, this paper describes the ways in which linguistic resources, everyday tasks and social space are intertwined in terms of metrolingual multitasking. Rather than the demolinguistic enumeration of mappable multilingualism or the language-to-language or language-to-person focus of translingualism, metrolingualism focuses on everyday language practices and their relations to urban space. In order to capture the dynamism of the urban linguistic landscape, this paper explores this relationship between metrolingual multitasking - the ways in which linguistic resources, activities and urban space are bound together - and spatial repertoires - the linguistic resources available in a particular place - arguing that a focus on resources, repertoires, space, place and activity helps us understand how multilingualism from below operates in complex urban places. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

The translingual advantage: Metrolingual student repertoires

© 2018 Taylor & Francis. This paper looks at the metrolingual practices of students in two tertiary institutions in Tokyo and Sydney. The argument here is that a focus only on the medium of instruction, or translingual educational practices, may overlook the diverse semiotic resources students bring to their educational experiences. When it comes to study itself, students’ multilingual worlds confer not so much a ‘bilingual advantage’ as this has been narrowly defined from a more cognitive perspective, but rather a ‘translingual advantage’ that makes it possible to draw on a range of resources to construct meaning and develop learning

Cities, conviviality and double-edged language play

Abstract: In this paper we examine different ways in which seemingly joking encounters reconfirm, reinforce and reinscribe participants into particular lines of difference through language play. Our focus here is not only on interactive joking behavior in the workplace but also on the ways in which fellow workers are described, on the significant work that casually humorous language does in making and unmaking boundaries. Metrolingual conviviality, as people engage in everyday multilingual practices, and both celebrate and challenge the diverse environments in which they live and work, is often double-edged. The interaction between fixity (pre-given fixed ascriptions of linguistic and cultural identities and practices) and fluidity (creative linguistic and cultural forces that transgress fixity) that underpins light-hearted banter creates an urban space of doubleedged conviviality, reconfirming, reinforcing, subverting or adjusting the original fixity. Playful language works on multiple levels, both constructing solidarities (of the workplace, masculinity, or ethnicity) and creating potential fissures. This analysis of the complex roles of language play in the making of conviviality sheds light on the different cultural and linguistic tensions at play in the city