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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 698

Part of Session 119: Prefixing lingualism (Other abstracts in this session)

Metrolingualism and the city

Authors: Otsuji, Emi; Pennycook, Alastair
Submitted by: Pennycook, Alastair (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)

Looking at various contexts of multilingual life in Sydney and Tokyo, this paper makes a case for understanding such communication in terms of metrolingualism. There are several reasons for doing so:  In line with other recent moves aimed at rethinking multilingualism, we need to describe diversity not so much along the lines of a multiplicity of singular entities (languages, cultures, dialects, varieties), but rather through alternative ways of thinking about diversity. These comprise an understanding of diversity as the norm rather than the exception to be explained; diversity as a singular starting point rather than a pluralizing strategy; language as a set of multimodal resources that speakers draw on rather than fixed codes that they switch between; language ideologies as local ways of understanding language that need to be incorporated into any perspectival view of diversity; language as productive of rather than part of linguistic landscapes; and language as an activity, a practice, something we do. By making metro the modifier of –lingualism, we also draw attention centrally to the city, to the relations between language and urban space. We focus here on the city as the context for everyday multiculturalism, for the proximity of difference, for the rhythmic and spatial movement of people, for the quotidian need to get along, Questions of mobility are central, as workers, shoppers and commuters move in and around the city. Important too are niche lingua francas, the localised use of particular languages, and multilingua francas, the establishment of mixed language use as the local norm. Drawing on data from a diversity of urban sites – restaurants, markets, construction sites – in Sydney and Tokyo we look in this paper at how people manipulate linguistic resources in different city contexts and how they themselves understand their linguistic needs and repertoires.