Linguistic Choices in the Contemporary City

Postmodern Individuals in Urban Communicative Settings

Dick Smakman, Jiří Nekvapil, Kapitolina Fedorova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000555431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

Linguistic Choices in the Contemporary City focuses on how individuals navigate conversation in highly diversified contexts and provides a broad overview of state of the art research in urban sociolinguistics across the globe. Bearing in mind the impact of international travel and migration, the book accounts for the shifting contemporary studies to the workings of language choices in places where people with many different backgrounds meet and exchange ideas. It specifically addresses how people handle language use challenges in a broad range of settings to present themselves positively and meet their information and identity goals.

While a speaker's experience runs like a thread through this volume, the linguistic, cultural and situational focus is as broad as possible. It runs from the language choices of Chinese immigrants to Beijing and Finnish immigrants to Japan to the use of the local lingua franca by motor taxi drivers in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon, and how Hungarian students in their dorm rooms express views on political correctness uninhibitedly. As it turns out, language play, improvisation, humour, lies, as well as highly marked subconscious pronunciation choices, are natural parts of the discourses, and this volume provides numerous and extensive examples of these techniques. For each of the settings discussed, the perspective is taken of personalised linguistic and extra-linguistic styles in tackling communicative challenges. This way, a picture is drawn of how postmodern individuals in extremely different cultural and situational circumstances turn out to have strikingly similar human behaviours and intentions.

Linguistic Choices in the Contemporary City is of interest to all those who follow theoretical and methodological developments in this field. It will be of use for upper level students in the fields of Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, Linguistic Anthropology and related fields in which urban communicative settings are the focus.

1Introducing city people and their communicative challenges

D. Smakman, J. Nekvapil and K. Fedorova

DOI: 10.4324/9780429348037-1

1.1 Rationale behind this volume

Cities have always been an important focus in Sociolinguistics – from the study of the way people in Buenos Aires (Guitarte 1955), Tokyo (Sibata 1958) or New York (Labov 1966) speak to more recent studies into language use in Copenhagen (Holmberg 1991), Mannheim (Kallmeyer 1994), Tripoli (Pereira 2007) or South African townships (Brookes 2014). While a common interest was to highlight class-related linguistic patterns in big cities, more contemporary studies tend to focus on the language of and between individuals in places where people with many different backgrounds meet and communicate. Indeed, recent research has focussed specifically on high levels of diversity in cities nowadays and has moved away from the group approach to a more inter-individual and even intra-individual approach.

This volume addresses the theme of communication in the city in a broad way in one sense and in a very narrow way in another. The broad approach lies in the idea that communication (not language) is chosen as the theme, so that multiple communication tools are included as a focus. Although it can be qualified as sociolinguistic, and mainly focussed on language, this book takes a broader approach by acknowledging that there is no strict dividing line between the linguistic and non-linguistic, because communication might be in body movement, rituals and how objects are treated (Goodwin 2018; Pennycook 2018). Moving around the cities, people simultaneously make use of different communication channels: they look around and see street signs and advertisements in many colors and with every kind of images; they talk to strangers and text their friends on their smartphones; they listen to the noise and to the music of the city life. The specificity of the volume lies in the interest in individuals, specifically modern individuals. The idea behind the book is that interacting and co-operating individuals are increasingly less categorisable and are, in fact, in search of their own unique place in a generally diverse and often confusing societal urban structure. This leads to highly personalised styles and modes of communication. Narrow – or micro-level – approaches to such interactions within urban space make more sense than broad-scale surveys leaving individuals out of the picture. Methodologically, identities are no more conceptualised as fixed social categories useful for characterisation of linguistic details abstracted from complex semiotic behaviour. Due to the increased movement and contact of people, within the boundaries of states or transnationally, identities have become hybrid and less stable, which shifts the scholar’s attention to their dynamic production and management in talk-in-interaction.

This book aims to demonstrate a sociolinguistics of mobile semiotic resources, both in and across particular interactions taking place in multiple territories worldwide. To gain a better insight into communicative factors, this book zooms in on the individual and how they treat the communicative commodities at hand in their daily lives within specific settings, amongst which shops, trains, skating ranges, youth hangouts, etc. Rather than addressing abstract group behaviour and the correlations between linguistic/communicative and social/situational factors, this book focusses on interacting and co-operating individuals with different life trajectories in a diverse urban context, and their language choices. It asks the question why people communicate the way they do in highly diverse public-space contexts. In such contexts, the individual is confronted on a daily basis with their communicative repertoire and skills and makes choices based on changes in context: interlocutor, setting, speaker intentions, identity, emotional moves and many more. Metaphorically speaking, the individual asks themselves: ‘What do I want to achieve; amusement, money, food, a job, friendship, confrontation, love, attention, reassurance, or perhaps, identity expression?’ That same individual needs to adjust to changes in interlocutor and social setting, and the urban communicator is therefore typically a flexible and innovative forerunner in post-modern language use and management (Neustupný 2006), which is characterised by the strongly self-conscious use and management of communicative tools from the past adjusted to and mixed with more contemporary ones. This typically leads to an amalgamation of styles and genres including codes; an almost artistic mixing of all the communicatively relevant resources and strategies that are available into a personalised set of communicative habits, which rejects conventions and focuses on the interacting and co-operating social actor and their practical and symbolical needs. This everyday creativity connects to an enhanced sensitivity to the use of language, such as noting and evaluating linguistic phenomena, and, as a result, frequent metalinguistic activities evident in the communicative behaviour of the individual managing his or her language (Nekvapil and Sherman 2015). This book tries to fathom individual agency and the resultant choices in various cities across the globe and draw conclusions on how individuals in such varied places share certain behaviours and management strategies, which then may be interpreted as being the result of modern globalising tendencies – the roles they play, the social categories they assume turn by turn, their sensitivity to these roles and categories, including their self- and other-perceived position in the flow of communicative behaviours.

In line with the concept of ‘globalising sociolinguistics’(Smakman and Heinrich 2015, 2018), this book tries to give a central role to authors, places, approaches and theories that stem from outside the Anglo-western realm of sociolinguistic influence. Combined with research from within this realm, an insightful picture may be painted of the postmodern individual in the city and how they share habits and motivations with their equivalents in another urban context geographically far removed from them. It is true that in the global village of today’s world similar processes can be found all over the globe – the same way as fast food and mass market franchises. However, being diverse does not necessarily mean the same for a German city and a small Russian border town, or for an expat living in Japan and a taxi driver in Cameroon, which this volume will demonstrate. Changing focus helps to refrain from generalisations and preconceptions based on one’s own experiences and expectations, and to find better ways to deal with such diversities within diversities. The focus on postmodern individuals communicating in urban settings shouldn’t prevent us from acknowledging that the contemporary globalised world also comprises features ‘not so postmodern’– in other words, modern or even traditional – and the co-existence of the postmodern and modern may generate important research areas in present-day sociolinguistics.

1.2 The chapters

Part I of this volume is called Innovative language uses and describes such uses in urban contexts, and oftentimes involving the use of more than one language to get messages across. Urban communicative situations are known to be important places of linguistic innovation, both when it comes to changes to a broader language norm and to the upcoming forces through street-level use, where intuitive mixing of languages is practiced commonly. Massey (2005) described cities as ‘peculiarly large, intense and heterogeneous constellations of trajectories, demanding of complex negotiation’ (154). The dynamism of modern lifestyles, in which communication takes place in various languages with various types of speakers and is often not restricted to one language, results in interesting and often highly systematic language choices by ordinary speakers. In such superdiverse situations, linguistic resources are often freely borrowed from, resulting in heavy code-mixing and the rise of new systems, some of which could be referred to as languages in their own right. This first part illustrates how innovative language choices are not merely practical in nature but in the process naturally hold much identity expression.

The chapter by Iezzi, first of all, in a lively – and often confronting – manner describes how migrants find their way in a situation that they are not prepared for and in which the stakes are high and information communication may be life-changing. It illustrates the plight of Pakistani migrants in Italy in a small urban society that is culturally and linguistically foreign to them. Without documents or financial resources, linguistic resources are the main tool of these ‘profughi’, immigrants, towards communication and persuasion of authorities. In-depth observations of discourse show how these migrants mix language resources to demonstrate their willingness to integrate into the new society and positively contribute to this new environment.

The chapter by Radke on multilingualism among German-Namibians in computer-mediated communication asks the question what the similarities and the differences are between rural and urban language practices in multilingual societies when speakers meet virtually in CMC while at the same time meeting each other face to face on occasion. The chapter describes the interconnection of urban and rural areas through ‘rich networks of people, goods, and ideas’ that have been common in history. CMC provides a platform for the urban and rural to meet in order to maintain both types of networks. This lays bare the multilingual practices that urban and rural individuals partake of. The outcome of such communication is in this chapter captured through the unique linguistic repertoire of the German-Namibians. This repertoire includes German, Afrikaans, English, indigenous Namibian languages and a non-standard variety of German commonly referred to as Namdeutsch. The chapter shows that multilingualism among German-Namibians is a trans-urban phenomenon fulfilling a wide range of pragmatic purposes but is also stylised in many cases.

A final example of language innovation and of diffuse language systems and solutions for communicative obstacles is the situation in Ngaoundéré, as described by Beyer. In this city in Cameroon, the linguistic innovations by motorcycle taxi drivers are outlined through network analysis. The chapter suggests that while identity construction seems to be mostly associated with social settings in the Global North it is also found in the Global South. In the end, these taxi drivers follow well-known mechanisms of simplification and reduction that are typical of urban linguistic settings worldwide. An important and highly useful contribution of this chapter is methodological, making the observation that urban contexts, especially those that hold languages that are not standardised in the European sense of the word, need to be analysed differently and that special attention should be paid to data collection methods. To demonstrate one way of going about this, Ego-Centred-Networks (ECN) are presented for the specific group of speakers under investigation.

Papers focusing on identity-work of various kinds have been collected in Part II; Competing identities. Here the authors, in multiple and divergent connections and contexts, deal with identity as a situated accomplishment. They examine competing ethnic and non-ethnic identifications, demonstrate how constructing social identities is tied to the operation of political or language ideologies, and address the mutual forming of city identity and language identity, approaching them not only as the work of urban people, but also of the researchers investigating language life in the city.

Lehto’s chapter focuses on urban immigrants – Finns in Japan living in metropolitan areas. Through discourse analysis, her study demonstrates how identities are managed in talk of Finns in Japan who depict their multilingual lives. The author examines the identities of Japan Finns from two perspectives: firstly, she focuses on the reported language choices that they took in various domains; secondly, she pays attention to the categories and category-tied features that they choose to describe languages and their speakers during the research interview. As expected, the informants perceive Japanese as the language of the surrounding society, and hence important, while Finnish is seen as an index of heritage and the country of origin. The study reveals, however, that English works as a marker of identity as well. It connects the informants to the group of foreigners, which in the context of Japan may be more valued by them than being a Finn.

In their chapter, Bodó, Turai and Szabó seek to reveal local meanings and categories of political correctness in a contemporary East-Central European context, specifically, among university students in Hungary. Instead of focusing on the public sphere, the chapter examines individual understandings of political correctness. Dealing with everyday talk of students in Budapest, the capital city of Hungary, the authors demonstrate that individuals perceive political correctness as a constraint originated from an external (mainly Western) authority, and they negotiate this mode of expression in their ordinary talk. Drawing on the concepts of voice and enregisterment, the authors argue that political correctness in the metadiscourse among Hungarian students is assigned to the Other. Critiquing this political correctness contributes to individual self- and other-constructions by questioning Western modernist projects. Stances to political correctness serve as a means to work on individual and group identities. It should be mentioned that the chapter contains extracts of conversations the language of which may be offensive for those who belong to the groups concerned, such as black people and some ethnic groups.

The identity issue needn’t apply only to humans, but also, for example, animals, toys, things, theories, institutions, languages or cities. Smakman’s chapter on the ‘Haarlem legend’ clarifies how Haarlem, a Dutch town situated close to Amsterdam, is popularly associated with ‘good’ Dutch, that is, the national language norm in the Netherlands. This legend has been shaped and reproduced through continuous identity work both of Haarlem’s residents and other Dutch people taking place in the course of more than one century. The author gives both historical and current reasons that maintain the popularity of the legend in the Netherlands. He shows that, as a ‘totalizing vision’ (Irvine and Gal 2000), it is resisting numerous counter-arguments based both on common-sense and scientific discourse. He concludes suggesting that vitality of the myth of the distinctive linguistic status of Haarlem may be sustained by the desire of postmodern individuals to find a stable norm to face the ever increasing diversity of present-day language life.

In his chapter, Nekvapil reports on the large body of sociolinguistic knowledge justifying his claim that the city of Hradec Králové may be ‘the best researched town in the Czech Republic’. He draws attention to the research paradigms involved and seeks to present the conducted research as a coherent whole, addressing the issue to what degree the agenda of present-day sociolinguistics can profit from the sociolinguistic agenda of the past. In his methodologically oriented paper, city identity proves to be neither stable nor self-evident. Nekvapil demonstrates the ways city identity is constructed through various semiotic resources by various social actors living in the town. Moreover, he deals with how city identity works in the research design of the researchers – some fully acknowledge it and put it in fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• 1 Introducing city people and their communicative challenges
• Part I Innovative language uses
• Part II Competing identities
• Part III Multilingual strategies
• Part IV Linguistic landscapes
• Part V Global processes and sound change
• Index