Abstract
With different approaches, foci, methods and data, Betsy Rymes’s Communicating beyond Language: Everyday Encounters with Diversity and Jackie Jia Lou’s The Linguistic Landscape of Chinatown: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography are part of a recent turn in linguistic research that tries to grasp everyday communication in socio-culturally diverse contexts. Studies on translanguaging (Canagarajah, 2011; Creese and Blackledge, 2010; Garcia, 2009; Garcia and Wei, 2014; Wei, 2011), polylanguaging (Jørgensen, 2008; Jørgensen et al., 2016) and metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook, 2010, 2011; Pennycook and Otsuji, 2014a, 2014b, 2015), and methodologies such as ethnographic linguistic landscaping (Blommaert, 2012, 2013) are questioning the aptness of traditional categories, such as mono- multi-bi-lingualism, national language proficiency, and native-speaker competence for the investigation of communication in environments shaped and inhabited by people coming from different parts of the world; they instead look at individuals’ repertoires and socially and spatially situated practices characterized by fluidity, hybridization and a complex layering and mixing of elements traditionally ascribed to separate languages. All these works increasingly acknowledge the role of semiotic resources other than language in communication.
Rymes’s Communicating beyond Language: Everyday Encounters with Diversity takes what she calls a ‘repertoire approach’ to communication, against a monolithic view of language. She draws on data taken from classroom observations, interactions and interviews, and popular culture productions, chiefly YouTube videos, to show how a repertoire approach ‘provides a practical pathway for engaging with diversity – as a researcher, a teacher, a student, and most basically, as a person’ (p. 10). The book is structured in eight brief chapters.
The first chapter introduces the three main concepts of the book, i.e. ‘communicative repertoire’, ‘Diversity Principle’ and ‘metacommentary’. These concepts are explored through empirical investigation in the following six chapters, with the concluding chapter discussing methodological implications. Rymes defines communicative repertoire as ‘the collection of ways individuals use language and other means of communication (gestures, dress, posture, accessories) to function effectively in the multiple communities in which they participate’ (pp. 9–10). We communicate in multiple online and offline spaces, with people sharing specific interests, activities and tasks, while coming from different experiences and socio-cultural groups and understandings; we constantly need to communicate across differences ‘by negotiating or seeking our common ground and, then, creating new shared terrain’ (p. 6). The way we manage this depends on ‘the degree to which our repertoires expand, change and overlap with others’ (p. 6). Following her Diversity Principle, ‘the more widely circulated a communicative element is, the more highly diverse the interactions with it will be’ (p. 10). Far from homogenizing uses of resources, today’s wide and complex circulation of communicative elements, she argues, produces diversification. In communicating across differences – and in acknowledging these differences – we potentially become ‘citizen sociolinguists’, and produce a variety of metacommentaries, that is, reflections on meanings and values associated with situated uses of the linguistic and semiotic resources we come across. ‘In any interaction, metacommentary signals an understanding of what a sign means without arbitrarily systematizing communicative elements, but by pointing to that sign’s situated communicative value’ (p. 11). Metacommentaries are revelatory of people’s repertoires and their positioning towards the repertoires of others; hence, she suggests, they are not only key for evaluating our communicative success in interaction but also for the analysis of individuals’ repertoires. These three main concepts – communicative repertoire, Diversity Principle and metacommentaries – are explored in relation to actual instances of communication in the following five chapters. Chapter two relates them to multilingualism. Drawing on examples from classroom interactions, writers’ memoirs and pop songs, Rymes shows the advantages of a Repertoire Approach vis-à-vis ‘the Linguistic Monolith Approach’, which sees multilingualism as the co-presence of discrete nation- and culture-bound languages. Reviewing some of the main recently coined terms such as translanguaging, and linking them to Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of heteroglossia, she discusses evidence showing that hybridized language practices are the norm rather than the exception in everyday interaction. Chapters three, four and five show how individuals’ repertoires include the mixing of ‘communicative elements’ beyond language, encompassing ‘sound’, i.e. accent, rhythm and intonation (chapter three), elements of mass media and popular culture (chapter four), and storytelling elements (chapter five). All these circulate transnationally, both online and offline, and are appropriated and recontextualized, simultaneously providing grounds for genre recognition and shared knowledge on the one hand, and creativity and hybridization on the other. Chapter six discusses ‘youthy’ language used and metacommented on by adults, as a means to show that traditional sociolinguistic variables are no longer apt to define and predict an individual’s belonging to a particular demographic; speakers and writers use, mix and vary elements of language traditionally associated with specific social groupings, such as class, gender, age, education, and so on, to produce various effects, to ‘reach out’ to perceived others and to shape their persona and identities in particular communicative contexts. The way we combine these elements does not reveal or predict who we are in essentialist terms; rather, it reveals our communicative intentions in relation to the specific situation at hand. Chapter seven situates the notion of repertoire in the dynamics of everyday ‘encounters with diversity’. By reviewing and combining Wittgenstein’s (1953) ‘language games’, Bakhtin’s (1986) ‘speech genres’, and Goffman’s (1961) ‘encounters’, and situating these notions within actual classroom interactions and activities, the author shows how encounters among people belonging to different social groups can develop not only individuals’ repertoires, in the attempt at building common ground, but also a sense of sharedness, potentially transforming diverse occasional encounters into new communities. In the concluding chapter, Rymes sketches a methodological framework, showing how to map individuals’ repertoires and to raise students’ awareness through identification and reflection on their own metacommentaries and on those produced by others.
The work has many strengths. The writing style combines seamlessly narrative, personal reflections, data analysis and theoretical discussion, making its reading enjoyable and insightful at the same time, equally accessible and useful to the specialist and the non-specialist. While reviewing and integrating various theoretical approaches and notions, and applying them to everyday instances of communication both offline and online, Rymes manages to explore and explain the complexities and intricacies of today’s communication when each interlocutor is a potential ‘other’ for some aspects and a potential ‘kin’ for others. As announced in the title, the book is insightful in showing how communication is more than language. Discussion tends to devote a finer-grained and more systematic analysis to aspects of language, with minor analytical detail to other semiotic modes; drawing on the vast body of literature on visual communication and multimodal studies could have strengthened, refined and illustrated in more detail the ‘elements beyond language’, which are merged in the book without distinctions between semiotic resources (i.e. actual forms associated with meanings, such as gestures, camera shots, etc.) and semiotic principles that can be realized in different forms (such as discursive structures in storytelling). However, it is the case that multimodal studies have so far rarely focused on meaning- and sign-making in contexts of diversity. Rymes’s work can hence be considered a useful and insightful stimulus for multimodal research on the subject.
Jackie Jia Lou’s The Linguistic Landscape of Chinatown: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography, as the title says, presents a theoretically and methodologically integrated study on the linguistic landscape of Chinatown in Washington DC (USA), ‘a small, traditionally ethnic urban neighbourhood with a predominant presence of non-Chinese businesses but homogeneous bilingual commercial signage and with an ambivalent identity frequently perceived as inauthentic’ (p. 131). The book is composed of six chapters. By reviewing relevant literature, chapter one presents the theoretical framework used, which combines Linguistic Landscape, an interdisciplinary integration of notions of Space, Place and Time in relation to emplaced language, and Scollon and Scollon’s geosemiotics (2003) and nexus analysis (2004). Chapter two provides some background on Chinatown and presents the methodology used, which integrates a wide range of data, including interviews, photos of signage, the researcher’s observations while participating in the activities of the community, video-recordings of community meetings and events, participants’ map-drawing tasks, and relevant institutional documents on signage policies and proposals. Chapters three, four and five are devoted to the analysis. Following traditional linguistic landscape methodologies, chapter three analyses the signage in Chinatown both quantitatively and qualitatively, tracing similarities and differences between Chinese-owned activities and corporate shop chains through geosemiotic variables such as languages, scripts (traditional and modern Chinese), code preference, colour, and emplacement. Analysis shows the tension between attempts at preserving a Chinese identity tradition and the influence of globalizing forces (with corporate shops finding their way into the neighbourhood), shaping Chinatown linguistic landscape as heterotopia – a place defined by the co-presence of multiple, conflicting and apparently incompatible phenomena.
Chapters four and five interrelate theories and analytical tools of time and space, respectively, with methods drawn from urban geography, ethnography, history and discourse analysis, to provide a nuanced explanation of the multiple factors that have contributed to the geosemiotics of today’s Chinatown. These, I believe, constitute the most significant theoretical and methodological innovation of the work. Chapter four focuses on time, using Lemke’s (2000) timescales to explain what Blommaert (2005) defines as the ‘layered synchronicity’ of Chinatown’s heterotopia. The aim is to pinpoint the interrelation between macro-level economic and social processes (such as immigration waves and policies throughout history) and micro-level interactions of participants and resources (exemplified in discussions at a community meeting on the policy about signage), passing through discourse analysis of historically relevant policy documents marking governmental changes investing the image and design of the place. Their intertwining is revelatory of the social processes as they are entexted in the current linguistic landscape of Chinatown.
Chapter five – the longest in the book – discusses Chinatown’s polycentricity in space. The author identifies the two-faceted value of the neighbourhood as ritual and lived place. The former is meant to be ‘read’ by visitors, and is identifiable in ‘planning discourse, material construction, celebratory events and tourist spatial practices’ (p. 130). The latter is the one lived and perceived by the heterogeneous workers and residents of Chinatown, and configures itself as ‘a multilingual neighbourhood, which is, however, organized into separated centres of interaction along linguistic, economic and ethnic boundaries’ (p. 130). Within Chinatown as a lived place, people’s specific activities and linguistic resources conceive of and experience it differently – while the materiality of its value is more related to estate development than to its neighbourhood identity. Finally, analysis of public discourse on Chinatown shows its framing as an American destination and as an ethnic neighbourhood more than in its Chinese identity. This non-coincidence of different dimensions explains discourses around the perceived ‘inauthenticity’ of Chinatown in Washington, when compared to analogous neighbourhoods in other US cities. The final chapter sums up the main theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions of the work, offers some reflections on the active role of the researcher within the community and concludes by showing how linguistic landscape ‘lies at the intersection’ (p. 136) between spatial representation, material space and individuals’ spatial practices – and how language and discourse contribute to the production of the three, mediated by the visual and material aspects of the written mode, in their simultaneous nature of ‘cultural texts and material objects’ (p. 136).
In addition to the extremely rich empirical contribution to a nuanced understanding of the specific neighbourhood investigated, the major innovation of the book lies in its integrated framework and methodology, which goes beyond traditional linguistic landscape’s quantitative and qualitative analysis of signs in place. The book provides an extremely detailed guide to research, aiming to explain the complexity of a diverse semiotic place through the intertwining between macro-level factors, such as historical changes in migration waves and policies, urban planning and real estate market pressures, and micro-level aspects of individuals’ and community-based interactions and lived experiences.