27.1072, Review: Sociolinguistics: Otsuji, Pennycook (2015)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1072. Tue Mar 01 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.1072, Review: Sociolinguistics: Otsuji, Pennycook (2015)

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Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2016 10:45:29
From: Uri Horesh [urihoresh at gmail.com]
Subject: Metrolingualism

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-1487.html

AUTHOR: Alastair  Pennycook
AUTHOR: Emi  Otsuji
TITLE: Metrolingualism
SUBTITLE: Language in the City
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Uri Horesh, (personal interest - not currently working at a university)

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

In the abstract on the first page of Alastair Pennycook and Emi Otsuji’s
“Metrolingualism: Language in the city”, we are informed that “[t]his book is
about language and the city.” The authors intertwine a study of speakers and
their speech communities with a very vivid portrayal of two “metrolingual”
cities: Sydney and Tokyo. On many occasions throughout the book, the authors
stress that their concern is not in “counting languages,” but rather in
establishing a more intricate framework through which they propose to analyze
urban settings where a multitude of languages are used in concert with one
another. They do so through the introduction of many vignettes of speech,
collected and recorded in a series of ethnographic fieldwork in these two
cities. These vignettes are transcribed and—when needed—translated into
English, usually followed by metalinguistic commentary, as well as information
about the specific speech community (city, neighborhood, market, etc.) and the
ethnicities of the speakers cited.

Much of the first half of the book is devoted to illustrating how different
languages interact in situations where a speech community is multi ethnic
and/or when certain members of a speech community cater to others who do not
share (or are perceived not to share) their native language(s). One of the
main premises of this work is that monolingualism is an anomaly. The authors
have augmented one of the section headings in Chapter 1 beginning with “Beyond
multilingualism” with a German subtitle, „Niemand ist einsprachig” (p. 16),
‘Nobody is monolingual,’ indicating both verbally and metalinguistically their
conviction that a diverse combination of languages is the norm in most parts
of the world. Furthermore, they advocate for an analytic approach that shifts
away from concepts that indicate the specific relations between languages
(e.g., bilingualism, multilingualism, and even code-switching). Rather, they
employ the term that serves as the main title of the book, “metrolingualism,”
to denote what they insist is the natural situation in large urban centers,
namely a network of languages, the number of which is unimportant, that
speakers in cities comprising long-lived ethnolinguistic groups living
alongside and interacting with immigrants of various “layers,” use skillfully
to communicate with one another. This skillful linguistic dance is often
characterized by a trial-and-error type of endeavor to make oneself
understood, but is nonetheless a linguistic survival mechanism mastered by
most members of the community.

Following the first, introductory chapter, each subsequent chapter focuses on
a particular aspect of metrolingualism, such as constructing affiliations,
mobility and rhythm, spatial repertoires, overcoming conflicts through
convivial communication, and layers and networks. Occasionally, a specific
topic of conversation, often closely associated with a particular environment
(e.g., vegetables and other foods in settings involving markets and
restaurants – Chapter 6, for instance, is devoted to “Talking food”) is
addressed in much detail with many real-life examples. The chapter on layers
and networks is concerned with signs and other elements that are typically
associated with the emerging field of Linguistic Landscape (LL), attempting to
contextualize such phenomena as multilingual public signs and offer a
theoretical framework with which to understand their complexities. The final
chapter is entitled “Metrolingua francas” and attempts to summarize the main
gist of the book, as well as offer ideas for a sort of “applied
metrolingualism” (my term, not the authors’). 

This final chapter, in fact, is one of the cases in which the authors deviate
from their own fieldwork in Australia and Japan and introduce examples from
Luxembourg, the United States, Malaysia and England, to name a few. Another
chapter that transcends the two main case studies is Chapter 5, “Convivial and
contested cities.” Cities such as Samarkand, London, Chicago and Paris are
offered as additional examples of settings where language use is negotiated in
different ways. Perhaps one of the most important analogies made in this
chapter, and indeed in the book, involves linguistic attestations of racism,
particularly the discrimination against non-White populations, in both the
United States and Australia (p. 97). More on this in the evaluation section
below.

EVALUATION

The book makes for a very interesting read. It is markedly different from the
kind of research typical of variationist sociolinguistics. As the authors
explicitly say a number of times (e.g., pp. 31-32), their endeavor is distinct
from that of William Labov (and his followers). In their words, Labov’s
“classic work” on African American Vernacular English (Labov 1966, 1972a), has
a particular shortcoming in that “the city itself plays a very minor role” in
it. But Labov (of whom I am a former student), has done work that is much more
intricate than that alluded to by Pennycook and Otsuji. In both his previous
work on language variation and change in Martha’s Vineyard (Labov 1972b) and
in his subsequent work within the Language Change and Variation (LCV) project
in Philadelphia (see, e.g., Labov 1994), a great deal of attention is paid to
the environments in which the speech communities are situated. I understand
that the authors of this book are concerned primarily with other things than
Labov is—for instance, they do not do the kind of microvariation research that
variationists do—but I would have welcomed a more pluralistic approach to
sociolinguistics, in which the field need not be redefined but rather refined
and augmented. The book makes a considerable contribution to the field by
posing the questions that it does, rendering the dismissal of other approaches
somewhat superfluous.
 
As a reader who has no first-hand familiarity with either Sydney or Tokyo, I
have learned a great deal from the examples and analyses in this book. As a
scholar of language in the Middle East, I was keen to learn about the presence
that Arabic (especially Lebanese and North African varieties) has in these two
cities. It is also fascinating that the relation between Arabic and French,
which is ubiquitous both in parts of the Levant and in the Maghreb, also
manifests itself when speakers from these regions migrate halfway around the
world to countries where neither language is spoken natively. On this note, I
found it disappointing that the transcriptions of Arabic utterances in the
book are quite sloppy and often far from accurate. This is unfortunate,
because it seems as if the authors and editors were quite meticulous in
transcribing other languages, e.g., Japanese and Cantonese (for which the book
uses combinations of traditional orthographies and a Latin-based
transcription), French, Hindi and Polish. It is clear that the Arabic
transcriptions were done by someone who is proficient in Arabic, but it is
also apparent that whoever transcribed the Arabic is not a trained linguist. 

Much of the book is devoted to food and the linguistic practices surrounding
this element, which “is central to human life, both the private (…) and
institutional (…) domains” (p. 116). One reason that food is often at the
forefront of the speech presented to us here is that the researchers “have
perhaps inevitably ended up in restaurants, markets and shops where food is a
focus of doing and talking” (p. 116). One may question the inevitability of
this choice of venues, but it has nevertheless proved to be fertile ground for
a large quantity of utterances that illustrate the “metrolinguality” of the
urban space. Another theme which is omnipresent, at least in the first half of
the book, is the authors’ firm belief that enumerating languages is a futile
task, which offers no substantial theoretical innovation. This point is
hammered into the reader’s mind multiple times, in a manner that becomes a bit
tedious and at times feels apologetic and counterproductive to the authors’
goals. There is an interesting discussion of “multilingualism from below” in
the very beginning of the book (pp. 9-13). Later in the book (p. 47) the
authors assert that “numerical representations [of languages] (…) are premised
very obviously on the assumption that languages can be counted, that people’s
multilingualism can be numerically accounted for, and that proficiency and
frequency of use can also be reliably and accurately measured.” As with the
critique the authors offer for Labov’s work, here, too, it appears as if they
discount any and all quantitative approaches to language acquisition. I would
argue that this is not only a contestable disregard of a huge body of work in
psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, as well as variationist sociolinguistics,
but also an unnecessary addition to the authors’ main argument. It is quite
possible to give credence to statistical evaluations of language variation and
acquisition and at the same time acknowledge that languages are fluid and
mobile, as is argued in Chapter 3 (p. 47). It is this claim of mutual
exclusivity that I find troubling.

The heart of the book, its most interesting part, and the site of its greatest
contribution, in my view, is Chapter 5: “Convivial and contested cities.” This
chapter’s premise extends the Tokyo- and Sydney-based discussion to one of
cities in general. And while some scholars in sociolinguistics have argued
that the city is not the be-all and end-all of the field (see, e.g., Britain
2009), it is refreshing to read a solid theorization of urban sociolinguistics
from a qualitative angle. In this chapter, the authors grapple with the White
Australia Policies (p. 97), which had affected many groups of non-Anglo
Australians until the third quarter of the 20th century. While these policies
are no longer in place, racial tensions still exist in Australia, as they do
in the United States, the United Kingdom and many other countries (  the
American case is referred to specifically in the chapter). This chapter
engages in dialogue with such scholars as Foucault and Watson, and stresses
that linguistic—and other—discrimination is not limited to race and ethnicity,
but also extends to sexuality, drug use, and poverty, and is amplified in the
urban phenomenon of the ghetto. Again, examples are given not only from Tokyo
and Sydney, but also Chicago, Paris and Papua New Guinea. It also includes an
interesting discussion of the sociopolitical meanings of the term “Aussie,”
both for people and for objects.

Metrolingualism—the concept and the book—is a welcome addition to the somewhat
tense domain that straddles the fields of sociolinguistics, linguistic
anthropology and sociology of language. Theoretically, and in terms of its
argumentation strategy, it may not be the cup of tea chosen by everyone in
these fields of inquiry. However, it is a fascinating read, written in a very
accessible fashion, nicely interspersing details about the fieldwork
methodology used by the authors and their associates. With the exception of
the flawed Arabic transcriptions it is virtually free of typos and
infelicities, and is full of data, which is useful for any reader who may be
inclined to offer their own analysis or  interpretation. Because it rarely
uses highly technical language (and when it does, it is always clearly defined
and discussed), it can serve as a text for students and scholars at various
levels and in different fields, as indicated above. Some of its chapters may
be assigned to students in isolation, both because there is some repetition in
the book and because certain chapters are almost self-contained thematically.

REFERENCES

Britain, David. 2009. “Big bright lights” versus “green and pleasant land”?:
The unhelpful dichotomy of ‘urban’ versus ‘rural’ in dialectology. In: Enam
Al-Wer and Rudolf de Jong (eds.). Arabic dialectology: In honour of Clive
Holes on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Leiden: Brill. 223-247.

Labov, William. 1966. The social stratification of English in New York City.
Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Labov, William. 1972a. Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black
English vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Labov, William. 1972b. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Uri Horesh holds a PhD in Sociolinguistics from the University of Essex. He
has also studied Semitic and Arabic Linguistics at Tel Aviv University and
Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His interests are in language
variation and change in the Middle East, particularly with respect to language
contact between Semitic languages. He had served as the founding Director of
the Arabic Language Program at Franklin & Marshall College and most recently
as Assistant Professor of Instruction and Language Coordinator in the Middle
East and North African Studies Program at Northwestern University.





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