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    The Transformative Materiality of Meaning-Making
    The Transformative Materiality of Meaning-Making
    The Transformative Materiality of Meaning-Making
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    The Transformative Materiality of Meaning-Making

    By David Parkin

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    This book explores verbal and non-verbal communication from a social anthropological viewpoint, drawing on ethnographic data from fieldwork in East Africa. It gives an overview of developments since the 1960s in the anthropology of language use and how these have influenced the author’s thinking. The volume makes the argument that language and other forms of communication involve semiotic transactions between interlocuters; that such communicative exchanges do more than convey information; and that they give identity to the recipients of such transactions who reciprocate by defining speakers. The density and situational totality of such semiotic exchange can moreover be regarded as a kind of materiality, both in terms of their impact on social interaction and in how interlocuters interact bodily as well as verbally among themselves.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMultilingual Matters
    Release dateAug 18, 2021
    ISBN9781800411494
    The Transformative Materiality of Meaning-Making
    Author

    David Parkin

    David Parkin is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, All Souls College, having held the chair from 1996-2008. He was previously from 1964 to 1996 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. From February 2010 to October 2011 he was Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Germany.  He works in Eastern Africa among Muslims and non-Muslims on religion, healing, language, human bodily intelligence, and material culture.  His books include Sacred Void  (CUP 1991), Islamic prayer across the Indian Ocean (with Stephen Headley) (Curzon Press, 2000), The politics of cultural performance (with Lionel Caplan and Humphrey Fisher) (Berghahn Books, 1996) and Bush base, forest farm (with E. Croll) (Routledge 1992). 

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      The Transformative Materiality of Meaning-Making - David Parkin

      Introduction

      The book explores verbal and non-verbal communication from a social anthropological viewpoint and not just from that of linguistic anthropology. This is unusual because social anthropologists in Europe do not normally focus on the detailed analysis of language use, which is undertaken much more by sociolinguists (see Meyerhoff (2018) for a recent detailed and comprehensive overview) and by scholars in the new, mainly British, field of linguistic ethnography (Rampton, 2007a, 2007b). American linguistic anthropology is an important sub-field in North America but is not much pursued in Europe, even though elements of it influence and overlap with European linguistic ethnography and sociolinguistics. Even by 2016, Arnaut et al. note that ‘linguistic anthropology has very little institutional presence outside the US, and it is hard to find any graduate programmes in linguistic anthropology in Europe’ (2016a: 7). Intensive ethnography is, however, common ground in these interrelated perspectives, recently shared even more by an interest in ‘superdiversity’, a concept referring to the consequences since the late 1990s of unprecedented global population movement and sociolinguistic mixture transcending previous patterns (see Arnaut et al., 2017; Goebel, 2015; Vertovec, 2007).

      The ethnographic data in this book are mostly from an earlier period and are drawn from fieldwork in eastern Africa, where I have spent overall a number of years since the 1960s and have learned to varying levels of competence some of its languages, most fluently Swahili and to a lesser extent Giriama and Luo. I am able therefore to give an overview of developments since then in the social anthropology of language use and how these have influenced the chapters in this book (cf. Whiteley, 1971, 1974). Theoretically, the argument is that language and other forms of communication involve semiotic transactions between interlocuters; that such communicative exchanges do more than convey information; and that they give identity to the recipients of such transactions who reciprocate by defining speakers. The density and situational totality of such semiotic exchange can moreover be regarded as a kind of materiality through its performative impact on social interaction, through interlocuters’ bodily sensorial transmission of energy (akin to the notion of ‘bio-speech community’; Black, 2019), and through the more conventional graphic materiality of text or image.

      The book’s title: The Transformative Materiality of Meaning-Making is intended to convey this multimodal semiotic density of interaction and communicative exchange. This distinctive approach has been arrived at as follows.

      A paper published in 1976, and reproduced in the present volume as Chapter 6, is called ‘Exchanging words’. A prompt was Levi-Strauss’s characterisation of myth as the exchange of words and as one of three universal forms of exchange. The paper aroused queries at that time as to whether words could ‘really’ be likened to so-called material objects and transacted. The words in question were in fact East African ethnographically presented ‘role-terms’: i.e. consistent lexical labels for regularly recurring activities of which the most recognisable are defined occupations carried out by persons of the ‘tinker, tailor, soldier’ type. Underlying the questioning scepticism was an admittedly fading faith in the dichotomy of idealism and materiality: the sceptics claimed that words are ideal constructs and can only refer to but not become objects. Speech act theory and its concepts of illocutionary and perlocutionary force, semantic anthropology and philosophical developments have since those days served to dissolve that dichotomy in favour of regarding idealism and materiality as mutually constituted and as together having material impact. We are indeed well used to the idea of sacred words and magical spells purportedly having (sometimes harmful) physical and mental effect (Favret-Saada, 1980 (1977); Tambiah, 1968). Moreover, semiosis, as comprising cross-over non-verbal as well as verbal communication, has more than just physical or material effect but is itself materially constituted through interlocuters and their signs, in the same way that a high density of human interaction (e.g. a placard-carrying crowd, social gathering or interlocuters in conversation) can be thought of as a kind of materiality (Parkin, 2007a). This materiality of both agency and consequence is moreover made through reciprocal movement as the semiotic signs of voice, image, gesture, facework and bodily posture are exchanged between people in communication, a range of multisensory modes extensively analysed by Finnegan (2002).

      Although benefitting from diverse developments in the broad field of linguistic anthropology, the chapters in this volume most directly relate historically to the ‘ethnography of speaking/communication’ pioneered by Dell Hymes and John Gumperz (Blommaert, 2018; Gumperz & Hymes, 1972, 1964; Hymes, 1964, 1983 [1974]), for it was these scholars who helped shift an early anthropological interest in language classification to one of language as ontological, i.e. as identifying and so creating persons and things. The themes covered in the chapters subscribe to this approach to communication. They have arisen over time from detailed ethnographic interest in events unsought but encountered in the field which are revealed to be instantiated and made ‘real’ through speech and other forms of verbal and non-verbal communication. It is an interest shared by all anthropologists by definition. However, there is considerable variation in the extent to which a focus on language and communication is prioritised, as in this volume, as a way of showing how the voices, bodies and inter-subjectivities that make up social interaction are irreducibly consubstantial and material.

      Arnaut et al. (2016a: 7–8) recognise the overlap between their notion of the mainly European and recently established linguistic ethnography and that of the longer-established American linguistic anthropology (see also Rampton, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009). They see the latter as historically based on fieldwork ‘away from home’ while practitioners of European linguistic ethnography ‘focus on environments where researchers work and/ or have grown up or spent much of their lives … motivated by an interest in linguistic configurations, inequalities and divisions noticed locally, more or less on the doorstep … in engagement with, for example, local refugee centres and immigration and asylum procedures, work-place production and interviewing processes, complementary schools, primary and secondary education, literacy programmes and popular cultural production’.

      While acknowledging the influence of the ethnography of speaking/ communication on the new linguistic ethnography, Rampton spells out a distinctive feature which is relevant to themes covered by the present volume. He says ‘Linguistic ethnography is…investigating communication within the temporal unfolding of social processes …’ (Rampton, 2007b: 3, my emphasis). It is ‘… a view of situated communication that pays particular attention to the efforts individuals make to get other people to recognise their feelings, perceptions, interests etc. Every moment in the unfolding of communicative action is unique and never-to-be-repeated, but this also involves linguistic forms, rhetorical strategies, semiotic materials and institutional genres that have achieved a degree of stability, status and resonance in the world …’ (Rampton, 2007b: 4, my emphasis). For me, the key criterion here is the paradoxical notion of ‘temporal unfolding’ of a never-to-be repeated ‘situated communication’ in the context of stability, a juxtaposition of the immediate and continuous making up the complete utterance or speech event. Taken thus, it seems at first to resonate with the Saussurian contrast respectively with unique parole and enduring langue, but it goes much further in seeing the two as mediated by the play of interpersonal feelings, perceptions, strategies and (common and conflicting) interpersonal interests. The sense of an ‘unfolding’ may be extended to include things which emerge from a previous state (as a butterfly emerging from a cocoon), a kind of poiesis (cf. Arnaut et al., 2017: 3–24). An act of communication, or more specifically a speech event, may be viewed in this way as some examples from the chapters of the present volume show. What may be called a critical speech or communication event refers to the actual moment of transformation, triggered by any number of communication factors such as change of accent/pronunciation, topic, mood, misunderstanding, misinterpretation, accidental usage, bodily/ facial movement or gesture, textual or pictorial declaration or speaker’s deliberate provocation (see especially Part 1). The volume’s aim is thus to show that communication is not just affirmative but is a socio-ontological process of ‘coming-into-being’ through ‘instantiation’, on which more below. I see these aspects as packed into the ethnographic notion of ‘situated communication’.

      The publication dates of the seventeen chapters in the current volume range from 1971 to 2017. Before and during this period, especially since World War II, there were major developments and changes both in anthropology and the study of language in society. As regards language study, Boerllstorff’s informative compendium (2011) of 66 selected articles from 1888 to 2010 drawn from the American Anthropologist can be used as a rough guide of some such developments, some of which have a bearing on the collected chapters. From Boerllstorff, we see that from about the late 1940s and early 1950s, there is a reduction in articles and books dealing with the classification of languages, whether typological or genetic. Guthrie published his monumental The Classification of the Bantu Languages in 1948 which was followed in 1955 by Greenberg’s equally major Studies in African Linguistic Classification (preceded in previous years by journal articles on the subject). Interest in language classification has continued but as an increasingly specialised field separate from more ethnographically focused work on the sociocultural dimensions of language. Thus, in 1949, a work entitled ‘Ethnolinguistics and the study of culture’ (Silva-Fuenzalida, 1949) was followed by a majority emphasis in publications on such topics as ‘verbal expression’, ‘dialect differences’, ‘dialect stratification’ and ‘speech variations’ with the path-breaking work of Gumperz (1958, 1961) and Hymes (1964) being produced from the early 1960s and, as noted above, named ‘the ethnography of speaking/communication’, together with cognate study at the same time, including an early, partially feminist, perspective by Susan Ervin-Tripp on ‘language, topic and listener’ (1964).

      Language classification by itself had thus diverged from the increasing interest in the then increasing turn towards language as live discourse premised on communicative exchange, cultural precepts and context of situation. The 1960s also saw the birth of ‘ethnoscience’ as methodology for explaining culturally distinctive language-use rules (see Frake, 1964). At the same time, Labov’s famous research (1964, 1977) questioned claims that certain diatypes did not consistently follow grammatical rules and demonstrated the communicative logic of non-standard English in Harlem, New York. The 1970s and 1980s moved towards poetics and verbal art as performance with seminal contributions by Bauman and Briggs (1990), Bauman (1975), Briggs (1985) and Scherzer (1987) and thence in the 1990s to a consideration of ‘language ideologies’, an interest which has continued to present time (e.g. Chernela, 2003; Friedman, 2003; Friedrich, 1989; Haviland, 2003; Keane, 2018; Laitin & Gomez, 1992; Makihara, 2004; Schieffelin et al., 1998; Stromberg, 1990). A related concern with literacy also emerged (Besnier, 1991; Street, 1985). From the 1970s until the present, in anthropology, abstract concepts originating from or echoing philosophy have increasingly been applied theoretically across different communicative exchanges and performances. They include ‘intentionality’ (Duranti, 1993, 2015), ‘indexicality’ (Silverstein, 1976), ‘pragmatics’ (Levinson, 1983), ‘entextualisation’ (Bauman & Briggs, 1990; Silverstein, 2014; Wolfgram, 2012); ‘contextualisation’ (Silverstein, 1992), and many others. Such concepts may vary by author, sometimes extending out from a focus on the linguistic or textual. For instance, Wolfgram applying and widening his view of entextualisation to the analysis of scholarly medical traditions, declares that ‘… the concept of entextualization that I draw upon and develop here is not limited to the writing and deployment of text but rather the appropriation, circulation, and transformation of discourse more generally (that is, it includes but is not limited to text)’ (Wolfgram, 2012: 215, my emphasis). The introduction of the key theoretical concept of ‘discourse’ (see Silverstein & Urban, 1996) extends issues of communication to that of multimodality and semiosis, including use of the five senses. This is an interest implicit in some chapters in the present volume and of special concern in the increasing contemporary research into sign languages.

      Although influenced by early work in linguistic anthropology, the current collected papers reflect changes drawn more directly from social anthropology. For instance, ‘transactionalism’ was a social anthropological approach developed in the 1960s and 1970s, which analysed social interaction as a form of exchange in which individuals or groups sought to extract profit or benefits from those they interacted with at minimal cost to themselves (Bailey, 1969; Barth, 1966). The chapters in Part 1 analyse conversations in these terms, emphasising the fragile balance between competitive and cooperative communication and the danger in this of miscommunication. Occurring at the same time as the emergence of transactionalism, political anthropology turned towards an interest in what was called ‘local level politics’ (Swartz, 1968) with an emphasis on interpersonal and small group encounters, conflicts and goals rather than the analysis of large-scale states or other socially extensive political formations. The interpersonal and small group perspectives were sometimes identified as examples of ‘methodological individualism’ and are combined in a number of the chapters, which view language and communicative exchanges or transactions as a form of interpersonal micro-politics.

      This concern in the 1960s with micro-politics shaded into the analysis of political language which is the subject of the chapters constituting Part 2 of the book. Along with oratory and rhetoric, political language was much studied in the 1970s and 1980s (from Bloch (1975) to Paine (1981); Brenneis & Myers, 1984; Brenneis, 1986a, 1986b; Briggs, 1985; Grillo, 1989; Parkin, 1975, 1984) and comprehensively revisited a generation later (Stasch, 2011). The early interest raised questions about selfhood and personhood through the realisation that controllers of political language and rhetoric and their audiences were mutually identified and constituted by how they were spoken to and how they listened and, if at all, responded. A key issue is the distinction (in practice sometimes elided) between so-called formal and informal modes of communication, including types of greeting and honorifics, as discussed in Part 1. A derived issue is the extent to which speakers or interlocuters follow or neglect social rules governing communicative interaction, and the expectations and responses of educational and political authorities to either rule conformity or divergence, including the part played by government and other language ideologies (Parkin, 1975; cf. Blommaert, 2009).

      Part 3 includes chapters exploring the implications of the fact that, underlying any political engagement is the play of power, which is sometimes implicit rather than evident in communication and plays a role in how meanings are encoded and decoded. Here, meaning draws on more than words and lexicon and rests on key cultural concepts which are as much unsaid as said yet which, like stigma, sometimes powerfully influence thought and action and may lurk in unexpected contexts. A number of the chapters here describe cases where such apparent semantic invisibility, so to speak, has effect through indirect cultural allusion both outside and within language. The influence of Ardener is here often evident in the chapters. For about 15 years from the beginning of the 1970s until the mid-1980s, Ardener published a number of theoretically developing articles different in focus from most other anthropological approaches to language appearing beforehand (see Chapter 12; Parkin, 1982; and Ardener’s posthumous collection (1989a) edited by Chapman).

      Taken as a whole, the volume covers a view of communicative exchange as working within but also transcending rule-governed behaviour and so, through its material effect, creating new ‘ways of being’. In keeping with the ethnographic focus as analytical starting-point, all the chapters draw on fieldwork data from the peoples I have worked among: Luo, Giriama and Swahili in eastern Africa in both rural and urban areas from 1962 to present time. The remarkable increase in speed and scale of digital communication in the 21st century through social media, the internet and mobile phones (see McIntosh (2010) on Giriama) post-date the fieldwork and so are not documented in the chapters. The resultant explosion of internationally shared sporting events and of mutually identifiable forms of global popular culture and communication make human interaction across the world more accessible and potentially liberating. An instance is the cross-cultural ‘buffalaxed’ or parodied videos, recordings, lyrics and dancing of ‘the other’ and the international sharing of hip-hop and rap (Leppänen & Elo, 2016; Varis & Wang, 2016). But this development rides on the new digital technology which can be harnessed by states and other corporate institutions to exert greater communicative control over people. Research is likely on the consequences of this ambiguity. Is it a radical or fundamental change in global means of communication? Or is it simply an accelerated concentration of pre-existing and continuing templates of sociality? The former seems the more likely development. The chapters in this volume may then be read as describing past and generally more localised communicative exchange as being historically the precursor of unprecedented densities and scale of communication within which small group interlocution may or may not flourish.

      The three broadly thematic parts each consist of five or six chapters focused on small groups and are preceded by a short introduction. Apart from a few typological corrections and clarifications, the chapters are reproduced in their original form, the better to indicate the influence of their micro-historical contexts. However, they are not in the chronological order of their publication since the intention is rather to show the connection between ideas which might be interspersed and not always follow directly from one to the other.

      It is here relevant to mention an interview carried out by Karel Arnaut and Roxy Harris (2013), although not included in the present volume, which gives an informal overview of some of the intellectual paths taken, from an early interest in transactionalism to, later, the broader canvas of semiosis and its multimodal role in enabling interlocuters to copy, modify or reject each other’s modes of communication and lifestyles.

      Part 1

      Communication as Transaction and Becoming

      Chapter 1 was first published as Parkin (2016). Though recent, it is included early in the current volume because it is a kind of summation of developments beginning from the time in the 1960s when transactionalism informed my approach to the analysis of language and communication. The chapter is distinctive in making explicit that communication exchanges do more than convey meanings, directions and expectations, they also play a role in defining and re-defining the personhood of interlocuters. It documents the shift from an early concern with the classification of languages to more ontological issues of human ‘becoming’ through communicative interaction. It appeared in a volume arising from the work, inspired by Vertovec (2007), of the International Consortium on Language and Superdiversity (InCoLaS) (Arnaut et al., 2016b), which has been especially important in the immediate post-millennial years and has, in many respects, taken up ethnographically the mantel of language and communication that social anthropology touched on but did not carry far.

      Performativity and materiality are part of the ‘becoming’ in the interactions discussed in Chapter 1. Thus, when London teenagers imitate and embody the communicative styles, gestures and identities of a ‘cool’ and therefore exalted reference group in their circle, this is a kind of understated performance, not like a full-blown ritual, but performative nevertheless. It is language and body together physically prompting members of the circle to change positions and postures as well as speech modes, idioms and accents, and is to that extent language and communication as materiality, similar in a way to illocutionary force as being material effect and not just proposition.

      Chapter 2. While such examples of situated communication capture moments, Chapter 2 (Parkin, 1977) presents a case from the 1960s in Nairobi, Kenya, of youth groups over time dividing along putative class lines presaged beforehand in their perceived choice of dominant lingua franca. As youngsters they play football, speak a form of the ‘non-tribal’ language of Swahili and are uninterested in the ‘tribal’ divisiveness of their adult elders. But as they grow into adolescence they split into ‘gangs’ now differentiated on the basis of whether they speak, or claim to speak, Swahili or English. Gangs claiming to use mainly Swahili have failed to attend school through lack of fees and call themselves uneducated and unable to get good jobs and therefore socially rebellious, while the English gangs claim to be educated and to be able to aspire to better job opportunities and ‘respectable’ citizenship. There is a kind of template of such incipient class differentiation which is contoured by the value-laden distinctiveness of Swahili and English as low and high diatype, respectively. It is instantiation of class through a public perception of lingua franca hierarchy.

      It has to be noted that the relative statuses of English and Swahili have changed since this fieldwork was carried out in the 1960s: it might be difficult nowadays to refer to Nairobi or so-called ‘up-country’ Swahili as a low diatype. The distinction between speech pattern or varieties as either ‘high’ or ‘low’ must be seen nowadays as presupposing too much homogeneity between varieties and of ignoring the dynamic and changing overlap between such varieties. These are better analysed as differences of communicative style. As a prestigious language of Muslim coastal East Africa with a classical literary pedigree and a range of regional varieties, Swahili has always had elevated status along the coast. Tanzania’s post- independence further elevation of the language has helped spread its rising reputation inland as well, including Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo via Rwanda and Burundi. That said, socioeconomic differences continue under conditions of politico-inequality to be reflected in hierarchical judgements about people’s apparent language competence, including the colonial and postcolonial legacy of privileging supposedly ‘high’ competence in English in contexts defined by differential access to authority, power and wealth. Various chapters depict this earlier prestige hierarchy between English and Swahili. A relatively new form of mixed English-Swahili with vernacular inclusions, called Sheng, now occupies the place of so-called low diatype of Swahili in East African cities such as Nairobi, according to current East African language scholars, some of whom see it as a ‘working class’ youth language (Bosire (2009), Githiora (2018) and Mazrui (1995) for detailed analyses). Although the chapters in this section were written before Sheng was popularly named and widely recognised as a distinctive speech variety, Chapter 2 on youth groups (already mentioned) includes mixed English-Swahili usage in the 1960s that can be regarded as part of a prototype emerging from the 1950s of Sheng, as being indeed early Sheng.

      Chapter 3 documents some social implications of this early English-Swahili prestige hierarchy. Language-based differentiation and instantiation can of course lead not to harmonious imitation or integration but to conflict. The case described in this chapter (Parkin, 1971) is from 1962 of a well-educated tenant new to a low-income housing estate speaking at its association meeting in English to the annoyance of the other tenants, most of whom did not know English and so angrily accused him of not observing the convention that only Swahili should be used. A further example is of six male drinking companions nearly coming to blows in a bar in what I call a ‘conversational arena of prestige competition’. They are educated, in well-paid jobs and speak English fluently, which they use among themselves, preferring to do so despite being able to use their respective northern Uganda Nilotic dialects. Their preference to use English goes beyond an expression of high status. Much of their interaction consists of friendly banter and teasing, including a game to out-perform each other’s command of English through witty statements and clever use of vocabulary. The game gets out of hand when one of the men is losing badly in the competition and unexpectedly turns on one of the teasers, insulting him severely and provoking him to great anger. The high emotionalism, quarrel and near violence are only stifled when they calm the offended companions through use of their respective vernaculars. The switch from English to vernacular is thus from dangerous to less risky language use.

      Chapter 4. The framework of competitive jocularity and gamesmanship is in fact a recurrent feature of cross-ethnic talk and communication as well as that between English-speaking prestige contestants. Chapters four and five provide instances of such language competition. Chapter 4 (Parkin, 1974b) takes an example from the 1960s of market vendors and customers of different ethnic groups acting like rivals and making language concessions and appeasements in order to secure bargains or clients’ custom. Their banter is hedged around with humorous references as to whether or not the rival speaker is really competent in the language of the other. Banter among relative strangers is a common means of camouflaging underlying interpersonal tensions, especially those deriving from perceived differences of ethnicity or socioeconomic class. Traditionally, in much of Africa, institutionalised joking relationships played this role and the instances in this chapter occur in the wider context of pronounced polyethnic consciousness often displayed in humorous exchanges.

      Chapter 5. Politeness, like joking, may moderate interpersonal tensions, but sometimes institutionalised impoliteness can, paradoxically, also perform this role. Politeness and impoliteness can in fact be seen, not always as diametrically opposed, but as ends of a continuum of communicative exchange, between which there are other institutionalised examples of reciprocal address. In this chapter (Parkin, 1980) the topic of insult or abuse is treated theoretically. It shows how greetings, honorific address and formal and informal joking relationships constitute a cluster of ambivalent verbal encounters which sit dangerously on the edge of acceptability and severe insult but which nevertheless, through their very risky experimentality, innovate through creative suggestions about social status and relationships. Much of the ethnography is taken from my work on Giriama in Kenya but also considered are the extensive studies in linguistic anthropology on greetings, the reciprocal power semantic (e.g. tu versus vous) and other formulaic exchanges, including as already mentioned Labov’s analysis (1977) of the logic of non-standard English in Harlem, New York, through youths’ reciprocally competitive exchanges called ‘sounding’ and other names.

      Chapter 6 concludes this section with a critique but also sympathetic application of Barth’s transactional analysis, using Giriama role terms (Parkin, 1976). It continues to address the question of how we can refer to communication, including verbal language, as essentially a kind of materiality and, through its performativity, ‘making’ persons through the role relationships they are deemed lexically to hold. That is to say, the institutionalisation of social activity, through the terms used to designate publicly acknowledged occupational and other roles, structures the presentation of people. Thus rendered as objects rather than subjects or agents in communication, role-defined persons are transacted: the many roles they play ‘become’ what they are and are liable to be constantly shuffled.

      In short, Part 1 suggests that communication consists of reciprocal transactions which are ontological material, sometimes withholding interlocuters’ agency and so always liable to achieve their effect through emotional charge.

      1 From Multilingual Classification to Translingual Ontology: A Turning Point

      Superdiversity and Language

      In addressing the issue of ‘superdiversity’ as defined by Vertovec in 2007, subsequent work indirectly addressed an historical turning point (see contributions to Arnaut et al., 2016, Arnaut et al., 2017, Toivanen and Saarikivi 2016). The late 1980s and early 1990s saw major geo-political changes coinciding with those of rapid communications technology and the maturing of the digital age. There was the fall of the Berlin war in 1989, which Ernest Gellner called the most momentous occasion since the French revolution; the ensuing collapse of communism; its conversion to a new kind of capitalism in China following that country’s reforms of the 1980s; the remarkably swift effect of India’s own economic reforms; and the ending of apartheid in South Africa. That these politico-economic events occurred within a few years of each other is a good illustration of the knock-on effects of crises in relation to each other. Not necessarily related, at least in the first instance, was the way in which an already slowly growing globalisation following World War II was further helped through increasing use of mobile phones and the internet, a change that accelerated at a pace and to a geographic extent that left us bewildered in the very moment of experiencing it. The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, allegedly partly organised through digital communication, was a precursor of more of the like, as were the burgeoning new patterns of international population movement, with new, smaller and more ethno-culturally diverse groups of migrants caulked upon earlier, long-standing migratory patterns. National boundaries, for all the attempts of powerful nations to patrol them, are becoming more porous. They are part of a global demographic shift in the making, punctuated by savage curbs but redefining ineluctably and irreversibly the very idea of a self-recognising population.

      It is true that prior to the late 1980s, there was already a speed of communication and contact that made it feasible to speak of a new kind of globalisation different in these respects from any predecessors. But in this earlier globalisation, politico-economic and sociocultural diversity was seen as made up of supposedly discrete elements brought together in conjunction and not yet so merged as to lose their respective remembered lines of differentiation. The diversity then was really that of parallelisms and pluralities. Ethnic pluralism, cultural pluralism, medical pluralism and linguistic pluralism referred in liberal quarters to the side-by-side relations of distinctive entities or knowledges that were encouraged to celebrate their distinctiveness and, despite real differences between them of power, privilege and resources, to take their place as equals before each other. Ideologies cannot last for long without material or substantive reinforcement and, cross-cut by increasing inequalities, the ideal-based pluralisms gave way at their edges to fuzzy boundaries or no boundaries at all. Echoing Rampton (2016: 91) we can say that the current situation is one in which old predictabilities have dissolved and certain forms, acts and social categories no longer co-occur in the patterns that were once expected.

      A key notion here is what Arnaut (2016: 60–62) calls a new kind of post-panoptic governmentality that has developed since the late 1980s and which tries to control this diversity. This is different from an earlier view of governmentality as, ultimately, a centre controlling subject populations and institutions. The new post-panoptic hegemonic discourse is of rules, regulations, exactions and punitive stigma set up by various, and often unrelated, interests seeking to curb and direct what they see as the random spread of new migratory, linguistic and semiotic agents and activities. Arnaut importantly reminds us not to forget, however, that alongside this new ramifying hegemonic configuration, superdiversity has also opened up spaces for creativity of a kind not easily available beforehand when society was internally made up of relatively constant and therefore constraining boundaries, (e.g. of class, ethnic,educational and professional differentiation and commensurate lifestyles). Some of this ‘new’ creativity is seen as in fact the ‘recycling’ of the many disparate and overlapping elements that make up what we call social and linguistic communication and interpretation in so-called postmodernity. To extend the metaphor, but also to invite contestation, it is as if the bricoleur is seen as having taken up much of the space in public culture and opinion previously occupied by the scientist.

      The concept of superdiversity tries to capture the implications of the alleged development from the co-existing, side-to-side (and sometimes back-to-back) relations of relatively bounded entities to the reverberative, criss-crossing, and subdivision of different parts of these entities. In the field of linguistic ethnography, the latter is a process that Rampton (1995; 2010) has called crossover speech or crossing, in which a range of diverse linguistic particles are borrowed, transformed, returned and employed as communicative ‘resources’, to use the notion much evident in, for instance, Arnaut et al. (2016) and which I examine below. The resources make up what Blommaert and Backus (2011) call a speech ‘repertoire’, and which are deployed in what Jørgensen and others (2016: 137–154) call ‘polylanguaging’ and Creese and Blackledge (2010) refer to as ‘translanguaging’. The key position adopted in Arnaut (2016 and 2017) is that such processes are more than just code-switching. To coin a phrase, everyday speech is becoming more and more a matter of constant polythetic classification with social impact, as speakers juggle the limits of face-to-face intelligibility at any one time with new styles of expression made up of ever-changing linguistic resources. Varis and Xuan (2016: 218–221) similarly talk of a struggle between semiotic creativity and normativity. As Rampton showed for urban Britain, ethnicity from the 1980s and 1990s began to lose its predominance as a driver of youth speech in favour of social class and the crossing of different speech ‘styles’, a class-based heteroglossic vernacular that seems to have lasted into some speakers’ middle age and is not just a cyclical generational characteristic (Rampton 2006; 2011).

      So what is the difference between this relatively recent theoretical position and, say, early 1960/1970s descriptions by Joshua Fishman (1966; 1971) of ‘language shift, maintenance and stabililty’ and the code- switching studied by those such as John Gumperz (1961; 1982) and Dell Hymes (1962) as part of an ‘ethnography of speaking’?

      From Multilingual Classification to Ontological Processes

      One difference between crossover speech and code-switching (seen as speech alternating within single sentences between use of morphemes recognisable as deriving from different languages) is of focus. We can say that, while the earlier studies of detailed cases of code-switching could be called micro-sociolinguistics, the approach of Rampton and his colleagues is that of nano-sociolinguistics. It is concerned with conversation analysis (CA), whose constituent features are smaller than those making up codes and require longer within any stretch to decipher. It underlines a tendency and perhaps a need, given the greater complexity of superdiversity, to analyse minute fractions of the borrowings and exchanges characteristic of much speech in late modern urban settings.

      This perspective is a methodological response to the new and more varied population and linguistic flows whose intermingling of boundaries and identities invites a closer look at how elements of a communicative act cohere. Language ideology, its forms, and the way these are expressed in social interaction constitute a three-part interrelationship (some would say dialectic). Thinking of this interrelationship as a triangle (see e.g. Hanks 1996: 230), we can say that it has been stretched into more triangular shapes than was the case before the polycentric normative effects of modern superdiversity. Wide differences among interlocutors as to the relative value, modes of articulation, and interpersonal relevance of particular speech features need not nowadays seem to be a ‘foreign’ incursion into a ‘mainstream’ speech variety but can be thought of as belonging within a broad notion of ‘normality’.

      For example, Rampton (2013) examines the speech of a man who only started speaking English in the UK as an adult. He shows that the man’s ‘learned’ English unconventionally combines features which are however spread among other speakers who would not be regarded as learners. The point is that it is nowadays harder to separate as a category those who have learned English as a second language from other speakers, because these other speakers may also use such combinations in English as a first language. They are together making use of the variety of language resources available through superdiversity.

      Consider not only Rampton’s examples but also those of Jørgensen et al. (2016: 138–141) in their analysis of the deployment of fractional features. In one of their cases, overlapping features of standard Danish, youth Danish, English, Spanish, Turkish and Arabic are used by three Copenhagen girls in the space of just a few exchanges of conversation. As in youth language generally, such features are adopted rapidly (and in some cases discarded swiftly), many of them stylised for effect, a development to which I return below. It is difficult consistently to attribute the variable use of these features to changing topics or conversational domains.

      Gumperz and some of his colleagues acknowledged this in the 1970s. On the one hand, drawing on his earlier work, Gumperz recognised that there were occasions when a particular speech variety and a particular social event or setting would go together and that a change in the language or variety might change the social setting, and vice versa (Blom and Gumperz 1970; Gumperz and Hernandez-Chavez 1972). On the other hand, he also provided contrary instances of conversational code-switching between words of English and Spanish where such close correlations did not apply nor could be predicted. He showed, moreover, that switching between codes or varieties did more than communicate the meaning of the particular words used, but also metaphorically drew on the social associations each variety might have – to articulate a particular speech variety was to take on some of the stereotypical social characteristics of its speakers. Gumperz here took a step in a movement away from classification, and nowadays this is even greater. As evident in Arnaut (2016 and 2017) and also Vigouroux and Mufwene (2008), the features making up codes can no longer be regarded as unambiguously belonging to particular languages, for they are imperceptibly merged with other features of different provenances and do not necessarily alter by topic.

      Fishman’s interest was more macroscopic than the later Gumpez and was tied to the idea of a language as belonging to a group whose speakers would each share a loyalty to their distinctive language (Parkin 1974; Spotti 2011a). He described language shift and stability. This illustrates the most obvious case of languages seen as relatively bounded entities subject to change from contact with others or able to withstand such change or, as in some of Fishman’s examples, incorporating some changes while preserving an ‘original’ essence. Fishman’s recorded material, especially on the relation in urban United States between Spanish and English, is exemplary and did indeed at that time suggest both an ideological and practiced distinctiveness of two languages seen analytically as well as indigenously separable, a distinctiveness that then, as now, has ideological- cum-political significance in defining acceptable citizenship. It is a view of integrated speech, in Jørgensen’s terms (2016: 140), in which a noticeable degree of language distinctiveness is maintained, and which educators and policy makers assume is ‘natural’.

      So, just as the world has allegedly undergone the transition within a generation from (urban) diversity to superdiversity as a result of historical developments, is there a commensurately different linguistic horizon today in much of the world from that which existed in, say, the 1960s and 1970s, to say nothing of even earlier periods?

      It would be indulgent to dwell long on one’s own researches at that time in the cities of Nairobi in Kenya and Kampala, Uganda. But it should be mentioned that migration to each city, as in many African cities consequent on the expulsion in the early 1960s of French, British and Belgian colonialism (Portugese fifteen years later), consisted heavily of new migrants from rural areas many of who were, if not monoglot, at least defined in terms of a self-perceived single ‘mother tongue’ vernacular hedged around with other languages used at trading centres and markets. Nairobi under the British, after all, discouraged Africans from becoming permanent residents in the city and so urban ethno-linguistic admixture was small compared with today. A non-colonial ‘traditional’ city like Kampala was, by contrast, already ethnically and linguistically mixed, though even there LuGanda, the language of the dominant BuGanda kingdom, was seen by everyone as the ideological standard to which one should aspire if one wanted the benefits of Ganda ‘citizenship’. But it was the British and other imperialists of Africa who insisted on falsely demarcating peoples as unambiguously belonging to ‘tribes’. It was false because pre-colonial movement, trade, inter-marriage and alliances had precluded set boundaries and borders (Southall 1970). But in imposing them, the imperialists in fact created a sense of bounded ethno-linguistic distinctiveness that became partially reinforced in practice and has become the bane of modern national politics.

      The colonial project of ethno-linguistic essentialism did not in practice curb language mixing, and indeed studies were made of it in Nairobi and Kampala (Parkin 1971 and 1974). But colonial essentialising did foster an ideological view on the part of African speakers of the coexistence of not just ethnic groups, but also languages as discrete entities, which could be found in allegedly ‘pure’ form somewhere, perhaps in a notional rural heartland. There was, in other words, the coexistence of, on one hand, an ideology of linguistic pluralism and individual purity, and on the other hand, increasing heteroglossia, especially with greater urban migration. Such language mixing may indeed be said now to have grown more complex in conjunction with denser urban settlement, and yet still juxtaposed to colonially derived ideas of language separateness and purity. The two, language ideologies of purity, and crossover talk, continue today, reflecting a similar duality in Europe.

      Pre-colonial extensive African networks of trade, political absorption, movement to new farming, pastoral and hunting land, and intermarriage did spread the use of a number of vernaculars. To that extent, there was some indigenous linguistic diversity. But it was hardly on the scale of modern superdiversity. For, by the latter, we understand the situation in late modern urban settings, and, with in 2020 just over half of the world’s population living in urban areas and with two thirds predicted by 2050, there clearly has been a qualitative shift. More research on older archives and records is needed to say more about this shift and to compare earlier with present periods.

      Underlying such history of apparent polylingual change is a theoretical distinction. In the English language we can interrogate the verb, ‘identify’, with reference to the ways in which allegedly different speech varieties are classified and have effect on social relations. For a speaker to identify a speech variety as different from others is to classify it as one might an object. The act sets up a classificatory grid that is ideological insofar as it is based on a perception and claim that may depart from the fact that the variety is not really that neatly distinctive of others and in some respects overlaps with them. By contrast, for a speaker to identify with a speech variety is to embody it or, perhaps, to be embodied by it, with echoes of empathy and Levy-Bruhl’s notion of ‘participation’ by which the speaker and the variety share in each other’s being: I do not just speak it, for it is part of my being even when I do not speak it. To identify with is then ontological and not just classificatory.

      I raise this distinction because I have the impression that earlier sociolinguistics tended towards the ‘objective’ classification of speech varieties and their social and conceptual correlates. A primary task was to show how speakers make, or are induced to make, choices as between varieties or registers according to the sociocultural domain in which they are operating or the topic on which they are speaking. As mentioned above, the later Gumperz was different in that his approach to metaphorical code-switching understood varieties as coming from different settings and informing speakers with identities built on such variation. It was to that extent moving towards a view of conversations as ontological processes and not just one of speakers collectively classifying and being classified by the languages around them. The publications cited above (Arnaut 2016, 2017 et alia) on sociolinguistic diversity are in part heirs to Gumperz but go further and strongly depict the use of not just spoken language but also other semiotic resources (text, visual, dress, music). Their usage is seen as intrinsic to and part of the migratory and social superdiversity that for at least a generation characterises cities and can be seen as a kind of further diversification of pre-existing diversity. Such constant involution of semiotic resources lends itself to what Blommaert and Maly (2016: 197–217) call ‘ethnogaphic lingustic landscape analysis’ (ELLA). ELLA investigates not just the ‘permanent’ features of language and signs in a Ghent neighbourhood but also those that come and go quickly and would be ignored as unimportant in conventional studies of language diversity, but which are in fact intrinsic to the sociodemographic layers and dynamics of the neighbourhood.

      I deal with the notion of semiotic resources in more detail below. But I should here briefly note that it is different from the notion of urban language resources as used in the late 1960s in Nairobi by Parkin (1974), who explicitly adopted a transactionalist market model in which sellers and buyers of different, unambiguously defined ethnic groups at a market made challenges and concessions to each other by including parts of each other’s language in a game to gain custom or a lower price. The resources were seen as directly deriving from ethnic languages whose boundaries were maintained despite the reciprocal borrowing in the market transactions. It was a view of resources in the economic sense and of ethnic groups regarded by townsfolk as distinctive of each other. The classificatory predominated over the ontological, with only strains of the latter identified (e.g. Parkin 1971).

      The Semiotic Creation of Identity

      People’s use of semiotic resources as described in the work of Arnaut et al. does not unambiguously classify social strata and ethnic groups but creates and draws from communicative outlines that cut across them and blur their contours. Although to some extent evident earlier in Parkin (1977), the concept of semiotic resources is increasingly seen as relevant to the characterisation of late urban modernity. Put simply. it is a shift of analytical focus from mainly verbal ‘language’ to verbal and non-verbal ‘semiosis.’ Two findings emerge. One is that contemporary polylanguaging is an ontological act on the part of speakers to empower themselves or to project a desired or appropriate personal image, perhaps in accordance with some kind of network membership but not tied to a particular speech domain or topic in the broader sense given above. The other is that this creation of identity is through semiotic stylisation, which by non-standard means projects new identities or reinforces existing ones, sometimes allowing (rapid) change from one to the other.

      The distinction between the earlier tendency to classify on the basis of language varieties and the current or recent concern to show individuals’ ontological and stylistic deployment of semiotic resources is not watertight. But it does seem to constitute a broad if overlapping shift. Referring again to John Gumperz, Levinson says Gumperz in his early days was:

      interested in how social groups express and maintain their otherness in complex societies. Gumperz started as a dialectologist interested in tracking down the forces of standardization and particularly those of differentiation, and it was the search for where these forces are located that has led him inexorably from the macrosociological to the micro-conversational perspective; it was a long journey from the study of regional standards, to ethnic groups, to social networks, to the activation of social boundaries in verbal interaction, to discourse strategies (Levinson 1997: 1; 2003: 31; and see Gumperz 1982; 1984).

      Levinson points out that Gumperz’s later work on code-switching tried to reconcile the macro- (the group classification effect) with the micro- (the discursively strategic) through analysis of the individual speaker. He also wanted to explain how a speaker’s utterance could be interpreted in different and sometimes conflicting ways among interlocutors depending on their own respective backgrounds. In this attempt, he turned to ‘the careful analysis of prosody, the neglected acoustic cues that might help to explain how we can possibly mean so much by uttering so little’ (Levinson 2003: 33). I recall Gumperz in London in the 1980s describing how the distinctive prosody of immigrant South Asian bus conductors in speaking to passengers sometimes came across as impolite and even hostile, marking and so making them different from the indigenous ‘mainstream’. They were regarded by passengers as not just different speakers of English but as different persons of different behavioural disposition (personal communication).

      A recent example of how the ontological may be at the root

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