Commentary. A Sociolinguistics of Globalization.2003.

# Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
2003
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA.
Journal of Sociolinguistics 7/4, 2003: 607623
Commentary: A sociolinguistics
of globalization
1
Jan Blommaert
Ghent University, Belgium
1. INTRODUCTION
Johannes Fabian opens his latest book with an essay entitled `With so much
critique and reection around, who needs theory?' (Fabian 2001). The title and
the argument are inspiring and capture the spirit of our times: we live in an age
that of globalization, so to speak in which la pensee and careful analysis have
come under pressure from various sides, yet are more than ever necessary.
There is, on the one hand, pressure from `the eld', where urgent calls for
immediately applicable solutions to burning problems become louder and
louder. And on the other hand, there is pressure from a growing anti-
intellectualism articulated by politicians, media and other anti-elitist elites.
My argument here, much like Fabian's, is built on the old adage that there is
nothing as practical as good theory. Faced with deep transformations in society
which demonstrate the failure of older paradigms, we need not to abandon ship
but to reconstruct our paradigms, improve them and expand them (Wallerstein
2001). As announced by Nikolas Coupland in his introductory remarks, when
sociolinguistics attempts to address globalization, it will need new theory. The
rst phase of the process is, therefore, the laborious and often unrewarding
phase of trial-and-error: see what works, dene topics, units and elds, and try
some analysis. Two issues are on the table. First I want to comment on the
dierent papers in this issue and try to distil some general points, useful for what
I believe should be our ambition here: to start developing a sociolinguistics of
globalization. Second, I will add two suggestions for incorporating particular
theoretical instruments into such an exercise: the notion of the world system and
that of second linguistic relativity.
2. NECESSARY BUILDING BLOCKS
In general, all the papers in this issue address matters of scale: the macro and the
micro, the global and the local, the dierent levels at which `language' can be
said to exist and at which sociolinguistic processes operate. Various papers treat,
for instance, the relationship between a `world language' English and local
BLOMMAERT 608
# Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003
speech repertoires or speech communities (House; Heller; Pennycook; Meyerho
and Niedzielski), emphasizing the dierent ways in which English permeates
speech habits, propagates and organizes genres, or reorganizes functional
hierarchies for languages. The scalar processes and phenomena are becoming
less predictable and more chaotic and complicated, it seems, in the era of
globalization. The paper by Thurlow and Jaworski shows how airlines produce
self-imaginings of globality while remaining `based' in one country or place; and
Machin and van Leeuwen discuss the ways in which particular discourses of
femininity and sexuality get spread globally in the context of media industries.
In each of the cases, we see a questioning of the ways in which particular
situated events, genres, or styles connect to worldwide patterns and processes.
And in both cases, we see how hard it becomes to separate and order `small'
versus `large' processes. We are facing `small' genres that are deeply connected
to very specic audiences and forms of commodication (both genres address an
auent middle class). But they both explicitly articulate a global reach and use
similar modes of expression wherever they occur: they explicitly voice and
identify globalization as an identity issue for their readership. And yet, they
are simultaneously oriented towards national elites and both appeal to and
emphatically ag `national' (or `national-cultural') characteristics. So dierent
scales seem to overlap and combine in one genre, and it is hard to determine
which scale would hierarchically dominate the others.
Scale is denitely the keyword in any analysis of globalization. The term
globalization itself suggests a process of lifting events from one level to a higher
one, a global one, or vice versa, and a sociolinguistics of globalization will
denitely need to explain the various forms of interconnectedness between
levels and scales of sociolinguistic phenomena. The complexity and simultaneity
we are facing is a challenge, not a danger. But we need to be more precise, and I
think two qualications are in order.
First, we need to move from Languages to language varieties and repertoires
(Hymes 1996: 67; Silverstein 1998). What is globalized is not an abstract
Language, but specic speech forms, genres, styles, and forms of literacy
practice. And the way in which such globalized varieties enter into local
environments is by a reordering of the locally available repertoires and the
relative hierarchical relations between ingredients in the hierarchy. Socio-
linguistic globalization results in a reorganization of the sociolinguistic strati-
graphy, a process which does not necessarily lead to a new solid and lasting
hierarchy but may best be seen as an ongoing, highly volatile process cross-cut,
again, by matters of scale.
The point is forcefully made by Machin and van Leeuwen, who emphasize
the domain-related spread of global registers rather than languages. What
Cosmopolitan does sociolinguistically is to spread a particular discourse on
femininity, success, beauty and sexuality. This particular discourse is globalized
and it displays some degree of uniformity in each of the 40-plus local areas of
circulation investigated by Machin and van Leeuwen. But it is not a wholesale
A SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF GLOBALIZATION 609
import of a complete, new, set of ideologies of femininity it is niched.
Pennycook's Rip Slyme rappers insert globalized slang into an idiosyncratic
popular-cultural brew: a particular niche. Heller shows how àuthenticity' and
locality become commodities in a new, niched, globalized market. Conversely,
the argument developed by House, and Meyerho and Niedzielski focuses on the
reorganizing eect of ìnternational' speech varieties (House uses `lingua franca'
as shorthand for a complex set of particular speech types and genres performed
in English) on local repertoires. Again we see that (American) English does not
eliminate what was around, it does not bury the local languages, but it enters
the repertoire of language users as a resource that fulls both pragmatic
functions lingua franca functions, a certain degree of vernacularization
and metapragmatic ones. It marks the variety o against others and creates new
balances of `value' for the dierent varieties in the repertoire.
2
So again we see
that the impact is niched and restricted to particular groups (networks,
communities of practice, etc.) in societies. Therefore, nding the particular
niche on which the globalized ows eventually have an impact may be a crucial
part of our sociolinguistic assignment: it would oer us a rst clue about what
globalized sociolinguistic phenomena mean to identiable groups of people, and
about what these people can actually do with it.
It will also oer us deeper insights into the specic role of particular mediating
institutions in the new economies that appear to characterize globalized ows.
Almost all the papers in this issue mention such mediators: rap artists and the
music industry (Pennycook), international English training programs (House),
airlines (Thurlow and Jaworski), tourism and service industries (Heller) and the
printed press (Machin and van Leeuwen). A realistic look at globalization
processes involves questions about whose genres are being globalized, by
whom, for whom, when and how? Not everybody appears to be part of the
active globalization processes, but particular mediating actors are, and Heller's
emphasis on the new economies as driving forces behind the increased commo-
dication of language varieties and discourses may oer us an interesting
heuristics of research.
A second but closely related qualication is that we need to address the
language-ideological level in these processes. The key to understanding the
processes of `globalized' insertion of varieties into newly stratied orders of
indexicality, is to discover what such reorderings of repertoires actually mean,
and represent, to people. There is ample evidence for the assumption that
language ideologies aect language change, including forms of transformation
now captured under the label `globalized' (Schieelin, Woolard and Kroskrity
1998; Blommaert 1999a; Kroskrity 2000; Gal and Woolard 2001). And there
is a lot of evidence for that in the papers as well. The functional division
suggested by House between `languages for communication' and `languages for
identication' is a metapragmatic dichotomization that allocates specic indexi-
calities to particular speech varieties. The case is similar in Meyerho and
Niedzielski's paper: vernacularization is a metapragmatic complex conveying all
BLOMMAERT 610
kinds of indexical meanings (including the disappearance of the Àmericanness'
of particular sociolinguistic items). In Heller's Canadian cases, language shifts
from a marker of ethnolinguistic identity to an economically interesting `skill' or
a commodity. Rip Slyme's hip-hop slang is pure indexicality I'll come back to it
below. The ideological, metapragmatic aspects of language usage lead us to an
understanding of meaning and function of `new' ingredients in repertoires: they
allow us to understand which functions people assign to such items, and why.
In practical terms, they may for instance oer us an understanding of why non-
native English of the kind discussed by House often meets considerable
interpersonal tolerance for deviations from `standard' English in pronunciation,
syntax, lexis and style.
3
Let us take both elements together: we have to deal with niched socio-
linguistic phenomena related to the insertion of particular varieties of language
in existing repertoires, and also with the language-ideological load both guiding
the process and being one of its results. Now, one of the things we see in almost
all the papers is how people create semiotic opportunity in globalization processes
which, as noted above, may productively be framed in the larger picture of the
new economies. This is most outspoken in Pennycook's Rip Slyme case, but
Thurlow and Jaworski's airline network maps are also a case in point, and so
are House's globalized non-native English-using executives and Heller's heritage
tourism workers. They all manage to assign specic new functions to socio-
linguistic items (either `global' items or `local' ones), and accomplish specic,
targeted (globalized) goals with them; often these forms of identity work could
not be done without the potential oered by globalization.
Let us take a closer look at the Rip Slyme case discussed by Alastair
Pennycook. We have here a hip-hop ensemble who use phonetically `nativized'
American English hip-hop slang in a peculiar blend a `fusion' would perhaps
be a better term with Japanese, thus constructing a genred semiotic product:
rap lyrics. All kinds of functions are accomplished simultaneously here what
we see is a bundle of divergent indexical meanings packaged in one speech
event (cf. Woolard 1998; Maryns and Blommaert 2001; Blommaert 2003b and
in press b discuss similar examples from Tanzania and South Africa). Further-
more, the packaging of indexicalities is rmly anchored in, and enabled by,
globalization. The Japanese rap stars manage (at least) to: (a) produce a set of
propositionally organized `meanings'; (b) realize a particular genre which is
both local and transnational: Japanese versions of rap; (c) suggest locality
through the distinct `Japaneseness' of the lyrics; (d) connect with transnational
generic, cultural and social networks identied as hip-hop culture with Afro-
American rap music as its `center'; (e) appeal to, and thus construct a particular
subcultural community of hip-hop fans in Japan (in itself a typical globalized
sociocultural phenomenon); and (f ) display their own knowledgeability and
virtuosity in the stylistically elaborated genre they attempt to realize. In sum,
the particular `globalized' linguistic and cultural-stylistic blend allows the
semiotization of unique indexicalities that point towards the local-global
dynamics characterizing and contextualizing the cultural practice of hip-hop. It
thus allows the construction of a particular commodied variety of language, a
nicely globalized and globalizable language product. Importantly, at this level of
language usage, scale proves to be an issue again. We see no fundamental
hierarchical dierence between local and global indexicalities: they occur
simultaneously. Metaphors such as the ìnvasion' of English into Japanese, let
alone linguistic and cultural ìmperialism' or worldwide lingua-cultural homo-
genization McDonaldization are obviously inadequate for a description of this
fantastic semiotic creativity, which allows language users opportunities to
represent cultural, social and historical conditions of being.
4
It is an important accomplishment if we manage to see sociolinguistic
globalization in these terms: as a matter of particular language varieties entering
the repertoires of particular groups, creating new semiotic opportunities and
commodities for members of such groups and indeed constructing them as
groups. We can now move on and focus on mobility as a key feature of sign
complexes in globalization: the fact that language varieties, texts, images travel
across time and space, and that this is a journey across repertoires and sets of
indexicalities attached to ingredients of repertoires. Asociolinguistics of globaliza-
tion is necessarily a sociolinguistics of mobility. In what follows, I will oer two
theoretical suggestions for capturing the nature and structure of such socio-
linguistic processes of mobility. The rst one has to do with what we understand
by `global' in `globalization', the second one has to do with how we can conceive
of the processes of insertion of `globalized' material into repertoires.
3. THE WORLD SYSTEM AS CONTEXT
It is a regrettable feature of much discourse on globalization that it seems to
present globalization as the creation of worldwide uniformity. Processes are
often represented generically, as a universal shift in the nature of societies,
semiosis or identities. Terms such as `global ow' suggest a ow across the whole
of the globe, a generalized spread of sociocultural and economic patterns, a new
universalism. In our eld of study, some recent work on discourse in the
late-modern world falls prey to this. Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999), for
instance, suggest that the conditions for the production and circulation of
discourse (in general, without qualication) have changed in the present world.
Both the nature of signs and discourses as well as their distribution, access and
eects have undergone substantial transformations, and `discourse' is now a
dierent concept. I would suggest that this is a description of discourse genres in
late-modern Britain, but not a general theory of discourse in the world. What is
seen as `late-modern discourse' is a new genre, a new variety of language,
spread across the globe in the ways mentioned above: as a specic genre, and
across specic groups of people in specic contexts. The intricate and layered
semiotics we encounter in Cosmopolitan is a specic register, as Machin and
van Leeuwen rightly emphasize; Pennycook's Rip Slyme lyrics are also a
BLOMMAERT 612
generically regimented, highly specic, subcultural format, and so are the
airline network maps discussed by Thurlow and Jaworski. Late-modern dis-
course of the type discussed by Chouliaraki and Fairclough thus needs to be
understood in relation to the rest of the semiotic landscape in which it enters
and circulates. I will come back to this below.
We have to realize that the world is not a uniform space and that
consequently, globalization processes need to be understood against the
background of the world system. This world system, as Immanuel Wallerstein
has extensively argued, is a system built on inequality, on particular,
asymmetric divisions of labor between `core regions' and `peripheries', with
`semiperipheries' in between (e.g. Wallerstein 1983, 2001). Thus, the system is
marked by both the existence of separate spaces (e.g. states) and deep
interconnectedness of the dierent spaces, often, precisely, through the exist-
ence of worldwide elites.
5
Inequality, not uniformity, organizes the ows and the
particular nature of such ows across the `globe'. Consequently, whenever
sociolinguistic items travel across the globe, they travel across structurally
dierent spaces, and will consequently be picked up dierently in dierent
places. The interconnectedness of the various parts of the system creates the
previously mentioned issues of scale and levels of analysis: what occurs in a
particular sovereign state can and must be explained by reference to state-level
dynamics, but needs to be set simultaneously against the background of
substate and superstate dynamics, and the hierarchical relations between the
various levels are a matter of empirical exploration, not positing.
Globalization implies that developments at the `top' or the core of the world
system have a wide variety of eects at the `bottom' or the periphery of that
system. For instance, developments in the eld of sophisticated, multimedial and
multimodal internet communication have eects on other, less sophisticated
forms of literacy. I will illustrate this below. Important in all of this is that the
dierent levels seem to operate at dierent speeds. Fernand Braudel's famous
distinctions between slow time, intermediate time, and fast time may be a useful
metaphor here (Braudel 1969; see Blommaert 1999d: 36 for comments).
Braudel rst observes that historical developments are of dierent orders a
climate change (slow time) is something dierent from an economic conjunc-
ture (intermediate time) or a battle (fast time) but he adds that people usually
only observe the fast and (parts of ) the intermediate developments, and that
historical processes are therefore not necessarily accessible in similar ways to
the individual's awareness and agency. One may have degrees of consciousness
about and agency over `fast' and ìntermediate' processes, while the slow, macro
processes are an invisible (yet very real) context, not open to individual agency.
A sociolinguistics of globalization will need a holistic and world-systemic view
in which local events are read locally as well as translocally, and in which the
world system with its structural inequalities is a necessary (but not self-explanatory)
context in which language occurs and operates. In my view, this is the main
challenge of globalization to intellectual endeavors such as sociolinguistics,
which claims to contribute to an understanding of society through an under-
standing of language.
6
It is precisely the fragmented but interconnected nature
of the world system that accounts for the niched character of sociolinguistic
globalization: it occurs not everywhere, but in particular dierent yet inter-
connected places and not in others, and this is a structural and systemic matter
with deep historical roots, not a coincidental one. It is historical, and that means
that we have to situate globalization processes in a wider picture of structural
`becoming', of processes of worldwide inequality that derive their systemic
nature from the long history in which they t. We are never investigating
synchronicity, but always a particular stage in a historical process. In World
Systems analysis, emphasis is placed on issues of scale, layering, and dierential
development within a system dominated by interactions and mutual (though
dierential) inuences. This format looks to me to be a highly applicable
framework for sociolinguistic investigation.
For a sociolinguistics of globalization within a World Systems perspective,
I would suggest that emphasis is needed on the relative value of semiotic
resources value often being connected to translocally realizable functions,
the capacity to perform adequately in and through language in a wide variety of
social and geographical spaces and across linguistic economies (something often
attributed to English, but also to literacy and internet communication). This
capacity is the capacity for mobility, and this emphasis on value as a crucial
aspect of function is due to the fact that globalization raises new issues of
inequality, both locally and translocally, precisely with respect to the capacity
for mobility of resources. Specically, the `weight' of social and cultural
forms of capital across spaces (geographical as well as social) appears to vary
enormously. What works in one place does not appear to work elsewhere, and
the kinds of òws' usually associated with globalization processes involve
important shifts in value and a reallocation of functions (Appadurai 1990;
also Bourdieu 1990). When people move across physical as well as social space
(and both are usually intertwined), their language practices undergo re-
evaluation at every step of the trajectory and the functions of their repertoire
are redened. And conversely, movements of others, as in Heller's heritage
tourism, aect the value and function of local speech repertoires. (One can note,
reecting on Heller's case study, that globalization can increase the value of
otherwise minorized varieties; the direction of value changes again appears to
be unpredictable.) This, to me, looks like a prime target for a sociolinguistics of
globalization, and the most adequate way to address it is by looking at the
relative (and shiftable) value of linguistic practices as a component of their
function. This is the topic of the next section.
4. SECOND LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY AND GLOBALIZATION
Let me now introduce a second concept, useful in my opinion for analyses of
sociolinguistic globalization phenomena: Dell Hymes' notion of `second linguistic
BLOMMAERT 614
relativity'. Dell Hymes' voluminous oeuvre is well known and recognized as
foundational to sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Yet, some of the
theoretical wealth of his work remains largely untapped. A central concern in
his work is with function, and it is in this respect that he developed his notion of
second relativity. The argument (originally presented in Hymes 1966 but
recapitulated in Hymes 1980 and 1996) is of course cast in a performance-
view of language, emphasizing variability and thus paying tribute to Whorf 's
`rst relativity'. While indispensable to Hymes' view of language, Whorf 's
relativity of structure assumed stability in function (`the inference of dierential
eect on world view assumed equivalent role in shaping world view', 1966:
116). This is problematic, for:
. . . the role of language may dier from community to community; . . . in general the
functions of language in society are a problem for investigation, not postulation . . . If
this is so, then the cognitive signicance of a language depends not only on structure,
but also on patterns of use. (Hymes 1966: 116)
And consequently:
the type [of relativity] associated with Sapir and Whorf in any case is underlain by a
more fundamental kind. The consequences of the relativity of the structure of
language depend on the relativity of the function of language. Take, for example,
the common case of multilingualism. Inferences as to the shaping eect of some one
language on thought and the world must be qualied immediately in terms of the place
of the speaker's languages in his biography and mode of life. Moreover, communities
dier in the role they assign to language itself in socialization, acquisition of cultural
knowledge and performance. . . . This second type of linguistic relativity, concerned
with the functions of languages, has more than a critical, cautionary import. As a
sociolinguistic approach, it calls attention to the organization of linguistic features in
social interaction. Work has begun to show that description of fashions of speaking
can reveal basic cultural values and orientations. The worlds so revealed are not the
ontological and epistemological worlds of physical relationships, of concern to Whorf,
but worlds of social relationships. What are disclosed are not orientations toward
space, time, vibratory phenomena, and the like, but orientations towards persons,
roles, statuses, rights and duties, deference and demeanor . . . (Hymes 1996: 4445;
also Hymes 1980: 38)
7
One will be reminded of the comments on indexicalities and language ideologies
made above. We will return to this further on. At this point, Hymes' emphasis
on the problematic nature of language functions needs to be underscored:
according to Hymes, such functions have been taken for granted by linguists
while in fact they should be one of the foci of empirical investigation. Even if
language forms are similar or identical, the way in which they get inserted in
social actions may dier signicantly, and consequently there may be huge
dierences in what these (similar or identical) forms do in real societies.
Hymes thus shifts the focus of attention away from `linguistic systems' to
`sociolinguistic systems': systems that revolve around the concept (classic in
pre-War American linguistic anthropology) of `fashions/ways of speaking'.
What we need to investigate is the way in which language actually works in
societies, and function is the key to this.
This means, paradoxically at rst sight, that we shall need more ethnography
alongside all kinds of other approaches as part of a sociolinguistics of globaliza-
tion. Ethnography will allow us to unravel the details of how language varieties
and discourses work for people, what they accomplish (or fail to) in practice,
and how this ts into local economies of resources. It also allows us to check, at
the lowest level, how larger patterns and developments are set down in the
actual realities of language usage. We obviously need studies of the dierent
levels and scales studies of linguistic variation, of history and policy but it
would be a fallacy to regard ethnography merely as `the study of small things'.
It is an indispensable ingredient of a toolkit for the study of big things.
The impact of this relativity of function on sociolinguistic investigation is
huge, as is its critical dimension. Part of linguistic inequality in any society
and consequently, part of much social inequality depends on the incapacity of
speakers to accurately perform certain discourse functions on the basis of
available resources. Language functions and the ways in which they are
performed by people are constantly assessed and evaluated: function and
value are impossible to separate. Consequently, dierences in the use of language
are quickly, and quite systematically, translated into inequalities between
speakers (the key argument of Hymes 1996; see also Blommaert 2001a and
Maryns and Blommaert 2002 for illustrations). This observation holds for what
language does in stratied societies and it is central to, for example, Bernstein's
and Bourdieu's arguments on language; it accounts for almost any dynamics of
prestige and stigma in language, and sociolinguistics has built a remarkable
track record of descriptions of such processes in single and synchronically
viewed societies or speech communities. But there is more, as soon as we start
looking at globalization.
Globalization results in intensied forms of ow movements of objects,
people and images causing forms of contact and dierence perhaps not new in
substance but new in scale and perception. Consequently, key sociolinguistic
concepts such as speech community (always carrying problematic suggestions
of closure, synchronicity or achronicity, and homogeneity) become more and
more dicult to handle empirically (for an early critique see Hymes 1968;
Silverstein 1998; see Rampton 1998 for an excellent survey and discussion).
Even more disconcerting is the fact that the presupposability of functions for
linguistic resources becomes ever more problematic, because the linguistic
resources travel across time, space and dierent regimes of indexicalities and
organizations of repertoires. The functions that particular ways of speaking will
perform, and the functions of the particular linguistic resources by means of
which they are accomplished, become less and less a matter of surface
inspection, and some of the biggest errors (and injustices) may be committed
by simply projecting locally valid functions onto the ways of speaking of people
BLOMMAERT 616
who are involved in transnational ows. In our work on asylum seekers'
narratives, for example, we found that a particular kind of anecdotal sub-
narrative performed by asylum seekers (`home narratives') were easily dis-
missed by Belgian ocials as anecdotes that did not matter, whereas for asylum
seekers such anecdotes contained crucial contextualizing information without
which their story could be easily misunderstood (Blommaert 2001a; Maryns
and Blommaert 2001). Whenever discourses travel across the globe, what is
carried with them is their shape, but their value, meaning or function do not
often travel along. They are a matter of uptake, they have to be granted by
others, on the basis of the dominant indexical frames and hierarchies.
The fact is that functions performed by particular ways of speaking and
particular resources in one place can be altered in another place, and that in
such instances the `value' of these linguistic instruments is changed. The
English acquired by urban Africans may oer them considerable prestige and
access to middle-class identities in African towns. It may be an èxpensive'
resource to them. But the same variety of English, when spoken in London by
the same Africans, may be a crucial object of stigmatization and may qualify
them as members of the lower strata of society. What is èxpensive' in Lusaka or
Nairobi may be very `cheap' in London or New York. What people can actually
accomplish with these resources is likewise aected. `Good' and status-carrying
English in the periphery may be `bad' and stigma-carrying English in the core of
the world system. The opposite can, of course, also occur. Rampton's work on
the delicate and complex reshuing of linguistic and stylistic repertoires in
contemporary multi-ethnic peer groups has brought us a long way in under-
standing the relativity (and the renegotiability) of associated `values' to lin-
guistic modes of conduct caused by diaspora or globalization ows in general
(Rampton 1995, 2001; Harris, Leung and Rampton 2001). Social identities and
the symbolic forms through which they are agged become more and more
deterritorialized detached from conventional places and trans-idiomatic
detached from òwnership rights' over particular symbolic forms (Jacquemet
2000; Harris, Leung and Rampton 2001; Maryns and Blommaert 2001). A
careful re-reading of some outstanding sociolinguistic work along the lines of
shiftable and relative value may yield interesting insights in the same direction.
What this means for sociolinguistics, I believe, is that we need to revisit our
ways of addressing formfunction relations, probably foregrounding them if we
want to come to terms with globalization as a sociolinguistic phenomenon. And
in doing so, it may be wise to keep in mind that globalization also results in
global hierarchies in communication aecting existing local hierarchies and
value-scales. As said above, developments at the top have eects at the bottom
and vice versa. Consequently, a lot of what happens to linguistic resources in
terms of value attribution is beyond the reach of individuals for it happens at
macro-levels. It is determined in the Marxian sense of the term (see Williams
1977). In identifying formfunction relationships, a concept such as determina-
tion probably deserves more attention than has hitherto been given to it for it
may be indispensable for an accurate understanding of voice against the
background of the world system. The `limits of awareness' of language users
(the term is borrowed from Silverstein 2001) may be precisely the take-o point
for a sociolinguistics of globalization, for it may be the point where societies
come down on individuals' potential to decide and to act to produce voice so as
to be heard and read. The more we look at this point, the more dierences and
inequalities will appear, and explanations of these will force sociolinguistics to
come to terms with, or even contribute to, the construction of theories of society
in the world system.
5. WRITING IN/FROM THE MARGIN (OF THE WORLD SYSTEM)
Instead of a conclusion I will oer a brief analytic vignette illustrating some of
the theoretical points made earlier. I will discuss a small sample of writing
produced in sub-Saharan Africa the periphery or margin of the world
system but lifted out of its context-of-production and moved into a
transnational speech network involving the African author and an addressee
from the core of the world system (the `West'). The text is a handwritten letter
addressed to me by a 16-year-old girl from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The girl,
Victoria (a pseudonym), is the daughter of a family I stayed with during eld
trips to Tanzania, and I rst met her when she was two years old. Her father
is an academic, and Victoria was in secondary school when she wrote the
letter. Secondary education in Tanzania is delivered through the medium of
English, while the majority of the pupils (and teachers) have either Kiswahili
or other African languages as their mother tongue(s). In primary school,
Kiswahili is the medium of instruction and pupils are taught English as a
subject. Consequently, at the age of 16, Victoria would have had several years
of `deep' exposure to English. The girl is denitely a member of the local
middle class, a class which uses prociency in English as an emblem of class
belonging (Blommaert 1999c). It is, in other words, an èxpensive' resource in
Dar es Salaam.
Let us now take a look at what, and how, she writes. What follows is a
transliteration of the handwritten version, in which line breaks and graphic
organization are rendered as precisely as possible (all names, except mine, are
pseudonyms).
BLOMMAERT 618
20/9/1999
Dear !
Uncle Jan
How are you? I hope you
The main aim of this letter is to tell
you that, here in Tanzania, we have
remember you so much. Dady, Mum, Uzuri
Patrick, Furaha, and Veronica and other members
like Kazili, Helena, Bahati, Fatima and
and others. Other people forget to write for you
a letter, geat all your family I don't
have much to say. Sorry if you will
came Tanzania we will go to beach
BYe BYe From VICTORIA MTANGULA
A few comments are in order. Using a punitive reading, the rst thing that
strikes the linguist-observer is the frequency of rather severe errors at the level
of grammar (`we have remember you so much', `to write for you', ìf you will
came Tanzania'), as well as at the level of punctuation (absence of periods),
orthography (`geat all your family', the alteration of upper and lower case
symbols in the concluding line), narrative style and control over literary
conventions (the awkward list of names dominating the letter, the separation
of `Dear!' and Ùncle Jan', the unnished sentence Ì hope you'). Victoria
struggles with English literacy, her control over the medium is incomplete. At
the same time, her act of writing can best be seen as `language display' in the
sense of Eastman and Stein (1993): the mobilization of the best possible
resources for a particular act of communication. Given the particular relation-
ship I had with Victoria (and given the references to the other family members
not writing to me), the act of writing is loaded with indexicalities, constructing a
relational identity of a `good girl', someone who behaves and performs well, is
probably among the best pupils in her age-group, and is worthy of
compliments from her European Uncle. Her letter also indexicalizes all
kinds of things with regard to writing practices and the use of particular
codes (English) within a local repertoire. In short, Victoria tries to exploit the
semiotic opportunities oered by globalized sociolinguistic phenomena.
But she does so under world-systemic constraints. Victoria mobilizes the
maximum-status resources within her reach: the best possible (school) English,
the language of status and upward social mobility in Tanzania. And it is in that
respect that the errors become important: as soon as the document moves
across the world system and gets transplanted from a repertoire in the periphery
to a repertoire in the core of the world system, the resources used by Victoria
would fail to index elite status and prestige. The value of this variety of written
English in Europe is deeply dierent from the value it has in Dar es Salaam. The
indexicalities of success and prestige, consequently, only work within a local
economy of signs, that of Tanzania, an economy in which even a little bit of
English could pass as good, prestige-bearing English.
We are witnessing, in the process of intercultural/international transfer, a
shift in indexical and referential aspects of signs from one `placed' system to
another. It is at this point that the critical rereading of Hymes' second
relativity may be added to recent insights on indexicality and linguistic
ideologies. The reallocation of functions for resources proceeds along index-
ical and referential lines: we allocate functions to resources on the basis of
what we believe to understand by interpreting and contextualizing
indexical and referential meanings of signs. We also see huge discrepancies
between what linguistic resources and ways of using them mean in local
environments that of grassroots literacy in Africa and what they mean
in other, transnational environments in which they get inserted. The kind of
literacy shown here is, I believe, widespread in Africa, and it characterizes
much of what exists in the way of literacy in the sub-elite strata of many
African societies (Blommaert 1999b, 2001b, 2003a, in press a). In these
societies the periphery of the world system it may be quite sucient to
communicate adequately; in fact, it may even be an object of status and
prestige. But lifted out of the periphery and placed into the order of
indexicalities of the core of the world system, these forms of literacy lose
their functions and receive new ones. From a rather high rank in one's own
hierarchies of signs and communication practices, they tumble down to the
lowest ranks of the hierarchies of someone else.
Consequently, we are facing `placed resources' here: resources that are
functional in one particular place but can become dysfunctional as soon as
they are moved into other places. The process of mobility creates dierence in
value, for the resources are being reallocated dierent functions. The indexical
links between signs and modes of communication, and social value scales
allowing, for example, identity construction, status attribution and so forth
these indexical links are severed and new ones are projected onto the signs and
practices. Particular linguistic resources, often those of people in the peripheries
of the world system, do not travel well.
8
I would claim that such reallocation processes are central to the kinds of
mobility that characterize globalization: they dene how mobile resources are or
can become and how much opportunity particular resources will oer their
users in various places across the world. Consequently, a sociolinguistics of
globalization should look carefully into such processes of reallocation, the
remapping of forms over function, for it may be central to the various forms
of inequality that also characterize globalization processes. For this we need
BLOMMAERT 620
careful ethnographic work, sustained by a social theory which takes the world
system as the highest level of contextualization.
NOTES
1. The main part of this paper is a written version of a lecture given at Cardi
University, April 2002, during a workshop of the Leverhulme Trust project on
Language and Global Communication. I thank the participants of the workshop, as
well as those of the BAAL-panel in Cardi (September 2002) on which this issue is
based, for rewarding discussions on the ideas outlined here. I substantially rewrote
the rst version during my stay at the Department of Anthropology of the University
of Chicago, JanuaryMarch 2003, probably the most generous and stimulating
research environment I have ever seen. Finally, Nikolas Coupland provided excellent
suggestions and some important caveats that have greatly helped me nalize this
text.
2. House perceptively notes that this observation ìnvalidates the claim that English is
an imperialist ``killer language'' which English, we may ask'. The Linguistic Rights
issue, as well as issues of language death or attrition, become something completely
dierent indeed as soon as `Languages' are replaced by language varieties (see e.g.
Silverstein 1998).
3. I would argue, however, that the story is considerably more complex than the
distinction between `language for communication' and `language for identication'
oered by House. The kind of tolerance for errors in non-native English usage is
driven by an ideological perception of this language usage as ìnstrumental'. Precisely
this kind of usage of language denes the context and identies the participants as
people who subscribe to this functionalist-referential ideology of language-in-a-
business-setting. See Milroy and Milroy (1985) and Gal and Woolard (2001) for
general discussions.
4. Mufwene (2002) provides an insightful discussion of this based on language loss and
creolization. He observes, tongue-in-cheek, that `McDonald's outlets around the
world operate in the local lingua francas, if not their vernaculars' (2002: 33).
McDonaldization thus understood acquires a very dierent, more accurate meaning:
the process is exactly that described by Machin and van Leeuwen with regard to
Cosmopolitan.
5. Thus, the existence of such worldwide `globalized' elites (the readership of
Cosmopolitan, or customers of McDonald's for instance) does not alter the center
periphery structure of the world system, but often reinforces inequalities both locally
and translocally.
6. I am surprised by the often myopic nature of social-theoretical reections in our
eld. Scholars enthusiastically refer to social theorists such as Habermas and
Giddens theorists of the structure and development of First World societies but
hardly ever to theory that addresses the world system, (under)development and
dependency issues. Wallerstein has already been mentioned, but one could also
think of, for example, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, Giovanni Arrighi and
others, scholars whose work consistently emphasizes the interconnectedness of
processes across dierent parts of the world, the eects of developments in one part
on other parts, and the structural dierences in value of resources from dierent
parts of the world system. It is social theory that addresses the world, not just one
part of it.
7. The dierence between `real' world and `social' world as directions of orientation in
indexicality is somewhat overstated by Hymes in this quote. Work such as that of
John Haviland and Charles Goodwin has demonstrated how both are inextricably
linked. Hanks (1990) and Gumperz and Levinson (1996) provide excellent
discussions of this issue.
8. In another paper, we called this phenomenon `pretextual gaps': gaps that originate
when the resources people have fail to match the criteria of expected resources
(Maryns and Blommaert 2002). The example given here is merely meant to
illustrate such dierences in pretextualities, and I cannot address intricate issues
of actual contextual displacement here, the point here being one about potential
value rather than actual value. For fuller discussions, see Blommaert (2003a,
2003b).
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Address correspondence to:
Jan Blommaert
Ghent University
Department of African Languages and Cultures
Rozier 44
B-9000 Ghent
Belgium
jan.blommaert@ugent.be

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