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Jan Blommaert. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. 230pp. Reviewed by Jingyang JIANG This monograph is devoted to globalization from a sociolinguistic perspective, expressed in new forms and meanings. Globalization is perceived as having new intensity, scope and scale, breeding its own peculiar discourse, to be understood against the backdrop of history. The same is valid for sociolinguistics, as its theoretical foundations, vocabulary and instruments used are all new, as can be seen from numerous detailed case studies, a synthesis of the last ten years of the author’s research. In fact, language can no longer be regarded as static or sedentary, but has mobility in time and space. Therefore, linguistic phenomena must be looked at in their social, cultural, political and historical contexts. In a globalizing world, the author argues at the outset, people’s repertoires become more complex and less predictable; phenomena and processes take place in a tremendously complicated world, where linguistic changes live in ever-changing societies. The sociolinguistic world is regarded as a messy new marketplace, where language is often used in a semiotic sense rather than a linguistic sense. Globalization is both positive and negative: it provides opportunities as well as constraints, new possibilities as well as new problems, progress as well as regression, winners as well as losers. While sketching the change of sociolinguistics and its object, the author establishes some key concepts in this opening chapter such as scale, space, mobility and super-diversity. To account for mobility, a central theoretical concern of sociolinguistic resources, three theoretical concepts are proposed: sociolinguistic scale, orders of indexicality, and polycentricity. Scale, which has been used to denote spatial scope, enables us to see sociolinguistic phenomena as stratified images of social structure. It is also argued that indexicality is ordered, and it works as the metapragmatic organizing principle behind the pragmatics of language. Polycentricity is a key feature in human communication, in which more than one center can be distinguished. All three concepts lay emphasis on power, and have spatiotemporal sensitivity. Language should be understood as developing at different scales, on which different orders of indexicality are at work in a polycentric context. In a world of globalization, people tend to move around, both in real geographical space and in symbolic social space. All these processes of mobility have complex connections
Language Problems & Language Planning 36:1 (2012), 88–90. doi 10.1075/lplp.36.1.06jia issn 0272–2690 / e-issn 1569–9889 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
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with language. Scalar patterns of “upward” social mobility often involve moving through layered, scaled regimes of language. For instance, the website “American Accent Now” is a good example to show that language is not just linguistic structure, but bears dense ideological packaging: if you speak with an American accent, you will have job satisfaction, business opportunities, money, etc. The relation between center and periphery, focusing on the issue of locality from the peripheral perspective, is also addressed. For example, “smaller” languages such as Swahili can also be analyzed globally: the author’s analysis of a novel from the “periphery,” written in Swahili, shows how the language has become a vehicle for discourses of translocality and locality. Also, in peripheral areas, “deviant” normativity in language, such as English, can become a productive instrument allowing teachers to work with students with heterogeneous backgrounds. Certain errors recur in the writing of the teachers, so that, interestingly, this so-called grassroots literacy becomes not only a tool of expression, but also an evaluative and normative code to distinguish the degree of correctness. But problems may arise when the locally acquired (probably locally adequate) symbolic resources are exported to other places and spheres of society, crossing different scale-levels. In a world of globalization, the sociolinguistic reality is characterized by mobile resources rather than immobile languages in the traditional sense. Therefore, people’s repertoires are usually “truncated” and “unfinished.” A detailed analysis of the content and genre of e-mail fraud illustrates that even with limited linguistic resources, with the equipment of computer technology and carefully constructed patterns, e-mail messages may seem genuine to those who do not spot their nonnative indexicalities. But their grassroots literacy may finally betray them when they are read by highly literate elites. This view of truncated multilingualism raises theoretical issues of competence and the nature of standardness in a language. It is emphasized that globalization should be understood historically. For example, the ex-voto tablets in Japan seem to be a “flat” juxtaposition of “language” if seen synchronically, yet the different codes represent different historical origins or trajectories. A critical historical approach to resources and competence will compel us to consider inequality — a historical product — from a sociolinguistic perspective. Power causes stratification and categorization of people, and language may be seen as an indexical tool of certain political, historical and geographical positions. Several examples related to immigration are discussed. For example, Joseph, an applicant for refugee status in the UK from Rwanda, had his application rejected because he could not speak Kinyarwanda and therefore was not judged as a genuine Rwandan. At the same time, learning the language of the host country is regarded as a prerequisite to integration for immigrant children if they are to move from the periphery to the center. This is another side of globalization and a case of inequality. © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved
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In the conclusion, the author emphasizes that different sociolinguistics should be established alongside social phenomena and processes, which are changing and dynamic. This implies that not just methods or vocabulary should be readdressed, but also some concepts need to be sacrificed, such as the Saussurean notion of synchrony. To sum up, this book is very inspiring and thought-provoking, and forces the readers to think and to relate language with social reality. Reviewer’s address School of International Studies Zhejiang University CN-310058, Hangzhou, P. R. China
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About the reviewer Jingyang Jiang holds a PhD in linguistics and applied linguistics and is a professor of applied linguistics at Zhejiang University. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and pragmatics.
© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved
