Introduction

Work on national and transnational migrations has amply shown that geographic mobility often entails the restructuring of social and linguistic practices of both those who move and those in the host population who come in contact with them (Vigouroux, 2008). Blommaert (2006) has convincingly argued that texts, be they oral or written, may not travel as well as people because of the usual discrepancy between the ecology of signs in which a text is produced and that in which it is received, read, and therefore interpreted.

As ‘circulating entities’ (Latour, 1993, quoted by Urry, 2007: 46), textual artefacts establish relationality between people who would otherwise not be in contact with each other. Semiotic artefacts create social continuity between otherwise discontinuous geographic spaces. Yet, relationality experienced in the here-and-now may have been shaped by previous long-term processes of broader timed-spaced encounters, real and/or imagined, experienced first-hand or entextualized through fictional narratives. Because language is inherently indexical, the activity of making sense of a text is often inseparable from that of categorizing the scribe. In other words, ways of writing become iconic of (projected) ways of being (cf. Gal & Irvine, 1995). The indexical work performed in the activity of reading may be retrospective (e.g. s/he is poorly educated because s/he has ‘poor’ literacy skills) or prospective (e.g. s/he is expected to have ‘poor’ literacy skills because s/he is poorly educated). Work done on social literacy has shown that the activity of reading is shaped by, among other things, overlapping ideologies of what counts as text, as good or bad writing, and as an educated or uneducated scribe (e.g. Barton, 2007; Baynham, 1995; Gee, 1996; Street, 1995). Sociolinguistic work has illustrated how these multi-layered ideologies control people’s access to services, jobs, education, or asylum (Blommaert, 2001). Less attention has been given to the ways scribes may frame the readers' indexical work by conforming to the latter's sociocultural expectations.