For years, Jan Blommaert has been advocating an ethnographic approach to the study of contemporary sociolinguistic situations, the complexity of which, he has argued, can no longer be sufficiently described as multilingual or culturally diverse, but which is instead polycentric and superdiverse. He and his team of researchers have been collectively advancing this research paradigm through their innovative sociolinguistic ethnographic work in different parts of the world, from ‘old’ European cities such as London and Ghent, to urban and rural areas of Africa and Asia. Blommaert's latest monograph entitled Ethnography, superdiversity and linguistic landscape: Chronicles of complexity returns to his very own neighborhood and offers an intimate demonstration of the key theoretical and methodological claims that he has been developing over the past decade. As summarized succinctly in the concluding chapter, there are essentially two main arguments in the book. Theoretically, it argues that the linguistic landscape offers a unique lens through which complex sociolinguistic systems can be examined. Consequently, the typical methodological approach to linguistic landscape studies has to incorporate some form of ethnography.
In chapter 1, ‘Introduction: New sociolinguistic landscapes’, Blommaert first presents sociolinguistic superdiversity as an analytical problem and suggests that complexity theory could offer a solution. Drawing upon Steven Vertovec's work, he argues that, during the process of globalization, the increased scale of migration has brought people of vastly different cultural and linguistic backgrounds into close contact with each other, which reveals the limitation of long-standing sociolinguistic concepts, such as speech community. Inspired by complexity theory, Blommaert describes the resulting sociolinguistic system as polycentric, multi-scalar, constantly changing, and highly permeable. In the past, however, what research on linguistic landscapes usually created was only a synchronic snapshot of a multidimensional dynamic system. In other words, the linguistic landscape exemplifies the layered simultaneity of all discourse (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2005), and our challenge is to unpack these layers spatially as well as historically.
In the next two chapters, Blommaert outlines the theoretical as well as methodological framework that aims to take ethnography from ‘the uniquely situated events it describes’ to ‘structural and systematical regularities in interpretation’ (p. 24). While concepts such as intertextuality and interdiscursivity have been well researched, to historicize the linguistic landscape Blommaert turns to Scollon & Scollon's (Reference Scollon and Scollon2004) nexus analysis framework, as it takes into account not only the history of discourse, but also the histories of many other things involved in making discourse happen, including people, things, and space. Chapter 2, ‘Historical bodies and historical space’, discusses how an action, such as crossing the street, is a point at which the historical trajectories of the body, space, and signage (i.e. zebra crossing) converge. Chapter 3, ‘Semiotic and spatial scope’, shifts the attention to the spatial dimension of linguistic landscapes. Following Scollon & Scollon's (Reference Scollon and Scollon2003) geosemiotic framework, Blommaert emphasizes the importance of the physical emplacement of signs. At the same time, he also points out that public space is also layered and segmented, and signage can demarcate space within space socially as well as physically.
Transitioning from the theoretical to the empirical section of the book, chapter 4, ‘Signs, practices, people’, introduces the reader to the linguistic landscape of the author's own neighborhood—Oud-Berchem, Antwerp. Beginning with the ‘snapshot’ approach, Blommaert provides a list of languages visible in the public space of the neighborhood. He categorizes these signs first according to durability (permanent, event-related, and accidental ‘noise’) and then according to functions (landmark, recruitment, information, public statement, and muted signs). This general typology qualitatively informs the subsequent analysis of the social stratification among the languages in Berchem. Dutch, as the language of the most historical residential population as well as the lingua franca between different ethnic groups in the neighborhood, is unsurprisingly the most common language seen on signage. Turkish, the language of the most established immigrant community, often appears with Dutch in bilingual signage, while Polish, Arabic, Cantonese, Spanish, and Portuguese are also brought into the landscape by relatively newer communities of immigrants. This finding though is not solely based on the frequency of occurrences of each language, but informed by the author's own observations as a long-term resident, and his close examination of other semiotic properties of the signage. In this chapter, Blommaert particularly compares a Turkish poster for a party, a Spanish poster of the Association of Ecuadorians for a sports event, and a Polish event poster in an Asian phone shop, and argues that the professional design of the first indexes a more established and resourceful community while the ‘amateurish’ design of the other two index two emergent communities. In addition to these more durable types of signs, Blommaert concludes the chapter with an example of ‘accidental’ signage on a Western Union plastic bag used for garbage. The rare French on the bag indexes the regional mobility of residents between Brussels, where branches of Western Union can be found, and Antwerp, and the global flow of money on another spatial scale.
While chapter 4 provides the typical synchronic description of the linguistic landscape of Berchem informed by ethnographic observations, in chapters 5 and 6, Blommaert demonstrates how this could be further developed into a historicized and spatialized analysis. Chapter 5, ‘Change and transformation’, traces two historical processes that stratified the Turkish community along generational and class lines. As newer waves of immigrants arriving in the neighborhood increased the property values of the older generation of Turkish residents and ethnic business owners, younger generations of Turks have gradually emerged as a visible professional middle-class. The different educational backgrounds and levels of Dutch language proficiency of these two generations of Turkish immigrants were reflected in the degrees in which the shop signs of their businesses depart from the elite Dutch norm. Yet, this ‘ecumenical Dutch’, as Blommaert calls it, brings cohesion and conviviality across socioeconomic class and ethnic lines within the neighborhood, and signals its vitality and improvement. A historicized reading of these signs then yields a different picture of the neighborhood from its popular image as dangerous and poor, which had formerly misled a failed attempt to gentrify the neighborhood. Chapter 6, ‘The Vatican of the diaspora’, turns to the spatial organization of the community by focusing on its sixteen places of worship. While the two older Catholic churches enjoy high visibility with their historical architecture, the three mosques and eleven evangelical churches are housed in ordinary residential buildings or former retail spaces. They are almost invisible to outsiders except for small signs of identification written in the home languages of immigrants. Some of these evangelical churches, however, are connected with vast global networks. As they expand, they move into more visible spaces and widen their scope of activities with bilingual communication. The different types of signage then provide a window into the changing spatial organization of the neighborhood.
Chapter 7, ‘Conclusion: The order of superdiversity’, summarizes the key arguments in the book and suggests their implications for sociolinguistic research and interdisciplinary studies. An ethnographic approach to the linguistic landscape not only demonstrates its potential to move sociolinguistic analysis beyond synchronic description, it also opens it as a potential field of common interests shared among anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists. At the same time, it must be left to the reader to explore how specifically such interdisciplinary collaboration could take place.
Integrating nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2004) and geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2003), Blommaert's book demonstrates the power of ethnography in illuminating the complex historical trajectories and spatial layers laminated within linguistic landscape. While Blommaert's work is based on years of authoethnographic immersion in his own neighborhood, such a clearly theorized framework also leaves room open for other methodological approaches. Tracing the historical trajectory of changes in the neighborhood could incorporate critical discourse analysis of urban planning policies, for example. And the analysis of spatial organization of everyday activities in the neighborhood could include more participant observations such as the visit to the Belgian/Indian restaurant and more interviews with residents. All in all, there seems to be endless potential in which methodological approaches to linguistic landscapes can be innovated. As Blommaert says in the conclusion, any study about a superdiverse sociolinguistic situation is never finished, so we are also looking forward to reading more ethnographic research from Berchem and elsewhere.
