Commodification of African languages in linguistic landscapes of rural Northern Cape Province, South Africa
-
Felix Banda
and
Lorato Mokwena
Abstract
English has been portrayed in linguistic landscape literature as the definitive language of commodification. However, using linguistic landscape images from two rural communities in the Northern Cape, South Africa, this article shows how indigenous African languages and localised English are entangled as commodities – whether used independently or in hybridised form – for the sale of various goods and services. We show that the commodification of the languages and hybridised forms speaks to semiotic choices of local authorship of signage and to the influence of local communities’ languaging practices. We propose that commodity status of languages or their linguistic features is variable, since commodified languages or linguistic features as modes derive meanings from the assembled multimodal resources, whose design features as languages or translanguaged “blends”, and their statuses as being in and out of favour, depend on communicative purposes, the kinds of goods and services being marketed and the intended consumers. We conclude that languages, or their linguistic features as modes in signage, should be valued as mobile socio-culturally given and multimodally shaped semiotic resources deployed for communicative impact on consumers in local contexts of use.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- A story at the periphery: Documenting, standardising and reviving Cypriot Arabic
- The use of official languages in electronic communications in the Valencian local administration
- Language use and intergenerational transmission of heritage Veneto in the rural area of Santa Teresa, Brazil
- Yucatec Maya language planning and the struggle of the linguistic standardization process
- Language shift and language revival in Crimea
- Language and religion in Central Ukraine
- A sociolinguistic approach to implicit language attitudes towards historically white English accents among young L1 South African indigenous language speakers
- A sociolinguistic analysis of the use of English loanwords inflected with Arabic morphemes as slang in Amman, Jordan
- Commodification of African languages in linguistic landscapes of rural Northern Cape Province, South Africa
- Book Review
- Critical sociolinguistic research methods: Studying language issues that matter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- A story at the periphery: Documenting, standardising and reviving Cypriot Arabic
- The use of official languages in electronic communications in the Valencian local administration
- Language use and intergenerational transmission of heritage Veneto in the rural area of Santa Teresa, Brazil
- Yucatec Maya language planning and the struggle of the linguistic standardization process
- Language shift and language revival in Crimea
- Language and religion in Central Ukraine
- A sociolinguistic approach to implicit language attitudes towards historically white English accents among young L1 South African indigenous language speakers
- A sociolinguistic analysis of the use of English loanwords inflected with Arabic morphemes as slang in Amman, Jordan
- Commodification of African languages in linguistic landscapes of rural Northern Cape Province, South Africa
- Book Review
- Critical sociolinguistic research methods: Studying language issues that matter
