The sociolinguistics of globalization (review)

For many who are used to a more moderately scoped sociolinguistics—for example, sound shifts in Martha’s Vineyard or linguistic markers of identity in drag queen performances—a sociolinguistics of globalization might appear to be overreaching itself. Isn’t a sociolinguistics of globalization a bit like a linguistic theory of everything? The point of this book, by contrast, is to raise the question of how we examine local sociolinguistic interactions within conditions of globalization. This is not, then, one of those books attempting a global picture of world languages, looking, for example, at languages in competition, language death, or language policies. Nor is it yet another book about global English. Indeed, Jan Blommaert is highly critical of work that continues to deal with these large reifications of languages as entities in competition with each other, and which assumes the ‘spatial “fixedness” of people, language and places’ (44). The ‘linguistic–ideological dimension’ (44) to these views of fixed languages and world views are anathema to the analyses of mobile linguistic resources needed for a sociolinguistics of globalization.

Despite the apparently macro focus of a sociolinguistics of globalization, this book eschews these ways of thinking about language, of constructing languages as entities in competition: we need to move away from thinking in terms of ‘linguistically defined objects’ called languages (5). Such an enterprise entails several dimensions: a critical understanding of the forces of globalization, for which B draws particularly on the work of Emmanuel Wallerstein; a historical focus that locates sociolinguistic encounters within temporal trajectories; and an understanding of mobility as key to an understanding of language within current conditions of global life. ‘Mobility is the great challenge: it is the dislocation of language and language events from the fixed position in time and space attributed to them by a more traditional linguistics and sociolinguistics’ (21). It is this sense of mobility coupled with the idea of language resources, B argues, that is crucial for any sociolinguistic analyses within globalization.

Indeed at the heart of the book is an argument for a major shift in how we think about languages. The sociolinguistic world, argues B, is one in which language becomes dislodged from its traditional places and functions. We need therefore to ‘focus on mobile resources rather than immobile languages’ (197). A sociolinguistics of globalization (in spite of the title, B insists this is a not the sociolinguistics of globalization), therefore, looks at globalization in terms of the inequalities and mobilities it engenders and the roles that language resources, and people’s repertoires of resources, play within this shifting, uneven world. Linguistic inequality, argues B, ‘is organized around concrete resources, not around languages in general but specific registers, varieties, genres’ (47). It is the idea of mobility that drives this book, leading to strong critiques of several areas of linguistic and sociolinguistic orthodoxy. Primary among these is the critique of Saussurean synchrony, or what B calls a sociolinguistics of distribution (as opposed to a sociolinguistics of mobility), those snapshots of language stuck in a specific time and place. Here B takes up the idea of scales, arguing that space needs to be understood not as a horizontal plane over which languages are distributed, but as vertical layers that produce orders of indexicality. These define what is taken to be good, bad, appropriate, or inappropriate language as well as the lines along which social belonging occurs.

Between the opening and concluding chapters that lay out the general framework of the book, the different analyses that B offers range across a diversity of contexts, several from the African locations that have long been part of B’s work, but also from China, Japan, Finland, and Belgium. The market for American accents is the focus of Ch. 2, ‘A messy new marketplace’, where B develops the argument that while state language policies have traditionally focused on languages (and here we see the complicity of linguistics and state formations), global actors in language commodification focus instead on accents and discourse, creating a polycentric market of...