Cities of sociolinguistics

ABSTRACT

Sociolinguistics has an intricate relationship with the city and with objects and queries pertaining to the specificity of urban language. Cities have not only acted as sites of sociolinguistic research but have simultaneously provided tools and frameworks that have proven useful in this research. This heuristic mode has subsumed the object of language under a specific body of ideas, facts and arguments. Seen in an epistemological perspective, the city has offered delineations and specifications of language. The figure of the city appears to have created a logical reduction of the ways in which language can be grasped and investigated, framing it as a localised, social and formally heterogeneous – yet moored and well-defined – object. At the same, this reduction has opened up different possibilities for representing and analysing urban space and language. The paper discusses this dynamic.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemology of linguistics
• heteroglossia
• landscape
• linguistic variation
• sociolinguistics
• urban language

Acknowledgement

I thank Adam Jaworski, Chris Hutton, Li Wei, Natalia Ganuza, Linus Salö, Jürgen Spitzmüller and Jasper Wu for commenting and discussing ideas and drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

David Karlander is a postdoctoral fellow with the School of English and Society of Fellows in the Humanities, The University of Hong Kong. He has previously published on Övdalsk language politics, graffiti, socialist Esperantism and the history of linguistics.