Mundane metrolingualism

ABSTRACT

Drawing on data from a Bangladeshi-run mixed-goods store in Tokyo – a site of diversity in terms of customers, the products and interactions – we argue in this paper that in order to understand translinguistic ordinariness, or what we call mundane metrolingualism, we have to explore both the ideas of ordinariness and of diversity in greater depth. Ordinariness, or the cluster of other terms that have been similarly used (everyday, unremarkable, mundane, from below) has been employed to address four principal concerns: Difference – social, cultural, sexual, economic, racial – rather than commonality is the core experience of human life; diversity is not exotic or something that others have, but key to all experience; diversity has temporal dimensions as part of repeated everyday practice; and difference as everyday practice is part of the non-elite world of struggle for recognition. Focusing on two particular spatiotemporal themes, everydayness and simultaneity, we examine the ways in which different activities, conversations and artefacts may be brought together through mobile technologies. These mundane metrolingual assemblages are both central to the activities of the shop but also part of simultaneous worlds of engagement and activity.

KEYWORDS:

• Metrolingualism
• everydayness
• simultaneity
• assemblages
• Tokyo

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Part of our interest in Higgins ad Coen’s argument also derived from one of us [AP] being taken round Oaxaca in Mexico by the late Michael Higgins, introducing the ordinary people he worked with, explaining how diversity worked on the streets, in bars, in communities on the outskirts. This is where Michael lived and did his work, as part of an ethnographic praxis that sought to understand and change the lives of the ‘urban poor, discapacitados, transvestites’ (2000, p. 17) and other marginalised communities in the city.

2 In Turns 1 and 13, a literal translation of ‘baal’ would be ‘pubic hair’. In Turn 1 it has been translated as ‘bloody’ and as ‘stupid’ in line 13 where it is used with ‘shala’ (brother-in-law) which can also mean stupid.