Multilingual signage: a multimodal approach to discourses of consumption in a South African township

Abstract

The paper explores how global commercial discourses and the politics of aspiration in post-apartheid South Africa may be seen as contributing to the restructuring of spaces of multilingualism and the refiguring of indexical values of English and South African languages. The analysis takes its point of departure in how late-modern lifestyles, identities, aspirations and imaginations are represented across local and transnational commercial signage in the Western Cape township of Khayelitsha, focusing in particular on how different languages are multimodally constituted and differentially represented in two different sub-genres of commercial billboards. We suggest that new late-modern multimodal representations of identity, and the way multilingual resources are configured into new repertoires and genres of subjectivity, may be one important factor in how social transformation is mediated in changing perceptions and practices of language, while simultaneously and paradoxically reinforcing traditional conceptions of cultural authenticity and self-representation.

Keywords:

• visual semiotics
• multimodality
• multilingualism
• genre
• South Africa
• social transformation
• identity

Notes

1. A spaza is a local Afrikaans word denoting a small grocery store. In this context, we note the difficulty in assigning proper names, such as Siya, to any particular language. It could be argued that Siya's is an English word due to the possessive “s” (but see relevant papers in Shohamy and Gorter 2009), and that spaza, although an originally Afrikaans word, is now an English-adapted loan. However, these types of contention rest on the assumption that it is meaningful to attempt to, or want to, distinguish languages as distinct and separate systems, rather than acknowledge that some notion of (clines of) hybridity can better account for the data.

2. A particularly interesting example of incongruities arising from intertextualities of signage is the following name of a hair salon in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, “Repent the Lord is nigh Hair Salon” (Susan van Zyl, personal communication).

3. Margin real/given/new or margin ideal/given/new refer to compositions where a Centre is presented as “the nucleus of information to which all the other elements are in some sense subservient” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, 196); that is, ancillary and dependent.

4. We are less certain as to why the Castle Milk Stout advertisement should be an exception to the generalization regarding language and spatial placement, but suspect that we might be dealing with an instance of some form of “hierarchy of periodicity”, namely a situation where what was New at some point becomes Given, or a cyclical realization of theme-rheme, as a person (or object) moves through interconnected spaces. The Castle advert is an old advert that is now “moving through interconnected spaces”; that is, from urban city environments to township environments. Such a stance would be in accord with a dynamic view of signage in linguistic landscapes.

5. The extent to which speakers actually do construct alignments and footings in relation to the particular voices we have identified here, in what ways this is manifested and how they may be explored is a matter for further empirical investigation.