Abstract
What do we mean when we talk about “multilingual voice” in the post-apartheid sociolinguistic context of South Africa? In this paper, I explore this question by reporting on an ethnographic fieldwork project that involved the participant-observation of Rastafarian-herbalists trading goods in an informal marketplace. I focus in the paper on Rastafarian-herbalists’ language practices and participation in ideological debates surrounding the ethics of Rastafarian religious practices as they navigate the complex yet regimented linguistic landscape of the informal marketplace in which they trade their goods. Furthermore, I explore in the paper how the marginalized trading lives of the Rastafarian-herbalists are characterized by the daily negotiation of power and diversity discourses as they try to define their voices. Their engagement with diverse multilingual populations, I argue, not only provides them with excellent opportunities to expand their multilingual repertoires, but also teaches them to manage strategically “multilingual voices” in interaction in order to sell their products. I argue further that although we cannot take stock of all types of marginalization, we should develop sociolinguistic approaches that are not only sympathetic to the marginalization of people and languages in the everyday, but also attune our methodologies to accurately capture experiences in small places such as the ones where Rastafarian-herbalists trade.
Highlights
This paper is a sociocultural study of multilingual voice
I was interested in how these herb sellers enregister transnational language varieties, such as Jamaican Patois, mixed in with English and Kaaps to debate and prognosticate to each other of the local contingencies that define Rastafarian moral principles in the everyday, parallel to how they manage the flow of people and languages in the small spaces where they enact multimodal communication as they attempt to successfully sell their herbs
The findings in this paper suggest that the multilingual voices of the Rastafarian-herbalists are tied to linguistic and non-linguistic resources in the small spaces where they trade
Summary
This paper is a sociocultural study of multilingual voice. It attempts to weave together, from within the context of the sociolinguistics of globalization, a perspective on linguistic voice that considers how multilingual resources (forms and functions) are taken up in the complexity of multimodal communication in everyday spaces; how language is used to index and to symbolically inject meaning into material objects that are held up for interaction; and how moral issues of a religious nature are talked about and debated by multilingual speakers. This paper is inspired by ethnographic fieldwork studies on language in markets and aims to develop such literature by spotlighting the local permutations of multimodal communication by multilingual speakers It illustrates how they encounter each other and make meaning in small, local spaces, through the use of mobile linguistic resources such as language varieties and registers and through physical indexicalities such as gestures, body positioning and other non-verbal modes in communication (see for example Bauman 2001, 2004; French 2001; Farfan 2003; Kapchan 1996; Lindenfeld 1978; and more recently Pennycook and Otsuji 2015). I conclude the paper with a discussion of the importance of multilingual voice for multilingual identity in an increasingly globalized world where small spaces for multilingualism matter as much as big, expanding and densely-networked spaces
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