Dissecting multilingual Beijing: the space and scale of vernacular globalization

Abstract

Following Scollon and Scollon’s Discourse in Place: Language in the Material World (2003) in which the authors proposed that the placement and lettering of signs in public places convey the sociopolitical meaning of the region and society, this article employs the geosemiotic principles that they introduced to explore how regimes of languages are organized in fast globalizing Beijing. In doing so, the author incorporates the ‘space and scale’ perspective initiated by Immanuel Wallerstein and enriched by Blommaert, in an attempt to anchor the analysis of the phenomenology of multilingual language usage in a social and ideological context. She examines how the occurrence of standard and non-standard multilingual patterns in the streets of Beijing, a fast globalizing city, reflects people’s unequal access to global linguistic resources and marks the social stratification and power disparity that operate at various vertical scales. The article argues that the international discourse flow to China not only produces horizontal linguistic diversity but also engenders a ‘vertical scaling’ of domination and subordination, and proposes that linguistic globalization in Beijing can be viewed as a product crucially connected with social, political and ideological processes.

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