(Ed. by Carla Bossus)
In the last decades new terms concerning second language acquisition have been coined or added to our teaching glossary as well as to our disciplinary and teaching practices, leaving the concept and conceptions of bilingualism a far way behind. "Multi-lingualism, plurilingualism, translanguaging" and so forth have pushed practice theorization to its limits. The latest term at stake is "metrolingualism". The challenge for teachers and teacher trainers is to narrow down all this theorization into actual daily and contextualised practices and to provide room for multilingual literacies within what we wrongly or ordinarily call " one culture".I invite you to share the following research paper edition and to post your views or make contributions about your own reading and/or experiences of the classroom as an intercultural learning ambience.
Rather than describing such language phenomena in terms of monolingualism, bilingualism, code-mixing or code-switching, we shall look at this in terms of what we have called metrolingualism. Current cultural, social, geopolitical and linguistic thinking is predominated by a celebration of multiplicity, hybridity and diversity. Within this trend, terminology such as multiculturalism, multilingualism and cosmopolitanism are taken as a focus and a desirable norm in various fields including academia, policy-making and education. While they are generally seen as the driving force for new possibilities, an appreciation of multiple cultural/linguistic beings and practices also leaves us with at least two major concerns. First, one of the underlying ideologies of multilingualism and multiculturalism is that people and associated practices are composed of multiple discrete languages and cultural practices. Notwithstanding the fact that there is an increase in the number of studies that shift away from conceiving language as an adequate base category towards a focus on features, styles or resources in order to explicate late modern bi/multilingualism (Bailey, 2007; Coupland, 2007; J rgensen, 2008; Rampton, 2009), the difficulty still lies in fully escaping and dissociating from old statist language ideologies.Auer rightly critiques the 'rash equation of “hybrid” language use with “hybrid” social identity; such an equation may be as essentialist as that of nation and language which underlies traditional European language ideologies' (Auer, 2005, p. 403). That is to say, in celebrating multiplicity, models of diversity tend to pluralise languages and cultures rather than complexify them. One aim of this paper is to question multilingual or multicultural ideologies, to challenge too easy a move towards multiplicity with its particular strategies of pluralisation. Another, following Auer, is to be suspicious of claims to hybridity and to relations between hybrid language use and hybrid identities. If nothing else, a more complex vision of language use leads us to an inevitable questioning of such claims.And yet, at the same time, we also want to pick up on a second contradictory strand in common thinking about multiplicity: on the one hand, the celebration of multiple allows for difference and dynamism providing new possibilities to society and people. On the other hand, its antagonistic view towards pre-given fixed ascriptions of cultural identities - chastised for being essentialist - often fails to acknowledge the contribution that such pre-given identities have in becoming different. That is, one of the driving forces to be different and multiple and dynamic is the interaction between fixed and fluid cultural identities. The underlying assumption of the previous interview statements what we are doing here is bastardising English and Japanese as well as in a casual conversation, language is chaotic is that even though they do not have a sense of treating languages separately in their use, they have a set of ideal and orderly linguistic practices that are reflected in such terms as bastardising and chaotic. Our argument is that we need to account for this within our understanding of metrolingualism, especially if, as suggested above, it is incumbent on us to include the local perspectives of language users who appear to incorporate within their own hybrid practices both fluidity and fixity. What often seems to be overlooked in discussions of local, global and hybrid relations is the way in which the local may involve not only the take up of the global, or a localised form of cosmopolitanism, but also may equally be about the take up of local forms of static and monolithic identity and culture.We cannot therefore leap into an examination (or celebration) of hybridity as if fixed ascriptions of identity and their common mobilisation in daily interaction have ceased to exist. The celebration of happy hybridity, as an unproblematic category of cultural diversity that somehow provides solutions to sociocultural relations and conflicts, has been widely critiqued (Allatson, 2001; Perera, 1994). When we constantly focus on hybridity, 'the notion of the “hybrid” can become as fixed a category as its essentialist nemesis' (Zuberi, 2001, pp. 239-240). While we may wish to focus on a multiple, hybrid and complex world, we need both to avoid turning hybridity into a fixed category of pluralisation, and to find ways to acknowledge that fixed categories are also mobilised as an aspect of hybridity. In their search for more dynamic terms than global and local, which 'reify the status of geometric space over the dynamic conditions under which space is actively constructed and consumed by companies, institutions of governance and by individuals', Connell and Gibson (2003, p. 17) propose fixity and fluidity which 'reflect more dynamic ways of describing and understanding processes that move across, while becoming embedded in, the materiality of localities and social relations' (Connell & Gibson, 2003, p. 17). From this point of view, it is important not to construe fixity and fluidity as dichotomous, or even as opposite ends of a spectrum, but rather to view them as symbiotically (re)constituting each other. In talking of metrolingualism, therefore, we also intend to address the ways in which any struggle around new language, culture and identity inevitably confronts the fixed traditions of place and being.For Heller (2007b, p. 342), bilingualism is a 'kind of fault line, a space particularly sensitive to and revealing of social change' since both bilingual practices and the ways we perceive them raise questions about how we view language boundaries. This remark, however, is intriguing in another sense in that it shows how social change and new boundaries are also supported by this fault line. Similarly, J rgensen's study of polylingualism, while it attempts to challenge the notion of discrete language by using linguistic features, rather than languages, as the base of analysis, claims that 'competent polylingual languagers tend to be competent when they choose to follow a monolingualism norm' (J rgensen, 2008, p.174). This again shows how fixed boundaries/practices and those which are fluid cannot be simplistically treated as discrete phenomena. As we shall see, our hybrid and multilingual office workers can ascribe to themselves and others a mixture of open-ended and closed identities. The notion of multiplicity can thus contain complex and apparently contradictory processes.Put another way, the celebrated spaces of hybridity, third space and transcultural interaction may also include monolithic ascriptions of culture and identity. While one aim of this paper, therefore, is to demythologise notions of language mixing along the fault line of bilingualism, another is to demythologise hybridity as if cultural and linguistic fixity also were not part of its apparatus. We need to reframe what it means to be 'Japanese', what it means to speak 'in Japanese'/'in English'/'in French' and so on, and what it means to transgress and reconstitute cultural and linguistic borders. By extending the notion of metroethnicity, this paper proposes the notion of metrolingualism, which refers to creative linguistic conditions across space and borders of culture, history and politics, as a way to move beyond current terms such as multilingualism and multiculturalism. The notion of metrolingualism provides useful insights into processes of social change that are involved in different contemporary ways of being.
From metroethnicity to metrolingualism. The changing cultural and linguistic worlds in which many language users live pose challenges for how we conceive of culture, ethnicity and language. As Maher describes it in the context of Japan, young people of various backgrounds are rejecting fixed ascriptions of cultural identity and instead playing with notions of metroethnicity: 'Cultural essentialism and ethnic orthodoxy are out. In Japan, Metroethnicity is in. Cool rules' (Maher, 2005, p. 83). Metroethnicity, he explains, is 'a reconstruction of ethnicity: a hybridised “street” ethnicity deployed by a cross-section of people with ethnic or mainstream backgrounds who are oriented towards cultural hybridity, cultural/ethnic tolerance and a multicultural lifestyle in friendships, music, the arts, eating and dress' (Maher, 2005, p. 83). People of different backgrounds now 'play with ethnicity (not necessarily their own) for aesthetic effect. Metroethnicity is skeptical of heroic ethnicity and bored with sentimentalism about ethnic language' (Maher, 2005, p. 83).Metrolingualism, therefore, drawing on Maher's (2005) metroethnicity, is a product typically of modern, urban interaction. The notion of metrolingualism also invokes the metrosexual, that term for the new man (metrosexuality most often seems to be a gender-specific term, soccer player David Beckham, or swimmer Ian Thorpe, often being cited as the archetypes) who takes pride in his appearance, enjoys clothes, shopping, skin products, jewellery and good food, and engages in practices that distinguish him from the retrosexual (the old-fashioned male) (Coad, 2008). While conscious irony, affluent consumerism or a focus on fashion are not ideals we would wish to associate closely with metrolingualism, there are nevertheless affiliations here with metrosexual connections to the city, the centrality of style (Coupland, 2007) and the undoing of gendered orthodoxies, which resonates with the metrolingual undermining of ortholinguistic practices. Just as the metrosexual challenges hetero/homosexual and masculine/feminine dichotomies, so the metrolingual undermines retrolingual mono/multilingual dichotomies.This focus on the urban ties to Coulmas' observation that sociolinguistics 'is the study of language in urbanized settings, its proper object being the multidimensional distribution of languages and varieties in the city, as opposed to the regional distribution of varieties of language investigated in traditional dialectology' (Coulmas, 2009, p. 14). We do not, however, want to limit the notion of metrolingualism only to the urban. Just as Williams (1973) warned against the juxtaposition of an idyllic, rural, unchanging countryside with the grimy and polluted industrial city (ignoring, amongst other things, the organisation and conditions of rural labour), so, in different times and within different orientations to cosmopolitan, hybrid cityscapes, we want to avoid an idealisation of urban metrolingual landscapes set against the assumed narrowness of rural living. This has two corollaries: on the one hand, metrolingualism as a practice is not confined to the city; and on the other, it is intended as a broad, descriptive category for data analysis rather than a term of cosmopolitan idealism.While characterised by the kinds of language use commonly found in the contemporary city, in other contexts of movement, migration and mixing - such as can be seen in different regions of Africa (Blommaert, 2008; Higgins, 2009; Makoni and Makoni, 2010; Stroud, 2007) - metrolingualism may be rural, mobile, local and fragile. If, furthermore, we take on board Canagarajah's (2007a, p. 238) insistence that in order to understand contemporary multilingualism, we need 'to know how communication worked in contexts of rampant multilingualism and inveterate hybridity in traditional communities, before European modernity suppressed this knowledge in order to develop systems of commonality based on categorization, classification and codification', we might be tempted to broaden the notion of metrolingualism as an analytic category across both rural and precolonial linguistic landscapes. While this may be stretching the term too far, it does draw attention to the fact that the kind of mixed language use we are trying to describe in urban landscapes has many earlier precedents.Metrolingualism describes the ways in which people of different and mixed backgrounds use, play with and negotiate identities through language; it does not assume connections between language, culture, ethnicity, nationality or geography, but rather seeks to explore how such relations are produced, resisted, defied or rearranged; its focus is not on language systems but on languages as emergent from contexts of interaction. As a result, while part of the focus here is on hybridity and play, there are several caveats. As with many studies of language play - from Rampton's (1995, 2006) studies of crossing and the language of late modernity in school classrooms, or Lin's (2000) and Luk's (2005) studies of language play in Hong Kong, to studies of multilingual creativity in hip-hop (Lin, 2009; Omoniyi, 2009) - the focus here is not on elite game playing but the ludic possibilities in the everyday. While the focus of metrolingualism, therefore, may include forms of chic, privileged playfulness in elite bilingualism - acquired bilingual capacity for the upwardly mobile in a global world (De Meija, 2002) - it includes a much broader view of contexts of translingual activity.It is worth noting in this context that while Coupland (2007) and Rampton (2009) read Maher's metroethnicity as a shallow form of ethnic identification in terms only of being cool, Maher (2005, p. 84) conceives metroethnicity as 'an exercise in emancipatory politics. It is an individual's self-assertion on his own terms and that will inevitably challenge the orthodoxy of “language loyalty”'. If Maher's notion perhaps draws too ready a connection between emancipatory politics and individualistic assertions, we can nevertheless make more of this than only shallow identification. While metrosexuality may sometimes be playful and cool, there is also serious business at work here in terms of identity politics, of the queering of gender and sexuality (Nelson, 2009). Metrolingualism, accordingly, allows the reconstitution of language and an alternative way of being in and through ludic and other possibilities of the everyday, a queering of linguistic practices.There is an emancipatory politics in the challenge to 'the orthodoxy of language loyalty' that may enable people to disassociate legitimised links between language, ethnicity and nation state, which in turn renovates the discursive content of what it means to be 'Japanese' or to 'speak in Japanese'. In this sense, though there surely is an emancipatory politics to Maher's metroethnicity or metrolanguages, our notion of metrolingualism differs in that it by no means exclusively refers to the lite aesthetic options that are portable based on practices of here and now (Maher, 2010). We are interested in the queering of ortholinguistic practices across time and space that may include urban and rural contexts, elite or minority communities, local or global implications. In the same way that Butler (1993) strongly rejects the idea that performativity is akin to the pulling on or taking off of identities, we would reject assumptions that languages may be worn and discarded litely, as metrosexual accoutrements. We locate metrolingualism instead as another practice of undoing, as both a rejection of ortholinguistic practices and a production of new possibilities.The metro as we understand it, then, is the productive space provided by, though not limited to, the contemporary city to produce new language identities. Such an interpretation is intended to avoid the pluralisation of languages and cultures, and to accommodate the complex ways in which fluid and fixed, as well as global and local, practices reconstitute language and identities. J rgensen (2008) and M ller (2008) propose the notion of polylingualism in place of multilingualism in light of the idea that 'speakers use features and not langu ages' (J rgensen, 2008, p. 166). As M ller explains polylingualism: What if the participants do not orient to the juxtaposition of languages in terms of switching? What if they instead orient to a linguistic norm where all available linguistic resources can be used to reach the goals of the speaker? Then it is not adequate to categorise this conversation as bilingual or multilingual, or even as language mixing, because all these terms depend on the separatability of linguistic categories. I therefore suggest the term polylingual instead. (M ller, 2008, p. 218)By focusing on linguistic features rather than languages, their studies are more inclusive than many multilingual studies that attempt to account for late modern, urban language use, including the use of linguistic features at the word level by people who do not necessarily have sufficient knowledge or competence in the particular language. Nevertheless, while this notion of polylingualism shares much with the approach we are taking here, it still, like plurilingualism and multilingualism, tends towards a pluralisation of singular entities (languages). It is in part to move away from such pluralisations that we have opted for the more open metrolingualism, where the notion of language in time and space (metro) rather than countability, becomes the language modifier. Metrolingualism, while following in a number of ways the same trajectory as Maher's (2010) recent discussion of metrolanguages, provides us with more flexibility to move away from the enumerative strategy of counting languages (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). At the same time, however, just as we have warned against the celebration of happy hybridity, so we need to be cautious lest we adopt an uncritical analysis of metrolingualism as a locus of ludic diversity. Just as elements of linguistic and cultural fixity may be mobilised as part of metrolingualism, so metrolingual language use may have to confront its static nemesis, the fixed identity regulations of institutional modernity: when judgements in law courts, educational systems, asylum tribunals, job interviews or hospital waiting rooms are brought to bear on metrolingual language use, the full discriminatory apparatus of the state all too often works against such fluidity. As becomes clear in the example below with Osman, metrolingualism is not exclusively about fluid possibilities but is also about the fragile processes of identity reconstitution, about struggles in the face of local ortholinguistic practices.Metrolingualism, therefore, is centrally concerned with language ideologies, practices, resources and repertoires: a focus on language ideologies (Blommaert, 1999; Seargeant, 2009) provides an understanding of the ways in which languages need to be understood in terms of the local perspectives of the users, and the different struggles to represent language in one way or another; an understanding of language as a practice (Heller, 2007a; Pennycook, 2010) allows for a view that language is not an entity used in different contexts but rather is an emergent property of various social practices: bilingualism is 'a sociopolitical semiotic nexus of praxis cum ideology' (Tsitsipis, 2007, p. 277); an appreciation of language practices as drawing on semiotic resources and repertoires suggests that language knowledge should be defined 'not in terms of abstract system components but as communicative repertoires - conventionalized constellations of semiotic resources for taking action - that are shaped by the particular practices in which individuals engage' (Hall, Cheng, & Carlson, 2006, p. 232). Metrolingualism is not, therefore, playful language use devoid of social context so much as a way of describing diverse grounded local practices.
References: Otsuji, Emi and Pennycook, Alastair (2009) 'Metrolingualism: fixity, fluidity and language in flux', International Journal of Multilingualism, 7:3, 240 - 254, First published on: 24 December 2009 (iFirst)
In the last decades new terms concerning second language acquisition have been coined or added to our teaching glossary as well as to our disciplinary and teaching practices, leaving the concept and conceptions of bilingualism a far way behind. "Multi-lingualism, plurilingualism, translanguaging" and so forth have pushed practice theorization to its limits. The latest term at stake is "metrolingualism". The challenge for teachers and teacher trainers is to narrow down all this theorization into actual daily and contextualised practices and to provide room for multilingual literacies within what we wrongly or ordinarily call " one culture".I invite you to share the following research paper edition and to post your views or make contributions about your own reading and/or experiences of the classroom as an intercultural learning ambience.
Rather than describing such language phenomena in terms of monolingualism, bilingualism, code-mixing or code-switching, we shall look at this in terms of what we have called metrolingualism. Current cultural, social, geopolitical and linguistic thinking is predominated by a celebration of multiplicity, hybridity and diversity. Within this trend, terminology such as multiculturalism, multilingualism and cosmopolitanism are taken as a focus and a desirable norm in various fields including academia, policy-making and education. While they are generally seen as the driving force for new possibilities, an appreciation of multiple cultural/linguistic beings and practices also leaves us with at least two major concerns. First, one of the underlying ideologies of multilingualism and multiculturalism is that people and associated practices are composed of multiple discrete languages and cultural practices. Notwithstanding the fact that there is an increase in the number of studies that shift away from conceiving language as an adequate base category towards a focus on features, styles or resources in order to explicate late modern bi/multilingualism (Bailey, 2007; Coupland, 2007; J rgensen, 2008; Rampton, 2009), the difficulty still lies in fully escaping and dissociating from old statist language ideologies.Auer rightly critiques the 'rash equation of “hybrid” language use with “hybrid” social identity; such an equation may be as essentialist as that of nation and language which underlies traditional European language ideologies' (Auer, 2005, p. 403). That is to say, in celebrating multiplicity, models of diversity tend to pluralise languages and cultures rather than complexify them. One aim of this paper is to question multilingual or multicultural ideologies, to challenge too easy a move towards multiplicity with its particular strategies of pluralisation. Another, following Auer, is to be suspicious of claims to hybridity and to relations between hybrid language use and hybrid identities. If nothing else, a more complex vision of language use leads us to an inevitable questioning of such claims.And yet, at the same time, we also want to pick up on a second contradictory strand in common thinking about multiplicity: on the one hand, the celebration of multiple allows for difference and dynamism providing new possibilities to society and people. On the other hand, its antagonistic view towards pre-given fixed ascriptions of cultural identities - chastised for being essentialist - often fails to acknowledge the contribution that such pre-given identities have in becoming different. That is, one of the driving forces to be different and multiple and dynamic is the interaction between fixed and fluid cultural identities. The underlying assumption of the previous interview statements what we are doing here is bastardising English and Japanese as well as in a casual conversation, language is chaotic is that even though they do not have a sense of treating languages separately in their use, they have a set of ideal and orderly linguistic practices that are reflected in such terms as bastardising and chaotic. Our argument is that we need to account for this within our understanding of metrolingualism, especially if, as suggested above, it is incumbent on us to include the local perspectives of language users who appear to incorporate within their own hybrid practices both fluidity and fixity. What often seems to be overlooked in discussions of local, global and hybrid relations is the way in which the local may involve not only the take up of the global, or a localised form of cosmopolitanism, but also may equally be about the take up of local forms of static and monolithic identity and culture.We cannot therefore leap into an examination (or celebration) of hybridity as if fixed ascriptions of identity and their common mobilisation in daily interaction have ceased to exist. The celebration of happy hybridity, as an unproblematic category of cultural diversity that somehow provides solutions to sociocultural relations and conflicts, has been widely critiqued (Allatson, 2001; Perera, 1994). When we constantly focus on hybridity, 'the notion of the “hybrid” can become as fixed a category as its essentialist nemesis' (Zuberi, 2001, pp. 239-240). While we may wish to focus on a multiple, hybrid and complex world, we need both to avoid turning hybridity into a fixed category of pluralisation, and to find ways to acknowledge that fixed categories are also mobilised as an aspect of hybridity. In their search for more dynamic terms than global and local, which 'reify the status of geometric space over the dynamic conditions under which space is actively constructed and consumed by companies, institutions of governance and by individuals', Connell and Gibson (2003, p. 17) propose fixity and fluidity which 'reflect more dynamic ways of describing and understanding processes that move across, while becoming embedded in, the materiality of localities and social relations' (Connell & Gibson, 2003, p. 17). From this point of view, it is important not to construe fixity and fluidity as dichotomous, or even as opposite ends of a spectrum, but rather to view them as symbiotically (re)constituting each other. In talking of metrolingualism, therefore, we also intend to address the ways in which any struggle around new language, culture and identity inevitably confronts the fixed traditions of place and being.For Heller (2007b, p. 342), bilingualism is a 'kind of fault line, a space particularly sensitive to and revealing of social change' since both bilingual practices and the ways we perceive them raise questions about how we view language boundaries. This remark, however, is intriguing in another sense in that it shows how social change and new boundaries are also supported by this fault line. Similarly, J rgensen's study of polylingualism, while it attempts to challenge the notion of discrete language by using linguistic features, rather than languages, as the base of analysis, claims that 'competent polylingual languagers tend to be competent when they choose to follow a monolingualism norm' (J rgensen, 2008, p.174). This again shows how fixed boundaries/practices and those which are fluid cannot be simplistically treated as discrete phenomena. As we shall see, our hybrid and multilingual office workers can ascribe to themselves and others a mixture of open-ended and closed identities. The notion of multiplicity can thus contain complex and apparently contradictory processes.Put another way, the celebrated spaces of hybridity, third space and transcultural interaction may also include monolithic ascriptions of culture and identity. While one aim of this paper, therefore, is to demythologise notions of language mixing along the fault line of bilingualism, another is to demythologise hybridity as if cultural and linguistic fixity also were not part of its apparatus. We need to reframe what it means to be 'Japanese', what it means to speak 'in Japanese'/'in English'/'in French' and so on, and what it means to transgress and reconstitute cultural and linguistic borders. By extending the notion of metroethnicity, this paper proposes the notion of metrolingualism, which refers to creative linguistic conditions across space and borders of culture, history and politics, as a way to move beyond current terms such as multilingualism and multiculturalism. The notion of metrolingualism provides useful insights into processes of social change that are involved in different contemporary ways of being.
From metroethnicity to metrolingualism. The changing cultural and linguistic worlds in which many language users live pose challenges for how we conceive of culture, ethnicity and language. As Maher describes it in the context of Japan, young people of various backgrounds are rejecting fixed ascriptions of cultural identity and instead playing with notions of metroethnicity: 'Cultural essentialism and ethnic orthodoxy are out. In Japan, Metroethnicity is in. Cool rules' (Maher, 2005, p. 83). Metroethnicity, he explains, is 'a reconstruction of ethnicity: a hybridised “street” ethnicity deployed by a cross-section of people with ethnic or mainstream backgrounds who are oriented towards cultural hybridity, cultural/ethnic tolerance and a multicultural lifestyle in friendships, music, the arts, eating and dress' (Maher, 2005, p. 83). People of different backgrounds now 'play with ethnicity (not necessarily their own) for aesthetic effect. Metroethnicity is skeptical of heroic ethnicity and bored with sentimentalism about ethnic language' (Maher, 2005, p. 83).Metrolingualism, therefore, drawing on Maher's (2005) metroethnicity, is a product typically of modern, urban interaction. The notion of metrolingualism also invokes the metrosexual, that term for the new man (metrosexuality most often seems to be a gender-specific term, soccer player David Beckham, or swimmer Ian Thorpe, often being cited as the archetypes) who takes pride in his appearance, enjoys clothes, shopping, skin products, jewellery and good food, and engages in practices that distinguish him from the retrosexual (the old-fashioned male) (Coad, 2008). While conscious irony, affluent consumerism or a focus on fashion are not ideals we would wish to associate closely with metrolingualism, there are nevertheless affiliations here with metrosexual connections to the city, the centrality of style (Coupland, 2007) and the undoing of gendered orthodoxies, which resonates with the metrolingual undermining of ortholinguistic practices. Just as the metrosexual challenges hetero/homosexual and masculine/feminine dichotomies, so the metrolingual undermines retrolingual mono/multilingual dichotomies.This focus on the urban ties to Coulmas' observation that sociolinguistics 'is the study of language in urbanized settings, its proper object being the multidimensional distribution of languages and varieties in the city, as opposed to the regional distribution of varieties of language investigated in traditional dialectology' (Coulmas, 2009, p. 14). We do not, however, want to limit the notion of metrolingualism only to the urban. Just as Williams (1973) warned against the juxtaposition of an idyllic, rural, unchanging countryside with the grimy and polluted industrial city (ignoring, amongst other things, the organisation and conditions of rural labour), so, in different times and within different orientations to cosmopolitan, hybrid cityscapes, we want to avoid an idealisation of urban metrolingual landscapes set against the assumed narrowness of rural living. This has two corollaries: on the one hand, metrolingualism as a practice is not confined to the city; and on the other, it is intended as a broad, descriptive category for data analysis rather than a term of cosmopolitan idealism.While characterised by the kinds of language use commonly found in the contemporary city, in other contexts of movement, migration and mixing - such as can be seen in different regions of Africa (Blommaert, 2008; Higgins, 2009; Makoni and Makoni, 2010; Stroud, 2007) - metrolingualism may be rural, mobile, local and fragile. If, furthermore, we take on board Canagarajah's (2007a, p. 238) insistence that in order to understand contemporary multilingualism, we need 'to know how communication worked in contexts of rampant multilingualism and inveterate hybridity in traditional communities, before European modernity suppressed this knowledge in order to develop systems of commonality based on categorization, classification and codification', we might be tempted to broaden the notion of metrolingualism as an analytic category across both rural and precolonial linguistic landscapes. While this may be stretching the term too far, it does draw attention to the fact that the kind of mixed language use we are trying to describe in urban landscapes has many earlier precedents.Metrolingualism describes the ways in which people of different and mixed backgrounds use, play with and negotiate identities through language; it does not assume connections between language, culture, ethnicity, nationality or geography, but rather seeks to explore how such relations are produced, resisted, defied or rearranged; its focus is not on language systems but on languages as emergent from contexts of interaction. As a result, while part of the focus here is on hybridity and play, there are several caveats. As with many studies of language play - from Rampton's (1995, 2006) studies of crossing and the language of late modernity in school classrooms, or Lin's (2000) and Luk's (2005) studies of language play in Hong Kong, to studies of multilingual creativity in hip-hop (Lin, 2009; Omoniyi, 2009) - the focus here is not on elite game playing but the ludic possibilities in the everyday. While the focus of metrolingualism, therefore, may include forms of chic, privileged playfulness in elite bilingualism - acquired bilingual capacity for the upwardly mobile in a global world (De Meija, 2002) - it includes a much broader view of contexts of translingual activity.It is worth noting in this context that while Coupland (2007) and Rampton (2009) read Maher's metroethnicity as a shallow form of ethnic identification in terms only of being cool, Maher (2005, p. 84) conceives metroethnicity as 'an exercise in emancipatory politics. It is an individual's self-assertion on his own terms and that will inevitably challenge the orthodoxy of “language loyalty”'. If Maher's notion perhaps draws too ready a connection between emancipatory politics and individualistic assertions, we can nevertheless make more of this than only shallow identification. While metrosexuality may sometimes be playful and cool, there is also serious business at work here in terms of identity politics, of the queering of gender and sexuality (Nelson, 2009). Metrolingualism, accordingly, allows the reconstitution of language and an alternative way of being in and through ludic and other possibilities of the everyday, a queering of linguistic practices.There is an emancipatory politics in the challenge to 'the orthodoxy of language loyalty' that may enable people to disassociate legitimised links between language, ethnicity and nation state, which in turn renovates the discursive content of what it means to be 'Japanese' or to 'speak in Japanese'. In this sense, though there surely is an emancipatory politics to Maher's metroethnicity or metrolanguages, our notion of metrolingualism differs in that it by no means exclusively refers to the lite aesthetic options that are portable based on practices of here and now (Maher, 2010). We are interested in the queering of ortholinguistic practices across time and space that may include urban and rural contexts, elite or minority communities, local or global implications. In the same way that Butler (1993) strongly rejects the idea that performativity is akin to the pulling on or taking off of identities, we would reject assumptions that languages may be worn and discarded litely, as metrosexual accoutrements. We locate metrolingualism instead as another practice of undoing, as both a rejection of ortholinguistic practices and a production of new possibilities.The metro as we understand it, then, is the productive space provided by, though not limited to, the contemporary city to produce new language identities. Such an interpretation is intended to avoid the pluralisation of languages and cultures, and to accommodate the complex ways in which fluid and fixed, as well as global and local, practices reconstitute language and identities. J rgensen (2008) and M ller (2008) propose the notion of polylingualism in place of multilingualism in light of the idea that 'speakers use features and not langu ages' (J rgensen, 2008, p. 166). As M ller explains polylingualism: What if the participants do not orient to the juxtaposition of languages in terms of switching? What if they instead orient to a linguistic norm where all available linguistic resources can be used to reach the goals of the speaker? Then it is not adequate to categorise this conversation as bilingual or multilingual, or even as language mixing, because all these terms depend on the separatability of linguistic categories. I therefore suggest the term polylingual instead. (M ller, 2008, p. 218)By focusing on linguistic features rather than languages, their studies are more inclusive than many multilingual studies that attempt to account for late modern, urban language use, including the use of linguistic features at the word level by people who do not necessarily have sufficient knowledge or competence in the particular language. Nevertheless, while this notion of polylingualism shares much with the approach we are taking here, it still, like plurilingualism and multilingualism, tends towards a pluralisation of singular entities (languages). It is in part to move away from such pluralisations that we have opted for the more open metrolingualism, where the notion of language in time and space (metro) rather than countability, becomes the language modifier. Metrolingualism, while following in a number of ways the same trajectory as Maher's (2010) recent discussion of metrolanguages, provides us with more flexibility to move away from the enumerative strategy of counting languages (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). At the same time, however, just as we have warned against the celebration of happy hybridity, so we need to be cautious lest we adopt an uncritical analysis of metrolingualism as a locus of ludic diversity. Just as elements of linguistic and cultural fixity may be mobilised as part of metrolingualism, so metrolingual language use may have to confront its static nemesis, the fixed identity regulations of institutional modernity: when judgements in law courts, educational systems, asylum tribunals, job interviews or hospital waiting rooms are brought to bear on metrolingual language use, the full discriminatory apparatus of the state all too often works against such fluidity. As becomes clear in the example below with Osman, metrolingualism is not exclusively about fluid possibilities but is also about the fragile processes of identity reconstitution, about struggles in the face of local ortholinguistic practices.Metrolingualism, therefore, is centrally concerned with language ideologies, practices, resources and repertoires: a focus on language ideologies (Blommaert, 1999; Seargeant, 2009) provides an understanding of the ways in which languages need to be understood in terms of the local perspectives of the users, and the different struggles to represent language in one way or another; an understanding of language as a practice (Heller, 2007a; Pennycook, 2010) allows for a view that language is not an entity used in different contexts but rather is an emergent property of various social practices: bilingualism is 'a sociopolitical semiotic nexus of praxis cum ideology' (Tsitsipis, 2007, p. 277); an appreciation of language practices as drawing on semiotic resources and repertoires suggests that language knowledge should be defined 'not in terms of abstract system components but as communicative repertoires - conventionalized constellations of semiotic resources for taking action - that are shaped by the particular practices in which individuals engage' (Hall, Cheng, & Carlson, 2006, p. 232). Metrolingualism is not, therefore, playful language use devoid of social context so much as a way of describing diverse grounded local practices.
References: Otsuji, Emi and Pennycook, Alastair (2009) 'Metrolingualism: fixity, fluidity and language in flux', International Journal of Multilingualism, 7:3, 240 - 254, First published on: 24 December 2009 (iFirst)