Multilingual Margins

A journal of multilingualism from the periphery

Volume 2 Issue 1 August 2015

EDITORS
CHRISTOPHER STROUD QUENTIN WILLIAMS
University of the Western Cape University of the Western Cape
South Africa South Africa
GUEST EDITORS
JAN BLOMMAERT PIIA VARIS
Tilburg University and Ghent Tilburg University
University

ARTICLES

Editorial 2
The importance of unimportant language
JAN BLOMMAERT AND PIIA VARIS 4
Hallo hoe gaan dit, wat maak jy?: Phatic communication, the mobile
phone and coping strategies in a South African context 10
FIE VELGHE
Conviviality and collectives on social media: Virality, memes, and
new social structures
PIIA VARIS AND JAN BLOMMAERT 31
Common ground and conviviality: Indonesians doing togetherness
in Japan 46
ZANE GOEBEL
Between phatic communion and coping tactic. Casamançais
multilingual practices
TILMANN HEIL 67
Conviviality and phatic communion?
BEN RAMPTON 83
BOOK REVIEWS
Review of Sociolinguistics and mobile communication by Ana Deumert
ZANNIE BOCK 92
Review of Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space by Adam Jaworski and
Crispin Thurlow 96
FELIX BANDA
2 Multilingual Margins 2015, 2(1):2-3
Editorial
T his is a collection of linguistic trivia,
picked from the mundaneness of
everyday speech. However, as each of
the papers so well documents, the trivia
is far from trivial and the seemingly
marginal linguistic phenomena studied
here are full of significance, not least
from the vantage point of the margins.
The papers provide detailed analyses
of how ‘small talk’ regularly contributes
to the emergence of meaning and
interpersonal understanding; items that
get repeated across turns and speakers,
for example, help interlocutors stake out
joint coordinates in relation to the flow of
conversation, scaffolding what a speaker
may be taken to be referencing—or
intending to reference—and allowing
them to mutually work towards a shared
stance on ‘what a word might mean’.
One's thoughts turn here to
Tabouret-Keller and Le Page’s (1985)
notion of focusing, the process whereby
shared normative orders of language
emerge out of situations of multilingual
contact. Might not the small talk detailed
here underlie the linguistic regimes that
grow out of meetings of difference?
Small talk would then be the stuff out of
which meaning emerges—the reptilian
stem out of which grows the cortex of
propositional language.
However, these unimportant bits
of language do not only transform
fleeting moments of encounter into
the sustained social engagement that is
'language'. In another context (Williams
and Stroud, 2013), we have suggested
that convivial routines such as these are
the bedrock of new forms of citizenship.
This is, of course, not a citizenship of
nation states, but ‘citizenship’ performed
through what Isin calls ‘acts of citizenship.
© Stroud, Williams & CMDR. 2014
These are 'acts through which citizens,
strangers, outsiders and aliens emerge
not as beings already defined but as
beings acting and reacting with others'
(2008:39).
It is a citizenship of postnational
affiliations, one of, in Blommaert and
Varis' words, a 'community beyond
Durkheimian-Parsonian imaginations of
homogeneity and sharedness', forged
out of 'light and flexible social bonds'
(Blommaert and Varis, p. 8).
Again, the relevance for the margins
is clear, especially, in a context such as
the South African, where historically very
different people are seeking more ethical
forms of co-existence, Chipkin suggests
that 'citizenship could be defined by feelings
of friendship and solidarity reproduced
through interactions of democratic
practice' (2007). Rose speaks of 'minor
practices of citizenship formation that are
linked to a 'politics of cramped spaces of
action of the here-and-now'' (2000: 100).
The unimportant bits of language that link
people across disjunctive events help create
the space, out of which new possibilities for
mutualities among strangers can emerge.
We see examples of this in Velghe’s paper
which details the important social support
role that affiliative networks constructed
through unimportant language fulfill in
the impoverished communities of Wesbank
outside of Cape Town. We see this also in
Tilman’s piece on the Camancais migrants
from Africa
In their introduction to this issue,
Blommaert and Varis, citing Goffman,
note how “many of our vital relationships
are built on seemingly unimportant
interactions” and go on to remark on
how ‘small talk’ and restricted displays of
information … secure the persistence of
Editorial
‘big’ social structure (p. 43). However, not
only do these forms of language create,
sustain and amend social structures, but
they are also what translates these larger
than life social dynamics into peoples’
'vernacularized and everyday experienced
reality' (Blommaert and Varis, this issue,
p. 6). This is the essence of the idea of
‘linguistic citizenship, understood as
the linguistic mediation of agency in
cramped spaces, where larger circuits of
power are mediated through linguistic
engagements with the everydayness of
the local (Williams and Stroud, 2013:
293). Thus, it is out of the almost
imperceptible small bits of language,
the repetitions of fragments across many
turns, and the shifting meanings these
take on as they travel across contexts and
speakers, that the stuff of social life is
made. And herein lies the significance of
marginal and unimportant language for
the multilingual margins.
3
REFERENCES
Chipkin, Ivor. 2007. Do South Africans exist?
Nationalism, democracy and the identity of
the people. Johannesburg; Wits University
Press.
Isin, Engin  and Greg M. Nielsen (eds).
2008. Acts of citizenship, London and New
York, Zed Books. 
Rose, N. 2000. Governing cities, governing
citizens. In Engin Isin (ed.). Democracy,
Citizenship and the global city. Pp. 95-109.
London: Routledge.
Le Page, Robert B. and Tabouret-Keller,
Andree. 1985. Acts of Identity: creole-based
approaches to language and ethnicity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, Quentin. and Stroud, Christopher.
2013. Multilingualism in transformative
spaces: contact and conviviality. Language
Policy 12: 289-311.
© Stroud, Williams & CMDR. 2014
4 Multilingual Margins 2015, 2(1):4-9
The importance of unimportant
language
Jan Blommaert
Tilburg University and Ghent University
Piia Varis
Tilburg University
BANALITY AS MEANINGFUL
I n a recent paper, the Australian
historian, Martyn Lyons (2013),
reviews his attempts to study ‘history
from below’, using what can be called
grassroots writing by French and Italian
soldiers of the Great War. Lyons remarks
that the ‘First World War produced
a flood of letter-writing by peasants
whose literary capacity has often been
underestimated’ (Lyons 2013: 5). In
France, no less than 10,000 million postal
items were dispatched during the war,
huge numbers of those being letters
and cards written by soldiers from the
frontlines to their loved ones. Lyons
comments further:
Soldiers’ letters followed standard
ritualistic formulas, giving and
asking for news about health,
discussing letters and postcards sent
and received, sending greetings to
many relatives and neighbors. As a
result, their writing leaves us with
an overwhelming sense of banality.
(Lyons 2013: 22)
Contentwise, thus, the millions of letters
sent to and from the front seemed to have
little to offer: frontline soldiers ‘wrote,
© Blommaert, Varis and CMDR. 2014
and expected to receive, comforting
repetitions of laconic formulas, which
conveyed very little of their experience’
(id.: 23). This remark by Lyons is followed
by a fragment from a letter to the front,
which should serve as an argument
underpinning the claim about contentless
communication:
Rosa Roumiguières invited her
correspondent to dispense with
words altogether. ‘I’d be happy with
a single line, a single word’, she
wrote in August 1914, ‘even with just
an envelope with nothing inside, but
write to me often’ (…) (ibid.)
Rosa’s invective to her frontline soldier,
we would say, points to something
which is rather far removed from the
‘banality’ discerned by Lyons as the
reason why the mountain of frontline
correspondence reveals so little of the
soldiers’ (and their correspondents’)
experience. On the contrary: Rosa
clearly points towards the tremendous
importance of communication even
when such communication has little to offer
in the way of content. The banality of the
letters did not prevent their authors and
addressees from attaching extraordinary
The importance of unimportant language
importance to them—the sheer fact of
writing, or better, of sending something,
was enough to comfort and reassure
people worried to the extreme about
each other’s wellbeing. The simple act of
communication itself was tremendously
meaningful: it was the ‘sign of life’
that was so crucial in the social world
surrounding the Great War; it forced
people who otherwise were not great
writers to compose tons of letters and
postcards—in itself a pretty powerful
revelation of the soldiers’ and their
correspondents’ experience.
This special issue will engage with
the paradox we have encountered here:
that people often produce ‘unimportant’
language, when seen from the viewpoint
of denotational and informational
content, but still attach tremendous
importance to such unimportant forms of
communication. They invest tremendous
amounts of energy in them (Lyons
mentions a French soldier who wrote an
average of three to four letters per day at
the frontline, p. 22) and their efforts at
communicating were often effective. At
least, they were effective for the likes of
Rosa Roumiguières; for historians many
decades later, however, they often fail to
live up to the promise of denotational
and informational richness—they are
‘banal’ historical artifacts.
THE ISSUE
Erving Goffman, that great observer of
the ordinary, spent a large part of his
Behavior in Public Places on describing
the rules of superficial engagement
between people—the hardly profound
kinds of social relationships he called
‘acquaintanceship’. In Goffman’s words:
Common sense designates by
the phrase ‘mere acquaintance’ a
relationship in which the rights of
© Blommaert, Varis and CMDR. 2015
5
social recognition form the principal
substance of the relationship.
Further, after persons have been
‘close’ it is possible for their
relationship to decay, stopping only
at a point where they are ‘still on
talking terms’, or, after that (and
with a discontinuous leap), at a
point when they are ‘not talking’,
in either case conferring on mere
engagement practices the power
of characterizing the relationship.
(Goffman 1963: 114).
Particular ‘engagement practices’—let’s
call them patterns of social interaction—
define, in the minds of people, entire
elaborate typologies of social relationships,
a gradient from being ‘close’, to being ‘on
speaking terms’ to ‘not talking’ anymore,
with ‘acquaintanceship’ taking a position
somewhere midway between deep human
engagement (friendship) and no such
engagement at all.
The patterns of social interaction
in which ‘mere acquaintances’ engage
are quite superficial: Goffman (1963:
154) describes a universe of nods, body
movements, eye contact, greetings, and
what he calls ‘safe supplies’, maximally
shared topics of restricted importance
that can keep polite conversation going
for quite a while without any degree of
(or necessity for) movement towards
more intimate subjects. (Think of the
weather, sports results, popular TV
shows or current scandals as examples
of such topics.) Yet Goffman insists on
their extraordinary importance in US
bourgeois culture: failing to sustain such
low-intensity interactions or refusing
such forms of engagement is seen as a
very serious violation of the rules of
civility, and he draws on the support of
several authors of well-read etiquette
books and prominent society columnists
for evidence. Behavior in Public Places
demonstrates, along with other things,
6 BLOMMAERT AND VARIS
how many of our vital social relationships
are built on seemingly unimportant
interactions, how ‘small talk’ and restricted
displays of information, knowledge and
wit secure the persistence of big social
structures, membership of which we find
extraordinarily important.
The papers in this volume follow
this line of argument, namely, the vital
importance of patterns of interaction
often seen as unimportant. Each paper
seeks to focus disciplined attention on
forms of discourse that occur in minimal
quantity and degree of elaboration, that
nevertheless carry momentous social
salience in several domains of social life.
The orientation of the work reported here
is functional: we address language from
the perspective of its effects – ‘meaning’
of course, but typically a broad range of
meanings covered by terms such as ‘social
effect’. While the often emblematic or
‘phatic’ functions of such patterns of
interaction do not necessarily project
much in the way of denotational content,
they provide rich and ordered indexicals
and are, in that sense, a key form of
socio-linguistic life: forms of language
usage that, in themselves and because of
intricate pragmatic-metapragmatic links
to be described in the papers, create,
sustain and amend social structures. The
tremendous efforts often invested in
acquiring such ‘phatic’ skills, documented
in Fie Velghe’s paper in this volume,
illustrate the social significance of such
practices. This is micro-sociolinguistic
stuff directly connecting with macro-social
stuff. For the authors in this collection,
this is exactly the analytical importance of
unimportant language.
Let us make the latter point very
clear: it is important to keep in mind that
our focus is on the ways in which ‘minimal’
forms of language usage relate to large-
scale social structures and developments
© Blommaert, Varis and CMDR. 2015
therein. And while a significant portion
of what is discussed in the papers will
be devoted to the particular linguistic-
discursive forms themselves, the end point
of such description contributes to insights
in the nature of contemporary social
organization. This specific sociolinguistic
orientation sets this collection apart from
the well-known tradition of work on ‘small
talk’ initiated by Justine Coupland and
associates (e.g. Coupland 2000). In this
earlier work, much of it truly brilliant, the
focus was on the interactional importance
of ‘small talk’. While very often dismissed
as mere introductory and concluding
(‘unimportant’) aspects of talk-in-
interaction, Coupland and her associates
demonstrated how small talk contributed
to sustained interactional engagement
and, through that, to face, identity and
relational concerns among speakers (e.g.
Jaworski 2000). The recognition of small
talk as a legitimate and relevant object
of discourse analysis is due to this work;
we can build on this discourse-analytic
salience in our sociolinguistic approach
to similar phenomena. Taking their
discursive salience as a point of departure,
we can look at these phenomena from
the perspective of how they create a
vernacularized and everyday experienced
reality of ‘big’ social diacritics and
dynamics.
A number of points regarding the
specific orientation of papers in this
collection demand further explanation.
While we discuss these points, we will
also have the opportunity to locate the
specific contributions in this collection
within the framework thus sketched.
THE ONLINE ‘PHATIC’
WORLD
First, this collection grew out of a growing
awareness of the immense frequency
The importance of unimportant language
of ‘phatic’ features observable in social
media interaction (cf. Miller 2008; Lange
2009; Thurlow and Jaworski 2011). The
Facebook ‘like’ button is probably among
the world’s most frequently used signs,
with several billions of instances of use
every day, yet it is a typical ‘phatic’ sign,
a gesture, the precise semantic direction
of which is highly variable. One can ‘like’
both a relative’s birthday announcement
and a very unpleasant piece of news, and
the ‘like’ sign can thus effectively mean
‘dislike’ as well—it can be pragmatically
deployed to signal the opposite of its
conventional semantic content. That
other Facebook function, identifying
and requesting ‘friends’, is equally
something that in effect covers a very
broad and diverse range of experiential
subdivisions, casting an uncomfortable
light on established notions such as
‘community’ informed by Durkheimian-
Parsonian imaginations of homogeneity
and sharedness of membership status and
features. Other current phenomena of
online communication, such as ‘sharing’
and ‘retweeting’ signs and messages,
also appear to operate on a pragmatic-
metapragmatic level rather than on a
semantic one, signaling co-presence, as
well as attention and affection rather
than (dis)agreement with sign contents.
The emergence and wide
distribution of online and mobile
technologies has shaped new lifeworlds
for large numbers of people, now
effectively integrated, so to speak, with
‘offline’ social life and constructing
along with other forms of sociocultural
diversification the ‘superdiversity’
characterizing our present social systems
(e.g. Varis and Wang 2011; Blommaert
and Rampton 2011). New social units
have emerged—think of social media and
online gaming ‘communities’ – entailing
new opportunities for identity enactment
and performance and driven by new
© Blommaert, Varis and CMDR. 2015
7
forms of online visual-literate genres and
registers (see Varis 2014 for a survey).
It is important to understand that such
new social environments constitute novel
and unprecedented socio-technologically
mediated sociolinguistic environments
(‘contexts’ in traditional jargon). This
new online sociolinguistic environment
has reshuffled the entire economy of
semiotic and linguistic resources in social
formations – a feature which includes not
just those who have abundant access to
the new technologies but also those who
lack such (degrees of) access.
While much of the sociolinguistic
features and impact of these innovations
remains to be explored, authors in
this collection will suggest that part
of that newness may reside, precisely,
in the abundance of ‘phatic’ patterns
of interaction, combined with a
mysterious sociolinguistic and discursive
phenomenon commonly known as
‘virality’: the extraordinary speed and
scale with which certain signs—often
phatic—are spread on the internet.
Virality is a communication phenomenon
in which sometimes millions of people
‘share’ a sign, for reasons not located in
the sign itself—‘memes’ do not mean the
same thing for the people who send them
around (see Varis and Blommaert in this
volume). The astonishing virality of things
such as Gangnam Style (initially a music
video published on YouTube by the South-
Korean entertainer Psy) reaching two
billion views by June 2014 raises complex
issues of communication, meaning and
community structure for researchers; all
the more interesting since there appears
to be a very broad consensus over the fact
that Gangnam Style is neither a musical,
visual or entertainment revolution in
terms of quality.
The point is that the new online
world offers numerous invitations for
unthinking and rethinking semiotic
8 BLOMMAERT AND VARIS
truths for researchers, and that these
opportunities quickly extend to social
and cultural theory: the challenges are
fundamental and general, not specific
and case-restricted and authors in this
collection address them.
CONVIVIALITY
The recognition of the tremendous
frequency of ‘phatic’ phenomena online
goes hand in hand with a renewed
attention for the broader and equally
challenging phenomena that go under
the label of ‘conviviality’ (e.g. Wessendorf
2010). Conviviality stands for low-intensity
social engagement, seemingly superficial
but critical for, in fact, importantly
assuring social cohesion, community
belonging and social comfort. We can
see Goffman’s work discussed above as
a study of conviviality in US bourgeois
culture in many ways. Current research on
superdiverse sociocultural environments,
however, establishes the relevance of
conviviality as a relatively unexpected but
very important social structure in contexts
of profound sociocultural fragmentation
(cf. Blommaert 2013). The delicate display
of minimal and ‘truncated’ multilingual
language proficiency and discursive moves
captured under Goffman’s ‘safe supplies’
actually proves to play a crucial role in
sustaining a nonthreatening and homely
community feeling among people who
otherwise do not seem to share much. It
functions as an emblematic pointer to the
need and desire to get along in conditions
where more profound engagement may be
unwarranted, not necessary or impossible
(see the papers by Goebel and Heil, in this
volume).
Like the density of ‘phatic’
phenomena on social media platforms,
everyday forms of convivial interaction
appear to lead us to views of social
© Blommaert, Varis and CMDR. 2015
structures that ensure and generate
community membership in contexts where
sharedness of characteristics, backgrounds
and resources is not to be taken for granted.
Such insights may be of general relevance
for our understanding of contemporary
social and cultural dynamics propelled not
by ‘thick’ and dense social bonds but by
‘light’ and flexible ones.
ON STRUCTURE
The term ‘social structure’ has been used
repeatedly so far. But what exactly do we
mean by the term ‘structure’? Usually, we
refer to a form of stability, a recurrent
characteristic that does not define single
cases, but sets and categories of cases. A
structure is a generalization—regularities
across cases are defined by it – and a
projection of an image of a chunk of
reality, as the stable, static and timeless
characteristics of a system that otherwise
can be highly changeable. This is the
‘structure’ of classical structuralism.
In actual fact, and empirically, that
to which we assign the label of ‘structure’
is often a feature that is subject to slow
change. Empirically, we see a structure
when we encounter enduring features,
features that change at a very low
pace—structure, then, is the durée in
a system. Slow change, of course, is
change nonetheless and a structure can
therefore never be a stable feature, a
feature that does not change. It is a feature
that changes at a slower pace than
others. And—this is crucial—a structure
operates along all sorts of features that
have a shorter lifespan and a higher
pace of change and development, it is
part of a complex interplay of different
layers of history operating at different
speeds upon the same social situation.
So if we look for structures, we cannot do
that against or in contrast to fast-changing
The importance of unimportant language
aspects of the system. The stochastic
character of the system compels us to
see structures in interaction with other
features and to keep in mind that all sorts
of non-structural, exceptional and deviant
features can cause massive changes in the
system – can recreate structures so to say
(cf. Blommaert 2013: 115).
The social structures we address
in the papers in this collection are, we
believe, emergent structures characterizing
an evolving social order, the stability of
which is permanently under pressure
because of the diversity of people and
activities that co-construct it—‘human
association as a flowing process’ in Herbert
Blumer’s (1969: 110) famous words.
Looking at the lowest everyday level at
which such co-construction proceeds is
a tactic employed by Goffman, Blumer,
Cicourel and other scholars of an earlier
generation, who were dissatisfied with
structuralist a priori assumptions about
order and stability in social systems, and
who assumed that every degree of social
order rests on the continuous iterative
and made-meaningful enactment of
characteristics of such order in everyday
behavior. We share that assumption as well
as its methodological consequence: that
micro-research is at once macro-research,
in which a precise understanding of the
macro-structures of social life can, and
often does, reside in at first inspection
insignificant details of people’s social
behavior—such as ‘unimportant language’
usage.
REFERENCES
Blommaert, Jan. 2013. Ethnography,
Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes:
Chronicles of Complexity. Bristol:
Multilingual Matters.
Blommaert, Jan and Ben Rampton. 2011.
Language and superdiversity. Diversities
© Blommaert, Varis and CMDR. 2015
9
13 (2): 1-21.
Blumer, Herbert. 1969 [1998]. Social
Interactionism: Perspective and Method.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Coupland, Justine (ed). 2000. Small Talk.
London: Longman.
Goffman, Erving. 1963. Behavior in Public
Places. New York: The Free Press.
Jaworski, Adam. 2000. Silence and small
talk. In Justine Coupland (ed). Small
Talk. London: Longman. 110–132.
Lange, Patricia G. 2009. Videos of affinity on
YouTube. In Pelle Snickars and Patrick
Vonderau (eds). The YouTube Reader.
Stockholm: National Library of Sweden.
70–88.
Lyons, Martyn. 2013. A new history from
below? The writing culture of European
peasants, c. 1850 – c. 1920. In Anna
Kuismin and Matthew Driscoll (eds).
White Field, Black Seeds: Nordic Literacy
Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century.
Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.
14–29.
Miller, Vincent. 2008. New media,
networking and phatic culture.
Convergence 14: 387–400.
Thurlow, Crispin and Adam Jaworski. 2011.
Banal globalization? Embodied actions
and mediated practices in tourists’ online
photo-sharing. In Crispin Thurlow and
Kristine Mroczek (eds). Digital Discourse:
Language in the New Media. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. 220–250.
Varis, Piia. 2014. Digital ethnography. Tilburg
Papers in Culture Studies, paper 104.
<https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/upload/
c428e18c-935f-4d12-8afb-652e19899a30_
TPCS_104_Varis.pdf>.
Varis, Piia and Xuan Wang. 2011.
Superdiversity on the Internet: A case
from China. Diversities 13 (2): 71–83.
Wessendorf, Suzanne. 2010. Commonplace
diversity: Social interactions in a super-
diverse context. MMG Working Paper
10-11. <http://www.mmg.mpg.de/
fileadmin/user_upload/documents/wp/
WP_10-11_Wessendorf_Commonplace-
Diversity.pdf>.
10 Multilingual Margins 2015, 2(1):10-30

‘Hallo hoe gaan dit, wat maak

jy?’: Phatic communication,
the mobile phone and coping
strategies in a South African
context

Fie Velghe
Tilburg University

Abstract
This paper looks at the ways in which the mobile phone has become a means through
which phatic communication is being expressed. More specifically, the paper shows
how, in an impoverished community such as the Wesbank township in South Africa,
phatic communication and ‘maintaining a connected presence’ are vital strategies of
social networking. In a context of severe and desperate impoverishment, loneliness,
chronic unemployment and boredom, the exchange of phatic communicational
gestures such as a text message or a short phone call forms one of the many coping
strategies that the residents in Wesbank employ to face up to the harsh conditions of
poverty and insecurity.

Keywords: mobile phones; phatic communication; conviviality; voice; South Africa

1. INTRODUCTION getting a text message or a call back; or

I magine walking down the road in
your neighbourhood and the old lady
living on your street—who usually greets
you when you walk by—is suddenly
not answering your friendly greeting
anymore. Or your neighbour, with whom
you normally exchange some friendly,
formalised ‘small talk’ such as ‘Hello,
how are you?’ and ‘What bad weather
we have today!’, is ignoring your routine
attempts at interaction. Imagine sending
a text message to a friend you have not
heard from for a long time, just to say
you are thinking of him and that you
hope that everything is alright, but not
posting a (in your opinion quite funny)
status update on your Facebook wall
and none of your 300 Facebook friends
‘likes’ it. Or, finally, imagine a friend of
yours, who usually posts a huge (and in
your view sometimes irritating) number
of tweets daily on his Twitter account,
suddenly not tweeting at all.
All the above-mentioned situations
would probably make you feel
uncomfortable and make you wonder:
Did I do something wrong? Have I done
something to upset my neighbour or
the old lady in my street? Is my friend
angry with me for some reason? Was
my Facebook post maybe not so funny

© Velghe and CMDR. 2014

Hallo, hoe gaan dit?
after all? Is my silent Twitter friend ok?
It is only when such daily, routine social
interactions cease to take place that we
realize their actual importance. When
they disappear, we are suddenly left with a
feeling of worry or of being unheard and
unappreciated. We may think of the other
person who infringes the reciprocity of
such social interactions as impolite, rude,
pretentious or egocentric. This is because
such communicational exchanges that
do not necessarily intend to inform or
exchange any meaningful information
do have another, no less important
purpose: a social one (Malinowski 1923).
With such ‘phatic communication’, one
aims to express some kind of sociability
and to maintain social connections and
bonds (Miller 2008). Even though you
know nothing about that old lady living
in your street, and apart from ‘Hello,
how are you?’ you never really entered
into a conversation with her, those
simple greetings do give you the feeling
of being connected with her in some
way. Also, your friendly greetings to your
neighbour have made it possible for you
to go and ask him, without any feeling
of guilt, if you can borrow his drill when
you are doing some small jobs in the
house. And, although you have not seen
your friend for a very long time, an SMS
every now and then does, however, give
you the feeling of being in touch with
him and being updated about his life.
This article looks at how the mobile
phone has become a means through
which such phatic communication is
being expressed and how communications
such as a text message, a short call, or a
short comment on someone’s Facebook
wall ‘becomes part of a mediated phatic
sociability necessary to maintain a connected
presence’ (Miller 2008: 395). We will see
how, in an impoverished community such
as the Wesbank township in South Africa,
phatic communication and ‘maintaining a
11
connected presence’ are vital strategies of
social networking. In a context of severe
and desperate impoverishment, loneliness,
chronic unemployment and boredom,
the exchange of phatic communicational
gestures forms one of the many coping
strategies that the residents in Wesbank
employ to face up to the harsh conditions
of poverty and insecurity.
I will start by giving a brief
description of the research site, Wesbank,
and then turn to some examples of phatic
communication and its socio-economic
implications, followed by a review of other
literature on phatic communication in
relation to poverty and coping strategies.
2. THE FIELD: WESBANK
Wesbank community, which officially
became a residential area in 1999, five
years after the abolishment of apartheid,
is by all accounts a peripheral township,
characterized by poverty, unemployment
and high crime rates (Blommaert et al.
2005). It is situated on the Cape Flats,
the so-called ‘dumping grounds of
apartheid’, a dry and sandy low-lying
area 27 kilometres from the centre of
Cape Town and surrounded by many
other apartheid townships. The building
of the township started in 1998 as part
of the ‘reconstruction and development
programme’ (RDP), a national socio-
economic policy framework which the
first democratic government in South
Africa implemented in 1994 to tackle
the economic, racial and spatial legacies
of apartheid and to improve government
services and basic living conditions for
the poor.
The building of Wesbank was one of
the first post-apartheid housing projects
in the area of Cape Town that was not
segregated along racial lines, but was
intended to provide housing for deprived
© Velghe and CMDR. 2015
12
people irrespective of colour and descent.
‘Black’, ‘coloured’ and some ‘white’
people, and a growing number of African
immigrants, live in the same community,
although 67% of the population is
‘coloured’ and Afrikaans-speaking (Dyers
2008; Census 2013). This first so-called
‘rainbow community’ gave a home to
25 000 people in 5 149 fully subsidized
houses. The actual number of residents is
estimated to be much higher, but recent
statistics and numbers for the area are not
available. All the ‘RDP houses’ in Wesbank
have been granted for free to people who
were eligible for a full subsidy house,
targeting families with a monthly income
of less than R3 500 (approximately €266).
The low-cost houses have an average
size of 25 square metres, are very poorly
equipped and not isolated.
Poverty has been a characteristic
feature of the population since the first
days of Wesbank’s existence. Wesbank
has a very low average education rate,
with only about 10% of the inhabitants
having finished grade 11-12 (Blommaert
et al. 2005) . In ward 19, the administrative
area that contains Wesbank, only 26.9%
of those aged 20 years or older have
finished their last year of secondary school
(Census 2013). As a consequence, many
middle-aged residents are illiterate or
sub-literate and unskilled, which makes it
very hard for them to find a formal job.
While recent unemployment rates for the
Wesbank community are not available, the
latest report on ward 19 as a whole gives
an unemployment rate of 25.8% (Census
2013). The overall basic service delivery
is also very limited. Gangsterism and
crime rates are very high, mainly due to
high unemployment rates, the constant
inflow of new residents, easy access to
drugs, alcohol and firearms, the absence
of a police station in the area and the
© Velghe and CMDR. 2015
VELGHE
flourishing, deeply rooted presence of two
big and many small criminal gangs.
3. DATA COLLECTION AND
METHODOLOGY
This article draws on three extensive
ethnographic fieldwork periods in the
community of Wesbank between January
2011 and June 2013, with a total stay of
16 months. The study included in-depth,
face-to-face interviews with 33 middle-
aged women and one group interview with
eight women attending the senior craft
club organized in Wesbank. The women
interviewed face-to-face were all between
40 and 65 years old, with the exception
of one 25-year-old woman. Face-to-face
interviews were all held at the women’s
premises and lasted between one and
two hours. Potential interviewees were
selected and introduced with the help of
two community workers or by snowball
effect, in which interviewees introduced
friends or neighbours. Although a list
of questions was used as a reference, the
interviews were semi-structured, allowing
interruptions, follow-up questions and
space and time for interviewees to
accentuate their own fields of interest.
Other data were gathered by handing
out two different questionnaires in the
high school, one primary school and the
multi-purpose centre in Wesbank. Six
interviewees kept a mobile phone diary
in a small notebook in which they noted
all the text messages and phone calls they
made and received during the course of
one week. Three cell phone courses were
organised in which I was assisted by two
teenage girls who taught the participants
how to send and read and reply to text
messages and/or how to use the internet.
In total I have assisted nine women with
how to compose, send and answer text
messages, six women with how to create
Hallo, hoe gaan dit?
and operate a Facebook and e-mail
account, and two women with how to use
Google and Wikipedia. All these women
have also been interviewed and closely
followed up afterwards; I paid them
regular visits during which they could
ask questions, repeat things learned and
during which I could collect a corpus
of text messages, screen shots and get
a clear view on their learning processes
and vulnerabilities.
As much time as possible was spent
in the community and daily observations
of interactions, literacy classes for adults,
social gatherings, family situations, mobile
phone use, and informal conversations
were written down in a fieldwork diary,
following participant observation. Other
data included pictures, text messages
received and sent, screenshots of Facebook,
WhatsApp and MXit conversations, etc.
(see Velghe 2014 for a more detailed
description).
4. ‘PHATIC’
COMMUNICATION IN A
NEW COMMUNICATIVE
ENVIRONMENT
Malinowski (1923) was the first to use
the term ‘phatic exchange’ in ‘describing
a communicative gesture that does not
inform or exchange any meaningful
information or facts about the world’
(Miller 2008: 393), referring to verbal
exchanges that primarily serve a social
purpose, to express sociability and
maintain connections or bonds. Such
phatic messages are not intended to
carry information or substance to the
receiver, but instead concern the process of
communication (Miller 2008). According
to Vetere et al. (2005), ‘phatic acts ensure
existing communication channels
are kept open and usable’. Phatic
communication thus leaves the door ajar,
13
so to speak, for further communication,
sociability and, as we will see below,
survival or coping strategies in a context
of severe poverty.
As suggested above, we may think
of a person who infringes the reciprocity
of a friendly greeting as being impolite,
rude, pretentious or even egocentric. We
may also, when the person in question
is mentioned in a conversation, make
comments such as ‘This guy suddenly
thinks he is too good for me’ or ‘She
is so pretentious’. Leaving out ‘phatic’
gestures in the meeting and greeting
of other people can clearly impinge on
our feeling of ‘conviviality’ (Blommaert
2012). According to Blommaert (2012:
10), ‘people perform low-intensity
and apparently low-salience forms of
interaction tailored towards a sense of
commonness’ that leads to conviviality.
For instance, the many Congolese,
Somalian, Nigerian, and Zimbabwean
refugees who live in Wesbank and own
informal shops and businesses are all very
proud of being capable of exchanging
greetings with their clients in Afrikaans or
isiXhosa, the two main languages spoken
in the community. Although expressions
such as ‘hallo, hoe gaan dit’ (Afrikaans
for ‘hello how are you’) or ‘molo, unjani’
(isiXhosa for ‘hello how are you’) do
not carry substantial information to the
receiver and instead mainly concern the
process of communication, they do have
the capacity of strengthening existing
relationships in order to facilitate further
communication (Vetere et al. 2005, cited
in Miller 2008: 394) and to sustain a
feeling of conviviality and sociability.
According to Miller (2008: 395), ‘one
should not assume that these phatic
communications are “meaningless”, in
fact, in many ways they are meaningful
and imply recognition, intimacy, and
sociability in which a strong sense of
community is founded’.
© Velghe and CMDR. 2015
14
Miller (2008: 387) stated that phatic
communication ‘has become an increasingly
significant part of digital media culture
alongside the rise of online networking
practices’. Through the emergence and
high uptake of new information and
communication technologies (ICTs) we
now have a multitude of channels and
devices on which ‘small talk’ and phatic
gestures can take place. In what Miller
(2008) calls the ‘phatic media culture’, we
tend to constantly ‘keep in touch’ in order
to ‘maintain a connected presence in an
ever-expanding social network’ (Miller
2008: 395). We can chat, skype, tweet,
email, ‘poke’, ‘like’, SMS, call, etc., in our
attempts to connect with others without
being physically present.
According to Lacohée et al. (2003:
206), the mobile phone facilitates
communication as ‘the perfect tool for
increased levels of social grooming,
i.e. letting someone know that you are
thinking about them’: text messages can be
very low in information but high in ‘social
grooming’. In their research on mobile
phone use and SMS texting amongst
Australian youngsters, Horstmanshof
and Power (2005) found that text
messaging is primarily used for making
connections, affirming relationships and
friendship maintenance, fulfilling phatic
and social-relational functions. Since
phatic interactions create expectations of
reciprocation, Horstmanshof and Power
(2005) are of the opinion that youngsters
are able to find help with boredom and
anxiety by reaching out to their friends
with text messages in the confident belief
that at least one of their friends will
respond. As we will see below, middle-
aged women in Wesbank also seek
recourse on their phones when boredom,
insecurity, or a feeling of depression hits
them. Also here, (SMS) messages are not
necessarily used to exchange ‘content’,
but more for the creation of a sense of
being in social (phatic) contact with others
© Velghe and CMDR. 2015
VELGHE
(Horstmanshof et al. 2005). Similarly to
what Miller and Horst (2006) found in
their research, in Wesbank making short
and frequent phone calls is another way
in which the mobile phone lends itself
perfectly as an instrument for phatic
interaction: such calls maintain and
strengthen ‘presence’ in which the act of
calling counts more than what exactly is
being said (Licoppe 2004). This is what
Horst and Miller (2006) call ‘link-up’ in
their anthropological study on mobile
phone use amongst low-income families
in Jamaica. In a similar vein, Miller (2008)
states the following:
we see a shift from dialogue and
communication between actors
in a network, where the point of
the network was to facilitate an
exchange of substantive content, to
a situation where the maintenance
of a network itself has become the
primary focus. Here communication
has been subordinated to the role
of the simple maintenance of ever
expanding networks and the notion
of a connected presence. (Miller
2008: 398)
As we will see in the next section, in
Wesbank, it is exactly the maintenance of
networks and social bonds that seems to be
the primary focus of a lot of online, offline
and face-to-face communication. In a
context of severe poverty, the employment
of phatic gestures—part and parcel of
daily encounters and communicational
exchanges—is one of the many coping
strategies that the residents of the
impoverished community employ in order
to deal with the harsh conditions of living
their lives in poverty and insecurity. The
mobile phone has given the residents
a new medium through which they can
now maintain, strengthen and extend
their relationships and networks with
people both from within and outside the
community.
Hallo, hoe gaan dit?
5. PHATIC
COMMUNICATION AS A
SURVIVAL STRATEGY
As mentioned above, the kinds of
communicational exchanges that do not
necessarily intend to inform or exchange
any meaningful information do have
another, no less important function: a
social one (Malinowski 1923). Greeting
the old lady in the street, I did not have
the intention to stop and engage in
lengthy conversations with her about
her private life, politics, or the financial
crisis. I greet her because we are both
human, because saying hello ‘does not
cost a thing’, because it creates a sense
of conviviality, and because I do not
want to appear as an unfriendly and
rude person to her. For the same reasons
I say ‘assalamu aleikum’ to the Pakistani
shopkeeper in my neighbourhood, with
whom I also do not have the intention—
let alone the capacity—to engage in
further conversations in Urdu or Pashto;
yet, my greeting in ‘his’ language creates
a kind of sociability and commonness
that is always clearly appreciated.
Although people who disregard
(the reciprocity of) phatic gestures can
be quickly labelled as rude, impolite,
pretentious or egocentric, not respecting
or failing to engage in phatic exchanges
would not necessarily influence our
lives in disastrous and life-threatening
ways. Had I not greeted my neighbour
consistently from our first encounter
onwards, he probably would have refused
to lend me his drill when I asked for it, or
perhaps I would not have asked him to
lend me his drill in the first place, since
I would not have had the feeling that my
level of connection with him lends itself to
a request like that. This, however, would
hardly have made my life unbearable.
15
Similarly, greeting the Pakistani shop
owner in my neighbourhood with an
assalamu alaikum has maybe incited
him to sometimes offer me a free loaf
of bread, but had I not done that, or
greeted him at all, I would still be able to
go and shop in his store.
In contrast, for people who live
their lives on a shoestring budget, phatic
communication can be of vital importance.
As mentioned, phatic communication
leaves the door ajar, not only for further
conversation and sociability, but also for
survival and coping strategies. According
to Horst and Miller (2006), the primary
source of survival amongst low-income
populations consists of other people and
social networks. Based on their research in
Jamaica, they suggested that the mobile
phone should, therefore, not be seen
as a mere addition to the household or
as a luxury item, but ‘as something that
dramatically changes the fundamental
conditions for survival of low-income
Jamaicans, because it is the instrument
of their single most important means
of survival—communication with other
people (Horst and Miller 2006: 57). Social
connectedness and connected presence
have the possibility of generating a safety
network of acquaintances, neighbours,
church members, friends, family members,
colleagues, old school mates, etc. that can
be counted and called upon when help,
counselling or advice is needed.
In what follows, we will look at examples
of how three Wesbank residents employ
phatic gestures on their mobile phones in
order to create a connected presence that can
help them to cope with the harsh realities of
poverty, unemployment and boredom.
Lisa
Lisa is a 45-year-old Wesbank resident
and single parent of three children, of
© Velghe and CMDR. 2015
16
whom only the youngest, her 13-year-old
daughter, still lives with her. Originally
from Oudtshoorn, more than 400 km
away from Cape Town where most of
her brothers and sisters still live, Lisa
has been living in Wesbank since the
first days of its existence. As a single
mother with no regular income, Lisa
applied for a full-subsidy house in
Wesbank. Between 1999 and 2010, she
was able to survive and take care of her
family without having a formal, fixed
job. Throughout the years, Lisa has
established several informal businesses
in order to gain just enough money to
support her family. She has been buying
meat and other groceries in bulk to then
sell them with a little bit of profit to
other residents; she has made and sold
craftwork, and she also participated in
a sort of ‘saving group’ of women who
collectively contributed a certain amount
of money to a central fund, a stokvel. Each
month, a different member of the group
received the stokvel, giving the members
the opportunity to buy groceries in bulk,
to cover unexpected household costs, or
to invest the money. Lisa has also been
buying ‘food stamps’ at Shoprite, one of
the biggest supermarkets in South Africa,
to then sell them in the community.
However, above all she has been
able to survive since she has always been
loved and known by many people in the
community and, as a member of the
New-Born Christians, has also become
known as a very devoted Christian,
attending church meetings and Bible
study several times a week. For as long
as I have known her (since 2005) she
has always had neighbours and other
community members popping in and
greeting her on the street and she has
always been willing to help—financially,
emotionally, or practically—others in the
community.
© Velghe and CMDR. 2015
VELGHE
The case of Lisa resembles what Horst
and Miller found in their research on
Jamaican low-income households: they
see networking as vital in understanding
coping strategies, but according to them
the implications of cause and effect could
also be reversed—people give and take
not because they need to do so but also in
order to facilitate connectedness (Horst
and Miller 2006). Lisa’s generosity and
friendliness made her connected to a lot
of residents of Wesbank who all, in turn,
have become part of her safety network.
Instigated by her daughter, Lisa
started chatting on the very popular
South African mobile instant messaging
programme MXit. Very swiftly, Lisa
became a fervent and daily MXit chatter
using the nickname ‘Sexy Chick’; chatting
in chat rooms and on a one-to-one
basis mainly with men she had ‘met’ on
MXit. She started to live a ‘loose’ sexual
life—both virtually as well as offline—by
flirting with different men from outside
the community and even outside Cape
Town, regularly also meeting up with
them. The first offline encounter always
took place outside the community and for
subsequent encounters they either met
in a pub, in a hotel, or, when she trusted
the man well enough, in her house. MXit
had opened a whole new world for Lisa;
the adoption of a mobile phone and her
phatic chat sessions with unknown men
on MXit had made it possible for her
to transgress her own immediate life-
world and both mentally and physically
leave the seclusion of her house and the
community. The men she has met have
taken her out for dinners, have paid for
a night in a hotel, and given her presents
and money, etc. Next to tangible things,
the chats on MXit have given her the
feeling of ‘being out there’ and the
possibility to expand her networks and
broaden her safety net.
Hallo, hoe gaan dit? 17

Lisa also used MXit to chat with her
son—a soldier based in a province on
the other side of the country—and other
family members and friends. Figures 1,
2 and 3 below are examples of how Lisa
used her mobile phone (MXit and text
messaging) to stay in touch with me by
the mere exchange of phatic gestures.
Figure 2 is a text message Lisa
sent to me when I already had finished
my fieldwork stay and had left South
Africa for Belgium. The mobile network
operator that Lisa was using charged
1.75 ZAR per international SMS, which
is more than double the cost of a national
SMS and five times more expensive
than a national SMS during off-peak
hours. Given that people in Wesbank, on
average, buy airtime vouchers of R5, a
text message of R1.75 is a considerable
amount. Moreover, the text message Lisa
sent to me was so short that it only used

Sexy Chick: Suikrbosi

10:15

Sexy Chick: 1 Sexy Chick Suikrbosi

10:16
2 Sexy Chick 
Suikerbossie: Ah! 3 Suikerbossie Ah!
10:16 4 Suikerbossie Sorry, I just forgot to watch the time

Suikerbossie: Sorry, I just forgot 5 Sexy Chick Wuup2 (‘What are you up to’)
to watch the time
6 Suikerbossie I’m reading
10:16
7 Suikerbossie Wmj  (‘Wat maak jy – what are
Sexy Chick: Wuup2 you doing’)
10:16 8 Sexy Chick @ da hairdresr n u (‘at the hairdresser
and you’)
Suikerbossie: I'm reading 9 Sexy Chick No prob (‘no problem’)
10:17

Suikerbossie: Wmj
10:18

Sexy Chick: @ da hairdresr n u

10:16

Suikerbossie: No prob
10:18

Send

Figure 1: Phatic exchanges between ‘Sexy Chick’ and the author (Suikerbossie) on
MXit (2011)

© Velghe and CMDR. 2015

18 VELGHE

Dis 'kak' koud hier by ons. Mwah

‘It’s ‘shitty’ cold here our side. Mwah'
[onomatopoeic sound for a kiss]

Send

Figure 2: International phatic text message from Lisa to the author (2012)

‘Hi sissy, nice weather for the bed. What

Hi sissy, nice wethr 4 da bed.
Wuup2? Missing u! Mwah! are you up to? Missing you! Mwah!’

Send

Figure 3: Phatic text message from Lisa to the author (2012)

32 of the total of 160 characters available
in an SMS. The moment I received the
SMS I was in no doubt why Lisa would
spend so much money on a text message
just to tell me that it was very cold in Cape
Town. This seemingly ‘meaningless’
SMS made me smile, made me realize
she was thinking of me, and prompted
me to take my phone and call her, thus
strengthening our bonds although we
were thousands of miles apart.
In 2012, Lisa suddenly had a
boyfriend whom she had met in Wesbank
through mutual friends. Since he did
not really have a place to stay—he was
sleeping on a mattress in the shop he
owned—he had moved in with her at
quite an early stage of the relationship.
The relationship had its ups and downs,
predominantly because of the boyfriend’s
extreme jealousy. After moving in, he
had immediately forced her to stop
chatting on MXit since ‘she did not need
it anymore’. Every couple of weeks, they
had huge conflicts and discussions about
all the men and women popping in her
house without a ‘real’ reason, about Lisa
greeting men in the street, doing favours
for others, or visiting and spending time
with neighbours and other acquaintances
in the community, again, according
to him, ‘without real purpose’. Lisa
desperately, though unsuccessfully, tried
to explain to her boyfriend that those
encounters and chats were important to
her, since it was those very interactions
that had helped her survive throughout
the years. Her boyfriend regarded the
phatic exchanges as being ‘superfluous’
and ‘too much’, and could not understand
that Lisa needed those interactions in
order to live a comfortable and happy

© Velghe and CMDR. 2015

Hallo, hoe gaan dit?
life. She mentioned to me several times
that she was afraid that her boyfriend
would force her to renounce her contacts
and networks in the community and thus
lose her safety network. Lisa realized
well enough that she had always been
able to survive in the community by
pursuing conviviality and by respecting
the importance of phatic gestures and
phatic communicational exchanges. She
told me that she was worried about the
fact that, if she and her boyfriend would
ever break up, she would be left alone
without a safety network to call or count
upon.
Katriena
Katriena grew up on a farm in the
countryside. Being the oldest child, she
never had the chance to go to school as
she had to look after her siblings while
her parents were working on the farm.
At the age of 16, only capable of writing
her name and surname, she had tried to
learn how to read and write by herself,
copying words she saw around her and
trying to decode words and sentences
from newspapers and magazines. It
was only at the age of 62, when she had
started following adult literacy classes in
Wesbank, that she attended school for
the first time. Very laboriously, she was
now capable of reading the Bible and
occasionally read magazines and spiritual
books. Katriena had had a mobile phone
for a couple of years, but had only been
able to use the handset to answer and
make calls and to send off ‘Please call me’
(PCM) messages1. After following two
cell phone courses I organised as part of
my fieldwork, Katriena had started using
this Short Message Service extensively. I
had asked Katriena to keep a cell phone
diary of her activities and in the six days
following the cell phone courses, she
sent 39 text messages, an average of 6.5
19
messages a day. This is a lot, especially
if we look at her cell phone diary for the
two months before the courses—during
the course of one week, zero messages
had been sent and seven received, of
which four were advertisement messages
from the cell phone carrier and two were
PCM messages. Only one was an actual
message she had received from a church
member who wanted to find out whether
Katriena was at home. Looking at the
text messages that Katriena sent in the
first week after the cell phone course, we
see that the text messages were all very
short and quite similar to one another
(see figures 4-7 below). She started
using this new communication channel
mainly to greet the addressees and to be
informed about their wellbeing, clearly
with the intention to open up the new
channel that the use of text messages
had created for her and to show the
addressees that she was ‘out there’, now
using the new medium.
In other words, the text messages
must be seen as ‘mere’ communicative
gestures, expressing sociability and forging
connections and networks through a newly
discovered medium. Not so much the
content, but the act of communication is
important here. Katriena is an older lady
in her sixties with severe medical problems
and going out and walking around in her
gang-controlled neighbourhood is a source
of great anxiety for her. The use of text
messages became the most convenient and
safe way for her to stay in touch and link-up
with friends, church members, family and
even neighbours without having to leave
her house.
It was only after some weeks of
familiarisation that Katriena’s text messages
became longer and changed in content. She
started using the SMSs to also exchange
information, organise her life, manage
her household and to ask for help when
© Velghe and CMDR. 2015
20 VELGHE

'I love all of you'

Ek is lief vir julle

Send

Figure 4: SMS from Katriena to a family member (2012)

Hai sis hoe gaan dit met u want

‘Hello sis how are you because I still care
ek stel nogbelang in u van sist
Katriena liefde.
for you from sister Katriena love.’

Send

Figure 5: SMS from Katriena to a church member (2012)

Die here is goet vir my ek hoop om

die selfde van juo ti hoor
The lord is good to me I hope to hear
the same from you’
Send

Figure 6: SMS from Katriena to a friend in Wesbank (2012)

Halo muisie hoe gaandit met julle

‘Hello girl how are you two loved ones of
twee lieflinge van my hart dit is al
waat ek wil weet suster
my heart that’s all I want to know sister’

Send

Figure 7: SMS from Katriena to her daughter (2012)

© Velghe and CMDR. 2015

Hallo, hoe gaan dit?
needed. For instance, in figure 8, Katriena
asks a friend in Wesbank if she could send
her son to get her medicines.
All the text messages in which
Katriena asked for help (to go and collect
her medicines, to water her plants, to
come and pick her up for the Sunday
service at her church, etc.) were preceded
by text messages to the same people with
mere phatic content (see figure 9).
After first ‘linking-up’ by sending a
phatic text message, Katriena probably
thought she was now connected enough
to appropriate the new medium for
asking for help or favours. In the weeks
after the cell phone course, I also received
several text messages from Katriena—
some to thank me for the lessons, others
just to tell me that she had received
my messages, that she was at home, or
to tell me that she loved me. Suddenly
wat gaan an war om antwood jy
my nie of het hy nie die pille ge
gaan haal nie laat weet my ek is ge
wharrie liefde
Send
Figure 8: SMS from Katriena to a friend in Wesbank (2012)
Halo ek vir lang na julle ek mis julle
beai ek mis julle ek kan nie wag om
huis toe te kom nie..
Send
Figure 9: An earlier ‘phatic’ SMS from Katriena to the same friend as in figure 8
21
I also received a text message in which
she asked me to lend her R20 for her
electricity expenses. She had never asked
me for such financial favours before, but
apparently was of the opinion that our
constant connectedness through SMSs
had forged our relationship in such a way
that it was now appropriate for her to do
that. This presumption is in line with
the findings of Horst and Miller (2006),
who stated that a lot of mobile phone
communication is carried out in the hope
of continuously creating new possibilities
through personal networking. According
to them, the phone is not only used to
search for employment or to carry out
entrepreneurial work, but even more
importantly as the possible creator of
extensive networks and as the perfect
medium to engage in a large number
of small conversations with various
‘What is happening why don’t you
answer me or did he not go and get the
medicines let me know I am worried
love’
‘Hello I long for you all I miss you all
very much I miss you all I cannot wait to
come back home..’
© Velghe and CMDR. 2015
22
contacts, to ‘cast out the net of social
communication widely enough for one
to hope to finally catch a big fish’ (Horst
and Miller 2006: 157).
In figure 8 we also see that Katriena
expected answers to her messages and that
she got irritated when people did not reply
(‘what is happening why don’t you answer
me’). Her best friend in Wesbank, who was
also present during the cell phone course,
never replied to Katriena’s text messages,
even after they both had learned how
to compose and send them. Katriena
always mentioned this to me when I saw
her, and her friend’s reluctance to reply
was the object of several discussions
between them. As mentioned above,
phatic interaction creates expectations of
reciprocation. Katriena clearly regarded
her phatic exchanges as a valued form of
communication one should not overlook
or ignore. Just as one expects a greeting
back when one greets a neighbour in the
street, Katriena also expected an answer
to her text messages. Messages lacking
any form of meaningful information or
content, only intended to greet and to
‘link-up’ with people in one’s network, are
real communicative gestures with certain
intentions, implications and consequences.
SMS messages can create new forms
of intimacy and can form and deepen
relationships, ‘enhancing the ability to
be communicatively present while being
physically absent’ (Wajcman et al. 2008:
648). Accordingly, when Katriena was away
for a week, visiting her birthplace, she sent
SMSs to be in constant contact with her
son, her neighbour, her daughter and her
best friends in Wesbank.
Linda
During my fieldwork, Linda, a 25-year-
old Afrikaans-speaking resident of
Wesbank, was living together with her
3-year-old daughter, her mother, her
© Velghe and CMDR. 2015
VELGHE
brother, and her little sister. If tested,
Linda would probably be diagnosed with
a severe form of dysgraphia. Sitting bored
at home, Linda did, however, spend most
of her days and nights on MXit, chatting
with friends from outside and inside the
community. The moment that I met her
she was just replacing her mother as a
caretaker. After having dropped out of
high school she had never been formally
employed. Her friends had introduced
her to MXit and were still assisting her
with her reading and writing on the
program. Since the first day she had
been on MXit, she had been copying
words and sentences with pen and paper
from her chat partners and when asking
for advice from her friends. Papers and
notebooks in which Linda had taken
‘textspeak’2 notes—words, sentences,
and expressions she might copy and use
in the future—were scattered all over the
house. This ‘corpus’ of copied material
was the main instrument by means of
which she was capable of sustaining
and extending her (virtual and offline)
network. When Linda engaged in MXit
interactions, she copied standard ‘passe
partout’ phrases and expressions. These
writing resources formed a tightly closed
package of copied and memorized
words as she could hardly improvise
and innovate in her writing, she asked
standard questions such as ‘wat maak
jy’ (‘what are you doing’), ‘hoe gaan dit’
(‘how are you?’) and was able to reply to
such predictable and phatic questions
by means of routine answers (‘ek is bored’
– ‘I am bored’ – ‘ek is by die werk’ – ‘I’m
at work’). This way she could keep
conversations going for a while; through
the use of these phatic expressions, she
managed to appear as a competent user
of MXit and this apparently satisfied the
requirements of interaction and her wish
to be in touch with her social network
(Blommaert and Velghe 2012).
Hallo, hoe gaan dit? 23

Inthetranscribedinstantchatmessages simply did not answer me. When I asked

between Linda and me (see conversation
1 and 2 below), phatic expressions are
omnipresent. Both conversations are
predominantly in Afrikaans textspeak.
The ‘standard’ Afrikaans spelling is given
between brackets in the third column
and the English translation can be found
in the last column on the right. In the
first conversation, one can see that the
whole exchange did not transcend mere
phatic exchanges (‘how are you’, ‘I am at
home’, ‘what are you doing now’, etc.).
Linda’s sentences were all very short and
she was clearly taking fewer turns in the
conversation than me. When I tended to
exceed the phatic content by using longer
sentences or asking a lot of questions, she
her how long she still had to work, she
kept quiet until I asked her a new question
nine minutes later (see: ‘I hope everything
is ok at your job’), probably because she
did not understand my first two questions
(‘For how many days?’ and ‘For how many
nights?’).
During the second conversation,
the limitations of Linda’s literacy
repertoire became very clear. I opened
the conversation with two general
phatic questions (‘alles goed?’ en ‘wmj?’)
and I receive a general, routine answer
(‘I’m just sitting here watching tv and
you?’). In the two next turns, I answered
Linda’s ‘and you?’ question by providing
information about my whereabouts and

Conversation 1:
17:50 Me: Linda: Dag Linda hoe gaan dit? Hello Linda how are you
17:50 Linda: leka en mt jo (lekker en met jou) Good and you
17:52 Me: Joh ek kan die kleur van jou letters baie Joh, I can hardly read the colour of your
moeilik lees! letters!
17:53 Linda: ohk Ok
17:54 Me: Mr alles gan goed But everything’s ok
17:54 Me: Ek is by die huis I’m at home
17:56 Linda: O O
17:57 Me: Wat het jy gemaak vandag? What did you do today?
17:57 Linda: Wmjdn (wat maak jy dan nou) What are you doing now?
17:58 Me: Ek werk op my computer I’m working on my computer
17:58 Linda: by die werk nu At work right
17:58 Me: Ek moet n article skryf I have to write an article
17:58 Me: Is jy by die werk? Are you at your work?
17: 59 Linda: k Ok
17: 59 Linda: jip Yes
18:00 Me: Vir hoeveel dae? For how many days?
18:00 Me: Vir hoeveel nagte? For how many nights?
18:09 Me: Ek hoop alles gaan goed met die werk I hope everything is ok at your job
18:09 Linda: ja baie goed Yes, very good
18:10 Me: Dit is goed om te werk It is good to work
18:10 Me: Wanneer gaan jy huis toe? When are you going home?
18:10 Me: Mre (môre) Tomorrow

© Velghe and CMDR. 2015

24 VELGHE

Conversation 2:
10:47 Me: Alles goed? Everything alright?
10:50 Me: Wmj? (wat maak jy) What are you doing?
10:49 Linda: Siu ma hier kijk tv nj (… en jy) Just sitting here watching tv and you
10:51 Me: Ek is by die huis I’m at home
10:51 Me: Ek lees vir die universiteit I’m reading for university
10:52 Me: Wat is siu? What is siu?
10:52 Linda: ohk Ohk
10:52 Linda: wt? What?
10:53 Me: jy skryf siu mar ek weetnie wat dat You write siu but I don’t know what that
beteken’ie means
10:54 Linda: ok Ok
10:54 Linda: wat gaan jy vandag mk What are you going to do today
10:55 Me: wat is csclol in jou status What is csclol in your status
10:55 Me: Ek bly by die huis om te werk I stay at home to work
10:56 Linda: x weetie I don’t know
10:57 Linda: ohk ok
10:57 Me: jy skryf dit in jou status You write this in your status
10:59 Linda: ja yes
10:59 Me: En wat beteken dit? Ek is nuuskierig And what does that mean? I’m curious
11:00 “Linda is now busy” Status message
11:02 Linda: g2g Got to go
11:02 “Linda is now offline” Status message

activities (‘I’m at home’ and ‘I’m reading
for university’) to then, in the third
turn, inquire about the meaning of ‘siu’.
Linda first answers with ‘what?’ after
which I repeat my inquiry (‘You write
siu but I don’t know what that means’)
but I only get an ‘ohk’ as an answer.
Linda tried to bring the conversation
back to a mere phatic exchange by
immediately posting another routine,
standard question (‘what are you going
to do today?’). I gave a routine answer to
that question (‘I stay at home to work’),
but before I did that I asked her another
informational question about the status
line she had written in her profile (‘what
is csclol in your status?’). On MXit like on
other social media platforms, members
can enter a status—often a slogan or
a motto—in their profile. Linda was
changing her profile status almost daily,
another sign of her desire to be perceived
as a competent user. Probably a copy or
a transcription from a dictation by one
of her friends, Linda’s status that day
read: ‘WU RUN THE WORLD GALZ …
WU FOK THE GALZ BOYS … LMJ NW
HOE NOW::op=csclol=@’ (‘who runs
the world girls … who fuck the girls boys
…’). Linda probably accurately copied
part of the phrase into her status, but the
end of the status was very unclear and
looked rather like a random compilation
of signs. As an ethnographer in the
field I had been deeply immersed in
informal learning practices of textspeak

© Velghe and CMDR. 2015

Hallo, hoe gaan dit?
(see Velghe 2011) and was thus used to
constantly inquiring into the meaning
of what I received and perceived. By
asking Linda what csclol meant, I forced
her again to transcend the mere phatic
exchange of routine, standard questions
and answers. Linda first answered with ‘I
don’t know’ after which I told her that she
however had written csclol in her status,
implying that she should know what she
had written. She answered with a ‘yes’
two minutes afterwards (a marked pause
in an instant messaging environment)
after which I again clarified my question
(‘what does it mean? I am curious’).
Suddenly after that, however, the status
message ‘Linda is now busy’ appeared
on my screen, followed by Linda writing
a standardized ‘g2g’ (textspeak for ‘got
to go’) and effectively going offline
(Blommaert and Velghe 2012).
In the two transcribed instant
messaging conversations, it is clear that
Linda was quite fluent in asking and
answering routine, phatic questions
(How are you? What are you doing?
I am at work. I am watching television
and you?, etc.). She seemed, however,
to quickly reach her literacy limit when
different questions, requiring generative,
non-routine answers and exceeding
mere phatic content, were being asked.
In order to avoid being exposed as a
dysgraphic or ‘illiterate’ person, my
insistence on an explanation forced
her to withdraw from our conversation
(Blommaert and Velghe 2012).
Sitting bored at home, MXit
chatting was one of the most important
(social) activities in Linda’s life. Through
a limited set of interactional practices,
Linda managed somehow to be seen as a
competent MXit chatter by her network
of MXit friends. The reason that she
managed to be seen as a ‘fully competent’
member was because her messages were
less seen as linguistic objects than as
25
indexical ones, not as carriers of intricate
denotational meanings but as phatic
messages that supported Linda’s role
as a group member and defined her
relations with her peers as agreeable
and friendly (Blommaert and Velghe
2012: 20). Linda’s use of textspeak was
not primarily a use of ‘language’, it was
a deployment of voice—of a sign system
that opened channels of peer-group
communication and conviviality, and
established and confirmed Linda’s place
in her network of friends (Blommaert
and Velghe 2012: 20). In other words,
Linda did not invest so much time and
effort in the learning and writing of
these signs because they enabled her
to express denotational meaning (we
have seen the limits of her generative
writing and reading skills), but because
they were a crucial and essential social
instrument for her; one of the few very
valuable instruments she possessed to
make herself recognizable and respected
as a human being. Through the support
of her friends and her amassed ‘corpus
of textspeak’, Linda was able to apply
the mere phatic exchanges in order
to be ‘out there’, be in constant social
contact with others from within the four
walls of her small house, and build a
sense of conviviality while almost ‘saying
nothing’. Because of her disability,
phatic exchanges for Linda, were of vital
importance since they were the only
possible way to be in touch and connect
with the world around her.
6. DISCUSSION AND
CONCLUSION
Most of what has been discussed here is in
line with the research by Horst and Miller
(2005, 2006) on low-income families
in Jamaica. More focussed on calling
© Velghe and CMDR. 2015
26
practices with the mobile phone, Horst
and Miller have introduced the term link-
up to refer to the extensive networking
practices of very short phone calls to
a lot of different contacts in people’s
networks (Horst and Miller 2006).
Those link-up calls often have merely
phatic content or aims, consisting of
questions such as ‘Hi how is everything?’
or ‘wa gwaan?’ (Jamaican Creole for
‘what is going on?’) and replies such as
‘Oh, I’m ok, I’m just enjoying summer’
(Horst and Miller 2006: 96). According
to them, link-up is characterised by very
short calls made every couple of weeks
to a high number of contacts, in order
to keep the contact lists constantly active
(Horst and Miller 2005: 760). According
to the main cell phone carrier in
Jamaica, the average mobile phone call
there lasts only 19 seconds (Horst and
Miller 2006: 96). The most important
aspect of those phone calls is not the
content of the conversations but ‘their
use to maintain connections over time’,
all of these interactions ‘representing
potential connections that were usually
operationalized only at the time of a
specific need’ (Horst and Miller 2005:
760). The link-up calls are ‘extensively
used for economic development and
coping but it is not particular to times
of need’ (Horst and Miller 2006: 96).
Horst and Miller see these link-up calls
as a consequence of the characteristic of
Jamaican communication, in which the
desire to forge links and to be in touch
about ‘nothing in particular’ becomes
important in its own right (Horst and
Miller 2006: 96). The predominantly
phatic link-up calls observed by Horst
and Miller in low-income settings in
rural and urban Jamaica tended to create
safety networks that eventually could
be activated in relation to monetary,
emotional, practical or sexual needs.
The functions of the Jamaican link-up
© Velghe and CMDR. 2015
VELGHE
phenomenon are thus similar to what
Lisa was achieving by popping in on a
regular basis at friends’ and neighbours’
houses in Wesbank, or Katriena using
her text messages to set doors ajar to
sociability with people in her (mobile
phone) network, and Linda having
routine conversations on MXit.
According to Horst and Miller (2006:
97), link-up has become the foundation
to communication in Jamaica as well the
basis of networking: it can be built upon
‘to create relationships, realize projects
and gain support, whether emotionally,
practically or financially’. Similarly to
the case of Wesbank residents discussed
here, Horst and Miller stated that:
What the poorest individuals really
lack is not so much food, but these
critical social networks. The cell
phone and its ability to record
and recall upon 400 numbers,
is therefore the ideal tool for a
Jamaican trying to create the ever-
changing social networks that
Jamaicans feel are ultimately more
reliable than a company, employer
or even a parent or spouse alone.
This feature, perhaps more than
any other, represents the critical
economic impact of the cell phone
in Jamaica. (Horst and Miller 2006:
111)
In other words, the difference between
being destitute and not being destitute is,
according to Miller (2006), a difference
between having or not having friends or
family that one can call upon in times
of need. Horst and Miller found that in
their rural research site, only 10% of the
population were formally employed in
reliable, regularly paid jobs and more than
half the household incomes in their survey
came from social networking rather than
from any kind of labour or sales (Horst
and Miller 2005: 761). Similarly, since so
many Wesbank residents are (chronically)
Hallo, hoe gaan dit?
unemployed, they mainly survive thanks
to the generous support coming from
family, boyfriends, husbands, fellow
church members, friends and neighbours,
small and temporary informal sector
employment such as the ones that Lisa
had been involved in, or by applying for
social security benefits such as child care
and disability grants, or pensions.
In his response to the claim that the
uptake of mobile phones in the developing
world would generate an increased GDP,
a general increase of income for the
poorest of the poor, and close the so-called
digital divide between the developed
and developing countries with regards to
access to ICTs, Miller (2006) stated that
the vast majority of low-income individuals
in Jamaica—just like in Wesbank—did
not use their phone for entrepreneurial
activities or to obtain formal employment.
The critical economic impact of the
mobile phone in Jamaica—and in my view
more generally in the underdeveloped
or developing parts of the world—is not
due to its ability to generate income or
to ‘make money’ (Miller 2008) but to its
ability to ‘get money’ or, in other words,
to immediately ameliorate financial or
emotional ‘suffering’ (Miller 2008) through
connectedness and sociability. Used as
a means to this kind of ‘conviviality’, the
mobile phone should thus not be seen as
a luxury item that places an even heavier
burden on people’s finances, but as a
necessity that is vital to mere survival and as
‘an effective instrument for assisting in low-
level redistribution of money from those
who have little to those who have least’
(Horst and Miller 2006: 114). The more
people one has in one’s social network,
the more shock-resistant one becomes and
through social networking and conviviality,
Wesbank residents realized the need for
‘casting out their safety nets’ (Horst and
Miller 2006: 157). The exchange of phatic
gestures, whether face-to-face or ‘virtually’,
27
has a clear influence on our perception of
others, and being known in the community
as a friendly, caring and benevolent person
proved to be extremely helpful in coping
with harsh conditions of poverty, insecurity,
boredom and loneliness in Wesbank. As a
communication tool, the mobile phone
has proven to be the perfect instrument
for such phatic exchanges and thus,
for extending and strengthening one’s
networks, making it possible to link-up
through short phone calls, text messages,
Facebook wall posts, chat messages or
PCM messages (see also Bidwell et al. 2011
on rural communities in South Africa).
Vincent Miller (2008: 393) stated
that current communicative practices on
Facebook and other social networking sites
‘are motivated less by having something
in particular to say (i.e. communicating
some kind of information), as it is by
the obligation or encouragement to say
“something” to maintain connections to
audiences, to let one’s network know that
one is still “there”’. Text, chat or Facebook
messages should thus not only be looked
at as ‘linguistic’ objects (as carriers of
denotational meanings), but as indexical
objects that are meant to be used to
‘socialize’ with others. We should measure
these phatic exchanges by the standards
of the indexical order of conviviality,
instead of by the standards of language
only. Language and literacy are always
the means to (obtain) voice (‘to let one
be heard and understood’). Using phatic
exchanges is a deployment of voice—of
a sign system that opens channels of
communication and conviviality and that
establishes human beings as members of
communities and networks that in places
like Wesbank can be vital for survival. For
people in Wesbank, making sure that
people know that you are still ‘there’ can
have an influence on whether one will have
bread on the table at the end of the day
or not. The exchange of phatic gestures is
© Velghe and CMDR. 2015
28
not a new phenomenon and neither is the
exchange of phatic gestures as a coping
strategy in impoverished communities
like Wesbank. The high uptake of the
mobile phone has given the people
just another means through which they
can now ‘cast out their nets’ and create
extended networks through extensive
rather than intensive calling and texting. It
has given the people a new instrument for
communication and networking that can
be used from within the safe environment
of the home, spanning forever increasing
circles of acquaintances and distances.
ENDNOTES
1 In this article I call Wesbank a
‘community’ instead of a ‘township’,
‘settlement’, or ‘area’. Residents of the
area themselves refer to Wesbank as ‘a
community’, both in the physical sense
(community as a place or an area) but
also in the social sense (community as a
group of people).
2 The term ‘coloured’ remains
problematic, as it formed part of the
segregation policy of the apartheid
government to clearly define and divide
different sections of the South African
population. On the other hand it is a
firmly entrenched term and the racial
categorizing terminology still persists in
the appellation of people of mixed race
(‘coloureds’) and ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’,
and is still used by the South African
population itself. In this article inverted
commas are used to indicate this
dilemma.
3 Exchange rate on May 26, 2015.
4 Here again, more recent statistics for the
area are, unfortunately, not available.
5 Ward 019 includes the areas of Blue
Downs CBD, Brentwood Park, Camelot,
Delro Village, Driftsands, Gersham,
Hagley, Highbury, Highbury Park,
Highgate, Hindle Park, Rotterdam,
Silversands, Stellendale, Sunbird Park,
Wembley Park, and Wesbank. Most
of them are socio-economically and
demographically similar to Wesbank.
© Velghe and CMDR. 2015
VELGHE
6 MXit can be accessed on mobile phones
and is comparable to computer-based
instant messaging programs such as
MSN Messenger. MXit users can chat
either in chat rooms (often centred
around specific themes, geographical
locations or age groups) or one-to-one
with contacts one has to invite and accept
(Chigona and Chigona 2008). The fast
growth and popularity of MXit may
partly be attributed to its cheap costs;
a MXit message costs 2 South African
Rand cents compared to 70 cents for an
SMS (Chigona and Chigona 2008).
7 A PCM message or ‘Please call me’
message is a free service offered by
the cell phone providers; it allows
sending free text messages to any other
telephone number in cases of emergency
when one runs out of airtime with a
request to call back. Those free messages
– a daily limited amount of them – read
‘please call me’ and feature the number
requesting the call-back, followed by an
advertisement. Nowadays, one can add a
short personal message of ten characters
to these PCMs and personalise the
telephone number by adding one’s own
name or nickname. For many middle-
aged ‘subliterate’ women in Wesbank,
a PCM is next to calling and receiving
calls the only thing they (can) use their
handsets for.
8 ‘Textspeak’ is the name given to the
global medialect or the mobile texting
codes, characterized by abbreviations,
acronyms, initialisms, non-standard
spellings and emoticons.
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<https://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/events/
ubisoc2005/UbiSoc%202005%20
submissions/12-Vetere-Frank.pdf>
© Velghe and CMDR. 2015
VELGHE
Wajcman, Judy, Michael Bittman and
Judith E. Brown. 2008. Families without
borders: Mobile phones, connectedness
and home-work divisions. Sociology 42
(4): 635-652.
Zainudeen, Ayesha, Rohan Samarajiva and
Ayoma Abeysuriya. 2006. Telecom use
on a shoestring: Strategic use of telecom
services by the financially constrained in
South Asia. WDR Dialogue Theme 3rd Cycle
Discussion Paper, WBR0604, Version 2.0.
<http://ssrn.com/abstract=1554747>
Multilingual Margins 2015, 2(1):31-45 31

Conviviality and collectives on

social media: Virality, memes, and
new social structures

Piia Varis
Tilburg University

Jan Blommaert
Tilburg University and Ghent University

Abstract
There is a long tradition in which ‘phatic’ forms of interaction are seen as (and
characterized by) relatively low levels of ‘information’ and ‘meaning’. Yet, observations
on social media interaction patterns show an amazing density of such phatic
interactions, in which signs are shared and circulated without an a priori determination
of the meaning. We address the issue of ‘virality’ in this paper: the astonishing speed
and scope with which often ‘empty’ (i.e. not a priori determined) signs circulate online.
We address ‘memes’—signs that have gone viral on the internet—as cases in point.
Virality as a sociolinguistic phenomenon raises specific issues about signs, meanings,
and functions, prompting a shift from ‘meaning’ to ‘effect’. This effect, we can see,
is conviviality: the production of a social-structuring level of engagement in loose,
temporal, and elastic collectives operating in social media environments.

Keywords: phatic communion; social media; virality; memes; meaning; function;

community; identity

1. INTRODUCTION we see a shift from dialogue and

communication between actors in

I n a very insightful and relatively early

paper on the phenomenon, Vincent
Miller (2008) questions the ‘content’
of communication on social media
and microblogs (Facebook and Twitter,
respectively), and concludes:
We are seeing how in many ways
the internet has become as much
about interaction with others as it
has about accessing information.
(…) In the drift from blogging, to
social networking, to microblogging
a network, where the point of the
network was to facilitate an exchange
of substantive content, to a situation
where the maintenance of a network
itself has become the primary focus.
(…) This has resulted in a rise of what
I have called ‘phatic media’ in which
communication without content has
taken precedence. (Miller 2008: 398)
Miller sees the avalanche of ‘empty’
messages on new social media as an
illustration of the ‘postsocial’ society in

© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015

32
which networks, rather than (traditional,
organic) communities, are the central
fora for establishing social ties between
people. The messages are ‘empty’ in
the sense that no perceptibly ‘relevant
content’ is being communicated; thus,
such messages are typologically germane
to the kind of ‘small talk’ which Bronislaw
Malinowski (1923 [1936]) identified as
‘phatic communion’ and described as
follows:
‘phatic communion’ serves to
establish bonds of personal union
between people brought together
by the mere need of companionship
and does not serve any purpose of
communicating ideas (Malinowski
1923 [1936]: 316).
For Malinowski, phatic communion was a
key argument for his view that language
should not just be seen as a carrier of
propositional contents (‘communicating
ideas’ in the fragment above), but as a
mode of social action, the scope of which
should not be reduced to ‘meaning’ in
the denotational sense of the term. In
an excellent paper on the history of the
term ‘phatic communion’, Gunter Senft
notes the post-hoc reinterpretation of
the term by Jakobson (1960) as ‘channel-
oriented’ interaction, and describes
phatic communion as
utterances that are said to have
exclusively social, bonding functions
like establishing and maintaining a
friendly and harmonious atmosphere
in interpersonal relations,
especially during the opening and
closing stages of social – verbal –
encounters. These utterances are
understood as a means for keeping
the communication channels open.
(Senft 1995: 3)
Senft also emphasizes the difference between
‘communion’ and ‘communication’.
Malinowski never used the term phatic
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
VARIS AND BLOMMAERT
‘communication’, and for a reason:
‘communion’ stresses (a) the ritual aspects
of phatic phenomena, and (b) the fact that
through phatic communion, people express
their sense of ‘union’ with a community. We
will come back to this later on.
When it came to explaining the
phenomenon, Malinowski saw the fear of
silence, understood as an embarrassing
situation in interaction among Trobriand
Islanders, as the motive underlying the
frequency of phatic communion. In
order not to appear grumpy or taciturn
to the interlocutor, Trobrianders engaged
in sometimes lengthy exchanges of
‘irrelevant’ talk. While Malinowski saw
this horror vacui as possibly universal,
Dell Hymes cautioned against such
an interpretation and suggested that
‘the distribution of required and
preferred silence, indeed, perhaps most
immediately reveals in outline form
a community’s structure of speaking’
(Hymes 1972 [1986]: 40; see Senft
1995: 4-5 for a discussion). There are
indeed communities where, unless one
has anything substantial to say, silence
is strongly preferred over small talk and
‘phatic communion’ would consequently
be experienced as an unwelcome
violation of social custom. This is clearly
not the case in the internet communities
explored by Vincent Miller, where ‘small’
and ‘content-free’ talk appears to be if
not the rule, then certainly a very well-
entrenched mode of interaction.
This, perhaps, compels us to take
‘phatic’ talk seriously, given that it is
so hard to avoid as a phenomenon in
social media, for example. And this,
then, would be a correction to a deeply
ingrained linguistic and sociolinguistic
mindset in which ‘small talk’—the
term itself announces it—is not always
perceived as really important or in need
of much in-depth exploration.
Conviviality and collectives on social media
Schegloff ’s (1972; Schegloff
and Sacks 1973) early papers on
conversational openings and closings
described these often routinized
sequences as a mechanism in which
speaker and hearer roles were established
and confirmed. This early interpretation
shows affinity with Malinowski’s ‘phatic
communion’—the concern with the
‘channel’ of communicationas well as
with Erving Goffman’s (1967) concept
of ‘interaction ritual’ in which people
follow particular, relatively perduring
templates that safeguard ‘order’ in face-
to-face interaction. In an influential later
paper, however, Schegloff (1988) rejected
Goffman’s attention to ‘ritual’ and ‘face’
as instances of ‘psychology’ (in fact, as
too much interested in the meaning of
interaction), and reduced the Goffmanian
rituals to a more ‘secularized’ study of
interaction as a formal ‘syntax’ in which
human intentions and subjectivities did
not matter too much. The question of
what people seek to achieve by means of
‘small talk’, consequently, led a life on the
afterburner of academic attention since.
When it occurred it was often labelled as
‘mundane’ talk, that is: talk that demands
not to be seen as full of substance and
meaning, but can be analyzed merely
as an instance of the universal formal
mechanisms of human conversation
(Briggs 1997 provides a powerful critique
of this). Evidently, when the formal
patterns of phatic communion are the sole
locus of interest, not much is left to be said
on the topic.
As mentioned, the perceived
plenitude of phatic communion on the
internet pushes us towards attention to
such ‘communication without content’.
In what follows, we will engage with
this topic and focus on a now-current
internet phenomenon: memes. Memes
will be introduced in the next section,
and we shall focus on (a) the notion of
‘viral spread’ in relation to agentivity and
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
33
consciousness, and (b) the ways in which
we can see ‘memes’, along with perhaps
many of the phenomena described by
Miller, as forms of conviviality. In a
concluding section, we will identify some
important implications of this view.
2. GOING VIRAL
On January 21, 2012 Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg posted an update
on his Facebook profile, introduced
by ‘Here’s some interesting weekend
reading’ (figure 1). The message itself
was 161 words long, and it led to a
link to a 2000-word article. Within 55
seconds of being posted, the update got
932 ‘likes’ and was ‘shared’ 30 times by
other Facebook users. After two minutes,
the update had accumulated 3,101 ‘likes’
and 232 ‘shares’.
Given the structure and size of the
text posted by Zuckerberg, it is quite
implausible that within the first two
minutes or so, more than 3,000 people
had already read Zuckerberg’s update
and the article which it provides a link
to, deliberated on its contents and
judged it ‘likeable’; and the same goes
for the more than 200 times that the post
had already been shared on other users’
timelines. So what is happening here?
Some of the uptake can probably
be explained with ‘firsting’, i.e. the
preoccupation to be the first to comment
on or ‘like’ an update on social media—
most clearly visible in the form of
comments simply stating ‘first!’. Another
major explanation could be ‘astroturfing’:
it is plausible that many of those who
‘like’ and ‘share’ Zuckerberg’s update are
in fact Facebook employees deliberately
attempting to increase its visibility. We can
guess, but we simply do not know. What
we do know for sure, however, is that as
a consequence of a first level of uptake—
people liking and sharing the post—there
34
Figure 1: Screenshot of Zuckerberg’s status update on Facebook, January 21, 2012
are further and further levels of uptake, as
other users witness this liking and sharing
activity (some of it may already be showing
in the figures here), and consequently
make inferences about the meaning of the
post itself, but also about the person(s) in
their network who reacted to it. Further
layers of contextualisation are thus added
to the original post, which may have an
influence on the uptake by others.
Different social media platforms
offer similar activity types: YouTube
users can ‘view’ videos and ‘like’
or ‘dislike’ them, as well as adding
‘comments’ to them and adding videos
to a profile list of preferences; Twitter
users can create ‘hashtags’ and ‘retweet’
tweets from within their network; similar
operations are possible on Instagram as
well as on most local or regional social
media platforms available throughout
the world. Each time, we see that specific
activities are made available for the
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
VARIS AND BLOMMAERT
rapid ‘viral’ spread of particular signs,
while the actual content or formal
properties of those signs do not seem
to prevail as criteria for sharing, at
least not when these properties are
understood as denotational-semantic or
aesthetic in the Kantian sense. We shall
elaborate this below. The ace of virality
after the first decade of the 21st century
is undoubtedly the South-Korean music
video called Gangnam Style, performed
by an artist called Psy: Gangnam Style
was posted on YouTube on 15 July, 2012,
and had been viewed 2,345475395 times
on 30 May, 2015. Professional as well as
lay observers appear to agree that the
phenomenal virality of Gangnam Style
was not due to the intrinsic qualities,
musical, choreographic or otherwise,
of the video. The hype was driven by
entirely different forces.
The point to all of this, however, is that
we see a communicative phenomenon of
Conviviality and collectives on social media
astonishing speed and scope: large numbers
of people react on a message by expressing
their ‘liking’ and by judging it relevant
enough to share it with their ‘friends’
within their social media community. At
the same time, in spite of Zuckerberg’s
message being textual, it was not read
in the common sense understanding
of this term. The ‘like’ and ‘share’
reactions, consequently, refer to another
kind of decoding and understanding
than the ones we conventionally use in
text and discourse analysis—‘meaning’
as an outcome of denotational-textual
decoding is not at stake here, and so
the ‘liking’ and ‘sharing’ is best seen as
‘phatic’ in the sense of the terms discussed
above. Yet, these phatic activities appear
to have extraordinary importance for
those who perform them, as ‘firsting’ and
‘astroturfing’ practices illustrate: people
on social media find it very important
to be involved in ‘virality’. People find
it important to be part of a group that
‘likes’ and ‘shares’ items posted by others.
It is impossible to know—certainly in the
case of Zuckerberg—who the members
of this group effectively are (this is the
problem of scope, and we shall return
to it), but this ignorance of identities of
group members does seem to matter
less than the expression of membership
by means of phatic ‘likes’ and ‘shares’.
What happens here is ‘communion’
in the sense of Malinowski: identity
statements expressing, pragmatically
and metapragmatically, membership of
some group. Such groups are not held
together by high levels of awareness and
knowledge of deeply shared values and
functions—the classical community of
Parsonian sociology—but by loose bonds
of shared, even if superficial interest or
‘ambient affiliation’ in Zappavigna’s terms
(2011: 801), enabled by technological
features of social media affording forms
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
35
of searchability and findability of ‘like’-
minded people.
We need to be more specific though,
and return to our Facebook example.
‘Liking’ is an identity statement directly
oriented towards the author of the
update—Zuckerberg—and indirectly
inscribing oneself into the community
of those who ‘like’ Zuckerberg, as well as
indirectly flagging something to one’s own
community of Facebook ‘friends’ (who
can monitor activities performed within
the community). Patricia Lange (2009:
71), thus, qualifies such responsive uptake
activities (‘viewing’ YouTube videos in her
case) as forms of ‘self-interpellation’: people
express a judgment that they themselves
belong to the intended audiences of a
message or sign. ‘Sharing’, by contrast,
recontextualizes and directly reorients this
statement towards one’s own community,
triggering another phase in a process of
viral circulation, part of which can—but
must not—involve real ‘reading’ of the
text. Also, ‘liking’ is a responsive uptake
to someone else’s activity while ‘sharing’ is
the initiation of another activity directed at
another (segment of a) community. So, while
both activities share important dimensions
of phaticity with each other, important
differences also occur. These distinctions,
as noted, do not affect the fundamental
nature of the interaction between actors and
signs—‘sharing’, as we have seen, does not
presuppose careful reading of the text—but
there are differences in agency and activity
type.
This is important to note, because
existing definitions of virality would
emphasize the absence of significant change
in the circulation of the sign. Limor
Shifman (2011: 190), for instance,
emphasizes the absence of significant
change to the sign itself to distinguish
virality from ‘memicity’: memes, as
opposed to viral signs, would involve
36
changes to the sign itself. We shall see
in a moment that this distinction is only
valid when one focuses on a superficial
inspection of the formal properties of
signs. When one takes social semiotic
activities as one’s benchmark, however,
things become more complicated and
more intriguing. We have seen that
significant distinctions apply to ‘liking’
and ‘sharing’. In fact, we can see both
as different genres on a gradient from
phatic communion to phatic communication:
there are differences in agency, in the
addressees and communities targeted by
both activities and in the fundamental
pragmatic and metapragmatic features of
both activities.
To clarify the latter: ‘sharing’ an
update on Facebook is a classic case
of ‘re-entextualization’ (Bauman and
Briggs 1990; Silverstein and Urban
1996) or ‘re-semiotization’ (Scollon
and Scollon 2004). Re-entextualization
refers to the process by means of which
a piece of ‘text’ (a broadly defined
semiotic object here) is extracted from its
original context-of-use and re-inserted
into an entirely different one, involving
different participation frameworks, a
different kind of textuality—an entire
text can be condensed into a quote,
for instance—and ultimately also very
different meaning outcomes. What is
marginal in the source text can become
important in the re-entextualized
version, for instance. Re-semiotization,
in line with the foregoing, refers to
the process by means of which every
‘repetition’ of a sign involves an entirely
new set of contextualization conditions
and thus results in an entirely ‘new’
semiotic process, allowing new semiotic
modes and resources to be involved
in the repetition process (Leppänen
et al. 2014). The specific affordances
for responsive and sharing activities
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
VARIS AND BLOMMAERT
offered by social media platforms are
thus not unified or homogeneous:
we can distinguish a gradient from
purely responsive uptake to active and
redirected re-entextualization and
resemiotization, blurring the distinction
made by Shifman between virality and
memicity.
Let us have a closer look at memes
now, and focus again on the different
genres of memic activity we can discern.
3. THE WEIRD WORLD OF
MEMES
As we have seen, Shifman locates the
difference between virality and memicity
in the degree to which the sign itself is
changed in the process of transmission
and circulation. Memes are signs the
formal features of which have been
changed by users. For her definition,
Shifman draws on Richard Dawkins,
author of The Selfish Gene (1976), who
coined ‘meme’ by analogy with ‘gene’ as
‘small cultural units of transmission (…)
which are spread by copying or imitation’
(Shifman 2011: 188). We have already
seen, however, that even simple ‘copying’
or ‘imitation’ activities such as Facebook
‘sharing’ involve a major shift in activity
type called re-entextualization. Memes,
often multimodal signs in which images
and texts are combined, would typically
enable intense resemiotization as well, in
that original signs are altered in various
ways, generically germane—a kind of
‘substrate’ recognizability would be
maintained—but situationally adjusted
and altered so as to produce very
different communicative effects. Memes
tend to have an extraordinary level of
semiotic productivity which involves very
different kinds of semiotic activity—
genres, in other words.
Let us consider figures 2-4, and
5-7. In figure 2 we see the origin of a
Conviviality and collectives on social media
successful meme, a British World War II
propaganda poster.
A virtually endless range of
resemiotized versions of this poster have
gone viral since the year 2000. They can
be identified as intertextually related by
the speech act structure of the message
(an adhortative ‘keep calm’ or similar
statements, followed by a subordinate
adhortative) and the graphic features of
lettering and layout (larger fonts for the
adhortatives, ­the use of a coat of arms-like
image). Variations on the memic theme
range from minimal to maximal, but the
generic template is constant. Figure 3
shows a minimally resemiotized variant
in which lettering and coat of arms (the
royal crown) are kept, while in figure 4,
Figure 2: British wartime propaganda
poster
See http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/keep-calm-and-carry-on for figures 2-4
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
37
the royal crown has been replaced by a
beer mug.
In figures 2, 3, and 4 we see how one
set of affordances—the visual architecture
of the sign and its speech act format—
becomes the intertextual link enabling
the infinite resemiotizations while
retaining the original semiotic pointer:
most users of variants of the meme
would know that the variants derive from
the same ‘original’ meme. The visual
architecture and speech act format of the
‘original’, thus, are the ‘mobile’ elements
in memicity here: they provide memic-
intertextual recognisability, while the
textual adjustments redirect the meme
towards more specific audiences and
reset it in different frames of meaning
and use.
Figure 3: Keep calm and call Batman
38
Figure 4: Keep calm and drink beer
The opposite can also apply,
certainly when memes are widely known
because of textual-stylistic features: the
actual ways in which ‘languaging’ is
performed through fixed expressions
and speech characteristics. A particularly
successful example of such textual-
stylistic memicity is so-called ‘lolspeak’,
the particular pidginized English
originally associated with funny images of
cats (‘lolcats’), but extremely mobile as a
memic resource in its own right. Consider
figures 5, 6, and 7. Figure 5 documents
the origin of this spectacularly successful
meme: a picture of a cat, to which the
caption ‘I can has cheezburger?’ was
added, went viral in 2007 via a website
‘I can has cheezburger?’. The particular
caption phrase went viral as well and
became tagged to a wide variety of other
images – see figure 6. The caption, then,
quickly became the basis for a particular
pidginized variety of written English,
which could in turn be deployed in a
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
VARIS AND BLOMMAERT
Figure 5: I can has cheezburger?
See http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/
sites/cheezburger
broad range of contexts (see figure 7).
The extraordinary productivity of this
meme-turned-language-variety was
demonstrated in 2010, when a team of
‘lolspeak’ authors completed an online
translation of the entire Bible in their
self-constructed language variety. The
Lolcat Bible can now also be purchased
as a book.
The different resources that enter
into the production of such memes can
also turn out to be memic in themselves.
People, as we said, are extraordinarily
creative in reorganizing, redirecting, and
applying memic resources over a vast
range of thematic domains, addressing
a vast range of audiences while all the
same retaining clear and recognizable
intertextual links to the original memic
sources. This fundamental intertextuality
allows for combined memes, in which
features of different established memes
are blended in a ‘mashup’ meme. Figure 8
shows such a mashup meme.
Conviviality and collectives on social media 39

Figure 6: President and a possible voter having cheezburger.

See http://www.myconfinedspace.com/2008/04/18/barack-obama-yes-you-can/.

Figure 7: I has a dream.

See http://memebase.cheezburger.com/puns/tag/martin-luther-king-jr.

© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015

40
Figure 8: Keep calm and remove the arrow from your knee
See https://www.facebook.com/pages/Keep-Calm-and-remove-the-arrow-from-your-
knee/254461191300457.
We see the familiar template of
the ‘Keep calm’ meme, to which a
recognizable reference to another meme
is added. The origin of this other meme,
‘then I took an arrow in the knee’, is in
itself worthy of reflection, for it shows
the essentially arbitrary nature of memic
success. The phrase was originally uttered
by characters in the video game ‘Skyrim’
(figure 9). The phrase is quite often
repeated throughout the game, but this
does not in itself offer an explanation
for the viral spread of the expression way
beyond the community of Skyrim gamers.
The phrase became wildly
productive and can now be tagged to
an almost infinite range of different
expressions, each time retaining a tinge
of its original apologetic character, and
appearing in mashups, as we saw in
figure 8.
What we see in each of these examples
is how memes operate via a combination of
intertextual recognizability and individual
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
VARIS AND BLOMMAERT
creativity—individual users adding an
‘accent’ to existing viral memes, in attempts
to go viral with their own adapted version.
The work of resemiotization involved in such
processes can be complex and demanding.
Mashup memes, for instance, involves
elaborate knowledge of existing memes,
an understanding of the affordances and
limitations for altering the memes, and
graphic, semiotic, and technological skills
to post them online. The different forms
of resemiotization represent different
genres of communicative action, ranging
from maximally transparent refocusing
of existing memes to the creation of very
different and new memes, less densely
connected to existing ones.
Two points need to be made now.
First, we do not see such resemiotizations,
even drastic and radical ones, as being
fundamentally different from the ‘likes’ and
‘shares’ we discussed in the previous section.
We have seen that ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ are
already different genres characterized by
very different activity patterns, orientations
Conviviality and collectives on social media
Figure 9: Skyrim scene ‘Then I took an arrow in the knee’. See http://knowyourmeme.
com/memes/i-took-an-arrow-in-the-knee.
to addressees and audiences, and degrees
of intervention in the original signs. The
procedures we have reviewed here differ
in degree but not in substance: they
are, like ‘retweets’, ‘likes’ and ‘shares’,
re-entextualizations of existing signs, i.e.
meaningful communicative operations
that demand different levels of agency
and creativity of the user. Second, and
related to this, the nature of the original
sign itself—its conventionally understood
‘meaning’—appears to be less relevant than
the capacity to deploy it in largely phatic,
relational forms of interaction. This again,
ranges from what Malinowski described
as ‘communion’—ritually expressing
membership of a particular community—
to ‘communication’ within the communities
we described as held together by ‘ambient
affiliation’. ‘Meaning’ in its traditional sense
needs to give way here to a more general
notion of ‘function’. Memes, just like Mark
Zuckerberg’s status updates, do not need to
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
41
be read in order to be seen and understood
as denotationally and informationally
meaningful; their use and re-use appear to
be governed by the ‘phatic’ and ‘emblematic’
functions often seen as of secondary nature
in discourse-analytic literature.
4. Conviviality on demand
But what explains the immense density
of such phatic forms of practice on social
media? How do we make sense of the
astonishing speed and scope with which
such phatic forms of communion and
communication circulate, creating—
like in the case of Gangnam Style—
perhaps the largest-scale collective
communicative phenomena in human
history? The explanations, we hope to
have shown, do not necessarily have to
be located in the features of the signs
themselves, nor in the specific practices
they prompt—both are unspectacular. So
42
perhaps the explanations must be sought
in the social world in which these phatic
practices make sense.
In a seminal paper, Alice Marwick
and danah boyd (2010: 120) distinguish
between email and Twitter. They have
this to say on the topic:
(…) the difference between Twitter
and email is that the latter is
primarily a directed technology with
people pushing content to persons
listed in the ‘To:’ field, while tweets
are made available for interested
individuals to pull on demand. The
typical email has an articulated
audience, while the typical tweet
does not.
The statement demands nuancing, for
we have seen that even minimal forms of
activity such as ‘sharing’ involve degrees
of audience design—the seemingly
vacuous identity statements we described
above, lodged in social media practices,
are always directed at some audience, of
which users have some idea, right or wrong
(cf. Androutsopoulos 2013). Imaginary
audiences are powerful actors affecting
discursive behaviour, as Goffman and
others have shown so often (e.g. Goffman
1963), and Marwick and boyd’s early
statement that ‘Twitter flattens multiple
audiences into one’—a phenomenon
they qualify as ‘context collapse’—is
surely in need of qualification (Marwick
and boyd 2010: 122). The intricate social-
semiotic work we have described here
certainly indicates users having diverse
understandings of audiences on social
media. Different social media platforms
offer opportunities for different types
of semiotic and identity work and users
often hold very precise and detailed views
of what specific platforms offer them
in the way of audience access, identity
and communication opportunities, and
effects (cf. Gershon 2010).
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
VARIS AND BLOMMAERT
At the same time, Marwick and boyd
are correct in directing our attention
towards the kinds of communities in
which people move on social media.
In spite of precise ideas of specific
target audiences and addressees, it
is certainly true that there is no way
in which absolute certainty about the
identities (and numbers) of addressees
can be ascertained on most social media
platforms—something which Edward
Snowden also made painfully clear. In
addition, it is true that lump categories
such as Facebook ‘friends’ gather a range
of—usually never explicitly defined—
subcategories ranging from ‘offline
friends’ and close relatives to what we
may best call, following Goffman again,
‘acquaintances’. Goffman (1963), as we
know, described acquaintances as that
broad category of people within the
network of US middle class citizens with
whom relations of sociality and civility
need to be maintained. Avoidance of
overt neglect and rejection are narrowly
connected to avoidance of intimacy and
‘transgressive’ personal interaction: what
needs to be maintained with such people
is a relationship of conviviality—a level
of social intercourse characterized by
largely ‘phatic’ and ‘polite’ engagement
in interaction. Acquaintances are not
there to be ‘loved’, they are there to
be ‘liked’. Facebook is made exactly
for these kinds of social relationships
(van Dijck 2013), which is perhaps also
why a discourse analysis of Facebook
interaction reveals the overwhelming
dominance of the Gricean Maxims, that
old ethnotheory of ‘polite’ US bourgeois
interaction (Varis forthcoming).
But let us delve slightly deeper
into this. The communities present as
audiences on social media may be at once
over-imagined and under-determined:
while users can have relatively precise
ideas of who it is they are addressing,
a level of indeterminacy is inevitable in
Conviviality and collectives on social media
reality. This means, in analysis, that we
cannot treat such communities in the
traditional sense of ‘speech community’
as a group of people tied together by
clear and generally shareable rules of
the indexical value and function of signs
(Agha 2007). Indexical orders need to
be built, as a consequence, since they
cannot readily be presupposed. Virality,
as a sociolinguistic phenomenon, might
be seen as moments at which such
indexical orders—perceived shareability
of meaningful signs—are taking shape.
The two billion views of Gangnam Style
suggest that large numbers of people
in various places on earth recognized
something in the video; what it is exactly
they experienced as recognizable is
hard to determine and research on this
topic—how virality might inform us on
emergent forms of social and cultural
normativity in new and unclear large
globalized human collectives—is long
overdue.
Some suggestions in this direction
can be offered, though. In earlier work,
we tried to describe ephemeral forms
of community formation in the online-
offline contemporary world as ‘focused
but diverse’ (Blommaert and Varis 2013).
Brief moments of focusing on perceived
recognizable and shareable features
of social activity generate temporary
groups—think of the thousands who
‘liked’ Zuckerberg’s status update—while
such groups do not require the kinds of
strong and lasting bonds grounded in
shared bodies of knowledge we associate
with more traditionally conceived
‘communities’ or ‘societies’. In fact, they
are groups selected on demand, so to
speak, by individual users in the ways we
discussed earlier. People can focus and
re-focus perpetually, and do so (which
explains the speed of virality) without
being tied into a community of fixed
circumscription, given the absence of
the deep and strong bonds that tie them
© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015
43
together, and the absence of temporal
and spatial co-presence that characterizes
online groups (cf. Maly and Varis
forthcoming on ‘micro-populations’).
A joint ‘phatic’ focus on recognizable
form or shape offers possibilities for
such processes of groupness, while the
actual functional appropriation and
deployment of signs—what they actually
mean for actual users—is hugely diverse;
the infinite productivity of memes—
the perpetual construction of memic
‘accents’—illustrates this. Here we begin
to see something fundamental about
communities in an online age—the
joint focusing, even if ‘phatic’, is in itself
not trivial: it creates a structural level of
conviviality, i.e. a sharing at one level of
meaningful interaction by means of a
joint feature, which in superficial but real
ways translates a number of individuals
into a focused collective. Note, and we
repeat, that what this collective shares
is the sheer act of phatic communion
(the ‘sharing’ itself, so to speak), while
the precise meaning of this practice
for each individual member of the
collective is impossible to determine.
But since Malinowski and Goffman, we
have learned not to underestimate the
importance of (seemingly) unimportant
social activities. Memes force us to think
about levels of social structuring that we
very often overlook because we consider
them meaningless.
This neglect of conviviality has
effects. In the superdiversity that
characterizes online-offline social worlds,
we easily tend to focus on differences and
downplay the level of social structuring
that actually prevents these differences
from turning into conflicts. Recognizing
such hitherto neglected levels of
social structuring might also serve as a
corrective to rapid qualifications of the
present era as being ‘postsocial’—a point
on which we disagree with Vincent Miller.
44
There is a great deal of sociality taking
place on social media, but this sociality
might require a new kind of sociological
imagination. We will look in vain for
communities and societies that resemble
the ones proposed by Durkheim and
Parsons. But that does not mean that
such units are not present, and even less
that they are not in need of description.
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46 Multilingual Margins 2015, 2(1):46-66

Common ground and conviviality:

Indonesians doing togetherness in
Japan1

Zane Goebel
La Trobe University/Tilburg University

Abstract
While Humanities and Social Science scholars have a long history of trying to
understand how people from different backgrounds get along (i.e. to be convivial),
typically this work misses much of the work carried out in sociolinguistics and related
areas. In building upon work on common ground, small talk, and conviviality,
this paper examines how a group of Indonesian students living in Japan go about
practicing conviviality. I show how repetition and tiny response tokens are used to
build common ground. I argue that this practice is key to building convivial relations
amongst this group and that this type of interactional work helps open the possibility
of future interactions, some of which are tied with the need to build and maintain
support networks in Japan.

Keywords: conviviality; common ground; Indonesia; Japan; talk

1. INTRODUCTION 1982; Tannen 1984; Rampton 1995; Ryoo

A nthropologists, Sociologists, and
Cultural Studies scholars have a long
history of seeking to understand how
people from diverse backgrounds go
about getting along (e.g. Werbner 1997;
Ang 2003; Brettell 2003; Vertovec 2007;
Wise 2009). While recent work in this area
continues to highlight the importance of
everyday interaction in the building of
convivial relations (Thrift 2005; Landau
and Freemantle 2009; Wise 2009; Karner
and Parker 2010; Bunnell et al. 2012;
Amin 2013), bar Williams and Stroud’s
(2013) work on public performances of
conviviality, the majority of these studies
do not focus on everyday talk and indeed
seem to have missed work on these issues in
the field of sociolinguistics (e.g. Gumperz
2005).
Early anthropological work on
reciprocity (e.g. Malinowski 1996 [1922];
Mauss 1966 [1925]) and later work
by Goffman (1971) laid much of the
groundwork for the study of conviviality.
Goffman (1971), for example, showed how
reciprocity related to all sorts of semiotic
exchanges and social relations. Since
this work, the interactional practices that
build and maintain social relations have
been investigated from the standpoint
of ‘common ground’ (Enfield 2006) or
‘small talk’ (Coupland 2000, 2003). In
the current paper I seek to synthesize
these areas by examining how conviviality
is built through talk among sojourning
Indonesian students. I will argue that the

© Goebel and CMDR. 2015

Common ground and conviviality
use of small response tokens, repetition,
and teasing all build and reproduce
common ground and ultimately convivial
social relations. Practicing conviviality is
important for this group of sojourning
Indonesians because it helps ensure access
to important resources and information.
In what follows I cover some of the earlier
work on conviviality (Section 2), before then
introducing the study and the participants
(Section 3). I then analyze participants’
talk in a television viewing session (Section
4) and an interview (Section 5).
2. RECIPROCITY,
CONVIVIALITY, AND
COMMON GROUND
Since Malinowski’s (1996 [1922]) and
Mauss’ (1966 [1925]) classic works,
reciprocity has become an important
concept in anthropology, especially the
idea that reciprocity is key to the building
and maintenance of social relations. In
one of his many opuses, Goffman (1971)
argued that most human interaction
involves reciprocity of one form or
another.
[I]nterpersonal rituals have a
dialogistic character, and this
differently impinges on positive and
negative rites. When a ritual offering
occurs, when, that is, one individual
provides a sign of involvement in and
connectedness to another, it behooves
the recipient to show that the message
has been received, that its import has
been appreciated, that the affirmed
relationship actually exists as the
performer implies, that the performer
himself has worth as a person, and
finally, that the recipient has an
appreciative, grateful nature. Prestation
(to use Mauss’ favorite term) thus leads
to counter-prestation, and when we
focus on minor rituals performed
between persons who are present to
47
each other, the giving statement tends
to be followed immediately by a show
of gratitude. (Goffman 1971: 63-64)
The continued importance of reciprocity
in anthropology can be seen in Wise’s
(2009) work, which focuses upon the
giving and receiving of food, offers of
assistance, recipes, lessons, and does so
across lines of difference. In this work
Wise (2009) suggests that through this
type of reciprocal practice participants
are building convivial relations by
displaying mutual recognition of the
other. If we look at some of the work on
small talk, we also see that reciprocity
seems to be an underlying feature of
displays of recognition.
Studies of small talk show that
recognition is done through the giving
and receiving of compliments, the
exchange of a joke for laughter (Ryoo
2005), repetition (Tannen 1989), the
pursuit of sameness in states of being
(Ryoo 2005), teasing (Strachle 1993), the
use of response tokens (McCarthy 2003),
and so on. McCarthy’s (2003) work, for
example, shows how a single response
token (e.g. ‘yes’) indexes hearership, while
the use of additional response tokens
(e.g. ‘yes, yes, heem’) can index engaged
listening, which is a type of conviviality.
The use of additional response tokens
is referred to as ‘non-minimal response’
(McCarthy 2003).
The use of non-minimal responses are
part of a larger set of interactional practices
referred to as repetition and the social
pursuit of sameness (Bucholtz and Hall
2004; Lempert 2014), all of which help
establish and maintain convivial relations.
While there are many types of repetition,
including memicity which involve
replication of some elements and the
addition of some new elements (discussed
in the paper by Varis and Blommaert), this
paper is more interested in replication-as-
precise copy in conversation, and how this
© Goebel and CMDR. 2015
48
figures in the building and maintaining of
social relations. As Tannen (1989), Berman
(1998), Bjork-Willen (2007), and others
have shown, repetition of others’ words,
utterances or embodied practices can
index and produce positive interpersonal
social relations. When interactants know
little about each other, repetition can show
that you have similar linguistic repertoires,
dispositions, opinions, and so on. As a form
of linguistic reciprocity, repetition may not
only provide interactional recognition of the
other, but also tacit approval of their ways of
speaking, while also establishing common
ground on which future interactions can be
based (Enfield 2006). Enfield (2006: 422)
defines common ground as ‘knowledge
openly shared by specific pairs, trios, and
so forth’. Common ground is achieved
through participants’ ability to jointly agree
on referents in interaction (Enfield 2006;
Hanks 2006).
The interactional pursuit of common
ground establishes convivial relations,
while setting up a type of infrastructure
for future social interaction (Goffman
1971). As Blommaert (2013) points
out, these types of infrastructures are
important to mobile persons who often
do not have access to formal channels
of help such as banking, schooling, and
housing. In settings inhabited by mobile
persons, the pursuit of conviviality is
necessary for accessing information
about housing options, employment
options, the cheapest or best shops, and
so on (Wise 2009; Bunnell et al. 2012;
Blommaert 2013). In what follows, I
look at the forms conviviality takes in
talk amongst a group of sojourning
Indonesian students. In doing so, these
typically small and often minute orienting
practices help conversationalists construct
certain identities for themselves and
others (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998),
though as we learn more about identity
in interaction it seems clear that identities
© Goebel and CMDR. 2015
GOEBEL
are always emergent and produced over a
series of speech events (Wortham 2006).
3. METHODS AND
PARTICIPANTS
My data is drawn from recordings of
talk that were made as part of a larger
study conducted in Japan2. This study
examined how Indonesians interpreted
and talked about televised soap operas.
These Indonesians were all from a highly
mobile middle-income population. They
were primarily graduate students and/or
the spouses of graduate students studying
at a university in Nagoya. While this
group of Indonesians clearly fit into what
is essentially middle-class Indonesia,
nevertheless like many post-graduate
students across the world they were not
wealthy and lived very frugal lives whilst
in Nagoya. Typically their scholarships
were small by Japanese standards, with
most taking on part-time jobs to support
themselves and their families.
As I became part of the Indonesian
network in Nagoya, because of my
long-term interest in Indonesia and
also because of my Indonesian spouse,
I learned that most of these Indonesian
students lived in the old, yet-to-be-
made earthquake proof, public housing
located in the outer fringes of Nagoya.
In many ways a comfortable life in
Nagoya was made possible through the
support networks that had emerged
through their own efforts and through
their predecessors’ efforts. One such
network was the Nagoya branch of the
Indonesian Student Union of Japan (PPI
Japan).
This network provided: lists of
people who knew Japanese; lists of
people who knew the cheapest places
to buy furniture, clothes, appliances;
information about where and when
Common ground and conviviality
houses may become vacant and how to
work with (or around) bureaucracy to
ensure you had a place to live. The setting
where this research was conducted—in
a room located within a building that
housed the Saturday school for the
children of Indonesian sojourners—was
one of the hubs of this network. While
some participants either had children
in this school or were involved in the
running of the school, others were part
of the Nagoya Indonesian community
who would come together on Saturdays
to exchange information (e.g. about
accommodation, food, clothing,
upcoming gatherings), to organize the
settling in or return preparations for
sojourners, the organization of national
and religious celebrations, and to share
food or to do the evening prayer together
in the case of Muslim Indonesians.
Seventeen Indonesians voluntarily
responded to an advertisement seeking
participants for this study. Given what
we know about the ubiquitousness of
communal viewing practices in Indonesia
(Hobart 2001; Nilan 2001; Rachmah
2006; Goebel 2010), and with the help
of a couple of Indonesian research
assistants, we divided respondents into
viewing groups of four to five people
and invited them to attend four viewing
and interview sessions over four weeks.
Each viewing session lasted between
one to two hours. Typically, sessions
started with some informal chatting with
participants about the research project,
about participants’ backgrounds, and
about local events. Following this,
a comedic soap opera or a film was
screened. These screenings were audio
and video-taped. After the screening, I
interviewed participants using a mixture
of pre-devised questions and questions
that had arisen as a result of participants’
talk during the viewing session. What I
will present in my analysis is the talk that
49
occurred between participants during
the first viewing session. A summary of
participant backgrounds is presented in
table 3.1 (all names are pseudonyms).
This group of participants consisted
of five people, me, and an Indonesian
research assistant. As can be seen in
table 3.1 most participants were highly
multilingual. With the exception of Desi
and my research assistant, they were
also rather mobile. Participants were of
similar age (except Lina), and were highly
educated. Diagram 3.1 shows where
each participant was seated. All of these
participants knew each other to varying
degrees through their interaction within
the Indonesian community in Nagoya.
Slamet and Lina, a husband and wife
couple, had only recently arrived in
Japan and were not well acquainted
with the other participants who had all
lived in Nagoya for a number of years.
While the methods used here differed
from those used in much of the work
on small talk and other studies of social
relations, this context offers a number
of opportunities to focus on how people
do conviviality through talk. Despite the
artificial context, this group still needed
to build and/or reproduce interpersonal
relations because of their need to
continue to access the support networks
described earlier. This helps explain why
these participants continued to attend
these viewing sessions over the six-week
period that they ran, rather than not
attending after the first session.
Before looking at this talk I want to
provide some background information
about the comedic soap which this
group of Indonesians watched and
talked about. The episode they watched
was titled Cipoa (‘Con artist’). It was
part of the series Noné (‘Young Miss’)
that was broadcast nationally in 1995
during the mid-afternoon time slot
on the commercial, semi-educational
© Goebel and CMDR. 2015
50 GOEBEL

Table 3.1 Participant backgrounds

Name Age History of mobility Education Language ability

Years Place
Desi (S) 35 27 Bandung MA Indonesian
3 Solo Sundanese
5 Japan Japanese
English

Lina 23 8 Pekan Baru BA Indonesian

3 Jakarta Japanese
9 Padang
1 Japan
1.5 Padang
0.5 Japan

Slamet 33 21 Irian MA Javanese

5 Bandung Indonesian
0.5 Jakarta English
2 Japan
4 Padang
0.5 Japan

Gun (S) 37 19 Cirebon PHD Javanese

6 Bandung Sundanese
4 Jakarta Indonesian
8 Japan Japanese
English
RA 39 27 Solo BA Javanese
10 Jakarta Indonesian
2 Japan Japanese
Me 41 35 Australia PHD Indonesian
3.5 Semarang Javanese
0.5 Cirebon Sundanese
2 Japan English

television station TPI. This particular 4. SMALL RESPONSE

comedic soap is notable because of some
characters’ frequent alternation between
Indonesian and linguistic fragments
stereotypically associated with a regional
language, Sundanese, and because of
the representation of other signs that
anchored the linguistic signs and the
story geographically to West Java, an area
associated with an imagined community
of Sundanese speakers.
TOKENS AND
CONVIVIALITY
Throughout the viewing of this soap
opera the use of small response tokens
and repetition figured in the building
and reproduction of common ground
and convivial relations. As we will see,
participants’ ponderings over the
meaning of a particular word, cipoa,

© Goebel and CMDR. 2015

Common ground and conviviality
Diagram 3.1: Placement of participants relative to recording devices
became central to this process and to
the identification of participants as
being of a particular ethnolinguistic
background. The first extract of talk that
I analyze occurs after an elderly woman
has narrated a letter that is being read
by the main character, Dewi, and after
a series of images that show a house
situated within expansive grounds. (As
the analysis proceeds I will introduce the
transcription conventions). The import of
this extract is how participants establish
common ground and then move from
demonstrating co-presence to engaged
listening through non-minimal responses.
About a minute after seeing the
images of the house and yard, we see
that the topic of residence is ratified by
three participants through repetitions
(indicated by an underline) of vila
(‘villa’) and its rephrasing as rumah
(‘house’) on lines 1–3. In engaging in
repetition (or the reciprocal exchange of
linguistic forms), each participant is also
showing the other that they recognize
the referent (villa) and thus also begin to
start sharing common ground. We also
see that on lines 3 and 6, Desi notes that
the house is like those of the type found
51
in Kuningan (an area located in West
Java). The repetition that occurs on lines
1–3 and 6 shows how hearership and
common ground is established, while
Gun’s non-minimal response on line 7
shows that he has not only recognized
the referent (Kuningan) and is listening
to Desi with his first ‘heem’ but that the
ya gitu repeats this information in a way
that suggests ‘engaged listening’.
While the establishment of common
ground and a non-minimal response suggest
a reproduction of convivial relations, we
need to see how the interaction proceeds.
(For this pair I use ‘reproduction’ rather
than ‘build’ because these two participants
know each other through engagement in
Indonesian community activities over the
previous two years, though as we will see
they are uncertain about whether they are
members of the same ethnic community).
Following the talk in extract 4.1,
participants do not say much until the first
advertisement break that occurs nearly ten
minutes later. Some of the signs that these
participants have access to before their
next extended conversation include: a taxi,
which drives into the driveway of Dewi’s
newly acquired house; and the exchanges
© Goebel and CMDR. 2015
52 GOEBEL

Gun (S)
1 vila ya (1.0) vilanya si nike (1.0) It’s a villa yeah? Its Nike’s villa.
Slamet
2 vila (0.8) [Yes] a Villa.
Desi (S)
3 kaya rumah di kuningan [ laughs Like houses in Kuningan.
All
4 [ (laugh) = (Laugh).
Desi (S)
5 [In?] Kuningan (??? ???)
= kuningan sih (??? ???) =
6
Gun (S)
7 = heem . ya:: gitu. Heem, yeah like that.

Transcription key:
plain font Indicates forms stereotypically associated with Indonesian.
bold italic Small caps Indicates forms stereotypically associated with Japanese.
. between words Indicates a perceivable silence.
Brackets with a number (.4) Indicates length of silence in tenths of a second.
= Indicates no perceivable pause between speaker turns.
[ Indicates start of overlapping talk.
‘ after a word Indicates final falling intonation.
? after a word Indicates final rising intonation.
+ surrounding an utterance/word Indicates raising of volume.
A hash # surrounding an utterance/word Indicates lowering of volume.
> at the start and end of an utterance Indicates utterance spoken faster than previous one.
< at the start and end of an utterance Indicates utterance spoken slower than previous one.
: within a word Indicates sound stretch.
CAPS Indicates stress.
Brackets with three ?, i.e. (???) Indicates word that could not be transcribed.
In extract words inside ( ) Indicates a multimodal description.
In English gloss words inside [ ] Indicates implied talk or words used to make the gloss
readable.
In English gloss words inside (( )) Indicates implied background knowledge.
underline Indicates the repetition of words or utterances between
adjacency pairs.
broken underline Indicates that the word or utterance was repeated in prior
talk, although it may not always be in the immediately
preceding turn.

Extract 4.1 From hearership to engaged listening and transcription key

© Goebel and CMDR. 2015

Common ground and conviviality 53

Desi (S)
1 apa sih . judulnya . +judulnya apa sih . judulnya So what is the title? So what is the
2 apa sih+ = title? So what is the title?
Lina
3 What was the title earlier?
= apa tadi judulnya =
4
Research Assistant
5 = ci . cipoa = Ci, Cipoa.
Desi (S)
6 = +judulnya+ = The title.
Me
7 = cipoa = Cipoa.
Research Assistant
8 Cipoa.
= cipoa =
9
Desi (S)
10 = cipoa itu apa ya (0.7) What is [the meaning of] Cipoa?
Gun (S)
11 That
itu (while turning gaze toward Desi and
12 isn’t Sundanese
smiling) bukan bahasa sunda bukan =
13 is it?
Desi (S)
14 = (while moving body forward and turning Yeah so what does this [potentially
15 gaze towards Gun) ya apa sih (0.6) cipoa itu Sundanese] term Cipoa mean?
16 (0.5)
Slamet
17 nggak tahu = [I] don’t know.
Desi (S)
18 = pak gun = Mr.3 Gun?
Gun (S)
19 [I] don’t know (the meaning?) of cipoa,
= nggak tahu (artinya?) cipoa . cipoa =
20 cipoa.
Desi (S)
21 = (laughs)(2.3) Laughs.

Extract 4.2 From engaged listening to discourses of sameness

that follow between the taxi driver and the
passenger (Susi), Susi and Dewi, and Dewi
and the taxi driver. These signs may or
may not disambiguate earlier signs about
setting. For example, at the bottom of the
driver’s door of the taxi there is the text
‘Bandung Taxi company’ and the taxi
also has a number plate which is prefixed
with the letter ‘D’. For those who see these
signs, they may recognize them as pointing
to a setting in West Java, in particular,
the capital city of Bandung. There are
also marked contrasts in linguistic signs
exchanged in interactions between
different participant pairs. For example,
in the speech event involving Dewi and

© Goebel and CMDR. 2015

54
Susi, they exchange linguistic forms
stereotypically associated with Indonesian.
In contrast, in the interaction between Dewi
and the taxi driver, which immediately
follows, participants exchange many forms
stereotypically associated with Sundanese,
together with embodied ways of speaking
not used in the earlier interaction. Shortly
thereafter, there are some brief exchanges
between Susi and Ucup, Dewi and Ucup,
and finally an advertisement before the
participants in the viewing session start to
talk again (extract 4.2). The importance of
this interaction lays in the continued use
of non-minimal responses and the pursuit
of social sameness, in this case ethnic
sameness.
In this interaction there is the
continued use of repetition which helps
participants align with each other on a
number of topics, while also establishing
further common ground (e.g. the title of
the serial on lines 1–9, and the meaning
of the word cipoa on lines 10–20). We also
see that Gun’s use of features that seem to
index ‘engaged listening’ when speaking
with Desi earlier (extract 4.1, line 7), are
reciprocated through the emergence of
a type of discourse of ethnic sameness
between Desi and Gun. In particular,
we see that while Gun’s gaze direction
and question left some ambiguity as to
whether the question was addressed to the
group or someone who he thought knew
Sundanese (lines 11–13), nevertheless
we see that Desi self-selects suggesting
that she was the target of the question.
In doing so, she moves her body in a way
that she can see around Lina and Slamet
to look at Gun and ask again what is the
meaning of this potentially Sundanese
term (lines 14–15). In asking Desi about
provenance (lines 11–13), Gun appears
to be saying ‘you are Sundanese and may
know’ while also implying ‘you are of the
same ethnolinguistic background as me’.
In short, here participants are engaged
© Goebel and CMDR. 2015
GOEBEL
in reciprocating acknowledgements of
the other’s ethnic identity. Taking a
sequential view it also appears that Desi
ratifies this categorization by checking
whether Gun—as against Slamet and
Lina who she looks around—can provide
a meaning for the term (lines 14–16 and
18).
While the meaning of word cipoa
initially appeared to be unknown to
participants, now and in this context it
starts to gain a potential shared meaning
(i.e. common ground about its Sundanese
provenance). However, apart from the
earlier mention of place (Kuningan)
we are unsure what triggers a potential
ethnolinguistic meaning for Gun (line
11) and Desi (lines 15–16 and 18), but
we can suggest that it may have been the
agreed upon potential West Java setting
(extract 4.1), and/or the Sundanese
usage in the interaction between the
characters. In short, they seem to share
some common ground where ideas of
Sundaneseness are concerned.
While the social domain of cipoa
as having an ethnolinguistic meaning
appears to be only as wide as Gun and
Desi, this topic will be revisited a number
of times and by other participants
throughout the viewing session and
the interview, thus establishing further
common ground between participants.
This search for meaning continues
to be tied with the ethnolinguistic
identification of participants. Repetition
also becomes important in other ways,
especially as Slamet repeats Gun’s and
Desi’s utterance about the provenance
of the term cipoa. I suggest that the
repetition in extract 4.3 needs to be seen
as highlighting a move between a focus
on the literal meaning of the word cipoa
to one where the pursuit of conviviality
is fronted through agreements on its
meaning. This talk follows directly on
from that represented in extract 4.2.
Common ground and conviviality
In the above talk we can see that
repetition continues to function as a
way of establishing reference, topic, and
common ground (lines 30 to 34). Just as
importantly, we also see that although the
topic of provenance has been established
by Gun and Desi (lines 30–32), Slamet also
repeats this information (lines 33–34).
This informational redundancy suggests
that repetition is doing something else.
As with my earlier interpretations of a
non-minimal response (extract 4.1) and
discourses of sameness (extract 4.2), this
repetition appears to be part of ongoing
relationship building efforts, this time
on the part of Slamet, who can be seen to
be aligning with both Gun and Desi. On
lines 35–36 we also see that Desi repeats,
via her agreement (saya kira), the earlier
series of repetitions involving herself,
Gun, and Slamet (lines 30–34). This
suggests she is reciprocating Slamet’s
interpersonal relationship work.
It is also interesting to note that in
addition to repetition between utterances,
we also now start to see repetition that
does not always immediately follow a
preceding turn: that is, it is temporally
distant. These instances are indicated
by a broken underline. For example,
although Desi uses some Japanese (e.g.
the use of ‘eh’ on line 27 that is in bold
italic small caps), her whole utterance
repeats what Gun said in extract 4.2
on lines 11–13. This repetition also
appears to be part of ongoing efforts
on the part of Desi and Gun to align
with each other’s stances toward the
meaning of the word cipoa. In so doing,
their alignment solidifies some common
ground between them, while adding to
their earlier pursuits of social sameness;
this time sameness in their evaluations
of provenance. Just as importantly, this
repetition also again foregrounds Desi’s
claims as someone who is entitled or
able to evaluate what is Sundanese and
55
what is not. In doing this, she further
strengthens the ethnolinguistic identity
claims that she made in extract 4.2. In
this case, something like: ‘I can evaluate
this term’s provenance because I am
Sundanese’. In so doing, she continues to
engage in the pursuit of social sameness
by implying that she is also of the same
ethnicity as Gun.
After the talk represented in
extract 4.3 there is no more extended
conversation about the word cipoa until
the end of the serial. Before looking at
this talk, I want to take a look at one of
the few large chunks of talk that occur
amongst this group before the serial
ends (extract 4.4). This piece of talk is
interesting because in addition to the
building of common ground and the
use of non-minimal responses, teasing is
also used for building and reproducing
convivial relations amongst several of
the participants. This talk is preceded by
talk about the actors’ spouses.
In this interaction we can see
participants showing that they share
some common ground and are thus the
same at some level. In particular, we see
that after Desi mentions the actress’s
name on line 3 (Dian Nitami), both Gun
and Slamet demonstrate that they share
some knowledge about this actress and
her spouse (lines 4 and 11). As in previous
talk there are also instances of non-
minimal responses. The first instance of
a non-minimal response is that found on
line 6 where Desi answers Gun’s question
(line 4) with three ‘yes’ responses. The
first seems to be a response signaling
hearership, while the second iya huuh,
although appearing redundant, may in
fact be signaling ‘engaged listening’.
Similarly, while both Desi and Slamet
answer Gun’s question about whether the
actress playing Ayu is already divorced
on lines 8-11, we also see that on line 14
Desi rephrases her answer. This answer
© Goebel and CMDR. 2015
56 GOEBEL

Me
22 tukang bohong apa = Is it con artist?
Research Assistant
23 = tukang bohong = Con artist.
Me
24 Maybe it’s like con artist.
= tukang bohong kayanya =
25
Desi (S)
26 Is it Sundanese?
= +bahasa sunda?+ (0.8) e::h? =
27 Really
Me
28 I’m not sure.
= kurang tahu saya (1.0)
29
Gun (S)
30 mungkin bandung mungkin ya . Maybe it’s Bandung, maybe. A Sundanese
31 daerah daerah sunda gitu’ . area, yeah.
Desi (S)
32 [ kayanya nama daerah ya Yeah, it’s like a place name.
Slamet
33 [ setingnya bandung itu . setingnya The setting is Bandung, the setting. It can
34 (2.0) bisa nama daerah juga ya = be a place name yeah.
Desi (S)
35 I
= saya kira =
36 think so.
Slamet
37 = cipoa = Cipoa.
Desi (S)
38 = heeh (0.7) Yeah.
Slamet
39 (??? ???) =
Research Assistant
40 = nama daerah itu pak . It’s a place name Mr. [Zane].
Me
41 oh nama daerah . ya . Oh a place name, yeah.
Desi (S)
42 nggak tau tuh I don’t know.

Extract 4.3 Repetition and the linking of language with place

repeats what has already been said
(awet awet which literally means ‘to last
long’, but here meaning something like
‘still together’). In so doing, her talk is
again more than required and invites
us to interpret this type of repetition as
helping build convivial relations, this
time with Slamet, who has aligned with
Desi on the question of whether the
actor is divorced or not.

© Goebel and CMDR. 2015

Common ground and conviviality 57

Gun
1 ini namanya siapa (glancing toward Desi) What’s her name?
2 =
Desi
3 = dian nitami (0.8) Dian Nitami.
Gun
4 (???) (4.4) suaminya anajsmara nih = (???) she is Anajsmara’s husband,
yeah?
Desi
5 = iya . >iya huuh> (0.5) dian nitami (7.6) Yeah, yes, yes, Dian Nitami.
6
Gun
7 tapi udah itu kan . udah cerai ini = But [they] are already, already
divorced, right?
Desi
8 = (looking toward Gun) e:h . ngga::k . [ What? No [they] are
9 masih still [together].
10
Slamet
11 [(looking toward Gun) nggak = No.
Gun
12 = (looks toward Desi) eh masih [ (laughs)
13 Oh still [together].
Desi
14 [ awet . awet (0.4) Still together, still together.
15
Slamet
16 (after glancing away looks back at Gun)
17 jangan bikin gosip pak = Don’t spread gossip Pak [Gun].
Gun
18 = (looks at Slamet) +hehehe+ [ hehe
19 Laughs.
Slamet
20 [ hehehehe Laughs.

Extract 4.4 Teasing and conviviality

We also see that although Desi aligns
with Slamet, Slamet is also quick to try
and build convivial relations with Gun
by teasingly accusing him of spreading
gossip (lines 16–17). The tease touches
on multiple ideologies about gossip and
piousness. For example, Gun arrived a
little earlier than the other participants
and was finishing his afternoon prayer as
other participants arrived. Performing
his prayers indexed not only his Islamic
identity but his piety insofar as praying is
being pious. Engaging in gossip, which
is categorized as sinful, is thus part of the
joke. The other part is that while gossip
can often be meant to reach the person
being gossiped about (Besnier 2009), in
this setting the people being gossiped

© Goebel and CMDR. 2015

58
about would be very unlikely to hear this
gossip. Gun appears to orient to this joke
through his loud laughter (indicated by
a ‘+’ surrounding the hehe) and his
gaze (lines 18–19). Again, given that this
sequence is not informational, it seems
to invite an interpretation of another
local strategy for producing convivial
relations.
After this sequence participants do
not say much until the end of the serial
when Dewi’s grandmother makes her
fourth and final appearance to warn
Dewi about con artists. At this stage one
of the viewers, Slamet, reiterates that
the grandmother is a ghost before then
hearing the use of word cipoa. Upon
hearing this term, he then initiates the
talk represented in extract 4.5. There are
a number of important aspects to this
extract, including repetition that enables
convivial relations to be established
between Lina and Desi and renewed
discussion over the provenance of the
term cipoa, which enable the pursuit of
conviviality between Desi and Slamet in
the interview that follows.
In the above talk we can see that
the provenance of the term cipoa again
becomes a topic as Slamet suggests cipoa
is Sundanese (lines 2–3). Desi does not
align fully with Slamet’s interpretation
through her self-identifying as a
Sundanese who has never heard the term
(lines 7–8). While her comment repeats
her uncertainty about provenance,
which she shared with Gun (extracts
4.2–4.3), we can see that this talk also
represents a point in which explicit social
identification occurs through Desi’s
claims to native speakership. This social
identification occurs as part of another
sequence in which participants assign
an ethnic meaning to the word cipoa.
We also see that Slamet, although not
making native speaker claims, defers
to kamus besar ‘Authorative Dictionary’
© Goebel and CMDR. 2015
GOEBEL
(lines 9–12 and 15–16) where he notes
we may find this term. (Kamus Besar has
its authority by being both written and
endorsed by the government through
the government funded language center
in Jakarta.) In other words, Slamet is
unconvinced that its provenance is not
Sundanese despite Desi’s claims of not
knowing the term. His position on this
does not change as the viewing session
is brought to a close and he notes that it
is old archaic Sundanese on lines 31–32.
In the early part of the interview that
follows immediately after this viewing
session, however, Desi takes up the
theme of archaism in a way that suggests
alignment with Slamet on a number of
levels: in short, they too begin to build
some common ground.
Lina also offers a meaning for cipoa,
which does not relate to provenance, but
rather to morality, especially a tendency
to tell white lies or not be entirely
honest (lines 13–14). This interpretation
is oriented to by Desi through her
repetition of bohong ‘to tell white lies
or not be entirely honest’ (line 17) and
her upgrade of this term to menipu ‘to
deceive’ (line 20), which Lina ratifies
through her expansion of the meaning
to ‘someone who doesn’t know or talks
rubbish’ (lines 23–24). In short, the
social domain of the meaning of cipoa
as relating to a moral trait also widens
from me (extract 4.3) to include Desi and
Lina. This sequence also appears to be
similar to earlier instances of repetition
insofar as they function not only as signs
of topic alignment and the establishment
of common ground, but also as more
than is necessary in informational terms.
In other words, the extra repetition
from line 15 onwards seems to be doing
more than just repeating the meaning
of the term as something to do with
dishonesty. Instead, this repetition
seems to be contributing to the building
Common ground and conviviality 59

Slamet
1 neneknya hantu (1.8) +oh+ (1.8) oh (looks Her grandmother is a ghost. Oh. Oh it
2 at Desi) cipoa itu bahasa ini deh . sunda looks like cipoa is Sundanese.
3 kayaknya (0.8)
Desi
4 nggak tahu = [I] don’t know
Slamet
5 = cipoa . orang suka cipoa = A person who likes to cipoa.
Desi
6 = tiga puluh tiga tahun jadi orang sunda baru
7 denger (laughs) = [I’ve] been a Sundanese for thirty-three
8 years and [I’ve] just heard [this word]
Slamet
9 = cari di ini (looks at Desi) . (turns back to Look in this,
10 look at Slamet) apa kamus bahasa Indonesia what is it
11 sama anu . kamus . the Indonesian dictionary and the um,
12 dictionary.
Lina
13 orang suka cipoa:: katanya . [ suka bohong She said “Those who like to cipoa have
14 apa (1.0) a tendency to tell white lies all the time,
or something like that.”
Slamet > Gun
15 [ bahasa indonesia . kamus besar bahasa Indonesian, the Large Authorative
16 indonesia = Indonesian dictionary.
17
Desi
18 = bohong = To tell white lies.
Lina
19 = untuk menutupi kekurangannya = To hide
20 their inadequacies.
Desi
21 = menipu . eh = To deceive, eh?
Slamet
22 = cipoaé apa ya (1.75) What does Cipoa mean?
23
Lina
24 suka:: berdusta mungkin . Maybe [someone] who regularly
25 ndak tahu itu (1.2) ah omong kosong (0.9) deceives, [someone who] doesn’t know,
[or] talks rubbish.
Slamet
26 [ bahasa Its language
Me
27 [ mudah mudahan tidak begitu Hopefully this hasn’t been too
28 membosankan = boring.
Desi
29 = nggak . bagus (while laughing) [ lucu No, it was good,
30 it was funny.
Slamet
31 [ bahasa sunda . bahasa sunda kuno (2.7) It was Sundanese,
32 bahasa sunda kuno old Sundanese, old Sundanese.

Extract 4.5 Negotiating meanings and conviviality

© Goebel and CMDR. 2015

60 GOEBEL

of convivial relations, this time between suggestion. Instead, on lines 5–9 he

Desi and Lina, who to this point have not reiterates his earlier position (see extract
interacted much. 4.5) about its probable existence in a
dictionary and that it is probably an
uncommon or archaic form. In doing so,
5. IDENTITY, CONVIVIALITY, he adds ‘uncommon’ to the term’s ever
AND MEANING expanding meanings. The social domain
of this meaning also seems to widen to
In the rest of my analysis I focus on talk that
include Desi and Lina, who appear to
occurred in the interview that immediately
ratify this meaning on line 10 and lines
followed the viewing session. As participants
11–12 respectively. This ratification
move into a different speech situation (e.g.
represents an occasion where Desi and
from a viewing session to an interview)
Slamet, who have earlier disagreed on
they continue to engage in the building
provenance, now achieve some common
of convivial relations using the features
ground.
of talk discussed thus far. This talk is, in
After again re-iterating one of the
part, facilitated by the common ground
term’s meanings as relating to a negative
thus far established between participants,
personal trait (lines 13–14), in the talk
including the various meanings of the word
that follows immediately afterwards,
cipoa. What is also striking about this talk is
Desi repeats her alignment with Slamet
that while thus far the meaning of cipoa has
and Lina around the ‘archaicness’ or
been multiple, in the talk in the interview
‘uncommonness’ of the term cipoa
that follows participants increasingly align
(extract 5.2). This repetition seems
with each other about the meanings of this
to be going beyond conversational
word. The conversation below occurs after
alignment between Desi, Slamet, and
I bring up the talk about the word cipoa.
Lina by repeating the information ‘we
It represents both the continued pursuit
have aligned/agreed on this topic’ to do
of ethnic sameness (Desi and Gun), the
conviviality. In other words, in extract 5.2
establishment of some common ground
participants are engaging in pursuing
between Desi and Slamet, and the pursuit
sameness in epistemic stance.
of sameness in opinions on the part of Desi
Here we see Desi again pursuing
and Lina.
social sameness by literally asking Gun
In keeping with her earlier position
‘are you the same as me’ through her
on the provenance of cipoa (e.g. extract
utterance on lines 29–30 eh orang sunda
4.3 on lines 23–24 and extract 4.5
bukan (‘You’re Sundanese aren’t you’). On
on lines 7–8), Desi reiterates that the
lines 32–33 Slamet teases Gun, this time
term is probably not Sundanese (lines
about Gun’s ambiguous native speaker
2–3); a position Gun appears to ratify
credentials given his near decade-long
(line 4). In doing so, she appears to be
stay in Japan. This is yet one further
also identifying Gun as someone with
example of how teasing is used to build
native speaker expertise like herself.
convivial relations among a group of
When viewed together with earlier
relative strangers. We also see that Desi
instances of repetition, this pursuit
is repeating Slamet’s earlier suggestion
of social sameness seems to also add
that the word cipoa is old or archaic on
to the building of convivial relations
lines 21–25 and 27–28. In so doing, she
between these two participants. Slamet,
repeats her earlier alignment with Slamet
however, does not fully align with this
about the archaicness of the form, while

© Goebel and CMDR. 2015

Common ground and conviviality
Desi
1 = sebenarnya bukan yang jelas . (starts
2 looking at Gun) kayaknya bukan bahasa
3 sunda itu . [ kayanya istilah
Gun
4 [ kayaknya (???)
Slamet
5 [ kayaknya . kayaknya
6 kalau kita buka kamus besar kayaknya ada
7 itu . cipoa itu (0.5) tapi bahasa yang jarang
8 dipakai kayaknya . tidak [ umum #jadi#
9
Desi
10 [ bahasa karuhun =
Lina
11 = bahasa tidak [
12 umum
Slamet
13 [ jangan suka cipoa (1.1) #untuk menutupi
14 kekurangannya# (1.8)
Extract 5.1 Naming languages, native speakership, and pursuing social sameness
repeating Lina’s earlier contribution
about the form’s uncommonness.
In addition to highlighting a return to
the activity of working out the provenance
of the term cipoa, we also see how this
activity helps in the social identification
of participants. For example, Desi tries
to gain alignment from Gun (lines
27–28), before checking his native
speaker credentials (29–30). In doing
so, we get to again see the importance
Desi places on native speakership when
talking about language. In this instance,
it appears that her explanation of the
term cipoa rests both on the identity that
has emerged over interactional time
(that is, her identity as a native speaker
of Sundanese), and her wish to have
another native speaker (in this case Gun)
61
Actually, it is not clear.
It appears that it isn’t Sundanese,
it appears like a term ...
That’s what it appears like (???).
It’s like, it’s like if we opened the
authorative dictionary, it’s like the term
cipoa would be there. But it’s like language
that is rarely used, so it’s not common.
Ancestor’s language.
Language [which] isn’t
common.
Don’t cipoa to
cover up inadequacies.
align with her ideas about why she does
not know this term.
In the next extract we see that Slamet,
who has actually lived and studied for
five years in Bandung (stereotypically a
heartland of Sundanese speakers), now
also appears to be encouraged by Desi
to explain aspects of Sundaneseness. In
their interactions we get further insights
into how repetition helps to establish
more common ground between them as
they pursue sameness in opinions about
provenance, while further solidifying
emerging convivial relations between
these two. The talk in extract 5.3 follows
almost immediately from the talk
represented in extract 5.2 (I have deleted
two turns by Lina and Desi).
© Goebel and CMDR. 2015
62
Me
15 jadi ada? . yang bahasa bahasa lain yang
16 tadi #juga# . mungkin ndak (1.0) [ ndak
17 mengerti gitu .
Slamet
18 [ heem
Desi
19 mungkin kan . kalau di bahasa sunda
20 itu pak [author]’ . ah bahasa sunda itu
21 ada istilah bahasa karuhun ya . >bahasa
22 karuhun itu> bahasa yang tidak digunakan
23 sehari hari:: . tapi sebenarnya orang
24 orang tua di:: . tanah jawa barat itu
25 menggunakan gitu’ .
Slamet
26 [ heem
Desi
27 [ mungkin . generasinya saya . pak gun
28 #gitu# tidak begitu mengena::l . (looks
29 and points open hand at Gun) +eh+
30 >orang sunda> bukan .
Gun
31 heem =
Slamet
32 = orang [ sunda tapi tidak pernah di sunda
33 #dia# (said while smiling)
Extract 5.2 It is uncommon Sundanese spoken by the elderly
In extract 5.3 we see the continued
use of repetition as a way of showing
hearership, for establishing reference
and for establishing common ground.
For example, Lina and Desi align on
the topic of accent on lines 44–46, and
Desi and Slamet align on the topic of
the philosophy of life (lines 51–52).
When viewed in relation to the prior
talk in extract 5.2—where ‘archaic’
become a ratified meaning of the
word cipoa amongst these two—we can
say that this talk repeats much of the
earlier talk. In doing so, it adds to their
earlier alignments in a way that builds
© Goebel and CMDR. 2015
GOEBEL
So is there other language from
earlier that maybe [you] didn’t, didn’t
understand, you know?
Yes.
Maybe, right, if it is Sundanese
Mr. [author’s name], ah Sundanese has
a term bahasa karuhan yeah. Bahasa
karuhan means a language that isn’t used
daily, but actually the elderly in West Java
use it, you know.
Yes.
Maybe my generation [and] Mr. Gun’s
don’t really know the [language or its
words]. Oops!
[You’re] Sundanese aren’t [you]?
Yes.
[He’s] Sundanese but rarely lives in
Sunda. (a joke pointing to Gun’s near
decade-long stay in Japan)
upon the conviviality that has occurred
throughout the whole session (viewing
and interview). What appears even more
striking is while Desi contested Slamet’s
knowledge about things Sundanese
(extract 4.5 lines 7–8), here she has
made a number of concessions that have
helped build common ground between
the two, while also building convivial
relations between them.
In particular, although Desi
continues to foreground her expertise
and identity as a Sundanese through her
positive evaluation of the authenticity
of the televised representations of
Common ground and conviviality
Desi (S)
36 jadi e:: . >buat generasi saya tida::k>
37 tidak mengenal bahasa #itu# (0.6)
38 tetapi karena yang menjadi neneknya
39 ini sangat sunda . [ sundanese banget
gitu ya’ .
Slamet
40 [ hmmm (while nodding head)
Me
41 gi . gimana [ a apa . apa yang? .
misalnya
Desi (S)
42 [ (orang sunda?) (1.0) +dari dialek+ .
43 dari dialek . dari mis [ al kan
Lina
44 [ logat =
Desi (S)
45 = logat dari bicara itu (0.5) banyak
46 bahasa sunda keluar . dari . dari (0.5)
47
Slamet
48 psik psikologinya . (looking at Desi)
Desi (S)
49 [ heeh
Slamet
50 [ ah bukan psikologi apa namanya .
51 (looks at Desi) filsafat hidupnya:: =
Desi (S)
52 = filsafat hidupnya itu:? . jadi kalau
53 membersihkan halaman rumah? .
54 maka:? . (looks at Slamet and smiles)
55 >apa lagi>
Extract 5.3 The grandmother is just so Sundanese
Sundaneseness that she had just watched
(lines 38–39), nevertheless she also
ratifies Slamet’s comments about things
Sundanese. For example, after seeking
approval from Desi on lines 48 and 51,
Desi ratifies his contribution through
the use of ‘heeh’ (line 49), as well as
repetition and expansion (lines 53–55).
Slamet goes on to explain that the
reason for classifying cipoa as uncommon
63
So er for my generation [I] don’t don’t know
that language. But
because the grandmother is very
Sundanese, very Sundanese, you know.
Yeah.
(False start), why, what, what is it, for
example?
((Sundanese?)) From [the] dialect, from the
dialect, from for example, right.
Accent.
The speaking accent, a lot of Sundanese
also came with it. From, from
Psch, their psychology.
Yes
Ah not their psychology, what is it, their
philosophy of life.
Their philosophy of life. So if
you clean your yard, then …
what else Slamet?
and archaic relates to the old-fashioned
social practices engaged in by the old
woman represented in the soap. In this
case it is her philosophy of life, which
Slamet discusses at length after being
invited to do so by Desi (on line 55).
Without providing a transcript of the
rest of the talk, Slamet notes that this
philosophy relates to something like a
clean environment around the home
© Goebel and CMDR. 2015
64
and means that we have a clean spirit
and healthy life.
In summary, across another speech
situation (an interview), we see the
continued use of a number of features
that seem to be used for building
convivial relations amongst this group
of Indonesians, including the use of
teasing, the social pursuit of sameness,
and repetition (both temporally close
and that which is much earlier in the
group session). The use of these features
is intimately tied to the establishing
of common ground (personal ethnic
backgrounds, provenance, archaicness,
and traditional philosophies of life)
as well as continued acts of social
identification.
6. CONCLUSION
This paper added to a small but growing
body of sociolinguistic work by focusing
upon an old question in the Humanities
and Social Sciences, namely how do
people from diverse backgrounds do
conviviality. I explored the relationships
between the use of strings of small
response tokens (non-minimal responses)
and a form of linguistic reciprocity
commonly referred to as ‘repetition’,
how these features both helped to
establish common ground and pursue
social sameness, and how all of this
figured in the building and maintenance
of convivial relations between a group
of Indonesians living in Japan. My
empirical focus was on the conversations
of these Indonesians as they engaged in
viewing an Indonesian soap, and as they
engaged in a group interview afterwards.
Repetition of words and small
utterances was the primary way in which
participants went about establishing
reference and common ground. While
some common ground was emergent,
nevertheless the agreement on referents
© Goebel and CMDR. 2015
GOEBEL
formed the basis for subsequent
convivial talk. The establishment of
common ground through repetition
(i.e. the reciprocal exchange of linguistic
forms) was also part of the more general
processes of building convivial relations
between these Indonesians. Conviviality
was also built through the use of non-
minimal responses, teasing, and the
social pursuit of sameness; in this case
sameness in terms of ethnolinguistic
background and in opinions about the
meaning of the word cipoa. As Goffman’s
(1971) work suggests, the import of this
type of conversational work is not just
the conviviality that is established in the
immediate setting, but the potential for
future conviviality in other settings.
For this group of Indonesians it is
understandable that they engaged in this
type of talk (instead of say staying silent
throughout the two-hour session and not
attending the subsequent three viewing
and interviewing sessions) because their
situation as sojourners required them
to engage in conviviality. Indeed, most
had gone from being reasonably well-
off Indonesians in Indonesia with dense
networks of friends and kin who could
be relied upon to offer financial support
and physical labor in times of need, to
being relatively poor and needing to rely
upon other unfamiliar Indonesians to
provide financial and physical support
as well as information about how best to
eke out a living in Japan. Access to such
networks required and was reproduced
by attending regular gatherings and by
engaging in convivial practices in such
gatherings. Thus, by actively working
on establishing common ground and
pursuing social sameness, participants
(re)produced the basis for subsequent
convivial relations and access to the
important networks that would help
them while sojourning in Japan.
Common ground and conviviality
NOTES
1. This is a revised version of a working
paper entitled ‘Indonesians doing
togetherness in Japan’, which was first
presented as part of a panel titled
‘Constructing identities in transnational
spaces’ at the American Association for
Applied Linguistics conference in Boston
in March 2012. It then appeared in
2013 as a working paper (No. 67) in the
series Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies.
I subsequently presented this version
at a workshop at Tilburg University. I
would like to thank Jan Blommaert who
engaged with the paper in 2012 and
Max Spotti, Piia Varis, Sanna Lehtonen,
Tom van Nuenen, Paul Mutsaers, and
the dozen postgraduate students who
engaged with this paper during my
stay at Tilburg University. As always,
responsibility for the final version lies
squarely with me.
2. This research was made possible by
a grant from the Japan Society for
the Promotion of Science (Grant No.
C20520380). I would like to thank
the participants in this study for their
willingness to be involved and for
their graciousness and good-humored
responses to my questions. I would
also like to thank a team of Indonesian
research assistants who have worked with
me on this project, including Eni, Riris,
Inu, and Puji.
3. Pak is literally ‘Mr.’ but interactionally
is typically used as a kin term and has
indexical relationships with ideas about
fatherhood and the offering of respect to
elders.
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Multilingual Margins 2015, 2(1):67-82 67

Between phatic communion

and coping tactic. Casamançais
multilingual practices

Tilmann Heil
University of Konstanz

Abstract
This paper enquires into the role of multilingual practices in conviviality in shared,
socially and culturally mixed localities. I ask how Casamançais use diverse repertoires
to get by in everyday life in both Casamance, Senegal and Catalonia, Spain. The
concept of conviviality stresses fragile, dynamic processes characteristic of everyday
ways of living together with maintained difference. I argue that minimal, but diversified
language practices, which compose linguistically diverse repertoires, are central in
facilitating conviviality among local residents. Minimal interactions and ‘small talk’,
or phatic communion, cushion potentially conflictual socio-cultural differences and
inequalities. Firstly, I will evaluate discourses on multilingual practices of Casamançais
in both contexts. Second, I will critically explore the reasons for and quality of the
widespread use of diverse repertoires. I conclude that multilingual practices facilitate
phatic communion sometimes playfully and sometimes as part of coping strategies in
situations in which structural forces determine which choices will be more successful
than others. The process of conviviality spans both these aspects describing ever-
dynamic and ever-fragile ways of living with difference.

Keywords: everyday; conviviality; phatic communion; tactics; inequality; Casamance;

Catalonia; multilingualism; polylanguaging

1. INTRODUCTION and Castilian has seen further diversification

I n shared, socially and culturally mixed
localities truncated multilingual practices
are a central element of conviviality, a mode
of minimal sociality among people who
maintain differences.1 In both Catalonia
and Casamance, where I conducted
ethnographic fieldwork among Casamançais
migrants and their families and friends,
diverse linguistic repertoires are used to get
by in everyday life. To an extent, this reflected
the linguistically diverse local population.2
Catalonia’s everyday bilingualism of Catalan
due to immigration and Catalan is politically
promoted as the shared lingua franca; in
Casamance, various linguistic preferences
persist alongside local, regional, and national
linguae francae. In both localities, inhabitants
use diverse linguistic repertoires to get by
in everyday life. I will argue that truncated,
but diversified language practices, which
compose linguistically diverse repertoires,
are central in facilitating conviviality among
local residents. Minimal interactions and
‘small talk’ cushion potentially conflictual
cultural differences and social stratification.

© Heil and CMDR. 2015

68
Well aware that minimal interactions
change over time and according to wider
social contexts (cf. Heil 2013), here I discuss
the significance of ‘knowing just enough’,
i.e. developing a truncated multilingual
register needed to sustain minimal
interactions. I ask how such truncated
multilingualism facilitates conviviality by
way of ‘phatic communion’ (cf. Malinowski
[1923] 1994), which I define as a sequence
of situations in which people communicate
using minimal, mutually intelligible semiotic
resources. Truncated multilingualism
refers to repertoires which vary in degrees
of diversity but result from ‘creatively
appropriat[ing] the voices of others across
language boundaries, while [potentially
only] possessing a very limited knowledge
of the languages being appropriated’
(Blommaert, Collins, and Slembrouck
2005: 199). I use this interchangeably
with polylanguaging which describes ‘the
use of features associated with different
“languages” even when speakers only
know few features associated with (some of)
these “languages”’ (Jørgensen 2011: 33).
In the cases discussed in this paper, some
interlocutors exhibited quite sophisticated
linguistic knowledge, yet they often had
proven to be specialists in ‘knowing just
enough’ of particular languages and further
cultural practices which they had ‘learned
in passing’. I am particularly interested
in the moments of phatic communion
as a form of ritualised interaction, which
in (super)diverse contexts requires both
truncated multilingualism and cultural
translation. Additionally, I question which
social differentiations are related to diverse
linguistic repertoires and how hierarchies
and power discrepancies are negotiated in
phatic communion and thus, conviviality. I
will therefore account for both the language
ideologies and the use of (conflicting)
linguae francae in various social situations.
My aim is to engage with the tensions
between a playful practice and attitude,
© Heil and CMDR. 2015
HEIL
and people coping with situations in
which structural forces determine which
(linguistic) choices are more successful
than others. I will explore this dialectic
relationship via ethnographic case studies
of a Jola, a Mandinka, and a Fula, who only
to varying degrees perceive multilingualism
as something positive and/or necessary.
I will show when the logic of economic
interactions obliges them to use various,
dominant repertoires beyond their
individual linguistic aspirations. Next, I will
give some crucial empirical background
paying particular attention to the Catalan
language policy and the cosmopolitan self-
representation and multilingual practices
in Casamance.
2. FRAMING ENCOUNTERS
WITH DIFFERENCE
Although there were common features in
the migration trajectories of the mainly
male Casamançais I worked with in
Catalonia, the cases varied in terms of
migration trajectory, the economic means
available to them, methods of entry, and
living situation upon arrival. The cases of
my interlocutors also differed according
to places of origin, rural or urban place of
residence, ethnic and religious background,
formal education, and age. As one
important consequence of this diversity of
life trajectories, Casamançais over the years
had been exposed to variously configured
linguistic landscapes. Accounting for
this complexity where necessary, both
regional contexts nevertheless possess
some distinctive features to which my
interlocutors referred and which provide
frameworks to their multilingual practices
and their interpretation.3
Both Casamance and Catalonia show
diverse linguistic configurations in which I
observed a two-sided process. Firstly, diverse
linguistic repertoires are commonplace to
Between phatic communion and coping tactic
local residents due to complex histories of
migration and longstanding ethnic and
linguistic plurality. Secondly, this situation
is complemented by the role of various
languages which assume the role of the
regional or situational lingua franca (cf.
Juillard 1991; Dreyfus and Juillard 2005;
Juillard 2005; Pujolar 2009; Gal 2013;
Pujolar and Gonzàlez 2013; Woolard and
Frekko 2013). The regional perspective
is conducive to the present endeavour
since it helps shifting our focus away from
a focus on national languages and local
mother tongues (cf. Heil 2012). It avoids
methodological nationalism as well as an
ethnic lens (Wimmer and Glick Schiller
2002; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003;
Glick Schiller, Çağlar, and Guldbrandsen
2006). Taking subnational regions as an
entry point, further categories, such as the
national, ethnic, and social ones, continue
to play out alongside each other; I will
consider them in the following section.
Diversifying Catalonia
Catalonia is an autonomous region in
the northeast of Spain. Not least because
of the distinctive language and culture of
Catalonia, various political movements
and regional institutions have claimed its
distinctiveness and relative autonomy from
the Castilian-dominated Spanish nation
state. After the subaltern endurance of
Catalan during the Franco period (May
2012: 257), today Catalan ought to play
the role of the ‘common public language’
(Generalitat de Catalunya 2009: 69), or,
put simply, the lingua franca embedded
in a policy of active multilingualism.
Apart from the Franco legacies, Castilian
influences in Catalonia derive from the
large internal labour migration from the
south of Spain to the north since the 1950s
(Castells 2009: 51). They settled in the
suburbs of Barcelona and the surrounding
industrial towns, where I conducted
69
fieldwork. A further layer of complexity
consists of the rapid and significant
immigration of international and cheap
labour since the early 2000s, which in
2010 locally accounted for 17.5 per cent
of the population (Instituto Nacional de
Estadística 2011). This immigration is
often concentrated in the neighbourhoods
built by the southern Spanish arrivals
at the periphery of the old Catalan
city centres. Currently, this share of the
population comes from over 120 different
countries of origin (Instituto Nacional de
Estadística 2011) and speaks 250 different
mother tongues (Generalitat de Catalunya
2009: 69). Independent of their skill level,
most international immigrants in the
2000s, certainly those from sub-Saharan
Africa, worked in agriculture, factories,
construction, the service industries or the
informal sector (Díez Nicolás 2002: 266).
Mataró, a medium sized, industrial
town some 50 kilometres away from
Barcelona, was one of my fieldwork sites
and confirms the general picture. In the
neighbourhoods at the periphery where
I worked, around 50 per cent of the
population is born outside Catalonia, all
of whom exhibit distinctive, and often
multiple diverse linguistic repertoires
(Ajuntament de Mataró 2010). Around
half of them speak Castilian, often of a
Southern Spanish variety. The remaining
are international immigrants from other
parts of the world and continue to maintain
their respective linguistic repertoires.
In such a situation of diversification,
the Catalan migration and language
policies become particularly apparent. In
the renewed Statute of Autonomy in 2006
(Generalitat de Catalunya 2006), which can
be regarded as one of the hallmarks of the
Catalan independence ambitions, Catalonia
emerges as a nation due to its culture and
language. It stylises the Catalan culture
as mixed and cosmopolitan, facilitating
the inclusion of foreigners. ‘Un pacte per
© Heil and CMDR. 2015
70
viure junts i juntes. Pacte Nacional per a la
Immigració’4, which followed the Statute in
2009, more generally formulates a regional
policy on migration and integration and
applies some elements of immigration
management and control so far dealt with
on the state level. Consequently, in 2010
Catalonia was granted the right to issue its
own residency and work permits.
The promotion of Catalan language
continues in both this National Agreement
and its practical application, the Citizenship
and Immigration Plan, now also concerning
immigrant reception and as a means of
bridging the practice of everybody’s distinct
mother tongue (Generalitat de Catalunya
2009: 69; Generalitat de Catalunya 2010b:
68). The stated aim of the Citizen and
Immigration Plan is ‘… to foster knowledge
of Catalan among the entire population
of Catalonia, especially among foreigners,
and also extend the use of Catalan in
all community and social relationship
environments.’ (Generalitat de Catalunya
2010a: 68).
Eight million Euros have been
earmarked for ‘Catalan language
normalisation’ compared to just slightly
over 100 thousand Euros for language of
origin classes (Generalitat de Catalunya
2010a: 146–48). The imbalance could not
be expressed more strongly. In a first step,
these policies had mitigated the bilateral
political opposition of Castilian and
Catalan by embedding it in the practised
multilingualism in Catalonia. Yet, as a
second step, no doubt remained that
Catalan profited as the only lingua franca.
Casamançais linguistic diversity
In contrast, Casamance is a region of long-
standing diversity in the south of Senegal.
The national census of 2002 gives 19
different ethnic groups, leaving some to the
category of ‘other’. Focusing only on the
Lower and Middle Casamance where I did
© Heil and CMDR. 2015
HEIL
fieldwork, those administrative departments
with urban agglomerations, Ziguinchor
and Sédhiou are very heterogeneous
(Agence Nationale de la Statistique et de
la Démographie 2008, 2009). Most of the
ethnic groups categorised in the census
speak recognised national languages. In
1972, Senegal’s first president, Léopold
Sédar Senghor had officially granted
six languages equal status as national
languages of Senegal, in contrast to French
as the official one. He had envisioned this
configuration as a way to foreclose ethnic
group-based conflict guaranteeing equal
recognition. In 2001, President Wade
expanded the ‘national’ status to all codified
local languages which raised the number to
currently 24 languages listed as national
ones (Diallo 2010).
While many of the linguistic and
cultural diversity arguments could be
made for Senegal as a whole, Casamançais
often claim their home region to be
different from the rest of Senegal for its
more comprehensive ethnic, linguistic,
and religious diversity. The Casamançais
distinctiveness was dressed up as
cosmopolitan in contrast to the Wolof-
dominated north. While the reasons for the
Casamançais independence movement are
complex and multiple (e.g. Lambert 1998;
Foucher 2003; de Jong and Gasser 2005;
Evans 2005; Marut 2010; Foucher 2011),
the cultural specificity of Casamance
frequently came to stand next to the more
important developmental gridlock and
the political marginalisation of the region
(Foucher 2002).
While for political purposes the
Northerners and Wolof remain the
quintessential other of the Casamançais,
the Wolof language increasingly plays
a role in Casamance as a language of
commerce and among youth (Dreyfus
and Juillard 2005). According to the 2002
census, in Ziguinchor around 15 per cent
speak Wolof as their first language and 53
Between phatic communion and coping tactic
per cent as their second, which confirms it
as an important, widely spoken language
(Agence Nationale de la Statistique et de
la Démographie 2008, 2009). However,
the census gives no information on
further languages spoken, which would
be crucial to grasp language dynamics in
Casamance. Thus, the picture is already
very different in Sédhiou, the second
regional capital. 45 per cent name
Mandinka as their first language and
another 52 per cent as their second one.
In Middle Casamance, Mandinka clearly
remains the lingua franca. Insights from
peripheral markets in Ziguinchor also
shows that they mainly operate in local
languages, but interactions are often
multilingual (Dreyfus and Juillard 2005).
In the centre of Ziguinchor and at the
main market, multilingual interactions
are even more frequent accounting for
up to 70 per cent of all interactions. Only
in the centre is Wolof used in over 70
per cent of all interactions (ibid.). These
aggregate findings already emphasise the
need to closely study the local contexts
to understand multilingual practices and
their representation. The multilingual
Ziguinchor configuration sets the context
for the linguistic practices of Augustin
Sambou5, which I discuss next.
3. BETWEEN A ROCK AND A
CONVIVIAL PLACE
From the outset, Casamançais were exposed
to multiple local languages and often
had diversified, if truncated multilingual
repertoires. To better comprehend the
linguistic dynamics in Casamance, I first
turn to Augustin Sambou’s language
practices before introducing the lives of
two Casamançais migrants in Catalonia.
In contexts of obvious linguistic diversity,
I enquire what the reasons are for
situationally choosing a specific language
71
or getting on with mixed linguistic
practices. How do people relate to the
everyday occurrence of polylanguaging?
How do they judge multilingual practices?
I will arrive at answers to these questions by
way of focusing on the various multilingual
practices and social processes, which the
three distinct cases offer.
Augustin Sambou
In the local context of Casamance,
one does not need to migrate far, if at
all, to develop a very varied linguistic
repertoire. Augustin came to Casamance
in the 1970s as a refugee from Guinea
Bissau. He had finished high school
in Ziguinchor, had become a primary
school teacher, and prepared for an
exam for a higher administrative
position. One of my close confidants,
Augustin had a wide range of linguistic
registers from which to choose. He was
Jola, the largest ethnic group in Lower
Casamance; however, people could tell
his dialect was Bissau Guinean. He had
only spent a short time in Dakar and,
when we met, mainly commuted between
various villages in the Casamance-Bissau
Guinean borderlands. Following a
general trend, he mainly used Wolof in
everyday encounters with people of his
age. With his more distant relatives from
Guinea Bissau, he spoke Creole, with
his family members his home dialect of
Jola, and with his landlord he spoke Jola
Fogny, the most widely used variety. He
also handled encounters in Mandinka
and some aspects of conversations in
Fula. With his colleagues, he conversed
in French, while with me he sometimes
coquetted in English. Finally, he also
understood Portuguese.
Mirroring Augustin’s linguistic
repertoire, the peripheral neighbourhoods
of Ziguinchor were perceived as a similarly
diversified linguistic landscape. Despite
© Heil and CMDR. 2015
72
the increasing importance of Wolof, people
did not perceive a single language to
dominate public interactions and showed
an immense linguistic flexibility. People
disagreed over situationally dominant
linguae francae and the distinctions both
among local inhabitants’ ethnic origins
and linguistic practices were vague,
shifting, and constantly evaded efforts to
generalise. Sometimes, people spoke of
specific ethnic groups or they mentioned
which languages were mostly spoken, at
other times people just mentioned the
great diversity among the inhabitants.
Living in spaces in which their
mother tongues were often not the
dominant ones, many Casamançais of
various ethnic and linguistic backgrounds
tended to portray their multilingual
practice as a competence and expression
of their cosmopolitan attitudes (cf.
Heil 2012). This also emerged from
the playful, skilful, and easy-going
use of diverse repertoires by which
Casamançais creatively engaged with the
given situation and exchanged nothing
more than non-propositional language.
At its basis, I witnessed the Casamançais
discourses on multilingual practices in
both Casamance and Catalonia. In being
particularly apt, Augustin embodied
both the ideal-typical competence
and the aspired cosmopolitan attitude
of many Casamançais with whom I
interacted. While others just staked
a claim to speak many languages,
Augustin was more differentiated in his
assessment of his language repertoire.
He knew his qualities and deficiencies
well and humbly put his everyday
language practices into perspective. He
liked to portray it as the normal way of
living, which referred to the expectations
of good neighbourliness and thus
conviviality (Heil 2014a).
On many days, I could accompany
Augustin during his everyday business. On
© Heil and CMDR. 2015
HEIL
the back of his motorbike or walking with
him through Ziguinchor neighbourhoods,
he linguistically adapted quite aptly to
the changing situations. Contrary to his
humble reflections, it seemed that he
effortlessly faded in and out of situations
and the necessary registers to facilitate
interaction. The underlying principles of
interaction that Augustin and others stated
were the respect for those encountered
and the wish to receive difference openly.
They portrayed their linguistic skills
as a chosen and positively connoted
aspect of their everyday social relations.
Augustin underlined this point by happily
translating for me the discussions that
were on-going. More importantly, people
would even switch to French for substantial
parts of the conversation to have me
participate. At the same time, they trained
my own expending linguistic repertoire
in practising those skills I had acquired in
local languages.
On the other hand, most of the time
nothing particularly surprising seemed
to be said in fleeting encounters. The
showing of interest in the neighbour’s
well-being prescribed by cohabitation in
Casamance resembled more ritualised
practice than real concern for the other’s
well-being. Many Casamançais read such
forms of politeness and recognition as
signs of respect, which were needed, as
they argued, since this was Africa. Using
merely familiar phrases that pleased
those encountered exemplifies a practice
which Malinowski described in the 1920s
as phatic communion:
A mere phrase of politeness, in use
as much among savage tribes as in
a European drawing room, fulfils
a function to which the meaning
of its words is almost completely
irrelevant. … There can be no doubt
that we have here a new type of
linguistic use —phatic communion …
[T]his is in fact achieved by speech,
Between phatic communion and coping tactic
and the situation in all such cases is
created by the exchange of words,
by the specific feelings which form
convivial gregariousness, by the give
and take of utterances which make
up ordinary gossip. (Malinowski
[1923] 1994: 9-10, emphasis in the
original)
In a situation of linguistic diversity such as in
Casamance, Malinowski’s focus on spoken
interaction needs some qualifications.
The literal meaning of words indeed was
irrelevant for Casamançais, yet language
ideologies prescribed a need to utter them
in (one of) the language(s) accepted or
preferred in a given social situation. Often,
Casamançais addressed the language
ideologies playfully maintaining phatic
communion. In situations of unequal power
relations, however, their multilingualism
presented itself as a tactical choice.
When I went with Augustin to inquire
at a mechanic if he had repaired and sold
Augustin’s old motorbike, Augustin’s
tactic of using his multilingual repertoire
and speaking Wolof failed to establish
phatic communion and achieve a positive
outcome for the negotiation. While he
seemed fluent in Wolof speaking to his
friends, he audibly struggled to argue
his case to the mechanic. Instead of
maintaining his playfulness, his sentences
broke up into clumsy junks whenever he
had to think of the right technical terms
which he frequently could not help but
replace with French words. In principle
this is not remarkable since Urban Wolof
incorporates many French words (Juillard
1994; Swigart 2000; McLaughlin 2008)
and ‘Wolof only works with a little bit of
French’, as one of my other informants
once explained to me. Augustin, however,
later admitted that he had struggled
to find appropriate Wolof expressions.
The mechanic had also noticed this.
As a consequence, Augustin had not
convincingly used Wolof features since he
73
neither achieved phatic communion with
the mechanic nor his pertinent economic
objective of quickly selling his bike. Yet, he
had felt under pressure to use Wolof since
he envisioned the chances of settling a
good deal to significantly increase.
All of a sudden, Wolof was no longer
a choice but a way of coping with the
situational opportunity structures. They
need to be understood as multidimensional
hierarchisations, which result from the
situational significance of various language
registers which people activate, as well
as from the perceived social statuses
of the people present. The mechanic
had been in the centre of town where
Wolof increasingly prevailed as a means
of interacting commercially. Augustin
had chosen a central mechanic despite
his difficulties to relate to him due to
the language barrier. Yet he needed
the services that only this mechanic
could offer as a rare specialist. While he
previously had had good experiences,
this time Augustin’s tactic failed. In need
of money, he assumed a powerless social
position which his meagre attempts at
Wolof did not cushion. Judging his own
linguistic competences, Augustin knew
that he could have been more competent
in Jola or French than in Wolof since he
had not grown up with it nor used it under
such circumstances before. However, the
mechanic’s situationally superior position
based in his professional competence
and central location in town had let him
dictate the terms of interaction. At least,
this must have been Augustin’s perception
of the situationally specific opportunity
structures according to which he had acted.
As a consequence, Augustin’s difficulties to
satisfactorily blend in linguistically and his
economically weak position had prevented
his successful negotiation.
His intended strategic choice of
dealing with his own subject position had
not resulted in the expected outcome.
© Heil and CMDR. 2015
74
Put differently, his own Casamançais
language ideology of multilingualism
had been brought to a limit entering an
economic field in which rules governed
that he did not master to the required
level. Augustin failed at using Wolof as a
commodity, which it was intended to be
in this economic exchange. Language
here needs to be understood from the
economic angle (Irvine 1989), from which
it could appear as either a strategically
applied resource or coping tactic.
In addition to their multilingual self-
representation, the linguistic flexibility
and creativity of Casamançais thus is,
in certain situations, a way of dealing
with situational power structures in the
attempt to make economic ends meet.
Truncated multilingualism and the
convivial effects of phatic communion
thus may become a currency to cope
with real socio-economic disparities.
Rather than free play, I argue that
Casamançais tried to tactically influence
this exchange on the outcome of which
they were dependent. Such a situation, I
will show next, became more frequent in
the emigration context.
Aboubacar Diao
Aboubacar Diao, a Fula in Catalonia, had
felt constrained in his choice of language
in interactions on the labour market and
in everyday life in Catalonia. He had
grown up in an ethnically diverse village
of the Sédhiou region, where unlike many
other villages in Middle Casamance,
the predominance of Mandinka was
contested, most fiercely by the locally
resident Fula. Meeting him in Catalonia,
Aboubacar claimed to have already
started to forget Mandinka. Instead,
he actively only maintained Wolof and
Fula from his Senegalese repertoire. In
Catalonia, he had first learned Castilian
but quickly changed to Catalan. His
© Heil and CMDR. 2015
HEIL
young Fula wife from the same village
of origin, who had recently arrived and
given birth to their child, also took
Catalan language classes. Contrary to
other migrants, they neither shared their
house with family or friends, nor had
direct African neighbours. The few Fula
living close-by, they hardly visited.
While there were some Casamançais
immigrants that felt an immediate
interest in the Catalan language as an
expression of a regional specificity and
diversity much like in Casamance, others
like Aboubacar had initially set out to
learn Spanish since their work trajectories
would not be limited to Catalonia alone.
Back then, Aboubacar had reasoned that
Catalan was of no use in the rest of Spain
and Europe. This rational argument
ranking languages paralleled a similar
practice in Senegal. In general, Fula and
Mandinka speakers discredited Wolof
since they thought its geographical reach
was limited to Senegal and Gambia alone.
In contrast, both Mandinka and Fula were
languages with a trans-regional or—as
some liked to claim—a pan-African
reach. Neither Catalan nor Wolof could
claim such a significance. Yet, reasons
beyond possible onward migrations led
to a re-evaluation of specific language
ideologies. For example, Aboubacar
preferred Wolof to Mandinka due to
his direct confrontation with Mandinka
in his village of origin. Casamançais
entextualise their own situation in
the contexts of (competing) language
ideologies. Therefore, Aboubacar had
started to care for Catalan.
The first day I met Aboubacar and
his wife, he had just come back from a
Catalan class. Being reluctant to learn
Catalan at first, the Diaos had observed
three practical reasons for positively
engaging and learning Catalan. On the
labour market and in public institutions,
Catalans would increasingly assume
Between phatic communion and coping tactic
Catalan as the lingua franca and not switch
to Castilian automatically, thus limiting the
access of those not able to speak Catalan.
To participate locally and to achieve one’s
own goals it was necessary to avoid such
situations. Second, knowing that someone
only understood Castilian, Catalans
could speak about him or her in Catalan
unnoticed. Since this was potentially
dangerous, it needed to be prevented at
all costs. Finally, the Diaos noticed that a
group of locals would receive someone well
if addressed in Catalan.6 While this applied
to all immigrants, sub-Saharan Africans
frequently earned a lot of respect from the
Catalans for their high linguistic sensibility.
Among them, all three dimensions
had been recurrent themes reiterating
the importance of Catalan. Those not
knowing Catalan risked being excluded
and potentially discriminated against. To
prevent this, the Diaos regularly attended
Catalan classes and did not rely on the
vernacular everyone else picked up on the
street.
Taking classes in Catalan contrasted
with Aboubacar’s attitude to Castilian
that he only continued to pick up on the
streets and at work. The working class
street register of Castilian and some
minimal knowledge of Catalan would
have sufficed for Aboubacar to work in
low-skilled employment and maintain
phatic interactions as many Casamançais
did. Indeed, some Casamançais without
formal education sounded like their
Andalusian neighbours and work
colleagues, and thus succeeded in
creating phatic communion and earning
their living. Aboubacar, however, aspired
to more, he envisioned himself upwardly
mobile for which he needed to extend his
proficiency in Catalan. Seemingly as a
side product of this aspiration, the Diaos
had bought into the autonomy narrative
of Catalonia with its own culture and
language, which for them was a legitimate
75
explanation of the increasing pride of
Catalans and their efforts to promote
Catalan. Apart from being a sign of
respect for regional specificity, plenty of
Casamançais furthermore sympathised
with the Catalan minority concern similar
to that of the Casamançais in Senegal,
and the symbolic role of Jola, Mandinka,
and other even smaller language groups
therein. Quite literally, they compared
and translated the cultural dynamics
of the two regions, thus making them
intelligible.
As the dominant narrative, however,
Aboubacar portrayed his efforts to speak
and understand Catalan as a tactical
choice, which was facilitated by some
sympathy for a minority language. He
felt a need for Catalan to approach
people and to find work; he tactically
tried to comply with the requirements set
by those who could either grant or deny
access to employment and services. In
contrast to others who had transplanted
some of their linguistic playfulness to
Catalonia, his engagement with Catalan
showed little of such an attitude. To
achieve his own goals, Aboubacar
seemingly did the necessary by using the
resource of the dominant local lingua
franca.
Language ideologies promoting a
single lingua franca thus have the potential
to challenge truncated multilingualism
as the basis of phatic communion. The
imposition of regionally dominant or
politically favoured linguae francae
like Catalan, Mandinka or Wolof puts
the relative equality among interacting
parties and their linguistic repertoires
and registers at risk. This can result
in spaces being claimed by some local
residents who then intend to impose their
language preferences on others. In large
shares of the public and economic sphere
of Catalonia, Catalans occupied such a
position. Nevertheless, most Casamançais
© Heil and CMDR. 2015
76
(seemingly) playfully maintained phatic
communion for either normative or
tactical reasons, or both.
None of the aspects facilitating
phatic communion in a local social
field can thus be taken for granted. For
many Casamançais, cultural translation
and sustaining the local style of address
are in general a morally correct tactical
choice.7 However, normative evaluations
of social, cultural, and religious
collective and individual aspirations,
and of local configurations of language
ideologies challenge its feasibility.
Some Casamançais struggled with
differences in what constituted phatic
exchange. For example, rushing social
encounters or reducing them was
hardly translatable for Casamançais
who believed in the importance of
making time for encounters as part of
Casamançais cohabitation. Additionally,
educated Casamançais interacting with
working-class Andalusian neighbours
found it hard to generously equate
their different practices due to the
class differences; they were appalled by
unpleasant working-class small talk. Yet
this emotionally trapped them between
their disdain and mockery of their
neighbours’ repertoires, and their own
lack of respect this portrayed.
Indeed, Aboubacar had been
struggling to cope with the local forms
of creating phatic communion. Despite
learning the language, he stated his
preference at work and outdoors to
interact as little as possible, mainly to
avoid trouble. While he would watch and
listen, he never commented or joked. To
him local ways of joking were frequently
insulting rather than funny. Apart from
speaking as little as possible, Aboubacar
also explained to keep his bodily
expressions to a minimum, for example
not looking into the eyes of passers-by.
Aboubacar’s limited engagement
© Heil and CMDR. 2015
HEIL
at work and in public, as well as his
multilingual choices mirror his constant
evaluation of how to most efficiently deal
with current conditions. From the outset
in Casamance, he had only picked up
language repertoires that were useful to
know. Thus, he stopped at the level of
greeting in Castilian but invested more
in Catalan after he had seen possible
pitfalls in case he did not. He quickly
invested in the latter to access realms of
society from which he otherwise found
himself excluded. Part of this logic
was also, to keep the encounters to a
minimum of acknowledging each other’s
presence and distinctiveness.
Like in Casamance, Aboubacar had
used the suitable registers and forms of
interaction to the necessary extent. To
recognise such locally specific forms of
interaction was also part of the process
of cultural translation, i.e. the successful
translation between multiple systems of
meaning, making them intelligible and
moving between them. Casamançais
expressed their disposition towards such
practices through a close observation
of local sociality which they compared
to their previous social experiences
and to the information gained from co-
migrants in the new place. In contrast
to Aboubacar, who tactically reacted
to changing circumstances, we will see
next how Idrissa Samaté believed in the
genuine usefulness of multiple languages
and how he mastered the fine-tuning
of situational styles and registers with a
certain playfulness.
Idrissa Samaté
Idrissa Samaté, a Mandinka from
Sédhiou town, had been politically well
connected in a socialist-Marxist party
which had ceased to exist leaving various
splinter groups behind. As a result,
Idrissa felt that his future in Senegal
Between phatic communion and coping tactic
had waned and decided to try migration
inspired by his foster brother, whom he
eventually joined in Spain. He had left
his wife and children behind to start
the life of a migrant exposed to the
vagaries of an uncertain future, which
was in contrast to his initially promising
outlook in Senegal.
Explaining his linguistic repertoire,
he stressed his secure family background
and formal education in Senegal at the
University of Dakar. His whole family
was at least fluent in French, Wolof, and
Mandinka. Idrissa himself was a recognised
language authority for Mandinka, his
mother tongue, both in Casamance and
Catalonia. The Casamançais advertising
his language proficiency often implied
more than just language: they meant
a profound knowledge of Mandinka
cultural practices and their texts. For
this reason, Idrissa regularly received
visitors on weekends who came from
neighbouring towns to attend his
gatherings or causeries. Furthermore, they
demanded his guidance in rituals at any
kind of cultural event that was held in and
around his current place of residence.
Idrissa’s extensive knowledge
of home combined with an active
engagement with the Catalan locality.
Like many others, Idrissa believed in the
centrality of being able to communicate
in a new context in which he invested a
lot from the start. Although he dedicated
most of his time to migrant associations,
he had shown an interest in local
associations and always participated
in associational meetings on the
municipality level. When I met him
seven years after his arrival in Catalonia,
he furthermore had become a relatively
well-known and respected figure in the
trade unionism of Catalonia.
Working for one of the main trade
unions in the field of migrants’ rights, he
spent his days using the full scope of his
77
linguistic repertoire. In campaigns, he
emphasised the importance of interacting
with Moroccan and Latin American
workers as well as sub-Saharan ones. In the
office block, however, his Catalan register
proved important. On the corridors
and in casual meetings he constantly
exchanged the odd question and short
commentary with his co-workers. In style
he adjusted to the union environment,
addressing most people as compañera/o,
company/a, or camarada.8 Which one of
the Castilian or Catalan union forms of
address he used remained often unclear
since he kept a low voice throughout
the day. Speaking softly was one major
difference he had previously identified
between here and there, referring broadly
to Catalonia, Spain, or Europe on the
one hand, and Casamance, Senegal, or
Africa on the other. Apart from scripted
responses, he most of the time earned
a recognising smile. By the time I met
him, Idrissa had become a widely known
person throughout the office block and
had secured his social position. While
this was partly due to being one of the
few migrants working there, his efforts
put into knowing enough Catalan and
fitting in stylistically had their effect
and facilitated phatic communion and
everyday conviviality.
To get on in multiple languages had
always been helpful to him. Knowing
Wolof and French had been useful
resources in Senegal and continued to
be in Spain. In Catalonia, Idrissa assured
me that knowing either some Catalan or
Castilian was a mandatory first step to
integrate, as he phrased it. However, he
himself made use of them both. Catalan
was important at the office and in dealing
with the municipality, but Castilian
was a central means to get by in the
neighbourhood. Apart from the many
Moroccans and Latin Americans with
© Heil and CMDR. 2015
78
whom Idrissa used español or ‘Spanish’,
it also served with the Anglophone and
Lusophone sub-Saharan immigrants.
With fellow Africans little or unknown,
the geographical scope of Mandinka,
Wolof and French was simply too limited
to facilitate communication.
Despite knowing the value of linguae
francae, in our discussion Idrissa made
the case for the general desirability of
polylanguaging. He repeatedly stated
that it was desirable to learn further
languages such as his mother tongue,
Mandinka, or Jola.9 His support of
various co-existing language ideologies
demonstrates the multiple allegiances
with which multilingualism plays. The
lingua franca of a place is crucial, but
being able to situationally draw from a
wide repertoire certainly had a positive
effect on facilitating conviviality. Thus,
Idrissa would use ‘union-Catalan’ at
work, ‘Spanish’ with strangers, Wolof
with Senegalese, and Mandinka with the
people who knew him and at home. Even
Idrissa did not always seek proficiency
in the standard register. Especially the
proximity of Castilian, Catalan, and
French invited creative improvisations,
a skill many Casamançais had. Idrissa
regularly experienced that this would
work since in phatic communion
language ideologies were easily
satisfied by partial and fragmentary, yet
appropriate language practice.
Idrissa embraced multiple languages
more than most of my informants. To be as
successful as he was in both keeping a high
social standing in the migrant community
and among co-workers, he had developed
an advanced sense of appropriate registers
and styles. Whether in the trade union,
in migrant associations, in public spaces
or at home, Idrissa consciously adjusted
to every encounter. Although he had
achieved more than most Casamançais
and he seemingly enjoyed himself, he
© Heil and CMDR. 2015
HEIL
occasionally portrayed his life and with it
the language choices as a way of coping as
an immigrant. Drawing on this migration
discourse and alluding to the necessary
efforts of the apprenticeship on which
he had embarked was just another way
of engaging with political dynamics at
hand. While Idrissa genuinely believed in
the appropriateness of polylanguaging,
he also was strategic enough to dress
it up as a coping tactic specific to a
migrant’s life, which was convincing
in times of increasingly dominant and
exclusivist language ideologies as in the
case of Catalan. Idrissa’s case thus offers
a reading of a generally embracing
engagement with polylanguaging for
the sake of phatic communion and, in
consequence, conviviality; however, it
also raises an awareness for the tactical
use of polylanguaging within the wider
discourse of immigration.
4. CONCLUSIONS
In the introduction, I asked to what
extent Casamançais polylanguaging
is a way of playfully facilitating phatic
communion and conviviality, and how
far is it a result of a wider coping tactic of
people who often hold a comparatively
powerless subject position. It is worth
remembering that multilingual practices
of the same people play out in a number
of situations, for example, (seemingly)
unintentional everyday encounters
in public space, meetings in political
contexts, and economic interactions.
In this regard, multilingualism is both
intended and practised in various ways
depending on the overall configurations
of the context and the social situation itself.
The three examples have shown that it is a
process found among people of disparate
socioeconomic backgrounds. Depending
on all of these factors—the actual situation,
the structural context, and the subject
Between phatic communion and coping tactic
position of the speaker—multilingual
practices facilitate phatic communion
sometimes playfully and sometimes as part
of coping tactics.
Looking at the regional contexts,
Casamance and Catalonia are structured
by quite different configurations of
language ideologies. While in Casamance
multilingual practices were part of
the regionally dominant discourse, in
Catalonia the Catalan language ideology
supported Catalan as the main lingua
franca. Catalan dominated in the political
sphere and in Catalan work environments.
Both Aboubacar and Idrissa alluded
to this; yet, their cases also showed
that it was often enough to know some
Catalan features to achieve conviviality.
Moreover, Castilian regularly proved
equally important, yet in different social
situations, such as in neighbourhoods
and while doing manual labour alongside
Spaniards from the South and other
immigrants. In contrast, the need to
speak Wolof, increasingly the Senegalese
lingua franca in politics, trade, and youth
culture, demonstrated the limits of the
multilingual ideology in Casamance.
The case studies have shown how
the process of conviviality happens at
the interplay of multiple dimensions of
difference, which was reflected in both
the configuration of the social fields, and
the people’s practices of polylanguaging
and translation. Often strong supporters
of multilingual repertoires, Casamançais
normatively justified the equality and co-
existence of multiple languages, styles,
and registers in a local social field, yet at
the same time situationally accepted, and
creatively made use of, a lingua franca, as
well as the appropriate styles and registers.
Despite some like Aboubacar Diao who did
not positively relate to multilingualism,
many Casamançais valued (truncated)
multilingualism since it facilitated
the process of living with maintained
79
differences. They saw themselves
contributing to embracing linguistic and
semiotic differences in translation, thus
facilitating communication or, more
generally, interaction. In practice, this
often only involved features ‘learned
in passing’, which is characteristic of
phatic communion and thus temporary
conviviality.
This observation is highly relevant
for the question of multilingualism
in relation to social hierarchies. As in
Augustin Sambou’s case, disempowered
subject positions are situational. While
he kept afloat in most social situations
applying his wide repertoire, with the
mechanic he failed at achieving both
phatic communion and the desired
economic outcome. Thus, while in the
economic field multilingualism is a
tactical choice to mediate unfavourable
structural conditions and it may fail, in
public spaces phatic communion can be
created by the same people through the
playful exchange of non-propositional
language drawing on wide repertoires.
In the latter case, conviviality, peaceful
living with maintained difference, and
the experience of relative situational
equality are at stake, while in the former,
truncated multilingualism resembles an
economic investment.
Substantial differences and power
disparities always entail the possibility
of failure impeding the inherent
translation process of polylanguaging.
Cultural differences deriving from ethnic
competition or competing language
ideologies are closely related to, and mask
questions of power. This was the case of
the mechanic implicitly imposing the use
of Wolof in Casamance, and the tactical
use of Catalan by both Aboubacar and
Idrissa. However, when phatic communion
is established by creatively drawing from
a wide repertoire and skillfully handling
language ideologies, the situational
© Heil and CMDR. 2015
80
salience of social hierarchies is temporarily
reduced. For continued conviviality,
Casamançais were adjusting to changing
situations and contexts, which their
truncated multilingualism reflected. While
in this paper I have stressed the importance
of language ideologies which emphasise
underlying cultural, national, and ethnic
differences, practising multilingualism
and achieving phatic communion depends
on competently addressing further social
and economic differences. Variations in
registers and style which Idrissa combined,
for example, offered initial, but important
insights into these dynamics.
Exploring multilingual practices
and representations on a spectrum
between coping tactic and phatic
communion taking the crucial role
of language ideologies into account
has proven a productive way of
understanding the polylanguaging of
residents who live in diversified localities
and remain different, yet often maintain
conviviality. The process of conviviality
spans both these aspects describing ever-
dynamic and ever-fragile ways of living
with difference.
NOTES
1 I wish to thank participants at the
conference Language practices, migration
and labour: ethnographing economies in
urban diversities at the University of the
Western Cape, Cape Town, 9-10/10/2012
for very helpful and constructive
comments on earlier versions of this
paper. Errors remain all mine.
2 I matched a sample of mainly male
migrants and their relatives and
friends. The fieldwork lasted for
about 18 months between 2009 and
2010, equally split between Catalonia
and Casamance. While I recorded 66
open-ended interviews, much of the
presented material stems from informal
conversations that are only documented
© Heil and CMDR. 2015
HEIL
in my fieldnotes, which explains the lack
of direct quotations.
3 To also systematically take transit spaces
as further influencing contexts into
account could be promising, but lies
beyond the scope of my material.
4 ‘Agreement to live together. National
Agreement on Immigration.’ (from
Catalan).
5 All names have been changed. However,
the first name shows the Christian or
Muslim faith of an informant, while
the last name indicates the real ethnic
origins of the person. Where the latter
is crucial for the analysis, the ethnicity is
additionally mentioned separately.
6 Interviews of a Moroccan and sub-
Saharan African published online
support this fact (http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=RkA2CJASaiY [accessed
09/11/2012]).
7 Elsewhere, I more extensively discuss the
aspects of cultural translation and the
inherently comparative perspectives of
migrants (cf. Heil 2013, 2014b).
8 Compañera/o is Castilian, company/a
Catalan, and camarada exists in both.
9 It is likely that he consciously mentioned
Jola well aware of the local rivalry of Jola
and Mandinka speaking Casamançais in
both Casamance and Catalonia.
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Multilingual Margins 2015, 2(1):83-91
Conviviality and phatic
communion?
Ben Rampton
King’s College London
Centre for Language Discourse & Communication
T he focus on ‘unimportant’ language
in this collection is driven by major
contemporary questions. In conditions of
superdiversity, the old binaries—minority/
majority, migrant/host etc.—can no longer
account for the splits and alignments
emerging in globalised environments and
in response, social scientists have turned
their attention to informal processes,
seeking new principles for social cohesion
in low-key local ‘conviviality’ (Gilroy
2006; Vertovec 2007; Wetherell 2009).
Along similar lines, commentators point
to the decline of traditional party politics
and look instead to social media and
digital communication as new resources
for grassroots mobilisation. So does the
communication of apparently trivial
matters really hold the seeds to social
renewal, or are such ideas romantically
over-inflated?
The papers provide a range of
answers to questions of this kind, and
I won’t try to summarise their nuanced
formulations, or to endorse or challenge
their substantive claims. But whatever
their conclusions, ‘conviviality’ and
‘phatic communication’ play a major part
in the discussion; and in what follows,
I will comment on how and where I
think these notions are problematic
or productive. My remarks are largely
© Rampton and CMDR. 2015
83
methodological, dwelling in particular
on the challenges of working across social
processes of different scale, though I will
conclude with some notes on surveillance,
a (substantive) issue that in sociolinguistics
is often underplayed.
WORKING ACROSS
PROCESSES OF DIFFERENT
SCALE
The papers in this collection draw on
different disciplinary backgrounds—
ethnographic sociolinguistics, anthro-
pology, and sociology. Small and
apparently inconsequential pieces of
language constitute the central theme, but
they are situated in processes that are very
different in scale. So we have face-to-face
interaction unfolding from one moment to
the next (Goebel), case study descriptions
of the everyday lives and/or biographies
of individuals (Velghe and Heil), and the
widespread circulation of digital texts (Varis
and Blommaert). The multi-scalarity of
this combination of perspectives is very
well justified in Blommaert and Varis’s
introduction:
the social structures we address...
are… emergent structures character-
ising an evolving social order—the
84
stability of which is permanently
under pressure because of the
diversity of people and activities
that co-construct it. (…) Looking at
the lowest everyday level at which
such co-construction proceeds is
a tactic employed by Goffman,
Blumer, Cicourel and other scholars
of an earlier generation, who were
dissatisfied with structuralist a
priori assumptions about order
and stability in social systems, and
who assumed that every degree of
social order rests on the continuous
iterative and made-meaningful
enactment of characteristics of
such order in everyday behaviour.
We share that assumption as well as
its methodological consequence:
that micro-research is at once
macro-research, in which a precise
understanding of the macro-
structures of social life can, and often
does, reside in at first inspection
insignificant details of people’s social
behaviour – such as ‘unimportant
language’ usage (p. 7).
As Goffman (1963: 70) notes, ‘[w]
hether we interact with strangers or
intimates, we will find that the fingertips
of society have reached bluntly into the
contact, even here putting us in our
place’. In sociolinguistics and linguistic
anthropology, it is now fairly well
recognised that although the conditions
in which people communicate are
partly local and emergent, continuously
readjusted to the contingencies of action
unfolding from one moment to the next,
they are also infused with information,
resources, expectations and experiences
that originate in, circulate through, and/
or are destined for networks, media and
processes that can be very different in
their reach and duration (Bauman and
Briggs 1990; Scollon and Scollon 2004;
Blommaert 2005). As analysts, we can vary
the scope of what we focus on, looking,
© Rampton and CMDR. 2015
RAMPTON
for example, at the structure—the
organisation of beginnings, middles and
ends, the composition of segments etc.—
of very brief processes like sentences, at
the structure of longer ones like genres
such as the medical consultation, at the
structure of the institutional networks
through which medical records, for
example, travel, and/or at the structure
of medical careers, as well as at the
links between these processual systems,
which can themselves sometimes be
quite stable, at least for a while. But as
soon as we turn to action and meaning,
we are confronted by all the contingency
intrinsic to human conduct. In making
sense of their situations, people process a
huge range of semiotic signs and systems,
bringing their understanding of all sorts
of different structures to bear (material,
linguistic, interactional, institutional,
historical, etc.). At this point, the best
that we can get from our analytic models
of how processes at one, two or even three
levels normally hold together, is an initial
heuristic for exploring what is going on,
and we are thrown into the unpredictable
particularity that ethnography has taught
to accept (cf. Blommaert 2013: 11-12).
This has at least two implications for
the present collection.
First, if we are working across
processes that differ in their duration and
reach, we should not expect concepts that
work reasonably well at one level/scale to
continue to be useful when we shift up
or down to others. It is obvious—partly
because the analytic vocabularies are often
different—that when a sociolinguist moves
from describing the structure of T-sounds to
the structure of particular communicative
genres, the precise phonetic details become
largely irrelevant, even though T-sounds
continue to play a small but significant
part in genre enactment. But there are
concepts with domains of application
Conviviality and phatic communion
that are less clear cut and that generate
apparently conflicting claims when they’re
used at different levels. One such term is
‘phatic’.
According to Crystal (2008: 360),
‘phatic’ refers to ‘language used for
establishing an atmosphere or maintaining
social contact rather than exchanging
information and ideas (e.g. comments on
the weather, or enquiries about health)’.
Leech (1981: 41) describes it as the
function of ‘keeping communication lines
open, and keeping social relationships in
good repair (talking about the weather
in British culture). . . [I]t is not so much
what one says, but the fact that one says
it at all, that matters’. He goes on to say
that phatic language ‘has its parallels
in public affairs. Everyone is familiar
with occasions when statesmen and
politicians make public utterances which
are elaborate ways of saying nothing’,
and he gives the example of President
Kennedy’s inaugural speech, saying
that in this speech, ‘the informational
function of language is reduced to a
minimum’ (1981: 54–55). But contrast
this with Goebel’s excellent micro-
analysis of repetition, where for example
it is only when the phrase ‘a place name’ is
repeated by Slamet in line 34 of Extract 4.3
that it is informationally redundant and
appears to be primarily associated with
‘ongoing relationship building efforts’.
Here the account attends to the given/
new dynamic in linguistic exchange, and
we are entering a delicate level of analysis
where the referential and affiliative
functions normally operate together in
linguistic production and where it is only
at very particular points in the unfolding
of interaction that semantic significance
recedes and the relational dimension
comes to the fore. Indeed, this is very
much in line with Goffman’s account
of interaction ritual. Ritual concerns—
concerns about ‘keeping social
85
relationships in good repair’—pervade
all talk (as politeness theory affirms),
and it is only in a relatively limited class
of conventionalised utterances that
the referential dimension of language
ceases to matter.1 If we were to take this
powerful micro-perspective back to what
Leech says about Kennedy’s speech
being phatic, we would have to believe
that the President simply hummed or
scatted through the inauguration.
The conclusion of the linguist Stephen
Levinson is that functional schemes that
include notions like phatic are ‘of dubious
utility to the pragmatist. . .: the categories
are of vague application, they do not have
direct empirical motivation, and there
are many other rival schemes built upon
slightly different lines’ (1983: 41). But if
we follow Levinson and reject ‘phatic’,
what do we do when the word plays a
central part in Varis and Blommaert’s
account of collectivity in social media?
Do we adopt a foundationalist stance
and say that nobody should do any social
science until we have sorted out the
communicative basics? Or do we accept
that the clarity and stability of ‘facts’
always dissolve when scientific specialists
get close to their object of enquiry, and
learn to live with some indeterminacy?
We need to take the latter course,
and welcome ‘phatic’ as a helpful
overarching umbrella that allows Varis
and Blommaert to consider how the ‘new
online world offers numerous invitations
for unthinking and rethinking semiotic
truths’. Of course they treat ‘phatic’ as a
term that requires further specification
and one can retrieve the microscope
to argue with how they do so. Their
Zuckerberg update isn’t simply visual—
there is plenty of propositional content
that’s available to sharers, even though
they may not engage with it on first
encounter.2 But judicious broad-brush
characterisation of the kind sought by
© Rampton and CMDR. 2015
86
Varis and Blommaert is just as important
to multilevel analysis as intensive fine-
grained dissection of the type achieved
by Goebel.
Quantification may be an alternative
or additional resource for empirical
generalisation, especially with digital
media, but because the contingencies that
shape local sense-making are so complex,
it is useful only as a rudimentary pointer.
So yes, if you are studying text messaging
in South Africa, you might count the
number of texts that people send in Cape
Town and infer from their linguistic surface
that they are all about casual sociability.
But Velghe’s account of the perseverance
and protracted battle with literacy that lies
behind Linda’s text messages shows just
how valuable it is for empirical work to move
back and forth across processes of different
scale, combining linguistic analysis with
participant observation, for example. This
movement is not just about holding big
generalisations to account with particular
cases (Harris and Rampton 2009: 116-17).
It also involves production of the nuanced
but inevitably approximative syntheses
that we call general interpretation, where
terms like ‘phatic’—or ‘informational’,
or ‘aesthetic’—may very well be useful.
Indeed, this kind of epistemological
flexibility is intrinsic to linguistic
ethnography (Rampton, Maybin, and
Roberts 2014), which holds that:
i. the contexts for communication
should be investigated rather than
assumed. Meaning takes shape
within specific social relations,
interactional histories and
institutional regimes, produced
and construed by agents with
expectations and repertoires that
have to be grasped ethnographically;
ii. analysis of the internal organisation
of verbal (and other kinds of semiotic)
data is essential to understanding
its significance and position in the
© Rampton and CMDR. 2015
RAMPTON
world. Meaning is far more than
just the ‘expression of ideas’ and
biography, identifications, stance and
nuance are extensively signalled in
the linguistic and textual fine-grain.
My second methodological point follows
on from this: we need to be very careful
with the term ‘convivial’. Whether or
not small talk can be characterised as
convivial will very much depend on
the contingencies of where, when, how,
by and to whom it is produced. Heil
makes this very clear in his description
of educated Casamançais feeling
‘appalled by unpleasant working-class
small talk’, even though they feel bad
about ‘their disdain and mockery of
their neighbours’ repertoires and their
own lack of respect this portrayed’. If we
take Goebel’s list of types of action that
count as small talk—giving and receiving
compliments, the exchange of a joke for
laughter, repetition and non-minimal
responses—common experience tells
us that there are lots of circumstances
in which these are double-edged,
sarcastic, patronising and offensive.
Equally, there is nothing intrinsically
convivial about ‘polylanguaging’ and the
use of local languages you don’t really
know. Certainly, it can be convivial in
circumstances of the kind described,
for example, by Wise and Velayutham
(2014)—living in the same locality,
sharing the same spaces, supported both
by key individuals who bring different
types of people and by an intercultural
habitus willing to adapt to differences.
But there are plenty of studies
emphasising the context-sensitivity of
poly-/trans-languaging—its sensitivity
to processes and relations beyond the
purely linguistic—and it can often also
be an expression of hostility (Hewitt
1986; Rampton 1995). In fact there are
no forms of communication that are
Conviviality and phatic communion
inalienably convivial and this simply
follows from the fact that although it is a
very valuable part of the puzzle, you can
never get at what people mean through
language alone.
But if conviviality and the practice
of small talk can’t be equated, does this
mean that we should abandon the term
as a characterisation of the social worlds
in focus in this collection?
Vis-à-vis life online, my feeling is
that ‘phatic’ is a safer term to use, for the
reasons stated above. Off-line, however,
in discussions of globalised urban
superdiversity, the idea of ‘conviviality’ has
gained a good deal of consensual weight,
and I’d like to suggest that instead of being
an adequate analytic characterisation of
everyday practice, ‘conviviality’ describes
a particular local ideology, though this
needs to be very carefully contextualised
in at least three ways. First, its relationship
with other ideologies, both local and
national, needs to be addressed. From
Heil’s informant Augustin Sambou, we
have a clear view of conviviality’s power
as a reflexive representation of local life,
but it is in tension with the ideologies of
class influencing Aboubacar Diao and
it looks distinct from the authoritative
knowledge of Mandinka language and
culture that Idrissa Samaté also invests
in. Elsewhere, Back identifies a broadly
comparable ‘harmony discourse’ in South
London, but he examines its relationship
with ideologies of black community and
white flight (1996: Ch. 5), and Gilroy
makes it clear that conviviality ‘cannot
banish conflict… and should not signify
the absence of racism’ (2006: 39-40).
Second, an account of conviviality-
as-ideology needs to rest on a description
of the shared spaces and everyday
projects which make ethnic and linguistic
difference subsidiary to getting on with
practical activity. Explicit articulations
of convivial ideology may well emerge
87
at points where ordinary routines are
troubled or interrupted, but if we neglect
these routines in our descriptions, we
end up with an account that makes the
people we associate with conviviality
sound like smiley multiculturalist
‘hands-across-the-divide’, which they’re
not—they are ordinary people trying to
get on with their lives (Eley 2015).
Third, the collocation of ‘conviviality’
and ‘coping’ in the papers by Heil and
Velghe is very necessary to bring out this
ideology’s optimism-against-the-odds
and subaltern political significance. After
all, the varsity larks of Boris Johnson
and David Cameron in the Bullingdon
Club were also rather convivial and it is
important not to mix them up.
WHAT ABOUT
SURVEILLANCE?
I would like to close this discussant
commentary on a different tack, with a
few quick comments about surveillance,
an issue that speaks to the questions of
linkage and connection addressed in the
collection, but that is rather overlooked,
not only here but in the sociolinguistics
of superdiversity more generally (though
see Arnaut 2012).
The onset of globalised superdiversity
in recent times is often linked to the early
1990s (e.g. Blommaert and Rampton
2011: 2). But this period is also associated
with emergence of a huge transnational
field of security professionals, which is
‘larger than that of police organizations
in that it includes, on one hand private
corporations and organizations dealing
with the control of access to the welfare
state, and, on the other hand, intelligence
services and some military people seeking
a new role after the end of the Cold
War’ (Bigo 2002: 63-64). In this context,
migration and superdiversity are
© Rampton and CMDR. 2015
88
increasingly interpreted as a security
problem. The prism of security
analysis is especially important for
politicians, for national and local
police organizations, the military
police, customs officers, border patrols,
secret services, armies, judges, some
social services (health care, hospitals,
schools), private corporations (bank
analysts, providers of technology
surveillance, private policing),
many journalists (especially from
television and the more sensationalist
newspapers), and a significant fraction
of general public opinion, especially
but not only among those attracted to
‘law and order’.… The professionals
in charge of the management of
risk and fear especially transfer the
legitimacy they gain from struggles
against terrorists, criminals, spies, and
counterfeiters toward other targets,
most notably transnational political
activists, people crossing borders, or
people born in the country but with
foreign parents (Bigo ibid).
And while the development of new
communication technologies has major
implications for the maintenance and
development of diasporic networks and
other types of collectivity (Blommaert and
Rampton 2011: 4; Tall 2004), it obviously
also plays a major role in surveillance.
Observers note that superdiversity
presents a major challenge to the
traditional forms of social classification
with which states and institutions monitor
their populations. Scholars argue
that instead of relying on essentialist
identity categories, research should
focus on practices. But with ‘transactional
surveillance’, digital technologies
overcome these problems:
[s]ubjects… are very active
consuming, swiping credit cards,
walking streets, phoning. These
activities and transactions are an
© Rampton and CMDR. 2015
RAMPTON
immediate interaction with and
through technology. The interaction
creates data that are used to govern
subjects and their activities… As
Amoore and de Goede state in
their exploration of the increasing
importance of transactions for
security practice and its political
implications: ‘[T]ransactions people
make are, quite literally, taken to be
traces of daily life, they are conceived
as a way of mapping, visualising and
recognising bodies in movement’
(2008: 176). Ruppert and Savage
speak of transactional governance
(2011). While traditional data
sources engage subjects as identities
or fixed populations, transactional
governance derives information
directly from the interactions
and transactions. ‘Subjectivity or
identity is less an issue and instead
associations and correlations in
conduct are deemed more empirical
and descriptive than subjective and
meaningful’ (Ruppert 2011: 228).
Transactional governance decentres
subjects into transactions: what
matters is not subjects with opinions
or identities but transactions that
take place. It is a mode of governing
that seeks to quickly adapt delivery
of services, control and coercion to
changing behaviours deriving and
processing information directly
from the everyday ‘doings’ of
people. Transactional surveillance
is increasingly important in security
practice (Huysmans 2014: 166-67).
All this has at least three implications.
First, it changes our understanding of
the light-weight informational emptiness
of phatic communication. Velghe gives
a glimpse of this when she describes
the jealous boyfriend’s suspicion of
Lisa’s text messaging and the rows that
her phatic practices generate, but this
can be massively scaled up to security
Conviviality and phatic communion
surveillance organisations like the NSA
and GCHQ, which after all, only process
the metadata in our emails—who they are
to and what the subject header says—not
the contents of the messages themselves.
The afterlife of any electronic text,
phatic or otherwise, can be very different
from its producer’s initial intentions
(Blommaert 2001) and in social media,
the problems are especially acute.
Second and more briefly, the temptation
to look for conviviality in contemporary
superdiversity—to dwell on creative
translingual sociability or polylingual
business-oriented improvisation—needs
to be tempered by attention to fear, unease
and their systematic cultivation as modes
of control (Khan 2014). And following on
from this, third, it is important to ensure
that sociolinguists’ theoretical attraction
to Bakhtin is balanced by an extended
engagement with Foucault, who remains
a central figure in contemporary studies
of security. With heteroglossia and the
carnivalesque, Bakhtin speaks straight
to the interests of sociolinguistics, but
with ‘governmentality’ as a capillary web
of small-scale practices that deliberately
‘attempt to shape conduct in certain
ways in relation to certain objectives’,
Foucault can too (Rose 1999: 4; Foucault
1978/2003; Rampton 2014).
NOTES
1 ‘a special class of quite conventionalised
utterances, lexicalisations whose
controlling purpose is to give praise,
blame, thanks, support, affection or show
gratitude, disapproval, dislike, sympathy,
or greet, say farewell and so forth. Part of
the force of these speech acts comes from
the feelings they directly index; little
of the force derives from the semantic
content of the words’ (Goffman 1981:
20-21).
89
2 Indeed, elaborating like, for example
Levinson 1988 or Irvine 1996, it would
be worth exploring the extent to which
Goffman’s later work on footing and
participation frameworks could be
extended in a unified analysis of ‘likes’
and ‘sharing’, with, for example, the
distinction between virality and memicity
connecting with Goffman’s account of
‘responses’ and ‘replies’ (Goffman 1981).
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face of the preemptive strike. Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (2):
173-85.
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Elements of an emerging perspective.
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Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1987. The Dialogic
Imagination. Austin: Texas University
Press.
Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs.
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perspectives on language and social life.
Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59-88.
Bigo, Didier. 2002. Security and
immigration: Toward a critique of the
governmentality of unease. Alternatives:
Global, Local, Political 27: 63-92.
Blommaert, Jan and Ben Rampton. 2011.
Language and superdiversity: A position
paper. Working Papers in Urban Language
and Literacies, Paper 70. London:
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position_paper>.
Blommaert, Jan. 2001. Context is/as critique.
Critique of Anthropology 21 (1): 13-32.
Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse: A Critical
Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
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Blommaert, Jan. 2013. Ethnography,
Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes:
Chronicles of Complexity. Bristol:
Multilingual Matters.
Crystal, David. 2008. A Dictionary of Linguistics
and Phonetics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Eley, Louise. 2015. A micro-ecology of
language in multi-ethnic Frankfurt: The
linguistic ethnography of a barbershop.
Working Papers in Urban Language &
Literacies, Paper 155. London: King’s
College Centre for Language Discourse &
Communication. <https://www.academia.
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ethnic_Frankfurt_The_linguistic_
ethnography_of_a_barbershop>
Foucault, Michel. 1978/2003.
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Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of
Foucault 1954-1984. New York: The New
Press. 229-245.
Gilroy, Paul. 2006. Multiculture in times of
war: An inaugural lecture given at the
London School of Economics. Critical
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Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes
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Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford:
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Roberts. 2014. Methodological
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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218-33.
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Scollon, Ron and Suzie Wong Scollon. 2004.
Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging
Internet. London: Routledge.
Tall, Serigne Mansour. 2004. Senegalese
émigrés: New information and
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Transnationalism and Civil-Integration.
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Wetherell, Margaret. 2009. Introduction:
Negotiating liveable lives: Identity and
intelligibility in contemporary Britain.
Identity in the 21st Century: New Trends in
Changing Times. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
1-21.
Wise, Amanda and Selvaraj Velayutham.
2014. Conviviality in everyday
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© Rampton and CMDR. 2015
92
Review of Sociolinguistics and
mobile communication by Ana
Deumert
Zannie Bock
Linguistics Department, University of the Western Cape
I n the “Acknowledgements” to
Sociolinguistics and mobile communication,
Deumert comments that during the
writing process, the text “developed a life
of its own” and took her on a journey to
places, both theoretical and virtual, which
she had not anticipated (p. x). What makes
her book such a pleasure to read is that it
takes her audience on the same journey,
now carefully planned and crafted to
ensure maximum coherence, interest and
accessibility.
The ‘terrain’ is the emerging field
of mobile- (or computer-) mediated
communication and the ‘guides’ are what
Deumert refers to as the ‘ancestors’ of much
contemporary intellectual thought: scholars
such as Bakhtin, Jakobson, Goffman,
Barthes and Derrida, whose research
has influenced and shaped the study of
language and communication over the
past century, and more recently, the field
of sociolinguistics. She argues that we do
not need a fundamentally new theory
of sociolinguistics (or anthropology,
or sociology) to understand online
practices; rather we should revisit these
seminal texts and reread them through
the lens of digital communication. In a
very engaging and accessible style, this
book reviews a range of key concepts and
theories from the past and uses these
to explore the nature of contemporary
© Bock and CMDR. 2015
Multilingual Margins 2015, 2(1):92-95
mobile communication in terms of
three central organising themes: mobility,
creativity, and inequality.
The book’s central argument (and,
I would argue, its most interesting
theoretical contribution) is that creativity
should be viewed as fundamental not
only to digital language, but to language
in general. Traditionally, linguists have
argued for a view of language as an
ordered, structured system governed by
norms and conventions, and creativity
as an inherently rule-governed process.
Through her analysis of online texts
(and with reference to Jakobson’s poetic
function), Deumert makes a strong case
for viewing all linguistic and semiotic
creativity as open-ended and highly
original. For example, she shows how the
texting practices of young South African
participants include unconventional
spellings and localised initialisms,
sometimes realised in ‘ornamental’, non-
standard forms which emphasise the
visuality of language. These creative
and artful practices, she argues, allow
digital writers to style particular online
identities and index various stances and
degrees of emotional intensity. She then
extends this argument to traditional
offline linguistic play, such as the poetry
of the early twentieth century avant-
garde Futurist movement, and argues
Review: Sociolinguistics and mobile communication
that speakers and writers both online
and offline should be seen as refashioning
and not just reproducing semiotic and
linguistic signs. She quotes Derrida’s
observation that “signs are never
closed, but can always be manipulated,
twisted, changed” (p.171) and, drawing
on Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity,
argues that all language is liquid i.e.
immensely pliable, flexible and fluid (p.
144).
Each chapter introduces a set of
theoretical lenses, which afford multiple
perspectives on the complex phenomenon
of mobile communication. Chapter One
positions the book within the emerging
field of media sociolinguistics, sets the
frame for the book, and introduces the
key theoretical interests and arguments
(mobility, creativity and inequality).
Chapter Two uses Goffman’s notion of
the interaction order to explore how digital
communication facilitates the mobility
of people, ideas and semiotic resources
across time and space. It also raises some
important ethical and methodological
issues. Chapter Three explores the
theme of inequality and refers to a
range of literature which demonstrates
how differential access – the outcome of
unequal economic conditions – enables
or constrains different kinds of online
practices. For example, in Africa,
where most users do not have access
to fast bandwidth and large computer
screens, online communication relies
more heavily on text as opposed to
the multimedia creations typical of
youth in more affluent societies like
the US. Chapter Four continues the
theme of inequality and surveys global
digital culture from the perspective of
multilingualism. Here Deumert asks
which languages are most visible online
and concludes that, with the exception of
a handful of powerful languages (topped
predictably by English) mostly from
93
the global north (with the exception of
Chinese); the vast majority of the world’s
languages remain invisible. One of the
case studies in this chapter is a very
interesting study of Wikipedia based on
both published work as well as her own
research. Her analysis of the isiXhosa
wiki pages draws attention to the ways
in which this site reproduces rather
than challenges unequal global power
relations and reinscribes the marginality
of isiXhosa online. In this way, her book
serves the important counter function
of making isiXhosa and other African
languages visible in this growing field.
Chapter Five returns to the theme
of mobility (of texts and voices) and
takes Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism and
Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality as
core theoretical concepts. Through
an analysis of how YouTube videos are
creatively remixed and reworked, she
develops her argument that all signs
are multivocal with multiple meanings.
Once again, this chapter includes her
own analysis of an online isiXhosa lesson
on clicks and shows how material may be
taken up and interpreted by audiences in
unexpected ways. In this case, comments
on the site indicate how some visitors
interpret the lesson through a frame of
Western imaginings of ‘exotic’ African
beauty and sexual desire. Thus, she
argues, meanings emerge dialogically
and interactively, in ways often beyond
the author’s control; and, drawing
on Derrida’s notion of iterability, all
signs are in fact resignifications (not
merely repetitions) of earlier signs.
Chapter Six expands on these ideas
by exploring how users of social media
take up and refashion different ‘social
voices’ by inflecting and ‘twisting’ them in
different ways. She uses Bakhtin’s concept
of heteroglossia to explore how mobile
communication is characterised by both
centripetal (conventionalised patterns
and forms) and centrifugal forces (artful,
© Bock and CMDR. 2015
94
hybrid forms and practices) to argue that
“the fundamental heteroglossic nature
of language” provides speakers with
the multilingual resources essential to
creativity (p. 121).
In Chapter Seven, Deumert arguably
reaches the ‘high point’ of her journey.
This is a fascinating account of ‘textpl@y
as poetic language’. This chapter explores
the enormous variability and innovation
that occurs in online communication as
users play with linguistic form, layout,
typography and orthography. In this
chapter, she develops her central argument
(as outlined in the third paragraph above)
on the centrality of creativity to the nature
of language, both online and offline. Once
again, this chapter includes reference to
her own work on isiXhosa and through
a comparison with published research,
she makes the interesting argument that
in Africa, where texting practices tend
to be characterised by a high degree of
multilingualism, mobile texts reveal a high
level of abbreviations and shortenings for
messages which are written in the former
colonial languages but show considerably
more standard spellings for writing in the
local languages. According to her data,
participants argues that the local languages
need more ‘respect’ and that the extra
care that it takes to write messages ‘in full’
indexes a level of ‘care’ and ‘seriousness’
which is more suitable for certain topics
(such as declarations of serious love as
opposed to flirting). They therefore reflect
an identity rooted in local traditions,
while English, by comparison, evokes
a transgressive global post-modernity
and allows for freedom and ‘linguistic
whateverism’ (p. 138).
Chapter Eight shifts the focus from
textual forms back to social practices
again and takes up the primacy of the
relational function of texting and its
role in the lives of the users for creating
a sense of connectedness, community
© Bock and CMDR. 2015
BOCK
and online visibility. However, Deumert
gives this topic a new take by using
Barthes’s distinction between plaisir
and jouissance to explore the notion
of sociability. The former concept is
glossed as referring to the comforting,
cheering pleasure that strengthens social
bonds and the latter to a quite different,
unsettling enjoyment which derives
from acts known to be inappropriate
and offensive, but which nonetheless
elicit laughter and mirth. In her analysis
of several transgressive online sites,
Deumert productively employs Bakhtin’s
idea of the carnivalesque in a way which
once again illustrates the value of the
classic theories to our understanding of
digitally mediated communication.
The final chapter draws together
the different threads of the book and
revisits what an analysis of mobile
communication reveals about language
in relation to the organising themes of
mobility, creativity and inequality. She
concludes that this perspective allows us
to see that intertextuality, heteroglossia,
performance and the poetic function are
central to language and meaning making
and that contemporary sociolinguistics
should recognise more fully the central
role of creativity and artful performance
in everyday language practices.
The book covers an impressive
range of scholarship, both recent work
on computer mediated communication
as well as more established foundational
concepts and theories. In making
her arguments, Deumert draws on an
extensive review of published literature as
well as her own research on South African
texting styles and practices among
speakers of isiXhosa, Afrikaans and
English. In this respect, it is a significant
contribution to the field as it reflects
‘southern’ experience and scholarship in
a field dominated by research from the
north. In sum, the book is theoretically
Review: Sociolinguistics and mobile communication 95

grounded, reflects a thorough and and communication, sociolinguistics and

comprehensive reading of the field, and the media. It provides a very helpful and
contributes a new, interesting and relevant interesting overview of seminal concepts
theoretical perspective to the field. in the field and offers the reader a set of
The pleasure of reading was further theoretically productive ideas to think
heightened by the book’s lucid and about and analyse their own data and
readable style. Theoretical concepts are contexts.
carefully and accessibly explained with
concrete illustrative examples. The content
is organised into thematically coherent
chapters which are well structured with REFERENCES
helpful introductions and conclusions.
Ana Deumert. 2014. Sociolinguistics and
It also includes a very useful index. I
mobile communication. Edinburg: Edinburg
would suggest that this book is essential
University Press.
reading for every scholar of language

© Bock and CMDR. 2015

96
Review of Semiotic Landscapes:
Language, Image, Space by Adam
Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow
Felix Banda
Linguistics Department, University of the Western Cape
A lthough the volume was published
in 2010, it still remains one of the
most important contributions to a new
field of enquiry in the study of language
and signage in public spaces initially
conceptualised and institutionalised by
Landry and Bourhis (1997) as linguistic
landscapes (LL). They defined linguistic
landscapes as “[t]he language of public
road signs, advertising billboards, street
names, place names, commercial shop
signs, and public signs on government
buildings combine to form the linguistic
landscape of a given territory, region,
or urban agglomeration” (p. 25). As
the title of the volume suggests, the
aim was to extend the study to consider
other semiotic material in place rather
than linguistic ones alone. Jaworski
and Thurlow prefer the term semiotic
landscapes to LL to account for the fact
that descriptions of space are not just
about language, image and space, but
more so about how interlocutors engage
with semiotic material including objects
in place.
The volume has an introduction
by the two editors followed by 13
chapters covering a range of topics and
contributions by some of the major
© Banda and CMDR. 2015
Multilingual Margins 2015, 2(1):96-100
scholars in linguistic/semiotic landscapes
studies.
The introduction by Jaworski and
Thurlow introduces semiotic landscapes
as a new area of enquiry, focusing on the
interaction between language, image
and space—especially how culture and
textual mediation are implicated in the
discursive and multimodal construction
of space. In setting the background,
the editors make it clear within a few
paragraphs that the aim was to try
to extend the conceptualisation of
landscapes beyond what was premised
in Landry and Bourhis (1997) and other
earlier studies, which had focused on often
out-of-context survey and questionnaire
data. Their interest is the intersection
of visual discourse, language and socio-
cultural aspects of spatial practices. As
also seen from the title, the volume owes
much to Kress and Van Leuwen’s (2006)
notion of multimodality in which language
is just one of many semiotic modes used
for representation and communication.
Additionally, they draw on Scollon and
Scollon’s (2003) geosemiotics and Harvey’s
(2006) dynamic conceptualization of space
as a consequence of human interaction
practice—that is, space is invented through
human interactions with signs in place.
Review: Semiotic landscapes: Language, image, space
Jaworski and Thurlow are critical of
LL studies and a number of stances put
forward in such scholarship, including
the predominantly quantitative and
survey based data. Ironically, Jaworski
and Thurlow acknowledge that the
majority of chapters in the volume are
on LL, that is, written language in place
rather semiotic landscapes as proposed
in their introduction. They propose a
more genre- and context-specific study of
language in the landscape of texts. On the
whole the introduction gives an excellent
assessment of LL studies and offers
directions including relevant literature
for the study of semiotic landscapes.
Chapter 1, written by Jeffery Kallen,
takes issue with the ‘top-down’ versus
‘bottom-up’ dichotomy often made in
earlier LL studies such as Ben-Rafael
et al. (2006). He notes that official and
non-oficial languages/signage are not
neccessaily hierachical as they operate in
different domains or parallel universes.
Using data from Dublin’s semiotic
landscapes, Kallen goes on to suggest
five (which he extends to seven) spatial
frameworks in which to analyse signage:
civic, marketplace, portals, walls and
detritus zones (and also community and the
school). These, he argues, constitute the
complementary systems or domains in
which to consume signage. He concludes
that, although one finds many bilingual
English-Irish signs, the landscapes are
dominated by English. However, one
also finds signage in Polish, Chinese
and French, which he attributes to
immigration, international tourism and
business.
Mark Sebba contributes the second
chapter, which looks at ‘mobile’ public
texts as found on banknotes, pamphlets,
tickets, vehicles, and so on. He suggests
that both fixed and ‘unfixed’ signage
need to be analysed in the same way as
kinds of discourse in context. Second,
97
using the dominance of Afrikaans and
English in the apartheid South Africa’s
landscapes, Sebba argues that the white
population erased African languages
from public spaces. This ideological and
social engineering of space was designed
to prop up Afrikaans as being equal in
status to English. The reality, however,
was that whereas Afrikaans had more
status in rural areas, English remained
the language of status in business circles
and urban areas. Third, the ideological
project of making English and Afrikaans
visible had little impact on the linguistic
diversity on the ground where various
African languages continued to be
spoken.
In chapter 3, Nikolas Coupland
argues that the presence of Welsh in
Wales’ LL reflects an idealised political
and ideological perspective of ‘true
bilingualism’ rather than ‘any objective
realities of bilingual usage’ (p. 79). He
then concludes that the bilingual signage
reflect the ‘top-down’ aspect of language
planning in Wales.
In an interesting contribution, Susan
Dray’s chapter 4 explores the use of
non-standard language in the semiotic
landscapes of Jamaica. Dray’s focus is the
interplay and influence of Jamaican creole
on the national landscapes. From the outset
it is clear that what constitutes standard
and non-standard English in the Jamaican
contexts is not always clear-cut. She
gives an example of official government
signage often re-appropriating what could
be considered non-standard forms of
English (such as ‘Walk good’) in some of its
messages. Even Dray’s linguistics students
considered ‘Walk good’ a standard
Jamaican English form. Reminiscent of
what Stroud and Mpendukana (2009,
2010) have called signs of neccessity,
Dray finds a lot of innovation and
resourcefulness in Jamaicans’ re-using of
materials such as corrugated zinc doors
© Banda and CMDR. 2015
98
for signage. As Dray correctly notes, the
use of repurposed material (Bolter and
Grusin 2000) should not be seen as a sign
of lack of authority; rather it reflects the
resourcefulness which is commonplace
in Jamaica and indeed Africa. Although
standard English and Jamaican creole
remain in hegemonic existence, the latter
is increasingly gaining visual presence in
the visual public domains so that there are
times when the non-standard form is seen
as the legitimate and preferred code. In
essence, standard English and Jamaican
creole represent the different and
complementary identity options available
to Jamaicans.
Chapter 5 is about what Ingrid
Piller describes as the sexualisation of
travel-related public spaces in Basel,
Switzerland. Drawing data from shop
fronts, local newspaper adverts, websites
selling ‘prostitutes’, nightclubs and escort
services, Piller explores the intersection
between the semiotics of the sex industry
and the semiotics of Swiss tourism. She
shows that high levels of mobility are
connected to high visibility of the sex
industry, which also linked to high quality
and multilingual construction of the upper
class Swiss national identity.
Alastair Pennycook contributes
chapter 6, in which he characterises graffiti
as integral to semiotic landscapes in city-
scapes. Pennycook introduces several
notions drawn from a number of disciplines,
which would be useful to theorising and
studying semiotic landscapes. Some of the
concepts are graffscapes (graffiti in space),
gaze, ‘walk-in’ navigation of space, urban
cityscapes, counter-literacies and cultural
flows. He also characterises semiotic
landscapes in terms of spatial narrations.
Drawing on Cannadine (2000: 8), Pennycook
contributes a different way of conceiving
space when he argues that people reshape
the environment during landscaping. He
also argues that semiotic landscaping is a
© Banda and CMDR. 2015
BANDA
conscious act and that space is always under
construction, so that it is invented. In a way,
Pennycook’s contribution appears to extend
the scope of semiotic landscapes beyond
what Jaworski and Thurlow proposed in
the introduction. In arguing for narration
of place, Pennycook expands the ‘scenery’
to include environmental material (trees,
grass, mounds, etc.) and/or how these are
reused in the reshaping of place.
This is followed by a chapter by
Rodney H. Jones who investigates the
different ways teenagers use computers
at school and home in Hong Kong.
His interest is in the differential effect
computers have in governing how
students orient themselves in these
spaces and toward other people in the
vicinity. He notes that in the home, the
students’ computer use or discourse in
place included conversations with familiy
and related to activities taking place in
the environment. Magazines, newspapers
and other objects often attract the gaze.
Whereas in the home the orientation
was polyfocal, students’ orientation in
the school environment tended towards
being monofocal as a result of school-
based literacy practices reinforced by the
panopticon style setting (Foucault 1977) of
a traditional classroom in which students
sit at ‘long tables arranged in rows…’ (p.
160).
Chapter 8 by Thomas Mitchell
looks at how a newspaper article in
the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was framed
in such a manner so as to put a wedge
between new Latino immigrants and
established ‘traditional’ inhabitants of
Beechview. Mitchell finds that the article
did this through exploiting common
metaphors of Othering: immigration as
an ‘invasion’ and as a ‘flood’. He contends
that the presence of Spanish in the
semiotic landscapes may have contributed
to the newspaper exaggerating the actual
number of immigrants living in Beechview.
Review: Semiotic landscapes: Language, image, space
Chapter 9 by Thurlow and Jaworski
draws on the idea of elite closure, to show
how silence as a discursive and social
construct is used as semiotic resource
in high-end adverts and as a marker of
luxury and social status in commercial
representations of social space. They see
what they call an ‘anti-communicational’
ethos or commodification of silence
in luxury tourism adverts as encoding
an elitist ideology of ‘segregation and
isolationism’ (p. 212).
In chapter 10, Abousnnouga and
Machin problematises war monuments as
semiotic resources on which government
legitimise discourses of nation, nationalism
and the virtues of militerism. In turn,
they use multimodal discourse analysis to
show how the English/British government
continues erecting new war monuments
while sprucing up old ones with new
names of (‘forgotten’) ‘fallen’ soldiers, to
disseminate certain values, identities, goals
and politically-driven motives.
Continuing with the theme of
monuments, Shohamy and Waksman
(chapter 11) characterise monuments
as ideological sites of discourses of
nation and nationalism, and as places
of tourism and immigration. They focus
on the Ha’apala monument in the city
of Tel Aviv, which has become a place in
which texts and discourses of the Jewish
ideology and nationhood are produced
and consumed. The place has also
become a site of ownership of space and
redefinition of Others, reinforcement of
collective identity, shared traumatic past
and a site for a shared future recruitment
of the private for the public.
In chapter 12, Gendelman and Aiello
look at façades as semiotic resources in
global capitalism. Their interest is in
how city spaces and infrastructure are
deployed as media of communication
in the global marketplace. In this idiom,
buildings become semiotic artfacts/
99
material resources for tourism guidebooks,
brochures, t-shirts, etc. They conclude that,
although the post-Soviet era façades reflect
the commodified local identity, they also
depict the materialities of both pre- and
post-Soviet façades. Through notions of
layering and referencing, they demonstrate
that the very act of ‘renovation’ is
counterbalanced by ideals of preservation
of the ‘original’ appearance.
The last chapter is contributed by
Ella Chmielewska who looks at the visual
sphere, that is, the material objects of
semiosis to highlight the potential of close
reading of discreet place-scapes as a way
of emphasising the challenges of placing
visual material in positions traditionally
reserved for written language. She
jettisons multimodality and opts for
a wider socio-cultural theory to show
that the semiotic materials in place
are the resources for the consumption
and production of cityspace, both of
which require subjective ‘reading’ and
appreciation of meanings.
The volume is generally well edited
with chapters neatly flowing into each
other. As indicated earlier, Jaworski and
Thurlow are the first to acknowledge
that most of the chapters in the volume
do not adhere to the methodologies
and analytical/theoreotical ethos being
propulgated by the editors. In essence,
they also follow the path of LL studies
that they criticise. Another area of
concern is that the chapters are mostly
about urban areas, which means vast
amounts of rural and countryside are
left out. These concerns are also raised
in a recent special issue of linguistic/
semiotic landscapes of the Journal of
Sociolinguistics, edited by Zabrodskaja and
Milani (2014). Zabrodskaja and Milani
(2014) note that despite researchers
such as Stroud and Mpendukana (2009,
2010), Blommaert and Huang (2010),
Shohamy and Gorter (2009), Pennycook
© Banda and CMDR. 2015
100
(2009, 2010) and Jaworski and Thurlow
(2010) to name a few, who have all
suggested an ‘expansion of the scenery’
this is slow to happen. Recent work on
linguistic/semiotic landscape studies has
been moving in circles, shifting from
qualitative analysis and right back to
quantitative analysis. Thus, studies have
continued focusing on written language
(sometimes exclusively) rather than in
conjuction with other semiotic landscapes
and people’s experiences and interactions
in these spaces.
The volume is an excellent
contribution, whether one chooses to go the
traditional route of LL studies with its focus
on surveys and questionnaire data and/or
the more recent material ethnographies
and semiotic landscape route.
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