107: Urban Multilingualism

Music Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gawing. And I'm Gretchen McCullick.

And today we're getting enthusiastic about languages and cities. and how they're often a lot more languages that live in a city than we might realize at first glance. But first, our most recent bonus episode

was about all the different ways you can read the local linguistic landscapes in the science and other writing in public spaces. You could think of it as sort of a second part to this episode.

Here, we're talking about the unwritten ways that languages are often hidden in cities. And in the bonus episode, we're talking about some of our favorite street signs

that have interesting language things on them. I love this topic because there are so many linguistically interesting street signs and you'll never look at a street sign the same way again. And if you're like me and Lauren, you probably have a bunch of photos on your phone of linguistically interesting street signs that you've have across. Yep.

You can head to the Lentuziazum Discord or tag us on social media to share your favorite examples of interesting language things on signs and maybe we'll do a second one of these episodes if we get enough. Go to patreon.com slash link enthusiasm to get access to the linguistic landscapes episode and many other bonus episodes and help keep us show running. I live in a city, Gretchen, you live in a city. I think it's fair to say we're both big fans of Bob and Living.

living. So I live in Montreal, you live in Melbourne, and one of the things that I remember about visiting you in Australia, which is when I had been there for a few weeks and I got used to hearing Australian English sort of all over the place, which is a variety that I'm pretty familiar with, we're talking with you a lot, but it certainly not my local language. I remember being

being on a bus and overhearing some people talking to each other in Chinese and having this profound sense of feeling at home. Because when I'm on a bus in Montreal, I also overhear people speaking in Chinese, which I don't speak. But that is an experience that I wasn't having over here in people speaking of Australia in English because that doesn't happen to me very often in Montreal.

But it does happen that I overhear people sneaking a language I don't speak. And that aspect of, oh yeah, of course there are people who have immigrated to both Melbourne and Montreal and a lot of other cities who speak Mandarin, Cantonese, a whole bunch of Chinese languages.

Those are experiences that are part of living in this dense urban multi-lingual environment But sometimes getting nor do we represent countries as like points on a map of sort of country of origin without thinking about the history of people moving around as well. Yeah, cities are these magnets and they keep attracting new waves of migration from new

places and new languages and new experiences and it's part of what I love about the vibrancy of urban spaces. And again, just as countries aren't points on a map, people come to cities with many different languages and it's part of one of the many, many reasons I think cities are so compelling as

faces. And cities can not just attract people from different places with different linguistic histories, but also sometimes continue those and perpetuate those and you could have groups of people who are still passing that language down onto their kids or using that language in a variety of settings because you can have not just one person who's using that language but a community of people who are

using that language, even if they're not necessarily being counted by traditional metrics like a census or having their linguistic expertise represented on street signs, there are a lot of languages in cities these days. And perhaps have always been a lot of languages in cities because cities are these hubs and meeting places. And sometimes that diversity is really visible.

Fior City has centers like a Chinatown or a little Italy where groups of migrants have coalesced. Or an expat compound, which I think we should think of as well as like a little expatally. Oh, absolutely. In Singapore, that was Holland Village, and we would sometimes go and visit because it had really good Mexican food available. So going to the presumably relatively like Western Anglo expat community to eat the food of yet a different place because probably Americans are bringing Mexican food with them, I guess?

I don't know. Absolutely. Yes. And so different ways that migrant groups can coalesce is sometimes it can be quite visible.

And who we think of as an expat versus who we think of as a migrant definitely has this power dynamic of, the level of wealth, the level of whiteness of these different groups as we're talking about them. But nonetheless, there are these different linguistic histories in pretty much any city that you think about, even when they're not visible. Yeah, there's all this diversity that isn't visible.

Sometimes groups of migrants will unite around maybe the national language from where they've come from, or a larger lingua franca, because there's somewhere new which might make that diversity less visible. People coming from Nepal might all just identify in Australia as Nepalese speakers to make that easier to comprehend in this new space. Even if when they were in Nepal or when you sort of start asking

more deeply, they actually speak like I'd done the languages or 100 languages that are all spoken in Nepal. Yeah, I mean, not one person, but... Well, no, not one person's group. Yeah, not one person's group.

But as a group, yes. It would be very impressive. Yes. As a group, you might have this rich a diversity within.

And Nipali has this dominant status in Innipol. And you get people coming into the Open Centers like Cat Mandu, where there's diversity there. But then coming to Australia,

there's this extra layer of abstraction. We have lots of Nipali migrants coming to Australia