The sociolinguistics of globalization

QUESTION

Chapter 3

This week, Blommaert takes us to two countries in Africa. The first is Tanzania. Through Gabriel Ruhumbika’s novel, Miradi Bubu ya Wazalendo, Blommaert walks us through a bit of recent social and political history of the country. He focuses especially on the ways in which Ruhumbika makes use of the “sociocultural semiotics of space.”

• How does Blommaert use “sociocultural semiotics of space” in this novel to illustrate notions of centre-periphery relations, mobility vs. locality, and translocality?

• How does Blommaert’s discussion of the three scale levels (top of page 73) suggest a fractal model of organization?

• What is the author’s decision to write the novel in Swahili a “highly meaningful act”? What does this reveal about translocality and globalization? What are the implications of such a decision (or, similarly of rapper Amoc’s decision to use Sami – a nearly “extinct” language) for the linguistic vitality of non-dominant languages?

• Explain how “the radiator photo” story (pgs. 78-79) illustrates the mobilization of meanings associated with processes of “translocalization.”

In the second half of Chapter 3, Blommaert moves us from Tanzania to Wesbank township in South Africa. Again, Blommaert provides us with some recent history of the township, as well as a more ethnographic description of the place.

• What does Blommaert mean by “grassroots literacy”?

• How does Blommaert interpret the Wesbank teachers’ inconsistency (whether deliberate, or resulting from unawareness) in correcting student’s grammatical and orthographic errors? What implications does this have with respect to students’ desire to move across scales in the future?

• In what ways does Blommaert’s discussion of English1 and English2 (p. 100) in Wesbank high school complicate earlier, more simplistic, sociolinguistic representations of the tensions between “local” vs. “international” languages?

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