Language and Gentrification: local language practices in identities of place- a global perspective

Language and urban identity have long been at the forefront of sociolinguistic inquiry, with several of the foundational studies in the field stemming from work conducted in urban locales. In recent years, following a... [ view full abstract ]

Language and urban identity have long been at the forefront of sociolinguistic inquiry, with several of the foundational studies in the field stemming from work conducted in urban locales. In recent years, following a well-documented period of urban exodus to the suburbs and what Britain (2012, in press) calls “counter-urbanization”, much has been done in the neighboring fields of sociology (Patillo 2007, Woldoff 2011) and cultural anthropology (Trinch & Snajdr 2017) regarding recent alterations in demography, which have brought speakers of higher socio-economic classes back into the urban core. This shift has meant that who is part of the city, as well as what it means to be from the city, has shifted, which has notable consequences for linguistic identity. At the same time, however, we are well aware that language contact also occurs in rural areas as a result of “counter-urbanization” thus highlighting and also problematizing the entire urban/rural dichotomy and “fetish” within sociolinguistic research (Britain 2012).

Recent studies of language practices in urban locales have taken approaches ranging from discourse analytic, linguistic landscape, variation, corpus linguistics, and language contact and multilingualism (Lamarre 2014; Pennycook and Otsuji 2015). In addition, contemporary work in applied linguistics (Block 2014) has made the case for a more careful approach to the intersections of linguistics and social class, the construct that is the driving force of gentrification, revitalization and ultimately, urban change. In line with a growing body of work on sociolinguistic approaches to urban identity, this panel aims to bring a variety of scholarly approaches to bear on the question of language practices in gentrifying locales. We seek to demonstrate the breadth of methods used to study language(s) in a wide range of global urban spaces undergoing semiotic transformation, and use those approaches to show how language practices in the context of gentrification processes informs us about language, urban space, and the linguistic identities of the people who live there.  Such variety of approaches and locales not only exemplify the similarities and differences between urban sites, but also reifies the role of local language practices in identities of place.