Abstract
Multilingual cities are arising from migration and dispersal. Against this context, a sociolinguistic perspective reveals the cultural hybridity of contemporary multilingual cities around the world. Such complexities impact urban public spaces where languages interweave in translingual practices, interacting textually and visually. The ‘metrolingualism’ concept facilitates researchers to explore this hybridity, revealing the city as a site of communication with multimodal semiotic resources (Kress, 2020). Researchers can draw on the book to observe dynamic identities and the operation of socio-political rights within these sites. This monograph takes Singapore as an entry point to reflect on how the different positions represented by multilingual communication in urban space. Through the sociolinguistic approach of a binary nature, it further demonstrates the contradictions and their complexity that arise between macro and micro language policies, local and official narratives in a given location.
It is striking that the author creatively adopts the term ‘choreography’ in the dance field to present two contradictory paradigms, namely top-down institutional language and the bottom-up multilingualism. The term undoubtedly embodies the antagonistic relationship between the two discourse ideologies, while indicating the considerations and instability behind them. With this concept, Lee can adopt a critical approach to analyze the two writing modes in a concrete manner with examples, in an effort to conceptualize the writing practices in Singapore.
The research objects are seen as manifold writing texts. Here again, the author has enriched the writing concept. For this concept, Lee identifies and expands writing comprehensively to include not only public signages, anthologies, but also to literary writing and commercial products. Not to be overlooked are the writing images throughout the book, data collected by the author conducting ethnography, an increasingly popular research method in sociolinguistics, which makes the audience to read the kaleidoscopic landscape of multilingual symbols while being aware of the important role multimodality plays in global society.
The first chapter introduces the background of Singapore’s official language policy and historical major language movements. In Singapore, there are four officially recognized languages with English and Chinese dominating. At this point, a contradiction of discourse power has been succinctly outlined to the reader. The second chapter then focuses on the official semiotic landscapes and analyzes institutional writing in Singapore. Specifically, Lee adopts a multimodal lens, establishing a visual-spatial formula to apply to various official signs. Such an angle constitutes the book’s position at the forefront of interdisciplinary research in relevant fields.
The third chapter shifts to discursive publications. The materials are based on the Singapore government-funded literary anthologies published over the next three decades from 1985 onwards, which identified two variants of top-down language ideology with two translation modes that shaped the status of the texts.
The grassroots writing addressed in the next two chapters contrasts with the ideology represented by the official regime. Chapter 4 critically discusses the ways in which Singaporean intellectuals express discursive resistance through the incorporation of rich local vernacular into English by focusing on lexicon Spiaking Singlish. In this chapter, Lee draws out several layers of controversy between Singlish speakers and the language institutions. Chapter 5 then expands the argument by exploring noncanonical heteroglossic poetry writing as a community practice.
In the final Chapter 6, Lee makes a subversive point that top-down writing sometimes integrates and supports vernacular resources for strategies. Likewise, grassroots writing can be integrated into institutional structures to achieve alignment with state funding mechanisms. And he asserts that the increasing commodification of local vernaculars provides a window into the socio-economics of post-multilingualism. Therefore, multilingual choreography orchestration has moved beyond ‘top-down versus bottom-up dispute of language ideologies to include local identity representations in response to the pragmatic demands of globalization’ (p. 23).
Hence, what can we learn from such a Singaporean model of language choreographies? On the first level, the orchestrations about multilingualism portrayed here shows the complexity of city: The social and cultural realities of contemporary cities do not contribute to the disappearance of imposed monolingualism, but rather to the creation of plural power relations through interactions. It is a place where different narratives and voices are mixed, revealing dynamic socio-cultural realities through different languages. This discloses that not only is the city fluid, but each individual identity in the city is also unstable. Such a perspective can first help to dismantle essentialism about the single identity of urban citizens, allowing for a deeper analysis of individual’s translational identities.
On the second level, this book indicates the power relations behind languages by applying de Certeau’s spatial practices theory. Examples are based on the struggle between two objects of unequal power relations: institutions and grassroots writing. They create a ‘language contact zone’ that can also reflect cultural asymmetries (Pratt, 1992). The official display of neat multilingualism instead triggers the carnivals of the grassroots writing landscapes. From this complex interlaced relationship, a third level of meaning is derived: this study has transcended the either/or binary opposition of top-down and bottom-up narratives, and it allows reader to see the subtle relationships between various language ideologies, which are not linear and may negotiate a transformation into a hybridized translanguaging.
The pioneer book encourages researchers to embrace new research directions. Its theorization of Singapore’s semiotic landscapes contributes to sociolinguistics and translation studies (see Lee, 2021), not only in the rejection of the either/or binary notion of different language ideologies, but also in the cosmopolitan paradigm of the multiple languages hybridize between places. Lee’s original perspectives will prompt us to re-examine the language relationships of future multilingual cities in the globalized and post-colonial era.