Polycentricity and interactional regimes in ‘global neighborhoods’

Abstract

Focusing on multilingualism in late-modern urban environments, this article argues for the neighborhood as a unit of practice mapped by field-specific relations. We show how language use and multilingualism are given social form by conditions of polycentricity and regimes of interactional practice. We present a preliminary typology of different places in an immigrant neighborhood in Ghent (Belgium) that organize different patterns of language use and language assessment. Streets, shops, public health centers, schools, and bars all function as ‘centers’ in the neighborhood, but each one of them allows for or invites different interactional regimes, including perceptions of what counts as an acceptable set of (enacted) language resources from its users. Such densely layered patterns of multilingualism allow us to analyse the production of locality in the globalized era in which old and new forms of transnational movement and intra-national response intermingle.