Bark, smoke and pray: multilingual Rastafarian-herb sellers in a busy subway

Abstract

This paper is an analysis of how multilingual Rastafarian-herbalists organize multilingual and multimodal interactions in a subway. The rationale has been to understand the practice of multilingual repertoires by multilingual speakers in Cape Town marketplaces. It contributes to literature on language use in marketplaces by highlighting how linguistic and non-linguistic resources are drawn on and co-produced in interaction among Rastafarians who identify as informal herb traders. It also attempts to expand the theoretical apparatus of the sociolinguistics of globalization by introducing the notions of embodied rhythm and extreme locality. By applying these notions to how Rastafarian-herbalists organize multilingual and multimodal interaction in a subway, the analysis illustrates not only the importance of body positioning and bodily behaviour in multimodal communication, but also the emphasis on local languages and speech varieties that feature as important linguistic resources, and the multilingual performance of an extreme locality.