Commodification of African languages in linguistic landscapes of rural Northern Cape Province, South Africa

Abstract

English has been portrayed in linguistic landscape literature as the definitive language of commodification. However, using linguistic landscape images from two rural communities in the Northern Cape, South Africa, this article shows how indigenous African languages and localised English are entangled as commodities – whether used independently or in hybridised form – for the sale of various goods and services. We show that the commodification of the languages and hybridised forms speaks to semiotic choices of local authorship of signage and to the influence of local communities’ languaging practices. We propose that commodity status of languages or their linguistic features is variable, since commodified languages or linguistic features as modes derive meanings from the assembled multimodal resources, whose design features as languages or translanguaged “blends”, and their statuses as being in and out of favour, depend on communicative purposes, the kinds of goods and services being marketed and the intended consumers. We conclude that languages, or their linguistic features as modes in signage, should be valued as mobile socio-culturally given and multimodally shaped semiotic resources deployed for communicative impact on consumers in local contexts of use