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