Conclusions: The Transformative Power of Emplaced Language

Abstract

LL is a defining quality of the urban fabric, understood as a web of multiple meaning-making activities. LL agents interact with, transform, and challenge cityscapes as sites of evolving networks of individuals and groups, and of political and socio-economic processes. They participate in the construction of a communicational landscape that is composed of both explicit and implicit relations so that it also points to invisible or silenced linguistic dynamics. Discussions about language are rarely about language itself but about the discourses woven around language and via the medium of language. Choosing a language to construct a narrative is never a neutral act, as expressed by Bakhtin (1981, p. 294) ‘Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated — overpopulated — with the intentions of others.’ In the course of the book we have highlighted themes as they emerged from our field-work and from our reflections in relation to a sociolinguistics of place. In this sense, our analyses are firmly anchored in physical spaces that narrate localized stories and relational processes within given sociocultural sites. At the same time, however, we contend that the dynamics which we have observed also exemplify directions, approaches, and developments which can be shared and explored further in LL studies and beyond.