As indicated in the title – which can be translated as Speaking in the city, speaking of the city: Essays on urban registers – this multi-authored French-language collection of essays deals with the interaction of speech and the urban environment. It is the third volume in a recently created French series that aims at understanding the city through the analysis of urban discourse in its historical and sociocultural context. This particular book, co-edited by Paul Wald and François Leimdorfer, highlights the back-and-forth process between the city and speech: on the one hand, the urban environment is constitutive of certain “ways of speaking,” and on the other hand, language plays a role in constructing an image of the city. Both facets of the process are well illustrated in the essays assembled here, which are informed by various disciplines: linguistics, history, anthropology, and sociology.
In their Introduction, the editors state that the bi-directional process of interaction between the city and speech served as an organizing principle to divide the book into three parts – a somewhat artificial division, as recognized by Wald himself in the Conclusion. Part I deals with the emergence of new speech registers directly linked to life in the city; Part II documents situations of conflict regarding the designation of places in the urban landscape; and Part III focuses on the role played by lexicon and discourse in constructing the image of a particular city.
The three essays in Part I illustrate drastically different cases of evolving urban speech registers. In the first one – a shortened version of an English-language article published in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology in 1998 – Debra Spitulnik describes the emergence in Zambia, over the past half century or so, of a hybrid variety of Bemba (Bantu family) called Town Bemba, which is characterized by great instability. Resulting from the fusion in urban settings of traditional Bemba and other African languages with English (the official language of the country and the symbol of modernity), Town Bemba serves as a lingua franca among speakers of different languages in multilingual Zambia and has become the first language of many city dwellers. This linguistic hybrid of a heteroglossic nature is a speech register in the making that is constitutive of an urban identity. It must constantly adapt to an expanding world and the ever-increasing heterogeneity of life in the city, hence its built-in instability.
In total contrast with this case, the essay by Sylvie Teveny shows the Inuit who live in Iqaluit, the newly established capital of the Territory of Nunavut in Canada, as fiercely defending their traditional language against the encroachment of English. Their strategy has been the conscious creation of an expanding urban lexicon primarily based on Inuktitut, thus constructing their own image of the city and their own identity as an urban population. Lexical building takes place at two different levels within the community: the spontaneous “folk” level, and the official level through institutionalized workshops in which experts methodically create new words in consultation with elders. Although this new urban register is somewhat unstable, it has enormous value not only in a pragmatic way, but also and foremost as a reinforcer of community ties, since the creation of new words is based on consensus.
The third essay in Part I, in contrast, shows the ongoing evolution of the repertory of terms referring to public places in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, to be mostly under the control of municipal authorities. Dubravko škiljan's diachronic semantic analysis, which is based on terminology used in successive maps of the city from 1825 to 1995, points to the fact that the “indigenous” (Croatian) vocabulary of new city dwellers with rural origins has been relegated to the designation of non-major streets or passageways. Most of the terminology has been created by administrators and urban planners, who have often borrowed foreign words or made up unimaginative Croatian lexemes meaning, for example, “first branch of the second path.” Such control of the linguistic process by specific groups endowed with power is seen by škiljan as an intrusion into the construction of an urban identity in Zagreb.
Part II of the book opens with an essay by Abderrahmane Moussaoui that pairs off nicely with the preceding one, since it deals with official and folk designations of some urban places in Algeria, but here the focus is on confrontation. Countering administrative efforts to impose a learned variety of Arabic as a way to unify the nation-state and reinforce Arabic identity, ordinary people have created many folk names to designate parts of the urban landscape. Some of these designations are either former colonial French names or derivatives of them, which goes counter to the Algerian government's effort since independence to shed any vestiges of colonial power. Other names are on-the-spot creations, such as Arabic sha'bat annîlou ‘nylon vale’, which designates a particular newly built neighborhood exemplifying shoddy and unaesthetic construction. In this formerly colonized country that has seen an enormous increase in urbanization in the last few decades, the city functions as a natural setting for the construction of national identity; but it is also a place in which contradictions and confrontations can be played out by various segments of the population – sometimes taking the form of linguistic battles.
The next article takes us to India, a part of the world well known for its linguistic and cultural diversity. After a summary account of four decades (1950–1990) of major language conflicts in the country, Gérard Heuzé focuses on polemics about names of cities, as has occurred in the capital of Maharashtra. His sociohistorical picture of repeated efforts through the years to change its name from Bombay (an English creation) to Mumbai (a Marathi name) reveals a complex web of political, religious, cultural, regional and linguistic factors. The official change of name (even in the English language) from Bombay to Mumbai, which finally occurred in 1996, symbolized the victory of Marathi regionalists over other segments of the local population that favored Hindi or English as the official language.
Part III of the book contains four articles. The first one, authored by Abdelhamid Henia, traces the semantic evolution of one particular lexical item (rab') from its ancient use in classical Arabic to designate either an ethnic group's encampment or someone's abode, down to its current use (with the common pronunciation rba') in the vernacular of Tunisia to designate the covered part of a souk in a traditional urban medina. Henia's detailed analysis, which always considers the sociohistorical context of use of the word rab', shows the term to have acquired its specifically urban dimension after a period during which, in administrative and fiscal language, it referred to a valuable piece of property in any location. Its current popular use to designate a specific type of place in the city reveals a symbolic association in the speakers' minds between prosperity and traditional craft stores in the Tunisian urban environment.
The next essay takes us to a section of Naples, Italy, called Santa Lucia, whose working-class population designates parts of the city in a way that differs from the official terminology. Alessandra Broccolini examines, among others, the lexical item quartiere ‘neighborhood’; it is a general and neutral term in the administrative nomenclature of Naples, but the inhabitants of Santa Lucia have appropriated it to designate their part of the city – despite the fact that it is not an administrative unit – giving it a contextualized meaning that emphasizes social ties. When they speak in their Neapolitan vernacular of o quartiere nosto ‘our neighborhood’, they are referring to a community whose members are united through a tight network of kinship ties and neighbor relations with interweaving informal economic activities, and who share collective memories as well as the protection of their religious patroness, Santa Lucia.
We now move to South America, first to Brazil. Maria Stella Martins Bresciani ponders the meaning of the term melhoramentos ‘improvements’ as applied to various kinds of urban development in São Paulo from 1850 to 1950. Her “genealogical analysis” of written discourse on the subject in three different registers – the specialized register of experts, the “cultured” register of journalists and politicians, and the folk register of ordinary people – shows the meaning of melhoramentos to vary through time and according to the social context. First applied to specific projects concerning public health or traffic, it has been used more and more to refer to overall urban planning, with increasing reference to aesthetics as São Paulo undergoes gentrification. However, the basic meaning always remains the same: the term melhoramentos refers to changes that are supposed to be beneficial for the city and its population. It can therefore be regarded as a broad metaphor with both rational and persuasive dimensions, and as such is constitutive of the image of the city.
The last essay in Part III of the book also deals with language in relation to urban planning, this time in Buenos Aires. Irène Vasilachis de Gialdino uses discourse analysis to examine passages of a 1927 book by Paolera, the introducer of urban planning in Argentina. Central to the analysis are concepts such as semantic network, argumentation (positive/negative expressions) and metaphor, which highlight the way in which language is both interpretive and constitutive of the social reality of the city.
In the Conclusion, co-editor Paul Wald reflects on the lessons to be learned (or relearned) from the preceding essays. One is the need to study lexical items not only in their linguistic context – particularly at the level of discourse – but also in their historical and sociocultural context. He also points to the somewhat artificial boundary between “language in the city” and “language about the city,” since the latter is created within the city or at least within a discourse area which is linked to the urban environment. Another important point made by Wald is that the city is characterized by contradiction: it can be a locus of both linguistic diversity, owing to the different origins of its inhabitants, and of unification of speech varieties; it can also be a locus of conflict between speech registers linked to various socio-professional categories of speakers, and at the same time a locus of convergence toward a variety of speech that becomes characteristic of its inhabitants.
The book ends with an enlightening essay (surprisingly relegated to the Appendix) in which François Leimdorfer takes a historical look at the emergence of both urban speech and “registers about the city” in France. His vast picture of their evolution emphasizes the significance of power relations at various levels: city vs. countryside, Paris vs. the rest of France, highly positioned people vs. common folk, longtime residents of a city vs. newcomers, officials and experts vs. ordinary people, and so on. This essay serves as a good reminder of the need to take politics into account in many kinds of sociolinguistic analysis.
All in all, this book is a rich source of information about “speaking in the city” and “speaking of the city” that can certainly inspire future researchers. Generally well written, it provides a vast panoply of language phenomena analyzed in a thought-provoking manner by scholars representing various disciplines. The resulting variety of approaches and types of data analyzed, as well as the diversity of geographical sites, make this book relevant for all those who are interested in the complex relationship between speech and the urban environment.
