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Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis: Orders of Indexicality and

Polycentricity

Article in Journal of Multicultural Discourses · November 2007

DOI: 10.2167/md089.0

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Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis:
Orders of Indexicality and Polycentricity1
Jan Blommaert
School of Culture, Language and Communication, Institute of
Education, University of London, UK
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Developments in the structure of societies, such as globalisation processes, compel
us to devote more attention to issues of sociolinguistic variation in discourse,
because features of such variation become ever more important to users. Yet a lot of
discourse analysis starts from an old monolingual ideal, in which the sociolinguistic
dimensions of the linguistic resources used by people remains underproblematised.
This paper argues that our discourse analytic toolkit needs to be complemented with
some seriously useful sociolinguistic tools and presents two such tools in this paper:
orders of indexicality and polycentricity. Both concepts are designed to observe
forms of linguistic and cultural variation that characterise Late Modern diasporic
environments.

doi: 10.2167/md089.0

Keywords: multilingualism, orders of indexicality, polycentricity, discourse

analysis, sociolinguistics, variation, Late Modernity, globalisation

Introduction
It is one of sociolinguistics’ main accomplishments to have demonstrated
that ‘language’ is, in the practice of its occurrence in real situations of use, a
repertoire: a culturally sensitive ordered complex of genres, styles, registers,
with lots of hybrid forms, and occurring in a wide variety of ways big
and small. We have also learned that due to this fragmentation of ‘language’,
the spectre of variation is tremendously wide
from variation between
‘languages’ (codeswitching in the traditional sense) to variation playing out
small phonetic variables, microscopic style shifts and shifts in register. The
spectre of sociolinguistic variation now covers macro-variation as well as
micro-variation, and such forms of variation matter in social life (Gumperz,
2003; Hymes, 1996; Maryns & Blommaert, 2001; Rampton, 1995). They
function as powerful sources of indexical meanings
meanings that connect
discourses to contexts and induce categories, similarities and differences
within frames, and thus suggest identities, tones, styles and genres that appear
to belong or to deviate from expected types (Agha, 2005; Silverstein, 2003).
Indexicality connects language to cultural patterns, and considerations of
multilingualism thus also become considerations of multiculturalism.
Mainstream discourse analysis, however, often starts from a sociolinguis-
tically and culturally unproblematised object: a text, document or fragment of

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Journal of Multicultural Discourses Vol. 2, No. 2, 2007

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116 Journal of Multicultural Discourses

spoken discourse usually sensed to ‘be in a language X’ (e.g. ‘the text is in

English’), which is then analysed as to its intradiscursive characteristics. Such
intradiscursive characteristics are, then, often ‘intra-language X’ characteris-
tics: discourse markers, forms of lexical, syntactic or semantic coherence,
metrical or other ‘poetic’ structuring devices
belonging to language X.
Sociolinguistic features such as language variety/varieties and shifts therein,
accent, register or other are rarely drawn into the analytic exercise. The only
exception is when such varieties become overtly visible (or audible) and are
easy to recognise as essential in structuring the text. Codeswitching is a case in
point
a sociolinguistic feature of variation recognised as an important
discourse-structuring device (Auer, 1998; Gumperz, 1982). But by and large,
discourse analysis displays a marked preference for ‘monolingual’ discourse,
and if sociolinguistic variation is addressed, the preference is for ‘big’, visible,
abundantly flagged variation.2
The argument in this paper is that whenever we say that ‘this text is in
English’, we should address that text through the sociolinguistic spectre of
variation: what do we mean by ‘in French’? Do we see sociolinguistic variation
discursively deployed in the text? And if so, what does it mean? The drive
behind this argument is general as well as practical. In general, we should all
strive towards a better discourse analysis, one that keeps abreast of develop-
ments in related branches of language studies. In this case, drawing attention
to the possibilities of incorporating sociolinguistic micro-variation into
discourse analysis looks to me to be a worthwhile goal in itself. The practical
motive has to do with the simple fact that globalisation compels us to take
multilingualism and multiculturalism as a rule rather than as an exception,
and address the phenomenology of non-nativeness in language usage as
something that crucially connects with social, political and ideological
processes characterising Late Modernity (Blommaert, 2005; Chouliaraki &
Fairclough, 1999; Collins & Slembrouck, 2005; Coupland, 2003; Heller, 1999).
In sum, developments in the structure of societies compel us to devote more
attention to issues of sociolinguistic variation in discourse, because features of
such variation become ever more important to users. We are no longer at ease
when it comes to the monolingual default in discourse analysis. Consequently,
our discourse analytic toolkit needs to be complemented with some seriously
useful sociolinguistic tools. I will present two such tools in this paper: orders
of indexicality and polycentricity. Both concepts are designed to observe forms
of variation that characterise Late Modern diasporic environments (Blom-
maert, 2005; Blommaert et al., 2005a, 2005b).

Orders of Indexicality
The point of departure is quite simple: indexicality, even though largely
operating at the implicit level of linguistic/semiotic structuring, is not
unstructured but ordered. It is ordered in two ways, and these forms of
indexical order account for ‘normativity’ in semiosis. The first kind of order is
what Silverstein (2003) called ‘indexical order’: the fact that indexical
meanings occur in patterns offering perceptions of similarity and stability
that can be perceived as ‘types’ of semiotic practice with predictable
Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis 117

(presupposable/entailing) directions (cf. also Agha, 2003, 2005). ‘Register’ is a

case in point: clustered and patterned language forms that index specific
social personae and roles, can be invoked to organise interactional practices
(e.g. turns at talk, narrative), and have a prima facie stability that can sometimes be
used for typifying or stereotyping (e.g. ‘posh’ accents
see Rampton, 2003).
Speaking or writing through such registers involves insertion in recognisable
(normative) repertoires of ‘voices’: one then speaks as a man, a lawyer, a middle-
aged European, and asylum seeker and so forth, and if done appropriately, one
will be perceived as speaking as such (Agha, 2005). Indexical order, thus, is the
metapragmatic organising principle behind what is widely understood as the
‘pragmatics’ of language.
Such forms of indexical order sometimes have long and complex histories
of becoming (Agha, 2003 and Silverstein, 2003 offer excellent illustrations)
often connected to the histories of becoming of nation-states and their cultural
and sociolinguistic paraphernalia
the notion of a ‘standard language’ and its
derivative, a particular ‘national’ ethnolinguistic identity (Errington, 2001;
Silverstein, 1996, 1998). Yet, they also display a significant degree of variability
and change, and they can erupt and fade under pressure of macro-develop-
ments such as capitalist consumer fashions (as e.g. Silverstein’s oenologia
the
register of contemporary wine connoisseurs, Silverstein, 2003; also Agha,
2005). Indexical order of this sort is a positive force, it produces social
categories, recognisable semiotic emblems for groups and individuals, a more
or less coherent semiotic habitat.
It does so, however, within the confines of a stratified general repertoire, in
which particular indexical orders relate to others in relations of mutual
valuation
higher/lower, better/worse. This is where we meet another kind
of order to indexicalities, one that operates on a higher plane of social
structuring: an order in the general systems of meaningful semiosis valid in
groups at any give time. This kind of ordering results in what I call orders of
indexicality
a term obviously inspired by Foucault’s ‘order of discourse’.
Recall that Foucault was interested in the general rules for the production of
discourses: their positive emergence as well as their erasure and exclusion. He
started from the hypothesis
that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled,
selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures
whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its
chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality. (Foucault,
1984 [1971]: 109; see also his notion of ‘archive’, Foucault, 2002 [1969]:
Chapter 5)
If we now paraphrase Foucault’s hypothesis we see that ordered indexicalities
operate within large stratified complexes in which some forms of semiosis are
systemically perceived as valuable, others as less valuable, and some are not
taken into account at all, while all are subject to rules of access and regulations
as to circulation. That means that such systemic patterns of indexicality are
also systemic patterns of authority, of control and evaluation, and hence of
inclusion and exclusion by real or perceived others. That also means that every
register is susceptible to a politics of access. And it also means that there is an
118 Journal of Multicultural Discourses

economy of exchange, in which the values attached by some to one form of

semiosis may not be granted by others: the English spoken by a middle-class
person in Nairobi may not be (and is unlikely to be) perceived as a middle-
class attribute in London or New York.
Orders of indexicality is a sensitising concept that should point a finger to
(index!) important aspects of power and inequality in the field of semiosis. If
forms of semiosis are socially and culturally valued, these valuation
processes should display traces of power and authority, of struggles in
which there were winners as well as losers, and in which, in general, the
group of winners is smaller than the group of losers. The concept invites
different questions
sociolinguistic questions on indexicality
and should
open empirical analyses of indexicality to higher-level considerations about
relations within sociolinguistic repertoires, the (non-)exchangeability of
particular linguistic or semiotic resources across places, situations and
groups, and so forth. It invites, in sum, different questions of authority,
access and power in this field.

Polycentricity
One such question is: how do we imagine such patterns of authority and
power? Rather than to fall back on notions such as ‘habitus’ (with its
suggestions of incorporated automatisms) or on images of perpetual
reinvention in interaction I would suggest that authority emanates from
real or perceived ‘centres’, to which people orient when they produce an
indexical trajectory in semiosis. That is, I suggest that whenever we
communicate, apart from our real and immediate addressees, we orient
towards what Bakhtin called a ‘superaddressee’: complexes of norms and
perceived appropriateness criteria, in effect the larger social and cultural body
of authority into which we insert our immediate practices vis-à-vis our
immediate addressees. And very often, such authorities have names, faces, a
reality of their own: they can be individuals (teachers, parents, role models,
the coolest guy in class), collectives (peer groups, subcultural groups, group
images such as ‘punk’, ‘gothic’ etc.), abstract entities or ideals (church, the
nation-state, the middle-class, consumer culture and its many fashions,
freedom, democracy), and so on: the macro- and micro-structures of our
everyday world. The point is: we often project the presence of an evaluating
authority through our interactions with immediate addressees, we behave
with reference to such an evaluative authority, and I suggest we call such an
evaluating authority a ‘centre’.
The authority of centres is evaluative, and it often occurs as an authority
over clusters of semiotic features, including thematic domains, places, people
(roles, identities, relationships) and semiotic styles (including linguistic vari-
eties, modes of performance etc.). Thus, broaching a particular topic will
trigger a particular semiotic style and suggest particular roles and relation-
ships between participants, and certain types of communicative events require
appropriate places
not here! Not now! Not while the children are listening!
(Scollon & Scollon, 2003; also Blommaert et al., 2005a). One speaks differently
and as a different person about cars or music than about the economy or about
Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis 119

sex
in one instance, one can speak as an expert using a particular register
indexing membership of expert groups, in other instances one can speak as a
novice; one can shift from a very masculine voice on a particular topic (e.g. sex
or cars) to a gender-neutral voice (e.g. when discussing the war in Iraq), each
time also shifting registers, often even accents, pace, tone and rhythm (a
declarative tone on one topic, a hesitant one on another). And topics, styles
and identities belong to places and are excluded from other places (a thing that
becomes apparent during after-hours escapades at scientific conferences).
Each time one orients towards other centres of authority offering ideal-types of
norms or appropriateness criteria, as it is called in pragmatics: the places
where ‘good’ discourse about these topics is made.
It is the packaging of topic, place, style and people that makes up the
indexical direction of communication: the fact that certain topics require
specific semiotic modes and environments, and so organise identities and roles
(Agha, 2005). Goffman (1981) called such patterns shifts in ‘footing’: delicate
changes in speaker position that were accompanied by shifts in linguistic and
semiotic mode and redefined the participant roles in the interaction. We are
now in a position to empirically ‘dissect’ footing and bring it in line with larger
organisational features of life in society.
It is obvious that even though places impose rules and restrictions on what
can happen in communication there, every environment in which humans
convene and communicate is almost by definition polycentric, in the sense that
more than one possible centre can be distinguished: one can follow norms or
violate them at any step of the process, and sometimes this is wilfully done
while at other occasions it comes about by accident or because of the
impossibility to behave in a particular way. Again, Goffman’s descriptions
of the multiple layers that characterise mundane interaction scenes are
informative. Goffman, for instance, distinguished between ‘focal’ and ‘non-
focal’ activities occurring in the same event
as when a pupil in class
produces an offensive reaction to a teacher’s question, giving off negative
impressions (focal, for the teacher) as well as positive ones (non-focal, towards
his peer group who studiously try to avoid being qualified as ‘nerds’). In our
own research on asylum seekers’ narratives, we often found that ‘truthful’
accounts by the applicant were interpreted as ‘implausible’ (i.e. untruthful)
accounts by the interviewers, because describing the chaotic and often
paradoxical realities truthfully, often iconically, resulted in a chaotic and
paradoxical story, and whereas interviewees oriented towards ‘the truth’ as
defined by situated, densely contextualised realities in e.g. Africa, inter-
viewers oriented towards a particular textual (bureaucratic) ideal of decon-
textualisable coherence, linearity and factuality (Blommaert, 2001). Both
centres were always present in such a polycentric interview situation,
although the interviewers’ centre was often ‘non-focal’, kept in the back-
ground during the interview itself. In telling ‘the truth’, thus, the applicants
were often ‘wrong-footed’ by the interviewers, and in the real world, the
dominant order of indexicality is that of the interviewer and his/her
bureaucratic apparatus.
Polycentricity is a key feature of interactional regimes in human environ-
ments: even though many interaction events look ‘stable’ and monocentric
120 Journal of Multicultural Discourses

(e.g. exams, wedding ceremonies), there are as a rule multiple
though never
unlimited
batteries of norms to which one can orient and according to which
one can behave (as when the bride winks at the groom when she says ‘I do’),
and this multiplicity has been previously captured under terms such as
‘polyphony’ or ‘multivocality’. A term such as ‘polycentricity’ moves the issue
from the descriptive to the interpretive level, and again, my attempt is towards
sensitising others about the fact that behind terms such as ‘polyphony’, social
structures of power and inequality are at work, and that such structures

orders of indexicality
account for the fact that certain forms of polyphony
never occur while other forms of polyphony miraculously seem to assume
similar shapes and directions. The bride can wink to her groom, but baring her
breasts would be highly unusual. Certain voices, like the bureaucratic one in
the asylum system, systemically prevail over others, because the impact of
certain centres of authority is bigger than that of others. The multiplicity of
available batteries of norms does not mean that these batteries are equivalent,
equally accessible or equally open to negotiation. Orders of indexicality are
stratified and impose differences in value onto the different modes of semiosis,
systematically give preference to some over others and exclude or disqualify
particular modes.
Both concepts, orders of indexicality and polycentricity, thus suggest a less
innocent world of linguistic, social and cultural variation and diversity, one in
which difference is quickly turned into inequality, and in which complex
patterns of potential-versus-actual behaviour occur. They also enable us to
move beyond the usual sociolinguistic units
homogeneous speech commu-
nities
and consider situations in which various ‘big’ sociolinguistic systems
enter the picture, as when people migrate in the context of globalisation, or
when in the same context messages start moving across large spaces. In both
cases, people do not just move across space: given what has been said above
we also realise that they move across different orders of indexicality, and that,
consequently, what happens to them in communication becomes less
predictable than what would happen in ‘their own’ environment. Socio-
linguistics in the age of globalisation needs to look way beyond the speech
community, to sociolinguistic systems and how they connect and relate to one
another. Big things matter if we want to understand the small things of
discourse.

On the Move: Playful Polycentricity

Let us now turn to an example. The following fragment was recorded in
Cape Town in December 2000. It was recorded from Radio UCT, the Campus
radio of the University of Cape Town (an affluent, majority-white ‘Ivy
League’ university), and the fragment is taken from a Reggae programme
deejayed by a man
a UCT student
who calls himself Ras Pakaay. The
programme is a call-in programme, and listeners can call to tell stories and/
or to request particular songs. In the fragment below, Ras Pakaay first
concludes a song, then tells a small story about a listener who called just
now, and then goes on to take the call of a girl from the Khayelitsha
township.
Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis 121
122 Journal of Multicultural Discourses
Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis 123

The text is an instance of discourse-in-globalisation: it originates in an event

celebrating Reggae (one of the best known and most widely spread forms of
‘World Music’), a Caribbean popular cultural icon performed at the Southern
tip of Africa. The DJ is a local black man, as we shall be able to demonstrate
in a moment, but he poses as a ‘Rasta’, that is
he poses as a Jamaican adept
of Ras Tafari, and he makes every effort to produce semiotic tokens that
articulate that impersonation: Jamaican Creole imitations, Rasta slang,
references to Rasta emblems such as smoking weed, knowledge of Reggae
artists, song titles and lyrics. In that sense, we have already one orientation
towards a particular centre: Ras Pakaay orients towards the transnational
world of Reggae and Rastafarism, he ‘climbs into’ an identity which he
124 Journal of Multicultural Discourses

suggests belongs to that world. But let us go a bit deeper into this example
and return to some of the things mentioned earlier.
In this short fragment, Ras Pakaay shifts frequently, and he deploys at least
four different varieties of English. All of them are recognisably South African:
Ras Pakaay has a local, ‘black’ accent whenever he speaks; notwithstanding
that, he has a remarkable competence in different varieties of English. We can
distinguish:

(1) ‘Standard’ English, i.e. a variety which within the local economy of
linguistic resources would qualify as ‘good’, despite the ‘black’ accent;
this variety has been reproduced in Roman in the transcript.
(2) ‘Black Englishes’: varieties that remind us of African
American ‘tough’
varieties, of Hip-Hop slang and ‘talking black’; reproduced in underlined
in the transcript.
(3) Rasta slang and varieties reminiscent of Jamaican Creole, reproduced in
bold in the transcript.
(4) ‘Township English’
a one-word switch (‘otherwise’) betrays a lower-
class accent, widespread in subaltern ‘black’ varieties of English in the
townships; this is reproduced in Courier.
The shifts are minuscule
we are not talking about codeswitching in the
traditional sense here but about small changes within a continuum of
‘English’. The linguistic shifts, however, co-occur with a number of other
shifts, and together they produce the sort of dense feature packages mentioned
earlier, and they structure the discourse.
(1) Standard English seems to belong to a place: UCT. Being a black student at
UCT means being in a prestigious and previously inaccessible place
an
elite place where elite status is articulated, amongst other things, by high-
quality Standard English. Ras Pakaay uses Standard English as his
‘neutral’ mode of interaction on UCT Radio, and he also shifts into it
whenever he thematises UCT Radio itself, as in the time announcements.
Standard English, in contrast to some of the other varieties, does not seem
to flag gender roles or specific topics
it is a class variety tied to a
particular physical and social space.
(2) Black English occurs in Part 2 of the fragment
the part in which Ras
Pakaay narrates an incident with a caller who got cut off just as he was
going to put him on air. It is a variety that correlates with narrative style,
but it also occurs here and there in his conversation with the female caller.
It is a high-performance variety: its use is accompanied by creaky voice, a
slow and truncated pace of talk, heavy stress on some syllables, etc. Black
English is also gender-marked: it organises an outspokenly masculine
voice producing ‘tough’, black-male-peer-group talk. Black English is not
tied to any particular place, it belongs to a transnational network of male,
black, urban and lower-class, disenfranchised youngsters.
(3) Rasta Slang co-occurs with a clearly marked thematic domain: Reggae and
the Rastafari ways of life. Whenever Ras Pakaay refers to songs or to his
radio show, for instance, he shifts into Rasta Slang and inhabits a Rasta
persona. Rasta Slang connects Ras Pakaay to transnational networks of
Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis 125

Reggae fans and Rastas. Like Black English, Rasta Slang is a high-
performance variety, and whenever Ras Pakaay shifts into it, we notice
singing, heavy stress on some words or syllables, dragged out vowels,
rhythmic production of song titles etc.
(4) Township English occurs only once, in a repair strategy which Ras Pakaay
develops after being challenged by the girl (‘why you laughing at me?’).
The girl’s challenge breaks the interactional routine in which Ras Pakaay
normally asks the questions, and the repair work involves a dramatic shift
in footing by Ras Pakaay, away from the high-performance, bragging and
self-assured verbal display towards a serious, flat, apologetic utterance in
which he lapses into the only egalitarian code used in this fragment:
Township English. Township English situates talk in the poor black
townships
it indexes place and class
and in that sense it is similar to
Standard English, both being recognisable accents occupying opposite
ranks on the prestige hierarchies within a real social geography in the
Cape Town area. Its use defines Ras Pakaay as a member of the
communities living in these townships, and its use is triggered by
egalitarian male
female interaction
it is gender-sensitive, but in a
very different way than Black English was.
The four varieties also seem to organise particular participation frameworks
(in the sense of Goffman, 1981). Ras Pakaay, of course, goes public: as a DJ,
whatever he says is audible for a large and undifferentiated audience. But his
radio show also offers slots for dialogue with individual members of that
audience, and so we get a complex and layered pattern of participation, in
which the four varieties again seem to play an organising role.

(1) The ‘high-performance’ varieties Black English and Rasta Slang, one
could argue, are audience-directed, they target the wider community of
listeners rather than individual callers, and they design Ras Pakaay’s
public persona during the show.
(2) Standard English is also audience-directed (it is the ‘neutral’ code of UCT
Radio), but it is used as well in conversational involvement with callers.
The contrast with Township English allows us to infer that Standard
English allows Ras Pakaay a speaking position which Goffman called that
of a ‘principal’: ‘someone whose position is established by the words that
are spoken’ (Goffman, 1981: 144)
an institutional persona related to a
place and a social class.
(3) Township English, finally, here represents a brief moment of strictly one-
on-one conversational engagement: this is an intimate, egalitarian code
which does not allow any ‘principal’ speaking position for Ras Pakaay, is
thus not made to be heard by overhearers, and compels Ras Pakaay to get
out of it as fast as he can, back into the audience-directed varieties.
So Ras Pakaay speaks as four different personae: as a member of a privileged
elite associated to a prestige place
UCT; as a tough black male, member of a
transnational tough black male community; as a Rasta and expert on Reggae
music; and as a black township boy trying to appease a black township girl.
126 Journal of Multicultural Discourses

Each time, the shift in variety and identity also triggers shifts in the kind of
relationships Ras Pakaay entertains with his interlocutors:
(1) Standard English, Black English and Rasta Slang are all asymmetrical
codes, codes over which Ras Pakaay has superior control
specialised
registers with restrictions on access, one could say.
(2) Township English is an egalitarian code over which the girl has equal
control.

Ras Pakaay’s preference for asymmetrical codes becomes clear towards the
end of the fragment, when after having produced the flat, prudent Township
English apology to the girl, he gradually shifts back into full performance

shifting topics towards ‘reggae’ and thus reintroducing the code he can
dominate, Rasta Slang, and moving back out of the Township sphere in which
the girl had dragged him, and into the transnational, nonlocal sphere of
Reggae and Rastafarism. For each of the shifts, there appear to be ‘ideal-types’

centres
and Ras Pakaay moves in a polycentric environment with at least
four such centres. The complexity of the polycentric orientations (another
term, one could argue, for ‘codeswitching’) thus performed can be sum-
marised in Table 1.

Table 1 Summary of orientations

Thematic Scope Perfor- In- Gender Partici- Access

domain mance dexes sensitive pation
frame-
work
SE Place: Local Low ‘High’ No Audi- Exclusive
UCT place ence
& class conver-
sational
(princi-
pal)
BE Black
Global High Mascu- Yes Audi- Exclusive
black linity, ence
male tough-
group- ness
ness
RS Reggae, Global High Exper- No Audi- Exclusive
Rastafar- tise, ence
ism Rasta
identi-
ty
TE Gender Local Low ‘Low’ Yes Conver- Egalitarian
roles, place sational
conflict & class (inti-
mate)
Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis 127

Note that in all of this, Ras Pakaay deploys semiotic resources that make
sense locally. We have seen that the labels I used for the varieties must be
understood as referring to relative distinctions within the local repertoires of
speakers, and make sense in terms of a local, real, social geography in which
accents betray social belonging, trajectories and ambitions. In the transcript, I
added phonetic notes, enough to show that Ras Pakaay does not produce
any ‘stable’ variety
South African English shines through in some of his
Black English talk, alongside faint traces of his mock Jamaican Creole.
However, he brilliantly moves along a continuum of variation that
indexically produces relevant distinctions in the specific environment in
which he operates: he plays into the orders of indexicality that are locally
valid and recognisable.
To put it in simple terms: his Jamaican Creole may be oriented towards an
ideal-type
‘real’ Jamaican Creole, as it transpires through Reggae lyrics and
the speech of prominent Rastas
but its realisation is something recognised as
Jamaican Creole in Cape Town. The same goes for Standard English: what counts
is that Ras Pakaay is capable of producing a variety recognised as Standard in
Cape Town
and so on. The variation he displays is simultaneously oriented
towards centres that impose ideal forms and fashions of speaking and inserted
in a locally salient stratigraphy of variation, and apart from an awareness of
‘quality’ and where it comes from, we see that Ras Pakaay and his listeners
operate on the basis of a real, local political sociology of semiosis. In that
particular sociology, Standard English is ‘high’: in a society where ‘good’
English is a rare commodity, tied to particular social strata and places such as
UCT, it is a linguistic variety which unambiguously qualifies people

especially if they are non-white people
as elite members. Township English,
conversely, is a ‘low’ linguistic commodity, one that identifies speakers as
members of a struggling, suffering class and as ethnically
racially marked:
black. But within this black world, as well as within part of the wider world of
transnational popular culture, linguistic varieties such as Black English, and
even more so Rasta Slang, are hip, they are linguistic and semiotic emblems of
racial pride, solidarity and accomplishment-against-all-odds, of black cool.
Thus, even partial realisations of these varieties triggers the indexicalities of
category and personality that operate within this stratified system
a little bit
of Rasta Slang qualifies one as ‘Rasta’ in Cape Town and offers one all the
indexical benefits of that category.

Conclusion
I hope to have shown in the discussion above how concepts such as orders
of indexicality and polycentricity offer us possibilities to connect microscopic
instances of communicative practice to larger-scale political and sociological
patterns and structures. I consider this an interpretive step in which the
detection of what we used to call ‘norms’ and ‘polyphony’ is followed by an
interpretation of such phenomena as praxis, as politically and sociologically
‘determined’ action
action that systemically displays particular, explicable
structures and directions, not just incidentally or as by miracle. It forces us to
reflect on the fact that every emblem of distinction in societies is subject to
128 Journal of Multicultural Discourses

dynamics of availability and accessibility, of inclusion and exclusion, and that

consequently the delicate play of voices in polyphonic discourse tells us a
story of that kind
of availability and accessibility, inclusion and exclusion.
This, then, offers us a view of variation which is less bucolic than the current
ones: difference, we have seen, goes hand in hand with inequality, because
every difference can become distinction
valued, hierarchised emblematicity
of categories and identities.
The polycentric orientations we have seen organise the discourse pro-
duced. They provide its patterns, its ‘order’ and thus account for its
recognisability, value and effect. They provide multiple ‘frames’, in Goffman’s
sense, through which, on which and with which people can make sense, and
they do so in a socially sensitive way, a way which enables some frames to be
played out, organises relations between frames
some are foregrounded and
others (like the interpersonal conversational township frame) remain in the
background. Sociolinguistic micro-shifting of this kind thus illuminates
sociological substrate processes at work in a particular discursive environ-
ment.
Concepts such as these have no descriptive advantage over the existing
ones, and they should not be seen as substitutes for such terms. They offer
an additional analytic dimension to established concepts: a dimension of
system and structure that allows us to investigate the ‘macro’ in the ‘micro’,
rather than just posit or presuppose it. Discourse analysis has a long way to
go before it will get there; but it needs to start from a sociolinguistics that
theorises the conditions under which discourse comes about or fails to do
so.

Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Terry Threadgold and Michael Silverstein for very
useful comments at the Dexus 3.0 Summer School, and to Jim Collins and Stef
Slembrouck for feedback and input on many other occasions. This paper
expands and recapitulates theoretical points introduced in Blommaert (2005).

Correspondence

Any correspondence should be directed to Jan Blommaert, School of

Culture, Language and Communication, Institute of Education, University of
London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK (j.blommaert@ioe.ac.uk).

Notes
1. An earlier version of this paper was presented as a plenary Lecture for the Dexus
3.0 Summer School, Aalborg University (Denmark), August 2005.
2. Evidence abounds. There is an extremely limited amount of discourse analysis, for
instance, in which linguistic variation and multilingualism are part of the data, and
if we look at authoritative textbooks on discourse analysis, from Brown and Yule
(1983) to Fairclough (2003), we notice that (a) language variation is hardly ever
mentioned as a factor to consider in discourse analysis and (b) that non-English
examples are very rare. Key concepts such as ‘cohesion’, ‘genre’ or ‘style’ are
invariably described as intralanguage features of textuality. I like to note, as an
exception, the work done by Hill on ‘mock Spanish’ insertions in US English
Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis 129

speech
an extremely salient form of micro-shifting with interpersonal, dis-

cursive-structural and political dimensions (Hill, 2001, 2005).

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Jan Blommaert is Professor and Chair of Languages in Education at the Institute

of Education, University of London, and Finland Distinguished Professor at
the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He is the author of Discourse: A Critical
Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2005), co-author (with Jef
Verschueren) of Debating Diversity (Routledge, 1998) and editor of Language
Ideological Debates (Mouton de Gruyter, 1999).

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