ABSTRACT

Following our earlier work on metrolingualism, we propose an alternative to the demolinguistic mapping of ethnolinguistic communities, which tends to present a bird’s eye view of the city from above, and to present the city as a relatively stable space, with people assigned to particular places, and multilingual and intercultural interactions occurring on the borders where communities meet. We approach urban diversity, by contrast, through more of a cat’s eye view of the city from below, focusing on the very particularity of local interactions. Central to our understanding is the idea of semiotic assemblages, which enables us to show how histories of migration, configurations of suburbs, flows of goods, and deployment of language resources come together at particular moments and places. This paper highlights the semiotics of color (and yellow in particular) in these assemblages, arguing that colour may play a dynamic role in semiotic relations. The momentary assemblopoetics of people, colours, things and linguistic resources are part of the production of the city, and it is this view from below, of everyday multilingualism, of the spatial repertoires that encompass vegetables, people and semiotic resources, that are the stuff of metrolingualism.