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Focusing on multilingualism in late-modern urban environments, this article argues for the neighborhood as a unit of practice mapped by field-specific relations. We show how language use and multilingualism are given social form by conditions of polycentricity and regimes of interactional practice. We present a preliminary typology of different places in an immigrant neighborhood in Ghent (Belgium) that organize different patterns of language use and language assessment. Streets, shops, public health centers, schools, and bars all function as ‘centers’ in the neighborhood, but each one of them allows for or invites different interactional regimes, including perceptions of what counts as an acceptable set of (enacted) language resources from its users. Such densely layered patterns of multilingualism allow us to analyse the production of locality in the globalized era in which old and new forms of transnational movement and intra-national response intermingle.

In this article I want to contribute to the critical linguistic analysis of discourse representation practices in an institutional context. I focus on the minutes of the British parliamentary proceedings. My method is that of a detailed comparison of the printed text of the report against transcripts of the spoken debates. I begin by proposing two central premises for a theory of discourse representation. Applying these to the Hansard data, two fundamental tendencies are noted which reflect the impact of macro social-linguistic determinants on discourse. These I also analyse in the light of their attending ideologies of communication. Thus, one can put forward the existence of a wider ‘representational culture’ which is typical for a literate society like Britain (and whose workings also affect linguistic theory). In addition, I take up the idea that institutions provide the level at which social formations are instantiated and transformed. In this way, I show that an understanding of the Hansard practices also requires one to pay attention to factors which are specific to Parliament itself and which bring about a transformation of the culturally dominant ‘verbatim style’.

Shop and café signs in multiple languages are familiar features of polyglot immigrant neighborhoods. This paper examines such signs, presenting photographic, observational, and interview data from a multisited ethnographic study of language contact in Ghent, an urban Belgian city. Drawing upon diverse ethnographic sources, especially the comparative readings of foreign, immigrant, and native adults, we analyze signs and notices in several immigrant neighborhoods as (a) literacy practices, attending to their contexts of use as well as to their interpretations, and as (b) examples of indexical orders and orders of discourse, asking what hierarchical frames of interpretation and evaluation are brought to bear on the reading of such signs. Our findings show that shop signs and notices are complex indexes of source, addressee, and community, which are manifest in different readers' interpretations. The overall argument addresses several general points: that the study of indexicality helps conceptualize and analyze the rich and unexpectedly broad frames of interpretation readers bring to situated multilingual texts; that concepts of indexical or discursive order contribute to our understanding of multilingual literacy practices in situations of globalized locality; and that, conversely, the study of literacy practices reveals unexpected dimensions of Late Modern discursive orders. Shop and café signs in multiple languages are familiar features of polyglot immigrant neighborhoods. What passersby make of them, how they are read, is a question rarely addressed, but readings will surely vary by purposes of reading, prior experiences with such signs, and knowledge of languages. The field of

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