English Literacies in Medellín: The City as Literacy

Is there such a thing as a monolingual city? That question drove the inquiry and analysis reported here of English as a language and semiotic resource in physical spaces in the city of Medellín, Colombia. Combining ethnographic methods with our conceptual framework of ‘city as literacy’, the authors spent 2 years exploring urban literacies stemming from the mixture of English language, multimodal texts and the city itself as a semiotic system. This chapter will discuss instances of creativity, indexicality and multimodal text design found as the researchers walked through restaurants, malls, bookshops, libraries and advertisements in diverse neighbourhoods across the city. This chapter will show a polylanguaged city where English coexists with the dominant language Spanish and where the intermingling of languages is not conflictual but engages with inhabitants’ cultural values. We will also discuss our concerns about using the city as a literacy learning site and developing aesthetic sensitivities about second languages through semiotic analysis.