Trajectories of locally occasioned multilingual small stories in Sandton

International audience The research of this paper operationalises small story research (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2008) in a linguistic ethnography of place, using geomapping to trace participant trajectories through a site and thereby examine the emergence and occasioning of narrative interaction. The data for the study consists of photographs, and GPS mapped and transcribed, participant audio recordings. These are analysed using the axes of Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) approach to identity as complemented by a geosemiotic analysis of discursive environment (Blommaert and Maly 2014 and Scollon and Scollon 2003). The resulting exploration of Sandton, Johannesburg, is a ‘new’ ethnography that aims to better understand new language forms within city space. The data I would like to present concerns a series of small stories told by participants. Analysis concerns their stylistic adaptation to the masculine, globalised, modernist, space of Sandton and how this is reflected in their language and stylistic choices. I also look at story content and the use of indexical references as a tactic in positioning with respect to the discourses of the site. Sandton here is conceived synecdochically, standing for the multilingual dynamics towards which South Africa is transiting in its ‘future’ and resuming the current linguistic ecologies at the interface of the global and the local.