The lovers of English poetry among you will recall how the phrase “Betreten verboten” (“No trespassing”) encapsulates his alienation from Berlin and his longing for his English home for Rupert Brooke. Prohibition signs – signs that tell us what not to do– have become much more widespread in the century that has passed since Brooke noticed them on German lawns. This is due to a proliferation of spaces in which people who can no longer be expected to share the same set of norms congregate and circulate (airports, for instance, are a prime space where prohibition signs appear). At the same time, we also have seen a proliferation of rules and these rules often differ across spaces that even one single urban person might frequent in the course of their daily activities (e.g., the increase in smoking bans).

I have a hunch that prohibition signs are more likely to be multilingual than other types of signs (and I’m expecting that my students’ assignment will throw some light on whether that hunch bears out in Sydney’s suburbs). My hunch is based on the fact that humans often take a dim view of “the other” and tend to expect outsiders to be less compliant than insiders. As evidence for my hypothesis I have collected signs such as the one above. This hexalingual sign appears in the canteen of a Soviet-style hotel in Prague. The management of this budget hotel is clearly worried that guests might take the opportunity of the buffet-style breakfast to fill their lunchboxes, too. One thing that the sign obviously does is to mark the hotel as budget accommodation and to position its guests as cheapskates. What’s more, the language choices on the sign clearly address cheapskates of particular linguistic backgrounds. When I stayed in that hotel, most guests were Czechs, Germans and Russians, and it is entirely possible that the six languages represented are the languages of the majority of guests, and including any more languages would not have been useful (nor practical; as it is, the sign is huge).

While the language choices in the above sign in a multilingual tourist destination in the heart of Europe don’t single out a particular group as likely offenders, this sign does. I found this little flier in a hotel room in Sydney. I have a large collection of signage in Australian hotel rooms and they are mostly monolingual in English. In the minority of multilingual hotel room signage, Chinese figures rarely. This sign is thus exceptional in its bilingualism, its language choice, and even in the fact that Chinese appears above English. Clearly, someone is trying very hard to send a message to Chinese guests. When I stayed in that hotel, there were no Chinese guests present. The sign thus does double duty: not only does it alert guests to the prohibition against smoking, it also positions Chinese guests as likely offenders! The non-smoking sign below from a New Zealand train does exactly the same thing: again, we find a bilingual sign in a context dominated by monolingual signage. Again, the other language, Japanese in this case, stands out not only because of the choice itself but also because of its design (this time it’s not the position but the size and color).

Proponents of multilingualism often like to think that bi- and multilingualism per se are better than monolingualism, and that multilingual signs by their very nature are more inclusive than monolingual ones. Not so! It all depends on the context! While these signs include Chinese and Japanese readers as potential recipients of the message, they exclude them from “polite society” by singling them out as likely offenders.