More than English

If I type multilingual welcome signs into Google's image search, my screen fills up with options of posters to buy, just like the one above, on the outside of a local school.

I find this sign fascinating because I have found none of these languages publicly visible in the streets of my immediate environment. Yet they are placed here, amassed at the school, on the outside wall facing the street.

It sets me wondering how many languages the staff use for communication. Whether any of those languages besides English are on this sign. I wonder what languages the children bring into school. I wonder what support is available for children arriving with very little English at their command to a place where I assume English is the medium of instruction.

I'm intrigued too, by the many multicoloured words, which I assume each convey only the Welcome bit of the English phrase. Positioned under the English phrase in a quarter-size font in a broken column design they suggest to me that in the mixed hierarchies of languages, it is the English language which draws other languages together - perhaps the reading order I bring to the sign of a heading followed by text has this effect of submerging the differences between the languages: English is somehow the language that unites them, and this is greater than all the differences between them.

That interpretation is perhaps reinforced by the yellow Welcome, echoed at the base, and occupying a right-of-centre position, perhaps where an informal letter would be signed - thus English, the first speaker, the person beginning the greeting, encloses and wraps all other languages, top to bottom.

The phrase Welcome to Our School! is the beginning of a narrative, too: the visitor arrives in this place, where hospitality is expected by the residents. Why are they visiting? Did the visitor arrive unannounced? Are the residents of this place surprised by their visitor? I can imagine the drama unfolding. I wonder if there is a matching sign on the other side of the wall which reads Goodbye from Our School!

As a genre of school signs - and there are plenty of choices to buy of such multilingualism - I wonder about the sincerity of them. I doubt all these languages exampled are spoken here, and there may be languages in this school that are not represented on this sign. For my preference, it would be more satisfying to see a sign uniquely made to this specific place, perhaps made by the children themselves.

But as a school supplies sign, it conveys the idea of welcome, and as an idea, welcome, to convey alongside the more general school prohibition notices in what is a highly controlled space, then that juxtaposition perhaps leads to another discussion.

Speaks to an audience

Here's a shop front in a local town square.

At first I think, I cannot imagine a situation where I would use this shop. The signage We Buy Gold for Cash  suggests to me, this is a pawnbroker. Locally, we have several.

These days the name Pawnbroker has disappeared (due to an association with illegal trading in stolen goods). But pawnbrokers - offering loans to people who leave items of personal property as collateral - are still needed by those who manage their finances between goods and cash.

But the circumstances where I'd actually use a pawnbroker's? To pawn my mother's gold and alexandrite ring? Life would be pretty exceptional. I'd need a life/death moment, something out of a novel, where I had to give up the things of value to me in exchange for hard cash. (In a novel, it might come with a moral judgement made by the characters, the writer, or the reader.)

But this shop also offers flights where tickets probably amount to several thousand pounds.

And while you're booking the flight, you can transfer cash. Clearly, this shop - or rather this business service offering small-scale financial management - seems to assist in flowing money or assets around the world. More specifically, as Google helps inform me, all the banks listed in the window are Pakistan-based banks.

Thinking about this financial services centre - instead of walking past it and ignoring it, as I normally do - begins to tell me something about the ethnic community - my neighbours - who share this local town.

Here is a service centre for people, probably with extended family links to Pakistan, who travel perhaps at short notice between the two locations. For this group of people, goods are part of a routine trading; money conversion is normal and objects of value can be a means to an end.

So I'm looking at a centre which makes sense. It caters for a fluid, mobile population, much more global than me with my local mind-set, and much more accommodating than me when it comes to holding finances in different forms and moving funds between countries.

The one thing that stands out for me then, is that I'm not looking at Urdu, Punjabi, or Sindhi (I wouldn't be able to tell the visual difference): I'm looking at English, in a no-nonsense style, like Helvetica, writ large, written for English-speakers.

It leaves me thinking, I should be wiser about my local town. Perhaps I should even start talking to the neighbours.