The question behind this course is simple: what can we learn about a society by paying attention to the languages on its streets? Paris is a particularly good place to ask it. French has a privileged legal and symbolic position in France, but everyday Paris is multilingual. Arabic, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Hindi, Tamil, and many other languages are visible in particular neighborhoods, businesses, institutions, and forms of public communication. Their presence is uneven, and that unevenness gives us a way to study migration, colonial history, citizenship, neighborhood identity, and ideas about who belongs.

We begin with Arabic-speaking Paris, especially the parts of the city shaped by migration from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. In Barbès, La Goutte d'Or, and Château Rouge, students will document storefronts, advertisements, community notices, menus, and other public texts. Part of the work is learning to ask what each of these texts is claiming. A shop sign in Arabic script addresses a different public than the same business name rendered in French, while a handwritten community notice, a commercial logo, and an official municipal plaque each assert a different kind of authority over the space they occupy. We then use the same methods in the 13th arrondissement and La Chapelle, where Tamil, Chinese, Vietnamese, and other Asian diasporic communities reflect different histories of colonialism, labor migration, and displacement. Belleville gives us a final comparative site where several histories and linguistic communities overlap. The point is not to catalogue every language in Paris, but to ask how languages change in visibility, status, and meaning when communities move and settle elsewhere.

The first few days introduce a practical sociolinguistic toolkit: linguistic landscape analysis, geosemiotics, language ideology, prestige and stigma, diglossia, multilingual repertoires, and the relationship between language and place. Fieldwork starts almost immediately, so students begin using these concepts as they learn them. Later classes add the historical and political context needed to make sense of what students have seen, including colonialism and decolonization, postwar migration, language policy, and the prescriptive tradition represented by institutions such as the Académie française, which has long played a prominent symbolic role in defining what counts as legitimate French. The final week turns more directly to speakers and institutions: accent, social judgment, heritage-language maintenance, linguistic discrimination, and language in employment and public life.

Fieldwork is central to the course. Students learn to observe closely and then to analyze what they have observed, grounding their interpretations in current sociolinguistic scholarship rather than first impressions. Depending on the site and the question, fieldwork may include photographic documentation of public text, conversations and interviews with store owners, community members, and local organizations, and analysis of publicly available materials such as municipal signage, advertising, menus, and neighborhood publications. No prior knowledge of French, Arabic, or any other language is required. Students are encouraged to draw on whatever languages they already bring, and those repertoires often open doors in the field. By the end of the course, students will have learned to read Paris not simply as a multilingual city, but as a place where language makes histories of migration, power, inequality, and belonging visible. Expect to be on your feet and outdoors for much of the course, in markets, on commercial streets, and in neighborhoods across the city, so comfortable shoes, sunscreen, and a water bottle matter as much as a notebook.

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This course is 3 Rice credit hours.

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This course is currently under review for D1 and Analyzing Diversity credit.

Priority Deadline: December 9, 2026
Final Application Deadline: February 15, 2027

For details on these two deadlines, please navigate to the How to Apply section of the Program Information & FAQs page.

For questions regarding the course content, please contact the course instructor (see below).

For questions regarding the program (budget, application process, financial aid, global awards), first read through the Rice Global Paris Summer Program Information and FAQs page on our website. If you cannot find the answer to your question, email us at globalowls@rice.edu.