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.