Understanding Multilingualism: A Complex Interplay of Languages and Communities, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Linguistica

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Multilingualism and

multilingual speech

communities

 (^) ELCS0042 LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY: AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLINGUISTICS  (^) Week 2

‘We need to free ourselves of the tyranny of monolingualism’ ‘Monolingualism is the carbon dioxide of cultures. Multilingualism is oxygen for cultures’ ‘We shouldn’t think of languages in terms of hierarchies – that one language is better than another. We need to think of them as a network’ Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Edinburgh Book Festival, 2018

 What is multilingualism?

 Why do individuals and

speech communities use

more than one language?

 Multilingual London

 (^) (Top Language project by Oliver O’Brien, Dept of Geography, UCL). Tube tongues and Twitter tongues projects:  (^) https://maps.cdrc.ac.uk/#/metrics/lang uage/default/BTTTFFT/13/-0.1722/51. 66/

What is multilingualism? ‘Multilingualism … should not be seen as a collection of “languages” that a speaker controls, but rather as a complex of specific semiotic resources, some of which belong to a conventionally defined “language”, while others belong to another “language”. The resources are concrete accents, language varieties, registers, genres, modalities such as writing – ways of using language in particular communicative settings and spheres of life’. (Blommaert 2010: 102. Italics in original)

What does it mean to know a language? What about being fluent in a language? ‘Like “language” and “dialect”, “mother tongue” is not a technical term and there are many problems with its use. In one of its popular senses, the term “mother tongue” evokes the notion of mothers as the passive repositories of languages, which they pass on to their children.’ (Romaine 2000: 37)

Categories of multilingualism

 In sociolinguistics we identify different types of

multilingualism: societal multilingualism and individual

multilingualism, flexible and fixed multilingualism.

 Societal multilingualism: several languages are used in a

particular speech community for social and communicative

reasons.

 Individual multilingualism: an individual person may know

more than one language due to family background or

education, but these languages may not be used in the

individual’s speech community outside of the home or school.

How do you become multilingual?  (^) First language acquisition One parent – one language (one or more languages may be non-dominant) Non-dominant home languages (both parents)  (^) Second/third (LX) language acquisition

1. educational second language acquisition (conscious language learning)
2. untutored (natural/unconscious) second language acquisition

Mono- and Multilingualism:

one nation – one language?

 (^) Continuum from monolingualism to multilingualism (Weber and Horner 2012: 69-70)  (^) Increasing multilingualism: Wales, Spain.  (^) Decreasing multilingualism: Ukraine. Luxembourg?  (^) Multilingualism vs parallel or plural monolingualism (Heller 1999: 271; Otsuji and Pennycook 2011: 45).  (^) What is the ‘monolingual mindset ’ (Clyne 2008)  (^) ‘… regards monolingualism as the norm and multilingualism as “exceptional, deviant, unnecessary, dangerous or undesirable” or even … as theoretically impossible’. (Weber and Horner 2013: 104, quoting from Clyne 2008: 348)

Multilingualism and domains of language use  (^) What is a ‘ domain of language use’? ‘Certain social factors – who you are talking to, the social context of the talk, the function and topic of the discussion – turn out to be important in accounting for language choice in many different kinds of speech community’ (Holmes 2013: 21) DOMAINS: Family , Friendship , Religion , Education , Employment

WHAT IS DIGLOSSIA? ‘Often each language or variety in a multilingual community serves a specialized function and is used for particular purposes. This situation is known as “diglossia”’. (Romaine 2000: 46) Holmes’ gives the following definition, which is narrower:

1. Two distinct varieties of the same language are used in the community, with one regarded as a high (or H) variety and the other a low (or L) variety.
2. Each variety is used for quite distinct functions; H and L complement each other.
3. No one uses the H variety in everyday conversation.

WHAT IS CODE-SWITCHING? Alsation-French codeswitching, from Penelope Gardner-Chloros 2009: 1. Gardner-Chloros 2009: 4.

Code-switching: further definitions and reflections ‘Bilingual individuals living in bilingual communities are regularly faced with the question of which language to use. In many cases, the answer is not that they choose either one language or the other, but rather that they select now portions of one language and then of another, alternating back and forth. To outside observers not familiar with this language practice, it is hard to recognise any pattern, to the extent that the language being spoken cannot be identified. The resulting admixture has, therefore, often been considered a deficient and bastardized blend, certainly not a language worthy of that name. It has also been assumed that speakers engaging in such communication practices are forced to do so because their command of the languages involved is limited … Assuming that code-switching constitutes a skill, what does it consist of? … [I]n terms of cooperation, transmitting information and building rapport, bilingual conversations involving code-switching function much like monolingual conversations, smoothly and without disruption. This is what makes code-switching such an intriguing phenomenon, undermining as it does the fundamental assumption that in trouble-free linguistic communication interlocutors follow the rules of one shared language ’. (Coulmas 2013: 123, 127-128. Bold GH)

Fuzzy boundaries between code-switching and other multilingual processes Two year abroad students from the UK in a city in Germany Freya: Oh sorry, I can’t meet at 2 tomorrow, as I have to go to the bloody AUSLÄNDERMELDEAMT to ANMELDEN. [‘Ausländermeldeamt’ = Registration Office for Foreign Residents; ‘anmelden’ = to register] Josephine: Oh no, poor you. ANMELDEN is such a drag. ABER WENN ES SEIN MUSS, MUSS ES SEIN. [‘anmelden’ = ‘to register’; ‘aber wenn es sein muss, muss es sein’ = ‘if it has to be done, it has to be done’] Why do the speakers code-switch? How does it differ from the previous example (if at all)? REASONS:  (^) Situational : topic, environment, participants  (^) Affective: to convey personal feelings towards the situation.  (^) Metaphorical : to draw on the culturally significant German expressions that can’t be expressed as succinctly in English. A case of code-mixing or code-switching? Source: owlcation.com

BUT …  (^) ‘There is also a growing discussion of the fluidity of codes, and such codes are perhaps better described from an ideological perspective than from a linguistic one … Thus we will use the term multilingual discourse instead of code-switching or code-mixing, as these latter terms imply a normative monolingual ideology ’. (Wardhaugh and Fuller 2014: 86. Bold GH)  (^) Some of the reasons why we do not rely too forcefully … on a separation between intralanguage (between varieties of language) and interlanguage (between languages) phenomena are evidenced by the study of translanguaging , because the experience of different linguistic codes is not one where each language or language variety has its own boundaries very firmly defined. (Friedrich and Diniz de Figueiredo 2016: 56. Bold GH)