Susan Gal
,
University of Chicago, Department of Linguistics
Linguistic
regimes and European diversity
This
lecture argues that over a
longue duree
and
from an eastern European perspective (of migrants or potential
migrants) there is today a transformation in the sociolinguistic
regime of Europe: from coercive monolingualism to coercive
multilingualism; from the creation of valued and devalued
“dialects” to the creation of valued vs. devalued
multilingual repertoires. Yet, both regimes operate through
the cultural dynamics of standardization. The paper will compare
today’s official valorization of multilingualism to the way
monolingualism was installed as a norm in 19th c. central
Europe. It will also discuss current eastern European efforts at multilingualism.
A
decade ago, monolingualism was a presupposed norm in Europe
(Blommaert and Verschueren 1998). Increasingly this looks like
the last gasp of an departing nregime. By the 1990s, EU documents
called for multilingualism, justified as a democratic response to
regionalist demands and also as a necessity in a “knowledge
society.” The first justification gestured at regional
languages; the second at English. Both, however, were imagined
through an ideology of “standard” (Gal 2006).
Speakers of minority languages who demanded EU recognition were
recreating, at the scale of the region, the same dynamic of
standardizing exclusion that they suffered as minority-speakers. By
choice of forms, a minority-language standard excludes (and thus
derogates) the speech of many of the same people whose linguistic
practices it was supposed to valorize. This process of fractal
recursion in standardization depends on the co-constitutive values
of “authenticity” vs. “universal instrumental
authority.” Standardizing ideologies make this distinction,
then create a code (the standard language) that claims to transcend
it. European national standards index the authenticity of a speaker
when compared with other standards. But within each nation-state,
the standard is heard as an authoritative, neutral “voice from
nowhere,” (Woolard 2006). Extending this dichotomy to both
larger and smaller scales in an effort to encompass and disarm the
claims of not only regional but now also migrant languages, recent
European Commission documents embark on what Moore (2009) has aptly
called a “standardization of diversity.” Europe itself
is constituted as multilingual-in-essence and so is the idealized
European: speaking a vehicular language (English) for instrumental,
business transactions, plus a mother tongue,
and
a
“freely chosen” language of “affinity” for
pleasure and authenticity.
While
clearly an extension of standard ideology, this valorization of
multilingualism is also the sign of a new sociolinguistic regime,
one concomitant with “superdiversity.” It is part of the
effort to manage diversity by re-stratifying the continent through
linguistic means. Seeming to value all multilingualism, it
implicitly makes distinctions among multilingual repertoires.
Trilingualism in English, French/German and one other language is
becoming the indexical sign of pan-European elites in business,
academics and politics. East European speakers are often
“only” bilingual. The specific repertoires of East
European, Asian and African diasporas, even if tri-lingual, rarely
make them eligible for such elite status. But some are: My
examples will show that, seen from the east, national origin is
giving way to educational trajectory as the major form of
pan-European elite recruitment. This is instructively reminiscent of
the Habsburg Empire.
Adam Jaworski
,
Cardiff
Centre for Language and Communication Research (CLCR)
Tourism and
the sociolinguistic communities of contact
The
reorderings of contemporary social life under global capitalism
decentre and deterritorialize traditional systems of power and
agency, foster hybrid identities, introduce flexible hierarchies and
multiple sites of plural exchanges (e.g. Hardt and Negri, 2000;
Harvey, 2006). When people’s lives and identities are no
longer so neatly bounded or easily located (Sheller and Urry, 2006;
Z. Bauman, 2000), sociolinguists need to rethink and review some of
the central tropes of their field such as ‘community’,
‘authenticity’, ‘identity’ and, indeed,
‘language’ and ‘society’ themselves. In this
regard, Blommaert (2005), N. Coupland (2007), and Rampton (2009),
amongst others, have written about the need for a sociolinguistics
or discourse analysis that is better able to account for the hybrid,
the translocal, the spectacular, the idiosyncratic, the creative,
and the multimodal (cf. Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001). Following the
lead of R. Bauman and Briggs (1990), contemporary sociolinguists
make a special point of promoting the importance nowadays of
attending to processes of
entextualization
and
recontentextualization
,
as well as to situated, local practices, and to the linguistic
reflexivity and metapragmatic awareness of language users (cf.
Jaworski, Coupland and Galasiński, 2004).
In
its pursuit and endless production of difference, tourism offers
itself as an ideal site for the study of recontextualization:
lifting the everyday into the realm of the fantastical, transforming
the banal into the exotic, and converting use-value into
exchange-value. Tourism not only demands a rethink of certain
sociolinguistic truisms, however; it also helps to re-asses some of
the more traditional social concepts and formations, for example,
with regards the tenacious influence of nationality and national
identity in tourism discourse (Heller, 2008; Thurlow and Jaworski,
2010).
In
this talk, I want to explore some of these tensions by drawing on
the notions of the
commodification
and
dislocation
of
language under globalization. Then I examine several examples of
typical language exchanges in tourism between tour guides and
tourists, as well as instances of linguistic/semiotic landscapes
(Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010), to argue that tourists and their
‘hosts’ operate in transcultural contact zones (Pratt,
1992) characterized by a concentration of specific sociolinguistic
features, such as addressing participants in languages not known to
them, shifting between ‘ordinary’ and
‘performance’ frames, extensive use of formulaic
language, eliciting responses in unison, and engaging in various
forms of verbal play and (risqué) humour, among others. I
conclude by assessing the significance of these ways of speaking for
the enactment of tourists’ and hosts’ identities, and
the reproduction and subversion of dominant ideologies of tourism.
Thus, the talk attempts to make a contribution to a new
‘sociolinguistics on the move’, replacing the
‘sedantrist’ approaches focusing on stable, homogenous
and idealized speech communities, and capturing interactions and
meaning-making between people and places in flux and on the go.
Jan Blommaert
,
University of
Jyväskylä, Department of Languages
Language Policing
In the field of language policy,
literature often focuses on the macro-norms inscribed in
legislation, education and media policies. In this paper, I
argue that apart from 'policy', we should also look at
'policing' in order to understand the dynamics of normativity in
the field of language. Such 'policing' (a Foucaultian concept
referring to processes and practices of bringing and maintaining
order in a social field) touches micro-norms as well as
macro-norms. The suggestion is that we need to look at a wider
panorama of actors and practices in the field of language and
norms, certainly in an age of globalization where multiple new
language policing organisms emerge (e.g. over the internet), and
where language policing becomes increasingly a form of
linguistic border control.
Glyn Williams
,
University College of North Wales, Bangor, School of Social
Sciences
Sociology,
Language and Economy
The
Westphalian state and the industrial economy have coexisted for
almost two hundred years. During this time the state has regulated
its economy and society. It has actively cultivated a
citizenry that shares a common culture and a common language.
Alternative forms of language and culture have been relegated to the
private sphere. It set boundaries around its economy and the
associated labour market, carefully regulating the inflow of
population and capital.
This
uniformity is now being challenged as a consequence of the effect of
globalisation and a new form of modernity. The relationship between
the state, economy and society is restructured. The Knowledge
Economy relies heavily on interaction, communication and shared
meaning. This brings language into the economy in a way that
hitherto was unknown. It is not merely languages as objects
but as the very basis of constructing knowledge that is in
operation. This gives rise to arguments concerning the role of
working multilingualy in fomenting creativity within the knowledge
economy.
The
open economy and flexible labour markets contribute to labour market
segmentation which, in turn, envelops diglossic language group
relations. The relationship between
lingue franche
changes
and languages are freed from the constraints of a state regulated
emphasis on purity and variation. The emphasis shifts to the
social determinants of language use as social practice as one of
many human practices, a perspective that allows room for different
kinds of reflexivity while also engaging with how power constrains
praxis.
Rosemarie Tracy
, University of Mannheim
Now you see
me, now you don't! What it takes to see and foster multilingual competence
A
crucial dilemma in language-related research is that linguistic
competence (both in the Chomskyan and in the sociolinguistic,
“communicative competence” tradition) is not there to be
“seen” or “heard” in any direct sense.
Whatever system we assume behind peoples’ linguistic behavior
has to be reconstructed, and what we can reconstruct crucially
depends on our more or less explicit theories, i.e. on what Karl
Popper once called our “horizon of expectations” (
Objective Knowledge
. 1979:344).
One
major recurring theme in the outcome of LINEE area C,
“Multilingualism and Education”, is the crucial role of
attitudes
,
which obviously shape our linguistic horizon of expectations. While
educators have long known about the relevance of teacher or
experimenter attitudes and biases towards students and, more
generally, towards human and non-human subjects, the seriousness of
the influence of positive and negative attitudes in multilingual
educational settings has, so it seems, been underestimated.
Another
important lesson taught by the research conducted within the LINEE
programme is the extent to which both teachers and students lack
awareness of the linguistic resourcefulness of bilingual or
multilingual speakers. It seems that educational settings, instead
of building on the multitude of resources brought to schools in the
heads and minds of students (and teachers), impose more or less
explicit constraints on students’ (and teachers’)
behavior. While the ability to speak several languages is generally
considered an asset, especially with respect to languages that
“count” in the symbolic market, bilinguals/multilinguals
are typically expected to behave according to monolingual norms,
that is, essentially as if they were not what they are:
competent speakers of more than one language. Area C rightly calls
for an “inclusive language policy” (Franceschini 2009:
48), stressing that language teachers should also be experts in
multilingualism, hence capable of drawing on the metalinguistic
awareness and communicative skills of a linguistically diverse
student body.
I
fully support the recommendations put forth by programme area C. In
addition I would like to draw attention to fundamental and
persistent gaps in public knowledge concerning the nature and
complexity of natural languages and of language use. Little will
change within school and preschool contexts unless those ultimately
in charge of language policies and institutional conditions
recognize what it takes to provide people of different ages with
suitable opportunities for language acquisition. In addition I wish
to stress that the reflection on systematic properties of languages
and communicative behavior is not just the privilege and
responsibility of language teachers but of the whole educational
team of schools, regardless of subject. In this context I will
report on results from my own research on the creative ways in which
bilinguals of various ages and acquisition types (from the
simultaneous acquisition of two languages, to preschool
second-language learners, to adults) draw on their linguistic
repertoires. Based on current projects in preschool and school
settings in Germany I will attempt to demonstrate how insight into
learner grammars and childrens’ pragmatic skills can help
teachers undergo a more or less radical shift from a
deficit-oriented perspective of multilingual competences towards a
competence orientation.