Sociolinguistics Symposium 19
Freie Universität Berlin | August 21-24, 2012
Programme: accepted abstracts
Abstract ID: 119
Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)
Prefixing lingualism: Trans, poly, metro or zero?
Authors: Pennycook, Alastair
Submitted by: Pennycook, Alastair (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)
This thematic session will discuss and compare newly coined terminology that has recently been used to describe either new forms of multilingualism (the central idea being that multilingualism itself is changing) or to address what has perhaps always been the state of multilingualism (the idea being that it is not so much current changes that demand new ways of thinking but that the old ways of thinking have never been adequate). Drawing on data from different educational and urban contexts, with a particular focus on language in the city, the presenters will explore the differently prefixed lingual contexts with which they are familiar. The aim of this thematic session is by no means to set these in competition with each other but rather to explore why such terms have emerged, how they may help or hinder an understanding of contexts of multilingual language use, and what new understandings have been opened up through this work. While an emphasis on multilingualism – and a corresponding critique of the ‘monolingual mindset’ that was deemed blind to multiple language use – has opened up important avenues of study, emergent critiques have started to suggest that common thinking about multilingualism still bears the monolinguistic ideologies that were part of the formation of sociolinguistics: The idea of multilingualism seemed to signal the use of multiple languages without taking into account the far more dynamic uses of linguistic resources that appeared to be the norm in many contexts.
Perhaps the most widely used of these new terms is translanguaging, referring to “ the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages” (Garcia, 2009: 141). Creese and Blackledge (2010) advocate a form of translingual pedagogy, in which monolingual instructional approaches are eschewed in favour of teaching bilingual children by means of a bilingual pedagogy. Drawing on their research in Danish schools, Jørgensen (2008) and Møller (2008) have proposed the notion of polylingualism to capture the ways in which children may draw on all available linguistic resources or features to achieve their goals, and may not orient at all towards ideas such as switching or mixing. In a related vein, Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) have been attempting to encapsulate the dynamics of mixed urban language use through their conceptualization of metrolingualism. Here the city (metro) becomes the modifier (prefix) of lingualism, rather than the enumerative strategies of multi- or pluri-lingualism. Jaspers (2011), meanwhile, has discussed the ways in which the linguistic hierarchies evident in Belgian public discourses of ‘zerolingualism’ (akin in some ways to the old term semilingualism, that is, failing to achieve in either a first or second – here Dutch – language) are both challenged and reproduced in the ways in which some Moroccan-Flemish youths engaged in linguistic caricatures of broken Dutch (‘illegaal spreken’). Each of these discussions shifts common understandings of multilingualism in useful ways; the goal of this thematic session will be to take this collective discussion further.
Questions
Have the older prefixes for lingualism (bi/ multi/ pluri) become too fixed?
Should we be trying to reinvigorate these old terms with a new dynamism or do the new terms take us usefuly forward?
What new dimensions do the new prefixes bring to our understanding of multiple language use?
Why this proliferation of terminology now? New terms for new times or new terms for old themes?
What terms do we need to account for urban and eduational linguistic contexts in current times?
Key words
Multilingualism, translingualism, metrolingualism, polylingualism, zerolingualism
References
Creese, A. and Blackledge, A.(2010). Translanguaging in the bilingual classroom: A Pedagogy forlLearning and teaching? The Modern Language Journal, 94, 103–115
García, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Oxford: Wiley.
Jaspers, J (2011) Talking like a ‘zerolingual’: Ambiguous linguistic caricatures at an urban secondary school. Journal of Pragmatics 43, 1264–1278
Jørgensen, J. N. (2008). Polylingal languaging around and among children and adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism, 5(3), 161-176.
Møller, J. S. (2008). Polylingual performance among Turkish-Danes in late-modern Copenhagen. International Journal of Multilingualism, 5(3), 217-236.
Otsuji, E., & Pennycook, A. (2010). Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity and language in flux. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7(3), 240-254.