• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Search for abstracts --- authors title abstract

---

Abstract ID: 129

Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)

Multilingualism and emotions in urban settings

Authors: Pavlenko, Aneta; Dewaele, Jean-Marc
Submitted by: Pavlenko, Aneta (Temple University, United States of America)

Topic. In the past two decades, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and Western humanities in general have witnessed an unprecedented rise of interest in phenomena variably referred to as affect, emotions, or feelings (Lutz, 1988; McElhinny, 2010; Wilce, 2009). More recently, these phenomena began to be incorporated in the understanding of sociolinguistics of multilingualism (Dewaele, 2010; Pavlenko, 2005).

Studies of language contact reveal that emotions are implicated in a range of language phenomena from language maintenance (e.g., Mitchell, 2009) to language attrition (e.g., Schmid, 2004). Positive emotions were shown to influence L2 learning and language shift through affective investments into languages associated with desirable identities and urban life styles (Gal, 1978; Kinginger, 2004; McDonald, 1994; Norton, 2000; Piller & Takahashi, 2006). In the 1960s in France, for instance, peasant Breton mothers refused to transmit Breton to their children behaving as if the language itself “smelled of cow-shit” while French offered affinity and sophistication moving them up the social ladder all the way to urban middle class (McDonald, 1994). Drawing on Foucault (1980), Piller and Takahashi (2006) argued that in some contexts language desire may become a hegemonic instrument through which individuals conspire in their own oppression. They showed that in Japanese urban settings, the English teaching industry draws on the discourse of akogare, a desire for West and Western men, to become a powerful intermediary between female consumers and an English-speaking identity. Importantly, affect is never just positive or negative – most of the time, including in the context of language shift, we see a complex interplay of positive and negative emotions. Negative emotions may also come to dominate multilingual interactions. In the context of ethno-linguistic conflicts, ethnic strife, migration, and war, certain languages may become linked to the history of emotional trauma, discrimination, and persecution, leading to language rejection, be it of  German linked to the Holocaust (Pavlenko, 2005; Schmid, 2004), Russian linked to the history of occupation (Pavlenko, 2008) or Hindi linked to oppression and domination (Mitchell, 2009).

Rationale of the session and its aims and objectives. While informative, the research on the sociolinguistics of affect in multilingual settings has been largely descriptive and limited to a narrow range of phenomena, such as language shift, maintenance, learning and attrition. The purpose of the proposed thematic session is to draw on recent advances in the understanding of the role of affect in the new economy (e.g., Heller, 2003; McElhinny, 2010) and postcolonial settings (e.g., Mitchell, 2009) and to open up a more critical and comprehensive inquiry into political, economic, social, and cultural aspects of the interrelation between globalization, multilingualism, and affect, into mechanisms by which languages become vested with affective meanings in contemporary urban settings, and into the factors that shape emotion vocabularies and affective repertoires in multilingual settings.

Discussion questions and the issues examined in the contributions to this session include but are not limited to the following:

• discursive construction of languages and emotions in multilingual settings, with particular attention to the sites of ethno-linguistic conflict and processes by which languages become vested with affective meanings
• affective socialization of bi- and multilingual children and adult migrants

• affective repertoires of bi- and multilingual speakers, including factors affecting emotion term semantics in multilingual settings
• affect and identity performance in multilingual urban settings;  
• globalization and neoliberal transformations of emotional labor, including paid and unpaid reproductive work, such as domestic work, child care, elder care, and sex work   
• commodification of affect in multilingual urban settings, including the service industry   
• affective dimensions of multilingual city landscapes
•  globalization of the semantic space, that is adoption and spread of English-language emotion categories, such as ‘frustration’

Key references

Dewaele, J.-M. (2010) Emotions in multiple languages. Palgrave Macmillan.

McElhinny, B. (2010) The audacity of affect: Gender, race, and history in linguistic accounts of   legitimacy and belonging. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 309-328.

Mitchell, L. (2009) Language, emotion and politics in South India: The making of a mother tongue. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Pavlenko, A. (2005) Emotions and multilingualism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Wilce, J. (2009) Language and emotion. Cambridge University Press.