• 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: 142

Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)

Deconstructing the urban-rural dichotomy: language dynamism in indigenous language contexts

Authors: May, Stephen
Submitted by: May, Stephen (University of Auckland, New Zealand)

Following Rampton’s (1995) watershed contribution on linguistic crossing, subsequent work in critical sociolinguistics has increasingly turned to the study of urban language varieties, with a particular focus on their dynamism, hybridity and transnational origins and influences. This work has been particularly important and influential in terms of highlighting more nuanced ethnographic understandings of the complex multilingual repertoires of speakers in urban environments. It has also developed alongside an increasing focus in multilingual research on ‘superdiverse’ patterns of migration and post-migration and their implications for language use. Both developments challenge, in turn, the conception of languages as bounded systems (see, Blommaert, 2010; Pennycook, 2010).

     However, attendant upon the increasing focus and celebration of these ‘new’ urban language varieties, and what they represent for the development of critical sociolinguistics, is, we believe, their unnecessary dichotomization with so-called ‘localized’, often indigenous, language varieties. Indigenous language varieties in these critical sociolinguistic accounts are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, viewed as ossified and/or static (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). In line with recent ethnographic accounts of language policy (cf. McCarty, 2011), this colloquium directly contests these presumptions. It will argue that the urban-rural dichotomization of language varieties understates, even ignores, the complex dialectic clearly evident in many indigenous language contexts, including the interaction of local and global language ecologies (Canagarajah, 2005), overlaps and fissures among generations of speakers, and the simultaneity of transmigration and rootedness (Levitt & Glick-Schiller, 2008). This failure to recognize fully the dynamism of indigenous language contexts, in turn, ironically reinforces rather than deconstructs a modernist conception of languages and a related hierarchization of language varieties (May, 2012) – a supposed bête noir of critical sociolinguistics.

References

Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Canagarajah, A. S. (ed.) (2005). Reclaiming the local in language policy and practice.  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Levitt, P., & Glick Schiller, N. (2008). Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society. In S. Khagram & P. Levitt (eds.), The transnational studies reader: Intersections and innovations (pp. 284-294). New York: Routledge.

Makoni, S., and Pennycook, A. (2007). Disinventing and reconstituting languages. In S. Makoni and A. Pennycook (eds.), Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (pp.1-41). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

May, S. (2012). Language and Minority Rights: ethnicity, nationalism and the politics of language. 2^nd ed. New York: Routledge.

McCarty, T. (ed.) (2011). Ethnography and Language Policy. New York: Routledge.

Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a Local Practice. New York: Routledge.

Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longman.