Sociolinguistics Symposium 19
Freie Universität Berlin | August 21-24, 2012
Programme: accepted abstracts
Abstract ID: 567
Part of Session 197: Urban multilingualism in a context of international mobility (Other abstracts in this session)
Constructing multilingualism in higher education: Policies and everyday practices
Authors: Moore, Emilee (1,2); Nussbaum, Luci (1)
Submitted by: Moore, Emilee (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Spain)
This paper explores the different ways in which multilingualism at a Catalan university is understood in language policies and institutional practices (e.g. official ceremonies, service encounters and classrooms). The particular university studied, like many others across the globe, is simultaneously taking part in processes of internationalisation, related to the increasing introduction of English, and localisation, linked to the maintenance and promotion of Catalan, one of the two official languages. In this regard, linguistic anthropologists have discussed tensions between linguistic ideologies of authenticity, associated with local cultural and identitary values of minority languages such as Catalan, and anonymity, connected to an assumed neutrality and universality of global languages such as English (Gal & Woolard, 2001; Woolard, 2008).
Language policies at the university studied foreground and aspire to harmonize the possible tensions between these two ideological extremes by attributing different functions to languages. The study of language practices reveals that participants also orient to these understandings of multilingualism and thus point to possible tensions (Moore, 2011). However, the tools provided by research on plurilingual, multimodal and institutional interaction (e.g. Auer, 1984; Drew & Heritage, 1992; Mondada, 2004, 2007) help reveal how in everyday practices, university members’ plurilingual repertoires are used in far more complex ways than those accounted for in, or explainable through, institutional language policies.
The analysis thus leads us to argue that through hybrid practices – understood as the spontaneous and simultaneous use of diverse resources, including plurilingualism (Woolard, 2008; Nussbaum et al., forthcoming) – people overcome in everyday interaction possible tensions between what is considered authentic or local and what is assumed to be anonymous or international. The definitions of multilingualism traced in practice, however, often contrast with those in policy documents, which understand multilingualism from a monolingual mindset.
References:
Auer, P. (1984). Bilingual Conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Drew, P. & Heritage, J. (eds.) (1992). Talk at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gal, S. & Woolard, K. A. (2001) Constructing languages and publics: authority and representation. In: Gal, S. & Woolard, K. A (eds.), Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome, pp. 1-12.
Mondada, L. (2004). Ways of ‘doing being plurilingual’ in international work meetings. In: Gardner, R. & Wagner, J. (eds.), Second Language Conversations. London: Continuum, pp. 18 – 39.
Mondada, L. (2007). Bilingualism and the analysis of talk at work: Code-switching as a resource for the organization of action and interaction. In: Heller, M. (ed.), Bilingualism: A Social Approach. New York: Palgrave, pp. 297 – 318.
Moore, E. (2011). Plurilingual interaction at a Catalan university doing internationalisation: Context and learning. PhD thesis presented at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Nussbaum, L., Moore, E., Borràs, E. (forthcoming). Accomplishing multilingualism through plurilingual activities. In: Berthoud, A-C., Grin, F. & Lüdi, G. (eds.), DYLAN Book (provisional title). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Woolard, K. A. (2008). Les ideologies lingüístiques: Una visió general d’un camp des de l’antropologia lingüística. Revista de Llengua i Dret, 49, pp. 179 – 199.
Reseach financed by projects CIT4-CT-2006-028702 (6th Framework Program of the EU) and R+D+i EDU2010-15783 (Spanish MICINN).