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'Translanguaging' or 'doing languages'? Multilingual practices and the notion of 'codes'
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Abstract
translanguaging - a critique (codeswitching)
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This article discusses language practice, ideology, and identity construction among the Kotiria (East Tukano), an indigenous people of the multilingual Vaupés region in northwestern Amazonia. Based on detailed analysis of speech from a young Kotiria girl, it presents a case study of dissonance between reported language ideology-founded on the notion of 'linguistic loyalty' and presumably resulting in norms of monolingual speech-and actual language practice in this region. Drawing from current sociocultural linguistic theory on code-switching and multilingualism, it concludes that the alternations observed in this sample of spontaneous and unguarded speech cannot be explained by appealing to notions of difference, but are motivated by discourse-pragmatic considerations linked to previously unidentified connections between 'indexical ideology' and linguistic practice. Rather than looking for a divergence explanation for language alternation, it postulates a hybrid solution that indicates the existence of an as-yet unacknowledged 'multilingual' speech genre. It provides both a context-specific and data-driven look at language use in the multilingual Vaupés, and offers a theoretical contribution to our more general understanding of ideology and local speech practices in multilingual contexts.
This volume brings together researchers in conversation analysis who examine the practice of alternating between English and German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese in the classroom. The collection shows that language alternation is integral to being and learning to become a bilingual, and that being and learning to become a bilingual are accomplished through a remarkably common set of interactional objects and actions, whose sequential organisations are quite similar across languages and educational sectors. This volume therefore shows that having recourse to more than one shared language provides an important resource for getting the work of language learning and teaching done through an orderliness that can be described and evaluated. The findings and the suggested pedagogical applications described in the volume will be of significant interest to researchers and teachers in a range of fields including second and foreign language teaching and learning, conversation analysis, teacher education and bilingualism.
This study describes multilingual students’ authentic use of their first and second languages in a translanguaging science classroom, from a sociocultural perspective. The study is ethnographic, and has followed some lessons each month in a translanguaging science classroom at a primary school for three years. The observed lessons were documented by four video cameras and four audio recorders, while field notes and different types of students’ texts and other teaching materials were also collected. In order investigate how language operates, and to realise the meaning semantically, we analysed the students’ use of both first and second language to tie paradigmatic relations, and how they move in linguistic loops between languages and discourses. The results illustrate the ways in which a translanguaging science classroom constitutes a resource in joint negotiations of the scientific content and its related language for multilingual students, and benefits the students’ ability to relate and contextualise the science content to prior experience. The creation of translanguaging science classrooms, in which students’ experiences and diverse cultural and linguistic resources interweave with school science, and in which multilingual students are enabled and encouraged to use all available language resources, has important implications for science education.
The study presented here, theoretically framed at the crossroads of sociocultural and decolonial perspectives, draws attention to the sudden proliferation of two specific neologisms in the area of language, education and identity across time and space. It particularly highlights concerns regarding the ways in which these are deployed within scholarship and in schools and teacher education currently in the nation-state of Sweden. The analysis presented in this paper throws critical light on the ways in which the emergence and proliferation of neologisms like translanguaging and nyanlända (newly-arrived) contribute towards (or confounds) issues related to communication and diversity in the educational sector. This is done by juxtaposing the trajectory and deployment of neologisms in relation to social practices across institutional spaces. Such an enterprise is important, given recent calls for flexibility against the backdrop of concerns regarding heterogeneous populations in schools in geopolitical spaces like Sweden. Here expectations regarding both inclusion and learning goals for all students are prioritised agendas. We draw upon data from ethnographical projects at the CCD research group (www.ju.se/ccd) to make our case. This includes naturally occurring interactional data and textual data, for instance, current scholarship, directives from the national bodies in charge of schools and teacher education in Sweden.
This article seeks to develop Translanguaging as a theory of language and discuss the theoretical motivations behind and the added values of the concept. I contextualize Translanguaging in the linguistic realities of the 21st century, especially the fluid and dynamic practices that transcend the boundaries between named languages, language varieties, and language and other semiotic systems. I highlight the contributions Translanguaging as a theoretical concept can make to the debates over the Language and Thought and the Modularity of Mind hypotheses. One particular aspect of multilingual language users' social interaction that I want to emphasize is its multimodal and multisensory nature. I elaborate on two related concepts: Translanguaging Space and Translanguaging Instinct, to underscore the necessity to bridge the artificial and ideological divides between the so-called sociocultural and the cognitive approaches to Translanguaging practices. In doing so, I respond to some of the criticisms and confusions about the notion of Translanguaging.
This article seeks to develop Translanguaging as a theory of language and discuss the theoretical motivations behind and the added values of the concept. I contextualize Translanguaging in the linguistic realities of the 21st century, especially the fluid and dynamic practices that transcend the boundaries between named languages, language varieties, and language and other semiotic systems. I highlight the contributions Translanguaging as a theoretical concept can make to the debates over the Language and Thought and the Modularity of Mind hypotheses. One particular aspect of multilingual language users’ social interaction that I want to emphasize is its multimodal and multisensory nature. I elaborate on two related concepts: Translanguaging Space and Translanguaging Instinct, to underscore the necessity to bridge the artificial and ideological divides between the so-called sociocultural and the cognitive approaches to Translanguaging practices. In doing so, I respond to some of the criticisms and confusions about the notion of Translanguaging.
Translanguaging is a new term in bilingual education; it supports a heteroglossic language ideology, which views bilingualism as valuable in its own right. Some translanguaging scholars have questioned the existence of discrete languages, further concluding that multilingualism does not exist. I argue that the political use of language names can and should be distinguished from the social and structural idealizations used to study linguistic diversity, favoring what I call an integrated multilingual model of individual bilingualism, contrasted with the unitary model and dual competence model. I further distinguish grammars from linguistic repertoires, arguing that bilinguals, like monolinguals, have a single linguistic repertoire but a richly diverse mental grammar. I call the viewpoint developed here a multilingual perspective on translanguaging.
Language is the primary semiotic tool for representing and negotiating social reality, and it is thus at the centre of social and political life. Among its myriad social and political functions is to position speakers relative to a wide variety of phenomena including co-present interlocutors, the activities in which speakers are engaged, and various dimensions of the wider world, including social identity categories and their relative value. To speak is thus to position oneself in the social world, i.e. to engage in identity practices (cf. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985).
Most or all bilingual varieties of the languages spoken in the area between Sri Lanka and Greece have bilingual compound verbs, consisting of a lexical content verb from a donor language and a helping verb from the matrix language. In this paper, these verbs are described and analyzed, and the question is raised whether this widespread occurrence is specifically an areal feature, or a universally available pattern and a question of typological poise—the possibility of a construction arising due to propitious typological circumstances. Pleading for the areal perspective, it is concluded there is the fact that two large and important language families—Turkic and Indo-Iranian—either rapidly developed or already had a productive [noun + verb] construction. On the universalist side, it is clear that native [noun + verb] constructions very easily develop into [verb + verb] constructions in bilingual settings, though not in monolingual settings. This is a cross-generational change that is a contact phenomenon; that is to say, this development does not occur in monolingual, non-contact language settings.
This article describes a fixed pattern of assumptions about language learning implicit in the idea of a national language, and explores their role in failure in the multilingual, multicultural classroom. These examples are drawn from Europe, but they raise important issues for multilingual countries like South Africa with a dominant language of education.In hierdie artikel word 'n gevestigde patroon van aannames ondersoek oor die aanleer van 'n taal soos dit duidelik na vore kom in die opvatting oor 'n nasionale taal; verder word die rol wat dit by mislukking in die veeltalige, multikulturele klaskamer speel, ontleed. Hierdie voorbeelde word aan Europa ontleen, maar dit bring belangrike vraagstukke na vore in veeltalige lande soos Suid-Afrika waar 'n dominante taal van onderrig voorkom.
Light Warlpiri is a mixed language, with Warlpiri and Aboriginal English! Kriol as its sources. It was developed by a group who received codeswitched input in a baby talk register from when they were young. The innovating group conventionalized the input they received and developed morphosyntactic structures beyond those in the input. The development of Light Warlpiri shows that commonly occurring processes in language contact situations, codeswitching and re-analyses of existing forms, play an important role in the extreme outcome of the development of a mixed language, through a two-part process: a) an adult group directed codeswitched speech to children, and b) the children conventionalized and expanded the morphosyntactic structures they heard. The new code is an in-group language and did not emerge in order to indicate a new dual-cultural identity, but since its development it has come to signal the identity of young Warlpiri from Lajamanu.
It is mostly assumed that the way in which languages may be combined within a syntactic unit is such that language A is dominant and language B (embedded language) is inserted (in the form of single words or of larger con-stituents) into the grammatical frame defined by language A (matrix language). The grammar of the matrix language provides the grammatical frame of the sen-tence as a whole, while the grammar of the embedded language is used only in complex insertions to determine the structure of the inserted constituent. We will provide empirical evidence that, on the one hand, simple insertions do not necessarily take on the morphology of the matrix language, but may be treated according to the rules of the embedded language; and, on the other hand, that the language of complex insertions does not necessarily follow the grammar of the embedded language. The 'dominance' of one language over another in intrasentential code-mixing seems rather to be a matter of gradience and can mean different things in different situations of language contact.
Moitos investigadores do bilinguismo senten a necesidade de establecer que un fragmento dado de fala bilingue esta "basicamente" na lingua A, ainda que dun xeito ou doutro tamen poidan estar presentes nel elementos da lingua B. O obxectivo deste traballo e discutir os limites da habilidade do analista a hora de atribuir un fragmento dado de fala bilingue a lingua A ou a lingua B -isto e, determinar unha "lingua base"-, e mais plantexar cal e o camino axeitado de actuacion dentro deses limites -isto e, naqueles casos nos que e realmente factible e util reconstruir que lingua estan os participantes falando "basicamente" nun momento dado (ou durante determinada actividade). Neste estudio sostense asi mesmo que nunha aproximacion interpretativa a alternancia de codigos, baseada na conversacion e cunha metodoloxia inspirada na analise, compre ter moito coidado para non confundir as identificacions das linguas feitas polos linguistas coas feitas polos participantes. Presentanse exemplos de como a "lingua da interaccion" e secuencialmente negociada. Xunto a estes, discutense outros casos que exemplifican as numerosas estratexias de ambiguidade polas que os participantes bilingues poden escoller deixar momentaneamente sen resolver a cuestion da lingua da interaccion
The occurrence of codeswitching, or the seemingly random alternation of two languages both between and within sentences, has been shown (Gumperz, 1976; Pfaff, 1975; Wentz, 1977) to be governed not only by extralinguistic but also linguistic factors. For the balanced bilingual, codeswitching appears to be subject to an ‘equivalence constraint’ (Poplack, 1978): i.e. it tends to occur at points in discourse where juxtaposition of L1 and L2 elements does not violate a surface syntactic rule of either language. If correct, the equivalence constraint on codeswitching may be used to measure degree of bilingual ability. It was hypothesized that equivalence would either be violated by non-fluent bilinguals, or that switch points which are ‘risky’ in terms of syntactic well-formedness (i.e. those which occur within a sentence) would tend to be avoided altogether. To test this hypothesis, I analysed the speech of 20 Puerto Rican residents of a stable bilingual community, exhibiting varying degrees of bilingual ability. Quantitative analysis of their switches revealed that both fluent and non-fluent bilinguals were able to code-switch frequently and still maintain grammaticality in both Lx and L2. While fluent bilinguals tended to switch at various syntactic boundaries within the sentence, non-fluent bilinguals favoured switching between sentences, allowing them to participate in the codeswitching mode, without fear of violating a grammatical rule of either of the languages involved. These results suggest that the codeswitching mode proceeds from that area of the bilingual's grammar where the surface structures of Lx and L2 overlap, and that codeswitching, rather than representing debasement of linguistic skill, is actually a sensitive indicator of bilingual ability.
A continuum of language alternation phenomena is discussed which spans out between the prototypes labelled codeswitching (CS),language mixing(LM),and fused lects (FLs), with CS and FLs representing the polar extremes of the continuum and LM a point in between. In addition, an interpretation of this continuum is suggested according to which the transition CS-LM-FL can be understood as a case of structural sedimentation.
By extending the notion of metroethnicity, this paper proposes the notion of metrolingualism, creative linguistic practices across borders of culture, history and politics. Metrolingualism gives us a way to move beyond current terms such as ‘multilingualism’ and ‘multiculturalism’. It is a product of modern and often urban interaction, describing the ways in which people of different and mixed backgrounds use, play with and negotiate identities through language. The focus is not so much on language systems as on languages as emergent from contexts of interaction. Looking at data from workplaces where metrolingual language use is common, we show how the use of both fixed and fluid linguistic and cultural identities is part of the process of language use. The notion of metrolingualism gives us ways of moving beyond common frameworks of language, providing insights into contemporary, urban language practices, and accommodating both fixity and fluidity in its approach to language use.
The seventh edition of this bestselling textbook has been extensively revised and updated to provide a comprehensive and accessible introduction to bilingualism and bilingual education in an everchanging world. Written in a compact and clear style, the book covers all the crucial issues in bilingualism at individual, group and societal levels.
This chapter forms part of an analytical-interpretative exercise in coming to terms with one of the key concepts in contemporary writings on globalization-affected multilingual classrooms: translanguaging (TL). What is the term’s precise scope? What are the theoretical-methodological frameworks which bear upon the formulation of a basis for its implementation? And how can an answer to these two questions be informed by an analysis of instances where TL has been accomplished successfully in classroom practice? As a specific point of departure, we suggest a triadically formulated question: is translanguaging primarily a sociolinguistic, a pedagogical and/or an interactional concept? And, if the conclusion to be drawn is that an affirmative answer is invited for each of the three dimensions, then how might one understand the various interconnections between these dimensions?
The implementation of translanguaging at school is often seen to have transformative capacities: it will release bilingual subjectivities, and change unequal social structures. In this paper I argue that translanguaging is likely to be less transformative and socially critical than is suggested, because translanguaging research has more in common with the monolingual authorities it criticizes than it may seem, because it trades on causality effects that cannot be taken for granted, and because translanguaging, in some of its representations, is becoming a dominating rather than a liberating force. This does not detract from the value of translanguaging research, nor from the importance of reconciling schools with linguistic diversity. But it may imply arguing this transformation from a different tack.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/borrowing-9780190256388?lang=en&cc=ca
Studies of bilingual behavior have been proliferating for decades, yet short shrift has been given to its major manifestation, the incorporation of words from one language into the discourse of another.
This volume redresses that imbalance by going straight to the source: bilingual speakers in their social context. Building on more than three decades of original research based on vast quantities of spontaneous performance data and a highly ramified analytical apparatus, Shana Poplack characterizes the phenomenon of lexical borrowing in the speech community and in the grammar, both synchronically and diachronically.
In contrast to most other treatments, which deal with the product of borrowing (if they consider it at all), this book examines the process: how speakers go about incorporating foreign items into their bilingual discourse; how they adapt them to recipient-language grammatical structure; how these forms diffuse across speakers and communities; how long they persist in real time; and whether they change over the duration. Attacking some of the most contentious issue in language mixing research empirically, it tests hypotheses about established loanwords, nonce borrowings and code-switches on a wealth of unique datasets on typologically similar and distinct language pairs. A major focus is the detailed analysis of integration: the principal mechanism underlying the borrowing process.
Though the shape the borrowed form assumes may be colored by community convention, Poplack shows that the act of transforming donor-language elements into native material is universal.
Emphasis on actual speaker behavior coupled with strong standards of proof, including data-driven reports of rates of occurrence, conditioning of variant choice and measures of statistical significance, make Borrowing an indispensable reference on language contact and bilingual behavior.
One of the most common phenomena of language use among bilingual speakers is language alternation. Theoretically this is impossible, both grammatically and socio-functionally. Drawing on Ethnomethodology this book addresses the crucial question of how to account for its actual possibility, and offers a critical reading of current approaches.
As the first chapter in Part II, this chapter turns its attention to education. Focusing on the growing multilingualism in schools, the chapter reviews traditional definitions and types of bilingual education. It frames foreign/second language education, as well as bilingual education, as ways of enacting parallel monolingualisms, and then reviews ways in which this is resisted in classrooms all over the world. It also presents ways in which educators are promoting flexible languaging in teaching, transgressing the strict structures of dual language bilingual classrooms, as well as going beyond the traditional view of separate languages literacies.
Discourse Studies is an interdisciplinary field studying the social production of meaning across the entire spectrum of the social sciences and humanities. The Discourse Studies Reader brings together 40 key readings from discourse researchers in Europe and North America, some of which are now translated into English for the first time. Divided into seven sections – ‘Theoretical Inspirations: Structuralism versus Pragmatics’, ‘From Structuralism to Poststructuralism’, ‘Enunciative Pragmatics’, ‘Interactionism’, ‘Sociopragmatics’, ‘Historical Knowledge’ and ‘Critical Approaches’ – The Discourse Studies Reader offers a comprehensive overview of the main currents in discourse studies, both discourse theory and discourse analysis. With short introductions elaborating the broader context, the sections present key selections from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds by placing them into their respective epistemological traditions. The Discourse Studies Reader is an indispensable textbook for students and scholars alike who are interested in discourse theoretical questions and working with discourse analytical methods.
This chapter highlights that for contemporary Modern English, the structural category of gender fits into an expected and universal typology of categories of noun phrases. It is one from among the set of different but consistent ways that certain semantic configurations are expressible in language form. The traditional grammatical category of gender, or gender classes of noun phrases, for example, is a formal distinction from the analytic perspective of reference and predication. In fluidly stratified societies in particular, Labov and others have discovered robust results of just this sort of statistical variability. Feminist theory of language, and its analysis and prescription for linguistic reform, seems correctly and accurately to perceive the pragmatic metaphorical relationship between gender identity and status, though much is cast into the rhetoric of power in a more abstract and less culturally situated form. The linguistic change to be considered has resulted in the contemporary configuration of a different aspect of the structure of Modern English, that of so-called person and number.
Language is closely linked to our social relationships and is the medium through which we participate in a variety of social activities. This fascinating study explores the important role of language in various aspects of our social life, such as identity, gender relations, class, kinship, status, and hierarchies. Drawing on data from over thirty different languages and societies, it shows how language is more than simply a form of social action; it is also an effective tool with which we formulate models of social life and conduct. These models - or particular forms of social behaviour - are linked to the classification of 'types' of action or actor, and are passed 'reflexively' from person to person, and from generation to generation. Providing a unified way of accounting for a variety of social phenomena, this book will be welcomed by all those interested in the interaction between language, culture, and society.
This contribution traces John Gumperz' roots as a dialectologist back to his PhD thesis and shows how his later work as an anthropologist and sociolinguist continues to be indebted to his early training as a dialectologist in the European and American-structuralist tradition. These traditions served both as a starting point and as a point of reference for his later critique of traditional approaches to variation and its social meaning which led to Gumperz' own approach of Interactional Sociolingustics.
The concept of translanguaging is clarified, establishing it as a particular conception of the mental grammars and linguistic practices of bilinguals. Translanguaging is different from code switching. Under translanguaging, the mental grammars of bilinguals are structured but unitary collections of features, and the practices of bilinguals are acts of feature selection, not of grammar switch. A proper understanding of translanguaging requires a return to the well known but often forgotten idea that named languages are social, not linguistic, objects. Whereas the idiolect of a particular individual is a linguistic object defined in terms of lexical and structural features, the named language of a nation or social group is not; its boundaries and membership cannot be established on the basis of lexical and structural features. The two named languages of the bilingual exist only in the outsider's view. From the insider's perspective of the speaker, there is only his or her full idiolect or repertoire, which belongs only to the speaker, not to any named language. Translanguaging is the deployment of a speaker's full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages. In schools, the translanguaging of bilinguals tends to be severely restricted. In addition, schools confuse the assessment of general linguistic proficiency, which is best manifested in bilinguals while translanguaging, with the testing of proficiency in a named language, which insists on inhibiting translanguaging. The concept of translanguaging is of special relevance to schools interested in the linguistic and intellectual growth of bilingual students as well as to minoritized communities involved in language maintenance and revitalization efforts.
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Humankind is a languaging species. This means that as human beings we use language to achieve our goals. Every time we use language, we change the world a little bit. We do so by using language with other human beings, language is in other words social. In this paper we challenge one of the most widely held views of language as a social, human phenomenon, namely that "language" can be separated into different "languages", such as "Russian", "Latin", and "Greenlandic". Our paper is based on a recently developed sociolinguistic understanding that this view of language can not be upheld on the basis of linguistic criteria. "Languages" are abstractions, they are sociocultural or ideological constructions which match real-life use of language poorly. This means that sociolinguistics – the study of language as a social phenomenon -must work at another level of analysis with real-life language use. The first part of our paper presents such analyses of observed language use among adolescents in superdiverse societies. We show that the level of a linguistic feature is better suited as the basis for analysis of language use than the level of "a language". In the second part of the paper we present our concept of polylanguaging which denotes the way in which speakers use features associated with different "languages" – even when they know very little of these "languages". We use the level of (linguistic) features as the basis for understanding language use, and we claim that features are socioculturally associated with "languages". Both features individually and languages are socioculturally associated with values, meanings, speakers, etc. This means that we can deal with the connection between features and languages, and in the analyses in the first part we do exactly that. Introduction Humankind is a languaging species. Human be-ings use language to achieve their goals, and with a few exceptions by using language to other hu-man beings. It is a widely held view that language as a human phenomenon can be separated into different "languages", such as "Russian", "Latin", and "greenlandic". This paper is based on the recently developed sociolinguistic understand-ing that this view of language can not be upheld on the basis of linguistic criteria. "Languages" are sociocultural abstractions which match real-life use of language poorly. This means that sociolin-guistics must apply another level of analysis with observed language use. The first part of our pa-per is based on analyses of observed language use among young languagers in superdiverse so-cieties. We show that the level of feature is better suited as the basis for analysis of language use than the level of language. In the second part of the paper we present our concept of languaging, in particular polylanguaging. We use the level of (linguistic) features as the basis for understand-ing language use, and we claim that features are socioculturally associated with "languages". Both features individually and languages are sociocul-turally associated with values, meanings, speak-ers, etc. This means that we can deal with the connection between features and languages. In the paper we do so.
Translanguaging is both going between different linguistic structures and systems and going beyond them. It includes the full range of linguistic performances of multilingual language users for purposes that transcend the combination of structures, the alternation between systems, the transmission of information and the representation of values, identities and relationships. Translanguaing space is a space for the act of translanguaging as well as a space created through translanguaging. It is a space where the process of what Bhabha calls “cultural translation” between traditions takes place. The notion of translanguaging space embraces the concepts of creativity and criticality, which are fundamental but hitherto under-explored dimensions of multilingual practices. Using a combination of observation of multilingual practices and metalanguage commentaries by three Chinese youths in Britain, the article retells their experiences of growing up in a society which is dominated by a variety of monolingual ideologies, their multilingual practices and the creativity and criticality shown through such practices, the identity positions they construct and present for themselves, and the social spaces they create and occupy within the wider space they find themselves in. It examines the following themes: fun with words, from weekend bilingualism to flexible multilingualism, creating space and cultivating relationships, and transnational space. In examining these themes, a method, called Moment Analysis, is proposed, which aims to capture what appears to be spur-of-the-moment actions that are semiotically highly significant to the actors and their subsequent actions, what prompted such actions and the consequences of such moments including the reactions by other people.