Critical Perspectives on Linguistic Fixity and Fluidity

Languagised Lives

Jürgen Jaspers, Lian Malai Madsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429890383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume offers a critical perspective on current views on linguistic fixity and fluidity in sociolinguistics and highlights empirical accounts alternative to prevailing trends in the field. Featuring accounts from a broad range of regional contexts, the collection takes stock of such terms as "polylingualism", "metrolingualism" and "translanguaging" to question perceptions around multilingual and monolingual language use. The book critiques the status of fluid language use as a more "natural" language practice and in turn, its greater potential for corresponding social transformation, demonstrating the value of linguistic fixity and the continuous debate between fixity and fluidity in multilingual speakers' lives. In providing these accounts, the book seeks not to advocate for linguistic fixity or fluidity, but to argue that sociolinguists pay close attention to the way both types of linguistic practice open up or close down avenues for social transformation. This collection is a key reading for graduate students and scholars in sociolinguistics, multilingualism, and linguistic anthropology.

1 Fixity and Fluidity in Sociolinguistic Theory and Practice

Jürgen Jaspers and Lian Malai Madsen

Introduction

Multilingualism is an established topic in the study of language. Self-evident as this statement is, it is useful to remember that up until some 60 years ago it was something of a fringe topic, at best, in the broad field of linguistics, pursued by scholars who dared defy the motto that real linguists should investigate the systematicity of speakers’ cognitive abilities for producing language by relying on introspective intuitions of their own (and singular) native language. Studying multilingualism at the same time has long run up against popular assumptions that it is an exceptional, deviant phenomenon, or that it delays learning and causes linguistic deficiency—assumptions indebted to a predominant view, at least in the West, that communities are naturally monolingual, and to common sense metaphors of the mind as a limited container with room for only one complete language. That the first sentence on multilingualism on the Linguistic Society of America’s website, to take one professional organisation, still posits that ‘[c]ontrary to what is often believed, most of the world’s population is bilingual or multilingual’, illustrates the extent to which a scientific interest in the topic has been accompanied by normalising it as a social fact.

While it would be rash to claim that these fears and misgivings are a thing of the past, it is difficult to ignore the currently more receptive societal climate for multilingualism. Just as diversity has become a corporate value, managerial and policy discourse (especially at EU level) is now rife with praise for multilingualism. In addition, the wider public has not been insensitive to its value, bearing in mind the growing interest in linguistic immersion or content and language integrated learning, attracted by promises of cognitive advantages or increased job opportunities. Multilingualism today matters, then, even if it matters mostly in economic rather than cultural terms, and even if, as several authors have pointed out, the type of multilingualism that is seen to matter in fact concerns a set of parallel monolingualisms, preferably of Western-European cut (see, for example, Heller 2007; Moore 2015).

It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that multilingualism as a term, just when it has become a self-evident topic in the academy and beyond, is facing increasing dissatisfaction among sociolinguists who have been proposing a range of alternatives such as translanguaging, polylingualism and metrolingualism, among others. The main reason for proposing these and other terms is that they shift away from a focus on multiplying, switching or mixing distinct codes whenever speakers combine features that conventionally belong to separate ‘languages’, in favour of a focus on how speakers flexibly combine linguistic features of whatever pedigree, in line with local perceptions of language. Describing behaviour as multilingual may be correct if it corresponds with participants’ conscious alternation of what they see as several linguistic codes (‘French’, ‘Danish’). But on other occasions, such a description is jumping to conclusions, it is argued, since speakers may not regard what they say as ‘using multiple codes’ but as ‘the normal way of speaking’ or as ‘using one code’ if not a ‘continuously changing’ one. The prefix ‘multi’ thus merely pluralises language; it does not help with understanding its complexity (Otsuji & Pennycook 2010: 243). Sociolinguists moreover maintain that the occasions where multilingualism is inadequate for capturing language use are starkly increasing in (often urban) settings characterised by intense migration, mobility and communication technology, and that fluid language use is unnecessarily stigmatised or misrecognised, especially in education. The newly proposed terms for language thus strike several birds with one stone: they evoke a theoretical perspective that overcomes conventional ways of understanding language; they describe fluid linguistic behaviour that deviates from these conventional understandings; and they help draw attention to the normality and the ubiquity of linguistic practices that policymakers are hesitant to register on their discursive radar.

This explains at least partly the current popularity of new terms for multilingualism. Translanguaging, polylanguaging and metrolingualism, to take three of the best-known ones, have each appeared in the title of highly cited publications, and translanguaging in particular has commanded a great deal of attention. There is little that seems to impede the eventual recognition of these terms as the label for a separate province of sociolinguistic research, or as the foundational precursor to a so-called ‘new sociolinguistics’ which more accurately addresses the complexity and unpredictability of contemporary communication. Pending this development, however, we believe that the production and uptake of these terms, and the interest in linguistic fluidity that they represent, merit closer consideration as a scholarly phenomenon, and that an analysis of this phenomenon can contribute to understanding its present salience in sociolinguistics, to examining its viability, and to gauging its potential impact on the world this discipline takes as its object (cf. Salö 2017).

In this introduction we draw attention to three reasons for doing so. A first one is that these terms epitomise an anti-canonical standpoint, against linguistic fixity, the urgency of which appears to invite over-usage given that each term is recruited for descriptive, theoretical and ideological purposes at once. Rather than more, this leads to less precision: the fluidity these terms identify spills over into their flexible application. A second reason is that scholars’ interest in highlighting linguistic fluidity contributes to viewing an investment in linguistic fixity as a sign of false consciousness or conservatism, at the same time as the idea of separate languages is difficult to avoid epistemically and ideologically. The third reason is the principal, but problematic, association of fluid language with ideas of natural language, liberation or transformation. In what follows we give a fuller account of each of these arguments, before explaining how the different chapters in this volume contribute to their elaboration.

Post-language theory

Recent sociolinguistics has seen numerous new terms for characterising the flexible use of linguistic resources commonly associated with separate languages. In addition to polylingualism (Jørgensen 2008; Jørgensen & Møller 2014), translanguaging (García & Li 2014) and metrolingualism (Otsuji & Pennycook 2010), there is codemeshing (Canagarajah 2011), transidiomatic practices (Jacquemet 2005), truncated multilingualism (Blommaert et al. 2005), flexible bilingualism (Creese & Blackledge 2011), heteroglossia (Bailey 2007) and multilanguaging (Nguyen 2012). These terms add to a range of predecessors such as code-switching, code-mixing, crossing (Rampton 1995), fused lects (Auer 1999) and dual lingualism (Lincoln 1975), among others. If daunting at first sight, this terminological profusion usefully allows to distinguish, say, the idea of speakers who communicate each in a preferred, but mutually different, language (‘dual lingualism’) from the short-lived, exploratory experiments into a local out-group’s language (‘crossing’), and the unpredictable combination of linguistic features from diverse sources (‘polylingualism’). It is not unusual either to see several new terms highlight an important insight, and that from the total set of alternatives available at one point, only one or two withstand the test of academic criticism.

The recent stream of terms epitomises an anti-canonical stance. Several sociolinguists have repeatedly insisted that the idea of separate, fixed languages must be seen as an invention and a socio-political tool of nationalist and colonialist projects that long went under the name of ‘modernity’ (Bauman & Briggs 2003; Heller 2007; Makoni & Pennycook 2007). They have argued in addition that these inventions, and the homogeneous speech communities they are commonly associated with, are empirically inadequate for addressing an era of unprecedented sociolinguistic complexity (Blommaert 2010) or the ‘complex linguistic realities of the 21st century’ (Li 2018: 14) which have invited ‘new ways of being in the world’ (García & Li 2014: 9). Because these inventions and concomitant assumptions ‘are so deeply embedded in predominant paradigms of language studies that they are rarely questioned’ (Otsuji & Pennycook 2010: 251), it is recommended to reconsider the existing disciplinary vocabulary:

although notions like ‘native speaker’, ‘mother tongue’ and ‘ethnolinguistic group’ have considerable ideological force (and as such should certainly feature as objects of analysis), they should have no place in the sociolinguistic toolkit itself.

(Blommaert & Rampton 2011: 4–5)

Research on code-switching has been frequently lampooned in this regard as a domain that unnecessarily assumes, upon observing speakers’ use of linguistic features that are usually seen to belong to different ‘languages’, that such speakers combine autonomous linguistic entities. This is not only seen as empirically problematic, but also as reproducing the conditions for problematising speakers as deficient: it implies a view of the ‘perfect’ bilingual as a double monolingual, and of all other bilinguals as people who have difficulty keeping their two codes apart. Terms like metrolingualism or translanguaging are part of an attempt to go beyond these assumptions and undesirable consequences.

Apart from spawning a flourishing of new terms, this anti-canonical stance has been productive in other ways. It has invited scholars to denaturalise common frameworks for language by revealing the continuous activity that is required to construct the idea of separate languages, and by exposing the impact of this activity on the organisation of unequal social relations; it has inspired scholars to focus on non-native, unusual, self-conscious language use in multi-ethnic, ephemeral, practice-related communities rather than on non-self-conscious, regular, native speech in established ethnic or social groups; and it has invited a focus on language as an emergent property of interaction, that is, on how the use of linguistic features co-occurs with other semiotic sign forms, and on how the recurrent production and evaluation of such conglomerates of verbal and non-verbal resources can over time lead to their recognition as a distinctive model for interaction (Agha 2007).

Anti-canonical trends are not without risks, however. As Rob Moore (2007), an educational sociologist, argues, they are likely to invite schismatic discourse. Such discourse temporalises the social world and the research that addresses it by announcing a radical break with the past, both in the sense of postulating a new epoch that is fundamentally different from the previous one, and of carving up the scientific field in traditional pre- and innovative post-approaches. Typical of such discourse ‘is its claim to originality—it is being thought for the first time’ (Moore 2007: 44). But underneath this rhetoric it has a paradigmatic form in that it ‘appears episodically across the intellectual field in its various disciplines and sub-disciplines’ (Moore 2007: 44) to ‘adjus[t] the time frames of intellectual production—rearranging the history of scholarship and the sense of continuities and discontinuities’ (2007: 40). Rather than minimising the value of incisive criticism or the possibility of societal change, Moore cautions that the logic of schism leans towards a simplified representation of both sides of the dichotomy, and to a relative lack of engagement with earlier work that offered similar insights or that addressed comparable circumstances.

While Moore was mainly concerned with how postmodern approaches are distinguished from modern ones, the risks he points up may not be entirely hypothetical in this context (as is noted by Blommaert & Rampton 2011: 3; Makoni & Pennycook 2007: 3; Otsuji & Pennycook 2010: 245–246) when we observe, first, that the idea of languages as distinct codes has a long history of criticism (cf. Makoni & Pennycook 2007: 3). It will soon be half a century since Haugen claimed that the

concept of a language as a rigid, monolithic structure is false, even if it has proved to be a useful fiction in the development of linguistics. It is the kind of simplification that is necessary at a certain stage of science, but which can now be replaced by more sophisticated models.

(1972: 335)

A decade later Strevens pointed out that

A central problem of linguistic study is how to reconcile a convenient and necessary fiction with a great mass of inconvenient facts. The fiction is the notion of a ‘language’—English, Chinese, Navajo, Kashmiri. The facts reside in the mass of diversity exhibited in the actual performance of individuals when they use a given language.

(1982: 23 in Kemp 2009: 16)

Other authors have put forward similar ideas around that time (Ferguson 1982; Gumperz 1982; Harris 1981; Hymes 1973; Silverstein 1979) as well as a century earlier (cf. the references to Schuchardt 1884 and 1909 in Auer 2007 and Piller 2016). This suggests that the insight that the idea of autonomous languages is useful but reductive has long been a part of the sociolinguistic canon, if it has not been relatively mainstream, seeing as it has been formulated by some of the best and most widely acclaimed sociolinguists. Rather than incarnating a radical turn in the discipline, then, the current search for new terms to address the ‘inconvenient facts’ seems to stem from a long-recognised problem, one that probably haunts the entire discipline of linguistics—famously exemplified in Chomsky’s claim that performance features are irrelevant to analysing competence, whereby he recognised the reality of their inconvenience.

Some authors have remarked, secondly, that the perception of substantial societal change, especially in relation to linguistic diversity, may have to be seen as a contemporary Western (European) impression of conditions that it would be difficult to characterise as radically different from what can be observed in contemporary non-Western settings and from historical linguistic practices across the globe (see, e.g., Lucassen & Lucassen 2013 and Mackey 2005, cited in in Wiese 2018; Pavlenko 2018; Piller 2016; also see Collins & Krause, this volume). The representation of extraordinary complexity today may thus depend on the relative oblivion of complexity elsewhere and before (cf. Makoni & Pennycook 2007).

Thirdly, while research on code-switching often serves as a negative counter-example to a proper analysis of contemporary language use, this strand of research itself problematises the use of ‘a “language” [as] a prime of linguistic analysis’ (Auer 2007: 320; MacSwan 2017). To take one example, the key argument of Auer’s (1998) edited volume on conversational code-switching and code-mixing (which includes authors like Jørgensen and Li) is that verbal actions must be understood

not by subsuming (‘coding’) them under pre-established external categories, but by explicating the systematic resources that members of a community, as participants in a conversation, have at their disposal in order to arrive at interpretations of ‘what is meant’ by a particular utterance in its context.

(Auer 1998: 2)

Especially with regard to code-switching, this approach is argued to have

far-reaching consequences, since what linguists tend to take for granted as ‘codes’ (and hence classify as ‘code-switching’) may not be looked upon as ‘codes’ by members/participants […] [I]t is not the existence of certain codes which takes priority, but the function of a certain transition in interaction.

(Auer 1998: 2, 13, 15)

The goal for linguists is then to find when participants meaningfully orient to a juxtaposition between sets of co-occurring linguistic features, which must be done by investigating the possible conversational function of such a contrast and the social indexicality of the features in question. In principle, therefore, there is no guarantee that what participants consider different codes on one occasion they will see as different codes on the next—especially not in communities where a mixed code, and eventually a fused lect, is being developed on the basis of frequent, thus gradually less salient, alternations of linguistic features (Auer 1998: 16–21).

Some of the chapters in the volume subsequently demonstrate that what a linguist may on structural groun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• 1 Fixity and Fluidity in Sociolinguistic Theory and Practice
• Part I Negotiating Fixity
• Part II Pursuing Real Languages
• Part III The Meaning Potential of Fluid Language
• Part IV Dilemmas and Dialectics
• Contributors
• Index