The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language

Suresh Canagarajah

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317624332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

** Winner of AAAL Book Award 2020 **

**Shortlisted for the BAAL Book Prize 2018**

The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language is the first comprehensive survey of this area, exploring language and human mobility in today's globalised world. This key reference brings together a range of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives, drawing on subjects such as migration studies, geography, philosophy, sociology and anthropology. Featuring over 30 chapters written by leading experts from around the world, this book:

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• Examines how basic constructs such as community, place, language, diversity, identity, nation-state, and social stratification are being retheorized in the context of human mobility;

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• Analyses the impact of the 'mobility turn' on language use, including the parallel 'multilingual turn' and translanguaging;

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• Discusses the migration of skilled and unskilled workers, different forms of displacement, and new superdiverse and diaspora communities;

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• Explores new research orientations and methodologies, such as mobile and participatory research, multi-sited ethnography, and the mixing of research methods;

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• Investigates the place of language in citizenship, educational policies, employment and social services.

The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language is essential reading for those with an interest in migration studies, language policy, sociolinguistic research and development studies.

Part I
Concepts

1
Translanguaging in mobility

Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese

Introduction

In order to understand social life in the 21st century we need to understand mobility, and understanding mobility requires attention to the movement of linguistic and other semi-otic resources. In this chapter we ask what we mean by ‘mobility’, and consider mobility as movement in and of geographical and historical locations. To give us purchase on the movement of people and linguistic and semiotic resources in time and space, we develop an understanding of translanguaging which views mobility in relation to trajectories of human emergence or ideological becoming. We can make such processes visible through attention to communicative repertoire and voice.

Overview

In this section we provide an overview of key concepts in relation to language, migration, and mobility. Globalization has compelled scholars to see sociolinguistic phenomena and processes as characterized by mobility. Blommaert (2010) argues that mobility is a central theoretical concern in the sociolinguistics of resources, as it describes the dislocation of language and language events from the fixed position in time and space attributed to them by a more traditional linguistics. An approach to language which concerns itself with mobility views human action in terms of temporal and spatial trajectories. A socio-linguistics of mobility focuses not on language-in-place but on language-in-motion, with various spatiotemporal frames interacting with one another. Furthermore, a sociolinguistics of mobility “is a sociolinguistics of speech, of actual language resources deployed in real sociocultural, historical, and political contexts” (Blommaert 2010: 5). Blommaert (2014) argues that adopting mobility as a central concept in a sociolinguistics of globalization has three major methodological effects: (1) it creates a degree of unpredictability in what we observe; (2) we can only solve this unpredictability by close ethnographic observation of the minutiae of what happens in communication; and (3) it keeps in mind the limitations of current methodological and theoretical vocabulary. In contexts of mobility, people appear to take any linguistic and communicative resources available to them and blend them into complex linguistic and semiotic forms (Blommaert 2014). Old and established terms such as ‘code-switching’, and even ‘multilingualism’, exhaust the limits of their descriptive and explanatory adequacy in the face of such highly complex sets of resources. Taking mobility as a principle of sociolinguistic research requires us to challenge traditional notions of the static and unitary nature of language.

Changes in economic and technological infrastructure have affected what we understand by mobility (Blommaert 2010). People and their attributes move around, and they do so in new and unpredictable patterns of complexity we now call superdiversity (Kroon, Dong and Blommaert 2015). Whereas migration, especially migration to Europe, was previously viewed in terms of apparently homogeneous groups moving from one country to another, recent patterns have brought a change in the nature and profile of migration to Western societies. We are now seeing that the extreme linguistic diversification of neighbourhoods generates complex multilingual repertoires layering the same social space. In a globalizing world we need to consider language as a complex of mobile resources, shaped and developed both because of mobility, by people moving around, and for mobility, to enable people to move around. We will consider the implications of mobility for communicative practices.

A sociolinguistic system is a complex system characterized by internal and external forces of perpetual change, operating simultaneously and in unpredictable mutual relationships (Blommaert 2014). Canagarajah and Liyanage (2012) have noted that even so-called monolinguals shuttle between codes, registers, and discourses, and can therefore hardly be described as monolingual. Just as the traditional distinction between languages is no longer sustainable, so the distinction between ‘monolingual’, ‘bilingual’, and ‘multilingual’ speakers may no longer be sustainable. Blommaert (2012) argues for a recognition that the contemporary semiotics of culture and identity need to be captured in terms of complexity rather than in terms of multiplicity or plurality. Indeed he argues that

a vocabulary including ‘multi-lingual’, ‘multi-cultural’, or ‘pluri-’, ‘inter-’, ‘cross-’, and ‘trans-’ notions all suggest an a priori existence of separable units (language, culture, identity), and they suggest that the encounter of such separable units produces peculiar new units: ‘multilingual’ repertoires, ‘mixed’ or ‘hybrid’ identities and so forth.

(2012)

Blommaert argues that a perspective which focuses on ‘code-switching’ is emblematic of this view. Bailey (2012) engages with the limitations of an approach to linguistic analysis which emphasizes code-switching, arguing that a focus on linguistic features that are officially authorized codes or languages (e.g., ‘English’ or ‘Spanish’), can contribute to neglect of the diversity of socially indexical resources within languages. Bailey points out that if the starting point is social meanings, rather than the code or language in use, it is not crucial to ask whether a speaker is switching languages, alternating between a dialect and a national standard, register shifting, or speaking monolingually in a variety that highlights language contact. Language, whether monolingual or multilingual, carries social meanings through phonological, lexical, grammatical, and discourse level forms: “these forms index various aspects of individuals’ and communities’ social histories, circumstances, and identities” (Bailey 2012: 506).

We will review recent concepts and terms in relation to the mobility of communicative practices. Recently, a number of terms have emerged, as scholars have sought to describe and analyze linguistic practices in which meaning is made using signs flexibly. These include, among others: flexible bilingualism (Creese and Blackledge 2010); codemeshing (Canagarajah 2011); polylingual languaging (Jørgensen, Karrebaek, Madsen, and Møller 2011); contemporary urban vernaculars (Rampton 2011); metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook 2011); translingual practice (Canagarajah 2013); heteroglossia (Bailey 2012; Blackledge and Creese 2014); and translanguaging (García 2009; Creese and Blackledge 2011). The shared perspective represented in the use of these various terms considers that meaning-making is not confined to the use of ‘languages’ as discrete, enumerable, bounded sets of linguistic resources.

Canagarajah (2013) adopts the term ‘translingual practice’ to capture the common underlying processes and orientations of the mobility and complexity of communicative modes. In doing so he argues that communication transcends individual languages and involves diverse semiotic resources. He points out that languages in contact mutually influence each other, and so labelling them as separate entities is an ideological act. Multilingual speakers deploy repertoires rather than languages in communication, and do not have separate competences for separately labelled languages. Language is only one semiotic resource among many, and all semiotic resources work together to make meaning. Separating out ‘language’ from other semiotic resources distorts our understanding of communicative practice. Canagarajah (2013) points out that further research is needed to understand the complexity of communicative strategies that make up translingual practice, and to explore the implications for meaning construction, language acquisition, and social relations.

García uses the term ‘translanguaging’ to refer to the flexible use of linguistic resources by bilinguals as they make sense of their worlds. She proposes that in educational contexts translanguaging as pedagogy has the potential to liberate the voices of language minoritized students. For García (2009) a translanguaging approach to teaching and learning is not about code-switching, but rather about an arrangement that normalizes bilingualism without diglossic functional separation. She draws from Baker (2011: 288), who defines translanguaging as the process of “making meaning, shaping experiences, gaining understanding and knowledge through the use of two languages.” In the classroom, translanguaging approaches draw on all the linguistic resources of the child to maximize understanding and achievement. Thus, both or all languages are used in a dynamic and functionally integrated manner to organize and mediate understanding, speaking, literacy, and learning (Lewis, Jones, and Baker 2012). García argues that bilingual families and communities must translanguage in order to construct meaning. She further proposes that what makes translanguaging different from other fluid languaging practices is that it is transformative, with the potential to remove the hierarchy of languaging practices that deem some more valuable than others. Translanguaging, she argues, is about a new languaging reality, a new way of being, acting and languaging in a different social, cultural and political context, allowing fluid discourses to flow, and giving voice to new social realities (García 2009). Li Wei (2011: 1223) makes a similar argument, that the act of translanguaging “is transformative in nature; it creates a social space for the multilingual language user by bringing together different dimensions of their personal history, experience and environment.” Hornberger and Link (2012) apply such translanguaging constructs in educational contexts, proposing that educators recognise, value, and build on the multiple, mobile communicative repertoires of students and their families.

Thus translanguaging leads us away from a focus on ‘languages’ as distinct codes to a focus on the agency of individuals engaged in using, creating and interpreting signs for communication. Lewis et al. (2012) argue that the distinction between code-switching and translanguaging is ideological, in that code-switching has associations with language separation, while translanguaging approves the flexibility of learning through two or more languages.

García and Li Wei (2014) argue that the term translanguaging offers a way of analysing the complex practices of speakers’ lives between different societal and semiotic contexts as they interact with a complex array of speakers. García and Li Wei (2014) extend the notion of translanguaging as an approach which views language practices in multilingual contexts not as autonomous language systems, but as one linguistic repertoire with features that have been societally constructed as belonging to separate languages. For García and Li Wei, the ‘trans’ prefix in ‘translanguaging’ refers to (1) a trans-system and trans-spaces, in which fluid practices go between and beyond socially constructed language systems, structures and practices; (2) the transformative nature of translanguaging, as new configurations of language practices are generated, and orders of discourses shift and different voices come to the forefront; and (3) the transdisciplinary consequences of languaging analysis, providing a means of understanding not only language practices but also human sociality, human cognition and learning, social relations and social structures. Translanguaging does not refer merely to two separate languages nor to a synthesis of different language practices, or to a hybrid mixture. Rather, translanguaging refers to new language practices that make visible the complexity of language exchanges among people with different histories. García (2009) sees translanguaging practices not as marked or unusual, but rather taken as the normal mode of communication that characterizes communities throughout the world. Thus translanguaging is commonplace and everyday.

Translanguaging also perceives the language system differently. García and Li Wei (2014) view translanguaging as not only going between different linguistic structures, systems, and modalities, but going beyond them. Going beyond language refers to transforming the present, to intervening by reinscribing our human, historical commonality in the act of languaging. Translanguaging “signals a trans-semiotic system with many meaning-making signs, primarily linguistic ones that combine to make up a person’s semiotic repertoire” (2014: 42). García and Li Wei conclude that translanguaging enables us to imagine new ways of being so that we can begin to act differently upon the world. A translanguaging repertoire incorporates biographies and learning trajectories; it includes aspects of communication not always thought of as ‘language’, including gesture, dress, humour, posture, and so on; it is a record of mobility and experience; it includes constraints, gaps, and silences as well as potentialities; and it is responsive to the places in which, and the people with whom, semiotic resources may be deployed. As such it is responsive to the mobility of linguistic and other semiotic resources in time and space. In order to engage with semiotic resources in time and space we will consider the notion of chronotope (literally ‘timespace’).

Mobility implies not merely movement of people from one country to another to make a new life, but the mobility of linguistic and other semiotic resources in time and space. In considering language practices we need to account for both time and space – history and location. Human life is categorized by movement, whether through time or through space: we are always in motion (Pennycook 2010). In no other time has the coming together of time and space become more significant than in our own technological, global society (Wang 2009). Bakhtin (1981) borrowed the metaphor of the ‘chronotope’ from Einstein’s theory of relativity to describe the connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships. In the literary chronotope, “time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history” (Bakhtin 1981: 84). Analysis of chronotopes enables us to view synchronous socia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction: the nexus of migration and language: the emergence of a disciplinary space
• PART I Concepts
• PART II Contexts
• PART III Methods
• PART IV Policies
• Index