Researching Multilingualism

Critical and ethnographic perspectives

Marilyn Martin-Jones, Deirdre Martin, Marilyn Martin-Jones, Deirdre Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415748421
• eBook ISBN: 9781315405322
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Researching Multilingualism expertly engages with a new sociolinguistics of multilingualism, taking account of this new communicative order and the particular cultural and social conditions of our times. Seventeen chapters are divided into four sections covering: researching discourses, policies and practices; contemporary mobilities; Researching multilingual communication on-line; Multilingualism in research practice. This state-of-the-art overview of research methodologies in multilingual settings will be of interest for all students and researchers working in the area of multilingualism within Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Education and Communication Studies.

1Introduction

Marilyn Martin-Jones and Deirdre Martin

Over the last two decades, sociolinguistic research on multilingualism has been transformed. Two broad processes of change have been at work: first, there have been broad epistemological shifts in the field of sociolinguistics to ethnographic and critical approaches. These broad shifts have reflected the wider turn, across the social sciences, towards poststructuralist and postmodern perspectives on social life. Second, there has been increasing focus on the study of the social, cultural and linguistic changes ushered in by globalisation, including the intensification of transnational population flows, the advent of new communication technologies, and changes taking place in the political and economic landscape of different regions of the world. These changes have had major implications for the ways in which we conceptualise the relationship between language and society and the multilingual realities of the late modern era. They have also obliged us to adjust our research lenses and recast our research methodologies. A new sociolinguistics of multilingualism is now being forged: one that takes account of the new communicative order and the particular cultural conditions of our times, while retaining a central concern with the social and institutional processes involved in the construction of social difference and social inequality. The main aim of this volume is to provide a state-of-the-art overview of this distinct new research landscape and to illustrate the ways in which research methodologies are being reshaped in different strands of critical and ethnographic research in multilingual settings.

In the first part of our chapter, we trace the ways in which epistemological shifts in the broad field of sociolinguistics have contributed to the development and consolidation of ethnographic approaches and critical approaches to research in multilingual settings. We take a wide-angle, historical approach here, so as to fully contextualise the contributions to this volume. Our starting point is with the roots of ethnography in the seminal work of Dell Hymes and John Gumperz in the 1960s and 1970s and in their intense concern with “the interaction of language and social life” (Gumperz & Hymes, 1964, 1972). We then turn to the development of critical approaches to research on multilingualism in the late 1980s/early 1990s, foregrounding in particular the transdisciplinary influence of social theory and poststructuralist thought. We chart the specific ways in which critical approaches to research were developed in the field of multilingualism and we show how ethnography gained further epistemological status in research that adopted a poststructuralist perspective.

In the second part of the chapter, we then focus in on the ways in which the sociolinguistic study of multilingualism has been recast in the wake of globalisation and the ways in which it is still evolving. We consider the specific nature of the social changes ushered in by globalisation and we illustrate some of the ways in which researchers, such as those contributing to this volume, are rethinking their research goals and methods. In the third part of the chapter, we turn to the role of research in contributing to social change. We point to different ways in which concern about this role has been voiced by sociolinguists over the decades and to the specific ways in which this concern is expressed in this volume. In the fourth and final section, we then introduce the contributions to the volume, linking them to five broad themes.

Shifting epistemologies in research on multilingualism

The foundations of contemporary ethnographic research on language in social life

The foundations of contemporary ethnographic approaches to language in social life were laid, from the 1960s onwards, by Dell Hymes (e.g. 1969, 1972, 1974, 1983, 1996) and by John Gumperz (e.g. 1972, 1982, 1996, 1999). Dell Hymes’ particular legacy is evident in the fact that his contributions to theory-building are cited in half of the chapters in this volume. John Gumperz’ influence is evident in the continued use, and refinement, in the sociolinguistics of multilingualism of key analytic concepts such as ‘repertoire’ and ‘contextualisation’ (Gumperz, 1982), which were first forged in his extensive empirical work in multilingual contexts.

Hymes and Gumperz were developing their distinctive yet complementary ethnographic approaches to language, culture and society in an era of intense intellectual exploration. Diverse strands of research into language in interaction were emerging due to the pervasive influence of social constructionism. Some strands of research, such as pragmatics, conversation analysis and early anthropological linguistics, privileged the study of the linguistic and/or organisational features of interaction, while other strands, such as the ethnography of communication (e.g. Gumperz & Hymes, 1964, 1972) and the ethnography of speaking (e.g. Bauman & Sherzer, 1974), were explicitly rooted in the longer tradition of linguistic anthropology and, thus, ethnography was seen as the key means of knowledge building related to language in social life.

In this period, the label ‘sociolinguistics’ came to be used to refer to a broad range of research on language, culture and society, from conversation analysis to the ethnography of speaking. However, as Bucholtz and Hall (2008) point out:

The difference between anthropological and linguistic approaches to sociolinguistics was also becoming apparent, with the former seeking to explicate culture through the investigation of speech events (e.g. Hymes, 1974) and interactional practice (Gumperz, 1982) and the latter largely drawing on social information to illuminate issues of linguistic structure, variation, and change.

(Bucholtz & Hall, 2008: 402)

We see traces of a tension between these different approaches in the explicit assertion of the epistemological status of ethnography by Gumperz and Hymes in their early work: first, in the title of their jointly edited volume Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication (Gumperz & Hymes, 1972), and second, in the title of Hymes’ volume Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. In the latter volume, Hymes (1974: 83) confirmed this way of defining sociolinguistics in the following terms: “‘Sociolinguistics’ is the most recent and most common term for an area of research that links linguistics with anthropology”. Hymes and Gumperz were the first to dislodge the view of the relationship between language and society that had guided earlier research, namely the view that local ‘communities’ were stable, homogeneous entities and that language use was governed by ‘community-wide’ norms. Instead, they argued that attention needed to be paid to the situated ways in which language practices contribute to the ongoing construction of social identities and relationships and to the ways in which social and cultural meanings are contextualised in and through interaction. As Gumperz (1982) put it, the aim of the analysis of discourse-in-interaction was to forge a “closer understanding of how linguistic signs interact with social knowledge in discourse” (1982: 29).

Over the two decades from the 1960s to the late 1980s, a considerable body of research was built on these early foundations, in the interlinked fields of ethnography of communication and interactional sociolinguistics. Researchers espousing these approaches had ample scope for investigating speaker agency and the dynamic and situated ways in which social identities, relationships and boundaries are constructed in and through interaction in different multilingual contexts.

The development of critical and poststructuralist perspectives

By the end of the 1980s, interest had shifted to the new epistemological spaces opened up by developments in social theory, notably the turn towards poststructuralism and critical theory. Within the field of multilingualism, three linguistic anthropologists – Gal (1989), Heller (1995, 1999) and Woolard (1985, 1989) – were the first to lay the foundations of a critical, ethnographic sociolinguistics. They did this by engaging with the new lines of theory-building within the social sciences, in the work of scholars such as Bourdieu (1977, 1991), Foucault (1971, 1972) and Giddens (1990). Gal, Heller and Woolard were doing extended fieldwork in multilingual sites in Austria, French Canada and Catalonia respectively, and they were seeking ways of linking insights from ethnographic observation and analysis of interactional practices with their analyses of wider institutional and historical processes, wider discourses about language and identity, and specific political and economic conditions.

Following the ground-breaking work of these three linguistic anthropologists, a distinctive tradition of critical, ethnographic and discourse analytic research on multilingualism emerged from the 1990s onwards, and it is clearly reflected in this volume. Some of this research has been developed at the interface with related fields such as the study of multilingual classroom discourse (e.g. Lin, 1999; Heller & Martin-Jones, 2001); the study of complementary schools and heritage language classes (e.g. Blackledge & Creese, 2010; Creese et al., Chapter 13, this volume); the ethnography of multilingual literacy practices (e.g. Martin-Jones & Jones, 2000; Warriner, 2007; Lytra et al. 2016), the ethnography of language policy (e.g. Johnson, 2009; Ramanathan, 2005; McCarty, 2011), and, more recently, visual ethnography and the study of multimodal communication (e.g. Pietikäinen, 2012). Since the late 1980s, research has been carried out in diverse cultural and historical contexts and in different domains of social life – in schools, in heritage language classes, in workplaces, in bureaucratic encounters and in local life-world settings. This research has incorporated critical reflexivity (Pennycook, 2001), while aiming to reveal the links between local multilingual practices and wider social and ideological processes. These links have been investigated in different ways, for example by focusing on the ways in which linguistic and discursive practices are bound up with the processes of social categorisation and/or exclusion that are at work in particular contexts (e.g. Heller, 1999), or by focusing on the ways in which identities and social boundaries are constructed, negotiated or contested in different multilingual settings (e.g. Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004).

The influence of poststructuralist thought was particularly evident in the writing on language ideology that flourished in the 1990s (e.g. Gal & Woolard, 1995; Schieffelin et al. 1998; Blommaert, 1999). The research addressed the central question of “how linguistic units came to be linked to social units” (Gal & Irvine, 1995: 970), how particular language resources and ways of speaking came to be associated with simplified and essentialised social categories (e.g. categories of ethnicity or gender) or how languages came to be tied to whole populations within a particular polity. This strand of work in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology provided a trenchant critique of grand narratives and modernist assumptions about the links between languages and particular social groups, or between whole populations and nation-states. In its critique of the language–nation-state nexus, it had a significant historical dimension and involved tracing the discursive threads involved in the construction of nationhood in primarily unitary and essentialised terms, in different historical contexts: for instance in nineteenth-century Europe (e.g. Grillo, 1989; Rindler Schjerve, 2003; Heller, 2007), in the language revitalisation and minority rights movements of the twentieth century (e.g. Urla, 1993; Jaffe, 1999; Pujolar, 2007) and in postcolonial contexts (e.g. Errington, 2008; Stroud, 2007).

The influence of poststructuralist thinking is also visible in recent writing about language (e.g. Makoni & Pennycook, 2007; Heller, 2007; Errington 2008). For example, Makoni and Pennycook (2007: 2) argue that the notion that languages are discrete, bounded entities and “countable institutions” is a social construct. They call for critical, historical research that unpacks the discursive processes involved in the classification, naming and invention of languages. They refer to this project as the “disinvention” of languages. Given the creativity and hybridity emerging today in urban popular culture, in minority group vernaculars and in mediated communication, there is growing consensus that it is more useful to talk about linguistic resources than ‘languages’ and to take account of the full range of human communicative activities, online and offline. This is the stance taken by several contributors to this volume. This shift in thinking echoes Hymes’ (1996: 70) early call for a focus on ways of speaking and on “varieties, modalities, styles and genres, ways of using language as a resource”.

Poststructuralist perspectives and the consolidation of ethnographic approaches

Ethnography is well suited to the challenges involved in developing sociolinguistic research from a poststructuralist perspective. It involves commitment to participant observation and engagement with participants over an extended period of time, so this enables researchers to track social and ideological processes as they unfold or change over time, and to build detailed accounts of particular social and linguistic practices as they occur. At the same time, the ethnographic goal of gaining insights into the emic perspectives, beliefs and values of research participants opens up the possibility of building an understanding of the significance of ongoing social and ideological processes for the participants themselves.

A further strength of ethnography lies in the long-established tradition of designing research projects so as to include different methods of data collection and analysis, and the triangulation of data sources. Working in these ways enables researchers to uncover the complexity of the social and linguistic practices of contemporary social life (Blommaert, 2007). We return to this point later.

In addition, there is now much greater reflexivity among researchers and greater awareness of the ways in which researchers’ historically and socially situated subjectivity shapes the different stages of the research process. The turn to ref...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1 Researching trajectories, multilingual repertoires and identities
• Part 2 Researching discourses, policies and practices on different scales
• Part 3 Researching multilingual communication and multisemioticity online
• Part 4 Multilingualism in research practice: Voices, identities and researcher reflexivity
• Part 5 Ethnographic monitoring and critical collaborative analysis for social change
• Name Index
• Subject Index