Language as a Local Practice

Alastair Pennycook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136932786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

Language as a Local Practice addresses the questions of language, locality and practice as a way of moving forward in our understanding of how language operates as an integrated social and spatial activity.

By taking each of these three elements – language, locality and practice – and exploring how they relate to each other, Language as a Local Practice opens up new ways of thinking about language. It questions assumptions about languages as systems or as countable entities, and suggests instead that language emerges from the activities it performs. To look at language as a practice is to view language as an activity rather than a structure, as something we do rather than a system we draw on, as a material part of social and cultural life rather than an abstract entity.

Language as a Local Practice draws on a variety of contexts of language use, from bank machines to postcards, Indian newspaper articles to fish-naming in the Philippines, urban graffiti to mission statements, suggesting that rather than thinking in terms of language use in context, we need to consider how language, space and place are related, how language creates the contexts where it is used, how languages are the products of socially located activities and how they are part of the action.

Language as a Local Practice will be of interest to students on advanced undergraduate and post graduate courses in Applied Linguistics, Language Education, TESOL, Literacy and Cultural Studies.

1
Introduction

Language as a local practice

This book is about language, place and doing, about language as a form of action in a specific place and time. In talking of language as a local practice, I am seeking to address far wider concerns than a first reading of these terms might suggest. To talk of language as local practice might appear to invoke nothing more than the sociolinguistic truism that people use languages in particular contexts. This book, by contrast, approaches the issue from a different perspective: the idea that languages are systems of communication that are used by people in different contexts is challenged in favour of a view of language as a local practice whereby languages are a product of the deeply social and cultural activities in which people engage. The focus here is not therefore on language use in context, or the relations between language and particular places. Rather, this book questions the meanings of all these terms – language, local and practice – in conjunction: language is examined here in ways that go against some common assumptions about language systems; locality is explored in its complex manifestations as place; and practice is viewed in terms of mediated social activity. This opens up a range of ways of thinking about the interrelationships among language, place and doing.

The notion of the local has become an increasingly significant focus across the social sciences, to a large extent as a reaction to what has been seen as broad, ungrounded theorizing throughout much of the 20th century. Rather than talk about human nature, universal cognition, or language structure, the focus has shifted towards the local, the grounded, the particular. To talk of practices has also become common. We add the term to words such as language, literacy and discourse to turn these into things we do, rather than abstract entities: scholars of literacy are interested in literacy practices; research across fields of language studies asks what language practices people are engaged in. More broadly, there is a growing interest in the practices of everyday life. This is a move, similar to the orientation towards the local, to capture what actually happens in particular places and at particular times. It is a shift away from broad abstractions about language, discourse and society towards local activity as part of everyday life. To talk of language as a local practice, then, is about much more than language use (practice) in context (locality). To take the notion of locality seriously, rather than merely juxtaposing it with the global, the universal or the abstract is to engage with ideas of place and space that in turn require us to examine time, movement and interaction. To think in terms of practices is to make social activity central, to ask how it is we do things as we do, how activities are established, regulated and changed. Practices are not just things we do, but rather bundles of activities that are the central organization of social life.

Once we bring language into the picture, and consider language to be a local practice, and therefore a central organizing activity of social life that is acted out in specific places, a number of common assumptions about language can no longer hold. The notion of language as a system is challenged in favour of a view of language as doing. A discussion of language in place will open up an understanding of the interactive nature of our physical environments, suggesting not so much that language happens in particular places, but rather that language use is part of a multifaceted interplay between humans and the world. What we do with language in a particular place is a result of our interpretation of that place; and the language practices we engage in reinforce that reading of place. What we do with language within different institutions – churches, schools, hospitals – for example, depends on our reading of these physical, institutional, social and cultural spaces. We may kneel and pray, stand and sing, direct classroom activity, write on the margins of a textbook, translate between patient and doctor, ask when a cut hand might get seen to, or spray-paint the back wall; and as we do so, we remake the language, and the space in which this happens.

Viewing language as action and as part of how places are interpreted, how the meaning of places is reinforced or changed, suggests that thinking about language and locality can no longer be contained with a notion of language in context.¹ The notion of language as practice takes us away from a notion of language as a pre-given entity that may be used in a location and looks, by contrast, at language as part of diverse social activity. Social life is “policed by a range of such practices as negotiation practices, political practices, cooking practices, banking practices, recreation practices, religious practices, and educational practices” (Schatzki, 2002, p. 70). Practices are the key way in which everyday social activity is organized, and language practices, as one such set of practices, are a central part of daily social organization. This exploration of language as local practice takes us in a different direction from studies of the variability brought about in a pre-given language system through its contextual deployment, since it questions not only what we mean by language but also what we mean by context. To look at language as a practice is to view language as an activity rather than a structure, as something we do rather than a system we draw on, as a material part of social and cultural life rather than an abstract entity. As Bourdieu (1977) reminds us, practices are actions with a history, suggesting that when we think in terms of language practices, we need to account for both time and space, history and location.

In this book, therefore, I will address the questions of language, locality and practice as a way of moving forward in our understanding of how language operates as an integrated social and spatial activity. I will deal in depth with each term – language, locality and practice – and in doing so will draw on different perspectives and domains, from practice theory to spatial theory, from graffiti to language ecology. The notions of time, place and locality will come under scrutiny here from a number of different directions. The idea of language spread, for example, will be questioned from a position that considers the possibility of multiple origins: language may not have spread and taken on local characteristics so much as being already local. The notion of creativity will be explored as a way of asking how it is that a particular version of language with a central core and divergent edges has come to hold sway. I will look at how language is related to time and space, and the doing of the everyday, and ask how we can understand repetition as the key to understanding difference. Questions of how we can understand human agency in relation to repeated language acts will be a key concern here, as will be the question as to how we can grasp the very locality of language. Issues of language diversity will be crucial, especially if we attempt to step away from a view of diversity in terms of enumerating languages, and instead focus on diversity of meaning. The ways in which languages can be understood multimodally, as working in different modes in different domains, will also be significant. All these themes come together when we take the notion of language as a local practice seriously.

Let us take a simple example: writing a postcard (to which I shall return in Chapter 7). When I sit down to write a postcard – a practice that in a world of text messages, Facebook, Twitter and Skype may already be located both in temporal and in spatial ways – I engage in a particular local language practice. It is a practice because it is a set of bundled activities that are repeated over time: I have done this before; I will likely do this again; I draw on the memories of postcards written and received, and on other textual threads linked to the place I am writing in and the people I am writing to. It is a language practice because language is central to the activity I am engaged in: it is about linking a place, a feeling, a connection through text that will travel and recreate places, feelings, connections differently elsewhere. And it is local because it is deeply connected to where I am writing, the surrounds, and the ways I may invoke those surrounds in these texts. A choice between languages does not necessarily make it more or less local: if I am in Paris and start one card ‘Chère Dominique’ and another ‘Yo Osc’, the first is not more local than the other. Locality has to do with space and place, the use of text on one side of a card (with probable links to an image on the other), sitting at this table, on this street, drinking this beer (un demi pression de Kanterbräu). It is a local language practice because of all of this, the sedimented use of language, the activity of writing, the multifaceted relations to place.

Understanding the locality of language

While language is an obviously key term in this book, the idea of the local is also a concept that needs extensive exploration. One use of the term is in juxtaposition with concepts such as ‘global’, as the opposite of whatever the global is taken to mean. To the extent that globalization is seen in terms of the homogenizing effects of capital expansion, environmental destruction, cultural demolition or economic exploitation, for example, the local becomes the site of resistance, of tradition, of authenticity, of all that needs to be preserved. At the same time, the local can also carry less positive aspects in terms of being parochial, limited, constrained, unsophisticated. Studies of globalization that seek to go beyond a critique of large-scale global change always need to take into account local processes, hence of course the use of terms such as glocalization to deal with local relations to a global language such as English (Lin, Wang, Akamatsu and Riazi, 2002). In order to understand the effects of globalization – whether we deal with this in terms of economics, the environment, political organization or media influence – we need to look locally at what happens: what are the effects of global trade tariffs on these particular garment workers in Thailand? How does the changing climate affect these millet farmers in Ethiopia? What benefits can these women in Bolivia derive from this human rights legislation? How do these listeners to Jamaican reggae music in Finland interpret these sounds, rhythms and lyrics? How do these construction-site workers in Vanuatu interpret the speech given by Nelson Mandela on his 90th birthday and broadcast around the world?

This, then, gives us one sense of the local, as the grounded and the particular. The relation here may not only be in such local reactions to wider happenings but also in the broader mobilizations of local movements. Globalization needs to be understood not only in terms of reactions to global movements from above, made possible by new media, institutions and technologies, but also in terms of local movements being made global: what new mobilizations are made possible through international indigenous peoples’ conferences? How can we start to understand the ways in which Australian Aboriginal art has become a global commodity? How does the local practice of blogging participate in the global blogosphere? Is the relocalization of beer production (the move away from large companies towards micro-breweries) a local reclamation of a globalized industry or a global trend towards local manufacture? The ways in which we think about the local, therefore, should not be considered only in terms of embeddedness in time and place, but also in relational terms: The local is always defined in relation to something else regional, national, global, universal, modern, new, from elsewhere.

In Chapter 5 I shall link the understanding of language as a local practice to the idea of worldliness. This understanding of worldliness emphasizes that whatever aspect of language and the world we are trying to grasp, this can only be done while also acknowledging the perspectival heterogeneity of locality. When we speak of language as a local practice, then, this refers not only to the ways in which language use must always be related to place, must always be understood in terms of its embeddedness in locality, but also to the ways in which any understanding of the locality of language must also encompass an appreciation of the locality of perspective, of the different ways in which language, locality and practice are conceived in different contexts. As we shall see further in Chapter 5, this perspective questions the sweeping epistemologies of imperialism, language rights, mother tongues, lingua francas or World Englishes that inform much of the debate on language and globalization. Looking at language as a local practice urges us to think differently about language.

From the perspective of linguistic anthropology, with a particular interest in the notion of language ideologies, or regimes of language (Kroskrity, 2000), the question becomes one of asking how it is that languages are understood locally. As Woolard (2004) notes, such work has shown that “linguistic ideologies are never just about language, but rather also concern such fundamental social notions as community, nation, and humanity itself” (p. 58). For linguistic anthropologists, the problem was that the “surgical removal of language from context produced an amputated ‘language’ that was the preferred object of the language sciences for most of the twentieth century” (Kroskrity, 2000, p. 5). By studying language ideologies as contextual sets of belief about languages, or as Irvine (1989, p. 255) puts it, “the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests”, this line of work has shown the significance of local knowledge about language. At the very least, this sheds light on Mühlhäusler’s (2000) point that the notion of a ‘language’ “is a recent culture-specific notion associated with the rise of European nation states and the Enlightenment. The notion of ‘a language’ makes little sense in most traditional societies” (p. 358).

The point in suggesting that we need to take local understandings of language seriously is not to say that anyone may have as much (or as little) to say about language as a linguist, and that therefore all local perspectives are somehow equally valid. This would be to fall into a hopeless relativism that simply tries to give credit to everyone’sdifferent views. We need far more rigour in our thinking about localism than this; and this applies, to be sure, to the broader project of localization: this cannot only be about valuing local perspectives on the world. What we need is to understand that all views on language are located in certain histories and articulated from certain perspectives. Here we encounter the problem, as Croft (2001) notes, that “Just as traditional grammarians tried – unsuccessfully – to fit modern European languages into the mold of Classical Latin and Greek, modern linguists are trying to fit languages of the world into the mold of ‘Standard Average European’” (p. xiii). European perspectivalism underpins understandings of other languages. It is such problems that Sinfree Makoni and I (Makoni and Pennycook, 2005, 2007) have tried to address in our call for the need to disinvent and reconstitute languages, to question the ways in which languages have been constructed and to look for alternative ways of thinking about language.

We need to seek therefore the ways in which language practices are local, are linked to local perspectives, insights and worldviews. This is not to suggest that a speaker of Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, Krio in Northern Australia or Jamaican patwa in London, or a French farmer, a Quebec language activist, a hip-hop artist from Gabon or a speaker of Haitian Creole necessarily has a view on language, on English or French, on creoles and other languages, that should be considered as valid as anybody else’s; but it is to suggest that unless we can grasp the locatedness of those languages and their speakers, the ways in which language use is part of everyday activity and the meanings given to those activities, we will not be able to grasp what those languages are and how they mean. For Branson and Miller (2000) we “must not only revel in linguistic difference but cope with that difference analytically. Let us recognize the culturally specific nature of our own schemes and search for new modes of analysis that do not fit other languages into a mould but celebrate and build on their epistemological differences” (p. 32).

In order to construct itself as a respectable discipline, linguistics had to make an extensive series of exclusions, relegating people, history, society, culture and politics to a role external to languages: “If the history of a language and its users is not factored into the theory as a primary standpoint”, argues (Nakata, 2007, p. 37), “then any knowledge generated about that language is flawed.” This is not, as Nakata points out, to reject the whole body of work carried out by linguists – this would be foolish in the extreme – but it is to point to the problem that a linguistic focus on formal aspects of a language “fundamentally separates the language from the people; it falsely separates the act of speaking from what is being spoken”. Understanding the locality of language, therefore, is not merely about accurate descriptions of language systems – “as if languages were floating in a vacuum, ‘ready-made’ within a system of phonetic, grammatical and lexical forms and divorced from the social context in which the speech is being uttered” (Nakata, 2007, p. 37), but about people and place. The ways in which languages are described, legislated for and against, policed and taught have major effects on many people. In trying to develop a perspective on languages as local practices, therefore, we need to appreciate that language cannot be dealt with separately from speakers, histories, cultures, places, ideologies. Language questions are too important to be left to linguistics or applied linguistics if we cannot grasp their locatedness.

To talk of locality is not just to indicate the obvious point that all language use happens somewhere, or simply to start with a ‘bottom-up’ as opposed to a ‘top-down’ version of language. The local is too often equated with the ‘micro’ rather than the ‘macro’, with smallness, with embeddedness. In this sense, although my orientation shares many features with that of Blommaert (2005, 2008), my focus on the local is different in important ways from his focus on ‘grassroots literacy’. Blommaert (2008) takes the term ‘grassroots literacy’ from Fabian’s (1990) History from Below, a book that examines a locally written and produced book from Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For Blommaert, who also looks at texts, particularly handwritten, from the same region, grassroots literacy refers to “a wide variety of ‘non-elite’ forms of writing … It is writing performed by people who are not fully inserted into elite economies of information, language and literacy” (2008, p. 7). Blommaert’s work provides many useful insights into what I am looking at in this book, and I similarly find Fabian’s (2007) injunction to ‘think small’ by looking at practices a central part of what this is about. But by using the term language as a local practice, I am not focusing only on non-elite practices. Rather, I am suggesting that all language practices are local. Grassroots literacy practices such as writing local histories in ‘longhand’ are local language practices, but so too is signing a presidential decree, an email memo to all staff from the vice-chancellor of a university or the Queen of England’s Christmas Day message.

Likewise, when looking at language ideologies – at the ways in which languages are understood locally – we should not assume that this must necessarily be about languages used only within small areas and understood within narrowly circumscribed domains. It is the perspectival understanding of language that is important. Thus, ideologies of English (Seargeant, 2009) are as important as ideologies of Warlpiri, Arrente or Guguyimidjir. When Chinese people refute claims that Chinese is a cover term for a set of mutually incomprehensible languages, and insist that Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Hunanese and other varieties of Chinese should be considered as dialects of Chinese instead of languages, this is also a local language ideology, as is the counterclaim that thes...