Multilingualism, Discourse, and Ethnography

Sheena Gardner, Marilyn Martin-Jones, Sheena Gardner, Marilyn Martin-Jones

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138792982
• eBook ISBN: 9781136499852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Over the last twenty years, sociolinguistic research on multilingualism has been transformed. Two processes have been at work: first, an epistemological shift to a critical ethnographic approach, which has contributed to a larger turn toward post-structuralist perspectives on social life. Second, the effects of globalization—transnational population flows, new communication technologies, transformations in the political and economic landscape—have sparked increasing concern about the implications of these changes for our understanding of the relationship between language and society.

A new sociolinguistics of multilingualism is being forged: one that takes account of the new communicative order, while retaining a central concern with the processes in the construction of social difference. The contributors to this volume have been at the forefront of these epistemological shifts. They write here about the conceptual and methodological challenges posed by these shifts, and the profound changes that we are witnessing in the late modern era.

Part I
Linking Local Practices to
Wider Social Processes

Introduction

Li Wei

In 1980, Joshua Fishman, a father figure in the field of sociolinguistics and multilingualism, argued in a review article that, whereas considerable progress had been made in what he termed “;micro analysis” where “;variation theory, discourse analysis, speech act theory, pragmatics, and ethnomethodological concerns and sensitivities have pretty much become modern day orthodoxies” (1980: 161), hardly any attention had been paid to making connections with sociology or with socio-cultural theory more generally; “;none at all, indeed, except for the ethnomethodological corner thereof”, Fishman claimed. He further stated, “;If we look for linkages between macro-sociolinguistic efforts and the parent disciplines, the situation is even less heartening, because not only are such links exceedingly few and far between, but nothing approaching schools of thought or elaborated points of view are discernible. That being the case the likelihood of productive theoretical linkages between micro- and macro-sociolinguistic endeavours is rather remote for the foreseeable future” (1980: 161).

On the surface, things have certainly changed since the publication of Fishman’s article. At least in the field of multilingualism research, there are many more frequent mentions of sociologists and socio-cultural theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Benedict Anderson, and Stuart Hall. Even Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha get an occasional reference. Concepts such as cultural capital, symbolic dominance, and hegemony are now part of the discourse of many sociolinguists. Yet, methodologically, advances in integrating investigation of social processes at a global level and the interpretation of everyday practices at a local level into a coherent, critical analysis have been rather limited. In fact, there are now signs of a polarization between those sociolinguists who talk about ideology, power and social structures in abstract, purely theoretical terms, making occasional and superficial references to language policies, language attitudes, and community relations, and those who continue to focus on detailed documentation and description of what multilingual individuals and communities do on a daily basis. Sometimes, not a single example from naturally occurring social interaction is found in the publications by the former group of researchers, whereas the latter group produce pages after pages of transcripts with descriptions of the local context but no critical engagement with social or sociological theories.

The situation is unlikely to change in any fundamental way, unless we can overcome conceptual dichotomies such as micro-macro, event-structure, agency-social structure or even cause-effect. Take language and migration for example. It is often assumed that migration is a large-scale socio-demographic process and it impacts on many aspects of individuals’ social life including language. But there are plenty of cases where language is the cause or motivation for migration. People decide to leave one place for another because their language is no longer acceptable to others in the locality or because they identify more with a different community who would accept their language. Of course, such beliefs and attitudes towards various languages are tied to other historical and socio-cultural processes. Religion, for instance, may play a role. The key point here is that different processes are nested in one another. The so-called micro-macro distinction is a relative notion, just as power and agency are also relative notions. There are always higher and lower levels at which agency and structure operate. Sociolinguists, especially those working on multilingualism, perhaps need to shift their gaze to the nested relationships between these different processes at work in social life and the mutual effects they have on each other.

One area in which there has been considerable conceptual and methodological innovation of late is in the study of translocal and transnational multilingualism, but this research is still at an early stage and we lack a comparative dimension. Linguistic ethnographers have done an excellent job in providing some fascinating documentation of local practices including systematic and detailed descriptions of variation in local practices. They have often done so with equally detailed and fascinating discussion of the immediate socio-cultural and political contexts. But a fuller understanding of the wider social processes and the interconnections between local practices and wider processes of social change cannot be gained without comparative analyses. It is particularly interesting to note that recent research into language and globalisation tends to be done at a local level, building on the case study tradition. The value of such case studies notwithstanding, we cannot appreciate the complex interrelationships between language and globalisation without examining the differential impact that globalisation has had in different communities and without comparing the distinct responses to globalisation within these communities.

The chapters in the first part of this book address head-on a number of the issues that I have raised here and provide illuminating examples of the ways in which local practices in multilingual settings are linked to wider social processes and to political and economic change. In Chapter 1, Monica Heller argues that we need to “;let go of” the sociolinguistic dichotomy between macro and micro perspectives and challenge the long-held belief that different aspects of social life “;can be discretely assigned to different orders of experience and organisation” (p. 26). Her own concern is with the ways in which social difference and social inequality are constructed in the particular social and historical context of French Canada. In her chapter, she traces her own trajectory as a researcher working in that context, showing how, over two decades, she sustained a focus on the politics of language in Canada and on the ways in which different varieties of French and English were drawn upon and assigned value by different social actors in different institutional settings: in French-language minority schools and in public and private sector workplaces. During this phase of her work, she notes that she came to see these institutions as key sites for the “;discursive construction of ideologies of language, identity and nation and of social categories” (p. 27) and, at the same time, as sites for the production and distribution of prestigious language resources. She argues that focussing on processes such as social categorisation and on how the distribution and evaluation of language resources is bound up with these processes “;enables us to unpack the dynamic between agency and structuration” (p. 31). In the second part of her chapter, Monica Heller then goes on to show how, with the far-reaching changes ushered in by globalisation, she turned her research gaze away from individual institutions to the wider political and economic arena and began to focus on the specific ways in which these changes were being played out in French-speaking areas of Northeastern Canada. Here, she writes about the new patterns of labour migration that are emerging, especially in the wake of crises in industries that have, historically, sustained local populations of French speakers. These new migrations (e.g. to the new oil and gas fields of Northwestern Canada) have sociolinguistic consequences and French/English bilingualism has taken on new meanings associated with new mobilities. Heller also writes of the growing importance of bilingualism as a resource in the rapidly expanding new economy (e.g. in call centres, tourism or the new media). In this chapter, and in much of her recent work (e.g. Heller, 2007, 2011), she reminds us of the need to do a fundamental rethink of our approaches to research on multilingualism so as to take account of the new political and economic conditions of the global era.

In Chapter 2, Melissa Moyer provides a useful overview of the productive ways in which conceptual frameworks from other social sciences have recently been taken up by sociolinguists researching multilingualism. She focuses on conceptual frameworks and lines of enquiry developed in research related to different aspects of globalisation (e.g. the new economy, the advent of new technologies and contemporary mobilities and population flows), in research on the new work order and in recent writing on language ideology. Drawing on interactional and textual data gathered as part of a wider research project in Barcelona, she demonstrates that sociolinguists can open up a window on the wider social processes of concern to other social scientists precisely by studying the detail of everyday interactions in multilingual settings, provided that they ask different kinds of questions and move beyond a preoccupation with language as cultural practice or with variation within the language system. Like Heller, she sees the debate about macro and micro levels of analysis as belonging to an earlier moment in the history of sociolinguistics, prior to its current openness to social theory. Moyer calls for the adoption of a critical sociolinguistic perspective in research on multilingualism; one that addresses the unprecedented changes taking place around us in today’s globalised society and the increasing asymmetries of power created by these changes. She highlights, in particular, the need to understand the increasing construction of language as a commodity within the new economy; the increasing regimentation of language within the service economy and in new workplaces such as call centres, where communication is key; the role of language as a resource for gaining access to different institutional spaces and to particular kinds of material resources and the ways in which language ideologies are taken up and reproduced in everyday language practices in local settings. These aspects of language in contemporary social life take different forms in different cultural and institutional contexts; multilingualism is being taken up and reshaped in different ways so, as I remarked earlier, comparisons across contexts will further our understanding of the ways in which language is bound up with these social changes.

In Chapter 3, David Block turns his attention to the vexed question of the relationship between agency and social structure. He does this as part of a more general project of reviewing poststructuralist approaches to identity, including research on processes of identification and subject positioning in multilingual settings conducted by sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists. Block notes that in the sociolinguistic literature on identity, there is a tendency to view agency from an interactionist perspective, as “;emergent in social interaction” (p. 49). He therefore turns to recent work in other social sciences where attempts have been made to conceptualise agency in ways that take more account of social structures and the manner in which structures constrain agency. He argues that these sources provide useful pointers as to how we can reconceptualise agency in the current fluid, postmodern, twenty-first century context, whereas early poststructuralist thought (e.g. the work of Bourdieu) was constrained by the fact that it was “;still firmly anchored in modernity” (p. 51), when societies were characterised by greater stability and continuity.

All three of the authors contributing to this first part of the book offer valuable pointers as to how we might refashion our research lenses so that we can take better account of the ways in which multilingualism is being reshaped in different contexts in the current global era. Their lines of argument are firmly grounded in recent social theory. Thirty years on from Fishman’s review article, we are beginning to develop a more robust social component for sociolinguistic studies of multilingualism.

REFERENCES

Fishman, J. 1980. Theoretical issues and problems in the sociolinguistic enterprise. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 1: 161–67.

Heller, M. 2007. Bilingualism as ideology and practice. In M. Heller (ed.) Bilingualism: A Social Approach, ed. M. Heller, 1–22. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Heller, M. 2011. Paths to Post-Nationalism: A Critical Ethnography of Language and Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1 Rethinking Sociolinguistic Ethnography

From Community and Identity to Process and Practice

Monica Heller

METHODS, QUESTIONS AND WHAT WE SEE

I need to begin by insisting that I cannot write a chapter about methods as though methods were technical skills. I see them as practices of enquiry, shaped by the questions we ask, and by what we experience. This is, then, more in the way of an account of why I have been doing what I have been doing lately, my methods evolving as my questions emerge, and as I find myself wanting to account for things I may not have noticed before, or which may not have been around earlier.

I am scarcely alone in trying to make sense out of the kinds of social change we are currently experiencing, and I have certainly been inspired by the efforts of others; I hope therefore that this text may be useful to readers asking questions similar to mine. This is, I think, likely to be particularly true of people asking questions about multilingualism, a field whose very nature points to movement and fragmentation, despite our long-standing attempts to make it sit still.

That is the crux of the matter: the tools we inherited to make sense of multilingualism belong to an era when we were invested, as social scientists, in understanding languages as whole, bounded systems, lined up as neatly as possible with political, cultural and territorial boundaries. Indeed, I think the very idea of “;multilingualism” comes out of the ideological complex of the nation-state with its focus on homogeneity (Hobsbawm, 1990; Gal, 2001; Heller, 2007); it is a way to neaten up the mess of multiplicity, to put disorderly matter back “;into place” (to use Mary Douglas’ felicitous turn of phrase). It became a matter for academic enquiry, a “;problem” to be described and regulated, only insofar as it was the opposite of the uniformity that was hegemonically constructed as “;normal”, and therefore to be asked questions about. We have no courses or textbooks on “;monolingualism” (although Peter Nelde used to quip that monolingualism is a curable disease).

But if we follow the enquiry into multilingualism where it takes us, it points constantly in the direction of complexity and change, and the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Multilingualism, Discourse and Ethnography
• Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Multilingualism, Discourse and Ethnography
• Part I Linking Local Practices to Wider Social Processes
• Part II Researching Identities and Identities in Research Practice
• Part III Taking Account of Trajectories
• Part IV Visual and Semiotic Perspectives on Multilingualism
• Part V Interpreting Voices from the Classroom
• Part VI Building Researcher-Researched Relationships
• Contributors
• Index