Identity alignment and language creation in multilingual communities

Abstract

In multilingual ecologies we find communities that, in certain sociohistorical environments, undergo significant changes in their linguistic repertoire through contact, which often result in a type of shift that leads to the creation of new grammatical patterns. The ecology of language creation typically involves closely-knit minority/diasporic groups of mixed ethnic origins, often in the position of intercultural brokers. I have argued elsewhere ( Ansaldo, 2009a) that multilingual contexts in which different languages are negotiated on a daily basis, and where language contact and contact languages are ubiquitous, are in fact quite common in human history, exotic as they may appear to the Western monolingual speaker. This paper argues that in such ecologies the alignment between language and identity is complex, continuously shifting and not easily captured in terms of mother tongue or nativeness. In this sense, multilingual ecologies question the notion of mother tongue and its implicit and explicit role in our current theories of language.