Politics Of Multilingualism Research Articles

Elizabeth Acevedo, Laura Esquivel, and the Politics of Multilingualism

AbstractA number of bloggers, journalists, teachers, and librarians have compared Elizabeth Acevedo’s 2019 young adult novel With the Fire on High with Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (1989), recommending that fans of Esquivel’s work pick up Acevedo’s—and vice versa. These suggestions echo Acevedo’s own comments about the narrative, which she has characterized as “parecido a ‘Como agua para chocolate,’ pero en el barrio” (Acevedo & Pichardo, 2019). This article takes this recent reception history as an invitation to think through how With the Fire on High deepens and course-corrects the revolutionary path of Esquivel’s earlier text. More specifically, I interrogate how Acevedo and Esquivel engage with linguistic identities and with multilingualism in particular as source material for political resistance and healing. Acevedo, like Esquivel before her, represents multilingual identities in ways that disrupt and resist the neocolonial violence of the United States. However, whereas Como agua para chocolate’s references to minoritized languages are executed in a manner that threatens to reinscribe traumatizing ethnoracial and class hierarchies passed down via colonial history, multilingualism in Acevedo’s novel works more systemically to intervene in and undermine such established matrices of power. Acevedo participates in a project of linguistic resistance and healing that involves reclaiming a heritage language for a multiply marginalized protagonist and, through that act of reclamation, rejecting the received cultural wisdom propagated by both colonial and neocolonial systems.

Multilingualism and Social Inclusion in Scotland: Language Options and Ligatures of the “1+2 Language Approach”

Recent global trends in migration, trade and overall mobility have continued to transform our objective realities and subjective experiences around linguistic diversity. More broadly, in many countries, the politics of multilingualism seem to have changed the old links between language and nation-state. In this context, Scotland is studied in this article as a case study as it acts to dispel the myth of a ‘monolingual country.’ Its recent language policy, the “1+2 Language Approach” (Scottish Government, 2012b), including regional languages, modern foreign languages and heritage languages of migrants have created opportunities as well as imbalances and issues of equity in the Scottish language habitus. Drawing on Kraus’s work (2018), this article demonstrates how the policy creates language as ‘options’ and as ‘ligatures.’ However, these ‘options’ and ‘ligatures’ are not salient and straightforward. The policy is explored on three different levels: (1) on its potential for allowing the development of multilingual communication strategies such as intercomprehension, code-switching and mixing, (2) on its commitment to linguistic justice avoiding language hierarchies and (3) on its links with dominating, neoliberal approaches to education and the economy. The article finally concludes that options and ligatures visible in language policy impose some semantic order on the confusion of layered co-occurrences of various hegemonies, or the general strain between macro and micro distinction.

Meaning and linguistic variation: The third wave in sociolinguistics by Penelope Eckert

Reviewed by: Meaning and linguistic variation: The third wave in sociolinguistics by Penelope Eckert Meredith Tamminga Meaning and linguistic variation: The third wave in sociolinguistics. By Penelope Eckert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 209. ISBN 9781107122970. $29.99. In Meaning and linguistic variation: The third wave in sociolinguistics, Penelope Eckert brings us her ‘intellectual autobiography’: a curated sequence of papers from her career wrapped in firstperson narratives about the social and personal context in which each paper was written. While the book covers the full span of E’s career, the focus is on third-wave sociolinguistics, which she defines as ‘a theoretical perspective that puts the meaning of variation, in all its dynamism and indeterminacy, at the center of analysis’ (xi). In tracing the origins of key third-wave theoretical constructs to earlier work by both herself and others in the first and second waves, E builds up an unmistakable narrative arc covering the full span of her career. The first two chapters of the book, presented under the heading ‘Beginnings’, deal primarily with E’s years studying Gascon in St. Pierre de Soulatan at the time when the region was shifting from Occitan varieties to French dominance. In contrast to the historical phonological focus of her M.A. thesis and Ph.D. dissertation, the papers she chooses for inclusion here focus on the politics of multilingualism. Ch. 1, ‘Gascon’, discusses how minority nationalist projects such as the Occitan movement crucially rely on linguistic unification, but in doing so inevitably erase the finer-grained sources of linguistic diversity within their own borders (Eckert 1983). Ch. 2, ‘Stigma and meaning in language shift’, uses the relationship between French and Gascon to illustrate how diglossia involves not the peaceful coexistence of two varieties but rather the oppression and stigmatization of the ‘low’ variety; the introductory material here situates the paper’s inception in the political context of the Ann Arbor Black English trial (Eckert 1980). This pair of papers captures the beginning of E’s concern with the nuances of language’s ideological force. Although they are distinct in flavor from the rest of the chapters, their inclusion effectively foreshadows the themes of locality, identity, and the semiotic landscape found in the later chapters about the third wave. The second section, titled ‘My participation in the second wave’, is dominated by the Jocks and Burnouts of Belten High (Eckert 1989a). Chs. 3–6 lay out E’s analytic insights into the social and linguistic practices of these high school social groups in suburban Detroit. Ch. 3 (‘Jocks and Burnouts’), E’s study of the width of blue jeans as a signifier of different social groups occupying different parts of the high school (Eckert 1982), marks the first appearance of ‘style’ as a central theoretical construct that transcends linguistic practice. In Chs. 4 (‘Jocks, Burnouts and sound change’), 5 (‘The local and the extra-local’), and 6 (‘On the outs’), E delves progressively deeper into the territory laid out in Ch. 3, persuasively weaving the social life of adolescents into the study of sound change in progress (Eckert 1988, 1989b). In this, probably E’s best-known work, she argues that macrosocial structures like class and gender shape language change only insofar as they are indirectly realized on the ground through hegemonic oppositions between identifiable, locally specific social categories. The narrative portions of this section lay out clearly why the classic Jocks and Burnouts research, with its continued focus on static categories as opposed to [End Page 462] the agentive construction of meaning through stylistic practice, is not itself of the third wave. At the same time, the bracketing of the section with chapters about style nonetheless makes it evident that this work directly laid important foundations for the emergence of the third wave. The final section, ‘The third wave’, arrives at the thesis of the book: that social meaning and stylistic practice are central to understanding sociolinguistic variation (Eckert 2012). E’s cadre of notable graduate students come to the fore at the start of the section with Ch. 8, ‘The SLIC generation’. SLIC stands for the Style, Language and Ideology Cooperative/Collaborative, a studentled seminar with...

THE POLYGLOT VAMPIRE: THE POLITICS OF TRANSLATION IN BRAM STOKER'SDRACULA

The vampire’s longevity provides a solution to the difficulty voiced by Benedict Anderson: ‘[W]hat limits one’s access to other languages is not their imperviousness, but one’s own mortality.’ This article discusses the vampire’s intimate relation with translation and polyglossia, arguing that Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula () anticipates its own translatability by reworking ethnographic and travel sources to engage with debates now central to translation studies. The afterlife of Stoker’s undead Count finds its epitome in desiring relationships mediated not simply through blood, but through linguistic mastery, the restriction to a mother tongue, and the translated text. To this end, the novel pits the politics of multilingualism in central Europe against new, femalemediated technologies of translation: shorthand, the telegraph, the phonograph and medical hypnosis. The text of Dracula invites us to reconsider the intimacy involved in translating and the desire for translated texts in light of the novel’s own cinematic and linguistic translatability.

Multilingualism, conflict, and the politics of indigenous language movements

Experts know that multilingualism is not the aberration or minority phenomenon supposed by many English speakers. It is, on the contrary, a normal and unremarkable necessity for the majority of the world´s population. Because languages and dialects are often powerfull symbols of class, gender, ethnic and other kinds of differentiation, it is easy to think that language underlies conflict. Yet disputes involving language are really not about language, but about fundamental inequalities between groups who happen to speak different languages. It is for this reason that language has been an important focus for various kinds of social and political movements around the world. This paper examines the politics of multilingualism as expressed in the phenomenon of indigenous language movements in various parts of the world. Its not surprising that one of the demands of indigenous language movements are towards some form of bilingual education in the minority language. At the same time demands for state resources for support of the language, often undermine its position further and intensify conflicts between majority and minority.