A recent turn in sociolinguistic research is to see language not as a bound and discrete system, but as a form of social practice. Languages are sociohistorical in nature, bound up with conflicting and contested political ideologies that are shaped and remade by the everyday practices of speakers. This book furthers this turn by taking up a most appropriate subject: bilingualism. It is appropriate because bilingualism is inherently a boundary phenomenon and resists the propensity of researchers to study language as a series of isolated systems. This collection critically examines bilingualism from three perspectives – “practice, ideology, and political economy” – and shows the degree to which languages are jointly affected by language structures, agency, language ideology, and discourse practices.
Monica Heller’s introductory chapter presents the theme of the book and a concise historical overview of different ways bilingualism has been studied. This is followed by four parts. Part 1 traces developments in ideologies of state and nation from the 19th century to the present. Part 2 examines how bilingualism is regulated by late modern institutions such as education, tourism, health, and the Internet. Part 3 explores how bilingual practices in everyday life interact with identity and power relations. Part 4 shows how empirical studies of bilingual discourse practices challenge the idea that language is a bounded system. The final chapter considers new directions and implications for the study of bilingualism.
In part 1, chapters by Christopher Stroud and Alexandra Jaffe examine changes in the practices and ideologies of bilingualism in the cases of Mozambique and Corsica, respectively. Stroud demonstrates that as Mozambique moved from colonial to postcolonial status, notions of bilingualism were tied up with competing ideologies, practices, and powers of the state. During the colonial period Portuguese “was deemed essential for civilized states and seen as a bona fide ‘language’, whereas African languages were dialectos, corrupt and inadequate forms of speech” (p. 32). However, after independence and a civil war, state institutions were targeted, including Portuguese. In the current climate, African languages have become the voice of political power and civil society, spoken alongside vernacular Portuguese. Jaffe’s chapter looks at a similar case of contested practices on the French-ruled island of Corsica. Prior to the 1980s, the official position, often enforced in schools, was that the “Corsican language” (similar to modern Italian) was a detriment to learning and assimilation to a French identity. Recent decades, however, have seen a shift as Corsican-French bilingualism is now seen as “positive benefit.” Furthermore, being bilingual is associated with “openness, tolerance, intercultural and multicultural competency and sensibility” (63) and as “a point of access to European, Mediterranean and global forms of citizenship” (67).
The remaining chapters in part 1 look at bilingualism not in national but in international or postnational contexts. Joan Pujolar’s chapter covers the impact of globalization on language policies and practices in such areas as international relations, immigration, mass media, and the service economy. Each demonstrates a move from bilingualism-as-deficit to bilingualism-as-asset, valued in both public and private sectors, and challenging monolingual language policies. Shaylih Muehlmann & Alexandre Duchêne’s chapter looks at developing discourse about language rights in transnational (the United Nations) and paranational organizations (NGOs). They note a change from the argument that “minority languages” should be protected as a right within the nation-state, to the argument that the right to one’s own language as a universal human right, a change in which language experts have played an important role. However, they raise the possibility that in these efforts sociolinguists may be guilty of reifying and essentializing languages. The final chapter, by Donna Patrick, looks at the issue of “preserving” indigenous languages. It notes how the indigenous language movement has been couched in romantic terms – linked to a pristine past – and the belief that languages are “living things” and should be preserved in the interests of “biodiversity.” These beliefs are criticized by pointing out that languages do not “disappear” like species, and that the preservation of a language in its pristine environment does not necessarily benefit its speakers.
The four chapters in part 2 focus on bilingualism in more contemporary contexts. M. G.. Moyer & Luisa Martín Rojo focus on “migration and the role of language in the control and regulation of citizenship” (137). By examining data from educational and health contexts in Spain, they demonstrate the nationalist ideology that “[b]ilingualism or bidialectalism is still considered an exception” (148). Classrooms are mostly monolingual spaces where migrant children are placed in “special centres” where they are taught “educated” Spanish. In health contexts multilingual practices are regulated, and even censored. In one case, an effort to provide health information in Urdu and Punjabi via a poster in a health clinic failed because “Catalan patients would complain about seeing signs in a language they could not understand” (155).
Marilyn Martin-Jones’s chapter looks at bilingualism in education across a range of contexts and research paradigms. It reviews the move from a “container” model – languages as separate vessels – and an “immersion” approach to learning, to interpretive and critical studies. Interpretive studies, such as Gumperz’s (Reference Gumperz1982) investigation of “contextualization cues,” have brought attention to the process of learning in multilingual contexts. Critical studies bring to light “asymmetries of power between groups” (171) and changes in the “symbolic power” of languages.
Emanuel A. Da Silva, Mireille McLaughlin & M. Richards’s chapter looks at how globalization and the rise of the “new economy” lead to the commodification of language. In the case of francophone Canada we see the rise of “call centres” and a “language industry” where language is a commodity and skill that is depersonified. Likewise, in the tourist industry “authenticity” is performed by social actors through the accent of French that is spoken. In the final chapter, Jannis Androutsopoulos examines “bilingual media discourse.” Media such as minority language radio, “diasporic Internet,” multilingual advertising, and “web environments” display “a picture in which bilingualism in the media is ubiquitous rather than exceptional” (225). However, this is qualified by the finding that “bilingualism thrives at the ‘periphery’ rather than the ‘core’ of contemporary mediascapes” (225).
The third part has two chapters, with the first by Paul B. Garrett. This chapter reviews studies of language socialization (Ochs & Schieffelin Reference Ochs, Schieffelin, Shweder and LeVine1984), noting that most have looked at child language development in monolingual situations. In recent years a few studies (Kulick Reference Kulick1992) have looked at socialization and language ideologies in bi- or multilingual contexts. This chapter presents findings from the author’s study of children’s bilingual socialization in St. Lucia. While most adults are bilingual English and Kwéyòl (Afro-French Creole) speakers, they believe in “subtractive bilingualism.” They think that children should be explicitly taught to speak English first, fearing that Kwéyòl will have a detrimental effect. This chapter’s micro-analysis demonstrates how children resist this ideology as they become older, and shows how bilingualism develops. The next chapter, by Benjamin Bailey, is one I find most satisfying. It employs Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia to critically analyze the conduit metaphor of communication as a “folk theory.” It also analyzes the talk of Dominican American bilinguals through a Bakhtinian framework to show how language meanings are “historical social relations, rather than just details of surface form” (269).
Lukas Tsistipis’s chapter in the final part defines bilingualism “as a sociopolitical semiotic nexus of praxis cum ideology” (277). With a critique informed by Giddens’s (Reference Giddens1984) structuration, the chapter explains how and why mainstream (monolingual) linguistic research contributes to an ideological and reified understanding of language; praxis-oriented approaches, however, better address theoretical concerns by exposing power relations and the production of structures. It also analyzes Arvanitika (Albanian)-Greek bilingualism and its associated ideologies through the conceptual framework developed in the chapter. L. Mondada’s chapter employs the tools of conversation analysis to examine bilingual talk, in this case a medical operation with multiple participants code-switching in French and English. The data demonstrate that code-switching is a “flexible resource for constituting the interactional order” (315). Peter Auer’s chapter examines excerpts of bilingual talk in lexico-grammatical terms to demonstrate the indeterminacy of such talk and bring to light the inadequacy of linguistics. It convincingly demonstrates an overriding theme of this book: that bilingualism is not a case of serial or parallel monolingualism.
This book offers an excellent critique of sociolinguistic research, demonstrating in a variety of ways how and why bilingualism challenges the dominant paradigm. However, as is characteristic of good critiques, it gives us something to replace what is criticized: theoretical and conceptual tools that bring to light issues of “practice, ideology and political economy.” Thus, I find this an excellent book that should be on the reading list of any course in sociolinguistics, or the course I often teach, language approaches to communication. It should be noted, however, that as in any book there are some weaknesses. For one, most of the empirical findings are based upon studies of European-based languages. I would prefer to see more work in languages spoken in such contexts as Africa or Asia. Also, the issues covered in parts 1 and 2 tend to be repetitive, and I sometimes found it difficult to see what new ground was being covered. However, I found the chapters in parts 3 and 4 most informative, discussing issues in research I am addressing at present. Altogether, this book makes a fine contribution to the study of bilingualism and sociolinguistics.
