LANGUAGE IN MULTILINGUAL CONTEXTS

Multilingualism is the presence of two or more languages within one entity. Plurilingualism.
4 META SKILLS: speaking, writing, listening, reading (productive and receptive)
• Ambilingualism: equal competence/proficiency in all his languages (with no interference)
= rare!
• Fully biliterate ambilingual = the 'perfect' multilingual = two or more monolinguals in one
person -> probably does not exist!
• Balanced multilingualism: comparable levels of proficiency in his/her various languages
(with possible traces of interference).
• Dominant multilingualism: higher proficiency in one language than in the other(s).
• Semilinguism: limited or incomplete knowledge in any of the languages in the
multilingual's language repertoire.
• Functional multilingual(ism): using more than one language on a regular basis, with a
range of persons.

Individual Multilingualism
1. Knowledge/competence/proficiency/skills in two or more languages
2. Patterns of multilingual language use
3. Age: • Early vs. Late multilinguals (no clear cut-off age!)
• Early multilinguals: Simultaneous vs. Consecutive multilingualism
4. Context of acquisition of the various languages:
• Primary (spontaneous, natural) multilingualism: in the home, with family, in
neighborhood, at work... vs. Secondary (instructed) multilingualism: through
schooling/instruction but: often a mixture of both type of contexts!
• Endogenous multilingualism (in presence of the language community) vs. Exogenous
multilingualism (larger language community is absent)
5. Great diversity in individual multilingualism. Each multilingual is unique!

Societal Multilingualism
National language (constitutionally defined): Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Grand
Duchy of Luxemburg, Singapore, Ireland, Congo, South Africa, EU, USA, UK
CO-OFFICIAL LANGUAGES: Belgium: Dutch, French, German, South-Africa, India (Hindi +
English + 22 co-official Ls), Finland (Finnish, Swedish, Sami), Spain (Castillian; Catalan,
Aranese, Basque, Galician, Valencian)
Minority languages
Some minority languages are more 'minority' than others:
• Mudbarra in (Northern) Australia (19 speakers)
• Gagauz (Bessarabia) in Moldova, Roumania, Bulgaria (100.000 speakers)
• German in Belgium (70,000 speakers)
• Catalan in Spain, France, Italy (Sardinia) (9,200,000 speakers)
• Turkish in Germany (6,000,000 speakers)
Native (autochthonous) vs Migration/Heritage (allochthonous) Language
NATIVES • Hopi & Navaho in US • Inuit in Canada & Greenland • Maori in New Zealand •
Basque in Spain • Gaelic in Ireland
MIGRATIONS • Turkish, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek ... in Germany
Diglossia
• a situation in which two languages are used under different conditions, in different
situations and/or for different functions within a community, typically by the same
speakers.
• One language/variety has ‘high’ social status (formal, prestigious, H-variant), the other
language has ‘low’ status (colloquial, low prestige, L-variant)
• Example: Regional Dutch dialect (L) vs. standard Dutch (H) in Flanders or Guarani (L) vs.
Spanish (H) in Paraguay.
Language maintenance: the continuing use of a language
Language shift: the gradual displacement over time of one language by another in the lives
of the members of a bilingual community, leading to language loss.
Language death: Language shift and loss may lead to language death (loss of all speakers of
a language and hence of the language community): e.g., Latin, Gothic ... Irish, Sami,
Aranese?
Language maintenance, shift, loss, and revival depend on the vitality of a language and its
community
Institutional Multilingualism
Institutions, organizations, companies, hospitals, services, schools: NATO, European
Commission, International Court of Justice, United Nations, certain Belgian town halls,
courts, hospitals
Multilingual Education
Immersion education
Lessons/courses taught in the pupils’ L2 + L2 support
majority language pupils taught (in) a minority language
L2 teachers do not use but understand the pupils’ L1
Examples:
• L2 French immersion for anglophone children in Canada
• L2 Dutch or L2 English immersion for francophone children in Wallonia & Brussels
• L2 Irish or L2 Welsh immersion for anglophone children in Ireland and Wales
Submersion Education, Wild or Unstructured Education
Lessons/courses taught in the pupils’ majority L2 but little or no L2 support
majority + minority pupils taught in the majority language
L2 teachers do not understand, do not use, and often do not allow the minority pupils’ L1
Examples:
• Monolingual French education for minority Arabic-, Turkish-, Albanian-, Russian-,
Vietnamese-speaking pupils in Wallonia & Brussels
• Monolingual English education for Spanish-speaking (migrant) children in US
Pedagogical approach:
Content & Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) & Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT):
• Learning an L2 through activities, tasks, or courses in which the teaching of subject
content matter and language learning goals are integrated.
• CLIL in Flemish education is very similar to Immersion education in Francophone schools in
Belgium

Strong Forms, Aims: Pluralism, Enrichment, Maintenance

Weak Forms, Aims: Assimilation, Apartheid, Limited Enrichment, Detachment, Autonomy
Multilingualism = Contact between languages
CODE SWITCHING: code alternation, code mixing, translanguaging. It occurs between the
matrix language and the embedded language. It requires sophisticated grammatical
knowledge of both languages.
Intersentencial Code Switching: Switching after full sentences
• Pierre, viens ici ... Allez, Pierre viens ici! PIERRE, KOM HIER!!
Intrasentential Code Switching: Switching in the middle of the sentence
• Sie nehmen sein furniture away!
Tag Switching: Exclamations, tag clauses, interjections in another language
• Allez, bon, nu is het wel genoeg geweest, don't you think?
Sociolinguistic/Functional types of code-switching:
Situational Code Switching: Triggered by a change in topic, participants and/or setting:
• "domains": church, school, different public institutions (Fishman 1972).
• Emperor Charles V (born in Ghent in 1500) was said to pray in Spanish, converse with
women in Italian, speak to men in French, and address his horse in German.
Metaphorical Code Switching: It signals a change in the symbolic/pragmatic force
associated with the different languages in the individual or community's linguistic
repertoire.
•Pierre, viens ici ... Allez, Pierre viens ici! PIERRE, KOM HIER!!
BORROWING-LOAN WORDS: Donor language and Host language
• Kun je me dat formulier even mailen?
• My kids are still in kindergarten.
• The landscape around here is sublime.
• Watch out! It's a jungle out here.
Change in phonological/orthographical and/or grammatical form:
• cheque, beefsteak, yacht, jacht, cookie, koekje, biscuit, crèche, team, bat , roomie, stress
• Historical loanwords: Dutch schrijven rich, maintain, beef, salad, purify
CALQUES-LOAN TRANSLATIONS-TO COPY: Expressions taken over literally, either word for
word or morpheme for morpheme, from one language to another.
• 'it goes without saying' calques the French 'ça va sans dire'.
• 'point of view' calques French 'point de vue'
• 'marriage of convenience' calques French 'mariage de convenance'
• 'superman' calques German 'Übermensch'
• Dutch 'wolkenkrabber' calques English 'skyscraper'
TRANSFER: Error or mistakes
• I have 9 years. : I am 9 years old.
• I have been to the cinema yesterday. : I went to the cinema yesterday.
• I have cat black. : I have a black cat.
• Is my fault. Eat too many hamburger. : It is my fault, I eat too many hamburgers.
SOCIAL ASPECTS OF MULTILINGUISM
1) Speech Community and Linguistic Community
Chomsky (ideal speaker listener is someone who knows the language perfectly) vs Gumperz
(any human in the same social circle, social regular, frequent interactions)
DIGLOSSIA
FERGUSON
Dialect vs standard language
• Bruges dialect vs Standard Dutch
• Cockney vs Standard English
• Low prestige variety (L) vs High prestige variety (H)
• Clear functional difference/distribution
• H is determined by prestige, heritage, standardization, acquisition, literary tradition, ...
• Ferguson still considers diglossia to be typically stable
FISHMAN
Situations found where (forms of) two genetically unrelated (or at least historically distant)
languages occupy the H and L niches
• Latin versus vernacular languages in mediaeval Europe
• Formal versus informal domains of use
2) Sociolinguistic Status & Functions
Societal multilingualism with/without diglossia
• Diglossia: a situation in which two languages (or two varieties of the same language) are
used under different conditions, in different situations and/or for different functions within
a community, typically by the same speakers. One language has ‘high’ social status (formal,
prestigious, H-variant), the other language has ‘low’ status (colloquial, low prestige, L-
variant)
• Regional Dutch dialect (L) vs. standard Dutch (H) in Flanders or Guarani (L) vs. Spanish (H)
in Paraguay.
The Concept of Invisibilization
Traditional representation of bi/multilingualism tend to oversimplify complex language
ecologies.
Erasure policies need not be explicit, but can be:
• Forbidding languages in dictatorial contexts (cf. Franco’s Spain)
• Ignoring linguistic diversity in colonization contexts (cf. Belgian Congo)
• Nation-state building in 19th century Europe
• Quid language planning in the public sphere?
Blommaert & van Avermaet 2006: Even bad multilingualism is important. Unilingualism is
bad.
Nelde`s Law: There is no language contact without conflict, 1987.

Multilingual Education
Cazden & Snow: It is a complex phenomenon.
LANGUAGE CONTACT
It is the use of more than one language in the same place at the same time.
Trivial Language Contact: If there is no overlap between languages.
Why language contact? Economic reasons, Immigration, Slavery, Marriage, Colonialism,
Proximity, Education
Stable vs Unstable
Urbanization and industrialization => downfall of minority languages
Number of speakers and institutional support => keep minority languages
Contact Induced Language Change
Casual contact-Slightly more intense contact-More intense contact- Intense contact
Mainly relies on borrowing (adaptation of linguistic elements from one language to
another):
• Lexical borrowing: Adaptation of individual words(loanwords)/phrases (loan translation)
from one language to another
• Structural borrowing:
Phonological: Adoption of new sounds or phonological rules from one language to another
Morphological: Adoption of morphological features from one language to another
Syntactic: Adoption of word-order rules from one language to another

Code Switching
Intersentential Switching + Intrasentential Switching
If monolinguists use code switching, it is borrowed.

Code Alternation
Using one language in one context (or one speaker) and another language in another
context (or another speaker). Similar effects to code-switching, but far less investigated.

Passive familiarity
Occurs when a speaker acquires a feature from a language that they understand (at least to
some extent) but have never spoken actively at all
Example: Many words from AAE to American English, such as “cool”

Second Language Acquisition Strategies

1) Speakers change their language (A) to approximate what they believe to be the patterns
of another language or dialect (B).
Example: A northern region of the former Yugoslavia near Hungary used constant stress on
the second syllable when speaking Serbo-Croatian, but the stress is not fixed (unlike
Hungarian where it is fixed on the first syllable).
2) Gap-filling approach: using material from the native language, while speaking the target
language, to plug the holes in knowledge
3) Ignore distinctions that are present in the target language but that are opaque to learners
Example: The loss of gender in a dialect of Latvian under the influence of Uralic speakers.
Extreme Language Mixing
PIDGIN: Non-Native Lingua Francas
Simplified language, the most basic grammar
Happens when there is diglossia, a more dominant language. Slavery, Colonialism are
examples. They are only used for certain situations, labor and trade.
Papua New Ginea, Tok Pisin example
• A language that arises in a new contact situation involving more than two
linguistic groups
• The groups have no shared language
• They need to communicate regularly, but for limited purposes, such as trade
• They do not learn each other's languages, but instead develop a pidgin, with vocabulary
drawn typically (though not always) from one language in contact. Grammar is drawn from
multiple languages. This is influenced from universals of second-language learning: in
particular, ease of learning helps to determine the linguistic structure of a pidgin.
Pidgin is typically not a native language
Less linguistic materials (less words, limited grammar, etc.)

CREOLE: Native Speakers exist

• Native language of a community
• Develop in contact situations that typically involve more than two languages • Typically
draw their lexicon, but not their grammar, primarily from a single language.
• Some, but not all, creoles are nativized pidgins, its linguistic materials expanded with the
expansion of usage.

THE ORIGINS OF CREOLES AND PIDGINS

1) Monogenesis
2) Abrupt genesis scenarios: Language Bioprogram Hypothesis Children born in
plantations speak the pidgin and it becomes their native language therefore a creole.
Relexification Hypothesis Creoles are created by adults who develop a new lexicon
by combining the phonetic shapes of one language with the semantic and syntactic
information of another language • Evidence comes by comparing syntactic
structures of Haitian Creole (French-lexicon Caribbean creole) with syntactic
structures of Fon (West African language that was spoken in Haiti during the creole's
formative period). Combination of negotiation and second language strategies: The
aim is to communicate with each other by deploying the new vocabulary with
grammatical structures they hope will be understood by their interlocutors.
3) Gradual genesis scenarios: Creolized Pidgin: Creoles that develop gradually from
fully crystallized pidgins. Conquered: A European language learned imperfectly from
Europeans, then proceeds to an altered European language learned imperfectly from
conquered languages, and finally results in a variety so distant linguistically from the
original European target language that it qualifies as a separate creole language.
OTHER MIXED LANGUAGES

Arises in a contact situation involving just two languages (creole and pidgin is usually with 3+
languages)

• Widespread bilingualism so that there is no need for a new language to serve as a medium
of communication between the two groups in contact (not the case with creole and pidgin)

• The resulting mixed language is a first language for some learners, it has no lexical or
structural restrictions, and every component is easily traceable to a single source language

• The new mixed language is likely to serve one of two functions - keeping group members’
conversations secret from the other group(s), or being an identity symbol of an ethnic or
subethnic group within a speech community

LANGUAGE DEATH
• A language must be dead when it no longer has any speakers what if only one person still
has any practical knowledge of a dying
language?
• A language dies when it is no longer used as a means of regular communication
Most linguists would agree that Latin is a dead language, and yet it was the main language
of international European diplomacy for centuries after it ceased to be spoken as a first
language.
• A language dies when it ceases to be used for any purposes of regular spoken
communication within a speech community
Pidgins must surely be considered living languages if they continue to be in use, but they fit
the definition only if we use a rather elastic concept of `speech community'; and if we do
that, it's hard to exclude Latin.
How do languages die?
Attrition: a gradual process in which a language recedes as it loses speakers, domains, and
ultimately structure; it is the loss of linguistic material that is not replaced by new material
• First lexicon is lost so pervasive as to lead to significant reduction in the language's overall
vocabulary
• Loss of structure - mainly phonology, morphology, and syntax
• The most common linguistic route to language death
• Also, a cognitive component
Grammatical replacement: the original grammar of one language is gradually replaced by
the grammar of another
• Typically, also a great deal of lexical borrowing
• Differs from attrition (relies on loss without replacement) as there is a great
deal of replacement here
• Not that frequently observed
• E.g., Laha speakers (Malayo-Polynesian language) have maintained their language at the
cost of giving up its grammar by adopting Ambonese Malay grammar `bit by bit'
No change: Sudden dead of a language (no time for borrowing or attrition)
E.g., when all speakers die from an illness, such as Lower Chinook (Pacific NW USA)
NON-DOMINANT SOCIETAL LANGUAGES
Heritage languages, community language, immigrant language, home language, mother
tongue
Heritage Languages: Minority languages learned in bilingual environment. Heritage
speakers are minority language speakers in majority language environment. Child and adult
heritage speakers show different degrees of command of their heritage language.
Polinsky, Scontras, Montrul: Bilingualism is not balanced, one language is always weaker,
which is the heritage language.
Immigrant Multilingualism: Strong in-group support, strong maintenance of mother tongue.

Linguistic Ideologies in Immigration Policies:

A pluralist ideology: the state provides support for language classes and cultural activities to
promote mother tongue maintenance alongside second language proficiency. Maintenance
of ethnic group norms and values is accepted. (Australia)
A civic ideology: expects that immigrants will adopt the public values of the mainstream
society. (The Netherlands)
An assimilation ideology: It expects linguistic and cultural assimilation into the mainstream
society, language shift. (France)
An ethnist ideology: It shares most aspects of assimilation ideology, yet there are
ideological and institutional barriers for immigrant minorities to be accepted legally or
socially as full members of the mainstream society. (Germany)

Ethnolinguistic Vitality: a social-psychological approach to the relationship between

language and identity. High-Medium-Low
High ethnolinguistic vitality
Community languages with high ethnolinguistic vitality will be retained, while those with
low EV will tend to be replaced by the mainstream language.
Example: Turkish: a language with high ethnolinguistic vitality in language contact settings.
Turkish is mostly spoken in the domestic domain and in a neighborhood of other Turkish
immigrants. Turkish maintains its dominant role in the domestic domain and children born
into those families most commonly acquire Turkish as their first language. Turkish as an
immigrant language is very much a spoken language, much less a written one.

Family Language Policy (FLP)

Factors affecting FLP
Effect of the quantity of language input / language dominance (parents’ language
background)
Effect of the quality of language input (use of diverse vocabulary ~ educational background
of the parents)
Effect of family composition (parents are heritage/community language speakers, number
of siblings)
FISHMAN: REVERSING LANGUAGE SHIFT (RLS)
GRADED INTERGENERATIONAL DISRUPTION SCALE (GIDS)
8 Step Model (8 is most threatened, 1 is most vital)

LANGUAGE PLANNING:
Any kind of organized intervention to language.
Fishman: Organized pursuit of solution to language problems at the national level.
Neustupny: Systematic, theory based, rational and organized societal attention to language
problems.
Language planning is not language legislation, it is wider than laws, it is not just
governmental efforts.
Corpus planning: deals with the language itself, the form of the language, phonology, and
grammar, the words.
Status planning: deals with raising or lowering or maintaining the status of the language.
Deals with the function of the language, the number of contexts in which the language is
used.
Acquisition planning: deals with the number of users.
Language in education planning: Any kind of language planning in an educational context.
Prestige planning: try to make a language more prestigious
Identity planning: try to influence the way which people feel that the language is part of
their identity or not
Discourse planning: the way we speak about the language

LANGUAGE CONFLICT:
Nelde: Language conflict is a significant secondary sign of fundamental causes of conflict, of
a socioeconomic, political, religious, or historical sort.