Taking a

Social Approach
to
Bi/Multilingualism
FLE 337 Sociolinguistics Module:
Section 2 (W10)

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hale IŞIK-GÜLER

The weeks of
term for this
MODULE:

w10-w15
Let’s discuss…
• Taking a “social” approach

• What would this entail?

• the individual as a social being and its relationship with
other micro, meso and macro levels
• Influence – society and social context, institutions
• Behavior – impacts others’- behavior, thought processes
& emotions

• Does it stand in contrast to a

psycholinguistic/cognitive perspective? How?
• Can the two perspectives complement each other?
How?
COGNITIVE/ SOCIAL/
PSYCHOLINGUISTIC SOCIOLINGUISTIC
APPROACH APPROACH

Do we need them both? Why?

Our main textbook for this
module:

Weber and Horner (2012)

Weber, J. J. and Horner, K., (2012).

Introducing multilingualism: A
social approach. Routledge.
From our CO:
“In the second half of the course, topics to be covered from a
societal-level sociolinguistic standpoint will include language
diversity, linguistic vitality, language death and revitalization of
endangered languages, language contact, pidgin and creole
languages, linguistic identity and ideologies, bilingual and
multilingual education, and government-level language
planning.
Also specific contexts around the globe where multilingualism
intersects with issues of citizenship, education, migration,
employment and identity, and where questions of what
language is, who has it and who does not will be discussed with
special reference to social inclusion, justice and equity.”
Blommaert’s (2010: 102) definition of multilingualism:

• What are some key words here?

• Why does he use scare quotes with the term ‘language’ on two
occasions?
Remember?
What are semiotic resources then?
“Semiotic resources are resources that we use to organize our
understanding of the world and to make meaning in communication
with others, or to make meaning for ourselves. When organizing our
understanding of the world around us, we use semiotic resources” (e.g.
Kress, 2010)

“A semiotic resource is always at the same time a material, social, and

cultural resource.” (van Leeuwen 2004, p.285).
Van Leeuwen defines the term as follows: “Semiotic resources are the actions, materials and artifacts
we use for communicative purposes, whether produced physiologically – for example, with our vocal
apparatus, the muscles we use to make facial expressions and gestures – or technologically – for
example, with pen and ink, or computer hardware and software – together with the ways in which these
resources can be organized. Semiotic resources have a meaning potential, based on their past uses,
and a set of affordances based on their possible uses, and these will be actualized in concrete social
contexts where their use is subject to some form of semiotic regime” (van Leeuwen 2004, p.285).
If we take a “linguistic repertoire of a diverse set of
semiotic resources” kind of a stance to language
ability, then…

Agree or disagree?

“no one is monolingual”

What is a “linguistic repertoire”?

• The linguistic repertoire is the set of skills and knowledge a person has of
one or more ‘languages’, ‘codes’ as well as their different varieties
• Varieties may be
• diatopic (geographic/spatial differences),
• diaphasic (degree of formality) ,
• diastratic (variation depending on social, cultural or educational factors/social strata) or
• diachronic (change overtime).

• This repertoire comprises elements of the different levels of description of language

and its use (phonetic-graphical, lexical-grammatical, discursive-textual or pragmatic).
• Concerning the use of languages, this repertoire forms the basis of every language
speaker/learner’s plurilingual competence (either current or possible).
Blommaert’s (2010: 102) definition suggests
that…
• we all have a large number of linguistic and semiotic resources at our
disposal, and it does not really make a difference whether they
belong to only one ‘conventionally defined “language”’ or several of
them.
• Hence, multilingualism is a matter of degree, a continuum, and since
we all use different linguistic varieties, registers, styles, genres and
accents, we are all to a greater or lesser degree multilingual.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.2989/16073614.2014.992644?casa_token=4NPjMbC-
3fsAAAAA:E0dD8IrTG1ThRx8MTdHA97yX7uwgdHR9vg22Mumlb1YmQuRy3-E-
e6BqxeesVF7LHozVgqD6J6Utyg
Linguistic repertoire

• The varieties, modes, modalities, codes, etc. that we use constitute

our linguistic repertoire.
• Moreover, these repertoires are not static but dynamic, since the
resources in them change over time.

• Can you give any examples?

Mısır, Hülya (2023) Vlog as a Multimodal

Translanguaging Space: Insights From A
Turkish Social Media Influencer Corpus
(SMIC) (METU, Unpublished PhD
Dissertation)
Influencer vlogs in Mısır’s (2023) corpus are
from:
 What enacted linguistic repertoire and resource elements can we talk about in the following examples
from Mısır’s (2023) dissertation?

Nov, 2020 > I GOT KICKED OUT OF THE STORE BUT I

DIDN'T GIVE UP!
YT_KD_V5 12:47-12:54
<Turkish influencer in a supermarket in Los
Angeles talking to the vlog camera>
Line5 a en sevdiğim meyve de bu arada

Line6 dragon fruit is my favorite one

Line7 ne aldık

Line8 mango /ˈmæŋɡəʊ/ (TR /mango/)

#Makyaj #EzgiFındık #Pfnoktaları Makyaj Koleksiyonum ve En Sevdiğim Ürünler -
Easy Beauty Look- Hafif Belirgin Goz Makyaji
Eski YouTuberlardan Kim Kaldı?
(20:42 mins) (27:18 mins)
YT_EF_V3 15:46-15:51 YT_DO_V4 1359-14:07

eğer volume'e ihtiyacınız varsa daha böyle Clinique bu chubby stick inanılmaz güzel
kalın chubby fırçalar seçin this Clinique chubby stick is amazing

if what you need is volume, choose Milk'in bu glossu, face glossu

chubby brushes like this (one)
this is the gloss by Milk, face gloss
 hashtags+Turkish
code+English
code+emoticons
#Newyork #EzgiFındık #Vlog
Amerika’yı Benimle Gezin | Newyork Part 2 🌎🌴
YT_EF_V2 15:46-15:51 Line1 baksanıza (look)
<Turkish influencer in Magnolia Bakery in New York
showing the cakes in the shop window>
Line2 red velvet cupcake

Line3 chocolate

Line4 butter creamli (with butter cream)

Line5 farklı farklı carrot cakeler (a variety of

carrot cakes)

Line6 bananalar (ones with bananas)

Line7 çok tatlış (very sweet)

Ezhel’s rap lyrics…
• There are endless opportunities and infinite ways of looking into the
relationship between language and society through the lens of the
“public” display of language.
• What are these types of studies called?
 Can you think of other examples you have come
across from your own life and experiences?

“Linguistic landscapes” you are familiar with

maybe?
‘The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names,
commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the
linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration’ (Landry & Bourhis,
1997: 25).

• Linguistic landscape studies focus on the investigation • Linguistic landscape has been described as
of displayed language(s) in a particular space, being "somewhere at the junction of
• ‘the visibility and salience of languages on public and sociolinguistics, sociology, social psychology,
commercial signs in a given territory or region’ geography, and media studies".
Gorter & Cenoz (2023)
The book provides an overview of how the field of
Linguistic Landscape Studies has emerged and
developed over the past 20 years, combined with an
in-depth exploration of the theoretical approaches,
innovative research methods and major themes that
have been central to this dynamic area of research.

“The study of linguistic landscapes is one of the most

dynamic and fastest-growing fields in applied
linguistics and sociolinguistics. “
Summaries of the four classic
LL studies
https://onlinelibra
ry.wiley.com/doi/e
pdf/10.1111/weng
.12514
Which city is
this?
Signs @ Tuzluca, Iğdır (district gates)
• Turkish, Kurdish, English, Armenian

For a related news

interview on why there
are 4 languages here
(17.09.2015):
https://www.sondakika.co
m/haber/haber-tuzluca-
da-4-dilde-tabela-
7702602/

News on the removal of a

language on it a year later
(2016-06-23):
https://yesiligdir.com/hab
er/detay/18100
How does the
“Belediye başkanı”
explain the rationale
behind having these
signs in multiple
languages?

Why does he feel he

needs to explain?
• Why was one sign
later removed?
• What justification is
presented?
• What support is
called for?
 Why do you
think this has
stirred up
different
emotions for
different
people?

Are matters of
language really
about language
in the first place?
Language ideologies
• In the quotation re multilingualism, Blommaert also mentions
‘language ideologies’, i.e. our beliefs about what a language is (and
what multilingualism is), how language works, how it is used, what
value it has.

• the centrality of language ideologies >> a language ideological approach to

the study of multilingualism.

• Accordingly,
Seeing ‘languages’ as well-defined, bounded entities is the product of
an ideological process. WHY?
What does this mean?
• What would an alternative view of multilingualism entail?

• Not in terms of ‘languages’ but in terms of linguistic resources and

repertoires, and advocates this as a more successful way of capturing
what is often an elusive and intractable linguistic reality.
• It takes a broad definition of multilingualism as verbal repertoires
consisting of more than one variety (whether language or dialect, or
many other things).
Language ideologies and discrimination…racism

• What
assumption is
the teacher
basing his
explanation”?
Weber & Horner (2012) wrote:
• terms such as bilingualism, trilingualism, etc. are
subsumed under the term ‘multilingualism’; we avoid
such terms as far as possible because they are based
on the problematic idea that ‘languages’ are easily
identifiable and can be counted.
• In fact, however, the question of which resources in
people’s repertoires count as ‘languages’ and which
do not is a socio-political rather than linguistic one.
Do you agree, do you disagree, why/why not?
 e.g.

https://www.e
qualtimes.org/
the-politics-of-
language-in-
bosnia#.ZFH1C
uxBxR0

In spite of nationalist politics, many experts from the Balkans agree that Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian
and Montenegrin are one language with different names.
‘multilingualism’ itself is a rather problematic
term because of this underlying
assumption of language as a bounded entity
which is countable.
However,
• other terms proposed are not unproblematic either: they, too, could be
understood as being based on the same assumption or they are not (yet)
widely accepted.
• ‘plurilingualism’ (Council of Europe 2005),
• ‘polylingualism’ (Jørgensen, 2008),
• ‘interlingualism’ (Widdowson, 2010) or even
• ‘multiplurilingualism’ (Ehrhart, 2010),
• ‘metrolingualism’ (Otsuji and Pennycook, 2010)
https://www.tandfonline
.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1
4790710903414331?nee
dAccess=true
 DISCUSSION QUESTION:
Describing and comparing
linguistic repertoires
A repertoire is the set of linguistic resources (whether ‘languages’ or
‘dialects’ or “uses”) which are at an individual’s disposal.

Can you describe as fully as possible your own

linguistic/communicative repertoire: what varieties
and semiotic resources does it consist of? when, where
and with whom do you use these varieties? how does
your range of linguistic resources compare with those
of your classmates?
A sign language users language portrait…
• What other
varieties
languages or
codes does
your language
portrait have?
Questioning deeply held assumptions about
language and multilingualism…
1. How do languages ‘leak’ into each other (rather than being clearly
defined entities), and what implications does this have for our
understanding of what a language is and what multilingualism is?

2. In what sense can a language be said to be endangered, and what

are the benefits and the pitfalls of attempting to revitalize it?

3. What is the best way of organizing a multilingual system of

education which is truly open to linguistic diversity?
Questioning deeply held assumptions about
language and multilingualism…
4. What are the advantages and disadvantages of mother
tongue education and heritage language education?
A heritage language is a minority language (either immigrant or indigenous) learned by
its speakers at home as children, but never fully developed because of insufficient input
from the social environment.
Heritage speakers are individuals who were raised in homes where a language other
than the dominant community language was used.

5. How can we critically analyse multilingual signs, media

representations of multilingualism and official policy discourses,
and how can we identify the (often restrictive) assumptions and
ideologies underlying these discourses and representations?
• By tackling these and many other questions in the 6
weeks to follow, we ultimately aim at reversing the
traditional paradigm by normalizing multilingualism.
• In other words, we need to see/consider
multilingualism rather than monolingualism as the
normal state of affairs.

How can we capture the “full complexity” of

our linguistic realities in the late modern age that we are
living in?

What is influencing our (linguistic) reality in this age?

Globalization and superdiversity

• For more visit:

https://www.ac
ademia.edu/14
11177/Languag
e_and_superdi
versity_part_1_
Diversities_13_
2_
Some problematic distinctions…
• ‘languages’, we need to be aware that we are dealing with
socio-politically rather than linguistically defined units.
• Apart from ‘language’, we also sometimes use other terms
which are less than optimal such as, for instance, migrant
children or students.
• The problem with this term is that it perpetuates an us vs.
them distinction, which in fact needs to be overcome.
What is particularly worrying is that only certain children or
students tend to be perceived and categorized as ‘migrants’.
• For instance, in a French school, a child with one
French and one Belgian parent will probably not
be perceived as a ‘migrant’,

• whereas a child with one French and one Nigerian

parent most likely will be. Moreover, the latter
child may be perceived as a ‘migrant’ even though
she or he holds French citizenship and was born in
France (and hence never migrated). As is the case
with all forms of social categorization, the label
‘migrant’ is at least to some extent a matter of
perception and thus socially constructed.
 What could be some problems associated
with these terms?
• non-standard varieties
• minority and majority
• minority and majority languages.

1. oppressed minorities can sometimes be numerically the majority group: e.g.

black people in apartheid South Africa.

2. one and the same language can be the majority language in one social context (e.g. Spanish in Spain)
and a minority language in another (e.g. Spanish in the US).

Following Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004: 4), the terms ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ are therefore used ‘not to draw
attention to numerical size of particular groups, but to refer to situational differences in power, rights, and privileges’.
TEST YOURSELF 337 QUIZ-1

1. What is/are the official language(s) of the following countries:

Switzerland; USA; New Zealand; Belgium?
Switzerland: French, German, Italian, Romansch;
USA: no official language (at the federal level);
New Zealand: English and Maori;
Belgium: French, Dutch and German.
2. Do you know the rap music of Amoc or Nash? What language(s) do
they sing in?

Nash sings in Nouchi, and Amoc in Inari Sámi, mixed with English and
other languages.
Amoc sings in Inari Sami
For more on the
Sami People:
https://www.the
aurorazone.com/
the-sami-people

Watch the video at this link on why Nash

sings in Nouchi:

Nouchi: Why the future of French is African:

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p08vgtrg/n
ouchi-why-the-future-of-french-is-African
TEST YOURSELF QUIZ-1 (contd.)
3. What is Hindustani, and why did Gandhi try to – and fail to –
promote it as the national language of India?

Hindustani is the vernacular mix of Hindi and Urdu spoken by many

people in India (linguistically speaking, the two languages are
virtually indistinguishable).

Gandhi hoped that Hindustani would bring together the Hindu and
Muslim population of India. However, the Hindu elite chose to
promote (a purified) Hindi as an official language of India at the
expense of Urdu, because the latter is the official language of
Pakistan, the neighboring country with which India has entertained
highly strained relations.
 TEST YOURSELF QUIZ-2
4. In what language are these lines from Robert Burns’ poem ‘The
Banks o’ Doon’ written? In English or Scots?

Scotland is institutionally bilingual in Scots and Gaelic. Scots English forms a continuum from Broad
Scots (which itself consists of a large number of social and regional varieties) to standard Scottish
English. The question of whether Scots is a ‘language’ or a ‘dialect’ of English is hotly debated in
Scotland.

As we have seen, this distinction does not really make sense in linguistic terms, but the reason that the
question is debated in relation to Scots English and not in relation to e.g. Northumbrian or Yorkshire
English is of course a political one. It is connected with the fact that Scotland used to be an
independent kingdom in the past, and that in the present it has a certain degree of political autonomy
with its own Parliament in Edinburgh.
TEST YOURSELF QUIZ-3
5. Do you know what any one of the following terms refer to: Singlish
or Verlan or Ebonics?
Singlish is an English-based Verlan is a type of argot in Ebonics is distinctive speech of
creole language spoken in the French language, featuring African Americans as 'Black
Singapore. ... After some time, inversion of syllables in a word, and English' or African American
this new pidgin language, now English (AAE) or, if they want to
is common in slang and youth
combined with substantial emphasize that this doesn't
language. It rests on a long French
influences from Indian include the standard English
English, Peranakan, southern tradition of transposing syllables of usage of African Americans, as
varieties of Chinese, Malay, individual words to create slang 'African American Vernacular
and Tamil, became the words. English' (AAVE).
primary language of the
streets. Words in verlan are formed by -American black English
switching the order in which regarded as a language in its
syllables from the original word are own right rather than as a
pronounced. For dialect of standard English.
example, français becomes céfran.
TEST YOURSELF QUIZ-4
6. Is there a language called Chinese?

Chinese in fact refers to a whole range of

languages spoken in China (and other Asian
countries such as Singapore), from Cantonese in
Hong Kong to Mandarin in Beijing. The standard
variety Putonghua is based on Beijing Mandarin.

Taiwanese Mandarin, or Guoyu

(traditional Chinese: 國語; simplified Chinese: 国
语; pinyin: Guóyǔ; lit. 'National Language'), is a
variety of Mandarin Chinese and a national
language of Taiwan.
 TEST YOURSELF QUIZ-5
7. What language(s) may be looked upon as ‘American’ languages (as
opposed to ‘immigrant’ languages) in the United States?

Apart from English, there are about 175 Native American languages
still spoken in the United States.

As for Spanish, which like English is a colonial language, it would

probably also need to be looked upon as a language of the United
States, since it was the main language spoken in the southwest
(from Texas to California, and from Arizona and New Mexico to Utah
and Nevada), which used to be part of Mexico until it was annexed
by the US in the middle of the nineteenth century.

XX
TEST YOURSELF QUIZ-6
8. What is the difference between the English Only and the English Plus
movements in the United States?

• English Only takes a subtractive approach in that it

wants immigrants to switch over to English as quickly
as possible; all immigrant minority languages should
be eradicated.

• English Plus, on the other hand, takes an additive

approach: immigrants should be allowed to maintain
their own languages plus they should acquire English
as quickly as possible.
TEST YOURSELF QUIZ-7
9. What language(s) is/are used on the signs below, which you
encounter as you enter the Luxembourg or the Luxembourgish village
of Schengen?
Schengen
TEST YOURSELF QUIZ-4
Schengen (first sign) is the village in Luxembourg whose name has become
famous because the agreement to abolish border controls between a
number of EU member-states was signed there. The village is situated on the
Moselle river, with Germany on the other side of the river (and the border
with France also nearby).
Unsurprisingly, the name ‘Schengen’ is rather German-sounding, like most
place-names on the Luxembourgish side of the Moselle (Remich,
Grevenmacher, Wasserbillig, etc.). However, official policy requires place-
names to be indicated on bilingual signs with French at the top and
Luxembourgish at the bottom. For instance, the capital city signs read
‘Luxembourg’ and, below it, ‘Lëtzebuerg’ (see second sign).

This means that the Schengen sign is actually to be read as bilingual: the
top ‘Schengen’ is in French, the bottom one is in Luxembourgish, and
neither of them is in German!
Coulmas (2018)
The following matrix (from Coulmas, 2018) sorts key
concepts along a static vs. dynamic dividing line and
thus highlights a core characteristic of multilingualism,
its fluidity.
Coulmas (2018)
 Theoretical and methodological
framework
ch2

XX
The construction of meaning
What does this graph “mean”?
Genome size in seven groups
of crustaceans /krʌˈsteɪʃnz/

This graph suggests that there

are two sets of genome sizes,
groups with small genomes
(branchiopods, ostracods,
barnacles, and copepods) and
groups with large genomes
(decapods and amphipods);
the members of each set are
not significantly different from
each other. Isopods are in the
middle; the only group they're
significantly different from is
branchiopods.
Crustaceans

• A crustacean is an
animal with a hard
shell and several
pairs of legs, which
usually lives in
water. Crabs,
lobsters, and
shrimps are
crustaceans.
The construction of meaning…
But are things always so straight forward when
other (textual) modalities are involved?

How and why is/can meaning be constructed differently by

different hearers/readers?

Meaning is not fixed or contained within individual words, but(often times)

needs to be constructed by the hearer or reader, who links
the text with relevant background knowledge in order to make sense of it.
Which one makes more sense to you?
This is the meaning of This is the way I (or
this text/poem/novel, others) have
etc. constructed the
meaning of this text in
this situation.
X
Dominant vs. critical readings in textual
criticism
We use our own assumptions about the world in order to
understand what assumptions a particular text is based upon.

• If the two sets of assumptions seem (to us) to be aligned, we

simply go along with the writer’s assumptions, we allow ourselves
to be carried along by them: this is often referred to in textual
criticism as the dominant reading of a text.
• If, on the other hand, there seems (to us) to be a clash between
our assumptions and the assumptions made in or by the text, then
we might well begin to question or even reject the latter: this is
the resisting or critical reading of a text.
An example… • The dominant reading of Cinderella presents an
ideal image of romantic love that survives against
the odds. The prevailing message of this story
encourages readers to believe that dreams can
come true.
• A resistant reading of Cinderella reveals the love
interest to be a shallow man who judges women
solely on the basis of physical attractiveness.
• A man who will marry a woman on the basis of a
few hours of dancing is likely to leave Cinderella if
someone with daintier feet comes along.
• The story also represents a woman's physical
appearance as a commodity for her to use to gain
social status and wealth.
• The prevailing message cautions readers against
believing in romantic love and points out the
misogyny inherent in the societal structures
surrounding Cinderella.
 Why do we need to be critical when studying
multilingualism?
Here are three extracts: a newspaper headline, a sentence from a literary text and a
short extract from an official language-in-education policy document.

Use your own background assumptions in order to identify what assumptions these
texts seem to be based on, and decide whether or to what extent you accept or reject
these assumptions (and why):

BE READY TO TALK ABOUT HOW HARD/EASY THIS WAS!

• What may have made the above Activity difficult for you is that you
did not have much information about the context of the three
examples. It is clear that the more we know about the context, the
easier it becomes to understand the assumptions and implications of
a text.

• This is why, if you want to study sites of multilingualism, it is optimal

to combine the analysis of discourse with ethnographic
investigation.
Contextual information:
• In 1981, young people in Brixton, South London, demonstrated
against police harassment and brutality.
• The street ‘rioting’ that ensued spread to other parts of Britain.
• The following day, one British tabloid published an article about
these events with the headline reproduced above.
Lets go back and now do a critical reading of
(a)
Contextual information:
• This sentence is taken from Charlotte Brontë’s famous novel Jane
Eyre. Rochester, the English gentleman, is in love with the governess,
Jane Eyre.
• Here he tells her about some of the dark secrets of his past life, in
particular how he came to marry his first wife, Bertha.
• Bertha is a white creole, born in the West Indies as the descendant of
European settlers. Rochester feels convinced that Bertha’s family did
everything they could to ensure that this marriage would take place,
in other words that he was ‘conned’ into marrying Bertha.
 Lets do a critical reading of (b)

XX
• Contextual information: This sentence is taken from an official language-in
education policy document published by the Luxembourgish Ministry of
Education. It deals with the organization of the first year of pre-school education,
for children aged 3–4.
• Luxembourg has a highly heterogeneous school population (in many classrooms,
especially in urban areas, non-Luxembourgish passport holders make up over 50
percent of the schoolchildren).
• The national language, Luxembourgish, is spoken by most of the autochthonous
/ɔːˈtɒkθənəs/ children, but German and French are also officially recognized
languages and widely used in the country, as well as other languages such as
Portuguese, Italian and English. (For further details about the language situation in
Luxembourg, see chapter 9 in our main textbook.)
• Because of the small size of the country and the highly heterogeneous population,
mixed marriages are extremely frequent and the actual linguistic reality of many
families is highly multilingual.
Lets do a critical reading of (c)
….The need for ethnographically based
discourse analysis
• What is ethnography?

The following is a useful definition of ethnography: ‘the recording and

analysis of a culture or society, usually based on participant-observation
and resulting in a written account of a people, place or institution’ (Simpson &
Coleman 2017). Having said that, the empirical focus for ethnographic
research is in flux. For example, in recent years, some anthropologists have
moved away from face-to-face participant observation to studying alternative
constructions of cultural life, such as emergent online virtual worlds (e.g.
Boellstorff 2012)

• E.g. Conducting digital ethnographies

• Please read in more detail from the chapter…
The study of language ideologies and
criticality
• Language ideologies have been widely studied in linguistic
anthropology and sociolinguistics.
• Because, like most discourse models, they usually involve
simplifications, they ‘can do harm by implanting in thought and
action unfair, dismissive, or derogatory assumptions about
other people’ (Gee 2005: 72).
• It is therefore important to be aware of when texts rely upon
such potentially stereotyped and discriminatory assumptions
and ideologies.
What can language ideologies do?
• Blommaert and Verschueren (1998: 25), ideology can be defined as a
‘constellation of fundamental or commonsensical, and often normative,
ideas and attitudes related to some aspect(s) of social “reality”’.
• Language ideologies are those that relate to language use and structure.
• Because of the potential normative power of ideologies, language
ideologies, too, tend to be imbued with vested interests and can play a role
in group membership, boundary negotiation, as well as social inclusion
and exclusion.
• Irvine (1989: 255) emphasizes that language ideologies constitute ‘the
cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together
with their loading of moral and political interests’.
To be continued…
Any questions?
Who is afraid of Bilingualism?

Towards a More Language-

centered Approach to
Plurilingualism
Module 2 (W11)

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hale IŞIK-GÜLER

The remainder
of term with
MODULE-2:

-We will also provide

more information about
Data Collection 5%
today!
Topics left over from last week…
• ???
 Why do we need to be critical when studying
multilingualism?
Here are three extracts: a newspaper headline, a sentence from a literary text and a
short extract from an official language-in-education policy document.

Use your own background assumptions in order to identify what assumptions these
texts seem to be based on, and decide whether or to what extent you accept or reject
these assumptions (and why):

BE READY TO TALK ABOUT HOW HARD/EASY THIS WAS!

• What may have made the above Activity difficult for you is that you
did not have much information about the context of the three
examples. It is clear that the more we know about the context, the
easier it becomes to understand the assumptions and implications of
a text.

• This is why, if you want to study sites of multilingualism, it is optimal

to combine the analysis of discourse with ethnographic
investigation.
Contextual information:
• In 1981, young people in Brixton, South London, demonstrated
against police harassment and brutality.
• The street ‘rioting’ that ensued spread to other parts of Britain.
• The following day, one British tabloid published an article about
these events with the headline reproduced above.
Lets go back and now do a critical reading of
(a)
Contextual information:
• This sentence is taken from Charlotte Brontë’s famous novel Jane
Eyre. Rochester, the English gentleman, is in love with the governess,
Jane Eyre.
• Here he tells her about some of the dark secrets of his past life, in
particular how he came to marry his first wife, Bertha.
• Bertha is a white creole, born in the West Indies as the descendant of
European settlers. Rochester feels convinced that Bertha’s family did
everything they could to ensure that this marriage would take place,
in other words that he was ‘conned’ into marrying Bertha.
 Lets do a criticial reading of (b)

XX
• Contextual information: This sentence is taken from an official language-in
education policy document published by the Luxembourgish Ministry of
Education. It deals with the organization of the first year of pre-school education,
for children aged 3–4.
• Luxembourg has a highly heterogeneous school population (in many classrooms,
especially in urban areas, non-Luxembourgish passport holders make up over 50
percent of the schoolchildren).
• The national language, Luxembourgish, is spoken by most of the autochthonous
/ɔːˈtɒkθənəs/ children, but German and French are also officially recognized
languages and widely used in the country, as well as other languages such as
Portuguese, Italian and English. (For further details about the language situation in
Luxembourg, see chapter 9 in our main textbook.)
• Because of the small size of the country and the highly heterogeneous population,
mixed marriages are extremely frequent and the actual linguistic reality of many
families is highly multilingual.
Lets do a criticial reading of (c)
….The need for ethnographically based
discourse analysis
• What is ethnography?

The following is a useful definition of ethnography: ‘the recording and

analysis of a culture or society, usually based on participant-observation
and resulting in a written account of a people, place or institution’ (Simpson &
Coleman 2017). Having said that, the empirical focus for ethnographic
research is in flux. For example, in recent years, some anthropologists have
moved away from face-to-face participant observation to studying alternative
constructions of cultural life, such as emergent online virtual worlds (e.g.
Boellstorff 2012)

• E.g. Conducting digital ethnographies

• Please read in more detail from the chapter…
The study of language ideologies and
criticality
• Language ideologies have been widely studied in linguistic
anthropology and sociolinguistics.
• Because, like most discourse models, they usually involve
simplifications, they ‘can do harm by implanting in thought and
action unfair, dismissive, or derogatory assumptions about
other people’ (Gee 2005: 72).
• It is therefore important to be aware of when texts rely upon
such potentially stereotyped and discriminatory assumptions
and ideologies.
What can language ideologies do?
• Blommaert and Verschueren (1998: 25), ideology can be defined as a
‘constellation of fundamental or commonsensical, and often normative,
ideas and attitudes related to some aspect(s) of social “reality”’.
• Language ideologies are those that relate to language use and structure.
• Because of the potential normative power of ideologies, language
ideologies, too, tend to be imbued with vested interests and can play a role
in group membership, boundary negotiation, as well as social inclusion
and exclusion.
• Irvine (1989: 255) emphasizes that language ideologies constitute ‘the
cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together
with their loading of moral and political interests’.
• Language ideologies:
“morally and politically loaded representations of the structure and
use of languages in a social world. They link language to identities,
institutions, and values in all societies. Such ideologies actively mediate
between and shape linguistic forms and social processes.”
The study of language ideologies (LIs)
Some commonly held (and closely connected) language ideologies:

1. the hierarchy of languages

2. the standard language ideology (Milroy and Milroy 1999)
3. the one nation–one language ideology
4. the mother tongue ideology
5. the ideology of purism
LI-1: the ‘hierarchy’ of languages
• This is the belief that linguistic practices can
be labelled and divided into ‘languages’ or
‘dialects’, ‘patois’ /ˈpætwɑːz/, etc., which are
then subsumed into a hierarchy, with
‘languages’ being looked upon as superior to
‘dialects’ and, additionally, certain languages
being given a higher status as the ‘national’
or ‘official’ language of the state or
community.
Can you think of any such hierarchies you are aware
of/have seen in effect?
???
• The most common linguisGc argument put forward in
support of such a disGncGon is the criterion of mutual
intelligibility: if two varieGes are mutually intelligible, they
are dialects, and if not, they are languages.

• However, some ‘languages’, such as Danish, Swedish and

Norwegian, are largely mutually intelligible, and some
‘dialects’, e.g. of Chinese, are not.
• The position advocated by numerous contemporary
sociolinguists that named languages may be seen as
socio-political constructs seems a more viable view.

• Thus, if Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, or Serbian,

Croatian and Bosnian are seen as separate languages,
this is for socio-political rather than linguistic reasons.
 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/1
0.1080/14790718.2017.1350185?needAc
cess=true&role=button

MICRELA Project page:

http://www.let.rug.nl/gooskens/project/
 • BG: Bulgarian C
• PL: Polish
• SK: Slovak

• CR: Croatian,
• SL: Slovene
• CZ: Czech

One interesting finding:

“Slovenians understand Croatian

better (79.4%) than the Croatians
understand Slovenian (43.7%)”
• Are there
Chinese
varieties that
are not
mutually
intelligible?
(Tang and Van
Heuven, 2009)
On intelligibility (Gooskens and Van Heuven,
2021)
• Reciprocal versus asymmetrical intelligibility
• Inherent versus acquired intelligibility
• Modality differences (spoken versus written)

• Other possibilities:
A Typology of intelligibility tests
• (Functional testing, online and offline)
• Cloze test with written gaps,
• close test with spoken gaps,
• translation of semantically unpredictable sentences,
• sentence verification, carry out spoken interactions,
• text comprehension,
• text translation,
• story to picture mapping,
• (and at the discourse level) map task, spot the differences task)
Some
examples…
LI-2: the ‘standard language’ ideology

• The standard language ideology is based on the belief that languages

are internally homogeneous, bounded entities.

• Languages that have been named and thus separated off from other
named languages frequently undergo a process of standardization.

• The latter process needs to be understood from a historical

perspective: which variety becomes standard is mostly due to socio-
political developments, and certainly not to any inherent superiority of
this particular variety.
 “The development of standardized languages is directly
connected with the poli9cs of state-making” (Ricento 2006,
p.233).

“It seems appropriate to speak more abstractly of

standardiza9on as an ideology, and a standard language as
an idea in the mind rather than a reality – a set of abstract
norms to which actual usage may conform to a greater or
lesser extent.” (Milroy and Milroy, 1999, p.19)
Do you agree with the quoted above? Why, why not?
• DISCUSSION POINT:
• Can standardization
become (in any way)
problematic when
marginalizing a fair
share of a population
under a “Standardized
roof”?
LI-2: the standard language ideology (contd.)

• Linguist Nicola McLelland on “standard” language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4knCakLhPaU

• For those more interested in the process of language

standardization, studying or researching it (Proceedings published
after The International Symposium on Language Standardization in
1991): https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000090676

• Prof. David Crystal on standard vs. non-standard English

(….“Standard English is the minority dialect”):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGg-2MQVReQ
How is standardization attained and
reaffirmed?

According to Deumert (2003), the existence of this ideological

abstraction, the ‘standard language’, is continuously reaffirmed
through, in particular, codification rituals (the writing of grammars,
dictionaries, textbooks) and pedagogical rituals (teaching it in
schools). She concludes that ‘these ritual practices are instrumental in
creating the characteristic attitudes and beliefs of standard language
speech communities, and contribute to the “normalization” of the
ideological construction of standard languages’ (Deumert 2003, p. 48).

How about also “the media/social media”, publications and broadcasts for
the masses?
 LI-3: the one naQon–one language ideology
• According to this ideology, language can be
equated with territory, and the link between
language and national identity is essential.
• It informs the 18th and 19th century
discourse of modernity underlying the
formation of the nation-states.

• BUT?
Did you know…

The country with the most official languages is Zimbabwe with 16. These are: Chewa, Chibarwe, English, Kalanga, Koisan,
Nambya, Ndau, Ndebele, Shangani, Shona, sign language, Sotho, Tonga, Tswana, Venda and Xhosa.
How is the
situation in
Europe?

DISCUSSION:
Which countries
have a single official
language? Which
have more? Any
guesses as to why?
 How
about
South
America?

Which
countries
are in SA?
 How
about the
official
languages
of the
countries
in South
America?
 How
about
South
America?

DISCUSS:
What has
influenced the
official
languages and
their number
here?
Quechua? Where have you
seen this before?
Quechua /ˈkɛtʃuə/
• usually called Runasimi ("people's
language") in Quechuan languages, is
an indigenous language family spoken
by the Quechua peoples, primarily living
in the Peruvian Andes.
• Derived from a common ancestral language,
it is the most widely spoken pre-
Columbian language family of the Americas,
with an estimated 8–10 million speakers as
of 2004.
• Approximately 25% (7.7 million) of
Peruvians speak a Quechuan language.
LI-4: the mother tongue ideology
Deumert (2000, p. 395), building upon work by Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson
(1989), wonders what the concept of ‘mother tongue’ could possibly refer to:

• Is your mother tongue the language(s) you learned first, the

language(s) you know best or the language(s) you use most?
(remember Bilal hoca’s introductory lecture!)

• Or does the concept of mother tongue transcend all these definitions based on
origin, function and competence?

• Is it rather to be understood in terms of identity, that is, is your mother tongue

the language you identify with?
The mother tongue ideology
• Relates to the problem associated with the concept of the
Native Speaker:

• it leads to a negative view of non-native speakers as ‘deficient’ by

comparison with the native speakers who enjoy a “privileged
position”,
• it assumes a norm of monolingualism in a world where the norm
would rather seem to be the opposite, namely multilingualism.
How is this
advertised?
How is this
adver.sed?
Any
“deficiency”
assump.ons?
LI-5: the ideology of purism
• this ideology has a powerful evaluative component, which
stipulates what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘proper’ language.

• It is based on a denial of the linguistic ‘fact of life’ that

language always changes, and also includes the belief that
only some speakers of the language have an accent.
e.g.
LOL
ha ha ha
sdfjhdjhd Keymashing in Turkish and English
aushxbwhx (Işık-Güler, 2024, manuscript in
Ahahajajajajajaja progess)
• Movements of linguistic purism tend to emerge at times of rapid
social change and, depending on the situation, can target features
perceived as ‘nonstandard’ or as ‘foreign’. It is important to
distinguish:
Remember your Ling I lectures!
Multilingualism within and
across languages
Weber, ch3
What is “ENGLISH”?

• Take a look at this and with a pair try to fill in the diagram (on a piece
of paper or on your phones) with the names of as many varieties of
English as possible (names of regional and geographical varieties,
social class varieties, historical varieties, etc.).
160 + varieties of World
Englishes
 McKay and Bokhosrt-Heng
(2008) make an important
point when they write, "if
innovations are seen as
errors, many varieties of
English would never
receive legitimacy…” (p.
144).

• Their usage of the term "innovation" as opposed to

deviation is important as the latter term carries
negative connotations that help delegitimize World
Englishes.
• It is clear that non-standard Englishs do have their own
distinct rules and practices; unfortunately, those who
have not spent much time studying language often
scorn these as errors and, Quirk-style, advocate firm,
inner-circle based international standards for
English. Those who take this stance refuse to grant
legitimacy to non-dominant varieties of English.
 It is important to remember
that each of these varieties is
not a monolithic entity but
consists in turn of many ‘x’s
which stand for regional,
social or historical
subvarieties.

e.g, “Caribbean English” could be subdivided into

• Jamaican English,
• Trinidadian English,
• Barbadian English, etc.,
each of which could of course be further subdivided along regional,
time or social class dimensions.
For more visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_English
• Suresh Canagarajah has written extensively on World Englishes
and how they can be more consciously incorporated into
English language classrooms.

When someone posted a

question on an online
forum about the possibility
for a job opening for an
Indian English teacher,
Indian English was treated
as a joke!
What is “standard” English then?

All three sentences are in standard English, whereas the following sentences are in a
non-standard variety (in this case, a Northern England variety of English):
Which of these do you agree/disagree with?

(a) Languages do not exist.

(b) Languages are not bounded engges (engges with clearly defined
boundaries).
(c) Languages are not internally homogeneous.
(d) A standard language is a dialect.
(e) There is a socio-poligcal, not linguisgc, hierarchy on which ‘dialects’
are lower than ‘languages’.
Dewaele et al. (2003)

Ch 1 & 3

Dewaele, J. M., Beardsmore, H. B.,

Housen, A., & Wei, L. (Eds.). (2003).
Bilingualism: beyond basic principles.
Multilingual matters.
Let’s discuss…

Who is afraid of Bilingualism?

ch1
Dispeling antagonisms

• a deep-seated and
widespread fear of
bilingualism
• assumption that
unilingualism is the norm
and that bilingualism
represents some sort of
deviation
Why have research findings not had an
impact on public opinion?
• much research undertaken which has been
positive both in approach and outcome yet it
has failed to affect general opinions on
bilingualism

1. the message from research is not getting

across, partly because many of us implicitly
accept the problematic connotation
2. not sufficiently aware of the nature and extent
of the fears evoked by bilingualism so that we
do not know how to direct the research
findings to the right adversaries. (science
communication, BiG at METU:
https://big.metu.edu.tr/ )
Kinds of fears: They are
1. Those that reflect societal preoccupations mostly
2. Those centering on the individual intertwined

• Striking: few bilinguals share such fears, when

compared with unilinguals.
Why?

Grosjean (1982: 268) surveyed bilingual and

trilingual individuals about the inconvenience
of having more than one language and found
that 52% of the bilinguals and 67% of the
trilinguals simply replied ‘no inconvenience’
while not a single subject felt that there were
no advantages.
What about teachers?
Wischmeier (2020): “There is a lack of empirical data on the way in which
teachers deal with linguistic diversity in the classroom. Research into how
teachers judge the multilingualism of their pupils is also yet to be carried out
(do they consider multilingualism to be enriching or do they find it difficult to
cope with?). Information relating to teachers’ professional knowledge and
their epistemological beliefs regarding bilingualism has also not yet been
collated.”

Beliefs about bilingualism seem to be mostly infuenced by:

• practical experience related to the number of children with a migrant
background in a school and less (in this study, not at all)
• with the collective and individual feeling of one’s own effectiveness or
• with school guidelines for dealing with diversity or language diversity.
Further research is necessary here.
https://www.pedocs.de/volltext
e/2020/21030/pdf/Koenig_2012
_Teachers_Pedagogical_Beliefs.
pdf#page=173
What causes and
effects have been
found?

h"ps://biblio.ugent.be/publica3
on/5664851/file/5664852.pdf
The Origins
of Adverse
Teacher
Beliefs
against
Turkish from
Ağırdağ et
al’s (2014)
findings:
How about
when
there are
only few
students?

XX What about in TURKEY? How do you think teachers deal with similar issues?
What are the
Language
policing practices
used?
Our Alumni is a prominent
researcher in this field
(Tilburg University,
Netherlands)
Yagmur & van
de Viljer
(2022)
talk about the
“Widening
Gap”
Exception….? Just ONE teacher!
 There are clear illustrations in this data of what Pierre
Bourdieu calls ‘symbolic violence’ (1991).
• Bourdieu (1991) argues that social dominance can
only persist because the dominant groups in
society impose their judgments, such as beliefs
about monolingualism, upon dominated groups,
such as the bilingual Turkish community in
Belgium.
Pierre Bordieu
(1930-2002),
• THE DANGER:
French sociologist Once the dominated groups internalize the point of
view of the dominant, they will defend it as if it was
a universal point of view, even when these
judgments are completely against their own
interests.
Ağırdağ et al’s (2014) findings:
Did they find any detrimental consequences on
academic achievement?
• How do you conceptualize bilingualism?
• Can you now (on the spot) create a metaphor for bi/multilingualism?

E.g. ARGUMENT IS WAR Conceptual Metaphor

• Bi/Multilingualism is …?
Günaydın, Y . (2021). The Metaphoric Perceptions of the Prospective Turkish
Language and Literature Teachers, Taking Pedagogical Formation Education about
“Bilingualism”. International Journal of Psychology and Educational Studies , 8 (1) ,
75-85 . (LINK)
Most cited categories of fears:
• (1) Parental fears
• ‘What have I done to my child?’
• (2) Cultural fears
• ‘Does bilingualism entail acculturation?’
• (3) Educational fears
• ‘Does bilingualism affect academic progress?’
• (4) Politico-ideological fears
• ‘Is bilingualism a threat to the nation state?’
1. Parental fears
Apprehensions may arise in parents who either
• (1) come from unilingual backgrounds and
when confronted by bilingualism tend to
transfer the difficulties of their own adult
experience to what they suspect affects their
children.

• (2) bilinguals themselves are isolated in a

generally unilingual environment which
pressurizes them into worrying about
bilingualism in their children.
The Bilingual
Family
Newsletter

https://www.multili
ngualmatters.com/
page/bilingual-
family-newsletter/
 1984 - 2010
Last issue
First issue
(1984)
• Have things changed
at all since 1984?

“The very existence of

the Bilingual Family
Newsletter testifies to
the presence of
parental fears, with
its regular series of
readers’ questions
requiring advice and
reassurance.”
• Some parents fear that bilingualism stunts the linguistic development of
young children in particular.
• Some parents fear that a child who does not have a single language fails to
forge firm emotional ties with a given linguistic-cultural community.
• Certain parents experience feelings of regret that their bilingual children’s
linguistic and cultural allegiance is not as strong as their own, particularly if
the older child preferentially opts for a language group other than that of
the parents.
• This is sometimes the case with immigrant parents whose children slip away from
the ‘values’ the immigrant brought with them in favour of those of the ‘mainstream
society’.

Unfounded!
For a more recent study just do a Google
scholar search…

Link:
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/40898638/Final%20Manuscript_IJBEB_2018_dash.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed
=y
A systematic
review of 191
articles!

hips://www.tandfonline.com/do
i/epdf/10.1080/01434632.2020.1
858302?needAccess=true
2. Cultural fears
They represent an area difficult to circumscribe because of the lack of
consensus on what the attributes of culture are, how these are absorbed,
transmitted and measured.

• What is culture?

• Difficulty of distinguishing
between language and culture
• Some believe bilinguals may undergo a form
of disorientation or acculturation brought
about by cultures in conflict.
• E.g Tunisia: Arabic and French are used in
education
• people from upper social groups have no problems
with the bicultural values implicit in Tunisia’s
Arabic–French education system, whereas those
from lower social strata have difficulties in
reconciling the two cultures embodied in the
different languages.

• upper level groups are orientated towards

cosmopolitan values which makes
bilingualism stimulating and enriching
• lower level groups in Tunisia are more
orientated towards traditional, indigenous
cultural values which makes them perceive
bilingualism as a profound cultural
aggression.
Another finding from a study on
Morocco:
(majority of the participants agreed to
first 2):
• ‘The Moroccan bilingual is divided between
two cultures (Arabic and French), and he
does not seem to fully belong to either’
• ‘Arabic–French bilingualism produces in
Moroccans a cultural crisis and lack of
identity’.
• ‘‘Arabic–French bilingualism produces in
Moroccans a lack of culture and originality’.
(slight majority disagreed)
A news article
https://www.economist.co
m/middle-east-and-
africa/2019/08/15/a-row-
over-teaching-in-french-
has-reopened-old-wounds-
in-morocco
AddiQve or SubtracQve?
• Others, Skutnabb-Kangas (1984) argues that without maintenance of
the mother tongue and culture there is a risk of conflicts of identity,
rootlessness, marginality and alienation.

• The class factor plays a primary role which determines to some extent
whether bilingualism is additive or substractive and which affects
biculturalism.

• HOWEVER, with elite bilingualism conflicting cultural pressures seem

to be absent.
3. Educational fears

Types of (unfounded) fears

expressed:
• bilingualism will handicap
a child’s
• speech development,
• intellectual progress,
• educational chances,
• emotional stability;
Types of (unfounded) fears expressed in
public opinion outlets (contd):
• may cause character difficulties so that children
become aggressive and anti-social;
• bring about mental disorders;
• make children ambivalent;
• cause cultural disorientation or opposing pulls
of loyalty;
• make children morally untrustworthy
• and engender linguistic sloppiness.
All completely unfounded!
The real educational problems lie with biases:
• biases in test measurements,
• bias in cultural indices of learning styles,
• an inadequate appreciagon of the amount of gme required to
achieve academic and conceptual skills in a second language,
• the erroneous assumpgon that eliminagng the first language as
quickly as possible will help promote the learning of the second
language when in fact the opposite may be true.

the majority of fears are unfounded if one is

dealing with truly bilingual education, properly
developed and long-term in nature!
Can it be
possible even in
assessment?

https://www.tandfonline.c
om/doi/pdf/10.1080/1367
0050.2024.2324856?casa_
token=E_rBfTy52LMAAAA
A:qpRQJBwcayW2a2rbfZR
uMG3oa99_H-
e938c30R7mH-
OcbjoYL3ORmHKfDUAHLw
PghV3rrNosXW7Z
Politico-ideological fears

Unease about language is almost always

symptomatic of a larger unease’ (McArthur,
1986: 87).

Many fears expressed about the negative aspects of bilingualism tend

to be overtly directed towards questions of culture, aesthetics,
education, which hide the covert preoccupations of those involved:
‘The issues in question, I would suggest, are much more likely to be
such things as dominance, elitism, ethnicity, economic control, social
status and group security’ (McArthur, 1986, p.88).
Comparison of EU and USA (2006/2007)
A real court case….from Brussels
A real court case….from Brussels
Pauline is a talented 8-year-old Dutch-French bilingual
girl who lives in Brussels. She is fond of drawing, and her
parents decide to send her to a small local French-
speaking arts academy in Brussels. She loves it until,
suddenly, after five months, a formal notification is sent
to her parents expelling Pauline from the academy.
The school authorities have noticed on the admission
form that the father refused to sign a declaration stating
LINK to the legislation:
that Pauline’s mother tongue or most used language is https://minorityrights.org/w
French. The parents are told that since that omission p-content/uploads/old-site-
constitutes a violation of the Belgian linguistic legislation downloads/download-223-
of 1963, their daughter will no longer be allowed to Belgian-Linguistic-case-full-
case.pdf
attend the school or any other French-speaking school
within the Brussels region.
A real court case….from Brussels
The parents are shocked and lodge an appeal before the
‘Jury of Language Issues’, an administrative court. The
parents have to attend a hearing at which they are asked
questions such as ‘What language do you speak at home?’,
‘In what language did Pauline utter her first words?’, ‘Where
do you intend to send your daughter for her further
education?’. The parents find themselves in a situation that
reminds them of the Inquisition. Their appeal is eventually
rejected. The parents therefore decide to institute legal
proceedings against the Belgian State.

• “At the moment of writing the case is still pending before a

Brussels court. The fact that this incredible imbroglio
happened in Brussels, the officially bilingual capital of a
trilingual country and administrative heart of the officially
multilingual European Union, is ironical to say the least.”
(Dewaele et al, 2003)
Let us assume for the moment that unilingualism is desirable for the
cohesion of a given nation-state.

History has shown that wherever this goal has been promoted by
political intervention in the form of encouraging language shift to a
dominant language, this has rarely succeeded.
Some examples
• Welsh has not been eradicated from the United Kingdom in spite of
the Act of 1535 forbidding its use in official life,
• Breton has not disappeared from France in spite of its elimination
from education and the public sphere since the French Revolution,
• Catalan and Basque did not die out in Spain under the Franco regime
in spite of severe repression.

Official attempts to destroy a language have often merely promoted

tension without achieving language shift!
• The attitudes towards bilingualism:
e.g. the United States, as documented by
Marshall (1986), illustrate a perceived
threat to national identity under the influx
of massive immigration from mainly
Spanish-speaking countries.

• The Californian senator Hayakawa

maintains that: ‘A common language can
unify, separate languages can fracture and
fragment a society’ (quoted in Marshall,
1986: 23).

• This standpoint is debatable.

Towards a More Language-
centered Approach to
Plurilingualism
Ch3 (Clyne)
When my daughter was aged 7, one of her friends, knowing
that my daughter and I communicated in German, asked her if
she was German. ‘Oh no,’ replied Joanna, quite offended, ‘I’m
bilingual’.

Why did she feel this way? Offended?

What was the daughter thinking of?

“There was no doubt that she saw her

bilingualism as providing the basis for her
identity and not the other way around.”
Language determined by X or determines X?
• ‘Contact linguists’ have, for some time, been successful in
demonstrating the centrality of language to social life and human
development in plurilinguals.

• But we still project language as being determined by identity,

attitudes and motivation, and social needs.

• What role does language itself play in shaping these, apart from the
well-known aspect of regarding language as a surrogate for ethnicity?
A field: Contact Linguistics
Contact linguistics, in parallel with the given definition of
language contact, deals with characteristics pertaining to
languages of at least two or more communities whose
regions coincide (Tomic, 2000: 451).

Contact linguistics can also be defined as the linguistic field

which either
• investigates the diachronic changes in two or more
languages which had been in contact, or
• explains completed changes which lead to the
current linguistic forms in such languages
• describes the structural and lexical changes that have
transpired in languages due to language contact in
both diachronic and synchronic approaches
Contact Linguistics and Multilingualism
Social Bias
The social significance of language in a contact situation has been
argued in a number of ways:

• (1) Language choice as a reflection of societal patterning.

• (2) Language as a medium of identification.
• (3) Diglossia. aunder
situation in which two languages (or two varieties of the same language) are used
different conditions within a community, often by the same speakers. The
• (4) Factors in language maintenance and shift.
• (5) Corpus or status planning of language for more ‘nationalist’ ends.
• (6) Integrative, instrumental and intrinsic motivation in SLA.
Language learning as a choice/force? What governs it?

Beyond Motivation: purpose source and trajectory

• Intrinsic motivation?
• Linguaphiles
• E.g Why learn Esperanto

• Some have
• little interest in grammatical
structures or grammatical
accuracy or in the separation of
the languages – they can
communicate with reasonable
ease and that is the important
thing.
• Other bilinguals,
• are fascinated by the structure
of their two languages and they
want to learn more about it
Beyond Instrumental and Integrative
Motivation-2
Structural orientaEon
• Nicholas (1985) differenkates between two orientakons in language learners –
funckonal orientakon (interest mainly in gelng the message across) and structural
orientakon (an addikonal layer – an interest in how the language is structured).
• Clyne suggests that we would find among the intrinsically moKvated (rather than
instrumentally or integrakvely mokvated) to acquire or maintain a language those
who have a structural orientakon.
• Would you agree? Why/Why not?

FuncEonal specialisaEon and intrinsic moEvaEon

• Various writers (e.g. Grosjean, 1982; Romaine, 1995) remind us that bilinguals are
not double monolinguals.
• They employ the resources of both their languages, so that each language has certain funcFons,
and various combinaFons of the languages have parFcular social and communicaFve
meaning
Beyond Instrumental and Integrative
Motivation-3
• Metalinguistic awareness/language apprenticeship (e.g. language
awareness programmes)

• Hawkins (1986) has developed the concept of ‘language apprenticeship’,

which emphasises the value of acquiring one language as a basis for later
acquiring further languages.
• Also the acquisition of a third language could have a positive effect on the
languages of a bilingual.
Beyond Instrumental and Integrative
Motivation-4
• Community building function of language
• general assumption is that a language will be maintained around a group of
people of common culture and ethnicity and that it will have an integrative
function within the culture (cf. for instance the core culture theory of Smolicz,
1981).
• But there is also evidence of a group of people forming a community around a
language.
• E.g. Australia,: this has occurred among speakers of languages such as German, Spanish,
Arabic, Cantonese and Mandarin. Often the groups using a common language constitute
different vintages, and older established groups speaking a language help resettle newer
ones.
• Very much like Sunday schools
Beyond Instrumental and Integrative
Motivation-5
• Developing relationship through a language and with a language
• Studies of bilingual language acquisition employing the one parent, one
language approach (e.g. Döpke, 1992; Saunders, 1988, Taeschner, 1983), have
demonstrated how in the very early period of a child’s life, they develop a
relationship with a parent through a particular language.

• The importance of catering for intrinsic motivation and students

with a structural orientation in language programmes
• Intrinsic motivation and metalinguistic awareness should be very significant
outcomes of bilingualism, bilingual education and, in fact, of any second
language programme.
Possible Research Areas

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

What could be possible outcomes?

• (1) What is the relaGon between intrinsic moGvaGon and the

development of structural orientaGon?
• Are learners (adults or adolescents) with a structural orientagon
likely to start off with a more intrinsic mogvagon than those with a
mainly funcgonally orientagon?
• Are they likely to develop such a mokvakon?
• (2) Can one predict an intrinsic motivation for language
maintenance/bilingualism from any other information, such as
biography, personality? Can it be tested?

• (3) Can we conduct case studies of learners carried to high levels of

competence through intrinsic motivation? What will this reveal?

• (4) Exactly how does transfer of metalinguistic skills proceed from one
language to another in the structurally oriented? How can this be
stimulated at the individual level or through school programmes?
• (5) What is it about a language that amracts linguaphiles?
• Is it the uniqueness of any aspect of a language?
• Is it sound or script or the shape of the writen language?

• E.g, what is the role of: phonemes/ phones/clusters that have no equivalent
in any other language acquired; otherwise unknown graphemes (e.g. ü, é, å),
intonakon, an unusually complex case system, idiomakc expressions that are
unknown in any other language encountered by the person? (Some of these
would scare off other potenkal acquirers.)

This calls for comparakve case studies of adults and adolescents who have
acquired different languages and in different ways.
• (6) Does early exposure to a L2 at home, in the country, in a community
situation or in kindergarten or primary school affect intrinsic motivation
and structural orientation?

• (7) How does a structural orientation affect results in formal language

learning?
• Is it better protection from attrition than a more functional orientation?
• Does it mean that a language-object approach is more successful or useful with such
learners than an immersion/content based programme?
• What does a teacher or a curriculum need to do to enable such learners/bilinguals to
move more swiftly into the acquisition of other languages as they have a cognitive
apparatus to help them along?
ImplicaQons for InternaQonal CommunicaQon
• There has been much discussion on the most efficient means of
communicating across cultures and language communities
internationally, especially in Europe.
• Among the options suggested have been polyglot dialogue (Posner,
1991), where everyone speaks their language and understands that
of a number of other people, and multilateral competence, where
people acquire a number of related languages (Munske, 1972;
Schmid, 1994) through contrastive programmes.

Do you think this can work? Why/why not? Think about

specific countries in trying to answer this question.
Any questions?
Language Variation, Spread;
Endangerment &
Revitalization

Week 12/13 (p2)

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hale IŞIK-GÜLER

The remainder
of term with
MODULE-2:

-We will also provide

more information about
Data Collection
(Interviews) today!
Language variation and the
spread of global languages
Weber, ch4
Variation
There is a
continuum
• (1) unstable and shifting boundaries of languages between these
(i.e. how languages leak into each other), two types of
(previous lecture) variation, and all
these variation
• (2) “leakage” within a language (today’s topic) types feed into
multilingualism.

• Linguistic variation is inherent to all languages or

varieties.

What are some types of language variation you can talk about?
Language variation
• No two speakers of a language speak exactly in the same way;
• nor does any individual speaker speak the same way all the time.
• Variation is a natural part of human language, and is influenced by
such factors as socio-economic status, region, and ethnicity, etc.

Variation may be at o Phonetic level

WHAT levels? o Phonological level
o Morphological level
o Syntactic level
o Semantic level 5
African-American English
• African-American English (AAE) is the variety spoken predominantly in
the black community in the US and popularized all over the world
through the urban black youth culture of rap and hip hop.

• AAE is characterized by systematic grammatical features such as:

• invariant or habitual be and
• double or multiple negation.

Discussion on AAVE (remember your 146 lectures!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQrtB7cZDrA (Prof. Ziegler’s students discuss AAVE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZpCdI6ZKU4. (lots of examples)
 ..-15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QFp
VgPl9tQ

XX1
African-American English
• AAVE? BLACK ENGLISH? EBONICS?

• More on its features:

1. Many African-American English speakers do not use –s in third person singular present tense forms
E.g. He go, She like
2. The copula verb to be is absent
E.g. She real nice, He not American
3. There is the use of ‘invariant be’
E.g. She usually be around
4. Singular-plural be variation is missing (We was eatin’)
5. Question inversion, existential it and negativized auxiliary preposition (I asked her where did she do, It’s a
boy in my class name Joey, Doesn’t nobody know that..)
6. Double negation
E.g. I ain’t got no money. The grammar of AAE is as complex and systematic as that of
standard English, and the attacks of language mavens who look upon
AAE as ‘deficient’ or ‘illogical’ are completely ill-founded.
Distribution of African Americans in the
United States
• For ‘AAE’, as with other varieties, there is not
one single monolithic entity but a range of
varieties that depend on both social and
regional factors.

• This is a major difference with standard

English, since standardization always involves
an attempt to stop or slow down linguistic
change, by ‘fixing’ the language in
dictionaries, grammar books and textbooks.

• Due to the standard language ideology (as

discussed in the previous weeks), the standard
variety is also the one that is perceived as the
most uniform and systematic.

XX
Language Contact and Change
A functional perspective: (Matras, 2009)
Possibilities and outcomes of contact
• In language contact situations, two or
more distinct languages or dialects come
into contact with each other either
-- directly through social interaction of the
speakers or
-- indirectly through education, media or
literature.

• Outcomes of such contact include (1)

borrowing, (2) code-switching
(translanguaging), (3) pidgins and creoles,
(4) the adoption of a different (third
language) Lingua Franca, etc.
 Borrowing
The adoption of linguistic elements from
one language (DONOR) into another
(RECIPIENT).
Loanwords in Turkish:
Borrowing can be lexical (both overt and
covert), (the borrowing of words and «Televizyon» (French: télévision)
phrases) or structural (the borrowing of «Trend» (English: trend)
phonological, morphological or syntactic «Perde» (Persian: perde)
patterns). «Kalem» (Arabic: ghalem)
«Semaver» (Russian: sema:ver)
These words are commonly referred to as «Varoş» (Hungarian: város)
loans or loanwords. «Bitter» (German: bitter)
«İskele» (Italian: scala)
Mısır, 2023:
on SMI Vlog (video + blog)

What about Anglicisms? Lets now

take a look at Mısır’s data)
 From (Mısır, 2023)

anksiyete bravo entersan klip prodüksiyon spiritüel

antibakteriyel bronz favori kolajen prosedür spontane
antijen bronzer fiber kolektif prova sprey
antioksidan bronzluk figür kompakt reaksiyon star
aora dambıl fit kondisyon retinol statü
aranje detoks fondöten konfor revize stil
artisan dezenfekte fotoselli konsantre ritüel stok
baget dizayn full konsept sauna toksin
bandana efekt global kontür seans tonik
baz ekstra graffiti koreografi sebun top
blok enjekte kür pigmentasyon skala transparan
kaos popülarite slogan trend
kardiyo potansiyel spesifik vintage
• Gómez Capuz, J. (1997). Towards a typological classification of
linguistic borrowing (illustrated with anglicisms in Romance
languages).
 İnovasyon?
1 inanılmaz güzel oldu ya

<text on the phone:

trying the kiss lash glue liner >

2 aa ben şok
3 bu bir yani inovasyondur
arkadaşlar
 PALET?
1 S1 bir paletini mi temizlesen

2 S1 bir su içsen

3 S2 evet temizliyorum

An example of idiosyncratic transliteration- does it convey the

meaning? What is meant by palet? Is the word invented/borrowed
and understood by the interlocutors mutually? Why? A potential
candidate for the dictionary?
What motivates the borrowing of linguistic
matter? (Matras, 2009)
• The two most frequently cited motivations for structural borrowing are
gaps in the structural inventory of the recipient language, and the prestige
enjoyed by the donor language.
• “The ‘gap’ hypothesis assumes that bilingual or semi-bilingual speakers
notice that one language is in possession of expressive means that do not
exist in the other. In an effort to extend the range of expressive choices
when communicating in the other, the supposedly ‘poorly equipped’
language, they replicate the structure that is available in the ‘better-
equipped’ language.”
• Other view: ‘Gaps’ are therefore not to be interpreted as deficiencies in the
recipient system, but rather as speakers’ attempt to avail themselves of their
full inventory of linguistic resources, at all times and in all contexts of
interaction.
 “Like ‘gap-fillers’, prestige loans can in this way enrich the
lexical inventory of the recipient language.”

• The ‘prestige’ hypothesis assumes that speakers imitate elements of

the speech of a socially more powerful, dominant community in order
to gain approval and social status.
• What this means in practice is that bilingual speakers associate certain
elements within their repertoire with a particular set of contexts in
which these elements are normally used.
• By using those elements in other settings, speakers seek to activate
those associations.
• Unlike cultural loans or ‘gap-fillers’,‘prestige’ loans often have
parallel expressions in the recipient language.
The frequently cited borrowing scale proposed by Thomason
and Kaufman (1988: 74–75) is an attempt to relate the
likelihood of structural borrowing to the
intensity of contact…
How do “semantic domains” have an effect?
(Matras, 2009, p.168)
Code-switching
Other definitions:
Code-switch, code-mix, or code-mesh??
• Codeswitching occurs at sentence or discourse level
• Codemixing takes place at the level of words or morphemes, i.e. the
L1 and L2 are mixed within the same word.
• Both cases imply the transference of linguistic elements from one language to
the other, occurring at the phonological, morphological, grammatical, or
lexical level (Crystal 1997, p. 66).
• Codemeshing is the combination of local, vernacular, or colloquial
varieties of a language used in daily interaction in order to embrace
and articulate a host of local and global ways of being and seeing the
world.
 Monolingual view, CS
and
Translanguaging

DYNAMIC VIEW:
MONOLINGUAL LANGUAGES AS A
VIEW TO
BILINGUALISM UNIFIED BANK OF
RESOURCES
 Translanguaging (Trawsieithu)
Cen Williams (1994)
(a Welsh educator and a language activist)

• Translanguaging is “the ability of multilingual speakers to

shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages
that form their repertoire as an integrated system”
(Canagarajah, 2011, p. 401).
• «Translanguaging is contextualized in the linguistic realities
of the 21st century, especially the fluid and dynamic
practices that transcend the boundaries between named
languages, language varieties, and language and other
semiotic systems» (Li, 2018, p. 9).
• «Named languages are social, not linguistic, objects» (Otheguy,
Garcia, & Reid, 2015, p. 281).
Translanguaging

• Rather than “Codeswitching” a very new movement to look

at this phenomena: Translanguaging!
• Garcia and Wei (as cited in Molina & Samuelson, 2016) think
that translanguaging is different from code-switching.
• Code-switching is seen as the process of changing two
languages, whereas translanguaging is about “the speakers’
construction that creates the complete language
repertoire” (p. 3).
Briefly Translanguaging…
• Translanguaging is the act performed by bilinguals of accessing
different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as
autonomous languages and systems, in order to maximize
communicative potential. (Ofelia García, 2009, p.140)
• Translanguaging is about communication, not about language itself.

There is a BIG difference in researching these areas of

bilingual development as code-switching searches for
“language interference and transfer” while translanguaging
analyses “how bi/multilingual individuals are involved in
their linguistic practice” (Hornberger and Link, 2012, p. 267).
Translanguaging as ability/asset
• For Canagarajah (2011), ‘translanguaging is the ability of multilingual
speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse
languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system’ (p. 401).

• Cook (2008) considers it to be an ability that is part of the

multicompetence of bilingual speakers, whose lives, minds, and
actions are necessarily different from monolingual speakers due to
the simple fact of having two languages coexisting in their minds and
interacting in complex ways that always keep both languages in the
foreground.
Garcia’s video lecture on Translanguaging:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l1CcrRrc
k0
• Translanguaging is a holistic conceptualization and a new vision of
languages, speakers, and repertoires (Cenoz, 2017). Practically, it
considers speakers' deployment of their full linguistic repertoire
simultaneously in flexible and creative ways.
• Theoretically, it problematizes the validity of the views which have
conventionally sustained a fixed national language regime which
means we don’t speak a language in the most rigid fixed way but we
invent our idiolect, our own style of speaking a language.
• Sentence Level
• Phrasal Level
• Morphological Level
• Lexical Level
• Phonetic/Phonological
Level

(Mısır & Erdoğan-Öztürk, 2021)

•Sentence Level:
sana sorucağımızı bilmiyorduk we're sorry my lady.
• Phrasal Level
tamam askım we’ll speak like that bundan sonra
Morphological Level
Neden triggerlandınız [celebrity’s name] Hanım? İngilizcenin
bütün dünyada hypelanmış olması su götürmez bir gerçek.
Üstelik siz de [username] resmi yerine [username] official yazan
da sizsiniz.

Mısır & Erdoğan-Öztürk, 2021

35
Mısır & Erdoğan-Öztürk 36
Rank Digital lexis Gloss Token (Rf) Type

1 link hyperlink 142 37

2 story short video post 48 14
3 vlog video blog 31 13
4 influencer social media influencer 30 11
5 fav favorite 17 7
6 like to like a post 13 4
7 affiliate affiliate link 11 1
8 reel reel (short video on Instagram) 10 6
9 YouTuber YouTuber 9 4
10 kod coupon code 8 3
11 DM direct message 7 5
12 emoji emoji 7 3
The organic evolving nature of the diffusion of lexical innovations:
13 mail e-mail - DM or emoji expanded the meaning: like 7 link-lemek, story2 atmak,
14 post shared content
likelamak 6 6
15 bot robot (Internet
- Furtherbot)
translanguaging transform the 6form, function and 2meaning of
linguistic entities. (story, affiliate) Mısır, 2023
Mısır, Hülya & Erdoğan-Öztürk, Yasemin. (2021). Metadiscourses of Turkish-English mixing and
linguistic purism: A gateway to translanguaging. American Association for Applied Linguistics Virtual
Conference 2021.
Translanguaging Practice on Social Media

ama olmaz ki biraz substitute şart

ama 😅
English structures (example at the lexical level)
Turkish structures
The language of
Emoji (Li, 2016) hello bebegim hav ar yu
(example at the phonetic/phonological
level)
Mısır & Erdoğan-Öztürk, 2021

Li, W. (2016). New chinglish and the post-multilingualism challenge: Translanguaging ELF in China. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca, 5(1), 1–25.
https://doi.org/10.1515/jelf-2016-0001
Translanguaging Practice on Social Media
#socialdistancing
#sosyalmesafe
Hashtags (#)
as a translingual #ülkemdesuriyeliistemiyorum
resource
(Erdoğan-Öztürk & Işık-Güler,
2020)
#idontwantsyriansinmycountry

#blacklivesmatter

Erdoğan-Öztürk, Y., & Işık-Güler, H. (2020). Discourses of exclusion on Twitter in the Turkish Context:
#ülkemdesuriyeliistemiyorum (#idontwantsyriansinmycountry). Discourse, Context and Media, 36, 100400.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2020.100400
LINGUA FRANCAs
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN TWO DIVERSE SPEECH
COMMUNITIES NEED TO COMMUNICATE?
• They find a LINGUA FRANCA!
• Lingua Franca is a language used for
communication between 2 people first/native
language are is different.
• In the world today, the lingua franca is
predominantly ENGLISH.
• the unrivalled instrument of international
communication across national borders in science,
business, aviation, technology, the internet, pop
culture, etc.
Q: Will it always remain this way?
How do languages become a Lingua Franca?
What are some related issues?
Historically,
• Imperialism, Colonialism
• "the system or policy of a nation seeking to extend or retain its authority over other people
or territories"
• Post-colonialism
•… For more on the Spread of English, visit:
https://www.uni-due.de/ELE/Spread_of_English.pdf
Currently,
• World Englishes
• Native speakerism/the myth of the native speaker?
• NNEST (pronounced: en-NEST): non-native English-speaking teachers is an
acronym that refers to the growing body of English language teachers who speak
English as a foreign or second language.
Q: What will be the language(s) of the future?
 Whose English? The «Ownership» of English
EIL: English as an International Language
ELF: English as a Lingua Franca

Kachru's
three-circle-
model:

Figure adapted from

Crystal, D.
(1999), The
Cambridge
Encyclopedia of the
English Language.
Cambridge: CUP,
p.107.
Pidgin

• Speakers of mutually unintelligible languages who are brought

together (perhaps by social, economic, or political forces), and
need to communicate with one another develop various ways of
overcoming the barriers to communication. Thus, they create
pidgin languages.

• Pidgin languages are usually made up of mixtures of elements

from all of the languages in contact.

• Pidgins are not grammarless or broken languages!

• Many pidgin languages, regardless of their source languages, share
certain characteristics (phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics).
• Ethnologue currently lists 17 pidgins used aorund the World.
Creole
• Creole languages develop from a pidgin language when it is adopted
as the first, or native language of a group of speakers.

• All creoles seem to be languages that were initially non-native to any

group of speakers and were adopted as first languages by children in
some speech community.
• This process is called nativization (of a pidgin).

• There are currently 92 listed by Ethnologue:

https://www.ethnologue.com/subgroup/70/
Jamaican Creole:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNM-BE4xAyo
Caribbean ‘nation language’ Video Lectures on NL
Part 1: https://youtu.be/PQmTG-rtaWQ
(West Indian Creole) Part 2: https://youtu.be/SmUktdCGQ48

• Language choice in the Caribbean is

complicated by the ethnic mixture or hybridity
of its population.
• With the virtual extinction of indigenous
peoples (mostly Carib and Arawak), the
majority of present-day inhabitants of the
Caribbean are the descendants of slaves or
indentured workers.
• Poets use Caribbean Creole as a way of
disidentifying from standard English and of
challenging monolithic, restrictive conceptions
of identity – whether it is Caribbean or British
identity.
Edward Kamau
Brathwaite
introduces the term
‘nation language’ for
West Indian Creole.
 The
many
Island
French and
English
creoles…
for the slave as for the
present-day inhabitant of
the Caribbean, the use of
standard English/French
can be hegemonic,
whereas the use of
creolized English may be
considered a subversive
act.
Singlish
Singlish
• a variety of English spoken in
Singapore, incorporating elements
of Chinese and Malay.
• Singlish is widespread in
Singapore, but it is valued in very
different ways by the Singapore
government and by its speakers.
• The government started a Speak
Good English campaign in 2000,
with the aim of getting
Singaporeans to use standard
English for purely instrumental
reasons.
Singlish –use or eradicate?
• Standard English, they argue, is needed for
international business and science in this
globalized world.
• As for Singlish, it is looked upon as bad English,
and the government would like to eradicate it.
• However, it has not been very successful in this
attempt, partly because it failed to realize that
one can promote standard English without
having to eradicate Singlish and partly because
it underestimated the strength of the link
between Singlish and Singaporean identity for
many citizens.
 Singlish

Though it is a
working class
variety, it also
has a lot of
‘covert prestige’
as the language
of solidarity
that binds
together
Singaporeans.
https://www.hawaii.
edu/satocenter/lang
net/definitions/singl
ish.html
• “Singlish is a patchwork patois of Singapore’s state languages — English, Malay,
Mandarin and Tamil — as well as Hokkien, Cantonese, Bengali and a few other
tongues. Its syntax is drawn partly from Chinese, partly from South Asian
languages.”
Pennycook’s (2000):
notion of ideology in relation to six frameworks for
understanding the global role of English…
1. Colonial celebration (English brings all the advantages of a
rich, sophisticated, modern language);
2. Laissez-faire liberalism (everyone should have the choice to
use English as well as other languages in different domains;
the policy of leaving things to take their own course);
3. Language ecology (all languages should be preserved, and
the spread of English threatens this);
4. Linguistic imperialism (English is dominant because of the
power of English-using countries and their institutions);
Pennycook’s (2000):
notion of ideology in relation to six frameworks for
understanding the global role of English…
5. Linguistic human rights (the use of one's language is a
fundamental right, and English threatens it, as Skutnabb-
Kangas, 2000 also argues)
6. Postcolonial performativity (English should be seen in
particular contexts to understand how it is used and who is
empowered by this use)
+Linguistic hybridity: languages constantly change and adapt,
mix and ‘hybridize’…this is only natural. (appropriation)
Verlan

• A linguistic diversity example from within France

• Verlan is a form of French slang that consists of
reversing the syllables in a word. It is actively spoken
in France and words have become so commonplace
that sometimes you can’t even remember what the
correct word is.
• spoken mostly by young people in the banlieues
(suburbs) of Paris and other big cities such as Lille, Lyon
and Marseille.
• Many speakers of Verlan are marginalized youths of
North African origin, referred to as les beurs (Verlan for
Arabs), also spoken by young people of many other
origins (including French).
• Despite all the French state’s
efforts, since the time of the
French revolution, to construct
a homogeneous and
monolingual community, the
reality has been and is that of a
heterogeneous population and
of linguistic diversity.

• Verlan is always
changing.
“With each
generation
Verlan
becomes
more
complex and
strange,
where kids
reverse
already
reversed
words.”
• Doran’s (2004: 119–20) study highlights:
To conclude …
1. Linguistic variation is a characteristic of all languages,
from the smallest to the largest ones.

2. All varieties, whether they are perceived as languages or

not, are both systematic and rule-governed, and leak
into each other, with no clear boundaries between
them.

3. Identity work plays a big part when it comes to choice.

As a follow up,
Why don’t you….

Explore one of the mixed youth languages such as:

• Kanaksprak (Turkish –German) in Germany,
• Sheng (Swahili – English) in Kenya or
• Tsotsitaal (a mix of many languages including Zulu,
Xhosa, Sotho, Afrikaans and English) in South Africa.
Good resources to start reading from:
-Androutsopoulos and Georgakopoulou (2003)
-Stenström and Jørgensen (2009)
Revitalization of endangered
languages
Ch5, Weber
Discussion point:
• Is this issue “essential” or
“sentimental”?
• Why, why not?
???
• Words that describe a particular cultural practice or idea may not
translate precisely into another language.
• Many endangered languages have rich oral cultures with stories,
songs, and histories passed on to younger generations, but no written
forms.
• With the extinction of a language, an entire culture is lost.

• WHY ELSE?
Why do languages get “endangered”?
More and more languages are endangered in our globalized world. This
is due to two main factors we already discussed:
• 1. the politics of nation-state building, with states typically promoting
one language as the ‘national’ or ‘official’ language, while often
repressing the languages of both indigenous and immigrant minority
groups.
• 2. Due to the spread of global languages such as English with ever
higher instrumental value, there are strong pressures on minority
group members to drop their minority languages and to use instead
the national or official language of the state plus a global language
such as English.
Other
categorical
reasons?:
How many languages?
• It is widely agreed that there are around 7,200 languages spoken in
the world today, but their sizes and distributions vary greatly.
• largest 10 languages each have 100+ million speakers (Mandarin,
Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Japanese)
and together have 2.6 billion speakers (40% of world total)
4% of world’s languages are spoken by 96% of world’s
population, i.e. only 4% of world’s population speaks 96%
of world’s languages so there are many languages that are
very small (50% have less than 10,000 speakers, 25% have
less than 1,000)
L1 speakers:
All languages L1, L2, Lx combined
On the
internet?
Academic
publications?
Language Death
• There have been radical reductions in speaker numbers in the past 60 years for
languages across many regions of the world together with increasing age profiles
of remaining speakers, mostly as a result of language shift to more prestigious
and socio-economically powerful regional or state languages.

• May (2006): it is predicted on present trends that between 20 percent and 50

percent of languages will “die” by the end of the twenty-first century’. (that
would account to 3,500! languages)

• Concern for threatened languages has been combined with recognition of

linguistic and cultural rights of minorities, ethical and political considerations
(history of genocide, land rights etc.) and exercise of political power.
Levels of
endangerment
 Big discrepancy… mending a colonial past only?
• There is a big difference
here between indigenous
minority languages, which
have recently received a lot
of support (especially in
Europe through the EU’s
Charter for Regional or
Minority Languages), and
immigrant minority
languages, which have
received very little support.
un.gov.tr Language rights of indigenous peoples
Article 13 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples states that indigenous peoples have the
It is estimated that one
indigenous language dies every right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future
two weeks. The threat is the generations their languages, oral traditions, writing systems and
direct consequence of literatures. Further, it provides that States shall take effective
colonialism and colonial
practices that resulted in the
measures to protect this right, including through interpretation
decimation of indigenous in political, legal and administrative proceedings. Articles 14 and
peoples, their cultures and 16 state indigenous peoples’ rights to establish their educational
languages
systems and media in their own languages and to have access to
an education in their own language. Indigenous peoples’
• E.g. (also own language rights are also guaranteed under the Indigenous and
initiatives) Native
Hawaiians have Tribal Peoples Convention (No. 169) of the International Labour
promoted Organization. Other relevant international instruments are the
Hawaiian International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
language medium and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, among others.
education
For more information
go to:
http://www.unesco.o
rg/languages-
atlas/index.php?hl=e
n&page=atlasmap&c
c2=TR
Language Loss/Death

Tevfik Esenç
and Ubykh
language
(Ubıhça) died
in 1992 in
Balıkesir,
Turkey.

More on this last known speaker of the language: https://abaza.org/tr/ubyhcha-konushan-ubyh-tevfik-esench-anadilin-

son-tashyyycysy
A Citizen Science
initiative:

The
Endangered
Languages
Project:

http://www.en
dangeredlang
uages.com/
University
of London
(SOAS)

Go to:
https://ww
w.soas.ac.u
k/elar/
Endangered
Languages
Archive

Go to:
• https://elarar
chive.org/ma
p/
Language Revitalization (efforts)
Rescuing a language from near extinction due to colonialism, expansionism,
assimilationist policy, migration (in diasporic communities)
and more recently… globalization

• more or less successful revitalization of indigenous minority languages:

• Maori in New Zealand or Aotearoa,
• Sámi & Kven in Norway,
• Hebrew in Israel,
• Breton and Corsican in France
•…
Why revitalize? (Olko & Sallabank, 2021, p.10)
A range of social, psychological, and physical categories/stimuli:

(1) connecting with ancestors, the past, and cultural heritage;

(2) healing;
(3) building community;
(4) knowledge and culture;
(5) well-being; and
(6) cognitive benefits.
How can
you
assess
LV?

Language
Vitality
Index
When is Language revitalization the most
successful?
• Language revitalization is most
successful when it is simultaneously:
• promoted by a grassroots movement and
• by the state,
• by international minority rights
organizations.
Maori in New Zealand: a revitalization success
story (?)
• The Maori people are
the indigenous Polynesian
people of mainland New Zealand.

• Māori originated with settlers

from eastern Polynesia, who
arrived in New Zealand in several
waves of waka (canoe) voyages
between roughly 1320 and 1350.
 Maori in New Zealand: a revitalization success
story
• Maori became an official
language of Aotearoa (New
Zealand) – alongside English
– in 1987.
• New Zealand is ‘the only
example where the first
language of an indigenous
people has been made an
official state language’, since
other indigenous languages
such as Sámi in Norway only
have ‘regional official status’.
The Maori example has been such a resounding success
that other communities have adopted the same
teaching and learning philosophy… e.g. Hawai’i-Hawaiian,
e.g. Sámi and Karelian

• After a long period of colonial oppression and assimilationist policies in

education, Maori had become a highly endangered language.
• But the introduction of Maori-medium schooling from the 1980s onwards
has led to a successful revitalization of the language.
• In 1982 the first Maori-medium pre-schools (Te Kohanga Reo ‘language
nests’) were established, largely run by the Maori communities themselves;
rapidly extended to primary level and beyond.
• In 1985, the first Maori-medium primary schools (Kura Kaupapa Maori
‘Maori philosophy schools’) opened, and the first Maori-medium
secondary schools and tertiary institutions followed in 1993–94.
Home language versus school language?
• In spite of all these achievements,
• it is still a moot point whether Maori will be effectively
fully revitalized.
• because of the all-powerful position of English in New
Zealand society,
• it is not clear whether Maori will become (one of) the
home language(s) of many Maori again or whether it will
remain a (mere) school language.
Interest from sociolinguists and
discourse analysts (e.g. Prof. Janet
Holmes):
Please read on from Weber:
• Sámi and Kven in Norway: differential positionings on the success–
failure continuum

• Hebrew in Israel: the costs of revitalization

Revitalization of Hebrew took place at the expense of many other
languages, including such Jewish languages as Yiddish and Ladino,
which were ‘perceived as threats to the revival of Hebrew’.
On the revitalization of Hebrew

• Official documents written in the 1930s and 1940s, and shows how
Hebrew was imposed upon all the people.
• these documents stress the need to eradicate all non-Hebrew newspapers,
• to ban theatre performances in other languages,
• to change people’s personal names into Hebrew ones.
• (even an attempt) to force people to speak Hebrew at home. Home visits
were made to assess people’s proficiency in Hebrew and to identify language
violations.
• In this way, the imposition of Hebrew was accompanied by an
attempt to eradicate all other languages.
After class, look at the following sections from
Weber and identify differences in approach:

• Breton in France: how (not) to standardize

• Corsican and the polynomic paradigm

• Luxembourgish: constructing an endangered language

Q- Strategies adopted- same or different? What are the

after effects?
Extra Resource: Olko & Sallabank (2021)
…
Please research some attempts:
(un)Successful language revitalization
• Which examples have you studied?

• What factors promote language maintenance?

• What are successful revitalization strategies?

• How can the costs of revitalization be minimized?

• Please share your personal findings with us!

Follow up…
• Look at the UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger
(http://www.unesco.org/languages-
atlas/index.php?hl=en&page=atlasmap).

• Choose a particular country that you are interested in and an endangered

language in this country.
• Then carry out some research on this language: has there been an attempt
to revitalize it?
• To what extent has it been successful?
• Is the language fully standardized,
• (if not), has there been an attempt to standardize it?
• What have been the costs of revitalization?
Any questions?
 Societal and individual
multilingualism;
Multilingual Education & Language
Planning
Week 13/14

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hale IŞIK-GÜLER

The remainder
of term with
MODULE-2:
Societal multilingualism
Weber, ch6
What is the difference between individual
multilingualism and societal multilingualism?
• “Societal multilingualism” signifies the linguistic diversity that
can be found in a country, a region or a particular community.
• Societal (or social) multilingualism refers to countries or communities
where languages have different functions and often a different status.

• While societal multilingualism refers to linguistic diversity

found in a country or community, individual
multilingualism means a person's ability in languages other
than their mother tongue.
“Unity in diversity”?
• EU’s language-in-education policy of ‘mother tongue plus
two other European languages’ as a way of achieving the
vaguely defined goal of ‘unity in diversity’ – especially since
‘mother tongue’ is usually interpreted as the standard
variety of a European language, which may be more or less
different from the varieties spoken by many children as their
home languages.

• EU policy on giving more rights to speakers of regional

minority languages such as Welsh in the UK or Catalan in
Spain has opened up new spaces for multilingualism in
these areas.
• While Spain and the UK have moved on the continuum from being
more monolingual to more multilingual,
• other states have moved or are moving in the opposite direction:
• For instance, Ukraine has recently (pre-war) adopted a policy of de-Russification, thus
turning the country into a more and more monolingual, Ukrainian-only space.
• Another example is officially trilingual
Luxembourg (population 645.000), one of
the smallest EU member states, where the
new citizenship test requires applicants to
take a language test in only one language,
namely Luxembourgish.
• This has effected a shift away from the
traditional perception of Luxembourg as
trilingual (Luxembourgish, German, French) to
a new perception of it as a more monolingual,
Luxembourgish-speaking country.
Ukraine
• Ukraine was part of the USSR
(Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics) and as such (also
formerly) subject to Soviet
occupation.

• “increasing influence of the

Russian language during this
period is frequently interpreted
nowadays as an oppressive
policy of Russification”
(Pavlenko, 2011).

Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine has reversed this tendency

and has implemented the opposite policy of de-Russification.
A number of laws were passed to increase
the use of Ukrainian especially in education
and the media:

• 1993 Law on Television and Radio

Broadcasting stipulated that 50 percent of
broadcasts must be in Ukrainian,
• 2004 regulation even demanded that state
companies must broadcast only in
Ukrainian,
• 2007 law required all foreign-language (i.e.
including Russian-language) movies to be
translated into Ukrainian, either dubbed or
with subtitles.
• Even though Russian is still widely used especially in eastern parts of
the country and the Crimea, the new language policy means that
Ukraine has become, officially speaking, a more monolingual country
in Ukrainian only.
Language map
• Because of the demand
for English, many
schools have reduced
or even stopped their
teaching of Russian and
recruited large numbers
of English teachers.

• As a result, many young

Ukrainians nowadays
tend to be bilingual in
Ukrainian and English
rather than Ukrainian
and Russian.
Tensions and Language: Intertwined?
• As (currently) the assault on Ukraine continues, the differences between
these two languages have become part of the public discourse in the
west.
• E.g. the disparate spellings of Ukraine’s capital city, for example (Kiev being the
Russian transliteration, Kyiv the Ukrainian).

• For more on the two languages: https://www.britannica.com/story/ukrainian-and-

russian-how-similar-are-the-twolanguages

• https://theconversation.com/ukrainian-and-russian-how-similar-are-the-two-
languages-178456
Switzerland
• Switzerland’s multilingualism is based
on a strict principle of territoriality: the
four national languages, “German,
French, Italian and Romansch” are
official regional languages in different
parts of the country.
• In their education system, the Swiss
traditionally learn the official language of
their territory as L1 and another Swiss
national language as their L2 – though
we see that this is in the process of -Note: Romansh is one of the
changing (with English now in the descendant languages of the
equation). spoken Latin language of the
Roman Empire. (40-45.000
speakers)
Regions and Cantons in Switzerland
Singapore
• Just as in Switzerland, the language
policy balance set up by the Singapore
government over the last few decades
is in the process of being broken up by
the forces of globalization, though we
will see that here it is not just the global
role of English but also that of
Mandarin which is the catalyst for
change.
Hong Kong and China
• In 1997 Hong Kong’s status changed from a British colony
to a Special Administrative Region of China.
• Two languages are recognized as official: Chinese and
English, where Chinese is normally understood to refer to
Modern Standard Chinese as the written version and
Cantonese as the spoken one.
• At the same time, Putonghua (Mandarin), the spoken form of
Modern Standard Chinese, which is the national language of China
as a whole, has been vigorously promoted since the 1997
changeover of sovereignty.

• The official policy is for all Hong Kongers to become

biliterate and trilingual: biliterate in Chinese and English,
and trilingual in Cantonese, Putonghua and English.
普通话(Pǔ tōng huà), literally translates into
“common tongue.
• a Mandarin-speaker
(Putonghua) and a
Cantonese-speaker would
be able to write letters to
one another with minimal
difficulty. However, the
two languages are
distinct when spoken.
• Mandarin speakers
typically cannot
understand Cantonese
speakers, and vice versa.
Pro-Cantonese Protests in Guangzhou
• The imposition of Mandarin (Putonghua) as the standard has not
gone unchallenged in China.
• In July 2010, protests against Putonghua and in favour of Cantonese took
place in Guangzhou and Hong Kong (areas where Cantonese is widely used).
Official proposals to restrict the use of Cantonese on Guangzhou TV and to
replace it by Putonghua sparked off the protests in defence of Cantonese.

• The following is a brief extract from a comment about these protests

posted on Chinese-forums.com on 26 July 2010
(http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/26982-pro-
cantonese-protest-in-guangzhou).

Analyse the writer’s comment and the underlying language

ideologies:
“What do you guys think? I'm surprised to see a group of people
care so much about their dialect.”
 Afrikaan: It evolved from the Dutch vernacular
South Africa of Hollandic spoken by the European (Dutch, French, and
German) settlers and their slaves in South Afrika, where it
gradually began to develop distinguishing characteristics
during the course of the 18th century.

• After the Anglo-Boer war (1899–1902), the

defeated Afrikaners became British citizens
and South Africa a ‘dominion’ of the British Apartheid was a political and
Empire (like Australia and Canada) social system in South Africa
during which the country was
dominated politically, socially,
• The apartheid (“aparthood”) era in South and economically by the
nation's minority white population
African history refers to the time that the ... Under this system, the people
National Party led the country's white of South Africa were divided by
minority government, from 1948 to 1994. their race and the different races
were forced to live separately
from each other. There were
laws in place to ensure that
segregation was abided by.
• Apartheid was a social philosophy
which enforced racial, social, and
economic segregation on the people of
South Africa.
• The term Apartheid comes from the
Afrikaans word meaning 'separation'.
 President de Klerk and activist Nelson Mandela would
later win the Nobel Peace Prize for their work creating a
Apartheid law new constitution for South Africa.

• After the Second World War, the National Party came to power in 1948 on a
ticket of racial segregation and support for poor Afrikaners.
• A large number of laws were passed to establish the apartheid structure of
government. The three most important blocks of legislation were:
• The Race Classification Act. Every citizen suspected of not being European was classified
according to race.

• The Mixed Marriages Act. It prohibited marriage between people of different races.

• The Group Areas Act. It forced people of certain races into living in designated areas.

• Internal unrest and international condemnation led to dramatic changes beginning in 1989.
• The country waited in anticipation for the release of Nelson Mandela (South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, political
leader) who walked out of prison after 27 years on February 11, 1990. Mandela served as President of South Africa from
1994 to 1999.
 A period of transition from
apartheid to democracy…
After the transition from apartheid to democracy,
Nelson Mandela’s government voted a new
constitution which recognizes 11 official languages:
English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, Sepedi, Setswana,
Sesotho, Tsonga, Swati, Venda and Ndebele.

• The government has endeavoured to revitalize the indigenous

African languages by promoting them as medium of instruction,
so that education is often trilingual with the African ‘mother
tongue’ as L1, English L2 and Afrikaans L3 (African Dutch, a
Germanic language).

For more on “Afrikaans”: https://theconversation.com/more-than-an-

oppressors-language-reclaiming-the-hidden-history-of-afrikaans-71838
Pakistan

Yusra Amjad
(writer, poet)
• Urdu is the national
language and lingua
franca of Pakistan.
Although only about
7% of Pakistanis
speak it as their first
language, it is widely
spoken and
understood as a
second language by
the vast majority of
Pakistanis. English is
spoken as a first
language by 8% of
Pakistanis.
East Pakistan was the eastern provincial exclave of
Pakistan between 1955 and 1971, covering the territory of
the modern country Bangladesh.

• The state of Pakistan broke

over the issue of language as
out of 66 million 44 million
were speakers of Bengali,
mainly East Pakistan. Leading
to their genocide and
eventual secession.

• Eventually led to
Bangladesh Liberation War:
26 March – 16 December
1971
Language and identities
Ch7, Weber
Question to think about…
• If someone asked you to describe your identity to
them, where would you begin?

• Would it come down to your gender, skin color or

your nationality? What about the language you speak,
your religion, your cultural traditions/values or your
family's ancestry?
Categorization and identities
• We constantly categorize other people, we label, reify and objectify
them.

• Labelling is a way of trying to fix somebody’s identity, reducing it to a

single core element that sums up her/his identity in our eyes: e.g.
somebody becomes a ‘foreigner’ or an ‘immigrant’.
• naming, categorizing and labelling are political acts.

• Through a constant process of negotiation between ascribed and

achieved identities do we construct our identities.
What are these different types of labelling
doing?
• Sığınmacı • Immigrant
• Mülteci • migrant
• Muhacir • Refugee
• Göçmen • Boat people
• Suriyeli • Asylum seekers
• Afgan
•… Work with a partner and try
to find distinguishing aspects
and their specific legal, social,
and political implications.
 Taylor (2020)
Can you pick
out some uses
here? What is
being done via
language?

What is the
evaluative
potential of
these identity
labels?
Gee’s identity-theoretical framework (four ways
to view identity):
two basic ways of conceptualizing identity: the
essentialist and the social constructivist view:
• Gee’s framework also helps us to understand how and why identity
can be conceptualized in different ways:
• if you believe in the importance of N-identities, then you will tend to
take an essentialist perspective on identity,
• whereas if you believe in the greater importance of I-, D- and A
identities, you will take a more constructivist perspective.

Identity: a peach or an onion?

Which one do you think is dominant in the
social sciences today?
• If you see it as more like a peach, • If you see identity as more like an
then you take an essentialist onion, then you believe in the
perspective, viewing the self as possibility of having multiple and
continuous and fixed. changing selves. (social
• You believe in a ‘true’, ‘deep’ or constructivist)
‘real’ self which, just like the stone in • Just like an onion, the self has many
the middle of the peach, constitutes layers, some more central (inner)
your core identity. layers and others more peripheral
• The remaining parts of your identity (outer) ones, but all of them are
are less central and liable to change subject to change over time and
over time. none of them forms an essential and
fixed core (like the stone in the
middle of the peach).
How you talk about identity reveals your
perspective:
• The difference between essentialist and social constructivist
perspectives is also reflected and constructed in the way we talk
about identity.
• When we talk about having an identity, or about the danger of losing
our identity, we take an essentialist perspective: we look upon
identity as a kind of object that can be possessed or lost, like the
stone in the middle of the peach.
• With the onion metaphor, on the other hand, a different
understanding of identity comes to the fore: we may lose perhaps
one or more layers of our identity, but this is part of the normal
process of change and interaction, and new layers will replace the old
ones (momentarily or in the long run).
 Why not read Bonny Norton’s books?
• when we take a social constructivist
view of identity, we will talk about
identity being constructed and
negotiated, or performed in ‘acts of
identity’ (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller
1985).

• We also emphasize the multiplicity of

identity layers by using plural forms as
in, for example, ‘repertoire of
identities’.
How do you see your own identity?
How strong is the link with one (or
more) particular language(s), Read her article:
communities, places, etc? https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cmlr.2019-0287
More on Norton’s work
on identity &Language
teaching
Had a plenary at the ELT Convention this year…
(May 10-11, 2024)
A recent webinar:
Ethnic and national identity
Race versus ethnicity?

Race is understood by most people as a mixture of

physical, behavioral and cultural attributes. Ethnicity
recognizes differences between people mostly on the
basis of language and shared culture.

• One of the deepest layers of identity that many

people feel strongly about is their ethnic or national
identity.

• The ethnic identity of the dominant group in a

particular state is often equated with ‘national’
identity, while minority (or dominated) groups are
considered to be ‘ethnic’.
 State versus Nation
A clear distinction between state and nation:
• the state is the political entity (country),
• a nation is a group of people who perceive themselves as sharing
certain elements such as the following:
• Common descent.
• Common historical memories.
• Common culture.
• Homeland.
• Desire for political self-determination.

• A nation-state is a cultural group (a nation) that is also a state.

• Depending on the socio-historical context, different elements
will be foregrounded and become the key symbols of
nationhood.
E.g. Northern Ireland religion has played a major part in
constructing boundaries between social groups,
E.g. Belgium it is language that plays a more important role.
• These are among the different ethnic layers of identity that can
bring out deep-seated feelings in people and that extreme
nationalist movements can use or abuse for their own ends.
 Code-switching and identity
• Language contact outcomes. What were they?
• Any problems with the term ‘code-switching’? Translanguaging?
“The problem with ‘code’ and the idea of switching between ‘codes’ is that it
presupposes the existence of separate, bounded languages or varieties –
something that our discussion in the previous weeks has shown is not the
case. It would be preferable to talk about people’s communicative
repertoires.”

• Key topic in research on multilingualism!

“People frequently perceive their national identity as being linked to the national
language. However, in multilingual situations it may be linked to more than one
language.”

X
Situational and metaphorical code-
switching
• situational codeswitching: the linguistic behaviour of the bi- or multilingual
interlocutors changes when the situational circumstances (setting,
participants) of their conversation change.
E.g. French customers in an Irish pub in Paris who use French amongst themselves
but switch into English when ordering drinks from the Irish bar attendant.

• metaphorical code-switching: the speaker uses a linguistic switch to

invoke (and potentially renegotiate) particular values and to index a
particular identity. Indexicality is the process whereby the speaker’s use of
certain linguistic forms ‘points to’ a specific social identity.
• E.g. type: language crossing (Read Weber, p. 90-91)
 • How does Youth talk relate to all of this?

• This is a former exam question for 337…

What could be
findings regarding
types and functions
of code-switching/
translanguaging for
Youth Languages, if
any?
 What is going on
in this example?

What are the

interlocuters doing
via the switches?

Stylization:
• In the uni-directional case, a
speaker voicing a prior style
endorses or validates it.
• In the vari-directional case,
the speaker voices the style
with the intention of
discrediting it (that is, parodies
it) (Bakthin, 1984).
• Asiye tells Eda to speak Danish. Most likely, Asiye is here stylising the
voice of a teacher (i.e. this is what they have frequently been told to
do by many teachers). It is a case of vari-directional (ironic)
stylization, since Asiye does not follow her own stricture and switches
into Turkish herself in her next turn.
• Jørgensen (2005: 400) comments that Asiye voices an utterance (you
must speak Danish) which is not her own, knowing that it represents
a normative attitude that neither she nor her listeners ‘intend to act
according to’. Jørgensen (2005: 400) adds, referring to more
utterances of this kind in the rest of the adolescents’ conversation:

Has Jorgensen missed another example of stylizing?

How would you classify “ayağımın altına alırım”?
 Linguistic capital is a sociolinguistic term coined by
French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu.
FOR DISCUSSION: ... Linguistic capital has been used to describe the
different language resources available to a single person
and the values associated with each resource.

“Language as linguistic capital (Bourdieu) or

marker of identity?”

• To what extent can languages be looked

upon as linguistic capital and/or as
markers of identity?
• Do only standard varieties and national or
official languages have linguistic capital?
• Can minority languages also acquire a
certain amount of linguistic capital, for
instance as part of heritage tourism?
The interplay between
individual and societal
multilingualism
Ch8, Weber
• “complex interplay between individual and societal multilingualism”

An example:
• Canada
• work carried out by Monica Heller
• in a French medium school, the Ecole Champlain, in the anglophone
province of Ontario.
More info on Canada:
• Canada has about 35 million inhabitants,
• 26 million of whom have English as their L1 and
• 7 million have French as L1.
• Other important ‘mother tongues’ include Chinese (various
varieties of Chinese), Italian and German.

• And the largest indigenous languages are Cree (about

70,000 speakers, aboriginal language with the highest
number of speakers in Canada) and Inuktitut (about 29,000
speakers).
For more: https://deeply.thenewhumanitarian.org/arctic/articles/2016/05/06/to-save-their-
language-canadas-inuit-rewrite-it
• Canada has a federal government and is divided into ten
provinces and three territories.
• The provinces have jurisdiction over education, and the
territories, too, have gradually gained the right to deal
with matters of education.

• The fact that English and French are the official

languages goes back to a history of colonization by
Britain and France.

• Canadian Official Languages Act in 1969:

required all federal institutions to provide services in both of the official
languages, and ensured the right to L1-medium education for
francophone minorities outside Quebec as well as anglophone minorities
in Quebec.
“Melting pot” vs. “mosaic”
• Canada sees itself in terms of the
‘mosaic’ metaphor rather than the
US metaphor of the ‘melting pot’.

• Whereas the melting pot

metaphor suggests assimilation,
the Canadian metaphor of a
cultural mosaic promotes respect
and support not only for the two
official languages but for all the
languages and cultures in Canada.
 Quebec francophone nationalism
• French is the majority language in Quebec, but a
minority language in Canada as a whole.
• As a result, many Quebeckers feel that French is
endangered and needs to be protected against English
and to be defended in what some of them see as hostile
anglophone surroundings.
• Quebec has opted for a policy of French
monolingualism (Bill 101, the Charter of the
French language, 1977), which goes against the
federal Canadian policy of bilingualism and
multiculturalism. …
• sources of tension and led to legal challenges, as a result
of which some aspects of Bill 101 were ruled to be
unconstitutional.
• Bill 101…gradually “relaxed” around the 1990s.
Double monolingualism!
• French–English bilingualism is understood as double
monolingualism, with the students encouraged to keep the
two languages separate, to avoid code-switching and, in
particular, to cut all anglicisms out of their French.
A published
case study/
school
ethnography
Grants..
Ecole Champlain, a French-language high school
in the Toronto area, Heller found a highly
heterogeneous school population consisting of
the following three groups:

• A. Speakers of French as their L1.

• B. Middle class anglophones wanting to become
bilingual in English and French because such
linguistic capital provides access to desirable jobs
especially in the public sector.
• C. New immigrants from Somalia, Haiti, etc.,
who are speakers of French as their L1 or L2.
Findings from Heller’s fieldwork
• Thus the school relied upon the twin
ideologies of monolingualism and language
quality in a continuing endeavour to create a
French only zone.
• The teachers were expected to implement
the system of linguistic surveillance.
• were fighting a losing battle, due to the
importance of English in Canadian society and
the school’s need to accept anglophone students
as a way of boosting its student enrolment.
Findings contd. (Heller):
• With the increasing number of Somali students, it became
more problematic for teachers to present French as an
oppressed language, since for these students it was clearly the
opposite: namely, French was the language of oppression.
• But what most students seemed to share was a belief in French as a
means of social advancement in Canadian society. In this way,
language was commodified, and the old politics of identity was
gradually replaced by a new politics of linguistic capital.
• The school put greater value on standard French, even at the
risk of losing (some of) the authenticating value of the French
Canadian vernacular.
Heller shows how the students in particular helped to push the school
in the direction of a new policy of inclusiveness which could point the
way for the country as a whole to move beyond the French–English
cleavages into a truly multilingual and multicultural future.
To sum up, today’s lecture up to this point…
• The examples discussed illustrates a pattern that can
be traced in many parts of the world:
• individual multilingualism is frequently valued in a
positive way and viewed as ‘linguistic capital’ (Bourdieu,
1977),
• while societal or institutional multilingualism is still more
likely to be negatively valued.
Multilingual education:
(2) Flexible vs. fixed multilingualism
Ch9, Weber
• The distinction is based on similar ones used in the literature, most
recently the distinctions between homoglossic and heteroglossic
multilingualism in García (2009) and between separate and flexible
bilingualism in Blackledge and Creese (2010).

• Weber& Horner look at US language policy as a contrast to EU policy.

---
• Case Study 1: Luxembourg
• Case Study 2: Catalonia and the Basque Country
Mother tongue education or
literacy bridges?
Ch10
What are Literacy bridges?
• A flexible alternative to mother tongue education which would have a
much better chance of moving policy towards social justice and
educational equity would be the establishment of literacy bridges.
• The concept is used in Weber (2009) in relation to the language situation in
trilingual Luxembourg, where large numbers of romanophone children are
forced to go through a German language literacy programme.
• Weber argues that it would be counter-productive to call for
education in the standard variety of the (assumed) mother tongue of
each child, irrespective of the question whether the children actually
master this particular variety or not.
• On the contrary, it would be much more productive to
look for the ‘common linguistic denominator’ of
students whose home linguistic resources may well
include varieties of French, Portuguese, Cape Verdean
Creole, Italian, Spanish, etc. and, in this case, set up a
French-language literacy option for them alongside the
existing German-language literacy programme.

• The French-language literacy option would act as a

literacy bridge providing a link with, and building upon,
these students’ actual linguistic repertoires.
How to…
• The school-system needs to take into account this multilingual reality
if its aim is to advance on the difficult path leading towards the
elusive goal of educational equity.

• Three fundamental steps are required in this respect:

1) Study the students’ actual linguistic repertoires, taking into account all
their linguistic varieties and not just a narrow range of standard languages.
• Q: Has this been done in your educational contexts ever before?
2) Find the common linguistic denominators.
3) Establish the adequate literacy bridges by offering a reasonable range of
language options.
FOR DISCUSSION:
1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using
translanguaging/code-switching and mixed languages in bilingual
pedagogy?
2. If many children translanguage/code-switch outside school, shouldn’t
mother tongue education reflect this (if it is to be truly based on
children’s actual out-of-school linguistic practices)?
3. How can we ensure that the school’s emphasis on standard varieties
does not give children the feeling that their home varieties are bad and
worthless?
4. How can we ensure that the use of translanguaging/ code-switching and
mixed languages by teachers actually helps students acquire the standard
varieties and does not lead to what Blackledge and Creese (2010: 206)
call ‘the danger of participating in the reproduction of [the students’
social] disadvantage’?
Heritage language education
ch11
 A heritage language is a minority language (either
immigrant or indigenous) learned by its speakers at
home as children, but never fully developed
because of insufficient input from the social
environment. The speakers grow up with a different
dominant language in which they become more
competent.

• Heritage language speakers typically have a historical link to an

indigenous language (usually endangered) or an immigrant language
(often also endangered within the new migration context), which is
not normally taught in the mainstream school system of the host
society.
Read on…
• Language and heritage in the United States (Weber, p. 136-137)
https://www.google.com.tr/b
ooks/edition/Remaking_Mult
ilingualism/WJxjEAAAQBAJ
?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT10&
printsec=frontcover
Interesting new read:
Inan, S., Nisanci, A., &
Harris, Y. (2024).
Preserving Heritage
Language in Turkish
Families in the
USA. Languages, 9(2), 56.

https://www.mdpi.com/2226
-471X/9/2/56
For an example:
https://ataturkokulu.at
kb.org/en/about/

https://ataturkokulu.at
kb.org/wp-
content/uploads/2020
/01/Ethnic-Heritage-
and-Language-Schools-
in-America.pdf
Read on…

• Language and heritage in England (p. 137-138)

• The dominance of the standard language and purist ideologies

• Bengali – Sylheti
• Cypriot Turkish (tükenmez versus penna)
• Spanish and Latino students
FOR DISCUSSION:
The contradictory role of Spanish in the US
Consider the following statement which is often said to epitomize a
prevalent attitude in mainstream US society:

“Using Spanish as a heritage or immigrant

language is bad, but learning it as a foreign
language is good.”

• Discuss the underlying language ideologies. Make sure you take into
account the important aspect of language variation, including in particular
Castilian Spanish, Latin American varieties of Spanish and the Spanish
varieties of US Latinos.
FOR RESEARCH and later DISCUSSION:
Native American languages
• Explore the present situation of Native American languages in light of
the Native American Languages Act 1990, 1992 and the Esther
Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act 2006.
• What rights do these legal texts recognize for the use of Native American
languages in education?
• Do you think these rights are sufficient to ensure the revitalization and
survival of the languages? Why or why not?
• To what extent do you agree with Schiffman’s (1996: 246) assessment of the
Native American Languages Act: ‘now that Native-American languages are
practically extinct, and pose no threat to anyone anywhere, we can grant
them special status.’
Last topics of 337:

Emotions and Multilingualism

Critical analysis of
discourses & media representation
of multilingualism and immigration…
Any questions?
Emotions and expressive emotiveness
in multiple languages

May 31/June, 2024

Sharing Emotions, why is it so important?

For maintaining physical and mental health (Averill, 1982)

Can you
name some
emotions?
 How do communicating emotions change for
monolinguals and multilinguals?
• Monolinguals → Organizing various
feelings such as happiness, and sadness
in one single language (Javier, 2007)

• Multilinguals → Using several available

linguistic resources to express emotions
• constructing a unique, hybrid
cultural, national and ethnic identity
• “knowledge of two or more
languages in one mind” (Cook, 2003,
p. 2)
4 different approaches to Emotion and
Expressive Emotiveness
• The neurobiological perspective
• The neurobiological systems that mediate the basic emotions such as fear and joy (e.g., Panksepp, 2000)
• how subcortical areas of the brain coordinate the behavioural, physiological and psychological processes
• A cognitive linguistic approach
• “Emotions are both feelings and cognitive constructions, linking person, action,
and sociological milieu.” (Rosaldo, 1984, p. 304).
• Cultural psychological approaches
• Emotional expression → a public instrumental action that may or may not be related
directly to the inner feelings (Markus & Kitayama, 1991, p. 236)
• E.g. Showing anger in European and Japanese cultures, independent and interdependent selves

• A social constructivist approach

• Emotion as socially constructed subsystems of behaviors including an individual’s appraisal of the situation and
which are interpreted as passions rather than as actions”
The emic-etic distinction in SLA and
multilingualism research
• Etic analyses
• Outsider research perspective
• Comparative research across languages, situations and cultures
• Emic analyses
• Insider (participant-relevant) perspective
• Conversation Analysis (CA) → An inductive search for patterns of interaction
in episodes of naturally occurring interactions
• Employing language to access a participant’s emotional state (Ogarkova et al.,
2009)
• “a carefully done emic analysis precedes and forms the basis for etic extensions that
allow for cross-cultural or cross-setting comparisons” (Watson-Gegeo, 1988, pp.
581–582)
• Mixed method research design → rich, good-quality data
 https://mediazioni.unibo.it/article/view/15263

• to investigate how interactants express and

manage their emotions through swearwords

• 10.5 hours of video recordings collected in

Institutional (business meeting) and ordinary
(dinner party) settings in Milano, Italy

Findings of the Study

Adesso m’incazzo/“now I’m getting pissed”)

to show anger
Showing Anger in Call-Center Interaction:
“benim canımı sıkmayın”
(Bozbıyık, Efeoğlu-Özcan, Işık-Güler, msc in prep)

how the caller attacks to the professional

face of the call-center operator through
verbal statements of impoliteness and
showing anger

Request for Solution

Overlapping, Interruption
Verbal Aggresion (Threat)
Imperative Sentences

Directing to another operator

Holding the line
More Emotional Language in Classroom Interaction
Molecular pharmacology course
at master level

Using Spanish metaphorical expression

through embodied Actions

Using more emotional and vivid language

within translingual turns to bring the
academic content closer to the students

Translingual turns for communicating emotions

(Bozbıyık & Morton, 2024)

 (Dewaele, 2010)
• large-scale investigation on how multilinguals feel
about their languages and use them to communicate
emotion; 1600 multilinguals participated in the
research; quantitative and qualitative approaches used
• (?) factors that affect multilinguals' self-perceived
competence, attitudes, communicative anxiety,
language choice and code-switching when expressing
feelings, anger and when swearing.
• Results: how and when a language was learnt
determines future use and communicative anxiety.
Aspects such as present use of the language, the total
number of languages known, and the level of emotional
intelligence also play an important role.
 (Dewaele, 2010)
• The Bilingualism and Emotions
Questionnaire (BEQ) (Dewaele & Pavlenko,
2001–2003)
• 3 different parts of the questionnaire
• 1st part: 13 questions for demographic
information such as gender, age, education level,
and ethnic group
• 2nd part: Likert-type questions including code-
switching behaviour in inner and articulated
speech, on language choice for expressing
feelings in general, and more specifically anger;
on the use and perception of swear-words; on
attitudes toward the different languages and,
finally, on communicative and foreign language
anxiety in the different languages
• 3rd part: 9 open-ended questions such as their
linguistic preferences for emotion terms and
terms of endearment and the preferred language
to recall bad or difficult memories
Lets take a look
at some of the
questions:
(Dewaele, 2010) findings:
• How can use of emotional expressions change for language users and language
learners? (the effect of context of acquisition-instructed/natural/mixed)
• Learning a language through formal classroom instruction → less frequently
communicating emotions rather than naturalistic language learning and/or
practicing a language outside the classroom

• What is your preferred language for emotional expression?

• When you socialize more in a language, it can be the most emotional
language
• Changing in terms of various factors (e.g., new language, partner, and
culture)
• Networks of interlocutors

• How long does it take for you to learn swearwords in English?

• cultural background in the perception and use of emotional language
(Dewaele, 2010)
• How does knowing more languages influence anxiety to use emotional
expressions?
• The more languages you know, the more competent you feel to communicate
emotions.

• How do multilingual speakers use speech acts in more diversified ways?

• Having dynamic capacity to use emotional expressions
• Using their multi-competence to develop multilingual speech acts and
emotion scripts
• Strategic language choices for specific purposes (Complementarity Principle)
(Grosjean, 2001, 2008) (e.g., sacar las tripas-rip your guts out)
RQs he had:
(Dewaele, 2016, p. 118)

online questionnaire from 1159 native

English (L1) users and 1165 English as a
foreign language users (LX)

emotional valence from mildly negative to

extremely negative
(Dewaele, 2016)

LX users
• less sure about the exact meaning of
most words
• more frequent use of relatively less
offensive words
• over-estimate the offensiveness of
most emotion-laden words

L1 users
• Having a life-long exposure to
these words, knowing their
meanings more

Dewaele, 2016, p. 121

LX users found to “overestimate offensiveness” of
negative emotion-laden words:
(Dewaele and Forth, 2003)
(Dewaele, 2010, 2016)
• How have you learnt swearwords and other offensive expressions in
English?

• Televisions and the written press beep out swearwords. Authentic

materials do not include them. How can we teach these words to our
students? Or should we teach?

• What about the reactions of parents and social communities?

If they are a natural part of interaction, should

they not also be a natural part of our curricula?
(Dewaele, 2010, 2016)
• As potential (language) teachers,
how can you enable your students
use more emotional expressions and
emotion laden words in LX?
• combining classroom learning and
authentic interaction
• Role-plays and experiences of authentic
communication
• (e.g., using film extracts) →
https://hotpot.uvic.ca/

Are these materials really authentic?

 Tokyo Global Gateway (TGG)

(Nanbu, & Greer, 2023: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/tesq.3197 ).

https://tokyo-global-gateway.com/
Nanbu, Z., & Greer, T. (2023). Creating Obstacles to
Progressivity: Task Expansion in Second Language
Role‐Plays. TESOL Quarterly, 57(4), 1364-1400.
The multilingual emotion lexicon
• Recent research has shown that
• emotion words (‘‘love’’, ‘‘hate’’, “happy”, “angry”) and
• emotion-laden words (“failed”, marriage”, ‘‘kiss’’, ‘‘rape’’) differ from
both concrete and abstract words in the way they are represented and
processed (see Pavlenko, 2008 for a complete overview).
• The seminal work of Altarriba and Santiago-Rivera (1994) used
the word-priming paradigm to investigate the representation
that bilingual individuals have of emotion words in their two
languages linking it to cross-linguistic differences and language
histories.
How do we know about the Differences
between languages? (Pavlenko, 2008)
• Four types of studies contribute to our
understanding of emotionality of
bilinguals’ languages:
• experimental studies of skin conductance
response (SCR) in bilingual speakers,
• self-reports of bilinguals’ perceptions of their
respective languages,
• clinical case studies of bilinguals in therapy,
• experimental studies of bilingual
autobiographic memory.
Electrodermal activity…

• How about more emic study findings?

What did Dewaele
(2008) find?
SENİ SEVİYORUM

I LOVE YOU

ICH LIEBE DICH

JE T'AIME
• Dewaele’s (2008) quantitative and qualitative data
suggest that multilinguals typically perceive the
phrase I love you as having more emotional weight
in their L1,
• although a quarter of participants perceived it to be so in
the LX only.
• Participants often showed a strong awareness of subtle
differences in emotional weight of I love you in their
different languages.
• Statistical analyses showed that the perception of the phrase
I love you was not affected by sociobiographical variables
such as gender and education nor by trait emotional
intelligence,
• but that it was associated with the L2 learning history and
recent language use of the L2, as well as with the self-
perceived competence in the L2.

• What else can it be affected by?

Harris, C. L., Ayçíçeğí, A.,
& Gleason, J. B. (2003).
Taboo words and
reprimands elicit greater
autonomic reactivity in a
first language than in a
second
language. Applied
Psycholinguistics, 24(4),
561-579.
What
participants
in the study
said:
Işık-Güler (2013): Dil algısı
ve asimetrik güç ilişkisi:
Yabancı dil sınıfında
anadilde ve ikinci dilde
söylenen Uyarı sözcelerinin
eşdeğer(siz)liği

Işık-Güler & Acı (2012):

Teacher delivered
“Silencers” in the EFL
Classroom: the impact of the
use of L1/L2 and
Individual/Group Focus in
influencing Child and Adult
(Im)Politeness Evaluations
for more…
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AWowCJdwkE
Things to remember from FLE 337…on
normalizing bi/multilingualism for the future:
• Understanding the ubiquity of multilingualism
• We have seen that named languages are social constructs; the linguistic reality, on the
other hand, is the coexistence of a huge range of varieties which are not bounded
entities but are in contact with, and influence, each other. They constantly change,
moving closer to (sometimes mixing or merging with) some varieties and distancing
themselves from others.
• Acknowledging the linguistic diversity in the world
• Protecting the world’s linguistic diversity should not be limited to revitalizing the
standard varieties of particular languages which are perceived as being endangered. It
should also involve the recognition of the new linguistic diversity emerging every day in
our quickly changing and globalizing world.
• Building upon the whole of students’ linguistic repertoires
• It is essential for teachers to respect the whole of their students’ linguistic repertoires if
they want to provide them with the best possible chances of educational success.
 We, too, have travelled a long way together
on the road of multilingualism this term…

We have almost reached the end of our journey. We have seen many things
together on the way, potentially learned to think more critically about our
own language ideologies and hopefully gained a deeper understanding of
numerous issues surrounding bi/multilingualism, the individual and society.
It was a real pleasure being with you for half of this
term☺

Any questions?