Volume 7, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Sociolinguistics in a languagised world, Guest Editors: Jürgen Jaspers and Lian Malai Madsen

The idea that there exist separate, enumerable languages has in the last decades been widely criticised, and it has led scholars to propose various new terms and concepts such as ‘polylingualism’, ‘metrolingualism’, and ‘translanguaging’, among others. As these terms are attracting considerable acclaim within the academy, this paper argues it is time to reflect on their occurrence, provenance and pertinence for future research and theorisation. We devote particular attention to the risk of confusion if newly proposed terms interchangeably serve descriptive, ontological, pedagogical and political purposes; to the continuing relevance of language separation outside as well as inside the academy; and to the purported transformative and critical potential of fluid language practices in education and beyond. We suggest a close consideration of each of these concerns is central to a sociolinguistics of rather than for particular linguistic practices.

There is a potential tension between the descriptions of language use by contemporary sociolinguistic researchers keen to focus on metro- poly- or translanguaging – with a focus on repertoires of semiotic resources – and the terms used by language users themselves – which may accord much more with traditional linguistic labels. While we tried to account for this disparity in previous discussions by focusing on the push and pull between fluid and fixed language use and descriptions, we focus in this paper on the negotiations around the labels used by the participants themselves. While it is certainly the case that the tools for discussing language use and affiliation in everyday discourse are themselves linguistically constrained (using commonly accepted language labels) the terms people use to talk about their multilingual environments are not necessarily as normative as they first appear. Such apparently stable referents are themselves part of a more complex set of identity repertoires that are always being reworked. What is at stake, therefore, is not so much a polarisation between fluid language use and fixed language ascriptions as a constant reconfiguration of language meanings.

In this paper I describe how a group of speakers participating in a longitudinal study develop patterns of linguistic practices as well as norms for their use over time. The group at issue consists of speakers with a Turkish minority background living in Denmark. Data were collected from this group during their nine years of compulsory school and again in their mid-twenties. From a very early age this group of speakers acquires linguistic repertoires which involve features associated with several “languages”, of which the most influential are Turkish and Danish. I will show how they develop ways of employing large parts of those repertoires in their languaging practices and how at the same time they increasingly express an awareness of the fact that they are living in languagised world. I will do so by analysing instances where the participants explicitly refer to languages in peer group interactions, discuss observations concerning patterns of languaging in the same types of interactions, and consider the development of both phenomena.

Sociolinguists have recently suggested a range of new terms to re-conceptualise language and language use. Most of these are based on the empirical documentation of speakers using linguistically hybrid constructions which are understood as reflecting speakers’ orientation to norms of linguistic hybridity. In this article we bring data typical of SLA research and sociolinguistic theorisation together by discussing data collected among Swiss German university students learning Danish in the light of such sociolinguistic concepts. We show how in some cases, the students signal investment in and alignment with hybrid language use, but in others the students “polylanguage” from a form-analytic point of view, while the co- and context suggest they orient strongly to an idea of “pure” Danish. In these cases their hybrid linguistic productions are more likely to be explained by their status as language learners. We argue that these observations point to the need for a closer consideration of speaker stances towards language forms as well as a need for considering repertoire restrictions and learner ambitions in current sociolinguistic conceptualisations of linguistic hybridity.

This paper looks at how histories of conflict and ideologies of language as a bounded entity mapped onto a homogeneous nation impact on attempts of translanguaging in the classroom in the conflict-affected context of Greek-Cypriot education. Drawing on ethnographic data from a highly diverse primary school, this study examines how nationalist understandings of language and belonging affect the ways in which a group of Turkish-speaking students of Pontian and Turkish-Bulgarian backgrounds relate to their Turkish-speakerness in classroom interaction. The findings show that, despite the multilingual and hybrid realities of this particular school, in formal educational practices Turkish-speaking students kept a low profile as to their Turkish-speakerness. Even when the teacher encouraged translanguaging practices and a public display of students’ competence in the Turkish language, this was met with inarticulateness and emotional troubles, fuelled by a fear that ‘speaking Turkish’ could be taken as ‘being Turkish’. In discussing these findings, the paper points to the impact that different overlapping histories of ethnonationalist conflict have on translanguaging practices in education; in our case by associating Turkishness with the ‘enemy group’ and socializing children within essentialist assumptions about language and national belonging. The paper argues that in this case the discourses of conflict create un favourable ecologies for hybrid linguistic practices, which ultimately suppress creative polylingual performances.

Recent developments in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics have put emphasis on the contrast between ideologies of distinct ‘languages’ and the multifaceted reality of linguistic practices. This article argues that recent usage-based reconceptualisations of the notions of competence and repertoire can help paint a more complex picture of the relationship between monolingual ‘ideologies’ and diverse linguistic ‘realities’. Drawing on data from interviews with highly proficient adult speakers of Finnish as a second language, I explore some aspects of how speakers’ competence can be understood as shaped by language use, and what role linguistic ideologies, social expectations and speakers’ environments play in this process. I conclude that, in a languagised world, the ability to keep ‘languages’ apart and to successfully display monolingual competence can be seen as part of multilingual speakers’ competence. In this way, a usage-based perspective on competence enables us to treat ‘languages’ as ideological constructs, while at the same time acknowledging their ‘real’ effects on speakers’ competence and language use.