Researching Language in Superdiverse Urban Contexts. Группа авторов
negotiate multiple identities in family, work, social networking, and education, as well as in residential, cultural and religious roles’ (Cadier & Mar-Molinero, 2012). In clear contradiction to the statement with which this chapter began, two informants from our research into multilingualism in Southampton gave us accounts of the daily superdiversity they lived (and delighted in).
I’m talking Portugal, France, Spain, Italy, English, Greek, Turkish, Albanians. It’s a mix, you have no idea it’s incredible, just people from all over the world, just in a little circle, it’s incredible, ‘cos that’s how we started … we sat down at a table, in M’s just all of us eating and drinking and people from, we covered the whole world in one table. (Mario, restaurant worker, interview, 7 March, 2011)
Asian communities keep their connections right across the globe now because, I mean, when I look at myself, I have family in Kenya, I have family in Canada, in America, in Hong Kong, in Japan, in India, in Pakistan, wherever. Yes, I come from Kenya myself. My husband is from Uganda, so we have all this family all over the world. So not only do we link on, every week with everybody, but when there are major decisions to be made in the family we link with them too. (Southampton City Councillor, personal communication, 7 July, 2010)
Language: Translanguaging and (Post) Multilingualism
We have already seen that the notion of the contemporary ‘city’ is a fluid one. Likewise, we will problematise the meaning of ‘language’, especially the idea of a discrete, bounded language, linked to a specific national people. I have previously argued,
[The] constant, intense and complex movement of peoples has destabilised many of the conventional labels that in the past have been considered permanent. Identities and networks shift and adapt to their surroundings, recognising power structures, ideologies and the value of varied cultural and social capital of the context they find themselves in. A significant label that we argue shifts and adapts in transnational migration is that of ‘language’, particularly discrete standard national languages. Just as migrant identities merge and shift during a transnational journey, so too do languages and linguistic practices. These can be positive, creative resources that enable social contact and advancement, or they may be negative contestations within linguistic ideological hierarchies. (Mar-Molinero & Paffey, 2018: 15)
In a similar way Li Wei (2018: 22) writes,
No single nation or community can claim the sole ownership, authority and responsibility for any particular language, and no individual can claim to know an entire language, rather bits of many different languages. What is more, the association between a language and a nation or a community can change over time, just as an individual can also give up a language and adopt another.
Superdiverse environments ‘generate complex multilingual repertoires in which often several (fragments of) ‘migrant’ languages and lingua francas are combined’ (Blommaert & Dong, 2010: 370). This is particularly the case in the modern city as we have noted. As Smakman and Heinrich (2017: 5) remark, ‘Language diversity is not just a large number of languages, but more crucially also the diversity within and amongst these languages’.
Among the linguistic practices that Blommaert and Dong refer to, translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014), transidomatic practices (Jacquemet, 2005) and metrolingualism (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010) are particularly appropriate approaches to understand transnational and superdiverse repertoires. In order to reflect the increasing complexity and diversity referred to above, these concepts challenge earlier ones such as code switching and code mixing that have long been used to discuss bi- and multilingual contexts, considering these latter too simplistic and reductive.
Translanguaging is identified as a linguistic practice at work in their particular research environment by many of the contributors to this volume, particularly Bradley and Simpson, whose work derives from the ground-breaking research of the AHRC TLang project where translanguaging underpins the linguistic environments studied (see Chapter 2).2 García and Wei (2014: 22), leading early proponents of translanguaging, argue that:
Translanguaging differs from the notion of code-switching in that it refers not simply to a shift or a shuttle between two languages, but to the speakers’ construction and use of original and complex interrelated discursive practices that cannot be easily assigned to one or another traditional definition of language, but that make up the speakers’ complete language repertoire.
Translanguaging questions the basic concept of a named discrete language, normally closely aligned to a specific nation state. Identifying translanguaging challenges the bounded sense of nation and national language and those to whom a language is said to belong.
Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) when observing similar linguistic practices in contemporary urban contexts describe such activity as ‘metrolingualism’, which they understand in the following way,
‘… people from different and mixed backgrounds use, play with and negotiate identities through language: [metrolingualism] does not assume connections between language, culture, ethnicity, nationality and geography, but rather seeks to explore the contingencies of these categories; its focus is not on language systems but on languages as emergent from context of interaction … including a much broader view of contexts of translingual activity’ (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010: 246).
In previous work on Southampton (Cadier & Mar-Molinero, 2012, 2014) we saw many instances of this kind of use of linguistic resources that Otsuji and Pennycook identify. Interestingly, too, is the awareness (and perceived value) of this kind of linguistic interaction that our informants display. For example,
[Mario, Madeiran restaurant worker] describes what he sees as the common migrant experience, ‘if you don’t understand you ask or you just make fun or you just mix everything, Spanglish, Spanish, Portuguese, English …’ (Mario, personal communication, March 7, 2012)
Like others working in his sector, he shows how this playing with language or ‘performing’ language is essential for work. When working in a Spanish restaurant he comments, ‘you play the game [pretending to be Spanish], it meant they [the customers] were happy. It meant tips … manager happy’ (Mario, personal communication, March 7, 2012) (in Cadier & Mar-Molinero, 2012: 152).
Jacquemet’s concept of transidiomatic practices (2005), is discussed in his findings from his case study of Albanian migrants and complements and echoes the notions of translanguaging and metrolingualism. He argues that,
transidiomatic practices describe the communicative practices of transnational groups that interact using different languages and communicative codes simultaneously present in a range of communicative channels, both local and distant. This triangulation of linguistic activities, indexicality, and semiotic codes needs to be complexified to account for how groups of people, no longer territorially defined, think about themselves, communicate using an array of both face-to-face and long-distance medias, and in so doing produce and reproduce social hierarchies and power asymmetries. (Jacquemet, 2005: 264)
Importantly, such varied and innovative linguistic practices challenge traditional meanings of ‘multilingualism’. No longer should we assume that ‘multilingual’ only encompasses ‘many languages’, if indeed we do, but conveys as well, or instead, the diversity and intensity of linguistic practices and resources referred to above. As Pennycook notes (2010: 2),
The notion of language as practice takes us away from a notion of language as a pre-given entity that may be used in a location, and looks, by contrast, at language as part of diverse social activity.
Li Wei (2018) describes this situation as ‘post-multilingualism’. He argues,
We are therefore entering a post-multilingualism era where simply having many different languages is no longer sufficient either for the individual or for society as a whole, but where multiple ownerships and more complex interweaving of languages and language varieties, and where boundaries between languages, between languages and other communicative means and the relationship between language and the nation-state are being constantly reassessed, broken or adjusted. (2018: 22)