Researching Language in Superdiverse Urban Contexts. Группа авторов
centres to ask (in censuses or to children at school) what languages people speak could ignore this complex and sophisticated range of communicative practices that exists in much modern multilingualism (see also, Gaiser & Matras, this volume). Only counting discrete, bounded languages in investigating a city’s linguistic repertoire ignores the much greater richness and versatility of its speakers, but also sets up limitations of the information accessed and therefore of the potential support on the part of authorities such as local and national governments.
Language Ideologies and Language Policy
Throughout this chapter I am referring to ‘language ideologies’ in the sense first defined by Silverstein (1979: 193) as ‘sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use’. Or, with a more socially oriented focus Irvine (2012) writes,
Language ideologies are conceptualizations about languages, speakers, and discursive practices. Like other kinds of ideologies, language ideologies are pervaded with political and moral interests and are shaped in a cultural setting. To study language ideologies, then, is to explore the nexus of language, culture, and politics. It is to examine how people construe language’s role in a social and cultural world, and how their construals are socially positioned.
Earlier, in the example of Southampton, I have made the link as to how language ideologies, consciously or unconsciously, influence policies that affect language services and attitudes. I have also referred to the lack of an explicit language policy nationally in the United Kingdom, unlike in many other states where language policy is enshrined in national constitutions. The literature on language policy (LPP) is enormous and growing (for a good, if somewhat dated, overview, see, Ricento, 2006), since the early days of rather mechanical notions of Language Planning in postcolonial situations (for example, Haugen, 1959; Rubin & Jernudd, 1977). Recent interesting discussions around concepts of language policy include Shohamy (2006) who emphasises that such policies are implicit as well as explicit and are carried out at informal individual as well as formal societal levels. Barakos and Unger (2016) understand language policy as a discursive space in which valuable resources are at stake, and argue that language policy is an ‘interdisciplinary field of inquiry that offers a variety of theoretical frameworks, methodologies, analytic approaches, and empirical findings’ (2016: 1–2). Their edited volume promotes ‘critical’ language policy (see Johnson, 2017), and emphasises new methods of LPP research, particularly those employing varieties of (critical) discourse analysis (see Escandón, this volume). As one of the contributors to the Barakos and Unger volume, David Cassels Johnson, writes
… both micro and macro discourses, and both structure and agency can emerge in a single discursive event and shape a single policy document. Policy texts, discourses and practices are heterogenerous, and ideologies are multiply layered, and all can change from context to context over time. … [D]iscourse analysis techniques empirically uncover how LPP processes can lead to both social change and hegemony. (Johnson, 2016: 18)
Particularly relevant for research into contemporary superdiverse urban multilingualism is Spolsky (2012) who describes language policy as a ‘chaotic non-hierarchical system’ and suggests that the model of top-down to grass-roots hierarchy is outdated in the negotiation of superdiverse organisational and workplace discourses. He claims,
In essence the classical model [of Language Policy] was a ‘top-down’ only process, tending to ignore any demographic practice. To make this over-simplification work, many scholars tried to identify competing forces, which they labelled ‘bottom up’, perhaps not realising that one is dealing with a complex and chaotic non-hierarchical system. Each domain within a sociolinguistic ecology has its own variety of language policy, and each influences and is influenced by all the other domains. (Spolsky, 2012: 3)
In the case studies presented in this volume some of the authors dig deep to uncover this ‘sociolinguistic ecology’ and to identify the existence of language policies influencing this. In doing so, the researchers are exploring public ideologies, attitudes and beliefs about language and linguistic resources. Engaging with the public thus about the ‘value’ of languages involves influencing public opinion and policymakers about language and developing language sensitisation. We reported how such sensitisation occurred whilst working collaboratively with a range of organisations in Southampton to uncover implicit or explicit language polices in the workplace and/or to introduce such polices (Cadier & Mar-Molinero, 2014).
This approach emerges very strongly in some of the chapters here where there are clear action/participatory research approaches being employed effectively, combining outreach and social responsibility with research that demonstrates high impact, for example, brokering dialogue among stakeholders. Examples are given that emphasise the importance of social justice, and prolonged engagement in projects focusing on poverty and precarity, in some cases producing new communicative and semiotic resources for those without ‘voices’, or without ‘presence’ as I discuss further below (see also, Patiño-Santos, 2020).
Researching Multilingualism; Researching Multilingually
In seeking to bring together yet another, it might be claimed, edited volume about urban multilingualism, I have been influenced by the relatively new research methodological paradigm developed by those proposing the approach of researching ‘multilingually’3 (for example, Holmes et al., 2013, 2016; Stelma et al., 2013). As I have been underlining throughout this chapter, this approach requires the researcher to think intensely about their relationship between the researcher and researched, and in ways that put language at the core. Holmes et al. (2013), in their position paper on this approach, describe what they term ‘relationality’ as considering:
… who is involved, what function or purpose relationships have, how relationships are negotiated and managed; and which languages are in play in these researcher-researched relationships. Researchers rarely work alone, instead sharing multiple relationships (e.g. with supervisors, participants, translators, interpreters, transcribers, editors, funders). How these relationships are managed interpersonally and linguistically, and what languages are privileged within and across these relationships, all influence research processes and outcomes. Researchers exercise linguistic agency as they negotiate trust, ethics, power, and face over questions of who may enter the discourse, who speaks for whom, and how, when and where…
Holmes et al. conclude their paper by posing the following questions where we can see the role of language in multilingual research is linked to many of the concepts mentioned already in this chapter: for example, language as power; language and ideologies/policies; negotiating linguistic resources. They write,
Several questions (…) emerge: questions of power (between researcher and researched in negotiating language choices); questions of inclusion (which participants and which researchers get included in which research processes); questions of meaning-making (particularly concerning the role of mediators and translators as they construct meaning through and across languages); and questions of institutional constraints (where policies, practices, and preferences determine how researchers – and in some instances, which researchers – report and represent the researched). (Holmes et al., 2013)
These questions are reflected upon in different ways throughout the chapters of this volume. Most (for example, Gaiser & Matras; Karatsareas; Paffey; McAuley & Carruthers; Wells, this volume) explicitly address the issue of what language(s) they have conducted their research in and why. This often leads to them considering the power relationship the choice of interview language might signify (Karatsareas, this volume). Others, particularly Bradley and Simpson, and Paffey (this volume), consider these power relationships as an opportunity to give their informants a voice. At the same time we should heed the comments of Patiño-Santos (2020: 216) when she writes,
The dialogical and polyphonic character of ethnography obliges us to search for the ‘fairest’ ways to represent the various voices that we have captured, including our own, as well as the situations that we have documented.
It has led me to reconsider my own research in Southampton