Tilburg University
Bilingualism, Multilingualism, Globalization and Superdiversity
Blommaert, Jan; Spotti, Max
Published in:
The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society
DOI:
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212896.013.1
Publication date:
2017
Document Version
Early version, also known as pre-print
Link to publication in Tilburg University Research Portal
Citation for published version (APA):
Blommaert, J., & Spotti, M. (2017). Bilingualism, Multilingualism, Globalization and Superdiversity: Toward
Sociolinguistic Repertoires. In O. Garcia, N. Flores, & M. Spotti (Eds.),
The Oxford Handbook of Language and
Society
(pp. 161-178). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212896.013.1
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Bilingualism, Multilingualism, Globalization, and
Superdiversity: Toward Sociolinguistic Repertoires
Massimiliano Spotti and Jan Blommaert
The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society
Edited by Ofelia García, Nelson Flores, and Massimiliano Spotti
Abstract and Keywords
The chapter tackles key concepts in the study of language and society. It shows how the
study of language has shifted its terminology and its conceptual understanding of
language use by moving from (individual and societal) bilingualism to multilingualism and
languaging, ending with the revitalization of a much abandoned concept, that of language
repertoires. Rather than a comprehensive review, the chapter discusses selected key
assumptions, topics, and analytical developments in the field. It further examines how the
past decades of the study of language use have reached a post-Fishmanian stage of
maturity in its theorizing, moving from a sociolinguistics of distribution to questions of
speakerhood and praxis within complexity. Last, the chapter considers how
superdiversity, the emergent perspective of the study of language, and its theoretical and
methodological insights bring new life into old issues of language and social change.
Keywords: bilingualism, multilingualism, languaging, superdiversity, repertoires, Fishman
Introduction
Given that digital, and in particular mobile communication technologies are
considered a backbone of transnational mobility (e.g. Vertovec, 2004),
understanding the relation of language to individual trajectories in super-diverse
settings seems impossible without taking digitally-mediated communication into
account. The social functions of individual digital connectivity are manifold—
transnational families reuniting on Skype, couples maintaining a flow of
interaction via text messaging, undocumented migrants devising their route with
Print Publication Date: Jan 2017 Subject: Linguistics, Sociolinguistics
Online Publication Date: Dec 2016 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212896.013.1
Oxford Handbooks Online
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the help of mobile phones, etc.—and so are the implications of these trajectories
for individual linguistic repertoires.
—Androtsopolous and Juffermans (2014: 1)
IN the preceding quotation we find all the jargon that is considered “hot” these days when
dealing with the study of language and society. That is, we find the word “mobility”
accompanied by the adjective “transnational”; further, we find the prefix “super-” and the
noun “diversity,” and it takes very little time before we encounter another trope of
language and globalization, “the digital individual,” now the ecce homo of the e-turn in
the humanities. Apart from the fact that this quote could be addressed as yet another of
the many examples of the “super, new, big” syndrome (Reyes, 2014: 366–378) currently
(p. 162)
affecting the study of language and society, there is no way to escape the fact
that human beings—whether or not engaged in migratory movements—are increasingly
transnational mobile subjects and that transnational networks’ dynamics have gone
through deep changes since the advent of the Internet (Castells, 2010; Rigoni and Saitta,
2012). There is also no easy way around the fact that human beings have always been
mobile subjects—albeit perhaps functioning at a slower pace—and that language, in
either its verbal, written, or pictographic representation, is always involved. As Joshua
Fishman has pointed out in his seminal work on the sociology of language (Fishman 1968:
45), the point of departure in the study of language in society is that language—in
whichever form and through whichever channels—is constantly present in the daily lives
of human beings. That is, the use of language and the social organization of human
behavior that stems from it are constituent rei of the conditio humana. Consequently,
what this chapter seeks to do is to first review selected key assumptions, topics, and
analytical developments surrounding the study of language and society. From there, it
explores how, in the past five decades, the study of language and society has managed to
move from a Fishmanian stage, that is, from a sociolinguistics of spread, to a post-
Fishmanian stage, that is, to a sociolinguistics of mobility (Blommaert, 2013; Spotti,
2011). We show how it has managed to move from questions of who uses which language
with whom and for which purpose to questions of speaker-ness and praxis within
mobility-driven complexity (Blommaert, 2014). In order to map out this shift in
perspective, we first tackle bilingualism and its foundations. From there, we move on to
multilingualism and we try to describe how contemporary sociolinguistics has moved
from a variationist perspective toward a poststructuralist perspective that has tackled
linguistic diversity both as a focus of empirical description and as a political commitment
toward the eradication of inequality. Finally, we illustrate the concept of superdiversity
and its implications for the study of language and society. In so doing, we focus on the
notion of repertoire and we look at how, in conditions of superdiversity, the conceptual
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and methodological armamentarium used so far by sociolinguistics appears to be in need
of urgent revisions.
Historical Perspectives on the Topic
The problem with the expert and lay understanding of language (as with other big
concepts in the social sciences) is that the notion of language is often couched in
nationalist ideologies of belonging. Take the case of ethnicity and of its bedfellow,
identity (see Harris and Rampton, 2009: 96–100, for a comprehensive review of this
concept in the British context), and one will see that the two of them together create the
most exquisite byproducts of national ideological ordering. In the same fashion, it is the
mainstream view held by institutions—education and immigration services champion
such a view—that language(s) are neatly separated entities and that is so because a
“real” language can be named, as well as because real languages can be counted (see
Moore, Chapter 11 of this volume, regarding endangered languages). Contemporary
(p.
163)
sociolinguists have always opposed this kind of ideological underpinning, which
espouses a monolithic notion of language and of language use in society. Consequently,
they responded by advocating that all languages are equal (see Baugh, Chapter 17 of this
volume, for an exploration of the case of Ebonics in the United States) and they
contrasted the view that characterized language as a monolithic system and the language
user as someone who knows his or her (only) language perfectly. Blommaert et al. (2015),
among others, argue that no matter how unfortunate this situation may seem to
policymakers and governmental institutions, the world is not neatly divided into
monolingual states. Consequently, official administrative belonging—being a citizen of a
given nation-state—is a poor indicator of sociolinguistic belonging, let alone of language
behavior in general. They further add that the relationship between national identity and
the language-oriented activities of the state are even less straightforward if, for nothing
else, because of the elusiveness of the concept of “national identity” (cf. Blommaert,
2006: 238). In order to make all of the preceding more tangible to the reader and to show
how the field of the study of language and society has moved from a monolithic
conceptualization of language to a re-evaluation of the concept of language repertoires,
we begin by giving an outline of how present-day sociolinguistics has emerged from
studies of bilingualism. In doing so, we examine bilingualism—its streams of thoughts as
well as its foundations—and the way in which the study of this phenomenon has been
tackled through the past decades.
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Bilingualism and Its Foundations
Although it would be wrong to state that there is a fundamental difference between
bilingualism and multilingualism (see Bhatia and Ritchie, 2004: 1), if we take bilingualism
to refer to a social situation in which two languages are used, and multilingualism to a
social situation in which more than two languages are used, then it makes sense to draw
a distinction between the two terms, their foundations, and the scholars who have been
characterizing these phenomena and the respective growth of their conceptual
apparatuses at both the individual as well as the societal level. The investigation of
bilingualism remains a broad and complex field. For this reason, we have chosen to first
review its main assumptions before then moving on to deal with the study of bilingual
practices, such as code-switching and code-mixing, and putting these two processes in
relation to the concept of identity and more precisely of “bilingual identities,” a term very
much in vogue until the late 1980s and early 1990s (see Hamers and Blanc, 2000, for an
overview). John Edwards’s review of the field and his examination of those issues that
have tried to establish who is (and is not) bilingual can still be seen as one of the most
representative publications in the field (Edwards, 2004, 7–31). His uptake, very much
anchored in a structuralist understanding of language, shows that much of the concern
with bilingualism had to do with what a bilingual language user can and cannot do, as
well as with coming up with workable definitions of who is and who is not a bilingual
language user.
(p. 164)
Before Edwards, many have been engaged with the job of defining and measuring
the degrees of bilingualism that someone may hold. In 1933, for instance, Leonard
Bloomfield had already observed that bilingualism resulted from the addition of a
“perfectly learned” foreign language to one’s own. However, Weinreich in his 1953 work
on language contact, working within a structural paradigm, defined bilingualism as a
loose alternate of two codes that could not be explained without conceiving the individual
as social as well as a language user. Haugen, also in 1953, building on Weinreich’s work,
gave the bilingual individual the connotation of an individual who was able to produce
finite meaningful sentences in both languages. Given that this approach held as its pivotal
point the notion of (educational) mastery of the two languages involved, it opened the
problem of assessment of bilingual proficiency and of the education of bilingual pupils
(Baker, 1988: 2; Reich and Reid, 1992). This critique was then brought to the
dichotomous condition of whether bilingualism had to be either simultaneous or
sequential/successive, and with that came the dilemma, for both bilingual families and
schooling institutions, of having to deal with which model would allow a more balanced
bilingualism for their children (Kloss, 1966). All of the employed criteria ended up
revamping the debate of whether someone could or could not be categorized as bilingual