Alessandro Duranti
University of California, Los Angeles

1. Intersubjectivity as a condition of human existence

I borrow from phenomenology the idea that intersubjectivity is an a priori universal condition of our existence such that even though we might not be aware of the presence of other people or of the impact that their actions directly or indirectly have on us, we are always in “a world of others.” This has implications for all kinds of human activities as well as for perception. When we look at a table, we assume, without thinking, that this same table is perceptually accessible to others, even when they are not present. The durable presence of the table as a three-dimensional object is made possible by a shared but differentiated perceptual field where we can “trade places” with others, that is, we can imagine what it would be like to see the table from their point of view.

Intersubjectivity therefore is a precondition for interaction that allows for different degree of attunement. This happens, for instance, when we go from being passively aware of the people, sounds, or smells of the world we inhabit to actively attending to an aspect of the environment that has a strong attentional pull, e.g., a familiar song blasting out of the sound system of a store we just walked in.

2. The interactive and emergent quality of meaningful action

An interpretation of intersubjectivity in terms of a shifting degree of attunement lends itself to an understanding of human action as unfolding in time. As such, intersubjective attunement adjusts to context-specific interactional demands. Some telling examples of how meaning unfolds in spontaneous speech production were provided almost forty years ago by Charles Goodwin in his book Conversational Organization, where he showed how a speaker is able to change the meaning of an utterance in the course of its production in order to adjust to a new recipient’s knowledge of past events.

In addition to showcasing the notion of “recipient design” introduced by Harvey Sacks in his lectures on conversation, Goodwin’s examples highlight the fact that speakers can sometimes quickly adjust the content of what they are saying without stopping and restarting their utterances. Speakers seem to be very apt at rethinking, rephrasing, and changing the meaning of what they might have been trying to say. As noted by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, when speaking, we are not only expressing ourselves to others, we are also discovering our own thoughts.

The open-ended quality of communication and, more generally, action for phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty is akin to the dialogical linguistics proposed by Mikhail M. Bakhtin for whom the meanings of utterances are not completely authored by their speakers because all utterances are populated by the intentions of earlier users. This implies that we can never be completely in control of the force or pragmatic effects of our utterances. Sometimes we might offend others even though we did not mean to or we might sound hesitant even though we feel resolute. The weight of past language uses can predetermine and limit our ability to use it for our own individual goals.

3. A different concept of intersubjectivity: collective intentionality

The conceptualization of intersubjectivity as the basic condition of our sociality is by no means universally known or accepted. One competing model of intersubjectivity first proposed in the 1980s is the so-called “collective” or “shared” or “we-intentionality” model proposed by analytic philosophers. Their models, which are an extension of the causal models of individual agents, aim to explain how two or more people manage to perform actions that require cooperation like, for example, pushing a car, walking down the street, playing music, toasting each other, or having a conversation. For the shared intentionality model, all of these activities share something, namely, the intention or goal of the collective activity. But if, as mentioned above, even one person’s intentions might originally belong to others and speaking needs continuous adjustment, including changing the meaning of what we started out as saying, it would seem difficult to specify ahead of time exactly what the shared intention or goal of a joint activity is.

Take, for example, playing music together. This is one of the group activities mentioned by the shared intentionality proponents. Playing music requires a high level of cooperation (and coordination), but the identification of its “shared goal,” which is required by the collective or shared intentionality model, may turn out to be a challenge. Whereas in the case of musicians playing off a written or memorized piece one might assume (but not necessarily know) that the shared goal is the performance of the known score, the same could not be said of groups of people who are performing music together but not necessarily playing off an existing score, whether written or memorized. Philosopher and jazz musician Gary Hagberg, who evaluated the relevance of the concept of collective or shared intention for capturing group jazz improvisation, suggested that in this kind of joint activity, intentions are altered in the course of performance. Hagberg argued that when highly skilled jazz musicians play together, there is a level of creative work that goes beyond what any of the individuals involved could have “intended.” Even when jazz musicians can be said to improvise on a particular song, the original harmonic structure, rhythm, tempo or time signature may be altered to such an extent that the song they started from would no longer be recognizable by most people. It would thus be difficult to say exactly what goal they share except in some very vague terms like improvising or transforming a previously composed song into something else that is related to it but in unanticipated ways.

4. Improvisation and the force of tradition

Someone might argue that jazz improvisation is not a good counter-example to the model of collective actions as sharing a goal because it is an artistic activity and as such is guided by what Jan Mukařovsky identified as the “aesthetic function,” which entails the violation of established norms. Are not most of our activities much more predictable than jazz collective improvisation? This is indeed an implicit view among linguists and anthropologists who have tended to pay more attention to rules and routine activities than to novel or creative activities. Even when Noam Chomsky in the 1960s recognized creativity as part of the language faculty, he kept competence and performance separate so that the temporal unfolding of utterance meanings was left out of his model. In anthropology, predictability has been at the core of the definition of “culture” as shared knowledge and of the notion of “ritual” as a sequence of more or less invariant acts, which are not originally authored by the speaker (see Roy Rappoport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity). Especially in the 1970s, the concept of ritual as the performance of some culturally transmitted routine with a basic, essential form that could be adapted to particular contexts was applied to all kinds of communicative acts, from the most mundane activities like greetings to “traditional” oratory.

5. The rare recognition of improvisation

In the late 1970s, two social scientists made direct reference to the role of improvisation in their writings: Pierre Bourdieu, whose notion of “habitus” as a set of “dispositions” included “orchestrated improvisation,” and Ruth Finnegan who, on the basis of her study of oratory and music performance, proposed a definition of improvisation as “composition-in-performance.” But the great majority of scholars in linguistics and anthropology did not engage with these ideas. Students of verbal art, myself included, while documenting variation across contexts continued to ignore the occurrence and need for improvisation even when speakers are relying on formulae and common patterns. In the 1980s, only a handful of ethnographers (e.g., Barbara Myerhoff and Renato Rosaldo) mentioned improvisation in their analyses. In my own case, it took several years of teaching together with the legendary jazz guitar player Kenny Burrell before I could reconceptualize what I had learned about Samoan oratory in terms of improvisation and a few more year to write a chapter about socialization into verbal improvisation in collaboration with Steven Black, a linguistic anthropologist with extensive experience in jazz music and performance.

6. Improvisation as a hidden property of human action

Despite the increased focus in the social sciences on variation, variability, and diversity of all kinds, there has continued to be little empirical research directly addressing the role of improvisation in language, interaction, and culture. The exceptions are usually scholars who have had experience in one or more improvisational arts, like Howard Becker, Keith Sawyer, or Tim Ingold.

Paraphrasing Heraclitus’ famous saying Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ, often translated as ‘Nature likes to hide,’ we could say that “improvisation likes to hide,” that is, it is hard to detect and be recognized. Even though the analysis of human interaction shows that people are quick to adjust to new circumstances, change course, and do something that could not have been planned or expected, the work that they do is hardly ever recognized as an act of improvisation.

One set of contexts where improvisation could be said “to show itself” is when participants find themselves in situations when things do not go as they had expected. This is particularly evident in public events when participants are following a protocol that requires shared knowledge and suddenly something does not work and the joint activity cannot be completed or needs to be repeated. These are situations in which improvisation is desperately needed and the audience might expect it. I have examined a number of these interactional troubles and called them “interactional glitches.” In addition to constituting a challenge to the shared intentionality model because they occur even when participants appear to have the right prerequisites for cooperation, these glitches also show that there are social constraints on the degree of improvisation that participants are allowed to exert. This suggests that improvisation is a mode of acting that is not equally distributed across individuals, activities, and situations. Thus, for example, I have found that in the context of public performance, the on-going close scrutiny of a large number of people may inhibit the use of the on-the-spot creativity that would otherwise result in a successful adjustment or repair.

7. Improvisation as a condition for successful cooperation

Most of the time we believe that we know how to perform familiar tasks. We open the door of our car, sit inside, turn on the engine, and off we drive to work without much thought. When we arrive to our desk, we turn on our computer and, in a few seconds, we are reading and responding to messages. At lunchtime, we eat the snack we brought from home or walk to a nearby café or restaurant. These activities constitute our daily “rituals” and they are supported by verbal routines like greetings, polite formulas, or responses, which, in turn, are made up of a few items taken out of a vast repository of stock phrases that are available to us as speakers of a language. Just like jazz musicians can improvise melodic lines and rhythm patterns that are based on established conventions and a history of listening to other musicians, we can also move in the world and communicate successfully by adopting and adapting stock phrases that we have heard in the past or are being suggested by what someone else just said. Most of the time, we are given the right text to read, start at the right time, finish the toast before the music starts, and lift the glass at the right moment. When things go wrong, we are usually quick to retrace our steps, adjust, rephrase, or just wait until someone else saves us from embarrassment. All of this is made possible by the magic of improvisation as a force of both stability and creativity. The identification of such a force in human interaction suggests that cooperation in joint activities needs intersubjective attunement as well as flexibility, inventiveness, and tolerance for variation.

Bernard Spolsky
Bar-Ilan University, Israel

In the two decades I have been studying language policy, I have found it necessary to keep adding to the model in order to account for the many cases I have come across. My first early concern was proposing a language education policy for Israeli schools; in tackling this, I was able to build on my earlier experiences with Navajo and Māori and a long interest in language education. We proposed a model which defined language policy as consisting of three interrelated but independent components. These were language practice (the actual choices of language variety made by speakers in a community), language beliefs and ideology (what people think should be the language of the community), and language management (efforts by people or institutions inside or outside a community to modify the beliefs and practices of members of the community). This was and remains the basic model.

In order to account for common failures of national policies, I found it necessary to consider different levels ranging from the family to the state and in different domains from home to government. After a study of real cases, especially former empires and their successors, I extended the model to include non-linguistic situations and events interfering with the implementation of language policies. More recently, I have been persuaded of the significance of the individual, both for establishing practices and through self-management, for resisting external management and expanding individual and group linguistic repertoires. This in brief is where I came from and how I got here: in the book that I am now working on, it seems appropriate to rethink the topic of language policy by reversing the normal order, with its historical focus on state language policy, and to start rather with the individual speaker.

Just as not all states are very interested in developing a formal language policy – the United States is an obvious example – so most speakers are probably unaware that their own repertoires are changing as a result of external experiences and pressures. In a homogenous monolingual society like the one I grew up in, it was my family’s Jewish religious observance that first revealed to me that there was another language (Hebrew) that we used for prayers. My Protestant peers had to wait until high school offered us a French class, and even that remained an academic exercise until we saw a French movie. My own contact with languages other than English in vernacular use came when I taught classes that included Māori students in a high school and later when I moved to Israel. But anyone growing up in the normal multilingual environment of modern cities, with parents or grandparents or peers using a complex repertoire of varieties, early becomes aware of the values attached to each variety, and the costs and advantages of modifying their own repertoires.

I now speak of repertoires, avoiding the problem of oversimplification that comes of references to named languages. Using the concept doesn’t mean giving up on named languages, difficult as it is to define them linguistically, for they are usually defined politically or socially. How does one define English, with all its national and dialectal varieties? Or why does one distinguish among the recently separated varieties of what was Serbo-Croatian, each now recognized as distinct by the International Standards Organization? When does a regional dialect like Friesian become a separate language from Dutch, and why is Catalan a language even without political independence, and why are mutually intelligible varieties of Scandinavian languages accepted as languages, while mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese are all lumped together.

Children develop language repertoires from they hear in their environment. A child with both parents speaking the same variety will start off with it, but may later add the language of grandparents or caretakers, and of older siblings already at school. Studying this normal development is family language policy, and it is probably the most important domain for language maintenance: languages are endangered when they are no longer taught to babies and young children. But there are two other important processes to note. The first is accommodation, the not necessarily conscious modification of one’s speech to that of one’s interlocutor, and the second is self-management, the conscious effort to modify or add to one’s linguistic repertoire in the belief that it is advantageous.

It has been shown that speakers make linguistic adjustments based on their perception of their interlocutor’s social status, age, and presumed knowledge of the topic. They also learn what is appropriate when talking to various audiences: avoiding swear words when taking to their mother, or using a different variety in an immigrant family with their grandparents. Speakers modify their accent in order to obtain social approval: to express disapproval, they modify their accent in the opposite direction. At a group level, a minority group’s divergence might lead to language maintenance. Much the same process is dealt with by the theory of language socialization, an ethnographic approach which traces the way in which children’s and adults’ linguistic and cultural adeptness develops as they move into expanding speech and cultural communities with different linguistic codes and semiotic systems.

Some of the important evidence of the nature of accommodation refers not to language shift, but to the modification of dialect differences. The loss of localized features in British English was the result of geographical diffusion, with a spread from more populous and richer locations to surrounding cities and later to rural areas. The second mechanism, is called “levelling”, the result of speech accommodation. There has been dialect levelling in both Britain and France, associate with urbanization and internal migration. In Israel, the traditional distinctions between mutually unintelligible urban, rural and Bedouin dialects of Arabic still maintained by people over 70 are being lost among younger people working in public institutions and educated in standard Arabic, Hebrew and other modern languages. The values associated with speakers of more standard varieties then lead to changes in individual and community repertoires.

This influence of beliefs shows up also in accounting for successful second or foreign language learning. Attitudes and motivation are a critical factor in acquiring a language in school; there is a distinction between integrative motivation (learning a language as reflecting a desire to be like representative members of the other language community or to be associated with that community), and instrumental motivation (a desire to gain social recognition or economic advantage). In more recent work, the motivational self-system as it applied to second language learning has three components, the ideal self, the ought-to self, and language learning experiences.

Essentially we find that an individual’s language repertoire (combining with other to form the language practices of a community) depends on the languages to which he or she is exposed, while an individual’s language beliefs or ideology depend on his or her responses or attitude to the speakers in the environment and to their potential usefulness. Initially, this means caretakers, later it means peers including siblings and friends from the neighborhood, and in due course, it adds teachers and actual or potential employers. A growing repertoire results from these meaningful exposures and the associated values assigned to the people and the language varieties. In addition, it is liable to be influenced by management efforts of authorities, such as teachers and employers or the state. For example, there are the efforts of immigrant mother or father to preserve a heritage language or encourage the adoption of the local dominant variety. Each new domain or level, leading to communication with an increasing array of speakers, adds new sources of language management.

The three component model that I started with is useful in accounting for the development of individual language repertoires. First in importance are the language practices of the individual’s environment. In the home, this means that the choice of languages that household membres address to each other and even more important, the choice of meaningful utterances addressed to the growing child, helps establish the initial repertoire. These choices depend on two critical features: first, that others are willing to speak to the individual, and secondly that the utterances are meaningful.

What this suggests is the importance of beliefs or ideology, especially the values that are associated with a variety. A baby recognizes that the mother’s variety is associated with food and comfort; a pupil recognizes that the teacher’s variety is associated with success in school: a working adult may believe that an international language provides access to better paid work. These beliefs about the value of varieties play a major role in determining the continuing expansion of an individual’s speech repertoire.

Which brings us to the notion of self-management, a notion developed in research on voluntary language learning in international businesses. In such situations, a worker may notice the need to add a different variety to guarantee promotion: thus, Czech workers in a German-owned factory who wish to become foremen or managers realize that they should learn German and were willing to take private lessons. Self management occurs when an individual sets out to learn a valuable variety, providing support for the growing global language teaching industry. When collectivized, this can lead to the demand that the public school system teach the language: this is obvious in Asia, with the growing interest in English language teaching, or in the Australian language policy that encouraged the teaching of Chinese and Japanese.

Self-management has many similarities to accommodation theory, but while it is usually considered a positive action, it too can share a negative approach, as in resistance to language learning or to one or more of the efforts of language managers. This shows up in the research on attitudinal effects on language learning; the research usually points out that favorable attitudes to the language or its speakers results in better language learning, but the opposite is also true: unfavorable attitudes act as a block to success. I suspect that my own failure in German at university in 1951 was influenced by my growing awareness of the Holocaust. The decision to succeed in school second language learning or the decision of an individual to seek an alternative method of acquiring the language is self-management, influenced by values assigned to the language and its speakers. Within any speech community, there are likely to be a number of individuals who select their own repertoire expansion and others who resist the efforts of language managers, internal or external, who seek to influence their practices or beliefs.

Belief in the value of proficiency in English is associated with what has been called “the English divide”, whereby an elite group of citizens in virtually every country of the world are the ones who develop a high level of proficiency and fluency in English, which establishes their status. It is a common belief in many countries that, without this proficiency, one is excluded from the highest levels of employment.

As one explores the various levels and communities in which language policy occurs, it will be important to be reminded continually that there will be individuals (and often groups of individuals) who have their own beliefs, leading them to develop individual repertoires different from the majority. Thus, the language practices and beliefs of a community will always be diverse, producing a sort of chaotic pattern that will constantly challenge simple analysis. Starting like this with the individual, while it leaves gaps to be filled by other domains and environaments, will provide a better understanding of the way in which a person’s linguistic repertoire expands, as they move into new and more demanding situations, and the way in which putative managers at various levels, attempt, succeed, or fail to shape community repertoires.

Juan Carlos Moreno Cabrera
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Normalmente, la diversidad lingüística del mundo se plantea en términos proposicionales: un mismo enunciado se puede decir de una forma diferente en cada una de las lenguas del mundo. Se puede aducir, como ejemplo, que hay más de seis mil formas de expresar te quiero correspondiendo a los más de seis mil idiomas que se hablan en el mundo hoy en día.

Las lenguas se ven así como una especie de recipientes de diversas formas y tamaños en los que se vierten las ideas, que son independientes de las lenguas. Un punto de vista opuesto a este mantiene que las lenguas son mucho más que recipientes en las que se vierten ideas, sino que son unos moldes que crean y determinan la forma y posiblemente parte del contenido de las ideas. Este es uno de los postulados de la famosa hipótesis de Sapir y Whorf del relativismo lingüístico. Según el ejemplo puesto en el párrafo anterior, no habría más de seis mil formas de decir te quiero, sino más de seis mil formas de sentir el amor tal como es determinado por cada una de las lenguas. Por eso, la pérdida de la diversidad lingüística supondría una pérdida no solo de formas de expresarse sino también de formas de pensar. Aunque la versión fuerte de esta hipótesis según la cual pensamos como hablamos no es mantenida por la mayor parte de las personas expertas, no cabe descartar alguna influencia de la lengua sobre el pensamiento, aunque éste no se vea totalmente limitado o condicionado por ella, sino que es capaz de ir más allá de la lengua e incluso influir en ella de forma más o menos decisiva. Las relaciones entre pensamiento y lengua se han de plantear, pues, más como una interacción dialéctica bidireccional que como una determinación unidireccional.

Las discusiones del párrafo anterior están limitadas a la función proposicional de las lenguas, es decir, a la expresión lingüística de juicios o ideas. Pero en los idiomas hay fenómenos que trascienden esa frontera. Estos no solo representan ideas, conceptos o situaciones, sino que en ellos se realizan acciones lingüísticas para mimetizar, sugerir, recrear o reproducir esas ideas, conceptos o situaciones. De esta manera no estamos ante actuaciones proposicionales, sino representacionales o miméticas. La persona que habla hace una representación, una imitación de aquello que quiere comunicar, no se limita a referirse a ello de forma enunciativa.

En todas las lenguas del mundo existen expresiones lingüísticas que se basan en este tipo de modalidad no enunciativa. Los ideófonos, descubiertos el siglo pasado en las lenguas africanas son un ejemplo de este aspecto olvidado y, sin embargo, fundamental de las lenguas del mundo. Se trata de expresiones lingüísticas no referenciales (su forma lingüística sugiere o recrea aquello de lo que se habla) que sirven para reproducir algún aspecto de un objeto o suceso ante los ojos (pues suelen ir acompañadas de gestos) y oídos de las personas interlocutoras, de una forma directa, imitativa: su forma sugiere o recrea aquello de lo que se habla. Veamos unos ejemplos del edo, una de las muchas lenguas de Nigeria. En edo, para recrear o sugerir movimientos o formas irregulares se usan ideófonos con alternancia tonal: pérlépèrlèpérlé ‘aleteo’, tíghítìghìtíghí ‘retorcido’, kínókìnòkínó ‘entretejido’, bígóbìgòbígó ‘torcido’, góbágòbàgòbá ‘tullido’, khúrlúkhùrlùkhúrlú ‘espasmódico’, vàghàvághá ‘tambaleo’, wèkèéwèkèé ‘anadear’.

Estas palabras son inusualmente largas para este idioma, y además presentan repetición de sílabas alternando un tono alto (señalado con un acento agudo) y un tono bajo (señalado con un acento grave). Cuando se utiliza, por ejemplo, el ideófono vàghàvághá se está imitando lingüísticamente el movimiento tambaleante, de manera que se repiten las mismas dos sílabas cambiando el tono de grave a agudo: se reproduce lingüísticamente el tambaleo mediante la repetición silábica y la alternancia tonal. Al comparar esta expresión con las demás citadas, se ve que este patrón mimético se produce para recrear o reproducir otros movimientos alternantes o irregulares. Para expresar miméticamente el movimiento espasmódico, el ideófono khúrlúkhùrlùkhúrlú repite tres veces la forma mimética khurlu partiendo de un tono agudo (khúrlú), pasando a un tono grave (khùrlù) para volver al tono inicial (khúrlú). Mediante esta expresión se está reproduciendo lingüísticamente un movimiento espasmódico: dicha expresión tiene alguna de las propiedades de aquello que es objeto del discurso. A diferencia de las palabras referenciales en general, que no tienen ninguna propiedad formal que las asemeje a lo que designan, los ideófonos y expresiones miméticas comparten propiedades de los referentes y, por tanto, tienen una cualidad imitativa.

Pues bien, ideófonos como los del edo han sido descubiertos en centenares de lenguas africanas. Pero lo más interesante de todo es que expresiones miméticas similares han sido comprobadas también en lenguas de los cinco continentes. Por ejemplo, las lenguas asiáticas son muy ricas en ellas. Dos ejemplos notables son el coreano y el japonés. En ambas lenguas existen literalmente centenares de palabras miméticas cuya forma lingüística comparte alguna propiedad con aquello que denotan. Por ejemplo, en japonés para referirnos al ruido generado por las gotas de lluvia se utiliza la expresión mimética pota-pota, para sugerir el sonido de las tijeras cortando algo se usa choki-choki, para recrear el movimiento de un objeto redondo rodando se utiliza el ideófono koro-koro, para imitar el salto o brinco ligero de una persona o animal se emplea la expresión pyon-pyon, para representar un estado mental en el que una persona está muy ilusionada por algo se usa waku-waku. En coreano, kkam-kkam imita algo que está muy oscuro; para recrear algo que gira se utilizan los ideófonos bing-bing, pping-pping, p’ing-p’ing dependiendo de la velocidad del giro; el ideófono tan-tan se usa para sugerir algo firme y fuerte; ttuk-ttuk, para representar un líquido que gotea; el ideófono tuijeok-tuijeok recrea la acción de revolver, hurgar y rebuscar.

Las lenguas europeas también conocen expresiones miméticas de este tipo. Algunas son especialmente ricas en este ámbito, como ocurre con el euskera. En vasco encontramos expresiones miméticas como traka-traka ‘trotando’; hirrinbili-harranbala ‘atropelladamente’, itzuli-mitziluka ‘serpenteando’, pinpili-panpala (ibili) ‘(caer) rodando’, pilpil-pulpul ‘palpitar’ y centenares más, si investigamos los diferentes dialectos euskéricos.

Si comparamos las expresiones del edo, coreano, japonés y euskera que hemos dado en los párrafos anteriores, observaremos una evidente afinidad formal. La repetición y la alternancia (vocálica, consonántica, tonal) son elementos que aparecen en muy diversas lenguas asociados con el modo lingüístico representativo y que sirven para oponer ese modo lingüístico al proposicional.

Normalmente, cuando se describen lenguas no europeas sin tradición escrita, se siguen las normas de las gramáticas de las lenguas europeas que, en la tradición clásica, pertenecen a las correspondientes versiones escritas. Ello implica que se eliminan o se marginan muchos aspectos esenciales del funcionamiento lingüístico tales como, por ejemplo, los tonos y la entonación. En los modelos europeos de gramática no hay prevista ninguna sección dedicada a los fenómenos miméticos de los que se ha dado cuenta en esta nota. Como mucho, en las gramáticas más detalladas, se puede encontrar alguna sección breve dedicada a las onomatopeyas, interjecciones o a las palabras expresivas. Pues bien, lo mismo ocurre con las gramáticas descriptivas de las lenguas no europeas sin tradición escrita, realizadas sobre modelos europeos. Esos modelos impiden dar cuenta de aspectos importantes y esenciales de las lenguas habladas, tales como los miméticos que, ya lo hemos visto, no se limitan solo a unas pocas onomatopeyas aisladas, sino que implican mecanismos lingüísticos sistemáticos. De hecho, la ejemplificación que acabamos de dar está muy simplificada y deja de lado muchos aspectos complejos de difícil análisis que plantean las expresiones miméticas.

Todo lo anterior indica que la riqueza lingüística mundial es aún mayor de lo que habitualmente se supone. Porque, además de las expresiones habituales de tipo referencial, las lenguas en su nivel oral espontáneo muestran maneras de representar la realidad que están imitadas o sugeridas parcialmente por las formas lingüísticas mismas y en cada una se crean expresiones miméticas específicas, características y únicas que ya no son meros soportes materiales de un contenido proposicional común, sino representaciones o recreaciones vivaces, inmediatas y coloristas de la sensaciones y sentimientos humanos. Cuando se pierde una lengua no solo se pierde un sistema de expresión formal de contenidos proposicionales, sino también formas lingüísticas vivenciales que dan origen a creaciones originales y, a la vez, universales, pues son manifestación de la facultad lingüística humana que caracteriza comunicativamente a nuestra especie.

Frog
Folklore Studies, University of Helsinki

Poetics is an often-overlooked part of linguistic heritage, and getting a handle on it in today’s complex societies is becoming increasingly difficult. Romantic views so popular in the nineteenth century saw language as emblematic of both ethnic or national  identity and the corresponding historical or rural culture that united a society through a common heritage. The idea of culture and ethnic/national identity being homogeneously linked to a particular language remains commonplace, although it does not seem to match up with realities of most cities and the dynamic virtual arenas of the internet. I live on a quiet street in Helsinki, Finland, a country with two rather than one national language (Finnish and Swedish). Like so many mayor European cities, countless languages can be heard on the way to work in the morning. My neighbourhood is considered among the most linguistically diverse: at the elementary school down the street, tens of different mother tongues are found among the students. I recall my surprise when realizing that in my daughter’s second grade class (at a different school), only a quarter of the students had a national language as their mother tongue. This level of linguistic diversity is sometimes called ‘superdiversity’, which seems to be becoming a norm in major cities, but for many of us, this is just daily life. My wife and I are both immigrants who met in Finland with three (non-national) mother tongues between us. In our family, we speak three languages, sometimes in the same sentence: our daughters both speak the respective mother tongue that my wife and I use with them, but Finnish is now their strongest language. Of course, a shared language of communication is important for the functioning of a society, but a plurality of languages can also operate as part of a society and its identity, as well as offering resources for creativity with potential to stimulate language vitality and impact its trajectory of evolution.

Poetry tends to be seen as the highest form of language. This is because, in poetry, language transcends the mechanics of lexicon and grammar, allowing it to blossom with ideals of ordered arrangements of form, texture and musicality. Poetry is thus set apart from everyday speech like the emboldened colour of a rose’s bloom amid a thicket of dark leaves, thorns, and the cacophonous tangles of twisted vines from which it blossoms. And like that rose’s bloom, the ideals of poetics are bound to the language from which they grow. There is truth to the saying that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, but beauty in poetics is also linked to language, and especially to speech communities, in which we learn to recognize certain things as opposed to others that make something ‘poetry’ or at least ‘poetic’. Poetics depends on a sense of language internalized through uses of the language itself, a sense that even native speakers can lack, and it can be especially challenging to learn for a non-native speaker. Poetics –not just individual poems or a particular tradition of poetry– is a remarkably subtle and easily overlooked part of linguistic heritage.

But what makes something poetry or poetic? Abstractly speaking, poetry is customarily distinguished from other uses of language by organization in verses rather than simply in clauses and sentences according to content or function. Versification occurs when organizing principles of form and phraseology are given precedence over more common principles of syntax and prosody in speaking and writing. This can be done with formalized meter, sound patterning like rhyme or alliteration, or parallelism (see further Fabb 2015). Rhythms may be flexible and vary, particularly in so-called free verse, but a poem is characterized by versification of a whole text, whether or not editors organize it as verses on a printed page. When these features or uses of language occur only in some parts of a text but not others, we can recognize them as poetic, such as uses of metaphor or a rhythmically organized description in a novel or an advertisement. However, the key remains the perception of poetics when language is used.

Poetics build on sounds and other features of words that are perceivable to speakers and thus are linked to the particular language, but how poetic devices are perceived or whether they are noticed as poetic at all is something that is internalized or learned. For example, alliteration, the recurrence of the same sound at the beginning of words or stressed syllables, easily passes unnoticed by native English speakers, and is mainly used in contexts like advertising, titles and names. Speakers may sense it as a subtle aesthetic texture, but alliteration is not something associated with organizing language as poetry. Of course, alliteration’s prominent and persistent practice penetrates into perception, but its presence doesn’t make poetry or seem particularly poetic: people will probably perceive it as protusive, peculiar and perhaps even painful. In English poetic creation, rhyme marks inspiration with a smoother collocation in sounds’ organization than the rougher irritation of ongoing alliteration, so that attenuation to its patterned operation, gives, by association, a subtle inebriation in the rising anticipation of an inevitable deviation since all rhymes must end. Both alliteration and rhyme can be made salient, but their perception is within frameworks of the language’s poetics or a community’s sense of poetics.

If we were to jump back a thousand years or so, the situation in English would be reversed: alliteration was central to versification in Old English, as exemplified by the epic Beowulf, and rhyme was the feature with a more limited range of uses. Since that time, of course, the language underwent transformative changes. English is seen as a dominant language today, making it easy to forget its distinctive roots as a bastard child of Old English and Norman French, like a creole produced by the medieval colonization of the Norman Conquest. But the rise of rhyme is not simply a function of language change. Rhyme seems to have spread through Europe from language to language with new forms of poetry that were valorised, gradually becoming a general principle in local vernacular poetics. Finnic languages, where alliteration was a primary poetic principle, seem to have initially resisted rhyme: it appears that medieval rhymed ballads were initially recomposed into alliterative verse rather than immediately adopting the rhymed form (Kuusi, Bosley & Branch 1977: 56–57). We may appreciate poetry individually and subjectively, but such appreciation is normally dependent on shared (or at least overlapping) senses of poetics. This is particularly evident for oral poetry: it circulates through active reproduction by different people rather than as static text codified through writing, so shared frames of reference are essential or poetry will simply not be reperformed.

The spread of forms of expression from language to language and from culture to culture has probably been happening since there were such forms to spread, a process particularly familiar today through everything from the novel to rap music. When a word is borrowed, sooner or later it inevitably gets adapted into the receiving language’s sounds and structures. For example, Finnish distinguishes between long and short vowels, so English yes becomes Finnish jees, while English verbs won’t work in Finnish without an ending, so to scan becomes skannata. Poetics work in more or less the same way, except that, rather than a phonology, we have what can be described as a poetic ecology. It is practical to speak in generalizations about poetics of a language, but those poetics are always linked to different things that people do with language in verse, and the way poetics are used might be quite different in a ballad than in a lullaby or a sonnet. A poetic ecology is comprised of all of the different types of poetic forms and their distribution across genres and contexts of use. Thus, an earlier Finnish poetic ecology was dominated by alliteration to such an extent that it was initially difficult for rhymed poetry to find a place, but the ecology gradually changed as rhyme began to be adopted for use in one genre, and then another, and another after that. Different poetic devices are then understood and interpreted within that ecology. The adaptation of freestyle rap into Finnish involved the assimilation of a form of rhymed versification with conventions for how to organize words and syllables in relation to beats. However, rather than the type of end-rhyme customary in English, Finnish rap employs what is called systematic vowel rhyme, which is found already in forms of pre-modern Finnish oral poetry. In this type of rhyme, a series of vowels are used in the same order although the consonants may vary, as in the series läppäni – ässämmis – bäkkäril, and ‘multi-rhymes’, rhymes of four or more syllables, are particularly esteemed, as in jätkä vielä – bätläät siellä or tiputusta – vitut susta – kidutusta (Sykäri 2017: 140). How rhythms of language relate to the beat also had to adapt, not least because Finnish has much longer words than English and far fewer particles such as articles (a, the) or prepositions (to, from) – the language is very different.

On the surface, this may just seem like a few formal differences that need to be recognized for the poetry to be appreciated, but its significance runs much deeper. When I first heard Finnish rap in 2000, I couldn’t really appreciate it because I listened to it through the wrong poetics. My ‘feel’ for rap was rooted in hearing people rap and talk about what was ‘good’ and ‘bad’ while I was growing up in an American inner-city during the 1980s, back in the days when rap was more on the street than on the radio. Through that lens, I simply didn’t ‘hear’ läppäni and ässämmis as rhyming and Finnish multi-rhymes were completely off my radar, not to mention rhythms. This can be read as an anecdote about problems of interpreting poetry in one language through the poetics of another. However, the significance changes if we turn attention from the encounter to the differences in the poetics of a genre. When rap moves into a new language, it is not simply transplanted unchanged: if it is to continue there, it evolves into something sustainable, an evolution driven by the creativity of those adapting it.

Rather than simply one language and culture influencing a second, these processes occur today within dynamic, multilingual poetic ecologies. In a city like Helsinki, poetic principles like vowel rhyme may be particularly linked to the poetic heritage of Finnish language, but youths with diverse and potentially multiple mother tongues live in rich and flourishing poetic ecologies. They are continuously internalizing and negotiating shared principles of poetics within their multilingual communities. When speaking of a heritage of poetics, language or anything else, we tend to refer to or create ideal and static images of the past that we can connect with the present, with the implication that they are important to preserve it for the future. Such constructions of heritage normally emerge within Romanticism’s mythology of one language and one culture per nation or ethnicity, segregating diversity and devaluing what is other. The multilingualism, which will be the heritage of so many children today, becomes marginalized. More significantly, the valorization of heritage easily produces a competition between ossified images of what culture ‘should be’ and the creativity of innovation that both expresses and stimulates vitality, making inherited culture current through change. Much as change in a language is always built on continuities, so too is change in poetics. The spread of new forms of versifying such as rap attest to the vitality of the languages in which they become used, even as the new poetic form impacts the broader poetic ecology of the particular language. These impacts are perhaps most pronounced and dynamic in multilingual environments where different languages offer complementary and competing resources, facilitating and stimulating creativity in the negotiation of shared frames of reference across communities.

Works Cited

Fabb, Nigel. 2015. What is Poetry? – Language and Memory in the Poems of the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kuusi, Matti, Keith Bosley & Michael Branch (eds. & trans.). 1977. Finnish Folk Poetry – Epic: An Anthology in Finnish and English. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.

Venla Sykäri. 2017. “Beginning from the End: Strategies of Composition in Lyrical Improvisation with End Rhyme”. Oral Tradition , 31(1): 123–154.

Durk Gorter^1,2

1. Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science
2. University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU

Multilingualism comes with many attributes and has a lot of aspects. In this note, two European minority languages, Frisian and Basque, are briefly compared in order to show how they are historically embedded in a complex multilingual context.

Frisian is mainly spoken in the land of the black-and-white cows with the same name as the language and its inhabitants. About half of the population of the province of Friesland in the Netherlands, usually speaks Frisian at home, although almost all of its 640.000 inhabitants can speak Dutch, the socially dominant language. In traditional macro-sociolinguistic terms this could be characterized as a ´bilingual province´. However, the label ´bilingual´ does no justice to far more complex language practices of its inhabitants. Historically, various language varieties have been used in some towns, on its islands and in specific areas. In the capital Leeuwarden-Ljouwert, probably in the 16^th century, a variety emerged called Town Frisian (Stedfrysk / Stadsfries) due to political and economic changes leading to intensified daily contact between speakers of Frisian and Dutch. Over time a common variety developed which can also be found in at least six other Frisian towns. Furthermore, different varieties are used on three of the four Frisian Islands. There are speakers in northern, eastern and south-eastern parts of the province who use still other varieties, some related to Low-Saxon.

The foregoing is a succinct, almost classic description of ´the´ language situation in Friesland, but even if all the other varieties are taken into consideration, the approach is still based on separate languages and their distribution in society. The description remains incomplete and is founded mainly on assumptions of monolingual speakers in specific homogeneous geographic locations, who as a rule would use only one variety among each other, or, at most, two in contact with others. This view, of course, does not do justice to the multilingual complexity and language diversity of the area. For example, Latin played a role as language of the church (less so after the Reformation) and of academia (less after the 19^th century). Also ´German´, including varieties of Low German, played a role due to groups of seasonal labourers, mainly from Westphalia, who came during the summers from the 17^th century onwards. Today immigrants, expats, refugees and others come from all over the world and bring their languages with them: probably over a 100 named languages are spoken on the territory. English is an important language among migrants and visitors, but English is also common as a second or third language. In surveys over 90% of the population reported that they can have a conversation in English. The old image of a bilingual region where Frisian and Dutch are spoken needs to be replaced by an image of a multilingual assemblage in a geographic, socio-economic and political area where speakers use multilingual repertoires and where communication takes place in numerous languages.

In their daily lives, however, most people will be confronted, most of the time, with Dutch, because it is socially dominant. English needs to be added, a language that cannot be avoided because of its strong presence in old and new media, in the linguistic landscapes of public spaces and in education. Frisian will be included in the daily mixture for about half of the population. The minority language has shown a remarkable tenacity, notwithstanding predictions of rapid language loss. Other languages play a role in the lives of relatively few people. For example, the secondary school teacher of Latin will have a deep daily involvement with a language that 99.9% of the population rarely is confronted with. Even though people may see Latin words when reading their medical record, visiting the botanical garden, or during their school days, probably most speakers will not recognize loanwords of Latin origin incorporated in their vocabulary. German and French used to be characterized as ´modern foreign languages´, a designation that now sounds old-fashioned, although the two languages are still taught as a subject to a large proportion of the secondary school students. Some groups with a stronger presence in society have Turkish, Moroccan, Chinese or Antillean origins. They are not only speakers of Turkish Arabic, Mandarin, or Papiamentu, but also of Kurdish, Berber, Cantonese or Spanish. For them their languages are crucial for communication in local and global (!) networks, but in Frisian society-at-large or in education those languages hardly play a role. Other languages are spoken inside a handful of households and even if those varieties may occasionally be overheard in public space, they play an insignificant role at a societal level.

Basque is the oldest language in Europe with unknown origins, as many of its speakers are eager to inform. Basque is respected and renowned among linguists because of its ´exotic characteristics´ and classified as an ´isolate´, because it has no demonstrable genetic relationship to any Indo-European language. Among language policy makers and specialists in minority languages, Basque is known for its resilience and the remarkable revitalization that has taken place over the last 40 years. The label Basque is also known to a larger public because the name of the language coincides with the name for the people, for the region, and for many things originating there. The government recognizes Basque and Spanish both as official languages, but to characterize the region as just ´bilingual´ does not do justice to the complexity of the language mosaic. The many dialectal varieties of Basque have been spoken in the territory since time immemorial and the standardized version, Euskara Batua, was only created in the 1960s. After Basque declined in the 19^th and 20^th century due to economic developments and a 40 year political dictatorship, the minority language has regained some ground during the last decades of the 20^th century. It has advanced literally, because Basque is now taught and used again in geographic areas where it was (almost completely) lost for a long time. It has also made progress figuratively, because the language has gradually reconquered the education system to such an extent that today over 80% of newly registered children in pre-primary school go to the Basque medium model. However, also Basque is part of a wider configuration of languages, in which Castilian (or Spanish) plays a hegemonic role. Not just that Spanish has the largest number of speakers and is used by a majority of the inhabitants of the Basque lands, but also because Spanish continues to dominate the public sphere in almost any domain of social life. However, Basque is making some headway due to a robust language policy. Today Basque is held in high esteem and treated with profound respect by many. Still, Basque is the underdog and there is a strong awareness of a continuous struggle against Spanish, which is taken for granted and has a nearly invincible position.

During industrialization in the 20^th century immigrants from other parts of Spain, such as Andalucía, brought their varieties of Spanish; more recently the largest groups of immigrants come from Latin-American adding several other varieties. Today newly arrived immigrants, refugees and expats come from many different parts of the world, mainly from Africa and Europe and obviously, they take the language(s) first learned with them. Nowadays English gradually makes inroads into the schools and into Basque society, as almost anywhere else in the world. English has high social prestige and becomes a marketable product: diplomas for achieving a level in English are sold to parents as a valuable addition to the CV of their children. In a way similar to Friesland, one can count over a 100 different languages that are spoken in the Basque Country. However, also here most people will be confronted with a rather limited number of languages in their everyday lives. Anywhere in the Basque Country people are exposed to varieties of Basque and Spanish and increasingly so English. Other languages may only be seen here and there in the linguistic landscape, for example, Chinese on shops and restaurants in the cities and towns. Other varieties are probably overheard very little as they are used by relatively small numbers of speakers.

Similarities and differences

Ideas about languages and language groups have been revised in recent years as sociolinguistics has taken a ´multilingual turn´. An idealized vision would possibly like to conceive of Friesland as historically only speaking Frisian and the Basque Country as just speaking Basque. Even if such monolingual assumptions seem outdated and can easily be refuted, they are sometimes persistent. As shown above, the designation ´bilingual´ is also inaccurate, but then the issue is how can the multilinguality of these two European areas be characterized? Probably, these language constellations with over a hundred languages can be portrayed as ´superdiverse´. In the linguistic landscapes in public spaces in both regions various language or at least traces of them, can be observed. It is known that the boundaries between languages are more fuzzy and fluid than usually thought. In the case of Frisian and Dutch, two closely related Germanic languages, distinguishing the two is often impossible, but also in the case of Basque and Spanish, languages said to have a substantial linguistic distance, differentiating them can be challenging. Speakers of Frisian and Basque can be said to ´translanguage´ as they move seemingly effortless between their various languages. Legislation and language policies concentrate on measures to support revitalization of the minority language. In the case of Frisian, a modest and relatively weak set of measures is in place, whereas the policies developed for Basque are much broader and far more engaging and dynamic. In both cases, education is seen as of utmost importance, but desired language practices of students are not guaranteed as an outcome. In general terms, a hierarchical order between the languages relates to differences in social and political power and socio-economic prestige.

In the end, an image of a rich multilingual assemblage emerges both in Friesland and in the Basque Country, because languages are used in dynamic, ever changing constellations. In research studies a focus on multilingualism can bring about new insights about multilingual speakers in their own right, about their linguistic repertoires and about practices that depend on historically evolving social contexts.

Suggestions for further reading:

Cenoz, J. & Gorter, D. (2017). Minority languages and sustainable translanguaging: threat or opportunity? Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 38:10, 901-912, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2017.1284855

Cenoz, J., & Gorter, D. (2014). Focus on multilingualism as an approach in educational contexts. In A.Blackledge & A.Creese (Eds.) Heteroglossia as practice and pedagogy (pp. 239-254). Springer, Dordrecht. DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-7856-6_13

Gorter, D., & Cenoz, J. (2011). Multilingual education for European minority languages: the Basque Country and Friesland. International Review of Education, 57(5-6), 651-666. DOI: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11159-011-9248-2

Gorter, D., & Cenoz, J. (2017). Language education policy and multilingual assessment. Language and Education, 31(3), 231-248. DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09500782.2016.1261892

Website: www.ehu.eus/multilingualism

Video: “Let’s make the most of multilingualism” with some of our ideas can be found here:

James Hawkey
University of Bristol

All students of sociolinguistics quickly learn that language is highly variable, and that such variability can convey a great deal of social information. Let’s take the United Kingdom as an example. As soon as a native speaker of British English utters the word bath, they are opening themselves up to an onslaught of social judgement… Where is this person from? What kind of school did they go to? What kind of job do they have? What political party do they vote for? The answers to all of these questions are potentially coded within the pronunciation of that one little word: does the speaker use a short vowel, like in hat, or a long vowel, like in car? Is that last consonant pronounced with the tongue between the teeth, or in the same way as the last sound in staff? Just this one tiny word, with its three different sounds, reveals a number of possible pronunciations, each conveying its own social information. So, how do we go about patterning this complex variation? What sort of social categories can predict or govern a speaker’s preference for using one sound over another? And, of particular interest to us in this discussion, do our own opinions about the languages we speak affect the way we speak them?

In order to answer these questions, we need to draw on the most recent scholarly advances from two related sub-disciplines of sociolinguistics: variationism and language attitudes. Variationism seeks to establish correlations between the preferred use of a given variant (so, for example, whether you use a long or a short vowel in bath) and some broader social category (such as your age, social class, etc.) Language attitudes examine the views and belief systems we hold about the language(s) we speak. Social psychologists have long maintained that attitudes are made up of different components, including our emotions about a given object, our beliefs and thoughts about said object, and our enacted behaviours regarding the object. Attitudes and behaviours are therefore closely linked, and much social psychological scholarship seeks to understand how our feelings about something tie into our actions. Bringing all of this together, my work looks at the question of whether our opinions about a language reflect patterns of variation, with a particular focus on situations of bilingualism and language endangerment. My latest book, Language Attitudes and Minority Rights (Palgrave Macmillan 2018), constitutes an in-depth study of the Catalan language in Southern France, and asks whether language variation in Catalan can be correlated with speaker attitudes.

Firstly, I used anonymous questionnaires to paint a clear picture of the language attitudinal landscape in Northern Catalonia (the area of Southern France where Catalan is an autochthonous variety, based around the city of Perpignan). Language attitudes are typically quantitatively measured along two dimensions: status (‘the desire to get ahead in some way’) and solidarity (‘the desire to be accepted by another group’) (Woolard 1989: 90). Of course, it should come as no surprise that, in France, French was seen by almost everyone as the main language of status in the region. For centuries, regional and minority languages in France (like Catalan) have been subjected to processes of marginalisation and its speakers forced or encouraged to move towards French monolingualism. However, one thing that is particularly interesting in Northern Catalonia is that, even for speakers of Catalan (who, according to official statistics, number around 35% of the population, though the real figure is likely to be lower), French is a language of solidarity. That is to say, French is a language that all speakers hold dear as a vehicle of in-group communication and identity, even if these people are also speakers of Catalan. The centuries of French dominance have led to this language leading the way not only as a means to get ahead socially, but also as a strong identity marker. This being said, while French is viewed as the preferred vehicle of in-group solidarity and social advancement across the population of Northern Catalonia, people are not necessarily negative about Catalan: some speakers view Catalan as a language of potential status, social mobility and international advancement. So, what are the consequences for language variation? Do Northern Catalans who view Catalan positively as a language of status speak in a certain way? What about those people who do not view Catalan as a language of status, but instead as a vehicle of in-group solidarity? Do they sound different?

Turning to the study of language variation in the region, I focused on a number of different variables, only one of which we’ll briefly look at here. One of the most salient differences between varieties of Catalan spoken in France and those spoken elsewhere is the ‘r’ sound. In Northern Catalonia, many speakers use the uvular fricative rhotic, more familiar to most people as the guttural ‘French r’. This is basically limited to Catalan as spoken in France, with speakers from other areas using the alveolar tap or trill, recognisable as the rolled ‘r’ sound used in languages like Spanish or Italian. Within Northern Catalonia, this rhotic variable proved highly unusual, since there was very little intra-speaker variation, but large amounts of inter-speaker variation with little apparent accommodation. In short, this means that people were very consistent in their own use of either the ‘French r’ or the ‘Spanish r’ when speaking in Catalan, and that this didn’t depend on their conversation partner. So if people were categorically using one variant or another, and if they weren’t influenced by the person to whom they were speaking, how could this variation be predicted? What was the social meaning carried by the use of the ‘French r’ or ‘Spanish r’? The answer turned out to be language attitudes…

If a speaker rated Catalan highly as a language of in-group solidarity, then this person was more likely to use the uvular (‘French’) rhotic. A sense that the local language is important to interpersonal relations is clearly linked to use of local variants: remember that the uvular rhotic is not found outside this region. Local orientation on an attitudinal level is aligned with usage of local language patterns. In very broad terms, people who feel that their identity is bound up with use of the local language, sound more local. People overtly comment on this kind of variation too, as I discovered during the interviews I conducted in Northern Catalonia:

El meu accent és pas un accent totalment tradicional per la gent del sud. Per exemple, potser és anecdòtic, però les bromes pel fet de fer les erres guturals i no de les fer rulades.

My accent isn’t exactly traditional for somebody from the south [i.e. the Autonomous Community of Catalonia]. For example, it might be anecdotal, but the jokes (I get) because I have my guttural r instead of a rolled one (Hawkey 2018: 119).

This variable is merely one example of the complex variation that characterises this (and indeed, every) language variety. The links between variation and attitudes have been, until now, largely overlooked. Variationism has become increasingly focused on locally constructed categories as correlates for language variation: instead of simply saying ‘person X is more likely to use a given variant if they are male/working class/White, etc.’, scholars are now examining the different ideological stances that language variation might imply. My work is taking this a stage further, by using large-scale questionnaires to look at societal-level attitudes and belief systems, and then relating these to language variation. By marrying the different methodological approaches from variationism and language attitudes, it is possible to shed light on how our belief systems influence what we do. In short, perhaps the way we speak is indeed affected by how we feel about language itself, and this conclusion represents an interesting move forward for sociolinguistic scholarship. Moreover, this kind of holistic approach to linguistic communities (particularly those that find themselves in situations of endangerment) allows us to better understand the rich linguistic and cultural diversity that surrounds us, and ultimately, to better connect with other people.

References

Hawkey, James. 2018. Language Attitudes and Minority Rights: The Case of Catalan in France. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Woolard, Kathryn. 1989. Double Talk: Bilingualism and the Politics of Ethnicity in Catalonia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.