Dear SLICE friends

 This first 2015 issue contains...

 – a reminder: January 31 is deadline for submission of abstracts to the 6th International LANGUAGE IN THE MEDIA Conference (7–9 September 2015, University of Hamburg, Germany).

    http://language-in-the-media.org/

 – a report from Nik Coupland on the Round Table meeting Critical Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Multilingualism and Change which was held 12–13 January 2015 at Copenhagen University and addressed many themes that are central also to our SLICE perspective.

Best wishes from Copenhagen

Tore

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Report from a Round Table on Critical Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Multilingualism and Change

A Round Table meeting on the theme of Critical Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Multilingualism and Change was held at Copenhagen University, January 12-13 2015. The event was co-organised by Nikolas Coupland and Janus Mortensen, part-funded by The Finnish Academy and hosted by the LANCHART Centre.

We brought together three groups of researchers who are actively involved in empirical and theoretically innovative projects in the area of multilingualism. The three groups are: 

  • the Copenhagen Studies in Everyday Languaging (EL) researching language use and social practices among children and youth in a culturally diverse urban school, with a particular interest in polylanguaging, reflexivity, enregisterment, linguistic norms and ideologies.
  • the Peripheral Multilingualism (PM) group researching ‘small languages in new multilingual circumstances’ in four European sites, Corsica, Wales, Ireland and Sámiland, with particular reference to issues of reflexivity, commodification, authenticity and transgression (see peripheralmultilingualism.fi/)
  • the group researching Translation and Translanguaging in Superdiverse Wards in four UK cities (TLANG) with a focus on business, heritage, sports and legal advice (see http://bit.do/tlang)

The TLANG group was represented by Angela Creese, Li Wei, Agnieszka Lyons and Frances Rock; the PM group by Nikolas Coupland, Alexandra Jaffe, Helen Kelly-Holmes and Sari Pietikäinen; and the EL group by Martha Sif Karrebæk, Lian Malai Madsen, Janus Møller, Thomas Nørreby, Signe Wedel Schøning and Andreas Stæhr. Invited guests were Anne Fabricius, Hartmut Haberland and Marie Maegaard.

Each group prepared and circulated a short ‘position statement’, reflecting its own theoretical stances and priorities, explaining how the group’s research orients to particular social issues (including social or sociolinguistic change) and how its empirical agenda is constituted. Presentations all addressed multilingualism from particular critical perspectives, where the following themes and questions were in evidence:


  *   Multilingualism and mobility: what becomes of provenance and ‘heritage languages’ under highly mobile circumstances? What are the most relevant dimensions of mobility here? What sorts and contexts of data are most pertinent and revealing?

*   Change and theories of multilingualism: what do we mean by ‘traditional’ perspectives on multilingualism? Do (or did) these perspectives reflect older sorts of mobility and contact, or older research agenda, and in what ways? What do we risk losing as well as hope to gain from this realignment?

*   Centre/ periphery dynamics and multilingualism: superdiversity is associated with metropolitan ethnic complexities of culture and language, but are there other (perhaps related) changes in how peripheral spaces are experiencing diversity and mobility? Can we use the centre/ periphery distinction in new ways?


  *   Based on close linguistic analysis of contextualised interaction, what evidence is there to support a theoretical shift away from ‘multilingual practice’ to ‘polylingual languaging’, and so on? Is this terminological shift ideological (on the part of analysts), or is it an inductive necessity? Can code-switching literatures explain the phenomena? Do we expect emerging multi-ethnic styles to be enregistered as ‘new varieties’?

 
  *   How should the sociolinguistics of multilingualism respond to Heller and colleagues’ ideas about values for some languages shifting from ‘pride’ (national or ethnic identity and a sense of authenticity) to ‘profit’ (commodification, exchange value)? How wide is the remit of such a shift? Whose ideologies are in question here?

*   Indexicality and multilingualism: does sociolinguistic indexicality simply disappear among transient multilingual communities? Or is it too complex to track? How can we establish this (or, more likely, refute it)? What happens generally to ethnic and national identification under ‘new conditions’ of mobility and complexity? Is there evidence of ‘de-ethnicisation’?

*  What is likely to be the social impact of recent moves to deconstruct the concepts of bi- and multilingualism? What is the political motivation for these moves? Are non-code-based concepts such as ‘languaging’ likely to be perceived as emancipating, by whom? What good and bad outcomes should we expect?

These agenda overlap with those of the SLICE project in interesting ways. A thematic journal issue is planned, which will represent the Round Table participants’ contributions to rethinking multilingualism in the contexts of mobility and change.

Further information can be obtained from Nikolas Coupland (coupland@cardiff.ac.uk) or Janus Mortensen (jamo@ruc.dk).