Negotiating Linguistic Plurality

Cultural and linguistic diversity and plurality are seen as markers of our time, linked to discourses about citizenship and cosmopolitanism in the context of economic globalization in the late twentieth century. It is often monolingualism, however, that informs understanding and policies regulating the relationship between languages, nations, and communities. Grounded by the idea of language as lived experience, Negotiating Linguistic Plurality assumes linguistic plurality to be a continuing human condition and offers a novel transnational and comparative perspective on it. The essays featured cover concepts and praxis in which linguistic plurality surfaces in the public sphere through institutional and individual practices. The collection adopts a critical view of language policies and foregrounds distances and dissonances between policy and language practices by presenting lived experiences of multilingualism. Translation, seen as constitutive to the relations inherent to linguistic plurality, is at the core of the volume. Contributors explore a range of social and institutional aspects of the relationship between translation and linguistic plurality, foregrounding less documented experiences and minoritized practices. Presenting knowledge that spans regions, languages, and territories, Negotiating Linguistic Plurality is a thoughtful consideration of what constitutes language plurality: what its limits are, as well as its possibilities.

This book addresses the themes of language, identity and linguistic politics in Europe, drawing on approaches and methodologies from a range of disciplines from socio- and contact linguistics to cultural history, psychology and policy studies. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the linguistic landscape of today's Europe.

Bringing together the voices of a diverse group of scholars and language professionals, this edited collection, concerned with the cultivation of plurilingualism in multilingual educational settings, builds on the theory and practice of linguistic and cultural mediation both as curricular content and social practice. The chapters view mediation as an important aspect of communication which involves dynamic, purposeful interactivity, implicating social agents in the negotiation and construction of socially situated meanings across different languages and within the same language. Theoretically informed chapters present views on mediation as well as contributors’ research and project outcomes in educational interventions. They also describe how mediation has been incorporated in educational practices and how it materialises in social contexts. Ultimately, this book makes the case for why mediation constitutes a key competence to be developed for active global and local citizenry in today’s societies where there is an increased rate of knowledge acquisition and exchange. Presenting research from classrooms and other multilingual environments, this book offers concrete suggestions for the development of language users/learners’ ability to mediate within and across languages. It will appeal to scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of language and education, education policy and politics, bilingualism and plurilingualism more generally. Curriculum designers may also find the volume of use.

This collection represents contemporary perspectives on important aspects of research into the language in the public space, known as the Linguistic Landscape (LL), with the focus on the negotiation and contestation of identities. From four continents, and examining vital issues across North America, Africa, Europe and Asia, scholars with notable experience in LL research are drawn together in this, the latest collection to be produced by core researchers in this field. Building on the growing published body of research into LL work, the fifteen data chapters test, challenge and advance this sub-field of sociolinguistics through their close examination of languages as they appear on the walls and in the public spaces of sites from South Korea to South Africa, from Italy to Israel, from Addis Ababa to Zanzibar. The geographic coverage is matched by the depth of engagement with developments in this burgeoning field of scholarship. As such, this volume is an up-to-date collection of research chapters, each of which addresses pertinent and important issues within their respective geographic spaces.

This book addresses the importance of language in matters of sustainability and incorporating such concerns in implementing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Sustainable language policy must aim to include all groups, including language minorities and marginalized populations, such as refugees and aid recipients, in conditions that allow for their inclusion in making and implementing policy. The book brings together nine studies covering such topics as language and digital resources, sustainable and inclusive multilingual education, national language policy, and language in peacekeeping operations. A final chapter addresses the crucial intersection between sociolinguistics and economics, and the implications of this for development and the SDGs.

Translinguistics represents a powerful alternative to conventional paradigms of language such as bilingualism and code-switching, which assume the compartmentalization of different 'languages' into fixed and arbitrary boundaries. Translinguistics more accurately reflects the fluid use of linguistic and semiotic resources in diverse communities. This ground-breaking volume showcases work from leading as well as emerging scholars in sociolinguistics and other language-oriented disciplines and collectively explores and aims to reconcile the distinction between 'innovation' and 'ordinariness' in translinguistics. Features of this book include: 18 chapters from 28 scholars, representing a range of academic disciplines and institutions from 11 countries around the world; research on understudied communities and geographic contexts, including those of Latin America, South Asia, and Central Asia; several chapters devoted to the diversity of communication in digital contexts. Edited by two of the most innovative scholars in the field, Translinguistics: Negotiating Innovation and Ordinariness is essential reading for scholars and students interested in the question of multilingualism across a variety of subject areas.

In this volume, researchers in sociolinguistics, language politics, diaspora and identity studies explore contacts between languages and cultures in the post-Soviet world. The book presents a range of perspectives on the effects of migration among groups and individuals for whom Russian is a language with instrumental and/or symbolic prominence.

Diversity is a buzzword of our times and yet the extent of religious diversity in Western societies is generally misconceived. This ground-breaking research draws attention to the journey of one migrant religious institution in an era of religious superdiversity. Based on a sociolinguistic ethnography in a Tamil Saivite temple in Australia, the book explores the challenges for the institution in maintaining its linguistic and cultural identity in a new context. The temple is faced with catering for devotees of diverse ethnicities, languages, and religious interpretations; not to mention divergent views between different generations of migrants who share ethnicity and language. At the same time, core members of the temple seek to continue religious and cultural practices according to the traditions of their homelands in Sri Lanka, a country where their identity and language has been under threat. The study offers a rich picture of changing language practices in a diasporic religious institution. Perera inspects language ideology considerations in the design of institutional language policy and how such policy manifests in language use in the temple spaces. This includes the temple’s Sunday school where heritage language and religion interplay in second-generation migrant adolescents’ identifications and discourse.