Shifting Languages

A fascinating account of the role of language in radical social transformation in Javanese-Indonesian community.

English has long been suspected to be a vowel-shifting language. This hypothesis, often only adumbrated in previous work, is closely investigated in this book. Framed within a novel framework combining evolutionary linguistics and Optimality Theory, the account proposed here argues that the replacement of duration by quality as the primary cue to signaling vowel oppositions has resulted in the ‘shiftiness’ of many post-medieval English varieties.

This book challenges monoglossic ideologies, traditional language pedagogies and dominant forms of knowledge construction by foregrounding multilingual and multicultural students' language narratives, repertoires, and identities. The research is based on a sixteen-year longitudinal study of a sociolinguistics course at an English language university and the language narratives produced by the first-year education students. The study was borne out of a need to create a critically inclusive course that would engage a cohort of students from socially and linguistically diverse backgrounds in contemporary South Africa. Drawing on data from over 5,000 students who have journeyed through this course, this book shows how a narrative heteroglossic pedagogy harnesses students' multilingual strengths. A close analysis reveals complex identity work by students located in the Global South. The authors argue that decolonising language education is about reconceptualising language, reconfiguring what knowledges are valued in the classroom, and reshaping pedagogy.

The Mediterranean island of Corsica, a French territory, experiences mobility in the form of locals’ mass exodus to the Continent, the arrival of immigrants at rates similar to Paris, and a booming tourist industry with millions of visitors each year. What, then, are the multilingual dynamics on the island—languages emerging from above (French), a middle ground (Corsican), and sideways (languages of immigrants and tourists)? What multilingual subjectivities are articulated? Mendes analyzes competing conceptualizations of linguistic multiplicity, what he calls countervocalities, in which languages are constantly rearranging in variously imagined hierarchies. Countervocalities explores different dimensions of institutional multilingualism, namely those related to policies, practices, and ideologies within and extending from education settings. The chapters address reclamation, imposition, and erasure of different languages on Corsica, moving from inside the school, to artefacts from the schoolscape, to discourses about language teaching. The study fruitfully analyzes an array of interactional and artefactual data types. This productive alternation offers a cross-section of attitudes toward and representations of multilingual dynamics while foregrounding the role of mobility and language in understandings of place and what counts as local.

Gerard Philippson is Professor of Bantu Languages at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales and is a member of the Dyamique de Langage research team of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Lyon II University. He has mainly worked on comparative Bantu tonology. Other areas of interest include Afro-Asiatic, general phonology, linguistic classification and its correlation with population genetics.

This book is about the theory and practice of assistance to speech-communities whose native languages are threatened because their intergenerational continuity is proceeding negatively, with fewer and fewer speakers (or readers, writers and even understanders) every generation.