The Invention of Multilingualism

The Invention of Multilingualism
Author: David Gramling
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2021-06-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108804624

Multilingualism is a meaningful and capacious idea about human meaning-making practice, one with a promising, tumultuous, and flawed present - and a future worth caring for in research and public life. In this book, David Gramling presents original new insights into the topical subject of multilingualism, describing its powerful social, economic and political discourses. On one hand, it is under acute pressure to bear the demands of new global supply-chains, profit margins, and supranational unions, and on the other it is under pressure to make way for what some consider to be better descriptors of linguistic practice, such as translanguaging. The book shows how multilingualism is usefully able to encompass complex, divergent, and sometimes opposing experiences and ideas, in a wide array of planetary contexts - fictitious and real, political and social, North and South, colonial and decolonial, individual and collective, oppressive and liberatory, embodied and prosthetic, present and past.

The Invention of Monolingualism

The Invention of Monolingualism
Author: David Gramling
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2016-10-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501318047

The first book in the humanities and social sciences to offer an extensive conceptual definition of monolingualism, based on literary, applied-linguistic, technological, and translational examples.

Multilingual Practices in Language History

Multilingual Practices in Language History
Author: Päivi Pahta
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2017-12-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1501504940

Texts of the past were often not monolingual but were produced by and for people with bi- or multilingual repertoires; the communicative practices witnessed in them therefore reflect ongoing and earlier language contact situations. However, textbooks and earlier research tend to display a monolingual bias. This collected volume on multilingual practices in historical materials, including code-switching, highlights the importance of a multilingual approach. The authors explore multilingualism in hitherto neglected genres, periods and areas, introduce new methods of locating and analysing multiple languages in various sources, and review terminology, theories and tools. The studies also revisit some of the issues already introduced in previous research, such as Latin interacting with European vernaculars and the complex relationship between code-switching and lexical borrowing. Collectively, the contributors show that multilingual practices share many of the same features regardless of time and place, and that one way or the other, all historical texts are multilingual. This book takes the next step in historical multilingualism studies by establishing the relevance of the multilingual approach to understanding language history.

Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages

Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages
Author: Sinfree Makoni
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2007
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1853599239

This book questions assumptions about the nature of language. Looking at diverse contexts from sign languages in Indonesia to literacy practices in Brazil, the authors argue that unless we change and reconstitute the ways in which languages are taught and conceptualized, language studies will not be able to improve the social welfare of language users.

Standard Languages and Multilingualism in European History

Standard Languages and Multilingualism in European History
Author: Matthias Hüning
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2012
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027200556

Explores the roots of Europe's struggle with multilingualism. This book argues that, over the centuries, the pursuit of linguistic homogeneity has become a central aspect of the mindset of Europeans. It offers an overview of the emergence of a standard language ideology and its relationship with ethnicity, territorial unity and social mobility

Aspects of Multilingualism in European Language History

Aspects of Multilingualism in European Language History
Author: Kurt Braunmüller
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2003
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027219220

This volume gives an up-to-date account of various situations of language contact and multilingualism in Europe especially from a historical point of view. Its ten contributions present newly collected data from different parts of the continent seen through diverse theoretical perspectives. They show a richness of topics and data that not only reveal numerous historical and sociological facts but also afford considerable insight into possible effects multilingualism and language contact might have on language change. The collection begins its journey through Europe in the British Isles. Then it turns to northern Europe and looks at how multilingualism worked in three towns that are all marked by border and contact situations. The journey continues with linguistic-historical and political-historical visits to Sweden and to Lithuania before the reader is taken to central Europe, where we will deal with the influence of Latin on written German.As far as southern Europe is concerned, the study continues on the Iberian peninsula, where the relationship between Portuguese and Spanish is focused, to be followed by Sardinia and Malta, two islands whose unique geohistorical positions give rise to some consideration of multilingualism in the Mediterranean.

The Invention of Monolingualism

The Invention of Monolingualism
Author: David Gramling
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2016-10-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501318047

The first book in the humanities and social sciences to offer an extensive conceptual definition of monolingualism, based on literary, applied-linguistic, technological, and translational examples.

Multilingualism and History

Multilingualism and History
Author: Aneta Pavlenko
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2023-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009236253

Shattering the cliché 'our world is more multilingual than ever before', this book offers the first comprehensive history of our multilingual past.

Multilingual Hong Kong: Languages, Literacies and Identities

Multilingual Hong Kong: Languages, Literacies and Identities
Author: David C.S. Li
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2017-01-12
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3319441957

This volume gives an up-to-date account of the language situation and social context in multilingual Hong Kong. After an in-depth, interpretive analysis of various language contact phenomena, it shows why it is such a tall order for Hongkongers to live up to the Special Administrative Region government’s language policy goalpost, ‘biliteracy and trilingualism’. A detailed contrastive analysis between Cantonese and (a) English, (b) Modern Written Chinese, and (c) Putonghua helps explain the nature of the linguistic and acquisitional challenges involved. Economic forces and sociopolitical realities helped shape the ‘mother tongue education’ or ‘dual MoI streaming’ policy since September 1998. The book provides a critical review of the significant milestones and key policy documents from the early 1990s, and outlines the concerns of stakeholders at the receiving end. Another MoI debate concerns the feasibility and desirability of teaching Chinese in Putonghua (TCP). Based on a critical review of the TCP literature and recent psycholinguistic and neuroscience research, the language-in-education policy implications are discussed, followed by a few recommendations. Hongkongers of South Asian descent saw their life chances curtailed as a result of the post-1997 changes in the language requirements for gaining access to civil service positions and higher education. Based on a study of 15 South Asian undergraduate students’ prior language learning experiences, recommendations are made to help redress that social inequity problem.

Multilingualism in Ancient Contexts

Multilingualism in Ancient Contexts
Author: Louis C. Jonker
Publisher: African Sun Media
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2021-05-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1991201168

Multilingualism remains a thorny issue in many contexts, be it cultural, political, or educational. Debates and discourses on this issue in contexts of diversity (particularly in multicultural societies, but also in immigration situations) are often conducted with present-day communicational and educational needs in mind, or with political and identity agendas. This is nothing new. There are a vast number of witnesses from the ancient West-Asian and Mediterranean world attesting to the same debates in long past societies. Could an investigation into the linguistic landscapes of ancient societies shed any light on our present-day debates and discourses? This volume suggests that this is indeed the case. In fourteen chapters, written and visual sources of the ancient world are investigated and explored by scholars, specialising in those fields of study, to engage in an interdisciplinary discourse with modern-day debates about multilingualism. A final chapter – by an expert in language in education – responds critically to the contributions in the book to open avenues for further interdisciplinary engagement – together with contemporary linguists and educationists – on the matter of multilingualism.