Renee writes:
>bilingualism viewed from any perspective other than
>"somthing-in-the-head-of-the-individual," IĄd love to hear it, because I
>am
>still in the process of morphing.
I will explain a bit further about the context in which my bilingualism
question arises.
Firstly of course I live in a bilingual geographic area myself. I think
there are interesting questions to make around issues which distinguish
langauges which are <<apparently>> autochthonous, and those which arthe
languages of <<recent>> immigramt communities. What this means for/in the
United States presents a sub-problem. Historically Spanish and English are
immigrant languages, however one is the "state" language and the other is
not. The differing realtions between the local perceptions of "state" and
the realtion between language and state within a community clearly have an
impact on the status of other languages within a state. There is a clear
distinction also between languages which are "state" languages of other
states (eg Spanish in the US) and those languages which only exist in any
real sense in their historic home area (I don't count the Welsh speaking
Wisconsiners ).
Anyway langauge maintainance in autochthonous minority language
communities is a visible political and economic process and a site of
political struggle. <Renee, it is intersting to compare the status of
Gallega in Vigo with Catalan in Barcelona or Euskari in San Sebastian. The
level of economic and political strength of the language users has a
strong influence.>>
Secondly, I am interested in understanding "bilingualism" in terms of any
of the benefits it bestows. As we have the inverse of California's
Proposition 227, those who support the bilingual policy as an act of
political faith are called upon form time to time to convince parents
that their children do not "suffer" from learning Welsh.
Lastly , and this is my key issue, I am devising multilingual
communications environments. The totality of different kinds of
communincation I expect in the "environment" will call upon Helen's
comment about Bakhtin's polyglossia. There will be many genres , people
with differing linguistic capability in different modalities and also
faced with different audiences...( it is easier to talk French in a bar
than it is on a conference platform)
The important issue for me here is the language support thant can be
engineered into such a system. There are the orthodox tools which computer
engineers have already thought about : spelling checkers, theasauri etc.
There is machine translation. However although these have a place in
supporting dialogue in an electronic medium, they are not necessarily
designed to be avialable in the form where the making of meaning in more
than one language is facilitated as best it can be. The social dimenasion
of language creation and use is missing. I am sure that wandering around
with Berilitz phrase book- which are based on differing social scripts and
scenarios, can be more help than a large edition of a Larousse
Dictionary. However to work out what tools are needed and how best to
embed them in an environment I think I need to know a lot more about the
use of language in multilingual "communities" of practice. I know I will
have to do this empirically at some point soon. However if there are
others who have looked at bilingual CoPs I would be grateful for the
information.
Martin O
Helen, I belive Terry Pratchett is a westcountryman and his inverse
location was Llamedos.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 23 2000 - 09:20:39 PDT