emulsifying bilingualism

From: Jay Lemke (jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 30 2000 - 20:11:52 PST


Back a week now from travels, and skimming the creme de la xmca ...

Also alas paying the price of doing too much, home and away, and getting
over a flu ...

But I was interested by the discussion here, just at the time I was in
Berkeley, of 'morphing bilingualism' and the ways of enriching and
complexifying this concept (and its cousins, like diglossia, interlanguage,
creole continuum, etc.) as we move it from (to me) a rather old 'in the
head' view of language to a (no longer so new) view of speech in the community.

In Berkeley the conference theme was ecological approaches to language
socialization, by which was meant a broad umbrella sheltering ethnographic,
sociolinguistic, and complex-systems models of how languages are learned by
people, and people shaped by speech communities, including contexts of
'foreign language' learning, 'second language' learning, and participation
in communities where various language varieties are used, mixed, mingled,
morphed, and generally emulsified.

Participants included Ellie Ochs, Ron Scollon, Leo van Lier, Jonathan
Leather, Jet van Dam, Jim Lantolf, Diane Larsen-Freeman, Chris Candlin,
Srikant Sarangi, and Ben Rampton (an international crew, many of whom had
spoken at the applied linguistics meeting and/or TESOL just before coming
to Berkeley, as I did). Organized by Claire Kramsch and the UCB language
center, and cosponsored by everyone with the money to buy us a croissant or
a piece of cheese. It was a wonderful, small conference with a lot of
discussion of interesting ideas and issues.

One of the most interesting, to me, was the repeated evidence that we are
really misled by notions of language purity or homogeneous speech
communities as a norm or ideal. In living communities where different
language varieties are in use (including dialect and sociolect varieties,
learner languages, etc.) there are no pure Languages that then get mixed or
interact with one another. These ideal types are constructs of linguists
and enforcers of language purity, always for ideological reasons (some more
politically transparent, others very indirectly linked to the interests
they support). Learners, children growing up in such communities, all of us
as still-developing language-users tend more naturally to "mix" forms,
signs, meaning types, functions, or what have you than to maintain their
"purity" as ideal systems. Even in the case of phonology, the sound
contrasts basic to spoken language, as Jonathan Leather showed rather
dramatically, there are not the simple binary contrasts of ideal theory, no
apparently inherent pressure towards consistency that drives the
phonologies of different languages or dialects apart, but a perfectly usual
and functional blending, distribution, and general playing around with
sound, abetted by the disambiguating potential of situated activity.

Against such a backdrop the notion that people have to be moved from ideal
competence in one pure language variety to ideal competence in another
seems obtusely narrow and procrustean. The efforts that go into the social
work of purification on the part of the partisans of purity seem an uphill
battle against the entropy of life, and a pointless mistaking of the need
to maintain clear types in place of recognizing the emergence of new forms
and systems, always changing, but in different respects and at different
rates, that seems to characterize the speech ecology of a community.

Of all the classic notions about such speech communities, only that of the
creole continuum seems close to the messiness of real life that this
alternative picture describes.

Also called into question were linearized models of development, or
learning through stages. What seemed much more realistic was that (a)
people at any given time have speech repertories that are heterochronous in
the sense that practices and forms considered typical of many earlier and
later 'stages' co-exist and interact and are differentially produced in
different contexts, and (b) that development is not only 'uneven' but
proceeds at multiple rates simultaneously in regard to different practices,
even anticipating future stages that should not yet be possible.

One of my own ways of talking about this is to say that we internalize,
gradually, much of the full diversity of the community in which we
participate, including its age diversity (or developmental diversity),
through our interactions with those both younger and older than ourselves.

In a way this is a sort of extension of the ZPD notion from one person with
a more experienced peer to that person in a group of people both little to
much less experienced and little to much more experienced. More or less the
normal human condition, before age-graded schools or notions of one teacher
per class or even of one or two adult caregivers per nuclear family. How do
we learn and develop in highly diverse age-mixed settings and activities?

While more general, these notions apply as well to the original questions
of language learning in bi- or multi- lingual, or just language-diverse,
language-heterogeneous communities. And every community is linguistically
heterogeneous on some, and usually many, dimensions -- even small communities.

Finally, one more nail in the coffin of ideal types of Languages -- the
criteria for distinguishing significant differences among them. Such
criteria have to embody values; there are an unlimited number of
similarities and differences between any two speech data sets. Why do some
criteria matter more, and to whom, and for what reasons (overt and covert)?
Why, for example, must we accept that syntactic structural differences are
more important criteria for distinguishing speech varieties than are
intonational, voice-quality, or more generally musical-bodily 'style'
differences? In fact much of the debate over whether African-American
English (aka U.S. Ebonics) counts as a separate language from Standard
English, and whether it is more like African speech or European speech,
turns on the assumption that what matters is syntax more than lexis, more
than semantics, more than discourse patterns, more than emotional tone,
more than bodily hexis, more than paralinguistic features in the speech
pattern, etc. What matters more to Dr. Chomsky is not necessarily what
matters more to the speakers of these varieties. Is not necessarily what
matters to how people use these varieties or respond to them or learn them
or play around with them. Or decide that 'they' are discrete nameable
'somethings' in the first place.

It is perfectly possible to look in great detail at many of the dimensions
of variability and complexity in these real situations without reifying the
works of purification that enable some people to make grand theories and
bask in their grandeur. Good for basking, and maybe for getting rich; but
not for helping figure out how to help real people in real situations.
Every theoretical notion that is not a provisional, dispensable, modifiable
tool is a trap someone else has set for us. What we need theoretical
sophistication for is to make useful ad-hoc theory, not to use theories
ready-made.

Morph. Emulsify. Invaginate. Travesty. Play. JAY.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------



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