Martin brought up a question about bilingualism ...and since I have been
thinking of something lately, Martin, and your posting jiggled it I am going
to throw it out even if it is not entirely relevant to your question, but I
hope in some way it is...
Ahem. So I have been thinking about looking at bilingualism from a
community standpoint (well, I know there has been a lot of tugging at the
definition of community lately, but I am doggedly clinging to this word for
lack of a better one at this point). I mean, bilingualism, multilingualism
are gereally considered in the literature I have read to be an aspect of an
individual, someone is "balanced" biligual, developing bilingualism...etc.
But I remember reading some reseach in a book couple of years ago looking at
for example a Hindi-speaking communiy (well, neighborhood) in England where
the unit of analysis for bilingualism was not the individual but the
community...sort of a distributed cognition kind of thing, I suppose. Where
there were people who read Hindi and people who read English and people who
spoke English and people who were good at official goverment English...all
to different extents, but they kind of worked together to an extent. So
basically everybody did not have to be bilingual in the usual way of
thinking (really proficient in all aspects of both languages) but the key to
survival, success, etc. was to know who was good at what thing.
OK. Well for me since I started thinking about bilingualism in a
cognitively-oriented way first, and then encountered the notion of
sociocultural perspective, this is how my perspective has morphed. I am not
sure where to go from here, but if anybody knows any references or examples
of bilingualism viewed from any perspective other than
"somthing-in-the-head-of-the-individual," I´d love to hear it, because I am
still in the process of morphing.
Renee Hayes, Ph.D candidate
University of Delaware (virtually)
geographically...
Doctor Canoa 4, 1º-A
36206 Vigo
Spain
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