Societal and individual

multilingualism;

Multilingual Education & Language

Planning
June 2/9, 2022

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hale IŞIK-GÜLER

Where we
are in the
term:
Societal multilingualism
Weber, ch6
What is the difference between individual
multilingualism and societal multilingualism?
• “Societal multilingualism” signifies the linguistic diversity that
can be found in a country, a region or a particular community.
• Societal (or social) multilingualism refers to countries or communities
where languages have different functions and often a different status.

• While societal multilingualism refers to linguistic diversity

found in a country or community, individual
multilingualism means a person's ability in languages other
than their mother tongue.
“Unity in diversity”?
• EU’s language-in-education policy of ‘mother tongue plus
two other European languages’ as a way of achieving the
vaguely defined goal of ‘unity in diversity’ – especially since
‘mother tongue’ is usually interpreted as the standard
variety of a European language, which may be more or less
different from the varieties spoken by many children as their
home languages.

• EU policy on giving more rights to speakers of regional

minority languages such as Welsh in the UK or Catalan in
Spain has opened up new spaces for multilingualism in
these areas.
• While Spain and the UK have moved on the continuum from being
more monolingual to more multilingual,
• other states have moved or are moving in the opposite direction:
• For instance, Ukraine has recently (pre-war) adopted a policy of de-Russification, thus turning
the country into a more and more monolingual, Ukrainian-only space.
• Another example is officially trilingual
Luxembourg (population 645.000), one of
the smallest EU member states, where the
new citizenship test requires applicants to
take a language test in only one language,
namely Luxembourgish.
• This has effected a shift away from the
traditional perception of Luxembourg as
trilingual (Luxembourgish, German, French) to
a new perception of it as a more monolingual,
Luxembourgish-speaking country.
Ukraine
• Ukraine was part of the USSR
(Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics) and as such subject to
Soviet occupation.

• “increasing influence of the

Russian language during this
period is frequently interpreted
nowadays as an oppressive
policy of Russification” (Pavlenko
2011).

Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine has reversed this tendency

and has implemented the opposite policy of de-Russification.
A number of laws were passed to increase
the use of Ukrainian especially in education
and the media:

• 1993 Law on Television and Radio

Broadcasting stipulated that 50 percent of
broadcasts must be in Ukrainian,
• 2004 regulation even demanded that state
companies must broadcast only in
Ukrainian,
• 2007 law required all foreign-language (i.e.
including Russian-language) movies to be
translated into Ukrainian, either dubbed or
with subtitles.
• Even though Russian is still widely used especially in eastern parts of
the country and the Crimea, the new language policy means that
Ukraine has become, officially speaking, a more monolingual country
in Ukrainian only.
Language map
• Because of the demand
for English, many
schools have reduced
or even stopped their
teaching of Russian and
recruited large numbers
of English teachers.

• As a result, many young

Ukrainians nowadays
tend to be bilingual in
Ukrainian and English
rather than Ukrainian
and Russian.
• As (currently) Putin continues his assault on Ukraine, the differences
between these two languages have become part of the public
discourse in the west.
• E.g. the disparate spellings of Ukraine’s capital city, for example (Kiev being
the Russian transliteration, Kyiv the Ukrainian).

• For more on the two languages: https://www.britannica.com/story/ukrainian-

and-russian-how-similar-are-the-twolanguages
Switzerland
• Switzerland’s multilingualism is based
on a strict principle of territoriality: the
four national languages, German,
French, Italian and Romansch are official
regional languages in different parts of
the country.
• In their education system, the Swiss
traditionally learn the official language of
their territory as L1 and another Swiss
national language as their L2 – though
we see that this is in the process of -Note: Romansh is one of the
changing (with English now in the descendant languages of the
equation). spoken Latin language of the
Roman Empire. (40-45.000
speakers)
Regions and Cantons in Switzerland
Singapore
• Just as in Switzerland, the language
policy balance set up by the Singapore
government over the last few decades
is in the process of being broken up by
the forces of globalization, though we
will see that here it is not just the global
role of English but also that of
Mandarin which is the catalyst for
change.
 Hong Kong and China
• In 1997 Hong Kong changed its status from a British colony
to a Special Administrative Region of China.
• Two languages are recognized as official: Chinese and
English, where Chinese is normally understood to refer to
Modern Standard Chinese as the written version and
Cantonese as the spoken one.
• At the same time, Putonghua (Mandarin), the spoken form of
Modern Standard Chinese, which is the national language of China
as a whole, has been vigorously promoted since the 1997
changeover of sovereignty.

• The official policy is for all Hong Kongers to become

biliterate and trilingual: biliterate in Chinese and English,
and trilingual in Cantonese, Putonghua and English.
普通话(Pǔ tōng huà), literally translates into
“common tongue.
• a Mandarin-speaker
(Putonghua) and a
Cantonese-speaker would
be able to write letters to
one another with minimal
difficulty. However, the
two languages are
distinct when spoken.
• Mandarin speakers
typically cannot
understand Cantonese
speakers, and vice versa.
Pro-Cantonese Protests in Guangzhou
• The imposition of Mandarin (Putonghua) as the standard has not
gone unchallenged in China.
• In July 2010, protests against Putonghua and in favour of Cantonese took
place in Guangzhou and Hong Kong (areas where Cantonese is widely used).
Official proposals to restrict the use of Cantonese on Guangzhou TV and to
replace it by Putonghua sparked off the protests in defence of Cantonese.

• The following is a brief extract from a comment about these protests

posted on Chinese-forums.com on 26 July 2010
(http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/26982-pro-
cantonese-protest-in-guangzhou).

Analyse the writer’s comment and the underlying language

ideologies:
“What do you guys think? I'm surprised to see a group of people
care so much about their dialect.”
 South Africa
• After the Anglo-Boer war (1899–1902), the
defeated Afrikaners became British citizens
and South Africa a ‘dominion’ of the British
Empire (like Australia and Canada)
• A period of transition from apartheid to
democracy…
• The apartheid era in South African history refers
to the time that the National Party led the
country's white minority government, from 1948
to 1994.
Apartheid was a political and
social system in South Africa. ...
Under this system, the people of
South Africa were divided by
their race and the different races
were forced to live separately
from each other. There were
laws in place to ensure that
segregation was abided by.
• Apartheid was a social philosophy
which enforced racial, social, and
economic segregation on the people of
South Africa.
• The term Apartheid comes from the
Afrikaans word meaning 'separation'.
 President de Klerk and activist Nelson Mandela would
later win the Nobel Peace Prize for their work creating a
Apartheid law new constitution for South Africa.

• After the Second World War, the National Party came to power in 1948 on a ticket
of racial segregation and support for poor Afrikaners.
• A large number of laws were passed to establish the apartheid structure of
government. The three most important blocks of legislation were:
• The Race Classification Act. Every citizen suspected of not being European was classified
according to race.

• The Mixed Marriages Act. It prohibited marriage between people of different races.

• The Group Areas Act. It forced people of certain races into living in designated areas.

• Internal unrest and international condemnation led to dramatic changes beginning in 1989.
• The country waited in anticipation for the release of Nelson Mandela (South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, political
leader) who walked out of prison after 27 years on February 11, 1990. Mandela served as President of South Africa from
1994 to 1999.
 After the transition from apartheid to democracy,
Nelson Mandela’s government voted a new
constitution which recognizes 11 official languages:
English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, Sepedi, Setswana,
Sesotho, Tsonga, Swati, Venda and Ndebele.

• The government has endeavoured to revitalize the indigenous

African languages by promoting them as media of instruction, so
that education is often trilingual with the African ‘mother
tongue’ as L1, English L2 and Afrikaans L3 (African Dutch, a
Germanic language).

For more on “Afrikaans”: https://theconversation.com/more-than-an-

oppressors-language-reclaiming-the-hidden-history-of-afrikaans-71838
Language and identities
Ch7, Weber
Question to think about…
• If someone asked you to describe your identity to
them, where would you begin?

• Would it come down to your gender, skin color or your

nationality? What about the language you speak, your
religion, your cultural traditions/values or your
family's ancestry?
Categorization and identities
• We constantly categorize other people, we label, reify and objectify
them.

• Labelling is a way of trying to fix somebody’s identity, reducing it to a

single core element that sums up her/his identity in our eyes: e.g.
somebody becomes a ‘foreigner’ or an ‘immigrant’.
• naming, categorizing and labelling are political acts.

• Through a constant process of negotiation between ascribed and

achieved identities do we construct our identities.
What are these different types of labelling
doing?
• Sığınmacı • Immigrant
• Mülteci • migrant
• Muhacir • Refugee
• Göçmen • Boat people
• Suriyeli • Asylum seekers
• Afgan
•…
 Taylor (2020)
Can you pick
out some uses
here? What is
being done via
language?

What is the
evaluative
potential of
these identity
labels?
Gee’s identity-theoretical framework (four ways to
view identity):
two basic ways of conceptualizing identity: the
essentialist and the social constructivist view:

• Gee’s framework also helps us to understand how and why identity

can be conceptualized in different ways:
• if you believe in the importance of N-identities, then you will tend to
take an essentialist perspective on identity,
• whereas if you believe in the greater importance of I-, D- and A
identities, you will take a more constructivist perspective.

Identity: a peach or an onion?

Which one do you think is dominant in the
social sciences today?
• If you see it as more like a peach,
then you take an essentialist
perspective, viewing the self as
continuous and fixed.
• You believe in a ‘true’, ‘deep’ or ‘real’
self which, just like the stone in the
middle of the peach, constitutes
your core identity.
• The remaining parts of your identity
are less central and liable to change
over time.
• If you see identity as more like an
onion, then you believe in the
possibility of having multiple and
changing selves. (social
constructivist)
• Just like an onion, the self has many
layers, some more central (inner)
layers and others more peripheral
(outer) ones, but all of them are
subject to change over time and
none of them forms an essential and
fixed core (like the stone in the
middle of the peach).
How you talk about identity reveals your
perspective:
• The difference between essentialist and social constructivist
perspectives is also reflected and constructed in the way we talk
about identity.
• When we talk about having an identity, or about the danger of losing
our identity, we take an essentialist perspective: we look upon
identity as a kind of object that can be possessed or lost, like the
stone in the middle of the peach.
• With the onion metaphor, on the other hand, a different
understanding of identity comes to the fore: we may lose perhaps
one or more layers of our identity, but this is part of the normal
process of change and interaction, and new layers will replace the old
ones (momentarily or in the long run).
 Why not read Bonny Norton’s books?
• when we take a social constructivist
view of identity, we will talk about
identity being constructed and
negotiated, or performed in ‘acts of
identity’ (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller
1985).

• We also emphasize the multiplicity of

identity layers by using plural forms as
in, for example, ‘repertoire of
identities’.
How do you see your own identity?
How strong is the link with one (or more)
particular language(s)? Read her article:
https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cmlr.2019-0287
More on Norton’s work
on identity &Language
teaching
Ethnic and national identity
Race versus ethnicity?

Race is understood by most people as a mixture of

physical, behavioral and cultural attributes. Ethnicity
recognizes differences between people mostly on the
basis of language and shared culture.

• One of the deepest layers of identity that many

people feel strongly about is their ethnic or national
identity.

• The ethnic identity of the dominant group in a

particular state is often equated with ‘national’
identity, while minority (or dominated) groups are
considered to be ‘ethnic’.
 State versus Nation
A clear distinction between state and nation:
• the state is the political entity (country),
• a nation is a group of people who perceive themselves as sharing
certain elements such as the following:
• Common descent.
• Common historical memories.
• Common culture.
• Homeland.
• Desire for political self-determination.

• A nation-state is a cultural group (a nation) that is also a state.

• Depending on the socio-historical context, different elements will
be foregrounded and become the key symbols of nationhood.
E.g. Northern Ireland religion has played a major part in
constructing boundaries between social groups,
E.g. Belgium it is language that plays a more important role.
• These are among the different ethnic layers of identity that can
bring out deep-seated feelings in people and that nationalist
movements can use or abuse for their own ends.
Code-switching and identity
• Language contact outcomes. What were they?
• Any problems with the term ‘code-switching’?
“The problem with ‘code’ and the idea of switching between ‘codes’ is that it
presupposes the existence of separate, bounded languages or varieties –
something that our discussion in the previous weeks has shown is not the
case. It would be preferable to talk about people’s communicative
repertoires.”

• Key topic in research on multilingualism!

“People frequently perceive their national identity as being linked to the national
language. However, in multilingual situations it may be linked to more than one
language.”
Situational and metaphorical code-switching

• situational codeswitching: the linguistic behaviour of the bi- or multilingual

interlocutors changes when the situational circumstances (setting,
participants) of their conversation change.
E.g. French customers in an Irish pub in Paris who use French amongst themselves
but switch into English when ordering drinks from the Irish bar attendant.

• metaphorical code-switching: the speaker uses a linguistic switch to invoke

(and potentially renegotiate) particular values and to index a particular
identity. Indexicality is the process whereby the speaker’s use of certain
linguistic forms ‘points to’ a specific social identity.
• E.g. type: language crossing (Read Weber, p. 90-91)
 • Who chose the Youth talk question on the midterm?
• Lets recall your individual findings:

What were your

finds regarding
types and functions
of code-switching, if
any?
 What is going on
in this example?

What are the

interlocuters doing
via the switches?

Stylization:
• In the uni-directional case, a
speaker voicing a prior style
endorses or validates it.
• In the vari-directional case,
the speaker voices the style
with the intention of
discrediting it (that is, parodies
it) (Bakthin, 1984).
• Asiye tells Eda to speak Danish. Most likely, Asiye is here stylising the
voice of a teacher (i.e. this is what they have frequently been told to
do by many teachers). It is a case of vari-directional (ironic) stylization,
since Asiye does not follow her own stricture and switches into
Turkish herself in her next turn.
• Jørgensen (2005: 400) comments that Asiye voices an utterance (you
must speak Danish) which is not her own, knowing that it represents
a normative attitude that neither she nor her listeners ‘intend to act
according to’. Jørgensen (2005: 400) adds, referring to more
utterances of this kind in the rest of the adolescents’ conversation:

Has Jorgensen missed another example of stylizing?

How would you classify “ayağımın altına alırım”?
 Linguistic capital is a sociolinguistic term coined by
French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu.
FOR DISCUSSION: ... Linguistic capital has been used to describe the
different language resources available to a single person
and the values associated with each resource.

“Language as linguistic capital (Bourdieu) or

marker of identity?”

• To what extent can languages be looked

upon as linguistic capital and/or as
markers of identity?
• Do only standard varieties and national or
official languages have linguistic capital?
• Can minority languages also acquire a
certain amount of linguistic capital, for
instance as part of heritage tourism?
The interplay between
individual and societal
multilingualism
Ch8, Weber
• “complex interplay between individual and societal multilingualism”

An example:
• Canada
• work carried out by Monica Heller
• in a French medium school, the Ecole Champlain, in the anglophone
province of Ontario.
More info on Canada:
• Canada has about 35 million inhabitants,
• 26 million of whom have English as their L1 and
• 7 million have French as L1.
• Other important ‘mother tongues’ include Chinese (various
varieties of Chinese), Italian and German.

• And the largest indigenous languages are Cree (about

70,000 speakers, aboriginal language with the highest
number of speakers in Canada) and Inuktitut (about 29,000
speakers).
For more: https://deeply.thenewhumanitarian.org/arctic/articles/2016/05/06/to-save-their-
language-canadas-inuit-rewrite-it
• Canada has a federal government and is divided into ten
provinces and three territories.
• The provinces have jurisdiction over education, and the
territories, too, have gradually gained the right to deal
with matters of education.

• The fact that English and French are the official

languages goes back to a history of colonization by
Britain and France.

• Canadian Official Languages Act in 1969:

required all federal institutions to provide services in both of the official
languages, and ensured the right to L1-medium education for
francophone minorities outside Quebec as well as anglophone minorities
in Quebec.
“Melting pot” vs. “mosaic”
• Canada sees itself in terms of the
‘mosaic’ metaphor rather than the
US metaphor of the ‘melting pot’.

• Whereas the melting pot

metaphor suggests assimilation,
the Canadian metaphor of a
cultural mosaic promotes respect
and support not only for the two
official languages but for all the
languages and cultures in Canada.
 Quebec francophone nationalism
• French is the majority language in Quebec, but a
minority language in Canada as a whole.
• As a result, many Quebeckers feel that French is
endangered and needs to be protected against English
and to be defended in what some of them see as hostile
anglophone surroundings.
• Quebec has opted for a policy of French
monolingualism (Bill 101, the Charter of the
French language, 1977), which goes against the
federal Canadian policy of bilingualism and
multiculturalism. …
• sources of tension and led to legal challenges, as a result
of which some aspects of Bill 101 were ruled to be
unconstitutional.
• Bill 101…gradually “relaxed” around the 1990s.
Double monolingualism!
• French–English bilingualism is understood as double
monolingualism, with the students encouraged to keep the
two languages separate, to avoid code-switching and, in
particular, to cut all anglicisms out of their French.
Grants..
Ecole Champlain, a French-language high school
in the Toronto area, Heller found a highly
heterogeneous school population consisting of
the following three groups:

• Speakers of French as their L1.

• Middle class anglophones wanting to become
bilingual in English and French because such
linguistic capital provides access to desirable jobs
especially in the public sector.
• New immigrants from Somalia, Haiti, etc., who
are speakers of French as their L1 or L2.
Findings from Heller’s fieldwork
• Thus the school relied upon the twin ideologies of
monolingualism and language quality in a continuing
endeavour to create a French only zone.
• The teachers were expected to implement the system of
linguistic surveillance.
• were fighting a losing battle, due to the importance of English in
Canadian society and the school’s need to accept anglophone
students as a way of boosting its student enrolment.
Findings contd. (Heller):
• With the increasing number of Somali students, it became
more problematic for teachers to present French as an
oppressed language, since for these students it was clearly
the opposite: namely, the language of oppression.
• But what most students seemed to share was a belief in French as
a means of social advancement in Canadian society. In this way,
language was commodified, and the old politics of identity was
gradually replaced by a new politics of linguistic capital.
• The school put greater value on standard French, even at
the risk of losing (some of) the authenticating value of the
French Canadian vernacular.
Heller shows how the students in particular helped to push the school
in the direction of a new policy of inclusiveness which could point the
way for the country as a whole to move beyond the French–English
cleavages into a truly multilingual and multicultural future.
To sum up, today’s lecture up to this point…
• The examples discussed illustrates a pattern that can
be traced in many parts of the world:
• individual multilingualism is frequently valued in a
positive way and viewed as ‘linguistic capital’ (Bourdieu,
1977),
• while societal or institutional multilingualism is still more
likely to be negatively valued.
Multilingual education:
(2) Flexible vs. fixed multilingualism
Ch9, Weber
• The distinction is based on similar ones used in the literature, most
recently the distinctions between homoglossic and heteroglossic
multilingualism in García (2009) and between separate and flexible
bilingualism in Blackledge and Creese (2010).

• Weber& Horner look at US language policy as a contrast to EU policy.

---
• Case Study 1: Luxembourg
• Case Study 2: Catalonia and the Basque Country
Mother tongue education or
literacy bridges?
Ch10
What are Literacy bridges?
• A flexible alternative to mother tongue education which would have a
much better chance of moving policy towards social justice and
educational equity would be the establishment of literacy bridges.
• The concept is used in Weber (2009) in relation to the language situation in
trilingual Luxembourg, where large numbers of romanophone children are
forced to go through a German language literacy programme.
• Weber argues that it would be counter-productive to call for
education in the standard variety of the (assumed) mother tongue of
each child, irrespective of the question whether the children actually
master this particular variety or not.
• On the contrary, it would be much more productive to
look for the ‘common linguistic denominator’ of
students whose home linguistic resources may well
include varieties of French, Portuguese, Cape Verdean
Creole, Italian, Spanish, etc. and, in this case, set up a
French-language literacy option for them alongside the
existing German-language literacy programme.

• The French-language literacy option would act as a

literacy bridge providing a link with, and building upon,
these students’ actual linguistic repertoires.
How to…
• The school-system needs to take into account this multilingual reality
if its aim is to advance on the difficult path leading towards the
elusive goal of educational equity.

• Three fundamental steps are required in this respect:

1) Study the students’ actual linguistic repertoires, taking into account all their
linguistic varieties and not just a narrow range of standard languages.
• Q: Has this been done in your educational contexts ever before?
2) Find the common linguistic denominators.
3) Establish the adequate literacy bridges by offering a reasonable range of
language options.
FOR DISCUSSION:
1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using code-switching and
mixed languages in bilingual pedagogy?
2. If many children code-switch outside school, shouldn’t mother tongue
education reflect this (if it is to be truly based on children’s actual out-of-
school linguistic practices)?
3. How can we ensure that the school’s emphasis on standard varieties does
not give children the feeling that their home varieties are bad and
worthless?
4. How can we ensure that the use of code-switching and mixed languages
by teachers actually helps students acquire the standard varieties and
does not lead to what Blackledge and Creese (2010: 206) call ‘the danger
of participating in the reproduction of [the students’ social]
disadvantage’?
Heritage language education
ch11
 A heritage language is a minority language (either
immigrant or indigenous) learned by its speakers at
home as children, but never fully developed
because of insufficient input from the social
environment. The speakers grow up with a different
dominant language in which they become more
competent.

• Heritage language speakers typically have a historical link to an

indigenous language (usually endangered) or an immigrant language
(often also endangered within the new migration context), which is
not normally taught in the mainstream school system of the host
society.
Read on…
• Language and heritage in the United States (Weber, p. 136-137)
For an example:
https://ataturkokulu.at
kb.org/en/about/

https://ataturkokulu.at
kb.org/wp-
content/uploads/2020/
01/Ethnic-Heritage-
and-Language-Schools-
in-America.pdf
Read on…

• Language and heritage in England (p. 137-138)

• The dominance of the standard language and purist ideologies

• Bengali – Sylheti
• Cypriot Turkish (tükenmez versus penna)
• Spanish and Latino students
FOR DISCUSSION:
The contradictory role of Spanish in the US
Consider the following statement which is often said to epitomize a
prevalent attitude in mainstream US society:

“Using Spanish as a heritage or immigrant

language is bad, but learning it as a foreign
language is good.”

• Discuss the underlying language ideologies. Make sure you take into
account the important aspect of language variation, including in particular
Castilian Spanish, Latin American varieties of Spanish and the Spanish
varieties of US Latinos.
FOR RESEARCH and later DISCUSSION:
Native American languages
• Explore the present situation of Native American languages in light of
the Native American Languages Act 1990, 1992 and the Esther
Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act 2006.
• What rights do these legal texts recognize for the use of Native American
languages in education?
• Do you think these rights are sufficient to ensure the revitalization and
survival of the languages? Why or why not?
• To what extent do you agree with Schiffman’s (1996: 246) assessment of the
Native American Languages Act: ‘now that Native-American languages are
practically extinct, and pose no threat to anyone anywhere, we can grant
them special status.’
Last topic of 337:

Critical analysis of
discourses & media
representation of multilingualism
and immigration…
Any questions?