Applied Linguistics Review

Applied Linguistics Review 1 2010

Applied Linguistics Review 1 2010 Editor

Li Wei

De Gruyter Mouton

ISBN 978-3-11-022264-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-022265-4 ISSN 1868-6303 ISSN online 1868-6311 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ” 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ⬁ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Editor

Associate Editors

Li Wei Department of Applied Linguistics & Communication University of London, Birkbeck College 43 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury London WC1H 0PD UK E-mail: [email protected]

David Block University of London, Institute of Education Bencie Woll University College London Itesh Sachdev University of London, SOAS

International Advisory Board Keiko Abe Kyoritsu Women’s University, Japan

Alex Housen Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

Kingsley Bolton City University of Hong Kong, China

Andy Kirkpatrick Hong Kong Institute of Education, China

Vivian Cook Newcastle University, UK

Claire Kramsch University of California, Berkeley, USA

Donna Christian Center for Applied Linguistics, USA

Mayouf Ali Mayouf University of Sebha, Libya

Annick De Houwer University of Erfurt, Germany

Tim McNamara University of Melbourne, Australia

Patricia Duff University of British Columbia, Canada

Ben Rampton King’s College London, UK

Diana Eades University of New England, Australia

Elana Shohamy Tel Aviv University, Israel

Yihong Gao Beijing University, China

David Singleton Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Ofelia Garcia City University of New York Graduate Center, USA

Anna Verschik Tallinn Pedagogical University, Estonia

Susan Gass University of Michigan, USA Fred Genesee McGill University, Canada Nancy Horberger University of Pennsylvania, USA

Terry Wiley Arizona State University, USA Lawrence Zhang National Institute of Education, Singapore

Contents

Li Wei Editorial

ix

Ben Rampton Social class and sociolinguistics

1

Tim McNamara Reading Derrida: Language, identity and violence

23

David Block Engaging with human sociality: Thoughts on communication and embodiment

45

Helen Kelly-Holmes Language trends: Reflexivity in commercial language policies and practices

67

Anna Verschik Contacts of Russian in the post-Soviet space

85

Francesco Cavallaro and Stefan Karl Serwe Language use and language shift among the Malays in Singapore

129

Mila Schwartz Family language policy: Core issues of an emerging f ield

171

Aurora Donzelli Is ergativity always a marker of agency? Toraja and Samoan grammar of action and the contribution of emancipatory pragmatics to social theory

193

viii

Contents

Amelia Church Opportunities for learning during storybook reading at preschool

221

Lawrence Jun Zhang Negotiating language, literacy and identity: A sociocultural perspective on children’s learning strategies in a multilingual ESL classroom in Singapore

247

Editorial LI WEI

The original idea for this new publication came out of the weekly seminar series which is jointly run between Birkbeck College and the Institute of Education, both of the University of London, and the annual Round Table whose organization also involves colleagues from other colleges of the University in the Bloomsbury area, especially the University College and the School of Oriental and African Studies. Given the quality and variety of the presentations at these events, we thought that it would be very nice to find an outlet for them to be published and read by a wider range of colleagues. Mouton de Gruyter enthusiastically supported the idea and we agreed to produce an annual publication under the title The Bloomsbury Review of Applied Linguistics and Communication. However, just as the papers for the inaugural issue were ready to be submitted to the publisher, the publishing giant, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, sent us a letter through its lawyers insisting that the word “Bloomsbury” had been trademarked and therefore could not be used in any publication that they did not own. Whilst we were flattered by the fact that our new and rather modest venture was noticed by such a major player in the publishing world (and the thought that a handful of publishing houses are trying to dominate the world never crossed our mind. Honest!), we had to find an alternative title and amend all the documents and publicity material that had already been registered. It has turned out that Bloomsbury Publishing Plc’s intervention was a blessing in disguise. The papers we had received were of a more global appeal than the name Bloomsbury Review would indicate. And as the experts in Mouton’s marketing department suggest, the simpler the title the better – hence the current title Applied Linguistics Review. Applied Linguistics Review is a peer reviewed annual publication. It aims to serve as a testing ground for the articulation of original ideas and approaches in the study of real-world issues in which language plays a crucial role, by bringing together new empirical and theoretical research and critical reflections of current debates. As you can see in this inaugural issue, the issues dealt with in the

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Review are wide ranging, covering aspects of the linguistic and communicative competence of the individual such as bilingualism and multilingualism, first or second language acquisition, literacy, language disorders, as well as language and communication related issues in and between societies such as linguistic discrimination, language conflict, communication in the workplace, language policy and language planning, and language ideology. One key difference between this publication and the other existing journals and annuals is that we encourage personal reflections on emerging issues and themes in applied linguistics as a broad, multidisciplinary field. We urge our contributors not to shy away from expressing their own opinions. And we make sure that the peer review process is thorough and constructive, and in the meantime allows the personality of the author to shine through the writing. We invite potential contributors to contact the Editors directly to discuss their ideas before submitting the papers. We are particularly interested in papers that not only report new research findings but also critically engage in current debates over theoretical and methodological issues in applied linguistics and communication generally and point to directions of future research. Finally, readers of this volume will want to know what we mean by applied linguistics in the title. Here is our answer: applied linguistics is any attempt to work with language in a critical and reflective way, with the ultimate goal of understanding the role of language in the construction and expression of human sociality. We will try to elaborate on this through the contributions in future issues. Birkbeck College, University of London December 2009

Social class and sociolinguistics1 BEN RAMPTON

Abstract Thisarticle makes the case for resuscitating social class as an issue in British applied and sociolinguistics. It begins with a sketch of the treatment of class in post-war social science in the UK, drawing out the implications for sociolinguistics. It then moves to a fuller review of how sociolinguistics has actually handled class, and considers Bernstein’s work and its relationship to classic US research in the ethnography of communication, as well as the reasons from the ‘retreat from social class’ in discourse-oriented UK sociolinguistics from mid-1980s onwards. After that it offers a class-oriented reinterpretation of my earlier work on ethnolinguistic crossing and stylization, and it concludes with some suggestions for further research, stressing the need to develop interactional and ethnographic perspectives on class processes. Keywords: Social class; sociolinguistics; interaction; crossing; ethnicity.

This article attempts to make the case for resuscitating social class as an issue in applied and sociolinguistics in Britain. Certainly, there is a great deal of contemporary work on discourse, culture, power and social inequality, but this generally focuses on gender, ethnicity and generation much more than class. And yes, in ordinary everyday activity, ‘transportable’ identities like class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age are all blurred and interwoven with a considerable range of institutional and interactional identities (Zimmerman 1998), so that it is very much an analytic act separating class out from everything else. Even so, many many people – and not just academics – engage in this kind of analytic differentiation, and separating out ‘class’ has distinct implications. So for example, when migrant ethnicities are discussed in education, students’ practices-anddispositions are generally treated independently of the inherently stratifying

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processes of schooling, and there is talk of eradicating inequality by closing the gap between school and ethnic culture, either making schools more hospitable, or tuning home cultures more to education. Class analyses are potentially more pessimistic. Social and cultural identities are defined inside mainstream processes of stratification, not outside, and instead of being overcome by cultural bridge-building, inequality and discrimination are treated as central to schooling itself. So class isn’t an inconsequential concept, and there are four parts in my argument that contemporary linguists need to give it more attention. I shall start with a sketch of how class has been treated in post-war British social science. This will be brief and very second hand, but there are still some significant implications for sociolinguistics. In the second part, I shall comment on how sociolinguistics itself has dealt with class. Here, Bernstein looms large, though my main point is that there is still a great deal of scope for ethnographic and interactional sociolinguistic analyses of class processes. The third section tries to illustrate this by turning to my own interactional sociolinguistic research and looking at ethno-linguistic crossing and stylization through the lens of social class. And then to end, I offer some suggestions for further work.

1. Class in post-war British social science and some implications for sociolinguistics According to Mike Savage (2003, 2005, 2007), there have been three distinguishable ‘waves’ in the study of class in post-war Britain. The first dates from the mid-1950s to the mid-70s, and Savage associates it with figures like Halsey, Lockwood, Young, Hoggart, Williams, Willis, Thompson and Hobsbawm. The relationships between class consciousness, social stratification, community and family were of central interest in the first wave, and there was a lot of qualitative research, with, for example, in-depth interviews playing a major part in studies of community. In the second wave from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, Goldthorpe and Marshall were pre-eminent in British research on class, and this focused much more on the structural aspects of inequality. Statistical methods were used to link class with life-chances in health, housing, crime, education, etc., and class was simplified and operationalized as occupational employment.2 Interest in class consciousness and solidarity declined (Savage 2003: 536), while over the same period, there was also a growing body of work asserting the ‘demise of class’ in late-modernity, a line of argument that Savage associates with Bauman, Lash and Giddens. In the third wave of work on British social class, starting in the early 1990s, researchers such as Skeggs,

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Walkerdine, Lucy, Reay and Ball have contested these claims about the demise of class, and there has been a reaction against the reductive equation of class with occupation in survey work, turning from this to qualitative analysis of the cultural and psycho-social processes associated with class. The interest of the earlier generation in class identities and class identification has been revived with work on, for example, stigmatized working class identities and middleclass strategies in education markets, and the focus has also expanded beyond community, work, industrial relations to schooling, parenting, leisure and consumption. From the vantage point of sociolinguistics, there are at least three things that stand out in this work. First, even though it was pre-eminent in Savage’s second wave, there is no need to confine our notion of class to a single indicator like occupation – after all, in a country with a long history of stratification like Britain’s, ‘class’ can embrace a huge range of cultural and material processes, covering social differences in “family background, main source of income, place of residence, cultural tastes, . . . political affiliations etc” (Abercrombie and Warde 2000: 145–146). Next and much more suggestively, there are openings for sociolinguistics in the first and third wave interest in class identities and the ‘meanings’ of social class. In the first wave, both Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson were concerned with how class consciousness and experience were shaped in social activity. Thompson insisted that class needs to be studied “in the medium of time – that is, in action and reaction, change and conflict” (1978: 295–296), focusing on the articulation of a sense of solidarity or opposition in the struggle for resources in particular locations. ‘Class’ here means a sensed social difference that people and groups produce in interaction, and there is struggle and negotiation around exactly who’s up, who’s down, who’s in, who’s out, and where the lines are drawn. Material and cultural inequalities matter a great deal, but human agency still plays a vital part in class processes. So when analysts see people in better and worse, higher and lower positions, they need to look for the cultural practices that accomplish this, which is something that sociolinguists are potentially quite adept at. Williams also attended closely to the subjective side of social class, and was interested in how the experience of living in a stratified society works its way into “the fibres of the self”, producing social instincts and tacit sensibilities that are shaped by “the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes” (1977: 110). This has been picked up in the third wave by feminist researchers such as Skeggs (1997) and Reay (1998) – Skeggs, for example, emphasises the role that “everyday negotiations of the mundane” play in the formation of classed subjectivities (1997: 167),3 and she explores the

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implications in some long-term ethnography with working class women. So the second point to draw from Savage’s overview is that if sociolinguists want to investigate class, we don’t have to bind ourselves to large-scale comparisons of high- and low-placed social groups. In class societies, people carry class hierarchy around inside them, acting it out in the fine grain of ordinary life, and if we look closely enough, we may be able to pick it out in the conduct of just a few individuals. Third, alongside the perspectival shifts that Savage describes, there have obviously also been fundamental changes in the economy, culture and society since the 1950s – de-industrialisation, the decline of traditional collectivism and the emergence of gender, race and ethnicity as political issues, globalization, marketization and the ascendance of the individual as consumer (Abercrombie and Warde 2000: 148). “The working class”, Savage suggests, is now “no longer a central reference point in British culture”, and the middle class has “become the class around which an increasing range of practices are regarded as universally ‘normal’, ‘good’and ‘appropriate”’(2003: 536). But this doesn’t mean that class no longer matters – instead, “there has been a fundamental re-working of class relationships [and this] affects the mode by which class is articulated, imagined and thought” (2007). How far, we should ask, has sociolinguistics tuned into this kind of reworking? Indeed, how far has sociolinguistics contributed to its description? These are substantial questions, inviting consideration of some of the history of sociolinguistics itself, and I would like to try to respond, starting very briefly with Labovian variationism, turning to Bernstein and moving from there to ethnographic and interactional sociolinguistics.

2. Social class and sociolinguistics? 2.1.

Labovian variationism

Variationists have probably had a longer and more enduring interest in social class than any other branch of sociolinguistics, and they certainly got off to a very good start. According to Savage (2003: 536), Bourdieu has been the most important theoretical influence on the most recent, post-1990s third wave of class-focused British social science, but in fact Bourdieu was using Labov to develop his notion of classed habitus4 back in the mid-1970s. Variationists have repeatedly shown that in class-stratified societies, society-wide speech variation is ‘echoed’ in the style variation of individuals – the patterns of accent difference that you can see when you compare class-groups-distributed-across-society-as-

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a-whole are mirrored (more weakly) within the speech repertoire of individuals – and Bourdieu took this as impressive testimony to class reproduction, largescale stratification being inscribed even into the apparently flexible conduct of individuals (Bourdieu 1991 [1977]: Part 1; Woolard 1985; Eckert 2000: 13). But has variationist sociolinguistics in general lived up to its early promise in the analysis of class? In recent years, the link between Bourdieu and language variation has been renewed in Eckert’s sociolinguistic ethnography of adolescents in the US. Taking up Bourdieurian practice theory, Eckert insists on seeing speakers as “agents in the continual construction and reproduction” of the language system, not just as its “incidental users” (2000: 43), and she also looks hard for the local meanings of social class, finding it in the polarization of school-enthusiastic ‘Jocks’ and disaffected ‘Burnouts’ and in the contrasting connections that adolescents make between on the one hand, local social activities and categories, and mainstream values on the other. Even so, Eckert’s linguistic analyses are primarily statistical, and there are no detailed descriptions of classed language being used or developed in situated interaction (compare, e.g. Coupland 2007). More generally, as late as 1996 Hymes took the view that in variationist research, “class has entered sociolinguistic analysis as an indispensable parameter of change and statistical difference, but as a lived reality [it] has hardly begun to appear as a focus of inquiry in its own right” (1996: 73). The central and abiding interest is in variability and change in language itself; class tends to be defined occupationally, as in Savage’s second wave; and classically anyway, variationists emphasize attitudes and prejudice in their explanations of linguistic inequality. In Hymes’ encapsulation of the Labovian view of class, “[d]ifferential access to resources there might be, but so far as ability was concerned, class had no cost” (1996: 188). Which brings us, of course, to Bernstein. 2.2.

Bernstein

Bernstein’s analysis of language and class starts with macro-social structure and the division of labor, moves into the institutional organization of family and education, homes in on interactional practices deemed critical in socialization, and from there looks for links to the communicative disposition of individuals and their impact on school achievement. In doing so, Bernstein spans most of the levels where researchers have located class processes – the economy, the community, occupations, families, activity, discourse, language, consciousness and school career. In fact, Savage identifies Bernstein alongside Bourdieu as a major influence on the current wave in the British sociology of class (2003: 537), and Bernstein’s

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reputation has also substantially recovered among linguists over the last 10 to 15 years. With common ground in Halliday, critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis have always had a lot of time for Bernstein; Bernstein’s critique of ‘masking’ and the concealment of power relations in progressive pedagogy feeds into Fairclough’s account of the conversationalization of public discourse (e.g. 1995); and few can match Bernstein’s magisterial overviews of changing trends both in social science and in higher education generally (e.g. 1996: Chs. 3 and 7). Yet in the UK at least,5 subsequent to the critique by linguists like Labov and Trudgill (cf. Atkinson 1985: Ch. 6), there has been very little active interest in Bernstein’s analysis of class culture and language, in class “as a general position in society, which is also a tradition, with typical values [that have a bearing] on language use” (Collins 1988: 307). Bernstein’s work on class, family socialization and its educational effects generally gets bracketed off as ‘early Bernstein’ and it is worth considering the reasons for this. 2.3.

Bracketing off ‘early Bernstein’

There are many things that could be said to explain the sequestration of early Bernstein. First, early Bernstein is very much the product of its time, the 1950s and 1960s. Gender is taken for granted (Collins 2000: 73); there is nothing on ethnicity; and the main lines of the theory are formulated prior to the development of sophisticated discourse analysis, in the absence of detailed naturalistic observation of either homes or classrooms (compare Wells 1981; Tizard et al. 1988; Edwards and Westgate 1987: 35). Second, there is a neglect of all the ideology, politics, resistance and reflexive self-differentiation that shapes and develops in the interaction across classes (Rosen 1972; compare, e.g. McDermott and Gospodinoff 1981, Collins 1988). Third, within the highly ambitious, multi-leveled panorama that is covered in Bernstein’s argument, there is a great deal of scope for different specialists in this or that to zero in on particular details. And of course, fourth, from the late 1970s onwards, Bernstein himself shifted away from language and group culture to the social organization of educational discourse. But in trying to explain the bracketing off of Bernstein’s early work, I would like to dwell on his approach to knowledge production, and indeed his epistemology, it seems to me, also limits his contribution to our understanding of how class has changed in Britain.

Social class and sociolinguistics

2.4.

7

Bernstein’s non-ethnographic epistemology

In his paper on “Research and languages of description” (Bernstein 1996: 134– 146), Bernstein distinguishes two kinds of analysis, differing in their degrees of abstraction. On the one hand, there is what he calls an ‘external language of description’ – the frameworks and procedures for classifying, comparing, contrasting, sorting and organizing the recordings and observations from fieldwork. And on the other, there is the ‘internal language of description’, which involves more abstract models attempting to capture the fundamental principles that structure the patterns identified in field data. There is a strong resemblance in this account to research in syntax, and Bernstein is very explicit about the influence that linguistics had on the shape his theorizing took (1996: 127; also, e.g. 1971: 173). He refers to his own theory as a “generating grammar” (e.g. 1996: 127), and is open about being more interested in the abstract generative principles than in the more concrete specifics of class (1996: 126), which is also obvious in the proliferating grids of multi-directional arrows in his work, as well as in skimpy caricatures of class types like the ‘Millers’ (1971: 177). In consequence, Bernstein’s is very much a deductive, theory-driven account of class processes, and a great deal of effort goes into configuring data in ways that make it directly relevant to his theoretical models. Yes, the empirical descriptions can still exceed what the model anticipates (1996: 129, 138), but Bernstein doesn’t have the discursive disposition of the novelist, and his methods of work are emphatically non-ethnographic.6 ,7 This has several consequences for the account of class. First, one of ethnography’s key characteristics is its commitment to taking a long hard look at empirical processes that are hard to understand within established frameworks, and so when people start asking “What is the working class today? What gender is it? What colour is it” (Gilroy 1987: 19), ethnography is a potentially rather important resource. In the 1950s and 1960s when everyone thought they more or less knew what class meant, Bernstein’s thumb-nail character portraits and picture task elicitations might just about cover the lower-level empirical specifics of language and class, leaving him free to model the underlying dynamics, but this is far harder when the ground changes radically. When class identities become problematic, it is necessary to give much more attention to bottom-up description of the kind promoted in ethnography, and if that is what it would have taken – if what was needed was ethnography – then in the light of his stated methodological preferences, it is not surprising that Bernstein moved away from the work on language and group culture. Of course, Bernstein was just as aware as Savage of changes in how “class is articulated, imagined and thought”, and he himself discusses the formation of identities in reorganising

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capitalism (1996: 75–80). But these insights are highly schematic, delivered in what Gemma Moss has described as Bernstein’s ‘marmite’ prose; there is nothing on identity and language; and it would be very hard overall to count this later work as a specifically socio-linguistic contribution to understanding the reworkings of class. Second – and focusing here on the bracketing off of early Bernstein – different positions on ethnography help to explain the ‘Bernstein / Brice Heath paradox’ – the extraordinary contrast between, on the one hand, the general condemnation of Bernstein’s work on language and class, as opposed to the almost universal celebration of Shirley Brice Heath’s on the other.8 2.5.

Bernstein and Heath

There is actually a great deal of overlap in the ground covered by Bernstein and Heath. They both start by contrasting communities and then follow the lines of influence from different kinds of family relationship to different kinds of interaction, producing different ways of taking meaning, resulting in different educational careers. Indeed, in their neglect of inter-group politics,9 they share a common weakness. And yet while the refutation of Bernstein helped to make Labov’s “Logic of Non-Standard English” (1969) one of the most anthologised sociolinguistic papers in the 1970s, Heath’s take on the issues that concern Bernstein – her ethnographic remix in “What no bedtime stories mean” (1982) – became one of the most famous papers of the 1980s. From what I have already said, it should be clear that the issue of being ethnographic or not is far from being just a trivial methodological matter. Rather than having a few social types quickly flashed at us, Heath’s work describes people in all their individual and contextual particularity, and whereas Bernstein presents ‘critical socialising contexts’ programmatically, as a necessary link in the chain between role-systems and language development, Heath’s equivalent idea, ‘literacy event’, works as a sensitising construct, opening up a huge body of descriptive work documenting hitherto unimagined complexities in reading and writing (the New Literacy Studies). Heath’s empirical three-way community comparison escapes the dichotomisation that grips Bernstein’s thinking, and the balance between theory and empirical description is almost wholly reversed, with theory emerging inductively from data and scholarly abstractions like ‘cognitive style’ given only very subsidiary walk-on parts. And whereas Bernstein’s work seeks to disclose the rules and mechanisms that generate the patterns of conduct and achievement that schools are all too familiar with, Heath’s work bathes familiar classroom behaviours in new light, opening new dimensions and possibilities.

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Maybe if the ethnography of communication had been fully invented when Bernstein did his work on language and class (cf. Bernstein 1975: 154, 156), or if he had been less attracted to models of knowledge production propounded in formal linguistics, we would have had something more like Ways with Words in England in the 1970s and 1980s. Certainly, whereas Bernstein simply left it as a rather ominous black box, contemporary combinations of ethnography, conversation analysis, pragmatics and the semiotics of indexicality can now delve deep into ‘restricted code’, going far beyond the analysis of explicit propositions into robust and detailed description of eloquent silence, strategic indirectness, and allusive nuance (see, e.g. Clark 2003). But in spite of this, it is important to recognise that Heath and Bernstein were working with a very similar ontological map of the different macro-, meso- and micro-levels of social process that sociolinguistics should try to bring together. Yes, in his drive to fit all the jigsaw pieces together, Bernstein rushed past the image printed on each piece, but Heath and Bernstein were still working on very much the same puzzle, and in fact one can also see roughly the same pieces in John Gumperz’s work on Crosstalk (Gumperz et al. 1979). 2.6.

Bernstein, Heath and Gumperz united in a wider interdisciplinary field

Like Bernstein, Gumperz takes large scale social structural trends as the point of departure, pinpoints critical institutional encounters, and tries to show how unrecognised differences in the communicative dispositions of subordinate groups produce disadvantage in institutional environments, in spite of the participants’ good intentions. Within this, of course, there are substantial differences. Gumperz addresses racial discrimination in employment rather than class underachievement in education, and rather than mother-and-child interaction, the focus is on ‘gate-keeping’ interviews. In addition, the processes that Gumperz covers are much more limited, so his claims seem less speculative. Compared with the task of linking dialogue-at-home to achievement-at-school, it is relatively easy tying interactional practice to institutional outcome if all you’re trying to do is see how discourse in an interview affects the decision ten minutes after. Discussion of different communicative dispositions is also potentially more straightforward if these have developed in another language in another country. But despite such differences and the larger contrast between Bernstein’s epistemology and Gumperz’s affiliation with ethnography, there is a broad family resemblance in the sites, phenomena and processes that they are seeking to connect. So overall, although the differences between Bernstein, Heath and Gumperz loom large for specialists in applied and sociolinguistics, when they are placed

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Table 1. Similarities between Bernstein, Heath and Gumperz Bernstein

Heath

Gumperz

‘critical socialising contexts’

≈

‘literacy events’

≈

‘gate-keeping’ interviews

‘coding orientation’

≈

‘ways with words’

≈

‘communicative style’

‘elaborated’ vs ‘restricted code’

≈

‘Mainstream’ vs ‘Roadville’ and ‘Tracktown’

≈

‘they-code’ vs ‘we-code’

in a wider perspective, there are a number of striking similarities in their central concerns and orientation points. Some of the broad parallels can be mapped as in Table 1. More generally, these formative figures in sociolinguistics focus on: – language and literacy but seek to situate these in: – – – –

historical process institutions and networks situated activity and practices individuals and their repertoires

and they share a driving interest in how these basic coordinates are linked together in different settings. The consequence is that in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology 20 to 30 years later, there are now rather a lot of rather well-developed, well-tried frameworks and procedures for exploring all this (even though the coverage of some of these coordinates may often be fuller than others). For quite a lot of the British social science research on class described by Savage in Section 1 above, this is news. As already mentioned, Skeggs emphasises the role that “everyday negotiations of the mundane” play in the formation of classed subjectivities, but very few sociologists working on class have the tools or procedures for analyzing this, and it is remarkable how much scholars still rely on the research interview.10 Inside applied and sociolinguistics, this kind of ontological map of society, culture and discourse may fade into the background in arguments over detail, but I am currently involved in a three-year training course designed for non-sociolinguistic social science researchers UK-wide,11 and it is remarkable how illuminating the participants seem to find it when they

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are introduced to this combination of a basic orientational map and tools for connecting it to empirical social processes. So my claim is that there is ‘powerful medicine’ in sociolinguistics in the tradition of Bernstein, Heath and Gumperz. But if that is actually true, why, post-Bernstein, has there been so little British work on culture, identity and discourse as this relates to social class? 2.7. The retreat from class in British sociolinguistics Although class, gender and ethnicity flow together in practical experience, it is helpful to use Bradley (1996) to define class analytically as relations and identities lived within “the social arrangements of production, exchange, distribution and consumption”; to say that gender “refers to lived relationships between women and men”, including the production of “sexual divisions and definitions of masculinity and femininity”; and to identify race and ethnicity as “categories used to explain a . . . set of territorial relationships . . . involv[ing] conquests, . . . the historical development of nation states, and . . . migrations” (1996: 19–20). As mentioned in Section 2.1 above, social class is still important in variationist work, operating more or less in the survey mode that Savage associates with Goldthorpe, but from the mid-1980s onwards, non-variationist, discourse-oriented sociolinguistics in Britain has shown relatively little interest in social class, and instead it has focused much more on gender and ethnicity (though cf. Preece 2009). No doubt there are many different reasons for this loss of interest, many of them rooted in much wider cultural and economic changes (see Rampton et al. 2008). But closer to home, this sociolinguistic retreat from class analysis in Britain in the 1980s coincided with the growing influence of sociolinguistic ethnography and linguistic anthropology from North America. In the US, rather than being “spoken in its own right”, class tends to be “represented through other categories of social difference: gender, ethnicity, race, and so forth” (Ortner 1991: 164; see also, e.g. Bradley 1996: 75), and as it is set in very much its own continental history of conquest and slavery, North American work often shows an acute awareness of how the issues associated with class connect to race and ethnicity.12 But this can be lost in the transition to the UK, where class and ethnicity are more easily separated. In the UK, race and ethnicity get linked much more to post-war migrant groups than to indigenous populations, and so instead of seeing class and race as intricately linked, it becomes ethnicity for black and brown minorities and class for whites. With ethnicity and race de-classed in this way, it is quite easy to treat improved inter-group understanding as the key to full participation in mainstream society,

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and that has been the dominant interpretation of Gumperz’s work on Crosstalk (Gumperz et al. 1979). Indeed, you can draw the same interpretation from a great deal of the work on multilingualism that has flourished in Britain from the 1980s. But as I have stressed, race and ethnicity are meta-analytic constructs, even though participants and researchers may agree on their reflexive relevance, and if you change your lens, you can see class (or gender) going on in exactly the same strips of activity where you first saw race and ethnicity. After all, the main speech event in Crosstalk is a job interview, and as well as illustrating inter-ethnic misunderstanding, it is a case-study of the socio-economic class demotion of migrant professionals from India, of their devaluation on the labor market. Now methodologically, ethnography not only helps us pick up on both the multiple, unpredictable and changing ways in which something like social class manifests itself. It also allows one to revisit earlier work with new questions, partly because it generates much more data than one can ever use, and partly because the data-collection isn’t tightly bound to the research questions that one first set out with. In the 1980s and 1990s, I did a lot of ethnographic work on ‘language crossing’, working across the different levels of social process that Gumperz, Heath and Bernstein study, looking in particular at how adolescents in multi-ethnic adolescent peer groups used each others’ ethnic languages (Rampton 2005). I interpreted this both as a locally generated, vernacular anti-racism, and as a central sociolinguistic process in the development of what Hall (1992) describes as new, hybrid ethnicities. I certainly recognized that social class was an important background influence, but I didn’t appreciate just how important it was, and so in the penultimate part of my presentation, I would like to present a summary reanalysis of crossing in terms of class (see Rampton [forthcoming] for a fuller exposition).

3. Crossing into class My research focused on Ashmead, a working class neighbourhood in the south Midlands of England, and I discovered that there was rather a sharp symbolic opposition between Creole and Asian English. There is a glimpse of this in Extract 1, and this comes from a playback interview: Extract 1: Participants: Asif (15 years old, male, Pakistani descent), Kazim (15, male, Pakistani descent), Alan (15, male, Anglo descent), Ben (the researcher/author, 30+, male, Anglo

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descent). Setting: An interview, in which Ben is struggling to elicit some retrospective participant commentary on extracts of recorded data, and is on the point of giving up . . . 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Ben: right shall I- shall we shall we stop there Kazim: no Alan: no come [ on carry on Asif: [ do another extract Ben: le- lets have (.) [ then you have to give me more= Alan: [ carry on Ben: =attention gents Asif: ((quieter )): yeh [ alright Alan: ((quieter )): [ alright Asif: ((quieter )): [ yeh Ben: I need more attention Kazim ((in Asian English)): I AM VERY SORRY BEN JAAD [AI AI æm veRi s6Ri ben dZA:d dZA:d] Asif ((in Asian English )): ATTENTION BENJAMIN [@thenSA:n @thenSA:n bendZemIn bendZemIn] : [ ((laughter)) Ben: [ right well you can- we cnAlan: [ BENJAADEMIN Ben: we can continue but we er must concentrate a bit [ more Asif: [ yeh Alan: alright [ (go on) then Asif: ((in Asian English )): [ concentrating very hard [ k6ns@stRetIï veRi AR AR] Ben: okay right : ((giggles dying down )) Kazim ((in Asian English)): what a stupid ( ) [v2d v2d @ stupId ] Ben ((returning the microphone to what he considers to be a better position to catch all the speakers)): concentrate a little bitAlan: alright then Kazim ((in Creole )): stop movin dat ting aroun [dæt dæt tIN eôAUn eôAUn] Ben: WELL YOU stop moving it around and then I’ll won’t need to (.) r[ight Kazim ((in Creole )): [stop moving dat ting aroun [dæP dæP tIN @ôAUn @ôAUn] Ben: right okay [ Kazim: [ BEN JAAD Alan: ((laughs)) Ben: what are you doing Alan: ben jaa[ad Ben: [ well leave ( ) alone

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37 Kazim: IT’S HIM that ben jaad over there 38 Ben: right ((Ben continues his efforts to reinstitute the listening activity))

In this episode, things aren’t going quite as I had planned, and at the point where I threaten to stop the interview, Asif and Kazim switch into exaggerated Indian English in a sequence of mock apologies. Then a moment later in line 27, just as I seem to be signalling ’back-to-business’ by repositioning the microphone, the boot moves to the other foot, Kazim switches into Creole and directs a ‘prime’ at me, this time constructing my activity as an impropriety. This difference in the way Asian English and Creole are used fitted with a very general pattern in my data. Admittedly, away from stylized practices like these, Ashmead youngsters encountered many different uses of Asian and Creole English, and inside minority ethnic networks, the forms, functions and associations of Creole and Asian English were obviously a great deal more complex and extensive. But in spite of this, in crossing and stylization the images evoked were quite specific, and there was a sharp polarisation across a wide range of instances. Creole indexed an excess of demeanour over deference, displaying qualities like assertiveness, verbal resourcefulness, and opposition to authority, while Asian English stood for a surfeit of deference and dysfluency, typified in polite and uncomprehending phrases like ‘jolly good’, ‘excuse me please’, ‘I no understanding English’. Creole was clearly much more attractive to youngsters of all ethnic backgrounds, and it was often reported as part of the general local linguistic inheritance, particularly among Asian boys. So in the interpretation in Rampton (2005), I situated this socio-symbolic polarization in the larger context of migration. On the one hand, I said, Creole indexed an excitement and an excellence in youth culture that many adolescents aspired to, and it was even described as ‘future language’. On the other, Asian English represented distance from the main currents of adolescent life, and it stood for a stage of historical transition that a lot of youngsters, both male and female, felt they were leaving behind. Actually, though, this symbolization of a large scale historical trajectory went deeper. There was also a class dimension to the path indexed in the binary opposition of Creole and Asian English, and I shall mention four of the ways in which this showed up. First and most notably among boys, crossing and stylization themselves figured as something of a local class emblem, signifying the difference between Ashmead’s mixed adolescent community and the wider Stoneford population. When they described the kinds of people who wouldn’t do crossing and stylization, my informants referred to groups who were vertically placed at either end

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of a bipolar hierarchy of wealth and status – a hierarchy that matched the demographic facts quite closely. Up above, there were the ‘posh wimpies’ living in wealthier districts outside Ashmead, and down below, there were Bangladeshis living in the very poorest parts of town. Second, there was significant overlap in the evaluation of Creole and local non-standard working class English. So when Asian and Anglo youngsters of both sexes described the efforts of their mums and dads to get them to speak properly, it was often the intrusion of swear-words, question tags and tense forms in Creole that were targeted. Third, the Creole and Asian English contrast itself actually mapped into a set of high/low, mind/body, reason-and-emotion oppositions that have been central to British class culture for several hundred years. According to Phil Cohen, this dualistic high/low idiom was generated “from within certain strategic discourses in British class society” from the 17th Century onwards, and “from the very outset [it was] applied across a range of sites of domination, both to the indigenous lower orders and ethnic minority settlers as well as to colonial populations overseas” (1988: 63). Given what I have just said about the evaluation of Creole overlapping with the evaluation of working class English, it is not hard to see Creole linked to the low side of the traditional British class semiotic. But just as important, the high side of the class binary was linked to Asian English. English is a prestige variety in the Indian sub-continent, and when my informants compared themselves with relatives there, they saw their own varieties as ‘slangish’, ‘not really proper’, inferior to the ‘strict’, ‘clear’, ‘good solid English they teach ‘em over there’. Transposed to the UK, however, Ashmead kids depicted this Indian English orientation to the high, proper and polite as absurd, its aspirations hopelessly marred by foreignness. Lastly, there was very little indication of a commitment to education in ethno-linguistic crossing and stylization in Ashmead.13 Of course, schools were a vital meeting point for kids from different ethnic backgrounds, and the general pastoral and extra-curricular ethos played a very significant part in promoting good interethnic relations. But Creole, which many admired, hardly featured at all on the curriculum, and rather than being tolerant of learners of English as a second language, or respecting them for their progress (as the teaching staff might hope), adolescents generally stigmatized pupils who hadn’t yet been fully socialized into the vernacular ways of ordinary youth. Overall, instead of curriculum learning, it was the activities and codes of conduct characteristic of popular culture and playground recreation that were central to the cross-ethnic spread of minority languages, and if anything, this was easier when a style was used in opposition to school authority.14

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Drawing all this together, it looks as though the Creole / Asian English contrast oriented Ashmead adolescents to two major social processes. Not only did ethnolinguistic crossing and stylization situate these young people at an endpoint in the migrant transition from outside into Britain, but then also once inside, the binary lined them up with values much more associated with the lower than the higher classes. Yes, iconically, Creole was first and foremost associated with Caribbeans, Asian English with Asians. But in the problems, pleasures and expectations of working class adolescent life together, these kids experienced enough common ground to open up ethnolinguistic speech styles, respecifying their significance in crossing-and-stylization practices which recognized and cultivated the shared social space that labor migration had now created.

4. Conclusion I would like to conclude with two suggestions for further research and a general injunction. First, we need to understand how national and ethnic languages and speech styles contribute to the construction of globalized class identities. Under globalization, standardized minority language multilingualism is becoming more respectable and cosmopolitan – a new posh – and there is a strong case for seeing the kinds of ethnically-marked mixing, crossing and stylization described in the previous Section as an emergent counterpart to this, as a key feature in more globalized urban working class vernaculars. Second, in the words of one of Collins’ recent papers, we need to ask: “Where’s class in second language learning?” (2006). In a working class school I researched in the 1990s, it was quite common for multi-ethnic kids born or raised in Britain to direct stylized English foreigner talk at migrant and refugee newcomers, projecting a very non-cool, school-enthusiastic persona oriented to the high and polite. They were engaged in roughly the same kind of sociolinguistic status deflation that I had seen with stylized Asian English in Ashmead. Abroad, the global prestige of English might have encouraged you to see your acquisition of the language as an upward move, but for your classmates here and now, this was strictly comical (cf. Blommaert 2005). So how do newcomers navigate this kind of peer group pressure, what kinds of class origins and aspirations do they have, and how do they manage them in the relatively run-down urban environments where they often find themselves? Last and most obviously, we need to watch out for class much more generally, looking beyond occupation to the full range of processes and sites where central systems of production, distribution and consumption generate inequality, class

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relations and class identities. The pioneers of sociolinguistics have identified a really rather robust set of multi-level coordinates for examining change in the workings and meaning of class, ethnicity, gender and generation; Bourdieu, a familiar figure for sociolinguists, has been a major influence in contemporary sociological research on class identification, culture and experience; and according to Savage (pers. comm.), one of the first people ever to write about social class in the British Journal of Sociology was Erving Goffman, one of the pillars of interactional sociolinguistics (cf. Goffman 1951). So there is a strong base for the sociolinguistic analysis of social class, and of course finally, my own recommendation is that we make full use of the perspectives and procedures of linguistic ethnography in the pursuit of this enquiry. King’s College London

Notes 1. This paper is based on a lecture delivered at the 2008 Annual Conference of the British Association of Applied Linguistics, and although I cannot claim that he agrees with every part of its argument, I would like to acknowledge a considerable debt to the work and influence of my friend Jim Collins, who has been working these seams far longer and deeper than me. 2. Savage characterises the equation of class with occupation as a retreat from the complexity of people’s perceptions of class. See also, e.g. Marshall (1997: 53). 3. “Representations [of class] . . . are not straightforwardly reproduced but are resisted and transfigured in their daily enactment. Categories of class operate not only as an organising principle which enable access to and limitations on social movement and interaction but are also reproduced at the intimate level of ‘structures of feeling’ (cf. Williams 1961, 1977) in which doubt, anxiety and fear inform the production of subjectivity” (Skeggs 1997: 6) 4. In a linguistic context, ‘habitus’ can be defined as a pre-conscious disposition to hear and speak in class and gender specific ways, inculcated into the individual through long-term experience of the purchase that their language resources provide in different kinds of setting. 5. The situation is different in the US and Australia (see Collins 2000). 6. Contrast Bourdieu, as discussed by Blommaert (2006). 7. “The perspective focuses upon the construction of rules which generate what may be called official pedagogic discourse/practices, whether these be in the school or the family. The perspective does not include the study of the full choreography of interaction in the context of the classroom or the family. Nor does the perspective offer the possibility of a delicate description of the full repertoire of arabesques of interaction within any classroom, staffroom or family. . . However, the principles of

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8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Ben Rampton description, whilst not capable of describing the full repertoire of classroom interactions (for which they were not designed), are well capable of describing features relevant to the theory of classroom interaction, its organisational contexts, and their relation to external agencies (e.g. family and work).” (Bernstein 1990: 7) This can be seen in the responses of, e.g. Rosen (1972, 1985) and Pratt (1987). See Rosen’s otherwise very positive (1985) review of Heath (1983). Admittedly, Part III of Raymond Williams’ (1977) Marxist and Literature develops an extraordinarily subtle pragmatics, prefiguring a lot of contemporary work in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, but I’m not aware of this being picked up and used to any significant degree in, for example, Cultural Studies. “Ethnography, Language & Communication”, funded from 2007 to 2010 under the Economic & Social Research Council’s Researcher Development Initiative. See www.rdi-elc.org.uk. See, e.g. Collins (1988, 2000); McDermott and Gospodinoff (1981); Hymes (1996); Rampton et al. (2008: 73–74). Not that this critical integration of class and race perspectives is universal in NorthAmerica. Hymes speaks critically of an ethnolinguistic tradition which construes difference as “difference between separate, autonomous groups” (1996: 187), and this is central in Pratt’s (1987) critique of the ‘linguistics of community’. Delamont and Atkinson (1995) also suggest that this differential attention to ethnicity and class also has disciplinary underpinnings, not just national ones (1995: 34). At the same time, it is important to emphasize that for the most part, my research in Ashmead focused on a rather particular set of collective perceptions and conventional practices, and it would be a mistake to extrapolate from these to the more general attitudes, aspirations and trajectories of individuals. As a group, their crossing and stylization were embedded in practices and pastimes that were popular rather than elite, and looked towards (lower) class solidarity. But these kids also engaged in lots of other types of practice which I haven’t considered, and in fact in my datacollection, there was an explicit bias towards recreational sites. So it is very possible – in fact highly likely – that when, say, they settled down to work in lessons, a lot of youngsters could put aside the stances and alignments displayed in crossing – the attraction to Creole’s street credibility, the pleasures of Punjabi abuse, the mockery of Asian English deference. All of that might well be sectioned off quite easily as just having a laugh, messing around with friends. As well as Creole and Asian English, Punjabi had a very significant place in the local interethnic repertoire, and it was also beginning to be taught as a subject at school. But nobody white or black attended these classes, and instead of being book-learned, the active lexicon of cross-ethnic Punjabi among boys consisted of nouns referring to parts of the body, bodily functions, animals, ethnic groups and kin, as well as verbs to do with sex, violence and ingestion, while among a smaller number of primarily white girls, there was a degree of familiarity with bhangra. And in the three situations where most crossers got interested in Punjabi, the ethos was broadly non- or antischool. First, Punjabi was quite useful as a language for excluding teachers and other

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white adults; second, it had entered the kind of traditional playground language and lore of school-kids described by the Opies, figuring among boys in incrimination traps, jocular abuse and chasing games; and third, white girls’ cross-ethnic interest in bhangra music and dance was generally embedded in heterosexual relations, with learning much more a matter of legitimate peripheral participation than classroom study (cf. Rampton 2005: Part III; Lave and Wenger 1991).

References Abercrombie, N. & A. Warde, with R. Deem, S. Penna, K. Soothill, J. Urry, A. Sayer & S. Walby. 2000. Contemporary British society. 3rd edn. Oxford: Polity. Atkinson, P. 1985. Language, structure and reproduction: An introduction to the sociology of Basil Bernstein. London: Methuen. Bernstein, B. 1971. Class, codes and control, volume 1: Theoretical studies towards a sociology of language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bernstein, B. 1975. Class, codes and control, volume 3: Towards a theory of educational transmissions. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bernstein, B. 1990. The structuring of pedagogic discourse. London: Routledge Bernstein, B. 1996. Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. London: Taylor & Francis Blommaert, J. 2005. Discourse: A critical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. 2006. Bourdieu the ethnographer: On the ethnographic grounding of habitus and voice. The Translator 11. 219–236. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and symbolic power. Oxford: Polity. Bradley, H. 1996. Fractured identities: Changing patterns of inequality. Oxford: Polity. Clark, J. T. 2003. Abstract inquiry and the patrolling of black/white borders through linguistic stylisation. In R. Harris & B. Rampton (eds.), Language, ethnicity and race: A reader, 303–313. London: Routledge. Cohen, P. 1988. The perversions of inheritance: Studies in the making of multi-racist Britain. In P. Cohen & H. S. Bains (eds.), Multi-racist Britain, 9–120. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Collins, J. 1988. Language and class in minority education. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 19. 303–319. Collins, J. 2000. Bernstein, Bourdieu and the New Literacy Studies. Linguistics and Education 11(1). 65–78. Collins, J. 2006. Where’s class in second language learning? Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 41. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc. Coupland, N. 2007. Aneurin Bevan, class wars and the styling of political antagonism. In P. Auer (ed.), Style and social identities. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Delamont, S. & P. Atkinson. 1995. Fighting familiarity: Essays on education and ethnography. Kresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

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Eckert, P. 2000. Linguistic variation as social practice. Oxford: Blackwell. Edwards, A. & D. Westgate. 1987. Investigating classroom talk. Lewes: Falmer Press. Fairclough, N. 1995. Critical discourse analysis. London: Longman. Gilroy, P. 1987. There ain’t no black in the Union Jack. London: Hutchinson. Goffman, E. 1951. Symbols of class status. British Journal of Sociology 2(4). 294–304. Gumperz, J., C. Roberts & T. Jupp. 1979. Crosstalk: A study of cross-cultural communication. Southall, Middlesex: National Centre for Industrial Language Training. Hall, S. 1992. New ethnicities. In A. Rattansi & J. Donald (eds.), ‘Race’, culture and difference. London: Sage / The Open University. Harris, R. & B. Rampton (eds.). 2003. The language, ethnicity and race reader. London: Routledge. Heath, S. 1982. What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society 11(1). 49–76. Heath, S. 1983. Ways with words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hymes, D. 1996. Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality. London: Taylor and Francis. Labov, W. 1969. The logic of non-standard English. In J. Alatis (ed.), Georgetown monographs on language and linguistics 22, 1–22, 26–31. Washington: Georgetown Press. Lave, J. & E. Wenger. 1991. Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, G.. 1997. Repositioning class: Social inequality in industrial societies. London: Sage. McDermott, R. & K. Gospodinoff. 1981. Social contexts for ethnic borders and school failure. In H. Trueba, G. Guthrie and G. Au (eds.), Culture and the bilingual classroom, 212–236. Rowley: Newbury House. (Also in Harris & Rampton [eds.] 2003: 276–290.) Ortner, S. 1991. Reading America: Preliminary notes on class and culture. In R. Fox (ed.), Recapturing anthropology: Working in the present, 164–189. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Pratt, M. L. 1987. Linguistic utopias. In N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant & C. McCabe (eds.), The linguistics of writing, 48–66. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Preece, S. 2009. Post talk: language and identity in higher education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rampton, B. 2005. Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents, 2nd edn. Manchester: St Jerome Press. Rampton, B. 2006. Language in late modernity: Interaction in an urban school. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, B. Forthcoming. Style contrasts, migration and social class. Journal of Pragmatics. Rampton, B., R. Harris, J. Collins & J. Blommaert. 2008. Language, class and education. In S. May & N. Hornberger (eds.), Encyclopedia of language and education, Volume 1, 71–82. New York: Springer.

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Reay, D. 1998. Rethinking social class: Qualitative perspectives on class and gender. Sociology 32(2). 259–275. Rosen, H. 1972. Language and class: A critical look at the theories of Basil Bernstein. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. Rosen, H. 1985. The voices of communities and language in classrooms: A review of Ways with Words. Harvard Educational Review 55(4). 448–456. Savage, M. 2003. A new class paradigm? British Journal of Sociology of Education 24(4). 535–541. Savage, M. 2005. Working-class identities in the 1960s. Sociology 39(5). 929–946. Savage, M. 2007. An alternative history of class identities in post-war Britain. ESRC Identities and Social Action Programme Public Lecture, London Metropolitan University, 7 March. Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of class and gender. London: Sage. Thompson, E. P. 1978. The poverty of theory and other essays. London: Merlin. Tizard, B., M. Hughes, H. Carmichael & G. Pinkerton. 1988. Language and social class: Is verbal deprivation a myth? In N. Mercer (ed.), Language and literacy from an educational perspective, 4–15. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Trudgill, P. 1975. Accent, dialect and the school. London: Arnold. Wells, G. 1981. Learning through interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, R. 1977. Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willis, P. 1977. Learning to labour: How working class kids get working class jobs. Farnborough: Saxon House. Woolard, K. 1985. Language variation and cultural hegemony: Toward an integration of sociolinguistic and social theory. American Ethnologist 12. 738–748. Zimmerman, D. 1998. Discourse identities and social identities. In C. Antaki & S. Widdicombe (eds.), Identities in talk, 87–106. London: Sage. Ben Rampton is Professor of Applied and Sociolinguistics and Director of the Centre for Language Discourse and Communication at King’s College London. He does interactional sociolinguistics, and his interests cover urban multilingualism, ethnicity, class, youth and education. He is the author of Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents (Longman 1995 / St Jerome 2005) and Language in late modernity: Interaction in an urban school (Cambridge University Press 2006), and a co-author of Researching language: Issues of power and method (Routledge 1992). He has also edited or co-edited The language, ethnicity and race reader (Routledge 2003), Working papers in urban language and literacy (www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc), and special issues of Journal of Sociolinguistics (3[4] 1999; 11[5] 2007), International Journal of Applied Linguistics (7[1] 1997), Critique of Anthropology (21[1] and [2] 2001) and Pragmatics (13[1] 2003). He is currently Director of ’Ethnography Language and Communication’, a three-year research training program designed for social scientists UK-wide (www.rdielc.org.uk), and he is convener of the UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum (www.lingethnog.org.uk).

Reading Derrida: Language, identity and violence1 TIM MCNAMARA

Abstract This article offers a reading of a major text on language by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, and considers its relevance, and Derrida’s work more generally, to the concerns of applied linguistics. Derrida’s argument about the necessarily conflicted nature of identity and its relationship to language has implications for work in many areas of applied linguistics, especially bilingualism, language attitudes, language maintenance and shift, the role of English as a global language, theories of motivation in language learning and current debates over nationality and citizenship. Keywords: language and identity; Derrida; poststructuralist theory; applied linguistics; mother tongue.

1. Introduction: Reading Derrida This paper argues for the relevance to applied linguistics of the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) by offering a reading of a text of his on language and identity, Monolingualism of the Other (Derrida 1998), and considering its relevance to a range of issues in applied linguistics. Derrida’s work is relatively little cited in applied linguistics,2 which is on the face of it surprising given that language is a persistent focus of his work. His discussion of spoken and written language in his definitive early text, Of Grammatology (Derrida 1976), together with the work of his mid-career on the linguistic pragmatics of the philosophers Austin and Searle (Derrida 1988), would alone provide a basis for claiming that Derrida was one of the most important theorists of language of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He addresses the specific issue of the relation of language and identity in several places in his work, particularly, as

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we shall see in this paper, in his writing about himself as a speaker of French, but also for example in his discussion of the linguistic and cultural identity of the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan as a speaker of German writing in German about the Holocaust (Derrida 2005). There are a number of reasons for the relative unfamiliarity of Derrida’s work, perhaps largely a question of its difficulty for the applied linguistics reader. First is the fact that Derrida is of course not a linguist but a philosopher, and draws heavily on the philosophical tradition of both the Greeks and the philosophers of the Enlightenment. That should itself not be a problem, as the work of philosophers writing in English such asAustin and Searle have been important in applied linguistics. As a philosopher, he is not of course part of the Anglo-American analytic tradition, and must be read in relation to the philosophical tradition known in the English-speaking world as Continental Philosophy; he draws in particular on the work of Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas. Secondly, Derrida engages not only with the work of philosophers but with a wide range of nonphilosophers: Marx in political theory, de Saussure in linguistics, Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Freud and Lacan in psychoanalysis, Mallarm´e, Joyce, Jab`es and Celan in literature (in several languages), to name just a few. Thirdly, there is his style – poetic, meticulous, allusive, full of extended metaphors, rapidly shifting, and characterized by puns and paradoxes. And finally, his own texts consist of exacting readings of the texts of other thinkers, and assume in the reader a close familiarity with the original text – which may of course be lacking. In Of Grammatology, for example, a series of brilliant discussions of language, he offers careful readings of texts by Saussure, Rousseau and Levi-Strauss. Sometimes, the work of more than one thinker is the subject of commentary at the same time. The breadth and depth of Derrida’s erudition and familiarity with work in many linguistic and cultural traditions can be daunting. Perhaps because of the demands that his texts place on the reader, Derrida’s relation to the tradition of earlier thought is often misunderstood. The term deconstruction, the philosophy with which his name is synonymous, is associated in the popular imagination with a debunking or negative pulling apart, but in fact it is better captured by the term close reading. Such a reading shows at the same time as a spirit of interrogation a deep appreciation of and respect for the source text. The philosopher Judith Butler, in her published remarks at the time of Derrida’s death in October 2004, comments on this aspect of his work: These are authors that he could not do without, ones with whom and through whom he thinks. He writes only because he reads, and he reads only because there are these authors to read time and again. He “owes” them something or, perhaps, everything, if only because he could not write without them; their writing exists

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as the precondition of his own; their writing constitutes the means through which his own writing voice is animated and secured. (Butler 2004: 32)

A further misunderstanding of deconstruction is that it is at bottom nihilistic or at least in a limiting way relativist, or worse, apolitical. In fact Derrida, as I will show, is a profoundly ethical thinker, whose larger project can be seen as a sustained interrogation and revealing of the conceptual and intellectual underpinnings of violence in modernity. What is also clear is Derrida’s sustained interest in language as part of this problem of violence. The frequent (mis)conception of deconstruction as being about playfulness and irresponsibility could not be farther from the truth. Given then the relevance, but also the difficulty, of Derrida’s texts, how can we begin to approach them? Derrida is at his most accessible in interviews, but also and in particular when he reflects on the facts of his own autobiography, which he did in a number of texts, particularly towards the end of his career.3 These essays are not mere reminiscences but close meditations on the facts of his experience: his life becomes, as it were, the text he is deconstructing. This paper, then, offers a reading of a text on language and identity, Monolingualism of the Other, published in French in 1996 and in English in 1998. I begin with an overview of the argument of the book and its historical context, before discussing its themes in detail, and conclude by considering its specific relevance to applied linguistics.4 2. Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other In Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida uses an account of the violent and contradictory social forces central to the formation of his own identity as the occasion for a general reflection on linguistic and cultural identity and its relationship to violence. Born into a Sephardi Jewish family in colonial Algeria in 1930, he and his family suffered under the Vichy administration of Algeria during the war; his experience of colonialism and anti-Semitism in the formation of his identity as a speaker of French is the subject of the book. But the significance of the discussion goes well beyond this setting. His argument applies to all of us: our mother tongue is not our own, but is the language of the Other. Further, this means that to the extent that one’s mother tongue is an aspect of identity, this identity is always of the Other. While this becomes unavoidably clear for linguistic and cultural groups who find themselves the target of overt violence, it has a universal application. The title of the book needs explanation in relation to the political and cultural history of Algeria, the society into which Derrida was born. Algeria forms

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part of the larger area of North Africa known as the Maghreb. Berber people were among the early settlers of the Maghreb (certainly by 3000 bc); Berbers still make up approximately 20% of the population of the country, and speak a range of Berber languages including Kabyle. The majority of Algerians (around 80%) are Arabs, who first settled the Maghreb in the 600s ad and developed their own Maghrebian variety of Arabic. The Arab settlement of Algeria also saw the development of a small Jewish community5 who spoke a Jewish ethnolect of Arabic known as Judaeo-Arabic; this community was supplemented after 1492 with Jews expelled from Spain, who brought with them a Jewish ethnolect of Spanish known as Ladino. Combined, the various Jewish ethnic communities constituted by 1931, the year after Derrida was born, less than 2% of the population of Algeria (the proportion at colonization may have been less than this). The linguistic environment in which Derrida found himself as a child was formed within the context of colonialism. Algeria had begun to be colonized by the French in 1830. The explicit ideology of this colonization saw itself as bringing the fruits of the French revolution to other peoples, and thus as liberal and welcoming. This was expressed in various ways, including the encouragement to learn and use French, and the extension of certain civil liberties, specific products of the French revolution, to the colonial setting. As a result, French became the sole official language, the sole medium of education and the sole language of administration. The colonial language policy also meant that languages other than French were effectively, although not technically, forbidden in the education system and in public life. In this sense, according to Derrida, the “unilateral imposition of [a] ‘politics’ of language” was “disguised under alibis of ‘universal’ humanism, and . . . of the most generous hospitality” (1998: 39). The policy favoring French led, for example, to the absurdity that Arabic, the language of the vast majority of the population, was not recognized in public life, and was taught as if it were a foreign language like English or German; other minority languages, such as Berber or the Jewish ethnolects (the vernaculars Judaeo-Arabic, Judaeo-Berber and Ladino, and Hebrew, the written language of religion) had no place in public life. Derrida comments on the damaging impact of the colonial language policy on the indigenous communities of Algeria (and I think we can see many parallels to this in other situations of liberal domination): When access to a language is forbidden, nothing – no gesture, no act – is forbidden. One forbids access to speech, that is all, a certain kind of speech. But that is precisely the fundamental interdiction . . . . This limit was never set down, enacted either as an act of law – an official decree, a sentence – or like a physical, natural or organic barrier . . . . We had the

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choice, the formal right, to learn or not learn Arabic or Berber. Or Hebrew. It was not illegal, or a crime . . . . The interdict worked therefore through other ways. More subtle, peaceful, silent, and liberal ways . . . . In the manner of permitting and giving, for, in principle, everything was given, or at any rate permitted. (1998: 32)

Derrida grew up as a specific kind of colonial subject in Algeria: as a member of the indigenous Sephardi Jewish community in Algiers. The word Sephardi comes from the Hebrew word for Spain (Sfarad), and represents one of the two broad cultural traditions of Jewish life (the other, Ashkenazi, deriving from central and eastern Europe). All Jews and Muslims who refused to convert to Christianity were expelled from Spain in 1492 and spread throughout the Ottoman Empire, including in North Africa, the Jews bringing Ladino with them. The term Sephardi was then extended to refer to all Jews living in the Muslim world, even if they were not originally from Spain; i.e. it was extended to members of the ancient Jewish communities in Arab countries who spoke Jewish ethnolects of Arabic known collectively as Judaeo-Arabic. The tiny indigenous Jewish community of Algeria thus had a tradition of speaking Ladino or JudaeoArabic, although this had been lost in the generation preceding Derrida’s birth. This community had benefited from one of the fruits of the Revolution extended to colonized peoples, the granting of French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria in 1870. This Republican tradition in favor of civil rights for Jews was not matched in other spheres of French public life, which remained very divided in its attitudes to Jews, as the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s made painfully evident. Despite these ominous signs, the Algerian Jews responded to the gesture of citizenship by enthusiastically assimilating in a way which Derrida characterizes as “profound, rapid, zealous, and spectacular. In two generations” (1998: 17). One of the casualties of this assimilation was the loss of the traditional Jewish vernaculars. This, and the effective interdict against Arabic, meant that the indigenous Jews of Derrida’s generation were monolinguals – speakers of French. And then in 1940, following the occupation of France by Nazi forces, the Jews of Algeria were abruptly deprived of their French citizenship and many other rights. Derrida and his family experienced this directly, as he explains in a later text: When state anti-Semitism was unleashed in Algeria, in 1940–42, my father was grateful to his employers for protecting us, for keeping him in their service, whereas they could simply have fired this Jewish employee, as some people were urging them to do, and as they had the legal right to do. I felt humiliated to see him overflowing with respectful gratitude to these people for whom he had worked for forty years and who generously ‘consented’ to ‘keep him on’. (Derrida and Roudinesco 2004: 108)

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Derrida, who was in early adolescence during this period, was expelled from school as a result of these measures: I was expelled from the Ben Aknoun high school in 1942, and beyond any anonymous ‘administrative’ measure, which I didn’t understand at all and which no one explained to me, the wound was of another order, and it never healed: the daily insults from the children, my classmates, the kids in the street, and sometimes threats or blows aimed at the ‘dirty Jew’, which, I might say, I came to see in myself . . . . (Derrida and Roudinesco 2004: 109)

The result was the painful realization that Derrida’s Self was constituted in the discourse and language of the Other. He expresses this idea as a paradox: ‘I only have one language; it is not mine.’ I am monolingual. My monolingualism . . . feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me. . . . This monolingualism is me . . . I would not be myself outside it. It constitutes me . . . Yet it will never be mine, this language . . . . (Derrida 1998: 1–2)

However, in a later commentary on this text, he argues again for its significance beyond the immediate context of his autobiographical narrative. When I say “I only have one language: it is not mine”, such a statement defies common sense and is self-contradictory. Such a contradiction is not someone’s personal heartrending contradiction but a contradiction inscribed within the possibility of language. Without this contradiction there would be no language. I believe, therefore, that one must endure it . . . . (Derrida 2005: 104)

The complex and paradoxical argument of the book introduces a number of concepts and themes which, I will argue, are highly relevant and productive for issues central to the discussion of the relationship of language and identity in applied linguistics. In the next section, I will attempt to explicate how the text supports the following propositions, which have important implications for such discussions: 1. Subjectivity involves a relation to the Other (and its language). 2. Subjectivity involves desire in relation to the Other (and its language). 3. Deconstruction can be understood as the subject rewriting the language of the Other.

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3. Subjectivity and the relation to the other (and its language) Derrida does not use the term subjectivity, a term more familiar in the work of Foucault (e.g. Foucault 1977), but rather continues to use the terms identity and identification. For Derrida, identity is ‘disordered’: To be a Franco-Maghrebian, one ‘like myself’, is not . . . a surfeit or richness of identities, attributes, or names. In the first place, it would rather betray a disorder of identity [trouble d’identit´e ]. (Derrida 1998: 14)

What are the features of this disorder? First, and crucially, identity is dependent on identification by the Other, that is, on the terms in which one is recognized or identified. The input of the Other into the formation of consciousness is the subject of a famous passage of Hegel, the discussion of the Lord and Bondsman in Phenomenology of the Spirit (Hegel 1977). Judith Butler (1999) traces the powerful role of this passage in French intellectual life following Koj`eve’s influential lectures on Hegel in Paris in the 1930s, which were attended by Sartre, De Beauvoir, Lacan, and those who were some years later to teach philosophy to Foucault and Derrida.6 The relevance of the Hegelian tradition here is that the Algerian Jewish case illustrates how subjectivity is constructed through the terms in which one is recognized by the Other. Recognition or identification of the indigenous Jews of Algeria by the French Other occurred at two quite distinct moments, in 1870 and again in 1940, and their impact was contradictory. Even separately, however, in their different ways each of these recognitions created a ‘disorder of identity’. First, the granting of citizenship to the indigenous Jews of Algeria in 1870 extended the recognition represented by French citizenship to this previously ‘unrecognized’ group. This led to a transformation in their identity, involving an enthusiastic assimilation, which Derrida describes critically in the following terms: Since the end of the last century, with the granting of French citizenship, assimilation, as we say, and acculturation – the feverish bid for a ‘Frenchifying’ which was also an embourgoisification – were so frantic and so careless that the inspiration of Jewish culture seemed to succumb to an asphyxia: a state of apparent death, a ceasing of respiration, a fainting fit, a cessation of the pulse . . . . (Derrida 1998: 53)

The assimilation even affected the outward appearance of religious practices: Social and religious behaviour, even Jewish rituals themselves, were tainted . . . . The churches were being mimicked, the rabbi would wear a black cassock, and the verger [chemasch] a Napoleonic cocked hat; the ‘bar mitzvah’ was called communion, and circumcision was named ‘baptism’. (Derrida 1998: 54)

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Worse, the younger generation of Jews such as Derrida even began to see Jewish religious practices negatively through Christian eyes. The influence on his attitudes he describes as: . . . an insidious Christian contamination: the respectful belief in inwardness, the preference for intention, the heart, the mind, mistrust with respect to literalness . . . in short, a denunciation, so conventional, of Pharasaism. (Derrida 1998: 54)

This assimilation led to these younger Jews of Derrida’s generation living in a sort of no-man’s-land of identity: They could not properly identify themselves, in the double sense of ‘identifying oneself’ and ‘identifying oneself with’ the other. They could not identify themselves in terms of the models, norms, or values whose development was to them alien because French, metropolitan, Christian, and Catholic . . . . But being already strangers to the roots of French culture, even if that was their only acquired culture, their only educational instruction, and, especially, their only language, being strangers, still more radically, for the most part, to Arab or Berber culture, the greater majority of these young ‘indigenous Jews’ remained, in addition, strangers to Jewish culture; a strangely bottomless alienation of the soul: a catastrophe; others will also say a paradoxical opportunity. (Derrida 1998: 52)

This disordered identity was also reflected in language affiliation in terms of a mother tongue. For the indigenous Jews, monolingualism (in French) was the norm. Because of the ‘interdict’ represented by French language policy, Arabic was not available: These young indigenous Jews could easily identify neither with the ‘Catholics’ [the term used for all Christians], the Arabs, nor the Berbers, whose language they did not generally speak in that generation. Two generations before them, some of their grandparents still spoke Arabic, at least a certain form of Arabic. (Derrida 1998: 52)

Jewish languages were no longer available, either: As for language in the strict sense, we could not even resort to some familiar substitute, to some idiom internal to the Jewish community, to any sort of language of refuge that, like Yiddish, would have ensured an element of intimacy, the protection of a ‘home-of-one’s-own’[un ‘chez-soi’] against the language of official culture, a second auxiliary in different socio-semiotic situations. ‘Ladino’was not spoken in the Algeria I knew, especially not in the big cities like Algiers, where the Jewish population happened to be concentrated. (Derrida 1998: 54–55)

Abruptly, however, in 1940, the indigenous Jews of Algeria were re-recognized or re-identified, this time in very different terms. Suddenly, they were no longer recognized as French citizens, but were identified exclusively in terms of their

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(violently stigmatized) Jewishness. Derrida is careful to establish that this was the expression of a specifically French anti-Semitism:7 The withdrawal of French citizenship from the Jews of Algeria, with everything that followed, was the deed of the French alone. They decided that all by themselves, in their heads; they must have been dreaming about it all along; they implemented it all by themselves . . . . It was a Franco-French operation, one ought to say an act of French Algeria in the absence of any German occupation. One never saw a German uniform in Algeria. No alibi, denial, or illusion is possible: it was impossible to transfer the responsibility of that exclusion upon an occupying alien. (Derrida 1998: 16–17)

Derrida links his experience at that time to the issue of his identity as a French speaker: I was very young at the time, and I certainly did not understand very well . . . what citizenship and loss of citizenship meant to say. But I do not doubt that exclusion – from the school reserved for young French citizens – could have a relationship to the disorder of identity of which I was speaking to you a moment ago. I do not doubt either that such ‘exclusions’ come to leave their mark upon this belonging or non-belonging of language, this affiliation to language, this assignation to what is peacefully called a language. (Derrida 1998: 16–17)

In summary, processes of recognition by the Other were critical in shaping the identity, the language behavior and language attitudes of the community to which Derrida belonged. Moreover, this identity was shaped in a contradictory fashion. Recognition came first as ‘recognition as like’ (inclusion, leading to cultural and linguistic assimilation and alienation from traditional and local cultures and languages) and then without warning it became ‘recognition as unlike’ (rejection and exclusion, leading to another more obvious kind of alienation). In each case, the process of subjection and subjectification of the indigenous Jews of Algeria in these very different terms of recognition – ‘silent, peaceful’ assimilation on the one hand, violent anti-Semitism on the other – created a subject that was vulnerable in different ways. Each process contributed to the ‘disorder of identity’ which is the theme of Derrida’s text.

4. Subjectivity and desire in relation to the other (and its language) The account so far, however, would tend to suggest the essential passivity and receptiveness of the subject in these processes of recognition. But this is a misrepresentation, as there is another, compounding factor: the Other which identifies or recognizes the subject is itself the object of the subject’s desire.

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Desire here refers to a range of complex, even contradictory feelings: on the one hand passionate attachment, even physical desire, and on the other shame, pain, anger, and the desire to hurt. French, the only language that the community knows, as the embodiment of the Other, becomes the focus of desire in this sense. Thus, Derrida speaks of “an impulse of love and aggression toward the body of [French]” (Derrida 1998: 66), “one of these impulses of revenge out of which I here shape my theme” (Derrida 1998: 51), scandalously claiming that he both suffers and takes pleasure in8 his paradoxical relationship to the language: You at once appreciate the source of my sufferings, the place of my passions, my desires, my prayers, the vocation of my hopes, since this language runs right across them all . . . . I wonder if one can love, enjoy oneself [jouir], pray, die from pain, or just die, plain and simple, in another language or without telling anyone about it, even without speaking at all. But above all, and this is the double edge of a sharp sword that I wished to confide to you almost without saying a word: I suffer and take pleasure in [jouis de] what I am telling you in our aforementioned common language: ‘Yes, I only have one language; yet it is not mine.’ (Derrida 1998: 2)

He describes his discovery as a young man of philosophy and literature in French in terms of love and pain, of desire experienced as penetration: Several years later . . . I seemed to be harpooned by French philosophy and literature . . . wooden or metallic darts [fl`eches], a penetrating body of enviable, formidable and inaccessible words even when they were entering me . . . . (Derrida 1998: 50)

In an extraordinary passage Derrida talks of making deconstructive love to French: What dream? Not that of harming the language (there is nothing I respect and love as much), not that of endangering it or injuring it . . . But the dream . . . was perhaps to make something happen to this language. The desire to make it arrive here, by making something happen to it . . . something so intimate that it would no longer even be in the position to protest . . . so intimate that it cannot oppose it . . . something so intimate that it comes to take pleasure in it as in itself, at the time it loses itself by finding itself . . . at the time when an incomprehensible guest, a newcomer without assignable origin, would make the said language come to him, forcing the language then to speak itself by itself, in another way, in his language. To speak by itself. But for him, and on his terms, keeping in her body the ineffaceable archive of this event: not necessarily an infant but a tattoo . . . . (Derrida 1998: 51–52)

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It is not possible to do justice here to the theme of desire in subjectivity. It is a central theme in the work of Judith Butler (her thesis on the reception of Hegel in twentieth century France is entitled Subjects of Desire [Butler 1999]). In her books on gender and sexuality (Butler 1990, 1993), and in her later work on subjectivity (for example, Butler 1997, 2005) Butler’s project is to explore, using psychoanalytic theory, the psychic processes necessarily involved if the power represented by discourses (Foucault) or ideologies (Althusser) is to create the subject. The subject cannot exist prior to the process of subjectification; it is not just a tabula rasa on which is inscribed the subject positions determined by the operation of power. Suffice it to say here that Derrida is close to this view; the subject constituted through the power of the Other is involved in a relationship of desire with the Other which in this case complicates the relationship to the Other’s language. The option for Derrida is not simply to reject French (and remember he had no other language to turn to) but to critically re-work its significance for him by revealing that significance to itself and in the process in a sense re-inventing it – or deconstructing it.

5. Deconstruction as the subject rewriting the language of the other Derrida’s project of ‘deconstruction’ – the questioning of the linguistic, cultural and philosophical traditions of modernity in the context of the violence of Western culture as exemplified by colonialism and the Holocaust – can thus be understood as Derrida’s response to the dilemma, the disorder of identity, that I have outlined in the previous two sections. Derrida explicitly links the argument about language in Monolingualism of the Other to the project of deconstruction, which is at once a philosophical project and a reworking of Derrida’s problematic relationship with French: This debate with monolingualism will have been nothing other than a piece of deconstructive writing [´ecriture]. Such writing always attacks the body of this language, my only language, and . . . the philosophical tradition that supplies us with the reservoir of concepts that I definitely have to use . . . . (Derrida 1998: 59) Yes, by this word e´ criture we would indicate, among other things, a certain mode of loving9 and desperate appropriation of language and through it of a forbidding as well as a forbidden speech (for me, the French language was both) . . . the loving and jealous vengeance . . . which attempts to restore the language and believes it is at the same time reinventing it, finally giving it a form (deforming, reforming and transforming it), making it pay the price of the interdict . . . . (Derrida 1998: 32–33)

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Having no other language, he will show the Other what its language means, what it is saying, by critically examining its very vocabulary – ‘fraternity’, ‘brotherhood’, the ‘mother tongue’ – and in a sense turning the language on itself. . . . ‘My mother tongue’ is what they say, is what they speak; as for me, I cite and question them. I ask them in their own language . . . if they indeed know what they are saying and what they are talking about. Especially when, so lightly, they celebrate ‘fraternity’. At bottom, brothers, the mother tongue, and so forth pose the same problem. It is a bit as if I was awakening them to tell them: ‘Listen, pay attention, now that is enough, you must wake up . . . . One day, you will see that what you are calling your mother tongue will no longer even respond to you.’ (Derrida 1998: 33)

What is the general significance of this autobiographical text? In certain respects, his singular experience raises the general issue, discussed in parts of this text, and in other work, of the complex dilemmas of other assimilated European Jewish intellectuals prior to and following the Nazi period, including Rozenzweig, Sholem, Arendt, Celan and Kafka, and their relationships to Yiddish, Hebrew and German. One of the strongest impulses behind Derrida’s work as a whole, including his concerns in relation to forgiveness and hospitality (Derrida 2001; Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000), seems to me to be his position as an assimilated, secular Jewish intellectual in Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. Its violence, a violence of identity, is a fundamental challenge for all of us who wish to remain working within the European intellectual tradition. More generally, however, the paradox of Derrida’s relationship to French is characteristic of the way in which, throughout his writing, he draws out the simultaneous presence of apparent opposites, often in order to challenge what are seen as binary distinctions (for example, between speech and writing in Of Grammatology). One such binary is the distinction between inside and outside (e.g. in the discussion of the pharmakon in Plato’s Pharmacy [Derrida 1981]). This critique perhaps becomes clearer when we understand it in the context of Derrida’s life, where he is both insider and outsider, writing on the inside of language from outside, bringing the outside of language inside language. Here, the paradox of Derrida’s relationship to French carries with it an emotional burden (of alienation, of an undermining on one’s personhood, of the inward psychological impact of cultural violence). One’s innermost sense of linguistic and cultural identity is experienced as a contradiction – more, as an experience of violence. This is why Derrida’s narrative has implications quite beyond the particular context of which he is speaking. In his words:

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I knew that what I was saying in The Monolingualism of the Other was valid to a certain extent for my individual case, to wit, a generation of Algerian Jews before the Independence. But it also had the value of a universal exemplarity, even for those who are not in such historically strange and dramatic situations as . . . mine. I would venture to claim that the analysis is valid even for someone whose experience of his own mother tongue is sedentary, peaceful, and without any historical drama. (Derrida 2005: 101)

Thus the point here is not about a particular language (French) as such, nor about colonialism, nor even about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, but about the violence within cultural discourses constituted through language, including within monolingual contexts. In summary, then, Derrida’s project in relation to French is both singular and universal, a theme he elaborates in different parts of the text. In interpreting his disorder of identity in terms of this broader deconstructive project, Derrida is providing the basis for his assertion that all of us have a relation to the mother tongue as problematic as his, even when we are not aware of it; language, as he says, is always of the Other. In spite of appearances, this exceptional situation is, at the same time, certainly exemplary of a universal structure; it represents or reflects a type of originary ‘alienation’ that institutes every language as the language of the other. (Derrida 1998: 63)

6. Derrida and applied linguistics I have tried in this reading of the text to give a feeling for the richness, the complexity and the provocative quality of Derrida’s writing in relation to language. But how relevant is this work and the issues it raises to our concerns within applied linguistics? First, Derrida’s work contributes to the ongoing work of re-thinking our assumptions about ‘mother tongue’ within linguistics and applied linguistics. While the privileging of the native speaker is under considerable challenge, particularly in work on English as a lingua franca (Seidlhofer 2005, 2006, 2009; Seidlhofer et al. 2006), the ‘mother tongue’largely retains the romantic and positively charged aura given it within 19th century writings on German nationalism, whose toxic legacy has so clearly been demonstrated by Chris Hutton in his Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother tongue fascism, race and the science of language (Hutton 1999). Mother tongue is also a key and relatively unexamined concept in work on language maintenance and shift, and is ripe for critique, a process which has now commenced (Cameron 2007; Block 2008). Wiley’s trou-

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bling analysis of the ideology of research on mother tongue maintenance in the work of Heinz Kloss (Wiley 2002), central to so much that has followed in the sociology of language, is a case in point. Derrida provides a general theoretical basis for critique of the notion of the mother tongue. He contributes a general troubling of the assumed security and privileging that the mother tongue appears to offer by insisting that our relationship to the mother tongue is necessarily an experience of colonization; and that the resulting allegiance is open to question and indeed resistance if the experience of such colonization is recognized as psychologically or literally violent. The embrace of another language may be seen as a form of resistance, although it too will necessarily involve the experience of a secondary colonization. Thus even bilingualism or multilingualism offer no escape from the monolingualism of the Other – they involve simply a proliferation of monolingualisms. Second, Derrida’s account of his relationship to French is clearly relevant to the debate about the spread of English as an international language.10 Certainly there is material in this book to support the perspective that sees the spread of English in terms of linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 1992). But by extending the notion of colonialism to include all culture, and all language, including the mother tongue, Derrida makes a radical extension of the notion of linguistic imperialism in such a way as to complicate the notion of resistance to it: I would not like to make too easy use of the word ‘colonialism’. All culture is originarily colonial. Every culture institutes itself through the unilateral imposition of some ‘politics’ of language. Mastery begins, we know, through the power of naming, of imposing and legitimating appellations. (Derrida 1998: 39)

Moreover, the role of desire in the relation to the colonising Other complicates the situation further, as we have seen. Derrida thus provides a theoretical basis for those views of the cultural politics of the spread of English which are informed by poststructuralism and which are critical of simplistic accounts of linguistic imperialism (Pennycook 1995, 2001). He does so by removing the possibility of simple opposition between colonizing and colonized languages: there are no ‘good’ and ‘bad’ languages. Similarly, the notion of attachment to the colonizing language cannot simply be rejected as perverse. We are reminded of Achebe’s often-cited remark: “Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English for we intend to do unheard of things with it.” (Achebe 1988: 50) Third, in much work in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics on multilingualism, there is a celebratory emphasis on hybridity and hybrid identities. Derrida’s account of the hybridity of Jewish culture in Algeria, however, emphasises its vulnerability.

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To be a Franco-Maghrebian, one ‘like myself’, is not . . . a surfeit or richness of identities, attributes, or names. In the first place, it would rather betray a disorder of identity [trouble d’identit´e ]. (Derrida 1998: 14)

In other words, for Derrida being located at the intersection of two cultures does not represent a place of rest or abundance; rather it is a site at which the violence of the conflict between the cultures is experienced, resulting in an inner conflict which is irresolvable. We can surely learn from this perspective, so that the psychological and literal violence of the social, political and cultural context is fully countenanced in discussions of multiple linguistic identity. Fourth, the centrality of desire in Derrida’s account of his relationship to French strongly suggests that accounts of identity in language learning need to find a place for desire. While this is beginning to be explored within work on emotions and language learning (Pavlenko 2005, 2006) and in other areas of applied linguistics, particularly language and sexuality (Cameron and Kulick 2003), we need as a field to engage more deeply with the challenging and complex theories of desire that Derrida and Butler (e.g. Butler 1997) offer us. This will provide a more appropriate theoretical basis for work within a variety of areas in applied linguistics, including an opportunity to re-think the old chestnut of motivation in second language learning. Motivation as conceptualized within second language acquisition is socially theoretical in only a shallow way; the classic formulation for example of the distinction between instrumental and integrative motivation (Gardner and Lambert 1959) does not properly theorize the painfully conflicted intergroup context within which it was formulated, and discussions within that tradition have continued to be relatively asocial (McNamara 1997). Derrida reminds us how complex and conflicted the desire to be considered part of the polity of the Other may be. Furthermore, studies of integrative motivation do not typically conceptualise motivation as passionate, and as touching the deepest unconscious feelings of the individual, a perspective that is now being opened up in the work of Pavlenko, as stated above. Fifth, in recent work on the social and political functions of language tests (McNamara and Roever 2006) I have explored the notion of language tests as being tests of identity (McNamara 2005). The emblematic example here is the biblical story of the shibboleth, in which a particular ethnically marked pronunciation of a word was used as identifying the boundary between insider and outsider, with violent consequences for those identified as outsiders. The shibboleth is frequently used as a metaphor for the social/political function of tests as instruments of social control in situations of intergroup conflict and competition. Derrida’s own discussion of the shibboleth in texts on the contradictory relationship of the poet Paul Celan to his native German in the aftermath of

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the Holocaust (Derrida 2005) stresses its paradoxical character: he speaks of “The terrifying ambiguity of the shibboleth, sign of belonging and threat of discrimination . . . ” (Derrida 2005: 27). This is helpful as a way of re-thinking the necessarily complex and contradictory impact of language tests, a priori neither necessarily good nor necessarily bad. Recent studies of the impact in different national settings of the OECD’s program of language testing of reading skills in the main national language (PISA) (McNamara in press; McNamara 2009) demonstrate the powerful impact of this test on the education systems in the countries concerned; nevertheless the impact is not always negative, and in some cases actually positive, and thus escapes or exceeds the intentions of the test’s architects. Language tests, we might argue, are Derridean undecidables. Finally, Derrida’s complex notions of identity as inherently contested and divided are relevant to debates on the politics of language, identity and citizenship in a time of globalization and transnational flows, particularly as research has shown how ideologies of national belonging are enforced through language tests for residence and citizenship (Extra et al. 2009; Hogan-Brun et al. 2009; McNamara and Shohamy 2008; Shohamy and McNamara 2009). In Derrida’s words: Our question is still identity. What is identity, this concept of which the transparent identity to itself is always dogmatically presupposed by so many debates on monoculturalism or multiculturalism, nationality, citizenship, and in general, belonging? (Derrida 1998: 14)

7. Conclusion This paper has given a reading of Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other in order to argue for the relevance of his thought and in particular his work on language to concerns within applied linguistics. These concerns include studies of language learning, language maintenance and shift, language attitudes, the spread of English as a global language, language testing, and debates on language and citizenship, to name just a few. If applied linguistics is a field which “mediates between theory and practice” and “makes abstract ideas and research findings accessible and relevant to the real world” (Kaplan and Widdowson 1992: 76), then it will constantly discover new sources of theory which are relevant to its concerns. But the work of Derrida as one such potential source is not to be appropriated easily. I am referring here not simply to its great difficulty, or the fact that it lies not within social science, but the humanities. Rather, the challenge is

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that its notions are profoundly and deliberately destabilizing and disruptive, requiring of us an imagination and a tolerance of paradox that our very practically oriented field may find difficult to sustain – to its own great cost. University of Melbourne

Notes 1. I wish to acknowledge the contribution of my colleague in French at Melbourne, Anne Freadman, to the development of the argument of this paper. 2. One recent exception is Ramanathan (2008). 3. Particularly in Monolingualism of the Other (1998), “Circumfession” in Bennington and Derrida 1993, For WhatTomorrow (Derrida and Roudinesco 2004), Counterpath (Derrida and Malabou 2004), and in interviews (Derrida 1995, 2002). Further biographical information is presented, with Derrida’s cooperation, in Bennington and Derrida (1993) and Cixous (2004). 4. Accessing Derrida is particularly difficult for a non-philosopher. I offer the following account of my own personal experience as a person without any philosophical training, in the hope that it might prompt others to consider similar approaches. I became interested in reading Derrida during a sabbatical leave I had in 2003. I was keen to return to work on language and identity, and particularly language and racism, after a gap of a few years, and knew that I needed to become better informed about contemporary social theory and its view of the subject and of subjectivity. During some time spent at UC Berkeley in April 2003, I learned of a small, mostly invitational conference on racism at UC Irvine at which Derrida would be present, and saw and heard him there. The conference, which was attended only by about 40 people, and in which all sessions were in plenary, was intended to bring together those working in postcolonial theory and those working in deconstruction to explore their sometimes sharp differences. Derrida was discussant to a paper by the French philosopher Etienne Balibar, and he used the occasion to reflect on many of the papers that had been presented that day. He was clear and very constructive, though his remarks on his own work proved controversial. On my return to my university I was invited by some postgraduate students, with whom I had been sitting in on a seminar on postcolonialism and postmodernism, to join a reading group they had set up. We initially read Frantz Fanon’s beautiful and moving Black Skins, White Masks (Fanon 1967), and then decided we were most interested in reading Derrida. A group of five of us met for two hours each week in the five years following. We read Of Grammatology (Derrida 1976), Writing and Difference (Derrida 1978), some individual essays on Walter Benjamin and Lacan, Spectres of Marx (Derrida 1994) and other texts. We would read about half a dozen pages at a time, or less – all we could manage, none of us being philosophers; we would read it more or less line by line. Altogether, it was one of the most invigorating intellectual experiences of my whole career.

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5. There is some evidence of a Judaeo-Berber community predating the arrival of the Arabs. 6. They were also influential for Althusser, who wrote a PhD on Hegel. 7. The extent of French anti-Semitism and cooperation with the Nazi authorities in Vichy France has been widely documented (Todorov 1996), most recently for example in Callil (2006). 8. The term Derrida uses, jouir de, suggests sexual pleasure. 9. This phrase reminds us that restoring the language is a work of desire, and this is reinforced later when he writes of “an impulse of love and aggression toward the body of any given language . . . ” (Derrida 1998: 66). 10. The book originated as a paper given at a conference in Louisiana on la Francophonie.

References Achebe, C. 1988. Hopes and impediments: Selected essays 1965–1987. London: Heinemann Bennington, G. & J. Derrida. 1993. Jacques Derrida. Geoffrey Bennington (trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Block, D. 2008. On the appropriateness of the metaphor of LOSS. In R. Rubdy & P. Tan (eds.), Trading language: Of global structures and local market places, 187–203. London: Continuum. Butler, J. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York & London: Routledge. Butler, J. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York & London: Routledge. Butler, J. 1997. The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, J. 1999. Subjects of desire: Hegelian reflections in twentieth-century France. New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, J. 2004. Jacques Derrida. London Review of Books 26(21). http://www.lrb.co. uk/v26/n21/butl02 .html (accessed 23 October 2006). Butler, J. 2005. Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Callil, C. 2006. Bad faith: A forgotten history of family and fatherland. London: Jonathan Cape. Cameron, D. 2007. Language endangerment and verbal hygiene: History, morality and politics. In A. Duchˆene & M. Heller (eds.), Discourses of Endangerment, 268–285. London: Continuum. Cameron, D. & D. Kulick. 2003. Language and sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cixous, H. 2004. Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a young Jewish saint, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Derrida, J. 1976. Of grammatology. G. C. Spivak (trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. 1978. Writing and difference. Alan Bass (trans.). London & New York: Routledge. Derrida, J. 1981. Dissemination. Barbara Johnson (trans.). London & New York: Routledge. Derrida, J. 1988. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. 1994. Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new International. Peggy Kamuf (trans.). New York & London: Routledge. Derrida, J. 1995. Points: Interviews 1974–1994. E. Weber (ed.). Peggy Kamuf (trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other; or, the prosthesis of origin. P. Mensah (trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. 2001. On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. M. Dooley & M. Hughes (trans.). London: Routledge. Derrida, J. 2002. Negotiations: Interventions and interviews, 1971–2001. Elizabeth N. Rottenberg (ed.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. 2005. Sovereignties in question: The poetics of Paul Celan. T. Dutoit & O. Pasanen (eds.). New York: Fordham University Press. Derrida, J. & A. Dufourmantelle. 2000. Of hospitality. R. Bowlby (ed.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. & C. Malabou. 2004. Counterpath: Travelling with Jacques Derrida. David Wills (trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. & E. Roudinesco. 2004. For what tomorrow . . . : A dialogue. J. Fort (trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Extra, G., M. Spotti & P. Van Avermaet (eds.). 2009. Language testing, migration and citizenship: Cross-national perspectives. London: Continuum. Fanon, F. 1967. Black skin, white masks. C. L. Markmann (trans.). New York: Grove Press. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. A. Sheridan (trans.). London: Allen Lane. Gardner, R. C. & W. E. Lambert. 1959. Motivational variables in second-language acquisition. Canadian Journal of Psychology 13. 266–272. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of spirit. A. V. Miller (trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hogan-Brun, G., C. Mar-Molinero & P. Stevenson (eds.). 2009. Discourses on language and integration: Critical perspectives on language testing regimes in Europe. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hutton, C. 1999. Linguistics and the Third Reich. Mother-tongue fascism, race and the science of language. London & New York: Routledge. Kaplan, R. B. & H. G. Widdowson. 1992. Applied linguistics. In W. Bright (ed.), International encyclopedia of linguistics, vol. 1, 76–80. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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McNamara, T. 1997. What do we mean by social identity? Competing frameworks, competing discourses. TESOL Quarterly 31(3). 561–567. McNamara, T. 2005. 21st century Shibboleth: Language tests, identity and intergroup conflict. Language Policy 4(4). 1–20. McNamara, T. 2009. Are cognitive and social perspectives on assessment incommensurable? The case of comparative assessment frameworks and language education. Plenary address, 1st Combined Conference, The Applied Linguistics Associations of New Zealand and Australia, Auckland, December. McNamara, T. In press . Measuring deficit. In C. N. Candlin & J. Crichton (eds.), Discourses of deficit. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McNamara, T. & C. Roever. 2006. Language testing: The social dimension. Malden, MA & Oxford: Blackwell. McNamara, T. & E. Shohamy. 2008. Language tests and human rights. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 18(1). 89–95. Pavlenko, A. 2005. Emotions and multilingualism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pavlenko, A. (ed.). 2006. Bilingual minds: Emotional experience, expression, and representation. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Pennycook, A. 1995. The cultural politics of English as an international language. London: Longman. Pennycook, A. 2001. Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. London: Routledge. Phillipson, R. 1992. Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramanathan, V. 2008. Applied linguistics redux: A Derridean analysis of Alzheimer life histories. Applied Linguistics 29(1). 1–23. Seidlhofer, B. 2005. Standard future or half-baked quackery? Descriptive and pedagogic bearings on the globalisation of English. In C. Gnutzmann & F. Intemann (eds.), Globalisation and the English language classroom, 155–169. Tübingen: Narr. Seidlhofer, B. 2006. English as a lingua franca in the expanding circle: What it isn’t. In R. Rubdy & M. Saraceni (eds.), English in the world: Global rules, global roles, 40–50. London: Continuum. Seidlhofer, B. 2009. Common ground and different realities: World Englishes and English as a lingua franca. World Englishes 28(2) [Special issue: Symposium, “Perspectives on Lingua Franca”]. 236–245. Seidlhofer, B., A. Breiteneder & M-L. Pitzl. 2006. English as a lingua franca in Europe. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 26. 1–34. Shohamy, E. & T. McNamara. 2009. Language tests for citizenship, immigration and asylum. Language Assessment Quarterly 6(1). 1–5. Todorov, T. 1996. A French tragedy: Scenes of civil war, summer 1944, trans. Mary Byrd Kelly, edited and annotated by Richard J. Golsan. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

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Wiley, T. G. 2002. Heinz Kloss revisited: National Socialist ideologue or champion of language-minority rights? International Journal of Sociology of Language 154. 83– 97. Tim McNamara is Professor in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. His interests include language testing, language and identity, poststructuralism, the history of applied linguistics, and languages for specific purposes. His recent publications include Language testing: The social dimension (Blackwell, 2006) and Language testing (OUP, 2000).

Engaging with human sociality: Thoughts on communication and embodiment* DAVID BLOCK

Abstract In introducing the term ‘human sociality’into the social sciences lexicon, scholars such as Levinson and Enfield attempt to bring together several emergent tendencies. First, what they propose is part of a general move in the study of communication away from a dominant focus on language (phonology, syntax, morphology and lexis). For some time now, the study of communication in terms of language has been complemented by a growing interest in pragmatics, i.e. the study of how individuals accomplish goals drawing on the communicative resources at their disposal in ways deemed legitimate and appropriate in sociocultural contexts. More recently, further additions to language have come to the fore in the study of communication, most notably the growing interest in the communicative resources deployed in different communicative contexts. In particular, there has been a good deal of work on how semiotic resources, such as facial expression, gaze, stance, position and so on, come together as semantic assemblages in ongoing communication. In addition, human sociality is about how human activity, and indeed the very being of human beings, is biologically grounded and cognitively mediated. Thus, in any understanding of the social, it is worth bearing in mind (1) how communicative resources are embodied, i.e. they are the evolving products of the human body’s interactions in physical and social spaces over a lifetime, and (2) how a theory of mind, i.e. individuals’ theories about how other minds work, is essential to the ongoing cooperative activity which affords the continued existence and survival of human beings. In this paper, I engage with issues like the ones just listed, situated under the general umbrella of human sociality. Keywords: Human sociality; communication; multimodality; embodiment; neurobiology.

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1. Introduction: Considering human sociality At the heart of the uniquely human way of life is our peculiarly intense, mentally mediated, and highly structured way of interacting with one another. This rests on participation in a common mental world, a world in which we have detailed expectations about what we share and do not share in the way of knowledge, intentions, and motivations. That itself relies both on communication (linguistic and otherwise) and on a level of cooperation unique in the animal world. This mode of cooperative, mentally-mediated interaction enables the accumulation of cultural capital and historical emergence of cultures. By inheriting a world of social organizations and values, individuals are released from reinventing the wheel. In turn, cultural capital shapes the style of interaction in local social groups, hiding shared commonalities behind the veil of distinct languages, cultural styles and different, social organizations. (Enfield and Levinson 2006: 1)

Thus begins Nick Enfield and Stephen Levinson’s introduction to their edited volume Roots of Human Sociality, an ambitious book published in 2006. I say ambitious for two primary reasons: first, because of its broadly humanistic and universalist approach to the study of human beings and their activity at a time when a generalized devotion to the local and particular has become prevalent in the social sciences (even if recently it is showing signs of intellectual and epistemological fatigue); and second, because it is an attempt to link what in the past have been fairly disparate and indeed at times antagonistic disciplines in the human sciences, such as developmental psychology and sociology, or biological anthropology and sociocultural anthropology. I come to this ambitious project as a newcomer and therefore in this paper my aim is to engage with what I think I understand about it, which is, for the moment, still relatively inchoate and far from being fully developed (but see Enfield [2009] for a further development of the overall concept). I see human sociality as above all, the bringing together of a good number of human sciences disciplines in an attempt to develop richer and more nuanced understandings of human behavior and activity. In the book introduction previously cited, Enfield and Levinson discuss several well developed areas of inquiry that they believe contribute to understandings of human sociality. First, they see as foundational to the enterprise the notion that human beings develop from early in life a Theory of Mind, which, put succinctly, is an understanding of how other minds work. Were it not for this Theory of Mind, individuals would not know where to start in their attempts to communicate with others. For example, small children must think that pointing at an object will, in some sense, be interpreted by an interlocutor as indicating the location of the object pointed at or even that the child desires to hold the object. For Enfield and Levinson, there is a need to accept Theory of Mind as foundational to communication; otherwise,

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all communication would have to be seen to occur against an empty backdrop of tabula rasa. Emerging from the Theory of Mind is an acceptance of the notion that communication norms exist, such as those captured in Gricean (Grice 1975) and Gricean-inspired pragmatics (e.g. Levinson 2000) and maxims of communication around the principle of cooperation. As with the Theory of Mind, the basic idea here is that human beings could get very little communicative work done if there were not shared socio-histories and repeated experiences serving as a backdrop to this communicative activity. With interaction at its core, it is not surprizing that micro-analysis is a big part of the study of human sociality. And here scholars ranging from Emmanuel Schegloff (e.g. 2006) in conversation analysis to Erving Goffman (e.g. 1981) and his more socially informed dissection of interaction find a home in a broad church. Conversation analysis examines the architecture of conversation at the surface level – openings and closings, turn taking, repair and so on – but not in terms of deeper cognition. And this leads Enfield and Levinson to acknowledge that its consequent incorporation into the study of human sociality might be seen to be in conflict with the more psychologically grounded notions of Theory of Mind. However, the common ground here is an attention to detail and micro-analysis. At the same time, by drawing on scholars such as Goffman, and notions such as footing and the animator/ author/principle triad, human sociality researchers manifest a more sociologically grounded approach to interaction, which, in turn, may be seen to be in conflict with both Theory of Mind and conversation analysis. However, once again the combination can be made to work if one manages to see different disciplines making up for analytical gaps in others. I have always wondered about the maxim in conversation analysis of sticking to the data at hand and only the data hand, while eschewing speculations about more abstract notions such as social class, unless such abstract notions are explicitly mentioned by participants in an interaction being examined. Equally, I have noted how sociologists all too often make reference to psychological notions, such as motives and intentions, without really explaining what their theory of cognition is or exactly how they see the workings of the human mind. Perhaps human sociality is a move toward recognizing and working through such fissures and gaps. In any case, the fact that human sociality is also an attempt to bring biological and sociocultural schools of anthropology together under one tent is certainly enough to get anyone’s attention. This, of course, is not an easy task. On the one hand, we have a consideration of Robin Dunbar’s (1996) evolutionary argument that language practices such as gossiping parallel the grooming activities displayed by primates. On the other hand, we have work in language socialization in which communication practices are deemed to be embedded in

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and emergent from the particularities of local cultures (e.g. Brice-Heath 1983). In conclusion, the human sociality project is broad, too broad in fact for any one author to go through every single constituent part of its edifice as matters stand at present. Indeed, my musings thus far have been partial to an extreme. However, they serve as a backdrop to this paper, which is to present my incursion into human sociality given my background and interests. I aim to proceed as follows. First, I align myself with a general move in the study of communication, away from an exclusive (or in any case dominant) focus on language, where language has traditionally been understood to be composed of phonology, syntax, morphology and lexis. For some time now, the study of communication in terms of language has been complemented by a growing interest in pragmatics; i.e. the study of how individuals accomplish goals drawing on the communicative resources at their disposal in ways deemed legitimate and appropriate in sociocultural contexts. More recently, further additions to language have come to the fore in the study of communication, most notably the growing interest in what communicative resources might be in different communicative contexts. In particular, there has been a good deal of work on how semiotic resources, such as facial expression, gaze, stance, position and so on, come together as semantic assemblages in ongoing communication and how this communication is deemed to be embodied in individuals. This move from communication as exclusively about language to communication as multimodal and embodied is one pillar of what I will discuss in this paper. At the same time, I am intrigued in my readings about human sociality by the idea that human activity, and indeed the very being of human beings, is biologically grounded. Thus, in any understanding of the communicative resources and embodiment as social, it is worth bearing in mind how communicative resources are physically embodied; i.e. they are the evolving products of the human body’s interactions in physical and social spaces over a lifetime. In this paper, I start with this former notion of communicative resources and social embodiment before moving to consider the issue of physical embodiment. In each case I can only work from where I have been and where I am in intellectual terms, which of course narrows my particular way of dealing with these issues.

2. The move from communication as exclusively about language to communication as multimodal and embodied In his oft-cited work on what he termed a ‘socially constituted sociolinguistics’ and the development of an ‘ethnography of communication’, Dell Hymes (1974)

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includes some suggestive ideas regarding the limits of what we mean by language and linguistics. With reference to the ethnography of communication, he argues that apart from addressing instances of communication as events with various kinds of participants, settings, forms or genres of communication, attitudes and contexts, ethnographers need to be attentive to: . . . the various available channels, and their modes of use, speaking, writing, printing, drumming, blowing, whistling, singing, face and body motion as visually perceived, smelling, tasting,, and tactile sensation . . . [and] the various codes shared by various participants, linguistic, paralinguistic, kinesic, musical, interpretive, interactional, and other . . . . (Hymes 1974: 10)

By including channels and codes, and defining them in this way, Hymes showed himself to be prescient as regards how view of language communication would evolve from the 1980s onwards. Specifically, it is possible to establish a link between Hymes’s ideas in this regard and the rise of multimodality in the work of Gunther Kress, Leo van Leeuwen, Carey Jewitt and many others over the past two decades. Jewitt defines multimodality in manner consistent with Hymes’s views on communication some four decades ago as follows: Broadly speaking multimodality describes approaches that understand communication and representation to be more than about language, and in which language is seen as one form of communication (or a Mode – this refers to an organized set of semiotic resources for making meaning with) among other modes such as image, gesture, gaze, posture, and so on. These modes are understood as intimately connected, enmeshed through the complexity of interaction, representation and communication. (Jewitt 2009: 14)

However, Hynes was not alone in presaging the rise of multimodality as a generalized way of understanding communication. There were at least two other scholars – neither of whom had a background in linguistics and neither of whom worked in linguistics – who nonetheless had what were regarded by many linguists at the time as even more unorthodox views about language than Hymes, Erving Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu. Like Hymes, they incorporated into their comments about language the importance of other aspects of communication besides syntax, morphology and lexis. In the introduction of his oft-cited book Forms of Talk, Goffman writes the following about face-to-face communication: Everyone knows that when individuals in the presence of others respond to events their glances, looks, and postural shifts carry all kinds of implication and meaning. When in these settings words are spoken, then tone of voice, manner of uptake, restarts, and the variously positioned pauses similarly qualify. As does manner of listening. Every adult is wonderfully accomplished in producing all of these

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On the traditional approaches to observed speech, Goffman (1981) states that it is primarily about analysing how the floor passes from one interlocutor to the other and thus how speaker-hearer roles are interchanged. About the notions of speaker and hearer, he has the following to say: . . . the terms ‘speaker’and ‘hearer’imply that sound alone is at issue, when, in fact, it is obvious that sight is organizationally very significant too, sometimes even touch. In the management of turn-taking, in the assessment of reception through visual back-channel cues, in paralinguistic function of gesticulation, in the synchrony of gaze shift, in provision of evidence of attention (as in middle-distance look), in the assessment of engrossment through evidence of side-involvements and facial expression – in all of these ways it is apparent that sight is crucial, both for the speaker, and for the hearer. For the effective conduct of talk, speaker and hearer had best be in a position to watch each other. (Goffman 1981: 129–130)

Elsewhere, Bourdieu has expressed his views about language along similar lines. A starting point is his continuous discussion of habitus, defined as: . . . systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them, and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor. (Bourdieu 1977: 72)

One point that Bourdieu makes is that habitus, as predisposed ‘dispositions’ and ‘structured structures’, is embodied in what he calls ‘body hexis’, briefly defined as “a political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking and thereby of feeling and thinking” (Bourdieu 1990: 69–70). This embodied disposition may be understood not only as a phenomenon that is deep, but also one that is embedded temporally in personal history, emergent in the individual trajectories of the lifecourse. Thus, Bourdieu writes the following with reference to the interrelationship between body hexis and childhood: The child imitates not ‘models’ but other people’s actions. Body hexis speaks directly to the motor function, in the form of a pattern of postures that is both individual and systematic, because linked to a whole system of techniques involving the body and tools, and charged with a host of social meanings and values: in all societies, children are particularly attentive to gestures and postures which,

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in their eyes, express everything that goes to make an accomplished adult – a way of walking, a tilt of the head, facial expressions, ways of sitting and of using implements, always associated with a tone of voice, a style of speech, and . . . a certain subjective experience. (Bourdieu 1977: 87)

In his work, Bourdieu writes not of appropriacy but a ‘sense of acceptability’, the domain of the powerful in society (and indeed, the powerful in different fields, or spaces of social activity), those with the right symbolic capital, which allows them to move within the realms of valued practices and appropriate states of being. Relevant to my interest in communication as involving language, but not being exclusively about language, is Bourdieu’s observation about ‘the sense of acceptability which orients linguistic practices’. This ‘sense’ is said to be “inscribed in the most deep-rooted of bodily dispositions” (Bourdieu 1991: 86) in that it is “the whole body which responds by its posture, but also by its inner reactions, or more specifically, the articulatory ones, to the tension of the market” (Bourdieu 1991: 86). In short, for Bourdieu, “[l]anguage is a body technique . . . ” (Bourdieu 1991: 86).

3. The somatic appraisal system as embodied base for multimodal communication: Two examples Some years later, Charles Goodwin and Marjorie Goodwin (e.g. 2004) adopt Goffman’s notions of footing and frame analysis and echo Bourdieu’s views on body hexis and embodiment in their work on the analysis of participation patterns in a variety of communication contexts. Most importantly, they seem to have advanced on the notion that all face-to-face communication is multisemiotic or multimodal in nature, as the following comment suggests: The interplay between the semiotic resources provides in language on the one hand, and tools, documents, and artefacts on the other constitute a most important future direction for the analysis of participation. However, their multi-modal framework should not be seen as something new but instead recognition of the rich contextual configurations created by the availability of multiple semiotic resources that has always characterized human interaction. (Goodwin and Goodwin 2004: 239)

Drawing on this view of communication, Charles Goodwin (2007) looks at what he terms ‘embodied participation frameworks’; that is, how stance and affect are factors in ongoing communication in which language is a central feature. He examines how a father helping his daughter with her maths homework, makes use of his physical position vis-`a-vis her, points to particular parts of the prob-

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lem being discussed and uses his gaze back and forth between her face and the notebook to guide talk about the problem that they are both focusing on. All three of these spatially shaped and shaping actions carry an affective load, as proximity, along with tone of voice serve to show emotions ranging from sympathy to anger. And of course, everything I have just said about the father is applicable to the daughter and her role in the interaction, that is, stance, proximity, tone of voice and so on all come together to configure her contribution to the effect of interaction. Goodwin makes the point that this use of combinations of multimodal resources in activity to create the effect of interaction occurs across a range of day-to-day interactions. As we see in Goodwin’s work, real life examples of how ‘language as a body technique’ are not hard to come by, examples that show how communication is neither just about language nor even most centrally about language, and how an array of semiotic resources help to configure, shape and indeed provide for language the essential backdrop by which it actually makes sense. Another example, in a very different domain of human activity, is the video of the 2004 hit single “Over and over” by Hip Hop artist Nelly and Country Western artist Tim McGraw. The video begins with two men waking up in the morning in their respective bedrooms. Nelly’s room has a modern urban feel against white, black and light blue tones (not only the walls are painted these colours but Nelly is wearing a white tank top and blue bandana). Meanwhile, McGraw’s room is decorated in a country motif against a backdrop of brown tones with exposed wooden logs and breams and canopy bed also done in wood. He is wearing a brown t-shirt which matches the colour of his bed sheets and walls. As other parts of the respective homes are revealed, even the exteriors are notably different as Nelly stands singing in front of what looks to be a block of flats in a city environment while McGraw has a country home as a backdrop. This split between urban hip hop and county styles continues throughout the video as contrasts are drawn between the way that the two men dress, down to their belt buckles and footwear: Nelly wears an urban bling over-sized belt buckle while McGraw’s is country bling and over-sized; Nelly wears fashionable black and white trainers while McGraw wear cowboy books. The vehicles that the two men drive are very different: Nelly’s pimped ride vs. McGraw’s oversized SUV. In addition, the two men move in different ways, including their walks (Nelly’s variation on a pimp roll vs. McGraw’s stiff country walk), facial expressions whilst singing (most notably McGraw’s very country wince) and their movements (Nelly’s hip-hop style hand movements vs. McGraw’s relatively motionless style). Their respective inflections on English while singing are also very different with Nelly producing an African American inflection and McGraw producing what might be termed a Southern White inflection. Finally,

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different demographic and geographical backdrops are provided for the two men engaging in the same activities, such as driving, buying gas and singing autographs: for Nelly, African American and urban; for McGraw, White and rural. Thus, in the video the viewer is presented with two lives organized around what appear to be two separate ensembles of semiotic resources, which serve to frame the exact same words in English sung by the two men. Both thoroughly American, Nelly and McGraw live semiotically separate lives. In my view, the video can be seen alternatively as an indictment on the historical and current racial and cultural segregation of American society, or it can be seen as celebration of the notion that ‘deep down we are all the same’, although on the surface different. I would err towards the former interpretation, although this requires a consideration of how multimodality is historically situated. Though pursuing this theme in detail is interesting, more relevant to this paper is an examination of how multimodality of the type displayed by Nelly and Tim McGraw is deeply embodied as opposed to just existing superficially on show in day-to-day activities. Another example of embodiment, and one more language centred than the previous one, is how a significant part of second language learning is always set against backdrop of multimodal ensembles in which the language being learned is embedded. This is perhaps an obvious point to make, but it seems to be one lost on many second language learning researchers. To illustrate what I mean, I consider two expressions in Catalan which I first encountered naturalistically (in fact, it was probably a good deal of time before I actually saw them written anywhere) over 30 years ago. They are: D´eu n’hi do! Me cago en D´eu! The first expression is translatable into English as something along the lines of ‘I’ll say!’ or as a way of expressing agreement. My understanding of its use has always been that it shows the speaker’s agreement with someone describing a state of affairs, a situation or events and conveys emphasis and/or intensity. This view is supported by some linguists (e.g. Cuenca 2002; Sancho 2003), but contested by others (Mayol 2007; Mayol and Castroviejo 2008), who see it as often redundant and therefore lacking as a conveyer of emphasis and intensity. Translated literally, the expression is a grammaticalization of ‘May God give it to him/her’ (Mayol 2007). In my experience, the expression is sometimes accompanied by a gesture, which involves lifting the forearm slightly and then wagging the hand in a snapping manner as one simultaneously pronounces the words. It is as if the speaker were throwing the words out in parallel to the

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wagging hand. The words, therefore, are very overtly embodied in gesture and inflection on speech. The other expression is one that I first experienced in a small bar in Barcelona, again some 30 years ago. I refer here to a small smoke-filled establishment where people either spend as little time as possible over a caf´e (an expresso) or spend hours talking as they play cards or watch a football match. In the latter case the people in question are generally male and quite often of retirement age. In any case, my experience was one of overhearing a conversation taking place among a group of men who were playing cards around a wooden table cluttered with beer bottles and glasses, ashtrays and burning cigarettes. In the midst of a cloud of smoke, I spotted a man, cigarette hanging from his mouth, empathically throwing a card down on the table, as he uttered Me cago en D´eu! (literally, ‘I shit on God!’). Now I might wonder what shitting on God has to do with playing a trump card, but the scene makes this clear. It is embodied emotion spat out with the inflection on words and the throwing of the card on the table. Meanwhile, the expression utterer’s spatial situation vis-`a-vis others at the table is also part of the ensemble of semiotic resources making up the communicative event. In my brief descriptions of these two examples, and in particular the latter case, I am drawing on Goffman’s understandings of face to face interaction, Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and body hexis and finally, Goodwin and Goodwin’s ideas about ‘[t]he interplay between the semiotic resources . . . language on the one hand, and tools, documents, and artefacts on the other . . . that has always characterized human interaction’ (Goodwin and Goodwin 2004: 239). There is no prospect of a well-developed understanding of the two expressions without a consideration of how they form part of ongoing interactions, involving embodied subjects and mediated multimodally. However, as with the previous examples discussed in this section, we are speculating from a social perspective about observed phenomena which might be framed more person-internal, more affective, more psychologically and even more biologically. In the next section, I explore an additional way of framing embodiment in discussions of communication and practice.

4. Affect and its neurobiological bases I begin my consideration of this issue by going back in time over a decade ago, when I was reading the work of John Schumann, in particular his (1997) monograph on affect in second language learning, Neurobiology of affect in language. This reading was completed with forays into some of the source material for Schumann’s speculations as well as other work which was coming

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out at the time (e.g. Dalgleish and Power 1999; Damasio 1994, 1999; Lamb 1999; LeDoux 1996; Ortony, Clore and Collins 1999; Scherer 1988). More recently Schumann and his associates (Schumann, Crowell, Jones and Lee 2004) have published a volume examining the interrelationships between neurobiology and language aptitude, motivation, memory and attention. Through all of this work over the years, Schumann has rooted his discussion of learning in the ‘biological notion of value’, defined as follows: . . . a bias that leads an organism to certain preferences and enables it to choose among alternatives . . . Some aspects of value are so important that evolution has selected for them and they have become innate. Value is the basis for all activity; we perceive, move, cognize, and feel on the basis of value. (Schumann and Wood 2004: 24)

A value system is subsequently dependent on the development of three fundamental motivational systems, that is, systems that impel individuals to act in particular ways. The first of these systems is the homeostatic system which regulates the human organism, maintaining stable and consistent functioning. This system allows the human organism to sustain itself by monitoring and controlling such basic biological functions as breathing, eating, keeping warm or cool, maintaining the heart rate, procreating and caring for kin. The second system is called the sociostatic system which motivates human beings to associate with fellow human beings in their quest for feelings of attachment and group affiliation. As noted by Enfield and Levinson (2006), there is something intrinsically human about the need to associate with and engage in activities with fellow human beings. In the life of human beings, the same individuals – parents, family members, family friends – generally guarantee the provision of stimuli which cater to both sets of general needs and the relevant systems, homeostatic and sociostatic. For this reason, human beings develop them interdependently. In addition, through interaction with the environment, driven by these two systems, individuals acquire their individualized and idiosyncratic somatic system of preferences and aversions and likes and dislikes, the key element in the overall value system discussed by Schumann. This somatic system acts as an appraisal system for stimuli encountered as life unfolds. For example, if an individual initiates the study of an additional language in a formal classroom setting, the somatic system will act as a prism through which experiences are lived: the language being studied, learning activities engaged in, teachers, classmates, pedagogical materials and other features of formal learning environments. The idea here is that any instance of human behavior, taking place at a given point and time, should be understood as a set of locally and temporarily contin-

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gent conditions interacting with traces of memories of previous experiences – the goals, interests and beliefs of the individual – which come together for the occasion. The reality of cognition then is a constant back and forth interaction of the past with the present, of the remembered with the understood, and ultimately of the accommodation of the old in order for assimilation of the new to take place. Over the years, Klaus Scherer has developed a model that sees this process in terms of dimensions of appraisal which may be seen to make up the somatic system. These are listed and glossed in Table 1. Table 1. Dimensions of appraisal in a value system based on Scherer (1988, 2007) Appraisal of 1. NOVELTY 2. INTRINSIC PLEASANTNESS

Gloss The extent to which the internal or external stimulus event contains novel or unexpected patterns. Whether the stimulus event is pleasant or unpleasant. Whether approach or avoidance is in order.

3. GOAL/NEED SIGNIFICANCE

The extent to which the stimulus event is relevant to the individual’s needs and goals. How expected the stimulus event is at this stage and time in the individual’s goal/plan sequence. The extent to which the stimulus event is conducive to satisfying my needs and goals. How urgently a response is required.

4. COPING POTENTIAL

The cause of the stimulus event. If the individual can control the stimulus event or its consequences. If the individual has the power to avoid the outcome of the stimulus event through fight or flight. If the individual can adjust to the outcome through internal restructuring.

5. NORM/SELF COMPATIBILITY

How the stimulus event conforms to external socially-determined cultural norms and the expectations of others. How the stimulus event conforms internally with cultural norms and expectations.

Scherer is not saying that individuals actually go through these dimensions as a checklist each time they encounter a new situation; rather, these are meant to be aspects of any new stimulus against which the individual might elaborate an evaluation. The first dimension, novelty, is in simple terms about how new and unexpected a particular stimulus is to an individual, based on his/her past experience. The second dimension is more clearly an affective evaluation (is

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this stimulus pleasant or unpleasant for the individual?) along with a response to either engage with it or not. The third and fourth dimensions relate to Scherer’s and others’ theories of motivation, respectively, as revolving around goal and need based activity, as mediated by the individual’s awareness of his/her ability to control any progression of activities towards the satisfaction of a goal or a need. The fifth and final dimension is about the interaction between a need to conform to social norms and the expectations of others and the need to be true to oneself, to do only those things which are consistent with one’s self image. Discussing value and appraisal in terms of the homeostatic system, the sociostatic system and the somatic system could easily remain at the level of abstract modelling of speculation about what goes on in the minds of individuals as they encounter new experiences and develop over time. To put the neurobiological into the equation requires a theory of the hardware of human appraisal therefore making the case that the source of social regulation is at least in part biologically based. Goleman (1995) makes the following statement about the relationship between parts of the brain – the amygdala and the neo-cortex – and the interaction of what he calls emotional intelligence and more standard rational intelligence: . . . the pre-frontal amygdala circuit is a crucial doorway to the repository of the likes and dislikes we acquire over the course of a lifetime. Cut off from emotional memory in the amygdala, whatever the neocortex mulls over no longer triggers the emotional reactions that have been associated with it in the past – everything takes on gray neutrality. A stimulus, be it a favorite pet or a detested acquaintance, no longer triggers either attraction or aversion; these patients have ‘forgotten’ all such emotional lessons because they no longer have access to where they are stored in the amygdala. (Goleman 1995: 28)

The brain matter discussed by Goleman is in Figure 1.

5. Affect and its neurobiological bases: An example A well known vivid example of how the neurobiological links with the social behavior comes from Damasio (1994). Damasio describes in detail the intriguing case of Phineas Gage, a railroad construction foreman in New England in the mid-19th century. Gage was a highly qualified and respected specialist in engineering explosions to destroy rock encountered in the path of planned railroad lines. A part of this job involved the use of a tamping iron, an iron rod one meter in length, to pound the sand poured over gunpowder in order to ensure that an explosion moved inwards to destroy the rock as opposed to scattering away from

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Figure 1. The brain (This figure is taken from: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/b/bc/Constudoverbrain.png [accessed 1 June 2009])

the rock. One day in 1948, Gage was distracted in the middle of this process and accidently tamped the gunpowder before sand had been poured over it. The subsequent explosion drove his tamping iron up through his left cheek and behind his eye cavity, before exiting at the top of his head just behind his forehead. Gage survived this traumatic event and his wounds eventually healed. However, his personality seemed to change after the accident. Whereas previously Gage was considered a cool-headed competent professional and a shrewd businessman, after the accident he manifested extremely inconsistent and instable behavior, including capricious changes of opinion, fits of anger and an overall lack of discipline. He eventually alienated all of those with whom he had worked as a construction foreman and spent most of what remained of his life travelling and working in jobs which ranged from horseman to circus sideshow freak, before dying some thirteen years after the accident of what Damasio believes was a

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form of epilepsy. For Damasio, the lesson to be learned from Gage’s tragic story is as follows: Gage’s example indicated that something in the brain was concerned specifically with unique human properties, among them the ability to anticipate the future and plan accordingly within a complex social environment; the sense of responsibility toward the self and others; and the ability to orchestrate one’s survival deliberately, at the command of one’s free will. (Damasio 1994: 10)

It is not my intention here to explore in depth the physical location and basis for the appraisal system which Schumann describes. Indeed, I have only gone into detail here about the evidence for a neurobiological base for affect, value and appraisal to make two important points. First, such detail is necessary if I am to portray in a fair way the approach adopted by Schumann, whereby human behavior, specifically language learning, is seen to be affectively mediated and the affect that mediates is seen to be neurobiologically based and indeed, physically situated in particular part of the brain. Second, I offer this discussion as a probe of the limits of the human sociality, of what might be allowed into the broad church, which aims to explore human interaction and communication in as much detail as possible. Is there space for neurobiology in the project? I ask because I suspect that to pursue this angle is perhaps to move a little too far away from what is at the centre of human sociality; i.e. interactions with fellow human beings and the physical and social environment. So, rather than continue this direction, I propose to focus on what I do think is most interesting and relevant to human sociality in Schumann’s model, the embodied somatic appraisal system which I mentioned previously.

6. The embodied somatic appraisal system: An example Given its resonances with Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, body hexis and a “sense [which is] inscribed in the most deep-rooted of bodily dispositions” (Bourdieu 1991: 86), the embodied somatic appraisal system shows a degee of explanatory potential as regards how individuals engage with and make sense of the various stimuli which they come into and out of contact in the course a typical day. To make this point, I apply this model to a small part of an interview I carried out with two Spanish women, Elena and Almudena, some ten years ago. At the time of the interview, the two women who were doing a PGCE in MFL (Post Graduate Certificate of Education in Modern Foreign Languages) at a university in London while participating in an exploratory study that I was carrying out on how foreign nationals on PGCE MFL courses adapted to various aspects of

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MFL teaching in Britain (see Block [2001] for an account). In this part of the interview, Elena and Almudena are talking about motivational posters that they have encountered in the schools where they have done teaching practice. The exchange looks as follows (see Appendix for transcription symbols): Original in Spanish E: ahora hay posters! / {said with false earnestness} D: ¿de que clase? / A: motivational posters/ {said in dramatic tone} E: posters como (.5) the man hanging off a cliff = {extending arms upwards as if hanging} A: =no dos delfines!= {making a sweeping motion with her right hand} E: =y una frase que dice you can do it= {speaking hurriedly with false earnestness} A: =no group work leads to success / o algo as´ı / {speaking hurriedly with false earnestness} E: los hacen empresas [que A: [me guard´e uno para enviar a mis amigos [en Espa˜na] /

English translation E: now there are posters! / {said with false earnestness} D: what kind? / A: motivational posters/ {said in dramatic tone} E: posters like (.5) the man hanging off a cliff = {extending arms upwards as if hanging} A: = no two dolphins!= {making a sweeping motion with her right hand} E: =and a sentence that says you can do it= {speaking hurriedly with false earnestness} A: =no group work leads to success / or something like that / {speaking hurriedly with false earnestness} E: they’re done by companies [that A: [I kept one to send to my friends [in Spain] /

(A and E, 28 September 1999)

In this transcription, I have attempted to reproduce not only what was said but how it was said and inflected. I hope to have conveyed the high level of sarcasm and indeed cynicism coming from the two women as they almost gleefully ridicule the use of motivational posters in school settings. Motivational posters have become popular in recent years in the business world and progressively in school settings. They generally present a picture of someone overcoming adversity (such as the man hanging from a cliff, which Elena refers to) or a pleasant scene in nature (such as dolphins swimming in the sea, which Almudena refers to). However, they have also become the object of some derision as witnessed by the growing number of websites which are devoted to ridiculing them as naive, corny and silly. An example of one of the motivational posters mentioned in the exchange above – a man hanging from a cliff – is reproduced in Figure 2. As obvious ‘doubters’ as regards this practice, Elena and Almudena not only express in words their disdain but also they embody it with their voice

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Figure 2. A man hanging from a cliff (http://www.allposters.com/-sp/PerseveranceCliffhanger-Posters i113373 .htm [accessed 1 June 2009])

inflections and body language, via dramatic false earnest tones and exaggerated body movements (Elena imitating the man hanging from a cliff and Almudena’s sweeping hand movement when talking about dolphins). The code switching into English might be interpreted as further distancing from the posters as the two women do not bother to translate into Spanish the term ‘motivational’ or, with the exception of Almudena’s dos delfines the slogans on the posters (‘the man hanging off a cliff’; ‘you can do it’; ‘group work leads to success’). However, it should be noted that in all of their interviews there was a tendency to code switch to English when what was being said was a word or phrase encountered through the PGCE course and other teaching-related activity. In order to understand why Elena and Almudena adopted this sarcastic and cynical position when talking about the motivational posters, it might be useful to speculate that the kind of value/appraisal systems and professionals and personal habituses that the two women have developed in their lifetimes do not predispose them to engage with such practices in a positive way. The posters are presented as something of a novelty for them, as regards what they would expect to find in the world of teachers, although they do seem familiar with the genre. The issue is, then, that their encounter with these posters in schools is a stimulus event that it is both novel and unexpected. Elena and Almudena make clear that they expect something less ‘feel good’ and trite in communications with and among teachers. Indeed, encountering these posters in schools would appear to be for

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the two women a good example of an unpleasant stimulus, in Scherer’s terms, and one that is to be avoided if at all possible. As regards the dimension of goal/need significance, Elena and Almudena position the posters as irrelevant to their needs and goals as trainee teachers, something perhaps silly which crosses their path as they get on with more serious matters. As regards coping potential, Elena and Almudena clearly wish to avoid these posters, as regards any role they might have in their development as teachers and their somewhat aggressive treatment of them in this short stretch of conversation occurs as if to make two key points with regard to coping potential: (1) that they refuse to engage with the posters and therefore they resist any potential impact they might have on their way of viewing their professional activity as teachers; and (2) they distance themselves from the posters almost pre-empting any potential attempts by others to persuade them to engage with them. Finally, there is the issue of norm-self compatibility and lining up the cultural norms and the expectations of others with Elena’s and Almudena’s individual and socially situated cultural habituses and culturally based norms and expectations. From my interviews with these two women, I glean a common educational habitus forged via their formal education in Spain, one which was manifested despite the different geographical regions and types of schools which formed part of the their respective backgrounds and education: while Elena was from a city in the Basque country and had received part of her education in a French school, Almudena was from a small village in the central part of Spain and had received part of her education in a Catholic single-sex boarding school. This common educational habitus is one consistent with an educational system, which might be termed ‘rationalist’, as it “is associated with a systematic view of the physical world . . . [in which c]apacities for logic, deduction and abstraction together with systematization and synthesis should be developed . . . [and t]he private and irrational are rigorously excluded” (McLean 1995: 30). This system contrasts with the humanist tradition, predominant tin England, which emphasises “human character and its potential rather than the structure of the physical universe” (McLean 1995: 22). For these two women, the encounter with a humanistic approach to teacher development seems to have brought about a conflict. It is a conflict between their norm-self educational habitus, as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu 1977: 72) and the new stimuli in the form of humanistic educational norms and expectations. The conflict is indexed in the multimodal way in which the encounter is portrayed in the interview excerpt cited.

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7. Conclusion Scholars should always be careful about incursions into new epistemological territory and thus I have written this paper with some trepidation. As noted in the introduction, I have engaged with the emerging human society project exclusively on my own terms as regards both my portrayal of it and how I have related my work to it. Or, worded differently, I have only been able to engage with the new stimulus called human sociality as framed by my own socioculturally situated habitus. Those who see their work more centrally inside human sociality might well take exception to this paper and indeed might see it as under-informed or even irrelevant. However, the aim, again as stated at the outset, has been to situate human sociality as a mediator of my current thinking about communication and embodiment. I can now see avenues for further thinking about these matters and ultimately, this thinking may end up more clearly within a human sociality framework. University of London

Appendix Transcription symbols for the exchange in Section 6: E= Elena / (.5) (1) ? [xxx [zzz = italics ! {xxx}

D = David Block

A = Almudena

indicates the minimal but clear pause between phrases/sentences in normally paced speech. indicates pause of half a second indicates pause of one second indicates rising intonation (including questions) indicates overlapping speech indicates that the utterance latches with (i.e. occurs seamlessly after) the next utterance indicates words that were produced in English in the original version indicates raised intonation, exclamation comments describing aspects of body language, such as gaze, hand movements and facial expressions as well as voice inflection.

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Note * This paper is based on a keynote address given at the Bloomsbury Round Table on Communication, Cognition & Culture, held 4–5 June 2009 at Birkbeck College, University of London. It retains many features of a spoken paper.

References Block, David. 2001. Foreign nationals on PGCE in Modern Languages course: Issues in national identity construction. European Journal of Teacher Education 24(3). 291– 312. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity. Brice-Heath, Shirley. 1983. Ways with words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cuenca, Maria Josep. 2002. Els connectors textuals i les interjeccions. In Joan Sol`a, Joan Mascar´o, Maria Rosa Lloret & Manuel P´erez Saldanya (eds.), Gram´atica del Catal`a Contemporani, 3173–3237. Barcelona: Emp´uries. Dalgleish, Tim & Mick Power (eds.). 1999. Handbook of cognition and emotion. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Damasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Damasio Antonio. 1999. The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace. Dunbar, Robin. 1996. Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language. London: Faber and Faber. Enfield, Nick. 2009. The anatomy of meaning: Speech, gesture and composite utterances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Enfield, Nick & Stephen Levinson (eds.). 2006. Roots of human sociality. Oxford: Berg. Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of talk. Oxford: Blackwell. Goleman, Daniel. 1995. Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. New York: Bantum. Goodwin, Charles. 2007. Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse and Society 18(1). 53–73. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/clic/ win/ParticipationStanceAffect.pdf. Goodwin, Charles & Marjorie Goodwin. 2004. Participation. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology, 222–244. Oxford: Blackwell. Grice, Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Hymes, Dell. 1974. Foundations in sociolinguistics:An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Jewitt, Carey. 2009. Introduction: what is multimodality? In Carey Jewitt (ed.), The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis, 14–28. London: Routledge. Kress, Gunther & L. van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Arnold. Lamb, Sydney M. 1999. Pathways to the brain: the neurobiological basis of language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. LeDoux, Joseph. 1996. The emotional brain. New York: Simon and Schuster. Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive meanings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayol, Laia. 2007. Catalan ‘D´eu n’hi do’ and levels of meaning in exclamatives. In Charles B. Chang and Hannah J. Haynie (eds.), Proceedings of the 26th West Coast Conference on formal linguistics, 375–383. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Mayol, Laia & Elena Castroviejo. 2008. Asserted and implicated meanings in Catalan D´eu n’hi do. In Arndt Riester & Torgrim Solstad (eds.), Proceedings of the 13th Sinn und Bedeutung Conference, Stuttgart, 371–384. Stuttgart: University of Stuttgart. McLean, M. 1995. Educational traditions compared. London: David Fulton. Ortony, Anthony, Gerald L. Clore & Allan Collins. 1999. The cognitive structure of emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sancho, Pelegr´ı. 2003. An`alisi contrastiva interdialectal de la fraseologia: El cas de d´eun’hi-do, ausad.es/a gosad.es i espaiet. Catalan Review 172(2). 151–171. Schegloff, Emmanuel. 2006. Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scherer, Klaus. 1988. Facets of emotion: Recent research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Scherer, Klaus. 2007. Component models of emotion can inform the quest for emotional competence. In Gerald Matthews, Moshe Zeidner & Richard D. Roberts (eds.), The science of emotional intelligence: Knowns and unknowns, 101–126. New York: Oxford University Press. Schumann, John H. 1997. The neurobiology of affect in language. Oxford: Blackwell. Schumann, John H., Sheila E. Crowell, Nancy E. Jones & Namhee Lee (eds.). 2004. Neurobiology of learning: Perspectives from second language acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Elrbaum. Schumann, John H. & Lee Alexandra Wood. 2004. The neurobiology of motivation. In John H. Schumann, Sheila E. Crowell, Nancy E. Jones & Namhee Lee (eds.), Neurobiology of learning: Perspectives from second language acquisition, 21–38. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Elrbaum. David Block is Professor of Languages in Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. His main interests are globalization, migration and the interface between language and identity. He is author of Multilingual Identities in a Global City: London Stories (Palgrave, 2006) and Second Language Identities (Continuum, 2007).

Language trends: Reflexivity in commercial language policies and practices HELEN KELLY-HOLMES

Abstract Financier, philanthropist and economist George Soros is not the first to have used or derived the notion of reflexivity (for example, Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and others have found it useful in their work). What is different about the approach of Soros is that he has used the concept of reflexivity to explain the workings of global markets, and for this reason his work seems to me to have particular potential for explaining language trends in the linguistic policies and practices of global marketers. Soros has challenged ruling economic orthodoxy by arguing that demand and supply are not given or objective, and far from determining how markets develop. Participants in economic processes inevitably and unavoidably shape and determine the outcome of those economic processes and also create the conditions for future development of those market processes. This particular insight, I would argue, could help us to understand and develop further the notion of normativity in‘global’linguistic practices and policies, particularly when linked to economic processes since “the self-validating capacity [of such processes] encourages trend-following speculation” (Soros 1994). We can equate the decisions of many global marketers to that of stock brokers, who largely act on their intuitions (linguistic intuitions), but who in turn create conditions for those intuitions to be successful now and in the future, in effect by creating language trends. Keywords: Reflexivity; language trends; language policy; normativity.

1. Introduction The notion of commercial language policies and practices can be seen to encompass all decisions made in the context of commercial activities (i.e. buying

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and selling) that have to do with language. Some of these decisions may be codified into explicit (Schiffmann 1996) or overt (Shohamy 2006) policies or documents; or they may have become established, implicit (Schiffmann 1996) or covert (Shohamy 2006) policies through long-term use, which become accepted as the status quo, the way things have always been done in a particular company; or, they may simply be one-off practices. Whatever the case, they involve decisions which relate to managing languages – or more precisely speakers (cf. Heller and Duchene 2007) – for commercial purposes. Languages/speakers can be managed either as a problem or as a resource from a commercial perspective. On the one hand, linguistic diversity can be seen as a problem for many businesses; it is an external, uncontrollable factor (cf. Kelly-Holmes [forthcoming a], for in-depth discussion of this; cf. also da Silva et al. [2006] in relation to Canada), which needs to be managed by categorizing markets (i.e. groups of people / speakers of languages) in terms of particular languages with which they can be then targeted. On the other hand, linguistic diversity can also be seen as a resource which can be managed and exploited in order to differentiate a particular product or brand from other products or brands by appealing to primarily ethnocentric perceptions of other cultures, or of some essential qualities inherent in the language, which are essentialized in the language-product link and which the targeted consumer is deemed to share (cf. Martin 2006; Piller 2003; Ustinova and Bhatia 2005; Lee 2006; Kelly-Holmes 2005). Advertisers thus use languages for differentiation, in order to differentiate their product from other products, and also for segmentation, in order to segment markets and break them down into manageable units that can be targeted by specific strategies (cf. Kelly-Holmes [forthcoming b] for an overview of this). However, there is a sameness – and to a certain extent a predictability – in the ways in which language is used in these differentiation and segmentation practices: global brands which originate in non-English-speaking countries of origin use English language slogans globally and use English on their corporate or dot.com pages, where they seek to address a ‘global’ audience (e.g. Japanese Toyota; Finnish Nokia); where global brands want to exploit a particular attribute associated with their country of origin, they may indulge in decorative use of a small amount of their ‘national’ language combined with global English (e.g. Spanish Seat’s use of auto emoci´on; German Volkswagen’s use of Das Auto). McDonald’s has been using multilingual graphic since 2004, and Burger King and Espirit de Corps also followed suit. In terms of segmentation, we can observe similar trends, for example, the provision by international brands of strictly bilingual (i.e. parallel monolingual in Heller’s [1999] terms) sites for Belgium, Switzerland and Canada, with the use of MENA (Middle East and North Africa) sites in English, French and Arabic, by a growing number of

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brands, and also the growing use of Spanish on the USA sites of global and US American brands. All of these practices represent language trends and norms of a sort in advertising and market discourses. They are styles which may start with an individual, but which are then followed and come to be generally accepted as ways of ‘doing language’ in commercial contexts. Trends are by their nature transient, but while some inevitably fade away, others become established as norms. But, how might these trends or norms come about? As someone who has been observing such trends over a number of years, this question has come to concern and fascinate me, and in this article I would like to propose a framework that might enable us to track and understand these trends and to develop a sociolinguistics of the market (for an overview of approaches to this to date, cf. Kelly-Holmes [forthcoming c]). The framework that I am proposing is based on the economic writings of George Soros, and I want to begin by putting Soros’ work in context and arguing for the use of his work and insights from the field of economics in understanding commercial language trends, before going on to explain Soros’ most relevant theory, namely that of reflexivity. I then attempt to show how this could be useful for explaining how trends emerge in the use of languages for differentiation and segmentation in global, national and local advertising, and point to what I see as useful avenues for exploration in order to take these ideas forward.

2. Putting Soros in context George Soros is a controversial figure in all of the domains in which he is active – financial markets, academia and politics. He was born in Hungary, but his grew up in the USA. His brief encounter with the Nazi occupation and with the communist regime together with his discovery of the work of Karl Popper when he studied at the LSE have made him a lifelong advocate of the ‘open society’. The open society is, as one might expect, concerned with aspiring towards genuine freedom of information, thought etc., but – and this is relevant in terms of understanding reflexivity – also with an acknowledgement that there is bias at work and that we need to attempt to overcome or limit this bias, or work with it, rather than ignoring it or pretending it does not exist. Of interest to linguists may be the fact that Soros is a fluent Esperanto speaker, having been brought up with it as his first language. Soros is also known as the man who bankrupted the British pound on ‘Black Wednesday’ in October 1992. Much of the profit made by Soros in currency trading has gone towards philanthropic activities in former Eastern Bloc countries, particularly in the area of education (Soros established the Central European University in Budapest in 1991).

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What is compelling about Soros is his combination of theory and practice. There are few eminent economists or philosophers who actually try out their ideas on the financial markets or, in a grounded theory approach, formulate theories on the basis of their experience in such markets. Economic theory is notoriously and unapologetically abstract and generally not data-driven, and prides itself on ignoring real-life situations in favor of perfect market conditions and on the assumption of rational human behavior. Soros has argued, and his argument has added credibility because of his experience as a practitioner, that this is nonsensical. He is also anti-positivistic in his approach to studying economics, advocating, like Popper, that social sciences should not try to imitate natural or hard sciences and should instead work within and around the flawed, partial and unpredictable nature of human beings. Soros has published a number of works on his economic ideas (e.g. Soros 1987, 1998). However, to his disappointment, which he has spoken publicly about, the ideas have yet to be taken on board seriously (although as we shall see below there are points of comparison between him and the ideas of John Maynard Keynes), and he is generally seen as a maverick by orthodox economists. He has also been branded an ‘anti-capitalist capitalist’ and a hypocrite for being happy on the one had to make money from international financial markets, whilst at the same time criticizing them. Having put Soros in context, I will now turn to an explanation of reflexivity.

3. Reflexivity versus orthodox economic thinking In general terms, reflexivity can be seen to occur in social systems and processes “when an actor observes and thinks about his or her actions and their consequences and then modifies his/her behavior” (Umpleby 2006: 1). Soros did not of course invent the concept of reflexivity, nor is he the first person to use it as a way of explaining social processes and to “. . . refer both to the fact that and to the way in which agents are confronted with the results of their earlier actions” (Mügge 2007: 10). Soros and other proponents of the reflexivity approach would argue that these results are often different from what they may originally have intended, and the reason for this is that “. . . societies are extremely complex, bringing together myriad agents with different agendas, capability and perspectives” (Mügge 2007: 10). Consequently, these actions and their results, from a reflexive perspective, can “generate new agency and thus inject dynamism into social change” (Mügge 2007: 10). Furthermore, reflexivity means that the way agency affects overall structures is unpredictable, both for analysts and agents themselves (Mügge 2007: 10).

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Change, therefore, should be understood as “the combination of intended and unintended consequence of purposeful agency” (Mügge 2007: 10). Reflexivity, thus, gives us a way of engaging with and studying systems that include thinking and acting participants (Birshtein and Borsevici 2001: 74), and this is reflected in the work of sociologists of globalization such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck (cf. Bryant [2002] for a comparison between Giddens, Beck and Soros in relation to reflexivity). As mentioned above, Soros claims to have used reflexivity to explain and understand the workings of international financial markets. He sees market developments as dependent on “the beliefs of market practitioners about them. Therefore, a clear separation between markets and the beliefs observers hold about them is impossible” (Mügge 2007: 12). Soros argues that “many market participants are perfectly aware of this recursiveness. And they try to use it to their own advantage” (Mügge 2007:12). Soros has a more holistic approach to finance and economics: he sees finance as a ‘human player game’ with himself as a participant. One of his key criticisms of economic orthodoxy is that it negates or disregards the human dimension to economics and finance. In such classical – or more correctly neo-classical – economic thinking, the individual is deemed to act rationally and to make decisions on the basis of having access to perfect information. According to mainstream or neo-classical theory, economic man or woman is rational, being rational means that s/he seeks to maximize his/her utility and that s/he does so in a consistent way, using the perfect information available to make these rational decisions. Neo-classical economic theory considers utility to be that which is of value to (or in the best interests of) the individual – something that is different to the classical or Marxist view of utility. Thus, individuals try to maximize the value of goods to them. There are of course many problems with this theory, which Soros and others have pointed out, and which, commonsensically, we can see ourselves: individual human beings are highly complex and have multiple and often contradictory motivations. As economist John Kay points out: “the economic imperialism which seeks to ‘explain’ all behavior by reference to rational choice is absurd” (Kay 2004: 194), and “. . . often this is achieved by stretching the meaning of rationality” (Kay 2004: 201). Likewise, we can clearly see that ‘perfect information’ is hardly ever available in all situations, hence the famous caveat, ‘buyer beware’. According to the mainstream view, however, left to its own devices, with a minimum of intervention by governments or other players, and with everyone behaving rationally, demand should stimulate supply in order to achieve equilibrium in the best possible way for all agents and all participants. Another major criticism, and one levelled by Soros, is that mainstream economic theory is not based on reality – in fact it ignores realities – or on any data or experience; instead it proposes a

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Utopian view of economics. This might perhaps be acceptable in and of itself – the need for abstraction in all theory being important – were mainstream economics not used as the way in which major decisions are taken by national and international economic players such as governments, companies, international organizations etc. who operate in a far from Utopian world. Soros has turned mainstream economic thinking (which is largely based on this neo-classical or Chicagoean model) on its head – causing “constant annoyance among advocates of the orthodox economic and political theory” (Birshtein and Borsevici 2001: 74) – and tried to move away from this abstract concept of economics, by arguing that “economic reality is actively shaped by the perceptions of market participants” (Cymbalista 2003: 1). Thus, rather than demand and supply determining what happens in markets, it is instead what happens in markets that determines demand and supply; and what happens in markets is what individual human beings do on markets, with all their flaws, unpredictable and irrational behaviour and complex ideologies. According to Soros, participants in economic processes inevitably and unavoidably shape and determine the outcome of these economic processes, rather than these processes being shaped by some abstract notion of demand and supply. Soros sees individuals as participating at a fairly unsophisticated level – they use guesswork, they formulate hypotheses and they act on these hunches or hypotheses. The key aspect, according to Soros, is that by acting on these hypotheses or guesses, they actually create the conditions for their hypotheses to be successful. Central to this understanding is an acceptance of, perhaps even an embracing of, human fallibility, “meaning both the belief in [our] own fallibility and the belief that the misconceptions and misunderstandings that go into our decisions help shape the events in which we participate” (Cymbalista 2003: 1). Taking the example of English as a global language of business, it could fruitfully be argued that a process of reflexivity is at work here. The received idea within sociolinguistics and applied linguistics could perhaps be formulated as follows: processes of globalization have made English a global lingua franca in business, and thus there is a demand for English globally, which is being met by the supply of English. This status of English as global lingua franca leads in turn to a greater demand for English, which stimulates supply, and thus leads to a greater supply of English. This type of argument is based on ‘classical’economic theory, which would predict that some kind of equilibrium would eventually be reached in terms of the demand for English and the supply of English internationally. However, demand appears to continue to grow, and so, correspondingly does supply. Soros would argue that, what such an understanding lacks is the human component. Looking at the global spread of English from the reflexivity point of view, it might be possible to formulate a contradictory point of view:

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individual agents (e.g. companies) formulate their own linguistic hypotheses about using English in particular commercial contexts. These hypotheses are of course not just individual, but are also influenced by social, cultural and sociolinguistic factors; these are language ideologies (cf. Schieffelin et al. 1998; Kroskrity 2001; Bauman and Briggs 2003). But, basically, a decision is made somewhere, by someone, to use English in a particular advertisement for example, without there being any particular demand for English to be used in that advertisement. Thus, supply might precede demand. However, because the decision is made to supply or use English, English comes to be accepted in this particular context, and then more English is supplied. A reflexivity approach would argue that by using English, companies and agents are creating the conditions whereby more English can be used or is even expected to be used (e.g. corporate websites discussed above), the idea that ‘everyone is doing it, so we should be too’. Another important difference is that rather than simply focusing on variables, as is the practice in mainstream economics, Soros also looks at ideas, groups and events – factors that have either been deemed unimportant or have been neutralized or blanded out in mainstream economic theory (e.g. in the notion that there is perfect information, and that all individuals act rationally all the time). In his mind, it is particularly important that we take ideas into account – these can be seen as the bias which various actors bring to their decisions, their guesswork and hypothesizing, and, ultimately, their actions. From our point of view, this could be their own linguistic ideologies. The ability to incorporate individual language ideologies into a model of commercial language practices makes reflexivity particularly attractive to me, since too often in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, actions are deemed ‘corporate’, thus hiding or masking the societal, educational, familial and individual inputs in these. Often, too, it is forgotten that copywriters, marketing managers, brand and image consultants are more than just ‘economic man’ or rational human beings too. They have their own complex linguistic identities and these may impact on their behavior, which may be far from rational in a mainstream sense. All too often, perhaps, linguists are seen on one side and marketers on the other, whereas the reality is much more complex. For example, Atkinson and Kelly-Holmes (2006) and Kelly-Holmes and Atkinson (2007) argue that advertisers as members of particular language communities do not always act rationally as the Chicagoean school would predict. For example, some may advertise in a minority language primarily to lend financial support to a minority language newspaper and in this way support revitalization or maintenance in a language community rather than to reach particular customers and even where they acknowledge that it will probably not attract business for them. Equally, advertisers possibly influenced

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by majority language ideologies may decide to keep their advertisement in the national language (in this case Castilian Spanish) in a newspaper that is entirely in the ‘minority’ language, and which is translated free of charge into the minority language (in this case Catalan). Here, advertisers actively and explicitly opt out of speaking the customer’s language. The idea then is disarmingly simple: individual ways of thinking influence events on markets – according to Soros, reflexivity equals perception plus action. In other words, our perceptions plus our actions creates events which have consequences on markets. A recent example which came to my attention may help to illustrate this: international drinks brand Carlsberg recently produced an advertisement for the Irish market in which Irish is used (cf. Kelly-Holmes [2010] for a full discussion of the advertisement). This was the first time that Irish had been used in this way (see discussion below) in such a context by a global advertiser (it has been used nationally, and there is growing use of commercial Irish in a number of domains in Ireland). According to a source in Diageo, the global drinks company that owns Carlsberg, the marketing team, a very small group of individuals, felt that Irish is becoming ‘trendy’ and that an advertisement in Irish would work well. So, we can see here how these individuals formulated a linguistic hypothesis on the basis of their own language ideologies – in turn fed by societal language ideologies in Ireland. By using Irish in an advertisement for a global beer brand, these social actors have created a new scale (Blommaert et al. 2005) for the language and have also created the conditions whereby more Irish can be used in future advertisements – they have perhaps started a trend. In Soros’ terms, their perceptions (changing language ideologies about the ‘trendiness’ of Irish) together with their action (using Irish in this particular action) create the reflexivity, whereby they help to create the conditions for their use of Irish (and the future use of Irish in such commercial contexts) to be successful. We can equate this decision to that of stock brokers, who, Soros claims, largely act on their intuitions and biases, but who in turn create conditions for those intuitions to be successful now and in the future. Mügge argues in relation to global financial markets that “producers in the financial sector increasingly act as rule-setters in the transnational domain” (Mügge 2007: 7) and Yeung (2002) also points out in relation to globalization, that it is the social actors who exploit global scales who also and at the same time by doing so create and reinforce these global scales. For instance the ‘scale’ or ideology that enables English to work globally does not just exist; it is created, reinforced by people and their everyday language decisions. As Cymbalista (2003) argues in relation to price trajectories on international stock currency markets, “valuation does not represent economic value but creates economic value . . . markets and their

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participants are more than information-processors. They create information” (Cymbalista 2003: 20). So, we can see that rather than having perfect information about the sociolinguistic situation on a particular market or in relation to a particular customer or group, advertisers and marketers may have some – by definition – imperfect information, which they combine with their own perceptions and ideologies. Just as it is, Soros claims, impossible to have perfect information about market conditions, so too is it impossible to have perfect information about a sociolinguistic situation. Reflexivity also provides a way of explaining the ‘copycat’behavior which we can observe in commercial language policies and practices, the homogenizing trend we can observe around us (cf. Kelly-Holmes forthcoming b). Linguistic hypotheses, as argued above, become self-fulfilling: the presence of a language in a particular ‘event’ (see below) leads to an expectation of its presence. Consumers thus come to expect to see the particular language used in a particular way. Trends emerge, practices are copied and they become norms. For example, multilingualism has been used as an index of universalism or globalism by international organizations such as the UN and the EU. Promotional material for the EU tends to feature multilingual slogans and UNICEF’s Christmas cards have long featured multilingual greetings, a practice taken up by OXFAM and other international charities. Recently, brands which are seeking a similar type of global or universal image have also started/followed a trend in using multilingualism as a way of indexing this. Most notable has been the McDonald’s ‘i’m lovin’ it’ campaign, launched in 2003, which features a multilingual slogan with Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Filipino, Turkish, Ukrainian versions of ‘i’m lovin’ it’ alongside the English version. These versions together formed a multilingual graphic which was used on packaging in McDonald’s restaurants. When fast food rival Burger King relaunched its 30-year-old ‘Have it your way’ slogan in 2004, it too created versions in different languages and merged them into a multilingual graphic that appeared on packaging, cartons etc., and clothes brand Esprit de Corps (EDC) uses different language versions of its slogan ‘The world is our culture’ on its bags to reinforce its positioning as an “international youthful lifestyle company” (www.edc.com). The combinations of languages used, while displaying some differences (e.g. in McDonald’s use of Ukrainian and Filipino), also display remarkable similarities, with languages such as Arabic, Chinese, French, English acting as primary indexes of internationalization and globalization.

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4. A reflexive model of language trends In this section, I would like to attempt to model how commercial language policy and practice might operate as a social system, so that trends come about. The model, following Soros, has four key components. The first is ‘variables’, and in this model, the variables would be the language or languages used (including also varieties, accents, repertoires), as well as their modes of use (e.g. genres, discourses) which are also subject to reflexivity. In other words, which language(s) is/are chosen, and which are not, and how are they used? The second component is ideas, and these would be language ideologies – individual, group, societal – perceptions and preconceptions about language or languages or varieties etc. as well as about modes of use of language and about speakers. The third component Soros focuses on is ‘events’, and these would then be the particular texts and speech acts which take place, since these represent the action or fundamental intervention on the market (e.g. advertisements, websites, brochures etc.). Soros’ final component, ‘groups’ would in such a model refer to all actors at micro, meso and macro levels, who are involved in these processes, who can take part in these processes and who are affected by these process. So, the marketers themselves, companies, consumers, individuals, educational institutions etc. The proposed model is presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Reflexive model of language trends

The reflexivity model of language trends (see figure 1) shows the reflexive nature of the process, whereby action and participation are constantly being described and understood by the individual actors (groups), and whereby variables, ideas, events and groups are constantly interacting and affecting each other: . . . the psychology of participants in any historical process is its integral component and by continuously interacting with reality, it forms a reflexive process: a real situation affects the minds and behavior of its participants, while their thoughts and behavior affect the development of the situation. The participants’ ideas, evaluations, expectations and prevailing preferences, which are imperfect

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by nature, greatly determine the natural course of events and their basic uncertainty. (Birshtein and Borsevici 2001: 75)

Another appealing aspect of Soros’ theory of reflexivity from the point of view of applying it to the language policies and practices of marketers is his focus on the interdependence of the various factors which other economists tend to treat as discrete; namely, variables, ideas, events and groups. According to Soros, interaction comes first, and the model is predicated on the interdependence of variables, ideas, events, and groups. It is in fact impossible to think of these variables as independent or existing on their own. This is nothing new to sociolinguists, but it is fairly radical in economics. Reflexivity in economic theory recognizes that “. . . a factor never acts alone, but only as it changes and is instantly changed by being in interaction with all other factors” (Cymbalista 2003: 19). Thus, rather than a static and independent set of variables, a reflexive model should instead be seen as an “unseparated multiplicity” (Soros 1987), in which “interaction comes first” (Cymbalista 2003: 19). The model proposed above should therefore not be seen as something static or measurable. It is instead an attempt to model or gain a snapshot of a process that is continuous. The variables (languages, varieties, accents) are not static and measurable, since they are always interacting with ideas (ideologies) and groups (speakers, hearers) in ever-changing, continuous conversations and narratives (events) – the speech act we encounter at this moment cannot be seen or measured or encountered in isolation from the speech act immediately before or after it. Our ideologies are inseparable from our experience of events and groups and vice versa. It is this state of constant diachronic and synchronic change that leads to uncertainty, which in turn leads to (and actually necessitates) guesswork on the part of individual actors in the market. This state of uncertainty is due to the ‘unseparated multiplicity’ of variables, events, ideas and groups, which are constantly participating and reflecting on and understanding this participation, and which in turn leads to a state of constant change. Thus, “uncertainty is therefore not just the absence of certainty about an outcome: it is also the presence of the ongoing process of events” (Cymbalista 2003: 19). Market processes are “not a series of discrete events, a chain of completed occurrences, of finished happenings. The future is uncertain because it’s always in the process of being formed” (Cymbalista 2003: 19), and all the components of the reflexive model have a hand in how it is being formed. This concept of an ‘unseparated multiplicity’ also shows how ideologies and norms come about. Just as ‘the market’ does not consist of a series of discrete events, information too is “a continuous process which is created over time as the market participant engages with the events” (Cymbalist 2003: 20).

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Trends emerge when consensus emerges in this process among a range of market participants, who “not only perceive outside events in a similar way but also share perceptions of transition or stability, thus creating, reinforcing of reversing trends” (Cymbalista 2003: 20). Reflexivity can also be seen to have something in common with the process of linguistic normalization, in particular as exemplified by Strubell’s Catherine Wheel (cf. for example, Strubell 1998, 2001) – the case of commercial Irish being a good example. Although not explicitly economic in orientation, Strubell’s Catherine Wheel does show the reflexive impact of intervention in processes of language revitalization. Strubell shows how supply and consumption of goods and services in a particular language can lead to perception of a greater need for the language, leading to more motivation to learn and use the language, leading to more learning, more informal use in social situations, more demand for goods and services in the language and back to even greater supply and consumption of goods and services in the particular language. Interventions set the wheel in motion. However, the Catherine Wheel is predicated on the same assumption as mainstream economic thinking, namely that demand stimulates supply or supply stimulates demand. A reflexivity modeling of the processes of language revitalization or language normalization would instead focus on expectations and acceptability (in Bourdieu’s [1991] terms), rather than seeing a straightforward cause and effect or input-output relationship – again keeping in mind the contradictory and paradoxical behavior and ideologies which individuals have and which they are constantly revisiting. Taking the example of the Irish language, the introduction of Irish language television station TG4 (originally TnaG when it was founded) in 1996 can be seen to represent an intervention that would correspond to an increase in the supply of goods and services in Irish that would lead to greater demand and greater supply, according to Strubel’s Catherine Wheel. If we take the example of advertising in Irish, however, the situation is not quite a straightforward as this – there is an effect, but it happens in a much more indirect, unpredictable and long-term way. When TG4 was set up by the Irish government, many national and international brands initially started to advertise on the channel in Irish and paid for the production of Irish language advertising. However, soon after its launch, the channel began to lose its viewership and it consequently also lost advertisers. When the station began to recover and relaunched itself, it did win back advertisers, but this time the majority of the advertisers kept their advertising in English (cf. Kelly-Holmes 2005). So, in the ad breaks in the programs (which are in Irish with English subtitles during prime time) the bulk of commercial advertisements for national and international products are in English.

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While the intervention into the supply side (providing a television station in Irish) might not have led to a growth in the demand side (for advertising in Irish), the conclusion is too simple and points to the inadequacy of the mainstream economic view. In parallel with TG4’s growth and success, a number of interesting initiatives have happened – we could describe these as trends. An increasing number of businesses in particular domains are using Irish company and brand names, particularly in the areas of food (cf. Kelly-Holmes 2005), tourism (cf. Kelly-Holmes et al. forthcoming), but also in newer domains such as beauty (a local beauty parlor in Limerick uses the name Mise or ‘me’ to brand itself) and child care (a day care-centre uses the Irish word for care, Aire to mark itself out). The young producers on TG4 and the trendy programming have contributed to a phenomenon identified as ‘Sexy Irish’, and Irish has started to feature in comedy acts (Kelly-Holmes and Atkinson 2007b). Recently, as highlighted above, Carlsberg, a global brand, used Irish in an advertisement for lager. The last time Irish was used in a commercial for beer, it was for the iconic Irish brand of Guinness, and featured the inhabitants of the Irish-speaking Aran Islands, off the Irish west coast, watching the clock and the sea to await their supply of Guinness due to arrive by the traditional currach boat (1977). The Carlsberg ad on the other hand featured three young Irish men on holidays in Rio de Janeiro, and the message of the ad, that speaking Irish makes one attractive in international tourist destinations, was very much in tune with the ‘Sexy Irish’ discourse (cf. Kelly-Holmes [2010] for full discussion of this). What I think we can see happening here is something that cannot really be explained in terms of demand and supply or even demand/supply and consumption. It is instead a process of taking chances and making guesses about what is credible, acceptable (in Bourdieu’s [1991] terms), what is possible to say; and in the process of stretching the boundaries of what is currently acceptable, possible, credible, creating new levels of acceptability, credibility and possibility, while challenging prevailing ideologies. It involves very subtle guesswork based on knowledge of prevailing language ideologies, and knowledge of how far these can be stretched and challenged. In this way, trends are created, and reflexivity, by creating new trends, norms and expectations, ultimately leads to predictability and sameness.

5. Conclusion As stated in the introduction, this article grew out of my own curiosity about patterns and trends that I have been observing over more than ten years of research around the area of commercial language policies and practices. In particular, my engagement with reflexivity is driven by a desire to deconstruct

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the discourse around ‘the market’ and globalization, which is reflected in the ‘uneasy relationship’between sociolinguistics and economics (cf. Kelly-Holmes [forthcoming c] for a discussion of this). One appealing thing about reflexivity is that it enables us to stand back from vast nebulous processes like globalization or the global spread of English and break down these processes into the microlevel decisions of companies, teams, and sometimes individuals, sometimes working on their own, with their own particular language ideologies. The attempt to use reflexivity is also motivated by a conviction that orthodox economics, with its reliance on ‘perfect’ information, rational human beings and a notional equilibrium created by supply responding to demand and vice versa has little to offer us in understanding the complex and multi-layered interactions between languages and markets. More than this, it may even obscure what is actually taking place, masking the agency involved. What would be needed in order to build a credible and useful reflexive theory of language trends would be longitudinal, historical studies and tracking of institutional practices and of the development of such trends, in combination with ethnographic studies of the ‘groups’ identified in our model, in particular of course the actors who create the events and who make the language choices. Further fruitful research could look at the real effects of these choices, the ripple effects, in terms of speakers, ideologies, equalities and categorizations (cf. Blommaert 2003). Just as “. . . the evolution of prices on financial markets can be regarded as a reflexive historical process” (Birshtein and Borsevici 2001: 75), so too might we usefully research the evolution of language trends as ‘a reflexive historical process’. By acknowledging the ‘unseparated multiplicity’ of ideologies, languages, speakers and events, and their constantly modifying interactions, reflexivity allows us to understand a dynamic ‘future is now’, ‘past is now’ model of these interactions and their ongoing effects. Of course, reflexivity does not and cannot provide all of the answers; it may simply help to illuminate one part of the picture. As Cymbalist highlights, reflexivity in economics and international financial markets remains “mysterious, both at the theoretical and at the practical level: neither his [Soros’] conceptual framework nor the manner in which it gets translated into investment decisions is fully understandable” (Cymbalista 2003: 1). This mystery is, however, due to the fact that reflexivity allows us to acknowledge that we are dealing with human beings who are not rational and who are unpredictable, who behave in complex and contradictory ways – orthodox economics which eliminates these messy factors is much easier to comprehend and less mysterious, but not very useful, I would argue. Messiness is what sociolinguists and applied linguists deal in – the messy, mixed-up language practices that again and again defy categoriza-

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tion and labeling – and a useful, workable theory that helps us to understand language trends and their implications needs to have this messiness built in. University of Limerick

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Strubell, Miguel. 1998. Language, democracy and devolution in Catalonia. In Sue Wright (ed.), Language, democracy and devolution in Catalonia, 4–38. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Strubell, Miquel. 2001. Catalan a decade later. In JoshuaA. Fishman (ed.), Can threatened languages be saved? Reversing language shift, revisited: A 21st century perspective, 260–283. Clevedon UK: Multilingual Matters. Umpleby, Stuart A. 2006. Reflexivity in social systems: The theories of George Soros. Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences. www.gwu.edu/∼umpleby/recent papers/2007 SRBS Reflexivity Theory.pdf (accessed 30 September 2009). Ustinova, Irina & Tej K. Bhatia. 2005. Convergence of English in Russian TV commercials. World Englishes 24(4). 495–508. Yeung, Henry W. 2002. The limits to globalization theory: A geographic perspective on global economic change. Economic Geography 78(3). 285–305. Helen Kelly-Holmes is a lecturer in sociolinguistics and new media at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research interests focus on the sociolinguistics of market processes. She has published widely in a range of international journals and is author of Advertising as Multilingual Communication (2005, PalgraveMacMillan).

Contacts of Russian in the post-Soviet space* ANNA VERSCHIK

Abstract The article discusses the importance of contact linguistic research for a general understanding of the language dynamics and linguistic processes in the post-Soviet space. Unlike political and macrosociolinguistic studies, contact linguistic case studies on language contacts in FSU are still scarce; some reasons being the heterogeneity of data and isolation of Eastern scholars. The review is concerned with contacts of Russian language with Ukrainian, Kazakh and Estonian. It is demonstrated that the particular cases are relevant for a general discussion on the directionality of contact-induced change, grammar of code-switching, and the emergence of contact varieties. Keywords: language contacts; post-Soviet studies; Russian; Ukrainian; Kazakh; Estonian.

1. Introduction The collapse of the USSR and the subsequent fundamental changes that affected politics, language policies, sociocultural settings, minority-majority relations, language choice patterns, and the character and distribution of bi- and multilingualism, immediately attracted attention of scholars in social and political sciences but, surprisingly, not so much in contact linguists. Political scientists, most notably Laitin (1998) and Kolstø (1995, 1999) from the West and Lebedeva (1995) and Savoskul (2001) from the East with their teams conducted necessary foundational research. Later, linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists started their research in the post-Soviet countries (for instance, Ciscel [2007] on Moldova; Korth [2005] on Kyrgyzstan; see details and references in Pavlenko [2008a: 276–277]). However, among the researchers we do not find contact

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linguists. Such little interest can be explained by a variety of reasons, one of them certainly being the heterogeneity of the subject: fifteen successor states, different language policies, different degrees of proficiency in Russian/titular languages, different ethnic makeup of the population and the proportion of Russian-speakers, myriad of language contact situations, inherited and new, and different history of the incorporation into the Soviet Union. Yet, there is at least one common denominator that allows comparison between different post-Soviet contact situations and further theorizing: namely, the contacts between Russian and other languages. This circumstance turns the whole post-Soviet space into a kind of language laboratory (Verschik forthcoming). So far that most of the literature on contact linguistic addresses Western contact situations where a sociolinguistically dominant language is one of the Indo-European languages (English, German, Dutch, etc). The studies focus on contacts of immigrant languages (Turkish in Europe) or minority languages (for instance, Swedish in Finland). In this situation, post-Soviet language contacts will certainly add new empirical evidence from a novel sociolinguistic context. As far as macrosociolinguistics and language policy of post-Soviet space are concerned, some commonalities, differences and challenges have been outlined and a preliminary basis for further research has been formulated, thanks to the efforts of Aneta Pavlenko who has published several comprehensive reviews (2006, 2008a, 2008b). From the point of view of microsociolinguistics and modern contact linguistics, that is, the study of spoken/written language data collected from individual speakers, it is too early for large-scale generalizations. The first attempt of bringing together scholars in contact linguistics who work on post-Soviet language contact data was the colloquium “Language contacts in the post-Soviet space” held at the 6th International Symposium on Bilingualism in 2007 in Hamburg by the current author. Several papers from the colloquium are to appear in the special issue of International Journal of Bilingualism (Verschik forthcoming). Still, all the articles in the named collection have different focus and address a wide range of topics, from pidgin formation (Stern forthcoming) to a variety that has emerged as the result of contacts between closely related languages, Russian and Belarusian (Liskovets forthcoming), from the continuing impact of Russian on Komi (Leinonen forthcoming) to the growing impact of Estonian on Russian (Zabrodskaja forthcoming a) and Russian conjunctions in the speech of urban Kazakhs (Muhamedova forthcoming). The special issue may be viewed as the first step towards defining the field. Of course, the topic of contacts between Russian and other languages is not new in itself (see for instance Comrie [1981] on the languages of the USSR). However, the character, focus and scope of such research are most heterogeneous and the quality of writings on this topic is rather uneven. Many Eastern scholars

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are not familiar with modern theoretical frameworks of code-switching, contactinduced language change, bilingual speech, etc., and their studies are often rather descriptive without any reference to current discussions on contact linguistics in the West. In this respect, contact linguistic and sociolinguistic research in some post-Soviet countries is doing better than in others. The question why this happens is without doubts fascinating but cannot be addressed here. It has to be noted as well that many studies are published in languages other than English or German and, thus, remain inaccessible to Western scholars. It is difficult to present a concise review of such a new and constantly growing field of research. An all-inclusive comprehensive review on all language contact situations of FSU would be impossible and some delimitation is inevitable. The departure points in the current review are as follows. (1) Developing the metaphor of language laboratory, the focus will be on contacts between Russian with other languages, that is, the same language (once the dominant language of USSR) in different sociolinguistic situations. Thus, Latvian-Estonian or Tajik-Uzbek language contacts remain out of the scope of the present article. A view on contacts between Russian and typologically different languages or between Russian and other East-Slavic languages, Ukrainian and Belarusian, but in different sociolinguistic circumstances can in the long run provide relevant empirical data, which would hopefully improve the understanding of the interplay between typological and sociolinguistic factors in language contacts. (2) Directionality of impact and contact-induced language change. The question of directionality of impact and contact-induced language change appears a very obvious one, yet it has not been separately addressed in case-studies. Sometimes Eastern scholars write about ‘influence’ of other languages on Russian but most often it is not treated in any systematic manner within any modern contact linguistics theoretical framework (e.g., Külmoja 1999; Mechkovskaya 2005). As for directionality of impact, there appears to be a certain division of labor between disciplines. Traditionally, SLA research is concerned with the impact of L1 > L2 and contact linguistics deals more often with the opposite L2 > L1 impact. Thomason and Kaufman (1988) proposed a now classical model where the fundamental difference between two different sociolinguistic processes, language maintenance and language shift is highlighted. In language maintenance, the direction of impact is L2 > L1 (generally referred to as ‘borrowing’) and L1 > L2 in language shift (‘interference through shift’). In these two processes, different subsystems of language are affected. Synchronically, however, it is difficult if not impossible to say which process will eventually prevail. Communities are not homogenous and, especially in new sociolinguistic situations,

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some segments of a community or individuals may be oriented at language maintenance and others at language shift. It has to be noted though that change starts at the level of individual speaker. Weinreich (1953) was right when he stated that the locus of language contacts is bilingual brain. Not only that a community may be fragmented as far as language maintenance and shift are concerned but also in an individual contact induced language change may occur in both directions, L2 > L1 and L1 > L2. Pavlenko and Jarvis (2002) emphasize, as they call it, bidirectionality of transfer in bilingual individuals. For the post-Soviet language contacts, the directionality of impact is especially relevant. What was the impact of Russian on other languages? Is it continuing or has the direction changed in post-Soviet countries? What can be said about directionality in different speakers? At times, speaking of directionality, it appears difficult to avoid politicization and ideological connotations. For example, Leinonen (forthcoming) describes the state of research on KomiRussian contacts and observes that mostly Komi linguists discuss ‘purity’ of Komi and how Russian influence can be resisted. In not a very distant past, Hint (1991) was justly concerned with the Soviet ethnic and language policy in Estonia but dramatized the impact of Russian on Estonian. As studies by Ehala (1994) and Hasselblatt (2000) demonstrated, Hint’s (1991) claims are not substantiated. Research on the directionality of change, based on data from postSoviet contact situations, may have implication for theory as well because in some countries previously monolingual Russians are gradually becoming bilingual and researchers can observe the dynamics of contacts from the point zero, so to say. The issue of directionality may become complicated in the case of multiple contact situation where, on the one hand, titulars have some competence of Russian as L2 and, on the other, Russians start using the titular language as L2 (for Estonia see Verschik [2007a]). Probably, this type of contact situation is especially characteristic of some post-Soviet countries because of the reverse of language status, power relations and language policy after the disintegration of USSR. I am not aware of any similar studies from the Western context, although cases of spontaneous acquisition of minority language by majority language speakers have been reported (Auer and Dirim 2003; Dirim and Hieronymus [2003] on Germans acquiring Turkish). (3) Whether and how the collapse of USSR has affected the process and the outcome of language contacts? It is clear that many contact situations originate from pre-Soviet times. However, the whole post-Soviet landscape, so to say, presents a sociolinguistic constellation previously unknown in the Western sociolinguistics. While Russian minorities in the classical sense existed and do

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exist in the post-Soviet space, for instance, Old Believers in the Baltic countries, by and large Russians cannot be equalled with minorities and immigrants in the conventional sense (see Pavlenko [2008a] on terminology problems; also see Ozolins [2003] on the Baltic countries). In the East, mostly scholars with background in Russian linguistics consider Russians in the post-Soviet countries and, in general, abroad as a diaspora (Külmoja 1999, 2000; Mustajoki and Protassova 2004). However, considering all varieties of Russian in the post-Soviet context and elsewhere outside Russia as diaspora varieties may be counterintuitive in the view of sociocultural heterogeneity of Russian-speakers: can descendents of Russian post-revolution émigrés in France, Russian-speaking Jews in Germany, Kazakhs who have shifted to Russian during the Soviet era and Russian-speakers who viewed the Baltic region as a part of their country and settled there without any attention to the local languages, be characterized as speakers with the same profile? During the Soviet era, Russians were mostly monolingual in certain republics (Estonia, Latvia) but not necessarily everywhere. In Ukraine, due to the close relatedness of the varieties and exposure to Ukrainian, many Russian-speakers had at least a passive command of Ukrainian (Bilaniuk and Melnyk 2008: 345, 346– 347; Vakhtin et al. 2003). In Kazakhstan, Ukraine and some other republics, Russian was de facto considered more prestigious than the indigenous languages, so that urban elites tended to shift to Russian and send their children to Russian-medium schools; however, this was not the case in the Baltic republics where a silent but strong resistance to Russian as an ‘intruder’ language existed throughout the years of the Soviet rule (Raun [2001: 210] on the reported decline in Russian proficiency among ethnic Estonians in the census of 1979). Now the situation has changed in the terms of language policy and language status (on various versions of de-Russification in the post-Soviet countries see Pavlenko [2008a, 2008b]) but the question remains: what has changed in the linguistic behavior and repertoire of individual speakers? In Section 2, three case studies will be addressed: contacts of Russian and Ukrainian, Kazakh and Estonian. The reasons for choice of these particular cases will be presented and general points of comparison outlined. Section 3 of the current review comprises conclusions and possible topics for future research.

2. Review on case studies In what follows, I am going to focus on the contacts of Russian in three countries: Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Estonia. First, some general considerations will be presented and then the rationale for the choice will be explained.

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As stated before, the field of post-Soviet contact linguistics is new and so far there have been isolated attempts, albeit often successful and meaningful, to deal with aspects of contact-induced change. Apparently, it is impossible to give a systematic account on all existing literature because: (a) it is written in many different languages (Russian, but also Estonian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, etc.) and often published in peripheral periodicals rather than mainstream linguistic journals, which makes it difficultly accessible; (b) many researchers in the post-Soviet countries are not aware of modern contact linguistic theories and their research is either too descriptive (i.e. lots of isolated examples like lists of loanwords or instances of ‘interference’ presented without any connection to theories); or they attempt too high a level of generalization, for instance, judging on the processes in Russian in the whole post-Soviet territory without ample empirical data (see reference to Mechkovskaya [2005] in the next paragraph); (c) purist focus of some research, i.e., the main concern is either un-doing Russification or the necessity of following the norms of Standard Russian outside Russia (Zharkova [2006: 52] on “violation of the norm” in the speech of Russians in Lithuania). To render it in a slightly different manner, diaspora approach (see more details in Verschik [forthcoming]) displays some interest towards the regionalization of Russian in the new circumstances, i.e., what is in the terms of contact linguistics sometimes labeled as divergence. Some authors make rather categorical claims about all varieties of Russian in all post-Soviet countries (“Regional changes in the literary Russian language so far do not contradict the norms of Russian” [Mechkovskaya 2005: 60]). However, given the fact that still there is a serious lack of systematically collected data and empirical research, it is too early for any such generalizations. Moreover, empirical data from Estonia’s Russian (Verschik 2004, 2008; Zabrodskaja 2009, forthcoming a, forthcoming b) show that there are indeed constructions conventionalized in local Russian that are at odds with monolingual grammar rules. Divergence approach has its strong sides but, if not balanced with case studies on particular contact situations, there is a risk of overlooking relevant evidence, processes and results. Regionalization, i.e., emergence of regional varieties of Russian, cannot be fully explained exclusively by the dispersion of Russianspeakers, emergence of new state borders and new language policies. Contacts with different languages and, in some cases, convergence towards these languages (see especially Verschik [2006]; Zabrodskaja [2009] on Estonia’s Russian), different patterns of bilingualization of Russian-speakers/titulars and

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complexity of language contacts though the time span (like in Russian-Ukrainian case) are ‘responsible’ for regionalization not in the least measure than divergence by the means of population dispersion and establishment of new state borders. Significantly, purism, whether understood as de-Russification and stigmatization of ‘mixed’ varieties like Surzhik (literally, ‘a mixture of wheat and rye flour’ that was considered somewhat of low quality, see discussion below) or as strive towards the maintenance of Standard Russian in the post-Soviet countries in the face of impact of other languages, largely determines research climate. An essentialist view on monolingual ‘un-contaminated’ pure varieties (a case of monolingual bias, see Auer 2007; Ellis 2008) interferes with research goals and sometimes even the legitimacy of research on ‘inappropriate’ language phenomena is questioned (see discussion in Stavic’ka 2001). Despite the limitations that do not yet allow for a comprehensive, all-inclusive review on the post-Soviet language contacts, some recent research results can and should be compared and generalized. Three cases will be considered: contacts between Russian and (1) Ukrainian, (2) Kazakh, (3) Estonian. Below I will provide an explanation for such a choice. First, quite interestingly, David Laitin (1998) chose the same countries plus Latvia for his much quoted monograph. One of his reasons for picking exactly these cases was a considerable number of Russian-speakers in these countries, both ethnic Russians (like in Estonia and Latvia) and a high number of Russified titulars (Kazakhstan, Ukraine). Nauruzbayeva (2003) in her short review on language revival policies refers to the same cases (minus Latvia). I am not including Latvia in the current review article because, unlike in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Estonia, no modern microsociolinguistic research on language contacts has been produced there and nothing has been written in any systematic way on say, Latvian-Russian code-switching or contact-induced change in Russian of Latvia. Instead, researchers there are preoccupied with language policy and macrosociolinguistic studies. There are similarities and differences between these countries as far as their Russian-speaking populations are concerned. In all the three countries, these populations are socially and culturally heterogeneous (in that respect social scientists emphasize the Estonian case; see Vihalemm & Masso [2002: 85]; other references in Verschik [2005a]); thus, the label ‘Russian-speakers’ is abstract and general. For instance, Ukraine and Kazakhstan have a considerable number of Russified titulars who clearly are Russian-speakers (Pavlenko 2008a: 283, 291). This happened because Russian was associated with modern education, high culture and urban life there. Ukrainian had had necessary registers but these fell into disuse for various reasons (Masenko [2004] discusses Russification in

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corpus planning in the 1930s and the decreasing prestige of Ukrainian; see also Bilaniuk [2005: 90–91]). Kazakh, however, lacked important modern registers (academic writing, higher education, science, administration, etc.) because there had been too little time for urban modern culture in the national language to develop before Russian became omnipresent. Thus, Soviet language hierarchies have been internalized by certain titular elites, and often covert but consequent promotion of Russian at the expense of other languages lead to the loss of domains to Russian. This did not happen in Estonia and in the Baltic countries in general: the response to Soviet language policies, demographic Russification and pressure was a voluntary separation and segregation of Estonian-speakers, coupled with some functional EstonianRussian bilingualism for those who needed it because of the character of their occupation. The three cases illustrate that the terms ‘diaspora’ or ‘beached diaspora’ (Laitin 1998: 29) is too broad: some Russian-speakers have never left their homeland but shifted the language instead (for instance, urban Kazakhs in Kazakhstan) and thus differ from ethnic Russians who settled outside Russian Federation and felt no obligation to study the local languages (Russians in the Baltic countries). Probably, what is common now to all three countries is differentiation of Russian-speakers as far as their varieties of Russian, bilingualization, and civic identity are concerned. The three countries demonstrate that the ethno-demographic makeup of the population, while important, is not the only crucial factor that determines the outcome of language contacts. Ethnic and linguistic demarcation lines do not necessarily co-inside, as it is especially visible in Ukraine (see discussion in Section 2.1). Second, contacts of Russian with Ukrainian, Kazakh and Estonian have enjoyed in-depth monographic treatment, whereas the discussion is solidly grounded in modern sociolinguistic/contact linguistics theories. The existence of such scholarship provides a reliable basis for an overview and discussion. The monographs are all based on field work and real spoken language data and present a list of potentially relevant questions for further research and theory development: contacts between closely related languages, language ideologies and conversational practices in Ukraine, as well as a typology of Surzhik (Bilaniuk 2005); grammatical aspects of Kazakh-Russian code-switching and challenges to Matrix Frame Language model (Muhamedowa 2006); pragmatics of RussianEstonian code-switching among Russian-speaking schoolchildren (Zabrodskaja 2005) and contact-induced language change in Estonia’s Russian with a focus on non-monolingual constructions and code-copying framework (Verschik 2008). Third, contacts of Russian in these countries provide insightful data for comparison. Unfortunately, comparative glance at language contact processes in the

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post-Soviet space is still limited because of the focus on language policy and challenges for education systems. In any case, post-Soviet language contacts are in need of a comparative research as much as other aspects, such as language policies, language management, etc., do. The countries have a different history of incorporation into Russian Empire/Soviet Union (see more details in Pavlenko [2008a]). Kazakhstan was a colony that became independent in 1991 for the first time in its history. Ukraine presents a less clear case but is viewed by some scholars, notably, Masenko (1999, 2002, 2004) in the terms of post-colonialism (see overview on Ukrainian history in Bilaniuk and Melnyk [2008: 347–349]). Eastern Ukraine voluntary submitted to the Russian crown because of unwillingness to remain under the Polish rule (hence the union treaty of 1654), whereas Western Ukraine belonged at first to Lithuanian-Polish commonwealth and after the partition of Poland in the late 18th century became a part of Austro-Hungarian Empire. Noteworthy, the two empires had different language policies vis-à-vis Ukrainian (toleration and even promotion in Austria, belittling and limitation of domains in the Russian Empire). After World War I, Western Ukraine was mostly under the Polish rule and some minor territories belonged to Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Western Ukraine was annexed by USSR in 1939 after Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Eastern Ukraine enjoyed a short-lived independence in 1918–1920, to be soon incorporated into the Soviet Union. While in the 1920s a policy of indigenization (Ukrainization) was implemented, it was effectively undone in the 1930s (Bilaniuk 2005: 84–93; Taranenko 2007: 121–125).1 The differences in political history of different regions in Ukraine have far-fetched consequences for sociolinguistic profiles of the population and regionalization that is significant today. Estonia was conquered and ruled by different powers in its early history, ending up as the result of Northern War as a province within the Russian Empire in 1709. It was a fully independent state between 1918–1940 with Estonian as the official language functioning in all institutions and domains. It was a country with a fairly homogeneous population (before 1940, ethnic Estonians made up 88.8% of the population). Estonia was occupied and annexed by USSR in 1940 and after World War II demographically Russified by central authorities’ policy that facilitated migration of Russian-speakers (for a review of the sociolinguistic history of Estonia see Rannut [2004, 2008]; Verschik 2005a). Given all this, one should ask how different socio-political history has affected language contact processes and outcomes. Fourth, theorizing on correlation between sociolinguistic factors and structural characteristics of languages in contact has remained as relevant in contact linguistics as it was two decades ago when Thomason and Kaufman (1988) pre-

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sented their first systematic generalization based on a solid body of case studies. While sociolinguistic factors themselves do not directly cause contact-induced language change, they set into motion other forces, such as spread of individual multilingualism with a wide range of consequences: purely linguistic, cognitive, pragmatic and social (Backus 2005). At the same time, structural and typological similarities are known to facilitate contact-induced language change (Clyne [2003: 162–175] on facilitation). For instance, Surzhik is a cluster of contact varieties that are a result of Russian-Ukrainian contacts. One may ask what role the proximity of varieties in question plays in the emergence of contact varieties (see further Section 2.2). Fifth, the contacts of Russian in the three countries provide a fruitful ground for the inquiry into the afore-mentioned directionality of contact-induced change. Is the impact unidirectional? Do pre-1991 trends prevail or not? Does attitudinal delay, i.e., following earlier practices and adhering to earlier language ideologies and hierarchies etc. play a role? The three situations will be reviewed in the following aspects: – overall sociolinguistic setting, status of languages; – distribution of Russian-non-Russian bilingualism: who is bilingual, who recently became bilingual and for what reasons; – regional differentiation and its significance for bilingualism and language contacts; – directionality of contact-induced change; – contact varieties and purity discourses (if applicable); – practices of bilingual communication; – relevance of a particular case study on contact-induced language change for general theory; – other languages, for instance, English, entering the scene.

2.1.

Ukraine

Ukraine presents a fascinating case where two closely related varieties, Russian and Ukrainian, are in a long-term contact, while sociolinguistic circumstances keep changing. Ukrainian, together with Belarusian and Russian, forms the EastSlavic branch of Slavic languages. As mentioned above, due to the differences in political and cultural history between East and West, the language situation of Ukraine is far from homogeneous. Restrictions against the use of Ukrainian in the East began already in the 17th century and under various pretexts continued till the collapse of the Soviet Union (Bilaniuk 2005: 74–76, 79–80, 84–93). Ukrainian was overtly banned

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and excluded from education and public sphere under the Tsarist rule. Under the Soviet regime, after a short-lived policy of indigenization, Russification was systematically implemented in corpus planning in the 1930s as a means of fighting against ‘bourgeois nationalism’.2 The Russification became even more intense with the influx of Russian-speakers into industrial areas of South-East during the Soviet era (Donbass region) and introduction of compulsory instruction in Russian at school since 1938 (Bilaniuk 2005: 90). As of 1987, more than half of Ukrainian pupils attended Russian-medium schools (Bilaniuk and Melnyk 2008: 348). Gradually, Ukrainian acquired low prestige even among ethnic Ukrainians and was associated with backward, rural, uneducated speakers. For Western Ukraine, it was a different story. Ukrainian was never banned under the Austro-Hungarian empire, although in some regions such as Transkarpathia its usage was more restricted compared to Bukovina and Galicia (Bilaniuk 2005: 75). In the interwar period, some restrictions and relatively low prestige notwithstanding, Ukrainian was able to develop relatively freely (Bilaniuk and Melnyk 2008: 348). All this created a very different type of language attitudes and even under the Soviet regime Ukrainian enjoyed a covert prestige in the West, making the subsequent post-Soviet Ukrainization of public sphere smooth. Statistics provided by Bilaniuk and Melnyk (2008: 342) demonstrate the uneven distribution of Ukrainian and Russian population throughout the country, Ternopil oblast being the most Ukrainian region (98% Ukrainians, 1% Russians) as opposed to Donets’k oblast (38% Ukrainians, 57% Russians). The ethnic composition of the population in Ukraine is as follows. According to 2001 census, the whole population is 48.5 million. 78% identify themselves as Ukrainians and 17% as Russians. However, 68% indicated Ukrainian as their mother tongue and 30% Russian (http://www.ukrcensus.gov.ua/eng/results/ [accessed 10 December 2009]). While in comparison to the last Soviet census of 1989 the proportion of ethnic Ukrainians and the number of Ukrainian-speakers has increased by 5% and 3% respectively, this development may be accounted for by changes in civic identity but also in cultural and linguistic identity (Bilaniuk and Melnyk 2008: 342). The present debate on Ukrainian is complicated by the fact that the promotion of Ukrainian is accompanied by purist ideology, aimed at de-Russification (both in status and in corpus planning) and undoing the consequence of the historical subjugation to Russia.The stigmatization of ‘impure’language and non-standard speech, however, creates linguistic insecurity in many speakers (Bilaniuk and Melnyk 2008: 346). A rather useful overall description of Ukrainian-Russian contacts has been provided by Taranenko (2007), whose article belongs to the special issue of In-

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ternational Journal of the Sociology of Language on contacts between Slavic languages. From a historical point of view, Taranenko (2007: 121) mentions bidirectional influence up to the middle of the 18th century and the later unidirectional impact of Russian on Ukrainian. Thus, Taranenko (2007) touches upon directionality, albeit implicitly, from a historical perspective. Starting from the 1930s, Russification of Ukrainian corpus became a dominant tendency in language planning (Bilaniuk 2005: 86–87); however, the result is more complex than just a Russified version of Ukrainian. Indeed, directionality in Ukrainian-Russian language contacts is a highly entangled issue. In addition to Standard Russian and Standard Ukrainian, there are regional varieties of both languages that bend more in one or the other direction and contact varieties exist as well (as we shall see, there are different kinds of Surzhik). The borders between varieties cannot be easily drawn. For instance, Bilaniuk (2005: 118) refers to a case where a Ukrainian linguist admired beautiful Ukrainian of his co-traveller and the latter answered that she was speaking Belarusian and her native village was in Belarus (although her variety was very close to Standard Ukrainian, some regional traits notwithstanding). Pavlenko and Melnyk (2009) found in their experimental research on cross-linguistic influence among students in Kyiv that in certain instances it was impossible to determine what element belongs to what language. Taranenko (2007: 126–127) describes the state of dynamic balance in border regions between Ukraine and Russia (see also Chorny [2006] and Zhurzhenko [2006] on post-Soviet language preferences and self-identification in border regions). Historically, Ukrainisms have permeated South Russian dialects on all levels (lexicon, pronunciation, word formation, etc.), and it is often impossible to assign an element to either language (see the digest of an early and rather exceptional study by Chizhikova [1968] in Bilaniuk [2005: 115–117]). Ukrainisms have been conventionalized in varieties of Russian outside Ukraine as well, mostly being a feature of casual speech, sometimes communicating irony and sometimes signaling low style. Interestingly enough, the ethnic coloring may have disappeared for the speakers so that they do not identify the source of the items they are using. Lexical and semantic Ukrainisms are also present in the ethnolectal speech of some Russian Jews who unknowingly introduce Ukrainisms that are present in also in Yiddish (Verschik 2007 b: 227). Even today when Ukrainian is the only official language (with the exception of Crimea, which is an autonomy within Ukraine and where, for various reasons, Russian is the second official language, see Bilaniuk and Menlyk [2008: 342]), various authors point out that the situation of Russian-Ukrainian bilingualism is far from stable (Taranenko 2007: 119). Bilaniuk and Melnyk (2008: 346) claim that ethnic Ukrainians are 2.7 times more likely to practice bilingualism than

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ethnic Russians. Although the majority of the population is bilingual (including those who at least passively understand the other variety) and only a minority is completely monolingual Ukrainophones/Russophones (Vakhtin et al. 2003), the asymmetrical character of bilingualism has been still retained. Still, one cannot say that the promotion of Ukrainian and attempts to raise it prestige since 1991 have not brought about any changes in addition to the census statistics. While some authors, especially Masenko (2004, 2005, 2008) are inclined to speak about inequality of languages and de facto domination of Russian in mass media; others, like Vakhtin et al. (2006) have registered important changes in language attitudes even in areas with a prominent number of Russian-speakers (Kyiv and Kharkiv). They found that correspondence between language proficiency and support of the current language policy is not straightforward: the informants who are not fluent in Ukrainian and for that reason continue using Russian or versions of Surzhik, nevertheless, support the language policy and feel that Ukrainian should be the sole official language of the country. Field work data show that such a discrepancy is not conflicting: the same speaker can harmoniously use languages other than Ukrainian and yet favor the present Ukrainization policy. According to Vakhtin et al. (2003: http://old.eu.spb.ru/ethno/projects/project3/ukraine/004.htm), the present sociolinguistic situation of Ukraine can be characterized as follows: (1) almost equal segments of population speaking Ukrainian and Russian, whereas linguistic and ethnic borders are not identical; (2) territorial and social polarization of linguistic preferences; (3) declarative and often ambiguous statements in legislative acts. This leads us to the importance of empirical data on spoken language. While the concerns about the consequences of the Soviet Russification, certain retention of low prestige of Ukrainian among some ethnic Ukrainians, and problems of acquisition planning (especially in Crimea where only recently Ukrainianmedium schools have been established, Bilaniuk and Melnyk (2008: 342) are understandable and legitimate, these should not obscure the fact that, in reality, linguistic repertoire includes much more than just Russian, Ukrainian and Surzhik, the stigmatized contact variety. Although recently the interest towards Surzhik has increased, among Ukrainian scholars this was mostly dictated by the considerations of ‘purity’, ‘beautiful standard language’and the fear that Surzhik is a transitional stage on the way to ‘assimilation’. As Vakhtin et al. (2006: 200– 201) note, the question is often over-politicized and the fact that many speak Surzhik as L1 is disregarded or such speakers are viewed as deficient. In this respect, the project “New languages of the new states” of European University at St. Petersburg (Vakhtin et al. 2003), dedicated to field research on contact varieties (Surzhik in Ukraine and Trasyanka in Belarus), clearly dif-

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fers from the mainstream research done by scholars in Ukraine. The researchers concur with Orlov ([1997: 80] quoted from Vakhtin et al. [2003]) who, speaking of the situation in Ukraine, arrived at the conclusion that the set of identities legitimized by the society is often in contradiction with the existing latent self-identification. This explains the mentioned fact that while many continue using Russian and Surzhik, they strongly support the policy of promotion of (Standard) Ukrainian. Vakhtin et al. (2003) argue that in the situation of close contacts between the two groups self-identification is complex and non-linear. In ethnic auto-stereotypes of Ukrainians, the importance of common customs, religion, tradition, and way of life prevail, whereas Russians tend to emphasize the importance of their language, culture and features of character. Ethnic Ukrainians form a heterogeneous assemblage of bi- and monolinguals, Ukrainian- and Russian-speakers and also Surzhik-speakers. The researchers justly emphasize that sociological surveys cannot show what languages a respondent really speaks: for instance, surveys do not identify groups whose linguistic repertoire is Ukrainian + Russian + Surzhik, Ukrainian + Surzhik, Russian + Surzhik, etc. The close relatedness of the varieties enables a relatively easy acquisition of passive competence that is often disregarded by researchers but which, according to Thomason (1997) is one of the mechanisms of contact-induced language change. Surzhik is a passionately discussed and debated subject (see Tarasenko [2006] for a summary of different views). Several ‘good language’ guides aimed at the eradication of ‘Surzhikisms’ have appeared since 1991 (Hnatkevich 2000; Serbens’ka 1994). Surzhik is highly stigmatized for a variety of reasons, for instance, because it is usually perceived as a hallmark of Soviet Russification and a step away from Ukrainian towards Russian, and because it is ‘neither one, nor the other’, that is, its legitimacy is disputed precisely because it is a contact variety and its relation to the ‘parent varieties’ is transparent to a layperson.3 Sometimes it is stated that code-switching between Ukrainian and Russian is legitimate because different languages are used in different situations for different functions but Surzhik does not fulfil these criteria and, thus, is not viewed as code-switching (Stavic’ka 2001). Elements of Surzhik are not ‘well-formed’ in the terms of two monolingual grammars. Such an attitude, when forms that cannot be attributed to monolingual varieties are not tolerated, exemplifies monolingual bias. The emotional load and negative connotations of the very term Surzhik become explicit if one looks at metaphors and comparisons applied to it. Clearly, Surzhik is a result of bilingualism, but in post-Soviet countries with the strong memory of the Soviet language policy that promoted bilingualism among nonRussians the very concept of bilingualism has acquired negative overtones in

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public discourse (and also among some Ukrainian scholars). Sometimes the whole polemics reminds of old discussions on bilingualism where bilinguals were typically portrayed as people with split personalities and loyalty/identity conflict. Loaded metaphors and keywords appear both in popular writings and in scholarly literature. Surzhik is described as deformed, maimed, chaotic, poor language, a sign of the speakers’ low culture and ‘spiritual plebeianism’ (Tarasenko [2006: 64] for a review). It is interpreted as a sign of national schizophrenia, intellectual handicap and identity crisis (people who are ‘neither one nor the other’; see Vakhtin et al. 2003: http://old.eu.spb.ru/ethno/projects/project3/ ukraine/007.htm). For instance, Masenko (2002: 13) refers to Surhzik as to a “chaotic juxtaposition of superficially acquired Russian elements onto deformed Ukrainian structure”. However, in my view, the most marked metaphor has been coined by Yuryii Andrukhovich, a prominent Ukrainian writer: he calls Surzhik an “incestuous child of bilingualism” (кровозмiсне дитя двомовностi, quoted from Stavick’ka [2001: 20]). Thus, in this anthropomorphic metaphor, not only Surzhik is impure and contaminated by definition but, in view of Andrukhovich, this is a particularly ugly type of hybrid because of the relatedness of the two ‘parent’ varieties. Thus, emotional load, politicization of the subject and purism rather obscure the research agenda. Vakhtin et al. (2006: 200) describe even how at a conference in Ukraine they were viewed as ‘outsiders’, although, in fact, they are not (all have spent a considerable part of their life in Ukraine or continue living there; two are ethnic Ukrainians who graduated from Ukrainian universities, etc.). Although the scholars do not refer to Bilaniuk’s (2004, 2005) research and her typology of Surzhik, they also argue that, contrary to Stavic’ka (2001) and Masenko (1999, 2004), Surzhik is not necessarily a transitional stage on the road towards Russian because there are empirical data of the opposite linguistic behavior (see also Kuznetsova [1999: 9–10] who found in her study on bilingual families that speakers of Surzhik as L1 were capable of mastering Standard Ukrainian). Those whose work obligations presuppose the use of Ukrainian (teachers, workers in the public sectors, TV hosts and journalists, etc.) do their best, even if the final result is not necessarily monolingual Standard Ukrainian. Thus, the researchers confirm Bilaniuk’s findings on Russian-based Surzhik type (urban bilinguals’ Surzhik and post-Soviet Surzhik). In fact, Masenko (2002, 2004) never explains why Surzhik is a transitional stage on the way to Russian and not vice versa. Stavic’ka (2001) admits that theoretically a shift from Surzhik to Ukrainian is possible but not highly probable in the view of power and prestige of Russian. At the same time, during the field work in Kyiv and Kharkiv, summarized in Vakhtin et al. (2003), no

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interdependence between acquisition of Russian and knowledge of Surzhik was confirmed. It was established that the informants proficient in Surzhik often learned it as L1. Numerous Ukrainian scholars are concerned with the linguistic classification of Surzhik, asking whether it is a jargon, sociolect (Flier 2000), hybrid sociolect (Taranenko 2007: 125), mixed language, regional dialect, pidgin (Masenko 2004), a continuum of Russified dialects (Mechkovskaya 2005: 52), etc. Masenko (2002: 13) and Stavic’ka (2001) argue against classifying Surzhik as a regional dialect or a sociolect. Masenko (2002) argues that a sociolect emerges within one language and jargons appear because of the speakers’ wish to be different from the rest of population. It is not clear what ‘one language’ exactly means and whether slang/jargon is always conditioned by the wish to stand out. Both Masenko and Stavic’ka draw attention to the lack of urban colloquial registers in Ukrainian. To a degree, Surzhik compensates for this gap (also Kuznetsova [1999] found that many speakers emphasize the expressiveness of Surzhik). Stavic’ka (2001) claims that the explanation lies in the fact that urban subculture of Ukraine has emerged as a Russian-language subculture and, to some extent, elements of casual urban register come from Russian and, being added to Ukrainian, form Surzhik. Similarly, Trub (2000) points at the lack of an everyday urban register in Ukrainian analogous to Russian prostorechiye (‘casual uneducated / non-standard speech’). However, even this does not legitimize Surzhik for Stavic’ka (2001). According to her, Surzhik is a dead end of linguistic development because, unlike urban slang, it lacks creativity. This claim is not substantiated; after all, linguistic creativity is a characteristic of speakers, not varieties. What’s more, Bilaniuk (2005: 159–165) dedicated an entire section of her book to the subject of creative use of Surzhik. For Stavic’ka (2001), Surzhik exemplifies linguistic deficiency (неповномовность; literally, ‘incomplete language’) which produces ‘simplified thinking’. In this discussion one can see that researchers, literati and public figures are worried about the consequences of asymmetrical bilingualism; still, the argumentation appears to be essentialist (only ‘pure’ varieties are legitimate