Garrett (2004)

1. What is the relationship of language contact to translanguaging?
2. What factors are at play that decide when someone is engaging in conversational codeswitching with two discrete codes or speaking a pidgin language?
3. How does language convergence, where languages begin to resemble each other structurally but retain their lexicons and are seen as distinct by its speakers, impact a speaker’s understanding of their own identity/multilingualism when they speak languages that fall under this category i.e. Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, etc.?

Woolard (2004)

1. Does the idea of the “we/they contrast as the foundation of meaning in codeswitching” fall under an ideology previously studied (p.77)? If so, which?
2. Who gets to decide who is “crossing” vs codeswitching? In other words, who decides which speakers are part of the in-group? At what point does a speaker change from crossing to codeswitching?
3. How does a “monolectal view” on frequent intrasentential codeswitching, which views switching as “a single code of mixed origins” compare to translanguaging (p. 83)?
4. What considerations go into which code of a bilingual is seen as their “native language”? Can any one language be easily seen as strictly one’s native language?

Blog: varying views on language contact

This week’s readings touch on language contact, different views on understanding the interactions between codes, and the resulting impact on a speaker’s identity. The majority of them include discussions on why varying languages come into contact, where the authors inevitably discuss histories of colonialism, slavery, and migration.

Garrett (2004) discusses language contact, which come to be through social interaction between speakers of different languages, and the languages produced from such contact. He emphasizes that it is not the languages themselves that come into contact, but people who engage in linguistic communication which can produce a discrete code to facilitate communication. Other outcomes of this contact include multilingualism and monolingualism which result, depending on the specific circumstances of the interactions of the different people who speak different codes, with “asymmetries of power” characterizing these interactions (p. 65). Understanding this sociohistorical aspect to interactions between communities of speakers aids researchers in understanding current linguistic behaviors and how they came to be established.

Woolard (2004) focuses on codeswitching, which is seen as a way of understanding how multilingual communities organize their linguistic resources. She also provides a background into the shift in how it’s understood from “one of linguistic deviance, corruption, and incompetence to that of systematicity, meaning, and skill”, and the different approaches in understanding the meaning behind conversational codeswitching (p. 90). She emphasizes the reality that speakers are not only individuals but actors in a social world where linguistic intentions and actions are influenced by external forces and thus must be considered when studying linguistic behavior. She believes that codeswitching can be used to understand language processes, interactions, and society which relates to Garrett’s discussion of power characterizing language contact. 

While Sankoff (2002) also discusses language outcomes of language contact, her focus differs from the previous two chapters in her reference to the term second language acquisition. At the time of publication, she delineates a difference between language contact studies with a trend towards second language acquisition (SLA) and sociolinguistics towards studying monolingual speech communities. She holds a similar discussion of shift from viewing SLA as having a deficiency or weakness for a speaker to more neutral terms such as “interlanguage.” Like the discussions of previous chapters, Sankoff posits that internal constraints (such as individual choice) work in conjunction with external ones to form language contact outcomes, which she details in four domains: phonology, lexicon, syntax and discourse/pragmatics, and morphology/grammatical categories. 

Otheguy, Garcia, and Reid (2015) aim to clarify translanguaging, where speakers use their linguistic repertoire based on context rather than considerations of defined social and political boundaries, especially in contrast with code switching which has easily been seen as similar because of the shared notion of speakers making decisions on what code to use in social context but differs in code switching’s belief that languages are distinct from one another due to a distinct grammar. They attempt to do this through a comparison to cuisine in laying out how there are no defined similarities about the dishes themselves, but are named as one cuisine as “defined by the social, political or ethnic affiliation of its speakers” (p 286). They go on to effectively make this argument by citing how grammarians cannot judge one language from another based on lexical or structural reasons, concluding that the namedness of a language comes from essentialized social and political constructions rather than linguistic reasons. With this established, Otheguy et al. explain that people speak their own unique language, an idiolect, where a person’s mental grammar comes from interactions with others and facilitates their use of language, making no two idiolects identical. They go on to explain that linguists do not study “named languages,” but rather the “ordered and categorized lexical and grammatical features” of speakers (p.289). The primary reason for this idea is to describe a person’s speech in regards to themself and not only in relation to society as named language and code switching does. Translanguaging maintains the social aspect of linguistic communication but centers the individual and their developed linguistic repertoire. Such a concept rethinks other ideas about language contact and the resulting codes for speakers in contact. While very convincing, the idea can take some getting used to for unlearning established views on language and identity. The conversation surrounding the use of translanguaging and education has a social justice aspect to it as the authors advocate for a student’s idiolect can be assessed rather than a student’s knowledge of a politically bound named language which will particularly aid students who speak minority languages under the idea of named languages so that their abilities can be valued outside of “the monolingual approaches that rely on the standardized version of the named language” (p. 305).

The concepts explored propose many ways of understanding the interactions between linguistic codes and the resulting linguistic repertoire for the speakers in these interactions, however translanguaging seems to be the most revolutionary in its inherent viewpoint of valuing every individual’s repertoire while maintaining an understanding of the societal labels of standard languages and its impact on speakers’ understanding of self. Does this idea have the power of impact more rigid ideas of identity based on set linguistic boundaries?