Cultures and Languages in Contact: Towards a Typology

Rethinking multilingual experience through a Systems Framework of Bilingualism

“…Ambrose Bierce started drafting definitions for the "Devil's Dictionary 1 " in 1881, and was pre-dated by legions of satirists, philosophers, semioticians, rhetoricians, and many others. Nor is it new within the language sciences (e.g., the subfields of linguistic anthropology, language evolution, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, language planning, education, and more; for engaging reviews, see Edwards, 2012aEdwards, , 2012bGarcía & Wei, 2014;Grosjean, 1982;Steffensen & Fill, 2014). However, a countervailing force from both linguistic and psycholinguistic traditions collectively biases us to abstract away from (or ignore altogether) the admittedly noisy and hard-to-measure sociocultural reality of the linguistic code, and how humans wield this code in the service of everyday sociocultural needs.…”

“…Debra A. Titone and Mehrgol Tiv standing discussions in linguistics about how to best classify and compare languages around the globe (reviewed in Edwards, 2012aEdwards, , 2012b. The very idea of what constitutes a language is inherently fuzzy, even assuming a highly constrained view of language as a mere symbolic system (e.g., "a culturally determined set of acoustic, gestural, and/or written signals").…”

“…Thus, crucial to any classification of world languages, and consequently the experiences of people who speak and comprehend them, are sociocultural forces acting upon individual people when they choose or are compelled, utterance by utterance, to speak one or another language in daily life. Edwards (2012a) outlines no fewer than ten categories of language contact positioned around three distinct axes of variability: first, whether Indigenous, immigrant, or racialized linguistic minorities are only found within a particular region; second, how tightly organized they are within that region, and third, how physically separate they are from the linguistic majority (see also de Bot, 2019;Raviv et al, 2020;Wei, 2011). Accordingly, while the sociolinguistic forces leading to multilingualism in Canada (officially English-French) may bear some similarity to those operative in another officially English-French nation (e.g., Cameroon), there also exist crucial differences that can predict how people produce and comprehend multiple languages in these regions (see Grosjean & Li, 2013;Grosjean, 1982 for prescient attention to such details).…”

“…While a careful reader may be persuaded that social and cultural factors are crucial for multilingual processing at an individual, neurocognitive level, they may also be uncertain about how to account for so many mutually constraining layers of language use in real time. On this point, another key historical antecedent of a socially infused view of language derives from a tradition collectively referred to as linguistic ecology, language ecology, or ecolinguistics (reviewed in Atkinson et al, 2016;de Bot et al, 2007;Edwards, 2012aEdwards, , 2012bSteffensen & Fill, 2014;Wei, 2011). Haugen (1972) was among the first to refer to the "ecology of language", highlighting the ways in which language use for individual people aligned with the ecology of language use within the larger social context.…”

A cluster analysis of attitudes to English in Germany and the Netherlands

“…What are people's perceptions of (the rise of) English, and how do views differ within and between these two countries? In exploring such attitudes, the ‘spokesman’ problem (Edwards, ) arises: ‘who is actually in a position to present or represent the views of the group as a whole’ (De Bot & Weltens, , p. 145)? It is not self‐evident that the attitudes expressed most vociferously in the media and policy debates reflect those on the ground generally.…”