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Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies

Workshop 4: Spaces of multilingual communication

Outline: The presentations in this workshop will focus on the relation between urban spaces and different forms of multilingual communication. Types of urban spaces will be distinguished along the following dimensions:

  1. Differing degrees of pre-existing structures restricting possible verbal actions;
  2. Pragmatic dimensions, concerning the positioning of places along socially established paths of action. The positioning of places along these paths of action determines different forms and functions of multilingual communication;
  3. Historical dimension, concerning the change of places over time.

Presenters will analyze multilingual communication in different types of places:

  1. Places dominated and structured by institutional conditions;
  2. Public places outside of institutional conditions;
  3. Different subtypes of “interplaces” that are connected to institutional places, but not strictly regulated as they are not in the center of the purpose of the institution (e.g. anterooms, cafeterias).

Questions: How is multilingual communication practiced in different types of urban spaces? What are formal and functional factors constraining or fostering the use of different languages? How can multilingual repertoires contribute to social cohesion and the development of new communicative practices?

Methods: Workshop participants come from different scientific backgrounds, such as linguistics, urban sociology, and ethnology. They will present findings based on qualitative methods of social sciences and linguistics: audio- and video recordings, transcriptions, ethnographic fieldwork.

Results: Evidence provided by workshop participants will highlight the vital role of weakly regulated social “interplaces” for multilingual practice. Interplaces create opportunities for the perpetuation and evolvement of societal resources and repertoires, enabling societies to realize their inherent multilingual potential. In contrast, data from institutions with a high degree of regulation (i.e. language laws, prescriptions) show that multilingual communication and unexpected language choices take place even illicitly if official rules and policies hinder mutual understanding. Thus, multilingual practices emerge, often unnoticed, even within institutional regimes that presuppose individual monolingualism and adherence of clients to the monolingual institutional framework. However, the mismatch between official monolingualism and multilingual practice on floor level clearly biases the outcome of communication, which often turns out to be in some way unsatisfactory or deficient for agents and/or clients.

Program and Participants: