Spaces of exception: southern multilingualisms as resource and risk

ABSTRACT

In this paper we draw attention to people who journey from one temporal and spatial setting towards another in the ‘South’, who aspire to a reconfigured sense of belonging, prosperity and wellbeing, and their multilinguality and multilingualisms. Through three vignettes of journeys we illustrate how in changing of place that linguistic diversities are encountered and mediated. During moments of North–South and South–South entanglement and exception we argue that multilingualisms re-ecologise along horizontal axes of conviviality, and / or re-index along vertical axes of exclusion. We suggest that ‘rooting’ and ‘rerouting’ multilingualisms are not only multidimensional, but they are also multifaceted as people who choose or are obliged to experience dis-placement, undertake journeys of anticipation of replacement into regulated or unregulated situations.

Multilingualisms in the memories, dreams, complex selves, materiality and complicities of coping have yet to receive sufficient attention from linguists. We attempt to capture these aspects and suggest that southern multilingualisms have much to offer and entice northern multilingualisms. We illustrate how closely integrated are multilingual repertoires with mobilities and temporalities of dislocation and change; with loss, nostalgia and the anticipation of new beginnings; and with multi-scaled complicities between individuals as they re-calibrate lives in turbulent and changing circumstances.

KEYWORDS:

• Diasporas
• functional multilingualism
• linguistic citizenship
• resourcefulness
• southern
• multilingualisms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kathleen Heugh is a socio-applied linguist with thirty years of research in multilingualism. She has advised 35 governments on language policy and education in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe; and she led the first national sociolinguistic survey and the first system-wide multilingual assessment of secondary school students in South Africa. She has undertaken system-wide and multi-country studies in education for several governments and international development agencies. Together with Christopher Stroud she initiated the establishment of the Southern Multilingualisms and Diversities Consortium in 2012. She teaches linguistics and English through multilingual pedagogies at the University of South Australia.

Christopher Stroud is Director of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research and Senior Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape; and Professor of Transnational Multilingualism at Stockholm University. He has worked extensively with a broad range of applied sociolinguistics issues in Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Mozambique South Africa and Sweden. He is currently involved in developing the notion of Linguistic Citizenship, a Southern and decolonial contribution to a politics of language, originally formulated as a critical response to the paradigm of Linguistic Human Rights. ‘The Multilingual Citizen’, co-edited with Lisa Lim and Lionel Wee was recently published by Multilingual Matters containing papers from a wide range of contexts dealing with the notion of linguistic/multilingual citizenship.

Angela Scarino is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics and Director of the Research Centre for Languages and Cultures, University of South Australia. Her research expertise is in languages education in linguistically and culturally diverse societies, second language learning within an intercultural orientation, second language curriculum design and learning-oriented assessment. She has been a Chief Investigator on a number of research grants. She has worked in diverse contexts including Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, France and New Zealand.

Notes

1. As authors of this paper and as editors of the special issue, we should like to acknowledge our appreciation of Kate Loechel’s curation of and contributions to the editing processes. We should also like to express our appreciation of Tony Liddicoat’s generous patience and forbearance.

2. This study predates an increasing body of recent research relating to migration (e.g. that included in Guveli et al., 2016), and it differs in emphasis. The gaze is not so much towards vulnerabilities of migrant people, but rather how, a southern Italian community in the diaspora has melded into and shaped the very fabric of South Australia.

3. The most contemporary manifestation of this contribution can be seen in the Australian Council of Learned Academies’ report: Australia’s diaspora: Realising the potential for building transnational business networks with Asia (Rizvi, Louie, & Evans, 2016). In this report an argument is made for the recognition of diasporas as a source of economic ‘innovation’ and ‘enterprise’ that is currently underutilised. Although this report is focused on Chinese and Indian diaspora, the notion of contribution in this context may well be extended to other communities living in diaspora.

4. Angela Scarino wishes wish to acknowledge the work of Dr Antonio Mercurio as a fellow researcher on the project in this vignette.

5. Vertical language policy and planning under apartheid had been used to segregate people along ethnolinguistic lines of inequality and thus it was assumed that ‘corrective’ or democratic principles of equality and inclusion would require specific interventions to equalise the status of major African languages, together with the protecting and promoting other community languages.

6. Heugh and Alexander, a prominent anti-apartheid political activist and historian who developed an interest in post-apartheid language policy, worked together from 1988 to 2004 on language policy (including language education policy), in the National Language Project, the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa at the University of Cape Town, the Language Plan Task Group of South Africa, and the statutory body, the PANSALB. Colleagues Gerda de Klerk, Amanda Siegrühn and Peter Plüddemann encouraged exploring the relationship between language and the economy.

7. The circulation of the ideas of Richard Ruíz a scholar from Arizona immersed in Chicana/o decolonial thinking, along with Lo Bianco and colleagues in Australia and post-apartheid language policy activists in South Africa, is an early example of South–South collaboration in the field of postcolonial and possibly decolonial language policy and planning.

8. For example, Cape Town publishing giant, Naspers, became the largest stakeholder in Chinese social network provider Tencent between 2000 and 2017. It has recently sold 2% of its 33% stake for US$9.8 billion (Deng & Chen, 2018).

9. Data were collected in May–July 1996. Although some of the information that follows was included in official reports for the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (cf. Heugh, 1996a, 1996b), hinted at in the Language Plan Task Group (LANGTAG) Report (1996), and provided in some detail in several public forums/conferences over the next two years (e.g. Heugh, 1997), this did not fit the anticipated framing of multilingualism within ‘officially’ sanctioned or regulated policy and planning.

10. Joshua recovered some clothing literally off the back of a young boy he passed by on the street a day or two later. The boy claimed to have bought the items at a local flea market. The photos and letters were never recovered.