Narratives of Multilingual Becoming: The Co-construction of Solidarity as a Language Ideology

ABSTRACT

This paper explores linguistic life-histories from five participants in a larger interview study with U.S.-based adults. These five interviewees were middle-class White women from monolingual English-speaking families who pursued multilingual learning trajectories in young adulthood. Having previously attained proficiency in one language through academic study, all five recounted similar pivotal decisions to deprioritize that language, and instead invest in another language that they now saw as more socially relevant. Through discursive analysis of the emotionality and (lack of) agency in their narratives of linguistic decision-making, the paper demonstrates how all five women, in dialogue with the interviewer, co-constructed ideologies of linguistic solidarity across lines of social difference. Drawing on Bakhtinian theory to analyze identity development as ideological becoming, the research explores elite contestation of dominant language ideologies within interview dialogues.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• Bakhtin
• language ideologies
• language learning
• narrative

Acknowledgments

An early version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics, Portland, Oregon, 2017; I thank the audience for helpful comments. I also thank Deborah Palmer, Celsiana Warwick, and “Louise” for reading and affirming a later version. Finally, I thank the participants for sharing their stories.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I had other participants from immigrant backgrounds who had never been monolingual (Menard-Warwick & Leung, 2017).

2. Interviewees described participation in Catholic, Episcopalian, or Quaker communities; they were not necessarily involved in these faith communities at the time of the interviews.

3. I too learned Spanish through involvement in the 1980s Central American solidarity movement.

4. The most significant exception is that Suzanne did not recount any instance of inability to communicate, but simply the desire for Spanish learning and community participation.

5. “¿Cómo estás?” means “how are you? (familiar form)” and “rojo” means “red.”

6. The Sandinistas were the leftist government of Nicaragua; the Contras were U.S.-backed rebels.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julia Menard-Warwick

Julia Menard-Warwick is professor of Linguistics at University of California Davis, with interests in language identities and ideologies, especially in learning and teaching contexts. She has conducted research in Chile, Bolivia, and Guatemala, as well as in California. Her most recent book is Bilingual Parent Participation in a Divided School Community (Routledge, 2018, Critical Multilingualism series), based on a two-year ethnographic study at a dual immersion elementary school.