30.3224, Review: Sociolinguistics: Coulmas (2018)

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Subject: 30.3224, Review: Sociolinguistics: Coulmas (2018)

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Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 14:56:47
From: Irina Ustinova [iustinova at semo.edu]
Subject: An Introduction to Multilingualism

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36518817


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-1036.html

AUTHOR: Florian  Coulmas
TITLE: An Introduction to Multilingualism
SUBTITLE: Language in a Changing World
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Irina Ustinova, Southeast Missouri State University

SUMMARY

Florian Coulman offers a broad overview of the concept of multilingualism and
analyses the multiplicity of languages on the global scale from diverse
perspectives, such as bilingualism of young children and adult migrants;
mixing of ethnicities and languages in the international organizations,
cities, countries, and regions where population uses official and minority
languages; and Internet linguistics. The subtitle of the book,  Language in a
Changing World, indicates that multiple languages are changing together with
the sweeping dynamics in policies, ideologies, and societies; in this book,
the discussion centers on multilingualism as an ongoing process and on its
dimensions, such as the geographical distributions of languages; the accounts
of complex history of the world language systems with the explanations
grounded in sociology and political philosophy; the phenomena of bilingualism
in individuals, institutions, multiethnic counties and cities; and the use of
multiple languages in cyberspace as well as research and theory of
multilingualism.  Each of the twelve chapters includes fascinating examples,
graphics, and tables that provide visual representation of data and concludes
with relevant and challenging questions for discussion that relate to
current-day context and problems. The book contains a vast bibliography,
online resources, and indexes of names and subjects.

In a short review, it is impossible to summarize the vast amount of material
and due to word limitations, I have chosen a selected number of chapters to
describe in greater detail. Each chapter in the book, however, deserves a full
review because the book An Introduction to Multilingualism will be of great
interest to scholars in the fields of linguistics, sociology, communications,
culture, multimedia, and humanities. 

Chapter 1, “The Polyphonic World,” focuses on the richness of the languages on
the planet and offers their geographical distribution. The distribution of the
languages across continents reflects the stories of expansion, population
growth, and civilization changes. The author presents convincing statistics of
the top twelve languages by number of native speakers, with Chinese being at
the top with 982 million speakers; English is the third with 375 million
speakers; and French and Korean are at the bottom of the twelve languages
ladder with 79 and 78 million speakers, respectively. The author develops a
linguistics diversity index, having compared continents by percentages of
world population and languages. Thus, Oceania is the most linguistically
diverse geographical area, with an index of 36, and Europe is the least, with
an index of 0.5. The author looks deeply into the nature of the correlation
between the richness of languages and the wealth of the nations; the data
yielded by this study provide strong evidence that linguistically homogeneous
countries are usually more developed and wealthy than countries with diverse
languages. The premise of Coulman’s point of view is that economic development
favors linguistic homogenization and standardization. A closer look at
political, legal, social, medial, ideological, cultural, and religious
parameters explains why some languages thrive while others perish. The
multiplicity of languages constitutes a complex system and the inequity in
language status is revealing: thus, only 211 languages, less than 3% of all
languages, are recognized as official, co-official, or national. The United
Nations identifies only six official languages, while English as lingua franca
and a language of international, economic, and political power has the
official status in 64 countries.  

The current book appears to validate the real nature of multilingualism based
on its capacity, practice, ideology, and theoretic inquiry as discussed in
Chapters 2, 3 and 4. Chapter 2 gathers more than twenty definitions of
multilingualism, and the author groups them into four clusters; these clusters
focus on the capacity of individuals to communicate and co-use multiple
languages, the ideology of the state that might be associated with positive or
negative attitudes to other languages. This also includes willingness to
communicate with speakers of other languages and the theoretic inquiry
generated by language contact. In Chapters 3 and 4, the discussion revolves
around different language perspectives, such as linguistics, political
science, economics, history, and education, and provides definitions of the
concepts of diglossia, pidgin, code and code-switching, bilingual and native
speakers, mother tongue, and community language. The basic premise of
Coulman’s argument is that the coexistence of several languages in one
community is considered ideal; however, in reality, linguistic nationalism,
restrictions on language choice as a political strategy, and economic and
cultural repression prevail. To support his stance on the impact of politics
on minority languages, the author analyses the situations with Chinese
characters in Indonesia, the Catalan language in Spain, and the Russian
language in Ukraine.

In Chapters 5 to 9 the discussion centers on the coexistence of multiple
languages on the individual, institutional, state, nation, and multiethnic
city levels as well as in cyberspace. Coulman offers a closer look at
polyglots as people who have acquired and use several languages in daily life
and addresses the issues of the order of language acquisition, dominance of
one language over the other, and hardships for raising a bilingual child. The
book abounds with examples of the autobiographical reports of multilinguals,
such as William Gerhardie, Vladimir Nabokov, Elias Canetti, and Artur
Koestler. The forgoing discussion emphasizes the importance of social issues
in multilingual education and in the distinction between elite and transition
bilingualism. There is overwhelming evidence for the benefits and the cost of
(1) developmental bilingual education by choice, with the purpose of becoming
biliterate and embracing two cultures and two languages and (2) transitional
bilingual education by necessity, with the purpose of helping immigrant
children catch up with their dominant language peers. The author provides apt
data about multilingual International institutions and develops a claim that,
although the European Parliament, the European Council, the European
Commission, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the association of
Southeast Asian nations, and the African Union  confirm their attachment to
cultural diversity and fairness, the financial constraints and demand for
efficient communication pose challenges and aggravate tensions between
practicality and equality.  The review of those organizations reveals the
importance of analyzing multilingualism using  social and political practices.

Along similar lines, Chapters 7 and 8 argue that language policies reflect and
regulate the language behavior of citizens in various domains of social life
and exhibit the language situation in super-diverse cities such as Brussels,
Macau, and London; in multiethnic countries and regions such as the Balkans,
Switzerland, and Singapore. The author provides illustrations of linguistic
landscapes as well as multilingual advertisements indicative of the diverse
speakers’ standing in those areas, and the local government’s policies and
attitudes toward minority speakers and languages. The code-switching of
languages in those multiethnic communities with dominant and community
languages leads to multi-ethnolects. The social and linguistic diversity
mirror the coexistence of different ethnic backgrounds and languages; the
author is in favor of the view that linguistic heterogeneity is slowly taking
root in Europe and at the same time reflecting the social inequality typical
for those communities. The author explains the complicated relationship
between language and governance, discussing in detail the language regimes in
Switzerland and Singapore. He reveals that the contrast and at the same time
the parallels between the traditional European confederation and postcolonial
Southeast Asian republic exist.  Much of the content in Chapter 8 is devoted
to exploring the types of minorities in modern states, their definitions, and
examples, e.g., indigenous like Welsh in the UK, immigrant like Brazilians in
Japan, national like Russians in Estonia, and transnational like Kurds in
Turkey, Iran and Iraq. The author comes to the conclusion that multilingual
countries provide different accommodations to the language status of minority
ethnic groups. 

Based on the role of cyberspace in modern life, the author claims in Chapter 9
that Internet linguistics emerged as a research field in its own right because
the language used in cyberspace has its own social conventions, political
settings, and differences in grammar, writing, literacy, and discourse. The
data gathered in this study suggest five top Internet users by language, i.e.,
English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, and Portuguese.  Coulman develops a claim
that while English is in the vanguard of online communication, the highest
number of Internet users is in Asia nowadays. The absolute number of English
websites continues to increase but there is a steady decline of the share of
the English language content websites. The author adopts the approach that
statistical machine translation (SMT) dealing with huge bilingual databases
and translation software has significantly changed communication. Two visions
of the role of the Internet for the minority languages are offered in the
book: new opportunities for endangered languages that would empower them, or,
in contrast, overpowering of minorities by technology, which  may promote
language shift to a dominant lingua franca. 

In Chapters 10 and 11 the discussion points to the effects of multilingualism
on integration and separation of language and society, and the last chapter
evaluates the research methods for studying multilingualism. Issues of
linguistic purism are discussed and illustrated through examples of Dutch,
French, and Chinese languages. The underlying argument is against the idea
that the openness of the language systems to borrowings on lexical and
structural pattern levels depends only on similarity or distance between
source and target languages; instead, power relations and social issues
between communities play a greater role. The author gives the example that the
geographical distance may and may not provide a rationale for linguistic
separation; thus, Serbians live close to Croatians and the overlap of content
words in their languages exceeds 90%, but mostly for political reasons the
Serbo-Croatian language broke into two more than twenty years ago. Another
current debate revolves around whether lexical borrowings amount to enrichment
or contamination of a recipient language. 

The data gathered in the study suggest that since language is a part of global
and national power structure the social changes affect linguistic change, and
the process is reciprocal. The author explores and describes twelve aspects of
society, such as territoriality, essentialism, ideology, migration,
segregation, and integration, and reveals how those aspects are interwoven
between society and language, e.g. ethnic cleansing and purism, population
flow and lexical flow, people of an ethnic group and the language of an ethnic
group, and mixed community and multi-ethnolect. According to Coulman, contacts
between migrants and natives in multi-ethnic communities affect both
linguistic and social systems and provoke clashes between the practices of
assimilation and globalization. There is a rapid growth of literature on
multilingualism but no unified theory on its general principles. The author
claims that issues such as gradations of multilinguality, gradual shift on
lexicon and grammar, a bilingual child’s proficiency at different ages, and
comparatism of minority and majority languages. should serve as implications
for future studies. 

EVALUATION 

The book is a fascinating read for specialists, and students majoring in
linguistics, as well as those interested in issues of language and culture,
language and politics, sociolinguistics, and language research methods. As the
content of the book indicates, the research being undertaken in the field of
multilingualism is multidimensional and multidirectional. 

While the collection is a marvelous read, some critique may still be offered.
The author believes that simultaneous bilingualism is a burden for young
children because they struggle to attain proficiency in two languages (pages
96-98). This is controversial because some data show that young children build
lexicon and grammar in two or three languages effortlessly and many scholars
believe that more brainwork is not a burden but a benefit for developing
critical thinking skills and even a gift for life. 

On pages 86-87 the author points out that Vladimir Nabokov emigrated from
Russia to England as an adult in his twenties and that is why he was not able
to acquire a full mastery of the English language and especially a native-like
accent. In fact, as Nabokov describes in his memoirs, Speak, Memory, his
governess, Miss Clayton, was British, and Nabokov started speaking English and
Russian at the same time; what is more, he was reading in English before he
started reading in Russian.  He was exposed to British literature, poetry, and
culture from a young age and this was reinforced when he studied Slavic
literature at Cambridge University. The author mistakenly claims that Nabokov
had an identifiable accent because he was exposed to English past the time of
the critical period hypothesis. The most probable explanation of Nabokov’s
accent is that, though he had attained a British accent in early childhood, he
moved to the United States when he was forty and never acquired American
English pronunciation. 

Some translational typos and inaccuracy in meaning can also be noticed. Thus,
on page 213 Russian COBET (a noun) should not be translated as Soviet
(adjective) but rather as a piece of  advice, or committee. Oceania, by
definition is not a continent, a large land mass, and should be called a
geographical area (page 7).

 Diverse in research topics and approaches, overall An Introduction to
Multilingualism covers multilingual phenomena with clarity and erudition. The
strength of the study is the attention it pays to new concepts such as
multiethnolects and subfields of linguistics, such as Internet linguistics,
that should prove to be of great use and serve as implications for future
research.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Irina Ustinova, Ph.D., is a Professor at Southeast Missouri State University,
USA. She has taught Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Intercultural
Communication, Methods of Teaching, Curriculum Design, Research in TESOL to
graduate students from the United States, Brazil, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, France, Vietnam, and Ukraine. Her research interests include English as
a global language, language of advertising, cooperative learning and teaching,
semantics, the use of new technologies in the second and foreign language
classroom.





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