35.1700, Review: Multilingualism and History: Pavlenko (ed.) (2023)

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Subject: 35.1700, Review: Multilingualism and History: Pavlenko (ed.) (2023)

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Date: 07-Jun-2024
From: Keith Walters [waltersk at pdx.edu]
Subject: Applied Linguistics: Pavlenko (ed.) (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.3164

EDITOR: Aneta Pavlenko
TITLE: Multilingualism and History
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Keith Walters

SUMMARY

This edited collection seeks to challenge popular and academic claims
that “our world ‘is more multilingual than ever before’” (i). To do
so, the volume brings together two fields of research on
multilingualism that, sadly, have often not been in conversation.
These are, on the one hand, linguistically informed and generally
synchronic studies of multilingualism across the past few decades in
sociolinguistics, anthropology, education, and psychology and, on the
other, research on the history of societies where linguistic diversity
was or has been a defining feature. As Pavlenko explains, this latter
body of research provides tantalizing evidence of language contact and
language mixing. However, it has usually not sought to link that
evidence to work in a linguistic framework, nor have researchers in
the former group profitably incorporated the insights of existing
historical work.

Pavlenko’s lengthy opening chapter, “Multilingualism and Historical
Amnesia: An Introduction,” provides three perspectives on the topic.
First, it presents a critical analysis of the “fragmented
conversations” that have occurred among researchers in the first
group, who, while often speaking of the interdisciplinary nature of
their work, have in some cases mischaracterized the nature of
multilingualism in the contemporary world because of their limited
awareness of historical studies. Second, it surveys the six domains
that historical research on multilingualism has considered, namely,
administration of empires and kingdoms, courts of law, religious
institutions, the military, education, and public signage. It thus
provides a framework for comparative work examining the sorts of
multilingual administration that have been ubiquitous across history,
the sources of linguistic intolerance, the loss of linguistic
diversification during parts of the past century, the “banal
normativity of ‘translanguaging’” in written and spoken language
across history, and the affective and cognitive dissonance that are
byproducts of current discourses of tolerance in language management.
She closes the chapter by sketching a series of ontological and
epistemological assumptions about multilingual history and by offering
questions that can help direct future research in ways that should
lead to more historically informed work on topics related to
multilingualism.

Using the lens of religion, broadly conceived, and drawing on research
in papyrology, Egyptology, ancient history, and linguistics, Anastasia
Maravela examines bilingual papyri from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt
from the third century BCE until the fourth century CE as a way of
understanding the shifting nature and consequences of Greek-Egyptian
bilingualism. As she notes, this “linguistic cohabitation” is among
the longest in the ancient world. Following a short discussion of
sources and methods used in such an investigation, Maravela provides a
series of case studies examining the dreams of bilinguals, Egyptian
notary records (scribes were often priests), and the shift from
bilingual documents to Greek ones, which encouraged the graphic
convergence of writing Egyptian using an alphabetic script based on
Greek, that gave rise to Coptic.

Alex Mullen analyzes language shift, attitudes, and management across
several centuries in the Roman West, that is, the western provinces of
the Roman Empire where Latin, rather than Greek, was the primary
colonial and often dominant language. In addition to considering the
linguistic and “cultural entanglements” between Greek and Latin among
the discourses of the elite in their discussions of languages, she
examines linguistic attitudes and practices in the everyday life of
non-elites, the overwhelming majority of whom would have been
illiterate and had no engagement with the existing written evidence
from the period. At the same time, given the highly standardized
nature of Roman bureaucratic genres, those who did would have been
exposed to standardized Latin and its concomitant norms and
ideologies. In any case, these populations or certain segments of them
would have been bi- or multilingual to varying degrees, as evidenced
by letters, lists, and spindle whorls. Mullen reminds readers that
while linguists think in terms of languages, language users,
especially those like these non-elites, likely conceptualized things
in terms of repertoires, a fact underrepresented in written records.
She also describes Roman efforts at language management (in contrast
to policy), “focusing on what the central powers needed to control”
(81).

In a comparative study, Rachel Mairs draws on recent work on war
interpreters to consider the extent to which it is possible to examine
military interpreting across disparate historical contexts, focusing
on research in the Graeco-Roman world during the late first millennium
BCE and the early first millennium CE, on the one hand, and in the
Middle East during the French Egyptian expeditions (1798-1801) and
during World War II, on the other. Acknowledging the challenges of
locating interpreters in the archival records, including the
monolingualism of those records and the apparent invisibility of
interpreters therein, she uses other records—memoirs of officers and
other documents—to locate them and learn about their working
conditions. Memoirs also provide evidence of the occasional soldier
who learned local languages and ended up serving as an interpreter for
fellow prisoners of war. Mairs concludes her chapter by discussing
common trends she finds across these cases with a focus on recent
Western involvement in the Middle East.

Laura Wright provides a case study of how scholars can get things
wrong when they ignore sources of potentially relevant data. She
provides evidence to debunk a narrative that will be familiar to any
reader who has had or taught a course on the history of English,
namely, that Standard English developed from the East or Central
Midlands variety or Chancery English. In her discussion of how
multilingualism came to be ignored in the history of the language. She
examines multilingual business records (Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman
French, and English), demonstrating that matrix-language turnover
occurred, whereby the matrix language shifted from being “a Medieval
Latin and Anglo-Norman matrix that contained much English” to “a
supralocal English matrix that contained much Anglo-Norman” (112).
Wright also provides an analysis of how the “monolingual origins”
story came into being and why it has persisted. Like Mullen’s
analysis, Wright’s reminds readers of the pitfalls of a language
ideology that sees languages as discrete entities while paying no
attention to code switching.

>From 1099-1251, the “Latins,” followers of the Roman Church from
Central and Western Europe, ruled the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where
speakers of numerous European and Middle Eastern languages lived or
traveled. In his chapter, Jonathan Rubin provides a sociolinguistic
sketch of this kingdom with a focus on the French language and, more
particularly, the variety of French that developed there during this
period, often referred to as French of Outremer, which was not only
widely spoken but also written. This variety of French served as a
marker of elite status and of integration into the community as well
as a lingua franca for members of numerous groups. Predictably, the
context gave rise to a great deal of borrowing into French of Outremer
from the many languages used locally. A particularly interesting
aspect of this variety was its use by the Frankish elite for
translations of Latin text in domains still reserved for Latin at that
time in what are today France and Belgium. Rubin contends that these
elite assumed their language could be used for the communication of
complex ideas and acted accordingly. He concludes with some
provocative speculations about why such attitudes developed in the
periphery rather than the center that likely apply to many other
contexts.

Roland Willemyns’ concern is the question of why Colonial Dutch failed
to become a global lingua franca when the languages of the other
colonizing European powers did. He begins by examining the political
history of the Netherlands in terms of language and colonial
practices. He then surveys the territories that once spoke Dutch or a
Dutch-based pidgin thanks to the actions of the East and the West
Indian Companies. Currently, however, Dutch is an or the official
language in only six Caribbean islands and Suriname, all of which are
multilingual, although it is used as a lingua franca in other areas
formerly colonized by the Dutch and in South Africa, where Afrikaans,
“the only extant daughter language of Dutch” (142) is among the
official languages. Willemyns offers more detailed discussions of the
history of Dutch in Indonesia, where knowledge of the language is
necessary in the sciences and law, in particular, and in Suriname. He
uses these case studies to demonstrate that the current status of
Dutch results from the failure of the East India Company and later the
Dutch government to encourage the spread of the language. He contends
that the government’s behavior was the result of potential costs and
highly patronizing attitudes toward the colonized. On the other hand,
the Dutch government invested in the codification of local languages,
which, ironically, has resulted in Malay becoming a major world
language.

Gesine Argent seeks to call into question frequently made claims about
the uniqueness of Russia’s multilingual elite in the eighteenth and
nineteenth century. Following a brief survey of the available data and
materials on multilingualism in Russia during this period, Argent
describes the range of archival materials she analyzed. She then
describes the rise of elite multilingualism there beginning with the
reign of Peter I, during which knowledge of German, English, and
especially French came to be highly valued for intragroup
communication and for communication with other nations. She also
traces the development and promotion of Russian, especially during the
reign of Catherine the Great, which gave rise to debates about limits
on the use of other languages and borrowings from them. Argent details
a major debate from the early nineteenth century that continues today
focusing on efforts to “refine” Russian with the two poles being
largely predictable: take other languages, including their lexis, as
models or remove foreign influences and rely on a native resource, in
this case, Church Slavonic. Despite these debates and various
historical events, the elite continued to use French (and additional
languages other than Russian) in their personal writing and likely
when speaking as a marker of status and urbanity. (As a Russian
student pointed out to me years ago, written Russian-French
codeswitching involves the use of two scripts, giving it a visual
salience it does not have when the switching involves languages that
share a script even if Roman and Italic fonts are used, as is often
the case in translations into English of Russian literary works from
the period, where the translations of French appear in italics.)
Argent concludes by discussing the sociohistorical factors leading to
the decline of elite multilingualism in the late nineteenth century.
Throughout, she provides evidence that such multilingualism was
perceived as a source of cultural and social capital as well as a
marker of cosmopolitan identity rather than as insecurity, as is
sometimes claimed.

Focusing on the writings of several European linguist-ethnographers, a
historian, and a traveler who wrote about northwestern Siberia during
the period from the late eighteenth century until the mid-nineteenth
century, Susan Gal examines the consequences of Western language
ideologies they shared as well as the differences in their
perspectives on what they observed and heard. The particular ideology
assumes languages as bounded systems linked to groups whose essences
they represent and to specific territories.  A corollary is that
monolingualism is the normal and expected state of affairs. Obviously,
such an ideology and its corollary result in a great deal of erasure,
or failure to see or hear evidence to the contrary. Following a brief
summary of aspects of the history of this ideology, Gal explains how
the practices of what came to be called the Russian ‘German’ School of
ethnography, with roots in Göttingen, wrote descriptions of Siberian
languages that indicated ethnic differences; indeed, some took
linguistic differentiation as the best test of the similarities and
differences among peoples. Trained in philological methods, these
investigators collected word lists, which they then mapped onto
territories. This practice gave rise to named language families coded
to distinct non-overlapping geographic regions. Later researchers
would collect samples of folk genres, which were transcribed and
treated as literature, which could become the basis for grammars. As
evidence of the erasure they engaged in, Gal cites a two-volume study
about this region by Adolph Erman, a German natural scientist, which
calls into question many of the assumptions and analyses of members of
the Russian ‘German’ School. Instead of territorial monolingualism,
Erman described multilingual markets drawing speakers of many
languages, mixed marriages with bilingual offspring, trade languages,
specialized jargons, and speakers with varying degrees of competence
in several languages. In addition to erasure, Gal also examines the
qualities attributed to or projected onto languages and speakers, or
rhematization. Until the late nineteenth century, Russian elites saw
indigenous Siberians as “simple”; predictably, their languages were
said to have few words. In contrast, a Finnish-Swedish and a Hungarian
researcher, both of whom saw links between their own people’s pasts
and this part of Russia, found positive qualities in the languages,
which they linked to the people and, for the Finn-Swede, even the
landscape. Gal concludes by reminding contemporary researchers that
they and their research, no less than the researchers discussed and
their work, are influenced by the ideologies about language that they
hold.

Taking the nineteenth-century Hapsburg monarchy, known as a hotbed of
ethnolinguistic nationalism as his focus, Jan Fellerer examines the
methodological challenges of studying multilingualism in everyday life
in such a context. He surveys available resources for reconstructing
societal multilingualism in the monarchy, including ethnographic maps
and census data, both of which suffer from exactly the sorts of
ideological erasure discussed by Gal in the previous chapter and
familiar to all readers who have worked with comparable data on other
communities.  (At the same time, they are often a useful starting
point.) He likewise discusses the rise of language laws during this
period as well as their consequences for Hapsburg society and the
possibilities and challenges they create for researchers of
multilingualism given available archival data. In an effort to
overcome some of these challenges, Fellerer examines data from
memoires, satirical magazines, and court records for evidence of
multilingualism in daily life within and across various social
categories. In contrast to the “monolithic glossonyms” of the
monarchy’s bureaucracy, cartoons and texts in magazines provide
evidence of multilingualism, translanguaging, less-than-fluent
bilingualism, and contact-induced colloquialisms as well as the
ideologies of their creators. Fellerer is careful to remind readers
that these sources should not be taken as indications of actual
behavior but as representations—“cliched, sometimes maliciously so”—of
linguistic practices. He contends, however, that, in contrast, court
records can provide evidence, most often indirect, of reconstructable
linguistic practice that can be deduced from a careful reading of
information provided about individuals’ origin, social location, place
of residence, employment, social networks, and daily activities. He
concludes by acknowledging the potential and limitations of these
alternative sources of evidence to supplement the macro-level
information that can be gleaned from sources like census data.

Benjamin C. Fortina examines multilingualism at the end of the Ottoman
Empire with a focus on language, script, and the quest for the
“modern” as well as the ideological and technological influences on
efforts to solve the “problem” of linguistic diversity as the Ottoman
Empire ended and the Turkish republic came into being. He begins with
a description of the polyglot late Ottoman Empire, characterized by
the move toward increasing government centralization; the complex
nature of Ottoman Turkish, which was heavily influenced at the lexical
and grammatical levels by Arabic and Persian; other languages spoken
by local populations; exogenous languages, especially French; and
refugees from the Caucasus. He goes into additional detail about the
consequences of the weight of the Ottoman literary heritage and script
as the need for literacy and education rapidly increased. As he notes,
the challenge of scripts was larger than the mismatch between the
Arabo-Persian script, itself quite complex, and the Turkish language
but extended to the fact that printing was available—and simpler—in
the Greek, Hebrew, and Armenian scripts, all used by various language
groups. The solution, at least for Turkish, was ultimately a
Latin-based script, which could easily be printed and used for
communication via telegraph and Morse code. Following the loss of
territory at the end of World War I and the population exchanges
organized by the League of Nations in 1923, which were based on
religion, not ethnicity or language, the greatly reduced Turkish
Republic was created. It aggressively pursued policies of
monolingualism, despite the multilingualism of the country, as well as
efforts to purge Turkish of its foreign vocabulary. As Fortina
observes, however, that evidence of the Empire’s multilingualism,
which at one time was seen as uncontroversial, persists and manifests
itself in various ways.

The final four chapters of the collection examine contemporary
situations with an eye to their history and the consequences for
understanding history. Zorana Sokolovska’s chapter examines an
important dimension of multilingualism in history and particularly in
the contemporary world, institutional discourses on language and
international cooperation. Her focus is the Council of Europe.
Sokolovska begins the chapter with background on the Council before
focusing primarily on a debate that took place on September 28, 2001
during the European Year of Languages. The debate included the
presentation of a report, responses by delegates from ten member
states, and a vote on the recommendations contained in the draft of
the report; these recommendations were unanimously accepted by the
twenty-nine members attending.  While the geopolitics of language in
Europe have been a lively topic since at least the end of World War I,
issues related to language learning and teaching have been a focus of
the Council since its founding in 1949. Originally, the Council sought
to promote unity and democracy among ten countries in Western Europe,
but today, it has forty-six member states. During this period, the
significance of international communication and, hence, issues of
multilingualism have become increasingly important. Predictably, the
debate itself reflected ideologies about language and multilingualism
even as it enacted them; for example, the Council has chosen French
and English as its official languages, these languages being seen as
“apolitical.” In her analysis, Sokolovska examines three layers of the
context for the debate, the history of Europe, of the Council, and of
the Council’s debates about language. Among the discourses embedded in
the document and the debate are those expressing the uniqueness of
each language and its validity, a perspective that, on the one hand,
was a proxy for national-state nationalism and, on the other, an
expression of a hoped-for level playing field among member states.
However, one representative linked languages and relative power to
“big nations” and “smaller nations,” equating the latter with “the
languages of minorities,” a rhetorical move that called the idealistic
formulation of equality into question. The term “minority language”
was itself used in polysemous ways to refer to various and sometimes
overlapping categories of language: the dominant language of a smaller
nation, the less widely used of two official languages that is the
historic mother tongue of the country, regional languages, endangered
languages, or the language(s) of neighboring countries. Again,
predictably, given the context, no speaker contested the idea of
supporting the teaching, learning, and use of multiple languages, and
many comments celebrated plurilingualism. As Sokolovska’s analysis
ably demonstrates, arguments about language are rarely, if ever, just
about language. In this case, they were about the creation and
maintenance of power blocs as well as the creation of the appearance
of equality in a situation where nothing was done to deal with the
hierarchy that exists among languages.

Unlike the other chapters in the volume, Pia Lane’s discussion of the
role of the past in language revitalization is intensely personal,
recounting her own experiences as a speaker of Kven, a minority
language spoken in Norway that is closely related to Finnish. Though
she grew up in a household where Kven, Sámi, and Norwegian were
spoken, her parents, second language speakers of Norwegian, spoke only
Norwegian to her, and she was educated in Norwegian schools. After
studying Finnish in Finland, she returned to her home community to do
fieldwork for her thesis on Kven only to be confronted with the
reality that because she spoke “proper Finnish,” Kven speakers
preferred speaking to her in Norwegian. Thus, she reflects on her dual
roles as a student of language revitalization and someone who is
living through the trajectory of language shift and revitalization.
Throughout her chapter, she examines the ways that implicit attitudes
and ideologies toward a minority language, the result of past lived
experiences, frequently negative in nature, influence the likelihood
of revitalization, a project whose goal is creating speaking for the
future by rescuing the language from the past. Her concern is the
complex situation those seeking to revitalize a language likely
experience: it quickly becomes a source of vulnerability as these
learners confront aspects of their and their ancestors’ pasts as well
as responses to their current efforts to improve their ability to use
the language. Following a discussion of the Norwegian language
policies dating from the middle of the nineteenth century that led to
language shift in northern Norway, Lane discusses the challenges of
language revitalization and language reclamation, the term she prefers
for learning a language that was spoken in one’s home growing up but
that one did not learn. She then considers the emotional challenges
faced by those who undertake reclamation, particularly the fear of
being judged inept or inadequate by more proficient speakers as well
as a more general fear of speaking the language. (Interestingly, Lane
cites examples of speakers who report no fear at all about speaking
foreign languages like English or German but who report experiencing
fear when speaking Kven or Sámi, respectively, with fluent speaker of
the language, at least partly, it seems, because they felt they were
“expected” to know these latter languages.) Lane argues that
researchers in the field of revitalization and reclamation should
focus more seriously on the emotional challenges learners experience
as they seek to learn and use the languages of their families.

Yasmine Beale-Rivaya analyzes fiestas de moros y cristianos, festivals
of Moors and Christians, in contemporary Spain, focusing on one of the
most significant, that of Carboneras, northeast of Granada. These
increasingly popular festivals claim to be historically accurate
reenactments of events from the period when Muslims ruled Spain
(711-1492) at a time when nationalist sentiment is on the rise and the
number of immigrants from Arab countries continues to grow. As
Beale-Rivaya demonstrates, however, through their jumbled retelling of
history, the contents of the script, and the representation of the
region’s multilingual past, the festivals support essentialist notions
of Spanish identity defined against the otherness of anything
associated with Arabs, including Arabic and Islam. In short, recent
immigrants are casts as a second wave of invaders. After presenting
background on the history of the region and of the festivals, which
date to the late eighteenth century, Beale-Rivaya discusses the
details of the three-day festival in detail, focusing on passages of
the script and pointing out the ways in which they contribute to
affirming the nationalist Roman-Latin-Christian ideology it inscribes.
As she notes, “the script creates links between past events and the
present unease” (p. 265) while exoticizing the historic and present
Other for commercial and political purposes.

The collection’s final chapter, by Pavlenko, examines multilingual
ghost signs, that is, faded signs on old buildings, offering case
studies of four cities, all UN World Heritage Sites, where “dissonant”
languages no longer spoken there appear on signs, plaques, and
monuments. Based on fieldwork involving site visits, participation in
organized tours, interviews with tour guides and visitors, as well as
analysis of written sources—UNESCO documents, travelogues, and
guidebooks, she discusses and offers examples from Lviv, Ukraine
(formerly Polish Lwów); Toledo, Spain (home to large populations of
Muslims and Jews as well as Christians during the period of
Convivencia from the eighth to the fifteenth century, when these
groups coexisted and (sometimes) lived in harmony); St. Petersburg,
Russia (formerly Leningrad and home to the French-inspired Nevsky
Prospect as well as various ethnolinguistic communities at certain
times); and Palermo, Italy (site of the Norman kingdom of Sicily
(1130-1198), where Arabic, Latin, and Greek were used). For each of
the cases, she provides a historical overview of the past and present
situations. As she notes, academic discussions of such ghost signs
often mention their retro or nostalgic appeal. However, she notes four
specific patterns in particular when the situation involves dissonant
languages: the creation of a useable past emphasizing events or
situations contributing to a positive nationalist narrative (often
images of tolerance) while minimizing negative ones, the communication
of the past for commercial purposes of entertainment or tourism, the
exoticism of the now-absent Other, and the exclusion of those whose
heritage is said to be celebrated from any role in decision-making.
She presents evidence of recently created signs, especially those in
unfamiliar scripts, that contain errors as well as those where signs
in the currently dominant language have been added, creating the
impression that the language has a long history in the place. In her
discussion of the cases, she is careful to point out how various
sources such as tour guides and documents construct seamless
narratives that paper over the ways that such linguistic landscapes
are often contentious sites of “petty ethnic chauvinism and linguistic
intolerance” (p. 290) in contrast to the more complex
counternarratives indicated by graffiti, defacement, and the absence
of information about historical conflicts that had catastrophic
consequences for certain groups.

EVALUATION

This is an excellent addition to the work on multilingualism. The
diversity of these case studies fulfills the goals of the work: to
remind students of multilingualism of the need to look beyond the
present or recent past and to demonstrate that complex situations of
multilingualism have existed throughout history. The volume should be
of interest to anyone teaching courses on the topic, especially those
that deal with issues of social context for the creation, maintenance,
and societal consequences of multilingualism. The details presented in
the case studies that span millennia and continents will likely
represent new information for most, if not all, readers while
providing useful examples for teaching. Indeed, even those who argue
for the uniqueness of the contemporary nature of multilingualisms
around the world will find useful material here, including
methodologies for analyzing language use in the past. Specific
chapters will be especially used in courses focusing on topics they
treat. Pavlenko’s introduction represents a particularly useful
overview and taxonomy for examining multilingualism in history. A
contribution of the volume is its invitation to continue and broaden
work on the history of multilingual situations in various times and
places, particularly since the book’s chapters focus on situations in
Western and Eastern Europe (including Russia), the Mediterranean, and
former Dutch colonies.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Keith Walters is Professor Emeritus, Applied Linguistics, Portland
State University. He also held positions in the Linguistics Department
at UT-Austin and the English Department at Ohio State University. He
taught English as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia and as a
Fulbright Scholar in Guinee-Conakry and the West Bank, Palestinian
Territories. He has served as expert witness in a dozen court cases,
most of which involved issues of bi- or multilingualism. Much of his
research focused on issues of language and identity in the
Arabic-speaking world. He is also co-author of two widely used
first-year writing textbooks.



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