Read more
This volume offers a critical perspective on current views on linguistic fixity and fluidity in sociolinguistics and highlights empirical accounts alternative to prevailing trends in the field. Featuring accounts from a broad range of regional contexts, the collection takes stock of such terms as "polylingualism", "metrolingualism" and "translanguaging" to question perceptions around multilingual and monolingual language use. The book critiques the status of fluid language use as a more "natural" language practice and in turn, its greater potential for corresponding social transformation, demonstrating the value of linguistic fixity and the continuous debate between fixity and fluidity in multilingual speakers' lives. In providing these accounts, the book seeks not to advocate for linguistic fixity or fluidity, but to argue that sociolinguists pay close attention to the way both types of linguistic practice open up or close down avenues for social transformation. This collection is a key reading for graduate students and scholars in sociolinguistics, multilingualism, and linguistic anthropology.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Fixity and Fluidity in Sociolinguistic Theory and Practice
Jürgen Jaspers and Lian Malai Madsen
Part I: Negotiating Fixity
Chapter 2: Recognizing Languages, Practising Languaging
Janus Spindler Møller
Chapter 3: Languagised Repertoires: How Fictional Languages have Real Effects
Katharina Ruuska
Chapter 4: Lingoing and Everyday Metrolingual Metalanguage
Alastair Pennycook and Emi Otsuji
Part II: Pursuing Real Languages
Chapter 5: Carving out breathing spaces for Galician. New speakers' investment in monolingual practices
Bernadette O'Rourke
Chapter 6: Transformative Multilingualism? Class, Race and Linguistic Repertoires in Hong Kong
Kara Fleming
Chapter 7: The Symbolic Organization of Languages in a High Prestige School
Thomas Rørbeck Nørreby and Lian Malai Madsen
Part III: The Meaning Potential of Fluid Language
Chapter 8: Inarticulate Voices: Translanguaging in an Ecology of Conflict
Panayiota Charalambous, Constadina Charalambous, and Michalinos Zembylas
Chapter 9: Speaker Perspectives, Linguistic Hybridity, and Language Learning
Ursula Ritzau and Lian Malai Madsen
Part IV: Dilemmas and Dialectics
Chapter 10: The Deliberative Teacher: Wavering between Linguistic Uniformity and Diversity
Jürgen Jaspers
Chapter 11: Register Processes in Contemporary South African Schools:
Dialectics of Fixity and Fluidity
James Collins and Lara-Stephanie Krause
Chapter 12: Discussion: The Elephant in Every Room.
Rob Moore
About the author
Jürgen Jaspers is Associate Professor of Dutch Linguistics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium.
Lian Malai Madsen is Associate Professor of the Psychology of Language at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Summary
This volume offers a critical perspective on a range of increasingly popular terms in sociolinguistics and highlights empirical accounts alternative to prevailing perspectives in the field embodied by these terms.
