BILINGUALISM

Ability to speak two languages. It may be acquired early by children in regions

where most adults speak two languages (e.g., French and dialectal German in
Alsace). Children may also become bilingual by learning languages in two
different social settings; for example, British children in British India learned
an Indian language from their nurses and family servants. A second language
can also be acquired in school. Bilingualism can also refer to the use of two
languages in teaching, especially to foster learning in students trying to learn a
new language. Advocates of bilingual education in the U.S. argue that it speeds
learning in all subjects for children who speak a foreign language at home and
prevents them from being marginalized in English-language schools.
Detractors counter that it hinders such children from mastering the language
of the larger society and limits their opportunities for employment and higher
education.

MULTILINGUALISM

(a)Speaking several languages – able to speak more than two languages

(b) Involving several languages - relating to the use of more than two
languages

Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual

speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers
outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of
all Europeans claim to speak at least one language other than their mother
tongue, but many read and write in one language. Always useful to traders,
multilingualism is advantageous for people wanting to participate in
globalization and cultural openness. Owing to the ease of access to
information facilitated by the Internet, individuals' exposure to multiple
languages is becoming increasingly possible. People who speak several
languages are also called polyglots.
CODE-SWITCHING
Перемикання кодів, або кодове перемикання – це перехід мовця у процесі
мовного спілкування з однієї мови (діалекту, стилю) на іншу (інший ) у
залежності від умов комунікації.

Take for example Sasha and Lena.

When Lena says to Sasha: “Would you like some tea? And Sasha replies: “Why
yes, thank you.” They have just used a system of communication, or a code. We
might call that code English.

Now, if Lena and Sasha speak both English and Russian, and Lena asks Sasha
the same thing again in Russian, we would say they are employing two codes,
and by moving back and forth between the two codes, we would say they are
code-switching.

Finally, there is code-mixing:

Ask a student: Excuse me, what’s your name? Really, well, ochen priyatna!

That was an example of code mixing, using two codes, and mixing the two
codes together in a single sentence.

Now all of us, whether multilingual or not, use our languages or codes and the
dialect or dialects of our languages or codes in our speech community.
PIDGIN/CREOLE

Definitions
Pidgins and creoles develop out of a need for communication among people
who do not share a common language – for example, among plantation
labourers from diverse geographic origins. Most of the words in the
vocabulary of the new language come from one of the languages of the people
in contact, called the ‘lexifier’ (or sometimes the ‘superstrate’) – usually the
language of the group with the most power or prestige.
However, the meanings and functions of the words, as well as the way they’re
pronounced and put together (i.e. the grammatical rules) of the pidgin or
creole, are different to those of the lexifier. These rules may sometimes
resemble those of the other languages in contact, usually referred to in pidgin
and creole studies as the ‘substrate languages’. An example is the following
sentence from Bislama, the dialect of Melanesian Pidgin spoken in Vanuatu.
This language arose among Pacific Islanders working as plantation labourers
in Queensland (Australia) in the late 1800s.

(1) Woman ia bae i kilim ol pig long garen blong hem.

‘This woman will attack the pigs in her garden’.

All the words in this sentence are derived from the lexifi er, English, but most
with different meanings or functions. For example kilim is based on kill him,
but here it means ‘hit’ or ‘strike’; long is a general preposition derived from
along; and hem, from him, is used for he, she, it, him and her. The word bae
(from by and by) indicates future, and blong (from belong) is used to show
possession. The way the words are put together reflects the rules of the
substrate languages, the Eastern Oceanic languages of the southwestern
Pacific. For example the word ia (derived from here) means ‘this’, but it
follows the noun woman rather than preceding it as this does in English. Also,
the small particle i (from he) is required before the verb to indicate that the
subject (this woman) is singular. And the word ol (derived from all) precedes
the noun pig to indicate plural rather than a following –s as in English pigs.
Contact languages such as Melanesian Pidgin begin to emerge when people
speaking different languages first develop their own individual ways of
communicating, often by using words and phrases they have learned from
other languages (most often from the lexifier) that they think others might be
familiar with, but leaving out words such as prepositions.
The combination of these individualized ways of communicating is called a
‘jargon’ or ‘pre-pidgin’. Here are two examples from the early ‘South Seas
Jargon’, which first emerged from contact between Pacifi c Islanders and
Europeans in the early 1800s (from Clark, 1979: 30; Keesing, 1988: 43):

(2) a. Go my house; me got plenty fruit my house. (Rarotonga – 1860)

b. He too much bad man. (Kosrae – 1860)

If the different language groups remain in contact, or if several groups start to

use the pre-pidgin as a lingua franca (i.e. a common language), certain
communicative conventions may develop, resulting in a new language, called
a pidgin. In the Pacific, this occurred after 1863 when islanders from diverse
regions were recruited to work on plantations in Queensland and other areas.
A stable pidgin emerged, using some features from the pre-pidgin more
consistently, while dropping others – for example (from Keesing, 1988: 42–
43):

(3) a. Me want to go along big fellow house . . . (Queensland – 1870s)

b. big wind broke ship belonga me. (Efate [New Hebrides] – 1878)
c. man here no good . . . (Tanna [New Hebrides] – 1877)

These examples show the use of the preposition along for ‘to, at’, and belonga
for possessives (belonga me replacing my). These became long and blong in
modern Melanesian Pidgin. While got meaning ‘have’ in example (2a) remains
in modern Melanesian Pidgin, bad was replaced by no good when the pidgin
stabilized, as shown in (3c).

Once a stable pidgin has emerged, it generally continues to be learned as an

auxiliary language and used only when necessary for intergroup
communication. Its total vocabulary is small, and it has little, if any,
grammatical words and endings – for example, to indicate tense or plural. This
is called a ‘restricted pidgin’. Here is an example from a restricted pidgin,
Chinese Pidgin English, once an important trade language in southern China
and Hong Kong (Li et al., 2005):

(4) he more better takee two piecee coolie along he.

‘He’d better take two coolies with him’.

In some cases, however, the use of a pidgin is extended into wider areas – for
example, as the everyday lingua franca in a multilingual community, and even
as a language used in religion and government. As a result, the language
expands over time in its vocabulary and grammar, and becomes what is
fittingly called an ‘expanded pidgin’. This is what happened with Melanesian
Pidgin, which expanded when it became an important lingua franca after
returned plantation labourers brought it back to their multilingual home
countries. Thus, the example of Bislama in (1) is that of an expanded pidgin.
Bislama has its own writing system, and is used widely not only for
communication between people who have different mother tongues (Vanuatu
has over 100 indigenous languages) but also in radio broadcasting,
parliamentary debates and religious contexts. Another expanded pidgin that
serves this role is Nigerian Pidgin.

Areas of Research in Pidgin and Creole Studies

Research in pidgin and creole studies can be divided into four areas: (1)
description and development, (2) language in society, (3) variation, and (4)
applied issues. Each of these is described in turn.

Description and development

P/Cs are legitimate, rule-governed varieties of language, in some ways even
more complex than their lexifi ers.

For example in Bislama gender is not distinguished in the pronoun system,

and the pronoun hem (or sometimes em) can mean ‘she’, ‘he’ or ‘it’. So, the
sentence Hem i stap long haos can have three different meanings, depending
on the context ‘He’s in the house’, ‘She’s in the house’ or ‘It’s in the house. Also,
in the sentence Mi givim buk long hem, the samepronoun hem can also mean
‘him’ or ‘her’. Thus, it seems that Bislama has a pronoun system that is
‘simpler’ than that of English. However, this is not the full story. The pronoun
system of Bislama makes some other distinctions that are not made in English.
For example while standard English has only one second-person pronoun,
you, that can refer to either singular or plural, Bislama has four different
second-person pronouns: yu (singular – ‘you’), yutufala (dual – ‘you two’),
yutrifala (trial – ‘you three’) and yufala (plural – ‘you all’). Thus, Bislama
pronouns make a four-way distinction in number whereas English pronouns
sometimes make no distinction, as with you, or at the most only a two-way
singular–plural distinction, as with I versus we.

Variation
Another clearly sociolinguistic area of research in P/C studies focuses on the
variation found in what is known as the ‘creole continuum’ – a cline of speech
varieties of the creole ranging from what is called the ‘basilect’ (furthest from
the lexifi er) to the ‘acrolect’ (closest to the lexifi er), with intermediate
varieties, the ‘mesolects’. This is illustrated for Jamaican Creole in Figure 9.1
(adapted from Alleyne, 1980). The social conditions for a creole continuum, fi
rst outlined by DeCamp (1971: 351), include a standard form of the lexifi er
language being the

acrolect: he is eating his dinner.

mesolect 1: (h)im is eating (h)im dinner.
mesolect 2: (h)im eating (h)im dinner.
mesolect 3: im a eat im dinner.
basilect: im a nyam im dinner.
Figure 9.1 Range of speech in the Jamaican Creole continuum

dominant official language, the partial breakdown of formerly rigid social

stratification so that some social mobility is possible, and access to education
in the dominant language. Thus, this phenomenon is supposedly the result of
the lexifier language becoming the target and the creole then becoming
heavily influenced or restructured by it, a process called ‘decreolization’.
Decreolization is usually defined as the gradual modification of a creole in the
direction of the lexifier. However, some creolists (e.g. Mufwene, 2001) believe
that actually the reverse process led to the development of the continuum –
that is that the lexifier was gradually modified to become more basilectal.
Creole speakers have profi ciency over different ranges of the continuum:
Those with more education or higher socio-economic status control varieties
more towards the acrolectal end, and those with less education or lower
socio-economic status, towards the basilectal end. Speakers also shift their
speech along the continuum depending on whom they are talking to and the
context – more acrolectal in formal contexts and basilectal in informal
contexts. For example an educated speaker of Jamaican Creole might say him
eating him dinner to his wife at home, but he is eating his dinner to his boss at
work. In contrast, an uneducated speaker in similar contexts might say im a
nyam im dinner and im eating im dinner.
In Figure 9.1, there are at least two variables, each with three variants. One
concerns the subject pronoun: the use of he, him or im and the other concerns
present continuous marking: is VERBing, as in English, VERBing (without the
auxiliary) and a VERB. In a variationist sociolinguistic study, the frequency of
use of each variant would be calculated for various speakers and statistical
analysis would be done to see whether particular frequencies correspond to
social variables such as age, ethnicity, socio-economic status and gender.
These studies have confirmed earlier observations about factors affecting
variation along the continuum.
---Sociolinguistics and Language Education Edited by Nancy H. Hornberger and
Sandra Lee McKay Copyright c 2010 Nancy H. Hornberger, Sandra Lee McKay
and the authors of individual chapters.

LANGUAGE PLANNING
The term language planning refers to measures taken by official agencies to
influence the use of one or more languages in a particular speech community.
American linguist Joshua Fishman has defined language planning as "the
authoritative allocation of resources to the attainment of language status and
corpus goals, whether in connection with new functions that are aspired to or
in connection with old functions that need to be discharged more adequately"
(1987).
Four major types of language planning are status planning (about the social
standing of a language), corpus planning (the structure of a
language), language-in-education planning (learning), and prestige
planning (image).
Language planning may occur at the macro-level (the state) or the micro-
level (the community).

LANGUAGE POLICY

Language policy has been defined in a number of ways. According to Kaplan

and Baldauf (1997), "A language policy is a body of ideas, laws, regulations,
rules and practices intended to achieve the planned language change in the
societies, group or system". Lo Bianco defines the field as “a situated activity,
whose specific history and local circumstances influence what is regarded as a
language problem, and whose political dynamics determine which language
problems are given policy treatment”. McCarty (2011) defines language policy
as "a complex sociocultural process [and as] modes of human interaction,
negotiation, and production mediated by relations of power. The ‘policy’ in
these processes resides in their language-regulating power; that is, the ways
in which they express normative claims about legitimate and illegitimate
language forms and uses, thereby governing language statuses and uses".
Language policy is broad, but it can be categorized into three components.
Spolsky (2004) argues, "A useful first step is to distinguish between the three
components of the language policy of a speech community: (1) its language
practices – the habitual pattern of selecting among the varieties that make up
its linguistic repertoire; (2) its language beliefs or ideology – the beliefs about
language and language use; and (3) any specific efforts to modify or influence
that practice by any kind of language intervention, planning, or management".
The traditional scope of language policy concerns language regulation. This
refers to what a government does either officially through legislation, court
decisions or policy to determine how languages are used, cultivate language
skills needed to meet national priorities or to establish the rights of
individuals or groups to use and maintain languages.

Implementation

The implementation of language policy varies from one State to another. This
may be explained by the fact that language policy is often based on contingent
historical reasons. Likewise, States also differ as to the degree of explicitness
with which they implement a given language policy. The French Toubon law is
a good example of explicit language policy. The same may be said for
the Charter of the French Language in Quebec.
Scholars such as Tollefson argue that language policy can create inequality,
"language planning-policy means the institutionalization of language as a
basis for distinctions among social groups (classes). That is, language policy is
one mechanism for locating language within social structure so that language
determines who has access to political power and economic resources.
Language policy is one mechanism by which dominant groups establish
hegemony in language use" (p. 16).
Many countries have a language policy designed to favor or discourage the use
of a particular language or set of languages. Although nations historically have
used language policies most often to promote one official language at the
expense of others, many countries now have policies designed to protect and
promote regional and ethnic languages whose viability is threatened. Indeed,
whilst the existence of linguistic minorities within their jurisdiction has often
been considered to be a potential threat to internal cohesion, States also
understand that providing language rights to minorities may be more in their
long term interest, as a means of gaining citizens' trust in the central
government.
The preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity in today's world is a
major concern to many scientists, artists, writers, politicians, leaders of
linguistic communities, and defenders of linguistic human rights. More than
half of the 6000 languages currently spoken in the world are estimated to be
in danger of disappearing during the 21st century. Many factors affect the
existence and usage of any given human language, including the size of the
native speaking population, its use in formal communication, and the
geographical dispersion and the socio-economic weight of its speakers.
National language policies can either mitigate or exacerbate the effects of
some of these factors.
For example, according to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, "Native tongue title and
language rights should be promoted. The government ought to define
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander vernaculars as official languages of
Australia. We must change the linguistic landscape of Whyalla and elsewhere.
Signs should be in both English and the local indigenous language. We ought
to acknowledge intellectual property of indigenous knowledge including
language, music and dance.
There are many ways in which language policies can be categorized. It was
elaborated by Université Laval sociolinguist Jacques Leclerc for the French-
language Web site L'aménagement linguistique dans le monde put on line by
the CIRAL in 1999. The collecting, translating and classifying of language
policies started in 1988 and culminated in the publishing of Recueil des
législations linguistiques dans le monde (vol. I to VI) at Presses de l'Université
Laval in 1994. The work, containing some 470 language laws, and the
research leading to publication, were subsidised by the Office québécois de la
langue française. In April 2008, the Web site presented the linguistic portrait
and language policies in 354 States or autonomous territories in 194
recognised countries.