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Defining Multilingualism

OBJECTIVES

• Learn about how multilingualism is defined by reading about its characteristics and why it is important.
• Understand the historical context, relevant theories, and key concepts in multilingualism including how the field has evolved over time.
• Read about how theoretical perspectives from linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cognitive frameworks have informed our understanding of multilingualism.
• Explore the variability found in different types of multilingualism (individual multilingualism, societal multilingualism, and transnational multilingualism).

1.1 Introduction

Jerry was an English-speaking monolingual from the United States who had just graduated with an undergraduate degree in business. As a reward for his hard work, Jerry decided to go backpacking in Europe. His journey took him to several countries where he was able to visit important sites that he never dreamed of seeing in person. Jerry also enjoyed the local cuisines and met many new friends in the several hostels where he stayed. When Jerry returned home, he started to reflect on his travel experiences and on all the friends he had made along the way. With the exception of a few students from Australia and England, all of his new friends had spoken English as their second (or third or fourth!) language. This worked out fine for Jerry, who only knew English, but what type of experience would it have been, Jerry wondered, if he had been able to interact with these individuals in their languages, or at least a mixture of theirs and his. Would they have shared different stories? Would they have had a "better" or "worse" time? Would the connection they made still be the same? Jerry decided that he would learn a second language, and what better way than to begin practicing it than with some of the new friends he had made while abroad! Jerry knew that they would be pleasantly surprised, and perhaps even feel honoured, to see his interest in their language.

Jerry's story shows us that multilingualism forms an important part of today's interconnected world, and understanding the complicated characteristics of multilingualism, while challenging, can be beneficial in a number of ways. Multilingualism can help individuals navigate linguistic diversity, fostering better communication and comprehension in various settings such as academic and social systems. Multilingualism is often intertwined with cultural richness, by opening up a window into the linguistic aspects that shape and reflect diverse cultures. Moreover, it helps promote more inclusive and informed perspectives. In other words, multilingualism is not just a theoretical concept; it has practical implications in various domains such as education, business, society, politics, and media, among many others.

In this chapter, we will talk about insights and real-world scenarios in which multilingualism plays a vital role in the interconnectedness of languages, cultures, and societies on a global scale. In doing so, we look at how the field of multilingualism has developed through interdisciplinary synergies with other fields such as linguistics, psychology, and sociology. For instance, in linguistics, the dynamic nature of multilingualism can be seen through the various possibilities of conceptual and linguistic restructurings in multilingual minds. The use of multiple languages, or the speaker's multicompetence, is related to communicative competence, or the concrete usage of a language, which comprehends "different and typologically distant varieties" (p. 348). In sociolinguistics, multilingualism is viewed as "various forms of social, institutional, and individual ways that we go about using more than one language" (Franceschini 2011, p. 344), including not only official languages but also minoritized languages, sign languages, and dialects. In cognitive psychology, multilingualism has become an important area of investigation since the discovery that the regular use of two or more languages may lead to cognitive benefits not seen in monolinguals (Bialystok et al. 2004). Bialystok et al. (2007) found that multilingualism delays the onset of symptoms of cognitive decline among patients with dementia. In the study, for multilingual patients, dementia symptoms emerged around four years after those observed in monolingual patients. While several studies have found that multilingualism may lead to cognitive benefits not seen in monolingual individuals, others have found contrary evidence. Research is ongoing in this interesting area of inquiry.

As we will see in this chapter, multilingualism is not just a linguistic phenomenon, but it is also deeply intertwined with social and cultural factors. For instance, researchers have shown great interest in describing how language choice reflects identity, community belonging, and power dynamics within multilingual societies. There are also ongoing efforts to identify and design best practices that foster learning outcomes among multilingual learners in educational settings. These efforts often consider the role of the first language in second language learning settings (Ferreira et al. 2016) and can inform the development of effective bilingual education programs and language policies. Furthermore, because of technological advances, understanding multilingual practices is very important in digital media and communication. Accessing and analyzing the diverse linguistic interactions that have been recorded in large databanks called language corpora show us how new patterns and expressions in languages have evolved hand-in-hand with other developments in society, digital technology, and how humans interact in general.

Study Activity 1.1

If you speak more than one language, do you use them (mostly) in different contexts and places? For instance, do you use one language at home and one language at school and work? What are some of the benefits and challenges of living in a multilingual environment? How or where did you learn those languages? At home? At school? By watching movies? On the Internet? If you do not know more than one language, ask someone who does.

1.2 Evolutionary Roots of Language

The skulls of Neanderthals suggest that their brains had significantly smaller frontal lobes, areas that are crucial for expressive language and managing higher-level executive functions. This suggests that our ancestors did not have the same degree of biological capacity for language as we do today. In fact, it has been argued that spoken human language may have emerged from simple gestures (Fay et al. 2022), including pointing at things and grunting. As our brain developed, so did our abilities for languages, and over time, those gestures and non-language sounds evolved into more complex articulations and eventually formed a sophisticated and elaborate system of language. The need for communication was crucial for survival and collaboration. To early humans, developing a language must have been like creating a superpower.

Neubauer et al. (2018) argue that by around 300?000 years ago, "H. sapiens' brain size already fell within the range of present-day humans" (p. 1). The human brain consists of three main parts: the cerebrum, brainstem, and cerebellum. The cerebellum is associated with language, working memory, spatial processing, affective processing, and social cognition. The cerebellum grows at the highest rate of all brain parts in the first three months of life, and researchers speculate that this early growth phase may play a crucial role in setting the foundation for the birth of language. The cerebellum has also been associated with "verbal fluency (both semantic and formal) expressive and receptive grammar processing, the ability to identify and correct language mistakes, and writing skills" (Starowicz-Filip et al. 2017, p. 661). The idea of the cerebellum forming a basis of the regulation of cognitive and emotional functions (see Dow 1974) has been supported in several studies examining working memory, learning, executive and visuospatial functions, and emotion regulation. Studies are continuously published to unravel the complexities of early brain development and its capacity to learn and process languages.

Alongside the evolutionary changes of the brain, when humans were developing ways of farming and creating settlements, they began to use livestock and grains for trading. This task required them to keep tabs on what materials were taken in and which ones were traded or sold. Ancient accountants used various shapes of small tokens that were formed out of clay to track everything they had, such as bushels of grain, sheep, and goats. Schmandt-Besserat (2014) states that: "Unlike spoken language, the token system made no use of syntax. 'Three cones and three ovoids,' scattered in any way, were to be translated as 'three baskets of grain, three jars of oil' " (p. 1). The fact that the same shapes of tokens were used across an expansive territory in the Near East suggests that tokens, and thus, users of tokens, did not involve phonetics. They worked very well to track numbers, but not for expressing complex or unclear ideas. Nonetheless, they served their purpose. Our human nature drives us toward communication and telling stories, and these processes become more and more complex as our capacity to express them also develops....