Original title: Uncovering Small-Scale Multilingualism
The paper describes small-scale multilingualism: people using several languages in everyday interaction, without assigning each language a separate job or rank. These practices are rooted in social life in a particular place. The paper presents cases from West Africa, Amazonia, Northern Australia and Melanesia, and groups them by beliefs about language and by known patterns of use. It argues that studying them takes work across several fields.
Imagine a family sharing chores at home. The jobs are not permanently assigned to one person; who does what depends on the family’s habits and the situation. In this paper, the shared chores are the different languages people use, and the family’s habits are the local social practices that shape when and how they use them.
How people use languages can reflect long-standing social practices tied to a particular place, not just formal roles for different languages. Studying these communities may help explain how language contact and language structure have been shaped across much of human history.
The abstract does not report detailed findings for the individual case studies or establish how common these practices are. It describes settings mainly in regions spared from Western settlement colonies, so it does not show that the same patterns apply everywhere. It calls for an integrated approach but does not specify how that approach is tested.
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Uncovering Small-Scale Multilingualism — Friederike Lüpke — Critical multilingualism studies — doi:10.2458/cms.6634
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.