English language and linguistics research seminar: Samantha Goodchild (University of Copenhagen): Using linguistic biography to explore chronotopic representations of mono- and multilingualism in Essil, Senegal

Africa and particularly West Africa is generally regarded as being highly multilingual, so much so that Fardon & Furniss (1994: 4) referred to multilingualism as the lingua franca of Africa. West Africa has a high level of linguistic diversity (Atanga et al. 2013: 6) and people have multilingual repertoires. However, such characterisations can brush over the complexity of personal linguistic practices and their relation to broader societal norms and people’s perceptions of multilingualism. In this presentation, I will present a case study of the village of Essil, Senegal, a place which participants and some researchers have described as monolingual in Joola Eegimaa (e.g. Sagna & Hantgan 2021). I will demonstrate how a linguistic biographical approach is useful for studying participants’ own experiences of their repertoires and is key to helping describe and explain personal and societal language use. The data and analyses suit a chronotopic (Bakhtin 1981) theoretical orientation, where multiple perspectives and positionings are taken into account as participants engage in ideological work, particularly the scalar process of comparison (Gal & Irvine 2019). I will conclude that linguistic biography allows a nuanced examination of participants’ repertories and how they are affected by emotions, history and ideologies and thus can explain how the norms of societal language use are defaulted to a view of monolingual linguistic practices in Essil. 

References

Atanga, Lilian Lem, Sibonile Edith Ellece, Lia Litosseliti & Jane Sunderland. 2013. Gender and language in sub-Saharan Africa: A valid epistemology? In Lilian Lem Atanga, Sibonile Edith Ellece, Lia Litosseliti & Jane Sunderland (eds.), Gender and Language in Sub-Saharan Africa: Tradition, struggle and change (IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society Volume 33), 1–26. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaǐlovich. 1981. The dialogic imagination: four essays (University of Texas Press Slavic Series 1). (Ed.) Michael Holquist. (Trans.) Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Fardon, Richard & Graham Furniss. 1994. Introduction: Frontiers and boundaries - African languages as political environment. In Richard Fardon & Graham Furniss (eds.), African languages, development and the state, 1–32. London ; New York: Routledge.

Gal, Susan & Judith T. Irvine. 2019. Signs of difference: language and ideology in social life. Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Sagna, Serge & Abbie Hantgan. 2021. African multilingualism viewed from another angle: Challenging the Casamance exception. International Journal of Bilingualism. SAGE Publications Ltd 25(4). 939–958. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069211023146.