Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition

notes

n otes introduction 1. Wordsearch was realized under the auspices of the Deutsche Bank art series Moment, which began in 2001 and solicited original conceptual art works (Deutsche Bank Art). It can be partially viewed on the accompanying website: moment-art.com/moment/ wordsearch/e/index.php. The cover image of the present book is drawn from a photograph of another multilingual artwork, the mural Le mur des je t’aime (Wall of I Love Yous) conceived by Frédéric Baron and produced with the help of calligrapher Claire Kito in 2000. Printed on glazed tile, it features the handwritten phrase “I love you” in numerous languages in a small park adjacent to the Abbesses metro station in Paris. Visitors have added their own writings to the wall, thereby changing and expanding the original pattern. Much of the following analysis of Wordsearch also applies to Le mur des je t’aime. For an alternate multilingual employment of “I love you,” see the example I discuss in my conclusion. 2. Throughout this book, I use “multilingualism” as an umbrella term that can refer to different linguistic phenomena involving two or more languages. Each of these phenomena will be separately described and defined when first mentioned. Such definitions are necessary since there is no coherent, agreed-upon terminology, either within or across specific disciplines (or languages). Anglophone linguists, for example, tend to use the term “multilingualism” when referring to language issues at the macro level (i.e., processes of language change and language death) and “bilingualism” when referring to language issues involving individual speakers at the micro level (i.e., the study of code-switching ), although they sometimes also employ these terms to distinguish the number of languages concerned (Clyne, “Multilingualism”). Literary and cultural studies terminology is even less settled. It includes the Notes 214 traditional “polyglot,” which has usually been reserved for the linguistic abilities of intellectual elites—think Renaissance humanists—and is closely associated with elite cosmopolitanism. The more frequent contemporary umbrella terms are “bilingual” (see Sommer, Bilingual Aesthetics; Courtivron, Lives in Translation) and “multilingual” (see Sollors, Multilingual America; Schmeling and Schmitz-Emans, Multilinguale Literatur). Of these, “bilingual” may carry a greater political connotation, at least in the United States, as it is associated with the linguistic situation of immigrants and minorities—think “bilingual education.” Further coinages with widely varying definitions include but are not limited to “polylingual,” “interlingual,” “plurilingual ,” or “translingual” (sometimes also featuring the suffix “-istic,” such as in the “translinguistic sculpture”). This diversity testifies to the evolving state of the field and the great variety of phenomena that it includes. Because my study touches on a range of linguistic practices and conditions, I have chosen “multilingual” as an umbrella term. For my purposes, “bilingual” appears too tied to the individual level and to the numerical notion of two languages. 3. With roughly six thousand languages spoken in about two hundred countries currently in existence, it is obvious that language contact situations abound in the world, as linguist Li Wei notes (“Dimensions of Bilingualism” 3). Wei adds that “one in three of the world’s population routinely uses two or more languages for work, family life, and leisure,” especially in “many countries in Africa and Asia, [where] several languages co-exist and large sections of the population speak three or more languages” (4, 7). Michael Clyne, another linguist , concludes that “there are probably more bilinguals in the world than monolinguals” (“Multilingualism” 300). For documentations of multilingualism in literary history, see Forster, The Poet’s Tongues, and Kellman, The Translingual Imagination. 4. For references to the belated nature of monolingualism, see translation scholar Lefevere, Translation; linguists Braunmüller and Ferraresi, Aspects of Multilingualism; education scholar Hu, Schulischer Fremdsprachenunterricht; literary critics Feldman, Modernism and Cultural Transfer; Forster, The Poet’s Tongues; Kremnitz, Mehrsprachigkeit in der Literatur; and Steiner, Extraterritorial. 5. On a “monolingual bias” in the fields of linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and psychology, see Aneta Pavlenko (Emotions and Multilingualism). Mary Catherine Davidson likewise refers to a “monolingual bias” in the study of medieval multilingualism (Medievalism , Multilingualism, and Chaucer), while Ingrid Gogolin refers to a “monolingual habitus” built into the German educational system Notes 215 (Der monolinguale Habitus). I use the term “paradigm” to indicate the way in which presumptions of monolingualism thoroughly structure both modern modes of thinking and the makeup of institutions. 6. Besides Gogolin, Der monolinguale Habitus, see Hu’s remarkable case study, Schulischer Fremdsprachenunterricht...