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Introduction Beyond the Mother Tongue?: Multilingual Practices and the Monolingual Paradigm
- Fordham University Press
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i n t roduc t ion Beyond the Mother Tongue? Multilingual Practices and the Monolingual Paradigm rethinking monolingualism On September 29, 2002, the Sunday issue of the New York Times included a sixty-eight-page paid insert previewing a conceptual artwork called Wordsearch: A Translinguistic Sculpture conceived by German artist Karin Sander and sponsored by the Deutsche Bank, the world’s biggest corporate art collector.1 In response to the sponsor’s request to offer a global perspective in a metropolitan location, Sander’s project set out to document as many of the languages spoken in New York City as possible . It did so by finding one native speaker for each of 250 languages and asking each speaker to contribute one personally meaningful word in his or her “mother tongue” to a list. This list of unduplicated words was then translated into all the other languages. The resulting 62,500 words were arranged into columns resembling stock market tables and published as the actual “translinguistic sculpture” in another paid, eight-page insert in the business section of the New York Times on October 4, 2002. This commissioned artwork, Wordsearch, thus sought to render the novelty of globalized life at the turn of the millen- Introduction 2 nium through attention to the proximate coexistence of many languages in the same space. To Wordsearch and many other cultural texts, the phenomenon of multilingualism appears as a remarkable new development of the globalized age.2 Yet as linguists have come to agree, and as scholars in other fields increasingly document, multilingualism is and has been far more common worldwide than had been previously acknowledged.3 Indeed, it is monolingualism, not multilingualism, that is the result of a relatively recent, albeit highly successful, development .4 But a monolingual paradigm, which first emerged in late-eighteenth century Europe, has functioned to obscure from view the widespread nature of multilingualism, both in the present and in the past. While scholars across different fields have noted the “monolingual bias” or the “monolingual habitus” in particular areas, no study to date has spelled out the far-reaching implications of this insight.5 Recognizing the workings of the monolingual paradigm, I suggest, requires a fundamental reconceptualization of European and European-inflected thinking about language, identity, and modernity. For monolingualism is much more than a simple quantitative term designating the presence of just one language . Instead, it constitutes a key structuring principle that organizes the entire range of modern social life, from the construction of individuals and their proper subjectivities to the formation of disciplines and institutions, as well as of imagined collectives such as cultures and nations. According to this paradigm, individuals and social formations are imagined to possess one “true” language only, their “mother tongue,” and through this possession to be organically linked to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture , and nation. Indeed, as we will see, even an apparently multilingual artwork such as Wordsearch still functions according to the central precepts of the monolingual paradigm. The pressures of this monolingual paradigm have not just obscured multilingual practices across history; they have also led to active processes of monolingualization, which have produced more monolingual subjects, more monolingual communities, and more monolingual institutions, without, however, fully eliminat- [3.238.251.21] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:57 GMT) Introduction 3 ing multilingualism. Schooling has been one of the primary means of such a social engineering of monolingual populations.6 The diverse linguistic landscape of eighteenth-century France, where large parts of the population did not speak French, for instance, was reengineered over time to produce a more monolingual population of French speakers.7 This last point also underscores the significance of the modern nation-state for the monolingual paradigm , or rather, of the monolingual paradigm for the modern nation-state, with which it emerged at the same time.8 There are signs, however, that the tide is turning against such strict monolingualization. For a supranational entity such as the European Union, for instance, the challenge has become to manage multilingualism, not to discard it.9 Increased migration and mobility, the advance of communication technologies, and the spread of media have also contributed to the sense that multiple languages coexist and interact in new constellations, a sense that an artwork such as Wordsearch reflects and contributes to. Even English-dominated domains such as the global entertainment industry see new linguistic diversity. Hollywood movies such as Babel and Inglorious Basterds or globally consumed American TV shows such as Lost and...