Language and Intercultural Communication | 2019
Editorial
Abstract
For some time, empirical evidence in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics has demonstrated that the two concepts which are central to our field of study, ‘language’ and ‘culture’, have become increasingly tendentious. Few of those who contribute to this journal or participate in our association conferences would subscribe to the notion that either language or culture are intractably fixed or bounded entities, and critiques of a homology between the idea of ‘culture’ and the nation state are well known to our readers. For many, this has led to the increasingly widespread use of the term ‘interculturality’ to indicate a way of being which supersedes the idea of boundedness implied by combining the prefix ‘inter’ with the adjectival form of ‘culture’. Yet the phrase ‘intercultural communication’ remains hard to avoid when one is actually talking about language, communication and some, albeit permeable, affiliation of social relations, beliefs and practices, which we can now only loosely refer to as ‘culture’. As we shall see later in this issue, the assuredness with which we use the terms ‘language’ and ‘culture’ has been further challenged by the recent thesis that as humans, we not only interact with each other by employing whatever modes of communication we have to hand, but are also inextricably engaged in an ongoing dialectical relationship with the very material substance of the world which we inhabit, and the universe which engulfs us (Barad, 2007). Against this background, the nature of transcultural experience and intercultural learning in late modernity is impacting on our understanding of language, our understanding of the relationship between language and other semiotic systems, and indeed our understanding of ‘culture’ itself. Thus, the past decade has seen the continued expansion of the field of intercultural studies by its engagement with, or attempted incorporation by, emerging sub-fields within applied linguistics, such as English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and Translanguaging. The latter has recently benefitted from work carried out by research teams which have been supported by large scale research awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK, one of the voluminous outputs from which is reported in this issue. Within this, there has been a considerable tussle over claims for the homogeneity and/or heterogeneity of language and indeed the relationship between languages themselves. ELF, which began in the 1990s as a narrower investigation into the phonology of the varieties of English spoken by those for whom English is not their first language, has over the past decade increasingly laid claims to the mantle, first of all, to intercultural communication, and most recently also to part of the burgeoning ‘trans-’ movement in applied linguistics (Baker, 2015). In this, despite some claims to the contrary, the homogeneity and bounded nature of ‘culture(s)’ have been contested consistently and widely by progressive and critical interculturalists who I would characterise as the principal readers of this journal (see, e.g. Dasli & Diaz, 2017; Jackson, in press). This final themed open issue in this series issue of 2019 falls into two parts. The first group of papers consider the topic of transculturation and translanguaging from the perspective of intercultural communication; and the second addresses ways in which different types of interculturality can be developed within different educational contexts. We start with four papers which each adopt rather different conceptualisations of ‘language’ and ‘culture’ with which to explore the communication which takes place between people, and between groups of people. First, Trang Thi Thuy Nguyen conceives of the ‘languaging’ experiences of Vietnamese postgraduates studying in Taiwan through the prism of ‘contact zone’ (after Pratt, 1991). Secondly, Baker and Sangiamchit argue that the superdiversity of ‘languages’ and ‘cultures’ in social networking sites can be construed through the prism of ‘English as a multilingual franca’ (after Baker, 2015; Jenkins, 2015). Next, Zhu Hua, Li