Elizabeth Lanza

Can bilingual two-year-olds code-switch?

Sociolinguists have investigated language mixing as code-switching in the speech of bilingual children three years old and older. Language mixing by bilingual two-year-olds, however, has generally been interpreted in the child language literature as a sign of the childs lack of language differentiation. The present study applies perspectives from sociolinguistics to investigate the language mixing of a bilingual two-year-old acquiring Norwegian and English simultaneously in Norway. Monthly recordings of the childs spontaneous speech in interactions with her parents were made from the age of 2;0 to 2;7. An investigation into the formal aspects of the childs mixing and the context of the mixing reveals that she does differentiate her language use in contextually sensitive ways, hence that she can code-switch. This investigation stresses the need to examine more carefully the roles of dominance and context in the language mixing of young bilingual children.

Tell me who your friends are and I might be able to tell you what language(s) you speak: Social network analysis, multilingualism, and identity:

Social network analysis has proved particularly useful in explaining why speakers in bilingual communities maintain or change their language behavior. Researchers have employed this sociolinguistic tool to investigate language shift and maintenance among longstanding stable bilingual communities. An underlying assumption in this analysis is that language, particularly the first language or mother tongue, is an integral part of collective identities, such as national, ethnic or cultural identities, and that maintenance of language across generations is a key factor to the maintenance of such identities. Certain bilingual communities may maintain this language ideology; however, multilingual communities present a more complex picture of the situation and may thus offer a challenge to the underlying assumptions of social network analysis. This article discusses the application of social network analysis to multilingual communities by taking a point of departure in the Filipino community in Oslo, the capital of Norway, with a view towards understanding linguistic and cultural maintenance. Results from the analyses provide support for the importance of social network in understanding language choice and cultural and linguistic maintenance; however, there were some notable exceptions. In this article we discuss language ideologies and the relationship between language and identity as complementary sources of explanation for language choice and language maintenance in this relatively speaking newly established multilingual community.

Language Contact in Bilingual Two-Year-Olds and Code-Switching: Language Encounters of a Different Kind?

Language contact in the speech of children acquiring two languages simultaneously has been claimed to be qualitatively different from that of older more mature bilingual speakers, that is, of their code-switching. This article argues for the position that these patterns of language contact are in fact language encounters of the same kind. The grammatical properties of the young bilingual childs mixed utterances must be analyzed in light of the pragmatic dimensions of language use. Moreover, the type of mixing that occurs may be the result of a general imbalance in language input. Such an imbalance may affect language processing resulting in language dominance. Finally, current work in code-switching, which delineates constraints on language contact, also lends support to the stand that there is no qualitative difference between the mixing patterns of young bilingual two-year-olds and that of more mature bilingual speakers.

Indexing modernity: English and branding in the linguistic landscape of Addis Ababa:

In this article we address the issue of language and globalization by focusing on the use of international brand names and English in the linguistic landscape of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Ethiopia has been at the margins of the world economy; however, in the past decade Addis Ababa has witnessed a promising emerging economy, with many new international corporations investing in the country. The linguistic landscape is increasingly marked by the use of English, not only in general signage but also through international brand names and advertising. Moreover, a curious phenomenon has evolved in which international brand names and logos are used locally and are imparted an Ethiopian identity. The article highlights a particular case of cloning an international brand that touches on the discourse of national identity and development. The use of both English and international brand names in the linguistic landscape is perceived by locals as prestigious, indexing their aspirations towards modernity in this capital of the global South, with the notion of mobility covering not only geographical movement but also movement on a social scale. In conclusion, we relate our findings to a theoretical approach that aims to capture language in late modernity.

Multilingual encounters in transcultural families

The theme and the title for this special issue stem from a thematic colloquium that we organised at the annual meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics held in Portland, Oregon, USA, in March of 2014, as part of the strand on Language, culture and socialization. This special issue addresses a significant aspect of current international mobility and urban development in post-modern society – the increasingly large numbers of transcultural families, with multilingualism as a dominant feature of these families. Some transcultural families result from immigration and transnational movement, while others are from intercultural marriages and bonds. Some are recently established, others have existed for generations; globalization only serves to intensify the encounters of different traditions, values and languages of the various members of the family. A previous special issue of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development guest edited by Li (2012) dealt with language policy and practice in multilingual, transnational families and beyond. The editorial in that issue pointed out that ‘family language policy and practice has been an under-explored area of sociolinguistic research’ (Li 2012, 1). This current special issue contributes to this burgeoning field of inquiry, referred to as family language policy. Family language policy has been defined as explicit and overt, as well as implicit and covert, planning in relation to language use and literacy practices within home domains and among family members (King, Fogle and Logan-Terry 2008; Curdt-Christiansen 2013). Family language policy links research on child language acquisition, second language learning and multilingualism with language policy (King and Fogle 2013). The field highlights two areas of well-established sociolinguistic research: language socialization and linguistic ideology. In line with current trends in language policy research (Shohamy 2006; Spolsky 2009; Hult and Johnson 2015), family language policy involves linguistic practices, revealing implicit language planning (Li 2012). Family language policy is, moreover, formed and implemented in interaction with wider political, social, and economic forces. The articles in this special issue examine family language policy in multilingual transcultural families from Europe, the USA and Singapore, covering a wide variety of family types and documenting changing language ideologies and linguistic practices over time. Through a sociolinguistic ethnography of three multilingual and transnational families from China in Britain, Zhu Hua and Li Wei address in their article how these families’ experiences impact on the family dynamics in their everyday lives, including how they construct identities and build relations. Agnes Weiyun He examines conversations in American households in which Chinese is used as a heritage language to illustrate how the interactants employ both Chinese and English in creating meaning in everyday discourse. Using data from bilingual children in Belgium, Annick De Houwer and Marc Bornstein address the issue of parental input in early bilingual acquisition through reports and observational data in order to investigate whether there is continuity in parental language choice, and the factors affecting it. Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen studies the tension in the relationship between language ideologies and language practices in her article on multilingual families in Singapore. Rachele Antonini’s article focuses on a little documented practice, that of child language brokering, through children’s narratives on their experience as language brokers in Italy and how this practice impacts on their lives in their new country. In conclusion, Kendall King provides a commentary to the contributions to this special issue. She provides a summary of the articles and situates the individual studies within a research historical

Ideology, agency, and imagination in multilingual families: An introduction:

Ideology, identity and agency are central concerns in the current study of multilingualism and transnational families as greater analytical attention is given to how multilingual families imagine and collectively construct themselves. This introduction reviews recent shifts in the study of multilingual families and discusses the four articles that comprise this thematic issue. Together, these four papers present new empirical data concerning a wide array of family language practices and policies, differing in noteworthy ways, and in particular in terms of contexts and languages studied. As demonstrated here, these articles critically analyze the everyday ways in which ideologies, identities, agency, and imagination are created and enacted among multilingual families in divergent contexts. These analyses provide important windows into how meaning is produced within particular places, activities, social relations, interactional histories, and cultural ideologies, and collectively, this body of work advances our understanding of language use and learning within multilingual families.

Cross-linguistic influence, input and the young bilingual child

The field of bilingual first language acquisition has focused on several important and interrelated issues: whether or not the young child acquiring two languages simultaneously differentiates his or her two languages from the onset of acquisition, what role the input plays in the acquisition of two languages, and whether the path of acquisition is similar to that of monolingual peers (see De Houwer, 1990). As a member of the DUFDE team, Natascha Muller has in previous work argued forcefully and convincingly for the bilingual childs separate development of his or her two languages, and hence how language-acquiring bilinguals behave like monolinguals. In her keynote article, Muller invokes the notion of transfer, a well-known term from research into second language acquisition, and proposes to consider transfer from the perspective of the input to which the young bilingual child is exposed. When this input is ambiguous, so that is there is variation in the input regarding one of the languages, the child will resort to transfer from the other language as a so-called relief strategy. In the following, I address the issue of cross-linguistic influence in language development and highlight the implications Mullers proposals may have for the field of bilingual first language acquisition. In conclusion I will relate these issues to the complexity of the notion of input in early bilingualism.

Language contact, agency and power in the linguistic landscape of two regional capitals of Ethiopia

Abstract The issue of language contact in the linguistic landscape has been rarely addressed, especially in regards to issues of agency and power in this domain of multilingual practices. The linguistic landscape provides an arena for investigating agency as related to literacy, language rights and identity. In this article, we explore the linguistic landscape of two different regions in Ethiopia to provide an analysis of language contact that takes place between regional languages, which only recently have made the transition to literacy in the country as the result of a new language policy, and Amharic, the federal working language, which has a long and established history of literacy. The study is based on data collected through field work and participant observation from two federal regions in the country – Tigray and Oromia – two regions that have fought for the recognition of language rights, for Tigrinya and Oromo, the former a Semitic language like Amharic and the latter a Cushitic language. Results indicate ways in which speakers of the regional languages draw on their multilingual resources to create a new arena for language use and thereby assert their agency in developing new literacy practices.

Language management in multilingual families:: Efforts, measures and challenges

With increased national and transnational migration in Europe in recent years where people move to different cities, cross borders, integrate into new culturallinguistic landscapes, form intermarriages and create multilingual families, Family Language Policy as a field of study has emerged and is now receiving considerable attention. Caregivers, parents, and society at large are more and more concerned about what language(s) should be used when raising children, what language(s) should be maintained and further developed, what kind of (socio)linguistic environment is conducive to learning more languages, and what literacy practices provide affordances and constraints for multilingual development. The theme and the title for this special issue of Multilingua stem from a thematic colloquium that we organized at the 21st Sociolinguistics Symposium in Murcia, Spain, in June 2016. It brings together four papers that respond to the challenges of family language policy as a result of the intensified urban development, socio-political changes and transnational movement that have taken place in different European countries. Many questions arise concerning language in contemporary multilingual, transnational families: If apparently adequate linguistic inputs are provided and linguistic environments are conducive, can we expect raising children in multiple languages to be an unproblematic endeavour? If literacy resources are rich and various measures are in place, could we not raise children with a desirable bi/multi-lingual outcome? This thematic issue answers these questions by addressing the particular topic of languagemanagement, that is, language efforts andmeasures provided by caregivers as well as the manner in which family members encounter and address challenges related to language learning and use. The notion of language management actually derives from the work of the Prague Linguistic Circle in the 1920s in which language was perceived as a self-contained linguistic production (Jernudd and Neustrupný 1987). According to Jernudd and Neustrupný (1987), language management starts

MultiLing. Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan: A Center of Excellence in Norway

Abstract The world is connecting in many complex ways, driven by the globally integrated nature of technological innovation and human mobility across continents. Never before have so many different speakers and languages existed side by side in the OECD countries as they do today. This reality has placed multilingualism in the spotlight. Increased migration and transcultural flows across borders in Europe have highlighted the urgency for research on multilingualism in the individual and society. Academic institutions have recognized the necessity for such knowledge and research centers have evolved to meet this challenge (cf. Obermayer et al. 2014). MultiLing - the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan is a research center aimed at academic excellence and financed by the Research Council of Norway through its Center of Excellence scheme. MultiLing is hosted by the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Oslo in Norway. It opened in June of 2013 and is currently in its first five-year period of operation. The main goal of the Center is to generate state-of-the-art scientific knowledge on individual and societal multilingualism across the lifespan that will address the challenges and potentials multilingualism poses for the individual in the family, school, other institutions, and society in general. Moreover, the Center aims at providing research-based knowledge on multilingualism to central policymakers and stakeholders. Language planning and the standardization of languages are some of the Center’s key research foci and are indeed vital issues today at the top of the agenda for policymakers. The Center’s vision is to contribute to how society can deal with the challenges of multilingualism through increased knowledge, promoting agency for individuals in society, and a better quality of life, no matter what linguistic and social background.