Multilingualism and its Ramifications

Abstract

Multilingualism has both a de facto existence and an important place in the psychological, political and social debates that define social and ethnic groups, communities and regions. A very widespread phenomenon, it arises for a number of well-understood reasons. In the main, however, it is really an unremarkable state of affairs, fuelled by necessity up to, but rarely beyond, appropriately useful levels of competence. Multilingual capacities at an individual level can obviously broaden possibilities, but a world of many languages is also one in which communicative problems exist. In such a world, lingua francas and translation are required. Multilingualism is particularly interesting where “big” languages confront “smaller” ones, and thus where languages and group identities come to the fore. Even more specifically, we can note the scholarly interest in the maintenance of those smaller varieties – and if, as some have argued, the continuation of linguistic diversity is a matter of social justice and language “rights”, then a strong case could indeed be made for active intervention in the fate of endangered languages and dialects. The notion of such “rights”, however, is nowhere near as straightforward as some seek to imply. In discussing this aspect of multilingualism and language contact, we must necessarily pay attention to the relatively new emergence of an “ecology of language”. This, I will suggest, is of special importance where scholarship meets advocacy.

Speaker

About the Speaker

John Edwards is now a Senior Research Professor at St Francis Xavier University (Antigonish), Adjunct Professor, Graduate Studies, at Dalhousie University (Halifax), and Visiting Professor at Minzu University (Beijing). His main research interest is with the establishment, maintenance and continuity of group identity, with particular reference to language in both its communicative and symbolic aspects. He has lectured and presented papers on this topic in some thirty countries, and his work has been translated into half a dozen languages. Edwards is on the editorial boards of a dozen international language journals, and is the editor of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (published by Routledge). He is also the editor of the Multilingual Matters book series for the Bristol publisher of the same name, a series that now comprises more than 150 titles.

Date

05 October 2016 (Wednesday), 04:30 – 06:00pm

Location

Room 550, Meng Wah Complex, HKU

Chair

Dr Andy Gao