Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages

by Sinfree Makoni (Editor), Alastair Pennycook (Editor)

Overview

This book questions assumptions about the nature of language and how language is conceptualized. Looking at diverse contexts from sign languages in Indonesia to literacy practices in Brazil, from hip-hop in the US to education in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this book forcefully argues that a critique of common linguistic and metalinguistic suppositions is not only a conceptual but also a sociopolitical necessity. Just as many notions of language are highly suspect, so too are many related concepts premised on a notion of discrete languages, such as language rights, mother tongues, multilingualism, or code-switching. Definitions of language in language policies, education and assessment have material and often harmful consequences for people. Unless we actively engage with the history of invention of languages in order to radically change and reconstitute the ways in which languages are taught and conceptualized, language studies will not be able to improve the social welfare of language users.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781853599248
Publisher:	Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Publication date:	11/11/2006
Series:	Bilingual Education & Bilingualism , #62
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Sinfree Makoni is an Internationalist interested in contributing towards the development of alternative conceptualisations of language, society and culture in diverse contexts. He has held professional appointments in southern Africa. He currently teaches at Pennyslvania State Universityin the US. He is the co-author of Language in Aging in Multilingual Contexts (2005, Multilingual Matters), co-editor of Black Linguistics: language, society, and Politics in Africa and the Americas (2003, Routledge), Ageing in Africa: sociolinguistic and anthropological approaches (2002, Ashgate) Freedom and Discipline: essays in Applied Linguistics from southern Africa (Bahri-India (2001), Language and Institutions in Africa (1999, The Centre for Advanced Studies of African Societies, Cape Town). Improving Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (Wits UniversityPress, 2000).

Alastair Pennycook is concerned with how we understand language in relation to globalization, colonial history, identity, popular culture and pedagogy. Publications have therefore focused on topics such as The cultural politics of English as an international language (Longman, 1994), English and the discourses of colonialism (Routledge, 1998), Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001) and Global Englishes and transcultural flows (Routledge, in press). This current book on disinvention is the result of a sustained dialogue with Sinfree Makoni on language, politics and the world. Alastair is Professor of Language in Education at the University of Technology Sydney.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages

SINFREE MAKONI and ALASTAIR PENNYCOOK

This book starts with the premise that languages, conceptions of languageness and the metalanguages used to describe them are inventions. By making this claim we are pointing to several interrelated concerns. First, languages were, in the most literal sense, invented, particularly as part of the Christian/ colonial and nationalistic projects in different parts of the globe. From Tsonga, Shona, Afrikaans, Runyakitara, chiNyanja in Africa (Harries, 1987; Chimhundu, 1992) or Fijian in the Pacific and Bahasa Malay in Indonesia (Heryanto, 1995) to Inkha in Latin America (Mannheim, 1991) and Hebrew (Kuzar, 2001) in Israel, the history of language inventions is long and well documented. Our interest here is in the naming and development of these languages, not so much as part of a diachronic linguistic focus on the invention of languages but rather as an attempt to propose an alternative, more 'useful notion of history' (Inoue, 2004: 1), a critical historiography that allows for multiple temporalities rather than a linear progression of change and development.

Second, a related interest here is not only in the invention and naming of specific languages but also in the broader processes and contexts of linguistic construction. From this point of view, all languages are social constructions, artifacts analogous to other constructions such as time: The rotation of the earth on its axis is a natural phenomenon, but the measurement of time is an artifact, a convention. When we argue that languages are constructed, we seek to go beyond the obvious point that linguistic criteria are not sufficient to establish the existence of a language (the old language/ dialect boundary debates), in order to identify the important social and semiotic processes that lead to their construction. Social processes include, for example, the development of colonial and nationalist ideologies through literacy programs. Semiotic processes, following Irvine and Gal (2000) include the ways in which various language practices are made invisible (erasure), the projection of one level of differentiation onto another (fractal recursivity) and the transformation of the sign relationship between linguistic features and the social images with which they are linked (iconization). These different social and semiotic processes interact in complex ways, so that nationalism, for example, generates iconization and fractal recursivity, which in turn generate more nationalism as part of an ideological process of homogenization. As Irvine and Gal (2000: 47) describe the process of 'linguistic description' of Senegalese languages by 19th century European linguists, 'The ways these languages were identified, delimited, and mapped, the ways their relationships were interpreted, and even the ways they were described in grammars and dictionaries were all heavily influenced by an ideology of racial and national essences'.

Third, in a parallel process, a linguistic metalanguage – or as we prefer, given its broader coverage, a metadiscursive regime (Bauman & Briggs, 2003: 299) – was also invented. Metadiscursive regimes are representations of language which, together with material instantiations of actual occurring language, constitute forms of 'social action, social facts and can function as agents in the exercise of social and political power' (Jaffe, 1999: 15). Alongside or, rather, in direct relation with the invention of languages, therefore, an ideology of languages as separate and enumerable categories was also created. In one of its extreme manifestations, this nominalist view becomes a biological essentialist one in which languages are posited as having identities that correspond to species (Jaffe, 1999: 121; Pennycook, 2004). In its most common guise, this metadiscursive regime treats languages as countable institutions, a view reinforced by the existence of grammars and dictionaries (Joseph, 2004). The enumerability of language has to be understood as part of a broader project of 'governmentality', part of a Eurocentric culture which 'relentlessly codified and observed everything about the non-European ... in so thorough and detailed a manner as to leave no item untouched, no culture unstudied' (Said, 1989: 6; cited in Thomas, 1994: 38). In addition to the enumerability of languages, other aspects of these metadiscursive regimes include the widespread view of language in terms of what Grace (1981; 2005) calls autonomous texts. Autonomous texts are those which the speakers would require very limited amounts of contextual information to process, the prototypical mode being the written.

Fourth, these inventions have had very real and material effects. On the one hand, by advocating a view of languages as constructions, our position may be seen as a non-materialist view of language: languages do not exist as real entities in the world and neither do they emerge from or represent real environments; they are, by contrast, the inventions of social, cultural and political movements. On the other hand, we would argue for the very real material effects of linguistic inventions since they influence how languages have been understood, how language policies have been constructed, how education has been pursued, how language tests have been developed and administered, and how people have come to identify with particular labels and at times even to die for them, as the violent nature of ethnic rivalry in Africa, South Asia and elsewhere amply demonstrates. Thus, while the entities around which battles are fought, tests are constructed and language policies are written are inventions, the effects are very real.

Finally, as part of any critical linguistic project, we need a project not only of critique but also one of reconstruction. We need therefore to reconstitute languages, a process that may involve both becoming aware of the history of the construction of languages, and rethinking the ways we look at languages and their relation to identity and geographical location, so that we move beyond notions of linguistic territorialization in which language is linked to a geographical space. Given the real and contemporary effects of these constructions, our intention is not to return to some Edenic pre-colonial era (although we are willing to look to the past to seek inspiration; see Canagarajah, this volume). Rather, our intention is to find ways of rethinking language in the contemporary world, a need arising from an acute awareness that there is all too often a lack of fit between ostensible language problems and the languages promoted as part of the solution (Povinelli, 2002: 26). The broad discursive field of indigeneity and language maintenance, for example, has emerged from a set of particular constructions of the indigenous and of languages that frequently cannot address the current problems faced by disadvantaged people in the contemporary world (Povinelli, 2002). We need to rethink language in order to provide alternative ways forward.

We are not, of course, the first to draw attention to some of these concerns. The invention of languages is reasonably well documented, the problematic assumptions underlying the metalanguage of linguistics have not escaped the attention of some linguists (e.g. Harris, 1980, 1981; Mühlhäusler, 1996; Yngve, 1996) and anthropological linguists have drawn our attention to the ways in which local language ideologies construct languages in particular ways (e.g. Blommaert, 1999b; Kroskrity, 2000). It is our contention, however, that the interrelationship between these elements, the implications for domains of applied linguistics, and the development of strategies for moving forward have not been adequately considered. It is one of the objectives of this book to outline how such strategies can take us beyond a framework only of critique. A central part of our argument, therefore, is that it is not enough to acknowledge that languages have been invented, or that linguistic metalanguage constructs the world in particular ways. Rather, we need to understand the interrelationships among metadiscursive regimes, language inventions, colonial history, language effects, alternative ways of understanding language and strategies of disinvention and reconstitution.

Invention, Imagination, Co-Construction

Our use of the concept of invention locates this work within a particular tradition of historical and philosophical scholarship. In The Invention of Africa, Mudimbe (1988) critically examines the different Eurocentric categories that have been used to analyse Africa, dramatizing the distinction between an invented Europe and an invented Africa. Zeleza & Makoni (2006) enumerate seven origins of the name Africa, all of which are non-African in origin. The foreign nature of the origins of the term prompted African Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka (1976/87) to propose alternative names rooted in African languages, Abibirim and Abibiman from Akan, a language widely spoken in Ghana in West Africa. The term Africa was initially used in Roman times to refer exclusively to North Africa, an area roughly equivalent to modern Libya. Subsequently, Africa was then used to refer to the entire continent; more recently it tends to be restricted to sub-Saharan Africa and is divorced from its original usage.

The key issue is that the ways in which notions about Africa are understood have changed over the years, and that, in a very real sense, the idea of Africa is a European construct. The argument that Africa is a European idea is effectively articulated by Nyerere, as quoted by Mazrui (1967):

Thus, to use Nyerere's rhetoric 'Africans, all over the continent, without a word being spoken either from one individual to another or from one country to another, looked at the European, looked at one another, and knew that in relation to the European they were one. In relation to another continent, this continent was one: this was the logic of the situation'. (Mazrui, 1967: 47)

A similar point can be made for Aboriginal Australians' identification with each other as Indigenous, or for the possibility of identifying as Indian (Krishnaswamy & Burde, 1998).

Crucially, however, it is not only the geographical and political space of Africa that was constructed through European eyes, but also African history, languages and traditions. As Terence Ranger (1983) argued in his influential essay, The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa, what came to count as tradition was often a retrospective image constructed in colonial interests. There are at least four distinct ways in which Africa is constructed: Africa as biology, as image, as space, as memory. The invention of Africa and African tradition, furthermore, was part of the massive 19th century project of invention, with Europeans inventing both their own histories and those of the people they colonized (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983; and see Pennycook, this volume).

The concept of invention is relevant to both colonial and contemporary post-colonial metropolitan contexts. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983: 1) use the term to describe those traditions which on the one hand appear to be relatively old, but which 'in reality are quite recent in origin': 'Novelty is no less novel for being able to dress easily as antiquity' (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983: 3). The Scottish kilt, for example, which, as well as the Highland culture of which it is supposed to be an integral part, is often presented as if it has been part of Scots culture since time immemorial, is a relatively recent creation. In the 18th century, Gaelic, which is thought of as one of the defining features of Highland Scots, was referred to as Irish. The 19th Century Gothic style used for buildings such as the British Houses of Parliament was also part of the creation of an illusion of a long 'factitious' tradition: 'A striking example is the deliberate choice of a Gothic style for the 19th century rebuilding of the British Parliament, and the equally deliberate decision after World War II to rebuild the parliamentary chamber on exactly the same plan' (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983: 1–2)

A great deal of historical work has drawn attention to the common project of the invention of history (the processes by which we establish legitimacy, lineage and linkage by reference to a constructed past (see Hobsbawm, 1983, Ranger 1983, Wallerstein, 2000)). As Cohn (1996) and Wallerstein (2000) argue, a major aspect of the British colonial project in India was to turn Indian languages, culture and knowledge into objects of European knowledge, to invent an India not in Britain's image, but in Britain's ideal of what India should look like. This project of invention needs, therefore, to be seen not merely as part of European attempts to design the world in their own image, but rather as part of the process of constructing the history of others for them, which was a cornerstone of European governance and surveillance of the world. Although this process was perhaps most self-evident in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries in colonial times, it developed as a form of national-imaginary whose original focus was the European nation state.

It is this European national imagination that Ranger has in mind when he writes:

The 1870s, 1880s and 1890s were a time of a great flowering of European traditions – ecclesiastical, educational, military, republican and monarchical. They were also the time of the European rush into Africa. There were many complex connections between the two processes. (Ranger, 1983: 211)

As Ranger suggests for Africa, and Cohn (1983) for India, the invention of traditions became a crucial part of colonial rule as Europeans sought to justify their presence and redefine the colonized societies in new terms. According to Hardt and Negri:

British administrators had to write their own 'Indian history' to sustain and further the interests of colonial rule. The British had to historicize the Indian past in order to have access to it and to put it to work. The British creation of an Indian history, however, like the formation of the colonial state, could be achieved only by imposing European colonial logics and models of Indian reality. (Hardt & Negri, 2000: 126)

Invented traditions derive their strength from compulsory repetition, such as the wearing of wigs by British judges. It is important in this discussion of invented tradition to keep the notions of tradition and custom separate: 'The object and characteristic of traditions, including invented ones, is invariance. Custom cannot afford to be invariant because even in traditional societies life is not so' (Hobsbawm, 1983: 2). While custom is therefore a changing and dynamic space, tradition is all too often a retrospective construction of stasis, an invention of a prior way of being that is used to justify supposed historical continuity. Similarly, when we talk of the invention of languages, we are looking at the construction of linear histories that imply particular origins; we are not suggesting that language use itself is anything but dynamic and changing.

In questioning the invention of tradition, we should of course also be wary of casting notions of tradition aside. In African historiography it is not so much modernity that has been a source of controversy as the notion of tradition itself (Spear, 2003). Traditions have endured because (while creating the impression of timelessness) they have survived owing to an ongoing dialogical tension between social and historical realities. According to Vansina (1990), 'tradition is a robust and enduring endogenous process which represents, contrary to ahistorical expectations, fundamental continuities which shape the futures of those who hold them'. In African historiography, it is not language per se that is of central importance, but discourse. Tradition is one type of discourse, with different traditions having different discourses through which their individual histories are articulated.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Sinfree Makoni, Alastair Pennycook and the authors of individual chapters.
Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Foreword by Ofelia Garcia

Chapter 1 Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages - Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook

Chapter 2 Then There were Languages: Bahasa Indonesia was One Among Many - Ariel Heryanto

Chapter 3 Critical Historiography: Does Language Planning in Africa Need a Construct of Language as Part of its Theoretical Apparatus? - Sinfree Makoni & Pedzisai Mashiri

Chapter 4 The Myth of English as an International Language - Alastair Pennycook

Chapter 5 Beyond ‘Language’: Linguistic Imperialism, Sign Languages and Linguistic Anthropology - Jan Branson and Don Miller

Chapter 6 Entering a Culture Quietly: Writing and Cultural Survival in Indigenous Education in Brazil - Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza

Chapter 7 A Linguistics of Communicative Activity - Steven L. Thorne & James P. Lantolf

Chapter 8 (Dis)inventing Discourse: Examples from Black Culture and Hiphop Rap/Discourse - Elaine Richardson

Chapter 9 Educational Materials Reflecting Heteroglossia: Disinventing Ethnolinguistic Differences in Bosnia-Herzegovina - Brigitta Busch & Jürgen Schick

Chapter 10 After Disinvention: Possibilities for Communication, Community, and Competence - A. Suresh Canagarajah 

Editorial Reviews

Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages is a deeply thought-provoking volume which challenges conventional notions about language, the study of language and language policy. It's a must-read for anyone interested in the many complex sociological, ontological and epistemological questions that swirl around language, culture, globalization and identity.

Journal of Sociolinguistics, Volume 15, Number 3, June 2011 - Christof Demont-Henrich

The book powerfully juxtaposes the purported neutrality and scientific objectivity of conventional Saussaurean linguistics with images of a modernist Western discipline that continues to perceive and catalogue communication in other cultures through a subjective and value-laden prism. Readers with a questioning nature and an interest in the ramification of language invention will find Disinventing and Reconstitutiong Languages to be a book with a great deal to offer.

Working Papers in TESOL & Applied Linguistics, 2007, Vol. 7, No. 1 - Daragh Hayes

This book should be essential reading for language theorists and language practitioners alike and will interest a wide readership concerned with linking a socially responsible applied linguistics to a sophisticated discourse on the nature of language.

Christopher Stroud