This book explores multilingualism as an imaginative articulation of the experience of modernity in twentieth-century Spanish and American literature. It argues that while individual multilingual practices are highly singular, literary multilingualism exceeds the conventional bounds of modernism to become emblematic of the modern age. The book explores the confluence of multilingualism and modernity in the theme of barbarism, examining the significance of this theme to the relationship between language and modernity in the Spanish-speaking world, and the work of five authors in particular. These authors – Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Ernest Hemingway, José María Arguedas, Jorge Semprún and Juan Goytisolo – explore the stylistic and conceptual potential of the interaction between languages, including Spanish, French, English, Galician, Quechua and Arabic, their work reflecting the eclecticism of literary multilingualism while revealing its significance as a mode of response to modernity.

Provides a sociolinguistic account of classroom interaction, based on research in an inner-city high school.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the linguistic situation in Europe was one of remarkable fluidity. Latin, the great scholarly lingua franca of the medieval period, was beginning to crack as the tectonic plates shifted beneath it, but the vernaculars had not yet crystallized into the national languages that they would later become, and multilingualism was rife. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, languages were coming into contact with an intensity that they had never had before, influencing each other and throwing up all manner of hybrids and pidgins as peoples tried to communicate using the semiotic resources they had available. Of interest to linguists, literary scholars and historians, amongst others, this interdisciplinary volume explores the linguistic dynamics operating in Europe and beyond in the crucial centuries between 1400 and 1800. Assuming a state of individual, societal and functional multilingualism, when codeswitching was the norm, and languages themselves were fluid, unbounded and porous, it explores the shifting relationships that existed between various tongues in different geographical contexts, as well as some of the myths and theories that arose to make sense of them.

Bi- and multilingualism are of great interest for contemporary linguists since this phenomenon deeply reflects on language acquisition, language use, and sociolinguistic conditions in many different circumstances all over the world. Multilingualism was, however, certainly rather common already, if not especially, in the premodern world. For some time now, research has started to explore this issue through a number of specialized studies. The present volume continues with the investigation of multilingualism through a collection of case studies focusing on important examples in medieval and early modern societies, that is, in linguistic and cultural contact zones, such as England, Spain, the Holy Land, but also the New World. As all contributors confirm, the numerous cases of multilingualism discussed here indicate strongly that the premodern period knew considerably less barriers between people of different social classes, cultural background, and religious orientation. But we also have to acknowledge that already then human communication could fail because of linguistic hurdles which prevented mutual understanding in religious and cultural terms.

This book offers a fresh perspective on the social life of multilingualism through the lens of the important notion of linguistic citizenship. All of the chapters are underpinned by a theoretical and methodological engagement with linguistic citizenship as a useful heuristic through which to understand sociolinguistic processes in late modernity, focusing in particular on linguistic agency and voices on the margins of our societies. The authors take stock of conservative, liberal, progressive and radical social transformations in democracies in the north and south, and consider the implications for multilingualism as a resource, as a way of life and as a feature of identity politics. Each chapter builds on earlier research on linguistic citizenship by illuminating how multilingualism (in both theory and practice) should be, or could be, thought of as inclusive when we recognize what multilingual speakers do with language for voice and agency.

This new study argues that modernist literature is characterised by a 'multilingual turn'. Examining the use of different languages in the fiction of a range of writers, including Lawrence, Richardson, Mansfield, Rhys, Joyce and Beckett, Taylor-Batty demonstrates the centrality of linguistic plurality to modernist forms of defamiliarisation.

Focuses on the endangering effects of language-ideological processes. This book looks at the challenges imposed by globalization and super-diversity on the nation state and its language situations and ideologies, and demonstrates how many of its problems rise from the tension between late-modern diversity and the (pre-)modernist responses to it.