Glossary
Key concepts in Multilingual Community Organising
Some of these have been adapted from EFA’s Our Languages website
Community Organising
There is no single approach to community organising, but perhaps what all approaches share is a commitment to build the power of ordinary people to effect change. Saul Alinsky is often recognised as ‘the father of community organising’ and set up the first broad-based community alliances that are now the Industrial Areas Foundation in the United States. Broad-based means a mix of different types of community organisations. Labour unions and churches were the basis of Alinksy’s first community alliances. In broad-based community organising, people who belong to these institutions are trained in community organising methods and take action to bring about positive change in their communities. Other methods include building groups of individuals affected by the same issue, like insecure housing or racist discrimination, and taking action on that issue.
Sociolinguistics
The approach to linguistically inclusive and multicultural community organising taken in this project is informed by sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics is about the relationship between language and society; the study of how language reflects, structures and dominates social life. Some areas of sociolinguistic study are: language varieties; stylistic variation; language ideologies, attitudes and stereotypes; interaction; language and culture; societal and individual bi/multilingualism, language change.
Communicative repertoire
Our ability to draw on a range of resources, i.e. different named languages, language varieties, genres, styles, registers etc. to communicate in different contexts.
Repertoires are biographical and reflect where we have lived, worked and spent time and who we have mixed with. Migration can create an unpredictable mix of linguistic capacities and practices, especially in ‘superdiverse’ environments.
Seeing an individual as having a ‘repertoire’ challenges the idea that language competence can only be counted as mastery of discrete and well-formed named languages (‘French’ ‘Urdu’ ‘Arabic’) and the myth that languages are finished products spoken by a native speaker.
It’s an important concept in community organising because it values the resources that each person brings to the interaction. The power that you can build by working together and communicating together is more important than proficiency in any one language.
Named Languages
In sociolinguistics named languages are the recognised languages, often associated with a nation or several, like English, French and Arabic. By focusing on named languages we can overlook the variation within them and the similarities between them. Within the named language framework, certain varieties of language can be relegated to dialect-status or understood as inferior variants of the standard. This is important in community organising because language policies that hold up named languages are often used to oppress marginalised communities.
Language practices
Language practices are what people actually do with language in day to day life in different settings, contexts and domains. Language practices describe how we routinely use the linguistic resources we have in different situations in our lives. This can include our choice of sounds, words, grammar, formality, politeness, variety, style etc. Often we are unaware of the choices we are making.
When members of a speech community (any group of people who share a set of language practices and beliefs) hear a piece of discourse they can identify not just the meaning, but also evidence of specific choices which characterise the age, gender, social class, probable place of birth and education, level of education and other facts about the speaker and his or her attitude, and provide clues to the situation and context. These choices are governed by conventional rules, not unlike grammatical rules, which are learned by members of the speech community as they grow up.
Knowledge of this is very helpful in community organising. It can be liberating to be conscious of the language choices people make, especially political opponents.
Language domains
The basic notion that different spheres of life i.e. the home, work, education, the street, public transport, places of worship and so on are characterised by the use of different languages and literacies.
This can have repercussions: for example, the language or language variety of the home may be very different from the school; this can create an unfair advantage for children whose home language practices align closely to the school and problems for children whose resources are not recognised.
Community organising spaces (meetings, actions, assemblies, 1-1s etc.) are language domains. It can be useful to analyse and practise the language used in these domains to enable people with lower levels of the dominant local language to participate more equally.
Bilingualism/multilingualism
Some researchers view bilingualism as the ability to use two languages and multilingualism as the ability to use three or more. However, it is more common nowadays to use the terms multilingualism and bilingualism to refer to the same phenomenon, i.e. the ability to function, at some level, in more than one language. Perfect mastery and perfect balance of two or more languages is not required for a person to be regarded as bi/multilingual.
Multilingualism can be studied from an individual and a societal perspective. The multilingualism of individuals is sometimes referred to as polylingualism. Multilingualism in society is characterised by the presence in a geographical area of more than one language – these languages may or may not be recognised officially in law and language policy.
Even the most apparently homogenous societies can be multilingual when we consider varieties and registers that are used by different social groups and in different contexts. It’s important to recognise that we are organising in multilingual contexts as it helps to break down hierarchies predicated on language use and language policing.
Code-switching
Code-switching is the process whereby multilingual (or multidialectal) speakers switch back and forth between one language, dialect or variety and another within the same conversation; code-switching is common in conversations where participants share a knowledge of two or more languages.
Research has shown that there are multiple reasons why interactants might code-switch:
- reflecting a change in the social situation
- reflecting a change of topic
- quoting somebody
- signalling group membership/ethnic or political identity
- expressing solidarity/social distance
- signalling attitudes to the listener
- adding emphasis/authority
It is clear from this list that code-switching is fundamentally important in community organising.
Translanguaging
Translanguaging is how a speaker might potentially draw on a wide repertoire of linguistic and other semiotic (meaning making) resources to communicate and get things done. These resources can include translation, mime, gesture, strategically simplified English, emojis and so on as well as ‘named’ languages and varieties. Translanguaging is defined by García & Li Wei (2014) as ‘the fluid multilingualism characteristic of interaction in the world’s superdiverse urban areas’.
In community organising is can be useful to notice this and ‘give permission’ so people don’t feel inhibited from translanguaging and can participate fully. Sometimes people assume an unfamiliar domain might require adherence to monolingual language policy, which ultimately has a silencing effect on many participants.
Language ideologies
Ways in which language uses and beliefs are linked to relations of power and political arrangements in societies. Language ideologies can help give an insight into the workings of power and how language is appropriated by powerful elites, for example in education or language polices, to maintain dominance.
Examples of language ideologies are:
- ‘ESOL students learn more English if they don’t speak other languages in class…’
- ‘Parents who want their kids to learn their heritage language shouldn’t allow mixing at home – children will only get confused…’
- ‘Social cohesion depends on people speaking English’
Awareness of language ideologies can help people to resist oppressive language policies by understanding that they are contingent and not scientific laws. Organising around migrants rights inevitably comes into contact with language ideologies.
Linguicism
Linguicism is discrimination on the basis of language, in the same way that ‘racism’ is discrimination on the basis of race/skin colour or ‘sexism’ is discrimination on the grounds of sex.
Linguicism can be institutionalised, i.e. when some languages are not recognised and thus the speakers of that language do not have the same affordances and opportunities as the rest of the population, or it can operate on a personal level, i.e. when someone is insulted for speaking another language in public, for example.
Linguicism is unfortunately an everyday experience for many migrants in Europe.
Heritage language
The term ‘heritage language’ generally refers to a language with which a speaker feels a personal affiliation, either because it was the language of their parents or grandparents, their ethnic group or their ancestral home. In the UK other terms are ‘community languages’ and ‘home languages’
Multilingual pedagogies
Ways of teaching and learning that include the language practices of all students, particularly in settings where classrooms are highly linguistically heterogeneous. There is not one method or approach but a set of principles drawing on insights from research on multilingualism, i.e. that languages are not stored separately in the brain and are connected to each other in multiple ways. The focus should be not on the individual languages spoken by students but on what students do with languages in multilingual spaces. Activities and methods in a multilingual pedagogy might include: translation; creative multilingual storytelling; ‘translanguaging’, i.e. the planned use of students’ strong languages to help them access the curriculum or to develop their linguistic skills across their repertoire.
Multilingual community organising
Multilingual community organising is as old as community organising but in this project we are trying to raise awareness of language concepts and develop tools that can help organisers and activists to navigate the linguistic difficulties posed by community organising in diverse areas. Better and more inclusive language practices can help bring communities together and organise across difference. This isn’t only important for building healthier communities, where people get along better, but also helps marginalised communities to become more powerful. Everyone who is doing community organising in diverse contexts, and this can be diverse in terms of language varieties and dialects not only named languages, is doing multilingual community organising. The COFA project aims to help us to do it better.