Graduate Affiliate Working Group on Traveling Identities and Migration (9 April 2019)
Definition: Monolingualism is “the idea that anything […] can be reasonably done, said, or meant in any one particular language, given the proper circumstances. […] It is an artificial plentitude, a communitarian ubiquity that renders a single, centripetal, and heterodox universe of signs recognizable—and has no need for others.” (Invention of Monolingualism, 195)
Propositions for dialogue & debate:
- Monolingualism is a myth (Barthes), habitus (Bourdieu), a privilege (Sedgwick), a supply-side enterprise. It is not a phenomenon, entity, substance, or state of nature.
- Monolingualism is an unmarked term, which needs to be critically articulated—as whiteness, heteronormativity, masculinity, etc. have been.
- Citizenship technologies / administrative procedures have thickened around monolingualism since 1990, as ethnonational forms of citizenship have retreated from normative acceptability.
- Official languages / legal languages / state languages / constitutionally inscribed languages are not an effective indicator of a polity’s mono/multilingualism, nor of the workings of its juridical systems (Janny Leung 2019).
- National(ist) monolingualisms are the basis upon which global-translational monolingualisms and commercial multilingualisms are built.
- National(ist) monolingualisms are expressions of globalized structures of monolingualism—and/or vice-versa.
- Monolingualism differs meaningfully from linguistic imperialism, linguistic nativism, linguistic purism, and linguistic racism.
- Monolingualism manifests through its cumulative / interactional effects on persons, and not primarily as a characteristic possession of so-called “monolingual” individuals.
- The rebranding of bilingual education as global multilingual preparedness (in the US, UK, Germany, etc.) has raciolinguistic (Flores and Rosa 2015) overtones and a monolingualist substructure.
- Monolingualism corresponds to the embodied, enlanguaged reality of no actual human being (Holquist 2014), and this noncorrespondence is a source of power for monolingualism.
- Monolingualism has been increasing its ideological, civic, administrative, and technological power since 1990, despite all of the simultaneously increasing evidence of the multilingual subjectivity of citizenries and communities.
- Monolingualism can become expressed as a counter-hegemonic, decolonial tool.
- Monolingualism negatively impacts scholars, writers, refugees, immigrants, teachers (Kramsch and Zhang 2017), etc.
- Monolingualism has little to do with an individual’s competence in multiple languages.
- Justice (or justice systems) can be more-than-monolingual, but are not yet.
- Education (or education systems) can be more-than-monolingual, but are increasingly not.
- Monolingualism has produced features of social, civic, and / or scholarly life that we treasure and would have a hard time doing without.
- Monolingualism is de jure normative. Multilingualism is de facto normative.
- Monolingualism is bad and should be canceled.
- Monolingualism is productive and should be defended.
- Monolingualism can effectively be resisted, and here’s how:
- There is a special relationship that endures between monolingualism and literature in most nationalized northern traditions, and this is an awkward fact for literary studies in an era that prizes hybridity and plurality.
- Other aesthetic fields (film, art) don’t face the monolingual predicament in ways that literary studies does.
- There are instances of literariness and literary traditions that are entirely unbeholden to monolingualism.
- Literary / critical theory / linguistics / philosophy / translation studies / etc. have had, for good reason, too little to say about monolingualism.
- Literature is well equipped to critique monolingualism from within.
- Since 1990, language(s) has/have crossed the “production boundary” (from non-productive to productive of ‘value’) in ways that financial products were made to do in the 1970s.
- Languages are now commoditized, not just commodified, in the global, proprietary circulation of meanings.
- Monolingualism has been able to deploy normative forms of translation, translatability, and (“reactionary”) multilingualism (Moore 2015).
- Multilingualism is not the same as heteroglossia. Heteroglossia can be monolingual.
- Monolingualism is not the opposite of multilingualism.
- The “individual language” is a product of monolingualism.
- It is possible to think / practice language without “individual languages”, to “disinvent and reconstitute” languages (Pennycook and Makoni 2007) in new ways.
- Some form of monolingualism impacts my research domain and / or the norms of research & scholarly writing in that domain.
- Some prevailing narratives in my discipline or field are irrationally constrained by a form of monolingualism.
- Monolingualism in research is fueled by language-indifference and/or the relegation of language (as a category of analysis) to lowest critical priority (below culture / ideas, etc.).
- Monolingualism is a profound and often sophisticated epistemological, creative, and procedural constraint.