There is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages …There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb. It evolves by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil.
What is a language? This question has been answered in many different ways, and in the age of nationalism, it seemed to be a relatively straightforward matter: a language is what members of a community who live in one territory use to interact with each other. Today, we know that people may use more than one language; it is common for people to interact across national boundaries, communities come in many different shapes, and there are many cultures in which the concept of national monolingualism never prevailed. So, what is a language if we are not sure how to define the community that speaks it? Which concepts of language do we find in cultures that are not framed in Western ideas of nationalism and monolingualism? How do people conceptualise languages, language boundaries, and language norms if speakers who live in the same territory have distinct multilingual repertoires and only partially or only sometimes share ideas about what is right and wrong in a language? These questions have inspired the study of language ideologies in the linguistically and culturally diverse setting of Belize that I present in this book. In a nutshell, I examine the discourses on language produced by speakers who live in this multilingual setting and ask how their discourses contribute to the construction of a language. In other words, I aim to contribute to understanding how languages come into being, specifically in contexts of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity.
In the tradition of linguistic anthropological research, I approach languages as discursively constructed categories (e.g. Gal & Irvine Reference Gal and Irvine1995, Makoni & Pennycook Reference Makoni, Pennycook, Makoni and Pennycook2007, Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Duranti2009). I analyse the discourses that surround language categories in an ethnographic field study in a multilingual Belizean village, which is shaped by cultural and linguistic diversity where neither social groups nor languages are categorised in clear-cut ways. Belize is officially an English-speaking country that has been described as linguistically ‘diffuse’ (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller Reference Le Page and Tabouret-Keller1985). That is, language norms are not stable or nationally shared. Furthermore, ethnolinguistic concepts of belonging are not straightforward, as many families are of mixed ethnic origin, do not identify with only one ethnicity, and use various language resources on a daily basis. In other words, ‘ethnolinguistically different populations … coexist in a topographic space that is not (rigidly) segregated’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene2017a: 3), and neither languages nor groups display unambiguous boundaries. Local linguistic resources include features from English, Spanish, various Maya languages, Garifuna (an Afro-Carib creole), and languages associated with older and more recent migrations (viz., Chinese, German, Hindi, Arabic, etc.). In addition to this overall ethnic and linguistic diversity, we find the Kriol language to be crucial in constructing national belonging (on belonging, see Vallentin (Reference Vallentin2019)). As an English-lexified creole, Kriol is part of the Caribbean cultural space and its boundaries towards the English language are fuzzy (Escure Reference Escure1997, Reference Escure, Michaelis, Maurer, Haspelmath and Huber2013, Decker Reference Decker2013). Belize therefore offers ideal conditions for approaching the question of how languages and their boundaries come into being.
It is not by accident that an understanding of languages as outcomes of social discourses has been developed in the very complex and intriguing setting of Belize. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller’s Acts of Identity (Reference Le Page and Tabouret-Keller1985), a seminal linguistic anthropological study conducted in the country, has been a milestone in anti-essentialist perspectives on languages. It shows languages to be discursively constructed categories, emerging dialectically with social categories. In this specific case, the authors describe the concurrent development of the ethnic group of Creoles (Afro-European (sometimes Maya) Belizeans) and of the language repertoire that today is referred to as Kriol.Footnote 1 Le Page and Tabouret-Keller, despite their essentially poststructuralist conceptualisation of languages as outcomes of social discourses and their demonstration that languages do not come about ‘naturally’, do not discard, however, the idea that languages are empirical realities that co-produce significant social categories.
Sociological theories on Western late modernity, in a similar fashion, emphasise that social categories are discursively constructed but at the same time empirically relevant and socially real. In line with such theories, I argue that social categories that were discursively constructed in modern society – such as nation, gender, or class, and languages – do not dissolve; rather, people become aware of their constructed nature (Beck, Bonss, & Lau Reference Beck, Bonss and Lau2003). This differs from the modern age, in which social categories were typically understood as ordered by natural laws, static, and essentialist (Schneider Reference Schneider2017b; for a critique, see also Williams (Reference Williams1999)). In the current age of late modernity, and with the understanding that categories are not natural or essential, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (Reference Bauman2012: 90) draws on the metaphor of liquidity to argue that, for these categories, ‘change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty’. He describes modern social categories as essentially unstable and continuously shifting and develops the notion of liquid modernity, which has inspired the title of this book.
Liquids, unlike solids, cannot easily hold their shape. Fluids, so to speak, neither fix space nor bind time. While solids have clear spatial dimensions but neutralize the impact, and thus downgrade the significance, of time (effectively resist its flow or render it irrelevant), fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone) to change it; and so for them it is the flow of time that counts, more than the space they happen to occupy: that space, after all, they fill but ‘for a moment’.
The description underscores a particular relationship of liquids to time and space and emphasises their shifting, fluid aspects. It does not propose that substance vanishes, nor that all liquids flow into each other to become one. Thus, the metaphor does not imply the complete deconstruction of social categories. Instead of putting into question the existence of the categories that have shaped social life in modernity, as proponents of postmodernity sometimes do (Beck, Bonss, & Lau Reference Beck, Bonss and Lau2003: 3), Bauman argues that the categories continue to influence how we conceptualise social units and social structures today. In other words, modern social categories like nation, gender, class, or language remain crucial in the ongoing processes of the construction of social orders. Still, they do not come about as a priori, static, natural, or fundamental, and they continuously change (Beck, Giddens, & Lash Reference Beck, Giddens and Lash1994, Beck, Bonss, & Lau Reference Beck, Bonss and Lau2003).Footnote 2
Returning to the question of what happens to language if social and linguistic relations are not clearly defined, it is safe to say that the relationships between language categories and social categories are more liquid than imagined in Western modernist national mappings of languages and communities. This does not entail, however, that languages as concepts that categorise speech practice and speakers disappear. The metaphor of liquidity conjures up a view of language practices as non-stable, non-monolithic, and yet it does not suggest that the social category of language dissolves nor that productions of linguistic fixity are impossible. Languages, just like liquids, may, under particular conditions, flow slowly or appear in a stabilised form. Puddles of water, lakes, or icicles, for example, are non-flowing liquids. Liquids thus have an essentially fluid character, and particular conditions define whether they are contemporarily stable or flowing.
So, like liquids, speaking is an ephemeral sound-based and bodily practice, but it is to a certain extent possible to freeze it in space and time, as has been the case in European modernity (Otsuji & Pennycook Reference Otsuji and Pennycook2010). Writing, national discourse, cultures of printing, territorial concepts of belonging, and traditions of modernist clear-cut either–or categorisation (Beck, Bonss, & Lau Reference Beck, Bonss and Lau2003) have contributed to the perception of languages as stable. This means that stable linguistic systems are outcomes of particular conditions, in ways similar to lakes being outcomes of ensembles of landscapes, weather conditions, characteristics of the soil, or human intervention. The metaphorical concept of liquidity is helpful to understand the elusive nature of some languages (Mufwene Reference Mufwene1992a), but it can also be used to describe language practices that appear to be ordered and fixed.Footnote 3 Using metaphors of liquidity, fluidity, or flow in language research is not new (Pennycook Reference Pennycook2007, Riva Reference Riva2012, Friedrich & Figueiredo Reference Friedrich, Eduardo and Diniz de2016: 160–2, Coulmas Reference Coulmas2018: 223–8). Yet, while current emphasis in sociolinguistic debates is mostly on non-stable and diverse language phenomena, metaphors of the liquid also allow for conceptualising traditions of stability. I thus use the notion of liquid language to explain my understanding of languages as socially relevant constructs whose stability or fluidity depends on a range of sociohistorical and material conditions.
So, as much as it is inaccurate to assume languages to ‘naturally’ materialise in homogeneous and static cultural contexts, and as much as it is important to problematise the concept of separate languages, it might be premature to assume the idea of distinct languages has become irrelevant. As stated by Heller (Reference Heller and Heller2007b: 341) ‘despite a general scepticism towards conceptions of truth or supposedly “natural” social orders, we should be reluctant … to give up entirely any notion of system and boundary, any notion of constraint (whether physical or social)’. Even where speech forms traditionally associated with different communities interact with each other, for example, in code-switching practices (Auer Reference Auer1999), traditional concepts of languages or varieties are still used as analytical categories.Footnote 4 This does not necessarily mean that we have not come far enough in our attempts to deconstruct notions of fixity, normativity, or boundedness. Instead, it may mean that we have not yet given sufficient attention to the processes that lead to the making of languages as rule-governed systems. In a late modern understanding, ‘we can no longer see [languages] as fixed, natural, essentialized or objective; rather, we want to understand them as ongoing processes of social construction occurring under specific (and discoverable) conditions (many of them of our making, all of them made sense out of in some way)’ (Heller Reference Heller and Heller2007b: 341).
The attempt to focus on the ‘ongoing processes of social construction’ that produce languages may seem to counter recent attempts by sociolinguists to deconstruct bounded languages, advocating instead concepts like translanguaging, polylingualism, and languaging, among others (e.g. Jacquemet Reference Jacquemet2005, Pennycook Reference Pennycook2007, Creese & Blackledge Reference Creese and Blackledge2010, Canagarajah Reference Canagarajah2013, García & Wei Reference García and Wei2014). I share the social aims of translingual theories, such as support of minority populations, creation of democratic and linguistically fair structures in education, and share the assumption that bounded notions of language are constructed under specific sociopolitical conditions. And yet, my work does not aim to deconstruct language categories. Instead, I am interested in what contributes to interactional practices being understood as appearing in separate categories in the first place. How and why do humans construct languages, and which social discourses and material practices lead to their emergence? The theoretical deconstruction of language in academia and, in more practical terms, in education, is an important social development. We nevertheless should also ask for the role of bounded languages in co-constructing social structure, how translanguaging practices interact with language standards, and to what extent bounded languages may have inclusive functions.
Given the continuing social impact of languages as categories, the question of how these are constructed is not only relevant for sociolinguistic theorising but contributes to the traditional aim of sociolinguistics to promote social equity (Bell Reference Bell and Coupland2016: 393). The reification of speech as a discursive entity with a name, a form, and a particular social function reflects social realities and hierarchical power relationships. Studying the construction of such reifications goes in line with the demand to ‘reinflect and retheorise older concepts (community, variety, diversity, identity, standard and vernacular, mediation, etc.) rather than dispense with them altogether’ (Coupland Reference Coupland and Coupland2016b: 12). This allows a deeper understanding of how humans make use of signs, linguistic and other, to create their social worlds. Ideally, it can inspire the creation of a linguistically more just society under the conditions of diversity and liquidity. At the same time, this is in line with current attempts to decolonise linguistics (Deumert & Storch Reference Deumert and Storch2020) by scrutinising and denaturalising epistemological concepts developed in Western academia, which have relied on a priori notions of language.
In this study, I therefore ask how people construct languages in settings where neither these nor the groups that speak them can be taken for granted. In empirical terms, I study multilingual speakers’ language practices and meta-discourses about language. I scrutinise the social spaces and cultural practices associated with different languages. Who uses which linguistic repertoires where and why? Which social qualities are languages associated with? How is the mixing or switching of languages conceptualised? And what does this tell us about social and linguistic relationships within the community? Second, I ask about the influence of social and discursive complexity on language practice. The central aim of the study is not a documentation of the linguistic repertoire of a speech community. Rather, I study discursive representations of linguistic practices and the links between linguistic repertoires, social affiliation, social attribution, and materialisation (Chapters 6–8). In a second step (in Chapter 9), I explore how the often complex and sometimes paradoxical links between the linguistic and the social are related to the liquidity of language form, that is, to ‘non-monolithic grammars’ (Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Diane Brentari and MacLeod1992b).
In the endeavour of trying to understand how languages are brought into being in discourse and practice, I turn to Belize, an environment in which languages and the ideas that define them have never been as stable and clear as national discourses, as some strands of linguistics have made us believe. In Belize, as in other nations in the Caribbean, the link between linguistic practice and social belonging has never been a taken-for-granted matter. Linguistic diversity has a long and lively tradition in Belize as a ‘monolingual habitus’ (Gogolin Reference Gogolin1994) – the idea that monolingualism of individuals and societies is normal – has never been part of the dominant discourse. The country has about 360,000 inhabitants, but eight languagesFootnote 5 are recognised officially, and several other languages are part of the local linguistic repertoire. As virtually all Belizeans grow up speaking more than one of these languages (Escure Reference Escure1997: 28, Statistical Institute of Belize 2011), languages and cultural groups do not match up in a one-dimensional way, leading to the above-mentioned diffuseness. Close cultural ties to the United States, to the other Caribbean states, and to surrounding Hispanic nations that have arisen from related colonial histories, tourism, media, and migration, increase traditional indigenous diversity. Diversity is thus not only found in the number of languages spoken but also in the various histories, cultures, economic positions, and diverse transnational networks that are associated with the different languages. The cultural context of Belize offers laboratory-like conditions to study the processes of the construction of the link between language and social space in contexts of diffusion and diversity.
Adding to its multilingual complexity, the central role of Kriol in the Belizean society, where it functions as the national lingua franca, renders Belize an even more enticing site to study how languages come into being. Kriol is practised in parallel with English, its lexifier, and is related to other creole languages in the Caribbean region (Decker Reference Decker2013: 2–4). This brings up theoretical observations, discussions, and models that have been developed in creole linguistics. In this scientific discipline, we find concepts intended to account for variation, like the creole continuum (DeCamp Reference DeCamp and Hymes1971) or that of variable rule (Labov Reference Labov1969, Winford Reference Winford1984). These entail the assumption that there is no teleological path towards stable monolingualism. My study is interested in the same phenomenon but does not focus primarily on language practices. Instead, I start from the narratives and concepts people produce in relation to language, that is, the speakers’ language ideologies. I study these to argue that culturally based assumptions about language frame linguistic practices but also the academic analysis thereof, where ideals of systematicity may – or may not – be central.
Besides grammatical models that aim to grasp the more variable linguistic phenomena found in settings with histories of colonisation and creolisation, creole linguistics also discusses the ontological status of languages. The structural autonomy of creole languages has been subject to heated debates in social and academic environments alike. These debates connect to the anti-essentialist approaches to languages as discussed above. There are passionate discussions about whether creole languages have to be considered varieties of their lexifier language (e.g. Mufwene Reference Mufwene, Neumann-Holzschuh and Schneider2000, Reference Mufwene and Coupland2013) or as autonomous varieties. This is related to the question of whether creole languages are typologically distinct from ‘normal’ languages (see Chapter 3; for different positions, see e.g. Mufwene (Reference Mufwene, Neumann-Holzschuh and Schneider2000), DeGraff (Reference DeGraff2003), McWhorter (Reference McWhorter2005), Ansaldo & Matthews (Reference Ansaldo, Matthews, Ansaldo, Matthews and Lim2007), Bakker et al. (Reference Bakker, Daval-Markussena, Parkvalla, Plag, Bhatt and Veenstra2013)) and whether there are particular evolutionary processes that are likely to yield creoles, which are by some described as ‘simpler’ languages (a position that is found in e.g. McWhorter (Reference McWhorter1998, Reference McWhorter2001), criticised in e.g. DeGraff (2001), Mufwene (Reference Mufwene, Schmid, Austin and Stein1998, Reference Mufwene, Neumann-Holzschuh and Schneider2000)). From the perspective of language ideology research, the discursive dichotomy of ‘normal’ languages vs creole languages is indeed problematic, as it assumes that language cultures developed in sedentary and monolingual social settings of European modernity are the unmarked type. In contrast, languages developed in contexts of diversity and contact, as well as colonial subjugation, are understood not only as marked but even as ‘simpler’ (McWhorter Reference McWhorter2001). The dichotomy has therefore been accused of reproducing epistemic racism and colonialist racist biases (DeGraff Reference DeGraff2005; for a deconstructive analysis of the concept of creole, see Mühleisen (Reference Mühleisen2002)).
Academic debates do not take place in a social void. The dichotomy of creole versus ‘normal’ is also found in the societies in which creole languages are spoken. Here, the status of creoles as autonomous languages has been contested for a long time. Speakers have referred to them either as dialect (i.e. less than a language, from the point of view of non-linguists) or as ‘broken’ English or French, etc. In more recent times, they have often been passionately defended as languages in their own right, as made evident, for example, by the work of the National Kriol Council of Belize. (On the role of creoles in education, see e.g. Migge, Léglise, Bartens (Reference Migge, Léglise, Bartens, Migge, Léglise and Bartens2010a).)
Debates on the categorisation of speech, and on the intersection of language norms and community formation, have a long tradition in creole studies (Mühleisen Reference Mühleisen2002). Such debates have been more prominent than in general linguistics. This has to do with the fact that linguistic diversity has long been erased (Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Duranti2009) in Western nation states, where most linguistic research has been conducted. Newer social developments, including migration, technological advances, and more frequent travel have led to the realisation that diversity is part of everyday life also in Western contexts (Mufwene Reference Mufwene2017a). Research on creole languages has typically taken place in former European colonies, where constructions of linguistic and cultural difference served to legitimise racism and exploitation, and where these constructions of difference therefore have not been erased to the same extent. With its expertise in conceptualising language contact in culturally complex situations, linguistic research on creole languages gives valuable insight into more general discussions surrounding the construction of languages. At the same time, in creole settings, it is particularly important to question essentialist epistemologies of monolithic languages developed in monolingual cultures. It is a way to counter continuing colonial epistemes where some languages are considered ‘normal’ and others not. From the perspectives of language ideology research, languages as entities are understood are social–discursive constructions (see Section 2.1). They cannot be ‘normal’ or ‘unnormal’. Rather, languages emerge from culturally embedded interactional practices, grounded on social relationships and value-laden cultural ideologies that are expressed and at the same time come into being via semiotic, visual, and sound-based forms. The study of languages as discursive–material practices is therefore central to understanding that different cultural and sociopolitical conditions can bring different kinds of stability to the essentially liquid nature of language.
My decision to study the language situation of Belize as a European researcher is not based on the desire to study and represent an Other, presumably ‘exotic’, non-European culture. I do not aim at a colonial representation of practices of people whose culture and language are considered different from those of my Western world. Instead, I want to contribute to current academic discussions by studying a setting in which the myth of linguistic and cultural homogeneity has never been established and where, due to complex power structures, no clear hegemonies have emerged. Understanding post-national complex power structures to be on the rise in times of digital globalisation, the society I study is a cultural avant-garde, the analysis of which may help us improve our understanding of cultures of diversity in late modern times. In this light, European discourses of monolingualism, stable sedentary culture, and ‘normal’ language appear specific and even provincial (Chakrabarti Reference Chakrabarti2000). To avoid the reproduction of epistemic colonialism, I methodologically did not approach the people I introduce in my text as data sources for documenting a language. From decolonial perspectives, Deumert and Storch (Reference Deumert and Storch2020: 17) have criticised that
those who assist linguists in their efforts to describe a particular language rarely get a chance to express themselves using their entire repertoires, to tell the stories they wish to tell (not only ‘traditional’ stories), to share their thoughts, hopes, and maybe even fears (at least not during a ‘fieldwork session’). Instead, they complete word lists, repeat verbal paradigms, participate in experiments, and provide linguists with the data the latter deem important.
Rather than viewing the people I have met and spoken to during my research as producers of a particular language form, I try to understand and follow their expert knowledge of complex social and cultural conditions to develop critical perspectives on Western language traditions.
Overall, this book aims to shed light on the complexities of language ideological discourses of speakers whose concepts do not necessarily align with Western paradigms of the relationship between language and social order. The study of language ideologies in Belize promises crucial insight into how languages are constructed. Studying language as a liquid discourse phenomenon means enhancing our understanding of the cultural contingency and historicity of academic linguistic concepts. This helps us become aware of how modernist Western ideas about languages as stable, regular entities, belonging to well-ordered national or ethnic communities, have (mis)shaped linguistics (Pratt Reference Pratt, Fabb, Attridge, Durant and MacCabe1987). In this sense, linguistic as well as all other theories are not universal or neutral but intertwined with the cultural histories in which they have been developed. Thus, this book contributes to an empirical grounding of understanding languages as discursively constructed categories. It intrinsically questions modernist European idealisations that presuppose the existence of stable languages, related to homogeneous national groups,Footnote 6 and thus hopes to contribute to endeavours to decolonise linguistics (Deumert & Storch Reference Deumert and Storch2020) by giving access to rarely valued non-Western knowledge about language.
1.1 Overview of the Book
Belize’s complex language situation and the research traditions developed in multilingual contact situations demonstrate that the idea of a clear one-to-one link between community and language is culturally and historically specific. The methodological entry point I chose to study the potential multiplicity of such links is the language ideologies of the inhabitants of a Belizean village. The first question to be discussed in this book is what language indexes socially, where there is no simple mapping of language and nationality or ethnicity.Footnote 7 Such indexicalities, involving the discursive links between language use, social affiliation, and social values, give access to the concepts that help construct languages (see Section 2.3). The central research question posed to empirical ethnographic and interview data, discussed in Chapters 6–8, is: what are the social indexical meanings of language in the multilingual and socially complex Belizean context?
To make the theoretical grounding of the empirical analysis accessible, Chapter 2 introduces concepts that are relevant to studying language ideology and sociolinguistic perspectives on the social meanings of language. Previous studies on language variation and language attitudes in the field of creole linguistics are discussed in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 articulates the methodological and analytical steps of the study, while Chapter 5 is devoted to the historical, demographic, sociopolitical, and linguistic backgrounds of the Belizean context. The analyses of empirical data in Chapters 6–8 discuss discourse data from ethnographic field notes, visual documentation, and interview data. Via the study of indexicalities of language, I show that these do entail the categorisation of speech practices as separate languages. In a qualitative, theory-informed, and empirically grounded analysis, I identify three different interrelated discourse topics that contribute to this categorisation and thus to the construction of languages. These are:
1. Belonging – discourses on sociocultural orientation expressed via language (Chapter 6).
2. Prestige – discourses on social status expressed via language (Chapter 7).
3. Materiality – material language practices and discourses about themFootnote 8 (Chapter 8).
In a linguistically complex situation like Belize, it is not one language category that applies to any one of these discourses (in other words, we do not find diglossia, as discussed by e.g. Fishman (Reference Fishman1967), Section 2.2). Due to the intricate social history of Belize and the concurrent use of diverse languages, various codes can, for example, express belonging and social status, respectively. Material language ideological traditions and productions, like writing, (digital) media texts, policies, and school curricula, but also the related discourses about sounds, standards, and language practice, intersect with indexicalities of belonging and status in their own complex ways. The three topics, taken together, contribute to communicative practices being established as languages.
In Chapter 9, I turn to the level of language practice to illustrate the potential effects of a complex language ideological situation on language structure. To this end, the degree of heterogeneity in a language is explored, where I focus on the most recognised prestige variety of Belize: English as used in public formal spaces. As English is the official language of Belize, it is clearly classified as a separate language by its speakers. In actual practice, English spoken in formal public contexts shows patterns of variation; and some of its features overlap with those of other languages, especially Kriol and Spanish. I therefore ask: how do speakers construct and practise the prestige variety of public English in a setting shaped by diffusion and complex language ideological discourse? The analysis of public linguistic landscapes, classroom conversations, and speech in interview conversations gives access to how English is produced in local public spaces. I refrain from describing these forms as Belizean English, a term that is not used by speakers in the context of my research.
Finally, in Chapter 10, I draw theoretical implications from the empirical observations. Linking back to the questions posed in this introduction, I ask how languages are constructed in discourse settings where neither the languages nor the groups that speak them have clear boundaries. What does this tell us about the interrelations between language and social life in late modernity?
