Urban multilingualism and identity in the UK context: Perspectives on education and policy

The talk will address the challenges to UK policy in accommodating to the needs and opportunities of an increasing multilingual reality, especially in cities, at a time when the statutory and higher education sectors struggle to sustain interest in foreign language learning, and populist isolationism presents multilingualism as a potential threat to social cohesion. I review a range of settings in which scripted and routine-based policy is enacted: public service interpreting and translation, language assessment for the determination of origin in asylum applications, debates around the census question on languages, language policy as a feature of devolved (regional) government, approaches to learning English (ESOL policy), and attitudes toward the teaching and learning of 'modern foreign' and 'community' languages in statutory and non-statutory sectors. I discuss the role of universities as catalysts for debate and policy impact, and the need to shift attention from the traditional view of the relevance of languages to support overseas hegemony, to the domestic arena, where language policy should facilitate equal policy, cultivation of heritage, as well as a basis of skills.

Prof. Yaron Matras,
University of Manchester

Prof. Marina Terkourafi,
University of Leiden

Indirectness in the age of globalization: implications for theory-building

Indirectness has traditionally been viewed as commensurate with politeness and attributed to the speaker's wish to avoid imposition and/or otherwise strategically manipulate the addressee. Despite these theoretical predictions, a number of studies have documented the solidarity-building and identity-constituting functions of indirectness. Bringing these studies together, in Terkourafi (2014) I proposed an expanded view of the functions of indirect speech, which crucially emphasizes the role of the addressee and the importance of network ties. In this talk, I focus on what happens when such network ties become loosened, as a result of processes of urbanization and globalization. Drawing on examples from African American English and Chinese, I argue that these processes produce a need for increased explicitness, which drives speakers (and listeners) away from indirectness. This claim is further supported diachronically, by changes in British English politeness that coincide with the rise of the individual Self. I draw the implications of these empirical findings for im/politeness theorizing and theory-building more generally, urging attention to how the socio-historical context of our research necessarily influences the theories we end up building.
Reference:
Terkourafi, Marina (2014). The importance of being indirect: A new nomenclature for indirect speech. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 28 (1): 45-7