ABSTRACT
Recent studies of multilingualism in different societies have questioned the notion of languages as whole, bounded systems and have argued for a view of language ‘as a set of resources which circulate in unequal ways in social networks and discursive spaces, and whose meaning and values are socially constructed within the constraints of social organizational processes, under specific historical conditions’ (Heller 2007: 2). This understanding of language foregrounds the political and sociohistorical associations of linguistic forms and characterizes language users as social actors. It stresses the different ways language users are constantly employing, creating, and interpreting sets of linguistic resources to communicate across contexts and participants and perform their different subjectivities. This means that ‘participants’ awareness of “language” or “code” is backgrounded and “signs” are combined and put to work in the message being negotiated at hand’ (Creese and Blackledge 2010a: 2; also Creese and Blackledge 2010b; Blackledge and Creese 2010). This conceptualization of language captures the heteroglossic nature of communication, or what Bailey describes as ‘(a) the simultaneous use of different kinds of forms or signs and (b) the tensions and conflicts among those signs, based on the sociohistorical associations they carry with them’ (2007: 257). The focus on signs and sets of linguistic resources affords new analytical insights into our understanding of language and human interaction more generally as essentially social. Although acknowledging that linguistic signs are the primary semiotic tools for representing and negotiating meaning and social relations, this focus can account for the increasing recognition in current research on multilingualism of the highly multimodal nature of communication. Following Pahl and Rowsell, in this chapter multimodality refers to ‘communication in the widest sense, including gesture, oral performance, artistic, linguistic, digital, electronic, graphic and artefact-related’ (2006: 6).
