In multilingual settings, the status and prestige of the varieties in contact are hardly ever stable. The perception of languages (and thus of their speakers) changes with socio-political and economic circumstances, and it... [ view full abstract ]
In multilingual settings, the status and prestige of the varieties in contact are hardly ever stable. The perception of languages (and thus of their speakers) changes with socio-political and economic circumstances, and it depends on the ideas and linguistic myths that are constructed culturally in metalinguistic debates. These ideas and myths, in turn, tend to have long histories of their own (cf. Watts 2010), as every metalinguistic comment made in public discourse is, to some degree, a reproduction of former comments (cf. Blommaert 1999). In contexts of decolonisation and political emancipation, including pidgin and creole contexts, where the dominant voices in discourse have changed dramatically over the past decades, this process of language ideological reproduction seems particularly interesting.
Focusing on Tok Pisin and Hawai’i Creole, this paper examines how the story of Babel and the confounding of languages is invoked and instrumentalised in different ways in discussions on multilingualism in Papua New Guinea and Hawai’i. The data I will draw on consists of historical texts that formed the public discourse over the past six decades (i.e. newspaper articles, letters to the editor, academic papers, official documents, etc.), as well as interviews with Tok Pisin and Hawai’i Creole speakers that were conducted in 2014 and 2015.
Evidence can be found in both places that the biblical story of Babel – often used to criticise multilingualism in Western contexts – is implemented to support the use of the creole despite the dominant status of English. I will focus on two examples, one from each Pacific community. Even though the image of Babel is used very differently in the two examples, there are certain important similarities in how this myth is perpetuated and appropriated to either community’s sociocultural context. Key factors in these appropriations are not only preceding metalinguistic debates, but also shared ideas on diversity and (national) unity in general.
References
Blommaert, Jan (1999). The debate is open. In Blommaert, Jan (ed.), Language Ideological Debates. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1-38.
Watts, Richard J. (2011). Language Myths and the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
