In our multicultural, pan-ethnic states, issues of subjectivity, positionality, and equity in relation to language are central to our pedagogical practices and institutional settings. These issues are particularly salient in higher education, where knowledge of and experience with language shape the academic and life trajectories of an increasingly diverse student body. In this presentation, I rely on theoretical developments from multilingual studies, linguistic anthropology, post-structural and postcolonial theory, combined with my own experience teaching multilingual students, to perform a critical exploration of current efforts to embrace linguistic diversity and promote language learning, against a backdrop of monolingual and monolingualizing practices that remain ubiquitous in our cultures of scholarship and epistemological apparatuses (Gramling 2016).
I share the results of a multiyear study focusing on the personal narratives of multilingual first-year students at Princeton University. The overall purpose of the research is to understand how their subjectivities are negotiated in and through language, and the impact that language education has had on their personhood. The paths by which these speakers come to feel at home in a language are complex, subtle, and intimately connected to the experience of mobility. I pay special attention to the emergent dynamics between tongues and bodies in the semiotic practices of racialized subjects, who may not "look the way they sound" or "sound the way they look" (Rosa 2019), and I argue that monolingualizing forces undermine even the most progressive universities, which purport to promote and protect linguistic diversity while remaining a key cog in a system that constructs language as something which is a natural possession and towards which certain individuals can claim proprietary rights.
Multilingual students do not (and should not) fit into an idealized, institutionally palatable version of multilingualism. An analysis of their modes of identification and linguistic encounters with others shows that, while a multilingual repertoire can afford opportunities for radical reinvention, the essentialist linkage of linguistic nativism with authenticity, authority, and ownership functions as an othering device, devaluing and pushing to the margins the language practices of those who find themselves outside of the matrix of the monolingual establishment (Yildiz 2012; Chow 2014).
References:
Chow, Rey (2014). Not like a native speaker. On languaging as a postcolonial experience. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gramling, David (2016). The invention of monolingualism. New York: Bloomsbury.
Rosa, Jonathan (2019). Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of Latinidad. New York: Oxford University Press.
Shuck, Gail (2006). Racializing the nonnative English speaker. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 5(4),259–276.
Yildiz, Yasemin (2012). Beyond the mother tongue: The postmonolingual condition. New York: Fordham University.
