Lived languages: ordinary collections and multilingual repertoires

Until recently, the role of material culture in language has been little studied or seen as the context where language use is situated (Aronin et al., 2018). This article looks at the materiality of language in a new light by arguing that everyday objects such as kitchen utensils and wardrobes can b...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of multilingualism 2022-10, Vol.19 (4), p.647-663
Main Author: Ros i Solé, Cristina
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bilingual people
Biographies
Chronotope
Collections
Cultural Background
Ethnography
Family Environment
Foreign Countries
Humanism
Language Usage
lived
Material culture
Multilingualism
New materialism
Phenomenology
post-humanism
repertoires
Second Languages
Self Concept
Semiotics
Subjectivity
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Until recently, the role of material culture in language has been little studied or seen as the context where language use is situated (Aronin et al., 2018). This article looks at the materiality of language in a new light by arguing that everyday objects such as kitchen utensils and wardrobes can be seen as deliberate and conscious collections that are entangled with speakers' multilingual repertoires, subjectivities and embodied agencies. Clothes stored away in one's wardrobe, or ordinary kitchen utensils reveal themselves as the site where multilinguals' complex biographies and 'jigsaw repertoires' (Blommaert & Backus, 2013) can be traced and made sense of. Such a view of language sees the construction of subjectivities as both situated and relational. Situated because subjectivities are firmly anchored in embodied chronotopic continuums (Busch, 2017), relational because they align to a post-human approach to subjectivity (Pennycook, 2018) that conceives it as the confederation of different types of human and post-human agencies. Drawing on a study of 6 personal collections of ordinary objects, this paper investigates to what extent personal collections can be read as a 'laboratory' for multilingual practices, where multilingual agencies are played out in relation to time-space coordinates and the materiality of the self.
ISSN:1479-0718
1747-7530
DOI:10.1080/14790718.2020.1797047