(Dis)articulating identities : multilingualism in the Catalan countries

McGlade, Rhiannon and Epps, Brad (2022) (Dis)articulating identities : multilingualism in the Catalan countries. The Journal of Catalan Studies, 1 (23). 1–14.

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Abstract

What does it mean to be monolingual in a multilingual society? Or, indeed, multilingual in a predominantly monolingual society? How multifarious, or heterogenous, is "multilingualism"? How singular, or homogenous, is "monolingualism"? What, for that matter, constitutes a language? To what degree do sound and music, gestures, gazes and gaits, clothes and cuisine, appearance and ability figure in considerations of multilingualism? What about the deaf, the mute, the blind? Or as Monsterrat Lunati asks, what about the dead, the disappeared, the silenced and suppressed? These questions, amongst others, hovered at the humanistic—and post-humanistic— fringes of the AHRC-Open World Research Initiative, Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals Transforming Societies (MEITS), launched in 2016 and orientated, at its socio- scientific centre, to more familiar and delimited understandings of language(s). The four-year project, led by scholars at the University of Cambridge in collaboration with partners from the academic, private and public sphere, strove for a holistic investigation of multilingualism across a range of disciplines that included literary,film and cultural studies, linguistics, the history of ideas, conflict resolution, education and health and wellbeing. Stemming from multidisciplinary research and intellectual exchanges in the MEITS strand ‘Arts of Identity,’ the contributors to this collection consider various conceptions and practices of multilingualism and its implications for Catalan culture and civil society (the other language and culture addressed in the strand was Ukrainian). The following essays, produced and gathered under the title, "(Dis)articulating Identities: Multilingualism in the Catalan Countries," query the relationships between multilingualism, diversity and identity that are at play on and across individual, local, regional, national and global levels. In keeping with the aforementioned commitment to the multiple (and its relative singularities and specificities), the dossier spans the fields of Catalan theatre, literature, documentary cinema, performance and sociolinguistic practice in the educational sphere. It explores how the insights that are arguably gained from stepping outside and/or from moving betwixt and between any number of languages, cultures and modes of thought, are vital to understanding the implications of multilingualism for so-called minority, or minoritized, languages and their attendant—but also accidental and unexpected—cultural identities.

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