Contesting Metronormativity: Exploring Indigenous Language Dynamism Across the Urban-Rural Divide (original) (raw)

Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 2014

Abstract

Cities have always had a certain cache, a certain fascination—especially, large urban conurbations. They are the first (and often only) port of call for most migrants who see within them the greatest opportunity for employment; scope for upward social mobility; and/or access to wider social, cultural, and economic networks. Irrespective of whether this actually ever proves to be the case, since cities are riven with stark inequalities and related social, cultural, linguistic, and economic hierarchies (Goldsmith & Blakely, 2010; Gugler, 2004; Musterd & Ostendorf, 2013), the pull and influence of cities remains strong. Indeed, for the first time, more people across the world are now living in cities than in the countryside (Davis, 2004; Green & Corbett, 2013a, 2013b; Schafft & Youngblood Jackson, 2010). This longstanding fascination with, and privileging of, cities—which has been aptly termed by Green (2013, p. 19) as metronormativity—has also been evident in a wide range of academic fields, not least our own. In sociolinguistics, for example, we are currently seeing what I have elsewhere termed the multilingual turn (May, 2014a, 2014b). The multilingual turn comprises a (renewed)1 focus on the multilingual speaker, rather than the monolingual speaker, as the norm for language learning and teaching (see also Conteh & Meier, 2014; García, 2009). In addition, it involves an examination of the contexts in which such multilingual speakers live and “language.” These contexts are shaped by the current conditions of late modernity, not least the rise of globalization2 and related, rapidly increasing, patterns of transmigration. As a result,

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