Salsa, Zombies and Linguistics

We must question those ready-made syntheses, those groupings that we normally accept before any examination, those links whose validity is recognized from the outset; [...]. And instead of according them unqualified, spontaneous value, we must accept, in the name of methodological vigour, that, in the first instance, they concern only a population of dispersed events.

Foucault (1972: 22)

A while ago, a friend of mine gave birth to her second son. He was born in Frankfurt, Germany; accordingly, one may assume that his 'native language' is German. Yet, it is not only the place of birth but also the parents' cultural and linguistic heritage that are taken as indicators for the language considered to be 'native' to a child. In the case of the little boy just mentioned, however, both a territorial and a heritage approach to linguistic identity are problematic. While the mother is 'half' Serbo-Montenegrin and 'half' Hungarian, the father's parents stem from Spain and Greece.

In urban contexts today, linguistic complexities like this are by no means an exception. In Frankfurt, London, New York or Sydney, it has become unexceptional that people from different cultural backgrounds live together, become friends, attend the same schools and love each other. And, thus, affiliations with groups or with patterns of verbal and other behaviour oftentimes do not fit into established frameworks of culture and linguistic identity. However, although multiculturalism and multilingualism have become common, the categories with which culture, language and identity are described often obscure these complexities of social reality. Categories like cultures, nations or lang uages, categories that describe the world as materialising in static, bounded systems, draw an overly simple picture. Yet, they are still relevant for describing social life. It would be difficult to give an account of multicultural identity, as in the example above, without making reference to the concepts that are put into question through the existence of such identities. The notion of 'zombie category' (Beck, 2001) illustrates this paradoxical situation. Zombies are creatures that are dead and alive at the same time.

A concept that is crucial for the continuing relevance of such 'zombies', and that is the focus of this book, is the notion of language, in its function of denoting distinct and separate verbal systems. National cultures, for example, are co-defined through languages, and membership of a culture (or a sub-culture thereof) usually depends on language competence. The cultural autonomy of national and ethnic groups is typically legitimised by a language that proves their existence, and that is conceptualised as self-contained. Despite this important social function of languages, an understanding of the concept of language as a culturally constructed category has received relatively little attention. Even so, like nation,gender or class, the concept of language, as describing a distinct structural entity, has not fallen from heaven. Languages as bounded entities, marking cultural boundaries, have developed historically and are the result of specific discourses. They are central in imaginations of national cultures and are the result of language ideologies that are historically related to national epistemology and colonialism (see e.g. Errington, 2008; Gal & Irvine, 1995; Irvine, 2001; Irvine & Gal, 2009; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007; Pennycook, 2004; Pratt, 1987).

During the 20th century, the discipline of linguistics tended to regard linguistic systems, understood as separate entities, as fundamental and unquestioned objects of study. Therefore, the analysis of the discursive construction and the study of the cultural, political and social relevance of languages have remained somewhat marginal linguistics. Language ideologies that are found in linguistics often implicitly confirm the idea of the existence of culturally and linguistically homogenous groups and usually consider the language use of social elites to be 'a language': 'To speak of the language, without further specification, as linguists do, is tacitly to accept the official language of a political unit' (Bourdieu, 1980 [2000]: 468). To regard the official language of a nation as basis for research, without questioning its ontological status, is an instance of methodological nationalism. Methodological nationalism has been defined as the 'assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world' (Wimmer & Schiller, 2002: 301). Historically, it has developed on the grounds of the fact that '[t]he epistemic structures and programmes of mainstream social sciences have been closely attached to, and shaped by, the experience of modern nation-state formation' (Wimmer & Schiller, 2002: 303).

In an age of globalisation, it has become apparent that nations, cultures and languages are no 'natural' entities. Yet, how can we talk about such 'zombie' categories without giving them a 'natural' status? How can we conceptualise language and identity in a world in which the connection between culture and language is no longer as straightforward as it seemed to be in the past? How can we use the concept of language without assuming that there are fixed communities to which languages are 'naturally' tied? To develop an understanding of how languages and their symbolic functions are constituted in discourse is central to grasp their role in the creation of community and society in a post-national context. The study presented in this volume is an attempt to get a hesitant glimpse of the contemporary discursive constitution of languages, assuming that the language–culture nexus needs to be put into question. Due to the relevance of these questions in many realms, I regard not only linguists, sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists as the potential audience of this book but consider to be a potential a reader anyone who has an interest in the role of language in a transnational world. This involves above all cultural anthropologists, but also students and scholars of sociology, of political sciences and of cultural studies, and teachers in urban classrooms who want to get a closer understanding of the ideologies underlying the language practices of their multilingual pupils.

Transnational Salsa – The Object of Study

In approaching language in an age of globalisation empirically, I will try to avoid methodological...