The Vitality of Urban Multilingualism

Itesh Sachdev and Sarah Cartwright

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. [...] And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Book of Genesis, Chapter 11, Verses 1, 5–9 (King James Translation)

The Biblical Babel myth is frequently used to illustrate the historical desirability of monolingualism and conversely the confusions caused by the existence of many languages. In fact, as Blanc (2008) argued in using the quotation above, multilingualism (and plurilingualism) were widely accepted and enriching aspects of ancient societies. Indeed there is a large amount of research suggesting that not only is the vitality of multilingualism high in the ever-expanding urban centres of the world today (Edwards, 1994), but that multilingualism has been normative for millennia (Adams, 2003; Blanc, 2008; Mullen & James, 2012).

In recent years we have become used to a rather different, celebratory discourse countering the 'monolingual conservatism' of the past, with increasing references to the large number of languages spoken in urban localities as an important resource:

200 languages: Manchester revealed as most linguistically diverse city in western Europe. (Brown, 2013)

Home to around 800 different languages, New York is a delight for linguists. (Turin, 2012)

In fact, although useful for headlines, the overall number of languages spoken is a somewhat blunt measure of the vitality of multilingualism in urban contexts. A more systematic and nuanced characterisation is attempted in this chapter by introducing the notion of the vitality of urban multilingualism (VUM). It is defined as the degree to which multilingualism and plurilingualism are able to thrive and flourish in an urban conglomeration. Based on the notion of ethnolinguistic vitality (Giles et al., 1977; Sachdev & Bourhis, 1993; Sachdev et al., 2012) and considered under factors of demography, status and institutional support (and control), the vitality of urban multilingualism may serve as a useful heuristic to frame data obtained from the LUCIDE cities in Europe, Australia and Canada.

This chapter charts evidence for the vitality of multilingualism in antiquity to the relatively recent 18th-century 'one language: one nation' ideology that has left such a lasting legacy into the 21st century. The second section provides an introduction to the LUCIDE cities as portrayed by the City Reports and is followed by an analysis of vitality under the subheadings of demography, status and institutional support and control. The chapter concludes with some notes, including a reminder about the intergroup nature of multilingual communication in modern urban contexts.

From Antiquity to the 21st Century

Turning once more to the Babel myth, Blanc (2008) began his essay on multilingualism in the Ancient Near East with the reference to the City of Babel, where multiple languages were introduced and dispersed from the tower city of monolingualism: the vitality of urban multilingualism in antiquity. The existence of multilingualism has been attributed to intergroup contact, interaction, co-existence and conflict leading to integration, assimilation and/or exclusion in societies. Contacts between those who spoke different languages from varied social, cultural, religious, ethnic and economic backgrounds and aspirations, coupled with trade and commerce, exchanges (cultural, educational and diplomatic), migration and exogamy, invasion and colonisation, have all been described as contributors to the vitality of multilingualism in ancient times.

Having credited the Sumerians with the invention of irrigation, urbanisation, and writing, Blanc (2008) discusses evidence for multilingualism found on a variety of materials including tablets (clay, stone), obelisks, rock faces, copper, coins, papyrus and parchment. He charts the evolution of ancient multilingualism over several thousand years in Europe and the Middle East from the Proto-Elamite period of the 3rd millennium bc through Egyptian, Sumerian, Persian and Aramaic, up to the Hellenistic Greek (bc 331–323) and Roman periods. He correlates the rise and fall of empires, commerce and trade with material evidence for multilingualism in ancient Greek, Egyptian and Roman times, including languages such as Hebrew, Aramaic, Egyptian, Lycian, Greek and Latin. For instance, he cites the Rosetta Stone, written in two languages and three scripts, as evidence for multilingualism during the Ptolemaic period, and refers to the emergence of a class of bilingual officials needed to mediate between the local Egyptian-speaking population and the Greek-speaking administration and immigrants.

Archival evidence in material written form arguably underestimates the degree, function and spread of spoken multilingualism although there are some edicts as well as liturgical and epistolary correspondence that are closer to spoken forms. According to Blanc:

On rather rare occasions we catch a glimpse of the spoken language, even of pronunciation, as in the Book of Judges (12:6), where the Gileadites challenged their Ephremite enemies to say the pass-word 'shibboleth', which they could only pronounce 'sibboleth'. 42,000 of them failed to pass the first phonetic test in recorded history and were put to death. (Blanc, 2008: 3)

Rochette (2011) provides a detailed account of Latin in the Roman Empire. Internal governmental communications from the Emperor and other official documents were in Latin. It was also the language of the army (until the beginning of the 7th century), although, unlike in the Hellenistic period (Billows, 2005), the Romans did not aim to impose their language. In the eastern Roman Empire, laws and official documents were regularly translated into Greek from Latin. Latin–Greek bilingualism has been noted among Roman and Greek intellectual elites and both languages were in active use by government officials and the Church during the 5th century. From the 6th century, Greek...