Peripheral Multilingualism

Peripheral multilingualism

Sociolinguistic ethnography of contestation and innovation in multilingual Sámi, Corsican, Irish and Welsh indigenous and minority language contexts.

Peripheral multilingualism examines contestation and innovation in multilingual Sámi, Corsican, Irish and Welsh indigenous and minority language contexts. Starting from the premise that the relative fixity and fluidity of language boundaries are emergent properties of interaction, we focus on the tensions and creativity that arise from complex and changing multilingual processes, practices and experiences in these contexts. We argue that peripheral multilingual minority language sites are particularly revealing for rethinking what multilingualism means as they call into question the very nature of categories like “language” and “speaker”. We adopt a collaborative, multisited ethnography together with a discourse studies approach to identify and explore linguistic, social and ideological characteristics of peripheral multilingualism present across these indigenous and minority language contexts.