Il n'existe pas de locuteur monolingue

Jeudi 10 novembre 2011

Les langues dans la mesure où elles sont parlées sur la scène langagière, les langues en action ou in performance dans le dialogue et les arts de parole, ne sont pas des monades et ne s'excluent pas les unes les autres; au contraire, elles sont en intersection et en interaction. Il n'y a pas de locuteur ni de milieu social strictement monolingue, le langage est hétéroglotte de part en part.

Mikhaïl Bakhtine
Du discours romanesque, trad. française par Daria Olivier
dans M. Bakhtine, Esthétique et théorie du roman, Paris, Gallimard, 1978, p. 112

Ainsi donc, à tout moment donné de son existence historique, le langage est complètement diversifié [trad. américaine partout citée heteroglot from top to bottom]: c'est la coexistence incarnée des contradictions socio-idéologiques entre présent et passé, entre différentes époques du temps passé, différents groupes socio-idéologiques du temps présent, entre courants, écoles, cercles, etc. Ces «parlers» du plurilinguisme s'entrecroisent de multiples façons [trad. américaine these “languages” of heteroglossia intersect each other], formant des «parlers» neufs socialement typiques.

Excellent commentaire de Kathryn Woolard (San Diego)

woolard_simultaneity.pdf — Kathryn A. Woolard,
Simultaneity and Bivalency as Strategies in Bilingualism,
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Volume 8, No. 1, 1999, pp. 3-29

In spite of long-standing protests from sociolinguists, bilingualism and multilingualism traditionally have been cast not only in popular belief but also in social and linguistic theoretical perspectives as anomalous, marginal, and in need of explanation. […] The monolingual point of view has so dominated the Western intellectual tradition that it has been invoked by minority-language partisans, often themselves bilingual, in many language conflicts. For example, the first director of language policy in newly autonomous Catalonia once informed me that bilingualism was perforce abnormal “because a language is an instrument of communication, and with one, enough.”

…

In contrast, [one should assume] that the normative, the most revealing, speech situation takes place not in a homogeneous monolingual speech community but in a multilingual "contact zone." In such a zone, interactants […] share only partially overlapping linguistic repertoires. In some respects, such a linguistic theory, or at least a sociolinguistic theory, has begun to take shape in recent years, under the influence of postmodem trends and, more importantly, of the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin.

…

Indeed, multilingual or polyglossic and macaronic literary forms were central sites for Bakhtin's elucidation of his vision of language as “heteroglot from top to bottom” (1981:291 [Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Ed. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Transl. by Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981; trad. française, p. 112 citée en exergue ci-dessus]). The thoroughgoing multiplicity and heterogeneity of language are the well-known hallmarks of his theory of discourse. For Bakhtin, language is never really unitary but, rather, lies in the intersection of multiple voices or speaking positions and competing centrifugal and centripetal forces. Much of the innovative impact of Bakhtin's conceptual system comes from his rejection of binarism and the "dialectical either/or" (Holquist 1990:41 [Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, London: Routledge, 1990]) of structuralist understandings of paradigmatic relations. In their place, Bakhtin sees in language forms a "both/and" that is not a mere wavering between two mutually exclusive possibilities but a real simultaneity of contrasting elements in tension…