Simultanéité dans la langue (Bakhtine)
Il n'existe pas de locuteur monolingue

 

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.

(Abstract) Influenced by the work of Bakhtin, a sociolinguistics has begun to take shape in recent years that takes multiplicity, hybridity, and simultaneity as key concepts. Such a sociolinguistics should place bi- and multilingual speakers and communities at its center, rather than in their traditional place at the margins. Within the frame of a Bakhtinian concept of simultaneity in language, this article reconsiders translingual phenomena of codeswitching and so-called interference, and brings into focus a relatively understudied third form, here called bivalency. It further considers the ambivalent and simultaneous messages that are communicated in linguistic contact zones, and speakers' simultaneous claims to more than one social identity. There can be analytical advantage in comparing the frequencies, functions, and relationships of these different forms of simultaneity in different political economies of language contact.

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(3—4) 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. Suzanne Romaine, in her book Bilingualism, observed how odd it would be to encounter one entitled Monolingualism, given the degree to which the monolingual is taken for granted as the normal human condition (1989:1). Modern linguistics is an unlikely fish to discover that water. 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."(footnote 1)

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(footnote 1) 1. The director spoke as both professional linguist and partisan. Working within the conflict perspective developed by Catalan sociolinguists as a critique of diglossia, the director went on to argue that a community cannot simultaneously have two languages on an equal footing:

"Tambe es una equivocacio voler mantenir durant molt de temps un bilinguisme permanent perque aixd, una Uengua es un instrument de comunicacio, i amb un basta. I quan n'hi ha dos forcpsament la situacio es anormal, eh?… o be t'ho has de repartir a base de convenis o sempre n'hi ha una que queda per sobre de 1'altra" (interview, July 22,1980). "It's also a mistake to want to maintain permanent bilingualism over a long time, because a language is an instrument of communication and with one, enough. And when there are two, the situation is perforce abnormal, eh?… either you have to divide them up by an accord or there will always be one on top of the other."

A Catalan sociolinguist (Emili Boix, personal communication, 1998), has noted that this quote sounds "weird," given that this director defended official status for both languages in the sociolinguistic debates in Catalonia. However, I believe that just underlines the tenacity of the monolingual ideology.

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In contrast, Mary Louise Pratt speculated several years ago (1991) on the novel contributions that might be made by a linguistic theory that assumed 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 would 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.

Work in a number of fields, including linguistic anthropology, has focused on phenomena of multiplicity, hybridity, and simultaneity in language and speech (Duranti and Goodwin 1996; see Holquist 1990 for a discussion of Bakhtin's emphasis on simultaneity). A sociolinguistics that takes multiplicity and simultaneity as keys is arguably one that should place bilingual and multilingual speakers and communities at its center, as prototypes rather than exceptions. New insights could derive from such a shift in perspective.

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" (1981:281; see also Bakhtin 1984). 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) 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 (1981:281).

Within the overall concern that Holquist dubs dialogism, Bakhtinian simultaneities in language include: hybridity, "the mixing, within a single concrete utterance, of two or more different linguistic consciousnesses" (1981:429); heteroglossia, "that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide,... that which systematic linguistics must always suppress" (1981:428); and polyglossia, "the simultaneous presence of two or more national languages interacting within a single cultural system" (1981:431).