Urban Plurilingualism: Research Perspectives

An ideology of unilingualism as the natural human condition is argued to underlie Swiss policies regarding linguistic territories & official languages, as the administrative response to de facto linguistic diversity is to deploy multiple languages in a manner that guarantees each citizen the right to be unilingual. Official bilingualism of this type is shown to contradict the increasingly multilingual reality of Biel/Bienne, an officially bilingual Swiss city, where the need to address the language needs of immigrant children challenges the school language policy & cannot be met by a focus on English as a lingua franca. The multiplicity of different language practices observed in Biel/Bienne give empirical support to the replacement of essentialist conceptions of language & language varieties by a perspective in which situationally appropriate deployment of variational competence is negotiated by participants in each communicative interaction. References. Adapted from the source document