Multilingualism and Identity

Duff, P. (2015). Transnationalism, multilingualism, and identity. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 57-80.

ABSTRACT
Applied linguistics is a field concerned with issues pertaining to language(s) and literacies in the real world and with the people who learn, speak, write, process, translate, test, teach, use, and lose them in myriad ways. It is also fundamentally concerned with transnationalism, mobility, and multilingualism—the movement across cultural, linguistic, and (often) geopolitical or regional borders and boundaries. The field is, furthermore, increasingly concerned with identity construction and expression through particular language and literacy practices across the lifespan, at home, in diaspora settings, in short-term and long-term sojourns abroad for study or work, and in other contexts and circumstances. In this article, I discuss some recent areas in which applied linguists have investigated the intersections of language (multilingualism), identity, and transnationalism and present illustrative studies, and some recurring themes and issues.

A study of the limits of multilingual literary expression in print culture. Beginning with the insight that multilingual literature defies simple translation, Brian Lennon examines the resistance multilingual literature offers to book publication. Looking closely at the limit of multilingual literary expression and the literary journalism, criticism, and scholarship that comments on multilingual work, In Babel’s Shadow presents a critical reflection on the fate of literature in a world gripped by the crisis of globalization.

In accordance with the multilingual turn in SLA (May 2014), language education researchers are now directing more attention to the motivational dynamics associated with learning multiple languages, including the interrelationships between motivation and learners' sense of self. In contrast to research focused on language learners' psychological relationship to languages from the perspective of self-systems, this research instead takes a more identity-focused perspective that looks at motivation in light of learners' orientations towards ideological discourses associated with the languages they are learning. It draws on longitudinal qualitative interviews and supplementary data from a larger dataset of nineteen Chinese university students in Shanghai who are majoring in Japanese while continuing to study English, focusing on five cases in particular. The analysis highlights that the learners experienced a number of important identity-tensions as they attempted to reconcile ideological discourses on language with their own multi-layered identity positions and perspectives towards language learning. The discussion details the ways that learners mobilise their interpretive resources to evaluate instrumental and humanistic orientations towards language within macro-, meso-and micro-contexts and make agentive decisions that shape their motivational trajectories and multilingual identities.