Multilingualism, sociolinguistics and theories of linguistic form: some unfinished reflections

In this paper I attempt to make the case that those of us who take multilingualism to be the unmarked case must work towards an alternative theory of linguistic form because if we don’t what most of us do will continue to be seen as what Dasgupta (2000) refers to as a sweeping up operation. I shall argue that it is not enough to merely celebrate multilingualism or to use its existence to dismiss what cannot be dismissed or to shift attention from language to language institutions. Our commitment to multilingualism must lead us to combat the prediliction of the theoretician of form to parade distributional regularities as the picture of the undismissable and indispensible native speaker (cf. Coulmas, 1981). Fortunately, natural laboratories called multilingual contexts furnish abundant evidence for the construction of such a theory. They show that the routine abridgement of our linguistic competence is unwarranted but also that they have, as Haugen and others suggested in the past, important implications for the construction of monolingual grammars. The only option we have, I argue, is to refuse to renew the agreement we all signed almost a century ago and to work towards a new theory of linguistic form.

Research highlights
► Limitations of generativism.
► Limitations of contemporary sociolinguistics.
► Importance of evidence from contact.
► Reinterpretation of sociolinguistics.