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Project

Project MIDP IV (Multilingual Information and informatics Development) : Multilingualism from below.

In standard accounts of language policy and language planning, language users are too often viewed as the 'passive receivers' of linguistic decisions taken at the highest levels of state organization. In defiance of this tendency, the MIDP IV project wants to accentuate that subalternity involves, rather than excludes, agency. Through their everyday language practices and their discursive perceptions and interpretations of linguistic realities, those who are supposed to 'live' the language policies never submissively 'implement' them, but, appropriating them, steer them in novel, unforeseen directions. It is these dialectic processes of interaction between what is designed from above and how it is responded to from below which give shape to societies' overall patterns of multilingualism. This is the focus of the MIDP IV-fieldwork in the Xhariep (Free State Province, South Africa) and also the focus of the publication in which this research and other international research on the topic is reported on.
Date:1 Jan 2008 →  31 Dec 2010
Keywords:SOCIETAL MULTILINGUALISM, LANGUAGE CONTACT
Disciplines:Linguistics