Back in Germany and last week, I gave a talk at the GAPS conference in Münster, Germany. GAPS (formerly ‚ASNEL‘, the Association for the Study of the New Literatures) is now the ‚Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien (Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies) and hosted a conference on ideologies in postcolonial texts and contexts.
I spoke about language choices in Belizean literature (Zee Edgell’s Beka Lamb in particular) and how they are indexically linked to social, historical and political discourses that exist in Belize. A main aspect was to develop an understanding that the symbolic meaning of using ‚English‘ should not be looked at within colonial dichotomies (colonizer vs colonized) but that due to processes of localization, the symbolic meaning of a language is complex, created in a multiplex space and very much embedded in local and regional histories (which of course does not mean that the history of colonization would not be part of that). Looking more closely into postcolonial (anti-binary) theory would certainly be fruitful for (socio)linguistics.
I also saw other interesting talks on language ideologies, for example by Lionel Wee on language ideologies in Singapore (and linguistic chutzpah) and by some younger researchers who work on language ideologies and the Creole – English context in the Caribbean (as did, for example, Eva Canan Hänsel and Glenda Leung). Great that linguistic studies on language ideologies become more visible in the German-speaking world!
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