Are languages real? Communicative situations, grammatical systems, and ethnolinguistic constructions

Traditionally, structural approaches to linguistics have been based on idealisations positing distinct languages spoken in a homogeneous setting. This has been changing to more inclusive perspectives that take into account variability and crosslinguistic interactions. However, the underlying assumptions of monolingualism as the unmarked case and ethnolinguistic boundaries as the basis of grammatical systems have remained largely unchanged. As modern sociolinguistics has shown, these are social constructs based on European nation-state building and colonialism that cannot capture the fluidity and dynamics of language in settings of linguistic diversity. I discuss the challenges of these Western constructs for linguistic research and propose a linguistic architecture that takes this into account and is based on ‘com-sits’, representations of communicative situations that serve as an organising domain for linguistic structure and make bounded languages optional. I illustrate the implications of this approach and present an ongoing project that builds on this and investigates the impact of monolingually vs. multilingually oriented societies, comparing multilingual speech communities and their language use across different com-sits in Germany, Australia, Singapore (in cooperation with Sun He, NIE), and Namibia.

Heike Wiese got her PhD in 1997 at Humboldt-University Berlin, and finished her habilitation in German and General Linguistics in 2003. She has held posts, as a visiting professor, at Yale University (Linguistics Department), and as a full professor at Potsdam University; since 2019, she is a professor at the Humboldt-University Berlin, where she holds a chair for German in Multilingual Contexts and is the speaker of the Centre “Language in Urban Diversity”. Her research interests focus on linguistic diversity, language variation and multilingualism, with a projects on the grammar-pragmatics interface and linguistic architecture, and on sociolinguistic patterns of discrimination and us/them dichotomies based on standard language ideologies and monolingual habitus. Her research includes new urban dialects in Northwestern Europe and Subsaharan Africa, and heritage language contexts in Germany, Namibia, and the US.