Project description
Research design
The CODILAC project compares the role of English in seven representative and heterogenous multilingual world regions which represent individual projects (Botswana, Cyprus, Kurdistan Region Iraq, Nigeria, Northeast India, the Philippines, and Tanzania). Within the CODILAC project, we investigate common sociolinguistic patterns and outcomes of language contact, migration, and globalization, but we are also interested in the unique local characteristics and differences characterizing each individual project. More specifically, we are interested in the patterns and limits of multilingualism, speakers’ language repertoires, their Dominant Language Constellations, as well as the position of English in the relevant fabrics. Nevertheless, the overarching goal is a systematic comparison of different multilingual ecologies that include English according to a predefined set of dimensions.
Theoretical framework
The framework adopted is based on the concepts of multilingual ecologies (Vertovec 2007), language repertoires, and Dominant Language Constellation (DLC) (Aronin 2016; Aronin & Singleton 2012; Aronin & Melo-Pfeifer 2023; Lo Bianco & Aronin 2020). The main hypothesis pursued here is that most of the world’s linguistic diversity is converging on DLC of functional bilingualism and trilingualism in which English assumes a pivotal role. DLCs serve as individual and societal restrictors of otherwise superdiverse multilingual ecologies, here understood as an extended conception of Haugen’s (1972) language ecology. DLCs render these multilingual ecologies functional.
Research methods
The project produces comprehensive and comparable data sets that are enriched with extensive socio-economic background, ethnographic, and language use information. The core of the empirical work forms a contextually enriched and researcher assisted sociolinguistic online questionnaire that taps into the participants’ personal backgrounds and linguistic practices (counting code-switching), including their migration trajectories, their language repertoires, Dominant Language Constellations, and language biographies. In a second step, these sociolinguistic questionnaires will be flanked by semi-structured sociolinguistic interviews with a subsample of the above study participants during which the researchers will discuss the above-mentioned dimensions in more detail. These interviews will also leave room for elaborations on questions introduced in the online questionnaire and discussions of additional topics in the interviewees’ interest and potential concerns. The rationale of the Research Unit is to apply essentially the same research design to different locales around the world. This approach ensures the comparability of the collected data and of the obtained results.