Another arrow for the quiver: a new methodology for multilingual researchers

What is it about?

Imagine if you will a landscape, a deep riverine channel. On one side we have the linguistic landscape which tells us something about the language ecology of the place, on the other side we have survey data and demographics, which provide a similar yet different picture of the situation. But always and ever there is a yawning chasm below through which flows the river of actual speech used in the day-to-day interactions of the general speech community. In terms of volume, this river of oral and auditory language in the valley below is enormous by comparison with the subsets available from the other perspectives which can only provide distant views of what it is that we seek to know about. The challenge is, then, to be able to dip into the river and taste its waters more directly. This paper reports on a promising methodology for multilingualism studies that was trialled at the National Institute of Education (NIE) on the campus of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in 2018. The methodology named the Aural-Oral Transect (AOT) is a systematic, easy-to-implement, unbiased way of collecting quantitative data on spoken language use in multilingual settings, and the data arising from its application provides a snapshot of the aural-oral landscape, that is, the landscape of ‘heard speech’, a landscape that is available to the ears rather than the eyes. With its ability to provide easy access to data on the actual speech habits of members of a multilingual community, the wide employment of the AOT could bring forth a revolution in multilingual studies. The AOT is not intended to supplant or obviate tried and tested data collection approaches, rather it is promoted here as an additional tool for gathering data that has hitherto remained out of reach, another arrow for the researcher’s quiver.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

If you are looking for a fresh take on Linguistic Landscapes, this paper offers a new methodology that you could use. If you think that the linguistic landscape in your area does not match closely with the oral landscape, then the new AOT methodology will help you examine this more closely. If you think census and other demographic data is only providing a distorted view of language vitality, the AOT methodology may be able to help.

Perspectives