The Mediterranean island of Corsica, a French territory, experiences mobility in the form of locals’ mass exodus to the Continent, the arrival of immigrants at rates similar to Paris, and a booming tourist industry with millions of visitors each year. What, then, are the multilingual dynamics on the island—languages emerging from above (French), a middle ground (Corsican), and sideways (languages of immigrants and tourists)? What multilingual subjectivities are articulated? Mendes analyzes competing conceptualizations of linguistic multiplicity, what he calls countervocalities, in which languages are constantly rearranging in variously imagined hierarchies.Countervocalities explores different dimensions of institutional multilingualism, namely those related to policies, practices, and ideologies within and extending from education settings. The chapters address reclamation, imposition, and erasure of different languages on Corsica, moving from inside the school, to artefacts from the schoolscape, to discourses about language teaching. The study fruitfully analyzes an array of interactional and artefactual data types. This productive alternation offers a cross-section of attitudes toward and representations of multilingual dynamics while foregrounding the role of mobility and language in understandings of place and what counts as local.
Alexander Mendes has worked in interdisciplinary French studies from the vantage point of sociocultural and applied linguistics. He holds a PhD in French from the University of California, Davis.
‘Countervocalities is altogether an important contribution to the growing interdisciplinary interest in multilingualism. Mendes reflects at length throughout the text on his own positionality, beginning each chapter with an anecdote from his own experiences on Corsica, which results in writing that is engaging and thought-provoking while simultaneously engaged, heartfelt, and honest.’ Cameron Flynn, The French Review
