The material culture of multilingualism: moving beyond the linguistic landscape

Not all the constituents of societal or individual multilingualism (speaker, language, context and environment) have been researched equally to date. Multilingualism studies up to this juncture have theorised environment mostly as milieu, conceptualised usually in terms of people, i.e. community, family, school populations. Heretofore, the material culture of multilingualism has remained largely unresearched. This is surprising, since the environment of multilinguals is replete with material artefacts and objects (including technologically-enabled materialities) that represent their past and present real-life realities and which both reflect and influence languages and change language-related practices. Complementing present approaches to understanding the ecology of the multilingual environment in linguistic landscape research, this theoretical paper demonstrates that a study of materiality as a representation of its users is of considerable benefit to research approaches to multilingualism.