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Is There Linguistic Life After High School? Longitudinal Changes in The Language in Society 40, 617–648. doi:10.1017/S0047404511000704 Is there linguistic life after high school? Longitudinal changes in the bilingual repertoire in metropolitan Barcelona KATHRYN WOOLARD Department of Anthropology, 0532 University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0532, USA [email protected] ABSTRACT Do linguistic identities formed in high school endure after adolescence? Do age-related linguistic differences represent community trends over historical time, or are they age-graded practices that change over biographical time? Catalan advocates worry that perceived Castilian dominance in adolescents’ peer relations and media consumption forecasts the community’s sociolin- guistic future. To investigate the possibility of change in bilingual repertoires after adolescence, participants in a 1987 ethnographic study of high school students in metropolitan Barcelona were reinterviewed after twenty years. The reinterviews of L1 Castilian-speakers showed increased mastery and use of Catalan even among those who had been functionally monolingual and most resistant to Catalan in high school. Higher education, the workplace, romance, cosmopolitan travel, and parenthood were triggers of such postado- lescent change in the linguistic repertoire. Informants produce a common nar- rative attributing linguistic transformations to maturational processes that reduce the shame and intolerance of difference that inhibit adolescent second language use. (Bilingualism, second language acquisition, longitudi- nal research, language and identity, adolescence, Catalan, Catalonia)* INTRODUCTION This analysis of changes in bilingual repertoires over biographical time was trig- gered by a question raised at a conference at Yale University, where I had discussed difficulties that Castilian-speaking high school students encountered in using Catalan in metropolitan Barcelona in the late 1980s (Woolard 1997). A young man in the front row spoke up and said, “You have just described my high school.” Blushing, I peered closely to see if I should have recognized him. No, no, he said, he was from a neighboring city, where he had attended a public school very similar to the one in my study. What I found accurately reflected his own experience, he continued, but what I had captured was just the first year of high school. People change, language use changes, the young man asserted, © Cambridge University Press, 2011 0047-4045/11 $15.00 617 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 04 Oct 2021 at 15:18:23, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404511000704 KATHRYN WOOLARD offering himself as an example. What happened later, as these kids moved through and beyond high school? In recent years interactional research on language and identity in Western (post) industrial societies has focused increasingly on adolescence, and particularly on late middle school and early high school years (Bucholtz & Hall 2004). Penelope Eckert has aptly called high school “a hothouse for the construction of identities,” particularly those that highlight oppositions (Eckert 1997:163). High school might be seen as a distinct chronotope in the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s formu- lation—that is, a time and a space or “space-time” that carries within it a distinctive logic of character development (Bakhtin 1981). The interactional sociolinguistic literature on youth language and identity suggests that a drive toward the social semiosis of distinction is a hallmark of Western teenage life. This does not in any way implicate a biological imperative; rather, this semiotic preoccupation of adolescence responds to the emphatic age segregation within these societies, and in particular to the total institutions that modern schools are, as Eckert has described so well (Eckert 1989, 1997:163). Culturally, adolescence in the industrial and post- industrial West is a period of specialization in the dramatized semiotics of social identity, to a degree if not of a kind rarely found at other life stages. Do the linguistic identities that are formed in the crucible of adolescence remain part of the individual’s habitus throughout the life course, or are they of more ephemeral significance to the individual’s identity across the lifespan? This is the underlying question raised by the student at Yale, and it is one to which our fields do not yet have a clear answer. On one hand, in bilingual as well as variation studies, early adolescence is often understood, implicitly or explicitly, as the end of a sociolinguistic critical period, a time that fairly decisively establishes the individual’s linguistic habitus (Labov 1972; Bourdieu 1991; cf. Eckert 1997; Sankoff 2004, 2006; and Mendoza- Denton 2008 for discussions of the question).1 On the other hand, studies from the language socialization and communities-of-practice perspectives posit that the acquisition of language practices is an ongoing project across the lifespan (see especially Eckert 1997 on this view). Kulick & Schieffelin (2004) attribute the idea that cultural competence is largely complete after adolescence to what they see as an outmoded enculturation framework. As they point out, socialization to identities (or what we might call incumbencies, e.g. as coworker, lover, mother) happens throughout our lives, and this will be socialization to and through language, just as in earlier stages. There is now considerable agreement that linguistic identities are not fixed but rather are multiple and constructed through active, although not unconstrained, choice among stylistic practices. As Bucholtz & Hall (2004:378) put it, social actors move between different communities of practice in their daily lives, and as they do so, different dimensions of identity and linguistic practices come to the fore. Rampton (1999) refers to this as the “vacating” and “inhabiting” of identities in interactional time. The pendulum of research has now swung very far toward this 618 Language in Society 40:5 (2011) Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 04 Oct 2021 at 15:18:23, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404511000704 IS THERE LINGUISTIC LIFE AFTER HIGH SCHOOL? emphasis on the synchronic, interactional variability of an individual’s identity. There has been less attention to diachronic change in identities and linguistic reper- toires across biographical time, not just as people move between different commu- nities or personae in their daily lives, but as they vacate and inhabit different postadolescent life stages over the years. Variationist sociolinguists are currently attempting to find surer ways to dis- tinguish historical change—change in the speech of a community over time— from age grading—change in the speech of the individual as he or she moves through life stages (see especially Eckert 1997; Sankoff 2004, 2006). Noting that there has been no concerted study of variation from a life-course perspective, Eckert (1997:152) raises the questions of the extent to which a speaker’s language can change over the life course, and how any such changes are embedded in socially constructed, culturally specific life stages and life events (Sankoff 2004 and Keim 2007 are examples of research that addresses these issues). These questions are especially significant for bilingual minority-language societies, although the answers may be different from those found for language- internal phonological variation. In such settings, youth language behavior is gener- ally monitored by laypeople and professionals alike as a harbinger of societal language maintenance or shift. Reading age-related linguistic differences as repre- senting sociolinguistic change over time (just as variationists do in what Labov (1963) dubbed the “apparent time” interpretation of synchronic evidence), minority-language planners and activists often think that teenagers’ language use is a diagram of the community’s sociolinguistic future. “As our teenagers go, so goes the language” is a common belief. Indeed, in my own research on Catalonia, I have tended to write as if beginning high school students are at a decisive devel- opmental stage, consolidating ethnolinguistic identities and verbal repertoires that will become those of their adult selves. But there has not been much systematic study to test the assumptions on which this interpretation rests. (See Williams & Nussbaum 2001 for a critique of the developmental-stage view of identity for- mation in general, and Thurlow 2005 for an application of this critique to other issues in adolescent communication.) There have been some exceptions, particularly in earlier studies of bilingual communities, when causal explanations of language maintenance and shift were more frequently debated. For example, in a quantitative study of aggregate longi- tudinal data from francophone Canada, the sociologist Stanley Lieberson (1970) found bilingualism to wax and wane with the life cycle, corresponding particularly to participation in the labor market. In a challenge to Joshua Fishman’s model of the relation of diglossia and language maintenance, Pedraza, Attinasi & Hoffman (1980) also found some evidence of a life-cycle factor, suggesting that when some of the adolescents in their study of Puerto Ricans in New York took up young-adult roles, they revived Spanish linguistic skills that they had seemed
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