Multilingual Brazil

Language Resources, Identities and Ideologies in a Globalized World

Emeritus Professor Marilyn Martin Jones from the School of Education will be joined by two of her collaborators from Brazil, Professor Marilda Cavalcanti and Associate Professor Terzinha Maher, both from the University of Campinas, to present on their ongoing research in Brazil and to launch their recently published book, 'Multilingual Brazil: Language Resources, Identities and Ideologies in a Globalized World.'

Their research and presentation will highight a new approach to the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, challenging long-held perceptions about a monolingual Brazil by exploring the different policies, language resources, ideologies and social identities that have emerged in the country’s contemporary plurilingual landscape. Their publicaion elucidates the country’s linguistic history to demonstrate its evolution to its present state, a country shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces both locally and globally, and explores different facets of today’s plurilingual Brazil, including youth on the margins and their cultural and linguistic practices; the educational challenges of socially marginalized groups; and minority groups’ efforts to strengthen languages of identity and belonging. Their work incorporates theoretical frameworks from other disciplines to provide a comprehensive picture of the social, political, and cultural dynamics at play in multilingual Brazil, with this event being of particular interest to scholars, researchers and students in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, cultural studies, and Latin American studies.

Professor Marilyn Martin Jones

Marilyn Martin-Jones is Emeritus Professor and former Director of the MOSAIC Centre for Research on Multilingualism. She has been involved in research on bilingualism and multilingualism in different regions of Britain for thirty years. She has undertaken three broad types of research: (1.) research on the use of multilingual resources in face-to-face interaction; (2.) research on multilingual literacy and the uses of texts in bilingual and multilingual settings; (3.) ethnographic research related to the processes involved in the translation of language policies into classroom practice.

Her research has been primarily sociolinguistic and ethnographic in nature and has been based in different research sites: in urban and rural settings, in community contexts as well as in schools, colleges and classrooms. She has a particular interest in multilingualism and gender and in the ways in which language and literacy practices contribute to the construction of identities in local life worlds, in institutional settings and in trans-local contexts.

She was co-editor (with Alexandra Jaffe) of the international journal Linguistics and Education, from 2004 – 2007 and she is also editor of a book series (with Joan Pujolar) Critical Studies in Multilingualism (Routledge).

Marilda C. Cavalcanti is Professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil, where she is also a CNPq/Brazil researcher.

Terezinha Machado Maher is Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in bilingual education and language and diversity.