MARKY JEAN-PIERRE PHD, EDD.
Nou bay zafè lang nan yon gwo enpòtans. Dayè, nou ta ka menm di, pale se egziste pou yon lòt (Frantz Fanon, 1952).
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. […] For it is implicit that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other (Frantz Fanon, 1952).
Nous attachons une importance fondamentale au phénomène du langage. Etant entendu que parler, c’est exister absolument pour l’autre (Frantz Fanon, 1952).
Speaking more than one language, or simply put, plurilingualism, is a sign of our acknowledgment of, and a statement to, our humanity, a reclamation of our membership to this humanity as a social corps; and our desire for the expression of our voice in search of other voices.
My framework on language re-appropriation allows for an analysis of the speaking subject facing its creative linguistic act and language ideology as a multifaceted force that can either foster progress when critical consciousness is actuated or intersects with the unhappy consciousness of the speaking subject facing the crisis of alienation
Ideology is powerful but is not fixed over time. It is sometimes contested and can be challenged. Likewise, language ideology is powerful as a discourse but is not fixed over time. It can be contested and challenged depending on the need of a speech community.
The notion of language re-appropriation opens up an avenue for the consideration of the mosaic of languages that are present in a community. Language policy allows us to have the tools necessary to embark in language re-appropriation. Language pedagogy is the method by which language policy can be implemented. Plurilingualism is the result of language re-appropriation as an advanced stage in our civilization and the coupling of language policy and language pedagogy that, indeed, pivots around language re-appropriation.
We conceived our cultural character as a function of acceptance and denial, therefore permanently questioning, always familiar with the most complex ambiguities, outside all forms of reduction, all forms of purity, all forms of impoverishment. Our history is a braid of histories. We had a taste of all kinds of languages, all kinds of idioms (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, Confiant; 1990).
Language re-appropriation allow us to understand that languages are human values and that we can use them for our progress. Languages or plurilingualism allow us to approach other cultures with vehemence and to appreciate “the power of naming” of other speech communities.
Plurilingualism and interculturalism contribute to the development of multiliterate intellectuals
Being empowered through plurilingualism, iterculturalism, and multiliteracies, both tglobal South and global north subjects become more sophisticated subjects who may stand beyond the cleavage global South-global North and therefore become an empowered agent of global justice.
We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. (Bakhtin: 1981, p. 271)