The geographical and cognitive mapping of multilingualism and identity

Various strands of linguistic enquiry which historically have been only tangentially connected share the goal of mapping the location of languages, in some cases geographically, in others cerebrally or cognitively. They are grounded in a tacit faith in the immediate reality of visual, spatial representation of where languages are, in us and in the world outside us – a faith which however some of their practitioners have been bringing into serious question. This presentation will examine
- linguistic geography, from late 19th-century dialect atlases to online mapping
ego-documents in which multilinguals tie their linguistic knowledge to locations
- studies of fMRI scans of multilinguals’ brain activity
- sociolinguistic studies of multilingualism
- applied psycholinguistic mapping of multilingual identity
in order to find overlaps in the methodologies used, the representations generated, and the problems articulated by practitioners, who only rarely collaborate across these enterprises, but can potentially profit by understanding the diverse conceptions of language on which each is based.