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‘Restricted’ and ‘General’ Complexity Perspectives on Social Bilingualisation and Language Shift Processes

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Abstract

Historical processes exert an influence on the current state and evolution of situations of language contact , brought to bear from different domains: the economic and the political, the ideological and group identities, geo-demographics, and the habits of inter-group use, among others. Clearly, this kind of phenomenon requires study from a complexical and holistic perspective in order to accommodate the variety of factors that belong to different levels and that interrelate with one another in the evolving dynamic of human languaging . The need in my view is for the restricted and general complexity approaches to come to a meeting of the minds, and take steps toward a mutual integration based on the acceptance of the shortcomings of each approach, achieving progress through a non-contradictory complementarity of perspectives. It must be conceded that the practical and methodological applications of basic complexical ideas need to be developed much farther in order to apply them to specific research. At the same time , the limits of complex adaptive systems as computational strategies must be accepted in the pursuit of a better understanding of the dynamic and evolutionary processes typical of human beings . New tools for the conception, apprehension and treatment of the data will need to be devised to complement existing ones and to enable us to make headway toward practices that better fit complexical perspectives. It seems obvious that human complexics must be seen as multi-methodological, insofar as necessary combining quantitative-computation methodologies and more qualitative methodologies aimed at understanding the historical mental and emotional world of people.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The model is built on the basis of a community using two languages, one dominant and one subordinate. Individuals are characterised as monolingual speakers of the dominant code , as bilingual with a preference for the dominant code , or as bilingual with a preference for the subordinate code .

  2. 2.

    Byrne and Callaghan take the same view that I do: “Agent -based models in particular remain trapped, when used in isolation, within a micro-emergent understanding of the social . The social is not merely micro-emergent and any account of it which ignores the reality of what we must call conventionally ‘social structure ’ is always going to be incomplete” (2014: 257).

  3. 3.

    That said, nobody can deny the importance of the studies conducted to date from the perspective of complex systems , or the utility of modelling , which has brought us nearer to the essential elements of processes and to the expression of their interrelationships with the utmost clarity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics, Sociocomplexity—Complexity, Communication and Sociolinguistics Group, CUSC—Research Centre for Sociolinguistics and Communication, UBICS—Universitat de Barcelona Institute of Complex Systems, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Albert Bastardas-Boada

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  1. Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics, Scripta (FFI2016-80482P), UBICS, CUSC, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Àngels Massip-Bonet

  2. Grupo de Ingeniería Lingüística, Instituto de Ingeniería, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México, Mexico

    Gemma Bel-Enguix

  3. Department de Lingüística General, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Albert Bastardas-Boada

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Bastardas-Boada, A. (2019). ‘Restricted’ and ‘General’ Complexity Perspectives on Social Bilingualisation and Language Shift Processes. In: Massip-Bonet, À., Bel-Enguix, G., Bastardas-Boada, A. (eds) Complexity Applications in Language and Communication Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04598-2_8

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