Kees de Bot and Sinfree Makoni, Language and aging in multilingual contexts

Extract

Kees de Bot and Sinfree Makoni, Language and aging in multilingual contexts. (Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 53.) Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Pp.vi., 162. Hb. $99.95.

This book raises many questions. Depending on one's disciplinary perspective, this slim volume could be seen as uneven in its coverage and, as one reviewer has commented, its intended audience is not always clear (Chen 2006). Notwithstanding, it is an important book, on two levels. Its ostensible purpose is to present a contextualizing summary of language and aging, designed to tug readers away from a monolingual, Eurocentric focus. Beneath and through its chapters runs its second stream of thought, an effort to push readers to understand that many older people, and especially those speaking more than one language, are aging out-of-place, dis-placed, cut off by new caretaking venues and other-languaged caregivers, from their own places, those sites once indexed by their language (Lamb 2000, Neilson 2003). As Arjun Appadurai comments in an interview, “Sites, in the sense of secure locations for the practices of everyday life, may have largely vanished” (Baldauf & Hoeller 1999). What we have previously assumed about adult language, and about language and aging processes, may also need to change.