FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVE TO PLURILINGUAL COMMUNICATION IN HETEROGENEOUS SPEECH COMMUNITIES

Abstract

Prescriptive linguistic theories have viewed communicative competence for multilinguals as attainable separately in the different languages they use. However, plurilingualism – an emerging, 21st-century concept in communication studies – views communication in multilingual communities as a means, not an end. The functional method, as opposed to the earlier prescriptive methods, employed in this essay, views communicative competence, not as a goal to be achieved but as a process to be involved in. It was discovered that it is not necessarily so-called competencies in individual languages that aids the inclusion and survival of multilinguals in their heterogeneous speech communities. Rather, it is the continuous, deliberate and mixed use of multiple languages in various communicative events. This essay concluded that this communicative competence is, therefore, not per se attainable as a stop but only as a process. It was also recommended that language users trying to survive in plurilingual speech communities should be involved in active and continuous conversations across the different, available languages.