Mundane multilingualism

Abstract

Abstract This chapter argues that teachers at Dutch-medium schools in Brussels displayed habitual views about language in interviews about their work, but these views were contradictory: multilingualism was as mundane for them as monolingualism was. It will be shown that contrary to the idea that teachers have a unidimensional monolingual habitus, teachers in interviews recruited both monolingualism and multilingualism to defend or criticize the suitability of a monolingual school policy. Teachers thus possessed the ideological ingredients of reproduction as much as those of criticism and change. The chapter reveals, moreover, that these teachers commonly placed multilingualism above monolingualism, in keeping with now widespread discourses about language. The concept of the monolingual habitus is thus partially confirmed by the data discussed in this chapter but also revealed as one-sided. This raises questions about other settings where a monolingual habitus is attributed to teachers.