Redefining Multilingualism in Museums: A Case for Broadening Our Thinking

Museum professionals have long advocated for museums as valuable spaces for education, civic engagement (Archibald 2004; DSP-groep 2011; Hein 2005) and even as places that inspire social change in our communities (Brown, Wood, and Salgado 2009; Sandell 1998). Yet paradoxically, as we argue for the very real value of museums in society, we also struggle with actually engaging allmembers of our communities regardless of class, gender, age, race/ethnicity, or even linguistic background (see, for example, Farrell and Medvedeva 2010). In the case of language, we have arguably been slower to recognize and identify strategies for including multilingual audiences. The reasons for this vary and include, among others, the belief that linguistic diversity is not common, the prediction that youth will primarily speak the dominant language of the nation (meaning it is not necessary to invest in learning how to serve multilingual groups), the view that someone in a group can translate (for instance, children in a family group), and the opinion that developing multilingual resources is too challenging and cost-prohibitive. The prominence of one, or a few, dominant languages used in “official” capacities such as government or business tends to give the impression that linguistic diversity is uncommon. Yet this is far from true. Within Europe’s 48 countries, for instance, approximately 250 indigenous languages are spoken, and migration has made Europe increasingly more multilingual. London, for example, counts more than 300 languages spoken as “home languages” (Gorter et al. 2009). In the United States, more than 60 million people speak a language other than English at home; of this population, one in five are school-aged children. Moreover, many U.S. residents who speak a language other than English at home are not immigrants; 44% of those individuals were born in the United States (Ryan 2013). And, this does not count the estimated 70 million people around the world who use sign language as their first language (World Federation of the Deaf, nd). museums & social issues, Vol. 10 No. 1, April, 2015, 2–7