Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on regionalization and globalization along the Silk Road from northwest China's Hexi corridor through Central Asia, in the context of China's "One Belt One Road" Strategic initiative. Much attention has been given in the literature to economic and policy-related aspects of globalization in Central Eurasia, but little attention has been paid to microlevel questions of how such changes spread. The paper examines the little researched phenomenon of societal multilingualism, personal plurilingualism in this region and arguing that the development of mobile multilingual sociolinguistic networks play an necessary role in the mediation of change and exchange in the region.

This paper supplements globalization literature by questioning to what extent discourses "travel" in a vacuum, that is, are appropriated wholesale, or in the process of travelling are resisted, or appropriated for local purposes, or transformed, even distorted, in implementation (Lindblad & Popkewitz, 2004; Silova, 2005), and by focusing on the role of societal multilingualism and personal plurilingualism as key elements mediating the interchanges between individuals and groups by which globalization does or does not occur, is resisted, or transformed. This emphasis on language is drawn from Charles Taylor's arguments for the validity of transcendental arguments (Taylor, 1995, pp. 20-33), where inquiry focuses on the examination of the necessary conditions for some phenomenon that is taken as given, or what Bourdieu has referred to as "the conditions of possibility" of a phenomenon (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 18). In this paper it is assumed that processes of global change are taking place, but that these processes themselves depend on interchange among peoples and across borders, which itself requires knowledge of the language(s) of others. The paper draws on statistical data on language, education and migration to demonstrate the degree of inbound and outbound mobility and the scale and scope of plurilingualism within the region. The paper also reviews the historical role and contemporary role of multilingual trading networks, in mediating change and exchange. The paper concludes that regionalization and globalization processes in Central Eurasia are indeed dependent on the previous broad and increasingly large-scale multilingualism and plurilingualism, that Central Asia's experience is not at all at the margins of globalization, but at its centre.