ERIC Number: EJ1119110
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016-Nov-1
Pages: 25
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0167-8507
EISSN: N/A
Migrants' Alternative Multi-Lingua Franca Spaces as Emergent Re-Producers of Exclusionary Monolingual Nation-State Regimes
Sabaté Dalmau, Maria
Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, v35 n6 p649-673 Nov 2016
From a critical sociolinguistic perspective, this article investigates the written linguistic practices of 20 labor migrants from heterogeneous backgrounds who organized their life trajectories in an "ethnic" call shop in a marginal neighborhood near Barcelona. This was a late capitalist institution informally providing the undocumented with survival resources off the radar from governmental authorities. By drawing on interviews and visual materials gathered over a two-year fieldwork project, I report on the amalgamations of allochthonous and autochthonous codes which function as the multi-lingua franca of these alternative shelters, which have now colonized the globalized urban landscape. I argue that these translinguistic practices speak of the ethnolinguistic identities with which migrants try to secure subsistence. I show, though, that transnational populations simultaneously map their in-group codes upon a unified floor where the use of only global Spanish is fostered. Users sanction their linguistic hybridity and self-correct into hegemonic standard norms which index "integration" and fully-fledged citizenship statuses, delegitimizing their linguistic capitals. I conclude that the migrants' grassroots mobilization of both linguistic resistance and regimentation within a single discursive space where exclusionary sociolinguistic orders could be contested uniquely unveils the ways in which they challenge, but paradoxically re-produce, the monolingual nation-state regimes of their host society.
Descriptors: Multilingualism, Interviews, Urban Areas, Sociolinguistics, Written Language, Migrants, Ethnic Groups, Neighborhoods, Laborers, Disadvantaged, Foreign Countries, Social Systems, Undocumented Immigrants, Emergency Shelters, Self Concept, Language Usage, Second Languages, Social Integration, Citizenship, Spanish, Language Variation, Monolingualism, Romance Languages, Native Language, Official Languages
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
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Language: N/A
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Spain (Barcelona)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A