Book of Abstracts
1 Contents
COMMITTEES ...... 2 PLENARY SPEAKERS ...... 3 FULL LENGTH PAPER PRESENTATIONS ...... 7 REFLEXIVE & POSITION PAPER PRESENTATIONS ...... 98 SHORT PAPER PRESENTATIONS ...... 114
Committees
Organising committee
Charlotte Taylor (University of Sussex) Stuart Dunmore (University of Sussex) Jasmin Kidgell (University of Sussex) Dario Del Fante (Institute for Computational Linguistics «A. Zampolli»)
Programme committee
Anita Auer (University of Lausanne) Tony Capstick (University of Reading) Simon Goodman (De Montford University) Sandra Jansen (University of Paderborn) Eljee Javier (University of Sussex) Andreas Musolff (University of East Anglia) Keith Perera (University of Sussex / St Paul’s Catholic College) Ben Rogaly (University of Sussex) Patricia Marion Ronan (Dortmund University of Technology) Melani Schroeter (University of Reading) Marc Scully (Mary Immaculate College) Franco Zappettini (University of Liverpool)
2 Plenary Speakers
Abstracts are alphabetized by surname of the lead author.
"Britain has always been a safe haven": Mythopoetic legitimation in UK immigration policy
Sam Bennett Adam Mickiewicz University
@samtbennett
Understanding mythopoesis (van Leeuwen 2008) as a form of legitimation through history, in this lecture I argue that myths are second order objectivations that integrate existing socially constructed objectivations into a cohesive story (Bennett 2022 forthcoming). Their taken-for- grantedness relies upon a ‘sanctioned ignorance’ (Spivak (1988) of other potential histories, a form of epistemic violence limiting what is considered valid knowledge. Myths can thus be understood as a “purposeful silencing through the dismissing of a particular context as being irrelevant” (Mayblin 2020). In this way, they form one part of a much wider web of interdiscursivly and intertextually connected texts that serve to symbolically construct a community. One space where such a process can be glimpsed is in governmental immigration White Papers, which overtly present a particular policy direction (through multiple genres – Bennett 2018). Through a critically discursive analysis however, it is possible to glimpse and demystify the covert mythopoetic legitimation strategies contained within them.
3 What if … there had never been settlers? Thinking about coloniality, migration and language
Ana Deumert University of Cape Town
Drawing on recent work that speaks to the ‘coloniality of migration’ (Rodríguez’ 2018, Turner/ Mayblin 2020) as well as my own reflections on the locus of enunciation in settler-colonial societies (Deumert 2018, 2019), I argue that understanding colonial histories is central to migration studies. Focusing on South Africa and Namibia I explore the historical entanglements between settler colonialism, enslavement (17th/18th centuries) and labour migration (19th/20th centuries, ongoing). Settler colonialism can be conceptualized as a form of exploitative migration. Driven by a politics of dispossession and racial capitalism, settler colonialism constituted not only one the largest movement of people across the world, but also set into motion – forcefully and violently – migration movements of those populations it wished to eliminate, yet who were needed on the plantations and mines. I argue that the locus of settler-colonial enunciation is not only found in the world’s setter colonies (from the United States to South Africa), but equally in the colonial metropoles where contemporary processes of migration link directly to these colonial histories. My talk seeks to close the gap between migration studies and current work on empire-coloniality-racism, exploring its sociolinguistic implications.
TBA
Federico Faloppa University of Reading
4 Conceptualising Motion in Media Discourses of Immigration: Event-structure, Perspective and Metaphor
Chris Hart Lancaster University
@_chris_hart
In this talk, I apply a cognitive linguistics lens to critically analyse representations of immigration in different semiotic modes and the interaction between them in multimodal texts and talk. The talk is structured in three parts. Given that migration is most fundamentally the movement of people from one place to another, in the first part, I start by outlining the ‘default motion event’ as it is encoded in English (Talmy 2000). I then go on to highlight some of the conceptual parameters along which attested language usages found in online news coverage of migration to the UK depart from this basic model to enact alternative construals which contribute to the legitimation of discriminatory social action. Such conceptual parameters relate, for example to the manner of motion, the time frame in which the motion event is construed as occurring, and the perspective from which it is construed. In the second part of the talk, I show how, in multimodal news texts, language and image may converge in encoding parallel conceptualisations of immigration so that, for example, metaphorical construals evoked by language usages may also receive representation in co-text images. Such intersemiotic convergence, I argue, has a ‘ratcheting’ effect in discursive constructions of prejudice and the legitimation of discriminatory action. I analyse language-image combinations in the form of new photographs and their captions. In the final part of the talk, I focus on gesture in the situated performance of anti-immigration discourse, taking as a case study the discourse of Nigel Farage. I show how many of the rhetorical moves associated with (de)legitimating discourse, including Othering and threat-construction through deictic distancing/proximising, quantification and denial, in situated discourse, are performed multimodally through specific gesture-speech combinations. I therefore argue that gesture is an important discursive means by which prejudice is performed in situated political discourse.
5 Religious conversion and migrant integration
Ingrid Piller Macquarie University
@Lg_on_the_Move
This lecture examines the intersection of conversion to Christianity and migrants’ social and linguistic integration. The lecture is based on research conducted jointly with Yining Wang. Conversion to Christianity is growing among Chinese migrants to Australia. We investigated the conversion journeys of a group of first-generation Chinese Australians as they intersect with their experiences of English language learning, hybrid identity formation, settlement, and parenting. Based on qualitative open-ended interviews with seven highly educated women who had migrated to Australia as adults and converted to Christianity within the first few years of settlement, we trace conversion as a key aspect of their social integration into the new society. The women experienced migration as an existential crisis of economic insecurity, loss of status, language barriers, marital problems, and parenting dilemmas. In the absence of the social networks they had lost through migration, they turned to churches for practical support. The support and community offered by church groups led them to accept a new belief system and completely transformed their lives. The long-term consolidation of the benefits of conversion were achieved through bilingual and bicultural practices and hybrid and adhesive identities, resulting in personal well-being and a high level of social integration. Christian beliefs also became a kind of objective standard that allowed them to bridge generational, linguistic, and cultural gaps with their second-generation children. We close with a discussion of the lessons that this research holds for secular institutions as they try to improve the social integration of newcomers.
6 Full Length Paper Presentations
Abstracts are alphabetized by surname of the lead author.
Spanish as a heritage language in Europe and the United States: how academic performance is affected by group identity and collective self-esteem
María Cecilia Ainciburu & David Rodríguez Velasco Nebrija University / University of Sienna / Queen's University Belfast [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Second generation, Spanish as heritage language, academic performance, group identity, collective self-esteem
Group identity and associated collective self-esteem is a factor that has relevance in migrant acculturation (Luhtanen & Crocker, 1992; Martínez-Martínez et al. 2007, Berham et al., 2018). This factor, well studied in first-generation immigrants is often neglected in research on heritage speakers, even more so when it comes to students schooled in the country of birth. The fact that these students have a mother tongue knowledge of the language of the country of residence and often citizenship seems to take for granted that the process of sociocultural integration has been completed. Research on the phenomenon of US ""Latinos"" (Belpoliti, & Fairclough, 2016; Simpson & Burnett, 2019). is more frequent than those on Spanish-speaking communities in Europe (Ainciburu & Buttazzi, 2020). This research seeks to compare the results of the application of the Collective Self-Esteem Scale (validated questionnaire, Spanish version) to three groups of university students with heritage Spanish in the USA, in Italy and in Germany (n=78). Subsequently, the data obtained are contrasted with academic performance (number of courses evaluated and scores obtained). The results show that ethnic self-esteem is higher in the North American group than in the Europeans. The correlation study shows a positive relationship between a higher value of ethnic identity and higher university performance of the students.
7 Education, migration and social inclusion: the case study of the Khouribga province of Morocco
Aicha El Alaoui, Sigamoney Naicker & Maneesh P University Sultan My Slimane / University of the Western Cape / Madurai Kamaraj University [email protected]
Keywords: Inclusive Education; Social Inclusion; Migration and Refugees; Migration Policy, Morocco, Africa regional integration
Migration presents challenges to both developed and developing countries. Over the last few decades, there have been a considerable number of migrations across the world. We have learnt from these mass movements of people that the migration of people, often marginalized and alienated from their own countries, presents huge challenges and opportunities to countries of adoption. Depending on how a country responds, it could benefit individual, group or country. It is quite clear that migration affects on housing, education and of course the social fabric of society. This paper emphasizes that migration can be beneficial if countries work in an integrated way to develop sound inclusive education policy and related policy development and co-operation should become a priority. The meeting of cultures at both an ethnic and class level can have major consequences if there is no co-ordination and sound policy to address the complexities arising out of placing large numbers of people in a foreign land. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: (i) can education impact on migrants? (ii) can education change societal behaviour of the communities and societies that host migrants and refugees, with a view to achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 4 thus impacting on social inclusion and sustainable development? Finally, (iii) how can inclusive education realize ambitious, inclusive, fair and sustainable regional integration?
In addition to the qualitative analysis, we used the questionnaire distributed on the Khouribga Province of Morocco. We found three main results: (i) the best migration policy depends on the social integration of migrants and refugees; (ii) Morocco is far from achieving its social integration, and (iii) the Moroccan system education is not able to guarantee fair and easy access of migrant children in schools’ education. Thus, we have emphasized that an educational policy adapted to the needs of migrant or refugee populations is an essential step that will shape outcomes for each person or group of people, and an effective strategy to carry out the cohesion, human rights and peace in the region. Thus, we recommend interstate collaboration in Africa especially in the field of education and training. This strategy can establish a new educational system based on human rights, and consequently it will be global, multicultural and
8 pluralistic system/ inclusive system. This regional strategy can help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals of the country (SDGs) and, in the same way, the national and regional strategic goals of migration in Africa. Ultimately, a sound inclusive education policy will provide the necessary intellectual and practical tools that will create conducive conditions for migrants to be absorbed.
Migration and un/belonging in the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence
Nancy E. Avila-Ledesma Universidad de Extremadura [email protected]
Keywords: Irish emigrants; letters; mental verbs; migration and un/belonging
This paper aims to empirically explore the notions of migration and un/belonging in CORIECOR, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (McCafferty and Amador Moreno, in preparation). Specifically, the study proposes a corpus-pragmatic (Romero Trillo 2008, 2017) examination of mental verbs in an attempt to explain how they help to maintain crucial emotional and physical links between the Irish in the Australian colonies and their loved ones at home in the context of nineteenth-century Irish emigration. In so doing, this work seeks to address the following research questions. Firstly, what does personal correspondence reveal about the impact of emigration experienced by the Irish diaspora in Australia and New Zealand? Secondly, how are such migration experiences linguistically construed in the epistolary discourse? The material will be searched using Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004). The preliminary findings show that such a corpus based analysis offers several advantages. Methodologically, the first advantage lies in the possibility of quantifying and comparing the frequency and usage of mental verbs in the Irish emigrants’ letters. The second advantage offered by a corpus-based approach has to do with the horizontal reading of the results. In this sense, the qualitative inspection of the linguistic structures identified will be of paramount importance to understand and explain the spectrum of knowing and unknowing or, as Halliday and Matthiessen (2004, 206) put it, “the representation of the content of consciousness” as conceptualised in the Irish-Australian correspondence.
9 On myths and imaginations related to language, identity and mobility
Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta & Machunwangliu Kamei Jönköping University / SVKM’s Usha Pravin Gandhi College
[email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: languaging, identity, liminality, boundaries, migration, SWaSP
This study builds on a “Second Wave of Southern Perspectives” (SWaSP), that brings together two broad theoretical framings: sociocultural integrational perspectives, and decolonial Southern theories. Language practices or languaging is here seen as a fundamental dimension of human social existence and includes scholarly language practices that are complicit in creating world-views. The paper aims to unpack the role that boundaries and liminality play in the constitution of what is glossed as human and collective “identity” and “language”. It illuminates how ideas regarding individual and collective identity, including nation-spaces are historically marked, re-created and re-enforced and the role of peoples mobilities in this enterprise across timespaces. This is done by engaging with historical accounts, mass-media data and the scholarship. Analysis of four cases from across the global-North/South are juxtaposed reflexively with the aim to illustrate and thereby disturb not only the oppressive reductionism inherent in conceptualizations of language, migration and identity, but also to explicate the investigation of these issues non-programmatically:
1. Sápmi across northern Scandinavia and Russia, 2. Nagalim across eastern India, Myanmar and China, 3. Massive displacements during the violent emergence of the nation-spaces of India and (West) Pakistan through the creation of the Radcliffe Line in 1947, and 4. The urban to rural Pandemic induced exodus inside the nation-spaces of India in post-March 2020.
This study illustrates how reflexive tenets of SWaSP can illuminate the myths and imaginations that continue to give credibility to the idea of bounded language, identity and nation-states, including the role of communication or languaging as constitutive dimension of these processes.
10 Mapping pro migrant discourse on Facebook - The Belgian migration activist scene and its (re)configuration from 2014 to 2018
Cécile Balty & Alexandre Leroux Université Libre de Bruxelles
[email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Activism, refugee crisis, social media, discourse analysis, computational social science
In reaction to the refugee reception crisis of 2015, citizen movements sprouted up over Europe in solidarity with the struggles of the migrants. These new movements worked alongside traditional actors such as trade unions, asso ciations, and universities. However, in Belgium, citizen activist discourses and actions reproduced, and even reinforced, the institutional distinction between ’asylum seekers’ and ’economic’ migrants.
How do these new actors blend into the Belgian activist scene? And how have traditional actors dealt with divergent philosophies and mobilisation repertoires? The present contribution addresses the reconfiguration of the French-speaking Belgian activist scene by analysing a network of 116 Face book pages, which support migrants, and their publications between 2014 and 2018 (38 000 posts, 2.4 million words).
Conducting an analysis of such an amount of data requires a multidis ciplinary approach which efficiently combines both quantitative and quali tative methods. For this purpose, our methodology relies on three levels of analysis of varying granularity: a network analysis, a computational linguis tics model, and a discourse analysis. First, we construct a network made of publications shared between pages to identify community structure and actors’ prominence. Second, by means of a probabilistic topic model, we analyse the whole corpus and its thematic trends to extract discursive simi larity between actors and its evolution over time. Third, we rely on discourse analysis to focus on nouns used to designate human groups (such as ""move ment"") and their members (such as ""refugees""). This approach emphasises the way actors express relationships and their network in terms of belonging, identity, and affiliation as well as self-representation. These three parallel methods show the ambivalent relationships between the different actors as expressed in their Facebook publications with those that exist within the Facebook network itself (posts and shares).
11 Framing the Intersectionality of Indonesianness and Chineseness on the Indonesian Periphery
Jess Birnie-Smith La Trobe University
This sociolinguistic study explores the intersectionality of Chineseness and Indonesianness within a Chinese community that lies on the periphery of the Indonesian archipelago. Chinese migrant communities have been excluded from the category of ‘Indonesian’ since their arrival centuries ago. The recent resurgence of pribumi ‘nativist’ narratives in public discourse have further essentialised Chinese identity as that of “forever foreigners” who are strongly oriented to the PRC state and incapable of integrating into Indonesian society (Fealy & Ricci, 2019; Setijadi, 2017; Tuan, 1998). In this paper, I challenge this rhetoric by highlighting the imbrication of Chineseness and Indonesianness that emerges from analysis of ethnographic data, including interviews and recordings of daily interaction among ethnic Chinese youth in Pontianak, West Kalimantan. Specifically, I combine Blommaert and De Fina’s (Blommaert & De Fina, 2017) chronotopic frame theory with global southern perspectives embedded in intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989; Levon, 2015) to examine variation in how young Chinese Indonesians use address forms drawn from Indonesian and Chinese languages to do identity work in everyday interaction. The results illustrate the diversity in ways of being Chinese as well as the imbrication of Indonesian and Chinese social categories, reinscribed through linguistic practice in Pontianak city. At a higher scale, these findings illuminate new directions for sociolinguistic research integrating global southern perspectives that better represents the ‘lived experience’ (Levon, 2015, p. 297) of marginalised migrant communities.
12 Language choices and intergenerational cultural transmission in intermarried families: a case- study of Polish-Ukrainian marriages
Anita Brzozowska University of Warsaw [email protected]
Keywords: intermarriage, Ukrainian migration, identity, integration, language status
Knowledge and fluency in the majority language are consistently identified as central to the integration process (Ager & Strang, 2008; Spencer & Charsley, 2016). Learning and using the dominant language became not only a practical facilitator of social integration and successful incorporation into the labour market but also a marker of commitment to the country of residence or attachment to national identification. Therefore, language use patterns and identities became essential nodes in the contemporary politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2006). Although the issue of language competence receives broad attention, studies focusing on language use patterns among intermarried couples, outside the English-speaking context, are relatively scarce. Mixed marriages, however, form an interesting research group, as spouses during the ongoing and complex negotiations decide which cultural elements to emphasise and which language to use or not and thus play down its transmission (Collet, 2015). In the proposed research paper, I will show how language use patterns are connected to identity projects in the context of different language statuses and Ukrainian bilingualism. I will also indicate hidden hierarchies and prejudices embedded in couples’ social environments and Polish society. Moreover, I will provide evidence for mothers’ invisible, gendered work passing their native language to their offspring. The analysis is based on the results of a qualitative research project conducted among Ukrainian migrants in Poland married to Polish citizens.
13 Appreciation of Family Language Practices in Migration Contexts? Insights from a Pilot Study
Katja F. Cantone, Franziska Möller, Judith Purkarthofer & Tobias Schroedler University of Duisburg-Essen / Technical University of Dortmund [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Family Language Policy, Language Practice, Migrant Language Maintenance, Ideologies of Linguistic Diversity
Individual and intergenerational language use in migration contexts has been studied in the area of language transmission and maintenance, focusing on parents’ strategies (cf. the seminal work by Lanza, 1997; Braun & Clyne, 2014; Cantone, 2019; Purkarthofer & Steien, 2019) and on practices of children, parents and grand-parents (among others Gafaranga, 2010; Curdt-Christiansen & La Morgia, 2018 and Van Mensel, 2018). Beyond the role of family language policies, it has been established that immigrant language maintenance also depends on societal ideologies (e.g. perceptions of monolingual norms) as well as practices in educational institutions (Extra & Yağmur, 2004, 2008). What does, however, remain widely unknown are questions surrounding influences on parents’ language policies and practices:
In order to gain insights into factors influencing multilingual language use, a pilot questionnaire study was designed asking for attitudes and experiences of appreciation or contempt when using minority languages and how these experiences influence language transmission. Moreover, we analyze speakers’ perceptions of educational and societal language ideologies.
We employ both descriptive as well as inferential statistics to examine effects between sociodemographic information and items on our participants’ language experiences and reflections.
The results of this survey will be explored in reference to a framework that aligns heritage language identities along continua of pragmatic vs. emotional attachment and essential or peripheral language use (Little, 2020). Analyses will demonstrate whether speakers’ language practices as well as their experiences with using minority languages (in one of Germany’s culturally and linguistically most diverse urban areas) relate to the aforementioned framework.
14 Digital literacies and displacement: Working with NGO stakeholders to investigate language, migration and identity in refugee language lessons.
Tony Capstick University of Reading [email protected]
Keywords: Displacement; language learning; identity; literacy practices
As the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies, displaced learners face increasing challenges to accessing the learning online that they were attending offline before the start of the pandemic. It is these learners’ and their teachers’ digital literacies which are at the core of the Covid-19, migration and multilingualism (CV19MM) project, run in partnership with stakeholders offering language lessons in Jordan, Turkey and the UK. In our paper, we respond to the question ‘what are the challenges and opportunities of working with NGO stakeholders when investigating language, migration and education, together, during the Covid-19 pandemic?’ We examine NGOs’ shift to working online and the shift in data collection procedures when recording refugees’ ability to navigate online spaces through the lens of New Literacy Studies which foregrounds the analysis of culture and identity in the literacy practices of migrants (Barton and Hamilton 2000). Darvin and Norton (2015) recognize that the spaces in which language socialization takes place have become increasingly deterritorialized. We focus on the methodological issues raised by this deterritorialization by exploring how to equip refugee teachers with the skills to carry out their own research about language and identity in their own communities through interview and classroom data collected as part of the CV19MM project in 2020-2021. We end with discussion of how our findings shed light on working with stakeholders across borders and how this approach enhances research on language, identity and migration when carrying out impactful research which is of use to NGO stakeholders.
15 Smooth criminals: discourse on humanitarian NGOs as a key feature of sovereignist ideology
Andrea Cerase & Dario Lucchesi University of Rome / University of Padova [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: NGOs; criminalization; CDA; populism; refugee crisis
One of the repercussions of the so-called “Refugee crisis” has been a radical shift of public attitudes toward humanitarian NGOs and rescue operations in Southern Mediterranean, being increasingly subjected to stigmatisation. The values of humanitarianism have been harshly challenged by criminalising rhetoric and practices against NGOs (Carrera et al., 2018; Musarò e Parmiggiani 2018) also emerging as a key issue in sovereignism, a specific cross-national, right wing populist ideology (Basile & Mazzoleni, 2020).
The research paper leans on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach to investigate the discursive dimension of NGO’s criminalization within social media between 2017 and 2020. The case study focuses on Italy, where populist parties had a strong impact on both political scenarios and public debate. Our research aims to analyse whether the NGOs criminalization represents a new discoursive pattern able to redefine the populist far-right ideology in the Manichean separation “people vs elite”, also fostering the normalization of securitarian politics (Krzyzanowski et al 2018) within the broader politics of fear (Wodak 2015).
The analysis is guided by the following research questions: 1. Which changes have occurred in the discourse on NGO’s role in migration issues? 2. How these changes identify and summarize contrasting ideologies about border politics, nation-state, and sovereignty? 3. In which way this process affected NGOs' operations and political stances?
Data corpus is composed of social media texts (Tweets, Facebook posts, comments) produced by both top-down and bottom-up actors. CDA focuses on the recontextualization of topics and topoi together with legitimation and predicational strategies used to legitimize and (re)produce sovereignist identity and ideology. Findings show how the NGO public image has turned from “saviors of the seas” to “accomplices of slave-traders” and “sea taxis” suggesting that the criminalization is discursively constructed and normalized by complex practices of recontextualization of past discourses projected in the present/future. This process represents
16 a hybridization of top-down and bottom-up discoursive practices that enrich the wider anti- immigration discourse involving political, institutional, and other actors in turning populist discourse into common sense.
Integration and adaptation in higher-education foreign students: a case study
Rita Cersosimo, Giulia Lombardi & Alice Pagano Università di Genova [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Distance language learning; cultural identity; higher education; ethnography; L2 students
Covid-19 pandemic has brought several changes to the way students experience their university path. With this case study, the authors want to investigate how foreign freshers of the Language Department at the University of Genoa are dealing with distance learning from both a cultural and a linguistic perspective.
Ten students from different countries, such as Denmark, South Africa, Ecuador, Morocco, Russia and China took part in a preliminary study conducted with a hybrid methodology that combines quantitative research with a qualitative one inspired by Digital Ethnography (Murthy, 2008), a useful tool to elicit those “micro-features'' (Galloni, 2014) we might lose if we limit ourselves in a quantitative research. The interview took place with face-to-face online meetings in which students were asked to freely respond to questions about their cultural background, the impact of Italian culture on their study lives, progress and socialization in their degree course.
These answers were combined with data about their performance in both the entry test on key competences in Italian and the first semester exams. This gave the authors the opportunity to consider both students’ improvement in Italian language and in their Second Culture Acquisition (Robinson-Stuart & Nocon, 1996) throughout the beginning of their study experience taking into account that some students have moved to Genoa and attend online lessons from there, while some others are still in their home countries.
17 The aim of this case study is to identify possible connections between the students’ academic outcomes and a totally new way of interacting with the university environment, as well as to propose a reflection on the likely new perspectives of a more flexible post-pandemic higher education.
Grenglish: New understandings of the linguistic varieties of the British Greek Cypriot diaspora
Anna Charalambidou & Petros Karatsareas Middlesex University / University of Westminster
[email protected] @DrAnnaMDX
[email protected] @pkaratsareas
Keywords: diasporic languages, UK Cypriots, morphological adaptation, language attitudes, Grenglish
We present findings from the Grenglish Project, a public engagement initiative that brought together members of the UK’s Greek Cypriot diaspora in a crowdsourcing effort to document linguistic material that reflected the community’s linguistic history. This presentation examines British Greek Cypriot understand and view their own community’s linguistic variety. The material submitted to the project website include English loanwords that were integrated into the morphological system of Cypriot Greek by the addition of native derivational and inflectional suffixes (πάσον /páson/ ‘bus’ and πασέρης /paséris/ ‘bus driver’) and phonological adaptations of placenames of significance to the UK’s Greek Cypriot community (Φίσμπουρι Ππάρκ/Fishbury Park ‘Finsbury Park’). These widely used morphological and phonological adaptations, typically labelled Grenglish, are collectively recognised as a key part of a new linguistic variety unique to the UK’s Cypriot Greek speakers and indexical of the language, history and heritage of UK’s Greek Cypriot migrant community (Gardner-Chloros 1992, Papapavlou & Pavlou 2001). However, material contributed to the Grenglish website also included Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek terms, as well as puns and wordplay and even adaptations of Cypriot Greek words to English morphology (Karatsareas & Charalambidou forthcoming). Consequently, the boundaries between UK Cypriot Greek, Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek seems to be fuzzy and are explicitly contested by our informants. We consider the implications of the project’s findings for the status of British Cypriot Greek as a
18 variety on its own right and address the ideological and attitudinal factors that shape the prospects for its intergenerational transmission.
Linguistic Metaphors Shape Attitudes towards Immigration
Ana Chkhaidze, Parla Buyruk & Lera Boroditsky University of California [email protected] @chkhaidze9 [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: metaphor; framing; attitudes; immigration
Immigration policy has been one of the top concerns of American voters over the last decade (Pew Research Center, 2018) and has attracted some of the most heated rhetoric in politics and news media across the world. Much like other political language, talk about immigration is suffused with metaphor (Ana, 1999; Charteris-Black, 2006). To what extent does the public language about immigration, and specifically the metaphors used, influence people’s views of the issues? How powerful are metaphors? In our studies, we exposed participants to one of four versions of a passage about an increase in immigrants in one town. The four versions of the passage included all identical facts and figures and differed in only a single word at the beginning of the passage, describing the increase in immigrant labor as either an “increase”, a “boost”, an “invasion, or a “flood. Although the passages differed only in this one word, participants’ attitudes towards this increase and their predictions about its effects on the economy differed significantly depending on the metaphor. Of course, opinions on immigration differ across political affiliations (Citrin & Wright, 2009; Haubert & Fussell, 2006). Remarkably, the single word metaphor was strong enough to mitigate much of the difference in opinion on immigration between Democrats and Republicans in our sample. Further analyses suggested that the results are not due simply to positive or negative lexical associations to the metaphorical words, and also that metaphors can act covertly in organizing people’s beliefs.
19 Constructed subjectivities and self-formation: Rohingya students in New Zealand education
Md Sorowar Hossain Chowdhury Auckland University of Technology [email protected]
Keywords: Governmentality, Subjectivity, Self-formation, Linguistic norms
Rohingya refugees are one of the most persecuted communities in the world. Some of them have resettled in New Zealand as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)- mandated refugees. This paper is a part of the PhD research undertaken by the first presenter with an overall focus on Rohingya students’ educational aspirations and the way they negotiate New Zealand’s education in fulfilling their aspirations. Informed by a Foucauldian theory of power/knowledge and discourse, the study utilises ethnographic tools for field data generation from three secondary and three adult Rohingya students. Foucault’s governmentality (Foucault, 2007) is used as an analytical framework (Ettlinger, 2011). Governmentality deals with the “rationalities and technologies of governing in modern societies” (Dean, 2017, p.1). The research question being examined here is the ethical self-formation of the research participants, where their multiple subjectivities are in constant ‘agonistic relation’ between two forms of governance: the ‘governance of the population’ and the ‘governance of the self’ (Ettlinger, 2011, p. 540). The former is the system through which a population is governed at a distance and the latter allows a person to recognise that system and create distance between himself and that system by re-positioning himself. The presentation will focus on (i) the practices through which New Zealand education system materialises some specified linguistic norms and construct subjectivities of the Rohingya students, which they comply with; and (ii) the practices that allow these students to know their individual ‘selves’, create a space, and constitute their own subjectivities.
20 The stratification of migration policy lexicon: A corpus-based comparison between Italian and Arabic
Isabella Chiari, Maha Bader & Alma Salem Sapienza Università di Roma / Università di Bergamo / IULM / PISAI [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Arabic, Italian, language of migration, corpus-based glossary, translation and cultural mediation
The peculiarity of the migration lexicon is due to different aspects, mainly depending on the scope (often geographical and institutional) and time. More specifically, the language of migration has an international or transnational level where it is defined institutionally, like in the EU regulations (both legal and administrative); there is a further national level, where international procedures are modified and adapted to the specificity of the country in terms of administrative and general migration policies; a last ordinary level that is interlinked to aspects that migrants have to face in their interactions with institutions (for social security, health, education, administrative issues). These aspects are constantly shifting with changes in their legal framework (e.g., the Dublin Protocol and its revisions, the Italian Security decrees changing asylum typologies, etc.) and varying in each country. This paper discusses the peculiarities of Italian migration lexicon compared to the Arabic translation of more than 2,000 lemmas and collocations extracted by three different corpora of Italian language representing the three stratifications of the migration lexicon in its use. The research underlines the quantitative and qualitative relationships between subsets of the lexicon, and the differences that emerge when comparing Italian and Arabic terminology and phraseology, paying special attention to the differences in cultural and social backgrounds and how these influence linguistic choices.
21 Sadhubhasha as the Marker of Cultural/National Identity and the Position of Muslims: Politics of Language and Identity Formation in Colonial Bengal
Suma Chisti & Dripta Piplai IIT Kharagpur [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Sadhubhasha, Bhadralok Class, Language, National/cultural Identity, Muslims
With the introduction of new Western education by the British colonizers, Bengal witnessed the emergence of its intellectual social group or the Bhadralok class in the nineteenth century. The rise of the Bhadralok class coincided with the development of print-capitalism which, according to Anderson (1983), is the main equipment behind the evolution of “national” language. In the nineteenth century Bengal, these Bhadraloks along with the orientalist Pandits (learned men) engineered the new “standard”, “gentle” and “modern” Sadhubhasha (pure Bengali language) which was Sanskritized Bengali and was capable enough to communicate discourses and ideas. With its exclusive dominance on print-culture, the Bengali intelligentsia took all the initiatives of developing a “refined” literary circle and of creating indigenous cultural history of literature and liberal arts in vernacular language. This initiative of developing new Bengali language and literature can be viewed, as some critics have observed, as a part of upholding the distinctiveness of the “spiritual” or inner/cultural domain in the anti-colonial nationalist project of the native intelligentsia. As the language is an important constituent of cultural/national identity, the construction of Sadhubhasha was a conscious effort of the Bengali intelligentsia to assert the non-colonized domain of spiritual/ cultural identity. But this process of constructing the new Bengali language comes with some politics of exclusion whose worst victim was the Muslim community because: firstly, Sadhubhasha was used as a tool by the Bhadraloks to overpower the literature and culture of Muslim community and other less privileged group; second, Sadhubhasha was codified through inflicting Sanskrit (the religious language of Hindu community) words into existing Bangla (Bengali language) and through purging out the Perso- Arabic elements of it. This paper tries to find out how and why the codification of the new Bangla was exclusionary in nature and how the process of the codification was carried out. It also tries to look into how Muslim community fits themselves in the whole process of shaping the sovereignty of national culture through making the Bengali language Sanskritized. It also tries to find out how Muslims reclaimed their national identity in colonial Bengal if the Sadhubhasha was used as the tool of resisting the colonial intruders from colonizing their cultural space.
22 ‘Become a global citizen’: Ironic cosmopolitanism and the discourse of citizenship-by- investment
Joseph Comer University of Bern [email protected]
Keywords: citizenship-by-investment, migration, global mobility, cosmopolitanism, critical discourse studies
We nowadays live in a world in which processes of globalization have turned citizenship into a commodity; where passports, as material and symbolic signifiers of mobility, status, and security, are freely advertised and sold in an elite global marketplace. Whether euphemistically called ‘investor migration’, or maligned as ‘passports for cash’, citizenship-by-investment (CBI) is a growing business – over 12 countries (predominantly in Europe and the Caribbean) have established or are planning to implement such schemes.
CBI can be seen positively, as an inevitable flexibilization of outdated ideas of citizenship by ‘blood’ or ‘soil’, or negatively, as a blatant case of ‘instrumental citizenship’, indicative of a late capitalist dissociation between citizenship and nationhood (Jöppke, 2019). Undoubtedly, attention to CBI can shed light on the tensions between identity, global political economy, and social inequality in the contemporary world. In this paper, I present an exploratory examination of the CBI industry – and the first from a multimodal critical discourse-analytic perspective. I investigate the rhetorical and ideological structuring of four CBI brokers’ websites, asking, in simple terms: how are passports sold to the world’s elites, and to what ends?
In my preliminary conclusions I orient to theories of ‘ironic cosmopolitanism’ (Chouliaraki, 2013) – i.e. cosmopolitan dispositions that are individualist, self-righteous and increasingly corporatized. I describe how prospective purchasers of citizenship are framed as ‘global citizens’. Through affect-laden appeals to aspiration, openness, and the all-important freedom to choose, clients are framed not just as advancing their own interests, but a virtuous cause much greater than themselves.
23 Representations of (Un)belonging: A Visual Semiotic and Critical Media Discourse Analysis of German Political Cartoons
Emily E. Davis University of Groningen [email protected]
Keywords: political cartoons; head and/or face coverings; Germany; visual semiotics; critical media discourse analysis
This study examines how German political cartoons use images and text to visually represent (un)belonging. It defines a political cartoon as a multimodal, two-dimensional illustration or graphic image that utilizes humor or satire to comment on a current social or political issue. Due to their small size, cartoons often use an abbreviated or emblematic set of characters or objects to represent more complex perspectives or ideologies. I compiled a corpus from the archive of the Rückblende Prize for political photography and caricature in order to analyze depictions of women with head and face coverings between 2003-2020. Visual semiotics were used to ascertain what is represented (denotation) and what those representations mean (connotation) (van Leeuwen 2011), while captions were examined using critical media discourse analysis to better explain the text as a whole. Results show that depictions of head and face coverings are often used to represent specific activities, such as fortune telling or janitorial work associated with women. Images or text that directly reference Islam or the Islamic veil, and especially depict any face-obscuring, full-length garments, are often employed to reference ‘foreignness’ or indicate ‘unbelonging’ not only in the cartoons, but also, by extension, in the Germany that the cartoons represent.
24 A ‘burden’ or a ‘resource’? Positive perspectives on migration discourse in Italy between 1900 and 1915
Dario Del Fante Institute for Computational Linguistics «A. Zampolli» [email protected]
Keywords: Conceptual Metaphors, Representing migration from the perspective of departure country, Metaphor in representations of migration, Language, national identity and the Other, Corpus approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis, Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies
As discussed in Arcimaviciene and Baglama (2018: 1-2) and Taylor (2020), a large body of literature has shown that there is a tendency to conceptualize migration negatively in newspaper discourse by using specific metaphors (Santa Ana 1999; El Refaie 2001; Gabrielatos & Baker 2008). Most of these works are focused on newspapers’ representation of migration from the perspectives of their countries of destination; by creating boundaries – newspaper writers generally portray incoming immigrants (them) as a threat to (“our”) national security and social stability.
This work focuses on the Italian context in early 1900s, where the writer/speaker’s and people who actually migrated belonged to the same community in order to clarify the extent to which the writer/speaker’s perspective is a determinant of the metaphorical representation of migration. To address this, I adopt a corpus-approach to Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris- Black 2004) to examine and define the linguistic and conceptual metaphors surrounding migration discourse in Italy. The dataset consists of an Italian corpus (approximately 20 million words) containing extracts from La Stampa newspaper published between 1900 and 1915. All metaphors retrieved using the corpus tool WordSmith 8.0 (Scott 2020) are discussed in a subsequent qualitative analysis. Results show that, unexpectedly, the resulting metaphorical discursive image representing migration is positive. The QUANTITY of migrants is represented as LIQUID and interpreted as a NATURAL RESOURCE, whilst the MOVEMENT of migrants is represented as an INVASION needing to be militarily organised to overcome the difficulties of integration into a new country. In this case, the writer/speaker gives support to the emigrant’s journey, perhaps because migration has not been experienced as a threat to the community as these migrants constitute the group that decided to migrate for the good of the whole community.
25 Labor Migration and Neoliberal Discourses in Filipino Family Language Policies
Jeconiah Louis Dreisbach Universitat Oberta de Catalunya [email protected] @jecondraysbak
Keywords: family language policy, English, Philippines, neoliberalism, labor migration
The Philippine government institutionalized the migration of overseas Filipino workers through its labor export policy. Beyond earning certifications and applying for equivalencies necessary for employment applications abroad, the Filipinos’ relative fluency in the English language made them in demand workers. Capitalizing on English as linguistic capital, the Philippine government passed legislation intensifying the teaching and use of the English language as medium of instruction with the intention of improving the fluency of Filipinos on the language. Critical languages scholars have viewed such policies to be a continuation of the dependency of the Philippines to its former foreign colonisers in the postcolonial era. This study qualitatively explored the viewpoints of Filipino parents and youth regarding the intensification of English language education in the country. Through four focus group discussions, this study reveals the labor migration and neoliberal discourses of Filipino family language policies. This study found out that Filipino parents are in favor of the continued proliferation of English language education in the country as they are aware of the labor migration trend of Filipinos. They said that learning English would bring their children to ‘greener pastures’ if they choose to work overseas. Filipino youth, on the other hand, are critical of English language education, most especially in home settings, as it made them distant from the communities that they are living in and their cultures. For the latter, English already has all the attention in the Philippine education system and needs to have decreased teaching.
26 Divergent language ideologies in a transatlantic minority: Gaelic in Scotland, Nova Scotia and New England
Stuart Dunmore University of Sussex
[email protected] @Dun_Mor
Keywords: Language policy; language ideology; ethnolinguistic identity; revitalisation; Gaelic
This paper will examine how effective Scottish Gaelic revitalisation policy is in Scotland, and among diaspora communities in Nova Scotia and New England. Research in contemporary Scotland and Nova Scotia, where a Gaelic-speaking minority has existed for 250 years, explored policy interventions and language learning motivations through semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 70 ‘new’ speakers in both polities. Policymakers in Scotland and Nova Scotia often allude to the role that L2 speakers may play in ensuring the future maintenance of Scottish Gaelic on either side of the Atlantic. Second language teaching has subsequently been employed to create new cohorts of speakers, as intergenerational transmission continues to decline in traditionally Gaelic-dominant communities. Based on five years of ethnographic research in Scotland and Canada, this paper examines seven new speaker narratives concerning future prospects for language revitalisation in each country. I will also outline a scheduled 3- month research scholarship in Massachusetts, a major destination for secondary Nova Scotian emigration. This forthcoming research will assess how Gaelic learners in Boston construct and convey their linguistic ideologies and identities, and how these may relate to the better-known Boston Irish diaspora. I show that challenging sociodemographic circumstances in the remaining Gaelic-dominant communities in Scotland and Nova Scotia contrast with current policy discourses concerning the language’s future prospects. In particular, I consider Nova Scotian ‘new’ speakers’ relative sense of optimism for the future of their language in the province, compared to Scottish speakers’ language ideologies concerning revitalisation prospects.
27 Language, education and migration: Using perceptual dialectology to teach linguistic and cultural diversity
Katharina v. Elbwart University of Paderborn [email protected]
Keywords: Language barriers, Communication, Emergency Department.
Following the research paradigm of perceptual dialectology (Preston 2010, 1999), this paper presents the findings of a study of how non-linguists view linguistic variation in Florida and showcases how language regard (Evans, Benson & Stanford 2018) can be used in education to teach cultural and linguistic diversity in migration contexts.
This paper complements research on non-linguists’ beliefs about language in a linguistically (super)diverse setting and introduces methods in dialectology as a useful means to teach linguistic and cultural variation. I will showcase how Florida‘s heterogeneous setting has influenced the perception of varieties, how it fosters language ideologies and whether diversity plays a role in forming representations of linguistic landscapes among Floridian residents.
175 respondents completed Preston’s draw-a-map-task to access perceptions of linguistic variation in Florida. All maps were run and analyzed in ArcGIS to make geolinguistic spaces visible. The overall results indicate that Florida is perceived as a trichotomy with three salient dialect areas and point at a clear perception of Florida along the lines of an English-Spanish continuum. Prevailing ideologies point at strong beliefs about language indicated by labels such as “broken English” or “slang” which are used to identify spaces of strong Hispanic presence and demarcate more “proper American” and traditionally white areas. Together, these results help us to further our understanding of social spaces as negotiated by language and serve as a valuable resource to teach US-American language and culture – influenced by migration - in educational contexts.
28 Do intercultural communication barriers affect hospital admission rates?
Jacqueline Eleonora Malta
Keywords: Language barriers, Communication, Emergency Department.
Background: Communication is essential in healthcare [1],[2], up-trending global migration has increased the range of ethnically diverse patients presenting to local emergency departments (ED)[3]. Acute mental health presentations rely on detailed histories for diagnosis and management[1],[4]. Language barriers impede these communication channels [5]. This paper analyses the relationship between language barriers and psychiatric admissions rates in ‘local’ and ‘nonlocal’ residents attending ED with acute mental health presentations in Malta.
Methods: A retrospective review of electronic medical notes to assess the presence of a documented language barrier. The relationship between language barriers and admissions was analysed to compare the rate in ‘local’ and non-local residents.
Results: Acute mental health presentations were seen in 1% of the local population and 4.7% of the non-local population. In locals, language barriers were documented in 0.6% of cases whereas in non-locals it was 54.5%.
Psychiatric admission rates doubled in non-locals with a language barrier, 69.4%, compared to those without, 36.7%. Voluntary admissions were lower in those with a language barrier, 52%, and 63.6% in those without. Involuntary admissions were similar, 36% and 36.3%.
Conclusion: There is a relationship between language barriers and admission rates. The frequency of hospital admissions non-locals doubles when compared to locals.
29 “I think I speak European!”: Tracing immigrant identities in Edinburgh, Scotland
Zuzana Elliott University of Edinburgh [email protected]
Keywords: identity, immigration, vowels, belonging, Scotland
Linguistic features that are indexical of local and/or national identities in long-term immigrants remain an under-studied phenomenon (Stevenson, 2017). This paper explores adult Slovak immigrants in Scotland to assess how self-reported identity, length of residence, and pre- immigration language instruction demonstrate indexicality affecting FACE and GOAT vowel production. Scripted and unscripted vowel production data were collected via sociolinguistic interviews. Participants included Slovak immigrants and native Scottish residents in Edinburgh, and bilingual Slovak-English teachers in Slovakia. All participants completed a questionnaire whilst discussing their experiences, constituting the unscripted interview portion of the task, followed by a reading passage and word list.
Speech data for FACE and GOAT lexical sets were quantified via normalised Euclidean distance measuring overall vowel movement (Maguire, 2012; Stuart-Smith, 2008). Pre-immigration language instruction modelled these vowels as diphthongs with high movement (Kráľová, 2010), whilst local Scottish variants of FACE and GOAT were consistently produced as monophthongs with reduced vowel movement.
Analysis revealed that immigrant Slovaks’ FACE and GOAT vowel realisations were neither as diphthongal as Slovak non-immigrants nor as monophthongal as native Scottish participants. Immigrant participants’ vowel productions ranged across a vowel continuum and identity (Llamas & Watt, 2014). Findings suggest that strong European and Slovak identities were associated with relatively more diphthongal vowel realisations, while strong Scottish identities were associated with relatively more monophthongal pronunciations. Length of residence and pre-immigration language instruction were less effective in predicting vowel production. Findings reinforce observations that learners manipulate their linguistic features in relation of their identity (Block, 2008; Rindal, 2010).
30 Flamenco as a Means of Negotiating Identity
Taylor Elton University of Edinburgh
Keywords: Gender, Race, Spain, Flamenco, Feminism, Music, Gitano, Ethnicity, Immigration
Flamenco as a Means of Negotiating Identity explores the development of flamenco throughout the ebbs and flows of change for women in Spain from the mid-nineteenth century through modern times. This piece explores how flamenco singers spoke of their oppression in song as well as the changing role of the genre, especially with newer artists who migrate to Spain being welcomed into the flamenco scene. The genre was utilized by cantaoras (female flamenco performers) to elevate their position in society and covertly challenge patriarchal oppression. These performers were associated with licentiousness and served as a scapegoat for the perceived cultural decline as Spain lost its global domination; yet these cantaoras employed performance to mock and satirize the hypocritical notions of masculinity and femininity in Spanish society to change perceptions of gender. Furthermore, nowadays artists like Concha Buika, of African descent, are asserting their role in Spanish music with a more intersectional approach to their songs, addressing not only sexism, but the struggle of race, foreignness, and increasingly accepted identities such as queerness. The methodology employed involved a close reading on of the language employed in the songs of flamenco singers La Serneta, La Perrata, y Concha Buika. A theoretical framework around the language of feminism, race, and immigration is utilized to support close reading of singers’ lyrics, as well as the idea of racial discrimination against gitanos (Spanish Romani), who despite living in Spain for centuries are still outsiders, and other ethnicities outside of Spain
31 Negotiating Linguistic Hierarchies, Racism and Identity: Multilingual Syrian Refugees’ Narratives of Language Use in Turkey
Yasemin Erdogan Karabuk University / Middle East Technical University [email protected] @ysmnerdgn
Keywords: Syrian Refugee, Turkey, Language Ideology, Stance, Linguistic Racism
This critical sociolinguistic study (Heller et.al., 2018) aims to understand how multilingual repertoires, linguistic practices and identities are negotiated and strategically orchestrated by Syrian refuges living in Turkey. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic interviews and focus group discussions with two Syrian graduate students who have been forcedly displaced from Syria seven years ago and resettled in Turkey as a predominantly Turkish-speaking country, the study explores (i) how they negotiate their multilingual repertoires and practices with respect to broader ideological framings & majority discourses around their linguistic practices and languages, and (ii) how each social actor positions themselves in relation to nationalist discourses regarding Syrian refugees in Turkey. Personal autobiographical narratives shared by the informants within interactional interviews/discussions form the primary data for the study. Narrative inquiry (De Fina, 2003) and stance (Jaffe, 2009) were used as the main analytical/methodological approaches to critically investigate the linguistic and social hierarchies that the participants encounter on a daily basis. The results reveal that the participants’ linguistic practices and stances are heavily influenced by the nationalist, anti- refugee discourse prevailing in Turkey. Informants use predominantly Turkish language in the public sphere as a carefully-planned strategy; silence or minimize their native language, Arabic due to the pejorative meanings attributed to Arabic language recently in the public discourse in Turkey as an anti-refugee stance marker; and negotiate their self-identity with respect to and in sharp contrast with widely- circulating negative discourses of refugee representations.
32 Translanguaging art — Questioning boundaries in Monika Szydłowska’s ‘Do you miss your country?’
Dobrochna Futro University of Glasgow [email protected] @dobrochnafutro
Keywords: art, translanguaging, migration, identity, multilingualism, gender
Using the concept of translanguaging art, I will discuss an artist’s book published in 2016 by Monika Szydłowska, who is a Polish-born visual artist living in the UK. Szydłowska’s book Do you miss your country? is a visual diary in which, using media traditionally associated with a travel journal (pencil and watercolours), the artist narrates her experience of migration. The book depicts the everyday life of a young migrant woman from Poland, in the first years of her life in Scotland. The visual and textual narrative pinpoints the intricacies of the process of othering and identity building.
I will consider what the translanguaging art reveals about the process of identity creation in linguistically and culturally diverse communities and show how, through her choice of bi(trans)lingualism as a mode of writing and the form of a pocket size sketchbook filled with watercolour drawings and speech bubbles, Szydłowska problematises the popular image of the migrant. I will also discuss her engagement with the tradition of the migrant writing and travel writing and her subtle subverting of these genres. I will demonstrate how, by combining languages with visual means of expressions, a gendered and nationally loaded medium through which she negotiates her identity, destabilises power relations historically operating within the migratory discourse. My conclusion will support the claim that the translingual and visual devices, designed by the artist, indicate the transformative and emancipatory potential of migration seen more as empowering rather than disempowering process for migrants and locals alike.
33 #fromGR2UK: New Greek migrant (dis)identifications in social media discourse
Mariza Georgalou University of Western Macedonia [email protected] @MGeorgalou www.marizageorgalou.com
Keywords: new Greek migration; social media; discourse; identity; online ethnography
Since the eruption of the Greek crisis in 2010, thousands of highly educated and skilled Greeks have chosen or have been forced to migrate abroad in pursuit of better career prospects and living standards. This recent migratory wave has been termed ‛new’ Greek migration (Panagiotopoulou et al. 2019). Considering the transformative impact of social media on the lives and experiences of migrants (Madianou & Miller 2012) as well as the pivotal role of social media in (dis)identification and identity construction processes (Georgalou 2017, Leppänen et al. 2017), this paper aims at exploring the ways in which new Greek migrants construct their identities in their social media discourse. Based on a synergy between the constructionist approach to identity (Brubaker & Cooper 2000) and discourse-centred online ethnography (Androutsopoulos 2008), the paper presents and discusses empirical data (social media content and interviews) from three selected new Greek migrants settled in the UK, who write about and capture their migration experiences on their blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. As shown in the analysis, new Greek migrant identities are hybrid and multifaceted, constructed and negotiated through a gamut of discursive means, including stance-taking, intertextuality, entextualization and coupling. Having the migrants’ own voice and perspective at the heart of the analysis brings to the forefront significant socio-cultural dimensions of new Greek migration, often downplayed in economic and political analyses of the phenomenon. In this fashion, the potential of social media to heighten awareness of new Greek migrants’ (dis)identification processes is verified.
34 Onward migration from Italy to the UK: a sociolinguistic perspective
Francesco Goglia University of Exeter
Keywords: multilingualism, onward migration, language maintenance, language and identity
This paper presents a discussion on the complex linguistic repertoires and language use of families who have migrated onward from Italy to the UK: Italian-Indians, Italian-Bangladeshis, Italian-Ghanaians, Italian-Nigerians and Italian-Sri Lankans. A growing literature in Migration Studies has investigated the phenomenon of onward migration within the EU (Mas Giralt, 2017; Ramos 2017; Ahrens, Kelly, and van Liempt 2016; Della Puppa, 2018). These studies have only touched upon issues of language, in particular the role of English as pull factor for onward migration. However, no comprehensive studies have looked at this type of migration from a sociolinguistic perspective (with the exceptions of Márquez Reiter and Martín Rojo, 2015 and Mar-Molinero and Paffey, 2018; Goglia, 2021).
The data discussed in this article is part of a larger project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which investigates multilingualism, language maintenance and shift, and language attitudes among the second generation of families who onward migrated from Italy to the UK. The data was collected via interviews and focus groups. The paper will focus on the Italian language maintenance, its role in the linguistic repertoire of these families and as a marker of identity for the second generation.
35 Twitter and Refugeehood: Practices of Resistance in Contemporary Australia
Arianna Grasso University of Naples “L’Orientale” [email protected]
Keywords: digital resistance, cyber refugees, identity, Twitter, Manus Island
Over the past decades, migratory processes have globally intensified due to dramatic events that have reshaped the geopolitical order worldwide. In this unstable scenario, Australia has used extreme measures to stop the maritime arrival of people seeking asylum. With the 2012 reimplementation of the Pacific Solution and the 2013 Operation Sovereign Borders, asylum seekers who have tried to reach the Australian shores in search of protection have been arbitrarily confined to the offshore detention centres of Nauru and Manus Pacific Islands, among other detention facilities. While Australian politicians have instrumentalised the refugee issue to foment nationalist and xenophobic discourses and create consensus among voters, on the other hand, asylum seekers and refugees have engaged in virtual spaces to reappropriate their self-presentations and resist obliterating forms of subjugation. In this context, digital platforms have provided empowering epistemic resources, which have been mobilized by the digital actors to counteract practices of material and symbolic deprivation. The present study aims to understand the role of Twitter in the (re)construction of refugees’ individual and collective identities, as articulated by a group of detainees on Manus Island. The research relies on a mixed methodology that combines Corpus Linguistics and Discourse-Historical approaches to elicit quantitative and qualitative data from the purposely-built Refugee Twitter Corpus. Findings will shed light on how refugees’ digital practices are intercalated in a wider socio- political and historical order, which positions these deterritorialized subjects into counter- hegemonic systems of communication.
36 A dream of belonging: the case study of Polish Jews - French immigrés
Magdalena Grycan University of Warsaw [email protected]
The events of March 1968 in Poland remain a difficult and painful topic. All at once many Polish Jews lost their hometown and the people they knew. The world they had laboriously rebuilt, and had come to call home, vanished in a day. March ’68 meant the pain of separations and farewells, young people feeling lost and uncertain, and their parents’ suffering in having – at the age of 50 or 60 – to rebuild their lives in a foreign country. March ’68 is also tantamount to the end of Jewish life in Poland. As a result of the anti-Semitic campaign waged by communist Poland’s authorities, some 20,000 Polish Jews were forced to leave Poland, surrender their citizenship and the life they had known, and strike off in directions many knew but dimly. My presentation summarizes reflections on the identity of Polish Jews descent in the immigrant setting. An analysis of excerpts from interviews with Polish Jews emigrating from Poland to France between 1967-1980 containing discourse on their language, identity-belonging and acculturation strategies attempts to answer the following questions: how do the members of this group identify themselves? Where do they belong? To what extent do languages influence their identity and belonging? Finally, what acculturation strategies have they adopted in order to build their new life in France?
37 Being Jongé Abroad: A Discursive Negotiation of Senegalese feminine identities.
Astou Fall Gueye University of Wisconsin [email protected] @Satugey
Keywords: Jongé, diaspora, identity, language, negotiation
Jongé is a set of practices revolving around womanhood, femininity, and sexuality in Senegal. Previous work has focused on jongé in Senegal, but they continue in the diaspora. Senegalese women in the United States not only bring these practices with them from home but also continue to negotiate their meanings in the diaspora. Using an intersectional approach, I demonstrate how language, gender, and migration simultaneously inform us about identity’s construction and negotiation. Through the analysis of in-depth interviews with Senegalese women in the US, I argue that in their (re)definitions of jongé, they construct and perform their transnational subjectivities and negotiate their gendered and sexual identities. Engagement with jongé in the diaspora reveals women’s discursive agency and demonstrates how cultural practices gain new meanings when transplanted into a different context.
38 Subjectivities in migration. Multimodal language biographical research across educational trajectories
Jacqueline Gutjahr & Andrea Bogner Universität Göttingen
[email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: multilingualism, language regime, language biographies, identities, categorisation of languages
In line with theoretical developments in linguistics and the modelling of language as languaging, language biographical research has undergone a decisive shift from a rather static to a more dynamic approach capturing the intersection between migration, language and identity in the self-representation of speakers. In their multimodal expression, portrait and interview, as employed by Busch (2018), language biographical data are used to investigate how speakers themselves experience and interpret their heteroglossic practices and repertoires and how these self-representations are embedded in migration discourses, language policies and ideologies and at the same time reveal them. In our contribution we analyse data – performing a pictorial and sequential analysis – from three participants of our language biographical study collected in 2015 and 2020, a time span that corresponds to their transitions from a newcomer class and a secondary school in Germany to universities in various European countries. On the basis of the assumption that even within one narration speakers continuously re- position themselves in their communicative spaces and practices to invest in their identities, we want to trace how these dynamisms evolve at different points in time and relate to lived educational and institutional language regimes and at the same time maintain continuities as to the speakers’ beliefs.
39 Language, accent and the experience of belonging for the second-generation Irish from England
Sara Hannafin Mary Immaculate College [email protected] @HannafinS
Keywords: second-generation; return migrant; belonging; Irishness; (English) accent
This paper considers the significance of accent and the everyday use of language to a sense of identity for second-generation return migrants from England to Ireland. It is based on in-depth interviews with a small group of individuals who grew up the children of Irish migrants in England and returned to Ireland as adults. Voice has been key to shaping the experience of the Irish in Britain (Walter 2000) and voice is also key to the experience of belonging for second- generation returnees who have returned to a perceived home and yet sound as if they are from elsewhere. This therefore raises questions of belonging for these returnees and highlights the extent to which connection to place is shaped by accent and language. It also illustrates a boundary of Irishness and how this is contested in specific spatial and social settings. The paper draws on the work of Edensor (2002) who argues that a sense of national identity is created through everyday experience and embedded in the mundane spaces of everyday life. This includes the significant role accent and language play in everyday social encounters in which a sense of belonging is felt and affirmed. Research on migration and language frequently focusses on second language acquisition. This paper aims to broaden understandings of the migrant experience of language use to include an awareness of the role of accent in shaping an individual’s sense of belonging (or not) in their place of migration.
40 Second Homeland or Stepping-Stone: Belonging among Syrian University Students in Turkey
Melissa Hauber-Özer George Mason University [email protected]
Keywords: belonging, refugee education, higher education, language learning, critical ethnography
Current migration and language acquisition research are dominated by the assumption that integration (Ager & Strang, 2008) in the host country is the preferred outcome for refugees, and success is often measured by tangible factors such as employment and schooling rates. However, this fails to account for the often transitory or hostile settings refugees inhabit and their identities, aspirations, transnational bonds, and sense of belonging (Marlowe, 2018). This paper, drawn from a critical ethnographic dissertation study conducted with Syrian university students under temporary protection in Turkey, reports on how a group of refugee young adults experience belonging in the host society. Multilingual, multimodal data were collected through a questionnaire, in-depth, semi-structured interviews, and photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) workshops in the spring and summer of 2020 and were analyzed using layered narrative methods (Call-Cummings et al., 2019). The findings reveal intriguing patterns regarding participants’ sense of belonging in Turkey, which appears to be closely linked with language learning, social inclusion, academic success, and future goals, and ranges from strong identification with the host society based on ideological, religious, and cultural bonds to deep ambivalence. The paper aims to provide useful insights for educators and administrators on the support displaced students find meaningful and to complicate broader assumptions about the outcomes refugees want.
41 Language Officiality and Migration in Andorra
James Hawkey University of Bristol [email protected]
Keywords: Language policy; Official languages; Lingua franca; Catalan; Migrant testimonies
The Andorran constitution states in Article 2.1: ‘the official state language is Catalan’ (Govern d’Andorra 1993: 448). This sets Andorra apart as the only country in the world where Catalan is the sole official language. In other territories, Catalan either holds no official status (e.g. in Catalan-speaking regions of France) or is co-official with Spanish (e.g. the Autonomous Community of Catalonia).
Despite this official monolingual policy, Andorran residents are by no means monolingual Catalan speakers, with country-wide competence in Spanish rated higher than Catalan (Govern d’Andorra 2019a: 14). Moreover, Andorra is a nation of migrants, with over half of the country’s population born elsewhere. The majority of these migrants come from either Spain or Portugal, this group making up 37.1% of Andorra’s population (Govern d’Andorra 2019b: 44). So, how do these migrant groups engage with ‘Catalan-only’ language policies, if they do not speak Catalan before arriving in Andorra? Do they learn the official language, Catalan, or do they simply use the more widely spoken Spanish as a lingua franca? To what extent are these policies of ‘Catalan only’ language officialization used as gatekeeping devices to deny migrants power and social mobility?
This work analyses government legislation, as well as testimonies from members of the Portuguese migrant community in Andorra. I will show that the complex status of Catalan as simultaneously dominant and non-dominant (cf. UNESCO 2003, Grenoble and Whaley 2006) motivates governmental language policy decisions, which in turn impact the lives of migrant workers in Andorra.
42 Speech borrowings and superimposition in the urban variety of Punjabi - Evidence from refugee centres in Italy
Luca Iezzi Università degli Studi ‘G. D’Annunzio’ [email protected]
Keywords: refugee centre, code-mixing, insertions, superimposition, speech borrowings
This contribution illustrates the results of an analysis of authentic recorded speech events involving a selected group of migrants from Pakistan, settled in a particular type of refugee centre in Abruzzo, southern Italy, called CAS (‘extraordinary reception centre’). I aim at showing how the migrants involved in the European migrant crisis use the languages in their repertoire when speaking with fellow countrymen (so other refugee coming from Pakistan). After a brief description of the refugee centre, I plan to provide examples of language contact phenomena through excerpts from spontaneous interactions, showing the characteristics of the urban variety of Punjabi that they use in Pakistan, and how it changes upon their arrival in Italy. The results can be analysed from a structural perspective and a functional perspective. From a structural point of view, the data show that Punjabi is still the base language of interaction (Muysken 2000, Myers-Scotton 2006), but it contains a high number of Urdu, English and Italian insertions (Muysken 2000), some of which can be considered superimpositions of alien elements within a base language fixed structure (Ciccolone 2015); from a functional point of view, I analyse how and why some speech borrowings (Grosjean 1982, Regis 2004) are used in a language different to Punjabi, investigating whether they are core borrowings or cultural borrowings (Myers-Scotton 2006), and if these elements have some sort of cultural specificity (Backus 2001).
43 Constructing British National Identity: The Britain vs. Europe Dichotomy
Anna Islentyeva & Mihera Abdel Kafi Universität Innsbruck / Freie Universität Berlin [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Britain, British press, collexeme analysis, Europe, EU, ideological bias, media representation, national identity, othering, values
Britain’s decision to leave the European Union (EU) not only marks a crucial point in its history and politics, it also evidences growing concern over issues such as British self-determination and national identity. It is therefore particularly revealing to trace the contrasting contemporary media representations of Britain and Europe within the context of the EU membership referendum of 2016 and migration within the EU. Immigration, in its broadest sense, provides a basis for ideological debates about the nature of national identity and self- representation.
This corpus-based study primarily focuses on the discursive techniques employed by the national press in its representation of both Britain and Europe during the UK’s withdrawal from the EU in 2016–2018. The data represent a specialised corpus containing 500 editorials, opinion pieces and news reports from five British newspapers: The Guardian (The Observer) and The Mirror represent left-wing ideology, while The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail and The Sun represent right-wing ideology.
This study applies a mixed-method approach that combines corpus-based analysis with a further examination of wider contexts. As a first step, the analysis focuses on the left-hand collocates of the words Britain versus Europe, as well as on the right-hand collocates of the adjectives British versus EU. As a further step, a concordance analysis of the most salient and distinctive collocates is used to help identify the discourses constructed around these terms; the differences between the left- and right-wing newspapers are then analysed, and the findings are situated in a broader socio-political context. The study uses this combination of methods to reveal how the British press creates the Britain versus Europe dichotomy, in which British exceptionalism is foregrounded as something that stands in opposition to a united Europe.
44 An Ethnographic Case Study: Supporting Factors of Korean Canadian Children’s Bilingual Learning Within and Beyond the Heritage Language School
Soon Young Jang California State Polytechnic University, Pomona [email protected]
Keywords: heritage language, Korean Canadian, bilingual learning, ethno-nationalism
Korean immigrants are one of the fastest growing visible minority groups in Canada. In the midst of immigrant children’s prevalent subtractive bilingualism, this yearlong ethnographic case study was conducted at a church-based heritage language school to investigate “what are supporting factors of Korean Canadian children’s heritage language development and maintenance within and beyond this school?” Data sources include classroom observations; interviews with church leaders, teachers and parents; curriculum materials, children’s artifacts; and Korean government documents and websites. By utilizing Bourdieu’s (1991) theoretical and analytic tools such as field, habitus, and capital, this study identifies the Korean government as a macro level supporting factor, finding the close connection between Korean ethno- nationalism and globalization. Other levels of supporting factors include Sunday school, Korean language classes, and numerous formal and informal church meetings. The Korean government provides funding, textbooks, and classroom materials to this school, and this school provides children with a wide range of activities to learn about their heritage language and culture. This study concludes that this school is a field in which the aims of the Korean government and Korean Canadian immigrants intersect concerning heritage language education. For the Korean government, it is ultimately a field for strengthening national resources and for the congregants of this church, it is mainly for their heritage language and culture maintenance with the goal of fostering Korean ethnic identities of Korean Canadian children.
45 “What she speaks is not even Greek!”: monolingual and monodialectal ideologies in a post- multilingualist era
Petros Karatsareas University of Westminster
[email protected] @pkaratsareas
Keywords: new migration, language ideologies, post-multilingualism, Greek and Cypriot diasporas, UK
Over 65,000 Greek citizens migrated to the UK in 2010-2016, most of whom with the prospects of long-term settlement (Pratsinakis 2019). In this paper, I explore the impact of post-2010 migration on Greek complementary schools (GCSs), which were previously run primarily by and for the Greek Cypriot community. Drawing on a set of ethnographic interviews with teachers, I investigate how the arrival of Greek pupils, parents and qualified teachers diversified the sociolinguistic make-up of GCSs, and the critical role language played in the process. I adopt a post-multilingualist perspective that challenges essentialised associations between and rigid notions of ownership of languages, ethnicities and other dimensions of social belonging (Li 2018). I conceptualise GCSs as “fields of struggles”, where the established Greek Cypriots and Greek newcomers “strategically improvise in their quest to maximize their positions” (Maton 2008: 54), the former drawing on their social capital and the latter on their economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986). The qualitative analysis of teachers’ accounts suggests that post-2010 migrants projected monolingual and monodialectal ideologies about GCSs as diasporic institutions and community spaces. When the linguistic repertoires and practices they encountered in the schools on behalf of pre-2010 teachers and pupils did not correspond to these expectations, because English or Cypriot Greek were used, post-2010 migrants drew on their perceived linguistic legitimacy (Reagan 2016) to assert authority as speakers of ‘correct’ Greek. This perpetuated the stigmatisation of the multilingual and multidialectal repertoires of people with a Greek Cypriot background, especially people who are born in the UK and speak hybrid, diasporic varieties of Cypriot Greek.
46 Hybrid Language Identity of the Second-Generation Immigrants in Cyprus
Sviatlana Karpava University of Cyprus [email protected]
Keywords: Language identity, cultural identity, language practice, second-generation immigrants
According to Portes et al. (2016), there are culturalist and structuralist approaches to the integration of the second-generation immigrants into the mainstream society, which focus on cultural, linguistic and socioeconomic assimilation. Successful societal membership is associated with psychosocial adaptation, hybrid identity, selective acculturation or biculturalism, the adjustment of an individual to new psychological and social conditions (Schwartz et al., 2014; Leszczensky et al., 2019; Boland, 2020). Individual’s identity is related to the sense of belonging, integration, engagement in the current space (Chimienti et al., 2019). Self-identity is fluid and flexible, it comprises individual and collective identity, habitus, or unconscious identity, agency and reflexivity, which is re-evaluated and adjusted throughout the life trajectory of a migrant and is connected to citizenship and solidarity (Lizardo, 2017). This study investigated language identity of second-generation immigrants in Cyprus with various L1 background: Russian, Georgian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Arabic. Thirty participants (age range: 18-27) took part in the research. The data was collected via written questionnaires and in-depth oral semi- structured interviews as well as observations with a focus on linguistic interaction patterns and material culture at home. The analysis of the data showed that second-generation immigrants have hybrid language and cultural identity, perceptions regarding citizenship, inclusion and belonging. They try to assimilate to the target society, but at the same time they have a strong link the community of residence, with their L1 country, their heritage or home language. The participants also have hybrid language practice as they use mixed/multiple languages at home and outside.
47 Creole Identity and Transnational Migration in a Philippine context
Marivic Lesho & Eeva Sippola Franklin University / University of Helsinki [email protected]
Keywords: migration, translocality, hybrid language practices, language loss, Chabacano Creole
This paper examines how migration affects language and place identity, focusing on the case of the Chabacano Creole-speaking community of Cavite City, Philippines. Based on qualitative analysis of data collected in Cavite from 2010 to 2012 (including participant observation, sociolinguistic interviews, and Chabacano texts), we show how Creole identity reflects recent changes in the national and global context of mass migration. The data reveal a pattern of translocality in the residents’ daily linguistic, cultural, and economic practices.
The results indicate that Tagalog and English are now dominant in Cavite due to their linguistic capital in the national and global markets, while Chabacano is tied to local values and culture (Lesho & Sippola 2013). The decline of Chabacano has accompanied a shift from local to translocal place identity as a result of migration patterns, as seen in the current language practices of the Caviteños. At the same time, however, local pride in Cavite has always been tied to national pride, as well as the city’s cosmopolitan creole culture and historical importance in colonial trade. Caviteños are nostalgic for Chabacano, but it does not represent Creole identity alone, as multilingualism and hybrid language practices have always been present in the community.
Recent shifts in Cavite identity are related to longstanding historical and cultural patterns, with complex dynamics reflecting local, national, and global orientations. More generally, these findings contribute to the discussion of the links between language loss and culture loss and the effects of global migration on diversity, especially in multilingual societies (cf. Ladefoged 1992, Dorian 1998, Childs et al. 2014).
48 How attitudes to Covid-19 are affecting attitudes to migrants
Stephen Lucek & Dean Phelan University College Dublin [email protected] @DialectsIreland
Keywords: Language attitudes; raciolinguistics; social media data; survey data
Attitudes to language and attitudes to ethnic groups have long been shown to be related to one another (e.g. linguistic relativism), leading sociolinguistics to a raciolinguistic perspective that encompasses attitudes to race and language (Alim, 2016). In recent history, significant events have also been shown to negatively affect attitudes to specific groups who are deemed to be responsible (e.g. Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnary, 2013). The current paper looks at how the Covid-19 pandemic has emboldened far-right attitudes to migrants in an Irish context. Through a Twitter scraping exercise, conducted in August 2020, we show that far-right framing of migrants as a.) contagion or disease; b.) criminals; and c.) favoured or elites are clearly evident and considerably on the rise in these Irish data. This would seem to run contrary to a concurrent study in Germany (Dennison & Geddes 2020). Thus, we then pair with this quantitative Twitter data with qualitative observations of anti-mask protests as indicative of a broadening of the allure of far-right political groups with Covid-19 as the “leading edge”. Taken together, these data seem to run contrary to ESS and comparative data, leading us to question how attitudes are elicited, measured and reported.
49 (Re)negotiating Identity Through the Use of Material Culture
Chra Mahmud Canterbury Christ Church University [email protected] @MahmudChra
Keywords: identity, diaspora, identity negotiation, identity navigation, material culture
For most immigrants, material objects are valuable sources and carrying powerful meanings. These objects function as a negotiator between the established attachment to their home and the receiving country (Pechurina, 2020). Within immigrant contexts, material objects also can be viewed as an identity marker that distinguishes one community from another (Rosales, 2010).
Several studies have looked at the importance of using material objects concerning identity, yet the study of the variations in objects’ meaning as well as relationships and affects that evolved around them within the Kurdish context has been ignored entirely. Therefore, in this paper, I am going to explore how a ‘group’ of Kurdish immigrants in the United Kingdom (re)negotiate and navigate their cultural identity using material possessions. To answer the proposed research question, a narrative approach has been employed, and six people were interviewed for this study. During my visit to the participants’ home, I took photos of items and material possessions which were distributed around their houses, and the meaning behind these objects was investigated during the interviews.
The analysis in this paper is a part of my Ph.D. data on the topic. The findings suggest that material possessions function as a powerful mean for the Kurdish diaspora in the UK, it assists them to create meaning in the pristine environment (Trabert, 2020). For some immigrants, these objects are associated with deep ‘emotional investment’ (Svašek, 2012), and they are “material capsules,” since it is a product that connects them not only with the sites and landscapes from the past but also assist them to envisage their future (Naum, 2015, p. 73).
50 Ethnolinguistics Rollercoaster from KSA to Pakistan: A Scrutiny of Linguistic and Cultural Identity of Third Culture Kid
Amal Hamid Malik Kinnaird College for Women
Keywords: Third Culture Kid (TCK), Ethnolinguistics, cultural identity, overseas.
Each day, a family decides to move abroad for several reasons including better jobs, education and opportunities overall. With the moving, comes great experience of culture and eventually a cultural shift in the identity of movers. Some of them move with their parents and some are born in a separate country than their parents’ birth place. Such kids are raised in a different culture than their parents and may also possess a different country’s passport. The researchers John and Useem in 1950s referred to such children as “third culture kid”. They live in a new place known to them as ‘homeland’ but sooner or later, they shift back to their/ their parents’ native country. The present study aims to highlight the experience of third culture kid returning from Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to Pakistan. It analyzes their experience of cultural and linguistic identities. It is a substantial business area of ethnolinguistics. The research adapts a qualitative approach with semi- structured interviews and observations for in-depth information of third culture kids. It studies their identified desire to be treated just and equal to rest and their adjustment period and influencing factors. It is evident in their unanimous view that being a third culture kid is a positive experience. The findings of the study concludes their language and cultural identity challenges with reflection to their academic and social overseas and new at home experience. Moreover, the study mirrors the fact that a third culture kid acts as a bridge between the cultures.
51 From Rwanda to Canada, From Mother to Daughter: Intergenerational Diasporic Discourse About the 1994 Genocide
Kathryn Mara University of Wisconsin-Madison [email protected] @maramooooja
Keywords: postmemory, language socialization, genocide, Rwanda, diaspora
Literary studies scholar Marianne Hirsch describes “postmemory” as “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before” (2012 5). While its origin may be in comparative literature, postmemory’s usefulness does not end there. In its focus on transmittance, postmemory may serve as a starting point for understanding how ways of talking about the past are embodied and repeated by the “generation after.” In this paper, I build off the work of Hirsch and fellow linguistic anthropologists interested in the intersection language and memory (French 2012), by asking: how do young Rwandan women living outside of Rwanda (learn to) represent the 1994 genocide? I address this question by analyzing ethnographic interviews with Rwandan women, mothers and daughters, living in and around Toronto. While other factors such as commemoration and Rwandan legislation influence discourse about the genocide, for young Rwandans, I argue that family talk functions as an important form of language socialization in which those not physically present for the genocide are not only being taught to narrativize events in “appropriate” ways, using standardized or currently acceptable language, but also to embody the memory of genocide as their own and to identify themselves accordingly. Through this ethnographic work, we learn not only about what various narratives regarding the genocide mean to Rwandans themselves, but also about the processes by which narratives are created, used, and/or contested both in local, situated contexts and across time and space.
52 Collocational networks and subjectivity in judicial discourse: A corpus-based comparative analysis
María José Marín Universidad de Murcia [email protected] @MJ_MP
Keywords: corpus linguistics; discourse studies; legal language; appraisal theory; Immigration
The description of legal language has traditionally been based on scholars’ extensive experience in the field (Mellinkoff, 1963; Tiersma, 1999; Alcaraz; 1994), which points at the convoluted character of this language variety and its apparent detachment from subjectivity. Judicial decisions may be deemed an inherently objective legal genre, as judges must speak “in a way that appears fair and objective to all the parties involved as well as to the general public” (Gozdz-Roszkowski, 2017a).
On the contrary, recent studies (Marín, 2019; Gozdz-Roszkowski, 2017b) evidence the noticeable presence of evaluative lexicon in judicial decisions. Yet, could it be used to unveil the speakers’/writers’ attitude towards such a sensitive topic as immigration? And if so, could it enhance our perception of this phenomenon as seen through the eyes of the judiciary?
This research introduces a cross-linguistic examination of two corpora of British and Spanish judicial decisions on immigration of roughly 3 million words. Each corpus was analysed using Marín’s (2019) findings as a point of departure, where the collocate networks of some of the terms falling within the category affect, as defined by Eggins and Slade (1997), White (1999) and Martin (2003), were obtained. A close scrutiny of these networks reveals a thematic link between both corpora, by signalling the struggle migrants face in their voyage to European soil. The terms in the networks of family and familias display strong collocational bonds in both texts collections as well as those terms found in connection with other topics such as trafficking, exploitation, deseo (desire), or riesgo (risk).
53 Combining observational and narrative interviewing data in study abroad research: a critical discussion on qualitative research methods
Sònia Mas-Alcolea & Helena Torres-Purroy University of Lleida [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: higher education, study abroad, Erasmus, ethnography, shadowing, narrative interview, qualitative research
Study-abroad students are often described as a “type of migrant” (Murphy-Lejeune, 2003: 2) who leaves with similar migratory motivations (learning a foreign language and encountering ‘cultural difference’). The current paper aims to offer a focused critical discussion of two of the qualitative data collection methods used in a longitudinal multiple-case study (Mas-Alcolea, 2017) investigating the impact of intraEuropean mobility on the students’ linguistic and intercultural development. On the one hand, shadowing (Gorup, 2016) allowed the researcher to “closely [follow] a subject over a period of time to investigate what people actually do in the course of their everyday lives, not what their roles dictate of them” (Quinlan, 2008, p. 1480). On the other hand, the narrative interview (Riessman, 2008) stimulated interviewees to express their experiences “as they saw it, in their own language, using their own terms of reference, and emphasizing actions or participants which they regard as being significant” (Bates, 2004: 16).
The advantages of combining the direct and first-hand nature of the experience of the researcher (through shadowing) with the participants’ accounts of their experiences (through the narrative interview) are stressed in this paper. Special emphasis will be placed on the need to, not only rely on the participants’ self-report(s), but to also obtain an other-report about the phenomena being studied, to be aware and steer away from the idea of representing ‘reality’ from an insider’s perspective or, as it is called in the participant-observer literature, from “going native” (McDonald, 2005: 459) and, ultimately, to become a co-narrator and co-construct the meaning of their study-abroad experience(s).
54 Perceived disrespect and moral injustice in language discordant healthcare settings
Andresa M. de A. Medeiros State University of Campinas [email protected]
Effective communication is crucial for accessing healthcare services, which is made even clearer in language-discordant interactions. Research has demonstrated that the absence of a shared language between patients and health providers strongly impacts instrumental tasks, such as soliciting and gathering information to carry out appropriate diagnosis, explaining treatment plans, and ensuring compliance. However, less attention has been given to socioemotional aspects, particularly relating to the extent to which language discordance in healthcare settings affects (non-)recognition and opportunities for self assertion and the enactment of social power by international migrants. Ergo, this study intends to investigate if, and in what ways, language discordance impacts migrant patients’ perceptions of injustice and disrespect from health providers, and their responses to it. The research draws upon qualitative data collection through semi-structured interviews with five non-Portuguese-speaking migrants residing in São Paulo, Brazil, who have used the city’s public health system without the aid of a professional interpreter. Through my research, I have found that the responses brought by perceptions of injustice and disrespect are subject to language repertoire and migrant status, as non-Portuguese speaking patients lack the verbal means to effectively challenge the situation by expressing their feelings and demanding recognition. This is compounded by migrant and patient-specific conditions of vulnerability and constrains the subject’s ability to exercise social power.
55 The language practices of mobile students in Europe: implications for identity
Rosamond Mitchell University of Southampton
Keywords: student mobility, language identity, plurilingualism
Credit mobile students are numerous in Europe, and policies of internationalisation and the spread of English as medium of instruction have increased their range of study destinations (Mitchell & Tyne, 2021). Mobile students are known to socialise more easily with co-nationals and other international students, less easily with host nationals (Murphy-Lejeune, 2002); their preference for English as medium of instruction and also for lingua franca communication is well documented (Kalocsai, 2013). Implications for their language identity are less clear, with theoretical possibilities ranging from a “contentedly bilingual” identity (Henry, 2017) to a “plurilingual” identity (Beaven & Conacher, 2021; Cots et al., 2021).
This paper investigates the impact on student language identity of a sojourn abroad. It draws on an empirical study of incoming/outgoing mobility in varied European HE settings. Researchers in the recent COST Action “Study Abroad Research in European Perspective” interviewed mobile students regarding their language learning histories, language attitudes and values, and language practices when abroad; resulting data were transcribed and analysed thematically with NVivo12. Findings confirmed students’ positive views of English for academic study, international communication, leisure practices and future employment, and for many, positive views also of other “international” languages (especially Spanish). They expressed much more limited interest in learning/using lesser-spoken host languages (e.g. Catalan, Croatian). However students’ unproblematic acceptance of translanguaging, their willingness to learn new languages of significance for personal relations, and expectations that they would remain long term language learners as well as users, are interpreted as indicators of the emergence/strengthening of a plurilingual identity for many sojourners.
56 On how to become a privileged migrant – the relationship between study abroad and migration perspectives
Vasilica Mocanu Universidad de Salamanca [email protected]
Keywords: migration perspectives, study abroad, identity, multilingualism
This paper focuses on the relationship between study abroad and migration perspectives. Firstly, it examines how ongoing discourses on study abroad and a future in which migration processes will be a reality for many individuals shape the decisions of young European higher- education students both to enroll in a study abroad experience and its location. Secondly, it looks at how the mobility experience shapes the participants’ decision to migrate and in what ways the context of the stay abroad affects their choices. Therefore, the study aims at answering the question: How ongoing discourses on the benefits of study abroad in relation to migration perspectives shape the decision to enroll in a study abroad experience and what is the relationship between a study abroad experience and the perspective to migrate, as reported by young European higher-education students who decided to enroll and spent a period studying abroad.
In order to do so, the paper focuses on previous studies on study abroad and migration perspectives (e.g. Murphy-Lejeune, 2004) and on study abroad, identities, and multilingualism (e.g. Block, 2014). Data comes from a mixed-methods, longitudinal study that adopted a pre- post design to assess the reasons why young European higher-education students decide to enroll in a period of studying abroad at a foreign European university and the perceived impact of the experience in relation to identity, employability, multilingualism, and migration perspectives. The results point to a direct relationship between study abroad and migration perspectives, both at the level of social and political discourses as in relation to the impact of the lived experience.
57 Narratives of (un)belonging: Language management and identity negotiations in two immigrant families in New Zealand
Naashia Mohamed The University of Auckland [email protected] @Naashia_M
Keywords: immigrant identity, family language policy, heritage language maintenance, language shift, language management
Despite the increased interest in raising children bi/multilingually in immigration contexts, existing research shows that children become passive bi/multilinguals or are dominant in the societal language, displaying stronger connections to the societal culture. Maintaining familial languages and sustaining close links to the heritage culture remain parallel concerns of immigrant families. Such concerns are particularly important as they impact one’s identity and sense of belonging, and help prevent language shift.
This study focuses on the lives of two women from refugee backgrounds who resettled in New Zealand two decades ago. It sought to explore the language management strategies they use within their intergenerational families, and the impact immigration has had on their own identities, language use and sense of belonging. More specifically, it addresses these questions: How are parental language policies focused on heritage language maintenance and English language development?
How has resettlement affected immigrant identity and belonging over time?
Following a narrative design, the study uses interview data and applies thematic analysis to explore these questions. Findings indicate that the language management strategies used in the two families were markedly different and seemed to impact the linguistic abilities of both the adults and the children. The strategies adopted by both families were driven by a fervent desire to provide the best possible upbringing for their children. Feelings of alienation from the heritage culture and regret over language loss, as well as an underlying anxiety about the future were prominent themes in the data.
58 Degrees of Belonging in Diasporic Contexts – Indexical scales of Vietnamese-ness in the UK
Anh Khoi Nguyen University of Manchester [email protected]
Keywords: language practices; diaspora; heritage language; belonging; migration and memory
The goal of this paper is to analyse how different degrees of belonging to different types of Vietnamese diasporic identities are constructed, invoked, and assessed through linguistic and semiotic practices. The Vietnamese population in the UK is taken as a case study because of the complex identities emergent from multiple internal divisions along ethnic, linguistic, religious, political and historical lines. To grapple with these complexities, belonging to Vietnamese communities and being Vietnamese will be interpreted not in terms of binary membership, but rather in terms of social practices drawing on shared knowledge. Data is drawn from ethnographic observations conducted at Vietnamese locations and events, interviews, as well as virtual ethnography. Identity and belonging are described as indexicalities, specifically Silverstein's (2003) orders of indexicalities, the differential access and reference to which will be analysed through Blommaert et al's (2005) and Blommaert's (2007) scale analysis. A particular focus is examining the resources through which the scales are constituted and invoked (cf. Canagarajah and De Costa, 2016). Belonging is thus the fluid and temporary participation in distinctly Vietnamese scale practices and assessed not according to static individual identity, but an individual’s ability to participate. Participation is enabled and constrained by the linguistic and semiotic repertoires an individual can utilise to take part in Vietnamese practices. The degree to which somebody belongs varies depending on context, can shift within the same interaction, and can be contested and negotiated by the participants.
59 Integration of Repatriated Chinese Kazakhs in Multilingual Kazakhstan: Language, Culture and Identity Issues among Kazakh Youths
Marzhan Nurtaikyzy & Mukul Saxena Nazarbayev University [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Uyghurs, Kazakhstan, Migration, Language Challenges, China
Under the repatriation policy of Kazakhstan (a post-Soviet country), a large number of ethnic Kazakhs have returned from China. However, not much is known about their (particularly the youth) integration experiences into the wider society. The current study has looked at the revaluation of the cultural and linguistic capital (Pujolar, 2016) of the repatriated Chinese Kazakh youths in the ethnolinguistically diverse Kazakhstan. The language use and identities associated with Kazakh and Russian vary significantly from region to region (Smagulova, 2006) which make the issues of diversity more complex. Therefore, after identifying two contrastive urban sociolinguistic environments, the main cities Nur-Sultan and Almaty, this study asked what role language and identity issues play in Kazakh youths’ integration into the educational and societal contexts of Kazakhstan. In this small-scale qualitative case study, in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 youth in total (5 each in Nur-Sultan and Almaty) which elicited their language background, attitudes and use in educational and non-educational contexts concerning their integration experiences. The findings suggest that in contrast to the sociolinguistic hierarchies of Kazakh, Chinese and English under the overt and covert language education policies in China (Dwyer 2005; Finley & Zang 2015), the Kazakh language variety and identity of the youth in Kazakhstan have to contend with the local hierarchies of Kazakh, Russian and English of the Trilingual Education Policy. Their language and identity challenges are shaped by the trajectories associated with the historical language and identity regimes in China and the current local language and identity regimes in the two cities whose sociolinguistics environments are also shaped by the official national language education policy and the wider multilingual environment (e.g., social and official media) in Kazakhstan
60 Intra-regional migration as a context for identity work: linguistic identity and rural-to-urban mobility within Galicia
Annie Ornelles Georgetown University [email protected]
Keywords: discourse analysis, positioning, identity, Galicia, migration
Recently, contexts of migration and mobility have become fruitful sites of investigation for identity research, though within sociolinguistics, the majority of these studies have centered on contexts of transnational migration (Baynham & De Fina 2005; De Fina & King 2011, etc.). One understudied area that I suggest sociolinguistic research on identity can be expanded to is that of intra-regional migration, specifically in contexts where we find multilingual populations in which language use is often dictated not by spatial-geographic lines, but by more socially- or demographically-motivated divides such as that of rural vs. urban. In this study, I employ discourse analysis and positioning theory (Bamberg 1997) to examine “small stories” or micro- narratives in interviews conducted 14 Galician university students coming from towns of 3,000 people or fewer who have relocated to an urban city to attend university. In so doing, I examine the ways in which these speakers position themselves with respect to the language varieties in their new environment and how they navigate new individual and collective identities, often emphasizing rurality and reclaiming this oft-stigmatized category through their linguistic choices and emphasis of Galicianness as a not only belonging to the language, but their rural origins. Within Galicia, rural areas have historically played a significant role in both the preservation of Galician and the characterization of Galician identity, and a recent “rural exodus” makes this a productive site for identity work and a case study for the application of migration and discourse-analytic research on identity in a new setting.
61 Constructing the “acceptable EU migrant” in the UK Government’s Brexit-related documents
Tamsin Parnell University of Nottingham
[email protected] @tamsinparnell http://bit.ly/tamsinparnell
Keywords: Brexit, national identity, critical discourse analysis, EU migration, belonging
In this paper, I will use Key Semantic Domain Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis to answer the following research question: How are EU migrants discursively constructed in UK government documents about Brexit? I will focus specifically on political speeches and policy papers published on the UK Government website between February 2016 and December 2019. I will examine the intersection between discourses of national identity and migration, demonstrating that although British political actors construct Britain as a tolerant nation that embraces the cultural and economic benefits of European immigration, their grammatical and linguistic strategies discursively exclude EU migrants from the British public. I will argue that a neoliberal construction of the acceptable EU migrant discursively erases the identities of migrant workers in so-called “unskilled” roles and foreshadows the social exclusion of these groups brought about by the UK’s post-Brexit immigration system. I will illustrate that EU citizens living in the UK are often positioned as contributors to the British economy but not fully-fledged members of the public. Drawing on the 37th British Social Attitudes Survey (Curtice et al., 2020), I will explain that the government’s migration-related discourses do not reflect the British public’s positive view of, inter alia, would-be care workers from the EU. I will conclude that government documents problematise Britain’s construction as a tolerant nation and threaten to weaken feelings of belonging to the UK among EU migrants.
62 A disavowed community: the case of new Italian migrants in London
Giulia Pepe University of Westminster [email protected]
Keywords: Italian migration, community language, post-2008 crisis migrants, translanguaging, late modern community
This paper reports on a study of the language ideologies and practices of the post-2008 crisis Italian migrants in London. The study aimed at understanding how the traditional idea of a national migrant community is challenged through these practices. While the Italian post-2008 crisis migration continues a long tradition and has captured the attention of the media (King 2017), it is scholarly understudied from a sociolinguistic point of view. Using a qualitative research approach, two sets of data were collected: recordings of social interactions in spontaneously organised gatherings, and interviews with 15 post-crisis migrants. The data show the multilingual practices of post-2008 migrants and their attitudes towards these practices. Participants recognise translanguaging (García and Li Wei 2014; Li Wei 2011 ) as the main practice defining the community language. This seems to contrast with the disavowal of their national migrant community. They refuse to engage with traditional community sociocultural practices, they challenge their membership of the Italian community in London and, in some cases, they even deny the existence of the community by highlighting the internal diversity that characterises this group. Nevertheless, although the participants refuse to be seen as members of a national community, they describe their engagement with translanguaging as a community practice that determines their belonging to a migratory group. The paper argues that, through the practice of translanguaging, migrants negotiate and shape their migratory identities, and reflect on the concept of the community and its dynamics.
63 A corpus-assisted socio-political approach to the study of migration phenomena in parliamentary discourse
María Calzada Pérez Universitat Jaume I, Castellón de la Plana [email protected]
Keywords: corpus-assisted discourse analysis, socio-political approaches to migration, im/migration, parliamentary discourse, ECPC
As part of the ECPC-RECRI research project, the present paper aims to put forward (and illustrate) a theoretical and methodological framework for the comparative study of original and/or translated representations of im/migrations from European chambers such as the European Parliament (EP), the British House of Commons (HC) and the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados (CD). With this purpose in mind, we merge the solid socio-political theoretical stance put forward by Zapata-Barrero (2009) and Zapata Barrero et al. (2008) with a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach.
From the socio-political realm, we draw on Zapata-Barrero’s key notions of “discursive networks” (geopolitical chains of discourse representations), “politization of migration” (chronological profile of discourse representations) and “discourse politics” (concrete pro- active and re-active uses resulting from the geopolitical and chronological processes).
From the corpus-assisted analytical field (notably, Baker 2010; Partington et al. 2013), we put to use traditional and innovative tools to pursue an analysis in three stages. In Stage 1, the presence or absence of discussion of migrations is quantified and its spatio-temporal proliferation mapped through CL tools such as detailed consistency. In Stage 2, outstanding features/themes are identified and closely examined (through the use / grouping of wordlists, keywords and key key words, among others). In Stage 3, pro-active or re-active nature of discourse politics is assessed (via semantic prosody resulting from the examination of concordances and clusters and s-collocations and c-collocations).
Our methodological proposal is illustrated with use the European Comparable and Parallel Corpus Archive (ECPC), a set of monitored corpora of over 100 million tokens of parliamentary interventions from the HC, EP, CD.
64 Language practices in multicultural contexts: The linguistic immersion of Haitian children in the Chilean public school system.
Carolina Pérez-Arredondo Universidad Andrés Bello [email protected]
Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis; Language Practices; Multicultural Classroom; Third Language Acquisition; Education
In Chile, the Haitian community has become the fifth largest immigrant community, and they are overtly subject to (racial, cultural, and class) discrimination (Pavez-Soto et al., 2019, Tijoux & Palominos, 2016). Far too little attention has been paid to children as most research has been conducted on adults in informal educational settings. In this context, the linguistic challenges are greater for Haitian children than their parents as they must acquire both Spanish as a Second Language (L2) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) while also performing well at school (L3) (Jessner, 2013). Therefore, this study aims to identify EFL teachers and Haitian parents’ attitudes and perceptions towards their students/children’s learning processes and linguistic development in multicultural classrooms in Chile. By interviewing six EFL teachers and twelve Haitian parents, the study examines how socio-pragmatic factors such as power, social distance, and degree of imposition can affect students, parents, and teachers’ identities and learning processes. The study takes place in six different public schools distributed in three cities within the Chilean capital, which concentrates a large Haitian population, while the data is analysed considering Reisigl and Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach (2001, 2016). Results show that the tendency to linguistic assimilation creates bidirectional animosities between parents and teachers who blame each other for their children/students’ poor academic performance. Moreover, the lack of resources prevents teachers from assisting their students effectively, allegedly exacerbating these children’s anxiety and frustration.
65 Where´s home? EU citizens as migrants.
Pascual Pérez-Paredes & Elena Remigi Universidad de Murcia / The In Limbo Project [email protected] @perezparedes [email protected]
Keywords: Brexit, EU citizens, migrants, keyword analysis, representation strategies
Since January 2021, UK and EU citizens can no longer exercise freedom of movement between the two areas. EU, EEA or Swiss citizens living in the UK before 31 December 2020 have been forced to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme to continue living in the UK. In practical terms, EU citizens have become a new migrant community. The 2016 Brexit referendum started a period of uncertainty, agony and frustration for both EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU that ended with the trade deal that the EU and the UK made public on 24 December 2020. The anger, the sense of betrayal (Bueltmann, 2020) and various mental health issues (Reimer, 2018; Bueltmann, 2020), however, linger on.
This study uses a corpus of 200 testimonies from EU citizens in the UK to explore their feelings and reactions to Brexit and the hostile environment (Leudar et al., 2008) that emerged soon after the referendum. The In Limbo corpus of testimonies contains personal accounts by EU citizens living in Britain from 2017 until 2020. It has 81,000 tokens and 7,600 types. The collection of the data was organised by volunteers on a not-for-profit basis. The testimonies in Remigi, E., Martin, V., & Sykes (2020) were chosen as the basis of our corpus.
We used keyword (Baker, 2006; Baker et al., 2008) and collocation (Baker, 2006; Pérez-Paredes, Aguado & Sánchez, 2017; Pérez-Paredes, 2020) analyses to explore the self-representation of EU citizens across four emerging areas of interest: family life, loss of identity, feeling unwelcome and representations of post-Brexit Britain, including discourses about settled status and Britishness. In order to moderate the impact of Brexit-as-a-topic in the analysis of the narratives, we used two reference corpora in our study: the Brexit corpus and the enTenTen 2015, both provided through Sketch Engine. We used Wodak’s (2001) framework of analysis of representation strategies to pin down our discussion of the discourses emerging in the testimonies. Two strategies appear to be relevant in the context of our data: predication and perspectivation. The former is used mainly when expressing feelings about the UK while the latter are crucial to deliver the narratives discursively. While our research confirms some of the conclusions in the survey conducted by
66 Bueltmann (2020), the combination of corpus-based CDA methods and the rich data provided through these narratives open up further understanding of the discursive strategies used by EU citizens when resisting the anti-EU environment that was unleashed in the wake of Brexit. Our analysis provides an alternative representation of the consequences and impact of Brexit on EU migrants that is in contrast with the recent triumphalist discourse of the Tory government that misrepresents EU citizens as happily embracing the settled status scheme.
The construction of agentic identities by refugees learning English in Scotland and the pedagogical implications.
Iain Philip University of Edinburgh [email protected]
Keywords: Identity, Agency, Refugees, ESOL practice, picture elicitation
Refugees are increasingly defined by their lack of agency, reductively framed in political and social discourse solely as passive victims, forced to migrate by forces out with their control (Wroe, 2018). This research describes how twelve adult participants, refugees living and learning English in Edinburgh, challenge this through the construction agentic identities in picture-elicitation interviews to position themselves as people with a sense of agency (Mercer, 2011), or control over their lives, even as they struggle to overcome institutional and situational challenges to this. It argues that these participants want to seen as survivors rather than victims and utilise a range of expert, professional, hands-on practical and cultural identities to afford agentic identities and resist stereotypes that challenge these. It also explores the relationship of this to learning English and found that lack of validation of these identities was demotivating, and that practical activities that increased agency were appreciated. However, attempts to engage these identities could be counterproductive as they can highlight their fragility and the gap between participants sense of agency and capacity for action. It then examines the ESOL pedagogical and policy implications of this. This doctoral research used a poststructuralist perspective on identity (Norton, 2013), picture elicitation (Harper, 2002), in which participants choose pictures that represented their identity and language learning, combined with Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2014) in attempt to empower participants and position them as experts.
67 Motivation to Belong and its Connection to Language Learning: Exploring Performative Practices with Refugees and Migrants
Erika Piazzoli Trinity College Dublin
[email protected] www.erikapiazzoli.com
Keywords: Performative Language Learning, Arts Education, Exploratory Practice Belonging, Refugees and Drama
This paper discusses emergent findings of Sorgente, a study on motivation to belong and its connection to language learning. The research (funded by the Irish Research Council) is conducted by an international team of arts-based research practitioners led by Trinity College Dublin, in partnership with Youth and Education Services (YES) for Refugees and Migrants, and Youthreach. The participants are students attending English classes for refugees and migrants in Dublin, and their classroom teachers.
Performative language teaching is an interdisciplinary approach (Schewe, 2013) integrating Arts Education (drama, theatre, music, dance, visual arts, creative writing) and Applied Linguistics. This study explores whether, and how, a performative approach can investigate the relationship between motivation to belong and second language teaching and learning.
The study draws on Arts-Based Research (Barone & Eisner, 2011) informed by Exploratory Practice methodology (Hanks, 2017). The research questions of the study are:
How does motivation to belong relate to language learning, when working performatively with young people enrolled in an English class for refugees and migrants in Dublin? How can embodied research methods be used effectively to investigate motivation to belong, and its connection to language learning, in young people enrolled in an English class for refugees and migrants in Dublin? How does performative language practice support an ethical imagination in the practitioners involved in the study?
The paper will mainly focus on the first question, but will touch on the second and third questions while presenting the analysis. Data sets include: audio-recordings of selected activities (music-compositions; role-plays; soundscapes; improvisations); photography of
68 artifacts (drawings; poetry; fabric/clay sculptures); sketches of key moments drawn by a visual artist; interviews; teachers’ observations and researchers’ notes.
The discussion will give an overview of the project, including the methodology and emergent findings. It will draw connections between a performative approach to language, migration and belonging.
Exploring FORCE in Metaphor and Viewpoint phenomena in the multimodal representations of the refugee ‘crisis’ in online British newspapers
Javier Mármol Queraltó Lancaster University [email protected]
Keywords: Viewpoint, Conceptual Metaphor, Multimodality, refugee ‘crisis’, online newspapers
In the context of the recent political and migratory events occurring in Europe, the dynamics of inequality is a recurrent topic in public discourses in international spheres (Deardoff, 2017). While much has been written on media representations of migration in the linguistic modality (Baker et al., 2008; El Refaie, 2001), comparatively little has been written about the visual depiction of migrants and refugees. This is despite a wealth of literature which highlights the role that pictures play in communicating values and thus in creating and sustaining social identities more generally (Bednarek & Caple, 2012). This paper advocates a cognitive linguistic approach to Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS) and analyses British online newspapers Metaphor and Viewpoint phenomena (Hart, 2015) of the 2015-16 refugee ‘crisis’ in language and image, in order to assess the interactions between these modalities and their potential ideological implications.
This paper focuses on event-construal (Langacker, 2008), and my claim is that the ideological purport of newspapers in the process of metaphorical framing and of forcing a specific viewpoint toward events can serve to create alternative, ideology-vested, realities, both in language and image (Hart, 2016). The analysis focuses on the multimodal instantiations of Conceptual Metaphor (Forceville, 2008), and on the Viewpoint dimensions of Distance, Angle and Anchor (Hart, 2015) realised in language and static image. Viewpoint and metaphor enactors analysis can potentially be applied across languages and modalities (Hart, 2017a), and
69 its descriptive power will be shown in the analysis of a sample of British news reports. The focus is on the critical examination and potential emerging interactions between the image and specific linguistic elements (headline, subheading, caption and lead paragraph) within news reports, and the (in)congruent relationships there might occur.
The Language Baggage: Unpacking Language Ideologies among Young Filipino-Canadians
Chareena Lareza Quirante Carleton University
[email protected] @misschareena
Keywords: language maintenance, family language policy, migration studies, language ideology, youth discourse
Engaging second-generation migrants in “youth discourse” (McCarty et al., 2006), this research paper explores the ways young Filipino-Canadians feel and think about the multiple languages they carry. Under a qualitative lens, the data from the group discussions underwent a two-level thematic analysis and results were framed within the Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles & Coupland, 1991), presenting a set of language ideologies (Spolsky, 2004) relevant to younger speakers in diasporic settings. As they are the ones who are more likely going to experience the tension between maintenance and integration the most, this study aims to affirm the role of young people in the language planning process, situate immigrants of Philippine origin in the literature, and add to the affective dimension of the field related to languages-in-contact.
70 Migration in a cross-cultural perspective: using distributional semantic to study discrepancies in the framing of migration across languages and countries.
Maud Reveilhac, Gerold Schneider & Patricia Ronan University of Lausanne / University of Zurich / TU Dortmund [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Migration discourse, social media, Twitter, computational linguistics, distributional semantics
The proposed study investigates which framing (Gamson et al. 1992) and embedded ideologies surround migration discourse in news and social media, from a comparative international perspective. The framing of refugee crises (Heidenreich et al. 2019), and the influence of media on these discourses (Amores et al. 2019) and vice versa have been investigated. The current study extends this perspective to the question how media discourses are similar to social media ones and relates the findings to results from population surveys. The research aim is to show how far automated social media approaches can complement surveys, which tend to be limited when it comes to assessing cross-cultural framing and understanding of migration.
The study uses distributional semantics (Sahlgren and Lenci 2016) to measure word co- occurrences in large corpora. It identifies cross-cultural discrepancies in how migration is framed around the world on social media to map ways in which migration is framed by online populations and regions worldwide.
To do so, we use the Twitter Application Programming Interface and identify opinion makers and their followers from select countries, including the US, Britain, South Africa and Australia, and we assess prevalence, associations and tonality of migration-related discussions in these discourses. Specific migration-related tweets are identified and analysed with our distributional semantic model for each country using a word2vec model (Mikolov et al. 2013). Survey measures overall show increasing support for migration in European countries and in the US, but the reverse is true in South-Africa. We expect to observe similar patterns in salient Twitter frames.
71 Empowering communication through technology: migration and translation at a crossroad
Celia Rico & María del Mar Sánchez Ramos Universidad Europea / Universidad de Alcalá [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Crisis translation, machine translation, migration and translation
This contribution describes the work carried out in the framework of the project INMIGRA3-CM (H2019/HUM-5772), addressing the following research question: is there a place for Machine Translation in NGOs working with migrant people? The rationale for this work is the observation of a paradox that takes place in the communication flow between NGO’s workers and migrants: translation is seen as a key factor in the communicative process but there are no formal procedures for the implementation and use of the latest advances in translation technology.
In order to answer the research question we conducted a qualitative study gathering data from two key NGOs in Spain: CEAR (Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid) and Cáritas España. This data was analysed following the decision-making framework for the implementation of computer-assisted translation systems as proposed by Candel-Mora and Ramírez Polo (2015). Findings revealed a series of gaps in the translation process if translation tools (and machine translation) is to be used to its full potential.
72 “And suddenly the foreign, the Other, is no longer so foreign” – Polish Café as a grassroots initiative of linguistic integration.
Karolina Rosiak Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań [email protected]
Although immigration to Poland is not a new phenomenon, the year 2014 is considered to be the beginning of large influx of migrants to Poland, mainly due to significant increase in immigration from Ukraine. Despite that fact, Polish authorities have not yet implemented an official migration policy. Consequently, no policy exists regarding linguistic integration of migrants and there is little institutional help in teaching Polish to migrants. It is in this context that grassroots non-profit Polish Café meetings were established in the spring of 2019, i.e. informal regular meetings of immigrants in Poznań (Poland) learning Polish with native speakers of Polish. The meetings are organized by two teachers of Polish as a foreign language, who have observed that somewhat surprisingly their students do not have opportunities to practice Polish outside the classroom. Hence, the meetings take place in a café and consist in informal grammar and vocabulary learning, and conversations.
The present paper, then will discuss initial findings of an ethnographic study of Polish Café as a grassroots initiative with linguistic integration at heart. Data for this study was obtained between May 2019 and October 2020 (with breaks as of March 2020 due to lockdowns) through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and action research. The emergent themes from the study that will be discussed include challenges and opportunities that learning Polish brings, identity and belonging, and attitudes towards migrants learning Polish. All themes will be discussed from the point of view of migrants as well as Polish native speakers.
73 How should a refugee sound? Credibility and the politics of listenership
Jeremy A. Rud University of California Davis [email protected] https://linguistics.ucdavis.edu/people/jarud
Keywords: asylum narratives; credibility; linguistic anthropology; sociophonetic perception; asylum adjudications
Scholars have long studied the discursive origins of states’ and publics’ mistrust of asylum seekers (Daniel & Knudsen, 1996; Eades, 2005; Smith-Khan, 2017). Little research, however, has specifically sought to identify the role of the sociophonetic minutiae of asylum seekers’ narrative performances in these broader discourses of mistrust. In this study, I unearth micro linguistic details that can have life-or-death consequences for asylum seekers by investigating the following general research question: How do intelligibility and perceived origin of accented Englishes, as well as perceived emotional affect, influence perceptions of authenticity, credibility, and trustworthiness in asylum seeker narratives? To do so, I used sociophonetic perceptual tasks to elicit 25 listeners’ credibility evaluations of five audio-recorded asylum seeker narratives from YouTube: three performed by actors in Standard American, Standard Australian, and Arabic-accented English, and two performed by “authentic” asylum seekers in Arabic-accented English and English accented by an indeterminable African language. I then used qualitative discourse analysis to examine the relationships between intelligibility, affect, and raciolinguistic perceptions of national origin in the listeners’ responses, ultimately analyzing the constellation of social and perceptual cues that constitute “credibility” in asylum narratives. Preliminary results show that participants have more rigid sociophonetic expectations of authentic emotional performances when evaluating credibility of refugee narratives, than they have of the race or national origin of the speaker. Overall, this study extends the understanding of what asylum seekers are expected to say by determining how they are expected to sound and reveals the extent to which “credibility” in asylum seeker accounts is as much an issue of our ability to “listen” as it is about their ability to narrate, and as much an issue of us confronting our negative biases, as it about their tellings.
74 Poetry on the Road - An Experiment in Multidisciplinary Co-creation on the Topic of Refugees and Migrants
Sasha Rudan, Sinisha Rudan, Dimitrije Bukvic, Bob Holman & Eugenia Kelbert Uppsala University [email protected]
Keywords: migrations, co-creation, collective creativity, social objects
The project we present in this paper, Poetry on the Road 1 , is a venue for intercultural multidisciplinary co-creation on the topic of Refugees and Migrants. In this paper, we evaluate and analyse motivations, methodologies and IT support required for such a co-creation. The initial project prototype has already gathered European poetry organizations and 50+ poets writing in 10 languages.
Our first research question concerns the social and collaborative aspects of the creative writing process: how to engage the writers to participate in the SEW 2 on topics like migrations, how to augment writing from an individual act toward a collective act. We approach it through a survey; we present its findings and integrate them in our methodology for the Poetry on the Road.
The second research question is how to conduct structured and co-creative dialogue and process that balances between immersion in creation and thematic exploration. This dialogue is motivated by (i) facts (wikipedia as a structured knowledge base) and real stories of migrations, collected and contextually provided as inspiration, and by (ii) a space for critical and creative processes to happen. We present findings and platforms we used for the process - the CoLaboArthon co-creation methodology 3 - used in multiple related contexts around the globe.
The final research question concerns the possibility of enabling and augmenting the distant and cross-language co-creation process with a collaborative IT platform. The outcomes of the process are co-created artefacts . The artefacts originate from boundary objects 4 that serve as a “safe ground” across cultures, creative disciplines and the process stakeholders; refugees, writers and process facilitators. The artefacts end as social objects 5 interweaving poetry, cultural memory, culture, theatre and music.
75 We practice the process within the Colabo.Space ecosystem 6 , used in many international transdisciplinary processes. For stylometric NLP analyses, we rely on the Bukvik platform 7.
Hate Speech and Xenophobia in Covid-19 Twitter Discourse: A Critical Corpus-based Analysis
Katherine E. Russo University of Naples “L’Orientale” [email protected]
Keywords: covid-19 discourse, representation of migrants in news and social media, risk discourse, hate speech
During the on-going covid-19 pandemic, online news media have intensified their role as a channel for the communication of risk in an attempt to bridge the gap between experts and lay readers. Yet, they often redefined the meaning assigned to risks due to the influence of news values such as negativity, personalization, impact, superlativeness, novelty, and expectation (Bednarek 2006).
Covid-19 risk communication in online news media discourse entailed the spreading of information but also resorted to persuasion strategies such as fear appeals, which are a well- known rhetorical strategy of risk communication. Yet during the pandemic fear appeals arguably gave way to the promotion of a set of common values which resulted in online hate speech directed at migrants, which in the twitter corpus were constructed as a metaphorical enemy entity (in this case covid-19 epidemics, contagion etc.) posing an imminent threat. The study investigates whether fear appeals in risk communication may be considered a predictable trigger of hate speech towards mobility and migration in epidemic contexts. It provides findings on the remediation of covid-19 risk communication discourse in a specialized twitter corpus. The data are analysed according to an approach which draws upon findings in Critical Social Media Discourse Analysis and Appraisal Linguistics. Corpus Linguistics methodological tools such as quantitative techniques are combined with the analysis of context and discourse structural evaluation through qualitative assessments (Baker 2006; Martin and White 2005; Partington 1998; Thomson and White 2008; Zappavigna 2012). The analysis is narrowed from bulk data retrieval to identify the lexical and grammatical resources used to express attitude oriented to affect and associates the findings on affect with the analysis of the representation of social actors (Van Leeuwen 1996; Reisigl and Wodak 2001). The paper will
76 discuss findings related to the combination of fear appeals and specific representations of migrants which triggered negative appraisal and maladaptive responses, such as hate speech. The paper draws some interesting conclusions on how transnational/local news and social media channel information on epidemics and increase/decrease fear, hate and distrust and or solidarity. It hopes that the present research may spread awareness on the need for the development of ethical protocols for risk communication regarding migration and mobility in the management of epidemics.
Linguistic Identity of second generation of Arabic speakers in Italy
Alma Salem & Isabella Chiari PISAI / Sapienza University of Rome [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Linguistic identity, Arabic, Italian, second generation, migrants
This paper aims to outline an overall picture of the educational and sociolinguistic issues related to the experience of the second generation of Arabic speakers in Italy and their perception of the concept of identity linked to the language of origin, in order to illustrate the value these speakers attribute to Arabic as a marker of identity and cultural/ethnic belonging. This study also aims to analyze their linguistic attitudes, the use of Arabic in everyday life and their multilingualism, as well as the role of migrant parents in the transmission of the Arabic language and culture to their children and, finally, the degree of maintenance/loss of Arabic in the immigration context. The research is divided into two main parts: a theoretical part, dedicated to examining the general principles necessary both for a theoretical framework of the topic and for identifying the methodology to adopt for research, and an empirical part, based on the collection and analysis of data and on the observation of the relationship between language and cultural identity in second generation within the Italian educational system. The discussion of the results follows an order based on four socio-cultural parameters: linguistic attitudes, the link with the country of origin, the degree of socialization and integration, and the sense of belonging. Finally, the final results are collected on the basis of the sense of belonging and illustrate the sociolinguistic characteristics of the three identity profiles that emerge.
77 Metaphorical framing of undocumented immigrants in the US: a cross-party examination
Alfonso Sánchez-Moya Harvard University [email protected]
Keywords: (critical) metaphor, framing, undocumented immigrants, US immigration.
This paper examines metaphorical frames when conceptualising undocumented immigrants in the United States. Research investigating the metaphorical representation of immigrants in the US context is vast, covering different communicative contexts such as American print media (Santa Ana, 1999; Cisneros, 2008, Pinero-Pinero et al., 2014), online environments (Catalano & Musolff, 2019) or speeches at political campaigns (Smith, 2019; Atkins et al., 2020). With few exceptions, most studies underline the tendency among US society members to prominently construe immigrants by means of nonhuman domains. Despite interesting attempts to examine how dehumanisation of immigrants influences immigrations policy attitudes (Utych, 2018), there is a dearth of research that provides fine-grained correlations between US voters and the preference towards certain metaphorical framing they may have when conceptualising undocumented immigrants. This is of greater importance given the broadening divide between the two major political parties in the US in topics such as immigration, contributing to the already polarised political climate countrywide (Layman et al., 2006; Johnston et al., 2015). This research gap is addressed in this paper, which answers the following research question: how does party identification (Republican/Democrat/ Independent) affect the ways in which undocumented immigrants are metaphorically framed in the US? To this end, a US-wide survey (n=1202) was carried out, in which participants were asked to assess different metaphorical domains to construe undocumented immigrants on a 5-point Likert scale agreement. Owing to the wide range of variables including sociological details, results were then analysed taking into account the party identification information reported by the participants. Findings shed light on the preference towards certain source domains that participants show depending on the party identification they uphold.
78 Inequality and resistance in the discourse around teacher migration: focus on ELT in Thailand
Kristof Savski Prince of Songkla University [email protected]
Keywords: teacher migration; English language teaching; discrimination, resistance
The transnational migration of teachers is a phenomenon which, while becoming increasingly commonplace in times of global mobility, has received surprisingly little attention. In Thailand, a significant proportion of teachers, primarily those involved in English language teaching (ELT), are migrants, from both the developed world (primarily Europe and North America) and the developing world (other Asian nations and Anglophone Africa). This convergence of migration streams has been accompanied by significant inequality in the ELT profession as migrant teachers of different backgrounds are often valued differently by local actors, with white teachers typically able to access significantly better opportunities irrespective of formal qualifications. In this presentation, I discuss the findings of triangulatory research into the discourse surrounding this inequality, featuring a critical discourse analysis of job adverts in a Facebook group devoted to ELT recruitment as well as the interaction around them, in combination with interviews and focus groups with migrant teachers of English as well as local teachers, parents and students at three schools. The findings highlight the role that local hegemonic ideologies, particularly an Occidentalism deeply embedded in Thai collective identity, play in reproducing inequality between migrant teachers. At the same time, inequality was also found to be consistently legitimated by white migrant teachers in online interaction, often through the recontextualization of global alt-right discourse of white victimhood. I also discuss rising resistance to this inequality, both in interviews and in online interaction, highlighting the need for a more dialogic investigation of discourses around inequality in general.
79 Acquiring professional intercultural communicative competence without relinquishing cultural identity: A study of highly-skilled refugees’ labour market integration in the Netherlands.
Anna Fardau Schukking & Ruth Kircher Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning, Fryske Akademy [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: highly-skilled refugees, intercultural communication, intercultural communicative competence, cultural identity, labour market integration
In the last decade, thousands of forcibly-displaced people have sought refuge in the Netherlands. Many of them are highly-skilled, and their integration into the Dutch labour market could improve their own quality of life as well as making a significant contribution to the country’s economy. However, refugees face many challenges in their search for employment (e.g. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2017). This study aims to answer the question: What role does professional intercultural communicative competence play in highly- skilled refugees’ integration in the Dutch labour market?
Byram’s model of intercultural communicative competence (e.g. Byram 2008) has recently been extended to employment-related contexts, leading to the introduction of the term professional intercultural communicative competence – i.e. PICC (Critical Skills for Life and Work 2020). In this study, interviews and focus groups were used to elicit PICC-related discourses from refugees who had already successfully integrated into the Dutch workforce as well as from newcomers who were still in the process of achieving this. Content analysis was performed on the data, using rounds of deductive and inductive coding and analysis.
The findings indicate that the development of PICC plays an important role in helping refugees overcome the challenges they face. This suggests that offering training to promote newcomers’ acquisition of PICC could facilitate their labour market integration. However, it also emerged that participants felt pressured to relinquish their own cultural identity in order to participate in the host society. Yet the aim should be integration, not assimilation. This is a two-way process. The findings thus also suggest a necessity for (P)ICC training among the members of the host society.
80 Learning to Integrate, Waiting to Belong: Language, Time and Uncertainty Among Newcomers in Germany
Leonie Schulte University of Oxford [email protected] @LeonieEMSchulte www.leonieschulte.com
Keywords: language policy, integration policy, language learning, time and migration, Germany
Language proficiency requirements across Europe are often treated as innocuous components of broader immigration policies. However, recent scholarship in linguistic anthropology and related fields has demonstrated that such policies can, in practice, turn into significant sociocultural and economic barriers for newcomers (see e.g., Roberts 2013; Piller 2016; Smith- Khan 2016; Del Percio 2018; Khan 2019). Understanding the impact of language requirements in the German context is particularly pressing language learning is so central to German immigration and citizenship policy that it has become a core branch of a nationwide ‘Integration Programme’. Since 2015, Germany has granted asylum to over 1.1 million displaced people. Five years on, over 800,000 remain in Germany, most of whom are still seeking employment. How do these nationwide programmes impact the everyday lived experiences and socioeconomic (im)mobility of newcomers in Germany? This question still remains underresearched.
Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research within Berlin’s state-funded language-and- integration classrooms for adult refugees and migrants, this paper argues that although these programmes are designed to accelerate newcomers’ socioeconomic incorporation, in practice they significantly delay their access to work, higher education and a sense of inclusion. What is more, because of the slowing effect of these programmes, newcomers to Germany encounter temporal disruptions, which lead to acute experiences of boredom and uncertainty (see also Cwerner 2001, 2004; Griffiths 2014; Çaǧlar 2016). While it may not be surprising to imagine that processes of language learning take time, I found that time matters more and differently than one might expect. In fact, altered experiences of time are a crucial aspect of newcomers’ integration encounters: from contending with external expectations of progress, to navigating Germany’s opaque bureaucratic landscape, to recurring experiences of re-direction, deceleration and stalling, and shifting experiences of arrival and exclusion. These findings contribute to enhancing our as yet limited understanding of the ways in which language is
81 enmeshed in the temporal dimensions of migration and displacement, how policymaking impinges on experiences of temporal disruption, and what we can learn about newcomers’ positions of (un)belonging from their experiences of time.
‘When I speak Polish, something special is created between me and Polish people’ – Polish Café as a Polish language melting pot
Karolina Soltowska & Justyna Gola Polish for You, Poznań [email protected]
It is common knowledge that one of the most successful ways in learning a language is immersion in it, preferably in the country where it is spoken. But is immersion still possible in the era of English language dominance? Being teachers of Polish as a foreign language and owners of Polish for Your language school for years we have observed the frustration of our students. It turns out that for most of them, despite living in Poland, the classroom remains the only place where they speak Polish, and that is a maximum of 2 hours a week. What happens outside the classroom then? The relatives are not patient enough, friends prefer to chat in English, most shops are self-service, and at work the international team speak English. It is for all those wanting to learn and use Polish more that we created Polish Café.
The present paper will discuss the Polish Café meetings of Polish learners and native speakers, which allow the former to practice their language skills and learn more about Polish culture. The latter, in turn, can meet people from all over the world without leaving the city and share their language, culture and experience with them. For all of them it is great fun, new friendships, and exercise for the brain. We will show how these meetings do not only serve the purpose of language learning and teaching, but also promote intercultural communication and understanding.
82 Encounter and categorisation: Discursive educational practices and their effects on young people’s ‘integration’ in the UK
Emma Soye University of Sussex
Keywords: integration, education, discourse, encounter, categorisation
‘RefugeesWellSchool’ (RWS) is a large EU-funded social support project that seeks to promote young people’s ‘integration’ in schools. Emma Soye is a PhD student working on the RWS project with Professor Charles Watters at the University of Sussex. Emma conducted ethnographic research into the effects of the RWS project on young people’s integration in two London and Brighton secondary schools. She also explored how young people’s integration was influenced by the discursive practices of the schools and other institutional actors such as the family and local community organisations, foregrounding young people’s agency in responding to these influences (Orellana et al., 2001; Fass, 2005; Knörr, 2005; White et al., 2011).
This paper focuses on the impact of discursive educational practices on young people’s integration, asking ‘How do educational policies and practices mediate young people’s peer relations at the macro, meso and micro levels?’ (Watters, 2008). Emma’s analysis responds to criticisms of the concept of ‘integration’ as ‘methodologically nationalist’ in nature and ‘assimilationist’ in use (Wimmer and Schiller, 2002; Grzymala-Kazlowska and Phillimore, 2018; Favell, 2019). She draws on Freire’s (1970) theory of education as humanisation to reconceptualise ‘integration’ as a two-way process in which young people encounter each other through dialogue. On the basis of ethnographic findings from the two schools, Emma argues that this reconceptualisation of integration helps us to understand how educational practices can encourage both encounter and categorisation among young people in migration contexts. She makes brief recommendations for educational practice based on the findings.
83 Language Use and Attitudes Among Croatian Immigrants in Sweden
Sanja Škifić University of Zadar [email protected]
Keywords: language policy, language use, language attitudes, Croatian immigrants, Sweden
Considering the fact that a more significant number of immigrants in Sweden has been noted only since the second half of the 20th century, “the sense of being a multicultural and multilingual society is thus a relatively recent phenomenon” (Norrby, 2008, p. 73). As a consequence, the Swedish language policy has faced challenges regarding the status and use of both English and minority languages (Hult, 2004). This paper deals with the analysis of language use and attitudes among Croatian Immigrants in Sweden. The research that was conducted in October and November 2020 among 64 Croatian immigrants in Sweden included the application of a questionnaire that consisted of five sections and was for the most part modelled on the questionnaire used by Škifić and Grbas (2020) in their research on language use and attitudes among Croatian Immigrants in Ireland. Respondents were asked questions regarding their immigration experience in Sweden, while most language questions inquired into aspects of respondents’ learning and level of knowledge of Swedish and English, as well as their use of Croatian, Swedish and English. The analysis shows that most respondents have a positive attitude towards residing in Sweden, as well as the attitude about a greater importance of the knowledge of the Swedish language in comparison to the importance of the knowledge of the English language. Current level of knowledge of the English language has been evaluated higher than the current level of knowledge of the Swedish language, while a greater progress in language knowledge during the respondents’ residence in Sweden has been observed in the case of Swedish. Dominant use of Croatian, English, or Swedish has been shown to vary according to the domain of language use, while both Swedish and English have been evaluated relevant in employment applications.
84 Integration not Assimilation: Preserving Minority-Refugees’ Cultural Identity through Mother Tongue Education
Isilay Taban University of Sussex
Keywords: Cultural identity, language, integration, minority-refugees, displacement
The survival of minority languages is globally threatened by the dominance of national or international languages, assimilation policies and a decline in the number of minority language speakers. This threat is especially concerning for the languages of persons who were ethnic minorities in their State of origin without a kinstate, such as Yazidis, Doms and Kurds, and have been forced to seek refuge following humanitarian crises (so-called minority-refugees). The process of forced displacement that follows has imperiled the use and acquisition of minority- refugees’ languages, by dispersing these groups both amongst and within States. Therefore, minority-refugees’ languages, core elements of their cultural identities, are at risk of eradication.
This risk is compounded by the adoption of acculturation policies based on a misconception of the necessary elements of integration. In an effort to integrate refugees, host States mainly focus on teaching their official languages. Even though this is necessary to facilitate minority- refugees’ adaptation to the host State, the implementation of such policies, without any parallel effort to preserve the languages of minority-refugees, has the potential to lead to the eradication of these languages and, therefore, have an assimilatory effect. As integration is defined as a two-way process, it cannot succeed if newcomers are compelled to forego their cultural identity. Building upon this, this paper focuses on the protection of the linguistic identities of minority-refugees, arguing that there is a need to provide mother tongue education in order to both preserve their cultural identity and to successfully integrate them.
85 Language policy and linguistic human rights: A narrative inquiry into citizenship and (linguistic) identity among the Roma in Romania
Mia Tarau University of Auckland [email protected] @MiaTarau_
Keywords: The Roma of Romania, the Roma in Europe, minority group identity in the European Union, language policy, linguistic human rights, narrative inquiry
Indigenous and minority communities around the world are becoming increasingly successful in reclaiming their identities (Kaplan & Baldauf Jr., 1997; May 2012) as a consequence of being granted linguistic human rights, meaning access to both mother tongue and an official language in their daily lives (Grin, 2005; Kontra, Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1999).
In the shadow of these developments lies an ethnic group whose plight seems little changed centuries after their arrival and settlement in Europe. Lacking territorial reference, linguistic homogeneity and cultural unity, the Roma continue to struggle for survival, particularly in Eastern Europe and (notoriously) in Romania (Agarin, 2014; Goldston, 2010; Guibernau, 2013; McGarry, 2014; Pogany, 2006; Van Baar et al., 2019). Although Romania has been a European Union member state since 2007, which has meant increasing pressure on Romania to facilitate Roma “inclusion” into mainstream society, most social action-based initiatives to achieve this goal seem to have failed to date. As an alternative course of action, then, could their language (Romani) be instrumental in strengthening their Romanian community? Using narrative inquiry (Barkhuizen, 2013; Wells, 2011) as a framework for my research, I aimed to investigate the extent to which the linguistic human rights of the Roma are acknowledged and granted in Romania in national policy and through national and local practices, and whether Roma and non-Roma citizens are experiencing the impact of these policies in their daily lives. My data came from multiple sources: national legislation, interviews with local government representatives (both Roma and Romanian), and life stories from both Roma and Romanian citizens. My findings revealed that national legislation does grant the Roma their right to live in their own language, and that Romanian governing bodies appear to enact these policies as per European Union requirements. Surprisingly (?), the topic of Roma political representation has stirred heated debate among Roma party leaders and Romanian and Roma citizens alike. The most interesting discussion, however, regards the way in which my Roma interviewees
86 perceived the role, impact and need for Roma political representation, as well as the need for linguistic human rights in Romania, irrespective of ethnic identity.
Emigration: Amnesia and nostalgia
Charlotte Taylor University of Sussex [email protected] @_ctaylor_
Keywords: emigration / representation / corpus and discourse / public discourse / critical discourse analysis
This paper combines corpus linguistics and (critical) discourse analysis to address an imbalance in studies of migration by explicitly focussing on representations of outwards movement. It forms part of a larger study investigating British parliamentary and press migration discourses over a 200-year period and, in this talk I will focus on two aspects of contemporary migration discourse and memory. In the first, the amnesia of the title, I demonstrate how contemporary British emigration is largely absent from public discourses of migration by showing a) a decrease in discussion over time that is not matched with a similar rate of decline in mobility and b) that contemporary references to migration by British citizens is largely historicised and refers to past movements. In the second, the nostalgia of the title, I show how the past representations of British emigration frame the people involved as commodities of empire and have more in common with contemporary framings of immigration than with contemporary memories of past emigration.
87 Formation and life course impact of language identity: A case study of Japanese returnees from China
Yue Teng The University of Tokyo [email protected]
Keywords: Language identity, Japanese returnees, China, investment, transnationalism
As increasing number of young adults migrate transnationally in their childhood, their language identity, the assumed or attributed relationship between their sense of self and languages (Block 2006, Leung et al. 1997), is gaining importance in the literature. Existing studies on the language identities of Japanese migrants have shown that their language identities are diverse in the degree to which they feel affiliated to Japanese or the languages of their immigrated countries (Kanno, 2003; Koshiba & Kurata, 2012), which is affected by schooling, community backgrounds and language policies (Oriyama, 2010).
Despite the growing literature focusing on the migration between Japan and English-speaking countries, few had investigated the migration between Japan and another Asian country. Moreover, it remains unclear how language identity influences the migrants' life courses. To fill the gaps, this study focuses on Japanese young adults who had spent several years in China in their childhood and aims to examine (1) how the language identities of the Japanese returnees diverse, (2) how the language identities influence their life courses. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with three Japanese returnees and qualitatively analysed.
The results showed that the returnees' language identities vary from claiming strong affiliation and expertise to both languages to expressing no affinity with Chinese. External factors, such as schooling and community backgrounds, experiences with close people, and stereotypical expectation of the majority Japanese on returnees, affected the returnees' language identities, while their subjective interpretation of these factors also played an important role. Furthermore, the language identities formed during migration influence the returnees' investment in language learning and future occupation choice.
88 Discourse, opinion and episteme. Immigrants and covid-19 in the chilean press.
Elizabeth Torrico-Ávila Universidad de Atacama [email protected] @ElyChilena
Keywords: Discourse, episteme, press media, migration, covid-19, discrimination.
In the current democratic societies, the media, known as “the fourth power” and that are generally in charge of the local elites, have achieved a crucial role in the naturalization of discourses in the community having the capacity to even influence the public opinion in political, social, religious and economic areas, among others. Being the problem of study the influence that the expression of a certain type of discourse has over its receivers, the goal of this article is to reflect about the link between the discourse, the public opinion and the press epistemology regarding the immigration in Chile during covid-19 times. The results from the examination of eleven newspapers employing a Critical Discourse Analysis approach inform us that, on the one side, the actors such as authorities are nominalized, whereas the foreigners are assimilated in a group or invisibilized altogether. On the other hand, the themes that emerge from the data analysis are poverty, vulnerability and discrimination. This study aims at problematizing the discourses that come from the press from a critical perspective in order to contribute to the dialogical construction of the other from an objective point of view away from preconceived and stigmatized views spread by the media.
89 Land-Connectivity, Linguistic Resilience, and Identity among Urban Native Americans
Aresta Tsosie-Paddock & Elizabeth A. Redd University of Arizona / Idaho State University [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Land-centered connectivity paradigm, linguistic resilience, urban Native Americans, heritage language, ethno-linguistic identity
Forced and voluntary relocations from 1830s-1950s, resulted in significant language shift/loss for many Native American communities (Crystal, 2000; Goddard, 1996; Lee, 2007, 2009; McCarty, 2003; McCarty & Lee, 2014; Spolsky, 2002, 2003). Individuals displaced from a cultural homeland are less likely to retain language, due to dislocation from traditional environmental, ritual contexts, proximity to speakers and community. Despite this migration, many urban Native Americans maintained a connection to their heritage identities even in the context of language shift. For example, some families living away from traditional communities invest in their children’s Native identity through exposure to indigenous languages even though the parents are second-language learners. In support of decolonizing/indigenizing research (Smith, 1999; Wilson 2008), we apply Tribal critical race theory (Brayboy, 2013; Brayboy & Chin, 2018), and Land-Centered Connectivity Paradigm (Tsosie-Paddock, 2018) frameworks to critical discourse analysis of 28 interviews with urban Native Americans from six families and four language communities. We investigate 1) how urban Native Americans perceive heritage language’s relevance to identity and 2) specific strategies used to maintain connection to heritage identities and languages. We find that many urban intergenerational families maintain connection to identities through language and to language through social media, family communication, and return travel to Native land-bases. Individuals illustrate linguistic resistance and resilience (Hudson, 2019; Kirmayer et al., 2011) and express competing discourses: all perceive their identities as strongly Native American regardless of the level of their language ability, while many perceive language as essential to that identity.
90 Language skills are a ‘plus’: the limits of entrepreneurial multilingual nanny work in Britain
Rachelle Vessey Carleton University
Keywords: multilingualism, domestic work, nanny, language teaching
In the globalised economy where language and communication have become commodified practices, multilingualism is increasingly perceived as a way of maximising competitiveness (Urciuoli 2008). In this environment, the notion of ‘language work’ (Heller, 2010) provides a critical lens through which we can better understand how language ideologies are formulated and operationalised in particular sectors of society and, moreover, how these ideologies’ structure language use, language value, and speakers of different languages and varieties. Studies of migrant domestic workers have suggested that perceptions and evaluations of language skills lead to unequal access to the market and unequal reward for the labour (see e.g., Lorente, 2018; Pavlenko, 2001). This paper contributes to this area by examining multilingual London-based nannies’ representations of their language skills and work. As part an overarching project examining the value of multilingualism and communication within domestic work (e.g., Vessey, 2019), this paper asks: To what extent do multilingual migrant nannies consider language to be part of the skillset required for their work in the UK?
Interviews and focus groups with 15 London-based multilingual nannies produced over 10 hours of data (125,000 words), which was analyzed using a cycle of thematic and corpus- assisted discourse analysis. Findings suggest that it is not linguistic ability so much as metalinguistic awareness and language ideologies – formulated at least in part through their own experience of British “reproductive labour” – that afford nannies insight into the UK childcare industry and, by extension, an advantageous position within this niche market. This market is made possible by British(-based) families, whose privileging of migrant native speakers’ metalinguistic awareness ensures that these nannies become influential figures of language acquisition. At the same time, the advantages of multilingualism experienced by nannies are not necessarily passed on, not least because of issues relating to gender, class, and native speakerism. Thus, although mobilising and (re)constructing linguistic resources empowers nannies as entrepreneurial language workers, the specificity of this experience limits the extent to which multilingualism can increase competitiveness for others in class-stratified British society.
91 Vini moun Tèksas: Becoming Texan
Nathan A. Wendte University of Virginia [email protected] https://ncis.academia.edu/NathanWendte
Keywords: ethnolinguistic identity, Louisiana Creoles, internal migration, borderlands
In the Gulf South region of the United States, Creoles have historically been defined by distinct cultural and linguistic practices (Istre 2018). As an ethnolinguistic identity label, “Creole” encompasses and presumes certain linguistic behaviors and competencies. Although most often associated with the state of Louisiana, a steady stream of Creole migrants for more than a century has resulted in a large diaspora living across the border in Texas. This diaspora, however, does not uniformly retain their Creole identity. Like all identity categories, “Creole” is an ideologically informed, discursively constructed, and contextually dependent phenomenon (Bucholtz and Hall 2005). Despite the relatively short migration distance between them, Texas and Louisiana represent markedly different cultural contexts. Drawing from qualitative interviews conducted with Texas-resident (n=32) and Louisiana-resident Creoles (n=28), this paper explores the variable role that language practices—and the discourses surrounding them— play in Creoles becoming Texan.
These interviews were collected over a period of four years in association with the author’s dissertation fieldwork. I extracted those interview segments which concern language practices and discovered that language loss in and of itself was not sufficient to explain why Texas- resident Creoles may choose to stop identifying as Creoles. Instead, it is the choice to dissociate ideologically with aspects of Louisiana (notably past rural origins) that drives people to abandon Creole identity. Such choices are perceived by both Texas-resident and Louisiana resident Creoles to be reflected in individual language practices.
92 The making of the unaccompanied children on Lesvos island: From legal discourse to everyday life
Birgül Yılmaz University College London [email protected] @b_yilmaz04
Keywords: unaccompanied children, migration, legal discourse, entextualisation, governmentality
The management of unaccompanied children’s migration involves a complex legal framework laid out in international law which aims to give internationally recognised human rights to children. These rights involve policies and legislations to be implemented by supranational, national and local actors- creating a multi-layered infrastructure for the management of the refugee populations arriving in the EU. United Nations Refugee Agency (now IOM in Greece) is the most authoritative power that produces and circulates legal texts that materialise in the governance of the refugee children. These legal texts involve conventions/treaties, guidelines, standards, policies and legislations prepared by and for the United Nations agencies, governments and non-governmental organisations.
These texts that are written for the governance of children, (re) invent the label of the “child” and more specifically the “unaccompanied child” (UAC), a legally prescribed lexical label, discursively producing the child as a legal, psychological and biometric surveillance subject, resulting in an ambivalent management of the unaccompanied children. By drawing on a 9- month ethnography on Lesvos island, I report on how the figure of the unaccompanied child is (re) invented in legal texts and the performativitiy of the everyday when circulating in the humanitarian world by analysing the processes of decontextualization and recontextualization (Park and Bucholtz 2009; Blommaert 2005; Silverstein and Urban 1996; Bauman and Briggs 1990) on national and local levels in Greece. Linked with these, I explore the tensions, disruptions and refusals that arise when this definition of the child is implemented in a shelter for unaccompanied children on Lesvos island.
93 The Role of Cultural Awareness in the EFL Classroom
Ayşegül Yurtsever & Dilara Özel Kurşunlu Cumhuriyet Secondary School / Middle East Technical University
[email protected] @aysglyrtsvr [email protected] @dlrozel
Keywords: intercultural awareness, English as a foreign language, multicultural education, qualitative research
Four language skills such as reading, listening, writing, and speaking are the main essentials of a language classroom and we also construct healthy communication with them outside the classroom. Culture is regarded as the fifth skill of the language class reminding itself through interactions that can be troubling even for a proficient language speaker (Kramsch, 1993). Interaction in the class may be limited to the backgrounds and common values of its members, but once learners are outside the class, pragmatic skills are required to engage in social and cultural aspects. Turkey became the most refugee- receiving country worldwide with 4 million Syrian refugees (UNHCR, 2020). Thus, increasing cultural awareness in classroom settings gains importance with the adaptation process of refugees (Özel, 2018). The meta-synthesis procedure is used as a research design since it is aimed to examine the qualitative and quantitative studies about cultural awareness in EFL classrooms in a systematic way to gather influential and efficient practices and create a guide for EFL teachers. After applying four specified criteria, 50 studies about cultural and intercultural awareness in EFL classrooms were included to meet the aim of this meta-synthesis. There are two main themes called foundations and acquirements that emerged as a result of the analysis of the studies about cultural and intercultural awareness. Foundations of cultural awareness have four codes named lesson components, interaction, dynamic and personal connection. Furthermore, acquirements of cultural awareness have four codes as conversational competency, cognitive competency, cultural competency, and global involvement.
94 The Great Pretenders: Refugees in the European Press
Natalia Zawadzka-Paluektau Uniwersytet Warszawski [email protected]
Keywords: European refugee crisis, media discourse, corpus linguistics, argumentation analysis
The goal of this paper is to challenge the dominant media discourses on refugees by investigating the various linguistic mechanisms employed to construe them as impostorous and deceiving. While building on previous contributions (e.g., Gabrielatos & Baker, 2008; Vollmer & Karakayali, 2018; Abbas, 2019), it aims at providing a fuller spectrum of discursive strategies which present refugees as entering Europe illegally through false or mistaken identities. It is conducted on a corpus of 7,836 news reports covering the “European refugee crisis”, published between April 2014 and December 2018 in market-leading newspapers in Spain, Poland, and the UK. Methodological triangulation of quantitative (analysis of word sketches) and qualitative (analysis of argumentation) approaches is applied to increase the validity of findings (e.g., Marchi & Taylor, 2009; Baker & Levon, 2015). The analysis indicates that questioning the displaced persons’ identities is one of the most salient trends in the corpus and reveals a range of specific linguistic strategies used by the press to represent refugees as deceitful with regard to their ages, origins, motivations, and intentions. It is argued that what allows for these representations to emerge and gain currency in media discourses and, consequently, public opinions (e.g., van Dijk, 1991) are a range of racist topoi, such as the assumption that all people of colour look alike, various misconceptions and prejudices about Middle Easterners and Africans, as well as the arbitrarily established categories of deservingness. Differences in how the figure of an impostorous refugee is constructed across the three language subcorpora are discussed.
95 Migrant’s perspective in the construction of visual and multimodal metaphors of migration in W. Staroń’s “Argentinian Lesson”
Agata Zelachowska University of Salamanca [email protected]
Keywords: multimodal metaphor, migration, conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), visual grammar, W. Staroń’s Argentinian Lesson
Due to its controversial and sensitive nature, migration is often constructed metaphorically in discourse. A great deal of attention has been paid to the analysis of migration metaphors in the verbal mode, especially in the press, however, their visual and multimodal realizations have not been explored sufficiently so far. Moreover, most of those studies tend to concentrate on the metaphorical representation of migration from the host country´s point of view. A relevant question to ask is whether the migrant’s perspective would make use of similar metaphors. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to explore whether or not the same metaphors as in the verbal mode can be found in a multimodal medium such as W. Staroń’s documentary on Polish migration in Argentina, Argentinian Lesson (2011), and if that is the case, how they are cued. The method used for the analysis is based on previous work on the visual representation of metaphor combining cognitive and social semiotic approaches (Feng and O’Halloran 2013; Forceville 2016; Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006).
The findings indicate that some metaphors present in the verbal mode are also at work in the visual and multimodal construction of migration in the documentary, nevertheless they are cued significantly differently. They are not derogatory as they tend to be in the verbal language in the press. One of the conclusions may be that this is the consequence of the director’s adopting the migrant’s perspective, which lead him to making choices for some particular cognitive and semiotic resources and film techniques and not others, bringing into focus a humane representation of migration.
96 Migrant narratives of language learning and integration: struggles for legitimacy, deservedness, and the right to belong
Silke Zschomler University of Cambridge [email protected]
Keywords: language learning, integration discourses, un/deserving migrants
The dynamics of an increased hostility towards people who appear to be different coupled with heightened inequality and a diminished welfare state denote what Hall (2017) describes as a ‘brutal migration milieu’ producing a volatile lifeworld of migration in public discourse, policy, and everyday life. This has led to a situation in which belonging is precarious and conditional and sharp distinctions are drawn between insiders and outsiders as well as ‘good/bad’ or ‘deserving/undeserving’ migrants. At the same time, prominent immigration/integration discourses engage dominant moralistic narratives of productivity and aspiration and emphasize migrants’ agency and responsibility to learn English in order to “integrate” and to “fit in”.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within and beyond an institution offering English language classes to a heterogenous migrant student body, this paper sheds light on the lived experience of my participants who have come to London and find themselves caught up in these dynamics. My data show a certain complicity with these dominant discourses in my participants’ accounts and amplifies how my participants employ moralistic English language learning for integration discourses in their own narratives. In making sense of these findings, I utilise Bridget Anderson's (2013) idea of modern states as a ‘community of value’ and the different figures of the ‘good’, ‘failed’, ‘non’ and ‘tolerated’ citizen. I argue that my participants’ narratives should be understood as part of their struggle for legitimacy, deservedness, and the right to belong within their own precarious situation. This however contributes to the reproduction of inequalities, divisions and, with an ever-growing competition over resources, the exacerbation of latent tensions. To counteract this, I further highlight instances in which more critical accounts emerged during my fieldwork which disrupted and fractured dominant discourses and distinctions with the potential to dismantle hierarchies of differently valued persons and to rehumanise social relations.
97 Reflexive & Position Paper Presentations
Abstracts are alphabetized by surname of the lead author.
Migration, language usage and identity in the Muslim community of San Andres Island
Carlos Jair Martínez Albarracín [email protected] @cjmaralb
Keywords: Lebanese diaspora, bilingualism, arabic diglossia, cultural alternation, identity
This presentation addresses the relationship between language, migration and identity in the Muslim community of San Andres Island in Colombia from the characterization of bilingualism and emerging arabic diglossia. The presentation is divided into three sections, the first makes a mention on the history of the muslim community made up of lebanese immigrants historically settled around trade and with islam as a belief system. The second section refers to the situation of bilingualism caused by the linguistic contact between spanish and the lebanese dialect by the members of the community. The third section alludes to the situation of emerging diglossia given by the functional distribution of the fuṣḥā and amiyya arabic in different contexts of communicative interaction. Finally, the conclusions refer that cultural alternation is highlighted as a characteristic of the community and implies a daily change of discursive spheres and of negotiation related to the construction of identity.
98 Reflections on a post-positivist study of migration and language
Mario Bisiada Universitat Pompeu Fabra [email protected] @MBisiada
Keywords: nativism; corporeal strangeness & unbelonging; post-positivism; ideology; politics of knowledge
If migrants have been viewed with suspicion especially since the so-called “Migrant Crisis”, this has increased even more after the Covid-19 pandemic, the first truly “global event in the history of humankind” (Milanović 2020), which has socially distanced us from others, not just from the Other. This rupture has fuelled nativism, as evidenced by the now greater readiness to close borders and is being and will be exploited by authoritarian politics. In this contribution, I want to reflect on two questions concerning the study of migration in the pandemic aftermath, based on my own project on narratives of migration and translation.
First, I explore how Ahmed’s (2000) work on the notion of “strangers” is newly relevant in this time where danger is commonly constructed as coming from the outside of both the individual body and the “body politic” (see Gatens 1996: ch. 2).
Second, those individual and political restrictions have placed public health interventions based on a problematically generalised notion of “the science” (see Taylor 2010) firmly in the centre of discourse. Does this give new importance to Foucault’s notion of the “general politics” of truth (Foucault 1980) and the recognition that knowledge and science are not free of ideology?
I thus argue that the coming era may see a growing importance of what (Lather 2017: 225) has called post-positivism, and that this critical notion can be reflected in research on language and migration. While an immediate response has been to focus on conspiracy theories, mirroring the established CDA practice of uncovering “false” ideologies (Pennycook 2021), the long-term consequences of the pandemic especially on freedom of movement and migration may demand more self-reflective critical thought to defend the open society from new challenges.
99 Transnational learners: identity renegotiation and language learning in migratory contexts through art-related experiences
Giovanna Carloni Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo [email protected]
Keywords: identity negotiation, language learning, self-representation, symbolic investment, integration as a two-way process
To foster inclusion, second language teaching needs to address migrants’ sociolinguistic needs and transnational negotiations of identity. Within a post-stucturalist framework, identity is envisaged as consistently going through renegotiation due to dialogical interactions with new symbolic, social, and geographical spaces (Norton 2013). Thus, from a post-structuralist perspective, migrants’ complex identities are conceived as multiple and shifting due to contacts with new contexts of time and space (Norton 2013). Norton also envisions transnational learners’ multiple identities as the product of the way in which migrants interpret their relationships with the transnational dimensions experienced and as the product of the way in which they conceive their opportunities and their expectations in the host country (Norton 2013).
From a post-structuralist perspective, migrants’ multifaceted identities undergo renegotiation whenever interfacing with new symbolic transnational spaces (Norton 2013) and especially while engaging in a high level of investment to learn the language of the host country (Norton 2013). Within this theoretical framework, this presentation aims to show how migrants’ investment into the language and cultural practices of the adoptive country may be fostered through formal and informal art-driven learning experiences, triggering dialogical interactions with the works of art of the host and departure countries. To this purpose, various projects implemented in Italy, where multimodality also plays a key role (Darvin and Norton 2015), will be illustrated. In this perspective, art emerges as instrumental in fostering migrants’ renegotiation of identities while investing into integration as a two-way process.
100 Building a country-based lexicon of migration: Language on the Fly project
Isabella Chiari, Luigi Squillante, Alma Salem & Maha Bader Sapienza Università di Roma / PISAI / Università di Bergamo / IULM [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Lexicography, language of migration, corpus-based glossary, translation and cultural mediation
Language on the Fly is a multilingual lexicographic resource related to the domain of migration. This paper focuses on the corpus-based procedures and methodologies used to build the second version of a glossary (LoF 2.0) that is made of a set of 2.120 lemmas and collocations extracted from Italian language corpora specifically built to represent three levels of lexicon (international-EU, national, local), and further translated in 5 EU languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German) and 10 non-EU languages (Arabic, Azerbaijani, Serbian, Pashto, Russian, Persian, Albanian, Turkish, Chinese, Norwegian). The translation process has involved corpus-based techniques and the use of multilingual corpora. By considering keyword extraction methodologies, the glossary also uses corpus-based techniques to extract glosses that are further rewritten using controlled language in Italian in order to facilitate the use in cultural mediation contexts. Data on LoF 2.0 will be presented, as well as examples of the lexicographic resource and of the different ways corpora are used in the various phases of the glossary construction. The paper shows the capital importance of corpus-based data for the understanding of migration language and for the constant updating of linguistic information to be used by policy makers, administrators, managers of all different stages of the national migration process and also cultural mediators and aid workers. Our procedure can also be presented as a model of steps and procedures for the production of terminological resources for the migration domain.
101 Destigmatizing French Language Variations to Foster Learners’ Sociolinguistic Competence
Sandra Descourtis & Stefano Maranzana University of Wisconsin-Madison / Southern Methodist University [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: language practices and attitudes, language and identity, French language variations, nonstandard language, sociolinguistic competence
Despite their permeation in Standard Modern French (SMF), language variations, such as argot (Valdman, 2000) and verlan (Lefkowitz, 1989) are seldom included in the curriculum of French university language programs in the USA. Indeed, variations are often perceived negatively, leading to stigmatization towards the social groups who use them (Bourdieu 1982; Devereaux and Palmer, 2019; Lippi-Green, 1992; Metz, 2019; Silverstein, 1996). However, argot and verlan have been long an integral part of daily speech, attested in dictionaries, in literature and in the media (Torreira, Adda-Decker & Ernestus, 2010; Červenková, 2013).
Although the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2001) requires exposure to stigmatized vocabulary, its inclusion in foreign language classrooms is not yet widespread. Instruction is typically oriented towards “standardized” French, which creates a gap between formal education and the way French speakers actually communicate (Redman, 2012). Unsurprisingly, many learners often struggle to follow along with conversations in informal settings (Petitpas, 2010). Language is a marker of difference, of identity, of belonging to a community: knowledge of French language variations would “facilitate the student’s integration into the French-speaking community” (Retinskaya & Voynova, 2020, p. 2077).
We argue that the (mis)representation of argot and verlan as nonstandard and subpar language varieties has relegated them to the fringe of French language instruction. We also claim that through the study of language variations, students not only learn idiolects, but also acquire an integral part of French culture that can develop their sociolinguistic competence as well as forge their identity as French language users.
102 Minority language as one of the factors of self-identification
Zuzana Drugová & Jasna Uhláriková Matej Bel University / University of Novi Sad [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Slovaks living abroad, identity, education of minorities, mother language, dialect used at home as a real mother language
Almost 5.5 million people live in Slovakia and more than 1.125 million Slovaks live abroad, while unofficial estimations in particular countries are much higher. The oldest wave represents migration almost 300 years ago, to the enclaves of today's Serbia, Croatia, Hungary and Romania. The youngest wave is represented by diasporas after the fall of communism in 1989. Each of the minority environments runs Slovak schools or educational centers with diametrically different operating conditions. At the same time, the language skills of pupils are at a different level, depending mainly on the way of the use of the minority language in the family.
For all these groups, the project Self-Identification in multiethnic surroundings as a resource of ethnic tolerance has been created. Its main aim is to create didactic material as a practical tool for teachers, educators and cultural workers working in the surroundings of Slovaks living abroad. It is based on previous scientific findings that a good knowledge of the mother tongue helps children in a bilingual environment to get a better quality of education. Erasmus + supported the project in 2019 and will last until 2022.
One of the monitored indicators in the project is language as one of the self-identification indicators. We will present the way of teaching Slovak language as a mother language in a minority surroundings on the example of Slovaks living in Serbia, where Slovak education has been operating from primary school to university for decades. Another aim of the paper is the presentation of previous findings in the project, as well as considering the possibilities and forms of using Slovak dialect used at home as a real mother tongue in a minority surroundings.
103 Unity or Multiplicity: Philosophy of Narrative Identity in Light of Contemporary Migration Dynamics and Crises
Mateusz Dudek Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań [email protected]
Keywords: Postmodern Philosophy, Narrative Identity, Unity, Incoherence, Migration
On the one hand, postmodern philosophy questions the image of a stable and unified identity. On the other hand, certain scholars, such as Alasdair MacIntyre or Charles Taylor, still see identity as a coherent, purposeful unity. In response to this, Paul Ricoeur proposes a compromise: construing personal identity as a narrative, which forms a “discordant concordance” of life experiences. However, Dan McAdams, an American psychology professor, offers a dichotomy between “unity” and “multiplicity” of identity and views narrative identity only as a tool for providing coherence to life experiences. Psychologically speaking, understanding one’s identity as a unified structure helps regain a sense of life continuity. Nevertheless, for a literary scholar, narrative identity is text. A literary or cultural researcher has access only to a textual representation, that is: to narrative structures, metaphors, symbols, images, and possible contexts. My proposition is to see migrants’ identity issues not as postmodern “reflexive questioning [and] irony,” but as an identity crisis, experienced and reproduced through culture. Although McAdams frequently refers to literary theory and philosophy, I attempt to question his views’ applicability to the problems of literary analysis. The purpose of this paper is to think about possible consequences of reviewing the notion of narrative identity in light of incoherent narratives and internal textual conflicts and aporias. Following Stuart Hall’s work, I suggest developing a philosophical reflection on the crisis of cultural identity positioning and insist on dismissing the concept of “multiplicity” of simultaneous identities as inapplicable for analysing literary works depicting identity struggles of contemporary migrants.
104 Discursive and Rhetorical approaches to Migration and Identity
Simon Goodman De Montfort University [email protected] @DrSimonGoodman
Keywords: Discursive Psychology; Rhetorical Psychology; Discourse Analysis; Migration; Identity
This paper will set out the Discursive and Rhetorical approaches to language and explain how these have been applied to issues of migration and identity to develop a detailed understanding of the ways in which anti-migrant arguments are produced, while speakers/writers attempt to distance themselves from the identity of ‘prejudiced person’. The Discursive and Rhetorical approaches to language focus on what are accomplished by talk and texts within interaction, rather than attempting to ascertain what the talk tells us about what the speaker/writer believes. The research question for this paper therefore is: How is language about migration and identity used to argue for the exclusion of migrants into the UK? Through detailed discursive and rhetorical analyses, research has brought about important findings about how opposition to migration can be presented as justifiable, while also presenting the speaker/writer as reasonable and non-prejudiced. This research will be reviewed here. Key findings include how the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ are used at different points in debates, with ‘refugee’ containing positive connotations compared to the negative ‘migrant’. Other identities, such as ‘illegal’, ‘criminal’, ‘economic migrant’ and ‘terrorist’ have also been shown to be drawn upon in ways to challenge policies that allow refugees, or migrants more broadly, into the UK. Analyses also show how even allowing child refugees into the UK can be challenged through questioning the relevant identities – both ‘refugee’ and ‘child’ – to argue for preventing access to vulnerable refugees. The paper therefore shows the benefits of engaging with discursive and rhetorical analyses.
105 Towards the anthropology of fairness: language and minority movements during the pandemic in Georgia
Klaudia Kosicińska Polish Academy of Science [email protected]
Keywords: Georgia, Azerbaijani minority, post-socialism, anthropology of activism, Covid-19.
In the last few years, the emergence of different cultural and social initiatives, which are initiated by young generation of Georgian Azerbaijanis, can be observed in Marneuli, the territory of southeastern Georgia. The movement is diverse, but individuals who belong to it or sympathize with, have combined joint social and intervention activities during the pandemic in their area of living, which allow finding a common feature that connects each of them. At the end of March 2020, by the decision of the Government of Georgia, Marneuli was closed and quarantined for 56 days due to repeated detection of Covid-19 infections. Residents whose livelihood depends on cultivation, trade, export, and temporary migration were forced to face a very demanding challenge, made even more difficult by the lack of access to information provided by the government in their native Azerbaijani language. What was the response to these events from local activists living in Marneuli or connected with it? Based on ethnographic interviews made in the last two years with local activists (research project partners), and through participatory observations, will be discussed their motivations, as well as campaigns they had to make against the crisis situation in which the local community found itself. Activists' perception of the decisions of local authorities in facing a pandemic will be analyzed as well. By using the concepts of moral economy, Foucauldian relation between power and knowledge, and anthropology of activism and resistance, can be showed the dominance of structural power existing in the language of the top-down communication, types of struggles, and different types of agency manifested through what the interlocutors are talking about.
106 Decolonizing naturally occurring data in intercultural communication research: Lessons from the pandemic
Mariana Lazzaro-Salazar Universidad Católica del Maule [email protected] @MarianVicUni
Keywords: healthcare communication, simulated medical interviews, standardized patient, sociolinguistics, migrant physicians/doctors
Intercultural communication research in healthcare contexts has a long-standing preference for exploring workplace phenomena through naturally occurring data, that is, spontaneous conversation. However, the Covid-19 crisis has made scholars rethink the way we do research (Briggs, 2020), as we have witnessed rapid re-configurations of workspaces, social behavior, ideology structures and identities. Intercultural communication research in healthcare contexts has been most affected by this new sanitary reality, as workplace routines have been restructured and access to such professional spaces has been uncommonly restricted, limiting researchers’ access to naturally occurring data of workplace interaction. Though the effects of the Long Covid phenomenon (that is, the impact of the pandemic in the years to come, Lazzaro- Salazar, 2021) are yet to be assessed, all predictions seem to indicate that this changed workplace scenario will remain the norm after the pandemic is declared over. Intercultural researchers will then need to develop new and/or revised (most likely interdisciplinary) methods to be able to continue investigating healthcare communication in spite of the difficulties.
Drawing on my experiences from past (ANID FONDECYT N° 3160104) and ongoing (ANID FONDECYT N° 11190052) projects on intercultural communication with migrant physicians in public institutions in Chile, this paper will begin by reflecting on the practical and ethical issues of developing in-person research during health crises to then propose simulated medical interviews (SMI) as a valuable method to investigate intercultural communication in doctor- patient interactions. Reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of using SMI to study intercultural communication will be offered and ways to address its limitations will be proposed.
107
Discourse analysis approaches in arts-based research among refugee youths
Charity Lee University of Malaya [email protected]
Keywords: arts-based research, narrative analysis, storytelling, refugees, unaccompanied minors
This paper presents reflections on applying discourse analysis approaches in an arts-based action research study among unaccompanied refugee youths from Afghanistan. Unaccompanied refugee minors are especially vulnerable and conventional research methods are often intrusive, patriarchal, and unhelpful for those who have experienced trauma. The research project explored the youths’ lived experiences and representation of refugees through storytelling workshops, where they constructed narratives of their journey to and life in Malaysia using oral, visual, and theatre-based storytelling. The data collected comprised narratives in audio recordings, writings, drawings, and short skits, as well as interviews with the participants to discuss their work. The data collection period and triangulation of the data types is described, followed by a discussion of the methodological triangulation (Miles and Huberman, 1994) used on the diverse dataset. Narrative analysis (NA) formed the overarching framework, but multimodal and theatrical analyses were also used. The strength of using diverse methods was the ability to allow a holistic view of the refugee experience and to facilitate a more robust internal validity of the dataset (Gliner, 1994). It was also guided by the perspective that narratives can take shape across multiple media and individuals tell stories with specific preferences and skill over others (Labov, 1997). The multimodal nature of the project allowed participants to engage with discourses of vulnerability and agency of refugees in a non-threatening way. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of implications for discourse analysis research among vulnerable people groups.
108 A performative language teaching approach in connection with emotion and identity
Susana Martín Leralta, Margarita Planelles Almeida & María Eugenia Flores Universidad Nebrija [email protected]
Keywords: migrant language, performative teaching, second language teaching, emotional expression, identity
The expression of subjectivity and emotionality is a challenge for migrant speakers of a new or heritage language. A multilingual and multicultural reality leads us to (re)shape our own identity in order to adapt to new and increasingly hybrid social models (Iglesias & Ramos 2020). A teaching of the language of migration oriented only towards linguistic aspects is insufficient to contribute to the social and affective integration of the migrant population, as language is not simply a means of expression or communication, but a practice that constructs and is constructed by the ways in which learners understand themselves, their social environment, histories and possibilities for the future (Norton & Toohey 2004). More critical pedagogies than the communicative approach and new instructional practices are required (Ramanathan 2005, Norton & Toohey 2011, Kramsch 2014) which do not limit opportunities for language learning and for imagining more desirable identities (Lee 2008). In addressing the question “how can one intervene didactically in the language learning process in relation to the identity construction of the migrant speaker of the new language?”, this paper develops the grounds for a methodological approach based on embodiment for a performative teaching of the migrant language (Piazzoli 2018), aimed at learners of Spanish in the context of job placement, within a view of identity in which language learners are able to construct themselves as they would like to be perceived (Mantero 2007). This methodological approach is one of the results of the R&D projects EMILIA [FFI2017-83166-C2-2-R] and IN. MIGRA3-CM [H2019/HUM5772]. It is also linked to the SDGs of the 2030 Agenda in its Quality Education section, insofar as it values cultural diversity and is framed within the training competences for the employment of vulnerable groups.
109 Search: Migration discourses (-migration). Challenging (linguist) conceptualisations
Katharina Monz University of Köln [email protected]
Keywords: West Africa, migration, sociolinguistic fieldwork, conceptualisation, self-critic
Please consider this reflexive paper an approach to a retrospective critique of my dissertation research. Between 2018 and 2020, I conducted fieldwork in Western Africa, addressing questions of linguistic behaviour in a context of extensive inner African mobility.
I am aware of the two main narratives about the “African migrant”: He is depicted either as a threatening and overrunning mass, or as endangered person needing rescue. In order to avoid reproducing these narratives, I asked broader questions. We, as researcher, are still used to think in categories like ‘migrant’, ‘mobility’, ‘border’, ‘marginality’, ‘vulnerability’, ‘violence’ and tend to search for their academic conceptualisations in our interlocutors’ speech. During my exploratory dissertation and in the conversations, I conducted live or via social media, I came to understand that those conceptualisations are only of little, or even of no interest to the people concerned by the research. My interlocutors, instead, proposed their own theorizations, which I now try to contextualize by considering the stories told as well as the meta level of conversation itself.
I would not go as far as calling my thoughts an attempt to “decolonising the study of language and identity in relation to migration”, as you suggest in the call. Still a self-critical retrospective on investigation technics might help in the long term to find an answer to the above-mentioned question how to work on migration – as well as on other sensitive subjects – without using its conceptualisations.
110 Using Metaphors to Communicate Academic Development
Yoko Mori University of Otago [email protected]
Keywords: metaphors; academic development; migration; language; identity
The metaphor of migration is often found in higher education literature to depict how academic developers enter the field of Academic Development (AD) from other disciplines (Fraser, 1999; Rowland, 2003), and often struggle in their marginalized role and position. Like migrants who live in a liminal space, academic developers basically enter the field with no clear pathway. Though people move into the field from various fields primarily through their long interest and career in teaching (Fraser, 1999), they are constantly required to figure out for themselves their new role based on past experience. As a result, AD studies have found the community of academic developers as being ‘a family of strangers’ (Harland & Staniforth, 2008). Indeed, while there has been rapid progress in the enhancement of theory and practice in AD in the past half- century, not much is understood about how academic developers form a collective identity. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) claim, metaphoric language supports as to understand a complex reality, which in turn can guide us to the future. Using metaphoric language as a compass to guide us to better understand the formation of academic developer identity, this paper explores how past AD literature has portrayed academic developers’ ambiguous role and position, and how they have negotiated their identities to become members of AD community. I conclude with implications of how metaphors can help academic developers form their professional identity in their ambiguous role and position in higher education.
111 Migrant Writing: A Genealogy
Eugenia Kelbert Rudan University of East Anglia
Keywords: translingualism, Huston, aesthetics, literary genealogy, tradition
This paper approaches the study of translingualism, or literature written by migrants in the language of their host country, from the point of view of the gradual evolution of a literary aesthetics associated with translingual writing in the 20th and 21st centuries. Considerations of this broader context invite a reevaluation of the association of migrant literature with exceptionality. As Kellman puts it, translingualism “is a genuine and rich tradition, one in which authors are acutely aware of shared conditions and aspirations. Chinua Achebe responds, explicitly and implicitly, to Conrad, Eva Hoffman to Mary Antin. Both J. M. Coetzee and Raymond Federman have written extensively about Beckett” (9). Partly because to the marginalised status of translingualism in literature, and partly as a way to defy and change that status, we can trace a lineage of bilingual and translingual writers who have, for decades, been treated as exceptional but are now gradually coming to light as a genuine literary tradition. This paper focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on Nancy Huston and her book-length homages to two other non-postcolonial writers who also adopted French as a foreign language, Samuel Beckett and Romain Gary. Huston, I argue, incribed herself in the writing of two literary lineages, the translingual and the post-francophone. Her active inscription of her own writing within a tradition she both joins and co-creates is part of a larger phenomenon whereby a writer’s migrant identity grows into am accepted and increasingly elevated status within the contemporary republic of letters. It thus helps us rethink our notions of what is and is not normal in literature, how literary traditions emerge, and what mechanisms underpin the processes through which minority writing turns into minor literature.
112 The ‘securitisation’ of higher education in the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ for migrants
Johann W. Unger Lancaster University [email protected] @johnnyunger
Keywords: critical discourse studies, discourse-historical approach, hostile environment, secure English language testing, securitization
Using the example of Harding et al. (2020)’s discourse-historical investigation into the so-called ‘hostile environment’ for international higher education students in the UK, I aim to reflect on how scholars can respond to ever more extreme ‘politics of fear’ in relation to migrants (Wodak 2020). The UK’s ‘Secure English Language Test’ (SELT) policy is a clear example of this. For the past two decades, it has increasingly suppressed opportunities for migrant students and imposed ever-greater bureaucratic and financial hurdles on them. It constructs test ‘security’ not primarily as a technical and logistical factor in language testing, as it is often understood among professionals in the field. By contrast, SELTs are primarily used by the UK as an instrument of securitisation and control. Harding et al. (2020) show that in government tender documents, the policy has outsourced security concerns to language testing organisations, thereby effectively turning language testers and university admissions staff into ‘border guards’. As a form of prospective critique, I ask how these processes can be made more visible within universities and to prospective students. I suggest we must develop a critical vocabulary that allows us to communicate about this issue from both scholarly and more practical perspectives.
113 Short Paper Presentations
Abstracts are alphabetized by surname of the lead author.
Representation of migration: Perspectives from Kenya as a departure country
Beverly Achieng Egerton University [email protected]
Keywords: Representation, migration, discourse, linguistics, departure country
Much of the existing literature on language and migration addresses the linguistic behaviour of migrant and how migrants are affected by a variety of social, political and economic factors (Adserà & Pytliková, 2016). Much research also focuses on attitude towards migrants from the perspectives of people in the destination or host countries (Dempster & Hargrave, 2017). With regard to representation of migrants and migration. much attention has been given to representations of migrants in various media channels (Arcimaviciene & Baglama, 2018; Kosnick, 2014).This paper however, takes a different dimension and shifts attention to non- migrants in the countries from which the migrants depart. The paper employs a discourse analytic approach to deconstruct representations of migration from the perspective of those ‘left behind’ in the departure country. A sample of 150 respondents from Nakuru county in Kenya filled in a questionnaire with closed and open-ended questions about their perspectives on migration. The data suggests that non-migrants in departure countries have varied thoughts about migration. The paper argues that it is important to examine these representations of migration by those ‘left behind’ in order to better understand and deal with the determinants and consequences of migration.
114 In search of Hungaro-Romani
Martin Balo Hungarian Academy of Sciences [email protected]
Keywords: Hungaro-Romani, Para-Romani, mixed dialect, secret Romani lexicon
Para-Romani varieties, which have a Romani vocabulary but use the grammatical frame of another language, typically that of the co-territorial majority language (Bakker 2020), are known to have existed as early as the seventeenth century (see e.g. Adiego 1998 and Bakker 2002). They are also referred to as Romani mixed dialects and thought to be secret languages in bilingual communities (Bakker & van der Voort 1991). Besides the better documented Angloromani, Caló, Basque Romani, Dortika and Scandinavian Romani varieties, according to some of the more recent literature on Romani (Réger 1995, Kovalcsik & Kubínyi 2000, Stewart 2002, Courthiade & Rézműves 2009, Bakker 2020), a Para-Romani variety in which a Romani lexicon combines with Hungarian has also been in existence and used by Romungro musicians in Hungary. While Bakker & van der Voort 1991 do not make mention of it specifically when discussing possible other Para-Romani varieties in addition to the better known ones, they remark ""it is probable that other similar dialects exist or existed formerly"" (Bakker & van der Voort 1991: 29). An early reference to a Hungarian Para-Romani variety can be found in Hutterer 1963, who describes it as the remaining elements of a Romani vocabulary morphologically integrated into the new language system, and compares the process of its formation to that of Caló and Angloromani. Even more importantly, Hutterer 1963 adds that this phenomenon is observable among settled, mainly urban Carpathian Roma. Recent activity on the VakerMore social media page, a page dedicated to the Romungro variety, in the form of posts, comments and word lists, as well as personal communication with members of the community appear to confirm the existence of Hungaro-Romani in some form; however, it is not clear whether it is still actively used and how it actually compares with better known Para-Romani varieties. In light of this, we are planning to investigate the traces of Hungaro-Romani and uncover its history to the extent that it is possible. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, we will rely on online interviews with consultants who claim this variety exists and they are familiar with it.
115 The Other Side of the Story; investigating representations of minority and majority group citizens in ethnic minority media
Alice Beazer, Walter, S & Palicki, S. Technical University of Munich [email protected]
Keywords: Minority Media, Ethnic Minorities, Majority Ethnic Group, Othering
Whilst there is an extensive body of literature examining some minority groups in the mainstream media, majority group representation in minority media is a largely neglected area of research. Focusing on minority media sources in the UK and USA, this exploratory paper shall identify and explore the way in which both minority and majority group citizens are represented in ethnic minority news sources.
Extant research in this field has placed disproportionate emphasis on analysing the representation of certain minorities in Western nations – namely, Muslims – within the news media, whilst neglecting the analysis of other minority identities, and intersectional identities between these groups. Recent scholarship on minority group representation and framing in the media has been almost exclusively limited to the analysis of mainstream news sources, and has tended to examine the coverage of high-profile individuals from minority groups – predominantly political figures – as opposed to a broader analysis of ordinary citizens. Furthermore, it is not yet known whether the hegemonic and often negative framing of minority groups which dominate mainstream news discourse are also present within minority news media, nor whether majority group citizens are framed in a positive or negative way in minority media. Crucially, minority media is understood here as media produced by, and for a minority group within a society, with ‘ethnic media’ and ‘alternative media’ being categorised as types of minority media, within this broader definition (Matsaganis et al, 2011; Fuchs, 2010). Drawing upon social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979), framing analysis (Entman 1993), and the para-social contacts hypothesis (Schiappa et al. 2005) whilst employing the method of qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2004), this study answers the following research questions: How are majority and minority groups represented in ethnic minority media sources? In what context do majority and minority groups appear?
Ethnic minority newspapers have been selected from the UK and the USA for a number of reasons. Beyond the practical factor of selecting English-language publications, both nations have a significant proportion of ethnic minority and migrant populations, and therefore well-
116 established ethnic minority media landscape (to a far greater extent in the US). After building a search term to capture both minority and majority group citizens, 50 news articles will be randomly selected from 5 ethnic minority publications. Mayring’s (2004) qualitative content analysis technique will allow us to identify the way in which sexual, gender, religious and ethnic minority and majority group citizens are framed and represented, thus enabling an initial set of categories to be developed, which shall be explored in greater depth in a subsequent quantitative study.
Our initial results show that minority media represent other minority groups more accurately and positively than mainstream media. The representation of the majority group in minority media likewise refrains from stereotypes.
Digital Methodological Innovation: Linguistic Landscape Analysis in Riace, Calabria in the time of Covid-19.
Catherine Blair University of Birmingham
Keywords: Linguistic Landscapes, Hospitality, Integration, Riace
This paper presents a linguistic landscape analysis of the ‘Riace Model’ of refugee resettlement and integration, and discusses the methodological adaptations for data collection made necessary by Covid-19. Riace has a distinctive linguistic landscape comprised of murals and public art celebrating and memorialising the town's history of hospitality and solidarity. This three-dimensional ideology surrounds Riace’s inhabitants and forms a semiotic resource, which I term ‘hospitality capital’, that is disseminated and consumed on news and social media. I examine the civic participation, protest and activism, and argue that through the multilingual linguistic landscape we can attempt to theorise collective identity and inclusion. Using ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis to collect and analyse photographs of language and artistic phenomena, I ask what role these factors play in processes of inclusion. I consider how Riace’s ‘hospitality capital’ is utilised and consumed in the virtual linguistic landscape, and its links to protest and activism in other contexts. Due to Covid-19, I have redesigned my data- gathering methods to use digitally-sourced photographs, together with online earth browsers (satellite, aerial photography, street level applications, and three-dimensional geo-spatial data), to map, collect, annotate and analyse images of artefacts and linguistic phenomena within the
117 study area. These digital methodological innovations, combined with contextualising archival and interview materials, build a data source for a case study that sheds light on inclusion and integration through civic participation.
Supporting separated migrant children to thrive during Covid-19
Fiona Copland, King Goodwin, Maggie Grant, Marie Fotopoulou & Paul Rigby University of Stirling [email protected]
Keywords: Separated migrant children, ESOL, connectivity, Covid-19
Separated migrant children (a term we abbreviate to SMC) are a vulnerable group. ‘Separated from both parents and other relatives and are not being cared for by an adult who, by law or custom, is responsible for doing so’ (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 1997), SMC have been shown to face social isolation, irrespective of Covid-19 (Ní Raghallaigh and Gilligan 2010), with increased risks for children living in more rural or remote areas away from the major hubs of service provision (Rigby et al. 2019). Without parents/caregivers close by, their connections to support networks, to social work, education and legal services, and to peers are vital.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these networks and services poses urgent risks for SMC’s well-being and ability to thrive, socially and educationally. This working paper will report on the first stage of a UKRI funded project which responds to the research question: ‘how have SMC’s connectivity been affected in Scotland by the pandemic?’ As a stated ambition of the young people in our study is to improve their English, so that they can further their education or find work, we will focus on young people’s access to ESOL services during the last year. Drawing on interview data from young people themselves, ESOL tutors and the Guardianship Service in Scotland, our working paper will identify how the services have changed and how these changes have affected SMC’s ambitions to develop their English skills.
118 Identity ‘trans’formation: migrant construction workers as informal interpreters
Morwenna Fellows University of Reading [email protected]
Keywords: identity theory, informal interpreters, migrant workers, translanguaging
Migrant construction workers around the world take on additional work as informal interpreters to facilitate communication on multilingual construction sites. Although the literature demonstrates the universality of this role, little is known about who these informal interpreters are, or why and how they do this language work. Therefore, the question posed in this study is: How does the role of the informal interpreter change in relation to the worker’s identity? An ethnographic approach was used to explore the informal interpreter role. Data consists of forty informal interviews, observation notes, and photographs. A theoretical framework based on identity theory and translanguaging is mobilised to understand this particular group of migrant construction workers. Identity theory helps to understand the current and imagined identity of informal interpreters whose use of language, to bridge the linguistic and social gap between workers, may cause a ‘trans’formation of their own professional and personal identity. Furthermore, the analytical lens of translanguaging is used to provide insights into how workers use their entire repertoire of multilingual and multimodal communicative capabilities in the language work. Initial analysis suggests that the role performance of migrant construction workers who act as informal interpreters depends on their investment in their bilingual identity. Using narrative inquiry, this presentation relates the trajectory of a migrant worker who invests in their imagined future identity through the informal interpreter role.
119 LGBTQIA* migrants as new speakers
Michael Hornsby Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań [email protected]
Keywords: new speaker, LGBTQIA*, migrants, trajectories, critical juncture
The new speaker paradigm was the focus of COST Action IS13061 in the period 2013-2017, and concentrated on how multilingual citizens who, by engaging with languages other than their “native” or “national” language(s), need to cross existing social boundaries, re-evaluate their own levels of linguistic competence and creatively (re)structure their social practices to adapt to new and overlapping linguistic spaces. The network facilitated structured dialogue and collaboration amongst researchers from three different multilingual strands: Regional minorities, immigrants and transnational workers. Following the author's participation in this network, this emerging piece of research aims to continue to link the new speaker paradigm with migration, particularly in the case of LGBTQIA* migrants, whose life trajectories can often include what Catalan sociolinguists refer to as a 'muda' 2, or critical juncture when their linguistic practices undergo a re-evaluation and repositioning of priorities. Most especially, the 'freeing up' of spaces for LGBTQIA* migrants who may experience new modes of self- expression through adoption of the host language is of particular interest here, especially when the transition is made from homophobic environments to more liberal ones. The intended research instrument is the NEOPHON interview protocol2, which the author is beginning to trial with research participants in the Brighton (UK) area and data will be analysed through the coding of the most prominent themes which emerge in the life narratives of the participants.
120 A longitudinal comparison of the representation of migration in a corpus of British and Romanian newspaper articles published between 2006 and 2018
Mihaela Iorga University of Portsmouth [email protected]
This work-in-progress paper reports on a diachronic critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the conceptualisation of migration in the United Kingdom and in Romania. A comparison between the representations of migration in a corpus of British and Romanian newspaper articles published between 1st January 2006 and 31st December 2018 will be conducted. This project’s research question focuses on how the written media in the United Kingdom versus in Romania has helped conceptualise migration, between 1st January 2006 and 31st December 2018. Moreover, this research will discuss the connections which can be established between these conceptualisations and the political and historical events which occurred in these countries in the aforementioned timeframe.
Methodologically, the British dataset will be created by searching for ‘migration’ as a key word in the three most read left-leaning and right-leaning British newspapers, namely the Daily Mirror, the Guardian, the Independent, and the Daily Mail, the Times, the Sun respectively. In the Romanian sphere the newspapers Adevărul (“The Truth”), Evenimentul Zilei (“The Event of the Day”), and România liberă (“The free Romania”) and Gândul (“The Thought”) will be selected.
Following a quantitative analysis using corpus linguistics, a CDA will be carried out on this dataset. Particular focus will be placed on Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) to explore the media’s usage of conceptual metaphors, which at times can contribute to the migrants’ ‘otherisation’ in society. The conceptualisations of migration in countries with opposite migration flows will be discussed. In addition, this research will contribute to the understanding of the media’s role in shaping immigration discourse and the implications this carries within society in general and for shaping political life.
121 Temporary Language Teachers or Permanent Residents? Negotiating Migrant Identities in South Korea
Felicia Istad Korea University [email protected]
Keywords: immigration policy, language teacher visa, mobility, identity
A high demand for English language education has resulted in distinct visa categories for native speakers of English in East Asia. Following Ellermann (2020), this study examines language visas in South Korea both as a logic of entry and as a status of sojourn. By combining policy analysis with in-depth interviews, it is observed that language visas facilitate entry, but limit mobility. Identified as 'English teachers' in policy and social discourse, language workers find themselves unable to move into other forms of employment due to increasingly strict visa regulations that limit opportunities for permanent residency beyond the legal status as language teacher. The study concludes with a discussion of how language teachers negotiate their identity as permanent residents within a legal context that defines their status at the intersection between language and temporary migration.
122 Online Learning and Conversation in Celtic Languages: A Virtual Migration or ‘There and Back Again’?
Jeff William Justice The University of Edinburgh [email protected] @jwjustice73
Keywords: Celtic, virtual, education, conversation, language
‘Migration’ frequently (but not entirely) focuses on the movement of peoples across physical spaces, moving from one territory to another in response to biological or political needs. Migration can also occur in a virtual sense. The Internet, a wholly anthropocentric creation, creates a virtual place in which people can associate. It has its physical components, such as the interfaces through which we access it, but its domain is not in physical space.
The Celtic languages have all experienced significant, well-documented reductions in their physical space over several centuries. Activists and institutions now offer courses in all of these languages. Some of these courses have been made available online for years; others only went online recently, forced to migrate to a virtual space through the COVID-19 pandemic in the real physical spaces where they are spoken. Physical conversation circles once meeting in taverns and public halls now meet online, and there is some desire for them to remain there.
This paper discusses the impact of the virtual migration of Celtic language courses and conversation circles on the participants languages themselves. Have viable new spaces been created? Can they be sustained? It will also offer thoughts on the real world political impact that the virtual migration of Celtic language education may have moving forward from the pandemic. Among other points, I expect that online conversation circles learning will have increased the motivation for activism needed to move them back into real spaces, including a desire for stronger institutional support for these languages.
123 Migration, language and what to expect from the future
Angela B. C. Themudo Lessa & Grassinete C. de Albuquerque Oliveira Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo / The Federal University of Acre [email protected] [email protected]
Keywords: Migration, Sense of Belonging, Exclusion, Alienation, Language.
This paper presents and discusses an ongoing research which is being carried out in Brazil, the largest country in South America which has centripetal and centrifugal forces influencing migration due to social and economic diversity. The aim of the research is to (a) reflect about the senses and meanings – individual subjectify - people who want/need to move attribute to who they are and to what role they have in the world and (b) understand how the new individual sociability may be. Innovative and at the same time devastating. The research is theoretically grounded in Critical Applied Linguistics (MOITA LOPES, 2006; CELANI, 1998, PENNYCOOK, 2006, 2019) because language is considered as a fluid, unstable and dynamic social practice that opens space for new meanings and intervention. According to Rosa et al. (2015) and Cogo and Silva (2016) the migrants’ discourses reveal social, cultural, political and linguistic questions that have to be faced a solved. The methodological approach is defined by MAGALHAES (2009; 2011) as Collaborative Critical Research because it has as its cornerstone the active listening of people. Data was collected through recorded interviews with migrants who have different social-geographical, cultural, historical, and economic background: participant (1) migrated from Peru to Brazil, participant (2) from Haiti, participant (3) from the North to the South of the country and (4) from Brazil to the USA. Preliminary results show that all of them have controversial feelings of inclusion and belonging. Moving to a new social, economic and cultural context gives them a sense of freedom but, at the same time, a terrible feeling of imprisonment and alienation, that is a challenge researchers and policy makers must work out together.
124 Negotiating (un)belonging in sites of entanglements - Spatial identities of German migrants in Stockholm
Anna Mammitzsch Stockholm University [email protected]
Keywords: Migration and un/belonging, small stories, sites of entanglement, space of exception, German migrants in Sweden
This paper examines how German migrants in Sweden narrate their experiences of migration, language and identity and position themselves in relation to social categorizations and temporal spatial configurations. It draws upon the notion of small stories (Georgakopoulou 2007) to analyze participant-guided walking tours in Stockholm, conducted as part of my dissertation project, to different sites of entanglement emergent in the everyday lives of two participants. Sites of entanglement are understood as terrains of mutuality, where moments of complication, but also human foldedness are experienced, as previously separately imagined identities, spaces and social relationships intersect in unexpected ways (Kerfoot and Hyltenstam 2017; Nuttall 2009). Employing positioning analysis (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008), the study shows that by telling small stories of change, participants describe not only complexities of coping in spaces of exception (Heugh, Stroud, and Scarino 2018), but also negotiate different forms of (un)belonging by positioning themselves through tropes of difference and sameness. Using the notion of entanglement as a lens to understand German migrants’ experiences across imagined boundaries offers insights into how these participants construct spatial identities and their personas in different social spaces through interaction (Higgins 2017), for example through language preferences and moments of silence.
125 Heritage languages in the Irish primary school context: an investigation into teachers’ attitude and pedagogical practice in the area of support for first language maintenance in bilingual pupils’
Suzanne McCarthy & Bozena Dubiel Technological University Dublin
[email protected] @Suzanne75071461 [email protected]
This study investigates Irish primary school teachers’ attitudes and practice with regards to heritage languages in bilingual pupils. It has three aims: to explore teachers’ views on bilingualism and heritage languages, to examine their practice around support for heritage language maintenance, and to investigate potential changes in teachers’ views and practice across the school years. The theoretical framework draws on the role attitudes play in classroom practices (Christopoulou, Pampaka & Vlassopoulou, 2012), and on the relationship between teachers’ knowledge, training and approach with bilingual pupils (Flores, 2001). Past studies show that teachers value bilingualism, however, they emphasise the acquisition of the majority language and see the heritage language maintenance as the responsibility of the family (Blazar & Kraft, 2017; Sook Lee & Oxelson, 2006). Teachers highlight their lack of resources and limited awareness of strategies (Dillon, 2011; Ribeiro, 2011). The study utilizes a mixed methods approach underpinned by the pragmatism paradigm. The participants are ninety primary school teachers from six schools in Dublin. Thirty-six of those teachers took part in nine focus groups. Individual questionnaires were completed by ninety teachers. The qualitative data is being analysed thematically through NVivo 12, and the questionnaires through SPSS. This is an ongoing project, currently at the stage of data analysis. Initial results are that teachers value bilingualism yet they struggle to support heritage language maintenance in pupils which can be explained by their lack of knowledge, limited practice and a curriculum overload. It is anticipated that full results will be available in spring 2021.
126 A High Street of Hybrid Identity
Jeni Peake Université de Bordeaux [email protected]
Keywords: Hybridity, Identity, Advertising, Graffiti, Language
Walk down any street in France and you will see examples of language flux and hybridity, both in advertising and street communication, namely graffiti, tags, and street art. Anytime there is “displayed language” (Eastman and Stein 1993) this forms a part of our “linguistic landscape” (Coupland 2012). Language identity is one of the most important factors when defining an individual’s cultural group (Gade 2003) in this study, language identity is also an important part of an artist’s or business owner’s identity. There are several levels to identity, the internal individuality (the self) and the social identity (the person) (Reynolds 2016; Riley 2007). This work-in-progress paper explores the use of written hybrid language in France. What does it reveal about the language users’ identity? What effect does it have on the local population? The methods used were an ethnographical study of hybrid language in France, followed by an analysis of the corpus as well as semi-directed interviews of business owners and street artists. The original corpus contained over 150 examples of English, Anglicisms, or hybrid phrases being used by businesses in France. The graffiti corpus contains over 55 examples of English or hybrid graffiti found in France. The initial results demonstrate that business owners and street artists alike use language to attract people’s attention. The wealth of examples and puns using two language is testament to language flux and the incorporation of English into everyday French vocabulary.
127 Desire and self-defence strategies in the talk of some Sicilian migrants
Roberta Piazza University of Sussex [email protected]
This ethnographic study is the result of a series of interviews carried out with migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Morocco in the summer of 2013 and 2015. It draws on my on-going work on desire among individuals in socially liminal situations (Piazza 2021 and in preparation), aspiration and desire in migration studies focusing on migrants as desiring actors but also as object of desire by others (Collins 2018; Yang 2018) and studies that attempt to deconstruct the notion of ‘voluntariness’ in migration (Erdal and Oeppen 2018). Conducted in a holiday resort and contiguous city in the north of Sicily, the interviews were with three beach vendors interviewed once during their lunch break, a Pakistani vendor interviewed over a whole week, and a car window cleaner interviewed on two successive days. Despite the diversity within the data collection and the languages in the interviews (English and Italian), the talks reveal similarities in the way in which the male participants insist on discursively constructing their host place as a land of goods and opportunities and show agency in their ability to design realistic plans. Another feature of these exchanges, which ties in with the desirous identities these participants construct, is their strategies to protect their ‘male face’ and appear as capable persons in control of their destiny. The study uses thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) combined with a social interactional approach (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2008) with attention to the lexical, interactional and pragmatic levels.
128 How are the Rohingya crises discursively represented in British online news media?
Jasper Roe British University Vietnam [email protected]
Keywords: Migration, Exclusion, Othering, CADS, Immanent Critique
This research project investigates the discursive representation of the Rohingya in British online media from the perspective of immanent critique, realized through a Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) approach. This analysis uses a 100,000 word purpose-built corpus and aims to investigate the hypothesis that sympathetic discourses regarding the Rohingya are commonly employed in British online media, and that this is in necessary contradiction with discursive absence of identification of the causes of the suffering which generate such sympathetic approaches. The data is analysed through a combination of frequency, collocation, and concordance analysis, with particular focus on identifying absence and silence in discourse.
In exploring the construction of knowledge through discourse, it is hoped that this research can contribute to a better understanding of societies, their dynamics and structuration, leading to a higher dynamic and fluidity of established bodies of knowledge while also pointing towards directions for societal change, specifically in the areas of migration, mobilities, and the suffering caused through processes of social exclusion, othering, and discrimination.
Data 100,000 words collected from online news media outlets in the UK, over a span of 6 months from January - June 2020.
Methods Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies with a small specialized corpus, utilizing frequency, collocation and concordance analysis through the Sketch Engine platform.
129 Linguistic representation of migration in Italy (2013-2020)
Luigi Squillante & Isabella Chiari Sapienza Università di Roma [email protected]
Keywords: Representation of Migration, Italy, corpus linguistics, interdisciplinary approach, migration narratives
Our work-in-progress project proposes an interdisciplinary approach to tackle the topic of the identification of features, debates, actors and roles in migration narratives, taking into consideration their textual patterns and their evolution in time (2013-2020) within the Italian context, characterized by different migration issues as well as common and/or divergent discourses and policies throughout the years. The project makes use of state-of-the-art techniques in corpus linguistics and information extraction to retrieve, weight up and ultimately present the rhetorics of hetero-representations and self-representation of migrants over time. Data are gathered from two types of resources that are being assembled in the form of large corpora: namely, texts extracted from the media/press and interactions on social networks. Linguistic data are systematically coupled with a set of extra-linguistic information concerning historical events, legislative turns, and demographical/sociological data, in order to provide a dynamic and multidimensional portrait of changes in migration narratives and to identify their triggers. The outputs of the project are expected to include structured information on migration discourse in the forms of research protocols, country reports on the dynamics of representation and its interpretation, as well as guidelines available for both policy makers, media workers and the civil society in order to facilitate actions improving objective representations of migrants, fostering integration and inclusion.
130 Refugees in UK Higher Education: using narrative inquiry to investigate the lived experiences of sanctuary seekers and their English language learning journeys
Laura Walker UCLan University
Keywords: language learning; refugees in HE; identity; narrative inquiry; investment
Recent voluntary work has inspired me to want to document, via my PhD, refugees’ experiences prior to and/or during their studies here at UCLan university with a view to finding out whether learning English whilst studying or applying to study at university can help them reclaim their professional identities. Being able to access and benefit from higher education and the university ‘safe space’ (Blunt, personal correspondence, 2020) is beneficial, both educationally and in an aspirational sense. Morrice (2013: 653) also argues that HE can help refugees ‘re-build their professional identities’. In order to access higher education and associated opportunities for professional advancement and social mobility, English language proficiency is a requirement. It is also reported as a barrier to refugee integration in general (Blunt, 2018).
This study, which aims to answer the question: “What can be learnt about refugees’ journeys and reclaiming professional identities by documenting their lived experiences of language learning whilst studying and applying to study at universities in the UK?”, and will explore the role of sanctuary seekers’ ‘investment’ (Darvin and Norton, 2015) in classroom language learning practices in and prior to UK HE. Investment is understood here as a ‘commitment to goals, practices and identities that constitute the learning process and are continually negotiated in different social relationships and structures of power’ (Norton, 2013: 45, quoted in Darvin and Norton, 2015: 36).
This will be done through ‘narrative inquiry’ as a ‘process of collaboration’ between participant and researcher (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990: 4) in the context of qualitative, ethnographic approaches, to investigate refugees’ study experiences at UCLan. Data will be collected via observations, semi-structured interviews, and journals.
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