Linguistic (il)legitimacy in Migration Encounters

Petros Karatsareas

doi:10.3390/languages6020066

Abstract

Linguistic differences between groups of co-ethnic and/or co-national migrants in diasporic contexts can become grounds for constructing and displaying identities that distinguish (groups of) migrants on the basis of differences in the sociohistorical circumstances of migration (provenance, time of migration) and/or social factors such as class, socioeconomic status, or level of education. In this article, I explore how language became a source of ideological conflict between Greek Cypriot and Greek migrants in the context of a complementary school in north London. Analysing a set of semi-structured interviews with teachers, which were undertaken in 2018 as part of an ethnographically oriented project on language ideologies in Greek complementary schools, I show that Greek pupils and parents, who had migrated to the UK after 2010 pushed by the government-debt crisis in Greece, positioned themselves as linguistic authorities and developed discourses that delegitimised the multilingual and multidialectal practices of Greek Cypriot migrants. Their interventions centred around the use of Cypriot Greek and English features, drawn from the linguistic resources that did not conform with the expectations that “new” Greek migrants held about complementary schools and which were based on strictly monolingual and monodialectal language ideologies. To these, teachers responded with counter-discourses that re-valued contested practices as products of different linguistic repertoires that were shaped by different life courses and trajectories of linguistic resources acquisition.

Highlights

Recent years have seen an increased interest in the role language plays in processes of transnational migration (Canagarajah 2017; Capstick 2021) with scholars taking stock of theoretical and methodological advances in two distinct but interrelated paradigmatic turns: the mobility turn in the social sciences (Faist 2013; Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2007) and the multilingual turn in applied linguistics (Conteh and Meier 2014; May 2014; Meier 2017)
I have explored some of the sociolinguistic processes that were set in motion when, after the government-debt crisis began seriously affecting Greek society, people who had been born in Greece migrated to the UK in search of better life prospects for themselves, their families, and their children
Complementary schools were among the sites and spaces that family-orientated Greek migrants entered at the earliest phases of this “new” migration, facilitated by the positioning of schools as ethn(olinguist)ically Greek, that is, institutions that transcend divisions imposed by national boundaries such as the political separation between Greece and Cyprus and which forge links between people constructed as ethnically Greek, using language as the predominant cohesive characteristic

Summary

Introduction

Recent years have seen an increased interest in the role language plays in processes of transnational migration (Canagarajah 2017; Capstick 2021) with scholars taking stock of theoretical and methodological advances in two distinct but interrelated paradigmatic turns: the mobility turn in the social sciences (Faist 2013; Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2007) and the multilingual turn in applied linguistics (Conteh and Meier 2014; May 2014; Meier 2017). The new mobilities paradigm challenges views of human activity as largely rooted and fixed in particular geographical locations over periods of time with migration being pursued by relatively small groups of people who relocate from a place of origin (most commonly their country of birth) to a new place in the world only once in their lives and in order to settle permanently It emphasises the primordial and constitutive role mobilities (different forms and scales of mobility) play in people’s lives both on an everyday level and across their diverse life courses. These understandings have contributed to broader transformations of sociolinguistics as a field that is fundamentally about mobile resources, mobile speakers and mobile markets (Blommaert 2010; Blommaert and Rampton 2015) and to post-multilingualist outlooks on the present and future as times when languages and language varieties have multiple owners and the complex links between them are under constant negotiation and readjustment (Li 2018)

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Conclusion