Abstract
In this article, an interdisciplinary lens is applied to French migrants’ reflections on their everyday language practices, investigating how embodied and embedded language, such as accent and London-French translanguaging, serve as both in-group and out-group symbolic markers in different transnational spaces. Key sociological concepts developed by Pierre Bourdieu are deployed, including field, habitus, hysteresis and symbolic capital, to assess the varying symbolic conversion rates of the migrants’ languaging practices across transnational spaces. A mixed-methodological and analytical approach is taken, combining narratives from ethnographic interviews and autobiography. Based on the data gathered, the article posits that the French accent is an embodied symbolic marker, experienced as an internalised dialectic: a barrier to inclusion/belonging in London and an escape from the symbolic weight of the originary accent in France. Subsequently, it argues that the migrants’ translanguaging functions as a spontaneous insider vernacular conducive to community identity construction in the postmigration space, but (mis)interpreted as an exclusionary articulation of symbolic distinction in the premigration context. Finally, the article asks whether participants’ linguistic repertoires, self-identifications and spatialities go beyond the notion of the ‘cleft habitus’, or even hybridity, to a post-structural, translanguaging third space that transcends borders.
Highlights
This article stems from several years of research on French residents in London
Additional Bourdieusian concepts to be applied to the analysis are the potential for a ‘cleft habitus’ (Bourdieu 2004; Thatcher and Halvorsrud 2016) or hybrid habitus (Decoteau 2013; Pulley and Whaley 2020), resulting from the force of the transnational field on participants’ linguistic habitus, notably, the disconcerting hysteresis sensation triggered by the mismatch between the external field and their embodied dispositions
I will ask whether their fluid translanguaging sees the emergence of a linguistically hybrid ideal that transcends the dichotomies of bilingualism and codeswitching (Blom and Gumperz 1972; Auer 1984), as Li Wei posits (Li 2018), or whether the transnational geographically, culturally and linguistically in-between space results in a form of hysteresis whereby ‘the environment with which they are confronted is too far removed from that to which they are objectively adjusted’ (Bourdieu [1972] 2000, p. 260)5
Summary
This article stems from several years of research on French residents in London. I demonstrate how, on the one hand, this non-standard LondonFrench vernacular serves to strengthen in-group belonging and embedding within the postmigration space (Giles and Johnson 1987). On the other, it disembeds and uproots participants from the premigration ‘home’, where their pre-reflexive use of Anglicisms for efficiency or economy, are misconceived as affected devices of social distinction Rather than a sociopragmatic (Holmes 2018) examination of French migrants’ language use in practice, I examine their reflective and affective accounts of embodied and embedded translanguaging, doing so through a narrative-focused interdisciplinary lens that combines ethnographic and literary approaches. I provide a more detailed account of the paper’s methodological and conceptual underpinning
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