Abstract
In the research on borderscapes, particularly in the Albanian-Greek borderland, explorations of identities and fluidity of socio-cultural boundaries play a key role. Based on several ethnographic interviews and participatory observation during short-term fieldwork in the Konitsa region of North-Western Greece, this study aims to explore the metalinguistic narratives of the local people coming from Albanian/Arvanitika-speaking families. We observe how Albanian and Greek language use is narrated across several generations of these families, shaping narratives of place-making and belonging. Drawing upon the theory of cultural intimacy, studies of linguistic ideologies, and discourse analysis, we examine the multiple controversies in our research participants’ metalinguistic narratives and indexical signs such as code-switching. Using an anthropological lens, we also trace how these people’s personal stories are affected by national discourses, and how the state’s discourses infiltrate local peoples’ metalinguistic narratives. As previous studies have shown, in a situation of heteroglossia, the low-prestige language is perceived “through the eyes” of the dominant language. Nonetheless, when subversive heteroglossiaoccurs, the dominant linguistic ideology is also internalized by the speakers, but it is deviated and reassessed in the attempt to build spaces of cultural intimacy.
Highlights
In the research on borderscapes, in the Albanian-Greek borderland, explorations of identities and fluidity of socio-cultural boundaries play a key role
We focus on the narrations about Albanian and Greek language use among the local families with a history of family connections to the places that nowadays are located on the other side of the border, in Albania
Since linguist Michael Silverstein introduced the term linguistic ideologies and defined them as “sets of beliefs about language articulated by the users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use” (Silverstein 1979, 193), the study of people’s accounts on their linguistic experience has played an important role in anthropology
Summary
In the research on borderscapes, in the Albanian-Greek borderland, explorations of identities and fluidity of socio-cultural boundaries play a key role. If we go inside [meaning: to Albania], we can communicate!’ and he laughed This small passage from our conversation with Mr Selim reflects a widely circulated idea in social sciences that power relations are generated, reproduced, and revealed through language. Borders and borderlands have attracted much attention among researchers in social sciences, anthropologists not being an exception In these studies, borderlands are often described as complex geographic and symbolic spaces in which negotiations of power and sovereignty together with construction and reconfiguration of sociocultural identities and boundaries become intense and revealing (Wilson and Donnan 2012) while the experience of people living in the borderlands is conceptualized as the one of exceptional uncertainty, marginality, and liminality (Green 2005; Agier 2016). An even stronger emphasis is being made on how our research participants’ stories and metalinguistic narratives represent a cultural borderland, embodying an experience of heterogeneity and inconsistency which the established cultural narratives fail to express
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