Abstract
While post-migrant generation Moroccans from Europe often are able to converse competently enough in Moroccan languages to bargain in shops during visits to Morocco, many report that they are not given the ‘local’, ‘right’ prices because they are ‘smelled’ as outsiders. During fieldwork following these diasporic visitors in Morocco, several participants strategically shopped for goods with a ‘local’ friend or family member who might negotiate on their behalf for the ‘right’ price. This strategy was seen as a way to circumvent or ameliorate the ways the diasporic client might be negatively categorized as an outsider, especially in terms of his or her language use. Yet, examining these events in recorded detail indicates that diasporic clients are often bargaining for themselves as competent speakers, but are sometimes not able to skillfully bargain politely. In these moments, proxy bargainers intervene when debate and tension increases during bargaining and diasporic visitors do not adequately perform politeness – specifically by deploying religious speech – to soften and minimize tension. Analysis of these interactions indicates how diasporic branching of linguistic practice contrasts communicative skills of mobile populations with subtle, place-based competences, and how the mismatch between these can negatively mark diasporic visitors.
Funding source: University of London Central Research Fund
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Deaf signing diversity and signed language translations
- ‘Smelling’ diasporic: bargaining interactions and the problem of politeness
- Discursive strategies of self-promotion by doctors in online medical consultations in China: an e-commercialised practice
- Learning semantic and thematic vocabulary clusters through embedded instruction: effects on very young English learners’ vocabulary acquisition and retention
- Towards an understanding of multilingual investment: multilingual learning experiences among mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong
- The cognitive-conceptual, planning-organizational, affective-social and linguistic-discursive affordances of translanguaging
- Development and validation of the questionnaire on EFL students’ perceptions of authorial stance in academic writing
- Emergent LOTE motivation? The L3 motivational dynamics of Japanese-major university students in China
- Study abroad, human capital development, language commodification, and social inequalities
- Exploring the impact of a teacher development programme using a digital application on linguistic interactions in the classroom: a multiple case study
- Boredom in practical English language classes: a longitudinal confirmatory factor analysis-curve of factors model
- Medical students’ attention in EFL class: roles of academic expectation stress and quality of sleep
- Foreign language peace of mind: a positive emotion drawn from the Chinese EFL learning context
- Mutual intelligibility of a Kurmanji and a Zazaki dialect spoken in the province of Elazığ, Turkey
- Investigating the relationship between linguistic changes in L2 writers’ paraphrasing, paraphrasing performance and L2 proficiency
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Deaf signing diversity and signed language translations
- ‘Smelling’ diasporic: bargaining interactions and the problem of politeness
- Discursive strategies of self-promotion by doctors in online medical consultations in China: an e-commercialised practice
- Learning semantic and thematic vocabulary clusters through embedded instruction: effects on very young English learners’ vocabulary acquisition and retention
- Towards an understanding of multilingual investment: multilingual learning experiences among mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong
- The cognitive-conceptual, planning-organizational, affective-social and linguistic-discursive affordances of translanguaging
- Development and validation of the questionnaire on EFL students’ perceptions of authorial stance in academic writing
- Emergent LOTE motivation? The L3 motivational dynamics of Japanese-major university students in China
- Study abroad, human capital development, language commodification, and social inequalities
- Exploring the impact of a teacher development programme using a digital application on linguistic interactions in the classroom: a multiple case study
- Boredom in practical English language classes: a longitudinal confirmatory factor analysis-curve of factors model
- Medical students’ attention in EFL class: roles of academic expectation stress and quality of sleep
- Foreign language peace of mind: a positive emotion drawn from the Chinese EFL learning context
- Mutual intelligibility of a Kurmanji and a Zazaki dialect spoken in the province of Elazığ, Turkey
- Investigating the relationship between linguistic changes in L2 writers’ paraphrasing, paraphrasing performance and L2 proficiency