Interactional regimes of sociolinguistic behaviour: An ethnographic exploration of the scales at play across the spaces of an asylum-seeking centre

1 Introduction

Inasmuch as movement of goods, knowledge and capital is a key feature of contemporary globalised discourses across the EU nation-states, movement has always been part of the conditio humana, even before this contemporary globalised moment. More prominently than ever, however, the movement of people who (try to) set foot on EU soil contributes to the construction of superdiversity, that is to the diversification of an already consolidated diversity that had settled in Europe during the twentieth century (Vertovec 2007, Vertovec 2019; Blommaert and Rampton 2011). Again, more prominently than ever, this condition of superdiversity is cause of heated public and political debates (see Spotti 2018, Spotti 2019). These debates all seem to postulate one thing: migration of a certain type is a detrimental phenomenon for societies. Together with migration, in fact, comes diversity and within diversity – presupposing that the following are all countable definable and discrete objects – we find diversity of cultures, of languages, of customs, of childrearing practices, of gendered relations and through that the possible destabilisation of a presupposed national order. As a result of this, governmentally authored discourses across the EU present two types of individuals. One type refers to individuals that are favoured by migration authorities. Favoured individuals have clear cut legal status, e. g. expats, foreign students and knowledge migrants. They very often hold either one or more tangible proofs of identity or proofs of educational qualifications, which grant them to have self-sustaining societal positions that do not appear to impinge on the precarious economic well-being of EU societies. Further, this first set of people turn out to be deeply entrenched in (digitally) mediated communication; they bond and bridge their social relations networks through socio-technological platforms and are able to participate in society through an array of (often formally certified) digital literacy skills that allow them to be part of multiple overlapping transnational networks of socialisation (see Maric and Spotti 2016). At the other end, in contrast, we find individuals whose movement has happened through somewhat less orthodox means of mobility, e. g. migrant labourers working illegally on the black market, asylum seekers, refugees, illiterate and low literate migrants. These individuals tend to be relegated to essentialist identity categories by policy documents and their implementation, often glossing them over with the category ‘in need of civic integration’. With this all as our backdrop, an asylum-seeking centre functions as an important case in point here. The centre is a place filled by mobile people brought there by events happening many hundreds or thousands miles away who have different degrees (often informal, unrecognised and uncertified) of multilingual and digital repertoires that they employ on a daily basis while awaiting – in this waiting room of globalisation – for their legal status to be determined by the state (see also Dattatreyan 2015).

Against this background, drawing on the notion of sociolinguistic scaling, the present contribution focuses on the second set of mobile people mentioned above. In doing so, it argues for an understanding of an asylum-seeking centre as a unit of inquiry in which sociolinguistic repertoires and language users’ identity categorisation (Spotti and Blommaert 2017) are played out during intercultural communicative encounters. The contribution aims to show how the centre encapsulates time- and space-bound interactional regimes and language hierarchies. Taken as such, the different rooms that make up the centre, e. g. the office, the activity room and the corridor, to name but a few, all may seem neutral spaces where the daily lives of people unfold and tick together the way they do. However, each of these spaces invites, allows and dismisses different interactional sociolinguistic regimes. These regimes show perceptions of what counts not only as the right language to use when, where and with whom; rather, they also show how these language users manage to move across scales during the interactional process of meaning (un)making. Understanding practices of speakerness, the use of sociolinguistic repertoires and the rise and fall of the status of speakers during communicative encounters therefore requires ‘an understanding of the connections between different centres [of normativity] and their indexical orders’ (Blommaert et al. 2005: 207). What counts as ‘good’ communicative behaviour and ‘acceptable’ semiotic identity display in a place where those who inhabit the centre hang out spending their spare time watching videos on their mobile phone devices, it could be subsequently disqualified in another space where the valid sociolinguistic and semiotic norms are of a different scale level, e. g. that of the state and of its handed-down policies of integration, mostly based on language learning and on the learning of cultural norms and values.

My argument unfolds as follows. Given the centrality of the notion of space, I draw readers’ attention to theories of space and to the notion of sociolinguistic scales. I then draw on two ethnographic vignettes taken from a data corpus I collected during a large ethnographic interpretive inquiry focused on the implications of digitalisation for asylum seeking practices and on the meaning attached to being an asylum seeker in times of superdiversity. By doing so, I tackle the negotiation of sociolinguistic regimes across two ‘key incidents’ (Kroon and Sturm 2007) that happened in an asylum-seeking centre located in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. My contribution concludes by considering whether the policy-driven category ‘newly arrived migrant in need of civic integration’ remains a valid category for addressing and talking about the people who inhabit this centre or whether, on the basis of a more scale-sensitive analysis, we should start looking at the transformative potential that allows digitally literate mobile subjects at a disadvantage to move beyond this homogenising policy-driven discursive categorisation.

2 Moving from the scientification of language towards the socialisation of language

Let us begin with the following statement: the assemblage of what makes things and people, within a given socio-cultural space, all tick together in the way they do, i. e. society, is an extremely hard thing to understand. Following the scientification of language in the late nineteenth century, linguists taught themselves to abandon society and focus on ‘language’ alone. In concreto, this meant that those interested in language would have channelled much, if not all, of their attention on the phonological, morphological and syntactic structures that make up ‘a language’. The consequences of this selective attention, in turn, had been the isolation of the study of language from its societal use and more specifically, a divide between the study of language forms and the consequent mapping of these forms onto specific functions. These form-function mappings were then imagined to contribute to the construction of social meaning.

In sharp contrast to this rather opaque canvas depicting language and society as odd bedfellows, the study of language and society and, more precisely, the study of language as a social phenomenon is much indebted to the work of Joshua Fishman and to the later developments by Gumperz and Hymes (1964, 1986). Dealing with Fishman’s (1971) work first, we see that the basis for the sociology of language rests on the foundation of the use of language in concomitance with the social organisation of behaviour across societal domains. It is, again, thanks to Fishman that, from a descriptive sociology of language whose basic task it was to show how social networks and speech communities do not display either the same language usage or believe the same things about language, scholars have moved towards a more dynamic sociology of language. The main goal of the latter has been to unravel both why and how two once similar networks or communities have arrived at a quite different social organisation of language use and show a quite different behaviour towards language, whether factual or ideological. Although Fishman’s dynamic approach to the sociology of language touches on the issue of repertoire change, much of his initial work remains anchored in a sociolinguistics of spread, stable and unstable bilingualism and the construction and revision of writing systems.

It is with the work of John Gumperz that the study of language and society underwent a total reshaping. In the work that was seminal for the discussion of the concept of a “speech community”, Gumperz (1968) showed that while a named language was a category for those who studied language, it was not so for language users. Starting with communicative practices, functions and repertoires, rather than focusing on structuralist grammatical systems, Gumperz found that the study of language went beyond approaches that described how linguistic knowledge is structured in systematic ways. Rather, the core notions in Gumperz’s approach to the study of language became interpretation, understanding, meaning and, with that, meaning-making while engaged in interaction.

This all required a new level of sociolinguistic analysis (Gumperz 1971: 343) that had as its focal point how interpretation and understanding, rather than ‘language’, are intertwined with the construction of shared common grounds. This became a forerunner of the Silversteinian ‘total linguistic fact’ (1985) that, as Wortham states, includes the analysis of form, use, ideology and domain (Wortham 2008: 83). Most sociolinguistic analysis, by now, has taken on board that any language problem is concomitant with a societal problem, and that in order to have a full-fledged sociolinguistic analysis of a societal problem, we ought to pay attention to the in situ interactional micro-fabrics of sociolinguistic encounters.

3 Sociolinguistics domains, scaling and its conceptual implications

The language and society binomium above highlights a recurrent twitch in the eye of sociolinguistics in that societies do continuously change (Appadurai 1996) and with them sociolinguistic theorising is called, or even compelled, to (re-)invent its conceptual armour and its analytical lenses (Blommaert and Rampton 2011). While doing so, notwithstanding the risk of stepping into diatribes around ‘the barren verbiage’ of language (Makoni 2012) and around the branding of sociolinguistic theorising (Pavlenko 2018), sociolinguistics has to engage with metaphors that serve the purpose of helping the analyst imagine and, through that, understand the changing nature of contemporary globalised societies and scrape beneath the surface of their normalcy, i. e. beneath the normalcy embodied in their cultural ecologies. The notion of scales and with that its gerundive form, i. e. scaling, do seem a poignant embodiment of a sociolinguistics that wishes to re-invent itself (see also Blommaert this volume). Given that f this special issue goal is indeed to dwell on what scaling is and how it can best serve the regained uncertainty in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics that Gumperz had already vented in his seminal work, I first focus on the concept of space, or to use a more refined term, space as sociolinguistic domain. From there, I make suggestions on how scaling could potentially result in a viable set of metaphors for sociolinguistic theorising, although sociolinguistic analysis must beware the danger of being trapped by the very same tropes it produces, thus leading to the reification of scales as entities that can be ‘jumped’ or ‘leaped’ as if they were ready-made tangible objects.

Henry Lefebvre (1991) views space as a social product that masks the contradictions of its own production. Further, in an effort to link human agents and spatial domination, Pierre Bourdieu (1977) focuses on the spatialisation of everyday behaviour and how the socio-spatial order of behaviour is translated into bodily experience and practices of expression. Bourdieu – and social scientists will build heavily on this (see Scollon and Scollon 2003; Blommaert and Huang 2010) – proposes the concept of habitus, a generative and structuring principle of collective strategies and social practices that makes new history while being a product of history itself. Michael Foucault, in his seminal work on the prison (1977) and in a series of interviews and lectures on space (1984), examines the relationship of power and space by positing architecture and the use of space as a technology of the government that tries to regulate the bodies of those who are in its immediate detention. The aim of such a technology, in Foucault’s wording, is to shape ‘a docile body’ (Foucault 1977), an almost subjugated subject whose body can be mastered due to enclosure and the organisation of individuals in space. Building on this, de Certeau (1984) sets out to show how people’s ways of doing things make up the means by which users re-appropriate space organised by techniques of socio-cultural production. These practices are articulated in the fine-grained details of everyday life and used by groups or individuals already caught in the nets of discipline, though in his work spatial practices elude the (implicit) planning of government control. Drawing again on De Certau (1984), power in space is embedded through territorial delimitation and boundaries in which the weapons of ‘the strong’ are classification, delineation and division – the so called ‘strategies’ of spatial domination – while ‘the weak’ use furtive movements’ shortcuts and routes – also addressed as ‘tactics’. The latter is used to contest, negotiate or even subvert spatial domination and all that comes along with it that is the normativity of doing things as prescribed by the one in power (De Genova 2002). Understanding multilingualism and the deployment of sociolinguistic repertoires in the spaces of an asylum-seeking centre requires therefore an understanding of the connections between spaces, the bodies that populate them and the sociolinguistic scales at play within an established set of institutional practices.

4 The asylum-seeking centre, its ‘guests’ and its domains

This study, part of a larger ethnographic interpretive inquiry aimed at unravelling the implications of socio-technological means of socialisation in the lives of asylum seekers, builds on data collected through three rounds of fieldwork between 2012 and 2014 at an asylum-seeking centre in Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. The project combines insights, methods and epistemological stances stemming from linguistic ethnography (Creese and Copland 2014; Rampton et al. 2007) and socio-culturally rooted discourse analysis (Gee 1999). In both frameworks, the Gumperzian assumption that the way individuals speak as well as speak about things reflects their culturally embedded understanding of the human beings around them and their perception of the world is made explicit and showed in its empirical tangibility. The data from which the two ethnographic vignettes of the present contribution draw upon were collected in October 2013, during my first round of fieldwork at the centre. My positioning there was that of a buffer between ‘the assistants’, i. e. staff members regularly employed by the centre but who did not play any role – at least officially – in the recognition or dismissal of the applicants’ claims; the volunteers who were coming in weekly for an array of activities and the ‘guests’, a term being used by the director for addressing all the residents of the centre. When asked by ‘the guests’ who I was and what I was doing there, I candidly explained to them that I was writing a book about what it means to be an asylum seeker and what asylum seeking implies, and that I was interested in their daily lives. All the participants embraced my interest and, although they were given the opportunity to opt out of being included in the study, none of them did so. Possibly because I myself am not a native speaker of Dutch with a national background other than the mainstream one, they reacted enthusiastically as they imagined that another foreigner who had somehow gained a voice among the authorities there at the centre was hosted to write about their lives, their experiences at the centre and beyond that, during their individual asylum seeking routes. Living side by side with them, having breakfast with them, talking to them while drinking endless cups of sweetened Afghani tea, following their doings that ranged from Dutch language lessons to knitting lessons, to gym activities to simply smoking cigarettes together in the evening, all amounted towards a time of deep hanging out and trying to scrape beneath the surface of the centre’s socio-cultural and sociolinguistic ecology as well as beneath the surfaces of normalcy that wrap their daily living.

Rather than using either nationality or ethnic grouping as criteria for assigning rooms, the then director of the centre had opted – where he and his team members felt it not to be a risk – to put together people of different ethnic, linguistic and religious backgrounds. During this round of ethnographic fieldwork, the centre catered for 61 ‘guests’. They appear to be a multi-ethnic and multilingual group of migrants, yet still rather homogenous regarding further aspects of diversity, such as age group, gender and legal status. Following the information gathered at the centre during their intake talks, guests were from the following (often self-claimed) national backgrounds: 13 from Afghanistan; twelve from ‘The Russian Federation’ – mostly from Armenia and Chechnya – nine from Guinea Conakry; nine from Bangladesh; seven from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Following the unofficial statistics kept at the centre, the remaining eleven guests originated from what had been categorised as ‘other’ (anders). These were respectively two from Senegal, one from Somalia, one from Togo, three from China (Tibet), one from Albania and one from Ukraine. 40 of these guests were male, 21 were female. Eleven of them fell under the category unaccompanied minors, though three of them still needed to give age proof through bone scans. Only two guests had passed their 50s, confirming the trend – pointed out by the centre director – that seeking for asylum is mostly a practice for either unaccompanied minors or young (often male) applicants ranging from their early 20s to their late 30s. All names given in this case study are pseudonyms so to grant participants protection and privacy. Although video recording was not possible due to the resistance of some of the volunteers and due to the ethical issue of wanting to protect the guests from being made recognisable, audio recordings were always permitted. When I felt that a conversation we had was particularly interesting, I asked them whether they would have any objections to being taped, else I relied on my field notes alone.

5 Moving beyond the category ‘newly arrived migrant in need of integration’

To understand multilingualism and the deployment of sociolinguistic repertoires in the domains of an asylum seeking centre where different forces are at play across the scales that intersect these domains, it requires also an understanding of the connections between domains, the people who inhabit them and the sociolinguistic practices at play within established interactional orders. As showed in the first vignette, a perfectly plausible display of someone’s basic literacy skills is dismissed. This happens although drawing on basic literacy skills had been used to address the student’s puzzled feeling when noticing an orthographic peculiarity present on the worksheet used by the teacher. Further, while the sociolinguistic repertoires of these students were multilingual, the voluntary class teacher operates at a different scale level. Although she recognises her students’ as having an array of languages, which she reifies as beautiful, her metapragmatic evaluations suggests that these languages do not (really) count as languages. The second vignette focuses on a moment of temporary laddish aggregation around a popular culture expression that features a Bengali band doing a cover of a world famous American band heavy metal band on YouTube. Although the insights drawn from this second vignette should – as Rampton (2014) warns us – be taken with a pinch of linguistic ethnographic salt due to the risk of being blinded by addressing encounters like these as a priori convivial encounters, I nevertheless dare to infer from it the following. What the young men involved in this incident are doing on those steps appears as a coagulation around a socio-technological platform which – as Goebel (2015) points out in his work on knowledging and television representations among young Indonesian students in condition of migration in Japan – helps them construct a scalar sensitive moment of ‘doing togetherness’. The interaction becomes thus not just a one-off event, rather it is scale sensitive because, while immerged in the synchronic immediacy of the use of a socio-technological platform there and then, it is constructed in the vernacular variety of English and sees also the use of some tokenistic forms of expression in Dutch, which challenges the official monolingual scale that the centre tries to establish within its walls. This vignette could therefore be elected as an instance of the ‘sonic scape’ (Hankins 2013: 298) that characterizes these three steps as a space within the centre. A scape in which these two young men – in as much as other young male guests observed during my fieldwork there – construct an emotive, albeit transitory, trans-locality that, while lasting for less than the full streamed video clip footage, affords them the possibility to move away from their own positionality which in this case was that of asylum-seeking Bengali and Afghani young men with diverse language competences, uncertain legal statuses and trajectories of migration.

The categories ‘newly arrived migrant in need of integration’ and ‘guests’ are used to define the residents of the centre at different scale levels, the first being part of a governmental regulatory discourse, while the second being applied in the immediacy of the centre’s environment by the people who work there. Although these two categories are neutrally used as terms for defining someone’s status, both of them point towards people that are foreign to national space, in this case Flanders, and whose task is to integrate in Belgian mainstream society. Furthermore, these categories are, both at the governmental as well as at the local level of the centre, often associated with poor educational backgrounds, low levels of literacy skills, lack of digital skills, lack of Dutch language mastering and the like. As I hope to have shown here, by exploring the sociolinguistic repertoires as well as by exploring the online-offline nexus present in these mobile people’s lives, there is more to the ‘guests’ than the lack of civic integration presupposed by the prototypical figure of ‘the newly arrived migrant in need of integration’. Such a reified version of the unfavourable mobile subject here thus results as a form of societal imagination that not only appears to be rather odd, given the skills we have seen, but that appears to be in need of a strong revision.