Lifestyle residents in Barcelona: a biographical perspective on linguistic repertoires, identity narrative and transnational mobility
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Eva Codó
Abstract
The popularization of lifestyle migration epitomizes the individualization of contemporary lives, and the centrality of travel and spatial relocation in people’s aspirational or real life projects. This article examines the processes of sociolinguistic relocation of “lifestylers” in the polylingual city of Barcelona through the lens of their embracing or rejection of Catalan, the non-state, local co-official language. It aims to decipher to what extent these individuals see Catalan as relevant to their transnational life experiences, and how this relevance is embedded in their relational-emotional experiences and evolving sense of self. This article, which examines two life stories gathered through ethnographic interviewing, is framed within biographical-experiential approaches to the multilingual repertoire. The analysis shows that by assembling different narrative bits and by examining in detail the small stories informants tell to ground their accounts, a complex picture of language (dis)appropriation emerges. It argues that national identity rhetoric is a discursive strategy deployed by narrators to partly make sense and partly rationalize what is a complex bundle of identity (re)constitution reasons, emotional stances and interpersonal power dynamics. The article concludes by arguing that presences or absences in people’s repertoire are embodied struggles for personal coherence.
Acknowledgements
I want to heartily thank the two editors of this special issue for their support in the formulation of the main arguments of this article, and two anonymous reviewers for their perceptive feedback.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Lifestyle residents in Barcelona: a biographical perspective on linguistic repertoires, identity narrative and transnational mobility
- Exploring the interplay of narrative and ethnography: A critical sociolinguistic approach to migrant stories of dis/emplacement
- “No-one told me it would all be in Catalan!” – narratives and language ideologies in the Latin American community at school
- Narrative circulation, disputed transformations, and bilingual appropriations at a public school “somewhere in La Mancha”
- Circulation and localization of a transnational founding story in a social movement
- YouTube-based accent challenge narratives: Web 2.0 as a context for studying the social value of accent
- Afterword
- Book Review
- Ana María Relaño Pastor: Shame and pride in narrative: Mexican women’s language experiences at the U.S.-Mexico border
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Lifestyle residents in Barcelona: a biographical perspective on linguistic repertoires, identity narrative and transnational mobility
- Exploring the interplay of narrative and ethnography: A critical sociolinguistic approach to migrant stories of dis/emplacement
- “No-one told me it would all be in Catalan!” – narratives and language ideologies in the Latin American community at school
- Narrative circulation, disputed transformations, and bilingual appropriations at a public school “somewhere in La Mancha”
- Circulation and localization of a transnational founding story in a social movement
- YouTube-based accent challenge narratives: Web 2.0 as a context for studying the social value of accent
- Afterword
- Book Review
- Ana María Relaño Pastor: Shame and pride in narrative: Mexican women’s language experiences at the U.S.-Mexico border
