Abstract
Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and, more specifically, on the relationship between the macro-level of dominant discourses and the micro-level of individual positionings, we examine the way linguistic identities are constructed by immigrant students of Albanian origin in Greece. We elaborate on two ‘competitive’ discourses: the national, homogenizing one and the post-national, deconstructing one, and the way they influence the construction of immigrant students’ linguistic identities. Our data come from lyceum immigrant students’ essays which are analyzed in order to trace their positionings towards the two ‘competitive’ discourses, and in particular, towards the linguistic dimension of these discourses. For a systematic investigation of immigrant students’ linguistic identities we employ the membership categorization device living populations in Greece which includes the categories immigrant people and majority people as a standardized relational pair. We focus on the category-bound predicates of the category immigrant people and particularly on those related to the knowledge of the majority language. Our main finding is that the immigrant students of Albanian origin in our data are positively positioned towards the national, homogenizing discourse and particularly towards Greek monolingualism, thus looking forward to the social benefits of speaking Greek.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to my colleague Villy Tsakona for her valuable suggestions throughout my research. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their supportive comments. Further, I owe many thanks to my colleagues Prof. J. Androutsopoulos, Dr. A. Poulios, A. Droukopoulos and Prof. A. Kiliari for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. The data collection process of this study was funded by the NSRF research project ‘Education for Foreign and Repatriate Students’.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Hybrid practices meet nation-state language policies: Transcarpathia in the twentieth century and today
- Teaching the Romanian neighbors Hungarian: language ideologies and the Debrecen Summer School
- National and post-national discourses and the construction of linguistic identities by students of Albanian origin in Greece
- Null arguments in transitional trilingual grammars: Field observations from Misionero German
- Book Reviews
- Anne-Claude Berthoud, François Grin and Georges Lüdi: Exploring the dynamics of multilingualism: The DYLAN project
- Kelly-Holmes, Helen and Tommaso M. Milani: Thematising Multilingualism in the Media
- Fabienne Baider and Georgeta Cislaru: Linguistic approaches to emotions in context (Pragmatics & Beyond new series, 241)
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Hybrid practices meet nation-state language policies: Transcarpathia in the twentieth century and today
- Teaching the Romanian neighbors Hungarian: language ideologies and the Debrecen Summer School
- National and post-national discourses and the construction of linguistic identities by students of Albanian origin in Greece
- Null arguments in transitional trilingual grammars: Field observations from Misionero German
- Book Reviews
- Anne-Claude Berthoud, François Grin and Georges Lüdi: Exploring the dynamics of multilingualism: The DYLAN project
- Kelly-Holmes, Helen and Tommaso M. Milani: Thematising Multilingualism in the Media
- Fabienne Baider and Georgeta Cislaru: Linguistic approaches to emotions in context (Pragmatics & Beyond new series, 241)