Volume 2019, Issue 257 - Special Issue: Experiences of speakerhood: Migrant speakers’ battles for inclusion in traditionally monolingual and bilingual contexts, Issue Editors: Rosina Márquez Reiter and Luisa Martín Rojo

This special issue brings together a collection of case studies that examine the making of speakerhood as experienced by migrants in Spain and Portugal. It focuses on moments in the life course of speakers as they navigate across transnational contexts where they face various linguistic demands. This involves being confronted with the norms, requirements and the values that define who is considered to be a speaker of the “language” or “languages” of the receiving community and being assessed in accordance with a given measure, that is, a canon of speakerhood in a particular community. The findings reveal the complexity of linguistic appropriation and the fundamental inclusive and exclusive nature of the making of a speaker in a world characterized by ambivalent historicities and uncertain investment outcome. The special issue allows critical questioning of notions such as nativeness and new speakerness through a theoretical and political engagement with speakerhood, and to interrogate what it means for whom to navigate linguistically and socially in receiving societies where personhood remains solidly attached to speakerhood.

In this article, we examine the language surveillance – both self and externally imposed – experienced by Madrid university students of Latin American origin in their encounters with the local population in educational settings. A pattern of language surveillance emerges in the interviews held with these students. It consists of hierarchical observation, normalising judgment and interrogation. These three reported practices are related to the following linguistic and non-linguistic resources that make surveillance possible, namely: (a) indexicality, especially with regard to phonological distinctions that index speakers as “local” vs. “non-local” or “native” vs. “non-native”; (b) the invoking of disciplinary and prescriptive linguistic knowledge, together with the application of a colonial episteme whereby the metropolitan norm prevails, thus denying non-metropolitan speakers their right to language ownership; and, (c) the management of power within interactions. By these means, varieties and speakers of Spanish are hierarchised and those that differ from locals are positioned as subaltern others. Language surveillance is a disciplinary power technique that prompts speakers to adapt to the centripetal force exerted by the reproduction of this knowledge. Finally, the article examines the extent to which this stylistic move to adapt, could be considered an example of muda given that these shifts are situational and relational and attend to the different social demands of the communicative settings where the practice is observed.

Drawing on data generated in collaborative biographical story-telling groups with migrant women in rounds of stories, this article deals with the dynamics of power and knowledge displayed by migrant speakers in a situation of diaspora. I focus on a sexual harassment episode shared by one female Brazilian migrant speaker, Flavia, in relating a crucial moment of change in her life history. The study was structured to gain a perspective on this biographical rupture from three angles, namely successive rounds of stories, the story-telling interaction, as well as the circulation of knowledge displayed by speakers and textual objects they produced across situated interactions. The various perspectives bring to light a language biographical juncture, or muda , i.e. a meaningful, internalized, enduring and embodied re-socialisation into a new linguistic environment. An analysis of the moment by moment subjectivation process revealed this participant subalternally positioned as a woman, a Brazilian migrant and a speaker, hence, as a new citizen in Portugal framed by a set of different varieties of Portuguese permeated by (gendered) coloniality. I illustrate how a combined focus on the socio-material dispositions, on the production of discursive selves and on intersubjectivity in the rounds of stories helped to disclose the material and discursive workings of power and knowledge. Participants biographized themselves as migrants and speakers, with embodied, emotional and enduring biopolitical implications. Finally, the article discusses the extent to which the dispositions and affordances of biographical research, as acts of biographization, contribute to capturing the biopolitical nature of a language muda .

This article explores how the concept that we have chosen to call unvoicing practices , namely veiled discursive micro processes of social exclusion and silencing that social actors manage in byplay; in other words, subordinated forms of communication among a subset of unaddressed members of ratified listeners. These practices constitute efficient resources aimed at the (de)legitimization of linguistic mude processes within new “spaces of multilingualism” associated with migration in Galicia. The research was carried out in the second-year class of a Curricular Diversification Programme at a secondary school in Arteixo (A Coruña, Galicia, Spain), a community that has experienced an increase in its allochthonous population in recent years. The corpus of this study comprises the pupils’ linguistic biography, classroom interactions and a fieldwork log. The analysis shows the complex network of scales in which languages are legitimized or delegitimized – specifically, translinguistic practices of listeners’ participation in which local varieties of Spanish and Galician, youth slang and parodic double of Moroccan Arabic are crossed and make themselves heard through byplay in order to silence the principal speaker. This interactional distribution results in the latent discursive reconstruction of new translocal spaces in which migration-associated multilingualism remains peripheral and practically invisible.

This article studies the language uses of a group of new speakers of Catalan at a secondary school in a metropolitan working class area of Barcelona, who have experienced their linguistic mudes as a consequence of having being schooled in the Catalan education system from an early age. As shown in previous research on children of economic migrants in Catalonia, these students internalize and reproduce the language distribution of Catalan and Spanish that they are exposed to in their immediate environment. This will vary according to the locality in which they find themselves, in our case, a working class neighborhood in which Catalan is reserved as the vehicular language of instruction, while Spanish dominates as the language of social relations. The article adopts a language socialization perspective to give account of the linguistic competences these multilinguals display when carrying out an academic task. Translanguaging, in the form of language alternation and language mixing from the various repertoires that these students have at their disposal, emerges as the norm among them and their teachers in this school. This article embraces the idea that documenting the linguistic practices of new speakers can shed light on actual linguistic uses and trajectories after the linguistic muda takes place.

This article investigates the relationship between socialisation and the concept of linguistic muda in a community of practice that belongs to a social movement called Emmaus. Based on a long-term ethnography (2008–2017), the article focuses on two transnational migrants who undergo a linguistic muda into functionally bilingual Catalan through participation in communal activities at Emmaus Barcelona. The analysis firstly traces the tensions arising in linguistic negotiation during a migrant novice’s initial participation in assemblies as a “socialising routine”. Although established participants of all origins projected a preferred bilingual stance and routinely code-switched, newly-arrived migrants were initially addressed in Spanish, in line with the commonsensical sociolinguistic behaviour routinely adopted with migrants in Catalonia. Analysis of the two migrants’ socialisation trajectories in Emmaus illuminates the changing sociolinguistic norms in Catalonia that legitimise transnational migrants’ linguistic mudes in this community. In conclusion, acceptance as a legitimate speaker of Catalan at Emmaus Barcelona can be viewed as a means to an end: that of becoming a legitimate member, capable of participating in joint (inter)actions such as assemblies.

The concept of muda has recently been used to name the specific biographical junctures where individuals enact significant changes in their linguistic repertoire. Given that the use of different linguistic varieties constitutes a resource to construct social categories and to evaluate an actor’s claims to specific social identities, those who change their repertoire must deal with all the potential implications, namely how their social position to date may be affected. In this article, I explain how the notion of muda originated and how it has developed, and discuss how I believe that it can contribute to expand the purview of sociolinguistic research on multilingualism. I argue first that they provide an interesting angle from which to explore forms of agency through language. Secondly, I contend that muda makes time more visible in sociolinguistic processes. Finally, I show that these two aspects of mudes yield specific insights to address issues of linguistic legitimacy and their social consequences, particularly how linguistic capital participates in the construction of social difference and inequalities and, therefore, in the structuration of symbolic and economic markets.