L’image dominante associée aux francophones du Canada est celle de la sédentarité de collectivité... more L’image dominante associée aux francophones du Canada est celle de la sédentarité de collectivités bien ancrées dans un territoire et s’y reproduisant. Cette vision gomme presque complètement les formes de mobilité, pourtant liées depuis toujours à l’emploi des travailleurs francophones comme main-d’oeuvre de réserve mobile, aussi bien dans le système économique colonial classique que dans l’économie capitaliste mondialisée d’aujourd’hui. Dans ce texte, nous explorons l’interdépendance passée et actuelle de la mobilité et de la sédentarité dans la construction de l’identité des francophones au Canada, à partir des résultats d’une enquête ethnographique reliant les populations francophones de la péninsule acadienne à celles du nord-ouest du pays. Nous montrons que l’effacement des travailleurs mobiles au sein des représentations officielles des francophones au Canada (dont celle de la vitalité) contribue à créer des inégalités, mais que cet effacement est de moins en moins soutenable.
Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2012 in Switzerland, Catalonia and different zone... more Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2012 in Switzerland, Catalonia and different zones of francophone Canada in sites related to heritage and cultural tourism, we argue that tourism, especially in multilingual peripheries, is a key site for a sociolinguistic exploration of the political economy of globalization. We link shifts in the role of language in tourism to shifts in phases of capitalism, focusing on the shift from industrial to late capitalism, and in particular on the effects of the commodification of authenticity. We examine the tensions this shift generates in ideologies and practices of language, concerned especially with defining the nature of the tourism product, its public and market, and the management of the tourism process. This results in an as yet unresolved destabilization of hitherto hegemonic discourses linking languages to cultures, identities, nations and States.
The field of tourism, particularly in linguistic minority contexts, shows how texts are situated ... more The field of tourism, particularly in linguistic minority contexts, shows how texts are situated within struggles over the legitimization of symbolic and material resources. In order to understand this field, we distance ourselves from some of the prevailing assumptions in discourse analysis, which presents texts and contexts as separate entities for which a certain autonomy can be assumed. We offer instead a view of texts as some among many artifacts produced in communicative practice (and hence in social processes), and which therefore require apprehension as processual, and not as objects. We argue that an ethnographic approach to text production and circulation is central to such forms of analysis. We analyze a sample of texts as embedded in their production by linguistic minority stakeholders in historically situated institutions. We interpret these texts as evidence of discursive and social changes brought about by globalization. We argue that behind texts that formally recall modernizing discourses of language and identity, what we encounter are processes of adjustment towards new economic and political conditions that lead minorities to commodify identity within global markets.
Communities, identities, processes, and practices are key linked concepts of concern to research ... more Communities, identities, processes, and practices are key linked concepts of concern to research on the role of language in the construction of social relations within the nation-state. In the current globalizing context, sociolinguistics has begun to recognize the need to reorient studies of language, community, and identity in the nation-state away from autonomous structure and towards process and practice, in order to capture the ways in which linguistic variation is central to new forms of social organization. Such an approach examines the circulation of communicative, symbolic, and material resources, as well as the trajectories of social actors and of discursive spaces. The example of francophone Canada shows how dominant ideas about language as bounded systems, identities as stable social positions, and communities as uniform social formations are superseded by mobility and multiplicity. Sociolinguistics is well positioned to take on the challenge of addressing how social actors construct such flows and transformations and to contribute to a social theory of globalization, transnationalism, and the new economy.
The globalized new economy is bound up with transformations of language and identity in many dier... more The globalized new economy is bound up with transformations of language and identity in many dierent ways (cf., e.g. Bauman 1997;). These include emerging tensions between State-based and corporate identities and language practices, between local, national and supra-national identities and language practices, and between hybridity and uniformity. Ethnolinguistic minorities provide a particularly revealing window into these processes. In this paper, I explore ways in which the globalized new economy has resulted in the commodi®cation of language and identity, sometimes separately, sometimes together. The paper is based on recent ethnographic, sociolinguistic research in francophone areas of Canada.
This paper explores the challenges that neoliberalism and the globalized new economy present to t... more This paper explores the challenges that neoliberalism and the globalized new economy present to the politics of linguistic minority movements by ethnographically examining language policy as a discursive process, rooted in political economy. Following the post-WWII period, as most Western States restructured from welfarism to neoliberalism, there was a shift away from minority (language) rights towards economic development. In Canada, where State policy maintains a French–English “linguistic duality”, francophone regions outside Quebec became sites of discursive struggle, following the collapse of the old economy, between (1) a focus on the collective reproduction of “community” (maintaining language, culture and identity), and (2) the State’s focus on facilitating individual economic reproduction. What emerges is an attempt by the State, and certain community actors to save the traditional francophone minority collectivity by focusing on the “community economic development” of rural bastions, rather than the economic integration of individual francophones living in diverse, urban areas.
Language policy generally is framed in terms of rational choice, but this ignores the interplay o... more Language policy generally is framed in terms of rational choice, but this ignores the interplay of material and symbolic resources and the role of ideologies of language, culture, class, and nation in organizing the social and the moral order. Using examples from Canada, this article shows how dis-citizenship is a matter of struggle over access to resources, framed within the dominant ideologies of language and culture connected to the workings of the nation-state.
In this article I use a framework taken from political economy in order to describe and explain t... more In this article I use a framework taken from political economy in order to describe and explain the role of French in processes of symbolic domination . The construction of the nation-State went hand in hand with a specific form of capitalist expansion -liberal and democratic -legimitized through distinctively modernist ideologies . This expansion takes now forms different enough to claim that in our time we are immersed in high modernity . At the same time, it maintains enough continuities to describe it not as a post modernity but as a (high) form of modernity.
This article exploits Bourdieu's notion of legitimate language (and legitimate speakerhearers) to... more This article exploits Bourdieu's notion of legitimate language (and legitimate speakerhearers) to analyse the social origins and consequences of longuoge practices in a French-language minority high school in Ontario (Conada). Education is a key site for the construction of legitimate language in the social and political struggle of Franc0 Ontarians for rights and for social mobility. An examination of two Francais classes shows that teacher-centred forms of classroom social organisation are used to construct what counts as good French (monolingual practices and standard forms) and to devolue bilingual practices and vernacular farms. The construction, and, in particular, the contestation of legitimote language in the classroom also reveal contradictions between the socioeconomic values of social mobility attached to monolingual standard French and the political values of authenticity and solidarity linked to the bilingual vernacular, OS well as between educational ideologies of meritocracy and democracy and practices of streaming and differential treatment.
International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1997
This discussion of Rampton's and Coupland's papers argues that applied linguistics should take as... more This discussion of Rampton's and Coupland's papers argues that applied linguistics should take as its central focus the concept of language in the world. Extending Hymes' notion of a socially-constituted linguistics, I argue that it is necessary to examine directly the question of the relative autonomy or interdependence of linguistic, cognitive and social processes, and to define research questions which address the mutually embedded nature of these processes in an interdisciplinary fashion.
L’image dominante associée aux francophones du Canada est celle de la sédentarité de collectivité... more L’image dominante associée aux francophones du Canada est celle de la sédentarité de collectivités bien ancrées dans un territoire et s’y reproduisant. Cette vision gomme presque complètement les formes de mobilité, pourtant liées depuis toujours à l’emploi des travailleurs francophones comme main-d’oeuvre de réserve mobile, aussi bien dans le système économique colonial classique que dans l’économie capitaliste mondialisée d’aujourd’hui. Dans ce texte, nous explorons l’interdépendance passée et actuelle de la mobilité et de la sédentarité dans la construction de l’identité des francophones au Canada, à partir des résultats d’une enquête ethnographique reliant les populations francophones de la péninsule acadienne à celles du nord-ouest du pays. Nous montrons que l’effacement des travailleurs mobiles au sein des représentations officielles des francophones au Canada (dont celle de la vitalité) contribue à créer des inégalités, mais que cet effacement est de moins en moins soutenable.
Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2012 in Switzerland, Catalonia and different zone... more Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2012 in Switzerland, Catalonia and different zones of francophone Canada in sites related to heritage and cultural tourism, we argue that tourism, especially in multilingual peripheries, is a key site for a sociolinguistic exploration of the political economy of globalization. We link shifts in the role of language in tourism to shifts in phases of capitalism, focusing on the shift from industrial to late capitalism, and in particular on the effects of the commodification of authenticity. We examine the tensions this shift generates in ideologies and practices of language, concerned especially with defining the nature of the tourism product, its public and market, and the management of the tourism process. This results in an as yet unresolved destabilization of hitherto hegemonic discourses linking languages to cultures, identities, nations and States.
The field of tourism, particularly in linguistic minority contexts, shows how texts are situated ... more The field of tourism, particularly in linguistic minority contexts, shows how texts are situated within struggles over the legitimization of symbolic and material resources. In order to understand this field, we distance ourselves from some of the prevailing assumptions in discourse analysis, which presents texts and contexts as separate entities for which a certain autonomy can be assumed. We offer instead a view of texts as some among many artifacts produced in communicative practice (and hence in social processes), and which therefore require apprehension as processual, and not as objects. We argue that an ethnographic approach to text production and circulation is central to such forms of analysis. We analyze a sample of texts as embedded in their production by linguistic minority stakeholders in historically situated institutions. We interpret these texts as evidence of discursive and social changes brought about by globalization. We argue that behind texts that formally recall modernizing discourses of language and identity, what we encounter are processes of adjustment towards new economic and political conditions that lead minorities to commodify identity within global markets.
Communities, identities, processes, and practices are key linked concepts of concern to research ... more Communities, identities, processes, and practices are key linked concepts of concern to research on the role of language in the construction of social relations within the nation-state. In the current globalizing context, sociolinguistics has begun to recognize the need to reorient studies of language, community, and identity in the nation-state away from autonomous structure and towards process and practice, in order to capture the ways in which linguistic variation is central to new forms of social organization. Such an approach examines the circulation of communicative, symbolic, and material resources, as well as the trajectories of social actors and of discursive spaces. The example of francophone Canada shows how dominant ideas about language as bounded systems, identities as stable social positions, and communities as uniform social formations are superseded by mobility and multiplicity. Sociolinguistics is well positioned to take on the challenge of addressing how social actors construct such flows and transformations and to contribute to a social theory of globalization, transnationalism, and the new economy.
The globalized new economy is bound up with transformations of language and identity in many dier... more The globalized new economy is bound up with transformations of language and identity in many dierent ways (cf., e.g. Bauman 1997;). These include emerging tensions between State-based and corporate identities and language practices, between local, national and supra-national identities and language practices, and between hybridity and uniformity. Ethnolinguistic minorities provide a particularly revealing window into these processes. In this paper, I explore ways in which the globalized new economy has resulted in the commodi®cation of language and identity, sometimes separately, sometimes together. The paper is based on recent ethnographic, sociolinguistic research in francophone areas of Canada.
This paper explores the challenges that neoliberalism and the globalized new economy present to t... more This paper explores the challenges that neoliberalism and the globalized new economy present to the politics of linguistic minority movements by ethnographically examining language policy as a discursive process, rooted in political economy. Following the post-WWII period, as most Western States restructured from welfarism to neoliberalism, there was a shift away from minority (language) rights towards economic development. In Canada, where State policy maintains a French–English “linguistic duality”, francophone regions outside Quebec became sites of discursive struggle, following the collapse of the old economy, between (1) a focus on the collective reproduction of “community” (maintaining language, culture and identity), and (2) the State’s focus on facilitating individual economic reproduction. What emerges is an attempt by the State, and certain community actors to save the traditional francophone minority collectivity by focusing on the “community economic development” of rural bastions, rather than the economic integration of individual francophones living in diverse, urban areas.
Language policy generally is framed in terms of rational choice, but this ignores the interplay o... more Language policy generally is framed in terms of rational choice, but this ignores the interplay of material and symbolic resources and the role of ideologies of language, culture, class, and nation in organizing the social and the moral order. Using examples from Canada, this article shows how dis-citizenship is a matter of struggle over access to resources, framed within the dominant ideologies of language and culture connected to the workings of the nation-state.
In this article I use a framework taken from political economy in order to describe and explain t... more In this article I use a framework taken from political economy in order to describe and explain the role of French in processes of symbolic domination . The construction of the nation-State went hand in hand with a specific form of capitalist expansion -liberal and democratic -legimitized through distinctively modernist ideologies . This expansion takes now forms different enough to claim that in our time we are immersed in high modernity . At the same time, it maintains enough continuities to describe it not as a post modernity but as a (high) form of modernity.
This article exploits Bourdieu's notion of legitimate language (and legitimate speakerhearers) to... more This article exploits Bourdieu's notion of legitimate language (and legitimate speakerhearers) to analyse the social origins and consequences of longuoge practices in a French-language minority high school in Ontario (Conada). Education is a key site for the construction of legitimate language in the social and political struggle of Franc0 Ontarians for rights and for social mobility. An examination of two Francais classes shows that teacher-centred forms of classroom social organisation are used to construct what counts as good French (monolingual practices and standard forms) and to devolue bilingual practices and vernacular farms. The construction, and, in particular, the contestation of legitimote language in the classroom also reveal contradictions between the socioeconomic values of social mobility attached to monolingual standard French and the political values of authenticity and solidarity linked to the bilingual vernacular, OS well as between educational ideologies of meritocracy and democracy and practices of streaming and differential treatment.
International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1997
This discussion of Rampton's and Coupland's papers argues that applied linguistics should take as... more This discussion of Rampton's and Coupland's papers argues that applied linguistics should take as its central focus the concept of language in the world. Extending Hymes' notion of a socially-constituted linguistics, I argue that it is necessary to examine directly the question of the relative autonomy or interdependence of linguistic, cognitive and social processes, and to define research questions which address the mutually embedded nature of these processes in an interdisciplinary fashion.
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Papers by Monica Heller