Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Programme 2024

5 avril 2024 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Animé par Isabelle Léglise et Valelia Muni Toke (INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, salle L0.01)

Iris Padiou (Univ Sorbonne Paris Nord, Pléiade) : Etudier les pratiques de racialisation ordinaires : une approche sociolinguistique

1 mars 2024 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Animé par Isabelle Léglise et Valelia Muni Toke (INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, salle L0.01)

Il sera possible de suivre le séminaire, dans la limite des places disponibles, après avoir complété le formulaire ci-après : https://framaforms.org/participation-au-seminaire-pratiques-langagieres-1er-mars-1708964148

Lara Alonso & Laura Villa (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) : Raciolinguistic perspective on labor

2 février 2024 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Animé par Isabelle Léglise et Valelia Muni Toke (INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, salle L0.01)

Hélène Quashie (LARTES-IFAN, UCAD)

 Variations sociales de la blanchité à travers les usages différenciés du wolof et du français : retournement postcolonial du stigmate racial, colorisme inversé et subversion du préjugé de couleur au Sénégal 

Cette présentation s’intéresse aux constructions sociales de la blanchité à travers les usages sociolinguistiques du wolof et du français, lors d’interactions sociales entre résident.es sénégalais.es, européen.nes et diasporiques à Dakar. Ces constructions sociales, au-delà de la performativité du langage, soulignent plusieurs enjeux des reconfigurations postcoloniales au sein des sociétés africaines. Ainsi, la blanchité ne recouvre pas (que) des effets chromatiques et se réfère à des modes de mobilité sociale et géographique. L’ordre racial tel qu’il a été historiquement produit sous la période coloniale laisse place à des renversements. La notion de stigmate peut être associée à celle de blanchité, les nuances de la valorisation coloriste peuvent être inversées et les préjugés de couleur subvertis. L’analyse de ces différents constats invite à un décentrement des productions théoriques sur les questions raciales à partir de l’Afrique, et engage des réflexions sur les enjeux épistémiques de la positionnalité.

Programme 2023

8 décembre 2023 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Animé par Isabelle Léglise et Valelia Muni Toke (INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, salle L0.01)

Discussion de Rosa et Flores (2017) Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective

17 novembre 2023 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Animé par Isabelle Léglise et Valelia Muni Toke (INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, salle L0.01)

Cristine Gorski Severo (Université Fédérale de Santa Catarina):

Language Practices in Afro- Brazilian Religions: Towards Southern concepts of language

In this presentation, I argue that language is a multilayered and intersemiotic sign with social, political and religious significance in Afro-Brazilian contexts. This means that there is no way to imagine what counts as Brazil—and Brazilian languages—without reference to Africa and its cultural legacy and the impact of slavery on Brazil. I explore some concepts, particularly the notions of southern multilingualisms, authenticity and race.  I use such concepts to analyze how languages are used in African Brazilian religious practices, drawing on the ways people build both individual and collective  religious experiences. The religious experiences involve the use and interpretation of language in creative and at times unpredictable ways. This presentation seeks to contribute to the debates on decolonization allied to Southern epistemologies and methodologies in language studies, claiming for an engagement with a critique of the colonial legacy, institutional racism and market forces.

6 octobre 2023 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Animé par Isabelle Léglise et Valelia Muni Toke (INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, salle L0.01)

Monica Heller (Univ. Toronto) Pratiques langagières, pratiques méthodologiques : comment pratiquer une sociolinguistique critique ?

Si l’identification des formes, des processus et des conséquences du pouvoir sont au centre des préoccupations de ce que nous convenons d’appeler la (ou encore mieux « une ») sociolinguistique critique, comment faire en termes concrets ? Où figurent les formes et les processus langagiers dans ces processus plus généraux de la construction de la différence et de l’inégalité sociales ? À partir de quelques exemples concrets tirés de mes recherches dans l’espace franco-canadien, je suggèrerai quelques pistes pratiques sous-tendues par un cadre nécessairement théorico-méthodologique – puisqu’il faut comprendre les enjeux pour les gens occupant diverses positions dans des conditions politico-économiques du marché, et donc avec un accès variable aux ressources matérielles et symboliques. Quelles sont les conséquences pour *ces* gens, dans *ces* relations sociales, de l’exercice de *ces* pratiques langagières ?

14 avril 2023 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Animé par Isabelle Léglise et Valelia Muni Toke (INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, salle L0.01)

Mieke Vandenbroucke (Univ Antverpen) The role of talk and text in Belgian government investigations into fraudulent marriage migration

During the 21st century, accelerated processes of globalization have led to a stark increase in the incidence of marriage migration world-wide (Lee 2013). In recent years, transnational marriage migration as a form of family reunification has become a growing policy concern for migration governance and is seen as “the last loophole” in EU migration policy in face of a supposedly large and increasing number of sham marriages through which the non-European spouse is able to obtain a residency permit (Wray 2006). As a consequence, many EU Member States have legislated investigations into possible sham marriages to determine whether a marriage application involving a non-EU spouse is “real” or “faked”. In this talk, I discuss the central, yet multi-faceted role played by talk and text in the investigations conducted by Belgian governmental authorities into cross-border marriage applications which are suspect of being fraudulent. In doing so, I report on past and ongoing research by myself and with collaborators and cover the discursive construction of what a genuine marriage entails both as a legal category (Vandenbroucke & Wilson 2022) and in the spoken encounters and written reports of these investigations (Vandenbroucke 2020); the at times problematic nature of evidence finding through (re)duplicative validation (Vandenbroucke 2022), and finally the crucial role of (non)professional interpreter selection in the interviews and interrogations of the applicant couple (Vandenbroucke & Defrancq 2021). Drawing on these different insights, I finish by reflecting on the applicants’ discursive agency throughout the entire investigation (Vandenbroucke 2018).

17 mars 2023 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Animé par Isabelle Léglise et Valelia Muni Toke (INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, salle L0.01)

Stef Slembrouck (Univ Ghent) & Mieke Vandenbroucke (Univ Antwerpen) Interactional and Pragmatic Perspectives on Covid-19 Telephone Contact Tracing in Belgium

Telephone contact tracing was introduced overnight in May 2020 in Flanders/Belgium as a major strategy for combatting the Covid-19 pandemic. It was organized via government-contracted commercial call centres. Contact tracers did not receive a (para)medical training. On the basis of a large corpus of recorded telephone calls, our FWO-funded interdisciplinary project sought to improve practice on the basis of pragmatic and interactional analysis. In our seminar, we will present a number of interactional and pragmatic perspectives on the practice of Covid-19 contact tracing in late 2020 through mid-2021. First, we provide a functional overview of the contact tracing call as a “new” genre, linking it to societal conditions of risk management and responsible citizenship governance. In a further analysis, we will cast light on the transformative awareness-raising orientations of the instructions and guidance which the contact tracers are expected to communicate to the “index patients” (the infected individual who is being called). Finally, we will also provide an overview of the results of a coaching intervention which we executed in the Spring of 2021 on the basis of our first analyses. It turns out that some aspects of the pragmatics of professional interactional behaviour are easier to teach than others.

3 février 2023 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Animé par Isabelle Léglise et Valelia Muni Toke (INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, salle L0.01) et retransmis par zoom.

Rafael Lomeu Gomes (Univ. Oslo & UiT The Arctic University of Norway) Family multilingualism from decolonial and southern perspectives

The field of family multilingualism has been shaped in the past decades by various disciplinary traditions and their corresponding theoretical underpinnings and methodological approaches. More recently, the field has begun to embrace decolonial and southern perspectives, which is the focus of this presentation. Particularly, I draw on some concepts and lines of argumentation stemming from decoloniality, southern epistemologies, and southern theory to identify certain limitations of underlying assumptions in current investigations of language practices in the home. I will argue that taking the analytical vantage point of southern and decolonial approaches urges us to engage with local histories and epistemologies and to explore how these are shaped by local/global experiences of colonialism. In the first part of the presentation, I review studies of language practices of Indigenous peoples in contexts of settler and exploitation colonialism, families with members who have experienced forced migration, practices of family-making that question the traditional Western nuclear family model, and families engaged in transnational trajectories. In the second part, I will draw on examples of my published and ongoing research on multilingual families and media representations of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Norway to demonstrate that engaging with decolonial and southern approaches may advance the field of family multilingualism in ways that are worth exploring further.

Programme 2022

2 décembre 2022 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Animé par Isabelle Léglise et Valelia Muni Toke (INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, salle L0.01)

Stéphanie Rudwick (University of Hradec Králové) South African raciolinguistic dynamics of marginalisation and empowerment

In this talk I aim to carve out some of the complexities in the processes of marginalization taking place in South Africa due to raciolinguistic realities that are linked to the assumption that English is the putative lingua franca. At the same time, and in line with the theme of the ambiguity of all language usage I also portray how the defiance of the lingua franca status of English can be used for political empowerment by an African language speaker in a traditionally hegemonic English space. Specifically, I explain how South Africa’s ex-president, Jacob Zuma, evokes cultural, gender and linguistic identity politics by his ‘deep’ usage of the Zulu language. But I also show how the racial and raciolinguistic ideologies of English are intertwined with the discrimination of black South Africans. Selected narratives of black South Africans’ experience of the South African housing market show the limits of language against the power of race. Focusing on the domains of ambiguities rather than the domains of language usage, the discussion takes place across contexts and settings. Lastly, I discuss how some Afrikaners have embraced a problematic marginalization rhetoric by constructing what has been termed ‘subaltern whiteness’ by pitching the ‘coloniality’ of English against Afrikaner indigeneity.

25 novembre 2022 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Animé par Isabelle Léglise et Valelia Muni Toke (INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, salle L0.01)

Judith Purkarthofer (Univ. Duisbourg-Essen)  Transnational families as private and public encounters – Creative methods to explore lived experience of language and language policy

Families are formed along various dimensions, both biological and social, and linked by kinship processes and generational relations. Expectations of child-rearing and parental roles are highly culturally dependent and are thus subject to public discourses, for example, in mediatized discourses, blogs and online parental chat fora, and interpersonal evaluations. Family language policy research links individual cases to social evaluations and influences as it is anchored in the field of language policy: explicit and overt planning as well as ideologies and decision-making processes multilingual families engage in influences language development and use in the home. In line with current trends in language policy research, policies and practices are examined as intertwined, with practices contributing to bottom up policies.

This seminar presents research on family language policy and highlights how creative methods can foster an understanding of lived experiences of language. At the same time, the exploratory nature of such methods enables us to research the underlying understanding of what a family is and what functions are attributed to family life.

14 octobre 2022 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Animé par Isabelle Léglise et Valelia Muni Toke (INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, salle L0.01)

Quentin Williams (Univ of the Western Cape) An Accidental Missionary Linguist? How Abu Bakr Effendi influenced the future of   Kaaps

Kaaps is a latter-day language influenced by Khoe and San languages, creole Portuguese, Bazaar Malay, Kaaps-Dutch, Arabic and English. Its creole origins begin in the 1700s at the Cape Colony where travellers would hear the language of the enslaved informally used in the kitchen, on the streets, on farms and religious gatherings, and would often describe them as uttering ‘peculiar noises’ (Shell, 1994). For much of their existence in the colony, enslaved Kaaps speakers were perceived to utter peculiar noises from vulnerable bodies. Agentless and voiceless, it readily fell to other well-to-do travelers to the Cape to provide linguistic descriptions of the noisy sounds of the enslaved. And one such traveler, an accidental missionary linguist, was Abu Bakr Effendi (aka Khashnawi) (1814-1880) (see importantly, Brandel-Syrier, 1960; van Selms, 1979).

In this talk, I argue that the creole biography of Kaaps involved the transformation of peculiar noises into a coherent description of its linguistic system, and that formed part of an effort to describe and en-voice authentic linguistic practices that accurately characterises the language use of the slaves. In the first part of this talk, I discuss the Kaaps linguistic contributions of Abu Bakr Effendi. A well-respected Islamic scholar and polymath trained in Istanbul and Baghdad, Effendi arrived at the Cape in the 1800s after negotiating a deal with the Sultan of Turkey, Abd ulMajid, to support his subjugated clan. As part of the deal, the Sultan outsourced Effendi to Queen Victoria who previously begged the Sultan to “send a well-trained scholar to Africa” to quell disputes “about some points of religion” among “her Muslim subjects”. The timing of Effendi’s arrival to the Cape was propitious because he later established not only an Islamic school and Mosque, but became the first scholar to write down Kaaps-Dutch with Arabic characters (see Davids, 2011).

In the second part of my talk, I analyze the transliteration of Effendi’s Bayan ud-din (1877) from Arabic to Kaaps-Dutch. I demonstrate how Effendi’s translations on religious duties of Islam became a key text that pre-empted the development of Kaaps as a language. As Van Selms remarked: Effendi’s use of Kaaps-Dutch in phonetic Arabic was a version of “Dutch, though of a peculiar kind” that could be further characterised as “a transition form” that is not quite Dutch nor Afrikaans (van Selms, 1960: vi). I go on to demonstrate how Effendi’s translation of the Bayan ud-din serves today an important etymological source in the codification of Kaaps. By comparing his text with some textual evidence from the 2.3 million structured corpus of the Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps, I demonstrate how Effendi’s translation constituted then a form of decolonial communication (Veronelli, 2016) that favoured not only dialogue and a system of relationality amongst the slaves but recodified the terms of en-voicing. I conclude this talk by charting important trajectories for the study of Kaaps and its linguistic future, with a focus on what the Kaaps speaker does with language, how they challenge linguistic fixities and hierarchies of language, and then internalize new epistemologies of language.

23 septembre 2022 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Animé par Isabelle Léglise et Valelia Muni Toke (INALCO, 2 rue de Lille, salle L0.01)

Samantha Goodchild (Univ. Oslo) A chronotopic-spatial approach to analysing perceptions of language practices: a case study from Essyl, Senegal

In this presentation, I will demonstrate how different conceptions of space are linked to perceptions of language practices using a case study conducted in the village of Essyl, Senegal, described by some participants and researchers as monolingual. I will show how geographical places remain salient across numerous intertwining understandings of space, encompassing social space (Lefebvre 2000), spatial repertoires (Pennycook & Otsuji 2015), sociolinguistic space (Juillard 2016) and chronotopes (Bakhtin 1981). The complexity of lived time-spaces will be explored, examining participants’ mobility histories and how linguistic repertoires are constituted and evoked in interactions, also with reference to absent times and spaces. The project was carried out using an ethnographic-based methodology with a novel approach to analysis, termed ‘the triangulation of analyses’ and using methods such as linguistic biographies, interviews and analysis of recorded linguistic practices. The study shows that the various conceptions of place and space should all be taken into account in order to understand how the perception of societal monolingualism in Essyl pervades at the same time as individual multilingualism. I will conclude that a chronotopic-spatial approach reveals how perceptions and ideologies of monolingualism and multilingualism are not two fixed oppositions, but rather exist in a constantly evolving dialectical relationship.

13 mai 2022 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Animé par I. Léglise et V. Muni Toke
de 14h à 17h

Sophie Nakueira (Max Planck Institute for Anthropology, Leipzig)
‘Insider’ – ‘Outsider’: Positionality in Uganda’s and South Africa’s migrant spaces

Ethnographic research within migrant communities living in precarious conditions is mainly conducted by researchers from the Global North, or affiliated to research institutions located in the Global North. This raises specific methodological opportunities and challenges as well as ethical dilemmas depending on the researcher’s position in the field. Giving a global south perspective, this talk will focus on how Sophie Nakueira, a researcher affiliated with a global North institution is perceived by migrants in Uganda and South Africa. The talk will address how her positionality facilitates or constrains access to different spaces in the two countries where she conducts fieldwork. What role does gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion or class play in gaining access to migrant communities? How does one avoid or win over gatekeepers to migrant communities? These are some of the questions that will be addressed. More broadly she will discuss what her position in the field reveals about North-South relations and what the implications are for data collection as well as data validity.

-> Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

8 avril 2022 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Guri Bordal Steien (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences)

« In Uganda, we collected them in the street », Apprentissage d’une langue seconde et pratiques spatiales
Je présenterai les travaux de recherche que je mène depuis trois ans avec 12 réfugiés de la République démocratique du Congo réinstallés en Norvège par l’ONU. En Norvège, les deux premières années après leur arrivée, les réfugiés ont le droit et l’obligation de participer à un programme d’introduction qui comprend des cours de norvégien. L’objectif de mon enquête est d’étudier le processus d’apprentissage du norvégien d’un point de vue émique. Dans les récits sur leurs expériences avec la Norvège et le norvégien, les participants évoquent souvent des différences de pratiques spatiales. À partir de ces récits, je discuterai le rôle de l’espace social (De Certeau, 1990) dans l’apprentissage d’une langue seconde dans la migration forcée.

18 mars 2022 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Stefano Manfredi (CNRS, SeDyL)

Agencement, indexicalité et marchandisation des ressources langagières en temps de contestation : la Révolution de Décembre au Soudan
Cette communication se propose d’analyser les processus par lesquels les acteurs de la Révolution de Décembre au Soudan – qu’il s’agisse des acteurs révolutionnaires ou contre-révolutionnaires – utilisent la langue à des fins politiques et économiques. En s’appuyant sur une analyse ethnographique des pratiques langagières orales et écrites, l’étude décrit les changements méta-sémiotiques survenus au cours et après la contestation de 2018-2019 et les analyse à travers leur ancrage dans le contexte politique et socioculturel de la révolution Soudanaise. En se focalisant sur les processus de (ré)ordonnancement indexical et de marchandisation du langage, l’étude montre comment une phase de crise politique peut générer des reconfigurations méta-sémiotiques des ressources linguistiques révolutionnaires afin de les rendre plus adaptées à l’économie de marché et/ou à produire du consensus politique.

11 février 2022 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Janus Spindler Møller (University of Copenhagen)

Ethnolinguistic cornering
In this talk I introduce the notion of ethnolinguistic cornering and argue for its relevance in contemporary sociolinguistics. The concept is based on the ethnolinguistic assumption (Blommaert et al. 2012) denoting the alignment of languages and ethnic identities and the idea of the modern subject as mono-cultural and monolingual. The notion of ethnolinguistic cornering is used to describe and understand interactional sequences in which speakers explicitly (re)produce ethnolinguistic assumptions, which are treated as negatively charged by one or more of the interlocutors. An example is the question ”it’s difficult to be bilingual, right? » where “to be bilingual” is constructed in a binary opposition to being monolingual which is considered to be the normal and preferable. Empirically, I focus on instances and discussions of ethnolinguistic cornering, which unfolds among pupils in a linguistically and culturally heterogeneous school in Copenhagen. For instance when minoritized pupils experience ethnolinguistic cornering from teachers and object to being constructed as disadvantaged or when such experiences of being “cornered” influence the pupils’ language ideological reflections. I discuss how the notion of ethnolinguistic cornering relates to current sociolinguistic theory and argue that the notion invites to study nuances in identity work in the light of changing ideological language systems over time.

21 janvier 2022 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Séance dédiée aux étudiant.e.s

Programme 2021

3 décembre 2021 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Piet van Avermaet (Ghent University)

Beyond binaries. How to integrate multilingualism and language of schooling in education?
Since the first 2000 PISA findings we know that socio-ethnic inequality in education is a tenacious and persistent problem in many European countries. In explaining this inequality language (i.e. knowledge of the dominant language) is often presented by policy makers as the main – if not the only – causal factor. This incorrect causal interpretation has strongly impacted language policy making of the last 15 years in many European countries. For almost two decades knowledge of the dominant language has been seen as the main lever for school success. However, the recent 2015 PISA-data show that the inequality gap has not been reduced. On the contrary, social inequality in education seems to have grown in some countries. Independent of the fact that schools, as social and learning spaces, are multilingual and although there is no empirical evidence for the effectiveness of an exclusive L2 submersion model, many European countries maintain a monolingual policy, whereby children have to be submersed in the dominant language as a condition for school success. This often leads to school policies and classroom practices where children’s multilingual repertoires are banned, not exploited and where children are sometimes being reproved or even punished for using their multilingual repertoire in daily school and classroom interaction. In this paper I will discuss the counterproductive effects of excluding immigrant children’s multilingual repertoires in education. I will argue for a policy where multilingualism and the acquisition of the language of schooling can be interwoven.

19 novembre 2021 - 14h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Marcelyn Oostendorp (Stellenbosch University)

Towards surviving mastery in Applied Linguistics
The discourse of mastery is prominent in Applied Linguistics, in both scholarly work and in the application of research. For example, on the Cambridge International English Test website, the C2 level is described as a qualification that “shows the world that you have mastered English to an exceptional level”. The idea of mastery, however, does not only remain on the discourse level- curriculums are meant to be implemented and therefore mastery and all that is associated with it (near perfection, dominance over something etc.) is also practiced. In this article, I offer a proposal drawing on decolonial thought of mastery as an inheritance “we might (yet) survive” (Singh 2018: 2) by recuperating other ways of being, thinking and learning in classrooms. Specifically, I will offer ideas about how drawing on all the semiotic resources our students possess can create more equitable classroom spaces and will theorize from praxis (Mignolo and Walsh 2018). These spaces are however not comfortable, they are as Coetzee (2014) proposes accented. In these spaces, teachers might be confronted with resources they do not possess and might not be proficient in. In addition, teachers and learners can also be made aware of their own privilege, a realization which is often uncomfortable. By drawing on examples from the South African educational contexts I will make the argument that what is to be gained by these uncomfortable encounters are new forms of sociality, empathy, and greater agency on the side of the student. I will argue that these kind of pedagogical interventions, also offer points of reflection on how mastery can be survived in the practices that applied linguists engage in their research, and that by recuperating other forms of doing, our research participants can be engaged with in more ethical ways.

15 octobre 2021 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Lorenza Mondada (Univ Basel)

Rencontres entre inconnus dans l’espace public: approches corporelles et choix linguistiques
La question des choix de langues dans des contextes variés a été abondamment posée dans la riche littérature sur le code-switching. Cependant les contextes étudiés ont consisté surtout dans des conversations familiales (contexte informel) et des réunions ou autres situations professionnelles (contextes plus formels, et institutionnels). Cet exposé porte sur un type de contexte qui n’a que peu fait l’objet d’études détaillées: les rencontres entre inconnus dans les espaces publics de villes multilingues. Ce contexte est particulièrement révélateur des processus de négociation des langues car il concerne des interactions sociales aléatoires (non planifiées) entre personnes qui ne se connaissent pas: comment choisir la langue dans laquelle aborder l’autre dans ce cas? sur la base de quelles évidences? comment les choix effectués sont éventuellement révisables si la langue choisie n’est pas celle de l’interlocuteur? L’exposé repose sur un riche corpus vidéo de données naturalistes (non provoquées ou orchestrées par les chercheurs) et porte sur deux ensembles de phénomènes: d’une part, il montre comment l’approche même, préalablement ou durant l’ouverture de l’interaction, est négociée dans les trajectoires spatiales des participants; d’autre part il montre comment le choix de la langue peut être non seulement révisé et négocié, mais aussi exploité à toutes fins pratiques (pour refuser la rencontre par exemple). Ces deux dimensions nous permettent de réfléchir à une approche interactionnelle et linguistique de la notion d’espace public et des dynamiques multilingues qui la caractérisent.

5 février 2021 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Philippe Blanchet (Université Rennes 2)

Glottophobie: retour sur l’élaboration, la validation et la diffusion d’un concept
Définir le concept de glottophobie a demandé de poser des critères sociolinguistiques et interdisciplinaires qui permettent de l’inclure dans le champ des études sur discriminations, car ce concept relève de la sociolinguistique, de la philosophie politique, de la sociologie et du droit. Il a fallu rassembler des observations par enquête de terrain puis analyser un corpus significatif de pratiques sociales, vérifier et argumenter l’identification de discriminations glottophobes, puis expliquer leur existence (massive) et leur banalisation dans la société française notamment. Dans la visée interventionniste de la sociolinguistique que nous pratiquons, il s’est ensuite agi de proposer des pistes et des modalités d’action. La large diffusion médiatique et politique du concept depuis quatre ans permet d’en mesurer les effets et les limites à partir de l’observation de sa réception et de son utilisation.
Compléments bibliographiques :
Blanchet, Ph., 2019, Discriminations : combattre la glottophobie, Limoges, Lambert-Lucas, 152 pages. Réédition mise à jour de l’édition de 2016.
Blanchet, Ph. et Clerc Conan, S., 2018, Je n’ai plus osé ouvrir la bouche… Témoignages de glottophobie vécue et moyens de se défendre, Limoges, Lambert-Lucas, 128 p.

22 janvier 2021 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Suzie Telep Chercheuse associée au SEDYL (CNRS – INALCO – IRD) et au CERLIS (université Paris Descartes)

Pour une approche intersectionnelle du plurilinguisme en contexte postcolonial : le cas du rap et des musiques populaires de jeunes au Cameroun
Cette présentation propose une réflexion théorique et méthodologique sur l’analyse du plurilinguisme en contexte postcolonial dans une perspective intersectionnelle, au croisement des rapports de race et de genre. Si les premiers travaux en sociolinguistique et en anthropologie linguistique sur l’alternance codique et les pratiques plurilingues ont isolé un ensemble de facteurs explicatifs et de fonctions à ce phénomène sociolinguistique (Auer 1999, Léglise et Alby 2016), les catégories du genre et de la race demeurent encore largement sous-étudiées à ce jour. Par conséquent, je proposerai un cadre théorique et méthodologique pour décrire les pratiques plurilingues de jeunes camerounais selon une approche intersectionnelle s’intéressant à l’imbrication des performances de genre, de race et de l’emploi de ressources plurilingues. Pour ce faire, j’étudierai le cas des pratiques langagières plurilingues de jeunes dans les musiques populaires au Cameroun, et en particulier dans le rap, qui constitue un laboratoire des dynamiques sociologiques et linguistiques en cours dans l’espace urbain (Auzanneau 2001, Alim, Ibrahim et Pennycook 2009). Je me focaliserai plus spécifiquement sur l’usage du francanglais (ou camfranglais), un parler jeune hybride au Cameroun. Ce style est socialement perçu comme un langage de la « rue » et du « ghetto », associé à une masculinité virile et à une hétérosexualité normative (Telep 2017). En outre, son usage dans le rap peut signaler la construction en discours d’une africanité locale et un désir de singularisation au sein de l’espace mondialisé du hip-hop, qui est largement associé à une Blackness transatlantique renvoyant aux Etats-Unis et à l’Europe. Je montrerai donc dans quelle mesure l’usage du francanglais dans des chansons de rap ou d’autres styles musicaux favorise d’une part la reproduction de la domination masculine et de stéréotypes genrés, et d’autre part, la construction d’identifications raciales hétérogènes, prises dans une tension entre « localisation » et « globalisation » (Appadurai 2001). J’analyserai l’emploi des formes linguistiques associées au francanglais en relation avec différentes formes d’alternances codiques (entre français, anglais, pidgin-english, et vernaculaires locaux), d’emprunts, de néologismes et de mélanges codiques. Enfin, dans la perspective d’une anthropologie sémiotique d’inspiration nord-américaine (Eckert 2000, Agha 2007, Nakassis 2016), je montrerai l’importance de prendre en compte la dimension multi-sémiotique de la production des rapports de genre et de race, en analysant les pratiques langagières dans leur interrelation avec un ensemble de ressources musicales, corporelles, spatiales, et plus largement non verbales.

Références

• Agha Asif, 2007, Language and social relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Alim H. Sami, Ibrahim Awad, Pennycook Alastair, 2009, Global Linguistic Flows. Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language, Routledge.
• Appadurai Arjun, 2001, Après le colonialisme. Les conséquences culturelles de la globalisation, Paris : Payot.
• Auer Peter, 1999, ‘‘From codeswitching via language mixing to fused lects : Toward a dynamic typology of bilingual speech’’, The International Journal of Bilingualism 4 (3), 309 32.

Programme 2020

20 novembre 2020 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Anne-Sophie Bafort (Ghent University & Catholic University of Leuven)

Reconciling Diversity with Eliteness: A Linguistic Ethnographic Case Study of a Belgian International School’s Language Policy and Practice
International schools have become more prominent since the 1950s as a result of globalization and an increased demand to cater to expatriate families’ needs for transnational forms of education (Heyward 2002; Hayden 2011). These schools have not, however, received much attention of sociolinguists. Those scholars who have analyzed these contexts, on the one hand point out that these schools claim to celebrate cultural and linguistic diversity (Heyward, 2002) in a spirit of egalitarianism, yet on the other hand, various studies criticize their continuing elitist and prestigious character (Sunyol & Codó, 2020). According to Sunyol & Codó (2020), these schools’ claims of egalitarianism and inclusion of mother tongues is merely perfunctory. This case study demonstrates that not all international schools can be described as such, and that the investment in mother tongue support is met with various difficulties which are not necessarily related to an elite or prestigious character. Data were collected through on-site fieldwork, and comprise multiple data types and corresponding methods of analysis. Our analysis demonstrates that teachers actively sought to attend to students’ mother tongues notably via posters and strategic translanguaging in the classroom. At the same time it appeared that this attention for mother tongues was constrained by central International Baccalaureate exams being in English, a lack of managerial trickledown effect of the language policy regarding mother tongues and the use of English as a language of inclusion. As such, this study does not only yield further insights in the under-studied concept of international schools, but also aims to add to current sociolinguistic research by further mapping the complex manner in which linguistic diversity is mediated in multilingual educational communities of practice.

References

• Hayden, M. (2011). Transnational spaces of education: The growth of the international school sector. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9(2), 211–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2011.577203.
• Heyward, M. (2002). From International to Intercultural: Redefining the International School for a Globalized World. Journal of Research in International Education, 1(1), 9–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/147524090211002.
• Sunyol, A., & Codó, E. (2020). Fabricating neoliberal subjects through the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme. In Language and Neoliberal Governmentality (pp. 135-161). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.

24 avril 2020 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Susan Gal (U. Chicago) & Judith T. Irvine (U. Michigan)

Séance annulée pour cause de Covid
Reflections on Signs of Difference 
In our presentation we reflect on several key concepts we have discussed in our recent book, Signs of Difference, and comment on why we thought these concepts important. We start with the theme of difference and, relatedly, comparison – themes that provided the initial motivation for our collaborative project. Reading one another’s work, we had noticed that our ethnographic fieldsites, located in very different parts of the world, with different histories, ecologies, and language families, showed some surprising similarities: people in each fieldsite conceived of social categories in their community in terms of a contrast between restraint and elaboration/exuberance, a contrast they saw in linguistic variation, clothing, food choices, and many other aspects of behavior. How should we even describe the similarity? We approach it through a semiotic analysis that is applicable not only to these two ethnographic and linguistic cases but to others around the world. (Semiotics is another key theme.) In consequence, our book presents a novel conceptualization of the way that social and linguistic difference are made (together) in the processes of communication of every kind. Ideology – understood here as ideological work – provides the overarching rubric in which we outline the semiotic process involved in sociolinguistic differentiation. We also present a way to approach the empirical investigation of sociolinguistic difference, starting from sites (sites of ideological work, and sites for research) identified minimally as focus of joint attention, and working outward through a series of uptakes, each identifiable with different agendas and interests, taking participants and observers in diverse directions. Our presentation will provide various empirical examples of differentiation (and its partner, unification or encompassment) from Europe, West Africa, and the United States.

27 mars 2020 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Lorenza Mondada (Univ Basel)

Séance annulée pour cause de Covid
Choix linguistiques et négociations multilingues dans des interactions entre inconnus
Comment choisir la langue avec laquelle aborder un inconnu dans un espace public multilingue? Alors que les choix linguistiques dans des communautés bilingues s’orientent souvent vers des attentes, préférences, et régularités reconnues et partagées par les participants, que se passe-t-il quand les personnes entrant en interaction ne se connaissent pas? Nous poserons cette question à propos de rencontres dans des espaces publics  dans des villes multilingues où des inconnus sont amenés à se parler de manière impromtue et non-planifiée. Ce type de configuration permet de se pencher sur la question de savoir comment la langue ou les langues de l’interaction sont négociées in situ au tout début de la rencontre, durant les premières secondes et les premiers mots qui sont échangés – offrant ainsi un nouveau regard sur le code-switching, le parler multilingue et les choix de langue en situation de contact. L’analyse qui sera proposée réfléchit à la complexité des ressources que les interactants mobilisent dans ces situations, comprenant non seulement tous les niveaux de complexité linguistique mais aussi, de manière cruciale, la multiplicité des dimensions corporelles, fondamentales pour la définition endogène de l’approche en train de se faire. Les données discutées proviennent d’un projet en cours, « The first five words. Multilingual cities in Switzerland and Belgium and the grammar of language choice in public space » financé par le SNF et le FWO.

7 février 2020 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Xiao-Lan Curdt-Christiansen (Professor of Applied Linguistics, Department of Education, University of Bath)

Family Language Policy: Mobility, Migration, and Multilingualism in the UK
Résumé

31 janvier 2020 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Vanessa Piccoli ( ICAR, ENS-Lyon) – Leia de Jesús Silva (UFG/UFSC) en collaboration avec Isabelle Léglise (CNRS, SeDyL)

Vanessa Piccoli ( ICAR, ENS-Lyon)
Communication pluri-romane en milieu commercial: une analyse interactionnelle
&
Leia de Jesús Silva (UFG/UFSC) en collaboration avec Isabelle Léglise (CNRS, SeDyL)
Formas heterogêneas empregadas por falantes de português que vivem na Guiana Francesa: termos bivalentes e expressões mistas

Résumé

Programme 2019

29 novembre 2019 - 0h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Jürgen Jaspers (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Soft power: Teachers’ friendly implementation of a severe language policy
Dutch-medium schools in Brussels traditionally cater to a Dutch-speaking minority, but they have recently seen a massive influx of pupils with a limited competence in Dutch. Many of these schools have therefore intensified their efforts to remain monolingual Dutch enclaves in a predominantly Francophone city, sometimes in quite severe ways (like giving pupils penalties for speaking French). Looking at one of those schools in particular, I will argue though that teachers’ severe implementation of a monolingual policy did not go without a positive appreciation of linguistic diversity nor without an awareness that severity could backfire on this implementation. So, although teachers were agreed that a severe linguistic stance was important, they articulated various reasons for not adopting this stance relentlessly. And while pupils could in principle be punished if they failed to speak Dutch, teachers often merely prefigured the possibility of sanctions, ignored pupils’ use of other languages to attend to other business, and occasionally recruited pupils’ other linguistic skills as a pedagogical device – without, however, abandoning their language political stance. I will suggest that this ambivalent behaviour can be usefully explained as the outcome of negotiating dilemmatically related ideological concerns, that these concerns are also negotiated by scholars, and that this may invite us to approach teachers in a different way than is customary in the field.

4 octobre 2019 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Naomi Nagy, University of Toronto

Une vision variationniste de la variation dans les langues du patrimoine à Toronto
Le projet Heritage Language Variation and Change (La variation et les changements dans les  langues de patrimoine, Nagy 2009, 2011) se base sur des comparaisons inter- générationnelles (C’est-à-dire, combien de générations depuis l’immigration de la famille à Toronto?).  Je discuterai des différences qu’on voit parmi les résultats des études expérimentales et des études sociolinguistiques variationistes de la langue spontanée. L’accent sera mis sur l’image que nous recevons des différences intergénérationnelles, ainsi que les différences entre les variétés ‘homeland’ et les variétés patrimoines. Les données sont des études du Voice Onset Time (VOT), du marquage du cas, et du pronom sujet nul. Les langues discutées inclura le cantonais, le faetar (un variété franco-provençal sud-italien), l’italien, le coréen, le polonais, le russe et l’ukrainien.

• Nagy, N. 2009. Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto.
• Nagy, N. 2011. A multilingual corpus to explore geographic variation. Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata 43.1-2:65-84.
  

4 octobre 2019 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Daniel Suslak, Indiana University Bloomington

Mixe Language Revitalization and the Performance of Generation
Language revitalization is, by definition, an intergenerational activity, one that brings older community members who possess greater fluency, wider repertoires of speaking, and deeper local knowledge into partnership with younger community members who can bring technological savvy, literacy, and youthful energy to the table. In these intergenerational encounters we observe tension and conflict around questions of motivations, goals and broader ideas about language. It follows that to make sense of the phenomenon of language revitalization and to help address the urgent question of how to mount successful and sustainable language maintenance efforts, we need an understanding of intergenerational relations that is every bit as sophisticated as our understanding of language. With this goal in mind, I examine several decades of Mixe language activism in southern Mexico and how the participants in this movement frame their efforts in terms of generational identities. I draw from an emerging area of on generational identities in endangered language communities (e.g. Bauman and Henne-Ochoa 2015; Wyman 2009) and two decades of field research in Mixe-speaking communities.

17 mai 2019 - 0h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

James Collins, University at Albany/SUNY

Class, Race and Language in South Africa and the United States: Comparisons and Histories
Education is a social institution that regulates and reproduces social and linguistic differences and inequality. People often resist reproductive processes, however, by subverting or disrupting school practices. Anthropological and sociolinguistic studies also show that local cultural categories and linguistic differences are sensitive indicators of the class and ethnoracial affiliations and alignments through which resistance is organized. Much has been gained from the critique of reproductive determinism and the embrace of complexity through ethnographic and sociolinguistic research. What has suffered, however, is our understanding of dynamics that underlie enduring social and linguistic inequalities.

This talk examines dynamics and tendencies of class, race, and language in two different countries, South Africa and the United States. I treat both countries as capitalist social formations founded on white supremacy, and analyze historical and contemporary interconnections between class and racial inequality and language difference and hierarchy. The argument is grounded in ethnographic and sociolinguistic studies of language education policies, classroom language practices, and staff commentary about the language diversity of their schools and the students and communities they serve. The studies employ the concepts of language ideology and language register to investigate how language policies as enacted reflect economic and ethnoracial differences and produce political and cultural subjectivities. Despites difference in enacted policy, in both countries we find that ideologies of standard and vernacular languages embed assumptions about class and racializing differences and provide metapragmatic frames in terms of which actors make sense of language practices that both conform to and challenge official policies.

12 avril 2019 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Tommaso Milani (University of Gothenburg)

Queering multilingualism and politics: Regimes of mobility, citizenship and (in)visibility
In this presentation I investigate the intersections of mobility, sexuality and citizenship, and the role played by multilingualism and multisemioticity in mediating such relationships. In addressing these nexus points, I aim to offer a fresh, queer perspective to the growing scholarship on language and citizenship, an important body of work that has nonetheless largely ignored the gendered and sexual facets of the politics of mobility. Conversely,  a tight analytical focus on multilingualism and multisemioticity could constitute an new analytical contribution to the budding field of queer migration (e.g. Lubheid and Cantù 2005), an interdisciplinary enterprise that has however paid relatively “little attention […] to the border-zones of linguistic and sexual contact, and the attendant struggles for meaning and belonging that are produced through this contact” (Murray 2014: 3; see however Cashman (2015) for a notable exception).
I begin with a discussion of the concept of citizenship, and how it has been employed in recent sociolinguistic scholarship. In reviewing existing literature, I highlight the heuristic potential of the notion of belonging as a broad conceptual umbrella that encapsulates the relationships between mobility, sexuality and the domain of the affective. I then move on to offer a concrete example of the ways in which sexuality, multilingualism and mobility intersect in a recent documentary about a group of Palestinian gay men who leave the Occupied Territories. The presentation ends with a discussion of the double-bind inherent in a liberal politics of citizenship that dispenses rights and recognition on the basis of (self-)ascription  to pre-determined sexual identity categories.

22 mars 2019 - 0h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Martha Sif Karrebæk (University of Copenhagen)

Interpreting encounters: Sociolinguistic perspectives on communicative challenges in the Danish public sector
Contemporary societies are overwhelmingly characterized by various types of linguistic and cultural diversity. One of the consequences of such societal complexity is an increasing need for interpreting in institutional encounters. In Denmark interpreting in the public sector has recently received considerable attention, not the least because of the significant costs it represents, and from an academic perspective, the social encounters in which interpreting services are used provide a window into important social and linguistic processes today. Interpreting encounters are therefore vital to explore for the socially engaged science of language, namely sociolinguistics. Until today, research on interpreting encounters in Denmark has been limited, and mainly building on outdated data, interviews, or experimental settings (Galal & Galal 1999, Dubslaff & Martinsen 2007, Christensen 2008, Jacobsen 2010, Itani et al. 2014). I will present a project that just received funding – INTERPRETING – which will fill this knowledge gap and compare the Danish situation to the international literature.
INTERPRETING explores the interpreting encounter from the perspective of a sociolinguistics of globalization (Coupland 2003, Blommaert 2010) where social and linguistic diversity is taken as an ordinary condition of communication. This means that rather than issues of translation accuracy and interpreters’ alleged insufficient language competences, which are currently high on the national political agenda, INTERPRETING will offer a comprehensive understanding of language use, language ideologies and meaning-making in situations with an unequal distribution of linguistic resources, knowledge, and power, and with potentially significant consequences for (at least one of) the participants.

15 février 2019 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Alexandre Duchêne (Institut de plurilinguisme, Fribourg)

Ce que compter les langues veut dire : les sirènes de la quantification dans les coulisses du pouvoir
La quantification est séduisante (Engle Marry, 2016)à bien des égards: elle donne l’impression que nous pouvons comprendre le monde de façon objective et l’organiser par le prisme d’indicateurs chiffrés, de comparaisons statistiques et de données (dés)agrégées. Elle permet aussi de produire des régimes de connaissance et des effets de gouvernance. Dans cet exposé, j’examine ce qui se cache derrière la quantification des langues et des locuteurs-trices, comment elle est produite, par qui, avec quels intérêts et avec quelles conséquences pour qui. Partant de données historiographiques et ethnographiques sur les recensements en Suisse et ailleurs, je soutiens que c’est dans l’examen des coulisses de la quantification que se donne à voir comment les nombres se font et se défont, au gré d’intérêts conflictuels, de contingences techniques, d’(im)possibilités statistiques et d’expertises divergentes. Ces coulisses révèlent alors combien la fabrication des nombres et son utilisation mondaine et académique participent non seulement d’une tentative de gouverner les locuteurs-trices, mais aussi d’une « monstration » énumératives des langues qu’une société donnée cherche à rendre visible ou effacer.

Programme 2018

30 novembre 2018 - 14h00 - 16h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Asif Agha (University of Pennsylvania)

Pecuniary Media from Cowries to Bitcoin
What role do forms of money play in social life? What variety of things do people do with varieties of money in societies around the world? How are activities involving money differentiated into registers of money-conduct in specific times and places? It has long been understood that money is intimately linked to varied forms of discursive semiosis (whether oral, written, numerical, algorithmic, customary, or law-based; whether manifest as fiscal policy, computer code, or common sense) through which distinct forms of money are created and endowed with distinct use characteristics; that specific forms of money are readily linked to (or appropriated by) group-specific interests or ideologies; and that differences in types of money-conduct readily differentiate social roles and relationships among persons and groups in social history. Yet the role of discursive semiosis in the existence and use of money is not well understood, a lacuna that links most descriptions of “money” to voicing structures (or discursive positionalities) that are not grasped for what they are by those who offer such descriptions (e.g., “speaking like the State” without knowing it). The paper shows that if we understand the role of discursive semiosis in the social life of money, we are able to ethnographically answer the questions posed at the beginning of this abstract.

5 octobre 2018 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Anna Ghimenton (Université Lyon 2)

Étudier les pratiques langagières : un regard rétrospectif
Cette présentation est une réflexion critique sur les différentes approches méthodologiques et perspectives adoptées jusque-là dans mes recherches portant sur les pratiques langagières. Je montre la façon dont mon regard sur les pratiques langagières a évolué selon les questions qui émergeaient du terrain. En effet, les questions portant sur les processus d’acquisition en situation de contact de langues m’ont poussée à prendre en compte l’influence des caractéristiques sociolinguistiques de l’input sur l’acquisition et la socialisation plurilingue. L’élargissement de ces perspectives m’ont permis de voir un même corpus sous différents angles méthodologiques et disciplinaires. Le but de ma présentation est de souligner l’importance des aller-retours entre terrain et questions de recherche, afin de discerner les avantages et les limites de chaque approche.

8 juin 2018 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Constantine Nacassis (Université de Chicago)

Citing and Being
Writers such as Bateson (1955/1972), Bakhtin (1982), Voloshinov (1986), Austin (1962), Goffman (1974, 1981), and Derrida (1988) (among others; e.g., Frege [1892/1980], Banfield [1978], Butler [1997], Lee [1997]) have all various reflected, and reanalyzed, the transformative semiotics of citational acts (through analytics such as metacommunication, voicing / dialogicality, performativity, framing/footing, iteration/citationality, represented speech and thought, etc.). Particularly important for these authors are the ontological implications of citational acts, the ways in which their reflexive semiotics can come to bracket and decenter the ontic status of the signs and objects they cite (e.g., for Frege reference, for Austin and Bateson truth conditionality [sense and reference], for Bakthin and Voloshinov monologic language, for Goffman the speaker, for Derrida presence and being; see Lucy 1993; Lee 1997; Nakassis 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2016a).

In this paper, I explore the (meta)semiotics of this class of reflexive acts, tracing out the performative and ontological implications of their pragmatics. I focus on two particular ontologies—denotational code (viz. “language”) and the cinematic image—as they are wrought and transformed through citational framings of various sorts. The first case study engages the classic literature on codemixing to show how strategies of voicing and footing among post-colonial south Indian youth are enacted through a careful, and always tenuous and negotiated, alchemy of named/enregistered linguistic “codes” (in the instance, “Tamil” and “English”) whose pragmatics turns precisely on the bracketing and blurring of the lines between the very languages (and, by implication, political dispensations: Dravidianist and late capitalist) they citationally invoke. As I suggest, such linguistic (but also sartorial) practices put the very concept of language under erasure (Nakassis 2016a). The second case study turns to contemporary Tamil cinema, in particular, a scene from the 2011 film, Mankatha where one character/actor slaps another. I show how the entextualization of this image-text/act (Silverstein and Urban 1996) turns on what film scholars have called looking structures (Pasolini 1965/1988; Mulvey 1975; Willemen 1994; cf. “voicing structures”) as they are embedded within particular production formats and participation frameworks (as Goffman called them). Ethnographic analysis among the films’ makers and fans reveal divergent entextualizations of this scene that turn, ultimately, on distinct ontological and political formulations of what a film image “is” (Bazin 1967/2004; Morgan 2006; Nakassis 2017). (Indeed, at stake is the political nature of the image, vacillating between a bourgeois realism authorially helmed by a director and a populist performativity grounded in the auratic charisma of a hero-star.) Such distinct image ontologies presuppose, as I show, distinct production formats, just as they entail an ontic “heteroglossia” of the image.
The paper concludes by reflecting on the semiotics of citationality and its implications regarding questions of being. Not simply (or even primarily) metaphysical, such implications have urgent methodological and analytic (i.e., pragmaticist [Peirce 1907/1998]) stakes; indeed, they (i) call into question and mandate a rethinking of our basic categories of analysis (language, code, mixing, text, image, film, author/speaker, indexicality, etc.) (Nakassis 2016a, 2018), (ii) suggest the need for a more capacious conceptualization of the object of linguistic anthropological study (beyond the question of “language” or “interaction”; Nakassis 2016a), and (iii) demand a thorough integration of ethnographic methodology with semiotic theory.

18 mai 2018 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Caroline Kerfoot (Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University)

Languaging race and ethnicity: reconstructing raciolinguistic orders in post-apartheid schools
The postracial in contemporary conditions is an aspiration but simultaneously a descriptor for a new set of racial arrangements shaped by shifts in the political economy and broader geopolitics. This paper analyses the ways in which such racial arrangements in postapartheid South Africa are refracted, subverted, and reconstructed in interactions by young students in playgrounds on the periphery of Cape Town.

Work within linguistic anthropology and linguistic ethnography has shown that categories such as race, ethnicity, and class are interactional achievements grounded in social contexts and evolving with them (e.g. Alim, Rickford & Ball 2016, Bucholtz 1999, Chun 2011, Hill 1993, Ibrahim 2009, Urciuoli 1996). From this perspective, language and other identities are performed and negotiated in interaction. Influenced by both local contexts and wider ideologies in circulation, interactants align with, contest, or transform social categories of belonging. In these processes, racialised indexicalities and the raciolinguistic orders they construct are reworked. Most South African studies of school integration have focused on historically white schools as sites for engagement with ideologies of whiteness. In the schools studied here, however, the white ‘Other’ is absent from the site, thus relations of domination and subordination tend to be less asymmetrical and ideologies of language, legitimacy, and belonging less fixed.

Drawing on two six-year Linguistic Ethnographies using observations, interviews, and recorded peer interactions, this paper illuminates encounters across difference among multilingual 10-12 year olds in two primary schools. Findings show how dynamic new multilingual practices result in frictions but also new forms of conviviality. They illuminate in particular how youngsters use ‘strategically deployable shifters’ (Urciuoli 2003) to construct new raciolinguistic orders, reworking historical divisions through resignifying racial or ethnic categories and subverting the racialised indexicalities operating in the local social field, albeit not always unproblematically. Findings thus illustrate the potential of such fluid, heteroglossic contexts to inform models of cultural production, contributing to ‘a symbolic enlargement of knowledges, practices and agents’ (Santos 2012, 56) and perhaps contributing to a sociolinguistics of the South.

9 mars 2018 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Jacomine Nortier (Utrecht University)

Development and methodology in Youth Languages: practices, identity and multilingualism
In the first part of my presentation I will sketch the background and history of Dutch youth languages (although the term youth languages is not used and accepted by all researchers studying the phenomenon) since the nineteen nineties. Beside linguistic characteristics, matters of ethnicity, identity, language play and polylanguaging or translanguaging will be addressed. In interaction with the audience I hope we will be able to make a comparison between the Dutch and French situations.
Furthermore, I will discuss the pros and cons of collecting data from social media instead of ‘good old’ methods like recording and transcribing real-life conversations. I will argue that the use of Internet data cannot fully replace real-life data but it creates possibilities to study identity work – and play – that have not been possible before. Users of social media have rapidly developed new skills and we, as researchers, will have to follow from a distance in order to understand. By way of illustration: a twenty-five-year-old native French male Internet user can pretend to be a fifteen-year-old Senegalese girl living in the banlieue if he knows the linguistic means and uses the right nickname. Such identity changes are impossible in real-life. What are the consequences of these changes?

Participants are asked, if possible, to bring data from the Internet to support the readings which will be discussed during the seminar: can you find any metalinguistic comments on the use of French youth languages, Verlan, etc.? Or illustrations of topics from the readings? Examples can be found on Facebook, in YouTube comments, just to mention two possibilities.

9 février 2018 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Rosina Marquez Reiter (Univ. of Surrey)

Interviews as sites of ideological work: disentangling stance and alignment
Interviews in their various formats whether structured, semi-structured or unstructured, represent one of the most popular methods for collecting data qualitatively. However, the nature of interviews and the type of data they provide has been the topic of debate in sociolinguistics and associated language and social interaction disciplines such as conversation analysis. While it is now acknowledged that they are not mechanical instruments in which the interviewer poses ideologically free questions, the interviewee automatically responds to them and an objective truth on a given topic emerges, their potential for the construction of ideology they provide us with has been overlooked. To this end, a stance-taking perspective that differentiates between stance and alignment, and takes into account the (oscillating) discourse identities that the participants assume in interaction is adopted.
From an understanding of interviews as social practice and based on the interactional analysis of segments from two interviews, the talk maintains that they are, first and foremost, interactionally accomplished situated social encounters. It shows how the discourse identities assumed by the participants throughout the encounter, their aligning actions with respect to these and the views conveyed, can bring into focus aspects of ideology that would be difficult to capture otherwise. The talk thus shows how, through the calibration of stance, alignment and discourse identities, rapport is built between the interview participants. This rapport is not necessarily in line with the maintenance of the professional-personal boundary typically expected of interviewers. It is the result of the interviewer’s involvement with the interviewees’ accounts.

19 janvier 2018 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Luca Greco (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)

Le toucher dans les interactions, l’art et la politique : le mode haptique au centre des pratiques sociales
Toucher le corps, les objets, l’environnement matériel est l’une des modalités les plus puissantes de connaissance du monde et de construction de l’intersubjectivité (Gibson 1962, Merleau-Ponty 1964, Deleuze 1989, Abraira & Ginty 2013). Au croisement de la psychologie, des neurosciences, de la robotique, des sciences sociales et des humanités, le toucher constitue depuis quelques années un véritable champ d’étude au sein duquel les expériences sensorielles sont repensées au prisme des pratiques sociales. Dans ce cadre, la primauté de la vision sur les autres modalités sensorielles est sévèrement interrogée, les frontières entre le corps et l’environnement sont reformulées et le toucher est conçu comme une véritable ressource communicative (Finnegan 2005, M.H. Goodwin 2006, Cekaite 2010, Nishizaka, 2007, Meyer, Streeck, Jordan 2017).

A partir d’un terrain mené dans un atelier drag king à Bruxelles, d’un corpus constitué de performances ayant comme objet et ressource le toucher et d’un ensemble d’entretiens réalisés avec un groupe de femmes ayant participé aux groupes de conscience dans les années 70 en Italie, je testerai l’hypothèse selon laquelle les pratiques tactiles ont la capacité de construire de nouvelles modalités relationnelles et de rendre compte d’un corps en train de se faire. D’abord, le focus sur les pratiques tactiles dans les ateliers drag king me permettra d’interroger le rôle de l’imagination et des sens dans la construction collective d’un corps genré. Ensuite, l’analyse du toucher dans les arts me donnera accès à la façon dont le toucher entre artistes et spectatrices.teurs au cours d’une performance change radicalement les formats de participation. Enfin, l’analyse d’entretiens ouvrira l’exploration du rôle du toucher dans la construction d’un nouveau langage politique et la fabrication de nouvelles corporéités. L’analyse de ces trois cas exemplaires sera l’occasion d’explorer les modes de constitution d’une « intersubjectivité haptique », en articulant perspectives phénoménologique, interactionnelle et critique.

Programme 2017

8 décembre 2017 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Modalités d’évaluation du séminaire

17 novembre 2017 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Thomas Ricento (University of Calgary)

Immigrants, Language, and Integration into the Canada Labor Market
Changes to the 2002 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act focused on identifying immigrants based on their ability to integrate into the Canadian labor market (CIC 2010). The Federal Skilled Workers Program (FSWP) recognizes factors such as education, experience, and language ability through the awarding of points based on a grid. Yet, many studies have shown that immigrants’ labor market outcomes have declined over the last several decades, even though their average level of education is higher than that of the Canadian-born population (e.g., Hawthorne 2008). The importance of English and French literacy skills has been identified as having significant direct and indirect influences on labor market outcomes (Ferrer, et al. 2006). Yet, research has also shown that difficulty in getting foreign credentials recognized as meeting Canadian standards is a barrier to labor market integration (Schellenberg and Maheux 2007), irrespective of acceptable scores on the Canadian Language Benchmark tool in an official language. In this presentation, I report the findings from a two-year ethnographic study carried out in Calgary, Canada. In Phase II of this project, 6 families were chosen for an in-depth ethnographic study over a 10-month period which included more than 100 hours of recorded interviews. The findings demonstrate both the tenacity of individuals seeking a new life in Canada, and their frustrations as ‘foreigners’ whose cultural capital is not recognized by credentialing authorities and employers. The study also revealed that there is a significant non-alignment between the curriculum of the LINC (Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada) program, assessment of relevant language competencies, and the actual needs of skilled workers seeking to reestablish their professional careers in Canada.

13 octobre 2017 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Luisa Martín Rojo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

The interactional construction of social inequality in education settings
From a perspective that understand social inequality as produced by recurrent patterns of unequal distribution of goods, wealth and opportunities, in this seminar we will study how such resources are distributed in and through interaction in education settings. Using empirical data drawn from several research sites in Madrid, Spain, I outline a micro‐ethnographic, task‐oriented approach to understanding the distribution of the linguistic and social resources that are necessary for socio‐educative integration and social mobility through classroom activities. In order to do that, firstly we will examine the processes of capitalization and decapitalization (Martín Rojo 2010, based on Bourdieu’s notion of the convertibility of different forms of capital and social distribution), which will allow us to capture the roles played by the different participants in this unequal distribution of resources. Secondly, we will study how the processes of capitalization and decapitalization take place through a multiplicity of ‘relations of force’. Thus, developing a fluid and dynamic understanding of the microphysics of power and language, which prevent us from locating power in a single point or as exercised in a single direction, we will analyse how different participants can reach different positions within interactions, amplifying or reducing their possibilities of control and resistance. Through these analyses, we will not only capture some of the most recurrent patterns of unequal distribution of resources found in schools, but, in addition, understand how power relations in everyday encounters are fully imbricated with other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, gender, ethnic relations, among others).

Programme 2016

2 décembre 2016 - 14h00 - 17h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Cécile Van den Avenne (ENS Lyon)

Textes et voix. Pour une approche philologique des pratiques langagières en contexte colonial
Comment reconstituer et décrire des pratiques langagières anciennes, à laquelle nous n’avons plus accès que par des écrits, témoignages directs ou indirects d’une interaction définitivement perdue ? En partant de cette question, ma présentation abordera des questions d’épistémologie (penser les liens entre histoire et sociolinguistique/anthropologie linguistique), des questions de méthode (quel corpus, quelles traces textuelles ? comment les lire et les interpréter ?), tout en exemplifiant à partir d’un « terrain » que je pratique depuis maintenant une dizaine d’année : celui des archives coloniales, et d’un objet : les pratiques langagières en contexte de contact colonial, en Afrique de l’Ouest.

Parce que je travaille sur des textes anciens, dont il m’est très difficile de connaître les conditions de production, j’emprunte à des démarches d’historiens, que ce soit la méthode indiciaire, telle que théorisée par Carlo Ginzburg par exemple, la lecture « against the grain », pour retrouver la voix des dominés, préconisé par des chercheurs spécialistes de la période coloniale (par exemple dans les travaux des Comaroff, 1991), ou au contraire « along the grain » lorsqu’il s’agit de saisir les logiques propres aux archives coloniales (comme dans les travaux d’Ann Stoler, ), ou, dans des démarches féministes, postcoloniales, ou l’archéologie de la performance, proposée par l’historienne Anne Clé

18 novembre 2016 - 14h00 - 18h00

Séminaire doctoral – Pratiques langagières – terrains, méthodes, théories

Bibliographie et modalités d’évaluation du séminaire

-> Bibliographie et modalités d’évaluation du séminaire

14 octobre 2016 - 14h00 - 18h00

Li Wei, UCL Institute of Education, University College London

Translanguaging as a theory of language: some conceptual and methodological considerations
The notion of Translanguaging has, in the last ten years or so, attracted a considerable amount of attention in the applied linguistics community. On the whole, it has been accepted as a useful pedagogical approach to language education, particularly bilingual education. Its significance as a theoretical concept, especially as a theory of Language, remains controversial. Some question its added value compared to the more established concepts such as code-switching. In this article, I focus on Translanguaging as a theory of Language and discuss the theoretical motivations behind the concept and the methodological challenges in its application to real data. I contextualise Translanguaging in the debate over the Modularity of Mind hypothesis and the multilingual language users’ Symbolic and Multi-Competence. One particular aspect of multilingual language users’ social interaction that I want to emphasize is the multi-modal and multi-sensory nature. Drawing examples from everyday social interactions amongst the Chinese and Polish diasporic communities in Britain, I aim to show what can be gained by adapting the Translanguaging approach rather than the traditional code-switching approach, as well as how the notion of Language can be handled in empirical analyses from a Translanguaging perspective. In doing so, I respond to some of the criticisms levelled by theoretical linguists against the notion of Translanguaging and point out the muddles in the logic of arguments hitherto presented. To answer Kramsch’s call for a practice-based theory of language, I suggest that Translanguaging would be a strong candidate and would make a key contribution to theory building in applied linguistics. In the meantime, I also highlight the necessity to bridge the artificial, and ideological, divide between the socio-cultural and what’s been called the ‘cognitive’, approaches to dynamic multilingual practices.