„Why don’t you say it in Hungarian?”
Diasporization and language ideologies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58423/2786-6726/2022-1-162-182Keywords:
diaspora, diasporization, Catalonia, critical sociolinguistics, ethnography, identity, language ideologies, migrationAbstract
The field of research on linguistic ideologies goes back more than four decades. However, research on language ideologies, which has pointed to the mediating link between forms of social existence and forms of speech, has only recently begun to address the issue of diasporization. My ethnographically informed critical sociolinguistic research combines these two research themes. In this paper, therefore, I explore the linguistic ideologies that permeate the processes and practices of diasporization. To do so, I draw on my doctoral research among Hungarians in Catalonia and its fieldwork experiences. Sociolinguistic research on migration and diasporization traces the dynamic and local processes through which diasporic identities are constructed, asserted and even transformed in particular interactions. Thus, I look at ideologies and identities (including diasporic identities) from a social constructivist perspective, i.e. I focus on how they become relevant and salient in a given interaction, and how they are endowed with additional meanings in the perspectives of speakers, rather than on their given characteristics. In this paper, I analyze an excerpt from a conversation in which participants construct different ideological positions and identities along the lines of nationality, regionality, language, age and gender. In this conversation, the two research participants met each other for the first time, and such interactions help the researcher to adjust to what are the language issues that really matter to the speakers, as here the participants engage in different negotiations to construct and maintain their speaker roles. On the basis of this analysis, I argue that speakers are simultaneously surrounded by multiple linguistic ideologies that become reflected to different degrees, but a linguistic analysis that is sensitive to social functions cannot ignore these. This also requires the researchers-fieldworkers to take account of their own role in the data generation processes.
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