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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 539

Part of Session 165: Language, Place and Identity (Other abstracts in this session)

Language-use, Moral Geographies and Belonging in Super-diverse Roermond

Authors: Thissen, Lotte
Submitted by: Thissen, Lotte (Maastricht University, Netherlands, The)

The aim of my talk is to discuss ongoing research about the meanings and feelings behind language use and its connection to claims and ascriptions of cultural elements to ‘us’ and ‘them’ within Roermond. This city is located in the province of Limburg, in the southern part of the Netherlands. Limburg is imagined as a peculiarity within the Netherlands: its inhabitants claim to have their own dialect and distinct culture and to be ‘warmer’ than inhabitants from the north of the country (Knotter 2009). Roermond is an interesting place because of its position between the outspoken north and south of the province and its super-diversity (Vertovec 2007). The linguistic and cultural landscape of the city (cf. Landry & Bourhis 1997) is highly diversified because of the variety of ethnicities and social positions of its inhabitants and the prominent use of different Limburgian dialects (like Roermonds which differs according to neighbourhood, ‘city- centre Roermonds’ or ‘Velds Roermonds’, and dialects from the surroundings) and new linguistic varieties.
  The traditional linguistic paradigm is challenged by this super-diverse context in which ‘linguistic territories and boundaries’ are constantly crossed because of the ‘de-territorialization’ or ‘untying’ of linguistic and cultural resources from places and bodies (Blommaert 2010; Quist 2008). It is therefore necessary to explore the framework of language-culture to unravel the impacts of globalization on daily language-use. Language-culture looks into the dynamic processes in which cultural resources and linguistic repertoires are used as mediators in social interaction within particular places in the city of Roermond to imagine and mark boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. On the one hand this may result in people using a variety of linguistic resources while, on the other hand, this may result in constructing fixed moral geographies and language ideologies about places in order to construct a ‘pure’ language, dialect, identity and place (Jacquemet 2005; Modan 2007; Woolard & Schieffelin 1994). Moreover, it is important to investigate how people feel at home within this globalizing context. By exploring the concepts of languaging, culturing, senses of belonging and identifications, this research gives insights into processes of place-making and identity construction.
  With this focus on processes of semiotic and cultural meaning making of places on the one hand and power structures and moral normativities on the other, it is possible to answer questions like: how should a person from the neighbourhood of ‘het Roermondse Veld’ speak and what meanings are behind these beliefs? Which spaces are seen as good or bad and what cultural and linguistic resources are believed to be appropriate in these spaces? Where do inhabitants of Roermond draw boundaries on their mind-maps of the city and how are these boundaries prompted by senses of (un)belonging and identifications of ‘us’ and ‘them’? How are groups of ‘us’ and ‘them’ identified and legitimized by linguistic and cultural norms? This paper answers these questions by analyzing a case-study from ethnographic fieldwork in Roermond.