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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 828

Part of Session 125: The legitimate speaker in a transforming political economy (Other abstracts in this session)

Contested legitimacies and neo-speakers of minorized languages: who has the right to be a speaker?

Authors: Costa Wilson, James
Submitted by: Costa Wilson, James (ENS de Lyon, France)

This presentation aims at analyzing the interplay between the notions of new-speakers (or neo-speakers as they are called in France) and legitimate speakers, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two schools in Provence and Scotland between 2007 and 2009. Several issues are at play: what is a new or neo-speaker, and more importantly, who gets to decide who belongs to that category, and thus not simply to the category of “speakers”? What are the consequences for “new speakers”? Why does the category apply only to speakers of minority languages? Does it imply that new-speakers speak a “new-language”, i.e. a standardized form of previously mainly oral vernaculars? In this case, a form of competition between forms of legitimacies would seem to emerge between educated forms of speech, generally deemed more legitimate in late-modern societies, and traditional forms of speech, the status of which is generally left unclear by activists, between (covert) rejection and (overt) nostalgia.

Those questions are central in the context of minority language social movements where children are seen as both the saviors of the minority language and as a potential threat to it due to both their use of contact forms of speech and their social position as belonging to middle-class families living in urban centers. They are of particular importance in late capitalism where language is used to redefine forms of authenticity and autochthony in view of establishing new roles for languages in the “new economy”.

I will therefore question the use of the very notion of “new-speakers” and “neo-speakers” in sociolinguistics, as it serves to reify a category that may very well be detrimental to those it seeks to describe, and often fails to take into account internal dynamics at play among speakers. My presentation will draw on two specific examples from Scotland and Provence:

in Scotland, the status of Scots remains uncertain, politically as well as for its different types of users. I will draw on moments of negotiation between pupils and myself during interviews on their use of Scots, in which they position the type of language they speak with regard to the language of their parents and grandparents, and integrate into their discourse the more formal Scots of education.

in Provence, I will draw on a moment when pupils from a Calandreta school (an Occitan language immersion school) come in contact with the recording of a local elderly woman, and seek to position themselves and their language, which they consider perfectly legitimate, with that of a higher authority embodied by the figure of “the native speaker”.

Drawing on those examples I will look at the competing dynamics at play in establishing what constitutes a legitimate speaker, and a legitimate form of speech in late modernity among speakers of minority languages in Western Europe.