This paper focuses on the Cameroonian immigrant community, one of the most linguistically diverse countries on earth and the only African country to have known three former colonial languages. The paper deals with two main topics. First... more
This paper focuses on the Cameroonian immigrant community, one of the most linguistically diverse countries on earth and the only African country to have known three former colonial languages. The paper deals with two main topics. First the restructuring of linguistic repertoires by Cameroonian immigrants before and after the migration in Italy, as well as their language attitudes towards the numerous idioms within their linguistic space. Second, the position and function of Cameroonian local languages in the complex Cameroonian community linguistic repertoire. The survey involved 492 Cameroonian students and 50 Cameroonian families based in different Italian cities. The first results of the research reveal that the high prestige of former colonial, official, European languages (French and Italian) tend to undermine Cameroon local languages.
The article aims to identify how precarity and social exclusion can be experienced as a traumatic loss of voice. It is based on a transdisciplinary research project on traumatic experience, multilingualism, and resilience and presents the... more
The article aims to identify how precarity and social exclusion can be experienced as a traumatic loss of voice. It is based on a transdisciplinary research project on traumatic experience, multilingualism, and resilience and presents the case study of a woman, who lived as an undocumented migrant in Austria for many years. The paper begins by reflecting on social exclusion and theoretical perspectives about trauma in the context of displacement, precarity, voice, and the loss of voice. The results are discussed in terms of the bodily-emotional dimension of language, the experience of isolation, fear and anger, the re-invocation of former experiences and the use of language resources that contribute to strengthen resilience.
The language policy of the European Union has the goal that every citizen will be bilingual and everybody will be able to communicate in two dii erent languages besides one's mother tongue. The aim of this article is to investigate the... more
The language policy of the European Union has the goal that every citizen will be bilingual and everybody will be able to communicate in two dii erent languages besides one's mother tongue. The aim of this article is to investigate the conditions for reaching these goals among people with immigrant backgrounds. The article provides an overview of bilingualism among one group of adults with Hungarian background in Finland. The focus is on language repertoire (e.g. the self-assessed language proficiency), language choice between Finnish and Hungarian, the role of the minority language in their everyday lives and the future prospect for maintenance of Hungarian. The entire article is based on my own data, which I collected for a comparative sociolinguistic study on the role of minority language and identity among second generation adult Hungarians in Finland and Sweden.
This chapter explores language in global South-North migration from the perspective of aspiring migrants in Lusophone West Africa within the context of increasingly restrictive European immigration regimes and their consequence of... more
This chapter explores language in global South-North migration from the perspective of aspiring migrants in Lusophone West Africa within the context of increasingly restrictive European immigration regimes and their consequence of involuntary immobility in the South. While sociolinguistic scholarship has successfully engaged with globalization, mobility, and movement of people, it has insufficiently engaged with that which and those who don’t travel well. We argue that a sociolinguistics of globalization needs to develop multi-sited methods and tools for investigating and understanding these absent presences – the invisibly excluded – and propose that repertoires and trajectories are useful tools in such undertaking. The paper attempts a theoretical review of these concepts and illustrates their analytical potential with three cases from ongoing fieldwork in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau as part of a larger ethnographic project at the University of Luxembourg that explores the language lives, learning histories, (unfinished) travels, further mobile aspirations and changing social status of young West Africans on the move. The paper concludes by arguing that South-North mobilities are shaped by as well as shaping multilingual repertoires, and are entangled in complex desires and strategies of mobility.
Risorse linguistiche nei repertori dei giovani altoatesini, tra lingue standard e dialetti In the following article, we present aims, methods and first results of "RepertoirePluS", a project undertaken by Eurac Research in the province... more
Risorse linguistiche nei repertori dei giovani altoatesini, tra lingue standard e dialetti
In the following article, we present aims, methods and first results of "RepertoirePluS", a project undertaken by Eurac Research in the province Alto Adige/Südtirol. The project has examined the linguistic repertoires of 240 students of lower and upper secondary schools (age 12-17) and their use of their linguistic resources. By means of a questionnaire survey, we uncovered considerable complexity in the students' repertoires: at the very least, repertoires are made up of Italian, German and English and they may additionally include the minority language Ladin, other languages spoken in the family or acquired in formal and informal contexts, and non-standard varieties of the aforementioned languages. This illustrates how the province's linguistic make-up is not only characterized by the presence of historical linguistic minorities, but has also been shaped by forces of globalisation.
