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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2018

Agency through language practices in transnational and multilingual families

Suat Istanbullu

Résumé

The concept of agency “refers to the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahearn 2001, 112), that is for individuals the capacity to act independently from the collective social structures and the conventional forms (Rapport & Overing 2000, 1). This was studied mainly in “racial and gender equality” contexts to understand individual actions of those who “challenged existing power structures” (Ahearn 2000, 12), during the social movements from 1950s on. Like other social action, in linguistic context, agency is meaningful in the way the agent uses unusual linguistic features (Ahearn 2000, 14). Fogle and King (2013) observed the agentive role of children in shaping family language policy through interactions. In this study, we will see how agency is observed through families’ language practices where the youngest members act linguistically in a singular manner. We will consider the case of transnational families (Glick-Schiller et al. 1992, 1995; Basch et al. 1994) who are linked historically to Antioch (south Turkey) where they belong to an Arabic-Turkish speaking minority group, and who live mostly in Paris area (France) or Berlin (Germany). They are thereby part of a minority group and are minoritized at the same time in these three places. In this ongoing multi-geographical situation, they are confronted to several languages on a daily basis within and outside of the family. And at the same time, they find it difficult to transmit Arabic and Turkish to their children in Europe. In Turkey, they were in a language shift situation in favour of Turkish (Smith-Kocamanhul 2003). In France and Germany, they are in a progressive language shift towards the national language too. But above all, the phenomenon of agency by the youngest participants is observed. Following a quantitative and a qualitative approach, I show how these families use their heterogenous multilingual linguistic resources (Léglise 2013) during their interactions where they use two heritage languages (Arabic and Turkish) and the language of the country where they live mostly (French or German) (Istanbullu 2017). These interactions are transcribed following the multilingual corpora methodology (Léglise et Alby 2013; Sanchez Moreano 2015; Nunez 2015). We will see examples of linguistic agency phenomena through intergenerational conversations by these transnational and multilingual families. Indeed, children influence adults’ use of languages. This happens in the complex socially collaborative process (Luykx 2003) where influential roles in family socialization among the same family members are reversed.
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Dates et versions

hal-02437086 , version 1 (13-01-2020)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-02437086 , version 1

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Suat Istanbullu. Agency through language practices in transnational and multilingual families. 3rd International Conference on the Sociolinguistics of Immigration. Practices, Identities, Ideologies, Narratives and Politics of (Im)mobility in Migratory Contexts, Université de Turin, Sep 2018, Genoa, Italy. ⟨hal-02437086⟩
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