‘I speak small’: unequal Englishes and transnational identities among Ghanaian migrants

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates language ideologies involving various non-standard English-language practices among homeless Ghanaian migrants, and explores how these interplay with transnational identity management in Catalonia, a non-English-speaking bilingual society. Through a 6-month multi-site ethnography of three case-study informants which included recorded interviews and spontaneous interactions, I explore how migrants engage with various pluralisations of local and global English in reported encounters with other migrants and local residents, and I show that they share ambivalent positionings towards them. They generally present themselves as speaking ‘small’ or ‘no’ English, in acts of linguistic delegitimisation whereby they inhabit marginalised, de-skilled pan-African identities. However, on other occasions, they position themselves as ‘better’ English speakers than local populations who sanction ‘outer-circle’ English forms, in acts of self-legitimisation whereby they vindicate their ‘native speakerhood’ condition, constitutive of educated, cosmopolitan identities revolving around ‘Ghanaianness’. I conclude that these sociolinguistic comportments speak of migrants’ linguistic marginalisation. They uncover ways in which situated forms of identity categorisation linked to the censorship of socioeconomically-stratified English varieties shape, and are shaped by, hegemonic monolingual ideologies and societal normativities concerning ‘English standardness’ which dictate who count as legitimate transnational citizens in the Southern European societies of the twenty-first century.

KEYWORDS:

• English varieties
• migration
• transnational identity
• language ideologies
• linguistic marginalisation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank informants for having participated in this study. I also benefited from the comments and insightful feedback provided by Beatriz Lorente and Ruanni Tupas, organisers of a panel entitled ‘Unequal Englishes and political economies of globalisation’ at the 9th English as a Lingua Franca congress (held in Lleida, 27–29 June 2016). Many thanks, too, to the other panellist. Any shortcomings are, of course, mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Maria Sabaté-Dalmau http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6058-7227

Notes

1. Catalan is a minority language in the sense that it has been historically, socioeconomically and politically ‘minorised’ (see Bastardas, 1996) – today, for instance, it is not official in the European Union.

2. Inverted commas denote emic social categorisations.

3. The confidentiality of the data as well as the protection of the informants’ identities were ensured by the Ethics Committee at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (file number 1818, 2012).

4. In Ghana, only ‘dialects’ have a name. The terms for African languages are modern inventions to meet the standards of Western variationist approaches to describe the linguistic codes of that area. The Akan language group belongs to the Volta Comoé languages, classified under three smaller clusters of ‘dialects’, all considered ‘national’, Ashanti belonging to the Central Comoé cluster (Kropp Dakubu, 2015 [1988]).

5. Reports suggest that Catalans have a ‘medium’/ intermediate level of English, higher than the proficiency levels attributed to Italy and France, though lower than those of Northern European countries (EFSET, 2016).

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness; under Grants FFI2016-76383-P and FFI2011-26964; and the Catalan Ministry of Economy and Knowledge under Grant 2014 SGR 1061.