Transidioma and Territory: Language and Power in the Age of Globalization

Abstract

The experience of linguistic globalization and the communicative disorder it entails require a serious retooling of most basic units of linguistic analysis. The chaos and indeterminacy of contemporary flows of people, knowledge, texts, and commodities across social and geographical space challenge most sociolinguistic assumptions about social interactions. In particular, we can no longer assume that national territory is linked to a dominant language in ways that bind people together, facilitate interactions, or minimize conflicts. At the same time, communicative practices are still embedded in the territorial apparatuses of the nation-state (from control over the power grid to border enforcement and exclusions). By revisiting the concept of transidioma – i.e., the ensemble of communicative practices of people embedded in multilingual environments and engaged in interactions that blend face-to-face and digitally-mediated communication (Jacquemet 2005a) – as it applies to three different phenomena (the reliance on territorial infrastructure, the heightened sense of territoriality due to globalization, and the search for country origins during asylum hearings), this paper complexifies the interaction between language and space by discussing the importance of the territory in late-modern communication.

La experiencia de la globalización lingüística y el desorden comunicativo que conlleva requieren una seria reorientación de la mayoría de las unidades básicas del análisis lingüístico. El caos y la indeterminación de los flujos contemporáneos de personas, conocimientos, textos y comodidades a través del espacio social y geográfico desafían la mayoría de los supuestos sociolingüísticos sobre las interacciones sociales. En particular, ya no podemos suponer que el territorio nacional está vinculado a una lengua dominante de manera que se vinculen las personas, se faciliten las interacciones o se reduzcan al mínimo los conflictos. Al mismo tiempo, las prácticas comunicativas siguen estando arraigadas en los aparatos territoriales del Estado-nación (desde el control sobre la red eléctrica hasta el cumplimiento de las restricciones y las exclusiones en las fronteras). Al revisar el concepto de transidioma – es decir, el conjunto de prácticas comunicativas de personas integradas en entornos multilingües y que participan en interacciones que combinan la comunicación cara a cara y la comunicación mediada digitalmente (Jacquemet 2005a) – aplicado a tres fenómenos diferentes (la dependencia de la infraestructura territorial, el mayor sentido de territorialidad debido a la globalización, y la búsqueda de los orígenes nacionales durante las audiencias de asilo), en este documento se complejiza la interacción entre la lengua y el espacio y se examina la importancia del territorio en la comunicación de la última época.

Keywords:

• transidioma
• globalization
• territory
• scale
• asylum
• institutional talk

Palabras clave:

• transidioma
• globalización
• territorio
• escala
• asilo
• discurso institucional

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As lore has it, Samuel Morse invented the Morse code after his world had turned upside down when he missed the funeral of his wife due to a message being delivered late. He never wanted anyone to go through the pain that he had endured and so set about perfecting a message system.

2 By 2020, geolocation has become ubiquitous: we get geolocated by Tinder to find other singles; by Facebook for advertising activities near us; by Google to associate the photos we take with the locations of the shots; by Runtastic to share our evening jogging route; by TripAdvisor to see what the aperitif is like at the club we are entering; by Apple for when maybe one day we'll leave our iPhone in the bar where we have the aperitif; by Target to find the aisle of the product we need; by Glovo, Just Eat, and other food delivery to deliver food at home; by Whatsapp, Messenger, Telegram, and other messaging apps for no apparent reason.

3 This is a particularly common practice among migrants: in his book on undocumented migrants to the US, Conover (1987) comments – obviously impressed – on the ability of a family of Mexican seasonal farm workers to travel from Northern Oregon to Florida without maps, relying only on past knowledge, cardinal points, and the occasional land marker.