The south in the north
Family multilingualism among some Ethiopian migrants in Sweden
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jmtp.25995Keywords:
accent, family multilingualism, racialized language perception, raciolinguistics, suburban slangAbstract
Recently, it has been suggested that the study of family multilingualism could benefit from serious engagement with current discussions about southern and decolonial theories. Against this backdrop, this article draws upon raciolinguistics to investigate whether, and if so how, racialized ideologies of language have been internalized by family members of Ethiopian descent in Sweden in relation to their perceptions of their multilingual repertoire and practices. Specifically, this study examines how speaking accented Swedish and multilingual suburban slang is perceived, valued, and experienced by family members in the home. To this end, the study draws on multimodal research data obtained from three multilingual Ethiopian families living in Sweden. The findings show that racialized ideologies of language have been internalized, inhabited and enacted by family members, as revealed through raciolinguistic policing of what are perceived as immigrant Swedish accents and multilingual suburban slang. Consequently, this study illustrates the complexities and double binds that participating families experience, being caught between raciolinguistic ideologies that devalue speaking other than the idealized standard Swedish on the one hand, and attempts to maintain Amharic on the other. The ambivalences experienced by these families have implications for family multilingualism research on pockets of the south in the north.
References
Agha, A. (2005). Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 38–59. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.38
Agha, A. (2015). Tropes of slang. Signs and Society, 3(2), 306–330. https://doi.org/10.1086/683179
Årman, H. (2018). Speaking ‘the other’? Youths’ regimentation and policing of contemporary urban vernacular. Language & Communication, 58, 47–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2017.08.005
Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Dismantling anti-black linguistic racism in English language arts classrooms: Toward an anti-racist black language pedagogy. Theory into Practice, 59(1), 8–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2019.1665415
Bijvoet, E. and Fraurud, K. (2006). Svenska med något utländskt [Swedish with something foreign]. Språkvård, 3, 4–10.
Bijvoet, E. and Fraurud, K. (2016). What’s the target? A folk linguistic study of young Stockholmers’ constructions of linguistic norm and variation. Language Awareness, 25(1–2), 17–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2015.1122021
Blommaert, J. (2009). A market of accents. Language Policy, 8(3), 243–259. Retrieved on 21 October 2023 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/105451. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-009-9131-1
Busch, B. (2006). Language biographies: Approaches to multilingualism in education and linguistic research. Language Biographies for Multilingual Learning, 24, 5–17.
Busch, B. (2010). School language profiles: Valorizing linguistic resources in heteroglossic situations in South Africa. Language and Education, 24(4), 283–294. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500781003678712
Busch, B. (2012). The linguistic repertoire revisited. Applied Linguistics, 33(5), 503–523. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ams056
Busch, B. (2018). The language portrait in multilingualism research: Theoretical and methodological considerations. Urban Language and Literacies, 236, 1–13.
Cushing, I. (2022). Raciolinguistic policy assemblages and white supremacy in teacher education. The Curriculum Journal, 34(1), 43–61. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.173
Dagens Nyheter. (2022, 23 August). Andersson kräver färre låsningar från de andra partierna: ‘lättare att bilda regering efter valet’ (Andersson demands fewer shutdowns from the other parties: ‘Easier to form a government after the election’). Dagens Nyheter (The Swedish Daily). Retrieved on 21 October 2023 from https://www.dn.se/sverige/andersson-kraver-farre-lasningar-fran-de-andra-partierna-lattare-att-bilda-regering-efter-valet
De Jager, A., Tewson, A., Ludlow, B., and Boydell, K. (2016). Embodied ways of storying the self: A systematic review of body-mapping. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 17(2), 1–31. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-17.2.2526
Ericsson, S. and Boyd, S. (2017). Children’s ongoing and relational negotiation of informed assent in child–researcher, child–child and child–parent interaction. Childhood, 24(3), 300–315. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568216688246
Expressen. (2017, 15 December). Kristersson: ‘I sverige talar man svenska’ (In Sweden, we speak Swedish). Retrieved on 21 October 2021 from https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/kristersson-i-sverige-talar-man-svenska
Flores, N. (2013). Silencing the subaltern: nation-state/colonial governmentality and bilingual education in the United States. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 10(4), 263–287. https://doi.org/10.1080/15427587.2013.846210
Flores, N. and Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149
Flores, N. and Rosa, J. (2022). Undoing competence: Coloniality, homogeneity, and the overrepresentation of whiteness in applied linguistics. Language Learning, 1–28. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12528
Gal, S. and Woolard, K. (2001). Languages and publics: The making of authority. St Jerome.
García, O., Flores, N., Seltzer, K., Wei, L., Otheguy, R. and Rosa, J. (2021). Rejecting abyssal thinking in the language and education of racialized bilinguals: A manifesto. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 18(3), 203–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/15427587.2021.1935957
Gilligan, C. and Ball, S. (2010). Visualising migration and social division: Insights from social sciences and the visual arts. Forum, Qualitative Social Research, 11(2), 1–33. Retrieved on 21 October 2023 from https://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1486/3002
Habecker, S. (2012). Not black, but Habasha: Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants in American society. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35(7), 1200–1219. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2011.598232
Hermerén, G. (2011). Good research practice. Swedish Research Council.
Higgins, C. and Wright, L. (2022). Diversifying family language policy. In L. Wright and C. Higgins (eds), Diversifying family language policy (pp. 1–12). Bloomsbury.
Inoue, M. (2003). The listening subject of Japanese modernity and his auditory double: Citing, sighting, and siting the modern Japanese woman. Cultural Anthropology, 18(2), 156–193. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2003.18.2.156
Irvine, J. T. and Gal, S. (2000). Language ideologies and linguistic differentiation. In P. V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities (pp. 35–83). School of American Research Press.
Johnsen, R. V. (2021). ‘Then suddenly I spoke a lot of Spanish’: Changing linguistic practices and heritage language from adolescents’ points of view. International Multilingual Research Journal, 15(2), 105–125. https://doi.org/10.1080/19313152.2020.1821320
Jonsson, R., Årman, H. and Milani, T. M. (2019). Youth language. In K. Tusting (ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic ethnography (pp. 259–272). Routledge.
Kaplan, S. (2002). Black and white, blue and white and beyond the pale: Ethiopian Jews and the discourse of colour in Israel. Jewish Culture and History, 5(1), 51–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/1462169X.2002.10511962
King, K., Fogle, L. and Logan-Terry, A. (2008). Family language policy. Language and Linguistics Compass, 2(5), 907–922. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00076.x
Lane, P. (2023). The south in the north: Colonization and decolonization of the mind. In A. Deumert and S. Makoni (eds), From southern theory to decolonizing sociolinguistics (pp. 39–55). Multilingual Matters.
Lanza, E. and Lomeu Gomes, R. (2020). Family language policy: Foundations, theoretical perspectives and critical approaches. In A. C. Schalley and S. A. Eisenchlas (eds), Handbook of home language maintenance and development (pp. 153–173). De Gruyter Mouton.
Lippi-Green, R. (2012). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. Routledge.
Lomeu Gomes, R. (2018). Family language policy ten years on: A critical approach to family multilingualism. Multilingual Margins, 5(2), 54–76. https://doi.org/10.14426/mm.v5i2.98
Lomeu Gomes, R. and Lanza, E. (2022). Southern approaches to family multilingualism. In S. Makoni, A. Kaiper-Marquez and L. Mokwena (eds), The Routledge handbook of language and the global south/s (pp. 285–296). Routledge.
Milani, T. M. (2008). Language testing and citizenship: A language ideological debate in Sweden. Language in Society, 37(1), 27–59. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404508080020
Milani, T. M. and Jonsson, R. (2011). Incomprehensible language? Language, ethnicity and heterosexual masculinity in a Swedish school. Gender and Language, 5(2), 239–266. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v5i2.241
Milani, T. M. and Jonsson, R. (2012). Who’s afraid of Rinkeby Swedish? Stylization, complicity, resistance. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 22(1), 44–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1395.2012.01133.x
Milani, T. M. and Jonsson, R. (2018). Linguistic citizenship in Sweden: (De)-constructing languages in a context of linguistic human rights. In L. Lim, C. Stroud, and L. Wee (eds), The multilingual citizen: Towards a politics of language for agency and change (pp. 221–246). Multilingual Matters.
Milani, T. M., Jonsson, R. and Mhlambi, I. J. (2015). Shooting the subversive: When non-normative linguistic practices go mainstream in the media. In J. Nortier and A. B. Svendsen (eds), Language, youth and identity in the 21st century: Linguistic practices across urban spaces (pp. 119–138). Cambridge University Press.
Pennycook, A. and Makoni, S. (2020). Innovations and challenges in applied linguistics from the global south. Routledge.
Piller, I. (2015). Language ideologies. In K. Tracy, C. Ilie and T. Sandel (eds), The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction (pp. 917–927). Wiley-Blackwell.
Purkarthofer, J. (2019). Building expectations: Imagining family language policy and heteroglossic social spaces. The International Journal of Bilingualism: Cross-disciplinary, Cross-linguistic Studies of Language Behavior, 23(3), 724–739. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006916684921
Rosa, J. (2016). Standardization, racialization, languagelessness: Raciolinguistic ideologies across communicative contexts. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 26(2), 162–183. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12116
Rosa, J. (2019). Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of Latinidad. Oxford University Press.
Rosa, J. and Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society, 46(5), 621–647. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0047404517000562
Rosa, J. and Flores, N. (2020). Reimagining race and language: From raciolinguistic ideologies to a raciolinguistic perspective. In S. Alim (ed.), The Oxford handbook of language and race (pp. 90–107). Oxford University Press.
Salamon, H. (2003). Blackness in transition: Decoding racial constructs through stories of Ethiopian Jews. Journal of Folklore Research, 40(1), 3–32. Retrieved on 21 October 2023 from https://www.jstor.org/stable/3814642. https://doi.org/10.2979/JFR.2003.40.1.3
Santos, B. de S. (2007). Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledges. Canadian Parliamentary Review, 30(1), 130–147.
Santos, B. de S. (2012). Public sphere and epistemologies of the south. Africa Development, 37(1), 43–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/0035919X.2012.691433
Santos, B. de S. (2018). The end of the cognitive empire: The coming of age of epistemologies of the south. Duke University Press.
Santos, B. de S. and Meneses, M. P. (2020). Knowledges born in the struggle: Constructing the epistemologies of the global south. Routledge.
Senter, K. (2022). Att göra förort: Om språkliga resurser hos gymnasieungdomar med mångspråkig förortsbakgrund [Making suburbia: on the linguistic resources of high school youth with multilingual suburban backgrounds] [Doctoral dissertation, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala University].
Silverstein, M. (1998). Monoglot ‘standard’ in America: Standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony. In D. Brenneis and R. Macaulay (eds), The matrix of language (pp. 284–306). Routledge.
Silverstein, M. (2006). Old wine, new ethnographic lexicography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 35, 481–496. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123327
Stevenson, P. (2002). Language and German disunity: A sociolinguistic history of East and West in Germany, 1945–2000. Oxford University Press.
Stiftelsen The Global Village (2022). Fakta för förändring: så ser svensketiopiernas livsförhållanden ut [Facts for change: This is what the Swedish-Ethiopians’ living conditions look like]. Retrieved on 21 October 2023 from https://jarvaveckan.se/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Svensketiopierna.pdf
Stroud, C. (2004). Rinkeby Swedish and semilingualism in language ideological debates: A Bourdieuean perspective. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8(2), 196–214. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2004.00258.x
Veronelli, G. A. (2015). The coloniality of language: Race, expressivity, power, and the darker side of modernity. Wagadu, 13, 108–135.
Woldemariam, H. and Lanza, E. (2015). Imagined community: The linguistic landscape in a diaspora. Linguistic Landscape, 1(1–2), 172–190. https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.1.1-2.10wol
Yeshalem, A. D. and Milani, T. M. (2023). Family language policy in the public eye: Raciolinguistic ideologies at play. Journal of Home Language Research. https://doi.org/10.16993/jhlr.49
