‘Who can tell, mon ami?’
Representations of bilingualism for a majority monolingual audience
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v2i3.425Keywords:
Language Ideologies, french stylization, folk linguistics, mediaAbstract
French stylization can frequently be observed in the English-speaking media under the form of faked French accents or performed personas as is the case with Poirot’s TV character. In the popular ITV drama adaptation of the well-known eponymous novels of Agatha Christie, dialogues in English are peppered with French words. This paper will analyse the functions of these tokens of bilingualism and will show that they are used as a form of ethnosymbolism (Haarmann 1986). In this article, I argue that the actor’s performance is a representation of the foreign language and culture for a mainly monolingual audience. For Androutsopoulos (2007: 222), it is a matter of ‘styling ethnic otherness for majority audiences’. I relate the staging of salient linguistic traits to folk linguistics and more particularly to the beliefs a speech community carries on another speech community and its ways of speaking. In order to identify popular conceptions regarding transfers from L1 French, the lines of the Belgian sleuth are analysed on lexical, pragmatic and syntactic levels.
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