Search Results (2)

Recent research in social psychology underscores the role of language and its intersection with other identity markers, including ethnic visibility, in exploring social perceptions and biases. This paper examines the physical visibility of people of Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) descent in the U.S., and the linguistic visibility of a concentrated MENA American community in Dearborn, Michigan. Relying on headshots, Study 1 shows that MENA could be an ambiguous ethnic community based solely on physical appearance, while religiously affiliated attire proves to be a significant ethnic marker for MENA. Using audio cues, Study 2 shows that the English variety spoken in Dearborn is a recognizable variety with masculinity associations. As such, Dearborn English is argued to be an ethnolinguistic repertoire that can be used to project ethno-local visibility. The results highlight the importance of the linguistic visibility of Dearborn and future research on language attitudes towards this variety. Full article

Changes to the global infrastructure have contributed to the growing (linguistic) diversity of large metropolises. However, there have been calls from scholars to explore “emerging superdiversity” (DePalma and Pérez-Caramés 2018) in peripheral regions in order to fully understand the complexities and nuances of the sociolinguistics of globalisation (Wang et al. 2014; Pietikäinen et al. 2016). This article, therefore, explores language ideologies among a purposive sample of five young adults of Cape Verdean origin living in the peripheral region of Galicia, Spain, and draws on interview data to examine the ways in which multilingual migrants engage with the language varieties in their linguistic repertoire. In studying immigration from a former African colony to a bilingual European context, we can see how language ideologies from the migrant community are reflected in local ones. The sociolinguistic dynamics of Cape Verde and Galicia share many similarities: both contexts are officially bilingual (Galician and Spanish in Galicia, Kriolu and Portuguese in Cape Verde), and questions regarding the hierarchisation of languages remain pertinent in both cases. The ideologies about the value and prestige of (minority) languages that Cape Verdean migrants arrive with are thus accommodated by local linguistic ideologies in Galicia, a region which has a history of linguistic minoritisation. This has important implications for the ways in which language, as a symbolic resource, is mobilised by migrants in contexts of transnational migration. The findings of this study show how migrants are key actors in (re)shaping the linguistic dynamics of their host society and how, through their practices and discourses, they challenge long-standing assumptions about language, identity and linguistic legitimacy, and call into question ethno-linguistic boundaries. Full article