Abstract Summary
Drawing on the account of a young French national living in London I show how the emotions evoked in language autobiographies highlight ways in which agency remains heavily constrained by recourse to bounded labels of language, nationality and bilingualism, labels which do not adequately capture the subjective experience of multivocality.
Abstract :
Although multilingualism is now (again) an increasingly reality in Western Europe, as indeed it has always been in most parts of the world, anxiety around ‘fitting in’ remains a key factor in the way people present themselves, including in their language practices; in other words, how their agency is structured. In this paper I present an autobiographical account of a young bilingual French national living in London to demonstrate how shame features as a narrative trope in accounts of trying to fit in when non-nativeness becomes salient in cross-lingual interactions. Even in a truly “global city” (Block, 2006) such as London which has “one of the highest proportions of foreign-born residents across cities globally” (Fox & Sherman, 2018) we see how cross-lingual interactions are potentially fraught with identity marking turns including ‘correcting errors’ of speech. The emotions evoked in language autobiographies allow us to see how agency is heavily constrained by recourse to bounded labels of language, nationality and bilingualism, labels which do not adequately capture the subjective experience of multivocality in urban environments but do signal a form of boundary maintenance, in particular through the regulatory construction of shame. Investigating emotional responses like shame opens a rich avenue for research, combining established work in the pragmatics of error correction with the more recent poststructuralist turn which frames differentiated participation in complex “sociolinguistic economies” (Rampton, 2016) as an opportunity to contest discursive boundaries, loosening the imagined connections of place, culture and language. This repositioning offers an ontological shift away from the deficit model of assimilation (I’m a fraud / I don’t fit in) toward a positive, ironic view of oneself as a work-in-progress developing the “symbolic competence” (Kramsch, 2006) characteristic of intercultural sensibility.
