In my talk, I analyse biographic narrative conducted during an ethnographic study of Hungarian-speaking groups in Catalonia. I compare various data sources on the conceptualisations of the local linguistic diversity experienced in Catalonia and ways of imaginations of adjustment and integration to the local social milieu.
The question of integration has been intensively debated in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, especially when examining public speeches and language policy documents, as well as theorizing integration as a discursive constellation that contributes to the dogma of national homogeneity. However, the perspectives of newcomers from similar cultural-ideological backgrounds on how the adjustment to a new social, linguistic, and economic environment can be carried out have received less attention than the experiences of migrants from other continents and multilingual settings. My ethnographically informed sociolinguistic study addresses how integration and the (re)production of belonging intersect in the interactions of Hungarians in Catalonia. Specifically, I look at internalized expectations and individual experiences drawing on interviews and conversational data in order to find out how the ideologies of authenticity and anonymity play out when participants describe their linguistic and cultural resources. I argue that integration is desired and understood by the participants primarily in terms of becoming a new speaker; an implicit "Spanish-first" language learning policy dominates that is complemented by the role of Catalan in upward social mobility and admittance. This paper, by closely examining the interactional (re)construction of the pervasive discourse of integration, sheds new light on the juxtaposition of linguistic authenticity and the ways bonds of belonging are recreated.
