Maria Sabaté Dalmau | Universitat de Lleida (original) (raw)

Papers by Maria Sabaté Dalmau

Journal of Asian Pacific Communication

Following a critical sociolinguistics approach to language maintenance in the diaspora, this pape... more Following a critical sociolinguistics approach to language maintenance in the diaspora, this paper investigates interplaying linguistic identities and ideologies towards home and host languages among four case-study Pakistanis living in Catalonia, a Catalan/Spanish-speaking European society. By drawing on fieldnotes, interviews, naturally-occurring conversations and visual materials gathered in a Barcelona call shop, it shows how informants invest in Spanish as the ‘integration’ language, despite being categorised as ‘deficient’ users of it. They present themselves as ‘native’ speakers of Urdu, which indexes modern ‘Muslimness’ and ‘Pakistaniness’, while Punjabi users, associated with the ‘yokels’, are silenced. English is ambivalently taken-up as an intra-group sign of educational status and political power and as an anti-Muslim ‘coloniser’ language. Overall, these stratifying sociolinguistic behaviours reveal how Pakistanis’ home/host multilingual resources get re-ideologised thro...

Journal of Sociolinguistics

International Journal of Multilingualism

Atlantis Revista De La Asociacion Espanola De Estudios Anglo Norteamericanos, 2012

Th is article investigates the contradictions around the construction of English as a democratisi... more Th is article investigates the contradictions around the construction of English as a democratising lingua franca for intercultural communication and business in the Spanish telecommunications sector. From a critical sociolinguistic ethnographic perspective, I claim that this crucial segment of the market has embraced and mobilized a rhetoric through which, by presenting this language as an unproblematised added-value resource for everyone, multinationals make claims of modernity and 'civic' entrepreneurial relationships to target lucrative economic niches, particularly multilingual transnational customers. However, these neoliberal celebratory discursive tropes on the effi ciency and inclusiveness of global English contrast with the actual public language practices of the sector. English has become a pragmatic cover-up term for making claims of 'multilingual competence' , but it is actually unsystematically off ered only by key multinationals in specifi c spaces-usually call centres-and far less so by start-up operators. Overall, the sociolinguistic regime of the Spanish telecommunications sector fosters a Spanishregimented market where English ends up serving the needs of an already connected dominant technoliterate elite, while those who do not have access to English or Spanish, basically nonliterate migrant ict users, remain underserved and are forced to navigate society through these institutionalised language barriers.

International Journal of Multilingualism

Marketing university students as mobile multilingual workers: the emergence of neoliberal lifestylers, 2019

Under the conditions of the globalized new economy, European universities have become profit-maki... more Under the conditions of the globalized new economy, European universities have become profit-making institutions. They envision students as mobile workers-to-be whose employability chances depend on self-enterprising and on self-responsibilization for foreign-language command, and they now compete in the educational marketplace by targeting them with an increased offer of internationalized English-mediated 'multilingual' degrees. This paper explores attitudes towards these marketed/marketable studenthood identities by 30 Catalan/Spanish-speaking students enrolled in four Multilingual Studies degrees in Barcelona. The data include students' audio-recorded life-narrative interviews and online 'life-after-graduation' stories collected during a two-year ethnography (2011-2013). The results show that students engage in institutional neoliberal regimes which train them in the academic/ professional, linguistic and personhood profiles required in global employment niches. They inhabit unique 'multilingualized' identities, with English as their professional/socialization lingua franca, and they self-attribute open-minded 'civic-citizenship' values, with an 'innate' capacity to engage with Otherness. They also invest in 'cosmopolitan' trajectories which blend ways of being, working and enjoying leisure in the transnational arena. This reveals how students position themselves in the precarious job marketplace, in autobiographic accounts of experience, which contributes to understanding youth identity projections as elite entrepreneurial lifestylers pointing to newer practices of socioeconomic competition, distinction and stratification at university.

Language and intercultural communication, 2018

This article investigates the intersections of spatial immobility and informal work among homeles... more This article investigates the intersections of spatial immobility and informal work among homeless Ghanaian migrants and how these interplay with their multilingual practices. By analysing personal-life narratives and conversations recorded over a two-year ethnography in a bench in Catalonia, it shows that informants practice immobility to gatekeep subsistence resources. They present themselves as dispossessed of welfare rights and belie unregistered economic tasks. They establish non-legitimised translinguistic normativities for intercultural communication yet engage in linguistic regimes demanding 'integration' through the nation-state language. This reveals how undocumented migrants challenge but simultaneously perpetuate the neoliberal work/legality conditions and sociolinguistic orders to which they are subjected, which positions them as 'illegal', 'de-skilled' and 'languageless' non-citizens. Aquest article investiga com la immobilitat geogràfica i el treball informal d'un grup de migrants ghanesos sensesostre interseccionen amb les seves pràctiques multilingües.

International Journal of Multilingualism, 2018

ABSTRACT This paper investigates language ideologies involving various nonstandard English-lang... more ABSTRACT
This paper investigates language ideologies involving various nonstandard
English-language practices among homeless Ghanaian
migrants, and explores how these interplay with transnational
identity management in Catalonia, a non-English-speaking
bilingual society. Through a 6-month multi-site ethnography of
three case-study informants which included recorded interviews
and spontaneous interactions, I explore how migrants engage
with various pluralisations of local and global English in reported
encounters with other migrants and local residents, and I show
that they share ambivalent positionings towards them. They
generally present themselves as speaking ‘small’ or ‘no’ English, in
acts of linguistic delegitimisation whereby they inhabit
marginalised, de-skilled pan-African identities. However, on other
occasions, they position themselves as ‘better’ English speakers
than local populations who sanction ‘outer-circle’ English forms, in
acts of self-legitimisation whereby they vindicate their ‘native
speakerhood’ condition, constitutive of educated, cosmopolitan
identities revolving around ‘Ghanaianness’. I conclude that these
sociolinguistic comportments speak of migrants’ linguistic
marginalisation. They uncover ways in which situated forms of
identity categorisation linked to the censorship of
socioeconomically-stratified English varieties shape, and are
shaped by, hegemonic monolingual ideologies and societal
normativities concerning ‘English standardness’ which dictate who
count as legitimate transnational citizens in the Southern
European societies of the twenty-first century.

In this article I explore the benefits of interplaying narrative and ethnography for conducting a... more In this article I explore the benefits of interplaying narrative and ethnography for conducting a context-grounded, sociolinguistic analysis of the representational and interactional functions of migrant storytelling events concerning dis/relocation. I focus on a series of narratives of socioeconomic and geographic im/mobility told by three Ghanaians who, unsheltered, lived on a bench of a Catalan urban town. These were gathered via “go-along” narrative interviews and multi-site ethnography during six months of fieldwork. I show that the imbrications of a social-practice and social-action approach to narrative with network ethnography allow to: (1) investigate how representation and interaction in place-centered stories and storytelling acts reveal the narrators’ positionings with respect to host-society dis/emplacement, in their alternative spaces of socialization; (2) capture what gets silenced in dis/orientation narratives, like discrepancies between stories told and lived concerning identity management across migrant groups; and (3) expose the researchers’ impact on shaping the form and content of these stories by ingraining self-reflexivity activities into all analytical accounts. This offers an informant-integrative, critical view of how migrants enact transnational survival in contexts of precariousness and exclusion, which contributes to understanding how they place themselves with regard to their non-citizenship statuses, from a socially-sensitive, non-essentializing perspective.

Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2018

From a critical sociolinguistics perspective, this paper investigates processes of minority-langu... more From a critical sociolinguistics perspective, this paper investigates processes of minority-language newspeakerism among 23 migrants from heterogeneous socioeconomic and language backgrounds. Informants networked in a cybercafé and a bench in Catalonia, a European society with a majority and a minority language, Spanish and Catalan. Drawing on audi o-recorded interviews, naturally-occurring interactions and four-year ethnographic data, I analyze how informants’ language practices and ideologies interplay with self-/other-ascribed Catalan newspeakerhood. The results show that migrants do not envision themselves as Catalan newspeakers. They employ ethnicist constructions of Catalan as ‘the locals’’ language, and inhabit fluid identities whereby ‘Catalanness’ is vindicated through global Spanish. They invest in Spanish newspeakerhood instead, presenting Spanish as the language of ‘integration’. I conclude that newspeakerism contributes to understanding migrants’ roles in the linguistic conflicts of minority-language societies; particularly, the ways in which they invest in majority languages, following nation-state monolingual regimes which pervade as gatekeepers to post-national citizenship.

The Routledge Handbook on Language and Superdiversity (Eds. Creese & Blackledge), 2018

El Valor De La Diversidad Linguistica Actas Del Viii Congreso De Linguistica General 2008 Isbn 978 84 691 4124 3 Pag 103, 2008

From a critical sociolinguistic perspective, this article investigates the written linguistic pra... more From a critical sociolinguistic perspective, this article investigates the written linguistic practices of 20 labor migrants from heterogeneous backgrounds who organized their life trajectories in an 'ethnic' call shop in a marginal neighborhood near Barcelona. This was a late capitalist institution informally providing the undocumented with survival resources off the radar from governmental authorities. By drawing on interviews and visual materials gathered over a two-year fieldwork project, I report on the amalgamations of allochthonous and autochthonous codes which function as the multi-lingua franca of these alternative shelters, which have now colonized the globalized urban landscape. I argue that these translinguistic practices speak of the ethnolinguistic identities with which migrants try to secure subsistence. I show, though, that transnational populations simultaneously map their in-group codes upon a unified floor where the use of only global Spanish is fostered. Users sanction their linguistic hybridity and self-correct into hegemonic standard norms which index 'integration' and fully-fledged citizenship statuses, delegitimizing their linguistic capitals. I conclude that the migrants' grassroots mobilization of both linguistic resistance and regimentation within a single discursive space where exclusionary sociolinguistic orders could be contested uniquely unveils the ways in which they challenge, but paradoxically re-produce, the monolingual nation-state regimes of their host society.

This paper investigates the attitudes towards Englishisation displayed by 30 students enrolled in... more This paper investigates the attitudes towards Englishisation displayed by 30 students enrolled in a Combined Languages degree, including English and another language, in a top-ranked bilingual university in Catalonia, where Spanish and Catalan coexist complexly, and where foreign language medium instruction is relatively new. Through a two-year fieldwork project, I report on how the institution implemented this partial Englishmedium instruction program for the first time in Spain, following its internationalisation mission. I then focus on the students' perspectives towards the officialisation of English as the third language of the Catalan university system. Via a Domain and Emotion Coding analysis of 30 essay-writing assignments, I show that students mobilise a series of predominantly favourable discourses on Englishisation which conflictingly interplay with negative attitudes towards it. They envision English as a postnational 'democratising' lingua franca and as an asset for employability and educational excellence, but they also construct it as a politicised threat to linguistic diversity. These perspectives contribute to a nuanced understanding of the students' range of ambivalent stances concerning the established sociolinguistic orders of globalised universities in Barcelona and the neo-liberal linguistic regimes of the European Higher Education Area, which call for policies providing a more balanced ecology of languages.

From a critical sociolinguistic approach, this paper analyzes the stories of place and locality w... more From a critical sociolinguistic approach, this paper analyzes the stories of place and locality which emerge during a series of narrative interviews conducted with a small group of Ghanaian migrants who, unsheltered, lived on a bench in a public transport area on the outskirts of a Catalan urban town. By understanding narratives as situated interactional events with which both the researcher and the researched negotiate, shape and co-construct storyworlds, I focus on the social meanings of the stories of geographic (and socioeconomic) dis/emplacement whereby migrants strategically present their spatial orientations in town, which include largely unknown social networking sites. I complement their narrated in-group "safe mooring" spaces and their out-group zones of "mismeeting" with guided co-ethnographic visits to these selected locations. I claim that the imbrication of stories of dis/location with collaborative multisite ethnography contributes to the study of the migrants' alternative spatialization and ethnicization of their host societies, and to the discovery of alternative localities which challenge some conceptions about migrants' (im)mobility practices and identity management in new urban geographies. These may broaden our understandings of how they make sense of their transnational survival experiences in contexts of extreme precariousness, from a dialogical, participant-oriented, reflective perspective.

Journal of Asian Pacific Communication

Following a critical sociolinguistics approach to language maintenance in the diaspora, this pape... more Following a critical sociolinguistics approach to language maintenance in the diaspora, this paper investigates interplaying linguistic identities and ideologies towards home and host languages among four case-study Pakistanis living in Catalonia, a Catalan/Spanish-speaking European society. By drawing on fieldnotes, interviews, naturally-occurring conversations and visual materials gathered in a Barcelona call shop, it shows how informants invest in Spanish as the ‘integration’ language, despite being categorised as ‘deficient’ users of it. They present themselves as ‘native’ speakers of Urdu, which indexes modern ‘Muslimness’ and ‘Pakistaniness’, while Punjabi users, associated with the ‘yokels’, are silenced. English is ambivalently taken-up as an intra-group sign of educational status and political power and as an anti-Muslim ‘coloniser’ language. Overall, these stratifying sociolinguistic behaviours reveal how Pakistanis’ home/host multilingual resources get re-ideologised thro...

Journal of Sociolinguistics

International Journal of Multilingualism

Atlantis Revista De La Asociacion Espanola De Estudios Anglo Norteamericanos, 2012

Th is article investigates the contradictions around the construction of English as a democratisi... more Th is article investigates the contradictions around the construction of English as a democratising lingua franca for intercultural communication and business in the Spanish telecommunications sector. From a critical sociolinguistic ethnographic perspective, I claim that this crucial segment of the market has embraced and mobilized a rhetoric through which, by presenting this language as an unproblematised added-value resource for everyone, multinationals make claims of modernity and 'civic' entrepreneurial relationships to target lucrative economic niches, particularly multilingual transnational customers. However, these neoliberal celebratory discursive tropes on the effi ciency and inclusiveness of global English contrast with the actual public language practices of the sector. English has become a pragmatic cover-up term for making claims of 'multilingual competence' , but it is actually unsystematically off ered only by key multinationals in specifi c spaces-usually call centres-and far less so by start-up operators. Overall, the sociolinguistic regime of the Spanish telecommunications sector fosters a Spanishregimented market where English ends up serving the needs of an already connected dominant technoliterate elite, while those who do not have access to English or Spanish, basically nonliterate migrant ict users, remain underserved and are forced to navigate society through these institutionalised language barriers.

International Journal of Multilingualism

Marketing university students as mobile multilingual workers: the emergence of neoliberal lifestylers, 2019

Under the conditions of the globalized new economy, European universities have become profit-maki... more Under the conditions of the globalized new economy, European universities have become profit-making institutions. They envision students as mobile workers-to-be whose employability chances depend on self-enterprising and on self-responsibilization for foreign-language command, and they now compete in the educational marketplace by targeting them with an increased offer of internationalized English-mediated 'multilingual' degrees. This paper explores attitudes towards these marketed/marketable studenthood identities by 30 Catalan/Spanish-speaking students enrolled in four Multilingual Studies degrees in Barcelona. The data include students' audio-recorded life-narrative interviews and online 'life-after-graduation' stories collected during a two-year ethnography (2011-2013). The results show that students engage in institutional neoliberal regimes which train them in the academic/ professional, linguistic and personhood profiles required in global employment niches. They inhabit unique 'multilingualized' identities, with English as their professional/socialization lingua franca, and they self-attribute open-minded 'civic-citizenship' values, with an 'innate' capacity to engage with Otherness. They also invest in 'cosmopolitan' trajectories which blend ways of being, working and enjoying leisure in the transnational arena. This reveals how students position themselves in the precarious job marketplace, in autobiographic accounts of experience, which contributes to understanding youth identity projections as elite entrepreneurial lifestylers pointing to newer practices of socioeconomic competition, distinction and stratification at university.

Language and intercultural communication, 2018

This article investigates the intersections of spatial immobility and informal work among homeles... more This article investigates the intersections of spatial immobility and informal work among homeless Ghanaian migrants and how these interplay with their multilingual practices. By analysing personal-life narratives and conversations recorded over a two-year ethnography in a bench in Catalonia, it shows that informants practice immobility to gatekeep subsistence resources. They present themselves as dispossessed of welfare rights and belie unregistered economic tasks. They establish non-legitimised translinguistic normativities for intercultural communication yet engage in linguistic regimes demanding 'integration' through the nation-state language. This reveals how undocumented migrants challenge but simultaneously perpetuate the neoliberal work/legality conditions and sociolinguistic orders to which they are subjected, which positions them as 'illegal', 'de-skilled' and 'languageless' non-citizens. Aquest article investiga com la immobilitat geogràfica i el treball informal d'un grup de migrants ghanesos sensesostre interseccionen amb les seves pràctiques multilingües.

International Journal of Multilingualism, 2018

ABSTRACT This paper investigates language ideologies involving various nonstandard English-lang... more ABSTRACT
This paper investigates language ideologies involving various nonstandard
English-language practices among homeless Ghanaian
migrants, and explores how these interplay with transnational
identity management in Catalonia, a non-English-speaking
bilingual society. Through a 6-month multi-site ethnography of
three case-study informants which included recorded interviews
and spontaneous interactions, I explore how migrants engage
with various pluralisations of local and global English in reported
encounters with other migrants and local residents, and I show
that they share ambivalent positionings towards them. They
generally present themselves as speaking ‘small’ or ‘no’ English, in
acts of linguistic delegitimisation whereby they inhabit
marginalised, de-skilled pan-African identities. However, on other
occasions, they position themselves as ‘better’ English speakers
than local populations who sanction ‘outer-circle’ English forms, in
acts of self-legitimisation whereby they vindicate their ‘native
speakerhood’ condition, constitutive of educated, cosmopolitan
identities revolving around ‘Ghanaianness’. I conclude that these
sociolinguistic comportments speak of migrants’ linguistic
marginalisation. They uncover ways in which situated forms of
identity categorisation linked to the censorship of
socioeconomically-stratified English varieties shape, and are
shaped by, hegemonic monolingual ideologies and societal
normativities concerning ‘English standardness’ which dictate who
count as legitimate transnational citizens in the Southern
European societies of the twenty-first century.

In this article I explore the benefits of interplaying narrative and ethnography for conducting a... more In this article I explore the benefits of interplaying narrative and ethnography for conducting a context-grounded, sociolinguistic analysis of the representational and interactional functions of migrant storytelling events concerning dis/relocation. I focus on a series of narratives of socioeconomic and geographic im/mobility told by three Ghanaians who, unsheltered, lived on a bench of a Catalan urban town. These were gathered via “go-along” narrative interviews and multi-site ethnography during six months of fieldwork. I show that the imbrications of a social-practice and social-action approach to narrative with network ethnography allow to: (1) investigate how representation and interaction in place-centered stories and storytelling acts reveal the narrators’ positionings with respect to host-society dis/emplacement, in their alternative spaces of socialization; (2) capture what gets silenced in dis/orientation narratives, like discrepancies between stories told and lived concerning identity management across migrant groups; and (3) expose the researchers’ impact on shaping the form and content of these stories by ingraining self-reflexivity activities into all analytical accounts. This offers an informant-integrative, critical view of how migrants enact transnational survival in contexts of precariousness and exclusion, which contributes to understanding how they place themselves with regard to their non-citizenship statuses, from a socially-sensitive, non-essentializing perspective.

Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2018

From a critical sociolinguistics perspective, this paper investigates processes of minority-langu... more From a critical sociolinguistics perspective, this paper investigates processes of minority-language newspeakerism among 23 migrants from heterogeneous socioeconomic and language backgrounds. Informants networked in a cybercafé and a bench in Catalonia, a European society with a majority and a minority language, Spanish and Catalan. Drawing on audi o-recorded interviews, naturally-occurring interactions and four-year ethnographic data, I analyze how informants’ language practices and ideologies interplay with self-/other-ascribed Catalan newspeakerhood. The results show that migrants do not envision themselves as Catalan newspeakers. They employ ethnicist constructions of Catalan as ‘the locals’’ language, and inhabit fluid identities whereby ‘Catalanness’ is vindicated through global Spanish. They invest in Spanish newspeakerhood instead, presenting Spanish as the language of ‘integration’. I conclude that newspeakerism contributes to understanding migrants’ roles in the linguistic conflicts of minority-language societies; particularly, the ways in which they invest in majority languages, following nation-state monolingual regimes which pervade as gatekeepers to post-national citizenship.

The Routledge Handbook on Language and Superdiversity (Eds. Creese & Blackledge), 2018

El Valor De La Diversidad Linguistica Actas Del Viii Congreso De Linguistica General 2008 Isbn 978 84 691 4124 3 Pag 103, 2008

From a critical sociolinguistic perspective, this article investigates the written linguistic pra... more From a critical sociolinguistic perspective, this article investigates the written linguistic practices of 20 labor migrants from heterogeneous backgrounds who organized their life trajectories in an 'ethnic' call shop in a marginal neighborhood near Barcelona. This was a late capitalist institution informally providing the undocumented with survival resources off the radar from governmental authorities. By drawing on interviews and visual materials gathered over a two-year fieldwork project, I report on the amalgamations of allochthonous and autochthonous codes which function as the multi-lingua franca of these alternative shelters, which have now colonized the globalized urban landscape. I argue that these translinguistic practices speak of the ethnolinguistic identities with which migrants try to secure subsistence. I show, though, that transnational populations simultaneously map their in-group codes upon a unified floor where the use of only global Spanish is fostered. Users sanction their linguistic hybridity and self-correct into hegemonic standard norms which index 'integration' and fully-fledged citizenship statuses, delegitimizing their linguistic capitals. I conclude that the migrants' grassroots mobilization of both linguistic resistance and regimentation within a single discursive space where exclusionary sociolinguistic orders could be contested uniquely unveils the ways in which they challenge, but paradoxically re-produce, the monolingual nation-state regimes of their host society.

This paper investigates the attitudes towards Englishisation displayed by 30 students enrolled in... more This paper investigates the attitudes towards Englishisation displayed by 30 students enrolled in a Combined Languages degree, including English and another language, in a top-ranked bilingual university in Catalonia, where Spanish and Catalan coexist complexly, and where foreign language medium instruction is relatively new. Through a two-year fieldwork project, I report on how the institution implemented this partial Englishmedium instruction program for the first time in Spain, following its internationalisation mission. I then focus on the students' perspectives towards the officialisation of English as the third language of the Catalan university system. Via a Domain and Emotion Coding analysis of 30 essay-writing assignments, I show that students mobilise a series of predominantly favourable discourses on Englishisation which conflictingly interplay with negative attitudes towards it. They envision English as a postnational 'democratising' lingua franca and as an asset for employability and educational excellence, but they also construct it as a politicised threat to linguistic diversity. These perspectives contribute to a nuanced understanding of the students' range of ambivalent stances concerning the established sociolinguistic orders of globalised universities in Barcelona and the neo-liberal linguistic regimes of the European Higher Education Area, which call for policies providing a more balanced ecology of languages.

From a critical sociolinguistic approach, this paper analyzes the stories of place and locality w... more From a critical sociolinguistic approach, this paper analyzes the stories of place and locality which emerge during a series of narrative interviews conducted with a small group of Ghanaian migrants who, unsheltered, lived on a bench in a public transport area on the outskirts of a Catalan urban town. By understanding narratives as situated interactional events with which both the researcher and the researched negotiate, shape and co-construct storyworlds, I focus on the social meanings of the stories of geographic (and socioeconomic) dis/emplacement whereby migrants strategically present their spatial orientations in town, which include largely unknown social networking sites. I complement their narrated in-group "safe mooring" spaces and their out-group zones of "mismeeting" with guided co-ethnographic visits to these selected locations. I claim that the imbrication of stories of dis/location with collaborative multisite ethnography contributes to the study of the migrants' alternative spatialization and ethnicization of their host societies, and to the discovery of alternative localities which challenge some conceptions about migrants' (im)mobility practices and identity management in new urban geographies. These may broaden our understandings of how they make sense of their transnational survival experiences in contexts of extreme precariousness, from a dialogical, participant-oriented, reflective perspective.

Multilingualism in Migrant-Tailored Businesses: The Case of Telecommunications Multinationals and “Ethnic” Call Shops , 2018

This chapter explores the management of linguistic diversity in migrant-targeting and migrant-ope... more This chapter explores the management of linguistic diversity in migrant-targeting and migrant-operated telecommunications companies, including multinationals, small/medium-sized enterprises and “ethnic” call shops. I show that ICT ventures have adopted multilinguistic commercial strategies (understood as neoliberal language policies) which are, in reality, monolingual, with the scarce use of “economically viable” linguae francae and of migrants’ languages. I argue that this business sphere imposes a regime of clienthood which reinforces an integration-through-the-nation-state-language ideology tied to citizenship access, and I discuss the consequences of the fact that migration-flows surveillance is increasingly implemented by governments in close collaboration with the marketplace.