"Speaking like a White Person": Ideologies about Accent among Cameroonian Immigrants in Paris (in "OBST - Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie", 98, "Les Langues africaines en Europe") (original) (raw)
Related papers
This article describes some of the social issues of phonetic accommodation among Cameroonian immigrants in Paris, through the analysis of their ideologies about the practice of whitisage, a neologism which refers, according to the speakers, to the act of ''speaking French like a White person'' or in other words, ''speaking French without an accent''. This practice is a form of accommodation which consists in adapting one's way of speaking toward a non Cameroonian interlocutor by imitating his or her accent. By describing both the social functions and the ambivalent meanings of this language practice, I show that if it can be valued as a form of adaptation and a sign of open-mindedness to the others in a new socio-cultural environment, it can also be perceived, in some contexts, as a form of assimilation and rejection of one's identity. I argue that the negative values associated with whitisage must be related to the socio-historical circumstances in which this social practice appeared as a psychological and cultural consequence of the power relationship between the Black colonized and the White colonizer.
This article describes some of the social issues of phonetic accommodation among Cameroonian immigrants in Paris, through the analysis of their ideologies about the practice of whitisage, a neologism which refers, according to the speakers, to the act of ''speaking like a White person'' or in other words, ''speaking French without an accent''. This practice is a form of accommodation which consists in adapting one's way of speaking toward a non Cameroonian interlocutor by imitating his or her accent. By describing both the social functions and the ambivalent meanings of this language practice, I show that if it can be valued as a form of adaptation and a sign of open-mindedness to the others in a new socio-cultural environment, it can also be perceived, in some contexts, as a form of assimilation and rejection of one's identity. I argue that the negative values associated with whitisage must be related to the socio-historical circumstances in which this social practice appeared as a psychological and cultural consequence of the power relationship between the Black colonized and the White colonizer.
Article (English version) in "Langage et Société", n°165, pp. 31-49, 2018
This article analyzes the role of subjectivity in phonetic accommodation processes of speakers in a migratory and postcolonial context. It uses the case study of a young adult migrant of Cameroonian origin, who is an activist belonging to a pan-African society in Paris. Subjectivity, the process of constructing the subject, is always marked by the “paradox of subjection” (Butler 2002), which involves tension between subjection and emancipation. Beginning with an analysis of phonostylistic variation in public interactions with a political aim, this article aims to show to what extent an accent functions as a locus of desire that is central in the subjectivation of the racialized subject and manifests a tension between the speaker’s desire to identify with the Other and his or her desire for singularization. This desire results in part from postcolonial power relations that constrain the speaker’s agency. Key words: accent; style; subjectivity; race; postcoloniality; migration
SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 19, 2018
This article aims to describe some of the recurrent stereotypic indexical values that a group of young Cameroonian immigrants in Paris assign to Francanglais, a lexical register of French associated with informal and casual interactions, among young people, in urban settings in Cameroon. I analyse their metapragmatic discourses about this register, which were collected through interviews and based on ethnographic fieldwork in a pan-African association during my PhD research. These discourses are imbued by recurrent ideologies of slang, whereby speech repertoires are evaluated as deviant with respect to one or more presupposed standards when brought under slang formulations (see Agha 2015: 308). Therefore, I show that, through the opposition they make between language and slang, and through the recurrent metaphor of the hood, which is associated with the social figure of the thug, speakers tend to depreciate Francanglais by categorising it as a slang and thus by evaluating it as a substandard variety of the French language. They create symbolic boundaries between different and contrastive social types of speakers (young people vs. grown-up people, boys vs. girls, thugs vs. well-mannered people, rude people vs. polite people, competent French speakers vs. incompetent French speakers), and they associate these personae with contrastive social spaces and values.
Linguistic Segregation in Cameroon: A Systematic Tool for the Assimilation of the Anglophones
Asian Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, 2020
A retrospect of the close to 60 years after the reunification of Cameroon unveils a systematic chain of political repression, cultural marginalization, linguistic segregation and assimilation by the uninterrupted Francophone regimes on the Anglophones. This has led to Anglophone nationalism in the quest to protect, preserve and uphold their cultural identity. This has been as a result of the feeling that they are being recolonized by the majority Francophones. This paper based extensively on secondary sources takes off from the plethora of literature on the Anglophone Problem to make a diagnosis of linguistic segregation and cultural assimilation in Cameroon. The main problematic of the study lies in the fact that in the means of nation building, national unity, national integration or building a consensual national identity, there has been deliberate efforts at sideling the English Language despite the fact that the constitutions requires that the linguistic and cultural variables of both groups (English and French speaking) be protected, upheld and preserved. Linguistic segregation of the English language is thus endangering the cultural heritage and identity of the English speaking population. The main objective of the paper therefore is to reveal the hidden agenda which the successive Francophone dominated regimes had to sideline the English language and by extension "re-annex" Anglophones. The paper is a means through which to understand the diverse experiences which the Yaounde government or the French dominated regimes systematically executed language segregation and Anglophone assimilation agenda since independence. It goes further to demonstrate vivid and glaring examples and concludes that the
Just as the distinction between 'French' and 'Francophone' has implications in French literary studies, the boundaries that position certain groups as outsiders also exist in French society at large, where just because one speaks French, one is not necessarily a legitimate French speaker. For instance, while linguistic legislation in France stipulates that one must demonstrate a certain level of language proficiency in order to be granted citizenship as a means of fostering social integration, experiences of discrimination and exclusion evoked in interviews with 24 Senegalese immigrants and French citizens of Senegalese origin call into question the link between proficiency and acceptance. Through an applied linguistics perspective, this article demonstrates that linguistic competence is often determined by more than just the ability to use a language; it depends on the ability to prove cultural legitimacy, which is directly tied to understandings of race, nationality and language ownership.
A Short note on Accent–bias, Social Identity and Ethnocentrism
Advances in Language and Literary Studies
This paper discusses the interrelations among accent-based biases, social identity and ethnocentrism. Construction of social identity creates a set of ethnocentric values within a person, which indirectly or directly plays a pivotal role in generating accent related biases. Starting with Tajfel’s (1959) social identity theory and then the discussion of ethnocentrism, accent related biases have a long documented origin, development and consequences. People construct their social identity based on numerous variables and then their in-group and out-group memberships are established. Ethnocentrism, as a variable, influences listeners’ accent perception and subsequent judgment regarding their perceived accent. The degree of ethnocentrism is related to speakers’ potential accent biases. As legal safeguard against accent related biases is absent, active resistance and awareness-initiation are expected from speech language pathologists and the concerned community in general. Role of trainin...