Suchergebnisse

AbstractBased on a long-term ethnography of Sub-Saharan African migrants in Cape Town, South Africa, this article examines how language as ideology and practice shapes the rules of guesting and hosting and helps (re)configure the on-going positionalities of both the nation-state-defined-host and the foreigner-guest, making murky the distinction between the two. The key notion ofhospitalitydeveloped here is examined aspracticesrather than asidentities.I argue that this theoretical shift makes it possible to unsettle the host and guest positions by not positing them a priori or conceptualizing them as immutable. It likewise makes it possible to deconstruct the categories imposed by the State and by which scholars and policy makers alike abide, such as the dichotomy betweenmigrantsandlocals. At a broader level, the paper draws attention to the Occidentalism that has plagued academia, particularly in the work done on migration. I show how the South African case challenges many scholarly assumptions on language and migration overwhelmingly based on the examination of South-to-North migrations, which do not adequately represent worldwide migrations.

This review unravels different facets of la Francophonie, both as an international institution dedicated to the defense of French and as a group of people who speak or are united by French. Having been highly ideological since its beginnings and its association with France's colonial history, the very idea of la Francophonie has aroused passionate debates both within and without. Although it was officially launched as a cultural community seeking to develop economic partnership, it has evolved into a political organization promoting human rights and democracy and defending cultural diversity against Anglo-American hegemony. From a linguistic point of view, la Francophonie is approached in light of the centuries-long ideology of French as a universal language whose vitality is threatened by other languages. This review also shows that the political discourse of the institutional Francophonie has not always been in tune with that of its main agents, the Francophones.

The ultimate beginnings of this book lie in the interest that we the editors have expressed in the role that socioeconomic structures have played in determining the varying language choices speakers make in situations of language contact and multilingualism. Contrary to the received doctrine in the scholarship on language endangerment and loss, we have argued that globalization as discussed especially by economists accounts only partly for the spread of English as the foremost lingua franca of business, diplomacy, and science and technology around the world. It plays a negligible role in the general demise of indigenous languages and the death of nondominant European languages in former European settlement colonies, which is contrary to the fate of the vast majority of indigenous languages in the former exploitation colonies of Africa and Asia, where large numbers of small populations, typically rural, have maintained their ethnic vernaculars.