Catalan in “ethnic” call shops: migrants’ linguistic practices and ideologies in Spanish-speaking urban spaces

Abstract

From a critical sociolinguistic ethnographic perspective, this study investigates the linguistic practices and ideologies in connection with Catalan which are mobilised by a group of 20 undocumented multilingual migrants who, born in South Asia, North and Central Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America, organise their mobility trajectories in an “ethnic” call shop located in a Spanish-speaking neighbourhood in the Barcelona metropolitan area. By analysing interviews, naturally-occurring interactions, and oral and written communicative practices gathered by means of participant observation over two years of fieldwork, I focus on the discourses in connection with this language which circulate in these transnational discursive spaces. I argue that migrant social networks perceive Catalan as devoid of immediate socioeconomic benefits in their local labour marketplace, and as an outsider language for private use which, ideologically, does not belong to their linguistic repertoires. However, in practice, Catalan does indeed get inscribed within the eminently translinguistic Spanish which migrants use to cope with their socioeconomic precariousness. I conclude that, in urban spaces where global Spanish (in its highly flexible peninsular and Latin-American forms) prevails as the dominant lingua franca, migrant populations tend to legitimise the monolingual regimes established by their host societies. Concerning actual language use, though, the social networks that target re-localisation in Catalonia integrate themselves in the linguistic market of the Catalan neighbourhoods by daily bringing Catalan and Spanish bilingualism into play. However, they do not actually become new fully-fledged speakers of Catalan in these unexplored alternative institutions of migration in which the presence of this language is scarce.

Keywords: multilingual practices; linguistic ideologies; Catalan; migration; “ethnic” call shops.