New speakers: language and subjectivity

Abstract

This article postulates the relevance and productivity of research on “new speakers” in sociolinguistics. To this end, we discuss the historical relationships of sociolinguistics with other social sciences in terms of an ongoing adoption of concepts and methods from other disciplines. Accordingly, the concept of new speakers brings up the debates about subjectivity raised by the works of Foucault, Butler, Bhabha and other authors. We exemplify our reasoning with a reflection on how the various relationships with different languages of several profiles of speakers can help to shed light on the Catalan sociolinguistic situation and on how it is experienced. We finally argue that attention to subjectivity can help to connect sociolinguistics with the fields of research and with the contemporary social movements that have con tributed most to the debate, and to develop the concept of subjectivity: feminism, anti-racism, the LGBT movement, and ecologism.

Keywords: new speakers, subjectivity, sociolinguistics, intersectionality.