Hello all
I am reading the attached paper by Jan Blommaert for something I’m currently writing, and thought some of you might like to read it too. The reference is:
Blommaert, J. (2008) Language, asylum, and the natural order. Working papers in urban language and literacies (Paper 50). London: King’s College London.
Blommaert’s paper documents a case of a Rwandan refugee – Joseph – whose nationality was disputed, and his asylum claim rejected, because his quite hybrid linguistic repertoire didn’t fit the Home Office idea of what a Rwandan ‘should’ speak. This points to the importance placed by the Home Office in the concept of a ‘national language’ and how this fails to fit the ‘polyglot repertoire’ of many language users in the world today, and particularly people whose lives have been disrupted by war and other turmoil. It gives an insight into what some of our asylum-seeker ESOL students are up against: their claims are upheld or rejected on the basis of their ideas and assumptions about the static nature of the language varieties they use, ideas that hardly approach the reality.
Blommaert’s paper makes the case for a sociolinguistics not of (national) language but of speech and resources, ‘of the real bits and chunks of language that make up a repertoire, and of real ways of using this repertoire in communication.’ This postmodern way of looking at language use runs counter to what he terms a ‘modern’ concept of languages, one which the Home Office (along with other institutions) subscribes to. In the modernist paradigm a linguistic repertoire is ‘indicative of origins, defined within the stable and static (‘national’) spaces’ rather than of ‘biographical trajectories that develop in actual histories and topographies’ (p.17).
Linguistis are often called in to help authorities make judgements on peoples’ origins based on their language use. In 2004 an organisation was set up – the Language and National Origins Group – which developed a set of guidelines for the use of language analysis in relation to questions of national origin in refugee cases. You can read the guidelines here:
http://www.lagb.org.uk/language-origin-refugees.pdf
Blommaert’s paper is one in an excellent series of ‘Working papers in urban language and literacies’ which you can find on the King’s College London website:
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/education/research/groups/llg/wpull.html
Cheers
James
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