Speaking French in Portugal: An analysis of contested models of emigrant personhood in narratives about return migration and language use

Abstract

I address how the offspring of Portuguese emigrants in France, Luso-descendants (LDs), interpret their language practices and identities relative to models of language and personhood from their 'sending' society. Specifically, I examine how LDs tell each other narratives about having been identified as an emigrant in Portugal, based on French-influenced speech. In telling each other these stories, LDs position themselves relative to two models of language and personhood. The first diasporic model interprets LDs' French as willful abandonment of an essential Portuguese identity. The second transnational model interprets LDs' French as the legitimate result of extended residence abroad. I examine how participants explicitly and/or implicitly invoke both models, through the relationship between narrating and narrated participants' language use. I conclude by asking about LDs' awareness of their simultaneous adherence to multiple models of language and identity.Examino como os descendentes de emigrantes portugueses, os Lusodescendentes (LDs), interpretam as suas pr aticas de linguagem e as suas identidades em relac ßão a modelos de linguagem e de identidade da sua sociedade de origem. Especificamente, analiso como os LDs contam narrativas nas quais uma personagem e identificada como emigrante por ter falado em francês. Quando narram estas hist orias, os LDs posicionam-se em relac ßão a dois modelos de linguagem e de identidade. O primeiro modelo diasp orico interpreta o francês como um abandono volunt ario de uma identidade essencial portuguesa. O segundo modelo transnacional interpreta o francês como o resultado leg ıtimo de residência prolongada no exterior. Os participantes invocam os dois modelos, implicitamente e explicitamente, atrav es da relac ßão entre a escolha de l ıngua pelas personagens da hist oria e pelos participantes na entrevista. Termino perguntando-me se os LDs têm consciência da sua adesão simultânea aos multiplos modelos de l ıngua e identidade. [Portuguese]

Interviewing: Practice, Ideology, Genre, and Intertextuality

“…Because language ideologies are rarely all-encompassing, or singular (Gal 1998, Kroskrity 2004, participants usually draw from multiple ideologies at different moments or simultaneously (Koven 2013b). In this vein, Briggs (2007a) discussed the different, intersecting ideologies that work together to make interviews compelling across much of the contemporary world.…”

The Handbook of Narrative Analysis

“…As discussed above and elsewhere (Koven 2004(Koven , 2013aKoven and Marques 2014), this figure is situated in broader international hierarchies, so that my participants' notions of "modernity" are connected to more widely circulating French notions that have treated immigrants as "uncivilized" until assimilated into "French culture." Similarly, from a widely circulating Portugal-centric perspective, my participants may evoke particular images of rural Portugal, linked to the time and place of their families' emigration from peripheral regions in the 1960s and 1970s, during the Salazarist regime.…”

“…We observe this in Chun's (2009) discussion of how the comedian Margaret Cho stylizes her immigrant mother's speech, distinct from Cho's "normal" voice. In past work, I have shown how daughters of Portuguese emigrants perform figures of socially stigmatized types, the "bad ostentatious emigrant" (Koven 2013a) and the "backward racist" (Koven 2013b). In this chapter, I will describe how Portuguese migrants' daughters perform figures of otherness, presented as nonmodern, older, rural Portuguese women.…”

“…Instead, with the perspectives of Goffman's (1979) notion of footing and notion of heteroglossia, one can treat "cultural identities" in narrative as multivoiced productions. This multivoicedness results from participants' coordinated presentations, evaluations, and enactments of multiple images of selves and others, across here-and-now narrating and there-andthen narrated events (Mannheim 1998;Keane 2011;Koven 2002Koven , 2007Koven , 2013a. In particular, I draw from recent scholarship that treats such images as voices or figures of personhood (Inoue 2006;Wortham, Mortimer, and Allard 2011).…”

“…When participants fuse their roles as participants in the here-andnow interaction with the speech of a there-and-then character, it may sometimes even be indeterminate whether participants are speaking as a character, or speaking as "themselves" in the immediate interaction, or speaking as both simultaneously. Such moments of ambiguity/simultaneity/coincidence of narrated and narrating events are often particularly powerful and even transformative for participants Silverstein 2003;Koven 2013a;Eisenlohr 2006). During such moments, current participants may even seem to inhabit or actually become like the narrated figures of personhood (i.e., "identities").…”