La gestió del multilingüisme en un espai regulat entre persones immigradesel cas dels locutori

Résumé

This article investigates the management of multilingualism by and among migrants in a space which has emerged as an institution of migration: the call shop (or locutori, in Catalan). The author argues that these ethnic businesses offer a unique window into the observation of the institutional linguistic regimes currently found in Catalonia. They allow an analysis of the ways in which, by mobilising their social agency, migrants can overcome barriers and establish their own alternative linguistic hierarchies for inter-group communication and for the circulation of resources that are crucial for transnational living. These new linguistic regimes, organised “from below” in a bottom-up manner, are based on the legitimisation of a hybrid multilingual code with traces of non-literacy and a high degree of language contact. At the same time, the competition between the linguistic capitals of heterogeneous groups of migrants leads to the stigmatisation of other communicative practices and to the silencing of given allochthonous and local languages. This, paradoxically, promotes the unicity of the local linguistic market in a type of non-standard Spanish used as a lingua franca, to the detriment of Catalan and the rest of the migrants’ languages. The author concludes that in these discursive spaces migrants show that they can obtain access to the linguistic capitals required to overcome linguistic marginalisation and to navigate Western communicative cultures with remarkable success. The chapter ends with some observations regarding the debate on the social meanings of the linguistic practices observed, and on what they can tell us about the future of the Catalan sociolinguistic landscape.