Multilingualism and the Periphery

OXFORD STUDIES IN SOCIOLINGUISTICS

General Editors
Nikolas Coupland
Copenhagen University, University of Technology,
Sydney, and Cardiff University
Adam Jaworski
University of Hong Kong

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Multilingualism and
the Periphery

Edited by Sari Pietikäinen

and
Helen Kelly-Holmes

1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Multilingualism and the periphery / edited by Sari Pietikäinen and Helen Kelly-Holmes.
p. cm. — (Oxford studies in sociolinguistics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–994517–7 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–19–994519–1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Multilingualism — Social aspects. 2. Sociolinguistics. 3. Multilingualism —
Cross-cultural studies. 4. Multicultural education — Cross-cultural studies.
I. Pietikäinen, Sari, 1968– II. Kelly-Holmes, Helen, 1968–
P115.45M85 2013
306.44′6—dc23 2012022321

ISBN 978–0–19–994517–7
ISBN 978–0–19–994519–1

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
C O N TEN TS

Acknowledgements vii
Contributors ix

1. Multilingualism and the Periphery 1

Sari Pietikäinen and Helen Kelly-Holmes
2. Repositioning the Multilingual Periphery: Class, Language,
and Transnational Markets in Francophone Canada 17
Monica Heller
3. What Makes Art Acadian? 35
Mireille McLaughlin
4. Tourism and Gender in Linguistic Minority Communities 55
Joan Pujolar
5. Heteroglossic Authenticity in Sámi Heritage Tourism 77
Sari Pietikäinen
6. Linguistic Creativity in Corsican Tourist Context 95
Alexandra Jaffe and Cedric Oliva
7. ‘Translation in Progress’: Centralizing and Peripheralizing Tensions
in the Practices of Commercial Actors in Minority Language Sites 118
Helen Kelly-Holmes
8. Welsh Tea: The Centring and Decentring of Wales
and the Welsh Language 133
Nikolas Coupland
9. The (De-)Centring Spaces of Airports: Framing
Mobility and Multilingualism 154
Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow
10. The Career of a Diacritical Sign: Language in Spatial
Representations and Representational Spaces 199
Brigitta Busch
11. The Peripheral Multilingualism Lens: A Fruitful and
Challenging Way Forward? 222
Helen Kelly-Holmes and Sari Pietikäinen

Index 229
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A C K N O W L ED G E ME N T S

T his volume emerged out of a series of discussions we were fortunate to

have in different locations. It began as an invited seminar on Northern
Multilingualism in 2010 Inari, Finland and continued, with a larger set of partici-
pants, at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 18 in 2010 Southampton. Finally, in 2011,
the research project called Peripheral Multilingualism, funded by the Academy of
Finland (2011–2015) was launched. This volume is part of this research project
(http://www.peripheralmultilingualism.fi).
We are grateful for these opportunities, and for the many conversations in and
out of these meetings. We owe a debt to all the contributors for their engagement
and enthusiasm throughout the process.
We would also like to acknowledge the support of the Academy of Finland. The
actual preparation of the volume has greatly benefited from the support of Katja
Huutokari and Pekka Rötkönen, and we warmly thank them. We owe a special debt
to Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski, the series editors, for their critical eye and
continuing support.
This page intentionally left blank
C O N TR IB U TOR S

Brigitta Busch, University of Vienna

Nikolas Coupland, Copenhagen University, University of Technology, Sydney,
and Cardiff University
Monica Heller, University of Toronto
Alexandra Jaffe, California State University Long Beach
Adam Jaworski, University of Hong Kong
Helen Kelly-Holmes, University of Limerick
Mireille McLaughlin, Université d’Ottawa
Cedric Oliva, California State University Long Beach
Sari Pietikäinen, University of Jyväskylä
Joan Pujolar, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Crispin Thurlow, University of Washington, Bothell
This page intentionally left blank
Multilingualism and the Periphery
This page intentionally left blank
C H A P TER 1
Multilingualism and the Periphery
SARI PIETIK Ä INEN AND HELEN KELLY-HOLMES

T his book is an exploration of the ways in which centre–periphery dynamics

shape multilingualism. This exploration focuses on peripheral sites, which
are defined as such by a relationship (be it geographic, political, economic, etc.)
to some perceived centre. Viewing multilingualism through the lens of centre–
periphery dynamics helps to bring forth the language ideological tensions which
are evident in issues of language boundary-making, language ownership, commodi-
fication, and authenticity. It also highlights the ways in which speakers seek novel
solutions in adapting their linguistic resources to new situations and developing
innovative and creative language practices.
The sites of concern to us in this volume involve complex multilingualism and
minority languages—the minoritization of languages being part of peripheralization
processes—and as such are subject to the dynamics of renegotiation and contesta-
tion characteristic of the centre–periphery relationship. In this volume, we explore
multilingualism in minority language sites in order to examine how the dynam-
ics of centre–periphery relations might shape language practices, and how these
practices might, in turn, have wider resonance beyond the sites under investigation.
We see these peripheral contexts as ‘crucial sites’ (Philips 2000) for understand-
ing the current sociolinguistics of globalization (Coupland 2003, 2010; Blommaert
2010), although they are often neglected sites in sociolinguistic research, with the
focus predominantly on urban spaces for understanding the linguistic dimension to
contemporary globalization (cf. e.g. Block 2005; Harris 2006; Rampton 2006; Mac
Giolla Chríost 2007; Pennycook 2010).
Centre–periphery dynamics—and how they are imagined—have a significant
impact on the way that multilingualism in minority language contexts is conceptual-
ized and practised. An unstable model of centre–periphery calls for a reassessment of
what linguistic and cultural peripheries are, under globalization, and an exploration
of how people evaluate and work discursively with these reconfigurations. Minority
language sites are subject, by necessity, to various—and often conflicting—language
ideologies, norms, and practices. These are spaces where tensions between various
language ideologies are often made explicit, and their logics and borders are being
tested (see e.g. da Silva, McLaughlin, and Richards 2006; Jaffe 2009; Pietikäinen
2010). Despite the fact that linguistic minority sites are often constructed from the
centre as linguistically and culturally homogeneous, and while they may also be
constructed internally in this way in order to pursue particular rights and economic
benefits, the everyday language practices tend to be mixed, flexible, and diverse.
What we want to explore in this book is the evolution of language practices which,
on the one hand, challenge and disregard the centrist ideology and the normativ-
ity of parallel monolingualisms (cf. Heller 1999, 2003, 2006; Jaffe 2006), whilst,
on the other hand, relying on it as a necessary resource (Moore, Pietikäinen, and
Blommaert 2010; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011).
In consequence, this volume is concerned with processes of peripheralization
and of centralization, since the centre–periphery relationship is never fi xed, but
instead constantly renegotiated and mutually constitutive. Key to this examina-
tion is the problematizing of two clashing perspectives on multilingualism in
relation to minority languages: the standard language perspective, which is still
largely informed by a view of languages and speech communities as bounded
entities, so-called segregational linguistics (cf. Harris 1996); in contrast with
the heteroglossic or polynomic perspective (e.g. Dufva 2004; Jaffe 2007; Zarate,
Levy, and Kramsch 2008; Pennycook 2010), which emphasizes hybridity, flu-
idity, partial repertoires, and communities of practice. Given the complexity of
contemporary multilingual processes, we see an inherent problem in adopting
either of these approaches exclusively, and we see the peripheral perspective as
a way of highlighting this and moving forward our thinking on multilingualism.
Furthermore, the current globalizing processes call for examination of the dif-
ferent ways in which peripheralization and centralization happen, forcing us to
ask how a particular kind of multilingualism in a particular kind of site becomes
constructed as peripheral or as central, with what kind of consequences, driven
by whom, and with effects for whom.

FRAMING PERIPHERAL MULTILINGUALISM

The current volume is embedded in and further develops a number of key inter-
disciplinary concepts and literatures. First of all, there is the concept of centre–
periphery and the dynamics between centre and periphery; secondly, there is the
concept of multilingualism, and the rethinking of multilingualism, particularly
in relation to the sociolinguistics of globalization; thirdly, the notion of language
ideologies, particularly in relation to a changing conceptualization of language as
system to language as practice (cf. Rampton 2006; Pennycook 2010, Pietikäinen
2010; Kelly-Holmes and Milani 2011) and the implications of this for the concept

[2] Multilingualism and the Periphery

of minority languages. We will now examine each of these to show how the volume
both derives from and contributes to expanding these three areas.

Centre–Periphery

Centre–periphery is a common spatial metaphor used to describe and explain the

unequal distribution of power in the economy, society, and polity. The centre–
periphery is metaphorized, for example, in the division of the nation states of the
world into First, Second, and Third worlds, and in emphasizing the difference
between ‘South’ and ‘North’, or in describing ‘West’ or ‘urban cities’ as power bases
(cf. Ang and Stratton 1996; Potter 2001; Vanolo 2010). Also communities and
groups from the ‘margins’ of nations—or as Graburn (1976) describes it ‘engulfed
by the nations’—have employed this metaphor in constructing an alternative view
of the centre–periphery relations, using concepts such as ‘Fourth World’ or ‘First
Nations’.
The centre is typically defined in terms of its advancement, metropolitanism, and
political, economic, and trade power, while the periphery is characterized as marginal,
the opposite of the centre, the boundary or outer part of it. Johnston et al. (2000:
48) conclude that ‘the centre dominates whilst the periphery is dependent, and this
dependence may be structured through the relations of exchange, production or
evaluation between centre and periphery’. The use of the centre–periphery metaphor
is common in political geography, political sociology, and studies of labour markets
to explain both the concentration and the dispersion of mainly economic activity
(Friedmann 1966; Centre–periphery model 1998; Andrew and Feiock 2010); but it
is also used in history, cultural studies, and education to describe and explain dispari-
ties in uneven development (cf. e.g. Chakravorty 2003; Hayter 2003).
The centre–periphery model is also implicated in various types of world-system
theories. Its first major articulation, and a classic example of this approach, is asso-
ciated with Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 2004). His world-systems theory
provided a model for understanding both change in the global system and the
relationship between its parts, referred to as centre, semi-periphery, and periphery.
Wallerstein conceptualized a world system, comprised of centres and the periphery,
which are tied together by a network of economic exchange processes (Goldfrank
2000). His work has had a major impact on sociological and historical thought
and triggered numerous reactions, and inspired many to build on his ideas (cf. e.g.
Blommaert 2010; Schubert and Sooryamoorthy 2010).
At the current moment of globalization, the fixed centre/periphery divide
that was relatively clearly identifiable in the period of modernity, has become
problematic. As, for example, Appadurai (1990: 6) points out, ‘The global cul-
tural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which
cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centre-periphery models.’
To capture this transition, concepts such as ‘flow’, ‘networks’, ‘rhizome’, and

M U LT I L I N G UA L I S M A N D T H E P E R I P H E RY [3]
‘translocality’ have been used to describe and explain movement and circulation
(cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Appadurai 1996; Pennycook 2007) of resources,
including languages, in the contemporary era. Importantly, from this point of
view ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ (as well as locality, authenticity, tradition, and other
key terms in this volume) are not given, but are instead understood as discur-
sive constructs, products of social interaction, reflecting the circumstances and
dynamics of their construction (see e.g. Pennycook 2010). The centre–periphery
relationship is thus always constructed and subject to complex, socio-political
and economic processes and practices. By no means a one-way relationship, it
is both reciprocal and dynamic, and rarely stable or predictable in its nature or
effects (Burke 2000; McCulloch and Lowe 2003).
However—and importantly from the point of view of this volume—these flows
and shifts are not constituted randomly; mobility and circulation do not take place
in empty space, but always in already constituted space. Moreover, space itself,
as Lefebvre (1991/1974) tells us, is a complex and dynamic social construction,
produced and experienced in human interaction (see also e.g. Scollon and Scollon
2004; Pennycook 2010; Thurlow and Jaworski 2010). This means that the histori-
cal and cultural situatedness of spaces crossed by these flows has a great impact
on current processes and practices. Past structures and ideas remain powerful
elements in the present-day trajectories of cultural flows and emerging practices.
From this point of view, Ang and Stratton (1996: 28) argue that ‘we should per-
haps not so much replace the centre/periphery structure with that of flow, but
rather articulate the two, to account for the ongoing, always shifting, multidimen-
sional, heterogeneous and ambiguous relationalities which constitute our current
global predicament’.
In this volume, we want to examine this theoretical transition from the notion
of a fixed centre and periphery to notions of fluid, negotiated, and reconfigured
ideas of centres and peripheries in relation to multilingualism. We suggest that this
transition does not perhaps so much eliminate old bases of relations between cen-
tre and periphery, but rather situates them in a new, more complex configuration
(cf. Ang and Stratton 1996). Consequently, the idea of the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’
are still powerful; they are both the organizing factors in a system of global power
relations and the organizing concept in a whole way of thinking and speaking (cf.
Hall 1992). Peripheries could move to become part of the centre, and vice versa, as
centre sites and locations became less dominant, they would move to the periphery
of the system. As the cases in this volume show, some of the peripheral sites have
already had their ‘days of glory’ while some sites are on the brink of being the centre
themselves. There is an on-going dynamic between what is perceived as a periphery
and what is perceived as a centre. Also in our understanding of peripherality, rather
than changing over time, relative peripherality is changing constantly, so that one
location, practice, or process can be at one and the same time both peripheral and
central. Sites, areas, and processes which may be peripheral in one sense (e.g. dis-
tance from a national capital, large economic centre, or urban population centres

[4] Multilingualism and the Periphery

or from established norms) may be central in others (e.g. in terms of their role and
importance for national and international tourists, niche markets, and specialized
industries, language and cultural politics and policies, etc.).
It is this simultaneous, shifting and ambiguous position between peripherality
and centrality, and the tensions that arise from these transformations that make the
examination of peripheral sites interesting and revealing. It is the contradictions
and tensions between these two tendencies—on the one hand, the fact that centre/
periphery relations are both multiplying and no longer fixed, and, on the other hand,
the continuing discursive power of the ‘centre’ as the all-powerful centre—which
have important implications for the sites, processes, and practices under study in
this volume. We want to explore this further by focusing on regions, spaces, com-
munities, and practices that are simultaneously perceived to be peripheries for partic-
ular centres and centres for particular peripheries, or on the move from one to the other.
Peripheries are, we argue, ambiguous and interesting spaces; they are spaces
of transformation and negotiation, rendering them novel and revealing spaces to
examine contemporary complexities in multilingualism. While the role of cities
and urban centres in the globalized world system has been widely examined, as
mentioned above, the peripheries are rarely examined in terms of their contribu-
tion to globalization; instead, they are often seen to follow rather than lead. We
would like to examine the potential for peripheral sites to become centres of norma-
tivity rather than places to which norms are disseminated. In this way, we hope that
the book provides an original perspective to the relationship between ‘centre’ and
‘periphery’ in general, and in relation to multilingualism in particular.

Multilingualism

In this volume, we start from the premise that changing centre–periphery rela-
tions play an important role in understanding and reconfiguring multilingualism in
minority language spaces. A concern with centre–periphery relations is, of course,
nothing new in sociolinguistics or in understanding multilingualism. For example,
Kachru’s (1996) model of the three circles of English involves an inner circle (a
centre), which is both norm defining and controlling, and disseminates norms
and practices to the outer circle of countries with English as a second language,
and also to the expanding circle of countries with English as a foreign language.
The three circles model has been challenged by increasing focus on hybridity and
polycentric normativities (cf. Park and Wee 2009; Pennycook 2010) in both the
outer and expanding circles, and the two-way flows between the three circles,
which characterize the contemporary world. Another sociolinguistic thesis that
uses the central–peripheral model to explain multilingualism is de Swaan’s (2001)
world language system, which also focuses on mobility and sees the more central
languages as the more mobile. In his model, de Swaan categorizes languages across
the globe as central, supercentral, or peripheral. Central languages are those which

M U LT I L I N G UA L I S M A N D T H E P E R I P H E RY [5]
are the official languages of countries and which have the greatest communicative
power in those countries, but less mobility between countries. Supercentral lan-
guages are modern-day lingua francas, with use and power beyond the borders of
the countries in which they are located. English has special status as a hypercen-
tral language, which holds the system together. At the other end of the scale are
peripheral languages, which are the least mobile of the languages in the system and
which generally have the least power and may not have a written form, and so on.
Like Kachru’s model, there are problems with de Swaan’s system, since it is hard to
classify many of the languages discussed in this volume in terms of this system. For
example, where would regional minority languages which have official status (e.g.
Welsh and Irish) be located? These are privileged, minoritized languages—periph-
eral and minoritized in some contexts and domains, and privileged and central in
others. Furthermore, neither languages nor their speakers ‘stay’ in these categories
but rather there is constant movement between and across categories: for example,
regional minority languages may gain worldwide mobility through genres (hip-hop,
advertisements) and practices (tourism, cultural production). The lived reality and
actual everyday practices are far messier than these models suggest.
The current era of globalization has further challenged us to rethink multilin-
gualism. For example, Dor (2004: 97) argues that

most writers view today’s linguistic world as a site of contestation between the global
and the local: the spread of English as the lingua franca of the information age is viewed
as the linguistic counterpart to the process of economic globalization; the causal factors
working against the process of Englishization are thought of as locally bound and are
equated with patterns of local resistance to economic (and cultural) globalization. This
conception also determines the structure of the discourse on linguistic human rights:
the need for negotiated multilingualism and the rights of speakers to resist global pres-
sures and to use, maintain, and develop their local languages. (97)

This interest in global and local languages (echoing the centre–periphery distinc-
tion) has resulted in a wealth of studies on English as a lingua franca and linguistic
imperialism, on the one hand, and an extensive literature on language endangerment,
loss, and linguistic rights (e.g. Crystal 2002; Freeland and Patrick 2004; García,
Skutnabb-Kangas, and Torres Guzmán 2006; Jenkins 2007; May 2007; Ostler 2010.)
From the point of view of multilingualism, the current era of globalization can
be seen as a new kind of order, impacting on how languages and their relations are
constructed and are resulting in emerging ways of organizing and exploiting lin-
guistic resources (Coupland 2010). Contemporary globalization also impacts, we
argue, on what kind of multilingualism is perceived as ‘central’ (i.e. normal, desir-
able, and valuable) and what is considered ‘peripheral’ (i.e., marginal, devalued, and
useless). With this view, the volume engages with the recent upsurge in language
and globalization studies (see e.g. Coupland 2003; Heller 2003, 2011; Canagarajah
2005; Fairclough 2006; Heller and Duchene 2007; Blommaert 2010; Pennycook

[6] Multilingualism and the Periphery

2010). Further, contemporary globalization processes, particularly changing eco-
nomic conditions and increased mobility, both open up new opportunities and
create novel types of opportunities and restrictions for multilingualism and new
multilingual spaces where individuals, communities, and institutions adapt to these
changing conditions. One example of this, we argue in the volume, is the current val-
orization of certain types of bilingualism and the commodification of the periphery
as a site of authenticity. In this context, the periphery has come to have a new value,
perceived to offer experiences of authenticity, slow(er) lifestyle, solitude, and living
with the challenges and opportunities afforded by the local environment. In this
process, centres are constructed as predictable and unremarkable, whereas periph-
eries are seen as different, exotic, and other-worldly. The centre–periphery tension
together with reconfigurations and mobilization of linguistic resources has led to
novel types of diversity and tensions in peripheral sites under examination in this
volume, with several contradictions and complexities which can then result in cre-
ative crossings. Further, the circulation and emergence of language practices show
how fluidity and hybridity are part of language use and make it necessary to rethink
and redefine many key concepts of language studies as these clearly acquire new
meanings under new circumstances (cf. Canagarajah 2007; Makoni and Pennycook
2007). Indeed, the current conditions have put to the test the conceptualizations of
languages as unified, bounded entities separate from the social world (cf. Bauman
and Briggs 2003). These notions have been challenged both from the inside by
the integrational linguistics of Harris (1981), and by studies of language ideolo-
gies (Blommaert 1999; Kroskrity 2002; Woolard 2004) and heteroglossia (Bakhtin
1981; Dufva 2010), which aim to understand how language and multilingualism
may be understood differently in different contexts.

Language Ideologies

The reconfiguration of centre–periphery relations is, of course, a process taking

place wherever people are mobilizing and reorganizing linguistic resources. It is for
this reason, that the current volume examines centralizing and peripheralizing pro-
cesses in changing and evolving multilingual minority language sites. Such a focus
allows for the analysis and juxtaposition of sites where struggles, tensions, and
innovations between various language ideologies are often made explicit, and their
logics and the borders they attempt to create and maintain are being tested (see
e.g. Jaffe 1999; Busch 2006; da Silva, McLaughlin, and Richards 2006; Pietikäinen
2010). Being named and categorized as a minority language is a result of centralizing
and peripheralizing processes. To unpack these complexities, we draw on language
ideological work on multilingual contexts (Blommaert 1999; Irvine and Gal 2000;
Kroskrity 2000; Gal and Woolard 2001; Hill 2002; Gal 2006; Heller 2006; Jaffe
2007) and understand language ideologies as discursive constructs of the nature
and meaning of language that are historically embedded and locally appropriated.

M U LT I L I N G UA L I S M A N D T H E P E R I P H E RY [7]
Language ideologies carry and convey articulations and beliefs about the nature,
value, and functions of languages and are, at the same time, embedded in actual lan-
guage practices of individuals and communities. This conception emphasizes the
diachronic nature of any particular language ideology, its situational manifestation,
and the impact it has on actual language practices.
The idea of a language ideological struggle implies the simultaneous existence of
various language ideologies, particularly in contemporary evolving multilingual sit-
uations where language boundaries and norms are often dislocated, in flux, or rene-
gotiated (cf. Nevins 2004; Meek 2007; Jaffe 2009; Pietikäinen 2010). This makes
multilingual minority language sites a complex space for various ideological con-
flicts and contestations (cf. Lytra and Martin 2010), and consequently, important
and revealing sites for examining the evolving notions of language, multilingualism,
and other related concepts. As mentioned earlier, being considered and classified as
a minority language is itself a result of language ideological processes and directly
related to periphery/centre hierarchies. By their very existence, minority languages
undermine the prevailing ideology of monolingualism and its message of ‘one
country, one language’. This language ideology is, of course, nurtured particularly
within the context of the nation state and national identity (cf. Wright 2000), which
involves creating a strong centre with its own norms and clearly defined peripher-
ies. Minority language sites also provide evidence of what has been ‘won’ by minori-
ties from the centre. This evidence typically consists of some central institutions
that the centre has brought into the peripheries, and which function either fully or
partly in minority languages and through the minority language community. This
combination of economic, political, geographic, and ideological processes, as well
as other factors, has meant that minority language sites ‘have always had to invest in
one form of multilingualism’ (da Silva, McLaughlin, and Richards 2006: 185).
We can identity at least two language ideological formations that have structured our
understanding of multilingualism and consequently have had an influence on how indi-
viduals experience ‘languages’ and talk about them. One powerful conceptualization,
born and bred within the ideological framework of nation states and national languages,
has been the idea that languages are autonomous and unified entities—often described as
formal linguistic codes—with an ‘essential’ or natural relationship with a particular terri-
tory or the collective identity of a particular group, and essentially ‘different’ and ‘separate’
from each other (Heller 2006; Jaffe 2007). At the same time, we have also documented
an alternative ideological formation—that manifests itself, for example, in discourses
of plurilingual identities and competencies or ‘polycentric’ and ‘polynomic’ languages
and language practices (Zarate, Levy, and Kramsch 2008; Jaffe 2009; Pietikäinen
2010). Also, as Bakhtin (1981) suggests, language can be imagined in terms of coexist-
ing socio-ideological ways of speaking that, on one hand, emerge in a situated fashion,
but, on the other, echo the past history. This heteroglossic perspective sees language as a
practice, highlighting its expressive and communicative functions as opposed to linguis-
tic form (cf. Dufva 2004; Heller 2006; Makoni and Pennycook 2007; Pennycook 2010).
It can be argued that this perspective also captures the experiences of many multilingual

[8] Multilingualism and the Periphery

speakers more appropriately by recognizing the inherent diversity and hybridity that
characterizes multilingual living (Pietikäinen et al. 2008; Kramsch 2009). Further, this
understanding of language seems to be in accord with—or perhaps even grow from—
the various material and ideological shifts associated with processes of multilingualism
under globalization.
The tensions between these two ideologies provide the dynamics of the centre–
periphery relationship. While the centre has traditionally been seen as the source
of norms to be adopted in peripheries, contributors to the volume explore how the
dynamics of the centre–periphery relationship might instead lead to the deriva-
tion of new and multiple normativities; and to various tensions which emerge from
the dialectics between existing and emerging practices (cf. Heller 1999, 2006; Jaffe
2006; Kelly-Holmes, Moriarty, and Pietikäinen 2009; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes
2011). Peripheral sites allow the examination of the shift from a centre-driven system
of norms to fragmented and constantly changing systems of normativities. Norms
were—and still are—generally the preserve and under the control of centres, with
language policy being oriented towards, as well as formulated and implemented by,
powerful centres (Wright 2004). The contemporary era has, however, witnessed a
shift from these centrally controlled norms to polycentric normativities (Pennycook
2010; Pietikäinen 2010). In the ‘practice turn’ (Pennycook 2010; Kelly-Holmes and
Milani 2011; cf. also Rampton 2006), normativities are now also seen as the outcome
of various communities of practice and as such they are more fluid and situational
than norms which were linked to fairly well-established and territorially bounded
speech communities. Thus we see a shift from one centre which controls and decides
norms, to multiple centres of normativity decided according to needs, situations, con-
ditions, etc. Previously, it was—at least to a great extent—the centre with its large
bureaucracy and complex network of institutions that decided, encoded, propagated,
and policed norms. Even in areas where there was no explicit process, because of the
dominance of the centre, what happened was invariably what was proper in a de facto,
implicit (Schiffman 1996) or covert (Shohamy 2006) way. However, peripheral sites
can themselves become the centres of new norms—deciding and showing what is
and is not acceptable (Bourdieu 1991), at least within the local judgement of the com-
munity of that particular site. These processes may lead to innovative combinations
of global and local resources, which bring forth tensions that we would like to explore
in the volume. The practices and normativities that emerge from centre–periphery
relations can be seen as part of a wider process in sociolinguistics of rethinking mul-
tilingualism (Heller 2006; Jaffe 2006; Rampton 2006; Makoni and Pennycook 2007;
Blackledge and Creese 2009; Blommaert 2010; Coupland 2010; Pennycook 2010).

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The contributions to the volume examine the variability and complexities of

the processes and practices of peripheralizing and centralizing tendencies in

M U LT I L I N G UA L I S M A N D T H E P E R I P H E RY [9]
multilingualism in a wide range of economic, cultural, political, and physical periph-
eral sites and spaces (tourism, education, minority language rights and politics,
airports, gender relations, marketing, websites) in different geographic locations
(Austria, Canada, Corsica, Catalonia, Finland, Ireland, Patagonia, Spain, Slovenia,
United States, Wales). All contributions demonstrate how the constantly chang-
ing centre–periphery relationship plays an important role in understanding and
reconfiguring multilingualism in current conditions of localized and lived aspects
of globalization, particularly in relation to mobility, minority language spaces, and
authenticity. The contributors draw on ethnographic, discursive, and sociolinguis-
tic methods and share a common interest in ‘big issues’ (markets, mobility, econ-
omy, identity, etc.) as manifested in local language practices and experiences. The
contributions to this volume show the impact of globalization, particularly in terms
of (new) economic conditions, processes, and mobilities. By examining a range of
cases of multilingualism in peripheral minority language sites in a variety of loca-
tions, the volume aims to provide a major insight into the various, emerging ways
whereby centrality and peripherality are both created, maintained, and contested
by the current flows and circulations, resulting in emerging ways of organizing and
exploiting linguistic resources.
In Chapter 2, Monica Heller takes Francophone Canada as an example and
examines the historical development of multilingual peripheries as a process of
internal colonialism. She links this development to the rise of the nation state
and its colonial expansion. With an ethnographic approach she examines some
of the ways in which those peripheries now change position in a globalized new
economy in which multilingualism is an asset rather than a problem to be con-
trolled. The analysis shows how these changes and negotiations call into question
common-sense ideas about language and identity, as well as notions of centres and
peripheries.
Mireille McLaughlin also deals with Francophone Canada in Chapter 3, but she
focuses on Acadie, the transnational Canadian and American linguistic minority,
peripheral to many cultural and political centres. She adopts a concept of ‘multi-
lingual capital’ and uses it to explore Acadian cultural production (in literature,
comedy, music) in the globalizing economy. Her ethnographic analysis shows how
Acadian artists mobilize local forms of multilingualism to index their peripheral
cultural position, in order to present themselves as counter-cultural and to con-
struct Acadian identity as cool for global niche markets.
In Chapter 4, Joan Pujolar examines the intersection of heritage, gender, and
peripherality in the context of Welsh tourism. He argues that in this site, the con-
cept of heritage is indexical of peripherality within the framework of modernity. By
using a multi-sited ethnographic approach, he analyzes the different dimensions of
peripherality constituted by dichotomies such as gender and nation, gender and
tourism, and tourism and nation. He emphasizes how multilingual practices in such
contexts reflect and contribute to constructing these articulations, in which ideolo-
gies of modernity play a key role.

[10] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 The fifth chapter, by Sari Pietikäinen, focuses on indigenous Sámi heritage
tourism in Finnish Lapland, a geographical periphery but simultaneously a cul-
tural centre for the Sámi community. Using discourse analytical and ethnographic
approaches, she examines what gets constructed as authentic in this context and
what kind of tensions and creativity the economic capitalization of authenticity
generates. Applying Bakhtinian concepts of centripetal and centrifugal forces, she
shows how the dynamicity between standardized and flexible authentication prac-
tices creates a polycentric environment for multilingual and indigenous language
practices and thus problematizes what is perceived as ‘central’ and what is perceived
as ‘peripheral’.
In Chapter 6, Alexandra Jaffe and Cedric Oliva examine how linguistic boundar-
ies and statuses are negotiated through Corsican and other languages in commercial
and tourist spaces in Corsica. Their ethnographic analysis shows how continuity
with dominant, monolingual ideologies of language and identity is articulated
within a historical, Corsican‒French oppositional relationship. The findings suggest
the ways in which Corsican may be repositioned as a form of ‘added cultural value’
in the tourist market, and the possibilities and tensions in terms of identity that this
new market framework presents for speakers of the minority language. The find-
ings also problematize the notions of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, showing them not so
much as places, but as stance objects evoked in discourses and practices.
Chapter 7, by Helen Kelly-Holmes, is concerned with the tensions between cen-
tralizing and peripheralizing practices, policies, and ideologies of individual com-
mercial actors in sites of peripheral multilingualism. The particular site is Dingle in
the Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht, which is a minority language site and designated
Irish-speaking/bilingual area, as well as a major tourist destination in South-West
Ireland. Using the website of a local pottery workshop, she examines how individ-
ual actors in sites of peripheral multilingualism attempt to centralize or peripher-
alize Irish in their practices and whether individual commercial actors in sites of
peripheral multilingualism adopt centre/centrist practices and ideologies (e.g.
norm-driven, standards, parallel monolingualism, modernist concepts) or periph-
eral practices and ideologies.
In Chapter 8, Nikolas Coupland takes the trajectory of Welsh tea as an example
of the mobility between variously perceived ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’. His analysis
illustrates how shifting historical and geographical circumstances have variously
positioned Wales and the Welsh language as more or less autonomous, and more
or less peripheral, within particular cultural economies. The analysis demonstrates
how centre–periphery relations are always relative and subject to radical transfor-
mation from one national or international configuration to another.
Chapter 9, by Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow, examines airports as par-
ticular spaces of mobility and multilingualism. The semiotic landscapes of Cardiff
Airport and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport are analysed in order to show how
various discursive practices, including multilingual displays, are organized around
different spatial norms and how they are shaped by the polycentricity of airports.

M U LT I L I N G UA L I S M A N D T H E P E R I P H E RY [11]
The analysis emphasizes how the mobility of languages, people, and objects recon-
figure our understanding of centres and peripheries.
In Chapter 10, Brigitta Busch takes the region of Southern Carinthia in south-
ernmost Austria as a site to examine how the seemingly static relationship between
language and territory is dislocated. With an analysis of language practices, as well
as discursive and spatial practices, she shows how changes at the economic and
political macro level are translated into linguistic manifestations in the represen-
tational space at a micro level. The analysis also highlights how irony challenges
the traditional bipolar and asymmetrical language regime and gives expression to
growing linguistic diversification.
Finally, the concluding chapter reflects on the contributions to the volume and
assesses the opportunities and challenges presented by adopting a peripheral mul-
tilingualism approach.
As all contributions to this volume show, the complex interactions between
individual practices and institutional norms and ideologies, between language as
system and language as everyday life, are seen as necessary and inherent to the
novel practices that are emerging, and challenging us to rethink and re-image what
language means. We are living in a time of transition in understanding and con-
ceptualizing language: we are already witnessing a shift to a view of language as a
heteroglossic resource (Busch 2006; Pietikäinen 2010) and as repertoire (Hymes
1974; Blommaert 2010); as a local practice (Pennycook 2010) and as the emo-
tional and performative individual practices of subjects (Pavlenko 2005; Kramsch
2009; Blackledge and Creese 2010). Sites of peripheral multilingualism, we argue,
provide important and revealing spaces to explore the processes, practices, and
consequences of reinventing and reconfiguring the borders and values of linguistic
and other semiotic resources, linked to the new economy of local resources and to
the mobility and circulation of people and products.

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[16] Multilingualism and the Periphery

C H A P TER 2
Repositioning the Multilingual
Periphery
Class, Language, and Transnational Markets
in Francophone Canada
MONICA HELLER

CENTRE, PERIPHERY, MULTILINGUALISM,

AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM

The main goal of this chapter is to examine the underpinnings of a relation-

ship between the ‘periphery’ and ‘multilingualism’ which we sometimes take for
granted. I will argue that both terms are constitutive of each other and emerge out
of the ways in which linguistic and cultural homogeneity (‘monolingualism’, ‘mon-
oculturalism’) became building blocks of the nation-state capitalist centre in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The centre–periphery (monolingual–multi-
lingual) relationship, already always fragile, has been further destabilized by con-
tinuing capitalist expansion, in the form of what we often think of as the globalized
new economy. Imperialism, nationalism, colonialism, linguistic minority move-
ments, post-colonialism, all have had their role to play in these processes.
In the first part of the chapter, I will explain what views of global capitalism
underlie this analysis of the relationship between centre–periphery relations and of
the role of language in them. I will then provide an account of the particular case of
peripheral multilingualism I am most familiar with, that of Francophone Canada.
As is often the case, the sequence is the reverse of the analytical process; it was in
trying to understand the historical and contemporary shifts in discourses and prac-
tices of language, culture and nation in a discursive space I agree, conventionally, to
call ‘Francophone Canada’ that I came to the explanatory frame with which I begin.
Moving from language to political economy, it became necessary to engage with
the work of scholars addressing the broad processes which take specific forms in
specific places at specific times.
In the 1970s, scholars such as Wallerstein (1974) and Hechter (1975) examined
the emergence and growth of capitalism as a process of expansion (punctuated by
retractions) beginning in Europe in the sixteenth century, and eventually inscribing
regions around the world in what Wallerstein (1974) called the ‘world-system’ (see
also Braudel 1949, a precursor). Their point of departure was that capitalism creates
a relationship of centre and periphery, because centres, in order to maintain their
position, depend on relationships with zones of production and transformation of
natural resources, and accessible sources of labour. The centre–periphery relation-
ship takes a particular shape, then, in capitalism and is in many ways inherent in it.
In this chapter, I will build on this notion to explore how this centre–periphery
relationship got connected to nationalist ideologies of language, nation, and state,
and to the construction of multilingual peripheries with devalued linguistic rep-
ertoires (as against the élite multilingualisms of the centre). I will then examine
how that assemblage is repositioned under contemporary political economic con-
ditions, with a focus on the case of Francophone Canada.1 While not a canonical
case of European nation-state centre–periphery relations or of classic colonial ones,
Francophone Canada shares many of their features.
Specifically, I will explore the ways in which Francophone Canada was consti-
tuted as a source of labour in the Canadian economy, becoming the first element
in what the sociologist John Porter would later call the ‘vertical mosaic’ (1965),
concentrated in zones of primary resource extraction and industrial transforma-
tion which became Francophone Canada’s ‘bastions traditionnels’. I will show how
this ethno-class position was linked to specific ideologies of language, culture,
and nation which helped reproduce it, and in particular to a concentration of
English-French bilingualism among the Francophone élite and among working-age
male members of the working class (Lieberson 1970). I will then show how cur-
rent economic conditions reproduce this pattern to some extent, while adding to
it the newer notion of bilingualism as a commodifiable resource in its own right, as
well as a means of access to transnational globalized networks. The so-called lan-
guage industries, globalized multilingual service industries, and the revaluing of the
authentic through tourism and terroir, all constitute new areas in which linguistic
and cultural resources are revalued and redeployed.

Creating Difference

In order to understand this and other cases of shifting multilingual peripheries,

it helps to situate them as products of the kind of global expansion of capital dis-
cussed by Wallerstein, Braudel, and others (cf. e.g. Wolf 1982) in which the bour-
geois, liberal democratic nation-state has played a key role. The nineteenth and

[18] Multilingualism and the Periphery

twentieth centuries can be understood as the core moment of development of that
political and economic formation: the nation-state was invented in the interests
of construction of centralized national markets and their (internal and external)
colonial peripheries (Hobsbawm 1990). This is the period of homogenization and
standardization of language and culture as part of the process of making boundaries
(Barth 1969) and making citizens. However, this process also involved the produc-
tion of peripheries, both within newly constructed nation-states and with respect to
Europe as a whole (Hechter 1975).
The legitimization of that process, Hechter argued, hinged on the production
of social difference. While this process is familiar to students of empire, Hechter
argues that a similar analysis applies to the Celtic fringe of Britain, and, by exten-
sion, to other similarly constituted peripheries. Constructing inhabitants of periph-
eries as (less competent) others helps justify the exploitation of their land and of
their labour. Williams (1973) adds that the specific opposition of the country and
the city, which contrasted the civilized but corrupt world of the national urban cen-
tre with the backward but pure and natural world of the rural periphery, helped
bolster Romantic nationalist claims to territory and nationhood while legitimizing
the marginalization of the areas (and social actors) at the heart of the nation-state’s
legitimizing authenticity.
In other words, the centralizing, standardizing, homogenizing nation-state
actively (and necessarily) produces ethnolinguistic and ethnocultural difference as
part of the legitimization of its core political economy. It draws not only on the
dichotomies of Romantic nationalism described by Williams but also on their hier-
archization within modernist models of linear progress, and scientific models of
linear evolution, setting up the modern centre as more progressive and more devel-
oped. It draws also on Enlightenment theories about rationality, linking reason to
liberal democracy and capitalism, and hence to citizenship and wealth.
However, as Bauman and Briggs (2003) show, despite the redistributive prom-
ises of the French Revolution, the masculine bourgeoisie resisted the full implications
of ‘égalité’, using judgments of rationality to construct differential distribution and
divisions of labour along gender, class, and ethno-racial lines. Women, the working
class, subjects of internal and external colonialism, even the male bourgeois citizens
of other nation-states, were constructed as flighty, emotional, weak-willed, corrupt-
ible, or otherwise incapable of the rational thought and behaviour required of mod-
ern citizens (see also Outram 1987). We can also think about this as a productive
Foucauldian process, in which discursive processes of feminization, sexualization,
and racialization are attached to categorization (difference-making) and stratifica-
tion (inequality-making), and used to position specific bodies in specific ways.
Such differences and inequalities are made discursively on a variety of cultural
terrains, involving a range of forms of semiosis: how you dress, where you live, what
you eat, how you talk are all ways of making difference and distinction (Bourdieu
1979). Still, as we know, standardizing language in particular was a powerful way of
making nation-states, given the way it combines both centralizing and uniformizing

R E P O S I T I O N I N G T H E M U LT I L I N G UA L P E R I P H E RY [19]
possibilities, and simultaneously allows for the masking of the privilege and power
inherent in making decisions about what counts as a (proper) language, and what
does not; it is possible to argue that language is learnable, and hence perfectly dem-
ocratic (Higonnet 1980; Bauman and Briggs 2003). The rational procedures of sci-
ence were applied to the project of linguistic standardization and boundary-making,
in the process showing that some languages could be understood as more rational
than others, and hence better adapted to the nation-building endeavours of capital-
ist democracy (Hutton 1999; Errington 2008).
The ideal model, then, was of a polity of speakers of uniformized, standardized
languages; monolingualism became the norm and communication across lan-
guage boundaries the exception to be managed by specialized actors (translators
and interpreters) or a privileged élite capable of a multilingualism which remains
our ideal today, consisting of multiple monolingualisms, that is, the ability to per-
form as a monolingual speaker in more than one language, with no traces of the
boundary-crossing or multiple networks that multilingualism entails in practice
(Heller 2007). Any other form of linguistic diversity was then constructible as irra-
tional and contaminated (or contaminating) (Tabouret-Keller 1988).
Linguistic and cultural differences form resources for the construction of centre–
periphery relations, whether understood as standard vs. vernacular, or dominant vs.
dominated ethnolinguistic and ethnocultural groups. These hierarchized differences
served in particular for the inscription of certain kinds of (speaking) bodies in certain
kinds of economic activities. They also produced language and culture as terrains of
struggle, notably over what counts as legitimate language and who counts as legitimate
speakers (Bourdieu 1982). They construct bilingualism as a key mode of articulation
not only among national élites (as discussed above) but also between centre and periph-
ery. Typically, in this modern industrial regime, the burden of peripheral-vernacular vs.
central-standard bilingualism falls to a class of bilingual brokers drawn from among the
ranks of the marginalized or from another group altogether (Barth 1969).
In many ways, the very notion of multilingualism, and its specific forms of distri-
bution and evaluation (who is understood to be multilingual and who is not, how
one ends up being positioned as likely to become multilingual or not, who has an
interest in multilingualism and who does not, what forms of multilingualism are
considered of value and what forms are not) are a product of the political econ-
omy which produced centre–periphery relations, and indeed form a constitutive
dimension of that process and its reproduction. Even the periphery’s resistance to
its peripheralization has followed the logic of nation-state markets, simply arguing
that it can be understood in exactly the same terms as the centre and should con-
stitute a new one (producing thereby its own, new, peripheries): the decolonizing
and linguistic minority movements seeking emancipation from centralized states
or empires have sought to establish themselves exactly in the image of their oppres-
sors, standardizing their languages, establishing their territorial boundaries, and
constructing their markets. We can think of any of the linguistic minority move-
ments of Western Europe in these terms (Wales, Scotland, Brittany, Corsica), and

[20] Multilingualism and the Periphery

the same is true, for example, of Quebec (Grillo 1989; McDonald 1989; Urla 1993;
Heller 2011). Having been constituted as internal colonies in a centre–periphery
relationship (Hechter 1975), such regions adopted and adapted the logic of the
nation-state to establish themselves as new centres under regional control. The
logic of the nation-state is simply reproduced, creating new standards and new vari-
abilities, new legitimate languages and new stigmatized varieties.

MULTILINGUALISM IN LATE CAPITALISM

However, the continued expansion of capital, and the high modern emergence of
the tertiary sector, or what we often think of as the globalized new economy, has
shifted the position of multilingual peripheries in some ways, although not in oth-
ers. Peripheries continue to occupy marginal territory in the globalized new econ-
omy, but the value of their marginality has changed. New minority elites mobilize
the bilingualism that was once the hallmark of oppression in attempts to reposi-
tion the value of their cultural capital, in economic conditions which newly value
it. Nonetheless, old tensions between standard and vernacular, and between elite
and vernacular forms of bilingualism in particular, remain important grounds for
the working out of attempts to reposition linguistic capital and its holders in con-
temporary transnational markets. In this section, I will briefly review one analysis
of the role of language in late capitalism which is based on a number of studies
of the nature of globalization itself; this analysis holds that language has become
more salient in economic processes in the globalized new economy (see Heller and
Duchêne 2011 for an extended version of this argument). Regarding globalization
I draw notably on Harvey (1989), Giddens (1990), Castells (2000), and Inda and
Rosaldo (2008); regarding the role of language in general and multilingualism in
particular in the globalized new economy, I draw on recent ethnographies of the
shifting multilingualisms of the periphery (see e.g. contributions to Tan and Rubdy
2008 and to Duchêne and Heller 2011, or studies reviewed in Heller 2010).
The argument rests on the premise that our contemporary era is character-
ized more by continuity than by rupture, albeit in ways which destabilize our tak-
en-for-granted assumptions about language, identity, culture, nation, and state. The
expansion of capital set in motion around the sixteenth century is still the central
feature of our political economy; however, the late twentieth century and early
twenty-first constitute a moment of reorganization of the relationship between
capital and governance, between the economic and the political. National markets
and industrial products are insufficient to allow for continued expansion, and for
the increasing saturation of markets. The result has been a re-positioning of the
state, from what we have known as the welfare state to what we call the neoliberal
one, that is, one in which the state is clearer about its role in the support of global
expansion of capital, and in which, as a result, political discourses are subordinated
to economic ones (Fairclough 2006).

R E P O S I T I O N I N G T H E M U LT I L I N G UA L P E R I P H E RY [21]
 Language, in general, and multilingualism, in particular, become more salient
for a number of reasons.

• The saturation of markets leads to an increased emphasis on niche markets and

on niche products or products with added value. One way of developing added
value is through symbolic means, such as discursive ones. Among the semiotic
material available for making distinctions, we are able to mobilize the existing
distinctions of the nation-state among recognized varieties or identities, and the
value accorded to their authenticity. We see this process at work clearly in indus-
tries like tourism (see Coupland, this volume; Pietikäinen, this volume; Pujolar,
this volume), but also in the global circulation of ‘authentic’ goods, and even
in their hybridization in forms of popular culture such as hip-hop (Pennycook
2003).
• The management of globalized chains of production and consumption, includ-
ing of the circulation of niche products and consumers, requires increased reli-
ance on communication and mobilization of diverse linguistic resources, both
for reaching the social actors involved and for branding the products from label
to service.
• Increased competition is also linked to an emphasis on flexibility, whether for
sourcing material resources, human resources, or new markets, with a concomi-
tant value placed on the ability to mobilize diverse linguistic resources. In addi-
tion, older sources of primary resources and labour among internal colonies are
replaced by economic neo-colonies, which also increasingly ensure management
services; simultaneously, the centre relies increasingly on intensified circulation
of human resources.

These processes destabilize the existing nation-state linguistic regime without

destroying it. Peripheries find themselves in need of economic restructuring, since
the primary and secondary sectors on which their reproduction relied have been
relocated. Their populations can then either try to find new frontiers of primary
resource extraction in which to exercise their skills or reinvent themselves within
the context of the tertiary sector. As zones of both authenticity and multilingual-
ism, former peripheries have much to offer in the new circumstances, both in terms
of cultural and linguistic goods, and in terms of useful communicative resources.
They may also find themselves repositioned with respect to old centres and periph-
eries more interested in (or required to) participate in global networks and pro-
cesses than national ones. The linguistic resources of the periphery are reframed in
the new linguistic markets and their value called into question. Indeed, the close
relationship between nation-state and empire peripheralness and peripheral and
élite multilingualism comes under scrutiny.
In the next section, I will take a closer look at how those processes are unfold-
ing in a social space I will refer to as ‘Francophone Canada’, a space whose discur-
sive and political economic development I have been following for some time, and

[22] Multilingualism and the Periphery

which usefully blends a variety of positions as periphery and centre in its history
and its contemporary transformations.

FRANCOPHONE CANADA: REPOSITIONING A

MULTILINGUAL PERIPHERY
From Colonizer to Colonized

Francophone Canada has a complicated history connected to both forms of colo-

nialism, empire and nation-state. It was initially established as New France, a clear
form of European imperialism in which the colony was set up through the dif-
ferentiation, exploitation, and erasure of the indigenous population, whom the
French either harnessed to the production of the primary sources the metropole
sought (furs in this instance) or removed to allow for unrestricted appropriation
of territory (Wolf 1982). It also served as a place to send France’s own surplus
population.
The colonial construction of the indigenous Other has been well-documented
(Irvine and Gal 2000; Errington 2008; Hanks 2010) and does not seem to have
taken a radically different form in New France. Missionaries were charged with civ-
ilizing the ‘savages’ through conversion, which entailed the usual complex relation-
ship between European acquisition of indigenous languages as a means to bring
the word of God to the ‘Indians’, and the teaching of French to them as a means
of bringing them the language of civilization. The fur trade also had its bilingual
brokers, sometimes drawn from the aboriginal population, but also often from the
fringes of the settlers, who acted as brokers between the indigenous suppliers of
furs and their European managers and buyers. These became mythic figures, the
coureurs des bois (literally, runners of the woods), close to nature, and, in the pop-
ular imagination, freer from British (or clerical) domination than those who lived
more settled lives.
This relationship was complicated by the loss of New France to Britain in two
stages, in 1713 and 1763, as a result of treaties ending two of the many wars among
imperial powers which marked the eighteenth century. The French became both
colonizer and colonized, their expertise useful in brokering fur production with the
indigenous population, their settlement of the land problematic when desired for
British uses, but useful as a stand-in claim to territory. Their political allegiance was
always suspect, especially given the strong anchoring of the rivalry between Britain
and France in struggles over their own territories, and subsequently in struggles for
power in Europe and in imperial expansion. The difference, indeed the oppositional
categorization, was part of the discursive landscape. And yet, coexistence on the
northern fringes of North America was also an option, given initial lack of invest-
ment in British colonization, and the relatively larger numbers of Francophones,
with useful knowledge and potentially useful bodies, who stayed behind when their
leaders went back to France.

R E P O S I T I O N I N G T H E M U LT I L I N G UA L P E R I P H E RY [23]
 The resulting ambivalent relationship led to a variety of strategies over the years.
The most dramatic example is the expulsion of the (originally French) Acadians of
the Annapolis Valley (in what is now the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia) in 1755,
after Acadians refused to swear allegiance to the British Crown, and British settlers
began to eye their land. At the other extreme, we find the later declaration of the
colonial governor, who published a report in 1838 arguing for the assimilation of
Francophones into the civilized British population. In between, we find Francophones
participating in brokering with the aboriginal population, in settling their land, and
increasingly providing labour in new areas of primary resource extraction (especially
lumber, fish, and minerals) and their industrial transformation, as well as, by the end
of the nineteenth century, in the growing manufacturing industry.
Despite the fact that Francophones have historically been concentrated in the
St. Lawrence River valley, the heart of New France, Francophone settlements have
had a more complicated relationship to space, and particularly to that form of
boundable space which is amenable to being produced as a national place. To begin
with, Canada’s nationability was in any case subordinated to its status as British col-
ony. Second, it was a colony with a frontier, which Francophones helped to exploit
as labour and to settle, albeit from the late nineteenth century onwards as only one
of many racialized or ethnicized groups, along with immigrants (though people,
including aboriginals, tended to become white Anglophones if they passed into
a more central social position). Third, the Francophone professional and clerical
elite worked to produce a Francophone nationalism constructed in opposition to
the capitalist values of the British rulers; complicit in the Williamsian dichotomi-
zation of country and city, they produced a discourse of spiritual nationalism, tied
to nature, and more specifically to the North, understood as a frontier in which
autarky would be possible (Morissonneau 1978). Francophones moved west and
north, as Canada’s economic reach extended, both in the search for new sources of
wealth and for the means to extract, transport, and secure access to it by building
infrastructure and occupying the territory. At the same time, with this development,
the dream of rural autarky stood in starker and starker contrast to the involvement
of Francophone labour in resource extraction and processing industries, infrastruc-
ture building, and, eventually, in urban factories.
The peripheralization of Francophone Canada thus began in stages, embedded
first in a complex colonial relationship which set up Francophones as peripheral
participants in British-controlled exploitation of natural resources, and pawns in
imperial and post-imperial struggles over the control of North America (first with
France, then with what became the United States), then largely as labour in pri-
mary resource extraction and industry. This position was achieved in part through
the organization of relations of power between Anglophone rulers (and owners)
and Francophone labour through the Francophone elite, drawn from the ranks
of the clergy and the liberal professions (which were in any case constituted via
Church-run education). When Francophone Canada was not actually constituted
in geographically peripheral spaces, it was constituted in socially peripheral ones.

[24] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 Multilingualism is, obviously, one key to understanding the dynamics of the
articulation between centre and periphery, an articulation, I hope to have shown,
constitutive of the interdependence of centre–periphery relations. There are many
different ways in which linguistic difference can be used to dominate or resist domi-
nation; in this case, the British dominated (and Anglophones in Canada still domi-
nate) by remaining largely monolingual. If you want to speak to them, you have to
learn their language, and since they control both the political and economic realms,
speaking to them is difficult to avoid. Just as coureurs des bois were useful for their
knowledge of indigenous languages, the work of learning English, the burden of
bilingualism, fell largely to their Francophone descendants (along, of course, with
Canada’s other minorities). Of course, there are exceptions to this pattern, with
some knowledge of (European) French among the English-speaking élite, and
some managerial tasks involving some version of Canadian French. And, in fact,
most Francophones were not individually bilingual, leaving the work of brokerage,
or articulation, up to their own élite. However, in fact, we possess little knowledge
of the patterns of bi- or multilingualism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
tury, in part because categorization was largely understood as primarily an issue of
race, secondarily of religion, and only partly of language (Heller and Labrie 2003).
Our interest in language is more recent (for reasons I will explore further below)
and dominated by contemporary or future-oriented concerns (although some
work on the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the French Revolution, and on the work
of missionaries in colonial Africa and America provides helpful models of how we
might better attend to history; cf. e.g. Higonnet 1980; Fabian 1986; Branca-Rosoff
1994; Rindler-Schjerve 2003; Errington 2008; Gal 2011).
Still, it seems clear that industrialization and urbanization created a new bound-
ary of articulation within worksites, between Francophone labour, labour recruited
from other (immigrant) groups, and Anglophone management and ownership.
This is a different form of peripheralization that accompanies a growing sense of
Canada as less of a colony and more of a country, and ties Francophones in a differ-
ent way to the world economy.

From Colonized Race to Peripheral Citizen

Through the course of the nineteenth century, the Canadian economy focused less
and less on furs (although they still figure marginally in the Canadian economy
to this day), and more and more on other forms of primary resource extraction,
the transformation of those resources, and other forms of manufacturing. In some
cases, these activities took place in the rural areas long imagined as the redoubt of
Frenchness, as Francophones became increasingly involved in the lumber industry
and in mining. The mythical figures of the coureur des bois and the habitant (peas-
ant), or the fisherman on the high seas, were joined by the bûcheron (lumberjack)
and the draveur (responsible for getting the logs down rivers to the mills), although

R E P O S I T I O N I N G T H E M U LT I L I N G UA L P E R I P H E RY [25]
not, it must be said, by the equally present mill worker, fish plant worker, or their
eventual colleague, the miner. (The mythical female figure was, predictably, a bearer
of children or a celibate devoted to the people, cf. Pujolar, this volume.)
But even with a diversifying economy, the particular functioning of agriculture
in rural areas produced surplus labour (Ramirez 1991), and developing urban
industrialization needed workers. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
saw a major population movement not only from east to west and north but also
from rural to urban areas, both in Canada and in the United States. In both coun-
tries, ethnolinguistic difference was used as an organizing principle to legitimize
the restriction of Francophone and immigrant groups to the ranks of the working
class, and simultaneously to prevent the development of class consciousness and
solidarity.
This period is also the period of the consolidation of the United States and of
Canadian independence (1867), although Canada continued to act as part of the
British Empire (more specifically, a ‘Dominion’ thereof). Politically and economi-
cally, Canada began to organize itself as a central producer, not a colonial provider
of raw materials to the metropole, although its economy remained (and in many
ways today still remains) based on primary resources. The economy was dependent
on capital investment and control by Anglophone owners, who recruited workers
first from the available Francophone population, and then, increasingly, through
immigration.
Typically, Anglophone (and usually Protestant) owners and managers were res-
identially segregated from the (usually Catholic) workers, living to the west (and
upwind) of their factories, or on higher ground. The workers lived closer to their
workplaces, often in neighbourhoods organized around their places of worship
(usually Catholic), and ethnolinguistically separated from each other, if not in sepa-
rate towns altogether. (Welland, Ontario, for example, still bears the traces of French
Canadian, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, and Croatian working-class neighbourhoods,
while Woonsocket, Rhode Island, is largely populated by the descendants of French
Canadians, who replaced more expensive Americans in the textile mill.)
Lieberson (1970) points to the actual workers as sites of bilingualism in post-war
Montreal; my own work in a Montreal factory in the late 1970s identified a small
group of bilingual Irish-origin superintendents as the sites of articulation between
Francophone labour (whom they oversaw) and Anglophone management (Heller
2011). Laid-off male workers in Welland, Ontario, in the 1990s, however, described
to us how they made friends with their Italian or Polish co-workers, joshing with
them in English, or trading a few words in each other’s languages, though they sat
at separate tables in the cafeteria, went home to different neighbourhoods, and
belonged to different sections of the Catholic service organization the Knights of
Columbus, attached to different churches. Still today, construction workers on oil
sands sites in Northern Alberta describe how they are forced to learn English ‘on
the fly’ when they start to work under Anglophone foremen and with Anglophone
co-workers, but how workers wear Acadian, Newfoundland, or Nova Scotia flags on

[26] Multilingualism and the Periphery

their hard hats and congregate in homogeneous groups in the eating and sleeping
areas of the camps. Nonetheless, it is the ones who learn English the best (or the
fastest), who are granted supervisory capacity over their more monolingual fellow
workers, or who simply emerge as leaders of their group when it comes time for
talking to Anglophone others. In no case is it the monolingual Anglophones who
need to learn French (or any other language, for that matter).
This is one dimension of the constitution and reproduction of the vertical mosaic
described by Porter (1965), and more specifically of the economic peripheraliza-
tion of Francophones in Canadian and American industrial capitalism. Language
is still not the most salient characteristic of the social categorization in operation
(people understand themselves still to some extent in racial terms, or at least in eth-
nocultural ones), but it remains an important element. More importantly for our
purposes here, however, it is the distribution of multilingualism among the pop-
ulation (restricted to active workers, sometimes to specific ranks responsible for
relations between workers and managers), and in the lives of individual bilinguals
(restricted to their lives as workers), which helps explain both how multilingualism
worked and works in the constitution and reproduction of the periphery, and why
it is there that we find it, under conditions of industrial modernity.

From Periphery to Centre

Those same conditions underlie the modes of resistance to peripheralization which

have been discursively available. The constitution of the idea of the homogeneous
nation as normal and normative, and of the national as the principle of social orga-
nization, rendered the idea of the ‘nation’ available as a means to dominate, and
therefore also as a means to resist. As I noted earlier, initially the idea of ‘nation’
was mobilized by the Francophone élite to resist British domination, not in the
form of a liberal democratic nation-state, but rather as a spiritual, organic body,
a nation in the Herderian sense. Nonetheless, the mobilization of this concept in
order to justify a nation-state became quickly available; while not dominant dur-
ing the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries (for reasons having to do
with the suppression of state-building liberal democratic movements in the early
nineteenth-century British colony, the hegemony of Anglophone interests in the
emerging Canadian state in the late nineteenth century, and the conservative poli-
tics of the Catholic Church), it did circulate.
It was not, however, until the mid-twentieth century that the idea was able to
gain some purchase. There are a number of reasons for this, largely having to do with
the growth of wealth in the post-war period, Cold War interest in the far North, and
economic expansion in the North and West, all of which drew the Anglophone élite
away from the centre of traditional Francophone bastions and produced greater
access to wealth for Francophones themselves. There was room for some move-
ment, and resources to accomplish it.

R E P O S I T I O N I N G T H E M U LT I L I N G UA L P E R I P H E RY [27]
 The idea of the nation was available as a means for leveraging such social mobil-
ity, in Canada as elsewhere. What needed undoing was the idea of pan-Canadian
solidarity among Francophones, while the more general movement of decolo-
nization and nation-building of the 1960s provided an alternative model. The
linguistic minorities of First World states proclaimed solidarity with European
colonies seeking freedom and used the template of the nation-state to argue for
the legitimacy of new ones, distinct and liberated from their former centres (think
of Brittany, Corsica, Catalunya, Wales, Scotland, Friesland). In the specific case
of Francophone Canada, as is well-known, the proposal has been to constitute
Quebec as a Francophone state, independent from Canada, as a means to attend
better to Francophones whose linguistic difference has been used to justify their
exploitation and marginalization, and to safeguard the nation understood to consti-
tute the foundation of that difference. Francophones elsewhere in Canada (indeed,
in North America) are invited to join the Quebécois nation, or, possibly, attempt to
follow the Quebec model and constitute a nation-state of their own.
The mobilization of this model, of course, reproduces all of its effects. Far from
destabilizing the centre–periphery relationship, it merely displaces it. Francophone
Quebec becomes a new centre, with its own periphery, albeit one shared uncom-
fortably with the Canadian state to which Quebec remains tied. Quebec’s con-
struction of itself as a centre is seen in its economic relations, for example, in its
exploitation of the natural resources of the indigenous-inhabited North (notably
in hydroelectricity; for example, one of the first acts of the nationalist government
of the 1960s was the nationalization of that industry); in its political relations (e.g.
increased control over immigration, the gaining of representation on key interna-
tional bodies such as la Francophonie, the establishment of a foreign policy and
overseas Délégations du Quebec, internal legislation on language and citizenship);
and in its cultural and linguistic ones (the establishment of language planning
agencies, national media, education policies)—in short, all the usual strategies of
nation-building. The periphery is thus not only the resource-rich North but also
the rest of Francophone North America, and populations and practices whose dif-
ference makes them available as Other, and as marginalizable in social, economic
and political terms. Indeed, this effect has been deeply problematic for Quebec, as
it tries to legitimize the Quebécois centre as a liberal, democratic state attentive to
difference and marginalization because of its own history.
For the issue that concerns us here, we can see how centrification changes the
value placed on multilingualism. Quebec has been explicitly constituted as a mono-
lingual state, insofar as the 1977 Charter of the French Language proclaimed French
the only official language of the province and defined measures to make it the domi-
nant, and in some cases only required, language of key domains. Multilingualism is
valuable in so far as it does not destabilize monolingual domains or individuals and
reproduces the dominant ideology of whole bounded systems in contained contact
one with the other. The vernacular which serves as an emblem of the marginal-
ized and oppressed status of Francophones is devalued and understood to require

[28] Multilingualism and the Periphery

correction (although, of course, it also legitimizes the authenticity of the nation,
landing Quebec in the same contradiction between authenticity and authority
which has long dogged nation-states). Particularly problematic, of course, is the
way in which that vernacular bears traces of contact with English. And of particular
concern has been the effort to shift what has been understood as the burden of
bilingualism, asking non-Francophones to learn French, and freeing Francophones
from the obligation to learn English.
However, it is not only the contradictions of the modern nation-state which
make it difficult for Quebec to claim its legitimacy. The political economic shifts
of the last part of the twentieth century, and the early part of this one, have made it
difficult to sustain the work of making homogeneity out of diversity and of keep-
ing peripheries in their place. In the next section, I will consider some of the ways
in which these shifts call into question what the centre–periphery relationship is
about, where it lies, and what the role of linguistic diversity is in producing and
reproducing it.

Repositioning the Periphery: Late Capitalism and the

Globalized New Economy

The restructurings of late capitalism have repositioned centre and periphery in

some interesting ways. Off-shoring production has left former centres in search of
new economic bases, for the most part anchored in the tertiary (symbolic) sector.
At the same time, the management of global capital itself shifts, leaving former cen-
tres sometimes managed, or at least serviced, from afar (think of the complex ways
in which Indian call centres relate to clients in Britain and the United States; cf.
Sonntag 2006; Cowie 2007). The saturation of markets places an emphasis on the
development of niche markets and products with added value, both of which are
constructed largely through capital of distinction (Bourdieu 1979).
Multilingualism becomes important as a means of articulating global chains of
consumption and production, and as a source of production and management of
capital of distinction. In particular, both the old standardized variety and the mes-
sier vernacular variety are called into play; the first facilitates the (sometimes des-
perate) attempts to Taylorize the globalized new economy (whose communicative
activities are somewhat less amenable to Taylorization than manual or mechanical
labour), while the second harnesses the vernacular indexing of authenticity as a
source of added value (as against industrially produced goods and services).
The monolingualizing constructions of the centre and periphery in Francophone
Canada encounter these tensions in particular ways. First, the objective of centrifica-
tion was always to allow Francophones full access to modernity, but as Francophones
(that is, without having to pass as Anglophones). While the Canadian economy was
always dependent on international, and in particular English-speaking, markets,
Francophone Canada attempted to develop international Francophone relations

R E P O S I T I O N I N G T H E M U LT I L I N G UA L P E R I P H E RY [29]
based on old relations of empire. It has become, however, increasingly difficult to
avoid English, not only because of older economic networks and relations but also
because English has become the major lingua franca of late capitalism (Melchers
and Shaw 2003; Rubdy and Saraceni 2006; Pennycook 2007). English thus now
indexes both older relations of colonialist inequality and new forms of access to the
global economy.
This has triggered fierce debate within Quebec regarding access to English, nota-
bly through schooling and post-secondary education: on one side, we find the pro-
ponents of construction and maintenance of Francophone monolingual institutions
of socialization (linked to a modernist nationalist view of education as an institu-
tion for producing citizens), who argue that learning English is at best a private affair
and not the responsibility of the state; and on the other, we find the proponents of
increasing English instruction in school or easing access to English-language edu-
cational institutions (linked to a neoliberal view of education as an institution for
facilitating individual success). Recently, Quebec has seen both attempts to require
certain segments of the population to attend not only elementary and secondary
school in French but also post-secondary colleges should they continue their edu-
cation (not universities, however). At the same time, the provincial government
has promoted the introduction of intensive (‘immersion’-type) English instruction
in Grade 6 in French-language schools (that is, for students who are typically 11 to
12 years old). In addition, in Quebec as elsewhere, there has been a rise in interest
in other languages, notably Spanish, understood as a gateway to Latin America.
In other parts of Francophone Canada, the French-English bilingualism which
was a hallmark of peripheralness (and inferiority) has now become a distinct advan-
tage, facilitating access to both Anglophone and Francophone global networks. The
lack of ability to claim territorial boundaries or rootedness has turned into the pos-
sibility for claiming mobile, global citizenship. This is most striking in the case of
‘Acadie’. The 1755 Deportation of Acadians from what became Nova Scotia to vari-
ous parts of North America, the Caribbean, and Europe was long constructed as
the tragic fragmentation of a beautiful, bucolic national dream (and used as such
to politically mobilize Acadians in laying claims to national, including territorial,
rights). Not being able to lay claim to a heartland or bastion was a problem to be
overcome. The diaspora has now also laid the basis for the construction of a sense
of global acadianité, facilitating the mobility of people and of cultural products, and
legitimizing new Acadian claims to being authentic global citizens, that is, true citi-
zens of the world.
The arrival of Francophones from outside Canada, which has been part of the
global circulation of skilled labour, has also been experienced in two, contradictory
ways. On the one hand, it is understood as a potential threat to the reproduction
of the authentic nation, while on the other, it is seen as a passport to globalization.
By incorporating immigrants into Francophone institutions and social networks,
Francophone Canadians can appropriate the global ties those immigrants bring
with them.

[30] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 It is important to emphasize that the older idea of the authentic nation remains
potent not only because of existing investments in that particular discursive forma-
tion and its attendant markets but also because of the new conditions which retain
and recast its value. As capital of distinction it is mobilized in many of the new
economic sectors which both former centres and former peripheries can (indeed,
must) develop. Notable among these are tourism and the development of produits
du terroir (Le Menestrel 1999; Barham 2007), marketable commodities whose dif-
ference is based on the authenticity of local production (bearing the characteristics
of the particular corner of the earth from which they sprang, and which by defini-
tion is unique; for obvious reasons, this is often used for branding food products).
One of the ways in which products can be authentified is through the use of the very
vernaculars which were long associated with the organic nation, while also stigma-
tized as indices of the backwardness of the nation’s pre-modern wanderings in the
dark (see e.g. Le Menestrel 1999; Coupland, Garrett, and Bishop 2005; Bunten
2008; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). That tension too remains, as Taylorizable
sectors such as call centres (see Cameron 2001; Sonntag 2006; Cowie 2007; Boutet
2008; Duchêne 2009), or even the management of multiple clients and providers
in sectors such as tourism, exert pressure to conform to modernist modes of mul-
tilingualism (each variety in the repertoire understood to be a separate standard),
while authentification depends on the vernacular. We see this tension, for example,
in negotiations over linguistic choices in the production or delivery of tourist prod-
ucts in the context of heritage tourism (French and English? French only? Which
French? See Heller 2011: 136–138.).
Perhaps most importantly, the periphery becomes a source of added value,
albeit as a kind of commodified periphery. It even becomes transportable as such,
whether through Acadian-type diasporic claims to global citizenship, travel, and
tourism or through the circulation of cultural goods on world circuits (e.g. of music,
art, crafts, or food: see McLaughlin, this volume). Centres equally become mobile,
attached less to territory than to capital.
For Francophone Canada, the moment of centrification seems to have been
lost. Instead, late capitalism commodifies its identity, potentially reshaping the sub-
jectivity of its members and its relationship to language and culture. The formerly
hegemonic linkages among uniformized languages, cultures, spaces, and identities,
with their legitimizing historical narratives, have not disappeared, but it has become
more difficult to experience them as hegemonic, and therefore natural. Partly this is
because of their commodification, but it is also due to the increasing mobility and
dispersion of the centre–periphery relations of industrial capitalism.

CONCLUSION

This may be the most salient thing about the changes underway: they ask us to think
again about what it means to invest (even believe) in the social categories which we

R E P O S I T I O N I N G T H E M U LT I L I N G UA L P E R I P H E RY [31]
have long used to organize ourselves and our relation to the world, notably to the
resources we value and to the ways we regulate their production and distribution.
I will not be so bold as to try to predict how things will unfold; rather, my aim here
has been to sketch out the importance of understanding how what we think of as
‘multilingualism’ is inextricably tied to the specific political economic conditions of
our times, and those times are stretching our imagination to its limits.
We certainly need to stop understanding multilingualism as an observable fact,
and see it instead as a construct produced by specific ideologies linking ideas about
language to ideas about how to make differences harnessable to producing unequal
positions in relations of power (Irvine and Gal 2000). Its shapes and their value are
tied to the position of social actors in particular regimes of production, that is, in
particular markets, spatialized in what are now increasingly fragmented relations of
centre and periphery.
It is usually the case that relations of power are seen most clearly from a posi-
tion of relative disadvantage; as Bourdieu pointed out, the dominant have a vested
interest in not seeing how they dominate (Bourdieu 1982), although I would add
that that may be particularly true in liberal democracies legitimized by ideologies of
equality and meritocracy. The periphery thus affords us a privileged vantage point
on processes that affect us all.

NOTES

1. The research on which this chapter is based was funded by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research. I am grateful for their support,
and for the many things I have learned from both project participants (who
must remain nameless here) and the other members of the research team:
Gabriel Asselin, Maurice Beaudin, Lindsay Bell, Michelle Daveluy, Mireille
McLaughlin, and Hubert Noël. I am, of course, solely responsible for errors.

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[34] Multilingualism and the Periphery

C H A P TER 3
What Makes Art Acadian?
MIREILLE MCL AUGHLIN

COMMODIFYING THE MARGINS IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY

In this chapter, I show that multilingual capital, like any form of capital, participates
in the reproduction of unequal post-colonial and post-national power relations
(Bourdieu 1982; Heller 2002, 2010). This is particularly evident in the case of the
peripheral multilingual space of l’Acadie, a space traversed by globalizing processes
and ideologies. Acadie is a transnational Canadian and American linguistic minority,
peripheral to cultural centres, be those centres defined as Canadian, international
Francophone, Québécois, North American, or even global (see Heller, this volume;
Savoie 2000). Acadian elites have invested heavily in political activism seeking rep-
resentation and partnerships with the Canadian state, at a time when welfarism
and industrialism were in their heyday (Heller and Labrie 2003). In this modern-
izing shift, prescriptive ideologies of language (Kroch and Small 1978) were used
to argue for control of school boards, for access to publicly funded media, and for
public services in French. These negotiations inscribed Acadians in territorialized
power-relations at the community level, in relationships with the English-speaking
majorities and with Québécois cultural elites. It is in a context of nation-building,
reliant on ideologies linking the ‘quality’ of languages to the survival of cultures,
that the multilingualism characteristic of Acadians’ lived experiences was erased
in favour of ideologies of monolingualism (Heller 1999). Today, however, Acadian
peripheral multilingualism is proving to be marketable in a global economy of niche
markets centred on the consumption of cool, authentic and counter-cultural prod-
ucts (Da Silva et al. 2007 Kelly-Holmes and Atkinson 2007).
The marketing of Acadian cultural production for a globalizing economy has
rippling effects on Acadie, its practices, its ideological discourses, and the valued
linguistic capital within its space. This globalization of Acadian cultural produc-
tion is currently presented by the state as mandatory: minorities, in this context,
have to be competitive on a global economic terrain if they are to subsist in a global
economy. In ethnographic fieldwork carried out from 2006 to 2010, I followed the
effects of globalization and a repositioning of state policies, from welfare to neolib-
eral, on Acadian identity through the field of cultural production. Acadian artists
mobilize local forms of multilingualism to index their peripheral cultural position,
to present themselves as counter-cultural, and to construct Acadian identity as cool
for global niche markets (McLaughlin 2010; Heller 2003). It is peripheral multi-
lingualism itself, traditionally perceived by Acadian nationalist elites as problem-
atic, which becomes a resource within the global mediascape (Appadurai 1996;
Kelly-Holmes and Atkinson 2007; Kelly-Holmes 2010; Leppänen and Pietikäinen
2010). This peripheral multilingual cool, however, participates in the reproduction
of ideologies linking authenticating linguistic practices to nationalism, race, and
ethnicity (Coupland 2003; Jaworski and Thurlow 2004, 2010; Coupland, Garrett,
and Bishop 2005; Kelly-Holmes and Mautner 2010). In this way, it is a source of
contradiction for local artists and community actors as they mobilize cosmopoli-
tan ideologies to redefine Acadian identity as civically inclusive, all while having to
rely on stereotypical understandings of identity to render their products legible and
successful on global markets.
This chapter follows the ways in which peripheral multilingualism is gaining
value as linguistic capital and is therefore participating in the restructuration of eth-
nic categories. First, I will discuss theories of cosmopolitanism and link them to
contemporary sociolinguistic theories of multilingualism as a potential terrain for
challenging neo-imperialist power relations. I will then analyse how Acadian art-
ists orient both towards and against nationalist language ideologies to construct
a post-colonial critique of prescriptive language ideologies. In a global landscape
where cultural hybridity is deemed emancipatory, artists mobilize peripheral mul-
tilingualism to construct a cosmopolitan stance. This cosmopolitan stance relies,
however, on the reification of ethnic boundaries and ethnic stereotypes which can
be understood and marketed in the global context. As such, I argue that it is impor-
tant to consider multilingual practices as social capital and to track how they reify
or reorganize ethnic categories.

GLOBALIZATION AND THE NEW COSMOPOLITAN SUBJECTIVITIES

In political philosophy, debates around cosmopolitanism usually centre on the ten-

sions between cultural differences and political liberalism (Kymlicka 1995) and
upon questions of the recognition of difference and the politics of redistribution
of resources in order to augment the status of minorities (Habermas 2000; Fraser
and Honneth 2003). Today, cosmopolitanism is taken up by political philosophers
as a way to critique the West’s implicit naturalization of its own cultural beliefs as
‘reason’ in core institutions such as the nation-state. Iris Marion Young (1990), for
instance, draws on cultural and gender differences as the political positions that can

[36] Multilingualism and the Periphery

balance the ways in which Western ‘reason’ continues to produce social inequalities.
In short, cosmopolitanism is a political ideology that reflects upon the conditions
for an equitable dialogue across cultural, religious, and ethnic differences.
If cosmopolitanism is a site of discussion in social theory, it is often taken up
as an ideological stance by social actors who wish to argue against localized and
nationalized forms of power. Social actors invested in global networks tend to adopt
cosmopolitan standpoints as a way to legitimate their own transnational and/or
hybrid cultural capital (Davidson 2005; O’Reilly 2005). Sociolinguists and linguis-
tic anthropologists note that constructions of self as cosmopolitan are often prev-
alent amongst youths who are, much like the participants of this study, a part of
an upwardly mobile fraction of a previously marginalized category (Smith-Hefner
2007). Cosmopolitan youths often define themselves in opposition to prescrip-
tive national projects, on the one hand, and localized marginal populations, on the
other. They do this by participating in the construction of global networks where
their multilingual and ‘exotic’ linguistic practices are valued through various forms
of linguistic commodification. The affinities between economic globalization and
cosmopolitanism lead political economist David Harvey to a scathing critique of
contemporary uses of cosmopolitanism: ‘If this is what contemporary cosmopoli-
tanism is about, then it is nothing other than an ethical and humanitarian mask for
hegemonic neoliberal practices of class domination and financial and militaristic
imperialism’ (Harvey 2009: 84). Cosmopolitanism is, therefore, at present prob-
lematically embedded in neoliberal agendas and the different values attached to
transnational cultural capital (be this transnationalism acquired through personal
travels or mediated through involvement in niched media products).
Cosmopolitanism can serve, however, as a counter-discourse to nationalism
and its contingent discourses of languages as bounded systems (Heller 2009).
Cosmopolitanism as a political ideology capable of deconstructing or reconstruct-
ing nationalism was indeed the mark of my research participants. The group of
twenty-three artists and community workers who participated in my study, and/
or whose press clippings I followed as documentation, were generally active in
the independent global music scene, in their respective genres (from rap to world-
beats to acid jazz to folk-rock). The participants were well-travelled, most having
sojourned, studied, and worked in other parts of Canada and the world, some born
and raised elsewhere. Many split their time between projects in major urban centres
(Montreal, Toronto, New York, New Orleans, Paris) and geographically and eco-
nomically peripheral but far-from-culturally-isolated rural communities. They were
invested in a cosmopolitan, hybridizing view of cultural identities, some claiming
Metis status, others their Acadian-African origins. Most strove to access alter-
globalizing networks (aka, networks which were felt to be an alternative to main-
stream cultural production and its purported homogenizing effects) and all were
invested in creating contemporary, urban, cosmopolitan, and multicultural images
of Acadianité. These Acadian artists were not the exception: they shared a similar
lifestyle to the majority of contemporary Acadian artists. Their multidimensional

W H AT M A K E S A RT A C A D I A N ? [37]
symbolic capital (Lahire 2011) had the most value in globalizing, multi-ethnic,
networks. These were where authenticating non-prescriptive (read non-nationalist)
linguistic practices came to be an important marker of Acadian global hip. Peripheral
multilingualism granted access to and success in these spaces, most of which, such
as a Celtic music festival or the global rap scene, relied on authenticating but anti-
nationalistic performances of ethnicity, as was the case for Radio Radio, discussed
below.

PERIPHERAL MULTILINGUALISM AS LINGUISTIC CAPITAL

IN THE GLOBAL ART SCENE

Modern cultural production has expanded on a logic of authenticity and originality

which promotes the commodification of counter-cultural products (Harvey 1990;
Heath and Potter 2005). From the expansion of world music to the spread of global
hip-hop, marginality is a popular trope of the contemporary global music and art
scenes (Leppänen and Pietikäinen 2010). It is therefore no surprise that Acadian
cultural producers mobilize the peripheral position of Acadian identity to access
global markets. Artists mobilize the notion of the periphery and peripheral multi-
lingualism to construct their position as speaking against local and global systems
of oppression. It is, paradoxically, neoliberal public policies and a global public in
search of distinction that allows for the current emergence of Acadian ‘hip’ on the
global scene. Here, as elsewhere, the lines between political cosmopolitanism and
the commodification of subjectivities are often blurred.
Sociolinguistics is well positioned to understand the tensions of cosmopolitan-
ism and commodification (and the paradoxical commodification of cosmopolitan-
ism). The field has often contested nationalist ideologies of monolingualism that
legitimated (and continue to legitimate) the social exclusion of non-dominant
speakers (Bourdieu 1982). Critical sociolinguistics has tackled the ideologies
that rendered monolingual nationalist ideologies operational: the belief that lan-
guages are bounded systems, linked to one specific culture, organized within neat
territorialized and often racialized boundaries (Pietikäinen 2008; Heller 2010).
Sociolinguistics critiqued these views, arguing for the recognition of language as a
situated resource (Blommaert 2003; Pietikäinen 2008) and of multilingualism as
central to the daily experiences of speakers (Heller 2009).
Nationalism has been critiqued for reproducing social inequalities through
bounded and prescriptive understandings of languages (Hobsbawm 1990).
Linguistic nationalism participates in the definition of citizenship or group belong-
ing and reproduces inequalities in the job market and in access to the public space
by qualifying and disqualifying individuals on the basis of the construction of lin-
guistic competence. Because of nationalism’s focus on prescriptivism and linguistic
homogeneity, contemporary sociolinguistics often critiques nationalism by focus-
ing, instead, on the emancipatory power of the recognition of hybrid, multilingual

[38] Multilingualism and the Periphery

linguistic practices. Multilingualism is, here, presented as the counter-discourse
capable of keeping nationalist inequalities in check. In the field of language and cul-
tural production, Pennycook, studying the ‘mixing, borrowing, shifting and sam-
pling of language, lyrics and ideas’ (2010: 599) typical of hip-hop, comments that:

The mixed codes of the street, and the hypermixes of hip-hop, pose a threat to the lin-
guistic, cultural, and political stability urged by national language policies and wished
into place by frameworks of linguistic analysis that posit separate and enumerable lan-
guages. Hip-hop language use can therefore be read as resistant and oppositional not
merely in terms of lyrics, but also in terms of the language choice. Keeping it linguisti-
cally real (adopting the code of local authenticity) is often a threat to those who would
prefer to keep it linguistically pure. (ibid. 602)

I contribute to the reflection on multilingualism and its capacity to undo social

inequalities by focusing on globalization and the uses of multilingualism in cultural
production. Opposition and resistance are not outside of the discourses that give
them salience. I argue that it is because globalization reentextualizes stereotypes
inherited from colonization, such as nation, race, and gender that linguistic hybrid-
ity and multilingualism are gaining value in the global cultural scene. As such, I
question multilingualism’s capacity to undo social inequalities and wonder at the
global art scene’s attachment to essentialist understandings of cultural and ethnic
differences. A longitudinal ethnography of Acadian cultural production reveals that
the mixing and borrowing typical of global cultural production are not without
constraints or consequences. While it allows for emancipatory practices in regard
to territorialized and local nationalist ideologies reliant on linguistic prescriptiv-
ism, it also relies on cultural authentication that informs the circulation of cultural
products, as well as the trajectories of cultural producers. In a call to deepen our
understanding of language practices and power relations in a globalized world, I
trace how ideologies and practices of multilingualism and language hybridity are
themselves becoming capital in the global art scene, with consequences for what
counts as Acadian art and who can produce it.

THE ERASURE AND RE-EMERGENCE OF ACADIAN

MULTILINGUALISM

While there is certainly debate as to how to define the Acadian community (see
McLaughlin and Leblanc 2009), the Canadian state predominantly conceptual-
izes the community as a French-speaking linguistic minority residing in Atlantic
Canada. There are also Acadians along the East Coast of the United States and
links to Cajun identity in Louisiana, but as I document a Canadian shift in policy,
I will focus on Acadians residing in Canada and their institutional discourses. In
Canada, statistics usually link Acadian identity to the predominant use of French

W H AT M A K E S A RT A C A D I A N ? [39]
both as a first learned official language and a language still spoken at home. When
taking these linguistic criteria as elements to define the group, Acadians (includ-
ing different types of ethnic and racial categories but excluding individuals who
have English as a first language but who may consider themselves to be Acadian)
represent approximately 12 per cent of the population of Atlantic Canada. Again,
when focused solely on linguistic criteria (a move the Canadian state is wont to
use to manage its official bilingualism), Acadians share the territory of the Atlantic
Provinces with 85 per cent of people whose first language is English and 3 per cent of
the population whose first language is neither French nor English (Statistic Canada
2006). Other types of counting, along indigenous, ethnic, or racial lines, produce a
more varied but not dissimilar portrait: Acadians (this time as a white-settler eth-
nic category and not as a multiracial French-speaking one) are demographically the
most important linguistic and/or cultural minority in Atlantic Canada, alongside
an English-speaking white-settler majority.
Acadian linguistic practices have long been a site of moral panics and exoticism
in Canada. Many studies have shown, for instance, that Acadians show important
levels of linguistic insecurity all while valuing the authenticity of their practices
(Boudreau and Dubois 1993; LeBlanc 2010). The majority of Acadians (90%)
are French-English bilingual (Statistic Canada 2006). While Acadians speak a
variety of linguistic registers in French, they are stereotypically represented as
having a specific phonetic ‘accent’ when speaking French, one that differs from
Québécois French. Linguists explain this difference in terms of regions of origin
and subsequent political isolation (Péronnet 1989; Poirier 1994). Acadians origi-
nally migrated from Poitou Charente, whereas most Quebec migration originated
from Normandy. Acadians were politically isolated from exchanges with France
and Nouvelle-France (Québec) when the colony was traded to the British Crown
in 1713, some sixty years prior to France’s cession of Nouvelle France. Throughout
most of Canadian history, Acadians were subjected to (mostly) assimilationist
imperial politics (Griffiths 2005). These politics kept them at the margin of the
economy and eventually fostered an Acadian nationalist movement. While this
movement allowed for the emergence of a French-speaking Acadian elite, the major-
ity of Acadians survived through a subsistence economy coupled with contractual
employment as working-class employees in English-run businesses ( Johnson 1999;
see also previous chapter in which Monica Heller gives an overview of these histori-
cal processes).
Outside of Atlantic Canada, Acadians are often assumed to all speak Chiac, a
linguistic variety typical of South Eastern New Brunswick, characterized by the use
of words considered archaic in standard French and the inclusion of English mor-
phemes and syntax. English proximity, its prevalence in social life, as well as its cen-
tral position as the language of economic modernization, meant that many Acadians
living in contact regions started incorporating English phonemes, morphemes,
and syntax when speaking French (Perrot 2006). A portion of the population also
practised (and continues to practise) in-group code-switching (Acadians might

[40] Multilingualism and the Periphery

switch from French to English and French again within the same conversation, if
not the same sentence). The presence of code-mixing and code-switching in the
linguistic repertoires of some Acadians has long been indexed by French Canadian
and Acadian nationalist elites as the effects of oppression, if not the marker of the
Acadian working class’s acculturation to English values. It would index, in other
words, participation in the English-speaking world, be it through employment,
marriage, or media consumption. Code-mixing and code-switching were therefore
also perceived by Acadian and French Canadian elites as gateway practices leading
to linguistic assimilation. As such, nationalists put a lot of emphasis on speaking
and learning ‘proper French’, often presenting the inability to do so as a mark of a
lack of education, national sentiment, and even, perhaps, laziness on the part of the
deviant speakers.
As a result of nationalist ideologies, the quality of the French language (in terms
of closeness to or deviation from a prescribed/perceived norm) and the capacity
to speak French without English interferences soon became a central site of inter-
ventionism for French Canadian and Acadian elites (Heller 2002). The contrast
between linguistic purism and mixed practices also served to legitimate unequal
access to positions of power within the Acadian community itself. Acadian multilin-
gualism, a product of uneven economic conditions, was problematic for commun-
ity leaders, who wished to erase it (Irvine and Gal 2001). And yet, contemporary
economic conditions, combined with the democratization of access to media pro-
duction, have rendered multilingualism impossible to ignore. What is more, in a
knowledge economy, Acadians now fare economically better in regions where they
can mobilize their multilingualism. Is it any wonder that this multilingualism, born
out of marginalization, policed by nationalist prescriptivism, is now mobilized to
construct the type of counter-cultural claims valued in the globalized media-scape
and cultural markets?
The inscription of Acadian cultural products in global networks has brought
about an observable ideological change as to the value of peripheral multilingual
practices. Artists now mobilize peripheral multilingualism to position themselves
as speaking for the traditionally excluded. But, where, in past representation, this
bilingualism was a symbol of oppression, it is now touted as a symbol of periph-
eral cool (Pennycook 2010; Pietikäinen 2010). That is to say, multilingualism and
multilingual capital are gaining value as symbolic capital in global markets. To doc-
ument the ideological transformation at work, I mobilize data from two studies.
In 2000–2002, I carried out a series of interviews with Acadian writers. The focus
of the study was on their representation of the field of literature and the value of
multilingual practices in it. In 2006–2010, I focused on the emergence of niche
markets for Acadian artists and how it changed state investment in the production
of Acadian cultural production. In this part of the chapter, I investigate how ideolo-
gies of prescriptivism are being superseded by ideologies of multilingual cosmo-
politanism. I then follow how peripheral cool is constructed and its consequences
for local artists. Efforts to inscribe Acadian identity in the global market raise the

W H AT M A K E S A RT A C A D I A N ? [41]
stakes on linguistic and cultural grounds. Ethnic, national, and cultural stereotypes
have capital on global markets (Piller 2003; Kelly-Holmes 2010). Language plays
a central role in the production of these marketable stereotypes, especially for lin-
guistic minorities. In most instances, its communicative value is erased while its
symbolic value is fetishized (Kelly-Holmes 2000). What matters most in the fet-
ishization of language is its ‘authenticity’. Authenticity is itself socially negotiated
(Coupland 2003; Pietikäinen, this volume), and generally based on the perceived
moral-economic value of a practice. The definition of what counts as authentic and
legitimate Acadian linguistic practices is a fertile ground for local debates.
Global markets are avid consumers of cultural authenticity, one that is linked to
nationalist understanding of the links between language and culture. Here is where
Acadian peripheral multilingualism, be it local varieties such as Chiac, Acadjonne,
or code-alternations between these varieties, standard French and English, gains
value. Whether in Canada, Québec, or Europe, the public apparently buys into
ideologies which link Acadian artists’ use of Chiac or Acadjonne to an exotic but
authentic performance of identity. This, however, is a source of tension among
Acadians who, first of all, do not all speak Chiac or Acadjonne and who, second of
all, have undergone close to two centuries of language prescriptivism. In the next
sections, I explore how the emergence of a global market has undone ideologies of
prescriptivism in favour of ideologies where authenticating peripheral multilingual-
ism is valued. I focus on the discourse and trajectories of two Acadian artists and
one rap group: Mila, a writer in her thirties; Dano, a multidisciplinary artist best
known for producing an animated teleseries called Acadieman; and Radio Radio, a
rap band who are topping the Québécois music charts and getting noticed in some
Anglophone networks. I show that the value of multilingualism on global markets
is linked to questions of counter-cultural authenticity. Finally, I argue that this reli-
ance on authenticity reproduces racial hierarchies inherited from colonization.

MULTILINGUAL AND COSMOPOLITAN

Multilingual Authenticity

Language prescriptivism has been a central tenet of the ways in which the category
of ‘Acadian’ has been institutionalized (Heller 2002). The discourses surrounding
the valorization of peripheral multilingualism in the art field evolved through the
2000s in the Acadian context. For some artists, such as Mila, the use of multilin-
gualism was originally felt as authentic but potentially isolating. At an important
Acadian cultural celebration, the Congrès Mondial Acadien 2004, Mila was asked to
speak about her experiences as an Acadian writer. The audience was composed of
Acadian social activists and academics, a crowd usually associated with prescriptive
ideologies of language. She was presenting with two other writers who both argued
that the defence of French was an important part of their work as a way to help the
community fight against English domination. Born in a rural area and then living

[42] Multilingualism and the Periphery

and studying in Louisiana, Mila, on the other hand, took the podium to argue for
linguistic hybridity as authentically Acadian. She presented an argument in favour
of the recognition of multilingualism and linguistic hybridity as the authentic lan-
guages of her upbringing in the rural Acadian area:

mes personnages reflètent aussi toutes les langues qui m’habitent depuis mon enfance icitte à la Baie
/ euh il y a de l’anglais du français des accents peut-être difficiles à comprendre / pour les autres /
euh mais pourquoi réduire ce réseau complexe / euh quatre groupes culturels / en un seul / en un
seul monde / je trouve que: l’hybridité (rires) l’éclatement / des rencontres / culturelles et linguis-
tiques sont plus intéressantes et et honnêtes (que les contraintes linguistiques du monolinguisme)

my characters also reflect all the languages that have inhabited me since my childhood
here at la Baie / ah there is some English some French some accents perhaps hard to
understand / for others / but why simplify that complex network / ah four cultural
groups / in one alone / in one world / I think that: hybridity (laughter) / fragmenta-
tion / of encounters / cultural and linguistic are more interesting and and honest (than
monolingual linguistic constraints) (my translation)

Mila’s valorization of linguistic hybridity in and of itself is not surprising in the

current context of literary production, where post-colonial approaches to culture
are a leading paradigm (Bhabha 1994). But she goes on to present her multilin-
gual stance as deviant in terms of the dominant ideologies of the Francophone and
Canadian cultural markets. In her view, her propensity for multilingualism con-
strained her trajectory in the contemporary institutionalization of funding for the
arts in Canada. As a budding writer, she felt the Acadian milieu was definitely push-
ing her to choose French. Indeed, the legitimating discourses of the scene (and the
funding it received) mandated that writers and artists work to save the language and
save the culture (through French).

certains artistes en tout cas ils m’encourageaient de / de choisir le français euh / il y avait
un certain monsieur qui / il aimait ça de m’encourager / il faut vraiment Mila il faut que tu
choisisses le français arrêtes d’écrire en anglais arrêtes euh / de de t’obstiner avec ça (rires Mila
et membres de la foule) parce qu’il fallait absolument sauver la culture acadienne il fallait
absolument préserver notre langue euh bla bla bla (rires de membres de la foule) et puis écrire
des poèmes en anglais c’était point / c’était point intéressant / ça menait / ça menait pas à
grand-chose (ibid.)

some artists in any case were encouraging me to / to choose French ah / there was one
man who / he liked to encourage me / you really must Mila you must choose French
/ stop writing in English stop ah / persisting with that (laughter Mila and members
of the public) because we absolutely had to save Acadian culture we had to save our
language ah bla bla bla (laughter from members of the public) and then writing poems
in English wasn’t / wasn’t interesting at all / it didn’t lead / it didn’t lead anywhere (my
translation)

W H AT M A K E S A RT A C A D I A N ? [43]
In Mila’s narrative, the community perceives the purpose of artistic production to
be one of ‘saving’ the culture through the use of one linguistic system (French and
its varieties). Only in this way can writing in English be perceived as ‘not leading
anywhere’. Mila, however, reports that she could never limit herself to choosing
‘one’ of the three languages that were, according to her, part of her everyday life.
She could never restrain her writing within a linguistic conceptual framework and
this, she revealed later in the speech, is part of the reason why she decided to con-
tinue her work in Louisiana. She felt that the linguistic considerations that were
constraining her in Canada were not quite as present in the Cajun art scene. She
mobilizes the idea of artistic integrity to justify her multilingual stance. She opposes
multilingual linguistic authenticity as a defence against language prescriptivism and
monolingualism put forward by language activists (see Heller 1999 for a discussion
of how ideologies of monolingualism structure language activism in Francophone
Canada).

euh / j’accepte / pis je comprends ça / euh / ça va / euh // s : / je trouve c’est important moi
je veux m’exprimer en français mais / euh / je trouve que comme artiste / euh / c’est comme
impossible de choisir une langue au dépend d’une autre / euh // j’ai essayé / de choisir le
français de de comme partir d’un cadre conceptuel linguistique puis de me mettre là pis me dire
ok ben je vais écrire de même là / pis / j’ai pas trouvé cet exercice intellectuel-là vraiment euh
intéressant / euh si je suis artiste c’est parce que je suis libre / selon moi / si je suis artiste / euh
je me censure pas / je laisse passer ce qui doit passer euh de mon expérience jusqu’à la page /
pis euh je comprends pas comment écrire / comment créer quelque chose de vrai et d’honnête
euh en m’imposant des / des contraintes linguistiques / euh moi je suis point activiste / (rires)
/ j’ai décidé (rires Mila et de la foule) je comprends qu’il faut parler de (xxx) euh pis il faut
que les programmes d’école les subventions puis tout ça ça continue mais moi comme comme
artiste / euh je désire simplement être honnête / euh et de de m’exprimer / d’exprimer toute la
gamme / euh de possibilités et de mondes qui m’habitent / la langue dans le fond selon moi ce
ce n’est que un outil / euh c’est un chemin à suivre qui aide à raconter / j’adore les mots je les
trouve fascinant / euh je je trouve ça fascinant de voir les images se créer sur la page en utilisant
les mots (ibid.)
Ah / I accept / and I understand that / ah / it’s okay / ah // s/ I find it’s important I
want to be able to express myself in French but / ah / I find that as an artist / ah / it’s like
impossible to choose one language at the expense of another / ah // I tried / to choose
French to to like start from a linguistic conceptual framework and to sit myself down and
tell myself all right well I’m going to write like this / and / I didn’t find that intellectual
exercise that interesting / ah if I am an artists it’s because I am free / according to me / if I
am an artist / I don’t censor myself / I let flow what must flow from my experience to the
page / and ah I don’t understand how to write / how to create something real and honest
ah by imposing some / some linguistic constraints on myself / ah I am not an activist /
(laughter) / I’ve decided (laughter from Mila and the crowd) I understand that we have
to speak of (xxx) ah and that school curriculum and grants and all that has to keep going
but for me as as an artist / ah I simply want to be honest / ah and to express myself /

[44] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 express myself in the whole array / ah of possibilities and worlds that inhabit me / lan-
guage in the end is nothing but a tool / it’s a road one follows which helps to tell a story
/ I love words I find them fascinating / ah I I find it fascinating seeing images created on
the page by using words (my translation)

This brings Mila to advocate for authenticity, cultural hybridity, and multilingual-
ism, a wager that she feels is somewhat dangerous: who is the public for her partic-
ular kind of multilingualism? Will Franco-Canadian activists, the very ones who
share her linguistic and cultural upbringing, follow her lead and want to read pieces
in the multilingualism they have been trying to contain for decades? Is there a glo-
bal public for multilingual literary pieces?
In 2004, the global market for Acadian peripheral multilingualism was only
beginning to expand. Mila’s speech was striking, because it was still fairly defiant
to argue for multilingualism as an integral part of Acadian’s everyday lives and
sense of personhood. While there had been many writers, such as Antonine Maillet
Herménégilde Chiasson, Gérald LeBlanc, or Guy Arseneau LeBlanc who mobi-
lized multilingualism in their work, these writers usually did so in the framework of
cultural homogeneity. In Mourrir à Scoudouc (1974), for instance, Chiasson’s use of
English was meant to represent the social domination of English in everyday life in
Southern New Brunswick. Guy Arseneau’s AcadieRock (1973), for its part, framed
‘Chiac’ as the language of the growing Acadian urban working class (in Moncton
New-Brunswick) while Antonine Maillet’s Sagouine (1971) represented the local
dialect of a rural Acadian working-class community. Gérald LeBlanc would glorify
this variety in later years as the emblem of the emergence of an urban Acadian art
scene (LeBlanc 2004). With the exception of LeBlanc, these writers maintained
that English was somehow the language of the other, and framed Chiac as being
‘French’ and therefore part of Acadian identity. This all served to maintain an idea
of Acadian cultural homogeneity. Mila’s argument brings her elsewhere (literally
and figuratively): she mobilizes English, Acadjonne, and French as integral parts
of her identity. Her use of peripheral multilingualism serves, in this case, the func-
tion of revealing actual linguistic practices: it is not only lower-class uneducated
Acadians who are multilingual, but most Acadians living in regions where they are
a minority.

Multilingual and Counter-Cultural

As Acadian peripheral multilingualism serves to index an authentic stance, it also

constructs the works where it is showcased as counter-cultural. In 2005, multimedia
artist Dano LeBlanc1 found himself at the centre of a media blitz and intense pub-
lic debates when Rogers Communication, the leading private telecommunications
company in Canada, produced and aired the animated television show Acadieman.
Acadieman, ‘the first Acadian superhero’, is LeBlanc’s homage to an Acadian ‘regular

W H AT M A K E S A RT A C A D I A N ? [45]
Figure 3.1:
Acadieman, the first Acadian superhero, a creation by Dano LeBlanc

guy’, who works in call centres by day, attends community college, hangs out on the
couch with his buddies, and is called upon to save Acadians from the threat of a sec-
ond deportation during the Congrès Mondial Acadien 2009 (Figure 3.1).
At the centre of the debate was not LeBlanc’s critique of the commodification of
Acadian culture, his humorous take on the pomposity of the local art scene, or even his
characters’ propensity to get themselves into trouble (by, say, having unprotected sex).
As would be expected in a space where a specific language is called upon to save the com-
munity, it was LeBlanc’s use of multiple local varieties (Chiac, Brayon, Québécois, etc.)
and English code switching which caught the public’s attention. The naysayers centred
their critiques on two main claims: (1) Acadieman put all Acadians to shame because he
represented them as poor speakers of French and (2) Acadieman was a dangerous icon
for Acadian youths because he glamorized linguistic hybridity and code-mixing.
And yet, in an interview, LeBlanc touted: ‘C’est comme politically correct astheure
de parler chiac.’ (It’s like politically correct now to speak Chiac.) LeBlanc, after all,
had created the character to contest what he perceived to be the linguistic prescrip-
tivism of local elites. For him this prescriptivism served the gate-keeping strategies
of the elite. To his surprise, Acadieman was hailed as an Acadian Icon by the media
and, more importantly, a fraction of the local intellectual elite. Indeed, led by a group
of sociolinguists (myself included) who had been arguing, from a Bourdieusian
framework, for the valorization of Chiac as one of the languages of the commu-
nity, part of the local intellectual elite had taken the multilingual stance: Acadieman
was popular among youth because it portrayed their language. Acadieman, in other
words, was perceived as an authentic representation of youth’s linguistic practices.
From there, it was a small hop, skip, and jump to conclude that Acadieman helped
foster young people’s pride in their Acadian identity and thereby served the goals of
political activists: to retain and convert souls to the identity.

[46] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 This sudden Chiac political correctness came as a surprise to LeBlanc, who had
produced the character as a way to contest the prescriptive ideologies that had gov-
erned the institutionalization of Acadian identity for years. He reported that his
work had never been appreciated by the public-sector funded institutions because
of its multilingualism. In fact, the only way he could get his work recognized was by
turning away from the local community sector and by producing in the emergent
private sector. There he was able to make free use of multilingualism. He also felt
the private sector allowed him to openly take a counter-cultural anti-elitist stance:

Dano: ben moi au début [le projet] c’était vraiment c’était une joke right /c’était kind of
comme / pis c’était pas une joke c’était kind of une joke pis un fuck you en même temps
parce que / j’étais tellement tanné de // comme d’étre forcé d’écrire dans une langue ou
un autre quand-ce que je faisais de la création tu sais là / j’ai juste dit fuck it / tu sais là
/ je va faire cecitte pis / ça me donne la liberté de faire whatever que je veux / j’écrirai
en anglais si je veux j’écrirai en français si je veux / pis j’écrirai en chiac si je veux so
Mireille: Parce que, quoi’ce qui te forçais à choisir l’une ou l’autre langue ?
Dano: Ben / je veux dire / si t’appliques pour des bourses ou n’importe quoi il faut /ça
ça a beaucoup à faire avec pourquoi j’ai tombé dans le privé aussi tu sais là / parce
que moi ce que je fais ça tombe un petit peu plus comme dans it’s not considered high
art tu sais là c’est de l’art populaire pis c’est pas évident / ( . . . ) moi je suis tombé dans
le privé à cause que je pouvais pas j’aurais pas pu créer ça si j’avais cherché des bourses
du gouvernement parce que
Mireille: ça fittait pas dans leur cadre là
Dano: non ça fit pas dans le cadre à la fois pour parce que c’était nouveau média pis
c’était de l’animation à la fois parce que la langue c’est-y du français c’est-y anglais
c’est-y c’était nébuleux.
Dano: Well in my case at first Acadieman was really like a joke right / it was kind of
like / and it was a joke and a fuck you at the same time because / I was so fed up
with / with being forced to write in either one language or the other when I was
doing creation you know / I just said fuck it / you know / I’m going to do this /
it gives me the freedom to do whatever I want / I’ll write in English if I want and
I’ll write in French if I want / and I’ll write in Chiac if I want so
Mireille: because what forced you to choose one language or the other?
Dano: well / I mean / if you apply for scholarship or stuff like that you have / that
has a lot to do with why I fell into the private sector too you know / because
what I do it falls a bit more like it’s not considered high art you know it’s popular
art and it’s not obvious / ( . . . ) I fell in the private sector because I couldn’t have
I wouldn’t have been able to create if I had looked for scholarship because
Mireille: it didn’t fit in their framework
Dano: no it didn’t it fit in the framework simultaneously because it was new media
and it was animation and also because of the language is it French is it English
it was nebulous.

W H AT M A K E S A RT A C A D I A N ? [47]
 LeBlanc sees his work not only as countering the linguistic ideologies of the
modern Acadian art scene; he also argues that he is speaking from a working-class
position for the traditionally excluded Acadians. It is precisely because of a his-
tory of language prescriptivism that LeBlanc’s product is innovative. It is precisely
because the product counters a dominant prescriptive language ideology that it
is consumed as counter-cultural by youths, media, and academics alike. It is this
acceptance that leaves LeBlanc perplexed. As Pietikäinen notes for language ideolo-
gies in Sámiland, the ideology of prescriptivism is, here, slowly being displaced by
an ideology which favours multilingualism and linguistic authenticity (2010).

Peripheral Hip

While Dano LeBlanc uses peripheral multilingualism to construct a product that

contests prescriptive ideologies of language, Radio Radio rappers squarely use
peripheral multilingualism to construct a cosmopolitan stance. Gabriel Malenfant,
Alexandre Bilodeau, and Jacques Doucet have broken into the global rap market
with their use of Chiac, Acadjonne, and English (Figure 3.2). Their band, Radio
Radio, goes beyond a contestation of local language debates about French varieties
to package Acadian as part of the new ‘global hip’, precisely because of its peripheral
position. Three of their latest releases have topped the music charts in the province
of Québec, a contemporary music market which has been a fervent consumer of
linguistically hybrid songs. The Québec market, in fact, is the ideal fit for Radio
Radio: on the one hand, the rappers’ peripheral multilingualism situates them
favourably in the hip, multilingual, and culturally hybrid, Montreal-based hip-hop
scene (Sarkar 2009). On the other, their recognizable accent (which makes them
identifiable as Acadians, and so—peripheral to Québec politics) situates them as an
exotic yet non-threatening band for the larger Québec market. As audible Acadians,
Radio Radio is simultaneously part of French Canadian identity while being out-
side of Québec identity. The band raps about a postmodern French Canadian iden-
tity, one that is playfully accepting of cultural differences. Indeed, they mobilize
their peripheral stance as a way to construct themselves as cosmopolitan, outside
of the nationalist politics that govern language debates in Canada. They do this by
aligning themselves with other forms of peripheral cultural identities, for example,
collaborating with First Nation rappers, neo-Canadian musicians, or showcasing
indigenous cultural practices in their videos.
They mobilize the myth of marginality and oppression to showcase their upward
social mobility and their new position of power in a globalized world. In their songs
and videos, the rappers play with traditional images of oppression and sell Acadian
rural coastal regions as an integral part of global ‘hip’. They are hip precisely because
they are peripheral. As such, they participate in redefining Acadian identity out-
side the usual tropes of oppression (whether economic or linguistic) and suffering.
They playfully thank the British Crown for ‘the free cruise’ (e.g., the deportation of

[48] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 3.2:
Rap band Radio Radio, © 2012 Mamoru Kobayakawa

approximately 9,000 Acadians in 1755) while constructing contemporary Acadian

lifestyles as simultaneously urban-yet-rural, hip and postmodern. ‘Pas un cent à mon
nom à cause de Louis Vuitton ( . . . ) Je dirais pas je suis pauvre, je dirais plutôt que je suis
broke’ (not a cent to my name, because of Louis Vuitton ( . . . ) I wouldn’t say I’m poor, I
would say I’m broke2), they quip in a song, distinguishing between the devalued habi-
tus of poverty and the cosmopolitan capital of global travel and hyper-consumption.
The rappers represent themselves as happy navigators of global cities, broke
because of recent purchases of high-fashion commodities, but easily able to hitch a
ride to the (Acadian) shores of Nova Scotia, where a sumptuous lifestyle of access
to pristine beaches, family seafood dinners, grand parties, car racing, and out-
door Jacuzzis awaits them. In fact, it is through their link to Atlantic Canada (the
Maritimes in the following excerpt) and their use of code-mixed slang that they
come to embody joie de vivre to a non-Acadian public (in this part of the excerpt, it
is the Québec public, but in the text, the charm of the Maritimes will also take the
American, Canadian, and European publics by storm).

In 2008, the quartet formed by Jacobus, LX, TX and Timo signs onto Bonsound
Records and Cliché Hot, their first album, sees the light of day in May of 2008. The
charm of the Maritimes instantly takes over the province of Québec and the expres-
sion ‘cliché hot’ becomes common slang within the local indie scene, as the song Jacuzzi
becomes a real ode to joy. (Laradioradio.com)

While they have entered a playful upwardly mobile Acadie, they still lay claim to a
unique identity because of the peripheral location, one that grants privileged access

W H AT M A K E S A RT A C A D I A N ? [49]
to valued resources in the global economy: nature, friends, easy living and, more
importantly, a unique cosmopolitan and counter-cultural identity.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in their video for Cargué dans ma chaise.
Here, the rappers link multilingual practices to a cosmopolitan stance. While the
lyrics to the song are about time spent talking from one’s own relaxed position (car-
gué dans sa chaise), the video explores what subjectivity means in the post-industrial
landscape. The video, shot at the Kukulkan pyramid in southern Mexico, starts with
a voiceover featuring Tiburcio, a Mayan shaman, announcing that he will do an
interpretative dance showcasing the nine stages of the evolution of the universe. He
speaks in a Mayan language while French subtitles allow the intended Francophone
Canadian public to understand. Radio Radio then invites the listeners to ‘sit back,
relax’, an utterance made in English—but which could be understood as typical
Acadian code-switching (at least by Chiac-speaking Acadians). The video then pro-
ceeds to show the rappers ascending the pyramid, with the help of a youth which
one is to understand is also Mayan, as the shaman takes them through the nine
stages. These stages are introduced, every time, with a written presentation: le big
bang, les premiers animaux, les premiers singes, les premiers humains, langages (note
the plural), civilisations, le règne industriel, le galactique, and finally, ‘le oneness field’
(the big bang, the first animals, the first apes, the first humans, languages (note the
plural), civilizations, the industrial era, the galactic, and the oneness field). The act
of speaking is revered, in the lyrics, for its capacity to be ‘All inclusive, non-intrusive’.
In between the industrial era and the galactique, the lyrics of the songs invite the lis-
tener to join the conversation (sit on the couch), adopting the relaxed stance advo-
cated at the beginning of the song. One of the rappers then asks: ‘Yeah pis là quoi?’
(Yeah and then what?) at which point the Mayan youth chants the Latin phrase:
‘Magnus ab integro seclorum nascitur ordo’, (a new order begins again). This order, we
are to understand, will be multilingual, led by taking part in intercultural dialogues
with indigenous cultures. In short, it will be cosmopolitan.
Radio Radio embodies one of the leading paradoxes of the global art scene and
its cosmopolitanization. Radio Radio frequently collaborates with First-Nations
and neo-Canadian musicians and rappers on stage, and, in the video for another
song, Deckshoo, cast themselves as jury for an Inuk high jump competition (a sym-
bolic move that was surprisingly well-received in the Inuit community). In their
chart-topping video, Guess What, they play with gender and sexual orientation ste-
reotypes, showcasing themselves as toy boys (alongside bikini-clad but allegedly
powerful women), while rapping about the fact that they are contemporary metro-
sexual, sensitive men, whose sexual orientation is up for debate. Radio Radio’s use
of humour to contest and play with stereotypes relies on globalizing practices: rap,
the valorization of lifestyle commodities, access to travel, and even the capacity
to sit back and relax to discuss a new world order which depends on a life of lei-
sure. Stereotypes, however, remain central in articulating an image of previously
peripheral identities (be they Acadian, Inuit, or Mayan) as hip and cosmopolitan.
What marks them as apt representatives of the new global in the rap scene is their

[50] Multilingualism and the Periphery

allegiance to a formerly stigmatized community. The rappers reverse the image of
Acadians as poor and passive by flipping the script on images of the stigmatized use
of multilingualism. Acadian peripheral multilingualism is used, in their production,
as a way to authenticate their position and participate in the construction of a cos-
mopolitan Acadian identity. Radio Radio’s use of peripheral multilingualism grants
them global legitimacy. Access to peripheral registers, in other words, is capital in
the global art scene—but is still understood in ethnicizing terms. This is far from
being the case for all Acadian artists. Artists who, for instance, are racialized (black
or Asian) or artists who do not mobilize peripheral multilingualism have to either
compete in the broader Francophone or Anglophone markets or otherwise partici-
pate as representatives of Canada’s multiculturalism policies. At the global level, this
reifies l’Acadie not as a cosmopolitan category, but as one that is caught up in the
re-essentializing trends of globalization.

CONCLUSION

There are tensions between nationalist and global constructions of Acadianité.

Multilingualism, particularly the authenticating kind, is a resource in the global-
ized economy, one that relies on stereotype to reproduce or subvert ethnic subject
positions, to give cachet to products, and to access global markets. Acadian nation-
alism was premised on prescriptivism: this renders multilingualism available as
a way to contest domination. Social actors contest Acadian nationalism by con-
structing linguistic authenticity on the terrain of multilingualism. Peripheral mul-
tilingualism becomes a resource to contest national Acadian elites and to represent
the upwardly mobile Acadian working-to-middle-class. That opposition allows
this upwardly mobile group to participate in the construction of a ‘cosmopoli-
tan globalization’ which is hip, cool, networked, and multi-ethnic. Participation,
however, is still premised on stereotypes. As such, authenticity and the value of
peripheral multilingualism create two streams for Acadian artists: those who can
legitimately participate in the global scene as Acadians (those who have access to
the right kind of Acadian peripheral multilingualism from the market’s perspec-
tive) and those who are recognized as Acadians at the local/Acadian national level
but who participate in the global market as representative of Canada’s multicultur-
alism (thereby reproducing a white ethnic image of Acadian identity that is prob-
lematic at the local level).
Sociolinguistics is equipped to understand the ways in which peripheral multi-
lingualism participates in contesting or reproducing power relations in the global
economy, as discourses of globalization are reshaping the value of linguistic prac-
tices within linguistic minorities ( Jaffe 2007; Pietikäinen 2010). In the global art
scene, peripheral multilingualism becomes a resource, a symbolic capital capable of
authenticating products as emanating from an increasingly valued counter-cultural
periphery. Peripheral multilingualism functions as capital precisely because such

W H AT M A K E S A RT A C A D I A N ? [51]
practices are the counterpart to long-dominant nationalist monolingual prescrip-
tive language ideologies. And yet, the global market’s reliance on authenticating
linguistic practices ensures the reproduction of ethnic, linguistic, and racial stereo-
types. This structure of the market is a source of tension for artists as they navigate
the global art scene, as well as for language communities, as they strive to redefine
themselves from ethnically defined to civic and inclusive minorities.

NOTES

1. Translated by the author.

2. Participant identified with his authorization.

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[54] Multilingualism and the Periphery

C H A P TER 4
Tourism and Gender in Linguistic
Minority Communities
JOAN PUJOL AR

I n this chapter,1 I argue that peripheral positions allow in some circumstances

for social actors to carry out innovations and transformative social practices
that challenge dominant ideologies and power relations. I explore how different
intersecting dimensions of peripherality play out in the small town of Glanporth in
Wales in the context of a comparative project about language, tourism, and identity
in Wales, Catalonia, and Francophone Canada. By looking into various tourist sites
in these linguistic minority communities, I argue that heritage discourses present
inbuilt contradictions in terms of gender and ethnicity as they reproduce the clas-
sic ideological divisions of modernity and thus construct specific hierarchies and
centre–periphery relations. Heritage, I contend, is constituted in the geographical,
economic, and social peripheries of modernity. As such, it points at the marginality
of both women and minorities from its core processes. However, as women and
linguistic minorities increasingly participate in tourism development in their com-
munities, contradictions emerge. In places such as Glanporth, local actors react by
developing cosmopolitan representations of minority identities.
Specific forms of multilingual practices, as I will show, are intimately bound
up with these ideological struggles. Linguistic minority tourism confronts local
actors with the global marketplace in which local languages can suffer new forms
of displacement, either because of the communicative currency of transnational
languages in tourist contexts or because local languages can be recruited in the
commoditization of local cultures in ways that present them (again) as remnants of
pre-modern lifestyles and economies (Phillips 2000; Pujolar 2006; Heller 2011).
In Glanporth, local Welsh speakers carefully crafted initiatives which used the
resources of tourism to carve out spaces for the Welsh language without investing
in its commoditization as heritage.
 Heritage tourism is constituted through the production of modernist narratives
about identities and cultural practices largely located in peripheries and in the past.
In terms of gender, this involves the appropriation of discourses about history that
have been traditionally male-centred (Edensor and Kothari 1994; Edensor 1997),
together with a focus on ways of life in which patriarchy was eminently normal-
ized (Aitchison 1999). In terms of national identities, it involves constructing
regional minorities as cultural remains, very much what nation-states have always
sought to do as agents of homogenization and peripheralization and what minori-
ties have sought to resist. Although narratives of history and memory have always
been essential to the articulation of resistance on the part of minority nationalism,
heritage discourses invite tensions as they involve, on the one hand, processes of
Othering or exoticizing and, on the other hand, the appropriation of narratives in
which idealizations of the national past typically mobilize contentious gendered
representations.
In this chapter, I show how linguistic minorities develop different articulations
of gender and national identity in tourism depending on how much they invest in
heritage discourses or, alternatively, more cosmopolitan representations. I shall also
discuss how multilingual practices in such contexts reflect and contribute to con-
structing these articulations, in which ideologies of modernity play a key role. To
do so, I shall pay attention not only to the representations of national identity and
gender that emerge in the sites but also to the ways in which women participate in
the tourist process more generally (i.e. both as producers of nationalist discourses
and as workers and entrepreneurs in the tourist industry). As the analysis focuses
on how communities develop their own forms of representation, the perceptions of
tourists or visitors shall not be addressed centrally.
I draw on data from a research project on the marketization of linguistic minor-
ity identities in tourism that included fieldwork in various Catalan-speaking sites,
French-speaking minorities in Canada, and, finally, Welsh-speaking areas of Wales,
which is the main case drawn on in this chapter. The research project focused on
what Pitchford calls ‘identity tourism’: ‘attractions in which collective identities are
represented, interpreted, and potentially constructed through the use of history and
culture’ (2008: 3). The study was devised as a collection of cases to be used for com-
parison and to gain a general view of how linguistic minorities were getting gradu-
ally involved in new areas of activity in which identity was turned into a commodity.
It is a multi-sited ethnography in which fieldwork consisted less of extended resi-
dence than of short visits to the sites, explorations of the landscape, informal con-
tacts with the locals, formal interviews with participants (tourist workers, tourist
policy officers, cultural activists), and documentation gathering (through websites,
the press, and policy reports). All proper names from the Welsh site, ‘Glanporth’
included, are pseudonyms, and non-essential details of the description have been
slightly changed to prevent traceability as much as possible.
The chapter is organized as follows: first, I argue that the concept of heritage is
indexical of peripherality within the framework of modernity; secondly, I map out

[56] Multilingualism and the Periphery

the different dimensions of peripherality that are constituted through dichotomies
such as gender and nation, gender and tourism, and tourism and nation. After this,
I will show how these different dimensions of peripherality become integrated and
are resisted in complex ways in Glanporth.

HERITAGE AS PERIPHERY

Peripherality is a productive concept when it comes to characterizing how heritage

products are produced and consumed basically because heritage constitutes a meet-
ing point for the artefacts and practices that get centrifuged from modernity (i.e. that
become obsolete or pushed to the margins of social life). As such, heritage is a site of
articulation of multiple peripheralities. I shall expound here on how modern capital-
ism produces heritage as a continuous process, and how this mobilizes gender and
nationalist ideologies in complex intersectionalities (see also Heller, this volume).
Feminist thought has long established how modernity was constituted in ways
that endowed European male, white, upper-class elites with the cultural values
of rationality that legitimized control over the colonies, women, minorities, and
the lower classes. Bauman and Briggs (2003) have provided a cogent account of
how this modern thought developed the diverse strands of antiquarianism and
(Herderian) linguistic nationalism from the eighteenth century. Antiquarianism
sought to document past, obsolete, forms of life and social practice often associated
with women, while linguistic nationalism constructed the legitimacy of national
identities as primordial and inherited from the ‘fathers’ to their children (2003:
176). Both lines of thought constituted responses to the profound cultural break
that positioned modernity as in opposition to a past connected with superstition,
obscurantism, and underdevelopment (i.e. in opposition to tradition). However,
some aspects of tradition were recruited, reconstructed, and mobilized in the pro-
duction of national identities, as Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) have documented;
and the selection was often encoded in terms of gender. Herderian nationalism was
successfully adopted to legitimize the modern nation-state through a primordialist
conception of the national community that was eminently male-centred.
Important forms of aestheticization and idealization of the past developed in the
nineteenth century as the industrial revolution dislocated previous forms of pro-
duction and social organization. Harvey has documented how changes in technolo-
gies and transport brought about new representations and forms of control over
territories, dislocated existing geographies, accelerated urbanization, and changed
cultural perceptions of place: ‘transformations in spatial and temporal practices
implied a loss of identity with place and repeated radical breaks with any sense of
historical continuity. . . . historical preservation and the museum culture experi-
enced strong bursts of life’ (Harvey 1989: 272).
It is also important to bear in mind that not only space but time was important
in the equation in the sense that places often achieved their significance in terms of

TO U R I S M A N D G E N D E R [57]
their value in (national) history and memory. Urbanization effectively turned rural
areas into an economic and cultural periphery such that, as R. Williams (1975)
showed, the countryside was transformed into a commodity for urban dwellers.
Here it is also important to recall Pratt’s (2002) argument that modernity has a
constitutively diffusionist character, a logic that constructs centres as modern
and peripheries as pre- or not-yet-fully modern (as discussed by Pietikäinen and
Kelly-Holmes, in the introduction to this volume). According to Edensor (2002),
such developments are often used to (re)deploy nationalist discourses, typically
of a conservative character, as the artificial, technological, and culturally diverse
city is set in contrast with a natural and racially unpolluted countryside. Linguistic
minorities thus can also mobilize the countryside as a site where the national past
is somehow still available, peripheral to the urban present, and often embodied in
outdated cultural and economic lifestyles. Tourism is the typical space where these
images are produced, distributed, and consumed.
Thus, heritage is by definition the periphery of modernity, as it gathers the social
and cultural material outdated by social and productive transformations. It follows
from this that discourses and practices about heritage are bound to reproduce the
ideological processes and social divisions of modernity which construct specific
forms of gender, class, and ethnicity as anachronisms. And it also implies that it has
an important geographical component that inscribes the past eminently to rural
areas (although it can naturally be found in urban settings too). This clearly places
heritage in potential tension with both feminism and minority nationalism, that
is, with the principles of gender and ethno-cultural emancipation that they pur-
sue. To understand these tensions, it is necessary to specify some of the ways in
which women and ethnolinguistic minorities have been positioned as peripheral to
modernity and capitalism, as well as how nationalism has historically constructed
gender relations.

GENDER, MINORITY NATIONALISM, AND TOURISM

Gender relations in general can also be constructed in terms of cores and peripher-
ies. As Connell (2005) argued, they can be characterized as featuring a ‘hegemonic
masculinity’ that defines the terms upon or against which other forms of gender
and sexuality position and define themselves. Thus, most men or key men in pow-
erful positions invest in this hegemonic masculinity that produces the dominant
gender regime and places other models of gender and sexuality as closer or further
to normality, as more or less peripheral (see also Walby 1997; Chen 1999).
Linguistic minorities in Europe also respond to a general pattern of geographical,
political, and economic peripherality (with some exceptions, such as the Catalans
or the Flemish). They normally occupy a region under the jurisdiction of a nation-
state and where the national capital city, the main nodes of communication and the
traditional industrial and economic centres lie outside of it, comparably distant.

[58] Multilingualism and the Periphery

State institutions operate in the language of a dominant majority that typically
controls both access to economic resources and public institutions, and thereby
has the power to define the ‘normal’ linguistic and cultural practices in the public
sphere which give access to social mobility. This is why processes of language shift
have characteristically presented an urban-rural profile, with the dominant state
language increasingly occupying territories and social spaces closer to political and
economic centres and pushing minority languages further to the peripheries. This is
also why linguistic minorities have often been portrayed as anachronisms, particu-
larly by nation-state institutions and their intellectual élites.
A common response from these communities has been the adoption of a nation-
alist ideology that explicitly aimed at the modernization of their language and
culture through processes of linguistic standardization, control over public institu-
tions, and the creation of a cultural market (Grillo 1989; Hobsbawm 1992). This is
the case of Wales as a British internal colony from the Middle Ages. Welsh language
and culture have historically been pushed to the margins of the Anglicized and
industrialized areas of South Wales, which generally enjoy better road and rail con-
nections with England and London than the North of the Country, where speak-
ers of Welsh are still comparatively numerous (National Statistics Office 2004).
Important groups of mainly Welsh speakers have developed their own forms of
nationalism that rely on modernizing discourses about language, culture, and tradi-
tion, as we find amongst most linguistic minorities in Europe (Hobsbawm 1992; C.
H. Williams 1994; Heller 1999; Heller 2011).
Minority nationalism, however, by drawing on modern ideologies also repro-
duces their ideological divisions. Feminist analyses of nationalism have docu-
mented its overwhelmingly masculinist character. The exclusion of women from
public spaces has been extensively documented and takes specific forms from
the French Revolution (Outram 1987; Landes 1988). Such developments went
hand in hand with the discursive articulation of the French nation as a political
subject, where exclusion of women was accompanied by the exclusion of regional
minorities and languages, as well as members of particular social classes. Classical
studies of nationalism represented by Anderson (1991), Hobsbawm (1992), or
Gellner (1983) are eminently gender-blind; but feminist critiques of nationalism
have examined how gender has been articulated through dichotomies such as state
and nation or the public and the private. Women, according to Nagel (2001) get
assigned various roles in the latter categories, particularly connected to the tasks
of biological and cultural reproduction of the national group taking place at home
and associated spaces such as schools. Beyond this, representations of women may
also be mobilized to signify ethnic/national differences. Finally, they can also be
recruited as participants in national, economic, political, and military struggles;
though always in low capacities (i.e. in positions peripheral to those occupied by
men) (Yuval-Davis, Anthias and Campling 1989; Yuval-Davis 1997; Nagel 2001;
Puri 2004). Thus, nationalism has historically played a key role in the articulation
of patriarchal gender roles and in marginalizing women and alternative sexualities

TO U R I S M A N D G E N D E R [59]
in terms of the definition of national communities and participation in public life
(Anthias, Yuval-Davis, and Cain 1993; Edensor 2002).
Following their expansion in the late twentieth century, tourism and the heritage
industry (Hewison 1987; Urry 1995) have become important sites for the produc-
tion and dissemination of national identities both for nation-states and minority
communities (Picard and Wood 1997; Kapferer 1998; Pritchard and Morgan 2001;
Heller 2003; Hallett and Kaplan-Weinger 2004; Takashi Wilkerson and Wilkerson
2004; Pujolar 2006; Pitchford 2008). However, the ways in which different com-
munities relate to tourism are very much historically contingent. Acadians, for
instance, have developed cultural tourism since the 1960s as a form of economic
development (see McLaughlin, this volume). Catalans have historically exploited
the Sun, Sex, and Sand mass tourism model and have had little interest in cultural
tourism until recently. In contrast, Wales—especially Welsh-speaking Wales—has
had a problematic relationship with tourism historically. The seaside resorts along
the South and South-West coasts became early foci of Anglicization (particularly
as a result of the advent of the railway during the mid-nineteenth century); indeed,
Welsh-speaking populations in these areas were gradually displaced and generally
did not participate in the entrepreneurial initiatives from which important profits
could be made ( Jones 2000; Phillips 2000). Thus, tourism in Wales has charac-
teristically been largely based on English-speaking entrepreneurs relying on local
bilingual or English-speaking workforce. This is why Welsh cultural sectors and the
population in general developed mistrust for tourism, given that Welsh speakers
rarely controlled the businesses and received the benefits of this economic sector
(e.g. Phillips 2000).
In view of this, the Bwrdd Croeso Cymru (Welsh Tourist Board), in collabora-
tion with the Bwrdd Yr Iaith Gymraeg (Welsh Language Board), developed in the
early 2000s a series of policies and specific campaigns to prop up the role of Welsh
identity and of Welsh-speaking communities in tourism (Pitchford 2008): the
‘Homecoming 2000-Hiraeth 2000’ initiative, the Croesawiaith (language welcome)
scheme, Ennill Tamaid (Table Talk), Naws am Le (Sense of Place), and Croeso Cynnes
Cymreig (A Warm Welsh Welcome) have aimed to provide training, resources, and
grants to Welsh-speaking tourist sector businesses in particular (Pujolar 2006;
Pitchford 2008) These concepts pointed at the connection between Welshness,
language, and territory as a specific added value that Welsh-speaking communities
could bring into tourism, arguably in a bid to commoditize Welsh as heritage (see
also Coupland, this volume). The effects of and responses to these policies were
visible in the case of Glanporth, which I analyse below.
So far, there is no evidence that minority nationalisms have been different
from state-sponsored hegemonic nationalism with respect to their gender politics.
At least, the few studies that touch on this aspect suggest that the trajectories of
these social movements are also eminently male-centred with regard to the actors
involved and the discursive trajectories (Aaron 1997; Vilalta 2006). This does not
preclude the fact that the ethnocultural hierarchies that minorities have had to

[60] Multilingualism and the Periphery

confront have often been constructed or expressed in gender terms, which means
that minorities can often get desexualized, feminized or, alternatively, hypersexu-
alized by majorities (Browne and Misra 2003; Fernàndez 2008). In any case, the
peripherality experienced by these minorities does not seem to have made their
societies more sensitive to gender peripherality. Instead the trajectories of women
in these contexts suggest that a specific form of ‘double’ peripherality takes place
that is comparable with the classic case of black women that gave rise to the litera-
ture on intersectionality (Collins 1990).
Tourism is an area of activity that also has important implications for gender
relations. In the literature on gender and tourism, there is a general consensus to
apply a basic distinction between everything having to do with tourists (and the
consumption perspective) and the workers (from the perspective of production).
The first aspect affects the experiences and services offered to tourists, which are
often segmented according to sex or gender. Sex tourism is the classical example
(Enloe 2000); but there are many other aspects that incorporate gendered com-
ponents, such as the offer of events or entertainment (night life, festivals, concerts,
and sports), representations of local communities and particular patterns of host‒
tourist interaction. The second aspect has to do with the fact that tourism, for the
host society, is embedded in political and economic activities where actors have
different forms of access to symbolic and material resources.
The gender divisions of the tourist workforce are an important aspect (Hennessy
1994; Purcell 1997; Sinclair 1997; Enloe 2000). Purcell (1997) clearly showed that,
in the case of the United Kingdom in 1995, women made up the majority of the work-
force (62 per cent) in ‘accommodation and catering activities’; but that almost three
quarters of them (72.4 per cent) were employed in low-paid, part-time positions.
Further evidence showed that women had only exceptional access to stable employ-
ments with career prospects in the sector, which were overwhelmingly occupied by
men. As Enloe (2000) points out, employers in the sector have historically sought to
minimize employment costs by defining most jobs as ‘unskilled’ or ‘low-skilled’, par-
ticularly those that women workers are assumed to do ‘naturally’, such as household
maintenance. Of particular interest are what Purcell terms ‘patriarchally prescribed
occupations’, typically in small businesses, where ‘husband and wife teams work
together, with the woman frequently employed as “unpaid family worker”’ (1997:
49). Thus, when it comes to tourism employment, women are the numerical major-
ity but are nevertheless peripheral in relation to those in a position to control and
profit most from tourism. At the intersection of tourism, heritage, and nationalism,
we also find a characteristic gender profiling in female voluntary work: women volun-
teers were found to be essential in an Ontario Francophone pageant (Malaborza and
McLaughlin 2006; Heller and Pujolar 2010), in the development of some Catalan
literary heritage sites (Pujolar and Jones 2011), and, near Glanporth itself, in a project
of a British Heritage Foundation where 80 per cent of volunteers where women.
It follows from this that identity tourism potentially provides a site for the
reproduction of (and resistance to) the gender inequalities fostered by nationalist

TO U R I S M A N D G E N D E R [61]
movements. So far, existing literature has identified sites where national identities
are constructed ‘by drawing almost exclusively upon male experience and male
activity’ (Edensor and Kothari 1994: 183; Aitchison 1999; Knox and Hannam
2007), particularly where the remembrance of heroes and battles clearly draws
from historical narratives where women are eminently absent. However, heritage
tourism provides a much wider range of themes, some of which do provide roles
for women. One example is the sites devoted to the representation of past forms of
everyday life, which have been well documented in the Welsh context by Pitchford
(2008), though not from a gender perspective. Such sites, as I will show, are also
amenable to a critique of their investments in specific gender relations (Aitchison
1999: 61–62). Additionally, representations of national communities can also
be accomplished more subtly in tourist services such as hotels, bed & breakfasts,
restaurants, cafeterias, and other sites that constitute the scenarios, props, and
landscapes for tourists. Davidson (2006), for instance, argues that hotel space has
characteristically acted as a liminal space between the local and the global and, in
places like early twentieth-century Barcelona, was mobilized to overcome Catalan
cultural and economic peripherality. My examples will draw mainly on these liminal
spaces, although a nod to conventional heritage representations needs to be made
also to attend to the wider picture. In fact, Acadian heritage tourism and Welsh eth-
nological museums constitute good examples of this conventional heritage based
on the ‘antiquarian’ perspective and its nationalist and gender correlates.
In New Brunswick (Canada), sites such as the Village Historique Acadien in
Caraquet or Le Pays de la Sagouine in Bouctouche rely on impressive reproductions
of farm households, workshops, or village life in the old days. They include actors
styling themselves as the old residents, perfectly trained to explain and discuss any
relevant details to visitors. Women—again more numerous—can be found mainly
in the farms, the men working as printers, innkeepers, or carpenters: they are all, so
to speak, in their places, including their involvement in activities and skills they can
explain and enact for visitors (for women: cooking, baking, weaving, cloth-making,
child-rearing, care of small animals) (See also Boudreau and White (2006) for a
similar heritage site in the province of Nova Scotia.) These representations largely
subscribe to the conventional formulae of reproductions of past forms of life, work,
and artistic performance where the family and the domestic sphere take prece-
dence. This entails an adoption of traditional forms of feminine performance and
hence the uncritical reproduction of a historical patriarchal order. It also involves,
however, an active participation of women in the tourist industry as skilled and
semi-skilled professionals and hence a significant degree of control by women over
the representations of identity that are kept in circulation.
The development of a Welsh perspective on tourism has recently triggered
debates about how Welsh identity is represented, what the emblematic sites are,
and how these should be presented and interpreted. Pitchford (2008) mentions the
castle-trail, its most popular sites having been built by the English kings to ensure the
military control of the territory in the face of strong local opposition. These castles

[62] Multilingualism and the Periphery

can both be presented as a symbol of English domination and of Welsh staunch
resistance. On the other hand, there are the numerous sites devoted to character-
izations of Welsh culture and ways of life: mining and slate museums and heritage
sites, museums about Welsh crafts, traditions, and religions. These genres of tourist
narrative have also been criticized for: (a) romanticizing the past and erasing the
suffering of workers; (b) emphasizing the rural over the urban dimension of Welsh
experience; (c) presenting Welshness as something connected with the past rather
than the present; and (d) constructing Welsh art as folklore rather than art as such
(Lord 1993). Neither Pitchford (2008) nor Lord (1993) raises the issue of gender.
However, John (1991) and Aaron (1997) argue that representations of Wales and
the Welsh have historically been made from a masculine point of view that margin-
alizes women’s perspectives. Aaron (1997) observes that the disappearance of the
mining industry has left a void in received representations of Welsh identity.
These tensions over heritage tourism point to the more general issue of whether
Welsh identity should be associated with tradition or modernity (i.e. to periph-
eries or cores). When representations about Welshness get saturated by heritage
discourses and practices, there appears a danger that Welshness gets linked with
the past, the folklore, and dated forms of socialization and economic production,
including the old patriarchal regimes and nationalist histories. In short, it may be
constructed, or interpreted, as being an identity that is peripheral to contemporary
forms of modernity.

TOURISM AND WELSH IDENTITY IN GLANPORTH

There are other options to present Welshness in tourism beyond the heritage para-
digm, and the case of Glanporth shows one of them. In this town, a group of entre-
preneurial women promoted the social and economic development of the town in
ways that appeared compatible with a contemporary cosmopolitan community and
a business-orientated Welsh identity. As such it presented an atypical profile of par-
ticipation by Welsh speakers and women both in tourism and in the construction of
national identity. In this context, the use of Welsh played an important role, one that
stressed its value as a public language rather than as an exclusively cultural product.
This means that Welsh appeared as a functional language in public communications
orientated towards practical needs of information and signalling and not just as an
aesthetic addition to texts mainly written or spoken in English. Thus, this group of
actors was mobilizing in the periphery with peripheral resources and identities; but
they were at the same time discarding the appropriation of the typical symbolic
devices through which peripherality is commonly constructed, namely to present
language and identity as heritage.
Glanporth is a small-sized town of about 1,500 inhabitants sited in an area
where Welsh is reported as spoken by more than two thirds of the population
(National Statistics Office 2004), although English has long dominated in the town

TO U R I S M A N D G E N D E R [63]
itself. According to one interviewee, Welsh speakers perceived the town centre as
an English-speaking space where the possibility to use the language in shops and
services needed to be asserted or signalled. Glanporth had never had an impor-
tant industry or mines in the vicinity; but it had reportedly thrived in the early
twentieth century thanks to its port until the railway had rendered it redundant.
Agriculture had also remained relatively strong until the 1990s, after which local
farmers could no longer rely on the London market to take up their dairy produce
at reasonable prices. Although the touristic information reported on the existence
of some old industries and workshops (a woollen mill, a forge, a tannery, a wood
turner, and a wheelwright), no manufacturing existed anymore. A number of offices
of the county authority were sited there, which also provided skilled employment
for Welsh speakers. Otherwise, the sponsor list for the 2006’s town jubilee attested
to the touristic orientation of the local economy: apart from two web and video
design companies, one translator, eight sports or social clubs, and forty-one local
suppliers and services (shops, solicitors, public, offices), there were sixty-three
tourist establishments (hotels, restaurants), nine crafts makers, and twenty-seven
building-related businesses. As the town had not grown significantly during the
previous century, the urban landscape had remained agreeable and one fourth of
the houses were listed as being of architectural interest. There was a beach and a
port and opportunities for hiking or dolphin sighting. The main touristic asset of
the place was in the consumption of the quiet natural, sea and urban landscape.2
There were none of the more spectacular tourist resources, such as big castles or
famous sites.
The significance of a visit to Glanporth needed to be worked upon. This was
done to a great extent through the initiative of a network of locals in which women
played key roles. As local authorities have very limited resources in Britain, this net-
work concentrated on fund raising and mobilizing local actors such as social clubs
and cultural associations, in the organization of public events that were reported
in the press and that positioned the town as a place worth visiting. Other initia-
tives predominantly run by men consisted of the organization of an agricultural
fair and engaging a British Heritage Foundation to restore and put up visitors in an
old nobleman’s house. The women’s group worked primarily on the organization
of the 2006 Jubilee, a city walking trail, and other regular yearly celebrations that
involved activities in the streets (at Christmas, Halloween, Carnival, etc.). In this
process, an important role was played by three women who, together with their
husbands, were investing in new business initiatives that sought to promote a revi-
talization of the town’s life while catering for tourists at the same time. These were
one restaurant-pub (established 2002), one textile shop (established 2003), and
one hotel (established 2005).
I identified a total of five women who seemed to constitute a core network that
was however not formally constituted. In the interviews we conducted with four or
them, I have reconstructed an account based on my observations whereby participa-
tion in many city committees, associations, the city council, and various initiatives

[64] Multilingualism and the Periphery

(involving, of course, many other women and men) appeared to have this group as
a common denominator. They themselves did not explain the situation in the way I
do, although most other interviewees kept mentioning their names as the people to
talk to. Not only this: although the three businesses mentioned were run by married
couples, most locals (men included) also identified the women as at least an equal
partner or as the main driving force behind the initiative. At least in one case, it was
clear from the interview that the female partner had developed the idea, done the
investment, and most of the work. On the website, one could read the following
about the establishment of the business:

Extract 1: excerpt from the textile shop’s web presentation.

Welsh version
—gan Aeron Gwyther a Dyl Edwards, gŵr a gwraig sydd bellach yn byw yn y dref ac sydd
wedi eu geni a’u magu yng Ngwyradd

English version
—by Aeron Gwyther and her husband Dylan Edwards who live in the town and were
born and bred in the county of Gwyradd.

This unusual collocation of a married couple, with the woman first and the hus-
band’s position defined according to his marital status, expresses a reversal of the
conventional forms of naming that have traditionally been denounced as sexist and
thus dispels the reading that the wife could play only a secondary role in such joint
ventures, as usually happens according to the literature on employment. It must be
noted however that the Welsh version includes the expression ‘husband and wife’
in this order, which is less stylistically marked.
Most of the interviewees presented life trajectories characterized by a confronta-
tion with economic and cultural peripherality. They had been born in Glanporth or
very near; but they had also lived and worked in other parts of Wales. One of them
was retired and had just returned after working and raising a family in an English
city. Another one had also migrated but recently returned and remarried. Most of
the younger women had gone away to college, had worked for a few years in the
media or other occupations rare for Welsh speakers of former generations, and had
sought employment or directly set up a business in Glanporth. The three women
entrepreneurs had also been connected in their previous professional life. Thus,
they had all experienced the difficulties of an attachment to a place that offered
little economic prospects. Their strategy was not just about earning a living but also
about developing Glanporth and developing it as a Welsh space.
Aeron, the owner and manager of the textile shop, expressed this approach very
clearly. She got the idea for the shop while walking in the street and realizing how
old and simple the town’s commercial landscape was. Locals had to drive to larger
towns to find nice shops. So the idea was to create a situation whereby it made sense
for both locals and tourists to go shopping in Glanporth (i.e. to confront its periph-
erality). After many years of participation in local cultural and youth clubs, she was

TO U R I S M A N D G E N D E R [65]
in close touch with the local community and aware of the need to stimulate it. So,
the shop offered not just a space for retailing but also a café room for socializing,
as has become common in some bookstores (Aeron actually said that it was a good
idea for men to have somewhere to sit and spend time while their partners were
in the shop). The opening reportedly attracted a large number of friends and rela-
tions as local people felt involved in the success of the venture and that the shop
brought something new to the town. Aeron acknowledged that it was made viable
both by tourists and also by the locals who shopped less intensively but more con-
stantly throughout the year. Thus, this venture was partly motivated by a will to
stimulate (Welsh) community life, and it needed this same community dynamism
to survive.
The combination of community life and tourist activities was also promoted by
the hotel, particularly through the intensive use of a blog, where constantly updated
information told about local events, outings and hikes by locals, and small celebra-
tions around gastronomic topics (most of which were open to hotel guests, so that
these could potentially participate in local life during their stay). The restaurant had
also achieved a fine balance through the use of two different spaces: one offered the
service of a conventional restaurant with pricy and elaborate cuisine and another basi-
cally functioned as a local pub, always quite full of customers even on week days.
The balance between an orientation to (a largely Welsh) local community and
a (largely Anglophone) transnational tourist constituency was articulated in vari-
ous ways: first, through bilingualism; secondly, through the promotion of local
produce; thirdly, through the incorporation of cosmopolitan design and aesthetics.
Thus, these were entrepreneurial initiatives led by women (or partnerships in which
women were equal) who used their local networking resources (in one case, local
women as potential consumers) to push the town into recovering its role as a com-
mercial centre and by using Welsh as the main medium of communication. Gender,
economic, and ethnolinguistic peripheralities were being overturned in one stroke.

Welsh Bilingualism in Glanporth

Reports by interviewees, particularly older ones, bear witness to times in which

speakers of Welsh were in even higher proportions than today but the use of the
language was exclusively restricted to the private domain, and limited to farm-
ers and fishermen, in contrast with the contemporary experience of Welsh being
used in schools and in the public sphere and also in new neighbourhoods inhab-
ited by middle-class mobile sectors. The establishment of a Welsh Assembly and
the official enforcement of bilingual signage throughout the country had recently
turned Welsh-English bilingualism into a normal feature of the scriptorial land-
scape (Gade 2005). All signs from public institutions were systematically bilingual.
Not so consistent were, however, the language choices of private establishments
(cf. Kelly-Holmes, this volume). Shop signs and their commercial information were

[66] Multilingualism and the Periphery

mostly in English only, with Welsh restricted to the generic description and in sec-
ond position or smaller font (Pharmacy/Fferyllfa). Some shops had a Welsh name
more visible but accompanied by a translation or, in any case, all practical informa-
tion in English. In one of the cafés, for instance, the name of the establishment was
Welsh; but a board on the wall and another in the pavement displayed the products
on offer in English.
The interviewees had very different levels of competence in Welsh and acknowl-
edged the existence of tensions over language use within the community. One mem-
ber of one of the three couples could not speak it fluently; two other interviewees
were basically monolingual English speakers; one of the more active participants
could speak it and write it with difficulty.
Language choice was often a delicate issue: council meetings could not be held
in Welsh because not all members could follow, some local actors demanded com-
munications from the council in Welsh, some jobs and roles in local committees
required Welsh speakers, translation could be arranged for some events and not for
others, business owners worried when they could not find Welsh-speaking work-
ers, as this might make some clients uncomfortable. Although there were no local
offices of Cymdeithas yr Iaith or other language activist groups, all interviewees
avowed their commitment with the Welsh language. The question was how this
commitment was brought into practice, and two interviewees argued that Welsh
could not be ‘forced down people’s throats’ and hoped that the extension of Welsh
could be made gradually.
The three establishments analysed, in any case, had a policy of linguistic equal-
ity that in some aspects reversed the logic of the private commercial sector and its
tokenistic, emblematic, non-communicational use of Welsh. Two of them had an
English name, such as ‘The Traveller’s Inn’ or ‘The Railway Hotel’, with the Welsh
translation not always visible and in secondary position. The other’s name did not
mean anything in any recognizable language. But otherwise Welsh was present
throughout the premises and often in first position: in fixed signs (e.g. about toilets,
private rooms), in more-or-less carefully printed more variable messages, on printed
menus and blackboards, in the room plaques that remind visitors of the extension
number and service hours, on the key rings, on cards and leaflets, in a text explain-
ing the meaning of the room’s name and the history of Glanporth, in the ‘Llonyd plis
/ Do not disturb signs’ hanging off door knobs, in signs indicating how to use the
toiletries, in welcome messages and instructions about hotel/restaurant services
(such as telephone calls) and sale of merchandizing, in the quality appraisal forms,
in the list of town services, safety instructions, recommendations about behaviour
in common spaces (control of pets or children), price tags and offers, warnings to
thieves or smokers, directions, and so on. English-only texts appeared exceptionally
in items that might be difficult to obtain in bilingual versions, such as some safety
equipment, beer pump signs, soft drinks bottles, and so on.
When asked for the reasons for the use of Welsh, interviewees focused prima-
rily on the rights of Welsh speakers to use Welsh and circulate in Welsh scriptorial

TO U R I S M A N D G E N D E R [67]
landscapes. When asked if the use of Welsh might be appreciated by tourists as a
sign of local character (which was the argument of various campaigns by the official
Welsh language and tourism authorities), their responses were non-committal or
treated the question as an ‘interesting idea’. One of the interviewees actually asked
for advice about what to do with Welsh in events attended by tourists. Another,
however, recalled that some time ago tourists used to steal the menus of her par-
ents’ restaurant to keep them as souvenirs, because the presence of Welsh was then
so rare. In any case, my exploration of Internet tourist forums in July 2010 did not
give evidence of specific linguistic awareness by tourists. Out of forty finds about
the Glanporth establishments, all in English, clients concentrated overwhelmingly
on the comfort of the rooms and the quality of the food, and sometimes the land-
scape. The adjective ‘Welsh’ almost invariably referred to food, except for a positive
remark about the restaurant exuding ‘a certain Welshness’ and the ability of the staff
that ‘adjusted between the Welsh and English speakers in the restaurant well’.
Thus, the bilingualism of the establishments was one more way of reconciling the
division between the local Welsh and the foreign tourists, although local English speak-
ers were also important and interviewees also talked about an increasing number of
Welsh-speaking tourists, many of them from Cardiff, the capital, and South Wales,
which attests again to the ongoing change in the social and geographical profiles of
Welsh speakers. In the hotel blog, for instance, most announcements were made bilin-
gually; but many news items and most comments by blog visitors were in English,
including one complaining about a Welsh company that commercialized sauces and
did not label its products in Welsh. The blog, in any case, reflected well the ambivalence
of the business as it addressed both locals and tourists and used the two languages.
From this perspective, the Welsh-English equality choice was a specific form
of positioning that needed constant attention by the owners of the establishments
as to how the two languages should be used. Thus, the choice made by the three
entrepreneurs to use Welsh to the maximum extent possible was primarily a state-
ment about Welsh identity as deserving a place in modern public life rather than
as a heritage display (see Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011). If they considered
that the use of Welsh lent some ethno-cultural flavour to the sites or products—as
Piller (2001) and Kelly-Holmes (2000) documented in relation to non-English
multilingual advertising in Europe—they did not own up to this potential reading.
Their linguistic policy was rather presented as one intended to cater for the need to
address specific market segments, both local and global, characterized by differing
linguistic profiles (see Kelly-Holmes 2005); where no hint of a hierarchical differ-
ence between the two markets and languages was projected.

Local Food, Colour, Fabric, and Capital

According to one town councillor, the recent development of Glanporth in terms of

tourism and Welsh identity had to be understood against the backdrop of economic

[68] Multilingualism and the Periphery

change. The demise of industry and the fall in agricultural prices had forced farmers
to focus on locality and authenticity, which had made wide sectors of the popula-
tion especially sensitive to issues of identity. Although this is a view that, however
interesting, cannot be contrasted in terms of the causal connections it suggests (at
least with the data I have), it is indicative of the local political economic mood, as is
reflected in the following excerpt.

Extract 2: excerpt from interview

Local councillor: More money comes into this county through tourism than anything
else · and that even goes as far as farmers ( . . . ) they’ve had to diversify farmers have
had to look at how they operate ( . . . ) and they’ve done it I think very successfully ( . . . )
changing needs of the visitor ( . . . ) who likes to go to the farm ( . . . ) and is interested in ·
food · local food

This commitment to local food was clearly visible in the menus and products in cafes,
pubs, hotels, and restaurants. It was a nationwide trend, often symbolized by the men-
tion of the Ty Nant mineral water. One of the entrepreneurs explained that she had
increased her supplies of this type of Welsh product, which often came from firms run
by Welsh speakers who also used the language both in transactions and in the market-
ing of the products. This was held to signify that Welsh speakers were crossing the old
line that had allegedly kept them away from the world of business initiatives.
The focus on food did not lead, however, to an investment in traditional Welsh
cuisine. As one press reviewer (rightly) expressed, cuisine showed ‘a serious effort
to combine the best local ingredients with global influences’. Thus, the products on
offer referred predominantly to Italian, French, and other transnational products:
tapas, lasagne, baguette, and espresso coffee. A typical example would be ‘Bruchetta
ai pepperoni—Toasted slice of bread topped with warm Abergavenny goats cheese
and slices or roast peppers.’ This is contemporary menu style, combining multilin-
gualism with a short descriptive line. Interestingly enough, it is Italian that is used
here to provide some distinct ethnocultural flavour, not Welsh.
This distance from what would constitute a traditional portrayal of Welsh iden-
tity was, I would argue, a distinctive feature of the business models analysed and
arguably of the presentation of Glanporth to outsiders more generally. In Wales,
sites devoted to the marketization of Welshness usually gather a number of ele-
ments; typically signs in Welsh and/or Welsh Celtic fonts, flags, and merchandiz-
ing in the flag’s colours, particular filigree designs. No such semiotic repertoire was
present in these businesses, and it was also much lower key in Glanporth as a whole
as compared with other Welsh touristic towns. Here the reflections of one hotel
owner show the extent to which this was a reflected choice:

Extract 3: excerpt from interview.

Nick: [ . . . ] we got a chef · we (did) the restaurant out ·· we (x) a chef we advertise (x)
it’s very good does italian so- mediterranean sort-of food [ . . . ] well we got italian menus

TO U R I S M A N D G E N D E R [69]
 you can’t really put italian into welsh we can’t put spanish into welsh it’s a [ . . . ] and we
had a welsh designer to do the place · in welsh · the bedrooms are done in welsh tapes-
tries · · the who- the whole idea is to be we- [ . . . ] our idea was not to be like raffles in
singapore or some bar in you know ours is trying to be everything [ . . . ] but we didn’t
want to be just stick a welsh bar because it is blood- is boring as hell • you know if we had
a proper welsh pub • then you’d had as that as that a (saunas) and that’s it • • you know •
people don’t bother- we’ve been trying to make it women friendly • women have got say
in the last thirty years • far more identity in pubs and businesses than they did before •
• before it was all the men sitting around all evening (xxx) playing dominoes or playing
games in front of everyone • and now it is women who come out • you know they want
to sit in a bar • • women go into a pub • • not like before with old men looking at

Joan: how do you make it women friendly[?]

Nick: eee • • you make it clean you get away with what is a what is identified as a man • e • you
sell lot more wine you advertise wine • • saying trying to be more continental as opposed to •
continental bars are far more (xxx) to women than say the old british pub you know?

Here Nick voices in everyday language how the aesthetic balance should be negoti-
ated between providing local flavour and catering to the expectations of contempo-
rary customers who—as he was explaining earlier—could be Welsh or English; but
also German, French, or Spanish. As with the food, the result was that Welsh raw
materials were incorporated in a more contemporary eclectic design. Rooms had a
lot of natural light without dark corners, all tables high over the knees, the furniture
looking relatively new (not antique) in the hotel (with a Mediterranean flavour)
and the Café (more Starbuck’s style) and heavy real-wood square-shaped walnut-
coloured in the restaurant (suggesting natural material but not traditional style).
Reviews and client feedback provide further evidence of how this style was con-
sumed: ‘A cobalt blue boutique restaurant that’s modern yet perfectly in tune with
this stylish little town’, ‘It was decorated in a contemporary style, but using fabric
from a tradition welsh woollen mill in a pattern used from 1859’, ‘terrific ‘gastropub’
food’, ‘Cosy but cool’, ‘Seaside chic’, ‘hip’, ‘beautifully styled and totally without pre-
tence’, ‘it could be in London or Paris’.

Extract 4: excerpt from interview.

Kathryn: we’ve had to reinvent ourselves · I mean you can (xx) this place I mean (this
place) you could be anywhere couldn’t you the [Restaurant] it could be in a city it could
be anywhere · it’s great

To summarize, Glanporth presented an interesting profile where economic initia-

tives were developed through relatively separate (though compatible) networks
with either male or female predominance. In the female network, a key role was
played by three couples who developed their own businesses as a way to stay or
move back to the town. These businesses had an ambivalent agenda of economic

[70] Multilingualism and the Periphery

sustainability and promotion of Welsh-speaking social life. As such, they were pub-
lic meeting places for largely English-speaking tourist clients on the move in the
periphery and as centres for the construction of Welshness for locals. This Welshness
was both cultural and business orientated, transgressed traditional delimitations in
the access of Welsh-speaking women to business and nation building and inscribed
itself in contemporary gender-neutral ideologies that seek to position local identi-
ties in the global marketplace. This was achieved by performing hybridity at various
levels: through bilingualism, through using local ingredients to make a globalized
cuisine and through Welsh styles subtly contained in a postmodern patchwork.
Conventional, tradition-bound, male-centred representations of Welsh identities
were set aside in spaces that, like in the early Catalan hotels mentioned earlier, lay
claim to both local identity and global orientation (Davidson 2006).

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Identity tourism is inscribed in a wider context of economic restructuring in

which primary- and secondary-sector economies have receded and left periph-
eral areas dependent on tourism and few other options (cf. Heller, this volume).
Policies of economic development in these areas have targeted heritage resources
as a way to create unique selling points in the global marketplace (Urry 1995).
Linguistic minority identities have become open to commoditization in the pro-
cess, which raises new questions as to who has the right to represent local culture
and how, including what the legitimate linguistic resources are (Le Menestrel 1999;
Pritchard and Morgan 2001; Heller 2003; Boudreau and White 2006; Malaborza
and McLaughlin 2006; da Silva and Heller 2007; Pitchford 2008; Pietikäinen and
Kelly-Holmes 2011). The case of Glanporth provides an interesting window on the
tensions that arise as linguistic minorities vie to participate in the tourist market.
Different forms of representing national identity and different patterns of multi-
lingualism emerged as new actors—women and/or Welsh speakers—staked their
claim as participants in business initiatives and local economic development.
The Glanporth example provides evidence that representations of national iden-
tities in tourism can be produced in distinctly different ways, namely by investing
or not in a conception of identity as heritage. An analysis of the gendered aspects of
these contrasting representations interrogates the genealogy of heritage discourses
and their deep investments in ideologies of modernity. Amongst linguistic minori-
ties, heritage discourses mobilize historical and national narratives that are intrinsi-
cally gendered as they reproduce the hierarchical divisions and the diffusionist logic
of modernity. Heritage is embedded in the complex web of discursive trajectories of
modernity that elaborate ideologies of national identity and gender on the basis of
dichotomies between tradition and modernity, the public and the private, the past
and the present, the rational and the emotional, the civilized and the savage, the
male and the female, the white and the coloured. These dichotomies, as has been

TO U R I S M A N D G E N D E R [71]
widely contended, constitute established hierarchies that structure fundamental
divisions such as marked/unmarked, high/low, normal/deviant, and, last but not
least, core/periphery. Heritage, by commodifying the ‘Other’, provides space for
assigning value to the ideological peripheries of modernity. As such, a critique of
heritage requires an intersectional perspective that looks at the production of the
various dimensions of social categorization and social difference.
Peripherality is mobilized as a resource in tourism, particularly with the marketi-
zation of local landscapes and local produce that draw their value from their scarcity
in urban centres. In linguistic minority heritage more specifically, cultural represen-
tations of ethnicity and language can also be marshalled as products that retain a
value as enduring relics of state-building, industrialization, and modernization more
generally: thus, ethnicity as periphery, is often signalled or iconized through the
tokenistic use of local languages. There are however some potential tensions in these
processes, namely, in the fact that nationalist discourses characteristically pursue cul-
tural and linguistic modernization as opposed to folklorization, and also in the fact
that both nationalist politics and tourist development involve processes of internal
hierarchization, the marginalization of women being one of their features. In the con-
text of tourism, where women occupy characteristically inferior positions in terms of
employment patterns and in terms of participation in decision-making processes, her-
itage sites can easily resort to either male-only heroic-military renderings of national
history or depictions of national life of a characteristically patriarchal profile. So far
these tensions have caused debates in nationalist and feminist constituencies.
Women and linguistic minorities participating in tourism development must
therefore make choices as to whether they subscribe to these discursive trajecto-
ries and social histories. In the Acadian case referred to above, women are very
present—actually numerically predominant—at all levels of the structure, even in
leading positions, and subscribe to classical versions of heritage in a context where
feminine figures were traditionally prominent as national signifiers. In Glanporth, a
group of women who dominated local politics and new economic initiatives chose
to mobilize some aspects of peripherality as a resource and discard other aspects
of it. Thus, Welsh was adopted as a fully functional communicative language and
not only as a token for display at the same time that other traditional resources
for displaying Welsh identity were discarded in favour of local agricultural produce
and the adoption of a hybrid aesthetic that combined the local with the global.
These female entrepreneurs designed their initiatives so that the symbolic and eco-
nomic capital acquired through tourism could also be channelled to provide space
for Welsh language and culture in their communities. Their preoccupation with
Welshness showed an orientation to the present and the future rather than the past.
Thus, these Glanporth women, together with their husbands, were overcoming the
typical peripheral position of both women and Welsh speakers in politics, business,
and tourism and were doing so by both mobilizing Welsh peripherality as a market-
able commodity at the same time as challenging the construction of Welshness as
a peripheral ethnicity.

[72] Multilingualism and the Periphery

NOTES

1. This chapter is based on the research Project ‘Language, culture and tourism:
Identity discourses and the commoditization of languages in global markets’
funded by the Dirección General de Investigación of the Ministerio de
Educación y Ciencia in Spain: Ref. HUM2006–13621-C04–04/FILO.
It is also inscribed in the activities of the Linguamón-UOC Chair in
Multilingualism. Monica Heller (University of Toronto) and Kathryn Jones
(IAITH: Welsh Centre for Language Planning) contributed to the fieldwork.
I am also indebted to Maite Puigdevall (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) for
her help with materials written or spoken in Welsh, and to Monica Heller and
Maria Sabaté for their comments on earlier drafts of the text.
2. Through careful web searches, I found some markedly different forms of
tourism and leisure in the area. Some hotels or private individuals organized,
normally off season, boxing matches, special disco nights, or car-crash
gatherings. These activities did not appear in the conventional materials for
tourism promotion and were not mentioned by any of the interviewees.
The fact that these activities were not mentioned—not even for criticism—
suggest that they were comparably marginal, both symbolically (in the local
imaginary) and economically (in terms of visitor numbers and revenue). It is
interesting, however, that some of them point to the construction of the tough
masculinities that are declining in legitimacy.

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[76] Multilingualism and the Periphery

C H A P TER 5
Heteroglossic Authenticity
in Sámi Heritage Tourism
SARI PIETIK Ä INEN

T his chapter focuses on the multilingual indigenous Sámi village of Inari in

Finnish Lapland as a peripheral site of multilingual complexities. Lapland, also
known as Sápmi, Sámiland, Lapponia, and North Calotte, has long been considered
as a periphery on the edge of the world in the imaginations of the nation-state—sys-
tem, tourism, and literature. However, seen from the perspective of centre–periph-
ery dynamics, this seemingly stable position transforms. While Sámiland may seem
peripheral when looked at from the heartlands of the nation-state, it is central to indig-
enous Sámi. Further, the current conditions of globalization in Sámiland, with a novel
type of mobility, relocalization, and circulation, open up new opportunities for com-
merce, identity, and multilingual language practices while at the same time stirring up
the previous relations and categories in terms of what is considered central and what
is considered marginal multilingualism (cf. Coupland 2010; Pietikäinen 2010).
Looking at Inari village through a lens of evolving centre–periphery relations
provides a revealing nexus (Scollon and Scollon 2004) to examine tensions and
innovations emerging in the multilingual interaction of practices and discourses.
A powerful principle organizing relations, resources, and practices in Inari is the
transforming, contested, and guarded boundary between what is perceived as indig-
enous Sámi culture and language practices and what is taken as local and national
Finnish culture and language practices. Today, the village is a multilingual, polycen-
tric place with different sets of norms, opportunities, and resources, some open to
all, some only to a few (Pietikäinen 2010). For Inari, this creates its own peripheral
local political economy of resources (Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011).
Within this economy, authenticity has become a necessary capital for both polit-
ical mobilization and economic development (see e.g. Coupland 2003; Heller 2003,
2011; McLaughlin, this volume). It has become an invested and ideologized resource
circulating across the political spaces of Sámi identity politics and indigenous rights
into the economic spaces of heritage tourism and popular culture. It is also appro-
priated in the domains of Lapland tourism and in local arts and handicrafts. In this
circulation, various understandings, representations, and practices of authenticity are
constructed and consumed, and it is these dynamics that I wish to focus on in this
chapter. Further, these dynamics can be fruitfully seen, I believe, as a simultaneous play
of centripetal and centrifugal forces (Bakhtin 1982), standardizing and creating lan-
guage and discourse practices related to what is taken as authentic in the Sámi tourism
context. The centripetal authenticities are perceived as unified, unquestionably ‘real’,
and typically indexed by a Sámi family connection, tradition, and personal history. In
contrast, the centrifugal authenticity, emerging at the crossroads of tradition and inno-
vation, is more ambiguous, carnivalesque, and fluid, mixing local and indigenous tradi-
tions and practices with novel, often global formats, resources, and practices.
To examine the dynamics between centrifugal and centripetal authenticities, I
will draw on my longitudinal discursive and ethnographic research1 on multilin-
gualism in Sámiland (Pietikäinen and Dufva 2006; Pietikäinen 2008, 2010, forth-
coming; Pietikäinen et al. 2008). In particular, I explore what gets constructed
as authentic in one particular Sámi tourism site, marketed as an authentic rein-
deer farm,2 and what kind of tensions and creativity the touristic capitalization of
authenticity generates. The data drawn on in this article relating to the reindeer farm
include several on-site observations of tourism interaction between 2008 and 2011;
interviews with the hosts; informal discussions with hosts, tourists, and guides; and
multimodal and discursive data (linguistic landscape, printed materials, etc.). Here,
I will focus in particular on the use of Sámi resources in authentication practices at
the farm visit. I will next give a brief description of the village of Inari before moving
on to discuss authenticity as discursively constructed. Then I will present an analy-
sis of authentication practices at the reindeer farm and conclude with a discussion
of authentication in heritage tourism.

POLYCENTRIC PERIPHERY: THE CASE OF THE

INDIGENOUS S Á MI VILLAGE OF INARI

In common with many of the sites of interest in this volume, Inari village displays
many of the characteristics of centre–periphery dynamics. It is distant and peripheral
in terms of its relationship to larger urban centres, but it is a locally central and active
space. While it is over 350 kilometres to the nearest hospital or McDonalds, Inari
is a locally important centre for trade, tourism, and administration, especially for
the indigenous Sámi community. The Sámi people (approx. 60,000–80,000 people)
are a recognized indigenous people living in Scandinavia and North-West Russia,
and their culture and the indigenous Sámi languages are protected by various legal
instruments and to a varying degree, depending on the nation-state concerned (for
more details, see Pietikäinen et al. 2010). Today, nine different Sámi languages are

[78] Multilingualism and the Periphery

still spoken, but they are all endangered, with estimated numbers of speakers varying
from just a few people up to approximately 30,000 speakers of Northern Sámi, the
biggest Sámi language (Kulonen, Seurujärvi-Kari, and Pulkkinen 2005). There are
no monolingual Sámi speakers left, but rather Sámi languages have different posi-
tions in people’s linguistic repertoires, varying from mother tongue to knowledge of
a few words. Inari village is one of the symbolic and institutional focal points for the
Sámi languages, and the major site of Sámi language practices on the Finnish side
of the Sámiland. Many of the central Sámi institutions are in Inari, including, for
example, Sámi medium education, the Sámi Parliament, Sámi media, and the Sámi
museum Siida, making Inari a centre for Sámi language speakers and practices.
Inari village is thus a site of multilingual dynamics, where the hierarchies, cate-
gories, and boundaries between indigenous and other languages and their speakers
are under construction and often also contested. This relates, on the one hand, to
the shifting position of Sámi languages in people’s language practices linked to lan-
guage endangerment and revitalization. On the other hand, the ongoing transfor-
mation from the traditional livelihoods (fishing, reindeer herding, forestry) to the
service sector (especially tourism), has brought new languages and novel linguistic
needs into the area (for other minority language contexts, see e.g. contributions by
Jaffe, this volume; Kelly-Holmes, this volume; and Pujolar, this volume). Nowadays
tourism, with indigenous Sámi culture as its major selling point, is a rapidly growing
industry. Besides its economic impact, tourism also has an influence on what kind
of multilingualism is needed, valued, and expected in the area.
Within this dynamic multilingual environment, two important and interrelated
processes, relevant for the argument I wish to develop in this chapter, occur: First,
some new ways of using Sámi resources are now changing their traditional values
and functions. Secondly, authenticity, in its various forms and meanings, has become
a new commodity, used and invested in multiple ways. This transition brings about
tensions and creativity related to what is perceived to be authentic in the context of
Inari, and how this is discursively constructed. Inari can thus be seen as a polycen-
tric space of peripheral multilingualism, where various logics and norms of different
‘centres’—(the nation-state, Sámi indigenous politics, market forces) intersect and
interact, centralizing certain identities, languages, and practices while peripheraliz-
ing some others. In this sense, Inari is a nexus (Scollon and Scollon 2004) of centre–
periphery dynamics. The shifting ideas of desired or ‘unwanted multilingualism’ or
valued and ‘tacky’ authenticity point to the relativity of centres and peripheries, their
spatial and temporal variation and their codependence. Next, I will discuss in more
detail how these dynamics are played out in relation to the question of authenticity.

AUTHENTICITY IN MULTILINGUAL S Á MILAND

Authenticity is no doubt a complex and conflicted concept used not only in various
academic disciplines, language, and tourism studies (see e.g. Bruner 2001; Eckert

H ET E R O G L O S S I C AU T H E N T I C I T Y I N TO U R I S M [79]
2003; Coupland 2010; McLaughlin, this volume; Pujolar, this volume) but also
employed in a wide range of sites, practices, and events in peripheral multilingual
sites. Despite its ambiguity, authenticity remains, as Coupland (2003: 417) argues,
‘a quality of experience that we actively seek out’, an aspect often commodified in
tourism. In a shifting multilingual peripheral site such as Inari, authenticity is also in
high demand in the categorization of people, practices, and products as more or less
‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’. The concept also figures prominently in the conflicted
concept of ‘native speaker’, especially in various indigenous politics, language revi-
talization, documentation, and maintenance discourses (cf. Moore, Pietikäinen,
and Blommaert 2010).
In an attempt to build on an approach that helps to examine the various and
shifting meanings and usages of authenticity in heritage Sámi tourism in Inari, I
draw on some of the previous sociolinguistic and discourse analytical work on lan-
guage and authenticity (see e.g. Coupland 2003; Bucholtz 2003; Johnstone and
Kiesling 2008; King and Wicks 2009; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011) in see-
ing authenticity as a discursively constructed resource put to work in the service of
various interests.
The discursive conceptualization of authenticity foregrounds three important
aspects of authenticity, relevant for this chapter. First, it emphasizes the relative-
ness of authenticity (cf. e.g. Bruner 2001; Coupland 2001, 2003; Eckert 2003). It
comes in different shades and modes, linked to the variation depending on con-
text and participants, as well as on the particular time and space. Thus, there is no
one single, monolithic authenticity, but it is subject to change. The relativeness and
situatedness of authenticity stresses that we can only examine discourses, represen-
tations, and practices of authenticity. To underline this, Bucholtz (2003) suggests
that rather than studying ‘authenticity’ we need to focus on the processes of authen-
tication: the various ways in which certain languages, bodies, practices, places, and
objects become authenticated in a particular time and space. These are important
sociolinguistic and language ideological processes (cf. Coupland 2010; Pietikäinen,
forthcoming). Authenticity is thus seen as emergent from encounters, interactions,
socio-cultural situations, and the personal life history of the participants (cf. Scollon
and Scollon 2004; Otsuji and Pennycook 2010; Pietikäinen, forthcoming).
Secondly, and importantly for the argument I wish to develop in this chapter,
the understanding of authenticity as a discursively constructed resource and as
emergent in interaction, foregrounds the importance of language and other semi-
otic resources as a means for authentication (Coupland 2003; Pietikäinen and
Kelly-Holmes 2011). Multilingualism in Sámi communities usually receives a con-
flicted perception. This is complicated by the disjunction between what is perceived
as beneficial for endangered Sámi languages and the recent economic development
in the particular area, drawing heavily on tourism, requiring multilingual, incom-
plete, and changing language repertoires.
Also, the utilization of multimodal Sámi resources, such as Sámi colours, flag,
dress, and ornaments, in authentication of products and places has caused frictions,

[80] Multilingualism and the Periphery

particularly related to what is considered as a ‘proper’ or ‘respectful’ way to use them.
Another cause for debate is the question of who has valid access to these resources.
This discussion is especially tense in tourism, where there is a long history of debat-
ing how Sámi heritage culture can be used and by whom (cf. Länsman 2004).
Finally, authenticity implies, as powerfully argued by Coupland (2003, 2010),
a value system. The value system connected to authenticity can be seen to be con-
stantly on the move, continuously evolving, albeit not unconstrained and certainly
not without consequences. The circulation of Sámi resources stirs up existing lan-
guage relations, categories, and hierarchies and, at the same time, creates new mul-
timodal and linguistic environments, practices, and users (cf. Pietikäinen 2010). In
the context of Sámi authentication, different spaces may share or vary in what kinds
of orientations, norms, and practices in relation to Sámi authenticity are valued
and validated. This relates to the understanding of space as a complex and dynamic
social construction (cf. Lefebvre 1991; Pennycook 2010; Jaworski and Thurlow
2010; Busch, this volume) produced and experienced in human interaction. This
dynamic view of authenticity sees it in relation to time and place. The temporal
aspect emphasizes the historicity and change, while the spatial aspect underlines
the variation and multiplicity. Together they create the dynamics of authentication.
We can see temporary affordances and subscriptions of/into a certain type of Sámi
authenticity, as well as different ideas of Sámi authenticity operating at the same
time in the same place, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict.
These dynamics of Sámi authenticity in a complex multilingual and shifting situ-
ation can, I would like to suggest, be fruitfully examined with the help of concepts of
heteroglossia and the closely related concepts of centripetal and centrifugal forces
(see e.g. Bakhtin 1981: 294). Although heteroglossia is nowadays often used as an
overall expression for linguistic diversity, I would like to emphasize heteroglossia
as a fundamental characteristic of language, underlying its relational nature (as
opposed to seeing it as a closed system) and seeing it as a spatio-temporal whole—a
kind of chronotope to borrow the concept by Bakhtin (see Bakhtin 1981; also cf.
Dufva and Pietikäinen, forthcoming). The point here is that heteroglossia refers
not only to the coexistence of ‘languages’ within a language, but their coexistence
and temporal and spatial characteristics in a juncture of centralizing and decentral-
izing forces. These competitive forces, borrowing from physics, are referred to as
‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ forces. They serve to promote the continual evolution of
language and language practices. The centripetal and centrifugal forces within het-
eroglossia are what change the ‘official’, centralized and standardized language of a
culture over time, usually by infusing diverse, unofficial forms of language into offi-
cial forms via the speech of various literary characters (Bakhtin 1981). These forces
offer a way, taken up in this chapter, to examine centre–periphery dynamics in rela-
tion to authenticity in a peripheral multilingual site of Sámi heritage tourism.
When applied to Sámi tourism contexts, centripetal forces can be seen to be
working to render authenticity as monoglossic and unifying, linked to hierarchies
and normativity, while centrifugal forces bring in situationally changing and creative

H ET E R O G L O S S I C AU T H E N T I C I T Y I N TO U R I S M [81]
meanings of authenticity. The ‘central’ authenticity is typically perceived as ‘real’
and ‘genuine’, indexed, for example, by a Sámi family connection, Sámi language
skills, and personal history. The ‘peripheral’ authenticity is more ambiguous and
carnivalesque (Bakhtin 1981), mixing local and indigenous traditions and practices
with global formats, genres, and practices. The former can be seen as an ‘authorita-
tive’ authenticity, while the latter is perceived more as an ‘emerging’ authenticity.
Both centripetal and centrifugal authenticities invest and feed into the reinventing
of the bodies, practices, and resources that may index such authenticity. This calls into
question the understandings and perceptions of the role and value of Sámi languages
in the practices and experiences of creating and marking authenticity. Especially the
emerging markets for Sámi cultural and language resources, particularly in popular
music, art, and tourism, bring forth new versions and usages of Sámi authenticity
(cf. Pietikäinen 2008; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011). At the moment of the
simultaneous existence of centripetal and centrifugal authentication forces, there are
situations where the historically standardized markers of Sámi authenticity—the
family connection, the dress, the flag, the reindeer, and the language—encounter
emerging markers of Sáminess: multilingual, transnational family ties, a Sámi dress
with a twist, a multilingual repertoire without any Sámi in it.

A DISCOURSE APPROACH TO AUTHENTICATION:

PRACTICES IN S Á MI TOURISM

In attempting to understand this centripetal–centrifugal tension, I adopt a discourse

analytical approach to examine shifting authenticities under centre–periphery
dynamics in transforming, peripheral multilingual Sámiland. In particular, I apply
some of the ideas of transdisciplinary discourse analysis, called Nexus Analysis,
introduced by Scollon and Scollon (2001, 2004). Nexus Analysis is a form of mul-
tidimensional discourse analysis aimed at analysing the complexity and multiplicity
of situated events and actions by examining the simultaneous coming together of
participants, discourses, and interactional normativities in any moment of language
use. To capture this idea Scollon and Scollon use the term ‘nexus’, by which they
mean ‘a point at which historical trajectories of people, places, discourses, ideas,
practices, experiences and objects come together to enable some action which in
itself alters those historical trajectories in some way as those trajectories emanate
from this moment of social action’ (Scollon and Scollon 2004: 159; for applications
see e.g. Hult 2009; Lane 2010; Pietikäinen 2010; Pietikäinen et al. 2011).
The Sámi village of Inari can be seen as a nexus of many current and overlap-
ping authentication practices related to, for example, the new economy, globaliza-
tion, mobility, and indigenous language rights and revitalization, each impacting on
how authenticity is constructed. This results in emerging ways of organizing and
exploiting Sámi resources for authentication in a specific, situated interaction and
with particular participants. These simultaneous processes have an impact on what

[82] Multilingualism and the Periphery

kind of authenticity is perceived as centripetal (i.e. ‘central’ and ‘normative’) and
what is considered as centrifugal or ‘peripheral’ (i.e. creative, unexpected, and car-
nivalesque). However, as the concepts are under ongoing construction, there are
usually overlapping, conflicting, and even paradoxical understandings and criteria
as regards perceptions of authenticity. To me this suggests looking at authentica-
tion through discursive practices, not only limited to the use of Sámi languages but
including representations, discourses, particular spaces, and particular participants
related to Sámi authentication. Thus, my focus is on what authenticity comes to
mean: what is constructed and taken as authentic in a given situation.
To examine how some of the dynamics of Sámi authentication play out in the
tourism context, I will focus here on one particular site, namely a Sámi reindeer
farm, which is a popular tourist attraction in the area. The farm is in the business of
circulating Sámi resources and in making claims about and representations of Sámi
authenticity. The Sámi reindeer farm is the home of a multilingual Sámi family, who
turned it into a successful Sámi heritage tourism business decades ago. Now they
are making their living out of the business which is organized around claims, perfor-
mances, and experiences of Sámi authenticity. This Sámi tourism business is at the
core of the dilemmas related to creating and consuming Sámi authenticity. Living
at the heartlands of the Sámi culture and being a recognized Sámi family, they are
engaged in a permanent balancing act to make an economically viable tourism
product for volatile markets but in a way that taps into local norms regarding the
commodification of Sámi culture, and hence becomes locally validated. Working
with both requirements means a continuous and delicate balancing act between
centripetal and centrifugal authenticity: blending the authoritative, standard(ized)
Sámi authenticity and recognized heritage tourism practices with creative and
unique local resources to create a recognizable yet distinctive and locally accepted
heritage tourism attraction.
Their main tourism product is a pre-booked, guided tour with various activi-
ties in the surroundings of their home. The visit to the reindeer farm is typically
part of a holiday programme for a larger tourist group, who often travel with their
fellow-nationals and arrive in large groups by bus. Depending on the day and the
tourist season, the tourists may come from France, the Netherlands, Germany,
Hungary, and so on. Language practices are decided depending on the tourist
group: in most cases the host will use mainly English as a lingua franca for tourists
of various nationalities. However, at times the tourists will have their own guide
with them, who translates the host’s English into the language of the tourists.
The ethnographic and discursive data used here are based on my long-standing
ethnographic and discourse analytic research with this particular tourism attrac-
tion and with the family running it. The data comprise ethnographic observations,
photographs, and video- and audio-recordings of several on-site visits, interviews,3
and informal discussions with the family members, tourist operators, and tourists. I
have also made use of various tourism and media texts featuring this touristic attrac-
tion. The ethnographic nature of this research means that it is done in cooperation

H ET E R O G L O S S I C AU T H E N T I C I T Y I N TO U R I S M [83]
with the family and other participants, and they have been important and valuable
resources in planning, carrying out, and reflecting on this particular research. The
individuals running this tourism business have given their permission to be recog-
nized (e.g. via connection to place, product, language practices, etc.), and to use
their names, telling me that the publicity for their tourism business as well as the
unique characteristics of their product mean that publicity and recognizability are
part of their business and daily life regardless of this particular research. However,
to put emphasis on the authentication practices in this context, rather than on indi-
vidual decisions and experiences, I have anonymized the visit and participants to
some extent: I will not use names and I have left out some immediately identifying
details.
To examine authenticity as emerging in the interaction, I am not building on
any assumed connections between language, culture, authenticity, or geography
(cf. Otsuji and Pennycook 2010). Rather, my aim is to explore how such relations
are discursively produced, resisted, defied, or rearranged. I will next focus on two
interrelated discursive authentication practices simultaneously at play in the visit,
namely (1) visual consumption of Sámi resources and (2) discourses and language
practices related to Sámi languages.

AUTHENTICATION PRACTICES IN A S Á MI
TOURISM PERFORMANCE
The Stage

The Sámi tourism product, the visit to the reindeer farm, can be seen as being
created and consumed as a co-performance between the hosts and tourists (cf.
Bruner 2001; Sheller and Urry 2004; Salizar 2010). This scripted and repeated
co-performance requires awareness of the rules of touristic performances and
willingness from all participants to submit themselves to this play of authentic-
ity. In the play the tourists are cast as reindeer caretakers, lasso throwers, rein-
deer drivers, language learners, singers, and consumers while the hosts are hailed
as teachers, singers, sellers—and above all, authenticated, embodied Sámi. To
meet the varying criteria of a worthwhile tourism experience, a profitable tour-
ist product and local legitimacy in heritage tourism business, the performance
needs to be skilfully performed and carefully managed and yet be open to some
variation.
This means that the visit is performed in a juncture of centripetal and centrifugal
authentication practices. On the one hand, the performance needs to be standard-
ized and unified to some extent for it to be repeatable and manageable. On the other
hand, the performance also needs to vary and adapt, for example, according to the
tourist group (e.g. shared language resources, number of tourists, their preferences)
and to weather conditions (if there is snow, how cold it is, etc.), as well as to the
resources of the particular host for a particular visit. As a result, the visit is both

[84] Multilingualism and the Periphery

repetitious and unique. Figure 5.1 illustrates the repeated key activities in the visit
and their temporal order and location at the space of this tourism performance.
In the following, my aim is to briefly describe the key activities, and their stan-
dardized (i.e. centripetal) and varying (i.e. centrifugal) characteristics.

Figure 5.1:
Key activities in the reindeer farm visit and their temporal order

H ET E R O G L O S S I C AU T H E N T I C I T Y I N TO U R I S M [85]
(1) Welcoming: The tourists arrive by their buses and are greeted by the host,
typically one of the family members or hired helpers called ‘a friend of the
family’. Without exception, the host is wearing the Sámi dress.
(2) Feeding the reindeer: After welcoming, the host offers the tourists lichen
from a bag for feeding the reindeers on a leash nearby. Typically, the tourists
enthusiastically feed the reindeers and equally enthusiastically take pictures
of this activity.
(3) Teaching/learning about reindeers: After a while the host routinely gath-
ers the tourists in a semi-circle around reindeers and gives a relatively stan-
dardized lesson on reindeers; on their nutrition, survival in the arctic nature,
ear marking system, etc. The tourists are invited to ask questions and quite
often few are put forward, often regarding the biology of the reindeer. In the
background, some of the tourists ignore this activity and continue feeding the
reindeers and taking pictures.
(4) Teaching/learning lassoing: Next, the tourists are invited to learn lasso-
ing, a skill needed in reindeer herding. The training is done with a help of
a mock reindeer and a lassoing teacher. There is variation around who does
the teaching: sometimes it is the host, sometime an older man, dressed invar-
iably in a Sámi dress and talking only in Sámi (for details, see below). This
subversion of the participatory roles in lassoing is often a moment of laughter
and clowning. After some hesitation, most of the tourists participate in this
activity quite eagerly, but some withdraw to the background and observe the
event. Another activity going on all the time is extensive photographing and
videotaping.
(5) Driving a reindeer sledge: During the winter the tourists have an option
(for an extra fee) to have a reindeer sledge drive in the snowy forest right
next to the house. The hosts prepare the reindeers for the drive and guide the
tourists in the sledges and give directions on how to drive. The reindeers are
tamed and trained as sledge reindeers and they dutifully walk or slowly run
the approximately 500 meter long circle-shaped track. The tourists seem to
enjoy the excitement, take lots of pictures during the drive and give encourag-
ing shouts to each other and to the reindeer. Later, they will be given a humor-
ous ‘Reindeer driving licence’, a small card with a picture of the Sámi host
and a reindeer against a wintery scene. The ‘licence’ states that the holder has
passed the examination and is entitled to drive in the wilds of Lapland. The
license is ‘authorized’ by a date and the signature of the host. The tourists typ-
ically greet the cards with amusement.
(6) Visiting the kota: After the outside activities, the tourists are guided inside
a kota, which resembles the traditional Sámi ‘tepee’, but this modern version
is much larger and made of wood. Inside the kota the standard refreshments
include coffee, tea, and a biscuit traditional to the region. While enjoying
the coffee, the host tells stories about the Sámi culture, with an emphasis

[86] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 on handicrafts and languages. The latter part of the visit centres around sing-
ing: first, a member of the family performs a few Northern Sámi joiks, a tradi-
tional form of Sámi throat singing. After this, the tourists are taught ‘easy’ joiks
and all sing together. The closing sequence of singing varies depending on the
particular group of tourists. The tourists are asked to sing a song from their
native country in their native language. This request gets mixed responses
from the tourists: the big groups of tourists with the same nationality usually
pick up the song relatively quickly and end up singing a well-known song to
everyone. The situation varies even more when the tourist group is multilin-
gual and multinational or a very small group of people are put on the spot. At
times, there might not be that much singing, at other times the solution is to
sing a song that everyone knows (like Brother John), and everybody sings in
their own language.
(7) Souvenir shopping: Next, the tourists are guided to a small souvenir shop
next to the kota. In the shop, all kinds of Sámi and Northern souvenirs are
sold (e.g. knives, items made of reindeer antlers or skin, wooden items, stones,
postcards, etc.). Many of the sold items are made by the family members.
(8) Farewell: The host guides the tourists back to the front of the house where
the bus is waiting for them. The tourists climb in and the host waves to
everyone.

The visit to the reindeer farm is put into play in relation to other places and pre-
vious tourism experiences. In this sense, the visit to the reindeer farm takes place in
a trans-local tourism space. It draws on trans-local connectivity by indexing, using,
and moulding recognized tourism genres, scripts, and performances, resulting in
what Sheller and Urry (2004: 1) describe as ‘relational mobilization of memories and
images, emotions and expectations’. This is achieved by using strategically selected,
central local resources of Sámi culture and Northern nature, and mixing them with
globalized tourism resources. As a result, we have a construction of an authenticated
performance, produced in the tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces,
in a localized space of Sámi tourism. Next, I will focus on two interrelated discur-
sive authentication practices simultaneously at play, namely (1) visual consumption
and (2) discourses and language practices related to Sámi languages. Both show the
interplay between centripetal and centrifugal tendencies in authentication.

VISUAL CONSUMPTION OF AUTHENTICITY AT

S Á MI TOURISM PERFORMANCE

Visual consumption refers to strategic visual communication central to the experi-

ence economy, such as tourism, marketing, and media (Schroeder 2002). In tourism,
the ability to both strategically produce and make available visual representations,

H ET E R O G L O S S I C AU T H E N T I C I T Y I N TO U R I S M [87]
on the one hand, as well as the ability to ‘take in’ visual signs and circulate them,
on the other hand, constitutes a key attribute of the tourism product and experi-
ence (cf. Urry 2002). Tourism experience is very much also a visual experience,
including visual practices, notably photographing. The reindeer farm visit perfor-
mance draws on three central visual domains: Northern nature, iconic Sámi culture,
and home, illustrated in Figure 5.1. The picture illustrates how the landscape of the
Northern periphery functions as a wider framing for the performance. The farm is
geographically located outside the village, in the middle of ‘nowhere’, where an acci-
dental tourist would not ‘happen’ to end up. It makes use of the wealth of Northern
peripheral resources: untouched nature; snow, darkness, and silence during the
winter; a running stream and white nights during the summer.
The family house as the background of the many tourist activities (see
Figure 5.1) makes the visual and material connection between the touristic visit
and the home space: although the tourists do not actually go inside the house, they
walk around it while taking part in the various tourism activities. The living home
is a very efficient resource for authentication of the visit. Everyday life going on
in the house, evident from the accidental toys and bicycles in the yard and occa-
sional glances from the family members, making this tourism product distinctive.
In several tourism destinations throughout Lapland it is possible to ‘visit’ a Sámi
or Lappish (usually) man, who comes, dressed up in a Sámi dress or a modification
of it (Lappish costume), and with a reindeer or two to a tourist resort for tourists
to see and take pictures. To be able to come and visit the real, living home of a Sámi
family contributes to the feeling of being a guest and having a unique opportunity
to see something ‘authentic’.
The visual consumption of Sámi culture includes the Sámi flag, the Sámi tepee
kota, the sauntering reindeers, reindeer antlers, and reindeer skins. However, the
most obvious—and authenticating—visual consumption is the Sámi dress. With
its different colours and ornaments, the Sámi dress speaks of locality for the local
people and authenticity for the tourists. For those familiar with the language of
Sámi dress, the visual elements in the dress index the particular region in Sámiland
from which the person comes and consequently which Sámi language (potentially)
s/he speaks. Traditionally, the Sámi people wore these dresses every day, but more
recently the dresses are typically used only for various festivities (Lehtola 1997)
with the exception of tourism work. Moreover, only members of the Sámi com-
munity are entitled to wear the dress, even though, again, there are exceptions at
times in tourism. At the reindeer farm, the hosts are marked as Sámi by the styl-
ized Sámi dresses they are wearing, which simultaneously differentiate them from
the tourists. Their bodies become authenticated as genuine Sámi: the dress lends
centripetal, authoritative authenticity to the hosts, and the tourists have, perhaps
for the first time, a chance see the Sámi dress—and Sámi people, certified by the
dress—with their own eyes.
The visual consumption of the dress as a part of the performance is no acci-
dent, but a very conscious and strategic decision made earlier when establishing

[88] Multilingualism and the Periphery

the reindeer farm tourism business decades ago. In the interview extract4 below,
the host, one member of the family explains how the idea of the Sámi reindeer farm
started:

Isäntä: Sittenhän mulla oikeastaan alkoi himottamaanki tämä homma. kun olin täällä [yri-
tyksen nimi] töissä niin jatkuvasti tuli ihmisiä kysymään että missä näkis poron. [sanoin]
jotta tienvarressa niitä sattuu näkymään ni siinä on ainut mahollisuus. sitten ne kysy missä
näkis saamelaisia minä että tässä on ensimmäinen. ne katto pitkään mutta sitte ne muutti se
[kysymyksen] että missä näkis lapinpukusen ihmisen. [minä] että kyllä täällä saamelaisia
on mutta ku ei niillä ole lapinpukua päällä ni että jos joku vanhempi ihminen tullee. siihen
aihaan ruukas vanhemmat ihmiset tuli aina kylälle ni heillä oli lapinpuvut päällä. minä että
jos joku vanhempi ihminen sattuu kylälle tulemahan se on ainut mahollisuus mutta muuten
en tiiä sitä sanoa. sitten mulla tosin koko ajan mielessä kytiki siinä että minä tehen sellasen
yrityksen että aina saa sanoa että siellä on lapinpukune ihminen siell on poro (nauraa).

Host: Well then, this whole business started to interest me when I was working here in
[name of a company]. All the time people came and asked me where they could see a
reindeer. I said that you might happen to see them on the roadside. That is really the only
chance. Then they asked where they could see Sámi and I answered that here is the first
one. They looked at me for a long time and then they changed their question and asked
where they could see a person wearing a Sámi dress. I said that there are Sámi people
around here but they do not wear Sámi dress. Only if an older person comes—at that
time the older people always used to wear some dress when they came to the village. So
I said that if an older person happens to come to the village, that is the only chance, at
least as far as I know. But all the time, I was playing with an idea in my mind that I would
establish that kind of business, so that one can always say that there is a person wearing
Sámi dress there, and that there is a reindeer there (laughing).

The host’s account illustrates two interrelated points that are relevant for authen-
tication practices at the farm. First, as a Sámi family, this particular tourism enter-
prise has local legitimacy as regards Sámi culture and access to Sámi resources and
their commodification—an issue that is problematic for many in Lapland’s tourism
business. The use of Sámi resources is a hot topic in Lapland tourism and many
tourism products have been criticized for misuse of Sámi culture (see e.g. Saarinen
1999; Länsman 2004), and some products make use of Northern or Lappish
resources instead to avoid trying to claim access to or ownership of Sámi resources
(cf. Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011). Secondly, the extract illustrates the recog-
nition and reflection of the fact that tourists collect signs (Urry 2002): compulsory
and compulsive photographing is an important element in tourism, and providing
a scene for this activity opens up a business opportunity. Locally legitimate access
to the commodification of Sámi resources for the tourist gaze (Urry 2002) means
organizing the tourist practices for the consumption of what is taken to be authen-
tic by tourists, regardless of what the performances may mean or how they may be
treated by locals or the family members themselves.

H ET E R O G L O S S I C AU T H E N T I C I T Y I N TO U R I S M [89]
DISCOURSES AND LANGUAGE PRACTICES IN S Á MI REINDEER FARM

Another resource used for authentication of the reindeer farm visit is the dis-
course of Sámi languages and language practices in/around Sámi. While the most
used language resources for interaction during the visit are English and Finnish,
and at times other languages with the help of the interpreting guide of the tourist
group, Sámi languages and discourses about them are also used in two key activ-
ities: the lassoing (activity 4) and the kota visit (activity 6). Next I will focus on
the former case.
The lassoing activity centres on the idea of the tourists learning the ‘key skills of
a reindeer herder’, used to catch a single reindeer from a running herd. In the tourist
version, the ‘reindeer’ is a wooden, immobile model and the tourists try to ‘catch’ it
by throwing the lasso from a distance of approximately 20 meters. Typically in this
interaction, the key participants are the host, the lasso teacher (an older male mem-
ber of the family), and the tourists. The activity starts with the host explaining what
is going to happen. What is interesting in terms of authentication practices is the
use of Sámi language in this interaction. Dressed up in a Sámi dress and as a skilful
lasso thrower, the teacher is an embodied authentic older Sámi man. This image is
further reinforced by the teacher’s language choice in this activity. Regardless of his
multilingual repertoire, here he chooses to use only Sámi, a language totally incom-
prehensible to most of the visitors. The teacher talks only Sámi, for example, when
inviting tourists to take part, when explaining the various throwing techniques, and
asking about their previous experiences in lassoing. After some hesitation, most of
the tourists appear to take part in the activity rather enthusiastically, even if with
some self-consciousness, indicated by facial expressions and laughter. The tourists
respond to the teacher’s talk in Sámi typically with a mixture of laughter, cheering,
and replying to him either non-verbally (nodding, gestures) or in their own lan-
guage. This is a carnivalesque moment of subversion and laughter (Bakhtin 1981;
see also Blackledge and Creese 2009; Pietikäinen, forthcoming). Learning a Sámi
activity (lassoing) and being taught in an endangered, indigenous language by a
Sámi man wearing a Sámi dress is a rich point of authentication in the visit. It also
serves as a high visual point for many tourists, who take lots of pictures and video-
tape the activity.
In his interview with the researcher, the teacher himself reflects upon the
requirement of authenticity as regards Sámi language practices. He starts to explain
his language choice by telling a story he has heard of a Finnish man, hired in one
of Lapland’s tourist resorts to perform a joik (traditional Sámi singing). The man
had sung a ‘fake joik’, using Finnish lyrics ‘Hallikoira haukkuu hau hau hau (a dog
barks woof woof woof)’. These words did not have any obviously relevant mean-
ing in the context or any link to joiking, but rather the choice of these particular
words and syllables presumably drew on their phonetic similarity to an aural stere-
otype of joiking. According to the story, the tourists were very excited and clapped
enthusiastically, oblivious to the fact that the performance was not joik at all, nor

[90] Multilingualism and the Periphery

an ‘authentic’ Sámi performance. The lasso teacher says in the interview that some
people have also said to him that his job is easy as he, too, can say whatever he wants
or just nonsense in Sámi when teaching lassoing. However, he does not approve of
the suggestion of using Sámi only emblematically, but wants to keep the informa-
tional function at the centre of his performance:

Opettaja: Siihen ei koskaan voi luottaa [ettei kukaan ymmärtäisi] että siellä on seassa aina
semmosia jotka ymmärtääkin että se pittää olla hyvin tarkka että siinä ei kannattais tyhjiä
puhua (nauraa). joo moniki on sanonu mulle että johan sulla on helppo ku sie saat höpiskellä
mitä haluavat (epäselvää) mie että kyllä kai se nii että siinä on (epäselvää) (nauraen-) vapaa
että siinä voi kyllä kokkeilla että jos sillä kovin kauan ei pärjää ni sillon on tyhyjää höpissy
sitte (-nauraen).

Teacher: One can never trust that (nobody understands). Among the tourists there
might be people who understand. One must be very careful not to talk nonsense (laugh-
ing). Well, many have said to me, you have it easy as you can say whatever you want
(unclear). I (reply) that I guess one is (unclear, laughing) free, that one can surely try
but if one does not make it (in the tourism business) for long, then one must have talked
nonsense (laughing).

The teacher’s story and opinion about the ‘false’ authentication show his aware-
ness of and reflection about the authentication practices under local conditions.
Even though it may well be that, for the vast majority of the tourists, his language
is emblematic, functioning like a well-chosen sound track (cf. Kelly-Holmes 2005)
and from that perspective he could say anything. However, to him and potentially
for a few guests, the Sámi language is a communicative resource and hence the con-
tent of his talk needs to make sense. This multifunctionality of Sámi resources in the
lassoing context makes it ambivalent and multi-voiced (Bakhtin 1981), authenti-
cating the performance for the tourists and connecting locally with the value of the
Sámi language as a living language.

DISCUSSION: REPETITION, REFLEXIVITY, AND

PERIPHERAL MULTILINGUALISM

Multilingualism under the centre–periphery dynamics in a peripheral site of Sámi

tourism links to the centripetal and centrifugal authentication practices. Centripetal
authentication practices pull Sámi, local, and tourism practices and resources
together tightly into a repeatable, standardized performance, while centrifugal
forces propel them into unexpected and creative combinations and order. Together,
these forces create an ambivalent and heteroglossic authenticity performance, a
nexus of historical and new meaning, value and function of Sámi resources.
This multilingual performance also highlights the dynamics and potential of rep-
etition and creativity in heritage tourism. For example, Pennycook (2010: 36), when

H ET E R O G L O S S I C AU T H E N T I C I T Y I N TO U R I S M [91]
talking about cultural production and relocalization in relation to time and place,
argues that repetition and creativity are not opposite to each other, but rather rep-
etition can be seen ‘as an act of difference, relocalization, renewal.’ Copying a style,
activity, or genre, for example, and repeating the same performance over and over
can be seen as a creative relocation practice (Pennycook 2010: 42), amplified by
the flow of time and the uniqueness of individual experience. In the context of Sámi
tourism, we can see repetition as complementary to creative innovation in authenti-
cation practices, making the same reindeer farm performance different every time.
The experiences of the hosts in the Sámi reindeer farm visit bring out the impor-
tance of reflexivity in tourism. The capacity to reflect on their own actions and
choices seems to allow the tourist service providers to make a link between the
particular local conditions of producing a tourism product and the needs of the
tourism markets. This seems to be particularly relevant as regards access and own-
ership of Sámi resources and their commodification. In addition, reflexivity can be
used as a resource in the actual performance: the use of humour, irony, and laughter
can help in creating a space in which the playfulness and the performative char-
acteristics of the product are recognized and put in relation to other spaces and
performances. Also, the interaction between the tourists and the hosts can facilitate
a joint moment of experiencing the play but in a way that allows various distances
and distinctions.
The multilingual complexities in indigenous Sámi communities oblige speakers,
locals, and visitors alike, to adapt, develop, and strategize with their linguistic and
discursive resources and lead to both language-ideological tensions and creativ-
ity. Seeing multilingualism through a periphery-centre lens highlights the dynam-
ics of language change. As geographical, economic, political, and cultural centres
and peripheries are constantly renegotiated, language categories and practices also
become dynamic and are in a constant dialogue with the previous and current tran-
sitions. In the Sámi reindeer visit, all these trajectories, norms, practices, and bodies
come together, resulting in a heteroglossic tourism performance, simultaneously
repeated and unique.

NOTES

1. This article is based on two research projects, Northern Multilingualism

(http://www.northernmultilingualism.fi) and Peripheral Multilingualism
(http://www.peripheralmultilingualism.fi), both funded by the Academy of
Finland.
2. I wish to warmly thank the individuals who have allowed me to do
ethnographic research related to their multilingual everyday life in Inari.
3. Research assistant Hanni Salo collected some of these interviews.
4. The extracts from the interviews have been edited for readability. The
transcription of the interview interaction represents all the words spoken that

[92] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 could be identified. Unidentifiable words are in empty single parentheses and
audible paralinguistic communication like laughter is represented in double
parentheses. In the English translation, idiomaticity is a higher priority than
literal translation.

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[94] Multilingualism and the Periphery

C H A P TER 6
Linguistic Creativity in Corsican
Tourist Context
ALE X ANDR A JAFFE AND CEDRIC OLIVA

INTRODUCTION

In Corsica, as in other peripheral multilingual contexts, changing economic prac-

tices and circulating discourses about plurilingual, European and global mar-
kets, and forms of citizenship are creating new frameworks within which people
understand and enact their linguistic and cultural identities (Heller 2003, 2010;
Boudreau and White 2004; Da Silva, McLaughlin, and Richards 2007; Blommaert
2009; Duchêne 2009; Heller and Pujolar 2009; McLaughlin and LeBlanc 2009).
This chapter takes up the complex interrelationship between language practices, the
construction of place/space, and processes of minority language identification. The
specific focus is on how linguistic boundaries and statuses are negotiated through
Corsican along with other languages in the commercial and tourist spheres.
The focus on boundary work includes the historically salient boundary between
the minority language, Corsican, and the dominant language, French. But it also
encompasses Corsican’s relationship with its closest neighbouring language, Italian.
This represents a shift away from viewing Corsican only within the frontiers of the
French nation: as a ‘periphery’ that contrasts with a Parisian or continental French
‘centre’. Rather, this analysis addresses the varied historical and new meanings that
accrue to the multilingual resources in Corsican speakers’ repertoires. The analysis
focuses on the way that Corsican, a minority language, is positioned within public
and tourist texts and interactions. In these texts, social actors produce, reproduce
and potentially challenge notions of both centre and periphery by attending to or
backgrounding processes of differentiation through language, and by construing
various kinds of speakers, writers, and audiences. This dynamic process through
which minority languages are positioned and imagined is productively explored
through the lens of multilingualism, because a multilingual framework disrupts
dominant, historical conceptions of monolingual centres and (trivially) bilingual
peripheries. The multilingual speaker or community, on the other hand, has a
potential relationship to multiple linguistic and cultural centres and peripheries.
The ‘minority’ language can thus be ‘reimagined’ through its relationship(s) with a
variety of languages and speakers.
Data collected on the uses and representations of Corsican in commercial and
tourist spheres show evidence of ideological continuity with dominant, mono-
lingual ideologies of language and identity and are articulated within a historical,
Corsican-French oppositional relationship. At the same time, texts in this domain
show evidence of linguistic creativity in which language (and identity) boundar-
ies are expressed and experienced as a relatively fluid continuum. The findings also
suggest the ways in which Corsican may be repositioned, in contemporary dis-
courses and practices, as a form of ‘added cultural value’ in a tourist market, and
the possibilities and tensions of identity that this new market framework present
for speakers of the minority language. Finally, from a theoretical perspective, the
analytical approach taken in this chapter problematizes the notions of ‘centre’ and
‘periphery’, showing them not so much as places, but as stance objects evoked in
discourses and practices.

LANGUAGE SHIFT AND REVITALIZATION: DOMINANT

AND ALTERNATIVE IDEOLOGIES OF LANGUAGE

Over the last century, Corsican, like many minority languages in Europe, has gone
from being an unmarked code of everyday communication, to a stigmatized ‘dia-
lect’ subordinated to French, to a highly charged symbol of cultural belonging and
authenticity. French language ideologies, transmitted through the school system,
played a large part in the cultural devaluation of Corsican. At the same time, the
economic value of French was an integral part of the picture for Corsicans who
aimed for economic and social horizons beyond the limits of sheepherding and
small-scale agriculture. French was indeed a tool of social and economic advance-
ment for Corsicans who left the island in increasing numbers to work in France or
its colonies, as well as in an island economy that shifted definitively after the Second
World War to the tertiary sector. In these conditions, language shift towards French
accelerated.
The Corsican language revitalization movement, which began in the early 1970s,
was profoundly influenced by the French political and institutional context, as well
as by the dominant nation-state language-ideological framework. In this framework,
languages are conceptualized primarily as bounded, autonomous formal linguistic
codes with an ‘essential’ or natural relationship with collective identities and ter-
ritories (Blommaert and Verscheuren 1998; Wright 2004; Gal 2006; Heller 2006).
This influenced Corsican language activists’ understandings of what a legitimate

[96] Multilingualism and the Periphery

language and speaker are: that is, they measured the authority and authenticity of
their language with respect to an ideal of an ‘autonomous’ code, free from influence
from other languages, characterized by a single authoritative written and oral stand-
ard. In this framework, a legitimate speaker is someone who speaks the minority
language without ‘interference’ from other languages, and only legitimate speakers
can lay claim to a full minority cultural identity. Struggles for language rights within
the French State also imposed these ideologies of language, since Corsicans were
compelled to demonstrate that Corsican was a language on French terms: showing
that it had internal linguistic unity and was clearly differentiated from both French
and Italian.
In previous work on Corsica, Jaffe has traced the influence of this dominant ide-
ological formation in a variety of discourses and practices that emphasize the fix-
ity of language (and identity) boundaries and articulate Corsican language rights
on the basis of an essential link between Corsican and a bounded Corsican eth-
nic community ( Jaffe 1999). This dominant ideological framework surfaces in
policies and practices that endorse or enact parallel, authoritative monolingualisms
(Corsican and French), promote language purism, a single written and oral stand-
ard in both languages, and sanction code-switching and language mixing ( Jaffe
2007a). Corsican bilingual education is structured in part around this ideological
formation in its effort to create parallel, equally authoritative curricula and practices
in Corsican and French.
At the same time, research on Corsican has also documented an alternative
ideological formation—a discourse of plurilingual identities and competencies,
of ‘polycentric’ and ‘polynomic’ languages in which the emphasis is on language
practice (and its expressive and communicative functions) as opposed to linguis-
tic form and on fluidity rather than fixity of language boundaries ( Jaffe 2007a).
The notion of ‘polynomy’ has been most fully articulated as an alternative ideol-
ogy by Corsican sociolinguists (Comiti 1992; Marcellesi 2003; Thiers 2008; see
also Pietikäinen 2010 and Swigart 2001; Jacquemet 2005; Benor 2010 for ‘fluidity’
as a principle of sociolinguistic practice). Marcellesi’s definition of a ‘polynomic’
language describes its unity as ‘abstract’: located in the recognition by its speakers
of the equal legitimacy and status of different dialectal varieties (Marcellesi 1989:
170). In addition to not requiring a single dialectal norm, the notion of polynomy
has also been interpreted by Thiers as allowing for the potential recognition and
legitimation of mixed linguistic codes that arise from language contact between
dominant and minority language (Thiers 2003).1 Along with other scholars, Jaffe’s
work has documented reflections of this ideology in Corsican popular culture
(including broadcast media), as well as in highly reflexive educational practices
(Cortier and Di Meglio 2004; Jaffe 2007b, 2008).
While the dominant language ideological formation, above, comes out of a long
history of minority language speakers’ experiences in schools and in the politi-
cal sphere, the alternative and plural ideological orientation is also grounded in
those speakers’ experiences, and their inherently multiple and mixed linguistic and

L I N G U I S T I C C R E AT I V I T Y [97]
cultural character. It also grows out of material and ideational shifts associated with
processes of globalization: these include new forms of circulation of people, goods,
ideas, and communicative flows, as well as shifts in the language ideological dis-
courses articulated in centres of European language planning and policy-making
(see Coupland 2010).
In particular, contemporary Corsican language planning and educational dis-
course has been influenced by the Council of Europe’s promotion of the notion
of the ‘plurilingual citizen’, where ‘plurilingualism’ is defined as a ‘complex or even
composite’ communicative competence based on ‘varying degrees of proficiency
in several languages and experiences of several cultures’ (Council of Europe 2001:
4, 168). Plurilingualism is thus the ability to make flexible use of a linguistic rep-
ertoire in intercultural communication. Here, citizenship is predicated on partici-
pation through multiple languages, at various levels of competency: both language
boundaries and monolingual norms are deemphasized. The focus, in the follow-
ing analysis, is thus on the ideological work that takes place around constructing
and deconstructing language boundaries (see Makoni and Pennycook 2007; also
Busch, this volume): on both continuity and change with respect to dominant lan-
guage ideologies.

LANGUAGE-IDEOLOGICAL CONTINUITY AND

CHANGE IN TOURIST SPACES

Corsican language revitalization in the educational sphere is framed almost exclu-

sively with respect to institutionalized French language policy and language ide-
ologies and, in more recent years, supranational models of plurilingual citizenship
( Jaffe 2010). In contrast, in the domain of tourism, the market is the frame for both
linguistic practices and the values attributed to different languages. Language is
thus both a tool for market-based practices (a means to an economic end) and a
potential commodity itself. The commodification of language itself is particularly
clear in sites of heritage tourism (see e.g. Boudreau and White 2004; Heller 2003;
Coupland, Garret, and Bishop 2005; also Pietikäinen, this volume), but language
is also susceptible to commodification in destinations where cultural difference has
been made salient outside a self-conscious ‘heritage’ framework (Pietikäinen and
Kelly-Holmes 2011). In Corsica, there is little heritage tourism, but Corsican cul-
tural and linguistic difference from mainland France has long figured as a central
element of the island’s identity in the public and tourist imaginary both in and out-
side of France (Antonmarchi et al. 2010).
An emerging line of research (Coupland, Bishop, and Garret 2003; Heller 2003;
Boudreau and White 2004; Boudreau 2005; Jaworski and Pritchard 2005; Moïse
and Roy 2006; Pujolar 2006, this volume; Duchêne 2009; Heller and Pujolar
2009; McLaughlin and LeBlanc 2009; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011; as
well as contributions by Coupland; Kelly-Holmes; Pietikäinen; and Pujolar to this

[98] Multilingualism and the Periphery

volume) focuses on tourism as a nexus for the study of how processes of globaliza-
tion reconfigure the economic and symbolic/identity values of minority languages
and varieties. As Heller points out, in globalized economies, the state is no longer
alone in setting language hierarchies: language as a commodity ‘redefine(s) the rela-
tionship between language and identity and produce(s) new forms of competition
and social selection’ (2003: 473). One of the characteristics of tourist encounters
that makes them ripe for a sociolinguistics of globalization is that they make visible
both the circulation of people and the circulation of language(s) in the tertiary sec-
tor, and draw attention to multilingualism and other forms of linguistic variation.
This critical sociolinguistics of tourism is concerned both with the role of language
in the constitution of identity, power, and social difference in the context of tourism
and mobility ( Jaworski and Thurlow 2010) and with the way that tourist encoun-
ters and displays are implicated in ‘the production, distribution and attribution of
value to symbolic resources’ (Heller and Pujolar 2009: 178) that include language
and culture. As a consequence, the sociolinguistics of minority language tourism
looks at how minority language communities are discursively produced in sites of
contact between ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’.
In the Corsican tourist context, there are conditions that favour both language
ideological continuity and change. On the one hand, conventional models of lin-
guistic and cultural authenticity can be brought into play by tourists or be antici-
pated by Corsican tourist providers as product expectations and then reproduced in
tourist interactions (see also Pietikäinen, this volume). This favours the commodi-
fication of Corsican as a bounded, exotic, possibly archaic code or valorizes the use
of Corsican as a marker of authenticity or identity by tourist providers. Secondly,
the practical obligation of the tourist provider to accommodate to the tourist client
can result in normative language choices. Those norms may be anchored in global
frameworks in which English is predominant and in which Corsican is unimagi-
nable as a language of tourist exchange. This has the potential to suppress the use of
Corsican in favour of English as a lingua franca, or lead Corsican-speaking tourist
providers to use only their knowledge of major Romance tourist languages to com-
municate—that is, not to involve the tourist in the effort of ‘intercomprehension’
between Corsican and related languages. Finally, there is continuity with diglossic
ideologies that not only rank but compartmentalize minority vs. dominant language
practice. Corsican has historically been absent from the commercial sphere as a lan-
guage of tourist exchange, even though it has been nominally present as a language
of identity in a symbolic or ‘emblematic’ way, predominantly in business names dis-
played on signs. The default language of interaction with outsiders has long been
French, with English making some modest inroads during the last decade. In gen-
eral, there is also a striking absence of marketing of Corsican language and culture
for tourist consumption. Corsican has thus more or less remained an ‘insider’ code,
detached from the tourist enterprise.
At the same time, there are several elements of the tourist context that have the
potential to encourage change, including the use of Corsican, as well as creative,

L I N G U I S T I C C R E AT I V I T Y [99]
hybrid language practices. First of all, most tourist interactions on Corsica take
place outside of formal structures of linguistic control, evaluation, and surveil-
lance. This is important in a context where the use of the minority language has
become part of the academic institutions at all levels and has thus disseminated
notions of Corsican language ‘purity’ and ‘authenticity’ and ‘correctness’ that typi-
cally stigmatize mixed codes. The tourist domain thus has the potential to be a
space for the use of the Corsican language for Corsicans who are reticent about
using Corsican with other (more proficient) Corsican speakers who might nega-
tively evaluate the quality of their language. In a related vein, the fact that tour-
ist interactions take place outside Corsican identity politics creates conditions in
which Corsicans may use the language without any of the secondary entailments
(including political affiliation) that its use might have in other intra-Corsican con-
texts. Even though there is relatively little cultural tourism on Corsica, there are
some signs (see data below) of increased awareness of Corsican linguistic and cul-
tural distinctiveness as a possible tourist product. While this has the potential to
reproduce stereotypes, it also has the potential to valorize the knowledge and use
of Corsican (see Boudreau and White 2004). Finally, many tourist interactions
have a primarily practical/communicative rather than an ideological focus, and
tourists and tourist professionals have relative goal congruence: achieving under-
standing simultaneously meets tourists’ needs and facilitates the sale of tourist
products. This shared pragmatic focus authorizes and validates ‘imperfect’ and
hybrid language practices.

PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS: CONTINUITY AND

CHANGE IN TOURIST SPACES

The following findings are the result of preliminary observations and recordings of
tourist interactions and signage in tourist shops, tourist information centres, air-
ports, boats/ports, hotels and cafes conducted in the summer of 2009 and 2010 by
the authors. Commercial sites were located in one interior mid-sized town, a coastal
town, and one of the two major cities on the island. One fairly striking form of
ideological continuity is when Corsican tourist providers fail to consider Corsican a
possible language of exchange with Italian tourists, even when English is not work-
ing well as a lingua franca. This is something that we have observed and have also
had reported to us. Another is a purely emblematic use of Corsican on signs, mostly
business names. On the side of change and creativity, we have documented other
forms of public signage where Corsican is positioned as a language of communica-
tion and identity, or is the subject of metalinguistic play linked to the tourist frame-
work. Finally, we have also found evidence of the use of Corsican and mixed forms
of Corsican and Italian being used between Corsican tourist providers and Italian
tourists. In the following sections, we look at progressively more creative forms of
language use in these domains.

[100] Multilingualism and the Periphery

The Positioning of Minority Languages in Public Signage

Contemporary linguistic landscape research, launched by Landry and Bourhis

(1997), has focused on the way that signage—both ‘public’ and ‘private’—reflects
local economies of language including political and ideological processes and nego-
tiations surrounding the relative status of different languages present in a particular
context (see, among others, Backhaus 2007; Ben-Rafael et al. 2006: 8; Shohamy
and Gorter 2009; Stroud and Mpendukana 2009). For minority languages, public
signage is a site for the affirmation of language status and rights (see e.g. Cenoz
and Gorter 2006; Huss 2008; Coupland 2010; Pietikäinen et al. 2011; Busch,
this volume). Signs can counteract the historical exclusion of minority languages
from public space by making them visible. Once visible, a variety of forms of semi-
otic positioning (using resources of colour, size, placement, etc.) with respect to
other languages (particularly, dominant ones) also reflects and confers (relative)
status and contributes to the discursive construction of public space (Hult 2009).
Minority languages are also positioned in public signage by the genres in which they
are used (Pietikäinen et al. 2011) and the functions those signs fill. The approach to
Corsican signage developed in this section follows these lines of analysis to address
issues of the status of Corsican relative to French and other foreign languages as
reflected in commercial and public signage. The analysis also incorporates a model
of signage as a space of virtual or imagined interaction. In this framework, the choice
of languages and their functions presupposes and/or stages imagined linguistic com-
munities, audiences, and linguistic interactions. In particular, I focus on the distinc-
tion between signs that project Corsican as a language of communication (among
Corsicans or between Corsicans and speakers of other languages) and signs that
display Corsican in a primarily ‘emblematic’ way, as an identity marker. As Jaworski
and Piller’s work on the representation of languages in travelogues shows, tourists
and travel writers associated ‘lived’, rather than ‘displayed’ minority language use as
authentic (2008: 310): the mere ‘display’ of the language fails to exemplify the soci-
olinguistic authenticity of being ‘fully owned and unmediated’ (Coupland 2003).
The emphasis in the discussion below is on the visual representations of Corsican
that are accessible to tourists on high-use transportation routes and in businesses
where they are likely to shop.

LANGUAGE IDEOLOGICAL CONTINUITY: EMBLEMATIC SIGNAGE

One of the most common emblematic uses of Corsican in signage that tourists
encounter is in business names. In Figure 6.1, Corsican is used in the main busi-
ness sign, which reads ‘Produtti di Corsica’ (Corsican Products), followed by
‘Artisgianatu’ (Crafts). Corsican, however, is not used to communicate specific con-
sumer information: the list of products available is written in French, German, and
English on the sign to the right of the door to the shop (e.g. ‘Chacuterie, Wurstwaren,

L I N G U I S T I C C R E AT I V I T Y [101]
Figure 6.1:
Emblematic signage

Salumi’). This limited use of Corsican for business names is extremely widespread
and cannot escape the notice of the tourist consumer. It is thus both conventional,
and recognizable as a use of the language to mark local identity. At the same time, it
does not present Corsican to tourists as a language of communication.
The distinction between the symbolic and communicative functions is also
found and displayed to tourists in two other pieces of language addressed to tour-
ists. The first example is illustrated in the contrast between official and more ‘vernac-
ular’ signs on the Italian-run Moby Lines ferry linking Corsica and Italy. On these
boats, permanent/official signs in the ladies’ toilets (cautioning against throwing
objects in the WCs) and in the hallways (identifying different lounges and services
on the boat) address passengers in French, German, English, Italian, and Corsican.2
However, despite the official decision of the Moby Lines company to use Corsican
as a language of informational content, an employee-made sign on the same boat
(Figure 6.2) belies this symbolic message by communicating essential information
in French, Italian, and English only, sidelining both the Corsican and German that
appear in the official company signs.
Corsica Airlines has also adopted a policy of bilingual announcements in French
and Corsican. The departure text given to flight attendants to read goes as follows:

Salute à tutti, ghjunghjeremu in _____ trà un ore è mezzu, fate un bon’ viaghju.
Welcome everyone, we will arrive in ______ in an hour and a half. Have a nice trip.

[102] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 6.2:
Trilingual employee-made sign on Mobylines Ferry

However, once these announcements have been made, safety instructions and any
other important informational content are broadcast in French and English only.
All other routine oral interactions between flight attendants and passengers take
place in French or occasionally English. In summary, the airline announcements
and the kinds of official signage found on the Moby Lines boat mentioned above
are conventional in two senses. First, they are normative and widespread. Secondly,
they are ideologically conventional in their function of using Corsican to symbolize
Corsican identity. They differ from the long-standing practice of naming businesses
in Corsican in the degree to which they foreground the symbolic and political
aspect of displaying linguistic heritage.

LANGUAGE IDEOLOGICAL CHANGE

Evidence of more consequential language ideological change can be found in sign-

age that positions Corsican (to varying degrees) as a language of communication.
This can be seen in the large format electronic signboards erected on main high-
ways and road junctions by the Regional Collectivity. They feature generic pub-
lic service messages, alternating the French and Corsican versions of the message
every 30 seconds or so. In the summer of 2011, one of these messages was ‘Let’s not
burn Corsica; let’s protect it’—in French, ‘Ne brulons pas la Corse, protégeons-la’ and
in Corsican, ‘Un brusgemu a Corsica; paremula di u focu.’ In the same year, bilingual
parking meters were installed in the city of Bastia. The electronic message on the
meter’s screen read: ‘Tempu passatu: Amenda 1 €; Passata 1 H, 35 €’ (Time expired:
Fine, 11€, 1 hour past expiry 35 €).
While motorists can access all of these messages in French, these signs sym-
bolically position Corsican as a language of salient everyday public communication
equal to French.3 The functions of these signs (issuing warnings/advice, notifying

L I N G U I S T I C C R E AT I V I T Y [103]
Figure 6.3:
Corsican language sticker and packaging

about fines, etc.) also position Corsican along with French as a language of social
control (see Dann 2003).

LANGUAGE PLAY, FLUID BOUNDARIES, AND A

PLURILINGUAL FRAMEWORK

In this section, we explore some examples of language use in the tourist contact
zone that engage tourists as plurilingual consumers and position Corsican as one of
the languages in play in plurilingual repertoires and interactions.
In the first example (Figure 6.3), the Corsican language is the product being
marketed in a series of stickers featuring brief Corsican expressions. The full list
(printed on the back of each individual package) includes the Corsican term printed
on the sticker along with French and English translation (Table 6.1).
The fact that the expressions are all interjections evokes Corsican as a language
of local exchange—in fact, as a language that carries a significant affective load
and is used for high social-interactional purposes. In fact, ‘ordinary’ (that is, non
high-affect) translations are left out in the case of ‘Innò’, which can be translated
simply ‘No’, and ‘Chi c’è?’ The latter expression is translated relatively neutrally in
English, but the French version has an accusatory tone, reading ‘What’s your prob-
lem? What’s the matter?’

[104] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 Table 6.1 CORSICAN LANGUAGE STICKERS
Corsican French English
Aiò! Allons-y; j’y crois pas; ça suffit! Let’s go; I can’t believe it; stop it!
Innò! Ah non alors! No way!
Mi Mi Mi Mi! Mate, mate! Pas possible! Look, how possible!
Avà! N’importe quoi, c’est pas vrai! Non sense, it can’t be true!
Chi c’è? T’as un pb? Kes kya? Anything wrong?
Stà zittu! Tais-toi! Silence! Be quiet!

It is also worth noting that the French translations are also colloquial. For exam-
ple, the translation of ‘Aiò’ includes ‘j’y crois pas’, and the translation of ‘Avà’ includes
‘c’est pas possible’. In both these cases the ‘ne’ of the standard form of the negative
(‘je n’y crois pas;’ ‘ce n’est pas possible’) is left out in a reflection of everyday oral
usage and conventional ‘vernacular’ writing. The French translation of ‘Chi c’è?’ also
includes French text-messaging abbreviations (‘pb’ for ‘problem’ and a phonetic,
abbreviated spelling—‘kes kya’ in place of the standard ‘qu’est ce qu’il y a?’). These
translations also function to position Corsican as a colloquial language used for
every day, even high-tech functions.
This is the explicit message sent by a large poster situated in the departures area
of one of the two main airports of the island in the summer of 2011. It featured a list
of about twenty Corsican versions of common text messages, translated variously
into English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Breton. This material was also
printed as a glossy flyer that was distributed in many tourist offices across the island,
as well as in some highly frequented businesses in the summer of 2011 and was
made available on line at http://www.afcumani.org. The banner text on the front
page of the flier and poster was written in five languages in block letters and read:

(Corsican) I MIO TESTO I SCRIVU IN CORSU

(German) MEINE SMS SCHREIBE ICH AUF KORSISCH
(English) I WRITE MY SMS IN CORSICAN
(Spanish) ESCRIBO MIS SMS IN CORSO
(French) J’ECRIS MES SMS EN LANGUE CORSE

Below this banner, the text listed ten text messages, each written in Corsican plus
one other language, each preceded by a humorous text message category expressed
in Corsican. The first one, for example, was an ‘SMS Farniente’, where ‘farniente’
refers to lazing around (evoking both summer leisure and stereotypes of Corsican
‘laziness’). This text was in Corsican and French, with the message (translated here
but not on the flier) ‘Arrived safely. Kisses from Corsica’.

(Corsican) Ghjunti bè. Basgi da Corsica

(French) Bien arrivés. Bisous de Corsica

L I N G U I S T I C C R E AT I V I T Y [105]
 Another text was labelled ‘SMS Paghjella’, referring to a traditional, and some-
times melancholy, Corsican song form. This one was in Corsican and English:

(Corsican) N’ùn ti scurdà di mè ben ch’è luntanu.

(English) Don’t forget me far away.

An ‘SMS Facebook’ paired Corsican and German for the message ‘How are you?
Greetings from Corsica’:

(Corsican) Cumu stai amicu(a)? Ti salutu da Corsica.

(German) Wie geht’s? Grüsse aus Korsika.

The intent of the billboard is explained in Corsican and French in two text boxes
on the bottom of the panel (the same message appeared on the back page of the
flier). The following is my own English translation:

The Corsican language is like a magnificent, forgotten garden signposted ‘Forbidden to

the public’ . . . such a beautiful, lush, and useful garden, full of secrets and forgotten herbs
that can nourish and heal us. Let’s create that desire to pull down the sign ‘No Access’;
let’s rejoice in the pleasure of opening up the garden. Let’s conjure up the strength to
cultivate it with know-how, love, and experience. Language is the ‘house of being’: it
belongs to everyone. Let’s have the courage to make it flourish, to offer and share it.

This discourse identifies Corsican simultaneously as a privileged, essential element

of Corsican identity and heritage and as a token of exchange and interaction with
speakers of other languages, including another minority one (Basque). These tour-
ist visitors are invited ‘into the garden’ with text messages that locate the sender on
Corsica (which is the ‘deictic centre’ of messages) and the messages as going to friends
and family elsewhere. Thus Corsican is positioned as the language that both welcomes
the visitors and anchors their experience to a tourist place, and as the language that
does the work of connection and affective communication ‘back home’ and thereby
authenticates the tourist trajectory and experience. The message of the essential unity
of language and identity is ideologically conventional, but the imagined role of the lan-
guage in the tourist experience represents ideological change in the representation of
the plurilingual tourist adopting a minority language that is not his/her own for pur-
poses of communication both inside and outside the tourist host society.
In the stickers mentioned earlier and in the text messages, Corsican is also posi-
tioned as a language of light-hearted, playful communication and as a specific focus
of metalinguistic play (see Kelly-Holmes and Atkinson 2007; Jaffe 2000; Atkinson
and Kelly-Holmes 2011). The very implausibility of a Basque speaker texting ‘home’
in Corsican underscores this ludic quality and establishes another potential point
of convergence between host (author) and tourist (audience): the elite reflexivity
needed to create and understand metalinguistic humour.

[106] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 What is striking is that this play is packaged—at least potentially or partially—
for an outside audience, indexed by the translations and by where the texts are
located (tourist shops; airport). The target outside market is also reflected in the
commentary of the owner of a tourist shop where the stickers were sold. When
asked how they were selling, she said that they were not selling too well, and that
in her view they needed to put a visual symbol of the island on each sticker so that
tourists who bought them could display their Corsican origin outside the island.
In essence, she voices the principle that Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes articulate
for the labelling of souvenirs in Sámiland: that the ‘ideal’ tourist product should
both cue the authenticity of place and assure its mobility (2011: 325). So, for the
potential French- or English-speaking buyer, the Corsican language on the stickers
authenticates the localness and the exoticness of place. This is a form of ideological
continuity, both in terms of the use of the language and the positioning of Corsican
as a culturally specific tourist destination.
At the same time, these particular stickers also index something else: a potential
kind of intimacy of the buyer and the linguistic context without which it would be
hard to imagine the consumer value or appeal of the product. In one scenario, the
buyer can be imagined as having heard or heard of one or more of the terms evoked
on the stickers, and made a purchase to validate that brush with insider knowledge.
Alternatively, the tourist could buy the sticker with no prior knowledge of the terms
and use the purchase as a springboard for future acts of listening. Both of these
scenarios at least imagine non-Corsicans in interaction with the Corsican language.
This is a new form of sociolinguistic imagination that extracts Corsican from its his-
torical status as a uniquely insider code.
These products are also inherently multivalent, because they have other poten-
tial sources of consumer value for more than one category of consumer. With
respect to the stickers, there is an obvious emblematic dimension to these stickers:
they are linguistic tokens of Corsicanness, and Corsicanness is already heavily typi-
fied in the French national imagination. Thus, it is possible that both the producers
and consumers view the expressions on the stickers not so much as fragments of
a Corsican-speaking world, but rather as humorous elements of a regional variety
of French. This view is not unfounded, since these expressions are used by speak-
ers with a wide range of competencies in Corsican, and are used in both Corsican,
French, and mixed utterances. In this respect, the stickers can be consumed as con-
firmations of fundamentally negative stereotypes. Secondly, the stickers are not
uniquely targeted at or bought by tourists, so they also have to be interpreted as
‘insider’ consumables purchased by Corsicans living on the island permanently, as
well as those who live on the French continent and visit in the summer.
Finally, the purchase of these stickers, like the consumption of the text message
poster and pamphlet may also serve to authenticate the ‘elite’ tourist through the
appropriation of ‘local language’ in ways that position those tourists as ‘cosmopoli-
tan internationals’ who engage with local cultures and languages in superficial ways
( Jaworski and Piller 2008: 304).

L I N G U I S T I C C R E AT I V I T Y [107]
 The final example of linguistic creativity in the commercial domain is an advertise-
ment for a Corsican wine, documented on a large poster in one of the island’s main
airports. The poster had a dark background, with three wine glasses ‘hanging’ upside
down from its top right corner and a silhouette of the shape of the island against a
small pink text box with the word ‘Corse’ (Corsica) on the bottom right. The central
part of the poster is filled with three words in very large, pink typeface (Calibri), fol-
lowed by three bits of text in smaller typeface. They read, and are placed as follows:

Nielluciu*
Niélouchou
Nilouxou
c’est l’intention qui compte
*cépage Corse
FORCEMENT INATTENDUS

As in the stickers, we have another relatively rare instance of the presence of

Corsican being explicitly signalled as the object of creative play that engages an out-
side audience. The first line is the name of the grape: ‘Niellucciu’, written in Corsican.
The asterisk following the word identifies it as a genuine Corsican varietal. The
second two lines are faux-phonetic transcriptions, followed by ‘c’est l’intention qui
compte’ (it’s the thought that counts) in French. One presupposition embedded
in this humour is the unpronouncability of Corsican (see also Kelly-Holmes and
Atkinson 2007). This is, of course, a form of authentication—linguistic exoticism
signals an authentically other place, and authentically other, native speakers who
can say it correctly. This in turn authenticates and adds value to the wine itself as
an authentic, local product (Kelly-Holmes 2005; Pujolar 2006). The advertisement
also makes a tongue-in-cheek intertextual reference to tourist guide books and lexi-
cons and the language-of-purchase-specific pronunciation guides. These guides pre-
sume fleeting interlinguistic encounters and a tourist who will likely never advance
beyond an approximation of native pronunciations. All of this can be considered
ideological continuity relative to language in tourist spaces.
At the same time, the advertisement defines and positions several potential audi-
ences/consumers. The matrix language of the advertisement is French, which is the
language of all of its text apart from the two faux transliterations. French-speaking
audiences are thus positioned as its primary audience. This audience is differen-
tiated, however, by the first transliteration of the pronunciation of the word as
‘Niélouchou’ which follows French spelling conventions. This positions continen-
tal (non-Corsican) French speakers simultaneously as consumers (of the ad and the
wine) and as the targets of a joke to be consumed by Corsicans who, while French
speakers, do not need the transliteration to recognize and pronounce the name of
the wine variety. The spelling ‘Nilouxou’ indexes non-French tourists from a variety
of possible (but unspecified) places with languages in which the ‘x’ is pronounced
[t∫]. These tourists are less plausibly consumers of the ad; rather they are positioned

[108] Multilingualism and the Periphery

as underspecified exotic visitors. They authenticate the island as a tourist destina-
tion and are symbolically aligned with continental French tourists as targets of the
humour and as ‘outsiders’, thus highlighting the ‘insiderness’ and ‘not-Frenchness’
of Corsica and Corsicans.
With respect to the themes of ideological continuity and change, there are two
simultaneous, and conflicting, frames introduced by this ad. On the one hand, ‘It’s
the thought that counts’ frames any pronunciations produced via other-language
faux-phonetic transcription as imperfect, and thus emphasizes linguistic and cul-
tural boundaries. Outsiders cannot penetrate Corsican as a code. At the same time,
the ad evokes a frame in which there are potential tourists in Corsica who are inter-
ested in pronouncing a Corsican word and who might use the transliterations to do
so, as well as Corsican hosts who are willing to accept imperfect pronunciations as
good-faith efforts to accommodate to the presence of Corsican. In other words, the
advertisement invokes a space of linguistic exchange that allows boundary trans-
gressions and is not premised on perfect competencies.
This is particularly interesting because it contrasts with the history of represen-
tations of non-native pronunciations in Corsica. The speaking of Corsican with for-
eign accents has been the subject of radio and stand-up comedy sketches by ‘other’
foreigners for a Corsican audience (see Jaffe 1999). Non-native pronunciations of
Corsican have also been the focus of Corsican opposition to the use of Corsican
spellings and proper names on maps and road signs (now de facto norm). Objectors
claimed either that tourists ‘couldn’t understand’ Corsican place names and would
get lost, or objected to the potential for tourists, especially French ones, to mangle
Corsican pronunciations. In both of these discourses, linguistic boundaries are rep-
resented as impermeable by nature or by preference.

FLUID LANGUAGE USE IN TOURIST INTERACTION

The last piece of data we wish to examine is a partial transcript of a tourist interac-
tion between tourists who were accompanied by Cedric Oliva (identified as ‘F’ in
the transcript) during a visit to a Corsican shepherd who sells cheese on a heav-
ily travelled tourist route up a mountain (Transcript 6.1). Oliva habitually uses
Italian or English with these acquaintances, who do not speak French. In addition
to French, Corsican, English, Italian, and Spanish, the coding on the transcript indi-
cates two other categories: ‘bivalent’ utterances that are pronounced exactly the
same in Italian and Corsican and ‘mixed’ utterances in which a word or phrase has
elements of more than one language.
The transcript shows that for the shepherd, the default language of tourist inter-
actions is French, which the tourists don’t understand. Hearing Oliva’s English
explanation on line 9, the shepherd asks, ‘English’? They counter with ‘or Italian’,
to which he responds (line 11) in Corsican that he will speak Corsican to them
and they will ‘understand each other better’: better, presumably, than if he tried

L I N G U I S T I C C R E AT I V I T Y [109]
to speak English. So we can see that the shepherd assumes mutual intelligibility of
Corsican and Italian. He does indeed use Corsican with them, and it seems to work.
He also produces several mixed utterances, listed in Table 6.2. In all cases, these
mixed utterances involve phonological accommodation to Italian, thus an effort to
make his Corsican more understandable to his clients. So in lines 19 and 22, he pro-
nounces ‘ricotta/ricorta’ (fresh cheese) with an intervocalic [k] and [t], whereas in
Corsican, a phonological process of vowel lenition produces the sounds [g] and [d]
in the same contexts. The expression is ‘mixed’ because he uses the Corsican article

Transcript 6.1 TOURIST TRANSCRIPT

[110] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 Table 6.2 MIXED UTTERANCES IN TOURIST EXCHANGE
Line # MIXED UTTERANCES Italian Corsican French

19 a ricotta /a rikɔta/ la ricotta /la rikɔta/ a ricotta /a rigɔda/

22 ‘taliano’ pronounced /taliano/ /italiano/ /talianu/
22 ‘ricorta’ pronounced /rikorta/ /rikɔta/ /rigɔda/ or /rigɔrta/
24/26 ‘buon- ?’ and ‘delicios-?’ -o -u
32 ‘fromagiu’ (cheese) formaggio furmagliu/casgiu fromage
32 ‘pecura’ (sheep) pronounced / /pɛkora/ /bɛgura/
pɛkura/

‘a’ instead of the Italian ‘la’. On line 32 he again avoids Corsican consonant lenition
in the word for ‘sheep’, producing [p] and [k] where in Corsican, the consonants
are pronounced [b] and [g]. This word remains ‘mixed’ because he does not modify
the Corsican vowel [u] to the Italian [o]. He does, however, attend to the contrast
between [o] and [u] in the word for ‘Italian’ (line 22), beginning the word with a
Corsican pronunciation (an initial ‘t’ instead of an initial ‘i’) but ending it with the
Italian ‘o’ instead of the Corsican ‘u’. Finally, he produces a mixture of French and
Corsican for the word for ‘cheese’ on line 32. This is not as clear a form of accommo-
dation to Italian, since the resonances between Corsican and Italian and French and
Italian for this word are very different, but of the same order. However, it is likely
that his habitual word for ‘cheese’ in Corsican is ‘casgiu,’ since it is the generic word
for cheese that he uses on the sign for his business. In this respect, he may be seen
as accommodating to his clientele by mixing French with the Corsican vocabulary
word that is closer to Italian than the one he features on his sign.
On the part of the tourists, there is a lot of echoing of the words ‘good’ and ‘deli-
cious’ in the sequence as they try the cheese. On lines 24 and 26, the pronunciation
of the woman tourist was heard by both authors as having a—u, or Corsican end-
ing, although both also found the stimulus ambiguous in multiple listenings. It is
thus noted here as a potential act of accommodation to the shepherd.
This transcript shows the space of tourist interaction to be a linguistically flexible
one, in which both the tourists and the shepherd make mutual accommodations in
both the production and reception of language, instantiating a mixed discourse and
mixed codes that allow them to reach a variety of shared, or at least congruent social,
experiential, and commercial goals. Future data collection will reveal the extent to
which this kind of interaction is the norm, and what kinds of configurations of par-
ticipants (types of tourists and tourist providers) and events/activities facilitate
hybrid, creative, and multilingual practice. What we glimpse in the transcript is the
realization, in the interactional sphere created by a tourism of ‘proximity’, of the
kind of exchange indexed by the stickers, text message poster and the Niellucciu
wine ad. In this kind of exchange, tourists and Corsicans engage in communicative
exchanges in ways that include Corsican as a language linked to ‘authentic’ place but
also include Corsican as a language used as a bridge to interlinguistic conversations

L I N G U I S T I C C R E AT I V I T Y [111]
with other romance language speakers. In the same way that the textual materials
analysed above presuppose savvy audiences, these kinds of interactions also posi-
tion their participants as multilingual and reflexive social actors: as sharing metalin-
guistic awareness and orientations.

CONCLUSIONS AND PERSPECTIVES

Corsican sociolinguistic history has left a dominant language ideological legacy. The
drive for linguistic legitimacy that has marked the last several decades of Corsican
language activism favours the reproduction of dominant models of language as a
bounded code with an essential, iconic relationship with a bounded cultural iden-
tity. This model of language is activated and reproduced within the French national
context, which serves as an important frame for tourists and tourist profession-
als alike. In the public, visual domain, we see this in the bilingual signage that is
accessible to tourists, which positions Corsican as ‘not French’. The activation of
this contrastive value reproduces dominant language ideologies because it focuses
attention on language boundaries. In tourist spaces, the display and commodifica-
tion of the Corsican language as a marker of authentic heritage and place also tends
to reproduce ‘essentialist’ models of the relationship between language and identity.
This can be seen in all the emblematic uses of written Corsican in the commercial
domain, as well as in much public domain signage that is not exclusively targeted
at tourists but is nevertheless part of the linguistic landscape that they consume.
Tourist spaces also reproduce language hierarchies and differentiation of function
that are also linked to dominant language ideologies associated with minority lan-
guages. That is, the commodification of ‘heritage’ as a possible product tends to
confine Corsican—and other minority languages—to emblematic functions and
does not disrupt the default assumptions and conventional expectations that tour-
ist encounters take place in ‘major’ languages or lingua francas (a point made by
Kelly-Holmes 2005, with respect to minority languages in advertising). The still
limited interactional data collected suggest that many Corsicans still need to be
prompted to view Corsican as a language of tourist offer: one that can be displayed
more extensively in the public sphere, one that can be used among Corsicans in
front of tourists, and used with those tourists who speak other romance languages.
The potential for Corsican to be used as a bridge to communication with Italians
is present in the collective experience (see Oliva 2011) but is often articulated as
‘being able to speak Italian’, rather than being able to use Corsican. All these fea-
tures have the effect of reinforcing ‘peripherality’ as an element of Corsica and
Corsican’s positioning in the international context. We have seen the reflection of
this perspective in the relative and historical exclusion of Corsican as a language of
international, commercial transactions in the public sphere: in signage that restricts
the use of Corsican to emblematic/symbolic functions and uses French or other
major languages as vehicles for communicative content. While evidence is still very

[112] Multilingualism and the Periphery

preliminary, it is also attested in tourist providers’ habitual recourse to French or
English as the default, matrix languages of interactions with tourists.
At the same time, tourist contexts are also sites in which ideological change is
possible. The data that we have collected include texts and interactions that at least
implicitly validate a communicatively oriented, ‘repertoires’-based notion of the
multilingual person and presume or anticipate plurilingual zones of contact where
speakers with multiple language competencies of various kinds and levels engage in
fluid, creative language practices. This is an interesting extension of the ‘polynomic’
approach to intra-Corsican sociolinguistic variation. We have seen traces of this
kind of linguistic engagement and sociolinguistic imaginary in the advertisements
that involve metalinguistic play and evoke and position multiple audiences, as well
as in the fragment of interaction between the shepherd and his clients presented
in the last section. Within the actual and perceived constraints and regimentation
imposed by the economic market, tourist spaces thus offer some opportunities for
both language play and unregimented, convivial social interactions in which fluid
and varied uses of Corsican, Italian (and potentially other languages) can emerge.
The comparison and contrast of tourist data with previous research conducted by
Jaffe in Corsican bilingual schools ( Jaffe 2008, 2009) suggests that it may be useful
to distinguish between different kinds of linguistic regimentation: that associated
with commercial markets (the commodification of heritage, the homogenization
of products and services and the ranking and valuation of languages and language
skills) vs. the regimentation associated with public institutions. Market-driven
language ideologies may reproduce some, but not all institutional ones, since the
ultimate objective is not symbolic or political but commercial. The commercial
imperative, in particular contexts, may thus ‘free’ social actors to engage in mixed
language practices that may be sanctioned or undervalued in some official minor-
ity language contexts and practices; further data collection is needed to assess the
extent to which this happens on Corsica. The commercial (stickers and wine ad)
and semi-commercial (text message billboards and pamphlets) texts discussed
above also show the ludic potential of communication put on display in the lin-
guistic landscape accessed by tourists. These creative and playful texts create virtual
linguistic ecologies, imagined interactions, and participation structures in which
Corsican plays a central role as a language of exchange. These creative stagings of
Corsican represent it as a language that does not just symbolize a static Corsican
identity, but is a tool in the active expression of that identity in interaction with
outsiders. These uses of Corsican exhibit features of sociolinguistic authenticities,
positioning Corsican as ‘fully owned, unmediated language’ and as language that
‘indexes authentic cultural membership’ (Coupland 2003). They also index a key
feature of sociolinguistic authorities: metalinguistic control ( Jaffe 2011).
These forms of representational legitimacy are, however, complicated by the
dynamics of reception and evaluation in tourist spaces, where their meanings are sub-
ject to being reentextualized in ways that escape the control of their authors. While this
is true of many forms of expression, the fact that tourist audiences are also consumers

L I N G U I S T I C C R E AT I V I T Y [113]
implicitly gives them an edge, since they ultimately control the act of buying (whether
a product or an experience) that underpins all tourist relationships. Similarly, the cir-
culation of Corsican in a global market of words and images has the potential to both
attenuate and emphasize its peripherality. An island and language that is ‘peripheral’
to the French hexagon is not necessarily so when positioned as a bridge to nearby
languages (like Italian) or as a different kind of representational tool with more dis-
tant speakers and languages (indexed by the text messaging poster). However, the
positioning of the language as a transnational index of cultural authenticity can both
confer and undermine its status and legitimacy. This is because the tourist consumers
of Corsican circulate in contexts whose legitimacy is external to the island, contexts
in which local, exotic, and ‘small’ languages are powerful tools in the creation of elite,
cosmopolitan identities. These identities are potentially also available to Corsicans
involved in producing tourist texts of various kinds. These kinds of complexities, we
argue, are emblematic of emerging uses of minority languages in tourist contexts. In
the end, it is a question of the particular balance achieved and experienced in spe-
cific moments of use, exchange, and evaluation: this chapter sketches the parameters
needed for a full ethnographic account of those moments of action.

NOTES

1. Although he seems to have pulled back from this position in more recent
statements (Thiers 2010).
2. This message of symbolic parity through identical positioning in multilingual
signage is practiced routinely in numerous instances of public and private
(including commercial) signage on the island that, due to space limitations,
cannot be described in detail here.
3. With respect to the billboards, however, an analysis of them over several
months (that is, beyond the limited time of the typical tourist visit) revealed
that whenever there is time-sensitive, specific information to report (e.g. a road
closure) the information is presented in French only.

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C H A P TER 7
‘Translation in Progress’
Centralizing and Peripheralizing Tensions in the
Practices of Commercial Actors in Minority
Language Sites
HELEN KELLY-HOLMES

INTRODUCTION

This chapter is concerned with examining how the tensions between centralizing
and peripheralizing ideologies are reflected in the practices of individual commer-
cial actors in sites of peripheral multilingualism. My starting point is the following:
given the importance of tourism and craft industries in sites of peripheral multi-
lingualism, as outlined in the introduction to this volume, the role of individual
commercial actors in these sectors can be a significant one in these sites, and their
language practices may have an important impact. The linguistic decisions and
practices of individual commercial actors can be seen as involving guesswork in
terms of credibility and acceptability (Bourdieu 1991) within the boundaries of
prevailing language ideologies. Their practices may thus constitute a challenge to or
a reaffirmation of these ideologies (cf. Kelly-Holmes 2010 for a discussion of this).
Of course, commercial actors are also members of speech communities and share
language ideologies of those speech communities. Thus, they may not always act in
strictly rational ways—in economic terms—with respect to the language choices
they make in their marketing, advertising, and so on (Atkinson and Kelly-Holmes
2006). Consequently, the role of the individual commercial actor in creating, fol-
lowing, maintaining, or challenging language trends and language regimes is all
part of the political economy of language in sites of peripheral multilingualism
(Kelly-Holmes 2010; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011).
 The focus here is on two particular interrelated questions: First, do individual
actors in sites of peripheral multilingualism attempt to centralize or peripheralize
Irish (e.g. do they attempt to draw it into the centre of their everyday business and
commerce as a type of normalization, or do they peripheralize it by confining it to
particular functions and domains)? I understand centralizing here as the opposite
of peripheralization and thus as a form of linguistic normalization (cf. Bastardas
and Soler 1988), whereby the use of Irish in a commercial domain is driven by
the desire to have it used as a normal and unremarkable language of daily life and
commerce. Centralizing, then, involves taking on the trappings of modernity: for
example, corpus planning, using, disseminating and adhering to standards, ‘correc-
tion’ of linguistic landscapes in minority language contexts, and use of the language
in commercial or other high prestige domains (cf. Strubell 1998; Atkinson and
Kelly-Holmes 2006). Peripheralizing, then, is the other side of the coin: using Irish
in a marked, exceptional, and non-essential way, which may add symbolic value, but
which reinforces its status as something that is peripheral and not part of the ‘real’,
‘modern’ world.
Secondly, do individual commercial actors in sites of peripheral multilingualism
adopt centre/centrist practices and ideologies (understood here as norm-driven
policies and practices based on parallel monolingualism and modernist concepts)
or peripheral practices (understood here as hybrid processes, based on individual
practices). As outlined in the introduction to the volume, peripheral multilingual-
ism is driven by the concept of linguistic repertoire (e.g. Makoni and Pennycook
2007; Blommaert 2010; Pennycook 2010). In contrast to the centre, which is seen
as the source of norm creation and norm (re)enforcement, the periphery involves
multiple sites of normativity (cf. Blommaert et al. 2005). Centre multilingualism
is concerned with geographically or socially demarcated speech communities,
whereas peripheral multilingualism involves communities of practice (cf. Rampton
2006, 2009). The concept of ‘bilingualism as deficit’ is fundamental to centre mul-
tilingualism, whereas peripheral multilingualism assumes a ‘bilingualism as added
value’ ( Jaffe 2006) approach. Significantly, in terms of the focus here on individual
commercial actors, we can understand centre multilingualism as making use of
‘available forms’ and ‘available classifications’, whereas peripheral multilingualism
involves ‘individual acts of sign-making’ (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 12), and,
in common with many contributors to the current volume, it is to those ‘individual
acts of sign-making’ that we turn our attention in this chapter.
The particular site is the website for a pottery workshop in the Corca Dhuibhne
Gaeltacht/Dingle Peninsula, a designated Irish-speaking area, in the South-West of
Ireland. I begin by discussing Irish in relation to the concept of peripheral multi-
lingualism before going on to describe the sociolinguistic context of the peripheral
multilingual site of interest, in particular in relation to centralizing and peripher-
alizing tensions. The chapter then focuses on the case of one particular commer-
cial actor, Louis Mulcahy Pottery, and examines the practices on the website for that
company.

‘ T R A N S L AT I O N I N P R O G R E S S ’ [119]
IRISH AND PERIPHERAL MULTILINGUALISM—A PROBLEM CASE

The first thing to say about Irish in relation to the concept of peripheral multilin-
gualism is that we are not dealing with a ‘straightforward’ case of a peripheralized
language community in a peripheral location. Irish is both central and peripheral at
one and the same time in contemporary Ireland. The respective centralization or
peripheralization can vary depending on the actors, location, context, and so on.
This complexity, however, exemplifies the tensions that characterize centre–periph-
ery relations in the contemporary era, and how these impact on multilingualism.
In a context such as that of Irish, the periphery–centre dynamic involves constant
change and renegotiation: it cannot really be understood in terms of a system that
is unchanging or subject only to very slow change, in the way in which, for exam-
ple, Wallerstein (2004) has conceived centre–periphery economic and geographic
relations, or, de Swaan (2001) has metaphorized centre–periphery relations
between languages (as discussed in the introduction to the volume). In fact, it is
almost impossible to classify a language such as Irish in terms of de Swaan’s ‘World
Language System’, since ‘peripheral languages’, according to de Swaan, are generally
oral and without status in education, government, and so on, something which is
clearly not the case for Irish, while ‘central’ languages are national languages with all
the associated functions, again something which Irish falls short of for a variety of
reasons (cf. e.g. Mac Giolla Chríost 2005; Ó Laoire 2008; Walsh 2011).
The concept of a ‘privileged minoritized language’ (Kelly-Holmes 2006a) sums
up this ever-changing, constantly renegotiated status between centre and periph-
ery. As a ‘privileged minoritized’ language, Irish is both central and peripheral to
everyday life in Ireland. It is clearly central in some domains, being the first offi-
cial language of the country, and given a privileged status in the education system
and other official domains of life. However, it is certainly peripheral in other areas
(e.g. in mainstream entertainment, mainstream media, commerce, and advertis-
ing). Most significantly, it is not the everyday language of communication for the
majority of people in Ireland, although many people do use Irish on a daily basis (cf.
e.g. Mac Giolla Chríost 2005; Ó Laoire 2008 for an overview of the situation). For
Irish, as for many languages in a similar sociolinguistic situation, periphery–centre
relations are determined on the basis of context (who, what, where, how, why) and
are fluid rather than fixed.
Education is a good example of the centralizing–peripheralizing tensions.
While Irish can be seen to be at the core of the national curriculum, particularly
for primary schools—it is a compulsory subject throughout schooling and is usu-
ally required for matriculation purposes—its status in education is the subject of
constant debate. Its forced centrality almost makes it a target for those who argue
that its peripheral status in everyday life and in the ‘real world’ should be reflected
in its status in educational and official domains. As Gal and Woolard (2001) point
out, normalization is a marked way of using a language in order to make use of the
language less marked. Irish in its many contradictions and complexities also shows

[120] Multilingualism and the Periphery

how the drive to normalize and centralize a language by reversing an existing lan-
guage hierarchy can often in fact highlight and reinforce its peripherality (cf. Gal
and Woolard 2001).
In addition, norm-setting for Irish is not a straightforward case of rules being
set by the centre and followed by the periphery. In matters of spoken language, the
native speaker from the geographically peripheral Gaeltacht was traditionally seen
as the expert and so those geographically remote areas (like the Dingle Peninsula)
were in fact seen as central for that process. However, much of the emphasis in status
planning for Irish has been on written language, and the norms for this have tended
in recent years to be derived by elites living outside the periphery. In debates on
terminology, the speakers from the Gaeltacht may either be absent or may adopt a
more laissez-faire attitude to mixing between the languages—an example of ‘periph-
eral multilingualism’ in terms of this volume—whereas ‘language ideological bro-
kers’ (Blommaert 1999) are more concerned with boundary work between the
two languages (cf. e.g. Lenihan’s (2011) study of the Irish language Facebook site).
Unsurprisingly, there is resistance to adopting new terminology, designed in and dis-
seminated from the centre, among Gaeltacht speakers (cf. Ní Ghearáin 2011).
Finally, while Irish has long been stigmatized and peripheralized in the mod-
ern era and not associated with economic advancement (cf. Walsh 2011 for exten-
sive and comprehensive overview of these issues), there has, since the founding
of the state, been an advantage to Irish-English bilingualism for those in the cen-
tre, although not always for those in the periphery (who were expected to remain
monolingual in the Gaeltacht to provide linguistic resources for the centre, particu-
larly to support and aid the objectives of acquisition planning). So, discourses of
‘bilingualism as deficit’ and ‘bilingualism as added value’ ( Jaffe 2006) have man-
aged to co-exist in Ireland.

THE CONTEXT: THE DINGLE PENINSULA AS

PERIPHERAL AND CENTRAL

Like the Irish language, the Dingle Peninsula, where the Louis Mulcahy workshop
is located, is also both peripheral and central. Significantly for Dingle, its peripher-
ality and its centrality are interrelated and interdependent. Dingle is central as a key
tourist destination (listed frequently in the top 10 European tourist destinations);
many larger centres (e.g. Limerick) are bypassed by tourists and holidaymakers
(domestic and international) on their way to Dingle; and Dingle is also a centre
for the Irish language as part of the Gaeltacht area, which is made up of designated
Irish-speaking or bilingual Irish-English areas. For its locality, Dingle town is also
a centre of trade, particularly fishing, and provides shops and other facilities for
the hinterland. Crucially, it is also central to the Irish nation’s imagining of itself as
bilingual and to the marketing of Ireland abroad; the image of the Dingle peninsula
is an iconic one both in the Irish imagination and in the marketing discourse about

‘ T R A N S L AT I O N I N P R O G R E S S ’ [121]
Ireland as a tourist destination. However, Dingle is also peripheral, in its geograph-
ical isolation, distance from larger urban centres and from the capital, and limited
access to health, infrastructure, and so on.
Dingle like other minority language spaces has been the subject of language pol-
icy and language planning initiatives—most explicitly in the establishment of the
Gaeltacht areas, which can be seen as an attempt to create boundaries around the
communities and the language practices of these peripheries in an attempt to keep
them monolingually Irish or at least predominantly Irish-speaking, regardless of the
sociolinguistic realities within the area.
The case of the An Daingean/Dingle renaming controversy highlights the tension
that arises from the need for the area to be imagined as a monolingual periphery
by the centre and the imposition of centralizing (monolingual) norms in order to
achieve this. As part of the Official Languages Act (2003), a major piece of status
planning for Irish, there was a move to change the change the name of Dingle town
on signage and to impose a monolingual Irish name—An Daingean—with English
only or bilingual signage to be removed. The move was resisted by a large number of
local people, one of the main objections being that the erasure of the English name
(Dingle) would adversely affect tourism, given the value of the brand internation-
ally (cf. Moriarty 2011 for a discussion). The renaming controversy can be seen as
an attempt to impose centrist norms—norms of parallel monolingualism—onto
chaotic and fragmented language practices, and to impose boundaries between the
Irish and the English languages. As discussed in the introduction to the volume,
Wallerstein (2004) sees peripheries as being created and maintained by centres as a
source of primary resources (cf. Heller, this volume). Dingle and the other Gaeltacht
areas in Ireland have to be maintained as monolingual peripheries not only to act as
a linguistic resource for the rest of the nation (e.g. for language tourism and the lan-
guage industry) but also to provide a resource to legitimize Irish claims to be differ-
ent from the rest of the Anglophone world and to be ‘genuinely’ bilingual. Another
recent example of an attempt, driven by centre ideologies, to impose monolingual
norms on language practices in peripheral sites, was the ‘C’ status afforded to Dingle
in Ó Giollagáin et al.’s (2007) survey of Irish language usage in Gaeltacht areas. The
town of Dingle was classified as a ‘C’ location, meaning the lowest level of Irish
language usage on a day-to-day basis. However, the survey can, like the renaming
attempt described above, be seen to represent an attempt to impose centrist norms
on multilingual realities, since it is conceptualized on the basis of bounded languages
and ‘clean’ (i.e. one language or the other) language practices.
In common with many of the peripheral sites under examination in this volume
(e.g. Inari, Acadie), the tourism and crafts industry in Dingle grew out of a need
for an alternative economic development strategy for the area, which was adversely
affected by structural changes in the national and global economy. Peripherality
underpins Dingle’s popularity and appeal as a tourist destination for both domestic
and international tourists, again, in common with many of the sites examined in
this volume.

[122] Multilingualism and the Periphery

PERIPHERAL MULTILINGUALISM AND POTTERY

Louis Mulcahy is described as ‘one of Ireland’s most eminent potters’ and ‘the
best-known Irish potter’ (http://www.louismulcahy.com). His creations are not
just for tourists: as one Dublin customer comments on the company’s website, he
offers ‘inspirational pieces to lighten up our homes’ (http://www.louismulcahy.
com). Significantly, he moved his business from Dublin, the capital, to the Dingle
peninsula in the 1970s. This could be understood as a type of opting out and mov-
ing from the centre to the periphery. However, if we do not accept a fixed notion of
centre–periphery, we can see the move actually as an attempt to centre the business
even more, by locating it in an area which, while being geographically peripheral, is
also central in terms of the tourist trail and the craft route. The area is also of iconic
centrality, as outlined above, in the imagining and marketing of Ireland for Irish
people and for tourists, and so the locating of his pottery workshop on this site can
be seen in fact as a definite centring move as well as one that at the time challenged
the established norms of the centre–periphery relationship.
The business is, we are told, a key economic actor in the area, employing forty
people, and the impact of the businesses relocation to the Dingle Peninsula ‘on the
morale and economy of the local Gaeltacht community has been enormous’. The
continued location at a time when many of the better-known Irish craft industries
are contracting out work to cheaper labour markets overseas gives his work an
added authenticity: ‘Despite the high Irish labour costs, Louis continues to make
all his pots at his workshop in Dingle.’ He is described as ‘the last of the big potteries
making all their pottery exclusively in Ireland’. Amid pictures of iconic scenery and
pottery—with the potter emerging from the sea with one of his creations in one
image—visitors to the website are given the message on the homepage that Louis
Mulcahy is ‘one of the last workshops making every piece by hand at their base in
Dingle’ (http://www.louismulcahy.com).
The discourse of the website involves a strong marketing of place (Urry 2005),
and peripherality is a key resource in the marketing discourse and clearly adds
value to the brand. The pottery is ‘a great keepsake from Dingle’ and ‘his work is
distinctively Irish and reflects the magnificent scale and wonderful colours of the
landscape of his chosen home’ (http://www.louismulcahy.com). Thus, if he were
to leave this geographically peripheral site and move back to the centre of Ireland,
Dublin, or a larger urban area, he would in fact be peripheralizing his work. This
example shows the danger of falling into a fixed notion of central–peripheral rela-
tions: as stated previously, centre–periphery dynamics are being constantly negoti-
ated and renegotiated and are entirely context-dependent.
The marketing discourse not only highlights the peripherality that is at the heart
of the brand’s distinctiveness, it also traces the causes, and references the fragility
and vulnerability of peripheral economies. For example, the closure of any factory in
the West of Ireland is often followed, almost instantaneously, by emigration of those
workers to other countries for work, and to a lesser extent to larger urban centres in

‘ T R A N S L AT I O N I N P R O G R E S S ’ [123]
other parts of Ireland. The closure of a factory in a larger centre is unlikely to lead
to such a massive change—especially not in the short term—as people have more
opportunities to find alternative employment in their location. While Appadurai’s
(1996) ethnoscapes may bring to mind large cosmopolitan and industrial centres,
because of the conditions of peripheralities, there has always been movement into
and out of these areas. Previously, the movement was predominantly outward in the
form of labour emigration, with some inward movement in terms of lifestyle migra-
tion or the return of emigrants. Nowadays, tourists make up the biggest inward flow,
as well as those with their own property in the area as part-time residents.
The marketing discourse is also a discourse of peripherality in the sense that it
can be seen to borrow from and rely on endangerment discourses (Duchêne and
Heller 2007) about the Irish language. This key business located in this peripheral
site, which is also a minority language site, and so a site where endangerment dis-
courses are played out, is also presented in heroic terms: the economy is being saved
and the language is being saved also:

[I]n 2004 he became the first Irish craftsman ever to receive an honorary degree from
the National University of Ireland in recognition of his artistry and the prosperity it has
brought to his community, together with his support of the local culture including the
endangered Irish language. (http://www.louismulcahy.com)

It is interesting that Irish is described on the website as endangered, as in the extract

above, even in what is considered and proclaimed to be its centre and heartland (i.e.
the Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht). The pottery’s efforts to save the language, to revital-
ize it, and to centralize it are told within a peripherality discourse:

The fact that, despite the long hours spent in building their internationally known busi-
ness, the family took the time and effort to learn the local language and speak it in their
home and business lives showed a dedication to the well-being of their community.

The language was learned, not as a necessary means of doing business, employing
local people, and so on—it was in fact learned despite this. Learning it was an addi-
tional burden and distraction from building up the business and enjoying family
life—both of which are presented as vital, normal activities that do not need Irish.
Learning Irish is presented as an act of solidarity with the local community. The
‘international’ world of business is juxtaposed with the ‘local’ language. Thus, even
though the act of putting Irish on the global website and also making metalinguistic
discussion about Irish part of the content of the website and part of the marketing
of the pottery can be seen as a centralizing, modernizing move, the net effect is that
the language gets re-peripheralized through the endangerment-type discourse on
the website.
The default homepage is in English, but some Irish is used throughout this
default version (versions in Irish and Danish are available and these will be discussed

[124] Multilingualism and the Periphery

below). Irish is used in the slogan of the company, the sparrow pottery: potadói-
reacht na caolóige. Here the slogan is written in the old Gaelic alphabet, which was
in use up to the middle of the twentieth century, but is now used only in symbolic
and marked contexts. The slogan also alludes to nature (the sparrow pottery), again
strongly indexing place, although no translation is given and the meaning, even
for speakers of school Irish, might not be obvious to most visitors to the site. The
choice of an Irish slogan for the marketing of the company can be seen as a type
of centralizing or normalizing. Marketing on the web involves a global audience,
and consequently many companies opt for English as their default language, even
when the product or company does not originate in an English-speaking company
(Kelly-Holmes 2006b). Thus, the decision to use an Irish slogan, without an English
translation, in this global, high status domain could be seen as a normalizing move
which presents Irish as being as fit for this purpose as any other language, particu-
larly its rival English. However, the position of the slogan and the use of old Gaelic
script mark the usage as graphic rather than textual (for a wider discussion of this,
cf. Kelly-Holmes 2005). It is irrelevant whether the Irish version is understood. It
still enhances the product because it looks authentic and different—this, it could be
argued, continues to peripheralize Irish.
As well as the slogan for the pottery workshop itself, Irish is used in a number of
product names, for example, the Smoilín range; and it is also used in product names
which are also descriptions (e.g. Dearg for red). Again, we can see this use, on the
one hand, as centralizing. It involves a high status domain (i.e. branding), which is
a central part of the business and its identity, and it is on this basis that tourists and
customers are attracted to the workshop and enticed to buy the products. In addi-
tion, the Irish names are not marked by italics, thus in paralinguistic terms, they are
normalized, and the use of Irish for technical details such as colour (which can be
seen as part of the ‘housekeeping’ and serious business of a sales website) and its
use on the front page can all be seen as centralizing. However, we can also see this
usage as peripheralizing. The usage is generally fetishized (Kelly-Holmes 2005), or
functions as a type of linguascaping ( Jaworski et al. 2003), since the use of Irish on
the front page is limited to a number of tokens, with the main or serious business
taking place in English, thus reinforcing the linguistic status quo: it makes sense in
relation to the norm, which is English, from which it departs (cf. Bourdieu 1991).
One of the questions to be addressed in this chapter is the extent to which this
particular commercial actor adopts centralizing or peripheralizing practices in com-
mercial linguistic choices and language practices. As mentioned earlier, the Louis
Mulcahy site is provided in an Irish and also a Danish version. The choice of the
former version can be seen to be a rational choice in terms of the discourse of the
site—its strong indexing of place and neo-Whorfian discourse ( Jaffe 2006) about
the relationship between product, place, and language. Not to have an Irish language
version, in the context of having linked the business so strongly to its locality, would
be a marketing blunder. The provision of a Danish site would appear to be motivated
by Lisbeth Mulcahy, who is herself Danish. Danish does not frequently appear as an

‘ T R A N S L AT I O N I N P R O G R E S S ’ [125]
option in tourist language selections and can be considered in world-systems terms
as relatively small and even peripheralized in certain contexts (e.g. international
tourist domains). The provision of two ‘small’ languages (one very small and one
‘central’ in de Swaan’s (2001) terms) alongside English sends an interesting, desta-
bilizing message in terms of the received norms of commercial multilingualism—
the normal expectation being that languages such as French, German, and Spanish,
for example, would be provided (cf. Kelly-Holmes 2006b).
The provision of Irish and Danish versions can be seen as an attempt to central-
ize them, and, not surprisingly, this centralizing move relies on a parallel monolin-
gual ideology. For example, in the section where the language choice is made, the
user is presented with a symbolic line separating all the languages:

English | Gaeilge | Dansk

The strict separation between Gaeilge and English in this particular location
does not in fact reflect everyday life and local practice in this site of peripheral mul-
tilingualism, as outlined above, or in fact the everyday existence of both languages
in Ireland.
The visitor, having chosen Irish, is then presented with the following statement
in all three languages:

Translation in Progress

Much of this website is available in Irish now, and most of it will be. However, there will
be occasional words or phrases in English, which is unavoidable.

Here we can see that a centrist ideology is being adopted in relation to the
translation of the site. The provider states the need for separate, parallel versions;
the Irish site needs ‘purity’ and should be used with caution until the site is com-
plete. Being ‘complete’ means a site that is only in Irish and from which all English
words have been eradicated. This reflects an ideology of ‘functional completeness’
(Moring 2007), which is seen as necessary in order for minority languages to be
taken seriously. The respective language must be able to fulfil all functions in all
domains and only then will it be normalized. However, the reality of everyday life
in sites of peripheral multilingualism such as Dingle, is, in common with many of
the sites discussed in this volume, very much one of mixed up, bilingual and hybrid
language practices, which are very hard to separate and demarcate. However, on
this commercial site, we can still see the ideal, which is that of parallel monolin-
gualism (Heller 1999), and which reflects a centrist concept of multilingualism,
involving bounded languages (as discussed in the introduction to the volume). The
user must choose his/her language preference; a bilingual option (i.e. a mixed Irish
and English version) is not possible. The centrist ideology of parallel monolingual-
ism is reinforced by the search engine, Google, which saves the language prefer-
ence of individual users and automatically enforces it on the user on their next visit,

[126] Multilingualism and the Periphery

strengthening the message that people speak one language, people prefer to speak
one language (and only one at a time), and people only speak one language for one
particular domain. In addition, if the user selects the Irish version of the site, the
Google Translation toolbar automatically pops up with a warning that the site is
in Irish and asks if the user wants to use the application to translate it back into the
‘normal’ language of that user (i.e. English).
The Irish version of the site is an identical, parallel version of the default English
site with all the same features. As the user hovers over the list of links on the right
hand side, synopses in English appear. In addition, Irish and English co-exist on this
site, which is in fact a bilingual or mixed one, rather than a strictly monolingual one.
For example, the link to join the mailing list includes instructions partly in English
and in Irish, within a frame that is partly in English (including ads for the products
and marketing discourse about the pottery) and partly in Irish (headings for tabs
and links). English product names are used in descriptions that are written in Irish,
and vice versa. The heading for the mailing list form is in English: ‘Join our mailing
list/newsletter sign up’, while particulars such as email, name and country as well as
instructions for completing the form are given in Irish only.
A customer comment in English is posted above an Irish text encourag-
ing customers to click on the hyperlink to read more testimonials and customer
comments:

Excellent Service—loved the pottery making.

Féach ar a thuilleadh rudaí a dúirt custaiméirí eile (My translation: Have a look at what
other customers say)

Only one of the many customer posts featured is in Irish:

Tá ceann de na mugs a cheannaigh me i 1980 agam fós Sean O Broin (My translation: I still
have one of the mugs I bought in 1980)

Interestingly, this particular poster uses ‘mugs’ rather than an Irish equivalent in his
otherwise Irish language sentence, again highlighting the mixed language practices
that are a feature of everyday life.
Peripheral practices are then in evidence throughout the designated Gaeilge/
Irish language website, which is more mixed than the English version. In the
English default site, Irish is used mainly for graphic/symbolic purposes, whereas
in the designated Gaeilge/Irish language site, it fulfils unremarkable functions,
as well as these symbolic functions. This takes place in a mixed, hybrid context
where the frame is sometimes Irish, sometimes English, and sometimes both.
However, as the ‘Translation in Progress’ warning indicates, this hybridity is seen
as transitional phase, on the way to complete and separate versions; it is some-
thing that needs to be excused by the commercial actor, even though it actually
works.

‘ T R A N S L AT I O N I N P R O G R E S S ’ [127]
DISCUSSION

As well as borrowing from globalized trends in terms of language practices on

commercial websites, the louismulcahy.com site can also be seen to make its own
norms: Danish is a chosen language for the site, not because of demands from for-
eign tourists, size of the language or number of speakers, but because it is an avail-
able resource and an individual initiative. The Irish-English practices on the website
reflect a bottom-up initiative by an individual actor who will get the job finished (i.e.
complete the translation) eventually, when there is time; but there is also an implicit
acknowledgement that from a pragmatic point of view an unfinished, partially Irish
site can work and be acceptable (Bourdieu 1991) and can add value to the brand.
Peripheral multilingual practices can be a reflection of a way of life that is removed
from centres of norms and centres of power; they may also be a reflection that is
at odds with the image that the centre has of this place as monolingual, peripheral,
uncomplicated, and homogeneous (see the discussion in the introduction to the
volume). In the current context of a language ideological shift from ‘bilingualism as
deficit’ to ‘bilingualism as added value’ ( Jaffe 2006: 51), and even more than this, a
‘valorization of multilingualism’ at the global level, and the development of global
markets for ‘the expression of “authentic” minority language identities’ (p. 51), ‘tran-
sidiomatic practices’ ( Jacquemet 2005) and having a little bit of the language can be
enough to add difference and authenticity, no matter how fleeting.
Peripheral multilingualism thus offers the possibility to valorize the chaotic
coexistence of languages and heteroglossic practices (cf. Pietikäinen, this volume).
However, as we can see in the case of the Dingle/An Daingean renaming contro-
versy, central authorities seek to impose order on such chaotic practices and carry
out the necessary restorative boundary work (Bauman and Briggs 2003). Even
for individual commercial actors and community members, while practices may
be multilingual and mixed, ideologies and metalinguistic comment, as evidenced
by the endangerment discourse and the invoking of a parallel monolingual dis-
course by www.louismulcahy.com, can reinforce and maintain centrist ideologies.
Furthermore, while new technologies and means of production allow linguistic
and other resources to circulate in more unregulated and fragmented ways (cf.
Pietikäinen 2010), new modes and new technologies do not mean that centre ide-
ologies automatically give way to more fluid ones.
The pottery website also shows how the ‘neo-Whorfian discourse’ ( Jaffe 2006),
the same one used in endangerment discourses (Duchêne and Heller 2007) and
by minority language movements, can be utilized to appeal to tourists, consumers
of crafts and cultural products. In this way businesses can create a ‘unique selling
proposition’ in marketing discourse based on a ‘primordial language-culture con-
nection in bounded communities’ ( Jaffe 2006: 59). And thus, ‘minority and indig-
enous communities can reposition their identity as a commodifiable resource in the
interconnected fields of tourism and cultural production’ (da Silva, McLaughlin,
and Richards 2006: 186).

[128] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 Relations between centre and periphery, between the majority and minority
language, are, according to Aracil (1983), governed by a type of ‘linguistic inter-
position’, which means that relations are always determined from the perspective
of the dominant language; in our terms from a centrist rather than a peripheral
perspective. More than this, however, Pujolar (2006: 79) argues that linguistic
interposition

generates a categorical division between the dominated and dominating languages that
ends up influencing any situation perceived in any way to be ‘foreign’. . . . And beyond
this, any forum for interaction between that which is one’s own and that which is foreign
is to be treated as a vacuum, an impossibility or as simply not existing.

In some ways, we can see the tokenistic use of Irish on the website and the ‘incom-
plete’ translation of the Irish version as evidence to support the persistence of
‘linguistic interposition’ and the continuing ‘impossibility’ of addressing a global
audience directly through the minority language, thus leading to further peripher-
alization of Irish. However, if we look at this from an alternative point of view, the
website represents the reality of the global‒local connection, which, in this case
at least, negates the peripherality of the physical site and bypasses the national
level. For example, this is the first site to appear in the Google search engine if the
term ‘Irish pottery’ is entered. The ‘traversals’ (Lemke 2002) that are enabled in
cyberspace thus present a considerable challenge to established notions of periph-
erality and centrality. Furthermore if we abandon a centrist/monolingual ideology
in measuring this interposition and imagine instead that it can happen through
mixed language practices, then we can see new possibilities opening up in current
practices.
As argued in the introduction to the volume, peripheral multilingual sites
are also spaces for reinventing and reconfiguring borders and values of lan-
guages and their speakers, linked to the economy of local resources. As da Silva,
McLaughlin, and Richards (2006) point out, ‘the very act of commodification
can be seen as destabilizing’ and can have unexpected consequences not just
for the relevant minority language. For example, even where the dominant
(national/majority) language in a relationship of peripheral multilingualism is
English, as in the case of Irish, its role as a tourist lingua franca gives it new
meaning in its use and selection by www.louismulcahy.com and other commer-
cial actors. Its selection can take on the meaning of speaking to a global rather
than/in addition to a national audience, thus possibly justifying its use as a posi-
tive rather than as a negative (i.e. not as an imposition by a dominant language
in the national context or because of an individual’s lack of competence in the
relevant minority language).
Finally, let us return to our concern with the individual commercial actor and
his or her role in peripheral multilingualism. The current case reminds us that the
individual commercial actor is not always straightforward, predictable, and rational

‘ T R A N S L AT I O N I N P R O G R E S S ’ [129]
when making decisions about language in relation to his/her products, marketing,
and so on. As Kress and van Leeuwen (2006: 12) point out:

We have available the culturally produced semiotic resources of our societies, and are
aware of the conventions and constraints which are socially imposed on our making of
signs. However {we} are guided by interest, by the complex condensation of cultural and
social histories and of awareness of present contingencies.

The linguistic decisions of individual actors such as www.louismulcahy.com can be

seen in terms of ‘the complex condensation of cultural and social histories and of
awareness of present contingencies’. Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) capture wonder-
fully the complexity of decision-making in a commercial environment, particularly
involving individual actors in small communities, where ideological, social, cultural
historical and other factors all play a part, but so too does pragmatism. Out of this
messy and imperfect combination, creativity and individual acts of sign-making can
be born, and this creativity seems key to understanding peripheral multilingualism.

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C H A P TER 8
Welsh Tea
The Centring and Decentring of Wales
and the Welsh Language
NIKOL A S COUPL AND

INTRODUCTION

Wales has sometimes seemed to be a peripheral kind of place.1 Wales is joined in the
‘Celtic fringe’ of North-West European nations and regions by Scotland, the Isle of
Man, Ireland, Cornwall, and Brittany, all with complex but interlinked histories of
linguistic and cultural distinctiveness, but with this distinctiveness also having been
radically challenged by cultural incursions—in the British instances from England.
Raymond Williams (2003) euphemistically summarizes the history of cultural
relations between England and Wales as Wales having been regularly ‘penetrated’
by England since the 1536 Act of Union that incorporated Wales into the English
state and removed the public legitimacy of the Welsh language (see Colin Williams
1990, for a historical review of the Anglicization of Wales). Wales’s peripherality
might therefore be understood in terms of cultural and linguistic subordination,
as well as geographical marginality, not to mention its ‘smallness’—a population of
about three million contrasting with the 52 or so million inhabitants of England,
‘the old enemy’. If the Welsh language is perceived to be peripheral, again in the
sense of being a ‘marginal’ (= ‘small’ or ‘non-mainstream’) British language, this
might lie in the fact that virtually the whole population of Wales is fluent in English
while only around half a million people report themselves (at the decennial census)
to be competent users of Welsh in Wales.
This reading of peripheral Wales and Welsh, however, needs to be challenged on
many grounds. Relativities of ‘small’ versus ‘big’ languages are, of course, framed in
ideological terms from particular perspectives and in the service of particular points
of view. Raymond Williams (2003) invited us to consider how ‘big’ a nation might
need to be to be thought culturally viable or worthy of critical consideration, and
he considered Wales to be more than holding its own through its literary heritage
and its history of vibrant cultural self-interrogation. Williams in fact saw a legacy of
Welsh cultural resilience emerging from centuries of minoritization. Colin Williams
(2000, 2008; see also Coupland and Aldridge 2009) documents the revitalization
of the Welsh language in recent decades, with census data (for all their limitations)
suggesting that the historic decline of Welsh-speaking in Wales has been reversed.
Linguistic and cultural revitalization has been bolstered by political devolution
(since 1998) from the Westminster/London government to an ambitiously minded
National Assembly for Wales (Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru). In any event, Wales
has its own historic centring narratives—what Raymond Williams (1985) referred
to as its two competing ‘truths’. The first truth is based in the continuity of language
and literature from the sixth century, where Welsh stands as the ultimate icon of cul-
tural and territorial distinctiveness and successful, heroic resistance to oppression.
The second truth is based in quite different metacultural assertions—in (South)
Wales’s world-leading role as a creative force in the Industrial Revolution and in the
labour exploitation and resistance of its coal-mining workforce, amply documented
by socialist historians (Morgan 1981; G. A. Williams 1985; Smith 1999).
These ‘truths’ are the focus of continuous internal debates about where we might
establish a ‘real Wales’—authenticity contests of the sort that characterize mature
cultures as they move through different historical constraints and opportunities.
New ‘truths’ are certainly emerging. They include the emergence of a new and rela-
tively autonomous Welsh polity shaped by the Welsh Assembly Government, and
(despite acute local and global economic challenges) the potential for Wales to
develop its own voice in European and wider circles. But the ‘two truths’ debate and
those early alternative conceptions of Welshness under the constraint of English
hegemonic influence provide the backdrop to the present study, and to the particu-
lar topic of ‘Welsh tea’ that I deal with here.
As a starting point, it is necessary to challenge static and univocal conceptions of
centre and periphery, as the complex history of Welsh experiences of ‘penetration’ and
resistance, continuity and fracture, centring and decentring already suggests. While
Wales is often described as ‘England’s first colony’, correctly implying recurrent waves
of cultural influence and control flowing from the larger to the smaller entity, Wales
has not simply been a passive recipient of colonial exploitation. Wales has entertained
its own transnational colonial exploits, either linked to English expansionist moves in
times of empire, or as a globally mobile culture, and even as a colonizing force in its
own name. Below, I discuss two of the most salient of these Welsh moments and con-
texts of mobility, to show how shifting historical and geographical circumstances have
variously positioned Wales and the Welsh language as more and less autonomous,
more and less peripheral, within particular cultural economies. The chapter’s theo-
retical significance may therefore lie in helping to demonstrate how core/periphery
relations are always relative and subject to radical transformation from one national or

[134] Multilingualism and the Periphery

international configuration to another, as outlined in the introduction to the volume.
I also hope to show how language and languages are woven into relativities of core
and periphery, in that Welsh has functioned in ways that belie its status as a ‘periph-
eral minority language’. Welsh came to have quite different symbolic values and social
functions under the different conditions we will consider.
I organize the chapter in relation to the (intuitively unconvincing) notion of
‘Welsh tea’. It proves to be the case that this curious notion leads us into a nexus of
historical, global, and linguistic processes that have centre/periphery relations at
their foundation. Tea is, of course, not at all Welsh by provenance; tea is not Welsh,
that is, in the sense that lava bread (bara lawr, in Welsh, an edible seaweed), cockles,
spring water, and even wine can more or less legitimately be said to be Welsh. My
schoolmaster grandfather used to assert that ‘Tea comes from India, China, Ceylon,
and Carolina’, and however accurate or inaccurate this teacherly mnemonic was, the
list of origins certainly excluded Wales. But the aphorism hints at something British,
if not specifically Welsh, in the history of tea—tea as a commodity constructed and
exploited under the British Empire. Before I come to the two main scenarios in
which ‘Welsh tea’ does have some documented particular significance, I overview
British (and mainly English) colonial involvement in Eastern British India in the
late nineteenth century. My general questions in that context are whether and to
what extent Welsh colonizers were active in the establishment and management of
tea plantations and their spin-off industries back home. Did tea take on any plau-
sible dimension of Welshness in the colonial practices that brought tea to Britain?
The first of the two main scenarios involves the experience of Welsh expatri-
ates in North America, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this case I am
able to point to some direct archival evidence of ‘Welsh tea’ being at least an avail-
able concept. The challenge is to understand how tea, and tea referenced in Welsh
and now as a specifically Welsh commodity, featured in the social lives of Welsh
migrants to the New World. What does this contextualization of ‘Welsh tea’ suggest
about centre and periphery in an emerging Welsh diaspora? What part did tea play
in the articulation of Welsh and Welsh-American identities? How did tea come to
index not only Welshness but a certain valued sort of Welshness, relative to cultural
norms and expectations about who and what the newly migrant Welsh were?
The second main scenario sees ‘Welsh tea’ taking on very different symbolic sig-
nificance in the wake of Welsh people’s own ‘colony’ (Y Wladfa)—another Welsh
diasporic construction—established in the Chubut Valley in Patagonia, Southern
Argentina, from 1865. As we will see, to the present day Patagonian tea houses icon-
ize and celebrate tea-taking as a distinctively Welsh cultural practice, but this time as
a feature of the global tourist experience. I want to suggest that each of the two main
scenarios leads to a different conception of ‘Welsh tea’, and that historically shifting
practices around tea prove to be a surprisingly rich resource for understanding the
ebb and flow of transnational relationships. There is even some trace of a relatively
new, ‘at home’ (within-Wales) understanding of ‘Welsh tea’ that I briefly consider in
a further short section, before concluding.

WELSH TEA [135]

TEA COLONIALISM IN EAST INDIA: BRITISH, ENGLISH . . . OR WELSH?

Tea became a thoroughly colonial and imperial commodity, first in China and later
in India, largely through the British East India Company’s monopoly of the tea
trade from the early eighteenth century ( Joliffe 2003). Consolidating British hege-
monic rule, Queen Victoria took the title ‘Empress of India’ in 1876. Pia Chatterjee’s
(2001) ethnographic, dramatized re-creation of the lived practices of Indian planta-
tion life paints the stark contrast between, on the one hand, tea evolving as a focus
for elite and particularly female interest and, on the other hand, tea-picking as an
extreme instance of colonial labour exploitation among often female indentured
workers.
Chatterjee argues that colonial activity needed to symbolize its own ‘success’
in a material form and that the cultural meaning of tea should be understood in
these terms: ‘Cultures of consumption, fed by the very wealth of trade expansion . . .
demanded commodities that signified the success of ‘discovery’. . . Through ritu-
als of consumption, tea signified a new domain of desire in the new global empire’
(Chatterjee 2001: 22). Tea became an icon of upper social class and refinement,
eventually across Europe and in the colonial parlours of New York and Boston (ibid:
34);2 Pierre Bourdieu, for example, makes a passing reference to tea-drinking as a
mark of upper-class distinction in France (Bourdieu 2010: 13). But first and foremost,
tea drinking and tea ceremonialism, as it emerged from the empire, was an English
affectation. Tea manufacture in Britain was associated with specific elite compa-
nies and the most successful importers were almost all English, including Twinings
(based in London), Hornimans (also London), Brooke Bond (Manchester), Tetley
(Yorkshire, then London; now owned by Tata Tea), Ty-Phoo (branded later than
most in the early twentieth century, and named to conjure Chinese associations,
based in Birmingham), and Home and Colonial (London), although the Lipton tea
empire was based in Scotland (Glasgow). Tea rituals and their associated material
culture started to move beyond tearooms into tea museums.3
The images of tea advertising placards in Figure 8.1 capture something of the
(English, culturally centred) ‘home’ and the (peripheral) ‘colonial’ relationships
entailed.4 The Home and Colonial company itself flourished in Britain between
1883 and 1960 and developed into a chain of some 3,000 high street stores, clearly
branding itself as a purveyor of the ‘fruits of empire’. Note how the placards, taken
together, construct India-sourced English tea as an authentic commodity. The
Horniman’s text visualizes a plantation source for its ‘pure tea’, and potential users
of Hindoola tea, whose name appropriates and orientalizes ‘Hindu’ culture, are
warned to ‘Beware of imitations’. Liptons tea is branded as ‘By special appointment
to His Majesty the King’, invoking the force of empire behind the sourcing of tea,
which is then thoroughly domesticated in the homely image used in the Ty-Phoo
advertisement.
In the contemporary world tea-taking continues to have a predominantly
English resonance (in phrases such as ‘English tea’, ‘English breakfast tea’, and so

[136] Multilingualism and the Periphery

(a) (b)

(c) (d)

(e)

Figure 8.1:
Some nineteenth- and twentieth-century tea advertising placards

on). Tea rituals came to include mythologized expertise in the blending of tea, also
in tea-tasting and tea-serving, with their associated qualities of connoisseurship
and good taste. The story of English/British tea is a paradigmatic instance of colo-
nial exploitation, from the power base at its cultural centre, of human and natural
resources in a zone defined to be peripheral (‘at the margins of the empire’), with
those resources then being ideologically transformed and turned to the colonizers’
advantage, both commercially and symbolically. Regions such as Eastern Bengal
and Assam, referred to by colonizers at the time as ‘wastelands’, were offered a
modicum of English language and of Christianity, at the cost of servicing a vast
industrial-scale tea cultivation enterprise.

WELSH TEA [137]

 Aled Jones (2004) traces the history of Welsh involvement in the tea planta-
tions of these regions, and particularly the role of Welsh Presbyterian missionaries
there from 1850 onwards. He comments on the pernicious irony that the plan-
tations were referred to as ‘tea gardens’, while the Indian plantation project was
precisely to develop tea production on industrial principles, the first of them in
Malnicherra in the Surma Valley. By 1901 nearly one and a half million acres were
under tea cultivation in the districts of Sylhet (now in Bangladesh) and Cachar
alone, drawing in migrant workers as so-called ‘coolie’ workers ( Jones 2004: 267).
The East Indian tea plantations were a focal point of the British colonial project,
carried forward predominantly by English men, but with direct participation by
some Welsh and Scottish people. Jones explains that the East India Company’s
orientation to cultural intervention in India varied over the centuries, but at some
periods the Company was strongly committed to promoting the English lan-
guage (and, of course, not the Welsh language) as part of a wider programme of
Europeanization/Anglicization.
Welsh (and Welsh-speaking) missionaries were certainly engaged in evangeli-
cal Christianization of local people, and doing this mainly through the English lan-
guage. Jones concludes that the Welsh missionaries held an ‘ambiguous relationship’
(2004: 274) with colonial indoctrination, neither fully independent of the colonial
mainstream nor standing out consistently against it. There is therefore only very
limited reason to believe that there was a distinctively Welsh ideological orientation
to colonial practices around tea. (For a wider view, but reaching similar conclu-
sions, see Jones and Jones 2003.) Even though the Welsh language survives fitfully
in East India as a relic feature of Welsh missionary involvement there,5 the Welsh
played only a minor part in English-led, British colonial activity, and indeed, British
colonial expansion proved to be one of the forces that accelerated the decline of the
Welsh language at home through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
We can say, then, that tea did not take on a distinctively Welsh quality in tea colonial-
ism, although Welsh people did make some contribution to the expansion of the
British/English culture centre and the peripheralization of East India that colonial
activities engineered. It is against this backdrop that the consolidation of ‘Welsh tea’
under different conditions is all the more remarkable.

WELSH TEA, SCENARIO 1: THE EXPATRIATE WELSH

IN NORTH AMERICA

The idea of tea being meaningfully Welsh seems to have ‘brewed’ far more convinc-
ingly in Welsh-America through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ‘Welsh
tea’ (where my quote marks now indicate summary quotation from a source rather
than scare-quoting) certainly features regularly in one particularly useful source, the
community newspaper Y Drych (‘The Mirror’), which served the North American
Welsh expatriate group and was in continual publication between 1851 and 2001

[138] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 8.2:
Advertisement from Y Drych, 10 February 1889, page 6

in the United States. From its launch, Y Drych carried advertisements designed to
appeal to expatriate Welsh people who had settled in the New World.6 The advertise-
ments in Figures 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4 were typical of those that appeared in the pages of
Y Drych.7
Figure 8.2 gives an indication of the style and placement of Y Drych advertise-
ments of the period. It is a bilingual advertisement, at a time when the newspa-
per’s main text genres were predominantly Welsh, with the proprietor’s name and
address and promotional hook, ‘SOLE IMPORTERS’ (near the bottom of the

WELSH TEA [139]

advertisement panel), provided in English. Key parts of its Welsh text (below the
visual image) translate as follows:

TE Y BRENIN ‘The King’s tea’

Prawfiad diymwad o ragoroldeb ‘Undeniable proof of excellence’
EI WERTHIANT ARUTHROL ‘Its prodigious value’
EI BOBLOGRWYDD CYFFREDINOL ‘Its accepted popularity’
EI BURDEB DIAMEUOL ‘Its indisputable purity’
EI BRYS RHESYMOL ‘Its reasonable price’

Figure 8.3 is again bilingual, where TE’R HEN WLAD translates as ‘The tea of
the old country’, which is then rendered in an English brand name equivalent in the
ad as Old Country Tea. The accompanying Welsh text can be translated as follows
(keeping the idiosyncratic punctuation of the source text):

You wives and women . . . do you want cups of tea like the tea you used to drink in Wales,
try a pound of Cassidy and Co’s ‘Tea of the Old Country’ just once, then no-one will
have to ask you to buy it. You won’t be satisfied without it. Ask your shop-keeper for it,
Also on sale, a large selection of Congou Breakfast, Assam India, Scented Orange Pekoe
and Caper, Formosa Tea, Oolong, Gunpowder, Imperial and Young Hyson, Japan Green
Tea and Fired Basket of the best produce and distribution.

The advertisement in Figure 8.4 promotes the same product and distributor as in
the Figure 8.2 example. In Figure 8.4 he extols himself, in Welsh, as: ‘Distributor of
the best products from the South. Amongst them, the world-famous King’s Tea.’
Jones and Jones (2001a: 50) note that Te Y Brenin and Te’r Hen Wlad were
supplemented by other brands—Te Y Ddraig Goch (‘Reg Dragon Tea’, so-named
because the emblem on the Welsh national flag is a red dragon), Te Y Werin (trans-
latable as ‘Country People’s Tea’, although Y Werin in Welsh also implies Welsh folk
heritage) and Eryri Tea (‘Snowdonia Tea’, in recognition of the North Wales moun-
tain chain that has Mount Snowdon as its highest peak). Millward (2000: 11) also
refers to the popularity of Te Dwyryd (‘Dwyryd [a place in North Wales] Tea’). That
source also contains images of print advertisements for Terwerin Tea (probably a
re-spelling of the Welsh place-name Trewerin) and ads constructed by Wales-based
importers of Mazawattee Tea, Dulecmona Tea, and other brands. However, it was
Te Y Brenin (‘The King’s Tea’) distributed by G. T. Matthews that dominated the
tea ads in Y Drych and the Welsh tea market between 1873 and 1932. While the
brand-name of Te Y Brenin appeals to a royalist Britishness, there is no doubt that
Hen Wlad (‘The Old Country’) here refers to Wales not Britain, in that these brands
sometimes invoke stereotypically Welsh cultural iconography. For example, the
(indistinct) image in Figure 8.2 contains a visual representation of the ‘Welsh lady’,
dressed in what became known as the ‘traditional Welsh costume’ of a tall black hat,
apron and shawl. But the consistent use of Welsh-language brand names explicitly

[140] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 8.3:
Advertisement from Y Drych, 2 June 1898, page 5

characterizes tea as being Welsh, even though the importers were niche market-
ers and their businesses were presumably very small relative to the major English
colonial brands.
Was the Welshness of tea in this context simply a commercial spin-off from what
was more typically an English colonial commodity back in Britain? It is reasonable
to see Welsh tea offering a source of British, at the same time as more narrowly
Welsh, cultural continuity and reassurance for Welsh people on the move in the
New World. But tea took on a much more specifically Welsh metacultural signifi-
cance too. Jones and Jones (2001b: 66) confirm that tea-drinking was popular and
actively promoted among the expatriate Welsh in North America, but specifically as

WELSH TEA [141]

Figure 8.4:
Advertisement from Y Drych, 21 December 1899, page 8

an idealization of Welsh temperance—a policy of withholding from drinking alcohol

and adopting what was called a ‘teetotal’ lifestyle. The origin of the concept of ‘tee-
totalism’ is disputed, although it is generally believed to have no direct connection
with the drinking of tea. Nevertheless, tea was able to assume a moral value simply
by not being an alcoholic beverage, and this fitted neatly into religious values that
were themselves distinctively Welsh. The specific religious tradition in question was
Calvinistic Methodism, developed in Welsh-speaking West Wales and promoted
through chapel-going as a distinctive branch of Nonconformism (which implied
dissention from the Established Anglican Church). For Calvinistic Methodists the
drinking of alcohol constituted sinful behaviour and confirmed a fall from grace.
Te’r Hen Wlad therefore iconized an ideologically ‘proper’, ‘respectable’, and duwiol
(godly) form of Welshness as seen through a dominant and demanding Welsh reli-
gious doctrine.
Lambert (1983) gives a detailed history of the temperance movement in Wales
through the nineteenth century (see also Kneale 2001), showing that Welsh tea was
attracting symbolic value at home too. Lambert explains that, in the early years of
the century, drinking water was a dangerous practice, and that ‘beer was invariably
cheaper than tea’ which ‘was a rarity in Wales at this time’ (1983: 6) and remained
so until the 1840s. Notice the foregrounding of tea’s affordability in the ad (repro-
duced in Figure 8.2) for Te Y Brenin, but also its purity, probably implying a differ-
ent agenda of purity from that of the English tea products in Figure 8.1. Welsh tea’s

[142] Multilingualism and the Periphery

purity is very likely to have had both moral and health implications. Welsh tea is
mainly promoted in these turn-of-the-century ads as being a good-value, everyday
product with the added appeal of moral and cultural asceticism in uncertain times
in the New World.
There are further historical reasons for associating tea with Welsh asceticism,
and Welsh asceticism with the Welsh language. Lambert analyses the well-known
Welsh antagonism between the chapel and the pub (public house), and how the
absolutist temperance movement invoked an extreme moralizing discourse, inter-
twined with powerful religious but also social class imperatives. To chapel-goers,
total abstinence from alcohol was the route to self-improvement on earth, as well
as the road to heaven.8 But the temperance movement also strove to provide social
and recreational alternatives to drinking alcohol in pubs, and music and singing
(of hymns in Welsh) was a strong theme. From the mid nineteenth century, there
were ‘temperance eisteddfodau’ [competitive cultural festivals], held in local chapels
(Lambert 1983: 105–6). Lambert says that the temperance movement in Wales
was in general ‘an intensely religious phenomenon’ (1983: 115), strongly commit-
ted to resisting the inherent depravity of humankind.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Liberals (members of the Liberal
[political] Party) were taking a lead in the temperance movement (Morgan 1981:
29; Lambert 1983: 198). William Gladstone himself, four-times Liberal Prime
Minister of Britain between 1868 and 1894, endorsed the Welsh Sunday Closing
Act of 1881 (making it illegal to open public houses in Wales on Sundays), which
Morgan describes as the first distinctively Welsh Act of Parliament. The Act was
drafted in response to orchestrated pressure from Welsh (religious) Nonconformists.
There was undoubtedly a strong linguistic dimension to all this, not least because
Gladstone was an active proponent of the Welsh language and its place in Welsh
religious and cultural life, and Welsh was in any case the majority language in Wales
at the end of the nineteenth century.
The Welsh language, Welsh Nonconformism, and Welsh tea formed a power-
ful ideological triangle, drawing tea away from its English colonial roots and their
legacy, and remaking its social value. Welsh tea, together with a distinctively Welsh
form of religious worship and Welsh teetotalism, offered a new aspirational vision
of Welsh identity, rescuing Wales from its reputation of low sophistication, unruli-
ness, and excess as conjured in the Blue Books of 1847 (a damning English report
on the state of schooling in Wales): ‘Temperance was a theme naturally congenial
to the Nonconformist Welsh. The Blue Ribbon movement swept the land in the
[eighteen] seventies; ‘taking the pledge’ [to abstain from alcohol] became for cha-
pel boys what the Bar Mitzvah was for Jews’ (Morgan 1981: 36).
It is difficult to say whether the New World Welsh were more susceptible to this
aspirational vision than their fellow countrymen at home. The ‘fresh start’ mindset
of the expatriate Welsh may well have inclined them that way. Whatever, we see an
ideological distinction being forged between (on the one hand) English tea and its
exploitative colonial past, and (on the other hand) Welsh tea and a very different

WELSH TEA [143]

aspirational future for the expatriate Welsh. While English tea maintained its colo-
nial cachet of cultural elitism, ceremony, and perhaps femininity, and successfully
exported this set of associations to America and beyond, Welsh tea came to be asso-
ciated, at least for a time, with abstinence, cultural asceticism, and a more ‘proper’
way of being Welsh. The early decades of Welsh-America saw diverse efforts, not
least the publication of Y Drych as a thriving ‘community newspaper’, to maintain a
Wales-centred and Welsh language-centred experience. This was to hold on into the
early twentieth century, particularly in Pennsylvania and in the ‘very Welsh’ coal-
mining town of Scranton in Pennsylvania.9

WELSH TEA, SCENARIO 2: TEA TOURISM IN

CONTEMPORARY PATAGONIA

Wales’s own quasi-colonial experiment in Patagonia, Southern Argentina, ulti-

mately provided another platform for the conceptualization and promotion of
Welsh tea, but in a quite different framing of its cultural significance. Y Wladfa, the
settlement established in the Chubut Valley of Patagonia in 1865, is usually referred
to in English as ‘The Colony’, but it was not an attempt to exploit a remote periph-
ery or to grow a cultural centre at others’ expense. It was a self-focused effort to
shore up the Welsh language and Welsh cultural traditions that were under threat
at home.10 In that sense it was more of an anti-colonial initiative—an effort to resist
continuing colonial pressures from England and from the advance of the English
language in Wales by establishing a national bridgehead in a far-distant space. For
several decades Y Wladfa successfully sustained a small ethnolinguistic Welsh
group—a supplementary Welsh cultural centre—‘in the periphery’, in fact in one of
the world’s ‘most remote’ locations. Patagonia’s remoteness is, of course, an impor-
tant part of its attractiveness nowadays to tourists, some of whom want to consume
aspects of its residual Welsh culture, as well as its expansive natural resources.
The legacy of Welsh language use in Patagonia is generally sparse, although
Welsh does have a presence, particularly in ceremonial contexts (such as the annual
Welsh cultural festivals or eisteddfodau). To some extent Welsh is also visible in the
Patagonian semiotic landscape ( Jaworski and Thurlow 2010). In an earlier paper
Peter Garrett and I have commented on how the bilingual (Spanish-Welsh) land-
scape in Patagonia, particularly in the more tourism-oriented towns of Gaiman
and Trevelin, is organized under different interpretive frames (Coupland and
Garrett 2010). Contemporary Patagonian Welshness is a mix of continuing his-
torical indexicalities and new commercial and tourist initiatives. In the earlier study
we drew attention to the transformations through which linguistic and cultural
Welshness is reworked as a heritage tourism resource (cf. the contributions by Jaffe;
Kelly-Holmes; Pietikäinen; and Pujolar to this volume).
Patagonia ceremonializes casas de té galesas (Welsh tea houses) (Lublin 2009) as in
the four commercial signs and displays in Gaiman that are combined as Figure 8.5.11

[144] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 Welsh tea in Patagonia appeals to tourists, certainly from Wales but probably
from different local and global constituencies too, for its heritage value—as one
way of remembering the original Welsh settlement of 1865. The images refer
back to a non-threatening cultural incursion from Wales that left distinctively
‘non-Argentinean’ and perhaps ‘non-Spanish’ cultural forms and practices which
have resurfaced in ritualized, touristic, metaculturally Welsh semiotic displays. For
Welsh tourists in Patagonia, tea-drinking is not at all an obvious metacultural signi-
fier. But it would have had contrastive cultural significance for earlier, non-Welsh
inhabitants of the region who, we can safely assume, were not regular tea drinkers.
There are rather few Welsh linguistic items in the tea house signs. Welsh is
mainly restricted to names and titles. Ty Cymraeg (‘The Welsh House’, although
in Welsh orthography Ty does not normally have circumflex diacritic ^ above <y>
as it does in the first image in Figure 8.5) is the name of an establishment run by

(a) (b)

(d)

(c)

Figure 8.5:
Signs and icons displayed outside Welsh tea houses in Patagonia

WELSH TEA [145]

the Thomas family (and Thomas is a very common family name in Wales), trans-
lated into Spanish as Casa Galesa. In the second and third images Caerdydd is the
Welsh name for Cardiff, the capital city of Wales. In the fourth image Nain means
‘Grandma’, and Ty Nain (‘Grandma’s House’) is a suitably cosy ethnic and gender
stereotype to index the supposedly comfortable familiarity of Welsh tea-taking.
Red and green (the dominant colours used in all four images) repeat the colours of
the Welsh national flag whose main motif (as we saw earlier) is the red dragon; the
dragon is shown in stylized form on the sign in the second image and on the giant
teapot pictured in the third image. The language text at the bottom of the second
image refers to Lady Diana Spencer, and this is another effort to stereotype cultural
Welshness, although it is likely to mis-carry for the majority of Welsh people who
do not consider the late Princess of Wales to be closely associated with Wales in
any significant cultural sense (as opposed to institutionally, through having married
into the British Royal Family, becoming the wife of Prince Charles who is desig-
nated Prince of Wales).
In other words, several significant semiotic transformations in relation to Wales
and Welshness are clearly visible in Patagonian symbolic representations of tea. Tea
again takes on some ‘old country’ values (not unlike those in the Y Drych ads), but
the old country in question is both Wales itself, the home of the Patagonian settlers,
and a Cymrified (Wales-infused) nineteenth-century Patagonia. There is metacul-
tural drift into idealizations of Wales as a culture that reveres its associations with
British royalty (when for the most part it does not), and as a culture bathed in warm
(cálido), grandmotherly (Nain), traditional (tradicional), and authentic (auténtico)
sensations. Many national cultures may be prone to imagining themselves in these
terms. But we have to remember that these particular representations are creative
imaginings by contemporary Patagonians (some of whom may have traceable Welsh
ancestry) of a distant and limited Welsh cultural presence that has largely lapsed.
These are conditions under which tradition is a matter of selective remembering, if
not invention (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), and where authenticity needs to be
asserted rather than assumed.
The Welsh language here becomes a heritage resource in its own right, index-
ing an exotic ethnolinguistic difference but needing (in the tea house signs) to be
interpreted through Spanish text. In fact there are interesting differences between
the textual pragmatics of Welsh and Spanish (in the tea shops data) and Welsh and
English (in the Y Drych data). For tourist sign readers in Patagonia, Welsh language
items are present for the purposes of ethnosymbolic display (Eastman and Stein
1993; Coupland 2012). Tea shop names in Welsh take pride of place as brands in
the semiotic structure of the signs’ textual construction, whether or not their lexical
meanings are intelligible to tourists (and even Welsh tourists may not have the lan-
guage proficiency to decode them). Spanish elements of these signs, on the other
hand, do more interpretive work, either glossing the Welsh formulations, building
the cultural values of Welsh tea-taking, or providing more instrumental information
such as giving directions (the arrow-text in the first Figure 8.5 image tells readers

[146] Multilingualism and the Periphery

that Ty Cymraeg is 70 metres away). In Y Drych ads the branding function is again
fulfilled mainly in Welsh, but glossing and interpretive text is also in Welsh, address-
ing a Welsh expatriate group that is presumed not only to use Welsh as its com-
munity language but to sense an intimacy with the product through Welsh being
used to promote it. In those ads, English features only in instrumentally referencing
suppliers’ names and addresses (in the English-dominant context of New York).
In current-day Patagonia, therefore, Welsh tea has some direct and material ref-
erence—tourists can drink tea in purportedly Welsh surroundings—but it is also
the iconic focus of a metacultural memory or re-enactment. In Patagonia, Welsh
tea is heritage-ized. It finds a key place within performative activity that re-creates
and stages an aspect of a cultural past, with a complex relationship to what might
be considered cultural authenticity (cf. Heller 2010; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes
2011). Heritage reframing is a common characteristic of tourism, although ‘heri-
tage tourism’, the celebration of ‘heritage’ meaning a valued past, does not always
recognize its own performative dimension. Heritage is also a characteristic of glo-
calization (Robertson 1995), the globalization of the local and the reconstruction
of the local in globalized economies. Patagonian Welsh tea is a ritualized stylization
of Welsh cultural practice that reaccentuates aspects of a remembered Wales. This
reaccentuation constructs Welsh tea drinking as a homely practice, but spills over
into the elite ‘colonial English’ mode of tea culture too. Fodor’s online review of
Casa de Té Caerdydd (‘Cardiff tea house’),12 for example, is as follows:

Cypress trees, fountains, and sculpted gardens mark the grounds of Gaiman’s largest
teahouse, which looks like a mini-palatial estate on the south bank of the Chubut River.
It succeeds in impressing, though the dining rooms are larger and less homey than the
town’s other teahouses.

The Caerdydd tea house is grand and said to contrast with more (in American
English) ‘homey’ tea houses. But homey Ty Nain is itself celebrated as ‘una de
las primeras casas de té galés de Trevelin . . . que mantiene la tradición del té, elabo-
rado con finas hierbas y acompañado con las mas variadas exquisiteces’.13 This text
recycles elite criteria of not only ‘tradition’ but ‘fineness’ in a representation that
certainly contrasts vividly with the ascetic associations of ‘temperance tea’ that
we saw earlier.

DISCUSSION

This short historical tour has, I hope, opened up a perspective on how cultural
Welshness has shaped and been shaped by different internal and external relation-
ships related to mobility and contact. The Welsh people and the Welsh language (if
we feel able to consolidate those categories) are often taken to exemplify a stable,
continuous, and indigenous minority experience, but the account of ‘Welsh and

WELSH TEA [147]

Welshness in Wales’ is clearly not the whole story. As Welsh people travelled—to
India and to North and South America, motivated by very different types of colonial
ambitions—what it meant to be Welsh, and what part the Welsh language played
in that general process of (re)identification, took on very different qualities. At one
level the history of Welsh tea is, of course, highly specific, but in rather unexpected
ways it also seems to open a window on much wider social and linguistic realign-
ments. Tea, which emerged as a quintessentially English icon of colonial conquest,
also focused cultural meanings for Welshness—the respectable and abstinent Welsh
in the New World of the late nineteenth century and the docile, home[l]y coloniz-
ers remembered in modern-day Patagonia. What does this history suggest about
centre–periphery relations, as they are mediated by language and textual represen-
tation? And, first, does the concept of Welsh tea have any continuing resonance in
Wales itself?
As I suggested at the outset, the concept of Welsh tea is perplexingly empty
without the transnational contextual detail of the above scenarios. One or two com-
mercial efforts to market tea as Welsh do currently exist—the bilingual brand of
Murrough’s Welsh Brew/Paned Cymreig (‘The Welsh Cuppa’) and the Wales-targeted
Glengettie tea (whose brand-name indexes Scotland more than Wales). Murrough’s
brand their packaged tea in Welsh as well as in English, although most of their pro-
motional text (including their web site) is in English only. They use promotional
discourse that loosely appeals to ‘Welsh tradition’:

There is nothing quite like the welcome afforded by a hot cup of quality tea. Such a wel-
come has long been the tradition of hospitality in Welsh households. Murroughs Welsh
Brew encapsulates the flavour and taste of tea to the traditional standards we recall from
years gone by . . . 14

The text constructs a veiled national association with Wales, suggesting that Welsh
households are welcoming by virtue of offering tea, intertextually referencing the
old Welsh song ‘We’ll keep a welcome in the hillsides . . . ’. Murrough’s market-
ers side-step the ethnic provenance problem by further suggesting (in the same
online text, with original spelling) that ‘The special blend of quality African and
Indian teas, perfectly compliment the waters of Wales’. From their own publicity,
Murrough’s appears to sell particularly well to the expatriate Welsh and to incom-
ing tourists to Wales, to some extent therefore replaying the marketing strategy
of Te Y Brenin (in Figures 8.2 and 8.4, above) in the late nineteenth century. So
there is some evidence—limited, in that Murrough’s is not a particularly prominent
brand—that Welsh tea might continue to have some marketability in the interstices
of glocalization, reaching outwards from Wales to the Welsh diaspora. Similar mar-
keting strategies support Yorkshire tea and Cornish tea15, for example, where each
of the regional affiliations is similarly tenuous and lacking in metacultural value
(notwithstanding that the Tregothnan Estate, the marketing base for Cornish tea,
claims that its brand is the only tea grown in England).

[148] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 Overall, the Welshness of tea is neither a matter of cultural inherency nor a mat-
ter of opportunistic and simply false cultural attribution; ‘Welsh tea’ is neither fully
authentic nor fully inauthentic in the way it associates a commodity/practice with
a national culture. As I noted earlier, my grandfather’s aphorism, couched in terms
of tea ‘coming from’ a restricted set of national places, clearly excluded Wales. But
when we review the explicit and implicit bases of this sort of association over the
different social and historical contexts I have introduced, we see ways in which,
under very specific circumstances of time, place, opportunity, and constraint, it has
become meaningful to claim or disclaim the Welshness of tea.
In all cases, the Welsh language and multilingualism are, in one way or another,
corralled into the link between Wales and tea, and each particular association posits
a specific relationship between a cultural centre and a periphery—Wales on the
fringe of the English colonial core in India, the North American Welsh seeking to
perpetuate a sense of home away from home, the contemporary Patagonian Welsh
tea house ceremonializing a historic Welsh colony on their own soil and appropri-
ating within-Wales names and images through the mist of tourist priorities. This is
why a ‘peripheral multilingualism’ perspective is helpful in tracking the symbolic
complexities of Welsh tea. Like language, tea appears to be a rich but highly mallea-
ble metacultural resource, implicated in establishing different versions of Welshness
under mobile transnational circumstances.
If we look inside the concept of authenticity, we might gain more critical pur-
chase. In an earlier paper (Coupland 2003) I suggested that a sense of the authen-
tic relies on five interlocking sub-criteria being met: ontology, a secure sense of
real being; historicity, a depth of being that transcends the local and the now; sys-
temic coherence, ‘making sense’ within some specific network of social understand-
ings; consensus, the ability to mobilize attention and credibility over a reasonably
large field of judgement; and value, a shared sense that the object or process ‘mat-
ters’. In these terms there is, for example, undoubtedly a glibness in Murrough’s
contemporary appeal to a Welsh tea-drinking ‘tradition’. Because historicity is a
necessary condition of the authentic, we may feel the need to interrogate the his-
torical depth of this tradition. And, of course, discursive claims to tradition, just
like discursive claims to authenticity itself (as in one of the Patagonian tea shop
texts) tend to trigger historicity tests rather than being taken at face-value. In any
event, historicity is not in itself a sufficient criterion for authentication; history
alone, even if it is accurately told, is unable to convincingly warrant the Welshness
of tea, any more than the Yorkshireness or the Cornishness of tea. People in all
these places have drunk tea, but generally without any meaningful metacultural
indexicality.
Tea can only be constructed to be in some sense authentically Welsh if its his-
tory incorporates specific values—if there is sufficient consensual appreciation of
a historical process that lifts the otherwise mundane product of tea and practice of
tea-drinking to a level of metacultural significance. This is precisely what happened
when tea acquired salience as a manifestation of discipline and restraint in Welsh

WELSH TEA [149]

contexts where these cultural values had been deemed lacking. Systemic coherence
could be appreciated in the contextually significant conflation of the Welsh lan-
guage, Nonconformist religion, and teetotalism. We might say that the ontological
status of tea, as a ‘real’ and partially defining attribute of Welshness, was scaffolded
in the temperance movement. In that context tea could index a certain purity of
body and mind, not unlike the singing of Welsh hymns, which was strongly pro-
moted at temperance meetings (which themselves stood in ideological opposition
to public houses and disreputable Welshness).
At other moments tea was drawn into long-running cultural antagonisms
between Wales and England (which Raymond Williams often characterized in
his critical writing), when the vernacular practice of drinking tea in Wales could,
this time, stand in opposition to the potentially effete and definitely elite model of
the colonial and post-colonial English tea ceremony. England was the motivating
centre of the colonial effort in India, and the Welsh, despite their modest colonial
involvement in the tea plantations, could to some extent distance themselves from
the legacy of English colonial exploitation. Tea could indeed index a distance or
peripherality from England that has been appealing to the Welsh, no doubt as a
national response to a long history of minoritization.
There is no reason to suppose that the small group of Welsh settlers in South
America saw particular cultural value in the tea-drinking practice that they pre-
sumably took with them to Patagonia. But centuries after Y Wladfa, mainly
Spanish-speaking Patagonians, some of them descendants of Welsh migrants,
have been able to construct their own sense of quasi-authentic Welshness, again
with tea as its symbolic focus. Historicity was again available—accounts, which
are recycled in Patagonian school history lessons, of the Welsh settlers’ struggle to
survive and to ‘stay Welsh’ in the arid Chubut Valley—and a cultural coherence
could be constructed at the interface between tea, a shakily surviving Welsh lan-
guage in the Chubut Valley, and other cultural indexicals (e.g. distinctive patterns
of house-building, since several of the casas de té galesas do indeed look ‘European’
more than ‘South American’).
In different metacultural nexuses, therefore, language, tea, and Welshness
have been able to mutually authenticate each other to a reasonable level.
The flows of people and symbols that are implied by the term globalization
(Coupland 2010) create opportunities and needs for semiotic and metacul-
tural renegotiations of this sort. Globalization often facilitates shifts of scale
(Blommaert 2010; Kelly-Holmes and Mautner 2010; Pietik äinen 2010), which
I take to mean, at its simplest, that cultural forms and attributes are liable to
‘shrink’ and to ‘grow’ in different symbolic economies, from different ideologi-
cal standpoints. To say that (sometimes bilingual) Welsh people drink tea is
an overwhelmingly banal observation. But the fact that tea, and drinking it ‘in
Welsh’ and ‘as something meaningfully Welsh’, have under some conditions
been meaningfully upscaled into national signifiers is suggestive about the flex-
ible semiotics of globalization.

[150] Multilingualism and the Periphery

NOTES

1. I am very grateful to the volume editors and to Adam Jaworski for incisive
comments on earlier drafts of this text.
2. Celebrating the Britishness of tea in nineteenth-century America would, of
course, have carried deep irony for those remembering the Boston Tea Party as
a pointed act of resistance against British rule in 1773. The contemporary ‘Tea
Party Movement’ in the United States, a caucus of Republican, conservative,
anti-big government politicians, today echoes the politics of the Boston Tea
Party.
3. See, for example, the promotional website for Bramah Tea and Coffee
Museums at http://www.teaandcoffeemuseum.co.uk/. (All urls cited in the
chapter were last accessed in February 2012.) The Bramah Tea Museum
valorizes its own tea ceremonials as follows: ‘The ceremony of English
afternoon tea was popularized throughout the world by the British and is
kept alive in our authentic tea room. The five minute wait for the tea to infuse
is the heart and soul of English afternoon tea. The ritual had an etiquette
which enabled the matriarch of the family to impress and entertain.’ There are
countless other celebrated English tearooms and tea museums, both in England
and globally, including The Twining Teapot Gallery, Norwich Castle Museum,
and Babington’s English Tea Rooms in Rome. English tea as a concept sells well
in the United States today—see http://www.englishteastore.com/ and http://
www.veryenglishtea.com/.
4. I am grateful to Alex Renshaw of the Advertising Antiques company for
permission to reprint these images, some of which are available at http://www.
advertisingantiques.co.uk.
5. See Jenkins (1995) and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/508582.stm.
6. With colleagues I have written about various aspects of the history of Y Drych,
including wider trends in the contents and imagery of its advertisements over
time (see Bishop et al. 2005; Coupland et al. 2003; Garrett et al. 2005). My
colleagues and I continue to be grateful to successive editors of Y Drych for
permission to use the photographic representations of original text that we
have archived.
7. I am very grateful to Bill Jones for generously making these advertisement
images available from how own collection.
8. Leif Jones, brother of John Viriamu Jones (first principal of the University
College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, which became Cardiff
University), came to be known as ‘Tea Leaf Jones’, partly as a pun on his
first name but also partly because of his passion for temperance/ teetotalism
(Morgan 1981: 107).
9. See the collection of biographies of the Scranton Welsh at http://
thomasgenweb.com/scranton_welsh_bios.html.

WELSH TEA [151]

10. For a historical review of Y Wladfa and a semiotic interpretation of the
Patagonian-Welsh linguistic landscape, see Coupland and Garrett (2010) and
further references in that source.
11. I am grateful to Peter Garrett and Hywel Bishop for making their own
photographs of Patagonian semiotic landscapes available to me for this and
the earlier study.
12. See http://www.fodors.com/world/south-america/argentina/
atlantic-patagonia/review-441199.html.
13. See http://www.patagoniaexpress.com/nainmaggie.html.
14. See http://www.welshbrewtea.com/.
15. See http://www.yorkshiretea.co.uk/ and http://tregothnan.co.uk/.

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WELSH TEA [153]

C H A P TER 9
The (De-)Centring Spaces
of Airports
Framing Mobility and Multilingualism
ADAM JAWOR SKI AND CRISPIN THURLOW

A irports are complicated places and demand complicated ways of thinking about
not only space and mobility but also about language and languages. Airports
also disrupt tidy assumptions about the meanings of core (or centre) and periphery.
How does one otherwise account for London’s Heathrow airport or Nairobi’s Jomo
Kenyatta International airport? For all intents and purposes, Heathrow is a power-
ful core place—the world’s busiest international airport serving the political centre
of a G8 nation. But what of the trajectories of the 70 million passengers passing
through Heathrow each year? The dynamic, human geography of Heathrow is not a
homogeneous, uniformly centred one; instead, it is constantly decentred or periph-
eralized by the flow of people from other global centres or its own post-Imperial
peripheries. Speaking of which, with just under 5 million passengers a year, Jomo
Kenyatta is Kenya’s largest airport and the sixth busiest airport in Africa. As a major
hub (i.e. centre) in Africa, it too is not quite so easily located as peripheral, how-
ever geographically, financially, and culturally removed from New York, London, or
Tokyo it may be (cf. Sassen 1991).
Against this backdrop, we start by grounding our chapter in the following theo-
retical/critical principles:
(a) space is as much a semiotic and, indeed, linguistic accomplishment as it is a
physical or material one (cf. Soja 1989; Lefebvre 1991);
(b) no aspect of contemporary life is ever fully displaced or completely static; our
lives are simultaneously sedentary and nomadic (cf. Clifford 1997; Sheller
and Urry 2007);
(c) the places of language are no longer neatly contained by the political and
cultural geographies of nation states or speech communities (cf. Blommaert
2005; Rampton 2009); and,
(d) binarized approaches to most social phenomena (e.g. identities of race, gen-
der, and sexuality) inevitably give way to more discursive, dialectical, perfor-
mative understandings (cf. Butler 1990; Hall 1997).

With these principles in mind, and paying particular attention to contemporary

multilingualism as ‘ideology and practice’ (Heller 2007), we present here a visual
discourse ethnography of the ‘semiotic landscape’ of airports (cf. Jaworski and
Thurlow 2010; Thurlow and Jaworski 2012). While we largely draw on the type of
data associated with ‘geosemiotics’ (Scollon and Wong Scollon 2003) and ‘linguis-
tic landscapes’ (e.g. Shohamy and Gorter 2009; Shohamy et al. 2010), we position
our work in a broader tradition of multimodality (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001),
as well as visual sociology and visual anthropology. In this sense, our ‘visual inquiry
[of emplaced multilingualism] is no longer just the study of the [photographic]
image, but rather the study of the seen and observable; it includes issues of visibil-
ity, mutual interaction and semiotics as they relate to objects, buildings and people
as well as to the study of images’ (Emmison and Smith 2000: ix). This is also a study
of ‘visuality’—the ways in which our seeing (our ‘vision’) is constructed: ‘how we
see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing and the
unseeing therein’ (Foster 1988: ix; cited in Rose 2001: 6).
We have deliberately eschewed the usual airports of academic interest (Los
Angeles, London, Hong Kong, New York, Amsterdam, etc.) by turning our attention
instead to less obvious sites for studying the place of ‘language/s on the move’ (cf.
Thurlow and Jaworski 2010a): the airports in our own respective back yards. Cardiff
Airport (Welsh: Maes Awyr Caerdydd) and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport
(Sea-Tac) have been for many years the local gateways through which we ourselves
have frequently entered into the global ethnoscape; both are regional airports on the
margins of powerful nations (see Figures 9.1 and 9.2). While Cardiff Airport ranks as
the UK’s 21st busiest airport (just over 1.2 million passengers a year), Sea-Tac ranks
as the fifteenth busiest airport in the United States (with over 32 million passengers).
Like most airports, they also lie outside of the city centres which they serve; in physi-
cal or territorial terms, they are doubly peripheralized from the outset.
Our goal with this chapter is to use these two airports partly as an analytic (or
allegory, even) for theorizing the dialectics of centre–periphery. More than this,
however, we want to use them as empirical sites or texts for tracking the place of
language under globalization and the contours of multilingualism in contemporary
life. With this in mind, we ask the following questions:

• Where (or when) is language at the airports?

• How are language and other semiotic resources deployed as a resource for struc-
turing and producing these particular spaces?

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [155]
Figure 9.1:
Cardiff Airport/Maes Awyr Caerdydd

• What languages are in evidence, how are they deployed and with/for what
effect?
• How is language (or are languages) used to manage core/peripheral identi-
ties—of the nations/cities they ‘serve’ and of the passengers they ‘handle’?

Before we turn to our ethnographic encounters with Cardiff Airport and Sea-
Tac, we want to set the scene by orienting briefly to the dynamics and dialectics of
centre–periphery relations and accounting for airports as (linguistic) places.

Figure 9.2:
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport

[156] Multilingualism and the Periphery

CENTRE–PERIPHERY DYNAMICS

Peter Burke (1992) finds centre and periphery a particularly productive pair of con-
cepts for different lines of inquiry due to their opposed yet complementary nature.
Burke also recognizes their ambiguity, being used both literally, in the geographical
sense, and figuratively, in the political or economic sense. For example, the Marxist
theory of social change considers the contrast between prosperous, industrialized
nations and poor, ‘underdeveloped’ nations as a systemic feature of the capitalist
system, with the centre, or ‘metropolis’, appropriating the economic surplus from
its peripheries, or ‘satellites’, for its own economic development. In particular,
Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1974) spatial model of the world system is premised on
the idea that the economic development of the West as the ‘core’, dating back to the
extensive division of labour in the sixteenth century, took place at the expense of
its ‘peripheries’, most notably the New World’s slavery and East European serfdom,
with other areas (e.g. Mediterranean Europe) forming the ‘semiperiphery’.
Burke cites Edward Shils’s (1975) idea of society’s ‘central value system’ (what
the society holds sacred) and its own central institutional system (the ruling appa-
ratus of the ruling authorities of the society) as intimately connected, each sup-
porting and defining the other (cf. Silverstein’s 1998 ‘centering institutions’). Yet,
while peripheries are associated with borders and frontiers, they can be seen as
‘regions favouring freedom and equality, a refuge for rebels and heretics . . . a coun-
terpart . . . to the orthodoxy and respect for authority and tradition associated with
the centre’ (Burke 1992: 83). And due to the permeability of borders, people on
each side of a border may progressively find more in common with each other than
with their respective centres (Sahlins 1989).
In likening airports to cities (or even city-states), our analysis below will evi-
dence a number of centring political and economic forces, as well as value systems
analogous to those outlined above. Along similar lines, we observe implicit and
explicit shifts in linguistic usage and the valuation of languages, including their pres-
ence or disappearance from view, coming into focus and receding into peripheral
‘waiting’ areas.

AIRPORTS AS (LINGUISTIC) PLACES

Alongside motels, chain hotels, motorways, theme parks, refugee camps, and
other similar locations, airports have been cited as a prime example of ‘non-places’
(Augé 1995). These spaces of mobility, epitomizing Clifford’s (1997: 36) idea of
‘dwelling-in-traveling’, are typically said to manifest ‘intense sameness’ in their
bland, impersonal design, and ‘intense hybridity’ as the nexus where vast num-
bers of mobile peoples and cultures intersect (Urry 2000: 63), where they ‘coex-
ist or cohabit without living together’ (Augé 1995: 110 quoted in Cresswell 2006:
220). As observed by Sarah Sharma (2009: 129), so-called non-places have been

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [157]
disparaged for their architectural uniformity, sterility of their environments, and for
their privileging of transactional interactions over personal interactions. However,
Sharma rejects the idea that ‘non-places’ are extraterritorial spaces transcending
their localities. She proposes that it is less a question of non-places displacing the
local or creating asocial facelessness but rather the theorist of non-place who erases
the local in their accounts.
The sense of airports’ locality is also shared and particularized by the makeup of
the low-wage labourers (airport cleaners, baggage handlers, security guards, and so
on), often invisible to the disinterested traveller, with their ethnicized immigration
flows, gendered divisions of labour, and multilingual repertoires (cf. Sassen 1996:
146–147). Airports are also recognizable as uniquely ‘Amsterdam’, ‘Paris’, ‘London’,
‘Chicago’, ‘Seattle’ and ‘Cardiff ’ because of their specific geographical locations,
histories, networked connections, the lived experiences of the people working and
passing through them, and last but not least, their semiotic landscapes (cf. Creswell
2006: 267).
The politics of language is certainly implied in this theorizing of space. In glo-
balized, service- and information-based economies, prestigious jobs which require
standardized practices in dominant (national) languages and world lingua fran-
cas are highly remunerated or symbolically recognized as a form of distinction
(Duchêne 2011). Many low-prestige and low-paid jobs (with the exception of
call centre workers) require little or no use of the dominant languages which ren-
ders otherwise multilingual and linguistically highly competent migrant workers
marginalized and powerless due to their inability to cope with specialized regis-
ters or literacy demands (McCall 2003; Roberts 2010). However, as explained by
Duchêne (personal communication), ‘front’ employees at airports with national
multilingual competencies and lingua francas gain access to ‘visible jobs’ (i.e. in
direct contact with clients), but these jobs are not well-paid and have little prestige.
Furthermore, the lack of competence in predictable, dominant languages works as
a mode of gate-keeping, mostly for the ‘lower classes’ and migrants. At the same
time, unpredictable language competences (or lesser-spoken languages) are used
and exploited by companies capitalizing on migrants’ language skills to help out
with the everyday running of the institution—for instance, at airports, migrants
who work as cleaners or restaurant staff, both ‘invisible’ jobs, may be asked to trans-
late for passengers having problems at the transit desk. These ad hoc multilingual
services facilitate the smooth functioning of the institution but are rewarded nei-
ther financially nor symbolically (cf. Duchêne and Heller 2012a).
The uses and displays of languages at airports are driven by a complex inter-
weaving of their functionality (getting passengers through to their aircraft or desti-
nation), commercial interests (getting passengers to consume), and the dominant,
centring ideologies privileging the global and national elites, their interests and
well-being. One striking example of the powerful globalist linguistic ideology evi-
dent in airport spaces is the favouring of English as the language of globalization,
efficiency, and ‘neutrality’. For example, Amsterdam’s Schiphol abandoned Dutch

[158] Multilingualism and the Periphery

from much of its signage in 2001 in favour of English only signs (Cresswell 2006).1
Yet, to borrow from Jan Blommaert’s work on the sociolinguistics of scalar rela-
tions, airports are also polycentric and stratified spaces, ‘where people continuously
need to observe “norms”—orders of indexicality—that are attached to a multitude
of centres or authority, local as well as translocal, momentary as well as lasting’
(Blommaert 2007a: 2; more on this below). In fact, as we have shown elsewhere in
the context of airline industry, different scales and orders of indexicality are simul-
taneously exploited in the marketing strategies of airlines seeking the symbolic and
economic capital of international recognition and of a ‘global reach’, while also ser-
vicing their nation states’ particular identity concerns (Thurlow and Jaworski 2003;
Thurlow and Aiello 2007).

TRACKING THE SEMIOTIC LANDSCAPE OF AIRPORTS

In the literature reviewed so far, there is some consensus that airports are organized
both as spaces of passage, transit, or flow and as spaces of containment and consump-
tion. These broad activities are necessarily intertwined with elaborate procedures of
security and surveillance (Morgan and Pritchard 2005; Sparke 2006), all of which are
regulated by a combination of architectural layout, mechanical/digital technology, and
vocal/visual sign-posting (cf. Cresswell 2006). As David Pascoe (2001: 201) notes,
however, ‘progress’ through airports is usually marked as much by stasis and conges-
tion as it is by movement and flow. This complex ‘stop-start’ experience of airports
is important in understanding airports as simultaneously centring and decentring
spaces, and for picturing the ebb and flow of languages in airports. Arguably more so
than many other sites, airports are characterized by their ‘between two worlds’ dia-
lectics (cf. Eggebeen 2011): coming/going, here/there, presence/absence, motion/
stasis, departure/return, time/space, and, of course, centre/periphery.
It is with this dialectical quality in mind that we turn now to our analysis of
Cardiff Airport and Sea-Tac. In particular, we demonstrate the role of language
and languages (in the sense of multilingual uses and displays) in centring and
decentring airport spaces, that is, creating focal areas/sites of engagement at dif-
ferent scale levels. Our data (collected in the summer of 2010) are drawn primar-
ily from ethnographic observation and photographic recording, but supplemented
with the official promotional discourse of both airports (e.g. their websites and
internal documents). In tracking these semiotic landscapes and their framing, we
treated the two airports as ‘text types’ or genres in terms of four defining moments
or stages (Van Leeuwen 2005): approach, departures, airside, and arrivals (cf. de
Botton 2009). In each of these communicative stages, we witness how ‘centre’ and
‘periphery’ are both static and dynamic, permanent and transient, and how they are
also dialectically constituted through the deployment of various discourses, genres,
and styles, including multiple language codes alongside images, interactions, bod-
ies, and artefacts. With a special focus on mono- and multilingual displays, we mean

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [159]
to show how these two regional airports position themselves—and their passen-
gers—as being simultaneously connected to the global (i.e. gateways to the world)
and to the local (i.e. thresholds to ‘home’). As agents of difference and markers of
distinction, airports are purveyors of both national/regional pride and global capi-
tal (cf. Thurlow and Jaworski 2003; Thurlow and Aiello 2007; Duchêne and Heller
2012b). The periphery is centred, and established centres are drawn—sometimes
quite literally—into the periphery.

APPROACH

It is in the nature of space that it is never easily located or neatly bounded (see our
opening ‘principles’; also Busch, this volume). Our spatial encounters with airports
begin well outside the buildings themselves and long before we enter them. By the
same token, our experience of an airport is also shaped by our previous experiences
with other airports. Before approaching Cardiff Airport or Sea-Tac, we are already
familiar with—have been enculturated into—the typical layout, bureaucratic proce-
dures, and interactional norms of airports in general. In other words, we recognize the
genre if not the local style or ‘discursive content’ of the airports. Our knowledge of
airports—and their spatialization—is often also acquired via (old and new) media.

Strategic Centring

Many passengers will start their journey to an airport by visiting its website, per-
haps to check flight arrival/departure information, to get ground transportation
information, to book a parking place, or just to ‘pre-visualize’ this part of their trip as
an exciting step towards reaching their final destination, whether going on holiday
or business. Connecting to the homepages of Cardiff and Sea-Tac airports (Figures
9.3 and 9.4), the destination maps on each site immediately present an example
of what we call strategic centring—accomplished this time by largely visual means.
Neither Sea-Tac nor Cardiff is explicitly marked on the maps. By mentally complet-
ing the gestalt and filling in the ‘missing’ spot, however, viewers are actively engaged
in a cognitive act of centring both airports—in the world (Sea-Tac) or in Europe
(Cardiff ). Even more crucially, the relatively small number of international (and
in the case of Cardiff, national) destinations is scattered across the world/conti-
nent, implying not only the centredness but also the ‘global reach’ of both airports
(for more examples of this visual technique at play, see Thurlow and Jaworski 2003;
Aiello and Thurlow 2006). Here, the relatively peripheral and low-capacity airports
are positioned as international gateways, graphically placed near the centre of the
map image, with dots for destinations, and contour maps of the continents with no
(or only weakly articulated) national borders, all suggesting ease of movement and
access.

[160] Multilingualism and the Periphery

(a)

(b)

(c)

Figure 9.3:
Excerpts from Cardiff Airport website, including a route map

Gateways to the World

We have already noted how Cardiff Airport and Sea-Tac are, like many airports,
located on the periphery of the cities they serve. In modern cities, one cannot fail
to notice road signs scattered alongside main thoroughfares leading out to airports
(Figures 9.5 and 9.6). While a practical necessity for those actually travelling to air-
ports, for all those passing the signs during their daily commute to and from work,
or just going about their own daily business, it is hard not to see airports as being
thereby indexically centred. No matter where one may be in a city, a small arrow or
outline of an aeroplane on a green sign will always point one in the direction of an
airport. Like signs for city centres, and even though found on the outskirts of towns
and cities, airports are their cities’ new communication centres—connecting city

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [161]
(a)

(b)

Figure 9.4:
Excerpts from the Sea-Tac airport website, including a route map

Figure 9.5:
Cardiff Airport/Maes Awyr Caerdydd road sign

[162] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 9.6:
Road sign indicating exit for the Seattle-Tacoma airport

dwellers with the rest of the world, seeding fleeting fantasies of travel to exotic des-
tinations, anywhere that is not ‘work’ (or ‘home’), any place that promises a change
from the routine. On most days, for most people, airports remain out of reach, but
the aspirational homing in on airports by consuming the road signs may go on every

Figure 9.7:
Airline billboard, Cardiff Airport

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [163]
day. This promise is articulated and made concrete in the kinds of marketing that
occur the closer one gets to the airport (Figure 9.7) where, as with the online maps,
airports look to position themselves as hubs or gateways, and airlines offer to take
us there.

Global Spectacles

For all their instrumentality, airport road signs also serve important symbolic func-
tions. The same may be said also of the indicator boards inside airport buildings
(Figures 9.8 and 9.9).
Depending on the time of day, the departures board at Cardiff Airport lists dis-
tinctly non-English (or non-Welsh) places like Zakynthos, Arrecife, Enontekiö, Sharm
El Sheik, Kittilä, and Fuerteventura. However déclassé these may be as tourist desti-
nations, they still resonate as exotic, enchanted sounding places of ‘infinite and imme-
diate possibility’ (de Botton 2009: 29). Charting a very different geography, Sea-Tac
displays its own multilingual allusions with Kahului, Sitka, Mazatlán, Tapei-Toayuan,
Incheon, and Osaka-Kansai; also, the distinctively European tones of Paris Charles de
Gaulle and Frankfurt. In the mouths of locals and others passing through, the read-
ing/speaking of these place-names obliges a shift—however fleeting—into other lan-
guages. As we hang around near the entrance to the airport terminal, we notice how
arriving passengers pause, look up the boards, locate ‘their’ destination, re-confirm

Figure 9.8:
Indicator board, Cardiff Airport at departures

[164] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 9.9:
Indicator board, Sea-Tac departures

departure time (‘on time’), and seek further instructions (‘Desks 03–07’); one pas-
senger at Cardiff points at the board and says almost triumphantly to his companion
‘Alicante’. These distant place-names appear as muffled, isolated soundbites, but dif-
ferent languages are present through them and come into earshot.
Websites and indicator boards may list a dazzling array of actual travel destina-
tions accessible from airports, but they are also full of implied or imagined des-
tinations. In a more glamorous—or at least, self-conscious—way, the gleaming,
polished-steel sculpture at Sea-Tac (Figures 9.10a and 9.10b) is styled as a giant
road sign indexing a myriad of international, if relatively small and unknown, desti-
nations. Where exactly are Arvida, Rouen, Karlsruhe, Brno, Levola, and many oth-
ers? If Sea-Tac can connect its passengers to these mysterious sounding places, and
symbolically it does by invoking their names in a spectacular display, then it appears
yet again as a fully globalized, central point on the map from which to reach even
the most ‘remote’ corners of the planet. The same message emanates from airline
advertisements at Cardiff either through a symbolic signpost on the steps leading
to the departure hall (Figure 9.11), or a billboard alongside the driveway leading to
the terminal building: Amsterdam, Dubai, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Cardiff, Cork,

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [165]
 (a) (b)

Figure 9.10:
Symbolic road signs at Sea-Tac airport (a) general view and (b) close-up

New York, Orlando. Lists are ‘colony texts’ (Hoey 2001), where in the absence
of any visible ordering, each element is equal to all the others. In the functional
and symbolic lists of destinations, the significance of each place-name is as great
as the next; some are more readily recognizable than others; all, especially in their

Figure 9.11:
Airline advertisement/symbolic road sign, Cardiff Airport departures

[166] Multilingualism and the Periphery

collective promise—however illusory—of freedom of movement, reinforce the
mysticism and excitement of travel and connectedness with the world.

DEPARTURES

In the 1970s, architectural design critic Robert Sommer (1974) dismissively character-
ized airports as a matter of endless tunnels and funnels. Airports certainly retain much
of the quintessential system of moving walkways and jetways, and the continual lining
up for human ‘processing’. Perhaps, however, a more contemporary way of thinking
about airports is less in terms of their architectural design—which is nowadays typified
by vast, glassy atria (see Edwards 2005)—and more in terms of centring and decentring
processes that may emerge not only through the built environment but also through
more semiotic (which includes linguistic), interactional and psychological means. With
this in mind, we now head for Departures, to check-in and to clear security.2

Staging Centre

Movement (or lack thereof) in the airport is generically organized by a series of key
communicative stages each of which is associated with a number of centring and
decentring activities such as checking-in, security screening, duty-free shopping,
and boarding. In most airports, particular spaces are assigned for these activities,
carved out in sometimes permanent but often temporary ways. (Think here of how
post hoc spaces were hurriedly created in hallways and corridors for intensified,
post-9/11 security screening in US airports.) The seemingly endless hallway of
check-in counters at Sea-Tac (Figure 9.12) finds its equivalent at Cardiff Airport
(Figure 9.13)—albeit on a smaller scale. In both cases, different agents or air-
lines sometimes have dedicated check-in zones but also share check-in counters
at different times of the day (see Figures 9.14 and 9.15). Airlines therefore come
to prominence in the airport by staging themselves as distinctive commercial and
processing centres through a combination of fixed or transient signage (e.g. digi-
tal monitors above check-in desks), banners with trademarked colours and logos,
moveable stanchions and strips of carpets (a favourite semiotic marker for staging
elite traveller status—Thurlow and Jaworski 2006; Figure 9.16). In the large, open
space of the departures terminal, each airline stakes a claim to its own commer-
cial zone which, in the case of international airlines, becomes a quasi-diplomatic
zone. Cheek-by-jowl at Sea-Tac, British Airways, Korean Air, Lufthansa, Eva Air,
and Air France create a little bit of Britain, Korea, Germany, Taiwan, and France,
respectively. The same physical space can be semiotically centred and re-centered
throughout the day, so that the props for staging Little Britain (i.e. two upright
banners and some Hand Baggage Allowance equipment; Figure 9.17) wait in the
wings, while Little Korea (Figure 9.18) takes centre stage. Further down the line of

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Figure 9.12:
Check-in area, Sea-Tac

Figure 9.13:
Check-in area, Cardiff Airport

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Figure 9.14:
Monitors above check-in desks, Cardiff Airport

Figure 9.15:
Signs above check-in desks, Sea-Tac

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Figure 9.16:
Monitors, first class banner, stanchions, carpets at Korean Air check-in desks, Sea-Tac

Figure 9.17:
British Airways sign and equipment, Sea-Tac

[170] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 9.18:
Korean Air sign and equipment, Sea-Tac

check-in desks, Asiana and Eva Air signage wait backstage while that of Air France
(not shown here) has been centred to provide appropriate setting or ‘expressive
equipment’ for the airline’s front stage performance (Goffman 1959) of checking
in its passengers. At Cardiff Airport, the Manx2.com Welsh-English bilingual Hand
Baggage Allowance rack (the English language side seen in Figure 9.19) sits in the
corner of the check-in area waiting to be wheeled out when the passengers for its
sole flight to Anglesey arrive for check-in. Through these semiotic centrings and
recentrings, the airlines, their countries of origin, and the global or local destina-
tions they service, come into and out of focus; sometimes prominent, at other times
literally marginalized and muted, but always on display. The centre is thus a process
of attunement as much as it is of actual space; airlines centre themselves by calling
attention to themselves and by hailing passengers at relevant points in time.

Multilingual ‘Touch-Spaces’

Languages are often a key resource for staging the fleeting centres of airline flag-car-
riers. The Korean-English displays for Korean Air’s checking-in (e.g. Figure 9.18)
will eventually give way to the monolingual displays for British Airways
(e.g. Figure 9.19). Just as French (Air France) will give way to Korean (Asiana) and,
a little later still, to Chinese (Eva Air).

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [171]
Figure 9.19:
Manx2.com sign and equipment, Cardiff Airport

Languages also come into and out of focus in other polycentric spaces of depar-
ture. In the check-in zones of major US airlines (e.g. Continental, United, and
American), interactive digital stands make the process of checking in available in
a range of major European and East-Asian languages (e.g. French, German, and
Spanish; Korean, Japanese, Thai, and Chinese—both Simplified and Traditional;
Figure 9.20); Portuguese, Italian, and Greek are also available in some cases, even
though Sea-Tac has no apparent cultural or commercial links with these particu-
lar languages. Elsewhere in Sea-Tac, multilingual interfaces—or ‘touch-spaces’—
are available in cash machines and tourist information stands (see Arrivals
section below), just as cash machines at Cardiff Airport offer service in Welsh or
English.
These different languages are brought to the fore and actualized by speakers
at a moment of need, in a moment of contact. However transient computerized
check-in centres may be, they exert a centrifugal pull as otherwise distant (or
peripheral) places like London, Paris, Taipei, Seoul, and Frankfurt are drawn
to the fore (or centre) at Sea-Tac. These transient diplomatic zones are also
connected through their human geography (e.g. British ground-staff and pas-
sengers at BA check-in), the banal nationalism (Billig 1995) of their corporate

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Figure 9.20:
United Airlines’ automated check-in stand, Sea-Tac

displays (e.g. flag colours and national languages), and, of course, the planes
waiting on the tarmac to carry off passengers. A global ‘plane’ or ‘scape’ is
thereby realized.

AIRSIDE

At Cardiff Airport and Sea-Tac, ‘airside’ spaces are realized slightly differently. With
only one terminal, these areas at Cardiff Airport are exclusively for departing pas-
sengers. This is also true of Sea-Tac’s international terminal but not in its domestic
terminals where departing, transferring, and arriving passengers mingle in the same
spaces. In this last case, ‘airside’ is very much a space of coming and going, although
the semiotic landscape retains a dominant orientation to the departing (or perhaps)
transferring passenger.

‘Glocal’ Ethnoscaping

Airside spaces are, of course, at the very centre of airports’ commercial activity—of
restaurants and duty-free shopping. Mirroring the strategic centring on the airport
websites, the world is everywhere at Sea-Tac and Cardiff Airport—at least in its most

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [173]
aesthetic, ‘cosmopolitan-lite’ (cf. Beck 2006) sense. At Sea-Tac, the commercial areas
are peppered with stylized images of the globe, a ubiquitous signifier of globalization
(cf. Szerszynski and Urry 2002) (Figures 9.21 and 9.22) and Cardiff has the ‘WORLD’
(Figure 9.23). Of course, at both airports there are opportunities to buy into the world
by purchasing (or simply browsing) the usual duty-free offering of global brands,
although still usually representing only a narrow slice of the world (e.g. French per-
fumes, Swiss watches and chocolates, Scotch whiskey, Italian scarves and ties). This
semiotic landscape of brand names, logos, and shop signs, alongside the stylized globes,
‘unwaved’ international flags, lists of international cities/destinations, and so on, are
prime examples of the visualization of what we choose to call ‘banal globalization’, in
parallel to Billig’s (1995) ‘banal nationalism’, Beck’s (2006) ‘banal cosmopolitanism’,
and Szerszynski and Urry’s (2002, 2006) ‘banal globalism’; those everyday ways that
the global is performatively enacted through ordinary, seemingly innocuous textual
practices and other semiotic means (see Thurlow and Jaworski 2010a, 2011).
Sea-Tac, in particular, enhances—or embellishes—its global ethnoscape with
a food hall of ‘exotic’ restaurants with their one-word multi-languaging: Qdoba,
Maki, and Pallino (see Figures 9.24, 9.25, 9.26). At Cardiff Airport, too, we can
buy ‘sunglasses and accessories’ at the cosmopolitan sounding (or looking) Nuance
or drink a cup of coffee at Caffè Ritazza (not shown here). To choose just one
example (Figure 9.27), the brand names of cosmetics in one part of the Cardiff
duty-free shop are arranged into a string of familiar signs: Dior, Estēe Lauder,

Figure 9.21:
‘Globe’ display and shopping area, Sea-Tac airside

[174] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 9.22:
‘Globe’ display, ‘Club Jet Duty Free’, Sea-Tac airside

Figure 9.23:
The stationery-cum-confectionery store WORLD at Cardiff airside (now replaced by WH Smith)

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [175]
Figure 9.24:
‘Qdoba Mexican Grill’, Sea-Tac airside

Figure 9.25:
‘Maki of Japan’, Sea-Tac airside

[176] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 9.26:
‘Pallino Pasta’, Sea-Tac airside

Figure 9.27:
Cosmetics display at ‘Nuance’, Cardiff Airport airside

Lancôme, L’Oréal, Elizabeth Arden, Givenchy, Clarins, Prada, Stella McCartney,

alongside a more generic ‘Celebrity Fragrance’ (not all these clearly visible in the
reproduced image). The iconicity of these brand names exploits consumer stereo-
types of Frenchness, Italianicity, or ‘simply’ glamour, elegance, and sophistication

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [177]
associated with international ‘celebrity’ lifestyle rather than any specific national
characteristics. Pursuing their aspirational identities, targeted consumers may not
even associate these brand names with any specific (national) language, or they may
think of them as ‘belonging’ to different languages (Tufi and Blackwood 2010), a
global commercialese. This global semiotic landscape of celebrity brand names, like
the multilingual language of advertising (e.g. Kelly-Holmes 2005) interpellates
(Althusser 1971) or positions its audience as cosmopolitan and transnational elite
of global travellers (cf. Piller 2001; Thurlow and Jaworski 2006). Such multilingual
amalgams blend into glittering ‘language displays’ (Eastman and Stein 1933) and
a fetish of freedom and democracy or, to be more precise, neoliberal consumer
choice. Thus, consumerism appears one of the key central values responsible for
the organization of ‘central’ multilingualism of airports (cf. Shils, above).
For all its global reach, this commercial ethnoscape is also structured through its
juxtaposition of the local with the global. Seattle’s Best Coffee jostles for space (and
attention) right next to the typographically authenticated Kobo: Sushi, Salad, Udon
(Figure 9.28). At Cardiff Airport, soft-toy versions of the national emblem, a Welsh
dragon (Figure 9.29), are for sale together with Welsh-themed rugby balls, teddy
bears, Penderyn single malt Welsh whiskey, and (at a short distance away) another
small department with Welsh-themed goods such as fridge magnets, rugby shirts,
Welsh carved wooden ‘love spoons’, watches, and more soft toys. Some of these
gifts are targeted at an international clientele with labels in some of the key ‘central’
languages (de Swaan 2001) such as English, French, German, and Italian (marked

Figure 9.28:
Localizing and globalizing brands, Sea-Tac airside

[178] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 9.29:
Localizing display in duty free, Cardiff Airport airside

with corresponding ‘appropriate’ national flags). Others use a strategy of ‘authenti-

cating’ their labels in English and Welsh (cf. Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011).
All these goods and their branding texts—Welsh single malt alongside more
‘international’ Scotch whiskeys and French brandies, international and local com-
pany names, souvenir labels with different and somewhat unpredictable (if limited)
language choices, globes on shop signs next to maps of Wales on the fridge magnets,
images of ‘generic’ flowers on the ‘summer time’ display underneath the Diageo-
owned alcohol brands opposite Welsh daffodil pins, international flags and Welsh
flags, Welsh dragons for sale and Welsh dragons as decoration (part of the Penderyn
display), Swiss chocolate and Welsh fudge, together with more straightforward,
commercial texts such as ‘Any 2 for (+name of products and price)’ speak of dif-
ferently ‘scaled’ goods and centring forces at play—global glamour vs. shopping on
a budget vs. local colour and authenticity. Duty-free stores are transpatial (‘here-
and-there’) microcosms of ‘glocalization’ (Robertson 1995); they are also spaces
in which the meanings and experiences of centre and periphery become very con-
fused. Here is where Welsh people can buy dragons to take off with them to distant
places as reminders of home, or where foreigners may buy dragons as exotic souve-
nirs for home. Indeed, we are reminded that airports are inevitably experienced as
central for those who call it ‘home’ and as peripheral for those who call it ‘away’.

Multilingual Scapes

Unsurprisingly, Cardiff Airport is a site of more visible (English-Welsh) bilingualism

than the more resolutely monolingual Sea-Tac. While limitations of space preclude

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Figure 9.30:
Bilingual signage, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), Cardiff Airport
arrivals

us from a detailed discussion of this aspect of Cardiff ’s semiotic landscape, we will

limit ourselves to just a handful of observations. Cardiff Airport is a privately owned
company and has no legal obligation to orient to the Welsh Assembly Government
and its 1993 Welsh Language Act stating the equality of both languages in Wales (cf.
Coupland’s 2010 discussion of the significance of this Act for the study of linguistic
landscapes in Wales). While all state institutions in Wales are required to publish all
their documents (including public signage) in both Welsh and English (as is the case
with all the signs of the UK Border Agency and the Department for Environment,
Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA , around the airport; Figure 9.30), Cardiff Airport,
not unlike many other Welsh-based companies in the private sector adopting the
stance of ‘corporate and social responsibility’, strives to support and promote the
use of Welsh among its staff, increase bilingual service provision for its customers,
and to use the Welsh language to create a ‘sense of place’ for its business (cf. Cardiff
Airport, 2009/2010). This extends to the (re-)placement of new (at the time of data
collection) bilingual, permanent and temporary signage, audio announcements, sta-
tionary, customer satisfaction survey forms, press releases, marketing texts, and so
on (ibid.). Indeed, at the time of data collection, many new signs were already on
display with the bilingual ‘We’re evolving . . . ’ / ‘Rydym ni’n datblygu . . . ’ campaign
advertised widely and included not only the linguistic re-branding but also structural
improvements to the terminal building and parking facilities.
One of the key examples of the general and linguistic re-branding of Cardiff
Airport is its new logo (Figure 9.1), with the clearly privileged English text over its

[180] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Welsh equivalent, and the Celtic-styled compass. While state institutions display
all their signs bilingually (Figure 9.30), the presence of English as the dominant
language of Wales and international travel is safely assured. This can be seen, for
example, in the English-only sign ‘executive Lounge’, where the ‘usual’ space for
Welsh below the main body of text in smaller font (compare Figure 9.1) is taken up
by the English tagline ‘a stylish departure’ (Figure 9.31).
All the same, the Welsh language and Welsh iconography are present at Cardiff
on a scale that makes the airport unmistakably ‘Cardiff ’ and ‘Wales’ (as opposed
to ‘Sea-Tac’, ‘Heathrow’, or ‘Schiphol’), and the fact that the prescriptive adherence
to absolute semantic and graphic parallelism between Welsh and English is less-
ened may overall produce effects of greater involvement with the cultural values
of the Welsh language than the sterile form-focused parallelism of bilingual texts
(Coupland 2010: 98). As Nik Coupland observes in his study of Welsh linguis-
tic landscapes ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, ‘[c]omplementing rather than paral-
leling, maximizing the different cultural resources of both Welsh and English, and
finding cultural value in the interplay between languages, are likely to be more pro-
ductive’ (ibid.).
Beyond the national−global interplay of Welsh and English bilingualism across
Cardiff, far more languages are visible throughout both airports. Tucked away in
a bookstore at Sea-Tac (Figure 9.32), we come across a shelf of travel magazines
whose covers make colourful promises of ‘elsewhere’ (cf. Reh 2004 for an ethnog-
raphy of ‘visible writing’, including books, as part of a locale’s linguistic landscape;
also Pavlenko 2010). Close by is another bookshelf crammed full with travel guides
and ‘teach-yourself ’ language books. It is in this repository of travel publications
that a myriad of languages, or ‘language potentialities’, lies dormant in the relative

Figure 9.31:
‘Executive Lounge’, Cardiff Airport airside

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Figure 9.32:
Guidebook and language self-teaching books, bookstore, Sea-Tac airside

periphery of closed books until an interested traveller starts browsing through their
glossaries and useful phrases sections, glancing through ‘foreign’ politeness formulae
or scripts for basic service encounters (see Thurlow and Jaworski, 2010a).
In the midst of its visual landscape of signs, brands, logos, and magazine/book
covers, what is not immediately apparent—certainly not from our photographic
data—is the soundscape of these airports. With the few exceptions of low traffic or
VIP lounges, where quietude is one of the marks of distinction and privilege (cf.
Thurlow and Jaworski 2010b, 2012), airports are by no means tranquil, silent
places. Indeed, to speak of them as ‘non-places’ where ‘people coexist or cohabit
without living together’ (see Augé 1995) makes more of an existential or even polit-
ical claim than it does a sensible linguistic or communicative one (see above). In his
critique of the ‘rhetoric of ubiquity’, Andrew Wood (2003) dismisses airport inter-
actions as uniformly disconnected: ‘random’, ‘isolated’, and ‘anonymous’. For us,
this is equivalent to dismissing the phatic exchanges of small talk as nothing more
than ‘empty’ or pointless (cf. J. Coupland 2010; see also MacCannell’s 1989: 105
critique of Boorstin’s 1964 concept of ‘pseudo-places’). All across the airport but
especially here in the Airside spaces, we find passengers chatting constantly with
each other, whether standing in check-in lines or security check-points, in cafes or
while shopping, and most definitely when they end up facing a significant delay in

[182] Multilingualism and the Periphery

take-off time; ground staff ask and answer endless questions, and sometimes chat
casually with passengers; flight crews mix work talk and small talk as they move
swiftly towards their aircraft avoiding eye contact with waiting passengers; kitchen
staff, cleaning staff, and baggage handlers, too, talk amongst themselves while work-
ing and especially during periods of relative calm between loading and unloading
planes, in their backstage regions of conveyer belts and baggage carts. For all of their
normative regulation of people and spaces, airports are surprising sites of agentful
practice and busy interaction (most definitely awaiting a more systematic and long-
term ethnography of communication). Sharma (2009) and Cresswell (2006) both
argue that ‘non-place’ perspectives which view airports as generic, sterile, soul-less
typically privilege the point of view of elites—especially the business commuter—
and overlook many other people who pass through or spend their time in airports.
As Creswell puts it, the airport ‘is not simply a part of the life-world of the kinetic
elite, but a place of shelter and livelihood. The people who service the elite are every
bit as cosmopolitan’ (Creswell 2006: 257).

ARRIVALS

In some ways, the spaces of arrival at airports work in parallel to—are almost mir-
ror images of—their departure spaces. Not exactly departures in reverse, but often
another set of corridors, of queuing and waiting rituals, and of centres within cen-
tres. In our visits to Cardiff Airport and Sea-Tac, we traced the geography of arriv-
ing from disembarkation, to walking towards passport control (or just the Exit), to
waiting in baggage claim, and to passing through the arrivals/departure hall out to
ground transportation (e.g. taxi ranks and car parks). We will keep our comments
on this last stage fairly brief, using Arrivals mainly as a way to exemplify and pull
together some of the recurring themes in our analysis of airports as (de-)centring
spaces.

Re-Imagining Home

Welcome to your destination. Welcome home. ‘Welcome to Seattle and the Pacific
Northwest’ (Figure 9.33). ‘Bye bye airport. Hello Wales.’/ ‘Hwyl fawr faes awyr. Helo
Cymru.’ (Figure 9.34). Like Departures, Arrivals is a point of crossing, a threshold,
by which airports are simultaneously gateways to a destination and places of home-
coming. Always Janus-faced, they simultaneously point to ‘here’ and to ‘there’ (see
Schivelbusch 1986 for a similar view on railway stations).
Throughout the arrival spaces at Sea-Tac and Cardiff Airport, this dual-pur-
pose landscape is accomplished semiotically, as well as architecturally. As above,
we find a similar mix of symbolic and functional signposting—most notably in
welcome signs—where here and there must be managed. At Cardiff Airport,

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [183]
Figure 9.33:
‘Welcome to Seattle and the Pacific Northwest’ (Lufthansa), Sea-Tac arrivals

the official Welsh Tourist Board extends its WELCOME and CROESO along
with a pan-European greeting in Italian, German, Spanish, and French (Figure
9.35). Wales thereby expresses its local identity and situates—or centres—itself
more internationally. At Sea-Tac, the most prominent message of welcome to

Figure 9.34:
‘Bye bye airport. Hello Wales.’/ ‘Hwyl fawr faes awyr. Helo Cymru.’, Cardiff Airport arrivals

[184] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 9.35:
Multilingual ‘welcome’ sign (Welsh Tourism Board), Cardiff Airport arrivals

the city and the region, is extended/sponsored by the Port of Seattle and the
German airline Lufthansa (Figure 9.33). At the time, services between Seattle
and Frankfurt were very new, and, with this sign, the airline was looking to make
a concerted bid to centre itself visually and commercially. As such, this second
welcome sign doubles as an advertisement for not only the airline but also for
the world—selling to locals the global reach of Sea-Tac by enworlding their cor-
ner of the continent. Arrivals spaces therefore serve two interesting functions:
they must create a distinctive sense of the local ‘home culture’ while reassuring
visitors that they remain connected to their homes—and reassuring returning
locals that they remain connected to the world at large. This can be done both
literally and imaginatively. Tokens of easy or rapid connectivity—between cen-
tre and periphery (depending on your point of view)—are manifest in advertise-
ments for international (or ‘global’) calling cards (‘Stay in touch the easy way’,
‘Swipe and call’) at both airports (Figures 9.36 and 9.37). Most likely directed at
visitors, these tokens act as reassurances of home; for locals, they are nonethe-
less reassurances of elsewhere (cf. Blommaert and Dong 2010). Arrivals is an
obvious space in which to imagine and stage the nation (or the city, region, etc.;
cf. Anderson 1983; Billig 1995), as well as branding the place as a distinctive
destination (cf. Flowerdew 2004; Jensen 2007). Inevitably, these are discursive
accomplishments. At Sea-Tac, indigenous Native American ‘craft work’ or other
‘cultural artefacts’ are encased and displayed alongside contemporary works of
art by ‘local artists’ (Figure 9.38).
At Cardiff Airport, the seemingly endless passageway from aeroplane through
baggage claim to exit is playfully but strategically staged with large red and green

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [185]
Figure 9.36:
‘Stay in touch the easy way’, Sea-Tac arrivals

Figure 9.37:
‘Swipe and call’, Cardiff Airport arrivals

[186] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 9.38:
Art from the Pacific Northwest, Sea-Tac

panels in English and Welsh (the playful key of the signs realized by the choice of
brighter and ‘cheerful’ hues of red and green in contrast to the darker and more
‘sober’ values of the colours in the Welsh flag). The different ‘stations’ offer a com-
bination of signposting, advertising, and entertainment: ‘Wales this way’ / ‘Cymru
fforda yma’ (Figure 9.39); ‘Our craggy coastline is 7,987 times longer than this cor-
ridor.’ / ‘Mae ein harfordir creigiog 7,987 gwaith yn hirach na’r corridor hwn.’ (Figure
9.40); ‘Wales, 23% national park[,] 0.14625% airport.’ / Cymru, 23% parc cened-
laethol, 0.14625% maes awyr.’ (not shown here); and many others. Interestingly,
some of the signs make explicit metalinguistic comments, not only putting Welsh-
English bilingualism on display, as amusing or decorative (Kelly-Holmes 2005),
but as explicitly self-reflexive acts of linguascaping ( Jaworski, Thurlow, et al. 2003).
For example, ‘Welsh also spoken in Chubut Valley, Patagonia.’ / ‘Hwyliodd y Cymry
cyntaf i Batagonia ar gwch o’r enw’r Mimosa.’ (not shown here); ‘“Hello” in Welsh is
“helo”. So helo.’ / ‘Helo, croeso adref.’ ( = Hello, welcome (back) home) (Figure 9.41).
All these more or less explicitly metalinguistic displays of bilingualism, and espe-
cially of Welsh, engage in language ideological work (e.g. Woolard and Schieffelin
1994; Coupland and Jaworski 2004; Kroskrity 2004) positioning and normalizing
the Welsh language as an index of the Welsh nation (especially by bringing Welsh in
the linguistic landscape outside of the strictly institutional frame), subverting the
mythology and hegemony of English monolingualism in Wales/United Kingdom,
as well as internationalizing Welsh by pointing to its use outside of Wales (‘also

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [187]
Figure 9.39:
‘Wales this way’/‘Cymru fforda yma’, Cardiff Airport arrivals

Figure 9.40:
‘Our craggy coastline is 7,987 times longer than this corridor.’/‘Mae ein harfordir creigiog 7,987 gwaith
yn hirach na’r corridor hwn.’, Cardiff Airport arrivals

[188] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 9.41:
‘“Hello” in Welsh is “helo”. So helo.’/‘Helo, croeso adref.’ [ = Hello, welcome (back) home], Cardiff
Airport arrivals

spoken in Chubut Valley, Patagonia’) and inviting its international (including other
British) visitors to engage in an act of code-crossing (Rampton 1995) by realizing
the second part of an adjacency pair in the ubiquitous and most pervasive speech
act in tourism discourse—the greeting ( Jaworski 2009)—‘So helo’. These are, again,
localizing and globalizing communicative practices commonly found in other con-
texts of tourism and mobility, whereby languages, and especially ‘small’, minority
languages are used as resources for creating a ‘sense of place’, authenticity, distinc-
tion, and exoticity of travel destinations (cf. Jaworski, Thurlow, et al. 2003; Pujolar
2006; Budach et al. 2007; Jaworski and Piller 2008; Pietikäinen 2010; Thurlow and
Jaworski 2010a; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011).

AIRPORTS AS UNEVEN, INTERSTITIAL SPACES OF

MOBILITY AND MULTILINGUALISM

[T]hese interstitial spaces . . . are also places of fantasy and desire, places of inclusion and exclu-
sion, and social milieux for different groups of people. (Crang 2002: 573)

Mike Crang reminds us that airports are not easily resolved. Perhaps it is this elusive
quality that warrants their status as the most emblematic spaces of globalization—even
more so than their affiliation with communication technologies and human mobilities.
At one and the same time, airports are spaces of mobility and immobility, elite spaces

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [189]
and spaces of exploitation, leisure spaces and working spaces, spaces of connection and
spaces of alienation, distinctive spaces and generic spaces, and so on. Airports are also
simultaneously centred (or centring) spaces and peripheral (or peripheralizing) spaces.
Drawing on Jan Blommaert’s work (cf. Blommaert 2005; Blommaert and Dong
2010), we prefer to think of airports as being akin to densely populated, ethnically
and nationally diverse urban neighbourhoods where different, socially stratified
groups of residents and more transient dwellers, migrants and non-migrants live,
work, do business, get educated, worship, relax, and so forth together or side by
side. These are translocal and trans-national spaces but also locally anchored spaces,
where the distribution of language codes, linguistic repertoires, and a wide range of
linguistic displays vary across the ‘horizontal’ dimension of neighbourhood spaces
(streets, businesses, cultural institutions, etc.); each of these spaces is further diver-
sified by vertically stratified layers of scalar relations ranging from strictly local
(e.g. interpersonal) to strictly global, and a range of intermediate scalar levels
between these two extremes. In specific contexts of use, particular linguistic
resources (standard and non-standard varieties, accents, styles, genres, and dis-
courses, often mixed or truncated) display orientations to orders of indexicality, that
is, socially and culturally patterned ‘norms’ of control, authority, and evaluation
associated with these resources in their microenvironments, settings, and networks
(Silverstein 2003).
Airports are sites of intense production of spatial relations which situate them
not only within their local constituencies (cities, regions, nations) but also within
broader global networks. Their pervasive positioning, or styling, of passengers
as political, economic, and cultural subjects makes them, together with other
places of mobility, particularly rich sites for critical observation and study (cf.
Cwerner, Kesselring and Urry, 2009). However, as already indicated, we do not
accept that this complexity is best explained by conceptualizing airports as some-
what transcendental or de-localized, and for that reason we opt out of referring
to them with the somewhat misleading concept of ‘non-place’. On the contrary,
airports appear to us to be uniquely grounded as multiply layered spaces, both
local and global, through (a) their often sophisticated and iconic architectural
design (Pascoe 2001; Pearman 2004); (b) the presence and flows of human sub-
jects with tangible biographies and aspirations (Adey 2008); (c) the interplay of
globally framed but locally managed practices of mobility, business interests, and
security politics (Klauser, Ruegg, and November 2008); and last but not least
(d) their concentrated semioticization with spoken and written language, indexi-
cal and symbolic signage, advertisements, displays of goods for sale, exhibition/
promotional areas, works of art, that is, the totality of discourses in place (Scollon
and Wong Scollon 2003), or semiotic landscapes ( Jaworski and Thurlow 2010).
In paying attention to these discourses in place, we reveal airports to be places
of mobility not only of people and goods but also of language and discourse. With
regard to the theme of this volume more specifically, we hope to have shown how
various discursive practices, including multilingual displays, are organized around

[190] Multilingualism and the Periphery

different spatial norms, or orders of indexicality, how they are shaped by the
polycentricity of airports, that is, multiple centres of authority producing differ-
ent ‘social categories, recognisable semiotic emblems for groups and individuals,
a more or less coherent semiotic habitat’ (Blommaert 2007b: 117). The ‘coherent
semiotic habitat’ of the airport, like any other ‘text’, displays certain generic qualities
that link it to other, similar text types (in this case, the global network of airports)
alongside other, site-specific features anchoring each airport in a specific locality
(or layered localities). To be sure, and still following Blommaert (ibid.), our wander
(or dérive—see Debord 1995 [1967]) through Cardiff Airport and Sea-Tac surely
confirms how different forms of semiosis are positioned ‘as valuable, others as less
valuable, and some are not taken into account at all, while all are subject to rules of
access and regulations as to circulation’.
Inevitably, given the location of both airports in the United Kingdom and United
States, English appears as the dominant or centralized code throughout both sites,
following the centring logic and ideology of its position as the main national lan-
guage of both countries, and reinforced by its role as the world lingua franca and
international language of mobility. However, other codes are also present, either
competing for symbolic centre-stage, or waiting in the wings for their ‘moment’ to
be noticed, to come into our ‘attention structures’ ( Jones 2010), to be displayed,
or centred in a fleeting moment of a passenger passing through a particular area of
the airport or engaging in one of the encounters with a member of staff, fellow pas-
senger, sign, or screen. Apart from the centring of Welsh at Cardiff Airport, albeit
persistently ‘trailing’ behind English, languages other than English are spatialized
mimetically in terms of Wallerstein’s world order, the most visible of which in our
data fit de Swaan’s category of ‘super-central’ languages: Chinese, French, German,
Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish (but not Arabic, Malay, Russian, Swahili, and
Turkish), with Italian, Korean (especially at Sea-Tac) a close second, and a smat-
tering of other ‘central’ languages cropping up less often. However, although these
languages are centred in terms of their visibility due to size and frequency of dis-
play (e.g. at airline-branded check-in areas, or on symbolic ‘welcome’ signs), their
discourses are somewhat limited and reduced to the most rudimentary operations
associated with passengers moving through the airport (e.g. organizing passengers
as ‘elite’ or ‘economy’ at check-in), allowing passengers to perform basic transac-
tions (e.g. withdrawing money from cash machines), or advertising ‘ethnic’ restau-
rants with foreign-sounding names. Together with the ostentatious brand names in
retail outlets, all these codes blend into a kind of Internationalese (or as suggested
above, Commercialese), spoken by few, understood by many, often devoid of any
specific ethno-national associations.
In an age of intensified language commodification (Heller 2003, 2011), the
global semioscape (Thurlow and Aiello 2007) is dominated by a mélange of
relatively few but powerful genres, images, practices, and codes in a bewilder-
ing array of styles and spectacles – especially in places where it is most bus-
ily manifested (airports, shopping malls, commercial city centres, theme parks,

T H E ( D E - ) C E N T R I N G S PA C E S O F A I R P O RTS [191]
international sporting events, music festivals, etc.). The primary orientation of
the global semioscape is to form, hence aestheticization and realization of the
poetic function in the sense of Jakobson (1960). And despite being simply a
veiled manifestation of synthetic personalization (Fairclough 1992), its implied
recipients are styled as unique and distinct from one another, and above all from
the (marginalized) masses which, ironically, most of them are a part of. On the
other hand, and following Sahlin (above), we suggest that people in the multi-
lingual peripheries (Sahlin’s border areas) may find more in common with one
another (despite their obvious diversity) because peripheries are democratiz-
ing, egalitarian, and equalizing.
So it is in the peripheral (literal and figurative) spaces of the airports, their
semiotic nooks and crannies, that we find multilingualism at its richest and most
diverse, albeit, and other things being equal, lacking in symbolic capital across
the board. By definition, the peripheral multilingualism of airports is frequently
dormant and hidden from view. All the backstage, hushed, multilingual, and
multi-accented conversations of small groups of families, fellow passengers, fellow
workers passing through or dwelling at airports, languages waiting to be ‘activated’
by someone paying attention to them at computerized check-in, on the labels of
local souvenirs, in books and magazines, testify to more chaotic and unregulated
ethnoscapes.
To conclude, we return to Alexandre Duchêne’s account of the otherwise ‘invis-
ible’ workforce whose multilingual skills may be activated by the airport manage-
ment in the moment of need (see above). In parallel to Duchêne’s own example,
at the KLM check-in desk at Cardiff Airport, airline staff have at their disposal
two A4 sheets with four routine, security questions printed in thirteen languages,
should staff and passengers at check-in be unable to find a common language,
mostly English (not a frequent occurrence according to the KLM staff on duty at
the time of data collection). In order of appearance, the languages on these some-
what tired, unglamorous printouts (see Figures 9.42a and 9.42b) are: ENGLISH,
ČESKY/CZECH, DANSKE/DANISH, DEUTSCH/GERMAN, ΕΛΛΗΙΚΑ/
GREEK, ESPAÑOL/SPANISH, FRANÇAIS/FRENCH, ITALIANO/ITALIAN,
NEDERLANDS/DUTCH, NORSK/NORWEGIAN, POLSKI/POLISH,
PORTUGUÊS/PORTUGUESE, SUOMI/FINNISH, SVENSK/SWEDISH.
While this list appears a little arbitrary in view of de Swaan’s approximate 150 ‘cen-
tral’ languages, care has been taken to print their original names complete with
appropriate diacritics. And if ever used, the printed questions are not likely to cause
any communication breakdown due to the ASCII-dominated, English version of
Word that was probably used for typing them up disregarding all the ‘necessary’
diacritics beyond the language labels. Such is peripheral multilingualism at airports.
Not always in full view, not always ‘perfect’, and certainly not spectacular; rather
humdrum but unexpectedly diverse and fully functional when needed.

[192] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 (a) (b)

Figure 9.42a and b:

Sheet 1 of multilingual security questions at KLM check-in desk, Cardiff Airport; Sheet 2 of multilingual security questions at KLM check-in desk, Cardiff Airport
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge help and assistance with our fieldwork from both sites.
Crispin thanks Port of Seattle’s Chris Nardine for his support. Adam thanks Steve
Hodgetts, Business Development and Commercial Director, Cassie Houghton,
Head of Marketing, Lynne Bolton, Director of Passenger Services, and all other
staff at Cardiff Airport for generously allowing access to and guidance through all
areas of the airport. We also thank Sari Pietikäinen and Helen Kelly-Holmes for
useful comments on the penultimate draft of this chapter. The usual caveats apply.

NOTES

1. Creswell (2006) maintains Dutch was abandoned completely on Schipol’s

signage. Mijksenaar, the design company responsible for Schipol’s signage,
in fact removed it only in the liminal airside (or runway side) spaces
where passengers are either flying away from the Netherlands or have just
disembarked and are heading towards the point of official entry into the
country. (See http://www.mijksenaar.com/upload/pressitems/Amsterdam_
Airport_Schiphol.pdf.)
2. Passengers arriving into both Sea-Tac and Cardiff Airport from international
destinations must pass through Immigration or Passport Control, as well as
Customs; departing passengers, however, must just clear security screening
while ‘passport control’ is handled by the airlines’ check-in agents who are,
therefore, also ‘check-out’ agents of the State. In this sense, national borders are
visibly materialized only on arrival.

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[198] Multilingualism and the Periphery

C H A P TER 1 0
The Career of a Diacritical Sign
Language in Spatial Representations and
Representational Spaces
BRIGITTA BUSCH

INTRODUCTION: LANGUAGE AND SPACE

The notion of peripheral multilingualism establishes a relation between language

and space or rather between language practices and spatial practices. In social
sciences and cultural studies there has over the past decades been an increasing
interest in concepts of space and spatiality. Scholars contributing to this spatial
turn—such as Edward Soja (1996), Doreen Massey (2005), and Edward Said
(1993)—primarily refer to the work of the French philosopher, sociologist and
geographer Henri Lefebvre (1991) whose work dismisses the understanding of
space as a container.
The spatial turn in the social sciences has also influenced recent work in applied
linguistics, allowing interrelations between language and space to be explored from
different perspectives. In the field of dialectology and linguistic geography, Viaut
(2004) questions and deconstructs the notion of linguistic border referring to
research in social geography. He views linguistic borders as a product of social posi-
tioning and of sharing representations of space, which results in the construction
of territoriality. Drawing on semiotic theory and multimodal discourse analysis,
Scollon and Scollon (2003) explore how language is materially placed in the world.
They introduce the concept of geosemiotics to grasp the social meaning and index-
icality of the placement of signs and discourses in the material world. Analysing
language as a local practice, Pennycook (2010: 1) questions the notion of language
as a pre-given system. Language, as he stresses, does not only ‘happen’ in particu-
lar spaces and at particular times, but contributes to organizing space and giving
meaning to it. Therefore, language practices should be understood as the result of
speakers’ interpretation of a particular place and at the same time as reinforcing
the specific reading of that place. Pennycook (2010) and Jaworski and Thurlow
(2010) refer to Lefebvre’s theories of spatiality to understand language practices
as spatial practices. In the proliferating literature on empirical studies of linguistic
landscapes (e.g. Shohamy and Gorter 2009; Jaworski and Thurlow 2010), very dif-
ferent approaches to space can be discerned, a common theoretical grounding—as
Jaworski and Thurlow (2010: 14) deplore—is still missing.
Lefebvre (1991) defines space as a social product and underlines that every
society produces its own specific space. For an analysis of the production of space
(spacialization) he develops a conceptual triad which encompasses the following
dimensions (1991: 33):

(1) Spatial practice ‘embraces production and reproduction, and the particular
locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation’. These every-
day practices of appropriation of space ensure continuity and to some extent
social cohesion.
(2) Representations of space meaning conceptualized space; discourses on space by
scientists, planners, social engineers; expert knowledge—‘i.e. a mixture of under-
standing (conaissance) and ideology’ (1991: 41)—which conceives of space.
(3) Representational spaces, space lived directly through its associated images and
symbols which have their source in history. It is the ‘dominated—and hence
passively experienced—space which the imagination seeks to change and
appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.’
(1991: 39). It embodies ‘complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes
not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life’ (1991: 31).

Lefebvre’s concept of the social production of space defines space as perceived

(perçu) through spatial practices, conceived through representations and theories
of space (conçu) and lived (vécu) as representational spaces. These three dimen-
sions of the social production of space do not exist independently but are dialecti-
cally interlinked. Lefebvre (1991: 132) also dedicates a chapter to the relationship
between language and space in which he applies the spatial triad to language and
discourse: ‘Every language is located in space. Every discourse says something
about a space (places or sets of places); and every discourse is emitted from a space.
Distinctions must be drawn between discourse in space, discourse about space and
the discourse of space.’
The bipolarity of centrality and peripherality which is already addressed by
Lefebvre (1991) in relation to the nation-state is developed further especially by
scholars in post-colonial studies who criticize the centre–periphery dichotomy as
a Eurocentric concept of domination (Soja 1996). For the purpose of our concern
in this volume, namely exploring the notion of peripheral multilingualism, I will
rely on Lefebvre’s spatial triad to approach the notion of peripherality: peripherality

[200] Multilingualism and the Periphery

as produced by ‘central’ social practices (e.g. economic marginalization of regions
and population); peripherality as a concept in spatial representations (e.g. as linked
to state borders which separate the inside and the outside); peripherality as lived
experience of being marginalized and excluded (e.g. as the speaker of a language
other than the state language).
Investigating peripheral multilingualism from a perspective of space as a social
production is more than just describing and analysing new linguistic practices in
regions marginalized with respect to being far away urban centres. Focusing on
questions of how peripherality was (and is) produced and how the centre–periphery
binary can be displaced, this approach challenges the more static notions of linguis-
tic practices conceived as practices tied to a specific territory. Taking the Austrian
region of Southern Carinthia as an example— the homeland of a linguistic minor-
ity in a region commonly defined as borderland, rural, and structurally weak—I
will examine how the seemingly static relationship between language and territory
is being dislocated. Addressing the relationship between language and space I will
try to apply Lefebvre’s multidimensional approach in considering different aspects:
spatial practices (e.g. of nation-state building) that correlate with specific language
policies (e.g. of assimilation), discourse about language and space (e.g. translated
into linguistic maps that draw clear-cut language boundaries), and representational
spaces (e.g. interventions in the public space). The main focus will be on the third
aspect, namely on the question of how changes on the economic and political macro
level are translated on a micro level into linguistic manifestations in the representa-
tional space. In particular I will examine how two forms of irony, a contesting and
a postmodern variant, challenge the traditional bipolar and asymmetrical language
regime and give expression to growing linguistic diversification.
In the first part of this contribution, I will briefly sketch how the drawing of the
national border and the resulting ethnolinguistic polarization have inscribed into the
representational space the binary logics of centre–periphery and majority–minority.
The second part focuses on a creative subversive intervention in public space—the
addition of Slavic diacritic signs in German inscriptions—and discusses this popular
campaign in the context of changing language regimes and changing connotations
of the state border. The third part outlines a series of events organized by artistic and
commercial actors, which takes up and comments on the fluidity of translanguaging
practices under the conditions of super-diversity (Vertovec 2007).

LANGUAGE AND TERRITORY

Every social formation and every epoch produces its own idea of space; space itself
has a history in Western experience (Foucault 1984). Retracing this history reveals
the genesis of present conceptions of space and traces of the past in the contempo-
rary.1 Almost until the end of the twentieth century the drawing of the state border
in 1920 has been formative for the spatial arrangement in the region of Carinthia.

THE CAREER OF A DIACRITICAL SIGN [201]

After the collapse of the multi-ethnic and multilingual Hapsburg Empire, Austria
was constituted as a nation-state. The programmatic orientation towards ethnic and
linguistic homogeneity was initially present in the official denomination of the state
as ‘Deutschösterreich’ (German-Austria). The new state established on the other
side of the border was also defined in terms of ethnicity as the Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats, and Slovenes. Within the Austrian nation-state, Carinthia was marginalized
politically as a contested buffer zone, economically as a cul-de-sac far away from the
industrial centres, and geographically as a zone of liminality between the ‘civilized
world’ of settled lands and the uninhabitable mountain environment. Right from
its inception, the border was reified as a ‘natural’ line separating the inside from the
outside and loaded with mythical connotations. That which lies on the other side
of the border became the construct of the fundamental, irreconcilable ‘other’. What
is left in the dark on the other side can thus act as a screen for the projection of fan-
tasies, for the threatening and also the exotic and the desirable. From a Eurocentric
perspective, this was, on the one hand, the ‘dark continent’ open for discovery
and colonization, and, on the other hand, the East and the Balkans (Todorova
1999). In Carinthia the topos of the stronghold, first against the Slavic Balkans
and later against the communist ‘threat’, dominated ideas of space. The drawing of
the Austrian border had a strong impact on the daily lives of the population in the
area by cutting through existing family connections and economic relations. It also
altered the previous language regime in conferring on the speakers of Slovene the
status of a linguistic and ethnic minority. It thereby accentuated already existing
linguistic polarizations which were based on an urban‒rural divide, urban centres
and sub-centres being associated with the German language while the surround-
ing rural areas became associated with Slovene. Within the nation-state framework
the linguistic minority is singled out as disturbing the imagined homogeneity. On
the Carinthian side, the idea of matching the ‘natural’ political boundary with the
linguistic one by means of forcing a process of assimilation to the German language
has been a political constant over the years. On the Slovenian side the fantasy of
uniting the divided nation, if not in one single state then at least culturally, has been
equally cherished. In this constellation the minority in Carinthia has constantly
been under suspicion of equivocation and potential disloyalty. During the Nazi
regime, the use of Slovene in public was prohibited and from 1941 onwards speak-
ers of Slovene were deported on a massive scale, with acts of resistance entailing
brutal persecution.
The spatial logic that dominated the twentieth century resulted in binary oppo-
sitions between inside and outside, between centre and periphery, between major-
ity and minority. Similarly a binary opposition between German and Slovene was
constructed through language ideologies, that is, ‘beliefs, feelings, and concep-
tions about language structure and use which often index the political economic
interests of individual speakers, ethnic and other interest groups and nation-states’
(Kroskrity 2005: 1). The area was not seen as a zone of language contact and transi-
tion but imagined as a language border with a clear-cut line dividing two distinct and

[202] Multilingualism and the Periphery

incompatible ‘language families’ with their respective normative centres that watch
over linguistic correctness and purity. The drawing of external boundaries separat-
ing one language from another and of internal boundaries defining the legitimate
speakers of the language were argued with linguistic differences deriving from the
languages’ inherent laws. Gal (2001: 31–33) describes a similar language ideologi-
cal process for nineteenth-century Hungary. In Carinthia, the speakers of Slovenian
were perceived as being divided into a core group and a marginal group engaged
in an assimilation process, whereby language was seen as a marker. Language
maintenance and the Slovene standard language were linked to ethno-political
consciousness whereas dialects with heavy borrowings from German counted as a
sign for the willingness to assimilate. In the late 1980s the sociolinguistic situation
was described as unstable bilingualism, characterized by increasing language shift
from a recessive minority language to the dominant majority language and by a
diglossic situation with a strict separation in function between Slovene, as a merely
spoken domestic and intimate language, and German, as language of public and
written communication (Österreichische Rektorenkonferenz 1989: 89‒90). This
constructed dichotomy between the minority and the majority language remained
firmly rooted in the monolingual paradigm, in which the idea of having one single
language is considered as norm. This homogenizing idea is a European ‘invention’
intimately linked to processes of nation-state building (Busch 2004; Makoni and
Pennycook 2006).

Visible Polarizations in the Representational Space

The representational space is also structured according to the logic of binary oppo-
sitions which leave visible and invisible marks and traces. As in other peripheral
border zones, there is also in Carinthia a large number of landmarks and memo-
rial sights commemorating the history and myths of the disputed border area, the
victims and the heroes of the battles. In the 1970s and 1980s several of these sites
were the targets of vandalism and even bomb attacks. Particular locations still serve
as stages for annual commemoration ceremonies, marches in traditional costumes,
cultural events that keep the myths alive. However, in Carinthia one of the main dis-
putes concerning language in space is about topographic signs. It was not until 2011
that a compromise was reached on this issue which has been at the top of the regional
political agenda for decades. In the State Treaty of 1955, Austria entered into com-
mitments concerning the rights of the Slovene-speaking minority in Carinthia, and
among these was the obligation to set up bilingual topographic signs in the bilin-
gual area. After protests by the Slovene-speaking minority and the Yugoslav State,
the Austrian government finally decided to fulfil the obligations in 1972. The reac-
tion from German-speaking nationalistic circles in Carinthia was immediate and
thoroughly organized. In what came to be known as the Ortstafelsturm (assault on
topographic signs), overnight the bilingual road signs that had been erected on the

THE CAREER OF A DIACRITICAL SIGN [203]

previous day were destroyed. Parts of Carinthia remained without any topographic
indications for a decade, as the authorities declined to confront German-speaking
nationalistic circles about the issue. A later law allowing only for very few bilingual
signs was constantly criticized by minority representatives and finally suspended
by the Supreme Court in 2002. In the following years a postmodern restaging of
the old myth of the threatened Heimat by the right-wing Populist Party under Jörg
Haider served to prevent a political solution.
What is at the core of the issue around the topographic signs is first of all the
power of naming and renaming. Germanizing Slovene homonyms and toponyms
has a long history in Carinthia. The Nazi regime first decreed and enacted the
erasure of all signs in Slovene in the public space and then denied the Slovene-
speaking population the right to live in this space. A master plan aimed at what
is euphemistically called ethnic cleansing—replacing the deported Slovene-
speaking population by resettling German-speaking families from Northern
Italy—only came to a halt because of armed resistance in the area. The violent
iconoclastic assault on the topographic signs in 1972 revived these traumatic
experiences of violence and erasure (Kert-Wakounig 2010). The act of renaming
is in itself an act of violence and imposing power. It is a symbolic act but also a
performative one. In the case of toponyms, renaming can function as a landmark
and support claims to a territory. In the Carinthian debate two strands of policy
discourse can be discerned. From the nationally oriented German-speaking side,
it was argued that Slovene toponyms could encourage the neighbouring state to
uphold territorial claims. This argument is based on a concept of space that main-
tains the equation of language, territory, and nation. The concept of space that
guides the argument of the Slovene organizations in Carinthia is different in so far
as it is not based on an assumption of exclusive ownership. The argument is that
bilingual signs mark a space which not only allows for the recognition of linguistic
difference but also guarantees full participation in social, cultural, and economic
life by respecting this ‘otherness’. In Carinthia as in most European regions with
officially recognized minority languages, linguistic rights are primarily framed as
territorial rights. This spirit is also visible in the European Charter for Regional
and Minority Languages,2 which defines these languages in Article 1 explicitly as
‘traditionally used within a given territory of a State’. In Carinthia the territorial
definition of linguistic rights resulted in a complicated mosaic of laws and regula-
tions which makes it difficult to know actually where and when Slovene can be
spoken. The rights to bilingual education, to bilingual topographic signs, to the
use of Slovene in administrative procedures, to the use of Slovene in court proce-
dures are all linked in a different way to the territory of particular municipalities.
There are only a few municipalities in which the whole spectrum of linguistic
rights can be enjoyed by Slovene speakers. These incoherent zones with more
and with less linguistic rights form a complex pattern which is part of the lived
representational space.

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CHALLENGING ETHNOLINGUISTIC DIVISION

The following two sections will deal with the process of dislocation of the inter-
linked binary logics of centre–periphery, majority–minority, and German-speaking/
Slovene-speaking and of the reconfiguration of the articulation between language
and space. I will explore these processes by doing a close reading of two interventions
in public space which in different ways ironically comment on and transform linguis-
tic hierarchies and practices in the representational space. Both interventions were
initiated by the cultural centre UNIKUM3 located at the University of Klagenfurt.
This bilingual initiative was founded in 1986 and has since then, in cooperation with
artists, organized cultural events which focus on the Austro-Slovene-Italian border
area. UNIKUM is known for its conceptual art projects that comment in a critical
and often satirical manner on the political situation in Carinthia. Right from the
beginning UNIKUM has adopted a policy of multilingualism and has often made
the unequal relationship between the regional languages a topic of its projects.
One of UNIKUM’s most popular projects was the production and distribution
of a set of stickers with the title ‘Haček (k)lebt!—Haček živi!: Aktion zur Ergänzung
von einsprachigen Ortstafeln’ (Haček is alive (and sticks)!)—campaign for enhanc-
ing monolingual topographical signs) which was launched in 2002 when the debate
on the bilingual topographical signs was once again high on the political agenda.
Already, within a few days, stickers originating from the UNIKUM sheet (see
Figure 10.1) could be seen throughout Carinthia. The art project triggered a pas-
sionate discussion in the media and the regional authorities announced that the use
of the stickers in public spaces would be severely sanctioned. Nevertheless, haček
stickers were placed on all kinds of public inscriptions: Figure 10.2 shows one on a
topographic sign, Figure 10.3 on the door plate indicating the office of the nation-
alistically oriented Kärntner Heimatdienst. The success of the sticker campaign was
to a large extent due to its playful character which employs strategies of irony to
undermine the hegemony of monolingual German signs in the Carinthian public
space. This strategy becomes apparent in several instances.
The term haček used in the title of the sticker sheet is already a deliberate choice
and demonstrates a translanguaging strategy. The term translanguaging (e.g. Garcia
2009; Creese and Blackledge 2010; Li 2011) refers to a growing corpus of empiri-
cal studies which have focused attention on linguistic practices—especially among
young people in urban spaces—that have also been designated by terms such as
language crossing (Rampton 1995), polylingual languaging ( Jørgensen 2008),
and metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010). These studies emphasize the
creative, playful, and subversive use of heterogeneous communicative resources to
create meaning.
Such translanguaging practices can be identified in the way in which the term
haček is employed by the initiators of the campaign. Haček stands for a diacritic
sign, an inverted circumflex, which indicates when placed in the Slovene language

THE CAREER OF A DIACRITICAL SIGN [205]

Figure 10.1:
The UNIKUM sheet with haček-stickers in different sizes. UNIKUM, Klagenfurt/Celovec

over the letters c, s, z the palatalized phonemes č, š, ž pronounced as [tʃ ], [ ʃ ], [ȝ].

Haček is derived from háček, meaning in Czech ‘small hook’. Whereas in Slovene
this diacritic sign is called strešica (little roof) and not haček, the term is current
in German—often written in the Germanized spelling ‘Hatschek’. In Austria the
haček is seen as emblematic for Slavic languages, in Carinthia particularly for the
Slovene language. In language ideological discourse it is linked to sounds that are
qualified as difficult to pronounce for German speakers, as ‘tongue twisting’ or as
‘harsh and ugly’. Although the etymology of the term ‘Tschusch’ (čuš) is not entirely
clear it does not seem to be a coincidence that there is a clustering of palatalized
consonants in this ethnic slur, which is in colloquial Austrian German used as a
pejorative expression for foreigners, especially of Slavic origin, in Carinthia also
for Slovene-speaking persons (Priestly 1996). Although the diacritic sign which
is discussed here is only part of a grapheme in the Slovene language and thus has
no meaning by itself separated from the letter above which it is placed, it becomes
within the Carinthian political context nevertheless an ideologically loaded sign
in which different meanings and connotations intersect. Vološinov (1973: 20)
speaks of the multi-accentuality of the sign, and observes the presence of conflicts

[206] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 10.2:
A press cutting showing the haček sign on the topographic sign announcing Klagenfurt, the capital of
Carinthia. Kleine Zeitung, Kärntner Ausgabe, 26 April 2002

Figure 10.3:
The haček sign on the door plate of one of the major German national organizations. Photo J. Zerzer

THE CAREER OF A DIACRITICAL SIGN [207]

and contradictions in signs that embody competing voices and interests. Removed
from its usual Slovene language context and used ‘out of place’ in a German lan-
guage context, the diacritic sign picks up yet another ideological meaning. It stands
for contestation and resistance against the dominant discourse of monolingualism.
To quote again Vološinov (1973: 23): ‘In actual fact, each ideological sign has two
faces, like Janus. Any current curse word can become a word of praise, any current
truth must inevitably sound to other people as the greatest lie. This inner dialectical
quality of the sign comes out fully in the open only in times of social crisis or revo-
lutionary changes.’
The postcard-sized sticker sheet designed by UNIKUM gives in small print on
the bottom of the page instructions for use, demonstrating how German words can
be defamiliarized and transformed by adding diacritic signs wherever the letters c,
s, or z appear:

15 praktiščhe Štičker (Klebefolie, geštanžt) zur Ergänžung von einšpračhigen Ortštafeln und
anderen Aufščhriften in Kärnten

15 čonvenient štickerš (on adhešive foil, perforated) to čomplement monolingual

topographičal šignš and other inščriptionš in Čarinthia

In the left-hand lower corner, the sticker sheet displays as ‘Anwendungšbeišpiel’

(example for uše) a miniature image of the topographic sign at the town exit of
‘Maria Saal’ modified to ‘Maria Šaal’. The display of the modified topographic sign
invokes images deeply anchored in the Carinthian ‘collective memory’—namely
those of monolingual signs being enhanced with Slovene toponyms in the quest for
minority rights, as well as those of the so-called Ortstafelsturm, the forced removal
of bilingual road signs in 1972 (see Figure 10.4).
The municipality of Maria Saal, which is given here as an example, is situated
near the Carinthian capital of Klagenfurt. Although today Maria Saal is not consid-
ered to be located within the bilingual area, it has a traditional Slovene name, Gospa
sveta (Our Lady). In German language historiography, as well as in the Slovenian
language historiography, Maria Saal/Gospa sveta has a special place due to its his-
tory reaching back to the Celts and the Romans and due to the medieval ceremony
of enthronement of the Karantanian dukes which took place nearby and included
an oath of investiture in the Slovene language. In mythified interpretations this
location has been constructed as a crucial site or even the cradle of Sloveneness.4
Such locations, which play a role in nation-founding myths, are often located in
peripheral and disputed areas, at the ‘frontier’ to the ‘other’. On Slovenian dialec-
tal maps5 which depict the linguistic border between the German-speaking and
the Slovene-speaking or bilingual territory, up to the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury the border line runs right through Maria Saal. When UNIKUM started the
sticker action, the mayor of Maria Saal immediately responded that bilingual topo-
graphic signs were not an issue in his municipality and that in any case there was no
Slovene-speaking minority in the town.

[208] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 10.4:
A picture taken during the Ortstafelsturm assault on the bilingual topographic signs. Photo H. G.
Trenkwalder

The Writing and Reading of a Diacritic Sign

Taking the example of Maria Saal does not mean a claim for the ownership of space,
but an intervention in space with a transformative character. The haček-campaign
points to the absurdity of establishing a reified link between language and territory.
A fine-grained analysis of how the ‘haček-ization’ works allows us to understand
how with the means of translanguaging and irony, ethnolinguistic polarization can
be undermined. For the analysis I draw as a first step on Bakhtin’s (1986) thoughts
on the sacred word and parody, as a second on Derrida’s (1972) concept of decon-
struction and thirdly on Pennycook’s (2009) understanding of graffiti as a spatial
and linguistic practice.
In the modification from Maria Saal to Maria Šaal shown for example on the
UNIKUM sticker sheet, the haček is placed on a topographic sign. The topographic
sign itself has a range of meanings: It displays the official name of a municipality
or locality; it is a symbol of state authority and has a perlocutionary force with
regard to different administrative areas (e.g. traffic regulations). It indicates that
the state authority holds the power of naming and also indicates language policy
regulations. The wording displayed on the topographical sign is what Bakhtin
(1986: 133) defined as an authoritarian or sacred word, that is ‘with its indisput-
ability, unconditionality, and unequivocality’ removed from dialogue and ‘retards
and freezes thought’ ignoring ‘live experience of life’. The addition of the haček

THE CAREER OF A DIACRITICAL SIGN [209]

on such an authoritarian word causes an irritation in the eyes of the beholder by
slightly displacing the original text and so achieving an alienation effect. It func-
tions as a metalinguistic comment, in Bakhtin’s words (1986: 133) as a parodic
antibody which challenges and profanes the authoritarian word and brings it back
into dialogue.
The addition of the diacritic sign makes a reference to the forgotten, denied,
and repressed Slovene language: traces of Slovene are inscribed into the German
toponym. The modification from Maria Saal to Maria Šaal creates a chain of signs
that can neither be attributed clearly to German or Slovene. By a translanguaging
gesture it transgresses the reified ‘boundaries’ between the two languages and
the mutually exclusive constructions of identity. The addition of the haček is a
displaced and displacing way of writing (Derrida 1972: 36). It can be seen as an
act of deconstruction of the binary logic of two monolingualisms. Derrida (1972:
35) conceived the practice of deconstruction as a double gesture, whereby the
first step consists of acknowledging that a binary opposition is not a relationship
of peaceful coexistence but of hierarchization. The second step or gesture con-
sists of displacing the field in which the opposition originated and in revealing
what the binary logic excluded to constitute itself. In our case it points to the
impossibility of a closed and ‘pure’ Germanness, as well as of a closed and ‘pure’
Sloveneness and to the existence of a marginalized and excluded other. Inscribing
the haček into the dominant German language refers to the traces of the excluded
other that leave ‘a phantomatical map “inside” the said monolanguage’ (Derrida
1998: 65).
Shortly after the launch of the UNIKUM haček campaign, stickers appeared
throughout the bilingual area in Carinthia and beyond. The rapidly evolving
dynamic is due to the fact that the haček by its form lends itself to becoming a pow-
erful symbol. It bears all the characteristics that Chakotin (1971: 190) qualifies as
important in the context of political propaganda: it is easily applicable and repli-
cable, has a high recognition value, and when applied it transforms other signs, but
is itself difficult to alter or erase. The haček inscriptions can be seen in the same way
as graffiti: as a subversive act of reappropriation of public space in which hegemonic
relations are symbolically inscribed. As Pennycook (2009: 307) stresses, graffiti ‘are
not only about territory but about different ways of claiming space. They are also
transformative in the sense not only that they change the public space but that they
reinterpret it.’ From one perspective graffiti is viewed as transgressive social behav-
iour, as little more than vandalism; from another as the creation of a (subcultural)
community using language as style (Pennycook 2009: 302). It is not only the result
that matters, the presence of the sign in public space, but also the specific location
where it is applied and the illicit act of applying it as an espièglerie in joking competi-
tion with others that ‘allows for human agency and sense of play’ (Pennycook 2009:
306). The addition of the diacritic sign invites the reader to engage in the language
game and pronounce familiar names and words with a new parodic accent. Cunning
and mockery are employed as a strategy to question deadlocked polarizations. The

[210] Multilingualism and the Periphery

‘hačekization’ can be interpreted as an ironic utterance which comprehends both,
the ‘onlooker’s gaze’ and her or his distanciation from the latter. Hence, it bears a
dialogic character; irony in this case is employed as a subversive strategy of self-
empowerment (Böse and Busch 2007).

Moving Beyond Bipolar Logics

In contrast to the linguistic militantism of the 1970s claiming the rights of minority
language speakers, the above discussed haček-intervention in the public space ques-
tions the very logic by which the notions of minority and majority are conceived.
It cannot be seen as an isolated action but rather as an action that mirrors and rep-
resents a number of geopolitical, economic and social changes that took place from
the 1990s onwards and altered the articulation of language and space. On the geopo-
litical level, with the end of the bipolar world division and the process of European
integration, borders became more permeable and changed their connotation. When
Slovenia was proclaimed an independent state in 1990, the former Austro-Yugoslav
border not only changed in political denomination becoming the Austro-Slovene
border but subsequently also in its geopolitical ‘supra-determination’ (Balibar 1997:
375) and in connotations. It was no more considered as a dividing line between two
ideologically different systems and, with Slovenia’s accession to the EU in 2004,
became an EU-internal border. The new geopolitical situation opened an opportu-
nity for the two peripheral regions which were separated by the border to intensify
cooperation and exchange.
Almost immediately after Slovenia’s EU accession in 2004, international com-
mercial chains began to regroup parts of Austria and Slovenia to one single market-
ing region. One of the first was Hofer, a subcompany of the German supermarket
retailer Aldi, which began its expansion into the Slovenian market in 2005. In the
same year products with bilingual product descriptions and names were put on sale
also in the Austrian Hofer stores. In the then current situation in which every bilin-
gual inscription in a public place immediately aroused a heated debate, it is inter-
esting to note that commercial language policies as the one described remained
uncommented.6
Another change is linked to greater social and demographic mobility. Whereas
moving to urban areas in the past usually entailed a language shift from the socially
disregarded minority language to the dominant one, today this is not necessarily
the case. An educated urban elite has emerged that retains Slovene as a family lan-
guage, passes it on to the next generation and creates a linguistic environment in
which bilingualism can be practised. Interpreting statistical data, demographers
attest that the Slovene-speaking population has overcome its traditional disadvan-
taged status in the sense that its educational level has become higher than that of
the monolingual segment of the Carinthian population (Reiterer 1996: 150). The
growing importance of Klagenfurt as a regional centre where Slovene is also present

THE CAREER OF A DIACRITICAL SIGN [211]

in the local cultural and economic life has given rise to an urban vernacular, derived
from the standard language and encompassing elements from different local dia-
lects (Schellander 1988), as well as to a specific regional variety of standard Slovene
(Busch 2010).
These developments contributed to an increase in the prestige and functionality
of Slovene in Carinthia. This is for instance visible in the rising number of students
in bilingual education: the enrolment quota for dual medium Slovene-German
education in elementary school rose from the all-time low of 13.5 per cent
(1976/77) to 44 per cent for the school year of 2010/11.7 While in the 1970s,
it could be assumed that all children attending bilingual instruction spoke either
exclusively or mainly one of the Slovene dialects at home, today, the pattern of
knowledge of Slovene is different. According to information provided by teach-
ers nearly three quarters of students enter school without previous knowledge of
Slovene. Obviously parents from German-speaking backgrounds enrol their chil-
dren in dual medium schools because they consider the option to learn an addi-
tional language as an educational opportunity and not as a choice linked to ethnic
identification (Wakounig 2008: 321).
A change can also be observed concerning discourses on language and space.
Whereas representations of space were formerly characterized by an almost obses-
sive focus on the course of the political and linguistic borderline separating an
imagined Germanic and Slavic space, in this period the idea of an enlarged tri-
lingual transborder region which encompasses Carinthia, Slovenia, and parts of
Northern Italy is beginning to be promoted. The trilingual slogan ‘senza confini—-
ohne Grenzen—brez meja’ which wishes away the borders is becoming emblematic
for envisaged cooperation on the economic, touristic, political, and cultural level.
The idea of a regional trilinguality is nevertheless again based on the three national
languages in the respective nation-states disregarding other regional languages such
as Friulian or languages of migration. Italian, which is introduced in Carinthia as a
possible third language to alter the German-Slovene opposition, is mainly used for
symbolic purposes, but has also begun to play a certain role in language policy (e.g.
by being promoted as a subject in school).

NEW SPATIO-LINGUISTIC CONFIGURATIONS

The above discussed developments indicate a reversal of the bipolar logics that
have characterized spatial practices, representations of space and representational
spaces over a long period. The increased permeability of the state border opens the
way for a gradual disenclavement of the borderland and re-weights language ide-
ologies formerly linked to the geopolitical divisions. Representations of space that
were formerly determined by discourses emphasizing the polarity between two
states belonging to two different ideological systems are progressively replaced by
discourses presenting the enlarged region as trilingual and ‘without borders’. All

[212] Multilingualism and the Periphery

these phenomena of transition and discontinuity suggest the emergence of new
spatio-linguistic configurations linked to processes of increasing global mobil-
ity which result in new and ever more complex social formations and network-
ing practices beyond traditional belongings, processes for which Steve Vertovec
(2007) has coined the term super-diversity. Bauman (1998) discusses globaliza-
tion as a transition from national economies based on industrial production and
territoriality to a globalized market based on the transfer of knowledge and infor-
mation. In this context he raises the question of peripherality in terms of a ‘pro-
gressive spatial segregation, separation and exclusion’ (Bauman 1998: 3). While
the ‘time/space compression’ (Bauman 1998: 2) interlinks the increasingly global
and extraterritorial elites in the centres, other regions are marginalized and ‘local-
ized’ as no-man’s-lands because they are excluded from the relevant communica-
tion flows. In structurally weak regions such as Carinthia, the fear of being left with
the marginalized locals is omnipresent and frequently compensated for by differ-
ent kinds of political activism, characterized by Bauman (1998: 3) as neo-tribal
and fundamentalist.
In some domains it seems, nevertheless, that peripherality is not just a disad-
vantage but can also be turned into an advantage (see e.g. McLaughlin, this vol-
ume; Coupland, this volume). One aspect often mentioned in this context is the
possibility of drawing on the idea of the periphery as a counter-world to the cen-
tral areas (as Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes; Jaworski and Thurlow; and others in
this volume point out). Precisely because of its quality of peripherality, it can be
perceived as possessing values such as authenticity and unspoiltness, values which
can be commodified. In peripheral areas such as the South of Carinthia, in the last
few years there has also been a certain inward movement that has slowed down
the demographic drain. This counter-movement is, on the one hand, due to a ris-
ing number of jobs which are now less tied to specific locations (e.g. in the IT sec-
tor). On the other hand, traditional small-scale economic structures which were
preserved can provide a certain basis of subsistence when complemented by other
activities (e.g. in the field of cultural work or soft tourism). Finally, the temporary
placement or long-term stay of asylum seekers and refugees in municipalities of
Southern Carinthia can also be seen in connection with the municipalities’ location
near the border.

Speakers on the Move

Increased mobility of the inhabitants, their participation in translocal networks of

communication, as well as social ties and partnerships that reach far beyond the
confines of the greater region, have led over the past decade to a linguistic diver-
sification that resembles small-scale language regimes and linguistic practices
described up to now mainly for urban areas. In one of the rural border munici-
palities, Eisenkappel-Vellach/Železna kapla Bela, a citizens’ initiative,8 promoting

THE CAREER OF A DIACRITICAL SIGN [213]

social integration and language learning organized in tandem pairs and conversa-
tion circles, counted among the 2,500 inhabitants more than fifteen languages other
than Slovene and German, among these the languages of former Yugoslavia, as well
as Turkish, Kurdish, Hungarian, Italian, French, English, Polish, Farsi, Ukrainian,
and Russian.
As far as Slovene is concerned, the sociolinguistic situation that was traditionally
framed in terms of language maintenance versus language shift, standard versus dia-
lect has become far more differentiated. What was almost unthinkable some twenty
years ago has become an everyday experience: there are learners of the minority lan-
guages and therefore there are speakers of ‘Slovene with an accent’ (Busch 2010).
This includes individuals learning Slovene as children or as adults, in formal or in
informal contexts and with different language backgrounds. The motivations are
equally varied: for some it means returning to a ‘lost’ family language, for others
acquiring a new family language within a linguistically mixed partnership; some
learn Slovene for professional or economic reasons; for immigrants with a Slavic
language background it often proves to be the first language of social contact in the
new environment. There is very little recent sociolinguistic research into the devel-
opments in Carinthia. One recent, as yet unpublished study,9 carried out among
learners and alumni of bilingual schools indicates changing self-perceptions: most
of the young people interviewed do not define themselves in terms of membership
of an ethnic or linguistic group. They stress their participation in different spaces
of communication in which they make self-confident use of their heteroglossic lin-
guistic resources and present themselves as polyglot and as rooted. Their linguistic
practices of language crossing and translanguaging as means of style and stylization
resemble what has been described earlier by Rampton (1995) and other authors
for urban areas.

The Alphabet Soup

The intermingling of the local and the global, of codes, registers, and styles that
refer to different linguistic spaces, was the topic of another event organized by the
UNIKUM cultural initiative a few years after the haček-campaign. It is again the
diacritic sign on the letters c, s, and z that plays a central role. For this UNIKUM
project a local enterprise began to produce a special version of pasta for alphabet
soup adding the letters č, š, and ž to the so far ‘monolingual’ alphabet. The pasta
was packed and labelled as ‘buhštabenzupe’ (see Figure 10.5). ‘Buhštabenzupe’
figures as a transliteration of the German word ‘Buchstabensuppe’ (alphabet
soup) into a ‘Slovenized’ spelling. Unlike the haček campaign, where the Slovene
diacritic sign was inscribed into German words and names, in the buhštabenzupe
case, hybridity is foregrounded. The package information sheet accompanying
the pasta details the contents as ‘Buhštabenzupe—gewürzt und veredelt mit slo-
wenischen Š, Č und Ž -Nudeln’ (seasoned and enhanced with Slovene Š, Č, and

[214] Multilingualism and the Periphery

Figure 10.5:
The alphabet soup with the supplementary ‘Slovene’ letters č, š, ž. Photo G. Pilgram, UNIKUM

Ž pasta). The commercial slogan consists of two parts in the two languages:
‘Z dvoječnim okusom! Zweisprachig schmeckt besser!’ (With bilingual flavour!
Bilingual tastes better!). The local Carinthian pasta enterprise profited from the
joint action with UNIKUM which served as a promotion campaign for the local
pasta manufacturer, spreading its brand name. It discovered a market niche for
custom-made products—one of their next clients being Jörg Haider’s right-wing
party BZÖ. The at best pragmatic and market-oriented attitude of the commer-
cial partner is in clear contrast to the cultural and socio-political ambitions of
UNIKUM.
As with the haček project, the buhštabenzupe project was very popular and a
series of events took place not only in Carinthia but also in Vienna where small
tasters with alphabet pasta were distributed at the International Book Day bring-
ing questions of peripheral multilingualism right into the centre. To launch the
buhštabenzupe, a series of events where alphabet soup was cooked and served was
organized. These events also featured a jazz music and poetry performance in the
style of slam poetry by the well-known Carinthian author Jani Oswald. His poems
written for the buhštabenzupe events10 revolve—as in the following extract of a
poem named ‘composition’—around the topics of cooking, mixing, stirring up,
spicing, and savouring.

THE CAREER OF A DIACRITICAL SIGN [215]

composition
Nicht allein das
ABC bringt den Menschen in die Höh
bei
A and O da käuft man so
keifft
soso tatà tàta pápa čudovito črkovito župo
X4U and nix for me
ist wie etwa
A-A-A tripple Ah
Papá isst Buchstabensuppe
kar tako
psst ach nur so
Suppé, Franz von
schon von
črkovita Tscherkowitter
Čajkovskij
Tschudowitter
Pjotr Ilijič
Čuš windischer

Using techniques such as transliteration, alliteration, onomatopoeic word cre-

ations, and different kinds of wordplay and puns, Jani Oswald draws on a broad range
of linguistic resources and discourses referring to the local and its commodification
(hooks 1992), as well as to the repertoire of cultural and economic globalization.
As in the haček project, in the buhštabenzupe project irony serves as a means to
undermine ethnolinguistic categorizations and polarizations. But whereas in the
first project language policy activism was a core concern, the second foregrounded
hedonistic and culinary aspects and used a postmodern variant of irony combined
with a rather arbitrary use of quotations (Rorty 1989; Colebrook 2004). There
is reference to a globalized repertoire in which Slovenian is one of the elements,
an element of distinction that functions in a postmodern sense as symbolic capi-
tal. Linguistic heterogeneity in this context is seen as a resource for constructing
socially interpretable and interpreted styles (Auer 2007).
The buhštabenzupe events can be interpreted following bell hooks (1992) as
a cultural commodification which she refers to as ‘eating the other’: messages of
social change are not taken up for their content but rather as an arbitrary element
of style. In fact, the buhštabenzupe events are meant to be both: the commodifica-
tion and the ironic commentary on commodification. In the postmodern variant of
irony, it is not the origin of the quotation that matters, but its appearance as a refer-
ence as such. For the commercial project partner this form of quotation lacked the
dimension of self-empowerment, the quotation rather served as an eye-catcher, as a
free-floating signifier without a signified.

[216] Multilingualism and the Periphery

CONCLUSIONS

Like Lefebvre, Michel Foucault (1984: 1) sees space as historically conditioned, as

having itself a history in Western experience which needs to be retraced. Developing
a larger historical picture, Foucault, in ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1984), explains that space
in the Middle Ages was seen as a hierarchical ensemble of places in which every per-
son and every thing had its emplacement, while in the Modern Age space becomes
an infinitely open space, and extension was substituted for localization. In his text
(1984: 1), he sketches a present-day (bearing in mind that he was writing in the late
1960s) understanding of space that anticipates the conditions of globalization and
super-diversity: ‘We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxta-
position, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are
at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life
developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects
with its own skein.’
If every era has its own understanding of space, then there is also a specific
understanding of the connection between language and space linked to that specific
moment in history. Space cannot simply be seen as a container that encompasses
particular languages or language practices. Language comes into play on all three
levels described by Lefebvre: on the level of spatial practices, of representations
of space (discourses on space) and of representational spaces (space lived directly
through its associated images and symbols). Language practices are themselves spa-
tial practices and space is also constituted through language practices. Language
ideologies are often linked with representations of space (e.g. monolingualism as
the norm with nation-state ideologies). And, language is present as signs and sym-
bols in the representational space, for example, visible in the form of topographic
signs, invisible in the naming of places and locations.
The peripherality of European border regions is determined by different con-
notations that define the border as hermetic or permeable, as a zone of contact or
of separation. The nation-state ideology has for a long period led to a conception of
state borders as lines unambiguously separating the inside from the outside which
also resulted in politics of linguistic homogenization within the state territories: state
borders were ideally supposed to be reified as ‘natural’ separations between distinct
national languages. Contesting linguistic homogenization could be interpreted as a
sign of ambiguity or a lack of loyalty towards the centres: ‘peripheral’ speakers who
were not willing to assimilate to the dominant language were frequently considered
as ‘not quite ours’ or ‘not ours at all’. Such forms of repeated Othering, of identifi-
cation and misidentification due to ‘suspicious’ language practices, contributed to
establishing and to reinforcing discursive categories of ethnolinguistic belonging
which exerted a formative and constitutive power on the speaking subjects.
Analysing the situation in Southern Carinthia, shows that speakers of a lan-
guage traditionally labelled as a minority language can no longer be unambigu-
ously territorially localized or ethnically identified, and that they see themselves as

THE CAREER OF A DIACRITICAL SIGN [217]

multilingual subjects with complex and changing linguistic repertoires rather than
as bilinguals oriented towards competing centres. The main focus has been on the
transition from modernity, linked to the logics of territorial extension, to postmo-
dernity, characterized by simultaneity, networking and the deterritorialization of
linguistic practices.
Focusing on spatial representations and representational spaces, the co-pres-
ence of different notions of space and different discursive formations on language
in space, connected to different moments in history, become obvious. As Heller
and Labrie (2003: 16) observe for the context of French in Canada, different types
of competing discourses on linguistic diversity can be discerned in different phases
of history, but are today also simultaneously present: the traditionalist (tradition-
aliste), the modernizing (modernisant), and the globalizing (mondialisant). In the
Carinthian context I identified the co-presence of different discursive formations
on language and space: a traditional ethno-territorial discourse which is restaged
in a postmodern version; a discourse of multiculturality which finds its expression
in the idea of an enlarged trilingual region; and finally a postmodern emphasizing a
glocalized from of linguistic diversity.

NOTES

1. This overview draws on my earlier sociolinguistic work on the situation in

Carinthia (Busch 1999, 2003a, 2003b).
2. European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, European Treaty Series
148 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 1992).
3. http://www.unikum.ac.at/.
4. A Slovene Tourism Agency, for example, proposes guided tours to
‘the cradle of sloveneness and our first statehood’ (zibelka slovenstva in
naše prve državnosti). http://www.alpetour.si/index.php?page=alpI_
raziskuje&item=168&predmet_id=&drzava_id=&id=133, accessed May
2011.
5. See, for example, Fran Ramovš, Karta slovenskih narečij v priročni izdaji,
Cankarjeva založba, Ljubljana, 1957.
6. The data that this chapter is based on were collected in the framework
of research projects carried out between 2006 and 2011, financed by
the Austrian Ministry of Education and Culture and by the Austrian
Office for Minorities at the Chancellery (Volksgruppenabteilung im
Bundeskanzleramt) (Busch 2010; Busch and Doleschal 2008).
7. All data in this paragraph according to press information and reports by
Landeschulrat für Kärnten (Carinthian school authority).
8. http://www.gesk.at/de/sprachentauschboerse.
9. Unpublished study financed by the Austrian Office for Minorities, carried
out 2011 by B. Busch and G. Gombos, Gelebte Mehrsprachigkeit: Eine

[218] Multilingualism and the Periphery

 qualitative Untersuchung der Schulerfahrungen von AbsolventInnen des
mehrsprachigen Kugy-Zweiges des BG/BRG für Slowenen und ihres
Umgangs mit Mehrsprachigkeit.
10. Jani Oswald, Frakturen (Klagenfurt/Celovec: Drava, 2007).

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THE CAREER OF A DIACRITICAL SIGN [221]

C H A P TER 1 1
The Peripheral Multilingualism Lens
A Fruitful and Challenging Way Forward?
HELEN KELLY-HOLMES AND SARI PIETIK Ä INEN

T his volume represents an attempt to understand in more depth the relation-

ship between language (multilingualism) and space/place (the periphery),
by focusing on sites of peripheral multilingualism. From the many and varied con-
texts examined in the volume, the common features of such sites can be seen as
follows: they are areas conceived of and designated as minority language spaces;
they are places and spaces of geographic, economic, and historical peripheral-
ity, and they are witnessing increasing commodification of that peripherality—
particularly in relation to tourism; they exhibit a high dependency on authenticity
and cultural legitimacy; they are the sites of pragmatically driven and often inno-
vative multilingual practices; and they are subject to complex and complicated
language ideological processes, which involve, on the one hand, a maintenance
of monologic ideologies and, on the other, a contestation and rejection of such
ideologies.
These are sites where we can observe language shift(s), and also language flows,
and because of this complexity, one of the aims of the volume, as outlined in the
introduction, has been to bring together these two ways of understanding sociolin-
guistic processes. Our desire was to try to create a dialogue between system/mod-
ernist/structuralist and repertoire/postmodernist/post-structuralist approaches,
because, as the contributions to the volume show, both are needed and both are in
evidence, and in fact, they both rely on each other. In this final chapter, we would
like to reflect on some of the possibilities afforded by examining multilingualism
and the periphery and also some of the challenges presented, and, at the same time,
to highlight possible future research directions.
First, the focus has been on areas and localities which are identified both as
minority language spaces and also as geographically and historically peripheral
in relation to some notional centre. These two essentialized features provide the
common context or frame within which practices, ideologies, and processes have
been examined in this book. The focus on peripherality and on minority language
status relies, of course, on a system or structuralist approach. It explicitly acknowl-
edges the existence of—and more than that exploits—binary oppositions such as
majority/minority and centre/periphery. It necessarily involves a freezing in time
of relations and their categorization and description in terms of prevailing ideolo-
gies. However, in order to identify the contestations, playfulness, and creativity, it
is first important to identify how the context for these phenomena was created and
has been sustained. As Rampton (2006) points out, just because post-structuralist
language practices are being analysed and valorized increasingly in the contempo-
rary era does not mean that structures cease to exist. All the contributions to the
volume, however, recognize the danger in relying just on the structuralist account,
which would mean that ‘peripheral multilingualism’ becomes simply another syn-
onym for ‘minority language’. Thus, combining the focus on peripherality with
an understanding of the dynamics of the centre–periphery relationship can be a
fruitful way forward for combining ‘language as system’ and ‘language as practice’
approaches to the study of multilingualism.
The focus on the dynamics of the centre–periphery relationship not only shows
how processes of peripheralization come about but also how they can change,
as discussed by Heller in this volume. Such an approach allows for the possibil-
ity of movement; not just mono-directional or even bi-directional movement, but
poly-directional. The periphery–centre lens also allows, as the many cases in the
volume show, for the possibility of stability and movement occurring simultane-
ously and codependently. Centrist norms and ideologies are a necessary platform
from which to launch creative play. As Jaffe (2006: 51) points out, many minor-
ity language movements have reached a certain maturity in recent years, having
achieved recognition, resources, and in some cases markets for these languages,
their speakers, and their products. In some minority language contexts, as illus-
trated in the volume, there is now something to rebel against, after many years of
‘centring’ and normalizing in the form of acquisition planning and status-planning
initiatives. Norms are known and established, so there is a possibility to subvert
and play with them. Many fights (for language rights, revitalization, status, etc.)
have been won or partially won, although with several exceptions, and to an extent,
the need to present a homogeneous front to the outside world may not be neces-
sary at all times. Irony, mockery, and hybridity, valued in the contemporary era,
have become a resource for multilingual identity and practices. Endangerment dis-
courses (Heller and Duchêne 2007) and heritage discourses can be simultaneously
both resisted and exploited, as many of the contributions to the volume show.
In addition, it is not just that new practices are emerging, as the contributions
show. We seem to be moving from ‘erasure’ (Irvine and Gal 2000) to ‘display’ in
terms of peripheral multilingualism. Thus, it is not just the case that diverse and
mixed linguistic practices and ‘incomplete’ linguistic repertoires which were erased

T H E P E R I P H E R A L M U LT I L I N G UA L I S M L E N S [223]
and rendered invisible by centrist ideologies (both in the periphery, by language
rights activities and minority language movements, and in the centre, by the state,
media, education, etc.) are no longer required to be hidden; as many of the contri-
butions to the volume show, they are also increasingly highlighted, paraded, and
commodified. In such a situation, the speaker with an ‘unbalanced’ repertoire, no
matter how limited, has something to offer and something that can be valorized in
particular sites and contexts (e.g. tourism and crafts, as indicated in the contribu-
tions to the volume). In the current era, the ability to draw on a range of ‘transidi-
omatic practices’ ( Jacquemet 2005) which can be manipulated in multimodal ways
is arguably more valuable than being the ideal monolingual, ‘pure’ speaker. What is
‘real’, as Mireille McLaughlin tells us in her chapter, is now valued as much as what
is ‘pure’ in certain contexts and for certain purposes. Keeping a methodological
and theoretical footing in the ‘language as system’ approach reminds us, of course,
that ‘bilingualism as deficit’ discourses persist alongside ‘bilingualism as added
value’ ( Jaffe 2006) ones; that monolingual ideologies both dominate and coexist
with and also codepend on monolingual discourses; that peripheral normativities
(Blommaert et al. 2005) often make sense in juxtaposition to central norms; and
that discontinuities occur in the midst of continuities.
As many of the contributions to the volume show, much of what drives periph-
eral multilingual practices is a pragmatic concern with getting things done, and
the goal-directed nature of tourism and related domains, which create a space for
‘linguistic flexibility’ as Alexandra Jaffe and Cedric Oliva, this volume, call it. This
reflects a valorization, which could then be reflected in other domains, leading to
an ‘upscaling’ (Blommaert 2007). However, as all of the contributors make sali-
ent, display or fetishization, or even use for instrumental purposes, does not always
contest and overthrow prevailing language ideologies. Commodification can be
destabilizing (da Silva, McLaughlin, and Richards 2006), but can also be restabi-
lizing. By using the linguistic resources for certain commodified purposes, exist-
ing linguistic regimes may simply be reinforced—a sign in the language, a brand
name, a piece of pasta, a visual can be simply, in Brigitta Busch’s words, a fleeting
and free-floating signifier, a small bit of colour to brighten up monolingual norms.
Or, it could challenge such ideologies. Or perhaps do both; simultaneity, as Brigitta
Busch and Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski remind us in their contributions,
being the contemporary experiential mode.
Coupland (2003) tells us that authenticity is valued in the contemporary era
perhaps more than in previous eras, given the present discursive regime. All of the
contributions to the volume show us that authenticity matters in sites of periph-
eral multilingualism—whether this is commodified authenticity or unmediated
authenticity (Coupland 2003), centripetal or centrifugal authenticity (Pietikäinen,
this volume). Ownership, Jaffe (2006) points out, has taken over from competence
in discourses about minority languages for the simple reason that competence is
too excluding and in the end possibly self-defeating for minority language revital-
ization, since it can alienate people who live in and support peripheral minority

[224] Multilingualism and the Periphery

language communities, and who feel ownership over the culture and the authen-
ticity, using it as ‘a source of creative identity’ ( Jaffe 2006). It is therefore just as
possible in the current regime for the potter who moves his business from Dublin
to the Irish-speaking periphery to ‘own’ and use Irish as a commercial resource (as
Helen Kelly-Holmes describes), as it is for the Welsh-speaking natives in Glanporth,
who Joan Pujolar reports on, to exhibit their ‘real’, ‘living’ bilingual community for
tourists. It seems clear, however, that all the cases discussed in the volume are more
or less authentic in some way or other, in line with Nikolas Coupland’s (2003)
criteria. Indeed, as his contribution to the volume shows, tracing authenticity—in
the form of the provenance, meaning, and legitimacy of ‘Welsh tea’—through time
and space is a far from straightforward process. As the contributions to the vol-
ume highlight, trying to pin down what is and is not authentic is not the point of
a peripheral multilingualism approach; instead, the focus needs to be on what is
authentic for whom (producers and consumers) and why (for commodification,
identification, etc.). The cosmopolitan spaces and visual/aural multilingualism of
the airport, as Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow, point out are both very fake
and highly real, just like the Inari Sámi lassoing display in tourism space, described
by Sari Pietikäinen.
The contributions to the volume also show us that peripherality, like many
modern categorizations previously thought to be preordained, is now not just
acknowledged as socially constructed, but is also possibly becoming a verb
(cf. Cameron 2005 in relation to gender categorizations), something we can
do, in the ‘performance’ era (Pennycook 2003; cf. Pietikäinen, forthcoming;
Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011 in relation to minority languages). It is clear
then that the performative potential of peripherality thus creates both a chal-
lenge and an opportunity for sites like those examined in the volume. If use of
these resources is uncontrolled, polycentric, bottom-up, and completely frag-
mented (Pietikäinen 2010), even globally dispersed, what are sites of peripheral
multilingualism to do in order to wrest back control of this authenticity? What
kinds of processes and types of ‘boundary maintenance’ (Barth 1969 in Kroskrity
2000: 340) are undertaken to keep claims to authenticity and ownership—both
in terms of identification and commodification? As Pujolar (2006: 82) puts
it, ‘What strategies do minorities and their elites develop to protect their own
sources of value and legitimacy in the new economy?’ In a similar vein, da Silva,
McLaughlin, and Richards (2006: 184) pose the difficult question that highlights
this tension: ‘In the new economy, which performances of language, culture and
identity are rendered legitimate?’ These questions, which have resonance for
all the contributions in the volume, are certainly something to grapple with in
future examinations of peripheral multilingualism. In addition, while authentic-
ity in cultural tourism has traditionally been seen as ‘anti-urban’ (Prentice 2001),
involving retreat to peripheral sites such as those examined in the volume, this is
clearly changing. Industrial heritage tourism, architectural tourism, and movie
tourism are all competing in the cultural tourism and authenticity stakes. Sites

T H E P E R I P H E R A L M U LT I L I N G UA L I S M L E N S [225]
of peripheral multilingualism are thus in competition for ‘authenticity’, and the
ways in which they compete are extremely revealing in terms of understanding
the sociolinguistics of contemporary multilingualism.
Finally, the contributions to the volume show how the current dynamics and
dialectics of language, space, and place emerge from adopting a peripheral multi-
lingual approach to multiple sites; from the ‘non-places’ of airports and websites to
the ‘hyper-places’ of tourist destinations, whose names are indexical of escape and
beauty, the centre–periphery lens points to a fruitful and challenging way forward
for our understanding of multilingualism as a dynamic/static, flexible/fixed phe-
nomenon in minority language spaces and beyond.

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Cameron, Deborah. 2005. Language, gender and sexuality: Current issues and new directions.
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Coupland, Nikolas. 2003. Sociolinguistic authenticities. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4):
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Da Silva, Emmanuel, Mireille McLaughlin, and Mary Richards. 2006. Bilingualism and
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Prentice, Richard. 2001. Experiential cultural tourism: Museums and the marketing of the
new romanticism of evoked authenticity. Museum Management and Curatorship 19:
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I ND E X

Acadie 10, 30, 34–52, 62, 122 commodity/commodities 31, 49, 50, 56, 58,
advertising 6, 68, 69, 70, 108, 109, 112, 113, 72, 79, 98, 99, 135, 136, 141, 149
118, 120, 136, 139, 140, 141, 142, 165, Corsica 10, 11, 20, 28, 95–114
166, 177, 180, 185, 187, 190, 191 Corsican language 95–114ff
airports 10, 11, 100, 105, 107, 108, 154–193 cosmopolitan/cosmopolitanism
Austria 10, 12, 201–218ff 35–51ff
authentication 11, 39, 78, 80–92ff, 108 counter-culture/counter-cultural 35–51ff
authenticity 1, 3, 7, 10, 11, 19, 22, 29, 31, crafts sector 31, 63, 64, 78, 87, 101, 118,
38–40ff, 42, 44, 45, 48, 51, 69, 77–84ff, 122–124, 128, 185, 224
87–91ff, 96, 97, 99–101ff, 107, 114, cultural production 6, 10, 35–39, 41, 92, 128
123, 128, 134, 146, 147, 149, 179, 189,
213, 222, 224–226 deconstruction 209–210
diaspora/diasporic 30, 31, 135, 148
banal nationalism 172 discourse 24, 37, 39, 42, 80, 82–84, 90, 97,
bilingualism 7, 18, 20, 21, 25, 26, 29, 30, 40, 98, 106, 111, 121, 123, 124, 125, 127,
41, 66, 68, 71, 119, 121, 128, 179, 181, 128, 143, 148, 155, 159, 189, 190, 199,
187, 203, 211, 224 200, 201, 204, 206, 208, 218
bilingualism as added value 119, 121, 128, 224
bilingualism as deficit 119, 121, 128, 224 endangerment discourse 79, 124, 128, 223
English 5, 6, 18, 25, 27, 29, 30, 31, 35, 40,
Canada 10, 17–32ff, 35–52ff, 55, 56, 41–48ff, 50, 60, 63, 64, 66–69ff, 71, 83,
62, 218 90, 99–107ff, 109, 110, 113, 121, 122,
Cardiff Airport/Maes Awyr Caerdydd 124–129ff, 133, 137, 138, 140, 144,
154–192ff 146–148ff, 158, 159, 164, 171, 172,
Carinthia 10, 201–218ff 178–181ff, 187, 191, 192, 214
Catalan language 56, 58, 61 English as a lingua franca 6, 83, 99
Catalonia 10, 55–62ff, 71 ethnolinguistic polarization 201, 209
centering institutions 157 ethnoscape 124, 155, 174, 178, 192
central value system 157
centre-periphery dynamics 77, 78, 79, 81, fetish/fetishization 42, 125, 178, 224
82, 91, 123, 157 Finland 10
commercial actors 11, 117, 119, 128, 129, Finnish language 77, 90, 192
201 Finnish Lapland 11, 77–92ff
commodification/commoditization 1, 7, 18, Francophone Canada 10, 17–32ff, 35–51ff, 55
31, 35, 37, 38, 48, 50, 60, 71, 72, 80, French language 11, 18, 23, 25–31ff, 35,
83, 89, 92, 98, 99, 112, 113, 128, 191, 39–48ff, 50, 56, 95–114ff, 126, 171,
213, 216, 222, 224, 225 172, 178, 184, 191, 214, 218
Gaeilge/Irish language 6, 11, 118–130ff, 225 linguistic capital 21, 35, 36, 38
Gaeltacht 11, 118–130ff linguistic imperialism 6
gender 10, 19, 36, 39, 50, 55–72ff, 146, 155, linguistic landscape 78, 101, 112, 113, 119,
158, 225 152, 155, 180, 181, 187, 200
genre 6, 37, 63, 82, 87, 92, 101, 139, 159, linguistic market 22
160, 190, 191 linguistic nationalism 38, 57
German language 70, 101, 102, 105, 184, linguistic prescriptivism 39, 46
191, 192, 201–218ff
globalization 1–7ff, 10, 21, 30, 35–39, 51, 77, market(s) 3, 5, 10, 17, 20–22ff, 29, 31, 32, 35,
82, 98, 99, 147, 150, 155, 158, 174, 189, 36, 38, 41–43ff, 51, 68, 82, 83, 92, 95,
213–217ff 113, 123, 128, 223
marketing 10, 33, 36,69, 87, 99, 118, 121,
heritage 10, 11, 31, 55, 56, 58, 60–64ff, 68, 123–125ff, 127, 128, 130, 148, 159,
71, 72, 77–92ff, 98, 103, 106, 223, 225 164, 180, 194, 211,
heteroglossia 2, 7, 8, 12, 77–92ff, 128, 205, metalanguage/metalinguistic 100, 106, 112,
214 113, 124, 128, 187, 210
hip-hop 6, 22, 38, 39, 48 minority language spaces 5, 10, 122,
222, 226
identity 8, 10, 11, 21, 31, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, mobility 4–7ff, 10–12, 28, 30, 31, 48, 59,
45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 77, 82, 99, 107, 134, 147, 154, 157,
62–66ff, 68, 69, 70–72ff, 77, 78, 96, 99, 189–192ff, 211, 213
100–103, 106, 112, 113, 125, 128, 143, modernity/modernist 3, 10, 11, 19, 27, 29,
159, 184, 191, 210, 223 30, 31, 56, 57, 58, 63, 71, 72, 119, 218,
imagined interaction 101, 113 222
imperialism 17, 23, 36, 37 modernizing/modernization 35, 40, 59, 72,
interaction 4, 61, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84, 90, 92, 124, 218
95, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 106, 107,
109, 111, 112, 113, 129, 155, 158, 169, nationalism/nationalist 17–19, 24, 28, 30,
160, 167, 182, 183 36–42ff, 48, 51, 52, 56–63f, 72, 174,
internal colonialism 10, 21, 22, 59 203–205ff
intersectionality 57, 61, 72 nation-state 3, 8, 10, 17–23ff, 27, 28,
Ireland 10, 118–130ff, 133 36, 56–60ff, 77–79ff, 96, 155, 159,
Irish see Gaeilge 200–203, 212, 217
irony 12, 92, 138, 151, 201, 205, 209, 211, new economy 10, 12, 17, 21, 29, 31, 82, 225
216, 223 nexus 77, 79, 82, 91, 99, 135, 150, 157
Italian language 26, 69, 95, 97, 100, 102, 105, Nexus Analysis 82
109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 172, 178, normalization /normalizing 56, 58,
184, 191, 192, 212, 214 119–121ff, 125, 126, 187, 223
normativity / normativities 2, 5, 9, 81, 82,
labour 3, 18, 19, 22, 24–26ff, 29, 30, 123, 119, 224
124, 134, 136, 157, 158 norms 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 77, 79, 81, 83, 92,
language as practice 2, 223 98, 99, 121–123f, 128, 135, 159, 160,
language as system 2, 12, 223, 224 190, 191, 223, 224
language contact 97, 202
language ideology/ideologies/ideological 1, orders of indexicality 159, 190, 191
7–9ff, 36, 48, 52, 80, 92, 96, 98, 99, 101,
103, 112, 113, 118, 121, 128, 187, 202, parallel monolingualism 2, 11, 97, 119, 122,
203, 206, 212, 217, 222, 224 126–128ff, 181
language regime 12, 118, 201, 202, 213 Patagonia 10, 135, 144–147ff, 148, 149, 150,
linguascape/linguascaping 125, 187 152

[230] Index
place 57, 80, 81, 82, 84, 92, 95, 96, 107, 108, sociolinguistics 1, 2, 5, 9, 38, 51, 99,
112, 123, 125, 128, 149, 154, 155, 156, 159, 226
157–159ff, 183, 185, 189–191ff, 200, space 4, 12, 24, 35, 57, 58, 62, 65, 72,
208, 217, 222, 226 78–81, 85, 87, 92, 101, 109, 111,
plurilingual/plurilingualism 8, 95, 97, 98, 144, 154–192ff, 199ff, 218ff, 222,
104, 106, 113 224–226
polycentric/polycentricity 5, 8, 9, 11, Spanish language 30, 70, 105, 109, 110, 126,
77–79ff, 97, 159, 172, 191, 225 144, 145, 146, 150, 172, 184, 191, 192
postmodern/postmodernity 48, 49, 71, 201,
204, 216, 218, 222 tourism 6, 10, 11, 18, 22, 31, 55–72ff,
postnationalism 35 77–92ff, 98, 99, 100, 111, 118,
122, 128, 144, 147, 189, 213, 222,
Quebec 30, 106, 126, 172, 178 224, 225

Sámi language 77–92ff Wales 10, 11, 20, 28, 55–72ff, 133–150ff,
Sámiland/Sápmi 77–92 ff 155–193ff
Sápmi see Sámiland Welsh language 11, 55–72ff, 111–150ff,
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport 171–193ff
(Sea-Tac) 154–192ff world language system 5, 120
semiotic landscape 11, 144, 155, 158, 159, World Wide Web 10, 11, 56, 64, 65, 73,
173, 174, 178, 180, 190 119, 123–129ff, 148, 159, 160, 165,
Slovene language 202–218ff 173, 226
social space 22, 59 world-systems theory 3, 5, 18, 126, 157

Index [231]