New Speaker Identities

In line with the mobility of our contemporary globalized societies, sociolinguistics has been reconceptualized to take account of the multiplicity of languages, social groups, and urban communities of practice which now exists... [ view full abstract ]

In line with the mobility of our contemporary globalized societies, sociolinguistics has been reconceptualized to take account of the multiplicity of languages, social groups, and urban communities of practice which now exists (e.g Blommaert 2010; Martin-Jones, Blackledge & Creese 2012; Pennycook 1994, 2007). This has given a rise to new metadiscourses that query the fixed uniform categories used to conceptualize that language/identity relation, and which draw our attention to the in-between spaces brought about by this new sociolinguistic order, spaces which had often been ignored in previous linguistic and sociolinguistic discussion. There has been an explosion of terminology, concepts and labels to capture and describe these spaces and to examine the practices and identities of multilingual individuals. In this panel we will examine what the “new speaker” label has added to these lines of critique and their terminological explorations, building on other more familiar terms in circulation, including “emergent bilinguals” (García & Kleifgen 2010), “multilingual subjects” (Kramsch 2009) or, in applied linguistics, “learner identities”, “L2 users” (Norton 1995; Norton 2000; Pavlenko & Piller 2001; Pavlenko 2002)” or “second language identities” (Block 2007). Research on new speakers is a fairly recent phenomenon. It has its origins in European territorial minorities where traditional communities have been in decline but where new profiles of speakers have emerged in the context of language revitalization projects and policy interventions. Research on new speakers gathered momentum in the context of a European project on the theme of “New speakers in a multilingual Europe” (2013-2017). As part of this research agenda, there has been an attempt to query researchers in other areas such as the sociolinguistics of migration and “World Englishes” as a means of exploring the overlapping themes of identity, authenticity and linguistic ownership. This panel brings together sociolinguists from a range of backgrounds and foci, who have engaged with the new speaker concept in different ways and are using it as lens through which to understand what it means for individuals to ‘become’ speakers of language or languages that are not their first or national languages.