ABSTRACT
“Migration” can be defined as “the movement from one place to another” (Deumert 2013: 57) or, as Boyle, Halfacree, and Robinson (1998: 34) put it, “a move within or across the boundary of an areal unit.” Boyle and his colleagues refer to the move within an areal unit as “internal migration” (e.g., rural-urban migration), and to the move across an areal unit as “external” (e.g., south-north) (Kamwangamalu 2013: 35). Migration, whether rural-urban, south-north, or such other categories as south-south, north-north, north-south, return migration, circular migration, chain migration, and step migration to be discussed in this chapter, redefines an individual’s linguistic repertoire – ways of speaking that were useful and highly valued in one place can be meaningless in another (Deumert 2013). The ways individuals use their linguistic repertoires in a migration or non-migration context are informed and shaped by such questions as (1) who am I? (Bernstein 1986: 495), (2) how am I perceived by others in the community of which I am a member?, and (3) how would I actually want to be perceived? (Kamwangamalu 1992: 33). Question (1) concerns individual (self)identity, how the individual perceives himself/herself, while questions (2) and (3) have to do with individual’s social identities – the relationship between the individual and society. Individual and social identities are interconnected, and so will be treated as such in the discussion that follows. Identity is a moving target; that is, identity is never static or enduring but is “endlessly created anew according to very various social constraints … and social contexts” (Tabouret-Keller 1997: 316). Thus, individuals’ ways of speaking – their linguistic acts – are what Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) refer to as “acts of identity”: “people create their linguistic systems so as to resemble those of the groups with which from time to time they wish to identify” (Le Page 1986: 23). It follows that “as the product of situated social action, identities may shift and recombine to meet new circumstances” (Bucholtz and Hall 2004: 376). An individual’s identities, or “practical [linguistic] accomplishments” (emphasis added) in the sense of Jenkins (1994: 218), may shift in the context of migration or any social context for that matter because, as already noted, identity is “open-ended, fluid, and constantly … constructed and reconstructed as individuals move from one social situation to another” (Zegeye 2001: 1). That is to say, when people migrate, they rarely, if ever, move across or 208arrive to uninhabited places; instead, their journeys, as well as their destinations, inevitably involve encounters, brief or extended, with other people, their linguistic practices and repertoires. These encounters, in turn, shape and determine the identities that migrants wish to project in the host community as they are preoccupied with such identity-related questions as those highlighted in (1)–(3). As Blommaert and Dong (2010: 368) put it, “The movement of people across space is therefore never a move across empty spaces,” with pre-determined, non-negotiable identities. Moreover, as these researchers go on to suggest, spaces are not only horizontal, they are vertical: each space has a dynamic and layered hierarchy of linguistic varieties “filled with norms, expectations, conceptions of what counts as proper and normal (indexical) language use and what does not” (Blommaert and Dong 2010: 368). Furthermore, trajectories of migration not only involve movement in space, but in time as well; thus, time scales are also important in exploring the relationships between migration and language. That is, how long it takes migrants to reach their destination and how long they stay in one place influence linguistic repertoires and identities of migrants and of those people who come in contact with them. It follows that an exploration of migration trajectories, the movement in time and space, is an investigation of the trajectories of human contact and the influence of this contact, linguistic and otherwise, on the parties involved. In this chapter, we focus on the relationship between different migration trajectories and identities and linguistic repertoires and resources. First, we consider the types of migration trajectories mentioned earlier, namely, return migration, circular migration, rural-urban migration, peri-urban, south-north, north-south, south-south, north-north, chain migration, and step migration. The aim here is to explore how these migration trajectories impact identities and language proficiencies. Next, we discuss the impact of migration trajectories on migrants’ linguistic repertoires and identities in the host destination. We conclude with a discussion of new challenges and directions in the study of migration trajectories and their broader socio-linguistic implications in the age of superdiversity (Blommaert 2013).
