The language debates on immigrant integration in France: immigrant integration or immigrant control?
- Autores: Vicent Climent i Ferrando
- Localización: Revista de llengua i dret, ISSN-e 2013-1453, ISSN 0212-5056, Nº. 63, 2015, págs. 144-164
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
This paper presents a discourse analysis of French language policies regarding the integration of immigrants. It traces the evolution of policy debates on language and analyzes how these have progressively mutated from immigrant integration to immigrant control, becoming the current dominant ideology and creating a linkage between these two previously separate domains. The paper empirically analyzes the compulsory language requirements adopted for immigrants seeking to enter France, or reside, be reunited with family or become naturalized there. It also conducts an empirical analysis of the rhetoric and narrative devices employed to invoke national myths, conventions, identities and values aimed at legitimizing this utilitarian approach to language. It concludes that this new instrument -language- reveals strategic thinking by the French political elites to use a politically accepted discourse -that of integration, participation and inclusion- to achieve the potentially objectionable and discriminatory outcomes of exclusion and control.
