Exploring the ‘languaging habitus’ of a diasporic community: Colombians in New Zealand

• Melanie Revis ^[1]
  1. [1] Victoria University of Wellington

     Victoria University of Wellington

     Nueva Zelanda

     
• Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 263, 2021
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This article introduces the notion of ‘languaging habitus’ as a vital constituent of a diasporic community. Linking features of the sociolinguistic term ‘languaging’ with the Bourdieusian concept of ‘habitus’, it refers to the ways an individual's linguistic and cultural socialisation trajectory affects their dynamic and multimodal use of different semiotic resources.

    The data presented forms part of a larger study involving three years of ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews with 15 Colombian caregivers and nine children, and recordings of naturally-occurring family discourse. The participants, who formed part of a governmental programme that involved the resettlement of Colombian refugees registered in Ecuador, had arrived in New Zealand only up to three years prior to the research.

    Their languaging habitus impacted their diasporic existence at several levels: First, the participants’ partially shared socialisation trajectories were reflected in cultural self-positionings and language ideologies which highlighted the Colombian variety of Spanish as a distinctive feature of their identity. Second, sharing gossip about one another contributed to the discursive establishment of the diaspora community. Third, linguistic and cultural dispositions strongly influenced the participants’ engagement in different local and transnational sociocultural networks, both in digital space and off-line