Déconstruire la motivation pour rencontrer le désir (de langue)

Privilege of Voice as a Criterion for Sociolinguistic Inequalities

“…Individual language learning is driven by a strive for autonomy (Maas, 2008, 272;Castellotti & Moore, 2011) or voice (Blommaert, 2010, p. 180 ;Blommaert & Backus, 2013, p. 29 ;Busch, 2016), especially when children first learn to speak but also when adults learn new ways of acting in an unfamiliar context that affords language learning (Ben Harrat & Zeiter, in this number ;Zeiter, 2019b, p. 151). Mobile adults like Natalia who have to live and act in a new language before speaking and writing it have individual reasons for wanting to learn a language, individual forms of autonomy they are striving for (Zeiter, 2019a). This does not require the individual to be conscious of this or explicitly aim to learn to have autonomy (even less so at an early age, in the ontogenetic perspective).…”

“…Analyses that use the notion of voice in this sense have to consider that being heard does not solely depend on linguistic aspects but also other political and socio-economic factors. Social structures enable or disable agency (Assmann, 2008) in a macro-perspective of social and sociolinguistic relations (Zeiter, 2019a). The literature on voice reveals a complex picture of its conditions, particularly Hymes' works (see Weirich et al, in this number).…”