‘Who can tell, mon ami?’

Representations of bilingualism for a majority monolingual audience

Authors

  • Gaëlle Planchenault Simon Fraser University Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v2i3.425

Keywords:

Language Ideologies, french stylization, folk linguistics, media

Abstract

French stylization can frequently be observed in the English-speaking media under the form of faked French accents or performed personas as is the case with Poirot’s TV character. In the popular ITV drama adaptation of the well-known eponymous novels of Agatha Christie, dialogues in English are peppered with French words. This paper will analyse the functions of these tokens of bilingualism and will show that they are used as a form of ethnosymbolism (Haarmann 1986). In this article, I argue that the actor’s performance is a representation of the foreign language and culture for a mainly monolingual audience. For Androutsopoulos (2007: 222), it is a matter of ‘styling ethnic otherness for majority audiences’. I relate the staging of salient linguistic traits to folk linguistics and more particularly to the beliefs a speech community carries on another speech community and its ways of speaking. In order to identify popular conceptions regarding transfers from L1 French, the lines of the Belgian sleuth are analysed on lexical, pragmatic and syntactic levels.

References

Anderson, K. T. (2007) Constructing ‘otherness’: Ideologies and differentiating speech style. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 17(2): 178–197.

Androutsopoulos, J. (2007) Bilingualism in the mass media and on the Internet. In M. Heller (ed.) Bilingualism: A Social Approach 207–230. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Auer, P. (2007) The monolingual bias in bilingualism research, or: Why bilinguals talk is (still) a challenge for linguistics. In M. Heller (ed.) Bilingualism: A social approach 319–339. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bell, A. (1999) Styling the other to define the self: A study in New Zealand identity making. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4): 523–541.

Bloomfield, L. (1944) Secondary and tertiary responses to language. Language 20(2): 45–55.

Coupland, N. (2001) Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in Society 30: 345–375.

Christie, A. (2003) The Mystery of the Blue Train. In Poirot, The French Collection 171–373. (First published in 1928.) London: HarperCollins Publishers.

Eastman, C. M. and Stein, R. F. (1993) Language display: Authenticating claims to social identity. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 14(3): 187–202.

Haarmann, H. (1986) Verbal strategies in Japanese fashion magazines – A study in impersonal bilingualism and ethnosymbolism. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 58: 107–121.

Hill, J. (1999) Styling locally, styling globally: What does it mean? Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4): 542–556.

Houdebine-Gravaud, A.-M. (ed.) (2002) L’imaginaire Linguistique. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Kelly-Holmes, H. (2005) Advertising as Multilingual Communication. Houndmills, Balsingstoke, Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kramsch, C. (1998) Language and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Li, W. (2007) The Bilingualism Reader. (Second edition.) London: Routledge.

Lippi-Green, R. (1997) Teaching children how to discriminate: What we learn from the Big Bad Wolf. In English with an Accent: Language, ideology and discrimination in the United States 79–103. London: Routledge.

Meinhof, U. (2004) Metadiscourses of culture in British TV commercials. In A. Jaworski, N. Coupland and D. Galasinski (eds) Metalanguage: Social and ideological perspectives 275–288. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Myers-Scotton, C. (1988) Code-switching as indexical of social negotiations. In M. Heller (ed.) Code-Switching: Anthropological and sociolinguistic perspectives 151–186. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Preston, D. R. (2004) Folk metalanguage. In A. Jaworski, N. Coupland and D. Galasinski (eds) Metalanguage: Social and ideological perspectives 75–101. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Rampton, B. (1995) Language crossing and the problematisation of ethnicity and socialistion. Pragmatics 5(4): 485–513.

Rampton, B. (1999) Styling the other: Introduction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4): 421–427.

Trim, R. (2002) The lexicon in European languages today: Unification or diversification. In P. Gubbins and M. Holt (eds) Beyond Boundaries: Language and identity in Contemporary Europe 35–45. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Published

2008-12-11

How to Cite

Planchenault, G. (2008). ‘Who can tell, mon ami?’: Representations of bilingualism for a majority monolingual audience. Sociolinguistic Studies, 2(3), 425-440. https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v2i3.425