New speakers, new linguistic subjects

Abstract

In this chapter, I take up the exercise of analyzing the experience of “new speakers” from the perspective of studies on forms of subjectivity. “New speakers” constitutes a new social category that emerged in the last decades in contexts where regional minority languages were spoken in Europe. The category designates those speakers of the minority language that have acquired it through formal learning and, therefore, are seen as different from the traditional community of native speakers. I argue that studies on subjectivity are relevant to understand the new speakers phenomenon because these perspectives provide a critique of the ideologies of modernity that constituted the category of “native speaker” besides the conventional hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality. As such, the study of speaker identities arguably makes a distinct contribution to intersectionality studies. To develop this argument, I discuss the implications of Thomas Bonfiglio’s (2010) history of the native speaker concept and I point at the connections with the debates on “non-native” speakers and varieties in Applied Linguistics. After this, I bring in some biographies from new speakers of Catalan that experience the process of adopting their new language as being in tension with their other language-based identities. These tensions emerge much more acutely with new speakers who can be constructed as racially different. This shows, I argue, that the processes of subjectification associated with modernity still favor durable and consistent forms of identity in which becoming and hybridity find no space. However, today’s increasing mobility and diversity fills the social landscape with these in-between subjects that must constantly travel across boundaries and categories.