Nativeness in transnational Antiochian multilingual familie

Résumé En

This presentation addresses on the one hand language ideologies and policies regarding minority languages in Turkey and France, and, on the other, the transmission of Arabic and/or Turkish as possibly heritage languages. Since the creation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, numerous reforms have minoritized language practices and positionalities of its non-Turkish speaking citizens. By purging from Turkish traces of Arabic or Persian influence, it wanted to create a "modern" Turkish language for an equally modern Turkish state. In this modernist ideological system, Arabic was indexical of a decadent and anachronistic past, legitimizing Turkish as the language of modernity, state and citizenship. Arguably, this ideology is reproduced in contemporary Turkish language policy. In globalization, however, speakers of Antiochian Arabic have been presented and confronted with new possibilities and sites for acquiring voice. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography, recordings of family interactions, [linguistic] biographies and migration narratives, I will thus discuss various native imaginaries, as linked to place and time, as well as to language and language ideologies, in a novel context of Antiochian transnationality. Here, previously fixed modes of belonging become increasingly mobile and (re)negotiable. Analyzing various interactional and narrative practices in the Antiochian diaspora (France) as well as among Arabic-Turkish speaking families in Antioch, I will highlight how such renegotiations could be analyzed as linked to complex, global processes of minoritization/deminorization.