Newspeakers strategies: from fuzzy linguistic borders to the use of multilingual resources in French Guiana

Résumé En

Because of its cultural and linguistic heterogeneity, French Guiana is a fascinating observatory for the study of new linguistic practices in relation with migration and language contact phenomena (Migge and Léglise 2013). 2% of the population declare Spanish as a language of first socialization and 5% of the population declare Spanish as being part of their linguistic repertoire 1. Colombian and Peruvian populations in Cayenne for example, which constitute a recent immigration wave, have developed strategies of communication which reveal the heterogeneity of their linguistic repertoire. In the market place for example, a meeting point of different populations in the center of the city, they interact with local populations such as Amerindian, Creole, Maroons and Hmong. But also they interact with other immigrant populations such as Brazilian and Haitians. The aim of this presentation is to show how, as Newspeakers (O'Rourke and Ramallo 2011) of majority languages (French, French Guianese Creole and Brazilian Portuguese), they bring into being linguistic and social strategies such as translaguaging (García and Wei 2014) and dis-alignments (Auer 1995; Kiesling, 2011) to communicate effectively with others. And also, to show how others address them within interaction. This study is based on a long-term ethnography fieldwork, on sociolinguistic data gathered in the whole territory, and on new recordings of heterogeneous multilingual practices (Jørgensen et al. 2011) gathered in the market place.