Multilingual dynamics among Portuguese-based migrant contexts in Europe

Abstract

This paper explores insights and understandings of multilingual dynamics within European-based migrant contexts where Portuguese plays a role. The intermediate position of Portuguese migration in Europe (simultaneously host and sending country) gives Portuguese a bipolar sociolinguistic status at the European scale, both as a ‘dominant’ and ‘non-dominant’ language, useful to use as an analytical springboard. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic work developed in two sites – Portuguese migrant women in London and Eastern European migrant children in Portugal – this paper discusses the tools used to (a) describe the informal emerging and creative multilingual use happening in local configurations of speakers, linguistic ideologies, artifacts, histories and institutions, and (b) explain how this creativity is re-scaled into dominant discourses situated in momentary yet simultaneously long-term historical sociolinguistic configurations, differently narrated by the multiple actors involved. A combined focus on personal trajectories and ‘history in person’, discursive dynamics of recontextualisation and re-scaling and an understanding of the power dynamics in intersubjective spaces helps develop the idea of polycentric speaking positions, affected by local creativities and constraints happening in conflicting historically configured hybrid spaces of verbal interaction.