Covert bilingualism and symbolic competence: Analytical reflections on negotiating insider/outsider positionality in Swedish speech situations
Författare
Summary, in English
Bilinguals often face the challenge of negotiating a range of insider/outsider subject positions when interacting in transnational and intercultural settings. This article takes up the concept of symbolic competence, the awareness of socially situated symbolic resources and the ability to use them to shape interactional contexts, to examine how the author, a Swedish–English bilingual, manages this negotiation. Drawing on principles of the ethnography of communication in concert with the complementary discourse analytic perspective of nexus analysis, ethnographic vignettes are analyzed to explore strategic language choices the author made during specific speech situations in Sweden. It is shown that the concealment of linguistic abilities, or covert bilingualism, served as a resource to support the symbolic competence needed to facilitate the presentation of self during social encounters while mitigating the ambiguity of being simultaneously insider and outsider.
Avdelning/ar
- Engelska
- Language, Cognition and Discourse@Lund (LCD@L)
- Language Acquisition
Publiceringsår
2014
Språk
Engelska
Sidor
63-81
Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie
Applied Linguistics
Volym
35
Issue
1
Dokumenttyp
Artikel i tidskrift
Förlag
Oxford University Press
Ämne
- Languages and Literature
Nyckelord
- Bilingualism
- discourse analysis
- ethnography of communication
- nexus analysis
Status
Published
Forskningsgrupp
- Language, Cognition and Discourse@Lund (LCD@L)
- Language Acquisition
ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt
- ISSN: 0142-6001