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Flipping French and Arabic: Language, Belonging, and Mobility among Muslim Youth in Marseille

In northern Marseille, youth from Marseille’s projects can be heard affectionately calling their hometown the “capital of all bleds,” an Arabic reference to their relatives’ countries of origin in North, West, and East Africa, or else Margérie, a name blending Marseille and Algérie. For these young people who identify as Marseillais and Muslim, their hometown is synonymous with converging stories of African immigration and diverse ways of living, worshipping, knowing, and speaking. Marseille’s appointment to European Capital of Culture for the 2013 year thrust a competing vision of Marseille into the spotlight however, as urban renewal projects and municipal initiatives targeted the city’s transformation into a capital for European “high culture” and a secular brand of cosmopolitanism. Beginning in 2012 with this contest over Marseille’s cultural coordinates, Flipping French and Arabic: Language, Belonging, and Mobility among Muslim Youth in Marseille is a decade-long study of how Muslim-Marseillais youth reposition Marseille as a Muslim city and themselves as cultural citizens within it, notably by transgressing established modes of speaking French and Arabic. The book captures how in their classrooms, prayer rooms, and community centers youth pepper their Marseillais French with dialectal Arabic, and also construct an Islamic register of Standard French, asserting their version of French belonging (francité) that inverts hierarchies between French and Arabic, standard languages and dialects, and French citizenship and adherence to Islam. In a further inversion, with age some of these Muslim-Marseillais have relocated to their parents’ birthplaces in North and East Africa. Hence, Flipping French and Arabic traces the linguistic and geographic displacements through which Muslim-Marseillais instantiate their francité. Challenging ongoing political debates in France that profess a singular mode of Frenchness, the youth in this book speak to a French belonging that is at once semiotically disjunctive, spatially diffuse, and markedly post-colonial.

Talks:

Cementing the Boundaries of Frenchness: Race/Ethnicity and Belonging in a Non-Color-Blind French Republic

Hosted by the European Studies Center at the Univ. of Pittsburgh. Featuring Jean Beaman, Zsuzsanna Fagyal, Christina Horvath, and I. Moderated by: Jae-Jae Spoon

Evers Chapter in "Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer Mediated Communication"

This edited volume, published by Cambridge University Press, explores the reflexive, self-conscious ways in which global youth engage with each other online. Presenters analyze user-generated data from these interactions to show how communication technologies and multilingual resources are deployed to project local as well as translocal orientations. With examples from a range of multilingual settings, the presenters show how youth exploit the creative, heteroglossic potential of their linguistic repertoires, from rudimentary attempts to engage with others in a second language to hybrid multilingual practices.

Affiliations:

Linguistic Anthropology

Affiliated with the Society for Linguistic Anthropology

The Society of Linguistic Anthropology is devoted to exploring and understanding the ways in which language shapes, and is shaped by, social life, from face-to-face interaction to global-level phenomena.

Member of the SLA Committee on Language and Social Justice

The charge of the SLA Committee on Language and Social Justice is to increase awareness, both within the AAA and among the general public, of the ways in which language is implicated in social discrimination; and, where appropriate, to respond to specific instances of language-related discrimination and injustice.

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