Barriers or Checkpoints? Language ideologies on migration and the modern-colonial communication model

ABSTRACT

In this article, we present a critical perspective on metadiscursive regimes of the “language barrier” in contexts of mobility, discussing the persistence of the assumptions of transparency and homogeneity inherited from modern-colonial reason on our models of language and communication, confronting them with heterogeneous linguistic practices in our ethnographic experience with migrant students at a Brazilian public university. The article is divided into three sections. Initially, we discuss the uses of the expression “language barrier” in the academic debate on languages and migration, highlighting its meta-discursive position to justify or rationalize “disagreements” or “communication problems”. Next, we present how the notion of barrier is articulated as a structuring element of communication in the public debate about immigration in Brazil, both in the news and in government documents. Then, we analyze metapragmatic forms that emerge in interactions between migrant students who participated in our ethnographic experience, when they assess and frame situations that could be identified as a “language barrier” in the terms presupposed by the debates. The results indicate that metapragmatic forms that could be identified as a “language barrier” are configured much more as “linguistic checkpoints”, functioning as interactional “stops” of “checking”, in which they and/or the interlocutors make use of some linguistic misunderstanding to act in the world. We conclude that interactional forms resist on the borders of violence of the modern communication model, challenging its assumptions; at the same time, they are tensioned by the notion of “language barrier” as a figuration of the governance of languages and people in movement around the globe.

Keywords:
Immigration; Communication; Language barrier; Language ideologies