“I don’t mix much” : language mixing in transnational Polish-British culture 2012-18
Abstract
Language mixing by migrants in the process of acquiring a new language is often treated as a symptom of their linguistic deficit, a stage to be overcome on the way to full bilingualism. Yet language mixing is also a creative process, a way to build community, maintain the transnational family, and restore cultural capital lost in migration. The cultural representations of the lives of post-EU accession Polish migrants in the UK discussed in this article – in an advertisement for an online shopping website, a novel for teenagers in English and Polish translation, and a series of illustrations with captions – use different strategies to tell stories of language acquisition and loss. I argue that ten years after Joanna Rostek and Dirk Uffelmann asked “Can the Polish Migrant Speak?” it is time to ask how the Polish Migrant speaks, and to offer an answer with more nuance than “in Polish” or “in English” by taking code-switching and translanguaging into account.
Citation
Finer , E 2020 , ' “I don’t mix much” : language mixing in transnational Polish-British culture 2012-18 ' , Modern Languages Open , vol. 2020 , no. 1 , 6 , pp. 1-20 . https://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.280
Publication
Modern Languages Open
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2052-5397Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
This research was supported by the University of St Andrews, Byre World, and the Santander Research and Travel Fund.Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
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