Language Attitudes and Identity Construction

This chapter highlights the Senegalese transmigrants’ language attitudes in comparison to those of their compatriots back home. The chapter shows that diasporicity, and, consequently, mobility, have a bearing on both language practices and language attitudes. With the effect of mobility on language (attitudes) being an understudied area, this chapter homes in on how notions of prestige language and symbolic capital can be reconceptualised by the speakers on the basis of new motivations, part of which is the construction of new identities, in the various successive chronotopic situations in which they may find themselves. It is to that effect that the respondents engage, prolifically, in many ethnolinguistic and metalinguistic discussions, to redefine taken-for-granted concepts of ethnicity and language. What makes this chapter original is that contrary to what is traditionally observable in ethnographic studies, where the researched are mere sources of information, the informants set themselves up as fellow linguistic ethnographers in the way they analyse their own languaging style. Furthermore, their criticality and creativity, coupled with the emic approach of this study, afford the participants the leverage to create new linguistic appellations that are consonant with their own idea of multilingualism.