Rethinking the relationship between language and competence and socioeconomic integration in the context of migration

"In this presentation I wish to revisit some of the long-standing assumptions on labor-language ideology as articulated in the linguistics literature and in the political arena. I will do so by examining the impact of informal economy on migrants’ language practices. This research is based on a multi-sited ethnography conducted in Cape Town over a period of 15 years with Congolese from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I reexamine the often assumed correlation between socio-economic integration and proficiency in the dominant language of the host economy, which rests on the idea that integration is uniform and unidimensional. It is also grounded in the discursive construction of informal economy as consisting of out-law practices and leads to the criminalization of migrants, thus often serving to justify the harshening of immigration policies and/or violence from segments of host populations.  I argue that the relation between language competence and job opportunities for the migrants has been instrumentalized in modern democracies in order to regulate population movements."

Cécile B. Vigouroux