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In:Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis
Edited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 81] 2019
► pp. 339–354

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Chapter 14
“They have lived in our street for six years now and still don’t speak a work [!] of English”

Scenarios of alleged linguistic underperformance as part of anti-immigrant discourses

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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 7 March 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.15mus
Abstract
Whilst sociolinguistic superdiversity is often viewed as an almost irreversible global development, there may be a question mark over whether the ‘mix of cultures’, which mass migration allegedly fosters, does in fact lead to an acceptance of multilingualism and/or multiculturalism in the respective societies. On the basis of public discourse data from press media and Internet forums, this paper explores popular attitudes the effects of mass immigration, which appear to express an endorsement of monolingual/monocultural societies. Using methods of argumentation theory, pragmatics and discourse-historical triangulation, the article argues that findings of a global rise in superdiversity as regards usage data need to be complemented by studies of divergent perception patterns at local/national levels.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methodology
  • 3.Arguments about and scenarios of immigration to Britain
  • 4.Conclusions and tasks for the linguistic investigation of attitudes towards migration-related language issues
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
References (64)
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