Doctoral student Chantal White, under the guidance of Dr. Bambi Schieffelin, New York University, will undertake research on language ideologies, language practices, and identity though formal linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis of radio communication. The researcher will examine how radio producers in a multi-ethnic and multilingual context draw on, mediate, and transform the ideological marking of different language varieties. The research will be conducted in Montréal, Canada, where the researcher will focus on the particular case of the development of Haitian identity. While situated within the larger socio-historical context of Québec's official cultural and language policies, aimed at forging a distinct society through the promotion of the French language, the researcher will pay particular attention to the choices and influence of the people who are most directly affected and targeted by these policies.
The investigator will combine participant observation, semi-directed interviews, social network analysis, textual analysis of radio documents, and conversation, discourse and phonetic analyses of on- and off-air language practices. The data gathered through these methods will be used to answer the following questions: 1) Who is involved in Haitian radio production in Montréal and what are their everyday work and linguistic practices that contribute to generating audience-appropriate programming and representing an image of a plural Québec within Haitian radio? 2) How are decisions to broadcast in a language or a variety of language arrived at, implemented and justified at the organizational level and what are the consequences of on-air language choice on the daily operations of these radio stations? And 3) What are the language ideologies undergirding and shaping French and Kreyòl language choice and language policy at each radio station both on- and off-air, and how are they made evident through language practices?
By attending to the ways Haitian radio producers negotiate their insertion into Québec's cultural landscape through their on-air language choices, this research adds to the theorization of radio, a widespread yet understudied medium. While much work has been done on the ways communities make use of visual media to represent and define themselves, this research will contribute to an understanding of the different ways a community get represented through its voices. The project also contributes to the education and training of a social scientist.
My ethnographic fieldwork on language choice and use on Haitian radio in Montréal addressed the broader issue of how minority nationalisms cope with increased immigration. Despite predictions of rapid demise at the hands of globalization, minority nationalisms remain a global phenomenon in every corner of the world. Needless to say, the global movement of peoples across the world has transformed minority nationalisms. While some minority groups have responded to immigration by adopting a defensive and exclusionary attitude, others have sought to take advantage of it. In Québec, as with other movements centered on the preservation of a minority language, this strategy has taken the form of official language policies aimed at encouraging the assimilation of immigrants into the minority French-language group. Rather than investigating governmental perspectives on these language policies, this research foreground the agency and choice of the people who are directly affected and targeted by them. In Québec, immigration is deemed necessary as a means to reverse the negative effects of a low birthrate and an aging population on the economy and the demographic composition of the province. Recently economists and demographers have begun to argue that immigrants to Québec and elsewhere around the world have only a marginal effect on these wider demographic and economic trends. However, the assumed role immigrants can play in the maintenance of Québec's political weight inside the Canadian federation and the survival of the French language in North America would also require more sophisticated research. In Québec, integration is equated metonymically with francization (the adoption of French over other languages by immigrants); in other words the degree of francization is perceived as an indicator of overall integration. Oftentimes, the Québécois government will measure the successes of its integration policies by measuring the number of immigrants who have adopted French as the only language or the language most often spoken at home. Yet, not only is this a very poor measure of integration, it completely ignores the complexity of immigrant linguistic practices that my findings clearly highlight. While few of the immigrants I worked with use French exclusively in the home (or at work for that matter), all of them are by all other accounts integration success stories, perfectly capable of using French in a variety of settings. My research also shows that their language choices are far more informed by their own language ideologies than by their ability and fluency in any given language, again underscoring the fact that the language spoken in the home indicator is a poor measure of the successes of Québec's integration programs targeted at immigrants. When the state intervenes on any aspect of a language, language becomes a contested object. This research complements linguistic anthropologists’ work on the language ideological debates that arise whenever a language becomes the object of state intervention, by demonstrating that not only is the code itself an object of contestation, but so are the cultural ideologies that are inextricably tied to the way a language is conceived by its speakers. In my research, I found that Haitian radio hosts and audience members strategically drew on their linguistic resources in their interactions both on and off air in order to position themselves, their interlocutors, the radio itself and to redefine the context of the interaction. This strategic use of the different language varieties they master in turn highlighted, renegotiated, and questioned the linguistic ideologies that were attached to these different languages and language varieties. Furthermore, by looking at these ideological processes as they unfolded inside the media world of the Haitian radioscape, this research added to theorization on this most widespread, yet understudied medium. While much work has been done on the ways communities make use of visual media to represent and define themselves, this research looked at the different ways a community gets represented through its voices, and how, through strategic management of the interactions, radio producers scaffold listeners’ voices as well so that they fit within an established mode of participation. This was most significant with Radio Union, which, in keeping with Québec's official language policy promoting the French language as the common denominator for a new plural Québécois identity, opted to have all of its "ethnic programming" be in French. While initially, this project was only supposed to look at Haitian media producers, throughout my fieldwork, I increasingly came in contact with members of Radio Union's audience. I found that they too claimed a say in language and topic-choice on the air, particularly through call-in segments. There, the voices of radio audiences and hosts (the radio's everyday language practices) confronted the voice of the radio (its official French-only linguistic policy), heightening the issue of language choice on air.
