July 2003. I am sitting outside a street cafĆ© on the main pedestrian thoroughfare in St. Helier with a friend who lives on Jersey, the biggest island of the Channel Islands situated between Britain and France. Two girls walk by, engaged in lively and animated conversation in Portuguese. My friend knows the girls; they attended her secondary school and are employed at de Gruchyās, one of Jerseyās central department stores. A man on the adjacent table looks rather confused and comments to his wife that the French of the Island sounds nothing like he remembers from his school days in Birmingham. Just who are these people and what language are they speaking? Why are there so many foreigners living on the Island? How do they find work when they donāt speak English?
This book is the culmination of over a decade of detailed research into migration, identity and language on Jersey, one of the main inhabited Channel Islands, along with Guernsey, Alderney, Sark and Herm. As a sociolinguist working primarily on these themes with various Portuguese communities in the UK, my interest in the Island was piqued when I met six Portuguese-speaking university students who lived on Jersey in what they themselves termed a Madeiran Portuguese migrant community. These students regaled me with stories about their lives on the Island and also invited me to listen to their familiesā and friendsā tales about their experiences on Jersey. From the outset, these narratives centred on the idea of migration in terms of spatial dislocation and movement as well as of belonging to different places at the same time. Participants often problematised their identities in terms of āreal-world problemsā (Brumfit 1995: 27), with language but also culture and social practices foregrounded in their self-perceptions. Key was how they conceptualised Jersey as a multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual island and the ensuing consequences for encounters with the receptor population. A deeper understanding of the complexities of these lives also necessitated a fuller appreciation of historical migratory trajectories to Jersey than that proffered by previous scholarship, with the focus turning squarely to the roles in particular of language, ideology, attitude and identity.
However, this book is not intended as a chronological account of Jerseyās migration history. Rather, it serves as a distinctive and innovative contribution to the growing body of research on recent migration contexts, transnational and translocal lives and language use, concentrating in particular on the small island setting and its somewhat unusual Portuguese-speaking diaspora. Clearly, such a focus on the contemporary still requires us to trace, examine, appreciate and understand the earlier contexts and influences. This book then, may have arisen from my interest in contemporary perspectives, but it is structured to build into the empirical, micro-focus of Part II from the historical, conceptual, macro setting of the book in Part I.
The small island context of Jersey is extremely unusual in research on global migration, transnationalism, translocalism and language, with most studies focusing on cityscapes. It is not my intention however, to suggest that an island setting can be viewed as a microcosm of British or European mainland experiences, despite similarities between receptor community infrastructures and migrant trajectories. I draw on an island studiesā approach to demonstrate that Jerseyās tradition of migratory in-movement offers an excellent comparison of the historical and contemporary impact of migration, which allows me to examine how transnational and translocal identities have been negotiated through linguistic, cultural and social network practices and how they shape social embeddedness, belonging, place and home. This juxtaposition of historical and contemporary migratory movement also opens up a compelling area of interest concerning the presence of so-called minority languages in a multilingual environment. It affords a comparison of the symbolic, identification roles and representations of Jersey French, Standard French, English and contemporary migrant languages such as Portuguese, how language is perceived as a tool of social integration, the potential of such integration for consequent shifts in migrant group allegiances, and receptor community responses. Indeed, a major facet of this bookās originality lies in its examination of the receptor populationās official representations of self and its ideologies and attitudes towards migrant populations.
Jersey has long been an Island of strategic importance to Britain and France, and historical publications abound about the German Occupation during World War II. In a significant departure from such accounts, this book examines the Occupationās legacy on the Island as well as its impact on Island identities and ideological precepts concerning nationhood. Throughout, I adopt a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to migration, identity and belonging, which engages sociolinguistic and island studies models with concepts from social psychology, mobility studies and human geography.
Since the late twentieth century, global debates about population movement, migration, diaspora and transnationalism have undergone a hitherto unprecedented increase in number and significance. However, many modern nation states articulate migration as a problem in society that needs to be solved by stemming their means of arrival. As a corollary, in the mediaās mainstream, populist discourse, misinformation regarding non-integration and anti-assimilation practices may echo political anti-immigration rhetoric, rife on both sides of the Atlantic as well as beyond. Often, images of the plight of many migrants simply serve to reinforce largely stereotypical and negative portrayals (see, for example, Baker et al. 2008). Thus, migrants may be depicted as hapless victims laid bare to the proclivities of their ethnic, social and cultural backgrounds and with little control over their fate, or as delinquents, freeloaders and benefit cheats, with no moral compass or contrition. Rights to citizenship and residency may be overlooked or even dismissed outright as migrants take the blame for the social, economic and even cultural problems of the receptor society.
Academic discourse has sought to unpack these issues through a grounded and theoretical analysis of a number of global case studies, and has demonstrated that such stereotypical representations of migration are often replicated in attitudes and ideologies towards identity and language use.1 Integration has often been a requisite of national citizenship in multilingual and multicultural environments, with acquisition of the receptor societyās official language articulated in institutional policies not only as an indispensable communication tool but also as an indicator of group belonging, a way of trying to encourage migrants to identify with and conform to the shared majority cultur...