International Journal of Multilingualism

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‘I speak small’: unequal Englishes and

transnational identities among Ghanaian migrants

Maria Sabaté-Dalmau

To cite this article: Maria Sabaté-Dalmau (2018) ‘I speak small’: unequal Englishes and
transnational identities among Ghanaian migrants, International Journal of Multilingualism,
15:4, 365-382, DOI: 10.1080/14790718.2018.1428329

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2018.1428329

Published online: 15 Feb 2018.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM
2018, VOL. 15, NO. 4, 365–382
https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2018.1428329

‘I speak small’: unequal Englishes and transnational identities

among Ghanaian migrants
Maria Sabaté-Dalmau
Departament d’Anglès i Lingüística, Universitat de Lleida, Catalonia, Spain

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper investigates language ideologies involving various non- Received 27 October 2017
standard English-language practices among homeless Ghanaian Accepted 11 January 2018
migrants, and explores how these interplay with transnational
KEYWORDS
identity management in Catalonia, a non-English-speaking English varieties; migration;
bilingual society. Through a 6-month multi-site ethnography of transnational identity;
three case-study informants which included recorded interviews language ideologies;
and spontaneous interactions, I explore how migrants engage linguistic marginalisation
with various pluralisations of local and global English in reported
encounters with other migrants and local residents, and I show
that they share ambivalent positionings towards them. They
generally present themselves as speaking ‘small’ or ‘no’ English, in
acts of linguistic delegitimisation whereby they inhabit
marginalised, de-skilled pan-African identities. However, on other
occasions, they position themselves as ‘better’ English speakers
than local populations who sanction ‘outer-circle’ English forms, in
acts of self-legitimisation whereby they vindicate their ‘native
speakerhood’ condition, constitutive of educated, cosmopolitan
identities revolving around ‘Ghanaianness’. I conclude that these
sociolinguistic comportments speak of migrants’ linguistic
marginalisation. They uncover ways in which situated forms of
identity categorisation linked to the censorship of
socioeconomically-stratified English varieties shape, and are
shaped by, hegemonic monolingual ideologies and societal
normativities concerning ‘English standardness’ which dictate who
count as legitimate transnational citizens in the Southern
European societies of the twenty-first century.

Introduction: unequal Englishes and transnational identities in migration

contexts
The globalisation processes of the twentieth century have propelled an unprecedented
mobility and diversification of people across the world (Urry, 2007) who now hold
various citizenship statuses and have very heterogeneous socioeconomic positions,
work experiences, family projects, political and religious affiliations, and cultural and
language backgrounds (Blommaert, 2013; Vertovec, 2009). These mobile populations
are translocal, in the sense that they network across and beyond established geopolitical

CONTACT Maria Sabaté-Dalmau [email protected] Departament d’Anglès i Lingüística, Universitat de

Lleida, Plaça de Víctor Siurana 1, bústia L5, 25003 Lleida, Catalonia, Spain
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
366 M. SABATÉ-DALMAU

boundaries (Glick Schiller, 2010) and are simultaneously locally and globally informed (Cas-
tells, 2004).
This diversity of people has motivated a growing body of research within socially-com-
mitted interpretive humanities disciplines (see, e.g. compilations in Canagarajah, 2017;
Duchêne, Moyer, & Roberts, 2013). Among linguistic anthropologists, critical sociolinguistic
ethnographers, discourse analysts and narrative practitioners working within the field of
transnational migrations, particular emphasis has been placed on language and identity;
more specifically, on how language practices and ideologies interplay with the ways in
which current migrant networks manage, inhabit, and/or resist social identity categoris-
ations when they negotiate their place in resident societies, in the urban geographies
of the twenty-first century (see, e.g. Baynham, 2005; De Fina, 2003; Lanza, 2012; Relaño-
Pastor, 2010).
In this paper, I understand language as practice and as ideology (Heller, 2007); that is, as
communicative practices in which we get organised in society in everyday life, and as
indexes of the norms, attitudes, judgments, etc., Which govern collective and individual
sociolinguistic comportments (Schieffelin, Woolard, & Kroskrity, 1998). Likewise, I concep-
tualise identity as social categorisation practices mediated through, and constituted in,
situated communicative events. I follow a line of research which envisions transnational
populations’ identities as hybrid and fluid, rather than as ‘fixed’ or ascribed to a single
place of origin (see De Fina, 2016; Woolard & Frekko, 2013). I approach these re-presenta-
tions of the Self as emerging and materialising in ‘multilingua francas’ (Makoni & Penny-
cook, 2012, p. 449). These are non-orthodox multilingual practices based on
translinguistic communicative resources which consist of non-standard, inextricable amal-
gamations of linguistic codes from local and distant contexts – ‘repositories’ of mobile
populations’ socialisation experiences (De Fina & Perrino, 2013; Dovchin, Sultana, & Penny-
cook, 2016; Jacquemet, 2005, 2010).
From this perspective, transnational migrants’ language and identities challenge nati-
vist conceptions of language which link linguistic codes to given homogeneously ima-
gined monocultural, monolingual territories or ‘ethnicities’ (Sabaté i Dalmau, 2014).
Despite their counterhegemonic, transgressive nature, migrants’ multilingualisms are
silenced and sanctioned, on being considered ‘non-quite-languages’ (Gal, 2006, p. 15)
used by ‘incompetent’, ‘language-less’ people (Blommaert, Collins, & Slembrouck, 2005,
p. 213). In this sense, migrants’ languages and identities are inserted into local, nation-
state and supra-state language ‘regimes’ (Kroskrity, 2000), including institutional language
policies and mundane norms and societal monolingual/monoglossic mindsets, which
foster particular standard uses of dominant lingua francas as well as of ‘official’ state
languages as a precondition for accessing citizenship and for attaining ‘proper’ person-
hood legitimacy.
Unsurprisingly, one of the socioeconomically and politically powerful lingua francas
which gets most frequently mobilised (i.e. relocalised, appropriated) by migrants in inter-
cultural encounters is English (Canagarajah, 2013; Pennycook, 2012; Tupas & Rubdy, 2015),
whose global spread and imposition, particularly in former UK and US colonies, has been
widely attested (see, e.g. Fairclough, 2006; Pennycook, 1994, 2007; Phillipson, 1992). In this
sense, most migrants’ multilingual practices are mediated in and through English plurali-
sations, and most transnational identities involve ideological (non)-engagement with
socioeconomically de/valued translocal forms of this language. I refer to these
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM 367

pluralisations of English emanating in migrant identities as ‘unequal Englishes’ (Tupas,

2001, p. 81) in order to problematise the perpetuation of the exclusionary hegemony of
‘inner-circle’ English varieties and of their prestige for those who speak it, stressing the
idea that non-orthodox English forms ‘are all linguistically equal but [that] their political
legitimacies are uneven’ (Tupas & Rubdy, 2015, p. 3). This approach is particularly
helpful for the exploration of the (re)-production of situated forms of social distinction,
difference and, ultimately, inequality among native and non-native English-using
migrants, particularly in contexts of extreme precariousness, in peripheral urban geogra-
phies of twenty-first century Southern European societies such as the one presented
below.

The present study

The aim of this paper is to explore migrants’ ideologies around multilingual practices invol-
ving a diversity of de/valued forms of local/global English and to understand how these
interplay with English-mediated transnational identity management. I do so through the
analysis of three case-study informants consisting of three homeless Ghanaian men
who lived in a public-transport bench in a town called Igualada. This was located an
hour away from Barcelona City, in Catalonia. Catalonia is a bilingual society of about 7.5
million inhabitants (Idescat, 2016) located in North-eastern Spain where a majority
nation-state language, Spanish, coexists with a minority national language, Catalan.1 Con-
cerning foreign languages, Catalonia is officially non-English-speaking: the teaching of
English is relatively new and its use as a lingua franca is scarce, when compared to
other European regions (Eurobarometer, 2012). The methodology employed consisted
of a multi-site ethnography of this small network which included participant observation,
audio-recorded narrative interviews and spontaneous interactions (see below).
The analysis is organised as follows. Firstly, I provide a rationale of the informants’ trans-
linguistic English practices, frequently involving language resources in Ashanti and Arabic.
I then analyse how they positioned themselves with respect to the ideological conceptions
and socioeconomic legitimacies assigned to these various local/global English forms (and
to their speakers) in their resident society, and I show that they shared seemingly ambiva-
lent positionings towards them. I first focus on how informants generally presented them-
selves as speaking ‘small’ or ‘no’ English. I approach this sociolinguistic comportments as
acts of ‘self-decapitalisation’ (Martín-Rojo, 2010); that is, as acts of linguistic delegitimisa-
tion of one’s language resources which embedded what was dismissively constructed
as ‘black English’2 (i.e. postcolonial, ‘outer-circle’ English) into a macro marginalised
migrant identity linked to a stereotyped social image of African foreigners as powerless,
uneducated persons. I then analyse how, and why, on other occasions, informants posi-
tioned themselves as ‘better’ English speakers than locals in town, who tended to foster
dominant prestigious (‘inner-circle’) accents only, and who systematically sanctioned
hybrid, reterritorialised English varieties, with a monolingual/monoglossic mindset. I
show that they did so in acts of linguistic self-capitalisation or self-legitimisation
whereby they vindicated their ‘native speakerhood’ condition and claimed ‘ownership’
of the language, constitutive of a distinctive identity which included literate, cosmopolitan
‘Ghanaianness,’ in the same discursive space. In the last part of the analysis, I argue, first,
that migrants sought to attain a certain degree of social agency (i.e. an authoritative voice,
368 M. SABATÉ-DALMAU

or linguistic empowerment; see Giddens, 1984) by demarcating their bench as a Ghanaian

space through the use of Ashanti in combination with translinguistic English, in front of
other non-English-speaking migrants with whom they competed for transnational
resources (like job opportunities in the informal economy or food). In this sense, I try to
focus on ideologies on pluralised English forms in situated communicative events which
are meaningful and relevant for the informants themselves. I claim that this highlights
the importance of approaching ideologies of language practices involving Englishes
from a participant-oriented perspective, understanding individuals as key actors in
social contestation and change (Pujolar & O’Rourke, 2016).
I conclude that the informants’ ambivalent attitudes index both ‘linguistic insecurity’
and ‘linguistic affirmation/assertiveness’ (Canagarajah, 2013, p. 4) concerning the use of
English with other migrant networks as well as with local populations (including the
researcher). I suggest that this reveals how migrants voiced, and coped with, the censoring
of their multilingual resources mediated in/through English, in resident societies. I argue
that such devaluation propels the linguistic marginalisation of these populations in ideol-
ogy and in actual practice, particularly their ‘de-languaging’ and ‘de-skilling’ (Allan, 2013,
p. 58), where a command of Spanish as the nation-state language of ‘integration’ is a must
(see BOE, 2015), and where linguistic hybridity and ‘accent’ are penalised (Codó & Garrido,
2014). Overall, the findings contribute to an understanding of how situated forms of socio-
economic differentiation and inequality materialised in the devaluations of non-elite
English varieties ultimately shape, and are shaped by, exclusionary language mindsets
engrained in neoliberal global sociolinguistic orders that regulate who count as ‘proper’
migrant English speakers and citizenship-deserving, transnational Selves.

Context and participants

At the time when this project started, Igualada, the capital of a central Catalan county, had
about 40 thousand inhabitants, 14.7% of whom consisting of foreign residents (the per-
centage of ‘foreigners’ in Catalonia as a whole was then 15.7%). The first largest
migrant group consisted of people born in the African continent (6.49% of the town’s
population), the Ghanaians under study being the second largest subgroup after the Mor-
occans, with 112 people, mostly single men aged between 35–44 (Ajuntament d’Igualada,
2012).
The three informants of this research project, Alfred, Benedito and Paul (pseudonyms)
were, respectively, an English teacher, an accountant, and a schooled cocoa farmer in their
forties who were born in an urban town and two rural villages near Sunyani, the capital of
Brong Ahafo, the second largest province in Ghana (West Africa), characterised by twenty-
first century mass emigration (Pierre, 2012). Between 2000–2001, escaping from violence
among Muslims in their region (as detailed in Tsikata & Seini, 2004, p. 26), and trying to
protect their transnational family income and find better employment chances in
Europe, informants moved to Southern Spain and started working in agriculture. During
that period, their mobility trajectories included frequent visits to their relatives in Ghana
and in other parts of Europe (like Italy and the Netherlands). Later on, the three moved
to Catalonia, pursuing socioeconomic improvement, informed by other Ghanaian acquain-
tances which had followed similar mobility paths. Benedito and Paul settled in Barcelona
City, and Alfred moved to Lleida (Northern Catalonia) to pick fruit. They reported having
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM 369

had a difficult time in these places, for which, between 2004 and 2007, they decided to
move to a smaller yet well-connected town where they expected to work in the industry
sector. Igualada was their choice because it then was one of the biggest textile industries
in Catalonia and the first tanning market of the Iberian Peninsula (Ajuntament d’Igualada,
2013). The three met there for the first time. Alfred started working in a tannery; Benedito,
in the biggest foundry; and Paul, in the construction sector, and they all obtained a tem-
porary residence visa.
In 2010, Igualada was struck by the Spanish economic recession, linked to an economic
crisis of global reach. As a consequence of this, the leather and tanning industry collapsed,
and the region experienced the highest percentage of employment loss in Catalonia as a
whole, the most affected by it being foreign labour workers, whose unemployment rate
reached 37.1% (Galí Izard & Vallès, 2010) – when in Catalonia as a whole it was 22% (Comis-
sió Obrera, 2011, p. 16). Informants became unemployed and started working in the infor-
mal economy, selling scrap from garbage containers, and begging in the car park of a
peripheral supermarket, while they kept in touch with the temporary-work agencies
with which they had previously found employment. None of them was receiving any
severance pay at the time of the fieldwork. Cáritas, the official confederation of charities
of the Spanish Catholic Church, provided them with washroom facilities, food and
clothes. Their transnational mobilities had become very limited (none of them had
visited Ghana since 2008), because with their non-permanent visas they could no
longer travel freely to other parts of Europe. By the end of the fieldwork, they could not
pay for a shared rented room anymore and became totally unsheltered. Then, they
decided to take refuge on the bench of an open-air public transport area located on
the outskirts (in front of the supermarket and the car park aforementioned), where they
lived under precarious conditions (they developed serious stomach, lung and heart pro-
blems). This bench became their ‘public in private’ socialisation place – their space of
‘meetingness’ (Urry, 2007, p. 68).

Methods and data

The data was gathered by means of a 6-month multi-site network ethnography of the
small Ghanaian network under study (I went into the field at least three times a week
during different times of the day from July 2012 to January 2013, and then, intermittently,
until November 2014). This consisted of active participant observation of the informants
on their bench and of several ‘co-ethnographic visits’ (Convey & O’Brien, 2012, p. 339)
to the particular socialisation places in Igualada that they mentioned at different stages
of the fieldwork, all located at a 20-/30-minute walk from one another (these places
included, e.g. the mosque, Cáritas office and the temporary-work agencies). My objective
in embedding this mobile ethnography into the spaces that were made salient by infor-
mants was to turn the research into an informant-oriented project, which further
helped me to establish rapport with them (for the details on this methodology see
[author]).
Access was granted after I had been observing the informants for a year, on my way to
the bus station, where we could have short conversations, too. I introduced myself as a
Catalan English ‘teacher’ wanting to investigate migrants’ languages in town, and I
always told them what I wanted to know and why. They were totally unimpressed by
370 M. SABATÉ-DALMAU

the university certificates with the project information, and fruitful cooperation, followed
by verbal informed consent to participate in the study, was not granted until they were
convinced – and saw – that I did not work for the town hall or for any NGO, because
they feared both.3
Since I had no command of any African languages, I introduced myself in Catalan, and
then in English and in Spanish, too. I chose Catalan following the idea that not addressing
migrants in the local language was an exclusionary ‘Othering practice’ (Barth, 1969) that
prevented them from learning the language which opened the doors to the local
economy, and which indexed membership and belonging to Igualada. This was a
marked sociolinguistic comportment, for it has been attested that local populations
switch from Catalan to Spanish automatically when addressing ‘foreigners’, and that
migrants, at the same time, expect locals not to use ‘their’ code with them (but to
employ Spanish instead), fostering a complex Catalan/non-Catalan ethnolinguistic bound-
ary (see Woolard, 2006). For all these reasons, the informants associated my choice of
Catalan with a ‘Catalan’ ethnolinguistic identity.
The fact that I made frequent use of English was considered a marked sociolinguistic
comportment, too. This was so because local people are expected not to command
English ‘well enough’ so as to use it as a lingua franca with foreigners – as outlined
above, the common language to be used between locals and migrants is Spanish, con-
ceived of as the ‘language of integration’ indexing a ‘right to naturalisation’ and ‘proper
citizenship behaviour’ (Pujolar, 2007). I believe that the choice of English worked to my
favour in that (1) it allowed the researcher and the researched to have a distinct ‘we-
code’ with which to interact (as opposed to what happened with the Moroccan popu-
lations, for instance, with whom I used local languages only) and that (2) it gave them a
voice as legitimate English speakers who could tell their story in non-standard Englishes.
The data collection process was as follows. Over six months, I recorded narrative inter-
views, here understood as negotiated, reflective and transformative communicative
events (De Fina & Perrino, 2011), on the following intertwined narrative themes: (1) geo-
graphic im/mobility; (2) un/employment, up/downward economic mobility and pro-
fessional stagnation; (3) non-legality statuses and (non)- citizenship rights; (4) social
relationships and identity ascriptions among themselves and with other migrants and
(5) de/legitimised multilingual resources. I asked them to conduct these interviews in
their preferred languages, which in the end consisted of English and Spanish, with exten-
sive code-switching, as seen in the analysis.
Finally, the data also comprised a series of spontaneous interactions (mostly salutations
and chitchat) between the informants and other migrant men from Senegal, Morocco and
Kashmir, which took place in Spanish, English, Arabic and/or Ashanti (all recordings lasted
for about 145 min), as well as archival documents, reports and visual materials such as
hand-written notes. For the purposes of this paper, I chose to analyse five excerpts broach-
ing narrative themes (4) and (5). These excerpts were selected on the basis of their use for
the aims of this paper, which consisted of: (a) illustrating ideologies on multilingual reper-
toires and translinguistic practices involving non-elite Englishes, and (b) exploring narra-
tives broadly concerning English-mediated transnational identity as linked to situations
of social categorisation, difference and inequality (I provide an analysis of the other narra-
tive themes in [author]).
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM 371

Analysis: Ghanaians’ transnational identities and unequal Englishes at

play
In this section, I first offer a brief description of the multilingual resources into which infor-
mants’ local/global English forms got inserted and materialised in actual practice. I then
analyse the attitudes that they displayed towards them when they explicitly delegitimised
non-orthodox English forms in public, on the bench. I argue that these intertwined with
presentations of the Self which drew on, and relocalised, a circulating pan-African identity
(a well-known ‘macro’ social categorisation of the ‘black foreigner’), on the peripheries of
Catalan urban towns. Finally, I analyse acts of linguistic self-empowerment whereby, by
contrast, informants legitimised their English and make prevail their ‘native speakerhood’
condition in this language to present themselves as ‘better’ English users than locals and
other migrants, which triggered the self-ascriptions of transnational identities revolving
around modern ‘Ghanaianness.’ .

Non-standard multilingualism resources interplaying with devalued Englishes

Concerning multilingual repertoires mediated through various English varieties, Alfred,
Benedito and Paul employed the most prestigious and the most widely spoken
variety of what in 1950 was labelled as ‘the Akan language’ (Bodomo, 1996; Kropp
Dakubu, 2015 [1988]), Ashanti, used as a lingua franca among themselves – they
also commanded other Ghanaian languages and many of the other eight Akan
language forms, such as Akyem.4 Ashanti was of crucial importance on the bench,
since it demarcated that zone as a ‘Ghanaian’ space which welcomed and provided
resources for transnational subsistence to ‘the other blacks’ (as informants called
them). The Senegalese and Nigerian men who came by the bench to access food,
cigarettes and advice on legality issues, for instance, greeted informants with the
Ashanti salutation ‘bone nnim’ (literally, ‘no problem’), before having their conversa-
tions in Spanish (with the former) and in English (with the latter), showing deference
towards them.
Some Arabic was also used in an intra-group manner by informants, too, to show
respect to Paul, a practicing Muslim, whom Alfred and Benedito, non-practicing Chris-
tians, always greeted with the salutation ‘As-salam alaikum’ (‘peace be with you’). Arabic
was simultaneously mobilised in an inter-group manner, but very differently, as a site of
struggle whereby to negotiate competitions of linguistic legitimacies. These uncovered
rivalling relationships across migrant groups, particularly between Ghanaians and Mor-
occans, who kept presenting themselves as ‘less advantaged’ and ‘more in need’ than
‘the others’, when they talked about access to Cáritas’ resources. An example of this
was provided to me by informant Paul and his ‘acquaintance’ Abdelmahid from
Morocco, who always used the nickname ‘A’azi’ to call each other – their conversations
then followed in Spanish. This term of reference is a racist Arabic slur equivalent to
‘nigger’, here used ambiguously and with laughter, as a way to manage social
tension between both migrant groups (for language-mediated conflictual relationships
see [author]).
Against common thought, informants did know about, and understood, the Catalan
language, despite the fact that they claimed not to be ‘competent enough’ in it, as
372 M. SABATÉ-DALMAU

observed in audio-recorded comments such as: ‘If you speak yes it’s [ok] but I can’t reply
you in catalán (‘Catalan’)’ (made by Paul). They made reference to Catalan particularly
when displaying their knowledge about the language and identity dynamics and the
sociopolitical situation of Catalonia within Spain, in front of the ‘Catalan’ researcher (for
example, when talking about the non-binding pro-independence referendum in Catalonia
held in 2014).
Following an ‘integration through state language’ monolingual ideology, informants
mostly used Spanish with local populations and with non-English-speaking migrants.
They presented it in interviews as the (only) legitimate language of reterritorialisation,
to the extent that it got inserted in the English talk mediating their interactions, as
seen, e.g. in audio-recorded statements dealing with work and legality issues, such as:
‘In the almacén (‘warehouse’) you inside room big big big big room; it’s a fábrica
(‘factory’)’ (taken from Paul).
The Spanish language was also a barometer of ‘integration’ to be used among infor-
mants themselves and with other migrants in linguistic competitions whose aim was to
see who was recognised as a law-abiding, compliant transnational Self. Paul, for
instance, insisted that Malians in Igualada spoke ‘little little Spanish’ and presented
himself as ‘more enculturated’ and experienced than them. In this sense, informants
participated in, and actually reproduced, the sociolinguistic regime of normalcy con-
cerning ‘integration’ to which they were subjected in Spain, which fostered the ideo-
logical construction and actual use of monolingual Spanish (and sanctioned hybrid
multilingualism) as the resource to gain access to citizenship status and, ultimately,
to citizenship rights.

Self-delegitimisation acts and postcolonial pan-Africanism

The latest official statistics report that the percentage of Ghanaians aged 15 or more who
can read and write is 76.6%, a literacy rate between 10 and 35 points higher than that of
Ghana’s three neighbouring countries (CIA, 2016). This is due, in part, to the introduction of
the policy Free and Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE), passed in 1995, which
made Ghana’s educational system one of the most successful systems in Sub-Saharan
Africa (Akyeampong, 2009). The vast majority of Ghanaians, particularly in Brong Ahafo,
speak English (called ‘Ghanaian English’ or GhE), since this is the only language of
formal education beyond the first three years of primary school (conducted in Ashanti)
and the only official language at a national level.
The informants who participated in this study were all schooled and read and
wrote in English – one of them, Alfred, was a primary school English teacher
before migrating. This was a very important lingua franca for inter-group communi-
cation; for example, in intercultural encounters with Pakistani acquaintances. And
yet, the first time I asked the informants about their multilingual resources, they insis-
tently downplayed and dismissed their command of English, as shown in Excerpt 1
below.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM 373

(1) Speaking ‘small’ or ‘no English’.

@Location: 20 July 2012. Bench. Igualada.

@Bck: Paul (PAU) presents himself first as a non-speaker and then as a non-fully
competent speaker of English in front of the researcher (RES).
1 *RES: so how many languages do you speak?
%com: Paul laughs.
→ 2 *PAU: no me I don’t speak English.
%com: Paul laughs.
3 *RES: you don’t speak English?
→ 4 *PAU: I no speak English # <why are you > [?].
→ 5 *RES: +^ did you go to school in Ghana?
6 *PAU: why are you saying that?
7 *RES: because I heard you speak English.
→ 8 *PAU: I speak small small.

In Excerpt 1, Paul, the cocoa farmer, presents himself as speaking ‘no English’ (lines 2
and 4). My first reaction was of surprise, because it was apparent that we were actually
conversing in this language, in that interview. After my interruption with an overlap in
line 5, he clarifies this and, in a paraphrase, explains that he speaks ‘small English’ (line
8) – note that the ‘lack’ of command of English was interactionally emphasised with the
repetition of ‘no’ or ‘small’ before providing a list of languages that he did speak, in
order to answer the researcher’s question concerning his multilingual repertoire. I under-
stand this as a public act of self-delegitimisation of one’s linguistic resources in English,
constitutive of a further process of a presentation of the Self which included self-delangua-
ging, on the part of Paul, in this case.
I argue that Paul’s attitude may be tied to a dominant language ideology which con-
ceives of Englishes that are not monoglossic ‘inner-circle’ varieties like GhE as faulty and
non-complete. This social construction of GhE as a non-fully-fledged code is deeply
rooted and widespread not only in society at large but also in some applied linguistics
circles where it gets defined as ‘broken English’ and ‘pidgin English’, reinforcing the
idea that it is a primitive/basic type of English (see, e.g. the language labels employed
in the reference guidebook The Languages of Ghana by Kropp Dakubu, 2015 [1988]),
despite the fact that sound evidence has long been provided that postcolonial Englishes
are totally functional, legitimate codes (see, e.g. Kachru, 2006, pp. 247–250).
I suggest that Paul’s presentation of the Self as having scarce or no English resources
interplays with the migrants’ use of the self-ascription of a broad social categorisation
of African foreigners in Europe as docile, marginalised and victimised personas in need
of Western ‘resocialisation’ and schooling (for more examples of this media-sponsored
‘macro’ identity see Codó & Garrido, 2014; Sabaté i Dalmau, 2014). The apparent embodi-
ment of this identity (which does not imply internalisation of English-language non-own-
ership, as shown below) may be read as this network’s complaints against social
disadvantage and linguistic marginalisation, issued in public in front of a local, advantaged
researcher. The linguistic marginalisation Paul was complaining about was observed, for
instance, when his English résumé was translated into Catalan by work-agency employees
who were mistrustful of the authorship of such document (and, therefore, of Paul’s literacy
resources).
374 M. SABATÉ-DALMAU

On other occasions, though, this simplistic image of the African migrant, which draws
on Africa’s past colonial heritage and present-day oppression, is taken up by the same
informants to vindicate a proud sentiment of shared ‘pan-Africanism’ – a complex multi-
valued construct encompassing the idea of a ‘broader African people’ (Lake, 1995, pp. 21–
22) stereotyped as ‘underdeveloped’ but as being more ‘honest’ and ‘humane’ than ‘Eur-
opeans’. I suggest that pan-Africanism, among these particular informants, revolves
around the mobilisation of two traits, ‘blackness’ and ‘Englishness,’ as seen in Excerpt 2.

(2) Pan-Africanism: Blackness and Englishness.

@Location: 18 July 2012. Bench. Igualada.

@Bck: The researcher (RES) asks Alfred (ALF) and Paul (PAU) whether they know
George, a Nigerian person who she mistakenly believes is from Ghana.
Informants attribute George a pan-African identity on the grounds of his
‘blackness’ and ‘Englishness.’
→ 1 *RES: I know a locutorio a guy from Ghana -, George.
%com: Locutorio means ‘cybercafé’ in Spanish.
→ 2 *ALF: George is from Nigeria is a Nigerian.
→ 3 *RES: ah I thought he was from Ghana!
→ 4 *ALF: <no:> [<].
→ 5 *PAU: <Nigeria>[>].
[…]
6 *RES: how did you know him?
→ 7 *ALF: <ah> [!] [>].
→ 8 *PAU: <he’s a black> [!] [<].
→ 9 *ALF: +^ he’s a black.
10 *RES: he is a black?
11 *PAU: yeah.
→ 12 *ALF: we all speak English in Nigeria they speak English.
13 *RES: in Nigeria they speak English.
→ 14 *ALF: yes.

The interview in Excerpt 2 was conducted when I was trying to find more Ghanaian
informants for the study. In line 1, I tell Alfred about George, a cybercafé worker whom,
I mistakenly believed, was from Ghana (line 3). Paul and Alfred together present George
as a Nigerian (lines 2, 4 and 5), and I was very surprised that they knew and talked
about him with such a degree of familiarity, since his cybercafé was located in the town
centre, at a 20-minute walk (besides, I never saw George near the Ghanaians’ bench). Infor-
mants were surprised, at the same time, that I asked such a question: For them it was
obvious that they knew the members of the network of ‘blacks’ in town, as seen by
Alfred’s emphatic expression of astonishment ‘ah!’ (in line 7), which overlaps with Paul’s
explanation that they indeed knew George and that they conceived of him as ‘African’
because of a physical trait that they shared: his black skin complexion (line 8). Note
that, in doing so, he self-attributes an ‘insider knowledge’ about Africans in Igualada.
Paul is supported by Alfred, who repeats the same argument, in another overlap (in line
9). Alfred later provides yet another reason why they knew about George. He explains
that Ghanaians and Nigerians are both English speakers, on having been born in countries
where this is the only official language, appropriating an ‘Englishness’ trait concerning
language choice (in lines 12 and 14). This is also constitutive of the sort of pan-Africanism
which informants presented under an umbrella social category that they constructed as
‘we the blacks’ (see [author]). As we shall see, this connects with the communicative
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM 375

events where they drew on their ‘Englishness’ and, in this case, spoke proudly about their
English resources, as presented below.

Self-legitimisation acts and modern ‘Ghanaianness’

As outlined before, on other occasions informants presented themselves as fully-fledged
English speakers, drawing on nativists conceptions of the language whereby they made
prevail their ‘native’ speakerhood condition and ‘ownership’ of the language (GhE, in
this case) not only to interactionally construct themselves as linguistically competent mul-
tilingual personas but also to position themselves as better English-language users than
local populations, as illustrated in Excerpt 3.

(3) Dispossessing local populations of ‘Englishness.’

@Location: 18 July 2012. Bench. Igualada.

@Bck: With the help of Paul (PAU), Alfred (ALF) presents himself as a legitimate
English speaker, constructing, in turn, locals as having no (or scarce) command of
the language, in a self-capitalisation act, in front of the researcher (RES).
→ 1 *ALF: <I visit> [//] I visited the Holland.
2 *RES: Holland?
3 *ALF: yes!
→ 4 *RES: the language is difficult there?
→ 5 *ALF: no difficult they speak good English # Holland English.
→ 6 *RES: and in here do they speak English?
→ 7 *ALF: the people here they are not.
→ 8 *PAU: +^ small [//] < small English> [>].
→ 9 *ALF: <no> [<].
→ 10 *ALF: no only a few people.
11 *RES: only a few people.
→ 12 *ALF: only a few people speak English only few only.

In Excerpt 3, Alfred, the English teacher, presented his mobility trajectories, which
included visits to Holland (line 1). I inquire about the language that he used there and
about whether he found it ‘difficult’ (line 4), thinking that maybe Dutch had become
part of his multilingual resources. He replies, though, that people in Holland spoke
‘good English,’ actually equating ‘Holland’ to this lingua franca, ‘English’ (in line 5). I
then ask about the use of English in Igualada by local populations (line 6), to which
Alfred replies that they do not speak it (lines 7 and 9). Paul, the cocoa farmer who had pre-
viously presented himself as having ‘no’ or ‘scare’ English resources (see Excerpt 1),
answers, in an overlap, that people in town speak ‘small English’ (line 8), indirectly posi-
tioning himself as a ‘better’ English speaker than them, in this interaction. Alfred finishes
the conversation by clarifying, again via repetition, that what they meant is that just a few
locals have a command of this language (lines 10 and 12).5
I claim that on having been given a legitimate voice to assess the locals’ multilingual
resources, these two informants gained a degree of linguistic legitimacy and empower-
ment. On the one hand, they conduct an act of self-legitimisation whereby they indirectly
present themselves as competent English speakers; on the other hand, they dispossess
locals of their ‘Englishness’ with authoritative voice.
Similarly, informants tended to assume that English should be the lingua franca among
migrants (along with Spanish). They presented other African migrants as non-English
376 M. SABATÉ-DALMAU

speakers, too, and they saw this, literally, as a ‘problem’ for intercultural communication
and socialisation, as shown in Excerpt 4 (lines 1 and 5), where Paul indirectly constructs
himself as more enculturated or linguistically equipped than Malians and Senegalese
migrants (line 3) (again, his claims here stand in opposition to his presentation of the
Self as having none or scarce English resources, in Excerpt 1).
(4) Dispossessing ‘other’ African migrants of ‘Englishness’.

@Location: 18 July 2012. Bench. Igualada.

@Bck: Paul (PAU) presents ‘other’ African migrants as non-English speakers, which
he conceives of as being a ‘problem’ for inter-group communication.
→ 1 *PAU: and in here em my problem is people don’t speak English here.
2 *RES: this this village?
→ 3 *PAU: <this village> [?] some people speak some like eh Mali Senegal + …
4 *RES: Mali Senegal + …
→ 5 *PAU: they cannot speak English they speak French.

I argue that the informants’ linguistic self-empowerment interplays with a projected

social category tied to a proud sentiment of ‘Ghanaianness.’ This is an identity constitutive
of modernity and Westernness that counteracts stereotypes pejoratively associated to Gha-
naian migrants which include socioeconomic stagnation, rurality, illiteracy and cultural
backwardness (see Pierre, 2012). In other words, linguistic legitimisation acts and modern
Ghanaian identities are both mobilised to fight the image of the marginalised African
foreigner presented in the section above. In the particular context under analysis, this
self-ascribed social categorisation revolved first and foremost around the educational
system of their country, as seen, for instance, when informants listed the world-ranked Gha-
naian universities in front of the researcher, an example of which is provided in Excerpt 5.

(5) ‘Ghanaianness’: Educational leadership and modernity.

@Location: 20 July 2012. Bench. Igualada.

@Bck: Benedito (BEN) had provided a list of Ghanaian universities to the researcher
(RES) and was now focusing on the University of Science and Technology,
emphasising Ghana’s international leadership in higher education.
→ 1 *BEN: in Kumasi we call it Tec.
2 *RES: vale.
%tra: ok.
→ 3 *BEN: we call it Tec # if you reach (?) Accra ask anybody about Tec and they all know
4 about Tec.
5 *RES: about university.
→ 6 *BEN: because all Africa + …
7 *RES: aha.
→ 8 *BEN: they used to even sometimes the Europeans come to Ghana to study in thi:s eh
9 university.
10 *RES: of course aha.
→ 11 *BEN: Europeans -. and eh we have the General University # iu es ti in Kumasi.
%com: Writes U. S. T. for the researcher on an envelope.
12 *ALF: University of Science and Technology.
13 *BEN: University.
14 *RES: Science and Technology.
→ 15 *BEN: in Ghana!
→ 16 *ALF: in Ghana!
→ 17 *BEN: the who:le the who:le Europe used to come there to study ui es ti.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM 377

In Excerpt 5, Benedito, the accountant, starts talking about the Kwame Nkrumah Univer-
sity of Science and Technology (KNUST, or Tec) in Kumasi (lines 1, 3 and 4). He emphasises
its reputation in Ghana (‘ask anyone’; ‘they all know’; lines 3-4) and its importance for the
continent (with the expression ‘all Africa,’ in line 6). Benedito’s construction of Ghana as
having attained educational leadership worldwide is also observed when he more expli-
citly emphasises the international character of this university, mentioning that ‘the Eur-
opeans’ (lines 8 and 11) – ‘the whole Europe’ (line 17) – studied there. Benedito does so
by displaying his literacy practices. He took an envelope and wrote down the university
acronym on it, despite the fact that the researcher had already done so in her fieldnotes,
reinforcing his presentation of the Self as a schooled, cultivated persona, as part of the lin-
guistic self-legitimisation acts that he conducted in public (he had told me that because of
his homeless condition some local populations believed he could neither read nor write).
This construction of Ghana as having attained global educational prestige is, once
again, interactionally achieved by means of repetitions (see, e.g. the emphasis placed in
repeating the name of the country, both by Benedito and Alfred, in lines 15 and 16).
Besides, during the time of the fieldwork, ‘Ghanaianness’ was reinforced by the informants’
mobilisation of key information about Ghana’s importance in the international arena, such
as the fact that it was the first sub-Saharan country to gain political independence from the
UK; that the former Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi A. Annan was born there
(and studied at KNUST, as they noted later on in our interview), all aimed at situating this
country in the global map.

Conclusions: unequal Englishes and linguistic marginalisation

materialised in ‘English standardness’ ideologies
In this paper, I have explored linguistic ideologies concerning the English-mediated multilin-
gual repertoires of a network of three Ghanaian migrants and the ways in which these inter-
play with their transnational identity management, in a peripheral urban zone of a non-
English-speaking bilingual society in southern Europe. I have done so from an informant-
oriented perspective which has put participants’ self-reflexivity concerning their linguistic
resources and communication acts at the forefront of a socially-engaged critical analysis. I
have focused on their positionings towards their translinguistic practices involving English
pluralisations as well as local and allochtonous codes in order to problematise essentialising
constructions of languages as homogeneous bounded units ‘belonging’ to a particular
fixed ethnicity (and territorial polity). In particular, I have focused on how the informants’
English forms challenge ‘outer’-‘inner-circle’ English-language dichotomies and de/legitimisa-
tions. I have shown that migrants’ socialisation processes and ‘integration’ practices today are
conducted through these counterhegemonic complex amalgamations of linguistic codes,
though in ways that are subjected to, and in the end, get modulated or regulated by, local,
nation-state and supra-state neoliberal language ideologies and dominant sociolinguistic nor-
mativities. I have argued that migrants’ intercultural encounters take place through English
varieties which constitute non-standard multilingua francas for socialisation across and
beyond social networks, in public-transport benches which have become underexplored
migrant-regulated spaces of silenced multilingualisms. These hybrid forms provide an under-
standing of the social meanings of non-elite languages which are frequently backgrounded
but which are core in English-mediated multilingual practice, such as, for example, Ashanti,
378 M. SABATÉ-DALMAU

crucial, here, for migrants’ gatekeeping and access to transnational subsistence resources (e.g.
food, information and communication technology).
The analysis of the informants’ discourses towards their own and the others’ Englishes
has provided an account for the ambivalent positionings that they show towards them. I
have claimed that their gliding through acts of linguistic de/legitimisation in English
indexes both linguistic assertiveness and insecurity, revealing how migrants voice, and
cope with, the devaluing of their English-mediated non-standard varieties by other local
migrant groups and by society at large (including institutions such as bureaucratic
offices, NGOs or temporary-work agencies). I have called this devaluation linguistic mar-
ginalisation, and I have argued that these contradictory sociolinguistic comportments
speak of these migrants’ frequent de-languaging and de-skilling, which occurred not
only when they were not conceived of as workforce for the tertiarised new economy
but when they were positioned as non-schooled, ‘illiterate’ manual labourers who
should command Spanish as the nation-state, locally legitimised, language (one of the
informant’s credentials as an English teacher, for instance, were totally ignored).
The self-legitimisation acts whereby they counteract linguistic marginalisation sheds light
on the informants’ degree of linguistic authority and social agency, as observed, for instance,
when they defined what counts as legitimate ways of speaking and of being in the bench in
linguistic competitions with other rivalling migrant networks; particularly, their use and vindi-
cation of the appropriateness of their ‘outer-circle’ English forms. These forms, however, repro-
duce traditional nativist conceptions of the language, since they are grounded on ‘native
speakerhood’ constructions of linguistic codes and, thereby, in fact follow classic nation-
state regimes of thought concerning (territorial, ethnolinguistic) ‘ownerships’ of languages.
When it comes to identities, migrants sometimes appropriated presentations of the Self
such as the pauperised African migrant based on paternalistic conceptions of displaced
migration from the ‘underdeveloped’ south. However, they also simultaneously inhabited
pan-African social categorisations and cosmopolitan ‘Ghanaianness’ identities linked to
‘blackness’ and ‘Englishness,’ as well as to modernity, mobility experience, world knowl-
edge and education.
Overall, this shows that situated forms of social distinction, difference and inequality
among migrants living under precarious life conditions are entrenched in language
(Piller, 2016). More specifically, it demonstrates that situations of marginalisation are
linked to the censorship of transnational populations’ non-standard practices and fluid
identity enactments involving reterritorialised English forms. This allows us to better
understand the degree to which unequal Englishes shape, and are shaped by, exclusionary
sociolinguistic regimes of mind and hegemonic local and global ideologies linked to the
racialising language policies and geopolitical orders which today dictate who count as
legitimate English speakers and, ultimately, as citizenship-deserving Selves, in the resident
societies of the twenty-first century.

Notes
1. Catalan is a minority language in the sense that it has been historically, socioeconomically and
politically ‘minorised’ (see Bastardas, 1996) – today, for instance, it is not official in the Euro-
pean Union.
2. Inverted commas denote emic social categorisations.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM 379

3. The confidentiality of the data as well as the protection of the informants’ identities were
ensured by the Ethics Committee at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (file number
1818, 2012).
4. In Ghana, only ‘dialects’ have a name. The terms for African languages are modern inventions
to meet the standards of Western variationist approaches to describe the linguistic codes of
that area. The Akan language group belongs to the Volta Comoé languages, classified under
three smaller clusters of ‘dialects’, all considered ‘national’, Ashanti belonging to the Central
Comoé cluster (Kropp Dakubu, 2015 [1988]).
5. Reports suggest that Catalans have a ‘medium’/ intermediate level of English, higher than the
proficiency levels attributed to Italy and France, though lower than those of Northern Euro-
pean countries (EFSET, 2016).

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank informants for having participated in this study. I also benefited from the com-
ments and insightful feedback provided by Beatriz Lorente and Ruanni Tupas, organisers of a panel
entitled ‘Unequal Englishes and political economies of globalisation’ at the 9th English as a Lingua
Franca congress (held in Lleida, 27–29 June 2016). Many thanks, too, to the other panellist. Any short-
comings are, of course, mine.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness; under
Grants FFI2016-76383-P and FFI2011-26964; and the Catalan Ministry of Economy and Knowledge
under Grant 2014 SGR 1061.

ORCID
Maria Sabaté-Dalmau http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6058-7227

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Appendix: Transcription system

Language coding
Plain: English.
Italics: Spanish.
Underlined: Catalan.

Transcription conventions
@Bck Background information of the participants, context and topic
%com Comment; contextual information about the previous utterance
%tra: Free translation of the turn for languages other than English
+^ quick uptake or latching
# pause
[>] overlap follows
[<] overlap precedes
[//] reformulation
<> scope
: lengthened vowel

Intonation contours
. end-of-turn falling contour
? end-of-turn rising contour
! end-of-turn exclamation contour
-,. end-of-turn fall–rise contour
-. intra-turn falling contour
-, intra-turn fall–rise contour