Effacement ou mise en frontières des langues dans l'interaction : contribution des études créoles

International audienceResearch on language contact or codeswitching mostly assumes bounded languages or repertoires. Most studies presuppose the identification of specific languages in bilingual (sometimes plurilingual) corpora. Similarly, language annotation in corpus linguistics is based on the principle of univocity of items belonging to specific languages. In the last years, in an attempt to avoid referring to bounded languages, a lot of terms have been coined in sociolinguistics or anthropological linguistics-as transidiomatic practices, heteroglossia, polylanguaging, translanguaging, languaging etc. Heterogeneous and hard to classify, multilingual language practices are due to, and at the same time reveal linguistic diversity and the multiplicity of self-identification and positionnings linked to processes of homogeneization and differentiation. In this talk, I will address the notion of language boundaries, constructed both by linguists and by languagers. I will show how ambivalence or a play on boundaries is a common characteristic of languaging in multilingual contexts. I will first show how languagers make use of all kinds of linguistic resources in order to communicate, and how, in endolingual settings (Lüdi 1987), when languagers share more or less the same language(s) background, they sometimes choose ambivalent elements, attributable to various languages or varieties. In doing so, they choose, in a way, not to perform language boundaries but to 'float' instead in mid-water. It is particularly obvious in postcolonial contexts (involving for example close language varieties or a Creole and its lexifier in decreolization contexts). In this field, the contribution from creole studies is high. The use of bivalent elements may be politicized and controversial (Woolard 1998) or may represent a linguistic resource that is strategically marshaled by languagers in their everyday interaction to position themselves, linked to processes of homogeneization and differentiation