Crossing or maintaining language boundaries: analyzing languaging and heterogenous language corpora

International audienceI 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 ‘floate’ instead in mid-water. It is particularly obvious in postcolonial contexts (involving for example close language varieties (Migge & Léglise 2013), or a Creole and its lexifier in decreolization contexts (Ledegen 2012)). Then, I will focus on exolingual settings, when speakers of different languages interact and see what happens when they install, cross or maintain, language boundaries. I will show how it relates to issues of power. Interactions in a hospital or a school in French Guiana will be cases in point