anyone who can speak English to any degree), but we focus more narrowly on those socialised via English as their first and only language in the home. The term Anglophone can be interpreted broadly (e.g. In this complex language situation, people have varied language skills and views on multilingualism (de Bres 2014). English has high prestige in Luxembourg and is widely believed to be on the rise (de Bres 2017a). Luxembourgish, meanwhile, is increasingly a marker of group membership within the Luxembourgish population (Horner and Weber 2011). As most cross-border workers come from France and French-speaking Belgium, French has become the main lingua franca (Horner and Weber 2011). The presence of migrants has a significant impact on the languages used. In addition, cross-border workers from France, Germany and Belgium accounted for 45% of the workforce (STATEC 2018). This includes historical migration of Italians and Portuguese (the latter comprising 16% of the population), alongside more recent arrivals working in multinational companies and European institutions. People with non-Luxembourgish nationality made up 48% of the resident population of 602,000 at the time of our research (STATEC 2018). The first three have long been widely used, and linguistic diversity continues to increase through high levels of migration. Luxembourg is a small country between France, Belgium and Germany, with four official languages – Luxembourgish, French, German and German sign language. While some research has investigated the language ideologies of migrants to Luxembourg (de Bres 2014 Franziskus 2013) or the sociolinguistic positioning of Anglophone temporary workers (Lovrits and de Bres 2020), our research is the first to our knowledge to focus on the language ideologies of Anglophone migrants who have settled here. In this article we seek to build a fuller view, examining the language ideologies of twelve Anglophone migrants to Luxembourg. They may be constructed as bearers of envied linguistic capital, as bumbling linguistic tourists, or as ‘foreigners’ unwilling to adapt. Fundamentally, though, monolingual cringe reinforces privilege, allowing participants to apologise for their monolingualism even as they continue to benefit from it.Īnglophone migrants 1 in multilingual societies like Luxembourg are generally viewed as occupying a privileged position, given the power attributed to English worldwide (Crystal 2003 Doerr 2009). The affective intensity of the drawings suggests the ideology of global English does have costs for Anglophone migrants. Sometimes it performs a distancing function, enabling them to oppose themselves to the stereotype of the monolingual English speaker. Sometimes it appears to express genuine distress, in the form of searing linguistic insecurity. Sometimes it serves as an affective disclaimer, allowing them to lean on their privilege in a more socially acceptable way. Monolingual cringe – expressed as shame, embarrassment and being ‘bad at languages’ – performs several functions for the participants. Visual features indexing affective states include colour, gesture, facial expression, and composition. Participants adopt various ideologies, sometimes aligning with the ideology of global English, sometimes with counter-ideologies of resistance to it, and sometimes a mix of the two. Analysing twelve interviews in which participants drew and described their language experiences, we examine the language ideologies Anglophone migrants adopt in response to the ideologies of English they encounter. This article uses reflective drawing to explore representations of multilingualism by Anglophone migrants in Luxembourg.
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