Du translingue comme post-monolinguisme. Subvertir le maternali(ngui)sme dominant pour légitimer la minorité spanglish

Abstract

About Translingual as Post-Monolingualism. Subverting the Dominating Mothertongue to Legitimize the Spanglish Minority

The puertorican cultural identity was forged between American colonialism and the previous secular Spanish rule, but now Puerto Rico is a free state associated to the United States. The circular migratory flows between the two territories allowed the consolidation of a consistent Hispanic community in the surroundings of New York, the newyorican one, living at the crossroad between two ethnic groups, two languages. Thus, the prolonged contact of English and Spanish led to the development of a new linguistic code: Spanglish. This transcends the phenomena of bilingualism, diglossia and code-switching, placing the speakers in a linguistic continuum and eluding the notions of mother tongue and foreign language, dominant and minor language. Starting from the subversion of the concept of mother tongue, this essay explores the discursive and linguistic strategies by which the Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi in her "Yo-Yo Boing"! legitimates Spanglish. If mother tongue shapes the ontological identity from birth, language fluid contributes to the deconstruction of language as identity belonging. Language is a liquid object: polyphonic, dialogic and conative because it addresses to recipient, its arbitrariness makes it polyhedral and it is a representation of the multiple facets of identity. Our research, dealing with the geopolitical frictional context of the borderland between United States and Latin America, problematizes the location of a non-canonised literature employing linguistic hybridity as a marker of dominant identity. In fact, in-between linguistic politics is not bilingual, but translingual; it posits a post-national and post-conflictual ideology and transculture's linguistic porosity makes monolingualism obsolete, affirming translingualism as post-monolingualism. Post-monolingual being is the one who has freed himself from dependence on the "langue" making the "parole" the means of expression of his logos. Hybridity allows to make the dominant the dominated, that is why Giannina Braschi writes in her foreign language and not in her mother tongue, she writes in minor language in order to promote it, dominant language becomes the dominated one.