The multilingual repertoire of the Haitian community in Chapecó (SC, Brazil): Patterns of linguistic evolution in a South–South migration context

Abstract

This article provides an initial sociolinguistic and structural characterization of the multilingual repertoire of the Haitian migrant community in Chapecó, Santa Catarina, Brazil, based on a corpus of interviews I compiled myself. The focus is primarily on two languages from the repertoire, French and Spanish, which I consider ‘forgotten’ in two senses. First, in a scholarly context, since studies in migration linguistics often pay less attention to languages that are neither the in-group language of the migrant population (in this case, Haitian Creole) nor the main language of the host country (in this case, Portuguese); indeed, French is the official, post-colonial language used by the social elites in the homeland, while Spanish is the language of a first country of migration (the Dominican Republic) for some Haitians before their current migration to Brazil. Second, at the cognitive level, because although these languages are part of the speakers’ experiential baggage, they are seldom actively spoken in the new Brazilian context. Lastly, the article highlights how speakers efficiently utilize the different languages in their repertoire, giving rise to contact-induced linguistic features (which, following traditional criteria, are classified here as the result of transfer or borrowing).

Keywords

• multilingualism
• migrant varieties
• language obsolescence
• haitian creole
• postcolonial french
• borrowing
• lexical aspect
• arbitrary subjects