Le "frañol" des immigrés espagnols dans les départements de l’Hérault, du Gard et des Bouches-du-Rhône dans les années 1960analyse et perspectives

Resumen

The purpose of this interdisciplinary research—which lies at the crossroads of migrations ethnography, anthropology, and, through ethnosociolinguistics, of language sciences—is to draw up the linguistic framework of hundreds of people who emigrated together from Lorca’s ‘Pedanías Altas’ and settled in Hérault, Gard and Bouches-du-Rhône French departments in the 1960s. By frequently settling in isolated places where they already knew a relative or a friend, most of this wave of people from Lorca formed Spanish communities in which language and culture were transposed far away from their hometown. The fact that several Spanish of the above-mentioned group learnt little or no French may be explained by means of a context of both ethnic and linguistic ghettoization in farming domains located in the vicinity of Southern French towns, as well as by the lack of linguistic training among other factors. Others contributed to a ‘migrants’ interlanguage’, Lorquinos ‘Frañol’, whose hybrid features acted as an identity display. When they were too young to work at their arrival in France but their legal status was in order, children were generally educated in French at school. Schools lacked differentiated structures adapted to newcomers at the time. Those young children of migrants spoke French just as their native classmates. Therefore, they were bilinguals within homes in which French language was seldom used. As regards adults, that is workers who did not speak French or used their interlanguage, several L2 acquisition related approaches may be questioned in order to frame a diagnosis of the lack of host country’s language learning or its fossilization during the learning phase. Thus, this research focuses on four possible L2 acquisition related approaches: neurophysiology, communicational, ethnolinguistic and psycholinguistic. Depending on the chosen approach, facts that are connected with one group or its members are to be observed. In view of the multiplicity of approaches and factors here analysed, the lack of L2 learning may be related to one single component or to several concomitant factors. What is more, one is to answer too whether the uniformity of one single diagnosis is transposable to the group of individuals who were adults during the vast migration that left Lorca to settle in South-eastern France. Last but not least, 14 interviews in which 16 informants took part in France and also in Spain were recorded during the ethnosociolinguistic fieldwork phase. First-hand information, which was gathered through life history that progressively shifted towards the semi-structured method, enables to make diagnoses. The other concern filmed in those interviews is related to the constitution of a ‘Frañol’ corpus whose originality lies in its bilingualism as well as in the presence of some of its very own hybrid forms. The total amount of audio-visual material that was gathered provides the collective memory of the 1960s great Lorquinos migration wave in France. Apart from materializing such memory, the corpus contains precious sociolinguistic and linguistic data that enables to reach this unnoticed community’s linguistic related representations and practices. Indeed, most of migrants from Lorca relocated there during the 1970s and the 1980s, whereas the children and the grandchildren of those who remained in France were fully assimilated and live between acculturation and deculturation that will lead most of those young people to lose any sort of link with Spain.