UC Berkeley

To date, most sociolinguistic research on style has attempted to map patterns of variation at levels of social aggregation that abstract away from the individual. In this dissertation, however, I take the individual as a point of departure, focusing on the ways in which her phenomenal experiences of a sociolinguistic landscape inform the styles that she constructs. To that end, I draw on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted at a social center for Spanish seniors (i.e., people over the age of 62) in Saint-Denis, France. My research sample is comprised of women, aged 62 to 80, who participated in a wave of female migration from Spain to Paris during the 1960s to work in a burgeoning domestic service industry in the capital's most affluent neighborhoods. All of them arrived in France without speaking any French; now, more than 40 years later, they have acquired the language to comparable levels of proficiency, but they make use of their linguistic repertoires in idiosyncratic ways. My project explores the origins and expression of this variation as a means of getting at the idiosyncratic dimension of language acquisition and use.

As conceived in this project, language acquisition entails more than learning grammatical and lexical forms; it also describes the subjective process of becoming multilingual. To understand the mechanics of this process, I conducted comparative case studies of three individuals I observed in the field, juxtaposing discourse analysis of their language use with detailed reconstructions of their biographical trajectories. My analysis shows that, although these women have acquired French under the same social and historical conditions, they have done so in variable ways and to variable ends; they now engage differently in multilingual practices (namely, code-switching and bilingual discourse-marking) as a means of constructing styles that are both socially intelligible and individually marked. Through recourse to poststructuralist sociolinguistic theory, I illustrate how an individual's experience of a sociolinguistic landscape, as well as her perceptions of those experiences, not only inform the social meanings (such as the personae and stances) that she is given to construct, but also the very means through which she constructs meanings. My investigation of style among multilingual subjects underscores the ways in which an individual's memories, experiences and ideological associations, accrued over time, inform the linguistic practices in which she now engages.