Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses how the analytical tool of “register” (Agha, 2007) can be leveraged to understand “translingual” and syncretic language phenomena. Using ethnographic data from a Sunni mosque in the Northeastern U.S., I illustrate how mixed codes are endogenized to particular speaker identities.

Paper long abstract:

Translinguistic approaches (Hill & Hill, 1986; Meeuwis & Blommaert, 1998; Urciuoli, 1996) have traced the systematicity of syncretic language use to a process whereby ongoing reflexive activities link mixed codes to particular speaker identities. I posit that conditions of "superdiversity" in Europe (Blommaert, 2010) as well as in the US, as immigration increases, proliferate opportunities for interlocutors to use languages "punctually" and yet to great pragmatic profit. Set among members of a Sunni mosque in a Northeastern American city, this paper examines the formation of a multilingual prestige register and its negotiation by newer members (with different linguistic repertoires). This ritual space was, until recently, stratified between first-generation Arabs socialized into Standard Arabic and those without native access to varieties of Arabic. Increases in the membership of non-native learners of Arabic—some of whom are now enjoying greater mobility to study in the Arab world, others who experience Standard and varietal Arabic locally—have created a radial distribution of competence in this prestige register across the community. More to less "-onomic" (Silverstein, 2006) use of the register's forms are observable along various dimensions of language: most notably, the quantity and type of Arabic used. Even as competence in the prestige register mediates an interactional hierarchy, shifting demographics invite the register's partially incongruent use by Arabic learners. A creative outcome has been widespread misrecognition of the register's forms; knowingly or unknowingly, the mosque's novices are leading a process of register reanalysis that projects itself in fractal iterations through the ranks.