Cécile Evers

This paper examines the interlocking nature of corpus policy and cultivation planning through a case study of the Wolof orthography and its changing role in the Senegalese educational landscape. Until recently, local language orthographies have been the purview of a very limited slice of Senegalese society. absent, as they were, from formal education in the post-independence period, Wolof orthographies were practiced only by a small group of leftist Senegalese intellectuals, and later by the informal education movement. I trace how the various orthographies of Wolof (viz., french, indigenous, and standard orthographies of Wolof) have been taken up by (often) unexpected actors new political players, international bodies, and many Senegalese youth and look into what enables orthographies to function as useful tools in the construction of a post-colonial state, particularly one comprising such different social projects for the future.

Based on long-term ethnographic research with youth who were born to North, West, and East African families in northern Marseille, this article explores the common experience of alienation that practicing Muslims from Marseille report as they endeavor to live piously in their hometown, together with the mobility-oriented strategies they have devised to achieve belonging. Following these Muslim-Marseillais young adults longitudinally, it emerges that some relied on physical migration away from France (religiously conceived as hijrah) as a means of remaining pious and finding belonging. Others, meanwhile, navigated towards pious personhood and finding home in ways that still involved movement but transpired within France. Significantly, individuals who have chosen to remain in France carve out pious belonging by engaging in domestic movements to particular places in France, by pursuing occupational mobility, and by making advantageous use of prestigious linguistic registers like Standard French and Modern Standard Arabic. As such, the article suggests that hijrah is but one-and the most transnational-among various kinds of movement to which young Muslim-Marseillais turn as they grapple with discrimination, seek to improve themselves, and ascertain how best to belong.

This article examines the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that a group of youth born in the working-class, culturally Muslim milieu of Marseille’s northern housing projects navigates on a daily basis. A spotlight on their language practices reveals that these youth mix linguistic resources to express a project-centric (quartier) identity, drawing heavily on Marseille’s dialect of French (Marseillais) but also peppering their French with Arabic-sourced linguistic elements. Meanwhile, these young men and women assign a social meaning to this linguistically syncretic register of French that is highly divergent than that given by people from Marseille who are unfamiliar with the projects. That youth understand their speech to reflect their cultural belonging to Marseille, and more specifically their deep identification with the immigration history of the projects, while outsiders to the projects see indicators of foreignness therein, is argued to derive from a tendency for mainstream individuals to focus more readily on the ethnic or cultural minority status of young project residents than on the audible signs through which they point to their local belonging.

This chapter explores the onward migrations being carried out by young Sunni-identified women from Marseille, France, towards their parents’ home countries in North Africa and also the Gulf States. Based on long-term ethnographic research with diasporic youth from Marseille’s northern housing projects, I detail the matrix of circumstances leading highly pious young women, in particular, to depart Marseille in their early twenties. I discuss how social media networks prove essential, furthermore, in both facilitating and justifying these young women’s relocations. Close attention paid to the discursive stances they assume, in person and in their online conversations, shows that these spiritual migrations are underpinned by a reframing of Marseille as a place of exile and of the Muslim World, simultaneously, as the true abode for European Muslims. After linking such stances to circulating religious discourses and illustrating how such discourses play out linguistically, I address some of the practical challenges and social tensions these young women face while planning their migrations.

A B S T R A C T: A moral panic is afoot in contemporary France surrounding what place French-Muslim youth hold within the national identity. The French state, in particular, is actively engaged in regimenting what it means to be a young Muslim person from France. This article examines how, during Marseille's year (2013) as the European Capital of Culture, the municipal government and the local branch of the Ministère de l'Éducation Nationale spearheaded several initiatives, a number of which focused on Arabic-language education, with the aim of transforming French-Muslim youth from Marseille's housing projects into secular, upwardly mobile individuals. Ethnographic inquiry with the youth targeted by such "linguistic gentrification" programs reveals that the state's reimagining of them in these terms remained largely at odds with how they themselves understood their identities. This article, as such, illustrates the analytical importance of attending to people's uptake when evaluating the eventual scope of top-down discourses and projects, while also offering an example of how the label "Mediterranean" functions as a spatiotemporal shifter, deployed by different groups to activate alternative accounts of history, the present, and the future.

This volume explores the reflexive, self-conscious ways in which global youth engage with each other online. Presenters analyze user-generated data from these interactions to show how communication technologies and multilingual resources are deployed to project local as well as translocal orientations. With examples from a range of multilingual settings, the presenters show how youth exploit the creative, heteroglossic potential of their linguistic repertoires, from rudimentary attempts to engage with others in a second language to hybrid multilingual practices.

Since the 1980s, when it became clear that immigrants from France’s ex- colonies were likely to settle with their families in France, the French have repeatedly questioned the cultural compatibility of Muslim immigrants and their descendants with French Republican values. Recent security concerns about Islamic terrorism in Western countries have reinflamed this debate about French Muslims’ “assimilability,” albeit with a novel focus on the cultural affiliations of French Muslim youth, in particular. The French State and politicians are concerned about survey data showing that, even as such youth have acceded to legal citizenship, they nevertheless exhibit a greater adherence to Islamic norms and more numerous transnational links than their parents’ or grandparents’ generations, and may, for these reasons, pose a threat to French sovereignty. This dissertation investigates these top-down claims of French Muslim youth’s unprecedented religiosity and transnationalism, seeking to ethnographically test the veracity of such hypotheses and to offer a more nuanced, historically emplaced account of youth’s cultural identifications and practices.

Based on long-term research with youth ages 13 to 30 who grew up in North, West, and East African Muslim households in Marseille’s northern housing projects, I demonstrate that such youth embody various emic forms of belonging to France, many of which stretch mainstream definitions of what constitutes Frenchness. Through ethnographic observation of these youth while they partook in Arabic classes, spent time with their peers and family, and navigated public space, this work reveals that youth more often perform local cultural belonging than are accorded French cultural citizenship, or the right to be seen and heard as French within the public sphere. I document the forms of alienation from Marseille that youth experience as a result, quite notable among them a gendered reverse migration phenomenon whereby orthodox-identified Muslim young women are planning to leave Marseille for their parents’ home countries and the Gulf States. Two further foci of the dissertation are the role of Arabic language education, both publicly provided and denominational, in shaping youth’s cultural trajectories, and also the analysis of youth’s language practices. I contend that, as diasporic youth draw upon—and play with— standard and non-standard varieties of French and Arabic, they afford the listener unique insight into where they are coming from and where they are headed, or their life-worlds and aspirations.