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Discriminating an Accent, Enacting a Race (and Vice Versa): Perception and Representation of Phonic Variability on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Élodie Blestel
Élodie Blestel*
Affiliation:
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France
*
Contact Élodie Blestel at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Maison de la Recherche, EA 7345 CLESTHIA, 4 rue des Irlandais, 75005 Paris, France (elodie.blestel@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr).
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Abstract

We examine the metalinguistic, psychosocial, and identity-related indexical indications of (speaking about) the other, as provided by 36 Santa Marta inhabitants (Blestel 2022). Santa Marta is a city on Colombia’s septentrional coast, populated primarily by individuals of multiracial heritage, descended from Indigenous peoples, African slaves, and Spaniards. We show that the established main axis of differentiation (Gal and Irvine 2019) and associated judgments are adjacent, sometimes very explicitly, to racializing ideologies that more broadly traverse Colombian society as a whole. We maintain that these metapragmatic discourses, far from being anecdotal, indicate semiotic discrimination processes at work in sustaining or even renewing a system of values passed down from the colonial era.

Type
Articles
Information
Signs and Society , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , Fall 2022 , pp. 334 - 361
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Semiosis Research Centre at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. All rights reserved.

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