The Diasporic New Speaker: A Deterritorialization

Abstract

This paper explores how speakers of Irish within the Irish diaspora complicate and expand notions of identity and belonging within global diasporas, and how they may fit within a deterritorialized conception of the ‘new speaker’. New speaker theory reshaped sociolinguistic understandings of language revitalization in the last decade by decentering nativeness and foregrounding questions of legitimacy, authority and authenticity. However, the framework was largely developed within territorially bounded minority language contexts in Europe, implicitly linking speakerhood to place. This territorial bias obscures the experiences of second and later-generation diaspora Irish speakers, who also experience struggles over legitimacy and authenticity, though these struggles are structured through different spatial, institutional, and ideological systems. This paper proposes a rescaling of the new speaker category by introducing the sub-category of the diasporic new speaker. These are individuals who acquire and use minority or heritage languages outside the historical homeland and for whom language becomes a key site through which belonging to an imagined homeland is claimed, negotiated and contested across borders. Through a critical review of existing scholarship on new speakers, heritage language learning, and diaspora studies, this paper demonstrates how the territorial assumptions embedded in existing literature on new speakers limit our understanding of how linguistic identities and senses of belonging are constructed. It is further argued that the experiences of those outside of traditional territorial boundaries deserves greater academic attention, thus the proposal of this revised analytical lens. By foregrounding diaspora contexts, this paper proposes a shift from a model that is implicitly territorially grounded to a transnational, identity- and mobility-oriented framework. In doing so, it contributes to interdisciplinary debates on how migration shapes cultural and linguistic identities as well as the role of the diaspora in issues such as language revival.