Transidioma and Territory: Language and Power in the Age of Globalization

Abstract

The experience of linguistic globalization and the communicative disorder it entails require a serious retooling of most basic units of linguistic analysis. The chaos and indeterminacy of contemporary flows of people, knowledge, texts, and commodities across social and geographical space challenge most sociolinguistic assumptions about social interactions. In particular, we can no longer assume that national territory is linked to a dominant language in ways that bind people together, facilitate interactions, or minimize conflicts. At the same time, communicative practices are still embedded in the territorial apparatuses of the nation-state (from control over the power grid to border enforcement and exclusions). By revisiting the concept of transidioma – i.e., the ensemble of communicative practices of people embedded in multilingual environments and engaged in interactions that blend face-to-face and digitally-mediated communication (Jacquemet 2005a) – as it applies to three different phenomena (the reliance on territorial infrastructure, the heightened sense of territoriality due to globalization, and the search for country origins during asylum hearings), this paper complexifies the interaction between language and space by discussing the importance of the territory in late-modern communication.