Childhood Heritage Languages: A Tangier Case Study

Abstract

Through the testimony of a Tangier female citizen who grew up in the “prolific multilingual Spanish-French-Darija context of international Tangier”, this article analyzes the web of beliefs projected onto both the inherited and local languages within her linguistic repertoire. Starting from the daily realities in which she was immersed and the social networks that she formed, we focus on the representations of communication and her affective relationship with the host societies. The analysis starts from the most immediate domestic context in which Spanish, in its variant Jaquetía (a dialect of Judeo-Spanish language spoken by the Sephardic Jews of northern Morocco) was displaced by French as the language of instruction. After an initial episode of reversible attrition, we witnessed various phenomena of translanguaging within the host society. Following the binomial “emotion-interrelational space”, we seek to discern the affective contexts associated with the languages of a multilingual childhood, and which emotional links are vital for maintaining inherited ones. This shift towards the valuation of the affective culture implies a reorientation of the gaze towards everyday experiences as a means of research in contexts of language contact.

1. Introduction

Through the testimony of Alegría Bendelac, a Tangier citizen who grew up in the “prolific multilingual Spanish-French-Dariya context of international Tangier” (Bendelac, 1992) and then undertook a migratory process to America, this paper aims to approach the web of beliefs projected on the languages in contact of her linguistic repertoire and its maintenance in the diaspora.

Starting from the daily realities in which she was immersed according to the narrative of her life itineraries and the social networks that she formed, we will focus on the representations of languages and their relationship with the different host communities. The analysis starts from the most immediate domestic context in which Spanish, in its variant Jaquetía (a dialect of the Judeo-Spanish language spoken by the Sephardic Jews of northern Morocco), was displaced by French as the language of instruction. After an initial episode of attrition (loss of competence in the L1 due to decreased use (Kouritzin, 1999, p. 203)) which was reversible due to the presence of the father figure, we witnessed various practices of translanguaging. The latter construct, considered as “the complex language practices of plurilingual individuals and communities” (García and Wei (2014, p. 20)) implies the “deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages” (Otheguy et al., 2015, p. 283), as carried out by Alegría.

The testimony analyzed includes a whole series of complex linguistic and sociocultural dynamics, both at the family and institutional levels. It is within these dynamics in which code-switching starts from the speaker’s own associations to certain contexts of use but ends up overflowing them in a kind of standardized multilingual linguistic continuum. We rely on a conception of translanguaging that goes beyond the analysis of mere cognitive structures, making room for the inclusion of the speaker’s subjectivity in his interactions (Foucault, 2008). It is precisely in these interrelational contexts where the idea of emotions “(…) como modos de afiliación a una comunidad social; una forma de reconocerse y de poder comunicar juntos, bajo un fondo emocional próximo” (Le Breton, 2012, p. 73)1 emerges.

Following this binomial “emotion-interrelational context”, we articulated our study around three central research questions: what intracommunity affective contexts are associated with the languages of a multilingual childhood and what identity implications do they generate; what influence does the institutional context exert in relation to the inherited language; and, finally, what extracommunity emotional ties enable the maintenance of the inherited language. These issues will be covered in Section 6, following the presentation of the results in Section 5. The following sections precede this analysis: Theoretical Framework (2), Context and Objectives (3), and Methodology (4).

2. Theoretical Framework

2.1. Jaquetía as a Heritage Language in Northern Morocco

The north of Morocco has hosted a displaced population from Spain since the time of the Reconquest. Focusing on the population of Jewish origin, expelled from the Peninsula in 1492, we know that “miles de sefardíes se instalaron en Tetuán y, más tarde, en Tánger (Sayahi, 2005), manteniendo el uso del judeoespañol hasta su rehispanización en el período del Protectorado español (1912–1956) “(Fernández Vítores & Benlabbah, 2014, p. 28).2 During this last period, Spanish was imposed in the north and south of the country as the first language in the administrative and institutional sphere, while French was predominant in the central area. Regarding the Jewish community itself, Castilian, in its variant Jaquetía, was the natural language of the prominent Sephardic community in Morocco (Feria García, 2007).

As Levy (2005, p. 48) points out, the Jewish communities, integrated from Spanish-speaking founding groups, preserved a religious minority bilingualism where Arabic was the vehicular language of trade with Muslims or Jews from the south, while Spanish was used in the Jewish quarters and in the domestic sphere3 (Levy, 2005, p. 48)” (in Fernández Vítores & Benlabbah, 2014, p. 104). As the latter authors explain, unlike the Sephardim who settled in European countries (France, the Netherlands, Italy, England), they were integrated into their host societies. By the eighteenth century they no longer spoke Spanish. The Sephardim who settled in Morocco retained their use of the language and some Hispanic cultural traits (Fernández Vítores & Benlabbah, 2014, p. 105). In her study on Jaquetía in Morocco, Paloma (2015) emphasizes the role of Sephardic women in preserving language and culture at home: “while men perform a number of responsibilities associated with liturgical ritual and political power in the public sphere, women retain much power in the private sphere, where heritage languages may be preserved” (in Kirschen, 2020, p. 85).

Moving forward in time to the presence of Jews who spoke that Jaquetía (resulting from the contact of Judeo-Spanish with Arabic) in Tangier, it would be necessary to add the Spaniards that during all the XIX century were settling in the city or arrived to trade (Moscoso García, 2023, p. 35). According to this same author, quantitatively, the panorama was as follows:

(...) a principios del siglo XIX había unas 200 familias judías en Tánger. Comenzado el siglo XX había 7 000 judíos, y en los años cincuenta, 18 000 (Ceballos, 2013, pp. 320–328). El sionismo provocó, directa e indirectamente, la salida de estos judíos hacia Israel, Francia o Canadá, por lo que en los años setenta no quedaron más que 250.

(Moscoso García, 2023, p. 39)4

This drop in numbers was influenced by the European occupation of Morocco at the beginning of the 20th century, which increased contact between the Moroccan Sephardim and with both Spain and France. In a context of minoritization of Jaquetía together with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 with all the Zionist propaganda, meant that “más de 90.000 judíos abandonaron el país, entre ellos muchos sefardíes, en los años posteriores debido al clima de tensión generado por los conflictos de 1956 y 1967” (Fernández Vítores & Benlabbah, 2014, p. 105).5

The current multilingual context of Morocco (with Arabic and Amazigh as official languages) reflects the different languages in contact which have configured from a diachronic point of view and the resulting linguistic space:

las variedades del bereber, el tarifit, el tamazīght y el tachelḥit, son la base de la comunicación de gran parte de la sociedad gracias al uso y apego de sus hablantes, mientras que el judeoespañol se haya prácticamente perdido por falta de hablantes locales, aunque es cierto que quedan activas ciertas reivindicaciones identitarias sobre la haketía o jaketía.

(García Collado, 2024, p. 8)6

As the latter author concludes, we cannot forget the cultural and affective complicity which has marked the bilateral relations between Spain and Morocco, since beyond the official status of Spanish for a period there exists all the influence of social ties in the preservation of the Spanish language in an Arab country (an aspect that distinguishes Jaquetía from the other branches of Judeo-Spanish). This meant the “gradual and unstoppable adoption of Spanish to the detriment of Haketia, because it was the language of the colonisers and the ruling political class to whom the Sephardic Jews felt connected, seeking refuge in the idea of a common past” (Bürki, 2016, p. 149). We will explore this emotional (and, therefore, identity) links in the following section.

2.2. Heritage Speakers and Ancestral Belongings

The narrow definition of heritage speakers is Valdés’s (2000): individuals raised in homes where a language other than English is spoken and who are to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language. From the wide spectrum of definitions of heritage language, (HL from now on), for our study and, according to the unique context of international Tangier (1923–1940/1945–1956) discussed in the previous section, we are interested in its consideration as a “home language” (Guardado & Becker, 2013), but “not minority” (Cummins, 2005). Concerning this minority character and in the present classic definition of HH that S. A. Montrul (2012) applies to the American context, reference is made to “(…) the children of adult immigrants born in the host country or immigrant children who arrived in the host country some time in their childhood” (2).7 In our specific context, the transmission and domestic uses of the HL would be fulfilled. However, as Bürki (2016) has pointed out, in the peculiar idiosyncrasy of the Tangier context we would be in a singular situation of diglossia:

among Sephardic Jews, Spanish began to serve as a Dachsprache, or roofing language, and Haketia assumed two different positions according to the level at which we are looking: on the diastratic level, it began to be associated with the uneducated working classes, and therefore occupied the lowest position on the Dachsprache scale, on the diaphasic level, the number of words and expressions from Haketia grew in proportion to communicative immediacy between interlocutors and it was used as a familiar register.

(p. 150)

Nonetheless, when the inherited language is displaced to distant territories such as the United States, the destination of Alegría, it can undergo dynamics of linguistic and socio-cultural adaptation, as in the case of Judeo-Spanish, a language that became a heritage language instead of a vernacular one (Bunis & Gil, 2021). The Sephardic Spanish of the United States exemplifies this situation in which, although its linguistic characteristics are maintained, the linguistic pressures of contact with English and Spanish in the United States added to social pressures affect its process of abandonment and disuse (Kluger, 2021). As the latter author points out, in the intracommunity dynamics of the Jewish people in the Diaspora, it is generally a minority that has advanced knowledge of Hebrew, while there is a great variation in terms of linguistic skills with the rest of the members of the various communities, since familiarity with Hebrew letters of liturgical texts is not equivalent to mastery of the language (Kluger, 2021). We would be witnessing a clear example of diglossia (Fishman, 1971, p. 560), in which each language has a “functional differentiation between two languages” (in García et al., 2006, p.19).

Other authors focus the definition of a heritage speaker (HS from now on) on cultural heritage and their perception as members of that speech community as individuals who have “ancestral or familial ties to a particular language other than English, and it is they who exercise agency in determining whether or not they are learners of such linguistic or cultural heritage” (Wang, 2008, p. 4).

The identity component, especially in contexts where it may undergo processes of relocation, is thus essential for our study, in the sense of belonging to a cultural community which, given the hybrid nature of its expectations, takes part in a “constant process of identity renegotiation” (Hidalgo, 2008, p. 335). Closely related to all this is the inseparable nature of the language–identity binomial defended by authors such as Kouritzin (1999), “heritage language ability and cultural identity are inextricably linked” (1999, p. 179). This binomial will be explored in the following section.

2.3. Affective Contexts and Identity Construction Associated with Heritage Languages

This duality of social contexts mentioned in the explanation of the diglossic context of Morocco means that, at the individual level, heritage speakers pass through their linguistic spaces, past and present, with a high emotional charge conferred to each of their languages. Experience of emotion, as affective circulation emanating from within, is shaped by everyone’s unique trajectory, but projected in interaction with others. In that process would emerge what has been agreed to be called reflective nostalgia which “nace de la memoria cultural, de las reminiscencias individuales y alienta múltiples narrativas cuyo rasgo principal es la mediación entre el pasado y el presente, entre el sí mismo y el otro (Boym, 2001, pp. 41–55)” (in Fernández Merino, 2008, p. 240).8

Regarding this mediation between past and present, authors such as Kemppanen et al. (2012) have denounced the limiting situations that certain asymmetrical power relations can cause in postcolonial contexts such as those of the subject of our study. Specifically, they focus on the false equation between emotional and cultural distance which has been overly simplified in the relationship between subject and object, that is, between heritage speaker and context in this case: “we are actually dealing with degrees of emotional affinity more than with degrees of cultural affinity” (2012, p. 5). This emotional affinity, in various degrees, can transcend the boundaries attributed to a speech community or to certain nationalities. To all this would be added the affective dimension which emerges from languages, not always valued as a determinant, especially in multilingual contexts where so-called “emotional diglossia” can occur, a construct which reflects the idea of the generation of different emotions in bilingual people when they are exposed to one or the other language (Duñabeitia, 2017, p. 18).

Identity construction, as a fluid or “malleable” construct (Ricoeur, 1995), is inherently relational. The diglossic contexts (emotional and institutional) are an integral part of this scaffolding, emphasizing the speaker’s subjectivity in his interactions (Foucault, 2008). According to symbolic interactionism, human experience is mediated by interpretation. Furthermore, this study is positioned under its derivative theory, the sociocultural-constructionist theory which accommodates the idea of “la variabilidad cultural e histórica con un fuerte énfasis en las nociones de construcción social, cultural e, incluso, lingüística de las emociones” (Bourdin, 2016, p. 55).9 It is precisely in these interrelational contexts where the idea of “particular affective cultures with a common emotional repertoire of the social group that acts as a mode of affiliation to a community and as a way of communicating” (Le Breton, 2012, p. 69) emerges. This shift towards valuation of the affective culture implies, in turn, a reorientation of the gaze towards local and everyday experiences as a way of understanding culture. Identities are thus reconfigured and co-constructed through socio-historically situated interactions, in singular contexts and the result of particular experiential exchanges: “Incluso cuando más subjetivos parecen, los pensamientos y sentimientos son siempre culturalmente encuadrados e influenciados por la biografía del del individuo, la situación social y el contexto histórico” (Rosaldo, 2000, p. 126).10

The theory of affects would be connected with the idea of affective culture discussed above and, especially, with the contributions of feminism concerning this experiential field, through the so-called “affective turn” of Sara Ahmed (2015), which goes beyond the traditional definition of emotions with a greater consideration of their effects, that is, “the way in which emotions circulate between bodies, analyzing how they “stick” and how they move” (Ahmed, 2015, p. 24). The author does not limit herself to the movement of affects between bodies, but to how these themselves are “affected” in their social and cultural practices: “al hablar de emociones se incluye el análisis de la afectividad, en tanto conlleva procesos de afectar y ser afectadx por otros cuerpos, y los modos en que nos ponemos en contacto con el entorno” (in Herranz, 2019, pp. 278–279).11

Our study would thus be identified with the most conscious dimension of emotion, especially in a reflective process such as that of “writing oneself” through life stories. It is in this sense of “conscious affectation by the context”, plural contexts in our case, where the life story of our author, Alegría Bendelac, is inscribed.

2.4. Institutional Contexts and Reconfiguration of Linguistic Repertoires

The growth of the Spanish colony in northern Morocco during the Protectorate resulted in the establishment of primary and secondary schools in the cities of the territory and in the main areas of concentration of the Spanish population (Fernández Vítores & Benlabbah, 2014). Spanish language teaching coexisted with the traditional Moroccan teaching, “a new Moroccan teaching, of a more modern approach, in which Spanish appeared as a fundamental subject and with the same status as Arabic (Benyaya, 2007, p. 169)” (in Fernández Vítores & Benlabbah, 2014, p. 29) was steadily gaining ground. As the latter authors explain, the independence of Morocco meant an advance of French, which came to be perceived in the north of the country as the language of social promotion, to the detriment of Spanish, which was relegated to the domestic sphere, with the imposition of bilingualism by the Moroccan authorities (Fernández Vítores & Benlabbah, 2014, p. 29).

As we saw in Section 2.3, in the processes of schooling, the HL can overlap with or differ from the mother tongue(s) or L1. Relocations that take place when a heritage speaker enters the orbit of learning other languages and especially his or her own heritage language in an institutional context where a process is initiated “through which [HLs] are socialized into particular communities and how their subjectivities change over time” (Leeman, 2015, p. 115).

Moreno Fernández (2024) has highlighted the relevance of the school environment as a space of socialization for the transmission of HLs with a powerful somber image: “El entorno escolar puede ser cementerio para las lenguas de herencia o soporte para su mantenimiento” (p. 19).12 The key is to avoid approaching the teaching of a heritage language as if it were a foreign language. The author identifies teachers’ attitudes as the root of the problem: “Las ideologías del estándar y nativista llevan al profesorado al ejercicio de la práctica correctiva de todo aquello que se desvíe del estándar, en cuanto al uso de la lengua de herencia se refiere” (Moreno Fernández, 2024, p. 21).13

When accessing these academic contexts, differences in proficiency become evident, which have been described in terms of deficiencies of the heritage language according to its lexicon and grammar. S. Montrul (2015, p. 8) considers the heritage speaker to be an “interrupted” native speaker who maintains a large part of his native competencies but, due to the lack of development of certain grammatical aspects (due to the scarcity of input), only reaches the level of an intermediate-level second language speaker. This categorization of “incomplete competence” has been criticized because it establishes an analogy by comparing the grammar of heritage languages with that of monolinguals without taking into account other variables in the process related to the “quantity and quality of input and access to literacy, as is the case for monolinguals (Kupisch & Rothman, p. 2018)” (in Buyse et al., 2022, p. 15). These authors propose as an alternative, free of negative connotations, the term “differential acquisition” (Buyse et al., 2022).

Beyond the differences in proficiency, from the heritage academic collective itself, the construct of translanguaging is being defended (García & Wei, 2014) which “captures the idea of ‘passing through’ languages and cultures both horizontally and vertically—and not so much the idea of reaching them—resulting in identities that are culturally complex and ambiguous” (Odartey-Wellington, 2018). The latter construct implies the “deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for strict adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages” (Otheguy et al., 2015, p. 283). In such practices, HSs manage “their entire linguistic repertoire—including their background, identities, histories, and beliefs--to make meaning and to interact across complex social, economic, and political contexts” (García & Flores, 2013). In short, the use of the languages of one’s own repertoire as positive anchors to which to resort without constraints when communicating, is far from the stigmatization which comes with the term code-switching, traditionally understood as a strategy against lexical deficiency in one of the languages and usually penalized. On the contrary, from the translanguaging theory, “mixing is not considered a problem of linguistic deficit, but a repertoire that serves complex discursive practices of the user, common among those who inhabit transcultural and cross-border spaces” (Parra Velasco, 2022, p. 174)

However, if at the institutional level, at school, there is insufficient input in the heritage language in the sense of the risks mentioned above, one can reach a final stage of attrition, i.e., loss of competence in the L1 due to a decrease in use and exposure to its input (Kouritzin, 1999). These socializing processes are decisive, given that in this space the transition between family life and community life is resolved and the future of heritage languages is definitively decided (Moreno Fernández, 2024). Family networks and close community spaces are discussed in the following section.

2.5. Internal and External Language Practices of the Heritage Community

The linguistic dynamics of the members of the household are crucial in preserving the heritage language, not only by the action of the parents, but also by grandparents (especially grandmothers) or cousins (Moreno Fernández, 2024). The family is a “community of practice” with “its own norms for the use of language” and has its “own ways of speaking, acting and believing” (Lanza, 2007, p. 47). The decisions made within it would constitute the so-called family language policy (FLP): “explicit and/or implicit decisions that adult family members make about children’s language use and language learning in the family setting” (King et al., 2008, p. 907) and which includes parents’ choices and attempts to maintain the language(s) at home.

In such maintenance, several strategies exist: Piller (2001, p. 66) lists the following: One person, one language (each member of the family must be consistent in the use of a single language with the speaker (Döpke, 1992)) to Home language vs. community language (typical of diglossic situations, Grosjean (1982)), including Code-switching and language mixing (free mixing of languages consciously or unconsciously (Tabouret-Keller (1962)), and Consecutive introduction of the two languages (waiting a few years before exposing the infant to the majority language (Zierer, 1977)). As this author points out, the first two strategies are usually associated with elite bilingualism, in contrast to the last two, which are generally less well regarded. More recently, in editorial contexts of parenting guides, the so-called “Context methods or Time and place methods have been registered, in which it is decided in which spaces or at what times to use one language or the other (Crisfield, 2021)” (in Piller, 2001, p. 67).

However, these dynamics must be accompanied by a truly meaningful use of language which can find its purpose in the speech community, near or far. Successful maintenance will require continuous exposure to the speech of the people around him, where Bruner’s (1983) notions of scaffolding and format, with ritualized routines of joint interaction between adult and child, will be essential, interactions in which the feeling of belonging to a group and the support of the community (Tse, 2001) are determinant.

Guardado and Becker (2013) develop the concept of diasporic family, which is the “substitute family formed by immigrant countrymen or other immigrants with the same L1 to fill the gap created by distance” (p. 57). A dynamic community that, if it has the possibility of organizing cultural, religious, or educational activities and having its own institutions or means of communication, increases the possibilities of using the HL outside the home, both in formal and informal contexts (Houle, 2011, pp. 11–12). Seeing that their HL has communicative value outside the home may encourage its preservation. Indeed, Guardado and Becker (2013, p. 67) suggest that active participation in cultural organizations not only provides a context for HL use and practice but may also have an enduring effect on cultural identity, HL use, and their desire to pass it on to future generations. When families try to foster interaction with other members of the heritage language community external to the family, one can then speak of external interaction practices. These may take place through “contact with friends and acquaintances, or through social, religious, or cultural activities organized within the heritage community that are conducted in the heritage language” (Álvarez Mella et al., 2023, p. 49).

The continuity in the migratory flow, a key factor in maintaining the HL, as we have seen, is especially unique in the case of Judeo-Spanish and its Jaquetía variant, where there are additional social factors such as

la falta de cohesión del grupo, la ausencia de inmigración (debido a las persecuciones durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial) y la competencia intraétnica con el hebreo (Spolsky, 253-257) que han contribuido al proceso de pérdida y abandono de la lengua. (…) La creación del Estado de Israel en 1948 y la elección del hebreo como lengua nacional generaron un proceso de pérdida tanto del español sefardí como del idisch entre las comunidades que hablaban estas lenguas.

(Kluger, 2021, p. 222)14

Later on, as Bürki (2016) points out, the independence of Morocco and the establishment of a Muslim nation-state triggered the dispersion of the Moroccan Sephardic Jews in different countries with their own vehicular languages, so that Haketia had even less possibilities of being used (reduced to cultural expressions such as songs and proverbs). But that same dispersion, as the author states, has generated that, nowadays and outside the land where it appeared, Jaquetía has become an icon of the Sephardic culture of Morocco that re-emerges through a new common space: “Given the dissemination of North African Sephardic Jews, spatial and temporal differences aside, North African Sephardic Jew communities with more or less knowledge of Haketia now come together in the boundless world of cyberspace” (p. 150).

3. Context and Objectives

During a research visit to the Faculty of Translation of the Abdelmalek Essaâdi University of Tangier (Morocco) in 2023, I accessed at the Cervantes Institute of the same city the testimony that Alegría Bendelac wrote in her work Une Enfance Juive à Tanger (1930–1945) published in Casablanca by the Société Marocaine D’Édition Wallada in 1992. The author is heiress of the powerful Sephardic community which settled in the north of Morocco after the expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 and whose ancestors settled in Tetouan and Tangier. Alegría was one more inhabitant of the so-called Spanish Protectorate (1912–1956) during which the Spanish government exercised its control over the north of Morocco and the southern zone with Tetouan as its capital, while Tangier remained as an international zone.

Alegría’s life begins in Caracas where she was born in 192815 due to her family’s migration from Tetouan. She was the fourth of five siblings, the daughter of Moroccan immigrants from Tetouan. After four years in Venezuela, she spent her childhood and adolescence in Tangier (1932–1945), the period described in her book. In 1953 she married Rafael Bendelac and had two daughters, Mercedes and Lisita. Ten years later, in 1963, she emigrated to New York, where she graduated in French at Columbia University and began teaching at Penn State University. Her works include dictionaries and historical research on Sephardic languages and traditions; she also wrote poetry. She died in 2020 at the age of 91 in New York. Her linguistic profile included Spanish (Caracas and Sephardic—Jaquetía varieties), French, and English, along with comprehensive skills in Dariya and Hebrew.

The book, Une Enfance Juive à Tanger [A Jewish Childhood in Tangier] (1930–1945), on which our study is based, is a compilation of memories and remembrances focused on childhood landscapes from her final destination in the USA. Through the selection of the texts in which she portrays herself as a heritage speaker of the Jaquetía variant, immersed in the multilingual context of international Tangier, our aim is to approach the interweaving of the emotional contexts (both intra- and extracommunity) which are reflected in her testimony and enable the maintenance of a plural linguistic repertoire and of the HL. To approach this representational identification and following the binomial “emotion-interrelational context”, we articulate our study around three central research questions: what intracommunity affective contexts are associated with the languages of a multilingual childhood and what identity aspects they imply; how the institutional context affects the heritage language; and, finally, which extracommunity emotional links enable the maintenance of the heritage language.

4. Methodology

Methodologically, this shift towards the valuation of the affective culture causes a reorientation of the gaze towards local and everyday experiences as a means of research in contexts of past and present language contact. In order to approach the latter, our methodological option is life histories as narrative and identity options co-constructed along the various itineraries of the displaced person. To do so, we rely on what Martuccelli calls an extrospective and latitudinal biography condensed in those “trials” narrated “from within”: “(...) l’histoire de vie extrospective est une sorte d’intermédiaire entre l’histoire collective et l’expérience personnelle” (in Verrier, 2014, p. 3).16 Concerning these narratives, Rivas Flores and Leite Méndez (2020) speak of a collective process in which each subject is processually reconstructed. These authors, who refuse to place methodology and content in watertight categories, place special emphasis on the weight of subjectivity in qualitative research such as the one in question and on the double articulation between the individual and the collective: “las historias de vida permiten volver a insertar los sentidos individuales atribuidos a la experiencia en el contexto social en el que ellos surgen, única vía de trascender lo particular y construir un saber más denso sobre lo social” (Rivas Flores & Leite Méndez, 2020, p. 301).17

By exploring narratives like the one presented, we seek to discern which central thematic lines stand out, addressing the experience of separation from one’s native country in a migratory context, and which discursive threads become visible in this search for “the singular and not unique” (Palou & Fons, 2011). We thus start from a qualitative discursive analysis by sticking to the textual words Alegría and using, as a tool for discursive extraction of keywords and thematic constellations, the program Sketch Engine (2023). We then go on to analyze the most significant extracts of Alegria’s testimony in relation to the linguistic contexts of her childhood.

5. Results

We proceed in this section to systematize the results obtained from the discursive analysis of Alegría’s testimony. The testimonial threads are organized according to the points raised in the initial objectives (Section 3): intracommunity affective contexts and identity implications, institutional contexts, and extracommunity contexts. This analysis starts from the most immediate domestic context, in which Judeo-Spanish, in its Jaquetía variant, was displaced by French as the language of instruction in high school. This led to an initial episode of attrition, which was later reversed by a change in family linguistic policy.

5.1. Intracommunity Affective Contexts and Identity Implications

5.1.1. Presentation of the Community and Inherited Language

Concerning the affective contexts, the first reference which appears in Alegría’s narrative is the presentation of the HL linked to the diasporic Jewish community (in all the variants present in Morocco). The reference distinguishes its Spanish as HL from that of other Sephardic communities: c’est un espagnol très particulier, qui, ayant gardé un grand nombre de tournures, mots, et expressions tombés en désuétude en Espagne, a ajouté à ces archaïsmes un grand nombre d’emprunts à l’hébreu et à l’arabe dialectal marocain [it’s a very special variety of Spanish, which, having retained a large number of turns of phrase, words, and expressions that have fallen into disuse in Spain, has added to these archaisms a large number of borrowings from Hebrew and Moroccan dialectal Arabic] (Bendelac, 1992, p. 23). After having explained the genealogy of the inherited language (with a predominance of recurrent verbs related to preservation, such as conserver, garder, etc.) and highlighting the singularity of its variant Jaquetía, she establishes a marked polarity between its variant of Judeo-Spanish and the one from the rest of the Sephardic communities. To the latter language, she associates the adjectives maternel and savoureux linked to the verb être [to be] as the central nucleus of belonging (Figure 1): Cette langue, connue de ses usagers sous le nom de jaquetía, est une langue savoureuse et imagée [This language, known to its users as Jaquetía, is full of savor and images] (p. 23).

On an emotional level, she emphasizes the affective charge in the attribution of musicality to her language, far from the stigmatization of its orality: essentiellement oral, ces caractéristiques se traduisent non seulement au niveau des mots et des tournures, mais aussi dans le ton; il y a véritablement une sorte de chant de la jaquetía [essentially oral, these characteristics are reflected not only in the words and turns of phrase, but also in the tone; there is a kind of Jaquetía’s chant] (p. 23). She argues the richness of her HL around the criteria of its antiquity: Les Juifs de Tétouan et des autres villes du Nord et de la côte ont toujours conservé comme langue maternelle l’espagnol, apporté de la péninsule au quinzième siècle, et le parlent en famille [The Jews of Tetouan and other towns in the north and along the coast have always kept Spanish, brought from the Peninsula in the fifteenth century, as their mother tongue, and speak it with their families] (p. 23).

Behind this ascription of the Jaquetía restricted to the Sephardim of the north, disassociating them from the Jews of the center and south of the country, the author establishes an internal dichotomy, between the elitism of the Tetouanis (en raison de leur longue tradition d’études talmudiques [due to their long tradition of Talmudic studies]) and the cosmopolitanism of the Tangierians (Ils se sentaient plus sophistiqués et plus cosmopolites que toutes les autres communautés [They felt more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than all other communities]) (p. 24).

If anything is clear from this description, it is the markedly diglossic character in which an inherited language such as Jaquetía, which was born in a plural context of languages in contact, is immersed, beyond the rigidity of the language of worship mentioned above: ses formes propres sont nées et se sont moulées sur les besoins de la réalité quotidienne, en brassant avec flexibilité et invention les trois langues en presence [its own forms are born and molded to the needs of everyday reality, flexibly and inventively blending the three languages in presence] (p. 23). It is precisely this earthly and familiar character which amalgamates the entire northern Sephardic community, overcoming the previous fragmentation, and distinguishing them from those whom he does not hesitate to qualify with a significant forasteros (outsiders) (p. 23).

5.1.2. Family Community Context

Family Nucleus

Alegría closes her overview presentation of Judeo-Spanish in North Africa, describing it, as she has done previously, in a singularized manner, contributing, on this occasion, to the rehispanización that this language underwent in its early childhood when it came into contact with Venezuelan Spanish: La langue de notre famille était essentiellement l’espagnol; un espagnol fortement teinté des expressions, exclamations, formules de courtoisie sociale, proverbes et bénédictions de la jaquetía, et assaisonné de quelques idiomes vénézuéliens [The language of our family was essentially Spanish; a Spanish strongly colored by the expressions, exclamations, formulas of social courtesy, proverbs, and blessings of the Jaquetía, and seasoned with a few Venezuelan idioms] (p. 33).

She breaks down, again dichotomously and emotionally, the hybrid origin of that legacy, as embodied by her father and mother, respectively. She highlights her father’s tripartite linguistic repertoire (l’arabe, le berbère, la jaquetía et l’espagnol [Arabic, Berber, Jaquetía, and Spanish]) which culminates with Venezuelan Spanish, emphasizing the use of the Jaquetía for pragmatic purposes, such as cursing: Quand il était furieux contre quelqu’un méprisable, il le maudissait en ces termes (en jaquetía): “Puissent ses pieds et ses mains être enterrés en cent différents endroits” [When he was furious with someone despicable, he would curse them with these words (in Jaquetía): “May his feet and hands be buried in a hundred different places”] (p. 27).

In the maternal figure, this tripartite repertoire is reduced to the binomial of Jaquetía and French as a colonial language, the latter serving as a vehicle for the potential academic success of her children, which she does not hesitate to impose: Ma mère se fit du souci à la pensée que nous aurions du mal à apprendre à lire et écrire en français et se mit donc à nous parler français et exigeait que nous lui répondions dans la même langue [My mother was worried that we would have trouble learning to read and write in French, so she began to speak French to us and demanded that we reply in the same language] (p. 33). In this sense, and after having extracted the central verbs of both discourses with the French Web 2023 of Sketch Engine (Figure 2), it is significant that, while the father speaks the languages, the mother does with them. Discursive reflection of who applies language policies in the domestic space:

These decisions align with the cosmopolitan context such as that of international Tangier. In this discourse, the conscious valuation of the privilege of having lived immersed in it can be observed: si Tanger, en raison de son statut international, était divisée administrativement entre plusieurs pays, linguistiquement et culturellement, elle était dominée à part égales par l’arabe, l’espagnol et le français et ces trois langues s’entrentendaient constamment à travers toute la ville [although Tangier, by virtue of its international status, was administratively divided between several countries, it was linguistically and culturally dominated equally by Arabic, Spanish, and French, and these three languages were constantly heard throughout the city] (p. 33).

If we extend these parental linguistic decisions to the five children, we obtain a map which draws a line of comings and goings: an initial phase of Spanish, fueled by the paternal decision to migrate to Venezuela, a regression of HL against French when entering the academic context by maternal decision, and a return to Spanish which is difficult to reverse despite the unsuccessful attempts that will be made later (

Table 1. Language distribution (French/Spanish) between parents (Bendelac, 1992, p. 44).

Childhood	Adolescence	Adulthood
Spanish/French	French/Spanish	Spanish/French
Venezuela/Tangier	Tangier	Tangier/USA
Jusqu’à l’âge de quatre ans, je ne parlais qu’espagnol, mais quand, un peu plus tard, au Maroc, mise au Lycée Français de Tanger, ma langue la plus naturelle devint le français. [Until the age of four, I spoke only Spanish, but when, a little later in Morocco, I was enrolled at the Lycée Français de Tanger, my most natural language became French.]
Les cinq enfants, avions acquis l’habitude de nous adresser à maman en français et à papa en espagnol; entre nous, nous parlions toujours français. Ce que nous faisons mit mon père dans une position difficile et inconfortable et l’isola. Il comprenait en gros ce qui se disait en français devant lui, à condition que nous ne parlions pas trop vite ou tous ensemble, mais il ne pouvait pas parler en français du tout et se sentait frustré et exclu. Je ne me suis pas pardonné la peine que nous lui causions par notre égoïsme. [The five children had gotten into the habit of speaking to Mum in French and to Dad in Spanish; between us, we always spoke French. What we did put my father in a difficult and uncomfortable position, and isolated him. He could understand most of what was said in French in front of him, if we didn’t speak too fast or all together, but he couldn’t speak French at all and felt frustrated and excluded. I couldn’t forgive myself for the pain we inflicted on him because of our selfishness.]	Á notre entrée en onzième au lycée, nous nous sentions bien à l’aise avec le français et n’eûmes aucun mal à étudier dans cette langue. Ma mère, satisfaite et rassurée à la pensée que nous pouvions désormais nous débrouiller bien en français et ne pas être retardés dans nos études, essaya de faire marche arrière et de rétablir l’espagnol comme langue familiale, mais il était trop tard. Elle se mit à nous parler en espagnol, en vain. Nous ne pouvions plus lui répondre dans la même langue; nous avions trop pris l’habitude de lui parler en français. [By the time we started high school in the eleventh grade, we felt comfortable with French, and had no trouble studying in the language. My mother, satisfied and reassured that we could now do well in French and not be left behind in our studies, tried to backtrack and re-establish Spanish as the family language, but it was too late. She began to speak to us in Spanish, but it was in vain. We could no longer answer back in the same language; we were too used to speaking French to her.]	Après cela, et pour toujours, mes parents se parlaient en espagnol; mon père nous parlait en espagnol et nous lui répondions dans la même langue; ma mère nous parlait principalement en espagnol (quelquefois en français, mais plus tard, dans ses lettres, elle nous écrivit toujours en français). Nous, les enfants, lui parlions et lui écrivions toujours en français et, entre nous, faisions tous nos échanges en français. [After that, and forever, my parents spoke to each other in Spanish; my father spoke to us in Spanish and we answered back in the same language; my mother spoke to us mainly in Spanish (sometimes in French, but later, in her letters, she always wrote to us in French). As children, we always spoke and wrote to her in French and, between us, we did the entire communication in French.]

).

This family septet appears closed by the figure of Jacinthe, the Venezuelan babysitter, who becomes the means and vector of acquisition of Venezuelan Spanish, both during their time in Venezuela and after the family’s return to Tangier. This variant re-hispanizes, to a certain extent, the linguistic repertoire of the children, and supplements the foundational Jaquetía spoken in the household before emigration. This is one of the most emotionally charged moments in the text, as the author affectionately reflects on the role of Jacinthe, who spent more time with the children: une jeune mulâtresse très gaie et adorable. Jusqu’à l’âge de quatre ans, je ne parlais qu’espagnol, mais quand ma langue naturelle devint le français et que mes parents évoquaient les jours heureux de Caracas, ce nom frappait mes oreilles d’enfant [a cheerful and adorable young mulattress. Until the age of four, I spoke only Spanish, but when my natural language became French and my parents spoke of the happy days of Caracas, that name struck my childish ears.] (p. 33).

The constellation of positive adjectives surrounding this figure is representative in this regard: delicate, joyful, happy, wonderful, natural, close, spring-like, poetic, or adorable (

Table 2. Key adjectives in the excerpt about Jacinthe, the babysitter. (Bendelac, 1992, p. 33). Reference corpus: French Web 2023 (tenTenTen23).

Adjective	Frequency	Adjective	Frequency
1 grand	2	11 naturel	1
2 français	2	12 espagnol	1
3 autre	1	13 proche	1
4 délicat	1	14 pseudopodiques	1
5 aguacate	1	15 subtil	1
6 gai	1	16 printanier	1
7 seul	1	17 poétique	1
8 heureux	1	18 antérieur	1
9 jeune	1	19 adorable	1
10 merveilleux	1

).

Regarding the emotions which emerge in her discourse, two lines stand out clearly: the joy of having had the babysitter in their lives (responsible not only for that Caribbean Spanish but, especially, for the whole magical and eternally spring-like universe “of guanavana, pineapple, coconut, and avocado” covered by the folklore of her stories) and the sadness for her return to Venezuela, resulting in a real family excision and a feeling of loss which permeates the narrative: rompant ainsi pour moi encore un lien avec une existence antérieure [breaking for me once again a link with a previous existence] (p. 37).

Extended Family and Traditions

After detailing the central branches of the family tree individually, she goes on to describe a list of collective celebrations ranging from the Sabbaht breakfast to the petitions of hand or berberiscas through the nights of the henna or the Pessah. In her account, the number of terms in Spanish Jaquetía is significant (gastronomic, textile, and religious, especially) as can be seen in the 50 keywords extracted with Sketch Engine French Web 2023 (frTenTen23) (

Table 3. Key words in the extract on Jewish celebrations. (Bendelac, 1992, p. 53). Reference corpus: French Web 2023 (tenTenTen23).

Lemma	Lemma	Lemma	Lemma	Lemma
1 berberisca	11 agnao	21 larache	31 oro	41 dragée
2 paños	12 ma’alem	22 noche	32 berbère	42 vanité
3 traje	13 terefa	23 beatriz	33 épicier	43 peigner
4 menos	14 chauen	24 ay	34 cara	44 au-dessous
5 tétouan	15 adafina	25 pessah	35 henné	45 formaliser
6 despozorio	16 puño	26 melilla	36 mano	46 noce
7 alheña	17 arzila	27 alcazar	37 elias	47 dignité
8 adafinas	18 hamsa	28 casher	38 peut-on	48 empresser
9 bakkalito	19 tanger	29 ceuta	39 faste	49 boulanger
10 apalabrabiento	20 réchaud	30 sabbath	40 fiançaille	50 mèche

).

In the description of each event, a vast linguistic repertoire is demonstrated (an example of translanguaging), as can be seen in the example of the preparation of the stew for the Sabbath (

Table 4. Example of translanguaging in an account of adafine preparation (Bendelac, 1992, p. 166).

Language	Terms	Explanation
Spanish	La Beatriz	Spanish origin stove
French	baguette	Bread loaf
Arabic	ma’alem	Arab master baker
Judeo-Spanish	adafina	Chickpea stew with lamb

) where, in just five lines, up to four languages intersect:

This textual space in her memories favors the incorporation into the story of Judeo-Spanish expressions that she introduces, as is, in the middle of French, in relation to the pomp of which the organizers of such celebrations boast:

Cette attitude s’exprimait parfaitement dans deux expressions courantes: Ay qué menos! et No es de tu cara! La même expression qui exprimait fierté et dignité servait aussi les besoins de la vanité pure et simple. Trois cuisines?—Ay qué menos, une pour tous les jours et quand nous mangeons terefa (aliments interdits par la loi en tous temps), une pour le casher ordinaire (aliments permis en tous temps) et une pour la fête de Pessah [This attitude was perfectly reflected in two common expressions: Ay que menos! and No es de tu cara. The same expression that expressed pride and dignity also served the purposes of sheer vanity. Three kitchens?—Ay que menos, one for every day and when we eat terefa (foods prohibited by law at all times), one for ordinary kosher (foods permitted at all times), and one for the Pesach feast].

(p. 166)

Links, unions, and ascriptions which stand out in each one of the testimonies in a need to overstate the value of the collective.

5.2. Institutional Context

When recounting her entry into the school context, Alegría makes explicit the origin and social class of the student body, identifying herself as belonging to the middle/upper class as a Jewish student.

In her account about education, Alegría focuses on the colonial languages of the two metropolises. When she speaks about French, the language of instruction, she moves from the pleasure of discovering its academic dimension (Je pris grand plaisir à découvrir la grammaire [I really enjoyed discovering the grammar] (p. 56)) to the disappointment of experiencing marginalization. She expressed this in a physical and embodied way (not fitting the mold or feeling amputated). Regarding Spanish, (qui était notre langue maternelle [(which) was our mother tongue]), the system seeks to stigmatize it (reléguées au fond de la classe [relegated to the back of the classroom]) based on the “contaminated” character of their inherited language. This situation is described through a warlike vocabulary (guerre froide [cold war]), while underscoring a sense of pride in a the “own language”. As with so many multilingual speakers, the introduction of a third school language, in this case, classical languages, repositions her belief system, tipping the balance towards a more positive consideration of the academic space as far as languages are concerned: je pénétrai dans le monde grec avec émerveillement; cette langue si riche, si souple, si nuancée, si poétique, cet équilibre qui me paraissait parfait entre l’humain et le divin [I entered the Greek world with a sense of wonder; this language that was so rich, so flexible, so nuanced, so poetic, this balance that seemed to me perfect between the human and the divine] (pp. 139–140). The system of beliefs projected on her school learning (

Table 5. Beliefs and emotions surrounding the linguistic system of the Lyceum in Tangier (Bendelac, 1992, pp. 50, 139, 140).

School Language	Perception	Emotions
French	Inferior	Pleasure for the academic dimension. Non-recognition as a student.
Spanish	Undervalued	Boredom. Lack of motivation.
Classics	Fascinated	Pleasure. Motivation.

) would thus be as follows:

5.3. Non-Community Relations in the Neighborhood

The description of the neighborhood and surroundings in which Alegria spends her childhood starts from the more immediate context of teterías [teashops] and coffee shops and gastronomic spaces to extend to all kinds of businesses and trades in neighboring areas. The linguistic and cultural diversity of international Tangier is reflected in the description of three businesses: a Spanish tea shop, a French café, and an Arab restaurant. It is interesting to note that Spanish is very present in the names of these businesses using family surnames as in the case of the Spanish tea shop, owned by the Izquierdo family, in the very name of the Paris café, or finally, in Esperanza Orellana Street where the Petit Café Maure is located.

The author emphasizes the description of the two “metropolitan” teashops. On the one hand, the salon de thé espagnol La Española owned by the Izquierdo family with a whole thematic constellation revolving around the Spanish peninsular and, more specifically, the capital: Joaquín Izquierdo faisait les meilleurs gâteaux espagnols que j’aie jamais goûtés, même à Madrid [Joaquín Izquierdo used to make the best Spanish cakes I’ve ever tasted, even in Madrid] (p. 153). On the other, the salon de thé français, Chez Porte, belonging to the Porte family. Far from any hint of competition, both businesses are united in an affectionate story that emphasizes the marked community character of both spaces: Les deux établissements, bien que très différents en style, atmosphère et pâtisseries, offraient la même chaleur d’accueil et le même sentiment de confort que l’on trouve dans les affaires de famille [Both places, though very different in style, atmosphere, and pastries, offered the same warmth of hospitality and sense of comfort found in family-run businesses] (p. 153).

In front of them, and as an alternative to tea, there is the Café de Paris et de la brasserie de France which, despite its French-speaking label, displays a whole menu of Spanish food and drinks: un chato (vin blanc espagnol de Jerez) ou un cinzano agrémenté des tapas habituelles: amandes salées, pommes frites, calamars en su tinta, salade russe, pois chiches à la sauce piquante, crevettes frites, olives vertes [a chato (Spanish white wine from Jerez) or cinzano with the traditional tapas: salted almonds, fried potatoes, calamari en su tinta, Russian salad, chickpeas in hot sauce, fried shrimp, green olives] (p. 157).

From a discursive point of view, food takes center stage, accompanied by multisensory elements such as smell (thé à la mente) or hearing (aouadi melodies accompanied by lute). As was to be expected, all the fragments describing these hotel spaces are covered by an infinity of localisms and terms specific to the respective languages linked to their first socialization. After extracting the key words from the text by comparison with the reference corpus of Sketch Engine, 2023,

Table 6. Keywords in the fragments on restaurant industry (Bendelac, 1992, pp. 157–158). Reference corpus: French Web 2023 (tenTenTen23).

Lemma	Lemma	Lemma	Lemma	Lemma
1 barquillos	11 maîtres-pâtissiers	21 ruisselant	31 cribler	41 oublie
2 socco	12 cinzano	22 esperanza	32 chiche	42 caraméliser
3 perra	13 chato	23 guéridon	33 luth	43 beignet
4 izquierdo	14 orellana	24 amoncellement	34 brochette	44 tanger
5 harira	15 gorda	25 pita	35 chewing-gum	45 beurrer
6 aigre	16 attrouper	26 tombée	36 brouhaha	46 espagnols
7 jerrayas	17 joaquín	27 jerez	37 maure	47 châtaigne
8 aouadies	18 española	28 affamé	38 gazelle	48 abrupt
9 chubaikía	19 chica	29 tinter	39 ramadan	49 su
10 thé-pâtisseries	20 buriner	30 calamar	40 frire	50 coriandre

), the diversity mentioned above can be appreciated. In addition to waffles, chato, sherry, and Spanish calamari, there are brochettes, chewing-gums, bonbons, chocolat, pommes caramélisées, and barbe à papa, not to mention Arab pastries embodied in cornes de gazelle, pyramides de chubaikía, and tasty beignets de pâte tressée (p. 157).

Continuing with the evocation of these spaces, all descriptions emphasize again the community’s character over and above origins and beliefs. In this sense, the community is not articulated around blood ties but is projected and extended to the circle of friendship, or neighborliness, as shown by the alternation of languages/cultures that run through their testimony. Concerning these identity associations embodied in drinks, food, and various celebrations, the ascription to the cultural group through various discursive strategies is striking. In some cases, it is carried out explicitly by including herself in the community of belonging (as in her comments on Spanish pastries). At other times, she wields a bond of union with the rest of a neighboring community which is above confessions and origins which is evident when she praises Muslim festivities and, especially, the month of Ramadan: Mais les meilleures époques étaient les semaines autour des fêtes religieuses musulmanes et, surtout, le mois du Ramadan [But the best time was during the weeks surrounding the Muslim religious festivals and, above all, during the month of Ramadan] (p. 157).

Beyond the streets surrounding her home, she presents a whole linguistic landscape of stores of various kinds in which Spanish signs predominate alongside other types of businesses such as Jewish or Arab ones: Textiles El Remate, Mercería española La Sultana, Juguetería francesa Salles, Zapatería Bata, El Gran Zoco, Fondaq de granos, Librería Lévy, Óptica Pichery, or Boutique de platería Christofle (p. 159).

As a culmination to this diverse commercial network, she lists a series of leisure spaces which are also crossed by the linguistic diversity: from the famous Cervantes Theater to the sunsets of Malabata and Tarifa in whose surroundings the Spanish maids and their military suitors used to meet. Plural spaces where they merge, in a multilingual continuum, local population and Spanish expatriates in the projection of their extracommunity relations.

6. Discussion and Conclusions

Building on the contributions of the main authors mentioned in the theoretical framework, we will now address each of the research questions derived from the central objective of approaching the network of contexts which support the maintenance of a HL in childhood, with all its identity and emotional implications. Specifically, we explore what intracommunity affective contexts are associated with the languages of a multilingual childhood and what identity aspects they imply; how the institutional context affects the heritage language; and, finally, which extracommunity emotional links enable the maintenance of the heritage language.

Concerning the intracommunity affective contexts, inheriting a language such as Jaquetía, where the inseparable character of the language–identity binomial (Kouritzin, 1999, p. 179), with a diasporic culture such as Jewish (especially in a situation of rehispanization due to the passage of early childhood in Venezuela and its continuation by the babysitter) reaffirms identities in a singular way, affecting the cultural heritage and their perception as members of that speech community (Wang, 2008). This identity undergoes a “constant process of identity renegotiation” (Hidalgo, 2008, p. 335) in the multiple contexts where Alegría lives.

Regarding recurrent emotions and their effects, Alegría’s testimony reveals the traces left by rituals, exemplifying how bodies are deeply “affected” in their social and cultural practices (Ahmed, 2015, p. 24). That would be the case of the excerpt in which she describes her Venezuelan babysitter and the access to the parks and the magic of a Caribbean atmosphere where the connection to the distant realm of childhood can be observed. This aligns with the idea of “particular affective cultures with a common emotional repertoire of the social group which acts as a mode of affiliation to a community” (Le Breton, 2012, p. 69), although in our case, it would not be a single social group, but a multitude of communities coexisting within a Tangier neighborhood.

Upon arriving in Tangier, this identity expands through interactions with the immediate community context, the powerful Jewish network of northern Morocco (Feria García, 2007, p. 10), which favors the intensification of intracommunity relations. Religious celebrations intensify community connections, strengthening the feeling of belonging and collectivity (both in the celebration and in the preparation). Successful maintenance of the HL requires, as we have previously seen, continuous exposure to the speech of the people around him, where Bruner’s (1983) notions of scaffolding and format, with ritualized routines of joint interaction between adult and child, are essential. These interactions, in which the feeling of belonging to a group and the support of a community (Tse, 2001) as wide as the one in northern Morocco, are crucial. Diasporic family, in short, that uses the same L1 to “satisfy the void created by distance” (Guardado & Becker, 2013, p. 57). A dynamic community that, if it has the possibility of organizing cultural or religious activities, as is the case of our Bendelac family, “can have a lasting effect on cultural identity and its desire to transmit the HL to future generations” (Houle, 2011, p. 11). The conception of identity as a fluid concept with all its mutability in the cohesion of a life (Ricoeur, 1995) emerges here prominently through the emotional dyad pride–admiration for these collective celebrations. The diglossic contexts (emotional and institutional), such as those studied, are an integral part of this scaffolding in a singular way, emphasizing the speaker’s subjectivity in his interactions (Foucault, 2008).

From the point of view of linguistic choices, Alegria’s biographical trajectory reflects many of the strategies adopted by a HS’s parents as described by Piller (2001, p. 66). From an initial situation of home language vs. community language (typical of diglossic situations, Grosjean (1982)) to the maternal imposition of French at home once they begin their schooling, a clear example of one person, one language (Döpke, 1992)). This last dynamic would also correspond to the so-called Context Methods or Time and Place Methods, in which it is decided in which spaces or at what times (a late attempt to reestablish Spanish in Alegrías’s domestic environment) to use one language or another (Crisfield, 2021). In the author’s home, the result of the imposition of the language of instruction at home is the isolation of the father figure. This situation, which she laments from a distance, is the result of an extreme family language policy decision (King et al., 2008). In Alegría’s testimony, the paternal figure, who advocates for the use of the inherited language, represents the destiny of the most affective and emotional discourse, masterfully illustrated in the pragmatic space of the curses in Jaquetía. This would be an example of “emotional diglossia” (Duñabeitia, 2017, p. 18). In any case, the maternal decision to prioritize the use of French, the colonial language of promotion (Fernández Vítores & Benlabbah, 2014, p. 29), to the detriment of Spanish, because of fear of school failure, is not so different from that of many parents of Hispanics in the USA and Europe today, nearly a century later.

Leaving the domestic space and entering the school sphere, the way in which the institutional context affects the heritage language, as addressed in the second question, is clearly negative. At first, we could blame the historical context of the 1930s, the decade in which Alegria attended the Liceo. Nonetheless, as we have seen in the state of the question, attitudes towards heritage students are still, on many occasions, anti-pedagogical. In such attitudes we can observe the standard and nativist ideologies of the teaching staff who base their actions on the corrective practice denounced by Moreno Fernández (2024, p. 21). The boredom described by her during the classes, given the structuralist teaching of a mother tongue as if it were a foreign language—another error denounced by Moreno Fernández (2024)—leads to the final abandonment of the subject by the author.

On the other hand, the access to the field of classical languages fosters a positive attitude in Alegría, reshaping her beliefs and recovering her lost motivation as shown by the enthusiasm which floods her later discourse. The new fascination for Greek, but also for Latin, may have a lot to do with the connection and affinity with her inherited language (especially in its Jaquetía variant). We thus see, as with so many heritage speakers, how the emergence of a “third language” can mediate (and even improve) the linguistic conflict between the minority language and the official language of the host society, often leading to a reconciliation with the HL.

In this reconciliation, the extracommunity emotional ties which make possible the maintenance of the heritage language, the third and last of our questions, take on a central role. In extracommunity spaces such as those analyzed, the transition between family life and community life is resolved and the future of the heritage languages is definitively decided (Moreno Fernández, 2024). As we have seen, the identity associations which emerge from the interaction with the immediate community context, being included in a distinctly religious community, are ultimately overwhelmed when they meet the mosaic of identities of a neighborhood with so many different religions. This dynamic is particularly illustrative in a reality such as that of Tangier in the 1930s, where rites and celebrations arise more from proximity and neighborhood than from the exclusivity of each community, as can be observed in Alegria’s account. We would thus witness a reconfiguration of the link between the local and the global (Hirai, 2014) resulting from socio-historically situated interactions, in singular contexts and as a result of particular experiential exchanges, where feelings are always culturally framed and influenced by one’s biography, social situation, and historical context (Rosaldo, 2000).

Likewise, special emphasis is placed on the openness and accessibility of international city context, characterized by community courtyards and streets where public spaces are actively used by the community. Collectivism, once again, to enjoy the Jewish Pesach, but also the Muslim Ramadan, highlighting the intergenerational character of both. In relational terms, the axis of the use of simultaneous languages is marked around the diversity, ease, and positivity of childhood. Interactions which would be in the relational line of emotions (Calderón Rivera, 2012), but that are not limited to the evocation itself in the text, but refer, explicitly, to the emotional influence of the narrator’s infantile body cone in the more corporeal line of Ahmed (2015). Deconstruction of bipolarities which would connect, in the case of Alegría, with the false equation between emotional distance and cultural distance that has been attributed to supposedly distant speech communities (Kemppanen et al., 2012).

Regarding linguistic uses, the emotional associations with hospitality industry are embodied in the names of drinks, food, and musical repertoires, which transport her back to her childhood. We see, thus, a continuous back and forth between the languages of those spaces where the construct of translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014), which gathers the idea of ”passing through” languages and cultures, fully comes into play. That pleasure appears intensified as opposed to the idea of loss in the American host society from which Alegría makes her evocation. Territories of lost childhood which evoke, inevitably, the central emotion of nostalgia. Emergence of the reflexive nostalgia discussed in the theoretical framework, which is born of cultural memory, of individual reminiscences, and encourages multiple narratives (Boym, 2001, in Fernández Merino, 2008). Intracommunity and extracommunity contexts, in short, that illustrate the complex web of relationships in which HLs are inserted where the psychological is imbricated with the identity and the linguistic with the social (Moreno Fernández, 2024).

As we saw in the theoretical framework, Ahmed (2015), with her “affective turn”, carried out a transformation in the traditional conception of emotions, moving to a greater consideration of their effects, without limiting it to the movement of affects between bodies, but to how these are “affected” in their social and cultural practices. Focusing on our study, among these practices we could consider the linguistic practices of the different speech communities inserted in contexts where there is language contact and the weight that emotional dimensions have in the maintenance of the heritage language and culture (or in the opposite process due to the atavistic fears of school failure of so many parents). Experience of emotion, thus, as affective circulation emanated “from within”, from the memory of Alegria when she is immersed in affective contexts that trigger it in her particular life itinerary, but, also and especially, when remembering them from the transnational spaces in which the evocative act takes place. This being transposed to our classrooms, it would be essential not to obviate the affective dimension in multilingual contexts fertilized for all kinds of “emotional diglossia” in multilingual people when they are exposed to one or another language. We thus advocate a profoundly experiential didactic approach (in the most vital sense of the term), without forgetting the emotional component remains central in the story of an author who carries embodied, in her own name, the patrimonial joy associated with the inherited language.