In the Museum of Modern Art in Brussels, there is a painting by the

Flemish expressionist Constant Permeke. It depicts the interior of an

inn or popular restaurant. The onlooker is in the centre of the dining
room, facing into one corner, where there is a table. Simple wooden
chairs occupy the centre of the picture which is crowded with a number
of solid-but shadowy figures, including two women attending to
children, a waiter bearing a dish of food and clad in a long white
apron, and, in the foreground, a plump, bald figure with a tea~towel
thrown across one shoulder who must surely be the patron. He stands
impassively facing the doorway which occupies the top right-hand
corner of the picture. In the doorway, which is the scenes main source
of light, is a man who is built rather like the patron, but bigger and
more formally dressed. He is wearing a black coat and his right hand
rests on the handle of an unopened umbrella. With his left hand, he is
dofiing his hat and strangely, given the animation of the scene, it is this
movement, this act of greeting, which is the focal point of the picture.
Yet at the same time this gesture also serves to hide his face, leaving
him an anonymous, awkward bulk, blocking the light and the doorway.
The picture is called L'étrangerlDe vreemdeling the foreigner or
stranger and. for me at least, captures powerfully, both figuratively
and metaphorically, all the ambiguity and potential of meeting and
being a foreigner. Despite the ordinariness of the setting, despite the
fact that the patron seems to be the only one to take any notice of the
new arrival, there is a degree of expectancy, urgency and uncertainty
which comes from a great artists identifying and expressing something
of the essence of our social nature. Anything could happen.
This situation is both literally and metaphorically liminal (the
stranger is standing on the threshold, between the world outside and
the world inside), adumbrating (the strangers shadow is cast before
him, foreshadowing some immediate yet unknown events) and
epiphanic (like the Magi in the Gospels, prototypical foreigners come
from afar to witness the godhead of Christ shining through the form of
a human baby and a new covenant no longer limited to the chosen
people: there is literally a shining through of the light behind him).
You will have recognized, perhaps, that the vocabulary I am using
(liminal, adumbrating, epiphanic) is in fact the terminology used by
anthropologists (in particular those who are interested in rites of
passage, for example Van Gennep 1909) to discuss inter-group
interaction. My choice is deliberate, because what I hope to do here
is precisely to explore the notion of The Stranger', or The Foreigner,
not with brush, paint and canvas but with instruments taken from
anthropology and sociology.
On the whole, linguists and applied linguists have been content to
leave foreignness and foreigners to the realm of common sense. For
example, if we look at the expression foreign language learning' (or
teaching', for that matter), we are immediately struck by the fact that
whereas two of its constitutive elements language and learning -
have been the objects of intense scrutiny and the subjects of vast
numbers of publications over the years, the third, foreign, has
remained relatively unexamined. There are exceptions, in particular
some of the work being done in the field of intercultural communi-
cation, for example (Scollon and Scollon 1995; Byram 1997; Zarate
1994), and a small number of publications problematizing the concept
of the Native Speaker and its adoption as the unique model for foreign
language learners (Adami et al. 2003).
Now this is rather surprising for at least two reasons. The first is that
linguists, above all, are in a position to challenge this particular piece of
common sense, simply by comparing the expression the stranger with
its translation equivalents across languages and cultures. The English
language, for example, draws a distinction between 'foreigner and
stranger which is notoriously difiicult to express in French, with its
single expression l'étranger: German, on the other hand, has both
Ausl'ander' and Fremde, roughly corresponding to the English
distinction. Finnish has vieras, which, according to the context, can
be translated into English as foreigner', stranger or guest: Mika
Waltari has a short story, Vieras tuli taloon, a title which is extremely
difficult to translate: did a guest come home, or a stranger come to the
house? From language to language, from culture to culture, there are
fundamental differences in the ways in which this semantic field is
segmented, differences which can penetrate every nook and cranny of
the legal code, social attitudes and interaction.
One of the bestdocumented cases is Ancient Greece. The Greeks had
barbaros for nonGreeks (and which, interestingly, was a contemptu-
ous onornatopoeia for the way all foreigners were supposed to talk),
xenos', for a Greek from another city-state who, though not a citizen,
had recognized civil rights which were defended by the proxenetes, a
sort of ombudsman, and metoikos, for someone who had changed
house', usually an artisan or merchant living in a Greek town without
rights of citizenship, the object both of admiration and fear.
Interestingly. though rather depressingly, both proxenetes and metoikos
have survived into modern French, though it should be noted that
proxénéte means pimp and méteque is your general, all-purpose term
of abuse for 'dirty foreigners. And of course much has already been
made of the fact that the Latin word for foreigner, hostis, means both
enemy and guest (cf. host and hostile). How is the unknown figure
in the doorway going to be treated? 15he a threat or not? Is he friend or
foe?
The second reason why this lack of interest in the foreigner is
surprising is the fact that the foreigner (stranger, marginal man, etc.)
is regarded as a highly problematical category in the social sciences
anthropology, social psychology, sociolinguistics and sociology in
- which is
particular virtually defined by the notion of outgroup
member. The problems in question concern two main and related
issues: the first is identity and the second is the ways in which identity
impinges on forms of interaction. In other words. how do speakers go
about categorizing their interlocutors as 'foreigners' and how does that
perception influence interaction?
One of the clearest illustrations of the slipperiness of the social
category foreigner is to be found in a situation which I have known at
first-hand for many years and which has been studied in detail by
Finnish sociolinguists such as Marika T andefeldt (1990, 1996, 1997). In
the vast archipelago that stretches along the Finnish coast and out into
the Gulf of Bothnia across to Aland and ciweden, you have not only part
of one of the great dialect continua of the world, beginning as it does 1n
Austria.sweeping 11p through Germany [and Switzerland, Alsace,
Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland, Denmark, Northern Scandinavia,
Sweden, Finland and petering out in Russia and the Baltic states) but
you also have, in the Finnish language, a highly vital variety which is
expanding into Sweden (leapfrogging across the archipelago, as well as
through economic immigration of Firms into Sweden). It is comparable
to the effect you get when you throw two stones into a pool, setting up
tw0 sets of ripples which meet and mesh. The result is a pattern of
bilingualism so complex that it makes nonsense of the ofhcial statistics
which say quite simply that 94 per cent of the Finnish population is
Finnish-speaking, 6 per cent Swedish-speaking. In other words, as in
almost all such national censuses, no allowance is made for bilinguals.
However, understanding this situation is not just a matter of
a third category bilinguals' ~ into the statistics. Partly,
introducing
of course, this is because degrees of bilingual competence vary
enormously so that you have speakers who are, say, Swedish-dominant
with just a touch of Finnish and others who are Finnish dominant with
a smidgin of Swedish and between the two you have a continuum
where every possible degree is represented. And then there are the
monolinguals and the ambilinguals and the functional bilinguals ~ and
they have surprising difficulty in accurately recognizing one another as
members of their own speech communities or as foreigners.
Tandefeldt was able to show that speakers were not always able to
identify even monolingual speakers belonging to their own monolin
gual or dominant speech community. That is, she found cases where a
monolingual speaker of Finnish, listening to a recording made by
another monolingual speaker of Finnish, would declare him or her to
be a Swedish speaker. She also found cases where an individual, self-
identihed as a mother tongue speaker of Swedish, was declared to be a
native speaker of Finnish by Finnish speakers. I shall resist the
temptation to be ironic at length about terms like native speaker in
the light of these findings, but it is clear that they call into question any
approach to linguistics which is based on the intuitions of the native
speaker'. Moreover, the two categories foreigner' and non native
speaker, which are often used even in the technical literature as if they,
are synonyms, are simply not so. They are two separate complicating
factors in identity.
Three sources of help in disentangling these questions are available:
first, the sociological literature on the Stranger which has developed
since the beginning of the last century provides a rich typology of types
of foreigner and stranger. Second, one of the central questions of
ethnography and ethnolinguistics is What does it mean to be a
member of a specific group and how is this sense of identity manifested
and maintained in daily life?. Research on the notion of ethnicity has
proved particularly useful for conceptualizing and delineating certain
major forms of identity. And third, work in the field of discourse
analysis and, more generally, in the social psychology of language, on
such topics as compensation strategies, exolinguistic discourse and
membershipping, provides conceptual and methodological tools for
investigating the communicative and interactional dimensions of inter
group relationships. Let us look at each of these areas in turn.
It is not difficult to understand why the stranger should be a central
focus in sociological theory. Any approach to the description and
analysis of society which sets out to identify the rules for membership
of social groups will also necessarily be a model of the members
competence in identifying non-members. A team' - or, for that matter,
an army, family, gang, profession or church that cannot differentiate