Compounding forms of inequality: Cape Verdean migrants’ struggles in education and beyond in Luxembourg

Abstract

Abstract This paper seeks to show how language, combined with other social variables, exacerbates migrants’ and their descendants’ struggles at school and beyond in Luxembourg. To a certain extent, the official trilingualism of Luxembourg – French, German and Luxembourgish – corresponds to an ‘elite multilingualism’ (Garrido 2017; Barakos and Selleck 2018) which defines who can access certain resources, e. g. education, work etc., and who can be left playing catch-up. The latter are those migrants who I here conceive as multilinguals on the margins. The elitist system is a form of domination and power over those whose language repertoire is less valued. Migrants’ disadvantage is further impacted by other indicators of their identity that can go beyond their educational qualifications and language repertoire per se, such as their country of origin, ethnicity, race, gender, citizenship etc. Language intersects with other forms of disadvantage or privileges. From an ethnographic sociolinguistic perspective, drawing on interviews and participant observations, this paper will illustrate this intersection of language, race and ethnicity, and struggles from the ground-level educational realities and aspirations of Cape Verdean migrants and their descendants in Luxembourg. This helps cast light on the social organisation in Luxembourg and understand the effects of multilingualism in creating ‘abyssal lines’ (Santos 2007) between the nationals, certain European migrants, Lusophone and African migrants in terms of social and economic mobility.