On my accent – Signs of belonging in present-day multicultural societies

The article takes as a point of departure the anecdotic experience of conversation with an Australian winemaker in the Yarra Valley in order to propose a detailed semio–linguistic analysis of the question “where is your accent from?”. The pragmatic implicatures of this question are made explicit in the framework of intercultural pragmatics, conversation analysis, situation semantics, and interaction studies. The social implications of such question are pinpointed through a philosophical excursus on small talk — interpreted in analogy with the concept of sacrifice in René Girard’s mimetic theory — and territoriality studies — with particular reference to Goffman and the topic of silence. The analysis continues through some thought experiments designing alternative conversational scenarios and ends with a comparison between the multicultural question “where is your accent from?” and the non–multicultural question “where are you from?” Through such comparative analysis, the article demonstrates that exclusionary logics are not absent in multicultural societies, but disguised in social rhetorics that are even more difficult to decode than those characterizing non–multicultural societies.