Abstract: Much research on intercultural competence (IC) focuses on relatively recent human history, on a transnational era when, for many, especially in the economically privileged parts of the world, the possibilities for intercultural interactions have rapidly increased as physical and virtual mobility opportunities have also increased through processes such as globalization, tourism, economic migration and international education. Such research has also tended to focus on the modernist project, which developed essentially mono-ethnic, mono-cultural, and even mono-linguistic constructions of society, and inherent nationally framed understandings of cultures. Our work on IC has a different starting point. Using the narratives of often elderly Sephardic Jews living in Bulgaria, we reach back almost a century in order to trace the intra-, inter-, and transcultural activities that this diasporic community have engaged in, and continue to engage in, within and beyond their home society, interactions enabled by their multilingualism and especially their main language of cultural affiliation, Ladino. Based on our exploration of their stories, we have developed a new, data-grounded conceptualization of IC as a dynamic process of performing intra-/inter-/transcultural identities in zones of interculturality. Understood in this way, IC manifests itself as work ceaselessly in progress, as unfinished and evolving identity performance. Our research participants constantly experiment with and extend the language and relational resources they have. Whether it is when they seek interactional opportunities or when they respond to changing social circumstances, they play with the languages they have to achieve what they want to achieve and get on with their lives.
Abstract: Ladino, the heritage language of cultural affiliation for many Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria and beyond, is often discussed in terms of language endangerment and of cultural loss for this community and humanity more widely. However, for intercultural communication specialists, especially those with a linguistic focus, the Ladino experiences of Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria, as set against the backdrop of their changing political and social realities, provide rich insights regarding the linguistic complexities of identity. Through the Ladino-framed narratives of (often elderly) members of this community, we have learned how they drew, and continue to draw, upon their diverse linguistic and cultural resources to define themselves, to articulate their various identities, and to communicate within and beyond Bulgarian society. In order to connect these insights to current discussions of interculturality, and as informed by intercultural thinking, we developed the following five-zone framework: (1) the (intra-)personal, that is a zone of internal dialogue; (2) the domestic, that is a zone for the family; (3) the local, that is a zone for the Sephardic community in Bulgaria; (4) the diasporic, that is a zone for the wider Sephardic Jewish community; and (5) the international, that is the international community of Spanish-speakers. Further, the project presented here is methodologically innovative involving: several languages (i.e. it was researched multilingually as well as focused on multilingual communities) and therefore issues of translation and representation; and the use of researcher narratives as an additional means for managing the inherent reflexivities in our work.
