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22 - Migrants, Citizenship and Language Rights

from Part V - Ethics, Inequality and Inclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2020

By
Lionel Wee
Edited by
Anna De Fina  and
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Anna De Fina
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Summary

The notion of language rights has proven to be highly controversial. It has typically been invoked in calls for the state to protect and recognize the heritage languages of minority communities. Implicit in such calls is a reliance on traditional understandings of what it means to be a member of a language community, to be a speaker of that community’s affiliated language, and to be a citizen of the state within which the community is embedded. But the conceptions of citizenship as well as those of community and language are changing – often in response to global shifts in mobility and migration. And these changes exacerbate rather than mitigate the problematic nature of language rights. In this chapter, I review various studies of citizenship, mobility, migration and language rights. Among the points that I make are the following: A fuller appreciation of implications of these changes needs to take into account the impact of neoliberalist ideologies. Recent developments such as the gig economy and virtual migration also need to be factored in. Underlying all these is the idea of personhood and how it variously informs the understanding of what it means to be a migrant, a citizen and a speaker of a language. I then flesh out the theoretical and policy implications of these studies, arguing that there is need to move beyond language rights if the migrant-citizen-language nexus is to be properly understood and fruitfully addressed.

Keywords

Community identityethnic minorityglobalizationmobilityneoliberalismpermanent residentstatelessnesssuperdiversity
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies , pp. 487 - 504
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

Further Reading

This book addresses the complex question of how inclusivity and diversity can be fostered in a democracy. It proposes a model of public deliberation based on the public reasoning and discussions of citizens so as to encourage cooperation amidst increased social complexity.

This volume elaborates on the notion of linguistic citizenship, presenting studies from the global South. It shows how addressing speakers’ vulnerability and need to exercise agency requires first deconstructing ideas of what language is.

This volume highlights the importance of approaching the language–citizenship nexus from a multivocal, multimodal and semiotic perspective. Drawn from a variety of case studies, it shows how conflicting notions of citizenship can be understood only if institutional discourses are combined with more ethnographic data.

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Lim, L., Stroud, C. and Wee, L. (eds.) (2018). The Multilingual Citizen. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Milani, T. (ed.) (2017). Language and Citizenship. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar

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