An inconvenient truth: When ideologies of multilingualism lead to auto‐inflicted epistemic exclusion by multilingual students in higher education

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, we juxtapose two international contexts of higher education to critically examine both the situated complexity of (restrictive) ideologies of multilingualism and the ways such ideologies inform multilingual students’ choices of language use that contribute to their own epistemic exclusion in Canada and Germany. A content analysis of data from interviews and written reflections on language choice illustrates that the ideologies of (1) devaluation of partial repertoires, (2) maximalist view of language competences, (3) neoliberal multilingualism, and (4) native‐speakerism‐in‐multilingualism are enacted and reproduced by students themselves in both contexts, leading to auto‐inflicted epistemic exclusion. The findings reveal not only the pervasiveness of monolingualism within multilingualism and higher education, but also the hierarchization of languages and their (imagined) speakers, from which we conclude that not all forms of individual multilingualism are valued, despite increasing celebration of diversity in global higher education.