Abstract
Waiting for the egalitarian agenda ofuniversal human rights, and its relatedbranch of linguistic rights, to be fulfilledthrough official political processesand structures is not an option. As thecontributors to this volume discussand illustrate, language rights policiesand discourses have yet to providecomprehensive improvement of the wellbeingof members of multilingual andminoritized communities in many partsof the world. They call for investmentin and recognition of other channelsof political action, in particular theagency of local individuals who engagein language politics through formsof linguistic citizenship. This volumebuilds on the growing body of workwhich explores linguistic citizenship(hereafter LC) as an alternative tolanguage rights and recognition policies(Stroud, 2001; Stroud & Heugh, 2004;Williams & Stroud, 2013), directingfocus towards “what people do with andaround language(s) in order to positionthemselves agentively, and to craftnew, emergent subjectivities of politicalspeakerhood, often outside of thoseprescribed or legitimated in institutionalframeworks of the state” (Introduction,p. 4). It is a welcome contribution tothe scholarship on language policyand planning which gives seriousconsideration to the nature of languagepolitics on the ground, and attempts tograpple with the inequalities that persistregardless of official pluralist policies(Canagarajah, 2005; Hornberger etal., 2018; McCarty, 2013; Ricento &Hornberger, 1996).
Highlights
Waiting for the egalitarian agenda of universal human rights, and its related branch of linguistic rights, to be fulfilled through official political processes and structures is not an option
Considering the aim of the volume to take a step “firmly anchored in a transformative notion of linguistic citizenship” (Introduction, p. 12), several areas emerge which are in need of closer consideration in future research, in particular the relationship between micro-practices of linguistic citizens and the political affordances and constraints which they must negotiate, methodological approaches to examining citizenship practices, and the need for scholarly reflexivity towards the acts of linguistic citizen-scholars
The first section on Language Rights and Linguistic Citizenship lays out the key conceptual arguments of the book, with chapters by Christopher Stroud and Lionel Wee, and a commentary by Stephen May
Summary
Waiting for the egalitarian agenda of universal human rights, and its related branch of linguistic rights, to be fulfilled through official political processes and structures is not an option. The volume makes conceptual and empirical additions to this growing domain of inquiry, and will be valuable to scholars and students of language policy, multilingualism, language education, development studies, and (postnational) political science, among other related disciplines.
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