Abstract
New forms of mobility presuppose a technological factor that frames it as ‘topological proximity,’ regardless of the nature of the mobile agent (human being, robot ware, animal, virus, digital object). The appeal of the so-called linguas francas is especially evident in human beings showing high propensity to move, i.e., motility. They are usually associated with transnational communication in multilingual settings, linguistic justice, and globalization. Paradoxically, such global languages foster mobility, but, at the same time, they may hinder social inclusion in the hosting society, especially for people in mobility. The article compares English as a lingua franca and Esperanto in the European context, putting together the linguistic hierarchy of transnational communication (Gobbo, 2015) and the notion of linguistic unease, used to assess sociolinguistic justice (Iannàccaro, Gobbo, & Dell’Aquila, 2018). The analysis shows that the sense of belonging of their respective speakers influences social inclusion in different ways. More in general, the article frames the linguistic dimension of social inclusion in terms of linguistic ease, proposing a scale suitable for the analysis of European contexts.
Highlights
Humanity is currently facing the greatest challenges of urbanization in its whole history
We compare a variant of English functioning as a lingua franca (Jenkins, 2014; Seidlhofer, 2011) and Esperanto, in order to illustrate our discussion on the linguistic dimension of social inclusion
Languages play an important role in analyzing societies in general and their respective modalities of social inclusion, in particular in reducing linguistic unease
Summary
Humanity is currently facing the greatest challenges of urbanization in its whole history. Hyper-places exist at the same time locally and globally, and this means that what happens there has repercussions in all dimensions in their topological proximity. An example of this is Times Square, which is local (place in New York), national (within the USA) and global: A demonstration held there reaches a different audience according to other parts of the world, e.g., Paris, Tokyo, Dubai. There are digital divides, connection gaps as well as information highways What does it mean to be close, under the emic perspective of a (human) agent? Scholarly literature reflecting on this hyperconnected world rarely takes into account how much language choices impact the propensity to move
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