Abstract
Multilingualism constitutes an integral part of post-national citizenship, in which political argumentation may defy linguistic barriers. And yet at a political level, the interplay between language, citizenship practices and translation needs to be emphatically thematised and investigated. This chapter revisits the nexus between multilingualism and politics, with a focus on multilingual publics, translation and citizenship practices, political translation and activism. It calls for a reconsideration of publics in the current historical moment of the multilingual condition, with new modalities of multilingual communication and new forms of deliberation, which may heighten inequalities. It also highlights the need to broaden our research beyond the European/Western focus and beyond spoken languages.
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Notes
- 1.
For a thorough account of such studies, from Socrates and Plato to contemporary scholars, see Xenos (1988).
- 2.
Focusing on Britain, anthropologist Steven Vertovec (2007, p. 1) defined superdiversity as follows:
Britain can now be characterized by ‘super-diversity,’ a notion intended to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything the country has previously experienced. Such a condition is distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade.
Blommaert (2013, p. 6) adds that superdiversity “is driven by three keywords: mobility, complexity and unpredictability”.
- 3.
Meylaerts (2013, p. 548) uses Bourdieu’s linguistic power relations to argue that minority and majority languages do not refer to numbers but to relations of power. In this sense, minoritised publics are those who have purposely been demoted to a weaker public of lesser status with access to a narrower pool of resources, even if their language is widely spoken.
- 4.
A concept developed by Naoki Sakai (1997), “the heterolingual address” includes social and political aspects of translation in a way that homolingual address does not. Buden, Mennel and Nowotny (2011) take the concept further and argue that heterolinguality, or the heterolingual condition, must take into account hybrid and other forms of language that transcend what they see as restrictive language communities.
- 5.
Uchiyama’s fascinating study focuses on the nineteenth-century Meiji era in Japan.
- 6.
According to political scientist Nancy Fraser (1993), subaltern counterpublics include historically oppressed groups that have been excluded from the dominant public sphere by legal or extralegal means:
Members of subordinated social groups—women, workers, peoples of colour, and gays and lesbians—have repeatedly found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics. I propose to call these subaltern counterpublics, in order to signal that they are parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpenetrations of their identities, interests, and needs. (Fraser 1993, p. 123)
Fraser argues that these counterpublics function as spaces of “withdrawal and re-groupment” (op. cit., p. 124) and as bases and training grounds for “agitational activities directed toward wider publics” (ibid.).
- 7.
The argument has been made by many scholars, but perhaps Meylaerts’s has been presented more emphatically: “At the heart of multilingualism we find translation” (Meylaerts 2013, p. 546).
- 8.
Addis (2007, p. 136) makes a similar point regarding translation, highlighting its high cost and complex management.
- 9.
European culture and heritage scholar Máiréad Nic Craith (2004) also makes important connections between language and citizenship, focusing on the importance of language in identity and belonging.
- 10.
For example: “The procedures of democratic politics can be understood as methods for translating and eventually revising worldviews and articulating, examining and cooperatively weighing conflicting interests. […] The discursive practice of translation can thus be regarded as a model for deliberative procedures in democracies where conflicts of ethical/cultural perspectives and interests prevail” (Nanz 2006, p. 84).
- 11.
Kellman (2000, p. 36) goes a step further and suggests that if the Whorfian hypothesis of our worlds being limited by our language is correct, then multilingualism itself “is emancipation”.
- 12.
For a critique of EU language and multilingualism policy, see Krzyżanowski and Wodak (2011), where the authors argue that democracy, European values and social cohesion seem to have been secondary in EU policy documents and superseded by economic skills and competitiveness.
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Strani, K. (2020). Multilingualism and Politics Revisited: The State of the Art. In: Strani, K. (eds) Multilingualism and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40701-8_2
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