Abstract Summary
This presentation examines how three analytical sociolinguistic frameworks – superdiversity, linguistic citizenship (LC) and language rights (LR) – might usefully inform the ongoing development of national language policies in relation to both their increasingly diversified/multilingual constituent populations and wider trends of migration/transmigration in a globalized world.
Abstract :
Contemporary developments in language policy internationally currently reflect two apparently countervailing trends. The first sees a retreat from multiculturalism as public policy, along with a related retrenchment of minority language rights for national minorities and/or Indigenous peoples within modern nation-states (May, 2011). The second sees the rapid expansion of patterns of migration and transmigration that have resulted in the exponential diversification worldwide of national populations, along with the foregrounding, in sociolinguistic terms, of an increasingly visible, and complex, multilingualism among constituent populations (Vertovec, 2007).
In this paper, I will examine three prevailing analytical sociolinguistic frameworks – superdiversity, linguistic citizenship and language rights – that bear directly on these developments and the issues to which they give rise. Drawing on Vertovec’s (2007) original framing of the concept, sociolinguistic accounts of superdiversity (see, e.g., Blommaert, 2013; Arnaut et al., 2015) champion the complex individual multilingualism of migrants/transmigrants in an increasingly globalized, late modern world, and the related opportunities that this provides for deconstructing named and/or standardized languages. Linguistic citizenship, with its origins in deliberative democracy, makes allied arguments in relation to contemporary multilingual language practices – emphasizing individual agency and voice, and the use of translanguaging, as a means of recognizing the complexity and dynamism of intragroup language differences (Stroud, 2018; Wee, 2018).
Both these frameworks explicitly disavow the recognition of language rights as an analytical framework on the basis that the latter, in their view, reinforces a necessarily essentialist view of intergroup language differences at the expense of the heterogeneous, fluid language practices attendant upon complex individual multilingualism. Drawing on Kraus’s (2012) notion of ‘complex diversity’, I will offer a rejoinder to this position - outlining how a non-essentialist understanding of language rights can still be maintained alongside a recognition of complex individual multilingualism in this globalized, late modern world.
