Struggles for Multilingualism and Linguistic Citizenship

Quentin Williams · Ana Deumert · Tommaso M. Milani

jul 2022 · Channel View Publications

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This book offers a fresh perspective on the social life of multilingualism through the lens of the important notion of linguistic citizenship. All of the chapters are underpinned by a theoretical and methodological engagement with linguistic citizenship as a useful heuristic through which to understand sociolinguistic processes in late modernity, focusing in particular on linguistic agency and voices on the margins of our societies. The authors take stock of conservative, liberal, progressive and radical social transformations in democracies in the north and south, and consider the implications for multilingualism as a resource, as a way of life and as a feature of identity politics. Each chapter builds on earlier research on linguistic citizenship by illuminating how multilingualism (in both theory and practice) should be, or could be, thought of as inclusive when we recognize what multilingual speakers do with language for voice and agency.

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Quentin Williams is Director of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) and Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His most recent book is Neva Again: Hip Hop Art, Activism and Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa (HSRC Press, 2019, with Adam Haupt, H. Samy Alim and Emile Jansen).

Ana Deumert is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She is currently co-editor of Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact (with Salikoko Mufwene) and co-editor of Edinburgh Sociolinguistics (with Paul Kerswill). She is a recipient of the Neville Alexander Award for Multilingualism and the Humboldt Research Award.

Tommaso M. Milani is Professor of Multilingualism at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and Visiting Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is co-editor of the journal Language in Society and he edits the Bloomsbury book series Advances in Sociolinguistics.