Language on the Move is back from our summer break! And we start the year with a quick intro to language and social justice.
How and why are language and social justice connected?
When you think “language”, think “linguistic diversity”
It is a cliché to say that language is a characteristic of our species. But we often forget that “language” is not some sort of entity. Language is an incredibly diverse phenomenon.
There are thousands and thousands of different languages, dialects, and registers. There is spoken language and written language. There is language for political interventions and for whispering love. There is language for our youth and for our old age.
The linguistic bits and pieces that each of us have available as communication tools are called “linguistic repertoire.”
Our linguistic repertoire is shaped by the circumstances of our childhood, our education, our life trajectory, and so comes to stand for who we are. “Language most shows a man: Speak, that I may see thee,” as the English Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson put it.
In fact, our linguistic repertoire does more than show who we are. It is part and parcel of our identity, of who we are.
Linguistic diversity implies linguistic hierarchy
Language is not only something that individuals have or do but it is fundamentally relational. The meaning of language comes about in interaction. And in interaction we translate linguistic diversity into linguistic hierarchies.
Linguistic repertoires are not just seen as a product of time and space and experience but as superior or inferior, as right or wrong, as appropriate or inappropriate.
What is considered good or bad language differs from context to context. Some of these contexts can be very small-scale (even families and friendship groups have ideas about how communication should be conducted within the group) and others are widely agreed upon (think standard language, national language, or even English as a global language).
Although most people know what are considered good or bad ways of using language in any group or society, that does not necessarily mean they can do it. In fact, the number of those who can do socially approved language is always much lower than those who recognize socially approved language.
Linguistic recognition and access
The fact of linguistic diversity and its social reinterpretation as hierarchies leads to a range of social injustices. What undergirds all these is that we consider some people more or less worth listening to – based not on the quality of what they have to say but how they say it.
***On the conditions of authority in academic publics***
This thread 👇🏼 summarizes recent article by Ingrid Piller in Journal of #Sociolinguistics for the busy reader#research #AcademicTwitter pic.twitter.com/ixzkvemTu2
— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 16, 2019
Dismissing the language of whole groups of people – and hence dismissing the people – is a harm in itself. It leads to further harm as most social goods – education, work, healthcare, welfare, etc. – are mediated by language.
In other words, a mismatch between the language of an institution and the people it is supposed to serve creates a barrier to the goods distributed by that institution. For instance, last year we amply documented the differential consequences of COVID-19 health communication for linguistic minorities around the world.
How to overcome linguistic injustice
Justice is to reduce injustice. Therefore, the struggle for linguistic justice is necessarily a local struggle: whether it is for rural Indonesians to receive meaningful and accessible COVID-19 prevention information, for Mongolians to maintain their bilingual education system, or for Australian primary schools to have the resources to support new arrival students during pandemic-related school closures.
As linguists we can contribute by faithfully engaging with the struggles of our own communities; and, more generally, by providing the tools to think critically about the relationship between language and social justice. That linguistic diversity is deeply entrenched in social problems still comes as news to too many people.
So our New Year’s resolution here at Language on the Move is to keep researching language in social life. And to keep engaging with the many struggles for fairer linguistic recognition and more equitable communicative access.
A more detailed – yet still short – overview of the relationship between language and social justice is in the recently published International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology as:
Piller, I. (2020). Language and Social Justice. The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118786093.iela0416 [you can download your personal copy from here]
This work is licensed under a
thanks Ingrid! Just read your contribution in the encyclopaedia of linguistic anthropology and cannot help but think of how the disadvantages faced by minoritized children at (yet to be fully monolingualized) schools are recently framed into an advantage by the official discourse in Inner Mongolia. The title of the news is: Let our children soar high and wide like awe inspiring eagles! (by learning only Mandarin supposedly).
Thanks, Gegentuul! For context, I wrote that entry 2 years ago in January 2019 … the mills if academic publishing grind slowly …
Having said that, China is not alone in promoting assimilation as the high road to social inclusion…
Man is hiding behind his tongue coz some forms of utterance have the power of magic, well noted in Article Two of The Declaration of Human Rights: https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
Ingrid’s article illustrates that unity in diversity and justice for all are self-evidently served sub-optimally by colonial and imperial languages. ‘To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them.’ https://www.mkgandhi.org/towrds_edu/chap02.htm ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world.’