Multilingual Citizen : Towards a Politics of Language for Agency and Change

In this ground-breaking collection of essays, the editors and authors develop the idea of Linguistic Citizenship. This notion highlights the importance of practices whereby vulnerable speakers themselves exercise control over their languages, and draws attention to the ways in which alternative voices can be inserted into processes and structures that otherwise alienate those they were designed to support. The chapters discuss issues of decoloniality and multilingualism in the global South, and together retheorize how to accommodate diversity in complexly multilingual/ multicultural societies. Offering a framework anchored in transformative notions of democratic and reflexive citizenship, it prompts readers to critically rethink how existing contemporary frameworks such as Linguistic Human Rights rest on disempowering forms of multilingualism that channel discourses of diversity into specific predetermined cultural and linguistic identities.

Lisa Lim is Associate Professor and Head of the School of English, The University of Hong Kong.

Christopher Stroud is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape, and Professor of Transnational Bilingualism at Stockholm University. His current research focuses on practices and ideologies of multilingualism in Southern Africa, specifically Linguistic Citizenship, as a way of rethinking the role of language in brokering diversity in a decolonial framework. He has published in English, Swedish and Portuguese in journals such as Language Policy, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Sociolinguistic Studies, Semiotics, International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, MAN, and Multilingual Margins (the latter of which he is co-founder). He has edited and authored a number of volumes, most recently: The Multilingual Citizen: Towards a Politics of Language for Agency and Change (co-edited with Lisa Lim and Lionel Wee (2018), Multilingual Matters; The Sociolinguistics of the South (co-edited with Kathleen Heugh, Peter da Costa and Kerry Taylor Leech (2021), Routledge: Critical Studies in Multilingualism; and Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education: Reclaiming Voices from the South (co-edited with Zannie Bock) (2021), Bloomsbury Academic. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Science in South Africa (ASSAf), a Member of the UNESCO Chair in Multilingualism and Language Planning; Scientific Board Member: The Centre for Multilingualism across the Lifespan (MultiLing), Oslo University; He co-edits a series for Bloomsbury Press together with Kathleen Heugh and Piet van Avermaet entitled ‘Multilingualisms and Diversities in Education’.

Lionel Wee is a linguist in the Department of English Language & Literature, National University of Singapore. He is interested in language policy (especially in Southeast Asia), the grammar of Singapore English, metaphorical discourse, and general issues in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. He sits on the editorial boards of Applied Linguistics, English World-Wide and Multilingual Margins. His recent publications include The Singlish Controversy: Language, Identity and Culture in a Globalizing World (2018) and Language, Space, and Cultural Play: Theorizing Affect in the Semiotic Landscape (2019, co-authored with Robbie Goh), both with Cambridge University Press.