Linguistic Citizenship

Christopher Stroud University of the Western Cape and Stockholm University

The capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming question of the 21st century

Stuart Hall

Introduction

A major challenge of our time is to build a life of equity in a fragmented world of globalized ethical, economic and ecological meltdown. In this context, language takes on singular importance as the foremost means whereby we may engage politically and ethically with others across difference. Howevever, any attempt to address this concern would need to comprise a critical and fundamental rethinking of the idea of 'multilingualism' itself. Contemporary understandings of multilingualism are the nomenclature par excellence of how we have come to conceptualize and regiment our relationship to different others. However, the construct, with its colonial pedigree, continues to engage and contain diversity in ways that reproduce essential features of colonial social logics in contemporary 'postcolonial' societies (compare Stroud & Guisemmo, 2015). Non-metropolitan languages, for example, especially in the African context, are positioned vis-à-vis metropolitan languages (English, French, Portuguese) in a different temporal discourse as languages in the 'becoming' (in need of intellectualization), or languages of times past (in need of revitalization). In both cases, the temporal displacement of speakers of these languages produces a subaltern who is only able to engage linguistically in the present through the words of the metropolitan language. (For an extended argument, see Stroud & Guissemo, 2015.) In other words, there is an important sense in which the crisis of humanity we are experiencing as a crisis of diversity and voice is deeply entwined with a subterranean crisis of a politically fraught notion of language itself. Thus, if we are to engage seriously with the lives of others, an imperative is reconceptualizing language in ways that can promote a diversity of voice and contribute to a mutuality and reciprocity of engagement across difference.

This chapter offers the notion of linguistic citizenship as a blueprint for a conceptual space within which to think differently – politically and ethically – about language and ourselves. In what follows, I provide a short chronological overview in the second section of the idea of linguistic citizenship. I emphasize how acts of linguistic citizenship do not only challenge ideas we hold about language and multilingualism, but also contribute to an agentive and transformative understanding of the idea of citizenship itself. In the third section, I illustrate this argument further with a case study of Kaaps, a stigmatized variety of Afrikaans spoken in the Cape Flats of South Africa. The section offers an analysis of a performance of a Hip Hop Opera called Afrikaaps, as well as a documentary on the making of the opera, which shows how a new sense of language emerges simultaneously with a new sense of self, dignity and citizenship.

In the final section of the chapter, I discuss how the idea of linguistic citizenship might contribute to a construal of 'multilingualism' as a space of vulnerability. This is a space where speakers meet different others in disruptive and unsettling encounters that interrupt the status quo (Pinchevski, 2005), and where senses of self may be juxtaposed and refashioned as part of the deconstruction of dominant voices and more equitable linguistic engagement with others.

Linguistic Citizenship: Early Beginnnings

Linguistic citizenship is fundamentally an invitation to rethink our understanding of language through the lens of citizenship and participatory democracy, at the same time that we rethink understandings of citizenship through the lens of language. The conjuncture of these two terms troubles both our conventional ideas of the 'linguistic' as well as how we think about 'citizenship'.

The concept of linguistic citizenship is a Southern and decolonial concept that arose out of the contradictions surrounding programmes and practices of mother tongue and bilingual education in the 1990s in the context of the geopolitical South. The contradiction lay in the fact that similar investments in language teaching provisions for mother tongue/ bilingual education, such as literacy materials, grammars, orthographies, dictionaries, teacher-training programmes and infrastructure delivery, resulted in very dissimilar outcomes in different contexts. An extensive meta-analysis suggested that a key parameter distinguishing successful from failed programmes was whether, and to what extent, community members found vernacular/local language provisions useful in their everyday management of issues, such as employment, economy and (local/ provincial) politics of housing, education and health (Stroud, 2001). Importantly, the longer-term viability of mother tongue/bilingual programmes was dependent on the degree to which the community itself was actively involved in developing and administering the programme, for example, by contributing to the establishment of orthographic conventions or choice of curriculum content (Stroud, 2002). A good example of the importance of participation was a local mother-tongue programme in Ghana developed in conjunction with an HIV prevention programme for youth and adults – also involving an adult literacy...