Call for papers

Linguistic nationalism, a phenomenon familiar to many parts of the world, traces its roots to the idea of the monolingual nation that emerged in fledgling form during the Renaissance, and developed in the argument for the right to self-determination of nations based on language (Lenin, 1914). Often a reaction to colonialism or majoritarian policies, linguistic nationalism tends to justify, and thus perpetuate, an unequal multilingualism, wherein ‘minority’ language speakers learn the ‘majority’ language with little reciprocity. The early twentieth century shift in South Asia of seeing a language as an attribute of a person, instead of the earlier domain- or location-specific understandings of languages (Mitchell, 2009), led to multilingual communities being viewed with mistrust as not belonging to a particular group. This lingering mistrust has frequently translated into accusations framed on linguistic grounds of ‘incorrect’ usage and ‘impure’ dialect. This in turn plays into the valorization and active promotion of the ‘purity’ of language, leading to a further disadvantaging of multilinguals who do not fit the monolingual model of speaking, understanding, reading and writing in all of their languages.

Because languages are unequally weighted, with some wielding more power than others through technology and the arts, official state sanction, or religious significance, it is difficult to make a blanket argument against measures to construct and to maintain a ‘purity’ of language (see Rambukwella, 2021). However, measures to enforce and naturalize language standards themselves create new injustices. Moreover, the monolingual bias underlying the argument for language purity makes it difficult to imagine a community that is both multilingual and one. Trite treatments of the theme that downplay structural inequalities in favour of genial stereotypes have not, in most places, captured the popular imagination in the way that the idea of the monolingual nation has.

This workshop calls for papers that take on the struggle of engaging with the complexity of such linguistic situations and wrestle with the question of whether a multilingual nation is possible or merely a pipedream. The workshop will have two tracks - the first panel will focus on the issue of language purity and its relation to multilingualism and multilingual communities, the second will zone in on the question of the multilingual nation within a context of unequally weighted languages.