Contemporary ideas of nationhood have long been shaped by the ideal of the monolingual nation, which links language to identity, citizenship, and political belonging. State policies, institutions, and cultural norms reflect this by privileging certain languages over others, which often produces unequal forms of multilingualism in which minority speakers must adapt to dominant languages. At the same time, the language of multilingual communities is often labeled “impure” or illegitimate and theses efforts to enforce standards and linguistic purity, though presented as cohesive or neutral, can create new exclusions and deepen structural inequalities.
This workshop invites critical engagement with these tensions, exploring how language, power, and belonging intersect and asking whether a genuinely multilingual nation is possible in practice rather than merely in principle.