Introduction

Linguistic citizenship is discussed in this volume in relation to education in four southern countries, each of which has its own particular history of internal conflict, occupation and ongoing political tensions and debates. The tensions coalesce along predictable lines of dissonance between local language practices, needs, perspectives and ideologies on the one hand, and those held and mediated through the ideologies and instruments of state policy on the other hand. A further tier of complexity, that of external debates and ideologies of language, is one that intersects with debates that have been largely conceptualized or influenced by those circulating in the global north, is introduced in two of the chapters.

Below I attempt to pull out a few of the threads that weave through each of the four chapters that address issues of linguistic citizenship in education. Before I begin, I think it worthwhile noting that we owe a debt to two West African scholars, Ayo Bamgbose (1987) and Beban Chumbow (1987), for our understanding of how in contexts of considerable linguistic diversity, language planning has greater productive traction for local communities when articulated at the local level, than appears possible via top-down policy measures. Three decades later, the centralized administrations of many southern countries remain woefully unwilling and/or underprepared for productive engagement with diversity (e.g. Bamgbose, 2014; Chumbow, 2013). To a greater or lesser extent, we see this unfolding in the four chapters that discuss language education policy and planning in relation to linguistic citizenship in this volume.

The first two of these are contextualized in Africa. Chiatoh discusses linguistic citizenship in relation to community-based language development in Cameroon, while Chimbutane discusses the intersection of political ideology and language through the struggle for, and during, post-liberation Mozambique. Two chapters focus on Southeast Asia. Premsrirat and Bruthiaux discuss localized language development in Thailand, the only country in Southeast Asia to have escaped European colonization. Nevertheless, it is a country in which extreme asymmetries of power are evident, demarcated along lines of ethnicity and language.