Linguistic Citizenship: Agency, Structure and History–Present–Future

The notion of linguistic citizenship is concerned with what Christopher Stroud (2001: 345) calls ‘political subjects’, and the ways in which they engage with language and linguistic forms in everyday life. It reflects the so-called ‘agentive turn’ in the social sciences; a theoretical ‘turn’ that was shaped by developments taking place during the second half of the 20th century in society and politics. Thus, from the 1960s onwards, social movements across the world have ‘reconfigured the relationship between state and society’, and within the academy, poststructuralist critiques ‘have called into question impersonal master narratives that leave no room for tensions, contradictions, and oppositional actions on the part of individuals and collectivities’ (Ahearn, 2001: 110). Once we move away from these master narratives – from the grand histories of languages to diverse practices of speaking/writing – we are able look at what people ‘do’ with linguistic resources in their everyday lives. Adopting a practice-perspective allows us to focus on linguaging (rather than speaking/writing ‘a language’), and this locates linguistic citizenship within longstanding philosophical traditions of performance and performativity, of language-as-a-mode-of-action. In this intellectual tradition, emphasis is placed on the ways in which language is embedded in practical activities, meaning is not given but situated and co-constructed, and language can bring about a change in the world.

Although agency is often seen as transformative, reflecting our ability ‘to make a difference’ and to bring about change, it can also reproduce and stabilize existing social relations and structures. The ways in which we shape society while, simultaneously, being shaped by it, is reflected in

Karl Marx's much-cited words in Chapter One of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852):

People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they choose by themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited. The tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.