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. However, 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 & Guisemmo, 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.