Who has the authority to speak? Linguistic intolerance in the twenty first century

1. Who has the authority to speak? Linguistic intolerance in the twenty first century Bernadette O’Rourke Heriot Watt University/University of Glasgow CIOL Members’ Day Threlford Lecture 16 March 2019

2. You are in the UK now so speak English!

3. Overview of talk • Look at language ideologies to understand • Why it is that certain speakers (new speakers, native speakers) are given authority? • Why it is that particular languages (majority or minority languages) are given authority? • What are the consequences on the speakers themselves? • What are the consequences for the use of certain languages? • What role do we play as linguists in responding to these types of issues? 

4. Changes in the linguistic ecologies of contemporary societies • Globalization and greater levels of mobility through migration and transnational networking • Multilingualism the norm and not the exception

5. Salzburg Global Seminar’s Statement for a Multilingual Society (February 2018) • all 193 UN member states and most people are multilingual • 7,097 languages currently spoken across the world • 2,464 endangered • 23 languages dominate among these 7,097, and are spoken by over half of the world’s population.

6. Monolingual Ideologies • One Language One Nation • Basic principles of linguistics • Native speaker • Mother tongue • Linguistic competence

7. Monolingual mindset – linguistic intolerance

8. Multilingualism in UK • historical language - Gaelic, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Manx, Irish, British Sign Language • + 150 other languages

9. Linguistic intolerance and paranoia • Why are you speaking that language? • What are you saying? • Are you talking about me? • Are you laughing as me?

10. Linguistic intolerance = other kinds of intolerance • Race, social class, gender, ethnic group ‘soft’ intolerance I don’t mind people speaking those languages in their own homes and it is good they keep their languages but in public we speak English so people need to adapt to it to integrate…

11. Linguistic intolerance in pre-Brexit UK Welsh woman on bus shuts down racist who told Muslim passenger to 'speak English‘ A Muslim woman was apparently told she "should really be speaking English" by a stranger on a bus, when she was actually speaking Welsh. Scotland, November 2014 Speak English, Brexit campaigners tell would-be migrants Wales, 21 June 2016 (just before Brexit vote) England, 1 June 2016

12. Linguistic intolerance in post-Brexit UK England, October 2016 England, July 2016

13. Linguistic intolerance further afield

16. Linguistic anonymity • The language belongs to everyone and no one: a “common, unmarked standard public language” (Woolard 2008: 4) and thus perceived as appropriate for use in the public sphere • English • anonymous language • Neutral • Unquestioned authority • Legitimate language • Other languages • Deviant • Out of place • Marked

17. Naturalisation of linguistic authority • “…an ideology of anonymity allows institutionally or demographically dominant languages to consolidate their position into one of hegemony … that [is] they achieve what the cultural theorist Raymond Williams called the saturation of consciousness, which allows their superordinate position to be naturalized, taken for granted, and placed beyond question (Williams 1973).” (Woolard 2016: 26)

18. Minoritized languages

19. Linguistic intolerance in Scotland

20. When hegemony presents the other as ‘insular’

21. The language from ‘nowhere’

22. From speaking the legitimate language to speaking with legitimacy

23. The native speaker ideology Traditional foundations of linguistic nationalism

24. What of the non-native? • What legitimacy do they have? • What kind of authority do they have to speak? to write? to translate? to teach?

25. legitimacy, equality and access

26. Linguistic intolerance and new speakers

27. Linguistic intolerance and new speakers

28. Questioning the terminology: from non-native speakers to ‘new speakers’ ...individuals and groups who adopt and use a language variety other than their native language … all multilingual citizens who, by engaging with languages other than their “native” or “national” language(s), need to cross existing social boundaries, re-evaluate their own levels of linguistic competence and creatively (re)structure their social practices to adapt to new and overlapping linguistic spaces (EU COST Action IS1306 MoU p.3)

29. Immigrant communities Dawid First language Polish moved to UK “new speaker” of English

30. Speak English or lose benefits: Cameron to stop payouts to immigrants who use taxpayer-funded translators

31. Important questions...

32. How should we react to this if at all?

33. Personal adoptive language – a way of counteracting intolerance? “3) For those Europeans whose mother tongue occupies a dominant position in the world, acquiring a personal adoptive language would be particularly important, in order to avoid remaining isolated in monolingualism.” http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-08-129_en.htm

34. Acknowledgements • Many of the ideas explored in the presentation are part of a larger discussions taking place within the EU COST-funded New Speaker Network COST Action IS1306 New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Opportunities and Challenges. I would like to thank them for their input.