Eleanor Chapman
University of Glasgow
Post-monolingual commons
There has been a considerable amount of critical sociolinguistic work identifying the construction, imposition and territorialisation of a standardised national language as a key technology of empire (Phillipson 2010; Schwarz 1997). In this talk, I propose to engage more thoroughly with the ‘people’ element of this so-called ‘one-nation, one-language, one-people’ imaginary, specifically with regards to how that people – and their linguistic expression – come to be racialised in relation to a set of nation-state borders. My argument is not that certain languages are tainted by the moral baggage of a colonial past, nor that language practices and ideologies are shaped by empire and nation alone. Rather, I will suggest that as part of a complex colonial apparatus of language, race and power, the construct of standardised and territorially bounded national languages cannot be fully extricated from ongoing processes of racialisation and colonisation. I will further suggest that this ongoing ‘coloniality of language’ (Veronelli 2015), through which raciolinguistic ideologies of ‘languagelessness’ (Rosa 2016) are inextricable from the colonial construct of national monolingualism (Yildiz 2012), rests upon an understanding of language (and identity and culture more broadly) as property. Through considering James Trafford’s proposal that the ‘foundations of private property lie in ideologies of labour and improvement, providing the means for transforming nature as waste into nature as property’ (2021: 25) from a sociolinguistic perspective, I suggest the alternative of the collaborative meaning-making labour of translation as a move towards a post-monolingual commons.