Linguistic Citizenship and Vulnerability: The Making and Unmaking of Language and Selves

Examining Hannah Arendt’s concepts of ’pluriversality’ and ’natality’ through a linguistic lens, this book explores their implications for language. Highlighting discourses of vulnerability, chapters critically approach, dissect, and analyse a range of issues related to the practice, or avoidance, of multilingualism and how this contributes to states of unpredictability and exposure.

Exploring in detail how forms of vulnerability are semiotically constituted out of the pluriversality and multivocality of everyday engagements, this book examines how vulnerability is expressed across modalities. Viewing Hannah Arendt’s concepts of pluriversality and natality through a linguistic lens, it casts light on how individuals and groups made vulnerable enact and counteract or contest vulnerability in acts of ’linguistic citizenship’.

Critically dissecting and analysing a range of issues related to multilingualism, chapters argue that vulnerability offers a way to engage productively with others and ’redesign’ the self, and that finding ways to engage with pluriversality and unpredictability productively is crucial for complex societies. In so doing, Linguistic Citizenship and Vulnerability puts forward a strong case for adopting the concepts of pluriversality and vulnerability into the wider framework of linguistic citizenship.

Quentin Williams is Senior Lecturer of Linguistics and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR), University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

Christopher Stroud is Senior Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR), University of the Western Cape, South Africa.