3 - Language Activism and Social Justice

Summary

Recent work in sociolinguistics criticizes labeling sets of linguistic practices as languages and varieties. A focal concept is translanguaging – while opening productive perspectives on linguistic behavior, this approach often claims that, linguistically speaking, there is no such thing as a language. In this chapter we argue that this ontological claim is too strong, and that bottom-up approach to activism that follows in its trail, is insufficient as a response to linguistically embedded social hierarchies and power inequalities. Linguistics has a checkered history; labeling of varieties and construction of language standards has served dubious ends. However, using Norway as a case in point and alluding to other cases of standardization and norm regulation, we argue that effective linguistic activism aimed at social justice sometimes requires the identification of varieties as linguistic objects. We reject a generalized language suspicion, because the anti-language approach to activism pushes out of theoretical reach a level of organization where social and political hierarchies are instituted and maintained – but where such hierarchies may also be challenged and altered. We conclude that socially engaged language scholars must struggle with the concrete contextual assessments that languages and varieties confront us with, and face the normative dilemmas that top-down political intervention on languages allegedly faces. Otherwise, important means of social justice are lost.