The speaking citizen: language requirements and linguistic neoliberal colonialisms

ABSTRACT

This article concerns contemporary common-sense politics around language, integration, and citizenship that pervade Western European countries, where language is at the basis of a new model of citizenship – jus linguarum. I situate jus linguarum as the product of two seemingly different logics: the logics of neoliberalism and the logics (and legacies) of colonialism. I argue that jus linguarum obscures the fact that ‘national language’ is a historically constructed category with roots in imperialism, and allows for the disappearance of other categories, such as whiteness and middle-classness. The chapter shows how a form of ‘provincialised national languages’ arise from the tensions between the inevitability of multilingualism in today’s global world, on the one hand, and the insistence of one-nation-one-language, on the other. The analysis of jus linguarum developed in this paper forces a new understanding of citizenship where regimes of seeing and regimes of hearing combine in definitions of citizenship and citizens, through intersecting inequalities of language, race, and class.

KEYWORDS:

• Language
• languaging
• linguistic colonialism
• national language
• verbal/audial hygiene
• class and race inequalities
• jus linguarum

The speaking citizen: language requirements and linguistic colonialisms

A noteworthy shift in citizenship regimes in Western Europe since the turn of the 21st century are ‘national’ language requirements for citizenship, citizenship-like statuses or entry visas, in what has been characterised as a new model of citizenship based on language: jus linguarum (Gramling 2016). In what follows, I argue that while jus linguarum may be conceived as a new model of citizenship, in effect it extends and naturalises old (and new) inequalities and exclusions. I argue how language requirements for citizenship distinctively combine the logics of neoliberalism and the logics (and legacies) of colonialism. This means that in order to fully appreciate the assumptions and consequences of jus linguarum, we must consider the historical and contemporary dynamics through which language, race, and class are mutually co-naturalised, and how this co-naturalisation is integral to, and has historically enabled, the development of jus linguarum policies and politics.

This article includes three parts: the first two, respectively, unpack the neoliberal logics and the colonial logics and legacies of jus linguarum. The third section bring them back together to conclude with how contemporary forms of jus linguarum teach us about the importance of including regimes of hearing in understandings of citizenship today.¹

Neoliberal logics of jus linguarum

David Gramling dubbed the term jus linguarum to describe the basis of a new model of citizenship based on the ‘demonstrated language competences’ of prospective citizens (2016: 25). He goes on to argue that the ‘right to language(s)’ is framed as a legal right that protects migrants and new citizens from exclusions that result from not speaking a national language (2016: 205). Jus linguarum signals what Gramling refers to as ‘post-ethnic lingua franca’; that is that the politics, policies, and discourses surrounding language requirements untether language from ideas of what constitutes ‘national culture’ and instead present it as a public good that promises individual and social integration. Gramling further argues that this ‘post-ethnic’ model is rooted in the recognition by national governments that superdiversity and multilingualism are the norm in today’s world (2016: 196), but a problematic norm that governments must ‘manage’ and respond to. In short, jus linguarum has become the new common-sense politics of language, integration, and citizenship.

Jus linguarum is arguably a neoliberal product insofar as it positions language fluency within broader governing strategies that emphasise ‘added value’ and skills as key organising and sifting mechanisms. Language fluency – along with other skills – indexes the integratability of migrants, and determines who enters, under what conditions, and who is eligible to stay. Language requirements are part of broader integrationist ideologies that have redefined citizenship as something to become through achievement, rather than a status to acquire. Language requirements are also part of the skillification of citizenship: the replacement of normative judgment with scales, scores, and rankings, where tests and other evaluations are seen to ‘objectively’ assess the integration skills of immigrant workers and foreigners seeking entry, permanent residency, or citizenship.

Language fluency is measured differently in different contexts: some countries require a test or evidence of fluency for all applicants for permanent residency status or citizenship, while other countries exempt some migrants on various grounds. It is worth noting that some research shows that informal ‘testing’ also occurs in encounters between applicants for citizenship and state representatives or delegates, where the latter take note of someone’s fluency in the course of conversations with prospective citizens; notes that will have different consequences depending on the context. Overall, the general trend remains that ‘linguistic integration’ is founded in the idea that speaking (one of) the ‘national language(s)’ is (1) an enabler of integration and civic participation for migrant populations; (2) an upskilling opportunity for migrants, who are responsible for taking it up; (3) an efficient way to ensure peaceful cohabitation between ‘communities’; (4) and a necessary channel for developing and sharing interpersonal, social, and cultural values. Language is instrumentalised as a pseudo-neutral civic resource detached from its historical and contemporary connections with race, class, and gender.

But jus linguarum is more than an element of the neoliberal citizenship toolkit. Jus linguarum as it exists today is enabled by a long history of putting value on language. Monica Heller and McElhinny (2017) track how language became salient through the history of interlocked colonialism and capitalism. They show how language gets bound up in complex circuits of mobility and exchange, where it acts as resource that is unequally distributed, but also that reproduces inequalities and boundaries through the unequal distribution of other kinds of resources needed to access it. In addition, language also acts as legitimation that enables these inequities to ‘make sense’ (2017: 3). These two threads – language as resource and language as legitimation – run through the fabric of jus linguarum, as I now go on to explain.

The unequal distribution of language as a resource is exemplified in how linguistic integration cannot be understood outside of the intersectional inequalities that shape people’s lives. Inequalities of class, race, gender, age, ability will variously come to bear when individuals are expected to: pay for language tuition, attend classes during working hours, have or achieve certain literacy levels set by benchmarks, sort out childcare, have the time and space to study and progress at the expected pace, and so on. Language tests (as well as citizenship tests) are means of inclusion and exclusion which are framed as beneficial to integration and participation in ways that distract from the experience of the testing regime by those affected by it. In addition, the basis of jus linguarum is generally that of linguistic competence rather than communicative ability. If language requirements were only about communicative ability many more applicants would be eligible for citizenship status and would be relieved of the emotional, material, and financial costs of undertaking a test.

As for the second thread that is constitutive of jus linguarum, language as legitimation, it is exemplified in the UK where a succession of multiple government reviews, consultations, reports, and policies conclude that ‘boosting’ the English language among migrant minorities will take them out of poverty, segregation, isolation, and social immobility. As a result, language skills are ossified as markers of inequality; the repeated equation between poor integration on the one hand, and poor English language skills or the use of other languages on the other, naturalises inequalities through language. Concealed in these strategies are the unequal conditions under which individuals acquire the ‘national language’ as well as the role of the state in creating and reproducing inequalities between the more or less ‘integratable’ or ‘competent’.

The common-sense politics of jus linguarum draw on assumptions about the necessity for a shared lingua franca as a common resource that may be difficult to contest. But what the politics also do is to make speaking the national lingua franca an obligation for the public good. This model of citizenship turns social deficiencies – such as failures in social cohesion – into an individual rather than a collective responsibility. Linguistic integration is cast as the responsibility of migrants and new citizens whose willingness and desire to be a truly integrated citizen and to belong are signified by their linguistic skills. Framed in the discourse of opportunity rather than inequality, government policies on language and integration skirt the ways in which inequalities and inequities are reproduced through language. Language has become a way to signify ‘true citizenship’ that evades questions of ‘blood and soil’ by legally codifying language as integral to civic ideals of integration, participation, and social mobility. But more than that: the national lingua franca is both crystallised a national value and as the standard upon which the value of foreign citizens is assessed.

The colonial logics and legacies of jus linguarum

But ‘blood and soil’ are not absent from jus linguarum, which is founded on the idea of ‘one-nation-one-language’, which is linked to the birth of the modern European nation that required the standardisation of language as a means to create imagined national communities. This history alerts us of the power dynamics behind the establishment of national languages; power dynamics that are linked to internal or external colonialisms. What is more, with the creation of the nation came the creation of ‘languages’ as discrete objects; as separate, discernible, and locatable systems (Heller and McElhinny 2017). The construction and naturalisation of language developed alongside the construction and naturalisation of race, both of which were key components of European colonial formations. Languages were ascribed to different racialised groups, and ‘[a]s with race, the creation of language hierarchies positioned European languages as superior to non-European languages’ (Rosa and Flores 2017, 623). It followed that colonial regimes ‘stipulated mastery of European languages as a requirement for the evolution of colonized populations’ (Rosa and Flores 2017, 627). And these European languages were also tied to class hierarchies. Obscured in the political and theoretical framing of jus linguarum as a civic resource is the disappearance of ‘national language’ as a historically constructed category, which allows for the disappearance of other categories, such as whiteness and middle-classness. As a result, jus linguarum in Western Europe reconstitutes national languages, whiteness and middle-classness as unmarked and worldly.

The cultural political power dynamics of language, race, and class are not new and will have different histories in different contexts. What is new is the connection between language, integration, and citizenship in ways that shore up and, in many countries, legally enshrine the requirement that one speak a national language in order to be citizen. As a result, this formally legitimates a monolingual ‘national’ space – real and symbolic – that undermines and discredits multilingualism and multilingual speakers. At best, the expectation is that citizens speak the national lingua franca in public, confining other languages to the private domain. At worst, all forms of multilingualism are deemed suspicious and undesirable – such as in the UK, where politicians and commentators from across the political spectrum have expressed their concern for children growing up in households where English is not spoken or not spoken ‘well’.

It is worth pausing here to consider the status of English as a ‘world language’ and what this means when it comes to English language requirements in the UK. In contrast to other national languages, English occupies this paradoxical position of being both a language that is presumed to be spoken worldwide and the UK’s de facto ‘national’ language – and by the same token, undermining if not erasing the status of other ‘national languages’ in the UK. There is a naturalised and de-historicised understanding of English as a global language, which deterritorialises it and makes it the property of the world. Three things are unsaid here, and which are worth noting for they give us further insights into the logics of colonialism. First, the origins and enduring legacies of linguistic imperialism supporting the spread of English in the world and the establishment of ‘standard (British) English’ as the prerogative of Britain to define, control, and impart.

Second, the assumption that English was/is equally distributed, rather than as operating as a gate-keeping mechanism within colonies as well as in international migration flows, past and present.

Third, what is also unmarked is how ‘powerful English-speaking nations are both the producers and beneficiaries of English as a global language, and they tend to be monolingual’. (Ellis 2006, 189). The unmarked monolingual English speaker is the norm against which bilingualism and multilingualism are judged.

Such denials constitute a form of provincialising English in two ways. First, in the literal spatial sense of grounding the English language decidedly in Britain (or in other [powerful] English-speaking nations and white settler societies, such as the US, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Canada) and concurrently, expelling multilingualism as something which occurs elsewhere but which, when reterritorialised ‘here’, should not leak into public civic life for it threatens national cohesion. In addition, if jus linguarum is rooted in the acknowledgement of multilingualism as an inevitable reality, tensions arise between three forces: insisting on the prevalence of English as the ‘national language’, the status of English as a ‘world language’, and the ‘reality’ of multilingualism among vast sections of the world’s population. Following Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) definition of provincialising Europe, the second way in which provincialising English operates is that it acknowledges the indispensability of multilingualism to representations of English as both a world and national language, ‘and yet struggles with the problems … that this indispensability invariably creates’. (Chakrabarty 2000, 22) In short, if standard English developed in response to the spread of English in the British empire, linguistic citizenship developed in response to the spread of other languages in Britain. Other languages (and other Englishes) are spoken here because English was there.

Beyond the specifics of the international status of the English language and how that affects language requirements in Britain, this example sheds light on how the logics of colonialism underpin and are enabled by jus linguarum in different contexts. Jus linguarum arises from and facilitates the provincialisation of national languages, where governments feel compelled to respond to the perceived problem posed by multilingualism and superdiversity, conceived as inevitable external global forces that affect ‘national’ spaces and cultures. However, and following the colonial logic of provincialising language, these forces are indispensable to propping up the representation and status of some languages as ‘national’ languages that must be protected and tethered to citizenship. However, far from being a ‘post-ethnic’ model, as Gramling suggest, jus linguarum is deployed in some contexts to further ethnicise and racialise citizenship.

Citizenship and the speaking citizen: lessons from jus linguarum

Disentangling the threads of neoliberalism and colonialism that together underpin contemporary jus linguarum sheds light on the intersections of regimes of seeing with regimes of hearing in the constitution of citizens and citizenship, in what Rey Chow terms as ‘languaging’: the ways in which subjects are ‘racialized by language and languaged by race’ (Chow 2014, 9; Gramling 2016). When considered in relation to citizenship regimes, the theory of ‘languaging’ can be further extended to consider how subjects are migratised by language and languaged by migratism (anti-migration politics and discourses). What do you hear when you see a racially minoritised person speaking – be it the ‘national language’ or another language? What do you see in your mind’s eye when you hear another language or another accent (without seeing the speaker)?

Back in the UK, ideas of ‘good English’ that are deeply rooted in class and racial discrimination have a long history, both across the empire and on UK territory. Jamaican patois, for instance, has been a cultural battleground in the cultural politics of race and class since post-war migration to the UK in the middle of the twentieth century. More recently, accounts of Europeans being verbally if not physically assaulted for speaking a language other than English in public have made the headlines, particularly following the Brexit vote in June 2016. Together, these histories are telling of the whitening of the English language in the UK. On the one hand, racially minoritised migrants or citizens who speak other languages or even ‘other Englishes’ from former colonies are racialised through language and made into linguistically deficient subjects who are perpetually migratised as alien to white English Britishness. On the other hand, the (presumably) white-bodied European-language speaking subjects are migratised through language; that is, they are ascribed migrant and outsider status within the British national space. But more than that: the violent injunction to ‘speak English’ constitute racialising acts of purifying whiteness – ‘speak white’ – that add foreignness to the layers of white hierarchy marked by class, gender, race, and ethno-nationalism.

While these examples illustrate how racialisation or migratisation through language can happen, subjects could also be languaged by race or migratism. Consider how, in the UK, politicians have expressed concerns about Asian Muslim spouses – particularly women – who do not speak English at home and the risks this poses for the radicalisation of young Asian boys. These gendered figures – the non-English speaking mother, the ‘lost’ young Asian man – are languaged by race and by migratism. That is to say that it is because of their racial and migrant status that their languages are deemed suspect; the ’language’ of racism and migratism shape how their foreign languages ‘become associated with non-assimilable alterity and danger’, as Gunew (2017, 17).

It is in contexts such as these that new citizens, as well as immigrants, are compelled to speak the national language and to exercise verbal hygiene in order to protect the audial hygiene of the nation. Verbal hygiene is what Deborah Cameron describes as ‘all the normative metalinguistic practices through which people attempt to improve languages or regulate their use’ (2013: 60): learning a language not only comes with bodily contortions and mannerisms, such as the pursing of lips, the twisting of tongues, the pitching of the voice to repeat sounds, syllables, words. It also comes with learning the social norms around language use in a language community: tone, forms of address, and so on. Furthermore, when considered in the context of moral panics about threats to national language(s) or national culture(s), the idea of verbal hygiene extends into what I call ‘audial hygiene’. The verbal hygiene required of aspiring or new citizens is about protecting the audial hygiene of the national public space. Audial hygiene is a practice of cleansing audial surfaces of ‘poor’ uses of the presumed national language or of the uses of other languages altogether.

* * *

To conclude, the politics of jus linguarum force the question of how inequalities are reconfigured and renamed in citizenship. Through jus linguarum, migrants’ belonging or non-belonging is carved out from the very dynamics of the linguistic relations that they are brought into. The normalisation of fluency in the ‘national’ language means that this national language as a historical category disappears. And this is a historical category that cannot be dissociated from colonial histories – foreign and domestic – and racial, gender, and class inequalities.

Jus linguarum may be a new model of citizenship, but it is not replacing jus soli or jus sanguinis. Imperial legacies and continuities, along with recent histories of migration in the era of globalisation and neoliberalism, shape policies of language and integration where national languages are normalised and unmarked as ‘naturally’ necessary for the public good. Practices of verbal and audial hygiene blend into regimes of seeing and regimes of hearing which combine in shaping what it is to speak like a citizen and what it is that citizens can speak.

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Notes on contributors

Anne-Marie Fortier

Anne-Marie Fortier is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. Her most recent monograph is Uncertain citizenship: life in the waiting room (Manchester University Press)

Notes

1. The paper will use examples from the UK and English language requirements because this is the context with which I am most familiar. My hope is that this will spark reflections about specificities and similarities in other contexts.