The racialization of language in British political discourse

Abstract

In the summer of 2001 there were violent disturbances on the streets of towns and cities in the north of England. These disturbances, popularly described in the British media as ‘race riots’, principally involved young British Asian men, young White British men, and the police. In November 2002 the Nationality, Immigration, and Asylum Act was granted Royal Assent, and passed into British law, introducing legislation which required spouses of British citizens to demonstrate their proficiency in English when applying for British citizenship. This paper provides an analysis of the racialization of language in political discourse which linked the violence on the streets of northern England with the argument for extended citizenship language testing. The paper concludes that this discourse is recontextualized and transformed in increasingly legitimate contexts, gaining authority as it travels, until it is enshrined in the least negotiable domain of all – the law.

Keywords:

• language ideology
• racialization
• political discourse
• recontextualization
• multilingualism

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrian Blackledge

His publications include Teaching Bilingual Children (Trentham Books, 1994), Literacy, Power and Social Justice (Trentham Books, 2000), Multilingualism, Second Language Learning and Gender (co-edited with Aneta Pavlenko, Ingrid Piller, & Marya Teutsch-Dwyer, Mouton de Gruyter, 2001), Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts (co-edited with Aneta Pavlenko, Multilingual Matters, 2004), and Discourse and Power in a Multilingual World (John Benjamins 2005). His main area of research is multilingualism and social justice in linguistic minority settings, including political and institutional discourse.