Lisa Lim, Christopher Stroud and Lionel Wee (Eds.). (2018). The Multilingual Citizen: Towards a politics of language for agency and change. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. xiv + 303 pp. €144.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781783099658

Abstract

Waiting for the egalitarian agenda ofuniversal human rights, and its relatedbranch of linguistic rights, to be fulfilledthrough official political processesand structures is not an option. As thecontributors to this volume discussand illustrate, language rights policiesand discourses have yet to providecomprehensive improvement of the wellbeingof members of multilingual andminoritized communities in many partsof the world. They call for investmentin and recognition of other channelsof political action, in particular theagency of local individuals who engagein language politics through formsof linguistic citizenship. This volumebuilds on the growing body of workwhich explores linguistic citizenship(hereafter LC) as an alternative tolanguage rights and recognition policies(Stroud, 2001; Stroud & Heugh, 2004;Williams & Stroud, 2013), directingfocus towards “what people do with andaround language(s) in order to positionthemselves agentively, and to craftnew, emergent subjectivities of politicalspeakerhood, often outside of thoseprescribed or legitimated in institutionalframeworks of the state” (Introduction,p. 4). It is a welcome contribution tothe scholarship on language policyand planning which gives seriousconsideration to the nature of languagepolitics on the ground, and attempts tograpple with the inequalities that persistregardless of official pluralist policies(Canagarajah, 2005; Hornberger etal., 2018; McCarty, 2013; Ricento &Hornberger, 1996).