Multilingualism and Politics

Katerina Strani is Associate Professor and Head of Cultural Studies in the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies at Heriot-Watt University, UK. With a background in languages and politics, she is interested in how multilingualism and multiculturalism shape contemporary society, politics and communities.

Chapter 1: Introduction (Katerina Strani).- Chapter 2: Multilingualism in/ and Politics Revisited: the State of the Art (Katerina Strani).- Chapter 3: Diverting Linguistic Diversity: the Politics of Multilingualism in the European Parliament (Martijn Mos).- Chapter 4: The Grilling: An Ethnographic Language Policy Analysis of EU Multilingualism Performed in the European Parliament (Péter Károly Szabó).- Chapter 5: Flagging the Homeland: Interpreting Brexit à la UKIP in the European Union (Morven Beaton-Thorne).- Chapter 6: Multilingualism and the Brexit Referendum (Roland Kappe).- Chapter 7: Civic Citizenship as Multilingual Citizenship? Somali People's Experiences of the Limits of Language and Belonging in Scotland (Emma Hill).- Chapter 8: Managing Institutional Spaces: Negotiating Linguistic Inequality in Repatriation Programmes (Katy Brickley).- Chapter 9: Monolingualism and National Identity: Lessons from Europe (Simona Guglielmi).- Chapter 10: Galician-Portuguese and the Politics of Language in Contemporary Galicia (Alejandro Dayán-Fernández and Bernadette O'Rourke).- Chapter 11: China's Belt and Road Initiative: Opportunities and Linguistic Challenges for Hong Kong (Tae-Hee Choi and Bob Adamson).- Chapter 12: For Whom the School Bell Tolls: Minority Language Politics in the Croatian Educational System (Kristian Lewis, Anita Skelin Horvat, Filip Skilijan).- Chapter 13: Multilingualism from a Monolingual Habitus: the View from Scotland (Argyro Kanaki).- Chapter 14: Linguistic Jacobinism on French Caribbean Soil: Teachers as Public Policy Engineers in Guadeloupe (Sally Stainier).

"This volume is a rich source of fresh material analysing the politics of multilingualism and the discourse of language within the public sphere. ... it is a useful corrective to the overly systematic interpretation of language/linguistics offered in so many sociopolitical interpretations. ... the many fresh interpretations and insights offered here make the book worth reading in its entirety: profitable, prescient and persuasive." (Colin H. Williams, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, October 28, 2021)

"The volume points toward an urgent field in language policy, namely a closer connection and cooperation between the disciplines of political science, applied linguistics and sociolinguistics in order to tackle the challenges of an ever-growing globalising world in the twenty-first century in which multilingualism is the new linguistic dispensation ... ." (Oliver Delto, International Journal of Multilingualism, April 23, 2021)