Linguistic Justice and the Politics of English(es)

ABSTRACT

In this afterword, I focus on two key contributions that this special issue provides for ongoing discussions of linguistic justice in relation to the internationalization of English. The first is its attempt to address previously reductionist accounts of linguistic justice in political theory, which construct languages only in relation to their communicative value, thus stripping them of their identity functions. This contributes in turn to an often naive valorization of English as the language of wider international communication, and its apparent centrality to the expansion of deliberative democracy worldwide, alongside a problematic construction of multilingualism as an obstacle to such processes. The second relates to the increasing need to explore the interstices between linguistic racism and linguistic justice, not only through the lens of raciolinguistics but also related work in language ideologies and the social physcology of race/ism and discourse.