Language, Citizenship, and Personal Freedom

Journal title PARADIGMI
Author/s John E. Joseph
Publishing Year 2013 Issue 2013/1
Language Italian Pages 19 P. 91-109 File size 185 KB
DOI 10.3280/PARA2013-001006
DOI is like a bar code for intellectual property: to have more infomation click here

Below, you can see the article first page

If you want to buy this article in PDF format, you can do it, following the instructions to buy download credits

Article preview

FrancoAngeli is member of Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA), a not-for-profit association which run the CrossRef service enabling links to and from online scholarly content.

Citizenship has its basis in law, and fulfills the needs of the institutions that lie at the interface between governments and the people who fund them, and whom they serve. National identity has its basis in history and culture, and fulfills those needs that arise at the only semi-institutionalised interface between a people and the individuals who constitute it. Language has central roles to play in both citizenship and national identity, but there is a particular paradox in the case of language and citizenship: accepting the language of the receiving country potentially compromises their personal freedom to maintain their linguistic identity. Yet rejecting that language can mean that other freedoms are denied them.

Keywords: Language and citizenship, Language and cultural value, Language and immigration, Language and identity, Language policy, Language rights

  1. Agha A. (2003). The Social Life of Cultural Value. Language & Communication 23: 231-73. DOI: 10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00012-0
  2. Agha A. (2007). Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  3. Appiah K.A. (2005). The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press
  4. Bakhtin M.M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by M. Holquist, transl. by C. Emerson & M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press
  5. Blommaert J. (2007). Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis: Orders of Indexicality and Polycentricity. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 2: 115-130. DOI: 10.2167/md089.0
  6. Bucholtz M. & K. Hall (2005). Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach. Discourse Studies 7: 585-614. DOI: 10.1177/1461445605054407
  7. Daftary F. & Grin F., eds. (2003). Nation-building, Ethnicity and Language Politics in Transition Countries. Budapest: Open Society Institute
  8. Hutton C.M. (1999). Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language. London & New York: Routledge
  9. Joseph J.E. (2004). Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan
  10. Joseph J.E. (2006a). Language and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624522.001.0001
  11. Joseph J.E. (2006b). ‘The grammatical being called a nation’: History and the Construction of Political and Linguistic Nationalism. In: Language and History: Integrationist Perspectives, ed. by N. Love. London & New York: Routledge: 120-141
  12. Joseph J.E. (2010). Identity. In: Language and Identities, ed. by C. Llamas & D. Watt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 9-17
  13. Joseph J.E. (2013). Identity Work and Face Work across Linguistic and Cultural Boundaries. Journal of Politeness Research, 9 (1): 35-54, special issue on The Interconnections between Face and Identity, ed. by P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich. DOI: 10.1515/pr.2013-0002
  14. Joseph J.E., ed. (2010). Language and Politics: Major Themes in English Studies. 4 vols. London & New York: Routledge
  15. Klemperer V. (1949). LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag
  16. Kymlicka W. (2001). Politics in the Vernacular. Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/0199240981.001.0001
  17. Kymlica W. & Grin F. (2003). Assessing the Politics of Diversity in Transition Countries. In: Daftary & Grin, eds.: 5-27.
  18. Kymlicka W. & Patten A., eds. (2003). Language Rights and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  19. Rawls J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Rev. edn, 1999).
  20. Sériot P. (2004). Oxymore ou malentendu? Le relativisme universaliste de la métalangue sémantique naturelle universelle d’Anna Wierzbicka. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 57: 23-43
  21. Taylor C. (1994). Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press
  22. Wierzbicka A. (1997). Understanding Cultures through their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German and Japanese. New York: Oxford University Press
  23. Wierzbicka A. (2008). Имеет ли смысл говорить о «русской языковой картине мира»? (Патрик Серио утверждает, что нет) [Ha senso parlare di una “raffigurazione linguistica del mondo russa”? (Patrick Sériot dice di no)]. In: Динамические модели : Слово, предложение, текст. Сборник статей в честь Е. В. Падучевой, [Modelli dinamici: parole, enunciati, testo. Scritti in onore di E. V. Paducheva], Moscow: Языки Славянских Культур [Mosca: Lingue e culture slave]: 177-189

John E. Joseph, Lingua, cittadinanza e libertà personale in "PARADIGMI" 1/2013, pp 91-109, DOI: 10.3280/PARA2013-001006