The Power of Voice in Transforming Multilingual Societies

This insightful volume, The Power of Voice in Transforming Multilingual Societies, highlights how marginalized speakers reclaim their voices and challenge societal inequities.

Drawing upon the framework of linguistic citizenship, the chapters in The Power of Voice in Transforming Multilingual Societies link questions of language to sociopolitical discourses of justice, rights, and equity, as well as to issues of power and access. They present powerful evidence of how marginalized speakers reclaim their voices and challenge power relations.

This volume aims to capture evidence of marginalized voices in various contexts globally and show how speakers seek to reclaim their voices and challenge power relations. The chapters reveal how speakers actively confront inequities in society, such as the unequal distribution of resources. Through bottom-up initiatives and conscious involvement in language use, documentation, and the development of language domains, speakers can address issues of language-based marginalization, (re)establish linguistic human rights, and reclaim their linguistic and cultural identity.

Chapters in the volume explore commitments to democratic participation, to voice, to the heterogeneity of linguistic resources, and to the political value of sociolinguistic understanding. Drawing upon the framework of linguistic citizenship, they link questions of language to sociopolitical discourses of justice, rights, and equity, as well as to issues of power and access within a political and democratic framework. This timely response addresses the marked and growing interest in the notion of linguistic citizenship.