Multilingualism and Politics Revisited: The State of the Art

Abstract

Multilingualism constitutes an integral part of post-national citizenship, in which political argumentation may defy linguistic barriers. And yet at a political level, the interplay between language, citizenship practices and translation needs to be emphatically thematised and investigated. This chapter revisits the nexus between multilingualism and politics, with a focus on multilingual publics, translation and citizenship practices, political translation and activism. It calls for a reconsideration of publics in the current historical moment of the multilingual condition, with new modalities of multilingual communication and new forms of deliberation, which may heighten inequalities. It also highlights the need to broaden our research beyond the European/Western focus and beyond spoken languages.