Language Attitudes and the Pursuit of Social Justice

Book excerpt: Language Attitudes and the Pursuit of Social Justice explores the relationship between language attitudes and forms of inequality and oppression, fostering greater awareness of how linguistic choices become political ones and encouraging the search for practices that promote social justice. The volume is organized around different sections that look at language attitudes and their intersections with different dimensions of contemporary social and cultural life, including language policy and planning, language and education, and the role of identity in forming strong communities that promote multilingualism and multiculturalism. Both established and emerging scholars explore the ways in which language attitudes are informed by extralinguistic factors, drawing on case studies involving French, Italian, and Spanish in Canada; interaction of migrant languages in Austria; national languages in West Africa and Senegal; signed languages in Spain; Spanish in Aruba, Uruguay, the US, Catalonia, and Majorca; and Quechua in Peru. The collection urges the development of critical linguistic awareness and a view of languages which recognizes that they shift and change across time and space. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of sociolinguistics, multilingualism, language education, language policy and planning, and bilingual education.