• Journal Menu
  • About This Journal
  • Aims and Audience
  • Abstracting/Indexing
  • Editorial Board
  • Subscription Information
  • Contact Information
• Authors
  • Author Guidelines
  • Code of Conduct
  • IJLS Editorial Style
  • IJLS Style Sheet
  • Peer Review Process
  • Call for Papers
  • FAQ
• Editors
  • Editorial Board
  • Reviewer Guidelines
  • Code of Conduct
  • Peer Review Process
  • IJLS Editorial Style
• Archives
  • Papers in Press
  • Latest Issue
  • Back Issues
  • Special Issues
• Home

Introduction to the April special issues on language(ing), multilingualism, diversity, equity, social justice, and language activism

This paper explores crosslinguistic and multimodal health communication strategies employed by the South African government during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2022. Some governments used multiple languages, yet in most cases, English monolingualism was a predominant form of communication. This paper utilised a multimodal critical discourse analysis to explore public health communication by government officials in South Africa and by members of the National Coronavirus Command Council that was mandated to combat the spread of COVID-19 in South Africa. The paper interrogates how this language and messaging limited or enabled linguistic equity and social justice. The paper concludes that in a country such as South Africa, for any government’s initiative to promote linguistic and social justice, it ought to be ‘languaged’ and messaged through the linguistic repertoires that the majority of its citizens understand; if not, it is doomed to fail as was the case with the South African government’s COVID-19 communication strategies.

This study explores the way an existential sociolinguistic paradigm helps to deconstruct the oppression and exclusion of minority or indigenous languages in multilingual societies in the Global North and in the Global South. It uses the theoretical framework of existential sociolinguistics and the method of philosophical reflection to address the question: How can existential sociolinguistics foster existential justice in building more humane relations (BMHR) among languages within multilingual societies? It argues that existential justice as an overarching justice encompasses all models of justice and should help promote an attitude of linguistic intercultural solidarity and a treatment of dignity towards all languages. This study concludes that laws and policies about languages in modern multilingual societies need to overcome econotechnocracy, that is, a world order in which economic and technological powers subordinate justice, democracy, and the legitimacy of less-powerful nations, cultures, and languages. This suggests that all existing languages deserve dignifying treatment.

Persian, the lingua franca of Iran, is spoken as a mother tongue by all monolingual or polyglot Iranian citizens who belong to a rich variety of pedigree-Iranian ethnic populations, including Gilak, Mazandarani, Baloch, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Assyrian, Armenian, Lur, Talysh, Tat, and so on. There are random political dissidents who desperately desire to sell their myth that Persian has long been a ‘colonizing’ force, but the vast majority of Iranians earnestly argue that Persian has never been a ‘colonizing’ language; it has always been a lingua franca or a language of communication freely and consciously chosen by the inhabitants of the Iranian plateau who cherished it throughout history. This paper (a) draws on the existing literature on ‘language colonization’ and ‘language weaponization’ to afford a clear understanding of these topics and (b) aims at demystifying the status quo of Persian. It concludes that Persian has never been a colonizing force and argues that the ‘teaching of local languages’ is quite acceptable, but ‘teaching in local languages’ is the call by radical separatist groups who aim at the disintegration of a historically-unified nation.

Language’s capacity to shape and perpetuate ideologies, cultural values, and social conditions is well-established across linguistic theory. From this perspective, combatting linguistic prejudice and promoting language equity are key to contemporary cultural concerns around challenging prescriptivist worldviews and disrupting hegemonic historical perspectives. Institutional collections represent promising staging grounds for such efforts, with wide reach and accessibility, but are typically focused and curated in mainstream language varieties. This paper explores how institutional collections may correct this homogeneity, through connecting materials containing regional/social language varieties, including those of community archives, into collections more representative of diverse linguistic and cultural landscapes. Using an AHRC-funded project integrating community-generated content into the UK national collection as example, this paper addresses challenges and makes recommendations for effectively valorising language varieties in institutional collections. Consequently, this paper argues for the potential of linguistically diverse institutional collections as transformative tools for promoting language equity and reducing linguistic prejudice.

As an instructor teaching a majority of Navajo students at a rural branch campus of a state research university near the Navajo reservation, I have observed that many of my Navajo students claim that they do not speak the Navajo language fluently. Data obtained through background forms and in-class writing exercises and observations suggested that a minority of the Navajo students claimed that they can hold a conversation or get by with another Navajo speaker in Navajo. Some of their parents never or hardly ever spoke the language to them, so they never learned the language. Some claimed that only their grandparents spoke the language to them. Due to moving to a different place, they lost their language proficiency because their parents never spoke the language to them. Some claimed that their grandparents passed away, so they lost their language proficiency. The majority of the Navajo students hope to learn or re-learn their language of heritage.

This paper focuses on the cognitive effectiveness of watching subtitled discipline-specific videos to determine how subtitling, as an emerging technology, encourages language equity, social justice, and the rise of technomultilinguialism. Cognitive effectiveness is investigated using gaze duration in eye-tracking as a proxy for attention allocation and gist comprehension together with scene and word recognition. It also considers whether academic English subtitles permit students enough time to look at both on-screen images and text. This study uses eye-tracking data from seven student participants in the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Pretoria. The students were offered subtitles in English, Afrikaans, isiZulu, and Sepedi. However, the participants who volunteered for the study selected largely English and Afrikaans subtitles, and the isiZulu and Sepedi subtitles were unfortunately not utilised during this particular study. This paper concludes that the participants preferred English subtitles and remembered certain concepts from the videos better when their focus was on the subtitles themselves rather than exclusively on the on-screen image.