Language, Migration, Diaspora: Challenging the Big Battalions of Groupism

Abstract

This chapter revisits and interrogates mainstream sociolinguistics and social science discourses and conversations that inform current understandings of key issues on language, migration, and diaspora. The focus is on the theoretical underpinnings and the attendant social policy and political consequences of approaches to the three interrelated areas of current concern in the field of language and society studies, namely (1) conceptualizations of the language profiles and practices of immigrant communities; (2) transnational migration and migrant identities; and (3) imaginings of diaspora cultures and identities. The chapter argues that standard ideological frameworks that came with the industrial revolution and the invention of the modern nation-state have seen debates on language, migration, and diasporas being attached to a set of unpromising associations-language as a monolithic ontological entity; diasporas as backward-looking with nostalgia for "homeland"; and immigrant communities as somewhat reified, inflexible, and never changing. Immigrant and diaspora linguistic and cultural identities have historically been looked at through the lenses of the two battalions of groupism: multiculturalism and multilingualism. These dominant theoretical frameworks that undergird current academic debates and conversations around these issues have not engaged in substantial ways the reflexive relationship among the notions of language, immigrants, and disaporas.