Linguistic Disadvantage: The case of control over one’s environment

Can democratic citizens be required to learn (and use) an official language(s)? Most analyses of this issue situate it in the context of debates about immigrant integration and citizenship acquisition (see, e.g., Goppel 2019, Bonotti & Willoughby 2022, Hoesch 2023). This paper takes a broader approach by exploring whether there is a distinctive ‘linguistic disadvantage’, experienced by people in their capacities as democratic citizens, due to being unable, or unwilling, to use a dominant language. In doing so, the paper applies a model derived from the capabilities approach. According to this, a broad range of disadvantages can be explained by the way in which a person’s language repertoire and preferences (or ‘internal capabilities’) combine with their social, political and economic circumstances, including the demo- and sociolinguistic features of their society (or ‘linguistic environment’) (Shorten 2017). Conceptualising these disadvantages as capability deprivations makes clear that they can be addressed in two ways. Either by acting on the disadvantaged person (e.g. enhancing their internal capabilities with additional language skills), or by altering their linguistic environment (e.g. adjusting their social, political or economic circumstances by providing translation and interpretation services, offering public services in multiple languages, or addressing prejudices). There are often reasons of linguistic justice to prefer the second strategy, but advocates of official language learning suggest that this will not be possible for the specifically political disadvantages people experience for linguistic reasons (e.g. Barry 2001, Stilz 2009). The capabilities in question are what Martha Nussbaum (2011) calls ‘control over one’s environment’ and Elizabeth Anderson (1999) describes as the ‘ability to exercise specifically political rights’. People exercising these when, for example, they influence public policies, hold office holders to account, express themselves politically, and collaborate with others in pursuit of shared objectives. Previous studies have suggested that official language skills may often be required by immigrants seeking to exercise their political capabilities (Shorten 2022) but not by all national minorities (Brando & Morales-Gálvez 2023). This paper adopts a wider and more systematic perspective, using the capabilities approach to categorise six groups of (potential) political actors (immigrants, national minorities, Indigenous peoples, sign-language users, speakers of supercentral languages, speakers of lesser-used national languages) according to their political capabilities at three distinct levels (local, national and transnational). The resulting typology reveals a complex picture, in which majority language skills are only sometimes necessary for democratic citizenship.