Global English and the Limits of Liberalism: Confronting Global Capitalism and Challenges to the Nation-State

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increased interest from political theorists into questions of language rights, linguistic justice, and language politics. This interest has produced a call for greater connection between those language scholars working from more empirical and practical approaches, including language policy, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology. This chapter endorses this general project by highlighting the limitations and problems raised specifically by the dominance of liberal individualism within political theory. The chapter takes the work of Will Kymlicka as possibly the most useful liberal political theorist and interrogate his theoretical approach to language in order to assess its appropriateness to grapple with key features of the advent of “global English,” especially the conceptualization of the native speaker and the role of language politics in global, “cognitive,” or “communicative” capitalism. The chapter concludes by turning to Antonio Gramsci’s approach to language to further illustrate the limits and occlusion of liberal political theory for understanding language politics.

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