Reconceptualising language tests for citizenship as raciolinguistic border regimes

Abstract

This contribution to the Special Issues situates citizenship tests, which satisfy language requirements, as ‘raciolinguistic borders’. This is because such tests cannot be confined to education but function as tools within a wider socio-political apparatus. They have an impact on racialising language so that those with the most proximity to the national linguistic community encounter the tests at lower stakes or closer to their own language(s). Thus, tests are bordering techniques which can be retracted to exclude or expanded to externalise legal and linguistic borders. They are both fluid in their remit and hard in their materiality in the lives of migrants. At the heart of the rationale behind these borders is the fundamental question about whether they are unjust or not.

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