Multilingualism and activism in Italian studies

Abstract

Near the end of his life, linguist and anthropologist Jan Blommaert gave an interview where he looked back at his career, and at what he had learned about the role of language in society. Talking about his time as a university student in 1980s Belgium, he tells an anecdote that I have started to mention often in my classes. Blommaert recalls opening a book of ‘useful’ phrases in five African languages, as an eager student, just to find phrases like ‘get my car out of the mud’, ‘get your boss’ or ‘lazy people will be punished’ (Docwerkers, 2021). The book, written under the pretence of helping beginners learn new languages, was obviously steeped in a colonial mentality: its intended readers were students of languages, but they were also expected to hold political and economic power over the native speakers of the languages themselves. I have come to use Blommaert’s anecdote to discuss with my students (potentially, future language professionals) how any use of language is never ‘innocent’ and never disconnected from relations of power within and across societies. In specific contexts, speakers of certain languages (like English or Spanish) have socio-economic advantages over speakers of other languages (like Wolof or Quechua). Many languages have standard varieties and/or high prestige accents which afford concrete advantages to their users. That ‘is a problem not just of difference, but of inequality’ (Blommaert, 2010: 3). Language, in fact, holds the power to reinforce or subvert the architecture of society. My role as a teacher and researcher in Italian studies depends largely on the perceived ‘usefulness’ of my native language in a global marketplace, together with the perceived ‘importance’ of certain canonical works of Italian literature and art. My very status as a native speaker of Italian rests partly on my linguistic proficiency, and partly on sociopolitical divides. The phrase ‘native speaker’ is partly a descriptor of linguistic profiles and partly ‘a personification of the safeguards of unity and continuity that are lodged at critical epistemic boundaries – the boundaries between languages to be exact’ (Chow, 2014: 58). The concept of ‘native speaker’ is often used, for example, to exclude individuals from former colonies from the teaching of English, as several scholars have noted (Canagarajah, 2012; Holliday, 2006). In my case, being a white man with