Migration and Language: Introduction

The chapters in this section focus on writers and texts which explore a range of creative practices expressing the linguistic diversity of everyday life and the many mechanisms through which migration transforms, with power and critical imagination, the constrictive landscapes of national literatures. These landscapes characteristically depend on the idea of a “mother tongue” that binds language, origin, and identity, celebrating and naturalizing the primacy of monolingualism. Yet languages bear the imprint and energy of human mobility. Used to signal symbolically the nation as a monolingual “imagined community”, their inherent heteroglossia insists on difference within as well as across language boundaries. They conserve the historical sediments of past migrations as well as the traces of colonial conflict and incursion, yet continue to mutate and develop in the present and into the future. The increase in demographic movement, forced and elected, as well as the rapid expansion of the anglosphere through globalization and the spread of digital technologies, bring different language systems into potentially transformative contact while accelerating the pace at which endangered languages become extinct. Languages inhabit a complex and unequal global ecology.