Speaking from the Linguistic Margins

This chapter explores an injustice that arises as people switch between languages (‘interlinguistic injustice’). It is common that speakers moving between languages encounter mismatches between the distinct sets of hermeneutical resources available to them. We argue that, for speakers from less powerful linguistic communities, or those with marginalised social identities, these mismatches become systematic barriers to communicating significant areas of their social experience in a hegemonic tongue. By expanding on the literature on epistemic injustice, we argue that these barriers amount to an injustice with a distinctive epistemic dimension that has yet to be recognised. We start by showing that linguistic mismatches can take the form of ‘voids’ or ‘surpluses’, can reflect greater or lesser (mis)alignment in surrounding networks of meanings, and can affect speakers’ ability to contribute to a linguistic community’s collective understanding. Crucially, given the inequalities built into the structures of languages and societies, the epistemic harms are unlikely to fall equally: marginalised speakers are most likely to lose testimonial clout. We end by discussing some mitigation strategies, examining their applicability to different forms of linguistic mismatch, and their distribution of cognitive burdens between speakers and audiences.