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Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

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22
Jan
2025

Britain’s cities are multilingual, but utopian visions of equality are being cancelled

Yaron Matras

It’s a cliché that Britain’s power as a nation is linked to the English language, so much so that prime minister Theresa May assured the public that Brexit would be a success because “our language is the language of the world” and Boris Johnson complained that there were “too many people in our cities who don’t speak English as their first language”. In my book Speech and the City: Multilingualism, Decoloniality and the Civic University I discuss the need to acknowledge the multilingual reality of Britain’s cities and to reshape public discourse, institutions and procedures to accommodate to that reality. My principal case study is Manchester, where I worked for some 25 years and where I founded and led a university-based project that combined teaching, research and public engagement around the city’s multilingualism.

Two main threads run through the chapters. The first is the contrast between conversations at national and at city levels. The Brexit debate saw political actors at national level mobilising linguaphobia – a fear of exposure to other languages – to serve an isolationist agenda. Some official policy reports even incorrectly equated use of languages other than English with low proficiency in English and so with low socio-economic integration and even a risk of political radicalisation. Multilingualism was regarded as deficient citizenship. National government does nothing to support the languages of minority communities (except Welsh) and rarely reaches out to population sectors in their own languages; the absence of multilingual communication during the Covid outbreak was a pertinent example. By contrast, public institutions and front-line practitioners at city level are more sensitive to the needs of multilingual population groups. Manchester’s health care system offers interpreting services in more than one hundred languages and libraries stock multilingual materials. After we published research on the city’s linguistic diversity and organised neighbourhood Language Days to raise public awareness, Manchester branded itself ‘Britain’s City of Languages’. A civic identity narrative emerged that embraced language diversity, migration history and trans-local connections to strengthen a feeling of local belonging.

The second thread contrasts decoloniality with neoliberalism. I understand the first as an epistemological stance where knowledge is acquired and disseminated through a reciprocal process of exchange with non-academic partners like communities of shared background, public service providers and cultural institutions. Here, research impact is not understood as the effect of independent research on others; rather, research is designed from the outset to involve, and be meaningful to external partners. Decoloniality questions ontologies like traditional boundaries among academic language disciplines, aiming not to protect existing turfs but to create frameworks that serve local interests, for instance by introducing a focus on multilingualism into a Locality Studies strand. It interrogates existing language hierarchies, questioning the division between Modern Foreign Languages (MFLs) and Community Languages. Decoloniality also offers a lens on public celebration through the concept of linguistic citizenship. Critics maintain that celebrations serve to perpetuate the existing social order and do not help to promote social justice and equality. But language day events can be organised as a grassroots experience that gives a voice to families and community groups. They use the public space to draw attention to their own identities, needs and aspirations and give practitioners confidence to enact new protocols, in effect modifying local institutional policies.

This second theme also captures the tension between the multilingual utopia – understood as the ‘not yet’ or ‘still to be achieved’ – and the institutional appropriation of ‘diversity’ for profitability and reputational purposes. Manchester embraced a city language narrative, adopting International Language Day on 21 February into its civic calendar and flagging its language diversity to visitors and investors. But it has been reluctant to support the work of community-based language supplementary schools, to support quality assurance in public service interpreting or to implement new data collection protocols in order to monitor language needs, though it joined our call to national government to amend the census question on language (the current question ‘what is your main language?’ is ambiguous and only allows one single answer, erasing from the statistics home multilingualism, including combinations of English and another language). Pursuing the utopia means that academic researchers can and should use their position to draft and promote global solutions. But the promise that higher education is making to be socially responsible is disingenuous; in reality it is preoccupied with reputational control, efficiency and profitability, merely paying lip service to decoloniality as part of creating an appealing brand.

Modern Foreign Languages (MFLs) have been suffering cutbacks due to declining enrolment. In a bid to protect their departments, MFL academics tried to appeal to policymakers by embracing the post-Brexit ‘Rule Britannia’ narrative. They argued that languages are vital for security, diplomacy, ‘soft power’ and global trade. The government’s lead on languages is GCHQ, the country’s spy agency, and implementation is delegated to the Department for Education with support from the British Council. They consider languages firstly and foremostly as a foreign policy instrument and a skill with which to equip civil servants of (largely) monolingual background. Their approach continues to prioritise western European languages (we’ve been teaching French to the English middle class since the Norman conquest) and now also Mandarin in elitist regional school ‘hubs’. The fact that some 50% of young people in our cities are multilingual even before they enter school, and the importance of languages for inter-generation wellbeing, culture and creativity receive little or no attention. Indeed, when I argued in favour of prioritising a domestic language policy, I was cancelled rather aggressively by colleagues who hailed the MFL agenda as ‘progressive patriotism’ and I was instructed by university management not to speak out of turn. The concept of the ‘civic university’ has come to mean immersion in the urban knowledge economy. The belief that it can enable genuine partnerships with communities and offer opportunities to draft a utopian vision for a more equal society turns out to be a mirage.

Yaron Matras is former Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester where he founded and led the Multilingual Manchester project. He currently holds honorary affiliations with Aston University, Birmingham and the universities of Haifa and Hamburg. His notable publications include Romani: A linguistic introduction (2002), Language contact (2009/2020), Romani in Britain: The afterlife of a language (2010), A grammar of Domari (2012), The Romani Gypsies (2015).

Speech and the City by Yaron Matras

About The Author

Yaron Matras

Yaron Matras is a former Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester, where he founded and led the Multilingual Manchester project. He holds honorary affiliations with...

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