Experiencing the Gilded Cage of Multilingualism: How Global Language Enculturation Normalizes Global Inequality

This study shows how experiencing multilingualism—a political economy process driving global language enculturation—can be a socialization mechanism normalizing global inequality. I distinguish multilingualism as a spontaneously occurring phenomenon in which individuals adopt and use linguistic practices associated with various languages from multilingualism as a political economy process. My concern is with the latter in a global context. Multilingualism as a political economy process involves a language ideology promoting multiple languages. The ideology of multilingualism produces policies and practices resulting in multilingual enculturation and intervening in the global language economy. The global language economy is characterized by a language prestige hierarchy in which languages are valuated unequally. A few dominant languages associated with former empires (e.g. English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, etc.) are more valuable than other languages in terms of offering access to knowledge, expertise, and to other valued resources globally. Native language practitioners of non-dominant languages find themselves needing to acquire competences in dominant languages or risk exclusion from the global economy. In these circumstances, multilingualism commonly means learning dominant languages in addition to one’s native language. The embodied experience of multilingual enculturation can thus socialize practitioners of non-dominant languages into taking global inequality for granted. Multilingualism inculcates in them awareness of the world pecking order and of their less advantaged position in this order. For practitioners of non-dominant languages, multilingual competences can constitute a gilded cage. They can provide access to valuable knowledge and expertise and ensure a privileged position relative to fellow practitioners of non-dominant languages. However, multilingual competences simultaneously represent the price for this privilege by creating negative distinctions from both the linguistic community of origin and the communities of native practitioners of dominant languages. The study is based on the extended case method combined with autoethnography.