The Fellowship of Common Speech: Democratic motivations for linguistic assimilation
Liberal multiculturalists, most prominently represented by the work of Will Kymlicka, have struggled to defend the proposition that group-differentiated language rights help nondominant cultures integrate, rather than contributing to their isolation and withdrawal. I show that multiculturalists’ difficulties emerge in part from a strong recency bias that leads integration through linguistic assimilation to be dismissed as necessarily denigratory for nondominant language groups. Taking advantage of the vastly diverse world that ancient authors inhabited, I contrast Kymlicka’s presentation of assimilation with the works of Herodotus and of Polybius, which depict assimilation as a practice that groups may adopt without coercion or denigration. This paper demonstrates how theorists can use premodern sources to enrich their understanding of language rights, subverting the literature’s recency bias while broadening its ethnographic frame.
Camille DeJarnett is a PhD candidate in Stanford’s Political Science Department, where she is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her research interests span comparative politics and political theory, centering on the role of common language in the formation of political communities. DeJarnett’s dissertation uses qualitative and quantitative fieldwork in Senegal to examine the role of language diversity and of language policy in the politics of developing nations. Prior to coming to Stanford, DeJarnett completed a BS in linguistics at MIT and worked in computational linguistics and economic consulting.