ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the institutional management of multilingualism in legal-administrative contexts. Research in the field of language and the law has topicalized the critical role of language in shaping sociolegal realities. Language has been considered a powerful tool in the transformation of social conduct into legal categorizations and a majority of studies in this field have analysed the legal space as a site of linguistic inequality. Whereas much has been written about the linguistic asymmetries between legal and lay participants in courtroom interaction (Conley and O’ Barr 1990, 1998; Drew and Heritage 1992; Mertz 1994; Matoesian 1999; Cotterill 2004), a searching examination of the language-based discrimination of linguistic minority participants in legal contexts has developed only recently. The primary focus of analysis in these studies has been the institutional hegemony of monolingual ideologies that persistently disadvantage speakers of minority languages in procedural contexts. The observed clash between monolingual ideologies and multilingual realities has become prominent in the fields of discourse analysis and interpreting studies alike. Discourse analysts in the area of sociolinguists and linguistic anthropology have investigated the way that monolingual ideologies inform legal institutions and affect the evaluation of multilingual competences in legal-bureaucratic settings (Eades 2003; Haviland 2003; Maryns 2006). Critical scholars in the field of legal interpreting and translation have been similarly concerned about the ideological underpinnings of what counts as legitimate language use in legal encounters: their analysis of interpreting as a ‘monologizing’ practice that reinforces a one-sided treatment of multilingualism in the courtroom, has challenged the more canonical views of interpreting in terms of bilingual mediation between two neatly separated monolingual codes (Inghilleri 2003; Wadensjö 2004; Angermeyer 2008). Drawing on and elaborating the language ideological topics raised in these writings, I investigate how the legal institution manages and controls the multilingual performance of its clients.
