ABSTRACT
The chapters brought together in this volume document and analyze continuing hegemonic struggles over language in the contemporary world. The tension between (ideologies of) fixity and fluidity in language structure and use is shown to be rooted in post-Enlightenment anxieties about the relationship between languages as instruments of communication, and languages as emblems of modern polities. Language standardization—underway since the late 18th century—may have changed the terms of the debate, but it cannot resolve the underlying tensions: like ‘modernity’ itself, language standardization is inherently an un-finishable project. The chapters illustrate the germinal role played by institutions of schooling in the dialectics of fixity and fluidity in language, and complicate views of translanguaging that see it as ‘the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages’ (Otheguy et al. 2015: 281).
