ABSTRACT
Nations are often thought of as communities united – or divided – by language. People living in them are supposed to speak the same language – both linguistically and culturally; where they do not, the assumed unifying powers of language are missing and the nation as imagined community becomes ‘at issue’ (as the examples of Belgium, Italy, Canada and, indeed, Wales, suggest). So language is a crucial aspect of successful and confident nation-building, and in bilingual and multilingual nations there is always a language ‘problem’ to be navigated. But is this a problem for public pronouncements and programmes alone, or does it trouble people’s own sense of who they are? And where do children figure in this? Language emerges, of course, in childhood – but to what extent and how do children use it as a resource in their constructions of nation and, indeed, place-belonging? This chapter, then, addresses children’s use of and attitudes to language – particularly in terms of the minority/majority language relations existent in bilingual nations.
