Language and the nation-state: Challenges to sociolinguistic theory and practice

Communities, identities, processes, and practices are key linked concepts of concern to research on the role of language in the construction of social relations within the nation-state. In the current globalizing context, sociolinguistics has begun to recognize the need to reorient studies of language, community, and identity in the nation-state away from autonomous structure and towards process and practice, in order to capture the ways in which linguistic variation is central to new forms of social organization. Such an approach examines the circulation of communicative, symbolic, and material resources, as well as the trajectories of social actors and of discursive spaces. The example of francophone Canada shows how dominant ideas about language as bounded systems, identities as stable social positions, and communities as uniform social formations are superseded by mobility and multiplicity. Sociolinguistics is well positioned to take on the challenge of addressing how social actors construct such flows and transformations and to contribute to a social theory of globalization, transnationalism, and the new economy.