Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the intersection between linguistic diversity and imaginations of justice within British society looking at Polish-speaking community's language policy efforts.We analyse migrants' senses of belonging in relation to economic inequality,political participation,cultural domination.

Paper long abstract:

Since the EU enlargement in 2004, Polish-speaking migrants with diverse linguistic and sociocultural profiles have been settling in Britain in large numbers at an unprecedented pace. This paper examines how their struggle for representation within British society is played out at the level of language. Based on extensive linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in London and focus group interviews with members of key Polish organizations in the UK conducted for the ESRC-funded Family Language Policy project between September 2017 and August 2018, our preliminary analysis shows how contemporary senses of belonging are linked to social and economic struggles, political participation and discourses on culture and language.

The aim of this paper is to show how members of contemporary diaspora communities claim their legitimate place in the new nation-state through language policy and practice and how this is linked to their ideas about language, culture and justice. By looking at a mobile migrant community, we investigate how the relationship between imaginations of language and justice is also reconfigured by constant flows of people and languages. The emerging themes of interview data centring around key socioeconomic challenges facing the community, current changes in cultural and political situation in Britain and language policy efforts as well as discourse analysis of existing policy documents allow for identification of emic and etic categories potentially shaping this community's senses of belonging. The paper contributes to the debates on linguistic justice, economic inequality and cultural domination.