Paper short abstract:

Using ethnography about trans and non-binary people’s engagements with Welsh language revival, this paper explores the relationship between alienation and epistemology, its simultaneously oppressive and liberatory potential, and its capacity for impact beyond those directly alienated.

Paper long abstract:

Using ethnography about trans and non-binary people’s engagements with Welsh language revival, this paper explores the relationship between alienation and epistemology. My research demonstrates that non-binary people are excluded from Welsh language revival both literally and politically; first due to grammatical restrictions on Welsh as a language structured around the gender binary, and second due to Welsh government and language industries’ failure to develop and promote more inclusive ways of using Welsh. This exclusion leads to alienation. Participants feel that speaking Welsh is incompatible with their non-binary identities, complicating relationships with a language that the Welsh government claims is “for everyone” (Welsh Government 2017). I draw on Fricker’s theory of “epistemological injustice” to illustrate the violence of not knowing how to articulate an experience. Yet I also use Ben-Moshe’s concept of “dis-epistemology” (2014) to explore how “not knowing” can “aid liberatory struggles”. Despite alienation from mainstream language revival, non-binary people create and popularise more trans-inclusive ways of speaking and being Welsh through grassroots and community methods. Consequently, non-binary people perform linguistic creativity and activism, which, although symbolically, historically, and emotionally central, have been largely absent from Welsh language revival since it became government dominated post-devolution. This paper considers what theories of alienation can tell anthropologists about contemporary linguistic, national, and cultural revivals. Alienation can allow people to refashion a sense of self outside of normative collective identities, challenging dominant ways of knowing. This paper provokes questions about how alienation transforms power dynamics and generates impact beyond those directly alienated.