A Reflection Paper

Language, migration and citizenship:

new challenges in the regulation of bilingualism

This article looks at migration and the role of language in the control and regulation of
citizenship. It also shows challenges across nation-state borders in terms of bilingualism. As I read
up this article, monolingualism cannot be sustained anymore in the face of the language diversity
migrants as well as in national linguistic minorities. In addition, due to globalization people tend
to communicate easily through the use of development of communication technologies that
makes physical mobility and contact with other countries easier and lenient for migrants.
Language has also vital role in addressing professional discourses to migrants by which
regulation of bilingualism is reproduced. Furthermore, some ethnolinguistic minorities faced
challenges in acquiring new languages and cultural ideologies. Given the fact that ethnic groups
have their own code of language that is used for everyday discourses.
Apparently, the institution also plays an important role to lift up and educate society
through implementing rules and regulations that will lead to the upbringing of ones’ nation. In
this article it’s stated that teachers and doctors are the ones who impart knowledge, culturally
established forms of behaviors, norms, and regulate social relationship as they set out
authorization in the state. Wherein the clinic and the school are set to be an example about
conceptions of language and citizenship. The clinic is all responsible for teaching migrants to take
care of their bodies and standard ways of giving instructions because they might have language
barriers and unfamiliarity of medical practices. On the other hand, the school perhaps is the most
important institutional arena to regulate its citizens. Schools regiment the mind by defining what
it is citizen are supposed to know and how they are supposed to express the knowledge. We all
know that citizenship has single shared culture where language is a key element that has to be
recognized in terms of their rights to speak various languages specially when migrants are came
from the other countries. Further added, it also bunks on the idea that foreigners must still have
access to the material resources like health, education and employment of a nation which also
include language practices and public discourses in an institutional context.
The assumptions of one to one relation between language and its group of speakers
usually underlies the monolingual and bilingual nation-states. Since people tend to use language
for economic benefits there are changes in the commodification of language. Thus, English as
universal language is used for daily discourse. Through English language people can communicate
easily because they have same understanding about the concept and idea of how to use the
standard language.
 In this article, in terms of ideologies of homogeneity, schools are a key site for teaching
and transmitting a standard language as well as a place where common knowledge and values
get established and practiced. In addition, just like what Willis 1997 stated herein, the teachers
are in a position to assign value to other languages and cultures within the school. Meaning,
teachers as social actors have major role in upbringing standard language in a discourse and they
have social power to influence students to establish resources and practices in terms of cultural
and linguistic resources.