‘In Conversation’ with Dr. Ruanni Tupas – “Inequalities of Multilingualism”

This talk focused on a recent case of English linguistic imperialism in the Philippines where three high school students were expelled from school for speaking their mother tongue, Ilokano. This example provided a compelling case for the idea of ‘multilingualism’ as unequally structured. In other words, when we describe a place or country as ‘multilingual’, it hides the fact that languages are actually unequally valued, and that some speakers, because of the languages they speak, are more privileged than others in terms of their access to both the material and symbolic resources of society.