Reinventing the legitimate speaker of Suburban Swedish: Linguistic citizenship as tool for post-abyssal thinking in education for multilingual students

Abstract

Based on deficit perspectives in education, multilingual students’ experiences have often been marginalized or ignored in classroom environments. This tendency has been argued to maintain the abyssal line, an imaginary divide that constructs dominant knowledge as universal and centered, while positioning marginalized knowledge as “not existing in any relevant or comprehensible way of being” (Santos, 2007, p. 45). In relation to this issue, García et al. (2021) call for the rejection of abyssal thinking in education, encouraging the creation of spaces in the classroom in which diversities can be voiced and multiple epistemologies of language co exist. Against this backdrop, the current study attempts to answer the call for a postabyssal imaginary by suggesting tools that position multilingual students’ knowledge and experiences as centered and relevant, allowing issues of language to be taken seriously in Swedish education. The study is theoretically guided by the concept of linguistic citizenship, a decolonial notion that encompasses all those processes in which marginalized speakers “exercise control over their language, deciding what languages are, and what they may mean” (Stroud, 2001, p. 353). Drawing on linguistic ethnography, the study builds on the recording of a classroom interaction, in which four female students at an upper secondary school in a suburb of Gothenburg enter a dialogue with their teacher concerning the authenticity of the Swedish rapper Dogge Doggelito as a legitimate speaker of Suburban Swedish. In a joint effort with the teacher, the students engage in an act of linguistic citizenship through which they resist and deconstruct Doggelito’s identity, reconstructing ideological boundaries in accordance with their own experiences of multilingualism in the suburbs.