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Afterword: language, affect and everyday citizenship

In 2014, Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), a party that was pivotal in campaigning for Britain leaving the European Union, told a story about feeling ‘awkward’ when he heard foreign languages spoken on a train. This was an anecdote delivered as part of a conference speech, made in anticipation of the 2014 European Elections. In it, he described the UK as feeling like ‘a foreign land’ because of immigration (Sparrow 2014). He talked about getting on a train at Charing Cross, London, and not hearing English spoken until he had passed four stops out of the city: ‘it was not until we got past Grove Park that I could hear English being audibly spoken in the carriage’. Asked what the problem with foreign languages was, he replied that they made him uncomfortable because he did not understand them. Later, in a radio interview, he was challenged about these remarks, as journalists pointed out that his wife’s first language is German, and that he and his children live in a multilingual home (Belfast Telegraph 2021). The ensuing discussion raised further contradictions, but made some things clear: some languages appear more 'foreign' than others, and multilingualism is acceptable in some spaces, whilst in others, it represents peculiarity, if not a threat. What this anecdote suggests is that language is more than a means of communication. Languages also operate affectively. As the philosopher and poet Denise Riley (2005, 1) puts it, there is ‘a forcible affect of language’. Language carries not only a symbolic meaning, then, but also sensory elements (Houen 2011, 216; Riley 2005, 3). Language is a place where people dwell together. It also forms a way we can feel out of place. Consider how someone’s use of spoken English makes our own English feel inadequate or feel ‘marked’ in classed or racialised ways. Or consider how learning to speak like an organisation might make us feel part of something bigger than ourselves. Language therefore has affective and performative powers (Houen 2011, 216). This is not only because language provides the means through which we might discuss, say, a happy or a sad subject. As Alex Houen argues, it is because the very syntax, vocabulary, punctuation as well as ideological discourse through which that happy or sad subject is discussed carries its own affects. This can be explained by thinking of the experience of reading a bedtime story. The story itself may or may not move us. But the affective arrangement of words, the fact that we have spoken them a hundred times before, the repetition of key words and letters, or the rhythm of the sentences as we read them for someone else’s attention, might all carry affective resonances.