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This article discusses the language politics of micronations. It argues that micronational language planning offers a three-pronged satirical rejoinder to mainstream language politics. First, micronational language politics pushes back at attempts to frame nation-states and national languages as irrelevant in a globalized world. Second, it rebuffs neo-romantic sociolinguistic critiques of globalization. Third, it troubles technocratic approaches to language policy and planning (LPP). This argument is grounded in a close analysis of two micronational art projects: Elgaland-Vargaland and Ladonia. These micronations simultaneously appropriate and debase traditional LPP, creating both a defamiliarization of well-worn language ideologies and a destabilization of technocratic linguistic expertise. This is a promising starting point for reimagining research into the politics of language.

Graffiti is an integral part of public space, in cities and beyond. Spreading globally in its contemporary form for almost half a century, graffiti still retains symbolic and social connections to its subcultural origins in 1970s New York. Yet, graffiti is not only an interest of graffiti writers, but of numerous social agents and institutions too, including art dealers, museums, policy makers, academic scholars, journalists, law enforcement agencies and various corporate actors. As a result, the imageries of graffiti writing are bound up with a range of practices, each with its own scope and logic. This chapter taps into some of them. It engages with graffiti as image and practice before proceeding to discuss the suppression and commodification of graffiti writing, as well as the patterns of mobility and permanence in which graffiti often is encapsulated. To this end, the chapter reviews a relatively large (yet far from complete) collection of research, stemming from the humanities, social sciences and (socio)linguistics.

Esperantist radical Eugène Lanti (1879–1947) anticipated a total ‘unification’ of humankind, envisioning that national, linguistic, and social differences would soon give way to a global, stateless, monolingual, postcapitalist utopia. This vision was grounded in Lanti's understanding of history as teleological progress toward increased rationality, social integration, and demythologization, as well as in his cosmopolitan reinterpretation of the social utility of Esperanto, which prioritised anti-nationalism, revolutionary tactics, and class-struggle over humanism and language rights. Lanti's linguistic–political thought is, consequently, an enticing and a reflexively potent example of a non-canonical approach to linguistic community, progress, and radical equality. A critical reading of it – as is laid out here – casts light on some of the tensions immanent in any linguistic universalism.

‘Semilingualism’ is one of the most questionable theories produced in the language sciences. Yet, little is known about its origins. We present a critical account of the history of semilingualism, tracing its roots in the work of Nils Erik Hansegård, (1918–2002), inaugural chair of Sámi at Umeå University (1975–1979), who developed a theory of semilingualism (halvspråkighet) in the 1960s. We show how Hansegård theorized semilingualism using ideas from Nazi German linguistics, producing an unforgiving theory of linguistic pathology directed at minoritized bilinguals in Sweden's far north.

This introductory article opens the thematic issue Spaces of Upset in the Nordic Region. It introduces the contributions of the issue, outlines the concepts that unite them, and discusses the sociolinguistic area in which they are set: the Nordic region. Centering on Denmark, Finland and Sweden, the article offers an overview of some of the sociolinguistic, ideological and political characteristics of the region and the countries it comprises. The Nordic region is widely seen as a paradigm case of social stability, consensus and cohesion. This vision is, however, a mirage. To be sure, upset often lingers below the discursive veneer of Nordic harmony, concord and agreement. Breaking with this outlook, this thematic issue takes a closer look at some of the antipodes of this sociolinguistic and ideological condition. Its contributions engage with ‘spaces of upset’, that is, with manifestations and experiences of sociolinguistic rupture, upheaval or change, in and through which visions of sociolinguistic stability and cohesion are disrupted and challenged. These spaces of upset bear witness to social, ideological and linguistic tensions and changes, be they incipient, enduring or surpassed. They accordingly provide a new take on processes of continuity and change, pointing out the ideological faultlines of the orders they disrupt, or upset.

Sociolinguistics has an intricate relationship with the city and with objects and queries pertaining to the specificity of urban language. Cities have not only acted as sites of sociolinguistic research but have simultaneously provided tools and frameworks that have proven useful in this research. This heuristic mode has subsumed the object of language under a specific body of ideas, facts and arguments. Seen in an epistemological perspective, the city has offered delineations and specifications of language. The figure of the city appears to have created a logical reduction of the ways in which language can be grasped and investigated, framing it as a localised, social and formally heterogeneous – yet moored and well-defined – object. At the same, this reduction has opened up different possibilities for representing and analysing urban space and language. The paper discusses this dynamic.