Towards Multilingual Deliberative Democracy: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities

In the present article, I offer a theoretical and explorative overview of the relationship between deliberative democracy and multilingualism to claim that multilingualism is an asset for deliberative democracy. I argue that the traditional approaches to deliberative democracy have often overlooked the importance of linguistic diversity, partially due to the dominant narrative of the prerequisite of a common language for – deliberative – democracy. This paper examines why it is worthwhile to reconcile democratic deliberation and multilingualism, exploring the benefits and challenges of integrating linguistic pluralism into deliberative democracy. By unpacking the positive impacts of embracing multilingualism and providing insights into suggestive possibilities on how deliberative mini-publics can best accommodate multilingualism, I advocate for a more robust and inclusive deliberative democratic framework.