Vol. 25 No. 2 (2026)
Special Issue: Minority Languages and Documentary Media: Representation, Translation and Power
This special issue examines the relationship between documentary media and minority and minoritised languages across diverse historical, political, and cultural contexts. Bringing together scholarship from Europe and Asia, the collection explores how documentary engages with linguistic identity through questions of representation, translation, memory, aesthetics, and cultural power. Through studies spanning Galician, Zhuji, Kurdish, Upper Silesian, and Scottish Gaelic contexts, the contributions demonstrate that language in documentary is never a neutral vehicle of communication but a political and aesthetic practice through which communities negotiate visibility, legitimacy, historical memory, and cultural continuity. Rather than treating documentary as a practice of representation and preservation alone, this collection argues that documentary actively participates in producing the public understanding of linguistic communities. Documentary emerges not simply as a record of minority-language worlds, but as a site where languages are translated, mediated, legitimised, contested, and reimagined within broader structures of political, cultural, and institutional power. By bringing documentary studies into dialogue with minority studies, translation studies, and ethnopolitics, the collection reframes language as a central site of cultural and political negotiation rather than a neutral medium of communication. In doing so, it demonstrates how documentary has become an important arena for negotiating linguistic justice, cultural rights, epistemic authority, and minority identity in an increasingly globalised and digitally mediated world.
Cover photo: Still from On the Way to School / Iki Dil Bir Bavul (2008), directed by Orhan Eskiköy & Özgür Doğan