Stephanie Rudwick

Against the background of Czech society as relatively homogenously white, this chapter discusses race-related dynamics in relation to English (and to a lesser degree vis-à-vis Czech). Focusing on the lived experience of long-term residents with African heritage and Afroczechs, this work provides an ethnographic perspective of how racialisations of the ‘Other’ in the form of phenotypical blackness influence quotidian encounters of individuals with African and Afroczech heritage and how English is entangled in these raciolinguistic dynamics. Methodologically grounded in participant observation and extensive interviews, the chapter aims to develop a brief account of specific language and socio-political dynamics in this central eastern European space where whiteness and the Czech language are hegemonic and blackness and English signifiers for ‘Otherness’. Employing a raciolinguistic lens by examining where social constructions of language and race intersect in individual life trajectories of participants shows how English language ideologies play out in everyday Czech life. The findings suggest that there are generational changes in English language attitudes and competencies, at least in big cities, and that place and space are crucial determinants of the extent to which English is embraced or rejected and how linguistic and racial Otherness plays out.