This themed section explores linguistic disadvantage as a key form of structural-institutional disadvantage in welfare societies, focusing on how language policies, practices, and ideologies shape migrant background service users’ access to services, rights, and social protection. The novel contribution by the team of authors with a background in social policy, social work, sociology, and ethnology is to fill existing conceptual and empirical gaps by advancing a relational view on multilingualism and linguistic diversity and highlighting the critical importance of language in institutional policies and practices and in the everyday encounters and relationships between service users, the welfare state and its representatives. The articles represent a rich variety of national and cross-national research, drawing on empirical case studies from Finland, Sweden, Belgium, and Canada. By situating language practices within broader social, political, and cultural struggles, the section calls for social policies and practices that challenge monolingual ideals and promote plurilingual ways of knowing.

While previous research has highlighted the significant role of language in conditioning migrants’ access to key institutions of the welfare state, the question of how individual migrants experience linguistic disadvantage has been less in focus. Drawing on a relational approach, the article moves beyond the idea of language barriers as a static structure of (in)equality or a matter of individual shortcomings. It demonstrates how language policies and language ideologies, and their entanglements with more general trends in welfare policies and ideologies, shape migrants’ relational experiences with the welfare states and their representatives, and what are the implications of such interactions – or the lack of interaction. Empirically, it builds on qualitative data collected in Belgium and Finland, showing how language barriers and discrimination can result in Kafkaesque administrative processes that produce both material and affective hardship for migrants in these national contexts.