Identity and Language

I read part 3 of the edited book by Alim, Rickford and Ball (2016) this week and I enjoyed reading every chapter and kept nodding my head all through in agreement. Because there are a lot of issues to discuss from the readings, I will only focus on 3 things I found interesting or helpful for my own research on language, ethnicity, and education. Raciolinguistics allows us to see how language and the people who speak it become racialized. It allows us to study how certain linguistic characteristics are racialized because they are spoken by certain racial and ethnic groups. Raciolinguistics shows how multilingual speakers who are very skilled in codeswitching between multiple languages (and language practices) are marginalized because they do not speak the language of power. Raciolinguistics ideologies challenges the monolinguistic, monoglossic, and ‘standard’ way with words by positioning language and language speakers as complex, valuable, and dynamic. In Paris (2016) we see in ...

When I read this week’s readings, I kept thinking of my interest in Ghanaian languages and its exclusion in the classroom. I could live on this topic for a long time. When Anzaldua says that when you can hurt her by talking bad about her language, for me, I think you can hurt me even more if you ignore my language. Although Ghana has approximately 72 languages, the dominance of English as the ‘standard’ of the ‘educated’ makes it easy for policymakers and educators to gear all learning in school via English literacy practices. Outside of the classroom, students live in environments where people speak various Ghanaian languages in the marketplace, on the radio, on tv, on the street, among friends, and family. However, in schools, their textbooks, classroom practices and D/discourses do not reflect that these multilingual practices. Textbooks are all in English. The teacher is supposed to speak only English. English is the language of school. There have been English-only policies t...