Raciolinguistics

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 the urban community that AAL is largely spoken not only by African American youth but also by Hispanic youth who make up the largest demographic in the area. AAL is the main language outside of the classroom yet ‘Standard’ English is preferred within the classroom where unsurprisingly this urban youth are failing. If language is tied to culture (including history) then only recognizing one group’s English as standard over another, positions that culture as superior to all others. For students to succeed it seems they must shed their language (culture) and take own another’s. Paris (2016) encourages bringing both languages into the classroom to inform teaching learning. After all these students live in multilingual/multicultural societies and not in a monolinguistic/monocultural one and so their school must reflected exactly that.
• Not everyone from Mexico speaks Spanish (Perez, Vasquez, and Buriel, 2016). When Mexican immigrants in US classroom are unable even to speak in Spanish, they may be considered unable to succeed academically. This chapter reveals how even among minoritized languages, indigenous languages are lower in terms of hierarchy. When these indigenous students cannot yet speak English, their emerging multilingualism is viewed as a deficit in US classrooms. For example, if Zapotec youth for instance moves from Mexico to the US, and they live in a Hispanic dominant community, they now not only have to learn English the language of school but also Spanish the language of the community yet speak Zapotec at home. While it is easy for an educator to tell the student ‘speak English’, the educator fails to understand the linguistic complexities this student navigates daily.
• In bilingual communities, bilingual speakers are not two monolingual speakers in one. They are both at the same time. Zentella’s (2016) study on Border High students show that although these students are emerging bilinguals, school policies and practices uphold English as the language of power at the expense of Spanish. Honor students at this high school who are the most fluent bilinguals were also found to be the most frequent Spanglish speakers. Speaking Spanglish therefore is not a marker of language deficiency but a complex linguistic variety on its own. It is important that instead of racializing language as non-standard or inappropriate, we need to embrace multiple language development of young learners in the classroom in an atmosphere that elevates English, and AAL/Spanish/Twi/Ga/Zapotec, etc. Doing this means that rather that only looking nationally for a ‘standard form’, we should also consider the languages of the community where the school is found and bring that into the classroom.

These themes for me were highlighted throughout the section I read. Often when people of color speak a language, their linguistic characteristics are racialized by others. So, when an African American is seen as ‘articulate’ and speaking English so well or when an African American says, ‘I be…’ instead of ‘I am…’, both forms of speech are racialized because perception other people have of the people speaking it. That is what Raciolinguistics for me is interested in studying and it does this in order to problematize whose language is standard.