Liberatory Linguistics - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

Liberatory Linguistics

Anne H. Charity Hudley

While the college population in the United States is becoming increasingly diverse,
few studies focus on the goal of linguistic justice in higher education teaching and
learning–a critical factor in achieving all forms of social equity. I offer liberatory
linguistics as a productive, unifying framework for the scholarship that will advance
strategies for attaining linguistic justice. Emerging from the synthesis of various
lived experiences, academic traditions, and methodological approaches, I illustrate
how a structural ignorance of language justice affects the lived experiences of peo-
ple across the world. I present findings from my work with Black undergraduates,
graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty members as they endeavor to
embed a justice framework throughout the study of language broadly conceived. ICH
conclude by highlighting promising strategies that can improve current approaches
to engaging with structural realities that impede linguistic justice.

T he authors in this volume have presented a comprehensive overview of the

study of language and social justice. The authors’ varied lived experiences
and disciplinary lenses have richly added to our own knowledge of lan-
guage and justice. They also leave us squarely and directly with marching orders
on what we need to do next.1

As authors and linguists, our own appearance in this volume is a double-edged
sword. The writing we covet as scholars can, gleichzeitig, be used as a racial-
ized weapon to keep students and other people out. Zum Beispiel, I have worked
for several years on a Conference on College Composition and Communication
(CCCC) research initiative grant with Hannah Franz of the Jack Kent Cooke Foun-
dation. To support Black students’ linguistic agency, she launched the website en-
titled Students’ Right to Their Own Writing, which offers guides for writing in-
structors and for their students. The project stages included creating content for
the website based on our prior work, gathering feedback from student and faculty
focus groups, updating the content based on this feedback, designing the web for-
mat, and disseminating the website through targeted outlets. Students who of-
fered feedback suggested that the information on African American English and
grading can help them view previously confusing instructor feedback in the light
of language variation. Our recommendations for “questions to ask your instruc-
tor” give students a way to turn instructor feedback into a conversation and, im

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Verfahren, advocate for the right to their own writing. These findings show a need
to use specific examples and guidance to educate faculty and empower students to
advocate for grading that enacts students’ right to their own languages.

In this volume, we have veered into that taboo territory of explaining how
we–the people who would write or read Dædalus–are complicit in both the cre-
ation and maintenance of linguistic ignorance and, through these essays, have at-
tempted to lay bare how that work benefits us, even as we critique it and seek in-
stitutional change. Through these tensions, our conversations have given us new
ways to disrupt these patterns and dominant narratives. Our ways of interacting
aren’t limited to the grammatical and rhetorical conventions favored in the acade-
Mein. We have to delve even deeper into our notions of who is a “good speaker” and
even whom you want to be around and communicate with. Our language ideolo-
gies help us get through the day and have helped us to be successful academics, Aber
they also betray us.

For my part, I have tried to be a disruptor, but I am keenly aware of my own
complicities. I am deeply committed to change, but I also have worked tirelessly
to keep my sparkling academic record. I was born to two Black physicians who
were part of two large, privileged Black families in the Upper U.S. Süd. My fam-
ily members have been multigenerational graduates of Historically Black Colleges
and Universities (HBCUs) and Ivy Plus universities. I work every day to use that
privilege to bring about educational justice in the world in service of Black lives
and Black students. I identify as Black/African American in the one-drop rule
style of the Upper South, growing up in an area with three-way segregation be-
tween Black, Indigenous, and white people. I walked a fine but proud Black line
between all three. I’m lighter-skinned with straightish yet curly hair, but my looks
are deceiving. My mother was a brown-skinned Black woman, and that’s the ener-
gy that I bring into most rooms and even to the writing of this essay. And years of
chemotherapy and immunotherapy have straightened my previously very-telling-
that-I-am-Black hair.

All of this begs the question, “How did I come to be writing here?” I first found
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on one of my long walks as an under-
graduate at Harvard. I thought it was a Harvard building, so I went in to ask what
es war. When the person at the front desk told me it was the Academy, I asked how
I could become a member. The person took their time to explain it all to me. Bei-
taining membership was at the same time all so close and tangible, yet so many life
experiences and pathways away. That experience stands as a metaphor for what it
means to pass through elite higher education spaces as a Black Southern Woman.
Black women like me spend a lot of time trying to figure out our place and our
truth and where we belong. A lot of that sorting and figuring is linguistic; it is spo-
ken, written, and signed. It is what we produce, and it is how what we produce is
read, heard, and seen. Yet we have roadmaps and warnings to support us in this

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152 (3) Summer 2023Anne H. Charity Hudley

Verfahren. In seinem 1979 essay, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, Was
Is?” James Baldwin contended:

The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in America never had any interest in
educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black
child’s language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his ex-
perience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot
afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, Ist
that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a
limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never be-
come white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.2

This statement shapes my creation and spread of liberatory linguistics as a key
theoretical framework and active methodology for linguistic justice. We need lib-
eration in linguistics to repair the exclusionary and colonizing harms done in pur-
suit of linguistic knowledge as well as to recenter the study of language on libera-
tion and the personal and institutional ways that language is cocreated and used.
As we continue to work on institutional and structural changes in pursuit of lin-
guistic justice, we are also in a constant process of linguistically liberating our in-
dividual selves and our collective communities.

I n our book Talking College: Making Space for Black Language Practices in Higher

Education, Christine Mallinson, Mary Bucholtz, and I define liberatory linguistics
as linguistics designed by people from marginalized and racialized commu-
nities focused on liberating their forms of communication and expression while
humanizing their connections.3 Liberatory linguistics stems from the fourth wave
of sociolinguistics, the scholarship of dissemination, which I first started to lay
out in 2016.4 It is truly linguistics done by Black people rather than (presumably
and sometimes even questionably) for Black people. It takes as literal both the cre-
ation of linguistics and the intended audience. We work with allies and stand in
solidarity with other groups in linguistics who are focused on liberation but refuse
to be intellectually or practically lumped together. Liberatory linguistics recog-
nizes the material and intellectual profit from the linguistic value of community
Wissen.

In our book, which speaks directly to Black undergraduate students and their
Lehrer, we ask: How can we change the system to center Black students’ knowl-
edge in the study of Black language practices? How can we ensure that Black stu-
dents are fully supported educationally and holistically in ways that challenge lin-
guistic and cultural anti-Blackness? To achieve these goals, over my fifteen-year
working relationship with Christine Mallinson, we have intentionally engaged in
collaborative partnerships with thousands of students and teachers to cocreate
educational equity and linguistic justice in classrooms across the United States.

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesLiberatory Linguistics

Our work, grounded in our backgrounds as Black and white women scholars who
were born and raised in the South, centers language and culture by centering peo-
ple and communities. Our most recent student-focused work tackles linguistic
justice in higher education, offering a model of linguistics that puts the compre-
hensive educational, sozial, emotional, and cultural needs of Black college stu-
dents first. Our Black student-centered model prepares students to be the leaders
of the linguistic new school. Their insights and interests are at the heart of social-
ly relevant, community-centered, participatory teaching and learning about lan-
Spur, Kultur, and education.

Daher, liberatory linguistics is more fully linguistics intentionally designed by
Black people (as well as people from other communities in solidarity) and ex-
pressly focused on Black languages, language varieties, linguistic expression, Und
communicative practices within the ongoing struggle for Black liberation. Der
components of linguistic liberation include 1) self-determination, in how Black
language is used and how it is studied; 2) action and resistance, as both practical
and aspirational strategies; Und 3) humanization, fully recognizing Black people’s
humanity in the ways they connect to each other linguistically, culturally, socially,
emotionally, and spiritually. We focus our model on linguistics, but it is relevant
to all of higher education.

Liberatory linguistics also manifests for us in a current and ongoing Build and
Broaden 2.0 Collaborative Research project entitled Linguistic Production, Per-
ception, and Identity in the Career Mobility of Black Faculty in Linguistics and
the Language Sciences.5 Our mixed-methodological study examines how Black
faculty in the language sciences and related areas linguistically navigate their pro-
fessional experiences. Black faculty are skilled at navigating between varieties of
English, with strong perceptual and linguistic abilities and linguistic flexibility.
Gleichzeitig, linguistic inequalities may cause Black faculty to experience the
structural realities of racism through the continuous evaluation of their language.
These findings give us very detailed and nuanced insights into how language dis-
crimination plays a role in the systemic underrepresentation of Black scholars in
academia and how language plays a role in those processes. The study also exam-
ines professional inequalities for Black scholars in the language sciences and re-
lated areas to provide precise data that language researchers can use to broaden
participation in linguistics departments and programs. The following narratives,
taken from my forthcoming article with Aris Moreno Clemons and Dan Villarre-
al, humanize the researchers themselves and put our Blackness front and center.6
Several of the Black diasporic scholar interviewees emphasized that their per-
sonal understanding of and lived experiences surrounding Black language, iden-
tity, and culture led them to linguistics and language study as places where they
could embrace their positionality as Black scholars in their academic pursuits. In
her interview, Shelome Gooden described her upbringing as a Jamaican Creole

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152 (3) Summer 2023Anne H. Charity Hudley

speaker. Both Creole and English were used in her school, and Gooden recalled
how her first exposure to language differences was in elementary school: „[Mein
teacher] was doing what I now know is contrastive analysis, where he would ask
a question, he would receive responses from his mostly Creole-speaking students
in Creole. And then he would ask us, ‘How would you say this in English?’ And
then he would . . . show us these differences.” Gooden noted that these insights
were foundational to her career, which proceeded from the inherent validity of
Creole languages: „[Mein] pursuit became about not validating the language in a
linguistic sense, per se, but looking for theories that can tell me something about
my language.”

Ähnlich, Marlyse Baptista recalled: “I became a linguist because, later in life, ICH
realized that Cape Verdean Creole, the language that I speak, was actually stigma-
tized.” Although she was raised in France and attended French-speaking schools,
Baptista recalled that “the language that I really could connect with, for me as a
marker of identity, was Creole. And to me, when I first realized in my early twen-
Krawatten, that actually the language was stigmatized, it made no sense to me.” Baptista
explained, “That’s what brought me to linguistics because I identified the field as
providing me with some scientific tools that I could use to demonstrate to myself
primarily, and to others, to a community, that the language that my parents spoke
is a language like any other natural language.” Linguistics provided Baptista with
the tools to refute linguistic racism and marginalization and honor her and her
family’s linguistic experiences.

Shenika Hankerson also recalls moments when her language, African Amer-
ican Language (AAL), was stigmatized in educational settings. Hankerson was
raised in Romulus, Michigan, and remembers the years around 1985 Zu 1996 as be-
ing particularly traumatic. During this time, she was taught by several teachers
who used “eradicationist” language pedagogies in the classroom. These pedago-
gies prevented Hankerson from using AAL in speech and writing, and when she
attempted to do so, she was penalized (zum Beispiel, received lower grades). Sie
encountered similar harmful and unjust experiences after 1996, during her college
Jahre. These experiences led Hankerson to her career in linguistics, with her re-
search and scholarship focusing on topics such as dismantling anti-Black linguis-
tic discrimination in language and writing pedagogy.7

Ähnlich, Aris Moreno Clemons discussed how her family ties to linguistics
for Black liberatory struggles made the field and its potential for social justice
meaningful, and were a key motivation to keep studying language. Growing up in
Oakland, Kalifornien, Clemons’ grandmother

was very involved in Stanford and politics, and she worked with Stanford. Now I’ve
come to find out my Stanford aunties were also linguists. I remember very clearly
them fighting for the rights of African American Language, in what would lead up to

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesLiberatory Linguistics

the Oakland Ebonics debate of the 1990s. . . . They helped to start a school called the
Nairobi School in East Palo Alto in California, welches ist, und war, the Black region. Ev-
erything was done in English, Swahili, and French. . . . [It was an] educational space for
kids to learn using their own languages and using other kinds of historically Black lin-
gua francas.

Years later, in graduate school, Clemons realized that her Stanford aunties were
linguists Faye McNair-Knox and Mary Hoover:

I was like, wait a minute, is this Auntie Faye? Is this Auntie Mary being cited in these
books? . . . Having familial ties to linguistics is what keeps me doing it because I do see
the liberatory values of linguistics . . . that linguistics can be used in order to argue for
liberatory frames and for pedagogical frames that support Black students and their de-
velopment and rail against the machine that is academic and “appropriate” language.

The diasporic multilingualism of the Nairobi school was also a feature in the up-
bringing of other Black scholars of language, like Kahdeidra Monét Martin.

Martin credits her love of language to two things: Brooklyn and Pan-African-
ism. Reflecting on the quizzical look that hearers often assume when wondering
where she is from, she notes, “My accent skirts the edges.” Born in Savannah,
Georgia, and raised biregionally in Brooklyn, New York, and the cities of Atlanta
and Savannah, Martin developed a range of multicultural and multilingual com-
petencies at an early age. She states, “My step-father was Jamaican, and I spoke
Gullah Geechee, African American Language, and Jamaican Patwa in my home.
In neighborhood schools, I learned that ‘kaka,’ ‘dookey,’ and ‘doodoo’ were all
names for what you definitely did not want to get caught stepping in during field
trips, or you would never live it down.” In the Crown Heights and Flatbush neigh-
borhoods in Brooklyn, Martin bolstered her linguistic repertoire with words from
Puerto Rican and Dominican Spanishes and Haitian Creole, the latter of which
she currently uses in prayers and conversations on a daily basis as a priestess in
Vodou. These lived experiences have spurred her current theorization on Afro-
phobia and convergent discourses of deviance and disability applied to African
diasporic languaging and spiritual practices. “In the wake of the latest diasporic
wars on social media and the newest cycle of attacks on antiracist teaching,” she
says, “I think back on the Pan-African liberatory project that fortified me during
my childhood and kindled my love of literature, literacy, and linguistics.”

These histories show the direct engagement that Black linguists have with re-
search on Black language and culture for the benefit of Black people and Black
communities. It contrasts with the often disembodied and detached linguistic ap-
proach that a predominantly white-oriented linguistics has set as the tradition-
al frame of study. Through our stories, we are also creating a place for us–in the
academy in general and in this Academy.

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152 (3) Summer 2023Anne H. Charity Hudley

W hy do we need a Black-centered model of linguistics? Because cur-

rent disciplinary models, as well as academic frameworks focused on
“diversity” and “inclusion,” are woefully inadequate to the task of
Black liberation: Black scholars and students aren’t just “underrepresented” and
“under-served” (in the parlance of academic diversity discourse) but “misrepre-
sented” and “disserved” (to quote a graduate student interviewed by Kendra Cal-
houn, Mary Bucholtz, and me), both in linguistics and in the academy generally.8
Our model of liberatory linguistics aligns with the Demand for Black Linguistic
Justice, written by a team of Black language scholars who wrote the CCCC posi-
tion statement on anti-Black racism and Black linguistic justice, April Baker-Bell,
Bonnie J. Williams-Farrier, Davena Jackson, Lamar Johnson, Carmen Kynard, Und
Teaira McMurtry.9 We are inviting ourselves in as we resist.

When it’s all said and done, liberatory linguistics aligns with multicultural ed-
ucation, culturally responsive and culturally sustaining pedagogies, and critical
theories. It emphasizes needed pedagogical innovations that facilitate the spread
of information about Black language and culture to Black people in service of the
liberation of users of Black languages, varieties, and language practices. It takes a
broad, transdisziplinär, Black-centered sociocultural linguistic approach to hu-
manistic inquiry.

Liberatory linguistics advances self-determination in Black language and com-
munication through “applied” and “translational”–that is, immediately useful
and socially beneficial–research, as well as community-based participatory meth-
odologies. It involves collaborative efforts that center Black students and faculty
in all aspects of the research, particularly faculty at HBCUs. It privileges modes of
scholarly communication and public dissemination that are directly accessible to
Black scholars, students, and the Black community and use culturally relevant lan-
guage and ideas. Mallinson’s and my first coauthored texts–Understanding English
Language Variation in U.S. Schools in 2010 and We Do Language: English Language
Variation in the Secondary English Classroom in 2014–were directly addressed to
In- classroom educators to help support them in the challenging task of support-
ing students home languages and varieties while helping students be successful
in contemporary educational systems, which are often ignorant of and even ag-
gressively negative toward the use of language varieties in educational contexts.10
Each text engaged directly with educators and students as they dealt with the lin-
guistic tensions they faced in schools and communities.

Liberatory linguistics also imagines a liberated expressive future for Black peo-
ple in the academy in general, in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in
besondere, and in the world. It stands with work on liberatory education–and
abolition, fugitivity, and emancipation–to say, “In liberating you, I also liberate
myself.”11 This is a tangible call as academic leaders grapple with the reality that
historical looting has left people from unrepresented backgrounds lower on their

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesLiberatory Linguistics

strategic academic priority lists because they aren’t the most prominent donors;
their rhetoric walks that delicate balance. And now, we must balance with the
race-ignorant rulings by the majority of the Supreme Court. What is diversity and
inclusion work without a comprehensive budget and the support of the law? And
because of that balance, we are witnessing institutions and organizations craft
statements condemning police brutality and anti-Black racism while ignoring the
anti-Black skeletons in their own classrooms. In this collection and in our work,
we are calling the question, which forces us to face the imbalance. These guiding
challenges help frame how students, instructors, and other readers can use this
entire volume–including white allies in high-resource spaces, who must also take
up this charge–to advance racial, linguistic, and educational justice.

O lder, predominately white people constructed and dominated models

of academic success that relied on the values of competition, individual
arbeiten, and narrow notions of excellence and merit. New models, wie zum Beispiel
the Imagining America consortium, rely on the values of intellectual communi-
ty, collaboration, and an emphasis on socially beneficial research.12 Not surpris-
ingly, white supremacy preserves old values within the academy, including in the
discipline of linguistics. These values privilege the research interests of the over-
represented, overserved majority of influential white scholars, framing them as
the most pressing theoretical questions. Everyone else, and particularly misrep-
resented Black scholars and disserved Black students–whose home, Gemeinschaft,
and heritage languages and varieties are often the focus of colonizing research–
are then expected to orient their work to these questions, rather than setting their
own research agendas. “Academic freedom” is often touted as a scholarly right,
but in our Black-centered model, academic freedom does not exist without Black
liberation. In the old model, research on pedagogy that involves direct communi-
ty engagement is devalued, cast as unintellectual and “applied,” and therefore un-
würdig, unscientific, and outside the bounds of “real,” “theoretical” scholarship.
These values, im Gegenzug, directly support structural barriers that maintain white su-
premacy and demand assimilation in the academy, erase the intellectual contribu-
tions of generations of Black scholars, and prevent social change.

Our model of linguistics is a liberatory effort in response to this history and on-
going reality–a direct intervention and a value shift. Black education is a key ten-
et of our liberation model. As John Baugh has compellingly argued, language has
been central to the “educational malpractice” facing African American students
from the slavery era to the present day.13 Fortunately, old academic hierarchies are
now crumbling as the next generation of Black students works collectively and
courageously, in solidarity with faculty and other allies, demanding greater change
from institutions of higher education. It’s a wonderful time to be bold and active,
Und, in the words of the late Congressman John Lewis, to make “good trouble.”

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152 (3) Summer 2023Anne H. Charity Hudley

This volume represents the open, direct conversations about liberation that
linguists have been having. Liberatory linguistics frees our research from old val-
ues and enables students and scholars to do work that is valued, endorsed, Und
needed by their own communities. And our conversation is broad. So how do we
disrupt all of this and create linguistic space in the academy and in linguistics?

I n my engagement with linguistics faculty and students across the world, ICH

have been promoting a three-stage model of addressing inclusion challenges
in the language sciences. The model recognizes the current pressure between

existing inclusion models and the nature of academic relationships.

• The STEM model: The STEM model follows National Science Foundation
and National Institutes of Health inclusion model directives. From a criti-
cal race theory perspective, the STEM model follows an interest convergence
model that relies on adherence to current government mandates and nar-
ratives of “broadening participation,” in which diversity and inclusion are
good for the individual and good for the state.

• The racial value model: This stage in the model emphasizes social justice
and the intellectual values of scholars presently in linguistics from groups
that are underrepresented, particularly in highly resourced linguistics de-
partments and programs. This intellectual valuing is at the heart of intellec-
tual liberation, and requires more inclusion in publication and hiring in par-
besonders. A focus on racial valuing doesn’t just call the question; it reframes
and reauthors it. It asks, what questions do Black scholars who study lan-
guage have and how can scholars comprehensively center their questions?
• The partnership model: The third aspect of the model states that to cre-
ate genuinely interdisciplinary models of linguistic justice and liberation,
it is essential to work with neighboring disciplines and research areas and
with racial/ethnic and gender studies programs. In this volume, the essays
by Aris Moreno Clemons and Jessica A. Grieser and by Jonathan Rosa and
Nelson Flores give thorough examples of the work that happens when the
study of language overlaps with Black feminism and Latinx studies.14 To
make this succeed, we need all of you to engage with us and our work to
make it stronger.

The key to the model is active work. Our theories will only take us so far. Ein
article I and my colleagues wrote for Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America in
2018 led to the first-ever statement on race for the Linguistic Society of America,
which was adopted by the association.15 We drew on this statement to write a sub-
sequent theoretical paper, “Toward Racial Justice in Linguistics,” which inspired
a set of published responses on racial equity in the field.16 That work then led to

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the forthcoming Oxford University Press edited collections Inclusion in Linguistics
and Decolonizing Linguistics.17

Conceptualized as a two-volume set, Decolonizing Linguistics and Inclusion in
Linguistics establish frameworks for the discipline’s professional growth and cre-
ate direct roadmaps for scholars to establish innovative agendas for integrating
their teaching, Forschung, and outreach in ways that will transform linguistic theo-
ry and practice for years to come. Decolonizing Linguistics focuses on how to decol-
onize linguists’ theories, methodologies, and practices. Inclusion in Linguistics pre-
sents theories, resources, and models for achieving inclusion and broader partic-
ipation in linguistics. Both volumes center social justice as an urgent priority for
linguistics as a discipline. Forty contributions were received across both volumes,
all of which have gone through an intentionally inclusive process of development,
workshopping, and revision that we adopted in deliberate contrast to the tradi-
tional paradigm of scholarly writing, Bearbeitung, revision, and anonymous critique,
which is often isolated and isolating, as well as susceptible to processes of injus-
tice and exclusion.

This intentionally inclusive scholarly conversation has included colleagues in
applied linguistics as well. Der 2022 Annual Review of Applied Linguistics focused on
social justice in applied linguistics. Nelson Flores and I noted that the volume was
brave in the level of content and disruption it offered:

When thinking about the role of linguists in promoting social justice, it is tempting to
focus our attention solely on what we can contribute to the world “out there.” Indeed,
in light of the many struggles for justice and liberation throughout the world, it is easy
to see the urgency in wanting linguistics to contribute to social transformation. Equal-
ly important, Jedoch, is to recognize that the study of language has been shaped by
the world and that oppression doesn’t simply exist “out there” but also in research and
practice in higher education.18

We also note that our next task is to think about how we help each other both in our
scholarly development and in our local context across experiences. If we don’t, Wir
risk reinventing and rewriting the wheel in our scholarship, even with the nuances
of local realities and nuanced solutions that undergird this new work. At the end
of the day, this work is meant to sustain and support learners worldwide. Being ex-
plicit about that mission and who we need to reach to make it happen should be our
guiding principle as we continue the work of this tremendous volume.

The education and inclusion of new and emergent scholars are central to the
Modell. For too long, introductory courses in linguistics have been white-centered
by default. By centering Black language and culture throughout the course and tai-
loring content to the knowledge, interests, and educational experiences of the stu-
dents in the class, my colleagues and I designed an introductory linguistics course
that was more accessible to and equitable for Black students as part of a larger effort

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152 (3) Summer 2023Anne H. Charity Hudley

to create a more liberatory linguistics. The course was grounded in our experien-
tial knowledge as Black people living in the United States as much as peer-reviewed
research on Black students’ experiences and barriers to equitable education. In our
description of the course and explanation of our pedagogical choices, we highlight
how moving away from teaching to an imagined (Weiß) linguistics student and
directly to Black students forces instructors to confront the anti-Blackness–and
white supremacy more broadly–that shapes their teaching choices.19

It is time to move away from simply advancing linguistic scholarship and make
the intellectual leap toward research that has articulated immediate tangible ben-
efits for marginalized communities and communities of color. That model is
needed now more than ever–people are dying in the damn streets. And we need
to be the audience for our own work, examining our own campuses to discover
answers to the following questions:

1. What is taught to linguistics students about education, Kultur, Und

Diversität?

2. What is taught to education students about language, Kultur, and diversity?
3. What is taught to everyone else?

In 2009, Christine Mallinson and I described the dissemination of linguistic
knowledge in the professional development of teachers, where contrastive analy-
Schwester (of African American English versus Standardized English) plays a major role.20
In 2010, we presented a linguistic awareness model that is designed to facilitate the
sharing of knowledge about language variation between researchers and commu-
nity members.21 The goals of the model are to:

1. Partner with community members, particularly in underserved areas where
universities may not already have such partnerships, including K–12 schools
and others who provide for the educational, sozial, and health welfare of the
Gemeinschaft;

2. Communicate sociolinguistic information about language variation to
community members in ways that are effectively tailored to their skills and
their needs;

3. Disseminate accurate linguistic knowledge to community members, beide
to train them in the science of linguistics and to help them better serve dia-
lectically diverse students;

4. Assess the results of providing linguistic information to community mem-

bers; Und

5. Apply these findings to public policy and social justice models.

We contend that more effort and energy should be spent on disseminating rele-
vant information that has already been gathered about language variation, Par-

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesLiberatory Linguistics

ticularly when integrated with existing literature from education, Soziologie, psy-
chology, and other related fields. Researchers must share knowledge while also
adding to this body of information by continuing to document and analyze how
language variation interacts in real-world educational settings within the con-
texts of local communities. This volume contributes to that work.

Linguists and related scholars should also be more involved in creating
easy-to-implement and realistic language-based strategies to help educators and
students facing larger social and educational issues. These strategies must be both
linguistically and educationally informed; das ist, they must be oriented toward
helping students understand sociolinguistic concepts and be practical enough to
implement in everyday settings.

Future research centered on liberation should have a focus on the study of

language across disciplines and the academy rather than just within linguis-
tics and related areas. We see such rich strands of research across scholar-
ly traditions come together in the essays in this volume. We’ve had enough ba-
sic research extensions in the study of language at this point, such that to try to
stay within a small technical band now, people are wading into the dangers of re-
researching and rewriting previous work in an attempt to stay intellectually and
technically relevant, as they try to stay apolitical enough to appease tech giants
they don’t even know. Our model, as exemplified by the essays in this volume, Ist
to decolonize this work, and our approach is one of direct refusal and of recreation
of our language ideologies and practices. All linguistics needs to be applied with
an articulated and transparent purpose for the work.22 As Aris Moreno Clemons,
Dan Villarreal, and I write in a forthcoming article:

The 4th wave of sociolinguistics, as Charity Hudley first outlined in 2013, notes that
scholarly communication must be the focus of our needed research because our peo-
ple are out here dying in the streets, and we’re losing our fundamental civil rights; als
we write. As scholars & communities of color, insbesondere, we must be the audience
for and arbiters of our own work. The stakes are too high at this moment, after every-
thing we have been through, to revert to some delicate dance that relies on the niceties
of the technicalities of consonants & vowels.

Liberatory linguistics is alive at this moment. Liberatory linguistics is scientific,
but it is also lyrical. It is our community and our soul.

Liberatory linguistics pays homage to a long lineage of scholars who have per-
sistently asked: who is all this linguistic work for? And it gives the center intellec-
tual stage to those who have been punished and ignored even for the asking.

I’m writing fire fueled by the heat of climate change in California and my
mother’s spirit, magic, and memory. I’m writing for the American Academy right
now under Paula Giddings, who is making history as the current chair of the or-

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152 (3) Summer 2023Anne H. Charity Hudley

ganization’s council. Her monumental work When and Where I Enter: The Impact
of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984) established a frame to which this
work is responding.

I’m riding the fourth wave of sociolinguistics and laying it all the way down for

my people.

Liberatory linguistics extricates, but it also remembers. It says that you have a

place here because I am here.

I’m the first Black woman to edit Dædalus. Who got next?

author’s note

I am grateful to the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Endowment at Stanford Universi-
ty, the North Hall Endowment at UCSB, the National Science Foundation, und das
National Council of Teachers of English Conference on College Composition and
Communication for support of this work. I would like particularly to thank Dr.
Kahdeidra Martin for her editorial assistance.

Parts of this essay are adapted from my book Talking College, especially chapter 5,
“The Next Generation of Linguistic Dreamkeepers.” See Anne H. Charity Hudley,
Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, Talking College: Making Space for Black Lan-
guage Practices in Higher Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2022).

about the author

Anne H. Charity Hudley is Associate Dean of Educational Affairs and the Bonnie
Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education and African and African-American Stud-
ies and Linguistics, by courtesy, at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford
Universität. She is the author of four books: The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate
Forschung (with Cheryl L. Dickter and Hannah A. Franz, 2017), We Do Language: English
Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom (with Christine Mallinson, 2013),
Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools (with Christine Mallinson,
James A. Banks, Walt Wolfram, and William Labov, 2010), and Talking College: Mak-
ing Space for Black Linguistic Practices in Higher Education (with Christine Mallinson and
Mary Bucholtz, 2022). She is a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and the
American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesLiberatory Linguistics

Endnoten

1 Calvert Watkins, “Language and Its History,” Dædalus 102 (3) (Sommer 1973): 99–111,
https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/Daedalus_
Su1973_Calvert-Watkins_Language-and-Its-History.pdf. I am so grateful to my under-
graduate advisor Calvert Watkins, whose essay “Language and Its History” appeared
im 1973 Dædalus volume on Language as A Human Problem. I want to thank Kahdeidra
Martin and Christine Mallinson for their careful feedback on this essay.

2 James Baldwin, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” The New
York Times, Juli 29, 1979, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/
03/29/specials/baldwin-english.html?source=post_page.

3 Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, Talking College: Making
Space for Black Language Practices in Higher Education (New York: Teachers College Press,
2022).

4 Anne H. Charity Hudley, “Language and Racialization,” in The Oxford Handbook of Language
and Society, Hrsg. Ofelia García, Nelson Flores, and Massimiliano Spotti (Oxford: Oxford
Universitätsverlag, 2016).

5 NSF Award Abstract #2126414 (University of Maryland Baltimore County), https://
www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2126414; and NSF Award Abstract
#2126405 (Leland Stanford Junior University), https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/
showAward?AWD_ID=2126405.

6 Anne H. Charity Hudley, Aris Moreno Clemons, and Dan Villarreal, “Sociolinguistics—
What Is It Good For? A Case for Liberatory Linguistics,” Needed Research in American Di-
alects (bevorstehend).

7 Shenika Hankerson, “Black Voices Matter,” Language Arts Journal of Michigan 32 (2) (2017):
32–39, https://doi.org/10.9707/2168-149X.2160; and Shenika Hankerson, “‘I Love My
African American Language. And Yours’: Toward a Raciolinguistic Vision in Writing
Studien,” in Talking Back: Senior Scholars Deliberate the Past, Present, and Future of Writing Stud-
ies, Hrsg. Norbert Elliot and Alice S. Horning (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2020).
8 Kendra Calhoun, Anne H. Charity Hudley, Mary Bucholtz, et al., “Attracting Black Stu-
dents to Linguistics through a Black-Centered Introduction to Linguistics Course,”
Language 97 (1) (2021): e12–e38, http://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2021.0007.

9 April Baker-Bell, Bonnie J. Williams-Farrier, Davena Jackson, et al., “This Ain’t Another
Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” Conference on College Com-
position and Communication, Juli 2020, https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/demand-for-black
-linguistic-justice.

10 Anne H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson, Understanding English Language Variation
in uns. Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010); and Anne H. Charity Hudley
and Christine Mallinson, We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English
Classroom (New York: Teachers College Press, 2013).

11 Beverly M. Gordon, “African-American Cultural Knowledge and Liberatory Education:
Dilemmas, Problems and Potentials in a Postmodern American Society,” Urban Educa-
tion 27 (4) (1993): 448–470, https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085993027004008; Abolition-
ist Teaching Network, https://abolitionistteachingnetwork.org (accessed August 23,
2022); and Jarvis Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching
(Cambridge, Masse.: Harvard University Press, 2021).

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152 (3) Summer 2023Anne H. Charity Hudley

12 See Imagining America, https://imaginingamerica.org (abgerufen im August 7, 2023).
13 John Baugh, Out of the Mouths of Slaves: African American Language and Educational Malpractice

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).

14 Aris Moreno Clemons and Jessica A. Grieser, “Black Womanhood: Raciolinguistic In-
tersections of Gender, Sexuality & Social Status in the Aftermaths of Colonization,”
Dädalus 152 (3) (Sommer 2023): 115–129, https://www.amacad.org/publication/black
-womanhood-raciolinguistic-intersections-gender-sexuality-social-status-aftermaths;
and Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores, “Rethinking Language Barriers & Social Justice
from a Raciolinguistic Perspective,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Sommer 2023): 99–114, https://
www.amacad.org/publication/rethinking-language-barriers-social-justice-raciolinguistic
-Perspektive.

15 Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, Mary Bucholtz, et al., “Linguistics and
Race: An Interdisciplinary Approach towards an LSA Statement on Race,” Proceedings of
the Linguistic Society of America 3 (1) (2018): 8–14, https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v3i1.4303.
16 Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, “Toward Racial Jus-
tice in Linguistics: Interdisciplinary Insights into Theorizing Race in the Discipline
and Diversifying the Profession,” Linguistic Society of America 96 (4) (2020).

17 Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, Hrsg., Inclusion in Lin-

guistics and Decolonizing Linguistics (bevorstehend, Oxford University Press).

18 Anne H. Charity Hudley and Nelson Flores, “Social Justice in Applied Linguistics: Not a
Abschluss, but a Way Forward,” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 42 (2022): 144–145,
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0267190522000083.

19 Calhoun, Hudley, Bucholtz, et al., “Attracting Black Students to Linguistics through a

Black-Centered Introduction to Linguistics Course.”

20 Anne H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson, “Language Variation in the Class-
Zimmer: An Educator’s Toolkit,” Summer Workshop Series, Virginia Commonwealth
Universität, 2009.

21 Christine Mallinson and Anne H. Charity Hudley, “Communicating about Communi-
cation: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Educating Educators about Language Varia-
tion,” Language and Linguistics Compass 4 (4) (2010): 245–257.

22 Charity Hudley, Clemons, and Villarreal, “Sociolinguistics—What Is It Good For?”

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