Rethinking Language Barriers & Sociale - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Rethinking Language Barriers & Sociale
Justice from a Raciolinguistic Perspective

Jonathan Rosa & Nelson Flores

The trope of language barriers and the toppling thereof is widely resonant as a refer-
ence point for societal progress. Central to this trope is a misleading debate between
advocates of linguistic assimilation and pluralism, both sides of which deceptively
normalize dominant power structures by approaching language as an isolated site
of remediation. In this essay, we invite a reconsideration of how particular popu-
lations and language practices are persistently marked, surveilled, and managed.
We show how perceptions of linguistic diversity become sites for the reproduction
of marginalization and exclusion, as well as how advocacy for language and social
justice must move beyond celebrating linguistic diversity or remediating it. We argue
that by interrogating the colonial and imperial underpinnings of widespread ideas
about linguistic diversity, we can connect linguistic advocacy to broader political
struggles. We suggest that language and social justice efforts must link affirmations
of linguistic diversity to demands for the creation of societal structures that sustain
collective well-being.

I n December 2021, CNN reported on the creation of a digital platform–an

app–to “eliminate miscommunication by changing people’s accents in real
time.”1 The app is specifically designed to modify the English language prac-
tices of call center employees in the Global South such that they would become
more intelligible to presumed Global North customers. The report suggests that
“a call center worker in the Philippines, Per esempio, could speak normally into
the microphone and end up sounding more like someone from Kansas to a cus-
tomer on the other end.” While the platform’s “algorithm can convert English to
and from American, Australian, British, Filipino, Indian and Spanish accents . . .
the team is planning to add more.” The broader vision is for this app to be used in
any context in which there are communication barriers, including language learn-
ing, health care provision, film dubbing, and digital voice assistants.

Depending on one’s outlook, this technology might be interpreted as utopian
or dystopian. From a utopian perspective, this app could be perceived as a prelude
to a Star Trek style universal translator that facilitates communication across what
might otherwise be experienced as fundamental linguistic divides. From a dys-

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topian perspective, by continually positioning dominant languages and varieties
thereof as target reference points, such apps could contribute to the production
of global homogeneity through the elimination of linguistic diversity. Yet these
seemingly opposing perspectives are united in their orientation to language vari-
eties as discrete and disembodied sets of forms and structures.

This understanding of language varieties as separable from the people who use
them and as objectively classifiable into bounded categories (such as “American
English”) is a reflection of modern language ideologies that serve particular po-
litical and economic interests.2 In the case of accent-modification technologies
designed to facilitate global commerce, as well as local classifications of language
difference and its management, the recognition and mediation of linguistic diver-
sity is often framed as progress toward social justice. Language ideologies schol-
arship, Tuttavia, has taught us that purported recognitions of linguistic diversi-
ty can, Infatti, function as deceptive forms of regimentation, stigmatization, E
commodification in service of particular populations’ accumulation through oth-
ers’ dispossession.3 For example, sociolinguists Nelson Flores and Mark Lewis
show how stigmatizing stereotypes about low-income Latinx students’ perceived
linguistic diversity function as rationalizations for their racial and socioeconomic
marginalization.4 Thus, linguistic recognition is always about more than lan-
guage, requiring careful analysis of deeply intertwined relations among languag-
es and political economies.5 In the discussion that follows, we invite a reconsid-
eration of how particular populations and language practices are persistently
marked, surveilled, and managed. We show how perceptions of linguistic diver-
sity become sites for the reproduction of marginalization and exclusion, anche
as how advocacy for language and social justice must move beyond celebrating
linguistic diversity or (Rif)mediating it through an app. Così, language and social
justice efforts must link affirmations of linguistic diversity to demands for the cre-
ation of societal structures that sustain collective well-being.

D igital platforms, such as the app described above, are a continuation of

long-standing accent-modification efforts in educational, professional,
legal, medical, and broader societal contexts. Such efforts have been fa-
mously dramatized in widely beloved popular representations such as George Ber-
nard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion, later adapted into a 1938 film with the same title,
as well as its 1956 Broadway musical adaptation, My Fair Lady, starring Julie An-
drews, UN 1964 film musical by the same title starring Audrey Hepburn, and many
subsequent revivals and remakes. These various representations center on the fig-
ures of Henry Higgins, a phonetician and professor, and Eliza Doolittle, a working-
class woman who sells flowers in the public commons of London. Higgins offers
Doolittle elocution and etiquette lessons, with the goal of modifying Doolittle’s
stereotypical working-class Cockney accent such that her language use would

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesRethinking Language Barriers & Social Justice from a Raciolinguistic Perspective

become less marked and stigmatized. The implication is that Higgins’s accent-
modification support would improve Doolittle’s ability to find employment in
and effectively navigate “higher” societal settings. For Doolittle, the aspiration is
to sound like someone who sells flowers in a proper shop rather than on the street.
In Shaw’s Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins initially encounter one
another serendipitously, with Doolittle attempting to sell flowers to one of Hig-
gins’s associates. When Doolittle is informed that the linguist Higgins has taken
an interest in her language practices and is documenting everything she says, she
initially presumes he is a police officer. While a language analyst and police officer
might seem to have little in common, research on accent modification, lingua
policing, and various forms of linguistic profiling demonstrate powerful links be-
tween language and population management.6 Moreover, linguists’ systematic
participation in domestic and imperial state projects of population surveillance
and management, including long-standing colonial language-brokering practices
and their contemporary recontextualization as part of development and democ-
ratization efforts, suggests that the perception of a linguistics professor as a state
agent was not simply by chance.7

Professor Higgins explains to his associate that by modifying Doolittle’s
speech, he could make her sound like a duchess instead of a flower girl. Higgins’s
coached modifications of Doolittle’s phonological patterns seem to effectively, if
not completely, eliminate the sonic dimensions of her Cockney accent by assimi-
lating it to received pronunciation. Tuttavia, the referential content of Doolittle’s
speech, her affective and gestural stances, and her infamous use of the term
“bloody”–which in the context of the play and its reception was regarded as an
obscenity and thus highly provocative–signaled that the markedness and stigma-
tization of her class status through her accent had not, Infatti, been eradicated but
rather shifted to other semiotic targets. Eventually, Doolittle is left feeling fun-
damentally transformed and alienated from her previous life. Nel frattempo, Quando
Doolittle stops working with Higgins, he experiences ambivalence about his de-
sire for what Doolittle was and what she has become. Infatti, the Greek mytho-
logical figure of Pygmalion, perhaps most widely recognized in Ovid’s Metamor-
phoses, which served as inspiration for Shaw, is a sculptor who falls in love with his
own creation. While interpersonal accent modification might function as a form
of narcissistic projection, commodified and institutionalized accent-modification
efforts require structural analysis to understand the interplay between percep-
tions of linguistic diversity and population management strategies.

With this context as a reference point, it is crucial to reconsider the logics that
inform contemporary digital accent-modification platforms and the broader ways
that purportedly benevolent efforts to help marked subjects modify their language
practices become institutionalized as assimilationist projects masquerading as as-
sistance. These dynamics are reflected in the tropes that informed the creation and

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152 (3) Summer 2023Jonathan Rosa & Nelson Flores

uptake of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins as characters. Note that the characters
of Doolittle and Higgins were inspired by the family of Alexander Graham Bell,
who is credited with creating electronic speech technology that led to the invention
of the telephone. Bell’s work was shaped not only by his grandfather who instruct-
ed speech etiquette classes for young women, but also by his father’s and his efforts
to hone language-teaching methods for deaf individuals, including their respec-
tive wives, Mabel Hubbard and Ma Bell.8 These efforts centered on oral methods
that discouraged sign language based on theories that “deaf persons speak by read-
ing the lips of others . . . in other words, they speak by becoming operators.”9 This
ableist logic ignores the complexity and robustness of deaf linguistic and broader
cultural practices by approaching deafness as a functional challenge of linguistic
transduction. Ableist objectifications of deaf persons combined with misogynistic
objectifications of women in the invention of the telephone, which came to be re-
flected in a gendered division of labor such that “women claimed 87 percent of the
public service positions in telephone offices as early as 1907.”10 Thus, stigmatiz-
ing ideas about the need to manage linguistic diversity associated with gender and
disability shaped the invention of the characters of Doolittle and Higgins, anche
as the invention of the telephonic technology that subsequently inspired accent-
modification platforms for telephone operators.

Relatedly, one of the earliest digital language processing platforms and a
key precursor to contemporary accent-modification apps was created at MIT in
1966 and called ELIZA in reference to My Fair Lady.11 Such technologies are often
framed as advances toward using artificial intelligence to overcome language bar-
riers. Allegedly benevolent projects of helping people accommodate and adapt to
dominant communicative norms could be framed as social justice commitments
that attempt to challenge systematic experiences of linguistic marginalization. In
practice, Tuttavia, these initiatives often misunderstand the nature of the prob-
lem by orienting to it pragmatically as a matter of linguistic mismatch necessitat-
ing individualized remediation, rather than systemically as a matter of endemic
structures of discrimination necessitating societal transformation. By continu-
ally identifying and modifying language practices positioned as deviating from
standardized norms, accent-modification projects never address the fundamental
causes of linguistic marginalization and discrimination. Insofar as the focus is on
modifying marked forms, whether through individual practice or digital media-
zione, the structures that position particular forms and the populations with which
they are associated as dominant or subordinate–idealized or deficient–remain
unquestioned. While many contemporary linguists might object to Higgins’s
work to eradicate Doolittle’s stigmatized accent and to aspects of the accent-
modification platform described in the CNN story, we suggest that these various
efforts resonate with liberal humanist linguistic logics that shape the foundation
of the discipline of linguistics, as well as applied linguistics and sociolinguistics as

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesRethinking Language Barriers & Social Justice from a Raciolinguistic Perspective

its engaged offshoots. These liberal humanist logics are characterized by the over-
representation of particular populations’ interests as universal norms and rights,
producing intersecting marginalizations in relation to axes of difference includ-
ing race, class, genere, ability, and language.12

L iberal humanism is the foundation of the Chomskyian framing of linguis-

tic competence as a context-free, underlying universal cognitive capacity.13
While Chomsky’s universalist conceptualization of competence might
seem to be radically egalitarian, it is crucial to note his framing of “an ideal speaker-
listener, in a homogeneous speech community who knows its language perfectly”
as the proper object of linguistic science.14 Although Chomsky frames linguistic
competence as a universal human cognitive phenomenon, societal assumptions
about and assessments of linguistic competence have perpetually positioned par-
ticular populations and practices as more or less competent, or even as fundamen-
tally in/competent. These dynamics are reflected in accent-modification efforts
aspiring to produce linguistic ideals, perfection, and homogeneity to remediate
purported linguistic problems, deficiency, and diversity, which Chomsky posi-
tions as outside of the scope of a science of language.

This liberal humanist project is also the foundation of the Hymesian framing
of communicative competence that has sought to account for the social dimen-
sions of language through a focus on the interactional norms that shape linguistic
practices within specific speech communities.15 The reframing of linguistic com-
petence as communicative competence might seem to present a more affirming
orientation to linguistic and cultural diversity. The shift from linguistic compe-
tence to communicative competence, Tuttavia, perpetuates the structural posi-
tioning of particular populations and practices as fundamentally problematic,
deficient, and nonstandard. This is demonstrated by the uptake of the concept
of communicative competence in language-teaching in ways that reify the ide-
alized native speaker from a homogeneous speech community that communica-
tive competence was ostensibly developed to challenge.16 As with the case of lin-
guistic competence and its particularism framed as universalism, communicative
competence reifies language ideals under the auspices of recognizing and affirm-
ing diversity. The institutionalization of communicative competence often takes
the form of efforts that identify distinctive language norms but exclusively target
marginalized populations’ language practices for remediation. The implication is
that while all populations might possess different forms of communicative com-
petence, only particular populations’ communicative competencies are appro-
priate for success within schools and other mainstream institutions.17 Therefore,
while communicative competence has often been offered as an alternative to the
theoretical abstraction of linguistic competence, its logics contribute to the repro-
duction of social hierarchies and dominant language ideologies under the guise

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152 (3) Summer 2023Jonathan Rosa & Nelson Flores

of appropriateness. This is because communicative competence, like most main-
stream approaches to (socio)linguistics, frames language discrimination primar-
ily as a matter of affirming the legitimacy of stigmatized language varieties on the
grounds that all languages are legitimate, rule-governed, and share universal un-
derlying structures. Così, we are left with the assumption that linguistic justice is
primarily a matter of establishing and promoting knowledge of the systematicity
of stigmatized language varieties and the skillfulness of their users, which leaves
unaddressed the structural barriers that ultimately anchor the stigmatization of
populations and communities associated with these practices.18

A raciolinguistic perspective offers an alternative approach to these conceptu-
alizations of language. As opposed to efforts to create universalizing typologies of
language structures and proficiencies, such as linguistic or communicative com-
petence, a raciolinguistic perspective seeks to denaturalize contemporary concep-
tualizations of language by pointing to their roots in the globalization of the mod-
ern European colonial project.19 A raciolinguistic perspective emphasizes 1) IL
colonial anchoring of racial and linguistic classifications and hierarchies, 2) IL
modes of perception through which race and language are jointly apprehended
across contexts, 3) the production of naturalized typologies of racial and linguis-
tic features, forme, and categories imagined to emanate from and correspond to
one another, 4) the intersectional matrices of marginalization that dynamically
(Rif)structure racial and linguistic hierarchies, E 5) the need for radically re-
imagined theories of change that move beyond modifying the linguistic practices
of racialized populations to challenging colonial, imperial, and capitalist power
formations that continually reproduce disparity, dispossession, and disposability.
A raciolinguistic perspective further rejects essentialist notions of race. It
frames race as a dynamic process of sorting populations into those deemed more
or less fully human, a process that is shaped by histories and contemporary reali-
ties of settler colonialism, enslavement, and imperialism, but plays out differently
in distinctive local contexts. A rejection of essentializing static understandings of
race provides us with conceptual tools for analyzing racialization beyond the log-
ics that inform its stereotypical construction in any given context. Per esempio,
anti-Black U.S. racial logics of hypodescent have historically relied on the “one-
drop rule,” a biological ideology presuming racially distinctive blood in which
one drop of “Black blood” constituted Black legal status regardless of physical
stereotypes like skin color.20 Thus, in Plessy v. Ferguson, Homer Plessy was white-
identified based on physical stereotypes such that the Court suggested his “one-
eighth African blood” was “not discernable in him,” yet the Court ultimately re-
affirmed his Black legal status, which in turn reestablished legal segregation tar-
geting all Black legal subjects.21 In contrast, Mexican American racialization was
developed via the “reverse one-drop rule,” a logic in which one drop of “Spanish
blood” constituted white legal status regardless of one’s skin color.22 While this

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesRethinking Language Barriers & Social Justice from a Raciolinguistic Perspective

provided certain legal rights, it was also used to justify the continued oppression
of Mexican Americans by denying them the right to make claims under the equal
protection clause in the face of systemic discrimination across societal contexts,
including labor, formazione scolastica, and housing.23 In this way, the legal status of white-
ness was simultaneously a privilege in certain ways while also part of the contin-
ued racialization of Mexican Americans in the context of an ongoing colonial re-
lationship. Here, the Spanish language, which in other geopolitical contexts was
colonially imposed on Indigenous populations, became a mechanism for racial-
izing Mexican Americans based on the assumption that the presence of Spanish
in their communities justified their segregation in schools and other facilities.24
Nel frattempo, the imposition of the English language and the rigid maintenance of
linguistic borders in these communities was linked to the broader regulation of
racial, ethnic, genere, sexual, socioeconomic, and religious borders, and the vi-
olent colonial and imperial population management projects of which they are a
part.25 The goal of a raciolinguistic perspective, Perciò, is not to decide which
people and language practices coincide with which ethnoracial categories, as if
this were an objective process. Invece, a raciolinguistic perspective seeks to un-
derstand how racial and linguistic discourses are conaturalized in ways that posi-
tion particular populations as less than fully human and in need of perpetual con-
tainment and (Rif)mediation.

A raciolinguistic perspective also rejects the essentializing linguistic assump-
tion that each named language possesses ontologically discrete boundaries cor-
responding to a particular territory and belonging to a specific group of people.
It traces the emergence of these ideologies linking named languages, territories,
and populations alongside the rise of European nation-states and the globaliza-
tion of the European colonial project.26 It also locates the creation of the modern
science of language within this broader colonial history, calling into question its
empiricist impulse to separate language from bodies as part of the scientific study
of language. Rather than approaching languages as disembodied sets of forms
and structures, a raciolinguistic perspective examines how hegemonic modes of
perception (trans)form interpretations of what are ostensibly the same linguis-
tic practices based on the racial status of the producer.27 For example, in the U.S.
context, the same linguistic tokens that are framed as nonstandard, incorrect,
or inferior English when produced by Black language users can be interpreted as
cool, youthful, and desirable when produced by white language users.28 Similarly,
Princess Charlotte’s Spanish language use is positioned as worthy of laudatory
newspaper headlines, whereas U.S. Latinx Spanish language use is presented as
a problem in need of careful management and remediation.29 Therefore, the goal
of a raciolinguistic perspective is not to decide which racial categories correspond
to which linguistic forms and varieties, but rather to interrogate and contest the
power structures that organize the conaturalization of race and language.

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T aking this nonessentialist view of race and language as its point of entry,

at the core of a raciolinguistic perspective is critical examination of ideol-
ogies that frame the language practices of racialized communities as in-
herently deficient and in need of remediation.30 Raciolinguistic ideologies dif-
fer from the standard language ideologies that shape the marginalization of Eliza
Doolittle. Understanding this difference requires careful conceptualization of
race and racialization. As ideological justifications for the globalization of mod-
ern European colonialism, race and racialization center on the imposition and
contestation of “what is to be the descriptive statement of the human”: questo è, IL
epistemological battle over sorting populations into those deemed fully and less
than fully human.31 Decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo traces the origins of con-
temporary race and racialization to religious distinctions that characterized the
European premodern world, which were remapped onto enslaved and colonized
Black and Indigenous populations.32 European whiteness emerged in part through
Christian ideologies that positioned Jews and Muslims as possessing the wrong
religion and, by extension, as inferior humans. European settlers in the Americas
presumed that Black and Indigenous populations had no legitimate religion and
were, Perciò, not fully human. Ideologies distinguishing between populations
framed as possessing the wrong religion and those framed as possessing no reli-
gion are linked to the distinction between standard language ideologies and ra-
ciolinguistic ideologies. While standard language ideologies frame working-class
white individuals like Eliza Doolittle as producing the wrong form of a legitimate
lingua, making them inferior humans on a case-by-case basis, raciolinguistic
ideologies frame racialized populations as having no legitimate language or being
altogether languageless, collectively rendering them as less than fully human.33
Whereas standard language ideologies draw individualized distinctions in terms
of perceived degrees of correctness, raciolinguistic ideologies draw collective dis-
tinctions in terms of perceived ontological kinds.

Raciolinguistic ideologies were instrumental to the rise of European nation-
states and the European colonial project.34 For example, raciolinguistic ideologies
were integral in producing justifications for white settler colonialism, with white
settlers often depicting Indigenous languages in the Americas as animal-like
forms of simple communication incapable of expressing Christian doctrine.35
In addition, raciolinguistic ideologies were integral to the dehumanization of
Black populations as part of the justification for the transatlantic slave trade and
the forced segregation of African Americans within the context of the Jim Crow
South.36 In a reconfiguration of early anti-Semitism framed in religious terms,
racio linguistic ideologies were also central to the racialization of Jewishness in
the context of the Holocaust. Specifically, Jews were represented as having no loy-
alty to a mother-tongue, thereby posing an existential threat to the integrity of
the German language, paralleling their framing as an existential threat to German

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesRethinking Language Barriers & Social Justice from a Raciolinguistic Perspective

society.37 In short, raciolinguistic ideologies that called into question the inherent
legitimacy of racialized populations’ language practices were part of the framing
of these populations as a threat to the national polity in need of containment and
perhaps even elimination.38

Studies of raciolinguistic ideologies are also anchored in a distinctive ontolog-
ical and epistemological perspective from dominant sociolinguistic approaches
to the studies of standard language ideologies. Sociolinguistic approaches to the
study of standard language ideologies often begin from an empirical perspective
presupposing standard languages as sets of disembodied linguistic features as-
sociated with higher social status groups in a particular society that can be used
by anyone regardless of their social status.39 In contrast, raciolinguistic ideolo-
gies build on conceptualizations of race as a fundamentally colonial-ontological
problem of being made to exist as an object in advance of one’s presence through
processes of conaturalization.40 From this perspective, language varieties are not
sets of disembodied linguistic features. Invece, hegemonic modes of perception
can frame what are ostensibly the same language practices as standard when pro-
duced by someone inhabiting a dominant racial status but nonstandard when pro-
duced by someone inhabiting a subordinate racial status. From this perspective, ra-
cialization can render particular populations’ language practices as inherently defi-
cient and fundamentally illegitimate.41 Thus, raciolinguistic ideologies’ systematic
attributions of un/intelligibility disrupt ontological distinctions between languag-
es and varieties thereof. These conceptualizations can help us better understand
distinctive articulations of linguistic, racial, and socioeconomic marginalization.
Per esempio, while Eliza Doolittle experienced socioeconomic and linguistic mar-
ginalization, her whiteness provided provisional access to elite spaces that are sys-
tematically denied to racially minoritized communities. This by no means negates
the marginalization that Eliza Doolittle experienced or the alienation that it pro-
duced, but rather illustrates the importance of attending to the ways that linguistic,
racial, and socioeconomic stigmatization coarticulate and disarticulate.

Adult-education scholar Vijay A. Ramjattan characterizes various contempo-
rary “accent reduction” industries as “raciolinguistic pedagogy” that attribute de-
ficiency and value to different populations’ language practices in deeply contra-
dictory ways that obscure the reproduction of racial and class stratification.42 This
focus on race can sharpen understandings of contemporary linguistic marginaliza-
zione. One example that we have written about previously is “Long-Term English
Learners,” a label for students institutionally classified as English Learners for
seven or more years and subjected to perpetual remediation due to their supposed
lack of English language proficiency.43 Based on its association with systematically
racialized attributions of linguistic illegitimacy, Long-Term English Learner has
become institutionalized as a deeply stigmatizing raciolinguistic classification in
NOI. schools. We have examined how racialized experiences of students designat-

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ed as Long-Term English Learners are linked to the experiences of students desig-
nated as “Heritage Language Learners” and “Standard English Learners,” which
also function as raciolinguistic classifications. These linguistic designations are
produced through hegemonic modes of perception associated with white listening
subjects that frame racialized students’ language practices as inherently deficient
and in need of remediation, even when these practices ostensibly correspond to
standardized norms that are institutionally affirmed or even prized for white lan-
guage users. Infatti, even researchers who accept these raciolinguistic catego-
ries as objective descriptions of students’ purportedly limited linguistic capaci-
ties acknowledge this overlap, with one prominent report focused on Long-Term
English Learners describing them as sharing “much in common with other Stan-
dard English learners–the mix of English vocabulary superimposed on the struc-
ture of the heritage language and the use of a dialect of English that differs from
academic English.”44 Default assumptions about the linguistic deficiency of stu-
dents designated as Long-Term English Learners systematically obscure their
demonstration of profound multilingual skills that in many ways meet or exceed
stipulated educational standards.45

Raciolinguistic ideologies associated with the U.S.-based Long-Term English
Learner label are rooted in the nation’s white settler colonial and anti-Black
logics, which also undergird the Standard English Learner category. This un-
derlying logic is demonstrated by Standard English Learner linguistic screeners
used in the Los Angeles Unified School District that seek to identify students who
“would particularly benefit from mainstream English language development.”46
The screeners provide separate lists of “African American linguistic features,"
“Hawaiian American linguistic features,” and “Mexican American linguistic fea-
tures.” Each list includes approximately twenty sentences that are represented in
Standard English and the respective nonstandard racialized variety, highlighting
the particular linguistic features that distinguish between the two. The screeners
are designed to identify students whose attributed lack of Standard English abil-
ities make them eligible for a remedial program focused on correcting their pur-
ported linguistic deficiencies. Here, we once again encounter the distinction be-
tween standard language ideologies and raciolinguistic ideologies in that, based on
the screeners available, the working-class white U.S. equivalent to Eliza Doolittle
would not be targeted for formally institutionalized linguistic screening, E
would, Perciò, not be threatened with remediation and marginalization re-
gardless of their perceived linguistic deviation from Standard English.

Despite African American and Native Hawaiian students’ display of tremen-
dous communicative dexterity, dialect variation is framed as an endemic educa-
tional problem for them, which reflects how anti-Blackness and white settler colo-
nialism are deceptively reproduced through raciolinguistic ideologies.47 Mexican
American students’ targeting as part of these screeners underscores the impor-

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesRethinking Language Barriers & Social Justice from a Raciolinguistic Perspective

tance of understanding the racialization of Latinxs in relation to the foundational
anti-Blackness and white settler colonialism of U.S. society.48 As a result of such
English language screeners and assessments, millions of students are designated
as English Learners annually, a significant percentage of whom are relegated to a
perpetual classification as Long-Term English Learners and assigned to remedial
classrooms for the entirety of their elementary and secondary schooling experienc-
es. These experiences of perpetual linguistic remediation constrain the opportu-
nities available to racialized students, often reproducing intergenerational socio-
economic vulnerability and societal marginalization. Sociologist Brian Cabral
conceptualizes this as a racialized process of “linguistic confinement,” and argues
that state-based educational language assessments come to be institutionalized in
conjunction with broader carceral dynamics of surveillance and containment.49
In this way, raciolinguistic ideologies that produced contemporary categories such
as Long-Term English Learner are rooted in the nation’s white settler colonial and
anti-Black foundations. These educational language learning assessments, desig-
nazioni, and curricula are presented as helpful interventions that serve to (Rif)me-
diate linguistic barriers. A raciolinguistic perspective on linguistic (Rif)mediation
attends to the historical colonial underpinnings of contemporary language clas-
sifications to examine how deeply stratified political and economic structures are
rationalized through ideologies of linguistic deficiency. The broader goal is to re-
fuse behavioral linguistic explanations for challenges requiring broad institution-
al and societal transformation to sustain collective well-being.

Whether in terms of the contemporary emergence of digital language technol-
ogies such as accent-modification apps, or past popular representations of upward
socioeconomic mobility through elocution lessons, the trope of language barriers
and the toppling thereof is widely resonant as a reference point for societal prog-
ress. Central to this trope is a misleading debate between advocates of linguis-
tic assimilation and pluralism, both sides of which deceptively normalize dom-
inant power structures by approaching language narrowly as an isolated site of
(Rif)meditation. This dynamic can be recognized in assimilationist efforts toward
Standard English remediation in U.S. schools that systematically target racialized
students regardless of the extent to which their English language practices might
seem to correspond to standardized norms.50 It is also at work in dual-language
programs that systematically support the achievement of economically dominant
white students, many of whom enter these programs identifying as monolingual
English users, over their racialized and economically marginalized peers, many
of whom use multiple languages and varieties thereof throughout their everyday
lives.51 Thus, it is insufficient to challenge assimilation through advocacy for lin-
guistic diversity as an end in itself. Reconnecting contemporary advocacy for mul-
tilingual education in the United States to its history as part of broader civil rights
demands for institutional and societal transformation is one strategy for refusing

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generic affirmation of linguistic diversity as the solution to hierarchies rational-
ized in relation to linguistic differences.52

These rationalizations and narrow, instrumentalist framings of language
dovetail with prevailing approaches in U.S. linguistics that separate the study of
languages from the populations and communities among which they are used.
In contrast, a raciolinguistic perspective interrogates the fundamental relation-
ship between linguistic and racial classifications, thereby refusing to separate the
study of languages from the experiences, positionalities, perspectives, and polit-
ical projects of their users. By recognizing the colonial underpinnings of wide-
spread ideas about linguistic diversity, we can connect linguistic advocacy to
broader political struggles. This is what the digital app as the newest attempt at
bridging linguistic diversity misses. Its design presupposes that the marginaliza-
tion of those positioned as having a marked accent is primarily linguistic, in partenza
uninterrogated the colonial and imperial structures that shape contemporary ra-
cial and economic inequities. While such an app may benefit the primarily Global
North customers who will no longer have to navigate linguistic diversity, it does
little to improve the social outcomes of the call center workers, primarily of the
Global South, whom the app was reportedly developed to help. Through their pri-
mary commitment to maximizing efficiency in service encounters, such technol-
ogies contribute to the reproduction of dominant political and economic power
structures under the auspices of brokering linguistic diversity. Yet mainstream
approaches to sociolinguistics, which often celebrate linguistic diversity without
situating it in relation to broader colonial and imperial histories and their effects
on contemporary political and economic realities, also do little to challenge pre-
vailing power structures. Così, language must be understood as a central medi-
um and object in all justice struggles, including those focused on issues such as
climate change, formazione scolastica, health, reproductive rights, migration, labor, hous-
ing, race, genere, sexuality, disability, anticapitalism, prison abolition, and decol-
onization.53 We look forward to continued dialogues about the role of language
in these various political struggles, as well as the role of different scholarly ap-
proaches in supporting or constraining them.

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about the authors

Jonathan Rosa is Associate Professor of Education, Comparative Race and Eth-
nic Studies, E, by courtesy, Anthropology, Linguistica, and Comparative Litera-
ture at Stanford University. He is the author of Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a
Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2019) and editor of Language
and Social Justice in Practice (with Netta Avineri, Laura R. Graham, Eric J. Johnson, E
Robin Conley Riner, 2018).

Nelson Flores is Associate Professor in the Educational Linguistics Division at
the University of Pennsylvania. His research examines the intersection of language,
race, and the political economy in shaping U.S. educational policies and practices.
He is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society (with Ofelia García and
Massimiliano Spotti, 2017) and Bilingualism for All? Raciolinguistic Perspectives on Dual
Language Education in the United States (with Amelia Tseng and Nicholas Subtirelu,
2020).

endnotes

1 Catherine E. Shoichet, “These Former Stanford Students Are Building an App to Change
Your Accent,” CNN, Dicembre 19, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/19/us/sanas
-accent-translation-cec/index.html.

2 For more on ideologies of linguistic diversity, see Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine, Signs of
Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2019); and Nelson Flores, “The Unexamined Relationship Between Neoliberalism and
Plurilingualism: A Cautionary Tale,” TESOL Quarterly 47 (3) (2013): 500–520, https://
doi.org/10.1002/tesq.114.

3 Frances R. Aparicio, “Of Spanish Dispossessed,” in Language Ideologies: Critical Perspectives
on the Official English Movement, Volume I: Education and the Social Implications of Official Lan-
guage, ed. Roseann Dueñas González and Ildikó Melis (Abingdon-on-Thames, England:
Routledge, 2001), 248–275; Alexandre Duchêne and Monica Heller, eds., Language in
Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge, 2012); E
Aneta Pavlenko, “Superdiversity and Why It Isn’t: Reflections on Terminological Inno-
vation and Academic Branding,” in Sloganization in Language Education Discourse: Conceptual
Thinking in the Age of Academic Marketization, ed. Barbara Schmenk, Stephan Breidbach, E
Lutz Küster (Bristol, England: Multilingual Matters, 2018), 142–168.

4 Nelson Flores and Mark Lewis, “From Truncated to Sociopolitical Emergence: A Critique
of Super-Diversity in Sociolinguistics,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 241
(2016): 97–124, https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2016-0024.

5 Susan Gal, “Language and Political Economy,” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989):
345–367, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.18.100189.002021; Susan Gal, “Language
and Political Economy: An Afterword,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3) (2016):
331–335, https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.3.021; Jonathan Rosa and Christa Burdick,
“Language Ideologies” in The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society, ed. Ofelia García,
Nelson Flores, and Massimiliano Spotti (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017),
103–123; and Jillian Cavanaugh and Shalini Shankar, eds., Language and Materiality:
Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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6 John Baugh, “Linguistic Profiling,” in Black Linguistics: Language, Società, and Politics in Africa
and the Americas, ed. Sinfree Makoni, Geneva Smitherman, Arnetha F. Ball, and Arthur
K. Spears (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge, 2003), 155–168; Vijay A. Ram-
jattan, “Racializing the Problem of and Solution to Foreign Accent in Business,” Applied
Linguistics Review 13 (4) (2019): 527–544, https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2019-0058;
Ian Cushing, “The Policy and Policing of Language in Schools,” Language in Society 49
(3) (2020) 425–450; and Kamran Khan, “What Does a Terrorist Sound Like?: Lan-
guage and Racialized Representations of Muslims,” in The Oxford Handbook of Language
and Race, ed. H. Samy Alim, Angela Reyes, and Paul V. Kroskrity (New York: Oxford
Stampa universitaria, 2020), 398–422.

7 Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power
(Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007); and Monica Heller and Bonnie McElhinny,
Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History (Toronto: University of Toron-
to Press, 2017).

8 Bernhard Siegert, “Switchboards and Sex: The Nut(T) Case,” in Inscribing Science: Scientific
Texts and the Materiality of Communication, ed. Timothy Lenoir (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 78–90.
9 Ibid., 81, emphasis in original.
10 Ibid., 80.
11 Gerard O’Regan, The Innovation in Computing Companion: A Compendium of Select, Pivotal

Inventions (Berlin: Springer, 2018).

12 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards
the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial
Review 3 (3) (2003): 253–337, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

13 Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Massa.: The MIT Press, 1965).
14 Ibid., 3–4.
15 Dell Hymes, “On Communicative Competence.” in Sociolinguistics: Selected Readings, ed.

J. B. Pride and Janet Holmes (London: Penguin Books, 1972).

16 Cem Alptekin, “Towards Intercultural Communicative Competence in ELT,” ELT Journal,

56 (1) (2002): 57–64.

17 Jennifer Leeman, “Engaging Critical Pedagogy: Spanish for Native Speakers,” Foreign Lan-
guage Annals 38 (1) (2005): 35–45, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-9720.2005.tb02451.x.
18 Mark Lewis, “A Critique of the Principle of Error Correction as a Theory of Social

Change,” Language in Society 47 (2018): 325–346.

19 Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores, “Unsettling Race and Language: Toward a Raciolin-

guistic Perspective,” Language in Society 46 (5) (2017): 621–647.

20 Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (New York and London: Verso

Books, 2016).

21 Mark Golub, “Plessy as ‘Passing’: Judicial Responses to Ambiguously Raced Bodies in

Plessy v. Ferguson,” Law and Society Review 39 (3) (2005): 563–600.

22 Laura E. Gómez, “Opposite One-Drop Rules: Mexican Americans, African Americans
and the Need to Reconceive Turn-of-the-Twentieth Century Race Relations,” in How
the United States Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and Its Consequences, ed. José A. Cobas,

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Jorge Duany, and Joe R. Feagin (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge, 2009),
87–100.

23 Giorgio A. Martinez, “The Legal Construction of Race: Mexican-Americans and White-

ness,” The Harvard Latino Law Review 2 (1997): 321–348.

24 Ruben Donato and Jarrod Hanson, “Mexican-American Resistance to School Segrega-

zione,” Phi Delta Kappan 100 (5) (2019): 39–42.

25 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute

Books, 1987).

26 Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Pol-
itics of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Sinfree Makoni and
Alastair Pennycook, eds., Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (Tonawanda, N.Y.:
Multilingual Matters, 2007); and Nelson Flores, “Silencing the Subaltern: Nation-State/
Colonial Governmentality and Bilingual Education in the United States,” Critical In-
quiry in Language Studies 10 (4) (2013): 263–287, https://doi.org/10.1080/15427587.2013
.846210.

27 Jonathan Rosa, Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and

the Learning of Latinidad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

28 Jane H. Hill, The Everyday Language of White Racism (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell,
2008); and April Baker-Bell, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Peda-
gogy (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge, 2020).

29 Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa, “Bringing Race into Second Language Acquisition,"
The Modern Language Journal 103 (S1) (2019): 145–151, https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12523.
30 Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa, “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies
and Language Diversity in Education,” Harvard Education Review 85 (2) (2015): 149–171,
https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149.

31 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.”
32 Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, Massa.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).
33 Jonathan Rosa, “Standardization, Racialization, Languagelessness: Raciolinguistic Ide-
ologies across Communicative Contexts,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26 (2) (2016):
162–183, https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12116.

34 Flores, “Silencing the Subaltern.”
35 Gabriela A. Veronelli, “The Coloniality of Language: Race, Expressivity, Energia, and the
Darker Side of Modernity,” Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies
13 (2015): 108–134.

36 Cécile B. Vigoroux, “The Discursive Pathway of Two Centuries of Raciolinguistic Stereo-
typing: ‘Africans as Incapable of Speaking French,’” Language in Society 46 (1) (2017): 5–21,
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404516000804; and John Russell Rickford and Russell
John Rickford, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (New York: Wiley, 2000).

37 Christopher M. Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-Tongue Fascism, Race and the

Science of Language (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge, 1999).

38 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans.

David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).

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39 James Milroy, “Language Ideology and the Consequences of Standardization,"Giornale di

Sociolinguistics 5 (4) (2001): 530–555, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00163.

40 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
41 Flores and Rosa, “Undoing Appropriateness”; and Rosa, “Standardization, Racialization,

Languagelessness.”

42 Vijay A. Ramjattan, “Accent Reduction as Raciolinguistic Pedagogy,” in Thinking with
an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice, ed. Pooja Rangan, Akshya Saxena,
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar (Berkeley: Stampa dell'Università della California,
2023), 37–53.

43 Flores and Rosa, “Undoing Appropriateness.”
44 Laurie Olsen, Reparable Harm: Fulfilling the Unkept Promise of Educational Opportunity for Califor-

nia’s Long-Term English Learners (Long Beach: Californians Together, 2010), 22.

45 Ramón Antonio Martínez and Alexander Feliciano Mejía, “Looking Closely and Listening
Carefully: A Sociocultural Approach to Understanding the Complexity of Latina/o/x
Students’ Everyday Language Use,” Theory into Practice 59 (1) (2020): 53–63, https://doi
.org/10.1080/00405841.2019.1665414.

46 “How to Use the SEL Linguistic Screener,” Los Angeles Unified School District’s Aca-
demic English Mastery Program, https://achieve.lausd.net/cms/lib08/CA01000043/
Centricity/Domain/217/2016%20AEMP%20SEL%20Linguistic%20Screeners%20.pdf
(accessed June 13 2023). See also Rosa and Flores, “Unsettling Race and Language.”
47 Kathryn H. Au and Julie Kaomea, “Reading Comprehension and Diversity in Historical
Perspective: Literacy, Power and Native Hawaiians,” in Handbook of Research on Reading
Comprehension, ed. Susan E. Israel and Gerald D. Duffy (Abingdon-on-Thames, England:
Routledge, 2020), 571–586; and Gloria Swindler Boutte, Mary E. Earick, and Tambra O.
Jackson, “Linguistic Policies for African American Language Speakers: Moving from
Anti-Blackness to Pro-Blackness,” Theory into Practice 60 (3) (2021): 231–241, https://
doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2021.1911576.

48 Laura C. Chávez-Moreno, “The Problem with Latinx as a Racial Construct vis-à-vis Lan-
guage and Bilingualism: Toward Recognizing Multiple Colonialisms in the Racializa-
tion of Latinidad,” in Handbook of Latinos and Education: Theory, Research, and Practice, ed.
Enrique G. Murillo, Jr., Dolores Delgado Bernal, Socorro Morales, et al. (Abingdon-on-
Thames, England: Routledge, 2021), 164–180.

49 Brian Cabral, “Linguistic Confinement: Rethinking the Racialized Interplay between
Educational Language Learning and Carcerality,” Race, Ethnicity, and Education 26 (3)
(2022): 277–297, https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2022.2069742.

50 Baker-Bell, Linguistic Justice.
51 Sofia Chaparro, “But Mom! I’m Not a Spanish Boy! Raciolinguistic Socialization in a Two-

Way Immersion Bilingual Program,” Linguistics and Education 50 (2019): 1–12.

52 Nelson Flores and Sofia Chaparro, “What Counts as Language Education Policy? De-
veloping a Materialist Anti-Racist Approach to Language Activism,” Language Policy 17
(2017): 365–384, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-017-9433-7.

53 Netta Avineri, Laura R. Graham, Eric J. Johnson, et al., ed., Language and Social Justice in

Practice (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge, 2019).

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