Language & Social Justice in the United States

Language & Social Justice

in the United States

Walt Wolfram, Anne H. Charity Hudley &

Guadalupe Valdés, guest editors

with Anne Curzan · Robin M. Queen

Kristin VanEyk · Rachel Elizabeth Weissler

Wesley Y. Leonard · Julia C. Fine

Jessica Love-Nichols · Bernard C. Perley

Jonathan Rosa · Nelson Flores

Aris Moreno Clemons · Jessica A. Grieser

Joyhanna Yoo · Cheryl Lee · Andrew Cheng

Anusha Ànand · H. Samy Alim · John Baugh

Sharese King · John R. Rickford

Norma Mendoza-Denton

Dædalus

Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Summer 2023

Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Dædalus

“Language & Social Justice in the United States”

Volume 152, Number 3; Summer 2023

Walt Wolfram, Anne H. Charity Hudley & Guadalupe Valdés, Guest Editors

Phyllis S. Bendell, Editor in Chief

Peter Walton, Associate Editor

Key Bird, Assistant Editor

Inside front cover: The photos on the inside front and back covers, provided by the authors of

this volume of Dædalus, represent the rich and varied ways that, in the words of Toni Morrison,

“we do language.”

(top row) Basket weavers in Village Tindomsolibgo (Upper East Region, Ghana) do call and

response work songs, 2021. Photo courtesy of Walt Wolfram.

(middle row, left) Wesley Y. Leonard in Miami Tribe of Oklahoma headquarters, standing next

to a display of myaamia ribbonwork that also has the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma seal, June 2023.

Photo courtesy of Wesley Y. Leonard. (right, upper) Black deaf signers demonstrate some of

the characteristics of Black ASL (American Sign Language) at Gallaudet University in Washing-

ton, D.C. Photo courtesy of Walt Wolfram. (right, lower) The Eastern Band of Cherokee immer-

sion school, New Kituwah Academy, Cherokee, North Carolina, 2014, as featured in the Emmy

award–winning ﬁlm First Language: The Race to Save Cherokee. Photo courtesy of Walt Wolfram.

(bottom row) Sophomores at Sequoia High School in Redwood City, California, work with

Jonathan Rosa in Stephanie Weden’s class, February 2019. Photo by Elisa Niño-Sears, courtesy of

Jonathan Rosa.

Contents

5 Language & Social Justice in the United States: An Introduction

Walt Wolfram, Anne H. Charity Hudley & Guadalupe Valdés

18 Language Standardization & Linguistic Subordination

Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk &

Rachel Elizabeth Weissler

36 Addressing Linguistic Inequality in Higher Education:

A Proactive Model

Walt Wolfram

52 Social Justice Challenges of “Teaching” Languages

Guadalupe Valdés

69 Refusing “Endangered Languages” Narratives

Wesley Y. Leonard

84 Climate & Language: An Entangled Crisis

Julia C. Fine, Jessica Love-Nichols & Bernard C. Perley

99 Rethinking Language Barriers & Social Justice from a

Raciolinguistic Perspective

Jonathan Rosa & Nelson Flores

115 Black Womanhood: Raciolinguistic Intersections of Gender,

Sexuality & Social Status in the Aftermaths of Colonization

Aris Moreno Clemons & Jessica A. Grieser

130 Asian American Racialization &

Model Minority Logics in Linguistics

Joyhanna Yoo, Cheryl Lee, Andrew Cheng & Anusha Ànand

147 Inventing “the White Voice”: Racial Capitalism,

Raciolinguistics & Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

H. Samy Alim

167 Linguistic Proﬁling across International

Geopolitical Landscapes

John Baugh

178 Language on Trial

Sharese King & John R. Rickford

194 Currents of Innuendo Converge on an

American Path to Political Hate

Norma Mendoza-Denton

212 Liberatory Linguistics

Anne H. Charity Hudley

Dædalus was founded in 1955 and established as a quarterly in 1958. Its

namesake was renowned in ancient Greece as an inventor, scientist, and unriddler

of riddles. The journal’s emblem, a maze seen from above, symbolizes the aspira-

tion of its founders to “lift each of us above his cell in the labyrinth of learning in

order that he may see the entire structure as if from above, where each separate

part loses its comfortable separateness.”

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, like its journal, brings together

distinguished individuals from every ﬁeld of human endeavor. It was chartered

in 1780 as a forum “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance

the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous

people.” Now in its third century, the Academy, with its more than ﬁve thousand

members, continues to provide intellectual leadership to meet the critical chal-

lenges facing our world.

Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Dædalus

Nineteenth-century depiction of a Roman mosaic labyrinth, now lost,

found in Villa di Diomede, Pompeii

Dædalus Summer 2023

Issued as Volume 152, Number 3

Editorial ofﬁces: Dædalus, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 136 Irving Street,

Cambridge MA 02138. Phone: 617 576 5085. Fax: 617 576 5088. Email: [email protected].

Library of Congress Catalog No. 12-30299.

Dædalus publishes by invitation only and assumes no responsibility for unsolicited man-

uscripts. The views expressed are those of the author(s) of each essay, and not necessarily

of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Dædalus (ISSN 0011-5266; E-ISSN 1548-6192) is published quarterly (winter, spring,

summer, fall) by The MIT Press, One Broadway, Floor 12, Cambridge MA 02142-1189, for

the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. An electronic full-text version of Dædalus is

available from amacad.org/daedalus and from The MIT Press.

Dædalus is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0

International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. For allowed uses under this license, please visit

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0.

Members of the American Academy please direct all questions and claims to

[email protected].

Advertising inquiries may be addressed to Marketing Department, MIT Press Journals,

One Broadway, Floor 12, Cambridge MA 02142-1189. Phone: 617 253 2866. Fax: 617 253

1709. Email: [email protected].

To request permission to photocopy or reproduce content from Dædalus, please contact

the Subsidiary Rights Manager at MIT Press Journals, One Broadway, Floor 12, Cambridge

MA 02142-1189. Fax: 617 253 1709. Email: [email protected].

Corporations and academic institutions with valid photocopying and/or digital licenses

with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) may re produce content from Dædalus under

the terms of their license. Please go to www.copyright.com; CCC, 222 Rosewood Drive,

Danvers MA 01923.

Printed in the United States by The Sheridan Press, 450 Fame Avenue, Hanover PA 17331.

Postmaster: Send address changes to Dædalus, One Broadway, Floor 12, Cambridge MA

02142-1189. Periodicals postage paid at Boston MA and at additional mailing ofﬁces.

The typeface is Cycles, designed by Sumner Stone at the Stone Type Foundry of Guinda

CA. Each size of Cycles has been sep arately designed in the tradition of metal types.

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license

https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_e_02014

Language & Social Justice in the

United States: An Introduction

Walt Wolfram, Anne H. Charity Hudley &

Guadalupe Valdés

n recent decades, the United States has witnessed a noteworthy escalation of

academic responses to long-standing social and racial inequities in its society.

In this process, research, advocacy, and programs supporting diversity and in-

clusion initiatives have grown. A set of themes and their relevant discourses have

now developed in most programs related to diversity and inclusion; for example,

current models are typically designed to include a range of groups, particularly

reaching people by their race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious afﬁliation,

gender, and other demographic categories. Unfortunately, one of the themes typ-

ically overlooked, dismissed, or even refuted as necessary is language. Further-

more, the role of language subordination in antiracist activities tends to be treat-

ed as a secondary factor under the rubric of culture. Many linguists, however, see

language inequality as a central or even leading component related to all of the

traditional themes included in diversity and inclusion strategies.

In fact, writer

and researcher Rosina Lippi-Green observes that “Discrimination based on lan-

guage variation is so commonly accepted, so widely perceived as appropriate, that

it must be seen as the last back door to discrimination. And the door stands wide

open.”

Even academics, one of the groups that should be exposed to issues of compre-

hensive inclusion, have seemingly decided that language is a low-priority issue. As

noted in a 2015 article in The Economist:

The collision of academic prejudice and accent is particularly ironic. Academics tend

to the centre-left nearly everywhere, and talk endlessly about class and multicultural-

ism. . . . And yet accent and dialect are still barely on many people’s minds as deserving

respect.

As such, as the editors of this collection, we have commissioned thirteen essays

that address speciﬁc issues of language inequality and discrimination, both in their

own right and directly related to traditional themes of diversity and inclusion.

6 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Language & Social Justice in the United States: An Introduction

Recent issues of Dædalus have addressed immigration, climate change, access

to justice, inequality, and teaching in higher education, all of which relate to lan-

guage in some way.

The theme of the Summer 2022 issue is “The Humanities in

American Life: Transforming the Relationship with the Public.” As an extension of

that work, the essays in this volume focus on a humanistic social science approach

to transforming our relationship with language both in the academy and at large.

There is a growing inventory of research projects and written collections that

consider issues of language and social justice, including dimensions such as racio-

linguistics, linguistic proﬁling, multilingual education, gendered linguistics, and

court cases that are linguistically informed. Those materials cover a comprehen-

sive range of language issues related to social justice. The collection of essays in

this Dædalus volume is unique in its breadth of coverage and extends from issues

including linguistic proﬁling, raciolinguistics, and institutional linguicism to

multi lingualism, language teaching, migration, and climate change. The authors

are experts in their respective areas of scholarship, who combine strong research

records with extensive engagement in their topics of inquiry.

he initial goal of this Dædalus issue is to demonstrate the vast array of so-

cial and political disparity manifested in language inequality, ranging from

ecological conditions such as climate change, social conditions of inter-

and intralanguage variation, and institutional policies that promulgate the notion

and the stated practice of ofﬁcial languages and homogenized, monolithic norms

of standardized language based on socially dominant speakers. These norms are

socialized overtly and covertly into all sectors of society and often are adopted

as consensus norms, even by those who are marginalized or stigmatized by these

distinctions. As linguist Norman Fairclough notes in Language and Power, the ex-

ercise of power is most efﬁciently achieved through ideology-manufacturing

consent instead of coercion.

Practices that appear universal or common sense

often originate in the dominant class, and these practices work to sustain an un-

equal power dynamic. Furthermore, there is power behind discourse because the

social order of discourses is held together as a hidden effect of power, such as stan-

dardization and national/ofﬁcial languages, and power in discourse as strategies

of discourse reﬂect asymmetrical power relations between interlocutors in sets of

routines, such as address forms, interruptions, and a host of other conversational

routines. In this context, the ﬁrst step in addressing these linguistic inequalities

is to raise awareness of their existence, since many operate as implicit bias rather

than overt, explicit bias recognized by the public.

Unfortunately, and somewhat ironically, higher education has been slow in

this process; in fact, several essays in this collection show that higher education

has been an active agent in the reproduction of linguistic inequality at the same

time that it advocates for equality in many other realms of social structure.

Two

152 (3) Summer 2023 7

Walt Wolfram, Anne H. Charity Hudley & Guadalupe Valdés

essays in particular explore underlying notions of standardization and the use of

language in social presentation and argumentation. The essays also address lan-

guage rights as a fundamental human right. In “Language Standardization & Lin-

guistic Subordination,” Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk, and Rachel

Elizabeth Weissler discuss how ideologies about standardized language circulate

in higher education, to the detriment of many students, and they include a range

of suggestions and examples for how to center linguistic justice and equity within

higher education.

Curzan and coauthors give us an important overview of language stan-

dardization:

We have suggested some solutions to many of the issues we’ve highlighted in this es-

say; however, implementing solutions in a meaningful way ﬁrst requires recognition

of how important language variation is for our everyday interactions with others. Sec-

ond, implementing solutions depends on recognizing how our ideas about language

(standardized or not) can pose a true barrier to meaningful change. Such recognition

includes the understanding that much of what we think about language often stands

as a proxy for what we think about people, who we are willing to listen to and hear, and

who we want to be with or distance ourselves from.

In “Addressing Linguistic Inequality in Higher Education: A Proactive Model,”

Walt Wolfram describes a proactive “campus-infusion” program that includes

activities and resources for student affairs, academic affairs, human resources,

faculty affairs, and ofﬁces of institutional equity and diversity. Wolfram’s essay

shows directly and speciﬁcally how academics aren’t always the solution but, as a

whole, are complicit in linguistic exclusion. He writes:

A casual survey of university diversity statements and programs indicates that a) there

is an implicitly recognized set of diversity themes within higher education and b) it

traditionally excludes language issues.

Topics related to race, ethnicity, gender, reli-

gion, sexual preference, and age are commonly included in these programs, but lan-

guage is noticeably absent, either by explicit exclusion or by implicit disregard. Ironi-

cally, issues of language intersect with all of the themes in the canonical catalog of di-

versity issues.

The absence of systemic language considerations from most diversity and in-

clusion programs and their limited role in antiracist initiatives is a major con-

cern for these programs, since language is a critical component for discrimination

among the central themes in the extant canon of diversity. Language is an active

agent in discrimination and cannot be overlooked or minimized in the process.

Some of the essays in this volume of Dædalus address the sociopolitical dom-

inance of a restricted set of languages and its impact on the lives of speakers of

devalued languages. The authors of these essays consider the effects of climate,

8 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Language & Social Justice in the United States: An Introduction

social, educational, legal, and political dissonance confronted by speakers of non-

dominant languages. They also show how the metaphors of “disappearance” and

“loss” obscure the colonial processes responsible for the suppression of Indig-

enous languages. People who speak an estimated 90 percent of the world’s lan-

guages have now been linguistically and culturally harmed due to the increasing

dominance of a selected number of “world languages” and changes in the phys-

ical and topographical ecology. The authors describe the implications of this ex-

tensive language subjugation and endangerment and the consequences for the

speakers of these languages. Both physical and social ecology are implicated in

this threat to multitudes of languages in the world.

Linguistics in general, and sociolinguistics in particular, has a signiﬁcant his-

tory of engagement in issues of social inequality. From the educational controver-

sies over the language adequacy of marginalized, racialized groups of speakers in

the 1960s, as in linguist William Labov’s A Study of Non-Standard English, to ideo-

logical challenges to multilingualism and the social and cultural impact of the de-

valuing of the world’s languages, as described in the essays by Wesley Y. Leonard,

Guadalupe Valdés, and Julia C. Fine, Jessica Love-Nichols, and Bernard C. Perley,

the role of language is a prominent consideration in the actualization and dispen-

sation of social justice.

In addition, this collection addresses areas of research that are complementa-

ry to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ 2017 report by the Commission

on Language Learning, America’s Languages: Investing in Language Education for the

21st Century.

In spite of the long-term presence of the teaching of languages other

than English in the American educational system, concern over “world language

capacity” has surfaced periodically over a period of many years because of the

perceived limitations in developing functional additional language proﬁciencies.

The consensus view (as in Congressman Paul Simon’s 1980 report The Tongue-Tied

American) has been that foreign/world language study in U.S. schools is generally

unsuccessful, that Americans are poor language learners, and that focused atten-

tion must be given to the national defense implications of these language limita-

tions.

In the 2017 Language Commission report, foreign/world language study is

presented as 1) critical to success in business, research, and international relations

in the twenty-ﬁrst century and 2) a contributing factor to “improved learning out-

comes in other subjects, enhanced cognitive ability, and the development of em-

pathy and effective interpretive skills.”

The Academy’s report presents information about languages spoken at home

by U.S. residents (76.7 percent English, 12.6 percent Spanish). It also includes a

graphic illustrating the prevalence of thirteen other languages (including Chi-

nese, Hindi, Filipino and Tagalog, and Vietnamese) commonly spoken by 0.13

percent to 0.2 percent of the population, as well as a category identiﬁed as all

other languages (a small category comprising 2.2 percent of residents of the Unit-

152 (3) Summer 2023 9

Walt Wolfram, Anne H. Charity Hudley & Guadalupe Valdés

ed States).

The report focuses on languages–rather than speakers–and rec-

ommends: 1) new activities that will increase the number of language teachers,

2) expanded efforts that can supplement language instruction across the educa-

tion system, and 3) more opportunities for students to experience and immerse

themselves in “languages as they are used in everyday interactions and across all

segments of society.” It also speciﬁcally mentions needed support for heritage lan-

guages so these languages can “persist from one generation to the next,” and for

targeted programming for Native American languages.

While it effectively interrupted the monolingual, English-only ideologies that

permeate ideas on language in the United States, the conceptualization of language

undergirding the report needs to be greatly expanded. The report focuses on devel-

oping expertise in additional language acquisition as the product of deliberative

study. For example, in the case of heritage languages (deﬁned as those non-English

languages spoken by residents of the United States), the report highlights efforts

such as the Seal of Biliteracy. Through this effort (now endorsed by many states

around the country), high school students who complete a sequence of established

language classes and pass a state-approved language assessment can obtain an ofﬁ-

cial Seal of Biliteracy endorsement. Unfortunately, the series of courses and the as-

sessments required to obtain the Seal are only available in a limited number of lan-

guages. The report mentions other efforts, including dual language immersion pro-

grams, yet it does not recognize family- and community- gained bilingualism and

biliteracy. Notably, the report speciﬁcally laments what are viewed as limited literacy

abilities of heritage language speakers and recommends making available curricula

specially designed for heritage language learners and Native American languages.

The view of language that the report is based on is a narrow one and does not

represent the linguistic realities of the majority of bilingual and multilingual stu-

dents. In her contribution to this volume, “Social Justice Challenges of ‘Teaching’

Languages,” Guadalupe Valdés “speciﬁcally problematize[s] language instruction

as it takes place in classroom settings and the impact of what I term the curricu-

larization of language as it is experienced by Latinx students who ‘study’ language

qua language in instructed situations.”

Valdés shows us how these speciﬁc issues

play out in what is typically viewed as the neutral “teaching” of languages. She

writes that challenges to

linguistic justice [result] from widely held negative perspectives on bi/multilingual-

ism and from common and continuing misunderstandings of individuals who use re-

sources from two communicative systems in their everyday lives. My goal is to high-

light the effect of these misunderstandings on the direct teaching of English.

In “Refusing ‘Endangered Languages’ Narratives,” Wesley Y. Leonard draws

from his experiences as a member of a Native American community whose lan-

guage was wrongly labeled “extinct”:

10 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Language & Social Justice in the United States: An Introduction

Within this narrative, I begin with an overview of how language endangerment is de-

scribed to general audiences in the United States and critique the way it is framed and

shared. From there, I shift to an alternative that draws from Indigenous ways of know-

ing to promote social justice through language reclamation.

Leonard encourages us to directly refute “dominant endangered languages nar-

ratives” and replace the focus on the actors of harm in Indigenous communities

with a focus on the creativity and resolve of native scholars working to revitalize

native language and culture. As he states, the “ultimate goal of this essay is to pro-

mote a praxis of social justice by showing how language shift occurs largely as a

result of injustices, and by offering possible interventions.”

In “Climate & Language: An Entangled Crisis,” Julia C. Fine, Jessica Love-

Nichols, and Bernard C. Perley

note that these academic discourses–as well as similar discourses in nonproﬁt and

policy-making spheres–rightly acknowledge the importance of Indigenous thought

to environmental and climate action. Sadly, they often fall short of acknowledging

both the colonial drivers of Indigenous language “loss” and Indigenous ownership of

Indigenous language and environmental knowledge. We propose alternative framings

that emphasize colonial responsibility and Indigenous sovereignty.

Fine, Love-Nichols, and Perley present models of how language and climate are

intertwined. They write, “Scholars and activists have documented the intersec-

tions of climate change and language endangerment, with special focus paid to

their compounding consequences.” The authors “consider the relationship be-

tween language and environmental ideologies, synthesizing previous research on

how metaphors and communicative norms in Indigenous and colonial languages

inﬂuence environmental beliefs and actions.”

he essays in this volume proﬁle a wide range of language issues related to

social justice, from everyday hegemonic comments to legislative policies

and courtroom testimony that depend on language reliability and the lin-

guistic credibility of witnesses who do not communicate in a mainstream Amer-

ican English variety. In 1972, the president of the Linguistic Society of America,

Dwight Bolinger, gave his presidential address titled “Truth is a Linguistic Ques-

tion” as a forewarning of the linguistic accountability of public reporting of na-

tional events. In his other work, he describes language as “a loaded weapon.”

Through these essays, we ﬁnd both concepts to be true.

Over recent decades, the ﬁeld of linguistics has developed a robust specializa-

tion in areas that pay primary attention to the application of a full range of legal

and nonlegal verbal, digital, and document communication that is at the heart of

equitable communication strategies. Language variation is also a highly politi-

152 (3) Summer 2023 11

Walt Wolfram, Anne H. Charity Hudley & Guadalupe Valdés

cized behavior, extending from the construct of a “standardized language” con-

sidered essential for writing and speaking to the use of language in negotiating

the administration of social and political justice. The essays on linguistic variation

and sociopolitical ideology, by Curzan and coauthors, Jonathan Rosa and Nelson

Flores, and H. Samy Alim, examine both the ideological underpinnings of con-

sensual constructs such as “standard” versus “nonmainstream” and their use in

the political process of persuasion and sociopolitical implementation.

The au-

thors in this section address key issues of language variation and language dis-

crimination that demonstrate the vitality of language in issues of social justice,

both independent of and related to other attributes of social justice. This mod-

el includes standardization in media platforms, as described in Rosa and Flores’s

essay, demonstrating the systemic othering of those who do not speak this variety

as their default dialect.

In “Rethinking Language Barriers & Social Justice from a Raciolinguistic Per-

spective,” Rosa and Flores show how “the trope of language barriers and the top-

pling thereof is widely resonant as a reference point for societal progress.”

We argue that by interrogating the colonial and imperial underpinnings of wide-

spread ideas about linguistic diversity, we can connect linguistic advocacy to broader

political struggles. We suggest that language and social justice efforts must link afﬁr-

mations of linguistic diversity to demands for the creation of societal structures that

sustain collective well-being.

Rosa and Flores present and update their raciolinguistics model in current

spaces where race meets technology. With this emerging technology as a refer-

ence point, they demonstrate why “it is crucial to reconsider the logics that in-

form 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

assistance.” They also note that disability has always been part of the story–and

needs to be brought back to light–sharing that Mabel Hubbard and Ma Bell, who

were both inﬂuential on modern linguistic technology, were deaf women.

In “Black Womanhood: Raciolinguistic Intersections of Gender, Sexuality &

Social Status in the Aftermaths of Colonization,” Aris Moreno Clemons and Jessica

A. Grieser “call for an exploration of social life that considers the raciolinguistic

intersections of gender, sexuality, and social class as part and parcel of overarching

social formations.” They center the Black woman as the prototypical Other, her

condition being interpreted neither by conventions of race nor gender. As such, we

take “Black womanhood as the point of departure for a description of the neces-

sary intersecting and variable analyses of social life.” Clemons and Greiser “inter-

rogate the intersections of gender, sexuality, and social status, focusing on the ex-

periences of Black women who ﬁt into and lie at the margins of these categories.”

12 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Language & Social Justice in the United States: An Introduction

They highlight the work of semiotician Krystal A. Smalls, who “reveals a model

for how interdisciplinary reading across ﬁelds such as Black feminist studies, Black

anthropology, Black geographies, and Black linguistics can result in expansive and

inclusive worldmaking.”

In “Asian American Racialization & Model Minority Logics in Linguistics,”

Joyhanna Yoo, Cheryl Lee, Andrew Cheng, and Anusha Ànand “consider histori-

cal and contemporary racializing tactics with respect to Asians and Asian Ameri-

cans.” Such racializing tactics, which they call model minority logics,

weaponize an abstract version of one group to further racialize all minoritized groups

and regiment ethnoracial hierarchies. We identify three functions of model minori-

ty logics that perpetuate white supremacy in the academy, using linguistics as a case

study and underscoring the ways in which the discipline is already mired in racializing

logics that differentiate scholars of color based on reiﬁed hierarchies.

The authors consider the often-overlooked linguistic experiences of Asian

Americans in linguistics and show how “ideological positioning of Asian Amer-

icans as “honorary whites” is based on selective and heavily skewed images of

Asian American economic and educational achievements that circulate across in-

stitutional and dominant media channels.”

In “Inventing ‘the White Voice’: Racial Capitalism, Raciolinguistics & Cultur-

ally Sustaining Pedagogies,” H. Samy Alim explores

how paradigms like raciolinguistics and culturally sustaining pedagogies, among oth-

ers, can offer substantive breaks from mainstream thought and provide us with new,

just, and equitable ways of living together in the world. I begin with a deep engagement

with Boots Riley and his critically acclaimed, anticapitalist, absurdist comedy Sorry

to Bother You in hopes of demonstrating how artists, activists, creatives, and scholars

might: 1) cotheorize the complex relationships between language and racial capitalism

and 2) think through the political, economic, and pedagogical implications of this new

theorizing for Communities of Color.

Alim digs deep into models of aspirational whiteness in Sorry to Bother You and

shows how it goes past the mark. In the script, Boots states, “It’s not really a white

voice. It’s what they wish they sounded like. So, it’s like, what they think they’re

supposed to sound like.” All of the authors in this section examine varied kinds of

intervention strategies and programs in institutional education and social action

that can raise awareness of and help to ameliorate linguistic subordination and

sociolinguistic inequality in American society.

From our perspective, it is not sufﬁcient to raise awareness and describe lin-

guistic inequality without attempting to confront and ameliorate that inequality.

Thus, our third and ﬁnal set of papers by John Baugh, Sharese King and John R.

Rickford, and Norma Mendoza-Denton offer legal and policy alternatives that

152 (3) Summer 2023 13

Walt Wolfram, Anne H. Charity Hudley & Guadalupe Valdés

implement activities and programs that directly confront issues of institutional

inequality. As linguist Jan Blommaert puts it, “we need an activist attitude, one in

which the battle for power-through-knowledge is engaged, in which knowledge is

activated as a key instrument for the liberation of people, and as a central tool un-

derpinning any effort to arrive at a more just and equitable society.”

Our authors

illustrate the communicative processes involved when we use our human capacity

for language to work toward justice.

In “Linguistic Proﬁling across International Geopolitical Landscapes,” Baugh

“explore[s] various forms of linguistic proﬁling throughout the world, culminat-

ing with observations intended to promote linguistic human rights and the aspi-

rational goal of equality among people who do not share common sociolinguistic

backgrounds.”

Baugh extends his previous work on linguistic proﬁling into the

international geopolitical landscape and notes, in countries that have them, the

role that language academies play in reinforcing narrow norms, showing how those

practices relate to practices in countries where these processes are more organic

and situated in the educational systems.

In “Language on Trial,” King and Rickford draw on their case study of the testi-

mony of Rachel Jeantel, a close friend of Trayvon Martin, in the 2013 trial of George

Zimmerman v. The State of Florida.

They show that despite being an ear-witness (by

cell phone) to all but the ﬁnal minutes of Zimmerman’s interaction with Trayvon,

and despite testifying for nearly six hours about it, her testimony was dismissed

in jury deliberations. “Through a linguistic analysis of Jeantel’s speech, comments

from a juror, and a broader contextualization of stigmatized speech forms and

linguistic styles,” they show that “lack of acknowledgment of dialectal variation

has harmful social and legal consequences for speakers of stigmatized dialects.”

Their work complements legal scholar D. James Greiner’s essay on empiricism in

law, from a previous volume of Dædalus, to show how empirical linguistic analysis

should be included in such models.

As King and Rickford state:

Alongside the vitriol from the general public, evidence from jury members suggested

that not only was Jeantel’s speech misunderstood, but it was ultimately disregarded in

more than sixteen hours of deliberation. With no access to the court transcript, unless

when requesting a speciﬁc playback, jurors did not have the materials to reread speech

that might have been unfamiliar to most if they were not exposed to or did not speak

the dialect.

In “Currents of Innuendo Converge on an American Path to Political Hate,”

Norma Mendoza-Denton shows that politicians’ “innuendo such as enthymemes,

sarcasm, and dog whistles” gave us “an early warning about the type of relation-

ship that has now obtained between Christianity and politics, and speciﬁcally

the rise of Christian Nationalism as facilitated by President Donald Trump.” She

demonstrates that “two currents of indirectness in American politics, one reli-

14 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Language & Social Justice in the United States: An Introduction

gious and the other racial, have converged like tributaries leading to a larger body

of water.”

Anne H. Charity Hudley concludes the collection with “Liberatory Linguis-

tics,” offering the model as “a productive, unifying framework for the scholarship

that will advance strategies for attaining linguistic justice [. . .] [e]merging from

the synthesis of various lived experiences, academic traditions, and methodolog-

ical approaches.” She highlights promising strategies from her 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 that can “improve current approaches to engaging with struc-

tural realities that impede linguistic justice.”

Charity Hudley ends by noting

how this set of essays is in conversation with the 2022 Annual Review of Applied Lin-

guistics on social justice in applied linguistics, and the forthcoming Oxford vol-

umes Decolonizing Linguistics and Inclusion in Linguistics, which “set frameworks for

the professional growth of those who study language and create direct roadmaps

for scholars to establish innovative agendas for integrating their teaching and re-

search and outreach in ways that will transform linguistic theory and practice for

years to come.”

As our summaries suggest, this collection of essays is diverse and comprehen-

sive, representing a range of situations and conditions calling for justice in lan-

guage. We hope these essays, along with other publications on this topic, broad-

en the conversations across higher education on language and justice. We are

extremely grateful to the authors who have shared their knowledge, research, ad-

vocacy, and perspectives in such lucid, accessible presentations.

about the authors

Walt Wolfram, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2019, is one of the pio-

neers of sociolinguistics. He is the William C. Friday Distinguished University Pro-

fessor at North Carolina State University, where he also directs the Language and

Life Project. He has published more than twenty books and three hundred articles

on language variation, and has served as executive producer of ﬁfteen television

documentaries, winning several Emmys. His recent publications include Fine in the

World: Lumbee Language in Time and Place (with Clare Dannenberg, Stanley Knick, and

Linda Oxendine, 2021) and African American Language: Language Development from In-

fancy to Adulthood (with Mary Kohn, Charlie Farrington, Jennifer Renn, and Janneke

Van Hofwegen, 2021).

152 (3) Summer 2023 15

Walt Wolfram, Anne H. Charity Hudley & Guadalupe Valdés

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

University. She is the author of four books: The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate

Research (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.

Guadalupe Valdés, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2020, is the Bonnie

Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education, Emerita, in the Graduate School of Edu-

cation at Stanford University. She is also the Founder and Executive Director of the

English coaching organization English Together. Her books Con Respeto: Bridging the

Distances Between Culturally Diverse Families and Schools: An Ethnographic Portrait (1996)

and Learning and Not Learning English: Latino Students in American Schools (2001) have

been used in teacher preparation programs for many years. She has recently pub-

lished in such journals as Journal of Language, Identity, and Education; Bilingual Research

Journal; and Language and Education.

endnotes

See, for example, the statement by the Linguistic Society of America, “LSA Statement on

Race,” May 2019, https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/lsa-statement-race.

Rosina Lippi-Green, English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United

States (New York: Routledge, 2012).

R. L. G., “The Last Acceptable Prejudice,” The Economist, January 29, 2015, https://www

.economist.com/prospero/2015/01/29/the-last-acceptable-prejudice.

Cecilia Menjívar, “The Racialization of ‘Illegality,’” Dædalus 150 (2) (Spring 2021): 91–105,

https://www.amacad.org/publication/racialization-illegality; Jessica F. Green, “Less

Talk, More Walk: Why Climate Change Demands Activism in the Academy,” Dæda-

lus 149 (4) (Fall 2020): 151–162, https://www.amacad.org/publication/climate-change

-demands-activism-academy; D. James Greiner, “The New Legal Empiricism & Its Ap-

plication to Access-to-Justice Inquiries,” Dædalus 148 (1) (Winter 2019): 64–74, https://

www.amacad.org/publication/new-legal-empiricism-its-application-access-justice

-inquiries; Irene Bloemraad, Will Kymlicka, Michèle Lamont, and Leanne S. Son Hing,

“Membership without Social Citizenship? Deservingness & Redistribution as Grounds

for Equality,” Dædalus 148 (3) (Summer 2019): 73–104, https://www.amacad.org/

publication/membership-without-social-citizenship-deservingness-redistribution

-grounds-equality; and Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson, “The Human Factor: The

Promise & Limits of Online Education,” Dædalus 148 (4) (Fall 2019): 235–254, https://

www.amacad.org/publication/human-factor-promise-limits-online-education.

Norman Fairclough, Language and Power, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001).

16 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Language & Social Justice in the United States: An Introduction

Stephany Brett Dunstan, Walt Wolfram, Andrey J. Jaeger, and Rebecca E. Crandall, “Ed-

ucating the Educated: Language Diversity in the University Backyard,” American Speech

90 (2) (2015): 266–280, https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-3130368.

Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk, and Rachel Elizabeth Weissler, “Language

Standardization & Linguistic Subordination,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023): 31, https://

www.amacad.org/publication/language-standardization-linguistic-subordination.

Kendra Nicole Calhoun, “Competing Discourses of Diversity and Inclusion: Institutional

Rhetoric and Graduate Student Narratives at Two Minority Serving Institutions” (PhD

diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2021), https://www.proquest.com/open

view/552b09ea236453a210e8b541d03188fe/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y.

Walt Wolfram, “Addressing Linguistic Inequality in Higher Education: A Proactive

Model,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023): 37, https://www.amacad.org/publication/

addressing-linguistic-inequality-higher-education-proactive-model.

William Labov, A Study of Non-Standard English (Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied

Linguistics, 1969), https://ﬁles.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED024053.pdf; Wesley Y. Leon-

ard, “Refusing ‘Endangered Languages’ Narratives,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023):

https://www.amacad.org/publication/refusing-endangered-languages-narratives;

Guadalupe Valdés, “Social Justice Challenges of ‘Teaching’ Languages,” Dædalus 152

(3) (Summer 2023): https://www.amacad.org/publication/social-justice-challenges

-teaching-languages; and Julia C. Fine, Jessica Love-Nichols, and Bernard C. Perley,

“Climate & Language: An Entangled Crisis,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023): 84–98,

https://www.amacad.org/publication/climate-language-entangled-crisis.

American Academy of Arts and Sciences, America’s Languages: Investing in Language Education

for the 21st Century (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2017),

https://www.amacad.org/publication/americas-languages.

Paul Simon, The Tongue-Tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis (New York:

The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1980), https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED206188.

American Academy of Arts and Sciences, America’s Languages, vii.

Ibid., 4.

Ibid., 6.

Valdés, “Social Justice Challenges of ‘Teaching’ Languages,” 53.

Ibid.

Leonard, “Refusing ‘Endangered Languages’ Narratives,” 69.

Ibid.

Fine, Love-Nichols, and Perley, “Climate & Language,” 84.

Ibid.

Dwight Bolinger, Language: The Loaded Weapon—The Use and Abuse of Language Today (New

York: Routledge, 2021).

Curzan et al., “Language Standardization & Linguistic Subordination”; Jonathan Rosa

and Nelson Flores, “Rethinking Language Barriers & Social Justice from a Raciolin-

guistic Perspective,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023): 99–114, https://www.amacad

.org/publication/rethinking-language-barriers-social-justice-raciolinguistic-perspective;

and H. Samy Alim, “Inventing ‘The White Voice’: Racial Capitalism, Raciolinguistics

152 (3) Summer 2023 17

Walt Wolfram, Anne H. Charity Hudley & Guadalupe Valdés

& Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023): 147–166, https://

www.amacad.org/publication/inventing-white-voice-racial-capitalism-raciolinguistics

-culturally-sustaining.

Rosa and Flores, “Rethinking Language Barriers & Social Justice from a Raciolinguistic

Perspective,” 99.

Ibid., 101–102.

Aris Moreno Clemons and Jessica A. Grieser, “Black Womanhood: Raciolinguistic Inter-

sections of Gender, Sexuality & Social Status in the Aftermaths of Colonization,” Dædalus

152 (3) (Summer 2023): 115, 117, 119, 124, https://www.amacad.org/publication/black

-womanhood-raciolinguistic-intersections-gender-sexuality-social-status-aftermaths.

Joyhanna Yoo, Cheryl Lee, Andrew Cheng, and Anusha Ànand, “Asian American Racial-

ization & Model Minority Logics in Linguistics,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023): 130,

https://www.amacad.org/publication/asian-american-racialization-and-model-minority

-logics-linguistics.

Ibid., 134.

Alim, “Inventing ‘The White Voice,’” 147.

Jan Blommaert, “Looking Back, What Was Important?” Ctrl+Alt+Dem, April 20, 2020,

https://alternative-democracy-research.org/2020/04/20/what-was-important.

John Baugh “Linguistic Proﬁling across International Geopolitical Landscapes,” Dædalus

152 (3) (Summer 2023): 167, https://www.amacad.org/publication/linguistic-proﬁling

-across-international-geopolitical-landscapes.

John R. Rickford and Sharese King, “Language and Linguistics on Trial: Hearing Rachel

Jeantel (and Other Vernacular Speakers) in the Courtroom and Beyond,” Language 92

(4) (2016): 948–988, https://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/ﬁles/Rickford

_92_4.pdf.

Sharese King and John R. Rickford, “Language on Trial,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023):

178, https://www.amacad.org/publication/language-on-trial.

Greiner, “The New Legal Empiricism & Its Application to Access-to-Justice Inquiries.”

King and Rickford, “Language on Trial,” 181.

Norma Mendoza-Denton, “Currents of Innuendo Converge on an American Path to Polit-

ical Hate,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023): 194, https://www.amacad.org/publication/

currents-innuendo-converge-american-path-political-hate.

Anne H. Charity Hudley, “Liberatory Linguistics,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023): 212,

https://www.amacad.org/publication/liberatory-linguistics.

Alison Mackey, Erin Fell, Felipe de Jesus, et al., “Social Justice in Applied Linguistics:

Making Space for New Approaches and New Voices,” Annual Review of Applied Linguis-

tics 42 (2022): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0267190522000071; Anne H. Charity

Hudley and Nelson Flores, “Social Justice in Applied Linguistics: Not a Conclusion,

but a Way Forward,” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 42 (2022): 144–154, https://doi

.org/10.1017/S0267190522000083; Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and

Mary Bucholtz, eds., Decolonizing Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forth-

coming); and Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, eds.,

Inclusion in Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Rachel Elizabeth Weissler

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license

https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_02015

Language Standardization &

Linguistic Subordination

Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk &

Rachel Elizabeth Weissler

Language standardization involves minimizing variation, especially in written

forms of language. That process includes judgments about people who don’t or can’t

use the standard forms. These kinds of judgments can unfairly limit people’s access

to opportunities, including in educational and professional realms. In this essay, we

discuss standardized language varieties and the speciﬁc ways beliefs and ideologies

about them allow judgments about language to become judgments about people,

especially groups of people who share, or are presumed to share, gender, race, eth-

nicity, social status, education status, and numerous other socially salient identities.

After describing how the process of standardization occurs, we illustrate how the

expression of language peeves becomes embodied. Finally, we discuss how ideolo-

gies about standardized language circulate in higher education to the detriment of

many students, and include a range of suggestions and examples for how to center

linguistic justice and equity within higher education.

anguage peeves seem harmless, which only enhances their power. How

serious could it be to complain about people’s use of apostrophes or dou-

ble negatives or the contraction ain’t? The features under ﬁre are relatively

trivial when it comes to mutual comprehension. At the same time, many articu-

lations of language peeves, intentionally or unintentionally, belittle or humiliate

those who have “transgressed,” which is not trivial. Such peeves can become a ref-

erendum on the people themselves rather than “just” their language. For example,

someone who uses ain’t may be understood as uneducated; or an expression like

we don’t want none of that is presumed to be illogical and thus a sign of a speaker’s

inability to think precisely. And these kinds of judgments can unfairly limit peo-

ple’s access to opportunities, including in educational and professional realms.

To understand the unfairness of these judgments and their real-world impli-

cations, it helps to return to our use of scare quotes around “just” in the previous

paragraph. The languages we speak are essential parts of our identities; they are

not just how we talk about the world but are part of who we are and part of our

152 (3) Summer 2023 19

Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk & Rachel Elizabeth Weissler

cultures and communities. Further, the languages we speak are part of how we un-

derstand the world we live in. For example, one of the authors of this essay, who

is from the Southern United States, can use multiple modal verbs to indicate ﬁn-

er distinctions in grammatical mood than are available with a single modal verb.

In the sentence “We might should go to the beach today,” the speaker indicates

both that it is an action that probably needs to be done and an action that may or

may not be feasible. This construction, acquired by speakers in toddlerhood, cre-

ates a different ﬂavor for modal verbs and is tied to how a speaker shows polite-

ness. Multiple modals are nuanced and helpful. They are also often framed, both

by those who don’t use them and by some who do, as highly “incorrect” and as

signaling a lack of education and intelligence.

Given the connection of language to identity, culture, and community, judg-

ments about individuals’ language use are frequently linked to groups of people

(rather than speciﬁc individuals), particularly those connected by race, ethnicity,

gender identity, social status, geographic location, and education. At their most

troubling, overt judgments about language and imagined “correct” ways of speak-

ing reinforce social hierarchies and deny the richness of linguistic diversity. The

language gatekeeping that happens routinely in institutions of higher education

and elsewhere ultimately promotes the ideologies of the powerful and disempow-

ers those who are disenfranchised based on the various social groups of which

they are a part.

Language gatekeeping happens in both formal and informal ways in higher

education. For example, all four authors of this essay know colleagues who have

policies in their courses that penalize students if their written work contains, say,

more than three “errors” per page. Other colleagues give their students a list of

their language peeves (for example, using different than rather than different from, or

ending a sentence with a preposition, or using anyways rather than anyway, or using

multiple modals such as might could) that students should not use in their written

work if they want to please their instructor and receive a better grade. At a less for-

mal level, students themselves may “correct” their peers for saying something like

“aks” in “aks a question.” While not a formal correction tied to a grade, this judg-

ment and gatekeeping take multiple forms, from an explicit correction to derisive

laughter or eye-rolling. Similarly, we have all heard other instructors complain-

ing to a colleague that their students “can’t write” because they confused the ho-

mophones their and there or sent in their “collage application essay.” We’ll return

to the different kinds of language that are being corrected in these examples–

and the harmful language ideologies that justify this powerful gatekeeping.

These instructors and students are participating in a gatekeeping discourse

that circulates broadly in institutions beyond education, including popular me-

dia. Consider, for example, a 2021 feature in Reader’s Digest titled “11 Grammar

Mistakes Editors Hate the Most,” which offers a collection of grammatical peeves

20 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Language Standardization & Linguistic Subordination

sourced from language experts like editors and college instructors.

The “mis-

takes” by “offenders” range from confusion of homophones (their/they’re/there)

to nonstandard apostrophes to the use of I for me. One editor-in-chief, irritated

by the abundance of grammatical errors on public signs, used her own pen to

correct them. She explains, “I’ve only done it once or twice, but when a mistake

makes my skin crawl, I have no shame.”

The use of phrases like “makes my skin crawl” is an example of language em-

bodiment, which in this case describes a physical response to a visual grammatical

“error.” It reﬂects how beliefs about language correctness are deeply held and how

they are both cognitively and physically naturalized–to the point where people

articulate that perceived mistakes cause physical pain (for example, ears or eyes

hurting, feeling ill). Figure 1 illustrates such embodiment.

Throughout this essay, we provide further examples of embodiment/embodied

responses that occur in the name of language standardization to illustrate how

deeply ingrained beliefs about what is and isn’t “correct” are.

Discussing language standardization is critical, given how deeply ideologies

about language use and correctness are embedded in our social interactions with

one another and in our cognitive capacities to both produce and interpret lan-

guage. Standardization often hides the fact that all varieties of all human languages

are equally capable of being “grammatical” in the sense that users have strong un-

derstandings of the rules that govern the variety. For this reason, we don’t use the

term dialect or accent to refer to less standardized varieties. Instead, we use variety.

In doing so, we are committing to the position that standardized varieties are not

better or worse than less standardized varieties. Yet the discourses that position

standardized varieties as better, correct, or the “real” language naturalize the as-

sumed superiority of the standardized variety. We must take seriously the power

of this naturalized discourse about language “correctness” because it facilitates

and often overtly promotes discrimination, both deliberate and unintentional.

We urge readers to consider the implications of language standardization

within their own ﬁelds. Language standardization supports one of the most con-

sistent forms of gatekeeping, and one in which every ﬁeld represented in the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences participates. The ideological power of

language standardization holds true for English and for other languages, includ-

ing many found in the United States. For instance, there is a general prestige as-

sociated with the standardized form of Spanish used in Spain that relegates oth-

er forms of Spanish, such as Cuban or Mexican Spanish, to a signiﬁcantly lower

status.

This version of an ideology about standardized language facilitates dis-

crimination against those who use varieties of Spanish other than those found in

Spain–and, of course, the same discrimination against minoritized varieties hap-

pens in Spain itself. When we unquestioningly reinforce the belief that the stan-

dardized variety is inherently “correct,” we almost always marginalize those who

152 (3) Summer 2023 21

Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk & Rachel Elizabeth Weissler

are minoritized in ways that appear neutral but are in fact classist, racist, sexist,

and in other ways discriminatory.

igher education in the United States (and many places with a long histo-

ry of standardization) presupposes a standardized, edited written form

of English as the model for what is “correct” linguistically. We often talk

about this variety, “Standard English” (or even just “English”), as a stable, neu-

tral, locatable entity. Let us be clear: It is none of those things. In fact, the very act

of trying to deﬁ ne Standard English reveals how slippery this notion is. For this

reason, it can be useful to start a discussion of Standard English with the process

of standardization, rather than the variety itself.

Standard languages do not magically or neutrally appear; they result from the

process of language standardization. The central goal of standardizing a language

Source: RD.com, Getty Images, https://www.rdasia.com/true-stories-lifestyle/humour/

23-grammar-memes-thatll-crack-you-up?pages=2 (accessed May 30, 2022).

Figure 1

Standard Grammatical Use of the Contraction “You’re”

22 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Language Standardization & Linguistic Subordination

is to minimize variation in the selected variety, which can then be used to facili-

tate communication across regional and social dialects of a language. A common

by-product is shoring up social hierarchies based on who has access to the stan-

dardized variety, which comes to represent not only a shared standard but also

the one “correct” or “proper” way to use the language. Variation is natural to any

living language, so the process of standardization must always work against the

natural tendency for a language to morph over time, space, and social identities.

The process of language standardization is often described in four stages, ﬁrst

outlined by sociolinguist Einar Haugen, which we’ve summarized below:

• Selection: A dialect of the language is chosen as the variety that will be

shared more broadly. Typically, this variety carries social, political, and/or

economic prestige based on the status of its speakers.

• Elaboration: As a more local variety is asked to take on a wider array of func-

tions (for example, legal documents and scientiﬁc writing), its available

resources–such as vocabulary and written style–must expand to meet the

varied needs of speakers and writers.

• Codiﬁcation: As the variety comes to be more broadly shared, it starts to

become more regulated in an attempt to minimize variation across speak-

ers and writers.

• Acceptance: The variety is institutionalized as a standard in education, me-

dia, administrative functions, and elsewhere, and mastery of it becomes a

qualiﬁcation for higher education and many professional careers.

Sociolinguists James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, who describe standardization as

an ideology in addition to a process, expand this model to include more stages:

selection, acceptance, diffusion, elaboration, maintenance, codiﬁcation, and pre-

scription.

In these late stages (which are not necessarily linear), the standardized

variety often acquires prestige.

There is nothing formalized about these stages; no one “decides” to select a

variety and elaborate on it. Rather, selection often follows from the institution-

alized social power of particular users, and the stages follow the idea, promoted

within powerful social, cultural, and legal institutions, that standardized varieties

are inherently better than varieties that are less standardized. The standardized

variety is then available to confer social prestige on those who use it while the less

standardized varieties are seen as evidence of lower social prestige. For example,

in the United States, a roughly Midwestern variety of spoken English was “select-

ed” by broadcasters in the early to mid-twentieth century because it was neither a

Southern nor a Northeastern variety of American English.

One of the important

aspects of this selection can be seen in ﬁlms from the early through the late 1950s,

in which varieties associated with the Northeast become less and less prestigious.

152 (3) Summer 2023 23

Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk & Rachel Elizabeth Weissler

In the ﬁlm Philadelphia Story (1940), Katherine Hepburn’s character Tracy Lord

uses language associated with the Northeast to mark her upper-class status. By

1954, however, Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront uses language

associated with the Northeast (speciﬁcally New York) to mark lower-class status.

The selection of the “standard” variety is not neutral, nor are the parties re-

sponsible for its codiﬁcation, maintenance, and prescription. In some countries,

there is an identiﬁable institution that promotes standardization, such as the

Académie Française in France. In the United States, by contrast, standardization

is enforced by a loose network of language authorities, including editors, teach-

ers, dictionary and usage guide writers, language pundits, and the like. In English,

codiﬁcation and prescription took hold in Britain and the United States and be-

yond in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the proliferation of dictio-

naries and then style guides that would become standard reference tools in the

educational system.

Standardization works to limit change and variability within a language vari-

ety. Change still happens in standardized varieties (for example, the introduction

of the passive progressive–the house is being built–in the nineteenth century), but

it is often resisted and only slowly accepted (for example, the use of “they” as a

singular pronoun, which occurs as early as the fourteenth century).

Therefore,

we use the phrase Standardized American English to capture the dynamic processes

at work in this variety. Standardized American English (henceforth referred to in

this essay as SAE) is easier to distinguish in writing than in speech. While we can

identify some features that are prototypically standard (for example, single nega-

tion, use of third-person singular -s in the present tense as in she thinks, he dreams),

SAE is often identiﬁed by what it isn’t (for example, ﬁxin to, ain’t, multiple modals,

merger of the vowel in pen and pin [but the merger of the vowel in cot and caught

is not stigmatized as nonstandard], aks rather than ask).

As these few examples

capture, these distinctions between standardized and nonstandardized language

features are often raced and classed.

While SAE is often described as neutral or unmarked, it is neither. It may not

have distinctive markers of geographical location, but SAE indexes whiteness and

higher socioeconomic class.

It is enforced and reinforced through discourses of

“correctness” in our educational system, editorial practices, a proliferation of us-

age guides and style manuals, and technologies such as grammar checkers built

into word processors.

It is important to note here that language gatekeeping and the discourse of cor-

rectness are not entirely consistent and apply to variety and register (or stylistic)

differences as well as spelling and punctuation. Let’s return to the examples in the

introductory section of common language gatekeeping practices in higher educa-

tion. Some of the examples involve nonstandard pronunciations or grammatical

features associated with social groups, such as aks, anyways, and multiple modals.

24 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Language Standardization & Linguistic Subordination

Some of the examples are stylistic distinctions, in which arguably both variants

fall within standardized usage (for example, different from versus different than or

ending a sentence with a preposition). And especially with these kinds of pre-

scriptive rules, not all language authorities will agree on what counts as an error.

For example, not all readers of this essay will care equally, or at all, about different

than, or hopefully used to mean “it is hoped,” or the use of impact as a verb. The list

goes on. Then there are typos and “grammos” or homophonous grammar errors

(for example, their/they’re, its/it’s), which are entirely written phenomena–and in

some cases created by autocorrect functions found on mobile devices that, for in-

stance, often revert the possessive its to the contracted it’s, despite attempts by the

typers to change it.

At some fundamental level, when we think about language as

a communicative system, these grammos are trivial (we cannot even hear them in

speech) and most writers have made them when writing quickly or in less proofed

genres. Yet the stakes for making them can be socially and professionally high:

they can be seen as markers not just that a writer may not have proofed carefully

but also that a writer is lazy, unintelligent, unqualiﬁed.

The consequences of language standardization are signiﬁcant because of the

beliefs the process creates and sustains. While, in theory, the standardized variety

could coexist with nonstandard varieties in a way that legitimizes and celebrates

the richness and systematicity of linguistic diversity, the commonsense belief that

the standardized variety is inherently better results in the degradation of other va-

rieties, including both regional and social varieties of the language that are core

cultural markers of communities. This ideological system, typically referred to as

Standard Language Ideology (SLI), can be summarized as “a bias toward an ab-

stract, idealized language, which is imposed and maintained by dominant institu-

tions and which has as its model the written language, but which is drawn primar-

ily from the spoken language of the upper middle class.”

As a result, SLI allows

those in power to exclude and restrict access to power for speakers of minoritized

varieties in many sectors of the public domain.

SLI generally works invisibly, by nature of its “commonsense” approach to

right and wrong (or better and worse) language patterns. It allows, if not encour-

ages, the dissemination of misinformation about language variation, and speak-

ers of all varieties tend to accept SLI without question. This ideology captures the

power of convincing speakers that their own language varieties, which they use

for diverse communicative purposes, are “wrong” if they do not correspond with

what is seen as standard. This bias applies not only to SAE but also to many lan-

guages in the United States such as Spanish, which is spoken variably by people

in the United States depending on their background and origin. Because the stan-

dard variety of a language functions as the uninterrogated norm, other varieties

are relegated to the margins as linguistically inferior, even if they may carry so-

cial capital. Those who speak nonstandardized or semistandardized dialects are

152 (3) Summer 2023 25

Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk & Rachel Elizabeth Weissler

labeled ungrammatical, which translates to illogical and untrustworthy. Such dis-

information consolidates power, reiﬁes it, and naturalizes its reiﬁcation.

he embodiment of negative reactions to linguistic (primarily orthograph-

ic) “errors” presents a fascinating aspect of the language standardization

process, which can link bodily sensation to beliefs about standardized and

nonstandardized forms of language. Eyerolls, for instance, are a form of embod-

ied annoyance, as is saying someone’s grammar makes you sick (or [sic]), as seen

in Figure 2.

Though theories of embodiment have made their way across ﬁelds, from cog-

nitive neuroscience to robotics to anthropology to some areas of linguistics, they

have not been widely incorporated into theories of language standardization.

Nonetheless, embodiment offers fertile ground for understanding linguistic judg-

ment and prejudice. When a person expresses that grammatical errors “make

their skin crawl,” or when certain speech modalities such as creaky voice or up-

talk are described as an “embodied contagion” or metaphorical viral infection, we

see a direct link to speciﬁc ideologies about language that set up the standardized

form as correct, beautiful, healthy, and pure.

Further, these embodied physio-

logical responses to language variation suggest how deeply naturalized standard

language ideologies are, including among the most highly educated.

Language production and perception–spoken, written, or signed–always en-

gage the body directly: the hands, the mouth, the larynx, the lungs, the ears, the

eyes, the motor system, and the processing systems in the brain.

This materi-

al physicality is simultaneously involved in both producing and perceiving lan-

guage, including linguistic forms understood as being correct because they are

standardized. Most important, these responses embody the power of standard-

ization and the challenges involved in dislodging that power. Therefore, engaging

with and changing SLI, especially those that subordinate other people’s linguistic

production, requires confronting their embodiment.

One area of embodiment that occurs with some frequency when grammar

“errors” are under consideration is laughter. Laughter is a physical characteristic

of and reaction to a range of affective states, including playfulness, amusement,

joy, but also discomfort, dismissal, schadenfreude, or tease.

In the context of

language standardization, attempts to evoke laughter most typically involve teas-

ing, schadenfreude, and superiority, all of which are negatively valenced toward

the user of grammar “errors.”

The connection between public humor about grammar and a taunting or supe-

rior affect can be seen in the frequency with which the “humor” of many grammar

memes derives from metaphors of sickness and death, as seen in Figures 3 and 4.

In examples like Figures 3 and 4, in which the memes discuss pain and death as be-

ing brought on speciﬁcally by grammatical “errors,” it becomes clear how ideolo-

26 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Language Standardization & Linguistic Subordination

Source: Logo of the public Facebook group “Bad Grammar Makes Me [Sic].”

Figure 2

Bad Grammar Makes Me [Sic]

Source: Taken from Lenia Crouch, “Grammar Memes to Make Your Day,” The EMS Sound,

February 6, 2018, https://emssound.net/1560/fun-and-games. Made using https://imgﬂip.com.

Figure 3

“When You Use Bad Grammer [sic] It Kills Me Again”

152 (3) Summer 2023 27

Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk & Rachel Elizabeth Weissler

gies about the inherent correctness and superiority of the standard are reinforced

through the representation of embodied illness.

In surfacing these ideologies about a standardized language, memes and other

“humorous” displays of grammar errors are immediately available to denigrate

socially and linguistically marginalized groups of people. For instance, articles

such as Business Insider’s “The 13 Celebrities with the Worst Grammar on Twit-

ter” are meant to elicit a visceral and critical response.

Despite the availability

of many celebrities with “poor grammar” who embody a range of identities on

Twitter, eleven of the thirteen celebrities in this article are People of Color, includ-

ing Queen Latifah who is criticized for using “U” in place of “you” in a tweet, and

Snoop Dogg for using numbers “2” and “4” in lieu of “to” and “for” (see Figure 5).

These forms are clear (and at this point, largely standardized) ways to reduce

the number of characters in a tweet since Twitter limits how many characters a

single tweet may have. These celebrities are using the orthographic norms of the

medium; nonetheless, they are criticized for using especially poor grammar.

Many news organizations have features about poor grammar that are framed

in terms of the embodiment of grammar scorn, for instance, BuzzFeed’s article

“19 Grammar Fails That Will Make You Shake Your Head Then Laugh Out Loud,”

CNBC’s article “The 11 Extremely Common Grammar Mistakes That Make People

Figure 4

“My Eyes Are Burning”

Source: Taken from Rose Ledgard, “Grammar Memes,” Rose Ledgard: MA Major Project, Oc-

tober 10, 2012, https://roseledgarddesigns.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/grammar-memes.

Made using https://quickmeme.com.

28 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Language Standardization & Linguistic Subordination

Figure 5

Snoop Dogg Tweet Using Numbers “2” and “4” in Lieu of “To” and “For”

Source: Kirsten Acuna, “The 13 Celebrities with the Worst Grammar on Twitter,” Business In-

sider, June 25, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/worst-celebrity-grammar-2013-6.

Cringe–And Make You Look Less Smart,” and the BBC’s article “Have We Mur-

dered the Apostrophe?”

These types of articles present negatively embodied re-

sponses to other people’s intelligence, social class, racial or ethnic background,

and presumed lack of education. Such responses incorrectly reduce language to

the (formal) written language. More insidiously, they mobilize ideas about lan-

guage to make strongly negative assessments of people who are marginalized or

otherwise oppressed for reasons beyond language.

eep-seated beliefs about language correctness circulate so broadly in U.S.

culture that they metaphorically become part of the air we breathe. That

said, we must pay particular attention to their pervasiveness in K–12

152 (3) Summer 2023 29

Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk & Rachel Elizabeth Weissler

spaces and in higher education. Early in their literacy careers, children are taught

to write adhering to speciﬁc forms and conventions: capitalize the ﬁrst word of

a sentence, write homophones correctly, and end each sentence with appropri-

ate punctuation. They also learn that some linguistic features are not appropriate

for school, be that ain’t or the pronunciation “aks” or constructions such as me

and my mom went. As students progress through their literacy and writing curricu-

lums, the forms and conventions become increasingly speciﬁc to the preferences

of SAE. While there are many varieties of English spoken around the world, and

indeed many varieties spoken in the United States, rarely are “nonstandard” va-

rieties permitted for high-stakes–or even low-stakes–uses in schools. Especially

for academic writing and standardized testing, the use of SAE is normalized as the

only appropriate linguistic variety.

The consequences in schools can be devastating. Students get silenced because

they are told they talk “incorrectly.” As students experience the dissonance be-

tween home and school ways of speaking, they must navigate complex emotional

terrain as they decide how to present themselves. This cascade of events and cir-

cumstances can undermine students’ conﬁdence as well as their identity and can

result in attrition: students drop out of school because they don’t see themselves

as belonging there or are told, with or without words, they don’t belong there. All

of this runs counter to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that are

making their way across the United States. Yet not nearly enough attention has

been given to countering SLI as part of DEI initiatives.

In spaces of higher education, whether it be composition classes or writing

centers, language is typically taught as one speciﬁc, idealized, standardized form.

While teaching SAE to the exclusion of other varieties in schools is the normal-

ized practice, there have been movements recently to permit students to use their

home language varieties in schools, sometimes as a learning tool for translation or

code-switching to help students acquire SAE, and occasionally, but increasingly,

for academic purposes.

Historically, code-switching approaches, which taught

students to switch between their home language codes and school codes, took a

language awareness approach that taught students to use their knowledge of their

own language to acquire SAE. Problematically, students sometimes interpret this

practice to mean their home language is inferior in school and professional set-

tings, reinforcing deﬁcit ideologies about their home languages and identities.

Given the interconnections of language, dialect, race, and identity, some explain

the practice of code-switching as “race-switching,” meaning non-white people

are expected to put on linguistic patterns of whiteness to be taken seriously in

schools and professional settings.

Recognizing the challenges of switching on the formation of students’ linguis-

tic identities, there has been an increasing call in education to allow students to

use their home language varieties for school and professional purposes.

Allow-

30 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Language Standardization & Linguistic Subordination

ing students to speak and write in their home varieties in schools moves toward

greater linguistic justice, but it is predicated upon an essential ideological shift

in the infrastructure of schooling. Before students can bring their full linguis-

tic identities into the classrooms, the systems of schooling must create inclusive

spaces in which all language varieties are treated as equally valid for academic pur-

poses. Given the associations of particular language varieties with various social,

economic, ethnic, and racial groups, just treatment of all varieties is a radical ap-

proach for education, one that relies on those with power and inﬂuence to deliber-

ately redistribute power to those whose language varieties have historically been

discriminated against in schools.

For the redistribution of linguistic power to take place in schools, the acade-

my has to make a fundamental ideological shift away from language standardiza-

tion toward a preference for language diversity. In the K–12 setting, students learn

from teachers who are trained, explicitly and implicitly, in SLI through the acad-

emy. Beyond K–12 teacher education curricula, the academy trains its students to

practice and prefer the standard, through the use of SAE in course materials, class-

room discourse, and unstated expectations for formal and informal writing, even

in low-stakes academic assignments. The practice of SAE for academic purposes

is so naturalized within the academy, it is often omitted from the syllabus or as-

signment expectations, despite being expected from students. On formal writing

assignments, the conventions of SAE often appear on grading rubrics, absent any

discussion of the politics of language and standardization.

There are several tangible actions those of us in the academy can pursue to fur-

ther diversity, equity, and inclusion when it comes to the treatment of SAE. The ﬁrst

action is to teach students about the politics of language standardization.

This ap-

proach, sometimes now called Critical Language Awareness, aims to make students

aware of standardized language forms while also being explicit about the socially

constructed nature of standardization. The goal is to empower students as speakers

and writers to make informed choices about what language varieties and styles they

want to use in a given context, with a speciﬁc audience, and to empower them to

challenge systems of power that promote standard language ideologies. This con-

versation should also extend to colleagues across a university’s campus. DEI work

that does not include attention to linguistic justice cannot achieve its goals because

of the mutually sustaining relationship between language and identity.

A second action is to challenge the preference for standardization within the

discourse of the academy. In addition to naming linguistic justice and inclusion

as a pillar of classroom discourse, academics can issue explicit calls for invited

speakers, papers, dissertation formats, journal abstracts, and more that are pre-

sented within a framework of linguistic justice.

If this feels impossible, it is because the system has made SAE unchallengeable.

Teachers and academics struggle to see linguistically diverse writing and speaking

152 (3) Summer 2023 31

Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk & Rachel Elizabeth Weissler

styles as part of cultural and intellectual diversity. Even when permitted to use di-

verse language varieties, researchers and writers may be hesitant because hyper-

standard academic norms are difﬁcult to subvert. Rather than erasing the richness

of linguistic diversity, we could teach the standardized version of the language as

content rather than the only correct way to speak and engage.

The discriminatory consequences of language standardization go far beyond

schools. For example, language standardization is problematic in legal spaces

where standardized languages are privileged and others are ignored.

Unsurpris-

ingly, many court reporters are trained only in standardized English, focusing on

accuracy and typing speed, and these reporters may be ill-equipped to transcribe

diverse English dialects. Fortunately, there are linguists who are teaching lin-

guistics in prisons, such as Nicole Holliday, training court transcribers in African

American English (AAE), such as Sharese King, and writing articles about court

transcriber accuracy to bring awareness to these issues.

any scholars across the disciplines consider how interactions with in-

stitutions affect people who are in relatively minoritized groups. How-

ever, little research pays careful attention to the ways in which minori-

tized language forms are part and parcel of those interactions. In our conversa-

tions with education specialists, psychologists, political scientists, sociologists,

and others in both the social sciences and the humanities, we regularly encounter

surprise at the suggestion that language, especially language attitudes, form an-

other materialization of many of the topics they investigate. Indeed, this material-

ization is frequently embodied, metaphorically and literally, in feelings of disgust,

illness, and discomfort. We ask of them, as we ask of you, to rethink the assump-

tions about language that inform scholarship, as this is one concrete way to dis-

mantle some of the consequences of beliefs about standardized forms of language.

We have suggested some solutions to many of the issues we’ve highlighted in

this essay; however, implementing solutions in a meaningful way ﬁrst requires

recognition of how important language variation is for our everyday interactions

with others. Second, implementing solutions depends on recognizing how our

ideas about language (standardized or not) can pose a true barrier to meaningful

change. Such recognition includes the understanding that much of what we think

about language often stands as a proxy for what we think about people, who we

are willing to listen to and hear, and who we want to be with or distance ourselves

from.

Acts of language oppression are generally directly tied to ideas about the

“proper” or “correct” way to use language, and ideas about what is correct gener-

ally follow from very speciﬁc beliefs regarding standardized language forms and,

often much more speciﬁcally, forms that are expected in formal, written prose.

While there are also plenty of contexts in which standardized, written prose is not

32 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Language Standardization & Linguistic Subordination

welcome (for instance, on many social media platforms), the majority of us par-

ticipate in the reiﬁcation of standardized language expectations. These ideas cir-

culate in virtually all of our institutions–in employment, banking, medical prac-

tice, housing, education, and business. In our own practices within higher educa-

tion, we have a responsibility to regularly rethink how we teach and then come to

expect standardized forms in at least some contexts. We can also learn to have a

heightened awareness of how those expectations can easily slip into language dis-

crimination and general oppression of people who use linguistic systems that are

minoritized in many contexts.

Within higher education, one solution is to consider standardized forms, par-

ticularly formal written prose, as a type of content rather than simply a content deliv-

ery system. For instance, discuss the variation linked to genres of speaking and writ-

ing as a form of information. Other practical solutions include: 1) working with others

to develop an ongoing meta-awareness of how attitudes about language surface–

for instance, asking students to survey their friends and peers about responses to the

use of forms found on social media; 2) asking ourselves and others how much of our

assessment of a person is tied to something about their language–for instance, by

ﬁrst writing a reﬂection about a particular person’s language use and what it seems

to indicate and then sharing those reﬂections for further discussion; and 3) consid-

ering how our assessments of individuals lead to broader assumptions about groups

of people who share an identity or identities. We can all talk together, with curios-

ity and generosity, about what we think about language and why we may react to

particular linguistic forms in the ways we do. Finally, we can all embrace the rich-

ness, creativity, and wonder that comes when we recognize what linguistic diversity

brings to the experience of being human together in the world.

authors’ note

The four authors worked together at the University of Michigan on the Language

Matters initiative, an interdisciplinary initiative to increase recognition of the role

of language diversity, to create linguistically inclusive classrooms, and to contribute

to an inclusive campus climate. The authors are listed in alphabetical order.

about the authors

Anne Curzan is the Geneva Smitherman Collegiate Professor of English, Linguis-

tics, and Education at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Gender Shifts

in the History of English (2003), How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction (with Michael

Adams, 3rd edition, 2012), Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History (2014), and

152 (3) Summer 2023 33

Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk & Rachel Elizabeth Weissler

endnotes

Molly Pennington, “11 Grammar Mistakes Editors Hate the Most,” Reader’s Digest, Decem-

ber 26, 2022, https://www.rd.com/list/grammar-mistakes-editors-hate.

For more on varieties in sociolinguistics, see Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, and Cecil

L. Nelson, eds., The Handbook of World Englishes (Hoboken, N.J.: Blackwell Publishing,

2006).

Salvatore Callesano and Phillip M. Carter, “Latinx Perceptions of Spanish in Miami:

Dialect Variation, Personality Attributes and Language Use,” Language & Communication

67 (2019): 84–98, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2019.03.003.

John R. Rickford and Sharese King, “Language and Linguistics on Trial: Hearing Rachel

Jeantel (and Other Vernacular Speakers) in the Courtroom and Beyond,” Language 92

(4) (2016): 948–988, https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2016.0078.

Einar Haugen, “Dialect, Language, Nation,” American Anthropologist 68 (4) (1966): 922–

935, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1966.68.4.02a00040.

James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English, 3rd

ed. (London: Routledge, 1998).

Lesley Milroy, “Britain and the United States: Two Nations Divided by the Same Lan-

guage (and Different Language Ideologies),” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10 (1)

(2000): 56–89, https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2000.10.1.56; and Thomas Paul Bonﬁglio,

Race and the Rise of Standard American (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002).

Oxford English Dictionary: Word Stories, https://www.oed.com/discover/a-brief

-history-of-singular-they (accessed August 16, 2023).

First Day to Final Grade: A Graduate Student’s Guide to Teaching (with Lisa Damour, 3rd

ed., 2011).

Robin M. Queen is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Linguistics, English, and Ger-

man at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Vox Popular: The Surprising

Life of Language in the Media (2015), Through the Golden Door: Toward an Effective Delivery

Strategy for Low-Schooled Adolescent Immigrants (with Betty Mace-Matluck and Rosalind

Alexander-Kasparik, 1998), and several other works related to Turkish-German bi-

linguals, American lesbians, and American ﬁlms dubbed into German.

Kristin VanEyk is an Assistant Professor of English at Hope College. Her most

recent publication is “What Women Write: On Decanting Macaroni and Saying

Goodbye to Ghost Trains,” which appeared in Writing on the Edge.

Rachel Elizabeth Weissler is a postdoctoral scholar in Linguistics, Psychology,

and Black Studies at the University of Oregon, where she will begin as Assistant Pro-

fessor in Linguistics in fall 2023. Her research, which uses experimental methods to

investigate linguistic perception and production, has recently been published in Ap-

plied Psycholinguistics and Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, while her public scholar-

ship has appeared in The New York Times, Vice, and the PBS series Otherworlds.

34 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Language Standardization & Linguistic Subordination

Peter Trudgill, “Standard English: What It Isn’t,” in Standard English: The Widening Debate

ed. Tony Bex and Richard J. Watts (London: Routledge, 1999), 117–128.

Bethany Davila, “The Inevitability of ‘Standard’ English: Discursive Constructions of

Standard Language Ideologies,” Written Communication 33 (2) (2016): 127–148, https://

doi.org/10.1177/0741088316632186.

Joseph M. Williams, “The Phenomenology of Error,” College Composition and Communica-

tion 32 (2) (1981): 152–168, https://doi.org/10.2307/356689.

Julie Boland and Robin Queen, “If You’re House Is Still Available, Send Me an Email:

Personality Inﬂuences Reactions to Written Errors in Email,”

PLOS ONE 11 (3) (2016):

e0149885, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0149885.

Rosina Lippi-Green, English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United

States, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2011), 64.

Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, “Embodied Sociolinguistics,” in Sociolinguistics: Theoretical

Debates, ed. Nikolas Coupland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 173–

198; and Suresh Canagarajah and Valeriya Minakova, “Objects in Embodied Sociolin-

guistics: Mind the Door in Research Group Meetings,” Language in Society 52 (2) (2023):

183–214, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404522000082.

Tyanna Slobe, “This American Creak: Metaphors of Virus, Infection, and Contagion in

Girls’ Social Networks,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American An-

thropological Association, Minneapolis, Minnesota, November 2016, https://static1

.squarespace.com/static/5a7f8cf0f6576e9725b83c31/t/5ac551aa03ce644a7d456434

/1522881038322/Slobe_This+American+Creak.pdf; and Tsung-Lun Alan Wan, Lauren

Hall-Lew, and Claire Cowie, “Feeling Disabled: Vowel Quality and Assistive Hearing

Devices in Embodying Affect,” Language in Society, September 5, 2022, http://doi.org

/10.1017/S0047404522000380.

Bucholtz and Hall, “Embodied Sociolinguistics”; and Canagarajah and Minakova, “Ob-

jects in Embodied Sociolinguistics.”

Chris Sinha and Kristine Jensen de López, “Language, Culture, and the Embodiment of

Spatial Cognition,” Cognitive Linguistics 11 (1–2) (2001): 17–41, https://doi.org/10.1515/

cogl.2001.008; and Nguyen Tat Thang, “Language and Embodiment,”

VNU Journal of

Science, Foreign Languages 25 (4) (2009): 250–256, https://js.vnu.edu.vn/FS/article/view

/2440.

Diana P. Szameitat, André J. Szameitat, and Dirk Wildgruber, “Vocal Expression of Af-

fective States in Spontaneous Laughter Reveals the Bright and the Dark Side of Laugh-

ter,” Scientiﬁc Reports 12 (1) (2022): 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-09416-1.

Kirsten Acuna, “The 13 Celebrities with the Worst Grammar on Twitter,” Business Insider,

June 25, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/worst-celebrity-grammar-2013-6.

Kevin Smith, “19 Grammar Fails That Will Make You Shake Your Head Then Laugh Out

Loud,” Buzzfeed, October 31, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/kevinsmith/compete

-is-in-our-nature; Kathy Petras and Ross Petras, “The 11 Extremely Common Grammar

Mistakes That Make People Cringe–And Make You Look Less Smart: Word Experts,”

CNBC, March 24, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/24/common-grammar-mistakes

-that-make-people-cringe-and-make-you-look-less-smart-word-experts.html; and Hélène

Schumacher, “Have We Murdered the Apostrophe?” BBC, February 24, 2020, https://

www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200217-have-we-murdered-the-apostrophe.

152 (3) Summer 2023 35

Anne Curzan, Robin M. Queen, Kristin VanEyk & Rachel Elizabeth Weissler

Christine Mallinson and Anne H. Charity Hudley, “Balancing the Communication Equa-

tion: An Outreach and Engagement Model for Using Sociolinguistics to Enhance Cul-

turally and Linguistically Sustaining

K–12 STEM Education,” Language 94 (3) (2018):

e191–e215, https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2018.0048.

Vershawn Ashanti Young, “‘Nah, We Straight’: An Argument Against Code Switching,”

JAC 29 (1/2) (2009): 49–76.

April Baker-Bell, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy (New

York: Routledge, 2020).

Anne Curzan, “Says Who? Teaching and Questioning the Rules of Grammar,” PMLA 124

(3) (2009): 870–879, http://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2009.124.3.870.

Rickford and King, “Language and Linguistics on Trial.”

Taylor Jones, Jessica Rose Kalbfeld, Ryan Hancock, and Robin Clark, “Testifying While

Black: An Experimental Study of Court Reporter Transcription Accuracy for African

American English,” Language 95 (2) (2019): e216–e252, https://doi.org/10.1353/lan

.2019.0042.

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license

https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_02016

Addressing Linguistic Inequality in

Higher Education: A Proactive Model

Walt Wolfram

Although most institutions of higher education in the United States have now de-

veloped diversity, equity, and inclusion centers, programs, and initiatives, language

equality tends to be excluded from the typical “canon of diversity.” Language re-

mains an overlooked or dismissed issue in higher education while it insidiously

serves as an active agent for promoting inequality in campus life. Based on two em-

pirical studies, one of students from Southern Appalachia attending a large urban

university in the South, and one of tenured faculty at the same university, I establish

the need for the awareness of language inequality in higher education. I then de-

scribe a proactive “campus-infusion” program that includes activities and resources

for student affairs, academic affairs, human resources, faculty affairs, and ofﬁces

of institutional equity and diversity. As an interdisciplinary team from different ad-

ministrative and disciplinary programs within the university, we used a variety of

venues, resources, and techniques to educate the faculty, students, and staff about

the signiﬁcance of language inequality on campus that has had an ongoing effect on

higher education.

n a career spanning more than a half-century of teaching in higher education,

I have served in institutions that range from elite private universities with

large linguistics departments to small, open-enrollment HBCUs, and large

land-grant, research-extensive universities where linguistics was incorporated

into larger departments such as communication sciences and English. In these

higher education contexts, the linguistics programs have always considered it a

foundational premise that all language varieties were based on systematic, com-

plex patterns, and that there were no linguistically superior or deﬁcient languages

or dialects.

I regrettably admit that, at the same time, I was aware that this axi-

om was not shared throughout the university, even within linguistics programs. In

fact, in many aligned disciplines, it was commonly assumed that nonstandardized

versions of English were simply a “collection of errors” or “ungrammatical” pat-

terns to be stamped out in the process of higher education. While these universi-

ties might have been progressive in their stances on other social issues, language

equality was exempted from inclusion. In fact, in the historical predecessor of the

152 (3) Summer 2023 37

Walt Wolfram

HBCU where I served, students were required to pass an exam in standardized En-

glish to qualify for graduation, in addition to other requirements.

Over the past couple of decades, diversity has become a growing topic in uni-

versities, and practically every university in the United States now has a version of

an “ofﬁce of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The themes covered in such ofﬁces

have developed into a canon of diversity, including topics related to race, ethnicity,

gender, religion, sexual preference, and so forth. What is typically missing from

such canons, however, is language. As noted in an article in The Economist, lan-

guage is typically excluded, and it has rarely been addressed explicitly in diversity,

equity, and inclusion ofﬁces.

The collision of academic prejudice and accent is particularly ironic. Academics tend

to the centre-left nearly everywhere, and talk endlessly about class and multicultural-

ism. . . . And yet accent and dialect are still barely on many people’s minds as deserving

respect.

A casual survey of university diversity statements and programs indicates that

a) there is an implicitly recognized set of diversity themes within higher education

and b) it traditionally excludes language issues.

Topics related to race, ethnicity,

gender, religion, sexual preference, and age are commonly included in these pro-

grams, but language is noticeably absent, either by explicit exclusion or by implicit

disregard. Ironically, issues of language intersect with all of the themes in the ca-

nonical catalog of diversity issues. How can we address discriminatory issues of

race, sex, gender, and class without including the conversational interactions and

language labels that index each identity marker (see Aris Moreno Clemons and Jes-

sica A. Grieser in this volume)?

And how can we contend with inequalities of race

and ethnicity without tackling offensive, explicit, and implicit racist language use

at an institutional level (see Sharese King and John R. Rickford in this volume)?

Institutional ofﬁces of diversity, like academic disciplinary ﬁelds and scholars, are

indeed vulnerable to the construction of a canon of issues restricted to customary

and traditionally recognized topics while ignoring or dismissing topics that are

outside of the traditional foci.

Unfortunately, language is one of those issues that

remains unrecognized in the higher education diversity canon while it insidiously

serves as an active agent for promoting inequality in campus life.

I recount my personal experience here because, like many other linguists, I

have often followed the practice of compartmentalizing linguistics in higher edu-

cation. For the majority of my career in higher education, the linguistics programs

in which I served operated as isolated enclaves of linguists in a university setting

where our foundational axioms about language were disregarded and dismissed

by aligned disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and education. A pair of

empirical studies, one on university students speaking a nonstandardized variety

of English and one on faculty backgrounds and perceptions of language, ﬁnally

38 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Addressing Linguistic Inequality in Higher Education: A Proactive Model

caused me to realize that I had been ignoring a sociolinguistic conundrum in my

own experiences of higher education.

ne of the pivotal studies of student behavior related to dialect differenc-

es comes from Stephany Brett Dunstan’s examination of students from

the mountains of Appalachia who attended a large state university in

an urban region of the South. In this university context, their speech was quite

different from the majority of the students who were Southern but not from the

Southern mountains. Dunstan conducted extensive interviews with the select-

ed students and analyzed their use of a couple of iconic vowel productions found

in that region of western North Carolina (for example, the pronunciation of the

vowel in time and the vowel in bought), as well as the use of some socially stigma-

tized grammatical features (for example, multiple negation in He ain’t do nothing or

subject-verb agreement in We was down there).

In addition to the sample of their

speech, the students discussed questions about their sense of belonging, their

comfort level in class, and their interactional experiences related to language dif-

ferences at the university.

Dunstan found that dialect played a signiﬁcant role in student experiences on

campus, including their academic and social life, as participants from the region

expressed hesitance to speak out in class for fear of drawing unwanted negative

attention.

These students also indicated that their dialect could inﬂuence how

comfortable they felt in certain courses and in interactions with other students

and instructors. For example, one student indicated that he felt more comfortable

in his economics courses where there was considerable linguistic diversity than in

his sociology course where his peers and instructor used his dialect (sometimes

negatively) to make him the representative of all rural white males. Quotes from a

few students typify these comments:

I don’t really speak up too much in class and stuff like that unless I feel really comfort-

able. . . ’cause I can hear, you know, people snickering or stuff like that when I talk. . . .

Sometimes I think that people might think that I’m not educated . . . just because I have

this accent and you hear a country accent and you think hillbilly, and then hillbilly, no

education. So I think it’s just the social norm to think that way.

One of the outcomes of Dunstan’s study indicated that student experiences re-

lated to language differed by departments and colleges within the university, but

not in a way that aligned with traditional sociopolitical ideologies found in most

universities. In most universities, the humanities and social sciences tend to em-

brace more progressive, liberal political and social stances, as opposed to those in

the physical sciences or economics.

But students in Dunstan’s study reported

that their treatment by instructors and students in the social sciences and human-

152 (3) Summer 2023 39

Walt Wolfram

ities courses was more negative than those in the physical sciences with respect

to dialect differences.

In part, this may be because of the language-gatekeeping

and guardianship role assumed by faculty in the humanities and social sciences

disciplines. At the same time, it attests to the acceptance of an ideology by some

professors in these universities in which language differences do not cluster with

attitudes about other kinds of social and cultural differences. Therefore, it is open

to implicit bias.

As pointed out by sociolinguist Rosina Lippi-Green, language

diversity is often “the last acceptable prejudice,” and may persist in situations

where other progressive sociopolitical stances are embraced and promoted.

Students with nonstandardized dialect features said they had to work harder

than students with more normalized dialects to prove their intelligence to both

faculty and peers. Participants also indicated that language inﬂuenced their sense

of belonging; some students indicated feeling a need to code-switch to ﬁt in or

be accepted academically or socially. Although signiﬁcant outreach has been con-

ducted in terms of language diversity in the communities in North Carolina and

in the K–12 system, we began to realize that we had not speciﬁcally addressed this

issue in the community of higher education, where students from diverse back-

grounds might be facing issues academically, socially, and personally because of

language differences.

The results of Dunstan’s study revealed discomforting ex-

ceptionalism and marginalization within and outside of the classrooms of higher

education related to their native “mountain dialect,” a Southern Highland variety

of English often referred to as Appalachian English.

Following up on Dunstan’s study of a speciﬁc dialect community’s experienc-

es in higher education, we decided to interview a sample of faculty at the same

university about their dialect background and current experiences with language

variation in their interactions in the classroom. I sent out a randomized request

to one-third of the faculty to see if they would be willing to be interviewed. More

than seventy faculty members volunteered to be interviewed, and my colleagues

at North Carolina State University and I conducted the interviews. Questions in-

cluded a discussion of their home dialect from their community of origin to their

progressive and current use of language in the academic community of practice,

resulting in several different research studies based on these interviews.

Some faculty exhibited explicitly positive perspectives, but others offered in-

sight into underlying prejudicial attitudes and perceptions relating to language.

Some of the statements reﬂected issues of standard language ideology in academia:

in particular, the idea that student and faculty scholars should aspire to certain he-

gemonic styles of speech, notably those associated with the white middle class. In

addition to faculty members’ perceptions of students’ language in the classroom,

participants also shared thoughts on how they believed others on campus perceive

their language. Several faculty members suggested a belief that the way they are

perceived by students and colleagues is shaped by their language and the factors

40 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Addressing Linguistic Inequality in Higher Education: A Proactive Model

that have inﬂuenced their speech, such as race/ethnicity, geographic origin, and

gender. For example, one instructor believes that his social class dialect and geo-

graphic origin inﬂuenced his credibility as a scholar in the eyes of his peers:

I’ve always been insecure about [my speech] and I’m still insecure about it to this day.

In fact, earlier this week I got invited to do an interview on NPR radio. I’m like, I would

love to talk about the research I’m doing and to share that, but to be interviewed

on a national radio program where it’s just my voice and nothing else, I’m scared to

death. . . . I hate going to professional conferences for that very reason. I love reconnect-

ing with colleagues and meeting new people. I’m an editor of a journal in my ﬁeld and

you know I get treated very, very well and everybody’s respectful to me, but I know

that the moment I get up to the podium and I open my mouth, you know for half the

audience at least it’s going to just–my credibility’s just going to sink and I have to

spend the rest of the time like building it back up, you know.

Faculty who shared this perspective also observed that they make or have

made a conscious effort to change their speech. This ﬁnding is interesting since

linguistic representation matters for students who want to feel that they belong in

the academic community. If faculty feel the need to code-switch to accommodate

perceived norms of valued language in the academy, students from diverse back-

grounds may not hear faculty who sound like them.

In examining the disciplinary backgrounds of faculty in the study, however,

sociolinguist Aston Patrick did ﬁnd a beneﬁt to speaking a local dialect.

Her

analysis based on the set of interviews indicates that faculty regard Southern, ru-

ral dialects as devalued in many parts of the university, but that “these dialects

confer beneﬁts to faculty in the colleges of agricultural sciences, natural resources,

and veterinary sciences because of these colleges’ signiﬁcant connections to rural

areas and communities.”

Her analysis demonstrates that professors may beneﬁt

when they speak Southern or rural dialects of English within university colleges

that have a high proportion of students from rural backgrounds and when con-

ducting ﬁeldwork with rural, Southern communities. The beneﬁt of speaking a

Southern or rural dialect, however, did not extend to other colleges whose facul-

ty have greater bias against nonstandardized varieties of English. Patrick’s study

demonstrates that acceptance or nonacceptance of varieties of English among

professors may vary depending on context and constituencies, highlighting the

need for greater nuance in understanding how conventional in-group and out-

group dynamics of social identity formation can shift in local contexts, even with-

in the university.

The analysis of these faculty data by sociolinguist Caroline Marie Myrick ex-

amines the role of language and gender ideologies.

Myrick’s mixed-methods

analysis uncovers linguistic expectations and pressures that female faculty per-

ceive as normative in academia, including how and why they conform to or re-

152 (3) Summer 2023 41

Walt Wolfram

sist these expectations.

Many female professors report being advised in graduate

school and beyond to alter their speech to sound “more competent” in a univer-

sity setting, including their resistance to so-called vocal fry (the lowest register

[tone] of a person’s voice characterized by its deep, creaky, breathy sound) or “up-

talk” (using a rising terminal intonation at the end of a declarative statement to

make it sound like a question), two indexes of women’s speech that are consid-

ered “nonprofessional.” Men have considerably more classroom ﬂexibility in lan-

guage usage, since male language is unmarked and normative in the classroom.

Women, on the other hand, are sanctioned for indexing femininity such as uptalk

and vocal fry at the same time they may be sanctioned for violating gender-norm

expectations. This places them in a double bind, in which their multiple identities

as women and scholars intersect to produce a unique form of social oppression.

Sociolinguist Peter Andrews conducted a chronotropic analysis of the data in

terms of ethnicity, describing the “comfortably white classroom” where norma-

tive, standardized speech prevails.

In this context, the use of regionalized South-

ern English may enhance solidarity between Southern instructors and Southern

white students–but African American Language is marginalized. For example,

one white Southern male professor made the following observations about the

speech of an African American male graduate student in his seminar:

And his speech patterns are very Black. He’s not altered his speech patterns like I see

most of them trying to do when they come here. In fact, it’s so much so, that he comes

across very unprofessional. . . . I would say I have a hard time treating him professional

because he’s so jive-y in his talk. It’s just “street talk” almost, the way he talks . . . and

I’m like, “How can you look and talk like this?” . . . because you’re really making it hard

for me.

The same professor offered the following contrast for a white female Midwest-

ern student in the class:

So I think, yes, that if I had that [Midwestern] voice that I would use it. I think I deﬁ-

nitely would. Because I always notice it when someone has one. And I point it out to

them . . . so I’m teaching people how to speak, right? And we had this Midwestern-

voice girl, and her diction was just perfect. And after she gave her seminar, I said, “You

know, you sound like a radio announcer. You could go into radio,” I said. “You’ve got

that nice Midwestern,” I said. “Perfect. It’s just beautiful, you know. Use it.”

We have also found that African American faculty face the burden of being

exceptionalized as a token representative of ethnicity and gender in their use of

language.

I’ve been told by a couple of students over the years that I’m the very ﬁrst African

American person that they’ve ever spoken to in their life . . . and I ask them, “What has

42 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Addressing Linguistic Inequality in Higher Education: A Proactive Model

that experience been like?” . . . And so, you know, how I speak is really important to

make sure that those students see, you know, that African American people can talk

just like you.

Results from empirical studies such as these reveal how language use and atti-

tudes by professors in the academy operate to reproduce and instantiate language

inequality in our institutions of higher learning. It is not just the student body that

needs vital information about dialect diversity; faculty and administrators are

equally in need of such substantive information. This knowledge inﬂuences how

faculty interact with and assess students, how they interact as colleagues, and how

they view themselves as members of the academic community. Indeed, studies such

as these challenge us to “educate the educated,” who are the gatekeepers of language

in our academic communities, along with the students who are discriminated upon

based on erroneous linguistic assumptions.

The empirical results of student and

faculty interactions and attitudes reported above cannot be ignored or dismissed if

sociolinguistic equality is to become a practiced reality in higher education.

lthough our program in linguistics has been engaged in proactive language

awareness activities outside of our campus for several decades now, the

landmark study by Dunstan and the follow-up study of faculty language

experiences have inspired our program to address issues of language inequality

that exist in our own backyard.

After meeting with the diversity ofﬁcer of the

university to explain our ﬁndings, we obtained a modest grant from the ofﬁce of

diversity to implement a program on linguistic diversity throughout the campus.

The conceptual framework underlying the program is based on psychologist

Paul Pedersen’s Multicultural Development Model, which includes the stages of

awareness, knowledge, and skill.

Because language is rarely addressed as a type

of diversity in college and because standard language ideology and linguistic he-

gemony are so pervasive in American society, members of the campus communi-

ty are largely unaware of the attitudes and assumptions they hold about language.

We devised a program that seeks to raise awareness through an inductive process

in which participants initially think critically about beliefs they hold. The second

stage of the model, knowledge–the cognitive domain–addresses factual linguis-

tic evidence to dispel common myths and fallacies associated with language vari-

ation. Finally, the third stage, skill, addresses the behavioral domain by offering

strategies for inclusion and for considering language and dialect when interacting

with others from different linguistic backgrounds.

The initial goals of the program were: 1) to raise awareness about language

as a form of diversity on college campuses and on our campus in particular, 2) to

educate a full range of members of the campus community about language vari-

ation and diversity, and 3) to provide multifaceted resources and strategies for

152 (3) Summer 2023 43

Walt Wolfram

the campus community to facilitate the inclusion of language diversity in diver-

sity programming. The initial target was undergraduate students, for whom we

designed positively framed interactive workshops in a variety of undergraduate

courses that addressed language myths and facts regarding the dialects that stu-

dents might hear on campus. Upon completion of the workshops, participants

should recognize that: 1) the scientiﬁc study of language does not acknowledge a

single correct variety or “standard” of any spoken language and that “standards”

are social constructs, 2) speakers of any language necessarily speak a dialect of

that language, and 3) all dialects are systematic, patterned, and rule-governed.

Participants in the workshops included ﬁrst years through seniors with a range

of majors, and several hundred students completed both pre- and postworkshop

surveys aimed at measuring language attitudes and beliefs and assessing learning

outcomes. The postworkshop survey also asked questions related to how inter-

esting and beneﬁcial students found the workshop. The response from students

was overwhelmingly positive, and the assessment data collected indicated that

they were interested in the material covered and met the learning outcomes of the

workshop.

Given the initial success, and the shift in students’ previously held

attitudes and beliefs about dialects, we decided to scale up the program to reach a

broader audience across campus.

The program is an interdisciplinary, collaborative endeavor, rather than a group

of linguists who set themselves apart as the exclusive experts on issues related to

language variation. The program coordinators represented different colleges, as

well as faculty and administrative roles at the university, thus offering different

perspectives, disciplinary afﬁliations, and administrative networks for the pro-

gram, leading to a “campus-infusion model” for implementation. The primary

team involved an educator, a linguist, and an administrator. Using university orga-

nizational charts, we identiﬁed key units and divisions to approach, which would

reach broad and diverse audiences across campus. We then identiﬁed key person-

nel from each of these units and divisions and began discussions with leaders and

gatekeepers regarding our program, its objectives, and potential collaboration

with their units. Given the commitment of our campus to creating diverse environ-

ments and because the ideas the program presented are “a fresh take on diversity”

to most academics outside of the ﬁeld of linguistics, it was relatively easy to obtain

a pledge from members of the campus to participate in our program.

With the development of the campus-infusion model depicted in Figure 1, the

leadership team pursued connections across campus in various divisions and be-

gan sharing language diversity awareness materials in several forms. As Figure 1

notes, the campus-infusion model includes student affairs, academic affairs, fac-

ulty affairs, and campus diversity programs. We were strategic in selecting units

and programs in each of these areas in an effort to fully address the entire campus

community. Over the next couple of years, we conducted more than ﬁfty work-

44 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Addressing Linguistic Inequality in Higher Education: A Proactive Model

shops with faculty, staff, and administrators, ranging from new faculty employees

to the service workers throughout the university.

For the diversity initiative, we produced speciﬁc video vignettes of three to

six minutes that we posted online for the campus population and used regularly

in our workshops and presentations, including new student orientation for ﬁrst

years. One vignette was ﬁlmed on the university commons and included spon-

taneous responses from passing students, staff, faculty, and key administrators,

including the chancellor of the university, to questions about their speech and

Figure 1

The Campus-Infusion Model in Implementation

Source: Stephany Brett Dunstan, Walt Wolfram, Audrey J. Jaeger, and Rebecca E. Crandall,

“Educating the Educated: Language Diversity in the University Backyard,” American Speech 90

(2) (2015): 274, https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-3130368.

152 (3) Summer 2023 45

Walt Wolfram

about language diversity on campus.

Another vignette, “I Sound like a Scholar,”

features students from different regions, ethnic backgrounds, and language back-

grounds saying the phrase “I sound like a scholar” to underscore the fact that lan-

guage variation is not connected with intelligence or scholarly achievement.

These vignettes continue to be key components in presentations and serve as a re-

source for others on campus in diversity training/programming. We also created

a brand of language diversity related to the North Carolina State University’s mas-

cot, the Wolfpack. More than a half-dozen years after the initial launch, campus

residents and personnel can still see digital versions of the poster on video boards

throughout campus, and the brand button on diversity remains popular with stu-

dents who receive them at different events on campus (see Figure 2).

The workshop format has been fairly standardized, although we adapt cer-

tain elements of the workshops (primarily the implications for practice, and ex-

amples given during the workshop) for speciﬁc audiences. The workshops are

centered on the learning outcomes previously described in this essay and follow

the following format: 1) deﬁning a dialect; 2) addressing common myths/truths

about dialects; 3) addressing issues of linguistic discrimination; 4) addressing

how language variation might impact you, your discipline, work environment,

interactions with others, and so on; and 5) implications for practice (how audi-

ence members can use dialect diversity to create inclusive and respectful environ-

ments). The workshops are interactive in nature, calling upon audience members

to reﬂect on experiences, explore their attitudes and beliefs about language, work

through examples of dialect patterning, and collectively discuss strategies for us-

ing this knowledge.

The engagement of students plays a critical role in the implementation of the

campus linguistic diversity programs. From its inception, students were involved

in workshops, the production of videos, and the stafﬁng of exhibit booths on and

off campus. The programs also targeted different student groups, like those in

university housing. Many undergraduate students live on campus, and residence

halls are a critical environment for the psychosocial development of college stu-

dents and informal learning.

Students in residence halls engage in diversity pro-

gramming, thus offering an opportunity for inclusion of language diversity as part

of this education. Accordingly, we provided language diversity training for all new

residence hall directors and resident advisors for the university.

Linguistics students also established a student organization ofﬁcially recog-

nized by the Student Involvement Ofﬁce in the Division of Academic and Student

Affairs named the “Linguistic Diversity Ambassadors” (LDA). As we discuss in

our report on the study, the LDA program offers students an opportunity to be-

come involved and to develop leadership roles in multiple dimensions of advoca-

cy and activities on campus.

Graduate students, in particular, often have limited

engagement experiences compared to undergraduates, in part due to their myo-

46 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Addressing Linguistic Inequality in Higher Education: A Proactive Model

pic focus on their academic subject.

Since 2013, the Educating the Educated Pro-

gram has involved the LDA for meetings, events, promotional ventures, and oth-

er activities related to language variation supported structurally and ﬁnancially

by the Division of Academic and Student Affairs. It has a proﬁle on the NC State

“Get-Involved” website that informs students of events and assists in event logis-

tics. The team also hosts booths at various functions for students and the campus

community.

A substantive function of the LDA is a monthly meeting for students and oth-

ers that highlights a language issue of relevance to the campus community. For

example, in the last couple of years, meetings have included:

• A presentation and discussion of language issues in the University’s Book

of Common Reading for 2019–2020, Born a Crime by Trevor Noah. This ac-

Figure 2

“Howl with an Accent” Campus Poster and Button

Source: Language Diversity Ambassadors, North Carolina State University, https://howl

.wordpress.ncsu.edu (accessed May 17, 2023).

152 (3) Summer 2023 47

Walt Wolfram

tivity is a recognized campus seminar event in connection with the Book of

Common Reading.

• A screening and discussion of the documentary Talking Black in America as an

event celebrating Black History Month on campus.

This event was cohost-

ed by the NC State Union Activities Black Student Board.

• A student presentation on “Queer Language” that presented the state of cur-

rent ideology and research about the notion of speech in queer communities.

• A presentation and discussion of American Sign Language, including diver-

sity in ASL that is featured in a Language and Life Project documentary, Sign-

ing Black in America. This event was cohosted with a university sorority that

requested that LDA give a presentation on the topic.

• A demonstration and discussion of language misogyny in classic Disney

ﬁlms over time.

LDA’s programs focus on current language events relevant to campus life, and

presentations and discussions have included themes such as language and politics,

language and the LBGTQIA+ community, and gendered language in Disney ﬁlms,

among current topics. In many cases, these events are cosponsored with other stu-

dent organizations to facilitate a collaborative and interdisciplinary perspective in

considering language variation. LDA staff also engage in class presentations and

guest lectures, and write op-ed pieces for the school newspaper and other venues as

issues about language arise in higher education and on campus. In fact, during the

2021–2022 academic year, the LDA did more than twenty presentations for ﬁrst-

year writing instructors who requested a lecture on language diversity as a part of

their course. Language Diversity Ambassadors have also worked to create an online

digital repository of resource materials (such as PowerPoint presentations, audio-

visual materials, and assessment materials) that all team members can access for

their use.

They also participate actively in social media such as Twitter, Facebook,

Instagram, and TikTok. Through their regular promotion venues, they have raised

the awareness of language diversity on campus, leading to an increase in student

enrollment in linguistics courses and a general awareness of language variation un-

der the rubric of the Educating the Educated campaign.

s I have demonstrated, linguistic subordination is a pervasive ideology

in higher education that is manifested in faculty, students, and staff. Ac-

cordingly, it calls for the campus-infusion model described here if we ex-

pect to make a signiﬁcant difference in campus life. While it may seem obvious to

sociolinguists that linguistic prejudice and discrimination are pervasive on col-

lege campuses, it is not nearly as transparent to the campus community. In fact, a

proposal to implement a language component in a diversity initiative at a neigh-

boring university similar to the one described here was met with the response that

48 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Addressing Linguistic Inequality in Higher Education: A Proactive Model

“there is no evidence that language diversity is a problem on campus.” There are

many dimensions of linguistic intolerance in higher education in addition to those

researched here, which are limited to the relatively narrow issue of dialect differ-

ences on a Southern metropolitan campus. For example, prejudices exist with re-

spect to second-language acquisition accents just as readily, though these issues

were not a part of the empirical study included in our examination. Linguists also

need to form alliances outside the narrow conﬁnes of their linguistic department

that include proactive collaboration with the campus ofﬁce of diversity program

and aligned disciplines.

Linguists and sociolinguists can play a prominent role in confronting linguistic

inequality in higher education, but they cannot do it simply by espousing their po-

sition in the limited linguistic courses they teach or in conversations that they have

with other professionals. While we have had a highly successful initial campaign in

the Educating the Educated program, it needs to become integrated into the regular

programs offered by the ofﬁce of diversity at the university. When I give presenta-

tions about linguistic inequality at various universities around the country, one of

my ﬁrst requests is, “Would you please invite representatives of the ofﬁce of diver-

sity to the talk?” And when they attend, they commonly remark that this program

is unique, and they want to incorporate a similar one at their university. In fact, a

number of universities around the United States are now beginning to include di-

mensions of language variation in their diversity programs. Educators, specialists

in aligned ﬁelds, and administrators familiar with effective methods for program

implementation need to be a part of the program. Happily, some have started to

include language in their diversity initiatives, but many more institutions of high-

er learning need to ensure that language bias, one of the most signiﬁcant and over-

looked dimensions of inequality, is substantively confronted, and interdisciplinary

solutions must be programmatically incorporated into programs of diversity in our

institutions of higher learning.

about the author

Walt Wolfram, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2019, is one of the pioneers

of sociolinguistics. He is the William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor at

North Carolina State University, where he also directs the Language and Life Project.

He has published more than twenty books and three hundred articles on language

variation, and has served as executive producer of ﬁfteen television documentaries,

winning several Emmys. His recent publications include Fine in the World: Lumbee Lan-

guage in Time and Place (with Clare Dannenberg, Stanley Knick, and Linda Oxendine,

2021) and African American Language: Language Development from Infancy to Adulthood (with

Mary Kohn, Charlie Farrington, Jennifer Renn, and Janneke Van Hofwegen, 2021).

152 (3) Summer 2023 49

Walt Wolfram

endnotes

In sociolinguistics, language variety or simply variety refers to differences in speech pat-

terns, for example: dialect, register, and general style. Standardized English is one of

many varieties of English. For more on varieties in sociolinguistics, see Braj B. Kachru,

Yamuna Kachru, and Cecil L. Nelson, eds., The Handbook of World Englishes (Malden,

Mass: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).

R. L. G., “The Last Acceptable Prejudice,” The Economist, January 29, 2015, https://www

.economist.com/prospero/2015/01/29/the-last-acceptable-prejudice. See also Steph-

any Brett Dunstan, Walt Wolfram, Audrey J. Jaeger, and Rebecca E. Crandall, “Edu-

cating the Educated: Language Diversity in the University Backyard,” American Speech

90 (2) (2015): 266–280, https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-3130368; and Walt Wolfram,

“Sociolinguistic Variation and the Public Interest,” Cadernos de Linguistica 2 (1) (2021):

1–25, https://doi.org/10.25189/2675-4916.2021.v2.n1.id357.

Kendra Nicole Calhoun, “Competing Discourses of Diversity and Inclusion: Institutional

Rhetoric and Graduate Student Narratives at Two Minority Serving Institutions” (PhD

diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2021), https://www.proquest.com/open

view/552b09ea236453a210e8b541d03188fe/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y.

Aris Moreno Clemons and Jessica A. Grieser, “Black Womanhood: Raciolinguistic In-

tersections of Gender, Sexuality & Social Status in the Aftermaths of Colonization,”

Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023): 115–129, https://www.amacad.org/publication/black

-womanhood-raciolinguistic-intersections-gender-sexuality-social-status-aftermaths.

Sharese King and John R. Rickford, “Language on Trial,” Dædalus 152 (3) (Summer 2023):

178–193, https://www.amacad.org/publication/language-on-trial.

Walt Wolfram and Karen Eisenhauer, “Implicit Sociolinguistic Bias and Social Justice,”

in The Routledge Companion to the Work of John R. Rickford, ed. Renée Blake and Isabelle

Buchstaller (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge, 2020), 269–280.

Caroline Marie Myrick, “Language and Gender Ideologies in Higher Education: An Ex-

amination of Faculty Discourses” (PhD diss., North Carolina State University, 2019),

https://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/handle/1840.20/36471; and Stephany Brett Dunstan,

“The Inﬂuence of Speaking a Dialect of Appalachian English on the College Experi-

ence” (PhD diss., North Carolina State University, 2013), https://repository.lib.ncsu

.edu/handle/1840.16/8561.

Dunstan, “The Inﬂuence of Speaking a Dialect of Appalachian English on the College

Experience.”

Ibid.

Ibid., 239.

Ibid., 340.

Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern, “Professors and Their Politics: The Policy Views of

Social Scientists,” Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 17 (3–4) (2005): 257–303,

https://doi.org/10.1080/08913810508443640.

Dunstan, “The Inﬂuence of Speaking a Dialect of Appalachian English on the College

Experience.”

Erin Beeghly and Alex Madva, eds., An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the

Social Mind (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge, 2020).

50 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Addressing Linguistic Inequality in Higher Education: A Proactive Model

Rosina Lippi-Green, English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United

States, 2nd ed. (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Routledge, 2012), 73.

Jeffrey Leo Reaser, “The Effect of Dialect Awareness on Adolescent Knowledge and At-

titudes” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2006), https://ﬁnd.library.duke.edu/catalog/

DUKE003867906; and Walt Wolfram and Jeffrey Reaser, Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices

Tell the Story of North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Appalachian English (Arlington, Va.: Center for Ap-

plied Linguistics, 1976); Kirk Hazen, ed., Appalachian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century

(Morgantown, W.Va.: West Virginia University Press, 2020); and Dunstan, “The In-

ﬂuence of Speaking a Dialect of Appalachian English on the College Experience.”

Myrick, “Language and Gender Ideologies in Higher Education”; Aston Patrick, “Sound-

ing Like You Belong: How Shared Dialect Creates Community in Academia” (master’s

thesis, North Carolina State University, 2021), https://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/handle

/1840.20/39136; and Peter Andrews, “Comfortably White or Uncomfortably Black:

The Racialization of Black Students in Undergraduate Classrooms,” paper presented

at The Department of Linguistics Spring Colloquium, University of North Carolina

at Chapel Hill, April 6, 2019, https://linguistics.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/

984/2019/10/SpringColloquiumProgram2019.pdf.

Interviews conducted by the author and colleagues at North Carolina State University.

Patrick, “Sounding Like You Belong.”

Ibid., 3.

Myrick, “Language and Gender Ideologies in Higher Education.”

Ibid.

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic

Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University

of Texas Press, 1981); Dunstan, “The Inﬂuence of Speaking a Dialect of Appalachian

English on the College Experience”; and Andrews, “Comfortably White or Uncomfort-

ably Black.”

Interviews conducted by the author and colleagues at North Carolina State University.

Ibid.

Dunstan, Wolfram, Jaeger, and Crandall, “Educating the Educated.”

Dunstan, “The Inﬂuence of Speaking a Dialect of Appalachian English on the College Ex-

perience”; and Wolfram, “Sociolinguistic Variation and the Public Interest.”

Paul Pedersen, A Handbook for Developing Multicultural Awareness (Alexandria, Va.: American

Association for Counseling, 1988).

Dunstan, Wolfram, Jaeger, and Crandall, “Educating the Educated.”

“Language Diversity at NC State,” The Language and Life Project at North Carolina State

University, February 5, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQYNEHwDF

hE.

“I Sound Like a Scholar,” The Language and Life Project at North Carolina State Univer-

sity, November 1, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjfC-1lgOrY&t=11s.

152 (3) Summer 2023 51

Walt Wolfram

Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini, How College Affects Students, Volume 2: A Third

Decade of Research (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005).

Stephany Brett Dunstan, Amanda Eads, Audrey J. Jaeger, and Walt Wolfram, “The Impor-

tance of Graduate Student Engagement in a Campus Language Diversity Initiative,” Jour-

nal of English Linguistics 46 (3) (2018): 215–228, https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424218783446.

Ibid.; and KerryAnn O’Meara, “Graduate Education and Community Engagement,”

New Directions for Teaching & Learning 113 (2008): 27–42, https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.306.

Neal Hutcheson and Danica Cullinan, dir. Talking Black in America: The Story of African

American Language, aired on PBS January 19–March 19, 2019.

Neal Hutcheson and Danica Cullinan, dir. Signing Black in America (Raleigh: The Language

and Life Project at North Carolina State University, 2020).

“Why Language Diversity?” Language Diversity Ambassadors at NCSU, https://howl

.wordpress.ncsu.edu (accessed May 16, 2023).

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license

https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_02017

Social Justice Challenges of

“Teaching” Languages

Guadalupe Valdés

This essay explores the challenges to linguistic justice resulting from widely held neg-

ative perspectives on the English of young Latinx bi/multilinguals and from com-

mon misunderstandings of individuals who use resources from two communicative

systems in their everyday lives. I highlight the effects of these misunderstandings on

Long-Term English Learners as they engage with the formal teaching of English. I

speciﬁcally problematize language instruction as it takes place in classrooms and the

impact of the curricularization of language as it is experienced by minoritized stu-

dents who “study” language qua language in instructed settings.

ong-Term English Learner (LTEL) is a legal category for students in the

State of California. It is used to describe immigrant-origin students who

were initially categorized as English Language Learners (ELLs) upon enter-

ing school and whose test scores, after six years, suggest that they are not making

sufﬁcient progress in learning English. The legal LTEL category is the product of a

well-meaning political campaign launched by sympathetic supporters of Mexican-

origin students in California (for example, Californians Together) who claim that

more attention needed to be given to the teaching of English in schools and to re-

classifying ELLs as Fluent English Proﬁcient (FEP).

Advocates of the legislation

argued that, because of lack of attention by schools to the teaching of English,

many Latinx ELLs in California were not passing the state English Language Pro-

ﬁciency examination required to reclassify them. As a result, they were denied

access to challenging subject matter instruction, to college-preparation courses,

and to other important educational opportunities. The new legislation requir-

ing schools to identify and monitor students was envisioned as a way of bring-

ing attention to the unintended consequences of existing policies and of forcing

schools to implement quality English language development programs designed

to meet the needs of young ELLs.

A Google search for “LTEL” yields 594,000 results to education-related sites

that include school district policy documents relating to the challenges of edu-

cating such students, guides for administrators and educators, ads for curricular

aids and materials, and lists of characteristics of LTEL students. A Google Schol-

152 (3) Summer 2023 53

Guadalupe Valdés

ar search produces over seven hundred ﬁfty articles, some of which prescribe ap-

proaches for remediating the assumed language limitations of LTEL-designated

students and others that question the validity and usefulness of the category itself.

The LTEL label has created a category widely used around the country that po-

sitions students “new to English” as out of step, as failing to move at the “right”

pace in their additional-language acquisition trajectories. In using the term and

establishing the category of LTEL, the educational community is formally making

the case that a speciﬁc group of students is not making academic progress. The cat-

egory, moreover, is based on widely shared expectations underlying established

educational policies that make the assumption that students initially labeled ELLs

can be 1) accurately identiﬁed in early childhood and 2) supported with adequate

educational “services” leading to successful performance on state mandated En-

glish language proﬁciency examinations. Unfortunately for Latinx students, the

path to reclassiﬁcation as FEP is much more challenging than originally expected.

Policies and procedures established to “teach” English, to support subject mat-

ter learning, and to assess students’ levels of English proﬁciency leading to their

timely reclassiﬁcation have, over time, led to unforeseen consequences. Sadly, as

determined by varying state and district classiﬁcation criteria in different parts of

the United States, many students who have been bureaucratically categorized as

ELLs since kindergarten are now currently identiﬁed by state assessment systems

as “failing to acquire English.”

For Latinx youngsters, the extensive use of the LTEL label along with frequent

criticisms of their spoken Spanish on social media suggest that these young peo-

ple are being seen (and perhaps are also seeing themselves) as languageless.

Taken

together, both labels imply that these young individuals speak neither English nor

Spanish well or possibly at all. In the case of LTELs, the description of language-

lessness is clearly impacting Latinx students’ educational lives and futures more

directly. In the ongoing analysis and prescription of remedies for perceived lin-

guistic limitations, formal language study is invariably identiﬁed as the principal

solution. LTELs need more ESL (English as a second language) classes.

In this essay, I explore the challenges to linguistic justice resulting from wide-

ly held negative perspectives on bi/multilingualism and from common and con-

tinuing misunderstandings of individuals who use resources from two commu-

nicative systems in their everyday lives. My goal is to highlight the effect of these

misunderstandings on the direct teaching of English. I speciﬁcally problematize

language instruction as it takes place in classroom settings and the impact of what

I term the curricularization of language as it is experienced by Latinx students who

“study” language qua language in instructed situations. I analyze the activity of

language teaching itself and argue that, while existing work in critical applied lin-

guistics (for example, Alastair Pennycook’s study on the teaching of English as an

additional language across the world) is an important ﬁrst step, it has not yet pen-

54 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Social Justice Challenges of “Teaching” Languages

etrated the various levels of the powerful language industry teaching English to

immigrant-origin students.

n the American educational system, Latinx children and particularly Mexican-

origin children are considered “disadvantaged.” They are part of a class of

students whose family, social, or economic circumstances have been found

to impact negatively on their ability to learn at school. These young people are

both minoritized and racialized, and their educational experiences are impact-

ed strongly by well-meaning educational policies–focusing on language–that

directly contribute to both exclusion and inequality.

The category of English Language Learner was established in federal policy

as part of the Civil Rights initiatives of the 1960s, the passage of Title VII of the

Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1967, and the Lau v. Nichols

Supreme Court decision of 1974.

Following the Lau decision (which established

that students could not be educated in a language that they did not understand),

the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 required states to take appro-

priate action to overcome language barriers and provide equal opportunities for

children. This legislation led to extensive debates and court challenges during the

1970s and 1980s that focused on the types of remedies (for example, ESL pullout

programs and bilingual education programs) that would be required in order to

provide opportunities for children who were in the process of acquiring English.

Over time, there has been strong opposition to bilingual education, numerous

lawsuits seeking to compel school districts to serve the needs of Latinx students,

and shifting federal and state regulations and guidelines.

In 2001, the shift to standards-based educational reform in the country (dereg-

ulation at the federal level in exchange for demonstrated educational outcomes)

led to the No Child Left Behind Act, to strong accountability provisions, to the es-

tablishment of detailed English Language Learner classiﬁcations, and to increas-

ing opposition to bilingual education.

In 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act

(ESSA) reauthorized the ﬁfty-year-old ESEA, the national education law seen as

a long-standing commitment to equal opportunity for all students. ESSA estab-

lished reporting requirements for all states and Local Education Agencies (LEAs)

on ELLs’ progress in attainment of English language proﬁciency, on academic

achievement, and on high school graduation rates.

Currently, the use of any non-English language at home has direct conse-

quences for all children who enter the American educational system. Upon enroll-

ing children in school, parents are required to complete a home-language survey

and speciﬁcally to identify the language spoken at home. The assumption is that

children raised in homes where a non-English language is spoken may themselves

be non-English-speaking or ELLs. In theory, screening for home language allows

schools to appropriately serve the needs of all children entering schools by clas-

152 (3) Summer 2023 55

Guadalupe Valdés

sifying them as English Only (EO), Initially English Proﬁcient (IEP), or ELLs. In

the case of Latinx families, even when children may already speak and understand

English, reporting the use of Spanish in the home almost always results in their

being categorized as ELLs, an identiﬁcation that directly affects their education-

al trajectories and opportunities to learn. Importantly, schools receive additional

funds for ELL-classiﬁed students.

nglish is currently taught as an additional language to students who are cat-

egorized as English Language Learners. By law, all students so categorized

must be provided with “language assistance” and assessed every year un-

til they are reclassiﬁed as Fluent English Proﬁcient. Language assistance, howev-

er, has been variously deﬁned. Over the last ﬁfty years, different states have rec-

ognized a variety of approaches for delivery of this assistance to children rang-

ing from 1) providing subject matter instruction in students’ home language and

gradually transitioning to instruction in English; 2) requiring periods of designat-

ed English language development (that is, direct teaching of ESL using pedagogies

adapted from the teaching of ESL to adults); and 3) implementing instruction de-

scribed as integrating both English and subject-matter content.

Each of these approaches involves the direct teaching of an additional lan-

guage to young children. In the case of the ﬁrst approach (known as bilingual edu-

cation), English is used gradually as a medium of instruction complementing the

use of children’s home language to teach academic content. In many programs,

however, explicit teaching of English vocabulary and/or forms is also included.

The second approach, referred to as Structured English Immersion (SEI), in-

volves the adaptation of explicit language-teaching methodologies used tradi-

tionally for the teaching of English as an international language to adults. Such

instruction often takes place in pullout ESL programs that group children by lan-

guage levels (beginning, intermediate, advanced) for segments held separately

from monolingual English coursework. Known as “leveled” English Language

Development (ELD), this approach limits ELLs’ access to ﬂuent English speakers

and opportunities for imitating or interacting with such speakers.

The third approach directs the teacher to structure subject matter teaching (for

example, math, science, initial reading) to include mini lessons on grammatical

structures and forms, such as phrasal verbs. Popular in many parts of the country,

this approach, often marketed to school districts as SIOP (Sheltered Instructional

Observation Protocol), requires that teachers develop both content and language

teaching objectives for each lesson. Unfortunately, even if teaching structures and

forms to children were effective–a point numerous experts have questioned (for

example, Michael Long and H. D. Adamson)–very few elementary or second-

ary content teachers have the background to do so without sacriﬁcing either the

teaching of English or the teaching of subject matter content.

56 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Social Justice Challenges of “Teaching” Languages

In many districts, there are specialized newcomer programs–particularly at

the secondary level–in which students new to the country and to English are pro-

vided intensive, traditional language instruction for a period of time in lieu of en-

rollment in regular subject matter classes. In Arizona, this same segregationist

approach was implemented with elementary school children. ELLs were assigned

to a prescriptive English language development program and grouped only with

other English learners at the same level for four hours a day. They were separated

from English-speaking peers and, more important, from subject matter instruc-

tion (math, science, social studies). The goal was to accelerate the “learning” of

English so that children could pass the required state English Language Proﬁcien-

cy examination after a single year of leveled ESL instruction. According to educa-

tional psychologist Patricia Gándara and political scientist Gary Orﬁeld, Arizona

was following a model designed by an “obscure educational consultant” whose

program focused on “ﬁve ELD components within the four hour daily time block:

phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and semantics.”

The extensive analyses that have been conducted on the Arizona program reveal

that the three-part test established by the Fifth Circuit Court in 1981 by Castañeda

v. Pickard for determining whether a school district program is “appropriate”

led to the establishment of the SEI program that deprived ELLs of access to sub-

ject matter instruction and resulted in their linguistic isolation.

These analyses

clearly uncover the challenges of providing children English language assistance

while at the same time giving them access to the curriculum. They make evident,

moreover, the impact of political contexts at particular points in time when, as in

this case, opposition to bilingual education led to Propositions 203 in Arizona and

227 in California, measures that required Latinx ELLs to be taught exclusively in

English.

he establishment of language classiﬁcations in K–12 schools in the United

States and the accompanying practices and mechanisms are relatively re-

cent examples of the ways in which such categories operate and the chal-

lenges encountered in their implementation. As useful as classiﬁcations are in doing

the work of schooling, it is also the case that such classiﬁcations can serve as rigid

demarcations that exclude particular groups of students, denying them entry and

access to educational opportunities and to challenging instruction.

As described above, the category of LTEL is the result of the implementation of

such policies and of the well-intended concern expressed by educators, research-

ers, and other members of the public. However, recent and ongoing research on

the impact of this new classiﬁcation on the lives of already marginalized students

(for example, by Maneka Deanna Brooks) provides strong evidence of the nega-

tive consequences of academic “sentencing” and “carcerality” of the largest group

of ELLs in the country: speakers of Spanish.

This research points speciﬁcally to

152 (3) Summer 2023 57

Guadalupe Valdés

the “ineffective” teaching of English, the exclusion from opportunities to learn,

and the consequences of language assessment practices that determine progress

toward students’ reclassiﬁcation as Fluent English Proﬁcient.

The “teaching” of languages in instructed settings involves bringing togeth-

er in a classroom setting a group of learners to “study” and “learn” a language

that is new to them. The learners, moreover, outnumber the teacher, the single

competent user/speaker of the “target” language. Whether the target language is

seen as a social practice or primarily as structure and form, if the goal of instruc-

tion is viewed as the development of interactive competence in the language be-

ing studied (for example, for immigrant-origin students, the ability to understand

teacher explanations, to respond to questions, and to interact with fellow stu-

dents), the ﬂuent-speaker-to-learner ratio is a particularly serious problem and,

to date, an underexamined challenge, resulting in what some have described as

adverse and detrimental conditions for the acquisition/development of addition-

al languages.

The activity of language teaching in classroom settings, moreover, takes place

as part of a complex system that is, for the most part, invisible to its participants.

All instructional arrangements that have additional language acquisition as their

goal–for example, English as a second language, English as a foreign language,

foreign/world language instruction, bilingual education, and content and lan-

guage integrated learning–are engaged in an activity that has been described as

curricularizing language.

When language is curricularized, it is treated not as a

communicative system acquired naturally in the process of primary socialization,

but as a subject or sets of skills, the elements of which can be developed through

speciﬁc types of curricula and controlled experiences. While the activity of “lan-

guage teaching” itself varies depending on the speciﬁc goals and purposes of in-

structional programs (for example, foreign/world language, heritage language

instruction, content-based language instruction), the process of curricularizing

language involves a series of levels of interacting mechanisms and elements as il-

lustrated in Figure 1.

he speciﬁc activities that count as language instruction take place at the

classroom level. Drawing from twenty-ﬁve centuries of pedagogical prac-

tice in combination with notions of “proﬁciency” as established by na-

tional, state, and local “standards” and listings of learning progressions, the

teaching of language in classroom settings inevitably requires a curriculum, that

is, an instructional plan that guides the presentation, learning, and assessment

of the elements to be “learned.”

These elements are often presented in a time-

honored, accepted order, following either an obvious or more disguised gram-

matical syllabus usually packaged in published materials, including workbooks

and possibly multimedia activities. Whatever the “essentials” are thought to be,

58 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Social Justice Challenges of “Teaching” Languages

instructors “teach” speciﬁ c elements (such as vocabulary, sentence frames, lan-

guage forms) that students are expected to “learn” using approaches, materials,

and activities that are sanctioned by the schools in which they teach, by the dis-

tricts in which the schools are located, and by broader state mandates within the

larger national system of which they are a part. Instructors carry out the activity

of teaching as it is understood by state and national policies and established tra-

ditions, bringing to it their own strengths and limitations as well as their own un-

derstanding of what teaching language entails. To facilitate their work, teachers

Figure 1

The Curricularization of a Language: Mechanisms and Practices in

Education and Beyond

Source: Author’s data; infographic created by Dozandri Mendoza.

152 (3) Summer 2023 59

Guadalupe Valdés

generally categorize students as beginners, intermediate, or advanced learners,

but, as many practitioners have found, all categories lead to exceptions.

Finally, assessment practices, which are an essential part of classroom instruc-

tion, include grades based on the completion of tasks and assignments, as well

as student performance on both classroom and ofﬁcially prescribed student eval-

uation instruments. Both types of student evaluations are informed by the pro-

gram’s design as well as by understandings of language development progressions

and theoretical perspectives on what needs to be acquired by students when “learn-

ing” an additional language.

acropolicies at the national and state levels, mesopolicies at the school

district level, and micropolicies at the school level constrain what

teachers do and how they view student progress. For example, current-

ly, the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 requires all states to develop or adopt

“English language proﬁciency standards”: that is, state-consensus documents

that put forward the expected language-learning progressions for beginning, in-

termediate, and advanced English language learners of immigrant background.

Even though they are the products of consensus activities and not empirically

based, these standards documents specify the content of language assessments

and directly inﬂuence the language teaching enterprise.

he mechanisms that frame language instruction (that is, the often unex-

amined ideas that shape the practice of teaching additional languages)

include:

• conceptualizations of language;

• ideologies of language, race, class, and identity;

• theories of second-language acquisition/development; and

• theories of bilingualism/multilingualism.

Conceptualizations of language are views and ideas about language as well as

deﬁnitions of language that are informed by the study of or exposure to established

bodies of knowledge. There are many ways that ordinary people as well as linguists

deﬁne language. Different perspectives on language, moreover, give rise to dramat-

ically different expectations about teaching, learning, and assessing languages. As

sociolinguist Paul Seedhouse contends, researchers and practitioners involved in

the area of language teaching may not be aware they are starting with vastly dif-

ferent conceptualizations of language and that these differences in conceptualiza-

tion have led to existing debates in the ﬁeld.

The conceptualizations that have in-

formed and continue to inform institutionalized language teaching include notions

that various researchers have commented on, including linguists Vivian Cook; Leo

van Lier; and Hannele Dufva, Minna Suni, Mari Aro, and Olli-Pekka Salo.

Many

60 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Social Justice Challenges of “Teaching” Languages

of these notions can be seen as “common sense” (for example, language is a medi-

um of communication), while others are more closely informed by speciﬁc theo-

retical positions (for example, language is a rule-governed system).

Ideologies of language, race, class, and identity inform the entire process of

language curricularization and directly inﬂuence language education. They in-

form constructions and conceptualizations of language itself and established and

emerging theories of what it means to “acquire” both a ﬁrst and a second language.

Language ideologies intersect in important ways with perspectives on bilingualism

and multilingualism, as well as with theories of bi/multilingual acquisition and

use. These ideologies–often multiple and conﬂicting–help compose the institu-

tional and social fabric of a culture, and include “notions of what is ‘true,’ ‘morally

good,’ or ‘aesthetically pleasing’ about language, including who speaks and does

not speak ‘correctly.’”

Deﬁned variously as feelings, ideas, conceptions, and cul-

tural models of language, language ideologies may appear to be common sense, but

are in fact constructed from speciﬁc political economic perspectives and frequent-

ly result in evaluative views about speakers and their language use.

Theories of second-language acquisition/development (SLA) are also important

in framing the teaching of additional languages. What is now referred to as main-

stream SLA (as contrasted with alternative approaches to SLA) is informed primar-

ily by componential and formalist conceptualizations of language as well as by the

disciplines of linguistics and psychology. Until the last two decades, mainstream

second-language acquisition has viewed the end-state of additional language

learning to be the acquisition of the full monolingual norm said to be characteristic

of educated “native speakers.” It has also regarded the process of second-language

acquisition as a cognitive phenomenon that takes place in the mind of individual

learners. The primary focus of language study has been considered to involve the

internalization of the linguistic system (that is, the forms and structures) of the ad-

ditional language. These theories and perspectives have played an important role

in framing the practice of institutionalized language teaching.

Finally, theories of bilingualism/multilingualism are central to both the teach-

ing of additional languages and the assessment systems developed to measure

learning/development. Until recently, the ﬁeld of applied linguistics, and with-

in it the subdiscipline of SLA, had given little attention to bilingualism or multi-

lingualism. The end-state of the acquisition process was seen as the development

of the language characteristics of the educated native speaker of the additional

language. This native speaker, moreover, was constructed as a monolingual, per-

haps the ideal speaker-listener of Chomskyan theory.

When bilinguals entered

the discussion, they were viewed from a monolingualist perspective that over-

whelmed the second and foreign-language teaching ﬁeld, and that constructed

“ideal” or “full” bilinguals as two monolinguals in one who are capable of keeping

their two internalized language systems (or their two sets of social practices or lin-

152 (3) Summer 2023 61

Guadalupe Valdés

guistic resources) completely apart.

As Dufva, Suni, Aro, and Salo point out, un-

til quite recently, monological thinking dominated the ﬁeld of applied linguistics

and the practice of language teaching.

Controlled by both established theoretical

linguistic perspectives as well as by a written language bias, languages were seen

as singular, enclosed systems.

As a result, involuntary, momentary transfers in

language learners that drew from the “other” national language(s) were frowned

upon, corrected, and labeled linguistic interference. The use of borrowings and

other elements categorized as belonging to another language system were labeled

language mixtures (such as Spanglish, Chinglish, and Franglais), and language

learners were urged to keep their new language “pure.” They were expected to re-

frain from “mixing” languages and from engaging in practices typical of compe-

tent multilinguals that involve the alternation of (what have been considered to

be) two separate and distinct systems.

Much has changed. Monolingualist perspectives have been problematized. The

expansion of and increasing epistemological diversity in the ﬁeld of SLA have led to

what some refer to as the “multilingual turn” in applied linguistics and describe as a

direct consequence of a growing dissatisfaction with and concern about the tenden-

cy to view individuals acquiring a second language as failed native speakers.

Be-

ginning in the early 1990s, numerous scholars criticized monolingual assumptions

and the narrow views of language experience that these perspectives implied.

Nevertheless, writing many years later, applied linguist Lourdes Ortega contends

that mainstream SLA has not yet fully turned away from the comparative fallacy:

that is, the concern about deviations from the idealized norm of the additional lan-

guage produced by language learners.

She argues, moreover, that in spite of the

extensive work carried out on this topic,

many applied linguists and language ed-

ucators do not fully understand the ideological or empirical consequences of the

native-speaker norms and assumptions they rely upon in their work.

Others are more optimistic. For example, the Douglas Fir Group, a group of

distinguished applied linguists and second-language acquisition theorists of var-

ious persuasions, contends that a wider range of intellectual traditions and disci-

plines are now contributing to the ﬁeld of SLA, leading to a greater focus on the

social-local worlds of additional language learners.

They argue that SLA must

be “particularly responsive to the pressing needs of people who learn to live–and

in fact do live–with more than one language at various points in their lives, with

regard to their education, their multilingual and multiliterate development, social

integration, and performance across diverse contexts.”

While not yet widely represented systematically in the actual practice of lan-

guage instruction, there has been an extensive expansion and problematization,

at the theoretical level, of positions that were previously unquestioned. For exam-

ple, that language programs teach and students learn speciﬁc “national” (named)

languages, and that national languages are unitary, autonomous, abstract systems

62 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Social Justice Challenges of “Teaching” Languages

formally represented by rules and items. There is also increasing rejection of the

position that, although national languages have different social and regional va-

rieties, the goal of language teaching is to help learners to acquire the norms of

the “standard” language as codiﬁed by pedagogical grammars and dictionaries.

Importantly, the ﬁeld of applied linguistics itself is being closely examined and in

the current context in which there is increasing awareness of the impact of sys-

tems of oppression on minoritized peoples, the question is whether there can be

a race-neutral applied linguistics: that is, “impervious to the effects of racism,

xenophobia, and concerns about language rights.”

n both current and past discussions about educational policies and practices

focusing on the education of students who do not speak a societal language,

very little attention has been given to conceptualizations of language itself. In

the United States, it has been taken for granted that there is a common, agreed-

upon understanding of what languages are, how they work, and why English, as the

societal language, needs to be “learned” by students in order to succeed in Ameri-

can schools. Underlying existing classiﬁcation and assessment policies for students

who are categorized as English Language Learners, moreover, are folk perspectives

about “good” language or more recently “academic” language that emphasize vo-

cabulary, correct grammar, near-native pronunciation, standardness, and other

markers of complexity, accuracy, and ﬂuency understood as “good” usage. Addi-

tionally, it has been generally assumed by both educators and policy-makers that

for English Language Learners, second-language acquisition follows predictable

trajectories that can be accurately measured by standardized tests.

At the same time, for almost ﬁve decades, there has been a fundamental par-

adigm shift in the ways that scholarship in a number of disciplines (such as ap-

plied linguistics, psychology, sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, commu-

nication, cognitive science, usage-based linguistics) now problematize “what is

casually called a language.”

In the second decade of the twenty-ﬁrst century,

cutting-edge scholarship on language in disciplines that directly inform educa-

tion has undergone a paradigm shift from the tenets of behaviorist psychology

and structural linguistics to a more contextualized, meaning-based, social view

of language. This shift takes for granted a rethinking of language as object.

Per-

spectives on bi/multilingualism, moreover, have shifted from views of “real” or

“true” bi/multilinguals as speakers of two named languages (always kept sepa-

rate) to views of communicative and interactional multicompetence in which in-

dividuals deploy resources from their entire repertoire.

High school students labeled LTELs, who entered the American educational

system as young children, have been found to be multicompetent, skilled users

of English capable of expressing themselves effectively for a variety of purposes

in both spoken and written English.

Recent research, moreover, has determined

152 (3) Summer 2023 63

Guadalupe Valdés

that these young people see themselves as ﬂuent and capable speakers of English.

They dismiss attempts to “assess” their English on yearly English Language Proﬁ-

ciency examinations and thus rarely make an effort to obtain high scores.

For the ﬁeld of applied linguistics and for the practice of language education/

language teaching, the identiﬁcation of students as LTELs, however, presents

challenges. In theory, applied linguists can provide a race- and class-neutral

theoretical framework that can inform the practice of teaching English to LTELs.

And yet, as pointed out above, researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners are

part of a complex system that constrains their perceptions of both groups of stu-

dents. Teachers, moreover, are embedded in the same system and deeply inﬂu-

enced by their commitment to doing the “best” for their students. ESL teachers

want their students to pass the required state English Language Proﬁciency ex-

amination and to be reclassiﬁed as early as possible. Moreover, they want to help

LTELs develop the variously described “academic language” that many educators

and researchers claim that they do not have and that they believe is essential to

their educational futures, social justice, and life success.

or minoritized students and especially for LTELs, every aspect of the educa-

tional system that involves them implicates language. Content and language

standards, curriculum, pedagogies, and assessments in particular can poten-

tially contribute to or undermine these students’ opportunities to develop their sub-

ject matter knowledge and their talents and to maximize their futures. For that rea-

son, when linguistic justice is a goal, it is of vital importance that researchers and

practitioners scrutinize the sets of standards (learning progressions) and expecta-

tions underlying the language assessment systems currently in use to measure the

development and/or the quality of both English and Spanish. Minimally, these

standards need to be examined to determine whether they are informed by current

scholarship and research about both ontologies and ideologies of language as well

as about bi/multilingualism. Standards are important because they establish:

• the ways ELL students are assumed to grow in their use of English over time;

• the language abilities expected at different levels of development;

• the aspects of language that need to be measured in determining progress;

and

• the types of support that will be required in order to provide these learners

with access to instruction in key subject-matter areas (available exclusively

in English).

For such standards to serve the purpose of appropriately supporting and mon-

itoring the growth of English or Spanish language proﬁciency in minoritized

youth, they must be constructed to describe the trajectories that linguistical-

ly multicompetent K–12 learners follow in the development of English/Spanish

64 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Social Justice Challenges of “Teaching” Languages

in school settings. Additionally, they must be informed by a clear theoretical po-

sition on the ways that instruction can impact (or not) the complex, nonlinear

process of language development/acquisition, and they must take into account

the fact that there are currently few longitudinal studies of the second-language

acquisition process.

Researchers working from the tradition of corpus linguis-

tics, moreover, argue for authentic collections of learner language as the primary

data and the most reliable information about learner’s evolving systems. Drawing

from the study of learner corpora, applied linguist Victoria Hasko summarizes the

state of the ﬁeld on the “pace and patterns of changes in global and individual de-

velopmental trajectories” as follows:

The amassed body of SLA investigations reveals one fact with absolute clarity: A “typ-

ical” L2 developmental proﬁle is an elusive target to portray, as L2 development is not

linear or evenly paced and is characterized by complex dynamics of inter- and intra-

learner variability, ﬂuctuation, plateaus, and breakthroughs.

In sum, the state of knowledge about stages of acquisition in second-language

(L2) learning does not support precise expectations about the sequence of devel-

opment of additional languages by a group of students whose proﬁciency must be

assessed and determined by mandated language assessments. Thus, constructing

developmental sequences and progressions is very much a mineﬁeld.

Assessing language proﬁciency, moreover, is a complicated endeavor. As ap-

plied linguists Glenn Fulcher and Fred Davidson contend, the practice of language

testing “makes an assumption that knowledge, skills, and abilities are stable and

can be ‘measured’ or ‘assessed.’ It does it in full knowledge that there is error and

uncertainty, and wishes to make the extent of the error and uncertainty transpar-

ent.”

And there has been increasing concern within the language testing pro-

fession about the degree to which that uncertainty is actually made transparent

to test users at all levels as well as the general public. Linguist Elana Shohamy, for

example, has raised a number of important issues about the ethics and fairness of

language testing with reference to language policy.

Attention has been given, in

particular, to the impact of high-stakes tests, to the uses of language tests for the

management of language-related issues in many national settings, and to the spe-

cial challenges of standards-based testing.

Applied linguist Alister Cumming

makes the following powerful statement about the conceptual foundations of lan-

guage assessments:

A major dilemma for comprehensive assessments of oracy and literacy are the concep-

tual foundations on which to base such assessments. On the one hand, each language

assessment asserts, at least implicitly, a certain conceptualization of language and of

language acquisition by stipulating a normative sequence in which people are expect-

ed to gain language proﬁciency with respect to the content and methods of the test.

152 (3) Summer 2023 65

Guadalupe Valdés

On the other hand, there is no universally agreed upon theory of language or of language acquisi-

tion nor any systematic means of accounting for the great variation in which people need, use, and

acquire oral and literate language abilities.

Accepting the results of current assessments as accurate measures of the lan-

guage proﬁciencies of bi/multicompetent students is simply unjust and unaccept-

able. Tests are not thermometers; they are instruments that allocate educational

opportunities and that, as sociolinguists Matthew Knoester and Assaf Meshulam

contend, impair the cultural, educational, and personal development of the coun-

try’s most vulnerable students.