<p>The quite contemporary epistemological postures that are critical of the dominance of Euro-modernist knowledge traditions are sometimes guilty of inadvertently perpetuating the very same hegemonies they seek to unsettle. For this reason, the intervention by Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa is timely and relevant. In re-assessing the “common sense” assumptions that belie the concept of “raciolinguistics,” Flores and Rosa remind us of the need to pitch our conversations with boldness, conceptual clarity, and conviction to avoid essentialisms that tend to hide and reveal—in equal measure—the co-naturalization of language and race and the concomitant discourses they invoke. This short commentary engages their reflections.</p><p>More than two decades ago, Latin American decolonial theorist, philosopher, and semiotician Walter D. Mignolo (<span>2002</span>) published an article on “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.” In the article, Mignolo introduced several concepts that are foundational to the arguments that Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa advance. Included among the concepts introduced by Mignolo is “colonial difference,” “repetition without difference,” “the double bind,” “border thinking,” “relocation of thinking,” “critical awareness of the geopolitics of knowledge,” “Eurocentrism from the left,” and “Eurocentric critique of modernity,” among others. Together, and individually, these concepts point to the conundrum that contemporary social science and allied scholarly communities face in trying to transcend meta-narratives of Euro-modernist coloniality—in ways that do not reproduce the same. When Mignolo introduced these concepts, he was drawing attention to the fact that while the postmodern criticism of Euro-modernity is important and necessary, it is not enough. His call was for the development of alternative grammars and vocabularies that are fit for purpose—ones that would enable us to side step the language of colonial dichotomies and fallacies of superiority, linearity, completeness, and universal relevance.</p><p>In re-engaging and troubling the concept of “raciolinguistics,” Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa follow the path of reflexive praxis charted by Walter Mignolo and other decolonial theorists. They are inviting us to enter dialogic conversation on the imperative to think otherwise, to think anew, those rarely challenged “commonsense” assumptions that underpin the work we do in sociolinguistics and allied fields of study. It is an invitation to change not only the conversation but also the contents of our conversations. Flores and Rosa urge us to embark on delinking—a project that confronts the dangers of global coloniality and hierarchies of humanity, race, languages, and knowledges. They are inviting us to undertake a broader global review of our practices to ascertain how we got to be where we are as well as the steps we might take to pick ourselves up and continue walking. Or, as postcolonial literary cr
{"title":"Troubling sociolinguistics practice and the coloniality of universalism","authors":"Finex Ndhlovu","doi":"10.1111/josl.12644","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12644","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The quite contemporary epistemological postures that are critical of the dominance of Euro-modernist knowledge traditions are sometimes guilty of inadvertently perpetuating the very same hegemonies they seek to unsettle. For this reason, the intervention by Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa is timely and relevant. In re-assessing the “common sense” assumptions that belie the concept of “raciolinguistics,” Flores and Rosa remind us of the need to pitch our conversations with boldness, conceptual clarity, and conviction to avoid essentialisms that tend to hide and reveal—in equal measure—the co-naturalization of language and race and the concomitant discourses they invoke. This short commentary engages their reflections.</p><p>More than two decades ago, Latin American decolonial theorist, philosopher, and semiotician Walter D. Mignolo (<span>2002</span>) published an article on “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.” In the article, Mignolo introduced several concepts that are foundational to the arguments that Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa advance. Included among the concepts introduced by Mignolo is “colonial difference,” “repetition without difference,” “the double bind,” “border thinking,” “relocation of thinking,” “critical awareness of the geopolitics of knowledge,” “Eurocentrism from the left,” and “Eurocentric critique of modernity,” among others. Together, and individually, these concepts point to the conundrum that contemporary social science and allied scholarly communities face in trying to transcend meta-narratives of Euro-modernist coloniality—in ways that do not reproduce the same. When Mignolo introduced these concepts, he was drawing attention to the fact that while the postmodern criticism of Euro-modernity is important and necessary, it is not enough. His call was for the development of alternative grammars and vocabularies that are fit for purpose—ones that would enable us to side step the language of colonial dichotomies and fallacies of superiority, linearity, completeness, and universal relevance.</p><p>In re-engaging and troubling the concept of “raciolinguistics,” Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa follow the path of reflexive praxis charted by Walter Mignolo and other decolonial theorists. They are inviting us to enter dialogic conversation on the imperative to think otherwise, to think anew, those rarely challenged “commonsense” assumptions that underpin the work we do in sociolinguistics and allied fields of study. It is an invitation to change not only the conversation but also the contents of our conversations. Flores and Rosa urge us to embark on delinking—a project that confronts the dangers of global coloniality and hierarchies of humanity, race, languages, and knowledges. They are inviting us to undertake a broader global review of our practices to ascertain how we got to be where we are as well as the steps we might take to pick ourselves up and continue walking. Or, as postcolonial literary cr","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"27 5","pages":"449-452"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12644","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136114226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>En 2023, me invitaron a dar una charla sobre el resurgimiento del pensamiento deficitario en las escuelas de Inglaterra y cómo las políticas educativas contemporáneas reproducen ideologías raciolingüísticas, las cuales enmarcan las prácticas lingüísticas de les niñes racializades y de clase trabajadora como si estuvieran sufriendo de carencias debilitantes. Después de la charla, un profesor blanco comentó que el pensamiento deficitario trataba más de la clase que la raza, y que los estudios que se enfocan en la raza corrían el riesgo de minimizar las luchas sociolingüísticas de la clase trabajadora blanca. He sido testigo del despliegue de las mismas ansiedades en la evaluación por pares, donde les sociolingüistes del Reino Unido parecen incomódes por los estudios que centran la raza y el colonialismo, a pesar de las lógicas coloniales que se encuentran al centro de la disciplina (Heller y McElhinny <span>2022</span>). Esto es particularmente preocupante dado que la sociolingüística surgió simultáneamente con la organización anticolonial del Movimiento de Poder Negro en los años 1960, lo cual representaba el activismo comunitario que involucraba la exposición de la vigilancia antinegra sistémica de las prácticas lingüísticas en las escuelas.</p><p>El artículo de Flores y Rosa en el presente diálogo expresa cómo una perspectiva raciolingüística nos invita a interrogar las raíces coloniales de la sociolingüística y cómo se han empujado los asuntos de la raza, el colonialismo y la supremacía blanca a los márgenes disciplinarios. Una perspectiva raciolingüística busca deshacer asunciones dadas por sentadas sobre la lengua, la raza y la clase para interrogar cómo las lógicas coloniales británicas siguen dando forma a la sociedad moderna. Este enfoque interseccional ha sido fundamental al surgimiento de una perspectiva raciolingüística desde el Reino Unido que ha examinado la naturaleza mutuamente constitutiva de la raza, la clase y la lengua en contextos diferentes, incluyendo en las escuelas (Cushing, <span>2022</span>; Cushing y Snell, <span>2023</span>; Li Wei y García <span>2022</span>), en el proceso de ciudadanía del Reino Unido (Khan, <span>2021</span>), en la terapia del lenguaje, fonoaudiología y logopedia (<span>Farah f.c</span>.) y en zonas urbanas con altas poblaciones del sur de Asia (Sharma, <span>2016</span>; véase también Harris, <span>2006</span>). Estas investigaciones continúan una historia larga de estudios producidos por académiques marginalizades que expusieron cómo las lógicas coloniales y supremacistas blancos deslegitimaron las practicas lingüísticas de comunidades racializadas a mediados del siglo XX (p. ej., Coard, <span>1971</span>; Singh, <span>1988</span>). Sin embargo, estos nombres son típicamente borrados en los relatos históricos de les sociolingüistes del Reino Unido (véase Gilmour, <span>2020</span> para una excepción) de la misma manera en que el colonialismo y la antinegrura a menudo se pasan por alto en proyec
{"title":"Una perspectiva raciolingüística desde el Reino Unido","authors":"Ian Cushing","doi":"10.1111/josl.12637","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12637","url":null,"abstract":"<p>En 2023, me invitaron a dar una charla sobre el resurgimiento del pensamiento deficitario en las escuelas de Inglaterra y cómo las políticas educativas contemporáneas reproducen ideologías raciolingüísticas, las cuales enmarcan las prácticas lingüísticas de les niñes racializades y de clase trabajadora como si estuvieran sufriendo de carencias debilitantes. Después de la charla, un profesor blanco comentó que el pensamiento deficitario trataba más de la clase que la raza, y que los estudios que se enfocan en la raza corrían el riesgo de minimizar las luchas sociolingüísticas de la clase trabajadora blanca. He sido testigo del despliegue de las mismas ansiedades en la evaluación por pares, donde les sociolingüistes del Reino Unido parecen incomódes por los estudios que centran la raza y el colonialismo, a pesar de las lógicas coloniales que se encuentran al centro de la disciplina (Heller y McElhinny <span>2022</span>). Esto es particularmente preocupante dado que la sociolingüística surgió simultáneamente con la organización anticolonial del Movimiento de Poder Negro en los años 1960, lo cual representaba el activismo comunitario que involucraba la exposición de la vigilancia antinegra sistémica de las prácticas lingüísticas en las escuelas.</p><p>El artículo de Flores y Rosa en el presente diálogo expresa cómo una perspectiva raciolingüística nos invita a interrogar las raíces coloniales de la sociolingüística y cómo se han empujado los asuntos de la raza, el colonialismo y la supremacía blanca a los márgenes disciplinarios. Una perspectiva raciolingüística busca deshacer asunciones dadas por sentadas sobre la lengua, la raza y la clase para interrogar cómo las lógicas coloniales británicas siguen dando forma a la sociedad moderna. Este enfoque interseccional ha sido fundamental al surgimiento de una perspectiva raciolingüística desde el Reino Unido que ha examinado la naturaleza mutuamente constitutiva de la raza, la clase y la lengua en contextos diferentes, incluyendo en las escuelas (Cushing, <span>2022</span>; Cushing y Snell, <span>2023</span>; Li Wei y García <span>2022</span>), en el proceso de ciudadanía del Reino Unido (Khan, <span>2021</span>), en la terapia del lenguaje, fonoaudiología y logopedia (<span>Farah f.c</span>.) y en zonas urbanas con altas poblaciones del sur de Asia (Sharma, <span>2016</span>; véase también Harris, <span>2006</span>). Estas investigaciones continúan una historia larga de estudios producidos por académiques marginalizades que expusieron cómo las lógicas coloniales y supremacistas blancos deslegitimaron las practicas lingüísticas de comunidades racializadas a mediados del siglo XX (p. ej., Coard, <span>1971</span>; Singh, <span>1988</span>). Sin embargo, estos nombres son típicamente borrados en los relatos históricos de les sociolingüistes del Reino Unido (véase Gilmour, <span>2020</span> para una excepción) de la misma manera en que el colonialismo y la antinegrura a menudo se pasan por alto en proyec","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"27 5","pages":"478-482"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12637","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136113152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>Flores and Rosa's proposition of a raciolinguistic approach provides an important political, historical, relational, and sensorial framework for understanding how people become raced and how social action becomes interpretable through a racialized lens. I build on this analysis to underscore the need for scholarship of race and language to consider a multidimensional analysis that is dynamic, historical, and cognizant of the complex power relations involved in linking and unlinking race and language. As I understand, their argument is a call to be wary of approaches that treat race and its relationship to language as decontextualized ahistorical categories across space and time.</p><p>Attention to the sensorial interface that impacts how race is interactionally experienced also means paying attention to the historical circumstances and relations of power that produce race as a perceivable category of social differentiation, be it through aspects of speech and language, physical appearance, genealogical ancestry, and/or whichever characteristics become historically associated with racial categories in a given place and time. This requires a simultaneous acknowledgment and analysis of race as a colonial construct, as an anchor of relations, and a basis for certain forms of identity. In this commentary, I briefly discuss racial categories as complex, multifaceted colonial orders. I then discuss a multi-vector framework that, in acknowledging the multidimensionality of racial instantiation, allows for a grounded analysis of how race and its relationship to linguistic phenomena may be constructed, experienced, reproduced, and challenged.</p><p>Thinking of coloniality as the productive of the modern social orders that produce race as an important vector of and proxy for sociocultural experiences across different historical and geopolitical situations allows us to analytically see how these categories also produce interstices and voids where the limitations and excesses of assumed categories are insufficient and do not neatly map onto lived experiences and conceptualizations of identity and language. To understand the multifaceted and lasting ways that European colonial projects have structured systems of knowledge, hierarchies, and culture to reproduce Eurocentric colonial power, we need to ask: What gets erased, left out, or overdetermined in the broad categories of language and race used to demographically trace patterns?</p><p>The discussion of race in this context can be understood in relationship to the distinctive forms of organizing differences within coloniality. The concept of coloniality (Quijano, <span>2000</span>) points to the epistemological conditions that are shaped along the political–economic conditions of colonial relations. Reyes (<span>2020</span>) applied this concept to ideas about mixed race and mixed language, to understand them not as attributes of persons and speech, but instead as an attribute of the listening subject pos
{"title":"Raciolinguistic approaches and multidimensional analyses of the links among race, language, and power","authors":"Sherina Feliciano-Santos","doi":"10.1111/josl.12639","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12639","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Flores and Rosa's proposition of a raciolinguistic approach provides an important political, historical, relational, and sensorial framework for understanding how people become raced and how social action becomes interpretable through a racialized lens. I build on this analysis to underscore the need for scholarship of race and language to consider a multidimensional analysis that is dynamic, historical, and cognizant of the complex power relations involved in linking and unlinking race and language. As I understand, their argument is a call to be wary of approaches that treat race and its relationship to language as decontextualized ahistorical categories across space and time.</p><p>Attention to the sensorial interface that impacts how race is interactionally experienced also means paying attention to the historical circumstances and relations of power that produce race as a perceivable category of social differentiation, be it through aspects of speech and language, physical appearance, genealogical ancestry, and/or whichever characteristics become historically associated with racial categories in a given place and time. This requires a simultaneous acknowledgment and analysis of race as a colonial construct, as an anchor of relations, and a basis for certain forms of identity. In this commentary, I briefly discuss racial categories as complex, multifaceted colonial orders. I then discuss a multi-vector framework that, in acknowledging the multidimensionality of racial instantiation, allows for a grounded analysis of how race and its relationship to linguistic phenomena may be constructed, experienced, reproduced, and challenged.</p><p>Thinking of coloniality as the productive of the modern social orders that produce race as an important vector of and proxy for sociocultural experiences across different historical and geopolitical situations allows us to analytically see how these categories also produce interstices and voids where the limitations and excesses of assumed categories are insufficient and do not neatly map onto lived experiences and conceptualizations of identity and language. To understand the multifaceted and lasting ways that European colonial projects have structured systems of knowledge, hierarchies, and culture to reproduce Eurocentric colonial power, we need to ask: What gets erased, left out, or overdetermined in the broad categories of language and race used to demographically trace patterns?</p><p>The discussion of race in this context can be understood in relationship to the distinctive forms of organizing differences within coloniality. The concept of coloniality (Quijano, <span>2000</span>) points to the epistemological conditions that are shaped along the political–economic conditions of colonial relations. Reyes (<span>2020</span>) applied this concept to ideas about mixed race and mixed language, to understand them not as attributes of persons and speech, but instead as an attribute of the listening subject pos","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"27 5","pages":"463-467"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12639","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136115919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Who is (not) engaged with undoing Raciolinguistics?","authors":"Wesley Y. Leonard","doi":"10.1111/josl.12638","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12638","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"27 5","pages":"441-444"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136112718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p><i>Why</i> this text? Why <i>now</i>? These are two questions that Flores and Rosa's article prompted on my mind. The paper sounds like a ‘tune up’, if not a recalibration, of the raciolinguistic perspective (RP) that the two authors see drifting away from its original ambitions, which can be summarized as (1) to account for the co-naturalization of language and race and how the process is achieved semiotically; and (2) ultimately to expose and disrupt the inherited colonial foundations of the field of linguistics.</p><p>The fact that intellectual ideas or theoretical paradigms take a life of their own — with misinterpretation being part of the equation — is not new in science. Related to the questions articulated at the outset of this commentary are those of why the RP has been embraced increasingly by several language scholars in some parts of the world and why it has evolved in the way it has. The sophisticated analysis of academia of Bourdieu (<span>1975</span>) as a field — whose social dynamics are analogized to those of a game — helps us understand this evolution. The RP's higher ‘market value’ over the previous scholarship that had also addressed the entanglement of language and race and did not receive as much attention from the wider academic community (see for instance Makoni et al., <span>2003</span>) appears to be the answer. It adds to the geopolitics of the production of knowledge and the circulation of the latter from the United States modern academic ‘centre’ (which is highly stratified) to the world's ‘peripheries’ (in the terminology of Wallerstein (<span>2004</span>)’s world-system analysis). Although I assume that <i>doing raciolinguistics</i> is part of <i>doing being</i> in the current game of socially-oriented linguistics, I do not intend to undermine in any way Flores and Rosa's (as well as other scholars’) important contributions to our understanding of the intersections of language and race. Unveiling the logics of the heterogeneous academic field in which we position ourselves and are positioned by others not only challenges the positivist idea of ‘true knowledge’ but also helps each of us reflect on <i>what</i> we research, <i>why</i> we do it, and <i>why now</i>. It would be naive to think that language scholars’ increased interest in language and race has been driven only by the current political situations across the world. Contemporary race-based dominance and exclusion have precedents, often distant ones, from which they are not radically different.</p><p>Flores and Rosa add their voices to some prominent linguists before them (e.g. Mufwene, <span>2001, 2008</span>; DeGraff, <span>2005</span> in the case of creolistics) who have repeatedly called out some racist underpinning of Western linguistics inherited from its birth in a period when colonization was associated with ‘la mission civilisatrice’, and non-Europeans were considered less evolved than, and their languages as inferior to, Europeans. We should ask
{"title":"Why this text? Why now? A response to Flores and Rosa","authors":"Cécile B. Vigouroux","doi":"10.1111/josl.12649","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12649","url":null,"abstract":"<p><i>Why</i> this text? Why <i>now</i>? These are two questions that Flores and Rosa's article prompted on my mind. The paper sounds like a ‘tune up’, if not a recalibration, of the raciolinguistic perspective (RP) that the two authors see drifting away from its original ambitions, which can be summarized as (1) to account for the co-naturalization of language and race and how the process is achieved semiotically; and (2) ultimately to expose and disrupt the inherited colonial foundations of the field of linguistics.</p><p>The fact that intellectual ideas or theoretical paradigms take a life of their own — with misinterpretation being part of the equation — is not new in science. Related to the questions articulated at the outset of this commentary are those of why the RP has been embraced increasingly by several language scholars in some parts of the world and why it has evolved in the way it has. The sophisticated analysis of academia of Bourdieu (<span>1975</span>) as a field — whose social dynamics are analogized to those of a game — helps us understand this evolution. The RP's higher ‘market value’ over the previous scholarship that had also addressed the entanglement of language and race and did not receive as much attention from the wider academic community (see for instance Makoni et al., <span>2003</span>) appears to be the answer. It adds to the geopolitics of the production of knowledge and the circulation of the latter from the United States modern academic ‘centre’ (which is highly stratified) to the world's ‘peripheries’ (in the terminology of Wallerstein (<span>2004</span>)’s world-system analysis). Although I assume that <i>doing raciolinguistics</i> is part of <i>doing being</i> in the current game of socially-oriented linguistics, I do not intend to undermine in any way Flores and Rosa's (as well as other scholars’) important contributions to our understanding of the intersections of language and race. Unveiling the logics of the heterogeneous academic field in which we position ourselves and are positioned by others not only challenges the positivist idea of ‘true knowledge’ but also helps each of us reflect on <i>what</i> we research, <i>why</i> we do it, and <i>why now</i>. It would be naive to think that language scholars’ increased interest in language and race has been driven only by the current political situations across the world. Contemporary race-based dominance and exclusion have precedents, often distant ones, from which they are not radically different.</p><p>Flores and Rosa add their voices to some prominent linguists before them (e.g. Mufwene, <span>2001, 2008</span>; DeGraff, <span>2005</span> in the case of creolistics) who have repeatedly called out some racist underpinning of Western linguistics inherited from its birth in a period when colonization was associated with ‘la mission civilisatrice’, and non-Europeans were considered less evolved than, and their languages as inferior to, Europeans. We should ask","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"27 5","pages":"445-448"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12649","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136115144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>In 2023, I was invited to give a talk on the resurgence of deficit thinking in England's schools, and how contemporary education policies reproduce raciolinguistic ideologies which frame the language practices of working-class and racialised children as suffering from debilitating absences. After my talk, a White male professor commented that this was more about class than race, and that sociolinguistic scholarship focusing on race risked downplaying the struggles of the White working class. I have witnessed the same anxieties unfold in the peer review system, where UK sociolinguists seem uneasy about scholarship which centres race and colonialism, despite the colonial logics which lie at the core of the discipline (Heller & McElhinny, <span>2022</span>). This is especially concerning given that sociolinguistics emerged simultaneously with the anti-colonial organising of the Black Power Movement in the 1960s, representing community activism which included exposing systemic anti-Black language policing in schools.</p><p>In their leading piece, Flores and Rosa articulate how a raciolinguistic perspective invites us to interrogate the colonial roots of sociolinguistics and how issues of race, colonialism and White supremacy have been pushed to its disciplinary margins. A raciolinguistic perspective seeks to undo taken-for-granted assumptions about language, race and class to interrogate how British colonial logics continue to shape modern society. This intersectional approach has been fundamental to the emergence of a raciolinguistic perspective from the United Kingdom which has examined the mutually constitutive nature of race, class and language in different contexts including schools (Cushing, <span>2022</span>; Cushing & Snell, <span>2023</span>; Li Wei & García, <span>2022</span>), the UK citizenship process (Khan, <span>2021</span>), speech and language pathology (<span>Farah, f.c</span>.), and urban areas with high South Asian populations (Sharma, <span>2016</span>; see also Harris, <span>2006</span>). This builds on a long history of work produced by racially marginalised scholars who exposed how colonial and White supremacist logics delegitimised the language practices of racialised communities in mid-20th-century England (e.g. Coard, <span>1971</span>; Singh, <span>1988</span>). Yet, these names are typically erased out of historical accounts of UK sociolinguistics (see Gilmour, <span>2020</span> for one exception) in much the same ways that colonialism and anti-Blackness are often overlooked in projects on so-called Multicultural London English. The need for UK sociolinguists to pay attention to coloniality is ever more urgent given energised attempts by the state to deny the existence of institutional racism, censor anti-colonial efforts in schools and universities and project images of White, working-class children as victims of ethnic diversity (Shafi & Nagdee, <span>2022</span>). As Flores and Rosa argue, sociolingu
20世纪中期的方言学家项目，如1951年至1961年的英语方言调查，基于生物规范性的语言规范文献，积极寻找居住在农村地区的白人，健全，土著，老年人，男性，“口腔，牙齿和听力良好”的告密者(Orton et al.， 1978)。20世纪下半叶，受拉布维翁启发的英国社会语言学的出现，将人们的注意力转移到了城市地区，同时也认同了一种自由进步的叙事，这种叙事声称与被污名化的社区团结一致，并受到工薪阶层儿童在学校表现不佳的激励。正如弗洛雷斯和罗莎在本期文章中所论述的那样，社会语言学继续受到这些助手逻辑的影响，这些逻辑表明，适度的、基于语言的改革是解决社会不公正的灵丹妙药。这些善意的伪装最初是在英国殖民时期排练和完善的(查普曼&安培;威瑟斯,2019)。英国的社会语言学家经常将他们的工作定位为倡导工人阶级儿童的母语实践，而很少关注白人至上主义的更广泛结构以及命名语言和变体的殖民历史(Halliday, 1978;Le Page, 1968;Trudgill, 1975)。这些努力表明，被污名化的社区最好的支持方式是肯定语言学家认为是一套非标准化、非学术的经验主义语言实践，然后利用这些作为获得标准化和学术形式的桥梁，相信这将为他们提供社会正义。这些尝试继续以将语言缺陷的意识形态转化为经济利润的方式为补偿性教育计划提供信息(见Cushing, 2022, 2023)。这些努力与黑人活动家语言学家的努力形成鲜明对比，如安塞尔·王和罗克西·哈里斯，他们都隶属于黑人教育运动和布里克斯顿黑豹党，并在20世纪70年代与内伦敦教育当局密切合作，为学校设计反种族主义的语言材料，这些材料植根于种族化社区所面临的更广泛的社会政治斗争。他们的努力激发了今天类似的工作(例如Thompson, 2022)，特别是那些像Flores和Rosa所呼吁的那样，仔细关注殖民历史和等级制度的作品，这些历史和等级制度构成了当代社会，作为一种颠覆种族不公正的手段。种族语言意识形态是英国殖民者描述非洲黑人和土著社区的作品中不可或缺的一部分，被用来为种族灭绝、剥削、占领和彻底消灭土著生活世界辩护。长期以来，英国白人工人阶级被比作黑人奴隶和殖民地人口，人们对白人工人阶级所谓的闲置语言实践的看法，被用来将他们定位在白人本身的界限上(Shilliam, 2018)。弗洛雷斯和罗莎展示了关注白人和种族边界的动态是种族语言学视角的关键，种族语言学视角试图使关于语言的本质假设变性。英国社会语言学家倡导语码转换及其各种衍生词——甚至是那些简单地暗示种族和语言共同构建的非自然化(如Rampton, 1995)——完整地保留了更广泛的殖民历史和命名语言和语言品种的地位。这些所谓的进步方法也可以在超多样性的社会语言学概念中找到，它很少关注欧洲殖民主义的悠久历史以及它如何继续塑造现代社会。虽然普遍声称拒绝Flores和Rosa所批评的以适当为基础的语言教育模式，但即使是英国批判性语言意识的支持者也很少关注种族(例如Fairclough, 1992)。种族语言学的观点不太关心以自然化形式身份关系的方式记录经验语言实践，更关心的是，即使种族化的说话者可能被认为是“转换”或“跨越”到一种被理想化的白人所登记的语言品种，他们仍然会面临耻辱，因为对语言的看法是如何被殖民、政治和经济地位的意识形态所塑造的。在与译语的对话中，它本身就是一个从威尔士语境中出现的非殖民化项目(Lewis et al.， 2012;参见李伟&;García, 2022)，一种种族语言学的观点试图解决边界和过境问题，这些问题依赖于英国语言学家一直致力于生产的命名语言/品种的经验地位。
{"title":"A raciolinguistic perspective from the United Kingdom","authors":"Ian Cushing","doi":"10.1111/josl.12632","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12632","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In 2023, I was invited to give a talk on the resurgence of deficit thinking in England's schools, and how contemporary education policies reproduce raciolinguistic ideologies which frame the language practices of working-class and racialised children as suffering from debilitating absences. After my talk, a White male professor commented that this was more about class than race, and that sociolinguistic scholarship focusing on race risked downplaying the struggles of the White working class. I have witnessed the same anxieties unfold in the peer review system, where UK sociolinguists seem uneasy about scholarship which centres race and colonialism, despite the colonial logics which lie at the core of the discipline (Heller & McElhinny, <span>2022</span>). This is especially concerning given that sociolinguistics emerged simultaneously with the anti-colonial organising of the Black Power Movement in the 1960s, representing community activism which included exposing systemic anti-Black language policing in schools.</p><p>In their leading piece, Flores and Rosa articulate how a raciolinguistic perspective invites us to interrogate the colonial roots of sociolinguistics and how issues of race, colonialism and White supremacy have been pushed to its disciplinary margins. A raciolinguistic perspective seeks to undo taken-for-granted assumptions about language, race and class to interrogate how British colonial logics continue to shape modern society. This intersectional approach has been fundamental to the emergence of a raciolinguistic perspective from the United Kingdom which has examined the mutually constitutive nature of race, class and language in different contexts including schools (Cushing, <span>2022</span>; Cushing & Snell, <span>2023</span>; Li Wei & García, <span>2022</span>), the UK citizenship process (Khan, <span>2021</span>), speech and language pathology (<span>Farah, f.c</span>.), and urban areas with high South Asian populations (Sharma, <span>2016</span>; see also Harris, <span>2006</span>). This builds on a long history of work produced by racially marginalised scholars who exposed how colonial and White supremacist logics delegitimised the language practices of racialised communities in mid-20th-century England (e.g. Coard, <span>1971</span>; Singh, <span>1988</span>). Yet, these names are typically erased out of historical accounts of UK sociolinguistics (see Gilmour, <span>2020</span> for one exception) in much the same ways that colonialism and anti-Blackness are often overlooked in projects on so-called Multicultural London English. The need for UK sociolinguists to pay attention to coloniality is ever more urgent given energised attempts by the state to deny the existence of institutional racism, censor anti-colonial efforts in schools and universities and project images of White, working-class children as victims of ethnic diversity (Shafi & Nagdee, <span>2022</span>). As Flores and Rosa argue, sociolingu","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"27 5","pages":"473-477"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12632","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136115952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
En este comentario, discutimos las trampas comunes asociadas con el estudio de la raza y el lenguaje, centrándonos específicamente en la reciente aparición de la raciolingüística como marco para estos esfuerzos. Examinamos cómo la raciolingüística puede ser abordada de maneras que aíslan las discusiones sobre la raza del resto de la lingüística ‐como si fuera algo que solo hacen los “raciolingüistas”‐ de modo que el estudio cuidadoso de cuestiones que incluyen el colonialismo, el poder y las jerarquías sociales quede perpetuamente relegado a los márgenes del campo. También consideramos cómo la nominalización de la raciolingüística puede sugerir que la raza y el lenguaje son objetos consensuados de maneras en las que se reproducen esencializaciones problemáticas. Mostramos cómo una perspectiva raciolingüística puede resistir tales tendencias al interrogar continuamente la reproducción colonial y la transformación de proyectos de conocimiento moderno y formas de vida a lo largo de contextos sociales, así como al examinar constantemente la naturaleza fundamental del lenguaje, la raza y el poder. Concluimos con lo que consideramos las implicaciones de una perspectiva raciolingüística para toda la lingüística.
{"title":"Deshaciendo la raciolingüística1","authors":"Nelson Flores, Jonathan Rosa","doi":"10.1111/josl.12642","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12642","url":null,"abstract":"En este comentario, discutimos las trampas comunes asociadas con el estudio de la raza y el lenguaje, centrándonos específicamente en la reciente aparición de la raciolingüística como marco para estos esfuerzos. Examinamos cómo la raciolingüística puede ser abordada de maneras que aíslan las discusiones sobre la raza del resto de la lingüística ‐como si fuera algo que solo hacen los “raciolingüistas”‐ de modo que el estudio cuidadoso de cuestiones que incluyen el colonialismo, el poder y las jerarquías sociales quede perpetuamente relegado a los márgenes del campo. También consideramos cómo la nominalización de la raciolingüística puede sugerir que la raza y el lenguaje son objetos consensuados de maneras en las que se reproducen esencializaciones problemáticas. Mostramos cómo una perspectiva raciolingüística puede resistir tales tendencias al interrogar continuamente la reproducción colonial y la transformación de proyectos de conocimiento moderno y formas de vida a lo largo de contextos sociales, así como al examinar constantemente la naturaleza fundamental del lenguaje, la raza y el poder. Concluimos con lo que consideramos las implicaciones de una perspectiva raciolingüística para toda la lingüística.","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"27 5","pages":"428-435"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136113327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hanna-Mari Pienimäki, Tuomas Väisänen, Tuomo Hiippala
This article explores the spatiotemporal and affective qualities of linguistic landscapes at three linguistically diverse neighborhoods in Helsinki, Finland. The three sites were selected for qualitative fieldwork using a method that combines social media and population registry data with quantitative measures of diversity and spatial analytics. The article demonstrates how each site is characterized by its own distinct affective atmosphere, which is discursively construed and made sense of through references to other places and times. The timespace analysis of affects provides conceptual and methodological tools that allow analyzing the change and circulation of social meanings in the landscape, as well as differences in these aspects across settings.
{"title":"Making sense of linguistic diversity in Helsinki, Finland: The timespace of affects in the linguistic landscape","authors":"Hanna-Mari Pienimäki, Tuomas Väisänen, Tuomo Hiippala","doi":"10.1111/josl.12633","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12633","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores the spatiotemporal and affective qualities of linguistic landscapes at three linguistically diverse neighborhoods in Helsinki, Finland. The three sites were selected for qualitative fieldwork using a method that combines social media and population registry data with quantitative measures of diversity and spatial analytics. The article demonstrates how each site is characterized by its own distinct affective atmosphere, which is discursively construed and made sense of through references to other places and times. The timespace analysis of affects provides conceptual and methodological tools that allow analyzing the change and circulation of social meanings in the landscape, as well as differences in these aspects across settings.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 2","pages":"3-21"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josl.12633","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135044015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Although recent sociolinguistic research on high performance has shown that persona construction is multidimensional and context-specific, little work has explored how interactions between personae affect their shared semiotic landscape. This study focuses on stylistic practices in 2017′s The Rap of China, China's first hip hop-themed competition show. A quantitative analysis was conducted to describe the rhyming styles of contemporary Chinese rappers. Based on language uses, visual representations, and lyrical themes, we then identify three rapper personae and discuss the semantic dimensions of hip hop authenticity invoked by each persona. Finally, through an analysis of a combative rap performance and reactions to it, we argue that contestation among different personae shapes the ideological landscape of “authentic Chinese hip hop.” This work demonstrates the potential of the semiotic landscape as a theoretical tool for the analysis of digital communities and cultural forms.
{"title":"Rhyming style, persona, and the contested landscape of authentic Chinese hip hop","authors":"Yuhan Lin, Tianxiao Wang","doi":"10.1111/josl.12635","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12635","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Although recent sociolinguistic research on high performance has shown that persona construction is multidimensional and context-specific, little work has explored how interactions between personae affect their shared semiotic landscape. This study focuses on stylistic practices in 2017′s <i>The Rap of China</i>, China's first hip hop-themed competition show. A quantitative analysis was conducted to describe the rhyming styles of contemporary Chinese rappers. Based on language uses, visual representations, and lyrical themes, we then identify three rapper personae and discuss the semantic dimensions of hip hop authenticity invoked by each persona. Finally, through an analysis of a combative rap performance and reactions to it, we argue that contestation among different personae shapes the ideological landscape of “authentic Chinese hip hop.” This work demonstrates the potential of the semiotic landscape as a theoretical tool for the analysis of digital communities and cultural forms.</p>","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 2","pages":"22-41"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134943683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Last Language on Earth: Linguistic Utopianism in the Philippines. Piers Kelly, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2022. 328 pp. 47 illustrations. Hardback (9780197509913) 99.00 USD, Paperback (9780197509920) 39.95 USD","authors":"Courtney Handman","doi":"10.1111/josl.12636","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josl.12636","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Sociolinguistics","volume":"28 4","pages":"85-87"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135646251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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