2.2 Linguistic Diversity and Linguistic Justice

The ideas and arguments about “correct” or “standard” ways of speaking and writing that we challenge in this text are not neutral; they are deeply tied to the history of the Official English movement in the U.S. and to social and political debates about American identity, immigration, assimilation, and citizenship. In Bad Ideas about Writing [PDF], Steven Alvarez details the history of this movement, from its early conceptualization among the Founding Fathers (who viewed a shared language as essential to an “emerging American identity”) to efforts, beginning in the 1980s, to establish English as the “official” language of the U.S. through a constitutional amendment and through English-only legislation, of which 31 states have some form (93-95). For proponents of these efforts, English is not only a shared means of communication, but a way of encoding a set of values about American identity and of delineating who is or is not recognized as fully “American.”

In calling attention to the way English-only policies target immigrants and promote a deficit view of those who speak different home languages or dialects, Alvarez argues that “English-only policies make prescriptions about official languages, and such debates also make prescriptions about who can be a citizen or pass as one” (94). Moreover, support for these policies conflicts with extensive research, showing the benefits of bilingual education and the strengths of pluralistic writers who “have extensive vocabularies beyond English and excellent abilities to translate and interpret across and between languages. Bilingual individuals have also proven to develop complex metacognitive skills for translating and communicating among diverse audiences” (96). Honoring and cultivating students’ diverse linguistic repertoires not only prepares them for academic success but also equips them with the rhetorical skills needed for participation in civic life. It also aligns with the Jesuit tradition of social transformation for the common good.

In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue [PDF],” a chapter from her book Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Gloria Anzaldúa demonstrates how the languages we speak are inseparable from who we are and our experiences in the world. Growing up in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, Anzaldúa’s linguistic identity was shaped by these borderlands and a sense of being “ni de aquí, ni de allá“—”from neither here nor there”. In her writings, Nepantla is the term that Anzaldúa uses to describe this border state—a sense of in-betweenness that positions you with a unique set of skills for negotiating between cultures, spaces, languages, and different points of view.

From her positionality as a Nepantlera and plurilingual speaker, Anzaldúa challenges the idea that there is one “correct” way of speaking and asserts the value and legitimacy of all the languages and dialects she speaks and that connect her to different communities, including those that would be considered “slang” or that mix English and Spanish. Her argument (and positionality) is also shaped by her own lived experiences of the relationship between language, power, and identity—of being criticized (or violently punished) for speaking Spanish by teachers (and parents who encouraged assimilation through English) and for speaking Chicano Spanish by Spanish speakers from countries where Spanish is the dominant language. From this position, Anzaldúa argues that efforts to control, suppress, or denigrate another’s language is an act of violence—what she terms “linguistic terrorism”—that has the potential to cause deep psychological wounds:

So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. (81)

As educators within the Jesuit tradition, we believe in valuing the linguistic and cultural heritages and plurilingual practices of our students as essential to enacting cura personalis (care for the whole person)—a core value of Jesuit teaching. All students possess rich linguistic repertoires (including those who identify as “monolingual”) that should be welcomed into the writing process as resources. As Peter Elbow points out, “Standard Written English is no one’s Mother Tongue” [PDF] (362). Inviting students to draw on their repertoires shifts the focus from correcting language and writing “correctly” to practicing the kind of deep critical thinking that takes place through writing as an ongoing process of learning.

Linguistic Justice

Recognizing the realities of linguistic diversity paves the way to developing what we’ll call a linguistic justice orientation to discourse, which enables us to resist linguistic normativity and engage in a more complex, asset-based, rhetorical inquiry into how language works.

April Baker-Bell, author of Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, defines the concept of linguistic justice from the perspective of Black language practices, moving the needle on linguistic justice by underscoring the connections between linguistic discrimination and anti-Black violence. She calls for anti-racist pedagogies to combat the myth that there is “a homogenous, standard, one-size-fits-all language,” highlighting the ways this myth “normalizes white ways of speaking English and is used to justify linguistic discrimination on the basis of race” (Baker-Bell 99). These beliefs about linguistic homogeneity do not serve language users of any identity or background, as they incorrectly represent language as stable, uniform, apolitical, and ultimately a-rhetorical. These representations naturalize other systems of power, privilege, and discrimination as similarly stable and neutral.

As Baker-Bell emphasizes, attention to Black language is not new—neither is attention to language diversity as a resource. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has been moving in the direction of linguistic justice for a long time in its scholarship and position statements. More than 50 years ago, in 1974, they published the “Students’ Right to Their Own Language [Website]” as an attempt to communicate the value of language diversity to public audiences and teachers. In the meantime, there has been a lot of debate about how to enact these values in the classroom and beyond. The publication of scholarly works like those of Baker-Bell, along with the adoption by the Conference on College Composition and Communication of resolutions like “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a Demand for Black Linguistic Justice!” [Website] in the same year, has moved the conversation forward. Still, more work remains to be done in shifting public perceptions of language diversity towards an asset-based framework such as that advanced by proponents of linguistic justice. For additional resources on this topic, see Linguistic Justice [PDF] from East Carolina University.

Part of the problem lies in disrupting what Baker-Bell calls “linguistic hegemony” of normative language practices. It is also about disrupting the limiting colonial beliefs about language systems as discrete and separate, positing a false binary between linguistic forms: a choice to either assimilate or resist. Instead, language theorists like Baker-Bell and others understand language as fluid, emergent, and lived.

Just as identity is not stable and the same everywhere, neither is language. We all use different forms of language—different discourses, including genres, tones, registers, and modalities—in different contexts. Some of us think, speak, and write in multiple languages, but internal variation and change are continually enacted even among supposedly “monolingual” English speakers. Everyone is always moving across, within, and among supposedly discrete or separate language systems. At the same time, it’s also not as though you fully become a different person with an entirely different set of practices in each setting. Instead, language use is characterized by hybridity and fluidity.

We each have a linguistic identity, and the languages we speak are not homogeneous. For instance, I (Maura) am originally from Western Pennsylvania and grew up speaking a regional dialect known as Western Pennsylvania English, or “Pittsburghese,” which developed from the Scottish, Polish, and German immigrants that settled there in the 19th and 20th centuries. The most famous example is that we say “yinz” for the second person plural pronoun (and refer to ourselves as “yinzers”).  Moreover, my “Pittsburghese” was interspersed with Yiddish, a dialect that my grandparents spoke at home. In other words, the English that I speak and consider my “home language” is multifaceted and shaped by the dynamics of place, family, and culture. My experiences are not equivalent to the experiences of the above authors, insofar as I am not subject to the systems of linguistic racism, though my language use is inseparable from the histories of antisemitism.

In “Linguistic Diversity, Linguistic Justice [Website],” Brian Hendrickson provides a useful analogy for understanding these concepts—and this particular aspect of fluidity, hybridity, and emergence—through the framework of ecology. He argues that, just as biodiversity is essential for maintaining a healthy and thriving ecosystem, the celebration and cultivation of linguistic diversity is essential to creating more equitable environments where everyone can thrive:

…languages are living things. They thrive, evolve, proliferate, and in doing so contribute to the diversity, abundance, and overall health and life-sustaining capabilities of dynamic cultures…Just as maintaining biodiversity is a matter of environmental justice for all of an ecosystem’s organisms, us included, linguistic diversity too is a matter of linguistic justice. More important than learning the “correct” way to write or speak English, then, is celebrating, learning about, and cultivating linguistic diversity, while devoting equal energy to calling out and unlearning the intentional and unintentional ways we unjustly judge ourselves and others for speaking and writing in non-dominant varieties of English. After all, had the English colonists spent more time learning and listening to the Pokanoket and Narragansett in their own varieties of Eastern Algonquian–from which we nevertheless adopted into English a number of words including moose and squash–and less time trying to force English language and culture upon them, we might know a far more biodiverse, abundant, and life-sustaining Narragansett Bay today. (Hendrickson)

As Hendrickson emphasizes, English is not homogeneous—it has evolved over time, in part through its complex interactions with other languages and traditions. For example, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), or Black English, has deep roots in the linguistic traditions of African American communities in the U.S. Its distinct grammatical features have been shaped by the histories and lived experiences of these communities. Despite its rhetorical sophistication, Black English has been devalued in academic and other spaces—inextricably linked to the history of racism in the US. According to Hendrickson, “Recognizing how linguistic value judgments can operate as a form of racism is the first step in beginning to dismantle the systems of linguistic oppression that have been constructed to maintain white supremacy.”

In this text, we endeavor to contribute to the goal of dismantling systems of linguistic oppression by writing pedagogies that emphasize personal experience, identity, and community as rhetorical resources. This is not about abandoning standards or rigorous expectations. Quite the opposite—a linguistic justice approach involves recognizing that successful writing is the result of an iterative practice that involves making intentional choices, drawing from and reflecting a range of discourse practices as well as ongoing revision. It is more work, not less. And, moreover, AI can’t do that work for you, as the “hyper-reduction of difference inherent in GenAI algorithms represents an important limit to the possibilities for our students to create language that represents their diverse experiences in the world” (“Linguistic Justice and GenAI” [Website]). That is, AI flattens language difference and diversity and therefore is not actually producing what we would consider to be good, meaningful writing.

Linguistic justice offers a powerful framework for thinking critically about the possibilities, as well as the limitations of GenAI tools. It not only examines what counts as “good” writing in a given context, but also asks key questions, like “why?” and “according to whom?” It provides a language for reckoning with the complex power relations that influence how we approach teaching and learning about rhetoric and writing processes. As Pattanayak explains, promoting the “ideology that there is one correct way to speak and write disenfranchises many populations who are already denigrated by society. The writing most valued in this binary is a type of writing that is situated in middle-class white culture. In adhering to so-called correct language, we are devaluing the non-standard dialects, cultures, and therefore identities of people and their communicative situations that do not fit a highly limited mold” (83).

Reflect: Linguistic justice is a framework that might cause a paradigm shift for you. It gives you a framework for enacting what we claim in the introduction: that you don’t have to leave your full self at the door when you enter the college classroom. How is this idea sitting with you? What is your emotional response to this idea? Does it connect to any experiences you’ve had in the classroom or outside of it? Are there any aspects of this concept that you find yourself struggling with or resisting?

Resources

• Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” [PDF]
• Cathy Park Hong, “‘Bad’ English is Part of My Korean American Heritage” [Website]
• José Olivarez, “Mexican American Disambiguation” [YouTube] (spoken word poetry)
• Denice Frohman, “Accents” [YouTube] (spoken word poetry)
• Daniel Summerhill, “Aint We” [YouTube] (spoken word poetry)
• Jamila Lyiscott, “3 Ways to Speak English” [Website] in Polyphony: Reader and Explorations for First-Year Writing
• Jamila Lyiscott, “Why English Class is Silencing Students of Color” [Website]