Linguistic racism: Origins and implications

Abstract

This special issue of Ethnicities focuses on the phenomenon of linguistic racism. Linguistic racism constitutes the intersection of language, race/ism, and in/equality, as seen in racialized discourses on the relative status of languages and bi/multilingual language use, particularly as these are directed toward non-dominant language speakers. The theoretical framings underpinning the contributions in this issue draw on sociological discussions of critical race theory, and sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological discussions of language ideologies, linguistic racism, and raciolinguistics. Racialized discourses of language (use) are situated within sociohistorical and sociopolitical contexts, grounded in nationalism and colonialism, that privilege dominant national and international languages, public monolingualism, and native-speaker competence in those languages. In contrast, related linguistic hierarchies of prestige pathologize the language uses of non-dominant language – often Indigenous and/or bi/multilingual – speakers and construct their language use in both overtly and covertly racialized terms. The result is regular linguistic discrimination and subordination experienced by non-dominant language speakers, inevitably framed within wider racialized institutional and everyday discursive practices. The contributions herein explore these issues in relation to Indigenous and other non-dominant language use(s), and their (mis)representation, in the media, workplace, and academia, in the contexts of New Zealand, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, and the United States.

In June 2016, at the height of debates on Brexit, and related racially charged discussions of immigration to Britain, the BBC reported on a racist incident, which subsequently garnered wide international attention. On a bus between Cardiff and Newport, a Muslim mother, wearing a niqab, was talking to her son in a language other than English. A White English male passenger intervened to tell her: “When you’re in the UK you should speak English”. At this point, an old woman in front of the man turned to him and said: “She’s in Wales. And she’s speaking Welsh”. ¹

It was almost certainly the schadenfreude of this rejoinder that generated widespread international media attention in the story at the time. However, it also usefully highlights the role and influence of linguistic racism and the often highly misinformed views of monolingual speakers that underpin it. Indeed, the perpetrators of linguistic racism are most often majority (often monolingual) language speakers. Their targets are likewise most often minoritized language speakers and/or their bi/multilingual language practices.

Such acts of linguistic racism are also imbued with and embedded within a sociohistorical and sociopolitical confluence of racialization, colonization, and modern nation-building. The former – racialization and colonization – were invariably predicated on European notions of White racial superiority vis-à-vis their subjugated colonial, often Indigenous, peoples (Allen, 1997; Feagin, 2020; Hage, 2000). The latter – the nation-building of the last few centuries – was driven by the notion of nation-state congruence. Nation-state congruence holds that the boundaries of political and national identity should coincide. The view here is that people who are citizens of a particular state should also, ideally, be members of the same national collectivity. And if they are to be the same nationality, they should also, by extension, speak the same national language. Consequently, a key feature of modern nation-state formation is the promotion of a common “national” language, invariably that of the dominant ethnic group, and, relatedly, an emphasis (ideally) on public monolingualism (Bauman and Briggs, 2003; May, 2012, 2016, 2021).

National languages are thus a social construction, a product of the politics of state-making, as are the attendant linguistic “hierarchies of prestige” (Liddicoat, 2013) that result. As the American anthropologist, Manning Nash (1989), observes of this:

Language seems straightforwardly a piece of culture. But on reflection it is clear that language is often a political fact, at least as much as it is a cultural one. It has been said that ‘language is a dialect with an army and a navy’. And what official or recognized languages are in any given instance is often the result of politics and power interplays. (p. 6)

Languages are a dialect with an army and a navy…

The phrase to which Nash refers highlights that languages and dialects are not distinguished or distinguishable primarily by their linguistic features (some languages are mutually intelligible, and some dialects are not), but rather by their sociopolitical status in particular (national) contexts. First attributed to the linguist Max Weinreich in the 1940s, the phrase has since been taken up widely in academic discussions of language policy as a key motif for the (differential) politics of language, both in relation to nationalism and nation-state formation and with respect to postcolonial/decolonial contexts (Ricento, 2006; May, 2011, 2022; Mignolo, 2000, 2003). Pierre Bourdieu, for example, comments on this process of linguistic hierarchization in relation to the formation of modern France that “measured de facto against the single standard of the ‘common’ language, they [other language varieties] are found wanting and cast into the outer darkness of regionalisms” (1991, p. 54).

Thus, sociological discussions of nationalism have long recognized what Grillo (1989) aptly describes as this ‘ideology of contempt’ (Grillo, 1989) toward languages that have come to be historically minoritized because of these processes of colonization and nation-state formation. Often expressed in visibly racialized terms, these processes of linguistic hierarchization have been evident since at least the 16th century – attributing chosen national languages with civilization and social and economic mobility and other languages as not only ossified and antediluvian but also as a threat to the state. Taking Wales as an example, the (1536) Act of Union, which formalized the political incorporation/subsumption of Wales into a British state dominated by England, was unequivocal about the need to exclude the ongoing use of Welsh from the public realm:

... because the people of [Wales] have and do daily use a speech nothing like … the natural mother tongue used within this Realm [England] ... to reduce them to perfect order notice, and knowledge of the laws of this, his Realm... and utterly to extirpate all and singular the sinister usages and customs differing from the same ... bringing all the citizens of this Realm to amiable concord and unity.... From henceforth, no person or persons that use the Welsh speech or language shall have or enjoy any manor, office or fees ... unless he or they use and exercise the speech or language of English. (Acts of Incorporation of Wales with England, 1536, cited in Williams and Raybould, 1991, p. 2; my emphasis)

These negative attitudes toward Welsh were, not surprisingly, subsequently entrenched in popular understandings of racial and linguistic hierarchies. William Richards, in his Wallography of 1682, notes, for example:

The Native Gibberish is usually prattled throughout the whole of Taphydome, except in their Market Towns, whose inhabitants being a little raised, and (as it were) pufft up into Bubbles, above the ordinary scum, do begin to despise it ... ‘Tis usually cashier’d out of Gentlemen’s Houses ... the Lingua will be Englishd out of Wales. (cited in Aitchison and Carter, 1994: 27)

Similarly, the phrase “beyond the pale” – a clearly negative ascription that is still widely used in English – has its origins in the (linguistic) colonization of Ireland by England. The pale specifically refers to the area within and around Dublin in the late Middle Ages that remained directly under the control of the English government and nobility, the result of the Anglo-Norman invasions of Ireland from the 12th century onward. The pale was predominantly English-speaking. Beyond the pale thus directly refers to the (still clearly “uncivilized”) Irish-speaking Gaeltacht outside of it.

The direct association of minoritized languages with primitivism, and national languages with modernity and progress, was also evident in academic commentary in subsequent centuries. John Stuart Mill, for example, notes in his 1861 treatise on representative government:

Nobody can suppose that it is not beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilised and cultivated people – to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship ... than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world. The same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander as members of the British nation [sic]. (John Stuart Mill [1861] 1972, p. 395; my emphasis)

Even Marx and Engels were not immune to these ongoing negative conceptions and associated linguistic hierarchies. Engels [1849] could observe, for example, that:

There is no country in Europe which does not have in some corner or other one or several fragments of peoples, the remnants of a former population that was suppressed and held in bondage by the nation [nation-state] which later became the main vehicle for historical development. These relics … mercilessly trampled down by the passage of history, as Hegel expressed it, this ethnic trash…. Such in Scotland are the Gaels ... Such in France are the Bretons ... Such in Spain are the Basques ... (Marx and Engels, 1976: 234-235; my emphasis)

Given the entrenchment and legitimation of these language ideologies, including within academia, it should come as no surprise that the subsequent histories of European colonization in relation to Indigenous peoples worldwide have also been characterized by widespread cultural and linguistic – as well as actual – genocide (May, 2023; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000; Starblanket, 2018; Woolford et al., 2014).

Academic analyses of language and racism

The sociology of nationalism highlights the malign confluence of nation-building, colonization, and the related linguistic hierarchization of Indigenous and other minoritized languages. However, in so doing, this literature only addresses indirectly the links between racism and language (use) underpinning these processes. Meanwhile, the sociology of racism throughout the 20th century, including the initial evolution of Critical Race Theory (CRT), was focused primarily on color racism and its biological determinants (Gould, 1981; Darder and Torres, 2002; Grosfoguel, 2016). It was only in the 1980s that attention shifted to a broader conception of racism that included the emergence of what the British cultural commentator Barker (1981) first described as “new racism”, with its focus on cultural differences rather than biology. For Barker, these more covert forms of racism described group differences primarily in cultural and/or historical terms without specifically mentioning “race” or overtly racial criteria. These cultural racisms also aligned closely with what Brah (1992) describes as ethnicism, a process by which racialized “stereotypic notions of common cultural need” are imposed upon heterogenous groups (p. 129). This framework of new/cultural racisms was subsequently taken up by other European commentators (e.g. Taguieff, 1987; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1988; Balibar, 1991; Miles, 1993). Balibar (1991), in discussing the links between nationalism and racism, for example, highlights what he terms a “spectrum of racisms” (p. 40), reflecting these new developments. In the United States, parallel discussions of new (cultural) racisms emerged in the mid-1990s, albeit as is often the case with North American academia, without attribution to these initial European discussions of the phenomena (see, e.g., Bonilla-Silva, 2003, 2022; Kohli et al., 2017).

Meanwhile, the specific links between language and racism were beginning to be explored within the fields of social psychology, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics. Wetherell and Potter (1992) for example, were one of the first in social psychology to examine the discursive construction of “everyday racism” (Essed, 1991) in their study of Pākehā (White) New Zealanders’ racialized views of Indigenous Māori, including the latter’s language (see May, this volume), a product in turn of its sociohistorical and sociopolitical organization as a (British) settler-colonial state. In “mapping the language of racism” in the context of New Zealand, Wetherell and Potter argued that racism is organized through discursive patterns of signification and representation and thus must be investigated through the specific analysis of discourse. That said, they state:

[w]e are not wanting to argue that racism is a simple matter of linguistic practice. Investigations of racism must also focus on institutional practices, on discriminatory actions, and on social structures and social divisions. But the study of these things is intertwined with the study of discourse. (p. 4)

The focus within social psychology on the discursive construction of racism, in specific contexts, and its links to institutionalized racialized practices and positionings, is also usefully highlighted by Van Dijk’s (1993) influential and contemporaneous study of elite discourses of racism. Van Dijk argued that elites produce and reproduce racism via representations in the media, academic discourse, and textbooks, among others, providing the basis for the extension/expansion of these discursive racialized (linguistic) constructions into other social fields (see also Van Dijk, et al., 1997).

Around this time, linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic analyses were also beginning to address these concerns directly, particularly via the notion of “language ideologies”. Kroskrity (2010) summarizes language ideologies as the “beliefs, feelings, and conceptions about language structure and use which often index the political economic interests of individual speakers, ethnic and other interest groups, and nation-states” (p. 192). This conception highlights how such ideologies shape speakers’ attitudes to and use of language, as well as linking these with their positionality, socioeconomically, socio-politically and, for our purposes here, in direct relation to racialized (linguistic) hierarchies and associated discursive practices. Work in language ideologies also provided the basis for a more direct and critical analysis of the complex and at times subliminal interplay of language and racism.

Jane Hill’s (2008) examination of everyday White racist discourses is particularly significant here. Via her analysis of the use of “mock Spanish” by White American English speakers, Hill highlights how these speakers minimize the racism underpinning its use on two grounds – personalism and referentialism. Personalism relates to the disavowal of racist intent in their use of language – “I was only joking…”. But such disavowal does not obviate a speaker’s engagement in racist discourses. Referentialism refers to the preoccupation with overtly racist vocabulary, focusing on the propositional content of language, rather than a broader examination of the role and influence of social indexicality in the construction of racist discourses (see also Hill, 1998; Kroskrity, 2020).

Hill’s exploration of covert forms of racist discourse clearly articulates with allied discussions of cultural racisms. It has also contributed to the increasing focus in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics over the last decade or so on the phenomenon of linguistic racism itself, which Kroskrity (2020) defines as constituting “racist and racializing acts and/or projects that use linguistic resources as a means of discrimination and subordination” (p. 68). H. Samy Alim’s (2016) notion of “languaging race” – “theorizing race through the lens of language” (p.7) is also consistent with this position. Meanwhile, more recent sociolinguistic work in what has come to be termed “raciolinguistics” (Rosa, 2019; Rosa and Flores, 2017, 2020) (re)connects these racialized discursive practices directly to processes of nation-building and settler colonialism and the linguistic hierarchies attendant upon them, as discussed earlier. Rosa and Flores (2020) argue, for example, that while “raciolinguistic ideologies differ in some ways across conventionally defined colonial and postcolonial contexts, these various settings are characterized by the ideological assumption that racialized subjects’ language practices are unfit for legitimate participation in a modern world” (p. 93).

It is within this broad theoretical framing then, that the contributions to this special issue on linguistic racism are situated. Stephen May examines the confluence of modern nation-state formation and colonization in relation to the historical and ongoing marginalization and denigration of minoritized language varieties, particularly Indigenous languages. Specifically, he explores discourses of linguistic racism by Pākehā (White) New Zealanders in Aotearoa New Zealand toward te reo Māori, the Indigenous Māori language, in everyday discourses and the media. These overt and covert racist discourses are part of a broader public contestation of the increasing normalization of te reo Māori in contemporary New Zealand society, the result of the successes of the last 40 years of Māori language revitalization. These discourses act in defense of English monolingualism, the direct linguistic legacy of New Zealand’s settler-colonial history, along with the privileges this history has provided for White, monolingual English-speaking New Zealanders. As he highlights, however, the racialized opposition to te reo Māori is most evident among older, White New Zealanders, suggesting the potential for change among younger New Zealanders and New Zealand’s increasingly diverse migrant population, both of whom appear more open to the ongoing development of societal bilingualism in English and te reo Māori.

Shaila Sultana highlights how, despite extensive individual multilingualism in South Asia, and widespread use of Indigenous languages as mother tongues, national language policies, emerging from colonial settler histories, continue to reinforce monolingual language competency, and native-speaker norms, in dominant national languages across South Asia. Via an ethnographic study of Bangladeshi youths from Indigenous communities, who are designated as ethnic minority groups in Bangladesh, she examines how these youths perceive themselves with reference to their Indigenous mother tongue, national language, and foreign language(s). She further explores what impact their relationships, their preferences, and use have on the maintenance and sustainability of their Indigenous mother tongue in this multilingual ecology. The discursive claims of these Bangladeshi youth participants indicate that the presence of the ‘mother-tongue’ and ‘national language’ in these contexts is always ideologically infused, layered, value-laden, relational, and paradoxical. It is via the paradoxical role of these languages in contexts that the article aims to identify the socio-psychological reasons behind ongoing Indigenous language loss in Bangladesh.

Ingrid Piller, Hanna Torsh, and Laura Smith-Khan examine how racial and linguistic identities are constructed on the Australian reality TV show Border Security. Based on an analysis of 108 episodes of the show involving 253 border force officers and 128 passengers, they explore how the hegemonic Australian identity of the White native English speaker is constructed on the show. Officers are represented as a relatively uniform group of “heroes” devoted to protecting Australia’s national security. Simultaneously, most of them look White and sound like native speakers of Australian English. In contrast to the officers, passengers, as their antagonists, do not have a predominant racial or linguistic profile – instead, being represented as highly diverse. What unites the latter is their potential threat as a security risk, thus mapping the notion of threat directly onto racial and linguistic diversity. By identifying with the White and English-speaking heroes, the audience also comes to take on their power of judgment over its diverse linguistic and racial Others. The article’s main contribution is to show how the raciolinguistic construct of the White-English speaker is made hegemonic in Australia – an ethnically diverse society officially committed to multiculturalism.

Ana Tankosic and Sender Dovchin examine how linguistic racism generates and endorses monoilingual, native-speaker, and normative language practices by reinforcing dicrimination and injustice toward non-standard, often multilingual, speakers. Based on an ethnographic study of Eastern-European immigrant women in the Australian workplace, the authors highlight how these women experience both overt and covert forms of linguistic racism as a result of their non-native English language skills, and ethnically marked accents. The women were regularly subjected to social exclusion, mockery, mimicking, and malicious sarcasm in relation to their language use in the workplace. Consequently, these migrant women experienced psychological trauma and distress, emotional hurdles, loss of credibility in the workplace, along with ongoing language-based inferiority complexes. The implications of addressing and remediating experiences of linguistic racism in workplace and related institutionalized settings are also explored.

Ryuko Kubota, Meghan Corella, Kyuyun Lim, and Pramod Sah draw on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its methodological use of counterstorytelling to investigate how racialized graduate students and faculty members at a Canadian university experienced racialization and racism in relation to issues of language, including communication and the use of ethnic names as semiotic markers. Participants' stories highlighted how they were often forced into predetermined and essentialized categories of race, ethnicity, nationality, and language. Racialized non-native speakers of an official language—English or French—often received “compliments” or inquisitive comments on their language proficiency, which further accentuated their raciolinguistic Otherness. Conversely, racialized native speakers did not report receiving compliments on language. For East Asian participants especially, speaking White English seemed to offset their racial stigma and psychologically separated them from non-native, English-speaking East Asian immigrants who looked like them. These experiences indicate normative expectations. The participants felt they were expected to not only speak, write, or communicate in the White normative language and manners, but also to use or not use an Anglicized name against their will. These impositions were questioned and resisted by some participants, and antiracist consciousness was expressed. From a CRT perspective, the participants’ voices encourage universities to validate their (multilingual) stories as well as their ways of telling their stories, rather than simply imposing dominant language norms upon them.

Suresh Canagarajah explores how academic communication can be diversified to facilitate antiracist scholarship. The article draws on complex theories of social structuration within the social sciences but also demonstrates how linguists can offer fine-grained analytical tools to track these processes across diverse scales of space, time, and institutions. Canagarajah argues against traditional reductive and overdetermined perspectives on language and for the generative and resistant potential of language in relation to racialization processes and positionings. He introduces translingual practice as accommodating the theoretical developments discussed and demonstrates how methods of indexical analyses can help scholars study texts and communication across various spatiotemporal scales in achieving structuration. This approach is applied specifically to the writing practice of African American scholar, Geneva Smitherman, to demonstrate how her antiracist scholarship renegotiates established structures of academic communication and generates (antiracist) change. The article helps applied linguists to develop an appreciation of writers and writing in constructing diversified academic communication. However, it also provides linguistic tools to social scientists for tracing the workings of structuration and change at diverse spatiotemporal and social scales of consideration.