Language

The relationship between language and power, or more specifically, domination and racism, dates back to the colonial period when the colonial language became an aspect of cultural production that established dominance as well as cultural and linguistic superiority of one language group over the other (Pennycook 1998). In the case of the expansion of the British Empire, English was used to paint the world from the perspective of superior over inferior, culture over nature, and civilized over savage. It produced the constructions of “self and other” as superior and subhuman.

Many of these constructs continue in the early twenty-first century, specifically in the centrality English assumes in language policies that produce and reproduce ideologies and structures of inequality, a characteristic Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson (1990) call “linguicism.” Closely associated with the biological form of racism—that is, the basing of superiority on racial traits—linguicism reproduces “unequal division of power and resources (both material and non-material) between groups which are defined on the basis of language” (p. 110). These structures of power grow out of the nature of language itself as a group identifier and the ideological discourses that produce and are produced by exclusionary legislation, news media, and pedagogical beliefs.

Language, for example, is a social phenomenon that shapes one’s humanity and one’s group membership. Like racism, it is not neutral. Rather, it is “dialectically related to society, and not an independent, isolated linguistic system” (Fairclough, quoted in Hruska 2000, p. 1). Rather, it is heavily weighted with the socioemotional experiences of the individual and the group, the history of intergroup relations, and the embodiment of power dynamics. Language is emblematic of identification, and as Fishman (1985) points out, is part and parcel of the “authentic doing and knowing of a particular kind of people” (p. 9) that generates a profound distinction between “us” and “them” in intergroup relations. This distinction is experienced at two levels of language contact: (1) the point at which the social, psychological, and linguistic features of language use affect the individual, the context, and the language itself and, (2) the point at which a particular language is culturally and politically legitimized, learned, and/or expanded (Appel and Muysken 1987).

Vulnerability to racist ideologies and structures— that is, the potential for evaluation of difference in terms of better or worse and the subsequent unequal access and distribution of resources based on that evaluation—is possible at either of these levels of language contact. Social and institutional conventions exert pressure on the individual or the group to shift to the dominant language and give up their identification with a non-dominant language and its beliefs, values, and worldview, often without the same benefit accorded to members of the dominant group. The compulsion to shift to the national language is conveyed in multiple ways: (1) in the dearth of institutional information available in the minority language to facilitate the acquisition of health care, social services, and justice; (2) the exclusion of the minority language as a viable tool for intellectual work; and (3) the promulgation of the primacy of English by the media. The highly publicized directive to immigrants made by California’s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to “turn off the Spanish television set” so they could learn English is an example of the chauvinism surrounding the value of English (Salinas 2007).

Intentional and unintentional—as most would classify Schwarzenegger’s comments—language forms that racialize groups has a differential impact on inequality than language ideologies. For example, it is a common assumption that the use of racially charged language is intended to disparage the “other.” It is inflammatory, marginalizing, and basically racist; however, individuals who use presumably harmless linguistic forms from a minoritized language such as “Hasta la vista, baby” (Spanish for “see you later,” typically used for “good riddance’), “nappy-headed hos” (whores with naps in the hair), or “chinito” (Spanish for “little Chinese,” a term used by Spanish speakers to refer to all Asians) in a state of innocence, also disparage the minority language and its speakers, at the same time they elevate the dominant language speaker and culture (Hill 2001). The use of language to racialize an individual or a group is implicated in the promotion of racist ideologies and structures of inequality and voices the hierarchical nature of the society (Asante 1998). However, offensive language does not have the direct impact on language rights and equal opportunity as does cultural and political ideologies and structures.

Language-based structures of inequality privilege the dominant language to the detriment of the minority language and its speakers. The imposition of monolingualism, seen as “a reflection of linguicism” by Skutnabb-Kangas (1988, p. 13) also comes at considerable cost to the sociohistorical legacy of the minority language speaker. In addition, these policies have an added disadvantage of diminishing the viability of the monolingual speakers to perform on the world stage where bilingualism is a social reality. The imposition of the dominant language—in the case of the United States, English—destabilizes, deculturates, and domesticates non-European groups (Wiley 2000). Shrouded in ideological rationality, the pressure to shift to the dominant language and abandon the native tongue is touted as the most logical thing to do given the circumstances. Reasons given for shifting to the dominant language such as the lack of resources, the economic necessity to learn the dominant language, or the importance for social mobility are typically taken as common-sensible without question. The common refrain “Speak English, you are in America!” is one of these seemingly rational imperatives that is loaded with ideological connotations about which language is valued and more tragically, which language is to be forsaken. These practices produce and reproduce exclusive and arbitrary systems of awards and access that establish, reaffirm, and promote structural inequality based on language. They also lay the burden of learning a second language, negotiating mainstream bureaucracies, and scaling the opportunity ladder squarely on the disempowered and dispossessed minority language speaker.

Such complex processes of linguistic privilege and favoritism shape and are shaped by legislation and the news media. Both ideological fields reflect the dominant perspective of the hegemonic language. Both base their formulations on uninformed, incomplete, and “linguicistic” assumptions of what is “good” and “bad” language and what is “right” for the country (Goldstein 2001). The media circulates national views on language at the same time that it racializes language in what Hill (2001) calls “language panics’—‘intense public attention to “language problems.’” (p. 249) It is the sheer intensity of these episodes, the low level of the discourse, and the maligning of the minority language speaker that classifies these media eruptions as racist. Gutiérrez and colleagues (2002) concur that these panics and “backlash politics” have little to do with language and more to do with race, specifically with the threat that the minority language and its speakers pose for national identity. In the discourse surrounding the proposed use of Ebonics by the Oakland School District in California and the consequent series of propositions in California between the 1980s and the 1990s (Hill 2001, p. 245), language became the proxy for race, facilitating a recategorizing of its speakers as deviant and semilingual (having an incomplete working knowledge of either the native or the second language) and their language as underdeveloped. The more recent media outburst in 2007, caused by former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s comments that “English is the language of progress” and bilingual education is teaching “the language of living in a ghetto” (Sanchez 2007), illustrates that the connection between language and national identity at the expense of the minority language and its speakers continues to have a major sway in the ideological discourses in the United States.

Nowhere is the connection between language and racism more potent than in the schooling process where income, class, ethnicity, and gender are interlinked with language into a synergistic process of inequality. The schooling process typically excludes the minority language and culture from the curriculum content, medium of instruction, and interpersonal communication cultivating long-lasting ideas of self as unfit and the world as unfair. This process creates a disequilibrium in which the individual is confronted with his or her language as unsuitable for personal expression or intellectual work, an experience best described by Adrian Rich as looking into a mirror and not seeing oneself. Thus, language is often used as a proxy for race to sort students into ability and interest groups, freeing the school to speak of deficiencies and rankings according to academic and social needs without repercussions. This is particularly true in states that have passed antinative language legislation such as California’s Proposition 227, euphemistically called “Language for the Children.” These types of legislation shape the educational content and curriculum to privilege the dominant language and deny access to the children’s complete linguistic resources (Gutiérrez et al, 2002). As a result, minority language speakers are subjected to an education that is undemocratic, theoretically weak, and out of sync with the social and multilingual realities of an increasingly globalized and multilingual world.

SEE ALSO American Colonization Society and the Founding of Liberia; Cultural Deficiency; Education, Racial Disparities; Slavery, Racial; Slavery and Race.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appel, René, and Pieter Muysken. 1987. Language Contact and Bilingualism. Baltimore, MD: Edward Arnold.

Asante, Molefi Kete. 1998. Identifying Racist Language: Linguistic Acts and Signs. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Available from http://www.asante.net/newsmagazine/identifyingracistslanguage.html.

Fishman, Joshua, Michael H. Gertner, Esther G. Lowy, and William G. Milán. 1985. The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival: Perspectives on Language and Ethnicity. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Goldstein, Lynn M. 2001. “Three Newspapers and a Linguist: A Folk Linguistic Journey into the Land of English as the Official Language.” In Language Ideologies: Critical Perspectives on the Official English Movement, Vol. 2: History, Theory, and Policy, edited by Roseann D. González, 221–244. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Gutiérrez, Kris. D., Jolynn Asato, Maria Santos, and Neil Gotanda. 2002. “Backlash Pedagogy: Language and Culture and the Politics of Reform.” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 24: 335–351.

Hill, Jane H. 1993. “Hasta La Vista, Baby: Anglo Spanish in the American Southwest.” Critique of Anthropology 13: 145–176.

_____. 2001. “Racializing Function of Language Panics.” In Language Ideologies: History, Theory, and Policy. Vol. 2, edited by R. Dueñas González and I. Melis, 245–267. Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum.

Hruska, Barbara. 2000. “Ideologies, Programs, and Practices: Implications for Second Language Learners.” Paper presented at the Puerto Rican Studies Association Conference (Amherst, MA), October 28.

Pennycook, Alastair. 1998. English and the Discourse of Colonialism. New York: Routledge.

Salinas, Maria Elena. 2007. “Governor Is Wrong about Spanish Media.” Fresno Bee, June 26. Available from http://www.fresnobee.com/columnists/salinas/story/69541.html.

Sanchez, Rick. 2007. Paula Zahn Now program: “Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich under Fire; Is Media Portrayal of Iraq Accurate?” April 2. Available from http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0704/02/pzn.01.html.

Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove. 1988. “Multilingualism and the Education of Minority Children.” In Minority Education: From Shame to Struggle, edited by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Jim Cummins, 9–45. Clevedon, U.K., Multiligual Matters.

_____, and Robert Phillipson. 1990. “Linguicism: A Tool for Analysing Linguistic Inequality and Promoting Linguistic Human Rights.” International Journal of Group Tensions 20, no. 2.

Wiley, Terrence. 2000. “Continuity and Change in the Function of Language Ideologies in the United States.” In Ideology, Politics, and Language Policies: Focus on English, edited by Thomas Ricento, 67–85. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Olga A. Vásquez